With U.S. aid to Ukraine stalled by solid Republicans in Congress and Ukraine's counterattack stalled by a strong Russian military, Western powers supporting Kiev are looking for ways to ramp up the war effort. Due to the lack of trained personnel and artillery, attention has turned to drones and artificial intelligence. However, overestimating the role that these technologies can play in an armed conflict risks entrenching the very impasse that Ukraine needs to break.
In some ways, it's no surprise that both Russia and Ukraine are focused on digital battlefield intelligence, automated targeting, and unmanned aerial vehicles. Presidents Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskiy don't have many other options for cooperation on either side at the moment. , both seem reluctant to order new military mobilization. But this is also puzzling. That's because the technology-centered strategy appears to have played a major role in turning the Kremlin's predicted three-day war into a two-year war of attrition.
Russia has ceded nearly half of the territory it once occupied in Ukraine, at the cost of approximately 90 percent of its prewar standing army. But on paper, Ukraine is easily outnumbered and outgunned, not to mention billions of rubles and years of investment in new capabilities such as cyber operations, AI, robotics, drones, and electronic warfare. Ta. Perhaps this is why it has been so easy to downplay aspects of the war that are harder to quantify and receive less attention, but ultimately more decisive, such as planning, logistics, coordination, morale, and leadership.
The most attractive quality of technology for militaries is the promise that it might somehow make the physical demands of occupying territory cheaper in terms of blood, treasure, time, and labor. But no matter how detailed the insights, safe distances, and speed that technology provides, it cannot replace the traditional capabilities that defined 20th century conflicts.
Since kickoff With the military modernization plan drawn up in 2008, President Putin and his allies have aimed to create a “modern high-tech army” and envisioned a war in which technological superiority would be decisive. In the years that followed, many advanced weapons systems filled the arsenal, boosted arms sales, and flooded Syria's battlefields. Meanwhile, Russia's military and intelligence services, and their proxies such as the late Wagner Group chairman Evgeny Prigozhin, are posing increasingly sophisticated and bold threats in cyberspace.
By late 2021, these factors led some Western observers to conclude that Russia would easily defeat Ukraine, in part because of its technological prowess.
Rather, Russia's overwhelming record in conventional warfare over the past two years has shown that reliance on high-tech weaponry comes at the expense of focus on other important aspects of a functioning military. Russia's defense industrial base and supply lines were plagued by corruption, while Russia was losing military power. The shabby officer corps suffered from poor composition and incompetence.
A former deputy chief of staff for national intelligence says Western analysts have relied too much on cataloging Russian equipment and cyber tools and failed to account for the status, plans, and quality of the forces using them. More fundamentally, Moscow and Western observers alike have been unable to explain how advanced technology specifically aids in seizing, recapturing, and holding territory. The hard truth that has remained constant since before the Trojan Horse is that doing so is an inevitable human endeavor.
Much of my professional research has been devoted to understanding how Russian leaders think about conflict in cyberspace. Drawing distorted lessons from the U.S. military's performance in the 1990s, Moscow's combat doctrine combines technology and psychology in subtle ways, and its goals often border on pseudoscientific mind control. There is.
For example, the Soviet theory of “reflexive control” aimed to induce adversaries into self-defeating actions by carefully placing “information packets” on various media channels. Psychological factors led to the gradual withdrawal of even troops and materials, the focus of Russian military theory. In addition, enemy forces were gradually replaced by the final goal. The digital age has created a never-ending struggle for recognition across society.
In Ukraine, this has resulted in the Russian government devoting many of its high-tech capabilities, particularly cyber operations, to internment of Ukrainian civilians rather than defeating the Ukrainian military. As expected, this strategy gained little territory over the past year. Since at least 2014, Russian military and intelligence services have been trying to wreak havoc in Ukraine with cyberattacks, including ones aimed at cutting off heat, electricity, internet and mobile connectivity.
But what the Russian government is downplaying is that the victims also have the right to vote. Instead of being depressed, like the Ukrainians, rally around the flag. Moscow's so-called information warfare has failed, no matter how costly and destructive its cyberattacks have proven as part of a broader project to conquer its political and geographical neighbors.
Meanwhile, Kiev has adopted several new technological approaches to repel Russian invaders since early 2022. It would democratize intelligence gathering on the battlefield, allowing Ukrainians to track and report Russian movements, collecting data on elements ranging from supplies to missiles. This has activated a global volunteer force operating in cyberspace targeting Russian organizations. Using off-the-shelf communications and software, it has created a fleet of self-driving cars and drones that are increasingly lethal in the air and at sea.
Ukraine's technological ingenuity in this war will be the subject of study for generations. In comparison, despite these feats, the Ukrainian military is exhausted and weakened. A more coordinated focus on strategies to demobilize long-serving troops and recruit and train new ones to replace them is critically overdue.
The near-term future of the technology in this war is likely to change, as both countries are now racing to acquire and produce lower-cost, more disposable unmanned aerial vehicles, while also competing to improve their own electronic jamming capabilities. , could be characterized as an innovation in the war of attrition. Russia is tapping its friends in Beijing and Tehran to build up its stockpile of unmanned vehicles, while Ukraine has become a hotbed for Western defense and technology companies with drone warfare capabilities.
But if either party to this war could achieve advances from safe movement to actual battlefields solely through such high-tech tools and intelligence gathering, then there would be no need for a conventional counterattack in the first place. Probably. Therefore, with the influx of more technology into warfare, both sides may be able to distance themselves further and gain better insight into the movements of the other's forces. But dislodging or driving them back is unlikely, and there may even be a risk that Ukrainian forces will be forced into costly battles like the one in Bakhmut that do little to change the status quo.
That said, emulating Western forces may not be Kiev's best bet for this conflict, especially given the US's unique urge to quantify every aspect of the war into a digital problem to be solved through calculations. There is also gender. Ever since U.S. Army General William Westmoreland predicted the rise of automated warfare from Vietnam in 1969, technologically possible and perhaps “easier wars” have been theoretically imminent. It has always seemed that way, but in reality it is somehow elusive.
As political scientist Stephanie Carvin has written, science and technology made possible the “fastest ground invasion in the history of warfare, but they could not solve the difficult and complex problems that would inevitably arise.” Focusing on what Kervin calls “shiny objects” themselves, such as drones, cyber, and AI, distracts from discussions of how they can be integrated and employed toward concrete goals. is common.
None of this This suggests that Kiev's motivations are not existential. Given the headwinds it faces, the Ukrainian military must undoubtedly make the most of every advantage it can find. Kiev urgently needs a cheap, rapidly scalable way to minimize casualties on the front lines and keep Russian forces at bay, especially as ammunition shortages intensify.
However, if Ukraine's ultimate goal is to expel occupying forces from its territory, there are reasons to be wary of techno-solutionist approaches, especially those divorced from the broader organizational context of the Ukrainian military.
The escalating arms race between Ukrainian drones and Russian electronic warfare may captivate the imagination and capital of futurists, but it is conceptually untethered from the combined arms demands of past ground warfare. must not. Tactical systems such as drones can deny front-line maneuverability, but they are much less likely to enable it. They are certainly no substitute for recruiting, training, and equipping a capable fighting force over the long term. Doing so will require tough decisions from Kiev and its Western backers, especially the European capitals, but none of them must harbor or cultivate any illusions about a technological panacea.
No amount of magical technology can replace the weapons, equipment, and training that the United States and its few allies can exclusively provide, and the personnel that Kiev must recruit and mobilize. And if Kiev fails to do so, the result may be less about the future of war and more about stalemate.
