Posts Tagged ‘gamification’

How Ukraine Is Hammering Russian Logistics

Sunday, June 7th, 2026

In this week’s LinkSwarm, I briefly touched on how Ukraine is absolutely hammering Russia’s logistics behind the front lines. So here are a couple of videos that go into more detail. First up: Task & Purpose.

  • “Right now, Ukraine is hammering away at Russia’s logistics in a big way.”
  • “Over the past several months, Ukrainian forces have been expanding what are being called middle strikes. Drone attacks against Russian logistics, air defenses, command posts, and support areas dozens of miles behind the front line. These attacks have been reported as typically happening between about 30 and 180 km behind the line of contact, which means roughly 19 to 112 miles.”
  • “They’ve branded this new campaign as ‘The Logistics Lockdown,’ and Kiev says it is allocating another five billion Hryvnias, or about $13 million, to expand their middle strike capabilities against Russian logistics, warehouses, equipment, command posts, and supply routes.”
  • “These middle strike drones are being used to hit the stuff that keeps the front line alive.”
  • “Ukrainian units are using systems like the Chaklun-B, B2, and Decrotia drones to hit Russian targets far from the trenches.”
  • “If a drone can reliably reach 80, 100 or 150 km behind the front, Russia has to reconsider where it places things that used to feel far enough in the rear. Fuel depots, ammo dumps, repair facilities, all those things that we’ve already mentioned may now have to be pulled back, dispersed, hardened, or used for shorter periods of time before relocating.”
  • “The farther you pull back, the more that you complicate logistics.”
  • “This is becoming a significant problem for Russia, especially in occupied southern and eastern Ukraine, where these routes connect Russia with occupied Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Crimea. The Institute for the Study of War says that these Ukrainian strikes are hampering Russia’s ability to move personnel and material along key arteries like the M14 Highway from Rostov to Crimea.”
  • “More recently, Ukraine’s 412th Nemesis Brigade used a so-called new secret strike drone against the R-280 highway, also called by Russian occupation authorities, the Novorossiya route.” Novorossiya is in Russia’s extremely far east, so I think this is probably a joke. “This route runs through occupied Mariupol, Melitopol, and Simferopol, linking occupied southern Ukraine with Crimea and serving as a key logistics corridor for Russian military equipment and supplies. They claimed that these new strike drones destroyed dozens of trucks and fuel tankers and forced Russia to limit heavy equipment movement along the highway.”
  • “There are also reports about a drone called Hornet. Defense Express reported that Ukrainian forces have used Hornet strike drones against Russian logistics routes at depths of roughly 50 to 150 km. and they describe the system as a fixed-wing UAV associated with visual navigation and target detection or target capture algorithms.”
  • “If they’re using onboard terminal guidance through AI chips with cameras, then you really can’t jam them through the typical GPS spoofing or GNSS spoofing. So, these might be kind of a secretish weapon that they’re now using AI to guide to the target.”
  • “But whether the drone is Hornet, Decrotia—” I don’t which drone this is; the drone they’re showing on the screen is usually referred to as Shark; if you know what a “Decrotia” drone is, or how to properly spell it, feel free t0 share in the comments. “—Chaklun-B, B2, or something still being kept out of public view, it doesn’t really matter.”
  • Skipping over the section on fiber-optic drones, well-covered and I would be flabbergasted if they’re using them for such long strikes.
  • “Ukraine is showing what happens when cheap and medium-range drones start focusing on boring logistics trucks and support sites far from the front.”
  • “Logistics wins wars. So Ukraine is trying to and they’re succeeding in making Russian logistics slower, farther away, more expensive, and just more stressful. And if Russia wants to keep attacking and hold on to the ground that it has taken, it still has to solve the same basic problem that every army has always had to solve ever. Getting the right stuff to the right people at the right time.”

    • From Task & Purpose to the guy who used to present the Task & Purpose videos, here’s Cappy Army on the same topic.

