The Autonomous Drone Tech Stack & Economics of Drones — Yaroslav Azhnyuk, The Fourth Law & Guest Host Noah Smith, Noahpinion

Summary

---

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast

Episode: "The Next War Is Already Here. The West Isn’t Ready."

Guest: Yaroslav Azhnyuk (The Fourth Law)

Guest Host: Noah Smith (Noahpinion)

Date: May 18, 2026

---

Overview

This episode explores the transformative impact of drones and AI-driven autonomy on modern warfare, as seen through the lens of Ukraine’s efforts to rapidly innovate under existential threat. Yaroslav Azhnyuk, founder of The Fourth Law, reflects on his journey from building pet tech startups to leading companies building AI and drone technologies for Ukraine’s defense. The conversation, hosted by Brandon and co-hosted by economist and tech thinker Noah Smith, pivots from personal narratives of wartime innovation to deep dives on technological, moral, and geopolitical questions surrounding autonomous warfare, drone mass manufacturing, the evolving character of war, and looming global threats—particularly from China.

---

Main Themes & Discussion Points

1. Yaroslav's Journey: From Pet Tech to Defense Tech

• Personal Transformation: How Yaroslav went from making Petcube (cameras that fling treats to pets) to “cameras that fling explosives to occupiers” ([00:20], [02:23]).
• War’s Moral Imperative: Transitioning to war tech was a moral decision: “The only morally right thing to do is to fight back. It is immoral not to fight back, and then the choice becomes very clear.” (Yaroslav, [10:20]).

2. The Ukrainian Experience: The Surge of DIY and Startup Drone Warfare

• Innovation Driven by Necessity: By 2023, it was clear “warfare is redefined by drones as platforms… a platform that is software defined that can increase your battlefield capabilities in a step change just overnight.” ([07:58]).
• Scale of Production: Ukraine produced 4 million FPV drones in one year—China could scale to 4 billion. ([00:00], [66:30], [67:00]).
• Tech Summary: Ukrainian teams have become “the leading team in on-drone AI and thermal imaging on a Ukrainian battlefield. And likely one of the leading, if not the leading, in the world.” ([14:50]).
• Technical Breadth: Companies led by Yaroslav build thermal and daytime cameras, autonomy modules, and multiple classes of drones (bombers, interceptors—battery operated) and provide simulation, training, and plan to build semiconductor fabs ([14:34]-[18:49]).

3. The Technological Shift in Warfare

• Five Levels of Drone Autonomy ([37:52]):

  1. Terminal guidance (~final approach guidance, AI takes over in last 500m)
  2. Autonomous bombing
  3. Autonomous target detection and engagement
  4. Autonomous navigation
  5. Autonomous takeoff and landing

• Eight Dimensions of Autonomous Battlefield ([41:09]):

  • Level of autonomy
  • Platform (quadcopter, fixed-wing, missile, land/sea/air)
  • Domain (ground to ground, ground to air, sea, etc.)
  • Higher autonomy (swarming, drone nests)
  • Environment (day/night, terrain, weather)
  • Command and control (coordination, data collection)
  • Infrastructure (simulation, deployment, security)
  • Distribution (scaling from 100 to 100,000+ drones)

• Impact on Success Rate: Level 1 autonomy (terminal guidance) boosts success rates from ~20% to over 70% ([33:59]):

  "Just that feature alone ... has increased his mission success rate from 20% to 71%, and it also increased his kill zone from 3 kilometers to 10 kilometers." (Yaroslav, [33:53])

• Exponential Change: Each layer of autonomy multiplies combat effectiveness, and “full autonomy” might make drones “four orders of magnitude” more effective—by making use more accessible, increasing mission success, and allowing drones to return ([32:03]).

4. Ethics, Morality, and Global Consequences

• Moral Dilemmas: Discussion of whether building dual-use or lethal tech is moral, and at what point the maker is responsible ([11:29]):

  “When you think about all the terror... the only morally right thing to do is to fight back. And it is immoral not to fight back.” (Yaroslav, [10:20])

• Slippery Slope of Dual-Use AI: Drawing parallels between drones and large language models (LLMs); every tool can be used “for good or ill” ([12:08]).
• Future Outlook:
  • “Five to ten years from now it will be immoral to use weapons without AI because weapons without AI will be more likely to cause collateral damage.” (Yaroslav, [45:10])
  • “In an ideal world... you calculate all the possible consequences before starting. In our world, you deal with the wolf before you call Greenpeace.” ([13:59])

5. Limitations, Failure Modes, and the Human Role

• Out-of-distribution Risks: Distribution shift remains a risk with autonomy—mistargeting in fog, new environments, edge cases ([44:44]).
• Human Infantry’s Future:

  “Human infantry ... will not be able to stand against swarms of AI-powered suicide drones.” (Noah Smith, reflecting on his 2013 prediction, [51:53])

  • But ground troops “are still needed”—modern war remains complex and multi-dimensional ([54:10], [65:12]).

6. The China Problem: Manufacturing & Geopolitical Readiness

• Scale and Readiness: “China can produce 4 billion of these FPV drones.” ([00:00], [66:30]-[67:00])

• Critical Chokepoints: Western supply chains depend on China for rare earths, motors, fiber optics, components, even as Ukraine and its allies try to “China-proof” their supply ([66:30]).

• Technological and Industrial Gaps:

  “We in the West ... don’t have the technology to do that. ... We lack technology, we lack mass manufacturing capacity, we lack the components and ... the rare earth materials.” (Yaroslav, [70:03])

• Conventional Power: Is China now supreme in conventional military power due to manufacturing? “We cannot count it out. And that alone should be a big warning sign.” (Yaroslav, [71:35]).

7. Policy and Strategic Recommendations

• Learning from Ukraine: The “future of defense is already here” on the Ukrainian battlefield—US and allies must massively accelerate integration, learning, procurement reform, and industrial mobilization ([84:37]).
• Mass and Economics Over Expensive Platforms: “It’s no longer about an aircraft carrier ... it’s about mass ... That is, you can iterate on very quickly ... and everyone can operate it.” ([114:14])
• Urgency: Western progress is too slow compared to the exponential gains in Ukraine and Russia. Europe “didn’t even make one year of progress [in drones] ... the gap is getting wider and wider” ([81:54]).

8. Memorable Exchanges & Moments

• Drone Production vs. Tank Production:

  “The drones we manufacture in one day will be more than enough to destroy all the tanks [Rheinmetall] manufactures in a year.” ([27:13])

• The Essential Lesson:

  “You want peace? Be prepared to war. Got to invest in defense and security.” (Yaroslav, [118:58])

• Housewives With Drones:

  “Don’t mess with those housewives.” (Noah, [28:00])
  “Drone wives.” (Yaroslav, [28:04])

• War, Self-defense, and Tech:

  “There’s always victory where there is union.” (Yaroslav, [76:28])

---

Selected Timestamps and Notable Quotes

[00:00] Yaroslav on Ukraine’s and China’s drone numbers
[10:20] "The only morally right thing to do is to fight back. It is immoral not to fight back, and then the choice becomes very clear." – Yaroslav
[14:50] “This group of companies is currently the leading team in on-drone AI and thermal imaging on a Ukrainian battlefield.” – Yaroslav
[32:03] “When you add full autonomy to that FPV drone... full autonomy increases its capabilities by four orders of magnitude.” – Yaroslav
[33:53] “Mission success rate from 20% to 71%, and it also increased his kill zone from 3 km to 10 km.” – Yaroslav
[45:10] “Five to ten years from now it will be immoral to use weapons without AI…” – Yaroslav
[66:30] “China can produce 4 billion of these FPV drones.” – Yaroslav
[70:03] “We lack technology, we lack mass manufacturing capacity, we lack the components and ... rare earth materials.” – Yaroslav
[71:35] "We cannot count it out. And that alone should be a big warning sign." – Yaroslav
[84:37] “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet. ... Kyiv and Ukraine is sort of the defense valley.” – Yaroslav
[114:14] “It’s no longer about an aircraft carrier ... it’s about mass.” – Yaroslav
[118:58] “You want peace? Be prepared to war. Got to invest in defense and security.” – Yaroslav

---

Key Takeaways for Listeners

• Adapt or Fall Behind: Modern warfare is being redefined by rapid, software-driven innovation—those not adapting and investing in mass production and AI autonomy risk catastrophic disadvantage.
• Morality & Responsibility: As lethal AI and autonomous systems proliferate, ethical lines are blurred; makers and societies must grapple with their responsibilities and unintended consequences.
• China’s Edge: Chinese manufacturing scale represents a profound threat; the West must address supply chain dependencies and industrial innovation with urgency.
• The Power of Mass, Not Prestige: The future belongs not to those with the biggest, shiniest platforms, but to those who can cheaply and quickly mass-produce and iterate—both in autonomy and in countermeasures.
• Humility and Unity: Learning from Ukraine’s frontline “defense valley” and forging deeper ties, manufacturing partnerships, and innovative procurement is critical for Western resilience.
• Prepare for the Unexpected: The battlefield of the 2020s is full of edge cases and unexpected threats. Flexibility, humility, and an appetite for rapid iteration are vital.

---

Conclusion

This urgent, wide-ranging conversation captures the stark reality, complexity, and ethical knots of modern AI-powered warfare. Ukraine’s innovative survival is a wake-up call: the “next war” isn’t coming—“the next war is already here.”

---

For further reading, tech deep-dives, and show notes, visit latent.space.

Transcript

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

So think about this. Last year, Ukraine produced 4 million FPV drones. Ukraine is not the most industrious nation in the world. China can produce 4 billion of these FPV drones.

[Noah Smith]

Would you say that right now China is now the supreme conventional military power on earth, given its ability to manufacture and deploy drones in the quantity and quality that you just described?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

I don't think we have all the information to claim that, but we cannot count it out. And that alone should be a big warning sign. And as I say, at some point in my life, I went from making cameras that fling treats to pets to cameras that fling explosives to the occupiers. So that's the short story. And when you think about what your nation, what your compatriots are going through, you realize that that's the only morally right thing to do, is to fight back. And it is immoral not to fight back. And then the choice becomes very clear.

[Brandon]

Welcome to Leinspace. I'm Brandon. I normally do science podcasts, but today we're going to do something a little bit different. I'm joined by Noah Smith of no Opinion on Substack and Twitter and he has lots of interesting things to say about drones. And as a guest we have Yaroslav Ajnuk, founder of the Fourth Law and several other drone related startups. But yeah, to get started. So it is February 23, 2022. You are running a pet startup. You are connecting pets with their owners. Let's go in just a little bit of background. How did you get started in tech and what were you working on before the Ukrainian war started?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, good to be here. Thank you. On February 23rd, late in the evening, like, I think like 11:00pm Kyiv time, my wife and I, we landed in Kyiv actually then she was fiance and we were, we came from Lviv where we were looking at a church where our wedding should have taken place. And we got into this cab riding from airport to our home and the driver was like, you crazy? Like, everyone's leaving Kyiv. Why do you come? Like, what? Nothing, nothing's going to happen. Like, dude, chill. And then obviously eight minutes later or eight, eight hours later, the bombs fell in the city. It was quite surreal. We probably landed on the last flight that landed in K, one of those last flights. But yeah, you know, my background, I'm a tech guy, studied applied mathematics in Kyiv Polytechnics. Born and raised in Kyiv. Parents, you know, old PhDs from academia and grandparents to everything from linguistics to nuclear physics. And I'm an entrepreneur. So I built a bunch of companies petcube is the one you were referencing. So I lived in San Francisco, 2014-2020, building Petcube, which is one of the leading pet device companies in the world, selling lots of pet cameras. And then, as I say, at some point in my life, I went from making cameras that fling treats to pets to cameras that fling explosives to the occupier. So that's the short story.

