Plain English with Derek Thompson - A Surprising Theory About the Future of War

Episode Date: June 30, 2026

From the bombing campaigns of World War II to the precision strikes of the modern era, for 80 years air power has defined modern warfare. But today, a new technology is changing the battlefield: drones. From Ukraine to the Middle East, cheap drones are transforming how wars are fought, giving countries and even small groups capabilities that once belonged only to the world's most powerful militaries. They’re changing not just how wars are fought, but who can fight them. Today, Derek is joined by Erik Lin-Greenberg, an MIT professor and author of 'The Remote Revolution: Drones and Modern Statecraft,' to explore how drones are reshaping modern warfare and what this new era could mean for the future of conflict. Subscribe to our YouTube channel here:https://www.youtube.com/@PlainEnglishwithDerekThompson If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Erik Lin-Greenberg Producer: Devon Baroldi Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, the future of war. In 1942, soon after the attacks on Pearl Harbor, the United States entered World War II. It fought along two fronts. It fought in the Pacific Theater against the Japanese and it fought against the Nazis in North Africa and Europe. But the U.S. fought a two-front war in one other way. It fought on land and it fought in the air.

Early aircraft was used during World War I, but it was only in the second World War that aerial warfare became truly central. Aerial warfare particularly suited the strengths and the philosophy of the U.S., as David Kennedy wrote in the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Freedom from Fear. Quote, a people living at a great distance

from the major theaters of conflict and commanding awesome productive potential took naturally to the idea of a weapon that could be deployed far from American shores, put relatively few Americans in harm's way, and make maximum use of America's industrial might and technological know-how. End quote.

Air power in World War II allowed the U.S. military to do several previously impossible things beyond the obvious, which is take ground warfare and put it in the skies. First, it made it easier for the military to target civilians,

not just the soldier carrying the gun, but the millions of people behind that soldier, the woman making bullet casings in the factory back home, and the farmer growing the wheat. Second, planes could carry out precision attacks on economic targets, like arms factories or power plants. What's better than blowing up a tank? Blowing up the tank factory and destroying the capacity to make hundreds more.

The Allied powers did both of these things. They aimed to obliterate the engines of war in Germany and Japan, but they also killed hundreds of thousands of civilians with the flattening of Dresden and the firebombing of Tokyo, not to mention, of course, the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The history of the world is in many ways the history of war, and for the last 80 years, no idea has changed the philosophy of war more than the invention of airpower. Today, what we're seeing is nothing less than the re-invention of air power, thanks to the emergence of drones. While one-strike drones have been around for decades now, we are seeing how they're reshaping war, whether in Israel, the Ukraine-Russia border, the Strait of Hormuz, and beyond.

Cheap drones have allowed Iran to wage war against other countries in the Middle East, while cheap drones in Ukraine have changed the war against Russia. For the first time ever, I think, the following statement is true. It is impossible now to understand any major military conflict in the world without having a theory of drones. Today's guest has a theory. Eric Lynn Greenberg is a professor at MIT and the author of The Remote Revolution,

Drones and Modern State Craft. We talk about the history and the future of aerial power and whether a world of drone warfare is a world with more wars, less deaths or both. I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English. Eric Lynn Greenberg, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. So let me start by telling you why I wanted to have you on the show. It really started with this observation that seemed too interesting to not explore with an expert in a full episode. On the last week of February 22, Russia invaded Ukraine, believing that its military superiority was sufficient to topple the government in Kiev in a few days to a few weeks. But today it's now engaged in a clearly protracted, expensive and bloody war due to, among other things, Ukraine's extraordinary drone capabilities. And four years later, to the week that Russia invaded Ukraine, the U.S. attacked Iran, similarly

believing that it had the military superiority to topple Iran's regime in a few days to a few weeks, but now the U.S. finds itself or has until the last memorandum found itself engaged in a protracted war due to, among other things, Iran's drone capabilities. And so the fact that the two great powers, the second half of the 20th century, both found their military superiority stymied by a drone wielding adversary seemed too significant to not stop and ask, are we seeing the future of war play out in front of our very eyes? So before we talk about your scholarship on the history and the future of drones, I would just love us to park in this moment.

What do you think is most significant about the role? that drones are playing in the wars in Ukraine and Iran today? So I think we really see drones changing the character of warfare because of a few things. First, you have this new technology that is enabling actors, both states and non-state actors, so generally weaker actors, to carry up precision strikes in a way that in the past, only great powers could. And what I think is important here is it's not just drones as a single technology. It's drones coupled with things like commercial sales.

