In a basement somewhere in Ukraine, an operator presses a button. Seventeen kilometers away, a drone the size of a dinner plate descends toward a fuel truck. The screen goes white, then black, then shows the next target in the queue. There are always more targets in the queue.   This episode takes you inside the first large-scale drone war in history. From the basements where operators make life-and-death decisions, to the Pentagon briefing rooms where Replicator takes shape, to Chinese defense labs drawing lessons from the battlefield, to the epistemic fog where experts disagree on whether true autonomy is months away or decades. We explore what "swarm" actually means in robotics versus headlines, who is building these systems and why, and the question no one can answer: can humanity govern technologies that compress decision-making below the speed of human thought?   This episode was AI-generated using Claude Opus 4.5 and ChatGPT 5.2 Extended, and narrated with Speechify text-to-speech. It may contain inaccuracies. Composite characters are clearly identified. Facts drawn from defense department sources, think tank analyses, academic literature, and international reporting. For the full sourced analysis, visit Proxima.Earth. Story ID: MIL-2026-001.