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- [00:00]
A
Justin, Brian, Tony Stark joined today by Rob Lee, dialing in from Ukraine. We're checking in. Hopefully going to hear some positive developments on war talk for the first time in a real long time. Rod, welcome back.
- [00:17]
B
Yeah, thanks for having me.
- [00:19]
C
I noticed there was an account that was posting photos of Ukrainian fighters from, like, just before the war started, and. And then pictures of them today. And you could really see the changes that have gone on. And like, Rob, like, I know you've. You've been with a lot of the fighters and the commanders, if you want to talk through just a little bit of, like, what they've kind of gone through over these. Over these four years.
- [00:39]
B
So. I served four years in the Marines. I deployed three times. The deployments are, you know, relatively short in this year in this war. A lot of people volunteered on February 24th with no military background. Now, four years later, right, they're still in service, and they put their lives on hold, even with those who are serving in the gwat. You know, you're home at times. You know, you're deployed. Like, you can still kind of, you know, carry about your lives. The burden of this war, it's very narrowly focused, right? All Ukrainians feel it, but in particular the infantry men. You know, rotations are very difficult now because of the kill zone, but also manpower challenges. And so, you know, right now, infantry, you know, some brigades I met with, they say infantry spend a minimum of three months at the zero line with no rotation. But there are many cases of six months, of nine months. There are a couple cases of guys who are over a year who are on position and just with no rotation. And, you know, and what it's like is, you know, usually if your infantry are underground, right, either in like a hole, a hole dug in a tree line somewhere or in the basement of building, you're not going outside very much because. Because of the drone threat, you know, some. Some of these guys, their eyes have to kind of recover because they haven't seen sunlight that much for. For, you know, six months. There's very little physical exercise you can do because you're in a very small, confined space. Almost all resupply is done by drone, right? So these big vampire drones drop almost all the food, ammunition, water, you know, what else you need. And then, you know, it's. You're basically with these guys for. For a really long time. And it's very difficult to do casualty evacuation to zero line in many places. You can only do it by ground drone. You can't even bring up vehicles. So basically, you either have to walk out yourself or you have a UGV come get you. And in many cases that's not possible. So it's just, it is extraordinary difficult, you know, situation to be infantry in this war and to walk to position and back. In some cases you have to walk 25 kilometers, right. So I talked to an infantryman for the 9th, 3rd Brigade a couple weeks ago, and on his way out, he had to walk 18 kilometers. And of course, you're walking along the kind of most concealed and covered route. It might take days or a week or so because you walk when there's, you know, bad weather, when the drone thread is kind of reduced and so on. It's just, it's very hard to kind of fathom this, even for me, just because it's so different than kind of what we saw and what I saw in Afghanistan and what other people kind of experience. And so, you know, this, this infantry guy I talked to, you know, he was telling me basically he only slept a couple of night in hours a night. And, you know, he's always kind of on edge. They got. They're getting hit by, you know, artillery, FPVs, other things, you know, pretty, pretty often almost every day. And you never know if Russian infantry are going to walk up on you. Right. Because sometimes they get through. Sometimes UAVs don't see things, and you might have to fight. And so in this guy's case, there's a case where six Russian soldiers got into his position and they had to, they had to fight them with small arms. And so anyway, it's just extraordinarily difficult. But yeah, I mean, you can imagine how much it ages you because you're so tense for so long at a time and there's no rotation. So you have to be on edge for so long and just the psychological and physical effects are going to be really kind of long term, you know, problems, these guys.
- [03:47]
D
Yeah, There was a saying about soldiers in World War II where they saw about 10 days of intense combat, Right. That's not dismissing the combat they saw, but it was kind of like this roller coaster of like there would be dead periods where you wouldn't have it, and then you'd be in these massive engagements. During gwad, it was kind of the opposite where it was like you could take contact every day, but you weren't under sustained fire every day.
- [04:08]
B
Right.
- [04:08]
D
You had fobs, et cetera. And then you have. What I'll say is, was General Milley's perception of future war, which was that you would always, you wouldn't get a lot of sleep, you'd always be under threat of fire and you'd have to move a lot. And that's the one difference is that for Ukraine, they really can't move. They're stuck in this attritional battle of where they're, there's not large scale maneuver warfare there.
- [04:30]
B
Yeah. And, and you know, the, the ombudsman for the military, had she mentioned a study like a month or two ago now I was thinking about writing about something about this, but she said that according to a study, anyone who's been on the zero line for more than 40 days becomes like, you know, kind of ineffective. Maybe not ineffective, but they, they stop kind of caring too much about their survival. They just, you know, they, they, they lose their effectiveness essentially. And you know, I talked to this guy, he thought he was, you know, he was still effective. Right. He's still obviously afraid and has certain issues. But because as you said, the comparison here, it's not the most intense combat because you're underground, you're in some kind of COVID and concealment. It's not like you're in a firefight the entire time, but you're on edge the entire time. Right. Anytime your position could be attacked and you could get hit by drones all the time and you can't kind of go outside. So there's both sides to this, I think. But drones have both created this problem with this kill zone concept, but they also enable you to be able to fight within it because drones also are doing all the logistics too. So. But as you said, it's ever present, drones are just having a really dominant role in the war at this point. And that's why really talk about what's happening now. The kind of case for optimism, I'd say, is that Ukraine is kind of retaking the upper hand on the drone side. The qualitative improvements, quantitative I think, is pretty even. But that's one of the really big developments the last five, six months is that really Ukraine has really reestablished this upper hand. Last year some people thought that maybe Russia had caught up or maybe narrowed the gap. But it's very clear that Ukraine has kind of surged forward this year. And that's really, you know, one of the reasons why the situation is better than it was a year ago.
- [06:09]
A
What have been the developments over the past, I don't know, three to four months or wherever you want to put the turning point that has changed the dynamics on the ground.
