# FPV Drones -The Next War Is Already Here — Yaroslav Azhnyuk, The Fourth Law & Noah Smith, Noahpinion Latent Space · 2026-05-18 Yaroslav Azhnyuk (The Fourth Law) and Noah Smith explain how FPV drones now cause 70-80% of frontline casualties, dethroning artillery as the 'god of war.' Azhnyuk's firms produce thermal cameras, autonomy modules, and interceptors; level-one autonomy (terminal guidance) raised one brigade's mission success from 20% to 71% and extended the kill zone from 3 to 10 km. Fiber optic drones resist EW but cost $32/km and limit payload; AI autonomy removes the radio horizon problem. He warns China could build 4 billion FPV drones versus Ukraine's 4 million, and that the West lacks mass manufacturing, rare earth refining, and autonomy tech. Azhnyuk calls for a shift from costly platforms to cheap, software-defined drones, and for learning from Ukraine's battlefield experience. ## Questions this episode answers ### What percentage of casualties in the Ukraine war are caused by FPV drones? According to Yaroslav Azhnyuk, FPV drones now account for 70 to 80 percent of all casualties on the front line, effectively replacing artillery as the primary source of destruction. He notes that artillery used to cause around 80 percent of casualties, but FPV drones have now dethroned it as the "god of war." [25:31](https://addtry.com/c7aedbae-d7a3-4a20-b92a-578a5a8deac3?t=1531000) ### What are the five levels of drone autonomy as defined by Yaroslav Azhnyuk? Azhnyuk defines five levels of autonomy, inspired by self-driving car classifications. Level 1 is terminal guidance (AI takes over for the last 500 meters). Level 2 is bombing. Level 3 adds autonomous target detection and engagement decisions. Level 4 enables autonomous navigation. Level 5 is autonomous takeoff and landing. [38:03](https://addtry.com/c7aedbae-d7a3-4a20-b92a-578a5a8deac3?t=2283000) ### How many FPV drones could China produce compared to Ukraine? Yaroslav Azhnyuk claims that Ukraine manufactured 4 million FPV drones last year, whereas China could produce 4 billion – a thousand times more. He warns China could make them fully autonomous, fixed-wing, with ranges up to 300 km, and deploy them from submarines or container ships, posing a massive conventional threat. [1:07:15](https://addtry.com/c7aedbae-d7a3-4a20-b92a-578a5a8deac3?t=4035000) ## Key moments - **[0:00] Origins** - [0:01] China can produce 4 billion FPV drones compared to Ukraine's 4 million last year, says Yaroslav Azhnyuk. - [0:10] Q: Is China the supreme conventional military power? Yaroslav Azhnyuk says we can't count it out. - [0:21] Yaroslav Azhnyuk: 'I went from making cameras that fling treats to pets, to cameras that fling explosives to the occupiers.' - [1:51] Yaroslav Azhnyuk returned to Kyiv on February 23, 2022, the last flight before bombs fell hours later. - [3:37] Yaroslav Azhnyuk and his family spent 17 hours driving west from Kyiv on the first day of the invasion. - [4:42] Yaroslav Azhnyuk stored diesel in repurposed window-wash canisters during the evacuation. - **[14:01] Tech Stack** - [14:34] Yaroslav Azhnyuk's The Fourth Law builds massively scalable autonomy for drones, teamed with Odd Systems' thermal cameras. - [14:54] The Fourth Law and Odd Systems combine cameras, drone autonomy modules, and drones, selling to over 200 Ukrainian manufacturers. - [16:25] Yaroslav's companies produce FPV strike drones, bombers, and interceptors for Shahed drones and ISR drones. - [17:17] Yaroslav Azhnyuk: 'Zero, our Shahed interceptor, goes up to 326 km/h.' - [18:21] Yaroslav Azhnyuk's company is building two semiconductor plants to produce thermal camera sensors. - [18:59] Q: Do AI drones replace fiber-optic drones? Yaroslav Azhnyuk: AI replaces human operators; fiber optic is for resilient comms. - **[41:37] Autonomous Battlefield** - [41:44] Yaroslav Azhnyuk lays out eight dimensions of autonomous warfare: from autonomy level to distribution at scale. - [44:23] Q: Can AI drones fail under new conditions like fog? Yaroslav Azhnyuk says AI will be more precise than mortar fire and prevent collateral damage. - [45:45] Yaroslav Azhnyuk: 'Five to ten years from now, it will be immoral to use weapons without AI.' - [46:42] Q: When will an AI general command battlefields? Yaroslav Azhnyuk says technically now, but deployment is the bottleneck. - [47:07] Yaroslav Azhnyuk warns that the race to AI battlefield command means the fast adopter gains decisive advantage. - [48:50] If an enemy deploys autonomous AI command systems first, they become a thousand times faster; defense must match pace. - **[1:05:18] China's Advantage** - [1:07:15] China could produce 4 billion FPV drones and deploy millions of long-range autonomous drones from hidden sea vessels to any coastline. - [1:08:39] Current US defenses cannot counter a mass drone attack from thousands of Chinese vessels, warns Yaroslav Azhnyuk. - [1:10:04] Q: Which drone technologies does the US lack? Yaroslav: Autonomy on small drones, mass manufacturing, components, rare earth materials. - [1:11:14] Yaroslav Azhnyuk: 'There should be far more smart people working in defense and more funding.' - [1:11:42] Q: Is China the supreme conventional military power? Yaroslav Azhnyuk again says we can't count it out. - [1:13:03] Wars of mass drone production follow the law of manufacturing capacity; China has the advantage, says Yaroslav. - **[1:24:20] Defense Policy** - [1:24:38] Yaroslav Azhnyuk: 'The future is already here, just not evenly distributed. Kyiv is the defense valley.' - [1:25:52] Yaroslav Azhnyuk recommends the US learn from Ukraine's battlefield, reform procurement, and scale drone dominance programs. - [1:27:21] Yaroslav Azhnyuk doubts the US has fully absorbed drone warfare lessons from Ukraine, despite recent Middle East encounters. - [1:28:28] Smaller nations can hold off larger drone powers by withstanding suffering across military, economic, and political axes. - [1:29:50] Yaroslav Azhnyuk: Europeans often say they'd move rather than fight if invaded, weakening deterrence. - [1:31:51] Yaroslav Azhnyuk predicts many more nations will pursue nuclear weapons after Ukraine's Budapest Memorandum experience. - **[1:42:03] Countermeasures** - [1:42:08] Q: Can shotguns reliably counter FPV drones? Yaroslav Azhnyuk: They are used, but an average soldier has a very low chance of survival. - [1:44:10] Q: Is there a portable counter-drone system with >50% survival chance? Yaroslav Azhnyuk: No universal system; depends on drone's capabilities. - [1:46:38] Yaroslav Azhnyuk: 'Abrams tank, great tank, but against an FPV drone, sorry dude, it's not gonna work.' - [1:47:30] Ukraine's kinetic countermeasures: fish-net road corridors, tank 'porcupines', and harpoon-like interceptor drones against FPVs. - [1:51:45] A $3M anti-drone laser could be overwhelmed by a swarm costing just 6,000 FPV drones, illustrating the economics advantage of cheap drones. - [1:53:35] Yaroslav Azhnyuk: Defense must shift from expensive platforms like $14B carriers to mass-producible, iterable drone systems. - **[1:58:27] Final Thoughts** - [1:58:59] Yaroslav Azhnyuk's closing message: 'You want peace, be prepared to war. Gotta invest in defense and security.' ## Speakers - **Brandon Anderson** (host) - **Noah Smith** (guest) - **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** (guest) ## Topics Robotics ## Mentioned Brave One (company), D3 (company), DJI (company), Neuros (company), Odd Systems (company), Palantir (company), PetCube (company), Raytheon (company), Rheinmetall (company), The Fourth Law (company), VIARI Drone (company), Mavic (product), Patriot (product), Shahed (product), Skynex (product), Zero (product) ## Transcript ### Origins **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [0:01] So think about this. Last year, Ukraine produced 4 million FPV drones. Ukraine is not the most industrious nation in the world. China can produce 4 billion of these FPV drones. **Brandon Anderson** [0:10] Would you say that right now China is now the supreme conventional military power on Earth, given its ability to manufacture and deploy drones in the quantity and quality that you just described? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [0:21] I don't think we have all the information to claim that, but we cannot count it out, and that alone should be, you know, a big warning sign. And yeah, as I say, some point in my life I went from making cameras that, uh, fling treats to pets, to cameras that fling explosives to the occupiers. Um, so that's the short story. And, uh, when you think about what your nation, what your patriots are going through, uh, you realize that that's the only morally right thing to do, is to fight back, and it is immoral not to fight back, and then the, the choice becomes very clear. **Brandon Anderson** [1:05] Welcome to Lane Space. Um, I'm Brandon. I normally do science podcasts, but today we're gonna do something a little bit different. I'm joined by, uh, Noah Smith of Noahpinion on, uh, Substack and Twitter. Uh, and he has lots of interesting things to say about drones. And, uh, as a guest, we have Yaroslav Azhnyuk, uh, founder of The Fourth Law and several other, um, drone-related startups. Um, but yeah, to, to get started, um, so it is, uh, February 23rd, uh, 2022. You are running a pet startup. Um, you're connecting pets with their owners. Let's go in just a little bit of background. Um, where... How did you get started in tech, and, uh, what were you working on before the Ukrainian war started? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:51] Yeah. Uh, good to be here. Thank you. Uh, on February 23rd, late in the evening, like, I think, like 11:00 PM Kyiv time, uh, my wife and I, we landed in Kyiv. Actually, then she was a fiancée. Uh, and, and we were, uh... We came from Lviv, where we were looking at a church, uh, where our wedding should have taken place. And we got into this, uh, cab riding from airport to our home, and the driver was like, "You crazy. Like, everyone's leaving Kyiv. Why, why, why do you come?" We're like, "What? Nothing's gonna happen. Like, dude, chill." And then obviously, uh, eight minutes later, or eight, eight hours later, uh, the bombs fell in the city. Uh, it was quite surreal. We probably landed on the last flight that landed in Kyiv, or one of those last flights. Uh, but yeah, uh, you know, uh, my background, I'm a tech guy. Uh, studied applied mathematics in Kyiv Polytechnics. Born and raised in Kyiv. Uh, parents, uh, you know, all, uh, PhDs from academia, and grandparents too. Like, everything, uh, you know, from, uh, linguistics to nuclear physics. And, um, I's an entrepreneur, so I've built a bunch of companies. Uh, PetCube is the one you were referencing. So I lived in San Francisco 2014 to 2020, uh, building, uh, PetCube, which is, uh, one of the leading, uh, pet device companies in the world, uh, selling, uh, lots of pet cameras. And then, yeah, as I say, some point in my life I went from making cameras that, uh, fling treats to pets, to cameras that fling explosives to the occupiers. Um, so that's the short story. Uh, uh. **Brandon Anderson** [3:28] Yeah. So, uh, February 24th, um, I guess a few hours after you, uh, go to check out your wedding chapel, um, what do you do? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [3:37] Well, we had a plan for this situation. So my, my parents and family live in Kyiv, and, uh, we're like, "Okay, this has actually started. Uh, the, the worst has, uh, come true." And, uh, so we basically packed our belongings and, uh, got in the car and, um, spent 17 hours driving west. Um, and, uh, that was, uh, pretty sure most people in our audience watched an at least one apocalyptic movie in their life, so that was exactly like that. Like, felt exactly like that. I... You know, missiles are falling. It's like there was smoke in Kyiv. Like, you know, my dad and I went, like, to central part of the cities. It's probably, like, 800 meters from presidential office, to pick some stuff in, in his, uh, uh, workplace. Uh, 'cause he's, like, uh, the head of an academic institution, so he had to, uh, get so- some of the things with him. And, uh, super surreal. Like, the, the, the streets are empty. Like, the gas stations are out of gas. Like, we found some gas station. Um, we didn't have, like, spare canisters with us, so we're like, um... We, we figured out... Like, the car was diesel, so, like, we figured out, um, if it's diesel, you can actually store it in plastic, uh, canisters, and we bought some window wash for the cars. We poured it out of the canisters, and we poured the, the, the diesel into that. Uh, yeah, so it was like that. And then, like, you know, helping friends get out. Like, my friend and his dog, like, we found... Like, my brother was also, like, riding in a separate car. We found a place for my friend who didn't have a car. It was like, uh, yeah, it was, like, totally surreal. **Brandon Anderson** [5:23] Wow. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [5:24] Yeah, and we didn't know... You know, of course, and you didn't know this will last for so long. You didn't know whether Kyiv will be able to... w- whether Ukraine will be able to defend Kyiv. Um, and it was like, yeah, very little information and very little insight into future. **Brandon Anderson** [5:42] So what do you... What are your thoughts with regards to how do you, uh, defend, you know, Ukraine? So you eventually start- ... building drones. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [5:54] Yeah. **Brandon Anderson** [5:54] Like, what is the process to get from there to, you know, or from where you were building, you know, devices that connect owners with pets to building drones? And what other things did you do to help the war effort in the process? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [6:08] Yeah. Uh, it's, it's definitely non-trivial, right? Like, I, I didn't go, uh, to... I didn't get any, like, military education when I was a student. Like, normally, uh, in Ukraine, you would, you would go to, like, this, uh, military school even if you're getting higher education in any, any other, uh, sphere. Um, I decided to skip that, which, which is, like, an unusual way to go. Um, and I never thought that I will be somehow engaged in a war effort, and like, "What is war? Of course, wars are over. It's the end of history." Um, so one thing you gotta understand about, like, many Ukrainians, and like, I guess, um, uh, it's also true about most of the people I met here, here in the US, uh, that your, who you are in terms of your nationality is a big part of your identity. So when that gets under attack, i- it's something deeper than just the country you live in gets under attack, right? And, um, so I, I... Day one, I figured I'm gonna, I'm gonna fight back with everything I can, right? But I, I didn't think on day one that I'm actually gonna do, uh, weapons. Um, and, you know, a bunch of things. We were, uh, reaching out to l- a number of American, uh, congresspeople and senators, um, and, uh, basically advocating for support of Ukraine, for voting for lend lease, which has happened in May 2022, but didn't actually work as expected. Um, uh, you know, we, we helped start, uh, uh, Brave One, uh, which is, uh, now very important defense innovation cluster, sort of like a DIU here in the US. We helped start, um, a fund called D3. Uh, it's like, uh, it was, uh, started or co-started by Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google. Um, so a bunch of these odd things, but then eventually I was like, "Okay, by 2023 it was obvious this thing, A, is gonna last a lot more time, and B, that the whole world is shifting, and, uh, that there's gonna be a new arms race, uh, that the warfare is redefined by drones as platforms. And for the first time in history, you have a platform that is software defined, uh, that can increase your battlefield capabilities, uh, you know, in a, in a step change just overnight. So it's like if you were able to push a software update and get all of your Roman legionnaires a new helmet, you know? That has never been possible before. It's, it's the first time in the history of war this is possible. So all of that, and many other things like, you know, supply chain fertilization, uh, and the impact that the AI is gonna have on all of this, all these things have become evident to me in 2023, and it's like, "Okay, I, I, I should do what I do best, uh, uh, or what I know how to do best, start a tech company, uh, and sort of leverage the global techno capitalist machine, uh, to, uh, provide, uh, defensibility to, uh, Ukraine and the free world." So that's literally the mission of the company, you know, increase defensibility of Ukraine and the free world. Um, and then there, there was some sort of soul-searching and like asking yourself. It's like, "Okay, am I..." Actually, I know nothing about weapons. Am I actually, like, ready to make, you know, things that other people use to kill other bad people? And, uh, when you think about what your nation, what your, um, you know, compatriots are going through, you think about all the terror of places like, like Bucha, the occupied cities in the, um, east and, and south, uh, the abducted children, the raped women, all the economic damage that's being done, and the intention to destroy a whole nation, to genocide the people of Ukraine, uh, you realize that that's the only morally right thing to do is to fight back, and it is immoral not to fight back. And then the, the choice becomes very clear. Um, and look, we're, we're just passing the ammunition. We're not doing the actual job. The, the actual fighters and defenders and heroes are people in, in the armed forces. We're just support. **Brandon Anderson** [10:34] Oh, okay. I have so many questions. Um, actually, Noah, you seem to have a question. Do you want to ask anything? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [10:39] No, no, I, I, I, I'm just listening. Go ahead. **Brandon Anderson** [10:41] Okay. Okay, cool. Cool. Yeah, I do wanna talk about, um, some of, let's say, the moral issues. Like you just said, uh, you are not building- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [10:51] I think there are no issues there. **Brandon Anderson** [10:52] Yeah. Uh- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [10:53] What would an example of a moral question be in this case? **Brandon Anderson** [10:56] Well, well, no, I mean... Okay. Uh, as you, you just said, um, you know, you are creating the tools, but others are using them. