AI Warfare: Pentagon Deals, Iran Cyber Threats & Anti-Drone Tech | TSG Ep. 1030

Hey, everyone. Well, it's Monday. We made it, we made it through Monday through this tumult tumultuous weekend.

Certainly no lack of things to talk about. We're gonna focus on the tech, though. I know there's a lot going on in your world.

My world, all of our worlds, and, and, but tech as usual is front and center in it, and I think we're gonna have some great discussions today. I got some great people to discuss it with us. Some of our gang here, regulars.

Let me introduce you to JP Morgenthal. Garima Boal, Stephen Foskett, and I guess he's still the man in the High Castle. Mike Ard.

I forgot Dan. Welcome. I forget how that book ends, but I got a feeling it wasn't good.

Um, yeah, well, you might wanna go watch, you could watch the miniseries, the video. Um, ask TPT I'm sure it'll know Uhhuh. Yeah.

Or just ask an ai. And if you don't like it, well, of course you don't like it, Michael. We'll make that better for you.

Um, but it's certainly all kidding aside, gang members, I really feel like I'm living in the midst of history. And, and at some level, we all live through history because every day makes new history. But I, I can't help but feel that these are somewhat historic times that we're living through here these last couple weeks, if you will.

And, um, for the technology and what, what's going on in our world, but what's going on in the broader world at, at large as well. And, um, you know, we'll, we'll try to stick to our subjects and mind our knitting, but I, I'm sure the, the world will, you know, make their way into that. Mike was an interesting, uh, weekend, and I guess we're gonna start off with, you know, I get it became official when they, we had cyber command as part of DOD, right?

I guess. Well, the issue is, I think we're all sitting around now from a cybersecurity perspective, at least waiting to see if this other shoe is gonna drop. And Iran has demonstrated some significant capabilities in that regard over the years.

And they have a huge ecosystem that they've built up around them. And we don't know what those folks are gonna do. And some people seem to think that maybe, you know, the, the lack of current leadership means it'll be a while before they get their act together.

And others will say, well, it's just only a matter of time before, you know, they get through some of the recent holidays and they're gonna be back in full swing and all hell's gonna break loose. But I mean, Alan, what's your assessment of the capabilities here? And, you know, the cybersecurity folks clearly need to be on point.

You know, I, I wrote a few articles regarding this on Security Boulevard over the weekend as stuff was breaking. So first of all, look, when your lead is 87 years old, chances are pretty good, you probably have a, a succession plan in place. Now, they did take out a good chunk of, of leadership, but, uh, from what I'm seeing, you know, leaders have already, uh, you know, there, there's already people leading the way and they're, and Iran is certainly not sitting in, you know, they're in mourning, but they're not sitting on their hands doing nothing.

I think one has to suspect that there are cyber terrorists, cyber hacking, cyber attacks, nation state level cyber attacks in the hopper ready to go. And, and we'll, we'll probably be seeing them at some level as their, their physical, uh, military capability is degraded. I think it, you know, cyber becomes their, their card, their ace card to play, and they're gonna play it.

There's no, there's no sense saving it. They're gonna play it. Now, unfortunately, it comes at a, a terrible time for us in some ways because we have this, you know, shutdown involving Department of Homeland Security in cs a and then on top of that, there was a report this week that, you know, we haven an act.

We had an acting CSA director because the permanent director was never, uh, was never, uh, you know, uh, approved by the Senate, Senate. And there's a long history of, look, you don't put the right people in the right jobs. When stuff happens, it comes back to bite you.

And it turns out this interim guy they had in there was a bit of a disas, more than a bit, he was an effing disaster and, and couldn't happen if it was possible time for us. I, I just hope though that look, private industry and the rest of our government have to be on vigilant guard here because things are gonna happen and, and I, I pray for the best. Mm-hmm.

I would assume a couple of things are true here. One is we're probably attacking on the cyber front as progressively as we did. So we might be taking out a lot of their capabilities as we speak.

So we don't know what that is gonna look like. But secondarily, I think it's gonna be a while before they do respond because they are at theocracy and they have to put together a meeting to go elect the next ayatollah, which is roughly equivalent to trying to elect the Pope. So everybody's gotta get in a room, and there'll be a lot of voting back and forth.

