“What does Ukraine really need? How do we make sure they're delivering what they actually need? And you know, right now those are air defense munitions, it's funding for drones, it's extended range artillery, electronic warfare, etc. And then the other big thing was to try to improve predictability because, you know, Ukraine could only plan operationally, if they knew what they were getting. And so how could we help better inform their planning efforts and their ability to operate together?”
That was just-retired -- on October 1-- Army Lt. Gen. Curtis Buzzard, most recently the former U.S. Commander of Security Assistance Group – Ukraine (SAG–U) and NATO Security Assistance and Training for Ukraine (NSATU), speaking last Wednesday on the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) streaming podcast, The Last Line of Defense.
Being in charge of both these headquarters, located in Wiesbaden, Germany, Buzzard said he had traveled to Ukraine “some 30 times” over the past two years and was able to “develop close relationships with government officials, with the general staff, with units, and really watch them evolve over this period, visit the unmanned systems force, [and] visit some of these underground command posts.”
As a result, he said, “I think this is the most consequential environment to observe the evolution of warfare right now. And it really gave me firsthand observations about the future of war. It's really an action, reaction, counter-counter-reaction at an incredible pace.”
After Russia’s February 2022 invasion, Ukraine has turned it into “a brutal contest of wills,” Buzzard said, adding, “Who would have imagined they've [the Ukrainians] essentially halted the Russian offenses, and Russia's not accomplished a strategic objective in this war yet. And the Ukrainians have been doing this largely with innovations in unmanned systems, particularly drones.”
Buzzard confirmed reports that Ukrainians “largely have stopped Russian advances and these continued attacks are at great cost to Russia.” He continued, “You know over 30,000 [Russian] casualties a month generally and, from reporting, over 60 percent are fatalities. So this is incredibly lethal and that costs Russia money to recruit and to pay death gratuities.”
But it were the details that Gen. Buzzard went on to describe that made his presentation most interesting.
For example, Buzzard said, “When when anybody wants to talk about employing unmanned systems [in Ukraine]…I'd say the secret sauce is really Delta. It's this mission command system that enables them to be…fast, flat, and accurate [with] over 200,000 users -- on a handheld device like your cell phone or a tablet.”
Developed by Ukraine’s Centre of Innovations of the Ministry of Defense and Aerorozvidka, a prominent Ukrainian civic-tech volunteer NGO and military unit specializing in aerial reconnaissance, Delta is a cloud-based, modular situational awareness and battle management system that gathers and integrates data from diverse sources, and mapping it in real time.
Buzzard said, “I used to carry [a] tablet with layers of intelligence so you can see where the enemy is. You can coordinate missions. You can do targeting on there. You can also see every drone feed, and they've got an app called Vasia which allows you to ingest every drone feed, so you're not having to [deal with], you know, proprietary computers with imagery or whatever.”
Actually, Vasia, according to her Instagram, is the call sign of vasylynanakonechna, a well-known female drone operator and the Deputy Commander of a UAV unit within the Ukrainian Armed Forces called the White Demons. “War is brutal and dangerous,” she has written, “but our goal is simple: risk technology instead of people whenever possible.”
Buzzard last Wednesday continued saying of Delta, it “allows them to fight so fast and rapidly upload BDA. I mean battle damage assessment. Yeah, to rapidly upload what they've just done, and then using that data to better understand what tactical effects they've had on the battlefield.”
Buzzard identified “the guy that's really remarkable doing this” was Major Robert Yosypovych Brovdi , Commander of the Unmanned Systems Forces of Ukraine, “who was a businessman three years ago, a grain trader, art dealer.”
Buzzard went on, “I mean, his [Brovdi’s] underground command posts are kind of a surreal experience because you're watching essentially like a Vegas stream of what effects they're having on the battlefield in terms of destruction of enemy. And then there's this incredible piece of art with a QR code [quick response matrix bar code] on it where I could look up the history of it.”
“You know,” Buzzard said, “they're sitting on the world's best combat data when you think about all the imagery feeds, all the understanding of Russian attacks into Ukraine and what routing speeds -- you know all this stuff. And so there's opportunities to work with them to use this to inform aided target recognition…to support Ukraine first and foremost, but also to learn ourselves. There's a professional responsibility to do that. This data in particular reinforces this idea of a lab, a battle lab that this fight in Ukraine is kind of like the Silicon Valley. I mean, they already had a real knack for technology and innovation.”
I should insert here that Buzzard also said Ukraine drone companies put a QR code on each drone.
