Once opened, the fifteen-kilo black briefcase, with its two screens, recalls the gadgets provided to James Bond by his colleague “Q”. But for Ukrainians, this is not a movie prop. Their army uses in the field dozens, maybe even hundreds – the information is secret – of these Skykit suitcases designed by Palantir, the American company which provides spy and military management systems to the United States and to other Western nations. At the Davos forum, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov revealed that this technology made it possible “to follow the evolution of the war in real time”. The boss of Palantir, Alex Karp, told him that his company was even “responsible for most of the targeting in Ukraine”.
With its drone, its small antenna pointing to the sky and its latest generation programs – including Gotham, bought by the French Directorate General for Homeland Security, and Foundry, used by Airbus to manage its industrial chains – Skykit acts as a center of mobile intelligence. Thanks to in-house software called Meta-Constellation, the Ukrainian soldier can connect to one of the 40 commercial satellites that fly over Ukraine every twenty-four hours, have the data collected by various artificial intelligence modules analyzed and thus “see” the enemy, less than two hours after a satellite flyby. Depending on intergovernmental agreements, Skykit can also access “sovereign” military satellites such as those of the Pentagon.
Capitalizing on its strong technological culture, Ukraine has been able to take advantage of a wide range of digital tools, foreign or national. These play a vital role in its resilience against more powerful, but less agile Russian forces. For the armies of the world, the war in Ukraine offers many lessons. It reminds how this type of confrontation, symmetrical, is deeply destructive in material and lives. But it also reveals how indispensable digital instruments, in particular those used to collect and process information, have become.
The Ukrainian government understood this from the first months of the invasion. To overcome its shortcomings in the intelligence system, it quickly went in search of a supplier, first going around the chancelleries, tells L’Express an “insider”, until several interlocutors advise Mykhailo Fedorov – also in charge of the country’s digital transformation – to contact Palantir. Deal concluded: after Alex Karp’s visit to Kiev on June 2, the Denver company, determined to demonstrate its capabilities in the most destructive European conflict since the Second World War, opened an office there.
The crucial role of drones
Since then, Palantir has lifted the veil on its Skykit, with an obvious commercial objective. He could easily find customers, as this system highlights one of the main lessons of the war in Ukraine: the battlefield, constantly observed, generates a colossal amount of data to be processed and shared, after their collection. While satellites and drones had played an important role in previous conflicts (Syria, Nagorno-Karabakh, Libya), in particular armed tactical drones, such as the Turkish TB2 Bayraktar, and prowling ammunition, they are used on such a scale massive than unprecedented in Ukraine.
Paradoxically, the drones with the strongest impact on the battlefield are those that can be found on the market, for simple reconnaissance – and sometimes to drop a grenade equipped with a product stabilizer on an enemy unit. by a 3D printer. In the Ukrainian sky, where they buzz by the thousands, their role “is all the more decisive as the use of aviation and helicopters is restricted” by effective anti-aircraft defenses, as noted in a recent report by Senator Cédric Perrin .
For this specialist in defense issues, the lesson to be learned is obvious: “In this type of conflict, to survive, all ground units must be equipped with unmanned vehicles.” Jack Watling, of the Rusi Analysis Center in London, made the same observation: “You need drones at all levels, down to the infantry unit, to know what is behind the hill , correct a mortar shot and make a weapon that is not otherwise accurate”, he insisted, during a recent seminar organized by the French army.
The problem, as the ongoing conflict shows, is that large quantities are needed, as their lifespan is so short. A Rusi report on the course of the fighting from February to July found that 90% of the drones used by the Ukrainians had been lost. They rarely make more than three to six flights, victims of more or less powerful jammers, such as electromagnetic rifles. For Jack Watling, Western forces must therefore find “new industrial solutions” in order to have a “mass” of cheap drones, in the event of future conflicts.
flood of fire
In Ukraine, this transparency of the battlefield, coupled with the use of precision weapons such as the American Himars rocket launchers or certain missiles, also obliges us to constantly review the location of the means. “If you group your headquarters in one place, they will be destroyed; if you do the same for your logistics nodes, for a certain time, they will be destroyed, noted Jack Watling during his research stays in Ukraine. These are problems that [les armées occidentales] have not taken enough into account, it is necessary to know how to disperse [pour rester opérationnel].”
Because the attrition of forces in Ukraine has reached levels not seen on the European continent since the Second World War. Russia has lost thousands of tanks, including half of its estimated fleet of main battle tanks. While France has barely more than 200 Leclercs, the tanks turn out to be “consumables”, so a quantity is needed to withstand the shock of the “high intensity”. Bordering Russia – via the enclave of Kaliningrad – and its Belarusian ally, Poland has drawn the consequences by placing an order in recent months for 366 American Abrams tanks and 1,000 South Korean K2s.
Without the support of the Europeans and, above all, of the Americans, who provide them with most of the military aid, the Ukrainians would have quickly found themselves short of means of combat. In addition to hundreds of artillery pieces, the United States has already supplied more than one million 155mm shells to kyiv. But the consumption of the Ukrainian army is faster than the production of NATO factories. To remedy this, the Pentagon announced that the rate of manufacture would increase in two years from 15,000 shells per month – the quantity consumed in one week by Ukraine – to 90,000. The Europeans are also announcing increases in the rate, to like the German Rheinmetall, which has just laid the first stone of a new ammunition factory in Hungary.
Faced with this deluge of fire, the soldiers had no choice but to dig into the ground, like the soldiers of Verdun, to take shelter. “Despite connectivity, satellites, drones, the best way for an infantryman to protect himself from artillery fire is to make a trench, a return to basics that will never change. This is what soldiers experience Russians and Ukrainians, in all weathers, in the mud, the snow, having to last for weeks, without a shower, when your uniform is a stench and your shoes are going to shreds”, notes Marc Chassillan, military engineer and consultant specializing in defense .
All eyes turn to Asia
“Ukraine is a lesson in rusticity, and for the training of the armies, it will perhaps be necessary to relearn the soldiers to be rustic, and to take them out of operational comfort, as is the case for the American army, whose bases include the ‘McDo’, the pizzeria, the saloon, the slightest injured being evacuated by helicopter before being brought back to the United States; and even the French army, with bases offering correct conditions in external operations , continues this good connoisseur of land forces. Because this type of war has the unfortunate tendency to thwart your ambitions: logistics and ammunition do not arrive, neither the relief nor the doctors, leaving the wounded without care…”
The Ukrainians were prepared for it, they who have been waging trench warfare in the east of their territory since 2014, in Donbass. But they also knew how to make the most of the procedures and advice provided by NATO. “I think [qu’ils] fought well from the start thanks to the training we gave them, […] we have seen non-commissioned officers take initiatives on the battlefield”, welcomed the American Minister of Defense, Lloyd Austin. This observation will not have escaped the staffs: the Russian units, restrained by a vertical operation typical of the Soviet model, wasted time and lives waiting for their orders.
Without knowing yet to what extent, the war in Ukraine is also reshuffling the cards in Asia, where the chancelleries fear an upcoming major conflict with the invasion of Taiwan by China. Beijing’s military advantage, both technological and quantitative, does not guarantee victory. “There are lessons we are learning, there are lessons European countries are learning, and there are lessons President Xi is learning. [Jinping] and the Chinese army are firing,” US Chief of Staff General Mark Milley said in November.
“There is a lot of friction, fog and death in a fight,” he continued, predicting that the Chinese military, with no recent combat experience, would be in trouble in the event of an offensive on Taiwan. A year after the Russian invasion, the situation in Ukraine reminds us of another obvious fact: we know when a war starts, but we can never predict when it will end.