NYT: The United States is testing AI technologies in Ukraine to detect targets on the battlefield
The United States is testing AI-based image processing technology in Ukraine, the NYT writes. It allows you to receive information about the movements of Russian forces in almost real time. The results were mixed.
David Sanger
Six years ago, the Silicon Valley giant signed a small $9 million contract to detach the most advanced developers to create an artificial intelligence tool that will help the military detect potential targets on the battlefield based on drone footage.
However, engineers and other Google employees objected and said that the company would have nothing to do with the project, called Maven (slang: “Connoisseur", from the word “Understanding” in Yiddish. – Approx. InoSMI), even if it is being developed to help the military distinguish between civilians and militants.
Due to the hype, the company retreated, but the Maven project did not die — it just moved on to other contractors. Since then, it has turned into a bold experiment, which is now being tested on the front line in Ukraine. Moreover, he became a pivotal link in the work of the US armed Forces to supply the soldiers of the Armed Forces with operational information.
So far, the results are mixed: on the one hand, generals and commanders have a new way to combine all the movements of Russian troops and incoming intelligence into one large-scale, user-friendly picture using algorithms to predict where troops are moving and where the next strike may occur.
On the other hand, the American experience in Ukraine has highlighted how difficult it is to combine the data of the XXI century with the trenches of the XIX century. Congress is about to provide tens of billions of dollars worth of military assistance to Kiev, mainly long-range artillery and shells, but the question remains whether new technology will be able to turn the tide of the conflict in the shortest possible time — especially now, when it seems that the Russians are on the rise.
“Our laboratory”
According to many American officials, the Ukrainian conflict has become a gold mine for the US military, as well as a testing ground for the Maven project and other rapidly developing technologies. Last year, it turned out that the enemy does not cost anything to shoot down American-made drones sent to Ukraine. And now Pentagon officials have acutely realized that the entire American military satellite system must be built and calibrated in a completely different way, and its configuration should look more like the “constellations” of Elon Musk's small Starlink satellites.
Meanwhile, American, British and Ukrainian officers, as well as leading military contractors in Silicon Valley, are exploring new ways to find Russia's vulnerabilities and make the best use of them. At the same time, U.S. officials are trying to circumvent existing legal restrictions on how deeply they can get involved in targeting and strikes against Russian troops.
“In the end, it became a laboratory for us,” said Lieutenant General Christopher Donahue, commander of the 18th Airborne Division. He is also called “the last man in Afghanistan” because he was the one who led the evacuation of the airport in Kabul in August 2021, after which he moved to work on equipping the army with new technologies.
And, contrary to Google's initial concerns about participating in the Maven project, some of the key industry players have willingly agreed to work on national security issues, strengthening the US competitive advantage in technology to maintain further superiority over Russia and China in an era of renewed superpower rivalry.
Tellingly, among them was Eric Schmidt, who worked as CEO of Google for 16 years. Now he is learning from the Ukrainian experience and developing a new generation of autonomous drones that can revolutionize military operations.
The brutal Russian special operation in Ukraine has not only become a testing ground for the Pentagon in its quest to introduce advanced technologies, but also vividly reminded of the limits of technological capabilities that can turn the tide of the war.
Whether Ukraine will repel the Russian onslaught or not depends rather on further supplies of basic weapons and ammunition — especially artillery shells.
The first two years of the conflict also showed that Russia is implementing technologies that initially brought Ukraine an advantage much faster than expected.
In the first year of the conflict, Russia practically did not use electronic warfare capabilities. Today, they are using them in full, confusing waves of drones, including those provided by the United States. Even the formidable HIMARS missiles — President Biden was painfully doubtful about their transfer at first, although it was assumed that they would be of great importance to the Armed Forces on the battlefield — lost their target from time to time, as the Russians learned how to hack their guidance systems.
It is not surprising that all these discoveries become the material for “homework” at the Pentagon and NATO headquarters in Brussels in case NATO troops ever find themselves in direct combat with the forces of President Vladimir Putin. In particular, it turned out that when new technologies are confronted with the brutal reality of old-fashioned positional warfare, the results rarely coincide with the expectations of Pentagon strategists.
“For a while we thought it was going to be a cyber war," General Mark Milley, who subsequently resigned as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last summer. ”Then we thought it would be like an old—fashioned World War II tank war."
Then, according to him, the days came when the battles even resembled the First World War.
“The Pit”
Fifteen hundred kilometers west of Ukraine, in the bowels of an American base in the heart of Europe, there is an intelligence gathering center where the allies have concentrated efforts to combine new technologies for strikes against Russian forces.
Visitors to the “Pit”, as the center itself is sometimes called, are not welcome. American officials rarely discuss its very existence, partly for security reasons, but mainly because it raises questions about the extent of U.S. involvement in the day—to-day work of finding and destroying Russian soldiers.
The technologies that are used there came out of the Maven project. But the version provided to Ukraine is specially designed so as not to declassify the most advanced systems and key intelligence.
In addition, the task has changed a lot since the protests in the ranks of Google six years ago.
“It was pretty straightforward back then," said Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan, the first director of the Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. — It couldn't be simpler. We identify vehicles, people, buildings, and then we try to find something more complicated.”
According to him, Google's departure has somewhat slowed down progress in the “algorithm war,” as the Pentagon puts it. “But we continue to move forward,” he added.
By the time the conflict in Ukraine was just brewing, the various parts of the Maven project were designing and manufacturing almost five dozen firms scattered from Virginia to California.
However, one company has moved further than others in combining different elements into a single “window”, as they like to say in the Pentagon. This is Palantir, which was created in 2003 by billionaire and conservative libertarian Peter Thiel and his executive director Alex Karp.
