We have a very special panel today for two reasons. I'll get the newsy one out of the way as a journalist. Dan Driscoll is the former Secretary of the Army in the United States, a very high-profile Secretary of the Army. I might say at least the press has taken great interest in him. He left his job last week. This is the first public appearance he is making since that time.
I can tell you, this is going to be my characterization. He may not agree. He has always been within the administration one of the most staunch supporters of Ukraine and the importance of defending freedom in the West. So, welcome Dan.
The reason this is kind of a significant panel is when the war began, I was having a conversation with my dear friend Eric Schmidt and I said to him, "We need to support Ukraine in this struggle" and he warmed to the idea immediately. And I said, "You should come to Ukraine." There's this important conference held every year by Victor Pinchuk and his foundation and you should find, do you think you could manage to do it? And he said yes, sure. The advantage of being Eric Schmidt is you can make anything happen. And so next thing I know, we're flying to Lublin and coming here and we did a panel here with him and me and Mr. Fedorov about the war and the technical possibilities. Now I was trying to get Eric sold on the idea that in a sense Ukraine was the frontier of freedom, a brave democracy struggling against the aggression of an authoritarian empire. Eric got sold on that very quickly, but then realized that Ukraine was also the frontier of technology, that something was happening on the battlefield that was extraordinary. And so what I'm going to ask you, Eric, is we all know now what that is, and most people know your role in helping Ukraine develop these extraordinary drone technologies. Where are we now? If you were to have come for the first time to Ukraine in 2026 and talk about the way in which war is being transformed, what would you say?
You know, I wish I understood war back then the way I understand it now and thank you for that. I do actually owe you for getting me into this and to Secretary Dan for being a good sounding board and helping us in the United States. I had a relatively naive idea. General Petraeus and I talked about this at some length and he said, and I'll hopefully quote you correctly, that war is not a single thing. It's a systemic solution. And I did not have a full model of that systemic solution, but I think I do now. So first place, pretty much all of the traditional assumptions about war and particular devices are probably false now. And so ships are big targets, tanks are a terrible idea, those sorts of things. These are fighting words for a large military ecosystem. It is however important to say them, right? On the current kill zone as it's called here, the flat, it's 50 kilometers wide, nothing moves, tanks are not safe, that kind of stuff. The same thing is true for sea lanes. You see this in the bombing of Odessa, the grains and so forth and so on. So these drones appear to be toys but they're in fact, especially when swarmed, they are extraordinarily powerful and you can see this today in the streets of Kyiv. The most recent example of me failing to understand this is that I knew that the Russians were working on jet Shaheds. So everybody knows what a Shahed is. It's relatively easy to make it a bit stronger. Take a Chinese jet engine. They cost $5,000 to $10,000. It'll go some number of hundred kilometers and it's faster than the propeller ones. I knew that. But it didn't occur to me that at the exact same time the Russians would add mesh networks using intermediate router points with these jet Shaheds. Now that's just idiocy on my part. It's obvious if you think about it. So I think the way to understand the progression of this war, the only way to do it is to take your knowledge and then put yourself in their position and figure out how you're going to solve the problem. Unfortunately, the Russians have solved the jet Shahed plus the mesh network solution. Well, the mesh network solved their Starlink problem. They have their own Starlink coming called Roosevet sometime next year allegedly. But I'm extraordinarily worried that the Russians will use these new discoveries aggressively and our side has not yet come up with the solutions. People are working very hard on this. But when you look at the battlefield at this point, it looks frozen.
But take us inside because you've been very recently there. Is it as frozen as it seems? Are you worried about Russian advantages?