[Brandon]

Yeah. So February 24th, I guess, a few hours after you go to check out your wedding chapel, what do you do?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Well, we had a plan for this situation. So my parents, family live in Kyiv. And we're like, okay, this has actually started. The worst has come true. And so we basically packed our belongings and got in the car and spent 17 hours riding west. And that was pretty sure most people in our audience watched at least one apocalyptic movie in their life. So that was exactly like that. Like, felt exactly like that. Missiles are falling. Like, there was smoke in Kyiv. Like, you know, my dad and I went, like, to central part of the cities, probably like 800 meters from presidential office, to pick some stuff in his workplace. He's like, head of an academic institution, so he had to get some of the things with him. And super surreal. Like, the streets are empty. Like, the gas stations are out of gas. We found some gas station. We didn't have spare canisters with us, so we're like. We figured out the car was diesel, so we figured that if it's diesel, you can actually store it in plastic canisters. And we bought some window wash for the cars. We poured it out of the canisters, and we poured the diesel into that. Yeah. So it was like that and then, like, you know, helping friends get out. Like, my friend and his dog, like, we found, like, my brother was also, like, riding in a separate car. We found the place for my friend who didn't have a car. Like, yeah, it's like, totally surreal.

[Brandon]

Wow.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah. And we didn't know, you know, of course, then you didn't know, know this will last for so long. You didn't know whether Kiev will be able to. Whether Ukraine will be able to defend Kiev. And it was like, yeah, very little information and very little insight into future.

[Brandon]

So what do you. What are your thoughts with regards to how do you defend, you know, Ukraine? So you eventually start building drones. What is the process to get from there to or from where you were building devices that connect owners with pets to building drones? And what other things did you do to help the war effort in the process?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, it's Definitely non trivial, right. I didn't get any military education when I was a student. Normally in Ukraine you would go to this military school, even if you're getting higher education in any, any other sphere. I decided to skip that, which is like an unusual way to go. And I never thought that I will be somehow engaged in war effort. Like what is war? Of course wars are over, it's the end of history. So one thing you got to understand about many Ukrainians, and I guess it's also true about most of the people I met here in the US that who you are in terms of your nationality is a big part of your identity. So when that gets under attack, it's something deeper than just the country you live in gets under attack, right. And so I, I, day one I figured I'm gonna, I'm gonna fight back with everything I can, right. But I, I didn't think on day one that I'm actually gonna do weapons. And you know, there are a bunch of things we're reaching out to a number of American congresspeople and centers and basically advocating for support of Ukraine for voting for land lease, which has happened in May 2022, but didn't actually work as expected. You know, we helped start Brave One, which is now very important defense innovation cluster, sort of like a Diu here in the US we helped a fund called D3 was started or co started by Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google. So a bunch of these odd things. But then eventually I was like, okay, by 2023 it was obvious this thing A is going to last a lot more time and B, that the whole world is shifting and that there's going to be a new arms race, that the warfare is redefined by drones as platforms and first time in history you have a platform that is software defined that can increase your battlefield capabilities in a step change just overnight. So it's like if you were able to push a software update and get all of your Roman legionnaires new helmet, that has never been possible before. It's the first time in the history of war this is possible. So all of that, many other things like supply chain fertilization and the impact of that AI is going to have on all of this. All these things have become evident to me in 2023 and it's like, okay, I should do what I do best or what I know how to do best, start a tech company and sort of leverage the global techno capitalist machine to provide defensibility to Ukraine and the free world. So that's literally the mission of the company increase defensibility of Ukraine free world. And then there was some sort of soul searching. And like asking yourself is like, okay, am I actually, I know nothing about weapons? Am I actually like ready to make, you know, things that other people use to kill other bad people? And when you think about what your nation, what your compatriots are going through, and think about all the terror of places like Bucha, the occupied cities in the east and south, the abducted children, the raped women, all the economic damage that's being done, and the intention to destroy whole nation, to genocide the people of Ukraine, you realize that that's the only morally right thing to do, is to fight back. And it is immoral not to fight back. And then the choice becomes very clear. And look, we're just passing the ammunition. We're not doing the actual job. The actual fighters and defenders and heroes are people in the armed forces or just support.

[Brandon]

Okay, I have so many questions, actually. I know you seem to have a question. Do you want to ask anything?

[Noah Smith]

No, no, I'm just listening.

[Brandon]

Go. Cool. Yeah, I do want to talk about some of, let's say, the moral issues, like you just said.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

I think there are no issues there.

[Brandon]

Yeah.

[Noah Smith]

What would an example of a moral question be in this case?

[Brandon]

Well, no, I mean. Okay, as you just said, you know, you are creating the tools, but others are using them.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah.

[Brandon]

You know, I was maybe thinking of having this conversation later, but one of the questions is like, is it actually, you know, you are going to be building them for your homeland, which. You are building it for your homeland, which is, I think, very strong, morally defensible position. But this technology is not going to stay with you. Right. Yeah, this, you know, you will probably be selling these to other people.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

And.

[Brandon]

Yeah, so, you know, the. The future is really where the moral issues may come into play.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

But yeah, this question becomes easier and more complete if we ask this. Not about a particular technology or particular weapon, if we think that this question actually applies to any kind of technology. Right. So knife or fire? You know, you can use knife to do surgery and save people's lives, or you can use it as a weapon to take people's lives.

[Noah Smith]

Cut tomatoes, too.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Cut tomatoes too?

[Noah Smith]

Yes. Nice. Yeah, it's in Japan. Sword and knife, they, you know, call the same word.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah. So, you know, it's like it's with any technology, large language models. Right. Look at how powerful they are. And yet they're available to anyone in North Korea or in Russia. So that's one side of the argument. The the other side is, as a maker, what is your responsibility for how the tools you're creating will be used? There's definitely some responsibility. Right. Then how should the decision process look like? Should you try to calculate all the possible scenarios before starting to work on something? Or do you create something that is needed now to save people's lives and then think about, you know, addressing the unwanted edge cases later? You know, in ideal world where there is like, okay, it's not ideal world in a mythical world where there is some one governing party and gets to decide everything and there is no other country that can, you know, decide on their own, you could say, well, we need to calculate for all the consequences. And only then, you know, maybe build this building, you know, by, by replacing this park because, you know, maybe we need this park in the city. Right. So that kind of situation. But when you're in a situation where you're in a forest in front of a wolf, you know, you first gonna deal with the wolf that wants to eat you, and then you're gonna go consult Greenpeace. So that's kind of situation that Ukraine is in.

[Brandon]

Okay, fair enough. Because this is a tech podcast. I did want to spend some time talking about the tech that you've developed and what you've been working on. Can you explain, I guess first of all, the problem that you were trying to solve from a technical standpoint and then maybe go into some of the solutions and some of the design process that led you from designing little laser guided, you know, guiding lasers with an iPhone versus typing drones.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Sure. Well, look, it so happened that my partners and I, we serve. So I started one company called the Fourth Law. And its goal was and is to make massively scalable on drone autonomy. And then in parallel with that, together with my hacky co founders, partners and friends, we started another company called OddSystems, which was focused on making thermal cameras. Thermal cameras are seeing thermal radiation and are used to see at night. And we're now sort of. Those companies are getting close and closer together and we're probably going to merge them. And this group of companies is currently the leading team in undrawn AI and thermal imaging on a Ukrainian battlefield. And likely one of the leading, if not the leading, in the world. So we have these like three sort of business units which are cameras, drone autonomy and drones. So the cameras and drone autonomy sell daytime and nighttime cameras and different types of drone autonomous modules to other drone manufacturers. Over 200 drone manufacturers in Ukraine. And then the UAV business unit sells the drones Themselves to the armed forces of Ukraine. Ukraine government. And there are different types of drones. There's a sort of front strike, as we call them. So those are sort of FPV strike drones and the bombers and then interceptors. And there are different kinds of interceptors. We do shaheen interceptors and we do ISR interceptors. We don't do the deep strike.

[Noah Smith]

What's an ISR interceptor?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

ISR stands for intelligence surveillance reconnaissance. And those are basically drones which Russians are using to watch over positions and then communicate where.

[Noah Smith]

Target reconnaissance.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah. ISR is sort of a classical term for reconnaissance drone.

[Noah Smith]

Are all of these battery powered drones that you just described? Because I know that the sort of deep strike drones still have like some

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

sort of internal combustion engine.

[Noah Smith]

Yeah, internal combustion engine. Are all the things you're talking about battery powered?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, what we're working on is all battery powered. Right. We don't do the deep strikes. Right. And then in terms of autonomy, you

[Noah Smith]

can catch us ahead with a battery powered thing. It's not too fast to catch.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. Look ahead. Interceptor like ours is called zero. It goes up to 326km per hour for reference.

[Brandon]

How fast is a shahed?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Like an internal phase, it could be 280, but in, in cruise phase, it's like 220ish. Okay. Yeah. And sorry, I'm not like, you know, you can convert that into miles if

[Noah Smith]

you're interested, multiply by 2/3 or point 6.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, that's easy. Yeah. I was saying that for, for autonomy modules, right. We, we make systems, autonomous systems for frontline for interceptors and some for deep strikes as well, and then different levels of autonomy. So from terminal guidance, which is like last 500 meters, give or take, to autonomous bombing, to autonomous target detection, to autonomous navigation and all of that across day and night, different terrains, different time of different platforms like quadcopters and fixed wing and maybe some other platforms. So this is quite a wide variety of products. We also have like our own simulation, we have our own training school for the warfighters. And we're about to start construction of two semiconductor plants to make sensors for thermal cameras. So that's super exciting for me as a computer science guy is like doing semiconductors super, super cool.

[Brandon]

But in terms of kind of core drone technologies, you basically are. One is an FPB replacement without fiber optics, and the other is a single

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

track with or without fiber optics. Fiber optics is just like sort of a communication module. So you can use classical analog video link and radio link. Those would Be two separate radios. You can do digital or you can do fiber optic. And then fiber optic has its own advantages, but also adds weight and decreases the distance and decreases how fast you can turn and move with the drone.

[Brandon]

Do you need AI for fiber optic drones?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Like, you can use AI for fiber optic drones. AI replaces a human, right? Fiber optic is making your communication link more resilient. So those are slightly different goals. Like if you want, you can have AI controlling hundreds of fiber optic drones instead of having 100 operators for each.

