George Barros
speaker
576 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 6 Jun
George Barros’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And it seems to me that they've not yet gotten to the point where they can completely remove the human operator from the drone, but they are working deciduously to try to get to the point where you have basically autonomous drone on drone warfare where there is no human pilot involved in the terminal phase. Okay.
This is going to sound like a stupid question, but what is the key impetus for taking the human out of that scenario? Pilots are a huge rate determiner. So to have a skilled FPV drone pilot is a determinant of how many missions can you fly? What's your sortie rate? How many targets can you engage at a particular time?
And the Russians are actually going out of their way now to try to target and kill skilled Ukrainian FPV drone pilots. So pilots is a big enabler. And if you no longer need to pilot to be able to do your missions, then that removes one of the caps for your ability to fly the drones. Number one. Number two, electronic warfare.
Partially. So, for example, what you might do is you might fly your drone to an area where it's going to be saturated with just enemy targets. And then at that point, the need to discriminate will be minimized. And so, that way it's basically just going to say, hey, drone, I'm going to take you to a place where anything that you can see is going to be enemy target.
And now at this point, go ahead and do it yourself. At which point, yeah, you would not have a human in the operator for the go, no go.
That's correct. And there's a big concern about pressure side, at least among the Ukrainians, because a lot of the kit that the Russians use, the Ukrainians use too. Like T-72 battle tanks, for example. So, if you train a drone to recognize and do object classification on, hey, here's what a T-72 main battle tank looks like. Well, is that a Russian T-72 or is that a Ukrainian T-72? Right.
But I think the concept of operations here is, hey, if you drive the drone deep enough into the enemy control territory, say 10 to 15 kilometers away, and then to the place where you can have a geofence and say, hey, we don't have any friendly T-72 operating in the vicinity here. So, as soon as the drone therefore sees anything that looks like a T-72, you take it out. And that's the concept.
Now, the Russians have an interesting and different way of going about this. Whereas the Ukrainian response to electronic warfare jamming is, hey, just have the drones do it autonomously, the Russian response has been a little bit lower tech, but not necessarily less effective. They are using fiber optic drones.
So, they've now developed these specialized drones that have spooled up on the rear 10 or 15 kilometers worth of physical fiber optic cable. that has a hard line to the pilot. And so, what these drones can do is they can just fly unimpeded, unimpeded by electronic warfare systems, unimpeded by other radio interference.
And they're just hard line, like a tow guided missile straight to whatever kind of target they're working at. And so, these are some of the tactical innovations that the sides are implementing.
They rely on outside for providers for components. So, the Chinese basically have a monopoly on the high-end electronic electrical rotors that go into quadcopters. Basically, no other countries make them the good ones. I mean, there's a bunch of countries that make them, but apparently they're not the quality controls quite poor.
And so, interestingly, the Russians and the Ukrainians defense industrial base are really overexposed on China for those rotors.
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, they stand to benefit too. And it makes me really scared as well because this is a capability that the U.S. is going to need too. And American industry doesn't have the capacity to build hundreds of thousands of drone rotors at a competitive price. So, it's a huge problem. And if there's any smart VCs out there that want to build a factory for something, drone
These are drone components that are made primarily at first in their inception for hobbyist aviation purposes, but now they have a great dual use in military applications. These drones, Mike, they're inflicting about 60% of the casualties right now on the Ukrainian side, or again, I'm sorry, for the Ukrainians against the Russians.
I mean, this is not just a capability among many, this has actually become the main thing that puts Russians in the dirt, which is incredible.
Absolutely. The tactical doctrine for how to do a platoon mechanized assault, battalion-sized mechanized assault, that doesn't work anymore because as soon as you leave your line of departure and you start heading towards the enemy positions, you start getting engaged before you're even within five kilometers of the zero line. 100% accurate. And not just for combat forces too.
It's changing concepts for how to do logistics. The Ukrainians have... Usually these unmanned ground vehicles that are hauling medicine and hauling ammunition and fuel, the Russians use them for casualty evacuations.
Though in the path where you might have a logistics platoon or a logistics company that'd be trucking all kinds of stuff with a physical driver exposing himself to risks, the Ukrainians have in some regards minimized that because now they'll have robots that are hauling the stuff to the frontline fighting forces. So, yeah, it's changing a lot of things about warfare.
So I think the key thing to focus on is Vladimir Putin very much decisively rejected U.S. President Donald Trump's very straightforward proposal for a 30-day unconditional ceasefire. Putin rejected that. He instead said, well, we'll talk about a ceasefire and energy infrastructure. We'll talk about a ceasefire on the Black Sea.
But the key issue there that he rejected the main area where the actual fighting is happening, the land domain, which is where 95% of the killing is at. So that's important not to lose sight of. The Russians continue to want to conduct conventional operations. They want to keep war fighting. They see a military solution to this conflict. They think that they can wait out the West.
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