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0:00This is a grainy, sped up, cut up, loud and
proud, combat highlight tape released to
0:06social media by a Ukrainian military brigade.
In the picture are Russian T-72B3M tanks,
0:13a refurbished and revamped Cold War staple that
Russia has come to rely on during their invasion
0:18of Ukraine. All three are doomed, about to be put
out of commission by the author of this video,
0:24the 79th Air Assault Brigade—a highly trained but
highly out-gunned subset of the Ukrainian defense
0:30effort. The unit deals with all three tanks
through conventional means—weapons and approaches
0:36that have more or less been around since World War
II. The first is stopped in its tracks by a mine,
0:41an anti-tank mine, while this one, unclear as to
why it’s stopped, is hit by an antitank missile or
0:47some similar sort of air ordnance. Finally, what
struck the second is what strikes and stops the
0:53third. Up to this point, if the video were just a
bit grainier or black and white, the battle scene
0:59could be from 2024, or 1974, or 1944.
But the clip isn’t over.
1:06These three tanks—at least by their own
power—are not going to move again which,
1:11for the 79th, means they’ve landed three mobility
kills as they’re called in military parlance. But
1:16the work’s not done—should they be hauled back
behind Russian lines, perhaps they could be fixed,
1:22or at least used for parts. So the 79th needs
to finish the tanks off. But now they turn to
1:28something novel, something that’s shaped
Russia’s invasion and Ukraine’s defense,
1:33something that’s quickly becoming a
staple in 21st century warfare: drones.
1:39Rather than sending troops in to finish off tanks
and chase down their operators—which risk the
1:43safety of a soldier—or fire artillery or missiles
at the sitting targets—which the Ukrainian
1:48military has desperately few of—the 79th now
mobilizes a fleet of small, inexpensive unmanned
1:54aerial vehicles. Here, a fixed-wing drone strapped
with an explosive plows into the tank’s weak point
2:00to render it useless. Here, another does the same.
Here, a drone pilot, rather than tracking on foot,
2:08follows the path of hiding Russian soldiers with
what’s in all likelihood a quad-copter equipped
2:13with a grenade. Here, the same. And, when zooming
out to consider what made this possible—spotting
2:20the quickly moving enemies approaching first,
then filming it all to cut the prideful 1-minute,
2:2427-second piece later—it’s again a drone,
this of the more expensive military-grade
2:30variety. And these 90 seconds serve as a
microcosm—drones are no small part of what’s kept
2:36Ukraine in the fight for this long and they’re a
big part of why the 79th still exists at all.
2:43Consider the context of this clip—it’s shot
somewhere around here on the front lines in
2:48the hotly contested Donbas region near Donetsk.
For years now, the 79th Air Assault Brigade has
2:53been battling over this region—in particular over
this village, Marinka. Once home to 9,000, Marinka
3:00is now a ghost town with few structures
still standing. It’s a spot that Ukraine
3:05and Russia grappled over for 20 months
before it finally fell to the invaders in
3:09late 2023. And to some educated onlookers and
strategists, its fall was cause for concern.
3:16Now, it seemed Russia would have easier access to
Ukraine’s interior by way of the city of Kurakhove
3:21just 10 miles or 16 kilometers west down O0510
Road. But in more than 6 months of trying and 14
3:28coordinated efforts to break through, Russia’s
been rebuked—because of brave, well-trained
3:32soldiers, and because: drones. In fact, most of
these thwarted efforts play out in a strikingly
3:39similar manner to the earlier clip. Just 11 days
prior to the 79th releasing the video of the three
3:44ill-fated T-72s, they posted this video. And 9
days prior to that, they posted this one. In each,
3:53drones, like Ukraine itself, are punching
far above their commercial-grade weight. And
3:58they’ve been doing so since the very first days
of the invasion—it just looked a bit different.
