Lawfare Daily: Does the U.S. Have a Drone Defense Problem?

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1:01It's the lawfair podcast. I'm Anastasia Lapitina, Ukraine Fellow at Law Fair, with Fabian Hoffman, a doctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo and Pavlolytovkin, a senior Ukrainian drone instructor who's been teaching foreign armies and civilians, how to pilot and intercept drones. We need to share expertise and world must put attention to us because we passed through a lot of things, and all that rules, all of that approaches, it's built on our blood, on our bones, someone's lives, and we must deliver it to the world. We recorded two separate conversations, speaking about the Iranian-Shahed drones, and what the U.S. and its allies can learn from Ukraine, as they navigate the war against Iran. Here is my conversation with Fabian. So Fabian, and your latest newsletter, which is called Missile Matters with Fabian Hoffman,

2:04will link it below for our listeners, you discuss how the Iranian-Shahed drone theoretically should be quite easy to defeat, but in reality they've proven to be quite tricky targets to deal with for the U.S. and its allies. So let's just start with that. Can you just explain the basic characteristics of the Shahed drone, and why intercepting it can be a challenge? So in principle, it's a pretty simple airborne vehicle, it's rather large, it's not very stealthy, it flies at pretty low velocities, at least compared to cruise missiles, or especially ballistic missiles, they're choking us, sometimes they say, if you have a radar that's suitable for picking up these things, and you point it at a Shahed, it's going to light up the radar monitor like a Christmas tree, a New Year's Eve. So there's nothing that will stop you from picking it up on radar, if you are in the vicinity and you have somewhat optimized gear to deal with it.

3:05And that's the problem in the Middle East, that these states, they invested billions and billions into missile defense, but they focused on what they perceived to be the primary threat, which was Iranian ballistic missiles, and they do not really have optimized gear, optimized systems to deal with this long-rich drone threat, which in principle, right again, paradoxically it should be much easier to deal with than the ballistic missiles, but if you don't have to ride systems in place, then it becomes a challenge. And the other factor of course is, and this is what we already know from Ukraine and elsewhere, it's just the mass. So if I launch a critical mass of these systems, no matter how well-defended your airspace is, there's always a probability that some of these Shahed-type drones will get through and cause some level of damage, and this is exactly what we're seeing playing out in the Middle East right now. Since February 28th, Iran has targeted almost a dozen countries, most of them in the Middle East, with many, many hundreds of its Shahed drones.

4:08And to understand that we're still working with limited data because of operational security and other factors, but to the best of your understanding, how are these countries coordinating the response and what systems are they actually using to shoot down these drones? Yeah. So basically, I think you can conceptualize it in terms of two defensive barriers that they have, you know, more or less on the hot hot bases put up to deal with these long range drone threats. The first one is a barrier or an air defense system consisting of manned aircraft. So that is manned aircraft, either helicopters or fine jets operated by the Gulf states themselves. So also, many by the United States, which are very active in the region of course, and of course, also Israel, that are flying manned Saudis to intercept these incoming drones. So that could be an F-15E, that could be an Apache helicopter, that could be an F-16. All of these different manned aircraft have been demonstrated to be active in the region

5:13right now and active in intercepting incoming long range drones. And they intercept by, you know, at least the numbers that we're seeing. And of course, we have to be a bit careful with that. But I think by a large, the battle damage reports also indicate that most of them are intercepted in this initial stage. So most are intercepted by manned aircraft. They're using a range of ammunition, you know, helicopters, they can use their guns. So this can be very cheap, maybe a couple hundred, couple thousand US dollars per intercept. The F-15s and the F-16s also, they've been seen using sidewinder. So this would be a more expensive air-to-air missile. But also many are apparently using APKWS, air-to-air missiles. These are the rather cheap air-to-air missiles that are also used by Ukraine and have been demonstrated in terms of their effectiveness over there. So you know, can be more or less expensive and most drones are intercepted at that stage. If some slip through, then you get to the stage where the Gulf states and partially the United

