How Ukraine is fighting and winning the digital war

The Russian invasion of Ukraine of February 2022 did not quite go as anyone expected. Vladimir Putin expected to have decapitated the Ukrainian government and installed a more compliant satellite regime in a matter of days. Similarly, many military analysts did not expect that Ukraine would be able to hold out, let alone repel, one of the world’s supposedly more powerful militaries. One think tank predicted that Kyiv would fall “within hours”. [1] This blog post does not tell the story of why the initial Russian invasion failed to achieve its initial goals, nor why Ukraine exceeded the world’s expectations in holding out, as this is clearly beyond my area of competence. Instead, I look at how Ukraine is making full use of its home-grown tech expertise adopting techniques, technologies and approaches that would be recognised by any tech companies to help repel the invasion. This is not simply a fight for market share, but rather a fight for a nation’s survival. The people engaged in this struggle are fighting for their lives and those of their families as well as the very survival of their country. Their heroism has been amply covered. This post explores their ingenuity.

Ukraine Drone Operations as Open Innovation

Much has been talked about the Ukraine war being dominated by drones. Whilst some of the attention is a case of visibility bias driven by the very social media-friendly footage of artillery strikes and tanks exploding captured by drones, it is clear that these are having a big impact on the battlefield. Ukraine has developed this capability organically by coopting volunteer groups of drone and software specialists that have been originally outside Ukraine’s traditional military structures. One such group, called the Aerorozvidka (aerial reconnaissance in Ukrainian), is an NGO that has worked to customise commercial off-the-shelf drones. Established in 2014 [2] to support the fight against Russia-backed separatists in the Donbas, Aerorozvidka is at the forefront of providing drone technology to complement and support the Ukrainian armed forces, using them to guide and correct artillery fire beyond the line-of-sight, using thermal imaging to spot enemy troops and vehicles and attack Russian tanks and vehicles by dropping cheap, armour-piercing grenades fitted with 3D-printed fins.

Aerorozvidka is not the only organisation innovating in the operations of drones. The Kyiv-based Dronarnia workshop produces drones to order for military units via an online ordering website, while the Dnipro-1 unit of the National Guard runs a workshop customising explosives for use on drones.

This is a classic case study of Open Innovation [3], where when an organisation is faced with a competitive environment for which it hasn’t got the capability to compete effectively, it co-opts the innovation potential of outsiders. Companies and militaries alike develop the organisational capability to compete in a given context, be it by producing a particular product, or fighting a certain type of war. Where the context changes faster than the organisation’s capability to adapt or assimilate the new skills required, then bringing in external know-how can be the fastest way in closing this knowledge gap. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was an extreme example of a rapid change in a competitive environment.

Networked Organisations and Bottom-up Innovation

Open Innovation is however only possible if the organisation is prepared to make its boundaries more permeable, allowing the flow of information and ideas into and out of the organisation. Such ‘permeability’ runs counter to the military’s culture of operational security, or OpSec, which is considered crucial to maintaining tactical and strategic surprise, ensuring that your enemy remains unaware of your intentions. In his book ‘Team of Teams’ [4], Gen Stanley McChrystal showed that top-down hierarchical organisations, such as traditional militaries, are too slow to react to a rapidly-changing environment that requires rapid response and shift of tactics. Instead, he advocates for empowering decision-making as close to where the action is, whilst simultaneously providing as much operational visibility across teams as possible to allow teams to make the best decisions.

Gary Kasparov, the former chess champion and Russian dissident frames the Ukrainian approach as a contest between Ukraine’s lateral networks and Russia’s vertical hierarchies, and explicitly makes the analogy with how tech start-ups can disrupt legacy companies using agility, speed bottom-up innovation. The comparison is particularly apt, as it highlights that much like start-ups, Ukraine has to operate in a different way to its adversary as it hasn’t got the depth of resources, strategic capability and willingness to waste human capital as Russia has. Ukraine does however have the skills and culture to be particularly effective in this space. Unlike Russian IT companies which relied on a large internal market, and so focused on working with Russian companies, Ukrainian software companies had to seek customers overseas, particularly in Europe and so they become adept at working in English, adopting the best practices used by the tech industry. For example, the Financial Times [5] tells the story of a Ukrainian IT engineer, who after 2 decades working for large western companies, established a tech hub associated with a Ukrainian motorised brigade to come up with tech solutions to the problems being faced in the field. Connected to the Internet via Starlink terminals, this team created a series of hackathons, whereby different teams competed and collaborated in rapid fashion to come up with solutions as to how to protect Ukraine’s comms equipment in the field or how to incapacitate Russia’s drones.

Drone Warfare as Disruptive Innovation

The theory of disruptive innovation was introduced by Clayton Christensen in 1995 [6]. In the seminal book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, Christensen showed how disruptive innovations often start addressing problems in less valuable market segments that are ignored by incumbents. They do however benefit from steeper performance improvement curves than existing technologies, meaning that they sooner or later disrupt the business model of existing mainstream products. A classic example of disruptive innovation was Netflix’s launch in 1997 as a niche mail-order DVD service targeting niche under-served segments – movie buffs and online shoppers.

