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