Nearly two and a half years after Russia’s latest invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, the countries are vying to see whose “observe, orient, decide and act” cycle–the late Col. John Boyd’s “OODA loop”– is more rapid and responsive to military forces’ needs.
For Ukraine, that increasingly means ensuring its drones are able to skirt Russian jamming zones and take out Russian targets, such as ground radars, airfields, and supply lines.
“If you look at the drone obsolescence life cycle [in Ukraine], you’re looking at something like six weeks before the electronic warfare [EW] jamming environment means that you’ve got to redesign certain things,” Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer at Palantir [PLTR], said last week in an interview at the company’s Washington, D.C., office.
“They are very good at electronic warfare/jamming,” Sankar said of Russia. “They’ve turned on their industrial base, and so we shouldn’t underestimate them.”
The specter of Ukrainian drone strikes is a worry for Russian air commanders. On June 9, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense said that a drone had destroyed a Russian multi-role Su-57 fighter “for the first time” at the Akhtubinsk Air Base in Russia’s Astrakhan region–about 400 miles from the front line.
While Russia has boasted, and NATO intelligence has leaked, that Russia has been building artillery shells at three times the rate of NATO, Russia’s command economy and its Soviet tradition of top-down attrition warfare have raised quality concerns on whether such a shell ramp-up will come with a significant increase in Russian firepower.
Last month, Putin ousted his ally and defense minister of 12 years, Sergei Shoigu, and chose deputy prime minister Andrei Belousov to replace him. Belousov, an economist, has overseen Russia’s expanded drone production.
“Today, the winner on the battlefield is the one who is more open to innovation, more open to implementation as quickly as possible,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said last month in announcing Belousov’s appointment. “It is natural that at the current stage the president decided that the Ministry of Defense should be headed by a civilian.”
Last month, the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) launched the Open Data and Applications Government-owned Interoperable Repositories (Open DAGIR) effort to foster competitive innovation on the use of data to meet military forces’ needs (Defense Daily, May 30).
Industry ownership of the data rights on DoD weapons has raised costs. For Open DAGIR, the Pentagon is to own the data and related processing, while industry is to manage “the data stack.”
In addition, Open DAGIR is to feature enterprise licenses for mature applications, such as Palantir’s Maven Smart System (MSS), which is moving into production through a five-year $480 million indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract awarded last month (Defense Daily, May 30).
DoD has referred to MSS as the first version of Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control.
Under Open DAGIR, the CDAO is to use combatant commands’ feedback from the DoD Global Information Dominance Experiment to accelerate fielding of what military forces need.
The Ukrainians “have their own version of Open DAGIR, if you will, where Ukrainian ‘green suiters’ build their applications…and use it to drive strikes and describe ‘pattern of life’ analysis,” Sankar said last week. “I think it’s a good marker of what’s to come as we develop Open DAGIR in the U.S.”