FanDuel is now available everywhere in the U.S.
So you can get in on the sports action no matter where you are.
Including these places.
Make this your most rewarding season ever with FanDuel.
Age and location restrictions apply.
Product availability varies by market.
See FanDuel.com for eligibility.
Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER.
If you shoot down a $1,000 drone with a million dollar missile, you're losing every time.
It's not a winning proposition.
And we've seen in recent conflicts a number of countries be on the wrong side of this cost equation.
Certainly it's true for Ukraine, where they face a lot of situations where they have a limited number of Patriot air defense missiles, for example.
And it's not worth shooting down Russian drones.
They've got to save these scarce missile interceptors to go after Russian ballistic missiles, the higher order kind of thing.
Hello, and welcome to One Decision.
Conversations about intelligence, statecraft, and the forces that drive world politics.
With people who've been in the room and on the ground.
I'm your co-host, John Rain.
Hello, and I'm Mr. Richard Deerlove, the former chief of British intelligence.
And John, it's really good to see you and to have another really important podcast to discuss.
And great to see you too, Richard.
We have a rich interview for you today.
To keep up with all our content, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
And we'd love it if you could like this episode or drop us a comment on YouTube.
That will help others find us.
Right, let's get to the business in hand.
Today, we're looking at nothing less than the future of war.
The Russia-Ukraine war and the conflict between the U.S. and Iran have a common thread.
They are telling us that.
We are now entering a new era of warfare where cheap drones and commercial tech can rival expensive military platforms costing tens of millions of dollars.
And this feels like just the beginning.
As artificial intelligence matures, the battlefield as we've known it will shift even more dramatically.
Our guest this week has spent the last decade considering where this shift might take us.
And in particular, how the United States should prepare.
For the transformation.
Paul Charest is Executive Vice President at the Center for a New American Security in Washington.
He's worked on autonomous weapons policy at the U.S. Department of Defense, in the Bush and Obama administrations.
And before that, importantly, Paul completed multiple combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan as a U.S. Army Ranger.
He is the author of Four Battlegrounds, Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
Paul, welcome to One Decision.
Thanks for having me.
We're talking today about nothing less than the future of war.
So it's an enormous subject and great pleasure to have you here to guide us through it.
I thought we might start by just asking you, what characteristics do you see as defining the new drone-centric warfare?
And maybe give us a little bit of a feel of how we got there.
Well, thanks so much for having me.
Yeah, we are in a moment of very profound change in warfare.
The age of AI warfare is here.
This is no longer something in the future.
It's here now.
We're seeing artificial intelligence being used in conflicts around the world, in Ukraine, in Gaza, in the U.S. conflict with Iran.
We're also seeing drones being used at a massive scale.
Ukraine is producing 4 million drones a year.
So when you ask about what are these attributes, one of them is just the scale that's possible physically with cheap drones.
I think another example we saw of this was the barrages of missiles and drones that Iran has unleashed on the region more broadly in the Middle East over the last several months, over the course of the conflict with the U.S. and Israel.
So there's a physical scale to this era of sort of machine-driven warfare.
But also there's a cognitive scale that we're just starting where AI is processing information.
It's helping people make decisions.
There was just a report that came out this last week.
It was a report that came out this last week about an AI system hallucinating, an intelligence report that almost had the U.S. board a Chinese ship in the Middle East.
And so it's kind of a wild time, the way that warfare is evolving very, very quickly with technology, and people are just struggling to catch up.
But everyone is coming to terms with pervasive AI and a new pace and scope to. The technology that AI drives in the military, which is a notoriously well-defined culture.
How do you think that militaries themselves are coming to terms with this?
Do they see this as just another weapon in the arsenal, or do they think, as clearly you do, no, this is a whole different era where everything gets redefined?
Well, militaries tend to be relatively conservative institutions when it comes to making changes and adopting new technologies.
And the fundamental reason for this is we don't fight wars very often, thankfully. That's the good news.
And so militaries tend to be cautious about changing the way that they're fighting.
And when it's adopting an improvement on an existing technology within a paradigm that they understand, militaries are pretty supportive.
So, you know, a slightly better missile, slightly better radar or stealth. But when it's something that just totally upends a paradigm for warfighting.
All right. We're going to get rid of horses completely and we're going to use tanks or, you know, we're going to we're going to take these airplanes.
We're going to put them on ships at sea and use aircraft carriers and airplanes as the way to fight at sea instead of battleships.
Militaries are actually pretty slow to make those changes because they don't get the kind of feedback about what works the same way that, say, a company is getting in the marketplace.
They release a product. They see whether people buy it or not. For militaries, they might go decades between major conflicts.
And then they need to know whether something's going to work.
So I think within, you know, militaries, you see kind of a mixed approach with artificial intelligence.
Militaries are excited about it. They're trying to adopt it, but they're not going to wholesale throw out the ways that they have been fighting.
They're not going to say, OK, drones are here. We're going to get rid of fighter jets and bombers.
And it's like, no, how do we use this to complement what already exists in the force?
I have to ask you, since you've been through U.S. military training.
Is it is it impacting on what is taught in U.S. military academies?
I think to some extent, certainly there's there's excitement about using artificial intelligence.
We're seeing the U.S. military has pushed A.I. tools.
So large language models, chatbot tools like ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini to both military and civilian personnel across the broader defense enterprise.
So they're putting these tools in people's hands.
But like a lot of industries, a lot of companies, people aren't sure what to do with A.I. yet.
It's like, OK, I have this I have this chatbot, I have this language model.
Like, what do I how do I use this thing to increase productivity?
It sounds like a great idea. It's actually tricky to figure out how to do this in practice.
And I think we see that historically with new technologies, whether it's, you know, the advent of electricity and the electrification of factories during the pandemic.
The advent of factories during the Industrial Revolution or introducing airplanes and tanks and submarines and warfare.
Like getting the widget is only the first step.
Figuring out what do you do with it is actually kind of really where the hard work happens.
And that's going to take time.
I have to ask two more.
Is military training still fundamentally about building the warrior or is the warrior something new these days?
Yes and no, both.
What we've seen over the long haul of human history in warfare is that like the skills that you need warriors to have evolved quite a bit.
So I was an army ranger, was trained as a sniper.
Like marksmanship is really core to what we do.
I spent a lot of time sitting behind a rifle aiming and things and shooting and trying to hit a very small target.
