Seeking low-cost technological solutions for the war in Ukraine

Teams from the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the Ministry of Defense — who look more like they came from a start-up than a military barracks — are looking for low-cost technological solutions that can produce material on a large scale. They believe that the war against Russia will not end anytime soon and that, to win, they need to be independent from foreign military aid. With limited resources and financial capacity compared to the enemy, they are sharpening their ingenuity.

They ask that their full names not be disclosed for security reasons. Nor will they give details about the office from which they operate, beyond a generic description: a modern co-working space in the centre of Kyiv. They do not reveal how many of them there are, for the same reason, but they do say that they do not work alone, but in a network, in close collaboration with researchers, private companies, NGOs, and various ministries.

Oleksi, dressed in jeans and a grey hoodie with an embroidered cat, looks more like he works in a technology company than in the military. He had no technical training before the war, but now he is a specialist in one of the devices at the center of this conflict: drones, a gamble on both sides — the Ukrainian army has received 1.2 million of these devices so far this year, according to a statement from the Ministry of Defense published on Wednesday. Oleksi started in the army, after the large-scale invasion of February 2022, in an artillery reconnaissance unit. “We had a problem: we were short of ammunition. We started using FPV drones (which carry remote vision systems) adapted as kamikazes. Now we use drones as ammunition carriers on the battlefield,” he explains.

These adapted drones are an example of the cheap technology they are looking for, compared to more expensive and difficult-to-produce models such as the American Switchblade 500/600 and the Polish Warmade. When they first started using them, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy announced that they would make 100,000 of them, Oleksi recalls. They have already made 2.5 million, he says. “It is very easy to scale up production.”

Between meetings, this soldier takes time to explain how he started out as a drone operator, and was then promoted to platoon commander, responsible for the drone unit. He knows the battlefield, the trenches, and the command centers well. Now, from the co-working space in the centre of Kyiv where he and other members of the Office for Support of Reforms operate, he is looking for technologies that can be applied on the front. His team works with Brave 1, a platform that brings several ministries and the army together with entrepreneurs and producers.

Oleksi is studying, among other things, whether the inventions presented to him can actually be useful. A few days ago, for example, a company showed him a device that could be attached to a machine gun to hit a drone with a laser pointer. “It was completely useless. The human field of vision is 500 meters; at that distance you don’t need a drone.” However, he came up with ideas for using the component in another way.

In November, they held a hackathon, a meeting with the defense industry and manufacturers called Attack of the Machines 2.0, to address some of the problems they face. Together, they sought solutions to combat gliding bombs. And they thought of new ways to neutralize enemy drones, which operate on fiber optic cables of up to 10 kilometers in length, more protected against interference than those that use radio signals.

Ukraine’s aim, other sources explain, is for at least 80% of its weapons to be cheap. But also powerful: they are looking for sufficient capacity to combat not only swarms of drones or bomb devices such as the Shahed, which can cost around $20,000, according to some sources, but also high-cost missiles. One success story they like to recall is the attack on the Russian fleet in the Black Sea with swarms of nautical drones.

Russian superiority

Moscow, which has the support of allies such as North Korea, Iran, and China, is also ahead of Kyiv in the technological domain. “Usually Ukraine innovates and invents, and Russia steals and escalates,” says Yuri, who leads a team dedicated to analyzing trends in this field of warfare. This soldier, dressed in a cable knit sweater, modern-cut trousers with pleats and sneakers, attributes this to the verticality of the Russian hierarchy, compared to the more open Ukrainian society and industry. “The source of our resilience is that we do not have just one entry point, but many. But to escalate, a more centralized organization is needed.”

“The side that has a technological advantage over the enemy wins,” he said at one of the meeting tables in the co-working space on Monday. His team is dedicated to seeing “which technologies can have a role on the battlefield and which will remain science fiction; also, what bottlenecks there are and how to solve them.”

The biggest technological breakthrough in this conflict has been unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) on land, at sea, and in the air. Much of the development is now focused on drone swarms, artificial intelligence, and machine learning systems, which have sparked ethical debates. In the medium to long term, the Ukrainian army wants to work on underwater UAVs. Other technologies on the battlefield include quantum computing and the use of lasers, which are already being tested by the U.S., UK, and Israeli armies, but which are out of Ukraine’s reach due to their high cost, according to Yuri.

The change is not just technological, explains the analyst. “The transformation is immense.” The use of UAVs impacts everything: the development of military doctrine, the training of troops, the structure of units, recruitment, and even the way in which defense fortifications are built, to make them drone-proof.

“This war is also unique in that the battlefield is transparent, which makes it difficult to deceive and toy with the enemy,” he says. In the 10-kilometer kill zone, “everyone sees everyone else with drones; it is very difficult to deceive the enemy,” although the invasion of the Russian Kursk region shows, in his view, that it is still possible to confuse them.

The battlefield is now a mix of the old and the new, featuring 60-year-old armored vehicles with autonomous turrets or 12.7-caliber machine guns with machine learning systems. The army is too: Soviet-era top brass are mixed with NATO-trained soldiers and teams like Oleksi’s and Yuri’s are reminiscent of start-ups. “The most effective units are those with a commander with civilian management experience. They operate like companies,” he says.

With this business logic, they are also looking for investors. The format of international aid they prefer is the Danish model, in which Ukraine provides a list of projects seeking funding, which Danish experts then evaluate and support. Or the Nordic and Baltic model, with the creation of joint ventures. Always with the aim of being autonomous and producing their own low-cost technology on a large scale.

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