WarTalk：コフマンが語るウクライナ戦争から米軍が学ぶべきこと

One thing you can see in just the May of War, there's no culture of decoys. It's not just about buying technology. You have to make real choices on force structure and organizational capacity. Nobody wants to make them. Everyone can see a guy with a Mavic. He spent $3,500 on a Mavic 3T, which was pound for pound the most used drone in this war. You can see on thermal your entire force miles away before you get to your own flop. Okay? Like, you don't own the night. War talk, the leading analyst of his generation, has taught me more over the past four years than, I don't know, anyone else about this. I think, like, got me into the field, honestly, reading Michael Kaufman's tweets and articles and listening to his podcast over at the Russia Contingency over the past five years. We're going to go through some of the more recent developments in the war in Ukraine, starting with all the Starling Starship drama, Operation Vivaldi,

maybe broaden out towards some broader discussion about lessons and meta discussion about the discussion about lessons. Let's make sure we won't, you know, stick quite at the, you know, 101 level of this. Co-hosting today we have Justin McIntosh, a retired Green Beret, currently working defense tech. And then Tony, who needs no introduction. Yes, former problem child and current problem child. Yeah. I do want to say one thing before we get into the really serious discussion. Mike, is that John Luke Picard on your wall? It is. It's Patrick's story. Well done. Well done. It's a very serious painting of him in the garb a Napoleonic War period officer. I got this here originally during COVID. Remember when we're all stuck here? I noticed I was having meetings. I just had this blue wall. I was like, something needs to go on this wall.

sometimes it's been a lot of fun because sometimes folks see it and I get messages from random couples arguing over what it is. If they see me on TBS, I get these messages from I've had this argument with my wife. Is it Patrick Stewart? They're actually like my favorite emails to reply to. And, Jordan, I'm sorry if I got you in the field. I'm going to tell you something you probably already figured out. Ain't no one's gotten rich by becoming a military analyst. You've never heard somebody say, that's it. I'm cashing in. I'm going to go make money. I'm going to do military analysis. So, good luck. It's all about the friends you make along the way. We didn't start War Talk to make money. Speaking of other things in your background, like, you know, how, what percentage of the Russian officer corps you think your dog could do a better job at, like, mission command then? I have two dogs. The other one you can't see is right below me. I definitely think that they have better initiative. And unlike the Russian military, one of whose cultural problems is a deficit of trust.

Like, you need to have good trust between the officers and people who serve under them. There's a lot of trust. This is what we call strong unit cohesion here. Not always. There are definitely sometimes too much mission command, and then I have to go and corral them. But in general, I think just from a level of pure culture, trust, cohesiveness, this is a stronger tactical unit than one you'll find in the Russian armed forces. I think that's actually a really good kickoff point for the news of the week, or at least the news of the last week and a half, has been that someone in the United States, it has been blamed on both the administration and Elon Musk. It seems like the blame is falling on Elon Musk now. slowed down the Starshield, Starlink network within Ukraine to a point that it could no longer match the speed of incoming Russian drones and missiles so that their interceptors stopped working, obviously contributed to increase in civilian casualties, bombardments of Kiev. Mike, what are you seeing or hearing about both that decision and the impacts of it?

Okay, so just to be clear, right now it's Friday, October 23, and this is a very rapidly developing story. The situation might change in a day or two, but here's where we are today. It's clear for the past week what happened was Starshield specifically, not just Starlink. Starlink and Starshield in Ukraine are kind of two different subscriptions, even though they use the same constellation. They're both run by SpaceX. Starshield, though, has managed through government contracts, and I think that the Starshield subscriptions are paid by Germany and Poland for Ukraine. But Starlink has been velocity limited for some time since the beginning of the year. Starshield is specifically used by Ukrainian forces for something they call mid-strike, which are long-range strike drones typically in 50 to 300 kilometer depths, which are two categories, let's say, two groups. Light mid-strike, Hornet, Darks, typically 10-kilogram payload, targeting Russian logistics, Russian troops, at decent depth but normally operating around 100, 150 kilometers in depth.

And then there's the heading mid-strike, which are big drones like FP-2s, 300, 200-kilogram payload, operating upwards of 300 kilometers, but very large systems that are basically going after command and control, larger targets. All right. what it essentially did is there was a throttling to 100 miles per hour and the first night it didn't even work it barely worked at half that and so almost nobody could fly then eventually started operating not 100 miles per hour but more like upwards of 80 and then it became unstable between 80 and 100 and so lots of units started losing journals because they started losing connectivity or just inconsistent unstable and ukrainian military since then has had two big problems first they have to fly below the speed limit and the speed limit seems inconsistent right it's sort of like 160 kmh but actually it's unstable at around downward to 130 which means the drones have to fly too slow and many of them now get shot down because they're flying so slow russians can intercept them with their own interceptor drones the second problem is some

of the big heavy drones they just can't fly that slow they're not designed to fly at that slow speed it creates a huge issue because okay just because somebody woke up in the site to throttle Ukrainian data connectivity, which they need to maintain direct control of these drones, to 160 kmh or below, it doesn't mean that the drone itself can operate that slowly. The third part is Ukraine has been trying to scale production of jet-powered drone interceptors. Why? Because Russian jet-powered strike drones, Ground 4, Ground 5, which are really ground-launched cruise missiles, they're basically like cruise missiles, in terms of altitude and velocity, price out traditional interceptors, right? They're just coming in at around 6 to 8 kilometers in altitude and several hundred kilometers in terms of speed. And so Ukraine's been mostly intercepting these with F-16s and traditional air defense systems, but this is not a sustainable approach. They've been now scaling up production of a new type, new version of jet-powered interceptors, and those two were operating via Starship, okay?

So the bottom line is Starshow has hampered both types of what Ukraine is called mid-strike. It has hampered Ukraine's effort to control operational depth. And it's also significantly hampered Ukraine's ability to scale up deployment of these jet-powered interceptors as well. And that's been a story for the past week. Yesterday, there was a sense that something might have changed, and some Ukrainian units were able to fly at higher speeds. but in general it still seems that there's a throttle in place connectivity is very inconsistent it drops out a lot people are losing systems basically because it's the worst because let's say it's one thing somebody tells you the throttle speed limit it's another thing when the throttle speed limit isn't what they said and you're not sure what it is and you're doing a strike and you just lost the platform because the connections just dropped and remember these are dynamically flown and targeted typically in Ukrainian territory and surrounding territory like the Black Sea and what have you.

So it is important. These are not autonomous systems, right? Most systems in Ukraine, I'm going to say 99%, are at best semi-autonomous, but typically remotely operated. So here, Star Shield plays an important role. Can we do a little bit of strategic context of, like, why this is a thing that would even be happening in the first place before we go to the fallout? That's a great question. So speculation is right, but, you know, Wall Street Journal had two days of stories covering this, basically suggesting that the way their sources told them, you know, It's clear Trump's been frustrated with Zdansky and have been trying to get him to stop strikes against Russian fuel refineries. That's been the story for the past two weeks. And that blew up into a bit of a spat in crisis because the United States signed this ridiculous diesel import deal with Russia

where we're going to be importing tiny diesel volumes from them. I think the total amount is going to be basically one day's worth of usage in the United States. which is super useful, especially considering, I'm being sarcastic here, considering we are a major exporter of these products, meaning we don't need to import them from Russia to begin with. But we'll put that aside. And so there was this whole blow-up, and at least the way Wall Street Journal covered it, it seemed like Musk may have pitched this to the administration. They approved it. Then Starship got throttled. Ukraine's got official notice of a throttling with no explanation. Nobody else kind of, everyone got blindsided who's involved in working this, I think. And since then, they've been trying to get it fixed. And the latest story was that maybe Trump had talked to Elon Musk to get it switched back on to remove this throttle limit. It's not clear if that's true. I'm just repeating what I've read. But hopefully this is going to get fixed in the near future because it's a real problem.

