Military Drones | 60 Minutes Full Episodes

One of the biggest revolutions over the past 15 years of war has been the rise of the drones, remotely piloted vehicles that do everything from conduct airstrikes to dismantle roadside bombs. Now, a new generation of drones is coming. Only this time, they are autonomous, able to operate on their own without humans controlling them from somewhere with a joystick.

Some autonomous machines are run by artificial intelligence, which allows them to learn, getting better each time. It's early in the revolution, and no one knows exactly where it is headed. But the potential exists for all missions considered too dangerous or complex for humans to be turned over to autonomous machines that can make decisions faster and go in harm's

way without any fear. Think of it as the coming swarm. And if that sounds like the title of a sci-fi miniseries Well stay tuned as we're about to show you it's already a military reality This swarm over the California desert is like nothing the US military has ever fielded before Each of those tiny drones is flying itself.

Humans on the ground have given them a mission to patrol a three-square-mile area, but the drones are figuring out for themselves how to do it. They are operating autonomously, and the Pentagon's Dr. Will Roper says what you're seeing is a glimpse into the future of combat.

It opens up a completely different level of warfare, a completely different level of maneuver.

The drone is called Perdix, an unlikely name for an unlikely engine of revolution. Roper, head of a once secret Pentagon organization called the Strategic Capabilities Office, remembers the first time he saw Perdix, which is named after a bird found in Greek mythology.

I held it up in my hands, about as big as my hand, and I looked at it and said, really? This is what you want me to get excited about? You know, it looks like a toy.

Perdix flies too fast and too high to follow. So 60 Minutes brought specialized high-speed cameras to the China Lake Weapons Station in California to capture it in flight.

Very nice.

Developed by 20 and 30-somethings from MIT's Lincoln Labs, Pertix is designed to operate as a team, which you can see when you follow this group of 8 on a computer screen.

We've given them a mission at this point, and that mission is as a team, go fly down the road. And so they allocate that amongst all the individual purdicks.

And they're talking to each other?

They are.

By what? So they've got radios on, and they're each telling each other not just what they're doing, but where they are in space. How frequently are they talking back and forth to each other? Many, many times a second when they're first sorting out. I mean, it looks helter-skelter. You want them to converge to a good enough solution and go ahead and get on with it.

It's faster than a human would sort it out.

Cheap and expendable, Perdix tries to make a soft landing.

Nice.

But it's no great loss if it crashes into the ground.

All units down, all units killed.

Perdix can be used as decoys to confuse enemy air defenses or equipped with electronic transmitters to jam their radar. This one looks like it has a camera. As a swarm of miniature spy planes fitted with cell phone cameras, they could hunt down fleeing terrorists. There are several different roads they could have gone down and you don't know which one swarm of miniature spy planes fitted with cell phone cameras that could hunt down fleeing terrorists.

There are several different roads they could have gone down, and you don't know which one to search. You can tell them, go search all the roads, and tell them what to search for, and let them sort out the best way to do it.

The Pentagon is spending $3 billion a year on autonomous systems, many of them much more sophisticated than a swarm of purdits. This pair of air and ground robots runs on artificial intelligence. I'm gonna say start the reconnaissance. They are searching a mock village for a suspected terrorist, reporting back to Marine Captain Jim Pinero and his

tablet. The ground robots continuing on its mission while the air robot is

searching on its own.

The robots are slow and cumbersome, but they're just test beds for cutting-edge computer software which could power more agile machines, ones that could act as advanced scouts for a foot patrol.

I would want to use a system like this to move maybe in front of me or in advance of me to give me early warning of enemy in the area.

This time I'm the target. The computer already knows what I look like, so now we'll see if it can match what's stored in its memory with the real thing as I move around this make-believe village. The robot's artificial intelligence

had done its homework the night before, Tim Faltemeier says, learning what I look like.

We were able to get every picture of every story that you've ever been in.

So, how many pictures of me are there out there?

When we ran this through, we have about 50,000 different pictures of you that we were able to get. Had we had more time, we have about 50,000 different pictures of you that we were able to get. Had we had more time,

we probably could have done a better job.

So because you've got 50,000 images of me, how certain would you be?

Very.

Now it's looking at me.

It recognized you instantly. And so what we reported today on our scores were about a 1 in 10,000 chance of being wrong.

While the robot was searching for me inside an auditorium at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia...

This will give us a technological advantage.

...Lieutenant Commander Raleigh Wicks was watching from a missile boat in the Potomac River.

