Ukraine: The Rise of the High-Tech Coalition
Ukraine transforms its military amid trench warfare, leveraging cutting-edge technology and support from a technology coalition.
“Ukraine is in a stage where it's transitioning its military very fast to become a 21st-century military, and what we see now on the ground in Ukraine is interesting warfare: where you have this kind of trench warfare together with a very high-tech warfare happening at the same time,” said Heli Tiirmaa-Klaar, chair of the Ukraine IT Coalition Steering Group.
Within the framework of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, a wide coalition of countries that assist Kyiv in its defense, Estonia and Luxembourg lead this information technology association, which was set up in September 2023 with Belgium, Denmark, Latvia and Lithuania.
“We will build a secure and reliable ICT [information and communications technology] infrastructure for Ukrainian defense", said François Bausch, Luxembourg’s minister of defense, when this group was launched.
So far, the team has developed a back office to support the military effort on the ground.
“We are providing support, keeping that back office working, and of course, we are also looking into the future capability requirements that Ukraine will have and helping them with the kind of future capabilities they want to build,” Tiirma-Klar told SIGNAL Media in an interview.
The ongoing war in Ukraine has placed interest in unmanned platforms, especially smaller and expendable aerial devices.
“This is certainly what we haven't seen in the past wars so far,” Tiirma-Klar said.
You have this kind of trench warfare together with a very high-tech warfare happening at the same time.
The arrival of drones en masse means that troves of data become available and should be processed using novel capabilities. Regarding this, Ukraine is developing cutting-edge applications, according to Tiirma-Klaar.
And they have also innovated to compensate for the slowdown in weapons deliveries from the United States and other countries. For example, adapting drones to deliver shells as guided munitions, the so-called kamikaze drones, and updating this equipment with electronic warfare resistance engineering.
“They are making up for conventional shortages sometimes with very far-reaching technological capabilities, which is good, and they learn very fast,” Tiirma-Klar said.
This group continues to expand. The United Kingdom and Japan were the last countries to join it.
