Allies force flow of artificial technology and precision missiles against Russian military power, including with a new smart bomb
From Soviet scrap to experimentation with the best generation of military weapons. This is the path taken by the Ukraine during the nine months since the Russian invasion; from those days in March and April when it used up its old reserves of ammunition inherited from the USSR, becoming a pariah country that begged the West for weapons to stop the occupation, to its current condition as a military neo-power capable of pushing back its enemy thanks to a competent war machine.
The seed of transformation is clear: the continued shipment of arsenals by the United States and its NATO allies. This same Thursday, the Alliance estimated the money invested so far in arming the Ukrainian Army at 40,000 million euros. Their role is vital, but so is the defense industry, experimenting with new methods of waging modern warfare in a real war arena. No matter how cold and cruel it turns out to turn a blood-soaked nation into a laboratory.
France has delivered two LRU rocket launchers to Ukraine this week. It is a system that makes good the motto of the old gunmen: where the eye puts the bullet. The LRU has a range of 70 kilometers and hits a target with a margin of error of only one meter. With its incorporation, kyiv already uses up to four different models of rocket launchers in this war, all of them pointers. It is preceded by the popular and lethal HIMARS, whose main supplier is the United States, the M270 and the MARS II. These three have been decisive in pushing back the Russian troops and reconquering a significant percentage of Donbas. They are surgical bombs. HIMARS can hit the rear against warehouses and supply lines. And without this infrastructure, no Army can hold out for long on the front lines.
“The Ukrainian Army is still stronger,” said Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, after receiving the French consignment. Paris plans to send other batteries of short-range ‘Crotale’ missiles, very effective in destroying Russian kamikaze drones. It is one of the most successful surface-to-air missiles in the SAM range in the history of weapons. It has been in service for fifty years. They are used by 22 countries, but mostly by the French and Finnish forces.
modern battles
Artificial intelligence, satellites and drones have defeated Russia’s military minds
The Mavic-3, a small drone that Russia and Ukraine use for surveillance work. /
The response of the ‘Crotale’
The ‘Crotale’ fit into the philosophy of Washington and NATO to provide kyiv with custom weapons. The goal is for them to respond to the worst Russian threats as they arise. The two countries have reformulated the rules of war. In Ukraine, the importance of aerial bombardments, remote-controlled weapons (drones) and a decisive intervention of technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) predominates, which in European war conflicts such as the one in the Balkans were still utopian.
Google has refused to allow its software to be used as a weapon of war. However, other technology companies are currently testing the application of so-called AI against invaders in Donbas. It represents a way to support kyiv, whose president, Volodímir Zelenski, met this summer with the CEOs of several companies, but also to test its applications in a real war context. One of the keys to the surprising failure of some of the most brilliant military minds in the Russian Army resides in the use of tools such as satellites, observation drones and systems capable of forecasting strategies – or making predictive models based on the crossing of thousands of parameters. , reviled for their planning errors.
At least three specialized facial recognition technology companies operate in the country to identify corpses, prisoners or war crimes suspects. Dozens of Russian commanders have been charged thanks to applications that compare photos and videos recorded on the battlefield with databases containing millions of images of faces publicly available on websites and social networks. Russian and Ukrainian authorities use two of them to identify their dead soldiers. The process requires strong stomachs: a portrait must be made of the corpse, often badly damaged by the ravages of wounds and corruption, and subjected to a search for someone with a strong resemblance. In more than a thousand cases the result has been positive. They are not war-specific apps: they are used by more than 3,200 government agencies.
kyiv’s advance in the invasion contains a paradox: it needs a constant supply of ammunition from the West to maintain its power. And that creates a boundary problem. The Foreign Minister, Dimitro Kuleba, has made an appeal this week to the governments of the Atlantic Alliance to encourage the urgent manufacture of new weapons in the face of the emptying of arsenals already suffered by dozens of European armies and the United States itself. The question is to what extent these countries will be able to get involved in a new investment cycle, now focused on arms production, once they have already sent billions of euros in military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, and with the caveat that they will have to put up other items in the future reconstruction of the country.
