Dexter Filkins on Drones and the Future of Warfare

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

Politics, Obama, News, Wnyc, Washington, Barack, President, Lizza, Wickenden

4.2 • 3.3K Ratings

🗓️ 25 August 2025

⏱️ 24 minutes

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Summary

Since the end of the Cold War, most Americans have taken U.S. military supremacy for granted. We can no longer afford to do so, according to reporting by the staff writer Dexter Filkins. China has developed advanced weapons that rival or surpass America’s; and at the same time, drone warfare has fundamentally changed calculations of the battlefield. Ukraine’s ability to hold off the massive Russian Army depends largely on a startup industry that has provided millions of drones—small, highly accurate, and as cheap as five hundred dollars each—to inflict enormous casualties on invading forces. In some other conflict, could the U.S. be in the position of Russia? “The nightmare scenario” at the Pentagon, Filkins tells David Remnick, is, “we’ve got an eighteen-billion-dollar aircraft carrier steaming its way toward the western Pacific, and [an enemy could] fire drones at these things, and they’re highly, highly accurate, and they move at incredible speeds. . . . To give [Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth credit, and the people around him . . . they say, ‘O.K., we get it. We’re going to change the Pentagon procurement process,’ ” spending less on aircraft carriers and more on small technology like drones. But “the Pentagon is so slow, and people have been talking about these things for years. . . . Nobody has been able to do it.”

Read Filkins’s “Is the U.S. Ready for the Next War?”

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0:51.2	You're listening to the political scene. I'm David Remnick.
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1:17.3	Donald Trump has done a 180 on Ukraine, it seems.
1:21.1	After insisting he would end the war very, very quickly with some kind of peace deal,
1:26.3	the reality of Russia's war seems to have sunk in.
1:30.6	I'm not happy with what Putin's doing. He's killing a lot of people. And I don't know what the hell
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1:45.1	Trump recently announced shipments of Patriot missiles and other weapons to Ukraine.
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