Starlink, Palantir, Maxar: In Ukraine, a number of high-tech companies are helping the military. How great is the influence of high-tech in war – and is it to the advantage or disadvantage of the country?
It’s a two-speed war, as the pictures from Ukraine show: trench warfare along the front lines, drone attacks and modern anti-aircraft systems – and above all a satellite network, with the help of which a hitherto unparalleled amount of data from across the country is disseminated around the world in real time become. “I would describe this war as a very conventional war, partly with almost archaic elements such as artillery duels, but which is overarched and permeated by an additional level of high technology,” says Frank Sauer from the Bundeswehr University in Munich. The fact that Ukraine has been able to withstand the Russian attack for a year and a half is thanks not only to its fighting spirit and the steady supply of conventional weapons, but also to the use of modern technology on the battlefield.
Just days after the Russian invasion began, tech billionaire Elon Musk helped maintain Ukraine’s communications network with “Starlink.” The company “Clearview AI” offered the country its facial recognition services, which the armed forces now use to identify fallen and captured Russian fighters. Using the “Primer” AI software, they were able to intercept and analyze unencrypted telephone calls from Russian fighters. In April 2022, satellite images from the company “Maxar” caused an uproar by observers because they allegedly showed mass graves on the outskirts of Mariupol – and thus allowed conclusions to be drawn about the conditions in the city, which was still under siege at the time. In early 2023, Palantir CEO Alex Karp claimed that Meta-Constellation software was responsible for most of Ukraine’s target detection and selection. Since then, his company has aggressively advertised “Skykit,” a kind of portable computer that includes a quadcopter drone and satellite dish that can be used for days without being connected to the power grid.
High tech doesn’t solve all problems
Machine vision, speech recognition, geodata analysis using neural networks: all the services mentioned are based on technologies that can be assigned to the field of “artificial intelligence”. Unmanned weapon systems such as flying or swimming drones are comparatively simple weapons – but they are also used en masse by both warring parties.
According to an article in the US National Defense Magazine, Ukraine is “a laboratory in which the future form of warfare is being created”. The effect can already be felt in the country: the “kill chain”, i.e. the sequence of an attack from detection to destruction of a target, is significantly reduced through the use of targeting software – as is the time and manpower that has to be allocated for data analysis. The technology also plays an important role in protecting one’s own armed forces: A quadcopter camera drone can be had for a few hundred euros and – if it is not shot down – can do what a reconnaissance troop would have to be sent for by remote control.
Attacker Russia has not yet been able to keep up on this level. Military expert Sauer sees “a significant difference between what Russia has presented in the media in recent years and what these systems really do. So far, none of these supposed high-tech miracle weapons have been seen in Ukraine. My impression is that over there not much has happened beyond prototype status.” However, Russia also takes advantage of the relative cost savings through the use of technology: For example, through the mass deployment of cheaply produced Shahed Kamikaze drones, which then have to be shot down by Ukrainian forces with expensive anti-aircraft salvos.
In any case, modern technology does not always solve the military problem. “You can fly over a minefield with a drone with an infrared sensor – you do that in the evening when the sun has been shining all day and the mines have warmed up more than the surrounding soil. Then you can see every single mine in this infrared image identify and map it,” says Sauer. “That’s great, but it’s still a long way from clearing them out. You need mine clearing systems for that – and for them it’s not critical to the centimeter where the explosive devices are.”
Dependence on tech companies
And yet another disadvantage lies in the relative dependence on high technology: Sauer cites the example of “Starlink”, which was a “game changer” for Ukraine. Company boss Musk had flirted with a restriction or termination of the service several times – apparently at random – but has so far maintained it.
The other AI companies are also completely non-transparent in their so-called “support” of Ukraine. It is not publicly known whether the country has to pay for it or gets the software for free because it provides data and experience for the algorithm in the conflict. “These are companies – and their goal is to sell their products,” says Sauer. “And a product that can be advertised as having been tested and reworked will sell better at the next gun show.”
This is not the only reason why Ukraine is now emphasizing that it is also developing technology-based weapons itself. She combines high-tech and low-tech, tinkers together civilian components and military equipment. For example, the SBU secret service recently presented “SeaBaby”, a floating drone with hundreds of kilograms of explosives, which is said to have been decisive in attacks on the bridge to Crimea and on the Russian landing ship “Olenogorski Gornjak”.
Far from a “hyperwar”
Sauer emphasizes that the special feature here does not lie in an extraordinary progressiveness, but in how inventively the Ukrainian forces used the available material and technology. “The view of a NATO armed force would be: ‘We don’t need anything like that. That’s why we have torpedoes or anti-ship missiles,'” he says. “The ability to innovate and the incredibly short cycles in which it is developed – that’s the really interesting thing that we can learn from.”
Ukraine’s chances are not bad in this respect. Security expert Ulrike Franke from the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) writes that it is likely that Ukraine will become “a serious player in the drone sector” once the war is over. The Ukrainians themselves are spreading even more optimism: we will sell software to Palantir by the end of the war,” the Washington Post quoted an officer with the pseudonym “Lesya” as saying at the end of last year.
In the present, the conflict is still a long way from a “hyperwar”, as former US Navy General John Allen and AI entrepreneur Amir Husain call a hypothetical war of machines with almost no human participation.