(Bloomberg) -- Google’s former chief executive officer Eric Schmidt is urging the US military to replace its fleets of “useless” tanks with drones powered by artificial intelligence.
“I read somewhere that the US had thousands and thousands of tanks stored somewhere,” he told the Future Investment Initiative in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday. “Give them away. Buy a drone instead.”
Schmidt, who has founded a startup building autonomous kamikaze drones for Ukraine, according to reports by Forbes, told the gathering the Ukraine-Russia war has demonstrated how “a $5,000 drone can destroy a $5 million tank.”
Ukraine has been using cheap, off-the-shelf drones to counter Russia’s military supremacy, but tanks have also been central to its fight. The Israel-Hamas war has also seen Israel — which possesses scores of sophisticated drones — rely on infantry forces and deploy thousands of tanks to the Gaza Strip in parallel to its air raids.
Schmidt, who left his board position at Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. in 2019, has for years acted as a liaison between Silicon Valley and the US government. He was the inaugural chair of the US Defense Innovation Board, advising senior defense leaders on emerging technologies, between 2016 and 2020. He also led the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which in 2021 made recommendations to Congress on how to best deploy AI for national security and defense.
Ukraine and Russia’s drone tactics change every three to six weeks as the two enemies rush to innovate, Schmidt said.
“The cost of autonomy is falling so quickly that the drone war, which is the future of conflict, will get rid of eventually tanks, artillery, mortars,” he added.
Still, Schmidt indicated he thinks governments and armed forces in the West will be slow to adapt.
“The system is precisely wrong for this kind of a scenario,” he said, adding that despite the radical changes on the battlefield, organizational and political structures “are not changing.”
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