4 days ago
How drones and video-game techniques are coming together in Ukraine's war
UKRAINE'S WAR has been a forcing house of military innovation. Among the more interesting is the use of 'video-game incentives' to increase the armed forces' efficiency in fighting the Russian invasion . The system ensures that successful drone operators get new drones before their less effective colleagues do. Now the process is being upgraded with what Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's digital-transformation minister, has called 'Amazon for the military'—a scheme that allows units to buy battlefield kit with points won by destroying Russian vehicles and other targets.
'Gamification', a term coined in the early 2000s, has been used in many fields, from health care and customer-loyalty programmes to education and workplace productivity. Participants score points; leader boards, progress bars, levels and badges tend to feature. In some cases points can be translated into rewards beyond the satisfaction of game-defined 'winning'.
Gamification came to the drone war in August 2024, when the Army of Drones, a government-backed initiative to acquire drones for the armed forces, launched a 'bonus' system. The drone war is well suited for gamification because all kills are recorded by the same drone cameras that are used for flying the aircraft and a system already exists for logging them. (In other forms of combat claims may be exaggerated—combatants may not know the results of a lobbed mortar round.) Once a drone kill is logged, identified and confirmed, it wins a number of points depending on the military value of the item destroyed.
A drone operator who destroys a T-90M tank–Russia's most advanced combat vehicle–with a disposable First Person View (FPV) drone gets enough points to make his unit eligible to receive 15 more (which would cost the armed forces around $10,000 in total). The system gives operators an incentive to find high-value targets and means that the units scoring kills are rewarded with prompt resupply. Even though Ukraine produced 1.5m drones last year, there are never enough.
The elite 414th Marine Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle Strike Unmanned Systems Battalion, better known as 'Birds of Magyar' after their charismatic commander, Robert Brovdi (callsign Magyar), have implemented this system to good effect. Established in 2022 as a platoon–a relatively small formation–Birds of Magyar became a full regiment at the end of 2024. It now accounts for 8% of the Russian armour that Ukraine destroys, according to official figures. In April the unit rose to the top of the leader board with 16,298 points, up from second place, and it has stayed there since. In June Mr Brovdi was appointed overall head of Ukraine's unmanned forces.
In April Mr Fedorov announced that the points system would be integrated with Brave 1 Market, a system that allows combat units to acquire equipment directly, bypassing the standard procurement process, which can be slow and cumbersome. The system also motivates troops to log every drone strike, which they must do manually. This gives commanders a more complete view of the fighting.
As well as channelling resources to where they are best used, gamification shapes the character of combat, according to Mr Fedorov. He notes that the Army of Drones recently increased the number of points for killing a foot soldier from two to six. Units like Birds of Magyar immediately began killing more infantrymen. Mr Fedorov says that this led to a doubling of the number of Russian infantry casualties. A later change doubled the number of points for taking out Russian drone operators, making them higher-value targets than tanks. Such changes show how the system can shift with commanders' priorities. They have also led to a fall in the number of tanks destroyed.
Critics have decried dehumanising 'video-game wars' since the first Gulf war in 1991. They are dismayed that gamification rewards killing with scores that can be used to win virtual cash for buying more weapons. Traditionalists may worry that gamification undermines the military hierarchy by decentralising control of supplies. But the use of quantitative targets in war is not new. Body counts were the 'primary measure of progress' for American forces in the Vietnam war, notes one historian. They determined who got medals, promotions and even rewards, such as time away from the front. Today's warriors, who grew up playing video games, will no doubt see gamification as an unsurprising evolution of that idea.
