AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Air raid sirens have become a chillingly familiar sound in Ukraine as Russia sends thousands of drones to strike across the country. A recent analysis from Agence France-Presse showed that Russia fired a record number of drones in July, more than in any other month since the start of the invasion. This is the new reality of war, where drones perform everything from long-range strikes to delivering medicine. To tell us more about how the battlefield has changed, we called up James Patton Rogers. He's the executive director of the Brooks Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University. Welcome to the program.
JAMES PATTON ROGERS: Thank you for having me.
RASCOE: So what does drone warfare look like right now in Ukraine?
ROGERS: Drone warfare in Ukraine can be separated into two levels. You've got, first of all, the tactical battlefield use. This is the deployment of hundreds of thousands of drones by both Ukraine and Russia against each other's military, and they can either be sent in as a kamikaze suicide-type drone system, a one-way attack drone that can target troops on the battlefield, or they can drop their munitions into the trenches of those soldiers sheltering below. And so every second on that frontline of the battlefield is dominated by the sound and the buzzing and the threat of drones above. The second layer is the use of long-range loitering munitions or one-way attack drones.
Russia is now able to produce these themselves with their own factories in Russia, and they can send up to 700 of these systems all at once to attack Ukrainian cities, to target civilians and to target key critical infrastructure. Now, on the other side in order to try and fight back against this, Ukraine has developed similar systems. And what we're seeing is this back-and-forth over thousands of kilometers of both sides sending salvos of drones at one another. But what Russia is doing is they are sending these in the multiples of hundreds, and as a result, we're seeing, well, scenes that really would be reminiscent of The Blitz.
RASCOE: How do you gain ground when you have these drones so involved? Is it a matter of who has the most drones, whose drones are most effective?
ROGERS: We're not seeing either side securing a certain revolutionary victory from their deployment of drones. Instead, we're seeing this continued war of attrition with very slow movement from either side in terms of advances and gains being made. And so what is it that the drone actually offers? Well, it offers the ability for Ukraine to fight back against Russia, and perhaps that is a revolution in itself. But instead, I think that what drones are showing us is that war continues to be a brutal affair in which it is humans who carry the costs.
RASCOE: Pulling back a bit, how prepared is the U.S. to fight a war waged with drones?
ROGERS: It depends what type of war we're talking about here. The United States has the most advanced military drones in the world. And these are very different to the systems that we've just been speaking about. These are the drones that we use to take out high-value targets, suspected terrorists during that global war on terror, to much controversy. Now, there's one fly in the ointment, and that is the fact that the bases in which these drones are kept. Well, they become increasingly under attack by proxy groups and hostile states in those regions, who can now fire drones at those bases. So those sort of wars that perhaps we would deem to be cost-free in the past in terms of U.S. military lives are going to be cost-heavy in the future because we really are finding it difficult to counter these systems.
RASCOE: Let's talk specifically about a potential conflict between the U.S. and another large military power. Do drones change the equation?
ROGERS: I think it's here that we have to look back again at Russia and Ukraine and see that for both of those state militaries, it has not achieved what they wanted in terms of that resounding victory. And so I think that we'd see it as another layer of brutal warfare in the future. It's not going to be drones that will define that victory, it'll be our deployment of more legacy systems, aircraft carriers, our conventional air power capabilities. These are the sort of things that the United States and European allies at this time of heightened tensions will need to continue to invest in instead of relying on experimental, novel technologies that really haven't been proven to win those wars.
RASCOE: How do you imagine, though, that this drone technology will continue to change how wars are fought?
ROGERS: Well, there's almost an endless spectrum of possibilities here when it comes to the future of drone warfare. I think some of the most cutting-edge advances are taking place in the maritime domain, with drone boats being sent out. I think also we're going to see a major revolution in the use of what we call loyal wingman systems that will fly off the wing of crude, human-piloted jet fighters and bombers. And then you have an autonomous revolution, the ability of these drone systems to make that choice about whether or not a human lives or dies without a human being in that loop of control. Now, this is that President Xi and then President Biden agreed should never take place. It's something that the United Nations is pushing to try and bring in resolutions to try and stop from happening. But I do worry about our ability to regulate those sort of weapons over the coming decades.
RASCOE: That's James Patton Rogers, Executive Director of the Brooks Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University. Thank you so much for joining us.
ROGERS: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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