FPV Drones -The Next War Is Already Here — Yaroslav Azhnyuk, The Fourth Law & Noah Smith, Noahpinion

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

Wow.

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.

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.

Yeah.

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?

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.

Oh, okay. I have so many questions. Um, actually, Noah, you seem to have a question. Do you want to ask anything?

No, no, I, I, I, I'm just listening. Go ahead.

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-

I think there are no issues there.

Yeah. Uh-

What would an example of a moral question be in this case?

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.

Yeah.

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?

Yeah.

This... You know, you will probably be selling these to other people, and-

Yeah

... yeah. Um, so, you know, the, the future is really where the moral issues may come into play, but-

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.

Mm-hmm.

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.

Cut tomatoes, too.

Cut tomatoes, too.

Yes, knife.

Yeah. Yeah. That's helpful.

In, in Japan, sword and knife, they, you know, call the same word.

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.

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?

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-

Yeah

... driving drones.

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-

What's an ISR interceptor?

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.

So it's, it's reconnaissance.

Yeah. That's, that's, the ISR is sort of a classical term for a, for a reconnaissance drone.

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-

Uh

... some sort of, of, of-

Internal combustion engine?

Yeah, internal combustion engine.

Yeah.

Um, are all the things you're talking about battery-powered?

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-

You, you can catch a Shahed with a battery-powered thing. It's not-

Yes

... too fast to catch.

Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. Look, uh, Shahed interceptor, like ours, uh, it's called Zero, it goes up to 326 kilometers per hour. Uh-

For reference, how fast is a Shahed?

Eight, like, in internal phase it could be 280, but, uh, in, in cruise phase it's, like, 220-ish.

Okay.

Uh, yeah. And sorry, I'm not like... You know, you can convert that into miles if you're interested.

Yeah, that's fine.

Uh-

Multiply by two-thirds or point six or something.

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.

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-

Yeah, y- you can-

... signal tracking with interceptors

... with or without fiber optics. Fiber optics-

Okay

... is just like, uh, sort of a communication module.

Mm-hmm.

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-

Yeah

... with a drone. Uh-

But do you need AI for fiber optic drones?

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.

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.

Yeah.

Or I guess to counter those.

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-

Mm-hmm

... for FPV drones, which means that, you know, as I believe Earth is round. Some people disagree.

Mm-hmm.

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.

What was drone dominance? What was that competition?

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-

Got it

... here in the US.

And the longest range thing they were using was 10 kilometers.

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-

So the cable that you have to unspool as you go weighs.

Yeah.

It, it is heavy.

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-

We've already got a series

... 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-

So Claude Code is, is stopping the Russian drone effort here.

And Ukrainian as well. Yeah.

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.

Yeah.

How, how accurate is that?

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.

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?

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.

Right. FPV drones are the new weapon of, universal weapon of warfare.

Yeah. So it's like-

Land warfare, anyway

... 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-

FPV

... FPV drones rule.

FPV drones are the god of war.

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?

What is the usefulness-

So it's-

... of a tank in the, in the modern-

That's, that's where we need Greenpeace to say a word, but they're silent. Yeah.

Fair. What's the use of a tank on the modern battlefield?

Mm.

It's diminishing.

Diminishing.

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.

Don't mess with those housewives.

Yeah. Drone wives.

Drone wives.

And that's it.

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?

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-

Just interrupt. You said full autonomy, but just-

Yeah

... a second ago you were saying that the autonomy here is guidance, right? It's not decision-making.

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-

Well, he, I think he's asking what does it... Can you, for the listeners, can you explain-

Yeah

... what the term full autonomy means?

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?

That's a bomber drone.

That's, that's full autonomy for a bomber drone, right?

So you're saying that no human decision is made in this entire process?

That's not, that's not what he's saying.

The human decision was made at the beginning of the process.

Okay. At the beginning.

The same way as you would fire an ar- artillery.

Okay.

When you fire an artillery, you don't stop at, like, 500 meters away from a target-

Mm-hmm

... and ask it whether, you know, you want to strike or not.

