Anarchonomicon - Ep 11 Yemeni-Indo-Ukrainian Air War w⧸Goppy

00:00:00.000 They will chain you, like Prometheus, to a rock, where the memory of your own greatness

00:00:15.680 will gnaw you.

00:00:29.560 The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena.

00:00:35.500 The video drone.

00:00:36.840 You look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters.

00:00:42.260 The very minds of the people we are trying to save.

00:00:45.160 But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy.

00:00:50.620 No, we're not doing that. You're getting called a slur.

00:00:54.560 After all, there is nothing real outside our perception of reality.

00:00:59.560 is there you can see that can't you tribal people one of the main kinds of 0.52

00:01:07.960 sport is sort of butchering each other so it's a full-time sport in tribal 1.00

00:01:12.600 societies you my children are the water they will wash away all that has gone 0.84

00:01:19.200 before the gleam in the eye of sex it's very simple the message is force is more

00:01:28.160 effective than vote elections change nothing but i had some ideas we got global and tribal we you

00:01:34.320 know we were going to come the closer you get together the more you like each other yeah

00:01:37.660 there's no evidence of that in any situation that we we've ever heard of major lennox answered with

00:01:43.580 his life as you should have done if you had any sense of honor you have to understand most of

00:01:48.740 these people are not ready to be unplugged and many of them are so inured so hopelessly dependent

00:01:54.900 on the system, that they will fight to protect it.

00:01:58.720 He who saves a nation violates no law.

00:02:06.020 All forms of violence are a quest for identity.

00:02:09.720 When you live out on the frontier, you have no identity.

00:02:13.620 You're a nobody.

00:02:14.600 Therefore, you get very tough.

00:02:16.880 You have to prove that you are somebody.

00:02:19.960 And so you become very violent.

00:02:21.720 I'm coming to kill you! 1.00

00:02:23.580 For greater safety, please avoid the English language. 0.83

00:02:30.800 Please do not translate this message.

00:02:34.720 And so identity is always accompanied by violence.

00:02:38.560 This seems paradoxical to you?

00:02:41.180 It works.

00:02:42.380 Violence works.

00:02:44.100 Therefore, television is reality.

00:02:48.040 And reality is less than television.

00:02:51.080 Were you listening to me, Neil?

00:02:52.160 or were you looking at the woman in the red dress it's just a grotesque post-modern psyop and anyone

00:02:57.980 who's fallen for this is brain damaged hello hello hello glorious listeners welcome to the

00:03:03.100 another exciting episode of the anarchonomicon podcast i am joined today by my friend and your

00:03:10.920 friend to be the one the only what are you calling yourself uh let's go by goppy goppy

00:03:18.860 Yeah, so Goppy has been a friend of mine for a few years now, and I consider him one of my real nerdy resources on everything air power related and everything to do with really the niche geeky details of air war specifically.

00:03:46.800 Between him and Hypozomata, I have a wonderful resource on all these technical details that

00:03:54.900 I would never have it in me to research in my life. 0.97

00:04:00.520 And I was going to have him on to kind of dig deep in and dive into the possibility of a U.S.-Israeli

00:04:11.960 joint strike on iran when it looked like that was building up but uh right now we are in the midst of

00:04:20.700 and everything occurrence every single front in the the the middle east india uh ukraine is still

00:04:33.100 ongoing uh china is hanging in the background i i don't really know what to cover i i'm i'm

00:04:42.740 flown away at gapi what do you think of the current situation what should this episode even be about

00:04:49.340 well the potential iran scenario is mostly what i prepared for i can comment a little bit on

00:04:57.160 india pakistan but there's so little information on that up until now i probably wouldn't be able

00:05:02.220 to spend more than 10 minutes on it i can touch on the air war in ukraine as well probably if

00:05:08.060 you're so inclined yeah so last i saw the ghost of kiev has been spotted flying attack runs over

00:05:16.260 pakistan as part of a joint ukrainian israeli indian operation force protection

00:05:24.020 projection uh samuel l haiti is still out there doing wonderful work uh yeah summarize what you

00:05:35.280 know about india pakistan in the first 10 minutes we'll all start there start with the headline

00:05:40.400 so what it looks like is that the indian air force flew a series of cross-border strikes

00:05:48.320 into de jure Pakistani territory not just the disputed territory in Kashmir against what they

00:05:56.160 called terrorist targets basically the group that conducted this attack a few weeks ago and by the

00:06:03.720 looks of it the Indian Air Force may have gotten a bit of a bloody nose in the process I've seen

00:06:10.100 evidence that I consider to be credit credible that they lost three planes so far with you know

00:06:17.280 potentially more that we don't know about. I think Pakistan is still claiming five as of this time.

00:06:26.060 So this is a scenario where you, dear listener, are blessed by my ignorance, because I know

00:06:34.120 nothing about Indian Pakistani air power. What type of planes is India supposed to have lost

00:06:43.840 in Pakistan. So Pakistan is claiming to have downed three French built Rafals, one Russian

00:06:54.200 built MiG-29 and one Russian stroke Indian built Sioux-30 MKI. I have seen evidence I consider 1.00

00:07:02.980 credible for the MiG-29. I'm pretty sure about that because the tail section was pretty intact.

00:07:09.680 There's Su-30 wreckage plus ejection seat that I think was pretty positively identified.

00:07:15.220 And then another pile of really badly mangled wreckage that I think might have been a French-built Mirage 2000, but I'm really not sure about that.

00:07:26.760 The evidence currently being circulated for Rafale losses seems pretty dubious to me, but I wouldn't rule it out either.

00:07:34.660 so now which generations are these fighters uh because u.s fighter planes are very easy

00:07:43.900 to follow you just you just look f and then you follow which number it is

00:07:49.520 so like obviously the f-16 is more advanced than the f-14 the f-18 is more advanced than the f-16

00:07:57.220 Where does the Raphael fit into this?

00:08:00.340 Where do the MiGs fit in?

00:08:02.760 So the Rafale is a relatively late fourth generation, 4++, 4.5, depending whose nomenclature you're using.

00:08:14.780 French fighter entered service in the early 2000s with France.

00:08:20.200 India bought a relatively small number in the 2010s and kind of overpaid for them.

00:08:26.540 as part of what was originally the mmrca tender where they planned to buy over 100 aircraft but

00:08:32.140 the order ended up being scaled down um so that's kind of what we're dealing with there

00:08:39.580 uh the other sort of mainline combat aircraft of the indian air force their main air superiority

00:08:46.940 and otherwise multi-role aircraft is the su-30 mki which is a russian airframe with indian avionics

00:08:55.580 and an israeli electronic warfare suite um and then their second line behind those is kind of

00:09:04.220 comprised of the aforementioned mig 29 which are relatively early model ones that have been upgraded

00:09:12.860 somewhat in recent times and the mirage 2000s which is an older french fighter

00:09:19.420 from the 1980s which have also been updated to a reasonably modern standard

00:09:25.580 All right, so these are like Cold War junk.

00:09:29.900 Oh, I missed one, actually.

00:09:32.780 There's the other fourth generation fighter in Indian service is the Tejas, which is an Indian design, which entered service relatively recently.

00:09:44.240 I'm not sure if any of those have seen combat in this recent fighting.

00:09:49.440 All right, so this isn't like Cold War junk.

00:09:52.800 Usually we think of third and second world countries outside of Europe as running, you know, these relics from the 60s through the 80s that have, like, barely been upgraded and, like, maybe not maintained.

00:10:09.620 Like, these are, like, fairly modernized air systems with, like, fairly good electronic warfare suites.

