Drones are no longer the future of war. They’re now a defining weapon in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, and beyond—altering the course of conflicts and reshuffling the balance of military power. The pace of change has caught many by surprise, with state and non-state groups racing to mass-produce, diversify, and protect their rapidly evolving drone arsenals.
Transcript
Note: this is an AI-generated transcript and may contain errors
TWU Ft. Steve Feldstein (AUDIO).mp3
Jon Bateman: Introduction
Jon Bateman: So listen, we're here today to talk about the future of warfare that in many ways is already here today. And that's drones. Drones have gone from a boutique tool used by a handful of elite militaries to now maybe the defining weapon of modern wars that are proliferating around the world to any number of armed groups and are being used by the millions in conflicts that are happening right now. I can't think of a better person to talk about that with you, Steve. You have followed drones for many years. It's a key part of your forthcoming book. You've been to Ukraine and other hotspots around the world. And I think we're going to talk a lot about Ukraine. But before we get into that, I thought maybe you could tell the audience a little bit about Sudan. This is a conflict that is not as much in the headlines, but it's another area where drones are making perhaps a decisive difference. Tell us about what's going on there.
Steve Feldstein: So the situation in Sudan has been pretty grim and has gotten even worse in recent months. Essentially, the country has been locked for the last several years in a civil war that is taking place between sort of two large military factions. One, the Sudanese army, and then two, an insurgent militant force, the RSF. But one of the kind of game-changing weapons that has been used has been the import of military grade drones on both sides. Initially, there was a greater proportion of high-end drones that came from Egypt and Turkey to support the Sudanese armed forces. There were also some Iranian drones that they had in their arsenal as well. And many people believe that those drones in particular were responsible for helping the Sudanese armed forces recapture the capital city cartoon earlier this year. And drive the RSF out of that kind of area of the country. Well, one of the things, one the responses that came from the RSF who are backed by the UAE was for the UAE then to provide their own set of sophisticated military grade drones imported via China. And these Chinese Wing Loong II drones have been particularly useful for the RSF to push back the Sudanese Armed Forces in another theater. Of the conflict, this time in a city, Al-Fasher, which is in the Darfur region. And so that city has now fallen through the RSF in part due to relentless bombing strikes by these Chinese military grade drones.
Jon Bateman: So what I'm hearing is this is an ultra-violent civil war. It's a reprise of other civil wars that have been fought in Sudan within living memory. But the difference between this war and those prior wars is the introduction of drones and strikingly, what you're saying is that the government forces and the rebels have both used drones to take key terrain in recent offensives. They've both used. Would you call it a decisive weapon in some of these strategic offensives going after population centers or an augmentation? How much would the war being played out differently if we didn't have these drones there?
Steve Feldstein: They've certainly played a mate; they've had a major contributing factor. They have given capabilities that neither side necessarily had or would have cost them far more, I think when it came to their own manpower and they've been able to sort of augment and give them weaponry that has done pretty significant damage.
Jon Bateman: An undertone that many of us have around drones that they're kind of bad in some ways, that there's an ick factor when it comes to drones, whether it seems to lead to a dehumanization or even just a fueling of violence. Do you have a sense that Sudan is a case study in kind of the badness of drones? Would it be preferable if this war were playing out without them? We're old enough to remember, Steve, the Darfur Conflict of the early 2000s. This was a cause celebra in the United States and many Western countries, same territories, some of the same actors at play, also ultraviolent, and ultimately was called a genocide and led to some international criminal court cases. At that time, we didn't have drones. I think some people even call this the Land Rover War, because one of the defining technologies of this era was just a Toyota SUV that people would run around in and maybe attach light arms to. Hundreds of thousands of people killed there too. So I guess what I'm trying to unspool here is, is there something inherently worrisome about the transition into this new phase of war that we're fighting?
Steve Feldstein: You are seeing an augmentation, right? It's not that drones have become a substitute, at least in that conflict from traditional weaponry, but they're giving more capabilities. They're allowing a greater amount of devastation that can occur over a larger area. So for example, one of the things the RSF has been able to do with their drones is to strike port cities like Port Sudan, which is about over a thousand kilometers away from any area that they actually hold. So they're able to have an extensive reach that goes beyond what they otherwise would be able to do. And that brings the war to many corners that otherwise might be less touched by the conflict. So I think that's one thing. I mean, I think a second aspect in general is that we're seeing this kind of really big proliferation of these weapons in different forms. And so anytime that you see that kind of massive increase and the type of lethal weaponry available. Especially to unaccountable armies, I think that is problematic. And the cost is going down as well.
