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How Ukrainians learn to pilot kamikaze drones that destroy tanks
First-person view (FPV) drones are cheap and effective on the battlefield in Ukraine, but the army urgently needs to train pilots how to fly them.
Over two years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with ammo running low and ongoing military aid from the West at risk of drying up completely, the Ukrainian army is turning to a small piece of technology that’s having a surprisingly big impact on the battlefield: first person view (FPV drones), Alex Kliment reports for GZERO World with Ian Bremmer.
Originally invented for drone racing, FPVs have cameras that transmit what they “see” in real time to a pilot wearing goggles on the ground. FPVs are fast, hard to track and target, fit into spaces traditional artillery can’t, and can be fitted with explosives to use in kamaze-style attacks. Most importantly, they only cost around $500.
The biggest hurdle to scaling up Ukraine’s use of FPV drones is that they’re really hard to fly. So schools are opening nationwide to teach soldiers how to fly and incorporate them into battlefield tactics. Last fall, Adnan “Audi” Rana, a former marine who runs a non-profit called Aerial Relief Group, visited a drone school on the outskirts of Kyiv to check out the training program and see first-hand how well Ukraine’s efforts to incorporate the technology into its military is going. He found a DIY, ad-hoc effort run entirely by volunteers representing Ukraine’s best chance of holding back Russian troops until fresh military aid arrives from the West.
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Is building warships still worth it?
The Ukrainian military said Tuesday it had sunk yet another Russian warship in the Black Sea, this time the patrol ship Sergey Kotov. Kyiv has already put nearly a third of Moscow’s Black Sea fleet on the ocean floor, and they’ve done it by relying heavily on drones. Not just the airborne ones you’ve heard plenty about but also unmanned waterborne drones. These deadly and relatively inexpensive weapons have helped Ukraine to even the seascape against a much larger enemy.
Consider that the cutting-edge Sergey Kotov was worth roughly $65 million. The Jet Ski-powered MAGURA V5 kamikaze drone that destroyed it cost about $250,000. You do the math. In less than a year, these drones had knocked off a missile corvette and two landing ships.
The historical irony. During the Crimean War of 1854-1856, Russia was the power using a new technology called the “torpedo” to harry the British fleet.
The future challenge. Navies around the world have some questions to answer. A cutting-edge US aircraft carrier costs $13 billion, and then you gotta buy the planes. If an enemy can sink it for the price of a modest condo in Phoenix … would you ever deploy it?
Ukraine’s AI battlefield
Saturday marks the two-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Over the course of this bloody war, the Ukrainian defense strategy has grown to a full embrace of cutting-edge artificial intelligence. Ukraine has been described as a “living lab for AI warfare.”
That capability comes largely from the American government but also from American industry. With the help of powerful American tech companies such as Palantir and Clearview AI, Ukraine has deployed AI throughout its military operations. The biggest tech companies have been involved, too; Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Elon Musk’s Starlink have also provided vital tech to aid Ukraine’s war effort.
Ukraine is using AI to analyze large data sets stemming from satellite imagery, social media, and drone footage, but also supercharging its geospatial intelligence and electronic warfare efforts. AI-powered facial recognition and other imagery technology has been instrumental in identifying Russian soldiers, collecting evidence of war crimes, as well as locating land mines.
And increasingly, weapons are also powered by AI. According to a new report from Bloomberg, US and UK leaders are providing AI-powered drones to Ukraine, which would fly in large fleets, coordinating with one another to identify and take out Russian targets. There is no shortage of ethical concerns about the nature of AI-powered warfare, as we have written about in the past, but that hasn’t stymied President Joe Biden’s commitment to beating back Vladimir Putin and defending a strategically crucial ally.
Reports about Russia’s own use of AI in warfare are murkier, though there’s some evidence to suggest they may be using the technology to fuel disinformation campaigns as well as build weaponry. But Ukraine might have an advantage: Recently, Russia’s fancy new AI-powered drone-killing system was reportedly blown up by, of all things, a Ukrainian drone.
Ukraine’s stand against Russia has been called a David and Goliath story, but it’s also a battle evened by technological prowess. It’s a view into the future of warfare, where the full strength of Silicon Valley and the US military-industrial complex meet.Hard Numbers: Russian drones, Malagasy election, Ireland's clashes, China's illnesses, breakaway iceberg
75: Russia launched its biggest-ever drone attack on Kyiv on Saturday, firing 75 Iranian-made Shahed drones at the Ukrainian capital, and all but one were shot down. President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the attack, noting that it came on the commemoration of the 1932-1933 Holodomor famine, engineered by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, which killed several million Ukrainians.
58.9: Madagascar’s incumbent President Andry Rajoelina is poised for a new term in office after garnering 58.9% of the vote in last week’s elections. Only 46% of voters cast a ballot after 10 of 12 rival parties refused to campaign and called for a boycott. They now refuse to recognize the results, which have to be formally validated by the country’s constitutional court.