00:10:20.980 yeah and this applies to both sides the indian air force is numerically superior but the

00:10:28.020 pakistanis obviously aren't to push over either they operate pretty modern fourth generation

00:10:34.120 fighters both have pretty high-end integrated air defense systems yeah it's it's it's a fairly

00:10:41.140 high-end fight that we're seeing here at least in the air so this is so this was a theory that

00:10:48.960 there's a theory i had which um i'm shooting right from the hip here that i haven't really

00:10:54.900 seen anyone else talk about this but um most like uh airframe like stealth technology like

00:11:04.140 how you conceal the aircraft how you maneuver an aircraft kind of avoiding detection and

00:11:09.520 avoiding air defenses most of that technology is like kind of peaks in the 90s like uh the u.s

00:11:18.200 current stealth bombers are stationed in diego garcia which we'll get to the b2 spirit like it's

00:11:23.800 in late 80s 90s design a very advanced system with like like a ton of engineering work put into it and

00:11:31.520 a classified coating that's supposed to reduce the radar cross-section a ton to take this like

00:11:41.500 massive fighter fighter bomber i think it's classified just as a bomber uh this massive

00:11:49.000 bomber and compress its radar cross signature down to like the size of a golf ball or less

00:11:55.400 but the thing is all that like stealth technology that goes into concealing airframes um

00:12:04.540 that's inherently limited because it's an engineering problem like uh like concealing

00:12:11.280 an airframe designing the plane to have a smaller radar cross section that's a physical problem of

00:12:20.640 actually creating the shape of the the plane and it has to go through the air at the end of the day

00:12:26.740 like it still has to fly it still has to meet all these like actual aviation require requirements

00:12:32.700 Whereas detecting that is inherently like a much easier problem because basically in the time since the 90s, we've had a revolution in computational power.

00:12:48.920 So your ability to, even with like maybe a legacy radar system, just apply more compute power, apply AI to it, apply more advanced algorithms, apply this revolution in computing power we've had since the 90s.

00:13:06.980 your ability to just apply that and draw more out of of the radar signal you're getting back

00:13:14.600 you know you don't need your radar to fly at the end of the day it is it isn't having to solve

00:13:21.480 three problems it just try it has to solve one computational problem of detecting a flying

00:13:28.120 object out there amongst uh the scatter of a radar and information that you're getting back

00:13:34.420 It seems to me that inherently, like, air defense, at least in the past 30 years and probably going forward for it for several more decades, has this massive advantage in just how fast and how quickly it can advance compared to, like, the aircraft or the stealth tech.

00:13:59.880 of course there's hard limits there like uh fundamentally information does disappear like

00:14:07.020 there is an over the horizon where it becomes harder and harder to detect anything and even

00:14:14.340 if you have over the horizon radar there there's ways to get around it and under it like there is

00:14:21.820 a point where the information just like stops existing but seems seems that the ability for

00:14:30.020 stealth technology to overcome air defenses has just the calculus has shifted massively

00:14:36.480 just in the past 30 years am i completely off base or is that

00:14:40.400 so on stealth technology specifically you're definitely on to something with

00:14:48.300 kind of the way that it works and the limitations of it because even though radar absorbent materials

00:14:54.580 and coatings exist and are helpful the majority of what makes an aircraft stealthy is its geometry

00:15:00.820 and that mostly boils down to avoiding right angles to the emitter and so obviously you're

00:15:07.480 going to be more stealthy if you're facing toward it at certain angles and that sort of thing

00:15:13.600 i mean on the in the realm of radars that's an area where i have to go out on a limb a little

00:15:19.160 bit because i don't pretend to understand that technology perfectly but it does seem like

00:15:25.400 in general the capabilities of air defense systems in recent times have become very formidable

00:15:33.720 whether that's sufficient to overcome stealth aircraft so like at the very high end of the

00:15:41.880 spectrum say whether s400 can see a b2 i don't know

00:15:47.880 yeah like uh this is this is where we have to speculate because of course all of this

00:15:56.760 everything related to like radar capabilities and limitations is insanely classified um when i wrote

00:16:03.840 the motorcycle warlord piece i wanted to like look into well how easily could you depict detect

00:16:11.480 a motorcycle using radar you know it's a metal it's a large metal object if you have like 20 of

00:16:16.320 them out there in the woods like does that show up it'll show up more if it's moving yes exactly

00:16:23.860 but uh the the thing that like i really concluded was i don't think there's a person on earth who

00:16:33.860 really knows the answer to that because everyone's like very jealously guarding their capabilities

00:16:39.960 and very jealously hiding what they can and can't detect.

00:16:44.900 Because, of course, if you know exactly how far your opponent can detect,

00:16:51.760 how reliably they can detect the exact specifications of their systems,

00:16:57.080 like, you can do insane stuff and dance around them.

00:17:01.660 That is, like, unthinkable in a world of, like, normal strategic ambiguity.

00:17:08.460 so the there's kind of inherently this error bar bar on either side of like what what radar is and

00:17:18.820 is not capable of and what my theory is that the error bar of radar being like vastly more capable

00:17:29.700 than you might think, or having a specific kind of freaky extra ability

00:17:38.400 that you wouldn't expect, that the addition of all this computing power

00:17:43.140 in the past 30 years has increased that radically,

00:17:47.600 especially for, like, air and sea-based stuff.

00:17:51.420 um uh obviously on the ground assets are a different story and like can almost always

00:18:02.540 inherently hide or disappear into the environment but this stuff in the air it would seem like it's

00:18:10.480 very possible that that a lot of um that some countries or or a good segment of countries

00:18:17.300 might have vastly better detection capabilities

00:18:22.100 than you'd think just by applying new computer science coding

00:18:30.980 to existing systems.

00:18:33.240 That like a radar system from the 90s

00:18:37.140 could have gone through like five upgrades

00:18:40.340 without anyone really touching the hardware.

00:18:42.720 yeah there's definitely plenty of that and in terms of countries sort of guarding their

00:18:50.780 technology and being reticent to show their hand until say an actual war starts is something that

00:18:57.980 we see quite a lot of like stealth aircraft in peacetime that are conducting sort of more mundane

00:19:05.120 missions will have radar reflectors fitted so that a potential adversary can't

00:19:12.080 get a detailed picture of its radar cross-section like say an american f-35 scrambles from

00:19:20.120 just picking out of a hat alaska to go and intercept a russian bomber and fly alongside it

00:19:27.260 over international airspace in the in over whatever waterway that that f-35 will be fitted

00:19:34.860 with a radar reflector so that it makes it more difficult to gather electronic intelligence about

00:19:40.520 it oh by the way you you kids at home look up a radar reflector it's the simplest thing in the

00:19:48.540 world to make it's just like a um it's a it's a cube of right angles that's like concave uh as

00:19:58.440 soon as you see it you'll understand it immediate immediately but uh if you're ever stranded out in

00:20:04.100 the middle of the ocean or the middle of the desert and you think and you think you're lost

00:20:10.540 forever uh that's it that's a very easy thing to fashion that'll make you wildly detectable

00:20:16.980 detectable in a way that like even you know writing oss on like a sandy beach or whatever

00:20:23.780 might not be interesting i hadn't really thought of that yeah no um that was one of the things i

00:20:32.460 was looking up sailing and one of the things they recommend for like uh if you're like doing

00:20:38.400 sea kayaking or if you're uh or if you're like taking a small sailboat out on the ocean they

00:20:46.560 recommend that like you actually bring a a prefab radar reflector with you that like you know this

00:20:55.360 thing the size of like a you know smaller than a laptop or like the size of a you know small

00:21:03.520 quartum quartum milk it's cube shape shape essentially but like a small metal object

00:21:10.040 you know if you put it out it like on radar actually looks like you know a 20 meter by 20

00:21:17.540 meter uh monolithic metal object like it looks very distinctive to radar and that is

00:21:25.220 essentially how chaff works as well obviously yeah exactly exactly but uh that's that's one

00:21:32.540 of the things that like i'm surprised they don't teach often in survival classes that i thought

00:21:38.680 like that as soon as i heard them like that's something like people should know because like

00:21:43.340 that would be very easy to like fashion yourself it's just like a few sheets of like metallic

00:21:50.340 object yeah that didn't come up in the survival course i did but i'll definitely keep it in mind

00:21:55.940 yeah look look up radar radar reflector sea kayak because like there are uh boaters and stuff who

00:22:03.900 just like just like they're out there in like a canoe or something on the open sea and they'll put

00:22:09.520 a massive radar reflector on them uh some of them just to avoid like you know if you're in a small

00:22:18.500 boat at night and you're near, you know,

00:22:22.740 stealing and whatnot and don't want to get hit by, like, an oil tanker.