6:15States, if it has the systems in place on the ground, has to rely on surface-to-air missiles. So this could be Patriot. This could be the South Korean system that the UAE operates or some other type of system. And as many commentators have pointed out, if you get to that stage, it can be very expensive to intercept the long-range drone, especially compared to the price of the drone itself. With a Patriot missile costing potentially up to four million US dollars and a drone costing something around 20 to 30K. So in that sense, it doesn't make perfect sense to allocate these missiles, but if your alternative is that the drone gets through and hits the target, potentially a radar costing hundreds of millions of US dollars, as has apparently happened, in that case, you still probably would want to allocate your Patriot interceptor. So yes, it's not ideal doing that, but very often alternative would probably be bad. So in that sense, the cost-effectiveness argument is not always very straightforward, but

7:20ideally, you would want to have some type of optimized low-cost, affordable interceptor system in place to deal with these column leakers. So those drones that leak through the initial air defense barrier and then to deal with them in an appropriate way. And that's something that neither the United States operates in significant numbers in the region nor the Gulf States, which I have talked about investing in this type of capability prior to the war, but the procurement processes have proved too slow. So just to make this point clear, there has been a lot of chatter in the media and on social media about the US and Gulf States using these hyper-expensive Patriot missiles to shut down these very cheap drones. It is happening, but it's very much the minority of the interceptions, right? So it's not the go-to method or the primary method, is that right? Exactly. It's absolutely not the go-to method. It is an option of last resort. I mean, they will do everything in the power to avoid that, but sometimes you cannot

8:22avoid it, right? Sometimes you then probably have to choose between okay, letting the drones slip through or accepting that you now have to allocate a fairly expensive interceptor and then probably most of the time they will choose, you know, unless it's clear that the drone is very far off any critical target or it's cleared, it's already damaged or something like that, they will choose to intercept it and for good reason. Also in your writing on the subject, we've talked about area defense and point defense. Can you just describe the difference and what it means for this context in the Gulf? So as the name suggests, area defense is about defending large areas, large swaths of territory from incoming threats, whereas point defense, that's really about protecting a relatively small footprint of territory or an individual facility even. And in the context of the Gulf states, basically this first air defense barrier, right, manned

9:22aircraft, patrolling the area, sometimes traveling dozens or hundreds of kilometers to the target to intercept it, and that's really an area defense system, right? And that's needed because the Gulf region is so big, the territories are so large and the attack vectors, as we call them, from which the shy type drones can come in, are so many that really you need to have systems in place where you have, you know, a large protected area and a manned aircraft, they can offer that and it's much more difficult with surface to air systems. So very often than the surface to air systems, also like Patriot, right, it's still a fairly significant range, depending on the Patriot interceptor that is being used, it's, you know, 60 kilometer radius, but it's obviously, you know, no comparison to a fighter aircraft that can fly hundreds of kilometers to intercept the target. So that is really more point defense in nature, right? So then I'm no longer interested in protecting, you know, an entire country or an entire region.

10:27This is really than about protecting very specific critical facilities that need an additional redundant layer of air defense. And you know, this is then also what we are, what we're seeing right now play out in the ongoing conflict is that, okay, you have this first, I would say this first, you know, very critical barrier of area defense, but then not all possible targets in the region are protected also by a point defense system, right? So I mean, some of the Gulf states there are fairly small, right? So Bahrain and the UAE probably they can cover most of their territories with Patriots, but for a state like like Saudi Arabia, for example, that's really, really difficult. Same as it is for Ukraine, by the way, right? And this is then another reason why when some of these shy type drones get through, why they will necessarily cause damage because you not always have a second redundant layer of point defense in place to defend against them.

