This is an audio transcript of the Tech Tonic podcast episode: ‘Future weapons — Tomorrow’s technology’
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One of the mysteries of wartime science, one of the war’s most closely guarded secrets, the miracle of radar, is now revealed.
John Thornhill
In the early days of world war two, there was a breakthrough in defence technology.
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Radar, one of the most ingenious secret weapons of the war, is being operated by South African servicewomen who are working day and night spotting enemy submarines which may be prowling around their coast.
John Thornhill
Radar systems had existed well before the outbreak of world war two, but in 1940, a technological leap forward gave the Allies an edge. That meant they could more accurately track submarines, direct armies and detect enemy attacks.
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A flick of the switch isolates the target image, and here it is, one tiny speck of light.
John Thornhill
Advanced radar meant aeroplane pilots could carry out long-range bombing raids, like this strike on an aircraft factory on the Japanese coast.
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Ready on 70 degrees. Ready. Marked. Bombs away!
John Thornhill
But that advancement in wartime defence tech didn’t come cheap.
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The future security of our nation depends upon such developments. And they are all expensive. Those millions must come from victory bonds. Buy bonds.
John Thornhill
War often forces scientists and industries to take risks and to innovate with new engineering and materials. It can marshal new sources of capital, spawning technologies that become part of everyday life. That was true back in 1940, and it seems true again today as the world goes through another breakthrough moment in defence tech, spurred on by the war in Ukraine and broader geopolitical instability.
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My name is John Thornhill, I’m the FT’s innovation editor, and in this season of the podcast, we’ve been exploring the impact of technology in armed conflict.
Today, we’ll be hearing from FT correspondents about how defence tech is changing geopolitics. Here with me in the studio is Sylvia Pfeifer, the FT’s industry editor.
Sylvia Pfeifer
Hello.
John Thornhill
And down the line are Ryan McMorrow, the FT’s deputy Beijing bureau chief. Hello!
Ryan McMorrow
Hi, thanks for having me on.
John Thornhill
And in Washington DC, Demetri Sevastopulo, the FT’s US-China correspondent.
Demetri Sevastopulo
Hi, John.
John Thornhill
Sylvia. Obviously, we’ve moved on from the days of world war two-style radar, but you covered this sector more than 20 years ago and you’re covering it again today, what has changed in that time?
Sylvia Pfeifer
Yes, so back in the early 2000s, I spent most of my time speaking to large defence companies. They were sort of publicly listed companies with heavyweight chief executives. And we spent . . .
John Thornhill
These are known as the primes.
Sylvia Pfeifer
These are known as the primes, and we spent most of our time talking about, you know, what we think of as traditional weapons, so your fighter tanks, your artillery, your submarines, and your jets. And nowadays, obviously, I’m spending a lot of my time talking to start-ups that are not necessarily publicly listed, and talking a lot about defence technology rather than your sort of heavyweight equipment.
The Ukrainian war has definitely turbocharged investment into this. So everything from drones to other unmanned systems to robotics, to sensors. And I think one of the challenges or one of the gaps that the war has exposed is just how little European governments invested in defence innovation before the war started. So I found some research from Lakestar, which found that between 2011 and 2022, European governments allocated only about 4 per cent of their defence spending on R&D compared with 14 per cent in the US. So they’re obviously trying to increase all of this, but it’s gonna take some time.
John Thornhill
Demetri, you have been a reporter and an editor in Asia. You’ve been a reporter and an editor in DC as well. Can you tell us what is the kind of geopolitical balance between the US and China right now in the second Trump administration?
Demetri Sevastopulo
I think there are some areas where China is actually already ahead of the US, which is very interesting. I would say hypersonic missiles is probably the best example of that, and also in military drones. But China is also catching up in artificial intelligence. The Chinese Navy is now bigger than the US Navy. China has anti-ship missiles that would target US aircraft carriers in any conflict over Taiwan. So the really . . . the gap between the two militaries is closing. And I would say something that hasn’t gotten the huge amount of attention is the nuclear issue, and China is rapidly expanding its nuclear forces.
