This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Revnik.

Donald Trump has done a 180 on Ukraine, it seems.

After insisting he would end the war very, very quickly with some kind of peace deal,

the reality of Russia's war seems to have sunk in.

I'm not happy with what Putin's doing. He's killing a lot of people.

And I don't know what the hell happened to Putin.

I've known him a long time.

Always gotten along with him,

but he's sending rockets into cities and killing people, and I don't like it at all.

Trump recently announced shipments of Patriot missiles and other weapons to Ukraine.

Now, throughout this conflict, we've often talked as though the fate of Ukraine depends entirely on what the U.S. is willing to send them.

But there's another story here.

Ukraine has been inflicting huge losses on the Russian army, the gigantic Russian army, largely with drones, drones that are dirt cheap and disposable and can be made by the Ukrainians themselves.

Some are as small as a couple of pounds.

Staff writer Dexter Filkins has been reporting on this for The New Yorker, and it's a story with huge implications.

We may not have taken it on board quite yet, but we have entered a new era where we certainly cannot take U.S. military supremacy for granted.

Dexter, you've published a remarkable piece on the future of warfare, and I want to really get into it with you.

We tend to think of war as soldiers on the ground and tanks and brigades

and divisions and the warfare that we're seeing and not only in Ukraine but all around the world

is changed and changed utterly. What does war look like today? Very, very different, as you said.

So, like, yeah, fewer soldiers and fewer big tanks and big ships and more drones and more robots

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