If you go back far enough, people were fighting hand to hand with swords and axes and things.
And that's not really a skill that we prioritize.
Even infantry troops today, maybe they get like a half day of bayonet training.
But that's not where you focus a lot of your time.
So I think we have seen warfare transition over the last hundred years or so to be much more technological.
We look at like what a pilot does or a submarine officer.
They're managing a lot of complicated technology.
And there's more and more of that.
But it is probably something that, you know, is a slow evolution over many generations.
That shift towards a much more focus on using this technology, knowing how to harness it effectively.
And the sort of physical attributes, you know, being relevant in some cases.
If you're like a grunt out on the battlefield, you got to carry a bunch of gear around.
But that is diminishing slowly over time in terms of importance.
Paul, it's always been the case that, you know, warfare has driven an accelerated innovation.
You know, needs must.
So under the pressure of warfare.
But, you know, given this drone revolution, I'm curious, how did it actually happen?
just give you an example. I mean, after 9/11, I was certainly very rapidly in the States and
witnessed drones being used live in Afghanistan. So the Americans had already developed some
capability. Now that's a long time ago. But it seems to me that the real acceleration of the
technology has been in Ukraine, perhaps almost as an act of desperation, given that we all thought
that Ukraine would be so rapidly overwhelmed by what had been the Red Army or the Soviet Army now,
the Russian Army. But it just didn't happen. What is your comments on the sort of roots and origins
and the speed of this development? Because it has been around for a long time, but it didn't come to
the forefront.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Until Ukraine, really.
No, I think that's right. I think there are these kind of twin evolutions of drones and warfare.
One is this sort of post-9/11 era of the US military, the CIA, using drones to find and track
terrorists. And that's a certain kind of drone. It's basically like a small airplane, a Predator
or Reaper drone, something that flies at maybe a medium altitude, maybe 30,000 feet,
has a couple of missiles on it. I mean,
very high-end sensor that's used either both for daytime or nighttime vision using infrared
to find and track targets. That type of technology has proliferated. We're seeing other versions from
Iran, Russia, China, Turkey that are cheaper or cost-effective versions of this
that have kind of spread around the world. And then you've got this whole other
evolution of drones. It's really coming out of the commercial space. Things like commercial quadcopters,
which really looks more like a flying smartphone. You look at like a DJI, it's a Chinese company,
your DJI drone, you know, they're super small. And, you know, that's also a big part of what
we're seeing in Ukraine, both of these kinds of drones that are being used very widely.
And I would say underlying all of this is really the technology we're seeing coming out of
information revolution that's making all of this possible. It's cheaper sensors, cameras, computer networks, computer
chips on board, that like the physical attributes of the drone are made possible by things like
electric motors and batteries. But it's not like, it's not the physical performance characteristics
that's actually revolutionary here. It's really the digital guts that are inside it that are
powering it that's making this whole drone revolution possible. One of the things though
about the technology which I find most striking, and maybe that's an appropriate word, is the degree
to which it can be accurately targeted at a massive distance. I mean, I was talking
recently to the manufacturer of some of the chips used in some of the drone technology,
and he was saying to me now they can fly it through a car window at like 600 kilometers.
It seems to me that that sort of directional control technology is almost more important now
than any other aspect of the development, you know, as we're sort of witnessing it on the battlefield.
I mean, at what point did those, as it were, technical elements
aggregate into what we're seeing today? That's a great example, actually, because
what's making that possible? It's not that the engines or motors behind drones have had some
revolution that allows longer range. That technology has been around for a while,
getting more cost effective, sure. But what's really amazing here is the accuracy that you're
describing. And so there's a whole bunch of digital technologies that are making that happen.
Ukraine's been conducting a lot of long range deep strikes inside Russia.
To do that effectively, you need to be able to not rely on communications links
because those can be jammed. And so the drone is operating autonomously. So how is it doing that?
Well, one of the ways that it could do that is you upload satellite imagery
into the drone and then map a route out. And the drone has a camera looking down and it's looking
at the terrain. It's comparing what it's seeing to what it's expecting in the satellite imagery. And
it's using that to find its path. So to do that, you need cheap, commercially available satellite
imagery. That's relatively new. You need computer chips that are pretty capable to do the onboard
processing. You need high resolution cameras. This is the same kind of guidance system that
actually the Tomahawk cruise missile has had for decades. But it used to be this really exquisite
defense technology that only the US military had. And now it's available anywhere. And people can do
it for pretty cheap. It's like a couple of bucks. It's like a couple
thousand bucks. And so that's like really this kind of democratization of information technology,
making it cheaper, more widely accessible, is what enabling what you're talking about.
Paul, fascinating insight into how what we now see as military capabilities just rests upon
the steady increasing availability and the reduction of the cost of the component parts
and stuff. It leads to this extraordinary situation where you have
the weapon itself costing very little and the countermeasure costing a fortune.
Looking ahead, do the costs of countermeasures, do they come down? Or are we stuck with this
curious asymmetry that plays into the hands of under-resourced, non-state actors, criminal
groups? I mean, that's a really awkward position to be in. And the state charged with the defense
of its population and its territory is having to spend a fortune on defending itself. Is it
just a point at which it starts to level up? I think the cost will come down, but the net of
effect is going to be to relatively benefit less capable actors, non-state groups, terrorists,
smaller countries. What do I mean by that? Well, right now, the cost of countermeasures to shoot
down these drones is like really favors the offense. If you shoot down a thousand dollar drone
with a million dollar missile, you're losing every time. And we've seen in recent conflicts, a number of countries be on the wrong
side of this cost equation. They've got to save these
scarce missile interceptors to go after Russian ballistic missiles, the higher order kind of
threat. In fact, one of the tactics that we've seen Russia employ is they'll send a wave of cheap
drones to soak up some of the missile interceptors and then follow that up with ballistic missiles.
And Iran did the same to the United States.
They're severely depleting the U.S. global stocks for missile interceptors over the last
six months or so in the conflict between Iran and the United States. And Iran's been using pretty
cheap drones and ballistic missiles. It's not just a cost factor here. Certainly for the U.S. and
Ukraine and others, there isn't some other inventory of these missiles available. They're
working on ramping up production, but the supply chains have bottlenecks. It's going to take years
to fill that inventory. So that's, I think, a huge constraint. So people are working on
lower cost interceptors and cheaper missiles and drones to shoot down cheap missiles and drones.