The United States is now actively hampering Ukraine's ability to conduct military operations in very important areas. and it's not clear why. I'm going to get ahead of your follow-up question. It's like, what do we want? It's not actually clear to Ukrainians what we want, from what we actually want them to do to remove this throttle limit. That's the other tough part. I'm not trying to dodge the question. It's just not even clear to me why we did this and what we specifically want from them. To kind of get to the overliance of Starlink and Starship, the ability to do low-Earth orbit, resilient comms has been a military technical revolution, perhaps one of the fastest, most widely deployed and then used. Simultaneously, I think it's becoming quite clear to everyone around the globe that having one supplier of that is bad. And that, too, is that eventually the enemy will get around to figuring out ways to jam, disrupt, deny. It's just from, even from a, you know, to the what do we want perspective,

It doesn't even make sense what, you know, Elon might want, because, you know, if you read like SpaceX's IPO where they say they've got this massive global market share. Well, I'm pretty sure they just tanked it because everyone's going to build their own competitor now. If I was a shareholder, I'd be considerably worried just on that alone. I mean, clearly this was like a phone call between Elon and Trump. Yes. And maybe there is some ambiguity, but, like, the only reason this happens is because it's a sort of, like, working towards the Fuhrer, you know, type of deal where, like, Elon is doing this because he thinks this is something that's in the interest of the Trump administration to win an election or something that they want. And, you know, we can have a blame game afterwards because it's like really ugly and noxious. But, I mean, maybe before we go too deep into this, like taking a step back, if Trump gets even more cranky than he is today and pulls like everything that the U.S. can, you know, how bad does it get for Ukraine over the coming weeks and months?

I mean, like, are Russians in Kiev by Easter or, like, how much leverage does the U.S. still actually have sitting here today? We still have quite a bit of leverage. I'll be honest. We have quite a bit of leverage. No, it doesn't lead to a sudden collapse of Ukraine's military effort. That's not the case. But we have quite a bit of leverage. And we also have to be clear on what we might pull back. So, Donnie's comments on Starlink. Yeah, one of the main critical enabling technologies throughout this whole war had been Starlink, right? And if it wasn't for that, it's difficult to see how Ukrainian units would have cheap expendable comms that would then allow you to connect drones, UGVs. There are other communication solutions out there, I want to be clear, but they're actually quite expensive. And to scale up, like, the rapid proliferation of the many, many thousands of Starlink terminals across Ukraine,

it's brewing an essential enabling technology. And Star Shield is a pretty small, like, subset of that for Ukraine, but an important one because it's used in very specific strike roles. So when you say that, it depends what we do. If it's something like cutting them off from being able to use Star Shield or going to SpaceX and telling them to cut them off from technology, it would be disastrous. But in general, we have, yeah, we have leverage. We're still a key provider of all sorts of form of intelligence support. We're a key provider of military goods, of munitions, air defense, missile defense, interceptors. Yes, Europeans are paying for it, but it's our choice to send it. You know, we can stop sending it tomorrow. In fact, there are several stories of Hexah basically dragging his feet on signing over the latest shipment of interceptors for PAG-3. Like the United States tomorrow has the option to just stop sending these things if Trump wants to. And often the threat of cutting off intel and cutting off the actual military supply by the Pearl arrangement have gone in tandem.

It's very difficult to see one without the other. So what we do is it would substantially hamper Ukraine's war effort. And, yeah, I think Ukraine wouldn't be in dire straits because Russia is doing really badly this year. This is the worst year of Russian military performance on the ground since, like, winter of 2023. But if we're talking about air and missile defense, which is an important part of this war, Ukraine is entering a very, very difficult and uncertain winter if you look at the current situation with air and missile defense on the ground. Yeah, it could definitely affect the war. I don't have an easy way to qualify it. Like, it's not going to lead to a collapse of the front line or anything like that on the one hand. but on the other hand just doing that alone will change russian expectations about the war if your goal is to compel russia to change the negotiating position towards some kind of acceptable terms for ceasefire settlement you're definitely not going to get that because what you're telling your adversaries is essentially like hey it's it's a matter of time like ukraine has now been cut off

of u.s until military support so all they have to do is wait because time is on their side in the You're worth characterized by attrition and exhaustion. So you're essentially killing what potential leverage you have. You're changing expectations for the future of the war. Michael, is this the biggest independent variable when we're thinking about the next, you know, I guess two years is just like if Trump is going to go full King Lear, if he'll just kind of, you know, keep waffling like he's done over the past two years. or if, I don't know, the ghost of Lindsey Graham somehow inhabits him and he wants his Nobel Prize through ending this war and, like, put pressure on Putin way in the final two years of his administration? Yeah, I'll speak of the ill of the dead. I'm not sure how effective Lindsey Graham was ever really in this at the end of the day. But I will say that, yes, U.S. policy is probably the biggest independent variable role, Although Europeans are too, and I will add, for reason being that they're about to have a bunch of elections in the spring.

And at this point, Ukraine's effort very much depends on European capital and also provision European military support. And if you have Le Pen or other folks who win in France, it's not clear where those policies are going to go. but on our side it's not just our support for Ukraine which more or less still over the last year and a half has been fairly steady with like some crises in between it's all the fact that you don't know what else we're going to do and what war we're going to start like the US-Arland war definitely affected this war so you just don't know what policies this administration will pursue either either policies that affect our allies if we go back to January Europeans were really uncertain about our intentions towards Greenland with Denmark we were nice way I could put it, very weird and so it's these policies that also affect the course of the war

because the other wars are not going to wait for your war to finish especially if the United States is starting something yeah, I mean I think was it Thomas Schelling in Arms and Influence talks about one of the biggest things that you can do when you're influencing is like have your back against the wall, make it to where it's very clear, like if you're doing deterrence or you're trying to achieve an end goal, that your enemy knows that like there is no retreat for you. You're in a position where like this, if you cross this line, you're going to be engaged in conflict with us. And the U.S. has continually given ourselves over the last like year ways out of allies and partnerships. And we've looked to blame the allies and partners in some very significant ways. that I think have put us in a position where we are, one, we're unpredictable, but then also, like, it allows us to give in to our worst nature, which is, like, we don't want to be involved in a conflict. So then you get Trump goes to, you know, the Trump-Xi summit and says, like,

well, you know, Taiwan's a really long way away. You know, we have the president saying that Zelensky should end this war. he could have ended this war a long time ago. And it's like, well, the only way he was going to end the war by capitulation, because he didn't start the war. What are the actual terms that the United States wants to achieve in this conflict? We talked about the same thing with Iran. What was the actual end goal when we did the war in Iran, the initial strike? And we have the theory that, hey, we took our big hit. We thought maybe if we took out the top 20% of leadership that they would just capitulate and we would win. Okay, then that didn't happen. And now what is our best outcome, best available outcome? That's kind of where we are with Ukraine. I don't know that the administration really has a fully flushed out like this is the best outcome for the United States in this conflict or for the globe in this conflict if it ends this way versus the other. So it's difficult to see how it would continue to play out because it does seem slightly capricious and at the whims of the administration.

I think that their defining approach is transactional, which is a big problem for alliances and for coalitions involved in a military effort. Second, the people leading the negotiations are principally business individuals, business elites, with Goff, Jared Kushner. They're not thinking about this from the standpoint of diplomacy and statecraft. They're thinking about this from, as best I can tell, as a business deal. and they see the transaction they're trying to make on settling the war as the thing standing in the way of other business deals they want to pursue. And unfortunately, many of them seem to be with Russia. And then I think that as far as the actual outcome for Ukraine, these folks don't care all that much. And that's the big problem for Ukrainians and Europeans. Because when Ukraine is not interested in a deal, there's just a piece of paper that's a ceasefire on it. You know, that actually leaves Ukraine a very vulnerable place because Russians will break the ceasefire like they have others in the past, renew the war under more favorable conditions,

and Trump administration can walk away saying, we made a deal, here's the deal, now we can pursue other business deals with Russia. Well, you know, a year later, Russia restarts the war, Ukraine's forced to demobilize its forces. They can't keep them in the field, naturally. Once he been made people want to go out And then Russia renews the war and you have a continuation war Because this war is a continuation war of the 2014 war We got here through two failed ceasefires and you can easily get it's very likely that a third ceasefire could take you to a third iteration of this war. And also, they don't care about the implications necessarily for Europeans, and that's why Europeans are not on board with parts of the suffering. Because they understand that folks who just want to make a deal don't care if this deal actually ends the war, don't care about the implications of the deal for Ukraine and Europeans, they're not really interested in this, then they don't think strategically they don't have Europe's interests at heart. And, yeah, I think that's a big problem of folks being involved in policy that, you know, see this much more as a transaction and that their approach to Europe is not so much strategic.

