This transcript is from a CSIS podcast published on May 9, 2025. Listen to the podcast here.
Andrew Schwartz: To get to the truth of the matter about what CSIS’s Future Labs is doing, particularly in Ukraine and tracking the Russian firepower strikes in our new Russian Firepower Strike Tracker, we have with us none other than the director of the Futures Lab, Ben Jensen. He’s also a senior fellow in the Defense and Security Department here at CSIS and a professor at the Marine Corps University.
Welcome, Ben. This is great having you. I can’t wait to get into this.
Benjamin Jensen: Hey, thank you for having me. Excited to break down some interesting, complex issues with you, Andrew.
Mr. Schwartz: All right. So tell me about the Futures Lab Firepower Strike Tracker. What does it show? And how did you go about collecting data for this?
Dr. Jensen: All right. So the Future Power – I mean, it’s in the title, “Firepower Strike.” So firepower strike, first, just to, like, level-set on what this is, is this idea that in modern war is almost a new missile age. So states, in this case Russia, will send ballistic missiles, crude missiles, and then these new one-way attack drones – the Shahed you hear about in the news, and you see the picture with that delta wing. The idea is these are massed salvos, or a firepower strike, designed to either have an operational effect – so if I’m trying to affect the front of the battlefield, I strike the command-and-control nodes, the logistics, so my enemy can’t generate combat power – or used in a strategic sense to hit political centers of gravity, and then frankly in a really tragic sense to terrorize the population, the idea being that I can launch a punishment campaign that produces fear in the part of the population who then pressure their leadership to sue for peace.
So that’s a concept called a firepower strike. It’s used by Russia. It’s actually in Chinese doctrine as well. And so as we watch this war play out, we really wanted to, you know, both from actually somewhat of a normative standpoint give voice to what the Ukrainians were experiencing; but, two, also be able to statistically analyze and track how these firepower strikes occurred. Because in the Futures Lab, we’re very committed to methods and particularly data science. So sometimes you can find interesting patterns that reveals a strategic tendency that, if you write about it, you can hopefully help draw attention to it, and then also help either the U.S. help Ukraine or the Ukrainians directly find ways to reduce the efficacy of those firepower strikes.
So it really – it started as a desire to help Ukraine, but to really apply our kind of advanced training and statistics and methods to basically do the descriptive statistics with the pattern over time. And then in the Firepower Strike Tracker you’ll see that we publish short, focused statistical pieces where we analyze the corelets. Like, what explains the rate of interception? How frequently can Ukraine shoot these down versus when they can’t? And we’re even expanding that further, so we’re going to start collecting and integrating weather data, currency data, and use a(n) AI technique called lasso where we’re actually going to be able to statistically reduce all of that down to particular observations that help us understand the Russian patterns. All of us have patterns in our life, and usually the more data we collect the more we can identify that pattern.
Mr. Schwartz: That’s fascinating, and it’s definitely a new way of measuring things, utilizing all the technology you just mentioned.
A lot of times, Ben, people ask me, you know, what are the – what weapons are most common in Russian strikes on Ukraine, and does it match the U.S. intelligence on Russian stockpiles that we actually know about.
Dr. Jensen: Yeah. Well, great question. And actually, the answer is evolving as the conflict evolves.
So we entered this war – and I’ve – you know, I’ve served in the military for over 20 years. So we were told, oh, the Russians are obsessed with operational fires, so what you’re going to see when you fight the Russians is they’re going to have these waves of cruise missiles and ballistic missiles. So some of the names like the Kalibr-class cruise missile; the Iskander, their ballistic missile; these are very fast – the Iskander – or they fly low to the Earth and are evasive, the cruise missile. And the idea would be you would have these salvos, these firepower strikes of these weapons that would disable your ability to respond. So they’d hit your command and control, they’d hit your radars, they’d blow up your fuel depots, your ammunition, and then the Russian tanks and the mechanized vehicles would roll across the border. That is – what’s really interesting is Russia hasn’t fought that way.