Jon Bateman: I sometimes think about kind of two eras of military drone technology. There was the initial era really pioneered by the United States where UAVs were flown over Iraq, Afghanistan and other wars where we were prosecuting the war on terror. And these were fixed wing drones, right? They were planes essentially very large in some cases. I think the predator drone has a wingspan of like 66 feet. So this is a very substantial aircraft. And It would fly very high and it would fly over a long distances and for long amounts of time. And it was equipped with missiles and we would use them to execute precision strikes. So that's kind of one aspect of drone warfare. And my sense is those are still around and it's not just the U.S. Operating these fixed wing surveillance and armed aircraft now, other countries are too and they're selling them. But now we've entered into this second era defined in many ways by quadcopters. I've got my DJI quadcopter back here. This is not a military specimen. At least I haven't outfitted it that way. This was a birthday gift from some years ago. And as you can see, it's just a few pounds and anybody can buy something like this on Amazon for probably a couple hundred bucks now. And it's very light. It doesn't fly very high. It doesn't fly that fast, although it can go. 25 miles an hour or more. And this can also be used for surveillance or in a kind of kamikaze style attack. We've seen these videos of kamakaze drones proliferate all throughout the Ukraine conflict. Do I have that right? And what's your sense of the strategic importance of these two broad categories of drones? Or are there other categories that I'm missing here? Yeah, no, I think you generally have.
Steve Feldstein: I mean, the way the Pentagon classifies it is that there is a category three drone, which is in some ways really interesting type, and this is sort of the TB2s, the Bayraktar models from Turkey, the Shahed drones, Shahed Drones from Iran that have been repurposed as Jaron drones. These are the kind of drones. So these sort of are medium altitude drones. On a nightly basis in Ukraine, they have caused tremendous amounts of havoc. A lot of them get shot down, but many go through in part because they are cheap enough that if you use an expensive missile battery to shoot them down, you're losing the battle of asymmetry when it comes to cost, that you're using $1 million or $500,000 missiles to shoot down $20,000 or $30,000 drones. You just can't sustain that. No one can sustain it. The U.S., Kansas State, and let alone Ukraine. So that's one of the problems, but they're also good enough. They have enough munitions associated with them. They're able to fly longer and higher and have some radar elevation compared to category one or two that they are able to get through these defenses and cause a lot of harm. So this is to me, another area as well, in addition to kind of the battlefield tactical ones you mentioned and the high altitude other ones, these sort of medium range ones are I think are also significant.
Jon Bateman: Is it the case that all of these types of drones are essentially being flown in the Ukrainian airspace right now? Which ones are having the biggest impact on the battlefield?
Steve Feldstein: Sort of multi-layered, that you have different types of drones for different aspects. But I would certainly say that the aspect that most of us have paid attention to in Ukraine are the tactical drones on the front lines, where you have something like, you know, I think Ukraine's, they will make around 4.5 million drones total this year for use in the frontlines, which is an increase from 2 million last year that were manufactured in Ukraine. And, you know, the most crucial thing that they are doing is essentially when you have an army that is having difficulty recruiting enough humans, especially experienced soldiers to man the front lines over hundreds of miles of border, you're using drones as a substitute to fill in the gaps there. It's essentially what is allowing Ukraine to kind of maintain the fight against a much larger force for a pretty long period of time. Without those drones, without those millions of drones. That are there, creating like a kind of a quasi drone wall, as some experts describe it, on the border, I think the battle would look very different.