The Pentagon projects that by 2035, China will have deployed as many nuclear warheads as the US and Russia have deployed at the moment. And so that brings up the question, if there was a conflict over Taiwan, for example, what role would nuclear weapons play? That’s something that 10 years ago we probably wouldn’t have been talking about.
John Thornhill
Ryan, can I come to you? What does the defence tech effort look like in China at the moment?
Ryan McMorrow
Well, there are many different military modernisation projects going on in China. Definitely something the government is focused on is getting its many electronics and hardware companies working to a greater degree with the military, because that’s really seen as the way to advance the military’s capabilities. They’re also watching the Ukraine war closely and watching the development and use of drones in the war as well.
And every month or so, there seems to be some type of new drone system being released or marketed in state media. The drone industry here is huge. We have DJI, the world’s largest drone maker, and an entire electronic supply chain, which directly feeds into making small consumer drones — what Ukraine has equipped to become military drones. Chinese military companies, state-owned military companies are also taking it one step further and turning, using the robust supply chain here to make a variety of new drones. One that just came up, I think in the last couple of months, was this essentially a drone that looks like a small thermos that has two fixed rotors on and it’s like a flying grenade. It’s like a mini flying grenade that weighs less than a kilogramme.
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So just the integration of the entire supply chain in China from the batteries to the rotors to the mini motors has made a lot of advances possible. And the government at the moment is really trying to promote greater civil-military fusion. So getting these hardware companies to work together with the military is a big goal.
John Thornhill
OK, one of the things that we’ve been discussing in the series is that defence tech is about the fusion of hardware and software, and China would seem to be very well placed for that. China is already the kind of world leader in commercial drone technology, and as we’ve seen with the arrival of DeepSeek, it also has pretty formidable AI expertise. So, how is the US able to respond both on the hardware and the software side?
Demetri Sevastopulo
I mean, one of the big questions with China’s capabilities are, yes, it’s making great strides in both hardware and software, but one of the most difficult things to do in the military — particularly in a time of conflict — is how you connect hardware with software. How well can your satellites in space communicate with your ground stations on land and then communicate with their ships at sea and then down under sea to your submarines? And that’s something where it’s still not clear how much progress China has made and in some ways it’s very difficult to make a real assessment until you see those systems operate together in a combat scenario.
What the US is trying to do, I mean it’s trying to do all the things that I outlined earlier on, fielding more weapons, accelerating weapons production, coming up with these initiatives to field low-cost autonomous weapons and also to — under the Biden administration and yet to be seen under the Trump administration — expand and deepen alliances in Asia and the Indo-Pacific, but also get countries within the Indo-Pacific to do more things together, not necessarily with the US, but so Australia and Japan, the Philippines and Japan. Get South Korea to do more with other US allies. And one of the questions at the moment is how the Trump administration is going to proceed and whether it will largely go along the same track that the Biden administration was going on or whether it will take a different approach. And right now, we don’t know the answer to that.
John Thornhill
Sylvia, how large does China loom in western development of new defence tech?
Sylvia Pfeifer
I think one of the things that’s obviously arising as companies and governments try to invest in this is, you know, China’s the largest producer of some of the sort of key raw materials that go into defence tech. So a sort of modern battle tank, I think, uses raw materials in its sensors, in its weapons armour, in its comms. Some of the key raw materials that they’re looking for are sort of mercury, cadmium, germanium, copper and tantalum. And again, I think Nato and the EU have recently released lists of raw materials that were critical for defence purposes. And here, again, China seems very well situated, I mean, they’re the largest producer of both copper and germanium, so there could be this battle for the raw materials that you need if you want to build up your defence technology industry.
John Thornhill
So far in this series, I’ve been on the ground in Ukraine, where I did some reporting on low-cost drones, we’ve spoken about AI in Gaza, and a new wave of defence tech start-ups in the US. But what do you think is gonna have the most impact?