So there are options that are out there that are going to bring the cost down. I think in the long
run, we're seeing transition is warfare to this sort of war of attrition of cheap missiles and
drones where the economics of warfare matter a lot here. What analysts will talk about is the cost
ratio between offense and defense. Okay. What does it cost in one party to send more of these
cheap assets to attack versus to defend against them? And that's a different kind of game to be
playing where you're focused not just in like, how do I make the most exquisite stealth fighter jet,
which is kind of where the U.S. military has been focused for the last 40 years or so,
but now how do I make these things cheap? How do I crank them out fast?
How do I make them affordable? And that's a ballgame that actually tends to favor
I think the less capable actors. It feels a bit like a Kalashnikov moment,
Paul, where somebody comes up with a weapon which is very cheap to produce and in an instant
redefines warfare and combat. But I just wanted to ask you one more thing on this asymmetry. Does it
also build in a protraction in warfare? One of the things that struck me about certainly the Gulf
conflict is the asymmetrically disadvantaged actors, which is everyone who's not Israel or the U.S.
the Iranians or their other parties. They've managed to keep going because you don't have
to deal a decisive blow. You just have to keep the conflict going. You have to
oblige your adversary to be on the defensive, to be burning up money, and eventually you win
on the economics. So does it inherently lead to protraction or less decisive warfare?
I don't know that it's inherently. I'd say that it certainly can.
Obviously, the Ukraine war has been going on for four years now,
the Iranian conflict was a good example of this dynamic you're describing where there was a huge
uptick of strikes on both sides early on in the conflict of Israel striking targets, of course,
Iran. The U.S. launched 13,000 strikes against Iran and Iran launching a wave of drones and
ballistic missile attacks back against a variety of targets in the region. But then it's sort of
transitioning over time to this longer tail phase of conflict where neither side could get a decisive
advantage, where the U.S. is sort of chasing around mobile targets in Iran, mobile missile launch
mobile drone launchers, military commanders who are hiding.
All the big targets have already been hit at that point in time.
But the U.S. can't stop Iran from launching more drones and missiles back.
There's just too many of them.
They're too good at hiding.
They're able to reconstitute.
And so the number of Iranian strikes sort of diminished but never went away.
And that is, I think, a feature of this kind of conflict
where it's a war of attrition in the sense of both larger numbers,
the cost equation mattering,
but it can be a sort of more protracted conflict
where it becomes a conflict in who is able to reconstitute their forces faster,
who is able to have an industrial base that can compete effectively,
and who is able to just bear the economic and political costs of this conflict.
Who wants it more?
Who's willing to pay that price?
And it's certainly for the United States.
That's a kind of warfare that the U.S. military hates, hates to try to fight.
But that's some of the reality of warfare today.
It seems to be warfare without the decisive maneuver.
Yeah.
In a manner of speaking, it introduces the concept of,
rather than victory and defeat,
it introduces the concept of not losing.
And that, you know, if you don't lose,
and I would put the Iranians in that category at the moment and the Ukrainians,
you're in a— but you're the sort of subsidiary power.
It puts you in a relatively strong,
I was going to say negotiating or political position.
I mean, to that extent, that has sort of shifted the gauge on how we fight.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, there's certainly some conflicts where it can devolve into simply who's willing to outlast the other person or pay a larger price.
But I think there's also this dynamic you're describing where, you know, going into a conflict,
oftentimes for the perceived to be weaker or militarily weaker party,
just surviving can be beating the spread, right?
And they can come out politically much stronger.
And I think that's really clearly the case with Iran and this conflict,
where the Iranian regime has continued to persist as a threat in the region.
Militarily, of course, they are weaker than they were six months ago before the conflict began.
But politically, they've shown that they can weather—
these strikes from the U.S. and Israel, and they're still here.
They're still disrupting traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.
They're still causing problems in the region and attacking bases in the Gulf.
And so, you know, whether the U.S. and Israel like it or not,
they are a force that they're going to have to deal with and the U.S.
is going to have to negotiate with in order to get stability in the region.
And so that certainly makes Iran come out politically much stronger.
Paul, in your foreign affairs article, you also use this phrase "adversarial disability."
Which is interesting, and I think I understand what it means.
But then it is relevant to what we're talking about.
I mean, can you explain how that applies to the sort of theory that you've put forward,
that, you know, the commercialization of cheap warfare?
All right. Okay, so it's a bit of a technical term, so folks, hopefully bear with me.
So these large language models that people are using, you know, Gemini and Claude and ChatGPT,
these are massive neural networks that are trained on the billions of words,
trillions of words, these neural networks are very large and they're expensive to run.
Now, a technique that AI scientists use to take a bigger neural network and make a smaller version of it
that is almost as good is called distillation.
They basically take the outputs from the larger neural network and they train a smaller one on it,
and they can kind of piggyback off of all of the effort and data and computing power
they want to train in the larger one.
And that might be helpful if you want to have an AI model that is more cost effective,
it's cheaper to run, it could be maybe run locally on your device, on a laptop or a smartphone.
So that's like an AI technique.
Now, adversarial distillation is when another AI company does this to somebody else's model,
and it's against the terms of use for those models.
And a lot of Chinese companies are doing this right now to US AI companies and they're using it to draft
their own models and they're using it to develop their own AI models and they're using it to develop
their own models and they're using it to develop their own AI models.
And so if you look at like the most advanced AI models that are out right now,
they're coming from US labs, they're coming from Google DeepMind, Anthropic, OpenAI predominantly.
The Chinese companies are only a couple of months behind, maybe about six months behind.
And there's a couple of reasons why they're, I mean, one, they have smart engineers and scientists,
want to give them a lot of credit for that.
They are also getting access to chips that they're not supposed to have access to.
Because they're being smuggled into China, AI chips that are banned in China,
or they're getting them through third parties.
They're accessing computing hardware that's like in Southeast Asia, for example.
But also one of the things they're doing is they're getting information from these US companies,
taking the outputs of those models and using it.
I hesitate to call it like stealing or intellectual property theft,
because it gets into some tricky questions of like, does that count as intellectual property theft?
You know, it's worth pointing out these AI companies,
these companies themselves, did train their models on a whole bunch of copyrighted data,
which they said, oh, that's not, that's legit, that's not intellectual property theft.
