https://archive.ph/SdTVv
This is a long and wide ranging, but worthwhile read about our national security future.
One lesson for the US Military from the Russia/Ukraine war:
our military's defense-industrial base has to be transformed beyond being, as Jake Sullivan said, "a generational project."
Palmer Luckey's company,
Anduril, is helping with that so our military procurement/contracting can be faster.
... At the beginning of the war, Ukraine used drones mostly for reconnaissance. But, as they showed their worth as weapons, their use expanded. Last year, by some estimates, Ukraine’s factories turned out more than three million drones. The key to successful operations, TAF workers told me, was that the manufacturers of the drones and the soldiers using them were in the same place, allowing the software and components to be continually tweaked. The drones that I examined were remarkably simple: a lightweight square frame, four propellers, a video camera, a battery-powered motor, and room for a bomb. The attack drones, known as F.P.V.s, for “first-person view,” are guided by an operator watching a video screen that shows what the drone is seeing; other members of the unit monitor feeds from reconnaissance drones. Yakovenko described a recent attack in which a Ukrainian pilot crashed his drone into a Russian tank, forcing the crew inside to flee. Other F.P.V. drones chased down the Russian soldiers. “We killed all of them,” he said...
...The recent Ukrainian drone attacks on the Russian warplanes marked a striking advance in the arms race: a combination of human subterfuge and precise tech work. More than a hundred drones were smuggled into Russia in pieces and assembled there. A phony businessman arranged for them to be loaded onto cargo trucks, without the drivers’ knowledge. Deep inside Russian territory—as far as twenty-five hundred miles from the border—the drones flew out and struck.
The effects were devastating, crippling about a dozen long-range bombers that were equipped to carry nuclear weapons. Borovyk, whose company made the drones, told me that the key was the element of surprise. Russia hadn’t anticipated drone strikes so far from the border, and had no time to put jamming systems into place. “They were not prepared for that type of attack,” Borovyk said.
Ukraine’s fighters have not yet been able to regularly deploy autonomous drones—the kind that can find targets without human help—but they are getting closer. Some of Borovyk’s drones were steered manually, but others were equipped with A.I. technology that could help them find their marks. According to reports in the Ukrainian press, the A.I. had been trained to recognize targets using images of old Soviet warplanes on display in an aviation museum east of Kyiv...
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