Frozen is the wrong description. It's very hot. There's an enormous amount of conflict. And the simplest way to understand it is the soldiers are in foxholes. Every day and every night they're subject to what are called KAB bombs. These KAB bombs are launched by Russian jets coming out of Russia at full mock speed. They glide and they have their equivalent of GNSS which allows them to hit quite well. Ukraine today has no effective defense against them. Again, people working very hard on this. So imagine the Ukrainian soldiers sitting in their foxholes. Boom, boom, boom. Waiting for their turn, right? And these bombs are 3,000 kilograms. That problem's got to get solved. You got to solve the ballistic missile problem, which is hitting key energy infrastructure. I think everybody understands that. People in Ukraine are working on that. And you have to solve the jet Shahed problem. What's interesting is I think that we were looking at the speeds of drones. And a simple rule is that these FPV drones and so forth, which were so magical when Fedorov and I were first talking about it's like FPV drones and they're going to change the war and so forth, they're all being outflanked by much faster solutions. So the way to understand war is it starts with relatively toylike systems, but it very quickly the ranges get faster, the delivery gets faster, the payloads get faster. Every commander I talk to says, "I just need more, faster, right? Farther, faster, more." And because the war is expanding, the term I'm using for this is total war. And unfortunately, total war means kind of everything's in play on both sides. And that's horrible. Diplomacy, which I'm not at, is needed to solve this problem.
Dan, the thing that Eric wrote about this in the Washington Post recently and that others have been talking about is the Ukrainians are being quite innovative. In fact, I was just talking to the commander of the deep strike unit that is sending drones 3,000 kilometers into Russia and destroying their refineries. And his feeling was exactly, and he referenced Eric's work and said, you know, we're going to get the solutions. We have some of them already. What we need is scale. We need to be able to multiply these and mass produce them. You know a bit about this having presided in part over a trillion dollar defense budget. What do you think it would take for Ukraine to achieve the kind of scaling that it needs to be able to win this war? Because it's up against an adversary that is four times the population and 10 times the economic heft.
As I reflect back on my time in the role about 18 months, I'm kind of horrified in some ways, like Eric mentioned, what I didn't know and what took me a long time to realize. And so, anecdotally, we were in Germany with General Christopher Donahue and some of the colleagues, the Ukrainians were there helping us train. And I had just been in another European country the day before and it was actually Miruvs that we were talking about. And what we found out was this country I was in didn't think they were going to be all that helpful because they couldn't tie them into their sensors and their radars. They had all of this siloed information that wasn't being shared. And that was something that nearly every day in my job I would face. We would have one of the defense primes would tell me it would cost us $100 million to create some sort of program to share the information across the platforms. And so the next day I was with the Ukrainians and they were showing me Delta and I kind of very silly said, "Oh, do you guys have problems getting your radars and your sensors to share information?" And the look they gave me was like that of a child that they just felt sad for where they said, "Well, Mr. Secretary, as long as it creates data through a wire and it can access a network, like we can get any information to flow into our system." And it was this just the light bulb went off. I walked out with Christopher Donahue and I basically two hours later called the seven top CEOs of our American defense companies and I said, "We are going to break open every single system we as the United States Army have and we're going to start, this was a Thursday, we're going to start on Monday." I didn't know we had 2,000 systems at the time, but we picked the top 150 and we launched the, I believe this to be true, the largest hackathon in human history. And that was all because of watching what the Ukrainians were doing. And so I think your question of scale is we just, we the West have got to internalize these lessons that what you're doing here in a very scrappy fast iterative nature is what we must contort our systems where we can achieve scale. We're just currently doing it often times with the wrong products.
Fareed, can I just amplify? Look, Ukraine after four and a half years of the war knows what they're doing. They have the technical talent. If they didn't have it, they've now trained them. The country is organized to win this. What's missing? Money, right? Literally funds from the West, which is needed for all sorts of reasons, including the fact that export markets have largely been affected. And the second is the scaling point. Now, what does scaling mean? This is a big war. You don't understand that until you see the op centers and you see the rate at which things are happening. It's so much larger than the television and the coverage can capture just physically. You need a lot of everything. When I started, the country had no SMT lines, which is the way in which you build semiconductor boards. Today, it has them. It needs such lines in other countries as well. The correct solution is to use contract manufacturers in the West to assist in getting the necessary defense and offensive systems to Ukraine. Without it, I worry. With it, I'm certain Ukraine can prevail.
