Toy Soldiers

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This week, on the New Yorker Radio Hour, Bradley Cooper talks with me about his lifelong dream of conducting an orchestra, which he does in the new film Maestro. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Hey, it's Latif. One quick thing I wanted to say before we get going today. Despite everything that has been in the news. Despite the fact that what's happening in Israel-Palestine is on everyone's mind, including everyone on our staff, our episode today is not about that. But we did want to do one thing we just wanted to shout out at the top. That in situations like this, one where things are changing so quickly, when emotions are so heated, when good information is so hard to come by. The podcast we listen to is on the media.

You're listening to Radiolab from WNYC.

Hey, I'm Latif Nasser, this is Radiolab. Today. We're going to talk about war, and not the one that is front and center in the news right now. The you know, horrible things that have been happening in Israel and Palestine. Instead, we're going to talk about the other war that has been in the headlines.

Yeah, so I want to talk about the war in Ukraine.

OK, and quick note This story contains audio of combat that may not be suitable for our younger or more sensitive listeners.

Have you, like, have you been following it very closely?

I feel like I was at the beginning and then I kind of, I mean, not, not, not so closely lately.

Right, and I don't think you're alone, right? But it is still, obviously, you know, a live conflict. One that has been going on for over a year and a half now, which I don't think anybody really expected.

I mean, by all paper statistics, the Russians should have just walked over the Ukrainians in a few days, or maybe a few weeks. But people like Eric B. Villard here, digital military historian for the U..S Army Center of Military History, here in Washington, D.C. have been watching the war in Ukraine super closely.

And he says, Well, the startling thing is that, unlike any war in human history, you can literally watch this one play out step by step, almost in real time.

Yes, you know, honestly, a lot of it really is YouTube, YouTube. MM. Hmm, OK.

First person views of things like.

Infantry is advancing through, you know, miles and miles of trenches.

A lot of these are actually made by the Ukrainian army. Some of them have millions of views, really, and there's no way around it like they are disturbing to watch.

Yeah, I mean, people are getting killed. Let's not be coy about that.

I am going to play you some of these videos and well, the corpses in them are blurred out, They're awful, They're disturbing. They captured the war.

That's the one I'm thinking of.

Big like cost millions of dollars rain, hellfire, missiles, that's right, controlled from thousands of miles away.

Yeah, like, somebody in a basement in Las Vegas or something.

Yeah, right, right, yeah, those are not the drones we're talking about.

No, no, not at all.

These drones, he says, are.

Cheap costs, just like a couple hundred dollars used for commercial photography.

Oh, toy drones.

Yeah, basically, but at this point in the war, Ukraine is sending.

At least 10,000 of these drones.

Up into the sky.

Each month.

Jesus.

Right, so this is the scale of what we're talking about. Those individuals are now probably where that IED is suspected.

Well, you know. Predator drones fly up at like 30,000 feet and are controlled from thousands of miles away. Tracking down and sending back grainy video of squiggly little heat signatures on black and white monitors. These commercial drones, they hover at just like 200 feet, providing Ukrainian soldiers a steady, high-definition view of the battle lines right in front of them.

And some of these drones are literally they will fit in the palm of your hand. So you can just, you know, bring this out of your pocket, throw it up in the air.

And there's suddenly this little personal periscope floating above your head.

I see where the Russians are.

They're advancing on you take up your position now.

They start radioing in the exact coordinates to a Ukrainian artillery position, you know, somewhere in the rear.

You know, the guys with the big, big guns.

Saying, Who wants, who wants it?

And the screen starts lighting up with these.

Little puffs of white smoke, poom, poom, poom, poom.

As the artillery hits.

Throwing shrapnel.

But the artillery's a little bit off target, and so the drones help adjust our artillery.

I mean, the battlefield awareness is just unbelievable, unbelievable.

And I mean, this is Eric's whole point about why this war feels different and why it's gone on longer than anybody expected.

Yes, one of the reasons Ukrainians have done so well is, even though they've been outnumbered and outgunned for most of the war. Their ability to know what the Russians were doing, that's made all the difference.

And, oddly enough, this difference, it began with regular Ukrainian people, civilians, so back up to 2014 2015, hold on a second.

Ahem.

Sorry about that, no problem.

One, two, three. So what happened in 2014 and 2015 was basically Ukraine lost Crimea, eastern Donbass and Lugansk regions.

