Jack Armstrong (19:41)
No, no, that would be great. They say that's a really difficult thing for robots to accomplish at this point for a variety of reasons. But yeah, I'm trying to think of what tasks would be best. Certainly vacuuming and that sort of thing. They have robot vacuums, that kind of work. Yeah. Folding laundry is right up top. Yes. I hate it. Yeah. But if you Got like music listen to or like a dumb TV show you only half watch? It helps, but yeah, all right. Get paid to do chores. That's pretty cool, I thought. Yeah, I suppose you become a maid, but you know, that's fine. It's a rewarding line of work. A lot of nice people do it. So moving on to a different, different technology. This is written by Gillian Melchior of the Wall Street Journal, among other publications she writes for. But she's writing about going along with a big NATO multinational drone war exercise that they're using to try to get up to speed. Let me. I'll hit you with some of it. If Russia attacked Estonia, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's multinational battle group would be the first line of defense. On a sub freezing February day, I joined British soldiers who along with some 250 French troops comprise the roughly 1200 man battle group to see how well they are learning the lessons from the war in Ukraine. Let's see. During the exercise I saw real progress as the British forces drilled with drones and electronic warfare. Yet I left uneasy that NATO partners aren't sufficiently prepared for today's warfare. As we were discussing last half hour listening to Mark Ruta, NATO partners aren't sufficiently prepared for any warfare. Anyway, here's a brief recap of some of the ways war is changing. Cheap weapons like aerial drones threaten expensive targets, especially when deployed in huge numbers. Use expensive countermeasures against them and you'll quickly find your resources strained. Technology is rapidly evolving which requires faster and nimbler procurement. Ubiquitous drones and sensors can provide combatants with a continuous, real time, high definition picture of the battlefield. What's visible is vulnerable. The unprecedented quantity and detail of battlefield data then that the drones are taking in requires changes to how intelligence is collected, analyzed and disseminated. Again, they're sucking up such enormous amount of data, which is super useful, but you got to find a way to process it. Retired General David Petraeus was over there studying the evolution of military technology. He spent a lot of time in Ukraine primarily, but listen to these quotes, would you? We're not talking about change at the margins. We're talking about a complete overhaul of how war is waged and how it should be envisioned in the future. A complete overhaul of how war is waged and how it should be envisioned in the future. Back to Ms. Melchior. She writes, during the NATO drill, I saw changes to training, the types of personnel being cultivated, the facilities where warfare is drilled, and to some extent the materiel used. But I also saw worrisome indicators that some NATO military leaders hadn't fully absorbed lessons from Ukraine and haven't adequately adjusted doctrines or policies, including vital changes in procurement. She mentions. The British troops in Estonia came from Britain's 12th Armored Brigade. By the time my visit, that brigade had put about 100 soldiers through a month long course focused on electronic warfare, the use of drones for reconnaissance and strikes, countering drones and tactics, according to their leader. I watched as a drone zoomed in low through the Estonian woods. Only a few seconds elapsed between the drone's eerie buzz and it's hitting its target, a net strung over a military vehicle. The goal isn't to become competent at any specific model of drone, obviously, because they're changing so quickly. It evolves day by day by day. In Ukraine, the proving ground of all this mayhem, instead of training, the soldiers of the 12th Armored Brigade focused on fundamentals like hand. I'm sorry, I mis. Emphasized the words. Instead, the training for the soldiers focused on fundamentals like hand, eye coordination on controls, evasive maneuvers and rapid attacks. Practicing in the terrain they could someday have to defend. British soldiers also learned practical lessons like how quickly a drone battery drains and how slowly it charges in frigid weather. During the NATO exercise, troops knelt in the snow to set up an unwieldy device resembling an antenna known as the Kraken system. Plant three of them and you can triangulate the position of an enemy drone, among other targets. Let's see. And they're trying to up the use of the Kraken, but it was released in months, not years, still longer than it takes in Ukraine. But to develop and deploy something in months and not years is a huge improvement over most military procurement, including the United States, which is famously slow and lead footed and prone to pressure from Congress and that sort of thing in a way that will get just scores of soldiers killed if we continue in those ways. So the NATO battle group in Estonia now has a 3D printer to make drones or build spare parts. The battle group's youngest members are showing a proclivity for using new tech to solve problems. One soldier recently 3D printed a replacement for a broken fuse box cover. Cultivating creative initiative, even at the lowest unit levels is an important military mentality shift. It's been vital for Ukraine. And then the next step for NATO's tinkerer soldiers is to scale up production. Since August of 24 in Ukraine, the Russians have been using unjammable stealthy fiber optic drones that get their signals from a thin wire resembling like a fishing line. This NATO battle group has only 10 or so of them to train with, and they're a recent acquisition. As of September, Russia produced more than 50,000 of these fiber optic drones a month. That's according to their state run media. But there's no reason to doubt it, I suppose. And there are many other sorts of drones on the battlefield. Ukrainians, for instance, now deploy some 9,000 drones every day. Ukraine's target is to build 7 million drones this year, a Russian official recently said. Moscow's goal is to train more than 70,000 drone operators in 2026. And Ms. Melchior says it's unclear if NATO military leaders fully grasp how the ground fight changes when so many drones are deployed on the battlefield. War eventually comes down to the moment when metal meets metal, said Major James Curry, second in command. Blah, blah, blah. Taking and holding territory still requires close combat, and to advance rapidly you need mobile, protected firepower. But the war in Ukraine is making it clear how much more difficult it is to field tanks and armored vehicles in large groups on a battlefield that's dominated by drones. The weapons that can reliably disable tanks are so pervasive and inexpensive that it's impossible to operate larger or armored formations anymore, says Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute. It is not hard for a drone to knock off a tank off its tracks, I should say, leaving the crew stuck and giving the enemy a chance to finish the job at their leisure. But NATO doesn't seem to be on the same page, and I can't appraise who's right and wrong in this discussion, but I think we'll all find out pretty quickly. They quote Major Curry, who we quoted earlier. I fundamentally disagree that tanks are any more vulnerable than they used to be. And it's true that there have been more ways to kill tanks about as long as there have been tanks. And Major Currie also praised the sturdiness of the British Challenger 2 tank, which he said is capable of surviving multiple drone strikes. But drones are a highly dispersed threat, which makes them harder to get to target them at their source. And so this in turn makes it hard to shape the battlefield before your armored formations roll in. You'll just get wave after wave after wave after wave of drones anyway, other than the introduction of like the bow into battle back whenever that happened. If Jack was here, he could probably tell you he reads about that stuff a lot. Yeah, this is, this is such an enormous fundamental change in warfare so quickly. It's amazing. Okay, well, I hope the good guys are as up to Speed as the bad guys. And I hope the Ukrainians continue to sell us their expertise and their equipment and teach us how to do it. Because, man, we can. We can blast 350 foot rockets to the moon back, but if we can't quickly produce cheap, crappy drones to blow up the bad guys, we'll be hosed. Oof. The modern world. I don't like it. You can have it back. We're gonna finish strong next. Stay with us, Armstrong and Getty.