Yeah.

So that's exactly, a human decision is always made at some point.

Okay.

Right?

Okay.

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.

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.

Okay. But maybe, uh, to push back on that-

They're super, they're superhuman. They're, they're 10X superhuman.

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-

So what's, what's first level autonomy?

First level autonomy is just the terminal guidance.

Okay.

Yeah. By the way, we, we have video of that. We can watch that.

Terminal guidance means a human gets it nearby and then the AI takes over.

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.

What is a zero line?

Zero line is, is sort of an imaginary line of, uh, of, uh, control, uh, of, of two conflicting forces.

Okay. It's important to explain these things to a lot of the listeners who are not-

Yeah, thank you for asking

... familiar with, with warfare.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Like myself.

Yeah, I am one of those listeners.

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.

And increases the kill zone from-

And increases the kill zone

... 3 kilometers to 10 kilometers.

Got it.

So on both parameters-

What does full autonomy do? And, and-

But actually on, real quick, can we define mission success and like maybe in a way what are the failure modes of missions?

Yeah.

I have a guess what mission success is.

I mean, well, well, yeah, but I could, uh-

Get 'em.

Yeah.

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.

Okay. And so the, th- so level one autonomy, basically you manage to point in a direction.

Yeah.

Uh, you go there, and then the last mile is-

Yeah

... the drone taking over.

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-

Those are good things to know

Those are five levels of autonomy. Now, if you want-

I have a third for you.

Yeah, sorry. Like, let me finish with the theoretical part.

Sorry.

So-

What is Tesla running at right now?

Tesla?

No, sorry.

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.

Waymo is level five, right? You just tell it where you wanna go, it picks you up and then you go there.

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-

Can I, can I interject a question here?

Yeah.

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?

That's a great question. So, uh-

You need another drone

... 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."

Those guys are watching.

Yeah.

They, they have their own drones in the sky.

Target destroyed. They, they have like a carousel of drones because, like-

Right

... one Mavic cannot stay more than 30 minutes. It like go-

Right. They're constantly surveilling the battlefield.

Yeah, yeah. Almost, almost every, every spot on the battlefield.

Got it.

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.

Oh.

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.

You double tap.

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.

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.

And now when you're saying level, you're talking about dimensions, not about autonomy levels, so-

Oh, yeah, sorry. Yeah, I mean, I mean di- dimension

... dimension four.

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.

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.

Like what?

I mean-- Well, I mean, first of all-

If the, uh, I'm very interested-

Yeah. No, no, no

... in sort of, sort of kinds of scenarios that you're thinking about.

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-

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.

Wow, I never considered that might be-

Really?

Yeah.

That's definitely coming.

Yeah.

Anyway.

No, but, but that's-

Yeah. No, no, no

... you know, that's an un- an obvious-

No, no

... an obvious thought. I agree with you.

Yeah.

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.

Well, yeah, no, that one don't I believe. Um-

No, I think you were, you were talking about drones, right?

Oh, the drones, right. Yeah.

The drones, yeah. The weapons, right?

Friendly fire and collateral damage and stuff like that is all minimized with, uh, with AI.

Yeah.

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-

Yeah

... and agentically do target selection.

Be the general, right?

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?

Hmm.

AI general.

Well, the most important thing to ask ourselves is who will be faster to that, us or our adversaries?

I assume us, but how fast will we be to that? I hope us.

Hmm. I hope so too.

But how fast can we-- uh, like, when, when are we looking at that in terms of, like, horizons years?

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-

The e- if the enemy is a thousand times faster than you at deploying those systems?

N- like if, if enemy starts deploying level six autonomy, as you call it-

Right

... and you have not started doing that-

You're in trouble.

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.

What would be the safety risk of such a system?

Well, of course-

Friendly fire?

Uh, just wrong decisions, right?

Oh, I see.

Uh, you know, um, m- m- m- maybe, um, you know, these decisions-

Skynet AI decides it's gonna use the-

No. The, these-

... drone army to kill us

... 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.

