SYDNEY — For centuries governments have filled warehouses with military gear, stockpiling it for the day they hope will never come, when they must go to war.
But at least for the drones so crucial to the battle between Ukraine and its invader, Russia, that is all in the past as Kyiv’s front-line troops now order the drones they need when they need them, using blockchain technology to guarantee security and speed.
Lyuba Shipovich, head of the volunteer group Dignitas Ukraine, detailed the incredibly rapid cycle of drone development, manufacture and delivery her country has created to help contain and beat back the Russian bear.
“There are no warehouses anymore. Military units can order and drones or ground robots on the website that is called blockchain defense. It’s similar to Amazon. They just order directly from the manufacturer, and they get delivered directly from manufacturer to the military unit to the battlefield,” Shipovich said last week at the Sydney Dialogue, a conference organized by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. “Currently, the delivery takes 24 hours from order to [delivery to] the front line, and this is the right time to be on the front line, so we won’t need repair shops to modernize ever since that we requested like few weeks ago.”
That kind of speed and agility, Shipovich said, is “something that NATO countries could learn from Ukraine — adapt NATO procedures to new realities, to this war.”
The Ukrainian advocate pressed on to broaden her call, noting “there are just two countries in the world that know how to fight a modern war — Ukraine and Russia. So it’s time for everyone to decide to learn from Russia or from Ukraine, and Ukraine is willing to share knowledge. We invite everyone for our training, we are ready to share information about training, certification programs, procedures and so on.”
For its part, NATO is all too aware of how Ukraine is not just pushing the envelope for modern combat, but building a whole new one.
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The “speed and quality of decision making is what really has made a difference in Ukraine,” Marco Criscuolo, NATO’s acting head of strategy and policy, told the conference. “For those who believe it’s about technology, I tell you the solution is about human capital and processes. When it comes to human capital, it’s about the mindset that we adopt.”
An ‘Interlinked’ Threat
Latvia’s national security advisor, Aeris Rikvellis, told the 300 attendees that the threat is not just from Russia.
“Russians, Chinese and North Koreans are learning from each other, learning from us,” creating a vast “interlinked” theater, stretching from Europe to Asia.
“They are interlinked, and we will feel events in one that will be felt in others,” Rikvellis said.
Although the theater is vast, the tactical problems remain daunting and very local. “We have a problem in Belarus, that Lithuanian and Latvian border guards are trying to solve: How we can solve the air balloons that they are constantly sending into our territory with smuggled cigarettes?” he said.
Lithuania has called for European Union sanctions against the Russian ally because, Rikvellis said, that country is doing little to stop the balloons which have formed airport closures and now the problem has spread to Latvia.
“You might think that you might shoot it down, but it’s 50 to 60 kilograms [over 100 pounds] falling down upon somebody, right?” Officials in both countries “understand what the principle is,” but the hard part is to decide what actions to take on the spot.