00:22:28.180 But, uh, but no, that's

00:22:30.320 one of the things that's, like, actually, that's something the average person

00:22:34.380 should know. But, uh, but yeah, no, so

00:22:38.220 India, Pakistan, as much as we meme on it,

00:22:42.260 as much as I meme on it particularly, a whole lot of people

00:22:46.380 are going to be watching it very, very closely.

00:22:48.500 to see the current balance of, like, technical capabilities.

00:22:53.640 And it certainly matches the theory that a lot of people had

00:22:57.540 from the Russo-Ukraine war

00:23:00.620 that air defense has, like, gained a significant upper hand

00:23:06.340 over a lot of, like, deep-strike-type strikes.

00:23:10.620 That Ukraine, they haven't been doing, like, a lot of long-range air raids.

00:23:18.500 They've been actually designing kits and glide bombs and stuff to launch airstrikes at a standoff range.

00:23:36.620 Yeah, standoff capability is mandatory, is pretty much the development there.

00:23:41.740 yeah which you know i don't think anyone had them upgrading dumb dumb bombs into glide bombs

00:23:53.200 in their like 2020 bingo card the next decade but that's certainly an interesting development

00:23:59.660 but i might have guessed at that but i can get to that at a slightly different time

00:24:04.120 i can also do uh pakistan's air force if you like all right yeah well we're on the topic

00:24:11.660 Let's do PAX Stanzer.

00:24:14.220 So their frontline strength of tactical aircraft is mainly in three types.

00:24:21.720 The oldest that's sort of in serious frontline use is the F-16, supplied by the United States in the 1980s, but upgraded to much newer specifications.

00:24:33.600 The F-16 in various country services has proven itself to be an aircraft that's very amenable to substantial upgrades that have kept even pretty old ones fairly competitive.

00:24:46.520 Sort of the middle of the pack is the JF-17, which is an aircraft developed jointly by Pakistan and China, which is a bit of a weird hodgepodge of aircraft and systems.

00:25:02.180 it has the engine from a mig-29 it has a russian gsh-23 cannon that you would see on a mig-21 it 0.99

00:25:10.740 has the radar you would see in an f-16 and yeah a bunch of bit of a hodgepodge of western chinese

00:25:17.380 and some russian technology in it and the probably the most potent aircraft in their service now and

00:25:23.960 And the one that they're attributing some of yesterday's kills to is the Chinese-built J-10C, which they took delivery of relatively recently.

00:25:34.940 And it's kind of China's backbone fighter, fourth generation, akin pretty much to the F-16 in capability, although the J-10C has some pretty new technology in it, a pretty powerful electronic warfare suite and active electronically scanned array radar.

00:25:53.960 and perhaps most critically, in this case, the PL-15 long-range air-to-air missile.

00:26:02.300 And now you're saying electronic warfare suite, and I have a guess of what that is,

00:26:09.080 but I don't have the expertise, and most of our listeners are probably, I assume, going to be completely in the dark.

00:26:19.520 A, what are the dates of these fires? When is this technology being developed?

00:26:23.960 But B, what kind of capabilities does the electronic warfare suite give?

00:26:30.760 So in terms of technology, it pretty much all dates to the 2010s-ish.

00:26:37.900 Most of these aircraft have been upgraded or straight up built fairly recently.

00:26:43.000 In terms of electronic warfare systems carried by fighter aircraft these days,

00:26:48.000 They will almost all carry jammers, which will be capable of putting up some electronic interference with surface-to-air and air-to-air radars to a point, and will often also include various forms of electronic intelligence gathering equipment, so they can take incoming radar waves and classify them as what type of emitter it is, what direction, and maybe get some idea of range and triangulated position.

00:27:18.000 Um, these days that gets pretty advanced, but the earliest iterations of that go back

00:27:25.240 to the fifties and sixties with your basic radar warning receiver, uh, which were originally

00:27:30.920 fitted to bombers and then made their way into fighters, at least U S fighters in Vietnam,

00:27:35.700 which can sort of read incoming radio waves and classify what type they are pretty much

00:27:42.600 mandatory equipment for any kind

00:27:44.680 of

00:27:45.040 serious modern war because

00:27:48.360 there are so many radar-guided

00:27:50.640 weapons that are going to be coming at you.

00:27:53.660 No,

00:27:54.520 tangential,

00:27:57.220 but if you follow

00:27:58.220 E-Rex Arms or

00:28:00.400 S2 Underground, 1.00

00:28:02.880 the Prepper YouTubers,

00:28:04.700 this has been an ongoing project

00:28:06.740 of the Prepper space, is to

00:28:08.660 develop a

00:28:09.660 kind of

00:28:11.460 kind of open source ai enabled uh uh amazon amazon uh products built uh electronic warfare suite for

00:28:27.300 pickup trucks that uh you can be sitting there in your pickup truck with a with a like raspberry

00:28:34.780 pie and a dongle and have an automated AI warn you of a anti-tank targeting radar detected

00:28:45.720 or or tell you the specific make of the radar detector more realistically that you're being

00:28:54.200 lazed by like a police speeding radar is the common application of it but but this is something

00:29:02.560 that's like been around long enough that now the the prepper space is trying to build a ghetto 0.55

00:29:09.520 version of it for their technicals and pickup trucks yeah well in terms of police radars i mean

00:29:16.240 fuzzbusters have been a thing for a while and those are basically a simple radar warning receiver

00:29:21.620 i know the the hardware and this is the thing you you learn when you look into it the hardware is

00:29:30.180 actually like doesn't change very much the the software though like the actual the data set

00:29:38.880 that uh hey you know the patterns of like this is an iranian radar this is a chinese

00:29:46.860 tarding radar this is a a you know weather station station that data set is like

00:29:55.320 surprisingly common but um hard to track track down like it's not quite as you'd think you'd

00:30:04.160 be classified but it's not it's it's floating out there and the real one is just like the software

00:30:11.300 capability like uh like i said these people are trying to like get in out of the something close

00:30:18.780 do an out-of-the-box version of this with like an ADBS receiver dongle and like a Raspberry Pi.

00:30:26.980 It's not like hardware intensive. It's just getting it to work properly. But that's something

00:30:37.340 that you should be looking into, dear listener, if you're in the proper space. If you want your

00:30:42.100 true warlord panic call, you need your ghetto 0.96

00:30:46.100 electronic warfare suite as well. 0.89

00:30:49.520 So the balance of forces

00:30:54.140 between Pakistan and India, 0.89

00:30:56.920 I assume India has vastly more

00:31:01.900 assets than Pakistan. Yes, in terms

00:31:06.300 of tactical aircraft, they outnumber them by

00:31:09.780 close to three to one all right so and in terms of like uh their technical capabilities do they

00:31:20.120 outman them or are they fairly evenly match on the technical side technologically i think the space

00:31:27.860 is pretty even there might be individual systems that have a competitive advantage over their

00:31:33.600 immediate counterpart but nothing i would consider decisive i mean people are talking about what

00:31:39.280 happened last night and i'm still because it's last night taking everything with a pinch of salt

00:31:44.080 but assuming it's true let's say the indians lost three to five aircraft and the pakistanis lost

00:31:51.260 none it's possible that that's due to a superiority in technology and training that they were able to

00:31:57.780 bring to bear it could also be entirely down to the fact that the indians were the ones conducting

00:32:03.320 the offensive operation attacking a heavily defended target and the pakistanis had the

00:32:07.760 advantage of the defender i sort of hesitate to draw broad sweeping strategic conclusions for

00:32:13.540 that reason yeah and there there's lots of intangible things that like you know we won't

00:32:23.300 know for a decade like it could be it could be complete luck that like something just went

00:32:30.420 abhorrently wrong wrong which like does happen there are like like history is filled with uh

00:32:38.500 lots of cases of but for the nail the shoe for look was lost but for the shoe the horse was lost

00:32:44.180 but for the horse the rider and the company was lost or it could be like there are cultural

00:32:52.260 things that crop up were like dumb you know it might be that Pakistani air defense has like

00:32:59.860 a more competent culture than than uh relative to uh Indian fighter command or something or it could

00:33:10.560 be 10 million different different factors factors that again the book will be written in 10 to 20

00:33:19.860 years, maybe, if you can get in

00:33:21.700 translation.