So like, you know, that question gets a little dicey, but I will say it's against the terms of use for these models.
The companies don't want them doing it.
And it is a big, one of the reasons why China is so close behind the United States in AI right now.
That does raise the intriguing question, Paul, is that if there were a military conflict between China and the US,
what is the current strategic balance between the two?
Or given that one of the factors is also how quickly you can catch out what your innovation cycle is,
as well as what your inventory is, where in the next epoch of warfare,
where does the military balance lie between the two commercial superpowers?
Yeah, I mean, I think like in the AI space specifically, there's a lot of excitement about, you know, which companies are ahead.
I would say for military purposes, that doesn't matter very much.
So if the leading US companies in the United States are a couple months ahead of Chinese companies,
but it takes both the US and Chinese militaries a few years,
let's say charitably two to three years, maybe more like five to ten, to figure out how to use AI effectively,
being a couple months ahead of the commercial side just doesn't matter.
It's not that important.
The real race on the military side is in
adoption, not development of the technology in the commercial sector.
And so I think that's a big challenge.
Now, AI is only a piece of this, of course, right?
There are other aspects to the military dimensions of the conflict.
The biggest one, of course, is geography, which is to say that if the US and China fought a war over, say, Taiwan,
that's in China's front yard, right?
That's right on their doorstep.
The United States has to travel across the entire Pacific, and China's made a lot of investments in long range ballistic missiles,
and anti-ship cruise missiles and other technology submarines to try to at least slow down the United States
and make it harder for the US to project power into the region.
So that's going to be a big challenge for the United States.
But a lot of these new technologies, AI, drones, these are technologies that are pretty widely available to everyone.
And they're like in some ways like the opposite of stealth technology that came out of secret US defense labs was very slow to proliferate.
And so the net effect of this, I think, is really to relatively advantage other players instead of the US military.
And that's, I think, a real hard challenge for the US to adapt to.
It is a tough one, Paul, isn't it?
I remember from my own time with the US military in Iraq, how embedded the concept, the culture was of superior firepower.
And I know it can be a little bit of a cliche, the Americans have always got more than anybody else, but if you move into an age where
the asymmetry between your adversary actually favors your adversary and it's fueled by technology,
that's quite a cultural adjustment you have to make.
Yeah, and I think, look, you always want to have an advantage on the battlefield, right?
I'm a big fan of superior firepower.
Having been in a couple of gunfights myself, it's always better when you're shooting more at them than they're shooting at you.
You want them to keep their heads down.
But I think where I would say the US military has maybe
become overly attached is the idea of technological advantage, that the US military has sort of had this luxury of technological
advantage that came out of investments made in the 1960s and '70s in, you know, the sort of first wave of information technology in
satellites, in computer chips, in computer networks, in GPS, in precision-guided weapons, in stealth technology, and the US has been able
to use that to have a massive technological advantage over competitors.
Yeah, that's great.
If you get that, that's awesome.
But the idea that that's always going to be the case is, I think, actually not true about the era of warfare that we're getting into.
If we're looking at cheap drones, it's not just that China also has cheap drones, but Iran also has cheap drones.
So if you look at what's unfolding between the US and Iran in this recent conflict, it's not that Iran can do everything that the US can do.
Iran doesn't have an F-35 fighter jet.
It doesn't matter.
They don't need that.
They can still launch cheap drones and ballistic missiles to destroy very expensive US aircraft.
on the tarmac, on the runways and bases in the Middle East.
The U.S. doesn't have the ability to defend against those in a cost-effective way.
And that's a reality of warfare that is not, I would argue, not unique to that conflict.
It's one we're seeing in other conflicts, too, and that is going to persist over time.
And U.S. military has got to adapt to that reality, that we're not going to have a technological advantage.
We've got to find other ways of staying ahead of competitors.
Paul, we talk about Ukraine, AI, the battlefield, but how more precisely would the Ukrainians now be using AI to coordinate their capabilities?
I mean, is it mainly about targeting or is it more profound than that?
And then to what extent is the sort of command and control actually being handled?
By AI rather than humans?
I mean, you know, where does that boundary lie?
Because is it, I mean, a further extension of the question.
I mean, I'm sure we remember that brief period in Ukraine when Trump switched off the intelligence feed from Vice Biden.
How, you know, how does that actually fit together?
Sure. So let me talk about ways that AI is being used today and then maybe what that might look like going forward.
So today.
Today, certainly it's possible to use AI image classifiers to sift through drone video feeds, satellite images to identify objects.
The U.S. military is doing this.
And so, you know, if you have lots of satellite imagery, you can, or drone imagery, you can, you just don't have enough people to put on that.
There's not enough human eyeballs to actually watch all that.
AI can do that for you.
It can find objects.
AI is also getting good enough to be miniaturized.
The chips are capable enough to put some of that on the drones themselves.
And there have been a couple of reports coming out of the conflict in recent months about both on both sides, both Russia and Ukraine, having image classifiers using AI on a drone so they could fly.
And now if the communications link to the human is jammed, the drone doesn't just hit a fixed target.
It could fly around and look for something that's looking maybe for ground vehicles or some other kind of target to then swoop in and attack.
That's an autonomous weapon.
That's a weapon now that is actually making its own decision, in a small degree, about what to attack on the battlefield.
And certainly, technologically, a small step.
I would argue kind of from a moral or ethical standpoint, big line to cross, a profound one in human control over warfare.
Right now, things like command and control are still being done by humans.
But also, you know, the front lines are pretty static in the Ukraine war.
You switch to a different kind of conflict that's much more dynamic, where there's a lot happening.
For example.
For example, the U.S. kind of the air campaign against Iran, where you've got mobile and relocatable targets.
You've got things happening in real time that are very dynamic on the battlefield.
The U.S. was using AI to help process all that information, feeding that into humans still making the decisions.
But that enables things like, OK, you might have an airplane that's in route to its target.
And then information changes.
You're feeding new targeting information to that airplane.
And while it's flying, saying, oh, I got a new target for you that just came up.
Again, humans still all involved in that chain.
But AI helping to do that faster and hopefully works, hopefully better.
The idea that drones will redefine warfare is it is gaining a lot of currency.
But of course, warfare is bigger than just the war between the weapon systems themselves.
And I just wonder, what are your thoughts on where this leaves conventional concepts of warfare, which is that.
