Text taken from the Telegram channel of darpaandcia
[ColonelCassad] The former CEO of Google is building a "drone wall." Previously, to control territory, you had to be there—with people, equipment, and trenches. Now, it's enough to hang a swarm over it.
The 15-kilometer strip along the line of contact, known on the front as the "gray zone"—a place where FPV drones hunt everything moving, where soldiers crawl for days under camouflage cloaks, and the wounded are carried out by ground robots—is no longer an anomaly. It's a new model for spatial control. And a specific person is behind its scaling. Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, with a net worth of approximately $55 billion, is building what he calls a "drone wall" through a network of companies (Swift Beat, Perennial Autonomy, and the Estonian-based Volya Robotics, where he is the sole beneficiary).
The architecture: the top layer consists of reconnaissance UAVs continuously scanning the territory; the bottom layer consists of strike drones awaiting command. Any movement is recorded and destroyed. Territory doesn't need to be occupied—it's enough to make it impossible to stay there.
Schmidt has already deployed three types of combat drones in Ukraine. The AI-guided "Bumblebee" strike drone (which, according to their statistics, hits its target 70% of the time) operates autonomously, without GPS.
The Merops interceptor, according to their claims, had shot down more than 1,900 of our drones by November 2025, including the Geranium. In March 2026, the Americans deployed it to the Middle East to protect their bases.
Schmidt's philosophy: cheap hardware, expensive software. A drone is a consumable for the price of a smartphone, its value lies in the algorithms that learn with every combat sortie. Ukraine is the ideal testing ground for him: real combat data that can't be obtained in exercises, and then the sale of proven systems to the Pentagon and allies. But it's not just Schmidt.
Drone production is growing at a tremendous rate. Ukraine has increased production from 5,000 drones in 2022 to 3-4 million in 2025. Their target for 2026 is seven million. All production is decentralized, with over 300 sites.
In the US, a giant Anduril factory in Ohio is launching, producing tens of thousands of autonomous systems per year, while the military's SkyFoundry program is producing 10,000 drones per month.
Croatia's Orqa has announced a million FPV drones per year, and a factory capable of producing 2,000 drones per day is under construction in the Baltics. The five largest EU military budgets have launched a joint program. Germany has invested $12 billion in this.
Production is doubling and tripling every year, and the acceleration shows no sign of slowing. By the end of 2027, combined Western production will exceed ten million combat drones per year. This is not a forecast, but the combined capacity of factories already under construction. "Gray zone" is no longer a frontline term. Schmidt described a "drone wall" as a concept for the future, but it's already starting to come true.
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