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--:-- Alex Osola: Hey, What's News listeners. It's Sunday, October 5th. I'm Alex Osola for The Wall Street Journal. This is What's News Sunday, the show where we tackle the big questions about the biggest stories in the news by reaching out to our colleagues across the newsroom to help explain what's happening in our world.
--:-- Alex Osola: On today's show, as recent drone incursions in Europe have shown, drone technology has evolved a lot as it's been used by both sides on the battlefields of Ukraine. Today, we'll dig into how they got there, what drones can do, and how they're shaping the business of war.
--:-- Alex Osola: Last month, a series of drone incursions rattled Europe. First, it was Poland, where NATO planes shot down about 20 Russian drones. Then, airports in Copenhagen and Oslo closed for hours after several large drones were spotted in their airspace. And on Friday, we told you about another airport closure, this time in Munich, after several drone sightings there.
--:-- Alex Osola: NATO is accelerating efforts to respond to these kinds of threats, which have become much more prominent in the past few years. Today, drones are way more than hobbyist toys for taking pictures. They can surveil, carry weapons, and swarm. They can even be armed with a bomb and then lie in wait before crashing into something. Those are called loitering munitions.
--:-- Alex Osola: The West has been falling behind in producing these kinds of drones. But just this past week, news broke about a potential landmark deal that would see Ukraine share its battle-tested drone technology with the U.S. Today, we're taking a step back from the front lines to talk about the business of drones, who makes them, who buys them, and the financial trade-offs in defending against them.
--:-- Alex Osola: Joining me today is Alistair MacDonald, who covers Ukraine and the defense industry for the journal. Alistair, drones are not a new technology, but they've reached this new level for defense purposes in Ukraine. How has that been playing out there, and what are they being used for?
--:-- Alistair MacDonald: Well, drones are being used on land, are being used on sea. They are being used in the air in particular. And that's what people tend to associate drones with. It's aerial usage, both in commercial and hobbyists and in defense sectors. Drones have been used in warfare on a relatively significant manner, really, for the last 20 years, if not more, that the Ukrainians and also the Russians, in fairness, have pushed the envelope.
--:-- Alistair MacDonald: You've got long-range drones, you've got short-range drones, you've got drones that used for logistics. You've got drones that are used just for attack. You've got drones that are just used for reconnaissance. It's a huge now, broad spectrum of drone usage. That's the big difference.
--:-- Alistair MacDonald: So on a technical level then, do they have abilities now that even a decade ago, they didn't have?
--:-- Alistair MacDonald: The big difference is that in the Ukraine war, its quantity, its volume, and its ability to produce these very cheaply The Ukrainian industry produced 2 million drones last year Some of these are relatively cheaply produced And so one of the key things now which the West is starting to wake up to is just that, yes, we can produce drones, but can we produce them en masse? And can we produce them cheaply?
--:-- Alex Osola: I definitely want to talk more about the production of drones and who's doing it in just a moment. But I still want to understand where we are in terms of drone use. So it sounds like if you wanted to attack a particular target or troops, you could do that via drones. You could get a lot of information. How do you actually defend against a drone?
--:-- Alistair MacDonald: Well, it's increasingly difficult. There are many ways, some very expensive. The Ukrainians say that one of their most effective anti-drone capabilities is something called the Gepard, which the Germans gave them, which is just like these massive machine guns, basically, that just shoot a large amount of bullets, but large caliber bullets out of drones very quickly.
--:-- Alistair MacDonald: They use ancient machine guns, some of which date back to the First World War, heavy machine guns. They use old Soviet anti-aircraft weapons. And they have these groups that used to go around effectively with Kalashnikovs just shooting down Shahids. They're slightly less effective now, but that's certainly been the case.
--:-- Alistair MacDonald: And then there is, of course, electronic warfare, which is essentially signals jamming or signal spoofing. And that's a huge portion of how the Russians and the Ukrainians down each other's drones. The Russians have a particular expertise in this.
--:-- Alex Osola: Now I wanted to get a little bit into who is making these drones. So like I mentioned, the Trump administration is working on a deal to gain access to Ukraine's drone technology. So are they the leaders in this industry right now? Who are the big players here?
--:-- Alistair MacDonald: The Ukrainians have proved very good at what I was talking about earlier which is mass producing cheap drones for instance there's a company it's named swarma that now uses AI to have drones communicating with each other it's quite fascinating if one drone is running out of energy it literally communicates that to the other drones and they reshuffle each one's tasks and they communicate when they're going to strike where the target is although it's obviously been programmed before what the target is
--:-- Alistair MacDonald: The Americans have some very high-end long-distance drones like the Reaper drone for instance going further down the chain there's a lot of new entrants andrell more famously including a so-called loitering munition then you have a company called air environment and then you have all the big primes trying to get in the act by primes I mean the likes of Lockheed Martin these huge great defense companies that are now trying to produce their own drones.
--:-- Alistair MacDonald: In marine drones, HII, a very old American company, the company that produces the aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines, for instance, they have done for a while and are continuing to do a lot of underwater drones. In Europe, you have a British company called BAE Systems that's very good on heavy logistics drones.
