Drone arms race transforms war in Ukraine, with U.S. now learning lessons | 60 M [5:05-10:07]

This is like a kind of obstacle course for drones. Ukraine's military has set up drone training academies to teach the new technology. Patience and practice. Yes. I mean, practice makes perfect. Am I right? And the rapid shifts in tactics that come with it. This ground drone, mounted with a 50 caliber machine gun, recently held off a Russian attack single-handedly for 45 days straight. In January, three Russian soldiers surrendered to a similar robotic drone. Our main idea, we can send the robot and to not risk with a human life. So the faster it's a human life, it's the most important. In Ukraine says it makes more than 95% of its own military drones, harnessing talent from some unusual places. Roman Tukachenko is a former brewery engineer who founded a company called Tencore and developed these remote-controlled armoured evacuation drones to transport wounded soldiers. They gave us a demonstration at a military training ground and claimed that drones have saved hundreds of lives. How do you figure out what your next design needs to be? We are working with the end-users. End-users, that means the soldiers who are on the front line. Yeah. The soldier said we need a drone to do evacuations and you built it. Yep. That's how it works in Ukraine. We are designing for soldiers. The same drone base can be adapted to mount a 40 millimeter grenade launcher. Controlled from a bunker which could be hundreds of miles away. When it comes to drones, how quickly is the technology changing? Innovation cycle is roughly one week. It means from the point you're sent a drone to the front line, get the feedback, change something and get the new version. It could be as short as one week. Are the Russians also innovating? Yes, definitely. We have to admit it. Who has the edge? At this point, I would say that's equilibrium. Equilibrium in a drone arms race and both sides will take any help they can get. Air logics makes aerial surveillance drones for the Ukrainian military. Their production spread across more than 20 sites to minimize risk because they've already been bombed twice by Russia. It's a dangerous business, but the company recently secured over a million dollars from an American investment fund that specializes in Ukrainian drone technology. It's run by two former US Marines, William McNulty, who has a background in humanitarian work and Lenore Karafa, who built a career in finance after leaving the military. They told us their investors are wealthy individuals who support Ukraine. I worked at one or two jobs after the military that were more about the money than anything else. That is not my main motivation. You didn't join the Marines for the money? What's your main motivation? Service, patriotism, democracy, mission, and Ukraine takes all of those boxes. I fell in love with the Ukrainians when they arrived. How could you not just come to help the people that are literally fighting for what NATO has created for to stop Russian aggression? At a NATO training exercise in Estonia last year, the Alliance tested its vulnerability against drones. Around a thousand NATO personnel were defeated in the drill by a group of drone operators. Some of them, Ukrainian. Is this a revolution in warfare? It is. No question in your mind. No question. You know, in every war, like there is innovation, from going from horses to tanks to machine guns and then tactics evolve in response to that. And that is why it's just incredibly important for the US for our European allies to learn these lessons from Ukraine. There's a real risk that the US would lose its military supremacy if it doesn't adapt to modern conditions on the battlefield. We're going to be going up against these same unmanned systems that Russia is using against Ukraine. The US military told us it intends to hang on to its supremacy, not by buying, stockpiling, or replicating Ukraine's drones, but by tapping into the same passion for innovation the Ukrainians have. At the WiiSpot and Garrison in Germany. The cable channels you run through keep everything nice and flush.