Jon Bateman: You mentioned two things here that are of utmost importance. One is scale. Prior to Russia's full-blown invasion, everyone knew that we were, to some extent, in an era of drone warfare. And if you were to say, oh, Russia's gonna invade Ukraine next year, there's gonna be a big land war, I'm sure everyone would have agreed drones would be used in that conflict. I don't know if anyone predicted the scale at which they have been used. As you say, up to four million or more drones being manufactured by Ukraine this year, I've seen similar estimates of the Russian manufacturer of drones this year. And so perhaps 8 million drones will be manufactured and used this year if we continue to fight throughout the year. Do the math on that. Maybe hundreds of drones will used in Ukraine during the span of this podcast. I read in one of your articles that about 70% of casualties in this war have been attributed to drones. If that's right, or even remotely correct. It starts to appear as though this is the defining weapon of the war. More so than tanks, maybe more so than artillery rounds. A new type of precision small scale munition that might just be executed on the battlefield or perhaps from afar. Tell us about how that scale developed. How was it possible to go from manufacturing very few drones to millions? Is this a duplicatable strategy? Can other countries do this? I mean, I think one.
Steve Feldstein: One of the things that's interesting with Ukraine is that they've had a real innovation and adaptation drive. They have had a very strong industrial base anyway, which in the past have been used for manufacturing tanks and other vehicles and so forth. Part of what they were forced to do very quickly in the war was to think about how you then repurpose what you have, put in place the right investments. Retool factories that were making other types of items, whether civilian or other types of military items, and put them to use towards this tool. And given the industrial capacity that Russia has, as you were just mentioning a moment ago, you're seeing very quickly the Russians being able to fall in behind, be a fast follower to the Ukrainians, and do pretty much the same type of things that Ukrainians are doing with drones anyway. So now you're sort of having this like kind of. Battle of manufacturing, which shouldn't be a surprise as much as you are a battle of tactics.
Jon Bateman: Yeah, just sticking with this industrial piece for a minute, because it feels really important, any future war that the United States, China, Russia, others are gonna fight. If it's gonna last more than a few weeks, your ability to sustain at scale becomes critical. So one difference between the weapon of the moment, these drones, and maybe the weapon of the past, let's say artillery shells, is artillery shells are just much simpler to produce. Maybe you need some metallurgy. Some explosives, gunpowder, whatever it is, drones, even this little DJI thing sitting on my shelf over here requires a lot of sensitive electronic components. You need a circuit board, you need chips, you need sensors, you a battery, many other aspects of it. So where are these things coming from? Is Ukraine sourcing these materials from China, from the West, because I think this then goes to the question of who will be able to make these things in the future.
Steve Feldstein: That's a great question. I don't completely know the answer to that in part because it's not an answer that maybe the Ukrainians fully want to be out there anyway. What I can say is that, especially in the early stages, a lot of what was sourced anecdotally was getting consumer grade drones from China, from DJI in particular, which is responsible for only about 70% of the consumer grade. And I think over time, what the Ukrainians have been able to do were to take these prototypes, take these models, and begin to figure out ways that they can indigenously replicate portions of those. But, you know, you can't replicate everything. One of the things I've looked quite a bit at is Russian weaponry, whether it's to run drones or otherwise. And one of the thing that we've learned is that many of the microchips that they're using, whether it is for cruise missiles or drones, come from Western manufacturers, as it turns out. Uh, and, and a lot of it, you know, goes through third parties. A lot of goes through different trans shipment networks. Sometimes it's Chinese purchasers who buy these items of bulk, which are, you know, just basically like consumer grade microchips used in refrigerators. And then they're repurposed and sent over to Russia. Uh, it's on this idea that you have like a single cutoff or a single supply that goes directly to a military factory and that one entity based in a particular country ought to know or not know. Where that item is being shipped and for what purpose is not really how it all works. It's all very muddy, opaque, integrated, in source for many different suppliers from many different countries. Some of the other- Yeah, thousands. Thousands, right. For a part, it reflects a real mind shift in the Pentagon, one where you're sort of saying, instead of trying to manufacture exquisite weaponry that costs in the hundreds of millions of dollars, whether it's F-35s or something else, you're instead gonna refocus at least part of your purchasing towards the lower end. Low-cost but high-bulk items like the kind of drones that we're talking about that tactically can make a difference that are attributable, you know, that essentially that are disposable that where you expect to lose a good portion of them. But you know what you gain, but what you gained from that is being able to have at least some of them break through because you have so many swarming a target at a given moment. I mean, it's a real change in tactics, a real changing strategy when it comes to What role? Mass can play on the battlefield, particularly unmanned.
