Angry Planet - The Drones Above Ukraine

Episode Date: March 21, 2023

You know, we wanted to talk about European (and especially German) views of the war in Ukraine today. And we still will. What’s an IRIS-T, for example. What’s up with those Leopard tanks? But then a Russian Su-27 fighter jet crashed into an American MQ-9 Reaper above the Black Sea and the guest we planned to have on, well, she knows a lot about drones.With us today is Ulrike Franke. Franke is a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. She’s an expert in all things Germany, drones, and AI. She got a PhD from Oxford and she hosts a podcast on German defense, the name of which I will absolutely butcher if I attempt to pronounce.Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world and their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Fields. You know, we wanted to talk about European and especially German views of the war in Ukraine today, and we still will. You know, what, for example, is an IRST? What's up with those leopard tanks? But then a Russian SU-27 fighter jet crashed into an American MQ9 Reaper above the Black Sea. And the guest that we plan to have on, well, she knows a lot about drones, so we would be remiss if we didn't ask her about it. With us today is Ulrichi Franki.

I probably just butchered that, even though I think I did it right in the preamble. She is a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. She's an expert in all things, Germany, drones, and AI. She's got a PhD from Oxford, and she hosts a podcast on German defense, the name of which I will absolutely not try to pronounce. Thank you so much today for joining us. Well, thank you very much for having me. All right, so first things first.

what happened over the Black Sea? Yes, well, actually, today that they were recording, we got a video recording of this incident. The incident being that there was a U.S. Reaper drone, MQ9 Reaper drone, that was flying over the Black Sea and the U.S. says over international waters. And a Russian, or actually two Russian fighter jets, started to, well, basically harass it. So they were dumping fuel, and that's something you can.

actually see on the video. And at one point, apparently one of the fighters kind of clip the propeller of the drone, or in any case, the drone was brought down, was, yeah, crashed into the sea. And of course, the US criticized this quite heavily because it was, as they say, in over international waters. And the Russians, as far as I could gather from their statements, basically said, yes, we were there, but it wasn't exactly our fault, and we didn't bring it down. And also, there was an interesting line in the Russian statement that said something along the lines of, you know, for the duration of this special military operation, this isn't quite international water anyway. I don't quite know. This is more of an international law issue,

but yeah, we had a confrontation between a U.S. and a Russian aircraft, and the U.S. aircraft went down. And I think this is one of those moments where we can be happy that drones are remotely piloted and the pilot didn't go down with the drone. This is a, a Reaper is, this was a spy drone, essentially, right? Yes, I mean, the Reaper is a so-called hunter-killer drone, so it can be armed. It often is armed. It is actually one of the drones worldwide that can carry the biggest amount of missiles and bombs and all of this.

But of course, as basically any drone, it also carries a lot of intelligence, gathering, surveillance equipment and in this case it reportedly was used to gather intelligence over the Black Sea wasn't armed and yeah is now at some I don't know how many meters down in the Black Sea. And Russia said it's going to work to recover in, right? Or that's the implication? Yeah, I wonder, I wonder about that. I mean, they can try. I've actually been asked and I don't actually know the answer to this, to what extent the U.S. is kind of able to, you know, self-destruct elements or wipe elements of this just drone when it comes down. I think the U.S. has said it wiped kind of remotely some data from the drone. I don't think there's a real kind of self-destruct

button or anything like that, but I actually don't know. So maybe you do. So I'm curious to see whether Russia is actually retrieving it and whether it really will guide. rather that much relevant intelligence, I'm not so sure. I mean, this isn't quite the incident, like when Iran brought down, again, with a certain question mark, but when a kind of US drone crashed in Iran, and that was a more experimental secret design. And so this was really kind of unfortunate from a US point of view. The Reaper is well known. I mean, of course, the Russians can still gather something from that. But I don't think, I wouldn't think that this is the same, the biggest concern here. I think the real problem, the real problem, the issue really is that,

