00:04:47.080But so we have been, if you haven't picked it up,
00:04:53.980I have been geeking out over Warno, kind of a war game-esque, uh, a real-time strategy game that I recently had to delete us, consuming vastly too much of my time, but, um, playing, playing that, um, playing the simulation of what if the Cold War went hot in, in, uh, central Germany, uh, has, like, really solidified a lot of my, I, ideas and a lot of things
00:05:23.860that i've been hearing over like the past two three years about about ukraine and the fp return
00:05:32.140rubbish now you might be thinking what how how does how does a hypothetical war in the 1980s
00:05:40.700this historical artifact game that had like the synth waves soundtrack you know these stacks of
00:05:47.960are aping like a vhs vhs like training video it's it's quite the aesthetic but also it's
00:05:56.340completely gated how how does that solidify a lot of your ideas about fpb jones it's completely
00:06:05.320alien revolution in modern warfare that you think you think has completely changed everything
00:06:13.540And the answer is, dear Elizabeth, that the FPV drone revolution, the drone revolution, the self-guided weapon revolution, does not start with the Ukraine war.
00:06:26.620It does not even start with the quadcopter Chinese-made remote-controlled drones that started cropping up on the battlefield in 2015 in the hands of ISIS.
00:06:40.120It doesn't even start with the Reaper drones of the 2000s that the U.S. was using its terrorists.
00:06:48.020The drone revolution, and this is a mind-blowing one, but I don't know if you know him,
00:06:55.700but Bean at Naval Gazing made this observation in one of his pieces and blew my mind when he said it.
00:07:01.760The drone revolution starts in the 60s and 70s with the guided missile weapon system that, in fact, we've been living in the drone revolution all our lives.
00:07:15.620And this has insane, weird repercussions and is really central to understanding the modern battlefield today.
00:07:24.880so um what i like to i have as a motto what i'd like to do to like kind of get our blisterous
00:07:33.140head wrap around this is kind of take um three samples of um what would be considered modern
00:07:40.140or third generation what are the third generation yeah third generation work warfare so these are
00:07:47.480three examples of conventional army v army war you have the 1950s uh the hypothetical cold war
00:07:58.540going hot between the u.s and russia you have our war no example of the 1980s hypothetical
00:08:05.280cold war going hot between the u.s and russia again and then you have ukraine and the fpv
00:08:12.080drone revolution and as soon as you see the tactical differences between these you're really
00:08:19.120being to understand that what's happened with with uh drones in ukraine has not been some like
00:08:25.340crazy out of left field revolution it's really been a continuation of um trends that have been
00:08:31.140ongoing since really world war ii the nazis had the first missiles even earlier the earliest
00:08:40.660first air-launched cruise missile, if you can believe this, is a World War I technology.
00:08:47.660The Boffins of 1917 saw into the future. They envisioned a future of standoff,
00:08:53.700fully autonomous strike, and they could not produce something that was genuinely effective
00:08:59.180with the technology of their time, but they had the concept right, and they tried.
00:09:03.080If you Google Kettering Bug, you will see what they called an experimental unmanned aerial torpedo, which was the predecessor of the modern cruise missile.
00:09:15.280We've been working on this for over a hundred years.
00:09:22.860He is the best technical advisor I could hope for.
00:09:27.480And if you are a, if you are a commander out there leading men into war, you are the poor for not having it.
00:09:38.420I'm genuinely way more passionate about this stuff than the movie Heat, which is quite funny.
00:09:45.860But I definitely, I agreed to be on Kulak's podcast because I agree with the fundamental theme that what we are seeing today is not a sharp disruption in the trajectory of warfare, but rather continuity and arguably the timeline catching up to where we should have been in the 90s.
00:10:04.860it the fall of the soviet union meant that the sophisticated militaries of the west and the east
00:10:13.200essentially took a 30-year break from having to take high-end war seriously and we are finally
00:10:18.600back on track yeah so i'm very fascinated to hear hear this argument but before we get into it i
00:10:28.520I take the listener on a little journey through modern warfare. So if we go back to the 1950s
00:10:35.160and the 1940s, the main challenge of dominating the modern battlefield is infantry versus tanks.
00:10:46.620There's obviously a lot of complexity in there, but this is the real challenge.
00:10:51.120how do tanks defeat infantry how do infantry defeat tanks and in the 1940s uh it's really
00:10:59.900hard for the infantry so um tanks have have a main gun that even in the 40s with like early
00:11:07.660setting systems have these massive ranges that like outstretch basically any weapon the infantry
00:11:15.260have uh main tank and now quickly quickly before we dive into this are are you talking about
00:11:23.160weapons organic to the infantry on the squad level or are we talking about infantry at the
00:11:28.200formation level in terms of the infantry division and what sort of equipment the division might have
00:11:32.840access to uh so we will get into we can address special weapons but um platoon versus platoon
00:11:41.200let's let's say this is like uh you know okay so no dedicated anti-tank guns yeah so infantry
00:11:51.120organic to just a random infantry three squad there really aren't um even if you have say a
00:12:01.560panzer faust or a bazooka that is massively arranged by a tank gun this is correct but
00:12:08.680let me ask you a question, Kolek. Have you ever been
00:16:44.000uh which is very important um the primary weapon of the tank is its engine the operational level
00:16:50.180maneuverability of a tank formation in the sense that a tank once it has gotten past your front
00:16:56.960line can move at 30 to 40 even 50 kilometers per hour in terms of the the fastest vehicles
00:17:04.060into the rear areas of your infantry formation and kill everything that makes the infant uh
00:17:10.280makes the infantry effective at the front right if you are defending your trench and you are
00:17:15.680defending it successfully but the battalion next to you your sister battalion uh in the regiment
00:17:23.060has been overrun there are tanks pouring through the gap and now the tanks are into your baggage
00:17:28.580train they're into your divisional level artillery they've overran your hq they've run over your field
00:17:33.980kitchen and your signals units and your engineering units then you are worthless even though you have
00:17:39.880held your trench because your formation is crippled and that is the true weapon of a tank
00:17:44.660it's mobility more than anything else all right so hold on to that thought because we do have to
00:17:52.660get back to it and for our discussion of tanks versus um infantry fighting vehicles and whether
00:18:01.280an IVF is going to be able to like perform that same sort of task or whether the main battle tank
00:18:09.460is still the king of the attack but um so for talking about this arm arms race that
00:18:18.820the equilibrium of long-range tank gun versus versus close and anti-tank weapons um that
00:18:29.040maintains there are of course of course some dedicated anti-tank rifles and um actually
00:18:36.400there were anti-tank um vehicles that um they would mount an anti-tank um to um to like a jeep
00:18:46.080an unarmored jeep or other vehicle that they could use that as a sort of point of defense
00:18:52.680against tanks and um actually they mounted these two vespas at one point um i've never seen it i'm
00:19:00.140sure right like the the recoilless rifle that they put on the the airborne vespa
00:19:05.540So that that was a fun side note. But AT guns behind Jeeps became largely obsolete by 1942. Right. In the early war, you had things like the German 37 millimeter or the American M3 AT gun that you could drag behind a Willie's Jeep.
00:19:22.500But these things just would not be able to penetrate the frontal armor of anything from the mid to late war.
00:19:30.200By the end of World War II, you need something like the American 90 mil or the British 17 pounder or the German Pac-43.
00:19:37.020These are very ponderous AT guns that have to be dragged behind a large, tracked, dedicated prime mover in order to be repositioned around the battlefield.
00:19:48.940You just can't push it around with two guys.
00:19:50.780And so this was arguably the high point of the dominance of the tank, because these AT guns were so immobile. And all the wealthy great powers wanted to replace them with dedicated tank destroyers, right?
00:20:03.960The Soviets had the legendary Su-85 and Su-100, which are casemate tank destroyers based on the T-34 chassis with much more powerful guns than the T-34s themselves had, right?
00:20:17.180The Germans had enormous Jagdpanzers and even the Jagdtiger at one point, right?
00:20:23.620The Americans are special because the U.S. is the only country rich enough to actually put a turret on their tank destroyer.
00:20:31.000And so things like the M-18 and the M-36 tank destroyer are often confused for tanks, even though they're very different on a doctrinal level.
00:20:39.420Yeah. And for those of you who watch like World War II movies, these these pulled large tank, anti-tank tank guns, the Germans often had them pulled by horses.
00:20:57.360So if you watch the 1993 film Stalingrad, there's a wonderful sequence where they may actually defeat a tank assault, but then their horses are dead.
00:21:09.120So this victorious German, actually it was a penal battalion, this victorious German penal battalion has to drag this massive tank and back like 20 men haul, yet you are the horses through a blizzard.
00:21:27.360which is actually one of the most gorgeous sequences in any film I've ever seen.
