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PS Preston Stewart Preston Stewart Former U.S. Army officer and West Point graduate who breaks down war, conflict and geopolitics.

“It looks like an old Game Boy. It has a screen on it. So you're driving down the road in Ukraine, watching the screen. It turns on and it is the enemy's view of the drone. … It's literally watching the feed of the Russian soldiers that are hunting you. Just about everybody along the front has that right now. It's just a weird dynamic that's brand new to war.”

Lex Fridman Podcast · Ideas & Essays · November 2026

“It looks like an old Game Boy. It has a screen on it. So you're driving down the road in Ukraine, watching the screen. It turns on and it is the enemy's view of the drone. … It's literally watching the feed of the Russian soldiers that are hunting you. Just about everybody along the front has that right now. It's just a weird dynamic that's brand new to war.” — Preston Stewart, Lex Fridman Podcast

Context

Kofman had just described a handheld detector that picks up the analog video feed of incoming enemy drones. Stewart steps in to point out how strange this is, describing what soldiers actually see on the device.

Transcript

Lex Fridman Podcast Around 31:53 into the episode
Preston Stewart

that width, too. It's very thin.

Michael Kofman

…identified it. And this was Ukraine's frustration. That once the Russian military identified something as effective and they saw that Ukraine is doing something well, they would then allocate capital, industrial capacity, scale it, deploy it across the force in a standardized way, a bit faster.

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 a screen on it. So you're driving down the road in Ukraine, watching the screen. It turns on and it is the enemy's view of the drone. Is it your vehicle or is it a different vehicle? And you will watch, you can watch as the enemy drone comes in at you. For soldiers in tree lines, they might be watching and trying to decide, does that drone see us? Do we need to move? It doesn't see us. It's looking the other direction. It's literally watching the feed of the Russian soldiers that are hunting you. That is just about everybody along the front has that right now. It's just a weird dynamic that's brand new to war.

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…

Preston Stewart

I think we're at a transition point right now. This war represents Russia and Ukraine. It is not representative of what every war in the world would look like should it spark today, tomorrow, or next year. There's just very unique aspects to this. The lack of air superiority on Russia's part plays…

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

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