A $200 Drone Can Sink a US Coast Guard Boat. Nobody Is Fixing It.
Every adversary of the West is inside this war, learning. We are not. Here's UFN's Silicon Curtain Weekly Digest, edition one.
A Green Beret veteran who fought on Ukraine's drone lines says America's enemies are mastering the new way of war—while the West watches from shore.
A retired Green Beret stood on a US Coast Guard boat in Los Angeles and realized he could sink it with $200 of equipment from Amazon. The crew had no counter-drone defense at all. Not one system.
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That moment is at the heart of this week’s must-listen interview from the Silicon Curtain—Jonathan Fink’s channel of long-form conversations with the soldiers, analysts, and technologists closest to Russia’s war on Ukraine. His guest: Bryan Pickens, who spent two decades in US special operations, trained Ukrainian forces as a Green Beret, then fought alongside them on a drone team at the front.
The full interview is here and worth every minute. If you only have five, we provide the top ten essential points below.
1. A new Cold War has begun, and it is a race in drone technology, not nuclear weapons. “We have started the new Cold War and it is not about nukes—it’s about drone tech and modern technology in the battle space. Our enemies across the globe are in a race with Ukraine and the West on how to create the best drone systems.”
2. Cheap drones can exhaust American air defenses and leave the homeland exposed. “[They] send a thousand Shaheds at the Eastern Seaboard. [They] deplete the Patriot missile system that’s defending the nation—and then [They] send a nuke. The pawns on the chessboard are drones.” Sacrificial munitions whose purpose is to strip away the defenses that protect against everything worse.
3. US military assets currently have no defense against hobbyist-grade drones. Visiting his younger brother’s Coast Guard boat in Los Angeles, Pickens found no netting, no standoff material, no counter-drone equipment of any kind—200 meters from a civilian ridge line. “For like $200 on Amazon right now and a little bit of Tannerite, I can sink this boat.” He asked the crew what drone defenses they had. The answer was none. “That was my first onion peel. I think we’re way further behind than I had assumed.”
4. Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and Cuba are learning drone warfare inside this war—the West is not. “All of our enemies are active participants in this conflict on the other side. There’s been Koreans killed. There’s Chinese entities, Cuban, Iran. We—the West—are passive observers while they’re active participants... It’s as if the West is on a rowboat and all of our enemies are on a jet ski getting away from us.” Russia’s elite Rubicon drone formation, meanwhile, is reportedly building toward a force of operators that would outnumber many European militaries.
5. Senior US commanders do not understand the threat. A general told Pickens that America would simply “outmaneuver the drones.” “I asked him how he’s going to outmaneuver something that is flying 50 kilometers and coming at him at 140 kilometers an hour—that a small OP of two soldiers in a wood line can deny an entire route for a convoy. He did not have an answer.” On the front today, a 30-kilometer strike drone “is as common as seeing an M4.”
6. Western militaries do not yet know what they need to learn.