Russia’s opening salvo in the beginning of the invasion in the beginning of the war was only 45 minutes long, and part of it is because I think they were arrogant. I think they thought they could have this short, intense firepower strike and then just roll in and Kyiv would capitulate. So, number one, it turned out that Russia –
Mr. Schwartz: So it’s sort of their version of shock and awe.
Dr. Jensen: Yeah, exactly, shock and awe, so great parallel. And you saw how that turned out for us, too. You can beat a conventional force and lose an insurgency. And in their case they could definitely shock the international system, but it turns out they couldn’t transition that initial firepower strike into an operational advantage in support of campaign objectives. And what I mean by that is some of the – frankly, some of the missiles either didn’t hit the targets – I’ve been to Kyiv, and what’s interesting is you can still see where some of the cruise missiles hit the wrong building. And that’s not a - I’m not criticizing the Russians. If you’re maneuvering something going 400 miles per hour through city streets, you’re going to hit a building accidentally once in a while.
Mr. Schwartz: For sure.
Dr. Jensen: And so there’s some real difficult geometry to how missiles will maneuver to the target.
Number two, there’s also, like, old intelligence. What was an important building in one report might no longer be an important building in the future.
And then, what’s really interesting – it doesn’t get enough attention – is the Russians were actually thinking about unconventional warfare plus a firepower strike. So they had infiltrated Kyiv with a number of special operators, and they were marking targets. The challenge was, though – is that you Ukraine picked up on this, and regular citizens would set up these patrols around the capital where they would ask the people to say a word. And I forget what the word is, but basically it’s such a subtle difference between Russian and Ukrainian that even if you were a Russian who learned Ukrainian you’d mispronounce the word, and off you go to prison or you’re dead. So, actually, the Ukrainians were lucky in that they beat the unconventional warfare attack in their city and the shock and awe didn’t work. So that really set the stages for some of the successes you saw: At Hostomel Airfield, they defended; the beating back the armored columns.
As the war progressed, though, it turned out that Russia didn’t have necessarily the depth of cruise missile and ballistic missile inventories that we thought. Now, it may have been some of them were faulty, so what’s called readiness – combat readiness levels in modern war. And what you saw is quickly over time the Russians started to import weapons from Iran and North Korea. So, really, the first wave was the Iranians started to send them that Shahed – long range, it flies very slow. If you can see it, it’s very easy to shoot down. But it’s extremely cheap, and that’s really the power of it. You can mass produce them, which means no matter how good you are at shooting them down one or two will always get through. And they really are a terror weapon. They’re not really as precise as they’re made out to be. Russia, in fact, has started to actually put ball bearings, often chemically laced, in them, which is a violation of the Law of Armed Conflict, to try to maximize civilian damage and then even get first responders who pick up shrapnel sick from the chemicals they lace them with.
And so you’ve seen them go from what we thought they would do – shock and awe – to this more terror from the air approach, these punishment campaigns that are really targeting the Ukrainian population, counter-value targeting, as opposed to really selectively targeting military forces. And that means it’s strategic campaign, a tragic campaign, not necessarily an operational campaign. They really struggle to combine these with fights along the front. In fact, our report we just dropped on this, we statistically show that Russia’s use of these firepower strikes is decoupled from their activities along the frontline. So usually in military planning you want an integrated, integrated lines of operation or lines of effort targeting a particular series of decisive points as intermediate military objectives. It’s just common sense, right? I want to mass at an objective, and then be able to put myself in a position of advantage.
Well, it turns out the Russians either have given up on that or that’s just not how they’re working. So you have this massive increase in the number of Shaheds and, increasingly the North Korean ballistic missiles, but they’re not timed with pushes along the front. So we can statistically analyze casualty rates on the front versus the number of missile attacks, and we can prove pressy conclusively the two aren’t related. Which means Russia over time has now essentially defaulted to kind of like a new-Medieval form of bombing to win, combining kind of old concepts of siege warfare with Robert Pape’s famous work “Bombing to Win.” Where it’s really just in this case about punishing a society to put political pressure on their leader. It’s really horrific.
