Drones are changing the very nature of warfare. After playing a salient role in the recent conflict between India and Pakistan, unmanned aircraft stunned the world in Operation Spider’s Web on June 1, when Ukraine struck multiple sites deep in Russian territory. But are technological advances like drones and AI leveling the playing field or giving military powers an even greater advantage?
The answers to these questions are no longer theoretical. With conflicts playing out on multiple continents, the world has suddenly been thrust into the future of war. On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with military expert Mara Karlin, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who has advised six secretaries of defense. Karlin helped author and execute the National Defense Strategy in 2022, when she was deputy undersecretary of defense for policy in the Biden administration. Subscribers can watch the full discussion in the video box atop this page or follow the FP Live podcast. What follows here is a condensed and lightly edited transcript.
Ravi Agrawal: I have heard two takes about Ukraine’s audacious drone attack on Russia. One is that it showcased Ukrainian ingenuity in causing billions of dollars of damage to Russia. In other words, this was a watershed moment. But another school of thought suggests the attack won’t change the status quo in the war. What do you think?
Mara Karlin: This stunning operation by Ukraine is fascinating because it demonstrates the relevance of many themes we’ve seen in warfare for centuries. It’s still not entirely clear how many strategic bombers Ukraine destroyed. The Ukrainians are saying 40, while the Russians are saying it’s just a handful. So, this highlights the salience of information operations, which we’ve seen since time immemorial. We also see the continued importance of surprise. We see the criticality of strategic planning; the Ukrainians said they have been planning this operation for a year and a half.
It does not completely change the face of this war. It will make things harder for the Russians because these are not easy planes to replace. They are pricey and take a long time to develop.
RA: Reports that [Ukrainian] President [Volodymyr] Zelensky was personally involved in this decision, waiting for the right moment, are also notable. Do you have any sense of whether he held off on such an operation when [former U.S. President Joe] Biden was in office because he believed the White House wouldn’t want him to? I should note you were in the White House then, too.
MK: I have no idea. It’s quite possible that he was just waiting for the moment to be ripe.
I’ve been comparing Operation Spider’s Web to what the Israelis did with the pager attacks against Hezbollah last fall. They’re both spectacular operations. But frankly, the Israeli operation against Hezbollah, which injured at least a couple thousand Hezbollah operatives, felt like more of a game-changer for Hezbollah than Operation Spider’s Web’s impact on the Russians.
RA: But the Ukraine-Russia drone attack was David and Goliath. The Israel-Hezbollah attack was the opposite. Israel had more resources, which allowed it to innovate more and to infiltrate the supply chains. So, does more technology level the playing field or does it allow for asymmetrical uses?
MK: In the short term, it does help level the playing field. But the story of military innovation, frankly, is less about who gets the special capability or technology first. It’s more who’s able to integrate and scale it first and who’s really able to adapt their force to it. So yes, in the short term, technology helps the scrappy folks a little more. But in the medium to long term, that’s not definitive.
RA: It’s striking to me that drones have become so salient not just in Ukraine, but in so many other arenas. There’s Iran and Israel over the last couple of years and then, more recently, the conflict between India and Pakistan—two countries that have fought many wars before but never with drones until last month. It’s also telling that in each of these cases you have one or more nuclear powers involved.
MK: We have a lot more to learn about that brief India-Pakistan conflict, but it does demonstrate a couple intriguing things. One is what we call in wonky literature the stability-instability paradox. Effectively, India and Pakistan are nuclear powers, and they’re more likely to escalate below that threshold. It’s not at all clear why folks ultimately de-escalated. Was it the U.S. role, which became more active? Was it that both parties got what they needed? I don’t know.
But on drones specifically, my colleague Joshua White says drones are in the murky middle of how we think about escalation. You’ve got artillery on the lower end. You’ve got cruise and ballistic missiles on the higher end. And the murky middle is always the complicated spot.
RA: Let’s discuss nukes more. Has there been a shift in how many countries are thinking about their nuclear doctrines?
MK: The whole issue of nuclear weapons obviously took on greater salience over the last few years, not least because of Russian saber-rattling vis-à-vis Ukraine. It has been striking for me to hear how that dialog has shifted across Europe, across the Indo-Pacific, so now countries talk about getting latent capabilities or more. It’s increasingly becoming part of the conversation even in countries that might not typically discuss it, like South Korea, Japan, Germany, Poland, and with Sweden’s second-largest political party, which makes a lot of sense. If Ukraine still had nuclear weapons today, what would be the state of that conflict? Would Russia have even launched it? So, I find it intriguing that the dialog now is so loud among many who weren’t talking about it even five or 10 years ago.