Russia, as we should recall, crashed across the Russia-Ukraine border.

Armored Russian vehicles burst through the wall of Crimea's Belbek base today.

And just said, This land is ours now, and there's nothing you can do about it.

So it became clear that the Ukrainian military wasn't quite ready, and it had capability gaps, such as not enough aerial coverage.

And so, according to military analyst Samuel Bandet, there.

Ukrainian private sector and Ukrainian volunteer technical communities stepped up. People started manufacturing short-range drones, basically in their garages, in their homes, on their free time.

Thinking Here's a great resource that we can afford to keep an eye on. The Russians.

And the Ukrainian government and its various ministries readily embraced this volunteer effort, holding meet-ups and competitions.

Just saying, you know, let a thousand flowers bloom, just like, go out, innovate, try stuff.

More recently, these volunteers have been converting these commercial drones.

Into essentially mini-bombers by 3D printing special equipment that allows soldiers to basically strap on a grenade.

Yeah, they're like these little claws that when the operator clicks, a button, opens up releasing the grenade.

So if the Russians leave a hatch of a vehicle open, drop it right in there.

Ukraine says it's ramping up the homegrown production of drones. They're carrying out attacks in Moscow, the Black Sea and on the battlefield.

The biggest drone attack yet inside Russia.

It seems to me we were prevailing over the Russians with drones again. Anna Kalyusina.

Today, Russia flies a large number of these drones.

Kamikaze drone striking a residential area in Kiev on Monday.

Raining fire on Ukrainian civilian and military targets.

And, you know, not one to be left out. The U.

One of the big early takeaways which I know is resonating with the army is that, even, you know, back in Iraq and Afghanistan, the command center is a bunch of tents. Well, you know, all the computers are, and generators and radar arrays.

And these temporary stationary bases were where they directed the battles from. But now today....

That's not going to cut it. You cannot afford the luxury of being in one place and setting up your tents yourself. No, you're just going to get killed. So suddenly you have to figure out a way to be on the move while the battle is going.

The U.

And what it is is a drone operator talking to the Ukrainians in the trench.

Because through the drone hovering just right above them, this operator, he's looking around the corner.

There's a Russian sitting 20 meters in front of you, Jesus, in a hole.

Throw a grenade in that direction and I'll adjust you so these hands pull out a grenade, pull the pin.

He says, OK, you threw it five meters too far, throw it again.

Throw it again.

Got him.

And the guys keep moving.

Right?

But again, what they've done is they've pixelated or fuzzed out the dead bodies, and so watching it feels both sanitized and brutal at the same time. But you know, these drone operators and soldiers, like, obviously they're seeing the real thing all the time in high definition. They can see their enemy and what's happening to them, often just around the corner. Or, yeah, cowering in a trench. And in fact, one of the things Eric told me was that these drones. They are not just changing how war is fought, but they are changing how the folks fighting are experiencing it.

In previous wars, you rarely saw the enemy, you know, until sort of the moment of decision. And in the 20th century, as weapons became deadlier, you often didn't even see the enemy at all. Like, if you look at the footage, for example, that the Americans took in the Pacific in World War II. There are literally only two or three examples that I can think of where a combat cameraman actually caught sight of Japanese soldiers in action, right?

But you know, this new kind of fighting, this kind of war where you can see so much of your enemy, Eric says. It's having this strange, unintended consequence.

And we'll get to that right after a quick break.

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Hey, I'm Latif Nasser. This is Radiolab. We're back with Simon Adler, who's been telling the story of just how crystal clear everyone involved can see the battlefield in the war in Ukraine.

Right, and just to pick things back up with Eric, he says. It's not just the clarity or the intimacy, but the fact that these guys are watching each other day after day, after day. That may be most powerful here.

You know, these drone operators, you know, are going up so often. They, you know, get to the point where, you know, in some cases, they're able to distinguish between. Oh, that's the guy who has the red boots, or that's the guy who leaves his trash outside of his dugout. So they're seeing the Russians as they're living, they're seeing them as they're cooking food and moving supplies and washing clothes and tending to wounded and all the other sort of pedestrian things that people still have to do in wartime.

He says Oddly, this new technology is almost making war like it used to be. Like back in revolutionary war days, when you actually had to look your enemy in the eye.

