Torsten Reil
speaker
213 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Torsten Reil’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The new wave was electric software and autonomy.
Why is that such a challenge? We're going to be faced with a large number of autonomous systems from our adversaries. That's going to be the focus that they're going to take. And by the way, it's quite likely that they won't have the same ethical red lines that we as democratic societies should have.
So they have, from a functionality point of view, I think they'll have the ability to take shortcuts that we don't want to take. We have to earn the luxury basically to be able to really care about ethics. And that means that we have to have technology leadership overall.
Yeah, I think so. I mean, they're quite clear for everyone to see. Iran is producing a large number of drones already. They've been using and working on the Shahid, for example, for a long time. They've licensed that design to Russia. Russia is now manufacturing it itself. Software is getting better over time.
Russia has the Lancet, which is a capable strike drone, quite different from the Shahid, which I think they've developed themselves. And the software for all of these is getting better as well.
We're going to be faced either through Russia alone or through partners like Iran with adversaries that are committing to precise mass, large number of autonomous systems that we're going to have to counter one way or the other. And you can counter them, But you can't counter them with the current systems that we have.
You can't just have exquisite systems like tanks or artillery guns that are not particularly well connected, that take a while to take a shot. You need to work basically at the speed of software. You need to interconnect all of these systems. But crucially, you need to have precise mass on your own side as well.
You need to have the ability, however horrible that sounds, to have thousands and tens of thousands of strike drones to deter. Do governments understand this? I think some governments are starting to understand it. I think governments at large probably haven't understood it. There is a big wave coming towards us, and it is autonomy and software and defence. And it's unstoppable.
And we're just going to be forced into that race.
We can already look at Ukraine and look at the trends there. And the trend, even at the beginning, there were some drones that were being used. Remember the TB2s, for example, from Turkey. Over time, that's evolved towards more and more drones. Initially, it was to make up for lack of artillery munitions.
Now, actually, the drones themselves have such good success that more and more are being built. And I believe Ukraine is building one and a half million FPV drones, the small first-person view drones a year. I think Russia is building roughly the same. So there's already a shift towards mass and reasonably precise mass.
What hasn't happened yet is that those drones are scalable, but that will happen in terms of their usage. At the moment, you have one operator operating one drone. It's going to happen quite quickly that that's going to change, and you'll be able as a single operator to control multiple drones. And that trend, I think, we'll see playing out as early as next year.
It's not long now because the algorithms are all coming. We know this because we have those algorithms too. You said there about kind of drones having success. How do you measure success? I think it's the ability to hit the target. It's hitting a target that itself uses electronic warfare, so it tries to jam the signal of the drone.
These are some of the bigger problems right now that Ukraine is facing and that NATO will be facing in a peer conflict as well or any other country in a peer conflict. So drones themselves, if they're just remote controlled drones, eventually have the problem that they can be jammed. That's GPS jamming, so it doesn't know where it is.
Or it's comms jamming, which means that the control inputs to the drone or the video feed back from the drone to the operator is jammed and therefore you can't use it. So this is the problem. I mean, there's a jamming station at the frontline every few kilometers right now. So it's almost impossible to get around jamming at the moment.
Yeah. How do you think about that? It's the same thing with strike drones and tanks and artillery. A tank costs several million pounds, euros. A strike drone is much, much, much cheaper. Depending on how things play out, you need one or maybe two or three strike drones, even with countermeasures to actually overcome a tank. That's basically the danger. Same is true for artillery systems.
They become very hard to defend. And the problem with mass, especially precise mass, is that you can solve almost every problem with saturation. So even if there were countermeasures, let's say on the tank side. So what do you mean you can solve every problem with saturation? It means that basically instead of sending one, you send five. If they're cheap enough, you can just do that.
And at some point, you just oversaturate defenses of an expensive system. And it's still very cheap to do it that way. If you just think about the economics of it, you still have a really strong asymmetry. And so it'll become harder and harder unless you find a way to really counteract these systems, which is hard to send expensive tanks and artillery systems into battle.
When on the other side, there are strike drones that are much, much cheaper. Is the future of war contactless in terms of human contact? Ultimately, yes. I think ultimately, again, you can already see the first signs in Ukraine. Some areas of the battlefield are essentially no-go zones for humans because you have drones buzzing over you all the time.
I think that gives us a kind of a first indication how conflict is going to evolve. It'll be impossible and I think ethically extremely problematic to send humans into a battlefield that is facing large numbers of autonomous intelligence systems on the other side. What is the point of a battlefield?
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