“It is not only weapons that provide a technological advantage in the pain of battle. The 13th brigade of NSU “Chartiya” implemented a system that allows you to stop the enemy’s offensive without firing a single shot of the infantrymen. How does it work?”, — write: www.epravda.com.ua
“The eye is the lamp of the body. So if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be healthy. And if thine eye be evil, then thy whole body shall be dark.” (Matthew 6:22-23)
Everyone knows the problem of “information garbage” – when it is impossible to find something valuable and important in an endless stream of content and news. A similar trend is observed in war.
Previously, the military had very limited information about the enemy, who was several kilometers away from them. Today, thanks to drones, modern communication systems, radars and satellites, the headquarters receives huge amounts of information.
This created another challenge: what to do with all this data? A small group of people at headquarters must somehow analyze terabytes of information about the enemy in a matter of hours. It is difficult not to go crazy from this, because the data obtained may be wrong or simply useless.
In modern warfare, the army has two ways: either to tame information flows and become many times more effective, or to drown in a pile of excel sheets, screenshots, labels and transcripts, which in themselves do not make any sense.
In order to move in the first direction, the commanders of Ukrainian units in various directions began to create specialized units within themselves, which, with the help of modern technologies, collect and analyze all information from the front. Such units are called ISTAR centers, and this is the practice of NATO countries.
In the 13th National Guard “Charter” brigade, dispatchers at ISTAR centers are on duty around the clock in front of monitors with several broadcasts from drones and are in contact with the military on the front lines. They write down everything they see and hear: what roads the Russians walk on, what equipment is nearby, at what frequencies drones fly, etc. After that, analysts gather from this data a complete picture of the battlefield for the headquarters.
If you need to react to the enemy’s movements immediately, the dispatchers are able to call FPV or artillery in a matter of minutes and watch the destruction of the Russians live.
Currently, not every unit has a properly configured ISTAR system. However, its implementation is a real opportunity for Ukraine to become effective on the battlefield, destroy more enemies with fewer resources and protect the lives of servicemen.
The price of informationAny modern army needs a network of units that collect and analyze information from the battlefield. This seems obvious today, but it wasn’t always that way.
“Earlier, armies fought infantry against infantry, tanks against tanks. Everything was decided by numbers. But with the advent of modern communication and intelligence technologies, everything changed. The Americans thought about building a single network that would collect and process information from the battlefield only after the defeat in B ‘Yetnami, and finally formulated its principles after the advent of GPS technology.
A vivid example of ISTAR in action is the war in Iraq, when 250,000 Americans took out 1.4 million Iraqi troops in 21 days. The operation went according to plan, the US used all its technical advantage, having all the information about the enemy. After that, their allies began to pick up on this approach.
Ukraine is decades behind the Western world, but now it is making up for it, because it has no other way out,” Yaroslav Gonchar, co-founder of Aerorozvidka NGO, which is engaged in helping the development of the ISTAR process in the Ukrainian military, told the EP.
There are more and more units in the Defense Forces that study NATO standards on their own and build the ISTAR system in their headquarters. One of them is the 13th brigade of NSU “Chartiya”, which works in the Kharkiv direction.
It was founded in 2022 as a volunteer formation of a few dozen people, and in two years it grew to a whole brigade of thousands of soldiers.
“The principle of our brigade is that the infantry should not enter the battle. If the infantry starts shooting, then we have already failed somewhere. We must deliver preventive strikes to the enemy, give them nightmares, prevent them from accumulating, mine the paths of movement, etc. For this, you need to know exactly what is happening around “, a military officer with the call sign “Bit” from the “Charter” headquarters explains to the EP.
The newly created ISTAR system helps the brigade to gather a complete picture of the battlefield. This is an abbreviation that means combination Iintelligence, Ssurveillance, Target acquisition and Racknowledgment. In translation – analytics, surveillance, targeting and intelligence. What does this mean in practice?
First, the military gets dozens of technological means to collect information. These can be reconnaissance drones that take turns “grazing” one area and record the movement of enemies, a sniper following a cluster of equipment with a thermal imager, radio-electronic intelligence systems, radars, satellites, cameras, etc. The unit commander determines the priorities for observation.