well, this was a very unfriendly encounter between U.S. and Russian forces, and that's something we like to avoid. It's an interesting situation because, of course, if this had been a manned jet, this could have been the start of war, right? So. Yeah. In a way, I mean, kind of this is, this can go both ways because, yes, you're absolutely right. If that had been a man jet and a U.S. pilot or pilots would have been hurt or even killed in such an incident. That would have been a huge scandal. And the U.S. administration would really have been pushed to respond in a certain way. And now with the drone, the Biden administration has much more kind of leeway as to how to respond. And so far, they've really tried to, you know, react in a very measured way. And of course,

they've condemned the attack in strong terms, but they're not immediately reacting kind of militarily. And We had a similar incident in June 2019 when Iranians shot down a global hawk. So this is another incident than the one I just mentioned, a global hawk drone over the Strait of Hormuz. And the Trump administration kind of thought about responding militarily, but that reportedly was aborted and the administration just responded with sanctions and maybe cyber attacks. So it kind of gives you more leeway if there is no pilot being heard. However, the other coin of the metal, sorry, the other side of the coin is that maybe the Russians just wouldn't have acted in the way they did had it been a mad aircraft, right?

I mean, they were really harassing this aircraft. We don't know whether they wanted to bring it down. There's a lot of speculation that maybe it kind of went wrong and they didn't actually want to bring it down. But they wouldn't, they most likely wouldn't have taken the same risks had it been a manned plane exactly because of this risk of escalation. So there's actually a lot of discussion and war games and everything being done on the escalatory potential of drones. And so far the answer is it kind of can go both ways. But at least it does give the side that has the drone a bit more leeway in terms of how to respond. So I think this is good because you don't want to be in a situation where you are kind of pushed to do something that you don't necessarily want to do just because, you know, you have to react.

if it had wanted to or if the U.S. if it had been armed and wanted to defend itself, well, let me let me just rephrase this. These kinds of drones are not typically armed for air-to-air combat either, right? It's usually like a hellfire that's for air to ground. So these drones are kind of sitting ducks if someone finds them, correct? Yeah. So the large majority of drones worldwide really aren't built to defend. themselves against, well, any kind of attack, whether from the ground or from the air, so they

don't really do dog fights. There have been kind of first tests, and I think we're going to see this more in the future where drones are being used to, well, they can defend themselves in the air or could even attack other aerial vehicles, whether it's manned or unmaned, though especially unmanned, I would say because they're kind of, they're not as fast as men aircraft. but so far, yeah, most drones can't defend themselves against this. Again, this Reaper wasn't armed at all as far as we know. So it couldn't have done that anyway. And incidentally, this is actually why I usually speak of armed drones rather than combat

drones, because in my view, a combat drone would indeed be a drone that can, yeah, defend itself against attack and do kind of aerial dock fights and the large majority of armed drones these days cannot do this. But this is one of the directions that development is going. Yeah, the combat role they kind of fill is more I mean, I know that we talk a lot about how

they're changing the battlefield and the revolutionizing warfare, etc., etc. But they tend to fill fairly traditional combat roles. Right? Yeah, I mean, this is the big discussion, right? How revolutionary are drones really? That was incidentally kind of

the title of my doctoral thesis. and there are many different ways of looking at this. And it really, as with so many new technologies, novel technologies, it's not just a technology, it's how you use it. And you can use drones and very kind of typical roles. We just use unmanned systems, remotely piloted systems, to replace man systems. And that can make a lot of sense because it can be cheaper. It can be more available.

We see this, by the way, in Ukraine, or we saw. saw this in Nagorno-Karabakh, when Armenia fought Azerbaijan, the big advantage of drones here was, in part simply the numbers and that they were there because, you know, Azerbaijan and Armenia aren't big militaries. They have a limited number of manned aircraft and fighter jets. And if you can use drones to take on some of the roles of these men aircraft, that's a huge bonus. That's a huge plus. That may not necessarily be revolutionary, but it can be very, very useful. So that can be good enough. But of course, you can also, you know, get with drones capabilities that you didn't have before. The kind of 24-hour, seven days a week surveillance that drones can give you at very low cost and at low hierarchical level.