For example, in the end, in the British tradition, the poor bloody infantry have to go in and take possession, you know, or suppress resistance.
Does that persist in military circles?
Or do you think that actually quite a lot of roles are going both before and after, you know, preparation of the battle space and all that's now done on an automated basis?
And there are fewer opportunities for medals for the U.S. Rangers.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm quite partial to the view of the infantry here.
I mean, I think that that perception will still persist among infantry troops.
But look, I mean, we're a long way from the days of the Swiss pikemen when the infantry was the vanguard of ground combat.
It's not anymore.
It hasn't been true, you know, at least since the days of the Blitzkrieg and World War II, where tanks really supplanted cavalry and maneuver warfare.
What we've seen in the last couple of years in Ukraine is drones sort of take on this.
New dimension.
So we want we want to clock a couple of years.
Very early on, the war in Ukraine sort of stalemated to this kind of World War I style trench warfare.
And over the last several years, drones have played a slowly incremental role in changing it.
I would say at first drones were kind of acting like spotters for artillery.
If you look at the conflict is today, it's actually quite different.
The front lines have thinned out considerably.
And so there's just like there are still troops.
Ground troops on the front lines, infantry, but much fewer than there used to be because you don't need them because the drones are actually what's seeing the enemy advance.
You can have a much fewer ground troops on the front lines.
In fact, you want fewer ground troops on the front lines because they're just targets for drones.
And so we've had situations where ground troops have surrendered directly to drones.
The main threat on the front lines isn't actually machine guns now.
It's drone warfare that you might get spotted by.
It changes the dynamic on the ground considerably.
It's not just that it's replacing ground troops, although it is to some extent, right, like offsetting that.
It's that now you have a threat that's three dimensional and that's very persistent.
And so the sort of paradigm shift I would make is I think it's analogous to what machine guns did to ground warfare in World War I,
where machine guns dramatically increased the lethality on the battlefield by about a hundred fold.
It increased just the amount of like lead.
That infantry troops in defensive positions could put downrange against offensive troops.
And it turned out that the old tactics that people would use in the 19th century to just like march forward in a straight line, like were not effective against machine guns.
Like you just wouldn't, you wouldn't make it and you would get mowed down.
And that was like, it took a while for people to adapt to that.
A similar transition is happening in ground warfare because of drones, because the drones are always there overhead.
They're always persistent.
It creates a new kind of transparency.
And lethality on a battlefield that we're seeing Russia and Ukraine be forced to adapt to.
And I think we'll end up in a place where people will, you know, figure out how to unlock maneuver in that kind of world.
But it's going to be a different kind of way of fighting.
There'll still be grunts, but, you know, they're not going to be necessarily the vanguard.
It's probably going to be drones in the future.
But just following further on that thought, I mean, what it appears to be the situation in Ukraine.
I mean, given that the Russians, strictly speaking, are on the offensive, they haven't been able to aggregate their forces to break the Ukrainian line.
Presumably because the moment you start aggregating, even if you're 60, 70 kilometers back from the front line, that's detected and you can send a swarm of drones to break up.
How might maneuvering on the battlefield change?
Because it seems to me that's what. It's much easier for the Ukrainians to defend than it is for them, of course, to go on the offensive and get back territory that they've lost.
Although there have been areas where they've been reasonably successful recently.
Is this a sort of stasis?
Are we stuck?
Or is there going to be an innovation somewhere which will change that?
Well, there's clearly currently a stasis now in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
And neither side knows how to. Break free to maneuver again.
I do think that will change.
Whether it changes in this war, like, I think, remains to be seen.
But I think the dynamic is going to be exactly what's occurring.
That in order to mass, to concentrate forces, to break through, it takes time.
It's very visible.
The drones can see you.
Now they can attack you.
So how do you break out of that cycle?
I do think you can imagine a different way to mass firepower through things like massed drone.
And missile attacks that might find ways to blind an adversary's communication to do, like, waves of drones and missiles, deep strikes to, like, you know, create some of that maneuver space, if you will, by blinding the adversary, you know, striking their communication, striking their command and control networks that would then allow you to have the space in the conflict and the time to start physically maneuvering.
Right.
So it may be that, like. Moving ground forces, moving tanks and infantry troops and ground vehicles is the second phase that happens after you first said to use the drones and missiles and cyber attacks and electronic warfare to blind and disable your adversary.
That could be one way out of it.
I think we'll have to see.
But it's a different, you know, it's very possible to end up in a place where there's just a different tempo of conflict.
That's a result.
There has to be some way of breaking loose that's going to be faster than the way of maneuvering.
With, like, physical troops on the ground because of the dynamics that you're describing.