What I was doing was I was turning over control of the weapon system to the autonomous systems that you've seen on the floor

today. Had Wicks given permission to shoot, the missile would have struck my location using a set of coordinates given to it by the robots. They were

controlling a remote weapon system. They were controlling where that weapon

system was pointing with me supervising.

It will be about three years before these robots will be ready for the battlefield. By then, Captain Pinero says, they will look considerably different. Will those robots, when they reach the battlefield, will they be able to defend themselves?

We are looking into that.

We are looking into defensive capability for robot, armed robots.

Shoot back?

Correct.

This Pentagon directive states autonomous systems shall be designed to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force. What that means, says General Paul Selva, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military's man in charge of autonomy, is that life or death decisions will be made only by humans, even though machines can do it faster and in some cases better. Are machines better at facial recognition than humans?

All the research I've seen says about five years ago, machines actually got better at image recognition than humans. Can a disguise defeat machine recognition? If you think about the proportions of a human body, there are several that are discrete and difficult to hide.

The example that I will use as I look at you is the distance between your pupils is very likely unique to you and a handful of other humans. A disguise cannot move your eyes. So if I have a ski mask on, that doesn't help? Not if your eyes are visible. If you have to see, you can't change that proportion. So if the machine's better, why not let it make the decision?

This goes to the ethics of the question of whether or not you'll allow a machine to take a human life without the intervention of a human. Do you know where this is headed?

I don't.

Virtually any military vehicle has the potential to become autonomous. The Navy has begun testing Sea Hunter, an autonomous ship to track submarines. Program manager Scott Littlefield says that when you no longer have to make room for a crew, you can afford to buy a lot of them.

You could buy somewhere between 50 and 100 of these

for the price of one warship.

I've heard somebody describe this ship as looking like an overgrown Polynesian war canoe. Ha ha ha. Why does it look like it does?

To be able to go across the Pacific Ocean without refueling, this hull form, the trimaran, was the best

thing we could come up with.

What is its range?

We can go about 10,000 nautical miles

on a tank of gas, 14,000 gallons.

Sea Hunter is at least two years away from being ready to steam across the Pacific on its own. Among other things, it has to learn how to follow the rules of the road to avoid collisions with other ships. When we went aboard, it had only been operating autonomously for a few weeks, and there was still a human crew just in case.

When testing is done, this pilot house will come off, and the crew will be standing on the pier, waving goodbye. From then on, this will be a ghost ship commanded by 36 computers running 50 million lines of software code. And these lifelines will have to come off, too, since there's no need for them with no humans on board.

It has a top speed of 26 knots and a tight turning radius, which should enable it to use its sonar to track diesel-powered submarines for weeks at a time.

Many countries have diesel submarines.

That's the most common kind of submarine that's out there.

China?

China has them.

Russia?

Russia has them.

Iran?

Iran has them.

North Korea?

North Korea?

Yes.

I think I get the picture.

Yeah. But of everything we saw, Tiny Perdix is closest to being ready to go operational, if it passes its final exam. Will Roper and his team of desert rats are about to attempt to fly the largest autonomous swarm ever, 100 Perdix drones. This is one of the

riskiest, most exciting things that's going on right now in the pentagon.

Risky not only because the swarm would be more than three times larger than anything Ropers ever done before, but also because 60 minutes is here to record the outcome for all to see. Why are you letting us watch a couple of

reasons, David? I when this first came up, I have to be honest with you, my first response was, that sounds like a horrible idea. It's just human nature. I don't want this to fail on camera. But I did not like the fear of failure being my only reason for not letting you be here.

And we also wanted the world to see that we're doing some new things.

This time, the Pyrdix will be launched from three F-18 jet fighters, just as they would on a real battlefield.

There they are.

All right. A little piece of the future.

The F-18s are traveling at almost the speed of sound. So the first test for Pertix is whether they will survive their violent ejection into the atmosphere.

That's 104 in the swarm, David.

104 in the swarm, David. 104 alive. That's a hundred swarm.

There they are.

You see them?

Look at them.

Look at them. They flash in the sun as they come into view.

Oh, there they go.

Yeah. As the PIRDCs descend in front of our cameras, they organize themselves into a team of three in the sun as they come into view.

As the purdicks descend in front of our cameras, they organize themselves into a tighter swarm. Imagine the split-second calculations a human would have to make to keep them from crashing into each other.

Look at that.

Everywhere you look, they're just coming into view. It does feel like a plague or locust You know, so they're running out of battery

There are reams of data that still have to be analyzed but Roper is confident Perdix passed its final exam Could become operational as early as this year. I've heard people say that autonomy is the biggest thing in military technology since nuclear weapons.

