Kimberly Adams

I'm Kimberly Adams.

Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

And a lot of us have been feeling probably particularly unsmart in the last few days as we're all trying to figure out what is happening with the U.S.

conflict in Iran and the broader implications in the Middle East.

So we're going to tackle just one slice of that today.

Today, we're going to talk about how the war playing out throughout the Middle East is involving the use of drones.

Now, ostensibly, the war is between Iran, the United States and Israel.

But a lot of other countries are involved and drones are really playing a big role in all of this.

Drone technology has evolved quite a bit over the past few years, and it's reshaping the way that wars are being fought and what they cost.

So here to make us smart about this is Sarah Kreps.

She's director of the Tech Policy Institute in the Cornell Brooks School of Public Policy and author of the book, Drones, What Everyone Needs to Know.

Sarah, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for making time.

So one headline that really caught my attention over the weekend was that for the first time in combat, the United States is using low cost unmanned combat attack system drones, also known as Lucas drones in Iran.

Can you walk us through how these drones in particular work?

I'm so glad that you mentioned Ukraine because I feel like the first kind of public awareness of drones being used in warfare has been in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the war between Russia and Ukraine.

How is the deployment of drones in this war here that the United States is doing with Iran different than how drones are being deployed in Ukraine?

Yeah, I imagine when people hear drone, at first they're probably thinking more of the drones that people are using for their social media videos or for a real estate shoot or something like that.

Is this what we're talking about, explosives strapped on to off-the-shelf technology like that or something a bit more advanced?

It's so bizarre to be talking about this technology and how efficient it is and how much lower cost it is when we are talking about lethal weaponry that has the ability to sort of, well, not just sort of, but to actually kill people.