satellite imagery that enable actors that previously didn't have access to precise intelligence that can be used or targeting to have that information, then to couple that with a relatively low-cost system, like a drone, in many cases, a one-way attack drone, that allows them to go destroy infrastructure that in many cases is far, far more expensive than the drones themselves. And I think what we're also seeing is that great power, so the United States and in Russia, to the extent that they are still a great power, are struggling to intercept these large numbers of relatively cheap drones that are approaching them. And that is why we're seeing, I think, this fundamental change in how states are engaged in conflict. Yeah, when I look at these

campaigns, I see this extraordinary asymmetry. The U.S. is so much richer than Iran, so much more powerful, spend so much more on military through the Pentagon. And yet drones seem, and I think this was in your answer, to level the field in a really amazing way. Like when the U.S. launches a Patriot missile against an Iranian drone, that's often a multi-million dollar expenditure trying to take on a $30,000 weapon. That is two orders of magnitude. And so it's like it doesn't matter in the context of that moment that the U.S. is an order of magnitude richer than Iran because the drone technology takes it, takes it up another order of magnitude. What does that asymmetry alone tell us about how drones are changing the calculus of modern war? Sure. So you think on this,

this notion of what the exchange looks like, defense analysts and pundits often refer to something known as the cost exchange ratio. And right now, that is not in the favor of the defender. Right? I can send a $10,000 drone, try to destroy something that's really expensive. And as you noted, right, launching Patriots or even launching fighter jets to try to shoot these things down is a very, very expensive endeavor that doesn't right now put the defender in an advantage. So what does this mean about kind of conflict more broadly? Well, it means I think that these weaker actors are able to initiate potentially uses of force they might not otherwise want to do, right? Because they realize now that they have a chance of potentially destroying adversary infrastructure,

whatever targets they're trying to strike, in a way that they can potentially get around the defender in a way that they just couldn't before. So, you know, that leads, I think, to this notion of more militarized interactions than we might have previously seen. Just because it's easier to do, you're lowering, essentially the barrier to entry to precision strike and precision engagement in a way that we previously didn't have. I'm going to hold on to this answer you just gave, the idea that drones might increase the frequency of military engagements, because the way that that plays out in your ultimate thesis is very interesting and I think very surprising, but still holding on to the moment, what's the right way to think about the difference in the role that drones are playing

in the war versus Russia and the war versus Iran? Are we looking essentially, at the same use case, or is it more sophisticated to say that the way that Ukraine is using its drone cash is very different than the way that Iran has replied to initial U.S. strikes with drones? Yeah, so I think before answering that question, I think we need to talk about what we mean when we say drone, because I think this is really important in answering your question. So when we think of the term drone, I think we really think of a broad range of technologies. So on the high end, you have very, very expensive drones like those operated by.

by the United States, things like the Global Hawk that cost tens of millions of dollars. And then on the very low end, we have modified commercial off-the-shelf drones or things that are even built using 3D printers, right? These very, very inexpensive systems. And then you have everything in between. So what we're seeing in both Iran and Ukraine is both sides using medium-range, medium-cost drones, right, that are pretty inexpensive to carry out precision strikes. And so I think that is one of the similarities, both Iran and the...

the Ukrainians are using relatively inexpensive drones as precision-guided munitions to strike critical infrastructure, whether that is a radar site, whether that is an energy production facility. So they're using these effectively as cruise missiles. So I think that is one of the similarities. One of the things, though, that I think is fundamentally different between the two use cases is the Ukrainians and also the Russians are using very, very inexpensive drones. In many cases, these first-person view drones, right, where you have people wearing a headset and seeing essentially what's going on, to essentially use them for battlefield operations along the front lines. And so they're using these to target individual troops in a way that I think changes the psychology

of conflict, right? If you are a soldier fighting on the front lines, now you're not only worried about the adversary that's approaching you from a few hundred meters away, but you're also afraid that you could potentially be attacked by a drone that is constantly present. So in the Ukraine War, you're seeing both the strategic use of drones, but also this incredibly tactical use of drones, where as of now, at least in the Iran War, we've really seen drones being used primarily in this kind of long-range fires type of context. A guest in a previous show talked about the future of drone warfare through the analogy to the famous innovator's dilemma, Clayton Christensen's theory from business, where you have

a big incumbent company that often ignores a new technology by focusing on the way that that new technology is inferior. But over time, the seemingly inferior technology supplants the legacy technology. So this is DVDs. It shows up all the time in tech and business history. But the argument here was that the U.S. had overinvested in heavy and manned, that is with men and women, technology in the 20th century and underinvested in lighter unmanned technology that's now dominating the battlefields the 21st century. And I wonder because your last answer was about the way that the economics of this technology sometimes underrates the effect of this technology. You can have a $30,000 drone that can do millions and millions of dollars of damage to, say, a local oil refinery. I wonder,

sort of holding on the economics of this, whether you think the U.S. might be behind the eight ball on drone technology precisely because it was overinvested in large manned technology over the last 50 to 60 years. I think the U.S. and many other great powers are very much in this catch-up game, partially because of just bureaucratic politics. If you think about who runs the Air Force,

it's typically generals who have spent their careers flying inhabited aircraft. And for them, the flagship capability are these very expensive, high-end assets that cost tens of millions and in most cases have a human on board operating them. And so it requires this fundamental shift in mindset to say, okay, we're not going to necessarily invest as much in these large platforms, which, you know, in some cases are still really necessary, but start investing in these lower cost systems that I think, you know, prior to some of the more recent conflicts, people would say, well, no, that's a lot. That's not a tool that major first-class militaries have, right?

