AI is changing the rules of war in Ukraine

Warfare in Ukraine and beyond will face a paradigm shift in the coming years as artificial intelligence is integrated into weapons networks and accelerates decision-making on the battlefield, a senior Ukrainian military official said.

Ukraine is already using artificial intelligence for a range of battlefield functions, from controlling drones that strike targets, to helping plan combat operations and processing data on Russian missile attacks.

"Artificial intelligence will shape a new paradigm of warfare. It is already actively doing so," Danilo Cvok, head of the artificial intelligence research center at the Defense Ministry, told Reuters.

He predicted that AI systems will soon be unified into a single network monitoring the battlefield, which, if the conflict continues, could lead to an “operating systems war” with Russia in the next three to five years.

"The system that has more data, understands it better and suggests solutions will gain an advantage over others," he said.

The center was established in March as Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov seeks to place artificial intelligence and data-driven decision-making at the center of Ukrainian defense.

Drones, still mostly piloted, have already fundamentally changed the way war is fought.

Ukrainian and Russian forces launch thousands of drones at each other every day. Kiev is also trying to make up for the lack of frontline soldiers with ground robots.

The ability of drones to constantly monitor the battlefield and precisely hit targets has accelerated the "kill chain" - the process of planning and executing attacks on the enemy. Making decisions using artificial intelligence would speed it up even further, Cvok said.

Technological arms race

Ukraine, whose army numbers about a million members, is already using artificial intelligence tools in its command systems.

However, Cvok said the goal is to create a single operational system that would recommend decisions on the battlefield, from individual frontline units to strategic command.

This, he said, would significantly speed up the analysis of data from the 1.200-kilometer-long front line and enable recommendations to be sent to commanders.

The goal, said Cvok, is to unite weapons and data systems into "one living organism that can act in a coordinated manner."

The technological arms race, sparked by the largest war in Europe since World War II, fought from 1939 to 1945, has attracted the attention of foreign AI companies eager for combat data to train their models and opportunities to test their systems.

Some of them, such as the American company Palantir, have lent their systems to Ukraine. Kiev has launched the Brave1 Dataroom, a project to exchange battlefield data with allied countries to train their software.

“This is where you can understand if your system is working,” said Cvok.

Moscow is also developing its own artificial intelligence capabilities. A senior Ukrainian air defense commander told Reuters in April that he was concerned about Russia’s increasing use of AI in planning drone and missile attacks on cities, which could significantly shorten the planning time for each strike.

"The question is," said Cvok, "how quickly we build our solutions, how practically we apply them, and how much we manage to achieve the first real effect on the battlefield on our part."

He added that the Defense Ministry is developing an artificial intelligence-based recruitment and human resources management system, as part of Fedorov's effort to implement data-driven reform of the massive government department.

Ukraine adheres to the principle that a human must be involved in making combat decisions, but Tsvok says that artificial intelligence systems could eventually outperform humans, whose presence would then slow down the decision-making process.

"Then the question arises: how do we keep up with the decisions proposed by autonomous systems?" he said.