Understanding the conflict two years on.
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With U.S. aid to Ukraine stalled in Congress by an entrenched Republican Party and the Ukrainian counteroffensive stalled by entrenched Russian forces, Kyiv’s Western backers are grasping for ways to bolster its war effort. Since trained personnel and artillery are in short supply, their attention has turned to drones and artificial intelligence. However, overestimating the role such technologies can play in armed conflict risks solidifying the very stalemate that Ukraine needs to break.
With U.S. aid to Ukraine stalled in Congress by an entrenched Republican Party and the Ukrainian counteroffensive stalled by entrenched Russian forces, Kyiv’s Western backers are grasping for ways to bolster its war effort. Since trained personnel and artillery are in short supply, their attention has turned to drones and artificial intelligence. However, overestimating the role such technologies can play in armed conflict risks solidifying the very stalemate that Ukraine needs to break.
In some ways, a focus on digital battlefield intelligence, automated targeting, and unmanned aerial vehicles by both the Russians and Ukrainians is unsurprising—neither side has many other options to work with at this point, as their respective presidents, Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, both appear reticent to order new troop mobilizations. But it is also puzzling, since a techno-centric strategy seems to have played a major role in turning what the Kremlin predicted would be a three-day war into a now two-year-old war of attrition.
Russia has ceded nearly half of the territory it once occupied in Ukraine at a cost of roughly 90 percent of its prewar standing forces. Yet on paper, it had Ukraine easily outnumbered and outgunned—without even mentioning the billions of rubles and years of investment into novel capabilities such as cyber operations, AI, robotics, drones, and electronic warfare. Perhaps this is why it was all too easy to discount the less quantifiable and less attention-grabbing—but ultimately more decisive—facets of war, such as planning, logistics, coordination, morale, and leadership.
Technology’s most alluring quality for militaries is the promise that it might somehow make the physical demands of seizing territory somehow less expensive in terms of blood, treasure, time, and labor. But no matter how much granular insight, safe distance, and speed that technology provides, it simply cannot substitute for the kinds of traditional capabilities that characterized 20th-century conflicts.
Since kicking off a military modernization program in 2008, Putin and his circle have sought to create a “modern high-technology army,” envisioning a war in which technological superiority would prove decisive. In the ensuing years, a host of advanced weapons systems filled out its arsenal, spurred its arms sales, and flooded battlefields in Syria. Meanwhile, Russian military and intelligence agencies—and proxies such as the late Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin—posed increasingly sophisticated and brazen threats in cyberspace.
By late 2021, these factors led some Western observers to conclude that Russia would easily prevail over Ukraine, including by dint of its technical prowess.
Instead, Russia’s underwhelming conventional battlefield performance over the past two years showed that its reliance on high-tech weaponry came at the cost of focus on other key aspects of a functioning military—its defense-industrial base and supply lines became plagued by corruption while its threadbare officer corps were saddled with poor force structure and ineptitude.
In turn, according to the former U.S. principal deputy director of national intelligence, Western analysts relied too much on cataloguing Russia’s inventory of gadgetry and cyber tools and failed to account for the context, planning, and quality of the forces using them. More fundamentally, Moscow and Western observers alike failed to account for the specific ways in which advanced technology would assist in taking, retaking, or holding territory. The hard truth, immutable since before the Trojans, is that doing so is an unavoidably human endeavor.
Much of my professional research has been dedicated to understanding how Russian leaders think about conflict in cyberspace. Drawing distorted lessons from the U.S. military’s performance in the 1990s, Moscow’s warfighting doctrines link technology and psychology together in tenuous ways, with its goals often bordering on pseudoscientific mind control.
For example, the Soviet theory of “reflexive control” aimed to induce adversaries into self-defeating behaviors by carefully placing “information packets” into various media channels. Psychological factors gradually dislodged even troops and materiel as the focal points of Russian military theorizing. Moreover, enemy forces were gradually replaced as the ultimate target; the digital age prompted an unending struggle over the perceptions of entire societies.
