A2 · Elementary
10 min
drone warfaremilitary technologyartificial intelligencegeopolitics
The Drone and the War: Machines in the Sky
El Dron y la Guerra: Máquinas en el Cielo
This week, Russia attacked Ukraine with drones and missiles, killing more than 26 people just hours before a ceasefire was set to begin. Fletcher and Octavio dig into how drones transformed modern warfare, the technology behind these machines, and what it means for the future of armed conflict.
Esta semana, Rusia atacó Ucrania con drones y misiles, matando a más de 26 personas horas antes de un alto al fuego. Fletcher y Octavio exploran cómo los drones cambiaron la guerra moderna, la tecnología detrás de estas máquinas, y lo que significa para el futuro del conflicto armado.
8 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| dron | drone | El dron vuela muy alto en el cielo. |
| alto al fuego | ceasefire | Los dos países firman un alto al fuego. |
| tregua | truce | Hay una tregua entre los dos ejércitos. |
| barato | cheap / inexpensive | Este mercado tiene frutas muy baratas. |
| objetivo | target / objective | El avión busca su objetivo en el mapa. |
| pantalla | screen | El piloto mira la pantalla de su computadora. |
| peligroso | dangerous | Esta zona es muy peligrosa en la noche. |
| autónomo | autonomous / self-operating | El robot es autónomo y trabaja solo. |
What caught me this week was the timing.
Russia killed more than 26 people in Ukraine with drone and missile strikes, and it happened hours before a ceasefire was supposed to begin.
Hours.
Sí.
Yes.
Rusia usa muchos drones ahora.
Russia uses many drones now.
Los drones son muy importantes en esta guerra.
Drones are very important in this war.
That's exactly it.
And I want to pull on that thread, because I think people hear 'drone strike' and picture something from a Hollywood movie.
The reality of what's happening in Ukraine is genuinely different from anything in the history of warfare.
Un dron es un avión sin piloto.
A drone is a plane without a pilot.
El piloto está lejos, en una pantalla.
The pilot is far away, on a screen.
Right, the basic concept is simple enough.
No human in the aircraft.
But what's happening in Ukraine is not simple at all.
Can you give listeners the picture of what a drone attack actually looks like on the ground?
Mira, hay muchos drones.
Look, there are many drones.
Cien, doscientos, en una noche.
A hundred, two hundred, in one night.
Atacan casas, fábricas, hospitales.
They attack houses, factories, hospitals.
That scale is staggering to me.
This week's attack killed 26 people and wounded more than 80.
And this is not a one-off event.
Ukraine has been living through this almost every night for years now.
Es verdad.
It's true.
Los ucranianos escuchan las sirenas cada noche.
Ukrainians hear the sirens every night.
Es su vida normal ahora.
It is their normal life now.
Let me back up for a second, because I think the history here is genuinely surprising.
Military drones didn't start in Ukraine.
The U.S.
was flying Predator drones over Afghanistan back in 2001.
But what Ukraine became is something nobody planned for.
En Afganistán, los drones son muy grandes.
In Afghanistan, the drones are very big.
Son muy caros también.
They are very expensive too.
Exactly, and that's the key shift.
A U.S.
Predator drone costs around four million dollars.
You know what the drones Russia is firing at Ukrainian cities tonight cost?
Some of them are closer to twenty thousand dollars.
Maybe less.
¡Sí!
Yes!
Los drones rusos son baratos.
The Russian drones are cheap.
El Shahed es un dron de Irán.
The Shahed is a drone from Iran.
Rusia lo compra mucho.
Russia buys many of them.
The Shahed-136.
That name came up again and again when I was reporting on this a couple years back.
It's essentially a small propeller aircraft packed with explosives.
Iran calls it a 'kamikaze drone.' The technical term is a loitering munition, which is a very sterile phrase for a very ugly thing.
El dron vuela, busca el objetivo, y explota.
The drone flies, finds the target, and explodes.
No regresa.
It does not come back.
It's a one-way trip.
And here's the part that I keep turning over in my head: Ukraine shoots most of them down.
Their air defense intercepts sixty, seventy percent on a bad night.
But the math still doesn't work in Ukraine's favor.
Claro.
Of course.
Un misil para destruir un dron cuesta mucho más.
A missile to destroy a drone costs much more.
Es un problema económico.
It is an economic problem.
That is perhaps the most coldly brilliant part of this strategy.
You fire a twenty-thousand-dollar drone.
Ukraine has to fire a missile worth half a million dollars to stop it.
Do that enough nights, and you bankrupt your opponent's air defense long before you run out of cheap drones.
Ucrania también tiene drones.
Ukraine also has drones.
Atacan Rusia con drones pequeños.
They attack Russia with small drones.
And that is the other revolution happening simultaneously.
Ukraine is flying consumer drones, the kind you can buy at an electronics store, and attaching grenades to them.
Soldiers are dropping improvised bombs from DJI Mavics.
A device built for wedding photography became a weapon of war.
DJI es una empresa de China.
DJI is a company from China.
Es muy famosa.
It is very famous.
Hace drones para turistas y fotógrafos.
It makes drones for tourists and photographers.
Which creates this surreal situation where the company making some of the drones being used in the war is a Chinese civilian technology firm.
DJI actually tried to geofence their drones, to block them from flying in conflict zones.
Ukraine and Russia both found ways around it almost immediately.
La tecnología cambia la guerra muy rápido.
Technology changes war very fast.
Los militares no preparan bien para esto.
The militaries are not well prepared for this.