  • “Ukrainian forces launched a new logistics lockdown campaign that’s systematically crippling Russian supply lines. Ukraine’s focused on destroying Russian supply trucks and disrupting logistics in a new approach that’s now causing severe problems for the Kremlin. As we’ll see today, I want to examine why this approach has experts licking their finger and saying the strategic winds are now blowing in Ukraine’s favor.”
  • “The reason why Russia’s supply lines are suddenly collapsing is because of a key concept called Battlefield Air Interdiction, or BAI. It refers to the broader military campaign of using air power or drone strikes to isolate the battlefield. It’s the strategy to destroy transportation arteries. BAI is about denying the enemy the use of crucial logistics lines to sustain immediate frontline operations.”
  • “Abstract concepts like BAI become reality when you look at the highways leading from Russia into Ukraine. They are just lousy with charred husks of Russian armored vehicles that now sit by the side of logistics roads. Footage has been flooding social media showing Ural heavy recovery trucks destroyed with their tires melted by drone strikes. Open source analysts have counted over 200 strikes just on Russian logistics vehicles.”
  • He too highlights the importance of attacks on the R-280 highway. “Ukraine has increased the rate of these attacks by five-fold in just a few months.”
  • “How were they able to do such a feat in mass production? Zelensky announced that they’re already mass-producing attack drones in four European countries, Germany, the United Kingdom, Denmark, the Netherlands, and there are plans to expand drone production into Norway and Sweden soon.” Plus expanding domestic production.
  • Medium range is also where soldiers rotate to and from the front-lines to decompress. “Middle- range strikes remove any feeling of safety for Russian troops. Ukraine now fires over 160 of these middle-range strikes per month, hitting logistics and ammo depots. They hit drone control points and command posts. It’s hard to appreciate how massive this change really is when you think about four times the amount of strikes compared to February.”
  • “The new mid-range drones have a payload of about 220 lb, 10 times more powerful and accurate than artillery shells.” The drones shown on screen are the FP-2 Fire Point, the AN-196 Liutyi, and the Peklo, none of which go all the way up to 220 pounds. But the new drones are now cost effective for going after logistics trucks.
  • “The middle range is the priority right now. Because Ukraine is hitting everything that’s feeding Russia’s front line, that constant pressure is causing some serious problems for the Russian army.”
  • “Ukrainian drone operators say that before middle-range strike campaign went into full gear, Russia was holding large portions of their supplies and ammunition in the range of between 60 to 80 km back from the front line. But now they’ve had to push all of their supplies twice the distance away to 120 km away. When you’re talking about having to feed Russian artillery teams to match their rate of fire of about 10 to 15,000 rounds a day during surge fighting, every additional kilometer moved back from the front is a huge cost.”
  • “The US government just signed off on a $370 million deal authorizing sending JDAM extended range glide bomb kits to Ukraine. It would send 1,500 of these glide bombs to Ukrainian fighter jets to fire at targets up to 75 kilometers away with 500 pound bombs. This is the kind of weapon system you send to support offensive operations.”
  • Back to the M-14 attacks. “The attacks have forced Kherson Oblast’s occupation head Vladimir Soldo to sign a decree restricting the movement of civilian vehicles to only Russian military vehicles here. As a result, Russia’s having an even harder time resupplying its entire southern grouping of forces. A Russian affiliated mil-blogger complained that restricting civilian trucks makes it more difficult for them because now Ukraine knows every vehicle on the highway is a military target. They don’t have to worry about hitting civilians if there are no civilians.”
  • “Artillery once accounted for 70% of casualties on the battlefield. It’s drones that now account for at least 70% of battlefield deaths.”
  • “Everyone was shocked when Ukraine’s 129th heavy mechanized brigade went on the offensive, assaulting the town of Odradne in Kharkiv. Armored vehicles pushed forward under artillery fire. Drone strikes blasted Russian soldiers out of trenches. Ukrainian infantry cleared out fortified fighting positions. When it was all said and done, it recaptured the town and 22km with it.”
  • “And it wasn’t a one-off. Ukraine’s ground forces recaptured 400km largely from the southern sector of Zaporizhzhia. Further east, soldiers retook the city of Kupyansk just when it looked like it was about to fall to Russia. These are just a few of the mounting signs that the momentum of the war is shifting.”
  • “The clearest indication of a shift came in April when the war hit a major milestone. Moscow lost more territory than they gained for the first time in two years, a net negative of 116km.”
  • “Russia’s forces [are] slowly losing the ability to sustain the war at the same intensity and momentum.”
  • There are signs Ukraine is preparing for a new offensive. “The Ukrainian army has started switching from a system of loose brigades with little coordination to a new command level of army corps. The concept puts about five brigades or 80,000 Ukrainian troops, all their drone units, artillery guys, infantry, intelligence officers under one unified command for the first time. The new roughly 18 to 20 something different corps, each report to one of four regional commands. It’s a clear sign that Ukraine is preparing to regain operational maneuver warfare capability.”
  • “What it means is Ukraine is finally moving away from the old Soviet era model to a NATO style command. This allows for joint planning between brigades for the first time.”
  • “The old brigade-centric army was good for holding front lines and plugging gaps. Now they will be able to coordinate assault actions. Ukraine is now offense maxing their army’s organization. Another indicator that Ukraine is preparing for localized counterattacks is that in 2026, Ukraine started building two new mechanized brigades, the 160th and the 50th. They’re converting old light infantry formations into mechanized units that ride into battle.”
  • Skipping over Clausewitz on the importance of morale. “When the Ukrainian war became longer than World War II and less than 1% of territory had been captured since 2023, this was a major turning point in the minds of many Russian troops.”
  • “Manpower and recruitment are becoming a problem for the Kremlin. Ukraine has come up with the new way to reduce the manpower advantage. They came up with a campaign to kill or wound 50,000 Russian troops per month. Then they gamified it so soldiers get points for every confirmed kill.” We covered the Gamification of the Russo-Ukrainian War here.
  • “Now evidence shows that the casualty rate is creeping up and retention and recruitment is creeping down. Russia is now struggling to match this rate with fresh recruits. Most open-source analysts have concluded that they’re losing more than they’re recruiting. Most analysts put the numbers at somewhere around 30,000 troops being recruited per month and roughly 35,000 lost each month.”