00:21:32.260But the, so continuing the story, so that's the equilibrium in,
00:21:40.820towards the end of the 1940s, start of the 1950s,
00:21:43.620that tanks really do not have a counter at range.
00:21:50.540You know, if you get sighting on it and you have a radio, you can call an artillery,
00:21:54.500but the tank can move and this is part of the advantage in hope tanks is that unless you get
00:22:00.300a direct artillery hit um it has armor it can survive the shrapnel that was cast and it can
00:22:07.380move this a little right so this was the common thinking in the u.s up until like the 60s and
00:22:14.14070s that it requires a direct hit from he to knock out a tank but then we decided to actually test it
00:22:20.980So we put up a formation of tanks, I think they were M48s, and then we fired a barrage of typical Soviet calibers at it, did a test to see how many tanks would be knocked out by direct hits, how many would be immobilized by indirect hits.
00:22:40.160And it turns out that the formation was utterly crippled by near misses to the sides and rear that sent shrapnel into the vulnerable side and rear armor of tanks.
00:22:53.660And so you really don't actually need direct hits from HE to cripple tanks.
00:22:58.460You just need fairly close approximate hits, which I promise you will be important later on when we discuss modern standoff weapons.
00:23:07.300all right so is that like i imagine that's like ripping the treads off that isn't actually like
00:23:13.440puncturing in and like killing the occupants or maybe that is sometimes it would genuinely
00:23:18.340puncture uh the hull and kill the kill crew members right because the rear armor of a tank
00:23:24.600is incredibly thin um of like even something like an abrams which is something like perhaps
00:23:31.480over a thousand millimeters of rolled homogenous steel equivalent from armor from from the front
00:23:38.140has something like 30 millimeters of protection from the back um a 152 millimeter shell detonating
00:23:46.680you know a meter or two behind a tank will absolutely send fragmentation into the engine
00:23:52.340deck not sorry through the engine deck and cripple the mobility of the tank that way and
00:23:59.140potentially even breach the fighting compartment and kill crew all right that is
00:24:04.260that is incredible to know terrifying if you are a a tanker listening to this but oh no all
00:24:12.740right like they get drilled they get this drilled into them on day one that they need to take
00:24:17.800artillery seriously all right so so that is the equilibrium as it stands in 1950 but by the the
00:24:27.78080s and especially the late 80s we've had a revolution in in how how the battlefield works
00:24:36.400because we've had missiles added to the mix um and now if you're a gamer you'll have like
00:24:42.800you'll have seen toe missiles and and other weapon systems appear um if you're really into
00:24:50.420like if you play like like ordinary like like baby games you'll have seen toe muscles on them
00:24:57.900but if you played like any milsim game or anything like even approximating
00:25:02.380war warfare you'll probably have heard of like milans and other other um etgm weapons that
00:25:09.760have an extraordinary range to them and have an incredible anti-tank payload and they're guided
00:25:15.940so this revolution actually takes off right after world war ii right the first generation
00:25:23.340of atgms is theorized during the war like uh the wearaboo type will say that the germans
00:25:29.080were pioneering it with um a derivative of the verstahl x4 but you know that that never went
00:25:35.200anywhere the true first systems to get off the ground are the french nord and the british
00:25:40.480Melkara, which show up as early as 1951. So while a lot of World War II tanks and servicemen are
00:25:47.760still in the army, these things are already appearing. But the world doesn't really understand
00:25:53.440the potential, or at least popular culture doesn't really understand the potential of the ATGM until
00:25:59.680Malyutka missiles produced by the Soviet Union utterly decimate Israeli armor in the 60s. That's
00:26:06.420that's when they really get to start to shine all right this is this is the part of the story
00:26:13.560where i haven't gotten to that part of my deep dive into israeli history i'm sorry
00:26:19.440you're you're completely spoiling murder made for me right now you're you're
00:26:26.260i see kulak doesn't give me an outline for like when i should spoil crap so i always drop it too
00:26:32.560early no no no you'd have to wait months and months to draw draw this this is something that
00:26:39.020i'm learning new today but uh the yeah so what atgms do and these by the 80s these are
00:26:48.080have ranges of like several thousand mirrors like uh i i don't know the like
00:26:55.520broad general ranges like 2 000 meters as a common one 3 000 000 meters um i was researching it and
00:27:05.440these are constantly getting updated like some of them are up now cara which is one of the first
00:27:10.980generation missiles i was just talking about already had a range of 4 000 meters
00:27:15.120exactly in the 1950s so these these atgms radically changed the equilibrium between
00:27:25.100infantry and and tanks because that dynamic where infantry has to be hiding in a low vis
00:27:34.240area where the where the infantry has to get in a standoff at range with a tank where the
00:27:42.380infantry has to be in a a depression or in like a second second or third row buildings or in a
00:27:49.440forest where where the rain shrinks down to like a few hundred meters that's no longer the case if
00:27:56.540you have like infantry in numbers or or want to like try and hold a position if you have enough
00:28:03.140atgm missiles you can stand you can be like on a continuous tree line or you can be on a on the
00:28:11.360edge of a city not not three rows in waiting for the enemy to puncture your for fortress and like
00:28:18.420fight you fight you close in you can be on the edge of it and and be firing out at at effective
00:28:25.800range as the enemy becomes visible which of course immediately immediately makes tree lines and
00:28:35.080Forest and cities are vastly more defensible because now in order to just get over the hurdle of getting into a town or village or a small city,
00:28:48.520you have to run this gauntlet of fire before an infantry fighting vehicle or trip transport or tank can get into it.
00:28:58.560And if the tank gets it at standoff range with the infantry, it's taking fire back.
00:29:03.660It's no longer just there being able to pop away as its assisting infantry is sitting there with binoculars and calling shots.
00:30:43.200So you need to know the enemy's moveset.
00:30:44.980Definitely. They're trying to approximate something which the technical term is MCLOS, or Manual Command to Line of Sight, which is the terminology for first-generation ATGM guidance.
00:30:56.520But just going back to a bit before, I think the real revolution in infantry performance versus armor is not just ATGMs, although ATGMs do vastly increase their defensive punch.
00:31:08.620The real revolution is mass mechanization, where infantry go from having to march everywhere and carry their supplies on horse-drawn wagons, like the early war French army, the German army throughout World War II, and most Soviet units had to do – they were just marching everywhere, right?
00:38:47.440a link to a picture of the building right now i do not remember off the top of my head how sick
00:38:53.920the building was okay so i'm looking at a like it looks like a cathedral or like an oppressively
00:39:00.760built church that's like been ripped apart but it's still standing and it's literally the only
00:39:06.800thing that is still standing exactly because a japanese city is all is largely made out of wood
00:39:12.040in paper which is very aesthetic but completely non-survivable if a fission bomb is air bursting
00:39:18.000right over you the japanese are too too beautiful to endure world war ii but back to our discussion
00:39:28.140of infantry versus tanks and survivability so the atgm gives the infantry this like really
00:39:38.340impressive advantage in terms uh equalizes a lot of the infantry advantage in terms of range
00:39:44.400and punching tower versus versus tanks they still have a fair bit less than a tank
00:39:50.060tank but they can they can gauge the tank at max uh what is very close to maximum range um if you
00:39:59.060get like two or three atgm crews firing at the same time at like uh formation that's coming in
00:40:06.540And you can actually do serious damage to, like, a tank platoon or, like, a strong movement of tanks as long as they don't run out of ammo, which is a major limiting factor of the ATGM that, like, you can only...
00:40:20.620Well, exactly. That's what the ATGM crew does. It buys time for the infantry at a formation level to fight the tanks, right?
00:40:27.500It doesn't matter if you don't kill any tanks at all.
00:40:29.880If you miss every single missile but force the tanks to stay at range, to sit there while they wait for their own artillery to soften you up,
00:40:36.760you have now turned the battle from being run over by tanks at point-blank range to an attritional fight where the infantry division's own artillery,
00:40:45.480you know, dozens of 155-millimeter guns, now gets to pound the tanks while they sit there and wait for their own artillery to pound you.
00:40:52.240And so this kind of sucks for the infantrymen, right?
00:40:54.980Because you are on the receiving end of artillery and you can't really do much back.
00:40:59.280But on the operational strategic level, this is a victory of the highest magnitude, right?
00:41:05.340For an infantry division to just stop a tank formation cold.
00:41:10.260Yeah, and the infantry sitting there and soaking up artillery is like largely what the infantry does.
00:41:20.240Like, this is the equilibrium of World War I.
00:41:22.780But you've done your job. You've done your duty to your country by slowing down this hostile, mechanized wave.
00:41:28.860Well, if you become an infantry, like the major tasks you're going to be trained to do and the most physical labor you're going to do, aside from just like marching and hauling stuff, is going to be like building hardened positions and digging holes that will like withstand artillery bombardment.