Especially those operators who are dropping grenades and other devices on Russian soldiers, you know, these Russian soldiers. Often they'll hear the sound of the drone, they will look up, so they will be looking up at the operator through the, you know, camera.

Now I asked Anna Kolyusna about all this. I wonder if any of the soldiers you've spoken to about whether having to look at the enemy so often, if that has changed their perspective on the enemy.

You know, the Ukrainians absolutely hate these folks that they see, rightly, you know, as invaders who, in some cases, have committed atrocities and, you know, destroyed their homes. But that is not the whole story.

Right, if I can jump in there, because it seems like your argument throughout all this has been. These drones have given us this incredible level of visibility and that has made it a lot easier to find people and therefore kill them.

Right?

But that with more visibility, maybe more humanity, comes through as well.

Right, does seeing the war on a more human level coarsen people to the effects of war? And then think of it more like, oh, well, it's just kind of like a video game. Or maybe inspire more sympathy, and that's an open question.

And with that in mind, Eric said he wanted to show me one final video I've. I've pulled it up here.

Yeah, let me see here, let me make sure that we've got. We're looking at the same thing, yeah.

You want to just set the scene a little bit. What is this video? where is it from?

Yeah, this is a video from a Ukrainian position that the Russians have been trying to seize for weeks, if not months. And, you know, it's from the point of view of a Ukrainian drone up above. Watching all this, you know, unfold.

As the video starts, the drone is sort of scanning the terrain below.

It's shell pack, bleak, you know, battle blasted. And then it starts zooming in on this sort of narrow band of trees, and there you see 12 or 15 Russian soldiers huddled down in this tree line.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Now these Russian soldiers who are in the trees, some are huddled in holes, others are hugging up against trees. And they're in a whole bunch of trouble. And don't know what to do about it. Because having seen the previous videos, you know it's coming, you know, this drone is is looking at these Russian soldiers, is radioing in their coordinates. And so basically, it's only a matter of time before the big stuff, these 155 millimeter Howitzer rounds. So the anticipation is almost palpable, because, kind of, and then boom, there we go.

And as the smoke slowly clears, it's carnage. In the video, you can see these pixelated blobs covering what are dead Russian soldiers? But you can also see that there is this one Russian guy still alive, still moving, yeah.

The Russian soldier gets up, takes off his Ak-47 rifle, puts it down, or sort of throws it down and takes off his hat or his covering. It's not even a helmet, it's just like a cap, and then he crosses himself.

Bends down and reaches into the guy's coat pocket.

Collecting personal effects, you know, possibly, you know, if it was a letter or a photo to send back. And then he looks at the sky. Did you see that? Yeah, he took something from the body.

One more thought before we go. Because, you know, the other question lurking here is, you know, how much longer will humans be the ones deciding to pull the trigger or not?

I was just talking with retired Major General Patrick Donahoe about this, and he's like, You know, the things that keeps me up at night is imagining a swarm attack. Not just one drone flying around with a couple grenades. But like you've seen this, like in some places where they have these drone LED displays, right?

Yeah, they're like drone firework shows.

Yeah, like, drone firework shows. Well, now, imagine that, and they're swarming on you like a bunch of angry hornets. And one step beyond that is, what about these things? Have AI on a cheap little, you know, memory stick inside and has all the information they need. What then?

Right?

Given how many AI tools were already used.

Once more, military analyst Samuel Bendet.

For data analysis, for image recognition, for speech recognition, for deciphering of communications, to do target tracking. And given the fact that Ukrainians really want a drone advantage, we're probably going to see some element, some iteration of that this year, or maybe even next year, if the war continues into 2024..

In fact, there are now reports they've already been used.

So I think in the near future they will have a very, very significant impact on how all forces fight.

This story was reported and produced by Simon Adler, with original music throughout by Simon Adler. Additional sound design by Jeremy Bloom, fact checking by Natalie Middleton and edited by Becca Bressler. Special thanks to Anna Kaliusna and her team for capturing that footage. Yulia Tarysuk for all her help with anything related to the Ukrainian language.

Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler.

Lulu Miller and Vlad Tifthaser are our co-hosts, Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Aketi Foster-Keys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Jnanasambadam, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Alyssa Jong-Perry, Sara Kari, Sarah Sambach, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. With help from Timmy Browder, our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.

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