Sylvia Pfeifer
I think anything to do with unmanned systems, so, you know, there’s a huge difference in what kind of drones you can have underwater. I think it’s becoming a sort of key battleground almost. Sensors, robotics, there is also a lot of investment going into laser weapons at the moment. Sounds very Star Wars-ish, but most of the defence companies I’ve talked to, so the Americans and the Europeans, they’re all investing in laser weapons that offer a sort of cheaper way of shooting down some of the cheap drones that the Russians, for example, have fielded in Ukraine.
John Thornhill
And how is defence tech changing geopolitical calculations? Could I come to you on that one, Ryan?
Ryan McMorrow
So as China grows larger and more powerful, it’s gradually increasing its presence in the South China Sea, around Taiwan.
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Spokesperson for the Chinese army said the joint army, navy and rocket force exercises should act as a stern warning.
Ryan McMorrow
And in recent years has even started conducting military exercises all the way around Taiwan.
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The European Union has accused China of increasing cross-strait tensions.
The Taiwanese military is keeping a close eye on Chinese warships in the Taiwan Strait.
Ryan McMorrow
Its military capabilities has allowed it to project power in a way that it really couldn’t before. And that for the moment is now in its neighbourhood, but by 2035 and then 2049, they have these long-term goals to be able to project power globally.
John Thornhill
Demetri?
Demetri Sevastopulo
I think one thing that’s really worth bearing in mind is when you’re thinking about the US and the Chinese military, particularly in the context of a conflict in the Indo-Pacific, it’s most relevant to compare what military power the US and China can bring to bear in China’s backyard, because that’s where the conflict will be fought. And that’s somewhere where the US faces a much bigger challenge for two reasons. One is what’s called the tyranny of distance, which is just how far you have to cross the Pacific to get from certain places where the US has bases to the area of conflict around Taiwan. And the second is something called magazine depth, which is, do you have enough ammunition, missiles, weapons to actually prosecute a conflict? And that is something that the US is facing a challenge at the moment as well. So there are some of the things to think about.
John Thornhill
Sylvia, you follow the industry closely. We’ve seen the rise of a new generation of defence tech companies like Palantir and Anduril, tell us about them. What are their strengths?
Sylvia Pfeifer
Yeah, so these are two of the sort of most valued start-ups. Palantir is obviously already listed. It does much more than defence. It’s a very large government contractor in the US. And Anduril is still privately held, but worth a lot according to the latest funding rounds. Both of them are large supporters of the new Trump administration. And they see themselves as very much as a sort of new guard defence companies in the States.
They want to take on the large primes that we’ve talked about. They’re saying that they can develop better cutting-edge technology and also faster. And that’s very much the pitch that they’ve made. And again, if you see what’s come out of the US recently, they are being taken seriously. Anduril won — together with another company — won the contract in the US to develop or work on drones for the next-generation fighter jet programme. So they are winning contracts, not necessarily the large platform contracts yet, but they’ve definitely made significant inroads in the US.
John Thornhill
And how are the big defence primes reacting? Are they sticking very much to their knitting and what they’re good at, or are they also trying to expand into these new areas like drones and software and AI?
Sylvia Pfeifer
No, so certainly the US contractors are all watching them quite warily. A couple of them, including L3Harris, which is known as the sort of sixth prime in the States, the chief executive, Chris Kubasik, came out with a memo shortly after Donald Trump’s return to the White House, where he also talked about the importance of speeding up defence procurement in the US. So they’re very aware that they need to up their game. In terms of how they’re reacting, they’re agreeing joint ventures with some of the start-ups. So again, L3 has a strategic partnership with Palantir, for example.
Here in the UK where I’m based, BAE Systems bought a US start-up called Malloy Aeronautics that develops heavy-lift drones capable of delivering supplies and evacuating troops. And then Sweden’s Saab, for example, is also one of the backers of Helsing, which is widely seen as Europe’s answer to Anduril, Palantir at the moment.
