Money and war are no strange bedfellows, but it was a mystery to me what Schmidt was doing risking life and limb in a war zone. Was it for the thrill of ordering a martini during a missile strike? Was it for the borscht? Nope. Like the many businessmen, Silicon Valley sharks, and technologists who had been pouring into the Ukrainian capital in recent years, Schmidt was in town for the drones.
The day before I saw Schmidt dancing, Time published his op-ed about the wonders of unmanned aerial vehicles. "Observing life and death on Ukraine's battlefield, it's evident to us that modern warfare now transforms at startup speeds...," Schmidt wrote. "Conventional wisdom might posit the widespread use of drones would sanitize warfare, but the in-the-mud reality we witnessed debunks this."
He had that part right. Drones are the killing machine of the twenty-first century, combining the remorseless brutality of medieval weaponry and the sadism of video games. Now responsible for 70 to 80 percent of all combat casualties on both sides in the nearly four-year-old war in Ukraine, drones are single-handedly transforming modern conflict as we know it. The war in Ukraine isn't just about the return of Russian imperialism or the future of Europe and NATO -- it has also remade war itself. The Top Gun era is over. Today, battles are being fought not only by fighter jets but by thousands of small, often very cheap drones flying alone or in swarms and synchronized to hit targets -- sometimes even without the finely calibrated finger controls of a pilot.
Strategic equalizers, cheap drones are a perfect fit for the outgunned and outmanned Ukrainian forces, who have held off an invasion from a much richer and more populous nation. Thousands of quadcopters strapped with explosives dive into tanks and pester Russian troops; wooden drones that are built to evade sophisticated radar systems have struck oil plants near the Urals, hundreds of miles into Russian territory. They can be snipers, mobile artillery rounds, and psychological banshees, terrorizing enemy troops with deadly strikes that seemingly come out of nowhere.