That's a tool of weaker actors. But I think what we've seen over the past few decades is a gradual and growing acceptance of drones in a way that is having an impact on defense acquisitions. So in the post-9-11 wars, you start seeing the use of drones primarily for counterterrorism operations, but we realize they offer a very unique capability that past systems couldn't offer. But those are still relatively expensive drones compared to what you see today. And then the cost curve continues moving in the direction that's moving, and you start seeing even cheaper drones that are able, as you noted, to generate pretty expensive, you know, effects and consequences. So I think that's really interesting anecdote that stands out is there's a new system that the U.S. has purchased called the Lucas, which is a low-cost one-way attack drone.

And if you look at images of the Lucas, it looks almost identical to the U. the Shahed 136, this one-way drone that the Iranians have been using to attack targets throughout the Middle East, that they've exported and are now essentially licensed producing in Russia, and the U.S. went and essentially reverse-engineered this tool. So if you think just a few decades ago, would the U.S. ever be reverse engineering something designed by an Iranian firm? The answer would have been no. But I think there was this realization that it was driven by battlefield consequences, which in many cases drives innovation, was this realization that, okay, we need to do something better. We need to have something that's cheaper and can hold adversary targets at

risk without the cost of our existing systems. And I think we're going to continue seeing that, you know, as we move forward in time. We're going to try to find systems that are cheaper and might not look like the traditional legacy systems of the past. And again, I think the bureaucracy is now moving in that direction. Are drones utterly unique in the history of military, Has there ever been another example when the cheaper technology, the technology that initially was potentially less sophisticated than the status quo technology nonetheless took over as like the new vocabulary of the new substance of warfare? Like when I as a total non-military expert, just think about how weaponry has gotten more

and more sophisticated. We have, you know, destroyers, then we have, you know, aircraft carriers. We have small planes in World War I that can barely do anything to just the extraordinary planes by the end of the 20th century that can, you know, fly at multiples of the speed of sound. In a way, just without really knowing, it seems like drone technology inverts a lot of rules that were written by the last 100 to maybe 1,000 years of war technology. Are they unique? Or is there, an analog to what you're describing? I'm not sure there's a specific analog, but I think if we look throughout history,

military commanders and the engineers that are designing weapon systems are always trying to find ways to do things more efficiently. And when we think about the cost of military operations, sometimes we think about the cost of a specific asset, right, as a drone cheaper than, you know, name your favorite fighter jet.

But then there's just also broader cost calculation of the cost of the overall operation, right? And so I think we have seen cases in the past where you have a weapon system that's developed, say a cruise missile, that perhaps is cheaper to launch a cruise missile than it would be to launch, let's say, a large-scale bomber raid over a target. So I think we've seen elements of this, but I think what's unique in the case of drones is that in some cases, you know, they help to replace multiple assets.

So not only is the system itself cheaper, but they fundamentally change how you're going to conduct an operation. So let me kind of walk through an easy example. So in the past, let's say I wanted to take out an adversary facility or an adversary leader. I might need a bunch of reconnaissance aircraft to go in and surveil that site. Then when it's time to go launch that strike, I would need a fighter jet and a whole host of other assets as part of the strike package, right? Suppression of enemy air defenses assets. I would need rescue aircraft on standby, potentially refueling aircraft. I can do that in many cases now with a drone. And in some case, it's a one-way drone that's fully attritable. So I think that is potentially what is fundamentally different here. It's not only

the cost of the asset itself that is lower, but also the potential cost of the surrounding operation. So, Eric, I'm satisfied, and I want to turn the page on this opening section of our conversation, which is about the landscape of drones today. I want to get to your grand theory of how drones change the future of war. And I think one way into your grand theory is something like this. A standard view among scholars of war is that technology, that make attacks cheap should make war more common and more deadly. And drones make it trivially cheap to launch an attack on an enemy. So that's going to give us, by this sort of standard definition, more war and more violent war.

But in your book, The Remote Revolution, you make the opposite argument. What is it? Yeah, so I essentially say because drones offer this really really, low-cost means of carrying out military operations, and most critically, because you're removing the human warfighter from the operation itself, you end up having these simultaneous but divergent effects. So on one hand, you have this escalation control effect, and on the other hand, you have a moral hazard effect. So essentially, you have more militarized interactions, but these militarized interactions often are more mild, because you don't necessarily see the same

kind of escalation that you would see if you have a confrontation of inhabited assets. So as a leader, you might be more willing to launch military operations because you have this new tool that allows you to do it without risking your own troops. But if those drones, whether they're in the sky or on the seas, are shot down or sunk, you don't necessarily have an obligation to respond. So it increases your flexibility in how you're conducting military operations primarily during these crises periods below the threshold of traditional conflict. So I want to pull on each piece here.