John Thornhill
And how is the Trump presidency changing the development of defence tech, both in Europe and China? So, first in Europe, Sylvia.
Sylvia Pfeifer
I think the return to the White House has just focused or refocused government’s attention on the need here in Europe to invest more.
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We were paying close to 100 per cent of Nato. So think of it, we’re paying 100 per cent of their military and they’re screwing us on trade.
Sylvia Pfeifer
There’s this whole focus now on developing your resilience. Trump’s cold shoulder to Nato and insistence that the EU should pay for its own defence has definitely turbocharged those efforts to boost investment by governments. Governments are also looking to speed up the procurement of weapons. There’s a big focus on getting equipment quicker to the battlefield. So, instead of fielding something that’s gold-plated and costs lots of money, Ukraine has shown that you can field something that might only be 80 per cent ready, but it’s better to get it out there rather than keep tinkering with it to the nth degree.
John Thornhill
And in China, Ryan, what difference is Trump making?
Ryan McMorrow
Well, tensions here are definitely high at the moment with the ongoing trade war. I think Trump and his administration is looking at China and seeing what they wish was available in the US with the deep industrial base that China has built up over the past 20 and 30 years, as basically electronics in various manufacturing has been built up here. And so Trump obviously wants to get some of that and some of those manufacturers back to the US. It’s kind of unclear if his tariffs will have any effect on that. But Beijing is keen to keep the manufacturing and is definitely more keen than ever to continue to develop its military capabilities.
John Thornhill
And as Sylvia is saying, many of the advances in defence tech are coming from kind of a newer generation of private sector companies. And China has clearly had a phenomenal success in developing its own kind of entrepreneurial base, but then appeared to . . . that kind of relationship froze after kind of Jack Ma from Alibaba was marginalised and there’s a bit of a clampdown on the entrepreneurial sector. There appears to be a renewed attempt to re-embrace that private sector entrepreneurship. Is that gonna play into the defence tech realm as well? Do you think a lot of these start-ups who are strong in humanoid robots or AI software drones that they are gonna be very much driving the defence tech innovation in China?
Ryan McMorrow
Yeah, it’s interesting. Sitting here in Beijing, you see Anduril and these other companies that Sylvia was talking about that are so flashy in public with their ambitions. And in China, it’s the opposite because many of these companies that could veer into defence tech, they’re consumer-oriented companies that don’t want to be seen being anything involved in defence. So you have . . . because a lot of them are selling their gadgets, their drones, their robots to the west, and so they don’t want to be sanctioned and they don’t want to . . . they’re also raising funding from western venture capitalists. So the consumer-oriented electronics companies that could contribute to China’s defence efforts, if they’re doing it at all, they’re doing it very quietly. For example, one company that we’ve reported on is Unitree. It’s this very high-profile maker of robotic quadrupeds or essentially robotic dogs.
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China’s state media has put out videos of their robot dogs with essentially a machine gun attached to its back as part of military exercises with Cambodia.
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And so when we reported on that, Unitree and their investors were very angry that we were reporting on it and naming the company and they were adamant that they had no direct connection with the PLA basically using their robots.
Chinese start-ups and private sector companies are very, very much in a hard position where even if they wanted to help the Chinese defence industry, because of where they get their funding and because of their customers, they can’t outwardly, at least, do that.
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John Thornhill
We’re gonna take a short break and we’ll be back shortly for more on China and the geopolitics of defence tech.
Earlier in the season, I spoke to the co-CEO of Helsing about what the battlefields of the future would look like, and he was suggesting it would be a no-go zone for human soldiers. Is that right?
Demetri Sevastopulo
I think in some cases that might be right, but in other cases, I think it’s definitely not correct. And so I’ll give you an example. If China was to try and invade Taiwan, there are lots of things it can do to degrade Taiwan’s defences and destroy military assets on the island using weapons that wouldn’t require humans being in the line of fire — mainland Chinese troops being in the line of fire. But if China wants to actually take over Taiwan, it’s going to have to put thousands, hundreds of thousands of troops on the island to secure the country after they have taken it.
