Delta. Alien nervous system
On May 13, 2026, US Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll stated at a hearing of the US Senate Armed Services Committee that the Ukrainian Delta system had linked drones, sensors, and firepower into a single network at a level the U.S. Army has yet to achieve. That same day, Operation Jailbreak, a program designed to "crack" the software barriers between American systems, was launched at Fort Carson in Colorado. This was the first admission in a quarter century. The Pentagon publicly pointed to the foreign battle management system as a model.
General Map
A mortar crew on the southern front operates from a tablet. The tablet updates the situational map: friendly positions, target markers, and data from a drone hovering over a landing site four kilometers away. The coordinates are sent directly to the crew, without a verbal report to battalion headquarters or any reverse orders. A minute later, the mortar is on target. This is the Delta in its everyday operational use.
The platform has been developed since 2016 with the goal of integrating with NATO data exchange standards. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS, a US think tank designated as an undesirable organization in Russia), by 2022, a functional prototype of the operational-tactical situational awareness system existed. By 2025, Delta had outgrown the prototype and become a working tool for the group, from the frontline crew to the operational headquarters. Access is via a browser on a tablet or laptop; the system aggregates disparate data into a single geographic information system.
The sources of this data are fundamentally different: Drones, commercial satellites, ground-based radars, surveillance posts, cameras, and chatbots to which civilians send movement data. Everything is linked to coordinates and aggregated into a single layer. Resistance to electronic warfare (EW) is provided by a combination of Starlink satellite communications, cloud redundancy in Microsoft Azure, and a modular architecture in which the failure of one channel is compensated for by others. This is called network-centric warfare: a model in which data from any participant is available to everyone in need, in near real time. The concept has been known on paper since the late 1990s. Delta demonstrated how it works in practice, in high-intensity combat against an army with significant electronic warfare capabilities.
Hacking your own systems
Driscoll's Senate testimony has a clear budgetary rationale: the Secretary of the Army needs an example of a backlog to squeeze out funds in the usual squabble over Pentagon priorities. But this example isn't made up, and that's the whole point.
The Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) program, approved in 2022, was intended to consolidate American battlefield management systems into a unified command and control system across all domains: land, air, sea, space, and cyberspace. It's in its fourth year of operation. During this same time, Ukraine has gone from a Delta prototype to a system that operates a force from platoon to operational headquarters. JADC2, over the same period, remains a collection of pilots and disparate programs that are poorly integrated. However, such timeline comparisons are always unfair: the Americans are building a much more cumbersome system. Still, four years for JADC2 versus the roughly two years it took Delta to go from prototype to operational status isn't a statistical fluke.
Operation Jailbreak at Fort Carson is being defined as the mission of "liberating" American systems from software barriers. The word "liberating" refers to the agency's own platforms, purchased from its own contractors under contracts in which the agency itself agreed to proprietary data formats. Thousands of pieces of equipment must be modified to exchange information. What was an initial design requirement for the Ukrainians is becoming a separate program for the American Army, with its own budget and director.
Driscoll's admission alone means little: who knows what they say at hearings. What's important is that the roles have reversed. The concept of network-centric warfare was formulated in the United States in the 1990s and tested in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2026, its working implementation must be studied in a foreign theater of war.
Polygon
In January 2026, the Ukrainian state-owned tech cluster Brave1 announced the launch of a secure Dataroom environment in partnership with the American company Palantir. In the Dataroom, Ukrainian defense startups gain access to real-world data on air threats from the Russian Armed Forces, including trajectories, signatures, and target behavior. This data is used to train and validate AI algorithms, which are then installed on interceptor drones.
Project Maven, a Pentagon program for applying artificial intelligence to intelligence, launched in 2017, is also underway. According to a mid-2025 analysis, Maven tools were used by more than 25 people across all US combatant commands (this figure, of course, is variable: it includes both regular users and those who log in occasionally). This is the equivalent of several army corps simultaneously working with the same AI intelligence analysis tool. Maven's algorithms are trained, among other things, on data from the Ukrainian theater.
