1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Jordan Harbinger Show – Episode 1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop

Release Date: March 30, 2025

In episode 1134 of The Jordan Harbinger Show, host Jordan Harbinger engages in a deep dive with Ryan Macbeth, a frequent guest, to unpack the evolving geopolitical landscape surrounding the Ukraine conflict as of 2025. The conversation traverses the complexities of drone warfare, intelligence sharing, European defense strategies, and the broader implications for NATO and global stability.

---

1. Current State of the Ukraine Conflict

The episode opens with an update on the Ukraine war, highlighting the rapid changes and the myriad of conflicting news reports that make it challenging to discern factual information.

Jordan Harbinger addresses the fluid nature of the conflict, stating, "We're talking about drones and drone warfare, electronic warfare, jamming, intelligence sharing. Should we stop intelligence sharing? Did we stop intelligence sharing? Should we stop supplying weapons? Did we stop supplying weapons?" (01:21).

Ryan Macbeth adds, "Even I'm at the point where I'm like, which news is actually real? And which is just something I read on Reddit..." (07:31), emphasizing the difficulty in tracking accurate updates amidst misinformation.

---

2. Drone Warfare and Electronic Countermeasures

A significant portion of the discussion centers on the advancements and countermeasures in drone technology used in the conflict.

Jordan Harbinger explains the evolution of drones in Ukraine, noting the shift from the Baraktar TB2 drones used for surveillance and micro-munitions to more sophisticated, fiber-optic-controlled drones that are resistant to jamming (21:07). He illustrates the technical aspects of Controlled Reception Pattern Antennas (CRPA) chips, which enhance drone resistance to GPS jamming by detecting false signals (17:32).

Ryan Macbeth questions the practicality of wired drones, prompting Harbinger to elaborate on their one-way nature and the logistical challenges they pose in urban or foliage-rich environments (21:14).

---

3. Intelligence Sharing and Its Implications

The conversation delves into the strategic decisions surrounding intelligence sharing between the United States and Ukraine.

Jordan Harbinger reveals that the U.S. has resumed intelligence sharing with Ukraine after a temporary halt, acknowledging it as "not our proudest moment" (33:00). He emphasizes the critical role of continuous intelligence in preempting missile attacks and guiding defense mechanisms (32:34).

Ryan Macbeth expresses concern over the ethical implications, stating, "It seems a little unconscionable to be like, we're going to let tons more of your people die by not sharing this information" (33:00), highlighting the moral dilemmas faced by policymakers.

---

4. European Defense and NATO’s Role

A substantial discussion focuses on Europe's preparedness to defend itself and the role of NATO in the current geopolitical climate.

Jordan Harbinger posits that the U.S. is strategically reallocating military resources from Europe to prepare for a potential conflict with China in the late 2020s, suggesting that Europe should take greater responsibility for its defense (08:07). He critiques the efficiency of European weapon manufacturing, citing discrepancies in standardization and production capabilities (35:38).

Ryan Macbeth underscores the challenges Europe faces in scaling up defense production, questioning the feasibility of sudden increases in military manufacturing (35:48).

Harbinger responds by highlighting efforts in countries like Germany and Poland to ramp up production, albeit noting logistical and political hurdles (36:34).

---

5. Russia’s Strategic Posture and Internal Challenges

The episode examines Russia's military strategies and the potential internal issues that may arise from prolonged conflict.

Jordan Harbinger expresses concerns about Russia potentially collapsing internally by 2027-2028 due to attrition, leading to fragmented warlord states controlling nuclear arsenals (09:52). He warns of the dangers posed by dispersed nuclear weapons should central control falter (11:14).

Ryan Macbeth questions the sustainability of Russia's military efforts, noting the depletion of armored vehicles and ammunition over the years (04:14), while Harbinger explains the logistical strain on Russia's armored units and the shift to less conventional methods of warfare, such as using motorcycles for troop movements (10:22).

---

6. Technological Advancements and Supply Chain Dynamics

The dialogue touches upon the integration of Chinese technology in Russian missile systems and the broader implications for global trade and sanctions.

Jordan Harbinger discusses the incorporation of Chinese CRPA chips in Russian missile systems, which allows them to evade GPS jamming (17:30). He criticizes the lack of effective U.S. response to this technological transfer, highlighting the challenges in enforcing sanctions (19:03).

Ryan Macbeth reflects on the potential consequences of allowing such technology transfers, pondering the risks it poses to U.S. national security (19:49).

---

7. Prospects for Ceasefire and Future Conflict

The conversation navigates the complex and uncertain prospects for a ceasefire in Ukraine, considering both military and diplomatic factors.

Jordan Harbinger outlines possible scenarios for a ceasefire, including the establishment of demilitarized zones and the involvement of multinational peacekeeping forces (75:05). He emphasizes the precarious balance between enforcing ceasefire terms and preventing future escalations (74:42).

Ryan Macbeth expresses skepticism about the durability of such agreements, given Russia's perceived lack of incentive to halt its aggressive expansion (74:35).

---

8. Update on the Syrian Conflict

Towards the end of the episode, the discussion shifts to the ongoing situation in Syria, particularly the actions of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the plight of the Alawite community.

Jordan Harbinger shares disturbing reports of HTS militants committing atrocities against Alawite civilians, including forced displacements and killings (76:16). He highlights the challenges in obtaining reliable information due to limited Western media presence in Syria (78:30).

Ryan Macbeth reflects on the human cost of the conflict, recognizing the complexities and historical grievances that fuel ongoing violence (77:49).

---

9. Geopolitical Analysis with Peter Zihan (Preview)

The episode concludes with a preview of an upcoming segment featuring geopolitical analyst Peter Zihan, who discusses the repercussions of decreased globalization and the impending disintegration of the European Union. Zihan predicts significant drops in agricultural output and rising global food supply issues, asserting that the final decade of the EU is fraught with challenges due to energy dependencies and demographic shifts (79:20).

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Notable Quotes

• Jordan Harbinger [07:13]: "Why is Harry Potter so popular? Because kids have no agency... when you're one of these people who can't figure out why their life sucks so much, it's like reading Harry Potter."

• Ryan Macbeth [09:52]: "Really? Maybe that's so much sooner than I thought."

• Jordan Harbinger [11:14]: "If Russia takes over Ukraine, that's fine. If Ukraine kicks Russia out, that's fine. If Russia takes some of Ukraine's land and leaves the rest alone, that's fine as well."

• Jordan Harbinger [21:07]: "These fiber optic drones are one-way attack drones... now we're talking 30 miles of range of wire."

• Ryan Macbeth [33:00]: "We're going to let tons more of your people die by not sharing this information."

• Jordan Harbinger [35:38]: "France makes its own equipment because it's France; they've decided to be independent from the get-go."

• Jordan Harbinger [44:56]: "Day by day."

---

Conclusion

Episode 1134 offers a comprehensive analysis of the multifaceted Ukraine conflict, emphasizing the interplay between technological advancements, military strategies, and geopolitical maneuvering. Jordan Harbinger and Ryan Macbeth provide insightful perspectives on the implications for Europe, NATO, and global stability, underscoring the urgency for informed strategies in an increasingly complex international landscape.

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Timestamp Reference:

• [00:00] to [08:07]: Introductory segments and advertisements.
• [08:07] to [79:14]: Main conversation between Jordan Harbinger and Ryan Macbeth.
• [79:20] to [81:24]: Preview and closing remarks.

Note: Timestamps correspond to the transcript provided and may not reflect the actual podcast episode structure.

Transcript

[Ryan Macbeth]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Unknown]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Unknown]

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Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become.

[Ryan Macbeth]

A better informed, more critical thinker through.

[Unknown]

Long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional neuroscientist, astronaut, hacker or real life pirate. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our Episode Starter Packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more. To help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show, just visit jordanharbinger.com start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today, a little update on the Ukraine war. We're talking about drones and drone warfare, electronic warfare, jamming, intelligence sharing. Should we stop intelligence sharing? Did we stop intelligence sharing? Should we stop supplying weapons? Did we stop supplying weapons? All these confusing news items that seem.

[Ryan Macbeth]

To change every five minutes. We do a little update on that.

[Unknown]

And what that means for the Ukraine conflict. We also discuss whether Europe should arm up, how they can arm up, can they arm up at all, and what it will mean for the future of this conflict.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Thanks for coming back on man. I had a slight lull in the angry emails about your episode, so I decided to have you come back on the show.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I think I'm a six timer now.

[Unknown]

Yeah, you might be the number one in terms of frequency, not in terms of quality. In terms of frequency.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Guest on the show.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I am honored. I hope your fans badgered you into this. I really appreciate opportunity to talk again.

[Unknown]

It's funny because fans are like, you do a good job of distilling a lot of stuff. I watch all his videos. But it's good because you have a conversation, you go a little deeper and you recap everything. And then other people are like, this guy's.

[Ryan Macbeth]

His head up his ass. And I hate everything that he says.

[Unknown]

But usually those people are like, they also send me crazy unhinged stuff at the same time.

[Ryan Macbeth]

So that is not a point in their favor. It's interesting. Look, there's reasonable people on all sides of most conflicts. There's like reasoned arguments, for example, why Russia felt threatened and like invaded Ukraine. And it's not like horrific genocide.

[Unknown]

Supporting comments.

[Ryan Macbeth]

It's just Russian empire is going to expand.

[Unknown]

It's just a little bit like realpolitik. But the ones who are like, no, Ukraine is Nazis and they were forced into it by NATO expansion. Those people are never calm and reasoned in their emails. They're always just angry and screaming. And I wonder if you have any.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Thoughts about why that is.

[Unknown]

Because you can talk Arab, Israeli conflict and each side can have a well.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Reasoned kind of calm argument about why they're right or why this is going on and happening the way it is.