34: Thirty-four people have been arrested in Dublin, Ireland, following clashes between right-wing protesters and police that saw widespread looting and rioting. The violence erupted after a man, who was falsely described as a foreign national, was taken into custody following last Thursday's stabbing of three schoolchildren outside a primary school.
13,000: Videos of Chinese hospitals overflowing with parents and children have circulated on social media. Beijing Children’s Hospital was admitting 7,000 patients daily as of late last week, and the largest pediatric hospital in Tianjin broke a record on Saturday, receiving more than 13,000 children. China told the World Health Organization the surge is due to the relaxing of COVID-19 restrictions and an increase in COVID-19, influenza, mycoplasma pneumoniae, and respiratory syncytial virus, not a novel virus.
1,500: One of the world’s largest icebergs is drifting beyond Antarctic waters after being grounded for more than three decades, according to the British Antarctic Survey. The iceberg is three times as large as New York City and over twice as big as Greater London, measuring around 1,500 square miles.Robots are coming to a battlefield near you
Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing everything – from education, health care, and banking, to how we wage war. By simplifying military tasks, improving intelligence-gathering, and fine-tuning weapons accuracy — all of which could make wars less deadly – AI is redefining our concept of modern military might.
At its most basic level, militaries around the world are harnessing AI to train algorithms that can make their work faster and more effective. Today, it is used for image recognition, cyber warfare, strategic planning, logistics, bomb disposal, command and control, and more.
But there’s also plenty of debate over whether this could lead to killer robots and an apocalyptic endgame. Science fiction offers plenty of images of this – from Isaac Asimov’s rogue robots, the “Terminator” and Skynet, to Matthew Broderick racing to stop a supercomputer from unleashing nukes in “War Games.” Can we have less deadly wars without robots taking over the world?
Much of the concern about the future centers on lethal autonomous weapons, aka LAWs or killer robots, which are military tools that can target and engage in combat without human intervention. The weapons can be programmed to seek and destroy without a human steering them. LAWs could eventually become commonplace in war, and while critics have long campaigned to ban them and halt their development, militaries around the globe are exploring and testing this technology.
The US military, for example, is reportedly using an AI-powered quadcopter in operations, and early this year, the Air Force gave AI the controls of an F-16 for 17 hours.
During the first AUKUS AI and autonomy trial this spring, the UK tested a collaborative swarm of drones, which were able to detect and track military targets. And the US has reportedly developed a “pilotless” XQ-58A Valkyrie drone it hopes will “become a potent supplement to its fleet of traditional fighter jets, giving human pilots a swarm of highly capable robot wingmen to deploy in battle.” While the AI will help identify the targets, humans will still need to sign off before they shoot – at least for now.
Samuel Bresnick, a research fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, says the potential uses of AI permeate all aspects of the military. AI can help the military “sift through huge amounts of information and pick out patterns,” he says, and this is already happening across the military’s intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems.
AI can also be used for advanced image recognition to aid military targeting. “For example, if the US has millions of hours of drone footage from the wars in the Middle East,” he says, “[they] can use that as training data for AI algorithms.”
AI can also help militaries plan hypersonic or ballistic missile trajectories — China reportedly used AI to develop a defensive system to detect such missiles.
There are innumerable other uses too, such as advancing cyber-espionage efforts and simplifying command-and-control decision-making, but the way militaries use AI is already garnering pushback and concern. Just last week, a group of 200 people working in AI signed an open letter condemning Israel’s use of “AI-driven technologies for warmaking, in which the aim is to make the loss of human life more efficient.”
World leaders like US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping are likewise concerned about the global adoption of AI-infused military tech, but that’s not slowing down their own efforts to gear up and gain a strategic advantage over one another.
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As the US ramps up its military capabilities, it is doing so as part of an AI arms race with China.
Last week, Biden and Xi met at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco, where they talked about artificial intelligence (among other things). The two world leaders “agreed to a dialogue to keep the [AI] from being deployed in ways that could destabilize global security.”
As AI becomes increasingly intertwined with their countries’ military ambitions and capabilities, Biden and Xi appear interested in keeping one another in check but are not in any rush to sign agreements that would prevent themselves from gaining a technological advantage over the other. “Both of these militaries want desperately to develop these technologies because they think it’s going to be the next revolution in military affairs,” Bresnick said. “Neither one is going to want to tie their hands.”
Justin Sherman, a senior fellow at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy and founder of Global Cyber Strategies, said he is concerned that AI could become the center of an arms race with no known endpoint.
“Thinking of it as a race …could potentially lead the US more toward an approach where AI systems are being built that really, as a democracy, it should not be building — or should be more cautious about building — but [they] are being built out of this fear that a foreign state might do what we do not,” Sherman said.
But with AI being a large suite of technologies, and one that’s evolving incredibly quickly, there’s no way to know where the race actually ends.
As AI plays an increasing role in the military destinies of both countries, Sherman says, there’s a risk of “the US and China constantly trying to one-up each other in the latest and greatest, and the most lethal technology just becomes more and more dangerous over time.”