One prediction that you're making is that drones lead to more confrontation but less escalation. So the way that I thought of it as I was reading your book is kind of like in boxing, it's like more jabs fewer uppercuts, right? I want you to slow down a bit on this first part,

actually on each of these. And I'm going to use, I want you to use stories from your book to explicate each side of it. So first to your argument that drones lead to more confrontation in the first place. It's not just because attacking nations is easier because it doesn't cost men.

It's also the case that defending yourself against this thing that's flying in the sky, it becomes more comfortable to blow it up because you know you're not blowing up a person. You're just blowing up a hunk of metal and silicon. So in order to get us to understand how both of those things might increase the number of conflicts, but also sort of change the nature of conflict as well because it removes a certain guilt that war means killing people. Tell us the story of Iran and the U.S. Navy RQ4 Global Hawk.

Yeah, so I think this is a great encapsulation of this argument of the remote revolution. So it's June 2019, and the U.S. has a number of reconnaissance aircraft that are patrolling over the Persian Gulf. And this is a period where, much like today, tensions between the United States and Iran are incredibly heightened. And the United States has this drone flying, and Iran shoots down this global hawk. And what's really interesting here is leaders on both sides are making their thought process known. So President Trump is both talking about this on Twitter and is also talking about it in press conferences, and the Iranians are having press conferences on the similar shootdown. And so what the Iranian general, who's responsible for air defense says, is, well, there was this manned U.S. aircraft operating nearby, but we chose not to shoot it down. We chose to shoot down this global hawk because we knew it would help send a signal to the Americans, right?

So instead of just using angry diplomatic notes, they took a very physical gesture in to the American. destroyed an expensive piece of U.S. equipment. And then there's this question of, was the U.S. operating more of these missions close to Iranian airspace because there was lower risk involved? And so you see this kind of interesting interaction. And what comes out of this is the United States

doesn't launch a large-scale retaliation. So President Trump at the time orders the planning and initial execution steps of a retaliation, then says, well, no, let's hold off. There's potentially too many casualties on the Iranian side and the shootdown of a machine doesn't justify this large-scale retaliation. And he actually says something to the effect of if there had been a man on board, the situation would have been really, really different.

So I think that is one example that helps highlight this. And if I can offer another from the current conflict in Ukraine, I think that's useful. So over the past few months, you've seen a number of likely Russian drone penetrations into NATO airspace. And you've also seen some cases where the Russians have. have sent fighter jets into Western European airspace, into NATO allied airspace. Unclear whether this is intentional probing or accidental, but the responses are super interesting.

In the cases where the Ukrainians have launched drones into NATO airspace, you see these assets shot down really quickly. But at the same time, when you have Russian fighter jets get lost over Estonia or penetrate into Estonian airspace, there's tons and tons of effort made, at least where the public media is reported, try and essentially de-escalate. They don't shoot these down.

They try to do everything to escort these aircraft out of NATO airspace without taking aggressive action. And so that's the kind of interaction that I described in the book. This is so interesting. Again, it feels like a world with more jabs and fewer uppercuts.

And the game theory here is interesting because, you know, the U.S. is jabbing, jabbing, jabbing, and Iran is thinking, in your 2019 example, if we uppercut back, if we shoot down the plane that has a pilot in it, well, then we might get a stronger response in return. But instead, all we want to do is just essentially send a message,

hey, stop doing that, right? And so we are in a way that is more costless or costs less sending a drone into Iranian airspace, and they are in a way that costs less to Iran shooting down that drone rather than the manned aircraft. It seems like a world, and tell me this is wrong, it seems like a world in which the definition of border crossings

or threatening borders suddenly changes its meaning because it's one thing for a military to cross over a border I mean that's war that is universally understood to be a declaration of an act of war to send right the ground forces

across Ukraine to walk toward Kiev obviously war but it's just interesting to think that doing the same with unmanned aircraft seems to explore this, this like weird space between it's definitely not all out war, but it's definitely not not war at the same time. And you have a lovely term to describe this. You say that drones, quote, create new rungs on the escalation ladder, end quote.

What does that mean? So Herman Kahn was this theorist during the Cold War, who was an expert on crises, escalation, and nuclear dynamics. And he described interactions between states is essentially falling on this ladder, where you go from peacetime all the way up to the use of nuclear forces and beyond. And so what I think happens when you introduce this new technology that allows for these interesting kind of tit-for-tat, low-level interactions using drones, in some cases, crossing borders, right? States compete and interact in the language of a drone.

