Eric Schmidt, the billionaire investor and former CEO of Google, said it’s time for the US military to do away with tanks, artillery and mortars in favor of aerial drones similar to the ones that he is building to help Ukraine.
“I read somewhere that the US had thousands and thousands of tanks stored somewhere,” he told the Future Investment Initiative in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday.
“Give them away. Buy a drone instead.”
Schmidt’s comments were reported by Bloomberg News.
Schmidt is listed by Bloomberg Billionaires Index as the 51st richest person in the world with a fortune valued at $33.3 billion as of Wednesday.
The former Google boss said that the Russia-Ukraine war has shown how “a $5,000 drone can destroy a $5 million tank.”
Earlier this year, Forbes reported that Schmidt is the founder of White Stork, a military startup that is building a “kamikaze drone” which is designed to loiter on the battlefield before being dispatched to destroy its target.
“White Stork” is also a reference to a species of bird that is commonly found in Ukraine, where Schmidt has taken on a significant role in helping the country’s defense efforts to repel the Russian invasion.
The company has been developing a mass-producible drone that uses artificial intelligence to zero in on a target even in environments were communications have been interrupted by GPS jamming, according to Forbes.
In July of last year, Schmidt penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal touting drones as “the future of war.
According to Schmidt, Ukrainian forces have “succeeded” because of their deployment of drones — this despite the fact that Russia has a 3-to-1 advantage in soldiers as well as air superiority.
While Ukraine has incurred heavy losses, it “has continually out-innovated the enemy.”
Schmidt served as Google’s CEO from 2001 to 2011, a time of rapid growth for the California-based technology company.
He later became executive chairman for Google, and in 2015, for its new parent company, Alphabet, before resigning as chairman in 2018.