That is a point I've heard military analysts make repeatedly, and I think it's worth sitting with.
The armies of the world spent the last century building tanks, training troops to operate tanks, writing doctrine around tanks.
And then along come these little propeller aircraft that cost twenty grand and can disable a tank worth four million.
En Ucrania, los tanques tienen muchos problemas con los drones.
In Ukraine, tanks have many problems with drones.
Los soldados tienen miedo.
The soldiers are afraid.
I covered a conflict where the big fear was the IED, the roadside bomb.
Hidden, invisible, impossible to predict.
Drones are the new IED, except they come from above and they can travel a thousand kilometers.
Mil kilómetros es mucho.
A thousand kilometers is a lot.
Moscú tiene ataques de drones ucranianos también.
Moscow has Ukrainian drone attacks too.
Right, Kyiv is about 750 kilometers from Moscow by air.
Ukraine has hit the Kremlin district, oil refineries deep inside Russian territory, airfields.
Things that would have required a full air force campaign twenty years ago.
Ahora, los drones son autónomos también.
Now, drones are autonomous too.
El dron busca el objetivo solo.
The drone finds the target alone.
And here is where it gets genuinely unsettling for me.
Autonomous targeting.
The drone uses artificial intelligence, cameras, pattern recognition, to identify a target without a human making the final decision.
We are at the edge of that territory and I am not sure the world has grappled seriously with what it means.
La máquina decide matar.
The machine decides to kill.
No hay un soldado, no hay una persona.
There is no soldier, there is no person.
Es muy peligroso.
It is very dangerous.
That is where you and I completely agree, and honestly that doesn't happen often enough to take for granted.
The international laws of armed conflict, the Geneva Conventions, they were built around the assumption that a human being pulls the trigger and that human being can be held accountable.
An autonomous drone breaks that entire framework.
Muchos países tienen drones ahora.
Many countries have drones now.
No solo Rusia y los Estados Unidos.
Not only Russia and the United States.
También Turquía, China, Irán.
Also Turkey, China, Iran.
The Turkish Bayraktar drone is worth a separate conversation entirely.
Azerbaijan used them against Armenia in 2020 and it was the first time the world really saw what a mid-size, relatively affordable armed drone could do on a modern battlefield.
It was a rout.
The Armenians had no answer for it.
El Bayraktar cuesta mucho menos que un avión de combate.
The Bayraktar costs much less than a fighter jet.
Es más fácil de usar también.
It is easier to use too.
And Ukraine bought them early in the war and made them something of a national symbol.
There were pop songs about the Bayraktar in Ukraine.
Which is a strange thing to say out loud, but it captures something real about how these technologies get absorbed into identity and narrative.
La guerra tiene sus canciones.
War has its songs.
Siempre es así.
It is always like this.
Pero las canciones no paran las bombas.
But songs do not stop the bombs.
No, they don't.
And the attack this week is a reminder of that.
Ceasefire hours away, and Russia launches a mass drone and missile wave anyway.
Whatever negotiations are happening, whatever agreements are being drafted, on the ground it looks like this: 26 dead, 80 wounded, one night.
Para mí, la pregunta grande es esta: ¿el mundo puede parar los drones autónomos?
For me, the big question is this: can the world stop autonomous drones?
¿Hay leyes internacionales?
Are there international laws?
The honest answer is no.
There are ongoing talks at the United Nations, a process around what they call Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, or LAWS, but no binding treaty.
The major powers, including the U.S., Russia, and China, have all resisted one.
The diplomacy is years, maybe decades, behind the technology.
La tecnología va rápido.
Technology moves fast.
La política va muy lenta.
Politics moves very slowly.
Este es el problema siempre.
This is always the problem.
I've spent a long time covering places where the gap between what technology makes possible and what human institutions can manage produces catastrophe.
This feels like one of those moments.
The genie is out.
These things are proliferating.
And I honestly don't know what the answer looks like.
Oye, quiero preguntar algo.
Hey, I want to ask something.
Antes dices 'ceasefire'.
Before you say 'ceasefire'.
En español, ¿cómo es esto?
In Spanish, how do you say this?
Okay, well, I believe it's 'alto al fuego.' Is that right?
Though I'm half-expecting you to tell me I've just said something deeply inappropriate.
Sí, 'alto al fuego' es correcto.
Yes, 'alto al fuego' is correct.
'Alto' significa 'stop'.
'Alto' means 'stop'.
'Fuego' significa 'fire'.
'Fuego' means 'fire'.
Stop the fire.
Stop the fire.
So it's literal.
Stop, fire.
Two words and you've got the whole concept.
In English 'ceasefire' is also built from two parts, cease and fire, but nobody walking down the street would recognize 'cease' as a normal word anymore.
'Alto' you'd know immediately.
También decimos 'tregua'.
We also say 'tregua'.
Es otra palabra para lo mismo.
It is another word for the same thing.
'Tregua' es más antigua, más formal.
'Tregua' is older, more formal.
Tregua.
That one I know from reading old texts about Spanish history, truces after sieges, that kind of thing.
It has a medieval weight to it that 'alto al fuego' doesn't quite have.
Same meaning, completely different feel.
Exacto.
Exactly.
Y con los drones, no hay tregua real.
And with drones, there is no real truce.
Los drones no respetan los papeles.
Drones do not respect papers.
Drones do not respect papers.
That might be the sentence this whole episode was building toward.
Thanks, Octavio.
Until next time.
Hasta pronto, Fletcher.
See you soon, Fletcher.
Y practica tu español, por favor.
And practice your Spanish, please.