So, you know, even just kind of infantry soldiers on the battlefield can get access to drone surveillance and the intelligence that drones gather. That's quite revolutionary, I would say. because this is something that, you know, 10 or 20 years ago, that's kind of information 10 or 20 years ago, only, you know, high-level commanders would have and not to the same extent. So the kind of effort to lift the fog of the war, which of course you can never really do,

but still, I think that's relatively revolutionary. There are other elements such as, and we saw this particularly in the U.S., where you had soldiers kind of commuting into war, you know, really people living somewhere near Las Vegas, as commuting into their shifts at Creech Air Force Base, being on several different, in several different war zones, sometimes, you know, first Iraq, then Afghanistan,

and then kind of go home to the kids. Like, this is quite revolutionary in terms of the experience of war. We didn't have that before. So there are definitely elements that are new and revolutionary. Swarm technology related to drones is also something that I think is worth keeping an eye on. And there you may also have. January new capabilities, military capabilities that you haven't, didn't have before.

But yeah, not every kind of drone on the battlefield does something completely new and kind of revolutionizes how wars are being fought. But simply, their availability, they're comparatively lower price, really difficult to generalize, as you can imagine, but they're comparatively lower price. And the surveillance that they did provide is already quite something for a lot of armed forces. They're much cheaper, too. you can do a lot of things that you used to be able to do much cheaper. Like a suicide drone is cheaper than a cruise missile.

Yeah. It really, obviously, it really depends, right? You can't, A, it's not life for light. You can't, even, even, you know, a cruise missile and a suicide drone, yes, fair enough. Often, you may be able to substitute one for the other. And if the suicide drone is cheaper, which is normally is, yes, is cheaper, but sometimes they don't fill the same roles. Also, you know, sometimes people ask me, you know, but a Reaper is much cheaper than an F-35. I'm like, yeah, that's true.

you don't necessarily use it for the same thing. So it is difficult to generalize, but yes, overall drones can be really cheap, especially the kind of smaller systems, army systems, all of this, and can have an important impact. So all, yeah, taking everything together, I would agree with this, but I think we need to be a little bit careful to just generalize the drones are cheaper. And especially you also have a lot of research now into kind of higher-end systems. I mean, the Reaper is already not cheap.

I mean, it's double-digit millions. And the global hawk, I think, is more like $120 million. You know, it's not nothing. And the Europeans are building systems partly to accompany men's meant aircraft, and there's a lot of money being spent there. So the price tag can also go up quite a bit, but you also see, yeah, very cheap systems being used and yeah, part of their attraction indeed is their price,

which also means that you can just have a lot of terms. I was really surprised, though, with the Reaper. I mean, the $35 million is what I read. I mean, there are a bunch of fighter jets that are cheaper than that. I mean, it just seemed like a very large amount of money. Why would something like that cost so much? It's got a propeller. I mean, and it's got, it's remote control.

Those cameras are real nice, Jason. I know they're real. Yeah. Anyway, I just was wondering if you had any thoughts about that. I was just a little surprised. Yeah, fair enough. So, yeah, I mean, I'm not an expert on what different military equipment costs. I find it difficult to compare.

I mean, you are right. The Reaper and the Predator in particular, right? The Predator is the kind of younger brother or, no, the other way, round in a way. Like, Predator came first, of course. And the predator, I vividly remember. talking to a German military engineer, right? And Germany had a long discussion on buying drones, armed drones and which ones, and the predator was in discussion at one point. And this kind of German engineer being very much a German engineer was, you know,

really looking down on the predator being like, you know, this is a model aircraft with like a lawnmower motor and, you know, it can barely carry its weapons and all of this. And partly he was right. I mean, literally when they put the first hellfire missile under a predator in early 20, 2001, they really were worried that the wing would come off from the force of the health fire missile just being shot. And this is not because it's, you know, terrible flimsy aircraft. That's not what I'm saying, but it's just that drones tend to be, you know, lightly built. That's the whole point. They don't carry human beings, so they can be quite, yeah, they're supposed to be light and everything.

