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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Drone Founders Argue Autonomy, Scale, and Software Speed Decide Future War
- Ryan Tseng and Adam Bry describe how they entered defense drones, with Tseng motivated by mission and his Navy SEAL brother and Bry by a lifelong interest in autonomous flight and a wish to avoid traditional defense contractors.
- Both say drones create massive cost asymmetry and are transforming warfare, citing Ukraine, where small drones are used by the millions each year while US programs run at only thousands.
- They argue China's manufacturing ecosystem is a formidable gap, but that the US can compete through AI, autonomy, and rapid software deployment, since mass without intelligence tends to produce grinding attrition.
- Lessons from Ukraine, including GPS jamming that defeated early systems, show that electronic-warfare resilience and 24-hour software updates are decisive, and that slow government software pipelines are unacceptable.
- On autonomy and ethics, they say human judgment remains important and human-machine teams are currently more effective, but that game theory means the US must lead rather than cede AI dominance to adversaries.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasCheap drones create a cost asymmetry the US military hasn't fully absorbed.
Adam Bry says a system costing a few thousand dollars can destroy one costing millions, and that inertia toward large exquisite systems persists even as the military starts to pivot.
US drone procurement is off by about three orders of magnitude.
Bry notes Ukraine uses millions of small quadcopters per year while US programs buy single-digit thousands; Tseng suggests adding a zero to quantities, and Bry says that means trading away legacy systems.
Mass alone doesn't win; it must be intelligent.
Tseng argues that history and Ukraine show mass can become attrition, and that autonomy lets forces find, fix, and finish targets at scale.
China's manufacturing depth is a serious gap but not insurmountable.
Bry says it's an ecosystem of expertise rather than just cost, while Tseng calls it fearsome; both see US strength in software and AI as the path to compete while reindustrializing.
Real battlefields demand electronic-warfare resilience.
Bry says Skydio's first drones in Ukraine failed because Army requirements ignored EW, and Tseng recounts V-Bat losing GPS at three feet, leading to a GPS-free re-architecture within 24 hours.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesI think a modern conflict, and you see this in Ukraine, becomes basically like a software writing fight, and the speed at which you can write it and deploy it really matters.
— Adam Bry
I think AI is the, the most important technology really in the history of humanity. And a world where our adversaries have it and we don't is not a good one.
— Adam Bry
There's a difference between mass, um, and effect.
— Ryan Tseng
I think the security challenge of our time is whether or not we can mobilize the bureaucracy to go reach out and pick up what's on the table
— Ryan Tseng
We're literally off by like three orders of magnitude, I would argue, relative to, like, what, you know, evidence suggests the modern battlefield demands.
— Adam Bry
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
