Exit Interview is an audio series produced by the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Co-hosts David Mayorga, associate dean of public affairs and communications, and Ambreen Ali, senior communications and media strategist, speak with graduating students who won prizes for their senior theses, which are the culmination of a year’s worth of research, interviews, and analysis on a policy topic.

Sam Chiang won the Richard H. Ullman Prize, awarded to the seniors who write the best thesis on a subject with foreign policy implications for the United States, for his thesis about the use of drones in the Russia-Ukraine war.

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The transcript below was auto-generated.

Intro: This is Ambreen Ali, and this is David Mayorga. You're listening to Exit Interview, a conversation with Princeton SPIA graduates about their senior year research.

Ambreen Ali: Sam, thank you so much for spending some time with us and talking about your thesis. I'm really excited to learn more about it. Can we just start with your name, where you grew up, and your major?

Sam Chiang: Yeah, my name is Sam Chiang. I grew up in New York. I'm a SPIA major here at Princeton.

AA: Okay, so let's just dive in. Let's start with kind of just a little bit of a summary of what your thesis was about in your own words.

SC: So my thesis was about how the Ukrainians have sort of prevailed in the past three years, fighting against the Russians in the Russo-Ukrainian war, and sort of outnumbered and outgunned, right? No one really thought the Ukrainians would stand a chance. Most military analysts around the world believed that Ukraine would fall in a matter of days when Russia invaded in 2022, and that hasn't been the case. And so my thesis sort of sought to answer the question of, well, how has Ukraine persisted? And I believe that its the emergence of these FPV drones. So first person view drones are essentially, sort of commercially produced drones actually pioneered by violent non-state actors in the Middle East, and Ukrainians have sort of adapted this consumer technology where you can take $1,000 drone, retrofit it with explosives, and then target enemy personnel and equipment, and it sort of allows you to create a situation in which an normally outnumbered and outgunned adversary can force the Russians, who typically use more sort of larger mass formation battle tactics, and you can force them to adapt those tactics to pursue more guerrilla warfare like methods, because essentially, these FPV drones are so deadly that they force the Russians to seek cover and then only engage in smaller and less direct methods of warfare.

AA: Yeah. So it's interesting, because guerrilla warfare has always been a thing, but because of these drones, the risk to the Ukrainians is pretty low, right? Because their soldiers can be far away when they're operating the drones.

SC: Yeah, exactly. So I think these FPV drones are relatively revolutionary in the sense that never before in a battlefield have you been able to sit sort of kilometers away in a bunker and deploy these drones with devastating success and extreme precision. In the past, you could sort of use artillery, which we've seen a lot in Russo-Ukrainian war, but it doesn't offer that level of precision that an FPD drone does. And then, sort of beyond the direct strike capabilities of these drones. They also serve as important surveillance sort of in ISR platforms. And so you can use these drones for reconnaissance, planning out missions, providing live, you know, live commands for sort of combined arms attacks. And so the like, the opportunities are endless.

AA: So ultimately, it's given the Ukrainians kind of a leg up in what should have been kind of an asymmetrical war, right. And as a result, they're still fighting. I'm sure a lot of other countries are watching this happen and thinking about kind of how they can leverage drones and other technology in this way moving forward. And I know that's part of what your thesis was about. So what, what did you kind of conclude in the end in terms of how to manage the situation, or, you know, what the United States in particular should be doing about it?

SC: Yeah, so I think drones are going to play a really important role in the war fields and the battlefields of the future, particularly in the skies overhead. I think one important limitation I want to sort of shout out here is that drones don't hold territory, soldiers do. And so there's sort of limitations right now to what these drones can really do. With that being said, I do think the United States has already begun developing these drones and sort of developing ways to produce them and deploy them as well as we've seen many countries do. And so from the US perspective, right? It's pretty interesting. You need to look at it from a deploying perspective of how can you use these drones? They offer, you know, soldiers on a tactical level, an unprecedented battlefield advantage. But then you also need think about how to respond to them, right? Because what we've seen with the United States is they're typically the stronger, you know, for the past 100 years or so, they've been the stronger power in these wars. And so when you think about, you know, how they're going to be used in the future, right? It's really that we're going to see a lot of these violent, non-state actors using them against the United States. We've already seen this in Syria, where US Special Operations Command has been, you know, particularly scared by how these FPV drones were striking their soldiers, and sensed that US didn't have proper countermeasures at the time, and so to develop them. And so when we think about how the US says this, like, massive war power can be seen, and, you know, be seen on battlefields in the future, other countries are going to deploy them, right? Because the opportunities for those countries from like a value proposition of using $1,000 drone to take down, you know a US soldier who's been trained for hundreds of thousands of dollars, or a US tank that costs also $100,000, maybe millions of dollars. You know, there's real opportunity there for them. And then, from the other perspective, right? You know, you need to think about how the US can equip its allies with these drones, and then train its allies as well. And so there's sort of a lot of opportunities, and you know, a lot of examples, you know, a lot of cases are where the US needs to sort of develop further on this.