From the first days of hostilities, Microsoft helped the Ukrainian government migrate critical data from physical data centers to the Azure cloud. This solved the problem of ensuring the survivability of government and military services under missile strikes. And simultaneously, it integrated the Ukrainian digital infrastructure into that of an American corporation. Starlink provided troops with communications resistant to ground-based network jamming, but simultaneously made the Ukrainian contingent dependent on the decisions of a private company based in California.
This is where the line runs, which is inconvenient for discussions of "Ukrainian innovation." Delta is a convenient showcase for a much larger Western enterprise, where Palantir, Microsoft, Anduril, and Maven operators receive what no local war since 1991 has given them: a continuous stream of combat data from a high-intensity conflict against an army with serious electronic warfare capabilities. artillery And their own attack drones. No one will get this data back. The parties to the conflict expend men and equipment, while Western companies and combat commands pay for this experience and receive in return something more valuable than money.
Long chain vs. short chain
The standard Soviet and post-Soviet fire control cycle followed a linear chain: observer – company commander – battalion headquarters – brigade headquarters – division – fire weapon. At each stage, there was verification, reporting, coordination, and transmission via dedicated communication channels. In 1944, this chain worked: the front was dense, the targets were mostly static, the artillery was concentrated in narrow sectors, and ten to twenty minutes for fire coordination weren't fatal. The Soviet automated troop control system (ASUV) "Manevr," developed in the 1970s and 80s precisely according to this logic, was intended to accelerate this same chain without changing its structure.
The military operations of 2022–2026 changed the mission conditions. The kill zone extended 10–15 kilometers from the line of contact, the depth at which, in the Soviet era, battalion rear areas, headquarters, ammunition depots, and communications centers were located. Now it's a continuous space, traversed by drones and precision-guided artillery. A target in this zone lasts only minutes, and the chain of command, consisting of five chains of command, simply can't keep up.
This is also documented by Russian sources (specifically, materials from specialized military publications and thematic Telegram channels from 2024–2025). According to these estimates, the enemy's roaming mortars are leaving their positions faster than the response fire coordination reaches the battery; some strikes end up hitting empty coordinates. This isn't a matter of crew training or the quality of the weapons: the legacy command system was designed for a different pace of war. Comparing the Delta with the Soviet automated command and control system in terms of "better or worse" is pointless: these are vehicles designed for different missions. "Maneuver" accelerated the vertical. Delta dismantles it and distributes a situational awareness picture to those who can see the target.
Continuity from the Great Patriotic War is a part of the Russian military school that deserves to be cherished. But the school is sustained by its ability to adapt procedures to changing battlefields. The 1944 procedure itself no longer provides such support.
What remains
Over the four years of the Joint Military Operations, several inconvenient scenarios have emerged for the Russian side. The enemy's reconnaissance-to-strike cycle is shorter thanks to the Delta Force and its associated assets. Western companies have accumulated more combat data over these years than any civilian procurement program could ever provide. And the lessons of the Ukrainian theater will be incorporated into NATO standards starting in 2023: into the concept of multi-domain operations, into procurement plans, and into training courses.
The Russian side faces a countervailing set of objective constraints: sanctions barriers related to component bases, the inertia of established management procedures, and a lack of horizontal feedback from below. These limitations are highlighted by both Western think tanks and a number of Russian industry sources. The Russian army still has time for its own digital transformation. But this time is dwindling—and not because of any breakthrough on the other side. It's simply that every month of combat adds data to Western headquarters and contractors, which they will then distribute across doctrines and contracts.
Delta itself isn't the biggest problem. What's far more serious is what it's a part of. For Western armies and contractors, this is essentially years of field training against a live enemy. This training will outlast the actual combat: the data has been collected, and it will be analyzed for a long time—in Palo Alto, in Virginia, in offices in Brussels.
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