[Brandon]

Okay, so I guess I thought that the key reason that people moved to fiber optic drones was for electronic countermeasures, or I guess to counter those.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, I think that's a correct assessment from sort of a public awareness standpoint. In practice, it's somewhat more difficult because besides electronic countermeasures, you have these issues of radio horizon for FPV drones, which means that, you know, as I believe Earth is round, Some people disagree. But basically, if you fly a drone and you have a land station over here and a drone flying over here, if your drone is flying high, you have good direct radio visibility. If your drone goes low, and usually, you know, Russian infantry and vehicles, they're on the ground, you want to hit them, you need to go low, lower you go, maybe you'll, you'll get behind a hill or behind the forest. And if you're far enough, you'll just get behind the curvature of the Earth. You get into what's called a radio shadow. And then that is real bummer because for the last beat, 60 or 20 meters, you won't be able to see anything and it will be very difficult to hit the target. So to counter what. And then the distances that these FPV drones act on there, they can be quite large. So for example, here in the US there was this drone dominance program competition. And in drone dominance, the furthest distance was about 10 km.

[Noah Smith]

What was drone dominance? What was that?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Drone dominance is a, is a program started by the US Government to accelerate the development of drone technology.

[Noah Smith]

And the longest range thing they were using was 10 km.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Was 10 km right in, in Ukraine. Like if your drone doesn't fly at least 20, 25, it just. No one's interested in it. And the usual hits are happening. It was like, okay, many hits are happening between 30 and 40 kilometers. And that's what expected from a regular 10 inch FPV drone. So at that distance, even at altitudes of to 100 meters, you might start losing the link. So some of the earlier AI technology that was fielded In FPV drone was this thermal guidance technology. That was the first product that we ever launched that helped you as an operator. Once you see the target from 2, 3, 500 meters, you lock onto the target and then it just drives the drone towards the target no matter what, even after you lost the visual connection. So optic fiber solves that. However, if you want to go like 20 kilometers with optic fiber, that will add an extra three kilos of useful weight to your drone.

[Noah Smith]

The cable that you have to unspool as you go weighs.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah. So first, like the spool is about 800 grams. So basically, bit less than a kilo. And then, and then think about 10, 10 kilometer optic fiber is, is another kilo, something like that. So yeah, so that takes away from your useful mass. And then now you have like, you need a 15 inch drone and it can only carry maybe one or two kilos of explosives. If you want to go, you know, 20 kilometers. If you want to go to 30 or 4, like 30 is probably max. 40 is like very problematic on optic fiber. And then the problem with optic fiber is it's actually getting super expensive. And you know why? Because of all the data centers for AI, it's literally the same optic fiber that's being used there. So when Ukrainians and Russians come to Chinese factories to buy the optic fiber, they're like, we're out. We sold it out to the Americans. That's the craziest thing. So optic fiber went up in price from like $4 per km to like $32 per km in a few months in the beginning of this year. And I've even.

[Noah Smith]

Claude code is stopping the Russian drone effort here.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

And Ukrainian as well.

[Noah Smith]

Yeah, and Ukrainian. But I read somewhere that the Russians had grown more dependent on fiber optic drones relative to the Ukrainians, and that's one reason why the Ukrainians have sort of regained the initiative in drones recently. How, how accurate is that?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

The Russians were the first ones to scale that. I think by, as of now, Ukraine has caught up. I think, like as of maybe three months ago, Ukraine is mostly caught up on fiber optic. Yeah.

[Noah Smith]

What percent of, of damage would you say is in terms of FPV drone damage? Would you say is now fiber optic versus like autonomous?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, well, for our, for our audience, I actually, I cannot answer that question. Like, it's like, I know the answer, but I would not disclose that. But for our audience, I think another interesting fact is out of all the casualties on the front line, between 70 and 80% are done by FPV drones.

[Noah Smith]

Right? FPV drones are the new weapon of universal weapon of warfare.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah. So it's like they used to say that artillery is a God of war because artillery used to to cause like 80% of casualties. And now on that ranking, FPV drones rule.

[Noah Smith]

FPV drones are the God of war.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Sort of dethroned artillery, but it's not. To say that artillery is not useful is not needed. Like all of these systems are needed maybe, except cavalry. Although Russians still use it. I know. Have you seen the videos of Russians using mules and horses?

[Noah Smith]

What is the usefulness of the tank in the.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

That's where we need Greenpeace to say a word. But they're silent.

[Noah Smith]

Fair. What's the use of a tank on the modern battlefield?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

It's diminishing.

[Noah Smith]

Diminishing.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

However, I think there might be technologies which will revive the tank. Look, tank still provides you armor, and armor is important. Like you still need to armor and firepower. You can be an personal carrier that provides you armor. The challenge that currently exists is armor is not very well protected against incoming drones. However, there are ways to protect it. We were previously talking about this before the podcast. The CEO of Ray Mittal recently sort of ridiculed Ukrainian drone industry, saying that there is nothing interesting there, no real innovation, no to stand compared to Ray Matal or Boeing. And it's all made by housewives. There was obviously a ton of memes about this. People ridiculing the CEO of Raymetal. And one of the best quotes I heard on this topic is from my friend Alexei Babenko, who's the head of and founder of Veri Drone, which is one of the largest manufacturers of FPV drones. Drones, they're our partner. They're using our autonomy. So he said that the drones we manufacture in one day will be more than enough to destroy all the tanks Rainmetal manufactures in a year. And then, yeah, cost wise, of course, a drone is like $500 and a rain metall tank is probably 5 million ish or maybe more.

[Noah Smith]

Don't mess with those housewives.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, Drone wives.

[Noah Smith]

Drone wives.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

That's it.

[Brandon]

So there's a classic saying that everyone always fights the last war. Yeah. So from your standpoint, how did we get to the point where tanks became irrelevant, at least for now, in a matter of just a few years?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Well, look, I think it's the same way. How do we get to the point that calculators become irrelevant? Oh, now we have iPhones. Like, why would you need a calculator? Technology progresses and its Influence grows nonlinearly. It's all exponential. So I can tell you that full autonomy when you put it on a drone. So if you think about a tank and a drone, it's not direct comparison, but even like a drone and artillery shell or sort of cost per kill, an artillery shell for 155 caliber, which is a standard NATO caliber, currently market price is about $4,000 per piece. So, you know, compare that to say $400 per drone, that's 10 times more expensive. Account for the amortization of the artillery gun and for how vulnerable it is, and what is the sort of tactical capabilities it gives you as compared to drone. You'll figure out that an FPV drone is maybe three orders of magnitude more versatile, more useful, more capable than artillery. And many of the classic artillery, many of the cases are different types of artillery, not just like 1 155. You have mortars, you have all that, but give or take, you know, roughly three orders of magnitude maybe again, it doesn't have that firepower. It's not one on one comparison. So now take that FPV drone. When you put full autonomy on that FPV drone, which can be not very expensive like systems that were producing, they're like hundreds of dollars of pure bomb costs.

[Brandon]

Just interrupt. You said full autonomy, but just a second ago you were saying that the autonomy here is guidance, right? It's not decision making.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

No, I was saying that that's the first and sort of easiest pieces of autonomy that was fielded by us. But if you add full autonomy to

[Noah Smith]

a drone, I think he's asking, what is it for the listeners, can you explain what the term full autonomy means?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah. So basically, I think a good way to think about an FPV drone is like an iPhone of warfare. It's like very inexpensive, very mass producible, very versatile. You don't need a bunch of other things. When you have iPhone in your pocket. You don't need an MP3 player, you don't need a calculator. Don't need other things. All right, so FPV drawn as an iPhone, or like, okay, Apple, please don't sue me as a smartphone. And then when you add autonomy to it, it sort of becomes like uber or ride sharing. Okay, so what it means is instead of actually being a trained pilot who has this complex remote controller device which requires a couple months of training to actually pilot your drone, and then having to pilot it for 30 minutes, flying towards the target, et cetera, et ceter, now you basically, you have your smartphone you have a drone, you pick your smartphone, you say, we are here, the bad guys are here. Go and get them. And the drone goes up, flies in a given direction, localizes itself on the map, finds the dedicated area where the bad guys are supposed to be, sees the bad guys, bombs them, return like watches. So does, does a damage assessment, returns back, sits down, and then you can pick it up and, and watch the video if you didn't have the radio link. Right, That's a bomber drone. That's, that's full autonomy for a bomber drone. Right.

[Brandon]

So you're saying that no human decisions made in this entire process.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

That's not human decision was made at the beginning of the process. The same way as you would fire an artillery. When you fire an artillery, you don't stop it like 500 meters away from a target and ask it whether you know you want to strike or not. So that's exact decision is always made at some point. Right? Okay, so when you do that, that's full autonomy. And such full autonomy is happening as we speak. And such full autonomy increases the capabilities of an FPV drone, which is already like three orders more powerful than the artillery shell. Full autonomy increases its capabilities by four orders of magnitude. Because now you can have 100 times as many people who can use it, because you don't need to train those people. And this is important. You can have 10 times mission success rate, and you can have 10 times utility per drone, because now instead of being one way kamikaze, it can be a bomber.

[Noah Smith]

Now wait, let's. You said 10 times mission success rate, which means that fully autonomous bomber drones succeed in their missions ten times more often than human piloted bomber drones do. That's an important thing to know.

[Brandon]

Okay, but maybe to push back on.

[Noah Smith]

They're superhuman. They're 10x superhuman.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

They're not vulnerable to electronic warfare warfare. They don't care about the radio horizon. They don't lose track during navigation. They are not susceptible to human error. When an artillery shell or other drone blows up besides you and you're like, hell no, I'm getting out of here. That doesn't happen to an autonomous drone, all of those things. We have one of the brigades that's using our drones with just first level autonomy. They literally said that their success rate.

[Noah Smith]

What's first level autonomy?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

First level autonomy is just the terminal guidance. Okay. Yeah. By the way, we have a video of that. We can watch that.

[Noah Smith]

Terminal guidance means a human gets it nearby and then the AI takes over.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

So the human flies it all the way like 30 km towards the target. And obviously the target was probably given to that human by someone who's flying some ISR drone, some reconnaissance drone. Right. So all the way through the target and once you see the target from a distance of 500 meters, you do target lock. And from there drone flies autonomous. So just that feature alone, it has increased the guys call sign is grom. So it has increased his mission success rate. Like precision of mission. Yeah, mission success rate from 20% to 71%. And it also increased his kill zone from 3 kilometers to 10 kilometers, which means there is certain area around the front line which is designated kill zone. Whenever an enemy goes into that area, it's almost guaranteed to be to be destroyed by a drone. And then obviously the drones are not launched from like the zero line. They're usually launched from like minus 10 kilometers. Zero line is sort of an imaginary line of control of two conflicting forces.

[Noah Smith]

Okay, it's important to explain these things to a lot of the listeners who

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

are not familiar with warfare. Absolutely, absolutely.

[Noah Smith]

Yeah. Right, so you said that Level 1 autonomy, in other words, just terminal guidance, just like human gets it to the finish line and then it goes over the finish line, increases mission success from 20 something percent to 71% or, and

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

increases the kill zone from 3 kilometers to 10 kilometers.

[Noah Smith]

So on the parameter or actually on

[Brandon]

real quick, can we define mission success and like maybe in a way, what are the failure modes of missions?

