ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE
Modelling Military Equipment Losses with Open-Source Visual Intelligence: Evidence from the War in Ukraine
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Instytut Logistyki,
Wydział Bezpieczeństwa, Logistyki i Zarządzania,
Wojskowa Akademia Techniczna, Poland
A - Research concept and design; B - Collection and/or assembly of data; C - Data analysis and interpretation; D - Writing the article; E - Critical revision of the article; F - Final approval of article
Submission date: 2025-10-06
Final revision date: 2025-10-20
Acceptance date: 2025-12-30
Publication date: 2025-12-31
Corresponding author
Olimpia Wiktoria Sobczyk
Instytut Logistyki, Wojskowa Akademia Techniczna
Wydział Bezpieczeństwa, Logistyki i Zarządzania, gen. Sylwestra Kaliskiego 2B, 00-908, Warszawa, Poland
SLW 2025;63(2):151-164
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ABSTRACT
The research niche of this article is the use of open-source visual intelligence and automated computer vision, combined with classical time-series modelling, to analyse and forecast military equipment losses in the Russo-Ukrainian war. The purpose of the research was to test whether visually confirmed data (the Oryx repository) can be algorithmically transformed into a reliable weekly series and used for short-term forecasting. Two hypotheses were examined: (H1) open visual data yield a series with stable trend and seasonality; (H2) ARIMAX with Fourier terms outperforms seasonal ARIMA at short horizons. The methodology comprised a Python pipeline in which YOLOv8 localized date stamps and EasyOCR read them; STL decomposition characterized the trend and seasonal structure. Forecasting employed SARIMA and ARIMAX with sine/cosine pairs for the annual period. Results confirm pronounced annual seasonality (peaking in March–April) and a trend cresting in early spring 2023; relative to SARIMA, ARIMAX reduced errors by 14.6–23.7% (MAE) and 23.8–25.5% (RMSE) in both in-sample fit and rolling validation. The conclusions indicate that, despite limitations (a lower bound on true losses), public visual data provide a robust, verifiable analytical basis with strong predictive potential; future work should incorporate machine learning, exogenous covariates, and probabilistic forecasting.
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