They keep on taking these small punches at each other without necessarily having to climb up to a high. higher rung on the escalation ladder. But that's still useful for states, right? They can communicate their frustration against another state and actual physical means as opposed to just, again, using diplomatic messaging or signaling. But then you can also benefit them from the domestic perspective. They can turn to the domestic population and say, look, we shot down the evil aggressors airplane. We are doing well as a state. And Russia did this in 2023, where they're not doing so well in the land war in Ukraine, they down a U.S. military drone over the Black Sea. The U.S. doesn't really respond. But domestically, the Minister of Defense of Russia goes and

pins these medals on the Russian fighter pilots, and this is viewed as this, you know, heroic act that these pilots have taken. And again, there's really no escalation that happens in this case. Let me offer a counterpoint. I think someone listening might say, Eric, This sounds so naive. How can you possibly think that the introduction of an autonomous killing machine could lead to a world with fewer deaths and less violent war? I wonder how you deal, A, with this common and predictable criticism, which is that it seems like you're making a prediction about the relationship between military technology and violence. that is itself in violation of the history of war. And then number two, I'd love you to talk a little bit

about how the unglimpsed frontier of drone warfare, more AI, more autonomous swarms, changes the picture that you're describing here. Yeah, so I think there's, I think, two questions that we need to ask, right? The first is essentially, well, under what conditions might we see this interact. between drones lead to escalation. And then the second question is, okay, if this can potentially

lead to escalation, why don't we see as much of it? And so I think there's always cases, as with any kind of argument, that an argument is falsifiable, right? Otherwise, you have a totology and that's not interesting. And so, sure, one could imagine a case where a drone goes and carries out a precision strike against an adversary, so a decapitation strike that kills a leader of a country or a group, that then there must be some type of retaliation, or maybe it's a destruction of a key piece of infrastructure. So potentially that could lead to escalation, and that could happen.

But why don't we necessarily see that? So I think that the drone use can often be viewed as like a radio dial. You can choose how far up and down you want to turn that volume in a way that's much more difficult when you have traditional inhabited or ground-based assets involved. And this gets back to your comments earlier about, sending ground forces across a border is fundamentally different than sending a drone across the border. So I think here's a good example that I think helps to illustrate this. You can imagine a state

destroys using a drone a critical piece of infrastructure on the adversary side. But since you've only sent a drone in, the side that has been targeted can theoretically downplay that, right? They can turn the volume knob down and say, oh yeah, the other side just damaged a truck. and, oh, by the way, we shot down their drone on the way out. And so we've destroyed their infrastructure. And that's fundamentally different, right, than sending in a large ground operation to seize that critical piece of infrastructure. So I think, sure, there's always a chance that things escalate.

Conflict is always kind of based on chance, and there's a potential that you pick the wrong lotto ticket and you see escalation. But I think drones offer decision makers much, much more flexibility in a way that inhabited assets do not, right so you can choose when to not escalate and to escalate when drones are involved in a way that you simply are unable to once human life is entered into the calculus in going back to AI and thinking about the next frontier of drone warfare because obviously this is a fast-moving space and if you and I have this conversation in three years 10 years we could be looking at drones with capabilities and skills that they currently don't have with any great fidelity so let me

re-asked this question with an historical analogy. Early aircraft in World War I were not entirely toys, but in 1914, 1915, they weren't, they were kind of like toys. I mean, they were, they were so useless as actual tools of delivering bombs that the reports of many flyers in 1914 were just doing reconnaissance, like, waving at the enemy aircraft nearby, because there's nothing else they can do. They can't shoot at each other. They're not holding anything they can shoot.

30 years later, aircraft are dropping bombs on Dresden, you know, wiping out parts of Tokyo, obviously dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So in just a matter of 25, 30 years, right, you couldn't discuss aircraft technology as a stable thing. It changed so dynamically. So I wonder if you can walk us through how you think about AI and maybe in defining autonomy,

swarms, help us understand how the rise of that coordinating technology might or might not change your thesis. Yeah, so I think if we had this conversation in three months, things would be fundamentally different. I think that is something that is so different with drone technology than traditional air power, right? The time periods and spans that you described were in years and decades. We're seeing innovation in the drone space in many cases than weeks or months as as adversaries learn how to adapt to their rival's use cases. So, you know, I think one of the changes that we'll likely see, and we're starting to see it now, is increased integration of AI and autonomy into drone systems. So I think it's important to note first that many of the drones that we see operating today are not autonomous.

They're remotely operated. That means that there's a crew member sitting somewhere telling the drone where to go, when to engage a target. But I think as, you know, AI increases in its utility and effectiveness, we're going to see, you know, an increase integration. of these systems into drones, and you'll start seeing more and more autonomous systems in which humans play less of a role in the decision-making cycle. And you mentioned one of the potential use cases, and that is essentially drone swarms, where you see large numbers of drones operating in a coordinated manner, and one can imagine a variety of different use cases here.

You could use drone storms potentially to flood the battlefield and take out multiple targets at once. You could see this as a tool to degrade an end. enemy's air defense system on the eve of a large-scale invasion. So instead of using smaller decoys, you could fly a massive number of drones towards an enemy target or an enemy air defense system in ways that degrade its use. What I think is important here, though, is in all of those use cases that we just talked about, the decision to escalate has already been made.