11:30And so basically, right, this also means that if you want to have an effective defense against these long range drone threats, yeah, you need both, right? You need some type of area defense. Right now we're relying broadly on manned aircraft for the task both in Ukraine and in the Middle East. In the future, I think it might be more elegant to rely on unmanned aircraft together with a fairly cheap air-to-air interceptor capability, as this will bring down the costs quite significantly. And of course, also free up, you know, the manned aircraft for other, perhaps for critical tasks. While at the same time, you need to have them blazing or some type of point defense system around your critical targets where you say, okay, this is a target that really, really cannot afford to lose like hundreds of millions of dollar expensive radar, for example, right? So here it would have been really appropriate to have some type of point defense system in place. And the fact that it wasn't, that's, you know, a critical operational failure on the side of the Americans and the coalition partners. Iran has also been, of course, sending ballistic missiles at the Gulf countries and the United

12:34States and Israel have been trying to destroy the launchers that they're using to do that. Is the US also trying to hit Shahed launching sites or Shahed factories? Is that a tactic that could work? Yeah, they're definitely doing that. So we, we assume that most of the Shahed are launched from trucks. Those are smaller trucks than the transport or rectal launchers that launch the ballistic missiles. So they're more civilian-sized, I would say. But these are also actively being hunted. And there are, you know, several videos uploaded on social media by Sencom and by the Israeli Air Force that show the destruction of these trucks sometimes of secondary explosions, very clearly indicating that, you know, something explosive was in there. So that is done. We, we assume very strongly and we also know to some extent that the US is bombing, you know, these production facilities. Some are a buff ground, many are underground.

13:34So this is when the B2 and the B1Bs, the intercontinental range bombers are flown in from the intercontinental United States all the way to the Middle East and back. And they drop, you know, large amounts of fairly heavy munitions on these underground facilities to penetrate deep into the mountain ranges and then cause destruction. Of course, an issue here is that given that these sites are located underground, it's not straightforward to do what we call a battle damage assessment. So it's very difficult to tell now is the site actually destroyed or not, you know, even harder, of course, for us, what I'm called, civilian observers of the war without access to classified information. But even I guess for the United States or Israel, this would be very difficult unless they have some type of human intelligence on the ground that can confirm or deny the destruction of the facility. So how do you so far assess the response of the US and its allies to these attacks? How are they handling it? Because of course, the result of this reporting about the very problematic mathematics of

14:39it all and using very expensive systems to intercept really cheap ones and how that doesn't make sense. But at the same time, the interception rates are quite high, right? The interception rates are, you know, up to 90% and higher. So how do you assess what's really going on? So I mean, this is the funny thing, you know, if you these days, if you're on Twitter or other social media, it's all the tech pros discovering the economics of air defense. And then that this can actually be, you know, disadvantages and, you know, something that people who follow this have known for decades, but of course, you know, they have to reinvent it the way the same way they have to reinvent everything, just making it worse. So from an observational perspective of the public space, that's deeply frustrating. I mean, from a military perspective, I think the United States and Israel, they perform, you know, and this is really for a military perspective. So operationally, they perform as expected and of course, also the coalition forces, they perform as expected if not slightly better.

15:41So I think especially the tail hunting mission, right, like hunting those transporter erectal launchers that has been pretty successful. Of course, a lot is what we call the the fog of war. So we don't have, you know, perfect insights on what's going on on the ground. But I think the numbers that demonstrate that there are reduced launches of both ballistic missiles and long range drones, they show a fairly significant decrease in the availability of Iranian launcher capabilities for both ballistic missiles and long range drones. That is, was of course the strategy, right, because the United States, unlike the tech pros, they knew long before that, you know, you can't just counter Iranian ballistic missiles with defensive capabilities that's just not going to happen. So this was the strategy all along. And it's again, it's playing out as expected and maybe even slightly better. The big challenge, right, and this is removed from the, from the battlefield, where the US and its forces together with Israel and others are performing very well,