Well, I'm going to call on Radoslaw Sikorski because the foreign minister of Poland can react most usefully to this question of can the West provide the funds and the scaling that Ukraine needs right now?
Well, the obvious answer is half the funding has petered out when the United States did not follow up with another supplemental package. Since January of last year, the US is not funding the war. It's selling some weapons to Europe, but it's not funding Ukraine. And there are some reports that at least the Lindsey Graham bill might pass but what would be really helpful is for the US to match the European effort. So half the support has gone and both the European Union and the member states, some extraordinarily generously, Norway for example, are doing it but there are limits to what we can do. You know the European Union has extended a 90 billion euro loan. It is not fully dispersed yet. We can accelerate that and then there is an obvious pot of money from the Russian frozen assets. As G7 and as the European Union we have already said Russia is not getting this money ever. Russia will only get the money after she's paid reparations to Ukraine and of course reparations claims will be much higher than the 250 billion so Russia is not getting the money. The only question is when do we pass the money to Ukraine? After the war to rebuild it or now to prevent it from being destroyed? Don't ask me which option I would prefer.
Eric, we were all just in a room with a bunch of very very bright Ukrainians talking about AI and how AI can be brought to bear on this struggle. Give us your sense of how is AI going to change war and will it, is it something where Ukraine could have an advantage?
Well, Ukraine will have an incredible advantage by the end of this. Most people think of AI when they think of a drone they think the targeting that it does is AI. It's not. The targeting is done based on visual recognition and relatively straightforward algorithms. So the fact that you have automatic targeting essentially automation in weapons and in defensive systems is not AI. It's important. It's part of the digital revolution. I think everybody's doing it now. The key breakthrough is the ability to use large language models and reasoning to reason about what to do next. You know, I had the privilege of working in the Pentagon for eight years under various secretaries of defense and every one of the Pentagon generals explained to me what they wanted is they wanted a map of the sensor shooter network and they wanted to be able to see the battlefield and they wanted to be able to oversee it. The battlefield in Ukraine is too complicated even for the smartest Ukrainians to see all of it. Humans just can't manage that many things. We're talking about millions of actions in a day that has to be automated. If you're going to automate that, you might as well automate it around reasoning. How do I win? Where do I put my assets? Who's underperforming? Danilo, who was just before me, has said publicly, I'll just say publicly because I read your interview, is building such a system and he's one of my heroes and he has a whole team. I won't say more, but you're welcome to say about it. So it looks to me like Ukraine is going to build an AI system to win the war that has never been built before. And the key insight is to use artificial intelligence and I won't go into the details for obvious reasons. And it's recursive learning. So it gets smarter and smarter and smarter and smarter. That is the ultimate way to win the war given you have the kinetic capability.
Dan, let me ask you to talk about AI, but then I also want you to respond in some way to Radoslaw Sikorski. Do you think there's a possibility of new American support?