Mm-hmm.

And then obviously some environments are more like Ukrainian-Russian war, uh, where you have this-

It will have to choose to risk lives. It will have to choose to sacrifice human lives on your side.

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.

Got it. Um, can I ask a few more questions?

Yeah, yeah.

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.

You were way ahead of your time.

And I said, I said the following will happen-

It's, this article is real. I've read it.

Yeah.

It's, it's really-

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.

Yeah.

And then-

Yeah.

But it's-

You're just an avid sci-fi reader.

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.

Sooner or later.

Yeah.

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.

That's on Ukraine's side. On, on the Russian side, that's just like a zerg rush.

The zerg rush, and then they just die.

Yeah.

And then, but they have some guys in dugouts too, right? Like hi- like h- hiding in, in dugouts for months.

Yeah, they have. Yeah.

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?

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-

I see

... they are, they're establishing control over territory.

I see. So, so, so that is, so there still is a use for human infantry on the battlefield as of today.

Yeah.

How long will that last?

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-

Ground robots will not replace humans in the dugouts soon.

You know, I'm, I'm, I'm very much interested in following the whole humanoid robot theme and, uh-

What about like a dog, dog robot?

Or just mobile controlled platforms or something.

Spiders, spiders or, yeah.

Yeah.

Everything evolves into a crab.

Yeah, crab.

A humanoid-

Bioroboticization of warfare .

Of warfare .

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.

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.

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.

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.

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-

I'm not saying, I'm not saying it's trivial, but it's at least something that you imagine given our current state.

But us, us and Eric Schmidt, like Eric Schmidt's companies are, are pretty good.

Yeah.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah. Okay. I-- maybe my point was just much more high level. Yeah

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-

World models

... 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.

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-

Or at least the end of the rifleman.

Or the end of the rifleman, yeah.

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.

Let's talk about China and China's manufacturing capabilities. So suppose that someone, like suppose the United States went to war with China.

Mm-hmm.

And then-

I hope not.

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?

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.

With internal combustion or-

No, no, no. With battery-

Battery-powered fixed-wing drones.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Battery, yeah.

What's the propulsion system on those propellers?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't, I just don't know how that works.

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-

Ship missiles

... 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-

You mean similar number of drones?

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-

What technologies, key technologies do we lack?

Like autonomy, mass drone manufacturing, stuff like that.

Do we lack autonomy technology?

Well, I think so. If the-

Because our computer vision algorithms are not as good?

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.

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?

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.

That's just a typical law of conventional warfare and has been forever.

Sort of.

Do you read Noah's blog?

Uh, uh, I, not as often as I would like. But I, I read Noah's, uh, X.

It's not necessary.

It's, it's a theme where you-

Don't, don't read my, my X.

Yeah.

It's just for jokes.

He does, he has no opinion about anything.

It's just jokes.

No opinion.

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.

Maybe not easily. Yeah.

Not easily, but, but I, I mean, by a long, a long shot.

Also they had a benefit of not being attacked.

That's right. That's right.

That helps.

Yeah. And so, um, who knows how secure they are now, but, um... Or what, you know, we're cyber doomerists and-

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.

I'm not, I'm not doomerish. I'm, I'm thinking about the, I'm thinking about what we need to do.

Yeah.

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.

Yeah.

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-

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm

... Chinese supply chains?

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.

What are the most pressing choke points besides rare earths that everyone talks about?

Yeah. You know, that's one of the pieces that we do, thermal cameras. Uh, that's like actually a big one. Um-

Hmm. Thermal cameras.

Yeah. Uh, then like, uh, the, the motors, uh, like you, you need, um, the spe- special-

Even after you have the magnets, then you turn them into-

Yeah

... a really good motor.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You, you have, you need these special magnets and then that's sort of your rare earth component.

Right. That's, that's the thing, yes.

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.

Agreement.

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.

Trump withdrawing the image of omnipotent American support forced the Europeans to get their butts in gear, unite, and-

Yeah

... pick up their defense spending.