These folks are largely U.S. partners and allies. For the last couple of decades, when the United States did defense planning, it thought about nuclear weapons as, “I don’t want my adversaries or my enemies to get those.” But now, how do you think about these weapons when related to your partners or your allies? Especially allies who you have an agreement of extended deterrence with but who are effectively saying, “We don’t totally trust that compact anymore.” It’s a different set of dilemmas now.
RA: So, in a sense, we might see decades of nonproliferation reversing, as some countries feel like they need nuclear weapons for their own security and safety.
MK: That’s right. As you probably know, the Brits and the French have had discussions about an extended deterrence proxy across Europe. But to be frank, they don’t have a ton of capabilities. So, there’s a question about how credible it would be. Nevertheless, the fact that that’s even a discussion introduces some real questions about whether this whole map needs to change.
RA: As a policymaker, Mara, what should the United States do to help countries feel safer with their conventional capabilities rather than thinking about nuclear options?
MK: The United States can do a couple of things. One is pretty obvious. Getting nuclear weapons capability can be expensive and complicated for your force. You have to teach sections of your military how to operate it, how to have thoughtful command and control, etc.
A much bigger set of arguments is how to help make extended deterrence credible. There are things one can do like stationing nuclear weapons on territories where there currently are none or having submarines with nuclear capabilities visiting ports and then advertising it. The United States did this in South Korea about a year ago to show that it is willing to move these platforms around. One could have more sophisticated exercises, maybe by having more integrated war planning with these allies too, so that there is credibility behind the idea of extended deterrence. It also can be really hard when the political dynamics get radioactive.
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RA: Let’s go to artificial intelligence. We hear a lot about how AI is affecting warfare, but it’s less clear how that is happening. Can you give us a few examples about how AI is being used? How will it transform warfare?
MK: That is definitely not an answered question yet. Two really good examples are in Ukraine and the Middle East, where we see that AI is speeding up warfare. It’s also enabling countries to better understand what they are tackling. The feedback loop of having information coming in from many different sources and trying to understand what’s credible and what the impact of various actions will be is absolutely being influenced by AI. Right now, there are a couple of conflicts around the world and a couple of challenges to deterrence that serve as laboratories for innovation. Over the next few years, I suspect we will learn what’s worked and what hasn’t. But at a minimum, AI has helped military planners better understand what’s going on and what the impact is.
I worry a bit about AI speeding up decision cycles too much. You could see folks not thinking through their decisions and feeling pressure to respond. Fundamentally, that could be quite dangerous to conflict.
RA: The image that just came to my mind was when Deep Blue and other computers entered chess. Human versus computer is one thing, but if you have two computers playing against each other, they are much faster so you can complete games in seconds instead of hours. And that could change the nature of the game, of course. But with war, there are so many more variables. If you’re worried, then that’s a reason for all of us to worry.
A through line in our conversation has been that technology can sometimes benefit smaller players, but not always. With AI, the bigger the player, the more access they have to cutting-edge chips and raw computing power. But in some aspects, could it level the playing field for smaller countries?
MK: That’s such an intriguing question. It probably would encourage countries to get new and better partners. If you are small and have limited access to resources, but you are part of a broader geometry, you can punch above your weight.
Throughout military history, it’s easier to focus on the capabilities that are obviously tied to a military. Thinking about more civilian technologies is harder. But that’s why the conversation on AI is so important. We shouldn’t think of AI automatically as military technology, but it’s shaping warfare, whereas drones are probably immediately seen as military technology. Of course, the interesting question will be, how do you pull all this together? If we were having this conversation 140 years ago, we would talk about changes with the railroad, the rifle, and the telegraph. Some of those are military; some of them are civilian. We would also talk about things like the agricultural revolution and democratic revolution. How do we include all these trends into what we see as the changing character of war?
RA: You’ve been repopularizing the concept of “total war.” What is it and why are you worried about it?
MK: Absolutely. In post-9/11 wars, we saw this relatively narrow conception of conflict, where war means fighting terrorists, violent nonstate actors, proxies, and militias. It’s not conventional conflict and definitely not nuclear conflict.
