\n
Then, he said, there were days when it seemed as though they were fighting World War I.<\/p>\n
\u2018The Pit\u2019<\/h2>\n More than a thousand miles west of Ukraine, deep inside an American base in the heart of Europe, is the intelligence-gathering center that has become the focal point of the effort to bring the allies and the new technology together to target Russian forces.<\/p>\n
Visitors are discouraged in \u201cthe Pit,\u201d as the center is known. American officials rarely discuss its existence, in part because of security concerns, but mostly because the operation raises questions about how deeply involved the United States is in the day-to-day business of finding and killing Russian troops.<\/p>\n
The technology in use there evolved from Project Maven. But a version provided to Ukraine was designed in a way that does not rely on the input of the most sensitive American intelligence or advanced systems.<\/p>\n
The goals have come a long way since the outcry at Google six years ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn those early days, it was pretty simple,\u201d said Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, who was the first director of the Pentagon\u2019s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. \u201cIt was as basic as you could get. Identifying vehicles, people, buildings, and then trying to work our way to something more sophisticated.\u201d<\/p>\n
Google\u2019s exit, he said, may have slowed progress toward what the Pentagon now called \u201calgorithmic warfare.\u201d But \u201cwe just kept going.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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By the time the Ukraine war was brewing, Project Maven\u2019s elements were being designed and built by nearly five dozen firms, from Virginia to California.<\/p>\n
Yet there was one commercial company that proved most successful in putting it all together on what the Pentagon calls a \u201csingle pane of glass\u201d: Palantir, a company co-founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, the billionaire conservative-libertarian, and Alex Karp, its chief executive.<\/p>\n
Palantir focuses on organizing, and visualizing, masses of data. But it has often found itself at the center of a swirling debate about when building a picture of the battlefield could contribute to overly automated decisions to kill.<\/p>\n
Early versions of Project Maven, relying on Palantir\u2019s technology, had been deployed by the U.S. government during the COVID-19 pandemic and the Kabul evacuation operation, to coordinate resources and track readiness. \u201cWe had this torrent of data but humans couldn\u2019t process it all,\u201d General Shanahan said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Project Maven quickly became the standout success among the Pentagon\u2019s many efforts to tiptoe into algorithmic warfare, and soon incorporated feeds from nearly two dozen other Defense Department programs and commercial sources into an unprecedented common operating picture for the U.S. military.<\/p>\n
But it had never been to war.<\/p>\n
A Meeting on the Polish Border<\/h2>\n Early one morning after the Russian invasion, a top American military official and one of Ukraine\u2019s most senior generals met on the Polish border to talk about a new technology that might help the Ukrainians repel the Russians.<\/p>\n
The American had a computer tablet in his car, operating Project Maven through Palantir\u2019s software and connected to a Starlink terminal.<\/p>\n
His tablet\u2019s display showed many of the same intelligence feeds that the operators in the Pit were seeing, including the movement of Russian armored units and the chatter among the Russian forces as they fumbled their way to Kyiv.<\/p>\n
As the two men talked, it became evident that the Americans knew more about where Ukraine\u2019s own troops were than the Ukrainian general did. The Ukrainian was quite certain his forces had taken a city back from the Russians; the American intelligence suggested otherwise. When the American official suggested he call one of his field commanders, the Ukrainian general discovered that the American was right.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The Ukrainian was impressed \u2014 and angry. American forces should be fighting alongside the Ukrainians, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can\u2019t do that,\u201d the American responded, explaining that Mr. Biden forbade it. What the United States can provide, he said, is an evolving picture of the battlefield.<\/p>\n
Today a similar tension continues to play out inside the Pit, where each day a careful dance is underway. The military has taken seriously Mr. Biden\u2019s mandate that the United States should not directly target Russians. The president has said that Russia must not be allowed to win, but that the United States must also \u201cavoid World War III.\u201d<\/p>\n
So, the Americans point the Ukrainians in the right direction but stop short of giving them precise targeting data.<\/p>\n