[Unknown]

But with the Russia, Ukraine conflict, there's people who fall in the middle. But then the people who are really pro Putin, they can't just be pro Putin.

[Ryan Macbeth]

They have to spit, scream in your face about it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Well, it's because a lot of them are being paid.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yeah, that's what I think.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's the truth of the matter, right? Yeah. Just a lot of them are just being paid and it's their job. I can't really blame them all that much because they're getting paid to do that. And a lot of times they actually get paid for engagement.

[Ryan Macbeth]

I see.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So if you come up with a post that gets a lot of engagement and a lot of comments, then you get a bonus for that. The advantage of that is, at least from the Russian standpoint, is that you want to write the craziest stuff possible. Right. Because the whole point is to get.

[Unknown]

Engagement for that post.

[Ryan Macbeth]

I see. So that explains the social media stuff for sure.

[Unknown]

But it doesn't really explain the email.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Sent to me that's 17 pages long.

[Unknown]

Because that person is probably not getting.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Paid because that's a really bad use of time considering I just look at the AI summary at the top and delete it immediately.

[Unknown]

I read the first five you sent me, pal.

[Ryan Macbeth]

You're not getting me again. They're just people that have sucked down so much Kremlin propaganda that they're basically repeating Kremlin talking points.

[Unknown]

And again, I'm not saying anybody who.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Has a Russian slant to their bias on this war is doing that, but there's certain people in my inbox where.

[Unknown]

I just go, the only place I've.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Seen this claim is rt or the.

[Unknown]

Only place I've heard this claim is.

[Ryan Macbeth]

The Russian foreign Minister. So clearly you're just looking at everything they have to say. And.

[Unknown]

And there's other stuff that's like demonstrably not true. Russia only did this because of this. And actually they started in 2014 and.

[Ryan Macbeth]

This didn't even happen until 2016. So explain that.

[Unknown]

That's what I don't really get.

[Ryan Macbeth]

That's just like a purely brainwashed kind of person.

[Unknown]

I guess.

[Ryan Macbeth]

I answered my own question. They're just fanatical.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. I mean, a lot of it is if you go to work every single day and you hate your job and you can't really figure out what's wrong with your life, and then you go home and you turn on the computer and all these people are telling you this is what's wrong with your life. Because we're giving all this money to Ukraine instead of the American people, then it's really easy to come to that point of view that Ukraine is the bad guy. Russia is a Christian nation that's just.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Trying to get rid of the gay people.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. And.

[Unknown]

Sorry.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Expand their empire. Actually, both of these things are true. There's a whole list of things I.

[Unknown]

Could have said there that's interesting and insightful. I hadn't thought about the guy who's.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Just disaffected and is like, why am I single? Lonely? My boss is probably going to fire me. How do they get to Azov Battalion?

[Unknown]

Ukraine are Nazis and they deserve to.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Be part of Russia and Yada Putin.

[Unknown]

This. There's got to be some sort of.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Disaffection there because it doesn't make sense. Otherwise, who the hell has the time? Is my first kind of gripe with this.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Why is Harry Potter so popular? Because kids have no agency. Kids don't even get to decide what they eat. When you read Harry Potter, it's about this powerful wizard who knows secrets that adults don't know. So when you're one of these people who can't figure out why their life sucks so much, it's like reading Harry Potter. I know the truth. I know the secret. Biden is corrupt, and he was giving money to his cronies and laundering it through Ukraine. So it's really no different than Harry Potter.

[Ryan Macbeth]

That is a funny metaphor slash analogy, and I hadn't really thought about that.

[Unknown]

I just find the whole thing quite fascinating.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Anyway, this is not why I brought you back on. That sort of ended up accidentally being how we started the show here.

[Unknown]

But I do want an update on Ukraine because we just stopped sending them weapons, supposedly. Is that real?

[Ryan Macbeth]

Even I'm at the point where I'm like, which news is actually real? And which is just something I read on Reddit that was written by the sun, the Daily Mail, that is just made up because they want clicks. It's getting harder now to even discern what's fake.

[Unknown]

And not even just fake news, but something that the US government changed their.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Minds 24 hours later. And it's like, oh, I didn't catch the backtrack on this.

[Unknown]

So are we not sending weapons to Ukraine anymore?

[Jordan Harbinger]

So we are sending weapons to Ukraine now, and this is being recorded on March 23, 2025.

[Unknown]

Right. So if you're listening to this on Monday, maybe not. We don't know. Yeah, it could be. Could have changed by now.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's one of those things to back all the way up.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yes.

[Jordan Harbinger]

In the big scheme of things, essentially, the United States knows that it's going to be fighting China in 2027. 2028. President Xi Jinping has said, you must to the PLA, People's Liberation army, you must be ready by 2027 to attack Taiwan. My guess is that 2028 is probably a better date because that's when there's an American election, I believe an election in Taiwan as well. So 2028 would probably be a better date. We have essentially three years to get troops over to the Pacific theater. The easiest way of doing that is to cut the 84,000 troops that are in Europe. And in a lot of ways, it's kind of a shame, but Ukraine is becoming a victim of real politicians. Essentially, we need to get troops the heck out of Europe. And I believe they want this war over. No one's going to win. But if Russia takes over Ukraine, that's fine. If Ukraine kicks Russia out, that's fine. If Russia takes some of Ukraine's land and leaves the Rest alone. That's fine as well. They don't care anymore. They just need to get the heck out of Europe to start putting troops in Taiwan, much like the Philippines, Australia. So that's the basic strategy here. And so the President really doesn't care. He just wants the war over. And if Ukraine has to make concessions for the war to end, that's fine as well, because at this point, it's going to become Europe's problem. Hey, go take care of that. Because the last thing the administration wants is Russia collapsing, which could happen around 2026, 2027.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Really? Maybe that's so much sooner than I thought.

[Jordan Harbinger]

They're running out of armored vehicles.

[Unknown]

But haven't we been hearing about this since two days into the war?

[Ryan Macbeth]

Maybe five days, whatever.

[Unknown]

I'm giving you a hard time because people have been writing about how Russia's.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Out of ammunition since, like, week two, and now we're on year three.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. Vehicles are a little bit different. So you can actually look at vehicles and you can look at their marshaling yards and their storage yards, and essentially they don't have any more cheap armored vehicles, meaning stuff that was made during Soviet times that they can refurbish.

[Unknown]

I think maybe 200, 400 vehicles left.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Wow.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You can actually look at satellite footage and see these depots getting smaller and smaller.

[Unknown]

That's a small number.

[Ryan Macbeth]

I thought you were going to add a zero or two to that. That's crazy.

[Jordan Harbinger]

No, they're out of MTLBs pretty much. It's basically a box that carries troops.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Okay.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Really? No guns on it. And these are very useful as battle taxis. Get your soldiers to battle. So essentially, Russia, they're never going to run out of tanks, but instead of 12 tanks in a company, there'll be seven.

[Ryan Macbeth]

I see.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Or six. That's kind of the problem. They're going to enter. And you're already seeing Russian soldiers use things like mopeds or motorcycles to cross no man's land to perform attacks. So I think what we're afraid of is essentially Ukraine missed its window not to win, but to lose less.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Okay.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And because of that, we. What we're afraid of is that if Russia collapses internally in 2027, 2028, we're trying to fight China. Now we have Russia dissolved into multiple warlord states, each of which have nuclear weapons. Now, granted, those nuclear weapons are controlled from Moscow. They still have the permissive action links. They still have the codes to operate those weapons, but that's not good. And so the last thing we want is, is to be Running around Russia trying to recover all these nuclear weapons while we're simultaneously trying to fight China.

[Ryan Macbeth]

That makes sense.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Horrible as it is to say, it's easier to let Russia win.

[Ryan Macbeth]

So other Soviet states ostensibly have nuclear weapons, or did Kazakhstan say, hey, we'll give these back?

[Jordan Harbinger]

So it was Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine. When the Soviet Union fell, there were nuclear weapons in Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine. And again, those permissive action links, the things that actually the code to make the nuclear weapon explode, they were still controlled by Moscow, but Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan signed a treaty saying, we promise you won't attack us if we give these nuclear weapons back. We encouraged Ukraine to do this. Hey, we got your back. We'll protect you if you give these nuclear weapons back. And apparently, we haven't been sticking to that promise.

[Ryan Macbeth]

That makes sense, I guess.

[Unknown]

My question is, people online, they say things like, oh, don't worry, you can't launch a nuclear weapon if you don't.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Have these codes and stuff like that. So it doesn't really matter.

[Unknown]

But for me, I'm thinking, if you have the missile in your warehouse, in.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Your country or your territory that you.

[Unknown]

Can control, how long does it take to take the top off the rocket or whatever, find the computer that detonates.

[Ryan Macbeth]

The thing, rip that thing out, and put your own version of it in there? Yes, it requires some specialized knowledge, but.

[Unknown]

Theoretically, you can pay somebody to do.

[Ryan Macbeth]

That or figure out how to do that if you have the warhead in your possession.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yes, that's correct. Eventually you will be able to do that. That's what we're afraid of. And also, a lot of people don't know that you can't just take a nuclear weapon off the shelf and detonate it. The reason we came up with these permissive action links is that originally our nuclear weapons were essentially protected with bike locks, like back in the 1950s, 1960s.

[Unknown]

Wow.

[Ryan Macbeth]

These people have never seen a angle grinder, I guess.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. One Air Force guy grabbed a plane that happened to have a nuclear weapon on it, took off, flew around for a while, and Russia went absolutely nuts that we allowed that to happen.

[Ryan Macbeth]

He just sort of went for a joyride and he had a nuclear weapon on board.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Don't even know if this guy knew whether he had a nuclear weapon on board or not.

