AI and the Art of War in Ukraine
Both sides are using revolutionary means to wage battles on land and in the air.
June 3, 2024 The Wall Street Joiurnal
Kharkiv, Ukraine
This wasn’t the easiest time to visit Ukraine’s second-largest city. The local power grid and infrastructure were taking serious hits as missiles and glide bombs struck the city from nearby Russian territory. “Double tap” attacks, by which Russians strike a civilian target and wait for first responders to rush to the scene before launching a second strike, were becoming more common. I watched rescue workers dig through the wreckage of a big-box hardware store searching for body fragments to identify in a nearby forensic lab. After a second attack, I spoke with stunned office and factory workers waiting to have their injuries treated in a local hospital ward. As bulldozers tore up fields north of the city so workers could prepare trenches against possible Russian advances, Kharkiv was experiencing its tensest days since Moscow’s first assault fell short in 2022.
Things should improve. Russian advances have slowed as reinforcements bolster Ukraine’s defense farther north. With the flow of air-defense weapons resuming, and Western countries easing restrictions on Ukraine’s use of defensive weapons against immediate cross-border targets, there is reason to hope the city’s residents can soon live with more security and less fear.
But the fighting isn’t stopping, and the Washington policy establishment needs to think harder about the largest, ugliest and most dangerous land war in Europe since World War II. From a tactical and geopolitical perspective, Vladimir Putin’s war is changing the global balance of power in ways that the U.S. can’t afford to neglect.
Some of the news is encouraging. American and Taiwanese military planners can take heart from Ukraine’s success in bottling up Russia’s Black Sea fleet. It turns out that the new era of naval warfare favors the defensive party. Russia hasn’t been able to use its superior fleet to deliver land forces on Ukraine’s coast or even to block Ukraine’s commerce. Strategists in Beijing will note that it’s significantly harder to move invading armies across open water than before the Ukrainians humbled Russia’s fleet.
A visit to the battlefields north of Kharkiv revealed one consequence of the evolving state of the art of war. Increasingly one hears soldiers speak of “dead zones” between the opposing forces. Drones, which can now pursue individual soldiers through trenches, make it difficult for either side to conduct operations within 2 or 3 miles of the opposing battle line. For now, this may make new offensive operations on the scale of last summer’s ill-fated Ukrainian counteroffensive impossible. As soon as next year, “drone swarms” could create more formidable killing zones between armies, making offensive operations even more challenging.
Land and air warfare are rapidly changing, with both Ukrainians and Russians constantly updating technology. Along the battlefront, soldiers and engineers are introducing innovations large and small that can make old weapons systems obsolete overnight. As the Russians deploy new forms of jamming techniques or equip their drones and missiles with new stealth capabilities, the Ukrainians must match them and, where possible, out-compete.
With increasingly sophisticated weapons routing more-detailed performance information back to manufacturers, the tempo of weapons redesign and production is accelerating beyond anything seen in past wars. Ukraine is building a new kind of military-industrial complex, in which decentralized teams of hackers and tinkerers in small to medium-size firms continuously reimagine and re-engineer the tools of war. I visited camouflaged workshops where, among other things, I saw Ukrainian engineers converting children’s toys into land drones that could place mines before oncoming tanks. Something as simple as a swivel-mounted platform for a gun turret may receive dozens of software and hardware upgrades based on real-time information from the battlefield.
Past wars have seen cycles of tech competition, but this is the first peer-to-peer war fought in the age of artificial intelligence. Just as the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s saw the development of the tactics and techniques that shaped World War II, Ukraine today is witnessing the birth of a new kind of conflict. The combination of real-time feedback from continuously monitored weapons with the data-handling and design capabilities of flexible, highly trained and motivated battle engineers is introducing a new dynamic of military tech competition.
Weapons that were irresistible a few weeks ago can be easily neutralized today. New threats appear overnight. The Pentagon and the American defense industry need to keep up. The old ways of doing business will soon be obsolete.
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Appeared in the June 4, 2024, print edition as 'AI and the Art of War in Ukraine'.