AI & Drones: Eric Schmidt On The Biggest Revolution In The History Of Warfare
AI & Drones: Eric Schmidt On The Biggest Revolution In The History Of Warfare
https://www.noemamag.com/ai-drones-eric-schmidt-on-the-biggest-revolution-in-the-history-of-warfare
Publish Date: 2026-06-16 10:12:00
Source Domain: www.noemamag.com
Eric Schmidt is the former CEO of Google and the former chairman of the U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI). He is now the CEO of Relativity Space, and has been heavily involved in developing AI-powered military drone technology for Ukraine through ventures such as White Stork and Swift Beat. He spoke recently with Noema Editor-in-Chief Nathan Gardels.
Nathan Gardels: The wars in Ukraine and with Iran can arguably be considered the first AI and robot wars in human history, involving drone warfare and AI-enabled precision targeting on a massive scale. Given what we’ve seen so far, how do you envision the battlespace of the future evolving?
Eric Schmidt: I’ve now made many trips to Ukraine over the last four years, and what I’ve seen there has changed my mind about almost everything I thought I knew about how wars are fought. This is the largest revolution in military affairs in history and most Western militaries have not yet absorbed what that means.
The first thing to understand is that this is no longer a war of platforms. It’s a war of systems. The right unit of analysis isn’t the drone or the missile or the launcher. It’s the integrated architecture that lets a military see, decide, communicate, strike, survive and update faster than your adversary.
In the future, the front line will be a new form of the no-man’s land of World War I, as sensors and drones mean that anything that moves can be struck. Second, every weapon will be supported by AI in the system I mentioned. Third, and this is the part I think people are slow to appreciate: In future wars, the humans will go in last, not first. Today the basic order is humans first, with the technology supporting them. In the next war, that principle inverts. You send the robots in first to absorb fire and clear the battlefield. As Bob Work, the former deputy secretary of defense, and my former colleague on the NSCAI, put it: In the…