- [06:19]
B
So first off is a strong seasonal dimension to the fighting. And so every winter, you know, the fighting, it doesn't end, but it, but it's more difficult for Russia for offensive operations because Russia really prefers doing infiltration tactics. It's usually, you know, one or two guys at a time moving forward. And simply, you know, it was a very cold winter. Like, it was like negative degrees, you know, many cases this winter. And if you're out in the, in the, you know, in the environment like that, it's just, it's hard to survive. These guys aren't that well trained and the tree line goes away. So you lose this kind of camouflage. It's hard to camouflage from drones to thermal cameras work better when it's cold anyway, right? So thermal optics on a Mavic 3T is going to be more effective. And so basically in the wintertime, infiltration is much more difficult to do. And plus, you know, usually Russians try to infiltrate behind the front line. And then either they dig, they dig a position themselves in a tree line, or they try and find a basement. Well, in the winter, you basically have to find a basement to survive. And so it limited, kind of like how they did infiltration and some other things. And so, you know, over the winter, we knew that basically Russian advances would probably slow down. It did. And typically, if you look at the last year and the year before that, Russian advances would still be somewhat slow in the spring. That kind of pick up as the summer goes on. And we'll still probably see this, we'll probably see Russian rate of advance kind of increase. But the weather has turned for about a month or two, and we haven't seen a significant kind of increase in the rate of advantage for Russia. And so my view is that I think we have to wait and see how bad we'll get in the summer or the fall when Russia typically advances faster. But there are good reasons to believe this year Russia is going to have more problems advancing. One of the big ones is just the development of middle strike, which is kind of like operational depth strikes by Ukraine. Ukraine for a long time had very good intelligence on Russian positions. They knew where command posts are, where air defense systems are. Not perfect fidelity, but they had a good idea. In many cases, there was just a lack of some kind of capability to strike these things. And Obviously they had ATACMs before. That was one of the options. Himars used to be basically the only operational fires of cable they had for, for some time. And Himars kind of became less effective because the Russians adapted, right? They could shoot down gimm ew affects Gimm all that kind of issues. And then basically Ukraine's just developed and scales kamikaze drones that can, you know, basically focus on operational depth. And it's a huge quantitative increase the last six months or so and different types. So you have like FP2 made by this company called Firepoint. FP2 is, has like 100 kilogram warhead, right? So really big warhead. If it hits something, it's going to do a lot of damage. And you can use on buildings, you can, you know, collapse a building. But they're using these very frequently on air defense systems, on command posts, warehouses, all sorts, kind of logistics targets. It's like an FSB building in Kherson yesterday and it's like destroyed the building. So those are very, very effective. And even if the accuracy is like, you know, 30 to 40% get through, I don't know what the number is, but like I think it's, you know, probably some of those lines. Even if it's that many, right, you're still getting enough through to destroy targets, you know, and the price is not, I think, I think FP2 costs like 40, $50,000, don't quote me on it, but I think that's a rough idea. And so basically it's not that expensive. And you have a bunch of other drones that are in this class, but maybe small. Like there's a Hornet from Eric Schmidt's Print Autonomy that's doing a lot of significant damage right now at different areas on just, you know, logistics, roads, right? Knocking out trucks, making it very, very difficult for Russian logistics at you know, 50 to 100 kilometers or even further. Hornets are very, very cheap, like sub $5,000. And you can adapt them, you can put Starlink on them, you can, you can increase the battery size. Just a very, very successful system, very easy to fly to the AI. Like it'll, it'll ping targets. So as you're flying, you put in what kind of target you want the system to search for. It'll immediately put boxes up as it flies. And yeah, there are false positives, but it will locate things for you. And then the bum will be the kind of FPV Mavic type version of the Hornet from the same company also works integrating the system. And so the quantities of production are just, are just increasing. More Ukrainian units are getting these things and it's just doing a lot of damage. And then there are other Ukraine options like Bulova ramp 2X, a few other ones are kind of like the Lancet, but the quantity is just it's increased substantially, essentially, and, you know, they're getting through Russian ew. I don't know what the hit rate is, but obviously the economics makes sense to still use these aggressively because it's not, you know, $400,000, not $200,000. It's. It's something that's much, much more affordable. And that's just really changed the dynamic of the fighting. And so, I mean, again, I think middle strike is really the big development the last six months. And, you know, Russian advances have already kind of slowed. That's. That's from a variety of different kind of factors, I'd say. But now with the increasing improvement, middle strike and knocking out air defense systems and other things, I think we can also think about what other things might happen later this year or. But I definitely think this year it's shaping up better than it was last year.
- [11:10]
E
All your discussion about the kind of scale that they're able to operate at and the adaptability of these systems makes me think a lot of. They are just able to do a lot of kind of testing and probing to kind of see what works. So there's like, this ability to be much more adaptable because they could just poke and poke and poke until they find a vulnerability, and then they can kind of pour in on that, either that capability vulnerability that you see in the Russians or some, you know, mispositioning of forces that allows them to kind of take advantage of that and exploit a gap in what the Russians are doing. Does that. Is that a lot of what they're doing here is just taking advantage of the scale and the, the tempo they can generate?
- [11:48]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the Russians have a lot of vulnerabilities. I think they still are slow to adapt in many cases. And, you know, so there was a big debate over middle strike last year where some people thought this should have been a bigger focus. The operational depth was just not being hit. Ukraine kind of had a tactical strike and a kind of, you know, strategic kind of strike campaign, but his operational campaign wasn't there, and now it's here. And it's just doing, you know, enormous damage, I think, to Russia. And it's going to change how they do logistics. And so, you know, when High Mars arrived, Russia had to push back logistics, and they had to kind of develop a new system. And they had different echelons. So you have, you know, rural trucks would move from, like, this distance, and you had, they, they. They shift to, like, smaller pickups than the ATVs and so on. Russians are already starting to push back fuel storage further from the front line because they're having difficulty protecting it. The probably at the pushback command post and other things too. And so all this is just going to make those things more difficult. And yeah, I mean, you know, Ukrainian units, they have a lot of room for creativity and for you know, just figuring kind of things out. And you know, once they, they demonstrate success, you know, they're just going to kind of reinforce that. But I really think it's now we have the quantities of these kind of munitions, it's increasing the qualities there. And again, Eric Schmidt's company is a good example where you have, they came to Ukraine and they focus all on Ukraine. Basically everything's about Ukraine first and then everything else afterwards. And they brought in Google X engineers. So the best, most talented American engineers we have, they all offer and they partner with Ukrainian units who just give them feedback and immediately try and innovate based on this. And that partnership of just the best Ukrainian drone units with the best American engineers and plus massive funding from one of the most wealthiest people in the world is just a very strong kind of partnership. And so it's just working very, very well. And Russia just has nothing that can compete in this way. And the defense industry is still very kind of centralized. It's still old style. Big defense companies, they're far less innovative. They don't have the same talent coming there. And Russia's trying to compete with Ukraine on their own unmistakable forces branch this year. And it's a real priority for recruitment. They have a new program where they try to give university students basically, okay, you join a search for one year, you can go back, you'll get paid $100,000, a massive amount of money for Russia you'll get free tuition, always advantages. But they're struggling to get that talent right now. And, and Ukraine does have that talent. And you just have the, you know, that imbalance is really being felt. And so again, you know, the manpower situation has been the biggest problem for Ukraine for the last, you know, three years century, ever since summer 2023, offensive brigades have just been very undermanned. But you know, Ukraine at this point through kind of drone development, innovation, production, so on and the system they created, they really are able to compensate pretty effectively for the lack of manpower. There are also other positives like there's they, they change the reforms with the core. So before this, Ukraine is all brigade style military. They didn't have divisions, they didn't have anything above that. And the way it used to be. You had brigades, you had these kind of temporary kind of command control functions above, like otu, a tactical group in oso, which kind of like operational tactical groupings. But the, they were temporary. The commanders were kind of, you know, rotated in and out. The staff can't come, came in and out. And they were kind of too high level. Their manager, too many brigades that didn't really provide very good support. And they rolled out cores last year. And like, you know, it's still, it's hard to kind of roll, you know, a command control change mid war. But some of these cores are doing a very good job where basically, you know, the entire quality has kind of increased, the coordination has increased across the core, and the corps commander is controlling like five brigades, whereas an OTU might command like 20 brigades. And so a lot of improvements, I think, on command and control, adjacency and coordination, all those kind of things on your training side. And now the cores are also getting like core level assets. So they're trying to develop UAV regimens which can focus on operational depth and let the brigades kind of focus close to the front line. So that's another one of these kind of, you know, contributing factors that's really, I think, improve the situation.
- [15:51]
D
So, Rob, two, two questions here. One of which is that how is that structure evolving below the core level? Like, is the corps directly tasking the brigades or are they having divisions? And then those divisions are tasking because, you know, the American army is going through that same reformation where they trying to relearn how to fight as a division. The corps still doesn't know what it's up to. That's part one. And then just broadly, like, what is the role, the evolving role of the infantry here? Because you kind of hear two things in America, which one of which is that the infantry is done, which we hear that every 10 years. Right. The other part being is that the infantry doesn't need to change because the infantry will always be there. But I mean, infantry tactics change all the time. So how are those two things linked for how Ukraine is fighting from the top down?
