Operation Vivaldi & The Kill Zone: The Absurd Logistics of Ukraine's Frontline Operations

Ukraine has retaken a bunch of territory in recent months, but behind these numbers hides a bunch of logistical problems that, under normal circumstances, we could only describe as dumb. Because war makes even dumb things complicated. And the complicated logistics necessary to sustain frontline soldiers helps explain why everything in this war is so slow moving. Take Operation Vivaldi, named for composer Antonio Vivaldi, and responsible for the most recent set of Ukrainian gains. Beyond, you know, not dying while they advanced in Donetsk Oblast, Ukrainian troops also had to solve some more mundane problems. Take a river. Ordinarily, if people wanted to cross it, they would just build a bridge. But nothing is ordinary right now. Russians have assumed positions on the other side of the river, so you need to cross it one way or another. In a previous era, Maybe you would build a pontoon bridge if you wanted to move serious materiel. Failing that, get a boat into position to ferry everything back and forth. In today's era, though, either of those solutions just becomes target practice for Russian drones. You could swim, but these are offensive operations. None of the soldiers involved in the operation are coming home anytime soon. Even in temperate weather, soaked gear can cause hypothermia, trench foot, and skin blistering. Never mind that the water will add kilograms to what the soldier must de facto carry. And never mind that he cannot carry much equipment across if he wants to float. Ah, but if the problem in Ukraine is drones, the solution is more drones. Go ahead and have them swim. Then just have drones drop off a set of dry clothes on the other side, as well as any extra equipment he might need for his gun. Problem solved. Well, that is exactly how Ukraine solved one of its logistical problems during Operation Vivaldi. And maybe it sounds trivial, but solving these silly problems is how you go from consistently losing territory to making modest gains monthly. Nor is it a unique logistical problem. Your average gray zone soldier needs about 5 to 12 kilograms of supplies every day. Rations, water, meds, ammunition, the list goes on. And when you extend out the picture to the broader combat sector, the weight requirements only go up. Once upon a time, the estimate was about 200 kilograms per soldier per day. The modern figure is probably less than that. Artillery shells are heavy, and while they are still in use, lighter and more precise quadcopters have started to fill a similar role, thereby conveniently reducing weight demands. But whatever the true number is, logistics wins wars. And in the absence of carrying those 200 kilograms per soldier per day myself, I decided to just consult the experts to learn more about how it is done. So I went to the airport, got on a plane, did not travel to the front lines of Ukraine because I am a keyboard warrior coward, and instead went to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where I then got on a ferry to leave Halifax to go to Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, walked on a pleasant harbor trail, and eventually arrived at NATO's annual Shine Summit. You might remember Shine as a part of Allied Command Transformation's Innovation Continuum, which pairs allies with partners from industry to develop solutions to ongoing problems, And, increasingly in our world at war, integrates Ukrainians with allies to work on solutions to actual ongoing problems that NATO would also face in the event of World War III. Shine might sound familiar from last year's event in Istanbul, when one of the goals was to develop interceptor drones to counter Shahed drones. Because the solution to drones is more drones. And if that rings a bell, perhaps you saw the update on the effort that we recently covered. Anyway, this year, Shine shifted from counter-UAS strategies to working to improve the delivery problem. Let's zoom out to see just how complicated the task at hand is. Improved intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance technology limits what you can do now. Before, resupply was relatively straightforward. You send an armored vehicle near the relatively well-defined front line and offload what you need. If you tried pulling that stunt today, however, an enemy drone would likely spot the armored vehicle and destroy it. Heck, it is possible that the armored vehicle would pass by an enemy hiding under cover, who could then call in the drone strike. That is a good way to lose millions of dollars. Instead, the delivery system now involves multiple layers of increasingly expendable equipment. It starts with railroads that can bulk-carry car after car of cargo. You might have heard that Russia is using its jet-powered Shaheds to try to destroy every locomotive in Ukraine. That is why. Disable rail transport, and none of the rest of this matters. The locomotives that have survived still try to stay a safe distance from the front, so as to avoid the cheaper and more profuse loitering munitions. The exact distance varies from location to location. So let's just label it as a safe distance on our whimsical battlefield, remembering that this is a family show about war. Anyway, once you are within what we will leave at a nebulous tens of kilometers, then the burden shifts to trucks. They are slightly more mobile, but at this point you are accepting that some of them will be destroyed. You live with this because it is the cost of doing business. Besides, the trucks are not that expensive, and we are already down to wagering about 5 tons of equipment per truck. Note, though, that the trucks are not completely expendable. Ukraine's logistics lockdown campaign has specifically targeted the Russian fleet, and now the Kremlin is having to weigh trade-offs with its leftover lorries. There is more flexibility in how far the trucks can drive. Drones struggle to operate under rainy or windy conditions. Unless the weather is extreme, the trucks can still operate under those conditions. Thus, if the skies are quiet, they may get within 30 kilometers. Keep in mind as we go that these distances are constantly shifting back, so the actual distance at the time you watch this video may be much greater. Whatever it is, from there, you hope to stealthily unload its contents while holding fixed in position. You are essentially a sitting duck, hence the need to stay relatively far back. Next up on the delivery chain is an option between armored vehicles and unmanned ground vehicles. Armored vehicles can carry a literal ton, but come with the trade-off of needing to remain 15 kilometers back. Alternatively, you can start with larger UGVs capable of holding 500 kilograms. This narrows down to medium UGVs capable of holding 300 kilograms, notably large enough to ferry the wounded to safety on the return trip. By the time that you are 15 kilometers from the front, you need to switch to small UGVs, down to 25 kilograms in weight. These look like the overgrown delivery robots that urbanites have grown to despise. However, when they are carrying bullets, they are no laughing matter. Which size ground drone you choose depends on the mission and battlefield