The Drone Wars videos that we've been posting on the T.Rex Labs channel are valuable explorations of technology meeting combat, but there are certain things that we cannot show or talk about under Google's content rules. Those conversations will come here, to this podcast. Today we look closer at Ukraine's cheap suicide drones and what they mean in the context of just war theory, and the future of war in general.
The grim and terrible videos of explosive attacks on defenseless footsoldiers might be verboten on Youtube, but they raise a number of questions. Is technology neutral, or are some weapons too dangerous to go unbanned by authorities? Do FPV drones represent a completely novel groundbreaking type of combat, or merely a new look at the old face of war?
The Drone Wars videos that we've been posting on the T.Rex Labs channel are valuable explorations of technology meeting combat, but there are certain things that we cannot show or talk about under Google's content rules. Those conversations will come here, to this podcast. Today we look closer at Ukraine's cheap suicide drones and what they mean in the context of just war theory, and the future of war in general.
The grim and terrible videos of explosive attacks on defenseless footsoldiers might be verboten on Youtube, but they raise a number of questions. Is technology neutral, or are some weapons too dangerous to go unbanned by authorities? Do FPV drones represent a completely novel groundbreaking type of combat, or merely a new look at the old face of war?
You know, there's some content that we just cannot put on YouTube, and that is what this particular podcast episode is for. Welcome back to another T-Rex Talk episode, and this one we're going to be talking about some drone stuff. There are now four episodes of the Dr drone wars that have been posted to YouTube both the main T-Rex Arms channel and the T-Rex Labs channel and while we are primarily talking in those different videos about different drone types, about some of the lessons learned from Ukraine, the fact is that we haven't shown a ton of Ukraine footage in those videos, and the main reason for that is actually YouTube policies not only policies against showing violent content because it is you know, it is wartime footage but also their policies regarding current event footage. They have some new policies about how you show and use and exploit current event footage. They have some new policies about how you show and use and exploit current event footage. I think that's probably, you know, getting ready to fortify the election. That's probably what that policy is for, and so, as a result, we've shown random footage from Ukraine, footage of drones being used, mostly launched and landed, and we've used clips from other news shows and other news channels and different outlets because YouTube allows them to do stuff and if we repost their content with attribution, then YouTube lets us keep it up. But if you've been watching on Telegram or even Instagram, you have probably seen a lot of footage that is a bit more grisly. You probably have seen people getting blown to pieces by drones. You probably have seen guys sitting on tanks that explode when they're hit by drones. You probably have seen footage of people not just doing drone-related stuff but suffering horrific casualties and death, but filmed from drones. Everything about this conflict is pretty drone-centric.
Isaac:But even though we got a ton of battlefield footage being filmed by drones, there's no mistaking the fact that direct action being taken by drones, munitions being delivered by drones, is a very increasing threat. That isn't, as we talked about before in the videos, that unmanned aircraft haven't been used for a long time, going all the way back to World War II. We had unmanned aircraft doing mostly training stuff at first, but we had some essentially drone-delivered bombs that would go and hit enemy ships. Mostly those were anti-shipping devices in World War II, so this is not a new trend. We also had a bunch of unmanned aircraft fulfilling a bunch of different roles in wars in the Middle East, not just Global War on Terror, but previous wars had surveillance drones and various other types of unmanned aircraft and primarily the way that the United States has used its drones in the past have been for surveillance and then dropping munitions from them like regular aircraft, but we certainly have used suicide or kamikaze drones as well.
Isaac:The interesting thing that I think that we are seeing inside of this footage from the war on Ukraine is just a democratization of some of those tools and tactics. There's a bunch of people who weren't really paying attention to exactly how we prosecuted certain types of violence in Afghanistan and Iraq most recently, and because some of those drones were pretty cutting edge, we didn't talk about them very much. We only showed the aftermath or the debris that was left over. But the folks in Russia and Ukraine right now doing various things like flying unmanned Cessnas full of explosives directly into buildings, or little tiny FPV drones that were designed for racing, driving those stuff into individual guys who are trying to hide inside of trenches there really is no hesitation from either side to use that type of footage as propaganda for their own purposes, and so it's really easy to find and watch well, everywhere but YouTube, and that has sparked a lot of comment.