Jon Bateman: Yeah, what you just said, a shift from expensive, exquisite assets to small, cheap, attritable, scaled assets, you know, it's not a new idea. I mean, I worked in the Pentagon 10 years ago now, and already at that time, this was a common trope throughout the building. Everyone knew that this is where things were headed. And yet the U S is still so far behind making this a reality. It's probably a mixture of the culture, like you mentioned. Um, the strategic doctrine, but also the, the vested interests, the members of Congress who want to continue funneling money toward some higher end asset that's manufactured in their district. Um, and at the end, the industrial base just may not be there yet to manufacture at scale in the United States, but I think Ukraine has been a huge mindset shift for many.
Steve Feldstein: I think what has changed though, and probably from when you were in the Pentagon to where we are today, is that I think for a long time it was abstract, this idea of we need mass and we need to think about ways to sort of fight a longer war if it were to come down to that. But until you actually see it in practice, until you're actually seeing Ukraine, why it matters and what it looks like, it's hard to sort take that and sort of say, well, let's change everything. It's much easier to kind of follow along a path dependency to say, Well. We have another way of fighting. It's worked pretty well so far. We use small groups of special operators. We use expensive weaponry. You know, we use precise missiles. And even though it's expensive, it works and it ends conflicts quickly. But I think the difference here that we're seeing in Ukraine is that the conflict, a conflict, a prospective conflict with China may not end quickly. The ways in which battle is being fought is shipping pretty rapidly. And this sort of embrace now of mass. At the tactical level is something that's new. And I think all of that is kind of contributing, I hope, to a bit of a paradigm shift when it comes to saying, wait a second, the character war is changing in pretty significant ways and we may not be totally ready for that.
Jon Bateman: You used this very evocative phrase earlier when you said Ukraine has built kind of like a drone wall in the country and that that wall has enabled Ukraine to at least hold off or fight to somewhat of a standstill, a much larger and more capable adversary. A lot of people have looked at the use of drones in Ukraine and felt that these are what are called defense-dominant weapons. Because you can fill the sky with drones and you can surveil all of the battlefield, you know, to a much greater extent, and then shoot anything that moves or can be identified very accurately, it makes it much hard to move, to push the front lines, to mass forces in an area that'll immediately be targeted. It kind of brings you back to the World War I sort of trench warfare phenomenon. Are these defense dominant tools? Because if so, It brings me back to this big question of are drones really so bad or might we appreciate living in a world where aggression, like the territorial war of conquest that Moscow has tried to prosecute in Ukraine, is actually much harder to pull off than it was before because countries can build these kinds of drone walls, the modern version of digging trenches and hold adversaries at bay.
Steve Feldstein: I mean, isn't that good? Fighting over a hundred feet at a time or so forth and essentially when you have two evenly matched peer forces with an equal number of drones, barring some kind of innovation breakthrough, I think it's really hard to kind of gain territory. So that's why we're seeing like, you know, we look at, you know, slight breakthroughs like, Russia's ability to capture one more city in Donetsk that it has been circling for 14 months and we say, oh, that's, you change in the front line, but really what we're looking at are just, you know, not that many square miles at all over the course of a year or so. And so this idea that you can use combined maneuvers as a way to mass forces and then achieve a breakthrough, which is something that we actually were advising the Ukrainians a couple of years back to try to do, which failed. I think with drones, that has become almost an impossibility, assuming that you have kind of near visibility of the battlefield. So then what does that mean, kind of into your last question, does that mean that warfare has changed so much that now it's pure defensive? Well, I mean, I think at the moment it does feel like we're kind of in a static kind of era, again, assuming that like you're looking at kind of two peer forces, but you know, I do think that also what we do see is a constant adaptation, re-adaptation, and one of the areas that people are talking more and more about is autonomy and to extent that might be something that could eventually lead to a change in the offense, deepens balance. So I think it's hard to say. I think I hesitate to sort of say, well, now that we're looking at something that looks like X, therefore, that's what war will result.
