Final night time, Israel launched a significant pre‑emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear and missile packages.
Whereas particulars are nonetheless coming in, early stories counsel that drones and precision munitions performed a key function within the operation.
Irrespective of the placement, autonomous weapons have turn out to be a defining characteristic of recent warfare.
Working example: early Tuesday morning, the sky over Ukraine lit up with orange tracers as drones and missiles rained down on that war-torn nation.
Russia is estimated to have launched seven missiles and 315 drones throughout Ukraine that night time.
Some have been low-flying, GPS-guided Shahed variants, bought from Iran and retrofitted for longer vary and precision.
Some have been decoys, designed to overwhelm air defenses with sheer quantity.
Others have been meant to punch holes in Ukraine’s vitality infrastructure and injury the morale of its residents.
It was a horrific assault, one of many largest in months. It was one other escalation in a conflict that has gone on for much too lengthy.
And it additionally represents a elementary shift within the nature of warfare…
Fashionable Warfare
For many years, the U.S. and its NATO allies have invested in cutting-edge weapons methods. This sort of superior tech normally prices tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} per unit and takes years to develop and deploy.
However Tuesday morning’s assault reveals you ways warfare within the trendy period is altering.
Russia’s Shahed drones have a 2,000 kilometer vary and carry a 40 kilogram excessive explosive payload.
Supply: Wikimedia Commons
However their vary and firepower aren’t a very powerful elements right here.
It’s their price ticket.
Every Shahed drone is estimated to price $35,000. That’s surprisingly low-cost for contemporary weaponry.
It signifies that although these Shahed drones hit their goal lower than 10 % of the time, Russia can maintain launching them by the handfuls.
And that’s an enormous lesson the conflict in Ukraine is instructing the world.
In trendy warfare, adequate and prepared now typically beats high-end and sluggish to reach. This means the way forward for conflict will probably be considered one of each autonomy and affordability.
Ukraine has realized this lesson the arduous means.
With the nation going through a recruitment shortfall, it has responded with the one useful resource it has to fight Russia…
Its personal military of cheap drones.
Many of those drones are handmade, in-built garages or small industrial areas in cities like Kyiv and Dnipro.
Some are superior first-person view (FPV) fashions able to navigating Russian jamming methods utilizing on-board AI and real-time path correction.
However others are little greater than hobby-grade quadcopters retrofitted with explosives.
The purpose is that many of those drones are low-cost to supply, quick to construct and simple to deploy at scale.
Supply: Wikimedia Commons
Ukrainian officers say they purpose to supply over 1 million drones this yr in an try to fulfill Russia’s document variety of drone assaults.
Thus far they’ve skilled some main successes with them.
Swarms of Ukrainian drones have struck oil refineries deep inside Russia. They’ve hunted down tanks, artillery and cellular missile launchers. And so they’ve taken out radar installations with $500 quadcopters as a substitute of $100,000 cruise missiles.
The success of drones on each side of this conflict is making a radically totally different price curve for warfare.
It’s additionally forcing the West to rethink its military-industrial technique.
We’ve talked about Trump’s Golden Dome challenge, and the way privatization ought to velocity up the event of protection methods for a army that’s perpetually in procurement.
However this proposed missile protection system could be an enormous, costly enterprise.
Nonetheless, there are many indicators that the West is studying you don’t essentially want 10 good weapons to win a battle when 1,000 “adequate” weapons can get the job achieved.
For instance, the Pentagon’s Replicator 1 initiative is a program geared toward deploying 1000’s of low-cost autonomous methods to counter Chinese language army development.
And in Europe, protection ministries are working with automakers like Renault to transform business manufacturing traces into drone meeting vegetation.
This shift to cheaper autonomous weaponry is likely one of the causes Palantir (NASDAQ: PLTR) was my prime inventory advice of 2024…
As a result of it builds the software program spine for autonomous protection.
Fashionable warfare is all about understanding the battlefield quicker than the enemy, and allocating autonomous methods accordingly.
Drones, loitering munitions, floor robots and autonomous logistics automobiles all require coordination.
Palantir is turning into the mind for that coordination.
The corporate’s expertise is already serving to Ukraine combine intelligence from tons of of sensors, satellites and battlefield units. Palantir’s AI methods fuse this knowledge into actionable concentrating on and response suggestions inside seconds.
This sort of command-and-control benefit is exactly what’s wanted when a conflict zone turns into a swarm atmosphere.
And I consider it’s solely going to turn out to be extra related within the years forward.
Right here’s My Take
Earlier this yr, Palantir secured a $480 million contract with the U.S. Military partially to deploy its TITAN battlefield intelligence system.
It additionally signed a separate take care of the U.Okay. Ministry of Protection for AI-driven operational planning instruments.
And the corporate is predicted to be a significant participant in creating Trump’s proposed Golden Dome protection system.
However I don’t need my pleasure about Palantir’s expertise — or its funding potential — to be mistaken for cheerleading.
Conflict is a horror. And what’s occurring in Ukraine is nothing wanting tragic.
Nevertheless it’s essential to grasp that we’re witnessing the tip of 1 army period and the start of one other.
This new period is being outlined by velocity, adaptability and software program.
That’s sure to create a brand new class of protection corporations. And the winners will doubtless be those who make autonomous weapons smarter, cheaper and extra deployable in large portions.
Let’s simply hope the machines we construct in the present day in the end serve to discourage conflict as a substitute of prolonging it.
Regards,
Ian KingChief Strategist, Banyan Hill Publishing
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