The high-tech weapons changing how we fight wars

If you're ordering up an aircraft carrier, it might be a decade or more from the time the thing is commissioned to the day it's launched with a price tag well north of $10 billion. But if you intend to fight using drones, some might cost as little as around $1,000 and might be ready within a matter of weeks. And the designs of those cheap drones are easy to update and adapt as conditions change. The pace of change in how wars are fought is unprecedented in human history, and it seems to still be accelerating. From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I'm Chris Boyd. Military leaders in our era not only have to make the right decisions for which technologies to invest in and which to sunset, they also need to figure out how to best use things like drones and AI-guided missiles to their greatest advantage, how to anticipate and deter their enemy's use of these technologies, and how to get the troops they command trained to use all this new stuff. It would be hard to overstate those challenges. So we've invited Yaroslav trough him off to help us understand them. He is chief foreign affairs correspondent for the Wall Street Journal where you can find his article. There's a new way of war, but is it evolution or revolution? Yaroslav, welcome to think. Great to be in the show. Thank you. How do we know that these leaps forward in technology really are happening much faster than they have in the past? Well, I think what we see is that LeipSy technology overall in the last 10, 20 years have transformed our lives in ways that technology probably hadn't transformed lives for generations. If you just look at how the use of phones, iPhone, smartphones, social media, electric vehicles, the world is increasingly more connected. So the pace is accelerating, and obviously with the arrival of AI, And, you know, these changes have been really slow to penetrate the way the militaries operate because a lot of the, you know, fighting, sort of the way the militaries are fighting had been stuck in the ways of the past century, you know, artillery use, you know, tanks. So the infantry doctrine hadn't really been updated for decades in serious ways. And so now with the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, but also now with the wars in the Middle East, we've seen that this consumer technologists developed for civilian life have increasingly been repurposed and reinvented to make warfare different and to make warfare cheaper and also to equalize the playing field between nations like the United States, or for that matter, Russia that had been spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the newest defense innovation and on the military budgets overall, and much smaller countries that are finding ways to offset the disadvantage through technology, be it Ukraine, be it Iran, or beat others. It's a double-edged sword, isn't it? Because we have lowered the financial cost of self-defense. We've also lowered the cost of aggression or unprovoked attacks. Well, you know, this is the way technology develops overall. So it's not something that we can say that we have lower. This is just what happened. But I think it's true. It's true that it's increasingly difficult.

to defend against technologies like drones or like ballistic missiles. And we've seen that countries like Iran have developed the ability to produce precision ballistic missiles that can hit targets more than a thousand miles away. And countries like Ukraine are also working on this program. And I think we could expect that many more other countries will have long-range drones, long-range missiles that can target. what used to be thought of as very, very safe areas. And the cost of shooting down these missiles and drones is higher than the cost of making them. And so the mathematics of this war really, you know, favor the countries that are trying to attack others. On the other hand, also the new arithmetic of war make it much harder to launch old school. ground defensives. You know, if you think about, you know, the U.S. war against Iraq date in 1991 or in 2003, this sort of massive ground campaign with tank columns, you know, marine and infantry vehicles and army vehicles moving up through the planes, be to liberate Kuwait a city in 1991, be to capture Baghdad in 2003. are very hard to imagine now because the advantage of new technologies means that this mass massings of troops and personnel would be spotted very quickly and targeted very quickly far away from reaching the actual battlefield, which is something that we are seeing now in the battlefields of Ukraine, where Russia operates with groups of two to three people. trying to sneak in behind Ukraine lines and where mass offensives of tanks are unheard of, almost unheard of in recent years. What's happened to the notion of air superiority? The idea that one country would have such effective, you know, planes and bombers that it could do a lot of attacks that its enemies can't possibly match. Well, I think again, I think the very notion of air superiority has changed because let's think of how air forces used to operate. You know, you had to have a pilot in a plane and they would fly above a country and drop bombs on it. And that's how it used to be, you know, until the middle, even the end of the 20th century. And to do that, you have to suppress air defenses and suppress your enemy's air force. And then you have air superiority or even the air supremacy if you have. full operational freedom to operate. But now with the arrival of drones and precision weapons like ballistic missiles, things have changed. So look at the war against Iran. The Israeli and the American air forces had pretty much a free hand to operate in the skies of Tehran and had air superiority across most of the country, in part because Iran didn't have much in an air force. in part because of the successes in suppressing Iranian air defenses. But at the same time, this didn't mean that American troops in the Gulf, or for that matter, major installations,

