For a measure of how countries are equipping to fight the war of the future, planners are looking at the role of the front-line soldier in Ukraine.
Oleg Rogynskyy, chief executive of Uforce, which makes drones designed for the conflict, describes the fighter dug into the ground guiding drone warfare.
“The roles have completely changed already,” Mr Rogynskyy said. “The role of a front-line soldier is to get as far as they can to the front-line, dig a single person foxhole, and survive with help.
“It's no longer sitting there and shooting at someone.
“Frontline units are picking up drones and hunting down other infantry. Rows of units are blending short, mid and long-range at the same time.”
Western governments, like the UK, are struggling to flesh out plans to massively raise defence spending. Luke Pollard, the Defence Minister, left MPs frustrated on Wednesday as he dodged questions on London's Defence Investment Plan. Mr Pollard did say Ukraine would inform the choices. “The lesson I take from Ukraine and Iran is that we’ll need more autonomy, more drones, more understanding about mass, as well as exquisite high-end capabilities,” he said.
Mr Rogynskyy's Uforce is about to open a plant in the UK and he observed there has been parallels between the two wars. In the Iran War the drone attacks to GCC nations, saw asymmetric outcomes. “Most of the Shahid attacks were exactly the same concepts of operations and tactics, techniques and procedures as the Russian tactics over Odessa, the drone would be flying in over the water, two or three metres up and invisible to the ground-based radar, and then it would come to the shore and pop up.
“If there is a surface defence system on the shore, like a Patriot it then unloads everything they have at that one target and is overwhelmed.”
For that reason Mr Rogynskyy says the defence with interceptors, layered drone-based defence systems and most recently lasers is not only 1,000 times cheaper than offensive warfare like fighter jets but at least three times less expensive than the defensive systems offered by the defence giants.
Uforce technology in defending Ukraine's Black Sea cities demonstrates a proven capability for Gulf nations. “Given the geography of the Gulf, basically, that first light of defence should be on the sea,” he says. “You can have unmanned systems that go out, loiter on station, shoot down anything that's incoming.
“The whole Gulf [seaboard] can have multiple layer air defence capability for the price of two or three Patriot batteries, full autonomously. No humans needed.”
Solutions for this type of warfare include autonomous weapons, not from the outset of the mission but in swarming and execution of the task.
Suppliers across theatres from East Asia and the Middle East to Finland or the UK need only modify platforms. This means “universality” across allied conflicts. “You need to have similar software, you need to have operators trained across all countries how to operate these universal platforms,” he said.
“There is hunting as a multi-domain pack already enabled, where you can have your drones, your ground vehicles, and your boats, and your interceptors all collaborating in the same command and parole environment, executing very complex multi-domain missions (that's the first ever) and that's been running in Ukraine for a while now.”
As the UK prepares to announce its new spending road map there is some good news on the attractions of the country for investors in defence.
“We're already creating a lot of manufacturing jobs in the UK,” he said. “The UK with its maritime tradition, with a lot more naval architects per capita now, with 10 out of 11 Formula One teams, which are some of the best engineering teams on the planet, being within an hour from London, with universities with the best AI talent in the European region. There's nothing like London to compete with Silicon Valley or El Segundo.”