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-

About the Chinese economy

... 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?

It might be with China and Taiwan. Maybe. Or Japan.

Hopefully not. Yeah. It's like-

Hopefully not

... 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.

Hopefully. Hopefully.

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.

Polish people-

Polish people

... not, not surveys.

Oh, yeah. Sorry. Yeah, yeah. That's what I meant. Sorry, not my first language.

When I'm looking at the polls, what are they, what are they saying?

Yeah. Well, Polish people, polls-

No, no, Pol- no, it's the right word.

Yeah.

You know what I'm thinking, yeah, thinking about. Yeah.

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-

So Poland is not preparing for war correctly.

Uh, I-

They're doing a very bad job

... 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.

That happened in 1939.

I don't want that to happen again.

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?

And let's say three to five priorities.

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.

I think America's learning that lesson right now in Iran, in the Middle East.

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.

Perhaps losing a war to a minor power will teach America.

Well, yeah. I mean, you can, you can-

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.

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.

Uh, well, those examples did rely on Chinese supply chains, though.

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.

The way we did in World War II.

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-

They really should. I, I've, I'm consistently advocated for, uh, specifically Japan, South Korea, and Poland to get nukes. But obviously-

Y- yeah, like-

... Ukraine should as well, but can't

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.

Everyone says Russia's behind right now in the drone war.

Sure. Okay.

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.

Hmm.

Russia has more people, four times as many people about, um, or more.

Yeah, I think give or take, yeah.

Yeah. And-

30 versus like 120-ish. Yeah.

Yeah. So, so four times as many people. Um, more help from China.

Like economy is like te- uh, 10-

Yeah

... 10, 20 times bigger. I don't know.

Oil, a lot of oil money.

A lot bigger.

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-

I'm not sure about that, by the way.

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?

Sorry. For my own curiosity, can we define drone race?

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-

It's asymmetric, so it's hard to compare

... 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-

Where are they still ahead?

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.

Glide bomb?

Yeah, sort of. Yeah.

Yeah.

So they're ahead on that side, and it's like it's difficult to protect from those. Um-

What's the range of that?

It can be pretty big. I think it's like, can be up to 80 kilometers.

Hmm.

Yeah. And then obviously the range-

From like a fighter plane, like a strike?

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.

Um, helicopters. I, uh, um, I've recently seen reports of drones taking out helicopters in the air, and that this is new.

Yeah.

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?

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-

What kind of... Will those be battery powered drones themselves, do you think?

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.

That then go hit the helicopters.

For example.

Is that it?

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-

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?

I mean, uh, like in theory you can imagine that, but, but it, it, it's just like-

Or like surface, a drone that carries surface to air missiles somehow.

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.

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?

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.

Hmm.

And Russia uses helicopters to shoot down our deep strike drones.

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?

Shoot down drones that are coming after you. When you have like a guy-

Oh, that-

... why can't you just shoot the thing?

That's, that's the main, uh, weapon that people use against them.

Why aren't they very good?

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.

All right.

There's even like statistics of like-

Yeah

... what is the percentage of Ukraine FPV drones that didn't accomplish the mission because they were shut down by a shotgun.

Got it. So if I'm a guy with a shotgun, I'm walking around, FPV drone comes for me, um-

I don't recommend that.

No. I, I, I don't plan on it.

Okay.

But I'm saying suppose that were the case.

Okay.

In, in... or suppose there's a, there is a guy, he's not me.

Yeah.

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."

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

FPV drone goes after him. What... and he has a shotgun.

Mm-hmm.

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?

Depending how good you are with a shotgun. I, I'll tell you-

Randomly

... 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-

Got it. But your average-

So-

... non-Rambo

Average non-Rambo will just die.

Will just die. So there's like very low chance that they'll be able to use a shotgun to shoot down the drones.

Yeah, rather, rather low chance. Yeah.

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.

Um-

Very effective

... 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.

Let, let me simplify my question. Sorry.