So that’s a case where you would have a lot of humans on the battlefield. So I don’t think you can say flat out that there will be conflicts around the world we’ll never have humans involved any more. I just don’t think that’s realistic. There may be some cases where that happens, but I don’t think that’s going to be the overwhelming majority, at least in the near to medium term.
John Thornhill
And what about you Sylvia, what is the battlefield of the future going to look like?
Sylvia Pfeifer
I think the word interconnected is one that we’ll see come up more and more often. The chief executive of Rheinmetall — the German tank maker that’s done very well in terms of orders because of Ukraine, so it’s supplying tanks and ammunition to Ukraine — he’s talked about the battle tank of the future, you add on AI capabilities to tanks so the tank can talk to the other weapons on the battlefield, sort of seamless communication between the different elements.
Again, in terms of the new fighter jets, the jet itself is seen almost like a sort of command centre that will be flying and will be sending out drones to the front line so the fighter jet will sort of hang back almost and warfare will, well you won’t see the traditional dogfights that you’ve seen in the past or if anybody can think of Top Gun, those sort of very close encounters between very expensive jets might still happen but more likely you’ll see drones flying ahead of the jets themselves.
John Thornhill
You were talking about the swarms of drones that are being developed now. Ryan, is that the kind of future of the battlefield that we’re gonna have robotic armies fighting against each other?
Ryan McMorrow
That does seem like one possible future. It’s kind of hard to assess what is fact and fiction in China because the information is pretty closed off. But you have some defence . . . major defence shows where companies, state-owned contractors will go and display their weapons systems. And you have like the state-owned media defence channel that will oftentimes report on China’s latest technologies or the latest technologies that they want the world to know about. So in those reports and in the defence . . . major defence shows like the Zhuhai air show . . .
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You’re seeing trucks that can basically launch a drone swarm.
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And then there’s the drone aircraft carrier that’s using catapult technology to launch drones. So it does seem like China is investing heavily in this robotic future.
John Thornhill
And has this become kind of day-to-day conversation in Beijing, people very much talking about defence and China’s rising military strength?
Ryan McMorrow
I would say people are, in day-to-day conversation we’ll talk about Taiwan and that’s always in a large part of conversations here. Retaking the island has been a pretty universal desire for most of the Chinese population since I’ve been here. Actual defence tech, maybe more in the nerdy corners of the Beijing population, you’ll have people watching the videos and talking about it. But in my day-to-day conversations, it’s not something that generally factors into it.
John Thornhill
A lot of venture capitalists are now getting quite excited about defence tech in a way that they were just churning the sector a few years ago. Do you think it makes sense to invest in this area at the moment? The counter-argument would be that defence tech is likely to be incredibly cyclical. People worry a lot about defence at times of war, as we see in Ukraine at the moment, but the spigot of government spending might get cut down in future. And that, can you make any more money in defence tech than you can in any other sector, while the hassles are a lot greater? What do you think about that, Sylvia?
Sylvia Pfeifer
Would I invest in defence tech? I probably would. I think one of the difficulties, as you say, is there is a lot of money out there at the moment and there are a lot of start-ups. So as a reporter, I find it difficult. You don’t know which one of these are gonna still be here in two years’ time. I think one other important thing is also we need to see some of the start-ups win major procurement contracts. Again, the ones in the States have started to make inroads there, but I think that will be a sort of important inflection point for the industry.
John Thornhill
Is there a danger, do you think, that we’re overstating the importance of defence tech and that the traditional hardware — the tanks, the battleships, the aircraft — are still gonna be really important on the battlefield?
Sylvia Pfeifer
I think there’s definitely a lot of hype around a defence tech at the moment, if you see how much money is going into it. I wouldn’t rule out, or I wouldn’t discount money still going into hardware.