And frankly, it’s why you can tell they’re not going to stop and it’s going to keep going. So, again, why we want to lean doubly into the statistics of it, we can isolate those patterns. We can share them with our government. We can share them with the Ukrainians. We also believe, though, by the value at CSIS by, you know, shining a light on really important strategic problems in a nonpartisan way and getting people talking, we’re taking options away from our adversary and allowing the strength of free societies to rise up. We can outthink and out-adapt any authoritarian, and we have to because they’re just going to keep terrorizing the Ukrainians and it’s not going to stop there. It would be Poland. It would be the Baltics next.
Mr. Schwartz: You know, Ben, this is really a fascinating study, and I should have said at the outset this is all available to the public. It’s on CSIS.org. You can find it there. Our producer, Dave, is going to drop a link in the notes to this podcast, so please visit it. It’s a fascinating tool.
So we talked about some of the cheap options they use to terrorize the Ukrainians, the Russians are. What about some of the more advanced stuff? Are you tracking that as well?
Dr. Jensen: Yeah, we are. So the really advanced stuff tends to be more of the ballistic trajectory. So when we statistically analyze the neutralization rate, so what we really want to tell is what are the corelets or what are the things that best predict the Ukrainians’ ability to defend their sovereign territory from attacks from the sky. So how easy is it for them to intercept this Shahed, this cruise missile, this drone, this – you know, all of the above?
What we find is that the thing that’s hardest to intercept are actually the short-range ballistic missiles, which include both the Iskander and, actually, which is pretty scary for thinking about other parts of the world, the North Korean missiles as well. The North Korean short-range ballistic missiles have actually been very effective in terms of from a Russian standpoint, meaning for every one I launch it’s an increased probability it hits the target. Short-range ballistic missiles are very hard to shoot down because you don’t have that long to track it because of its shorter flight path and its high reentry velocity. So it’s coming back down very fast. That’s been, actually, the really dangerous ones.
Now, the good news is Russia hasn’t been able to mass produce those yet. They seemed – and they also seem to basically not be massing ballistic missile strikes; they seem to keep combining them. So most nights we’ll see a mix, and a mix of cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and Shaheds. What we find statistically is, actually, the quantity if not what matters. So one school of thought would say the more missiles, the more drones Russia fires, the higher the likelihood any one gets through. That’s actually not what we find. We find it’s actually the more mixed munitions they fire, the higher the probability they get through; the harder it is for Ukrainians to intercept. And really counterintuitive, it turns out in terms of cost effectiveness, when I analyze the number of those munitions that hit Ukrainian territory versus the cost to produce them, the cheap Shahed is the clear winner even though they’ll launch hundreds in a night and most will be shot down, because it only costs like $30,000 to produce. Every one of those, which sometimes is less than even artillery rounds, every one of those that gets through is cost effective, meaning relative to its cost it actually is likely to impact the target.
So there’s some strange counterintuitive things going on that really speak to something changing in warfare. It’s not necessarily about the biggest, coolest transformer that wins the fight. This is actually about a lot of cheap, little thing that pressure – that create constant pressure and that, you know, get through and achieve an effect.
Mr. Schwartz: And that’s because there’s a range of missiles they’re using, a range of cheap options.
Dr. Jensen: Yes.
Mr. Schwartz: And that makes it harder for the Ukrainians to spot and to address each one of them. Is that right?
Dr. Jensen: Yes.
Mr. Schwartz: OK.