And so I think I agree with you that the airframe of most of these drones isn't, shouldn't be super, super expensive. But I think it's a combination of, yeah, the equipment that they're carrying and they can carry all kinds of equipment, including extremely expensive ones. Development costs, all of all of that kind of stuff. But I can't tell you specifically for the, for the Reaper. I mean, A, what exactly it does cost? I've seen similar numbers as you, but it always depends on what you factor in. And also what the specific predator, sorry, Pacific Reaper was carrying and what makes this more or less expensive. Angry Planet.

We'll be back in a minute. And we're back. I almost feel like we need a different word to distinguish between. So when we say drone, it covers such a wide variety of things, right? I think for a long time in the minds of people, and probably still today, they think of the Reaper or the predator, right? these large hunter killers, spies, but also adept assassins. But I think when I talk about drones in Ukraine, I'm thinking more specifically of like off-the-shelf quadcopters that are that have little cameras that are watching people in

foxholes and dropping slightly altered munitions on top of them that are much cheaper, that are more ubiquitous, that are easier to get a hold of. And I think that there's such a world of difference between those two pieces of tech. But I wish we had a different word that was more common. That's a side rant. No, you and me both. And this is definitely a problem because a drone in the military realm, the term drone really describes everything from, say, the Black Hornet,

which is this tiny helicopter, looks like a toy helicopter, just slightly more expensive and takes off from the palm of a soldier's hand and it's doing surveillance and reconnaissance basically over the next hill or rather the next compound wall. And it goes from the Black Hornet to the Global Hawk,

the one I mentioned earlier, so-called hail, high-endurance, high-altitude long endurance system, which, you know, has the wingspan of like a commercial airliner, which costs, again,

something like $120 million, and it's completely different. And then you've got armed systems. like the Reaper and others. And as you were alluding to Matthew, now we also see the civilian commercial drones entering the battlefield. And this is actually a really interesting development, right?

For decades, if not centuries, drones were exclusively military. And drone development goes back a long time. It's really difficult to say, you know, when did it really come about? We had drones in the Vietnam War and Kosovo, all that. But I usually say, you know, around the year 2000s, the kind of, you know, stars align. for drone development and this is really when

drones took off pun intended but but then around you know 10 years or so later the commercial on the civilian drone world also developed quite a bit and now now you have these extremely capable

civilian systems I mean you and I can buy of Amazon or wherever drones for a few hundred or a few thousand dollars that are amazingly capable and they are re-entering the battlefield not being used by the Ukrainians for example for military purposes and and yeah as you say all these are also all called drones so this is this is

quite quite difficult and a bit annoying and i mean i used to joke every article about drones independently of on what exactly they were on had a picture of a predator you know you could get you could get articles about you know drones being sold for real estate visits and and whatever wedding pictures, and you had the picture of a predator, so completely nonsensical. But in the way it has now changed, because now you often get the picture of the quadcopter,

even when it's about, you know, military drones. And so, yeah, it's not ideal, but here we are. And I don't think, you know, when I started working on this, there even was still the discussion on, you shouldn't say drone, it should be unmanned aerial vehicle, or uncrewed aerial vehicle, or remotely piloted vehicle, and the corresponding abbreviations. And by now, I mean, I've given up on this.

It's a drone. There you go. Yeah, I mean, the military always has a specific way they want a thing to be referenced. And it never quite works out the way they want it to. Another thing I think is interesting that is kind of born by drones that I have to ask you about. How much are you on telegram by chance? I'm not on telegram, though. No, you're not on telegram at all.

I was wondering what you thought of. So I feel like this war in Ukraine is certainly not the first war that's been online and has like an internet component to it. But there's something different about this one. And I feel like some of it is supported by a telegram, which is this completely like unfettered, uncensored form of communication in a time when so many of the different spaces on the internet are kind of clamping down. censoring violence and language and this kind of thing without making a judgment call about what those about the policies of tech companies to be clear um i'm not anyway uh but we've got all these cameras in the sky you're capturing all this footage and we have this constant stream from both russia and ukraine of footage of people being killed from the drones um and i'm wondering what you think of this

