High-Tech Lessons from the Ukraine War cntd

New Delhi, Aug 8, 2024.

During a recent pow wow with Bharat Karnad and Ashish Sonal, mil-tech expert  in SITARA I learnt why we still rely on shepherds to detect border intrusions ­­­ in the Kargil conflict (1999) and Doklam and Galwan – despite our world class space based ISR capabilities – Mig 25s, the best aerial surveillance platform which was carrying out regular recce missions in 1999 along our LAC & LOC in 1999; the Israeli Heron UAV in this role since 2003, and succeeding state-of-the-art remote sensing amongst other ISR capabilities.

It prompted a request to meet with open-minded defence authorities to address the problem.  SITARA just gave them a suite of recommendations to increase the defence and tech preparedness of our forces (sorry cannot post our recommendations here), but before that we had written an article on the modernisation drives in other militaries and the Ukraine War’s lessons for us (link here: they changed the title from “High-tech Lessons of the Ukraine War”). Ashish & self underlined the need to act on the lessons from the Ukraine conflict (i)  fast track integrated (joint) command & control and joint data fusion centres and also (ii) expedite genuine indigenisation by focusing on components & capabilities, not platforms. Fortunately, they allow at least 1200 words though one cant do justice to this subject in such a limited space.

Posted therefore is a link to a more detailed Foreign Affairs article on military transformations – by Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO who quit Google to work on Military AI and is now Ukraine’s defence advisor (as described in our article he is spearheading several AI infused projects in Ukraine and elsewhere) and Mark Milley, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Google staff had protested against Google’s work aiding military goals.

The FA article mentions  that China has developed the world’s first AI military commander who/ which “substitutes for human military leaders in simulated war games… The bots, the first of their kind, are completely automated, possess the perception and reasoning skills of human military leaders, and are learning at an exponential rate.”

The human in the loop is rapidly being forced out. Here is a video – at the 2.03 mark a solder begs a drone not to kill him, he was lucky there was a human operator behind it. China, Russia and the US are planning on a million drones each, and increasingly imbuing them with full autonomy to get around EW (jamming) measures. “Black Mirror”, supposedly a sci-fi fantasy – predicted this in one of its episodes. The future is here and the footage of combat scenarios using autonomous killer drones is dystopian in the extreme.

Ghouls watching the carnage

The FA article moreover very interestingly underlines how even America’s advanced capabilities are slowly becoming outdated even as China nimbly steps up to meet the challenge. Meanwhile other powers profit from the Ukraine conflict as they get to sharpen their military claws. The ceaseless weapons flow is not because of a touching belief that Ukraine will prevail, it is to keep the MIC humming and evolving.

One has not heard of any similar transformative initiatives on the Indian side. There is a trickle of extremely hard to access funds even as research institutions are deluged with funds with little strategic direction or objectives in sight. Developing advanced tech is well within the capability of Indian companies provided they get the needed support from the relevant branches of Govt/ Armed Forces. That is why we too coincidentally requested in our article and to the Armed Forces that we focus not on platforms with their white-labeled products, but on high-tech components and sub-components which actually form the backbone of military platforms , thus encouraging the smaller more innovative companies. Amongst our priority asks was also a request to create data fusion centres to collate and relay the data from our high-tech assets up in the sky so that we dont rely on shepherds to warn us of border intrusions!

Regarding our meeting, on the positive side we detected good intentions and a sincere drive to act on the multiple obstacles still standing in the way of tech modernisation and integrated command and control structures, but our silo-based style of functioning and outdated financial rules which penalise innovation – again stood in the way. This is sad because people are fired up about technological upgradation in the Armed Forces and they were genuinely impressed by the capabilities of the companies they interacted with. Let us hope we find a way to reach our goals…

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