It's almost difficult to see it as, like, what is Trump administration's European policy? I recall one person last year described as less a policy and more of an attitude towards Europe. So I'm one I want to make a point, which is that I I think the best way to describe the way the parts of the West have approached this is that they are acting exhausted on behalf of Ukraine because it's, you know, of interest to them to be so. Right. And that applies both to the people who are like have peace at all costs and also the people who are like this is an economic inconvenience. Right. Is that they're acting more exhausted than the Ukrainians fighting on the front lines are. Secondly, getting to kind of like the, you know, European exhaustion or like frustration with the war. I mean, how has the Russian sabotage campaign impacted European politics? Has it finally ramped up enough that it's starting to change things? You know, how is it actually impacting production in the strategic rear? Yeah, it's a good question on production. So I don't actually think Europeans have reacted all that much to the Russian

commercial warfare campaign. I mean, they have like in a sense of people are aware of it, but it's not really shaping European politics. And it's actually an act of debate. To what extent is a reassessment of the Russian military threat and the kind of challenge Russia poses in the future? Is that driving European defense investment or is it fear of abandonment by the United States due to this transactional policy, right? what's a bigger causal factor in current increase of European defense spending? Because we've seen a substantial increase in defense spending and contracting in Europe. I think contracts-wise, something like a 170% increase for the past several years in terms of billions of dollars spent. But I don't know, just, I see a number of European efforts and initiatives to respond to Russian actions in Europe, but many also understand that some of this activity is essentially Russia trying to sabotage European support for Ukraine for various efforts involved in providing support to Ukraine and intimidate European countries.

To me, the big question, we look at the conversation between the United States and Europe and U.S. pushing this idea of like a NATO 3.0. So let me challenge, but Admin is trying to somehow shift the burden of conventional deterrence in defense onto Europeans for Europe. But like the whole bargain that we've had for many decades, and this is not a bug, this is a feature of the transatlantic alliance in a relationship, is that the U.S. plays a central leadership role. And if you look at kind of NATO regional defense plans, the whole idea of NATO is that the United States provides a lot of command and control of the enablers for large-scale force employment in Europe. and the best scenario is you have somebody who is not European providing it, not only because right now nobody in Europe can, not only because Europe is still very far away, whatever the aspirations may be, from being able to do that. If it's not the United States, who does everybody integrate around, who's going to provide all these capabilities, and who has the ability to employ force on a large scale in more complex types of operations? There isn't anyone there. And lastly, the U.S. plays this important role and has played this important role because it's mutually beneficial.

It's great for Europeans. It's great for us. And as much as things have changed, I don't see that changing still so fundamentally, even if U.S. officials under Trump are trying to push the balance of expenditures onto Europeans. It's a real basic question. how much can Europeans take over conventional deterrence in defense? The ability to employ forces skill depends on the role the United States currently plays in European defense. That's a good question because this is something that I've thought about a lot. Like if at some point when your allies are asked to like offset or contribute production that replaces U.S. capabilities that already exist, you start seeing like the two parts actually add up to less capability because you don't have a complicated complementing effects. You have, you know, just two systems that are basically in competition with each other. Is that a complementing? We talked about that specifically, like with Australia,

like asking Australia to build a robust defense industry that basically mimics a smaller version of the United States industry wouldn't actually be a very good use of Australian defense dollars because Australia should be geared towards. okay, what can I augment the existing U.S. force posture in the Pacific with? What is the European defense spending and buildup? How does that change if the threat is U.S. abandonment versus the threat is Russian aggression? Yeah, right. And the Russians, are they, you know, are they different threats? Or are they, hey, I'm worried about U.S. abandonment in the event of future Russian aggression, right? because Europeans are sure, Southern European states are very much concerned about migrant crisis and all this, but European generally, what is the military contingency for Europeans to pay requirements in theater? It's Russia. That's a good question. I think that part of the increase in defense spending has definitely been driven by

the war itself because Europeans expend a lot of stocks and have the online production of artillery ammunition, various other types of munitions. Part of it had led to a general recognition of the need to rearm because Europeans didn't buy ammo much for a lot of different parts of their forces. One of the best things that's going to come out of this, ideally, is substantial rearmament of Europe in general from my point of view. And then we have significant investment in artillery, protective mobility, air power. Although here we run to the issue just in the U.2. Countries typically want to spend dollars on their own defense industries. So often they might buy not necessarily what they need but what people can make at home. And Europe has a lot of redundant defense enterprises, right? Like there are lots of different types of artillery. There are lots of different types of protective mobility. there's lots of things that are

you know basically like you you could easily optimize by having folks pull together and just focus on a couple platforms usually you see them doing this maybe when it comes to air power and maybe when it comes to major land weapon systems like all the different variants of the Leopard 2 tank but still you have a lot of diversity because you have a lot of smaller defense industries and everybody's spending money on their own production. And, yeah, it's not very efficient, on the one hand, to have, like, a smaller version of the U.S. defense sector. But last point on this, the problem we've always gotten with Europeans is every time the United States says spend more, Europeans say, no, you just want us to buy your stuff, the United States, right? And then folks in the U.S. say, okay, well, your own defense industry is anemic and it can't absorb this funding. So it's not our fault that even if you wanted to buy, you know,

you don't have the production capacity. Now it's increasing across Europe, and the irony is that now we're the problem because now Europeans were also trying to buy from us. A running tradition of the United States says, well, actually, the things we promised to deliver you, we can't deliver. And sorry, you bought, you know, attackants, but I don't have missiles for you for many years, and I don't have a clear timeline when you're going to get them. So now we're in a place where Europeans are spending so much, they are willing to buy more from the United States. If you look at the back order for some of our systems, it's pretty extensive. But they're not even sure how reliable we're going to be on delivery of things they are willing to pay for. Kind of pivoting from that to talk about forced modernization and what we see in Ukraine, because I think there's sometimes where people over-index on Ukraine, right? But I think for the European point, like, it's that or the Arctic that they can index on, basically. And the Arctic is mostly go hunting for Russian subs. So if you're talking land power, then you're talking about, you know, indexing off of what you see in Ukraine. And, you know, I think Operation Vivaldi and kind of the use of mechanized forces in a way that is perhaps consistent with the evolutions we've seen in deployed FPV drones, et cetera.

you know how much of what we see live on the battlefield is europe indexing off of versus just trying to replace what the u.s was supplying i mean i definitely think if you're looking at position of drones ew these types of systems this is folks looking at the advent of mass precision which is just a further evolution of precision strike on the battlefield and uh trying to draw lessons from the war, and they have to because, look, whether you think this is generalizable from Russia, Ukraine to other future military contingencies, for Europeans, their future potential fights with Russia, and Russia is already going to fight in this way. So we already have solved for one part of the equation, one barrier, because does Russia employ mass precision and have they invested in shifting substantial amounts of manpower from traditional maneuver formations into drone formations?

Have they improved their ability to conduct reconstant fire or constant strike? Are they employing a new host of deep strike capabilities, you know, alongside traditional ballistic missiles and cruise missiles, new types of light cruise missiles, and large numbers of one-way tag jobs? The answer is yes. Europeans already know how the adversary is going to fight. The question they're asking themselves is how are they going to fight, okay? And their challenge is how do you integrate some of these new capabilities into the traditional advantages that our forces have. And the big issue they're running into, and I think it's an issue that we run into in the United States as well, is it's not just about buying technology. You have to make real choices on force structure and organizational capacity. Nobody wants to make them. They want to buy drones. They can't explain who's going to be fighting with these drones. Because in forces, typically, if you want to add something, you have to figure out what you want to delete. And as soon as you start having that conversation, everybody immediately says, don't delete me. My mission is still necessary. So then you look around the forest and you're like, let's take ours as an example.