- [16:35]
B
So on the first one above brigades, you just. It's brigade to core level now. And so there's nothing in between. Core is kind of our division. So I mean, it's, it's, it's not really a core level. It's kind of more of a division. It's somewhere in between. But they call them cores instead of divisions. So at the core level, you know, they're still kind of figuring out what Assets we have at the core level. But right now you usually have an artillery brigade you want. They're trying to set up a unmanned citizens regiment as well and some other kind of assets at that level. But they are, they're actively changing. The air defense component has changed too. They have a new kind of small air defense, you know, side led by the former commander Lazar group. He pulled away, you know, some of the air defense kind of the, sorry, the ground force air defense battalions. So they've kind of restructured that. They've restructured the counter shaheds, but it now is kind of part of an echelon system. And so at least for countering shaheds, brigades will often have interceptor teams. They'll have, you know, radar, radars to try and locate shaheds core level. You'll all have to have some level beyond that. And then kind of beyond that you have additional echelons for countering these kind of things. It really depends which core though. So Ukraine has some unique cores. There's the first AZOV Corps, Second Heartier Corps, Third Corps, which led by Beletsky, the former AZOV commander. These cores are quite elite. They're all unique though, right, because they're kind of, you know, they have a unique background. They were not necessarily, you know, normal kind of military units before. Second and Third Corps were kind of volunteer units that formed after the war began. And so there's a big difference between those cores, which have maybe more fleshed out staff work. And like other core assets, other regular cores may not have the same capabilities. So there's, I think, a wide variance still in the, in the core capabilities. And then what does it look like long term? I don't know. I think that's going to be a question, you know, for Ukraine, how they, how they form it long term. You know, they also have automated systems forces, a different branch, and those teams are all across the front line. They don't report the corps commanders though, so they typically kind of report up the, the unmasked forces chain. And then you also have these assault regiments. They're nominally part of the ground forces, but I think they're really separate and so. And they also kind of report directly to General Syrsky, not the core commanders typically. And so you have these other kind of command control relationships which are evolving. But like the corps commander does not always own every asset in his area as a battle space owner. And that does lead to some kind of frictions. So that, that, that, that is constantly being changed and updated. And I would Assume what we'll see in the future will probably look a little different. We see right now. And then for infantry, it's a good question, because infantry are not, they're not fighting infantry that often. Right. So, you know, I talked to the head surgeon for 7th Corps. 7th Corps is holding Pokrovsk Minnhrod, like this really key part of the front line. He estimated that about 2% of his Cavaliers are from small arms. Right. So it's, it's. The small arms engagements are a very small percentage. Even, even the, the urban fighting, it was still kind of small percentage. It's pretty much both on both sides. UAVs are doing the vast majority of killing. I told a couple Ukraine brigade commanders last October, and I asked them like, you know, what percentage of casualties are from UAS? A couple said 100%. So it wasn't even just like 90. It was like, it was literally 100%. And so infantry. You know, there is a question some of the infantry positions, because often the Ukrainian brigade commanders will tell their guys, do not engage Russian soldiers unless you have to. And basically we want you to hold a position because if you open up, the Russians will often have a Mavic following their infantry as they walk forward. And so if Ukraine infantry open up, the Mavic locates where a position is, and you can then hit it with FPVs, Molnya, artillery, whatever. Right. And once the position is located, you can usually destroy it. So oftentimes, Ukrainian units will tell their guys, don't engage unless you have to, only if they're within like maybe 20, 30 meters, something like that. And so some of these positions are kind of, kind of more like observation posts because they're not really doing fighting. They don't necessarily have to have fields of fire tied in with the next position. And the next position might be 500 meters. It might be a kilometer away. Right. It might be quite laid out. And so you don't have like interlocking field of fires. Like, we were trained in the US military to do this because again, UAVs are doing the killing. And so they're doing almost all the observation. And then vast majority of Chicago is coming from UAVs. And so basically, infantry are like, look, you're just the whole position. If you see someone, you know, call it in. We'll have UAV come and try and kill these guys for you. And of course, if you got to fight, you got to fight. Sometimes the weather's very poor. UAVs are just not flying. And so then infantry might have to like hear and say, hey, we've got infantry above. So there is some observational. Sometimes you have to fight, right? The weather is that poor. And of course, if you're taking a position from someone, right, infantry have to go there and they have to hold itself. So there is still an important role. The parole has kind of decreased, I'd say, in importance. It's still there though. The number of Ukraine infantry per km is very small. I mean, on average it's probably something like 6, 5 per km, maybe less than that. Depends in like cities and like urban areas, it'll be higher. But most of the trains or big field, these, you know, open fields and tree lines. There are no positions in open fields. Every position's either in a tree line, a forest or in the basement of a building because anything that can be seen can be destroyed, essentially. And on the Russian side, you know, they treat their infantry. They've kind of adopted Wagner's tactics where like writ large, they said, okay, we're going to treat infantry as though these guys are expendable. We're not going to care too much about them, we're not going to invest too much in them. And we're basically going to try to advance by having numbers of infantry plus fires doing a lot of the work. Artillery now it's UAVS doing this. I think it's been a poor approach. They really, they take more casualties. They need to. If they invest in their guys more, they could do much more. They really don't do much, you know, kind of unit level coordination. So they're not really, you know, training companies that do company level operations anymore. It's very, very small scale. But it really does treat the infantryman as though these guys are not that, that valuable, they're not that important. Many Russians don't do, don't make cow to evacuation a real priority. It's a very low priority. Some do, some don't, but it's, it's just not nearly the same thing. So again it's, it's. We don't see much infantry on infantry fighting. You still need someone to hold the front line though. There is also a question of what does the flat look like? You know, is it where the infantry are? Because if the infantry are not fighting, if they let Russian infantry walk past them, to what extent do they hold this position, right? To what extent they hold this terrain? And I remember when I was in Afghanistan, before I went to Marja, I talked to some platoon commanders who were there and their battalion commander, one of These guys came up to him and said, like, hey, like, you know, to what extent do you kind of control your area and what do you control here? And he basically pointed to the four corners of his patrol base and said, anything beyond where our guys are based, we don't really control because I don't know who these people are, I can't tell who's Taliban or so on. I think there's some similarity here where the infantry are not engaging. They don't control the whole front line. Infiltration is constantly happening, but infiltration doesn't lead to advancing necessarily. So it's a different kind of thing. I probably can't articulate as well as I should be able to, but it has changed quite a bit. But look, you know, I think it's also worth keeping mind. We're seeing a particular type of character fighting right now in Ukraine. Drones are here to stay, right? To some extent. I think that obviously that's pretty obvious, but I don't think the nature of the positional fighting will necessarily be the same in future conflicts for us. And so I think it is important you still need infantry. There are no brigades I talk to who think they have enough infantry. They want more guys. If you want to do offensive operations, you need infantry to move forward, to hold things, to take things. UGVs are still, they're coming along, but they're not there yet. So I still, I'm still a big believer in infantry myself, but certainly drones are, you know, playing a bigger role and you can compensate for lack of infantry more than you could before.
- [24:13]
C
When we look at that, then what is the theory of like the next six months look like for Ukraine is that they're comfortable kind of where the forward line of troops is currently against the Russian, you know, forward line of enemy troops, and they're comfortable continuing, like doing their longer range operational level strikes to continue to, to decrease Russian capability. Or is Ukraine in a spot where they have to actually start pushing the flot and therefore they need more manpower to be able to do that because they have to show some type of progress both for international backers and for kind of internal prestige, internal, you know, esprit de corps, whatever they want to call it.