4:04First it seemed the Turkish-produced Bayraktar TB2
might carry the day. Capable of staying aloft for
4:09up to 27 hours, carrying a payload of up to 330
pounds or 150 kilograms, these weren’t cheap,
4:16as Ukraine purchased six of the drones,
along with three control stations in 2019
4:20for about $69 million dollars. It was worth
the investment initially. As early as 2021,
4:28they patrolled the Donbas region and even fired
on a separatist position. Then, in February,
4:33with the invasion beginning, they quickly reached
legendary status—successfully firing on tanks,
4:38fuel trains, fighting vehicles, and missile
systems, the TB2 quickly gained a reputation in
4:43the invasion’s early stages. By April, they were
now sinking ships while Ukrainian troops sang—and
4:49Ukrainian radio played—the Bayraktar song as
the Turkish drone had become a central figure of
4:54Ukrainian resistance. The world took notice, too,
as The New Yorker even went so far as to publish a
4:59story titled “The Turkish Drone That Changed
the Nature of Warfare.” Then something changed.
5:07Specifically, the global attention
on the TB2 extended to Russia,
5:10which after anchoring more defense positions
near and within Ukraine’s borders, directed
5:15more attention to and surface-to-air missiles
at the relatively slow, relatively low-altitude,
5:20and relatively expensive drones, effectively
blasting them off the front-lines and into more
5:24minor observational roles.
High-dollar drones worked,
5:28but they didn’t play to Ukraine’s advantage—its
resourcefulness and conviction in the role of
5:33the defensive combattant—nor recognized the
gap in available resources between them and
5:38Russia. Fighting with, and inevitably losing such
expensive equipment played into Russia’s hands.
5:44 But rather than pivot entirely
away from UAVs, they iterated,
5:48moving away from the military-grade, million
dollar drones for the unassuming sort;
5:52the commercial, cheap, easy-to-operate, and easy
to produce quadcopters. While DJI, the world’s
5:58most renowned commercial quadcopter producer,
has never made a military-grade drone, and has
6:03no interest in its products being used, sold, or
thought of as weapons, they’ve become exactly that
6:08in the 21st century’s most significant
ground war to date. In October of 2023,
6:13the country’s prime minister Deny Shmyhal claimed
that Ukraine had gotten their hands on some 60% of
6:18the company’s global output of Mavic quadcopters.
These drones, DJI or otherwise, play squarely to
6:25Ukraine’s strengths. For one, they just don’t cost
much—they retail at under a thousand dollars. Used
6:32as small-area scouts, they also play to the
advantage of the defender rather than the
6:36aggressor, as any advance, build up, or really
any disturbance on the frontlines becomes easy
6:41to monitor via drone while the operator
maintains their cover. They also help
6:45mitigate Ukraine’s ammunition deficiency, as
a drone can scout targets—while a TB2 can spot
6:51a potential target miles away, a quadcopter
can fly near enough to make sure it is indeed
6:56worth the in-demand artillery shells to attack.
And this technology has helped Ukraine undercut
7:01mighty Russia’s greatest fighting strength: its
sheer scale. With the advent of such accurate,
7:07unrelenting monitoring of every movement, Russian
forces have had to adjust, moving in smaller
7:12numbers more quickly, which, for a fighting force
known for prevailing by force but consistently
7:17plagued by organizational issues, is a big ask.
And for a fighting force constantly in need of
7:22supplies, drones are uniquely easy to crowdsource
—Ukrainian citizens have been happy to donate
7:27their hobby drones to the cause, and so too have
citizens across the heavily sympathetic West.
7:32But if the idea of repurposed quadcopters
was resourceful on the part of Ukraine,
7:36then the advent of mass-produced kamikaze
drones is nothing short of scrappy.
7:42Mechanically, there’s a good few differences
between reconnaissance quadcopters and kamikaze
7:46drones—some of the latter are fixed
wing, a vast majority are piloted by
7:50fixed camera first-person-viewing-systems, and
increasingly these are manufactured strictly
7:54for military purposes within the borders
of Ukraine. But the biggest difference is
7:58that these aren’t capable of carrying, then
dropping, a payload, they are the payload.
8:04On an economic scale, these make obvious sense.
Consider the earlier example of kamikaze drones
8:09ramming into the weak points in downed tanks.