[Ryan Macbeth]

But, yeah, that's mildly terrifying.

[Unknown]

I mean, we had so many close.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Calls with this thing.

[Unknown]

Like, what's the story with the Russian guy?

[Ryan Macbeth]

They saw the launch and he's like.

[Unknown]

This doesn't look right.

[Ryan Macbeth]

And he didn't launch. And it turned out to be like a reflection and it almost ended the entire world.

[Unknown]

You know what I'm talking about?

[Jordan Harbinger]

The man who saved the world.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yes.

[Jordan Harbinger]

This guy, he noticed that there was an attack. This thing was Stanslov Petrov. This guy was on duty one night and he noticed, I think it was three nuclear weapons that were intended through the ussr. And he was like, all right, this is definitely attack. We are within our rights to counterattack. But why would the US only attack with three?

[Ryan Macbeth]

They would launch all their stuff if they were trying to take us out. Not just three missiles. It doesn't make any sense. Basically didn't sit right with it. It's like a Malcolm Gladwell blink moment where he's. I can't 100% put my finger on everything, but one of the reasons is this. There's something else that doesn't sit right here. Yeah. And he just didn't launch.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yep. Correct. And he essentially saved the world that night.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yikes.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Stanislav Petrov.

[Unknown]

Yeah. So close call. Along with dude joyriding out in an.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Air Force jet with a nuclear bomb attached to thing.

[Unknown]

Okay, so we're worried about Russia collapsing because the country of Russia, not the.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Former Soviet satellite states, but the country of Russia, we're worried that that's going to devolve into what, regional sort of warlordism. Feudalism, I guess, is the right word.

[Unknown]

And then why is it the US's responsibility to go and clean up heads? And how would we do that? Why can't Europe do this? Or is it just because they don't.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Know what the heck they're doing when it comes to this? And we would just automatically end up on the hook.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It would certainly behoove us to make sure that no nuclear weapons were in Europe, and Europe would certainly be helping. But you know those darn terrorists. If you're a warlord and you want some easy money and some terrorist goes, you know what? I'll give you a couple million dollars, this nuclear warhead. What are you going to do?

[Ryan Macbeth]

I think I call Iran and just.

[Unknown]

Say, do you have a billion dollars.

[Ryan Macbeth]

In untraceable US currency that you can give to me right now? Because I have a warhead with your name and you could disassemble the thing and threaten everybody with it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Well, they'll figure it out. Yeah, eventually they will figure out it was you because every nuclear weapon decays in a certain way. And you can figure out where this thing was manufactured.

[Unknown]

Okay, so I've already sold it. Yeah, it was me. What are you going to do?

[Ryan Macbeth]

You're already trying to kill me anyways. Probably. I don't have the nuke. Your problem is not solved if you just drone strike my house. Yeah, I don't know, man.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, I think we'd probably do that anyway, just out of pure spite.

[Unknown]

I hope so. Don't sell those nukes.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's the biggest issue. And as crazy as it is and horrible to look at Ukraine and say, you know what, sorry, Charlie, we need to worry about China. That's the truth.

[Ryan Macbeth]

It's terrible. I mean, as someone whose family is originally from Ukraine, I mean, you know, way back, slash Russian empire, you got some history there.

[Unknown]

But the idea that we don't want.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Russia to fall is sort of interesting. Right, because it's like we need a controlled dissent.

[Unknown]

Isn't China kind of also in the same boat?

[Ryan Macbeth]

Probably also because of the nuclear weapons.

[Unknown]

But two, if Russia is continually busy in Ukraine, they can't really push back.

[Ryan Macbeth]

On China, dictating harsh low oil prices.

[Unknown]

And hey, we might just start pushing your borders a little bit. But hey, you need us for Ukraine, so maybe you're going to pick your battles. Isn't this kind of their best case scenario? Russia's being ground down to a nub.

[Ryan Macbeth]

In the west, and they're in the east buying cheap oil and pushing their luck a little bit.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. So this war has been great for China and it's been great for India because they've been getting all sorts of cheap oil and China has essentially been ignoring sanctions. In fact, just today I made a video about there were GPS modules that could help avoid jamming that were showing up inside of Ukraine on Russian missile copies that came from China. So essentially, they're using Chinese chips to put into these missiles that can help avoid GPS jamming. They're called CRPA chips.

[Unknown]

First of all, what do they do?

[Ryan Macbeth]

How do they work? In brief?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Absolutely. So what these chips do, if you look at a military grade GPS or even perhaps the GPS that's in a Marine gps, like the thing that's on your boat, these chips, they detect false signals. And it can detect them because it'll say, all right, I know how loud a GPS signal actually is. And if you know how loud a GPS signal is, then you can figure out, like, all right, you have this place over here that's louder than what the normal signal should be. So I need to concentrate on this signal over here. So imagine a pizza, right? And there's a bunch of pepperoni on that pizza. Each one of those pieces of pepperoni is an antenna. This is called a controlled Reception Pattern antenna rpa. And essentially, if you're getting a lot of signal from a bunch of pepperoni on one side of the pizza, then, you know, okay, well, let me look toward this other side of the pizza where I'm getting the correct signal. And a lot of those chips are manufactured in China, and Russia has somehow been able to get their hands on these chips and is using them in Ukraine.

[Unknown]

Huh.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Okay, so China either doesn't care that we know that, because if you know that, then the CIA knows that, military intelligence knows that.

[Unknown]

So either China doesn't care or the.

[Ryan Macbeth]

United States doesn't care also, because couldn't.

[Unknown]

We maybe do something about that if we really wanted to or not?

[Ryan Macbeth]

I don't know what's going on here.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's the scary part. The scary part is we could say to China, listen, you need to do better at making sure that these chips aren't falling into Russian hands. And if you don't do that, we're going to sanction you or we're going to put tariffs on your goods coming in. If there's one thing China doesn't like is when you take their money. Right? There's a limited market for GPS chips, but there's a huge world market for, like, cheap toasters.

[Unknown]

So we have a bigger lever.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, we have a bigger lever here. There's a limited number of people you can sell gps. So it's one of those things where we could probably stop this if we wanted to stop this, or China doesn't care, which is scary as well.

[Ryan Macbeth]

That is scary, because if they're thinking we're going to supply these and the US can't do anything about it, or they can, and we don't care about that, that is a scary scenario.

[Unknown]

But it seems almost more likely that. That there's got to be some aligned.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Incentives, like, all right, they found out about this. But what we're telling them is, here's how many we're sending. Just enough to keep Russia bleeding out, not enough to make a big difference.

[Unknown]

I mean, am I a conspiracy theorist talking like this?

[Jordan Harbinger]

No, I don't think you're necessarily a conspiracy theorist. I don't really see that as a possibility. I say that because if Russia didn't have this tech, it would make it a lot harder for them to launch missiles, and nobody's winning on this.

[Ryan Macbeth]

I see.

[Jordan Harbinger]

If we can attrit Russia, it would have been better if this happened two years ago. But if we can get Russia to the point where they literally can't wage war anymore. They can't fire these missiles, they can't fire these small cheap drones, they can't attack Ukraine's electric infrastructure. The story on the ground would have been a lot different today.

[Ryan Macbeth]

I see. But doesn't this go along with the idea, the point you just made, that China doesn't want Russia to collapse completely and the US also doesn't want Russia to collapse completely. So it's almost like we have to allow China to help keep them in the game, at least for a while.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You know, maybe that could be a thing. That's a very real politic kind of idea as well.

[Ryan Macbeth]

I suppose it's speculative, so we should probably just move on. I just thought I'd throw that out there because it seems like a logical conclusion based on the stuff that you just told me.

[Unknown]

Tell me about the drones. I keep seeing drone footage on Reddit.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Where I live these days because I don't sleep anymore because I have small kids.

[Unknown]

But there's a lot of videos where.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Drones are going around on the battlefield. Some are really graphic and horrific and all that, but some of them are just kind of interesting where it's like.

[Unknown]

A wired drone is driving up to a vehicle. And for me, being an RC car.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Enthusiast along with my 5 year old.

[Unknown]

Son, that seems weird. I would never drive a wired RC car.

[Ryan Macbeth]

So I asked you about this via text, like why are they using wires? And you said they're fiber optic so they can't be jammed.

[Unknown]

It's almost like we play records here because our Spotify is not working so.

[Ryan Macbeth]

We have vinyl now.

[Unknown]

It's like going back to analog almost. I know, fiber optic, not really analog.

[Ryan Macbeth]

But my point stands, going wired seems like a weird step back somehow.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yes and no. So at the start of the war, remember the Baraktar now?

[Ryan Macbeth]

What's that?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, they had songs about Barak Khan and they had a little music video and all that to the Baraktar. The Baraktar TB2 Turkish drone. Ukraine was using that thing for ISR intelligence surveillance, reconnaissance. They're also dropping micro munitions from that drone to hit various platforms, especially on that Russian 40 mile long convoy that was headed into Ukraine after July, September of 2022. You didn't really see the Baraktar in the air anymore because Russia figured out how to do electronic warfare against it. And then by 2023, for the most part, you didn't see the drone anymore at all. It just wasn't effective. So we all thought, all right, well, fair, we're going to use electronic warfare against drones. That's where you saw these Star wars drone guns, these massive looking black guns that you'd point at a drone. And essentially with that, when the drone is flying, you point the drone gun at the drone and the gun fires a very high powered shutdown signal. So it essentially cycles through every single possible shutdown signal in its dictionary. You also have regular GPS denial, GPS jamming signals. Jamming. Essentially the 900 MHz band that you'd use in your cell phone for moving drones around, that's no longer usable. So you're at like 300 MHz, you're at 1 GHz now. So you're using essentially UHF to control a lot of these drones and send signal back or ldan.