16:47if not exceptionally, is translating this military success into a lasting political success. And I'm not a Middle East expert, right, so I'm not even trying to predict how this war will end on a political level or the best and worst case scenarios, what they could be. But I think also for me, it's pretty apparent that just striking targets, right, targeting itself, that's, ideally, it's a means towards an end, right. It is what you do in order to achieve the political objective that you're working towards. But you cannot treat the targeting, the process of targeting as an end in itself. And this is, of course, a bit the risk that I and I think many others are seeing that, you know, just because the United States may be bombing more targets and also bombing them more successfully, does not necessarily mean this will also be a political success in yet. You've mentioned Interceptor drones, which is kind of the elephant in the room here because, of course, these are the technology that Ukraine and some other companies abroad have developed

17:50and that Ukraine has been using actively for the past few months and they really seem to be the most cost effective and the most efficient way to hundreds of heads, these Interceptor drones. Could you talk a little bit about this technology and sort of how it differs from everything else that the US is currently using? Yeah, sure. So, I mean, these Interceptor drones that are, these are one very interesting solution that Ukraine came up with. And basically, it's an evolutionary design, right. So, Ukraine has had great success using FPV drones in general for a variety of purposes. And at one point, they also use them to intercept airborne vehicles. First, you know, ISR-type drones. And at one point, also, these larger long-range drones like Gueran. And from that point, it then evolved, you know, moving from a manned Interceptor drone system, where you have a pilot that's in the loop that's manually steering the drone into the incoming long-range drone towards an unmanned system, where you have an onboard camera, right, an infrared

18:52secret, for example, that an autonomously guides itself or guides the Interceptor drone into the incoming long-range drone. And for Ukraine, that appears to have been, you know, pretty successful. They're now intercepting large numbers of incoming drones on an almost daily basis with these types of pretty cheap Interceptor drones that, you know, depending on the system, only cost between 1000 to 5000 US dollars per shot. So, that's, of course, extremely cheap, right, even cheaper than the Shia-type drones themselves. Of course, these systems also have limitations, right, this is also something, always something I'm saying, you know, something is affordable for a reason. And often, greater affordability comes with a lack of capability. And the question is, of course, right, the remaining capability, is it enough? It appears in the Ukrainian context, very often, this appears to be the case. But, you know, some of the issues with these Interceptor drones, for example, are that they're pretty slow, right? Sometimes they are as fast as the

19:53long-range drone itself or slightly faster. But they do not, for example, have the speed of an Interceptor missile. And this reduces what we call the kinematics of the Interceptor. And that means, for example, that if you want to have a high chance of intercepting the long-range drone with the Interceptor drone, then you have to have pretty good early warning, right? You have to know that the drone is coming, you have to know from which angle, because your ability to maneuver once the drone is in the air to counter the threat, that is pretty limited, right? So, again, this does not mean that these Interceptor drones are bad, not at all, right? They are proven battle-tested systems that Ukraine demonstrates again on almost daily basis that they are very good. But there are no magical silver bullet-type solutions that will be perfect for all types of scenarios. But they could be very useful right now in the Middle East, right? The same way that other types of affordable point defense systems could really bolster the Gulf State missile defense system.

20:58Ukraine is actually not the only country making these Interceptors though, right? In fact, there is an American company that makes a system called Merrups, which is being widely used in Ukraine, and as far as I understand, it's actually even better than the Ukrainian models, or though it's also more expensive, around $15,000, I think. And so, my question is, how much do we know about which companies in which countries are developing similar technologies and sort of what's the lay of the land of this industry, this field in the West? It's super dynamic, and there are very many companies that are working on this outside Ukraine. So, I mean, in Europe, you know, you have many missile startups, you have Cambridge Airspace, you have Frankfurt technologies, you have Titan, you know, just to name a few that are working on some type of affordable interceptor technology. Not all of them are building drone interceptors, but you know, like the idea of making air defense affordable to deal with the bars of long-range drone threats. That's obviously very

