Ukraine's new Hryfon Zakhid runs the whole drone chain on one screen.

Ukraine's new Hryfon Zakhid runs the whole drone chain on one screen. Ukraine's Operational Command West has built an app that lets a single operator route drone strikes from a phone or tablet, in real time and without radio. The system, called Hryfon Zakhid, speeds the flow of tasks to drone crews and helps hide their positions from Russian reconnaissance, soldiers at the command's training center told Suspilne Rivne. Drone war is won on the speed of the kill chain — the minutes between spotting a target and hitting it. The system compresses the decision and covers Ukrainian troops from Russian electronic reconnaissance. Hryfon Zakhid is a regional take on the digitization that Ukraine has pushed nationally with systems like DELTA, which has shortened the path from detection to strike from roughly 20 minutes to a few. One operator runs the whole chain The app replaces the manual scramble of calling crews up one by one. "It is a very mobile program, and it speeds up decision-making," said Volodymyr Shvediuk, commander of the Operational Command West troops. The military can share it with everyone who wants it — air-assault troops, marines, and army corps. "You do not have to tell anyone, 'Petro, Vasyl, get ready.' One operator controls everything," he explained. The program runs on a smartphone, tablet, or computer, and works in real time without radio, according to a training-platoon commander with the callsign Vegas. The board turns recon into strikes A soldier with the callsign Wolf described the system's workflow. "A task comes to me from reconnaissance, and we send it to the striker's board. A target appears, and I choose the crew in the zone to work it," he said. Then he chose which drone would carry out the strike and sent it. "The board shows everything — where to fly, what to hit, and it even adds photos if we do not know which window to fly into," the Wolf adds. Read also