So that might take them three or four weeks to kinda sort that whole thing out. Uh, but what I worry about is the incidental fire, right? It's, they're gonna try to attack, you know, us cyber capabilities and probably not succeed, but then they'll go after the secondary and incidental folks.

And so it's gonna be small businesses and other businesses out there that might be the collateral damage of this thing. Jp, what do you think? I, uh, I'd tell you just a very, uh, right, for knowledge, I'm sorry, very special areas.

I, I, I wish I had the depth to understand all the nuances to this. I feel like the only people who really, uh, have a full picture sitting at in Washington, dc I, uh, you know what? You got me.

Uh, this is not my area of specialization. I don't even want to delve into it. Put a fell in water.

I would also like to pitch in, it's not my specialization either, but I think what we have seen in the past is that, Mike, to your point, that, um, of course, uh, this also will invite a lot of defects, disinformation, you know, phishing attacks because we are not waiting for the state sponsor, you know, cyber crimes to happen. It's all the other things which we are also should be, we should be concerned about. Right.

And I mean, to, what I would expect is that there will be a lot of defense ops in making when we see these kind of, you know, uh, repercussions, uh, over the time period. Mm-hmm. You know, people invest more in cybersecurity.

Are they gonna be a little more, uh, conscious or do you think we're gonna just wait? I, I think people have to be on guard, but you know, Mike, what? Look, if you're gonna be in a cyber fight, having Israel is your partner is probably not a terrible thing.

They're pretty good at it. I hear. Um, and, and you gotta assume their offensive cap.

And, and they have plenty of offensive capabilities. Their offensive capabilities are also fully engaged because they're probably a little, maybe even more on the frontline than we are. I think though, to, to think that Iran is gonna be in a holding pattern until they elect the new supreme leaders naive.

They, they have, they had to have plans in place. Your, your leader's 87 years old, you've lost how much of your leadership over the last couple months, years, they're, they're a, they're a contingency plans in place. They're not, this isn't like some backward, backward kind of, yes, they're a theocracy, but they ain't stupid.

Right? They, they're a sophisticated, and as I wrote in my article, who do we have to blame? Probably ourselves, I think stuck net and everything we've done to them since then, made them sharper in terms of being a cyber relevant and cyber aware, uh, or, you know, country and and administration.

The other thing you can't discount is anytime with Iran, you have the, the, the, the Hezbollah's, the Houthis, the, the Palestinian, you know, all of the proxies that they've funded over the years. These, these also have cyber capability, these proxies and cyber terrorism. Think about that.

Cyber terrorism attacking water supplier critical infrastructure or something that'll create terror, right? And it doesn't have to necessarily be in the US mainland on the US homeland to be anywhere in the world that maybe is not as hardened. Mm-hmm.

Right? They are, they are lashing out the way they're lashing out at the whole Gulf right now. Right.

And the whole, uh, the whole Arabian peninsula, they, you know, they're desperate, desperate people do desperate things. So, So, so, question Alan, you've been in, you've been in the security industry for many, many years, and you watch the grow at Emerge. So can you, can Iran accomplish this without social engineering?

And what kind of social engineering opportunities do you think they have given what's going on? So, I, is it Bruce Fort Bruce fors attack? Yeah.

No. So, so here's the thing. When you look at, you know, the axis of evil, right?

And you prioritize them, certainly the Chinese, the Chinese groups that have been responsible for a lot of, you know, the low and slow attacks that have been so devastating and exfiltrating so much data over the years, the apps, they're, they're top of the line. The Russians have been playing this game for a very, very long time, but recently, like in the last 3, 4, 5 years, North Korea and Iran are probably the two up in commerce in terms of number one, cyber, just flat out cyber capability. Number two, financing a lot of their regime and, and, and avoiding, uh, sanctions and so forth through cyber.

And they've been exporting it too, right? So one, you know, especially in the case of Iran, as I mentioned with Hezbollah and, and Hamas and, and the Houthis and, and all of their proxies. One is in Syria, in Iraq, they basically control Iraq, right?

So the, the problem is you've got a very sophisticated cyber capability that's dispersed through a lot like tentacles of an octopus. And you, you know, trying to keep all of them, like, where's the, where's the next thing coming from? So, so here, here's something thinking about then.

