The Future of War: How Autonomous Systems Are Reshaping Conflict

Global Security Briefing

General David Petraeus joins Kevin Rowint to discuss how the conflict in Ukraine is serving as a laboratory for the future of warfare. He explains that the rise

Key takeaways

Unmanned systems now account for nearly 90% of Russian casualties on the Ukrainian front line.
Ukraine produces approximately 8 million drones per year, with software updates occurring weekly.

Main topics

Autonomous warfare
Drone technology in Ukraine

Notable quotes

Ukraine is really the laboratory for the future of war.

Conclusion

The episode highlights the critical necessity for military institution

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:05) Hello, and welcome to RUSI in London. I'm Kevin Rowlands, the editor of the RUSI Journal and guest presenter this week of Global Security Briefing, the podcast devoted to providing regular insights from leading international experts to help you make sense of the far-reaching changes affecting international security around the world today. In today's episode, we have a very special guest, General David Petraeus. He's Senior Vice President of RUSI, former commander of the U.S. Central Command, former commander of the multinational force in Iraq, and a former director of the CIA. Ukraine has become the clearest evidence that warfare is changing in revolutionary ways. Uncruised systems now account for nearly 90 % of Russians killed and wounded on the front line. And Ukraine produces around 8 million drones a year, updating software weekly and hardware every few weeks. It's a pace that no Western procurement system can match. Traditional armoured manoeuvre has effectively stopped, replaced by a dense zone of surveillance and strike drones along the front. for general petraeus this demands a complete institutional overhaul covering doctrine force structure training procurement and personnel on a scale far beyond the changes he oversaw during the iraq surge He argues that the UK is unusually well placed to lead this change, given its visibility into the Ukrainian battlefield, its political continuity across governments, and a parliamentary system that can move fast, although entrenched interests in legacy platforms will resist the change required. General Petraeus came to the UK to deliver a speech to the House of Lords, and in that speech he called for change and transformation, and of course his trip to the UK wouldn't be complete without a short hop down Whitehall to visit us at Roussey. Here's our conversation info. Speaker 1 (2:05) General David Petraeus, former commander of ISAF in Afghanistan, former commander of US CENTCOM, former commander of the multinational forces in Iraq, including during the surge, former director of the CIA, but most importantly for us, I think, sir, current senior vice president of RUSI. For Speaker 2 (2:22) over 13 years now, I think. And welcome back to RUSI. Great to be back. Speaker 1 (2:27) You've come to the UK to deliver a speech to the House of Lords. And in that speech, you call for... institutional change and transformation. I mean, that's a tricky thing to do, given the challenges of our age. Can you expand on that? Speaker 2 (2:39) Sure. It's even more than that. It is urgent, revolutionary institutional military change. And institutional change means that this is much more than just routine modernization or modest changes at the edges. This is the whole institution has to change. And it starts with an entirely new big idea on the conduct of warfare. And that's most informed, of course, by Ukraine, which is really the laboratory for the future of war. And it's rapidly changing. And I'll mention some ways in which it will change further this year. But of course, what you see there is just largely unmanned systems. They account on the front lines for nearly 90 percent. of the Russian killed and wounded, which is way over a thousand a day, by the way. But this is a totally different form of war. At sea, in the air, on the ground, largely again remotely piloted systems or in missiles and so forth. And this requires a whole re-look at our concept of warfare. So you start with a whole new concept. That's the big ideas. Eventually that'll become formalized in doctrine as we did when we did change in the US Army and Marine Corps with the doctrinal field manual. Once you have that, and it doesn't have to be perfect, but it's just got to be good enough, now you make massive change to your force structure because clearly we need to buy many, many more unmanned systems and ideally... cheap, attritable unmanned systems. That's what enables Ukraine to use 10,000 drones per day on the battlefield. They're making so many, 8 million a year, that they could actually use even double that if they had the number of pilots. But so the big change to your force structure, revolutionary again. This is one of those moments in history that we haven't seen for a very long time. Then you have to actually look at how you train your forces, because obviously you're going to train them in a very different way. This is not, again, just giving 100 drones to an armored battalion that goes around its normal maneuver. Keep in mind that on this battlefield in Ukraine, there is no armored maneuver because they can't survive on the battlefield. There's a kill zone, a death zone, almost 35 kilometers on either side. of what really is the front line of troops, which isn't a line anymore. It's just individuals in survivability positions, not even fighting positions. So again, you've got to change completely how you train. You have to change how you educate your leaders, needless to say. And this is going to be massive because, of course, you've gone through enormous change in the new concept of warfare, huge change in your force structure, obviously change how you train. Now you're going to have to educate leaders on all of that. With an eye to the future always because it's still changing and as I mentioned there's a huge change coming later this year when the transition begins from remotely piloted or remotely driven systems to autonomous truly autonomous systems that's coming soon to a theater of war near us. Then of course you needless to say you have to change completely what you buy and how you buy it. In Ukraine, the manufacturers can make software changes once a week, as required by what the Russians are doing to counter their systems. They can make hardware changes every three or four weeks. The agility is just staggering, as is, again, the sheer capacity for manufacturing.