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [11:05] Yeah. **Brandon Anderson** [11:05] Um, you know, I, I was maybe thinking of having this conversation later, but one of the questions is, like, is it actually... You know, you are going to be building them for your homeland, which you are building it for your homeland, which is, I think, very a strong morally defensible position. But this technology is not going to con- stay with you, right? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [11:26] Yeah. **Brandon Anderson** [11:27] This... You know, you will probably be selling these to other people, and- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [11:31] Yeah **Brandon Anderson** [11:31] ... yeah. Um, so, you know, the, the future is really where the moral issues may come into play, but- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [11:39] Yeah. The, the, this, this, uh, question becomes, um, mm, easier and more complete if we ask this not about a particular technology or particular weapon, if we think that this question actually applies to any kind of technology. **Brandon Anderson** [11:54] Mm-hmm. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [11:54] Right? So, um- Knife or fire. You know, you can use knife to do surgery and save people's lives, or you can use it as a weapon to take people's lives. **Brandon Anderson** [12:07] Cut tomatoes, too. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [12:08] Cut tomatoes, too. **Brandon Anderson** [12:09] Yes, knife. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [12:09] Yeah. Yeah. That's helpful. **Brandon Anderson** [12:11] In, in Japan, sword and knife, they, you know, call the same word. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [12:14] Yeah. So, you know, i- it's like, um, it's with any technology. Large language models, right? Look at how powerful they are, and yet they're available to anyone in North Korea or in Russia. Um, so that's one side of the argument. The, the other side is, as a maker, wha- what is your responsibility for how the tools you're creating, uh, will be used? There's definitely some responsibility, right? Um, then, you know, how, how should the decision process look like? Should you, like, try to calculate all the possible scenarios before starting to work on something, or do you create something that is needed now to save people's lives, and then think about, uh, you know, addressing the unwanted edge cases later? Um, you know, in ideal world where there's like, or, okay, it's not ideal world. In, in a mythical world where there is some one governing party and it gets to decide everything, and there is no other country, uh, that can, uh, you know, decide on their own, you could say, "Well, we need to calculate for all the consequences, and only then, you know, maybe build this building, you know, by, by replacing this park because, you know, maybe we need this park in the city," right? So that kind of situation. But when you're in a situation where you're in a forest, uh, in front of a wolf, you know, you first gonna deal with the wolf that wants to eat you, and then you're gonna go consult Greenpeace. So that's kind of situation that Ukraine is in. **Brandon Anderson** [14:00] Okay, fair enough. Um, because this is a tech podcast I did want to spend some time talking about, um, sort of the tech in, that you've developed and what you've been working on. Um, so can you explain, I guess, first of all, like, the problem that you were trying to solve from a technical standpoint? ### Tech Stack **Brandon Anderson** [14:17] Um, and I think, and then maybe, like, go into some of the solutions and some of the, the d- design process that led you from, you know, designing, uh, little laser-guided, um, you know, d- guiding lasers with a, with an iPhone versus, uh- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [14:33] Yeah **Brandon Anderson** [14:33] ... driving drones. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [14:34] Sure. Well, like, uh, uh, it so happened, uh, that, uh, my partners and I, uh, we sort of... So I started one company called The Fourth Law, and its goal was, and is, um, to, um, uh, make, uh, massively scalable un-drone autonomy. Um, and then, uh, in parallel with that, together with my, uh, PetCube co-founders, partners, and friends, we started another company called Odd Systems, which, uh, was focused on making thermal cameras. Cameras, thermal cameras are seeing thermal radiation and are used to see at night. And we're now sort of, those companies are getting closer and closer together and we're probably gonna merge them. And this, this group of companies is currently the leading, uh, team in, uh, un-drone AI and, uh, thermal imaging on a Ukrainian battlefield, and, uh, likely one of the leading, if not the leading in the world. Um, so w- we have these, like, three sort of business units, which are, uh, cameras, drone autonomy, and drones. Um, so the cameras and drone autonomy sell daytime and nighttime cameras and different types of drone autonomous modules to other drone manufacturers, over 200 drone manufacturers in Ukraine. And then the, the, the UAV, uh, business unit sells the drones themselves to, um, uh, the armed forces of Ukraine, Ukrainian government, and there are different types of, uh, drones. Those are sort of front strike, as we call them, so those are sort of FPV strike drones and the bombers, and then interceptors. Uh, and there are different kinds of interceptors. We do Shahed interceptors and we do ISR interceptors. We don't do the deep strike- **Brandon Anderson** [16:32] What's an ISR interceptor? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [16:34] ISR is, uh, stands for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and those are basically drones which are, uh, which, you know, Russians are using to, uh, watch over positions and, and then communicate where, uh, the targets are gonna be. **Brandon Anderson** [16:48] So it's, it's reconnaissance. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [16:49] Yeah. That's, that's, the ISR is sort of a classical term for a, for a reconnaissance drone. **Brandon Anderson** [16:54] Are all of these battery-powered drones that you just described? 'Cause I know that the, uh, the sort of deep strike drones still have, like, um- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [17:01] Uh **Brandon Anderson** [17:01] ... some sort of, of, of- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [17:02] Internal combustion engine? **Brandon Anderson** [17:03] Yeah, internal combustion engine. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [17:04] Yeah. **Brandon Anderson** [17:04] Um, are all the things you're talking about battery-powered? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [17:06] Yeah. What we're working on is all battery-powered, right? We, we don't do the deep strikes, right? And then in, in terms of autonomy- **Brandon Anderson** [17:13] You, you can catch a Shahed with a battery-powered thing. It's not- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [17:16] Yes **Brandon Anderson** [17:16] ... too fast to catch. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [17:17] Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. Look, uh, Shahed interceptor, like ours, uh, it's called Zero, it goes up to 326 kilometers per hour. Uh- **Brandon Anderson** [17:26] For reference, how fast is a Shahed? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [17:28] Eight, like, in internal phase it could be 280, but, uh, in, in cruise phase it's, like, 220-ish. **Brandon Anderson** [17:36] Okay. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [17:37] Uh, yeah. And sorry, I'm not like... You know, you can convert that into miles if you're interested. **Brandon Anderson** [17:41] Yeah, that's fine. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [17:42] Uh- **Brandon Anderson** [17:42] Multiply by two-thirds or point six or something. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [17:44] Yeah, that's easy. Yeah, I was saying that for, for autonomy modules, right, we, um- We make systems, autonomous systems for frontline, for interceptors and some for deep strikes as well, and then different levels of autonomy. So from, uh, terminal guidance, which is like lasts 500 meters, give or take, to autonomous bombing, to autonomous target detection, to autonomous navigation and all of that across day and night, different terrains, different time of the year, different platforms like quadcopters and fixed wing, uh, and maybe some other platforms. Um, so it's, it's quite a v- wide variety of products. Um, uh, we also have like our own simulation. We have our own training school for the war fighters. Uh, and we're, we're about to start construction of, um, uh, two, uh, semiconductor plants to make, uh, sensors for thermal cameras. Uh, so that's super exciting for me as a computer science guy is like- ... d- doing semiconductors. Super, super cool. **Brandon Anderson** [18:49] But like f- in terms of kind of core drone technologies, you basically are, one is an FPV replacement without fiber optics, and the other is a- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [18:59] Yeah, y- you can- **Brandon Anderson** [18:59] ... signal tracking with interceptors **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [19:00] ... with or without fiber optics. Fiber optics- **Brandon Anderson** [19:02] Okay **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [19:02] ... is just like, uh, sort of a communication module. **Brandon Anderson** [19:05] Mm-hmm. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [19:06] So, uh, you can, you can use classical analog, uh, video link and, and, and, and radio link. Those, those would be two separate radios. You can do digital, or you can do fiber optic. And then fiber optic has its own advantages but also adds weight and, uh, decreases, uh, the distance and decreases, uh, how fast you can, um, sort of turn and, and move- **Brandon Anderson** [19:33] Yeah **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [19:33] ... with a drone. Uh- **Brandon Anderson** [19:33] But do you need AI for fiber optic drones? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [19:36] Uh, like y- you can use AI for fiber optic drones. Um, um, AI replaces a human, right? Fiber optic is, uh, making your communication link more resilient. So those are slightly different goals. Like if you want, um, you can have, uh, you know, AI controlling hundreds of fiber optic drones instead of having 100 operators for each. **Brandon Anderson** [20:03] Okay. So I, I guess I thought that the, the key reason that people moved to fiber optic drones was for like electronic, um, countermeasures. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [20:12] Yeah. **Brandon Anderson** [20:12] Or I guess to counter those. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [20:13] Yeah, I, I think that's, that's a correct assessment from sort of a public awareness standpoint. Uh, in practice it's somewhat more difficult, um, because besides electronic countermeasures, you have these issues of, um, a radio horizon- **Brandon Anderson** [20:30] Mm-hmm **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [20:31] ... for FPV drones, which means that, you know, as I believe Earth is round. Some people disagree. **Brandon Anderson** [20:41] Mm-hmm. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [20:41] But basically if you fly a drone and you have a land station over here and a drone flying over here, if your drone is flying high, you have good direct radio visibility. If your drone goes low, and usually, you know, Russian infantry and vehicles, they're on the ground and you wanna hit them, you, you need to go low. Lower you go, maybe you'll, you'll get behind a hill or behind a forest, and if you're far enough, you'll just get behind the curvature of the earth. You get into what's called a radio shadow. Um, and then that is a real bummer because for the last, be it 60 or 20 meters, you won't be able to see anything and it will be very difficult to hit the target. So to counter that, what-- And then the distances that these FPV drones, uh, act on, they're, they can be quite large. So for example, here in the US there was this drone dominance program competition, and in drone dominance the furthest distance was about 10 kilometers. **Brandon Anderson** [21:45] What was drone dominance? What was that competition? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [21:47] Drone, the d- drone, drone dominance is a, is a, a program started, uh, by the US government, uh, to, uh, accelerate the, uh, development of drone technology- **Brandon Anderson** [21:58] Got it **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [21:58] ... here in the US. **Brandon Anderson** [21:58] And the longest range thing they were using was 10 kilometers. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [22:00] Was 10 kilometers, right. In, in Ukraine, like if your drone doesn't fly at least 20, 25, it just, no one's interested in it, and the usual hits are happening. It was like m- okay, many hits are happening between 30 and 40 kilometers, and that's what expected from a regular 10-inch, uh, FPV drone. So at that distance, even at altitudes of like 60 to 100 meters, you might start losing, uh, the, the link. Uh, so, uh, so- some of the earlier AI technology that was fielded in FPV drone was this terminal guidance technology. That was the first product that we ever, uh, launched that helped you as an operator. Once you see the target from two, three, 500 meters, you lock onto the target and then, uh, it just, uh, drives the drone towards the target no matter what, even after you lost the, the visual connection. So optic fiber solves that. However, uh, if you want to go like 20 kilometers with optic fiber, that will add an extra three kilos, uh, of, uh, useful weight to, to your drone. So you- **Brandon Anderson** [23:13] So the cable that you have to unspool as you go weighs. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [23:15] Yeah. **Brandon Anderson** [23:15] It, it is heavy. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [23:16] Yeah. So at first, like the spool is, is about 800 grams, so a bit less than a kilo and then, and then think about 10, 10 kilometer optic fiber is, is another kilo, something like that. Um, so, so yeah. So that takes away from your useful mass and then now you have like, you need a 15-inch drone and it can only carry maybe one or two kilos of explosives if you wanna go, you know, 20 kilometers. If you wanna go to 30 or 40, like 30 is probably max, 40 is like very problem- problematic on optic fiber. And then the problem with optic fiber is it's actually getting super expensive. So, and you know why? Because, uh, because of all the data centers- ... for AI. That's literally the same optic fiber- **Brandon Anderson** [24:01] We've already got a series **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [24:02] ... that's being used there. So like when, when Ukrainians and Russians come to Chinese factories to buy the optic fiber, they're like, "We're out. We sold it out to the Americans." That's the craziest thing. So optic fiber went up in price from, like, $4 per, uh, kilometer to, like, $32 per kilometer in, in, in, in a few months in the beginning of this year. Um, and I've even- **Noah Smith** [24:26] So Claude Code is, is stopping the Russian drone effort here. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [24:30] And Ukrainian as well. Yeah. **Noah Smith** [24:32] And Ukrainian. But, but, um, I read somewhere that the Russians had grown more dependent on fiber optic drones relative to the Ukrainians, and that's one reason why the Ukrainians have sort of regained the initiative in drones recently. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [24:43] Yeah. **Noah Smith** [24:43] How, how accurate is that? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [24:44] The Russians were the first ones to scale that. I think by as of now, Ukraine has cat- uh, caught up. Uh, I think, like, as of maybe three months ago, Ukraine is mostly caught up on, uh, fiber optic. Um, yeah. **Noah Smith** [24:58] What percent of, of damage would you say is, uh, at, uh, in terms of FPV drone damage would you say is now fiber optic versus, uh, like autonomous? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [25:07] Yeah. Well, for our, for our audience, um, um, I, I actually, I cannot answer that question. Uh, like, it's like I know the answer, but I would not disclose that. Uh, but for our audience, uh, I think an in- another interesting fact is out of all the casualties on the front line, between 70 and 80% are done by FPV drones. **Noah Smith** [25:31] Right. FPV drones are the new weapon of, universal weapon of warfare. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [25:34] Yeah. So it's like- **Noah Smith** [25:35] Land warfare, anyway **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [25:35] ... they, they used to say that artillery is, uh, is a god of war because artillery used to cause like 80% of casualties, and now on that, uh, ranking- **Noah Smith** [25:47] FPV **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [25:47] ... FPV drones rule. **Noah Smith** [25:49] FPV drones are the god of war. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [25:51] Sort of. Dethroned ar- artillery. But it's not to say that artillery is not use- uh, useful, uh, is not needed. Like, all of these systems are needed, uh, maybe except cavalry, although Russians still use it. I know, have you seen the videos of Russians u- using mules and, and horses? **Noah Smith** [26:10] What is the usefulness- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [26:10] So it's- **Noah Smith** [26:10] ... of a tank in the, in the modern- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [26:11] That's, that's where we need Greenpeace to say a word, but they're silent. Yeah. **Noah Smith** [26:15] Fair. What's the use of a tank on the modern battlefield? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [26:19] Mm. It's diminishing. **Noah Smith** [26:22] Diminishing. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [26:23] However, uh, I, I think there might be technologies which will, uh, revive the tank. Look, tank still provides you armor, and armor is important. Like, uh, you still need to, uh, you know, armor and firepower, right? Like, you, you can be an armored personal carrier that provides you, uh, armor. Uh, the, the challenge that currently exists is armor is not very well protected against incoming drones. However, there are ways to do pr- to, to protect it. We were previously talking about this before the podcast. Uh, the CEO of Rheinmetall, uh, recently sort of ridiculed, uh, Ukrainian drone industry, saying that, uh, like, there's nothing interesting there, no real innovation, no to stand, you know, compared to, like, Rheinmetall or Boeing, and it's all made by housewives. So there was, like, obviously a ton of, of memes about this, people ridiculing the CEO of Rheinmetall. And, uh, one of the best quotes, uh, I heard on this topic is from my, my friend, Oleksii Babenko, who's, uh, the head of and founder of VIARI Drone, which is, uh, uh, one of the largest manufacturers of F- FPV drones. They're our partner. They're using our autonomy. Um, so he said that the drones we manufacture in one day will be more than enough to destroy all the tanks Rheinmetall manufactures in a year. And then, yeah, cost-wise, of course, a drone is, like, $500 and a, a Rheinmetall tank is worth probably 5 million-ish or maybe more. **Noah Smith** [28:01] Don't mess with those housewives. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [28:03] Yeah. Drone wives. **Noah Smith** [28:05] Drone wives. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [28:06] And that's it. **Brandon Anderson** [28:07] So there's a classic saying that everyone always fights the last war. Uh, yeah, the, how did... So from your standpoint, how did we get to the point where tanks became irrelevant in, at least for now, um, in, you know, a matter of just a few years? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [28:25] Well, look, I think it's the same way, how do we get to the point that calculators become irrelevant? Well, now we have iPhones. Like, why would you need a calculator? Uh, technology progresses and its, its influence grows non-linearly. Uh, it's all exponential. Uh, so I can tell you that, uh, full autonomy, when you put it on a drone... Look, so if you, if you think about a tank and a drone, like, it's not the right comparison, but even, like, a drone and a, a artillery shell or, like, sort of cost, cost per kill, an artillery shell for 155 caliber, uh, which is a standard NATO caliber, currently market price is about $4,000 per piece. So, you know, compare that to, say, $400 per drone. That's 10 times more expensive. Account for the amortization of the artillery gun and for how vulnerable it is and what is the sort of tactical, uh, capabilities gives you as compared to drone. You'll figure out that an FPV drone is maybe three orders of magnitude, uh, more versatile, more, more useful, more capable than artillery and, and many of the classic artillery, many of the, 'cause there are different types of artillery, not just, like, one 155. You have mortars, you have all that. But give or take, you know, roughly three orders of magnitude maybe. Again, it, it doesn't have that firepower. It's not one line comparison, so. Now, take that FPV drone. When you put full autonomy on that FPV drone, which can be not very expensive, like systems that we're, we're, uh, producing are, like, in hundreds of dollars of pure bomb cost- **Brandon Anderson** [30:07] Just interrupt. You said full autonomy, but just- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [30:09] Yeah **Brandon Anderson** [30:09] ... a second ago you were saying that the autonomy here is guidance, right? It's not decision-making. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [30:14] No, I was, I was saying that that's, that's the f- First and sort of easiest pieces of autonomy that was fielded by us. Uh, but if, if you, if you add full autonomy to a drone as- **Noah Smith** [30:25] Well, he, I think he's asking what does it... Can you, for the listeners, can you explain- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [30:28] Yeah **Noah Smith** [30:28] ... what the term full autonomy means? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [30:30] Yeah. So basically, uh, I, I think a good way to think about an FPV drone is like an iPhone of warfare. It's, like, very inexpensive, very mass producible, very versatile. Uh, you don't need a bunch of other things. When you have a iPhone in your pocket, you don't have, need an MP3 player, you don't need a calculator, don't need other things. All right? So FPV drone is an iPhone. Uh, or, like, okay, Apple, please don't sue me, is a smartphone. Um, and then, um, when you add autonomy to it, it sort of becomes like Uber or ride sharing. Okay? So what it means is instead of actually being a trained pilot who has this complex remote controller device which requires couple months of training to actually pilot a drone, um, and then having to pilot it for 30 minutes flying towards a target, et cetera, et cetera. Now you basically, you have your smartphone, um, you have a drone, uh, you pick your smartphone, you say, "We are here. The bad guys are here. Go and get them." And the drone goes up, flies in a given direction, localizes itself on a map, finds the dedicated area where the, the bad guys are supposed to be, sees the bad guys, bombs them, return, like, watches, uh, so does, does a damage assessment, returns back, sits down, and then you can pick it up and, and watch the video if you didn't have the radio link, right? **Noah Smith** [32:00] That's a bomber drone. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [32:00] That's, that's full autonomy for a bomber drone, right? **Brandon Anderson** [32:03] So you're saying that no human decision is made in this entire process? **Noah Smith** [32:07] That's not, that's not what he's saying. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [32:07] The human decision was made at the beginning of the process. **Noah Smith** [32:10] Okay. At the beginning. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [32:10] The same way as you would fire an ar- artillery. **Noah Smith** [32:12] Okay. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [32:13] When you fire an artillery, you don't stop at, like, 500 meters away from a target- **Noah Smith** [32:17] Mm-hmm **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [32:17] ... and ask it whether, you know, you want to strike or not. **Noah Smith** [32:20] Yeah. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [32:20] So that's exactly, a human decision is always made at some point. **Noah Smith** [32:23] Okay. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [32:24] Right? **Noah Smith** [32:24] Okay. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [32:25] Um, so when you do that, that's full autonomy, and such full autonomy is happening as we speak. And such full autonomy increases the capabilities of an FPV drone, which is already, like, three orders more powerful than an artillery shell. Full autonomy increases its capabilities by four orders magnitude because now you can have 100 times as many people who can use it, because you don't need to train those people, and this is important. Uh, you can have 10 times, uh, mission success rate, and you can have 10 times utility per, per drone because now instead of being one-way kamikaze, it's, it can be a bomber. **Noah Smith** [33:06] Now wait, let's, you said 10 times mission success rate, which means that f- fully autonomous bomber drones succeed in their missions 10 times more often than human piloted bomber drones do. That's an important thing to know. **Brandon Anderson** [33:17] Okay. But maybe, uh, to push back on that- **Noah Smith** [33:19] They're super, they're superhuman. They're, they're 10X superhuman. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [33:22] They're, they're not vuln- vulnerable to electronic warfare. Uh, they, uh, they don't care about the radio horizon. They don't lose track during navigation. Uh, they are not susceptible to human error when, you know, an artillery shell or other drone blows up besides you and you're like, "Hell no," like, "I'm getting out of here," right? That doesn't happen to an autonomous drone. Like, all of those things, like we have, like one of the brigades that's using our drones with just first level autonomy, they, they literally said that their success rate- **Noah Smith** [33:53] So what's, what's first level autonomy? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [33:55] First level autonomy is just the terminal guidance. **Noah Smith** [33:57] Okay. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [33:58] Yeah. By the way, we, we have video of that. We can watch that. **Noah Smith** [34:00] Terminal guidance means a human gets it nearby and then the AI takes over. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [34:03] Yeah. So the, the human flies it all the way, like 30 kilometers towards the target, and obviously the target was probably given to that human by someone who's flying some ISR drone, some reconnaissance drone, right? So all the way to the target, and once you see the target from a distance of 500 meters, you do target lock, and from there drone flies autonomous. So just that feature alone, uh, it has increased the guy's, his call sign is Grom, so it has increased his, um, mission success ra- like, uh, like precision of mission, yeah, mission, mission success rate from 20% to 71%, and it also increased his kill zone from 3 kilometers to 10 kilometers, which means there's certain area around the front line which is designated kill zone. Whenever enemy goes into that area, it's, it's almost guaranteed to be, to be destroyed by, uh, by a drone. And then obviously the drones are not launched from like the zero line. They're usually launched from, from like minus 10 kile- kilometers or something. **Noah Smith** [35:04] What is a zero line? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [35:06] Zero line is, is sort of an imaginary line of, uh, of, uh, control, uh, of, of two conflicting forces. **Noah Smith** [35:15] Okay. It's important to explain these things to a lot of the listeners who are not- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [35:18] Yeah, thank you for asking **Noah Smith** [35:18] ... familiar with, with warfare. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [35:19] Absolutely. Absolutely. **Noah Smith** [35:20] Like myself. **Brandon Anderson** [35:20] Yeah, I am one of those listeners. **Noah Smith** [35:21] Right. So, so, so you said that level one autonomy, in other words just terminal guidance, just like human gets it to the finish line and then it goes over the finish line, increases mission success from 20 something percent to 71%, or something like that. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [35:33] And increases the kill zone from- **Noah Smith** [35:35] And increases the kill zone **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [35:35] ... 3 kilometers to 10 kilometers. **Noah Smith** [35:36] Got it. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [35:37] So on both parameters- **Noah Smith** [35:38] What does full autonomy do? And, and- **Brandon Anderson** [35:38] But actually on, real quick, can we define mission success and like maybe in a way what are the failure modes of missions? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [35:44] Yeah. **Noah Smith** [35:45] I have a guess what mission success is. **Brandon Anderson** [35:46] I mean, well, well, yeah, but I could, uh- **Noah Smith** [35:48] Get 'em. **Brandon Anderson** [35:49] Yeah. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [35:49] Yeah, no, but that's a very good question in fact because, um, even if you fly into the target, uh, well, first the target can be damaged or destroyed. Those are two different modes. Uh, then there can be different targets. You know, uh, a, a sole infantryman is one kind of target. Uh, a dugout where supposed th- there are some, uh, enemies there is another kind of target, and, uh, a, a, some mechanical equipment is another type of target. Radio emitting equipment, which like often, like the targets that the military want to get more than anything else is the, some enemy radio tower or something like that, or some, some small radio dish that really makes life difficult in that area, in that combat area. So those are different targets, right? It can be destroyed, can be damaged. Then sometimes, uh, the drone hits but doesn't explode. Like, that happens. Um, and then, uh, there are other failure modes. You didn't even reach the target because you were, uh, A, jammed by electronic warfare, B, uh, you lost the control over drone because of the radio horizon, uh, C, you were jammed by a different type of electronic warfare that happens way before, um, you hit the target area. N- It's, um, impacting your, uh, uh, video r- uh, video receiver. Um, so like jamming on video or jamming on control are two dif- different types of jamming. Uh, then something malfunctioned on a drone, just a mechanical malfunction, maybe like a motor broke or like whatever. Um, so all of those are different failure modes. Yeah, or maybe you got lost, you're navigate- navigating to, to your, to your target. You know, that happens, too. **Brandon Anderson** [37:41] Okay. And so the, th- so level one autonomy, basically you manage to point in a direction. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [37:49] Yeah. **Brandon Anderson** [37:49] Uh, you go there, and then the last mile is- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [37:52] Yeah **Brandon Anderson** [37:52] ... the drone taking over. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [37:53] So we, we, we define this, like I define that, but it sort of got picked up by the industry. We define five levels of autonomy. So level one is terminal guidance. It's what we just discussed. Level two is bombing. Level three is, uh, autonomous target detection and engagement decision. Level four is autonomous navigation. Level five is autonomous takeoff and landing. So th- **Brandon Anderson** [38:16] Those are good things to know **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [38:17] Those are five levels of autonomy. Now, if you want- **Brandon Anderson** [38:19] I have a third for you. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [38:20] Yeah, sorry. Like, let me finish with the theoretical part. **Brandon Anderson** [38:23] Sorry. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [38:23] So- **Brandon Anderson** [38:23] What is Tesla running at right now? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [38:25] Tesla? **Brandon Anderson** [38:26] No, sorry. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [38:26] Well, that's, uh, that's a very good point. Like, it's, it's exactly, it was inspired by the levels of self-driving autonomy. **Brandon Anderson** [38:33] Waymo is level five, right? You just tell it where you wanna go, it picks you up and then you go there. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [38:37] I, I think, like, if you, if you look at the, the classic definitions of self-driving cars, Waymo is still, like, level four because it still requires even remote, but still, like, human control. It's like if Waymo gets in trouble, there is an operator who takes over and resolves this. So that would still be a level four. It doesn't map directly, but it's also five levels. Um- **Noah Smith** [38:58] Can I, can I interject a question here? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [39:00] Yeah. **Noah Smith** [39:00] So in terms of, uh, an FPV drone that's like a suicide drone that'll just blow itself up killing something, um, how do you know what it hit? Like, does it, uh, just transmit back, or do you sort of like lose track of it and hope it hit? Like, what, what happens to that? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [39:17] That's a great question. So, uh- **Noah Smith** [39:19] You need another drone **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [39:19] ... like the, the, the current battlefield in Ukraine is saturated with, uh, different types of drones. So obviously you have all the FPV drones and, you know, last year alone, Ukraine manufactured about 4 million of these, and then Russia is maybe like 20% less than that. And for this year, the publicly voiced target was 7 million on the Ukrainian side. So it's like serious numbers. We're getting in serious numbers here. Um, and then besides those, there are different, um, reconnaissance drones, ISR as we call them, and there are sort of tactical level ISR where we, both Ukrainians and Russians usually use, uh, Mavic, uh, drone by DJI. Um, and then there are a bunch of locally produced drones, which are sort of fixed wing drones that can stay in the air for much longer than Mavic, maybe, maybe like half an hour. And then, you know, there are drones that can stay for, uh, many hours or even up to a day. Uh, and those drones have, are more expensive, have more expensive cameras, et cetera, et cetera. We hunt those drones that Russians launch. The Russians hunt our drones, uh, uh, and so on. But ideally, ideally, when you, uh, are, uh, a, a group of soldiers operating an FPV, uh, you'll have someone in your, uh, company, uh, or, uh, someone in your platoon who has an ISR asset that will do target designation for you. They'll, they'll say, "Oh, like there's, there's a Russian vehicle over there. Uh, go and get him." Uh, and you go there, you get it, and they're like, "Okay," you know, uh, "Confirm." **Noah Smith** [40:57] Those guys are watching. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [40:58] Yeah. **Noah Smith** [40:58] They, they have their own drones in the sky. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [40:59] Target destroyed. They, they have like a carousel of drones because, like- **Noah Smith** [41:03] Right **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [41:03] ... one Mavic cannot stay more than 30 minutes. It like go- **Noah Smith** [41:06] Right. They're constantly surveilling the battlefield. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [41:08] Yeah, yeah. Almost, almost every, every spot on the battlefield. **Noah Smith** [41:11] Got it. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [41:11] But it's not always the case. Sometimes you will not have a surveillance asset, so then you would launch another FPV just to confirm that there was a hit. **Noah Smith** [41:20] Oh. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [41:20] And then if you see there was a hit and, um, you're not sure if it completely destroyed, you maybe hit again for good measure. **Noah Smith** [41:27] You double tap. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [41:28] Yeah. Um, so that's how it works. But I was about to, uh, give you another sort of piece of taxonomy. So you have five levels of autonomy, right? And then you have sort of eight dimensions of autonomous battlefield. ### Autonomous Battlefield **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [41:44] So what is eight dimensions? Uh, it's crucial to understand how autonomy evolves in a modern, uh, battlefield environment. So dimension number one is level of autonomy. You know, what are the capabilities that your asset has? Dimension number two is the platform you're operating on. So it can be a quadcopter, a fixed wing drone, um, different types of, you know, uh, um, maybe like a long range drone or short range drone, but it can also be a missile. You can have autonomy even on an artillery shell or a ground vehicle or a sea vehicle. So all of those are different platforms. Level three would be domain. So it's ground to ground or ground to air as an intersection, ground to sea or sea to air. They're all like all, all the nuances with, with different domains. Uh, then level four, uh, would be higher levels of autonomy, such as swarming, uh, drone carriers, drone nests, et cetera. **Noah Smith** [42:40] And now when you're saying level, you're talking about dimensions, not about autonomy levels, so- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [42:42] Oh, yeah, sorry. Yeah, I mean, I mean di- dimension **Noah Smith** [42:44] ... dimension four. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [42:45] Yeah, yeah, I used to say dimen- uh, b- b- supposed to say dimension. Uh, I say dimension because each of them works with another, right? So you, you might have, um, like third level autonomy, fixed wing drone operating in land to air, um, and stuff like that, right? And then operating in a swarm or operating from a nest. Uh, right? Then you have, uh, sort of dimension number five is environment. So is it day or night? Is it summer or winter? Is it, uh, humid, cold, uh, dry? Um, what kind of target is it? Is your target hiding in a forest, or is it, you know, behind a hill or within buildings? So all of that is environment. Then you have, uh, dimension number six is command and control. How are you dealing with mil- or like, you know, tens of thousands of those assets around the battlefield? How are you coordinating that on the higher levels of command? How are you collecting data, all that. Uh, dimension number seven would be infrastructure, so things like simulation, data collection tools, uh, security, uh, deployment mechanisms, et cetera. So all those systems have to be developed separately and integrate with all of the others. And finally, dimension number eight is, um, um, sort of distribution. Uh, have you deployed hundred of these systems or hundred thousand of these systems? Because those are two very different ballgames. Um, so that now gives you a more broad overview of how autonomy propagates across the, uh, battle space. **Brandon Anderson** [44:23] So as someone who has done machine learning and had gone out of distribution and had things, uh, go horribly wrong, um, you were talking several of these, uh, kind of axes of thinking about drone warfare seem like they could be very susceptible to some sort of distribution shift if you start making things autonomous. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [44:41] Like what? **Brandon Anderson** [44:42] I mean-- Well, I mean, first of all- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [44:44] If the, uh, I'm very interested- **Brandon Anderson** [44:45] Yeah. No, no, no **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [44:45] ... in sort of, sort of kinds of scenarios that you're thinking about. **Brandon Anderson** [44:48] Yeah. I mean, like the most obvious one is, uh, you, if I assume these are, you know, computer vision guided systems for at least the last mile, um, you know, how do you ensure that, oh, well, like you now have some cl- fog roll in or something and you, you know, the drones just attack the wrong thing? Or maybe, I mean, it probably will not turn around and fly back and attack you, but, you know- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [45:10] It's the same, the same question of how do you ensure that your mortar fire hits the right thing? Well, it's like mortar fire, give or take half, half a kilometer could be, you know, plus or minus. So maybe you fire one and then you fire another. Uh, so drones are actually m- uh, much better in, in being precise in those scenarios. And, uh, um, I think, you know, to your point, I think five to 10 years from now, it will be immoral to use weapons without AI. Because weapons without AI will be more likely to cause, uh, collateral damage or unwanted damage. Same way, it, it, it will be, um, immoral to drive your own car manually on a public road because it's, it's more likely to cause, um, unwanted damage. **Brandon Anderson** [46:03] Wow, I never considered that might be- **Noah Smith** [46:05] Really? **Brandon Anderson** [46:06] Yeah. **Noah Smith** [46:06] That's definitely coming. **Brandon Anderson** [46:07] Yeah. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [46:07] Anyway. **Noah Smith** [46:08] No, but, but that's- **Brandon Anderson** [46:08] Yeah. No, no, no **Noah Smith** [46:09] ... you know, that's an un- an obvious- **Brandon Anderson** [46:11] No, no **Noah Smith** [46:11] ... an obvious thought. I agree with you. **Brandon Anderson** [46:12] Yeah. **Noah Smith** [46:13] I, I, uh... No, I mean, they, obviously they're not gonna let you drive once most of the cars on the road are autonomous. **Brandon Anderson** [46:18] Well, yeah, no, that one don't I believe. Um- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [46:20] No, I think you were, you were talking about drones, right? **Noah Smith** [46:21] Oh, the drones, right. Yeah. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [46:22] The drones, yeah. The weapons, right? **Noah Smith** [46:23] Friendly fire and collateral damage and stuff like that is all minimized with, uh, with AI. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [46:28] Yeah. **Noah Smith** [46:28] But, um, okay, so here's my question. Take all-- l- let's go to level six autonomy. Let's take all of the, um, you know, target selection. Let, let's take all the battlefield data, integrate it into one big AI, and have that big AI basically be in command of the battlefield and- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [46:42] Yeah **Noah Smith** [46:42] ... and agentically do target selection. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [46:44] Be the general, right? **Noah Smith** [46:44] Yeah, it's a general. It's, um, you've cut humans out of the loop except maybe as dexterous robots, you know, repairing drones and fastening things to drones or maybe something like that 'cause you don't have those robots yet. Um, how soon are we there? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [46:57] Hmm. **Noah Smith** [46:58] AI general. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [46:59] Well, the most important thing to ask ourselves is who will be faster to that, us or our adversaries? **Noah Smith** [47:07] I assume us, but how fast will we be to that? I hope us. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [47:12] Hmm. I hope so too. **Noah Smith** [47:13] But how fast can we-- uh, like, when, when are we looking at that in terms of, like, horizons years? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [47:19] You know, like, technically, uh, it could, could, could be done now. Uh, the, the question is, of course, there's, you know, some engineering work to be done. Um, the bigger challenge is deployment. Uh, right? So okay, technically, you know, uh, like operation in Iran, right? They, they, they, you know, publicly, uh, it was claimed that, I think Palantir system was used for target designation, et cetera, et cetera. So it, it, it is not exactly as you say, the, the AI makes all the decisions, but basically AI goes through all the data you have, gives you these one thousand and twenty-seven different targets and says, "You-- To confirm, please press Okay." And you look at the targets and you're like, "Yeah, sounds right. Press Okay." Um, so that, that, that's-- I think that's where we are now already, or we were a couple weeks ago as we're recording this on, uh, April 10th. Um, another question is, uh, you know, how massively deployable it is. Is it, like, every decision being made like that, or is it, like, just some of the decisions made like that? Uh, and then different levels of command and control, you know, there you have, like, the, the platoon, the company level, the, the, the battalion, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Um- But, but, y-you know, the, the tricky thing here when we get into that territory, the tricky thing is if your enemy is getting advantage of being thousand times faster than yourself by deploying such systems, um, you know, what do you do? So you gotta- **Noah Smith** [49:12] The e- if the enemy is a thousand times faster than you at deploying those systems? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [49:15] N- like if, if enemy starts deploying level six autonomy, as you call it- **Noah Smith** [49:20] Right **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [49:20] ... and you have not started doing that- **Noah Smith** [49:22] You're in trouble. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [49:23] Yes. Exactly. So you have to catch up. So my point is that it is very important to think about the safety of these systems, but that thinking should not slow you down in developing them because they're critical for your existential, uh, survival, right? And like one person who doesn't think, doesn't get to think about the ethics of the war is a dead person. That person surely doesn't, doesn't get to think about it. **Noah Smith** [49:53] What would be the safety risk of such a system? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [49:56] Well, of course- **Noah Smith** [49:56] Friendly fire? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [49:57] Uh, just wrong decisions, right? **Noah Smith** [50:00] Oh, I see. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [50:00] Uh, you know, um, m- m- m- maybe, um, you know, these decisions- **Noah Smith** [50:07] Skynet AI decides it's gonna use the- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [50:09] No. The, these- **Noah Smith** [50:09] ... drone army to kill us **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [50:10] ... decisions will not only be made about drones. They, they are likely to made about what the humans should do on, on your side as well. **Noah Smith** [50:19] Mm-hmm. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [50:20] And then obviously some environments are more like Ukrainian-Russian war, uh, where you have this- **Noah Smith** [50:26] It will have to choose to risk lives. It will have to choose to sacrifice human lives on your side. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [50:30] Of course. Of course. And then some environments are, are just like dead, like, uh, uh, dead zones and, uh, there are no civilians. There are virtually no, no civilians close to the front line because like super dangerous, everyone has evacuated from there. But there are other environments which are more like, okay, there's a counterterrorist operation. There's like a group of terrorists or like group of civilians or, or like, it's like the, uh, uh, recent operations in Iran, I imagine that the US and Israeli forces do not want to harm civilians. They only w- o- o- only, only targeted the military targets there, right? So in those situations, it's, it's a different level of responsibility for that decision-making as well. Um, and then there are just such a big variety of those military missions, and I'm not even like well-informed or well-educated in military science to tell you about all those scenarios. We would need to, uh, you know, uh, pu- put some, some general besides me and, uh, maybe a Ukraine general and American general would, would've told you very different stories about these things. **Noah Smith** [51:35] Got it. Um, can I ask a few more questions? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [51:37] Yeah, yeah. **Noah Smith** [51:37] All right. So in 2013, I wrote one of my first, uh, paid articles ever was, uh, about how the era of drones will change human society. Um, I was just sitting around bored thinking about things. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [51:54] You were way ahead of your time. **Noah Smith** [51:56] And I said, I said the following will happen- **Brandon Anderson** [51:57] It's, this article is real. I've read it. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [51:59] Yeah. **Brandon Anderson** [51:59] It's, it's really- **Noah Smith** [52:00] I said small, small autonomous, uh, suicide drones, um, will cleanse the battlefield of, of human infantry. Human infantry will not be able to stand against swarms of AI-powered, um, suicide drones. That was... You know, I didn't even know about, you know, like AlexNet at the time, I think. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [52:20] Yeah. **Brandon Anderson** [52:20] And then- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [52:20] Yeah. **Brandon Anderson** [52:21] But it's- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [52:21] You're just an avid sci-fi reader. **Noah Smith** [52:23] I'm an avid sci-fi reader, but also like it's not like, like there will be a way to do that. It's a, it's a nonlinear multidimensional search problem, and you get enough compute, you'll find some search algorithm that will get you there. Um, and so, uh, I, yeah, I think that, that one sentence describes the bitter lesson right there. It's just like it's a multidimensional search space. You search it somehow. I don't know. Figure out some s- get a grad student to make a search algorithm. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [52:48] Sooner or later. **Brandon Anderson** [52:48] Yeah. **Noah Smith** [52:49] It's not that hard. Anyway, so but then, but I guess the point is, um, uh, the point is that human infantry on the battlefield will be, will be gone. At the... And I wrote that in 2013. Many people on social media laughed at me for that, called me hysterical. Said things like, "Electronic warfare will knock all the drones out of the sky." Um, you know, like, "You need humans to hold ground." Uh, that's something you still hear from a lot of people on social media today. Uh, I feel that this article that I've written has never been directionally wrong. It has gotten more and more right steadily over time, and that we're very clo- reading the battlefield reports from Ukraine, uh, where, you know, human infantry are basically guy, like a few guys hiding in dugouts for months. And I'm not sure what they're doing. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [53:35] That's on Ukraine's side. On, on the Russian side, that's just like a zerg rush. **Noah Smith** [53:39] The zerg rush, and then they just die. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [53:40] Yeah. **Noah Smith** [53:41] And then, but they have some guys in dugouts too, right? Like hi- like h- hiding in, in dugouts for months. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [53:45] Yeah, they have. Yeah. **Noah Smith** [53:46] Okay. But like, but that, like what are those guys doing in the dugouts? Are providing like frontline, like, like reconnaissance? Like what are they doing? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [53:54] Well, you know, if there is a guy in a dugout with, uh, with some bullets and automatic weapon, uh, the other guy cannot come and take the, the, the dugout. So that's- **Noah Smith** [54:08] I see **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [54:08] ... they are, they're establishing control over territory. **Noah Smith** [54:10] I see. So, so, so that is, so there still is a use for human infantry on the battlefield as of today. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [54:16] Yeah. **Noah Smith** [54:16] How long will that last? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [54:17] I think it will last for a while. There's, this is funny. Uh, there's this whole, um, layer of the modern culture, a modern Ukraine culture built around the war-related stuff. So there is this, uh, punk rock band, uh, that is called, uh, SZC, uh, I guess in English that would be, uh, which, which stands for, for, uh, like a deserter or something like that. Uh, so anyhow, this band has a, a song titled "2030"- As basically about year 2030 and the war still s- s- still goes on as like the, the th- whatever, third world, world war or whatever. And, uh, they, they basically, they, uh, sing about the AI and like cyborgs and everything, but the simple infantry is still needed, and we're still like getting cold in those dugouts and we're still doing our job. That's, that's sort of, uh, the, uh, the theme of the song. Uh, a- and it seems like that's actually what's gonna happen. Uh, there is this- **Noah Smith** [55:30] Ground robots will not replace humans in the dugouts soon. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [55:34] You know, I'm, I'm, I'm very much interested in following the whole humanoid robot theme and, uh- **Noah Smith** [55:40] What about like a dog, dog robot? **Brandon Anderson** [55:42] Or just mobile controlled platforms or something. **Noah Smith** [55:44] Spiders, spiders or, yeah. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [55:45] Yeah. **Noah Smith** [55:45] Everything evolves into a crab. **Brandon Anderson** [55:46] Yeah, crab. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [55:49] A humanoid- **Noah Smith** [55:49] Bioroboticization of warfare . **Brandon Anderson** [55:51] Of warfare . **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [55:52] There, there is a lot of utility in humanoid robots because the world is designed around humanoids. Um, so I would not like 100% disqualify the possibility that, uh, you know, sometimes 10 years in the future, humanoid robots, uh, will be actually fighting. So that's, that's an actual Terminator kinda scenario. **Noah Smith** [56:15] Uh, you have in, in the first Terminator movie, you look at what they've got on the battlefield, they've got flying bomber drones and humanoid robots. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [56:21] Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And look, the cost of, uh, large language models of running them is getting so low, um, you can have basically an inexpensive computer running, you know, what was a state-of-the-art model a year and a half ago, running it locally on a device with an open source model, which also means that the Chinese can have it, the Russians can have it, the North Koreans h- can have it, et cetera. Um, so that is already possible. And with, when, when, when we're looking at the acceleration of, of the neural nets, uh, you know, uh, I would've, uh, if not the acceleration of, of, of the large language models, I would've said that, you know, I, I don't think that humanoid robots will be able to be useful in the battlefield earlier than in 10 years. But, you know, if you account for the exponential, uh, it might be, you know, five years or so. The problem with all of the autonomous systems, and i- i- i- it's like starts with self-driving cars and even, even with, uh, all the AI, like modern day AI agents, to make them really, uh, useful, you have to solve such a long tail of edge cases, uh, that it's really difficult to make them useful. Like we were promised, uh, you know, self-driving cars, what, like 2007, Sebastian Thrun and Google, and even before that, all the challenges, everything. And Elon of course told us it's gonna be, you know, one year from 2014, and now we still don't have self-driving Teslas everywhere. We have Waymos in SF and some other places, but they're still like not, not perfect. So I think, you know, I expect something similar from self-flying drones and fully autonomous drones, and we saw that firsthand as with each le- level of autonomy that we're adding, um, there is a, a, a very wide distance between a prototype and something that is ready to be scaled to millions of units and something that has been scaled to millions of units. Um, but, but, uh, the, the, the race with, um, uh, like AI coding tools is just insane. Uh, so things might accelerate very fast, faster than we can imagine. **Brandon Anderson** [58:47] So I think your point is that with, um, you know, due to this long tail behavior, f- level one autonomy as you've defined it, is actually very natural. Like you basically are just solving an image recognition and tracking system. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [59:03] Yeah. You know, it's, it's actually interesting that you say it that way, and I, I thought about this, this the very same way, and we have this joke that there are like 200 companies in Ukraine which are trying to solve last mile, um, targeting or terminal guidance. It seems like we're like the only company that actually solved that. Because even that problem- **Brandon Anderson** [59:23] I'm not saying, I'm not saying it's trivial, but it's at least something that you imagine given our current state. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [59:26] But us, us and Eric Schmidt, like Eric Schmidt's companies are, are pretty good. **Brandon Anderson** [59:29] Yeah. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [59:29] Like I actually have lots of respect to what they're doing and they're, they have been practically influential and helpful on the battlefield and, uh, they have good engineering. **Brandon Anderson** [59:39] Yeah. So I, I wasn't, I wasn't saying it's trivial. I'm just saying this is a, something naturally adaptive based upon things that we know work, um, well. But some of the other domains that, where you do have to make decisions and you have a long tail become much harder, and you worry about edge cases more. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [59:58] Like the mo- the more complex behavior you're trying to simulate, uh, the, the more edge cases there are, right? The, the more ways to do it wrong there are. And then there are different approaches. It's like if you think about, if you read academic papers about robotics, right? You sort of, the, the robot is represented as some- something that has the, the sort of, uh, sensor input. And then you have three, uh, levels of, uh, sort of l- logics or, or decision making, which are perception, planning, and control, and then you have actuators as output. So, uh, you know, pre neural nets, uh, you would do perception, output, and control all with classic logics, right? Then, you know, with AlexNet and computer vision, you, you could do perception with, uh, neural nets and the rest with logic. You can currently do each of those separately with neural nets, each of those separately with logics, or you can just have one huge neural net that just takes lots of sensory data. It's not just pixels. Could be sound, could be accelerometer, could be everything. Um- Uh, as input and just outputs the controls. And other some of the self-driving car companies are doing that or, like, experimenting between different ways of doing that. Um, so you can also think about that, um, and the way you implement those features, uh, also influences how much degrees of freedom the system would have, right? Like control, you can do it classical algorithmic control with common filters and PAD filter, uh, PAD controllers, et cetera, or you can do a neural net, uh, that, that was trained in a gym with a reinforcement learning, et cetera. Um, and th- those would be two different behaviors of a system. **Brandon Anderson** [1:01:53] Yeah. Okay. I-- maybe my point was just much more high level. Yeah **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:01:57] Or you, you can like if, if you go even like if, if you go high level, you can, you can like train to, like, have whatever, like Fei-Fei Li and, and folks who are doing like physical, uh, sort of- **Brandon Anderson** [1:02:08] World models **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:02:09] ... uh, world models, right, physical intelligence, uh, they, they're trying to make these big, big models and sort of understand the world and, and then supposedly you have such model and you can tell a drone, "Okay, like, go over, over that hill and, like, find the ba- bad guys and then get them," or, "Make me a video and make me a photo of the guy smiling and get back to me." Right? Uh, that's one way. Another way you have like these subsystems, like one is navigation, another is finding the person, another is like getting to them to take a photo. Uh, and those are, again, very different behaviors. Uh, and then it's not that one is necessarily better than, than the other, and we might have more technological ability to do one or another. Uh, but all of those systems will exist. And then again, you should always keep in mind that it's only the-- not only the good guys are developing these systems, the bad guys are developing these, these systems as well. **Brandon Anderson** [1:03:01] Yeah. I guess where I'm going with this, back to Noah's original thought with the end of the, you know, end of the soldier. And so in order to replace soldiers- **Noah Smith** [1:03:11] Or at least the end of the rifleman. **Brandon Anderson** [1:03:12] Or the end of the rifleman, yeah. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:03:13] Yeah. I'm, I'm not seeing that very close. And it was like I'm, you know, as much as I'm, I'm a lover of sci-fi and all of that and a technologist, the more I, I, I try to be, um, like the, the, the I try, try, try, try to have certain humility about these things, uh, and like the, the military, um, domain and th- there was just so much human history and blood and, and tears, uh, dedicated to, uh, sort of understanding this art of war and perfecting it and, and so on. Uh, there is so much knowledge in there that I don't feel like I, I even started to comprehend, uh, a lot of that. But one thing that I really understood is that even though drones are now making eighty percent of, of, of the casualties, you go to the actual officers, you, you, you talk to the actual, like, brigade commanders, uh, corps commanders, um, and they explain to you, uh, how all of it fits together, how when you're thinking about an operation that involves a couple thousand people to, you know, get, g- get this piece of land, uh, out of the enemy's hands, deoccu- de- deoccupy it, how it is so complex. It involves, you know, dozens of different types of drones, and then land operations and reconnaissance operations, psychological operations, and then aviations and tanks and logistics, and all kinds of these different assets. So modern warfare is really very complex, and the fact that the drones are the latest, coolest thing, and then the, the AI is essentially the latest, coolest thing, uh, doesn't mean that now it's all that and only that, right? Um, so yeah, uh, whoever is looking into that, I, I think should, should realize that it, it's, it's not just what the press talks about, that the reality is much more difficult, much more complex. **Noah Smith** [1:05:18] Let's talk about China and China's manufacturing capabilities. So suppose that someone, like suppose the United States went to war with China. ### China's Advantage **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:05:26] Mm-hmm. **Noah Smith** [1:05:26] And then- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:05:27] I hope not. **Noah Smith** [1:05:28] I hope not as well. And then s- but suppose that drones were very essential to that war of all the types of drones that we're talking about here, and that suppose that China said, "All right, well, you need X and Y and Z, uh, to make those drones to fight us, and we control the production of X and Y and Z, so we're just gonna cut you right off, and now you have no drones." Um I know that a number of countries, including Ukraine and Taiwan, have been making moves to, um, China-proof their drone productions that China couldn't do that. Uh, examples of things they might be able to cut off might include rare earths, uh, fiber optic cable that you were talking about before, um, various other things that where even if they don't control a hundred percent of the production, they control enough of the production that would be extremely expensive to produce it without relying on Chinese sources or the market's fragmented enough, et cetera. What do you see as China's key bottlenecks, and how easy are those to overcome in terms of China-proofing drone production in case of a war against China? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:06:29] Hmm. Yeah, well, let me start with a saying that, um, although China does not sell directly to Ukraine and it does sell directly to Russia, um, a lot of Ukrainian supply chains, uh, they start in China, right? And, um, we're not in a conflict with China, uh, and we would not want to be in a conflict with China. And, um, we'd hope that China stays a neutral power between Ukraine and Russia and the US as well. Uh, that said, the scenario that you're describing, everything is much, much, much worse. So think about this. Last year, Ukraine produced four million FPV drones. Ukraine is not the most industrious nation in the world. China can produce four billion of these FPV drones. China can make them not drones with propellers, but fixed-wing drones which go not 40 kilometers far, but maybe two to three hundred kilometers inland. Slightly more expensive. **Noah Smith** [1:07:35] With internal combustion or- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:07:36] No, no, no. With battery- **Noah Smith** [1:07:37] Battery-powered fixed-wing drones. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:07:38] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Battery, yeah. **Noah Smith** [1:07:39] What's the propulsion system on those propellers? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:07:42] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. **Noah Smith** [1:07:43] I don't, I just don't know how that works. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:07:44] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Um, so you have that. They can also make them all fully autonomous. They have DJI, the world's most advanced drone company. They can make them fully autonomous without GPS, without anything. And then they can put those drones on, um, you know, maybe tens of thousands of fully autonomous underwater submarines, or maybe not even that, just on shipping containers, and, uh, you know, um, barges that ship goods or freight ships. Um, and then they show up with, uh, you know, millions of drones packed onto those, uh, sea vessels. They show up to any coastline in the world, be it Taiwan or be it California, and they have millions of long-range impactors targeted at a, at a piece of land. What do you do with that? There are not enough hunter submarines. There are not enough anti, um- **Noah Smith** [1:08:46] Ship missiles **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:08:47] ... yeah, anti-ship missiles, anti-ship, uh, planes. Uh, they can produce these assets, uh, on, in tens of thousands of factories because they're so simple to produce that, you know, even the, if, if the FBI director picks a phone, calls to the President of the United States, says, "Hey, the scenario Yaroslav was warning us about is beginning to unfold. We need to do a preemptive strike." Uh, you wouldn't have enough assets, uh, to, to, to do preemptive strikes because there can be like tens of thousands of places where these things are being manufactured. Uh, and then so to counteract a scenario like that, we would need to have like a similar amount of mass, um- **Noah Smith** [1:09:40] You mean similar number of drones? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:09:41] Yes, to intercept that, like either in sea or in, in the air, et cetera, at a similar cost, right? So economics should, should work out. I'll tell you that currently we in the West and we in the United States, we don't have the technology to do that. We don't have- **Noah Smith** [1:10:01] What technologies, key technologies do we lack? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:10:04] Like autonomy, mass drone manufacturing, stuff like that. **Noah Smith** [1:10:07] Do we lack autonomy technology? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:10:09] Well, I think so. If the- **Noah Smith** [1:10:11] Because our computer vision algorithms are not as good? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:10:13] It's not only about the computer vision algorithms. It's like the, the, like if, if, if, if a group of companies by Eric Schmidt founded two, three years ago and, um, my small, small startup, uh, was like maybe not as small, but it's also founded three years ago, uh, are sort of two of the leading companies in the world and maybe a couple others who are capable of something like that, but not really on small drones. Uh, I, I do think we'll, we were behind China in technology. So we lack technology, we lack mass manufacturing capacity, we lack the components, and we lack the rare earth materials. So there are four layers in which we're behind this challenge, and that's why it is my point that, uh, we in the v- in the West and especially United States, we should, there should be far more smart people working in defense and should be more funding, uh, if we want to keep the resemblance of our good past life. **Noah Smith** [1:11:14] That's really important. Would you say that right now as things stand in conventional terms, not, you know, abstracting from strategic nuclear weapons, but in conventional terms, would you say that China is now the supreme conventional military power on Earth, given its ability to manufacture and deploy drones in the quantity and quality that you just described? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:11:36] Look, I, I don't, I don't think we have all the information to claim that, but we cannot count it out, and that alone should be, um, you know, a big warning sign. We have not seen Chinese drones in action. We've seen some of the Iranian drone in action and Russian drones in action. Not Chinese really. Not seen Chinese forces in action. Obviously, you know, hopefully this never happens, but the conflict of a scale US, China, uh, there are many sort of classical assets that, you know, we should not discount as we just discussed. We should not discount artillery in the land war. We should not discount, you know, air, air-carrying groups and, you know, the, the, the Air Force, uh, and long-range missiles and, and electronic warfare and satellites, et cetera. But then there are also things that, mm, you know, we, at least we as a general public don't really know about China. I'm sure there's a lot of information that the US intelligence has about the Chinese capabilities. Um, but yeah, I think if you, if you get back to the scenario that I just described and if you take that like sort of to the maximum, you basically see that whoever has bigger manufacturing capacity, that side wins. **Noah Smith** [1:13:03] That's just a typical law of conventional warfare and has been forever. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:13:07] Sort of. **Brandon Anderson** [1:13:08] Do you read Noah's blog? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:13:09] Uh, uh, I, not as often as I would like. But I, I read Noah's, uh, X. **Noah Smith** [1:13:15] It's not necessary. **Brandon Anderson** [1:13:16] It's, it's a theme where you- **Noah Smith** [1:13:17] Don't, don't read my, my X. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:13:19] Yeah. **Noah Smith** [1:13:19] It's just for jokes. **Brandon Anderson** [1:13:20] He does, he has no opinion about anything. **Noah Smith** [1:13:21] It's just jokes. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:13:22] No opinion. **Noah Smith** [1:13:23] Um, but okay, so here's the, um- I guess there's two questions here. The question of could the United States and other countries allied with the United States even develop supply chains that are independent of China to make any of these drones? And the second question is, could they do it in sufficient mass? And so I think the answer to the question of can they do it in sufficient mass is today no. Um, but in a extended, prolonged war situation, things change a lot. And, um, you know, all the development restrictions that we put on new factories go out the window, and a sense of urgency. You know, I mean, Ukraine obviously wasn't making all these drones before the war. And so if America had the same kind of urgency that Ukraine has now, you know, things would happen, things would move, and of course, America has allies too, or had allies until recently, and may have them again in the future. Um but, but America has or had allies that would also scale up very quickly, like Japan and, um, you know, European countries if we ever ally with them again, et cetera. And so, um, a lot of things could then change in terms of the actual mass. So I, in terms of looking at China and saying they have all these factories today, and looking at the history of conventional warfare, you know, America had very few military fact- very little defense production capability on the eve of World War II, and ended up easily outproducing everyone else, even the Soviet Union. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:14:47] Maybe not easily. Yeah. **Noah Smith** [1:14:49] Not easily, but, but I, I mean, by a long, a long shot. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:14:51] Also they had a benefit of not being attacked. **Noah Smith** [1:14:54] That's right. That's right. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:14:55] That helps. **Noah Smith** [1:14:56] Yeah. And so, um, who knows how secure they are now, but, um... Or what, you know, we're cyber doomerists and- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:15:04] Yeah, no, look, I totally agree with your sentiment. I like, and I'm not as y- y- y, I'm, I'm la- I'm even less doomerist than, than you are. Uh, or, uh, as, as, as it seems to me, you, you're a little bit doomerish, but like in the long term you're bullish. **Noah Smith** [1:15:17] I'm not, I'm not doomerish. I'm, I'm thinking about the, I'm thinking about what we need to do. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:15:21] Yeah. **Noah Smith** [1:15:22] You know, I'm not, I'm not thinking like, "Oh, we're doomed." That's not my point. It's never useful saying that. Um, if you're doomed, then just don't go on podcasts. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:15:30] Yeah. **Noah Smith** [1:15:30] Um, you know, go pet a rabbit and play a video game or something. It's... Anyway, no, if you're, we're not doomed, but, um, but, uh, I'm saying step one, how, what are the key choke points that we need tomorrow, besides rare earths, which we already know, what are the other key choke points that the West needs to free itself from Chinese supply chains on in order to manufacture even one drone free of- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:15:53] Mm-hmm, mm-hmm **Noah Smith** [1:15:53] ... Chinese supply chains? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:15:55] Well, there, there are companies here who are doing that, like our, uh, we have, uh, good friends, a company called Neuros. I know they're, uh, down in El Segundo or whatever, like somewhere, um, South California. **Noah Smith** [1:16:06] What are the most pressing choke points besides rare earths that everyone talks about? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:16:10] Yeah. You know, that's one of the pieces that we do, thermal cameras. Uh, that's like actually a big one. Um- **Noah Smith** [1:16:17] Hmm. Thermal cameras. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:16:18] Yeah. Uh, then like, uh, the, the motors, uh, like you, you need, um, the spe- special- **Noah Smith** [1:16:25] Even after you have the magnets, then you turn them into- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:16:28] Yeah **Noah Smith** [1:16:28] ... a really good motor. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:16:29] Yeah, yeah, yeah. You, you have, you need these special magnets and then that's sort of your rare earth component. **Noah Smith** [1:16:34] Right. That's, that's the thing, yes. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:16:35] And like rare earth is not that oh, like there are these metals that o- only for, for some reason, God only put them under the Chinese territory and not, not under any others. No, like they're distributed. There are plenty of them around Earth. It's, it's about the refining capabilities and like investing into that and, and so on. And then like frankly at some point we don't have that many humans. Like, uh, that's where the humanoid robots help. Like China is a big populous country. Uh, the, the population of like United West is, uh, comparable to that, but the population of the US is much lower than that. And I, I definitely think that, you know, the, the whole West should get their act together, uh, because, uh, you know, ubi semper victoria, ibi concordia. Uh, there is always victory where, where there is, uh, union. **Noah Smith** [1:17:27] Agreement. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:17:28] Agreement, yes. Um, so I think we, we, we sh- I, sort of as, as the free nations of the world we should get their act together because freedom is what, what unites us. And I'm, you know, I'm, I'm also like pretty mad at what's happening in the European Union. Uh, and I think that, um, you know, uh, current US administration is the best thing that has ever happened to Europe since World War II probably. Uh, or since post World War II, because World War II wasn't the best thing. **Noah Smith** [1:18:00] Trump withdrawing the image of omnipotent American support forced the Europeans to get their butts in gear, unite, and- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:18:07] Yeah **Noah Smith** [1:18:08] ... pick up their defense spending. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:18:08] And also like doing that not in a nice way, right? Like when JD Vance came to Munich, uh, Forum one year ago, he wasn't like super nice, like, "Oh, please, our European friends, please could you please increase your, uh, defense spending?" He was somewhat pushy. Uh, let's put it that way. And that, I, I think that was a necessary measure. Like I've been, I've been thinking about that. Could it, could it have been he, maybe he could have been nicer? I was like, no, because like the voters of European leaders, the European countries, would have not understood this. They, they would not get the message. And now I think i- the message was gotten across, but Europe is still sort of slow to wake up. I would put it that way. Things are getting better, but I'm not happy about the speed of how they're getting better. So when I, when I, like, when I would go to, uh, some of the European capitals, I would get back pretty depressed from like talking to their, you know, military officials and their entrepreneurs, et cetera. Here, I've been in the US for the last month or so, I'm not, not depressed. I'm actually, I'm, I'm actually excited. I still think you should like 10X the effort in, um, sort of making sure that- Uh, you remain the, the, the strongest power, uh, in, in the world and you can defend your values, et cetera. But, um, but I'm, I'm very optimistic and definitely once we are in danger, I think, uh, we're just like lots of very smart people in the West who can figure these things out. Uh, but people in China are also extremely smart. It's, it's very different from even the Cold War sort of situation. Like Soviet Union was, uh, economically a very declining power. China's not like that. And then if, if we look at, you know, electric car race, I think they're ahead of the US and ahead of the whole world, definitely ahead of Europe, which used to be sort of a car superpower. Um, when you look at AI, I think they're almost where we are, maybe slightly behind. Uh, when you look at humanoid robotics, I would argue they're ahead. And, uh, in many other like, in like medicine and sort of biosciences, there's lots of interesting things there. And like in consumer space, there are lots of interesting, uh, things there. I don't know if you heard this podcast called 996. Uh, I don't know if, if it's still airing or not. There used to be a fantastic podcast by some, uh, American, American Chinese, uh, businessman, maybe venture funds. Uh- **Noah Smith** [1:20:55] About the Chinese economy **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:20:56] ... a- a- about, about China from a sort of tech venture point of view. Um, so, and I, I lived in China for maybe four months and I visited a couple times. Um, like, uh, even, even WeChat is like s- such a more advanced app than anything we have in the West. Um, so we-- it's very important not to be too arrogant, and I think we're guilty of that, like definitely in the US. Uh, you know, sometimes we tend to be too arrogant. Like I, I think like humility helps always, at least to me personally. Um, yeah. And then I, I think like we don't have to, we don't have to obviously be enemies. So, um, you know, like with Ukraine and Russia, it's like Russia came to kill all of these people and get all of this territory. With China and the US it's not like that, and thanks God it's not like that, right? **Noah Smith** [1:21:55] It might be with China and Taiwan. Maybe. Or Japan. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:21:58] Hopefully not. Yeah. It's like- **Noah Smith** [1:22:00] Hopefully not **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:22:01] ... Ch- China has their own, you know, problems probably with, with human rights, uh, et cetera. But, um, you know, hopefully, uh, it's still not beyond the, the fixing point. **Noah Smith** [1:22:13] Hopefully. Hopefully. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:22:14] But we, we, we should, we should be armed, right? We should, we should be ready to whatever and, uh, then that alone decreases the probability of any conflict. If you're weak, you're basically provoking the conflict. The problem with Europe these days is that like last year, Ukraine and Russia went in drone technology of 2025, uh, year to drone technology of 2026. Europe went from winter of 2022 to spring of 2022. So the gap, Europe didn't even make one year of progress. The g- and the US, I would argue, made less than a year of progress as well in, in the last year. So the gap, the technological gap is getting wider and wider and wider. And at some point, like I'm looking at polls, uh, polls who are like very close to us and close to Russia. **Noah Smith** [1:23:07] Polish people- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:23:08] Polish people **Noah Smith** [1:23:08] ... not, not surveys. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:23:09] Oh, yeah. Sorry. Yeah, yeah. That's what I meant. Sorry, not my first language. **Noah Smith** [1:23:13] When I'm looking at the polls, what are they, what are they saying? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:23:16] Yeah. Well, Polish people, polls- **Noah Smith** [1:23:17] No, no, Pol- no, it's the right word. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:23:18] Yeah. **Noah Smith** [1:23:19] You know what I'm thinking, yeah, thinking about. Yeah. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:23:21] So I'm looking at them and they bought like 100 tanks and four submarines. It's like, dudes, you don't have like 1,000 people who know how to operate an FPV. What the hell you're doing? Like- **Noah Smith** [1:23:31] So Poland is not preparing for war correctly. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:23:34] Uh, I- **Noah Smith** [1:23:34] They're doing a very bad job **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:23:34] ... from what I can see, they're not, not doing it right. Uh, and the problem is they'll, they'll be in a situation where, uh, they're so pro- proud of their winged hussars and like their, their cavalry and the enemy is attacking with airplanes and tanks. Uh, that, that's literally like the, the gap is getting wider between Russia and Poland. **Noah Smith** [1:23:58] That happened in 1939. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:24:01] I don't want that to happen again. **Noah Smith** [1:24:03] Um, all right. So, so the Europeans need to wake up more. Um, if you were advising America's defense establishment, which you might be doing in real life, but if you were saying things on a podcast that might be heard by some people connected to that defense establishment- ... then which you may or may not be, um, what are like the... besides more funding, you know, more funding, uh, that'll be necessary for anything, literally anything. But so what are the top priorities policy-wise for America to increase its readiness right now? ### Defense Policy **Noah Smith** [1:24:34] And let's say three to five priorities. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:24:38] Yeah. Well, uh, look, I, I really like this quote, I think it's by Arthur C. Clarke, that the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet. Um, and, um, just the same way as Silicon Valley as, as this sort of future location for all things tech, uh, Kyiv and Ukraine is sort of the defense valley. It's, it's, it's the, the, the point where the future of defense has already arrived, and there is a ton of things to learn from that, starting with particular, you know, hundreds of companies in, in very particular fields to the battlefield experience, from battlefield commanders of every level, starting from soldiers, surgeon to, to platoon level commander to brigade level commander. Uh, special forces and, and, and intelligence, all of that. Um, to how the government, uh, organizes, uh, the sort of the infrastructure and, and sort of the, the playing ground for all these businesses to, to flourish, e-et cetera. So I, I would definitely look into much tighter integration and exchanging, uh, the experience and so on. Um, that would be one thing. Um, you know, I think reform and procurement would be another thing, and I, I think that's what, um, is currently being done with, uh, drone dominance. I think Pete Hegseth is, is leading that and maybe some other people in the administration. I think that's extremely sort of powerful and right thing to do, and they, they should scale that big times. Um, well, obviously, you know, any, any sort of military person would say, "Well, yes, okay, Yar, you're fine. Cool." But you know, Ukraine and its war theater is very, very much different from, you know, potential scenarios that US, um, might have to fight, uh, a-and, and yes, I agree, but there is still so much to learn even, like, from the sea warfare that, that Ukraine is, is, um, uh, doing and, um, then long strain, uh, l-long range drones, like these Shahads that unfortunately damaged some of the American equipment in the Middle East. Uh, they can fly up to two thousand kilometers. So, like, if you think about in the Pacific region, like two thousand kilometers, that covers a lot of land with all the, like, islands and aircraft carriers, et cetera. **Noah Smith** [1:27:17] I think America's learning that lesson right now in Iran, in the Middle East. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:27:21] W-well, you would think so, but then, I mean, I'm not sure. Uh, it's like there was so many chances to learn that lesson from Ukraine before, and I don't think it was, like, fully learned, so I'm not sure how fully learned the Middle East lessons were. **Noah Smith** [1:27:35] Perhaps losing a war to a minor power will teach America. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:27:39] Well, yeah. I mean, you can, you can- **Noah Smith** [1:27:40] Although the, the, their economic weapon will be the most important and decisive by far, but still some of our bases were supposedly, allegedly rendered unusable by their Shahed-type drones. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:27:52] Yeah. L-look, I think, um, there are so many lessons to be taken from this, like Russia, a much bigger power attacking Ukraine. You know, given the same logic that we discussed, whoever has more production capacity should win. But then Russia didn't achieve victory in Ukraine, and then the US didn't get, like, full victory in Iran. Probably achieved some of the goals, but probably not all of them. So that also, you can flip that. Like when you say, "Okay, what if China has so much more capacity than the US? What if they attack us for whatever reason? How can we hold them back if we don't have the rare earths?" Well, as the Ukraine and Iranian examples show, uh, you know, you actually can hold back something like that even if you're a less capable, uh, party. **Noah Smith** [1:28:42] Uh, well, those examples did rely on Chinese supply chains, though. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:28:46] Um, partially yes, but then if you think about Ukraine in February twenty-two, twenty twenty-two to, you know, first half year or a year, wasn't much reliance on Chinese supply chain. We were just relying on whatever we, we've got. So that's one side of things. Another side of things is, um, is, is basically how much suffering can you withstand along multiple axes? It's not just the military axis, it's also like the economic axis and the political axis, I would, I would argue. So, like, one of the reasons why wars stop or start is because the political pl- pressure on the leadership internally in the country is so high that you just have to stop that, right? Um, so I think that differs big times, uh, from whether you were the one who's seen by the population as the party which started the conflict or the one who was attacked. That's one part. Another, just by overall state of the society. Like, and one thing I'm worried about in Europe now, that people are not ready to fight even if they're attacked. Like, when people are asked about that, they're like, "Oh, I'm just gonna move somewhere where there's like less, there's no war." Um, so that's a challenge, and that's what makes Europe weaker right now. And, um, you know, the US didn't really have to ever, I think, fight a foreign war on its own turf. Um, I hope that never happens, but in case that would have happened, I don't know what, what would be... You know, how would the rich cities of, uh, East or West Coast, how would people behave? Like, would, would all the Wall Street bankers and Silicon Valley VCs, uh, you know, mobilize and really start working on, on, on defense stuff? I h- I would love to think so. I like, that's the way I think about the American spirit. **Noah Smith** [1:30:50] The way we did in World War II. