Forged in the Heat of Battle: Drones in the Ukrainian War

 

Last December, near the Russia-Ukraine border, a group of about 100 Ukrainian soldiers from the drone-specialist Khartiia Brigade launched a massive all-drone attack on an entrenched Russian position.  No Ukrainians did anything except operate and monitor the drones and communications systems.  But ground-based drones, kamikaze drones, and even a drone with a rifle on it assaulted the Russians from multiple directions, causing chaos and leading the enemy fighters to abandon their position. 

 

The Ukrainians were expecting to lose as many as half of their drones before they reached their targets, but the operation proved to be successful beyond their hopes.  This is only one of a number of stories coming out of Ukraine that shows how drone technology is changing the face of warfare as I write.

 

The Russians have drones too, but they have relied primarily on their large advantage in the number of conventional forces and weapons they can bring to bear on Ukraine.  Both sides have advanced drone technology for military uses tremendously beyond what it was just a few years ago, but as reporter Tim Mak points out in a recent article in The Dispatch, Ukraine has three reasons why they are currently the world's leader in this field. 

 

First, desperation leads to innovation.  The Ukrainians are fighting for their own territory, towns, and loved ones.  Second, three years of war has provided them with a real-world testing ground that no amount of laboratory drills could give, and allowed them to respond to problems in real time and try new ideas to see which ones work in the battlefield.  And third, the decentralized nature of the Ukrainian military has kept bureaucratic delays and interference to a minimum, allowing different groups to try different approaches and share their successes.

 

The best drone in the world is not much good if you can't control it, and so many innovations have come in the field of communications technology and electronic warfare (EW).  EW is the suite of techniques that are used to disrupt an enemy's electronic communications and radar.  Mak turns up the surprising fact that the first country ever to use electronic warfare was Russia during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), when Russian ships attempted to interfere with Japanese radio messages to the Japanese Navy.  Russia developed "jamming" (the broadcast of interfering signals) to a fine art, and I recall as a short-wave listener in the 1960s hearing the buzz-saw sounds of USSR jamming stations scattered across the airwaves to prevent Voice of America and BBC broadcasts from reaching the USSR. 

 

But Ukrainian innovators such as "Mathematician" (a member of the Khartiia Brigade who goes by that pseudonym) have come up with clever and almost unbelievable ways of flouting Russian EW measures.  For example, one type of drone carries with it a 20-km-long reel of fiber-optic cable connected to its operator's control box.  As it flies, it simply unreels the cable over the landscape, and as long as the link remains unbroken, the operator has a completely secure and un-jammable way to communicate with the drone. 

 

Mak points out the ethical implications of a situation in which one operator might be in charge of several drones.  It is now entirely possible to program a drone to recognize the optical earmarks of, say, a Russian tank.  But Mak poses this question:  What if a Russian soldier in the tank decides to get out and surrender?  And what if the autonomous drone single-mindedly ignores him and blows up the tank anyway, killing the soldier?  Who is responsible for this incident, which could be considered as a war crime? 

 

Mak posed the question to a colleague of Mathematician, who said, "I think the end user will be to blame . . . . if you teach him badly, he will do badly."  Clearly, international agreements about what constitutes war crimes are lagging behind the technology currently in place, and such questions will arise more and more frequently in automated battlefields.

 

Reading Mak's report reminded me of how the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939 provided a testing ground for many war techniques that later found application in World War II.  Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy provided air support for Franco's Nationalists, and when their bombers mounted an attack on the Spanish town of Guernica on Apr. 26, 1937, over 1,600 civilian casualties resulted.  This is considered by historians to be the first time that the Luftwaffe fielded its doctrine of "terror bombing" to demoralize civilian populations.

 

Of course, both sides in World War II adopted this doctrine, although its first use was shocking enough to inspire Picasso's famous painting Guernica, which is an attempt to portray the horrors of modern war as it was taking shape in the 1930s.  I am unaware of any great art out there which includes images of drones, but it might happen yet. 