new kind of like rush of propaganda on both sides that's created that's been the technology has allowed and kind of supercharged yeah that's such a good point so i'm i'm not on telegram but i am spending more time on twitter than i probably should and and there of course you have similar um kind of videos and and clips by drones so i think the the possibility to use the video and the kind of intelligence you gather with drones by design to use those for information warfare and propaganda purposes is huge and is something that indeed we see a lot in the war in Ukraine but but also before so I think in a way the first group that really used this fact was ISIS right that the terrorist non-state organization that used

civilian drones, again, often, you know, really simple quadcopters. And it kind of went through different stages of development. And the first stage of the development, but it kept doing that throughout the whole time, was using drones to just film their attacks, film their so-called caliphate, film, you know, whatever they wanted to show and put these clips as propaganda online. And then further, they developed to kind of use it for, yeah, surveillance and then even attack, we'll be trapping these drones and all of that. Anyway, so we saw this here, and we are now seeing this a lot in the war in Ukraine.

So the Ukrainians in particular, but I think this has to do with kind of the Western information space being more dominated by the Ukrainian side than the Russian side for various reasons. So the Ukrainians in particular use post online clips of videos shot by drone. For example, attacks on tanks. I'm sure most of you listeners have seen attacks where you know you have even hand grenades a kind of small weapons being dropped right into a tank into the opening of a tank and then exploding you had videos by drone where Russian soldiers surrendered you know things like that are drones following Russian soldiers back to their to their bases and then being attacked so I think this is definitely playing a huge a huge role and yeah

The way you basically need to look at this is that with anything and everything you do with a drone, you basically have a camera camera team with you the whole time. And that is, of course, extremely useful for surveillance. Sorry, this is of course extremely useful for information, warfare and propaganda that purposes. And you just choose the videos that make you look best and make your enemy look the worst. Do drones bring equality on the battlefield in a way? if you can't afford a fleet of F-35s, but you can afford different, you know,

levels of drone, does they actually bring some level of equality that wouldn't have been there without them? This is such a fascinating question when you think about where drones kind of started. Again, if you take the kind of U-2000s at the starting point, because initially,

drones were very much the weapon of the stronger party. And even there were even discussions, discussions about this being completely unfair, which is always a weird thing to say in warfare, I guess, but unfair that you had, you know, the U.S. military with its all mighty drones, surveilling and attacking.

Yeah, people, not necessarily even more important forces, but more like militias and non-state groups, that had nothing similar, and so they had no way of defending themselves and all of this. And now it's kind of the other way around where drones

may actually, as you allude, to give the weaker party or kind of the poorer party, the less well-off and less well-equipped armed forces a way of coming on equal footing. I think it's a bit hard to generalize. So if you have, say, the military might of the U.S. military against you just being able to buy and field a few drones, not really going to save you, but I think depending on how your war is going, drones can have an important impact on giving you capabilities you didn't have before. I mean, for non-state actors, non-state actors didn't use to have armed, sorry, didn't use to have air forces, right?

And now they can have really relevant airborne capabilities, be it, Hesbola, which admittedly is already quite military, but, but Hezbollah, ISIS, even South American drug cartels can have so-called air forces by having drones. So that's already quite something. And yeah, smaller militaries now don't need as many fighter jets and other things because they can fulfill a few of the functions and roles with much cheaper drones. So it does play a certain equalizing role, but then, yeah, then it really depends on the kind of context. of the war of the capabilities to fight drones. I don't know whether we want to go there, but one of the interesting kind of insights from the war in Ukraine is also, I mean, how important

it is, of course, to be able to fight drones. And I'm really impressed by how well the Ukrainians have been doing on several drone models. And a lot of Europeans are kind of looking at this, thinking, oh, we really need to build up our aerial defenses against drones and other similar system. So yeah, it's hard to, it's hard to kind of really predict, but I think there is there, I think you're onto something when you talk about the kind of equality increasing factor that they bring to the battleflow, at least in some contexts. Talk about, talk about counter drone technologies and what is and isn't working in Ukraine, because I know that for a long time, there's been kind of, what I would call almost like a pseudo-scientific boom around people trying to sell.

various counter drone technologies and you have like these big weird giant guns that supposedly shoot directed energy and some of them work and some of them don't and people shooting nets into the sky and all kinds of things. I like the nets. Yes. But the thing about war is you find out what does and doesn't work very quickly. So what is working in Ukraine? Yeah, absolutely.

