A former Ukrainian commander-in-chief describes Ukraine’s DELTA battlefield-management system and other adaptations.
By Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi
April 10, 2025
Defense One
Ukraine’s tactical drones are “inflicting roughly two-thirds of Russian losses,” making them “twice as effective as every other weapon in the Ukrainian arsenal,” says a recent study by the Royal United Services Institute. This is a remarkable development for weapons considered relatively unimportant just three years ago—but it exemplifies how Ukraine is changing how the West will fight its wars.
At the risk of oversimplification, wars have always been about managing information, people, and equipment. Stone-age warriors, Napoleon, Patton, and Schwarzkopf all faced these tasks, though certainly on a vastly different scale. Napoleon introduced new ways to control unprecedented quantities of soldiers and materiel, enabling him to operate across distances and against adversaries far more effectively than anyone before him. Decades later, Helmuth von Moltke refined battlefield management by loosening the Napoleonic grip. “War is an art, not a science,” he wrote, acknowledging human judgment in command and control and introducing extensive planning, decentralization, and flexibility. The Prussian leader’s ideas have formed the basis for Western warfare strategy ever since—until the Russo-Ukraine conflict changed everything.
The technological realm has seen similar revolutions. Command and control were transformed by radio, computers, and satellites. Precision munitions gave field commanders the ability to direct “surgical” strikes at much lower costs than their less advanced opponents. During the Cold War, the U.S. military developed frameworks to harness these advances and counter numerically superior Soviet forces. Put to the test in Iraq, the Air-Land Battle concept enabled U.S. forces to dismantle Saddam’s substantial military within weeks.
Yet the new frameworks brought their own problems. The high-tech U.S. military, reliant on massive volumes of data transmission, gave off electronic traces that adversaries could detect and target. Lower-tech enemies continued to find cheap ways to inflict grievous damage, like the improvised explosive devices of the post-9/11 conflicts.
And now these and other developments have turned modern warfare on its head. After decades of increasingly rapid offensive maneuver, the Russo-Ukraine war is characterized by World War I-style attrition. The enemy can now detect the slightest movements and attack without notice, resulting in a battlefront locked into defensive strongholds with “soldiers buried in trenches, where even personnel rotations and medical evacuations have become perilous.”
This is the result of three main developments. The first is small tactical drones, which are used to target military forces and equipment across air, land, and sea—and even fight other drones.
The second is electronic warfare, which now encompasses tracing, jamming, and even taking over drone signals. It enabled an enemy to target back and eliminate specialized, difficult-to-replace crews.
And the third is remote-controlled sensors of varying complexity. Generously deployed in contested but undefended “white spaces,” they create protective buffers preventing the enemy from sneaking through. As the RUSI report says, “Russian [and Ukrainian] commanders assess where they believe the best lines of approach are, and in particular, where the boundaries between defensive units lie.”
Under existential threat, Ukraine has developed several ways to fight this new kind of war.
Its military has discarded Cold War-style methods, tactics, equipment, and information and signals management. Drones are put to use in many roles; for example, low-cost sea drones expelled the Russian Black Sea fleet from its seemingly impenetrable Crimean harbor. Unarmed drones are working nonstop in logistical and medical evacuation roles.
Drones in Ukraine are rarely the expensive proprietary products of traditional military enterprises. Instead, they are overwhelmingly made from commercially available hardware components and open-source software, making attrition warfare effective and affordable at scale.
The drone revolution has created a hardened and unyielding environment. Any visual sighting or electronic broadcast often leads to an attack within seconds, preventing either side from achieving a decisive breakthrough, even when willing to sustain heavy losses. Mobility is being sacrificed for protection, and stalemate has ensued.
Deception, visual camouflage, and concealment of electronic emissions have become essential to counteract continuous jamming, interception, and targeting of airborne signal sources. Long-forgotten fixed-line communication methods, such as underground, underwater, overhead networks, and especially fiber optics, are in fashion again because they are more difficult to disrupt and offer superior bandwidth, reliability, and security. Drones are increasingly autonomous, able to operate without constant attention from an operator or even constant connection to GPS signals.
Yet effective drone management remains crucial, just like it is for any other component on the battlefield. Here, the Ukrainian battlefield-management system known as DELTA deserves recognition. Ukraine began developing DELTA, an ecosystem of military products, several years before the 2022 Russian invasion. “We call it ‘Google for military’ because, after a single login, you have access to different modules in the system. Google helps to organize your workspace; DELTA helps to organize your ‘war’ space,” a Ukrainian Army colonel said during a recent NATO exercise.
More straightforward than the American Palantir battle-management system, DELTA has provided Ukrainian defenders with situational awareness and decision support in critical moments, offering an advantage against a larger yet information-deficient opponent.
Effective command-and-control systems must deal with information of varied types and sources: human reports, open-source intelligence, satellite imagery, drone video feeds, cellphone video clips, cyber data, and more. DELTA uses AI to swiftly sort through the data and give leaders a comprehensive picture of the battlefield and beyond.
This includes a repository of identified and proposed targets ready for deployment to the appropriate friendly strike or cyber platforms.
Subsequently, fast and resilient data-sharing capabilities and unmanned command and control centers evolved to the new battlefield conditions. Data, AI, drones, and their management have become the norm, forcing new tactics, equipment, and systems that can adapt quickly against an evolving enemy.
Lulled by decades of multi-domain dominance, Western militaries have slumbered too long. Meeting adversaries armed with mass-deployed, attrition-optimized autonomous weapons they may end up as the proverbial victims of the German WW2 Blitzkrieg. Fortunately, they have a gift of immeasurable value: Ukraine’s hard-won expertise, forged in a grueling fight for survival. If the West wishes to survive, it must swiftly and fully embrace these lessons, and use them well.
Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, is a former commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.