 

More importantly, anyone preparing for a ground war now has to take into account the drone factor, and right now the world experts in that military technology are in the hundred or so companies that have sprung up in Ukraine to supply the much-needed hardware and software that is keeping the Russians at bay.  It is a sad but obvious fact that wars tend to advance technology, and not just military technology, at a greater speed than occurs in peacetime.  Mak hopes that once the Ukraine war winds down, these technological drone advances will be turned to peaceful purposes:  evacuation of wounded people from natural disasters, the shipment of essential supplies, and the demining of mine fields, for example. 

 

And some of that may happen.  But first, the Ukrainian war has to end, and while President Trump and others have been trying to broker a deal to bring peace, nothing substantive has resulted yet.  When the war is over, perhaps we can enjoy the fruits of Ukrainian drone innovations, and they can take the lead in a business that is currently dominated by China.  They certainly deserve to profit from their innovations, which have been made at a huge cost in lives as well as money.

 

Sources:  Tim Mak's article "War Machines or Instruments of Peace?" appeared on Mar. 27, 2025 at https://thedispatch.com/article/ukraine-drone-warfare-automation-lethality-ethics/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on the Russo-Japanese War and the Spanish Civil War.

Finding Drones in Peace and War

 

DJI, the world's largest drone maker, has announced that it is stopping all shipments of new products to both Ukraine and Russia.  The Verge reported this on Apr. 27 following earlier stories that Russian troops were using a drone-tracking technology called AeroScope to locate Ukrainian drone pilots flying commercial drones that had been converted to combat use.  And last week, the White House announced that it was asking Congress to pass laws making it easier for government agencies to detect and track drones.

 

Drones, more formally known as unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), have changed from super-expensive military-only devices a couple of decades ago into popular consumer and professional products today.  Advances in software and hardware have led to over two million drone users in the U. S. alone, and the repurposing of consumer drones for military uses both by guerilla groups and defenders of the Ukraine. 

 

Most drones are not autonomous, but controlled from the ground by means of a radio link.  The radio link is the means by which both the controller and other parties can locate and track the drone.  In anticipation of the time when radio identification of drones would become a government requirement, in 2017 DJI began to include a signal broadcast from every drone they made which provides the drone's "position, altitude, speed, direction, serial number, and the location of the pilot."  This data is unencrypted, meaning that anyone with the proper receiver can pick it up. 

 

DJI also conveniently made available a system called AeroScope, which can receive this data and provide a readout of all drone locations within distances of a few kilometers, depending on the type of system.  Up to now, DJI has sold AeroScope only to law-enforcement agencies and other entities that it deems appropriate for the technology. 

 

Confirming DJI's intuition, in 2020 the U. S. FAA issued regulations that make it mandatory for any drone weighing more than 0.25 kilograms (about half a pound) to broadcast its location, the operator's location, and an identifying number by 2023.  So by next year, all drones big enough to do anything other than entertain the owner will have to have such radio identification means, whether they are new or old.

 

As an ethics issue, the question of drone identification and location technology has a number of ramifications.  From the Wild-West days when consumer drones were too rare for the FAA to have made detailed regulations, we have now reached the point that drones of any size must be trackable by authorities. 

 

If drone users aren't doing anything nefarious, it's hard to imagine why they would object to the requirement that drones must broadcast their identity and location.  A useful comparison might be made to automobile license plates.  The first state to issue state-made automotive license plates was Massachusetts, back in 1910.  Most automobile owners back then were glad that the states began to register and license their vehicles, because it freed them from having to follow a hodge-podge of local regulations that often put them at a disadvantage with respect to horse-drawn vehicles legally.  Massachusetts started their early license-plate numbers with 1 and went up from there.  I don't know if this is still the case today, but up to 1999 (the last year I lived in the state), it was possible to will one's legacy two-to-four-digit license plate to one's heirs, so that your low license-plate number let everybody know that your ancestors were among the first thousand or so people to own a car in Massachusetts. 

 

I doubt that any drone owners are going to get so attached to their drone ID numbers.  But there are real privacy and security issues in the question of who can access the drone ID signals.  Because DJI has not encrypted the data up to now, the company's AeroScope is simply a convenient way for a law-enforcement agency to get into the business.  I suspect that any well-informed engineer could come up with a similar system by combining the suitable microwave receivers with decoding equipment that would not have to be fancy at all. 

 

The White House's initiative seems aimed at giving more government entities permission to do this kind of snooping, and providing them with a list of approved equipment that does so.  There is an opportunity here for entrepreneurs to get in on the ground floor of drone-detection equipment, assuming that Congress responds, but that is an open question.