The Ukrainians quickly improved, and they built a sort of shadow Project Maven, using commercial satellite firms like Maxar and Planet Labs and data scraped from Twitter and Telegram channels.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Instagram shots, taken by Russians or nearby Ukrainians, often showed dug-in positions or camouflaged rocket launchers. Drone imagery soon became a crucial source of precise targeting data, as did geolocation data from Russian soldiers who did not have the discipline to turn off their cellphones.<\/p>\n
This flow of information helped Ukraine target Russia\u2019s artillery. But the initial hope that the picture of the battlefield would flow to soldiers in the trenches, connected to phones or tablets, has never been realized, field commanders say.<\/p>\n
One key to the system was Starlink, the Elon Musk-provided mesh of satellites, which was often the only thing connecting soldiers to headquarters, or to one another. That reinforced what was already becoming blindingly obvious: Starlink\u2019s network of 4,700 satellites proved nearly as good as \u2014 and sometimes better than \u2014 the United States\u2019 billion-dollar systems, one White House official said.<\/p>\n
Dreams of Drone Fleets<\/h2>\n For a while, it seemed as if this technological edge might allow Ukraine to push the Russians out of the country entirely.<\/p>\n
In a suburb of Kyiv, Ukrainian high school students spent the summer of 2023 working in a long-neglected factory, soldering together Chinese-supplied components for small drones, which were then mounted onto carbon-fiber frames. The contraptions were light and cheap, costing about $350 each.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Soldiers on the front lines would then strap each one to a two-or-three pound explosive charge designed to immobilize an armored vehicle or kill the operators of a Russian artillery brigade. The drones were designed for what amounted to crewless kamikaze missions, intended for one-time use, like disposable razors.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The broken-down factory near Kyiv encapsulated all the complications and contradictions of the Ukraine war. From the start, the Ukrainians understood that to win, or even to stay in the game, they had to reinvent drone warfare. But they could barely keep enough parts coming in to sustain the effort.<\/p>\n
The mission of remaking Ukraine\u2019s drone fleet has captivated Mr. Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google.<\/p>\n
\u201cUkraine,\u201d he said in October, between trips to the country, \u201chas become the laboratory in the world on drones.\u201d He described the sudden appearance of several hundred drone start-ups in Ukraine of \u201cevery conceivable kind.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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But by the fall of 2023 he began to worry that Ukraine\u2019s innovative edge alone would not be enough. Russia\u2019s population was too big and too willing to sacrifice, oil prices remained high, China was still supplying the Russians with key technologies and parts \u2014 while they also sold to the Ukrainians.<\/p>\n
And while Ukrainian pop-up factories churned out increasingly cheap drones, he feared they would quickly be outmatched.<\/p>\n
So Mr. Schmidt began funding a different vision, one that is now, after the Ukraine experience, gaining adherents in the Pentagon: far more inexpensive, autonomous drones, which would launch in swarms and talk to each other even if they lost their connection to human operators on the ground. The idea is a generation of new weapons that would learn to evade Russian air defenses and reconfigure themselves if some drones in the swarm were shot down.<\/p>\n
It is far from clear that the United States, accustomed to building exquisite, $10 million drones, can make the shift to disposable models. Or that it is ready to bring on the targeting questions that come with fleets driven by A.I.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s an awful lot of moral issues here,\u201d Mr. Schmidt acknowledged, noting that these systems would create another round of the long-running debates about targeting based on artificial intelligence, even as the Pentagon insists that it will maintain \u201cappropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force.\u201d<\/p>\n
He also came to a harsh conclusion: This new version of warfare would likely be awful.<\/p>\n
\u201cGround troops, with drones circling overhead, know they\u2019re constantly under the watchful eyes of unseen pilots a few kilometers away,\u201d Mr. Schmidt wrote last year. \u201cAnd those pilots know they are potentially in opposing cross hairs watching back. \u2026 This feeling of exposure and lethal voyeurism is everywhere in Ukraine.\u201d<\/p>\n
Audio produced by Adrienne Hurst.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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