Building Defense Technologies to Protect Democracies | Torsten Reil, Helsing

**David Senra** (0:02)
Let's start with what we were just talking about before we started recording. What are your opinion is of the future of tanks and battleships?

**Torsten Reil** (0:10)
I think there's a big change happening. You can already see it in Ukraine, obviously, where tanks are barely being used anymore. The same is true for artillery systems. If you get yourself into a tank, your survival rate is very short. Apparently, the time that a Russian soldier survives now at the front is about 20 to 30 minutes. You can argue about whether that's correct, but it's probably roughly right in terms of ballpark. It probably gets even worse if you're in a tank. If you put yourself in a tank, you are one of the high priority targets for anyone on the other side. Those targets can be found pretty easily now with drones. They can be destroyed very quickly with small drones or with large drones if they're a little bit further away.
I think the era of tanks is probably over. For artillery systems as well, if artillery systems try to hide 40 to 50 kilometers away from the front to shoot, you can still find them with drones and you can attack them with drones. And again, they are high priority targets. So I think we're seeing a big change right now in warfare. And those lessons have been pretty apparent, I think, in Ukraine over the past, I would say, 18 months or so. And I think people are starting to understand them now.

**David Senra** (1:14)
What's killing the Russian soldiers so quickly? Is it all drones?

**Torsten Reil** (1:17)
It's drones. It's the ability, first of all, to see them with ISR drones. And then secondly, to strike them with either FPV drones or larger strike drones.

**David Senra** (1:26)
Wait, what's the difference between those two drones?

**Torsten Reil** (1:28)
So FPVs are basically smaller drones, quadcopters, that most of the time are controlled manually, like a remote-controlled plane.
And strike drones often travel over longer distances. And like the HX-2, which is our drone, quite often the AI-controlled.

**David Senra** (1:44)
You had a tweet that was interesting, where maybe this can tie into the dinner that we had a few years ago, where we had this fierce argument. And I left thinking that we hated each other. And now we've become friends. But you said something like, a hundred thousand of your drones could prevent a land war in Europe.
What does that mean and why? Why do you believe that?

**Torsten Reil** (2:04)
Yeah, I said this, I think maybe a year ago or so. And I got into a bit of trouble for this because apparently it was deemed to be provocative. But I still think that's the case. I think the deterrence that you get out of having a very large number of strike drones at your border, I think is pretty strong. And the reason is that if you turn up with tanks on the other side, let's say you turn up with 3,000 tanks, 100,000 strike drones that are able to navigate without GPS, that are able to find their targets, obviously specifically focusing on tanks, will destroy those tanks, I think, in a matter of hours. It's very hard to defend against.

**David Senra** (2:36)
If you were on the other side, you wanted to invade a country that had 100,000 of your drones, how do you do that?

**Torsten Reil** (2:43)
I think it's very difficult.
So using tanks would be extremely difficult because again, there would be targets immediately. You probably want to not use those kinds of vehicles. You probably want to use autonomous systems, smaller autonomous systems. And this is basically where everything is going. So you have autonomy now with drones. You have autonomy coming up now with autonomous fighter jets. And you also have it coming up now with land systems, particular robots.

**David Senra** (3:10)
So what do you mean by autonomous drones though? So it's all run by AI?

**Torsten Reil** (3:14)
It will be. At the moment, you still have a lot, especially in Ukraine, a lot of drones are still remote controlled. So you have thousands of very skilled drone operators.
That one scale, particularly one scale to the West and one scale to NATO. If you really want scale drone usage, they have to fly autonomously. You want to have a human surveying them, looking at what they're doing and being on or in the loop. But the drones themselves need to be controlled and autonomous. It's the only way to get to true mass. And it's the only way also to make it work pragmatically because we won't be able to train thousands and thousands of drone operators. We need AI to control them.