Berlin, FRG (Weltexpress). This is the message that the former commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, General Valery Salushny, has published in an article on the popular US military portal “Defense One“. It reads: The West must rethink warfare and can learn from Ukraine.
The ex-general is currently filling the position of ambassador of his dying country in London, where the president-playing Zelensky, who fears for his throne, has sent his rival into gilded exile. At the same time, Salushny is allegedly the candidate of choice of the collective West to succeed Zelensky.
Under the title: “How drones, data, and AI transformed our military-and why the US must follow suit”, Salushny published an article on April 10 on “Defence One”, in which he claims that Ukraine’s tactical drones are “twice as effective as any other weapon in the Ukrainian arsenal”. The remarkable development of this weapon, which was considered relatively unimportant just three years ago, is an example of how Ukraine has revolutionized the battlefield of the 20th century with its innovations and thus shown the West how it will have to fight its wars in the future.
At a time when technology is reshaping the battlefield, ex-general Valery Salushny, former Ukrainian military commander and current Ukrainian ambassador in London, appealed to the West to rethink warfare. As usual, he greatly exaggerated the role of Ukraine, which is discussed at the end of this article.
Saluschny’s article draws on his own experiences on the battlefield in Ukraine, which indeed show that drones, artificial intelligence (AI) and data-driven systems have fundamentally changed modern warfare. From low-cost tactical drones to the AI-powered DELTA battlefield management system, Ukrainian innovations have gained the upper hand against a superior opponent, providing a blueprint for Western forces in future wars. Salushny warns that without adopting these Ukrainian lessons, the West risks becoming obsolete in a rapidly evolving global arms race.
It is primarily tactical drones that Salushny describes as Ukraine’s most powerful weapon. He refers to a study by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), the well-known “think tank” of the British military, according to which Ukrainian tactical drones “cause around two thirds of Russian losses” and are “twice as effective as any other weapon in the Ukrainian arsenal”. Salushny goes on to boast about the low-cost water drones that have driven the Russian Black Sea Fleet out of Crimea’s ports. The unarmed drones that support logistics and medical evacuations have also proven to be versatile and indispensable tools.
In contrast to traditional military equipment, Ukraine’s drones are not expensive products from defense companies. Instead, they are assembled from commercially available components and open-source software, decentralized, home-based by small businesses and even home-based for the military. This makes them affordable and scalable for a war of attrition, and at the same time this type of production and supply chain cannot be interrupted by the enemy. This shift from costly, patented and heavy weapon systems to agile, jointly developed weapons has enabled Ukraine to survive in a high-intensity conflict against a numerically superior opponent.
On the other hand, Salushny paints a bleak picture of the Russian-Ukrainian war and compares it to the trenches of the First World War. “After decades of ever faster offensive manoeuvres”, he writes, “the enemy can now detect our slightest movements and attack without warning”. This has led to a front “locked in defensive positions”. Soldiers, entrenched in trenches, are constantly in dangerous conditions where even troop rotations and medical evacuations are risky.
This change resulted from three developments: tactical drones that attack enemy forces in the air, on land and at sea; electronic warfare, including their jamming and hijacking of drone signals; thirdly, remote sensors of varying complexity. Together, they created a “hardened and unforgiving environment” in which any sighting or electronic transmission triggers an attack within seconds. The result is a battlefield where decisive breakthroughs are rare, even with high casualties.
DELTA – The “Google for the military”
The former military commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces then talks about the AI-supported battlefield management system “DELTA”, which was developed independently by Ukraine and which he praises for its simplicity and effectiveness as the cornerstone of “Ukrainian success” against the superior Russians. In Ukraine, “Delta” is referred to as “Google for the military”. In contrast to the more complex American Palantir system, DELTA offers straightforward situational awareness and decision support, which has helped Ukraine outwit its larger but “low-information (Russian) opponent”.
Access to this system is via a single log-in, whereupon the operator can access a variety of modules that organize the “war room” in real time. DELTA’s AI sifts through vast amounts of data to provide commanders with a comprehensive picture of the battlefield, including an archive of targets for attack or cyber operations. The user-friendly design has proven critical in high-pressure scenarios and demonstrates Ukraine’s ability to innovate under pressure.