[Noah Smith]

Yeah, I have a guess about mission success.

[Brandon]

I mean, well, yeah, but I could get them.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, yeah, no, but that's a very good question in fact, because even if you fly into the target, well first the target can be damaged or destroyed. Those are two different modes. Then there can be different targets. You know, a sole infantryman is one kind of target. A dugout where suppose there are some enemies, there is another kind of target and some mechanical equipment is another type of target. Radio emitting equipment which like often like the targets that the military want to get more than anything else is the some enemy radio tower, something like that, or some, some small radio dish that really makes life difficult in that area in that commentary. So those are different targets, right? Can be destroyed, can be damaged. Then sometimes the drone hits, but doesn't explode like that happens. And then there are other failure modes. You didn't even reach the target because you were A jammed by electronic warfare. B, you lost the control over drone because of the radio horizon. C, you were jammed by a different type of electronic warfare that happens way before you hit the target area. It's impacting your video receiver. So like jamming on video or jamming on control are two different types of jamming. Then something malfunctioned on a drone, just a mechanical malfunction, maybe like a motor broke or like whatever. So all of those are different failure mods. Yeah, or maybe you got lost, you're navigating to your target. That happens too.

[Brandon]

Okay, so level one autonomy, basically you manage to point in a direction, you go there and then the last mile is the drone taking over.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

So we define this, I define that, but it sort of got picked up by the industry. We define five levels of autonomy. So level one is terminal guidance, what we just discussed. Level two is bombing. Level three is autonomous target detection and engagement decision. Level four is autonomous navigation. Level five is autonomous takeoff and landing.

[Noah Smith]

So those are good things to know.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Those are five levels of autonomy. Now, if you want. Yeah, sorry, let me finish with the theoretical part.

[Brandon]

What is Tesla running at right now?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Tesla. Well that's very good point. Exactly. It was inspired by the levels of self driving and autonomy.

[Noah Smith]

Waymo is level five.

[Brandon]

Right.

[Noah Smith]

You just tell it where you want to go, it picks you up.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

I think like if you look at the classic definitions of self driving cars, Waymo is still like level four because it still requires even remote, but still like human control. So like if Waymo gets in trouble, there is an operator who takes over and resolves this. So that will still be level four. It doesn't map directly, but it's also five levels.

[Noah Smith]

Can I interject a question? So in terms of an FPV drone, that's like a suicide drone that'll just blow itself up, killing something, how do you know what it hit? Like does it just transmit back or do you sort of like lose track of it and hope it hit? Like what, what happens to that?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

That's a great question. So like the current battlefield in Ukraine, it's saturated with different types of drones. So obviously you have all the FPV drones. And last year alone Ukraine manufactured about 4 million of these. And then Russia is maybe like 20% less than that. And for this year the publicly voiced target was 7 million on Ukrainian side. So it's like serious numbers. We're getting into serious numbers here. And then besides those, there are different reconnaissance drones, ISR as we call them. And there are sort of tactical level ISR where both Ukrainians and Russians usually use Mavic drone by dji. And then there are a bunch of locally produced drones which are sort of fixed wing drones that can stay in the air for Much longer than Mavic, maybe like half an hour. And then, you know, there are drones that can stay for many hours or even up to a day. And those drones have, are more expensive, have more expensive cameras, etc. Etc. We hunt those drones that Russians launch, the Russians hunt our drones and so on. But ideally, ideally, when you are a group of soldiers operating in fpv, you'll have someone in your company or someone in your platoon who has an ISR asset. They will do target designation for you. They'll say, oh, like there is, there's a Russian vehicle over there, go and get him. And you go there, you get it. And they're like, okay, you know, watching.

[Noah Smith]

They have their own drones destroyed.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

They have like a carousel of drones because like one maybe cannot stay more than 30 minutes.

[Noah Smith]

They're constantly surveilling the battle almost, almost

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

every, every spot on the battlefield. But it's not always the case. Sometimes you will not have a surveillance essence so that then you would launch another FPV just to confirm that there was a hit. And then if you see there was a hit and you're not sure if it completely destroyed, you may be hit again for good measure. Yeah, so that's how it works. But I was about to give you another sort of piece of taxonomy. So you have five levels of autonomy, right? And then you have sort of eight dimensions of autonomous battlefield. So what is eight dimensions? It's crucial to understand how autonomy evolves in a modern Belfield environment. So dimension number one is level of autonomy. You know, what are the capabilities that your asset has? Dimension number two is a platform you're operating on. So it can be a quadcopter, a fixed wing drone, different types of maybe like, like long range drone or short range drone, but can also be a missile. You can have autonomy even on an artillery shell or a ground vehicle or a sea vehicle. So all of those are different platforms. Level 3 would be domain, so it's ground to ground or ground to air as an interception. Ground to sea or sea to air. They're all like, all the nuances with different domains. Then level four would be higher levels of autonomy, such as swarming drone carriers, drone nests.

[Noah Smith]

And now when you're saying you're talking about dimensions, not.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Oh yeah, sorry, yeah. I mean dimension. Yeah, I used to say. Supposed to say dimension. I say dimension because each of them works with another. Right. So you might have like third level autonomy, fixed wing drone operating in land to air and stuff like that. Right. And then operating in a swarm or operating from A nest. Right. Then you have sort of dimension number five is environment. So is it day or night? Is it summer or winter? Is it humid, cold, dry? What kind of target is it? Is your target hiding in a forest or is it behind a hill or within buildings? So all of that is environment. Then you have dimension number six is command and control. How are you dealing with, with tens of thousands of those assets around the battlefield? How are you coordinating that on the higher levels of command? Are you collecting data? All that. Dimension number seven would be infrastructure. So things like simulation, data collection tools, security, deployment mechanisms, et cetera. So all those systems have to be developed separately and integrated with all of the others. And finally dimension number eight is sort of distribution. Have you deployed 100 of these systems or 100,000 of these systems? Because those are two very different ball games. So that now gives you a more broad overview of how autonomy propagates across the battle space.

[Brandon]

So as someone who has done machine learning and had gone out of distribution and had things go horribly wrong, you were talking several of these kind of axes of thinking about drone warfare. Seem like they could be very susceptible to some sort of distribution shift if you start making things autonomous. Likewise. Well, I mean, first of all, I'm

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

very interested in kinds of scenarios that you're thinking about.

[Brandon]

Yeah, I mean, the most obvious one is, I assume these are computer vision guided systems for at least last mile. How do you ensure that, oh, well, you now have some fog rolling or something and the drones just attack the wrong thing or maybe, I mean, it probably will not turn around and fly

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

back and attack you. Same question. How do you assure that your mortar fire hits the right thing? Well, I was like, mortar fire, give or take half a kilometer, could be plus or minus. So maybe you fire one and then you fire another. So drones are actually much better. And being precise in those scenarios. And I think to your point, I think five to 10 years from now it will be immoral to use weapons without AI because weapons without AI will be more likely to cause collateral damage or unwanted damage. Same way it will be immoral to drive your own car manually on a public road because it's more likely to cause unwanted damage.

[Brandon]

Well, I never considered that might be really.

[Noah Smith]

Yeah, that's definitely coming. Anyway,

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

an obvious thought. I agree with you.

[Noah Smith]

No, I mean, obviously they're not going to let you drive once most of the cars on the road.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

That one, I believe you were talking about drones. Right. Happens. Right.

[Noah Smith]

Friendly fire and collateral damage and stuff like that. It's all minimized with AI, but. Okay, so here's my question. Let's go to level six autonomy. Let's take all of the target selection, let's take all the battlefield data, integrate it into one big AI and have that big AI basically be in command of the battlefield and agentically do target selection. That's a general. You've cut humans out of the loop, except maybe as dexterous robots repairing drones and fastening things to drones, or maybe something like that because you don't have those robots yet. Um, how soon are we there, AI General?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Well, the most important thing to ask ourselves is who will be faster to that, us or our adversaries?

[Noah Smith]

I assume us. But how fast will we be to that? I hope us.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

I hope so too.

[Noah Smith]

But how fast can we. Like, when are we looking at that in terms of like Horizon's years, You

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

know, like, technically it could be done. Now the question is, of course there's some engineering work to be done. The bigger challenge is deployment. So, okay, technically, like operation in Iran, right? Publicly it was claimed that Palantir system was used for target designation, et cetera, et cetera. So it is not exactly, as you say, the AI makes all the decisions, but basically AI goes through all the data you have, gives you these 10, 27 different targets and says you to confirm, please press OK. And you look at the targets and you're like, yeah, sounds right. Press okay. So I think that's where we are now already, or we were a couple weeks ago as we're recording this on April 10th. Another question is how massively deployable it is. Is it like every decision being made like that, or is it just some of the decisions made like that and then different levels of command and control there you have like the platoon, the company level, the battalion, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But the tricky thing here, when we get into that territory, the tricky thing is if your enemy is getting advantage of being thousand times faster than yourself by deploying such systems, what do you do?

[Noah Smith]

So you gotta, if the enemy is a thousand times faster than you at

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

deploying those systems, if enemy starts deploying Level 6 autonomy, as you call it, and you have not started doing that, you're in trouble. Yes, exactly. So you have to catch up. So my point is that it is very important to think about the safety of these systems, but that thinking should not slow you down in developing them, because they are critical for your existential survival. Right? One person who doesn't get to think about the, the ethics of the war, is it that person that person surely doesn't get to think about what would

[Noah Smith]

be the safety risk of such a system.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Well, of course, just wrong decisions, right? Maybe these decisions, these decisions will not only be made about drones, they are likely to made about what the humans should do on your side as well. And obviously some environments are more like Ukrainian Russian war where you have to

[Noah Smith]

choose to risk lives. It will have to choose to sacrifice human lives on your side, of course.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

And then some environments are just like dead zones and there are no civilians. There are virtually no civilians close to the front line because super dangerous, everyone has evacuated from there. But there are other environments which are more like, like okay, this is a counterterrorist operation. There's like a group of terrorists or a group of civilians or the recent operations in Iran. I imagine that the US and Israeli forces do not want to harm civilians. They only targeted the military targets there. So in those situations it's a different level of responsibility for that decision making as well. And then there are just such a big variety of those military missions and I'm not even like well informed or well educated in military science to tell you about all those scenarios. We would need to put some general besides me and maybe a Ukraine general and American general would have told you very different stories about these things.

[Noah Smith]

Got it. Can I ask a few more questions? All right, so, so in 2013 I wrote one of my first paid articles ever was about how the era of drones will change human society. I was just sitting around board thinking about things.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

You were way ahead of your time.

[Noah Smith]

And I said the following will happen.

[Brandon]

This article is real. I've read it.

[Noah Smith]

I said small autonomous suicide drones with will cleanse the battlefield of human infantry. Human infantry will not be able to stand against swarms of AI powered suicide drones. That was, you know, I didn't even know about like Alexnet at the time, I think.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

And then he's just an avid sci fi reader.