Really?

I think I might agree with that, David. I mean, if what we mean is the biggest thing is something that's going to change everything,

I think autonomy is going to change everything.

Over the last decade, a new breed of tech billionaires has positioned themselves not merely as entrepreneurs, but as visionary saviors who believe technology can transform the world. Tonight, we will introduce you to one of them. His name is Palmer Luckey, and he's the founder of Andril, a California defense products company.

Luckey says for too long, the U.S. military has relied on overpriced and outdated technology. He argues a Tesla has better AI than any U.S. aircraft, and a Roomba vacuum has better autonomy than most of the Pentagon's weapons systems. So, Andrall is making a line of autonomous weapons that operate using artificial intelligence, no human required. Some international groups have called those types of weapons killer robots. But as Sharon Alfonsi first reported earlier this year, Palmer Luckey says it is the future of warfare.

I've always said that we need to transition from being the world police to being the world gun store.

Do we want to be the world's gun store?

I think so. I think we have to.

Says the guy who sells weapons.

See, I agree, it sounds self-fulfilling, but you have to remember I also got

into this industry because I believe that. Palmer Luckey isn't your typical defense industry executive. His daily uniform, flip-flops and a Hawaiian shirt, is more suited for Margaritaville than the military. But the 32-year-old billionaire is the founder of Andril, whose line of American-made autonomous weapons looks like it came straight out of a sci-fi movie

and whose slick marketing videos wouldn't be out of place in one. There's the Roadrunner, a twin turbojet-powered drone interceptor that can take off, identify, and strike. If it doesn't find a target, it can land and try again. Andrew also makes headsets which allow soldiers to see 360 degrees in combat. And there's this. It's an

electromagnetic warfare system that can be programmed to jam enemy systems, knocking out drone swarms. It's not some futuristic fantasy. Andro systems are already being used by the U.S. military and in the war in Ukraine.

We shouldn't be sending our people to stand in other countries, putting our men and women, our sons and daughters at risk for the sovereignty of other nations.

So you'd rather have an American-made product in their hands than our soldiers over there?

Absolutely, every time. And I think that that's one of the reasons that autonomy is so powerful. Right now, there's so many weapon systems that require manning. You know, if I can have one guy commanding

and controlling 100 aircraft, that's a lot easier than having to have a pilot in every single one, and it puts a lot fewer American lives at risk.

To be clear, autonomy does not mean remote control. Once an autonomous weapon is programmed and given a task, it can use artificial intelligence for surveillance or to identify, select, and engage targets. No operator needed. It's a scary idea to some people.

It's a scary idea, but I mean, that's the world we live in. I'd say it's a lot scarier, for example, to imagine a weapons system that doesn't have any level of intelligence at all. There's no moral high ground in making a landmine that can't tell the difference between a school bus full of children and Russian armor.

It's not a question between smart weapons and no weapons. It's a question between smart weapons and dumb weapons.

Luckey showed us how those so-called smart weapons can be synchronized on Andril's AI platform. It's called Lattice. Lattice collects data from various sensors and sources, including satellites, drones, radar, and cameras, allowing, he says, the AI to analyze, move assets, and execute missions faster than a human.

If you were having to require the human operator to actually map every single action and say, hey, do this, if that, then this. It would take so long to manage it that you would be better off just remotely piloting it. It's the AI on board all these weapons

that makes it possible to make it so easy.

There are lots of people who go, oh, AI, I don't know, I don't trust it, it's going to go rogue.

I would say that it is something to be aware of, but in the grand scheme of things, things to be afraid of, there's things that I'm much more terrified of. And I'm a lot more worried about evil people with mediocre advances in technology than AI deciding that it's gonna wipe us all out.

Lucky says all Andrall's weapons have a kill switch that allow a human operator to intervene if needed. But the Secretary General of the United Nations has called lethal autonomous weapons, quote, politically unacceptable and morally repugnant. When people say to you, look, it's evil, how do you respond to that?

I usually don't bother because if I am going to argue with them, I usually poke it. I'm like, okay, so do you think that NATO should be armed with squirt guns or slingshots? How about sternly worded letters? Would you like that? Would you like it if NATO just, they just have a bunch of guys sitting at typewriters, a thousand monkeys writing letters to Vladimir Putin, begging him to not invade Ukraine?

Our entire society exists because of a credible backstop of violence threatened by the United States and our allies all over the world. And thank goodness for it.

It might sound flip, but part of Palmer Luckey's philosophy is that autonomous weapons ultimately promote peace by scaring adversaries away.