“So, if you're out on the front,” he continued, “you get a drone from a company and there's something wrong with the drone, you scan the QR code; it'll go right back to a 24-hour op center of a Ukrainian company; then probably down to a team that's there to help you out; or you may even talk to them right away. And then, if it needs to be adjusted, they're probably changing the production line within 48 hours. So you know how to adjust that rapidly or if the [radio] frequencies change how rapidly they got to change what frequencies are on. So just an incredible amount of innovation [arrives] at a pace that is important and gives you combat advantage quite honestly. And so I got to think about how do we learn from this?”
At one point, Buzzard said, “The number one thing I've learned, and a lot of people would ask, is it technology, you know, drones, is it whatever? It's this velocity of learning that the Ukrainians demonstrate -- from observing, to learning, to adapting. to then fighting it again. This loop, action, reaction, counter-action, is just unbelievable. And I think it equates to combat power. And when you look at a lot of the success they've had on the battlefield, it's due to their own innovation.”
For example, he said the Ukrainians “didn't have enough mid-range strike capabilities, so they invented their own…There weren't enough interceptors to engage [Iranian-designed] shaheds.” These were one-way attack unmanned combat aerial vehicles and loitering munitions and now there are jet-powered shaheds.
Buzzard went on, “So they created their own. They created drone interceptors which actually from a cost standpoint are tremendously cheaper than what it would normally cost,” adding, “And they've really kind of mastered, I would argue, the cost of war -- developed cheap attritable [interceptors] because they haven't had expensive and exquisite. And I think that's an important lesson for us to learn, you know, what's the right balance of that, and how do you layer this capability with some of the very exquisite stuff that that we have also.”
Buzzard also noted, “It's just unbelievable how quick they iterate. As you look at some of the [Ukraine] long-range strike with drones, you know, even over the course of several months, it's a different drone, a different technique…What's used in the latter, you know, an earlier and a later one as you compare these things.”
He also noted “some incredible innovation particularly in the middle, deep-strike [drones], and then they're learning a lot just about how to do this. How do you weave through the electromagnetic signature, the EW [electronic warfare], the air defense; what's the right weapon to target pairing? What's the type of redundant network? How do you dynamically control all kinds of other things that I think would be hugely valuable for us, but again it all comes back to that velocity of learning from unit to industry to government funding.”
Buzzard also talked about some Ukraine counterattacks that have not gotten much public attention in the U.S.
“Right now,” he said, “there's one,Operation Vivaldi, a lot of folks are talking about with [Ukraine’s] Third Army, Gen. [Denys] Prokopenko down at Donetsk had done counterattacks, and Gen. Oleh Apostol, the Airborne Commander down south had done them in Zaporizhzhia.”
Buzzard continued, saying, “They've been taking back terrain too in the midstrike [areas] that's been very effective, about 20-to-30-to-150 kilometers, to help relieve pressure on the front so they've been very effective at striking logistics nodes, command and control, etc., electronic warfare.”
Buzzard also talked of “Ukrainians deep strike into Russia, most of that's with indigenous capabilities and a ton they've learned on just how to execute that. But that's clearly had an impact. Also, most recently, these huge logistics sites, Wildberries.” The latter, Wildberrries,
being Russia's largest online marketplace, and the attacks are part of a Ukraine campaign to disrupt Moscow's wartime economy.
Buzzard concluded, “So collectively I think this all aggregates to be military pressure, economic pressure [on Russia]…You know if I'm inflicting a lot of [Russian] casualties on the front, he's [Putin] potentially losing terrain. His economy is getting worse every day. Ideally at some point would he think that a deal today is better than a deal tomorrow?”
Buzzard went on to speculate, “And I don't know whether that'll actually end up happening or not, but they're [the Ukrainians] certainly in a position that in terms of what they're doing and I think these long-range strikes you're seeing from Russia to Ukraine now are really somewhat of desperation, because they're not achieving anything on the front or very little gains. And so the only thing they [the Russians] can do, and a lot of its impact is due to [shortage in Ukraine of] global supply of air defense interceptors, is [for Putin] to strike into Kiev and make it seem like they're more effective [against Ukraine] than what they really are.”
Buzzard presented a more optimistic view for Ukraine than I see, in part because he has left out President Trump’s recent moves that favor Putin and the Russian side. I don’t believe that either Putin or Trump know what’s going to happen next. Only Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky seems to have a set path, and that is to continue defending his country by seeking continuing aid from supportive countries.
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