[Noah Smith]

I'm an avid sci fi reader. But also like it's not like there will be a way to do that. It's a nonlinear multidimensional search problem. And you get enough compute, you'll find some search algorithm that will get you there. And so yeah, I think that one sentence describes the bitter lesson right there. It's just like it's a multi dimensional search space. You search it somehow. I don't know, figure out some, get a grad student search algorithm. It's not that hard anyway. But I guess the point is that human infantry on the battlefield will be gone. And I wrote that in 2013, many people on social media laughed at me for that, called me hysterical, said things like, electronic warfare will knock all the drones out of the sky. You need humans to hold ground. That's something you still hear from a lot of people on social media today. I feel that this article that I've written has never been directionally wrong. It has gotten more and more right steadily over time. And that we're very. Reading the battlefield reports from Ukraine where human infantry are basically a few guys hiding in dugouts for months.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

That's on Ukrainian side. On the Russian side. That's just like a Zerg rush.

[Noah Smith]

The Zerg rush and then they just die. But they have some guys in dugouts too, right? Like hiding in dugouts for months?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, they have. Yeah.

[Noah Smith]

Okay, but that. What are those guys doing in the dugouts? Providing frontline reconnaissance. What are they doing? Doing?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Well, you know, if there is a guy in a dugout with some bullets and automatic weapon, the other guy cannot come and take that dugout. So that's. They're establishing control over surgery.

[Noah Smith]

I see. So there still is a use for human infantry on the battlefield as of today. How long will that last?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

I think it will last for a while. This is funny. There's this whole layer of the modern culture, a modern Ukrainian culture built around the war related stuff. So there is this punk rock band that is called szc, I guess in English that would be. Which stands short for like a deserter or something like that. So anyhow, this band has a song titled 2030. It's basically about year 2030 and the war still goes on like whatever, third world war or whatever. And they basically sing about the AI and cyborgs and everything. But the simple infantry is still needed and we're still getting cold in those dugouts and we're still doing our job. That's sort for the, the theme of the song. And it seems like that's actually what's gonna happen.

[Noah Smith]

Ground robots will not replace humans in the dugouts soon.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

You know, I'm. I'm very much interested in following the whole humanoid robot theme. And what about like a dog dog

[Brandon]

robot or just mobile control spider or something?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, everything evolves into a crab.

[Brandon]

Carsonization warfare.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

There is a lot of utility in humanoid robots because the world is designed around humanoids. So I would not like 100% disqualify the possibility that sometimes 10 years in the future humanoid robots will be actually fighting. So that's the actual Terminator kind of

[Noah Smith]

scenario you have in the first Terminator movie. You look at what they've got on the battlefield, they've got flying bomber drones and humanoid robots.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah. And then look, the cost of large language models of running them is getting so low. You can have basically an inexpensive computer running, you know, what was a state of the art model year and a half ago, running it locally on a device with an open source model, which also means that the Chinese can have it, the Russians can have it, the North Koreans can have it, et cetera. So that is already possible. And when we're looking at the acceleration of the neural nets, if not the acceleration of the large language models, I would have said that I don't think that humanoid robots will be able to be useful in the battlefield earlier than in 10 years. But if you account for the exponential, it might be five years or so. The problem with all of the autonomous systems, and it starts with self driving cars and even with all the AI, like modern day AI agents, to make them really useful, you have to solve such a long tail of edge cases that it's really difficult to make them useful. Like we were prompted Thomas, you know, self driving cars, what like 2007, Sebastian Trune and Google and even before that, all the challenges, everything. And Elon of course told us it's going to be, you know, one year from 2014. And now we still don't have self driving Teslas everywhere. We have Waymos and SF and some other places, but they're still like not perfect. So I think, you know, I expect something similar from self flying drones and fully autonomous drones. And we saw that firsthand. As with each level of autonomy that we're adding, there is a very wide distance between a prototype and something that is ready to be scaled to millions of units, and something that has been scaled to millions of units. But the race with AI coding tools is just insane. So things might accelerate very fast, faster than we can imagine.

[Brandon]

So I think your point is that due to this long tail behavior level 1 autonomy as you've defined it, is actually very natural. You basically are just solving an image recognition and tracking system.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, it's actually interesting that you say it that way. And I thought about this the very same way. And we have this joke that There are like 200 companies in Ukraine which are trying to solve last mile targeting or terminal guidance. It seems like we're like the only company that actually solved that, because I'm

[Brandon]

not saying it's trivial, but it's at least something that you imagine given our

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

current US and Eric Schmidt, like Eric Schmidt's companies are pretty good. I actually have lots of respect to what they're doing and they have been practically influential and helpful on the battlefield and they have good engineering.

[Brandon]

Yeah, I wasn't saying it's trivial. I'm just saying this is something naturally adapted based upon things that we know work well. But some of the other domains where you do have to make decisions and you have a long tail become much harder and you worry about edge cases more.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

The more complex behavior you're trying to simulate, the more edge cases there are, the more ways to do it. Wrong. There are. And then there are different approaches. If you think about, if you read academic papers about robotics, right, the robot is represented as something that has the sort of sensor input. And then you have three levels of sort of logics or decision making, which are perception, planning and control. And you have actuators as output. So pre neural nets, you would do perception output and control, all with classic logics. Right. Then with Alexnet and computer vision, you could do perception with neural nets and the rest with logic. You cannot currently do each of those separately with neural nets, each of those separately with logics. Or you can just have one huge neural net that just takes lots of sensory data. It's not just pixels. Could be sound, could be accelerometer, could be everything as input and just outputs the controls. And some of the self driving car companies are doing that or experimenting between different ways of doing that. So you can also think about that. And the way you implement those features also influences how much degrees of freedom the system would have. Right? Like control, you can do it classical algorithmic control with common filters and pad controllers, etc. Or you can do a neural net that was trained in a gym with reinforcement learning, et cetera. And those would be two different behaviors of a system.

[Brandon]

Yeah, okay, maybe my point was just much more high level.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

If you go high level, you can try to have whatever Fei Fee Lee and folks who are doing physical sort of world models, right? Physical intelligence, they're trying to make these big models and sort of understand the world. And then supposedly you have such model and you can tell a drone, okay, go over that hill and find the bad guys and then get them. Or make me a video, make me a photo of the guy smiling and get back to me. That's one way. Another way you have these subsystems, One is navigation, another is finding the person, another is getting to them to take a photo. And those are again very different behaviors. And then it's not that one is necessarily better than the other. And we Might have more technological capability to do one or another, but all of those systems will exist. And then again, you should always keep in mind that it's not only the good guys that are developing these systems. The bad guys are developing these. The systems as well.

[Brandon]

Yeah, I guess where I'm going with this, back to Noah's original thought with the end of the soldier. And so in order to replace, or

[Noah Smith]

at least the end of the rifleman,

[Brandon]

let's say, or the end of the rifleman.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, yeah, I'm not seeing that very close. And it's like I'm, you know, as much as I'm a lover of sci fi and all of that and a technologist, the more I try to be like, try to have certain humility about these things and like the military domain and there was just so much human history and blood and tears dedicated to sort of understanding this art of war and perfecting it and so on. There is so much knowledge in there that. That I don't feel like I even started to comprehend a lot of that. But one thing that I really understood is that even though drones are now making 80% of the casualties, you go to the actual officers, you talk to the actual brigade commanders, corps commanders, and they explain to you how all of it fits together, how. So when you're thinking about an operation that involves a couple thousand people to get this piece of land out of the enemy's hands, deoccupy it, how it is so complex, it involves dozens of different types of drones, and then land operations and reconnaissance operations, psychological operations and aviations and tanks and logistics and all kinds of these different assets. So modern warfare is really very complex. And the fact that the drones are the latest, coolest thing and then the AI is the latest, coolest thing doesn't mean that now it's that and only that. Right? So, yeah, whoever's looking into that, I think, should realize that it's not just what the press talks about, that the reality is, is much more difficult, much more complex.

[Noah Smith]

Let's talk about China and China's manufacturing capabilities. So suppose that someone like, suppose the United States went to war with China

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

and then, I hope not.

[Noah Smith]

I hope not as well. But suppose that drones were very essential to that war of all the types of drones that we're talking about here and that. Suppose that China said, all right, well, you need X and Y and Z to make those drones to fight us, and we control the production of X and Y and Z. So we're just going to cut you right off. And now you have no drones. Drones. I know that a number of countries, including Ukraine and Taiwan, have been making moves to China proof their drone productions that China couldn't do that. Examples of things they might be able to cut off might include rare earths, fiber optic cable that you were talking about before, various other things that where even if they don't control 100% of the production, they control enough of the production that would be extremely expensive to produce it without relying on Chinese sources or the market's fragmented enough, et cetera. What do you see as China's key bottlenecks and how easy are those to overcome in terms of China proofing drone production in case of a war against China?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah. Well, let me start with a saying that although China does not sell directly to Ukraine and it does sell directly to Russia, a lot of Ukrainian supply chains, they start in China. Right. And we're not in a conflict with China and we would not want to be in a conflict with China. And we'd hope that China stays in neutral power between Ukraine and Russia and the US as well. That said, the scenario that you're describing, everything is much, much, much worse. So think about this. Last year, Ukraine produced 4 million FPV drones. Ukraine is not the most industrious nation in the world. China can produce 4 billion of these FPV drones. China can make them not drones with propellers, but fixed wing drones which go not 40 km far, but maybe 2 or 300 km in land. Slightly more expensive.

[Noah Smith]

With internal combustion.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

No, no, no.

[Noah Smith]

With battery powered fixed wing drones.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, yeah.

[Noah Smith]

Battery propulsion system on those propellers.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, yeah.

[Noah Smith]

I don't, I just don't know how that works.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you have that. They can also make them all fully autonomous. They have dji, the world's most advanced drone company. They can make them fully autonomous without gps, without anything. And then they can put those drones on, I don't know, maybe tens of thousands of fully autonomous underwater submarines, or maybe not even that, just on shipping containers and barges that ship goods, freight ships. And then they show up with millions of drones packed onto those sea vessels. They shop to any coastline in the world, be it Taiwan or be it California. And they have millions of long range impactors targeted at a piece of land. What do you do with that? There are not enough hunter submarines. There are not enough anti ship missiles. Yeah, Anti ship missiles, anti ship planes. They can produce these assets in tens of thousands of factories because they're so simple to produce that even if the FBI director picks a phone, calls to the president of the United States says, hey, the scenario Yaroslav was warning us about is beginning to unfold. We need to do a preemptive strike. You wouldn't have enough assets to do preemptive strikes because there can be tens of thousands of places where these things are being manufactured. And then so to counteract a scenario like that, we would need to have like a similar amount of mass.

[Noah Smith]

You mean similar number of drones?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yes, to intercept that, like either in sea or in the air, et cetera, at a similar cost. Right. So economics should work out. I'll tell you that currently we in the west and we in the United States, we don't have the technology to do that. We don't have.

[Noah Smith]

What key technologies do we lack?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Autonomy, mass drone manufacturing, stuff like that.

[Noah Smith]

We lack autonomy technology?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Well, I think so if.

