Emily Bienvenue, Maryanne Kelton, Zac Rogers, Michael Sullivan, and Matthew Ford
The war in Ukraine affords a window into how private tech companies are reshaping states’ sovereign control over military power. State-centric models of war, where sovereign states control the battlefield and determine the technologies deployed within it, are being redefined by militaries’ growing reliance in the battlespace on commercial datafication software and hardware. The war in Ukraine signals a shift in the character of armed conflict. Militaries are simultaneously decentralizing distributed decisionmaking closer to the warfighter and centralizing command and control through dependence on private tech companies that produce essential tools, including cloud computing; intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) analytics; and scalable machine learning platforms for AI.1
The war in Ukraine is forcing conflict analysts and others to reimagine traditional state-centric models of war, as it demonstrates that militaries are no longer primarily responsible for defining the challenges of the modern battlespace and then producing tenders for technological fixes. Instead, private tech companies increasingly explain the ideal battlespace to militaries, offering software and hardware products needed to establish real-time information edges. In the Russia-Ukraine war, private companies have sought to shape Ukrainian intelligence requirements. At the beginning of Russia’s invasion in February 2022, Ukraine’s armed forces could not manage essential intelligence tasks. Ukraine’s military lacked its own software and hardware for real-time information dominance and instead accepted support from private tech companies. These companies provide AI and big data tools that fuse intelligence and surveillance data to enhance the military’s situational awareness. As the war has progressed, however, the Ukrainians have sought to develop their own government situational awareness and battle management platform called Delta. The platform was developed as a bottom-up solution, “initially focused on a single, highly effective application: a digital map for situational awareness.”2 Over time, it expanded into a robust software ecosystem used by most of Ukraine’s military, from frontline soldiers to top commanders. This in part reflects Ukraine’s desire to retain direct sovereign control over what the U.S. military refers to as Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control infrastructure (CJADC2), which manages networked sensors, data, platforms, and operations to deliver information advantages across all military services and with allies.
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