- [24:55]
B
You know, Zelensky said ever since Trump is in office, he said, look, look, we're ready to end the war basically where the front line is, right? We're basically ready to declare ceasefire. We'll negotiate other things. Let's just hold the front line where it is and we'll move from there. And Putin has Basically put this off the entire time to keep saying, no, we want all the region, then we can speak after we have the rest of the DNS region. So that is still this kind of stumbling block, I think, for Ukraine. And look, Ukrainians are tired. There are a lot of people who are ready for this war to end if, if they could freeze the front line where it is without significant losses of sovereignty. Other things I like. I think a lot of Ukrainians would go for this, right? As. As long as they. They thought they. They. You know, they still have ability to deter kind of future war and so on. But, you know, I think this year, Russia, actually, they have some really big issues. And I think Russia risks overextending itself and actually having some reverses. And we've seen this in this war consistently on both sides. One side, Russia, overextended in the spring and summer of 2022. That led to Ukraine's successful offensives in Kharkiv and Kherson the fall. Ukraine overextended December of 2023 on its offensive, and that led to Russian advances afterwards. I think there's a risk for Russia to do this again and again. A lot of this comes back to Putin just. I think the war reached diminishing returns some time ago for Russia, but he keeps just committing to it. And I think there are probably plenty of people in the general staff who think that this warship ended a while ago, but Putin is just kind of very, very focused on this. And again, keep in mind, Russia has had a lot of significant costs, like geopolitical costs, obviously, human costs, economic costs to extend this war. And it's kind of a question of what are you achieving really by doing so. Fedorov put his target. He wants to inflict 50,000 counties per month. So he wants to increase it. Right now that Ukrainians estimate it's like 30, 35,000. What they're saying, you know, we'll see if they can reach that, you know, the other side, while trying to inflict as many losses as possible. Unsustainable. They're trying to obviously increase deep strikes, increase the cost of the Russian economy, go after oil and gas, go after, you know, defense production, you know, but again, people are tired. Ukrainian military has a manpower problem. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if we saw some kind of offensive this year by Ukraine, partially because Syrski, the commander, he always wants to be on offense. He does not like defense. He like. He's very, very hesitant to do this. You know, he was the brains behind the Kursk Offensive, the Harky offensive, so on. I think he's always looking for weak spots. And we saw a small kind of offensive fence in the Hoya Polya direction, Zaporizhzhia in January and February that was successful. We saw one back at Kupiansk that started like last October that was successful. And I think, you know, my, my read from those two, like offensive operations they did is that Russian lines are not that strong. That really, you know, Russia, there's, there's unrealistic objectives. Constantly getting the Russian units, they're always told you have to take this village by this time. And it creates this, this, this really vicious cycle where commanders cannot reach that reach on the timeline. And so they'll often resort to line or they'll send a guy forward to like post a video of like a flag somewhere, which is not true. It creates this really internal bad system. They also rush operations. So instead of setting the conditions for an offensive a month from now, they have to constantly just throw guys at the front line because they're behind whatever the timeline is. Putin is just not allowing commanders to give honest appraisals. And this creates really bad kind of issues internally. But it also means that their defenses are not like it was in summer 2023. Right. We had very good fortifications. You had minefields, you had the Surovikin line, all that kind of stuff. And right now Russian lines, you know, they're focused on going offensive. And so the infantry with the flot or the flat, they don't really have positions. Their positions are kind of a point before they get to infiltrate forward. It's not like a position they're supposed to fight from. And infantry don't really have much in the way of anti tank weapons. It really depends on Mavic, FPV and Molnia teams. The Russian side, right, that's, that's how they kind of hold their lines. But if you can degrade these teams and suppress them, but there's no reason you can't use armor again, there's no reason you can't do offensive operations. And we saw some successes in nuclear pulley direction where Ukrainians like when they're able to locate these teams, they were able to suppress them with artillery or grad and mores. The assault units are, they're tinkering and they're figuring out how to do offensive operations in a drone environment. And really it involves using drones to set localized superiority in the right conditions for offensive operations. But I wouldn't be shocked if Ukraine does push back Russia in place of this year. And again, like I, they may not have enough manpower to do it, but, you know, in the Hu Puli direction, one of the regiments achieved a real breach. If they had someone to exploit it, they could have, they could have really advanced much deeper in the Russian lines. And I think the issues Russia has internally of the lying of the perverse incentives creates a lot of vulnerabilities that can be exploited. So again, I think Ukraine's strategy right now is end the war as soon as you can. I think they'd be happy freezing the front line, but I also wouldn't be shocked if Ukraine pushes back Russia in some places. And I think we might see that this year.
- [30:09]
E
Hey, Rob, you mentioned EW before. And I was wondering, talking about the ubiquity of surveillance and on the front lines, is to what degree is EW impacting the ability of either side to use their drones to kind of keep track of exactly what's going on on the front lines? Or is everybody just kind of devolved to using fiber optic cabling to their drones to overcome the EW challenge?
- [30:34]
B
One thing to keep in mind is different parts of the front line have a very different EW nature, right? So Pocros direction has often had the worst, heaviest EW concentration for the last couple years. So some UAVs that will work on one part of the front lines, Zaporizhzhia, will not work. At Bukros, for example, when I was talking to units in Minerab the last, like, year or two, they basically said, like, EW is so strong, we, we can only use fiber optic. And so for FPVs, fiber optics is dominating that direction. Radio signal, FPVS play a small role. There are other Ukrainians that do use radio signal there, but like, I think it's more difficult. Other parts of front line radio signal is okay and you, and you can, you know, conduct strikes at deeper range. Fiber optic cables have gotten more expensive because they almost all come from China. And so, you know, a 50 kilometer spool can be, you know, $2,300, $2,500. And so the, the economics have changed so that, you know, if you have a big FPV, like a 15 inch FPV, which is bigger than normal. Normal, it's like 10 inch. But a 15 inch FPV, you could put a Starlink on it and StarLink is like $500 and Starlink gets you around ew. And so now the economics make sense where Starlink is cheaper than fiber optic even, and some units have gone that direction. So I mean Starlink is just this. If there is a game changer in this war, I think it's Starlink because everything about how drone warfare works for Ukraine revolves around the use of Starling. They're putting it on everything. So I mean ISR often using them. Most of these middle range strike drones are using them. Not all of them, but like very commonly use them. UGVs constantly are using them, naval drones. And then of course every position has throwing to stream the feeds of the UAVs back to command post so you can see everything. So you know, Starlink is kind of this, like this, you know, solution to many problems, that if it was not there, the war would be entirely, entirely different. But yeah, EW is still a significant issue. You know, the Russians this year, the Russians realize they're, they're behind the power curve on the middle strike. They know that they're having big issues. Obviously they were, they were using Starlink on Molnia and Shaheds back in January. That's when SpaceX blocked it. And that was posing really big problems. I was down at the front around that time frame. They're, they're hitting like trucks, like 50 km from the front line. Oil, gas tanks, trucks. That was a big issue. But for other parts of ew, the Russians do have some sterling jammers that they're testing. They tested one in 2024. Two of them were destroyed. You know, of course, like if you, if you jam something you can look where, where's this, you know, the center of the, the jamming coming from. You did an idea of like, you know where it is. Yeah. The Russians are now trying to come up with like a more integrated kind of counter UAS system where you have a sterling jammer, you have other types of jammers that will jam other types of drones. And then you probably air defense kind of, you know, integrated into this. And so they're actively thinking through what is the system of kind of counter UEs. We have different echelons of radar, like SKVP radars that can locate. That's like their version of the RADA essentially. There's some Chinese ones too. You have some EW jammers to jam certain types of UAVs, including like ISR. You have interceptors to try and knock at ISR and kamikaze drones too. And then also some jammers to try and jam Starlink and other things too. So, you know, we'll see if they can succeed. But I know it is a big priority this year. It is One of the big questions, I think my, my view, if they can, if they can actually adapt and figure this out, then it, you know, they will negate a lot of these Ukraine advantages. If they can't fix this, then you know it's going to be a big problem for them.
- [33:59]
C
Happen.
- [34:00]
E
Yeah, yeah. And so, and so the Starlink jamming, I assume it's like a, it's the downlink jammer, basically you're jamming the Starlink signal coming down to the drone, I suppose, as opposed to trying to jam the satellite itself. Because that gets very hard with a LEO satellite.