  • “This kind of high casualty rate has a negative impact on troops morale.”
  • “A 24-year-old Russian soldier was fighting in the Donbas last year and he deserted from his unit and spoke to the New York Times about it, saying they spent a month trying to establish a foothold in a small town outside of Pokrovsk, and his unit would move in and then they would get wiped out by Ukrainian drones. Then his commander ordered them to try something different, to start infiltrating in two-man teams to slip through. They eventually had some success with this, and then he deserted to avoid being sent on more assaults.”
  • Ukraine is also having manpower issues, “and this has led to widespread use of robotic ground systems. In April, Ukraine seized the battlefield position without humans on the ground for the first time of the war, and an estimated 20,000 missions were conducted by ground robots.”
  • Ukraine seems to winning the technology war. A “one-two punch of the Kremlin blocking telegram messaging apps for many Russian troops because they were unable to monitor it. But it has kneecapped Russian soldiers communications.”
  • “Then the second punch was Starlink was turned off for Russia by Elon Musk…After access was cut off, Russian commanders were forced to rely on inaccurate maps. They deployed with no means of communication or the ability to use their drones.”
  • “European countries have agreed to send $100 billion for Ukraine through 2027 to keep their war economy running. When Viktor Orban was defeated in his election recently in Hungary, it unlocked this because he was cock-blocking/vetoing for the deal for years.”

    • We’ll see if Ukraine can turn their technological advantage in mid-range strikes into more offensive gains.

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    Posted in Military, video | 6 Comments »

    Ukraine And The Gamification Of Combat

    Tuesday, January 27th, 2026

    The Russo-Ukrainian War continues to accelerate military innovation at a furious rate. The latest innovation isn’t a better drone or newer hardware, but introducing a fundamentally new organizing principle: the gamification of combat.

    This article from September lays out the basics.