My position has been that the United States needs to arm our allies and partners around the world so that they can be prickly porcupines that nobody wants to step on. Nobody wants to bite them.

In your mind, is it enough just to have all these things as deterrent, or do they have to be deployed and used?

They have to believe that you can use them.

By the end of this year, Andrall says it will have secured more than $6 billion in government contracts worldwide. When you first came into this space and you're a tech guy in a hawaiian shirt and you're walking into the pentagon, maybe in flip flops, I

don't know.

Were you welcomed with open arms? There were a very small number of people who welcomed me with open arms and everyone else thought that I was nuts, nuts

because there hasn't been a new company in the defense industry in a significant way since the end of the Cold War. For decades, five defense contractors called the Primes have dominated the industry. Typically, the Primes present an idea to the Pentagon. If the Pentagon buys it, the government pays for the company to develop it, even if it's late or goes over budget.

Lucky started Aneril to flip that procurement structure on its head.

The idea behind Aneril was to build not a defense contractor, but a defense product company.

What's the difference?

Contractors, in general, are paid to do work, whether or not it succeeds. A product company has a very different mentality. You're putting in your own money, you're putting in your own time. My vision was to build a company that would show up not with a PowerPoint describing how taxpayers are going to pay all my bills, but with a working product where all the risk has been baked out.

It will work for enough things that you can save our country hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

It may not surprise you that Palmer Luckey's father was a car salesman. His mother took on the role of homeschooling him and his three sisters. Luckey says he was fascinated by electronics and spent a lot of time tinkering in his parents' garage in Long Beach, California. By age 19, his tinkering turned into Oculus, the virtual reality company. And at 21, Palmer Luckey fulfilled every young founder's dream when he sold Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion. The wonder kid graced the covers of magazines, but two years later, he was fired from Facebook.

Why did you get fired?

Well, you know, everyone's got a different story, but it boils down to I gave $9,000 to a political group that was for Donald Trump and against Hillary Clinton. To be a Trump supporter in 2016, this was at the height of the election insanity and derangement in Silicon Valley. And so I think that a lot of people thought back then that you could just fire a Trump supporter.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has denied that Luckey was fired for his political views. What do you think now when you see those tech leaders, Mark Zuckerberg, lined up behind President Trump now at his inauguration?

I am inclined to let every single one of them get away with it.

Look. What do you them get away with it. Look.

What do you mean, get away with it?

Coming around to a point of view that is more aligned with the American people broadly, I think is good for the country. I think it is not good for you to have techno-corpo elites that are radically out of step with where the American people are.

In 2017, Leckie says he left Silicon Valley with hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank and a chip on his shoulder.

I was fired at the height of my career. You know, my gears were ground, and I really wanted to prove that I was somebody, that I was not a one-hit wonder, and that I still had it in me to do big things.

He says he thought about starting companies to combat obesity or fix the prison system, but ultimately decided to break into the defense industry. Have you run into any people who don't take you seriously because you were never in the

military?

I, I don't think so. I think I owe that to the James Bond franchise. Everyone in the military has seen James Bond movies and they all like you, right? I'm the wacky gadget man. I'm the guy who types on the computer

and pushes up my glasses and then gives them a strange thing to help them accomplish their mission.

And this is his laboratory, Andrew's 640,000 square foot headquarters in Costa Mesa, California. It's a mix of high-tech carpentry and robotic engineering. A sign on the floor pokes fun at the boss's shoe choice. But Lucky wanted to show us something off campus.

We hopped in his 1985 Humvee. The billionaire told us he also owns a decommissioned Black Hawk helicopter, a 48-crew submarine, and a Navy speedboat. In Dana Point, we took a ride 15 minutes off the coast to see the largest weapon in Andrewll's arsenal, this submarine.

It's called the Dive XL. It's about the size of a school bus and works autonomously.

It's not remote controlled by this computer. It's doing it on the brain on the submarine itself. So if I told it to go off and perform some mission that's months long, like go to this target, listen for this particular signature, and if you see this signature run, if you see this one hide, if you see this one follow it, it can do that all on its own

without being detected, without communicating with it.

Andrell says the Dive XL can travel a thousand miles fully submerged. Australia has already invested $58 million in the subs to help defend its seas from China. But Andrell's most anticipated weapon was closely guarded until May. Hidden inside this hangar, Andrel's unmanned fighter jet called Fury. There is no cockpit or stick or rudder because there's no pilot.