00:41:48.580like uh if you're in an urban fighting position you're going to be stacking a lot of sandbags to
00:41:54.120like harden the hardened like basements against artillery and if you're in a field or a trench
00:42:00.100line you're going to be digging a very a ton of like fox uh fighting holes and like like
00:42:09.080jumping up and down on like the double stack sandbag roof so that like you know it won't
00:42:15.480collapse for anything except a direct hit and if you're i think the rule of world war one was that
00:42:21.160for every six hours that an infantry formation had time to uh to dig into a position
00:42:26.440um the survivability of that infantry group would double against artillery right so a an infantry
00:42:35.000formation that had a full day to dig in has vastly more survivability than one that has only been
00:42:40.800digging in for six hours and this doesn't there's there are relatively few limits to this you can
00:42:48.560just keep on digging in for weeks on end until you have something like the 1918 german trench
00:42:53.660lines with deep hardened shelters 40 50 feet below the surface in order to wait out utter hurricanes
00:43:00.080of artillery and of course this is why uh gaza has not been cracked in over like like a year now
00:43:09.380of Israeli bombardment operations against it
00:43:12.320because, of course, Hamas had 10 years ago.
00:44:26.980little um backhoes and in the garage and little front loaders that can move more earth in an hour
00:44:35.420than like a roman legion which it is insane a complete rebel revolution but no one thinks
00:44:44.500about it because it's not a traditional traditionally conceived as a weapon system
00:44:48.280oh yeah the tractor is absolutely another one of those weapons of modernity um if you just go on
00:44:56.140If you just Google maps of from not maps, but orbital photographs of the Russian defensive lines in Zaporozhaya Oblast that they erected in a matter of weeks, the Russians like to call it the Surovican line, although I don't think that's the official name.
00:45:11.860They put up a 30-kilometer deep, 200-kilometer wide belt of trenches, anti-tank ditches, obstacles, kill zones, firing positions, revetments, artillery concealed positions, supply dumps, etc.
00:45:29.620That managed to blunt four brigades of Ukrainian armored and mechanized formations attacking through it in their much-hyped 2023 counter-offenses.
00:45:40.560It's the digging in still absolutely works.
00:45:44.820And as we have the tunnels of Coochie in Vietnam were really one of the before that, I suppose Iwo Jima would be the best, best analogy.
00:45:57.540But the tunnels of Coochie in Vietnam and now as we're seeing Gaza, the Hamas Metro, the Gaza Metro.
00:46:06.600I have to admit on Gaza, I have been very wrong, and I apologize to Kulak because Kulak was right.
00:46:12.040I thought I was smarter than Kulak in predicting that within 8 to 10 months that Israel would manage to liquidate Gaza in its entirety, but Hamas holds.
00:46:23.440We will still see. I was predicting a ton of stuff, and geopolitics has completely shifted around to make the world unrecognizable from my original description.
00:46:35.620discussion of it but uh but yeah no the the effect of earth moving equipment and tunneling
00:46:43.280and and the ability to throw up these insane uh what before would be take years to build
00:46:51.860trench lines in a matter of like days or weeks is a a revolution in and of itself and no one wants to
00:47:00.420talk about that revolution because it's not sexy and sci-fi and you can't you can't you can't tie
00:47:06.880it into your favorite movies the way you can with drones but uh so so that was the revolution
00:47:13.820that was the state of things in the late 80s early early 90s that we had these anti-tank guide
00:47:21.560missiles that were some of them were still still required um line of sight maintenance to walk on
00:47:28.960and guy got in some of them were becoming fire and fire and forget and this gave the infantry um
00:47:36.420punching power back against tank now we come to 2025 we come finally an hour into this we come to
00:47:44.100oh no no no no no kulak i will not let you go there just yet so you you were talking about the
00:47:50.980state of atgms in the 60s and 70s maybe but by the 80s things are changing very rapidly
00:47:56.080in terms of the balance between the tank and the ATGM.
00:53:30.300and i should close with a target that is
00:53:36.140i've always wanted to play nicely never got to gotten to it so i i'm afraid i don't i cannot
00:53:42.780commentate on its mechanics but by the 80s uh late 80s autonomous weapons using either
00:53:49.900ir sensors or millimeter wave active radar seekers because start becoming viable
00:53:54.940this is where weapons like brimstone have their origin uh have you heard of brimstone
00:54:00.960being used in ukraine recently no i have not do do share with us so brimstone is one of those
00:54:10.080programs that emerged out of the late 80s and slash early 90s um desire to be able to kill
00:54:16.460these masses of soviet follow-on echelons um before they actually reach the front and so
00:54:24.940The concept is that a manned ground attack aircraft with cluster bombs flying a treetop-level, low-level penetration attack was no longer survivable, right?
00:54:38.800The Soviet short-ranged air defense system of the 80s was just getting too good.
00:54:43.840There are too many Shilkas and Tunguskas and Estrellas and Tors out there, and you're just never going to get manned tornadoes that deep behind Soviet lines.
00:54:53.280So what if you just fired a standoff cruise missile with a range of maybe 20 kilometers or more from an aircraft that was still over your front line, and each aircraft is carrying these four to six smart munitions that are all intelligent in their own right.
00:55:16.420They all have millimeter wave active radar seekers to identify, locate, and destroy tanks without any guidance from the pilot.
00:55:24.440You would just pick out a general area of where you want to fire your smart munitions, and they would autonomously seek out and destroy enemy tanks.
00:55:34.400And this actually matured in the 90s and early 2000s, and by Iraq, they were being regularly used.
00:55:42.280Today, they're being used in Ukraine, although weirdly enough, I have not seen that much about brimstone's effects in Ukraine.
00:55:49.980I had expected brimstone to be more effective, but the Ukrainians are not bragging about how many Russian tanks they've killed with it.
00:55:57.320And the Russians have not been either complaining that they've been losing tanks or bragging about how they jammed or shot down the brimstones.
00:56:05.940So I'm actually quite curious to see what happened there, where Siri met reality.
00:56:10.420All right. That is very fascinating. I know nothing about the kind of ballistic missile logic.
00:56:21.380this is not a ballistic missile this is um so brimstone is about the size of an american
00:56:28.480like a maverick missile right the default american uh ground attack missile of the last 30 years
00:56:33.800um it fly it doesn't fly on a ballistic trajectory it flies relatively low until it identifies and
00:56:40.280destroys its targets but again this is the state of the tech in the late 80s the stuff is starting
00:56:45.880to mature it was just put on hold for 20 years because no one wanted to no one wanted to fund
00:59:33.840drones and the big thing that i see drones having done is it's taken the atgm and not only given it
00:59:46.960more uh sometimes more range sometimes less range um some some drones have a problem with
00:59:55.140st ulrich fever shoot but he's made it an indirect fire weapon and more than an indirect
01:00:00.340fire weapon a self a kind of self self-guiding or target discovery indirect fire weapon
01:00:07.660we're now um as opposed to having to get line of sight on an armored vehicle the
01:00:14.640a quadcopter drone drone or i suppose a fixed wing drone that's launched from an infantry position
01:00:23.060now can go up out of the concealed position
01:00:27.280and start hunting for a tank or other target.
01:00:33.460Many of these drones have been taking out armored vehicles
01:00:36.960that they've been able to fit like javelin charges
01:00:40.420or other sheet charges on these that can take out armored vehicles
01:00:45.460because they're able to top attack or attack from the rear.
01:00:48.900It's no longer just going straight at the front.
01:00:51.320It's able to hit the tank in the weak parts of its armor, where, as you said, tanks are sometimes only 30 millimeters thick in the rear.
01:01:04.520It's hitting these weak points and getting kills with these very cheap consumer drones against multi-million dollar tanks.
01:01:15.120But the thing is, what looks like a complete revolution in warfare when you go through this long chain of causation, it's actually just a continuation of what the computerization and guidance systems had already started to revolutionize in the 80s.
01:01:36.900And this is where a lot of the predictions of how all the sci-fi predictions of how drones are going to completely change the battlefield and how drones are going to completely alter the nature of warfare and how this is going to do away with armored vehicles and even infantry themselves really falls flat.
01:02:00.220because we've been in this revelation for, as you said, 60 years now.
01:02:08.000And, you know, development started 100 years ago on this stuff.
01:02:15.540And the unique thing about these small, these consumer drones
01:02:22.380isn't really the suicide drone or quasi-drone aspect,
01:02:29.240This ability to go out and find and collide into it, explode against a tank and take one out.
01:02:37.820The real revolutionary aspect of the drones is the information transfer.
01:02:43.940The fact that sitting in a trench now, it's possible for a small unit on the ground to get an aerial picture of the battlefield that they're custom selecting.
