UKRAINE — In Ukraine, suffering for months from manpower crises and uncertain backing from the United States, has undergone a remarkable evolution. Large parts of its war effort are now unmanned, the robots, drones, and remotely piloted tanks giving it a sudden, albeit fragile, edge over a lumbering and strained Russian invader.
In April, President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed the first capture of a Russian position purely by robots and drones and added that since January unmanned machines had conducted 22,000 missions.
Survival is the mother of invention, under the orange glow of computer processor fans and subtle overhead lighting. The unit here has learned from Russian prisoners of war that their enemy calls these robots – each carrying a huge payload of explosive on a four-wheel chassis – “silent death.” They can only hear their approach when they are 10 meters away – well within their blast radius.
The first robot stumbles on aluminum debris, its wheels furiously trying to get traction and move around the obstacle. Eventually, it navigates around the crater in its path and from the observation drone above, the white heat of a small mushroom cloud flares up – the thermal footprint of the first blast. A second follows. The opening salvo of the assault is intended to distract the Russians and permit four other robots to get behind enemy lines.
The calculations here are simple: over 164 assaults, the “NC13” unit of the Third Assault Brigade has calculated they would have needed 2,300 troops for the same effect as their robot attackers. They would expect to have lost half their unit – dead or wounded – in the attacks, meaning the unmanned, doddering bombs on the screen in front of them are a technological advance that has saved a thousand Ukrainians. “I couldn’t even imagine such a thing, back then”, said Bar, the unit’s deputy commander, of his time in brutal urban combat in Donbas. “But I realize that if such equipment had been available at the time… more of my comrades would have survived”.
For Mykola “Makar” Zinkevych, the unit’s commander, the new world is lacking. “Back then, war was somehow more, shall we say, masculine. It was your skills that mattered there – how well you’d trained, how disciplined you were, and so on. Now, technology decides everything. There is no going back”. It is simply a case of who can adapt and evolve faster in the world of unmanned, remote killing. (CNN)