Jon Bateman: We're in such an early phase of this and you mentioned autonomy, which people very strongly associate with drones There's often this notion that drones are or will soon be piloting themselves and that is undoubtedly the future But correct me if I'm wrong Steve in the wars where drones are being used today such as Ukraine, Sudan Largely, they are a kind of one-to-one construct where you have one individual human pilot operating one drone, or there may be cases where they could be kind of pre-programmed in relatively simple ways, you know, go from here to these waypoints to here and strike. The future where one person is controlling an entire swarm of drones or they're operating largely on their own using AI is not yet there today. Is that right, and does that surprise you? Is holding us back from that future world and how would that change things?
Steve Feldstein: I think you're right. In terms of the types of autonomy or incorporation of AI we're seeing, it's pretty limited at this point. I mean, I think the numbers from last year were something like 10,000 out of 2.4 million or so drones in use were AI enabled. So it's a very small number. And I think it's increasing a bit now, but still rudimentary. I do think there's a lot of sort of semi-autonomous kind of quasi, some use of AI that are being incorporated. One of the things, for example, people. Have started to do a lot of is using this technology called pixel lock. So it's this idea that it's essentially, I mean, you can put in place a targeting system. It doesn’t actually have to cost that much. It can cost anywhere between $100 and $400, depending on the degree, how effective the model is. And essentially it allows for you to program in and lock on a particular target. And so then you can fly it. And if you lose connectivity or you fly that last kilometer and essentially try to identify, locate, and then target the item at hand. The problem with this is that especially when you get down to the lower numbers, the lower cost versions, you know, the $100 versions, they don't work very well. There are better versions that cost about as much of an Android phone. So about the mid-$500, right? So you have a $400 FPV. Now you're doubling the cost by putting in place an AI targeting system on that. So now it's $1,000. So how many of those can you use and how good is that AI targeting, so it justifies doubling the cost of the FPV? And the economics right now say, well, not good enough. In certain instances, yes. But in many other instances, not really. And so until those cost economics start to make more sense, I think you're still gonna hit some barriers.
Jon Bateman: Yeah, yeah, it's so interesting because when we talk about millions of drones being manufactured, you have this sense, perhaps, that the economies of scale have been solved, right? That this is now just very cheap and always worth doing. What I'm hearing from you is it's a little bit more complicated than that. There's maybe a variety of different price points or quality levels that you might want to have as a military. You might want your million-dollar drone. You might want your $100 drone, and you might want a lot of things in between. And it isn't the case that everything within that spectrum has been fully filled out or solved to the point where we can have a $100 precision drone. Maybe we're still making a lot of trade-offs around that cost curve. And that could be how warfare continues to evolve in the coming years. That's right. It's a mixture between.
Steve Feldstein: Much is a cost, what degree of effectiveness do you have? If you're putting $1,000 and you have like, is it 60% target hit rate? Is it 80%? That really matters in terms of your own decision about how to use your scarce resources.
Jon Bateman: And you're bringing us into the counter drone tactics, right? Um, electronic warfare seems to be one of the top threats to effective use of drones, where if you're trying to pilot a drone, you're trying to create, um, or maintain, you know, continuous connectivity with it. You know, through radio signals in order to operate it or satellite, you know your adversary can be jamming those signals or manipulating those signals and so how do you then respond to that and you mentioned one incredibly. Creative response, which is you actually have the drone drop a cable after it as it's flying. So there's a kind of electronic tether that continues to allow it to operate. And then once we get past electronic warfare, of course, the adversary can do all kinds of other things from shooting down the drone to very crude things like just shooting a net at it or putting a net on some kind of target so that a kamikaze drone... Like cook cages or tanks.