Paul, one of the things you referenced. for us a couple of times here is the that the tech base that this is that these weapons systems are
coming from the wide availability of a lot of that tech is somewhat breaking the monopoly that the
defense primes have on weapons systems i mean i i don't know how much an f-35 is these days around
100 million 120 million give or take yeah at the other end of the scale we're looking at five
thousand pounds a pop for the cheapest drones and you can arguably put one against the other and i
totally accept an f-35 is a sophisticated platform does a whole bunch of other things but you've got
these these huge disparities what is the outlook for these very expensive platforms that we've
that everyone has been buying sometime and indeed there's still huge interest in buying most
generally in the gulf what's the outlook for that as the sort of staple of modern defense systems
you
I think we're going to see large platforms still have a role to play but it will be balanced by
cheaper low-cost assets that are that are complementary so what might that look like
look um some of the advantages to the really expensive exquisite systems whether it's a
giant stealth bomber or an f-35 or something else is that there are going to be some special purpose
missions that you still want that that piece of equipment for right so if you want to go in
and take down an enemy's weapon system you're going to have to go in and take down an enemy's
advanced air defense systems you're going to want stealth aircraft to do that that's going to be like
the best way to do it if you have that tool that you're in your arsenal you know if you want to have
a mobile air base at sea you get an aircraft carrier like that's valuable right what's changing
is um we're going to see for example like fighter jets have um what that was sometimes a loyal
wingman uncrewed or droned aircraft operating alongside them right and so you might have an
f-35 that then has four or maybe eight drones that are paired with that f-35 that can carry more
missiles because there's only so many missiles the f-35 can carry inside its its cargo bay and
to say stealthy it has to carry them internally and so you could have all of these other drones
that are more missile carriers you can have some drones that are stealthy that you push ahead and
like you know they're really just there to be like ultra ultra stealthy they got sensors on them
and it's got a communications link back to the f-35 so that that's picking up the radar first
and so you might have to use like a like an american football analogy here you might have
a role where the crewed fighter jet is sort of quarterbacking this sort of larger team of drones
of different shapes and sizes and there's still a role for vehicles that have people inside them
particularly because it's really hard to have long-range protected communications
so any of these environments are going to have jamming they're going to have electronic warfare
and so you can have like short-range protected communications but it's hard to do and it's
really hard over longer ranges so i think you're going to have a need for people forward in the
fight but now it's going to look like this kind of mix of crude and uncrewed assets of
traditional legacy platforms fighters bombers ships complemented by this sort of much larger
number of drones that are helping to bring mass to the fight as well that's sort of that's a
fascinating example there paul of how how it might evolve but to have a platform at the center there
and of this carrier group in the sky suggests you see that the humans stay in the loop and indeed
quite a long time after that you see that the humans stay in the loop and indeed quite a long
way forward in the loop the big concern is that they drop out of the loop i mean is that just
you know is that just apocalyptic or or is it actually a possibility that they move out of the
loop i think the relevant question is sort of like where are humans in the loop or what role are
humans playing i think we're going to still still see humans involved in decision making the
battlefield that may not look like a human pressing a button authorizing every single target
that might look like a human directing a swarm
of drones to go conduct some mission to recon an area to find and strike things it might look like
humans delegating even lethal decision making to drones in some circumstances right okay there's a
this kill box to use sort of a term you know in the space and the drones are let loose in there
and anything that meets the targeting criteria the drones are going to attack on their own
i think there's there's probably going to be time and space and warfare where that's
occurring i think the most effective militaries will still have humans involved because
ai and automation often is not great at responding to novel circumstances
and there's a lot of that in warfare like you don't really know what your enemy's tactics are
going to be you can make some guesses but they're going to try to trick you right they're going to
try to come up with new things in the battlefield you don't know where you're going to fight the
next war particularly for somebody like the u.s military what you've just described is that what
a swarm looks like
looks like talk us through drone swarms because there's something nightmarish about
that image hitchcock like you know in reality what would it be so a swarm like a true swarm
is more than just a deluge of drones more than just a lot of drones it's drones that are able
to operate autonomously and cooperatively through various mechanisms there's a variety of ways to do
this the drones can coordinate their behavior and so that might look like let's say they're
attacking a target
they're able to come from multiple axes simultaneously to attack that target
so let's say they're tapping a ship at sea and there's drones or missiles coming to attack the
ship rather than four or five missiles coming from one direction the missiles are able to
communicate split up come from multiple directions and time when they're arriving at the exact same
time that's a much more difficult problem for the defender to react to right now they're coming
from here and there and you can imagine very quickly getting to an era of cognitive overload
for human defenders
you know there's only so much information that people can process all at once one or two threats
maybe but you've got you know 50 or 100 drones coming simultaneously from different directions
and waves of attacks changing directions maneuvering responding like that's really hard for
humans to respond to that that's a different kind of a problem um and that's one where you kind of
have to then look to ai to respond in kind um to respond to that so to make like another i'm gonna
make another american sports analogy
here i hope you'll forgive me but think about baseball fly ball two outfielders who's gonna get
the ball somebody calls it i got it humans can do that like that's a thing that humans can do
now imagine you've got 50 outfielders and 50 fly balls you gotta drop a lot of balls the humans
can't they can be best outfielders in the league it doesn't matter like humans can't coordinate
like that that quickly ai could actually do that and swarms could do that so so swarms could enable
a degree of superhumanity and that's a thing that humans can do that and swarms could do that so so
that's a thing that humans can do that and swarms could enable a degree of superhumanity and that's
a thing that humans can do that and swarms could enable a degree of superhuman not just speed but
a degree of superhuman not just speed but coordination on the battlefield that could
coordination on the battlefield that could
coordination on the battlefield that could be very hard for militaries to adapt and
be very hard for militaries to adapt and
be very hard for militaries to adapt and respond to one thing we haven't really
respond to one thing we haven't really
respond to one thing we haven't really focused on and you've mentioned it in
focused on and you've mentioned it in
focused on and you've mentioned it in passing is naval warfare and it it seems
passing is naval warfare and it it seems
passing is naval warfare and it it seems to me that the vulnerability
to me that the vulnerability
to me that the vulnerability of capital ships
of capital ships
of capital ships means that you know that sort of infinite
means that you know that sort of infinite
means that you know that sort of infinite dimension of
dimension of
dimension of sea air underwater is going to maybe
sea air underwater is going to maybe
sea air underwater is going to maybe transform the naval
transform the naval
transform the naval conflict faster than land conflict am i
conflict faster than land conflict am i
conflict faster than land conflict am i making a correct assumption there i
making a correct assumption there i
making a correct assumption there i think that's right when you look at what
think that's right when you look at what
think that's right when you look at what ukraine has been able to do
ukraine has been able to do
ukraine has been able to do using small um sea drones
using small um sea drones
using small um sea drones they've been able to cripple russia's
they've been able to cripple russia's
they've been able to cripple russia's black sea fleet at a fraction of the
black sea fleet at a fraction of the