First of all, it's naive to think that like a child, uh, throwing a tantrum, they're all of a sudden gonna get angry and throw these weapons and toys at us. They have, they are, they are consistently and actively pursuing these avenues and have been for years. Yep.

This is, this is not new. This is not something they're just turning on now in revenge. Um, so the question is, you know, do they have anything new that they Yeah, they do.

I mean, so the fact of the matter is Iran and, and Persia historically never, were never eager to be the front and center of a fight. They'd much rather sit back and let their proxies do things and, and live in the shadow, so to speak. But now you literally have a regime with a gun to its head.

You have a regime that's been decapitated. You have a regime that's fighting for its life, not just, it's one thing when you're worried about what those poor people in Lebanon or, or or Gaza are going to do. It's another thing when they're worrying about their own children.

And, and so they're gonna be a lot more desperate and, and I think they will empty the kitchen sink out here. Steven, there's this whole notion now of asymmetric warfare, and there's this whole notion of, um, you know, cyber is kind of the fifth dimension of war. I mean, this could go on for years, right?

I mean, it doesn't necessarily, this isn't gonna be, even if we were one and done so to speak and declared victory in 30 days, it seems like we'll be fighting this forever. Yeah, absolutely. That's my opinion.

And, and the, there does seem to be a real asymmetry here in terms of what's going on. I mean, the US is going in there with conventional weapons, uh, and, and Israel is, is going in there with a lot of conventional weapons, you know, bombs and, and, and war planes and missiles and that sort of thing. Um, Iran is responding with a lot of conventional weapons.

But of course, as you mentioned, uh, as Alan talked about, there are a lot of other aspects to this. And the asymmetry here is essentially that a country like Iran can strike back in many different ways that don't necessarily involve, you know, ballistic missiles and anti-aircraft guns and things like that. And, um, you know, they don't have to attack everywhere to succeed.

All they have to do is find some angle, some place to attack. And there's another aspect of asymmetry that's important as well. Iran is actually a very progressive culture, a very internet connected culture.

Um, but internally, and as of about a month ago, uh, most of the, uh, public internet in Iran was shut down. And they've been actively moving against, um, any unauthorized access, including, um, jamming starlink dishes and that sort of thing in order to make sure that nobody has access. And yet Israel and the United States and the West are extremely connected.

I think that it's safe to say that we all live incredibly connected lives, and that's what makes cyber warfare more interesting to me, because essentially it opens up more, um, attack surfaces. Yeah. Um, you know, as you mentioned, Alan, certainly there could be utilities attacks on that sort of thing.

There could be just, uh, disruptions to our daily connected lives. You know, if there was a DDoS attacks, which Iran has indeed conducted in the past against banks or against, frankly anything, anything that we interact with on a daily basis that could interfere and, and cause real, uh, disruption and pushback from Western cultures that maybe the Iranian people may be a little bit more prepared to accept because they've been accepting internet interruptions and disruptions to their daily lives, um, for many years as their regime has sort of flipped that big switch on and off. So I think there is an interesting angle here.

I think it's a concerning angle as well. Um, there could be other sorts of attacks in the west, again, that don't involve, you know, jets and bombs and missiles, but involve, you know, cyber About All of this is that I either side is gonna launch something at the other side aimed at some sort of cyber attack and lose control of it. And it's just gonna replicate everywhere through our networks.

You know, kinds of, all kinds of havoc may ensue, and it may very well come from something that, you know, technically is on our side, but once let loose, we lose control of. That's desperate. People do desperate things, and you gotta watch that.

But let, there's another angle I just wanna bring out and then we can move on. Our Iran is a country, this isn't some rinky dink 6 million, 4 million people country. There's something like 90 or 80 or 90 million people in Iran.

And there is a very, very wide diaspora of Persians, of Iranians throughout the world, especially here in the us. You go to parts of Great neck in New York, it's little per, you go to LA there's huge Iranian populations. Canada.

Europe, right? The Iranian, the Persians have always been a world worldly people. Right.

You know, and they, they're, we don't know how many embedded sleeper cells of potential cyber terrorists, or heaven forbid terrorists can be activated as a result of, you know, uh, coming out of this. And, and this is, so, this is why it's a terrible time for CSA to be on the balls of its butt, because we need, we need to be ever vigilant right now that that's, I think, the point we gotta move on though, to our next topic. Let's keep our fingers crossed and pray for the best, and we'll see.

