Ukraine’s Defence Minister announces official adoption of DELTA system long used by the Armed Forces — what does it mean?

On 6 August, Ukraine’s Minister of Defence, Denys Shmyhal, signed an order to implement the DELTA system – a digital situational awareness platform for the military – across all levels of the Defence Forces. The minister announced this via his Telegram channel.

Ukraine’s Defence Forces have been using the DELTA system since the very beginning of the full-scale invasion. The platform is developed by the Ministry of Defence’s Centre for Innovations and Defence Technologies Development (CIDTR). A CIDTR representative told Defender Media that, until yesterday, the use of DELTA had not been fully formalised. “The system had the status of ‘approved for operation’, but from a legal standpoint, it had not been officially implemented,” the source explained. Shmyhal’s order brings the system’s actual use in the Ukrainian military into line with its legal status.

The system enables users to observe the battlefield in real time, plan operations, and exchange information within the unit, brigade, or group. At present, DELTA has 11 modules, the most popular of which are the “Monitor” map and the “Tower” video streaming module.

DELTA successfully passed information security checks and real combat testing: during the defence of Kyiv in 2022, the destruction of the enemy’s Black Sea Fleet, and the liberation of Zmiinyi Island and Kherson. The system supports the destruction of more than 2,000 enemy targets daily. Over the course of a year, this amounts to more than half a million verified destroyed or damaged targets.

It is also known that DELTA provides over 150,000 parallel viewings of video broadcasts from UAVs, contains the most comprehensive statistics on enemy losses, enables decision-making based on high-quality battlefield data, and supports the effective planning of UAV crew missions in real time.

It should be recalled that following its experimental implementation, the Ministry of Defence is launching DOT-Chain Defence into full operation — a system for automating supplies and services in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.