Soldiers don SKIFTECH laser sensors for training. (SKIFTECH)
I/ITSEC 2024 — Twenty years ago, the Ukrainian firm SKIFTECH focused on battlefield tech, but only the kind of weapons weekenders would shoot each other with for fun: paintball guns.
But in 2014, the same year “Russian-backed separatist” invaded eastern Ukraine, the company pivoted to the real thing, turning itself into a high-tech military simulation and training specialist.
The company’s biggest customers are in Ukraine, but most recently the company has expanded into the US, according to Mikhail Obod, chief of the US branch. It’s a small footprint for now – just a dozen employees stateside — but Obod said the firm expects to grow here, potentially with the help of a US Army contract the company says is in the pipeline.
Through its work, the company said it sought to address what it sees as flaws in current generation training simulations, including by failures to account for a high level of casualties within the first 30 minutes of a fight to a dearth of more detailed after-action feedback for soldiers.
Obod claimed that the “final results are that the current Ukraine commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, has told us that units completing the entire one month-long course utilizing the latest SKIFTECH hardware and methods suffer 30 percent fewer casualties.”
Obod said the training system draws on the wide body of battlefield experience and the years of data accumulated since 2014.
“Rather it is our experience in this automated simulation technology — the ability to engage simulations in operating against drones, against aircraft and against ambush scenarios” he explained. Since the war in Ukraine became locked into a positional dynamic with limited movement in the lines, “the ‘trench warfare’ dimension has also been embedded into the simulation software modules.”
These real-world interactions are embedded in the software modules. Simulations include factoring in all kinds of weapons from tanks to small arms to drones – even hand grenades and anti—personnel mines.
Obod also claimed the company’s tech is “considerably more accurate” than other laser-based systems, built on a new 2024 design.
“It is not a two-dimensional training regime where if you are hit and there is a ‘beep’ that it means you are automatically dead,” he said.
Instead, the detectors worn by servicemen and those used on vehicles are “layered and graduated. A ‘hit’ registered by the laser sensor is not necessarily scored as a kill. The system calibrates the weapon used, the range, the velocity, the ballistic protection of the target, etc. to then rate the level of damage inflicted.”
Obod said the company added Stinger MANPADs to a simulated environment in just five months “not five years.” This truncated fast-track incorporation of real battlefield data to rapid prototyping to fielded product cycle is a competitive advantage for SKIFTECH.
What the company lacks at present is a diversified portfolio. The company’s current contracted profile is a 90 percent Ukraine customer database, Obod said. “We would like to sell to other nations outside of Ukraine,” he said, adding the company does work in a couple European countries and as far away as Malaysia and Ecuador.
In the end, “we are producing training using laser-based simulations which means not wasting a live round, which for tanks, armored vehicles, artillery is expensive. Our system does not conduct training against a target but against a simulated live-action adversary.”