--:-- Alistair MacDonald: So these carry very heavy weights around, something that helicopters would have once done. You have the European equivalent of Andrel. You have several of them. For instance, a German company called Helsing. China has proven very good at making very cheap drones very fast And everybody drone industry is even now still quite dependent on the Chinese The commercial drone industry is huge The Russians were late into the game but they caught up They have particularly their own surveillance drones but they're also using Iran's Shahid and adopting it to their own usage, and that's a major component of their warfare, basically.
--:-- Alistair MacDonald: The Israelis, they have their own drone industry. They have loitering munitions. In fact, they invented one of the first loitering munitions and various surveillance drones. So they're in there as well. But the thing with drones is there's just a plethora of new names coming out. It's quite a crowded field. And eventually that will have to fin. It will be a sort of Darwinian battle of the best ones will emerge.
--:-- Alex Osola: I want to dig in a bit more about the Shahid drone you mentioned, because it's one we hear about a lot. How has it become so common on the battlefield?
--:-- Alistair MacDonald: So the Shahid is emblematic of you need to have a drone that's cheap to make and you can produce very quickly. And so the design is such that it's a triangular or delta, as they call it, shape. Within the wings, it doesn't need many supports. And you can mold it out of one, basically. And it's a prop engine, which is much cheaper. It's designed to be cheap and it's designed to be easy to make.
--:-- Alistair MacDonald: The US, France, Britain, certainly China, everybody is trying to develop a Shaheed, basically, which is this sort of long range, cheap vehicle that they can churn out. And therefore, it's used to waste enemy defenses, distract the enemy, and also test their air defenses. And then you can send in more high-end things, such as ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, into the mix to a more targeted way of attacking.
--:-- Alex Osola: So you started to say earlier that the West is a bit more behind in the sort of like cheap, long range drone industry. Is that right?
--:-- Alistair MacDonald: Yeah, that's very much so. It just costs a lot more to make things in the West. And you can look at some of the prices of some of the military drones in the West and you can see that high end drones for a million a shot. These are expendable, weapons. So it better be a high profile target for you to be spending a million on it.
--:-- Alistair MacDonald: And the other thing, of course, is drone technology moves on all the time. And one of the reasons is this risk from jamming electronic warfare. You have to continue to update your drone. Before the break, you mentioned the idea of a swarm where drones communicate with each other using AI. Where does AI fit in?
--:-- Alistair MacDonald: So AI is going to become an increasingly important component of drones. And there's two main reasons, one of which is again electronic warfare if you can disconnect the drone off from its operator it's absolutely useless but what AI can do is it can continue the journey even though it's been disconnected it can do this for instance by referring to essentially maps that have been downloaded within it that follow the contours of the countryside as it goes
--:-- Alistair MacDonald: And it can also do it in terms of communicating with different drones So if you have a swarm of drones say 40 drones at the moment, do you need 40 people to operate those drones? That's very difficult to coordinate. But the idea of AI swarming technology is you don't, they coordinate amongst themselves. But the trouble is that Western rules of engagement is that you always need a human being in the kill chain. So it's not like some sort of robot wars where these guys go off and then they just pick their own targets and shoot.
--:-- Alex Osola: What does this look like for the future of war? I mean, it sounds like countries or groups with less manpower can have a more substantial presence with some of the sort of technological abilities that you're talking about. But is it inevitable that drones become the future of war? Is that what we're going to see, these robot wars?
--:-- Alistair MacDonald: Everybody knows drones are here to stay and that they will have this massive impact on the battlefield. There's nowhere to hide on a battlefield now just because you have these surveillance drones everywhere. In the past, you've had really expensive missiles for precision, and then you've had artillery for what you call mass, cheap mass. And what drones can do is combine them both. They can be precise, and because you can make them quite cheaply, you can use a lot of them. And that's also changed things around.
--:-- Alistair MacDonald: Look at what happened with the Russians. Russia was considered one of the great military powers and it was humbled by Ukraine, one of the poorest countries in Europe. And a lot of that, not everything, of course, but a lot of that has been through drones. You can see what's happening on the battlefield. I go to the front quite a bit and you can be on or near the front line and you will see no armor. You don't see tanks. You don't see infantry fighting vehicles. And the reason why is that as soon as they show up, a drone will hit them. It means that you have to move forward often on foot, and they move forward on things like buggies and bikes. It's completely changed it.
--:-- Alex Osola: There is an argument to say that Ukraine is different. Ukraine has ideally suited to drones. It's very flat. There's not many trees. It's perfect for drone warfare. And it's also a very static front line. It doesn't move much. Now, would that be the same in Asia? It'd be a completely different type of war. It would be very marine-based. There's obviously a lot of islands there. There's a lot more forest there and vegetation in general. it would be very different.
--:-- Alex Osola: But even given that argument, nobody thinks that drones won't play a massive part in warfare from now on. That was Wall Street Journal reporter Alistair MacDonald. Thanks so much, Alistair. Thanks very much. Thanks for having me.
--:-- Alex Osola: And that's it for What's New Sunday for October 5th. Today's show was produced by Zoe Kolkin with Deputy Editor Chris Zinsley. I'm Alex Osola, and we'll be back tomorrow morning with a brand new show. Until then, thanks for listening.
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