If you remember when the F-35, the current most advanced fighter jet, was built, that was going to be the last piloted fighter jet ever built. China’s now building something, we’re building, or the UK is building the global combat air programme jet with Japan and Italy, which might be piloted. So things always take longer than you expect.
One guy who had quite a nice analogy, chief executive of a defence software company, and he compared the current situation with the time when with the way that mainframe computers were replaced by personal computers and smartphones. And he sort of asked the questions, are these big manned platforms still going to be relevant in the same way in the future, now that we have all these other systems that are unmanned and expendable? He said he himself was not closing the door to manned systems or crude systems, as we should say today. But he just said, given the rapid development in technology, at least it’s a question that should be being asked by procurement departments out there.
John Thornhill
And Ryan, tell me about the landscape in China. Where are the Chinese putting their money?
Ryan McMorrow
They seem to be investing across the board. So what will end up being the future is unclear. I think at the moment, the humanoid robots fighting wars is probably a good deal off in the distance.
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Just this past weekend, I went to the world’s first half-marathon of humanoid robots.
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Twenty teams from leading companies and universities in China all put their robots out to the test to see how far they could run and if they could run faster than humans. And I think most of the teams didn’t make it to the finish line.
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While many of the human counterparts stopped to take selfies, the robots trailed from the outset. Some of them barely got started. One with propellers went out of control.
Ryan McMorrow
I saw many robots toppling over, unable to get up, and they would pull another robot out from their truck to try to continue on. So, at least in humanoids, humans are far from being replaced on the battlefield.
John Thornhill
Did any of these robots outrun you, Ryan?
Ryan McMorrow
One of them may have been able to, but I was on a bike, so that gave me an advantage.
John Thornhill
And Demetri, if you were running the Pentagon right now — and I know that’s a frightening thought — where would you be putting your money in defence tech?
Demetri Sevastopulo
Well, I think, you know, this is probably a very obvious answer, but I think AI is the biggest area. Another area which is critical for lots of different reasons is quantum. You know, China is, in some areas, arguably ahead of the US in quantum; in some other areas it’s behind, but quantum is important for everything. Like being able to use sensors undersea or in space to detect when a missile is coming over the North or South Pole, let’s say, towards the US or towards China in the opposite direction.
It’s also critical for efforts to decrypt highly encrypted classified information that militaries rely on. So I think technologies like that are gonna be more and more important for the future in the country that strikes out the biggest lead in those, whether it’s AI, whether it’s quantum or things like that, it’s going to have a big advantage. So I think you really have to focus a lot of money in those areas and make sure that you’re putting a lot into the research and development pipeline so that five years, 10 years down the road, you don’t look around and find that you’re actually behind and not ahead any more.
John Thornhill
Wonderful. Well, thank you very much, Ryan, Sylvia and Demetri, for a very rich conversation.
Sylvia Pfeifer
Thank you.
Demetri Sevastopulo
Thank you.
Ryan McMorrow
Thanks for having me on.
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John Thornhill
At the start of this programme, I spoke about the breakthrough in radar technology.
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A new era in safe navigation is ushered in, born of war’s necessity.
John Thornhill
Radar systems relied on tiny crystal detectors, which helped translate the reflected radio waves that bounced off aeroplanes, ships or submarines. These crystals would burn out quickly, a stubborn technological problem that would give way to important postwar research into semiconductors. Scientific breakthroughs made during war become the peacetime technologies of tomorrow.
Today, the development of drones, fully autonomous borders and hypersonic missiles signals the direction that technology is moving. Not only will that impact the battlefield, it will also influence how technology will shape society in the future.
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Tech Tonic is produced by Josh Gabert-Doyon and Persis Love. Edwin Lane is senior producer. Flo Phillips is the executive producer. Manuela Saragosa is the FT’s acting co-head of audio. Original music is by Metaphor Music. Samantha Giovinco and Breen Turner were the sound engineers for this season.
And this episode is dedicated to our engineer, Joseph Salcedo, who tragically passed away last month. We’ll be back soon with another series of Tech Tonic.