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:30:53] In a way. But look, like it wasn't that, that clear in World War II, and like Churchill, it was like famously said, "America will always make the right decision after trying all the wrong ones," right? And it's like one could argue that there is this sort of this USA that lives in popular culture and was sort of created by Hollywood as, like, cool dudes that will always come and do the right thing, right? And then if you, if you look at like, uh, international politics- It, it doesn't necessarily always look like that, you know. Like, the Budapest Memorandum, like Ukraine gave all of its nuclear weapons, the second, uh, worst -- third's largest, uh, nuclear arsenal, um, you know, because the US and, and, and Russia and the others were, uh, very persuasive and they're like, "Yeah, just give it away. We, we guarantee you security." And they're like, "Oh, it's not guarantees, it's assurances. We use the word 'assurances,' so therefore we didn't promise you much. You just gave it away for free." And then like Russia attacks and like no reaction. So the whole world, like 2022, the whole world looks at it and is like, "Oh, okay. So maybe we should get nukes." So like my prediction, next couple decades, a lot more countries, uh, will be working their own nukes. Um- **Noah Smith** [1:32:03] They really should. I, I've, I'm consistently advocated for, uh, specifically Japan, South Korea, and Poland to get nukes. But obviously- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:32:10] Y- yeah, like- **Noah Smith** [1:32:11] ... Ukraine should as well, but can't **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:32:12] Someone, someone, uh, someone could argue that if, if a country currently doesn't work on their own nuclear program, they're, uh, doing a disservice to their country and the government should be fired. Like, because it seems like from the recent world history that that, that is like the only way to actually provide credible deterrence, all right? Um, so I, I, I guess, I think like in Europe, people are not quite sure, uh, how will America behave. Will it behave as the Hollywood hero or will it behave pragmatically as it did at the beginning of World War II, or as it did, you know, with when, when Ukraine was attacked by Russia and, uh, you know, uh, the, the US just decided to sort of push the Budapest Memorandum, uh, aside because, of course, Russia's a nuclear power and, like, we don't wanna mess with it. **Noah Smith** [1:33:00] Everyone says Russia's behind right now in the drone war. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:33:04] Sure. Okay. **Noah Smith** [1:33:05] Um, but that wasn't true a year ago. So a year ago people were saying either Russia was ahead or they're at parity, or maybe a year and a half ago. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:33:11] Hmm. **Noah Smith** [1:33:13] Russia has more people, four times as many people about, um, or more. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:33:18] Yeah, I think give or take, yeah. **Noah Smith** [1:33:19] Yeah. And- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:33:20] 30 versus like 120-ish. Yeah. **Noah Smith** [1:33:22] Yeah. So, so four times as many people. Um, more help from China. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:33:29] Like economy is like te- uh, 10- **Noah Smith** [1:33:31] Yeah **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:33:31] ... 10, 20 times bigger. I don't know. **Noah Smith** [1:33:32] Oil, a lot of oil money. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:33:33] A lot bigger. **Noah Smith** [1:33:34] A lot of oil money, uh, that Ukraine just doesn't have. More direct help from China than Ukraine is getting. Um, so Russia just has this massive advantage in, in scaling against Ukraine itself. Ukraine has financial assistance from the EU, but, um, uh, right now Ukraine is ahead in the drone race by- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:33:55] I'm not sure about that, by the way. **Noah Smith** [1:33:56] Okay. Is that -- I was g- well, that was gonna be my next question. Is that true? And if it is true, how long before Russia manages to pivot, course correct, and regain the lead? **Brandon Anderson** [1:34:06] Sorry. For my own curiosity, can we define drone race? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:34:10] Yeah. Look, I think it's also for, for our listeners, uh, it's helpful to understand that there are at least 30 different types, categories of drones, right? Like you have -- if you, if you -- first, you have like different domains. You have flying drones, uh, ground vehicles, and you have sea vehicles, and you have undersea vehicles, right? Then for each of those domains, you have multiple use cases. Like for ground vehicles, you have logistics, evacuation, mining, demining, um, yeah, like maybe something else. For, uh, for aerial, you have reconnaissance, uh, front strike, mid strike, deep strike, mining, demining, radio repeating, uh, kamikaze and bombing, um, um, ISR, different types of surveillance. So tactical surveillance, operational level surveillance, um, maybe strategic level surveilla- uh, surveillance at some point. Um, uh, logistics also with aerial drones. For sea drones, same thing. So in each of those categories, you have dozens, sometimes over 100 companies, uh, and, uh, products which compete. So that's the current Ukrainian, uh, battlefield. From the Russian side, it's less of a zoo, as we say. So they, in each category, they usually have one to maybe three products, and, um, then they scale it sort of in a centralized fashion. Um, and then so when you talk about whether we are behind or who's behind or, or ahead in drone warfare, you gotta analyze that sort of- **Noah Smith** [1:36:04] It's asymmetric, so it's hard to compare **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:36:06] ... area by area, right? So if you're like talking about their front strike, I would argue that Ukraine has gotten ahead recently with, uh, after scaling the, um, fiber optic. Uh, before that Russia was, um, slightly be- uh, slightly ahead. So, so Ukraine got ahead. Um, with like mid strikes, so s- so say something like 40 to 200 kilometers, um, it's hard for me to judge. At some point Russia was, was ahead. I, I think maybe we're, we're getting ahead as well. And deep strike we recently got ahead, so we were, we were doing more damage to Russia with deep strike drones than they're doing to us. Um, in sea drones we're consistently ahead, always were ahead, and ground drones I think we're ahead. Yeah, I think like on like- **Noah Smith** [1:37:01] Where are they still ahead? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:37:02] In general, I think we're, we're ahead. Where are they, where they are still ahead? Um, I think in certain parts, um, of the components, uh, like a GPS free or navigation like these CRPA antennas are really good Uh, they have, uh, these, uh, winged, uh, bombs that they drop from their bomber planes. Um, I, I forgot the English name for it. **Noah Smith** [1:37:34] Glide bomb? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:37:35] Yeah, sort of. Yeah. **Noah Smith** [1:37:37] Yeah. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:37:37] So they're ahead on that side, and it's like it's difficult to protect from those. Um- **Noah Smith** [1:37:43] What's the range of that? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:37:45] It can be pretty big. I think it's like, can be up to 80 kilometers. **Noah Smith** [1:37:50] Hmm. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:37:51] Yeah. And then obviously the range- **Noah Smith** [1:37:53] From like a fighter plane, like a strike? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:37:55] Yeah, the range is, is a very iffy subject here because the range is, is like basically the distance from where you drop the bomb to where it lands, but also you drop it from, from a fighter plane, and then fighter planes are susceptible to aerial interceptor missiles. So on our side, we have our own fighter planes, and we have the ground anti-air systems. And then, uh, and then those two assets, they have their radars and radar fields. And then, uh, you know, depending on the enemy tactics, you can, uh, you know, calculate how big is the aerial area that you cover with those assets. And, uh, look, you know, I'm not a professional military guy, so I'm covering these topics in a, in layman terms. Don't quote me on this. I'm just trying this, to make this as understandable to an average listener a- as, as possible. **Noah Smith** [1:38:50] Um, helicopters. I, uh, um, I've recently seen reports of drones taking out helicopters in the air, and that this is new. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:39:00] Yeah. **Noah Smith** [1:39:01] Is that new? Is that going to be a big deal? Is that gonna increase... Like, is that gonna eventually get rid of helicopters the way drones are getting rid of tanks in the battlefield? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:39:10] Yeah. Look, helicopters are also ver- versatile assets. Uh, France strike helicopters, I think we're, we're gonna be seeing fewer and fewer of them. These few Russian helicopters that Ukraine's intercepted with drones were more like edge cases than a systematic, um, sort of helicopter hunting campaign. I think it is possible to turn it into a systematic, uh, countermeasure against helicopters. Um- **Noah Smith** [1:39:38] What kind of... Will those be battery powered drones themselves, do you think? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:39:41] Yeah. Uh, yeah, potentially. Uh, and there, there are like so many different scenarios. Uh, like you can have large aerial drone carriers carrying interceptor drones. **Noah Smith** [1:39:55] That then go hit the helicopters. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:39:56] For example. **Noah Smith** [1:39:57] Is that it? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:39:57] Or, or you can have, um, battery powered interceptor drones, but not of a, a missile with a propeller type, uh, as many of these well-known drones like Stinger or P-One Sun. Uh, they look like basically a missile with a qua- quadcopter, uh, behind it. Uh, but you, you can also have a plane or like fixed wing like, uh, aerial interceptors. Um- **Noah Smith** [1:40:25] Does any, does any of them have like a little like, uh, drone that flies super low under the helicopter and like shoots it from underneath? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:40:33] I mean, uh, like in theory you can imagine that, but, but it, it, it's just like- **Noah Smith** [1:40:38] Or like surface, a drone that carries surface to air missiles somehow. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:40:41] Yeah, I don't think that's very practical because whatever you have going on land will be just super slow and not, not fast enough to, to be able to hunt down a helicopter. **Noah Smith** [1:40:50] I meant like in, in the, in the air. Is it, is... are, is there a drone capable of carrying a, a s- a small surface to air missile that can like skim, you know, low and then launch its little missile, like a flying missile platform or something? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:41:01] Yeah. In, in, in theory. But like a big part of a mission like that is not just kinetically getting to a helicopter, but also identifying it, uh, you know, uh, either by means of first radar and then visually, and placing the asset you have, the interception asset you have in the right place in the right time. So the combination of tho- of those things i- is much more complex than just, you know, how can we strike it like from behind or from below. Uh, but then helicopters are not... that does not mean they're becoming like completely useless. Um, like for example, helicopters are used to, uh, um, intercept, um, deep strike drones. Like Ukraine uses a lot of helicopters to shoot down Shaheds. **Noah Smith** [1:41:45] Hmm. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:41:45] And Russia uses helicopters to shoot down our deep strike drones. **Noah Smith** [1:41:49] Um, a lot of people talk... Oh, so, um, some, some ideas about drone countermeasures, things people do technologically to try to shoot down FPV drones or bomber drones or whatever. Um, dumb question that I probably already know the answer to, but for the listeners, why can't you use a shotgun? ### Countermeasures **Noah Smith** [1:42:08] Shoot down drones that are coming after you. When you have like a guy- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:42:11] Oh, that- **Noah Smith** [1:42:11] ... why can't you just shoot the thing? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:42:12] That's, that's the main, uh, weapon that people use against them. **Noah Smith** [1:42:15] Why aren't they very good? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:42:17] They're, they're, they're pretty good. Like, there are, there, there are like hundreds, maybe thousands of cases of drones being shut down with shotguns, both by Uk- um, definitely thousands, but both by Ukrainians and Russians. **Noah Smith** [1:42:27] All right. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:42:27] There's even like statistics of like- **Noah Smith** [1:42:29] Yeah **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:42:29] ... what is the percentage of Ukraine FPV drones that didn't accomplish the mission because they were shut down by a shotgun. **Noah Smith** [1:42:35] Got it. So if I'm a guy with a shotgun, I'm walking around, FPV drone comes for me, um- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:42:41] I don't recommend that. **Noah Smith** [1:42:42] No. I, I, I don't plan on it. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:42:44] Okay. **Noah Smith** [1:42:45] But I'm saying suppose that were the case. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:42:46] Okay. **Noah Smith** [1:42:47] In, in... or suppose there's a, there is a guy, he's not me. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:42:50] Yeah. **Noah Smith** [1:42:50] He's dumber than me, okay? He's got a shotgun, he's walking around. FPV drone is sent. You know, someone says, "Okay, there's a guy walking around. Kill him. FPV drone go." **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:43:00] Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. **Noah Smith** [1:43:00] FPV drone goes after him. What... and he has a shotgun. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:43:03] Mm-hmm. **Noah Smith** [1:43:03] What are his chances of using that shotgun to shoot down the drone before the drone gets him? Can... Is... Are you allowed to say that? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:43:08] Depending how good you are with a shotgun. I, I'll tell you- **Noah Smith** [1:43:12] Randomly **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:43:12] ... like I was, I was talking to, uh, some Ukraine pilot group, and they told me like there, there was this Russian guy. He was just like Rambo. You see like He like, he shot down like seven FPV drones. They couldn't, they couldn't get him. They finally g- got him. But, uh, it was like nothing they've seen before, right? Like- **Noah Smith** [1:43:31] Got it. But your average- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:43:31] So- **Noah Smith** [1:43:32] ... non-Rambo **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:43:33] Average non-Rambo will just die. **Noah Smith** [1:43:35] Will just die. So there's like very low chance that they'll be able to use a shotgun to shoot down the drones. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:43:38] Yeah, rather, rather low chance. Yeah. **Noah Smith** [1:43:40] Got it. Well, that, that was the kind of question I was getting at, and there's no, um, there's no sort of portable electronic countermeasure that can get FPV drones if you're just holding it. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:43:49] Um- **Noah Smith** [1:43:49] Very effective **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:43:50] ... there, there are plenty of, uh... it just, uh, depends on, it, it's, it's always like electronic countermeasures are used all across the front line. The, the tricky thing is electronic countermeasures cover certain, uh, radio electronic bands of frequencies. **Noah Smith** [1:44:07] Let, let me simplify my question. Sorry. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:44:08] Like each side tries to, tries to- **Noah Smith** [1:44:09] Sure **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:44:09] ... find a frequency that they cannot be covered. **Noah Smith** [1:44:10] Let me simplify my question. Is there a man portable system that will give me a greater than 50% chance of living if an FPV drone specifically targets me to come kill me right now? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:44:22] Well, look, if your system jams the frequency the drone works on and the drone doesn't have optic fiber or, uh, a last mile autonomy, then you have 100% chance that it will, it will not fly towards you. But then what is the chance to, to, to not have drone that can either use different frequency or autonomy or fiber optic? Well, that depends on the, on the area you are in and who's, who's, who's your adversary in that area, in that zone. Um. **Noah Smith** [1:44:52] Okay. Well, let's... I guess this question was maybe too dumb that I was trying to ask. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:44:58] No, it's, it's a great question. There are no dumb questions here, and it is just like my answers, if you feel the common theme here, is that things in practice, in war, things are way, way, way more complex than they seem. **Noah Smith** [1:45:12] Sure. Okay. What, but, so, um, I want, like, I want... You know, I, I've read tons of things that say that basically if you're walking around in the open and drones come for you, you're not 100% dead, but you're probably dead, and I've read a bunch of things that say that. I want listeners to understand why, like, you know, pe- people, uh, who are paying a tiny bit of attention to this debate, to this, this issue from far away intermittently in America, uh, who don't, I think don't understand the weakness of our military against this kind of, uh, attack- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:45:48] Yeah **Noah Smith** [1:45:48] ... against drone attack. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:45:49] I think there was, uh, I mean- **Noah Smith** [1:45:50] Have a lot of mechanisms, psychological mechanisms by which they cope with the i- mental idea of drones. I would like to bust those mechanisms by explaining why drones defeat in human infantry on the battlefield. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:46:02] Yeah, I mean, it's just like- ... a guided, guided bomb flying at you and it, it knows exactly where you are, right? Uh, it's not that it's, it's the ultimate weapon, but I think like one of the things that went viral in, in Ukrainian defense tech bubble, even before the words of, uh, the CEO of Rheinmetall, was some American, um, uh, tank, uh, battle tank pilot, uh, who was interviewed and, uh, he was, he was asked whether he's afraid of FPV drones, and he's like, "No, it's, uh, it's like we have... our tanks are strong." And that, that went viral a- among Ukrainians because they're like, "Dude, you have no idea what you're talking about." Like, "Don't mess with those drones." Uh, like, you know, Abrams tank, great tank, but against an FPV drone, sorry dude, but it's- **Noah Smith** [1:46:54] Not g- just deadly **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:46:55] ... not gonna work. **Noah Smith** [1:46:55] Deadly. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:46:56] Yeah. No, I was like, maybe not, not from one drone, but like a dozen drones will, will take it out. So, um, yeah, uh, but there is hope. Um, so you just have to have kinetic countermeasures. Interesting thing- **Noah Smith** [1:47:10] Kinetic countermeasure means a thing that shoots down the drone. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:47:13] Well, can mean many things. So if you, if you go to, uh, Ukrainian east and sort of territories close to the front lines, I think like f- about 50 kilometers in from the front line, all the roads are covered by fish nets. So you literally, you ride in a corridor of fish nets, and that's the mechanical countermeasure against the drone. **Noah Smith** [1:47:39] You count that as a kinetic countermeasure? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:47:41] Well, mechanical. It's a mechanical countermeasure. **Noah Smith** [1:47:42] Yeah. Oh, okay. Okay. Got it. Got it. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:47:44] Yeah. **Noah Smith** [1:47:44] I don't know all the jargon, so it's, I'm, I'm learning- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:47:45] Yeah. Whatever. Whatever **Noah Smith** [1:47:46] ... or coming up with it. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:47:47] Then the tanks, if you look at Russian tanks and sometimes Ukrainian tanks or, or equipment, they, they all look like porcupines. They have these long sticking, uh, I don't know, poles. We talked about poles a- already on this podcast. **Noah Smith** [1:48:05] Different kind of poles. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:48:06] Different kind of poles. **Noah Smith** [1:48:06] A third kind of poles. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:48:07] Yeah. Uh, and, and, uh, that's, that's the way to protect from drone. That's to make to, that's the way to make the drone detonate, uh, maybe half a meter or a meter away from, from the actual shell of the tank. Uh, or, uh, yeah, sometimes there are like nets on, on top of these tanks, just welded, um, some extra, um, sort of eq- equipment. Uh, and then of course, uh, there are, um, guns that, um, like w- what both Russians and Ukraine or Ukrainians are beginning to experiment with is, um, kind of interceptor drone, anti FPV interceptor drone, which you put on top of something like a gun, like harpoon sort of thing. And when you see like a drone coming at you, maybe you can notice or hear it from 200 meters or 100 meters, so you have a couple of seconds and you grab that thing, you point it, and you fire it, and then onboard it has certain AI that helps it to, um, g- guide the, the small drone towards an attacking drone and intercept it that way. **Noah Smith** [1:49:11] Hmm. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:49:11] Um, so those are the things that are being developed and like we're working on some of these things as well, and then you can imagine like an armor with, um- Hundreds on, of, of, of drones on top of it, which are protector drones. They're sort of like active armor. Whenever they see- **Noah Smith** [1:49:28] Huh **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:49:28] ... a drone coming at you, they, like, take off. **Noah Smith** [1:49:30] That's cool. What about, um, what about the kind of things that the, the Germans are building, which is basically like a big truck with, uh, some sort of automated shotgun on it? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:49:40] Yeah, like they have Skynex. It's, uh, by Rheinmetall, by the guy whom we mentioned today. Um, Skynex is considered to be, uh, an okay weapon. Uh, their, their shots are quite expensive though. **Noah Smith** [1:49:55] Mm. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:49:56] And, um, so I'll tell you this different story, um, about, um- **Noah Smith** [1:50:00] It's about cost to fire each shot really and stuff. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:50:04] Yeah, cost to effect in, in a sort of a more, more abstract way. So I was, uh, last year I was speaking at, uh, Land Europe Conference. It's the biggest USAA, US- USA Army, um, conference in Europe, uh, called, called Land Europe. Um, and, um, there was an expo there, and, uh, uh, there was like a Raytheon, a RTX booth there. And Raytheon is an amazing company. Gosh, we love Raytheon. They're making Patriots. Patriots are the best. Um, and they make a bunch of other things. And they, they had this laser, uh, laser gun project there, basically. **Noah Smith** [1:50:45] That's what I was gonna ask about next is laser. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:50:46] Yeah. So laser thing was like they have it in two variations, two kilowatt, uh, sorry, 10 kilowatt laser and 20 kilowatt laser. I'm like, "Okay, 10 kilowatt laser, tell me about it." He's like, "Can it take down an FPV drone?" I'm like, "Yes, of course it can." I'm like, "Okay, cool. How much time does it take to take down an FPV drone?" And they're like, "Well, maybe three seconds." I'm like, "Hmm, three seconds, that's like a lot of time. But okay, maybe fine. And what if FPV drone tries to evade, right?" Mm, and it's like, "Well, we will retarget it again." And it's like, "And then three seconds start again?" "Yeah." "Okay. Well, can it take down, like, a dozen FPV drones?" They're like, "Yeah, for sure." I'm like, "Okay, a dozen FPV drones, 30 seconds? Uh, maybe, yes. Two kilometers? Maybe yes, maybe no." Um, and I'm like, "Okay, how, how much does it cost?" And he said something like $3 million or something like that. And I'm like, "Okay, $3 million. So that is 6,000 FPV drones. I doubt this thing will be able to handle 6,000 FPV drones or even 600 FPV drones coming at it at the same time." So you have this kind of economic, and, you know, this product may not be necessarily a product against an FPV drone. It might... Or against an FPV drone in an active battlefield environment. It might be guarding a stadium in a peaceful country. Uh, and then, you know, for some random dudes launch a couple drones above a stadium, shoot them down. Okay, everyone's happy, although the drone will fall down, maybe fall on someone's head. That wouldn't be cool. So you would want something like catching bad drones with a net above a stadium, so something like that. But whatever. **Noah Smith** [1:52:33] But- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:52:33] My point is the economics matters **Noah Smith** [1:52:36] ... you're talking about 6,000 drones. If you sent them one by one, it wouldn't, you know, it would just be pew, pew, pew, pew. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:52:41] Yeah, I mean, but who would send them one by one? **Noah Smith** [1:52:41] But if you sent a mass of 6,000, it wouldn't- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:52:43] Of course, yeah. **Noah Smith** [1:52:43] Yeah. Um, what about just like a more powerful laser, like 100, you know, kilowatt laser or something that wouldn't need to spend, that would just- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:52:52] No, that, that's worse. You need less powerful laser that, that achieves the same effect. **Noah Smith** [1:52:56] For cost of the system. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:52:56] A more powerful, yeah, a more powerful laser would be more expensive, m- heavier, uh, more difficult to transport. Uh, it will be more difficult to make many of them. Uh, and therefore you wouldn't be able to cover a long front line, and, uh, would be super expensive to replace if it gets damaged, all of those issues. So the, the reason why FPV drones or iPhones become so popular is because they're small and everyone can have one, you know? And so is with the countermeasures. Um, so that's, you know, you were asking me about sort of policy advice. So that's like another sort of mental shift that you gotta, gotta go through. It's n- it's no longer about an aircraft carrier that costs whatever, $14 billion and takes forever to build. It's, it's about mass, uh, that is, you can iterate on very quickly, you can upgrade it, everyone can operate it. And then that mass when it is combined, or the technologies when they're, you know, uh, extrapolated from like one domain to another domain, they add up, uh, right? Uh, as, as it happens with software. Um, so I think that's, that's important. **Brandon Anderson** [1:54:15] Can I ask a follow-up question? So, um, Russia is not necessarily the smartest army you could be fighting. What would happen if you, your adversary was smarter? Do you think things would change meaningfully? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:54:31] Look, I don't know if I fully agree with not the smartest army. Who is the smartest army? **Brandon Anderson** [1:54:38] Ukraine? **Noah Smith** [1:54:39] That's a great question. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:54:40] I don't know. I don't know. Uh, I, I think that those are, like, very dangerous assumptions to make. **Noah Smith** [1:54:48] Who was the smartest army in World War I? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:54:52] Like, well, define smart. **Noah Smith** [1:54:54] Germany was dumb. Yeah. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:54:54] Why, why do you think so? **Brandon Anderson** [1:54:55] Well- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:54:55] Why do you think Russia is not the smartest army? **Brandon Anderson** [1:54:57] Okay, I mean, maybe this is just my own, you know, information bubble. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:55:01] I'm just like, uh- **Brandon Anderson** [1:55:01] No, no **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:55:01] ... maybe I agree with you. **Brandon Anderson** [1:55:02] No, no. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:55:02] You know? But I'm just like, I'm naturally wired now- **Brandon Anderson** [1:55:05] Yeah, yeah **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:55:05] ... to challenge those assumptions. **Brandon Anderson** [1:55:07] Okay. No, no, that's, that's a, that's a really good point. I, I guess, um, when I, from my information bubble, it seems like Russia's strategy has largely been to just throw resources, people- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:55:18] Well, you're living in a Western propaganda- **Brandon Anderson** [1:55:20] Yeah, yeah **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:55:20] ... information bubble, of course. Like, as, as am I. **Brandon Anderson** [1:55:22] Yeah. Yeah. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:55:22] Like, 'cause we're all rooting- **Brandon Anderson** [1:55:24] Yeah **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:55:24] ... for Ukraine to win, right? But yeah, sorry, go on. **Brandon Anderson** [1:55:27] Yeah, yeah. I mean, in, uh, but, you know, going back to this, granted there's a history of large powers failing to take over smaller, um, you know- ... strategically, you know- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:55:39] David and Goliath **Brandon Anderson** [1:55:40] ... yeah. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:55:40] Yes. **Brandon Anderson** [1:55:40] Yeah. They, this is- **Noah Smith** [1:55:41] They fail a lot more now than they used to. **Brandon Anderson** [1:55:43] Yeah. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:55:43] Mm-hmm. **Noah Smith** [1:55:43] The, the success rate of taking- **Brandon Anderson** [1:55:45] That's true **Noah Smith** [1:55:45] ... places over has gone way down. **Brandon Anderson** [1:55:46] Yeah. Yeah. And, and certainly, yeah. But regardless, it, it does, I do wonder, like, if, if Russia had not essentially assumed victory early on- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:55:56] Yeah **Brandon Anderson** [1:55:56] ... it may have been different. Yeah. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:55:57] No, I, like, they're, they're super stupid. Of course. **Brandon Anderson** [1:55:58] Yeah. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:55:58] Like, they were marching at Kyiv- **Brandon Anderson** [1:55:59] Yeah **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:56:00] ... with their parade, uh, costumes and, like, you know, they were thinking they're gonna have a parade in Kyiv in, in a few days. Like, that was super stupid, and, like, there were lots of stupid things that are like they have no regard, no care for human life. They're sending those Russian f- folks just, like, without armor, without a- anything, like folks, folks on crutches, like sending them to storm Ukrainian positions. And it's like- **Noah Smith** [1:56:23] They're the Zerg. **Brandon Anderson** [1:56:24] You think at this point there's **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:56:25] Yeah. I have, like, I have actually a good friend. He's, he's American. He's, uh, he's from Seattle. Uh, he's, uh, you know, served, uh, uh, ha- had been in the Special Fo- Forces here in the US. Had been in maybe three deployments, and then went to Ukraine, volunteered. **Brandon Anderson** [1:56:40] Mm. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:56:40] And he's been fighting since, like, uh, 2022. He's a very good friend of mine. So at some point he's like, he's been texting me, and he's like, "Okay, I'm near Pokrovsk." And, uh, sorry, not Pokrovsk. It was, um, gosh, the other city. Uh, Chasiv Yar. **Brandon Anderson** [1:56:55] Mm-hmm. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:56:55] And it, he's like, "Okay, so what Russians are doing, they're just creating so much work for all the, all the psychologists who are gonna heal those Ukrainian, um, um, uh, whatever, ri- ri- riflemen or, or machine gunmen, uh, who are just, like, shooting at the Russians who are, like, going nonstop, right?" So it's like causing, or Russians are causing psychological trauma on Ukrainians because they're dying in such stupid way. Um, so- **Brandon Anderson** [1:57:26] Jeez **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:57:27] ... that is indeed stupid of, of sort of Russian higher command, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Um, but then that's the resource they have. Um, and the- **Noah Smith** [1:57:38] If you've got, if you've got Zerglings, you use your Zerglings. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:57:40] That's the way. That's their strategy. That's, that's their way of strategy, right? **Noah Smith** [1:57:43] If you're gonna play Zerg- **Brandon Anderson** [1:57:44] Oh, yeah, yeah **Noah Smith** [1:57:45] ... back in the day- **Brandon Anderson** [1:57:46] Yeah **Noah Smith** [1:57:46] ... that's what you do. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:57:46] If you play StarCraft, that's how Zergs win. **Brandon Anderson** [1:57:48] Yeah. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:57:49] Right? **Noah Smith** [1:57:49] Are Ukrainians the Terrans? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:57:51] Ah. I don't know. I, I, I, I hope we, we will become Protoss soon. I'm working on that. I'm working on that. **Noah Smith** [1:58:00] I feel like the- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:58:01] But then, but then, like, I, I, I wish- **Noah Smith** [1:58:02] ... Protoss had, had fairly bad political management at the top **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:58:04] ... I w- I wish, I wish, I wish, like, Protoss with, with the speed closer to, to, like, humans or Terrans, whatever it is. Uh, hopefully we can do Protoss technology with a Zerg speed. That, that would be the best. That, that, I think that's, that's what the h- housewives are working on, in fact. **Noah Smith** [1:58:21] You cannot beat those housewives. Do not oppose Ukrainian housewives. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:58:24] Do not mess with Ukrainian housewives, for sure. Yeah. **Brandon Anderson** [1:58:27] Two final questions. First one, you started out by telling us a story about going to a chapel on February 23rd. ### Final Thoughts **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:58:33] Yeah. **Brandon Anderson** [1:58:34] Um, were you able to get married there? And w- yeah, can you finish that story? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:58:40] We actually, we, we did get married, but we postponed the wedding as social event, uh, until the war is over. **Brandon Anderson** [1:58:49] Okay. Cool. And then last question, um, what do you want our audience to take away? If you have one point you wanna, want them to walk away with, what would it be? **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:58:59] You want peace, be prepared to war. Gotta, gotta invest in, in defense and security. **Brandon Anderson** [1:59:05] All right. Thanks. Thank you for talking with us. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:59:07] Thank you. **Brandon Anderson** [1:59:07] And, uh, thank you, Noah, for all the great- **Noah Smith** [1:59:10] Absolutely **Brandon Anderson** [1:59:10] ... questions. **Noah Smith** [1:59:11] Great. **Brandon Anderson** [1:59:11] Yeah. **Noah Smith** [1:59:11] Yeah, great to- **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:59:12] No, it was fantastic **Noah Smith** [1:59:13] ... to, to hang out. **Yaroslav Azhnyuk** [1:59:13] Thanks so much. **Brandon Anderson** [1:59:13] Really fun. Awesome. Thanks. --- This library is powered by PodHood (https://podhood.com), the podcast website platform.