- [34:14]
B
I, I think that's what it is. I think when I talk to guys when they used it in 2024, that basically it just showed like Starlink was not available in that area and that, that was like what the drones kind of showed. Yeah. And so back then it was mostly to disrupted Nemesis and laser grip drones, the heavy bomber ones. But obviously Starlink's being used in a much, you know, much more pervasive manner now. Yeah, but I think that's true. I do know there are companies working on a bunch of other things now to try and get through jamming, so things that can provide a better GPS signal, things can provide a better sheath on like, you know, radio frequency stuff. So there's a lot of, and again that's, that's one reason why I was talking before about, you know, Western tech getting over here. There's Western tech that's working on these problems. So it's not just Sterling and I think we'll see some successful kind of examples this year. And it's just something Russia will not be able to compete with.
- [35:05]
E
Right. Yeah. Because the issue ends up becoming if you're using a GPS jammer and a Starlink jammer, but it's only going to reach whatever, 10km and it's going to get impacted by terrain. So there's going to be like a little zone around the target. So you can do that around really high end targets, but you can't do it everywhere probably because of the, just the number of jammers you'd need. And then you can have like an end game seeker or something that gets the drone the rest of the way.
- [35:28]
B
Right.
- [35:28]
E
So you get within 10 clicks, you'll lose your Starlink signal, you lose your GPS. If you have some alternative way just to get you that last, you know, couple of minutes to the target, it seems like you can come up with a relatively inexpensive way to do that. That's a lot of what these guys are Working on for GPS independent navigation is just something to get you the last tactical mile, if you will, or last 10 kilometers.
- [35:48]
B
Yeah. And also like, you know, most of these comic hunter drones now have some kind of pixel lock on them. And so the last kilometer or so they can do, you know, target lock. It's not perfect, but like it gets you most of the way there. And again, if, you know, the horns is a good example because so cheap. It's like, okay, we can afford to, you know, 2030 accuracy. It can still be, you know, can be, you know, basically considered a win because before we use, you know, gimblers is I think what, $200,000, something like that. And if a Hornet is sub 5K, you can just send a lot of Hornets for the same price of one gimmlers and you know, achieve better results.
- [36:22]
D
Right. So just to pivot here a little bit, back to humans. There's reporting last night that the US is, you know, cutting a bunch of funding because of CENTCOM for training for units including tactical combat casualty care. Are there innovations in combat casualty care on the Ukrainian front? I know we talked about the Russians really don't care. I think the last time you were on the show you talked about UGVs, but like, how, how are the Ukrainians saving lives once they come off the front line?
- [36:48]
B
It's a huge issue. And you know, one of my conclusions is basically, so obviously, you know, golden hour is a concept that made sense to gwat. It's not something that, you know, makes sense here. I don't think we can assume we'll be able to do this all time. You know, helicopters do not come to flop and you know, Russia and they bring them up to do certain missions. You know, they're still getting hit by fpv. So it's, it's difficult to do this, um, on the front line everything is supported by drone. So in some cases they get wounded, they'll have, they'll basically have like telemedicine happen where, where a doctor will kind of talk a guy through and say, hey, we're going to drop you some, you know, medical equipment. Here's what you're going to do to provide care to the guy next to you because we can't get to you basically. And you know, vehicles, you know, they can go to zero line only if the weather is like horrific, but in, in many places can't do, bring, bring vehicles there. And so basically the only two calcium evacuation options typically are the guy walks out, someone drags him out, or it's a UGV. And they have some UGVs, they have like some frag, you know, protection. There's one, this 1st Medical Battalion, really interesting unit that has like their bespoke kind of UGV they're making and they're doing these really like long range kind of Kazakh missions. It's really, really interesting, but it's just, you know, the killzone has made it just incredibly difficult. And so, you know, keep in mind with UGV missions, they require a lot of planning and they're very slow because you have to be very worried about the route you take in order to not lose UGVs that often it takes a lot of planning. So you plan the route properly, think the timing, when to go with the uav, threaded and so on. And so an actual casback mission with UGV, it could take 12 hours, it could be more than that. And so by the time someone's wounded, by time they're back to some higher level care. Roll one, roll two facility and it could be 12 hours, right? It might maybe at a minimum in some places. So in that case, you know, it's just, it's just the, the likelihood of being killed is, it's higher if you get any significant wound. Keep in mind, Ukraine infantry men are all, you know, typically older, right? They're in their 40s or 50s. Many of them have existing health issues. So I mean sadly I hear stories of guys who die from just being sick. You know, they, they, they get some kind of illness, they have maybe some pre existing condition, there's no way of getting care to them and they die in position. I've heard of also cases where guys get wounded, they put a tourniquet on their arm and they left it on for like a month or so. And then like when they get, and they come back, you know, the, the lower part of the limb basically just falls off. So just some, some really horrific macabre kind of stories. It just shows you how kind of difficult this is. But my, my takeaway is that, you know, when I was Afghanistan, my platoon, we had two corpsmen. I think every squad had like a combat lifesaver. But basically at this point every fire team has to have someone with pretty good medical training. And I think that's, you really need to get at the lowest level, very good medical training where guys can take care of themselves because you just can't assume you're going to have, you know, high level care. You can't assume there'll be a rapid, you know, casualty evacuation. And I Think that's one thing that, you know, we should definitely not skimp on training for that kind of thing.
- [39:50]
C
That's one of the downsides to the way that medical training has always been looked at in the United States military. You look at, like, Special Operations combat medics or SOCMs. They're technically trained by, like, doctrinal definition to be able to sustain a casualty, multiple casualties, for up to 72 hours. And then you look at the Special Forces medic, the Special Operations Independent Duty Corpsmen, which are the Navy, Navy variant of the Special Forces Medics. They're technically trained to, as long as they have the supplies, sit on a patient indefinitely. When I went through Special Forces medical training, it was a year of medical training that goes from everything from, like, basic anatomy all the way through doing surgery on extremities and tropical medicine and everything that gays covered. Kind of in between those things. That's a level of training and a level of kind of the initial going in and learning pharmacology and learning how to actually treat and assess and do those type of medical procedures. That isn't going to be invested in every soldier or even every fire team or every platoon. But even if you were to invest in it, like, the sustainment of that, because again, the. The biggest fear, you know, ODAs have medics have is stuff is like, well, when we would train the. The other Special Forces members of our team, we were always the person who was injured, because the worst case scenario was we're in a firefight and I'm the one that's hurt. Now you have to do something. So, like, now you have to do all the medical stuff. To me, you know, when you're starting to talk about getting down into fire teams, that means you're saying one out of every three to five people needs to be trained at a pretty high level in medicine like that. That really fundamentally changes the way that you kind of approach the structure of an organization, how you're employing them, what you're giving them, and how you're equipping them. You know, how are the Ukrainians that are actually dealing with this? What is. What is the process, or is it all trial by error?