Dr. Jensen: That’s right. And you actually hit it on the head. I mean, for, you know, American listeners, it’s not unlike a football play, right? I’ve got people who are in motion to deceive the defense, so I’ve got decoys. I’ve got blockers. I’ve got people who run forward to collide with other members of the defense, right? So I might put up a wall of drones for you to shoot down. But both of those activities – the deception and the – and the blocking – is to open up an attack lane. And that’s something that Russia’s actually, sadly, getting much better at.
So there was a really interesting attack I think it was a week ago, maybe a little longer, in Odesa, where what’s really disturbing is not only did they have that type of playbook – deception, you know, decoys, jamming – now what they did is they stacked a new generation of Shaheds. So Iran used to produce them for Russia. Now Russia’s mass producing them. And frankly, the sanctions haven’t worked as well as they should, so they’re still getting advanced electronic components from the West. What they could do is now stack a number of these, think, like, 10 drones waiting to attack, and then simultaneously attacking from multiple different directions the same target. That’s deeply disturbing, because if they’re able to scale that, to not just one attack on one night but that becomes the common standard, that mix of munitions, that simultaneous attack property is going to make it that much harder for the Ukrainians to shoot down.
Which is why the Ukrainians are asking a lot more for things like directed energy, lasers, high-powered microwaves, in addition to what you hear in the news about Patriots, Stingers, NASAMS, IRIS-T, SAMP/T, all these different missile categories. Those are still too expensive, given the low cost of the Shahed. So you’re going to need something like lasers, directed energy, that has a low cost per shot, that allows you to change that cost curve and keep defending Ukraine.
Mr. Schwartz: I’m so glad you brought up the football analogy, because as listeners of this podcast know my favorite Baltimore Ravens use an awful lot of misdirection with Lamar Jackson and Derrick Henry. And it sounds like that’s what the Russians are doing too.
Dr. Jensen: Yeah. In fact, one of the interesting statistics that popped up to us a while ago – and we actually changed our chart to say “neutralization” vice “interception” – is we realized the Russians were using a large number of Shaheds in the front of their attacks because they were absorbing a lot of the electronic attacks. So imagine Ukraine is defending itself with a mix of assets. And the first rule of that is intelligence, detecting what’s coming. The second is, if I can detect it, can I actually jam it? If it’s using GLONASS, a Russian version of GPS, or our GPS, or satellite communications, can I jam the frequency it’s using so it doesn’t know what to do? Now, they can spend more money and then it has what’s called inertial guidance, so it can have a secondary guidance system.
But everything – this really boils down to economics. Everything I do to make your attack more successful means you can do less of them. And that really becomes the goal in that layered air defense Ukraine is doing. One of the interesting things about deception and decoys is the Russians – what we don’t know is the number of Shaheds that are neutralized, if they really are neutralized or if they’re just, like, you know, running a play. It’s an option. They’re heading towards the Ukrainian skies, and then all of a sudden turning around because they’re landing to be reused again the next night. So there’s some also interesting aspects emerging that are really important to watch.
But the real policy implication of this keeps coming back to, even if you think you should – Ukraine should negotiate to end the war, and that it’s in U.S.’s interest to end this war quickly, we’re going to have to find ways of helping them defend their skies. Because you can’t expect them to negotiate while any given night any given city will have toxic shrapnel threading through apartment buildings and killing the citizens. No political leader can negotiate under those terms, objectively. We couldn’t. They couldn’t.
Countless examples in history show that you simultaneously negotiate during bombing campaigns – actually go back to the history of the Vietnam War. But it makes it very difficult for that partner to make any concessions domestically, if his own citizens are, like, why am I going to give up territory when Russians just, you know, killed my grandma in that building last night? So there’s a really complicating political factor of why it’s so important for us to find ways to help Ukraine defend its skies and its citizens, because I think they actually – that will help accelerate these negotiations.
Mr. Schwartz: You know, Ben, talking about the skies, we haven’t talked yet about space. We know that these missiles are coming from air, land, and sea. What about space? How does space factor into this conflict?