Isaac:There's a huge amount of anti-drone sentiment because the footage that is coming out of this particular conflict is really scary and sad and horrifying. And I'm not entirely sure what people are primarily terrified about. I don't know if it's just the death from above, the fact that it's really really hard to hide from drones, whether it's the fact that these drones were originally thought of as toys and many of them that are carrying the explosives actually were built to be toys in toy factories in China but it is deeply unsettling for a lot of people, including me. I don't enjoy watching that footage and it is pretty terrifying to see the drone operators engaging in this kind of cat and mouse game, with guys that are caught out in the open trying to hide behind the burnt out husks of other detonated vehicles or even wheelbarrows, trying to stop the drones by throwing rocks and sticks and pieces of cloth at them. It is pretty grim stuff and as I am getting older and I have young kids that are also getting older, I realized that I am looking at the face of war today and the face of war tomorrow, wars that they may see in their lifetimes and potentially hopefully not, but very possibly participate in.
Isaac:So does that mean that I'm joining the large chorus of voices that is complaining about drones and saying that drones need to be banned and that drone warfare needs to be banned, or that FPV drones, suicide drones, kamikaze drones these scary drone types need to be banned? Well, no, actually. So I have an interesting position that is not held by most of the people on the internet. I believe that technology is actually neutral and that nothing else is. There is no such thing as a neutral idea, a neutral position or a neutral person, but I actually do believe that all technology is neutral right up until the point that it gets used by a person. It will then be used to do something that is either good or evil. Now there are technologies that are harder to use for good than for evil, and let's go back to World War I.
Isaac:World War I was a time in which a whole bunch of brand new technologies came into play on the battlefield. There were hints of this in the war between the states, when Union and Confederate soldiers fought each other with new rifles, new tactics, new ways of introducing artillery, new powerful artillery pieces, even balloons being used for aerial spotting. There were a bunch of new things that began to show their faces on the fields of that particular war. The Civil War was the beginning of a bunch of new mechanized, industrialized warfare. We didn't really see that come into play in a massive, massive, earth-shaking way until World War I. In World War I there have been some pretty significant leaps in those artillery pieces and in the rifles that infantry carry and in the machine guns, which obviously existed before but they were now being used in a massive scale of doing trench warfare. There was a lot of barbed wire. There were just horrific things that happened in World War I and they were amplified by the sheer scale of that conflict.
Isaac:And if you read war correspondence and people writing about World War I in the day, there's a huge amount of conversation about weapons that need to be banned completely. You have the Geneva Convention. You have a whole bunch of conversation about things that are in fact too inhumane for humans to use to kill each other, and I don't think it's surprising that we are seeing a lot of those particular arguments coming back and a lot of those particular sentiments coming back when people see footage from Ukraine. There's another element to it, which is that even though the war between the states. The civil war between Union and Confederate sides in the United States was pretty heavily photographed, one of the first large-scale conflicts that was photographed, with the very, very beginnings of cameras and daguerreotypes. World War I is one of the first very large-scale wars that was covered by lots of photography and newspapers were able to print photos and this was a conflict that was covered more widely than previous conflicts and was seen in pictures by more people who are not physically there.
Isaac:This conflict in Ukraine is similar. We've obviously had armed conflicts at different places on the globe for an awfully long time. But in the same way that the first Gulf War was covered by CNN in ways that were kind of new to people 24-7 news coverage, embedded news crews, constant video footage of stuff that is happening on the ground we're kind of seeing the same thing on a much larger scale with this war on Ukraine. There's just a huge amount of GoPro footage and drone footage that is all over the internet. It's not really allowed on YouTube, but it's appearing there, at least for short periods of time, and it's on Telegram and it's on Instagram and it's appearing there at least for short periods of time, and it's on Telegram and it's on Instagram and it's kind of everywhere else. People are seeing things that previously were not very well documented and it is a kind of war that we Americans haven't really seen for a while.