A leader has already made the decision to use drones kind of on the eve of a conflict or to carry out large-scale operations. The argument that I make in the book really focuses primarily on these crisis time periods where you haven't yet made a decision to use force. So the degree to which I think drone swarms would be used in crises is perhaps less than on the eve of a large-scale military operation. So I guess the political sciencey way to describe this is maybe that's a little bit outside of the scope conditions of the argument that I make in the book. Hey y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder, what if?

Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home. Eric, you and I are talking about cheap drone technology

in the context of state actors. I think that's important, right? We are looking at state-on-state wars. Russia versus Ukraine, America versus Iran, Israel versus various countries in the Middle East. But drones are cheap and destructive drones could get cheaper and cheaper. Or maybe a better way to put that is that drones of stable cheapness might become more and more destructive as the technology improves. How do non-state actors factor into this? Because we're familiar with terrorist groups commandeering airplanes where you now need a person

to drive the airplane into a building. But one could imagine a terrorist or other non-state group using extremely destructive drone technology to kill people, to destroy infrastructure. How should we think about that frontier and how worried we should be about drone technology, really, really sophisticated drone technology being held by non-state actors who want to do terrible things?

I think we should already be concerned. We've already met that frontier. We're at it. We've seen a variety of non-state actors integrate drone technology into their arsenals. And it's not just insurgent groups. It's not just terrorist groups. We're seeing drug cartels using this type of technology against state military forces. And it doesn't even need to be incredibly sophisticated drone technology for these actors to hold their adversaries at risk. If you think about the Mexican federal police force or the Mexican army that now needs to think about this whole other dimension. They need to look up in the skies as they're carrying out their operations. That has a fundamental effect on how state militaries and law enforcement agencies do business. And so even these cheap drones that are maybe quadcopters modified to drop small explosives have an effect. And one can imagine, you know, if you take these actors and give them more advanced weapon systems, which will likely proliferate off of traditional battlefields, that gives them the ability to perhaps hold the government. that they're trying to fight at risk in new ways

and generating new types of leverage that we haven't seen in the past. So if we're trying to think of a theory here, a thesis that is as strong as your first thesis, which is that drone technology is likely to increase confrontation, but not necessarily increase escalation, which will lead to a world with more jabs and fewer uppercuts.

Is there a similar thesis that we can derive out of this idea that, all right, we've seen the U.S. and Russia invade or try to take out weaker countries, but those weaker countries were able to use drone technology in order to stymie the larger power. And you think of that alongside a scenario that you just described, which is that the non-state actor within Mexico, using drone technology, is able to stop the state itself from wielding a monopoly of power and stopping the non-state actor, the drug cartel, from doing what it's doing?

Is there a similar thesis that we can develop about how drone technology essentially levels the playing field from between large powers and small powers and between states and non-state actors, maybe, by like making military engagements, making like the minimum viable product of military engagements cheap enough that it's harder for the presumably larger power to exert authority over the presumably weaker power.

Is there something there that we can develop a thesis around? I think you've made that argument more eloquently than I can, right? It's that you've gained a relative advantage for these smaller actors, right, that it doesn't entirely level the playing field, because arguably the greater power has the ability to develop counter drone systems in a way that maybe that weaker actor doesn't. But by introducing this new relatively low-cost threat, you're forcing the more powerful actor to think twice, right,

in a way that potentially limits their ability to conduct operations until they find a way to deal with the drone threat, potentially forces them to make some type of negotiated settlement in order to avoid putting their forces at risk. So I do think that there is this kind of leveling effect that happens, even if the playing field is not entirely leveled. Is the world you're describing a world of more stability or less, of more people, peace or more war? At the end of the day, I think we're just going to see more militarized interactions at lower levels. And in most cases, those interactions likely will not escalate, just because leaders have greater ability to turn up and down that knob when drones are used.

When you say, you know, it's all about how you turn that dial, I can imagine someone thinking, well, look, if it's a crazy leader turning the dial all the way to 11, that's not an especially calming thought, you know, we might just have in the future leaders who have, at their disposal, thousands of deadly drones who turn that dial all the way up to 11 and do some major damage that requires a major response on the part of the attacked party. That, of course, is possible, and you're not saying it's not. But another point of yours is that I want to make sure we hit this again, because I think it's really important, is that it matters that there's no one in the drone, and it matters that the way that drones are most consistently,

used, especially in the U.S. Iran War, is to destroy assets that are not people's homes. And so if you have military interactions where an unmanned drone is attacking a piece of infrastructure, then it's not as emotional as a plane with a person in it or a set of ground troops, which obviously are populated exclusively by people, essentially set up. out to kill people directly. Like the fact that there isn't a person there has an enormously important emotional role in why they tend to, in why drone warfare tends to not escalate the same way that human warfare does, right? Like that is a really important part of your thesis. Exactly. And so I think what's really key here is sometimes punnance will say, well,

you have these drones and there's almost this like technologically deterministic effect that happens. But at the end of the day, warfare is an inherently human. set of decisions, right? And decisions that are made by military commanders who, like the rest of us, have emotions. And there is something, as you noted, that is fundamentally different about losing a man or a woman or even having an asset with a man or woman attacked, right, relative to a drone. And I think President Trump, a few weeks ago when this army helicopter was shot down over the Persian Gulf, makes a statement that I think kind of captures this, right? The crew

members were not killed, but he basically says, look, the Iranians attack this helicopter, and even though those people were rescued, we still are obligated to respond. And I've run a number of surveys on military leaders and foreign policy decision makers that show this, right?

