RIGA, Latvia — The West would do well to make sure that its future drone units and command centers are mobile and ideally underground because they are such high-value targets, a Ukrainian defense official said.
The West is investing heavily in drone warfare and tactics after seeing how effective they have been in the war in Ukraine, and Ukraine has hard-earned lessons to offer.
One of the lessons Taras Berezovets, the head of the military cooperation department of Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces, a branch of the country’s armed forces, said the West can learn from its experiences is just how high-value drone units and command centers are as targets and how much effort is required to protect them.
“This war, especially in terms of the drone war, is like a cat-and-mouse game. The Russians are always searching for the locations of our drone units,” he said, so Ukraine is always relocating them, especially if there is a chance they have been exposed.
Speaking at a drone summit in Latvia attended by Business Insider, he said that Western allies also need to consider building drone command centers “deeper underground.”
“This is much more expensive, but with Russians and our Ukrainian experience, you can believe that it’s always better to hide these command centers and training centers deeper underground,” Berezovets said.
He said, “They should be as deep as possible.”
Berezovets said that the lesson may be harder to apply in the smaller NATO countries, which have less room than Ukraine to keep relocating drone units and command centers. Ukraine is nearly 10 times the size of Latvia, and in smaller countries, he said, “it would be much harder for you to find these locations.”
As an alliance, NATO gains more depth by dispersing units across its members, but in a wartime situation, moving command centers, training sites, and combat drone units across borders would bring its own complications, from logistics and communications to permissions and coordination.
Many of Ukraine’s drone command centers are kept concealed and operate underground when they can. Some centers have been built as mobile vehicle-based systems, with the command apparatus established inside trucks and armored vehicles.
Drone operators also regularly operate from concealed or underground positions, flying their drones as remotely as possible to stay safe.
Drone command centers, which can range from small to large operations, are high-value targets because they coordinate the work of high-impact weapons. Ukraine says drones are causing 90% of Russia’s front-line losses. Ukraine has also publicly celebrated when it has hit Russian drone command centers.
And it’s not just command posts that are in the crosshairs. Individual Ukrainian drone operators are also priority targets.
Ukrainian soldiers and officials have described drone pilots as Russia’s top targets, and Berezovets called them “the primary targets for Russian units,” saying that “they are trying to kill them.” The threat extends up the chain as well. The head of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces said last year that Russia had tried to strike multiple Ukrainian drone unit leaders at once.
These warnings align with growing realizations that for future fights, Western militaries will need to be more mobile, discreet, and dispersed.
Sir John Stringer, NATO’s Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, told Business Insider that Ukraine demonstrates that what the West has become used to in the decades since the Cold War, the “big single air operation center, which a lot of people have grown up with over the last sort of 35 years,” is no longer viable.
Force dispersal comes with complications though. “The more distributed it becomes, the more difficult and challenging it is,” he said.
Some Ukrainian defense companies have said their Western counterparts should consider no longer producing in a single large site, but instead break up their efforts across multiple locations. It makes the work harder, they say, but it’s safer.
Many Ukrainian companies break up their work like this to avoid being a target, and some also work underground.
Achi, the CEO of Ukrainian defense firm Ark Robotics, told Business Insider that the company makes sure to keep different parts of “manufacturing independently from the other” and is flexible about location.
“We try to avoid building a gigafactory. I would love that, to be honest, I think this is literally the best way to do it. You build a huge factory, everything is in there,” he said, speaking using a pseudonym as a security precaution.
But even as the company explores manufacturing in other parts of Europe, it still wants to keep that principle, and thinks the wider defense industry there should learn that lesson.
Achi said that “as default for defense-based manufacturing going forward, you don’t want to have huge factories in one place because they are these targets. ” He called it “a much deeper long-term lesson” rather than something that only companies in Ukraine need to pay attention to.
Karmo Saar, the head of sales for Estonian company Krattworks, which makes drones used by Ukraine, told Business Insider that some of Ukraine’s big drone makers have more than 15 production sites, even though it would be easier and cheaper to run everything in one big facility. He said the rest of Europe needs to learn from that, warning that if a war starts, “I think we’re going to be punished.”
Read the full article here
