Kimberly Adams

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.

What do you think we've learned from Ukraine and even in the first few days of this war about the lethality of this kind of technology compared to more traditional warfare?

I think that's such an important point, this idea that when there are not the sort of high casualty numbers with the acknowledgement that there have been several U.S.

service members killed already in this conflict, but when we don't see the kind of high casualty numbers.

That we would if there were boots on the ground.

But you're seeing, you know, what is being deemed military success because of these drones.

How does that change the way that people and people in this context being Americans in particular perceive warfare and our international engagements?

We need to take a quick break, but we are going to have much more on this when we come back.

All right.

We are back with Professor Sarah Kreps.

I know it's pretty early in this shift, but is there a sense about whether drone warfare reduces or increases civilian casualties in warfare?

You know, since you mentioned sort of intelligence gathering and reconnaissance, this brings into the conversation of drone warfare, artificial intelligence.

And, you know, we just had this big conflict here in the United States between Anthropic and the Pentagon over how the Pentagon would be able to use its technology and OpenAI stepped in where Anthropic stepped back.

How are advancements in AI shifting the landscape when it comes to drone warfare?

How do you think the widespread use of drones is right now and in the future going to impact how fast conflicts escalate and how fast they spread to other places?