When humans are involved, even if they aren't killed in the shootdown of a drone, or shoot down of a manned aircraft, rather, the fundamental response that people take is very, very different than when just a machine is lost. And if I come back to the comment about turning the knob up, right, this also gets to this kind of emotional element of conflict. Sure, a leader could choose to turn that knob

all the way up, but in doing so, he or she accepts a degree of risk that they might not want to take. And so drones allow them to potentially not turn that knob up and to avoid the risks of greater escalation, again, in a way that they might be forced to turn the knob up because of domestic political opinion if you are starting to lose, you know, men and women that are wearing the cloth of your nation. Eric, turn to the U.S. there's been a number of reports in the last few years of drone sightings in and around U.S. military assets. Talk a little bit about what the U.S. response to those drone sightings should be. So I think these drone sightings really highlight this notion that the U.S.

homeland is no longer a sanctuary. In the past, we've thought that large bodies of water and friendly neighbors on both sides protected us and kept us separate from the potential battlefields in which our military forces are operating in. But these drone sightings suggest that adversaries or non-state actors that want to cause Americans harm have the potential to spy on military installations, hold assets at those bases at risk, or even hold population centers at risk. And I'm not sure the United States is ready to respond to this.

If you drive past most large military bases, large amounts of equipment just sitting outside uncovered. And so how should we respond? I think there's a few challenges. The first is what we discussed earlier in that this cost exchange ratio is not in our favor. It's really expensive to shoot down or to destroy drones. And we are not yet at the point where we have low-cost technologies. And I think there's a need to develop things like directed energy weapons systems, lasers. They're able to more cheaply intercept.

and down these systems. But then there's a second challenge, and that is this notion of just kind of bureaucratic politics and what governance and law enforcement looks like here in the U.S. context. In the U.S., right, you have different agencies that are responsible for different types of security operations. So what happens if you have a drone that is first flying over a city and then flying over a military base?

Who's responsible for downing this? And then if you were to down it, are you actually potentially causing more, risk to the population on the ground. And so how should we start thinking about this? Well, first, you know, is to have a number of exercises that involve whole of government responses. And then the second is to start socializing to the American population, you know, how we should be better prepared, right? Do we have hotlines that you should be able to call into if you have a siting? How do you protect, you know, infrastructure and cities against these things? And again,

making this a much bigger whole of government initiative, I think, is important. I'm thinking about drones in the context of military technology and juxtaposing them with nuclear weapons. And I wonder how you think about this idea. It was just knocking around in my head as you were talking. In a way, drones are the opposite of nuclear weapons in two big ways. First, nuclear weapons are so escalatory that they tend to reduce conflict between powers that have nuclear weapons, whereas drones in your thesis increase

confrontation, but reduce escalation. And so in that way, there's sort of the antonym of nuclear power. But the other way that I think drones are very different from nukes is that I feel like this technology is dynamically changing in a way that makes it harder to have a stable thesis about what drones mean over a long period of time. Like at the end of the day, whether it's the atomic bomb or the hydrogen bomb or some crazy thermonuclear device, it's a city destroying bomb. Like that's fundamentally what it is. It's a small city destroying bomb or it's a ginormous metropolis destroying bomb. But it's a city destroying bomb. Whereas with drones, as you go from a really cheap drone that's like a kamikaze drone, like, you know, whatever, $500. You know, Ukraine, like

flies them up in the sky and just like fires hit at some. Russian tanker. You got stuff that's really cheap like that. You've got multi-million dollar drones on the American side. But you also, the introduction of artificial intelligence, which is changing so much year by year, that who knows how sophisticated an autonomous swarm of drones could be in one, three, five years. So it seems like it's harder to really get your head around. Like, what are these things going to be capable of when they're unleashed in the battlefield? I wonder if you, if you buy this idea, that, like, it is useful to think of drones as being like an antonym to nuclear weapons in the first way, thinking about escalation and confrontation.