**Disruptive and Sustaining Innovation – Source: C Christensen**

Many aspects of Ukraine’s response is following this classic model. For example, typical commercially-available drones such as those from DJI only cost around £2000-3000. However, their limited range and payload and lack of protection against electronic countermeasures meant that they were not considered to be viable in a military context by most armies. What these drones lacked in capability, they made up for in availability, cost and adaptability, with Ukrainian software engineers customising the software to make them more difficult to detect. Such systems show great cost asymmetries, with these low-cost drones able to destroy or incapacitate Russia’s tanks, which cost several hundred thousand dollars each, to around $2-3m for the most modern variants.

However, vulnerability remained an issue, and with an average life expectancy of about three flights, Ukraine’s drone operators adapted quickly. As predicted by Christensen’s disruption theory, Ukraine’s engineers are iterating rapidly, both by creating more capable devices, including the R18 octocopter that can survive the loss of one motor, and carry a load of 5kg. Similarly, Ukraine has managed to deter the Russian Navy’s Black Sea fleet from venturing too close to its waters through a mix of home-grown anti-ship missiles (an example of sustaining innovation) and a fleet of remotely controlled explosive drones (disruptive innovation).

Scaling – Army of Drones

Having established this highly agile and responsive drone operations capability, Ukraine faced the challenge of scaling it to cover the 1000km front line it is fighting on. The Ukrainian Ministry of Transformation established a programme, called Army of Drones [10], a crowd-sourcing initiative, supported by a number of celebrities such as Star Wars’ Mark Hamill (of Luke Skywalker fame) to purchase both commercial off-the-shelf drones as well as more capable reconnaissance drones that can fly for up to 24 hours. This form of crowdfunding driven by social media can be considered as the 21st century equivalent of the War Bonds that were used to purchase Spitfires in the Second World War.

Mykhailo Fedorov on Twitter: “What would happen if 472 soldiers from Army of Drones are simultaneously flying up the sky? Firstly, it’ll secure certain needs of front line in air reconnaissance. Secondly, it’s just astonishing picture. Thanks everyone, who continues to donate & dronate to @U24_gov_ua project. pic.twitter.com/8QtqeL2R31 / Twitter”
What would happen if 472 soldiers from Army of Drones are simultaneously flying up the sky? Firstly, it’ll secure certain needs of front line in air reconnaissance. Secondly, it’s just astonishing picture. Thanks everyone, who continues to donate & dronate to @U24_gov_ua project. pic.twitter.com/8QtqeL2R31

Real-time Networked Intelligence

The existential threat posed by the Russian invasion required a societal-wide response, not solely from Ukraine’s existing military structures, but also through a myriad of affiliated and non-affiliated volunteer groups. This created a big coordination challenge. To address this, the Ukrainian ministries of defence and digital transformation created a digital situational awareness system, which allows personnel equipped with appropriate applications on their laptops, tablets or mobile phones to share information about the enemy. [11] This system, called Delta, even makes use of chatbots to simplify the process of submitting information. When combined with the Starlink satellite communications system, this allows the Ukrainian military to create a near real-time aggregated view of enemy activity, annotated with data, UAV imagery and satellite pictures allowing it to respond to threats as they evolve.

What is telling is that although Delta predates the Russian invasion, its development has been accelerated by software engineers from the private sector who have joined the Ministry of Defence’s Innovation Centre. [12] The approach is typical of any agile development centre worth its name. “You develop, test, launch” said a member of the team. To allow the data to be best used by battlefield commanders, Delta is operated by a number of situational awareness centres that are set up close to the different fronts. This contrasts with the structural weakness of the Russian Armed Forces as described in a report [13] by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a defence think tank, which describes how their failure to rapidly fuse information impacts their effectiveness. The lack of up-to-date information leaves Russian forces vulnerable to deception and sees them wasting resources attacking targets that had since moved on or had been dispersed.

In October this year, the Ukrainian military further crowdsourced its intelligence by releasing a smartphone app [14] for reporting drones and other aerial threats. This app, called ePPO, is intended to allow any Ukrainian national to report the presence of incoming threats, particularly the slow-flying Iranian-made Shahed drones. As these fly at only around 115 mph and emit a loud and distinctive sound (it has been compared to a motorcycle), this can give enough time for air defence systems to react to notifications reported by the app and intercept the threats. To reduce the risk of impersonation, the ePPO app only works in conjunction with a signed-in official Diia government app, preventing, in theory, non-Ukrainians from using the app. What is particularly remarkable is that this app was only released one month after the first Iranian-made drones were used in attacks on Ukraine’s power infrastructure, highlighting the agility with which Ukraine is conducting its digital warfare.