and infrastructure targets in the Persian Gulf and all the way to Jim Jordan were safe from Iranian air attacks, because despite not having an air force, a manned air force, Iran did have a very strong unmanned air force, that is all these drones that could fly thousands of miles and strike targets and strike American bases, as did Iranian missiles. And so you can have this duality of air superiority in the manned aircraft domain, and yet you do not control the skies over your own troops because of the drones and missiles. Depending on what any military is contracting to buy, right, drones or planes or ships or tanks, in the past it might have taken months or years for these things to be developed. What is different when militaries are fighting primarily or to a significant extent via drone? Well, I think everything is a drone now. I think we have to think of a drone not as a weapon as such, but as a domain. And it's a domain of warfare that has been enabled by the two revolutions. The revolution in communications, that is the advent of systems like Starlink, that allow you to maintain a data feed and real-time contact with your manned systems throughout the world. And on the other hand, the advent of artificial intelligence. that serves as a backup for you know when you lose control and then the automatic technologies can take over and are they continue to seek targets as pre-programmed before navigate using optical navigation you know preloaded maps of terrain they can just you know even if this GPS signal is jammed could still see the rivers on the highways and the cityscapes and figure out where it is and go where it's supposed to go or to return to an area where it can reestablish connection with an operator. And so in this environment, you have to look at the arithmetic of the cost of war. So it's very important to have cheaper systems and a lot of systems. And that's in fact what we are seeing now in the war in Ukraine and Russia. In Russia and Ukraine now, each make millions of drones every year. And they cost in the tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars. And they are very different from this exquisite, very expensive systems that the U.S. had developed in prior decades during the war in terror, be it in Afghanistan and Iraq, where, you know, you could fly the predator drone to strike terrorists, and you didn't have to worry about the enemy's air defenses shooting it down. Well, now it's very different. And in the wars where air is contested, and that's going to be pretty much every war, because air defenses are also getting cheaper, including air defenses through drones, because now you have drones shooting down drones. It's important to have a lot of them, and it's important to have them at a low price, but it's also very important to be able to innovate very quickly, because if you look at how the battlefield has changed in the war between Russia and Ukraine, the systems that were in use in 2022 became obsolete in 2023, and then the new systems kept to replace them, either deal with the jamming or with the navigation issues.

or with the sort of cat and mouse game between offense and defense. And so systems that are being made now will probably be upslate in six months as well. And so I think the lesson here for the military companies is that they have to think of themselves not as a providers of a product of a thing, of a physical object, but as a providers of a service in which they have to innovate together with the military and innovate responding to the innovation of the adversary. Did the Ukrainians already have like a really robust drone development program before the last four and a half years of war with Russia? I mean, they now have this global reputation of being very good at cranking out these drones very quickly. No, I mean, there wasn't much of a drone industry. There was some drone industry in Ukraine before the war, but it wasn't very developed. Ukraine did, on the other hand, have a big military industry. including missile industry, and it had an aircraft industry. It was making the Antonov cargo planes, and Antonov is now one of the major drone manufacturers in Ukraine. And I think it was an evolution going from cheap Chinese-made systems, repurposing them, reinventing them. But I think the important thing is on the actual drone here. I think people are sort of looking at the Ukrainian successes, or probably a matter of Russian successes in the world with Ukraine. It's wrong to focus on the drone. The drone is just something at the very end of a chain. And Ukraine is able to achieve this kind of successes with the drones because they are integrated in a system in which feeds from... tens of thousands of drones right now in the air are being all pulled together and looks like uber-like network that makes them available to various parts of the military because of the amazing, you know, AI-enabled targeting development that is behind the launch because, you know, when you fire this drone at the Russian refinery, you know, a thousand miles away, you have to... plot its navigation course around russian air defense areas around areas where you know it could be shot down and that's you know find the time and the space and the particular time of the day where it's the best likelihood of it's reaching its turn so it's a lot of work that it goes behind that And in fact, Ukraine is now probably the only major country that has created, in addition to its army, its Navy, and its Air Force, its own unmanned systems force, which is a separate branch of the military. And if you look at the results in the battlefield, it's something like 90%, maybe more, of Russian casualties in Ukraine or destroyed Russian equipment in Ukraine, is the result of drones. For example, old school tube artillery has become... almost obsolete now because if you look at the traditional howitzers, especially towed ones, that fire an artillery shell at maybe 10 miles, 15 miles, well, that's well within the range of most drones. So if this howitzer fires once or twice, it will be destroyed by an enemy drone that will spot it exactly and just play it there. And if you also look at the cost.

