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MK Michael Kofman Michael Kofman Defense analyst

“There's been about a three to four month cycle of evolution of technology and tactics in this war between Russian and Ukrainian forces, and they iterate fairly quickly. … Ukraine has often led in terms of tactical development and bottom-up innovation because of the way Ukrainian units all experiment on their own. They're kind of all defense startups. They all have kind of their own R&D section. … Russian military was slower, but Russia had, in some ways, more capacity and tended to be better at scaling a solution once they identified it.”

Lex Fridman Podcast · Ideas & Essays · November 2026

“There's been about a three to four month cycle of evolution of technology and tactics in this war between Russian and Ukrainian forces, and they iterate fairly quickly. … Ukraine has often led in terms of tactical development and bottom-up innovation because of the way Ukrainian units all experiment on their own. They're kind of all defense startups. They all have kind of their own R&D section. … Russian military was slower, but Russia had, in some ways, more capacity and tended to be better at scaling a solution once they identified it.” — Michael Kofman, Lex Fridman Podcast

Context

The conversation was about fiber-optic drones, which can't be jammed. Kofman widens it to how both sides copy each other's innovations, describing Ukraine as the faster inventor and Russia as the better scaler.

Transcript

Lex Fridman Podcast Around 30:59 into the episode
Michael Kofman

…And once they saw that it was quite effective, impossible to jam, right? Because you literally have a cable attached to a drone, that the drone lays behind itself as it flies. Think of it like a very thin fiber optic cable filament, like on a fishing rod, the reel that you would use. It's about

Preston Stewart

that width, too. It's very thin.

Michael Kofman

…using an analog radio signal is closer to you than to the operator, the signal strength can be stronger to you. So you can start to receive the signal from it. And you have like a little screen that you can see the video feed of an enemy drone coming. And with a fiber optic cable drone, you have nothing in terms of warning because you can't perceive that signal. But the way I look at it is that there's been about a three to four month cycle of evolution of technology and tactics in this war between Russian and Ukrainian forces, and they iterate fairly quickly. So both sides have enough defense industrial capacity, enough capital, enough folks working on this that if one side is using something and it's demonstrated to be effective, they assume and anticipate that the other side is going to begin to imitate them and adopt those technology capabilities. And usually the interaction between the two, and I'm very broadbrushing this, it's been Ukraine has…

Preston Stewart

If I can add something to this likes, because it's an aspect of this that we just kind of, and Mike did it here, and I do it all the time too, is you just rattle it off like it's normal and it's so far from normal. The Chuika drone detector, what that means is it looks like an old Game Boy. It has…

Michael Kofman

It beeps and when it picks up the signal. And so when you're holding it, it's not a pleasant feeling for everybody else in the vehicle that you can see it's beeping. It's picking up the signal on the enemy drone. And I have had times where folks see me looking at the screen. It's a small screen…

Lex Fridman

So there's a surreal aspect to this. It feels almost like video game-like with real life life and death consequences. The soldiers on both sides are looking at screens, and then the whole world is looking at the screens at the soldiers filming the thing. It just feels like the nature of war is…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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