Dr. Jensen: Well, you just opened a can of space worms, my friend. Let’s giddy up and go. Put on your helmet. We’re blasting off.
Mr. Schwartz: There we go.
Dr. Jensen: Quite a bit. So first let’s talk about how space relates to modern battle network warfare, we’ll call it. When I say battle network, I mean modern war isn’t just a clash of wills of two land armies. It’s really about these distributed sensors, computers processing information, what’s called PED – processing, exploitation, dissemination. And then, passing all of that information to some longer-range missile to shoot. So that’s a battle network, right? It’s got to sense. It’s got to make sense. Meaning war just can’t be fought in any individual’s mind. That it’s not about shooting with a rifle, or even with a mortar, or artillery. It’s really about these battle network competitions.
And that means a lot of the information isn’t just passed through bouncing radio waves off the atmosphere, so radio, or buried fiber-optic cables, or in cyberspace. It means a lot of it actually comes from satellite communications. So the first space effect for both sides is how are you passing information through space, bouncing it off satellites in different orbits? So a low elliptical orbit, so bouncing it off a kind of heavy traffic area, or even a very sensitive deep space military or intelligence-grade satellite communications, right? So the first thing that both sides do is use space to coordinate the offense or coordinate the defense. So back to the football analogy, think of space like the offensive or defensive coordinator up in the box watching the play.
Now, here’s the other way space becomes really important too. It becomes important potentially from an intelligence standpoint. And this is really interesting, because since the beginning of the war Ukraine has been using more commercial, actually, satellite intelligence, both to defend itself and its terrain, as it has stuff passed from us or other partners. So commercial space has grown so much that it can actually help a middle-income country fight a high-income country in a protracted conflict. And, two, the Russians will continue to use satellites for intelligence, and then to identify those targets that they can then use to launch these firepower strikes or these salvos.
What’s really interesting is that space has also been a part of this war. So in that initial shock and awe the Russians did, they also launched a large-scale cyberattack against ViaSat, which is a satellite communications provider, because the Ukrainian military was using ViaSat. So the idea was it’s only shock and awe not if I just blow things up, if you can’t communicate. You know you’re being attacked, but you can’t communicate. You can’t send orders. You can’t send guidance. It’s paralyzing. It worked, but only partially. It actually had a bigger impact upon European wind turbines, because they also used ViaSat. So Ukrainian communications only went down for a brief period, but a lot of wind farms across Europe went down for a few weeks, because they used that same ViaSat and it hit.
And, second, Ukraine is in the space game. So in Crimea there is a deep space communications facility that was built under the Soviet Union. And we’re not quite sure what it communicates to, but the array of the antennas, the structures suggest it’s communicating for deep space. So one of those highly elliptical orbits. So some sensitive piece of equipment that’s very far out in space. The Ukrainians used Western missiles to actually attack that. So they were trying to blind Russia’s ability, or stop Russia’s ability to use some deep space asset to coordinate military operations. So it’s not just that a ballistic missile may or may not go all the way up to space. Its space becomes critical for communications and intelligence. And both sides have tried to achieve effects in space to offset the combat power of the other.
Mr. Schwartz: And are you able to use AI to track this stuff in space as well? I know that that’s a big part of the work you’re doing in the futures lab. So I want to ask you, can you talk about AI and how you think about it towards this, and then maybe even drill down a little bit into the space component of it?
Dr. Jensen: Sure. So we actually don’t have an AI project on space, but, you know, if my friend Kari and our, you know, Aerospace Program wants to, we definitely could. So the key way AI can be used in space is what’s called SSA, space situational awareness. There are so many satellites flying around at any given time – again, those are, each of those, a data point, a vector, actually – that you need more complex analytical models to analyze all of that and even make predictions about where things might happen in space. So that would be pretty easy to do. I guarantee you it’s being done at every commercial space company, or at least the ones that are interested in that aspect of space. And definitely at places like NRO, and even our own Space Command and Space Force.
