# Cheap drones are reshaping military strategy

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/cheap-drones-are-reshaping-military-strategy/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Eric Schmidt](https://realalpha.app/people/eric-schmidt/) · Eric Schmidt is a former Google executive chairman and CEO. · Scaled Google as CEO through 2011, now runs rocket maker Relativity Space and co-founded Schmidt Sciences.
- Host: [Chamath Palihapitiya](https://realalpha.app/people/chamath-palihapitiya/) · Founder & CEO, Social Capital · Led Facebook's growth team; his firm backed Slack and AI chipmaker Groq.
- Host: [Jason Calacanis](https://realalpha.app/people/jason-calacanis/) · Founder & CEO, LAUNCH · Early Uber angel; sold Weblogs Inc. to AOL; hosts This Week in Startups.
- Host: [David Sacks](https://realalpha.app/people/david-sacks/) · Co-founder & partner, Craft Ventures · PayPal's first COO, founded Yammer; White House AI & crypto czar 2025–26.
- Host: [David Friedberg](https://realalpha.app/people/david-friedberg/) · CEO, Ohalo · Founded The Climate Corporation, sold to Monsanto for about $1.1B in 2013.
- Show: All-In
- Episode: [Eric Schmidt on AI, the Battle with China, and the Future of America](https://realalpha.app/v/EkuVqdj8O6E/), Sep 24, 2025
- Moment: 10:03 to 17:39 of the episode (8 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/cheap-drones-are-reshaping-military-strategy/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/EkuVqdj8O6E/?t=603

## Quote

> “The American **tank costs $30 million**. You can send an awful lot of those drones to destroy those tanks.”
> — [Eric Schmidt](https://realalpha.app/people/eric-schmidt/) at [12:36](https://realalpha.app/v/EkuVqdj8O6E/?t=756) · All-In

## Takeaways

1. A small drone can threaten equipment that costs millions of dollars.
2. Military tactics are shifting toward detecting and defeating enemy drones.
3. AI battle plans could make each side’s capabilities harder to predict.

## About this segment

Eric Schmidt describes how Ukraine’s drone warfare exposes the cost mismatch between drones and traditional weapons, then outlines how drone-versus-drone tactics could evolve. He argues that AI-planned forces may make conflict harder to predict and deter attacks.

From “Eric Schmidt on AI, the Battle with China, and the Future of America”, Sep 24, 2025. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/EkuVqdj8O6E/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[10:09](https://realalpha.app/v/EkuVqdj8O6E/?t=609) this is, so you can go as far as you want to go into this, but you've done a lot as well in next generation warfare as well. Do you want us just to talk about that and how you ended up there and what role that plays and just give us a landscape maybe David asked about the China question but it's they're all kind of almost interrelated well first place I'm a softer person not a hardware person I explain to people that hardware people go to different schools than software people and they think slightly differently so I'm always at a limitation in these new industries I had worked for the Secretary of Defense and have a top secret clearance and all that I was given a medal etc for trying to help the Pentagon reorganize itself and when the Ukraine war started, I was watching, and I thought, well, here's an opportunity to see a country that has

[10:53](https://realalpha.app/v/EkuVqdj8O6E/?t=653) no Navy and no Air Force, how they do this with automation. And indeed, it has been a spectacular success as a matter of innovation, and outnumbered three to one with huge differences in kinetic strength, weapons, mobilization, and so forth and so on. Ukraine has held on really quite well. And what's happening now is you're seeing essentially the birth of a completely new military national security structure. One way to think about it is that we all, so first place, and I've seen it live, and I will tell you that real war is much worse than the worst movies you have ever seen about war. And that's all I'll say. It's really horrific. It's to be avoided at all cost.

[11:39](https://realalpha.app/v/EkuVqdj8O6E/?t=699) and then right for obvious reasons and the the and I love all these people say well we'll you know the warmongering talk be careful what you wish for because the other side gets a vote when I started working and trying to understand what Ukraine was doing Russia was pushed back And they've come back with a very, very strong second and third round, so the enemy gets a vote in this situation. But to go on, the rough way in which war will evolve is first things will have to be very, very mobile and very much not in fixed places. This takes out most of the military infrastructure that exists in the world. Things like tanks, of which we're now building a whole bunch more, even stronger tanks here in America, don't make any sense in a world where a two kilogram payload from a well-armed drone can destroy the tank. It's called the kill ratio,