00:33:23.680 Honestly, with technology this

00:33:25.880 sensitive, you might be waiting even longer than

00:33:27.860 that. I mean, in my opinion,

00:33:29.900 the only books worth reading on the air war

00:33:31.900 in Vietnam have been published in the last

00:33:33.900 10 years. 0.99

00:33:38.220 Fair enough, fair enough.

00:33:40.500 Hypo Zamata has been trying to

00:33:41.860 get me to interview

00:33:43.200 a dumb 80-year-old 0.67

00:33:45.960 lieutenant colonel

00:33:47.320 who we aren't quite sure is still

00:33:49.840 we aren't quite sure if he's senile or not but apparently he's out there and hyposomata really

00:33:56.060 wants to chat with him but uh the so moving away from india pakistan and the new hotness

00:34:04.100 uh what i really wanted to chat with you about was now almost old news but uh for the longest

00:34:12.600 time what it looked like building up for a few weeks was that america was going to war with iran

00:34:19.840 uh this had been building up for a while and i had been kind of dismissing it you know we've

00:34:26.680 we've had like scares with iran like a few times in a row but uh then if this was a bluff this was

00:34:35.700 the greatest bluff in military history uh six b2 spirits had been flown to diego

00:34:43.720 And Diego Garcia, which is this U.S. military base and island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. 1.00

00:34:51.060 The B2 spirit is... 0.92

00:34:51.840 Technically British, but the U.S. use it. 0.95

00:34:55.720 Okay.

00:34:56.860 The island.

00:34:57.420 Interesting.

00:34:58.660 These are the things that... 1.00

00:35:01.300 The coincidences of empire and the perfidious Anglo. 0.94

00:35:05.860 uh but uh six b2 spirits these uh stealth bomb bombers had been flown to diego garcia 0.77

00:35:15.700 and had been sitting out on the tarmac of diego garcia in like plain view to um

00:35:22.940 to like open source radar and like pay sorry uh pay satellite image tree that um i was following

00:35:33.020 several people notably s2 underground who were like actually buying the uh the real times the

00:35:40.340 daily satellite data and just seeing these sitting out there on the tarmac and we're actually tracking

00:35:48.420 the ships moving in and out of this place which is insane when you consider they're only 20 ish

00:35:55.740 20 ish 21 i think is the exact number uh b2 spirits in the entire american arsenal and these

00:36:02.480 are these are the heavy american stealth bomb bombers these are the ones that uh america uses

00:36:10.940 for for highly sensitive bombing missions against the hardened targets where enemy air defense is

00:36:21.120 going to be strong um so the now the reason that they're there it might have been a bluff it might

00:36:30.000 have been a disambiguizing operation, but probably one of the most expensive deployments

00:36:38.700 that didn't involve any shots being fired. These planes are so sensitive they cost probably

00:36:49.440 tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars a day, if not an hour, to keep them

00:36:56.160 sitting out there on the tarmac each each a lot of taxpayer money was spent on this but uh the

00:37:03.440 implicit threat of this or the implicit thing they were preparing for was a bombing run on

00:37:10.020 iran's nuclear facilities so so the way you so iran has this massive uh hardened nuclear facility i

00:37:19.820 don't have the name at the exact moment but uh they basically they've learned their lesson from

00:37:27.520 decades of various attacks on their nuclear scientists assassination attempts uh assaults

00:37:36.460 on various nuclear facilities assaults on iraq and iraq's facilities they build a buried super

00:37:44.520 base under a mountain with mere tens of meters worth of like concrete and steel reinforcement

00:37:51.940 on top like a like a buried subterranean u-boat kennel to try and prevent balmy attacks and even

00:38:01.660 bunker busters from punching punching through and destroying their nuclear facilities so the

00:38:07.920 the way you destroy a hardened nuclear facility like this the only way to do it

00:38:14.520 is you need a super heavy bunker buster,

00:38:17.780 which the B2 Spirit is specifically designed to carry,

00:38:21.740 and you need to drop several of these in sequence

00:38:26.200 to not only penetrate the earth

00:38:29.080 and destroy the hardened concrete and steel,

00:38:34.120 but to destroy it and then drop another one

00:38:37.220 and penetrate the earth and now the rubble of the destroyed concrete and steel

00:38:41.360 and destroy the intact concrete and steel under that.

00:38:46.380 And then another one to penetrate the earth

00:38:48.480 and penetrate the rubble and penetrate the moor rubble

00:38:50.900 and destroy the hardened concrete and steel under that.

00:38:55.080 And ideally, once you've dropped enough of these,

00:38:59.200 there won't be another layer of concrete and steel underneath.

00:39:02.940 There'll just be this mountain of earth and rubble.

00:39:06.340 And the last one, one or two,

00:39:08.980 will be able to penetrate through this now powder

00:39:13.460 and destroy the facility underneath.

00:39:17.320 You then collapse it.

00:39:19.440 And this was the implicit threat.

00:39:21.460 This is building up the, you know,

00:39:24.960 these tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour,

00:39:28.080 per plane, were being spent for days and weeks at a time

00:39:32.800 of your taxpayer money, dear Americans,

00:39:36.040 sitting out there on this tarmac in

00:39:38.020 Diego Garcia

00:39:39.600 waiting for the launch

00:39:42.220 order. You know,

00:39:43.900 these guild pilots

00:39:46.080 where they're not sure if they're going to

00:39:48.380 get the order to go out and

00:39:50.120 maybe not make it back alive.

00:39:52.720 Like, for weeks on end.

00:39:55.940 And

00:39:56.460 then something interesting happened.

00:39:58.900 And we weren't quite sure what,

00:40:00.120 although the leaks say

00:40:01.440 the official

00:40:03.960 leak

00:40:04.560 leak or the unofficial leaks are that

00:40:09.580 Secretary of Defense Hegseth and J.D. Vance and another figure who I've heard it said

00:40:18.380 said a few ways each time basically sat Donald Trump down and told him no under no circumstances

00:40:25.460 should he do this under no circumstances should he escalate with Iran that this would

00:40:30.440 there might have been a military reason from Hagseth, there might have been geopolitical

00:40:36.940 reason from Vance, or it might have been, you know, strictly political reasons on both their

00:40:43.700 sides that, you know, they didn't think MAGA would tolerate, you know, war for Israel. But

00:40:49.960 Trump seemed to back down from it, and it's not clear what that's done to his relationship with

00:40:55.180 Netanyahu, and it's not clear what that's done to geopolitics in the Middle East. And I haven't

00:41:01.440 read a good deep dive of it. It's kind of being commentated on, but not really. And

00:41:08.840 since then, policy in Gaza has changed. It might be Trump said something to Netanyahu that

00:41:18.440 is a sell to the fact that Netanyahu wasn't giving his war with Iran. He was giving the

00:41:24.260 green light to escalate his blockade of gaza but this this world-changing shift happened 0.96

00:41:33.220 in the middle east we got to the edge of something like really really destructive and like 0.67

00:41:40.280 incomprehensible and it might have like it might have been that this order would have gone ahead 0.95

00:41:46.380 these six b2 spirits would have been taken off and then we discovered the russians had given iran

00:41:52.100 a technology technology or capability that they just all got shot down that just six american 0.71

00:41:58.920 pilots and the pride of the american american air fleet died over iran and you know that could

00:42:06.940 have escalated very quickly to iran getting a nuke in america going to war with iran like we

00:42:13.140 came very close to that that this was like a major flashpoint like probably

00:42:18.820 probably some percentage the size of the cuban missile crisis and just no one's talking about it

00:42:28.860 and i really haven't seen good deep dives on it and now you know maybe the geopolitical fallout of

00:42:37.180 that caused in your backstamp but i i really want to get your opinions on this copy what what is

00:42:42.880 happening well in a way you might be disappointed to hear me say i suspect the reality isn't quite

00:42:49.680 as exciting as that whilst acknowledging that we do exist in a sort of state of profound ignorance

00:42:57.620 about what goes on behind closed doors i think maybe i'll touch the political side of it first

00:43:04.620 because i only uh sort of kept half an ear open to that i'd sort of gotten the impression

00:43:11.460 and maybe i need to look into this further that it was uh mr waltz who was essentially going behind

00:43:18.980 trump's back and talking to netanyahu trying to cook up some kind of a plan to

00:43:24.380 make war with iran a fait accompli in some way or another and that's the reason why

00:43:28.760 Mr. Waltz has since been

00:43:30.600 I mean

00:43:31.940 technically promoted but I would say

00:43:35.060 fired by way of being kicked upstairs

00:43:37.300 Alright

00:43:41.380 Interesting

00:43:42.720 I had heard that theory as

00:43:44.840 well and I had also

00:43:47.040 heard like this might have been

00:43:49.040 like chaff by like someone in the

00:43:51.080 know trying to like

00:43:52.220 like stay it's the opposite

00:43:54.920 but I had heard also the opposite

00:43:56.760 that there's just this

00:43:58.760 And this is the state of American politics right now. It's like, you know, it's like early imperial Rome where you don't know what what is actually happening in the empire until it's already happened. It's fait accompli that we are we are seeing the shift to imperial politics before our eyes.

