This is CBS, I and the World, I'm John Bachelor.

I welcome Ronan Wordsworth of the geopolitical futures and analyst.

He's in Europe in Prague writing about drones.

Drones on the battlefield especially in the about drones.

drones on the battlefield especially in the Ukraine conflict.

However, drones are looking to be the weapon of choice of the future wars in conflicts, local and regional and strategic. We begin, however, with

the names of some of these drones and see if you find the pattern that Ronan is found in drone making. Ronan a very good evening to you.

I remember the story emerging early on that the Russian forces were

buying drones from Iran the Shahad 131 and 136 what were they for how are they used on the

battlefield good evening to you

good evening John thanks very much for having me. Yeah, you're right. So at the start of the conflict, we saw this new type of use for drones on scale, which was using these larger fixed wing drones or the charheads which basically can travel long distance and then a kind of dumb I would say drones in the fact that they're not once they're lock on to tell you can just shoot them down to the earth and they're not actually

necessarily having to be guided after that point and these are obviously then one-way attack drones which will call and the way

that they were then utilized by Russia was kind of in place of or in addition to

regular missiles where you then send a bunch of drones from the sky and

attack infrastructure without needing to use precision in the same way on the

strikes to hit a specific target but be able to cause damage to infrastructure

whether that's power plants or things like this that then triples the enemy in the combat so this was kind of the first time we've seen these drones used in that way to

attack civilian infrastructure targets. And then as you said they began to receive many of these drones from Iran under and now they're producing them

under license within their own country.

The critical detail I learned from your essay is that each of these drones from Iran or licensing to build them in Russia from Iran

cost $198,000 each. So we go immediately this pattern. The AQ400 scythe that's Ukrainian made. What is it?

So the scythe is like a kind of looks like an old Wright brothers kind of

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