[Ryan Macbeth]

So this is like cat and mouse with the signals and the frequencies.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Spy versus Spy. You're absolutely right. It is spy versus spy. One guy comes up with an idea, the other guy comes up with a countermeasure. And one of the ways to prevent jamming is to use fiber optic. Essentially you have your drone and on the back of the drone is a spool of fiber optic wire and it unspools as you fly. Now, there's some disadvantages to this. The first disadvantage is that this drone, it can't really be recovered. It's going one way. You could theoretically fly it back, but then you lose half your distance. So a lot of these drones are one way attack drones. These fiber optic drones are one way attack drones. They're going one way. Initially the range was about 10 kilometers, 5 miles or so, 15 kilometers. Now we're getting up to 50 kilometers. So we're talking 30 miles of range of wire.

[Unknown]

Holy smokes.

[Ryan Macbeth]

I want to know what that spool looks like. That's got to just be enormous.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Fiber optic is pretty small, but the spools are getting pretty big. The fiber optic thing. I'm actually giving a briefing in Ohio in a couple of weeks to a bunch of intel guys about the current status of drones in Ukraine.

[Unknown]

They're that small, can't they snap?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, absolutely. You can't really use them in urban areas. You can't really use them in areas that are filled with foliage because they could snap. The other disadvantage is that you can't fire from the same place twice because now you have looks like Christmas garland. They glint in the sunlight. And there are pictures in Ukraine of wires everywhere in the trees, everywhere. Yeah, with the fiber optic drone, that's a new thing. But the advantage of it is that it can't be jammed. And if you can make it fiber optic and also put a little bit of artificial intelligence on it. Now, if the wire does break, it might continue on until it sees a target that's in its database and attack that.

[Unknown]

Now allow me to drone on about the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by CookUnity. I've tried pretty much every meal delivery service out there. Cookunity really stands out. What's cool is that every meal is chef crafted. And I'm not just saying that. You can actually see the chef's profile, their background, where they've worked and they've got something for whatever you're aiming for. High protein, which is me, keto gluten free. Even meals built around GLP1 goals. If that's something you got going on, everything shows up fresh, not frozen, heated up. You're eating restaurant quality meals in minutes. What surprised me the most though, is how good everything tastes like.

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The other night I had this herb.

[Unknown]

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I'm sorry, I probably butchered that.

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If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers and creators and Ryan Macbeth every single week, it's because of my network. And I'm teaching you how to build your network for free [e-mail] I know networking is cringy. People hate it. It makes you look like a D bag. I am not talking about that. I'm talking about non cringe, down to earth, non awkward strategies. Practical stuff that'll make you a better connector, a better peer, a better colleague in a few minutes a day. And many of the guests on our show already subscribe and contribute to the course. So come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course at 6minutenetworking.com all right, now back to Ryan Macbeth.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Jeez, how much of this is automated? Isn't AI but no wire. The next thing, you can jam whatever you want. The thing's not remote control anymore.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's already a thing Ukraine actually has. It's almost like a copy of the Shaheed Seth. That was the name of it. Seth kind of looks like a mini Iranian Shaheed. But Ukraine has a drone where they essentially set the drone up and they say, okay, you need to go after a target that looks like this and. And if that target isn't available, then you need to find another kind of target. So you essentially program the Ceph drone where you say, all right, find something that looks like this tank. If you can't find a tank, find an armored personnel carrier. If you can't find armored personnel carrier, find a truck and so on. And then they just launch that. And it's totally automated. We already have computer controlled killers that's already here.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Just getting closer to Skynet with Terminators every single.

[Unknown]

Actually, how long is the evolution?

[Ryan Macbeth]

Okay, we're going to come up with this. Oh, actually they can jam that.

[Unknown]

All right, we're going to come up with this.

[Ryan Macbeth]

But now they're jamming that.

[Unknown]

They'll come up with the wired version. Now we have the AI version. What is that cycle like?

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's six to eight weeks now.

[Unknown]

Wow, six to eight weeks.

[Jordan Harbinger]

At the start of the war, it was six to eight months. It's down to six to eight weeks. Ukraine, just recently, in September, I think it was the 13th Brigade of their National Guard, they did an all drone attack. They call them ground drones, but essentially drones with machine guns mounted on them. These drones that have machine guns on them are controlled by aerial drones. So you don't have line of sight to one of those drones, but you can bounce a signal off a hovering drone. So people were controlling these ground drones with machine guns on them through drones that were hovering. And they actually were able to attack a Russian position and they were able to hold that ground that's already here.

[Ryan Macbeth]

I see. So maybe it's using like laser or something like that. That's hard to jam.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So now they're using radio. So one of the ways you can cheat jamming is by going up and down a frequency all at the same time. So imagine everybody has a decoder wheel and you all know what letter to flip it to at a certain second. Imagine that, but it's at a certain frequency. So you might be at 2255 for one millisecond, then you bump up to 2270, then you go down to 2258. That's actually one of the reasons GPS was invented. It was for something called pnt, Precision Time Navigation. The GPS sends out a time signal. So every single American military radio in the world is getting the same exact time signal. So it knows when to jump up and down that frequency spectrum. So when you can talk on the radio and to you it sounds perfectly normal, but you're actually jumping up and down the radio dial. Kind of like you're in a car with one of those old knobs going back and forth. But the song is exactly. Imagine the same song playing on every channel.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yeah, that's really interesting. That's a good metaphor to explain this.

[Unknown]

Does it make sense to jump into the intelligence sharing thing? Because that seemed like a huge problem.

[Ryan Macbeth]

When we were like, hey, let's no longer share intelligence.

[Unknown]

First of all, what is Ukraine using US Intelligence for?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Targeting, yes, and for air raid warnings. So essentially there's an air base called Ingalls. It's in Russia. And this air base holds a lot of their bombers. There's other bomber bases around Russia, but we have, I think it's about 250 some military satellites. I believe all of Europe has maybe 13 or 20. So people think with a satellite, oh, I'm in my satellite. When I go over an area, if it orbits 90 minutes, then I have 90 minutes until I can see that picture again. And that's not true because the Earth is moving below you, so it might be 15, 18 hours before you go over the exact same spot again. So the way to fix that, the way to get constant ISR on a Runway or on something else that you want to look at, is to have multiple satellites in orbit, and one satellite is coming over the horizon just as the other one is leaving. So essentially, Ukraine is using a lot of our intelligence on what the Russians are doing with their aircraft. So that way they know, okay, the Russians just launched a raid. So now we need to get our fighters in the air to try to.

[Unknown]

Shoot down any glide bombs or any.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Cruise missiles that are being launched without that intelligence. They're still going to detect the raid, but it's going to be after the missiles have entered Ukrainian airspace. And then you're playing catch up. It's better to have assets in place, and you can pretty much guess where those cruise missiles are going to end up by the path that the bombers are taking.

[Unknown]

So did we stop that or did.

[Ryan Macbeth]

We go back on that? And now we're sharing again, too.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So we stopped that and now we're sharing that information again.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Okay, good, because it seems a little unconscionable to be like, we're going to let tons more of your people die by not sharing this information.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That probably wasn't our proudest moment.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yeah, I definitely had a hard time trying to explain that to people who were asking me, and I was like, God, I gotta text Ryan and find out what the logic is here, man.

[Unknown]

What is going on?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Well, the logic was we can turn this off anytime we want. Yeah, Your people are going to suffer. Make whatever concessions you need to make to end this war. That's the logic. You can call it wrong, but I don't know if you remember the army of Darkness, right? With good ass shoots badass, and he goes, good, bad. I'm the guy with the gun. And sometimes it really does come down to that. We're the people with the intelligence. We can Save your country or we cannot save your country. It would behoove you to do what we say.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yeah, interesting. Now Europe can't step into the gap. You mentioned that we have, what is it, 20 times more satellites or something?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Satellites. I'm doing this off the top of my head. I'm sure someone's going to write and go, technically it's 249, right?

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

And Europe has 19, not 13, which.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Are percentages off by a decimal. I'm not too worried about that. I just mean that they can't basically go, fine, stop sharing intelligence. We've got it covered. The UK and France can't say we got the whole area covered. Don't worry about it. That's not something that can happen.

[Unknown]

What about with weapons? I know we supply a lot of.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Shells to Ukraine and things like that.

[Unknown]

I know Europe's big thing is we.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Need to scale this up. And they're saying we're going to spend billions of dollars on this.

[Unknown]

Can this even be done? Or is it just, all right, we're going to start building factories, but they're.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Looking at each other like, right, guys.

[Unknown]

Is it going to happen? Is it possible?

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's certainly possible to build factories now. Putting satellites in space is always going to be hard. There's a limited amount of lift capacity that Europe has. The European Space Agency, they do have the ability to launch satellites, but not at the cadence, not at the operational tempo the US has, especially with SpaceX. So Europe can certainly start building more factories. There is an effort in Germany right now to take some of the old car factories and some of the old people who used to work at these car factories and put them to work building tanks. I never once thought I would see a Europe or Spain have more tanks than Germany, you know, but kind of, here we are.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yeah. Geez. Isn't there a lot of overspending on this kind of stuff, though? At one of the critiques that somebody had sent me was one of the problems Europe is having is the UK has a tank, France has a tank, Germany has a tank, Poland has a tank.

[Unknown]

They all have different weapons. And it's like, hey, how about Germans make tanks, UK makes planes, France makes munitions. Come on, guys. We don't all need a different platform.

[Ryan Macbeth]

For each country at this point. That was what this person had been saying. What do you think about that?