And then you're right. I mean, the Ukraine in some tragic way has become a kind of testing ground for a lot of military equipment, be drones or anti-drone capabilities. So there's a huge range of anti-drone capabilities and anti-drone systems, partly due to the fact what we were describing earlier that there is such a huge range of drones. And of course, you need a very different way of shooting down a quadcopter that weighs a few kilo. And there's a few centimeter in diameter and diameter. and shooting down a by Raqta TB2 that's a kind of armed Turkish drone that the Ukrainians have been using maybe comparable to the predator, not quite, but something along those lines. And you also need different systems depending on whether it's an active war zone or it's a civilian realm or anyway.

So there's a big range. So one area that's definitely important is the kind of electronic warfare area. So this is intercepting drones by jamming their link to the ground and to their operators. If there is a link, of course, this is relevant for remotely piloted systems, not for dose that are more autonomous or automated. Sometimes even hacking these links, although this isn't really done that much yet. Just overwhelming the link so that, again, it loses the link to the operator and basically just hovers or crashes or anything like that. There are kinetic ways shooting down drones in the same way that you would shoot down manned aircraft.

And this has shown to be quite successful in Ukraine. The big issue here is the price tag, right? So Ukraine has gotten a big range of different anti-Arial systems, German GEPA, the RIST system, Patriots, you know, a lot of other things. and some of them you can actually use for drones. But the problem is if you use a very expensive anti-airal system against a very cheap drone, that's not super sustainable. I mean, it can be sustainable for a while, especially if you have, you know, support.

And it can even make sense militarily because the cost calculation isn't just how much does my anti-airal system cost and how much does their drone cost, but also how much does the thing cost that I'm protecting. a hospital, a civilian camp, whatever. So it can still make sense to kind of shoot, in German you would say shoot cannons on sparrows. So shoot sparrows with cannons. So that can make sense, militarily speaking, but still it's not ideal.

And then you have indeed intercepting methods that aren't quite as kinetic, where you have, for example, nets or other drones, kind of very hardened drones. There are great videos. I posted one the other day on Twitter because I thought it was really interesting where you have kind of a hardened drone

that just goes up and kind of smacks into the other system and brings it down that way. Not this similar to the way that the Russian jet did with the Reaper. Although you wouldn't use a multi-million jet to do that. There even were tests with eagles, like the actual bird eagles going after drones. here we're in the in the small civilian round drones that that are necessarily armed but they can be used for example around airports or anywhere where you don't want people flying their their hobby drones

just just willy-nilly so there is a huge uh there's a lot of work being done on this and yeah i'm not surprised that a lot of firms are trying to sell their product because there really is is a lot of money to be to be made here. The big problem is that you, it's kind of trying to square a circle because you need to be able to defend against as many systems as possible, because it's all nice and well if you have this great anti-drone system against drone type A and then you're being attacked by drone type B. That's no good. So you want to be able to defend against a huge range of systems. You want it to be cost effective. It usually, your system usually needs to be quite mobile because the whole point is that drones can attack you anywhere.

I mean, this is what we're seeing in Ukraine. So if you have a static system, I mean, it's fine if you want to defend the White House, Buckingham Palace, a prison or, you know, a camp, but that may not be good enough for the rest of your country. So this is relatively difficult and a lot of firms are working on this. The Ukrainians, so far, I mean, apparently they've been most, successful really with shooting things down kinetically with the various anti-antial systems that they've gotten. And in particular when it comes to the Shai at 136, the kind of Iranian coming

casadron, I'm sure most of you listeners have heard of that Russia is using great numbers to attack Ukraine, well, pretty much anywhere and destroy critical infrastructure and attack civilians. And the Ukrainians have been really quite successful in intercepting most of them. I've heard numbers from 60 to 80 or even 90%. The problem, of course, is that even if you intercept 90%, 10% still go through and destroy critical infrastructure and kill civilians. So that's still terrible. But still, these numbers are relatively impressive in my view.