 

What is not in question anymore is whether a drone operator can fly with the assurance that nobody can find out whose drone it is or where he is.  That assurance, if it was ever present, is now gone.  And in the vast majority of legitimate-use cases, this can only be an asset to the situation.

 

As for Ukrainian drones, one must applaud the ingenuity of those who repurposed commercial and amateur drones for military purposes, either for surveillance or actual delivery of weapons.  At the same time, it's not at all surprising that the Russians would use AeroScope or something similar to track down the drone operators and attack them, although at this writing it is not clear whether this has actually happened.  One does not see license plates on tanks, and so the requirements of wartime use for drones are very different. 

 

Drones originated to meet wartime needs, and it's likely that the U. S. or other allied countries can supply Ukraine with military-type drones that will be far more effective than repurposed hobby-type units. 

 

Whenever I bring up the subject of engineering ethics in a discussion, if it goes on long enough sooner or later someone will come up with the bromide, "Technology is neutral—it's only how it's used that's good or bad." 

 

Like many sayings, this one has an element of truth in it.  But anonymized drones are obviously more suited to warlike uses than ones that constantly announce both their position and the position of the operator.  So the cases of drone identification in peace and war shows that this saying is limited in its applicability, to say the least. 

 

Sources:  The Verge carried articles I referred to on various aspects of drones and AeroScope at https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/25/23041869/white-house-biden-admin-counter-drone-legislation-plan-tracking and https://www.theverge.com/22985101/dji-aeroscope-ukraine-russia-drone-tracking.   A summary of the White House initiative is at https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/04/25/fact-sheet-the-domestic-counter-unmanned-aircraft-systems-national-action-plan/.  The FAA's new drone ID requirements are found at https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/28/22203398/faa-remote-id-rules-location-night-over-people.  And the story about the first automotive license plates in the U. S. is from https://time.com/4301055/license-plate-history/.

If We Could Stop ICBMs, Would We Want To?

 

Along with invading Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has put his country's nuclear arsenal on high alert.  He hopes by this measure to prevent the U. S. or its allies from interfering militarily with his exploits, but by doing so he has provided an unpleasant reminder that Russia has more nuclear weapons than any other country in the world.   

 

According to Wikipedia, the Russians, with about 5900 nuclear warheads, have a slight edge over the U. S. with about 5400.  But considering that just one nuclear weapon can spoil your whole day, this is a distinction without a difference.

 

What if we could erect something like Israel's Iron Dome system used against Palestinian rockets, a system that shoots down the vast majority, or even all, of a rival state's intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs)?  Besides being able to cross that off our worry list, we could then unilaterally disarm ourselves from nuclear weapons, at least in principle. 

 

There are several problems with that idea.  One of the biggest, according to a recent article at Salon.com, is that we've tried building an ICBM defense system, and it probably doesn't work.

 

I say "probably" because, thank God, it's never been subjected to a real-life test.  Termed the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system (GMD), it was designed primarily to guard against potential nuclear launches from North Korea.  GMD consists of some 44 interceptor rockets stationed in Alaska and California.  It's been tested with dummy targets dozens of times since it was first deployed around 1999, and while its record would look pretty good as a baseball batting average, even one strike with a nuclear missile is too many. 

 

Scientists consulted by Salon say there is no fundamental theoretical barrier that prevents us from developing a 100% effective anti-ICBM defense.  But it's a very hard technical problem.

 

An ICBM undergoes powered flight (the "booster phase") for only its first three or four minutes.  After that it goes ballistic, literally—meaning that it's moving like a thrown rock in space, subject only to Newton's laws and without any steering.  This is the phase in which it is easiest to get a radar handle on where it is and where it's going, and steer any prospective anti-missile weapons toward it.  Once it gets close to its target and slows down in the atmosphere, it's too late to do much about it, because blowing it up a few thousand feet above a populated area and scattering the radioactive residue all over would not be much better than just letting it do its job.