The idea is that you're building a robotic fighter jet that is flying with manned fighters and is doing what you ask it to do, recommending things that be done, taking risks that you don't want human pilots to take.

Fury represents a big turning point for the company. Andrewel was viewed by some inside the defense industry as a tech bro startup until it beat out several of the prime defense contractors to make an unmanned fighter jet for the Air

Force.

Fury is scheduled to take its first test flight this summer. If selected by the Pentagon, it, like all Andril products, will be produced in the U.S.

The war games say we're going to run out of munitions in eight days in a fight with China. If we have to fight Iran and China and Russia all at the same time, we are screwed. If we go to war, right?

Your version of what Anduril's place is in a conflict, how do you view it?

I think what we're going to be doing is first connecting a lot of these systems that otherwise would not have been talking to one another. We're going to be making large numbers of cruise missiles, large numbers of fighter jets, large numbers of surface and subsurface systems. I guess I would hope that Anduril is making most of the stuff that's being used on day nine, day 10, day 11, day 100. I think a lot of that is going to be coming out of

our factories after everything else is run dry. The head of NORAD and NORTHCOM, the military commands that defend North America, told Congress earlier this year that some of those mysterious drones seen flying inside the United States may indeed have been spying. He did not say for whom. 60 Minutes has been looking into eerily similar incidents going back more than five years, including those attention-getting flyovers in New Jersey.

In each, drones first appeared over restricted civilian or military sites, coming and going, often literally under the radar. As we first reported in March, the wake-up call came just over a year ago, when drones invaded the skies above Langley Air Force Base in Virginia over 17 nights, forcing the relocation of our most advanced fighter jets. Our story starts with

an eyewitness and an iPhone. Close around 7 o'clock, I would say, I started seeing these reddish-orange flashing lights that were starting to come in from the Virginia beach area. It began slowly, like one at a time.

Jonathan Butner's close encounter with drones came on December 14, 2023. He was at his family's cabin on the James River in Virginia, about 100 miles south of Washington, D.C., with a commanding view of several military installations across the water.

They started really coming in, like almost like on a conveyor belt.

How many in total?

I probably saw upwards of 40 plus. When I first saw that, I was like, dude, those are going directly over Langley Air Force Base.

Langley is one of the most critical air bases on the East Coast. Home to dozens of F-22 Raptors, the most advanced stealth fighter jets ever built. Butner says from his perch, he has seen it all.

I'm very familiar with all the different types of military craft. We have Blackhawks, we have the F-22s, and these were like nothing I've ever seen.

Butner took these iPhone videos of the objects coming and going for nearly an hour and a half. These are the only public videos of the drones over Langley.

There's another one. They're still swimming each other.

Yes. He shared this video with the FBI for its investigation.

And another.

Yes. The reports were coming in 20 to 30 sightings, same time every evening, 30 to 45 minutes

after sunset.

Retired four-star general Mark Kelly was the highest-ranking officer at Langley to witness the swarm. A veteran fighter pilot, Kelly went up to the roof of a squadron headquarters for an unobstructed view of the airborne invaders. So what did you see?

Well, what you saw was different sizes of incursions of aircraft. You saw different altitudes, different airspeeds.

Some were rather loud. Some weren't near as loud.

What was the smallest one? What was the largest one?

The smallest, you know, you're talking about a commercial-size quadcopter, and then the largest ones are probably the size of what I would call a bass boat or a small car.

The size of a small car? At the time, General Glenn Van Hurk was joint commander of NORAD and NORTHCOM, the military commands that protect North American airspace. He has since retired.

I actually provided support in the form of fighters, airborne warning and control platforms, helicopters, to try to further categorize what those drones were at the time.

Ten months earlier, he ordered an F-22 from Langley to shoot down that Chinese spy balloon over the Atlantic after it had sailed across the U.S. But this time, he found himself ill-equipped to respond. NORAD's radar systems, designed during the Cold War to detect high-altitude air, space or missile attacks, were unable to detect low-flying drones that could be

seen with the naked eye. Why don't we just shoot them down? Well first you have to have the capability to detect, track, identify, make sure it's not a civilian airplane flying around. If you can do that, Bill, then it becomes a safety issue for the American public. Firing missiles in our homeland is not taken lightly.

We're not able to track them? We're not able to see where they originate?

No, it's the capability gap. Certainly, they can come and go from any direction. The FBI

is looking at potential options, but they don't have an answer right now. And there haven't been

answers for similar encroachments for more than five years. There are multiple UAS in vicinity of Paul Hamilton, CPA 100 feet in altitude off the bow. In 2019, naval warships training off the California coast were shadowed for weeks by dozens of

drones.

