All of this has allowed many companies to bypass the traditionally slow process of testing and demonstrating their products, for better and worse.
Tech companies’ rush into the conflict zone has unnerved some observers, who are worried that by going to war, companies have sidestepped ethical and safety concerns over their tools. Clearview AI gave Ukraine access to its controversial facial recognition tools to help identify Russia’s war dead, for example, sparking moral and practical questions over accuracy, privacy, and human rights—publishing images of those killed in war is arguably a violation of the Geneva Convention. Some high-profile tech executives, including Palantir CEO Alex Karp and former Google CEO-turned-military-tech-investor Eric Schmidt, have used the conflict to try to shift the global norms for using artificial intelligence in war, building systems that let machines select targets for attacks—which some experts worry is a gateway into autonomous “killer robots.”
LMT’s Pollaks says he has visited Ukraine often since the war began. Though he declines to give more details, he euphemistically describes Ukraine’s wartime bureaucracy as “nonstandardized.” If you want to blow something up in front of an audience in the EU, he says, you have to go through a whole lot of approvals, and the paperwork can take months, even years. In Ukraine, plenty of people are willing to try out your tools.
“[Ukraine], unfortunately, is the best defense technology experimentation ground in the world right now,” Pollaks says. “If you are not in Ukraine, then you are not in the defense business.”
Jack Wang, principal at UK-based venture capital fund Project A, which invests in military-tech startups, agrees that the Ukraine “track” can be incredibly fruitful. “If you sell to Ukraine, you get faster product and tech iteration, and live field testing,” he says. “The dollars might vary. Sometimes zero, sometimes quite a bit. But you get your product in the field faster.”
The feedback that comes from the front is invaluable. Atlas Dynamics has opened an office in Ukraine, and its representatives there work with soldiers and special forces to refine and modify their products. When Russian forces started jamming a wide band of radio frequencies to disrupt communication with the drones, Atlas designed a smart frequency-hopping system, which scans for unjammed frequencies and switches control of the drone over to them, putting soldiers a step ahead of the enemy.
At Global Wolf, battlefield testing for the Mosphera has led to small but significant iterations of the product, which have come naturally as soldiers use it. One scooter-related problem on the front turned out to be resupplying soldiers in entrenched positions with ammunition. Just as urban scooters have become last-mile delivery solutions in cities, troops found that the Mosphera was well suited to shuttling small quantities of ammo at high speeds across rough ground or through forests. To make this job easier, Global Wolf tweaked the design of the vehicle’s optional extra trailer so that it perfectly fits eight NATO standard-sized bullet boxes.
GLOBAL WOLF
Some snipers prefer the electric Mosphera to noisy motorbikes or quads, using the vehicles to weave between trees to get into position. But they also like to shoot from the saddle—something they couldn’t do from the scooter’s footplate. So Global Wolf designed a stable seat that lets shooters fire without having to dismount. Some units wanted infrared lights, and the company has made those, too. These types of requests give the team ideas for new upgrades: “It’s like buying a car,” Asmanis says. “You can have it with air conditioning, without air conditioning, with heated seats.”