Drone Warfare in Ukraine with Simon Shuster

Simon Shuster: So that becomes the kind of, I'd say at least one of the defining challenges, if not the defining challenge, how to get around, how to secure that link, that electronic link between the pilot and the drone. And that's when things get really inventive and strange.

Simon Shuster: He showed me the interface where there's basically a sliding scale, where you can select how automated you want the targeting to be. He told me that he has decided on his own basically not to release that technology to his clients until the government or some other authority comes up with a legal framework for who is responsible for pulling that trigger.

Simon Shuster: Ukraine smuggled a couple of truckloads of drones into Russia and then released them remotely. The pilots were sitting in Ukraine. They were flown into military air bases very far from Ukraine, inside Russian territory, and used to destroy Russian bombers, strategic bomber planes that are part of the Russian nuclear triad.

Simon Shuster: We have, for example, in the field of chemical weapons or nuclear weapons, where there's a very well-defined, decades-old legal international law architecture that limits how those can and should be used. Here, nothing like that exists. That's kind of scary.