Steve Feldstein: Like cook cages on tanks, which have become a standard thing. Exactly, yeah, we've seen tons of pictures of these things. Yes, you're seeing a cat and mouse game. And this is just what you see anywhere, whether you're going back centuries before, and you had the invention of gunpowder that for a minute made obsolete fortifications. And then you had, you know, the development of trace Italian reinforced stone fortifications that were able to kind of negate to some extent, the ability of gun powder to kind pierce through. I mean, you've seen a similar type of dynamic play out where. Lots of resources, lots of money are coming into both finding ways to intercept drones, finding ways to adapt and hide from drones, finding ways even scramble the signaling when it comes to autonomous drones and pixel lock so that they glom onto incorrect targets and explode. And then you're also seeing something else that's interesting. I've recently been kind of picking up on unmanned ground vehicles. So drones that actually kind of, you know, are wheeled on the ground and what those have been used for primarily. Have been to shuttle logistics back and forth, as well as for health and evacuation of individuals. And so there was a really interesting report about a month ago in the New York Times by a reporter talking about how essentially these autonomous vehicles have been a lifesaver for soldiers that are wounded on the front lines who need to be evacuated. And where normally you'd have rescuers who would sort of risk their own lives and would have to sort of. Withstand drones in order to kind of get and evacuate the wounded. But instead, when you use these ground vehicles, even if one of them is destroyed by a mine or something else, you still have a much higher ability to get the wounded over to a safe area to receive life-saving services. And so here's another example where you have drone V drone, ground drone versus surveillance, and then attack drones from the air. And a human sort of human's life in the balance.
Jon Bateman: Fascinating to hear that these unmanned vehicles are actually being used to save lives on the battlefield. I do feel like I'm building a case for drone warfare being maybe not a bad way to fight wars. I mean, we all know war is hell, right? Civilians are killed, war crimes occur. There's famine, there's destruction of infrastructure any way you fight it, right, whether it's with machetes, arrows, drones, or even nuclear weapons. If I had to design a favorable weapon system, one that maybe a humanitarian could be least uncomfortable by, you would start to think to yourself, okay, I'd want it to be very precise, right? Minimum collateral damage, if used properly. I'd also want it to maybe have everything recorded, right, so that there's a kind of chain of evidence so that people can understand what the operator saw when they made a decision to kill or not kill. I'd want it to be defense dominant, like we talked about, right? Maybe a weapon that on net seems to restrict the aggressor more so than the defender and maybe tries to bring some stability to borders. Can we welcome the drone era? Does it have to be something that feels dangerous and dehumanizing? I do have a counter.
Steve Feldstein: And so let me throw out the counter. So the counter, I would say, is Gaza. And I would mention a few things there. So first of all, I think you're making an assumption that you're going to have two evenly matched armies fighting it out and that essentially you'll get a defensive stalemate. So, that sometimes is the case. Most often, it's not. Most often there's an asymmetry where you have a much more powerful military on the one hand and a much less powerful group adversary fighting on the other hand, and that's what you see in Gaza. And so in Gaza, it is not a defensive stalemate. It's an offensive slaughter. And what is also interesting or, you know, I think novel there is that in prior conflicts, even when you had the asymmetry, the amount of targets that could be generated and then used for strikes were limited by the humans who were able to process the information. And then the tools they had at hand in which to deploy missile strikes. Now, what you saw see in that conflict is that the target generation capacity is 10X what it was before, in part because of AI systems that are able to collect bulk information, process it, and then generate lists of suspects for targeting. And then when you actually have, you know, at your disposal, different types of drones that can fire missiles, And you have less of a risk of actually losing individual human soldiers as opposed to unmanned systems There's a higher propensity for for militaries to take advantage and use those, you know war is hell War is particularly hellish when you have access to these systems at a bulk rate and when your adversaries don't
Jon Bateman: It's a great point. And just because you have a weapon that's capable of being very precise, while also being quite destructive, that doesn't mean that the military employing it will choose to use it in precise ways. It could just be that they take advantage of the destructive potential and ignore the possibilities that precision offers it. I mean, we have had very, very imprecise ways of fighting wars before, you know, cluster munitions, fire bombing, you know, we've gone through other periods of scale that were horrific towards civilians. I mean, the level of destruction we've seen in in Gaza, we've see that in World War II and other wars before. My hunch is that Israel would have been able to level Gaza without the use of drones. But if we go to a place like Sudan, maybe it's less clear that the militant groups and armed forces fighting there would have been able achieve the same level of that they've achieved without the use of drones.
Steve Feldstein: That's right, proliferation really matters. And I think what's proliferating in terms of drones are not precision drones. And let's look at the Houthis or look at what HDS in Syria was using, or look what the Islamic State was using. The fact that irregular forces, militant groups can essentially set up 3D printers in their garages, build quadcopters to spec, use them in indiscriminate ways, sometimes discriminately, oftentimes indiscriminately. Against all manner of civilians. I mean, I think this proliferation issue also adds a dimension that I think is pretty frightening.