You know, an artillery shell now in the markets, you know, 155 millimeter artillery show, which is the most commonly used caliber is about $7,000. You know, the cost of a drone. that is precise, that unlike a shell will arrive directly on target and can fly much, much longer distance. We're talking about more than 100 miles versus 10 miles is about $17,000. And you need many common artillery shells to hit one target, because one drone will be enough. And so in a way, warfare has become cheaper by becoming more precise. I'm thinking Yaroslav as new technologies, even just updated versions of older technologies, continue to come online all the time. You have two challenges, right? You have the challenge of getting the people expected to actually operate this equipment up to speed on how it works. And then you have the even greater challenge. of making sure that leaders understand what the new technologies can do and how to best deploy them. Talk us through both of those sets of problems for any military. Yeah, so I think, you know, it takes a special skill to be a drone operator, and it's different from a skill of an infantryman. You know, a lot of the people doing it in Ukraine now are, you know, kids who really go to video games, you know, and, you know, and it's, you know, it's a skill of a pilot. but differ from a skill of a conventional pilot because some of the things that a pilot of a fighter jet has to train for and endure not gravity forces is not something that a drone pilot needs to be worrying about. So, you know, you have to teach people and you have to create this new class of troops that have a very different skill sets from the ones that are currently in the military. And the same goes for the officers and the commanders because, you know, all these people who had gone through military academies and staff colleges have learned the doctrine of the pre-drown age. And this doctrine doesn't apply anymore. And that's what the Russian commanders found, you know. through defeat in Ukraine. And that's actually what are we seeing now in the Middle East, where, you know, American bases in many of the countries in the Gulf were not prepared for an attack from the sky by the Iranian drones or missiles. In the West, they still had all those fortifications that were thought up in the age when the threat was coming from, you know, Iraqi insurgents driving improvised explosive devices. Does the term frontline mean something different than it did years ago? Well, absolutely, because there is no front line now. You know, if you look at the, again, if you look back at the one infantry war that is being fought right now, the one between Russia and Ukraine, there is this giant gray zone now, maybe 20, 30 miles wide.

in which no one is in charge, in which any movement by more than two or three people is usually discovered right away. And any vehicle trying to move across is picked up, picked out by dozens of drones. And the notion of who controls what village or what town is very blurry. You know, there's been several months now of battling for the city of Costa Tinevka in the Netsk region of Ukraine. Russia claims to control it. Ukraine claims to control it. But the reality is that you have groups of two, three soldiers. Ukrainian or Russians sitting in the building here and there, you know, several hundred years from each other. And no one really controls it because, you know, nobody can safely drive a vehicle through the streets of this city as long as there are enemy drone operations sitting within, you know, several dozen miles. And that's the reality of combat now. and in which you can only move your forces through an area if you achieve air superiority in the drone domain, not in the conventional war domain, because that doesn't really help you. Is this technology changing how many soldiers are needed by any country's forces to fight a war? Up to a point, up to a point. So you still need soldiers to take over and control a place. But I think it favors defenders because you can hold an area with a much smaller force if you have enough drone operators, if you have enough the network to support and sustain them, if you have connectivity, and if you have a technological edge more than anything. And again, this, this. revolutions, maybe not revolutions, but sort of the innovations can come very rapidly. If you look at the history of the Russian war against Ukraine, you know, in 2023, Ukrainian forces, sorry, in 2024, Ukraine forces seized the foothold in the Russian region of Kursk, which they held successively for several months. And then the Russians came up with this innovation of using drones that are flying. with an optical wire. So it's a wire that can be strung out for 10, 20, maybe even 30 miles, and that it's impervious to jamming. So all of a sudden, the jammers didn't work and all those drones were hitting and hitting Ukrainian troops. And that's one of the reasons where Russia was able to reclaim that particular part of the frontline. And so, and this kind of mouse game of innovation can change the the balance of power on the front line, even without the change in the number of troops on each side. You explained in this article that even the way Ukrainians are procuring weapons and supplies has changed in the last couple of years. Talk us through how this works. Yeah, again, so Ukraine has the system under which individual brigades