00:44:20.100 but uh this this like intersection of like five or six bizarre political realities uh

00:44:29.840 did i describe the tactical situation with dave garcia right like just the

00:44:35.980 the technical side of it with the b2 spurts so i'll get to that next in terms of the mission

00:44:43.260 profile to go out and hit a deep underground facility yeah it's more or less as you described

00:44:48.720 they'd be dropping their party piece weapon, the GBU-57, which is their deep bunker buster,

00:44:57.340 and each aircraft can carry two of those, so presumably they could drop enough of those

00:45:03.680 to achieve the desired effects.

00:45:07.100 In terms of the deployment itself, I think its purpose was a little bit different, and

00:45:15.300 a lot of that i've sort of diagnosed based on the mere fact that they were in diego garcia in a very

00:45:24.500 conspicuous fashion because they don't need to be based that close to iran to attack iran the

00:45:33.760 u.s air force has used its heavy bombers to fly power projection strikes on the other side of the

00:45:39.280 world from bases in the continental united states before like b-52s did that during the gulf war

00:45:44.760 obviously with quite considerable aerial refueling support but it can be done that way

00:45:50.580 and diego garcia is notionally outside the generally attributed range of known iranian

00:46:00.380 strike systems although some sea-launched missile capability may exist that would be

00:46:06.800 theoretically capable of hitting it so it's maybe putting the aircraft in harm's way a little bit

00:46:11.480 but not a lot. And the fact that they were parked conspicuously outside on the ramp in

00:46:17.820 broad daylight, which is actually quite hard on their radar absorbent coatings, which are

00:46:21.860 pretty high maintenance, normally they're kept in climate controlled hangars. That to me really

00:46:29.300 looks like a public show of force meant to basically exert diplomatic pressure and move

00:46:38.400 the needle towards making some kind of deal and also that the other purpose which they did actually

00:46:44.140 fill whilst they were there was flying strike missions against the houthis in yemen which they

00:46:49.780 did do uh since i mean and i can get into this as well that campaign didn't really seem to be going

00:46:57.940 very well and it was mostly a u.s navy show up until then and perhaps required some extra muscle

00:47:03.120 obviously there was there has been a development on that yesterday as well but i can touch that

00:47:08.480 subject uh probably on its own afterwards yeah so that the houthis i do want to get into because

00:47:17.360 that is like uh one of the stories that that deeply fascinates me and no one is going to

00:47:26.900 write this book about the houthis that i want to read read that's that really goes into their

00:47:35.500 their tactics their geopolitical position uh just how they're operating because the

00:47:42.380 the houthis have been subjected to like one of the most intensive like uh

00:47:49.380 multi-pronged geopolitical campaigns uh that i've ever seen any group like subjected to they

00:47:56.640 had the Saudis going after them they had various Israeli strikes on them they had the U.S. leading

00:48:02.400 multiple campaigns against them like over the past 10 years like this has been going on

00:48:09.760 I remember 2015-2017 people were talking about the the genocide in Yemen that that Saudi Arabia

00:48:17.780 was enabling by attacking life support systems and they just seemingly grown in capabilities like

00:48:26.180 They have fairly dramatic strike capabilities.

00:48:30.440 They have a ton of homebrew rocket systems and, like, imported rocket systems that are able to strike.

00:48:38.520 Like, you look on a map from Yemen to Israel, like, that's a long strike range to actually build to land rockets with precision.

00:48:52.680 Like, that's, that's, might be a thousand miles, miles out of my, eh, I'm thinking of the distortion of the earth right now.

00:49:03.580 About 1,200, I'm looking on a map here.

00:49:06.580 All right. Yeah, so that's, like, incredible capability to develop while under, like, blockade and starvation in the midst of cholera outbreaks.

00:49:17.840 and this inability of the U.S. to kind of break the Houthis

00:49:26.080 or make them negotiate to something approaching like peace and quiet

00:49:30.820 is quite dramatic.

00:49:34.340 And I want to get your opinion on this.

00:49:36.800 Like, what have the campaigns against them been like?

00:49:39.940 What's characterized it?

00:49:41.060 You know, why is air power seemingly getting weaker?

00:49:46.020 even where there is an air defense so the sheer amount of time that's passed since well during

00:49:57.400 which they've been subject to sustained bombing campaigns starting out with saudi arabia

00:50:03.160 means that at least certainly by now they have learned the critical aspect of resistance to

00:50:10.680 air power, which is how to disperse and camouflage your stuff so that even if the enemy can find it,

00:50:17.160 no one strike is going to do any great amount of damage.

00:50:20.960 This was kind of something that was really perfected in the Korean and Vietnam Wars by North Korea and North Vietnam. 0.77

00:50:29.020 that a you disperse and camouflage your stuff and b you put enough defenses in place such that

00:50:38.420 the risk isn't worth the reward now in terms of exactly what weapon systems they operate

00:50:48.540 i don't think there's really a ton of information floating around on it but in terms of air defense

00:50:54.520 capability the thing that i've kind of observed about this is that the way that and again this

00:51:01.760 has been a mostly u.s navy show in this recent bombing campaign against them in the last year

00:51:09.300 and a bit whatever it's been up until now is that they treat the threat like a fairly high

00:51:16.980 end one like you will see the way that u.s naval aircraft are conducting strikes against them

00:51:24.040 will very often be you'll have the core of the strike package will be you know super hornets or

00:51:30.740 whatever which are carrying fairly high-end standoff munitions like slam er cruise missiles

00:51:39.260 jsao stealth glide bombs systems like that that are capable of considerable standoff of you know

00:51:46.340 50 plus miles from a target and then in addition to that they'll be going in with heavy defense

00:51:52.180 suppression support so you'll see you know ea-18g growler electronic warfare aircraft carrying

00:51:58.740 in some cases as many as four anti-radiation missiles going in with them and they've

00:52:04.400 presumably got their jammers on and everything this is indicative of a threat which possesses

00:52:10.780 reasonably capable and mobile radar guided sam systems

00:52:16.080 so so is the conceit that the houthis have been getting this from iran or like backdoor from

00:52:27.420 russia what they've generally been what they've generally been accused of at least is receiving

00:52:34.240 equipment from iran by various means i'm not entirely sure exactly how that works but i'm

00:52:42.100 And I kind of gather from that, that most of this equipment is probably Iranian in origin.

00:52:48.680 All right.

