IT Essentials: The new rules of war

The battlefield belongs to innovators, not investors

When garage-built code can destabilise billion-dollar militaries, who controls the future of war?

Modern tech’s story is one of enthusiast hacking. It grew out of garages, basements and bedrooms, a wave of circuit boards and solder that evolved into the shiny silicon and slick software running our lives today.

You don’t have to dig too deeply to find traces of those roots in any system, and they were on full display in Ukraine’s latest attack on Russia: Operation Spider’s Web.

Open source is probably the closest we still regularly come to those early days of enthusiast tech, and the open source ArduPilot software that helped stabilise the drones in the unstable, high-latency environment was key to Spider's Web’s success.

Beyond the free open source software, Ukraine’s SBU used regular Russian mobile networks and commercial drones - no Starlink or $10,000+ specialist military equipment. In modern warfare the win goes to the side that can out-innovate, not outspend, the enemy, and Ukraine proved that.

There is a warning note: when it’s been done once, it can be done again. Open source software is available to everyone, and CEO of OpenUK Amanda Brock told me Russia could easily use ArduPilot itself in retaliation – or strike directly at the source code in a fit of pique.

The genie is out of the bottle. The world now has to address what Ukraine has done: the culmination of years of dual-use tech getting cheaper, more accessible and more advanced, to the point where it can be used on a massive scale.

For starters, perhaps as part of the Strategic Defence Review released this week, the UK could work to engage with the open source community on security. The battlefield has moved - at least partly - into places the Ministry of Defence doesn’t yet frequent, but urgently should.

Twenty-nine-year-old Ukrainian open source developer Oleg Bozhok lost his wife and suffered his own injuries in a Russian missile attack on Kyiv. OpenUK has published a blog post on this human cost of war.

Penny Horwood is recently back from a visit to the ITER project in rural France, which is trying to push commercially viable nuclear fusion across the finish line. Click here to read about the colossal nuclear fusion research and engineering project, involving 33 nations.

I've talked to GP (and Elsevier chief medical officer) Dr Rahul Goyal about AI on the front lines of medical care: how he's using it, who's still afraid of it, and what those attitudes mean for the government's grand ambitions.

Continuing his coverage from SAP Sapphire in Madrid, John Leonard caught up with David Robinson, global president and CRO of cloud ERP, about the company's unpopular cloud-first push.

And in our latest episode of Ctrl Alt Lead, Google’s EMEA head of AI Alex Rutter talks about the rise of open models, as well as why transparency is so important in the AI space.