have a budget to buy weapons. And it's very different from the traditional procurement system, you know, the Pentagon or in other major Western defense ministries where it's pretty much centralized and then, you know, contracts are awarded years and years before delivery. So there, because most of the deaths in this war, enemy deaths and hits on enemy equipment or enemy. you know, bases are recorded because they're carried out through drones. Brigades get points, points based on the number of kills. Classified network that is sort of very Uber-like in which manufacturers also participate. And then they can place orders. And they can place orders for drones. They can place order for jamming equipment. And then manufacturers are paid real money for that. And manufacturers can come directly and work with individual brigades embedding with them, embedding engineers with them, and finding solutions almost in real time. So you can have your weapon systems rethought, re-engineered in a matter of weeks, and then ship to the front line. This show is supported by Notion. Agents are getting smarter every day, but even the smartest agents get stuck without the right context and the right tools. That's where Notion comes in. With the recent launch of custom agents, Notion became the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents work side by side, and now their new developer platform is turning that workspace into infrastructure developers can build on. Notion's developer platform gives developers and coding agents the primitives to extend what's possible on Notion and take it beyond. Connect to external systems. Bring context in. Take permissioned actions across your tool stack and expose custom agents' capabilities to any system that needs them. It includes new primitives that allow teams to sync any data source into Notion, build any tool for your Notion agents, and orchestrate any agent in Notion. Learn more about Notion's developer platform today at Notion.com slash PRX. That's all lowercase letters, notion.com slash PRX to try Notion's developer platform today. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show. I want to make sure I understand this. You said that, you know, these different brigades can get points for the number of kills they have or the number of successful operations and then they can acquire more stuff. Are you saying, I mean, are they essentially competing for resources like the best units are going to get the most stuff? Absolutely, yeah, that's how it works. They're competing for resources. And obviously, it's tweaked because you have to take into account the operational environment and other requirements. But basically, yes, that's how it works. The better you are at performing, the more goodies you can get. What does that do for overall military cohesion?

Well, you know, that's a very good question. And I guess it's better than the alternative. It seems to work so far. The front line hasn't collapsed. And it has driven the innovation. So I think what also happens is once this... brigades that are successful and are working with the manufacturers to refine a weapon, then that weapon can also be supplied to other brigades. And it's obviously not the only channel of weapon supplies. This is on top of what has always been there, sort of the central procurement by the defense ministry. You mentioned these young soldiers who might have been really good at video games and now they're sitting in a complex somewhere, you know, partially operating these drones that are carrying out operations. I'm curious about how much, you know, when things are being handled by autonomous systems, what that means, like where that autonomy starts and ends, where a computer mind is making the call on something as opposed to a human being. Yeah, and that's, you know, I mean, the Ukrainians and most Western militaries, as of right now, have a policy that there must always be a human in loop, which means that the final decision to engage a target is made by a person. So there is a judgment there. But what it means in reality is that, for example, you now have drones patrolling the roads. in occupied parts of Ukraine all the way down to Crimea, hunting for military vehicles, hunting for fuel tankers. And they are an AI enabled, so they have optic recognition cameras, first of all, to find the way to find the road, but then also to recognize the types of vehicles that are looking for by the patterns, by the heat signature, by the speed of movement. And then when they identify this fuel tanker, for example, there is a human that has to push a button and say, okay, engage. And at that moment, the drone pursues that vehicle autonomously, which means that you don't really have to have a pilot piloting into it, but the drone itself finds the best way, the best approach. And if that vehicle disappears into a tunnel, the drone can wait for it on the other side of the tunnel and hit it there. And from then on, it's an autonomous pursuit. That is, you know, not that similar from, you know, when he fire a missile and then missile, then he is out of the control and then finds its target. Now, what we have seen now with the Russian military in Ukraine is because they don't have Starlink access, so they do not have the ability to communicate with a drone as their drones are performing very similar missions inside Ukraine. then it's become fully autonomous. So, you know, when the drone sees a truck, it just attacks a truck. And I think that's a very dangerous development because now we actually are seeing the advantage of fully autonomous weapons that these drones that make their own decisions on what to hit based, obviously, on the AI models in them, and very often they do make mistakes.