- [41:58]
B
So I. I can't give you the best answer. I mean, again, it's just, you know, also TBI is a huge issue. I mean, TBIs maybe. Maybe the majority casualties. And I mean, it's like there's. There's really no way of pulling guys out in many cases. And so in some places, you know, like, so again, 7th Corps they're the guys holding Pkrovs Minorab. Typically, Russia drops a lot of the glide bombs on the cities. And so wherever they think, you know, UAV positions are so on. And so guys will be there with just, you know, they'll get the bell rung, they'll have TBI and they just can't rotate out. Um, and so, you know, it leads to some like, really long term issues. When they, when they rotate guys out, these infantry, they do a lot. They do like a full assessment. I know that much. They do like, like psychological psychologists meet with them. They'll often be in rehab for like a month or so or more. I mean it's, it really is like physical damage when you're just in a position for like six months, you can't move physically, all the mental stress and so on. So it does, it creates all sorts of issues, most of which I can't really fully understand. But, you know, right now, again, US is the majority caltes, right? So most counties are fragged in some, in some capacity. You know, one thing that I was going to write about is about what body armor should look like. Because, you know, when I was in Afghanistan, at least with the Marine Corps, went and oif, oef, we had interceptor vests and OIF at the beginning. And then we determined we wanted something bigger and better than that. So we went to MTVs, these kind of like Turtle things that the Marine Corps had. The army didn't go with it, um, and then went to Afghanistan. MTVs were, were very big, but they're like way too hot, too heavy. And so we decided to go, we go to plate carriers. And then when I was in Afghanistan, so it was both a threat from IDs and small arms. And so basically you want to have as much savvy place, you know, kind of hard armor as possible. But now I think we're going to a different direction where if small arms is only, you know, less than 5% of cavalcies, then maybe it's soft armor really should be the focus, right? And then it's like, well, you know, do you need as many sappy plates? Maybe we need, you know, more Kevlar inserts in like, you know, the trousers and like the, and the, in the arms, so on. I think that kind of makes sense or making some kind of modular difference, but that's changed a lot. Another thing that's interesting too, UAVs are enabling a lot of things for mobility that weren't there possible for. And so one of these units that does Assault, you know, the big, the big threat is basically in your open areas. And so basically this offensive operation and they needed to get this force. It was like 3km of like open, open terrain. And so they basically had the guys, the guys were just slick. All they had was a rifle. They had a rifle, maybe, you know, a few mags. They just basically ran across the field as fast as they could. So like you know, trying to do eight minute miles across like these fields. And then when they got to the forest, they had vampires bring them everything, right? They brought the rocks, they brought like the plate carriers, they brought like everything they needed because you know, heavy bomber drones can do this. They can, they can basically be the enabling logistics funct and they can allow you to be mobile and not have to, you know, carry all this crap around as an instrument or as a Green Beret or so on. And in that respect. And actually I, I, some guys from the Marine Corps reached out to me like a month or two ago who were working on kind of UAS modernization and they asked me about bomber drones and about like, you know, should we kind of, you know, look at these things or is FPVs only need to learn from Ukraine? And I'm like, absolutely. You need to think through bomber drones because vampires are less than $10,000. You can use them for mining, you can use them for dropping munitions. You can, you know, all, all sorts of logistics can be moved by them. You can move rucksacks, any kind of ammo, whatever you need. They can be repeater for, for another drone. You can put a, you can put a, a laser designator on it, right? You can laser designate sites for Copperheads. You can do any sort of things. There, there are guys launching like air defense missiles from these things. I mean you can do anything you want. I no doubt you get into a marine battalion, the dudes will figure out amazing things to do with these things. But you know, I can think if, if we're doing kind of remote operations and you need to get like a fire team up top of hill, like okay guys, like don't carry all your gear, move up there. We'll bring, we'll carry all the stuff to you by uav. And now mobility just becomes much, much better. And it's one way we can kind of reduce the load that's on infantrymen which has got, you know, way way too heavy. And like I remember when I was in Afghanistan, probably carrying 60, 70 pounds of gear or something like that was, wasn't the most was on patrol, but like when you're fighting against guys who are carrying almost no gear and they're running shoes and I'm not and it's like, okay, I can, I can cross this field, I can buddy rush across this field, but like I'm not going to do more out to that, right? I'm, we're gonna all be gassed, we don't have enough water, we don't have everything else. Whereas if you can, you know, take certain kind of make some orm decisions here, you can mitigate a lot of those risks in a new way in interesting ways with UAVs.
- [46:36]
D
So that was, that was super fascinating. Kind of on the body armor topic, Justin and I have talked about this of you know, the army's US Army's new rifle which is chambered in six, eight. Right. Point being is there were some long range engagements in Afghanistan that you know, people think are the future of warfare. And there's a lot of concerns around body armor itself needing a, you know, a higher punch. But with that you bring, you know, I think it's 20 to 25 round mags instead of 30 or more, which means, you know, you're getting fewer rounds especially when you're doing things like clearing trenches etc. The, the preferred engagement range for the rifle obviously is much farther out. You know, the US army obviously the priority fight is, you know, the Chinese and they, you know, they focus on a much smaller engagement range. I think it's like 95 to 200 or something like that for their rifle. And there's issues with those as well. But yeah, I guess my, my big question here is, is like do the, are the Ukrainians, are you seeing reports from the Russians of like them feeling like the 762 isn't enough or that, you know, body arm is really impacting how infantry choose to engage or really drones are dominating it. So the body arm is not even a question.
- [47:41]
B
So the Russians, they have some new uniforms where you have Kevlar inserts into like the pants and the tops and so they'll have like a plate carryover but like you have some kind of soft armor that goes over the arms or legs as and they also have like tourniquets like incorporated into the pants. So again most infantry are not considered that valuable but they have some interesting kind of movement in that direction towards like more soft armor, like less hard armor kind of things, you know, with, with the small arm stuff. It's interesting because the first year of the war I talked to a bunch of guys who fought over here, including some former Green Berets. And their view is like, hey, we, we focus on CQB way too much. Like there's no CQB happening. It's all these like engagements, distance. And then it's changed though, because now with FPVs, right, you, you, you basically don't want to be in the open at all. And so engagements of 400 meters, it's like if you're in the open engage of 400 meters, an FPV is going to come for you at some point. And so basically you have to run from COVID to cover. And even 2023, some of my friends were doing like assaults or like Humvees and things. And their view is basically, look, we have to like suppress them. We drive across the front as fast as possible and then we get in the trenches as quickly as possible, right? We're not, we're not, we're not moving up anything that we have to get in the trench into cover and then we will win in the trench itself. And so their view is that basically it's either like very low engagements or CQB that actually is mid range stuff is not happening that frequently now. And so that's been an interesting dynamic where basically now guys are like, you know what CQB is everything. It's like, how do you find a trench, how do you find a building? Because if you're outside of these areas, you're going to get killed by either artillery in 2023 or FPVs. Now, now what does that look like in next war? I have no clue. Right. And it's hard for me to make a guess about this. I think marksmanship is still important. But I do, I've now come around to the view that actually, you know, CQB is actually a completely decent thing to focus on. And like in 2022 I was like, you know what? We made too focused on this. But now I'm coming back to like, you know what, like, like Ranger handbook Trench clearing. Like, you know, clearing, clearing buildings. Okay. Clearing rooms should be different. It shouldn't be four guys typically because it's conventional fight. It's, you know, first off, you frag everything you can hit with grenade. That's right, you, you destroy anything in there before you get in. And if you have too many guys in a room, right, If a tank fires on that room, all the guys are killed and you needlessly lose four guys, right? And so it becomes a, an ornament issue, like how many guys do you want to actually have in these areas? But I do Think cqb, like maybe not the hostage clearing type thing that Delta does, but back to okay, let's frag this room and try and kill everything first before we go in it. And we go in with two guys instead of four guys, so on. I think that still makes sense and training still makes sense. And there's a lot of interesting innovations happening here in that respect. In terms of seven, six, two, I don't, I don't, I haven't really heard much about like what calibers matter because it's just they're not, they're not getting too many engagements. I know that. So Russians, some Russian spetsnauts still use 762. They, they prefer that to 545. So even like AKMs, they'll still use, they prefer having a heavier bullet. But in general like the game range is, is short enough where it's not as much a priority. Some Ukrainians like having 545 just so that when Russians come up to them, they can use their ammo, right? They can capture the rifle and they can, they have the same ammo and so they can work from that. But otherwise I haven't actually heard too much about the ammo issue just because again, like drones are just kind of overtaking all this in priority and it's kind of a lower priority overall.