black sea fleet at a fraction of the cost i mean look i don't want to like
cost i mean look i don't want to like
cost i mean look i don't want to like hold up the russian navy as the world's
hold up the russian navy as the world's
hold up the russian navy as the world's best navy they're not okay like they
best navy they're not okay like they
best navy they're not okay like they have maintenance problems on the ships
have maintenance problems on the ships
have maintenance problems on the ships they have leadership problems the us or
they have leadership problems the us or
they have leadership problems the us or british or french navy or japanese navy
british or french navy or japanese navy at low cost to swarm and overwhelm ships
at low cost to swarm and overwhelm ships
at low cost to swarm and overwhelm ships and so i think that's going to
and so i think that's going to
and so i think that's going to asymmetrically favor less capable
asymmetrically favor less capable
asymmetrically favor less capable actors
actors
actors um and favor shore defense right those
um and favor shore defense right those
um and favor shore defense right those those kind of assets are going to be
those kind of assets are going to be
those kind of assets are going to be limited in range you're not going to
limited in range you're not going to
limited in range you're not going to take these small vessels and necessarily
take these small vessels and necessarily
take these small vessels and necessarily send them like all the way across the
send them like all the way across the
send them like all the way across the ocean but that's going to probably
ocean but that's going to probably
ocean but that's going to probably preferentially support the defense
preferentially support the defense
preferentially support the defense especially when you couple that with
especially when you couple that with
especially when you couple that with land-based drones and anti-ship cruise
land-based drones and anti-ship cruise
land-based drones and anti-ship cruise missiles all of that is going to make it
missiles all of that is going to make it
missiles all of that is going to make it harder for navies to get like real close
harder for navies to get like real close
harder for navies to get like real close to a country and like make amphibious
to a country and like make amphibious
to a country and like make amphibious assaults more difficult
assaults more difficult
assaults more difficult uh make projecting power more difficult
uh make projecting power more difficult
uh make projecting power more difficult like just one way to think about this is
like just one way to think about this is
like just one way to think about this is that we are transitioning to an era of
that we are transitioning to an era of
that we are transitioning to an era of expensive power projection when it's
expensive power projection when it's
expensive power projection when it's harder to project power and take
harder to project power and take
harder to project power and take territory and it tends to favor the
territory and it tends to favor the
territory and it tends to favor the defense on you know sort of in relative
defense on you know sort of in relative
defense on you know sort of in relative terms paul that graphic description you
terms paul that graphic description you
terms paul that graphic description you given of swarm technology if that were
given of swarm technology if that were in the hands of
in the hands of
in the hands of the hooties or the irgc it would make it
the hooties or the irgc it would make it
the hooties or the irgc it would make it very easy for them to close critical
very easy for them to close critical
very easy for them to close critical sea waves how accessible is that
sea waves how accessible is that
sea waves how accessible is that technology how close might
technology how close might
technology how close might they be or other
they be or other
they be or other non-non-state groups to acquiring
non-non-state groups to acquiring
non-non-state groups to acquiring swarm technology that is really difficult
swarm technology that is really difficult
swarm technology that is really difficult for ships to defend against well they
for ships to defend against well they
for ships to defend against well they certainly have um uncrewed vessels like
certainly have um uncrewed vessels like
certainly have um uncrewed vessels like like cheap boats some of which are
like cheap boats some of which are
like cheap boats some of which are uncrewed a lot of them are crude they're
uncrewed a lot of them are crude they're
uncrewed a lot of them are crude they're just like iran's been using fast
just like iran's been using fast
just like iran's been using fast boats for a long time
in the Strait to harass shipping.
They certainly have drones and missiles.
I don't think that we've seen Iran or the Houthis
at the kind of level of surface drone warfare
that Ukraine has been operating at.
But the technology Ukraine's using
is not like fundamentally challenging
or secret technology,
which is expected to proliferate
certainly to Iran over time.
The kinds of like cooperative swarming
that I was describing,
we're not seeing even the most advanced militaries
yet employing this kind of like cooperative autonomy.
But I think that will happen.
Again, like that technology
is going to be pretty accessible to others.
Like what enables that?
That's not some special piece of hardware
or advanced material science.
It's going to be software, right?
It's going to be some new software payload
that gets updated into the AI
along with communications
that allow the drones to communicate.
And so that's a longer time horizon,
but it's coming
and it's going to be very accessible when it arrives.
Well, if we,
if we look at the speed
with which those two organizations
I've mentioned have acquired
and innovated
around new weapon systems,
that may not be that far out.
Iranians in the Houthis
are able to do quite a bit
to disrupt shipping now, right?
And so like,
even with the technology they have,
they're doing things that are very disruptive,
that are hard to counter,
that sort of asymmetrically favor them.
And I think that
when we look at where the technology is headed,
they're easily,
even more things
that are going to be widely available
that are going to be very disruptive
and really differentially advantage
less capable states and non-state groups.
Now, I think the Houthi performance
is rather extraordinary.
This is almost a tribal militia from the mountains
that's turned out
to have a much more sophisticated military capability
than anyone expected.
And is that the result of IRGC training?
Presumably, it is to an extent.
And presumably,
they're buying stuff commercially
and adapting and developing it
with the help of Iranian technicians.
Would that be correct?
Well, certainly, yes.
There's a connection,
but I think it's also like
that is part of the future of non-state groups
is there are a lot of non-state groups.
And it's not just them, right?
Across the Middle East,
Hezbollah, Hamas,
other groups that get Iranian support.
That's certainly one of the main ways
that Iran likes to,
you know,
sow trouble in the region
and complicate life
for, you know,
the Saudis and Israelis
and the Americans and other countries.
But also, like,
the technology tends to proliferate over time.
And so you're going to get
a lot of non-state groups
that do have access to the state technology
either because they buy it
or because they get some state-level support
that's part of the future
of this kind of class of actor.
How in all of this, Paul,
do we, the US, NATO,
how do we hold our ethical,
how do we hold our ethical nerve?
How do we avoid being caught
in a race to the bottom
against adversaries
who are unscrupulous
in their use of AI?
I think sometimes there's this
tendency I'll hear
in these conversations about AI
or autonomous weapons.
We can't have our hands tied
because our adversaries
aren't going to do it.
And so we need to be able
to do these things too.
And I think that's like the wrong way
to think about ethics in warfare.
Like, just because terrorists
are sawing people's heads off,
and lighting people on fire
doesn't mean we should do that.
Like, that's not the right way
to think about ethics in warfare.
We should be doing things
because either they're consistent
with our ethical principles
or because they make
our militaries more effective
as a result.
I think there's a lot of reasons
to keep humans in control of warfare,
some of which are moral
and legal and ethical reasons,
some of which are just because
they're going to make
the military more effective.
Like, it is still the case,
we've got all this great AI,
it is still true,
at least for now,
that the most advanced
cognitive processing system
on the planet
is the human brain.
And certainly that's true
when it comes to novelty.
And so, yeah,
if you want to write computer code,
have an AI write
the computer code for you.
But in a battlefield environment,
where, like,
what's the training data
for that, right?
Like, the adversary
is going to do something
creative and clever
and different.
They're going to try
to trick AI systems.
They're not great at that.
And they're certainly
not reliable.
AI systems tend to make things up,
as I think we're all well aware,
there's a lot of value
in having humans involved
in that decision-making, too.
Now, it's not an either-or.
You don't have to throw out people,
right?