People talk extensively about procuring drones and adding them to our traditional vayages. Although many in the Army basically say, okay, well, we're over-indexing FPVs. Fine, not FPVs. There's all sorts of other different drone types. the bottom line is if you don't have drone platoons and drone companies you have nobody that's going to fight with drones in your force who's going to be employing these capabilities who's going to be training with them then who knows how to do logistics for them this requires both force structural modifications it requires real choice on force design and it requires investments in organizational capacity because a lot of conversation on drones involves a more boring conversation on data layer connectivity How are you going to run and operate this? And the logistical requirements of supporting a drone component of the force. And lastly, for Europeans and for us, a big question that we have looking at this war is air power adaptation, right? Our military has invested very heavily in air power because the logic goes, hey, if you have a real advantage in air power,

then you can achieve at least low-class air superiority. That's a great combination of building firepower on the battlefield. That then can enable the ground force to do the things it wants to do, right? And the question is, well, could we see a future where air power attains localized air superiority, but the enemy through dispersed drone units has effective fire control over enough of the terrain and is attraining your ground forces at an unacceptable rate, even though air power reports that they have achieved localized air superiority, but they haven't achieved the other effects that we traditionally have seen them be able to achieve for ground forces, part one. In part two, air power needs to be adapted to the challenges we see in this war. Because Western militaries have a big deficit of what in their force structure? Ground-based air defense. Because they assume that air power has the air defense mission cover. And if you ask typical air forces, do you have the air defense mission covering if you have like 800 drones coming at you in one sortie?

Okay. Plus cruise missiles. Plus, you know, other types of capabilities. The answer is no. All right. It's not adapted to that. It may be adapted to that. But those are investments you're really going to have to make. So it actually it should be an open conversation. We should be talking about it with greater uncertainty as to, you know, can air power reliably deliver these things? And, you know, we do exercises. We need to do war games. We need to be talking about this. I don't think we're over indexed on Ukraine. I mean, it's the large scale conventional war we have to work with. It's got to land, air and sea dimension. OK. All wars are different. They all have their own context. That's true. But if you want to index off of this war, what war do you want to index off of? I want to explore that a little bit. I want to explore the force modernization and force makeup, too, because something that the U.S. Army just announced, it was in an article that came out today, task and purpose or something, where they were saying the headline was basically one rifle squad out, one drone squad in.

So they're basically like in an infantry platoon. Now they're saying, oh, we're going to have every squad. There's going to be a drone squad in every platoon. I tend to agree with you that the right makeup isn't to have it that integrated into the line infantry companies, because I think that you run into issues with training, you run into issues with how do you manage the log pack, you know, how the logistics run, all of that. But while we're looking at the way that the Ukrainians are fighting, what should that force structure look like ideally? Like what does that actually look like for the U.S. or for European armies? And where do we think that the right makeup is? Because you also don't want this exquisite thing that we have to request enablers for because the army and military commanders are historically terrible at employing enablers. So, like, where do we get the fusion of the, like, long-range fires capability into the infantry squad, infantry company, while also not destroying, like, kind of the logistic back end of those units?

Yeah. I think, for me, probably the place I would like to start is something like a drone platoon per maneuver battalion and maybe a company per brigade, and then maybe an additional, at least a separate UGV platoon, because that requires specialization and technical knowledge and a different whole separate logistical pipeline. I think a platoon per battalion can then split itself into supporting, basically supporting elements and then have like a logistical component as well, potentially. to me there's a separate conversation to be had okay maybe you can also revisit the squad right operation of all you Tony you brought that up third core there had in every squad have one guy be a drone trooper essentially and he was basically providing very short range tactical precision

strike ability for a squad that's pretty great because he can come with several drones and really throw on goggles and have a very different perspective on the battlefield, a top-down one, and support the squad right there on the spot. He's closest because his antenna signal is closest to the drone he just threw up. It's very hard to jam him. And that's an interesting way of finding it. I'm not saying that that's the direction we should go at. We should probably have some part of the Force experiment with it. Let's get soft guys. They're flexible and agile. Make them have drone troopers or something like that, you know. So I'm just joking, but usually it's like somebody like this. You take up and you basically say, why don't you guys try the drone trooper thing, see if it works. But to me, definitely, let's start platoons and companies, okay? And then if that works, then build out to something like maybe a full-on drone battalion in a brigade combat team, okay? And if not that, then maybe the brigade has a company, and maybe there's at least a separate drone battalion that's enabling component above the brigade, okay?

worst case of like something the division commander has, let's say. Although I would like to be bigger than that, but my view is start at the beginning. Platoon's companies, if it works, then once we meet sense of that, go higher level formations. I don't like the people I've seen articles. I mean, you know, I'm a contributing area on the rock, so I've seen articles that come out. We will hold that against you. We need to create a drone force. And I'm like, we don't have drone platoons. What are you talking about? What drone force? Or we need to have drone regiments. Do you have any idea how to operate anything drone-related? Start at lower echelon formations. Have commanders experiment with them. You know, you need to learn to walk before you can fly. Right now, we barely have crawl phase and all of this. And then get the enabling things right. You need the software to allow situational awareness. Get in the unit. You need to organize this capacity. There's got to be somebody in charge of drones next to the guy handling artillery EW.

Drones are also very good for air defense and logistics. They spend a lot of time doing offensive, defensive mining. They spend a lot of time doing endpoint logistics. They can do CASVAC. They can do all sorts of things, okay? They need to have these folks working together, and then from there, they can figure out how to further evolve this part of our force. But unless we do that, this whole drone procurement conversation, We're procuring drones for who in the force to do what with. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the big struggles that they're having in conceptualizing, this is this is an end of one. This is me looking at it and just kind of like in my last couple of years in the military. There was, you know, the LISCO, the multi-domain operations, the you know, how how we were going to employ joint fires in support of units. And there's this graphic that the Army produced that had like the size of an element on the left hand side, the good guy side. And then on the right-hand side, it was how long, how far into the enemy, you know, across the plot, the forward line of troops, into enemy-controlled area there that size element was expected to be able to reach.

So you saw, like, squad and company was, like, one kilometer into the enemy-controlled territory. And you go to the company, or you went to the battalion, and it was five to ten kilometers. And you went to, you know, as you scaled up and you got to armies and corps, you started seeing much further reach. you know, 20 plus kilometers, 30 plus kilometers. I honestly think that there's actually one of the issues that our commanders are running into, that our doctrine runs into, is we're now starting to field some capabilities that would potentially be down at the company level that would give a company commander, so a captain in the United States Army, the ability to reach 20, 30, 40 kilometers into enemy territory. And that is something that is conceptualized as a strategic target or a strategic capability. And I think it's somewhat difficult for those commanders to wrap their head around the fact that, no, that's actually still a tactical fight. Like, we are now reaching the point where that is still within very much a tactical maneuver space that we need to let the actual tactical problem solvers own.

And that doesn't need to be handled up at the core level with a three-star staff. Part of the problem is we're trying to build doctrine that fits well on PowerPoints more so than we're trying to actually, like, does this work in the force? you know, because staff officers are lazy. And as I constantly lament the quality of staff officers just went down a lot But more importantly like you know we traditionally have ranged you know the depth that a unit can maneuver off of or strike off of based upon artillery right Like that is, you know, what are the indirect fire effects that that troop at that echelon can? And so it's line of sight for what a squad can see if they got it. And that works perfectly with what Justin just said, which is that it's just, it's different now. I think the readout from the 3-1 CAV, from their senior staff about their rotation in Germany, about how they learned to switch fire control measures around to be able to coordinate those fires deeper is a good step forward. But you have to do a lot of that over years to see how those moving pieces all fit together.

