WAR IN UKRAINEWhat’s Happened to Russia’s Much-Vaunted Battlefield AI?
So far, Russia’s deployment in Ukraine has been a demonstration of some of the limitations and vulnerabilities of AI-enabled systems. It has also exposed some longer-term strategic weaknesses in Russia’s development of AI for military and economic purposes.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the poorer than expected performance of the Russian army have prompted fierce debate among military commentators on why Russia’s much-vaunted military reforms of the past decade—particularly the integration of artificial intelligence technologies that were supposed to enhance Russia’s joint operations capability—seem to have been unsuccessful.
So far, Russia’s deployment in Ukraine has been a demonstration of some of the limitations and vulnerabilities of AI-enabled systems. It has also exposed some longer-term strategic weaknesses in Russia’s development of AI for military and economic purposes.
Russia’s use of AI-enabled technologies in the invasion reportedly includes disinformation operations, deep fakes and open-source intelligence gathering. But information operations are not the sum total of Russia’s AI capabilities. AI is embedded across the military spectrum, from information management, training, logistics, maintenance and manufacturing, to early warning and air-defence systems.
Since at least 2014, Russia has deployed multiple aerial, ground and maritime uncrewed systems and robotic platforms, electronic warfare systems, and new and experimental weapons in both Syria and Ukraine.
The AI elements in these systems include image recognition and image stitching in Orion combat drones, radio signal recognition in Pantsir-S1 anti-aircraft systems, AI-enabled situational understanding and jamming capability in the Bylina electronic warfare system, and navigation support in the Kamaz truck. So-called kamikaze drones (developed by the Kalashnikov Group, the maker of the famous assault weapon) appear to use a mix of manual and automated target acquisition.
One of the earliest images that circulated online in the current conflict was of a Russian Pantsir-S1 stuck in the mud in a field in southern Ukraine. The Pantsir is a component of the early warning and air-defence system that features both short-range surface-to-air missiles and 30-millimetre automatic cannon.
If we look under the hood at the purported AI technologies of the Pantsir, Russian state media Izvestia reported two years ago that it
is capable of detecting, classifying and firing at air targets without the participation of an operator. The developed algorithms instantly determine the importance of objects and arrange the order of their destruction depending on the danger they represent …
Its software takes into account the tactical situation, the location of targets, their degree of danger, and other parameters and selects the optimal tactics for repelling a raid.
