Final evening, Israel launched a serious pre‑emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear and missile applications.
Whereas particulars are nonetheless coming in, early reviews counsel that drones and precision munitions performed a key function within the operation.
Regardless of the situation, autonomous weapons have turn out to be a defining function of recent warfare.
Living proof: early Tuesday morning, the sky over Ukraine lit up with orange tracers as drones and missiles rained down on that war-torn nation.
Russia is estimated to have launched seven missiles and 315 drones throughout Ukraine that evening.
Some had been low-flying, GPS-guided Shahed variants, bought from Iran and retrofitted for longer vary and precision.
Some had been decoys, designed to overwhelm air defenses with sheer quantity.
Others had been meant to punch holes in Ukraine’s vitality infrastructure and harm the morale of its residents.
It was a horrific assault, one of many largest in months. It was one other escalation in a warfare that has gone on for much too lengthy.
And it additionally represents a basic shift within the nature of warfare…
Fashionable Warfare
For many years, the U.S. and its NATO allies have invested in cutting-edge weapons techniques. This sort of superior tech often prices tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} per unit and takes years to develop and deploy.
However Tuesday morning’s assault exhibits you the way warfare within the fashionable period is altering.
Russia’s Shahed drones have a 2,000 kilometer vary and carry a 40 kilogram excessive explosive payload.
Supply: Wikimedia Commons
However their vary and firepower aren’t a very powerful components right here.
It’s their price ticket.
Every Shahed drone is estimated to price $35,000. That’s surprisingly low cost for contemporary weaponry.
It signifies that regardless that these Shahed drones hit their goal lower than 10 p.c of the time, Russia can hold launching them by the handfuls.
And that’s an enormous lesson the warfare in Ukraine is educating the world.
In fashionable warfare, ok and prepared now usually beats high-end and gradual to reach. This implies the way forward for warfare might be considered one of each autonomy and affordability.
Ukraine has realized this lesson the arduous approach.
With the nation dealing with a recruitment shortfall, it has responded with the one useful resource it has to fight Russia…
Its personal military of cheap drones.
Many of those drones are handmade, in-built garages or small industrial areas in cities like Kyiv and Dnipro.
Some are superior first-person view (FPV) fashions able to navigating Russian jamming techniques utilizing on-board AI and real-time path correction.
However others are little greater than hobby-grade quadcopters retrofitted with explosives.
The purpose is that many of those drones are low cost to supply, quick to construct and straightforward to deploy at scale.
Supply: Wikimedia Commons
Ukrainian officers say they goal to supply over 1 million drones this yr in an try to fulfill Russia’s file variety of drone assaults.
To this point they’ve skilled some main successes with them.
Swarms of Ukrainian drones have struck oil refineries deep inside Russia. They’ve hunted down tanks, artillery and cellular missile launchers. And so they’ve taken out radar installations with $500 quadcopters as a substitute of $100,000 cruise missiles.
The success of drones on either side of this warfare is making a radically totally different price curve for warfare.
It’s additionally forcing the West to rethink its military-industrial technique.
We’ve talked about Trump’s Golden Dome project, and the way privatization ought to pace up the event of protection techniques for a navy that’s perpetually in procurement.
However this proposed missile protection system could be a large, costly enterprise.
Nonetheless, there are many indicators that the West is studying you don’t essentially want 10 good weapons to win a battle when 1,000 “ok” weapons can get the job executed.
For instance, the Pentagon’s Replicator 1 initiative is a program geared toward deploying hundreds of low-cost autonomous techniques to counter Chinese language navy progress.
And in Europe, protection ministries are working with automakers like Renault to transform industrial manufacturing strains into drone meeting crops.
This shift to cheaper autonomous weaponry is likely one of the causes Palantir (NASDAQ: PLTR) was my high inventory advice of 2024…
As a result of it builds the software program spine for autonomous protection.
Fashionable warfare is all about understanding the battlefield sooner than the enemy, and allocating autonomous techniques accordingly.
Drones, loitering munitions, floor robots and autonomous logistics autos all require coordination.
Palantir is changing into the mind for that coordination.
The corporate’s know-how is already serving to Ukraine combine intelligence from a whole lot of sensors, satellites and battlefield gadgets. Palantir’s AI techniques fuse this information into actionable focusing on and response suggestions inside seconds.
This sort of command-and-control benefit is exactly what’s wanted when a warfare zone turns into a swarm surroundings.
And I imagine it’s solely going to turn out to be extra related within the years forward.
Right here’s My Take
Earlier this yr, Palantir secured a $480 million contract with the U.S. Military partially to deploy its TITAN battlefield intelligence system.
It additionally signed a separate take care of the U.Okay. Ministry of Protection for AI-driven operational planning instruments.
And the corporate is predicted to be a serious participant in growing Trump’s proposed Golden Dome protection system.
However I don’t need my pleasure about Palantir’s know-how — or its funding potential — to be mistaken for cheerleading.
Conflict is a horror. And what’s occurring in Ukraine is nothing in need of tragic.
However it’s vital to know that we’re witnessing the tip of 1 navy period and the start of one other.
This new period is being outlined by pace, adaptability and software program.
That’s sure to create a brand new class of protection firms. And the winners will seemingly be those who make autonomous weapons smarter, cheaper and extra deployable in huge portions.
Let’s simply hope the machines we construct right now in the end serve to discourage warfare as a substitute of prolonging it.
Regards,
Ian King
Chief Strategist, Banyan Hill Publishing
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