[12:37](https://realalpha.app/v/EkuVqdj8O6E/?t=757) and that drone costs retail $5,000, $4,000. The American tank costs $30 million. You can send an awful lot of those drones to destroy those tanks. The likely evolution goes something like this. So first, people learn that drones are like rifles and like artillery. So it's more efficient to use drones now than to use mortars, grenades, artillery. That's clear. If you just look at the economics, economics in terms of cost or effectiveness, as it's called. The next thing that happens is that both sides develop drone capabilities, which is what you're seeing now, and each then becomes a war of drone against drone so you have drone against anti-drone and so then the shift moves to how do you detect the enemy drone and how do you destroy it before it destroys you so the doctrine ultimately is the drones are forward and the people are behind

[13:33](https://realalpha.app/v/EkuVqdj8O6E/?t=813) and i've seen operations in for example sitting in kiev where the ukrainians are commanding things over starlink i might add um in the distance in the distant war and they're very very effective So we've solved the latency problems, we've solved the timing problems, and so forth in that area. The ultimate state is very interesting, and I don't think anyone has foreseen this. If you go back to our conversation about RL and planning, which is what you're seeing with AI, let's say that we're on one side and we have a million drones, and there's another side over here that has another million drones.

[14:07](https://realalpha.app/v/EkuVqdj8O6E/?t=847) Each side will use reinforcement learning AI strategies to do battle plans, but neither side can figure out what the other side's battle plan is and therefore the deterrence against attacking each other will be very high. Today, the way military planners operate is that they count weapons. They say, well, you have this many and I have this many and you can do this kind of maneuver and so forth. But in an AI world where you're doing reinforcement learning, you can't count what the other side is planning.

[14:35](https://realalpha.app/v/EkuVqdj8O6E/?t=875) You can't see it, you don't know it, and I believe that that will deter what I view is one of the most horrendous things ever done by humans, which is war. Because unless there's a perfect balance between either side, there will be some mutual destruction of the drone supply like there would be with any artillery stock in traditional warfare, and whoever's left ends up winning. Like they're just...

[14:56](https://realalpha.app/v/EkuVqdj8O6E/?t=896) Well, it's very important to understand that there's no winners in war. By the time you have a drone battle of the scale I'm describing, the entire infrastructure of your side will be destroyed, the entire infrastructure of the other side will be destroyed. but these are lose-lose scenarios. Isn't there like an equilibrium, though, that that can also create where because of that mutually assured destruction, there's a detente, or is that?

[15:19](https://realalpha.app/v/EkuVqdj8O6E/?t=919) Well, I'm arguing that it's not a detente. It's a deterrence. Deterrence can be understood as I want to hit you, which I don't, but I want to hit you so much, but that if I do that, the penalty is greater than the value of me hitting you. And that's how deterrence works. That seems like a great advantage and upside of this move to sort of drones and automation that we don't have today. Well, there are many advantages to moving to drones and automation.

[15:49](https://realalpha.app/v/EkuVqdj8O6E/?t=949) One, they're much, much cheaper, right? They're much, much cheaper. Yeah. And two, you can stockpile algorithms. You can essentially learn and learn and learn. Remember, you can also build training data, right, that's synthetic, so you can be even better than the others. The final question I've been asked by our military is, what's the role of a traditional land army? And I wish I could say that all of these human behaviors can occur without humans being at risk.

[16:20](https://realalpha.app/v/EkuVqdj8O6E/?t=980) I don't think so. I think that the way robot war, essentially drone war, will occur is there will be these destructive waves, but eventually humans are going to have to cross a line they're going to have after we've depleted them so you're investing in this drone technology and then do you think optimists and humanoid robots are the next you know volley in this new warfare it's going to be a long time before humanoid robots which is what we see in the movies all day right be a very long time before we see that. What you're going to see is very, very fast mobility solutions, right? Air-based solutions, and also hypersonics, also things underwater. There's a lot of that going on. It's a different domain. If you look at the Maguro and some other boats that the Ukrainians used, they have essentially used USVs to destroy the Russian fleet in the Black Sea. This was crucial for them

[17:21](https://realalpha.app/v/EkuVqdj8O6E/?t=1041) because they needed to be able to export the grain from Odessa around, and it's like 6% or 10% of their economy. It's a very big deal, and they did that with drones. Eric, it seems like there's this overarching worldview that you have,