22:00prevalent right now, and many companies are working on this in the United States, in Europe, and probably soon also elsewhere, right? I would be confused if there would not also be startups, you know, emerging potentially in Asia at one point. So, so I mean, you know, by no means are they the only ones? Where do Ukrainians right now, and then also, you know, companies like Merups that are using their products in Ukraine, they have the big advantage, right? That they are the only ones that can put on their product, the label, battle tested, right? That it's been proven under operational conditions. And of course, that all the other companies, that all these other companies that just mentioned, they are of course also trying to flood Ukraine, right? They're not stupid, so they're also trying to get there and to battle test their systems. So, it's very dynamic, it's very competitive, but yeah, so I mean, from a buyer's perspective, this is a pretty decent market probably in the coming years, because you will have many companies competing for these

23:03contracts. While at the same time, of course, for the companies, this will also be very lucrative, because at the Middle Eastern states, for sure, they will accelerate this procurement process, following this war, maybe evil while it's ongoing. And you know, many European states, they also know that they have to invest in this type of capability. So yes, there are many companies, but the size of the market is also pretty large. Of course, many of these companies are Ukrainians startups. And President Zelensky told the New York Times recently that he's been fielding requests from many countries in the Gulf and also the United States to help with air defense. And he said that Ukraine has already sent both its experts and the actual interceptor drones to Jordan to help protect Miller kind of military bases there. And then Reuters also separately reported on March 7 that the US was sending this Merub system to the Middle East. As far as I understand, that's the first time the US military will be using that particular system. They didn't have a contract with

24:07the Pentagon before, but clearly now, now they do. So Fabian, should we expect that this shahed type low cost, long range drone will continue playing a big role in future wars. And what does that mean for sort of for NATO readiness and planning and what systems Pentagon will be procuring in the next many years? Yeah. Yeah, I also don't know the details. They are 100 percent my my understanding is or was that the United States, you know, they were also working on this. They were having you know, testing contracts and development contracts were ongoing. So that was clear interest, but there was no, you know, set winner yet that received a full-on procurement contract. And of course, the United States also never operationally use the system. So this might be the first time now that the United States will actually actually operationally use an interceptor type drone pretty fast. But yeah, so this, I mean, this long range drone, Fred, it's probably not going anywhere, at least for the foreseeable future. And I think it's very difficult to predict what's going to happen in the missile space

25:10more largely. And then also the long range drone space, you know, in the next or like after 10, 15 years, but I think at least for the next five to 10 years, I think everyone knows that this is a an expanding threat that NATO states have to respond to. Both in terms of acquiring capabilities that can deal with incoming enemy long range drones cost effectively. Well, of course, also building up these capabilities yourself, because you want them to saturate your adversaries air defense system, you want them to strike deep into visor territory. And you also just want something right to respond offensively, because as we said in the beginning, everyone knows, you know, with the exception of some unfortunate European decision makers, it seems that you cannot respond to incoming long range and deep strikes persistently just with defensive tools that doesn't work. At one point, you have to strike back, right? So this is another reason why

26:13why European states most likely, and I mean, they are already interested right now, but I think this this dynamic will also accelerate that, you know, European states, they will also acquire these types of long range drones in large numbers. And of course, then you get action reaction spirals, right? I mean, this is also something we cannot forget. So as Europe ramps up production, you know, Russia will probably continue, also try to accelerate to the extent that it can, which might be much more limited for Russia right now, given that they're already pretty much overmobilized in their defense industrial space. But yeah, so by large, this is something that will not leave us for the coming years, quite the opposite. It's going to be more important. Fabian, thank you. This was very interesting. Yeah, thanks so much for having you. And now my conversation with Pavlov Lytovkin. So, Pasha, I just talked to Fabian about the threat that they ran in. She had type drones reposing in the Gulf and in the broader Middle East region right now. But you and I both know that

27:17in Ukraine, Russia has been using these Iranian drones for many years. The first time Ukraine intercepted as a head drone was in the fall of 2022. So again, it just woke me through how Ukraine developed an air defense system that it has now to counter these long-range drones from those early months of the war to now. Yeah, thank you for this question. That looks like a big racing, big competition, because usually it's too team. And everyone trying to keep the ball on their side in the gates of the enemy. And Shahid drone was the really big threat for us, unexpectedly, because we've been prepared for the rocket missiles, ballistic missiles, and they started to use this tool, this weapon, in a really efficient way. We couldn't put them down by expensive type of air defense, like Patriot rockets and etc, because it's like