01:02:57.560that isn't being like sent to them and it's like like days out of out of date date that they're
01:03:04.660seeing in real time the battlefield and they're able to go over and explore uh hints and stuff
01:03:12.180that that um so part of what we've been discussing part of the the story we've been telling is that
01:03:22.260for almost this entire time it's been very possible for um all these units on the battlefield
01:03:29.620to hide from each other so tanks it's actually very hard even right it's the invisible battlefield
01:03:38.060right where over time you have less and less idea of where the enemy is at a specific targeting level
01:03:44.320where your intelligence and surveillance and reconnaissance bandwidth is now far less than
01:03:49.360your strike bandwidth. Um, you have all this firepower and you have no idea where to shoot
01:03:54.860because the enemy, well, you know where they are generally, you know, that there's an enemy brigade
01:03:59.500occupying, you know, the 20 kilometers wide front and 15 kilometers deep, uh, sector opposing your
01:04:08.100brigade, but you don't know where any individual fighting position is. Right. But just echoing back
01:04:13.620to our theme of continuity rather than change uh the idea that you could have a guided system that
01:04:21.660combined the functionality of reconnaissance and strike is also not a new idea um something that
01:04:29.680uh i'd like to go through a list of systems from the late 80s and 90s that we wanted to fund it
01:04:36.020right at the end of the cold war starting with something called e fog m uh and for your this
01:04:43.480was a i think it's e fog m stands for enhanced fiber optic guided missile which which was a
01:04:49.960racion program designed to put a 20 kilometer uh range missile with a tv camera um at the front
01:05:00.720and a fiber optic trail going out the back and equip the American Army's infantry with these systems at the battalion level.
01:05:09.040And this is essentially what fiber optic drones have caught up today.
01:05:15.520The idea that you can have this highly lethal, unjammable fiber optic guided system that can locate and identify enemy positions deep in their rear, 20 kilometers away.
01:05:30.260and have this available to the infantry at the front line.
01:05:34.420And EFOG-M is not the only program that the U.S. pursued.
01:05:40.380We had something called LongFOG, which was the proposed successor,
01:05:45.380which would extend the range up to 100 kilometers.
01:05:48.400These things were all defunded in 1990 because, well, the wall came down.
01:05:56.140Even Brazil has developed something called FOG MPGM,
01:05:59.580which has a 60-kilometer range fiber optic cable, TV guidance, capable of deep strike in the enemy
01:06:05.680rear. Serbia has something called ALAS, which uses a turbofan instead of a rocket to reduce
01:06:12.200IR signature. It can be launched from their APCs, from rocket artillery trucks, or even from
01:06:17.260shipping containers. Europe was working on something called Polyfem, which also had,
01:06:22.360curiously enough, a 60-kilometer range, a 15-kilogram warhead, fiber optic guidance,
01:06:27.220and an internal TV camera, but because Europe, they canceled it in 2003 without replacement.
01:06:33.320And China is working on a dozen of these systems today, starting with HJ-10, but
01:06:38.260continually evolving in range and lethality. So these sorts of like long range fiber optic guided
01:06:44.960combinations of reconnaissance and strike capability were being pushed out to the
01:06:51.700infantry at the end of the Cold War. It's only today that they're maturing because
01:06:55.120the manufacturing for these current generation of military drones in China is at a scale that
01:07:04.500even the Soviet industrial base of the 1980s could not contemplate. It is production rather
01:07:10.380than technology that has revolutionized the battlefield. Yes. So for our listeners who
01:07:17.860for struggling to visualize this uh your struggle visualizing this is exactly the struggle that
01:07:26.380every commander has had going back to the last 60 years of warfare because fundamentally the
01:07:34.660problem of modern warfare is that at the ranges the what the weapons are able to fire at it's
01:07:41.180actually very hard to have have knowledge of the battlefield so um you can go online right now look
01:07:48.600up like line of sight cards and how and how um commanders visualize and can see of what they can
01:07:56.740see and what they can't see you get these like like uh kind of radar graphs of um of what a per
01:08:04.380an individual person in a position hypothetically has line of sight on what they don't have line
01:08:10.360sign on and like um and like they'll be he'll be broken up by trees or whatnot or you'll be
01:08:17.180or you'll be mapping out where tree lines are within on a map because the hardest thing for
01:08:25.620commander to do for for basically the entire modern period of warfare is understand what
01:08:33.400the hell is going on uh if you read uh jf antel's uh interactive exercise series these are like uh
01:08:43.200they go like a series of like training devices that were structured as shoot your own adventure
01:08:47.900novels where you take on the role of an infantry commander the role of a um a tank platoon commander
01:08:54.680The role of a captain leading a company-level attack into, um, into, um, the hypothetical for that was, like, relieving incertal chirps in North Korea.
01:09:11.560If you read J.F. Vantel's series, which are amazing,
01:09:14.620I wrote a review of his bug, Infantry Combat.
01:09:18.840The number one thing that's hammered home is just how important spotters are.
01:09:24.760He hammers home several things, but that's one of the major ones.
01:09:35.760You need their radio working constantly.
01:09:38.280Like, just to have people in multiple positions telling you what is going on and giving you grid squirt for, and it's A, so your artillery can fire back, but B, so you don't even know where the enemy is or what's going on.
01:09:53.440And, of course, the challenge of this is even that is only giving you a few kill mirrors of visibility, mostly.
01:10:01.720Like, hypothetically, you know, if you have a really, really good spotter who's on, like, a mountainside, you know, he might be able to get you 10 kilometers to a point, maybe, if, like, they're driving down a highway.
01:10:17.560but realistically in almost all battlefields just light of sight is going to get you a few hundred
01:10:25.960meters maybe a few kilometers if you really have your your observation points picked out
01:10:32.420which is really bad because the speed at which vehicles move on the mountain water battlefield
01:10:40.680is very comparable to a car like uh three four kilometers is like a distance that can be crossed
01:10:47.000in like a matter of like five minutes like uh if you listen to a song if you zone out and start
01:10:56.900listening to a song you know by the time the song ends the enemy might be on your position that's
01:11:02.280how little the reaction time is between what you cannot see see and cannot really have knowledge
01:11:10.460of and what's there and this was a huge advantage for tanks and armored vehicles and all sorts of
01:11:16.200things that you'd think would be kind of hard to hide because you could just hide them several
01:11:21.500kilometers back you'd hide them like two or three three lines back or if you if you struck you
01:11:28.460struck where a tree line or a round of escape would allow them to pull back through and then
01:11:34.680you could maneuver around so there's a vast space that the enemy can't can't see and you could do
01:11:41.640any number of tactics and maneuvers this way and this was acute and this also was a huge advantage
01:11:48.480for infantry because if you're in a town or a tree line or a um forested area um basically your
01:11:58.760enemy has vigil on the immediate edge of that tree line or the immediate edge of that force
01:12:04.480of the immediate edge of that town as long as you have some way to get back from that if you take
01:12:12.360contact as long as you have some way to safely extricate yourself from them as long as you don't
01:12:17.820be caught up in like like a small bundle of trees in a field or whatnot not where you can't pull
01:12:24.580pull back and it's like you can do that you can you can fight fairly effectively and just pull
01:12:33.360away from it uh this is uh one of the big things that infantry commanders learn is how to just
01:12:40.540prepare a network of positions so that we can do defense and deaths and employ all these
01:12:47.760all these tactics right you can displace from position to position as uh one position gets
01:12:54.260identified i'd like to also say that the complexity of the modern battlefield especially
01:13:01.060in regards to electronic warfare means that a lot of times even if your recon team does have eyes
01:13:08.020on the enemy they might not be able to get that information to where it might be needed right to
01:13:13.680your own artillery fire direction center or to your hq or to a tank platoon over the next ridge
01:13:18.520because their radios are being jammed right um a lot of times that the enemy is dropping smoke
01:13:24.100from their mortars so that even if you have tremendous optics your line of sight is just
01:13:30.620obscured by smoke on the battlefield today between ukraine and russia it is tremendously difficult to
01:13:35.600distinguish between friend or foe right the old adage of like something between 10 to 20 percent
01:13:40.500of casualties being from friendly fire is still very real which is why ukrainian units even guys
01:13:46.780wearing the most sophisticated camouflage patterns ever devised are wearing giant stripes of blue
01:13:51.760tape all over their combat rig because they don't want to be friendly fired um it it's just
01:13:58.620tremendously difficult to uh collect and transfer that information to where it will be needed
01:14:05.780because the system of modern war is designed purposefully so that the adversary has every
01:14:12.720possible solution to prevent you from getting that information and um drones don't change that
01:14:18.620right i mean it makes it easier right but drones are vulnerable to all of these these issues that
01:14:24.500conventional forces are also vulnerable to yeah and of course everything we just listed
01:14:31.200is for midday you know during midday you have all these problems of just consuming of the
01:14:38.740battlefield as soon as you add like night or rain or any like weather effects all this multiply
01:14:45.920implies a mere effective amount of knowledge.
