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Start free trial →Lex Fridman Podcast · Ideas & Essays · November 2026
Co-guest Preston Stewart had just described FPV drones as mountains of cheap, expendable munitions. Kofman puts a number on the scale of the drone war in Ukraine.
…infantry? What's the role of tanks? What is this gray zone? What does it actually look like? How many drones are floating above? What does it look like, as Preston was saying, for an individual infantry soldier to run through that? Can you paint a picture of some of the basic things here?
…fortifications. And they can do that on the spot. So there are mountains of these FPVs. There's a picture of Kim Jong-un, actually, North Korea, walking through a hallway of stacked FPVs. So these are the very small, low-cost, attritable drones, and they're being used. The numbers are staggering.
I'd say for FPVs, it's probably somewhere eight to 10,000 per day, just those, not including other types of tactical drones. And that would be for one side of the war. So, to give you a sense that these are hundreds of thousands of these being employed per month, these tried capabilities exceed all the numbers of personnel and equipment on the battlefield by very substantial.
And just to clarify, behind every FPV drone, there's a human being operating it. So, there's also from the news or something, there's a sense that autonomy is being utilized. It is not. So, this is something you guys talked about. There's usually humans behind the drones.
So, I'll be frank. Most of this war are systems that are remotely operated, but they are operated by people. It is actually quite manpower-intensive. And in fact, it's in many cases, if you look at both Russian-Ukrainian military, they had to build out substantial numbers of drone units and channel…
So, one of the other novel aspects of this war is so much of it is televised so that you could see videos from the drone perspective on both sides of that drone killing another human being. It takes one drone to accomplish that task, and it actually takes a lot more. Can you speak to that in terms…