In Ukraine, this has led Moscow to dedicate many of its high-tech capabilities, particularly cyber operations, less toward beating the Ukrainian armed forces and more toward immiserating Ukraine’s civilian population. Predictably, that strategy has yielded little territorial gain over the past year. Since at least 2014, the Russian military and intelligence services have attempted to sow havoc with cyberattacks in Ukraine, including those designed to cut off heat and electricity, as well as Internet and mobile connectivity.
But what Moscow discounts is that its victims also get a vote: to rally round the flag, as Ukrainians have, rather than become demoralized. However costly and disruptive the cyberattacks may have proved, as part of a broader project to subjugate its neighbor politically and geographically, Moscow’s so-called information war has been a failure.
Kyiv, for its part, has employed several novel technological approaches to beating back Russian invaders since early 2022. It democratized battlefield intelligence collection, enabling Ukrainian citizens to track and report Russian movements, collecting data on factors ranging from materiel to missiles. It galvanized a global volunteer corps working in cyberspace to target Russian organizations. It drew on commercially available communications and software to make an expansive arsenal of autonomous vehicles and drones increasingly lethal by air and sea.
Ukraine’s technological ingenuity in this war will be the subject of study for generations. By comparison, and notwithstanding these feats, the Ukrainian military is both exhausted and stretched thin. More concerted focus on a strategy to demobilize long-serving troops, and to conscript and train new ones to replace them, is critically overdue.
With both sides now scrambling to acquire and produce lower-cost, more expendable unmanned aerial vehicles—while simultaneously racing to improve their own electronic jamming capabilities—the near-term future of technology in this war could be characterized as innovation in service of attrition. Russia is drawing upon friends in Beijing and Tehran to augment its arsenal of unmanned vehicles, while Ukraine has become a hotbed for Western defense and technology firms fielding drone warfare capabilities.
But had it been possible for either party in this war to achieve real battlefield progress from a safe remove through such high-tech tools and intelligence-gathering alone, conventional counteroffensives would not have been necessary in the first place. An influx of more tech into the war may therefore provide each side more distance from, and better insight into, the other’s troop movements. It is unlikely, however, to dislodge or drive them back—and may even risk Ukrainian forces getting goaded into costly battles, like that for the city of Bakhmut, that do little to change the status quo.
That said, modeling itself after Western militaries may also not be Kyiv’s best bet for this conflict, not least the uniquely U.S. impulse to quantify all aspects of war into a digital problem to be solved through computation. Since U.S. Army Gen. William Westmoreland predicted the rise of automated warfare from Vietnam in 1969, the technologically enabled, supposedly “easier war” has always seemed imminent in theory, but somehow elusive in practice.
As political scientist Stephanie Carvin writes, science and technology have “delivered some of the fastest ground invasions in the history of warfare, but have not been able to solve the difficult and complex” problems that inevitably follow. Focus on what Carvin calls the “shiny objects” themselves—like drones, cyber, and AI—often distracts from addressing how they might be integrated and adopted in service of concrete goals.
None of this is to suggest that Kyiv’s motivations are anything other than existential. Given the headwinds that it faces, the Ukrainian military must doubtlessly maximize every possible advantage it can find. Particularly amid intensifying shell- hunger, Kyiv urgently needs inexpensive and rapidly scalable ways to minimize casualties on the front lines and keep Russian forces at bay.
However, if Ukraine’s ultimate goal is to eject the occupying forces from its territory, there is reason to be cautious of a techno-solutionist approach, particularly one isolated from the broader organizational context of the Ukrainian military.
An escalating arms race between Ukrainian drones and Russian electronic warfare may capture the imagination—and capital—of futurists, but it must not become conceptually untethered from the demands of combined arms in land wars past. While tactical systems such as drones can deny mobility at the front lines, they are far less likely to enable it. They are certainly no substitute for recruiting, training, and equipping a capable fighting force over the longer term. Doing so will demand hard decisions from Kyiv and its Western backers—particularly European capitals—none of whom should harbor, nor cultivate, any illusions about a technological panacea.
No amount of technological wizardry can substitute for the arms, equipment, and training that the United States and a handful of allies can exclusively provide—nor for the personnel that Kyiv must recruit and mobilize. And if Kyiv fails to do so, the result may turn out to be less the “future of war” and more the marketing of stalemate.
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