28:20trying to put down bicycle by flat like comparable prices and it would exhaust our economy. What happened next, we implemented the mobile air defense group with the machine guns. We trained how to put them down, we created simulators, we created really good training for that, and we become efficient. And in some part of time, some scale, we had when air sirens came, we we've been relaxed because usually it meant that they will put them down. After that, they decided to create new solutions, and they changed tactics, and they started to fly higher and dive from the sky on the cities, on the critical infrastructures and etc, etc. And kind of simulating a ballistic

29:25missile in a way, right? And our drones, our machine gunners, air defense, they couldn't hit them, and we started to search the solution. And I've been a witness how our developers in drone industry started to create interceptor drones, which now is popular and still efficient at this part. And we have again this gap where we can be more relaxed against the Shaheed drones, because now we can intercept, I bet, I don't know exact numbers, but it's like more than 95%. And I saw the efficiency of the groups who graduated courses that I provide, and like they have really good result. And we built an amazing system of correlation between the radar, between the

30:26groups, and mass producing, mass training of them allow us to cover the cities and infrastructures. Also wanted to add that, now we're waiting for the new, so we know that they have some modifications for their drones, with the reactive, like with the jet engines, it would lead to the increasing of speed. And we try to predict what would be next, how to intercept the next evolution of their weapons. And how often do the Russians modify Shaheed, like what's the speed of innovation? Every few months or? It depends. I know that they already launched the jet Shaheeds, but I don't remember their tactical technical characteristics. At this moment,

31:31I guess they're searching for solutions, and you know, war is pretty dynamical, it's really hard to spectate. And the best way to do that is to come to the frontline and personally ask the guys who's working with this direction. I didn't have communication, I guess, for a month. And that's kind of a lot. Yeah, and that's kind of time a lot can happen. I also wanted to ask about the tracking of Shaheeds and the Raiders, because I know that when Russia just started using Shaheeds, it was a big problem that the Raiders steady grain had, couldn't really catch them, because the Shaheeds were flying way too low. And they're like very small and very slow moving targets. So the Raiders could like, you know, pick up on a bird and think that it's a Shaheed and stuff. So Ukraine had to develop a whole acoustic system, right? We had to develop a new tracking system. Yeah, this is yes, the sensors and around Ukraine, we have thousands of them. And they drank late, so they have a sensor, PSO, and a lot of them, they

32:41sedated in different places. So they cover whole Ukraine. And they triangulate the the enemy drone. And inside of the system, they have a library, sound library, and AI, which is detect the exact type of the enemy UAV. And that's why we have all of these applications with the threat where I have a rate sirens coming and warn people about the threat. Can you describe the basics of how the interceptor drones work, how the technology works, and sort of how that solution is different from every other other solution we've had this whole time? So if you will open YouTube and you will write there like high speed drone, it's pretty open sourced and the main secret, I guess, or it's like, no, the secret is the system system, which we built

33:48communication efficiency work safety because in interceptor drone, usually you do have explosive because you need to fly as close as you can and activate the explosive inside to put it down. The charge must be recommended for sure without any fragments to not to hard the objects below. So that's the big and huge work, a strategic work because you need to predict a lot of stuff which can happen. But the base of the drone, it's like multi-copter and depends on the model. You can understand that nothing specific inside of it you don't have. Like maybe constructional aspects, aerodynamical aspects, it depends on the model. There are now many Ukrainian companies making these interceptor drones and testing them inside

34:50Ukraine and there's also the American interceptor drone system, Maribs, which as far as Anderson has been used in Ukraine for many months and has been developed here and battle tested here. And also as far as I know, it's the most effective system so far, so it's better than the Ukrainian systems. Could you just talk a bit about what are some of the most common systems we have right now with Ukrainian and how it compares to the American one? I'm not sure that it's better than the Ukrainian one because mirrobes cost more than 20,000 or 15,000. Around 15, yeah. And if we will take Stink as an example, it costs 2000. That's a Ukrainian one. Yeah, but they're slightly different because mirrobes it's more plain that drone you launch it with this special cut-apult and Stink, it's like drone with the