00:52:51.600 Again, this is where I want a book about this, because just the logistics of getting an Iranian air defense system into Yemen,

00:53:02.860 which is like you know Saudi Yemen is like a a country on the sea but it's

00:53:12.160 bordered by Saudi Arabia and Oman which are like normal U.S. allies and and the U

00:53:21.100 you know the Red Sea there is one of the most heavily patrolled areas in the

00:53:27.320 world how they how they get those systems in is like like that the logistics of that fascinates

00:53:35.480 me like how do you load up an iranian aero defense system onto a ship and get it there or onto like a

00:53:44.060 a freight box and get it there these these are the stories that that keep me awake at me but um

00:53:53.320 Um, but the, so these, so that's fascinating that the, because that, so these air, these

00:54:06.320 airstrike missions, these, uh, um, multiple airplane strikes with, uh, this complex package

00:54:14.440 combining, combining, uh, the actual strike aircrafts, the Hornets with, with the, uh,

00:54:22.360 suppression of enemy air defense

00:54:23.860 missions like

00:54:25.220 that's multiplying the complexity

00:54:28.160 of the actual

00:54:30.040 strikes like five fold

00:54:32.360 plus because now

00:54:34.200 all of a sudden you've got to have

00:54:36.200 have

00:54:37.280 five planes flying

00:54:40.080 at once as opposed to just

00:54:41.580 one but also you have

00:54:44.120 all the like logistical tempo

00:54:46.140 and limitations

00:54:47.000 that come with having five

00:54:50.000 five going at once so like you need

00:54:52.340 Five times the maintenance, five times the repealing, five times the assets.

00:55:01.480 We're coming off the news right now that the U.S., I believe it's the Dwight Eisenhower, has lost a second F-18, like, just rolled off the deck into the sea.

00:55:18.400 USS Harry Truman is the one that's in the Red Sea right now.

00:55:22.340 Alright, these are the details I mix up as non-eracy person, but they've lost a second to F-18 that just rolled off the deck, or maybe they're doing evasive maneuvers, etc., etc.

00:55:44.920 the story is is uh we haven't been pulled the whole story yet but uh this speaks to like a

00:55:53.920 level of exhaustion that i've been hearing about like from multiple different sources

00:55:58.500 they're affecting like the u.s uh deployed like carrier groups that they're just the operational

00:56:05.900 build tempo that tempo that they're forced to work at to seemingly not get much done

00:56:13.840 that uh the number of planes are having to fly versus the number of like impacts on

00:56:20.280 on the ground is like really wearing down the u.s carrier groups at a time when like the navy

00:56:26.720 is struggling with recruitment and retention so you figure you figure you've deployed it you're

00:56:34.360 stretching the deployment you know you're exhausting your crew with uh these complex

00:56:42.820 missions that that are requiring mass amounts of effort and at the same time you might be under

00:56:50.160 crewed uh i i want to get your opinion on it yeah so it is true that yet another super hornet did

00:57:00.240 slide off the deck of Truman today at least that's what the official release has said and that another

00:57:07.440 one did I can't remember exactly when like a week or so ago and that in that previous incident it

00:57:15.500 seems to be pretty clear that it slid off the deck during a hard evasive turn during some kind of

00:57:22.240 missile attack on the carrier group so yeah that has happened and the exact circumstances

00:57:29.260 under which it transpired is obviously not entirely clear in the case of that first one

00:57:35.540 the official story is basically that the aircraft was uh under tow near the elevator on the deck

00:57:41.620 edge and the ship turned hard and it slid off because obviously the plane is does not have its

00:57:46.760 parking brake set and it's a lot heavier than the tractor that's entirely possible i think truman

00:57:51.520 also lost a plane over the side into the mediterranean during the deployment in 2022

00:57:57.820 i mean there's such accidents do happen but uh one also does wonder in the back of one's mind

00:58:06.940 of you know are they maybe just maybe covering up combat losses it's i i really don't know how

00:58:16.500 to assess the probability of that but the supposed uh friendly fire incident last year where one of

00:58:22.440 their super hornets was shot down according to them by one of the carrier group escorts

00:58:26.480 possibly smacks the most of that

00:58:29.240 but I don't really

00:58:30.800 quite know for sure how much to make of it either way

00:58:33.620 so this is

00:58:36.980 it's an

00:58:39.380 the combat losses theory

00:58:41.460 is like an interesting

00:58:42.860 one but like in a lot

00:58:45.500 of ways

00:58:45.980 it's kind of the same difference

00:58:49.440 like if the

00:58:51.300 if the

00:58:53.500 Truman has to like

00:58:54.980 turn hard to starboard

00:58:57.100 to avoid

00:58:58.000 a dumb

00:59:01.040 unguided rocket that

00:59:02.940 or a series of dumb unguided

00:59:05.140 rockets that

00:59:05.980 the Yemeni Houthis have fired out at it

00:59:09.260 and it loses a

00:59:10.580 hornet over the side.

00:59:13.340 Like, sure, the

00:59:15.040 Yemeni rocket didn't hit the

00:59:17.220 ship and destroy the hornet,

00:59:19.020 but effectively, it lost the hornet

00:59:21.160 to the rocket.

00:59:22.340 Yeah, it's not really an accident in that respect.

00:59:26.480 Like, just being able to force your enemy to make hard maneuvers and to work around the clock

00:59:36.660 and to launch five planes instead of one because you have the threat of an advanced radar air defense system

00:59:48.800 that you know you maybe never used or heaven fighter like only turned on once or twice and

00:59:55.580 then immediately like hightailed it out of there like just those kind of things like even if they

01:00:02.620 never really intended to fire it in anger at like one of these these planes that like probably a u.s

01:00:10.840 trained trained pilot you know would have like a fairly decent or even like a highly probable

01:00:19.000 chance of of avoiding or surviving like just forcing that operational no uh a risk and

01:00:28.160 forcing them to take that into account that's that's exhausting your enemies that's that's

01:00:34.620 making them use 10 million dollars where they should have been able to use 500 000 dollars

01:00:39.100 That's forcing a pace where they're either getting exhausted enough that they're losing F-18s over the side, or they're having to maneuver often enough to harassment that they're losing F-18 over the side.

01:00:56.600 You know, War of the Flea, but, you know, the flea might not really be able to hurt you, but if you have to, but if you start swatting at it and you wind up like jamming your hand against the door, you know, you know, the flea got you to hurt your hand.

01:01:15.640 yeah there there is much in what you say and the other aspects of this as well is when you have to

01:01:27.040 use standoff capability a lot of the time in order to honor the threat um you are not only

01:01:34.280 well you are using high-end standoff precision munitions which are expensive and not available

01:01:44.600 in unlimited quantities and the u.s navy's stocks of its higher end weapons and actually all the

01:01:53.100 branches of the u.s armed forces are always wary of drawing down those stocks too much because

01:01:58.020 they feel quite deeply that they are going to need a lot of them for a war with china

01:02:01.640 yeah no i i remember seeing memes about this that uh that pacific calm uh almost certainly

01:02:12.580 looks at CENTCOM with a mix of ire and resentment, because Israel is in CENTCOM, which is quite

01:02:23.900 ironic that the U.S. homeland is not CENTCOM, the U.S. homeland is NORTHCOM, Israel is CENTCOM,

01:02:31.320 but that because the Israel lobby is so powerful and Israel has such a hold on U.S. politics, 0.85

01:02:40.060 that stockpiles, that Pacific Kong really needs to deter China

01:02:47.480 might not be there, might be really thin on the ground

01:02:52.500 at the moment of a crisis.

01:02:55.480 That's got to be a thought going through the minds of every general

01:03:02.380 that's in the Indo-Pacific.

01:03:04.660 yeah and likewise the supplies of things like the attackms missiles that were sent to

01:03:14.140 ukraine are probably keeping them up at night a little bit too especially since that system

01:03:17.700 is long out of production so they're not getting any more in terms of centcom specifically

01:03:24.260 armchair warlord on x stroke twitter whom you should definitely follow has uh sort of only

01:03:31.740 half-jokingly describe CENTCOM

01:03:33.600 as America's equivalent of Japan's

01:03:35.980 Kwantung Army in China, and that it

01:03:37.820 sort of does whatever

01:03:39.840 it wants and feels no particular

01:03:41.920 obligation to ask

01:03:43.700 Washington for permission or even tell them what it's

01:03:45.760 doing.

01:03:48.920 This

01:03:49.600 is 100% true.

