General David Petraeus discusses autonomous warfare, drone technology and the military transformation driven by Ukraine. Ukraine offers the clearest evidence that warfare is changing in revolutionary ways. Unmanned systems now account for nearly 90% of Russia’s killed and wounded on the front line, with around eight million drones produced by Ukraine every year. Software is updated weekly and hardware every few weeks, a pace no Western procurement system matches.

Traditional armoured manoeuvre has effectively stopped, replaced by a dense zone of surveillance and strike drones along the front. For Gen. Petraeus, Senior Vice President of RUSI, this demands a complete institutional overhaul, covering doctrine, force structure, training, procurement and personnel, on a scale far beyond the changes he oversaw during the Iraq surge.

He argues the UK is unusually well placed to lead this shift, given its visibility into the Ukrainian battlefield, political continuity across governments, and a parliamentary system that can move fast, though entrenched interests in legacy platforms will resist the change required. This interview is featured in the latest episode of the RUSI podcast ‘Global Security Briefing’: https://www.rusi.org/publication/epis.