Speaker A
Eric Schmidt, welcome to Inside Defense.
Eric Schmidt discusses how Russia and Ukraine are innovating warfare with drones, AI, and missile tech, highlighting the urgent need for Western support.
Key Takeaways
- Russia and Ukraine are both innovating rapidly in modern warfare, particularly with drones and AI.
- Western support, especially financial aid and advanced technology, is critical for Ukraine’s defense.
- New technologies like jet-propelled drones and satellite networks are changing the battlefield landscape.
- Political decisions, such as Starlink usage in Russian territory, could impact the war’s outcome.
- The conflict highlights the increasing lethality and complexity of future wars driven by technological advances.
What the video covers
- Eric Schmidt shares insights from his visits to Ukraine's front lines and drone brigades, revealing the grim reality of modern warfare.
- Ukraine has been the primary innovator in the conflict, but Russia is rapidly closing the innovation gap with greater resources.
- Russia’s use of jet-propelled Shahed drones and mesh networks for real-time targeting has significantly increased their lethality.
- Ukraine is developing countermeasures against these drones, with multiple companies testing solutions.
- Russia is building a Starlink-like satellite network called Rusevet, expected to be operational within a year, which could shift battlefield dynamics.
- Ukraine lacks effective anti-ballistic missile defenses and needs substantial Western financial and technological support to scale innovations.
- The political question of allowing Ukraine to use Starlink inside Russian territory remains unresolved but could be a game-changer.
- The war demonstrates the evolving nature of conflict, emphasizing the importance of AI, drone warfare, and satellite communications.
- Schmidt stresses the need for Ukraine to match or exceed Russia’s innovation cycle to maintain its defensive edge.
- The interview also touches on broader implications for global military technology races, including US-China dynamics.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and context with Eric Schmidt
- 02:08Visits to front lines and drone brigade insights
- 04:04The harsh reality and goal to stop the war
- 06:09Ukraine and Russia's innovation dynamics
- 07:48Challenges with ballistic missiles and drone threats
- 11:14Western support and scaling Ukraine's defense
- 13:14Jet-propelled Shahed drones and countermeasures
- 15:19Russia’s satellite network Rusevet and future impact
- 17:15Starlink usage debate and political considerations
- 22:40Broader implications for global military technology
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
I'm glad to be here.
Speaker A
I am delighted to be having this conversation with you, particularly here in Kiev, Ukraine.
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You will be known to most of our viewers as one of the fathers of the modern Silicon Valley.
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You're a former CEO of Google.
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You're now a mentor and investor in some of the leading lights of the AI revolution, but you've also long been a leader in innovation to national security, and you've played a very outsized role here in Ukraine.
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You've built and scaled a drone company.
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You've gone frequently to the front lines.
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On this trip, I went to visit the command headquarters of Nemesis, which is one of the drone brigades in Ukraine.
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It's the subject of another Insider show we've done.
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And I have to say, you see, you get a glimpse of the future of war and it's pretty dystopian.
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War is really bad.
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And now I've seen it, it's much worse than you think it is.
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If you've been watching war movies, to watch people really be killed, really struggling, the death and destruction of a city, little old ladies being killed by the Russians, it's just horrible.
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The goal should be to stop it.
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The only way I know of to stop an aggressor is to fight back.
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And these new technologies have both offensive and defensive versions of each other.
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Russia and Ukraine are together in this unfortunate pairing inventing that future.
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And I had always thought that until recently Ukraine had the advantage in innovation, but you wrote recently in the Washington Post, it was very sobering, that you were more worried than at any time since the earliest days of this invasion.
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You said Russia was going towards a strategy of quote total war and that that was blunting Ukraine's innovative edge.
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Can you explain what you meant by that?
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Well, I've been doing this for more than three years.
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And I've watched the Ukrainians work really, really hard to innovate and they've held the line largely well at great cost to themselves.
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It's always been presumed that Ukraine was the innovator and Russia was big and slow and something changed.
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Russia is now on an innovation path at a slope, if you will, of improvement that's similar to that of Ukraine, but with much more resources.
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Here are my data points.