 

Also, modern ICBMs launch multiple warheads at the same time, some of which are decoys.  This makes hitting all the real ones much harder, especially considering that each one is only about a meter long, according to one source.  Against a single ICBM consisting of a single nuclear warhead, our GMD stands a good chance of whacking it out of the air.  But a massive full-scale ICBM attack such as Russia would be able to do is far beyond GMD's capabilities, and probably beyond the capability of any conceivable system we could put in place at a reasonable cost.

 

Suppose, however, the political will was there to mount an Apollo-space-program-style effort to design the ultimate ICBM-deflector, a U. S. version of Israel's Iron Dome that would really make us free from any concern about nuclear attacks by ICBMs.  Would we want to deploy it? 

 

For those of us with long enough memories, this was the ultimate goal of Ronald Reagan's so-called Star Wars program, which never got very far.  But if scaring the old USSR to pieces was the goal, Star Wars achieved its aims without even being built.  Historians will argue till doomsday about the true causes of the USSR's collapse, but Star Wars was certainly a factor.

 

The political prospects of the present U. S. administration announcing something like Star Wars for the twenty-first century are about the same as the prospects of a snowball in a volcano.  But if we built such a thing, would it be wise to scrap our nuclear arsenal and say that now we don't have to worry about nuclear attack, we don't need to threaten anyone else with it either? 

 

That would certainly be an option, and if we did so it would be a sign that we really trusted our ICBM defenses.  But I note that even with the Iron Dome, Israel has not divested itself of conventional rockets, and they hammer back at their enemies who throw rockets at them whether or not they land on Israeli territory.

 

Realistically, there are always going to be some regimes that won't feel safe until they have nuclear weapons.  North Korea is one such place, and currently Russia is another one.  A major nuclear war anywhere in the world would probably be a global disaster, with dangerous levels of radiation rising into the stratosphere and coming down gradually everywhere. 

 

While it would be nice to think that the world would follow our example and get rid of its nuclear weapons after the U. S. did, all it would take is one holdout to spoil the game.  And so it looks like the path to nuclear disarmament doesn't lie along the lines of developing a really good ICBM defense system first and then getting rid of our own nuclear weapons.

 

As in other aspects of war, you never know for sure whether you've prepared adequately for the next war until you lose it.  If you win, you might have gotten by with considerably less preparation than you did.  So war is always a wasteful proposition, among its many other disadvantages.

 

The current war in Ukraine is tragic enough without pulling us closer to the brink of what has become for many the secular Armageddon, the nuclear end of the world.  Let's hope that the prospect of mutually assured destruction, which has kept us free from nuclear war for seven decades or so, will continue to convince Putin and others that the nuclear option is really no option at all.

 

Sources:  The Salon article " Why scientists still can't figure out how to intercept nuclear missiles" by Nicole Karlis appeared on Mar. 3 at https://www.salon.com/2022/03/03/why-scientists-still-cant-figure-out-how-to-intercept-icbms/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Ground-based Midcourse Defense and obtained the statistics on nuclear weapons from the Wikipedia article "Russia and weapons of mass destruction."

Ukraine Gets Cyberattacked Again

 

First, a little geography lesson.  Ukraine sits north of the Black Sea, bordering Poland, Hungary, and Romania on its west and surrounded by Russia to the north and east.  Like Poland, the Ukraine has been subjugated for much of its history by foreign powers—the old USSR for most of the twentieth century, and even by Lithuania back in the 1400's A. D.  But when the USSR collapsed, the Ukraine gained independence again.  It is the poorest country of Europe, but has rich farmlands, which is one reason why foreigners want to take it over.

 

If you've been paying any attention to world news, you know that Vladimir Putin has been saber-rattling about a possible invasion of Ukraine recently, massing 100,000 troops on the border between the two countries and ramping up his warlike rhetoric.  Russia has been chipping away at the country since at least 2014, when the pro-Russian President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, lost an election, and Putin invaded the Crimea, the peninsula that sticks out into the Black Sea and separates it from the Sea of Azov to its northeast.  Having succeeded in that, Putin has since been backing forces that have taken over portions of eastern Ukraine, and it appears that he would like nothing better than to welcome the entire country back to the domination of Russia.  So far, the government of Ukraine has had different ideas.

 

As part of Putin's campaign, a war that isn't quite a war, most authorities agree that Russian-based hackers mounted a cyberattack called NotPetya back in 2017.  It was aimed primarily at Ukranian institutions, but it also affected thousands of other systems as well.  The White House later estimated that NotPetya caused about $10 billion worth of damage worldwide. 