situation. The trade-off among these drones is that the larger you go, the bigger the target they present from the skies. But the smaller you go, the more operators you need to run the missions. Sometimes bigger is better, because we have reached the point where the vehicles are expendable. And, indeed, 12% of these missions fail. Past 15 kilometers, we have entered the kill zone. Approaching 7 kilometers, everything must come off the ground and instead jump into the air. We often think of the quadcopter as the scourge of the modern battlefield, hunting every last opposing soldier, and forcing everyone to freeze in place. Yet, because the answer to drones is more drones, they are also what sustains life in the gray zone. How you go about making the final delivery depends on the current level of contestation on the battlefield. If things are relatively calm, you will opt for a larger drone like this one, capable of delivering about seven kilograms of payload. Each soldier needs one or two of these drops per day to get by. However, these drones are big, noisy, and noticeable. In a contested environment, they make for an easy target for opposing FPV drones. Remember, the answer to drones is more drones. Thus, you might need your own fleet of FPV hunter drones to protect your delivery drone. And if things are too hectic, you might have to resort to delivering everything with basic quadcopters, which will limit you to about 2 kilograms per delivery. And no matter which option you choose, you will be fighting through opposing electronic warfare trying to jam your signals. Overall, fail rates increase to about 17% here, but it is not like anyone has a choice. How the soldiers receive the packages depends on what is inside. If the equipment is durable, you can simply drop it into place. If it is slightly less durable, then you can attach it to a parachute, and still drop it into place. Only if the equipment is non-durable do you take the time to actually land the drone, and take off again. And that time question matters, because none of these drones are piloting themselves. Human crews in the rear, who need their own replenishment by the way, have to operate them non-stop. Think about the back end of that leg. Having to recruit and train pilots for this role is an equally non-stop demand. Never mind that pilots have become priority targets for Russians. Oh, and it gets worse because the time of day matters. Assuming weather conditions allow for opposing operations, nothing travels at night. It is too easy for thermal imaging to spot trucks, ground drones, or the quadcopters. The ground logistics run at dusk and dawn. the in-between period where thermal does not work, and it is not bright enough for Russians' first-person cameras to easily spot their targets. Only the aerial drones run at all hours of light. And thus you can see why pressing the front in large numbers is so difficult. Every step in the supply chain expands, leaving an exponentially complicated problem for the final step, and there is limited time to get everything done. Okay then, how can you improve on this system? Well, that is what NATO's innovation continuum tries to answer. Ukrainian soldiers have frontline experience and know where there is room for improvement. This is part of why NATO established the Joint Analysis Training and Education Center, or JATEC, in Poland. It provides a first step for Ukrainians to communicate those problems and open up a much larger network that can help search for solutions. And the event in Halifax is on the opposite end of the innovation cycle, where partners from industry can present solutions. One recurring issue in modern warfare is the network problem. This is a lot of information for a person to process. Doing it efficiently at scale requires automation. You might recall how militaries are innovating on this front from my experience at the NATO Tide Hackathon in Iceland earlier this year. There the task was to create a processing system to triage and move war wounded across a large front. The solution was to develop a user interface to input information like the location and type of injury, have AI determine a plan of action given the abundance of competing concerns, and then turn the proposal over to a human for approval? Well, Iceland is so small that the island cannot contain that technology. Militaries everywhere are implementing these types of triage systems. For frontline logistics in particular, there is a constant problem that many deliveries are dependent on each other. As an example, if a soldier needs a cleaning kit to fix his rifle, then the following delivery of ammunition is worthless until the kit arrives. You will recognize this as a common problem when companies produce end products that require a large number of inputs, and any single gap in the supply chain means that there is nothing to sell. Now imagine trying to balance this problem when about a sixth of your drones do not complete their trip because Russians are firing at you. A second problem is aggregating data on the broader logistics challenges. Current terrain conditions coming from the UGVs, weather forecasts, locations of friendlies, and possible enemy locations. Basically, you need a Delta Situational Awareness System, what Ukraine uses to catalog military engagements, which also traces its origins to a separate NATO hackathon. But instead of a military focus, it is a logistics focus. And, indeed, such a system is also in the works. On the technology front, we have this curious white device resting on top of a delivery drone. This is an attempt to escape the aforementioned problem with electronic warfare. You see, enemy signal jamming comes from the ground, which effectively places it as a horizontal angle by the time that it hits the drone. But if you have a box sitting on top of the drone that is communicating with satellites, well, then you are literally rising above your enemy's countermeasures. There are trade-offs, of course. You need a satellite constellation for communications to work. The upshot is that the West has that taken care of, while Russia struggled to replace its cutoff from Starlink. And that is a paragraph that I wrote two weeks ago, which obviously comes with its own baggage now. Note, though, that these delivery drones fly under the 160 kilometer per hour speed limit, so they are not currently the subject of any throttling. Aside from that note, every additional security measure adds weight, but reducing the payload of a larger delivery drone still gets you more heft than resorting to a basic quadcopter. And it looks even more attractive when you consider how it reduces the number of drones that need to be in the air, and all of the pilot logistics that come with it. Then again, there are discussions of equipping one of the larger delivery drones with its own smaller Hunter quadcopters, which could deploy from their mothership to counter Russia's Hunter drones. Because, say it with me for one final time, the solution to drones is more drones. Thank you to Canada for their hospitality, and for the invention of poutine, I think. I am still not 100% sure about that one. And if you enjoyed today's video, then please like, share, and subscribe, and I will see you next time. Take care.