Jon Bateman: Yeah, I mean, a small kamikaze quadcopter is essentially a micro cruise missile. And so if any number of armed groups can acquire a micro cruise missile for a few hundred dollars, that's a brave new world. And it's not necessarily one that's good for the targets of those groups. That's right. I mean we are. We're not going to unwind this drone revolution. We're going to be living in an era of drone warfare, perhaps our entire lives, or at least until. Some very effective counter has developed. What's the version of this world that you want to live in, Steve? How can we nudge the direction of drone warfare towards something that could be less aggressive, less harmful to civilians, less enabling of terrorist groups? Is there a better version of this world and a worse version? And what could we do about it?
Steve Feldstein: We should be dedicating as many resources as possible towards electronic warfare and other means to counter drones and more that we can come up with ways to blunt their effect, the less of a destructive tool they will be, period. The second thing is, is that, you know, as we talked about drones come in all matters of size, shapes and sizes and destructiveness. And, you now, it is very hard to find ways to kind of counter this sort of scale quadcopters that are holding grenades and explode. On the other hand... Their level of destructiveness is simply not the same as some of the more advanced models. And so in some ways, you can sort of say, look, let's focus on some of the advanced models first. Let's focus long range, highly destructive, or even medium range drones that potentially can have autonomy built into them. And let's come up with some basic rules when it comes to responsible use in terms of basic parameters for how they'll work. It's not that everyone will buy into that. But if we can get, you know, major militaries to kind of come to an agreement, whether it's, you know, equivalent to the kind of agreements different countries came to when it came to chemical weapons or something else and say like, look, there's something that is so insidious about this and what can hurt my adversary can also hurt me just as much. And so maybe we should have some basic, basic responsible use parameters around that that could be a viable and good thing.
Jon Bateman: Yeah, you know, there is a double-edged sword about seeking to neuter the drones through tools like electronic warfare. Maybe if drones were a lot more vulnerable to EW than they are now, perhaps Ukrainian drones would have been largely disabled by Russia, and that would have enabled Russia to invade and take over and destroy the country. It's so complex. It seems like there are some wars in which, depending on which side you're on, you might favor or disfavor. The use of drones and maybe that's a good place for us to end. The US was the innovator in this field. We were the country to pioneer and really almost become culturally identified on the global stage with the use of drones, the predators, the Reapers. These were iconic symbols of the global war on terror with the kind of brain-like protrusion flying right above the nose of the nose cone of the plane. Has the U.S. Lost the edge in this era of drone warfare? Are we the innovators that are now seeding the field? I think the U S remains in.
Steve Feldstein: Innovation leader, particularly when it comes to high end drones. I think that what naturally happens over time is that no matter what technology field you're looking at, the innovation leader that eventually fast followers will catch up. There's no way to stop that. This is the process of technological diffusion. You come up with something for a while, it is the cutting edge and it gives you advantage. But over time, that advantage arose. And then you have to come up with other ways to seek new advantages. So we can't sit, rest in our laurels. We have to keep pushing forward. And we have to also think about ways to balance the need for more firepower, more precision, and more strategy alongside idea of adhering to important rules and principles when it comes to protecting civilians. And living in a world that won't be ravaged by the destructiveness of these weapons. And accomplishing that balance in the best of times is hard when you're feeling vulnerable or you're feelin' that there's a prospective war at hand that tends to get pushed down even further. But I don't think we can afford as a global community to take our eye off the ball when it comes to that question.
Jon Bateman: So there's a task for the U.S. Here, which is to take our technological leadership and apply scale and achieve resilient and secure supply chains. These are the macro policy challenges for the US across so many different tech stacks now, but, you know, undoubtedly drones is where some of this effort needs to go. And then there's the challenge for the world, which is how do you govern this increasingly cheap and violent new tool? Could be good, could be bad, depending on who's hands. We're gonna have to have you back on, Steve, to talk more about these issues. You bring quality and scale to all of your analysis. So thanks so much for a really exciting and embracing conversation.
Steve Feldstein: I appreciate it.
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