We'll follow it. Mike. Lots going on with Anthropic this weekend and this, yeah, the end of last week.

This whole thing is turning into a soap opera. It's right up there with some of those shows that you watch. I'm Cable that go on forever, where there's all this ness and battle between executives.

But the latest is philanthropic told the Pentagon that, um, it wasn't gonna, uh, comply to its request for, um, I guess being good citizens in the world and not having their technology used to attack people and do all kinds of surveillance. And sure enough, OpenAI said, well, sure, we'll sign up for that program. And it was replacing philanthropic right behind them, even though there was some noise outta OpenAI saying that it was originally sympathetic to the philanthropic position, but not enough, I guess, to turn down the contract from the Pentagon.

And this whole thing is been blowing up. And guess what? Anthropic is like the most popular downloaded application now from Apple Store and probably the Google store as well.

And it seems like maybe this is good for business. Jp, what's your take on what's going on here? Oh, at least now I can speak to something.

I know, uh, you call me on that other one, I'm like, look, man, I'm sticking my toe in that deadly water. But, uh, I've been watching this closely and, and I'm actually impressed with Philanthropics handling this. Uh, it's a, it's hard to be an executive of, of a company, a really a startup.

I don't care that they're billions of dollars. There's still a startup, right? They, it's a fairly new, um, company.

They're trying to obviously, you know, build a product that's mature and robust, and they have to, uh, you know, worry about the competition, which is, you know, really a tight in this, in this area, right? Although we've talked before on this, uh, show about how it's not a one and done. You don't pick one and stick with it.

You, you probably have multiple LLM providers that you're using simultaneously. Uh, but there are ones that your business processes and your, uh, workflows will become, uh, heavily reliant on. And of course, you know, every one of them, Microsoft, Google, philanthropic, open ai, they all wanna be that organization that's chosen.

So it's tough right now to stand up and throw and, and say, I'm not gonna take money to do what's right. But I think it is so, so important for somebody to be willing to do it at this point in time. I was, um, I posted on LinkedIn over the weekend, uh, as I, uh, was going through, uh, spaceship Earth at Epcot for the, I don't know, a hundredth a hundred and 50th time, uh, because I'm an annual passholder, right?

You know, the, something hit me that never hit me before. It's every one of those little scenic things that you see along the way is about us advancing the speed at which we convey information to one another. And I don't know why it all of a sudden hit me that way.

Um, but, you know, it takes you through paper and pen and type press, and then you get to the newspaper and the newspaper press, and then wire, and then well, you know, TV and computers, right? You every time. What we did was, we, we, over the years, we continually advanced the speed, which we convey information ultimately leading to the epitome, which is the internet, which was an unguided.

And, uh, and with little guardrail environment that became, in my opinion, a danger zone right now for dissemination of information, freedom of information sharing act, all that other stuff. The, the free internet never considered the impact of social media and how it could be used by bad actors against our society. And right now, I think it's one of the most dangerous weapons on the planet.

And now you're gonna do, now we're our next race, we're finally actually entering our next race, which is to make un to, to have machines understand that information that we've worked so hard to share with each other so quickly, right? And now if we don't have guardrails, the right guardrails on that, the effect will be devastatingly worse than what the internet, uh, uh, represents right now with regard to the potential for bad actors. Mm-hmm.

So here's my problem with the whole concept. I mean, I don't disagree with you philosophically. I just don't see any way to implement meaningful guardrails here that are gonna be worth the damn.

So, I mean, it's just kinda agreement. Is this just the way the world is gonna be? I think we are living in the world of paradox, right?

We need a lot of deep strengthening of industry collaboration on, you know, defense of, as we mentioned earlier, as well as, you know, we need, uh, the AI models to be more trustworthy. And this, what this has done for the longer run, it, it erodes trust, right? And what happens in the background is that now there is a race of, uh, fragmented, uh, global, you know, adoption of AI models.

Not only like this is particularly what we are talking about in the DOD and the defense network, but it doesn't limit there, right? So the gold standard will, uh, start to kind of also spread into other industries, right? Other critical infrastructure segments.

So it is very interesting to see how it kind of boils down to the fact that, uh, we probably will see endless vendor audits, for example, in several enterprises. Uh, I especially work for critical infrastructure space. So I feel that pressure already itself, right?