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's actually probably not a bad idea, having Germans make the ground vehicles. It worked twice before. They did a pretty good job with that one. Yeah, that probably wouldn't be A bad idea. Although France is always going to make its own equipment because it's France, they've decided to be independent kind of from the get go. I think the Fram frigate is a French Italian combination, but for the most part, France goes its own way when it comes to manufacturing weapons. That might not be a bad idea, but of course some countries might not like the idea that their weapon systems are outsourced to somebody else. If the politics changes, then poof, all of a sudden they're out spare parts or their aircraft.

[Unknown]

Fine. But not to be too much of.

[Ryan Macbeth]

A dick about it, but weren't they totally fine with the United States having all of their weapons platforms and outsourcing everything to us for 80 years?

[Unknown]

They didn't seem to be complaining until.

[Ryan Macbeth]

We took it away. And now it's like, oh, I don't want France to have it.

[Unknown]

Why? You didn't even have it on your continent last week. Now you're mad because France is gonna have it and you're not. I guess the thinking has changed.

[Ryan Macbeth]

But come on, man, look, we make.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Some of the best weapons platforms on Earth. The F35, which it is a US made weapon, but it receives parts from all over the globe. Like the tires are actually named by Dunlop in England. So the United States couldn't necessarily build the F35 without help from the UK. There are Canadian parts in the F35 so far. Yeah, there's parts from all over the world. Every country is specializing on the stuff they do well. Now I can also tell you that what some countries have said, we shouldn't use American weapons. And essentially there is nothing on this planet that can compete with the F35. Nothing. Now you can have very, very capable fourth generation fighters. One good example of that is the Rafale, which is a French fighter. You can call that like a 4.5 generation fighter. Like an F15 is a 4th generation fighter, then the F35 is a 5th generation fighter than like the Rafale. You can call that like a 4.5 generation fighter, where a lot of the information flowing into that plane involves coordination. So it's coordinating all these other weapon systems. So you can think of the Rafael as like a flying supercomputer. It's just not as great as an F35, especially when it comes to things like stealth.

[Ryan Macbeth]

We're getting a little bit in the weeds. I was just bringing up the idea that shouldn't Europe manufacture their own weapons maybe? Yes. Europe wide. Yes. Individual countries are doing it. And you're saying it is possible for them to scale up production of, what is it, 155 millimeter artillery rounds that Ukraine needs, it would be 155.

[Jordan Harbinger]

155 millimeter artillery rounds. It's certainly possible for them to scale up. They just need to start building the plants to do it. There's one thing that we've seen, artillery is of predominance on the battlefield in Ukraine, when you do something like fire a FPV drone, first person view drone, it has an explosive on it, and everything flies toward a target. You're using a camera system, you have a flight controller. You might have audio visual processing. Right. You have all of this stuff on this thing that you just throw away.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yeah, it's just single use. It's like an iPhone that you just use once.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. But if you use something like a drone for isr, for intelligence reconnaissance, and then you use artillery to destroy that other target, you can continually use that drone again and again. That is a huge advantage. It's the artillery. There's a reason they call artillery the king of battle.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yeah, that's fascinating.

[Unknown]

Before I forget, the United States is.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Sharing intelligence with Ukraine.

[Unknown]

A lot of people don't know this.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Slash discount.

[Unknown]

Ukraine sharing a ton of intelligence back with NATO because they're seeing how Russian weapons work.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Chinese chips.

[Unknown]

I mean, this is like a gold mine.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You're absolutely correct. It's called jtech. It's this school in Poland that was. They conceived of it and they actually implemented it within six months, which is.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Like the fastest Europe has ever moved to doing it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Fastest Europe has ever moved. I've often said that NATO is like an unstoppable snail. Seriously. NATO's main advantage is that they have all of this tech that they standardize. So I can take a French bomb and put it on an American fighter. These are all incredible advantages, especially if you might have to use French bombs one day and British bombs the next. There's a reason I have a thing right here, this ammo box right here full of 556 NATO ball, and I can take this ammunition and I put it into any NATO weapon. That takes 5.56. That is a huge advantage, that all of our ammunition is interchangeable. That doesn't mean every gun is interchangeable, but it means all of our ammunition is interchangeable. And that is a massive logistical advantage. There's certainly some definite soft advantages when it comes to NATO. So Poland founded this school and they have Ukrainians working at the school rotating in, and they teach classes so people from NATO can come to jtech and they can learn. Here's what Russia is doing. And it's not just about Russia. It's about what the next war is going to look like. Ukraine made all the mistakes initially, so.

[Unknown]

We don't have to.

[Jordan Harbinger]

One of the things that they came up with was when people are attacking trench lines, they're now wearing ghillie suits. You know what a ghillie suit is?

[Ryan Macbeth]

That's the thing that the snipers wear. That looks like a bush. And then you stand up and you walk.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, it looks like a bush, right. They wear this floppy burlap kind of bush. A lot of them make it themselves. Right. Because like a Jedi constructs his own lightsaber, a sniper must construct his own ghillie suit. They're wearing these ghillie suits. And when I saw this, I was like, why the hell are you wearing this hot ass ghillie suit when you're trying to assault a position? And as it turns out, the ghillie suit actually lowers your thermal profile. So it used to be we were kind of worried about like the sensor of the human eye and movement and how fast can we get to the fighting position. Now we're worried about thermals and that's where the ghillie suit comes in. So you send that first group in with ghillie suits on. Then after that, once you take that trench, then you can send other people up who can help clear the trench without the ghillie suit.

[Ryan Macbeth]

So this is just stuff you find out when you're fighting a trench war in 2024, 2025.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Absolutely, absolutely. And that's been very useful. And that's how Ukraine is paying us back. They're paying us back with knowledge and all this information that we would have to learn the hard way in the next war.

[Ryan Macbeth]

God dang, that's fascinating. It's sad how Ukraine is paying the price for this knowledge, but just from an intellectual standpoint, it is quite fascinating.

[Unknown]

How quickly this cycle is really sort of terrifying.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Six to eight weeks. I still can't get around that.

[Unknown]

That's such a short time. Even if you'd said six to eight.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Months, I'm like, wow, that's so fast. How do they keep innovating?

[Unknown]

Six to eight weeks.

[Ryan Macbeth]

You barely put the little sensors together before they're obsolete at that point. That's faster than they design a new phone or a new graphics card for a computer. I mean, it's just crazy fast.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Well, there's a couple of reasons for it. The first is that Ukrainians are very well motivated. Right. They're defending their country. The second is that their production, it's not like American production or Chinese production or even Russian production. Essentially. In Ukraine, you have literally thousands of factories, thousands upon thousands of factories that are in people's basements. And they are usually sponsored by a brigade. And a lot of times, one of the reasons you see these drone drop videos and then they have the brigade watermark, top right corner of the video, it's so that people in Europe know where to donate money to. So essentially these people in these little shops, they're able to make a drone and then give it to the Ukrainian military and give it to their brigade. Right. That sponsors them. The brigade says, hey, this worked well, but this didn't work well. And that goes right back to these guys in the shop. And these guys in the shop can make the change immediately and send one out maybe the next day or within a week.

[Unknown]

This is too shiny. Oh, I'll spray paint it with some black paint, actually, that's more visible because.

[Ryan Macbeth]

It really stands out. All right, I'll spray paint it with.

[Unknown]

Some blue cloudy looking paint.

[Ryan Macbeth]

All right. Hey, these fans are really loud. Let me find some quieter fans. Let me put some tape on the parts that are vibrating and see if that makes it quieter. Yeah, that's really interesting.

[Unknown]

They're really iterating on this stuff.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yeah, just day by day.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, absolutely. Day by day. Now, the disadvantage of that is sometimes not everybody talks to each other. Right. So if you're the 13th Brigade and you come up with this new idea, you might not necessarily let the 50th Brigade know about it. So there might be people who are trying the wrong ideas again, the stuff that you've already fixed, just because they don't know about your change and you might be able to get that change pushed out to them, but you're probably motivated to get these drones out the door.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You have a finite amount of time.

[Unknown]

What about Naito?

[Ryan Macbeth]

Crumbling.

[Unknown]

People are saying, oh, it's obsolete now, and if the US leaves, it's over.

[Ryan Macbeth]

What do you think about that?

[Jordan Harbinger]

I don't ever see the US actually leaving NATO. Let's say the war in Afghanistan that took probably about 30 days to execute. From the September 11th terrorist attacks to when we actually went into Afghanistan with the Rangers. I want to say that was October 19th, but again, trying to do this out of memory. So it took us a little over a month to actually get boots on the ground in Afghanistan just for a raid. And we were able to do that because we had all these bases in Europe. So there is an advantage to having bases in Europe specifically for logistics. That's like super important.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Okay, so you think we would keep those even if we push our troops to the Pacific theater?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, we would almost definitely keep those bases. Every soldier was wounded. If they had to be evacuated, they went to. Yeah, in Germany, something like that is critical. So I don't really see us giving that up. Plus, the standardization is very useful. It's good for everyone to be kind of on the same page when it comes to weapon type and so on. And also having this market of weapons is useful, although it seems like we're throwing that one in the trash. I've been to NATO headquarters Flex.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Okay, continue.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, the US has two floors. I can't even imagine what it would cost to like, move all the secret documents out of there. Just the idea of moving the documents seems a little difficult. I don't see us leaving NATO, but what I do see is us scaring NATO straight. In 2014, it was President Obama who said to NATO, you need to start paying your way. In 2016, President Obama said, stop buying so much Russian oil. We've been saying this for over 10 years.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Then they said, sure, when I'm dead, the next guy, he might start listening to you.

[Unknown]

What's the joke about Europe?

[Ryan Macbeth]

They are going to have a meeting to talk about when they might start having the meetings needed to implement this particular plan. I mean, it's just completely ridiculous. They just had no incentive to actually do anything.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Well, now they do. Right now they do.