This week
kyiv has completed one of the best modern artillery deployments after receiving French LRUs
“While we fight today’s battles, we have to think about how we will fight tomorrow’s battles,” Kuleba justified in the “Político” newspaper, convinced that the invasion will be prolonged and without the arrival of ammunition, batteries and armored vehicles “it will not be possible to win » to Russia. The minister claimed to encourage production from “today”, especially tanks and air defense material.
maneuvers in the air
maneuvers in the air
The response to kyiv’s demands will be modulated in the coming weeks, especially when winter begins to leave the course of the war in the hands of military technology and the supply of ammunition and not in human advances. At the moment, the United States – reluctant to send long-range weapons to Ukraine so as not to unleash a war with unpredictable consequences – is considering exporting the GLSDB, a smart bomb that uses the HIMARS launch platforms, but is capable of maneuvering in the air and Above all, to circumvent the air defense tactics learned by the Russians in order to shoot down the HIMARS themselves. In practice, the projectile hits any target, even in a cave or behind a rock wall.
The Ukrainian Army could have the GLSDB before next spring and it would be the spearhead of a plan drawn up with NATO precisely to produce new precision bombs for kyiv. The GLSDB has a range of 160 kilometers and falls within the so-called ‘360 weapons’; that is, it can be shot at any angle.
What the supply plans reveal is that the time for experimenting with soda is long gone. In the last quarter of the 20th century, the military industry abounded in projects as bizarre as a nuclear rifle capable of firing a mini-atomic bomb a few kilometers away. It never materialized. The range was so short that the thermonuclear explosion killed the shooter himself. And long before, Winston Churchill’s strategists made a double wheel several meters in diameter ready to be launched full of explosives against the Nazi defenses. The difficulty of the ‘Panjandrum’, as it was baptized, was that its weight and volume made it impossible to control with the risk of it turning against the British soldiers themselves.
Today all that is Paleolithic history. When people talk about delivering weapons to Ukraine, it’s done in terms of technological ‘packages’. Among them, the most advanced mobile artillery system on the planet stands out, Zuzana-2, with a Slovak patent and which the former Soviet republic will begin to receive in 2023 with the sponsorship of Germany, Norway and Denmark. Fearsome. It loads with European 155-mm howitzers whose supply has already been guaranteed by Germany, France, Belgium and Italy. Shoot sixteen in three minutes. A lethal deluge with which the Army hopes to break Russian defenses and supply routes.
It will complement the state-of-the-art 2S22 Bohdana, a self-propelled howitzer that kyiv presented at a parade in 2018, but had not used until now. And he does it effectively in Kherson, awaiting a new experimental Turkish weapon, a tiny drone laser missile called ‘Bozok’, which may put a new twist on remote warfare. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense considers that the front is “the perfect environment” to test this unprecedented ammunition, still without staining with blood.
The value of trenches in a 21st century war
The Ukrainian president, Volodimir Zelensky, compares the invasion of his country with the First World War because of the profusion that the two sides make of the construction of trenches. He is not wrong. Reconnaissance drones show the Donbas crossed by thousands of kilometers of ditches, the only minimally effective space for soldiers to protect themselves from enemy artillery. The institutes of war studies in the USA and the United Kingdom agree that to see a similar layout it is necessary to go back to the conflagration that shook the world between 1914 and 1918. The war of the 21st century makes the portable shovel one of the « better defensive weapons”, according to the irony of the military themselves in the Kiev newspapers, in the face of short and medium-range bombing, although they are a more feasible target for drones. Now the soldiers also face mud and winter rains, which flood the trenches and can “force a rethinking of warfare tactics.” By the way, it is not his only ‘artisanal’ resource against warlike artificial intelligence. The Ukrainians sometimes fly wooden missiles or rocket-like balloons to wear down the Russians’ air defenses.
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