Allies are forcing the flow of artificial technology and precision missiles against Russian military power, including a new smart bomb
From Soviet scrap to experiments with the best generation of military weapons. This is the path Ukraine has taken in the nine months since the Russian invasion; from the March and April days when it used up its old ammunition reserves inherited from the USSR, became a pariah country begging the West for weapons to end the occupation, to its present state as a neo-military power in is capable of pushing back his enemy thanks to a skillful war machine.
The seed of transformation is clear: the continued shipment of arsenals by the United States and its NATO allies. That same Thursday, the Alliance estimated the money invested to date in arming the Ukrainian army at €40,000 million. Their role is vital, but so is the defense industry, which is 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 delivered two LRU missile launchers to Ukraine this week. It’s a system that lives up to the motto of the old marksmen: 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 establishment, Kiev is already using up to four different models of rocket launchers in this war, all of them pointers. It is preceded by the popular and deadly HIMARS, whose main supplier is the United States, the M270 and the MARS II. These three have been instrumental in pushing back Russian troops and retaking a significant percentage of Donbas. They are surgical bombs. HIMARS can hit magazines and supply lines from behind. And without this infrastructure, no army can last long on the front line.
“The Ukrainian army is still stronger,” Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said after receiving the French shipment. Paris plans to send other batteries of short-range “Crotale” missiles, highly effective at destroying Russian kamikaze drones. It is one of the most successful surface-to-air missiles in the SAM range in weapons history. It has been in use for fifty years. They are used by 22 countries, but mainly by the French and Finnish armed forces.
The ‘Crotale’ fitted into Washington’s and NATO’s philosophy of supplying Kiev with adapted 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), which were still utopian in European war conflicts such as those in the Balkans, predominate.
Google has refused to use its software as a weapon of war. However, other technology companies are currently testing the application of so-called AI against intruders in Donbas. It is a way to support Kiev, whose president, Volodímir Zelensky, met with the CEOs of several companies this summer, but also to test its applications in a real war context. One of the keys to the surprising failures of some of the most brilliant military minds in the Russian military lies in the use of tools such as satellites, observation drones and systems capable of predicting strategies – or creating predictive models based on crossing of thousands of parameters. , taunted for their planning errors.
At least three specialized facial recognition technology companies are operating in the country to identify corpses, prisoners or suspects of war crimes. Dozens of Russian commanders have been charged thanks to applications that compare photos and videos taken on the battlefield against databases containing millions of images of faces publicly available on websites and social networks. Russian and Ukrainian authorities use two 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 likeness. In more than a thousand cases the result was positive. They are not war-specific apps: they are used by more than 3,200 government agencies.
Kiev’s advance in invasion contains a paradox: it needs a constant supply of ammunition from the West to maintain its power. And that creates a border problem. Foreign Minister Dimitro Kuleba this week called on Atlantic Alliance governments to urgently encourage the production of new weapons in light of the emptying of arsenals where dozens of European armies and the United States itself are already have had to deal with. The question is to what extent these countries will be able to participate in a new investment cycle, now focused on arms production, if they have already sent billions of euros in military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, and with the caveat that they will have to put other items on in the future reconstruction of the country.
“As we fight today’s battles, we must think about how we will fight tomorrow’s battles,” Kuleba justified in the newspaper “Politico”, 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 equipment.
maneuvers in the air
The response to Kiev’s demands will be modulated in the coming weeks, especially as winter begins to leave the course of the war in the hands of military technology and ammunition supplies and not human progress. Currently, the United States – reluctant to send long-range weapons to Ukraine so as not to unleash war with unpredictable consequences – is considering exporting the GLSDB, a smart bomb that uses the HIMARS launch pads, but is capable of detonating within the air and mainly to bypass the air defense tactics learned by the Russians to shoot down the HIMARS themselves. In practice, the projectile hits any target, even in a cave or behind a rock wall.
The Ukrainian military could have the GSDB before next spring and it would be the spearhead of a plan drawn up with NATO precisely to produce new precision bombs for Kiev. The GLSDB has a range of 160 kilometers and falls within the so-called ‘360 weapons’; that is, it can be shot from any angle.
What the supply plans show is that the time to experiment with soft drinks is long gone. In the last quarter of the 20th century, the military industry abounded in projects as outlandish as a nuclear gun capable of firing a mini-atomic bomb a few miles away. It never materialized. The range was so short that the thermonuclear blast killed the shooter himself. And long before that, Winston Churchill’s strategists made a double wheel a few meters in diameter, ready to be launched loaded with explosives against the Nazi defenses. The difficulty of the ‘Panjandrum’, as it was christened, was that its weight and volume made it impossible to control with the risk of turning against the British soldiers themselves.
Today, that’s all Paleolithic history. When people talk about supplying weapons to Ukraine, it is done in terms of technological ‘packages’. Among them stands out the most advanced mobile artillery system in the world, Zuzana-2, with a Slovak patent and which will receive the former Soviet Republic in 2023 with the sponsorship of Germany, Norway and Denmark. Terrifying. It loads with European 155mm howitzers whose delivery has already been guaranteed by Germany, France, Belgium and Italy. Shoot sixteen in three minutes. A deadly deluge with which the army hopes to break through Russian defenses and supply routes.
It will complement the state-of-the-art 2S22 Bohdana, a self-propelled howitzer that Kiev presented in a parade in 2018, but had not used until now. And it is effectively doing so in Kherson, awaiting a new experimental Turkish weapon, a small drone laser missile called “Bozok,” that could bring a new twist to remote warfare. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry believes the front is “the perfect environment” to test this unprecedented ammunition, still without bloodstains.
Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky compares the invasion of his country to World War I because of the abundance both sides make in trenching. He is not without reason. Reconnaissance drones show that the Donbas is criss-crossed by thousands of miles of trenches, the only minimally effective space for soldiers to protect themselves from enemy artillery. The Institutes of War Studies in the US and UK 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 Kiev newspapers, despite short- and medium-range bombing, although they are a more viable target for drones. Now the soldiers also have to deal with mud and winter rains, which flood the trenches and “could force a rethinking of war tactics”. By the way, it is not his only ‘artisanal’ remedy against warlike artificial intelligence. The Ukrainians sometimes fly wooden missiles or missile-like balloons to weaken the Russian air defenses.
Source: La Verdad
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