So I think you'll see a spectrum, not just the high end.

MELANIE WARRICK- I agree.

And I think we absolutely need a high-low mix, but it's harder on the defensive side because the interceptors, you have to have a sophisticated seeker to hit something incoming.

And maybe autonomous weapons that use cameras, whether they're of some sort, whether it's a drone or not, will be able to intercept certain types of threats.

But even on the offensive side, I think, well, I'm very much in favor of having lower cost munitions to supplement our stockpiles.

There are real limitations to what they can do and what they can be used for.

And they're great for regional states, whether it's Iran or Russia that's trying to project power relatively close to their borders.

But for the near term, I think they're just they're going to have to double down on what worked and what they have left in a way simplifies the task for us.

Every day about 100 enemy died because of these drones.

The war in Ukraine has been transformative in terms of our understanding of what drones are doing to warfare and the changes that are still underway and are likely to come in the future.

My name is Stacey Pettyjohn.

I'm the Director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security.

I think a lot of people don't realize the huge density of drones that you see in Ukraine is within 25 to 50 kilometers of the front lines.

And these are very small drones.

A lot of them are commercially derived.

Stacey Pettyjohn says it's resulted in deadlock in Ukraine.

Is the concern that the US won't be able to defend its Gulf allies and US bases, or that it'll be less able to launch offensive strikes against Iran, or, or both?

both?It's both.

They're intertwined, and this is one of the interesting tensions with the situation that the US finds itself in.

You know, you can sit back and wait and use either your ground base, like the Patriot or the THAAD, or sea-based air defenses, which means they're on one of the destroyers or cruisers in the region to protect your allies or US bases in the region where US forces are stationed.

But those stockpiles are running low, they're finite, and they're not going to be replenished, um, in the next two to three years.

The other option is to go on the offensive and begin to pressure Iran again by hunting for its missile and drone launchers.

That's been a stated objective of this campaign since the beginning, and it seems like the US has actually had pretty notable success in some ways at this, but nowhere near to the extent to which the administration has claimed.

We, we began by me asking you when this war broke out, did you have an intuition about what might happen? Y- you know, as things stand now in this war, how might this unfold as we go forward?

She says the US was well ahead of the curve when it came to getting into the drone business.

The US is the leader in advanced, uh, expensive drones, and that's what, uh, the US military acquired a lot of for the global war on terrorism, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But these are 30 million or, like, very expensive drones, um, compared to what we're talking about that Iran, Russia, or Ukraine is, uh, building and using.

The difficulty lies with integrating that cheap stuff with the expensive gear that we already have.

Figuring out how to integrate them when you have this much more sophisticated military that includes large battleships, you know, carrier strike groups, um, submarines, uh, tactical aircraft, stealthy bombers, where does a, a tiny commercially derived drone fit in, and how do you make these different pieces work together?

So how are technological developments impacting the nuclear arms race? And do you see technology as being helpful in potentially maintaining stability, or is there a greater downside risk? Um, and how does the science of verification keep pace with the science of weapons?

Thanks, Courtney.

Sadly, I think I'm going to, uh, continue the pessimistic assem-- uh, assessment that Alex and David began with in terms of other technologies further fueling arms races, potentially undermining strategic stability as well as crisis stability, where I think there could be greater concerns of a first strike because of advancements in non-nuclear technologies that are making counterforce potentially more viable, meaning that a country might decide to attack another nation's nuclear arsenal, its nuclear weapons, and take them out in ways that previously wasn't very feasible.

So a lot of the technological developments also that are happening are happening in the commercial, uh, sector, which is unusual and something that I think is harder con-to control, um, which further reduces the prospects of using export controls or sometimes arms, arms control to, uh, limit these capabilities.

So on the increasing the ability to potentially conduct counterforce strikes, you're seeing space, um, is just exploding.

There are so many different sensors in low Earth o-orbit that are making it more possible to nearly continuously observe different parts of the world.

Unfortunately, I don't think that necessarily is gonna help verification as much as trying to track mobile weapons, though.

If you could talk more about how AI can play a role in nuclear technology, and specifically, will it be able to help countries get closer to nuclear weapons, or is that just not relevant here?

So what motivated you and your co-author, Molly, to write Hellscape for Taiwan at this moment?

Yeah.

We've had a series ofprojects and reports on drone warfare, starting with one that I wrote on Ukraine, and then a broader one thinking about the implications of lessons from recent conflicts for the Indo-Pacific called Swarms Over the Straits.

And there we were focusing on how the US, Taiwan, and China might use drones in a conflict over Taiwan.

And then there was all this buzz about Admiral Paparo talking about a hellscape for Taiwan, but was really cagey and said couldn't talk about the specific capabilities because they were classified, and there was little information out there.

And that m- got me thinking about what that would entail, because we'd concluded in our prior report that the US really needs a different class of drones than most of the ones that have gotten a lot of the attention in Ukraine.

I know they've been developing longer range strike drones to reach into Russia, but most of the drones that are being used and what is pushing them towards over a million a year are the small tactical drones, often just commercial quadcopters or indigenously produced variants of racing drones that are small quadcopters made from commercial components imported from China.

Mm-hmm.