The huge amounts of data that the DELTA AI sifts through to provide commanders with a comprehensive picture of the battlefield and corresponding decision-making aids only make sense, of course, if the data that is supposed to reflect the so-called “war room” is also available in real time. Data that is older makes little sense. After a day or even a few hours, enemy targets in the form of tanks, artillery positions or troop concentrations may have already moved on.
Real-time data on enemy movements and, above all, positions will therefore determine the efficiency of the “DELTA” system. And the bad news, which Saluschny did not mention in his article, is the fact that only the Americans, with their unparalleled SIGINT capabilities, can provide military reconnaissance results in real time across the “war room”.
SIGINT is short for signals intelligence. SIGINT refers to the collection and analysis of information obtained from electromagnetic signals. U.S. SIGINT assets include the various satellite networks, underwater communications cable interception systems, advanced cyber tools and global capabilities to intercept telephone calls, read emails, radio transmissions and record and locate non-communicative emissions such as radar signals, telemetry, etc.
But it seems that the supply of real-time SIGINT data to Ukraine has been interrupted on the orders of President Trump. According to reports in the British media, the British military leadership is also horrified because Washington has allegedly forbidden it to pass on US SIGINT data to Ukraine, because without US data, even the great DELTA system will be in the dark. Neither the British nor the French, and certainly not the Germans, could offer Ukraine a substitute, even if they pooled their own resources.
But that’s not the only problem that Saluschny has ignored in his whitewashing article.
Salushny’s claim that drones are responsible for two-thirds of Russian losses probably has less to do with the efficiency of drones than with the acute Ukrainian shortage of Western supplies of heavy equipment, primarily artillery and the associated ammunition, the lack of missiles and the shortage of trained infantry. In other words, if Ukraine can only operate with drones because it hardly dares to venture out of cover with its tanks and artillery for fear of Russian drones, then in purely mathematical terms it may well be that drones are Ukraine’s most powerful weapon, accounting for two thirds of Russian losses. This says nothing about the extent of Russian losses, which according to reliable US sources are much lower than those of Ukraine, both numerically and proportionally.
Although Salushny rightly speaks from personal experience of a drone revolution on the modern battlefield, reports from neutral observers as well as open source information on the conflict in Ukraine suggest that missile and infantry combat are the main cause of casualties. While drones excel at precision strikes and reconnaissance, their dominance should not overshadow the broader array of combined arms, as Salushny has done. He probably did this on purpose, as it is the only way he can emphasize the importance of Ukraine for the protection of NATO and Europe through the supposedly “successful” Ukrainian defensive campaign against the Siberian hordes.
Saluschny underlines this in his article by appealing to the Western armed forces to learn from Ukraine and its drone innovations on the battlefield. In particular, he addresses the USA, which he accuses of complacency. “Lulled by decades of dominance in several domains”, he warns, “Western armed forces have been dormant for too long”. Without adopting Ukrainian innovations, they risk becoming “the proverbial victims of the German Blitzkrieg in World War II” against opponents who use autonomous weapons on a massive scale.
That sounds like Salushny’s tit-for-tat against the US military leadership. US generals recently had no good words for the Ukrainian military leadership in a very long investigative article in the New York Times. In the New York Times, the Americans blamed the tactical narrow-mindedness and inflexibility of their Ukrainian counterparts for the enormous losses of men and material in the totally unsuccessful offensive of 2023. At the time, Salushny was Ukraine’s supreme military commander, which he chose to forget in his article.
Instead, he repeatedly refers in his article to a stalemate-like frontline situation in the form of an alleged war of position and attrition. The reason why the front is not moving is that under the conditions of modern drone warfare, anyone who comes out of cover runs the risk of being destroyed immediately. On the contact line, however, the opposite was the case. In fact, there is no section of the front where the Russians have not made significant progress in destroying Ukrainian war capabilities over the past 15 months, accompanied by significant terrain gains. His Excellency, the Ambassador of Ukraine in London, did not mention this either.
Instead, behind his emphasis on the alleged Ukrainian contributions to saving the West and his call to adopt Ukrainian lessons and combine them with Ukrainian strategy, an attempt to secure further NATO support can be seen.