AA: What I'm not hearing is that you can rein in this technology. And it sounds like that's not going to happen, right?

SC: No, I don't think it's going to happen. We so you can see online, there are these commercials published by US defense companies, where you see these massive swarms of drones. And the reality is, I do think they're about, they're sort of a way of fighting wars in the future, because they're so cheap, right? You can build these drones for simply $1,000, retrofit them with a shaped charge, and then deploy them in waves. And so you could send, you know, hundreds of hundreds of these drones, thousands of these drones in a wave. And the countermeasures right now are pretty limited, right? Because to sort of take down these drones, they're very difficult to shoot down. Jamming technology doesn't always work. And you know, maybe if your jamming technology works to a 99% efficacy rate. You know, if there's 100 drones, right, that means one still strikes its target. And so that's where it gets dangerous.

AA: Okay, so let's take a step back. Tell me about kind of your interest in war and conflict. How did this come about? And, you know, where did you get the idea of focusing on FPV drones for your thesis?

SC: I think growing up, it's sort of funny. I was always really interested in armed conflict and how the United States sort of played a role in that. I think that was a pretty big part of my childhood. And then when I got to Princeton, I sort of took a few classes that made me more interested in the space. And so one of them was this science and global security class I took through SPIA that taught me about how emerging technology is used on battlefields. I took a class about, my junior SPIA Policy Task Force with Professor Pinzone, was about unleashing Latin American Development. And I learned a lot more sort of about, like the economics behind what powers states forward. And I think that there's this economic interest in drones because they're so cheap and they offer that unique value proposition. He also was the Colombian minister of defense, and had sort of an underlying interest in asymmetrical warfare there. And then this past year, I took another politics seminar on violent non-state actors in the Middle East. That was a really good opportunity for me to learn more about these violent non-state actors and how they've been using FBV drones and actually been using them against the United States, and so sort of a combination of all those interests.

AA: That's so interesting. If you pull back on all of those experiences and things you've learned, what is your big takeaway from what you've studied? Do you feel like war is changing a lot in this current moment? Is it going to be completely different moving forward? Do we see less conflict or more conflict as a result?

SC: Yeah, I think what's really interesting with these drones is there's this theory of the body bag syndrome, in which there, when there are less body bags being sent home, as in, less soldiers are dying. It enables democratic powers to be a little bit more aggressive. And I sort of think that, because these drones are really sort of thought of as disposable, right, because they're so cheap, it sort of means that we probably will see more conflict in the future. And then also, you know, when you sort of think about the geopolitical implications right now with great power competition, and how, you know, the world is a very dangerous place. I think we've sort of seen that it continues to be a dangerous place. And unfortunately, the future, you know, is also a very scary world. And so when you think about these drones and how they're changing warfare, they enable nations from really strong powers like the United States that have always, you know, historically, wielded aerial assets that cost millions of dollars, and now, you know, you sort of enable violent non-state actors and other, you know, non-traditional actors with very limited access to resources. They can now build these drones, and it increases their capabilities tenfold.

AA: I wanted to ask kind of how working on this thesis kind of is shaping what you're going to do next. I imagine that you won't be doing anything like this in the job that you're taking immediately after you graduate, but did it make you think that there's anything about this area that you might want to kind of incorporate into your career at some point, or did you feel any sense of what you might be able to do about what you've learned?

SC: There's two things that are important to me. The first is at some point in my career, I really want to serve my country, and that can take a few different forms. The way I sort of envision it right now is being a US ambassador later on in life, maybe the ambassador to the United Nations would be nice or Secretary of Defense, something like that. So sort of really high aspirations there, and we'll sort of see what happens. I think, for something I can take forward in the near term, it's really being on the cutting edge of technological innovation. I think I've always been really interested in sort of how new technology is developed. In the past, we've seen sort of dual-use technology coming out of the military. And so when you look at GPS and radar, those are all military inventions that were then sort of adapted for the civilian use. And now you see the reverse in which civilian use technology is being used for fighting wars. And so I'd like to think a little bit more about that and see how I can stay up to date.

