Dexter Filkins on Drones and the Future of Warfare

The New Yorker Radio Hour

Content provided by WNYC Studios and The New Yorker, WNYC Studios, and The New Yorker. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by WNYC Studios and The New Yorker, WNYC Studios, and The New Yorker or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://podcastplayer.com/legal.

1M ago 21:47

MP3•Episode home

Since the end of the Cold War, most Americans have taken U.S. military supremacy for granted. We can no longer afford to do so, according to reporting by the staff writer Dexter Filkins. China has developed advanced weapons that rival or surpass America’s; and at the same time, drone warfare has fundamentally changed calculations of the battlefield. Ukraine’s ability to hold off the massive Russian Army depends largely on a startup industry that has provided millions of drones—small, highly accurate, and as cheap as five hundred dollars each—to inflict enormous casualties on invading forces. In some other conflict, could the U.S. be in the position of Russia? “The nightmare scenario” at the Pentagon, Filkins tells David Remnick, is, “we’ve got an eighteen-billion-dollar aircraft carrier steaming its way toward the western Pacific, and [an enemy could] fire drones at these things, and they’re highly, highly accurate, and they move at incredible speeds. . . . To give [Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth credit, and the people around him . . . they say, ‘O.K., we get it. We’re going to change the Pentagon procurement process,’ ” spending less on aircraft carriers and more on small technology like drones. But “the Pentagon is so slow, and people have been talking about these things for years. . . . Nobody has been able to do it.”

Read Dexter Filkins’s “Is the U.S. Ready for the Next War?”

969 episodes

#Conversations #Society #David #Remnick #New #Yorker #Storytelling #WNYC Studios #Books #Politics #News #News Talk #Arts #WNYC Studios and The New Yorker #New Yorker #WNYC