So, first, in the context of Russia and Ukraine, it's clear that because mass precision has this effect on the battlefield, you need to have a clear-cut plan on how you're going to set the conditions for any kind of offensive ground operation. And that means that you have to have thought through how are you going to suppress enemy drone units, how are you going to penetrate far enough, fast enough, X number of kilometers to displace them. Because if you haven't displaced them, there is no way to sustain offensive operation. your force will not have control of anything on the ground through their presence. They'll be hiding, trying to survive. You will have very little prospect for logistically sustaining them. They will close the corridor behind you, okay? And your offensive will basically be a crawl. So you need to be able to breach that number of kilometers in that initial force. So the suppressed enemy drone needs you to displace them. Once you've displaced that fire support, and remember, currently today in Russia, cream work. Your light ISR Mavic operators are somewhere 3-5 kilometers from zero.

Your FDV drone operators are sitting somewhere 8-12, okay, depending on what they're using. And your heavy multi-rotor and winged ISR operators are further back at like 15-25. So you're going to need to advance ideally. You need to isolate the theater of operations. You need to advance ideally at least 10-15 cam to displace those supporting enemy drones. Typically better than where artillery is sitting too. So artillery is usually also around 10 to 12, okay? And it's only sitting that close because Ukrainians don't have a lot of long-range artillery rounds. They're actually stuck because a large percentage of the artillery we supply them has only 15 kilometers range, which is part of the reason artillery is not used so much in the war a lot of people don't know is not only that it still has a decisive effect in shaping the dynamic on the battlefield because it's there. It prevents heavy force concentration. But when you have a drone employment zone at 15 to 25 km but stacking it around 10 to 15 in most parts of the fight, and you're only giving artillery guys 15 km artillery rounds and charges, they've got a big problem that you've created artificially for them.

Next, tactical risk operation. So to me, 15 to 30 is still very tactical. Justin, believe it or not, Russia, Ukraine, most drone battalion operators have strike capabilities going out 70 to 150 km now, You have a lot of drone battalion commanders in regiments that have strike ability to go up to 300 km. And that did create issues for them because you have this democratization, proliferation of precision strike across the force, and it creates a lot of coordination issues for the force because a lot of times I've talked to units, you know, I do field work in Ukraine pretty regularly, and I show the strikes they're doing within their, let's say, lane in support of their brigade. The brigade's doing strikes at 70 km plus, and then there's higher echelon formation supporting the core in that sector, and they're going all the way upwards to 300. Some of the strikes you're doing, you're like, why are you doing these strikes against the target? It's like, well, you know, we have the means. We're doing it for the plot. Like, why not? Nobody told us not to, okay? Because when we have long-range strike ability very rapidly proliferating across the force,

you'll have a lot of, like, I'm doing it because it seems, I'm taking initiative. It seems like the right thing to do. I'm blowing up these bridges. we're doing interdiction, and so on and so forth. The Force kind of gets a sense of, like, it has the capabilities that it starts to do the things that it always wanted to do, but you're definitely going to have to corral all of that. If for our Force, 15 to 30 cam is, like, operational level strike ability, it really isn't. And, you know, even basic first-person view drones now have pretty long range, right? Like, you should expect that the Force at a very low echelon is going to have this kind of precision strike ability. I have a point. What Raleigh shows us that, while tactical surprise in the traditional sense we try to get, it's very hard in a pervasive ISR environment. And ability to conduct nighttime operations is not going to give the Force an advantage anymore. Everyone can see, a guy with a Mavic, he spent $3,500 on a Mavic 3T, which was pound for pound the most used drone in this war, can see on thermal your entire Force miles away before you get to your own

slot, okay? Like, you don't own the night. This guy with this Mavic, can see everything. That Zestieth is going to be very upset with you for something. Yeah, well, I mean, look, I'm sorry, but just look, it's 2026. I'm not saying you shouldn't invest in night on an operations god bill. It's still important. You just have different expectations of what an advantage that gives you, right? But so tagging surprise is hard in a traditional sense, but operational surprise is still very much viable. It requires thinking through deception as a big part of how you plan a maneuver and setting the conditions correctly. But even though, in theory, everyone can see everything, you can still deny that ability for the duration of operation. And if you set the conditions right and you conduct proper deception, operational surprise is still pretty possible. And in the case of Operation Revolte, the Russians proved cooperative, but the Ukrainians did things that made them cooperative, right? they ran an operation in a certain way. It's not the first time I've seen it in this war.

So it shows that there's still a space for mobility and maneuver on the battlefield. Although, as you know, the pedantic debate in our military always continues. Is that really maneuver? You know, or is it like, I think it's a joke. Is it really maneuver or is it just like sparkling mobility? Because maneuver only comes from maneuver region of France. You know, like what, how do we know when we see it? I'm in several veteran and like still actor-duty-guy chats, and there have been these back-and-forths about exactly that, like, oh, it's not really maneuver. It's really just like, yeah. Unless you, like, circle up 200,000 Soviet troops in 1941, it's not maneuver, okay? That's exactly what it looks like. But I think that's actually a really great point because one thing the United States struggles with, and I would like to explore more, and I do think it's an under-reported-on aspect of the Ukrainian success over the last several years during multiple operations has been their ability to use deception because that's something that the U.S. struggles with. One of the psychological operation groups just got stood down. We've struggled very much with military

deception. We've struggled very much. They flew the bomber to the left and everyone thought it was going left, but it went right. Yeah, exactly. Even now, that's our great military deception of 2026 was we made B2s. I remember. Yeah. Deceived all the OSINT guys tracking them. But one thing you can see, just in the day around war, there's no culture of decoys. It's one of the most important things in the Rock Street Framework. There's like no culture of decoys. U.S. military will take a $500 million asset that's hard to replace and just put it out there, visible in commercial satellite imagery, with no effort to mask it and no decoys. I mean, it's not lethal, Michael. That's it. Yeah. Well, I guess, Michael, you know, like one of the themes of your of your research over the past few years is just Russia. Like they need to get punched in the face before they figure something out. It's like the helicopters need to get blown up.

Like the bombers need to get. Yeah, definitely. This thing needs to happen to them in a way where it, like, is so freaking obvious that you can't cover it up. I mean, is there any hope for us as a nation to, like, to learn these lessons? Like, I mean, it is 2026. It's been five and a half years. We've forgotten most of them is the problem. And, like, we have, to Michael's point earlier, where we've had air superiority for so long and we've had space-based superiority for so long that it didn't matter. We didn't have to think about how we actually protect our assets when they're in safe areas, because once we got to a safe area, we owned everything. It didn't matter. Both of my grandfathers served in Vietnam. One of them was a Green Beret. One of them was a logistics guy. And the logistics guy talked about a strategic bomber landing at his base while he was there. The sun went down, and he instantly had to drive out and, like, hook up to this bomber and drag it around the airfield to new locations, because literally when the lights went out, mortar started landing where that plane had been, had been at.

And like, they knew that there had to be deception. There had to be, you know, rapid movement. They had to protect assets. And we have lost that over the years because we became so used to the fact that like, yeah, we just, we, we own the night, we own the, we own the airspace. And I do think that like, we can get back to it. Hopefully we don't have to get punched in the face more than we already have for that to happen. To me, what I would take away from this is definitely the need for, first, hardening, passive protection. Second, point defense. I've said that after the losses and that round board, we're talking about point defense. We should have never lost people to a shadow bone 36 pounds. Just mighty on it. Putting things underground and digging, which is very important. Actually, it doesn't take much time. Very cheap measures. Decoys, properly done decoys, which are still highly effective. This war has shown that they are very effective. whether you're decoying high-value assets like long-range precision strike and air defense. You're decoying air defense positions. You're decoying command posts, whatever. They're still very useful.

And, yeah, like, Jordan, unfortunately, I think we will get there in a future fight when we lose enough high-value assets from people to have a strike capability, and we see that just air defense, missile defense is not enough. And if you had made much cheaper investments in decoys and other traditional forms of military deceptions, you could have saved your forest a lot of harm. We don't know how we operate. There's a real challenge on how you're in the ability to conduct maneuver, and most importantly, how you're in the ability to concentrate and do logistics. Because as I've seen the Russia Ukraine work, you can't concentrate, and you can't do a lot of these things pretty far from the plot, actually. Yes, things get really tough in the last 15 kilometers, but if you just try to operate with concentration of logistics or other supporting assets and elements, 30 cam, 40 cam, 50 cam, 70 cam, you'll easily catch an SRVM. or some other form of precision strike. And one-way attack, loitering munitions are pretty long-range in of their own, even basic ones like Lancet. Lancet 3 had like 80KM+.