[Unknown]

I don't love that, but I like.

[Ryan Macbeth]

The idea that Europe has to arm up. And look, people are going to get angry when I say that it's safer.

[Unknown]

This way, don't you think? I don't like that they can't rely.

[Ryan Macbeth]

On the US that sort of is embarrassing. But I do like that they eventually, hopefully won't have to.

[Unknown]

Because if something really serious does go.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Down and Europe cannot defend itself, that's really terrifying for everybody, is it not?

[Jordan Harbinger]

I think you're absolutely correct. Europe should be able to defend itself even now.

[Ryan Macbeth]

You mean as a matter of principle, they should scale up and pay their way for defense so that they can.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Look, when they join NATO, there is an agreement. You're going to spend 2% of your GDP on defense. And some nations still haven't done that. It's been three years since the war in Ukraine, and Canada still doesn't have their defense spending up to 2% of their GDP.

[Ryan Macbeth]

They neighbor Russia, for God's sake.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, they do that. So do we.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yes, Technically, Alaska.

[Jordan Harbinger]

We're on Russia's border, too.

[Ryan Macbeth]

That's right. But we have defense resources, and Canada has very little. I don't want to crap on Canada.

[Unknown]

It's good people. It's a good place.

[Ryan Macbeth]

I understand they need to spend more on defense. I just don't want people to think I'm picking on Canada. I'm from Michigan. I'm basically a Canadian with shitty health care. So I grew up north of parts of Canada. Right. As many people from Michigan are fond of saying. And I grew up drinking in Windsor with a bunch of nice Canadians who I would not like to see going up in a fiery inferno as a result of some sort of issue. And their economy as well. I'd like to see that. Stay strong. I love our previous relationship we had with Canada.

[Unknown]

But tell me more about Europe being.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Able to defend itself, because right now it almost looks like Poland is the military superpower in Europe, which is weird.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I believe Poland is trying to get to, I want to say, six divisions. So you figure divisions, 15,000 soldiers. One thing, I was just in Poland recently on a NATO trip, and in Poland, it's cool to be in the military.

[Unknown]

Really good for them.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It is a cool thing.

[Ryan Macbeth]

They don't have a choice now.

[Jordan Harbinger]

But yeah, I've said, like, I don't know how true this is, but if you're in college, you want a girlfriend, you better join the reserves, because she's probably in the reserves.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Oh, so you meet women in the military. That's not what I would thought you were going to say.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Poland has really stepped up to the plate. But look, when I was in Poland, I spoke with this woman. She's a teacher, like a kindergarten teacher, and she's dealing with all of these Ukrainian refugees. And it's horrible. These are kids who've lost their fathers. These are kids who can't go home. And it's horrible. And this was right after our Secretary of Defense went to Europe and offended Europe. And these people are mad at me, like, dude, I'm on your side here.

[Unknown]

Sorry.

[Ryan Macbeth]

You just happen to be standing here, so you're going to get it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, I just happen to be standing there. That was kind of an issue for these guys. But I wanted to hear what they had to say because Poland is a major US Ally. We're very lucky to have them. They're taking things seriously to the point where, look, Poland just bought more Himars missile launchers. Himars is a multiple rocket launch system. That's Basically fired off a truck was very effective. In Ukraine, Poland bought more Himars launchers than we have. They bought M1 tanks. They bought Korean K2 tanks as well. What do you got? We'll take and I believe it was Latvia. Who wants to start mining their border again?

[Unknown]

Mining which border?

[Ryan Macbeth]

I assume the Russian border in the Belarusian border.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Well, technically, Poland borders Russia as well. Kalin graduates.

[Ryan Macbeth]

They're not mining the border with Lithuania or Estonia. I assume they're mining the border with.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Belarus and Russia, so that would be ideal, I think. Poland is part of the landmine ban treaty, the anti personnel ban, the Ottawa Treaty. They're considering pulling out of the Ottawa Treaty just because landmines have been pretty darn effective.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yeah, they're useful in war, unfortunately.

[Unknown]

Now allow me to share some intelligence regarding the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Rocket Money. You ever sign up for something, totally forget about it and then realize months later you've been paying for it the whole time?

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yes. Been there.

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[Ryan Macbeth]

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[Ryan Macbeth]

This is really something. So Poland, military superpower, I use that in air quotes because they don't have nukes and stuff like that. And they probably don't have as large of an air force or nuclear submarines like Britain and France do.

[Unknown]

How many troops do Britain and France have? Look, the British Empire is no more.

[Ryan Macbeth]

This is no longer a massive landing force a LA World War II. Britain's just kind of chilling. They make good weapons, but I don't know how much they have in terms of personnel.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Britain can field, I believe, two divisions. France, I want to say they can field three. And Germany, they want to get at the point where they can field three.

[Unknown]

And an additional fourth of reservists.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I believe Germany is actually considering bringing back conscription, which they ended in, I think 2012.

[Unknown]

Oh yeah, because they still had it.

[Ryan Macbeth]

When I was an exchange student there. But you could also choose to like work in a hospital or an old folks home. And most of my friends did that. In fact, I didn't know anybody in the former East Germany who went to the actual army. You just didn't do that.

[Jordan Harbinger]

The German soldiers that I have met have been incredible. They are highly professional, they're motivated. It's just that their government just failed them. Their government let their military go to hell. But there's a lot of good German soldiers there who are dedicated and are committed. They're very serious about the threat. Look, I've been to Europe recently and the further you go east, the scarier Russia gets and the more concerned people are, I'm sure.

[Unknown]

Yeah, whenever I explored Eastern Europe, even.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Well into the late 90s, the early aughts, those people in Romania, Poland, they did not like Russia.

[Unknown]

It wasn't Russian people. They were scared of Russia. And I remember thinking, oh, legacy from your past.

[Ryan Macbeth]

You guys were under the Soviet thumb. You had secret police. I totally understand why you were oppressed. East Germany was the same. There's all these tales. If you ever see a Russian driving get out of the road because they're drunk, they'll run you over. There's no repercussions. That's kind of what you learned growing up in the former East Germany. Older people would tell me this, right, because they were occupied and they were treated like they were occupied, not like they were a friendly country. They were treated like they were under a hostile occupation. Which is interesting because West Germany was completely different situation with the Allies, at least in the 80s and the 70s. By then it was generations. The former Eastern Bloc never really forgot how much of a threat Russia was.

[Unknown]

And of course Estonia and Latvia, Lithuania.

[Ryan Macbeth]

And these countries have been for the last 20 plus years getting cyber attacked nonstop by Russia. They kind of never put their guard down because they never really even had a chance to.

[Unknown]

Maybe there was a period of 10.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Years where Russia wasn't screwing with them, but maybe not even that long.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Estonia has some of the best cyber troops on the planet. That's because of the soldier of Talon. There was a statue of a Russian soldier that this town, I think it was in the town of Tallinn, and they decided to move it to a Russian cemetery. When Russia found out that they did that Russia cyber attacked Estonia.

[Ryan Macbeth]

They turned off the electricity, didn't they, in the Internet.

[Jordan Harbinger]

They turned off banking. They turned off a lot of stuff. After that, Estonia said, this is never going to happen again. And so they probably have some of the best cyber troops in NATO.

[Ryan Macbeth]

That's kind of a cool place to specialize going into the 21st century here. Very interesting.

[Jordan Harbinger]

When you look like Lithuania, their major brigade is the Iron Wolf Brigade. So brigade 4400 to 4700 people. And their brigade is actually kind of neat because the king of Lithuania back in whatever century, he went to sleep and he had the Dream of an iron wolf that howled with the voices of a thousand wolves. Where he woke up, they decided that's where they're going to start. The city of Vilnia. Right. So there's a lot of history to that brigade. And the Lithuanians in that unit are very highly motivated people. But there's only one brigade. Right. Lithuania is only so big.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yeah. Interesting. Lithuania recently found out that those are also in part my family history. So I have a renewed interest in that whole area.

[Unknown]

Man, there's so many fascinating things to.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Talk about with this conflict. And I know I might be trivializing a little bit because I seem really hyped up and interested in it. And it is a war, which is really disgusting and sad. I guess I'm trying to just take a different spin on it because it's happening regardless of whether or not I act sad about it on this podcast. Right. We're all upset about the fact that there's a war anywhere of this scale and elsewhere in the world. It's just scarier, I think, because of the threat from Russia.

[Unknown]

Now tell me what you think about this. A lot of people go, I don't get why Europe is so worried, why.

[Ryan Macbeth]

People in the United States are so worried.

[Unknown]

Putin couldn't even take down Ukraine.

[Ryan Macbeth]

It's been three years, they barely had a developed military. What makes anyone think they're then gonna.

[Unknown]

Also go into NATO?

[Ryan Macbeth]

Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia and Poland. That's insane. They'll get their asses kicked. Putin's not that dumb.

[Unknown]

What do you think about that counter argument?

[Jordan Harbinger]

The problem is that they have to. The ultimate plan is taking the Baltics and then taking Poland. They have to do that. Russia has to do that.

[Unknown]

Why?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Because right now their border is about 1600 miles or so. That's undefended. There's no major rivers, there's no massive mountain ranges. So if you take Ukraine, then you have the Carpathia Mountains to the west. And then if you take Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and then you take Poland, then you've taken a 1600 mile border and you've shrunk it down to 150 miles.

[Ryan Macbeth]

I see. So Russia could protect itself from a land invasion, essentially.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's their belief. Because for very many years Russia has essentially relied on General Winter to defend itself. When the French invade, then General Winter comes out and destroys your army. When the Germans invade, General Winter comes and destroys your army. And it worked until one day it won't. So that's Russia's feeling that they feel like they need space. So they won't be invaded. Nobody's invading Russia.