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We have no effective way of handling the ballistic missiles that they're using.
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And indeed, the anti-ballistic missiles, generally known as Patriots in the West, are in such short supply that there's not enough to go around.
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And I understand that.
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If you look at jet shahads, Ukraine, sorry, Russia invented two things and put them together which I can describe separately which has made jet shahads that are roving around the country the major killers of things that are not on the front line.
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There's talk of a large mobilization which will be more human fighters on the Russian side against Ukraine, very hard to fight against.
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There's going to be a new satellite network in the air that's similar to Starlink.
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It's called Rusevet sometime next year.
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And finally, the Russians are building these very powerful so-called glide bombs, which are independently targeted and are keeping the front line from moving and really destroying a lot of people.
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It's any one of those Ukraine could overcome.
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The five is going to be, in my view, almost impossible without Western help.
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And the Western help, to be very precise, is they need money.
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Russians have now shut down all of their commerce, all of their ports.
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They need money.
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Literally money.
Speaker A
You're watching an interview from The Economist.
Speaker A
To get early access to our upcoming interviews and watch others from our archive, subscribe to The Economist by clicking the link above.
Speaker A
Now, back to the interview.
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And second, they need help on scaling.
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They have the courage to win that is or hold the fight, but they don't have the capability of scaling.
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Yeah, I hear that loud and clear, but let's just dive down into some of those specifically.
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So jet shahads, you know, the Russians took the shahed drone, Iranian drone that they now make in huge numbers and added jet propulsion, which as I understand it means they go faster and higher and much harder to intercept.
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How close is Ukraine to a solution to that?
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There are at least five companies in Ukraine that have come up with solutions that are in test now.
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It should be soon.
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But this was a major event in the war and I didn't fully foresee it which I hold myself responsible.
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We knew that the Russians were going to take their shahads, make the back stronger, add these small jet engines which you can get from China.
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We thought they were going to use about 10% of the supply and we thought that that was overcomeable.
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Russia accelerated the use of these to more than half of the shahads.
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But they did one other thing.
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They don't have access to the equivalent of Starlink for Russian use in Ukraine, thank goodness.
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So they built a mesh network out of Chinese parts and they typically have two shahads that are sitting in a going around in a circle between Belarus and Kiev, for example, and those are relays and those relays allow them to see literally 8K video of whatever their target is.
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So right next door they managed to go right through the central window of the SBU headquarters which is like the CIA and that's a good warning of the power of these things.
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There are reports that there are plans to use up to 80,000 such jet shahads against Kiev and the other towns between now and the end of December.
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This is a major point.
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The government here is extremely focused on this.
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I know of a number of efforts that are likely to work.
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You mentioned that the Russians, and this would be even worse, are close to or potentially close to building their version of Starlink, Rusevet.
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How close are they?
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Because it seems to me, and I'm no technician on this, but it seems that that would be a real game-changer.
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There's evidence that they have started launching.
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There's evidence that it doesn't work yet.
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My own opinion is it's probably a year away because these networks are hard.
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Once that network is in place, it is more or less unblockable, which means the Russians will be able to again hunt anywhere inside of Ukraine.
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Ukraine today does not have the ability to use Starlink to hunt inside of Russia.
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So you can imagine a situation if both countries had that capability, the level of damage that they could do to each other.
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In the case of Ukraine, one of their highest priorities is hitting the oil derricks and so forth and so on.
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They do that without really being able to see what they're doing.
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Imagine how much more deadly the Ukrainians could be against Russian oil if this happened.
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Well, this begs a question which many of the Ukrainian commanders I've spoken to mention.
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Why can't we use Starlink in Russian territory?
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And it usually comes up in the context of ballistic missiles because the other, and you mentioned it, the other thing that is terrorizing Ukraine is Russian launches of ballistic missiles, which are, you know, dramatically more powerful, huge damage, terrorizing the cities.
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And they say, if you can't hit the arrow, why can't we go after the archer?
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And why can't someone persuade Elon Musk to let us for that purpose use Starlink in Russia?
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Do you think that would be a good idea?