- [51:11]
C
It's interesting because it's a, it's a return to, you know, like Mogadishu. After the battle of Somalia, there were really big issues with some of the rangers and some of the CAD guys where they, they were so hyper focused on entering and clearing a building that their, their weapons were actually zeroed poorly. So they weren't actually super effective at long range. So they, they went back and like really focused back on like, hey, we need to make sure we can reach out and touch people. We need to be able to re, you know, engagement on rooftops, things like that. We can't just be hyper specialized. You saw that kind of gain especially through Afghanistan where you started seeing people like starting to worry about like, I mean you'd see guys with like normal rifles that had elevation measures on them and stuff. Because so worried about like shooting high angle, which realistically nobody was shooting high angle. They were just above the person they were shooting at a little bit or below them to, to see that it's kind of coming back to now. It's like, hey, it's, it's basic infantry tactics when they are being used. It's, it's, you know, seven Alpha, enter and clear a trench Stuff like that, where it's, you know, volume of fire and violence of action are really the most important things. I think that's. It's just interesting how it's always secular like that. And realistically, like, the caliber doesn't matter. What matters is the volume of fire and how much you can bring up. And I think that goes back to kind of Tony's point of like, hey, having less bullets is actually potentially a negative when you're looking at these type of tactics and operations.
- [52:42]
A
So, Rob, coming back to the beginning of this conversation of, like, the guy in the hole on the front line for six months, how do you resupply him with a drone without giving away where he is?
- [52:58]
B
It's not easy. You got to hope. I mean, so first off, you try and make sure there's no Mavic flying around so you're not hearing anything. Ideally, almost all happens at nighttime. So vampires come up nighttime, but it really depends on the Russians. The Russians have some units where, well, they'll have dedicated kind of counter night bomber teams. So sometimes it's snipers, sometimes FPVs. Sometimes they have FPVs that just be kind of flying around the front looking for targets. But in other cases, anytime they observe a night bomber coming, they'll try and take them out. And look, in some cases, when Russia is advancing, they advance by basically making logistics impossible. Right. And so you keep knocking out UGVs, or if vampires, every time they try and drop to an infantryman, destroy the night bomber uav. So I talked to a battalion Camaro who's in Constantinop, which is one of the main battles happening right now. And logistics are just very, very difficult. And so for him, he said, like, for a week, none of his vampires had gotten through to positions. They'd all been destroyed by FPVs. And he was, like, very concerned about how he was going to sustain those infantrymen. But there are. I mean, there are videos where Russians will see a vampire, instead of killing it, they'll wait for it to go to position, drop something, and then they'll try and kill the guys on the ground. But I'd say in general, the Russians don't really focus on infantry that much. They've, I think, determined the center of gravity for the Ukrainian military is either logistics or the UAV teams. And so most of the fires are directed at those kind of two, you know, targets. So artillery does suppress infantry, but not really because, again, infantry are not really killing Russian infantry. That's not what's denying Russia's ability to maneuver on the battlefield, it's UAV teams. And so they'll use artillery mostly to try and destroy UAV teams, sometimes suppress them. They'll use glide bombs on UAV positions. So they find them. And then they use, you know, FPVs, Molni, the kind of UAVs on these positions too. So it depends. You know, some places when it's like a village, they want to take the village, they'll try and assault infantry and try and kill the infantry itself. Other places they're like, you know what? The infantry are kind of somewhat irrelevant. We can walk past them. It's really about knockout logistics so the infantry can't be resupplied. Kill the UAV teams, and that's. That's how we can enable, maneuver. And so the priority is kind of in a different direction. But certainly the Russians will put up ISR. They'll try to find when the Ukrainians launch UAVs, where the launch locations are. If they find that, they'll definitely, you know, they'll often hit with. With glide bombs, artillery, like, you know, similar lines.
- [55:23]
A
So in it. But in the places where the Russians, you know, come to the conclusion that the infantry serve no real purpose or aren't a center of gravity. I mean, why are the Ukrainians putting these guys through hell then in the first place?
- [55:39]
B
So you need someone in front of your UAV teams. And. But this goes back to what Tony asked before about infantry, right? It's a hard question sometimes, like, what are infantry doing? Because they fight to some extent. In some places, I would say infantry positions are more to deny positions to the Russians. Right? So if it's in a village, you have basements and buildings, right? There's. There's a place near Constaha where I talked to battalion commander last summer, and he basically is like, look, all my guys are in basements in these houses. The houses are destroyed. We tunnel between the houses, you know, for our bunkers, and basically infantry like. Like barricade themselves in. And so they don't fight. They try not to fight. If the Russians get above them, they'll just call in and say, hey, UAVs, come and kill these guys. But they basically try not to fight at all. But they prevent the Russians from using these basements as a, you know, staging ground to keep moving forward. But elsewhere, you know, infiltration. A lot of times, infiltration groups, the mission for them is to locate Mavic teams and so try and make it 5km past the front line or so, find Mavic teams, try and kill Them with small arms. And so some Ukrainian units, like they'll attach one or two infantry men to a Mavic team so that. So they have like, you know, personal protection for them. This is happening in mirror during the battle there. But ultimately you need someone in front of the UAV teams because, yes, UAVs are killing, you know, vast majority guys. Yes. UAVs are locating most of the Russian soldiers themselves for observation, but not everyone. And you need someone in front of you. Otherwise, you know, you know, Mavic teams are often not the best guys at like getting in small arms fights. Right. They're focusing on flying Mavics. So it becomes a difficult conversation. Some places UAVs are holding the front line essentially and infantry are not doing much of the fighting. I talked to one battalion commander last summer as well who said he had a month where no Russians made it to his, to the flock. So they just. They killed any Russian tried to make it. They killed by UAVs. His infantry did no fighting for a month, basically. But other places it's just more difficult. So I don't think there's one standard answer, and I think it depends on sometimes it's more of an op. It's not like a fighting position. Sometimes maybe they want to have a guy on map so the commander can say to his boss, like, hey, I've got guys here. We control this. They don't really control, but they have guys there. They control that level position. But then it becomes a question of basic key terrain. So where are the villages, where are the cities, where are the big coal mines, the terracons that are next to them? The Slag keeps. That becomes kind of like the really important things. And you know, for Russia region, because that's really we're talking about, you know, how much are Russia going to take of DNS region. You've got two big cities, you've got Kramator, Sloviansk. These are still the real priority. You've got two cities that are like under pressure. Constaha Konstanivka. And like the battle has kind of begun. We're not sure how that's going to go. But elsewhere it's like, you know, you just have open fields and like, the value is really not that significant except in terms of how close it to cities. Does it help you get to cities and so on. So, you know, that's part of it. But again, part of this is very different to the way we talk about maneuver warfare because for us it's never like focusing on Terrain, usually, right? It's about look at the enemy as a system, how you defeat the system. Right now, a lot of it is like, where's the front line? We want to move the front line this direction, that direction. Territorial control is an important consideration. And so it's kind of a very different conceptual thing than the way the US Military operates.
- [59:03]
C
I think in some ways, what you just described is. And Jordan used a good term because he talked about center gravity. I actually think that what you've just described is, like, this is a critical requirement. So, like, if you break down cog and you do, like, targeting, there's like, you're working your way all the way down to core vulnerabilities. And interestingly, for both the Ukrainian and the. The Ukrainian and the Russians, their critical capability and their core vulnerability are the same thing. It's the Mavic teams, it's the drones, right? It's the ability to deep strike, and it's the ability to actually protect them. That requirement, then, that sits in between is an infantry line to be able to protect them. And that's. And that's what it becomes. I really think that what you've described is, yeah, you've removed them from being an. An ownership piece of. Owner of owning terrain, but what you have given them is you've given them a requirement that you actually protect this critical vulnerability that if we did not have, we would then not be able to perform the. The function of a military. And. And I actually think when you conceptualize like that, it. It kind of does fit into our normal definitions of maneuver warfare and thinking as a system, but it is something that's slightly abstract because we normally think of it as systems being like fuel or, you know, ammunition and not as a set of humans.