The coordinates of the seen enemies are entered by the military in Delta system. This is a digital map that is updated in real time and records the history of changes. If the military cannot physically enter the data, the ISTAR dispatcher will do it for him, who is constantly in touch and monitors broadcasts from drones and other sources.
The Defense Forces have tools that make tags on “Delta” automatically. For example, there is a special counter-battery radarwhich is capable of approximately detecting the departure point of an enemy projectile and plotting the coordinates on the map in a matter of seconds.
Also, other data are added to “Delta”: radio interception, information from chatbots, open sources, intelligence reports. As a result, a huge array of labels accumulates on the map, which is almost impossible to understand.
It is at this stage that analysts are included in the work. Their task is to find meaning in the collected information. To see patterns, visualize and quickly transfer them to the main customer – the headquarters of the division. And already there, the commanders are thinking about how to disrupt the enemy’s plans, relying on this analytics.
“Recently, our Aista residents collected aggregated data on how Russians have been walking on this road for several days,” Bit shows a graph on his laptop.
“The guys discovered that the Russians here regularly walk several kilometers for rotations. We remotely mine such areas and they are blown up. Or we track what time their rotations most often take place and raise FPV drones to hunt in advance. We also record patterns in the work of their artillery to find the safest time for our infantry to move. There are many such examples,” he explains.
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According to the military, now the goal of their ISTAR unit is to collect even more important information that can be important in battle. For example, analysts can collect data on the effectiveness of drones. If the technique does not show the desired result – the command thinks like a whirlwind solve this problem.
As a result, managing a team becomes similar to managing a large business, where the success of operations depends on the availability of information and the correct conclusions drawn from it. Even the tools used are similar – at the headquarters of “Charter” they use the Power BI program from Microsoft, which is generally intended for business analytics.
ISTAR centers can work at different command levels: battalion, brigade or operational-tactical groups. Everyone has their own level of autonomy, area of responsibility and priorities. Ideally, the centers should communicate with each other, coordinate actions, exchange data from their sources and help each other defeat enemies with their own means.
At the same time, technically, each unit can build the ISTAR system differently. The most proactive teams are even developing their own analytics software. “ISTAR is like a religion. The Bible is one, but everyone interprets it in their own way,” explains “Beat”.
The NATO document can be considered the “bible” of ISTAR AJP-2.7. There are general principles and recommendations on how this system should be built.
According to this document, the main task for the army is to launch a single synchronized network of “centers” for data collection and processing. So that all units communicate with each other, know the weak and strong points of the enemy and themselves, and based on this make correct and timely decisions.
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But what technical tools are used to achieve this – everyone decides for himself. For example, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom have different ISTAR systems. Ukraine also has its own peculiarities.
“Compared to Western countries, ISTAR in Ukraine is characterized by strong tactical awareness due to the mass use of various types of drones and other sensors, as well as weaker strategic awareness, because our army lags far behind Western partners in operating satellites or specific expensive radio-electronic means,” she said. EP Maryna Tsirkun, head of the ISTAR support department at Aerorozvidka NGO.
According to the polled EP military personnel and analysts, the implementation of ISTAR in Ukraine became possible thanks to Starlink satellite communication, reconnaissance drones and the domestic situational awareness system “Delta”.
At the same time, they try to find an alternative to all these technologies in advance, so as not to paralyze work in the event of the loss of one of them. System stability and interchangeability of its elements is one of the fundamental principles of ISTAR.
ISTAR in actionIf the video with the destruction of the Russian military is called a film, then the ISTAR control room is the director’s room. Another important function of these centers is the coordination of units in battle.
In the “Charter” brigade, ISTAR dispatchers are the first to react to enemy movement. Several people are on duty in one room at the same time. Everyone has their own small area of responsibility – for example, some important road, village or enemy landings in the so-called gray zone.
Each dispatcher simultaneously looks at several screens with broadcasts from drones. If the Russians gather under the camera, and they can be destroyed – the dispatcher knows exactly how it can be done.
There is always a connection to the FPV drone pilot or the gunners who hit the target in minutes. If there is no opportunity or order to destroy, the dispatcher simply enters the data into “Delta” and continues to monitor the screens.