We have visual of four probable unidentified drones with course unknown and speed unknown.

For years, the Pentagon did little to dispel speculation these images, taken with night vision equipment, were UFOs. But ship's logs show they were identified as drones at the time. And the Navy suspected they came from this Hong Kong-flagged freighter sailing nearby, but couldn't prove it. Since then, the defense news site, The War Zone,

has documented dozens of drone intrusions at sensitive infrastructure and military installations. In 2019, the Palo Verde nuclear plant in Arizona, the largest power producer in the country. In 2024, an experimental weapons site in Southern California, where defense contractors are building the next generation of stealth bombers. Last December, the Army confirmed 11 drone sightings over the Picatinny Arsenal in northern New Jersey where advanced weapons are designed and built.

What is that? Which ignited a public frenzy with sightings of unidentified flying objects all over the

region.

New Jersey remains the epicenter of the drone mystery.

While much of the country was fixated on New Jersey, another swarm of drones was disrupting operations at an air base in the UK, where U.S. nuclear weapons have been stored.

Clearly, there is a military intelligence aspect of this.

Republican Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi is chairman of the Armed Services Committee that oversees the Pentagon. We talked to him this past December. Do you believe that these drones

are a spying system, a spying platform?

What would a logical person

conclude?

That.

That these are spying incursions. And yet, I can tell you, I am privy to classified briefings at the highest level. I think the Pentagon and the National Security Advisors are still mystified. Still mystified? Yes.

More alarming? With drones overhead, some of the F-22s stationed at Langley were moved to a nearby airbase for their own protection. There's a new wartime reality. Drones that can spy can also destroy. Deep inside Russia, advanced aircraft have been destroyed by Ukrainian drones. General

Van Hurk told us drones could do the same thing here.

I have seen video of drones in various sizes flying over the F-22 flight line at Langley.

What's your reaction to that? They could drop ordnance on them, drop bombs on them, they could crash into them to disable them. Was that a concern?

Absolutely, it's a concern. Small UAS or drones can do a myriad of missions.

President Biden was informed of the Langley intrusions, and meetings were held at the White House to figure out how to bring the drones down. But after 17 nights, the drone visitation stopped. A senior official in the Biden White House later downplayed the incident to 60 Minutes, saying it was likely the work of hobbyists. From what you saw, did you rule out that these might be hobbyists sending these drones up?

No. It would be my assessment they weren't hobbyists because of the magnitude of the events, the

sizes of some of the drones, and the duration.

So what's going on?

Well, I wish I had the answer. It certainly could have a foreign nexus, a threat nexus. They could be doing anything from surveilling critical infrastructure, just to the point of embarrassing us from the fact that they can do this on a day-to-day basis, and that we're not able to do anything about it.

In overseas war zones, the U.S. military has broad authority to bring down menacing drones with gunfire, missiles, and electronic jamming. Here at home, any of those actions would pose a threat to civilians on the ground and in the air.

Well, we certainly need new systems to counter this threat.

A year ago, General Gregory Guillaume, a combat veteran, took control of NORAD and NORTHCOM. He ordered a 90-day assessment of operations and says the drones or UAVs at Langley became the centerpiece. We're the most powerful military on the face of the earth. And yet, drones could fly over a major Air Force base and we couldn't stop them?

How is that possible?

Well I think the threat got ahead of our ability to detect and track the threat. I think all eyes were rightfully overseas where UAVs were being used on one way attack to attack US and coalition service members and the threat in the US probably caught us by surprise

a little bit. As it stands today could you detect a swarm of drones flying over or flying into the airspace at Langley. Could you detect that today?

At low altitude, probably not with your standard FAA or surveillance radars.

Complicating his efforts? Bureaucracy. When the drones flew outside the perimeter of Langley Air Force Base, other agencies had jurisdiction. The Coast Guard, FAA, FBI, and local police. There was no one agency in charge.

So what did you determine went on at Langley?

Well that investigation is still ongoing. So I don't think we know entirely what happened.

You know, when we hear things from the White House that it's not deemed a threat, it seems to me that this is alarming. I mean, this is kind of hair-on-fire time.

It is alarming. And I would say that our hair is on fire here in Northcom in a controlled way, and we're moving out extremely quickly.

This past November, General Guillaume was given the authority to cut through the red tape and coordinate counter-drone efforts across multiple government agencies. He says new, more sensitive radar systems are being installed at strategic bases. And NORTHCOM is developing what it calls fly-away kits with the latest anti-drone technology to be delivered to bases besieged by drones.

