Key Points:

• The Gulf War pioneered space-based assets in military operations, shaping modern warfare.
• Space Force seeks space control and mission support against rivals like Russia and China.
• AI and drone swarms are evolving warfare tactics, alongside rapidly advancing countermeasures.
• Also: Start here to retire rich!

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Edited Video Transcript:

phrase to say. Let’s bring it a little bit closer to today, which is artificial intelligence.

The technology du jour, we are hearing about how it is going to inject into every economy, every industry, military and defense specifically.

There’s already a lot of companies that are making this a core part of their strategy, including Anduril, which we were talking about earlier.

What does AI mean for the future of war?

Does this increase the asymmetry?

Or is asymmetry even the right word anymore if…

a small nation state can have AI and effectively now be a superpower in this conceptual world.

Talk to me about what AI means in this space.

Sure. Well, it’s a very broad topic. We’re not going to exhaustively go over every application that it could be used for.

But I think from an American perspective, the most useful part is going to be enhanced command and control.

So when I say command and control or C-II, that is just the ability, that’s a core tenet of the US military today.

that’s just the ability to maintain lines of communication and control over during operations when things get very chaotic, as you can imagine.

So when we mention things like the fog of war, the uncertainty of what’s going on, the chaos.

Throughout history, if we go back to, let’s say, World War I, where

Since the Industrial Revolution, nations have had the capability to feed, arm, and equip gigantic armies, but not the ability to control them effectively.

Something that a lot of people aren’t aware of in World War I, when we think of the Western Front, we think of all these massive, wasteful attacks.

But the thing that gets overlooked is these attacks actually worked.

The problem was they were never able because communications were so poor and coordination between these gigantic forces was limited that they often lost the gains in the same day they made them through counterattacks because they couldn’t consolidate and build upon past successes.

It was slightly more successful in World War Two.

But again, this chaos of war as combined, you know, combined operations are very complicated pieces, as you can imagine, especially if you’re combining sea air and land forces together, a lot of different streams of information, lots of different moving parts for a commander to keep on top of.

Now, what AI can do potentially is streamline these. It can make the decision-making process a lot easier by synthesizing different sources of information, maintaining communication,

And perhaps even in a future scenario, offering different options for the commander on the ground.

Now, when we talked about symmetric asymmetric warfare, one of the features of asymmetric warfare is that tactical opportunities are very fleeting.

They have to be able to make a decision extremely quickly and

Under current circumstances, that can be very difficult. A target can present itself for a very short amount of time and then disappear again, or they can move in and out of a certain area.

So what AI can potentially do is just streamline this process, make it more efficient and secure, communication and coordination between different branches.

AI has a lot of limitations.

But if you operate it within a narrow set of parameters with clearly defined rules, it will outperform humans every single time.

The best example would be take chess. It did not take us very long to build a computer that would be vastly superior to a human player.

The program didn’t have any intrinsic understanding of what it was doing.

but it was able to calculate thousands of moves in one go that a human could never possibly keep on top of.

So in that sense, AI in this narrowly defined set of parameters with huge quantities of information that can sift through them, bring the most important details easily available to a commander on the ground, to have that ability to seize those opportunities before they disappear.

That’s one major aspect I think the United States would be particularly interested in.

But there’s another one we can go over as well, which is gonna be more available to for lack of a better word, lesser powers.

And that would be the advent of drone swarms.

All right. So yeah. Talk to me about drone swarms.

And I just want, I want to tee this up really quick because this feels like science fiction that is it.

I don’t want to say inevitable, but like right around the corner.

I mean, this is a technology that has been maybe theorized and conceptualized, but we now finally find ourselves at a place where we actually have a technology, both from a manufacturing and battery standpoint and an AI standpoint, where there’s this entirely new type of weapon that seems science fiction that might be right around the corner for militaries, including the United States or combatants.

So What are drone swarms and what is AI enabling here in this incredible new format of combat?

Well, the idea behind a drone swarm, as the name implies, just imagine it as like a colony of bees, the sort of hive mind.

They’re working together in coordination in vast numbers.

making it very difficult to deal with all of them at once.

So they can overwhelm defenses that are even considerably stronger.

I know that the United States and the UK have both conducted, they’re conducting training exercises in this area.

I think the numbers at the moment are fairly limited, but I think the possibility of controlling hundreds or even thousands of drones in one go, if it’s not there already, is definitely right around the corner.

The other aspect of this is just cost efficiency. You know, an individual drone, depending on its capabilities.

Now, you know, at the very high end at the moment, like the MQ-Nine Reaper, for example, costs thirty million dollars.

But at the lower end, let’s say like an Iranian Shahed one three six, that’s like twenty to fifty thousand dollars.

So you just put that a hundred of them, a thousand of them could overwhelm the traditional air defense system.