[Noah Smith]

Because our computer vision algorithms are not as good.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

It's not only about the computer vision algorithms. It's like if a group of companies by Eric Schmidt, founded two, three years ago, and my small, small startup, maybe not as small, but also founded three years ago, are sort of two of the leading companies in the world and maybe a couple others who are capable of something like that, but not really on small drones. I do think we were behind China in technology. So we lack technology, we lack mass manufacturing capacity, we lack the components and we lack the rare earth materials. So the four layers in which we're behind this challenge. And that's why it is my point that we in the west and especially in the United States, there should be far more smart people working on defense and should be more funding if we want to keep the resemblance of our good past life.

[Noah Smith]

That's really important. Would you say that right now, as things stand in conventional terms, not abstracting from strategic nuclear weapons, but in conventional terms, would you say that China is now the supreme conventional military power on earth given its ability to manufacture and deploy drones in the quantity and quality that you just described?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Look, I don't think we have all the information to claim that, but we cannot count it out. And that alone should be a big warning sign. We have not seen Chinese drones in action. We've seen some of the Iranian drone in action and Russian drones in action, not Chinese. Really not seen Chinese forces in action, obviously. Hopefully this never happens. But the conflict of a scale US China, there are many sort of classical assets that we should not discount, as we just discussed. We should not discount artillery in the land war. We should not discount, you know, air carrying groups and you know, the air force and long range missiles and Electronic warfare and satellites, etc. But then there are also things that, you know, we, at least we as a general public don't really know about China. I'm sure there's a lot of information that the U.S. intelligence has about the Chinese capabilities. But yeah, I think if you. If you get back to the scenario that I just described, and if you take that like sort of to the maximum, do you basically see that whoever has bigger manufacturing capacity, that side wins?

[Noah Smith]

That's just a typical law of conventional warfare and has been forever, sort of.

[Brandon]

You read Noah's blog?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

I. Not as often as I would like, but I read know as not necessary.

[Noah Smith]

It's a theme where you don't read my ax.

[Brandon]

Yeah, it's just he has no opinion about anything.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

No opinion, but.

[Noah Smith]

Okay, so here's the. I guess there's two questions here. The question of could the United States and other countries allied with the United States even develop supply chains that are independent of China to make any of these drones? And the second question is, could they do it? Insufficient method mass. And so I think the answer to the question of can they do it in sufficient mass is today, no. But in an extended prolonged war situation, things change a lot. And all the development restrictions that we put on new factories go out the window and a sense of urgency. I mean, Ukraine obviously wasn't making all these drones before the war. And so if America had the same kind of urgency that Ukraine has now, things would happen, things would move. And of course, America has allies too, or had allies until recently and may have them again in the future. But America has or had allies that would also scale up very quickly, like Japan and European countries if we ever ally with them again, et cetera. And so a lot of things could then change in terms of the actual mass. So in terms of looking at China and saying they have all these factories today and looking at the history of conventional warfare, America had very few military fact, very little defense production capability on the eve of World War II and ended up easily outproducing everyone else.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Even though maybe not easily.

[Noah Smith]

Yeah, not easily, but I mean, by a long.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Also an added benefit of not being attacked.

[Noah Smith]

That's right.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

That helps. Yeah.

[Noah Smith]

And so who knows how secure they are now? Or we're cyber.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, no, look, I totally agree with your sentiment. And I'm not as. I'm even less doomerish than you are, as it seems to me, you're a little bit doomerish, but in the long term, you're bullish.

[Noah Smith]

I'm not doomerish. I'm thinking about what we need to do. I'm not thinking like, oh, we're doomed. That's not my point. It's never useful saying that if you're doomed, then just don't go on podcast. Go pet a rabbit and play a video game or something. Anyway. No, we're not doomed, but I'm saying step one, what are the key choke points that we need tomorrow? Besides rare earths, which we already know, what are the other key choke points that the west needs to free itself from Chinese supply chains on in order to manufacture even one one drone free of Chinese supply chains?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Well, there are companies here who are doing that. Like our. We have good friends company called Neros. I know they're down in El Segundo or whatever, like somewhere South California.

[Noah Smith]

What are the most pressing choke points besides rare earths that everyone talks about?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, you know, that's one of the pieces that we do. Thermal cameras. That's like actually a big one.

[Noah Smith]

Cameras.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah. Then like the motors like you, you need,

[Noah Smith]

after you have the magnets, then you turn them into a really good motor.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, yeah, you, you have, you need these special magnets and that's sort of your rare earth component. Like rare earth is not that. Oh. Like there are these metals that only for, for some reason, God only put them under the Chinese territory and not, not under any others. No, like they're distributed that there are plenty of them around Earth. It's about the refining capabilities and investing into that and so on. And then frankly, at some point we don't have that many humans. That's where the human aid robots help. China is a big populous country. The population of United west is comparable to that, but the population of the US is much slower than that. And I definitely think that the whole west should get their act together because, you know, Ubisamper Victoria Ibi Concordia there's always victory where there is union agreement. Yes. So I think we sort of, as the free nations of the world, we should get their act together because freedom is what unites us. And I'm also pretty mad at what's happening in the European Union. And I think that, you know, current US administration is the best thing that has ever happened to Europe since World War II, probably, or since post World War II, because World War II wasn't the best thing.

[Noah Smith]

Trump withdrawing the image of omnipotent American support forced the Europeans to get their butts in gear. Unite. And.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, and also like doing that not in a nice way. Right. Like when JD Vance came to Munich Forum one year ago. He was, he wasn't super nice, like, oh, please, our European friends, please, could you please increase your defense spending? He was somewhat pushy, let's put it that way. And I think that was a necessary measure. I've been thinking about that. Maybe he could have been nicer. I was like, no. Because the voters of European leaders, the European countries would have not, not understood this. They would not get the message. And now I think the message was gone across. But Europe is still sort of slow to wake up. I would put it that way. Things are getting better, but I'm not happy about the speed of how they're getting better. So when I would go to some of the European capitals, I'd get back pretty depressed from talking to their military officials and their entrepreneurs, et cetera. Here I've been in the US for the last month or so. I'm not depressed. I'm actually excited. I still think you should 10x the effort in making sure that you remain the strongest power in the world and you can and defend your values, et cetera. But I'm very optimistic. And definitely once we are in danger, I think, or just lots of very smart people in the west who can figure these things out. But people in China are also extremely smart. It's very different from even the Cold War sort of situation. Like Soviet Union was a economically very declining power. China is not like that. And then if we look at electric car race, I think they're ahead of the US and ahead of the whole world. Definitely ahead of Europe, which used to be sort of a car superpower. When you look at AI, I think they're almost where we are, maybe slightly behind. When you look at humanoid robotics, I would argue they're ahead many other medicine and biosciences. There's lots of interesting things there. And in consumer space, there are lots of interesting things there. I don't know if you heard this podcast called996. I don't know if it's still airing or not. There used to be a fantastic podcast by some American Chinese businessman, maybe venture funds, about China from a sort of tech venture point of view. So, and I lived in China for maybe four months and I visited a couple times. Like even, even WeChat is like such a more advanced app than anything we have in the West. So it's very important not to be too arrogant. And I think we're guilty of that. Like definitely in the U.S. you know, sometimes we tend to be too arrogant. I think, like, humility helps always, at least Least to me personally. Yeah. And then I think, like, we don't have to. We don't have to obviously be enemies. So, you know, like with Ukraine and Russia, it's like Russia came to kill all of these people and get all of this territory. With China and the U.S. it's not like that. And thanks God it's not like that.

[Brandon]

Right.

[Noah Smith]

It might be with China and Taiwan maybe.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Hopefully not. Yeah. China has their own problems, probably with human rights, et cetera, but hopefully it's still not beyond the fixing point. Hopefully. But we should be armed, right? We should be ready to whatever. And then that alone decreases the probability of any conflict. If you're weak, you're basically provoking the conflict. The problem with Europe these days is that last year, Ukraine and Russia went in drone technology of 2025 year to drone technology of 2026. Europe went from winter of 2022 to spring of 2022. So the gap. Europe didn't even make one year of progress, and the US, I would argue, made less than a year of progress as well in the last year. So the gap, the technological gap is getting wider and wider and wider. I'm looking at polls. Polls who are, like, very close to us and close to Russia.

[Noah Smith]

Polish people. Not Polish people, Not surveys.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Sorry. Yeah, yeah, that's what I mean. Sorry. Not my first language.

[Noah Smith]

When I'm looking at the polls, what are they? What do they say?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, well, Polish people.

[Brandon]

Polish. No, it's the right word.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

So I'm looking at them, and they bought, like, 100 tanks and four submarines. I was like, dudes, you don't have, like, a thousand people who know how to operate an fpv. What the hell you're doing? Doing, like.

[Noah Smith]

So Poland is not preparing for war correctly.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

From what I can see. They're not. Not doing it right. And the problem is they'll. They'll be in a situation where they're so proud. Proud of their winged gusars and like their. Their cavalry. And the enemy is attacking with airplanes and tanks. That. That's literally like the. The gap is getting wider between Russia.

[Noah Smith]

That happened in 1939.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

I don't want that to happen again.

[Noah Smith]

All right? So the Europeans need to wake up more. If you were advising America's defense establishment, which you might be doing in real life, but if you were saying things on a podcast that might be heard by some people connected to that defense establishment, then you may or may not be. What are the. Besides more funding? More funding. Funding that'll be necessary for anything, Literally anything. But so what are the top priorities policy wise for America to increase its readiness right now and let's say three to five priorities.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, well look, I really like this quote. I think it's by Arthur C. Clark that the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed yet. And just the same way as Silicon Valley and as this sort of future location for all things tech. Kyiv and Ukraine is sort of the defense valley. It's the point where the future of defense has already arrived. And there is a ton of things to learn from that, starting with particular hundreds of companies in very particular fields to, to the battlefield experience from battlefield commanders of every level, starting from soldiers, surgeon to platoon level commander to brigade level commander, Special forces and intelligence, all of that to how the government organizes the sort of the infrastructure and sort of the playing ground for all these businesses to flourish, etc. I would definitely look into much tighter integration and exchanging the experience and so on. That would be one thing. I think reform and procurement would be another thing. And I think that's what is currently being done with drone dominance. I think Pete Haxut is leading that and maybe some other people in the administration. I think that's extremely sort of powerful and right thing to do and they should scale that big times. Well, obviously, you know, any, any sort of military person would say, well yes, okay, you're fine, cool. But you know, Ukraine and its war theater is very, very much different from, I know potential scenarios that us might have to fight in. And yes, I agree, but there is still so much to learn, even like from the sea warfare that Ukraine is doing. And then long range drones like these shahads that unfortunately damaged some of the American equipment in the Middle east, they can fly up to 2000km. So if you think about in the Pacific region, like 2,000 km, that covers a lot of land with all the islands and aircraft carriers learning that lesson

[Noah Smith]

right now in Iran, in the Middle East.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Well, you would think so, but then, I mean, I'm not sure, it's like there was so many chances to learn that lesson from Ukraine before and I don't think it was like fully learned. So I'm not sure how fully learned the Middle east lessons were.