But there's also a way in which, like, this technology is, like, really, really hard to be confident about in the long run because we're talking about something that is changing so fast. So I think there's, you know, these two elements of your story that are really important, right? So technology is fundamentally changing all the time. And as long as there's uncertainty, sure, it's going to be. difficult to look into the future. But I think if we take the first part of what you described, we do see some interesting parallels between nuclear weapons and drones. So as you said, nuclear weapons helped prevent conflict because they were so costly. And then my argument is that

drones, because they are so not costly, helped prevent escalation. So during the Cold War, there was this logic called the Stability and Stability Paradox. And the idea here was that because nuclear weapons had the potential to cause such large-scale damage, you prevent. at large-scale escalation, but you actually saw a lot of instability in the periphery. So you saw proxy wars and things of that nature, things that are kind of brush fires in the language of some of scholars that were talking about this. And I think drones operate in a very similar way, right, but because of a different mechanism. They're allowing states to have these pressure release valves by enabling these low-scale

confrontations on those lower rungs of the escalation ladder, where they can achieve some goals without the risk of large-scale escalation. So in that front, I think there are some parallels between how nuclear weapons and drones have affected the international security landscape. In terms of dynamic change, you're absolutely right. I wish I had a crystal ball that would make the book last for forever.

But what I think is interesting here is that there's a few kinds of dynamic change that are happening. So one is, as you noted, this potential introduction of AI into drone technologies. At the end of the day, though, there's still this core distinction between an inhabited asset and an uninhabited asset or a drone, even if it's AI enabled, right? The lack of a person on board, I think, still fundamentally changes things. One of the other things I think looking forward that makes things a bit harder to predict is that unlike nuclear weapons where the proliferation has been relatively limited, drone has been anything but limited.

We talked earlier about non-state actors. Hundreds of states now operate drones in their military arsenals. how do we think about interstate relations when you have so many different actors using these technologies? Eric, last question, and just pivoting off, the last thing you said, I don't know if it's like a Stalin quote or some Soviet quote that, like, quantity has a quality of its own, but like surely something like that applies to drone technology. The very fact that you're describing something that is ubiquitous and whose ubiquity,

therefore, makes it very different from other large-scale 20th century weapons, certainly like nuclear weapons. I mean, that does seem to create its own possibility of extraordinary destabilization. So I really liked your book. I've really enjoyed talking to you. I'm persuaded by a lot of what you say.

I think I'm less hopeful that drones will ultimately act as a device for essentially like holding the thermostat on intrastate conflict, right? Like to a certain extent like that's what you're saying.

interstate conflict can get really, really hot, but drones have like this thermostat capability where they keep a lot of conflict like right around 72, 73, so you don't have huge, massive wars between two countries that at least go into the war with drone interactions.

But once you have this thing everywhere, it seems to me to increase the likelihood of some crazy long-tail event of, you know, incredibly violent people having access to violent technology doing violent things, which just creates chaos. So maybe one more time for my benefit, explain the case for rational hope here against the case that once a destructive killing technology gets into the hands of enough

states and non-state actors, you have to expect some enormous amount of violent chaos because there are enough extraordinarily violent people out there who will use this technology to commit violence. So even if you are an incredibly violent person, as a leader of a state or a non-state actor group, you probably are irrational. You want to be able to achieve whatever your political aim is at the lowest potential cost, because that's how you're going to maximize the benefits that you're going to extract from whatever end you're trying to achieve. So if I want to force an adversary to do something, it perhaps is cheaper for me to try to coerce them using this new technology that I have than it would be for me to launch a large-scale

invasion in their territory and potentially set off a large-scale conflict that's going to kill lots of the soldiers that I've recruited. And so new technologies like drones provide leaders with this opportunity to do that. And totally by your point, right, there's always the chance that escalation is going to happen, right? There's no golden ticket that says this technology is going to eliminate the risk of escalation entirely. But at the end of the day, I'm hopeful that even as this proliferates, you'll see these interactions staying at relatively low levels in the escalation ladder. as leaders realize they have a new tool with which should advance their objectives.

That's a fair answer, and it reminds me of a conversation that I had a few years ago with someone who works in the autonomous weapons industry, who offered, as an hypothesis, a counterfactual. He said, do you think Putin attacks Ukraine? If Ukraine in the winter of 2022

has the drone presence that it has in 2020, He said, I don't think he does. And it's not because I think Putin is a generous person who would suddenly develop some sympathy for Kiev, is that our intelligence suggests that he thought he thought he could march his military, through the streets of eastern Ukraine,

all the way to Kiev and topple this government in a matter of weeks. And if you know that Ukraine has this enormous drone buildup along the border, it at the very least is going to change the calculus of someone like Putin, because it changes the war from something we think we can win in three weeks to something that we expect to take many, many years, but ultimately will take Ukraine because it's worth it. At the very least, it changes that calculus. And obviously,

that is the calculus. It is taking Russia years and years and years to essentially move that line in eastern Ukraine like a few miles. So at least from that standpoint, while I'm I might not be as hopeful as you. I do think that there is an argument here, that the presence of drones, even though it makes certain kind of low-level military incursions cheap, it makes all-out war seem extremely expensive between two powers that have a large drone presence,

and that itself might sort of play this moderating role in the future of war. Really, really interesting, really interesting thoughts. Eric Lindgrenberg, thank you so much. Thank you.