Ukraine, Taiwan face-offs help drive drone, AI revolution

LONDON — As Russian helicopter gunships and patrol boats closed on Ukrainian unmanned "sea baby" maritime-attack drones on Dec. 6 to destroy them before they reached their targets, they received an unpleasant surprise: The robot boats were shooting back, seemingly with machine guns being automatically aimed and fired.

According to Ukraine's security service, the SBU, the gunfire from the robot vessels forced the Russian units to break off their attack and is likely to have inflicted Russian casualties, though that could not be confirmed from the grainy video released by the Ukrainian government. It showed a machine gun firing towards helicopters but few further details.

Nor was it immediately clear how much damage the attack had inflicted on what appeared to be its primary targets.

"Russian pilots thought themselves the hunters and expected an easy hunt, but they themselves became the prey as the naval drones opened fire in return," the SBU said in a statement with attached video. It added that they also damaged a barge being used to repair the Kerch Strait bridge to Russian-held Crimea.

What is clear, however, is that unmanned systems — and the increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence and "edge computing" systems that can run them — are continuing to become ever-more important in both Ukraine and wider current and potential conflicts. They are driving new investment and seen as increasingly critical to future deterrence and defence.

Earlier this week, the Washington Post reported that Ukrainian drones and operators had been deployed secretly to Syria to support opposition forces in their lightning advance that ousted the government of Bashar al-Assad.

Meanwhile, US commanders have described the growing number of classified undersea systems as central to confronting China and deterring an invasion of Taiwan.

Speaking at London's Royal United Services Institute this week, US Deputy Secretary for Defence Kathleen Hicks said almost three years of fighting in Ukraine had seen "the character of warfare change", with commercial technology such as drones and AI systems rapidly entering service. "The Russia-Ukraine war didn't start this trend, but it did accelerate it."

Future major conflict, she said, is likely to involve a mix of more traditional highly expensive military technology that could take years to build, together with much faster-developed and hugely cheaper systems.

That has been especially important in Ukraine, where Western nations have struggled to supply the Kyiv government with enough more traditional weaponry, particularly artillery shells against Russia's invasion, while simultaneously cooperating on more high-tech forms of warfare including jamming.

For now, many of Ukraine's drones — and it often deploys tens of thousands every month — and other technological innovations come from small businesses and workshops.

But ever since the full-scale invasion started, a new generation of Western high-tech firms have also set up forward operating bases within the country itself.

"We have people who are spending a significant amount of time in Ukraine with the front-line elite units that are using our technology," Chris Brose, head of strategy at Anduril, one of the fastest growing defence tech firms, told this columnist last month.

"They are really harvesting the lessons, the criticisms and the requirements to build better capability within a few weeks or months."

Anduril has already delivered or is developing multiple platforms for the US military and others — including a robot submarine known as "Ghost Shark" that is "the size of a school bus" for Australia.

It is also already receiving contracts from the Pentagon's "Replicator" initiative, announced last year, which intends to purchase significant numbers of unmanned systems as well as counter-drone defences to be ready for the middle of 2025.

Trialling technology

Anduril's "switchblade" and "altius" loitering munitions — drones which fly above a battlefield before identifying and diving on their target - have also already been purchased by Taiwan.

In the event of an invasion there, US commanders in the Pacific say they would use such systems — as well as larger undersea unmanned vehicles such as "Ghost Shark" — to create an unmanned "hellscape" across the region and break up Chinese forces trying to cross the Taiwan Strait.

Drones — which have reportedly inflicted the majority of front-line casualties on both sides in Ukraine this year — would also be key to halting a Russian advance should the front lines unravel in Ukraine in the coming weeks.

That need might yet prove urgent.

British defence intelligence has reported the situation on the ground is the most unstable it has been since the start of the 2022 Russian invasion. The Kremlin has proven willing to take the highest casualties since those early weeks in the apparent hope of taking much greater territory before Donald Trump returns to the White House and tries to impose a truce.