A battle captain is on duty behind the dispatchers in the room. This is an experienced officer who controls the battle. According to the rules, it is he who must make the decision to defeat the enemy if the dispatcher sees him on the cameras. But experienced dispatchers usually themselves understand who needs to give an order in their area of responsibility, so they sometimes act at their own discretion for greater speed.
The ISTAR manager can also act proactively. For example, giving commands to the operator of a reconnaissance drone to collect more information. Or help in planning some local operations. EP spoke with Dmytro, the ISTAR dispatcher of the “Charter” brigade, who described several real combat situations.
The first – The FPV drone took off on a mission, but lost its target. At the same time, the dispatcher saw an enemy motorcycle with a sidecar in the nearby area. It calculates the direction of its movement and quickly transmits the data to the pilot. As a result, the latter changes the route and hits the motorcycle.
The second – the dispatcher saw Russian soldiers sitting in the basement of the building behind closed wooden doors. He quickly sends two FPV drones there. The first blows up the door, and the second flies inside.
The third situation – an enemy FPV-drone flies to the position and the Ukrainian EW is activated to suppress it. The dispatcher stops the scheduled departure of Ukrainian drones in this area so as not to suppress them with their own EW.
In “Charter”, the dispatcher is one of the key links of the ISTAR process. Now the team is in the process of building the system and looking for new people for relevant positions.
Not everyone uses it“All these hundreds of people processing huge masses of information appeared only in 2022. Before the full-scale war, all this did not exist. No one cared that the battalions were operating on maps that lag behind real events by at least 72 hours.
In order to receive information about the state of affairs, scouts of the brigade had to travel 200 kilometers to group meetings and redraw maps. Then they returned to their headquarters and received reconnaissance of the battalions, which were also redrawn. And this is our everyday life until February 24, 2022,” Honchar noted.
According to him, now everything is changing little by little. There are many brigades in the Defense Forces that are making progress in setting up the ISTAR system.
“It happens that the officers of the adjacent unit come to the headquarters of the progressive brigade with a paper map and outdated management approaches, and then they are explained that it will not work like that, they are taught to use Delta and other tools for gathering information. And after that, these commanders often also become “witnesses of ISTAR” or at least take over a part of the processes for themselves,” says Tsirkun.
In Ukraine, there is even a division that deals with the implementation of ISTAR at all levels of management. This is a separate military unit.
At the same time, the implementation of ISTAR standards is going much slower than it could be, especially in the conditions of the retreat of the Ukrainian army under the pressure of a larger enemy. According to Tsirkun, three key factors slow down the process.
First – outdated legislation. Almost nowhere in Ukrainian documents is the use of modern situational awareness systems regulated rather than prescribed data exchange processes within such systems.
There may be a fear among the commanders that they will do something wrong, not according to the charter, and then they will be responsible for it.
Second – the human factor. Not all commanders today understand the principle of mission command, which means that each unit is intelligent and can independently make decisions within its area of responsibility.
So they are reluctant to change their approaches to information management and continue to fight with old and ineffective methods.
Third – training. Educational programs in officer training institutions are evolving, but they still have work to do to meet NATO standards in inter-unit interaction and modern battlefield challenges.
“Moving to the principles of ISTAR comes down to those commanders who find the right people to build the system, give them some freedom of action and have the opportunity to provide these people with a workplace with powerful computers, communication, a headset, additional screens, etc.
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The average time for setting up ISTAR processes in a brigade and its battalions is approximately one to one and a half months. But everything will depend on the extent to which commanders accept this process and want changes,” said Tsirkun.
According to her, in some divisions, the construction of ISTAR is happening organically, even without any Western methods, according to their needs. And some divisions are still weak in this and they just have to fix these processes.
The faster the Ukrainian army approaches NATO standards, the less the Defense Forces will be like the “small Soviet army”, which will inevitably lose to the “big one” due to limited resources.
The ineffectiveness of unit management leads to the deaths of Ukrainian defenders, so a technological system of interaction must be built as soon as possible. Especially since Ukraine has qualified people and technologies for this.