Even when there's a human in the loop, you know, there's lots of evidence that humans sometimes trust the machine, you know, if they're doing mathematics and they've come up with the correct answer, but the calculator tells them something different because it was programmed that way for the experiment. People doubt themselves. I mean, I'm curious about that relationship. If the technology tells the human in the loop that this is a good target or a bad target, are they sort of more likely to trust the machine than their own sense of things? Well, I think very often that's the case. It's not necessarily in the drone domain, but in a lot of the targeting, for example, in the U.S. Air Company in Iran, was done using AI. And as we know, there have been mistakes made. And some of the areas that used to be military before were no longer military by the time they were struck. And on the other hand, the sheer number of targets. you know, this sort of finding, you know, tens of thousands of places to strike would have been impossible if the humans alone were going through all the databases without the use of AI. So it has dangers, it carries dangers. I think if you look at drones, it's a little bit less of it because, you know, a human loop would see. you know a drone identifying a military truck would also probably see a civilian vehicle right next to it and not not authorized a hit at that very moment So that's sort of the safeguard because I think ultimately it's the human that makes the judgment on what is the acceptable level of collateral damage. You know, what are the other circumstances out there? Suddenly the machine that is programmed to look for specific things may not necessarily take into sort of into consideration as part of this context. Yarosov, what does any of this mean in terms of the relative risks to non-combatants? In a world where you have autonomous weapons, working alongside people actually making decisions, is that world more dangerous or less dangerous for civilians than a war just carried out the old-fashioned way? I think it's more dangerous for civilians, first of all, because... of the range. You know, these weapons can now reach into areas that are far, far away from the front line. They can probably in a few years we can be able to reach anywhere in the world. And it makes infrastructure targets, you know, much more dangerous because we now live in the world in which we rely on having in 24 hour electricity, we rely on having fuel available for our cars, we rely on having internet connections, data centers.

And what we have seen, for example, with the Iranian drone attacks in the Persian Gulf, is just how easy it is to destroy all of that and create conditions that are not very conducive to modern life. And it comes at a time when we are building systems for efficiency. And so your refinery 100 years ago had multiple refining units. uh that are worse scattered in large space now you know there's one or two and take only takes one drone to knock out the whole system and the same goes for data centers and the same the same goes for power stations in many places and so uh i think A lot of the infrastructure in the U.S., in Europe and other countries in the West is actually at much more of a risk than we are thinking about now, precisely because even second and third tier adversaries of the U.S. and Western countries will soon have or already have access to this technologies. We worry about military personnel who suffer from moral injury for their role in attacks that might conflict with their personal values. Are people still vulnerable to this if they are operating some kind of technology from a remote location that might be hundreds of miles away from where the target actually exists? I think the same rules apply because let's not forget that you may be sitting 200 miles from the front line. It doesn't mean that a missile will not fly into your office as you sit there and kill you. So the risk is also spread. And in a war with like the one within Russia and Ukraine, both sides are hunting for the drone operators and drone command centers and sometimes killing them. And so I think That part of the equation really doesn't change because the risk is everywhere, really. The kind of clinical efficiency of this death and the fact that every death is now documented is probably something new. Because if you look at the, again, you know, the war with Russian Ukraine, but also the conflict, you know, in Lebanon and with Hezbollah against the Israeli army. You know, all this drone hits are recorded. They are released on social media. And I would say that probably the vast majority of Russian soldiers who are killed in Ukraine, you know, there is videos on where showing their death. And I think. This abundance of footage desensitizes a lot of civilians because people on both sides are also watching them every day and kind of turns this whole killing into a video game business, which I think is an adventure of development. Sure, because we just get, this is just a thing that we get used to happening because humans are really adaptable even to pretty horrendous things.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. So Yaroslav, let's take up that question. You know there are differing opinions as to whether these recent changes really represent a revolution in war versus an evolution. First of all, how should we understand the difference between those two terms in this context? I think the question is, do we have to forget everything we've learned until now and start from a blank slate? Or will these new technologies... coexist with the existing military equipment, existing sort of legacy knowledge and legacy hardware. And I think the answer is yes. Even if you look back into history, you know. Yes, the invention of artillery and gunpowder and guns due to revolutionize warfare, but somehow it also coexisted with cavalry and, you know, pikemen and, you know, people with, you know, with lances and swords for quite a long time for centuries. And so the question is, how do we adapt the existing weapon systems, be aircraft carriers, be fighter jets, be tanks into this new drone age and, you know, will they remain manned or unmanned? And to what extent do we have to change the doctrine? And I think there is a big and very robust debate about this among defense chiefs and defense officials around the world. And I think the opinion you hear most often is that it is an evolution. But an evolution was very, very rapid iterations, which means that the key to survivability in a conflict is not necessarily how good is your equipment and how good are your weapons, but how quickly can you adapt them, replace them, and tweak them once your opponent embraces a newer technology that offsets your advantage. And I think this flexibility is really the strength. sort of the measure of the strength of a country in the military conflict now. So how flexible is its military industrial basis? How flexible is its military? How flexible are its politicians to the environment that is changing so rapidly? How much does that flexibility vary by the country you're talking about, the military you're talking about? I think it varies greatly. And I think this is one area in which democracies have an advantage because, you know, even country like Russia or a country like China, it's discouraged to report bad news to your superiors. And the picture gets rosy or the higher gets up in the chain of command because it's just how autocracies work. And so if you do not acknowledge the existence of a problem, it takes you a much longer time to fix it. I think the reason why a country like Ukraine was able to withstand four and a half years of war against a much, much bigger opponent is precisely because its democratic nature allowed for the correction of the course and for adopting this innovation. And again, you know, obviously a country like the U.S., that is huge and has the world's largest defense budget and has had the luxury of.