Where we focus most of our AI attention in Ukraine lately is actually on something most people don’t think about. What’s the role of artificial intelligence agents in helping negotiations? And this was actually featured in The Economist two weeks ago. They did a big profile of our lab and how we’ve been doing this. So one of the ideas was that we could survey experts and find out how they look at different issues in terms of what you can negotiate about – each side, Russia, Ukraine, but also the European Union, and the United States. And then, what’s your level of satisfaction?
So I might have issues that I’m willing to negotiate about because I don’t care about. I have low satisfaction. There are other issues where I might be really intensely interested, high satisfaction, but I’m not really going to negotiate. And then I might have issues in between. And no party has the exact alignment on what issues that are high stakes or high salience, and also what they’ll negotiate about. So we began this project called Strategic Headwinds, where we actually built a simulator that allowed people to look at different tradeoffs based upon expert opinion.
The next iteration of that, which is super cool, is we’re using what’s called a batch call. So we’re able to plug into a commercial AI model through their API, and not just type in 10 times, what would this negotiator do, and then repeat, but to have it do a batch call and run 20,000 peace negotiation simulations, so that we can analyze their distribution. I mean, that is game changing. And this is linked to our larger project called Critical Benchmarking for Foreign Policy, where we’re actually trying to see what AI can do in foreign policy and what it can’t do, by applying it analytically and then analyzing it, which in AI research is called benchmarking.
Now, with the diplomacy stuff – so can you have AI diplomats – what we’re finding is that they actually fairly closely align with the human experts. And, again, that makes sense, because the way AI works in this case is it’s analyzing this massive training data set it has versus the particular articles that we’ve loaded. And then the only thing we’re really changing is what’s called the temperature setting. So we’re telling the AI how much variation we can have as it simulates different negotiations. And so we’ll be publishing that soon. Really groundbreaking in terms of actually not just talking about AI, but doing it, and applying it to foreign policy questions.
The second way we’ve used it to really make that possible is we used a really basic method called RAG, retrieval augmented generation, where what we did is we took our researcher – and it’s actually our postdoctoral research fellow Ian Reynolds. And what we did is Ian and I went and pulled over 300 different peace agreements historically. So now you have a new data set of all of these historic peace agreements. And you use those, plus high – you know, highly reputable news sources from each language about peace negotiations. And you have an AI look for those different tradeoffs between satisfaction and negotiation.
So we really are exploring AI’s role in helping us solve the world’s most pressing problems. We’re not the people who are the P(doom) class, which P(doom) is that idea – the probability of doom, that AI will end the world and we’ll get terminators and nonsense, nonsense, nonsense. We’re actually more of the optimistic, in saying, hey, we don’t lose our human agency by asking questions and using advanced statistics to help us organize our thoughts. So the real challenge for us is that benchmarking. How do I make sure that the AI model is up to the task, number one? And then, number two, what are these narrow, bespoke use cases?
Because if you look at – if you type anything into any of the models – ChatGPT, Llama, Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, any one of them, its training data set has more about the Kardashian family than it does about deterrence. (Laughter.) So it automatically is going to have a flawed reference point, unless you adapt these techniques – whether it’s RAG, so knowledge ontology. I need you to weight these texts higher in your search, or even in how you prompt. So understanding how to interact with the model. And then the next level, doing these more advanced methods where it’s larger order RAGs or these batch calls of doing these different iterated simulations.
So this process has made me even a bigger believer in this concept of agentic AI. And that we are on the cusp of a real revolution. It’s ours to lose, in both our diplomatic corps – so how we train our diplomats to work with this, and our military, how we plan. Even in terms of, really, economic security. How do we conceptualize global supply chains and then run different simulations on them? But we really need places like CSIS and, frankly, our partners, which in this case a lot of them are foundations, to basically help us sponsor that work so we can show the art of the possible for really objective, nonpartisan, highly technical work around cutting-edge issues. Whether it’s solving the war in Ukraine or, really, our other passion project, again, doing the type of detailed benchmarking and testing to prove when AI works in foreign policy and, frankly, when it doesn’t.