    The tall, bearded officer, code-named Prickly—like all Ukrainian fighters, he uses a call sign to protect his identity and his family from wartime retaliation—is proud as a peacock of what he has done in six months at the helm of his frontline drone unit. In an interview with me, Prickly gave some of the credit to Kyiv’s new “e-point” system, called the Army of Drones Bonus.

    He and several of his men explained how the system works in an conversation near a former farmhouse in eastern Ukraine. The yard is littered with military equipment and junk, including the farmer’s much-worn living-room furniture, now arranged around a makeshift fire pit. Several stray cats and a mangy dog wandered around as we talked. “We’ve improved our performance by a factor of 10,” Prickly said. “We know that thanks to the drone points system, which measures how many men we kill and how much equipment we destroy.”

    Snip.

    The top brass in Kyiv struggle to keep up with this innovation—both the new technology and its use on a highly decentralized battlefield. Drone production is scattered and diverse, with the Ukrainian drone company DroneUA estimating that as many as 700 companies and 500 suppliers are now churning out UAVs of every description. Active-duty units control their own budgets. With drones and other military kit in short supply, most fighters supplement what they get from the government with items they buy themselves—their own clothing and vehicles, for example—crowdsourcing, and donations from charity foundations. Some units say they count on donations for more than two-thirds of their drones, and most modify the devices they receive to suit their unique battlefield circumstances.

    Kyiv is working to tame this chaos with organizational reform—a corps-based command system aligned with NATO practices. But the armed forces also strive to take advantage of decentralization, harnessing it to drive innovation and effectiveness on the battlefield. That’s where the point system comes in—allowing fighters to bypass the bureaucracy in Kyiv and buy weapons directly from manufacturers.

    Frontline commander Prickly said that drone pilots save video clips of the damage they do—whether destroying machinery or killing Russian soldiers. The unit prepares a daily montage and sends it to the Ministry of Defense, where experts comb over the footage to confirm the unit’s claims and confer points for verified destruction.

    The allocation changes regularly, but as of June 2025, Business Insider reported that destroying a tank was worth eight points. A multiple launch rocket system counted for 10. Killing a regular Russian soldier earned 12 points. Wounding a drone pilot was valued at 15 and eliminating him netted 25. In the final step, the payoff, units use the points they’ve earned to purchase equipment—drones, drone jamming devices, ammunition, and other goods—on Brave1 Market, an online shopping platform not unlike Amazon.

    For some battalions, including Prickly’s, this represents a sea change. In mid-summer, his unit, part of the 54th Separate Mechanized Brigade, ranked fifth in the nation in total points earned. “It keeps the weapons coming,” he said. “What’s different isn’t just how much you get. It’s also the choice available on the marketplace.” In the past, Kyiv sent what it sent—often the most rudimentary equipment—and units struggled to upgrade it for use on the changing battlefield. “Now we’re in direct contact with producers,” Prickly says. “We order exactly what we need, and it comes ready to use.”

    Ukraine’s government-run media platform, United24, also reported that the Ukrainian government reaps data from the point system, enabling it to make better decisions about strategy. Varying the allocation—how many points, say, for a destroyed tank or for killing a drone pilot—gives Kyiv a new tool of command and control. Signals from the field about changing demand—what kinds of drones are selling best on the marketplace—help the armed forces make procurement decisions, and the system is a boon for manufacturers, who can lock in larger, longer-term contracts, enabling them to invest for the future.

    Denys Davydov explains in more detail:

  • “The long-awaited reforms of Ukrainian army are being introduced just right now into the system under the new defense minister of Ukraine, Mykhailo Fedorov, who is a very talented young guy and who thinks absolutely openly towards the introduction of the new technologies, drones and every sort of the new features which could help to save the lives of Ukrainian soldiers and help Ukrainian army to win in this war.”
  • Fedorov was previously head of Digital Transformation of Ukraine where he oversaw creation DIIA, a digital app for Ukrainians to interact with a variety of government services. “It is not just useful and saves time for people, but it also helps to eliminate, or reduce it’s better to say, corruption, because you don’t have those bureaucrats, officials. Everything is happening automatically and digitally.”
  • “Fedorov is now ahead of the defense minister of Ukraine. He’s the fourth defense minister who got his position from the start of the war, full-scale war of Russia against Ukraine.”
  • “He applied E-points, [so-called] electronic points which our soldiers obtain if they target Russian soldiers, Russian BMPs, tanks, helicopters, rocket artillery systems. So the higher the price of the destroyed vehicle equipment, the more E-points they obtain.”
  • “They might spend those E-points for new drones or some special equipment that particular soldiers need in a special unit, brigade, regiment, whatsoever.”
  • “It’s similar to the gaming industry. [You] fight against virtual enemies. You earn the points which you spend for the better gear in the game. But it is happening in real life in Ukrainian army.”
  • “And it is very effective because total equality among all of the Ukrainian soldiers is not possible. Some units are more effective than others, and they should obtain better equipment and more drones. For example, Magyar Birds [414th Unmanned Strike Aviation Brigade], one of the most effective units, they have the most of those E-points. So the analogy is the same as with the game. The better the player, the better gear it usually has. But instead of each player fights its own separate enemy, now all of the players, all of the soldiers in Ukraine, all of the regiments, they fight against the common enemy.”
  • “So all of the people are interested for the top players to have this better gear. Like for example, vampire drones, also called Baba [Yaga] drones. It doesn’t mean that the rest of the brigades will obtain absolutely nothing. No, everyone has this chance to be successful to hurt lots of the Russian soldiers in some of the particular direction and earn those E-points.”
  • “For example, each Russian soldier costs [i.e., earns] six points. Each Russian tank costs 40 points. A Russian rocket artillery system, as for example, book 60 points. Before Russian soldier price was two points but then the price rose up to six, well, Russia start to lose way more of the infantry.”
  • He explains how Brave1 works. “You may buy the special gear out there on the shop order. The government itself, the defense ministry, will send it for you. They directly purchase drones from the developers. For now, this system works just for the drones, but it seems like it will be also implemented for artillery. And of course, commanders of brigades, they’re very interested.”
  • “So the system has been taken from video games and it is damn effective. Actually lots of the stuff is been taken from the video games, and the most successful drone operators, they used to be gamers before, they have this muscle memory. Then they used to play lots of the video games for them to get used to the flight controller. It’s way way easier than to teach from the scratch. and you have to put all of those neurons here to the small muscles and fingers. Well, gamers here as a rule are more successful than average guys just taken from the streets.”

    • We’ve already seen the U.S. military adopt some video game technology, such as video game controllers for the prototype M1E3 tank.

    Science fiction has been predicting video gamers making effective warriors for decades, from Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game to Michael Bishop’s “The Last Child Into the Mountain.” But I don’t think anyone ever thought up video game reward systems as the basis for advanced weapon distribution.

    Britain had one of the best professional military systems in the world, but by the end of World War II they found an American system focused on logistics and speed surpassing their results on actual battlefields. (Montgomery spent two months preparing to cross the Rhine in the meticulously planned Operation Plunder; Patton did it in one night using small boats without asking permission.) In the modern world, America’s “pull” logistical system runs rings around the Soviet/Russian “push” system. We’ve already covered how Ukraine now has a direct feedback loop between front-line units and MilTech equipment manufacturers.

    Ukraine’s gamification approach represents another potential logistics revolution, with the best units potentially making use of the best gear. But a significant amount of the gamefication approach’s effectiveness may be unique to the static, atomized, defense war of attrition Ukraine is fighting, as the system seems less suitable to, say, big offensive pushes. And there have to be guardrails in place to prevent drone operators from “going Rambo” rather than supporting more important mission objectives.

    Still, the ability of front-line units to interface directly with manufacturers for new gear is an approach I could see the U.S. military undertaking for some units.

    And if Russians are outraged about their soldier’s deaths being used in a video game-like scoring system, 1.) They sure don’t seem to have cared enough about their soldiers being killed in wasteful “meat wave” assaults and endless undermanned probing attempts, and 2.) Maybe they should have avoided launching an illegal war of territorial aggression in the first place…

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Military, video | 9 Comments »