Oleksandr Kamyshin, Minister of Strategic Industries of Ukraine, told how unmanned weapons can change the course of war. President Zelensky set Kamyshin an important task — to develop a high-tech arms industry that could surpass the Russian arsenal. The key to this is the mass production of autonomous weapons controlled by artificial intelligence to minimize casualties, unacceptable for a country experiencing a demographic crisis.
Ukraine plans to surpass Russia with the help of autonomous weapons
This year we will see artificial intelligence become part of the game, we will see autonomous ground systems. No Western country can single-handedly compete with Russia's wartime military industry. We have already created a capability that can serve not only our own armed forces, but also the rest of Europe. Tanks and artillery have been neglected by everyone for decades, and Western companies are scrambling to develop factories and warehouses to produce enough of them. But they can finance the purchase and production here (in Ukraine), - Oleksandr Kamyshin said.
Oleksandr Kamyshin believes that production does not work without proper financing or procurement, it cannot be scaled and used. Russia has invested for decades and has a huge procurement budget, so Ukraine needs tens of billions of dollars to compete.
At the moment, there are more than two hundred companies in Ukraine that produce from the cheapest FPV drones costing $350 to those capable of flying deep into Russia. Unmanned ground vehicles such as the Ratel, which can carry 35 kg of explosives under a tank or in a bunker, or the Ironclad, a remote-controlled ground drone, are already being manufactured and tested on the battlefield, although not yet on a large scale.
It is already technologically possible to create fully autonomous drones that will take off and fly to a certain sector of the battlefield, identify targets, choose the highest priority and perform tasks based on it, says Yaroslav Azhniuk, CEO of the Ukrainian company Fourth Law AI, which develops defense technologies .
According to Azhniuk, the hardware has already been created, and the necessary microcircuits are available on commercial markets. Ukraine only needs to develop the software, connect and integrate the components. While the production of these new-age weapons is possible, doing so in a short period of time sufficiently to compete with Russia will be difficult, even with the support of Western companies.
