The U.S. military should replace its "useless" tanks with AI-powered drones, Google's former CEO Eric Schmidt said on Oct. 30, Bloomberg reported.
Speaking at the Future Investment Initiative conference in Saudi Arabia, Schmidt said that Russia's war in Ukraine showed how a "$5,000 drone can destroy a $5 million tank."
According to Forbes, Schmidt has been quietly building a startup in the U.S. and Ukraine for the production of military drones. The White Stork project aims to manufacture unmanned aerial vehicles using artificial intelligence and resistant to GPS jamming, the outlet wrote.
The former chief executive of Google and ex-chairman of its parent company, Alphabet, is also backing the startup Istari, which seeks to modernize the U.S. military with cutting-edge AI technology.
"The cost of autonomy is falling so quickly that the drone war, which is the future of conflict, will get rid of eventually tanks, artillery, mortars," said Schmidt, who has been an advisor to U.S. defense officials on emerging technologies.
Schmidt believes that Western militaries are adapting too slowly to new technology trends of the modern-day battlefield.
Ukraine and Russia have pioneered drone technology throughout the full-scale war. Kyiv, in particular, has been using cheaper drones in innovative ways to offset its limited resource pool when compared to Moscow or NATO militaries.
Ukrainian drones have been used to devastate the Russian Black Sea Fleet, drop molten metal on Russian positions, and intercept Russian helicopters.
Some military experts warned against dismissing traditional weapon systems like tanks as obsolete, however.
"The wars in Ukraine and Nagorno-Karabakh (in 2020) both show that mobile armored platforms with firepower are still important," defense expert Rob Lee wrote in a War on the Rocks article.
The analyst connected the tank losses Russian forces suffered in the early phase of the war to inadequate use of combined arms and weak logistics.
Charles Fergusson
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