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I'm in favor of giving Ukraine the tools to allow them to end the war by force, literally to stop the Russian aggression.
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The question you're asking is really a political decision.
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It's really a government decision.
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And the US government needs to grapple with this question.
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The most important thing right now is to get the innovation cycle in Ukraine equal or better than the innovation cycle now present in Russia and also have the scale.
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Ukraine does not have effective anti-ballistic missiles.
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It has one effective ballistic missile which is the firepoint of so-called flamingo missile which has d
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the most one possibility is they didn't grow up in an innovative environment, which is possible.
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A there's a long paper that analyzed this that I read and it basically said at the end of the day people in the military are more conservative because their loss aversion is greater because people die. So if you think about it, if you have a pretty certain model of an expensive way
Speaker A
to do something and Eric shows up with a cheaper way to do the same thing, you would never adopt it because you're certain the more expensive one works and you can't take the risk. I think that's the best way to understand what's going on in addition to the political maybe it takes and maybe
Speaker A
the lesson of Ukraine is you know first of all it happened in after an invasion here but secondly it takes people from outside the military I mean the striking thing all of these drone brigades are led by people who in a former life were civilians tech you know tech leaders business leaders they took
Speaker A
all the traditional Soviet generals and they all retired them for the same reason so that because it it it I mean you've given a very good answer about the United states. I'm wondering what you think about Europe's recognition of the scale of which war change because in some ways Europe
Speaker A
is more vulnerable. I mean it's right here on our doorstep. So the Europeans I've spoken with all have the same problem that the US people do. They're very smart. They understand the problem but the system is not organized around change. In most European countries, the militaries operate as
Speaker A
jobs programs. And those are important jobs. I'm not taking away. But they're building the wrong thing. So here's my deal. You can keep the exact budget that you have. In fact, you can increase it. Just build more effective things because you're going to need them. For example, in Europe,
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there's a huge problem with missile defense. And for all sorts of reasons, the Patriot missiles, which they rely on, are not available enough. We now understand looking at missile stocks and so forth on the Western side, we don't have enough of them. Now, since we don't have a
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lot more money to spend because these economies are struggling with debt and so forth and so on, you have to come up with new solutions. I show up with an argument that I have cheaper, better, faster, just use my architecture with all the companies that represent new war and spend the
Speaker A
same amount of money. The only reason that doesn't occur is because the incumbents don't want to make the change. I think that's one powerful reason. I think the other reason is that you're, you know, we're now a bit skeptical of American companies. We're a bit worried about that. I understand. And
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um it doesn't employ many people. Um I can assure you that if you were to take all the people in the militaries in Germany, the UK, and so forth, and you simply reassign them to an architecture that was AI, automatic targeting, missiles and drones, and some ships to move them around, you'd have
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full employment. Every job would change, but every job would still exist. And European labor laws don't allow you to lay off people anyway. So trust me, those people will still have jobs. What about the idea that at least for Europe, Ukraine becomes the vehicle through this which this happens? I
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mean, that struck me so much on this trip that we have the solution for Europe sitting here staring us in the face. I have said that publicly and I've said that to my Ukrainian friends because I want to encourage them to sell to Europe. Every European government I talk to says, "Your ideas
Speaker A
are great. it needs to be built here. So the most likely scenario in that scenario is Ukraine will license their technology to the European countries, which they should. They'll get a nice fee and the Europeans will build them at twice the price of eur of Ukrainians. And that's okay
Speaker A
in a rich democracy, which we can debate whether it's rich or not. But the part of the reason the Ukrainian stuff is so effective is the people who work so hard. When you go to the companies here, so and I've invested and worked with them pretty closely. There are it looks like China,
Speaker A
you have and I mean that in the work ethic sense. You have these long pe long buildings which are often underground now of people in white jackets sitting shoulders shoulder. They work for 12 hours a day, six or seven days a week, which is a Chinese. That's more than China. China's 966,
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right? So it's the work ethic is extraordinary. And they're all men. And do you know why they're all men? because if you work in such a factory, you get an exemption from the draft. I I didn't know they were all men. Um there are a lot of women involved in in elements of this too,