And it also demands for a larger collaboration, I mean, eroding trust, like this would mean that, you know, enterprises will also backlash for AI free enterprises, right? So how should we go about navigating these challenges is a question to be answered in the near future. I mean, nobody has a crystal ball at hand, but I think as technologists, as people who have been driving change for several years, I see that there will be a lot of, you know, um, evolution happening as we, uh, speak on this topic.

So, so even resolve is gonna wind up in court someday. 'cause there's gonna be, basically, you could argue that there's a certain amount of restraint of trade being applied here, right? Well, no, the government could do what they want.

I don't think it's answer. You keep, Yeah. So, so that's a, that's a good point.

Um, you know, to it, it's different, uh, for the Pentagon to say we choose this solution over that solution for reasons. And that's how we are then for the Pentagon to say anthropic is a threat to national security, because that essentially says that Anthropic is not, um, welcome at any, uh, government procurement and in fact may be unwelcome in a lot of private, uh, procure procurement as well, which is a pretty big hammer to wield in, in this situation. Um, especially when, you know, what I've read, uh, about the background of this is that, uh, essentially it was kind of a setup, um, that, um, Altman and his investors went to the federal government and said, you know, hey, theoretically, if you're gonna buy Anthropic, why don't you ask them whether you can use that for autonomous drone targeting or domestic surveillance, which they knew was illegal.

And, um, and the Pentagon said, oh, okay, we should probably ask that. And went back to Anthropic and say, Hey, anthropic, would you allow us to do this? And so it was a setup.

So Anthropic of course, had to say no, because that's illegal. And the open AI agreement is kind of interesting because to, uh, agreement's point here, um, essentially, and actually to what, what Alan said as well, just now, essentially what, uh, OpenAI announced is, yeah, we won't let them do those things with our tech either, except we'll let them do anything legal. And so the government decides what's legal, and so The government doesn't decide what's legal.

Yeah. The courts decide what's legal. The government does what it wants until the court tells them it's illegal.

And that's an important distinction here. The government is not the ultimate purveyor of what's legal, the government, right? It's our courts that have to decide whether a government's act is legal or illegal.

When we, when we allow the government itself, not the courts, not the judiciary, to decide what's legal or illegal, that's how you wind up in tyranny. Mm-hmm. Now, some may argue we're already there, but I'm not here to argue that today.

But let me, let me weigh in. I've let everyone talk. I look, there's so many delicious angles to this story, right?

You've touched on some of them. One is, yes, I was one of those people a year and a half or two years ago when the full page ad in the New York Times came out, signed by a hundred of the leading scientists that said, we should put a moratorium on AI because it could be dangerous. I said, ah, hogwash, ba humbug trains left the station.

No one's gonna stop it. Here I am sitting here today with my tail between my legs saying maybe I was wrong. Maybe maybe there are some ethical considerations that we should take into place, take into consideration before just marching forward into the night, into the darkness of the night.

That's number one. Number two, a private company can license their software any way they want. If a government or a user doesn't want to use that software as a result, they're free not to use it, but to, to take out this, this cudgel of, of declaring them a software supply chain is the, is the act of a five-year-old petulant child.

And there's no place for that in this world. That's number two. Number three, you know, you gotta believe in karma or the force, or whatever you wanna call it, but like OB one told Darth Vader, if you strike me down, I'll be more powerful than I, than you can imagine.

And I think we're seeing that with Claude Rise. I went out this weekend and spent and bought a year's subscription just because it was the right thing to do. Right?

We cannot, now, there are gonna be some who say, and you know who these people are under the Biden administration, they allowed the social media companies to sense are the right wing, first of all. I don't necessarily believe that. But secondly, that's a different situation than whether or not you wanna procure this software or not, right?

And it, there's no place for it here. As to slippery Sam Altman. What do you expect from him?

He has shown his colors a hundred times over. This is the Pi Piper of ai. He's gonna do whatever he can to try to justify.

They just raised, what was it, another $110 billion or whatever. And they still hemorrhage money. Like, like, uh, like someone who's had their jugular veins cut.

So, you know, you, you, you can't expect slippery slam Sam not to have his his spots. He does what he does. Do we need to pull the cord?

Do we need to have a step back? I'd like to say yes. Will it happen?

