Nick Beim

And the council has been a great place to really get to talk to a lot of the leading actors and thinkers in those worlds in an off-the-record context where they can just be very honest about, hey, these are the challenges we're having.

These are areas where we'd love to see the private sector help us.

And when I look at what we are witnessing now, I think we're witnessing a very rapid shift in the character of warfare.

And I think, interestingly, Ukraine has become the Silicon Valley of the future of warfare.

They've gotten so good at innovating and innovating.

constantly iterating on what works on the battlefield.

And I think however the Ukraine war ends is likely it will end with the Ukrainian army still probably the most significant land army in Europe, the most experienced in how war is changing.

So what's changing is a couple of things.

One is hardware is becoming commoditized and attributable.

for the most part.

There will remain some exquisite, very powerful hardware systems, weapon systems, aircraft, and so on.

But there's going to be a huge amount of mass production of land, sea, and air drones that are able to do a lot of the work that humans used to do.

So you can deploy them without the human risk.

And there are going to be specific defenses that are arrayed against them.

And when you think about where the intelligence for those is, it's really in software and AI.

So that's one change, sort of.

autonomous systems, attributable systems at the edge.

Another change is the ability of AI to ingest all of the sensor data from the battlefield, from potential battlefields, and understand what the most intelligent operational decisions are.

So it's been very difficult to get all that information historically in the first place.

to get it all together into AI and be able to query it and have it be a partner in decision making for operational decisions is incredibly powerful.