Earlier this month, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, and the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, wrote an article for Foreign Affairs arguing that the future of warfare is here.

They say that the U.S. is not ready for it.

Their article opens with Ukraine and describes warfare that features thousands of drones in the sky, as AI helps soldiers with targeting and robots with clearing mines.

The authors argue technological developments have changed warfare more in the past several years than the decades — spanning from the introduction of the airplane, radio and mechanization to the battlefield. And while this new tech has been used minimally in current conflicts, it is only the beginning.

“Today, what we’re experiencing is the introduction of drones on the ground and drones at sea, and also driven by artificial intelligence and the extraordinary capability that that’s going to bring,” General Milley told NPR.

“Now, it’s not here in full yet, but what we’re seeing are snippets, some movie trailers, if you will, of future warfare. And you’re seeing that play out in Gaza. You’re seeing it play out in Ukraine. You’re seeing it play out elsewhere around the world.”

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Evolution on the battlefield

Schmidt says that this transition is going to happen much quicker than some may expect.

“Autonomy and abundance are going to transform wars very, very quickly,” he told NPR.

“The only reason it hasn’t happened is, thank goodness, the U.S. is not at war, [but] others are. If you study Ukraine, you see a glimpse of the future. Much of the Kursk invasion that recently happened was due to their ability to use short and mid-range drones to support combined operations on the ground.”

Now that the human element of physically being on a battlefield can be replaced by remote operations, Schmidt argues that this will set a new, more precise method of fighting that would also be dramatically less expensive than traditional methods.

“I’m worried, of course, that this will ultimately set a new standard and actually lower the cost of war. But if you think about it, this technology is going to get invented one way or the other, and I’d like it to get invented under U.S. terms.”

Feeling underprepared

Both Milley and Schmidt say that even if major efforts are made to address this change, the red tape involved with approvals from the Pentagon make it difficult to take quick, effective action.

“Not even the president of the United States can fix the procurement process of the Pentagon,” Schmidt said.

“The procurement process is designed for weapon systems that take 15 years. In the Ukraine situation, innovation is occurring on a three to six-week timeline, and we need to find a way to get the Pentagon on that tempo. The only way to do that is with other authorities and other approaches, and with an understanding that you don’t design the product at the beginning and then develop it over five years. You do it incrementally, which is how tech works.”

Milley agrees that in order to keep up, entire systems of operating within the military will need to be revolutionized.

“We are in the midst of really fundamental change here. And then from that, you have to have an operational concept. And then from that, you’ve got to identify the attributes of a future force. And then from that, change the procurement system in order to build the technological capabilities, modify the training, develop the leaders, et cetera. Our procurement systems need to be completely overhauled and updated.”

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Donald Trump said he would vote against an amendment to Florida’s state constitution guaranteeing abortion rights, raising the stakes on an issue that is mobilising Democrats and threatening his White House bid.

The former Republican president had sent mixed signals and avoided taking a stance on the proposed amendment, which will appear on the state ballot in November’s election.

But on Friday, he told Fox News that he would be voting “no” on the measure, which would protect abortion rights until viability and negate a law signed by Republican governor Ron DeSantis in Trump’s home state that bans abortions after six weeks of gestation.

Trump said that while he disagreed with a six-week ban because “you need more time”, Democrats had “radical” policies on abortion. “It is just a ridiculous situation where you can do an abortion in the ninth month,” he said.

The former president has been caught between the need to maintain the support of staunchly conservative, religious voters who are opposed to abortion, and the political imperative of winning over moderate and independent voters who favour abortion rights.

Trump and other Republicans have been on the defensive over abortion ever since the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, including three justices he appointed during his presidency, overturned the right to an abortion nationally in 2022. That has prompted Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country to pass increasingly strict abortion laws, including the six-week abortion ban in Florida.

Opinion polls consistently show that the majority of Americans oppose such strict measures, and Democrats, including Trump’s rival in the race for the White House, US vice-president Kamala Harris, have relentlessly pounded Trump on abortion rights — and raised concerns that other reproductive practices, including in vitro fertilisation and contraception, could be at risk if he is re-elected.

Earlier this week, Trump had scrambled to say that he would ensure funding for IVF procedures, and on Thursday he had suggested that in Florida he would vote to make sure that abortion was not limited to the first six weeks of pregnancy.

But that comment triggered a backlash from the right, forcing him to clarify his position opposing the amendment on Friday.

Harris said in a statement that with his comments on Friday to Fox News, Trump had “just made his position on abortion very clear: he will vote to uphold an abortion ban so extreme it applies before many women even know they are pregnant”.

“I trust women to make their own healthcare decisions and believe the government should never come between a woman and her doctor,” Harris added.

Trump’s struggles to define his positions on reproductive rights come after his campaign attacked Harris for changing stances on a number of issues, including healthcare, energy and immigration, in order to appeal to centrist voters.

Trump’s latest comments on abortion came hours before he was set to address a national conference for Moms for Liberty, a conservative women’s group, in Washington. The Florida-based political organisation was formed to protest Covid-19 pandemic mask and vaccine mandates and now advocates to stop public schools from teaching about LGBT+ identities and structural racism, among other issues.

Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of the group, told the Financial Times earlier on Friday that Trump “really understands and cares about parents and parental rights” and urged anyone who had “an issue” with his stance on abortion to look at the Democratic party’s positions.

“Just wait until you see what the Harris-[Tim] Walz ticket, how anti-life they are,” Justice said. “People need to understand, we need to move our country forward, we need to unite to do that, and if there is anything that we can come together on, it should be our children and their health and safety and development.”

WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump’s legal team on Friday proposed a court schedule in his federal election interference case that would delay a court fight over whether his charges are covered by immunity until after the election — and push the start of a potential trial until well after the next inauguration.

Special counsel Jack Smith argued for a vastly different approach to the trial’s scheduling, saying the court should begin considering arguments immediately as to whether Trump’s actions are covered by presidential immunity, a process his office said will include revealing new evidence.

“The Government is prepared to file its opening immunity brief promptly at any time the Court deems appropriate,” senior assistant special counsel Molly Gaston writes for the government.

But Trump’s legal team wants to hash out other points before getting into the question of whether the Supreme Court’s decision earlier this year makes moot some of the charges that have been brought against him.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan has set a hearing for Thursday to discuss the future schedule of the case, which was originally supposed to go to trial in March 2024.

While Trump’s lawyers never explicitly invoked the pending election, the schedule outlined in the new filing would allow for no new substantive arguments from the special counsel until after voting is complete. Trump is accused of trying to defraud the American public and disenfranchise voters across several states, in charges that are related to his multi-pronged effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election by falsely claiming it had been stolen, which culminated in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Trump has pleaded not guilty and denied all wrongdoing. He has continued to falsely insist the election was stolen and begun to suggest that the coming election could also be subject to fraud that would deny him the presidency.

If Trump wins the November election, he would likely be able to end the case against him before a trial could be held once his appointees took over the Justice Department in January.

Trump’s lawyers indicated they were “considering several challenges” to the superseding indictment returned by a federal grand jury earlier this week, arguing that their challenges “should be resolved in his favor as a matter of law and would obviate the need for further proceedings.” One of their challenges will be questioning the legality of the appointment of Smith, repeating an argument that helped them successfully get separate charges in a Florida federal court tossed out — but a point his lawyers opted not to previously make in the election interference case.

Attorney General Merrick Garland told NBC News last month that he disagreed with a decision made by Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida in July that Smith’s appointment was unlawful.

“Do I look like somebody who would make that basic mistake about the law?” asked Garland, who former president Barack Obama had nominated to the Supreme Court towards the end of Obama’s second term. “I don’t think so.”

Trump’s team also said they strongly maintained that the Supreme Court’s decision means the new indictment should be dismissed entirely because some of the actions described in it, “including, but not limited to, Tweets and public statements about the federal 2020 Presidential election, communications with state officials about the federal election, and allegations relating to alternate slates of electors,” should be shielded from prosecution. Trump’s lawyers said they may also file a motion seeking to have the indictment dismissed because former Vice President Mike Pence was mentioned to the grand jury.

Trump’s team proposed a trial schedule that would have the first hearing on their motions held the week of Jan. 27, which would be one week after the next president is sworn into office. The spring and fall of 2025 would be time for “Additional proceedings, if necessary,” Trump’s lawyers proposed.

The positions of both the government and Trump’s defense team are laid out in a joint motion filed late Friday evening.

Trump was first indicted on the charges in August 2023 and was originally scheduled to go to trial in March 2024, meaning that there likely would have been a verdict in the case before Election Day and, if convicted, Trump would have already been sentenced or had a sentencing date on the books. But the strategy adopted by his legal team paid off, with their appeal significantly delaying the case.

The Supreme Court’s immunity decision, which gave wide protection to the former president to prevent him from being prosecuted for official actions he took as president, weakened the special counsel’s case. In an effort to simplify the issues raised by the Supreme Court’s ruling, the new indictment — returned by an entirely different federal grand jury earlier this week — does not include any of the allegations about Trump’s attempts to weaponize the Justice Department by installing Jeffrey Clark — an environmental lawyer with no criminal prosecutorial experience who believed the election may have been stolen via smart thermostat — as the acting attorney general of the United States just hours before the Jan. 6 attack.

While many Jan. 6 defendants have now conceded that they were tricked by Trump’s 2020 election lies and told judges they regret that they were gullible enough to fall for them in the first place, Trump’s team has attempted to give an intellectual spit-shine to his election conspiracy theories. In court, they’ve claimed that those election conspiracy theories — aired by the same man who rose to political prominence by falsely claiming that America’s first Black president had a fake birth certificate and was actually born in Kenya — “were plausible and maintained in good faith.”

Jack Smith’s team has said explicitly that they believe that Trump didn’t actually believe the lies he was spreading about the election, and that in fact he knew they were false.

“These claims were unsupported, objectively unreasonable, and ever-changing, and the Defendant and his co-conspirators repeated them even after they were publicly disproven,” the new indictment stated.