Over the last few years, whether with Russia-Ukraine or the conflicts spiraling across the Middle East, we’ve seen more of a total mobilization of militaries and societies. We’ve seen that you can’t just focus on the lower end of continual conflict like terrorists and proxies, but you have to worry about conventional conflict and the increasing salience of nuclear weapons, as well. You have to think about how to redefine deterrence, especially if you’re looking at the Indo-Pacific. How are you changing your relationships with different countries to present more complex approaches to deterrence? You really have to think about who else is on the battlefield, how are they shaping the war.
I’m not excited by the return of total war, of course. It just seems to me, when we look at major conflict spiraling or starting to spiral, folks are taking that much longer view. So, we need to have a much wider aperture when engaging in defense planning.
RA: Do you see the United States preparing in the ways that you’re recommending?
MK: I’m not entirely sure. On one level, I can say yes. There’s an increased focus, at least in terms of words, on strategic competitors like China. There’s also, though, been a hollowing out of the civilian force in the Defense Department. And that makes conducting civilian oversight and doing meaningful defense planning pretty hard. One of the important roles played by civilians in the Defense Department is to look holistically. Strategy making or defense planning is all about betting, hedging, and taking risks. They look across the whole force and the whole world to say: Where are we going to put our resources? Where are we going to accept risk? So, I worry a lot about that hollowing out.
RA: Of course, you’re describing [the Department of Government Efficiency] DOGE here. In terms of American preparedness, how does that affect us?
MK: Unlike any other military in the world, the U.S. military needs to be prepared for a wide range of conflicts anywhere, at any time. There’s finite resources, finite time, and finite attention. As you think about preparedness, there’s a lot that’s opaque. I’m sure you followed this golden dome idea, which the U.S. president is pitching as a massive missile defense shield. And as far as I can tell, it’s supposed to be all things in every way; it’s hard to imagine it being successful. It’ll be astonishingly expensive; it’s slated to be about a fourth of the defense budget. So, you’re not spending money elsewhere, and you’re effectively saying to our adversaries that America will just hunker down and focus on protecting itself. This is the opposite of U.S. defense planning through the ages, which recognized that we also needed to be able to go elsewhere so that challenges don’t come to us. We’re in a complicated time for U.S. military readiness, to put it lightly.
RA: It really is a paradigm shift. Let’s talk about China. In what military areas has China caught up with the United States?
MK: China’s made a lot of progress. Each year, the Defense Department puts out a spectacular document on China’s military power, which I recommend to readers because it is extremely thorough and detailed.
I would just take a moment to highlight China’s speed. The defense establishment consistently underestimates how quickly China can make progress, whether in ship numbers, nuclear modernization, or diversification. We should be a little nervous at how China’s progress is beyond expectations.
Then, of course, look at very specific capability areas. On nuclear, China is nowhere near having the number of nuclear weapons that the United States has, but it’s getting a lot. It’s getting them more quickly, and its doctrine is not entirely clear. Moreover, you don’t see a lot of interaction between the U.S. and the Chinese defense establishments. It means we’ll probably misunderstand each other. We don’t have those reps and sets in those engagements. So, I worry a lot about that, as well.
RA: And, notably, when [U.S.] Defense Secretary [Pete] Hegseth went to Singapore for the Shangri-La [Dialogue], the Chinese did not send their defense minister. So that was another missed opportunity.
When you look from afar at China’s ambitions on Taiwan, for example, there seems to be a multidimensional arms race underway. On the American side, they are trying to raise the costs of attacking or invading Taiwan, and on the Chinese side, they are working to lower those costs and build capacity. How do you see that playing out? What areas of military advances should we watch for?
MK: The Chinese leadership has said that they want to be able to militarily take Taiwan by 2027. It doesn’t mean they will, but they want to have the capabilities and the capacity. It seems to me that it’s not yet in their interest to do it because of concerns about U.S. action, how Taiwan might respond, and, frankly, if there’s a way to get what you want without using force. So all three of those dynamics are playing into Beijing’s thinking.
They probably learned from the Russia-Ukraine war of the salience of nuclear weapons and realized it was a smart investment for their defense establishment. But their military, which hasn’t engaged in any meaningful fighting in almost 50 years, probably needs to do a lot of training and figure out how to operate in a combat scenario.
I’m watching their progress in space capabilities, their investments on their surface ships or their undersea capabilities. Their cyber capabilities, of course, because if you take Taiwan’s critical infrastructure, you could really paralyze it. But the much bigger area to focus on is what does it look like for their personnel to engage in conflict? How can they think about the involvement of other parties like the United States? And then, how do they assess Taiwan’s military, which has also made some good progress?