Join Julia and Jackie in this bonus episode as they discuss what they’ve learned throughout the podcast, including what this means for the Trump administration and the future of defense innovation.

Join Julia and Jackie in this bonus episode as they discuss what they’ve learned throughout the podcast. Who are the new defense influencers that will shape America’s unmanned arsenal? What does this all mean for the Trump administration and the future of defense innovation?

The episode looks at what unmanned the US is currently buying and what it should buy for a war against China.

How is the US responding to unmanned innovation across the globe? This episode looks at what unmanned systems the US military is currently investing in and then turns to experts to ask what they think the US should be investing in. These interviews highlight a debate between different characteristics of war—precision vs. mass, attrition vs. maneuver, quality vs. quantity, and argue that too little emphasis is put on how these systems allow states to manage the long term economic and political cost of warfare.

How will the US respond to new experimentations of unmanned systems?

The US built an expensive, exquisite, and highly controlled inventory of unmanned systems for the wars on terror. What would happen to that arsenal when faced with a new political world of a rising China, an expansionist Russia, and a nuclear North Korea? Enter today’s world where the unmanned investments of the war against terror may no longer feel relevant for the wars of today. As AI and autonomy advances, we are seeing new experimentation on the battlefield with small quadcopters, increasingly autonomous land and naval mines, cheap drones and cruise missiles, hypersonic ballistic missiles, and an increasingly crowded and important space domain. How will the US respond? In this episode, we discuss Ukraine, China, and Houthi rebels and talk to those leading the ideas and decisions about technology in the American military. How will autonomy shape the future of war and what should the US invest in?