The Intelligence: French fly, catch up
The Intelligence from The Economist
The Economist
4.5 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 11 December 2023
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Our correspondent joins the French air force on a mission in the Baltics, seeing increasing support for NATO just as the country draws down in Africa. Drones have by now become a standard feature of warfare, but in Gaza the demands are different—and Israel has much expertise to draw upon (09:36). And artificial intelligence predicts the structures of 2m brand-new materials (16:38).
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Transcript
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| 0:23.0 | One pound for the first month after 14 free days, |
| 0:26.0 | and 999 a month thereafter. |
| 0:28.0 | Cancel any time, tease and sees apply. The Economist. |
| 0:37.0 | Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host |
| 0:46.2 | Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events |
| 0:50.9 | shaping your world. |
| 1:05.2 | Drones have, as we've been telling you for some years, transformed the modern theater of war, and Israel has been a major force in developing them. We look at how drones are being put to use in Gaza. And one of the things artificial intelligence can do is look at the rules of chemistry and make |
| 1:17.0 | guesses about what should exist in nature, even if it's never been seen. |
| 1:22.0 | And an AI set to look at crystals has found more than 2 million new ones. |
| 1:35.0 | But first. I'm trying to get I'm going to go back when I'm going to go back |
| 1:44.0 | when I'm going to be in the United States. |
| 1:46.0 | Please make sure all carry-on bags are stillway. |
| 1:50.0 | In November, I took off from East, which is a military base in southern France to fly with the French armed forces to the Baltics in a French air refueling plane. |
| 2:04.0 | Sophie Better is our Paris Bureau Chief. |
| 2:07.0 | And shortly after we took off at dawn, we could see out of the window four fighter jets. These were Mirage 2000s and we were all heading together |
| 2:16.8 | to an air base in Lithuania which was about 1,600 kilometers away from France. |
| 2:28.8 | Mid-flight, the fighter jets were refueled |
| 2:32.1 | by the Air Bass A330 air tanker that we were flying in, |
... |
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