01:03:53.540 And, of course,

01:03:55.860 CENTCOM is, like, only

01:03:57.580 only, like,

01:03:59.680 half of it because the cia is up to their nose and everything 0.95

01:04:02.960 they're like the u.s has been on both sides of every war in the middle east

01:04:08.660 of my lifetime like uh like you hear conspiracy theories that uh

01:04:15.500 that various factions of the u.s government 100 percent knew where bin lan was in the months after

01:04:22.760 9 11 11 and it's like that might be a conspiracy maybe i've seen various reports of stuff being

01:04:32.580 declassifier coming coming out but that's 100 the pattern of everything that's happened

01:04:38.460 in the millies like the within a decade of um of 9 11 the u.s was funding al-qaeda again as a proxy

01:04:47.780 in iraq and syria or or a proc or a hat pause of al-qaeda like explicitly al-qaeda

01:04:56.880 kind of brand groups and is still funding them in syria syria and at various points was openly

01:05:07.020 waging war on isis and funding isis at the same same time variously to check asad or check

01:05:14.900 check turkey or keep keep iran guessing or or to have a force that that was near lebanon

01:05:25.820 lebanon a lot of this stuff you can't it's a struggle to even know what their justification

01:05:32.240 is or if they're just like well this is an asset we have have that we have close ties to and we'll

01:05:38.460 do do bag stuff for us when we ask so might as well keep funding them and keep enabling

01:05:45.120 them that that the the mess of like i think it's 11 13 countries now that the u.s has like

01:05:55.200 been funding or carrying out operations and strikes in in the middle middle east like

01:06:01.560 within that dense web you know it's like dragon ball z every single combination of like like

01:06:09.540 allies and fights has occurred within my short lifetime time that if you want to see a matchup

01:06:19.000 of the u.s funding iranian proxies or the u.s funding funding hezbollah proxies or the u.s

01:06:26.380 funding al-Qaeda proxies, or the U.S. fighting each of these, or U.S. soldiers getting in

01:06:34.180 shootouts with each of these, or U.S. soldiers getting shot by weapons that the U.S. government

01:06:39.400 bought. You can find all that somewhere in the past 20 years, and it's truly insane, and

01:06:50.520 uh someone criticized the u.s uh system of dividing commands that that america had created

01:06:58.740 a little caesars caesars out of all its generals and the insane thing with centcom and like

01:07:06.700 wide segments of africacom is it seems that the u.s has created dozens of caesars with overlapping

01:07:15.300 mandates and like no mandate to say no to each other or anyone else like it's not clear that

01:07:23.500 there is a unified vision anywhere in the in this or that like even your wildest dreams like uh

01:07:31.840 like like anti-israel vision where that where netanyahu is pulling the strings behind it all

01:07:40.040 not even clear that that you know he's conducting the orchestra instead of the orchestra conducting

01:07:45.280 him that like it's true it seems that everyone is is now the sorcerer's apprentice who's lost

01:07:55.220 the hat but the magic keeps going yeah and i certainly don't know how to begin to make head

01:08:03.480 or tail out of quite a lot of it the one thing i'll probably add to that though is that during

01:08:08.060 mr trump's first presidency it seems entirely clear to me that he was being kept out of the

01:08:14.220 loop particularly about operations in syria by the various u.s forces that were there and that

01:08:21.520 when he made an attempt to withdraw them he was pretty much flatly disobeyed oh yeah syria

01:08:29.100 syria uh the person to follow on this who like writes incredibly long books on various

01:08:38.500 war zones is uh scott horton at the libertarian institute he runs he has it's actually on

01:08:46.420 radio uh anti anti-war radio it's a in podcast form it's wonderful listening but uh but he

01:08:55.180 covers he'll go back through and like cover the entirety of the afghan war cover cover the

01:09:01.980 entirety of the war on terror and he covers this stuff in real time and he follows all the dates

01:09:09.140 of like who was enabling who when and who had relationships with who in the 90s and whatnot

01:09:16.180 and the the raw madness of it all like uh the raw insanity of it of it all like uh

01:09:27.700 like the people who i i'm convinced that there have been like major american wars

01:09:36.840 that happened not even because any general had a vision but because like uh

01:09:42.280 like a minor lobbyist was really tight with hillary clinton at other crack point in the like

01:09:51.080 like 2000s early 2010s and barack obama had to assuage her this way or that for various reasons

01:10:00.500 or or that ex-dictator would went left when they should have went right on on putin or whoever 0.69

01:10:10.540 uh there's the conspiracy theories about gaddafi and his attempt to create a gold back

01:10:18.320 that currency in africa but i'm i'm not even sure that like that actually threatened the

01:10:26.100 petrodollar or anyone of important versus like threatening one specific you know wall street

01:10:32.800 donor who just said that was the case case and no u.s general knew enough about about finance

01:10:40.640 to contradict them so hillary clinton clinton backed it because a donor wanted it like there

01:10:47.760 There's tons of stuff like this where future historians will never be able to untangle why the U.S. did anything.

01:10:58.500 As much as a mess the Middle East is, like, the U.S. decision structures around the Middle East exactly reflect it. 0.55

01:11:13.720 Like, the complete madness and chaos that is the Middle East is an exact reflection of the U.S. decision-making process about the Middle East. 0.88

01:11:22.600 yep there is certainly much in what you say there i don't know if i have too much more to add to it

01:11:32.280 all right uh well i'm having you on to discuss aircraft we're discussing aircraft i i shouldn't

01:11:39.940 be taking over and philosophizing uh so within what are the interesting developments that you've

01:11:47.260 seen both in in the iran move uh the houthis in yemen or i suppose we can get into israel

01:11:58.580 palestine if you're seeing interesting stuff related to air power there um israel palestine

01:12:05.480 is pretty uninteresting because it's just the israelis bombing people who possess no meaningful

01:12:12.880 means of resisting

01:12:14.320 that's not really driving

01:12:17.180 technology or doctrine in any meaningful

01:12:19.180 way

01:12:19.520 yeah the only one

01:12:23.340 I'm

01:12:25.120 I have a spot in my

01:12:27.120 heart for the 1.00

01:12:29.060 Gaza war specifically because

01:12:31.020 it's

01:12:33.220 one of the first times we've seen

01:12:34.940 like a major tunneled

01:12:37.060 fortress go up against the air power since

01:12:39.040 like Uchi and

01:12:41.100 the iron triangle in vietnam and i i haven't really heard anyone talk about like how much

01:12:50.840 is really bunker busters have or have not been able to like damage the gaza metro

01:12:57.140 pro like i haven't even really seen seen much like theorizing or propagandizing about it

01:13:04.020 that like trying to map out what's there and what isn't maybe you know might be they've

01:13:11.120 destroyed all might be they haven't scratched it like i i really don't know and we've seen this

01:13:18.580 like uh kind of take over in in ukraine where a lot of like funneling warfare has has been used

01:13:27.620 to counter artillery rockets and airstrikes.

01:13:33.480 We see large factories and metalworks and stuff

01:13:40.000 kind of echoing or rhyming with World War II

01:13:46.540 and the various factories of Stalingrad.

01:13:49.300 But we've seen these used to dramatic effect

01:13:55.660 or at least considerable drama um do you have any thoughts about that or i am really not at all

01:14:05.100 sure whether the how intact the tunnel complex is uh underneath gaza or either it must be said

01:14:12.380 um i definitely have kept an eye on some of the tunnel operations that have been conducted

01:14:17.860 in crane usually seemingly meant for a very specific mission to infiltrate a force behind

01:14:23.480 a particular strong point

01:14:26.560 and that just in general

01:14:28.800 the urbanized nature of the fighting there

01:14:31.580 because of the sheer danger of operating in open country

01:14:34.820 with the sensor saturation

01:14:35.940 is certainly something to keep an eye on

01:14:39.240 yeah

01:14:41.560 so

01:14:42.480 this is one of those things where I wouldn't be shocked

01:14:46.900 if like

01:14:48.020 if like

01:14:51.700 Hamas is considerably

01:14:54.180 outperforming what you think 0.92

01:14:56.080 from what you see

01:14:57.020 on the ground.

01:14:59.740 That like

01:15:00.220 I'm not sure what the tonnage is now.

01:15:04.320 I remember at one point it was

01:15:05.520 50 to 100,000

01:15:07.960 tons of

01:15:08.520 tons of TNT

01:15:11.800 equivalent. It might be

01:15:12.980 like 300

01:15:15.840 400,000 tons by now

01:15:18.160 bombs have been dropped on Gaza.

01:15:19.540 But the U.S. dropped like 7 million tons of explosives during the Vietnam War as they were conducting way more aggressive maneuver operations.