This month, Germany announced it would provide Ukraine with 4,000 drones that use technology from new German defence tech firm Helsing to navigate to targets through much heavier jamming than might otherwise be possible.

Helsing's first work for the Ukrainian government involved using artificial intelligence to identify targets on commercial satellite imagery much faster than a human could. The ability to now carry out that kind of analysis on the drone is down to both advances in hardware and software — particularly microchips and programming — now on the brink of rewiring modern war.

Particularly in the Pacific, where distances are vast, the ability to get an unmanned vehicle to perform its own analysis — thereby only needing to send back much smaller quantities of data — is key to modern military war plans.

In a contested region like the Taiwan Strait, enough unmanned systems capable of selecting their own targets could be pivotal to victory or defeat.

As the launch of the Pentagon's "Replicator" programme last year, the then-commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral John Aquilino, suggested that in the first 24 hours of any conflict, he wanted US forces to be able to identify at least a thousand separate targets and hit them.

Making money

This would require systems very different to the single, pilot-operated "first person view" (FPV) drones that have dominated Ukraine's battlefields this year.

It would instead generate a need for much greater information-sharing and analysis allowing forward-deployed unmanned vehicles to collect intelligence and take direction from commanders with the smallest possible data footprint.

That technology is now developing fast.

Last week, the company announced its Dive-XL unmanned surface vehicle had just completed a 100-hour single voyage, and was preparing for a much larger 1,000-nautical-mile, fully submerged deployment in the coming year.

Earlier this week, Polish news website Politikaya quoted drone expert Piotr Wojciechowski as suggesting that the FPV systems seen in Ukraine might soon become extinct, forcing the evolution of a new generation of military drones much more autonomous than their civilian counterparts.

"Jamming systems are becoming so widespread and powerful that unprotected and unencrypted radio communication channels will soon be useless, even dangerous," he said. "This applies to areas spanning dozens of kilometers from the front lines."

War in Europe and a potential Asia conflict have helped drive a mini-venture capital boom into high-tech defence firms.

In August, Anduril — founded only three years ago — locked in an added US$1.5 billion (S$2 billion) in venture capital funding that took its overall valuation to US$14 billion — almost 70 per cent more than during a previous funding round in late 2022.

This week, Anduril — set up by 32-year-old virtual reality pioneer Palmer Luckey — announced a joint project with fellow defence tech heavyweight Palantir to share, retain and analyse data as well as using it to train emerging AI systems."No single company is capable of delivering on the promise of AI for national security," they said in a statement. "It takes a team of companies that are willing and able to ensure that the US government remains the world leader in the only advanced technologies to keep our citizens safe."

Analysis by the Brookings Institute in Washington showed the Pentagon spending 150 per cent more on artificial intelligence-related contracts in the year to August 2023 compared to the immediately preceding year.

Venture capital investment in defence start-ups in the US alone more than doubled between 2019 and 2022, reaching US$33 billion in the year of the Ukraine invasion, and most analysts and industry insiders believe it has risen further since.

A growing number of European firms have also looked to get in on the action. Germany's Helsing has raised US$489 million earlier this year, taking its valuation to more than US$5 billion.

Publicly-listed Palantir, which has seen its stock price rocket, is currently valued at over US$100 billion.

Whether those valuations are justified by the scale of potential defence contracts available is another question, even with all the talk of spreading armed conflict.

Ukraine has its own defence venture capital scene, including one fund, D3 (standing for "Dare to Defend Democracies"), whose investors include former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Ukraine's burgeoning tech industry has at times struggled to attract the investment the country has so badly needed.

Perhaps even more importantly, Ukraine's drone developments have continued to be matched by Russia — with both sides using mass-produced Chinese components — and have still not proved enough to stop Kremlin forces gradually advancing on the ground.

"Technology, whether old, new or both, is seldom itself determinative," Hicks, the US Pentagon deputy chief, said in London.

Ukraine's war may have witnessed a technological revolution. But its endgame looks set to be decided by more old-fashioned geopolitical issues, including whether the European nations have the resolve to defend the government in Kyiv once the shooting has stopped.

[[nid:712442]]