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but but what's noticeable is I said there why and they're all, you know, men of military age. And the answer is why do they work so hard? If they get fired, they go to the go to the front. Interesting. You mentioned China and I wanted to to ask you about how what you've
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seen happen here in terms of techled innovations in warfare has changed your view of how the US and China should or how this race technological race would will will develop. I mean you've been you played a huge role in this thinking through how to ensure that the US stays ahead in AI. Does
Speaker A
what you've seen here change your perception of where that will go, what China will end up doing, and who will be ahead? And my general belief is that we're extremely fortunate that China has been copying what we're doing because what we're doing needs to change and therefore they'll have
Speaker A
hysteresis in terms of changing. Um, if you think about it for a while, China already has the world's largest drone manufacturer, which is DJI, which America has just recently banned. Um, there's every reason to think, and I don't know this, that they have a military equivalent,
Speaker A
or maybe there's a military sub subdivision. The reason to think that we are better off than we think is that China's not fought a war in 50 years. There's no reason to believe that they understand the very subtle tactics. When you met with the commanders and when I talked to them,
Speaker A
when you actually ask them what are they actually doing, their reasoning is worldclass subtle thinking. I want to do this, this, this, this will happen and so forth and so on. You learn that by doing. There's every reason to think that China has no experience with that. There's no doctrine.
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There's no books. You can't study it. So, we may be okay. Um, with respect to the uh the Pacific, the Pacific area and so forth, there's a publicly discussed plan to protect the Taiwan Strait and so forth. I don't know, but I'm assuming that that will ultimately be a drone war and not a
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ship war. If you think about it, you don't really want to put a ship that close to China. You want to put a drone ship with drones in it because you don't want the people to be killed. So,
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it makes sense to me that all the arguments that we see here are also applicable to the Pacific. Big ships, big aircraft carriers are easy to hit, easy to blow up, and so forth. Um, drone ships are are harder. Drones are are harder to detect. You see this in Iran
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um with the problems we're having keeping the straight open. Um I think that uh my understanding again this is public information that China has a very large set of missiles that are land to sea. We would need to have anti-missiles. I don't know if we do or not that could that could deal
Speaker A
deal with that threat. So if you it maps pretty well to the current belief in the China fight.
Speaker A
What about could could the military area be an area where you might between China and the United States be able to reach some agreement over norms to go back to where you were earlier? I wonder because there's a lot of talk now given the pace at which AI capabilities are increasing very real
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fears of you know 100% recursive self-improvement and outofc control AI and people are debating whether you know the US should pause whether or companies should pause whether there should be some regulation and there are many who say we can't do that because China will be ahead well
Speaker A
first place we're not going to do a pause because the entire incentive system in America is not to pause and furthermore if you do a pause you do really open it up to competitive either local, you know, a local competitor violates the rules or the global. So there's not going to be a pause.
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The right thing to do is to invent this future while also invent the solutions to the problems that you're creating. It's just occurring quickly. Um so an example here is there's some evidence that you can take a new model that you um shows up and use the previous one which is typically
Speaker A
four months older to supervise the new model. It looks like that works. People are trying that.
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We'll see if that's technically true at scale. Um, if you look at China, there is no question we are in an an AI race that is profound between the Chinese approach and the American approach. You're watching an interview from The Economist. If you want to watch our other interviews, including
Speaker A
with Mark Carney and Dario Amade, subscribe to The Economist by clicking the link above. Now, back to the interview. And the easiest way to understand that is would you prefer to have your day-to-day life intermediated by an American model or a Chinese model? I think as westerners we
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prefer an American or American and British model. So that to me is the interesting fight. There's a series of uh track two and track one dialogues. I'm participated in one track two. There was a big meeting in Vienna where both sides are now talking this through. The simplest thing that we
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need to do is to avoid surprises. Henry Kissinger, our mutual friend, who we miss dearly, was very concerned that a single event would spiral in the same way that World War I did from the killing of the Arch Duke into a total conflration that that once the process started because of nationalism
Speaker A
and tensions and lack of communications, you can end up in a horrible, horrible war.