No. No, but we need people like the Emoti. I believe it's his brother and sister who started philanthropic, right?

Emo the diaries. Modi is the, uh, Dimo is the CEO. We need people like Emoti who are willing to take a stand for ethics, who are willing to take a stand to do right where it goes.

I, you know, I, I don't know, but I commend them. I support them. And I know a lot of you people out there do too.

Yeah. But I also want to add one more thing, which I have been observing, because, uh, when we talk about all these DOD negotiations, with all due respect to the defense people in the US and all the due respect for the technologists who are actually driving this change. But think about this, what traditionally these people were procuring, they were like procuring meile tanks aircraft.

The process itself is not, uh, adapted to this kind of a technological shift. The supply chain risks are not clearly witted. They are not enabled by, like, there is only a pocket of people who are aware of these risks.

Maybe they, they can do a proper due diligence on it, but it calls for a larger kind of shift in how we kind of develop these capabilities for the future. You know, where is the process? I mean, if there are legal implications, how do we fight it out?

Because the process itself is not adopted, right? I just come back to this one point though. It's like, so we are the United States military.

We're defending the freedoms that we and our forefathers have fought so hard for, and now we're letting AI just take those away and then claiming that it's part of the defense of our freedoms. It's kind of crazy when you think about it. Look, it, it's a double-edged sword.

I'm sure a mother or father who's had their child kidnapped on a public street, would love to have that technology active to rapidly identify the kidnappers and apprehend them. Sorry, in this story, it, it, we all, we all wanna, uh, support that. But you look how this federal government has deployed ice as a force.

Now, I'm not saying I'm not judging isis, necessary isis, they put untrained people on the streets. Now, had they put them through a Quantico training program and made sure they understood constitutional rights and, uh, and dealt with, you know, warrants appropriately and didn't just take orders like Gestapo, uh, from their bosses and not knowing whether they're lawful or unlawful orders, then that would be a different story. So they have proven they are unable to deploy technology like this in a reasonable and respectable or, or legal manner.

And that is the, that is the reason why at this point, we can't allow them to use it. Absolutely. JP and Mike, to your point, let me tell you this, and you, you learned this lesson in high school.

I'm sure a nation that lives under the rule of law shall not, shall perish if they don't follow the rule of law. There you go. Let's move On's point.

There's plenty of opportunity to use exigent circumstances to address an issue like a kidnapping. We just don't need to do it in mass all the time, in real time and create this massive surveillance statement. There you go.

That's exactly the point, Right? That's it. All right.

Hey, I, we'll go. Is that a knock at my door? Uh, let's let, let's move on here and talk about drone wars.

Like we don't have enough wars. Mike, what's this one about? Well, It turns out that this latest circumstances that we've been talking about in Iran is also playing out all over the world.

Places like Columbia and even our own borders. And interestingly enough, there's been a lot more investments as a result in anti drone technology. So people are starting to say, here's all this drone stuff.

And that's interesting. And they're getting cheaper. And even cartels in Mexico are building drones now and using them to, uh, ve particular DEA agents.

And it's just getting a little bit crazy out there. But it's interesting 'cause, you know, and Steven, I'm gonna come to you with this, but it kinda reminds me of, you know, world War II history. We rolled out all these great tanks, and the next thing you know, we had zuckers and Panzer fos, and the tanks couldn't go in the cities 'cause they were just gonna get blown up.

And I got a feeling that this is gonna play outta here with drones where we're gonna find some cheap anti drone technology. What do you think? Yeah, that's it.

Well, this is the history of a lot of things, and certainly the history of warfare is that each new technological advancement, um, really changes the game entirely. And, uh, you know, you mentioned World War ii, um, you know, battleships in World War ii, uh, that w they were a, a huge, um, uh, military capability. And, you know, the entire world was racing to build battleships until they found that they were completely pointless and have been entirely, uh, abandoned since the 1950s.

Apart from Reagan bringing them back from mothballs in the 1980s, uh, for a no particular reason. Um, and actually Trump proposed a new one now, again, for no particular reason. But if we think about, uh, what's happened on the battlefield and actually off the battlefield to the point of asymmetric and gorilla warfare and terrorism, drones have really changed the game.