Now, it’s difficult to boil down the exact unit
8:14cost of a T-72; they cost a couple million per
when built during the Soviet era, and they cost
8:19over $200,000 each to ramp up for the standards
of modern warfare. But whatever the cost, the
8:24math remains simple, as the oft-cited going rate
for a first-person-view kamikaze drone is about
8:29$400. Suddenly, the playing fields of an
asymmetrical conflict becomes a bit closer
8:36to level. And this goes for human capital,
too. Ukrainian troops on the eastern end are
8:41outnumbered by orders of magnitude by Russian
soldiers, so anytime a DJI Mavic can search
8:46the fields surrounding Marinka for retreating
Russians, or a quadcopter can drop a payload
8:50big enough to finish off a soviet-era tank,
Ukraine keeps another soldier out of harm’s way.
8:55Across what’s nearing three years of innovating
and iterating, drones have become central and
9:00fundamental in Ukraine’s defense. And its military
knows it. Just take the 79th air assault brigade’s
9:06website: there’s soldiers, there’s a helicopter,
and there’s a drone. And, should one view the
9:11brigade’s listed vacancies, they’re looking to
hire more drone pilots at a wage competitive
9:16to the rest of their open positions. The brigade
has even gone so far as to create an attack drone
9:21company to flank its more traditional tank company
and attack battalions. And along with more pilots,
9:26they need more drones, something that
battalion members have posted on YouTube,
9:29and something that American 501c3’s have latched
on to as an easy way to help the cause, with
9:34groups like Ukrainian Defense Support publishing
explainers on how to get all important drones from
9:39American consumer’s hands to Ukrainian soldiers.
But the cycle of military innovation is
9:45predictable, and the next stage after a novel
technology opens up an asymmetrical advantage
9:50is the development of countermeasures. In this
case, some of the countermeasures are stupidly
9:55simple. For example: nets. The exposed rotors
of commercial quadcopters will quickly seize
10:01up when in contact with just about anything,
so simple netting is enough to stop them in
10:06their tracks. So facing the new threat, Russia
has adorned all their key infrastructure near
10:11the front line with so-called anti-drone
netting, and it’s working. In addition,
10:16they’ve experimented with building metal cages
around high-value vehicles and weapons to at
10:21least minimize damage from kamikaze drones—keeping
the blast further away from fragile components.
10:27But then there’s the offensive option. The sorts
of sub-$1000, commercial drones used in this war
10:33have rather limited flight time—between
20 and 30 minutes—and even more limited
10:37signal range—often as little as a mile. While
there are ways to reduce these limitations,
10:42operating kamikaze drones always requires the
operator to be effectively on the front line.
10:47Therefore: drone on drone warfare. Observing
their effectiveness, Russia has built up an
10:53equally-strong drone capability, backed
by a burgeoning domestic manufacturing
10:57industry. Along the front line, operators
from both sides now hide in makeshift bunkers,
11:03peaking out momentarily to launch their aircraft
on a mission to hunt out their counterparts just
11:07miles away. Finding and destroying an enemy
drone base is now a prime objective of each
11:13side as it has the ability to immobilize a
whole fleet of potentially destructive drones,
11:18rather than just one tank or truck or soldier.
But perhaps the most effective countermeasure
11:24is signal jamming. Cheap commercial drones rely
on GPS to navigate, but fundamentally what a GPS
11:30signal is is a rather weak radio wave broadcast
from a satellite in space. Therefore, all it takes
11:36to disrupt GPS navigation is broadcasting
a different, incorrect signal on the same
11:41frequency. This is what GPS jamming is, and it’s
now rampant in hotly-contested areas. And the same
11:48principles apply for essentially any other form of
wireless communication. It's all just radio waves
11:53of different frequencies, so if Russia knows what
frequency Ukrainian drones use to communicate with
11:58their operator, which is fairly predictable
if they’re using popular commercial drones,
12:02they can simply overwhelm that frequency with
irrelevant radio waves, forcing the drone to lose
12:07signal and crash. This sort of electromagnetic
warfare has turned the drone war into a game of
12:13cat and mouse. One side develops a signal jammer
capable of interfering with the frequency used
12:18by the other side’s drones, so the other side
develops drones that communicate using a different
12:22frequency, then the first side adapts their
electronic warfare capabilities, and so on and
12:27so on. The net effect is that drones have gotten
less effective for both sides. The likelihood of
12:33a given drone successfully destroying an enemy
asset has steadily declined, and therefore that
12:38incredible efficiency that made headlines in the
early days of the war is quickly diminishing.