Isaac:I talked about this a couple of weeks ago with Michael McMartin and just some of the differences between the global war on terror that America waged against pretty disproportionately equipped forces and we had a pretty disproportionate level of control over that battlefield inside of Ukraine, inside of Afghanistan and inside of Iraq. But what we're seeing in Ukraine right now is two near-peer forces duking it out over bits of ground. This is more traditional warfare. This is what actual wars have looked like for millennia. The tools that the guys use have changed over the many, many, many centuries, but people killing each other in the mud is the standard Large groups of one population killing large groups of another population over the ground that they are standing on. That's what real war has always been, and Americans are seeing that in ways that well, we've kind of forgotten about.
Isaac:Yes, we've all watched World War II movies, but I think a lot of us believed that things were different, that drones and unmanned vehicles would bring about a new way of doing combat, where people sat in air conditioned bunkers and directed the drones and we wouldn't really have to see or experience or deal with the grim realities of actual combat warfare. And Ukraine is teaching us the exact opposite. Some of those new technologies mean that you have to be even better at your World War I style trench warfare tactics. You got to be even better with your barbed wire and you got to be even better with your visual camouflage, because drones are hunting you from above, just like the old, original World War I wood and canvas aircraft. It is a war of attrition, and people are running out of their really really precise guided munitions, and so what you would rather do is use aerial spotting to bring in dumb artillery fire from smaller artillery units and smaller bore artillery guns, and it's starting to look a little bit more like World War I or some of those Civil War battlefields. Don't get me wrong. The new tools mean that certain things are done in different ways, but the end result of a lot of people being blown to pieces in the mud is really similar, and so when people look at that, instead of realizing that this is a constant throughout this type of massed state versus state conflict, they are saying that this is something that needs to be changed.
Isaac:It's a little bit like that debate in World War. I all over again. What are some of the technologies that are intrinsically evil that we could ban? Could we bring modern gun control to the battlefield so that it is safer and nicer and nobody has some sort of disproportionate advantage over the other and nobody brings back footage of stuff that is so icky and unpleasant and as horrific and gruesome as a lot of that footage is? I stand by my opinion that all technology is neutral. Again, some of it is harder to use for good than others. Some of it definitely is harder to control than others.
Isaac:The poison gases that were used in World War. I had a tendency to be driven by the wind, which neither side had any control over, and go to places where it wasn't supposed to be. So it's very, very difficult to use poison gas for good where you actually are completely confident that it will only do what you want it to do. Indiscriminate machine gun fire and unguided rockets are kind of similar, but if the battle space is large enough and you know that enemy combatants are spread over a big enough area and that non-combatants are not there, I think that they can totally be used in a just way, and, as scary as it is to be hunted by little drones, you have to admit that they are far more discriminating and far more focused than an awful lot of other battlefield technology.
Isaac:Yes, it is very heart-wrenching to watch the footage of guys who are trying to hide from drones and this really brutal cat and mouse game that is going on between the drone pilot and that poor fool with nothing but a 2x4 to defend himself against the little package of high explosives. I mean it's hard to watch but in reality it is no different than the kind of cat and mouse games that snipers and counter snipers have always played, ever since there was basic marksmanship and even some of the tactics, where you use poison gas to get people out of their trenches and then you use the first wave of FPV drones to wound guys and then you use the second wave of FPV drones to hit the guys that come out with the stretchers. I mean, that's been happening as long as there have been trenches and there have been rifles. That is the kind of inhumanity that can only be perpetrated by ironically humans. It really has nothing to do with the technology at all. So are these type of drones, the sort of things that we can control and use discriminately or indiscriminately.
