Perilous Consequences Of The AI Revolution In Drone Warfare Spurred By Ukraine Conflict

For centuries, artillery was known as the ‘King of Battle’ relied upon by military commanders to rain hell on their adversaries. However, with the introduction of combat airplanes in the mid-1940s, also called as ‘flying artillery’, big guns got a bit sidelined, especially in the advanced Western-style militaries like the United States, NATO countries and Israel.

With the war in Ukraine, artillery rose back to prominence with airpower playing a very limited role due to Ukraine’s small fleet of aircraft and the reluctance of the Russian military to deploy its warplanes in the face of the threat posed by a wide array of air defense systems fielded by Ukraine.

However, alongside artillery, another category of weapon that rose to prominence in the Ukraine conflict is the armed unmanned aerial systems (UAS), especially the cheap off-the-shelf commercial drones and one-way kamikaze drones that are emerging as an expendable and cost-effective alternative to expensive warplanes, cruise and ballistic missiles, and artillery munitions.

The West has for years, preferred air superiority in warfare as aircraft provided much better mobility and longer ranges than the artillery systems, and involved less manpower. Also, huge financial and technological barrier involved in acquiring sophisticated aircraft systems kept several countries and non-state actors from catching up to the West in terms of airpower, including even China and Russia.

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With the coming of drones, however, the long-range precision-guided strike capability has been ‘democratized’ and this is only the beginning of what is a huge technological revolution set to eventually bring a fundamental shift in the character of warfare.

Earlier this month, the Ukrainian government’s public procurement platform Prozorro issued a tender for the acquisition of 10,000 First-Person-View (FPV) drones using Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the Ukrainian army.

“The first tender for FPV drones (using artificial intelligence – ed.) was recently launched on the closed module of Prozorro for the first 10 thousand, and more than 10 companies have already applied,” Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov reportedly said in an exclusive interview to Radio Liberty, as quoted by ‘Ukrainian National News’ (UNN), an independent Ukrainian information agency.

Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov at the Globsec forum in Prague, Czechia, on Aug. 30, 2024. (Image Source: X)

According to Fedorov, issuing a tender for manufacturers to compete could drive down the price of such drones. “This is what leads to competition on Prozorro and to a price reduction. So I would not say that they are much more expensive [than drones without AI]: one drone will cost a few hundred dollars more. And then the price will go down. Maybe the difference will be tens of dollars,” he was quoted as saying.

More importantly, he noted that competitive bidding for government contracts could be adopted for long-range drones as well, which have a greater cost difference between conventional ones and those using AI, when compared to the FPV category.

AI-enabled drones have become a priority for the Ukrianian armed forces to minimize the impact of Russian electronic jamming equipment that have been taking out thousands of Ukrianian drones every month.

For instance, The Economist reported in May that the Ukrainian special forces have also developed new software called Eagle Eyes, which enables drones to fly using visual navigation rather than the satellite-based GPS, thereby limiting the impact of Russian jamming.

The software is basically an image recognition system that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to compare its live feed of the area below the drone to a map made from images and video previously collected by a reconaissance aircraft. Per The Economist’s report, the software can recognize targets such as missile launchers and tanks, and can drop bombs on or fly into those targets autonomously.

A commander in a special forces corps called White Eagle, which is helping develop the technology, told The Economist that the software is being used widely and is cheap enough to be used on kamikaze (or suicide) drones that are not suitable for expensive upgrades.

Electronic warfare (EW) is one of the critical components of Russian military campaign in Ukraine, according to a report on Russian military tactics in Ukraine by the UK-based Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) which notes that the Russian military employs at least one major EW system along every 10 kilometers of the front line, usually positioned roughly 7 kilometers behind the frontline.

The Russian Shipovnik-Aero EW complex, in particular, is very effective against the Ukrainian drone operations, according to the RUSI report. With a range of 10 kilometers, this system can reportedly take control of a drone while simultaneously obtaining the coordinates of its operator’s location up to an accuracy of one meter.