When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022 with a direct assault on Kyiv, the conventional odds were that Russia’s post-Cold War military prowess, replete with a world-class nuclear arsenal, would readily conquer its former Soviet republic and fold it back into the restored empire.

Four years on, the battle not only still rages but it has also changed the nature of warfare as the first conflict to use AI-assisted precision-guided drones. Though pounded regularly by Russia, not least with hypersonic missiles as well as waves of drones, Ukraine has achieved the once unimaginable. It has increasingly brought the war deep into the Russian homeland, most recently hitting St. Petersburg — 1,000 miles away from Kyiv — with a drone strike on an oil refinery and military base supporting Russia’s war effort. 

Similarly, the most damage done to the integral infrastructure of the oil-and-gas-rich U.S.-allied Gulf States at the height of the hot war with Iran was inflicted by inexpensive drone swarms launched by the theocratic state.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has moved on from fostering AI development at the tech giant to founding companies that have become key innovators of battlefield drone warfare in defense of Ukraine. In an interview with Noema, he looks at the big picture of the technological shift in how war is waged. He calls the introduction of AI and drones into combat “the largest revolution in military affairs in history.”

From A War Of Platforms To A War Of Systems

As Schmidt sees it, the first thing to understand is that we are shifting from the conventional “war of platforms“ to a “war of systems.”

“The right unit of analysis,” he explains, “isn’t the drone or the missile or the launcher. It’s the integrated architecture that lets a military see, decide, communicate, strike, survive and update faster than your adversary. In the future, the front line will be a new form of the no-man’s land of World War I, as sensors and drones mean that anything that moves can be struck.

“Second, every weapon will be supported by AI in the system I mentioned. Third, and this is the part I think people are slow to appreciate: In future wars, the humans will go in last, not first. Today, the basic order is humans first, with the technology supporting them. In the next war, that principle inverts. You send the robots in first to absorb fire and clear the battlefield.”

I asked Schmidt about the role humans will still play in this future. Will they remain in the loop?

He noted, “In March of this year, 96% of Russian casualties were caused by Ukrainian drone units. The drone operator is now the highest-value target on the battlefield — Ukrainians prize killing a Russian drone operator even more than killing a tank. So the pressure to move the human farther from the battlefield is already very real.”

He continued: “The question then moves into what systems replace the human operator on the battlefield. The future will entail ‘humans on the loop’ of a distributed system, rather than always ‘in the loop’ — supervising, auditing and intervening when something looks wrong, but not necessarily authorizing each individual shot. This is really just the algorithmic form of the delegation down the chain of command that has marked militaries forever.”

One wonders if precision targeting by AI will make war “cleaner,” with less collateral damage, or just invite a broader scope of destruction.

“We are in an era of ‘precision mass’ in warfare,” Schmidt argues. “In conflict, you used to have to choose between mass and accuracy. Either you fired a great deal of artillery inaccurately, or you fired a small number of expensive precision-guided weapons accurately. What has changed in the last few years is that cheap drones, cheap GPS and cheap sensors have upended that trade-off.

“You can now field huge numbers of weapons that each hit exactly what they aim at. The war in Ukraine and against Iran have shown what this means. In Ukraine, FPV [First-Person View] drones in the hands of trained operators have produced minimal collateral damage in the engagements I’ve seen. The dumb war of mass artillery flattening a city block is far worse than a $500 drone going through a single window. This is the strongest case for the era of precision mass.”

“The drone operator is now the highest-value target on the battlefield — Ukrainians prize killing a Russian drone operator even more than killing a tank.”

AI In Nuclear Command & Control

In an earlier Noema interview with Schmidt, we discussed a 2023 visit he and former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made to Beijing to persuade President Xi Jinping to reach an agreement with the U.S. on the role of AI in nuclear strike decisions. So I asked him when we spoke again recently, will the evolving logic of warfare that he has explained apply to nuclear strategy as well?

“Nuclear weapons are the one category where the cost of a mistake can be civilization-ending, and where the case for AI-driven speed is weakest. The whole logic of nuclear stability for 70 years has rested on a small number of human beings, in a small number of minutes, having the ability to question what a system is telling them and judge the steps that should be taken. The danger of taking the human out of the loop is not that the machine malfunctions in some science-fiction sense but that the machine functions exactly as designed, with bad data, and faster than anyone can stop it.”

In short, the only thing worse than a human with their finger on the atomic trigger is an AI quick on the draw based on faulty intelligence.

We’ve now seen how powerful frontier AI models like Anthropic’s Mythos can spot and exploit software vulnerabilities that humans can’t, opening the door to cyberattacks on critical infrastructure by bad actors. Such models could just as easily penetrate nuclear targeting systems and the intelligence they rely on.

Unfortunately, Schmidt agrees. “As AI advances and is incorporated into the intelligence process, it can challenge the longstanding foundations of nuclear deterrence.

“Nuclear strategy has always rested on the assumption of each side having second-strike capabilities. As AI gets better at finding the hidden submarines or mobile launchers, however, that premise disintegrates. Furthermore, the data centers and computer centers that train AI might look like targets in their own right. This is the conversation the United States, China and Russia ought to be having now, in the way the nuclear powers during the Cold War negotiated limits on testing and on certain delivery systems.”

The Wrong Kind Of Weapons For A New Kind of War

The experience of the war in Ukraine is upending the way the American military-industrial complex, and by extension the complexes of other great powers, have gone about procuring the means for warfare. So much in the pipeline of military budgets will be obsolete on the battlefield of the rapidly arriving future.

Schmidt puts it this way: “The arithmetic of warfare is fundamentally changing. The Russians are aiming to produce 1,000 Shahed drones a day to fire against Ukraine, while Lockheed Martin produced 600 Patriot interceptors last year. For all of what AI will do for warfare and the world, that gap has to be filled by investing in our industrial capacity and building the cheaper, abundant systems that have been shown to be so important by the war in Ukraine.

“American military doctrine is still organized around exquisite, expensive platforms designed for a kind of conflict that is no longer the one being fought. A great deal of current military spending is going to systems whose purpose, training pipelines and budgets are built on assumptions Ukraine has already disproven. The institutions have not yet acknowledged that the doctrines and resources no longer match the war they will have to fight.”

The great worry is that the transformation of warfare is happening so rapidly that those with the most extensive arsenals will become the most insecure about the capacity of their rivals to gain the advantage by adapting faster. 

War most readily beckons when an imbalance of power, or its perception, arises. Any apparent advantage by others is inevitably regarded as concealing aggressive intentions. That results either in a debilitating arms race or, worse, a war of choice waged out of the fear that it will otherwise be too late.