How is drone warfare changing rapidly? An IDF interceptor explains what's next

With Russia logging over 100,000 drone strikes in a single year and the IDF going from one drone per unit to one or two per squad, Cukierman says this is the defining weapons story of our era.

In the latest episode of the Jerusalem Post's Defense & Tech podcast, host Anna Ahronheim sits down with Michael Cukierman, who heads the defense division at Cukierman & Co and carries a rare double résumé: a former IDF commander specializing in drone interception, and an investment banker who now shepherds Israeli defense companies into international M&A deals.

That combination, battlefield to boardroom, is what makes the conversation so compelling. Cukierman traces how the drone threat mutated in real time over the course of the war: from commercial quadcopters Hamas bought off eBay and Amazon, to Hezbollah's 3D-printed DIY drones in the north, to today's fiber-optic drones that render jammers and cyber defenses useless and have triggered what he calls a billion-dollar race for a kinetic solution.

With Russia logging over 100,000 drone strikes in a single year and the IDF going from one drone per unit to one or two per squad, he makes the case that this is the defining weapons story of our era.

From the battlefield to the boardroom

The battlefield segment is full of details that reward watching rather than reading a summary. Cukierman walks through the four-layer interception "kill chain": detection, identification, decision, and interception, and reveals how brutally little time defenders actually have: as little as 15 seconds from spotting a drone to stopping it. He's candid about the failures too, admitting that early in the war a "messy sky" of uncoordinated drones led to friendly-fire interceptions of Israel's own aircraft.

He explains why the lab lies to investors: a laser that melts drones on a test range can be defeated by fog, weather, or even the vibration of a passing tank, and gives a clear-eyed verdict on Rafael's Iron Beam: devastating against predictable targets, far less so against small, maneuvering drones. His most contrarian point may be the one component he says nearly every company underestimates: the command-and-control layer that could tie rival systems into a single network.

Then the conversation pivots to the money, and it gets just as sharp. Cukierman recounts an eight-month tender with German defense giant Rheinmetall in which his Israeli client reached the final two, only to lose to a Ukrainian competitor on valuation, a window into why European buyers keep looking at Kyiv instead of Tel Aviv.

He argues Israel has a knowledge problem, not a technology problem, and shares how a single meeting turned a skeptical German strategic player into a new partner. There's the surprising economics of dual-use tech (drone-detection acoustic sensors that became hearing devices; laser interceptors that pivoted to welding), the "do or die" logic that keeps buyers coming even when governments say they won't, and a genuinely provocative forecast for 2030: an automated frontline of drones and autonomous systems, with human operators pulled back to the rear, a battlefield that, in his words, may be safer for soldiers even as it grows deadlier. It's a rare, unvarnished look at how tomorrow's wars will be fought and funded, and it's well worth the watch.