So you've got to be very thoughtful about this. And unfortunately, you know, I would say best militaries learn from the mistakes of others. The second best approach is to learn from your own mistakes, right? And large institutional militaries sadly have a tendency to want to learn from their own mistakes. It's harder for them to change. that's just the reality. I think we're definitely doing a lot better than the Russians, but I think we need to be doing a lot better than what I see now in the conversation. And the next thing on the war, so briefly I want to make this comment on analysis. We do have to be careful that every war has its own context, right? So some things in the war are observations. They are not lessons learned. They're not really generalizable. Second, period of war really matters because the initial period of a conventional war is an intense dynamic fight. It's a reconciliation of forces, plans, there's a lot of things that are contingent, right, the degree of luck and chance involved too. You know, you have to then set these kind of offensive counteroffensives, then the war may, if it continues, become this prolonged conventional war defined by positional fighting and a lot of attrition.

And a lot of the mistakes people make is they'll draw lessons from the last couple of years of this positional war for what they think the opening of the next war will be. But remember, the context is usually different at the opening of a war than it is from a conventional war that you spent three, four years fighting. Forces change a lot over that time period. You have prepared defenses. It's actually, you have traditional problems of, you know, structuring an offensive to breach defensive lines. All this stuff shows up that may not be an issue in the early period of the war. I just say that as, you know, caveats. That's the way I think about this, and I often debate this myself, because the Russian Ukraine war, as we see now, is not how this war started. Actually, if I showed you the first year and a half of this war, it looks quite different than the last two years. I guess what's kind of really struck out to me about the past few months is like even we're so deep into this, like we've gotten pretty close to total war on both sides. We have pretty full mobilization,

and there's still so much kind of like technological and doctrinal exploration that can be done such that you can have something like an Operation Vivaldi, where, as you were talking about with your guest earlier this week, like you can have like positive casualty ratios while doing something on the offensive if you're just clever enough and trained enough, even having the same amount of drones and guys as the other side. And so, you know, when we're talking about like FPVs are the answer, it's like, yeah, like it's nice to have the toys, but, like, you got to have everything around it. And there's, like, so many, like, everything around it is as if not more important than having, well, having the toys is, like, table stakes. But, like, once both sides have the toys, then it's just all this other stuff that, if you're good at it and you can trick your opponent into screwing up, like, you can be remarkably effective.

Yeah. Look, Vivaldi, in terms of square kilometers, took back more territory in a couple of months than the summer 2023 offensive. So even in this period where people have kind of, I think a lot of folks who don't follow the war, think that there is a positional stalemate on the ground. And actually, it's a much more dynamic battlefield now than it was in some ways in 25 and 24. The space has reopened again. You see a lack of cohesive defensive lines on both sides. and you see both sides experimenting with how to take a technology, which logically first gets applied to defense. Why? Defense is easier on land than offense. I always say when folks ask, like, is this technology or drones offense or defense dominant? It's one of the least smart conversations you have to get involved in. It's easiest to apply technology to the defense first, and it's easier to do defense on land than offense, right? And then usually that technology then gets adapted over time by the same force to enable offensive operation. And so most technologies are offense-defense agnostic, okay? And that's just the way it is.

And Vivaldi and other operations, drone assault units like Code 92, for example, keep experimenting with ways to combine mechanized maneuver and drones. And if you look at their force structure, they have, like, equal amounts of basically drones, supporting drone units alongside mechanized assault formations to try to bring that back to the battlefield. So neither side accepts the dynamics. So that's why I'm saying we should be following this closely because you're seeing still both sides experiment and try to evolve out of the positional dynamic they first self-establish. I want to come back to something you said earlier, too, because I think it ties into this. You were talking about the length of time or the distance that you need to make an offensive maneuver for it to be something that's sustainable, and it's not just hiding from getting hunted by the other side's drones. So you're looking at 10 to 15 kilometers of penetration you're needing to get in any single operation to be able to, like, clear the back area and actually push an enemy back.

I think that's important to conceptualize, too, because that reminds me of a lot of, you know, how circular time is. That's a lot like some of the issues you ran into in World War I. And you've seen the Ukraine war actually go through a lot of the same permeations that World War I went through, where we went through, okay, initial maneuver, that failed. trench lines got dug. Now they're becoming spaced out. Now you're seeing that like there were offensives that would stall out because they wouldn't go far enough or they would lose command and control and everything would kind of peter out. And now you're finally starting to see a little bit of a return to maneuver because you're starting to layer these different operational capabilities in. But like you said, that was, you know, four years of combat that got them to the ability to be able to do that. You know, that's not counting what's happened in Crimea and kind of a whole of society operation and, you know, whole of society effort to be able to do that. Where is the European U.S. capability to replicate that without that same level of effort, or does it exist?

I mean, look, I think the U.S. point of view is like, this is not how we would fight or how we preferred to fight, right? I've heard this a lot. This is like a mantra of U.S. forces. This is not how we would fight. I always hear something like, oh, really? Tell me, how would we fight? And also, it is true we wouldn't fight this way. We are very different as a force in terms of how we operate. That's true. But it doesn't mean that the way we do plan to fight doesn't have problems. People often say that as though there's no problem with the way we plan to fight. And if not problems, at the very least there are interesting questions to be asked about how is it that we plan to fight. Now, we know a couple of things for certain. We do have a good sense of how our opponent plans to fight Russia. With one big caveat is that I like the way they are forced to fight now in Ukraine. They want to be able to return the force to large scale offensive maneuver. They basically optimize themselves for small scale combat operations, primarily using fire teams or infiltration to individual infantry.

But that's not the way they would like to fight. But we already have a decent sense of how that force would fight employing drones, traditional strike abilities, artillery fires, and long-range precision strike systems, including some of the newer ones that they've developed. So that part we can account for. On our end, it's a problem because the question of how much do we actually adapt, how much of this do we integrate, at least we've gone far enough that most folks say we need to find a way to protect our formation to be able to do this great maneuver stuff, okay? that's at least a positive side that people recognize a challenge and a threat to some extent I still think we have a ways to go I am a bit worried because I don't know how well I've seen Russia and Kramer work interacts with the way we plan to fight right like as I gave you as an example on the challenge of a key part of our doctrinal approach involves attaining air superiority will that air superiority deliver the effects

that delivered in previous conflicts to our ground forces, you know, where we're going to have problems. And when it comes to employ mass precision on the battlefield, so there I do think we have a phenomenon that we really have to account for. I think we do. I think that the force could face unacceptable levels of attrition if it doesn't properly account for us. And I use mass precision for a reason because I'm much more interested in force employment than the attributes of specific capabilities. Like other folks prefer the term precise mass or affordable mass. I think we're talking about different pieces of the same puzzle, right? Like I'm less interested in attributes. I think outcomes are derived from forced employment. And different militaries can come up with very different ways to use technology. You know, like classical examples are the tank and aircraft carrier. And often the military that first deploys the technology in the battlefield is not necessarily one that comes up with the rest of the most interesting adaptations, to force structure, operational concepts, to use it in a different way. Usually when the military first deploys somebody in a battlefield,

they just duct tape it to the way they fight. They're like, we're going to do this a new thing, and we're going to add it as a plus up to how we fight now. And then somebody else might come along later and say, you know, that's interesting, but it's actually much more interesting if you build more of the force around that technology instead of having that technology just be an add-on. And I think for us right now, from what I see, the way we see drones and all this, we are taking the traditional conservative approach of that is just an add-in, so we should find a way to somehow add that to the way we fight. Sorry if this is an incomplete answer, but I think, yeah, I think for us, the lessons learned is a work in progress and an act of debate. And last point, you know why it's an act of debate for us. It's not only because of vested interests. It's not only because the military doesn't like changing, and the initial lessons from any war for military folks is, I think whatever I see here validates the investments I already wanted to make. Right That the typical first reaction Pretty sure whatever I wanted to buy is the right thing It also part of the issue is that in this war both Russia and Ukraine have been entangled in a three to four months adaptation cycle

