DELTA

DELTA is the digital combat command system used by Ukraine's military. Think of it as a system that gathers information from drones, satellites, and various sensors, and displays it all on one real-time map so commanders can see what's happening on the battlefield at a glance. It works much like a central monitoring room where feeds from many surveillance cameras are brought together so an operator can grasp the whole situation.

Since 2022, the photos and videos that have accumulated through this system have been used for more than just mapping — they've also served as training material to teach computers to recognize enemy troops and vehicles. What matters here is that this is real combat footage. While most other countries have had to train their systems on synthetic, artificially generated data, Ukraine had millions of actual battlefield photos to work with.

In articles, you'll see phrasing like "material from the DELTA digital combat system, which weaves drone, satellite, and sensor data into a real-time battlefield picture." Here, DELTA doesn't refer to an AI model — it's the command-and-control system itself that collects and displays battlefield information. The key point is that the 5 million labeled images recently made available in the UK were accumulated through this very system.