01:14:49.740People with Darmulz or IR drops to the hundreds of meters.
01:15:14.700but uh if the conditions aren't right you aren't seeing much and especially
01:15:21.440rain is definitely still a major factor i will say that thermals have changed
01:15:26.380uh the effect of night fighting though thermals have effectively nullified any defender's
01:15:32.700advantage at night um but what we're seeing in ukraine is that even though both sides have
01:15:39.120these long range systems right um ground surveillance radars right ir sites thermals
01:15:44.660um the fighting tends to be at close range because both sides will use the contours of
01:15:51.260terrain to mask their approach which is why there's something like a dozen maybe two dozen
01:15:56.380um video clips of tank battles happening in ukraine one or ife versus tank battles
01:16:03.960happening at less than 200 meters away, which is point-blank.
01:16:08.880We're reaching the sort of territory where the tank commander
01:16:11.780could conceivably hit the opposing vehicle with a thrown American football
01:16:15.680because these vehicles are approaching through terrain contours
01:16:19.920and forests and built-up urbanized areas
01:16:22.980in a way that prevents them from being detected by the other side
01:16:27.260until you blunder into the enemy in some sort of point-blank meeting engagement
01:16:31.740straight out of command-and-conquer generals.
01:16:33.960Yeah. No, the modern state of warfare has turned everyone into like a little stealthy, stealthy operator. We've seen knife fights, knife fights like like right out of Metal Gear Solid or Name Your Video Game break out between between soldiers who who realize that they're right next to each other.
01:17:02.340They've been both hiding from each other until they got close enough that it was more effective to, like, jump on each other and try to stab each other to death than to drop their grenade and, like, go for the rifle.
01:17:21.740These video clips are not for the faint of heart.
01:17:24.380yes that then i i i i saw a knife fight that took eight minutes from the perspective of the
01:17:35.220man who lost it uh this it these are like really burl to watch uh like uh some of the most
01:17:43.920and the thing is because then the knives of course are like mostly utility knives these
01:17:50.120aren't like men who walked out there with swords expecting a melee fight.
01:17:58.820It's a bit of, at least the one I saw was quite the challenge for him to finish the
01:18:05.380fight even after he clearly won, and both men were horribly, horribly injured from it.
01:18:11.560There's actually an interview with the winner out there, but I don't speak Russian.
01:18:15.360uh but this is kind of the the state of the modern battlefield but this is one of the so
01:18:26.940so this fall war this intense fall war war on paper now drones and especially we have satellite
01:18:39.460imagery so if you prepare any fighting position on the open that's like not disguised satellite's
01:18:46.540going to pick pick it up or if you set up any depot depot satellite's going to pick it up
01:18:53.360and we have planes flying overhead that have radar that can detect vehicles from
01:18:59.980hundreds and hundreds of kilometers away um and modern okay so those aircraft are tend to be
01:19:08.600large commercial style jetliner hulls right like um the famous us one j stars um the ehc i think
01:19:16.580uh which was actually retired in favor of a successor based on a large global hawk drone
01:19:21.960was uh that thing is on i think like a 707 hull um a commercial jetliner from like
01:19:31.020the 60s uh so these things are not remotely survivable close to the front
01:19:37.220um a long-range shooter air defense system like uh the russian s-300 will knock them out
01:19:44.200at approximately the same ranges at which uh their long-range surveillance radar starts
01:19:50.640becoming effective right and um but still like even even things such as the f-35 have
01:20:00.380radars and stuff on them that are designed to detect a vehicle on the ground and yet what we're
01:20:06.300seeing is this sort of intensification of the effects of stealth and sneaking and the ability
01:20:16.540to hide on a modern battlefield because all these systems have increased the range at which
01:20:23.260engage what's happening, which means the gaps between those lines of sight and visibility and
01:20:29.980those detection systems are the the uncovered gaps are growing larger and larger if you can
01:20:38.760properly conceive of what those gaps would look like so obviously in order to snake any of
01:20:46.160in order for these tanks to slip into the pump where they're having engagements at 200 meters
01:20:53.460or for fighters to can get to the pump where they're having knife fights with each other
01:20:59.220That requires a lot of conceptual work on the part of the individual, like, fireteam or platoon level commander, the individual tank commander, the individual soldier that they have to even conceptualizing all these, all these different levels of kind of visualization and information lake.
01:26:41.180But you have that where, you know, you're hundreds of kilometers from a front line.
01:26:45.660And then, you know, something that you think is innocuous all of a sudden, like, you're hit.
01:26:51.160And then you also have the knife fights happening, which that means when the guy was like four, five, six meters away from the eye he had a knife fight with, he was undetected.
01:27:03.400that means when he was a hundred meters away from that guy he was still undetected that means when
01:27:08.580he was a kill reader away from that guy he was undetected and he was moving entirely through
01:27:13.940that space right up until he was like it's point blank as point blank gets undetected this is how
01:27:22.600ambiguous it is that bunches of kill mirrors you can get god and three more mirrors you're
01:27:31.900I know Kulak really likes knife fights, but I do want to stress that engagements coming down to melee distance are extremely rare and should not really inform your general perception of the battlefield, right?
01:27:45.520The number of actual knife fights going on in Ukraine is low enough that from an operational level, you can largely discount it.
01:27:51.780Most infantry firefights will still take place at normal ranges of like 50 meters or so.
01:27:58.320Yes, it's basically, but your normal range of 50 meters is 50 meters.
01:28:09.320An infantry unit, even like many of the most basic fire teams,
01:28:15.680have a designated marksman and a light machine gun,
01:28:22.160usually something that would fire something like 5, 5, 6, same round that goes to the rifle.
01:28:28.320Uh, probably the detonated marksman, too, would try to standardize on that round, unless they were, like, going for an extended capability one, something heavier.
01:28:36.700Uh, those two systems, just a detonated marksman rifle and a light machine gun, let's say, still using 5.56, those stretch out to 800 meters.
01:28:48.460Like, that is the weapons capability of those, those, like, very light weapon systems.
01:29:25.200or if you're like done through some or if the engagement's happening in like some heavy
01:29:30.700environment like uh urban environments where the fighting is happening at 15 meters yeah exactly
01:29:36.520so what so that's incredibly ambiguous range of you can be detected at 800 kilomeres or you can
01:29:46.980be detected at 15 meters and and that is the defining feature of the modern battlefield
01:29:56.120is that it can be that closer it can be that far away and yet no one wants to like acknowledge that
01:30:03.920in their theorizing like uh like all the talk about how drones have transformed the modern
01:30:11.400battlefield or this type of unit is irrelevant or this type of unit won't exist anymore or
01:30:17.160this type of person this type of fighting just isn't going to have them or all these discussions
01:30:23.600discussions that we see um even from like ranked people who should know better like people who
01:30:30.700should like under understand how history has developed with warfare i can't see trend lines
01:30:38.160Very careful about taking those sorts of public-facing sink pieces at face value because these people are all trying to push an agenda of their own.
01:30:49.260I would assume that they are smarter than they let on when they are targeting the public for some sort of culture war-adjacent or procurement-related, financial incentive-related proposal.
01:35:55.720of screamers because because the big limitation with drones right now and it's an unavoidable
01:36:04.880limitation really is battery life uh your modern mpb drone has a battery life uh the extra long
01:36:16.420operating ones have a battery life of 40 45 minutes uh the fast racing drone so once i can
01:36:23.800like actually chase down a guy on foot they have a battery life of like 10 to 15 minutes on the
01:36:31.100high end and thing is battery life um is not improving um the steve jobs uh now steve cook
01:36:43.080um android uh samsung elon at tesla the entire world is racing to try and develop
01:36:53.100uh better more efficient uh lithium ion batteries uh the entire world is fighting to come up with
01:37:01.720a battery they'll last last ideally 10 times longer but just like 50 percent longer would
01:37:09.000be a market changer just a battery that charges faster you know if you get your tesla to charge
01:37:16.760charge 50 75 faster it'd be a market game changer you get your tesla to drive you know
01:37:25.5402 000 kilometers instead of like the few hundred that is a strange now that would wipe out the
01:37:33.800the gas vehicle if you could get it to last last so i will say that top tier battery energy density
01:37:40.620has risen from maybe like 300 watt hours per kilogram um as recently as like 2018 to something
01:37:48.940like 500 ish today and costs of batteries have fallen exponentially um you were paying something
01:37:56.940like three thousand dollars per kilowatt hour like in like 2000 today you're paying like what like
01:38:04.04020 bucks um but the at the military level what you say is true right the these drones forms are
01:38:12.660highly limited uh by battery life they will not rampage over the uh over the terrain for
01:38:19.580for days and weeks and months but my question is does that matter if the drones are cheap enough
01:38:25.960and if fully autonomous terminal attack is mature uh people have been predicting this um
01:38:33.360For a couple of years now, you know, some commentators like Simplicius assumed that it would be present on the battlefields of Ukraine by late 2024 when he was writing in early 2023.