And even if it doesn’t, just the cost of dealing with them, like we’re seeing this to some extent in the Red Sea with the attacks on shipping by the Houthis.

Some of these drones are worth about five thousand dollars, but the munitions shooting them down hundred thousand times more expensive so that can just really be a major drain and then you have to consider this low cost the low logistical tail um you know you don’t need pilots remember we talked about that previously the the importance of uh our pilots are the most important part of an air force you can’t rush them that’s not an issue with unmanned aircraft

um you can just put them out you’re not going to lose the experience or combat experience.

You don’t need to train them. They’re not terribly expensive.

They don’t require a lot of resources. They’re much cheaper to build, to operate, to maintain.

And again, the barrier to entry is very low.

For a traditional air force with fixed wing aircraft and pilots, et cetera, that’s very expensive and only a select few nations can really operate at the high level.

Drone swarms are just available to almost anyone.

And we’re seeing a lot of disruptors in this market.

Like, for example, Turkey are betting big on drones in the future, and they have a pretty strong domestic manufacturing industry right now.

I mean, it helps that the owner, I believe, is the son-in-law of the president, but that shows the direction they’re going in.

Yeah, and it’s just a trade-off.

And for anybody who might be listening to this and saying, well, you know, how damaging can a swarm of bees be if the opponent is larger and powerful?

Imagine a swarm of bees trying to attack a grizzly bear.

There are plenty of examples from history where drone style conflicts have been incredibly potent.

So I’m thinking about the step archers, right? The Huns were, you know, they were famously powerful.

equated to a swarm of bees the way they would enter and strike with their archers and then retreat.

And they didn’t have traditional sort of heavy hand-to-hand combat, but they just completely overwhelmed their enemies in this swarm style fashion.

There’s also the Mongol horsemen were similar.

There’s the wolf packs in World War II that used to hunt larger ships as a smaller group of U-boats could convoy and hunt down larger ships.

So there are So many examples from history where a sort of decentralized swarm of attack with smaller forces can overwhelm a larger force that’s built to sort of, you know, go out in this slugging match with similarly sized and similarly equipped armies and vehicles.

Well, consider how difficult, for example, urban warfare is for a conventional army today.

And now we add…

the possibilities from a drone, then clearing that, the potential is massive.

But I think there’s something we do have to bring up.

Again, we look to the past to inform our future, to form ideas for the future is that for however impressive their capabilities may be, that doesn’t mean they can’t be countered.

For every new weapon, there’s usually a countermeasure that comes sooner or later.

And then, of course, that new weapon in turn gets more powerful, which means that countermeasures become more powerful in turn.

So we’ll turn to history for an example.

The tank, as I often like to bring up, first emerged in nineteen sixteen.

Its main problems were mechanical and we didn’t really know how to use it effectively.

But later on, the countermeasures became very effective.

The Germans developed a anti-tank rifle.

It was very difficult to detect. It was pretty good.

The problem for the Germans, like most of their tools in World War I, came a little too late.

Then, of course, in the interwar years, the capability of tanks grew massively, which meant that the countermeasures in turn had to grow massively.

So you had your cheap options like the tank traps to slow them down.

And you had your towed anti-tank artillery.

In fact, the Germans also had an anti-tank gun, a Type-Eighty-Eight, which could shoot down aircraft, but then it could be turned against armored vehicles as well, quite effectively.

But then you also had the handheld, the shoulder-mounted launchers.

The Bazooka, for example, was an immensely useful weapon in World War II.

So, like, the paratroopers could use it.

So the point is that however impressed we might be by drone swarms, we should acknowledge that there will be countermeasures.

And there are countermeasures being developed as we speak.

Raytheon, for example, are developing something called the Coyote, which is, if you like, an anti-drone drone.

It’s tube launched. I believe it can be fitted to vehicles, boats.

planes, et cetera.

It’s pretty versatile, and it just seeks out opposing drones and detonates.

And Anduril, kind of an upstart startup that are making major waves, they have their own answer.

It’s a little cheeky because they call it Roadrunner, which is a direct reference to Raytheon’s Coyote, which is kind of part missile, part drone.

which just seeks out opposing drones and detonates far more cost effectively than our traditional air defense systems right now, which are far too expensive to be used against drones.

And they don’t have the rate of fire that we would need to take down a drone swarm.

And I also think there are some experiments that are still in the early stages, things like microwave signals to jam the navigation devices.

And I think there’s also GPS denial I think Lithuania sent a few of those to Ukraine.

But of course, that continues the cycle because now we’re seeing development of military drones that can operate in GPS denial environments.

So it’s just going to be this endless cycle of innovation and countermeasure and further innovation.

So, yes, drones will change warfare, but countermeasures will soon follow.

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