[Noah Smith]

Perhaps losing a war to a minor power will teach America.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, I mean although the their economic

[Noah Smith]

weapon will be the most important and decisive by far, but still some of our bases were supposedly allegedly rendered unusable by their shahed type drones.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, look, I think there are so many lessons to be taken from this. Like Russia, a much bigger power attacking Ukraine you know, given the same logic that we discussed, whoever has more production capacity should win. But then Russia didn't achieve victory in Ukraine, and then the US US didn't get full victory in Iran. Probably achieved some of the goals, but probably not all of them. So that also you can flip that when you say, okay, what if China has so much more capacity than the U.S. what if they attack us for whatever reason? How can we hold them back if we don't have the rare earths? Well, as the Ukrainian, Iranian examples show, you actually can hold back something like that even if you are less capable.

[Noah Smith]

Party examples did rely on Chinese supply chains though.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Partially yes. But then if you think about Ukraine in February 2022 to, you know, first half year or year wasn't much reliance in Chinese supply chain. We were just relying on whatever we, we've got. So that's one side of things. Another side of things is basically how much, much suffering can you withstand along multiple axes. It's not just the military axis, it's also the economic axis and the political axis, I would argue. So one of the reasons why wars stop or start is because the political pressure on the leadership internally in the country is so high that you just have to stop that. So I think that differs big times from whether you were the one who's seen by the population as the party which started the conflict or the one who was attacked. That's one part, another just by overall state of the society. And one thing I'm worried about in Europe now, that people are not ready to fight, even if they're attacked, when people are asked about that, they're like, oh, I'm just going to move somewhere where there's like less, there's no war. So that's a challenge and that's what makes Europe weaker right now. And you know, the US didn't really have to ever I think fight a foreign war on its own turf. I hope that never happens. But in case that would have happened, I don't know what would be, you know, how would the rich cities of east or west coast, how would people behave? Like with all the Wall street bankers and Silicon Valley VCs, you know, mobilize and really start working on defense stuff. I would love to think so. That's the way I think about the

[Noah Smith]

American, the way we did in World

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

War II in a way. But look like it wasn't that that clear in World War II. And like Churchill was like famously said, America will always make the right decision after trying to trying all the wrong ones and it's like, one could argue that there is this sort of this USA that lives in popular culture and was sort of created by Hollywood, like, cool dudes that will always come and do the right thing. Right? And then if you look at, like, international politics, it doesn't necessarily always look like that. You know, like the Budapest Memorandum, Like, Ukraine gave all of its nuclear weapons the second world's third largest nuclear arsenal because the US And Russia and the others were very persuasive. And they're like, yeah, just get away. We guarantee you security. And they're like, oh, it's not guarantees, it's assurances. We use the word assurances. So therefore we didn't promise you much. You just gave it away for free. And then Russia attacks and no reaction. So the whole world, like 2022, the whole world looks at it and is like, oh, okay, so maybe we should get nukes. So, like my prediction, next couple decades, a lot more countries will be working their own nukes.

[Noah Smith]

They really should. I'm consistently advocated for specifically Japan, South Korea and Poland to get nukes, but obviously Ukraine should as well.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Someone could argue that if a country currently doesn't work on their own nuclear program, they're doing a disservice to their country and the government should be fired because it seems like from the recent world history, that is the only way to actually provide credible deterrence. So I guess I think in Europe, people are not quite sure how will America behave? Will it behave as the Hollywood hero, or will it behave pragmatically as it did at the beginning of World War II or as it did when Ukraine was attacked by Russia and the US just decided to sort of of push the Budapest memorandum aside because of course, Russia's nuclear power and we don't want to mess with it.

[Noah Smith]

Everyone says Russia's behind right now in the drone war, but that wasn't true a year ago. So a year ago, people were saying either Russia was ahead or they're at parody. Or maybe a year and a half ago, Russia has more people. Four times as many people about or more.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, I think give or take. Yeah, 30 versus like 120. Ish. Yeah, yeah.

[Noah Smith]

So four times as many people, more help from China.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Like, economy is like 10, 20 times bigger. I know a lot of oil money.

[Noah Smith]

A lot of oil money that Ukraine just doesn't have more direct help from China than Ukraine is getting. So Russia just has this massive advantage in scaling against Ukraine itself. Ukraine has financial systems from the eu, but right now, Ukraine is ahead in the drone Race, but I'm not sure

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

about that, by the way.

[Noah Smith]

Okay, well, that was going to be my next question. Is that true? And if it is true, how long before Russia manages to pivot course correct and regain the lead?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Sorry.

[Brandon]

For my own curiosity, can we define drone race?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, look, I think it's awesome. For our listeners, it's helpful to understand that there are at least 30 different types, categories of drones. Right. Like you have first you have like different domains. You have flying drones, ground vehicles, and you have sea vehicles and you have undersea vehicles. Right. Then for each of those domains you have multiple use cases. Like for ground vehicles you have logistics, evacuation, mining, mining, demining. Yeah, like maybe something else. For aerial, you have reconnaissance, front strike, mid strike, deep strike, mining, demining, radio, repeating, kamikaze and bombing, isr, different types of surveillance. So tactical surveillance, operational level surveillance, maybe strategic level surveillance at some point, logistics, also with aerial drones for sea drones, same thing. So in each of those categories you have dozens, sometimes over 100 companies and products which compete. So that's the current Ukrainian battlefield. From the Russian side, it's less of a zoo, as we say. So, so in each category they usually have one, two, maybe three products. And then they scale it sort of in a centralized fashion. And then so when you talk about whether we are behind or who's behind or ahead in drone warfare, you got to analyze that. It's asymmetric area by area. Right. So if you like talking about their front strike strike, I would argue that Ukraine has gotten ahead recently with, after scaling the fiber optic before that, Russia was slightly, slightly ahead. So Ukraine got ahead with like mid strikes, something like 40-200km. It's hard for me to judge. At some point Russia was, was ahead. I think maybe we're, we're getting ahead as well. And deep strike, we recently got ahead. So we were, we were doing more damage to Russia with deep strike drones than they're doing to us. In sea drones, we're consistently ahead. Always were ahead. In ground drones, I think we're ahead. Yeah. I think like on, like where are they still ahead? In general, I think we're, we're ahead where they are still ahead. I think in certain parts of the components like gps, free navigation, like these CRPA antennas are pretty good. They have these winged bombs that they drop from their bomber planes. I forgot the English name for it.

[Noah Smith]

Glide bomb.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, sort of, yeah. So they're ahead on that side and it's like, it's difficult to protect from those. What's the range of that it can be pretty big. I think it's like, can be up to 80 kilometers. Yeah. And then obviously the range.

[Noah Smith]

Fighter plane, like a strike.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, the range is, is a very iffy subject here because the range is like basically the distance from where you drop the bomb to where it lands, but also you drop it from a fighter plane. And then fighter planes are susceptible to aerial interceptor missiles. So on our side we have our own fighter planes and we have the ground anti air systems. And then, and then those two assets, they have their radars and radar fields and then depending on the enemy tactics, you can calculate how big is the aerial area that you cover with those assets. And look, I'm not a professional military guy, so I'm covering these topics in layman terms. Don't quote me on this. I'm just trying to make this as understandable to an average listener as a, as possible.

[Noah Smith]

Helicopters. I've recently seen reports of drones taking out helicopters in the air. And this is new.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah.

[Noah Smith]

Is that new? Is that going to be a big deal? Is that going to increase? Like, is that going to eventually get rid of helicopters the way drones are getting rid of tanks in the battlefield?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, look, helicopters are also versatile assets. Front strike helicopter, I think we're going to be seeing fewer and fewer of them. These few Russian helicopters that Ukraine has intercepted with drones were more like edge cases than a systematic sort of helicopter hunting campaign. I think it is possible to turn it into a systematic countermeasure against helicopters.

[Noah Smith]

Will those be battery powered drones themselves?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, yeah, potentially. There are like so many different scenarios. Like you can have large aerial drone carriers carrying interceptor drones that then go hit the helicopters for example. Or you can have battery powered interceptor drones, but not of a missile with a propeller type as many of these well known drones like sting or P1 sun, they look like basically a missile with a quadcopter behind it. But you, you can also have plane or like fixed wing like aerial interceptors.

[Noah Smith]

Does anyone have like a little like drone that flies super low under the helicopter and like shoots it from underneath?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

I mean like in theory you can imagine that. But, but like surface, it's just like

[Noah Smith]

a drone that carries surface to air air missiles somehow.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, I don't think that's very practical because whatever you have going on land will be just super slow, not, not fast enough to, to be able to hunt down a helicopter.

[Noah Smith]

I mean like in the, in the air. Is it, is, is there a drone capable of carrying a, a, a small surface to air missile that can like skim you know, low, and then launch its little missile, like a flying missile

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

in theory, but like a big part of a mission. Like that is not just kinetically getting to a helicopter, but also so identifying it either by means of first radar and then visually and placing the asset you have, the interception asset you have in the right place in the right time. So the combination of those things, it's much more complex than just how can we strike it from behind or from below. But then helicopters does not mean they're becoming completely useless. For example, helicopters are used to intercept deep strike drones. Like Ukraine uses a lot of helicopters to shoot down Shaheds, and Russia uses helicopters to shoot down our deep strike drones.

[Noah Smith]

A lot of people talk oh, so some ideas about drone countermeasures, things people do technologically to try to shoot down FPV drones or bomber drones or, or whatever dumb question that I probably already know the answer to. But for the listeners, why can't you use a shotgun, shoot down drones that are coming after you when you have

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

like a guy, why can't you use shotgun? That's the main weapon that people use against him.

[Noah Smith]

Why aren't they very good?

[Brandon]

They're pretty good.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Like there are like hundreds, maybe thousands of cases of drones being shot down with shotguns. Both by definitely thousands, but both by Ukrainians and Russians. There's even like statistics of like, what is the percentage, percentage of Ukraine FPV drones that didn't accomplish the mission because they were shut down by a shotgun.

[Noah Smith]

Got it. So if I'm a guy with a shotgun, I'm walking around, FPV drone comes for me.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

I don't recommend that.

[Noah Smith]

No, I don't plan on it. But I'm saying suppose that were the case, or suppose there is a guy, he's not me, he's dumber than me, he's got a shotgun, he's walking around, FPV drone is sent, someone says, okay, there's a guy walking around, kill him. FPV drone go. FPV drone goes after him and he has a shotgun. What are his chances of using that shotgun to shoot down the drone before the drone gets him? Are you allowed to say that the

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

banning, how good you are with a shotgun? I'll tell you, like I was talking to some Ukraine pilot group and they told me, like there was this Russian guy, he was just like Rambo. He shot down like seven FPV drones. They couldn't get him. They finally got got him, but it was like nothing they've seen before, right?

[Noah Smith]

But your average Non Rambo average non

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Rambo will just die.

[Noah Smith]

Will just die. So there's like very low chance that they'll be able to use a shotgun to shoot down the drones.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Rather low chance.

[Noah Smith]

Well that was the kind of question I was getting at. And there's no sort of portable electronic countermeasure that can get FPV drones if you're just holding it.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Very effective. There are plenty of. It just depends on. It's always like electronic countermeasures are used all across the front line. The tricky thing is electronic contra measures cover certain radio electronic bands of frequencies. Let me simplify my question tries to find a frequency that.