35:50vertical lift off. So it's multi-copter. It's two principally, practically different approaches, but you can have the same result. You can hit the drone. And I heard from the training that now we're trying to implement, not only show the practical aspect how to fly with that because it's required also some skills which is pretty narrow-directed. You also must know how to orient, how to work with the radar, and I heard that during the training, three different accidents where cadets were training, they hit the Shahid without exposing part because during the training it's forbidden to use it. They just got into the engine and hit it. So it's really interesting how it could be. Now efficiency from the cheaper drones,

36:54like Ukrainian one, they have the same results. You've been kind of dropping hints about the fact that you've been training a lot of people and I do want to talk about that because you've been teaching foreigners both inside and outside of Ukraine how to operate and intercept drones. Just talk a bit about your work and what your experience has been and sort of how foreign armies and civilians are perceiving this whole thing. Like usually my audience, my trainee, that's people who can't stand behind the activity here so usually they are amazingly conscious to join this battle voluntarily and they have a lot of motivation to be more efficient. Some people without ability to continue to be in the trenches, like an infantry member and they want to get

37:55something new and be integrated into the armed forces of Ukraine. They prepare themselves, like usually people tell us that like foreigners they will come, steal technologies and run away but the people with who I work, they fighting and using this technology, this instrument because I usually tell that that's one of the instruments. You can use it in this situation, that situation and you can implement it in your work and everything depends on your vision and how you will use which instrument you will use to accomplish it. So it's really interesting. My way started in 2023 when I voluntarily went, started to search in training for myself because I understood that war won't end in two, three weeks, days and it will continue and I wanted to be prepared. I

38:56checked my military ticket and I understand that I am aviation engineer. I do have a bachelor degree in this sphere but the aviation being not developed since COVID time. We had a lot of specialists, much better than me after university and I understood that I need to change direction from the big aviation to something smaller and drones industry. They were pretty narrow, pretty close society was involved in that like cinematographers, hobbyists and etc and I've been connected to that sphere and people told me yeah we started, we started to use it in the frontline and we want to create FPV school, one of the first or first I didn't know who was but when they invited me to the course I updated my knowledge in a point how to use it in the military conditions because I never

40:02been connected to that and never expected I would and after that I started to be instructor and concentrated and absorbing information from different direction of the frontline and it's like geometric progression. Each month you create 80 people, they went to the frontline, after that they bring to you, you always in touch, you help them to use to that condition to adapt their work to particular conditions they have and it's really a really interesting experience to me and after that I concentrated only on foreigners because we had big demand, they saw how we work and we helped to gather like FPV combat groups and help them to be integrated into the armed forces or some squads they have and I also worked in the direction how to

41:08adapt how to build the communication of them with the Ukrainian troops to not to have problems to to work effectively more efficient because the communication is the key especially in UAV sphere because friendly fire could be not only in the infantry with the rifle, also FPV drone can be directed to the wrong direction. Well considering what's happening in the world right now and how Ukraine has been building requests from foreigners to help and teach other countries on droid defense, I'm sure you're going to be very busy. In the next couple of months and years. Yeah, I'm already already busy. Yeah, you're probably going to be more busy. But thank you so much that you found the time for us, Pasha. Thank you. Thank you so much that you are opening and explore this topic to people because we knew that

42:12it will be high demand and we try to communicate it as well but you know people usually put attention to something when it burns and now everything what it hits their home. Yeah, and we need to extinguish this to cut the fire because that's the global problem. How to regulate this? If you will forbid it no, so now Sky around the European countries is closed just like our ego I just get known about that. Maybe it will pose the problem but to be honest it's the second question how you will detect the pilots, yeah like these terrorists or etc because they can use optic fiber drones, they can use whatever they need and we need to

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