being by far the strongest military power in the world for such a long time. I think it will take an effort to realize that change is necessary and that some of the old ways must be changed. And I think the lessons of the war in Iran are part of that because we were hearing for a very long time that the US didn't have much to learn from the war in Ukraine because it will have this overwhelming air supremacy. against any enemy to have all this precision weapons that will destroy and obliterate the enemy. And guess what? You know, large part of these precision weapons were expanded over Iran and the US does have conventional air superiority over Iran. And yet it so far has not achieved the political objectives of this conflict and has exposed itself to this new kind of warfare that also, among other things, makes it very, very difficult to contemplate. any sort of ground operation in Iran because we know what enactment will be in this new age of drone warfare. President Trump seems to have been taken by surprise that the strongest military in the world, the U.S., in partnership with Israel, has not just instantly achieved its goals in Iran, as you mentioned. As someone who studies this as part of your career, is it less surprising to you that the U.S. is struggling in Iran? I mean, no, it's it's it's it's it's less surprising to me because again, you know, the kind of ground campaign that the U.S. carried out against Iraq twice, you know, in 2003 and 1991 is just impossible now in Iran because of the size of the country, but also because any concentration of forces necessary for such a campaign would be very hard to sustain an age of precise missile strikes and precise drone attacks. And that is the reason why the US has had difficulties, because you cannot force Iran to accept US conditions, at least it hasn't happened so far, absent a real threat of a ground operation. You know, attacks from the air only achieve so much you can takeover countries from the air. How are military and defense leaders around the world deciding in this climate of rapid change where to invest their money in weapons and vehicle acquisition? Like what new items are they taking on board? What things might they think about no longer making or sourcing? Well, again, it's a lot of this decision making is political and sometimes, unfortunately. because we'll, you know, most of these countries live in peacetime. These are decisions made by considerations such as jobs, you know, okay, should we build this very expensive ships that will create, you know, kinds of thousands of jobs in our wharves? Yes, let's do it. And that's not necessarily something that is the best way of spending money for defense. I think...

The technologies that are clearly becoming more obsolete are artillery shells of the, at least not the sort of extended range, but the traditional basic tube artillery shells. And it's funny because there was a big shortage of them three or four years ago. Defense manufacturers in Europe are now very proud that they finally wrapped up production, but they wrapped up production by the time that the shells are becoming obsolete. And so, I mean, the tank manufacturing is probably another area that is increasingly become obsolete because a tank is not really serving its purpose in modern infantry combat. And it's, you know, it's a very, very expensive toy that can be destroyed by a very, very cheap drone. as we have seen, both with Russia tanks and Ukrainian tanks, and further matter recently with Israeli tanks. And so where exactly to put your defense dollars? It's hard to find a recipe because, again, you know, you don't want to make a million drones if you're a European country now and then have them sit in a warehouse and be obsolete by the time you're engaged in conflict a few years down the line. And so I think the best way of sort of preserving your edge is, again, you know, I'm going back to this issue of flexibility. You have to have a defense industry that is able to change course rapidly. And I think, you know, if you look at the defense industries in the U.S. and most Western countries, these are defense industries of a relative peacetime and defense industries of a time where no wars were fought against comparable adversaries. And they are not used to that. And they are also used to very, making very, very expensive weapons in small numbers. And they do not survive the modern battlefield. If defense contractors happen to overproduce something that becomes quickly obsolete or is obsolete as soon as the order is filled, should we worry those weapons, which, I mean, they may be obsolete, but they still work, that they might be sold at fire sale prices to non-state actors like terrorist groups or criminal cartels. Well, I think in most Western countries and non-Western countries, they're very robust end-user procedures that preclude such a sale. And obviously, in the U.S., weapons manufacturers will not be selling weapons to terrorists. So I don't think so. You know, and terrorists are not only using tanks and aircraft carriers. Again, these weapons are obsolete in a conflict against a modern opponent.

