In Ukraine, the war is transforming at brutal speed due to the massive irruption of drones and robotsmachines and devices that have ceased to be a complement to central part of the fight. Every week they appear new shapes to use them to reconnoitre, attack, evacuate or move supplies without exposing soldiersand that is forcing us to adapt tactics almost in real time.
What we did not imagine was to what extent.
Cross a line. In Ukraine, this “machine war” has entered a phase as delusional as it is logicalone in which a drone is no longer just a weapon or an eye in the sky, but a means of transportation: Ukrainian soldiers have started using aerial drones as if they were improvised Ubers for combat robots, loading small ground vehicles and dropping them near Russian positions to save time and, above all, blood.
The image was described by military commanders to the Insider mediumwhen the soldiers at the front saw with stupefaction and surprise the almost absurd scene (a flying platform carrying another armed platform), but which summarizes better than anything the technological moment of the front: the continuous impossible combinations that are born from a simple and brutal need, to put capabilities on the ground without exposing a human even a second more than is essential.
The trick. Here is a company that we have talked before. Ark Roboticswhich supplies autonomous robots to more than 20 brigades, says that this tactic has even surprised its own CEO, Achi, who speaks on Insider under a pseudonym for safety and that when he saw it he reacted with a mixture of disbelief and alarm, before admitting that it made all the sense in the world.
A large drone transports a small ground robot forward and “drops” it to deploy it directly where it matters, avoiding the most vulnerable part of the trip, that slow advance over land that exposes the UGV to mines, direct fire, mud, craters and detection. The idea is so simple that it is scary: it is not about inventing a marvel, but about skipping the route that produces casualties, and converting the deployment into something fast and safe for the human operator.
Why does it make sense? The reason this madness works is that air and ground combat complement each other in modern warfare: aerial drones are numerous, can cover distances quickly and cross dangerous areas more easily, but they are noisy, visible and need to stay close to observe or attack.
Terrestrial robots, on the other hand, they are slow to arrivebut when they are already in position they can do things that cannot be done in the same way from the air: get into trenches, enter shelters, approach without announcing their presence, place explosives, collect intelligence, shoot with more stability and remain hidden next to an enemy point as if they were part of the landscape. That species drone-Uber It precisely solves the bottleneck: it does not improve the robot itself, it improves “how you take it” to the place where it starts to be really dangerous.
Ukrainian land robot
Crazy innovation… with logic. This type of hybrid shows to what extent the war in Ukraine has become in a laboratory that no longer differentiates between classic categories, because everything is mixed in order to gain seconds and reduce casualties. It’s not just creativity: it’s creativity for survival, squeezing out any tool until you get uses from it that weren’t in the plans.
Other manufacturers as Milrem Robotics They have also recognized that the Ukrainians have used their robots in unexpected waysand that pressure from the front is rewriting the design of systems in real time, in cycles of change so rapid that they seem impossible in traditional industry.
The cost of speed. The problem for companies like Ark is that this “insane phase” of machine warfare forces them to innovate with a speed that can turn against: If you change too much, you no longer mass produce, and if you produce without changing, you fall behind.
Achi describe an almost inhuman pace of iteration, with multiple modifications in weeks, and the permanent risk of following wrong trends that compromise reliability and volume. In practice, war requires them to do two incompatible things at once: experiment as an improvised workshop and manufacture as a real industry.
The future that looms. Although hethe terrestrial robots are still a minority in the face of the torrent of aerial drones, the scene with Ark robots makes it clear that it is an expanding sector and that the front is pushing towards a model in which the front line is increasingly supported by machines.
The company develops a system called Frontier to coordinate thousands of drones and robots with minimal human intervention, and the idea that floats above everything is as disturbing as it is coherent: if moving people near the front is increasingly absurd, war will tend to move machines, and Ukraine this exploiting that logic in a big way.
Image | Ministry of Defense of Ukraine
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