Delta is a

situational awareness Situational awareness or situation awareness (SA) is the perception of environmental elements and events with respect to time or space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their future status. An alternative definition is tha ...

and

battlefield management system A battlefield management system (BMS) is a system meant to integrate information acquisition and processing to enhance command and control of a military unit. France The French Army is using SICS (Système d'Information du Combat de SCORPION - SCO ...

developed and used in Ukraine. The system integrates information from a broad network of participants, including troops, civilian officials, and vetted bystanders; and a wide range of streams, including sensors, intelligence sources, surveillance satellites and drones, especially

geolocated In computing, Internet geolocation is software capable of deducing the geographic position of a device connected to the Internet. For example, the device's IP address can be used to determine the country, city, or ZIP code, determining its ge ...

data, which it maps in real time, along with pictures of enemy assets. Delta is used by the Ukrainian military services, as part of the

Russo-Ukrainian War The Russo-Ukrainian War; uk, російсько-українська війна, rosiisko-ukrainska viina. has been ongoing between Russia (alongside Russian separatists in Ukraine) and Ukraine since February 2014. Following Ukraine's Rev ...

, especially after the launch of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, for a wide range of battlefield management tasks, including the planning of operations and combat missions, coordination between units, and secure exchange of information about the location of enemy forces. On the backend side, it's a

cloud native Cloud native computing is an approach in software development that utilizes cloud computing to "build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public cloud, public, private cloud, private, and hybrid cloud, hybrid clouds ...

environment. On the client side, it runs on regular PCs, laptop, tablets or mobile phones. Involved in the development and supervision of the system are the Center for Innovation and Development of Defense Technologies of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, the NGO Aerorozvidka and Mykhailo Fedorov, Minister of the Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Transformation. The system became broadly operational in August 2022. The software was developed in coordination with

NATO The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO, ; french: Organisation du traité de l'Atlantique nord, ), also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance between 30 member states – 28 European and two No ...

. The system was first tested in 2017, as part of a NATO initiative "to wean troops off Russian standards of siloing information among ground units instead of sharing it". Ukraine surprised NATO in quickly making this system even more accessible to troops than "more modern militaries". Delta, in its prototype phase, was first "pressed to its limits" during the Ukrainian counteroffensive to the

Russian Kyiv convoy The Russian Kyiv convoy was a large column of Russian military vehicles stretching some in the Kyiv oblast from Prybirsk to Hostomel via Ivankiv involved in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. It has been noted for initially threatening K ...

. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry credits Delta for helping identify 1500 confirmed, Russian targets daily during this time period. In December 2022, Delta was the target of an adversarial

phishing Phishing is a type of social engineering where an attacker sends a fraudulent (e.g., spoofed, fake, or otherwise deceptive) message designed to trick a person into revealing sensitive information to the attacker or to deploy malicious softwar ...

endeavor. On 4 February 2023, the Ukrainian government gave approval to full deployment of the Delta system to the

Armed Forces of Ukraine , imports = , exports = , history = , ranks = Military ranks of Ukraine , country=Ukraine The Armed Forces of Ukraine ( uk, Збро́йні си́ли Украї́ни), most commonly know ...

and permitted hosting of Delta's cloud-components outside of Ukraine to protect it against missile and cyber attacks.

Centrality of drone warfare

Aerorozvidka specializes

aerial reconnaissance Aerial reconnaissance is reconnaissance for a military or strategic purpose that is conducted using reconnaissance aircraft. The role of reconnaissance can fulfil a variety of requirements including artillery spotting, the collection of image ...

and drone warfare and their main contribution to Delta likely lies in this sphere. Delta, in this view, serves as a key link between raw reconnaissance (often remote photographic

telemetry Telemetry is the in situ collection of measurements or other data at remote points and their automatic transmission to receiving equipment (telecommunication) for monitoring. The word is derived from the Greek roots ''tele'', "remote", and ' ...

), identification, prioritization, and attack, facilitating a more rapid response cycle across diverse and dispersed participants and resources, known in military parlance as the kill chain. Systems such as Delta are poised to become a key information-management component of the rapid evolution of drone warfare on the modern battlefield. Mykhailo Fedorov, Minister of Digital Transformation, would like to see 10,000 drones operating continuously along the front lines. This vision entails a substantial network of digital coordination. For reasons of ongoing

operations security Operations security (OPSEC) is a process that identifies critical information to determine if friendly actions can be observed by enemy intelligence, determines if information obtained by adversaries could be interpreted to be useful to them, a ...

, the precise nature of the integration between Delta and drone warfare remains undisclosed.

References

{{Authority control Military of Ukraine Information technology in Ukraine 2016 establishments in Ukraine Reactions to the Russian invasion of Ukraine

Centrality of drone warfare

See also

References