Ukraine Turns To Flying Machine Guns And Autonomous AI-Controlled Drone Swarms To Counter Russian Numbers
It’s no secret that Ukraine is having a hard time in its fight against Russia at the moment. That’s in part because Ukraine is being limited in how deep into Russia it can attack using Western-supplied weapons. But mostly it is a matter of numbers: Russia has more men that it is willing to sacrifice in assaults, and more weapons and ammunition that it can use to pound Ukrainian positions and cities. As Alex Bornyakov, Ukraine’s deputy minister of digital transformation, told the UK Times: “We don’t have as many human resources as Russia, they fight, they die, they send more people, they don’t care, but that’s not how we see war.” Since it can’t match Russia in raw manpower and firepower, Ukraine has turned to technology to help it fight back.
In particular, Ukraine has been using drones in a way that is re-defining modern war. First, it is deploying them on an unprecedented scale. Back in December, Ukraine’s President Zelensky said that his country would produce one million drones in 2024. More recently, Hanna Hvozdyar, Ukraine’s Deputy Minister of Strategic Industries, stated that they would in fact produce two million drones this year, although these are unverified claims. In addition to sheer numbers, Ukraine is also pushing forward the boundaries of drone design. In May, Euromaidan Press reported that Ukrainian forces are mounting machine guns on heavy octocopter drones “to strafe Russian infantry assaults and fire into the trenches from above”:
Right now, Ukrainians are using two types of drones against the Russian infantry: grenade-dropping drones, and kamikaze drones. Dropping grenades accurately is extremely difficult, especially if the infantry is moving, or if the infantry has electronic warfare kits that necessitate operating from a much higher altitude, further reducing the accuracy.
The kamikaze drones, in turn, can only be used once. The development of gun mounts, combined with thermal vision and machine aiming, will change the setting completely.
Another innovative approach involves the use of AI to create a “swarm” of up to seven drones that can work cooperatively to attack tanks and carry out reconnaissance. The Times spoke to a Ukrainian entrepreneur working on this technology in Kyiv, Serhii Krupiienko:
“It’s the equivalent of bringing the steam engine into the factory all those years ago,” says Krupiienko, a software engineer who studied at Stanford University, California. “Our core mission is to get robots to do the fighting, not humans.
“They can communicate with each other, making decisions on which one attacks, which gathers intelligence — and they’ll do it faster than any human.”
Ukraine’s deputy minister of digital transformation Bornyakov told The Times that the country is testing another company’s intelligent swarm technology as well. The New York Times reports on a number of Ukrainian laboratories and factories working on other low-cost autonomous weapons. Bornyakov insisted that Ukraine will not allow any of these killing machines to go “completely autonomous”, without a human making the final decision. But when your soldiers are struggling against larger, better equipped forces in a war that will determine whether your country continues to exist in any meaningful sense, it will be hard to maintain that ethical position. And once that line is crossed, how wars are conducted will have changed forever.