So I'll go AI and then back to the question you probably want me to answer more. One of the most amazing parts of running an organization with 1.2 million people on a quarter trillion dollar budget is the richness of the context that you get. And by that I mean I have talked to nearly or many many of the world's top innovators in defense. A couple of days ago I was with all of the CEOs of all of the frontier labs hearing what they're working on. And what I can say about that context is it's hard to overstate what Eric is like the world we talk about inflection point and in the West in the United States and I was often times saying what you are facing here in this country is an inflection point in warfare. Within that inflection point, we are at a moment within this month where everything is about to change again. And the speed and the scale of the AI coming in with the compute that is about to hit these weapon systems actually will be, in my opinion on the optimistic side, an amazing opportunity for your nation to outrun the Russians and out innovate them and out partner so that you can crush them. Because right now the old weapons, we are a couple of months away from a lot of them being mitigated. We are a couple of months away from new solutions changing the very nature of how warfare will occur. And all of you in this room are so well suited to take advantage of that moment. To the specific question on funding, I think democracies are complicated. So if you look at the American budget for our own military, the President Trump has put out there, we want a standard budget, we want a supplemental, and we want reconciliation, and that would get us to our $1.5 trillion. If you've read about it in the news, it has not come easy. A lot of people are saying we may not get there for our own budget. And so it is not intended to be an excuse. It is intended to instead say voters have different preferences at different times. I think if you look at the posture of our army, if you look at General Donahue, who at least when I got to go interact with him and as he talked to a lot of your colleagues in the military and the sincere hugs and backslaps and I believe the relationship that the US has had with your country throughout this has remained not perhaps as strong as you wanted, but from my position, it's been unflinching in the desire for you to be successful and I am incredibly optimistic that people like Eric and a lot of our technology companies and our defense companies can come in and provide value even if it's not in the form of direct dollars.
Let me ask you Dan about what Iran has done to all of this because what I'm struck by is Russia is now Iran's principal military ally. It has provided tanks. It has provided advanced weaponry of all kinds. I'm sure you saw the FT report that it is trying to provide supersonic missile technology all of which will be used to kill Americans. It is finding western weapons on the Ukrainian battlefield sending them to Iran so that Iran can reverse engineer them and then again use them against Americans. Do you think this is something that the Pentagon is noticing and in a sense recognizing that behind Iran stands this nuclear power that is actively supporting it.
Yes, we're recognizing it. I think if you look at the Iranian conflict there are many critiques that would be fair on things we could have done better. One of the things we actually did in my opinion as a United States Army reasonably well is we had spent the previous six months redoing our acquisition structure. And so this sounds esoteric. It's slightly boring to talk about, but a lot of our bad outcomes come from bad system design. And so it used to be when we wanted to purchase a thing, it would go through 16 steps. And any one of those steps could reset the process. And so when we, the United States Army, when the Secretary of the Army wanted a thing, it could be up to two years until that thing was fielded, even if we already had the dollars. That is just a sinful, sinful outcome. When the Iran conflict kicked off, we were able to reach out to Eric's company and purchase 13,000 Miruvs and 10,000 Bumblebees in about 7 days. And we were able to have them on chartered flights flying into country about 5 days later. That is 12 total days from the start. And that is something that just we as a nation have not needed to do in a while. And so I'm incredibly optimistic that when we look at what is occurring in the Middle East, when we look at the threat from Iran, when we think of the changes we've tried to make structurally, that going forward from this exact moment on, we are going to be able to partner even better and take advantage of a lot of the learnings here so that we can bring to bear resources, scale, and technology that just not a lot of other countries have that can meaningfully impact the conflict you have here.
Can I just add going back to the AI revolution what I've learned in my various chatting with all the militaries is that they are first and foremost very large very slow bureaucracies and they just are and for many many reasons history tradition law and they have to be law abiding and so forth. So the AI opportunity is AI properly defined can reduce the coordination tax. It can actually allow the commander to get what they want quicker and I can say how do I get my weapon or whatever quicker delivered to this site and it'll tell you exactly who to call and what to do. I know that sounds stupid, but when you talk to the people in the bureaucracy, they know what they want. And the bureaucracy, which they can't identify, except it's true, is preventing them from moving quickly enough in a war. One of my greatest disappointments in helping trying to help Ukraine is that politics, political tensions, national tensions get in the way. Why don't we just figure how to stop the war and then we can argue after, right? But and I was studying World War II and in the internal politics of World War II there were similar this seems to be a human thing. So it may be possible using these planning systems that Danilo and I have been talking about and I'm just highlighting you Danilo. It may actually allow the compression of red tape which seems very boring but is very real when people are being killed.