[Unknown]

That's the counter, though I find that argument a little bit medium persuasive. It's not weak.

[Ryan Macbeth]

But it's also, okay, that made sense before we had airplanes, before we had drones, before we had massive warships that could come on land from anywhere that you have coastline. You had to march people through the mountains. And so Hannibal went over the mountains with elephants or something like that. Surprise.

[Unknown]

That's not how it is anymore.

[Ryan Macbeth]

That seems like 18th century military thinking. I don't really find it totally persuasive.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It does seem a little odd, but that's just how Russia feels. That's their basic psyche to secure our borders. We used to have that with the Warsaw Pact. We no longer have that. So we need to secure our borders from the West.

[Ryan Macbeth]

How do we know that Russia thinks like that? As Putin straight up said, hey, we need to go and take these areas because we'll be safer that way. I know, like the queen of the czar or Something said it 300 years ago, but what about now?

[Jordan Harbinger]

I don't believe Putin's ever come out and actually said that. But logically, why are you going to invade Ukraine? You could say, well, it's for resources. You could also say, well, it's because there are family members who live in Russia who also have relatives in Ukraine. And if Ukraine is kind of moving toward the west, then it's really tough when your family members in Russia call Ukraine and they have all these freedoms and you don't. That's a tough one to swallow.

[Ryan Macbeth]

What about the NATO expansion argument? You want to poke some holes in that? Because people say, well, yeah, we expanded NATO all the way up to their border. Of course they push back on this.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You know, look, every country has a right to enter into a defensive agreement with any other country. Look, Russia had a defensive agreement with Cuba. They put missiles in Cuba.

[Ryan Macbeth]

I was just going to say, yeah, and then they tried to move nukes there. And we were like, no way, man.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, we were like, no way, man. But we're allowed to say that, and they're allowed to enter into an agreement with whatever country, Right? We've had a communist country across the border with the US 90 miles away. Right?

[Ryan Macbeth]

And I know that, I'm not arguing for this just so people are clear.

[Unknown]

But how is Russia invading Ukraine not.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Similar or analogous in some way to nuclear missiles being put into Cuba? And the US Is like, fine, we are going to blockade the island with the navy and possibly sink yours.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I think the difference here is that NATO is not an offensive organization. NATO is a standards organization.

[Unknown]

Organization.

But Serbia has entered the chat, right, and they're not buying it because they got bombed by NATO.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You're absolutely correct. And they deserved it. Right. Like, if you don't want to get bombed by NATO, maybe don't put people into rape camps.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yeah, I understand that.

[Unknown]

I just, I'm mentioning that because, of.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Course, Serbs and other people go, well.

[Unknown]

NATO's defensive until it's not. In which NATO bombing Serbia, was it justified?

[Ryan Macbeth]

That's a whole different podcast. Of course they were trying to kill all the Albanians, but those people, they weren't NATO members. NATO just went, hey, we're going to do this humanitarian thing and bomb Belgrade.

[Unknown]

So it's a little bit like they're.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Not offensive, but it could be they.

[Unknown]

Can edge towards that. And who's to say that it's not.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Eventually going to end up that way?

[Unknown]

Because the conspiracy geopolitics circles online would.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Have you go, actually, the US Pushed Ukraine into this fight, hoping that Russia would pick a fight with Ukraine, slash eventually NATO, and that would be all she wrote. I don't necessarily subscribe to that, but it's not totally insane that NATO could be used offensively.

[Jordan Harbinger]

No, it's not totally insane when you think about it. Although the mission in Afghanistan wasn't really a NATO mission, many NATO members, including Ukraine, supplied troops. A lot of those nations supplied troops for Afghanistan. You might be able to make that argument. But look, one of the deals is that a lot of NATO countries, they don't have the expeditionary capabilities. There's really only four expeditionary, four and a half expeditionary militaries in the world. That's the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, and to a lesser extent, China. And by expeditionary, these are nations that can, at scale, move troops and effectively get supplies to those troops in order to have those troops fight in a different area of the world. Most countries have a little bit of expeditionary capability, but for the most part, most armies of Europe are defensive armies. So the idea of saying, oh, well, NATO could invade Russia, for the most part, a lot of these militaries are purely defensive in nature. They just don't have the logistical ability, the logistical lift, to move outside their own borders. With very small exceptions like humanitarian work like East Timor, or if there's an earthquake somewhere in Indonesia, you might be able to get some troops over to Indonesia to help out. For the most part, it's just not built like that. Their militaries aren't built to be expeditionary. Israel is another example. I've had Syrians talk to me, and these Syrians have said, how come Syria doesn't invade Israel? Like, dude, Syria can't invade Israel. They could get a couple miles into the border maybe. And you know what? Israel can't invade Syria either, outside of a couple of kilometers. They just don't have the logistical capacity to do that. War is hard and logistics is even harder.

[Unknown]

I feel like I'm lawyering you, so.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Forgive me here, but okay, so NATO, it's not an offensive alliance.

[Unknown]

Surely Russia knows this. And, and so that sort of pushes back on the idea that they need.

[Ryan Macbeth]

To take over the Baltic States, Poland and Ukraine in order to defend themselves against the invasion that can't actually happen.

[Unknown]

Surely they know that it's not possible.

[Ryan Macbeth]

So why would they bother taking these places over at immense cost?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Think about it this way. That is the argument that we can look at. But when you're Russia and you've always been in this tech backwater, when you're Russia and you don't necessarily have any defensive borders yourself, you might get a little concerned about that. Russians are thinking like Russians at this point. I'm thinking like an American where I can look at NATO and go, many of the countries in NATO don't really have any offensive capability. But if you're a Russian, are you really going to necessarily count on that?

[Unknown]

Of course not.

[Ryan Macbeth]

No. That's a good point. I'm also understanding that us saying NATO's not an offensive alliance and they're like, hey, what's the source? We just say, trust me, bro, that's also not very compelling for them.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Well, I mean, the proof is in the pudding.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So I don't even know what militarily, what it would take to actually perform an invasion of Russia. And actually, when you think about it, even though Russia has been attrited to a certain point regarding manpower and regarding vehicles, one of the huge issues is that Russia's been fighting for three years. You learn things. You learn things while you're fighting. And so now Russia has all of this real world experience, this genuine, honest to God, real world experience in fighting a modern war. They are way more dangerous now than they were three years ago. Even though technically their capabilities have been attributed to a certain point. They can build up their military again. They can certainly be a real threat, especially with all of this knowledge that they've developed.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Ah, I see. That's really interesting. And something that nobody has brought up. Right. Because everybody's just saying, hey, they're ground down to a nub with no sign of stopping. They're not going into the Baltic states, they're not going into Poland. And what you're saying is, don't be.

[Unknown]

So sure because they're attrition.

[Ryan Macbeth]

They need to rebuild some vehicles and munitions and things like that. But now they're much more of a capable and flexible force than they were when they invaded Ukraine and were rolling the dice just going, ah, they're too weak to invade these little Baltic states.

[Unknown]

It's like, okay, so are you willing to bet all of those people's lives on that?

[Ryan Macbeth]

Because if so, then go ahead. But if not, then you might want to put some landmines on the border or whatever.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You're absolutely correct. It's very scary when you think about it. For the longest time, Russia just didn't have the ability to learn. The Russian army was very inflexible when it came down to things like call for fire. Let's say you have a unit advancing and they run into some trouble. In an American unit, oftentimes you might be able to call for artillery. And if that artillery has already been allocated to you, you'll be able to call that artillery and you'll be able to have that artillery land on the bad guys. You'll be able to call that artillery in. Whereas Russia, a lot of their artillery fires are pre planned. About a year ago they started using the Orlan 10, which was a drone, to actually perform on demand artillery attacks against Ukrainian forces. And that's something they learned to do. Like they slowly figured it out. And it used to be that the Russian army was very inflexible and that isn't the case anymore. So they're a lot more dangerous than.

[Unknown]

They were just a couple of years ago.

[Ryan Macbeth]

I know we're closing in on time. I do have one last question. Speaking of invading Russia, Kursk.

[Unknown]

So the Ukrainians ran in there, took a bunch of territory, were supposed to.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Get pushed out or never get there.

[Unknown]

And they're still there, but they're getting pushed out slowly. What do we make of this? Why is this important?

[Ryan Macbeth]

Why does this matter?

[Jordan Harbinger]

So that's a very good question. And there's a lot of guys who died in Kursk, a lot of Ukrainians who died taking Kursk. And I believe their whole idea was, we're going to take Kursk, it's going to force a lot of Russian units all the way over to another part of the front lines. Pressure off our front lines. It was a gamble and it didn't really work because instead of moving forces from one part of the front lines to Kursk, they managed to get North Koreans to fight for them. And it was a gamble and it didn't pay off. And for the most part, Ukraine has been pushed out of Kursk.

[Unknown]

And so why does that matter?

[Ryan Macbeth]

I mean, look, not asking because I want to trivialize the deaths that are going on. Again, it's tough to be as sensitive as I need to be in this episode, but what is going on there? Why don't they just leave entirely and bring their troops back?

[Unknown]

What purpose does it serve for them.

[Ryan Macbeth]

To be there now?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Initially, it served the purpose of, all right, we're going to take some land. That way, when we negotiate with Russia, we'll give back Kursk if you give back these other lands that we have. And right now, Ukraine is fighting a rear guard action. So I don't want to say they're no longer there. They are still there, but they are slowly getting pushed out. And they're doing it in a way. Ukraine is doing what's called a rear guard action. So they're still fighting to allow their troops and equipment to leave while they still have them, rather than try to stay and fight this onslaught.

[Unknown]

I wanted to know what you think.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Of this latest ceasefire or the prospects of a ceasefire in Ukraine, because you.