12:44But there’s an obvious solution, and it's
seen in this short clip. These red boxes
12:50represent the first days of a new epoch
of warfare. That’s because this drone,
12:56developed by startup Ukrainian company Saker, is
autonomously identifying targets. Within each box
13:03is what a computer vision algorithm believes is
a target that could be strategically beneficial
13:07to destroy, while the text above indicates what,
in particular, it thinks it is, and the number to
13:12its right is an indication of the software’s
confidence in what it believes it sees.
13:17The short-term benefit of autonomy is
straightforward: Russia’s most effective
13:21countermeasure is to interrupt the signal between
a drone operator and a drone, so what if the
13:26drone doesn’t need a signal? What if the drone,
once deployed, could independently navigate to,
13:33identify, and strike a target. Or even: what if it
could determine its target and decide to strike it
13:39itself without any authorization by an operator?
While all indications suggest that there’s not yet
13:45wide-scale use of AI drones in Ukraine, Saker’s
scrappy autonomous drones have reportedly already
13:51destroyed Russian targets in autonomous mode,
meaning the era of AI warfare has quietly begun.
13:58In practice, autonomous drones have yet to make
a major impact in the war as they still require
14:02human involvement, they’re rather finicky, and
they’re more costly than equally destructive
14:06conventional equivalents—but 6,000 miles
away, on the other side of the Atlantic,
14:11in an industrial area next to an Ikea
in Costa Mesa, California, one company
14:16is trying to change that. Its name is Anduril.
Anduril’s heritage explains a lot. Its founder,
14:23Palmer Lucky, was the pioneer behind the Oculus
brand of VR headsets. While still a teenager
14:29he grew this into a burgeoning company and
eventually sold it to Facebook for $2 billion
14:33at just 21-years old. During these years, others
that would eventually join Anduril were working
14:38at SpaceX and Palantir. The significance of
this pair of companies is in the fact that
14:43they effectively built the Anduril business-model.
That’s because the rocket-launch and predictive
14:48analytics companies each took the US government
on in court when they believed they were being
14:53shut-out of competitive bidding for US military
contracts in favor of the old-guard of the
14:57military-industrial complex like ULA or Raytheon.
Each of these companies believed the US military
15:03procurement system was broken, and this belief
was well-grounded. After all, the United Launch
15:08Alliance was paid to keep operating a wildly
inefficient and aged Atlas V launch system
15:13for decades, with absolutely no incentive for
innovation in a way that might bring down cost for
15:17the government. That’s because, like many military
contracts, ULA was paid on a cost-plus basis,
15:24meaning they were paid whatever it cost for them
to do the work they were asked to do, plus a fixed
15:28percent for profit. In many ways, this actually
disincentivized innovation since creating a more
15:34efficient system that cost less per-launch would
actually reduce their fixed profit percentage. But
15:39SpaceX wasn’t getting these contracts anyways,
so their solution was to foot the cost of
15:43innovation themselves, develop a more efficient
launch system, then enter a competitive bidding
15:48process to offer space access at a lower cost,
yet still turn a profit. After some legal tussles,
15:54this worked, the government had effectively
no choice but to accept their proposal to do
15:58the same work for less, and they’ve now grown
into the largest launch provider for the US.
16:04Anduril was formed under the same model—that of
a traditional company, rather than a military
16:09contractor. But rather than work on the fringes
of the industry, competing in the space-launch or
16:15predictive analytics spaces, which have plenty of
private customers, Anduril is taking the old-guard
16:20head-on—developing innovative products that are
generations ahead of what the legacy contractors
16:25are offering, exclusively for the US and allied
militaries, under the belief that their offerings
16:29will be just too good to pass up.
At the core of that value-proposition
16:34is artificial intelligence. They seem to
recognize the shortcomings of early autonomy
16:39in Ukraine—fundamentally, that the full potential
of autonomous drones is stymied by the persistent
16:45one operator to one device equation. Just as
vehicle autonomy is still merely a convenience
16:50rather than the promised generation-defining
breakthrough due to the need for human oversight,
16:55drone autonomy won’t either until it’s able to
unlock unimaginable degrees of volume. That’s
17:00why Anduril’s marquee product is Lattice—this
is essentially an operating system… for war.