[Noah Smith]

Let me say a question. Is there a man portable system that will give me a greater than 50% chance of living if an FPV drone specifically targets me to come to kill me right now?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Well look, if your system jams the frequency the drone works on and the drone doesn't have optic fiber or last mile autonomy, then you have 100% chance that it will not fly towards you. But then what is the chance to not have drone that can either use different frequency or autonomy or fiber optic? Well, that depends on the area you're in and who's your adversary in that area, in that zone.

[Noah Smith]

Okay, well I guess this question was maybe too dumb that I was trying to ask.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

No, it's a great question. There are no dumb questions here. And it's just like my answers. If you feel the common theme here is that things in practice, in war, things are way, way, way more complex than they seem.

[Noah Smith]

Okay, so I've read tons of things that say that basically if you're walking around in the open and drones come for you, you're not 100% dead, but you're probably dead. And I've read a bunch of things that say that. I want listeners to understand why people who are paying a tiny bit of attention to this debate, to this issue, from far away intermittently in America, America who don't, I think don't understand the weakness of our military against this kind of attack, against drone attacks.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

I think there was have a lot

[Noah Smith]

of mechanisms, psychological mechanisms by which they cope with the mental idea of drones. I would like to bust those mechanisms by explaining why drones defeat human infantry on the battlefield.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, I mean it's just like a guided bomb flying at you and it knows exactly where you are. Right, right. It's not that it's the ultimate weapon, but I think one of the things that went viral in Ukrainian defense tech bubble, even before the words of The CEO of Rain Matal was some American battle tank pilot who was interviewed, and he was asked whether he's afraid of FPV drones. And he's like, no, our tanks are strong. And that went viral among Ukrainians because they're like, dude, you have no idea what you're talking about. Don't mess with those drones. Abrams tank, great tank. But against an FV drone. Sorry, dude, but not going to work. Maybe not from one drone, but a dozen drones will take it out. Yeah. But there is hope. So you just have to have kinetic countermeasures. Interesting thing.

[Noah Smith]

Kinetic countermeasure means the thing that shoots down the drone.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Well, can mean many things. So if you go to Ukrainian east and sort of territories close to the front lines, I think like about 50km in from the front line, all the roads are coming, covered by fishnets. So you literally, you ride in a corridor of fishnets. And that's the mechanical countermeasure against the drone.

[Noah Smith]

You count that as a kinetic countermeasure?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Well, mechanical. Okay, okay, got it, got it.

[Noah Smith]

I don't know all the jargon. So it's. I'm.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, whatever, whatever. Then the tanks, if you look at Russian tanks and sometimes Ukrainian tanks or equipment, they. They all look like porcupines. They have these long sticking. I don't know, Poles. We talked about poles already.

[Noah Smith]

Different kind of poles.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah. And that's the way to protect from drone. There's a way to make the drone detonate maybe half a meter or a meter away from the actual shell of the tank or. Yeah, sometimes there are like nets on top of these tanks, just welding it, some extra sort of equipment. Then, of course, there are guns that, like, what both Russians and Ukrainians are beginning to experiment with is kind of interceptor drone, anti FPV interceptor drone, which you put on top of something like a gun, like harpoon sort of thing. And when you see, like, a drone coming at you, maybe you can notice or hear it from 200 meters or 100 meters. So you have a couple of seconds and you grab that thing, you point it, and you fire it. And then on board, it has certain AI that helps it to guide the small drone towards an attacking drone and intercept it that way. So those are the things that are being developed, and we're working on some of these things as well. And then you can imagine like an armor with hundreds of drones on top of it, which are protector drones, sort of like active armor. Whenever they see a drone coming at you, they like, take off. Cool.

[Noah Smith]

What about the kind of things that the Germans are building, which is basically like a big truck with some sort of automated shotgun on it.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, like, they have Skynex. It's by Ryan Matal, by the guy whom we mentioned today. Skynex is considered to be an okay weapon. Their shots are quite expensive, though. And so I'll tell you this different story about cost to fire each shot. Really? Yeah. Cost to effect in sort of a more abstract way. So I was. Last year I was speaking at Land Euro conference is the biggest usaa, the USA army conference in Europe called the Landura. And there was an expo there, and there was like a Raytheon RTX booth there. And Raytheon is amazing company. Gosh, we love Raytheon. They're making patriots. Patriots are the best. And they make a bunch of other things. And they had this. This laser. Laser gun problem.

[Noah Smith]

That's what I was going to ask about next is laser.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

So laser thing they have in two variations. Two kilowatt. Sorry, 10 kilowatt laser and 20 kilowatt laser. I'm like, okay, 10 kilowatt laser. Tell me about it. It's like, can it take down an FPV drone? Like, yes, of course it can. I'm like, okay, cool. How much time does it take to take down an FPV drone? And they're like, well, maybe three seconds. I'm like, three seconds. That's like a lot of time. But okay, maybe fine. And what if FPV drone tries to evade? Right? And it's like, well, we will retarget it again. And then three seconds start again. Yeah, okay, well, can it take down like a dozen FPV drones? Like, yeah, for sure. I'm like, okay, doesn't FPV drones. 30 seconds? Maybe yes, 2 kilometers? Maybe yes, maybe no. And like, okay, how much does it cost? Cost? And this is something like $3 million or something like that. And I'm like, okay, $3 million. So that is 6,000 FPV drones. I doubt this thing will be able to handle 6000 FPV drones or even 600 FPV drones coming at it at the same time. So you have this kind of economic. And you know, this product may not be necessarily a product against an FPV drone or against an FPV drone in an active battlefield environment. It might be guarding a stadium in a peaceful country. And then some random dudes launch a couple drones above a stadium, shoot them down. Okay? Everyone's happy. Although the drone will fall down, maybe fall in someone's head. That wouldn't be cool. So you would want something like catching bad drones with a net above a stadium or something like that. Whatever. My point is the economics matters.

[Noah Smith]

If you sent them one by one, it wouldn't, you know, it would just be pew, pew, pew, pew. But if you sent a mass of 6,000.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah, yeah.

[Noah Smith]

What about just like a more powerful laser, like a hundred, you know, kilowatt laser or something that wouldn't need to spend.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

No, that's worse. You need less powerful laser that achieves the same effect. And more powerful. Yeah, more powerful laser would be more expensive, had heavier, more difficult to transport. It will be more difficult to make many of them and therefore you wouldn't be able to cover a long frontline and would be super expensive to replace if it gets damaged. All of those issues. So the reason why FPV drones or iPhones become so popular is because they're small and everyone can have one. And so is with countermeasures. So that's, you know, you were asking me about sort of policy advice. So that's like another sort of mental shift that you gotta go through. It's no longer about an aircraft carrier that costs whatever $14 billion and takes forever to build. It's about mass. That is, you can iterate on very quickly. You can upgrade it, everyone can operate it, and then that mass, when it is combined, or the technologies when they're extrapolated from one domain to another domain, they add up as it happens with software. So I think that's important.

[Brandon]

Can I ask a follow up question? So Russia is not necessarily the smartest army you could be fighting? What would happen if your adversary was smarter? Do you think things would change meaningfully?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Look, I don't know if I fully agree with not the smartest army. Who is the smartest army?

[Noah Smith]

That's a great question.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

I don't know. I don't know. I think those are like very dangerous assumptions to make.

[Noah Smith]

Make who is the smartest army in World War I?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Like, define smart. Why, why do you think so? Why do you think Russia is not the smartest army?

[Brandon]

Okay. I mean, maybe this is just my own, you know, information.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Maybe I agree with you, you know, but I'm just like, I'm naturally wired now to challenge those assumptions.

[Brandon]

Okay, no, no, that's, that's a, that's a really good point. I, I guess when I. From my information bubble, it seems like Russia's strategy has largely been to just throw resources.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Well, you're living in a western information bubble, of course, as am I. We're all rooting for Ukraine to win. Right. But. Yeah, sorry, go on.

[Brandon]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, but you know, going back to this, granted there's a history of large powers failing to take over smaller. You know, strategically.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

You know, David and Goliath. Yeah.

[Noah Smith]

They feel a lot more now than they used to.

[Brandon]

Yeah.

[Noah Smith]

The success rate of taking place is over. Gone way down.

[Brandon]

Yeah. And certainly. Yeah. But regardless, I do wonder if Russia had not essentially assumed victory early on.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

They're super stupid. Of course. They were marching at Kyiv with their parade costumes and they were thinking, they're going to have a parade in Kyiv in a few days. That was super stupid. And there were lots of stupid things that are like, they have no regard, no care for human life. They're sending those. Those Russian folks just like without arm or without anything, like folks on crutches, sending them to storm Ukraine positions.

[Brandon]

Do you think at this point there's.

[Noah Smith]

Yeah.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

I have actually a good friend, he's American, he's from Seattle. He's served, had been in Special Forces here in the US had been in maybe three deployments and then went to Ukraine, volunteered, and he's been fighting since 20. He's a very good friend of mine. So at some point he's been texting me and he's like, okay, I'm near Pokrovsk and not Pokrovsky was, gosh, the other city, Chasivyar. And he's like, okay, so what Russians are doing, they're just creating so much work for all the psychologists who are going to heal those Ukrainian, whatever, riflemen or machine gunmen who are just like shooting at the Russians who are going nonstop. Right. So it's like causing. Russians are causing psychological trauma on Ukrainians because they're dying in such stupid way. So that is indeed stupid of sort of Russian higher command, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But then that's the resource they have.

[Noah Smith]

If you've got Zerglings, you use your Zerglings.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

That's the way. That's their strategy. That's their way of strategy.

[Noah Smith]

If you're gonna play Zerg.

[Brandon]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Noah Smith]

Back in the day. That's what you do.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

If you play Starcraft, that's how Zergs win. Right.

[Noah Smith]

Are Ukrainians the Terrans?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

I don't know. I hope we will become protests soon. I'm working on that. I'm working that. But then, like, I wish like Protos with. With a speed closer to. To like humans or tyrants, whatever it is. Hopefully we can do Protos technology with Zerg Speed that that would be the best. I think that's. That's what the high housewives are working on.

[Noah Smith]

In fact, you cannot beat those housewives. Do not oppose. You cannot.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Do not mess with Ukrainian housewives. For sure. Yeah.

[Brandon]

Two final questions. First one, you started out by telling us a story about going to a Chapel on February 23rd.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Yeah.

[Brandon]

Were you able to get married there? And. Yeah. Can you finish that story?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Actually, we did get married, but we postponed the wedding as social event until the war is over. Okay, cool.

[Brandon]

And then last question. What do you want our audience to take away? If you have one point you want them to watch away with, what would it be?

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

You want peace? Be prepared to war. Got to invest in defense and security.

[Brandon]

All right, thanks. Thank you for talking with us.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Thank you.

[Brandon]

And thank you, Noah, for all the great.

[Noah Smith]

Absolutely great. Yeah. Great to.

[Yaroslav Ajnuk]

Fantastic.

[Noah Smith]

Thanks so much.

[Brandon]

Awesome. Thanks.