But neither of them have been able to break out of it to establish a decisive advantage. And U.S. military, like most militaries, are impressionistic. And if you don't see either side win decisively, then you're not sure if what you saw is compelling enough. Okay? Usually for U.S. military, you need to see something decisively playing on the battlefield. Either this side uses this to win, or they're the weaker force, and they're able to effectively defend. You know, it's like Israel in 1973, Arab-Israeli war. And if you don't get that impression, if a bunch of generals don't see that, then they're naturally skeptical. They're not sure. can we so to that point can we talk about wet gap crossings for a second because i think the one of the sorry this is like one of my like you know pet issues i don't know where that came from but let's do it well no because of like one of the biggest lessons the u.s army took away from the 2023 offensive is is that like the way in which we do wet gap crossings is probably not going to work because of the availability of sensors and and you know uh firepower and so like that is one

of the things that they took away, even though it's not how they employed it, it's that maybe we shouldn't employ it that way. What are kind of the lessons learned or ways that the Ukrainians and Russians have adapted since those early days? First, I'll tell you what you already know. They're really hard. And early on when I saw Russians in particular struggle with them, there was some really unhelpful commentary from Western military folks basically posting pictures of them in exercise with, like, a perfectly laid out pontoon bridge of saying they know how to do what they have. prowessings. It's like ridiculous. Try doing that under fire or under an opponent that has like low-end range precision strike abilities, pervasive ISR. It's a different story. My grandfather did two wet-gat prowessings in World War II and he told me about them. And either of them sounded like the kind of thing you could easily do against a capable opponent or would elect to do if you had the alternative to do something else, right? It did not sound like fun. So So and the truth is, I think in our militaries has been many years since anybody's actually done a contest one, possibly generations.

So, yeah, I mean, like the only one that's even close would be the Kurdish southern move in towards Manbij, which was supported by, you know, U.S. Special Operations Forces, but wasn't a U.S. led operation. And even that was kind of a shit show. Yeah. So here's what I've seen. And one, still, you know, pontoons seem to be the way to go, but you have to figure out a way of how you're going to defend the incident or keep replacing them. Like, you're going to have to keep replacing them. You have to have a lot. Yeah, you're going to have to keep replacing them. Second, ferries and ferry networks do work. Actually, if you remember early on, the Russian military was able to retrograde from Kursun using one bridge over Kakka with them and a ferry network, and they withdrew quite a few forces. It actually wasn't as easy to interdict it as folks thought it might be. Next, if you look at an example of Ukraine's operation in Krenke, we can debate how successful or useful it was, but nonetheless, they were able to sustain a force in a very narrow lodgement on the other side of the river,

primarily with drones, heavy multirotor drones and logistics supporting that force. And since you could use that to do CASVAC, to do logistics for a force, you can now think a bit differently on how you get your guys to the other side and how you support them. And to what extent you could use fires and essentially mass precision to basically isolate the theater of operations in order to enable a wet gap crossing. From my point of view, those are the base requirements. That's what you would have to do and plan to do first in order to, like, get the force across and somehow stable the entrench to another side. I'm not a wide gap crossing expert. I've only seen what I've seen in the Russia-Ukraine war. All I know is what I've read online. On Twitter, it seems really easy to the people who observe failed wide gap crossings. They're pretty sure, having never done one themselves, that they could do it under fire. It's just a river. I do want to say one thing. I have a buddy that was a logistics officer in the Army until relatively recently. He worked with the engineers for a little while, and I one time was talking about, like, the bridging units,

And he was like, oh, yeah, those things, they basically never work. They're always out of commission. And I was like, yeah, I know. So the maintenance on them is pretty rough because of, like, the hydraulics. And it's just a lot of equipment that you have to maintain for something that is never used. So they're neglected. And it's neglected, you know, across NATO. So 2023 did cause a little bit of a panic. Okay. For more, you know, subscribe to our nonexisting Patreon for 30 more minutes of Tony and Wicap crossings. Mike, I want to take it up a level from your comment before Tony got us soaked. That's a good topic. He just came out of nowhere, George. He's like, let's do Wiggy Up. I'm like, I'm in. What do we want to tell Congress from a procurement perspective? Yeah, I mean, Congress, unfortunately, shapes procurement a lot. It's not just our military. It's really Congress that actually shapes a lot of procurement decisions and often tries to insert things into that conversation. Yeah, on drones, I will go back to what I said earlier.

It's not just about procurement of drones. It is Congress has to get involved with the military to make sure the military is going to be making the right choices on force design and organizational capacity. Otherwise, we're not going to get very far with drones. And sometimes it just takes Congress to be involved to tell the force. second they need to get really involved on airbase hardening point defense and having our stand in force in theater particularly the air component of the force be more resilient um if any because i just don't think we should be losing any people to like one-way tag drones of the shia type um i find i find that very problematic uh third i think i think there should be some pretty hard questions being asked if the way we plan to fight is still suitable given the way our adversaries plan to fight. And if we're doing enough investigating. This is obviously a defense research person saying we need to do more defense research. But generally we do. These are open-ended questions. Like, I'm not sure.

Maybe it's still good, maybe it's not. I'm not sure. And Johnny Willis, that's it. Tony, go on, briefly. I have a story for you. I did I have a story for you, Tony. I did a wet gaff crossing in 2024 in the car with the rest of the team. There was, I took him across the Uskil River at night to a battalion position on the other side, like in that big lodgement the Ukrainians have, southeast of Kupiansk, if you know where Kupiansk is, about Kupiansk. And it was a communication brigade commander about kind of like what battalion was. And then, you know, can our vehicle make it? And I think there was something lost in translation. I didn't fully understand that we'd have to ford the river in the vehicle, but that's what we ended up doing. And most importantly, once we got into the river, it became clear that that's what we were doing that night. And we got through it. It was just deep enough with a running river that we could ford it in our car at night.

And that fording point actually regularly did get hit by glide bombs, you can tell. And it was an interesting experience. I still remember just dead quiet in the back of the car, right, as we're slowly kind of forwarding our way through there. Because you can't see what's under. It's been hit so many times. Those deep spots on the car could easily dip or get stuck. And I remember telling the team, saying, listen, whatever thoughts you all have right now, keep them to yourself because just so you know we're going to have to cross the server again on the way back. So if you don't – listen, I'm sorry. And it was fine. And, I mean, we did get stuck for, like, a minute on the way back inside that river, and it was really, really quiet. But it worked out fine. I did later on, as a joke, get them this T-shirt. It's got, like, a picture of the wagon from Oregon Trail that said, get in. We're going to cross the river. I just have a dark sense of humor. We need – we're going to get some Wartok wet gap crossing.

Sorry, I just remembered this. When the car gets stuck and it's like there's water coming in and then all of a sudden the water gets a little warm because somebody in the back is like, oh, no. I have lots of these, but I just remembered this particular one because you got me thinking. Sorry for the detour. I mean, it just really happened. No, so I do want to go back there, Tony. I think you brought up – or Jordan, I think you brought up a really good point about, like, the way that we approach things. So the Army or the military, they have a term called DOTMIL PF, which is a long-ass acronym that every letter stands for something. But the first three are doctoring, organization, and training. And I believe that, like, people generally list things in order of importance. Like when you're making a list, you don't put the least important thing at the top of it. You put the absolute most important thing. And if you look at that, like the DOTMIL PFP now, they added another P, which is policy. I would argue that we're getting a lot of things backwards because we're starting at policy, like DOW, the Department of War, sends out a lot of policy memos.