01:38:44.640But as of right now, it's mostly still an emerging capability.
01:38:49.600I think in a Ukrainian FPV found on the battlefield was found using an edge TPU or tensor processing unit, which is Google's latest neural net machine learning hardware.
01:39:05.760And so I think that there are systems like this being tested today, but they're not fully mature.
01:39:10.200What I am worrying about is what happens when they do mature.
01:39:13.080It doesn't matter if these kill drones only have a lifespan of 15 minutes.
01:39:17.300if they're completely immune to jamming um if they can return to base to recharge if they don't
01:39:24.180find a target within you know half of their allotted flight time and it costs
01:39:30.520uh one one thousandth of the cost to train and equip an infantryman to to procure a fully
01:39:41.320autonomous attack drone capable of neutralizing a vehicle right like even if you are smart enough
01:39:47.500and clever enough to hide from you know the first dozen eventually you are going to have to leave
01:39:52.860your foxhole and when that happens the drones will still be there so when the only solution
01:40:00.540that i can posit is not waiting out the drones but essentially there are several solutions beyond
01:40:09.480current generations of jamming to deal with these things right you have the classic gun orientated
01:40:14.860solution which is a essentially a naval style close-in weapon system with a radar an infrared
01:40:23.520sensor a computer-controlled fire direction system and either a rotary autocannon or a
01:40:32.660conventional chain gun that uses either proximity fused or smart programmed fusing to detonate at
01:40:41.620the range that the radar calculates the incoming drone swarm is coming at and so as of right now
01:40:47.160this is possible as of the 1970s this was possible this is essentially just miniaturizing
01:40:52.240say a flak panther gephardt and like distributing it to every mechanized company but the problem is
01:40:59.420this is really expensive because the costs for these sorts of vehicles are far higher than the
01:41:08.080costs of the drone storms that might be employed against them right um rate uh smart ammunition
01:41:14.140especially proximity fused can be more expensive than the drones that they kill right if you are
01:41:18.680firing a bullet and if that costs more than what you are shooting at then that's a losing proposition
01:41:25.380and you cannot have your radar on the whole time because the emissions of your radar can be
01:41:31.380detected located and then enemy artillery directed against it and you simply don't have enough power
01:41:36.760generation to keep your radar on at all times right so this is why i think gun-based anti-drone
01:41:41.440systems are relatively uh they don't have a extremely bright future but as an interim system
01:43:37.300These things already exist. They are already
01:43:39.300flying combat authorities today and they're only going to get more and more mature yeah and we've
01:43:44.580already seen uh uh hawks and other trained birds being used for this type of type of thing or um
01:43:53.340falconers have been used to counter drones at events uh so it's not inconceivable that this
01:44:03.320be the case but uh the part of the reason why i wanted to focus on this is i want to limit the
01:44:12.700expectation of a lot of people because a lot of people think of drone swarms and they think um
01:44:17.760you know the big light display of doll trump inch in drones or uh the big japanese chinese dragon
01:44:26.860displays that coming to hunt people down equivalent you know what would be millions of
01:44:34.800dollars worth of drones being expended to just like scour an area which which i the ability of
01:44:45.400drone swarms to to actually alter the battlefield i'm skeptical oh just because the survival rate
01:44:54.060of these drones per sortie uh you have to expect like right now ukraine has gone through like 30,000
01:45:01.280drones a month many of them admittedly many of those lost to jamming but a lot lost to other
01:45:11.42030,000 drones a month was like two years ago's figure right it's at least triple that today
01:45:18.040right? Ukraine expects to produce 1.5 million. No, sorry, not expects. Ukraine produced
01:45:24.120or procured. I mean, it was mostly China that produced 1.5 million of these small drones last
01:45:30.800year. This year, they're on track to procure 4.5 million, right? If you divide that by how many
01:45:37.280months in a year, you're looking at drone loss figures that are far in excess of 30,000 a month.
01:45:43.400Right now, something like 90% of drones are lost to jamming rather than something kinetic.
01:45:48.040So fully autonomous search and terminal engagement really will be a fairly revolutionary capability when that finally matures.
01:45:58.360So, yes, so the ability, and this is why autonomous drones matter, because one of the things with drones right now is,
01:46:11.900And this is one of the things that I was like very skeptical about autonomous drones is, well, is it really, are man hours really that short that you can't just have a guy man this like drone hunt for like a few minutes?
01:46:30.000It's about not being countered by jamming, right?
01:46:33.440Currently, the solution at the front is fiber optic tide drones, which are arguably an evolution of those fiber optic guided long range missiles that I was talking about earlier.
01:46:44.800And so there are battlefields like outside of Kursk and Tsutsa today that are just covered in hundreds of fiber optic trails going from one side to another.
01:46:53.060It literally looks like a spider web forest, right?
01:46:56.180Like that scene from Lord of the Rings before they run into Shelob.
01:47:00.000uh yeah if you ever see in real life uh in a hide very quickly have you ever just randomly
01:47:08.840see that hide right a field full of wires is pretty terrifying once you know what the wires
01:47:14.480are for yes exactly but uh this is the real advantage of like autonomous drones it's not
01:47:22.860It's not, oh, now there can be drones everywhere, and now drones, you can have 20 drones where there was one drone before.
01:47:33.460Like, it wasn't saving man-hours piloting the drones.
01:47:37.460It was saving the drones from getting immediately jammed and dying.
01:47:43.160That it was to extend the drones, like, lifetime use.
01:47:47.840But the thing is that that percentage lost to just kinetic interactions, that's still a massive drain on the on the number of drones.
01:48:00.320And you can imagine if they're going fully autonomous.
01:48:07.160One of the big advantages of having the drone in the drone operator, but you had a person immediately there to recover them.
01:48:14.560So if the drone was a few hundred meters out or got somewhere weird, you probably had someone there who could make a decision if they wanted to recover it or not.
01:52:50.260But we need to start thinking of treating drones like that.
01:52:53.240in order to actually manage, to master the proficiency necessary to employ them properly on the modern battlefield.
01:53:02.580And the West, arguably, is far behind China simply because they cannot produce drones in sufficient quantities to enable that mindset, right?
01:53:14.720And then there are companies like Palmer Luckeys and Darill that want to change that, that want to produce cheap, autonomous precision weapons for the West.
01:53:24.240But so far, the mainland Chinese are in the lead.
01:53:28.520yes uh america has to start to learn to treat drones as completely distort disposable nothing
01:53:37.040so there's no consequence for losing such as wars and not precious assets that you need
01:54:26.460the idea that an infantryman will have like multiple drones maybe on on him or you can imagine
01:54:34.800if we were equipping a a non-state actor uh with the latest a non-state state technological
01:54:45.380development uh we can imagine uh that you'd go out in your tactical with your pickup truck
01:54:52.960truck you'd have your rifle you'd have like your three cousins you'd have a a like whatever
01:55:00.440heavy weapon you could fit on your technical pickup pickup truck you know some some mortar
01:55:08.660i don't know the excess rocket tongue or something and then you'd have have like eight to ten
01:55:16.30010 drones strapped to it and maybe an additional one each for for being able to perform scouting
01:55:24.580maneuvers and then also probably the optic and a radio and some jury-rigged dongle-ridden laptop
01:55:32.660that you could also see the electromagnetic spectrum and see if anyone's operating
01:55:38.260uh visibly in your area on the electronic spectrum from that this kind of sci-fi
01:55:47.000sci-fi redneck um technical vision that you should be aspiring to dear listener you should
01:55:55.460aspire to have have this in your driveway ready to to go for you uh for you someone who old ranks
01:56:04.300or not uh uh this capacity is kind of going to be the default of the battlefield going forward
01:56:12.440and what what ai or um or self-guiding guiding drone tech is doing really seems to just be
01:56:25.600increasing the survivability of the drones like it doesn't seem to be actually adding
01:56:31.260a unique strike capability that people seem to be like terrified of that these
01:56:39.080fully autonomous killer robot battlefield is going to come for them like skynet and the modern person
01:56:46.060will be driven off the battlefield you know as if there was no challenge in recovering those
01:56:53.680Well, swarm networking is a thing, right?
01:56:58.840Like, we should expect that when full autonomy for a terminal attack emerges, that means the swarm, even though it's not as closely packed as it is in the movies or the drone shows, right?
