One of the emblematic characteristics of the Russian-Ukrainian war is that, to use the words of the journalist from "The paper", Cecilia Sala, it is “a war of 1914, conducted in the trenches, and a war where the protagonists of the battles are small drones manufactured with 3D printers costing six hundred euros, powered by the batteries of Iqos electronic cigarettes, which carry bombs".
Indeed, drones equipped with first-person view (FPV) are playing a central role in infantry combat, especially in this phase of the Ukrainian conflict, where the Russians are busy trying to conquer the Kharkiv area.
From an "emergency weapon", introduced onto the battlefield by the Ukrainians due to the shortage of conventional ammunition - also the result of the West's reluctance and doubts in the supply of ammunition and artillery systems - and the objective inferiority of the Armed Forces Ukrainians compared to Russians in maneuver support systems, FPV drones - which also have a very low production cost and are, after minimal training, easy to maneuver - have now become a weapon present in battle and to be reckoned with.
The figures on the use of FPV drones are interesting: in the period between 1 January and 9 March 2024, 5.285 were confirmed by video strike for the AFU and 4.120 for the Russian troops. Of these, 54% were attacks conducted against infantry units. The battle being fought between Neskuchne and Liptsy sees Ukrainian and Russian infantry squads clash with extensive use of drones. And this specific use of drones is particularly interesting because the systems unmanned they are no longer used as support weapons, but are an integral part of infantry combat.
One might think that, by hitting infantry or armored columns, the drones are performing the same function as the artillery, but what makes the difference, once again, is the possibility of using the drones to overload the enemy's defenses, preventing the activating effective countermeasures and making it useless to neutralize some - because we are only talking about some - of the devices launched against it. What needs to be countered is the redundancy of drones rather than their destructive potential. In the case of drones, in fact, mass is power.
Some time ago on "Foreign Affairs", Stephen Biddle identified the nature of the war in Ukraine as "twentieth century" (in some places even nineteenth century one could add), where, however, twenty-first century technologies are used to fight. But that doesn't mean it's revolutionary. It is not yet the era of "Star Wars", the Jüngerian "storms of steel" still dominate. However, it is worth underlining how the skilful use of drones by Ukraine is having a notable influence in an important part of the industrial-military debate in Western Europe.
The former Bundeswehr helicopter pilot, Florian Seibel, CEO of the German-Ukrainian company Quantum Systems, founded the newco Stark Defense with the aim of designing and producing AI-driven combat drones. Seibel is one of the entrepreneurs and defense technologists who are gaining multiple experiences from the war in Ukraine and who already supplies Kiev with drones of various types.
For Seibel, the massive production of drones with high technological content and destructive potential is the tool that a Europe with an increasingly older population and limited capacity to produce and stockpile conventional armaments can use to counter numerous and well-armed armies.
Technological superiority is the only field in which Europe can excel in the preparation phase of a conflict and then during the war. And the drones Seibel has in mind are multi-domain and capable of operating on land, in water and in the air. The doctrinal substratum of the reflections of Seibel and of many supporters of the "droneization" of the Western Armed Forces is the result of at least three fundamental questions: 1) the wealth of experiences of the Russian-Ukrainian war; 2) reflections on AI applied to weapon systems; 3) the construction of a European defense based on technological primacy.
Precisely with regard to the second point, it should be highlighted that the drones of Quantum system, equipped with AI and Nvidia chips, do not depend on GPS or a human pilot; they are, therefore, able to autonomously process the data needed to identify objectives and distinguish friends from enemies. The drones that Quantum system exported to Ukraine or produced directly on site, still follow the "human-in-the-loop" model, where the decision to hit a target or not still rests with the human soldier.
In the near future it is not certain that we will not choose - and reflections on the ethical implications behind this choice are already numerous - to allow drones to hit enemy targets autonomously, through processing and decisions directly taken by artificial intelligence in the event that it is impossible to communicate with human decision makers.
The direction Seibel leans towards is precisely this, so much so that he declares that one of the objectives of Stark Defense is precisely to create the technical conditions so that the Euro-Western general states have the possibility of exceed, should they opt for this path, the concept of “human-in-the-loop”.
