The US is using AI to assist the Armed Forces in the task of attacks by Russian troops - NYT

The Project Maven project combined a number of Pentagon programs into a general picture. Due to this, journalist David Senger says, the Americans helped the defenders of Ukraine, pointing directions for possible attacks on the Russian Federation. The war in Ukraine has become a testing ground for the American Armed Forces of the latest military technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) systems for detecting goals with drones.

About this April 23 reports the New York Times Viewer David Senger. According to the journalist, six years ago, the Silicon Valley giant signed a small contract of $ 9 million to use the skills of several most innovative developers to create an artificial intelligence tool that will help the military to identify potential goals on the battlefield using drones from drones.

Project Maven quickly became the most striking success in the numerous attempts of the Pentagon to move to the asymmetric war and soon combined data from almost two dozen other programs of the Ministry of Defense and commercial sources into an unprecedented general operational picture. Thus, the Americans pointed to the Ukrainians the right direction, but did not give them accurate data for aiming.

The Ukrainians quickly mastered technologies and created a kind of shadow Project Maven using commercial satellite firms such as Maxar and Planet Labs, as well as data collected from Twitter and Telegram channels. According to Senger, in the photos of Instagram taken by Ukrainians, trenches and missile installations are often visible.

That is, UAV images soon became the most important source of accurate target data, as well as geolocation data obtained from Russian soldiers who lacked discipline to turn off their mobile phones. "This flow of information helped Ukraine strike on Russian artillery. But the original hope that the image of the battlefield will be transferred to soldiers in trenches, connected to phones or tablets, and did not come true," the journalist emphasizes, citing field commanders.

One of the key elements of the system was Starlink, a network of satellites, created by Ilon Musk, which was often the only means of communicating soldiers with headquarters or with each other. According to one of the White House officials, which the journalist quotes, it was confirmed by the obvious: the Starlink network, consisting of 4700 satellites, was almost as beautiful and sometimes better than billions of pentagon systems.

We will remind, on April 20 in the House of Representatives voted in favor of four drafi, two of which concerned the allocation of packages of assistance to Ukraine, the rest helped Israel, Taiwan and resolved other issues that are important for Americans. The first draft law on confiscation of frozen Russian assets, in the second - giving Ukraine weapons and other support for a total amount of $ 64 billion.