So artificial intelligence is having a moment right now. You know, they just launched chat, GPT4. we're mostly seeing it. I think last year it was AI art. Now we're looking at generative text models. But there is a lot of other stuff going on with artificial intelligence.

The military is extremely keen on it. When we talk about AI in the military, what exactly do we mean? Yeah. This is such a huge area. As many know already the term artificial intelligence is quite difficult and quite broad and can include a lot of things.

And then, you know, AI in the military realm can also enable so many different systems and so many different functions that is difficult to generalize. Some areas where I think it will have or already has kind of the biggest impact is, I mean, most kind of obviously in the area of data analysis. I mean, this is literally what these computers were initially built for. before AI, we were talking a lot about big data. And so, you know, the ability to analyze huge amounts of data and find patterns or find any, any things you know where in there.

This is something that AI is particularly good at. And I think one of the earlier and probably the most, the best known military AI project was Project Maven, a cooperation between Google, other Silicon Valley firms and the Pentagon. where, yeah, they, Google and other Silicon Valley firms build an algorithm, basically, an AI-enabled system to go through the hundreds and thousands and millions of hours of data and video feed collected by drones. So this is kind of a very typical use. And AI is great for that. You can have AI in the cyber realm, right, where you kind of automate attacks or make them way more targeted and also automate and, and, enable your cyber defense.

This is a big, big thing as well. AI enabled autonomy is, I think, probably the area where there's most interest at the moment in the military realm. Autonomy doesn't have to be AI-enabled. This is also, once again, a kind of tricky subject. But I would say that most relevant autonomy developments have some element of AI, i.e., kind of self-learning systems just because, you know, you want to have a very intelligent, a very clever system if you give it AI.

Sorry, if you give it autonomy. So this is linked. An AI-enabled autonomy, I mean, this can be the kind of autonomous drone or the autonomous robot, the system that really can do a lot of things without being remotely piloted. So you may have fewer pilots or even just people on the loop who kind of observe the drone or the robot doing its thing and may not necessarily have their kind of finger on the button or on the joystick or anything like that. But you can also have autonomy and kind of other systems that have to be robots can be,

you know, kind of command and control and defensive systems and all of this. But even so these are all kind of more combat relevant functions. I mean, data analysis I think can go either way. But we sometimes also forget the non-combat related areas where I can also have a big impact. of logistics. And we're kind of being reminded now in the war in Ukraine how important logistics is. And AI can help to just make logistics more efficient, cheaper, faster, all of this. So knowing which parts of an aircraft to replace and when and knowing what you need in stock and when and transported at the right time, you know, things like that. AI is already doing this. AI is doing this

in the civilian realm, right? And so this is, yeah, one of those areas also where I can play a role. But you see from this kind of long list that there is a lot of different functions and capabilities that AI can enable, make cheaper, make faster, make more clever. And I guess, yeah, the Holy Grail as usual is the kind of new capability that you didn't have before. And I'd say this is primarily, yeah, probably in the area of autonomy and then also related to AI-enabled autonomy swarms. I think there's a lot of interesting tests being done with swarms of drones or different units. It doesn't have to be aerial drones, can be all kinds of things. And so several, you know, a dozen, 100 or even thousands of systems being able to interact with each other, communicate with each other, and, yeah, attack or surveil or whatever, do any kind of operation together. that this is something that could create a genuine new military capability, which is, I think,

the thing that most militaries are after with new technologies. It's interesting in one way to me, because artificial intelligence, the complaint is it's not creative. It can't actually, you know, write a sonnet, although I'm not sure that's true, but okay, let's pretend that it is true. Military applications, it seems like you don't have to be that creative, you just have to synthesize information incredibly quickly and then carry out what needs to be done in response, right? So does that make, it sounds like it makes AI a really good fit for military applications. Yeah, absolutely. So on the, on the creativity part, I think this is really difficult because it kind of boils down to this question, like, what's creativity anyway,

also what's intelligent anyway? As you say, can AI write a sonnet? I mean, GPD4 can, the question is Like, is it really a new sonnet? Like, who's going to judge that? Like, yes, it hasn't been published like this before, but it hasn't been fed with every other sonnet that has existed in the world. But I guess, you know, every poet also is influenced by all the other poetry. You or she has read. So, yeah, this is really difficult.

