Fireside Chat, Interview, Conference Presentation
Drone Warfare: The New Rules of Combat Are Here
- Modern conflict is projected to evolve into a contest of software deployment and AI-driven autonomy, where the pace of development and implementation is critical to military success over the next decade.
- A substantial and difficult-to-close industrial capacity gap exists between the U.S. and China, with U.S. current drone procurement levels in single-digit thousands compared to the millions utilized by the Ukrainian military.
- Re-industrialization efforts are underway with some optimism for the new administration, though closing the manufacturing gap is not expected to be fully attainable within one year or even a decade.
- The strategic approach involves remaking the economy to reverse offshoring trends and combining re-industrialization with software and autonomy capabilities to accelerate the OODA loop.
- A "max-q moment" is approaching for U.S. national security, necessitating a forced transformation where massive battlefield mass often leads to war of attrition, making large-scale deployment of autonomous systems a necessity over legacy exquisite systems.
- Future warfare will see a second wave of fundamental change over the next 10 years where drones communicate via advanced autonomy rather than relying solely on operators or simple algorithms.
- Shield AI aims to enable large-scale deployment of AI pilots for vehicles across America to make mass effective, utilizing computer vision for resilience in GPS-denied environments.
- Human-machine teams are expected to remain superior to machine-only teams for the next several years, while the expectation is that increasingly defensive forces will delegate fast reactions to machine control.
- Success in the AI and autonomy domain is deemed more critical than hardware alone, with the U.S. holding an advantage in civilian markets over competitors like DJI, though both are needed to avoid an unacceptable outcome where adversaries possess superior AI.
- Military procurement and regulation face challenges including the need to mobilize bureaucracy for large-scale autonomy operationalization, integrate electronic warfare testing, and reform defense procurement laws.
- A critical risk involves the inability of industry and government to coordinate on deploying software capabilities at the pace of days rather than years, which would leave the U.S. in a very tough strategic situation.
- Founders and developers should anticipate that building public safety and defense technology is an extremely challenging long-term endeavor requiring the embrace of hard problem-solving over extended timelines.
- Regulatory frameworks on AI parameters and compute could inadvertently benefit adversaries in Beijing or Moscow, requiring careful game theory analysis to prevent such outcomes.