My goal is inside of a year that we would have the fly-away kit capability to augment

the services and the installations if they're necessary. So within a year, were Langley to happen again, there'd be some ability to respond.

That's my goal.

His predecessor, Glenn Van Hurk, says the Pentagon, White House, and Congress have underestimated this massive vulnerability for far too long.

It's been one year since Langley had their drone incursion. And we don't have the policies and laws in place to deal with this. That's not a sense of urgency.

Why do you think that is?

I think it's because there's a perception that this is Fortress America. Two oceans on the east and west with friendly nations north and south, and nobody's going to attack our homeland. It's time we move beyond that assumption.

This past week, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky reasserted he doesn't want to surrender any territory in exchange for peace with Russia, a declaration that followed earlier warnings from Russian President Vladimir Putin that if Europe engaged in a wider war, it would be defeated. Nearly four years in, the conflict continues to send shockwaves through the Western alliance. European nations are beefing up their defenses.

Nowhere is the impact more profound than in Germany. Scarred by their country's Nazi past, Germans embraced pacifism after the Cold War. Defense spending collapsed to the point some soldiers were buying their own gear. But Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, combined with persistent pressure from President Donald Trump for Europe to shoulder more of its own defense, transformed the landscape. Today, Germany is racing to rearm. This past month we were invited by the Bundeswehr, the German military, to

observe basic training at the Munster army base in northwest Germany. A squad of recruits ran punishing drills, honing the skills they would need to defend their position against an enemy assault. The major in charge has been training troops since 2018. The Bundeswehr won't reveal his name to shield his identity from hostile actors. So have you seen a difference in the recruits of today

versus years past?

Yes, I think there's a huge difference. They know what they're here for and it's getting more clear to them that everything we are training here for could be one day real. We don't hope that,

but we're preparing exactly for that.

Because of the war in Ukraine?

Yes, of course.

The war in Ukraine has shaken Germany's sense of security. But the country is also shaking off the shadows of its brutal military past. This Holocaust memorial in Berlin, a stark reminder of that history, stands close by the Reichstag, where the national parliament is moving to restore Germany's military

as Europe's most powerful force. Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has overseen a 23% uptick in enlistments over last year. How is the war in Ukraine changing Germany's view of its own security?

I grew up in the Cold War and since February 2022, we all experienced in Germany and in Europe that the war is back. We never expected that and we were so hopeful that it would never happen again, but it does and we have to do everything to be able to deter and defend.

Pistorius was appointed defense minister in 2023, almost a year after Russia's large-scale assault on Ukraine. When conservative Friedrich Merz became chancellor this past May, he kept Pistorius, the blunt-talking social democrat, in his post.

I mean, you have to be clear on what you want, what you are standing for.

We met him at the Bendler Block, the Berlin building complex once housed the Nazis' Army High Command. Today, it's Germany's equivalent of the Pentagon. When we spoke with Pistorius this past month, he didn't pull any punches on Russian President

Vladimir Putin's ambitions.

There's not only the war against Ukraine. This is a war against a root-based international order. And at the same time, he does not stop stressing what he's really longing for, like a renaissance of the Soviet empire. He wants to be the dominant power in Europe,

and he wants to be the third of three world powers like China and the U.S. This is what he is heading for.

Pistorius warns Putin is rapidly rebuilding Russia's military, and he told us Russia could be in position to attack the West by the end of the decade. When does Germany need to be ready for war?

We should do everything to be that in 2029. This is our objective. This is still a way to go.

Three days after Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz told the Bundestag, Germany's parliament, the incursion marked a Zeitenwende, a turning point for Europe. He announced a special 100 billion euro fund to kick-start Germany's military build-up. Three years later, in the run-up to his election as chancellor, Friedrich Merz said he was troubled as well by President Trump's threats to pull back

from NATO.

My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA.

You're gambling with World War III.

After this contentious Oval Office meeting with President Zelensky this past February, Friedrich Merz posted, we must never confuse aggressor and victim in this terrible war. And he pushed Parliament to exempt defense spending from Germany's debt break, the constitutionally mandated spending cap. The money started flowing. The defense budget is projected to rise almost 80% by 2029. How big should the German military be?

Germany is the third biggest economy in the world, and the biggest one in Europe, of course. So everybody in Europe, of course. So everybody in Europe expects us to be the strongest ally in NATO in Europe.

With the surge of federal funding, the long, moribund German defense industry is springing back to life.

The drones are the future of warfare.