There are people, I hope I'm getting his name right. I think it's Kenneth Payne, who basically says that AI will really change military strategy and will have AI enabled systems do strategy. And this is going to be the biggest revolution. And this would very much link to your creativity a bit. This wouldn't just be, you know, AI being yet another system that makes war more deadly or faster or whatever, but really changes the nature or the character of war. I honestly, I don't know. We see right now in the civilian realm how fast AI develops and things that we thought weren't possible only a little while ago now seemed really easy and yeah easy to do for an AI's so I think we'll have quite the impact on

the military realm as well but whether it will change the nature and character of war I'm slightly more more skeptical but once again as we were saying about drones like here also it's not just With AI, there are kind of several layers of uncertainty, in my view. So the first layer of uncertainty is that you don't, we don't even know where the technology itself will develop, right? This is the GPT4 thing. Like, this is still in development even in the civilian realm. That is the kind of challenge or insecurity number one.

Then we don't know which military systems it will enable most successfully or also just where countries will put their money in and which military systems really will be most AI enabled in the future. And then the third level of uncertainty, and this is the one you always have, is this issue of, it's not just the new technology, it's also how you use it then once you have it. And yeah, given all of this, I find it very, very tricky to predict where all of this is going. But in the same way as AI is influencing very heavily, the civilian realm and we'll do so even more in the future, we'll see something similar in the military realm. And this may be, you know, anyone who's familiar with the literature on revolutions and military affairs knows that there is no agreement whatsoever on how many revolutions military affairs they were.

I mean, some people say, you know, like 24 and others basically say three. So, I don't know, the industrial age, the digital age. And yeah, now maybe the AI age. I think it's definitely, this is going to be big, but it's not one thing. It's not the same as the introduction of the tank or the introduction of nuclear weapons, which I would be fine with calling Revolution's Military Affairs. This would be bigger and more fundamental and thus also harder to pinpoint. So it is somewhat similar to maybe the digitization of the battle space or, yeah, the industrial age.

So much more fundamental, but also much more distributed in a way. Well, we were going to talk to you about Germany, but this turned out to be too good a conversation about drones to miss out on. So what do you think, Matthew? I need to come back. Yeah, we need to have you back because we wanted to talk to somebody about Europe and specifically Germany's relationship to the war in Ukraine. But that is a whole other episodes that we now didn't do. Sorry, audience. It's still ongoing.

Yeah, yeah. It's, yeah, I mean, absolutely it's going to be fresh in the minds, I think, for a little bit, right? Probably a few years, unfortunately. Oh, God, yeah. So, but yes, it's been, it's been almost an hour. So I think we will let you go. Thank you so much for coming on and walking us through this. Sorry, but being so long on drones, then. No, no. No, I mean, if you want to have me, have me back on German defense and security. I'm always happy to do to do that. And, yeah, I mean, you. even if the war ends sooner rather than later, the kind of German security defense question certainly isn't going away. And there's a whole sightenbender happening. I mean, you know, it's all new and shiny.

Yeah, and I think that the war in Ukraine, I think, is focusing and making people in Germany ask questions about what the role is of defense in their life and what their role is in the European Union, I would assume, and that's a tease for the next time we have you all. Thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through this. What's the, tell people the name of your podcast. If they speak German, they could go listen to it.

If they speak German, it's called Sishaheishaver. It's kind of a play on words in terms of like be secure, insecurity or something and something like that. Security's however, yeah. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to another episode of Angry Planet. The show is produced with love by Matthew Galt. Jason Fields with the assistance of Kevin Medell. This is the place where we ask you for money. If you subscribe to us on substack.aggrayplanet.com, it means the world to us. The show, which we've

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