AA: That's a fun observation about how that's flipped. One thing that was really impressive about your thesis was just the level of research that went into it. So I wanted to talk a little bit about that. Did you conduct interviews in addition to doing background research, or what was kind of the primary research methods you used?

SC: I actually didn't conduct interviews, unfortunately. In the old days of SPIA, there was a guy who embedded with US armed forces in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, I couldn't do that, so I wasn't able to conduct interviews. But I wanted to collect some material from the front line for more like a qualitative explanation of what's been happening. And for that, there's a lot of good frontline reporting out there, podcasts and news articles of soldiers reporting on those situations, so that was really interesting to collect and read about those firsthand accounts. But then really, the majority of my thesis focused on more of a quantitative analysis. There's this Ukrainian data scientist in combination with the general staff of the armed forces of Ukraine, and they publish a data set on how these FPV drones have been used. I was able to combine that data set with ACLED data and some other data resources to think about how these drones have been effective in taking down Russian soldiers and equipment into other targets for the Ukrainians. And the results of that were really interesting, because you find that even though these FPV drones are less effective compared to traditional airstrikes, when they're present on the battlefield, they offer numerous opportunities. They can be direct-strike platforms. They can also serve intelligence functions. And when you combine all those capabilities, you increase the deadliness of Ukrainian defending forces, and that becomes really, really important for them in these engagements.

AA: You mentioned the qualitative data. Did you go down any social media rabbit holes? I imagine there's a lot of footage.

SC: Yes, I definitely did. Some of that was quite jarring. I watched a lot of it on X, and I got really deep on Telegram. Honestly, I think what was quite fun for me was going down Russian Telegram. You can get into some dark places there, but there's a lot of information perpetrating the internet right now. And I think that's one thing that really was interesting to me about the Russo-Ukrainian war in general, is that when you have this sort of social media coverage in which soldiers on the ground, there was reports that soldiers on the ground were being targeted for cell phone usage. That was how Ukrainians were identifying Russian hot spots to strike. And so when you think about how, you know, every soldier these days has their own cell phone on them, and can post information online about it, you get these really interesting accounts of the war that you wouldn't really see in wars of the past, because that information either wasn't collected or hasn't survived. We're living in a very interesting time.

AA: So interesting. Okay, well, you are done with your thesis, and you've defended it and all that. But there are incoming seniors next year that are going to be starting this journey. If you had to go back to when you got started, is there a piece of advice you'd give yourself, or that you would offer to those who are going to get started soon?

SC: Yeah, definitely. I sort of got lost sometimes doing a lot of research, because you can sort of fall down these rabbit holes. My recommendation would be, as soon as you do research, taking notes is good, integrating into your outline is even better. And so as soon as you're doing research, really try to add it to your outline immediately, so you don't forget about it later. Because, I ended up finding a lot of good bits of gold searching through my research files at the end that I sort of wished I'd incorporated earlier. Putting those in as early as possible is always helpful.

AA: That's great. And I imagine being really organized, because it's a lot of notes.

SC: It gets to be a lot, so find a good citation tool.

AA: Yeah, wonderful. Okay, so last question, what are you most proud of in what you've produced and the process that you've gone through in creating this thesis?

SC: I think I'm proudest about the sort of challenges I've overcome. When you sort of think about collecting the data being used in an active war, it's very difficult, right? Because there's not very much data that exists. And if that data does exist, it's not necessarily given out to the public, because of the intrinsic value in being able to have a data set on how effective, you know, a relatively new technology has been on the battlefield. Being able to determine that efficacy rate is very valuable for militaries. And so sort of being able to sort of create my own data set and then analyze it, in a sense of when, you know, unfortunately in the data set I was able to compile, there was a lot of data endogeneity concerns, and that's a bad thing. And so, being able to use different statistical methods to try to remove that was obviously a big challenge for me, and something I was really proud to overcome.

AA: Oh, that's fantastic. Awesome, Sam, well, thank you so much for your time and for telling us about your thesis and congratulations on both the thesis and graduating. Best of luck.