17:07This promotion video demonstrates how Lattice
is supposed to work. In this mock scenario,
17:12a combatant drone is detected by the company’s
Sentry product—one of its first, originally
17:16deployed along the US-Mexico border as part of a
contract with US Customs and Border Protection.
17:21Sentry then alerts an operator, who elects to
activate Pulsar—Anduril’s electromagnetic warfare
17:26solution, capable of jamming communication signals
to and from the drone. But next we see the launch
17:32of Anvil—their kinetic interceptor drone or, put
another way, the drone built to smash into other
17:38drones. Each of these devices work autonomously,
yet are strung together into an integrated system
17:44by Lattice. And Anduril’s has plenty more products
to add to that system—a jet-powered interceptor,
17:50an infrared surveillance platform, and a
wide variety of other airborne platforms.
17:55This is what unlocks the full potential of
drones. Highly capable drones are now cheap, but
18:00human operators are not. So by stringing together
autonomous drones with an operating system, both
18:06the drones and the operation of drones is cheap.
This is where capabilities really compound.
18:13Destruction in warfare typically follows certain
rules. A grenade might be cheap and destructive,
18:19but it’s not very capable—it requires
close proximity. A guided missile might
18:24be destructive and capable, but it’s not very
cheap—its manufacturing is extraordinarily
18:29expensive. A single kamikaze drone might be cheap
and capable, but it’s not very destructive—it can
18:34possibly destroy a tank, but with lowering success
rates it’s really that a single drone can destroy,
18:39on average, say, a tenth of a tank.
Interconnected, autonomous drones, however,
18:44are cheap, capable, and massively destructive.
And that’s largely thanks to drone swarms. Without
18:53the need for operators in close proximity for
each aircraft, a military could deploy dozens,
18:57hundreds, even thousands of drones without
a risk to human life on their side before
19:02getting to the cost of a single advanced
precision-guided missile. That’s to say:
19:07the cost of killing is getting scarily low.
And then there’s one other key difference—to date,
19:15essentially every life taken in war has been
the direct result of a decision made by another
19:20human. Human judgment determines death. But soon,
artificial intelligence algorithms might. Humans
19:28will decide to deploy a drone, but a drone
will be capable of independently determining
19:32whether a life is worth taking. So that’s to
say, in addition to removing the monetary and
19:38human cost of killing, autonomous drones also
remove the moral cost—nobody has to bear the
19:43weight of pulling the trigger that ends a life.
Killing should have friction, it should be costly,
19:51it should feel terrible. This new era of
warfare unlocks apocalyptic levels of efficiency
19:58in death. It is often the case that early
observers overestimate the potential calamity
20:04that new military innovation will bring—the
long-term average is that reality is not as bad as
20:08we fear—but there is a fear that this time might
be different. Drone warfare has precedent—we’ve
20:16seen how militaries act when they have access
to risk-free killing anywhere in the world with
20:20multi-million dollar drones manufactured by
major contractors. Some of the most horrific
20:25actions by the US military have happened outside
the context of a formal war through the use of
20:30remotely-operated aircraft. Civilian casualties
have been enormous, and the state of war is now
20:35a blurry, near-perpetual concept—strikes happen
indiscriminately in countries with which the US
20:41has no active state of war. Now, we’re entering
an era where this same technology can be acquired
20:47on a miniaturized scale not from military
contractors, but from online retailers. So
20:53the concern is twofold. First, what will non-state
actors—terrorists, cartels, and others with a will
20:59to kill—do with a technology that allows them
to transport an explosive device effectively
21:05anywhere, at limited risk or cost to themselves.
And second, with the expanded capabilities of
21:10massive swarms of drones, what will state actors
do when the accountability and friction of war
21:17is minimized to perhaps its lowest level ever.
As this video makes clear, artificial intelligence
21:25is becoming quite influential—it is the key
technology around which the next generation
21:30of weapons is being built. When any technology
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