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A war with China would be just terrible, right? It would destroy so much of our modern lives in and all of those kinds of But should there be I mean I obviously completely agree with you that a war with China would be horrific, possibly existential, but do you think there is room
Speaker A
for some kind of limitations, mutually agreed limitations on AI between China and the United States? I mean, we have the meeting coming up between President Xi and President Trump. And A, do you think it's sensible? And B, do you think that the military area in a sort of modern-day
Speaker A
equivalent of nuclear arms agreements would be an area to start? So, we all believe that there needs to be a set of treaties in this area. The first treaty needs to be one about no surprises.
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So imagine a situation where an agent bot manages to get out of its testing range by accident um and but ultimately triggers a nuclear response because it signals that there's one coming and then the nuclear response happens automatically. There there are plenty of such scenarios that
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analysts have come up with. So the single most important thing is a no surprises rule, right? And the next one would be to attack the question of cyber. Neither side has been willing to limit its use of cyber attack, offensive or defensive capability. If you can't agree to that,
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it's going to be hard to agree to much more. And so, and you don't think even in principle a mutual agreement on pausing would make sense? I think it's the problem with pausing is first place um it's counter to the incentives of all the players of course. The second is how do you verify? Okay.
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So, for purposes of argument, the UN will in will administer the pause. So, that that's now you're really condemning it to failure. No, but we have an international body and they're supposed to be helping and both are on the security council. Okay. So, now how do they verify it? So, then
Speaker A
they have to go to the secret labs which includes the military secret labs and they have to read all the code. Well, first you can't read all the code because it's all written by computers. So now you have to take your computer system from the UN and you have to apply it to the Chinese system. Well,
Speaker A
the UN's system is not as fast or modern if you will than the Chinese or the US one by definition because they don't have all the resources. So you see how um I wrote a paper a while ago which said
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there is a solution to this and the solution is to have what we called mutual AI destruction. And the idea was that as we go up and up this competition list, you have to give the other side a chance to
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say you've gone too far. So we proposed that rather than bombing each other's data centers, we would just have a computer that would shut down the power to the data center in such a way it couldn't be restored for a while. So when when the other side got farther along, you could shut
Speaker A
off its and and they could obviously do the same thing to you. This was intended as a serious point and but it's also sort of far sounds like a modern day Doctor Strange level. But but the important point is that it in this particular formulation it would allow when somebody got well ahead of you,
Speaker A
you could shut them down and then they could shut you down and then you restart. That's another way of addressing this pause issue. I mean, we need a solution that's implementable for a pause and I don't see it. We we do. That's the alarming thing you just said. We need a solution
Speaker A
that's implementable and you don't see it. And I and to conclude I I as you know I'm we know I know we know each other reasonably well. I'm basically an optimist and I'm always looking on the upside. But I have to say in the last few weeks my general optimism has been a bit knocked.
Speaker A
firstly by what's been happening in Silicon Valley and the the fact that there are growing numbers of researchers in these companies themselves alarmed about the dynamic of not being able to pause as you say and secondly by what I've seen here which is even we're well we're nowhere near the frontier
Speaker A
of AI that we could be at in a few years and yet you see this escalation of innovation that seems to me to be ever more lethal. So so the counterargument is to be optimistic. Give me some reasons for optimism. You're building a kind of intelligence that's nonhuman but
Speaker A
under our control. Can we keep it under control? I believe we can. Partly because we at some level can pull the plug. Uh you always have the issue of a terrorist group. Let's assume terrorists don't have access to this because they can't get enough data centers to do it. Then diplomacy between the
Speaker A
countries should allow us to keep effective human control on these systems. They will move quickly, but fundamentally they'll be under human control. I honestly believe that as long as AI is under human control and under human alignment, it will be okay. That is my opinion. Well,
Speaker A
I have to say I really, really hope you're right. Eric Schmidt, thank you very much. Thank you, Zan.
Topics:Eric SchmidtUkraine warRussia Ukraine conflictdrone warfareShahed dronesAI in warfareStarlinkRusevet satellite networkanti-ballistic missilesmilitary innovation
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