We can use both.
Just the same way
in your regular job,
maybe you use AI
to help you with something,
and then hopefully
you kind of read
what the AI said.
You pay attention
to what it's doing.
We've got to do the same
in warfare,
find the ways to harness
the best of machine intelligence
and cognition,
but also the best
of human intelligence,
because there's still a lot
that humans bring
to this equation, too.
So there's still a role
for a Napoleon
and his mother
marshals.
For now, yeah.
I think so.
And a U.S. Ranger.
Yeah, for now.
Paul, we're drawing
to the close now,
so I'm going to ask you
the question
that we ask all our guests,
which is,
what's the one decision
that you're going to be watching
in the near future?
And given that
President Xi
is visiting Washington
this week,
is there a decision there
that might impact
on what we've been
talking about today
and that you might
be following closely?
Yeah, well, certainly
the Trump-Xi summit
is a big one.
I think in the news,
this week,
and, you know,
we'll see what comes out
of the summit.
Lots of issues on the table.
Certainly what I'm quite
interested in is
where do we end up
in terms of dialogue
on AI
between the two countries?
I suspect that we will
continue to see some
dialogue we've already seen
at the level beneath that
with the Chinese vice premier
and Scott Besson
here in the U.S.
have agreed to continue
talks on AI.
I'll be interested to see
whether anything comes out
of the Trump-Xi summit
that talks about,
that kind of gives us
a hint of the tone
of that.
Neither Trump nor Xi
is pretty focused
on AI safety.
And it's been a big topic
of concern, of course,
of people coming out
of the leading AI labs,
warning about the technology.
We've seen now a whole spate
of hacking incidents
where AI agents have engaged
in unauthorized hacking,
like, on their own.
Like, it sounds like
science fiction.
These rogue AI agents
that are breaking out
of containers
and accessing the Internet
and hacking,
without human direction,
like, that is real.
It's happened already.
So that's, like,
an actual problem.
But I don't think
Washington or Beijing
are mostly focused,
to be honest,
on safety.
Right now,
they're focused on
how to move faster
and race ahead of each other.
Like, that logical answer here is,
well, maybe they could have
some kind of agreement
to, like, focus on safety
and not endanger
all of humanity
with this technology.
I don't know that
we're going to get that,
but I think that's something
I'll be watching for.
Let's hope that
that is the decision.
Paul Sherry,
it's been a real pleasure.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
I really enjoyed the discussion.
Well, Richard,
that was a fascinating
and very engaging discussion
on quite a bleak subject.
What was it that really
resonated for you?
Well, I think we've just
had an explanation
from a weapons expert,
I guess is what he is,
as to why the war in Ukraine
is stuck
and why, let's say,
the U.S. intervention
against Iran
hasn't really achieved
any of its objectives.
And I think his, you know,
description of the way
that relatively cheap
new technology
can stop you being defeated
and the point that we discussed
that not losing now
seems to be as important
as winning.
Particularly if you're
the subsidiary adversary,
which Ukraine certainly
is in the case of Russia
and Iran certainly
is in the case of the United States.
I think he gave us
a very good idea
of the current dimensions
of the battlefield
and some view
into how that might
shift and change.
I think at the moment
I would say that
both conflicts
are pretty static.
I mean, that doesn't mean
that they aren't highly lethal.
The one in Ukraine
still is highly lethal,
but they're not really
going anywhere.
But he seemed to suggest
that, you know,
there could be innovations
over time
to break that stalemate.
I don't know whether
you agree with that, Charles.
Yes, I thought his comments
on how we've seen
the impact of the tech innovation,
but the innovation
in strategy and maneuver,
that hasn't caught up yet,
but will come.
The second thing
that stuck with me
was he clearly,
I'm sure this wasn't
a special pleading
for the U.S. Rangers,
but he clearly sees
the human element
as remaining critical
in all the activities
that go to make up
a campaign.
And his glimpse
into the future
still had humans
very much involved.
So I thought that
made it actually
a very rounded analysis
and vision.
It wasn't overly based
on the tech innovation
itself.
Yeah, I think that
is the sort of conclusion
I personally would share.
I don't see the battlefield
becoming totally dominated
by AI technological change
in weapon systems.
Obviously, they can give you
an advantage.
They change the character
of fighting.
I mean, one area
which we didn't really explore
is the fact that
which I think is going to be. highly relevant is the whole cyber dimension, which sits, as it were, above what we're discussing.
Because one of the questions that I've often posed to AI experts is, you know, what happens
when you combine AI with quantum computing? We haven't yet reached the end of this evolution.
I mean, the evolution has changed what we're familiar with, particularly in terms of, you know,
the battlefield or naval conflict. But there's much more to come, and some serious brains
probably tucked away in DARPA, and some of these research establishments are thinking hard about that.
The other thing we didn't really talk about was the fact that, okay, in the People's Liberation Army,
you've got a society of engineers driving innovation, but they haven't fought a war
for a very, very long time.
And, you know, does that really conceptually affect how one should think of the People's Liberation Army,
which has also been denuded of its senior officers by Xi, and might not be quite in the state,
even to invade Taiwan, that we fear?
I think that's absolutely right, Richard, and that applies to all combatant parties.
So countries who are adversaries.
Are also learning quickly through experience.
And, you know, one thinks of the Houthis and the Iranian IRGC, who've got this enormous
amount of experience and adaptation to draw on.
One particularly chilling scenario for me was the one that you raised over naval warfare,
but I think it's also applicable to commercial shipping.
I mean, there could be extraordinary vulnerabilities to shipping if we see swarm warfare falling
into the hands of, you know, unreliable non-state maritime powers.
And the other thing we didn't really discuss, but worries me enormously, is the challenge
to the Russian army of innovation, and the fact that that has been a motivation for them
to adapt their own tactics and their own technology.
And in a way, you know, we're training them how to fight a European war in the future.
That is, for me, pretty concerning, the longer that the conflict in Ukraine continues.
Indeed.
Well, thank you very much, Sir Richard.
That's all for this episode.
Join us every Thursday for new episodes.
Subscribe to One Decision on YouTube so you never miss out on a conversation.
Please also leave us a comment on YouTube or email us at
[email protected].
You can check out OneDecision.com for commentaries and explainers that you might have missed.
I'm John Rain.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you.
I'm John Rain.
We'll see you next time.
PodcastTranscript AI