Text taken from the Telegram channel of darpaandcia
Commentary by Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin is in italics.
[ColonelCassad] Eric Schmidt: the wars of the future will be the battles of millions of UAVs with AI Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, during his speech at the Global Conference of the Milken Institute in May 2025 presented a radical vision of the wars of the future.
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According to him, wars will take place over the Internet with the participation of millions of UAVs controlled by artificial intelligence. He gave such an example: people sitting and drinking coffee in Moscow and Kyiv will remotely control robotic systems conducting real combat operations somewhere above their heads.
Schmidt said that the traditional paradigm of "man with a gun against a man with a gun", which existed for thousands of years, is forever a thing of the past. He particularly emphasized the complete senselessness of fighters with pilots on board and tanks in modern conditions. The figures given by him: a drone worth only $5,000 dollars can destroy a tank worth 5 million dollars, and American tanks cost 30 million dollars a piece.
According to Schmidt, the USA should study the experience of the Ukrainian conflict and abandon the purchase of obsolete weapons.
Powerful data processing centers are needed to control large swarms of UAVs. In his testimony to the US Congress in April 2025, Schmidt warned of the coming energy crisis: data centers will need an additional 29 gigawatts of energy by 2027 and as many as 67 gigawatts by In 2030, this would be enough to feed dozens of large cities.
The construction of nuclear power plants in the USA takes about 12 years, which is completely unacceptable for such pace of development of AI technologies. Therefore, the Americans are seriously considering two space solutions:
1. Taking data centers into space - placing the data processing centers themselves in orbit
2. Space energy generation - creating solar power plants in space with energy transfer to Earth via microwave radiationIn March 2025, Schmidt made "significant investments" in the aerospace startup Relativity Space and immediately became its CEO. This company specializes in the production of rockets using 3D printing. These rockets will be needed to deliver both equipment for data centers and components of solar power plants into space.
At the same time, the startup Starcloud is operating in the USA, which specializes in the space generation of electricity - the creation of orbital solar power plants and energy transmission systems to Earth. This is the second piece of the puzzle in the overall picture of space infrastructure for AI.
According to Schmidt's logic, the more UAVs with AI the warring parties have, the less likely a real conflict is due to the absolute unpredictability of the outcomes of such battles. He claims that when each side has a million drones, planning an attack or defense will become impossible without machine learning and AI. The result will be so unpredictable that people are simply afraid to start such wars. This should create a new type of strategic deterrence, different from nuclear deterrence.
Actually, millions of drones are being used per hour already in Ukraine. The number will only grow further, and the number of drones with a neural network will increase. There will also be a lot of ground drones in the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the next hour. It is still about tens of thousands per hour. For now.The unmanned revolution is far from over and it will surprise many more times, continuing to change the battlefield.