If you look at what's happened, of course, in the uk Ukraine in the war, the Russian War in Ukraine, um, the drone, uh, capabilities there have really shifted the whole, uh, way that wars are fought. Um, the fact that they have just this incredible proliferation of, um, small and mid-size loitering drones, um, first person perspective, inexpensive drones. It essentially means that the, uh, the whole battlefield is shut down for a large part during the day because no one dares go outside.

And to your point on tanks, it's made tanks just completely ridiculous. I mean, there, there, there's this porcupine tanks with, um, protrusions out of them to stop the drones. Um, you know, it really has changed everything.

Now, I should point out that one country that is on the leading edge of developing drones is Iran. They have actually been deploying military drones since the 1980s. And their shahe drone is one of the top drones, uh, in terms of the number produced and the number used in combat, um, globally.

And Iran was also on the forefront of developing this sort of one-way kamikaze drone concept, as opposed to what the US wanted to do, which was to build big, expensive, uh, basically unmanned fighter planes and unmanned bombers that could, um, you know, do really kind of amazing things. And the US has a bunch of these that can do pretty amazing things. But we should also point out that drones are more than just airplanes.

There's other types of drones. You know, Ukraine has successfully used, um, drone ships against Russian ships. There are other types as well, including ground-based.

Um, and all of these have to be countered in some way because all of these change the battlefield in a, in a really incredible way. And I think we're about to find that out in this Iranian conflict, just how different the battlefield is. So how do you counter them?

Well, you can jam 'em, uh, which doesn't work very well now that we have fiber optic drones and, um, autonomous drones. You can try to shoot them down, which is pretty hard to do though. There's actually been successful, some successful tests and some, uh, questionable tests of, uh, for example, the laser in, uh, San Antonio that's now shot down, a party balloon and a friendly drone.

And the third thing that you can do is, um, you can actually do drone on drone warfare, which is something that Ukraine has been showing us is possible as well. So there are ways of doing this, but I don't think it's gonna be a one size fits all, just like submarines changed warfare, just like nuclear weapons, change warfare, you know, all of these capabilities mean that you have to have a whole range of counter capabilities in order to take them on. Yeah, this very, what does it mean from manned aircraft for man, you know, military aircraft.

Well spend $110 billion on the F 35 per, per copy or whatever it is. Mm-hmm. All I know, all I know about drones is they make really pretty sky shows.

So are we having, with some, some bad Star Trek episode, I remember where they landed on a planet and people were just reporting to get vaporized because the machines were finding the wars, and then they just tallied up the casualty rates, the import milk cleared. Is this gonna be, It also changes the way we see warfares, right? I mean, if you think about this, uh, for example, uh, FIFA or small events or micro events, I mean, there are disruptions happening everywhere through drones.

And I am essentially interested in, uh, drawn technology because that is where the cyber hat comes in. And, you know, I'm more interested into seeing that, you know, how are we moving away from RF jammers to laser, uh, rifles, for example, and other kind of technologies where I feel is more interesting for cyber professionals to, um, like, uh, like professionals like us to go into more detail about how we can enable or evolve this technology in some kind of defense hubs to ensure that we do our contributions in the right way. Absolutely.

Guys, we're about outta time. It's only Monday. I think.

I, my prediction is we're gonna reinvent the, uh, what were those things called? Medieval days, the triche. And we're gonna start throwing rocks at the drones.

So there you go. I would be a low tech way of dealing with them. That is one of the things they do.

They call it kinetic based attacks. Uh, the, I think they use, um, sort of tubes that fire, self-propelled projectiles. They call them guns.

What a great invention. Anyway, guys, certainly just some light reading for today, huh? Um, interesting times.

Indeed. JP Garima. Steven, Mike, thanks for joining.

Thank you for watching. We hope you enjoyed today's show. Uh, we'll be back tomorrow, God willing with more.

There's a lot going on and we can't wait to talk about it. Talk. Uh, but in the meantime, we do have text on TV immediately, immediately replaying immediately following this.

Stephen, I, I believe we have a field day this week. Uh, next week, March 11th, next week and 12th. Next week we're gonna be doing some cloud field day.

Uh, we're gonna have some, some pretty cool stuff, uh, showing up there, including some, uh, community presentations, which I always enjoy because you never know what somebody's gonna bring in to share with the, with the world. So check that out on the Textron tv. Excellent.

All right, until then, this is Alan Chinle. Thanks very much. We're out.