 

Now we come down to this week.  On Jan. 15, dozens of Ukrainian government computer systems were infected with malware disguised as ransomware.  An infected computer displayed a demand for a certain ransom to be paid in Bitcoin, but what really happened is that the malware "renders the computer system inoperable," ransom or no ransom. 

 

Microsoft issued a statement saying that they observed these attacks aimed primarily at Ukrainian government agencies and closely-allied organizations, and that they had issued updates that will address the problems.  But in the meantime, the Ukraine is suffering yet another cyberattack which appears to be instigated by Russia, although no firm evidence of the source has yet been forthcoming.

 

To my knowledge, nobody has actually died as a result of the most recent cyberattack on the Ukraine.  But to the extent that the public relies on computer-mediated government services, the consequences of a massive shutdown of government computers can range from the inconvenient to the life-threatening, in government-run hospitals, for example. 

 

In the logic of war, an enemy's assets are always a target, and now that computer networks and systems form so much of the infrastructure of modern life, they have become a uniquely vulnerable target.  Cyberattacks borrow from the fields of espionage, sabotage, and terrorism to create an insidious threat that knows no boundaries.  And defending against such attacks is a responsibility that is widely distributed among both public and private actors. 

 

All these features make cyberwarfare a different kind of thing from conventional warfare, and it is taking time for both military and civilian thinking to catch up to it. 

 

When this topic has come up in the past, I have taken the position that the U. S. military, in any event, seems to have an overly narrow focus on what cyberwarfare might amount to in the future.  While I am no technical expert in this area, I can see that even cyberattacks on U. S. organizations that have been definitely attributed to government-sponsored hackers in China or Russia do not seem to cause much concern on the part of our government, except to provoke warnings to private interests to do their cybersecurity better. 

 

That may make sense if you're a Boeing or a Kaiser Permanente, with entire staffs of IT security specialists.  But especially in the U. S., we have a great many small businesses whose functioning is nonetheless critical to our economy.  Many of them can't afford a full-time IT person, so IT maintenance is handled on an as-needed basis:  if something breaks, the owner hires somebody to fix it, but otherwise deals with things on his or her own. 

 

A supply-chain cyberattack similar to what was used against Ukraine could target a popular piece of software such as, for example, Quicken—something that almost all small businesses use.  With a few keystrokes, such an attack could cause devastation far beyond what we are presently seeing with the Omicron COVID-19 variant, which has done nothing worse than kill thousands of people and cause massive absenteeism, both involuntary due to sickness and voluntary due to vaccine mandates. 

 

The fact that nothing like that has happened in the U. S., with a few exceptions, may mean that the way we are doing things is just fine and we don't need to worry about a massive cyberattack that would bring the U. S. economy to its knees.  On the other hand, it may mean that whoever is capable of mounting such an attack is simply biding their time, awaiting the proper geopolitical moment when such an attack could be coordinated with more conventional warlike actions for maximum effect.  I hope it's the former, but I suspect it might be the latter.

 

What am I asking for?  Certainly not for every software app to be government-certified as secure.  At the university where I work, we have experienced a small-scale version of that type of thing, and all it has done so far is to create a lot of confusion and delays in purchasing needed software.  If there are government and military forces out there safeguarding not only their own systems, but those belonging to the public at large, I would at least like to know about it, in a general way.  And because my federal taxes are paying for it, I'd like to know what I'm getting for my money.

 

In the meantime, we can hope that the Ukrainian government has figured out how to defend itself and its citizens from what has to be the worst spate of cyberwarfare endured by any nation so far.  And maybe we can learn some lessons from them:  either good examples if they succeed, or bad examples if they lose and get absorbed into Russia. 

 

Sources:  I referred to the article "Microsoft discloses malware attack on Ukraine govt networks" which appeared on the AP News website on Jan. 15 at https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-europe-russia-ukraine-404c5e751709fba66b31fd512f734d80.  I also referred to a Microsoft blog at https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2022/01/15/mstic-malware-cyberattacks-ukraine-government/and Wikipedia articles on NotPetya, Ukraine, and the Crimea.