The US change in sides to ally with Russia has left Europe scrambling. Suddenly the continent's decades-long intertwining dependence on American military tech has become a vast liability, and one that needs to be urgently corrected.
Former Airbus CEO Tom Enders says the way to do this is to ditch American military tech, and quickly rearm having learned lessons from the conflict in Ukraine. He says a key insight from that war is that cheap drones can consistently destroy Russian systems that are orders of magnitude more expensive.
Coordinated by OneWeb, the euro version of Starlink, the continent's military should place tens of thousands of intelligent robotic drones along its border, and do this in a matter of months, not years.
The German government passed its €1 trillion ($1.1 trillion) rearmament budget yesterday, which also allows for unlimited future borrowing to fund further German military buildup. It seems vast robotic drone army battalions may be a thing of the future, and arriving soon.
Interview – Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). In German, use Google translate to read.
As the NATO alliance crumbles, Airbus's former CEO says Europe should ditch American military tech, and defend itself with a tens of thousands of intelligent roboticized drones on its eastern border with Russia.
byu/lughnasadh inFuturology
22 Comments
All these drones will end up getting used against the general population eventually. What do ya all think happens when we have a fully automated army and a few elites controlling it? We are digging our own graves.
Who the hell is saying the US has “changed sides”? Absolute bullshit. Just because the US is trying to get Europe to finally pay for and assume their own defense doesn’t mean the US has “changed sides”.
Let me guess he is a huge investor in Palmer Lucky
A roadblock EU likely run into is US is gatekeeping access to the much needed materials if they were to mass produce their own chips for drones and such.
Good. I mean, the general idea of Europe defending itself. Just putting that idea into words makes the previous status quo seem surreal… it wasn’t defending itself before?
And the answer kind of was no. Not sufficiently to be a real defense on its own.
Dating from Trumps first election he’s been all about getting Europe to bare the burden. He’s getting what he wants. And it should be what any European or American wants. We can certainly be allies but it should be as equals.
“tens of thousands” … how cute. Please add a couple of zeroes.
History sure does like to repeat itself….
* US economy tanking
* Rise of nationalism and antisemitism throughout Europe
* German military clamoring for funding in fear of Russian aggression
* A proxy war in Ukraine
Is this 1925 or 2025?
I had an argument with redditor stating this strategy years ago and he said I didn’t know what I was talking about.
What stops Russia from continuing the conquest to the west?
Ukraine is about to lose because it can’t hold anymore, the same will happen to other countries in the future.
It is now alliances against alliances rather than countries against countries.
Instead of it being between religion and race its now a matter of right or wrong.
Putin is in the wrong, maga is in the wrong.
What is the right thing to do?
As an American, please do.
It would cause our military industrial complex to crumble and after a trumultuous time maybe we’d shift those hundreds of billions of dollars to something like education.
After we finish surviving the current administration that is
NATO is not crumbling. The US is crumbling. The EU is not ditching the equipment we currently have, but we cannot trust the US currently and we need our stuff to work. Your president is obviously not understanding, who started the war in 2014 for which reasons. He is using your clout to strongarm smaller nations mafia-style, which are a big market for American companies at the same time. I can’t find words for this kind of stupidity.
Also, your government is interfering in our elections. Look at the support Musk gave to the AfD in Germany. In Eastern Germany, AfD is literally the nazi party reloaded. This is not exaggerated. In Eastern Germany, the party is literally led by the same people who burned asylum seeker homes in the 90s. One of them can be called a fascist by court ruling. They are so far right, that the far right parties from France and Italy don’t cooperate with them on the EU level. Yet “not hitler salute”-tech bro has no problems with supporting them. I mean, maybe these people really don’t know what they are doing – I don’t think so, though. This is a huge threat. The Russians push our fringe politicians in order to destabilize our European societies. Now your government also plays a role in that. It is a major, major attack. Nothing else.
We no longer craving US defense tech is all a result of huge trust issues and doubts regarding the sanity and general competencies of the orange man (yes, he is now called “Orangenmann” in Germany) and his cronies and that for obvious reasons.
That’s why we pump 1 billion into our own industry now. Well done. I hate that it came to this. The American culture industry made me feel like we are one. There is just some annoying stuff between us, taxes, borders, passports, some laws, nothing more. Well, no. It is obviously different. Good for my EU portfolio, very sad though.
Germany becoming the dominant power in Europe is playing right into the Russian plan. If you read the Foundations of Geopolitics, bolstering Germany to be the lead military power and establishing a particular relationship with them is one of the objectives of Russia
Former CEO of Airbus, who absolutely gut a buttload of shares in his exit package, says buy more Airbus military tech? Oh he does surprise me! Next up, the CEO of BAE says American military tech sucks!
Politically yes this may be unsurprising also, and he may be right, but I don’t think he’s exactly impartial either is he.
This is the dawn of the Era of the Drone, and buying a bunch of old fashioned strike fighters is just throwing money away. Even cruise missiles are looking a bit antiquated and they’re much more useful than fighter jets or bombers.
So leaving out the part where America is a turncoat with no honor who can’t be trusted, there’s other reasons not to buy America’s hardware. It’s all about to be as useful as a battleship in WWII or a pre-Dreadnaught battleship after Dreadnaught launched. That is to say, totally useless and suicide for the crew.