But they're not doing a lot of the doctrine, organization, training stuff that I think needs to happen. I think that would actually get more to your point that you're making is like where we're applying the focus and where we actually see the changes being made. And I think, you know, Mike's made a great point that, like, realistically, they don't know what to change is what we're seeing. Doctrine is good to talk about. But to me, organization force church is very important because force church is much more revelatory of a military's preferences. And it is going to be your de facto strategy in the war. It's going to have a much bigger effect than how you fight. Why? Because if you're with me and, you know, Stephen Biddle, let's say that force employment is the key, like, determinant of causal outcomes in the battlefield, all other things being equal. how you use the force. What will limit force employment the most was going to affect it is force design choices prior to the war and the force structure because that then, that kind of constraint, that constrains or opens up your ability to employ the force. I'll give you an example. Russian military, as you know,

ends up invading Ukraine. Prior to that, they made choices, trade-offs and force design, and they cut the infantry component of the force because they think this is not going to be as important. And they also think that they're not going to be doing strategic ground defense. So certain things that that force might need, they don't invest it, right? You have U.S. Marine Corps says, like, we don't need tanks. We're cutting armor. You have these choices forces make. Unless you made them, if it turns out you're wrong, it'll be very difficult to recover because you won't be able to come back later, three weeks into war, and be like, actually, you know what? We actually needed that whole combat arm, and it turns out that we're really constrained on force and blame. You can't just bring them back. British Army I think is like 14 Swedish archers is the total artillery component currently. Two for training and 12 for the entire rest of the force. I don't think I'm exaggerating this. I'm not saying they've cut the artillery component to the force, but let's say it's small enough that it would be hardly visible to an opponent. So the reason I raise this is that that's an important part of the conversation, force design

and organization. And to me, we spend too much time talking about technology and material, and then depending on what part of the service you're in, particularly Army spends a lot of time talking about doctrine, right? The Navy is very operational. The Air Force is heavily into investment technology. Army spends a lot of time talking about doctrine, trying to figure out, like, is it really maneuver or is it not? You're reminding me of the difference between a regular warfare and unconventional warfare arguments that I would see in Special Forces all the time. And it inevitably be like two warrant officers and a current and a colonel arguing over a doctrinal definition. And it's like, guys, none of this matters. Like, can we just go do our job, please? I think policy, by the way, is really important. And what a lot of folks don't appreciate is that military strategy really flows from the political. and ultimately political leadership will set the parameters and the conditions for the conduct of military operations.

And the concept of operations is going to flow from that. It will never be ideal, it will never be rational. And maybe I'll leave you in this thought. So somebody who's been in ALS pretty much all professional life but has had both opportunity and sometimes the burden of having to interact with senior political leadership and decision makers, they think very differently from military folks and traditional defense planners. We tend to have a rationalized view in that local war, and a political class of folks doesn't come from this community. They make the decisions on war. They make the decision to go to war. They have big assumptions when they do that. On the operating environment, on how the other side will react, right? Like, you could definitely have an interaction where, let's say, Suncom says, one of Iran's key coas will be the closest trade of Hermes, and the political leadership says, yeah, don't worry about it. In and out, 20-minute venture. We don't really need to plan for that so much because, guess what? I don't think this is going to happen. I think we're going to settle this war in two weeks.

And the one thing that you are sure they're going to do, I'm going to argue we don't need to plan for so much. I'm not saying that that's what happened in the Iran war, even though it looks like that might have been what happened in the planning for the Iran war. But what I'm telling you is that political leadership will have their own style of assumptions, independent of what you tell them. And so I often think that as a class of folks who think about war, we often don't spend enough time understanding the class of folks who make the decisions on war, the decision to go to war and who will set the policy for how the war is prosecuted. And often our class of people mirror image ourselves into that decision-making community. But if you spend enough time around them, you'll see that they're very different. Just the way they think about this. And that the military balance, traditional kind of rational defense plan or inputs are only one of the things they're thinking about. And often it's not the biggest one. And it's not necessarily the thing that impresses them the most. So on that, maybe we're starting trying to talk book club.

Our first book is Team Yankee, which I think is the opposite of that. Mike, for our next book, is there something that you think kind of embodies that lesson of, like, political class mindset banging up against kind of military planning and winning the arguments? Before and after the fall. Okay. Great. This is a collaboration between historians, analysts, and political scientists. it is i think one of the last books that nino montero was involved with before he passed and i think that this explores this book is basically part of a third wave of literature looking at the transition at the end of the cold war and the collapse of soviet union and it's by a host of different authors but essentially what would posits is that there was far more continuity change. The first wave of literature on what happens in the world, international

politics, in military strategy, in aspects of nuclear strategy, in economics. First of all, there was tremendous change in 1989 to 91. And this kind of third wave goes back to look at it. It has some really good folks. Robert Jervis is in this, Sergey Roshinko. I highly recommend a lot of people in here. You know, I can bury Daniel Duny. There's some really great historians as well. Fritz Bartel. I will concede. I have a chapter in this. I don't think it's going to be the most exciting one you'll read. It's called Continuating Change in the Russian Grand Strategy. But if you are like a Russia hat or interested in that, it might be interesting for you. But this isn't specifically about Russia. so I do recommend this because I found this very useful and it had a diversity of people in it it may not be the kind of book that you read because it's like oh great

it's just an edit volume those are only written for master students but I recommend it I find it very useful what a treat thank you so much for all the work you've done yeah I guess no one gets rich doing military analysis but they get rich in you know friendship I don't know. Intellectual glory, students, podcasters trying to embarrass you on their own show. You know. No attempt at embarrassment here. There's perks, right? Listen, Jordan, the perks are the further you go in the field, the more people on Twitter will yell at you and try to explain to you the thing you've already been working on for the last 20 years. That's the perk. No, I'm kidding. Well, I mean, it's the same with NBA, right? It's like, yeah, you got LeBron got a lot of haters. but like he's doing okay. Good. All right. We can call it here. Yeah. Definitely. Thank you so much for the part of War Talk. Thank you. Yeah.

It's great to be with you. Choose your occupation. Banker Carpenter Military Analyst. Military Analyst! Military Analysts start with zero dollars and two dogs. You are now at the Osceola River. River depth. Just enough. Weather. Glide bombs. You asked if your car could make it, he said sure if it's a Ford Something got lost in translation and the river came aboard Now the riverbed's all craters from a glide bomb before And the check engine lights, the brightest thing on either shore The back seat is very quiet. What is your choice? For the river, glide bomb Talk the wagon, glide bomb Take the ferry, also glide bomb Or wait to see if things improve Some guy's got you on thermal, and he's watching every move. You pass a gravestone, it reads, here lies, we own the night. Killed by a $3,500 Mavic, the 160th would like a word.

At the general store, you pack the wagon for the trail. There we'll bear axle and a bridge that's bound to sail. Cause they'll find it and they'll hit it, so you'll need another soon. Pack a pontoon for the pontoon, for the pontoon, for the pontoon. Back home, our bridging trucks are standing ready for the call. While they're standing mostly leaking, haven't moved since the Berlin Wall. Your bridge company has died of hydraulic failure. Tony has wet gap crossings. For the river, my bar. Call the wagon. It's an April. Make the ferry. Blast it. Or wait to see if things improve. The bridge truck's in the motor pool, and it still won't move. Don't you laugh at fairies? Ha, ha, ha. When the Russians had to scram. They got an army off the right. Fake on some fairies and a dam. Cranky drones replaced the oxen and supplies came by side. No dysentery, no cholera. They just need a charge to fly.

Your hexacopter has a broken arm. It's just a river. They're the posters on the timeline. It's just a river. They'd be over it by nine. They have never crossed a puddle, but they've got takes about the bridge And they picked them from a recliner Twelve feet from the fridge Dead quiet in the backseat Water coming in Whatever you're thinking right now, keep it to yourself We're crossing this river again on the way back Why is the water warm? Get more information The enemy already has more information than you Forge the river fly ball Call the wagon. Abrams. Take the ferry. Actually, fine. Here's the part that gave left out. The part that gets you through. Isolate the crossing first. Or the crossing isolates you. You have reached the far bank. Your dog's got there first. You need to come in.

Now cross back. Get in. We're crossing the river. Thank you.