Defense expert Ko Colijn has been providing Dutch people with insight into armed conflicts for almost fifty years. For NU.nl he follows the battle in Ukraine and answers our (and your) questions. This time he discusses the use of missiles and artificial intelligence (AI) on the battlefield.
In 2019, Donald Trump terminated the INF Treaty. That was the treaty that obliged Russia and the US to ban missiles with a range of 500 to 5,500 kilometers. This meant that Europe and Russia no longer had to worry about the nuclear threat from each other’s territory.
The US had believed for some time that Russia was violating the treaty, but it was also clear that the treaty was old and worn out. This was, for example, due to a new generation of (cruise) missiles. These are now being used by Russia against Ukraine.
In the meantime, the Americans themselves were not sitting still. After the withdrawal of the INF Treaty, they developed the HIMARS missiles, with a range of more than 500 kilometers. Now that war has broken out in Ukraine, this long-distance variant comes in handy as a stick. The Russian anti-aircraft defense (S300 and S400) has no defense against it, because the HIMARS flies too low and too fast.
Celebrated war hero and general David Deptula, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, referred to HIMARS missiles as “ridiculous“Airplanes could do the job much better, he thought. But those HIMARS missiles turned out to be a turning point in the Ukraine war. There are no more complaints about it now (and about the lack of aircraft).
At the beginning of December, manufacturer Lockheed announced that it would deliver the first precision missiles to the American army. Some of these have a range of 1,000 kilometers. The war in Ukraine has therefore accelerated a new arms race. Ukraine is also asking the Americans for artillery rockets with a range of ‘only’ 300 kilometers.
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This is how the heavy HIMARS missile that Ukraine will receive works
Rambunctious AI makes its mark on the battlefield
The use and development of AI (artificial intelligence) on the battlefield is progressing rapidly. This is the real game changer on the battlefield, regardless of the outcome of the war. The development of AI could have been unstoppable without war, but now the genie is out of the bottle.
Of course, AI also has other applications: in medical science, healthcare, logistics, administration, everywhere. But those rosy prospects do not put any brakes on its use in the arms industry.
The originally Turkish TB2 drone can be sent by Ukraine towards a Russian tank like a kind of kamikaze aircraft. Such drones are being assembled in hundreds of Ukrainian workshops. There are now eighteen times as many of these workshops in Ukraine than there were two years ago.
Very expensive Russian naval ships have been sunk by unmanned drones. The bridge between Russia and the Crimean peninsula has been severely damaged. Switching to AI also saves the Ukrainian military valuable ammunition and manpower. Previously, Kyiv fired loosely with far too many grenades in an old-fashioned way.
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Russia and China are not standing still
The military lessons of the Ukraine battlefield have led to a new slogan: full-spectrum superiority. You have to be better than your opponent across the entire range of weapons, otherwise you lose.
Security and maintenance of the HIMARS, which has emerged as a wonder weapon in Ukraine, is now completely left to AI. It filters all kinds of raw information from hundreds of satellites or field radios. The coordination of military aid from more than fifty countries of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group is also arranged by AI.
Not only Ukraine and the US and other supporting countries are working hard to inject AI into the military domain, Russia and China are of course also not sitting idle.
Russian AI already ‘predicts’ Ukrainian drones and troop movements. In addition, it evades Ukrainian air defenses better than about a year ago. The Russians have now discovered that with a swarm of drones, a few always get through the anti-aircraft defenses. The arms race rages on.
2023-12-17 08:21:00
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