they probably will not be obsolete if you have to do it, you know, an anti-terrorist campaign or a peacekeeping mission against, you know, a guerrilla organization or a weak military in a small country. It has been impressive to watch Ukraine as an example hold out for all this time. But you note that the lessons from that war, you know, against a much larger opponent in Russia, might not be as simple as having countries convert all their equipment to exactly what's working for Ukraine. Why not? Well, you know, Ukraine obviously is a country at war and existential war, and you cannot expect a country that is not of war to make similar sacrifices to the way they do things. You know, on everything, including, you know, labor safety laws. Obviously, it's much easier for Ukrainian company to make drones and wartime regulations because they don't have to worry about lots of things such as, you know, environmental regulations that a company in Germany or in the U.S. has to worry about. Now, I think the overarching lesson, though, of the war in Ukraine is that you have to be able to adapt. You have to be very quick. And the speed of your adaptability matters more than the quality of your actual weapons today, because you have to be able to respond, like in a boxer match, you know, to the blows coming from your opponent by changing your game and by finding solutions. What have you learned, Yaroslav, about how designers of weapons and other military systems are coming up with these new adaptations? What is their process? I think the process really lies in talking to your consumers. So you have to be able... to test you open in real conditions. And the results in real conditions are very often different from the results, you know, in a lab, you know, or in a peaceful country or, you know, against the made-up opponent. And then you have to have this feedback loop. And I think that's the value of the collaboration that many defense companies now have with Ukraine is because they can see what works, what doesn't work against a powerful and real opponent. and they can find ways of tweaking their systems to make them work. Does anything in the way that wars and their execution is changing suggest the possibility that we might have fewer wars in the future, that people might sort of look at the risks and the calculations and decide to try doubly hard to use diplomacy to solve their conflicts? Or, in fact, are we looking at probably a future of more hot conflicts? I mean, I'd like to be an optimist, but it's very hard to argue the case for optimism here, because the entry barrier to war, I think is much lower now. More and more countries and maybe not even countries will have access to this technology in the future. And also the line between war and peace is becoming increasingly blurry because you can have this drone attacks on critical infrastructure.

and, you know, deny your responsibility. And, you know, and we have seen this hybrid warfare already developing in Europe. You know, we're seeing warehouses going up in flames in countries like Britain or Poland. And this was the handiwork of Russian intelligence services, but it's still an act shorter for. And so I think... the more and more this drone technology and out of the precision weapons technology becomes accessible to smaller and poorer players the more risks they are because We used to think that we are safe in the West, in the U.S. or in Europe, but potentially there are dozens of rogue regimes that will have the capability to strike grid infrastructure in these countries down the line in the matter of just a few years, maybe two or three. What is your process as Chief Foreign Affairs correspondent for the Wall Street Journal of keeping up with pertinent changes in military technology? Just talking to a lot of people, obviously, you know, I read a lot of literature and reports, but also, you know, speak to defense chiefs, defense ministers, top officials and intelligence services and in defense companies very, very regularly. And I think this particular article was a result of talking to many of these people. Are commanders worried about their capacity to keep up with what's changing all the time? I think they are. I think increasingly so. And again, as I said, the war in Iran was very sobering for many people who thought that they don't really have to worry about this change and that they have everything under control.

Yaroslav Trofimov is chief foreign affairs correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, where you can find his article, which is titled, There's a New Way of War, but is it Evolution or Revolution? Yaroslav, this has been very, very interesting. Thanks very much for making time for the conversation. Great to be with you. Thank you. Think is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram and listen to our podcast for free wherever you like to get your podcast. Just search for KERA Think. Our website is think.k.k.org, and that's where you can find out about upcoming shows, as well as sign up for our free weekly newsletter. Again, I'm Chris Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.