Isaac:And that is where I think we draw a very interesting line between the autonomous drones that are set free to go and pick their own targets and the FPV drones that are driven by individual people over relatively short ranges, and there is a type of person who will say, oh no, no, the short-range knife fight with the FPV drones, that is barbaric. That is like the old days. How much better would it be for us to sit thousands of miles away in an air-conditioned office and press a button that lets a sophisticated robot do our fighting for us. But the less control that we have over our weapons, the less confident we can be that they are only doing what is just and what is good. It is more like that cloud of poison gas that we no longer have any control over drifting towards who knows where. As dirty and bloody and unpleasant as that short range knife fight is with the FPV drones, that is something that we still have some level of control over, at least as much control as we've always had over that short-range fog-of-war knife fight that happens inside of trench warfare and brutal house-to-house urban fighting.
Isaac:But there's another reason that I'm actually positively considering FPV drones and some of the really small lightweight. Considering FPV drones and some of the really small, lightweight, short-range, low-cost devices, the critics say that this just allows people to bring too much force to bear at a low level. But if you truly hate invaders and you truly hate bullies and you truly hate tyranny and you truly hate authoritarianism, then you would like powerful tools in the hands of those low-level guys. You truly want some pretty significant firepower in the hands of the people. If you're used to politicians telling you that it is impossible for men to fight governments because they have nukes and F-15s, this is a really fascinating thing to look into.
Isaac:One of the great tools of tyrants in the 20th century have been armored vehicles. It is very difficult for individual and lightly armed people to fight against tanks and other types of armor, but technology has kind of come to the rescue, depending on whose side you're on and at which times. But technology has kind of come to the rescue of at least certain people and certain times. There's some pretty sophisticated anti-armor stuff that exists now in shaped charges. There's a really cool device called the SLAM, which stands for Selectable Lightweight Attack Munition. It is a tiny, tiny shaped charge, weighs a couple of pounds, fits in the palm of your hand, fits in a pocket and it can defeat a surprising amount of armor. And that thing existed 30 years ago Now.
Isaac:One of the problems with the SLAM is that it kind of had to be used as a mine, as a landmine or a horizontally mounted tree mounted mine, because it had no delivery system. But now there's a pretty sophisticated way to carry very small shaped charges directly to the armored vehicles of invaders and it can be done a lot more simply and a lot more cheaply than previous methods. The electric motors are just a lot easier to make than precision rocket engines and electricity is easier to make in the field than rocket fuel. And those drone brains are a lot easier to build, program and control than the rocket guidance systems. And modern shaped charges are even more effective than that 30-year-old SLAM and there's interesting new ways to build those. So now you have the ability for a very small defensive force to defend themselves against some pretty significant offensive capability.
Isaac:And the other thing that I like about the FPV drones is they are pretty significantly defensive. The FPV drones is they are pretty significantly defensive, something that has the range of a mile, or maybe two, is extremely difficult to use to hassle another country, but if you have that kind of capability in your nation, it's the sort of thing that you can use against invaders. So, as much as there is a lot of hand-wringing and doom-proclaiming specifically about the brutality that we see wreaked by these FPV drones, in some ways they are the least terrifying and they are the hardest to use for evil and the easiest to use for good of any of the unmanned fighting platforms that we see being developed today. But at the same time, I don't really want to end this podcast episode on such a cheery note. I think that it is important, unpleasant though it is, to allow ourselves to be faced by the grim realities of actual war.
Isaac:The people who refuse to acknowledge this as the way of the world, but merely the product of a technology that is too dangerous to be allowed to exist, I think are of the world, but merely the product of a technology that is too dangerous to be allowed to exist, I think, are missing the point and they're going to create problems that are far worse than the war itself.
Isaac:A just war is going to be far better for the future than an unjust peace. This is something that politicians who are right and who are courageous have always understood, and people who want to create an unjust peace that is more comfortable than a just war have always created more misery, more bloodshed and more death than the wars themselves. And, of course, most of those brutal wars came out of a desire for domination, so that people could create the sort of unjust peace that the people next door weren't having properly. It's no good pretending that people are intrinsically good and that if we just had the right technologies in the right hands, only sweetness and flowers would emerge. Technologies are neutral, and people and ideas are not.