[Unknown]

Hear that we're willing to do something.

[Ryan Macbeth]

As the United States, but only if they give up mineral resources. And that seems okay, maybe they're going to stop blowing up energy facilities in each other's countries or the Black Sea, something like this. But a lot of it seems to be changing, and a lot of it seems to also be like something for nothing or unenforceable or no real plan.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Well, you're absolutely correct. It is a very fluid situation. And the fact is that Russia really.

[Unknown]

Doesn'T have any motivation to stop the war. And that's mainly because when it comes to their goals, they haven't completed all of their goals yet. And their goal is, of course, to take over all of Ukraine and then eventually go to the Baltics and then Poland. They have to do that in order to secure their country from what they perceive as NATO aggression. So Russia is under absolutely no motivation, because they believe if they can keep pushing and pushing, eventually Ukraine will collapse, at least according to them.

[Ryan Macbeth]

So do we just think that there's not going to be a real ceasefire? Do we think Russia will agree to one, build up their artillery, build a few hundred more vehicles, and then just continue?

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's certainly a possibility. Now, the kind of ceasefire that Russia.

[Unknown]

Wants is one where Russia remains in possession of Ukrainian land and eventually there's going to have to be some sort of give and take. As much as I'd hate to put it like this, Ukraine is likely going to have to give up some land in order to ensure some kind of peace. I foresee the Donbas, mainly Luhansk and Donetsk becoming a sort of not Russian satellite, but almost like a no man's land. Or like the Sinai Peninsula was in Egypt when Egypt and Israel agreed to peace and there were peacekeepers in the Sinai Peninsula. So perhaps the Donbas becomes a sort of free state that is perhaps aligned close with Russia and you have a peacekeeping force, D4, let's say Donbas force that patrols that area. Russia is limited to having a certain number of tanks near that area and Ukraine is limited to having a certain number of tanks and troops in that area. And perhaps in return they get Kirsten and Zaporizhzhia back as territories.

So who's going to patrol that?

[Ryan Macbeth]

The UN, Europe?

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's a good question. It could be the UN.

[Unknown]

K4 was a mainly NATO operation. That was the Kosovo Stabilization Force. The MFO multinational force and observers is a joint. I believe it's 13 countries. United States, Japan, Norway, Colombia, Fiji. They have a military and Fiji actually does a rotation. So it could be something like that where a third party force is used. The ideal situation might be some non aligned countries like Brazil, Indonesia. They could supply troops and different countries would pay for the upkeep of those troops while they're on rotation. It could be something that lasts 20 years. The MFO Multinational Force and observers in Egypt have been around since the 1980s, I believe.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Imagine being from Fiji and you get plucked and put in Ukraine.

[Unknown]

That would be the coldest you've ever.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Been in your whole life by a factor of 100.

[Unknown]

That's a deployment you don't want if.

[Ryan Macbeth]

You'Re a soldier from Fiji plopped into Ukraine in the winter.

[Jordan Harbinger]

The Fijians in my experience, are highly professional soldiers.

[Unknown]

They essentially have three battalions. One battalion rotates to Egypt, one battalion rotates to Lebanon and the other battalion stays home. It's mainly a reserve army and these guys go back to their plantations and farming. They leave again and go on another rotation. They're highly professional soldiers.

Lebanon and Egypt not as cold as.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Ukraine in the eastern Ukraine in the winter.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Absolutely correct.

[Unknown]

I was curious about this because I know it seems like Russia could just.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Agree to something and break it and if there's no one there to enforce it, we're just back to square one. Especially if Ukraine's military is degraded and not rebuilt and Russia rapidly rebuilds, the incentives are all misaligned. There's no point in them maintaining a ceasefire if they have a better chance to take over more of Ukraine later on.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That is the fear.

[Unknown]

The fear is that Russia would use any kind of time.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Ideally, a ceasefire will usually last for.

[Unknown]

30 days, and that just means, all right, there's certain agreements that ceasefire. You won't shoot at each other, and.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That'Ll give a chance for some soldiers.

[Unknown]

To rotate out and rest.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Now, you're not going to rebuild your.

[Unknown]

Forces over those 30 days. But ideally, a ceasefire turns into a permanent peace treaty, and after that we have negotiations on what troops are allowed in, what area is it, demilitarized zone and so on. So I could certainly see something like that happening eventually and it almost certainly benefits Russia. But depending on the terms of the ceasefire, if Russia has very favorable terms where they say, okay, Ukraine's army is limited to 200 tanks and they're not allowed to join NATO and they're not allowed to raise an army larger than a hundred thousand troops, that's an issue. That's an issue for the defense of Ukraine. And in 10 years, Russia could try again.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yeah, I think that's what everyone's afraid of.

[Unknown]

Before I finally let you go, I'm curious about an update here in Syria.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Because I know one of the last episodes, which is are out of the loop about Syria.

[Unknown]

You and I both were kind of like, all right, we are cautiously optimistic.

[Ryan Macbeth]

About hts, this Islamist group, taking over. And we're worried that they could turn into kind of like a sectarian conflict. A little bit of shades of isis.

[Unknown]

Shades of Al Qaeda, but so far so good. And now when I look at news.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Clips, I see Alawites being rounded up and shot and people getting killed all over the place. And it's a little bit confusing as to who is doing that. And is that the government or is that rogue people taking out revenge? What's going on in Syria now with this?

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's a very good question. I've actually been in touch with some Alawites who've been telling me that they have elements of HTS rolling through Alawite cities, just murdering military age males. They cut off water, they cut off power. So it's forcing people to leave their homes. But hey, there's a curfew. Oh, you're on the street, bang, right, left your home to try to find water, try to charge your phone. That does appear that seems to be happening. I don't know whether that is government policy, because you have the current leader of the current de facto leader of Syria right now who's now dressing up in a suit and shaking hands and looking like he's a perfectly normal politician. I don't know whether this is HTS doing this as a matter of government policy or it's a rogue group from hts. One interesting thing is that the HTS could be considered the army of Syria right now. They reached out to the Kurds and it appears that the Kurds have said, yes, we will join the federal army of Syria. Now, there might be separate Kurdish brigades, but it looks like they might be under a unified command. So as of right now, I don't know what's going on when it comes to who is actually committing these atrocities inside Syria. The other side of the coin is that there may be some Syrians who, I don't want to say don't care, but might be looking the other way because they're Alawites who were in charge for quite a few years and now they're getting what's due. That's a hard thing to say to a family who's just been murdered.

[Ryan Macbeth]

And also, let's say that my ethnic group was in charge of the country. I didn't do that. I just go to school, I just go to college or I just raise my kids. Like, yes, maybe there's some privileges, like people of my ethnicity get better jobs. But again, it's not my fault. I didn't put Assad in power.

[Jordan Harbinger]

One of the issues that you're running into is that we don't have a lot of media in Syria, so we're getting a lot of stuff secondhand. And so we don't really know exactly who is doing this. And the people who are doing this aren't necessarily going to tell you. Like I said, we really don't know right now, but it does seem like Alawites are being dragged out of their houses and murdered.

[Unknown]

Okay, awkward ending.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I think it's a pretty awkward ending for the Alawites too. Look, everyone has their fingers crossed that this conflict in Syria was going to maybe lead to an Islamic ish democracy. It'll definitely be based on Islam, but maybe there'll be rights for minority groups in there as well. Maybe. Look, we haven't seen Sharia law pop up in Syria, so I am still cautiously optimistic, but unfortunately there's really no Western journalists in Syria that can kind of explain what's going on right now.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Huh. We'll have to do another out of the loop on that when there are more developments. Ryan Macbeth, thank you so much, man.

[Unknown]

For coming back on the show for the sixth time.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Always a pleasure, Jordan. Thank you.

[Unknown]

You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show with geopolitics analyst Peter Zihan.

[Peter Zihan]

We're kind of in this soft moment in history where everyone's holding their breath and wondering if the next time there's an incident, the US is going to intervene or not. And I would argue we are not. Safety on the waves is what allows us to have the East Asian manufacturing model. Less than 1% of that shipping happens on land, and that is a recipe for 1910s and 1930s style conflict and competition. Countries are increasingly finding in their best interest to kind of hoard what consumption they do have and not allow trade access to it and then producing more locally. We were moving this way before the Ukraine war, before the Chinese started to break down, and before the German industrial model started to implode. This has just sped everything up. So we'll probably see significant drops in agricultural output next year, especially in the second half of next year year, which should suggest that we're going to have significant problems with food supply on a global scale in the months that follow. I mean, the food issue is the issue that gives me nightmares because I don't see a way to fix it. The biggest loser by far is China. Everything about China's functionality is dependent on a globalization and a demographic moment that has passed. I think we're in the final decade of the European Union because without that Russian energy, there is no German manufacturing model. And without the German German manufacturing model, you don't have the money that is used to keep the EU in existence. The pace of the disintegration here is really difficult to wrap your mind around. We've had a really good run the last 75 years. It was never going to last and it's. It's going to be a rough ride. So anyone who thinks this is going to be easy is wrong in every possible way.

[Unknown]

For more about how globalization and our way of life will change dramatically in the coming decade, check out episode 781 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. All things Ryan Macbeth will be in the show. [e-mail], advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, [e-mail] deals Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also our newsletter, wee bit wiser. The idea is to give you something specific and practical that'll have an immediate.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Impact on your decisions and your psychology.

[Unknown]

Your relationships in under two minutes. It's sent out almost every Wednesday. If you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It is a great companion to the show. Jordanharbinger.com news is where you can find it. Don't forget about six minute networking as well. Over at sixminutenetworking.com I'm ordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends. When you find something useful or interesting, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in the Ukraine conflict, war in Europe, geopolitics in general, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn and we'll see you next time.