Dominic Cummings: evaluation

Transcript context

…How about defense? In Ukraine, we’re seeing very asymmetric returns on different kinds of new weapons where you have cheap drones that are taking out expensive Russian tanks. How competent is defense generally, and how much are they adopting these new technologies? Generally in Britain, it’s completely shocking. Again, in 2019-20, we had arguments about this with Number 10 and the MoD. Again, it goes back to this generational thing. There’s a lot of younger people inside the MoD and obviously a lot of people in special forces who are looking at the sharp end of this and saying: Obviously, drones are going to completely change how land war operates. Obviously, we should be pushing this and exploring it ourselves. Obviously, we should be thinking about how to get large numbers of relatively cheap things leveraging commercial technology, and then think about how to add deep state capabilities on top of that, etc. But you also had a whole set of the senior people thinking, as they always do, “Fuck this. This sounds like it’s going to cannibalize our budgets. Oh, we’ve already got these drone programs.” Yeah, but a lot of your drone programs are complete dog shit. The drones fall out of the sky and they don’t work and they’re massively expensive and they should be closed down. There’s a drone now that Britain is trying to deploy in Ukraine called Watchkeeper. In private meetings in 2020, the MoD admitted the whole program was a complete disaster. They keep dropping out of the sky. They’re completely shit, and the whole project should be closed down. Of course, once we left and the system went back to normal, then they didn’t close it down, they haven’t replaced it, they’ve just thrown more money at it. And lo and behold, the things fall out the sky and fuck up. In 2019-20 a lot of these arguments were quite theoretical.There’s some things happening on the fringes. There’s the war in Armenia and whatnot, where you could kind of see some beginnings of people experimenting with some of these things. Literally, in 2019-20, people were saying to me, “Well, Dominic, our future fighter in 2040 or 2045 is still going to be manned, and there are all kinds of classified studies that show that drones are not going to be able to do this, that and the other.” “Really? Well, let’s open up these studies. Let’s see what OpenAI and DeepMind make of these so-called studies.” Of course, it all turned out to be total bullshit. Britain is still going ahead with that, though. And our current plan is to build another fighter in the same way, optionally manned, with BAE. Completely ludicrous. So there’s huge resistance inside the system to making that kind of shift for all of the normal reasons. The reason I’m especially curious about this is we’re seeing how this war in Ukraine is happening. I’m very curious about what this implies if there was a conflict in Taiwan. How easily could you take out an American or British aircraft carrier? Having seen the insight of how these things work, how confident are you in these war games and these projections? If there was an actual conflict in which Britain had to get involved, what do you think would happen?…

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