Lawfare Daily: Does the U.S. Have a Drone Defense Problem?
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 11 March 2026
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On today’s episode, Lawfare’s Ukraine Fellow Anastasiia Lapatina talks to Fabian Hoffman, a missile expert and author of Missile Matters, and senior Ukrainian drone instructor Pavlo Litovkin about Iran’s shahed drones and what lessons the United States and its allies can learn from Ukraine as they rethink their air defense amidst the war with Iran.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Electronic Communications Privacy Act turns 40 this year, and it's showing its age. |
| 0:06.0 | On Friday, March 6th, Lawfare and Georgetown Law are bringing together leading scholars, |
| 0:11.1 | practitioners, and former government officials for installing updates to ECPA, a half-day event |
| 0:16.6 | on what's broken with the statute and how to fix it. The event is free and open to the public, in person and online. |
| 0:23.2 | Visit lawfaremedia.org slash ECPA event. |
| 0:26.4 | That's lawfaremedia.org slash ECPA event for details and to register. |
| 0:35.6 | Ideally, you would want to have some type of optimized, low-cost, affordable interceptor system in place |
| 0:43.3 | to deal with these, call them leakers, so those drones that leak through the initial air defense barrier, |
| 0:50.3 | and then to deal with them in an appropriate way. |
| 0:52.3 | And that's something that neither the United |
| 0:55.0 | States operates in significant numbers in the region, nor the Gulf states. It's the Lawfare |
| 1:01.6 | podcast. I'm Anastasia Lopatina, Ukraine fellow at Lawfare with Fabian Hoffman, a doctoral research |
| 1:08.1 | fellow at the University of Oslo and Pavlo Litovkin, |
| 1:11.8 | a senior Ukrainian drone instructor who's been teaching foreign armies and civilians |
| 1:16.1 | how to pilot and intercept drones. |
| 1:19.3 | We need to share expertise and world must put attention to us |
| 1:23.8 | because we passed through a lot of things. |
| 1:27.3 | And all of that rules, all of that approaches, |
| 1:32.5 | it's built on our blood, on our bones, someone's lives and we must deliver it to the world. |
| 1:45.4 | We're recorded two separate conversations, speaking about the Iranian Shahed drones |
| 1:50.0 | and what the US and its allies can learn from Ukraine as they navigate the war against Iran. |
| 1:56.5 | Here is my conversation with Fabian. |
... |
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