Open Source Intelligence as Open Data

In the weeks ahead of the invasion, the world’s media was awash with images from satellite companies such as Maxar and Planet showing the accumulation of Russian troops on Ukraine’s border. Once the sole preserve of a handful of countries, high-resolution satellite imagery, up to a resolution of 30cm, was now available to everyone. It meant that operational surprise was becoming exceedingly difficult to maintain, not only for other governments but also for any media organisation willing to pay the fee for images.

40km-long Russian Armed Forces Convoy heading towards Kyiv in February 2022 – Source: Maxar

This use of commercially-available satellite imagery is an example of what is known as Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), the use of publicly-available sources of insight and data that are accessible to civilian observers such as journalists, academics and insights. For satellites, it is not just imagery that is providing useful insight. For example, FIRMS a NASA satellite used to monitor forest fires is being used by analysts to detect where the front lines are shifting in Ukraine [15]. Other sources and applications of OSINT include social media postings of troop movements posted by bystanders onto TikTok or Telegram, the use of Russian facial recognition platforms to identify individual Russian personnel suspected of war crimes and analysis of geo-tagged images and social media commentary posted by active personnel.

Amelia Smith on Twitter: “Many analysts have noticed that clusters of fire detections have followed the forward edge of battle pretty closely. Using @TheStudyofWar’s analysis of the Russian advances in Ukraine as of July 12, with @NASA FIRMS detections, we can see just how active these areas have been. pic.twitter.com/oV7bDYxNB0 / Twitter”
Many analysts have noticed that clusters of fire detections have followed the forward edge of battle pretty closely. Using @TheStudyofWar’s analysis of the Russian advances in Ukraine as of July 12, with @NASA FIRMS detections, we can see just how active these areas have been. pic.twitter.com/oV7bDYxNB0

Open Source Intelligence is akin to the way commercial organisations use a mix of data to operate their online services. This includes open data sources (i.e. free data), commercial data services, as well as Internet and social media scraping. Tech organisations are adept at discerning when creating and using their own data provides a valuable company asset or competitive advantage, and when it is more cost-effective or quicker to use data from third-party sources. The former head of British Defence Intelligence, Gen Sir Jim Hockenhull, recently said [17] that open source currently contributes 20% of current intelligence, but going forward he expects that the metric will be inverted.

Defence in the Cloud

Although we have looked at digital initiatives aimed at providing an edge on the battlefield, Ukraine’s first digital defence activities were aimed at securing the very essence of Ukraine’s digital identity as a country, namely its government’s digital records. In the weeks ahead of the invasion, the Ukrainian parliament amended legislation to allow government and specific private data to be stored on servers outside the country. This was the first step in what was certainly the first cloud migration project carried out under fire. Ukraine’s Digital Transformation ministry worked with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to transfer critical government information to the cloud [18][19]. The joint teams used ruggedised data storage devices, called AWS Snowball, effectively a “cloud in a box” to transfer data directly from Ukraine data centres. As of June, 10 petabytes of information had been transferred, preserving nationality records, land registration information, tax payment records, education registries and so on. This was an initiative that covered 27 Ukrainian ministries, 18 universities and dozens of key private companies, including the country’s largest bank. In this way, by transferring its digital records to the ‘cloud’ physically hosted in datacentres outside its borders, Ukraine was able to secure the very notion of its own statehood and the relationship it had with its citizens. As Mykhailo Federov, the Ukrainian minister for digital transformation put it, “Russian missiles can’t destroy the cloud”.

**AWS Snowball Devices as used in Ukraine – Source: LA Times**

Conclusion

Although this post has focused on Ukraine’s ability to innovate and learn in the first ten months of the war, the Russian Armed Forces have been adapting too. They make extensive use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, to direct artillery, many of which are of indigenous design, such as the Orlan-10 fixed-wing UAV. The introduction of Iranian-made Shahed long-range kamikaze drones is inflicting heavy cost asymmetries on Ukraine, as well as degrading its energy infrastructure. At a cost of $20,000-$50,000, these are significantly cheaper than the sophisticated missiles that are often used to shoot them down, estimated at around $400,000- $1m reported for a modern western missile, and raise questions on the sustainability of using these air defence systems if Russia ramps up the supply of these drones. The Russian Armed Forces have also become more adept in using electronic countermeasures against drones, and at one point were using radio interception features intended for law enforcement monitoring of commercial drones to locate the drone pilots and attack them.

Nevertheless, while clearly both sides are able to learn and adapt from the experiences on the battlefield, in the digital domain, it is clear that Ukraine has an edge. Ukraine is clearly successfully mobilising its in-country and diaspora tech-savvy workforce and tapping in expertise for technology companies in the west, while Russia, is suffering from a brain drain of its best-qualified and most-experienced knowledge workers. Moreover, more fundamentally, Ukraine has succeeded in co-opting and assimilating innovations from both within and outside the traditional military structures. Combined these provide Ukraine with an important edge, allowing it to not only learn faster than its adversary, but also putting these learnings into practice more quickly. On its own, this advantage will not allow Ukraine to win, but it may provide a decisive edge.