01:57:10.380Even if the drones are several hundred meters away from each other instead of several meters,
01:57:15.700it does mean that the swarm will be able to prioritize sectors of the battlefield to its appendages,
01:57:22.360that they will be able to coordinate with each other at a level where even a team of extremely experienced manual drone operators
01:57:31.620will not be able to coordinate at, right?
01:57:33.580Like, even, you know, callsign Magyar's guys are not that good.
01:57:40.380yes but i given the other limitations i so this is one of the things that i've i've heard that
01:57:50.220from like the extreme uh doomers about modern drone warfare that this will basically drive
01:57:58.980the infantrymen from the battlefield that now once these drone swarms are at
01:58:03.640activated no matter what the counter is they'll be cheap enough that basically once an infantryman
01:58:11.760is spotted just a minute or 30 seconds or a minute later another drum will appear and another
01:58:21.600drum will appear and he'll be overwhelmed and killed if he is ever spotted by an individual
01:58:27.580drum once the drum swarms are enabled and that seat strikes me as incredibly implausible
01:58:32.720yeah that's too reductive right you can i think that just like someone watching the emergence of
01:58:39.820atgms in the 1950s this will be a big deal but like the infantrymen in the tank will still exist
01:58:45.620yeah the because the obvious answer the final goal of any war is to deliver the infantrymen
01:58:54.600as payload to the target and the target is the enemy's legislative hall or presidential palace
01:59:00.220right the ultimate goal is to have an infantryman outside the enemy's political objective
01:59:04.620controlling who gets to enter their center of political gravity and to do that we need the
01:59:10.220infantryman everything else is to have have i've been fighting the belgians in the right stag
01:59:16.940right but you essentially you still need a guy with a bayonet to do the policing task
01:59:24.540that lets you govern a territory that you've conquered with drones all you can do is kill
01:59:28.840You cannot govern. And if you want the ability to kill, right, the people of the 1950s, right, the great powers of the late 50s, you know, Curtis LeMay and Thomas Power and their equivalents within Soviet Air Command, they had already mastered that ability by distributing hundreds of nuclear bombs to every squadron of strike aircraft in West Germany.
01:59:52.260yes but this it's more than that that no hour because the fundamental logistical limitation
02:00:00.940of the drones and um already we're seeing what the actual final counter of drones is going to be
02:00:09.220which is something even treat cheaper than drones which is strength that like uh you already see
02:00:17.740roadways on the russian front that just have like these vast webs of like uh a string and rope
02:00:26.920strung over them so that a drone i know what you're talking about i right there's the there's
02:00:31.860a road outside of the chasse of yard direction along the supply line from bottom to the current
02:00:38.600front which is essentially with all covered inside a giant net but this is only effective
02:00:44.760if you can sanitize an area for long enough for your engineering assets
02:00:48.420to set up that sort of anti-drone net fortification, right?
02:00:53.060It's like saying the torpedo net of World War I made the torpedo obsolete
02:00:56.720because you could string up these torpedo nets within a fortified anchorage or port
02:01:03.620It doesn't protect them when they're at sea.
02:01:05.700And similarly, the string cannot protect a maneuver force when it's in the open.
02:01:09.980It can't protect a maneuver force when it's in the open.
02:01:12.760However, infantry taking up a position in, say, an urban area, like it's very, it's very cheap and very easy to just send the privates around putting up string in all the windows such that you can't even pick out which building the funding positions are located in.
02:01:32.320If you're, if one building has a bunch of string covering all the entrances, then the enemy has identified that building as a target for their artillery.
02:01:39.920the drones the drone swarm right in its current iteration as a manned asset right as it in terms
02:01:49.900of every drone having a human controlling it and the future iteration of terminal autonomy
02:01:56.060the primary function of the drone is not just attack it is also calling in artillery or a glide
02:02:03.400bomb or a mortar or even a tactical ballistic missile on anything that the drone itself cannot
02:02:07.900successfully engage it is part of a reconnaissance strike complex rather than the reconnaissance
02:02:12.940strike complex in itself yes exactly and that's the the like real evolution of the drone is just
02:02:21.260the information that's being transmitted which like really that revolution of
02:02:27.780having those reconnaissance capabilities was basically realized with like the first kind
02:02:37.200of cherry-raped quadcopter rounds that were operated by the by the initial ukrainians in
02:02:44.9602020 22 like a big revolution back to world war one right where the biggest role for aircraft
02:02:54.840was not bombing people right it was not doing direct damage to the enemy army on the front
02:03:00.060it was a providing reconnaissance for your own artillery to spot enemy targets for your own
02:03:06.500artillery and b shooting down the enemy's observation balloons uh or protecting your
02:03:11.740own that are also providing spotting for artillery right because the artillery is doing 95 percent of
02:03:17.480the killing on a world war one battlefield um today the the ratio is somewhat flipped i think
02:03:24.240as of right now drones are actually killing more men and destroying more vehicles and artillery
02:03:28.820which um which has changed since like 2022 2023 um but they are still part of that complex rather
02:03:36.420than being isolated from it but but this is the thing that i wanted to to emphasize is that that
02:03:46.220radical increase in visibility of the balance space that ability to from a hidden position
02:03:53.240get an aerial view of what's happening on the battlefield and actually to cut a zoom around as
02:04:53.600that's a universal capability now that's been granted to basically everyone you know Hamas
02:05:03.040his drones there they're scouting out and looking looking through the rubble to see
02:05:09.820where the Israelis are operating or not uh ISIS was the one that like first started using quad
02:05:16.420captured her drones in conf and then bursa did drop her drones with grenades back in 2015 that uh
02:05:25.600far from being like uh this massive centralizing technology that is granting all these this power
02:05:34.040to centralize militaries uh the drone revolution as we've seen in ukraine is radically
02:05:42.240it's a democratizing force right like it yeah exactly the opposite of the fighter jet
02:05:48.600with like i mean only two maybe three countries today in the world today can produce a sixth
02:05:54.560generation fighter um but a drone is potentially available to every sub 90 iq terrorist out there
02:06:02.380yes and you're seeing democratization not just of like tactical drones but of strategic bombing
02:06:10.020Because if you look at some of the Ukrainian drones that they've been using to strike targets deep in Russia, to blow up targets in Moscow, and as far away as like Volgograd, these drones, like the UJ-22, with like an 800-kilometer range and a 25-kilogram payload, cost less than a nice car, right?
02:06:40.020says the ukrainians have even been retrofitting old soviet reconnaissance missiles uh you know
02:06:47.520basically like cruise missiles with a camera on it as long-range semi-autonomous attack drones
02:06:52.680right and they're producing these things for relatively cheap and striking extremely expensive
02:06:57.700capital targets like oil refineries uh basically they're accomplishing the effects that would
02:07:05.240previously have taken a manned strategic bomber and doing it with like the budget of like a high
02:07:10.300school engineering club yeah that's not like an incredibly difficult engineering problem
02:07:17.240once you already have the systems from from other drones like like you said a high school
02:07:23.680engineering club would produce like uh once you have the the gang system once you can kind of
02:07:30.780in a gps system on like a raspberry pi or something equivalent to to go to a target
02:07:40.540well it can't just be gps started right you need an inertial navigation system
02:07:44.680because the gps you can usually assume that unless your enemy is very dumb they will have
02:07:50.360gps scramblers and and jammers along your flight trajectory and protecting your target so you do
02:07:55.640need an ins uh but you can buy an ins like a low-end ins from like alibaba for like 300 bucks
02:08:04.920right like a these things are also starting to get dirt cheap because again china that's and it
02:08:11.460and are already pre-made off the shelves this is a lesson to you dear listener if you are in a
02:08:18.820prepping mood and want to be equipped that you can become come a baron of a region should the
02:08:27.180worst happen and you have a budget you can fully purchase the digital battle space right off
02:08:34.520alibaba and it's like these aren't even controlled substances like even even if you're in like the
02:08:42.740most restricted country in europe you can just order the stuff as a hobbyist and
02:08:48.200Yeah, because, like, what is the EU going to do?
02:08:50.240Like, ban INS that has, like, a trillion civilian uses?
02:16:27.860It is fascinating how sometimes fiction,
02:16:30.860even the wildest incarnations of fiction,
02:16:33.280manage to somehow get reality to echo with it.
02:16:37.700Yeah, Bond uniquely has been impressive at this.
02:16:42.000Part of it was that they're very explicitly
02:16:45.120trying to pull out stories from the headlines.