Like each side tries to, tries to-

Sure

... find a frequency that they cannot be covered.

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?

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.

Okay. Well, let's... I guess this question was maybe too dumb that I was trying to ask.

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.

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-

Yeah

... against drone attack.

I think there was, uh, I mean-

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.

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-

Not g- just deadly

... not gonna work.

Deadly.

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-

Kinetic countermeasure means a thing that shoots down the drone.

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.

You count that as a kinetic countermeasure?

Well, mechanical. It's a mechanical countermeasure.

Yeah. Oh, okay. Okay. Got it. Got it.

Yeah.

I don't know all the jargon, so it's, I'm, I'm learning-

Yeah. Whatever. Whatever

... or coming up with it.

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.

Different kind of poles.

Different kind of poles.

A third kind of poles.

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.

Hmm.

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-

Huh

... a drone coming at you, they, like, take off.

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?

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.

Mm.

And, um, so I'll tell you this different story, um, about, um-

It's about cost to fire each shot really and stuff.

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.

That's what I was gonna ask about next is laser.

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.

But-

My point is the economics matters

... 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.

Yeah, I mean, but who would send them one by one?

But if you sent a mass of 6,000, it wouldn't-

Of course, yeah.

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-

No, that, that's worse. You need less powerful laser that, that achieves the same effect.

For cost of the system.

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.

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?

Look, I don't know if I fully agree with not the smartest army. Who is the smartest army?

Ukraine?

That's a great question.

I don't know. I don't know. Uh, I, I think that those are, like, very dangerous assumptions to make.

Who was the smartest army in World War I?

Like, well, define smart.

Germany was dumb. Yeah.

Why, why do you think so?

Well-

Why do you think Russia is not the smartest army?

Okay, I mean, maybe this is just my own, you know, information bubble.

I'm just like, uh-

No, no

... maybe I agree with you.

No, no.

You know? But I'm just like, I'm naturally wired now-

Yeah, yeah

... to challenge those assumptions.

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-

Well, you're living in a Western propaganda-

Yeah, yeah

... information bubble, of course. Like, as, as am I.

Yeah. Yeah.

Like, 'cause we're all rooting-

Yeah

... for Ukraine to win, right? But yeah, sorry, go on.

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-

David and Goliath

... yeah.

Yes.

Yeah. They, this is-

They fail a lot more now than they used to.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

The, the success rate of taking-

That's true

... places over has gone way down.

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-

Yeah

... it may have been different. Yeah.

No, I, like, they're, they're super stupid. Of course.

Yeah.

Like, they were marching at Kyiv-

Yeah

... 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-

They're the Zerg.

You think at this point there's

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.

Mm.

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.

Mm-hmm.

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-

Jeez

... 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-

If you've got, if you've got Zerglings, you use your Zerglings.

That's the way. That's their strategy. That's, that's their way of strategy, right?

If you're gonna play Zerg-

Oh, yeah, yeah

... back in the day-

Yeah

... that's what you do.

If you play StarCraft, that's how Zergs win.

Yeah.

Right?

Are Ukrainians the Terrans?

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.

I feel like the-

But then, but then, like, I, I, I wish-

... Protoss had, had fairly bad political management at the top

... 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.

You cannot beat those housewives. Do not oppose Ukrainian housewives.

Do not mess with Ukrainian housewives, for sure. Yeah.

Two final questions. First one, you started out by telling us a story about going to a chapel on February 23rd.

Yeah.

Um, were you able to get married there? And w- yeah, can you finish that story?

We actually, we, we did get married, but we postponed the wedding as social event, uh, until the war is over.

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?

You want peace, be prepared to war. Gotta, gotta invest in, in defense and security.

All right. Thanks. Thank you for talking with us.

Thank you.

And, uh, thank you, Noah, for all the great-

Absolutely

... questions.

Great.

Yeah.

Yeah, great to-

No, it was fantastic

... to, to hang out.

Thanks so much.

Really fun. Awesome. Thanks.