Eric Schmidt on the war in Ukraine, AI and how Russia is innovating

There is an ominous new development. And ominous, I mean ominous. Humans can't run a swarm of a thousand drones, but a computer can. I'm quite worried that we're now at one of these decision points, inflection points in the war. Historically, Ukraine was this small, really smart, really fast innovator, and the Russians were, if you will, big, slow, not very capable. That's changed. That's a big threat. They need some money and they need technological help in order to counter this set of waves coming. I'm concerned that this is going to get much worse, and I'll give you my argument.

Yes, good to see you again, Richard.

I had worked for the US Pentagon and enjoyed it. I'm not a natural military person, but I like the people and I admire what they're doing in defense of liberty. So when I saw what I consider to be war crimes being committed by Russians against little old ladies in cities, I thought I should do something and try to help them. And this is a very different war from what everybody thinks it is, and the rate of innovation is faster than I've ever seen. And I work in tech, which has been the fastest ever seen anywhere. So, you're watching a war that's really driving the technological revolution in war in a way that I think people do not appreciate. And I've been privileged to watch it and try to help the Ukrainians.

I'd rather not get into any of the war specifics of that nature. So, let's try to talk at the general level, not at the specific level. The key problem now goes something like this. So, first to understand the battle, you think of a war as like people shooting each other with guns against each other with tanks and things like that. The battlefield today is a no-man's-land where nothing moves because there are drones and anti-drones above you. So, if you're in a hole, you look up. The moment you get out of your hole, within about three minutes, you're likely to be spotted and dead. Imagine what it's like on either side, by the way, to be in that situation. So, the humans are stuck. And in the case of Ukrainians, they are perpetually being bombed by these very large glide bombs called KAB bombs. But the real threat is continuous and ubiquitous drone war. And the way drones work is people tend to think of like AI and robots and humanoids and so forth. Think of them instead as little airplanes that are having dogfights with each other. And these little airplanes, which are traditionally battery-powered or gasoline-powered, run at a speed of about 100 to 150 miles an hour, which is not missile speed. And they come across and then you have to hit them. And the way you hit them is you basically build an interceptor, which both sides now have, and that interceptor seeks the other drone. So it's drone anti-drone.

For the last year, the Ukraine teams—there have been quite a few companies in this area—have done a fantastic job of downing the so-called Shaheds, as you describe them. Shahed means, I think, peace in Iranian. But in any case, the Shaheds were developed by Iran. They were used extensively against Americans in the Iran war, and then they've been scaled by Russia. There is an ominous new development. And ominous, I mean ominous. The Russians have taken the Shaheds and they've added jet engines. And what they do is they take these little jet engines that they get from China. I looked online and they cost, say, $5,000, so they're not expensive. They're tiny. They're about hand size. They run at 700 centigrade and they produce plenty of power. And those drones, those Shahed enemy drones, are going faster than the current interceptors. So how do you intercept a faster drone? Well, you have to add your own jet engine to the anti-drone. So this is called adaptation. And so eight months ago, when the initial drone attacks were working really well, everyone was all smiling because collectively we could defend Ukraine against these Shaheds. But as of now, there is no good defense. This gives you a sense of how fast this is going.

A pretty extraordinary thing occurred. There's something called the SBU, which think of it as like the CIA or the former KGB, and they have a building. And one of these jet Shaheds managed to get in, hit the building, and go into the building just in the right area where the people were, which is sort of horrible. This is the CIA headquarters. This is the KGB headquarters. This is a big deal. And it turns out, if you look at that particular Shahed, it took off near an area called Dobropillia, excuse me, in the southeast corner of occupied Ukraine in the Donbas, and it flew pretty much a straight line along the river right into Kyiv. How did it get commanded in Kyiv? That was the question. And the answer is that they have a mesh network and the Russians have developed essentially—think of it as a drone-to-drone communication network. So they were able to steer this thing straight into that window probably from Russia. This means that it's likely that in the next little while those things will be flooding most of Ukraine or at least the eastern part, which is where all the fighting is.

Now, why do I mention this? One of the numbers that was said publicly—I don't know if it's true—is that the Russians have readied 80,000 of these between now and December to hit our friends in Ukraine. All of this is faster than I expected, and I'm used to the speed of this war. When I was there in May, the number was 10%. Now it's 50% going to 80% of switch. So the key thing to understand about this war is it's not just innovation, but it's innovation to scale, right? Because it's a large country and also large war, and whoever plays the game of fastest innovation to scale will win this war. Notice—and I want to be very clear here—the Americans are not part of this. Most of the NATO countries are not part of this. There's very little transfer of this knowledge at the moment to the West, and yet Russia is a future enemy and/or fighter and/or conflicter against NATO. That's why NATO was invented. How could we not be capturing this knowledge in the West to defend our own countries, our own strategies? It's crazy.

