The idea sparked a full-scale riot on Google’s campus. Six years ago, the Silicon Valley giant signed a small contract worth $9 million to use the skills of several of its most innovative developers to create an artificial intelligence tool to help the military detect potential targets on the battlefield. using drone footage.
Engineers and other Google employees say the company should have nothing to do with the Maven project, even if it is designed to help the military distinguish between civilians and military personnel.
The scandal forced the company to withdraw, but Project Maven did not die – it was simply transferred to other contractors. It has now become an ambitious experiment being tested on the front lines in Ukraine and is a key component of the US military’s efforts to provide timely information to troops battling Russian invaders.
So far, the results are mixed: Generals and commanders have a new way to present the full picture of Russian movements and communications in one big, user-friendly picture, using algorithms to predict troop movements and locations of potential attacks.
But America’s experience in Ukraine shows how difficult it is to deliver 21st-century data into 19th-century trenches. Even as Congress is on the verge of approving tens of billions of dollars in aid to Kiev, the question remains whether new technologies are enough to turn the tide of the conflict at a time when the Russians appear to be regaining the initiative.
Photo: BTA/AR
The conflict in Ukraine, according to many US officials, has become a “gold mine” for the US military, a testing ground for Project Maven and other rapidly developing technologies. US-made drones that were delivered to Ukraine last year were easily shot down. And Pentagon officials now realize that America’s military satellite system must be built and configured in a very different way, with configurations that look more like Elon Musk’s Starlink constellation of small satellites.
At a time when U.S., British and Ukrainian officers, as well as some of Silicon Valley’s top military contractors, are exploring new ways to detect and exploit Russian vulnerabilities, U.S. officials are grappling with legal limits on how deeply they can engage in the detection and destruction of Russian forces.
“It ended up being our laboratory,” said Lt. Gen. Christopher Donahue, commander of the 18th Airborne Division.
Despite Google’s initial misgivings about participating in Project Maven, some of the industry’s most prominent figures are working on national security issues, highlighting how the US is using its competitive edge in technology to maintain its superiority over Russia and China in the age of renewed superpower rivalry.
Significantly, these figures now include Eric Schmidt, who for 16 years was Google’s CEO and is now using lessons from Ukraine to develop a new generation of autonomous drones that could revolutionize the military.
But if the conflict in Ukraine has become a testing ground for the Pentagon’s willingness to use advanced technology, it has also become a heartening reminder that technology cannot turn the tide of war. Ukraine’s ability to repel attacks likely depends more on the resumption of supplies of basic weapons and ammunition, especially artillery shells.
The first two years of the conflict have also shown that Russia is adapting much more quickly than expected to the technologies that gave Ukraine an initial advantage.
Photo: BTA
Not surprisingly, all these findings are feeding into a “lessons learned” study being conducted at the Pentagon and at NATO headquarters in Brussels, in case the alliance’s troops ever find themselves in direct conflict with President Vladimir Putin’s army. Among them is the discovery that when new technologies collide with the brutality of old-fashioned trench warfare, the results are rarely what Pentagon experts expect.
“For a while we thought it was going to be a cyber war … Then we thought it was like old-fashioned World War II tank warfare,” said Gen. Mark Milley, who retired as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff last summer . Afterwards, he says, there were days when it felt like World War I.
More than a thousand kilometers west of Ukraine, at a US base in the heart of Europe, is an intelligence-gathering center that has become a focal point for bringing together allies and new technologies in the fight against Russian forces.
No visitors are allowed in “The Pit”, as the center is called. U.S. officials rarely discuss its existence, in part for security reasons, but mostly because the operation raises questions about how deeply the U.S. is involved in the day-to-day work of detecting and destroying Russian forces.
Photo: BTA/AR
The technology used there originated from the Maven project. But the version given to Ukraine was designed not to rely on the US’s most sensitive intelligence or sophisticated systems.
“In those early days it was pretty simple… It was as simple as it could get. Identifying vehicles, people, buildings, and then we tried to move on to something more complex,” says Lt Gen Jack Shanahan, who was the first director of the Pentagon’s Joint Center for Artificial Intelligence.
He said Google’s departure may have slowed progress toward what the Pentagon now calls “algorithmic warfare.” But “we just kept moving forward,” says Shanahan.
At the time the conflict in Ukraine began, elements of Project Maven were being designed and built by nearly five dozen firms from Virginia to California.