**tl;dr AI drones is a shit idea. You know why it’s a shit idea? Because it’s really obviously a shit idea.**
You don’t have to go all Hunger Games to be horrified by this. AI is, currently, very limited. Heck, even the AIs will tell you that.
For one thing, they lack common sense. All it takes is for some badly worded request for things to go to shit.
Here’s what ChatGPT had to say about this:
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The idea of defending Europe with tens of thousands of AI-enabled drones has some fundamental problems, many of which tie directly into our past discussions about AI limitations. Here’s a breakdown of the key issues:
1. AI Decision-Making is Not Mature Enough for Autonomous Lethal Force
**Lack of Contextual Understanding**: Current AI lacks true comprehension. It recognizes patterns and reacts based on trained datasets, but it cannot fully grasp intent, deception, or complex battlefield dynamics. This leads to a risk of misidentifying threats or overreacting to ambiguous situations (e.g., mistaking a civilian convoy for an enemy force).
**Reinforcement of Faulty Logic**: As we discussed^^Below with AIs misinterpreting human intent (e.g., business AI talking to military AI and interpreting “eliminate competition” literally), swarms of autonomous drones could reinforce each other’s flawed conclusions, escalating situations unintentionally.
**No Moral Reasoning**: AI does not “understand” war crimes or ethical dilemmas in the way humans do. Without strict, fail-safe oversight, an AI force could commit actions deemed legally or morally unacceptable (e.g., striking a hospital due to bad target classification).
2. Operational Risks and Command & Control Issues
**Jamming & Hacking Vulnerabilities**: A massive drone fleet would be highly dependent on communications networks and cybersecurity. If an adversary (e.g., Russia or China) successfully hacks or jams the drones, they could:
Disable them en masse, rendering Europe defenseless.
Turn them against their own forces or civilian infrastructure.
Use AI-generated deepfakes or deception tactics to manipulate their target selection.
**”Black Box” Decision-Making**: AI models often make decisions without clear transparency into their reasoning. This means that if drones malfunction or misfire, military leaders may not be able to explain why it happened—or how to prevent it from happening again.
3. Escalation Risks & Unintended War
**Accidental War Trigger**: AI has no strategic patience or ability to interpret diplomatic nuances. A drone swarm might react aggressively to border violations, electronic spoofing, or accidental incursions, triggering full-scale war before human commanders can intervene.
**Lack of Proportional Response**: Humans consider the consequences of their actions, sometimes choosing non-lethal deterrents over immediate destruction. AI, unless specifically instructed otherwise, might always escalate to maximum force.
**Fast, Uncontrollable Feedback Loops**: AI war systems react faster than humans—potentially so fast that decision-makers don’t have time to intervene. This could create rapid, unplanned escalation where both sides retaliate automatically, leading to an uncontrollable AI-driven war spiral.
4. Logistics and Economic Strain
**Cost vs. Effectiveness**: Tens of thousands of autonomous drones would be an astronomically expensive undertaking. AI models require continuous updates, expensive sensor hardware, and human oversight.
**Supply Chain Fragility**: Producing and maintaining AI drones at this scale would require rare materials, chip manufacturing, and robust maintenance infrastructure—all of which are vulnerable to economic and political disruptions.
**Replacement Cycle**: AI drones would be highly expendable, but they’d also require constant replacement due to wear, losses, and obsolescence, making long-term sustainability questionable.
5. Ethical & Legal Challenges
**Accountability Gaps**: Who is responsible when an AI drone malfunctions and kills civilians? The manufacturer? The military operator? The politicians who approved it? There’s currently no clear legal framework for this.
**Public Backlash & War Crimes Risk**: Autonomous AI warfare is likely to be deeply unpopular with civilians and politicians. If European AI drones kill Russian civilians, that could create a massive PR and diplomatic disaster—especially if it turns out no human actually approved the attack.
Final Thoughts
While AI drones will absolutely be part of modern warfare, a fully autonomous AI-driven military strategy is currently a disaster waiting to happen. The technology isn’t advanced enough, the risks of unintended escalation are too high, and the cybersecurity vulnerabilities are severe. A more human-in-the-loop approach—where AI assists but does not fully control lethal decisions—would be far more viable and ethically defensible.
It’s ironic: people pushing for AI-driven war assume AIs will be perfectly logical and precise, but as we’ve discussed, they are neither. If anything, they introduce new risks of catastrophic failure that traditional militaries never had to deal with.
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The ‘business AI talking to a military AI’ refers to a screenplay I’m working on, where I’ve used ChatGPT as a reference on AI abilities. An AI/human war that starts when a corporate AI misinterprets a “Big Dick Energy”^^TM CEO’s request to “destroy the competition” literally and gets a military AI to carry it out. Neither does anything wrong. The Corp AI is asking the military AI for guidance, it doesn’t know war, the military AI assumes any request for lethal force it receives has been vetted. All by design…
I bet he has some new exciting products he’d like to show us as well.
That certainly seems to be the direction warfare is heading…
There was a great film “Pentagon wars” which is treated as documentary by everybody related to military business.
Trump is weakening NATO… exactly as Putin wants. What an amazing coincidence.
>The US change in sides to ally with Russia has left Europe scrambling.
Man, propaganda is becoming insanely easy to spot.
Alliance or not, drones are mass produced everywhere. Wars are forever changed… and this just got me thinking how normalized it is now. Wish there are no wars at all