We met Sven Kruke in Berlin. He is co-CEO of drone manufacturer, Quantum Systems. The company, with factories in Germany and Ukraine, just landed a 25 million euro contract with the Bundeswehr to produce up to 750 intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance drones, ISR for short.

We have now more than 1,500 at the battlefront, day by day in use.

1,500 drones?

Drones, drones, in use in Ukraine, day by day,

night by night.

Drones, including Quantums, have helped reshape the battlefield. A few months after the 2022 invasion, Russian forces tried to cross the Donetsk River in eastern Ukraine. Explosions and smoke obscured their movements.

A quantum drone equipped with a thermal camera

helped Ukraine see, target, and stop the advance. And this actually was our moment where everybody has seen quantum systems and especially ISR drones can make a difference.

Krug told us Germany isn't investing enough in cutting-edge technologies. But we saw evidence the defense ministry is thinking outside the box, way outside the box. It's funding tests to see if these giant Madagascar hissing cockroaches can be repurposed from repulsive pests to miniature battlefield assets.

This is a left turn and this is a right turn.

Steffen Wilhelm's year old startup, Swarm Biotactics in central Germany, is working with the Bundeswehr to develop technology that can steer the creepy critters autonomously and send them on reconnaissance missions. He let me take control.

Wow that's super resilient and as you can see, I mean there can cross with tiny spaces can go up the wall into pipes like underground and rubble.

You know, this is really bizarre. Is it? Swarm's insect neuroscientists attach electrodes to the roaches' antenna. They insist this doesn't hurt, stimulating their natural ability to navigate. The electrodes are hidden in these bug-sized backpacks, along with a battery and microchips. They're working to shrink the technology

to soon look like this.

♪♪

Swarm's AI-generated video shows how they might be deployed, carrying cameras, microphones, and Doppler radar into war zones. Right now, we're hearing that Russia is rearming itself. They've got more tanks, more armaments. How does this compete?

We have to be smarter. We have to use intelligence. We have to use autonomy because we wouldn't have enough personnel or enough equipment if you look at what Russia produces right now.

So I think this is a shift we see in the German startups.

Still, Germany is placing a big bet on its biggest defense contractor, Rheinmetall. A major arms supplier to German troops in both World Wars, Rheinmetall and its subsidiaries have won a commanding share of recent government contracts.

We are the fastest growing defense company in Europe at the moment.

Armin Popperger has been CEO since 2013. Pragmatic, forceful, strategic, he built Rheinmetall into a pillar of NATO rearmament.

Rheinmetall was an ammunition company. It's going from ammunitions to vehicle platforms. But now we go to digitization, we go to satellite business, we go to naval business.

His company's success and support of Ukraine made him the target of a Russian assassination plot. But that didn't slow him or the company down. Rheinmetall is building and expanding 13 arms factories across Europe.

We educated two generations, if something happens in the world, we call Washington and Washington will help us. That changed. President Trump said it very clear. America has her own problems. The Europeans have to help themselves. And now, with the Ukrainian-Russian war, it's very clear about that, that we have to do more.

In 2024, Germany began sending its 45th Armored Brigade, 5,000 troops, to Lithuania, once brutally occupied by the Nazis. Lithuania now welcomes German troops bolstering NATO's eastern flank, Germany's first permanent deployment of a combat-ready brigade abroad since World War II. Despite the uptick in enlistments, the Bundeswehr faces a manpower challenge. It wants to add about 75,000 active-duty troops to its all-volunteer force by 2035. History weighs on recruitment.

The issue still sparks protests. A recent poll found an overwhelming majority of 15- to 25-year-olds would not take up arms. If volunteer numbers fall short, the government may reintroduce the draft. Soldiers we met in basic training told us

they find the reluctance of their generation to volunteer troubling. I think a lot of it must have to do with the history of World War II.

Yes, of course.

Private Lasse told us he's proud to serve.

Nobody wants to go to war, but if it happens, you have to be there to defend your country.

So help me God, Rachel!

The week before we spoke to Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, he presided over a public swearing-in of new recruits in Berlin.

Deutschland! Deutschland! Deutschland!

Deutschland, they shouted. The world hasn't heard Germany assert itself like this since World War II, but times have changed. When you talk about rebuilding the German military, there are many people who recoil at that thought.

I try to explain to them, if you want to live in peace, in freedom, security, with the right to go on the street and to demonstrate against or for whatever you want, to love however you want and to believe in any god you want, then you need to be willing to defend it, because otherwise there might be people like Vladimir Putin because otherwise there might be people like Vladimir Putin

who will take that kind of living away from us.