Iran-backed Houthi rebels drum up trouble in the Red Sea
Houthi rebels appear to have opened a new front in the Israel-Hamas war, targeting maritime traffic in the Red Sea. On Sunday, they hijacked the Galaxy Leader, a Bahamas-flagged cargo ship bound for India, and took 25 hostages of varying nationalities, including Bulgarian, Filipino, Mexican, and Ukrainian. The hijackers then redirected the vessel to a port in Yemen and stated that “all ships belonging to the Israeli enemy or that deal with it will become legitimate targets.”
The Galaxy Leader is registered to a British company partly owned by Ray Car Carriers, a firm founded by Abraham Ungar, reportedly one of Israel’s wealthiest men. The ship was leased to a Japanese company, and no Israelis were on board at the time of the hijacking. Another vessel linked with Ungar was hit by an explosion in 2021 in the Gulf of Oman, which Israeli media attributed to Iran.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office condemned the seizure of the ship as an "Iranian act of terror" while the Israeli military called it a "very grave incident of global consequence." The concern is that this attack will expand the Israel-Hamas war to a regional conflict that impacts not just Israel, but Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states that form part of a Saudi-led coalition that has been battling the Houthis in support of the elected government of Yemen since 2015.
Prior to this incident, the Houthis were already conducting terrorist operations in the Red Sea. In December 2022, a Saudi-led coalition claimed the Houthis were using mines and explosive boats to disrupt maritime traffic, and in January 2023 the Houthis hijacked a UAE-flagged vessel off the coast of Yemen.
While fighting in Yemen subsided in 2023, the Israel-Hamas war provided a flashpoint for new engagement by the Iranian-backed Houthis, who announced their entry into the conflict a few weeks ago via a slickly produced music video. Since then, they have launched six aerial attacks against Israel and shot down a US drone over the Red Sea. Last week, American forces downed a drone emanating from Yemen that the US says was targeting the SS Thomas Hudner, a naval destroyer sailing in the area.
So now, it seems, the Houthis are taking that show on their road — and onto the water.
Hard Numbers: Pro-Palestinian protests rock London, Machado prevails in Venezuela, drone shortage woes, Madagascan opposition, joint aerial exercise with Asian allies, a great Great Lake discovery
100,000: In London, 100,000 protesters chanted “Stop bombing Gaza” and waved Palestinian flags as they marched from Hyde Park to Whitehall on Saturday. Officials asked Brits to be mindful of the Jewish community, with Metropolitan Police reporting a 13-fold uptick in reports of antisemitic offenses this month compared to last year.
93: Industrial engineer Maria Corina Machado declared victory in the opposition's presidential primary in Venezuela late Sunday. With 26% of ballots counted, she had 93% of the vote. The question now is whether Nicolás Maduro will allow Machado — who's been officially banned from running for office — to challenge him in the 2024 presidential election.
10,000: Ukraine loses 10,000 drones a month in its war with Russia and is now facing a shortage of parts due to export restrictions by China. Concerns about the impact on Ukrainian defense capabilities have prompted a search for alternatives made elsewhere, including by domestic startups.
50,000: Madagascar’s opposition parties held a rally with 50,000 people to protest what they call an “illegitimate” election process ahead of general elections in November. Last month, the country’s constitutional court dismissed appeals to have President Andry Rajoelina’s candidacy declared void over his dual French nationality, angering opposition politicians who say voters do not want “foreigners” running the country.
1: South Korea, the United States, and Japan have held their first joint aerial exercise in the face of an escalating North Korean nuclear threat and a recent visit by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to Pyongyang. South Korea and Japan host 80,000 American troops and are key American allies in the region.
128: A documentary about the invasive quagga mussel’s impact on the Great Lakes led to the discovery of a 128-year-old shipwreck. Filmmakers came across the Africa, a steamship that went missing in October 1895 while carrying coal from Ohio to Ontario, on the bottom of Lake Huron.
Hard Numbers: German far right comes up short, Ukraine dreams of drones, a space rock arrives on earth, world trade slows
54.9%: In an upset, Jörg Prophet, of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, lost a promising bid for mayor of Nordhausen the office on Sunday, as incumbent Kai Buchmann kept his job, winning 54.9% of the vote. The AfD has been polling at 21.5% nationwide, but has even more support in Thuringia, which is where Nordhausen is located.
$1 billion: Ukraine wants a drone army, and it’s looking to spend more than $1 billion to get one. Drones, Ukrainian leaders say, are great for reconnaissance, dropping bombs, and self-exploding on impact – all useful things in Kyiv’s war of defense against Russia. But what are drones not so good at? Holding territory.
6.21 billion: That’s how many kilometers (3.86 billion miles) a NASA capsule traveled to deliver the largest-ever asteroid sample to American soil. The capsule landed in a Utah desert on Sunday. Scientists hope the sample will help us better understand how the solar system formed and why life occurred on Earth.
3.2%: World trade volumes dropped 3.2% in July compared to the same month last year — the steepest decline in almost three years. High inflation is crushing demand for exports, while the resulting interest rate hikes are choking off credit, fueling fears of a global economic slowdown.