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Christopher Kirchhoff: evaluation

30 Oct 2024 Conversations with Tyler Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War

“Now we see the full coming of the circle of the future that some people in the military saw then, which is that, just last month in Ukraine, the US military has had to ask the Ukrainians to remove from the front all 31 of the M1A1 Abrams battle tanks that we gave the Ukrainians because a quarter of them had been destroyed by Russian kamikaze drones.”

— Christopher Kirchhoff

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Speaker
Christopher Kirchhoff
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
evaluation
Recorded
30 Oct 2024
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

Transcript context

…I have many questions about your topic. How permanent is the ascendancy of drone warfare? It’s nothing now. Is this the next 100 years, the next 5 years, what? It’s certainly the next generation of military technology. We’ve seen this coming for a while. DIU, Defense Innovation Unit — the topic of the book — in 2017 started the military’s first commercial drone unit and began experimenting with both offensive and defensive uses of drones. Now we see the full coming of the circle of the future that some people in the military saw then, which is that, just last month in Ukraine, the US military has had to ask the Ukrainians to remove from the front all 31 of the M1A1 Abrams battle tanks that we gave the Ukrainians because a quarter of them had been destroyed by Russian kamikaze drones. So, not only is it the ascendancy of an era of drone warfare, but it’s probably the end of man-mechanized warfare, as well, on land. We can also talk about similarly epic changes at sea, in the air, and in space. Some of the drones already are not working that well, like the Turkish drones seem less powerful than a few years ago. What is one possible way that defense against drones might catch up?…

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