I'm concerned that this is going to get much worse, and I'll give you my argument. And I was just in Kharkiv right before you, so I understand what you saw. So the key thing to understand about this new kind of warfare is these weapons are not toys. You look at them and, oh, it's a cute little drone and so forth. These are very powerful kinetic bomb-carrying devices, both drone and drone killer devices. They are highly automated. They swarm. So for example, the Russians have a recent technique where they'll take five or 10 Shaheds and they move them in various ways to try to evade being hit. But let me give you—I think there are five reasons to think it's going to get much worse. The first is that the missiles, these are ballistic missiles that are being launched by Russia against Ukraine. Ballistic missiles go up and down, they don't go sideways. Russia is increasing the number of those things, and they are on the order of allegedly 1,300 a year. Every one of those carries an enormous punch. They are block-destroying. They don't destroy just a building; they destroy the whole block, and the sound they make is terrifying. The second thing is this adoption of jets. So one way to understand how war will emerge, which I did not expect, but I think is pretty clear, is that the entry point of war is going to be these very small jet engines because they allow you to go very far, very fast. They're very hard to counter. You can carry a lot of stuff. It is ultimately about mass. Similarly, the ballistic and anti-ballistic missiles, as you know, it is again claimed in the open press—I don't know the real number—that the US is down to 400 Patriot systems because we used so many of them in the Iran war, we can't give them to anybody else, and certainly Ukraine needs them. That's the argument. So those are two.

The third one is the scaling of these so-called KAB bombs. They're glide bombs. They're launched from Russian jets across the border, and they silently hit and they carry up to 3,000 kilograms, and they're precision-guided using various forms of GPS. There's no effective counter to those. The fourth one is that it's widely believed in Ukraine that Russia will announce a mobilization, which is like a draft of another 500,000 or 600,000 people, excuse me, after the elections which are occurring in Russia, to the degree there are elections in September. And the fifth one that I don't think is getting very much attention is that Russia has a Starlink competitor called Rassvet, RSV, which sure looks like Starlink. And it appears to be operational sometime next year. At that point, it'll be very hard to stop the communication between these airplanes, drones, and cruise missiles that Russia's doing and surface. So what's the reason I'm giving a long-winded answer is to say, what's Ukraine going to do? They believe that if Russia wins, they will all be killed, their families will be destroyed, and so forth. They're not going to stop fighting. So you can imagine a scenario where you end up with what I'm going to call total war. Everything in both countries is a target for everything else. That's just horrible. And I think that the lesson when people go back and they look at this war, they're going to say, "We should have figured a way to get it stopped sooner, right, through diplomacy or pressure or whatever." But at the moment, what I can say to you and your audience is that Ukraine has the capability of doing this. They have the courage, which is impossible for me to imagine—I don't have that kind of courage to fight. They need Western help. In particular, they need some money and they need technological help in order to counter this set of waves coming. If that help comes, I think Ukraine can hold.

It's important to say that there are different layers of the war. Again, I'm new to this. Wars are more than one weapon and one system; they're really layers. Everyone knows about the small drone, the so-called first-person view drones. They use fiber optics. Those are used to essentially attack infiltration across the line. The Russians' tactic on the front, the kill zone as you say, is they order these very unlucky Russian army members essentially to run across fields. They're often very exposed, and the Ukrainians kill them. The death rate on the Russian side is horrible. It's just horrible. And these are human beings, too. And the estimates of the rate of death on the Russian side right now are the highest they've ever been. So Ukraine has to, because they don't have as many people, they have to be both morally but also strategically more careful. So the Ukrainians tend to hide from that, and then when they see their enemy, they shoot them or destroy them. The next layer is the KAB bombs, the glide bombs, which are responsible for many, many deaths on the front lines because these poor Ukrainians are sitting in their holes and the KAB bombs are just pounding around them, and you can imagine the PTSD if they survive. Then the next layer is the Shahed layer, which I was describing, which gives you range but not speed, but it's fast enough and can't be countered. And then the biggest of all is the ballistic missile.

What's interesting about that little hierarchy is you're also going up a cost hierarchy. So the first-person view drones are $600, $800, with fiber $1,000. They're inexpensive, but they don't go that far. Whereas the ballistic missiles, the US numbers are thought to be around $3 or $4 million a missile. I don't know the Russian numbers, but let's assume it's a similar number, maybe half that. So you don't have as many. Think of it as you have a lot of bullets and not very many bombs. And so the bullets in this war are largely these FPV drones, and as you go up, you get to these very, very expensive bombs. And they are used for different tactics. The bombs are essentially being used to terrify the populace of Ukraine and also to destroy key infrastructure. The jet Shaheds are being used in many, many cruel ways, including hitting children in kindergartens and things like that.

One of the things that's the hardest is—I've watched some of their command centers and they have built the equivalent of a Google Maps which shows you what's going on in the war. Okay, perfectly reasonable. I know what Google Maps is. And so you see an airplane, a Russian airplane, which they have on their system. They get it through various sensors like radars, and then you can see the glide bomb released. And they even can detect what kind of glide bomb it is. And your heart sinks when you realize that they know exactly where it's going and they have no idea where it's hitting. When I was in Kyiv most recently, we left. We were in and out. And they said, "You have to leave now." And I said, "Why?" "Because there are two bombers that have been launched that are going to be arriving at 3:00 a.m. and you need to be out of here by then." And I said, "No problem. I'm leaving." But these poor people in Kyiv were then in shelters all night because of these bombers coming in. The problem is they know where they are, but they don't have a good way to stop them.