The ex-director of Google called on the US army to replace tanks with drones

The war in Ukraine showed that cheap drones changed the battlefield. The US Army should replace its fleet of “unnecessary” and expensive tanks with drones based on artificial intelligence.

This was stated by the former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt, reports RBC-Ukraine with reference to Bloomberg.

“I read somewhere that the US has thousands and thousands of tanks stored somewhere. Give them away. Buy drones instead,” he told the Future Investment Initiative in Saudi Arabia.

Schmidt, who founded an autonomous drone startup- kamikaze for Ukraine, told the audience that the war between Russia and Ukraine demonstrated how “a drone worth $5,000 can destroy a tank worth $5 million”.

According to Schmidt, Ukraine and Russia's drone tactics change every three to six weeks as the two adversaries rush to innovate. will lead to the abandonment of tanks, artillery and mortars,” he added.

However, Schmidt made it clear that he believed governments and armed forces in the West would be slow to adapt.

< p>“This system is absolutely not suited to that scenario,” he said, adding that despite the radical changes on the battlefield, organizational and political structures “are not changing.” Schmidt, who left his position on the board of Google's parent company Alphabet in 2019, has served for years as a liaison between Silicon Valley and the U.S. government. He was the first chairman of the U.S. Defense Innovation Council, advising senior defense leaders on new technologies from 2016 to 2020. He also chaired the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which in 2021 presented recommendations to Congress on how best to use AI for national security and defense. It's not all so clear-cut. Ukraine has used cheap drones to counter Russia's military superiority, but tanks have also been central to its fight. Israel's war with Hamas also showed that Israel, which possesses dozens of sophisticated drones, relied on infantry forces and sent thousands of tanks into the Gaza Strip in parallel with airstrikes.