Yet there is one for-profit company that has been most successful in bringing it all together in what the Pentagon calls a “single pane of glass” — Palantir, founded in 2003 by billionaire conservative libertarian Peter Thiel and its CEO Alex Carp.
Palantir specializes in organizing and visualizing massive data sets. But the company often finds itself at the center of debates about when creating a picture of the battlefield can contribute to overly automated killing decisions.
Project Maven quickly became the most successful of the Pentagon’s many attempts to move toward “algorithmic warfare” and soon merged data from nearly two dozen other Defense Department programs and commercial sources into an unprecedented overall operational picture for the U.S. military.
But the project was never tested in the conditions of real war.
Photo: AR/BTA
Early one morning, shortly after February 2022, a senior US military official and one of the highest-ranking Ukrainian generals meet on the Polish border to discuss new technology that could help the Ukrainians repel Russian attacks.
In his car, the American has a tablet on which the Maven project was activated through Palantir software and which is connected to a Starlink terminal. The tablet’s display shows the same intelligence as the operators in the Pit, including the movement of Russian armored columns and conversations between Russian soldiers making their way to Kiev.
As the conversation progresses, it becomes clear that the Americans know more about the whereabouts of Ukrainian troops than the Ukrainian general. He is sure that his troops have recaptured a city from the Russians, but American intelligence claims otherwise. When the American official suggests that he call one of his field commanders, the Ukrainian general discovers that the American is right.
The Ukrainian was amazed – and angry. According to him, the American troops should have fought alongside the Ukrainians. “We can’t do that,” the American replies and explains that it’s a ban from President Biden. What the US can provide, he says, is a changing battlefield picture.
Today, a similar tension continues inside the Pit, where a cautious dance takes place every day. The military is taking seriously Biden’s directive that the US should not launch direct strikes against the Russians. The president said – Russia must not be allowed to win, but at the same time America must “avoid a third world war”.
In this way, the Americans point the Ukrainians in the right direction, but do not give accurate targeting data.
The Ukrainians quickly picked up on it and created a sort of shadowy Project Maven, using commercial satellite firms like Maxar and Planet Labs and data collected from Twitter and Telegram.
Instagram photos taken nearby by Russians or Ukrainians often show entrenched positions or camouflaged missile launchers. Drone imagery soon became a key source of precision targeting data, as did geolocation data from Russian soldiers who lacked the discipline to turn off their cellphones. This flow of information helps Ukraine strike Russian artillery. But the initial hope that images from the battlefield would reach soldiers in the trenches connected to phones or tablets never materialized, field commanders say.
One of the key elements of the system is Starlink, the Elon Musk-provided satellite network that is often the only means for soldiers to communicate with headquarters or with each other.
For a while, it seemed that this technological advantage might allow Ukraine to completely push the Russians out of the country.
Photo: AP/BTA
The mission to modernize Ukraine’s fleet of drones fascinated former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. “Ukraine has become the world’s drone laboratory,” he said in October between trips to the country.
But in the fall of 2023, Schmidt began to worry that Ukraine’s innovative advantages alone would not be enough. Russia’s population is too large and too prone to casualties, oil prices remain high, and China still supplies the Russians with key technology and parts – while also selling them to the Ukrainians. And as Ukrainian factories produce ever cheaper drones, he fears they will quickly be outclassed.
So Eric Schmidt started funding another concept that now, after the experience with Ukraine, finds supporters in the Pentagon – much cheaper autonomous drones that will launch in swarms and communicate with each other even if they lose contact with human operators on the ground.
The idea is to create new weapons that learn how to evade Russian air defenses and rebuild if some of the drones in the swarm are shot down.
It is far from clear whether the US, which is used to building fancy drones for $10 million, will be able to switch to disposable models. “There are a lot of moral questions here,” Schmidt acknowledged, noting that these systems will spark a new round of debate over AI-based targeting, although the Pentagon insists it will retain “an appropriate level of human judgment in the use of force “.
Eric Schmidt also comes to a stark conclusion – this new version of war is likely to be terrifying. “Ground forces over which drones circle know that they are constantly under the surveillance of invisible pilots several kilometers away… And those pilots know that they are potentially in the crosshairs of the enemy who is watching them… This sense of insecurity and deadly voyeurism is everywhere in Ukraine,” Schmidt wrote last year.
