Join Julia and Jackie in this bonus episode as they discuss what they’ve learned throughout the podcast, including what this means for the Trump administration and the future of defense innovation.

Join Julia and Jackie in this bonus episode as they discuss what they’ve learned throughout the podcast. Who are the new defense influencers that will shape America’s unmanned arsenal? What does this all mean for the Trump administration and the future of defense innovation?

The episode looks at what unmanned the US is currently buying and what it should buy for a war against China.

How is the US responding to unmanned innovation across the globe? This episode looks at what unmanned systems the US military is currently investing in and then turns to experts to ask what they think the US should be investing in. These interviews highlight a debate between different characteristics of war—precision vs. mass, attrition vs. maneuver, quality vs. quantity, and argue that too little emphasis is put on how these systems allow states to manage the long term economic and political cost of warfare.

How will the US respond to new experimentations of unmanned systems?

The US built an expensive, exquisite, and highly controlled inventory of unmanned systems for the wars on terror. What would happen to that arsenal when faced with a new political world of a rising China, an expansionist Russia, and a nuclear North Korea? Enter today’s world where the unmanned investments of the war against terror may no longer feel relevant for the wars of today. As AI and autonomy advances, we are seeing new experimentation on the battlefield with small quadcopters, increasingly autonomous land and naval mines, cheap drones and cruise missiles, hypersonic ballistic missiles, and an increasingly crowded and important space domain. How will the US respond? In this episode, we discuss Ukraine, China, and Houthi rebels and talk to those leading the ideas and decisions about technology in the American military. How will autonomy shape the future of war and what should the US invest in?

The episode looks at unmanned systems and the global war on terror, focusing on the rise of the Predator and Reaper.

On September 11th, everything changed. James Roche, then secretary of the Air Force, cut all remaining bureaucratic tape and armed General Atomic’s MQ-1 Predator. Over the next two decades and combat in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and the Horn of Africa, the US would fight for the hearts and minds of foreign publics with an increasingly prolific arsenal of remotely piloted armed aircraft providing persistent and pervasive intelligence over insurgents and terrorists across the world. The Air Force, the service of pilots, led the adoption of these systems. But while this was a golden age for unmanned platforms like the Predators, Reapers, or space-based satellites, other unmanned systems stagnated: strategic missiles atrophied, tactical missile inventories dwindled, and anti-ship and anti-submarine munitions were de-prioritized.

The episode looks at the rise of cruise missiles in the early information age, tracing a belief in military revolutions from the Gulf War to 9/11.

It is 1989. The US has won the Cold War and is about to have a dramatic victory in Iraq. Meanwhile, in the bowels of the Pentagon, a small office of ivy league elites headed by career bureaucrat Andy Marshall, introduces a new idea about the burgeoning information technology revolution in the American military. In what are called “revolutions in military affairs," these civilians predict a world of rapid, precise wars fought on the backbone of new technologies like unmanned systems. These beliefs get a stunning endorsement in the Gulf War which ushers in a golden age for precision-guided munitions, cruise missiles, space-based navigation, and the birth of a small but promising company, General Atomics.

This episode discusses developments in unmanned technologies from the battlefields of Vietnam to the end of the Cold War.

After decades of armed service budget sparring and a strategic focus on nuclear-armed ballistic and cruise missiles, an unpopular ground war in Vietnam refocused America’s unmanned investments away from the strategic and back to the battlefield. American leaders are looking for ways to use technology to win the war and save American service members’ lives to insulate presidential administrations from the wrath of an angry public.

Meanwhile, the US is on the edge of a digital revolution–one in which microprocessors offer a real possibility to bring intelligence from giant computer server rooms to battlefield munitions. These political, technological, and battlefield realities lead to new unmanned aerial vehicles for battlefield reconnaissance as well as the advent of a “precision-guided munition” revolution. As the US brings this unmanned arsenal out of Vietnam, it will make decisions about the future of its arsenal in the context of a Soviet Union on the cusp of destruction, an American military in the midst of its largest reorganization in half a century, and a president keen to be the one that sees the US out from behind a nuclear shadow.

The episode introduces the technologies of an American military post-WWII and the new influencers of the nuclear age: Air Force generals LeMay and Schreiver, Navy Admiral Rickover, and President Eisenhower.

It is the end of World War II and the beginning of the nuclear age. The American response to German rockets is a flurry of investments in missiles, rockets, and “pilotless aircraft” – all to deter a rising nuclear adversary, the Soviet Union. The introduction of the Air Force brings “main character” energy to US unmanned investments as Air Force General Curtis LeMay’s battle to shape his new service’s identity significantly alters the trajectory of unmanned for all the armed services. A Sputnik moment catalyzes investments in space even as President Eisenhower attempts to keep what he sees as dangerous armed service identity battles from hijacking the fragile peace in the domain. Meanwhile, as the US grapples with its new nuclear reality, unmanned strategic systems are front and center as tactical unmanned innovations in mines and early guided bombs debut in the Korean War.

The episode introduces not only the technologies, but the role of armed service identity to the ultimate trajectory of these unmanned systems. It will be the people of the nuclear age: Air Force Generals like LeMay and Bernard Schreiver, Navy Admiral Hyman Rickover, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower who will ultimately determine the strategic future of unmanned in the burgeoning nuclear age.

What are unmanned weapons and where did America’s quest for autonomy begin? The answer takes us back to the birthplace of the country and David Bushnell’s famed kegs of floating gunpowder then to the Civil War when, first Confederate and then Union generals experimented with land and naval mines and tethered torpedoes, and finally, how the invention of aircraft, the radio, and two World Wars ushered in a new age of autonomy.