Q Do they ever have, like, Predator drones, like the Global War on Terror type of drone, or do they jump straight to quadcopter and kind of, like, leapfrog the technology?
A So, you know, you've had this, this, uh, Russian aggression war in Ukraine since 2014. Obviously the full-scale invasion was 2022, but even during that, that period before the full-scale invasion, there was some usage of drones for surveillance and, uh, dropping explosives. These are primarily still, like, small drones like what you're seeing now, uh, but this was not a, a proliferated technology. Then, when the full-scale invasion happened, uh, within a few months, the Ukrainians started Thinking about all these ways that they could use, you know, inexpensive drone technology to get a, an asymmetric advantage. And that is where FPV drones started becoming a really, really big deal. So they pioneered the, uh, really this idea of, you know, putting an explosive on a racing drone and using that as a precision strike weapon. There were instances of this happening in other places, but they really scaled it and they've really refined it. And then. Russia was, was much slower to take it seriously. Although now they're, they tend to, uh, in some ways outproduce Ukraine and they have a much, you know, more direct line to China, um, where most of these components are coming from. But since. 2022 and FPV is just starting to get used. Now it's reached an unbelievable scale. Uh, it's estimated Ukraine is going to produce four and a half million FPV drones this year. And those are ranging f…
AI assessment note: “These are primarily still, like, small drones... where FPV drones started becoming a really, really big deal”