Mr. Schwartz: Ben, I want to ask you finally, what are some of the real conclusions that you’ve already determined in this work and the tracker? And, you know, what is – what’s next? What’s really coming next?
Dr. Jensen: Yeah. So the tracker – the little team in Futures Lab – and we should have you over, and even have a podcast there, because all we do – it’s, it’s covered in whiteboards with equations and weird drawings. So we go in there, we get up on a whiteboard, and we just start kind of debating with math and with madness.
And really, in those kind of jam sessions – that’s what it, it’s an intellectual jam session – what we found is the following: We think what you’re seeing happening really in the last six months in particular, where Russia’s pivoted from this, like, I am going to integrate ballistic cruise missiles, Shaheds, into my operations to, nope, the most valuable way of using these is to attack political centers of gravity and to attack the population. The battlefield is static. So I’ll try to achieve the initiative through sheer terror.
Sadly, I think that’s going to be the new norm. And so one of the things we’ve talked about is we have enough data, through the Firepower Strike Tracker, now we can actually build a robust game-theoretic model on the logic of firepower strikes, and then really superimpose those over different case studies. So, hey, based upon the statistical patterns and trends we saw in Russia and Ukraine, what would a Chinese firepower strike look like against Taiwan? What would an Iranian sustained attempt at firepower strikes against Israel look like? And then even other parts of the world – North Korea. What would North Korean firepower strikes?
And what’s interesting is we would do this in a way that decouples them from a major military campaign, because what we’re seeing is that it’s not about the major military campaign. This is a strategic campaign. And that that means the objective is the mind of the political leader and the will of the population. And when you look at it like that, that means that other authoritarians, whether in Pyongyang or Beijing, have a new card they can play in what we can call a new missile age. It means that they basically might stop short of an entire amphibious invasion of Taiwan or an entire conventional invasion of South Korea, and use these firepower strikes to really affect political decision making.
And that’s a – that actually means that the concept of iron dome that President Trump’s talking about is actually a good idea. And the question is how do we get the cost cheap enough, and how do we make sure it’s exportable to our partners, that we can deny authoritarian regimes the ability to attack free societies, the way we’ve seen it happen in Ukraine.
Mr. Schwartz: It sure works in Israel.
Dr. Jensen: Yeah. Yeah. But it has to be sustainable and work over time. It works against the Houthis. And Iran has not fired its best stuff yet. And so the question becomes, is how many times can you survive? And that goes back to that cost effectiveness, right?
Mr. Schwartz: Right.
Dr. Jensen: So if I spend a $2 million interceptor against a $30,000 drone, that’s a losing cost proposition. And, frankly, America’s seeing that in the Red Sea. If I was – if I was advising the Chinese Communist Party, which I never would, but if I was, every time that we shoot an SM-series missile out of a U.S. destroyer to shoot down a, frankly, lower-tier quality Houthi weapon, that’s a win for China because that’s one less interceptor we would have in a future crisis or war against them. So this does come back to the economics of war as well.
And we do have to – probably where it doesn’t – where Israel, and the United States, and other free societies – we actually have to start thinking about lower-cost effective ways of changing the balance here. Because this kind of politics by missile salvo, that is here to stay. And it turns out we used to think it would only lead to nuclear war, probably is not going to. So it’s this new space of sub-nuclear crisis maneuvering that, the tragedy is, it impacts individual citizens more than it does soldiers who swore to defend their country.
Mr. Schwartz: Ben, this is absolutely fascinating stuff. I’m so glad we talked today. And I can’t wait to have you back for another episode to talk about your work. Thank you so much for all the insight today.
Dr. Jensen: Anytime. Happy to talk and appreciate what you do.
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