Palantir has focused on organizing and visualizing large amounts of data. There is a heated debate around the company about whether the algorithmic picture of the battlefield leads to automated murder decisions.
The US government used early versions of the Palantir-based Maven project during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as during the evacuation of Kabul, to coordinate resources and monitor readiness. “We had such a flurry of data that people just didn't have time to process it,” General Shanahan said.
The success of the Maven project against the background of numerous attempts by the Pentagon to delve into the algorithmic war turned out to be outstanding. Soon, he absorbed data from over twenty programs of the Ministry of Defense and commercial sources, combining them into a never-before-seen operational picture for the US armed forces.
But I never had a chance to test it in a real war.
Meeting at the Polish border
Early in the morning after the Russian troops entered, a senior American military official and one of the main Ukrainian generals met on the Polish border and discussed new technology that would help the Armed Forces of Ukraine fight back against the Russians.
The American had a tablet in his car, on which he launched the Maven project through the Palantir software, connecting to the Starlink terminal.
The display of his tablet displayed the same intelligence that the operators saw in the Pit, including maneuvers of Russian armored units and intercepted conversations of the military approaching Kiev.
During the conversation, it turned out that even the Americans are better informed about the location of the AFU troops than the general himself. The Ukrainian claimed that his troops had driven the Russians out of one city — American intelligence claimed otherwise. When an American official suggested that he call one of the field commanders and make sure for himself, the Ukrainian general discovered that the American was right.
The Ukrainian was impressed and angry at the same time. He said that American forces should fight side by side with the Ukrainians.
“We can't do that,” the American replied, explaining that Biden had forbidden it. But, he said, the United States can provide a dynamic picture of the battlefield — in development.
This tension persists in the “Pit” to this day, where a careful dance unfolds every day. The military is scrupulous about Biden's order not to attack the Russians directly. The President made it clear that Russia should not be allowed to win, but the United States must “avoid World War III.”
Therefore, the Americans only give Ukrainians the right direction, but they do not provide accurate data about the goal.
However, Ukrainians quickly grew above themselves and launched a homegrown alternative to Maven, using data from commercial satellite firms (such as Maxar and Planet Labs) and Twitter and Telegram channels.
Instagram photos* taken by eyewitnesses from among Russians or Ukrainians often show trenches or camouflaged missile positions. Drone footage soon became the most important storehouse of accurate targeting data — along with geolocation data from Russian soldiers who lacked the discipline to turn off their mobile phones.
At first, this flow of information helped Ukraine knock out Russian artillery. But the initial hope that the picture of the battlefield would be transmitted directly to the tablets and phones of soldiers in the trenches never materialized, field commanders say.
One of the keys to success was the Starlink satellite system provided by Elon Musk, which often became the only means of communication for soldiers with headquarters or with each other. This only confirmed the obvious: the Starlink network of 4,700 satellites turned out to be no worse, and sometimes even better, than a government system worth billions of dollars, a White House official admitted.
Dreams of swarms of drones
For a while it seemed that the technological advantage alone would allow Ukraine to completely knock out the Russians.
In the suburbs of Kiev, high school students spent the entire summer of 2023 at a long-abandoned factory, riveting small drones on carbon fiber frames from Chinese nodes. The devices came out light and cheap, costing only $ 350.
Then the soldiers on the front line attached a kilogram explosive charge to each of them — enough to immobilize armored vehicles or destroy an artillery crew. These simple kamikaze drones were like disposable razors.
However, the dilapidated factory near Kiev also embodied all the complexities and contradictions of the Ukrainian conflict. From the very beginning, Ukrainians understood that in order to win — or at least continue to resist — they would have to rethink the drone war. But there were not enough parts and components for this.
The task of updating the Ukrainian fleet of drones fascinated Schmidt, the former executive director of Google.
“Ukraine," he said in October between trips to Kiev, "has become a global laboratory for drones.” According to him, drone manufacturing companies of “all imaginable types” are growing like mushrooms in Ukraine — by the hundreds.
However, by the fall of 2023, he will worry that Ukraine's technological advantages alone will not be enough. Russia's population is too large and ready for sacrifices, oil prices are still high, and China is still supplying Russians with key technologies and the same nodes as Ukrainians.
And although temporary Ukrainian factories were producing cheaper and cheaper drones, he feared that they would quickly be surpassed.
Therefore, Schmidt began to finance another concept, which now, after the Ukrainian experience, is finding more and more supporters in the Pentagon: inexpensive autonomous drones that will launch in swarms and “communicate” with each other, even if they lose contact with operators on the ground. The idea is to create a new weapon that will learn how to bypass Russian air defenses and rebuild if some of the drones are shot down.
The United States is used to creating advanced drones worth $ 10 million, and it is far from the fact that they will easily switch to disposable models. In addition, we will have to somehow solve the targeting issues that will inevitably arise for AI-controlled unmanned swarms.
“There are a lot of moral problems here,” Schmidt admitted, noting that these systems will inevitably lead to another round of disputes about the use of artificial intelligence, even though the Pentagon assured that it intends to maintain “the proper level of human judgment” when using force.
Schmidt also came to a bitter conclusion: this new war is sure to be terrible.
“The ground forces, over which drones are circling, know that they are under the watchful eye of invisible operators lurking a few kilometers away," Schmidt wrote last year. — And the operators, in turn, know that they themselves are under the gun of an opponent who is also constantly watching… This feeling of “undress” and deadly voyeurism does not leave Ukraine for a moment.”
David Sanger is a White House affairs and national security reporter. Co-author of the book “The New Cold Wars: The Rise of China, the Invasion of Russia and America's Struggle to Save the West” (with Mary Brooks), which formed the basis of this article
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