- [60:20]
B
So it's true. I also say that, you know, that there isn't really a flot anymore because Russians are constantly behind it. Positions are intermixed. Right? It's not. It's not. It's never clear. And so usually, like, mappers show as, like, kind of gray zone. But in some ways, you know, I think there's a benefit in saying not necessarily where's the forward line of troops, but where's the forward line of UAV teams on both sides? And then that becomes kind of the definition of, like, what. What the kind of front line is, because everything in between that, you know, it. It could be just complete mix.
- [60:51]
D
So I. I find this fascinating because, you know, one of the debates the US Army's had for the last 15, 20 years is who Owns reconnaissance, is it, you know, is it ground teams? Is it UAVs?
- [61:02]
A
Right.
- [61:02]
D
The first time with UAVs, you know, the Raven and everything else didn't work very well. There were these massive support teams for them, often crashed. Right. And now we're seeing, well, from lessons from Ukraine, right, You can use UAS effectively for reconnaissance, but then you still have the Russians, you know, doing infiltration tactics and being able to do that way. So I, I think the lesson here for the United States is that you have to have a mix of both because they provide different perspectives on reconnaissance.
- [61:30]
B
I'm thinking about, Ryan's thinking about what the Marine Corps could do to adopt uas. So if you adopting UAS from Ukraine here, changes might make sense. In infantry battalion, I think for the Marine Corps, the GCE needs to lean in. UAS thus far it's mostly been the ace, the kind of the air wing, whereas the ground component has not been the main focus. With small UEs though, it needs to be in the ground domain. And so my view, I think Navy trip battalion should be massively increasing their US component. I would be kind of radical in this regard because with the Marine Corps, with FD2030, we got rid of tanks, we got rid of a lot of the 155s, we lost a lot of our fires capability. And okay, the focus on China, we had to do anti ship missiles, all that kind of stuff. You can compensate for a lot of those things through UAS though, right? And one of the things I was explaining to the guys I talked to the Marines was, you know, okay, so FPVs are, we're procuring and that'll probably be a battalion level asset, right? Maybe it goes to weapons company or something like that. FPVs take training though, you need guys who are pretty good with them. But other UAVs, like, you know, the, the Hornet is pretty easy to learn. It's not that complex. It's cheap. Logistics are pretty minimal. And if you put it at the battalion level as like the battalion commander's like eyes and ears because you can have, you can have a cheap ISR with it too. You can massively expand the range of what an infantry battalion can engage. Because right now the max of the range of a Marine infantry battalion is the same thing it was when I was in, which is 81 millimeter mortar. And that, that max range is 5700 meters. FPVs give you four times that range. Easy, right, for, for engaging armor, infantry, whatever. But a Hornet would give you, you know, Hornets are hitting things at 200 plus kilometers. So I mean it massively increased that the training is not that, you know, significantly improved. Logistics are not that and it's not that it's not, you know, too much. So that's something we could do. Especially because the Marine Corps battalions are operating far from the regiment in many cases or on their own. Like it makes sense to really, you know, push these kind of things there. But you know, my view is that like things like Hornets would make sense. I think fixed wing isr, cheap ISR makes sense. I think at company level. I don't know if you guys know what the Bumblebee. The Bumblebee is the like FPV type thing that the Schmidt company makes. Bumblebee is very cheap. It's less than two grands. And it can perform the role of a Mavic, like a reconnaissance Mavic. It can be a kamikaze fpv, it can be a bomber fpv. It can do all those things, the same software, same command control as the Hornet. And so when a Bumblebee locates a target automatically through AI, a Hornet pilot can see that and it can basically ping a target for a Hornet team to go after. I think you can put it at a company level. The training is not that significant and I think you can really change that dynamic very quickly. And then the company maybe, maybe get rid of Carl Gustavs, I don't know, something like that. You have to get rid of something I think. But then the company really increases its capabilities quite dramatically. It has its own reconnaissance capabilities. It's cheap enough where you can lose, it's not a big deal. It can do strike and do a bunch of things. So I use a lot of things with uas we can start pushing things in there and really it needs to be the ground component. And you can significantly increase the lethality of these units at all levels by just really leaning heavily in on these capabilities. And again, I just think people don't understand how cheap they are. Right. And how much they can increase lethality at a very kind of low price point.
- [64:47]
C
I would even back that up too. It's not even just not understanding the economics of it because I think that's something the military has always kind of struggled with at a tactical and operational level because to quote a movie, it's fugazi. It's all made up. The money doesn't actually matter to the tactical person because they have an objective and they have an asset and they're told to get the objective. And it's well, I'm going to use the best asset to get that objective, whatever that may be. I think where they're struggling the most, based on everything that you've said, is really when you look at the way US army and even Marine Corps doctrine, the way they have tried to define like really hard lines between what is a fire team's distance and what is a platoon's distance and what is a company's distance. And they, they try to give you like, you know, going back and slicing up the battlefield into these discrete segments where it's like, well no, if it's 40 kilometers away, that's going to be the brigade, but if it's 50 kilometers away, that's going to be the division. And realistically what we're talking about now is a fire team that's properly equipped could potentially reach 200 plus kilometers and have effects. That's something I don't think commanders have fully grappled with. And they haven't started to figure out like what happens when I have a 24 year old, because we're talking about a lieutenant when I have a 24 year old who's making decisions that have what used to be considered operational reach impacts onto an enemy battle space. How am I, you know, looking at resources, thinking about supplying them, thinking about timing those operations and making sure that we have those synchronized to be able to do the things that we want to achieve. And I think those are the really, really hard questions that until you actually start getting drones, getting those type of equipment into tactical hands, you're not going to have an answer for.
- [66:39]
B
Yeah, yeah. I think there's also a question, do you put them infantry units, do you put them artillery units? Where do they go? So I think, I think the Germans are going to put loading munitions in artillery units. That makes some sense to me too because again the Marine Corps, you know, you attach out like a howitzers to battalions or to infantry regiments, so on. Like that could make sense. I just think that as low as possible you want to integrate UAS where infantrymen are comfortable around them. They're always involving them in some respect. And it's not just something you get attached and like does it does its role. It's like no, they're integrated as much as you can. And I think a lot of the new UAS that's going to come out is going to be pretty easy to operate. You can make it much simpler than it used to be and in which case, you know, you don't need a special MOS for all these drones. It can just be an infantry guy. You give him a week of training on Bumblebee, he can then fly this thing. Right. He doesn't have to be perfect if it's cheap enough. Okay, you lost one. Okay. It's like, you know, 1500 bucks. Oh, well, it's, you know, it's like, you know, what, a third the price of PVS 14. So, like, you know, we're going that direction. Yeah. But also, me, look, I'm fully cognizant that I don't know exactly what it should look like. I know that if you get these stuff to infantry units sort of soft and so on, they're going to. They'll plug and play, and they'll figure it out very quickly. Here's what makes sense, or it doesn't make sense, but there's a ton of utility here. The tough question is going to be what, you know, what cables do you give up to integrate these things? Because something's got to go away, and if you start pushing it into battalions, then it becomes a question of, you know, do you want to give up 240s? Do you want to give up heavy machine guns, mortars, you know, so on. Anything will become a very, you know, difficult question. Right. But, like, I certainly think that we need to start moving that direction. And the Russian side, some of their battalions, they're. They're pushing FPV teams to battalions, they're pushing Molnia teams to battalions, and they have a fixed swing ISR on battalion level two. So, I mean, they're still tinkering, but that's. That's the direction they're moving. And I think it makes sense for, like, our battalions to also go in that direction, too, because, again, you don't want your battalion commander to be outranged by an enemy battalion. And there's no reason that we have to be. It's not cost prohibitive, like, and so on.
- [68:48]
D
All right, well, I think this has been a. Okay, now, I would say this has been a fantastic episode.
- [68:53]
C
Thanks a lot for being on. Yeah, that was awesome.
- [68:55]
B
Absolutely. It was a great conversation.