02:16:50.200So, Goldeneye, James Bond's rival, played by Sean Bean, 006, this British defector, slash, he was originally Russian, so I'm not sure why they let him in MI6, but Alex Trevelyan, Sean Bean's character, was a Luhans Cossack, which, of course, if you know the current Ukraine war,
02:17:16.340many of the uh the luhans cossacks the reason he wants revenge on the british wants to destroy
02:17:24.000london with the golden eye weapon is because churchill betrayed him betrayed his family at
02:17:31.140the end of world war two and returned them to savvy union to suffer horribly which of course
02:17:38.420was in the headline to within like the past 15 years of golden eye um uh victims of yalta was
02:17:45.540published um nikolai tolstoy's book descendant of leo tolstoy very good book you should check it
02:17:51.300out but but uh yeah one of the most shameful events of world war ii but that was in the news
02:17:58.700that the thing is the luhans cossacks and this entire like saga directly echoes and like overlaps
02:24:01.220between um the american military and the german military and the number one thing you realize is
02:24:08.120just how much of vastly more discretion and control of officers head over their their soldiers and
02:24:17.000also how much they deferred to their soldiers like uh and actually almost kind of baby their
02:24:24.700soldiers and in a lot of ways like uh requires a level of unit cohesion and trust that it's
02:24:29.920difficult to generate in any country yes so uh uh one of the one of the examples i often give is
02:24:38.160that uh freshen officers and later vermouth officers are expected to remember and congratulate
02:24:44.000their soldiers on their birthdays that uh there's supposed to be that level of cohesion that like
02:24:51.180they could see their officers like father figure figures i'm like personal associates in a way
02:24:58.900That's, like, not really something that would exist in the modern U.S. military.
02:25:04.260But also, their officers were given incredible amounts of discretion.
02:25:08.100So things that, like, get peeled up, they're, like, require, like, this entire bureaucrat and regular rule in the U.S. military.
02:25:17.560Stuff like leave or special accommodations or considerations and stuff like this.
02:25:24.420then, uh, the U.S. military requires endless paperwork to, to do, like, stuff that's, like,
02:25:34.340the most dinky, uh, like, HR type, type stuff that's, like, you know, you have to do in any
02:25:41.900workplace. Uh, these requires reams of paperwork, and it's an incredible pain for the officers,
02:25:47.020and, like, um, you know, the clerk or someone in another department says no, it's, like, this
02:25:53.200entire process during military pre-war it was just entirely within the officer's discretion
02:25:59.920so one of my points regarding this is that it only works if you have the elite human capital
02:26:06.960of your society within the army and specifically the officer corps right and the reason why the
02:26:13.660u.s can't do this is that okay for germany during world war ii it had germany was a lot
02:26:19.740more industrially deprived than the US. They did not have the sheer productive capabilities
02:26:25.120to generate the number of support units and air units and signals units and engineering units and
02:26:31.500intelligence units that the US had. So a much greater proportion of the German army in World
02:26:36.360War II was foot slogging or otherwise combat arms. And as such, they could devote their
02:26:44.380elite human capital to leadership positions within combat arms. But in the US, the tradition has
02:26:51.020always been for the top 10% of elite American human capital, right? Like the MIT big brain types
02:27:00.220to go to those supporting arms, right? To do crypt analysis, to drive bombers and tankers
02:27:07.060instead of leading infantry companies. And because our supporting arms are so much larger,
02:27:11.000It means the infantry is left with the dregs, people who have to be forced to be governed with a bureaucracy because they cannot be trusted to take initiative.
02:27:21.640And arguably, like this, this reached a period of crisis during the latter stages of the war in Vietnam, where the infantry was just becoming out of control.
02:27:33.520We were starting to get fragging incidents, race riots, constant drug and sex scandals, and it somewhat recovered in the 80s during the Reagan administration as we transitioned to an all-volunteer force and abolished the draft.
02:27:48.360And I would argue that the U.S. infantry of the global war on terror period is fairly decent. But again, the true the U.S. military is not an extremely prestigious institution within broader American society, especially educated middle class types that don't think of the military as a career option.
02:28:10.880Right. There are a lot of guys who would be tremendous platoon commanders who are instead lawyers or private equity guys or like product managers at tech companies because they don't consider the military as something that they should be going into.
02:28:26.640And as a result, the people that we are getting are largely A, from traditional military families, which still produce quality human talent and really respectable guys. My heart goes out to them. But also folks that come from non-traditional demographics who are in the military for just benefits and who are incapable of performing at that level.
02:28:46.640yes and this is this is what i'm building to because the u.s military has kind of built itself
02:28:54.340around eliminating discretion like working with these with what is often
02:29:02.560sometimes at the officer level but especially at the grimp level uh not the peak of human
02:29:11.380human capital u.s military culture and u.s military institutions and by extension a good
02:29:17.740chunk of most of the rest of nato is its training and its culture is built around really crushing
02:29:26.220individual mission uh the number the worst possible thing you can do in like basic training
02:29:33.600or like probably probably most infantry training is like do something you are told to do or
02:29:41.080I feel like even the German military tried to crush individual initiative when you were, like, training to ruck, right? Like, they only really teach it once you're beyond that level.
02:29:51.780Yes, yes, yes. But, uh, so this is one of the things where the German military would, uh, at the individual, at the, like, grunt level often, but especially at the officer level, it trained discipline, but specifically it did not try to, like, kind of break the instinct for initiative.
02:30:16.600You see like this, this real kind of cultural difference where the German military emphasized kind of fraternity and discipline and this idea of like mutual self-sacrifice.
02:30:31.580where zs military talks about breaking down soldiers taking stripping their individual
02:30:37.860visuality and building them up anew and um really taking identity away from people and
02:30:46.320obviously like the caricature of this is full metal bell jacket where you you do encounter uh
02:30:55.880Soldiers who longed for, like, former soldiers and trainers who longed for, like,
02:31:06.820oh, we used to be able to train them properly back in the day.
02:31:10.220This idea that here you are all equally worthless.
02:31:13.180Here you only do exactly what you're told of.
02:31:25.500You're the smartest person here, here, that the joke is that the mentally disabled Forrest Gump is actually the smartest person in the military because he understands that he is to do exactly what he's told and nothing, nothing else.
02:31:41.960And, of course, once an infantry graduates, graduates our training, initiative is re-added.
02:31:52.120But there's a massive cultural clash between what would be expected of a traditional Vietnam or even global war on terror style fell infantry unit
02:32:05.460and what we're seeing in ukraine where there's this incredible amount of initiative discretion
02:32:11.480and like real strategic judgment or practical judgment it's not happening at the strategic
02:32:19.520level but it's a strategic love sort of thinking happening at the level of these individually
02:32:25.900individual units and like small squads of like four guys or even two guys who might be operating
02:32:34.220without an officer or even a sergeant deciding how they are going to move through what are very vast spaces
02:32:43.700and how they're going to account for what are a really dizzying number of threats
02:32:50.100and how they're going to skim the cat of carrying out their mission if they're going to skim that cat.
02:32:57.780Because they might have orders that if this isn't possible or if this becomes too risky, just do what you can or try to achieve this or try to try to achieve that, which is like this wild, wild amount of like vagueness.
02:33:17.740And again, ambiguity that I mean, it's arguably returning to a pre-modern level of ambiguity where you don't have centralized command.
02:33:27.780by radio whereas if you're like a skirmisher um during the seven years war you know out in the
02:33:33.600wilderness you have that authority to maneuver as you will to take cover and conceal yourself
02:33:39.100to dig fighting positions and to engage the enemy where uh you believe that you can do the most
02:33:44.360damage right i'm sure that like even in classical antiquity like when a small detachment was ordered
02:34:21.060Because, like, the closest analogy is light infantry during the Napoleonic Age, where they'd be doing these, like, very complex, long-range screening maneuvers over comparable, if maybe even slightly smaller-sized areas, where they'd be going to kill Mears away from their commanders and having to make, like, very complex, light-for-death judgments on what they do,
02:34:49.420how they want to risk their life, if it's worth the risk or not.
02:34:55.720Or the other analogy would be the knight errants of the medieval period
02:35:06.000that knights were given large amounts of discretion in their operations.
02:35:12.000And actually, as we're seeing right now with non-state actors,
02:35:15.240There's large amounts of local political discretion with who they trust, who they don't trust.
02:35:23.920You can see this within Hamas and other non-state or low-state actors where these individual small commanders are making what are very political and resource-intensive decisions while also making very tactical decisions.
02:35:46.900And this type of, like, complex decision-making, this ambiguous decision-making, Western militaries are just not equipped to inculcate and, like, have spent basically the past, I want to say 20 years, but really 80, 100 years trying to eliminate from their soldiers.
02:36:15.920uh even going to like war on terror stuff like uh the rules of engagement one almost at various
02:36:24.440points one almost had to be a lawyer themselves to read the rules of engagement not just right
02:36:29.740break them uh that that there's a correct that there was too much political micromanagement of
02:36:37.440what should have been tactical decisions during the war on terror but that only trained