UK-assisted Uber-style technology helped Ukraine to destroy Russian battalion

thetimes.co.uk

9 points·mannerheim··5 comments

An 'Uber for artillery' app is claimed to have played a major role in the Russian defeat at the failed Siverskyi Donets River crossing near Bilohorivka last week.

There was aerial visual confirmation of 73 vehicles shortly afterwards. Yesterday, the Ukrainians released on-the-ground footage of these losses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrU3WQcnS-I

Article on the battle itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Siverskyi_Donets

Twitter thread by a Ukrainian military engineer involved explaining how they discovered the crossing (the thread is longer than the first four tweets; a tweet in the middle was deleted): https://twitter.com/kms_d4k/status/1524506104192974849

Article from Ukraine in 2015 on GIS ARTA, with some pictures of the application: https://life.pravda.com.ua/society/2015/06/2/194846/

“GIS Arta, an advanced situational awareness system developed by Ukrainian programmers after collaboration with British digital mapping companies, has cut the military’s targeting time from 20 minutes to one.”

60 seconds after a target is identified it is targeted? Sounds hard to believe.

The war would be over quickly in this situation.

My understanding is that the reason for this application is not so much the firing time, which other militaries are perfectly capable of (I think the article is somewhat misleading in this respect), but so that the Ukrainians can disperse artillery guns, rather than keeping a battery at a single location, which in 2014 got much of their artillery destroyed.

I don't understand this. Why not keep it secret if it gives you considerable advantage?

The existence of GIS ARTA has been public since 2015.

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