01:15:30.660 And, you know, just 70, 80 miles of mud tunnels in Coochie, Vietnam, you know, held up and maintained, like, this connection basically from the border of Cambodia right into the city of Saigon.

01:15:46.880 that uh this this very rudimentary tunneling network tunneling network uh if you look at the

01:15:55.320 the photos you can see the vietnam like tunnel tunnel fighters the u.s tunnel rats crawling

01:16:02.180 into these and they're the most paranoid paranoid claustrophobic things you've ever seen like uh

01:16:07.500 like the nightmare caving videos that you see online it looks exactly like that but also they

01:16:12.900 have guns and someone might

01:16:14.740 as they're like crawling

01:16:16.700 and their hands are pinned someone might shoot them

01:16:18.680 but uh

01:16:20.100 the

01:16:21.320 this tele-network is incredibly rudimentary

01:16:25.140 tele-network that you can go and see

01:16:27.040 if you ever visit Vietnam

01:16:28.540 I fully intend to one day

01:16:30.840 yeah they 0.98

01:16:32.400 wind it for fat American acid

01:16:34.420 so like it's like you can go

01:16:36.720 down and crawl around in it and you won't

01:16:38.960 suffocate to death because

01:16:40.760 it was designed for like a five foot 1.00

01:16:42.520 but 90 pound Vietnamese person uh you can go there and you can see all the traps and like the 0.98

01:16:49.420 the barracks that they built in the bottom of it and uh they also have you can rent guns and fire 0.88

01:16:56.940 basically unlimited ammo as long as you pay pay of like their Soviet surplus stuff but uh

01:17:05.280 what what takes me back is that survived even with like like you know there was basically

01:17:13.940 nowhere in south vietnam that u.s soldiers like couldn't put a patrol like uh but you know it's

01:17:22.760 guerrilla warfare wherever you patrol someone's going to be there like an hour later and you

01:17:30.980 missed them and they controlled again. But the U.S. had like hundreds of thousands of soldiers

01:17:35.740 ready to patrol South Vietnam and they couldn't break that tunnel network. There was only like

01:17:40.220 70, 80 kilometers of like dug with hand tools. The Gaza Metro is like, it was supposed to be like

01:17:49.140 500 miles officially like public record before the war and was like built with concrete and 1.00

01:17:58.500 and the actual professional like state level warcraft like if it wasn't like the the kuchi

01:18:05.360 tunnel network was built built with like by people who are under occupation like you've built

01:18:13.780 you know great escape style you know having to smuggle out of the dirt the gaza metro was built

01:18:19.820 while hamas was the government of gaza well like they had complete control of the society and the

01:18:26.820 economy and, like, had a ready supply of people and earth-moving equipment and people who

01:18:33.960 had no other employment opportunities and could be paid incredibly cheaply, cheaply to dig,

01:18:40.540 um, I, if Israel has managed to destroy it, they, they had vastly better planning and someone had

01:18:49.600 read very intensively on the tunnels of kuchi beforehand which like maybe they did but i'm i'm

01:18:58.860 that's an uh the the book tunnels of kuchi by manigold is like fairly obscure and i'm not sure

01:19:05.900 like any current u.s military officers have read it read it and that was a u.s war so the extent to

01:19:14.680 which Israel had read up on it before going into Gaza.

01:19:22.140 Maybe?

01:19:22.880 Yeah, I would not be at all surprised if at least the majority of that complex were still intact.

01:19:27.560 It does seem like basically the majority of the bombing campaign has been targeted at buildings on the surface,

01:19:35.800 often seemingly with the express intent of killing and terrorizing the civilian population

01:19:43.000 as much as any kind of direct military objective uh on the tunnels in vietnam um they did have

01:19:50.860 geography going for them there a little bit in that the uh basically the soil they were digging

01:19:56.780 through there is a very thick clay that sets like concrete when it's exposed to air so that

01:20:00.780 was quite helpful to them um i have actually read a ton about the air war in vietnam that might be a

01:20:08.500 whole other uh thing in and of itself what i gather about the tunnel complexes there was the

01:20:16.640 main aid to their survivability was the americans by and large not knowing they were there

01:20:20.940 yeah no this was this was something that like um

01:20:30.780 the knowledge of the extent of them like uh for long as time the u.s u.s soldiers would like

01:20:38.940 bind a tunnel and then just drop like a grenade or like an explosive charge down and say there

01:20:44.920 we collapsed it and assume that was it not realizing that it was just like the entrance

01:20:50.960 to like you know a dwarf fortress that stretched dozens of miles and was like all continuous um

01:20:58.720 the the other thing is like they couldn't like actually put people in it and like penetrate

01:21:05.120 deeply because uh if you look up like uh uh diagrams of it there's a lot of good ones just

01:21:14.360 like on google image search they'll show you like uh they included booby traps and dead ends and

01:21:20.080 like three fork turns and like you know stuff that a really sick and twisted dungeon master would

01:21:27.000 like putting your dnd campaign back in the day you know you know uh a water passage that you have

01:21:34.860 to crawl through underwater to get to the end of but there are two of them and one of them doesn't

01:21:39.880 have an end it just continues in water until until you run out of air but the other one

01:21:46.820 but the other one is too long that you can't actually like go halfway and then turn turn

01:21:54.060 back you have to commit to like the death death swim uh if you're to actually like access the

01:22:01.700 true other side so like there's a lot of like sick and twisted stuff like that where like um

01:22:07.100 i i've heard stories of like like a clever one of these like wouldn't just like kill one person

01:22:14.080 who would kill like two or three trying to recover the bodies yeah i wouldn't want to go down to try

01:22:20.920 clear that either and from what i understand it doesn't look like the israelis have been

01:22:26.360 venturing down into the tunnels they do find very often no i saw them like trying to use

01:22:34.540 dogs and like other stuff like that uh robots and like even stuff like that you run into the

01:22:42.640 exact same problem of like of like uh really basic tunnel design stuff that like existed

01:22:51.380 you know in the vietnam era and probably existed like like in 2000 bc uh uh like

01:23:00.960 we'll just shred whatever whatever exploratory assets you send down so i can't can't imagine

01:23:09.640 And it's probably it's probably just in siege logic right now where it's like, how much could Hamas have stockpiled versus how how long can Israel starve out the entire entirety of Gaza before before Europe finally finally eliminates their Holocaust Nile laws?

01:23:31.840 yeah and sort of taking a more conceptual framework um it seems like as a rule when

01:23:41.360 conducting counterinsurgency operations using firepower as a substitute for maneuver which

01:23:47.340 the israelis in particular have done to a great degree it doesn't work because the enemy is simply

01:23:52.680 too elusive this is a theme that comes up repeatedly in a book that i just finished

01:23:58.120 on the soviet war in afghanistan which is uh the bear went over the mountain by

01:24:03.080 lester grau which i absolutely recommend

01:24:05.840 all right i i need to read that one i i just watched uh the the 1980s movie the beast of war

01:24:16.000 recently which i also highly recommend it's like uh uh what if the soviet afghan war was also

01:24:25.200 a 1980s film in the style of aliens that uh you have like american-accented soviet soldiers doing

01:24:33.860 like game over man type highly quotable stuff but it's actually an amazing film it uh it includes

01:24:41.800 all these like clever little parables has like a wonderful synthy soundtrack the visuals of it

01:24:47.900 manages to make

01:24:50.120 a random

01:24:52.020 desert seem like

01:24:53.780 really mystical. Probably

01:24:55.320 I need to write a review of it

01:24:58.000 but I highly recommend

01:24:59.920 that one. Yes, shamefully

01:25:01.860 I have not gotten around to that one yet but I do know

01:25:03.960 it by its reputation and certainly

01:25:05.820 I mean

01:25:07.080 that was, creating that

01:25:09.920 kind of atmosphere is probably the

01:25:11.980 proper thing to do since that's

01:25:14.000 kind of the

01:25:14.900 popular image that's created

01:25:17.700 of the Afghanistan war

01:25:19.480 is these mysterious

01:25:21.640 mountains with their mysterious people

01:25:23.800 or as the one song goes

01:25:26.060 Goodbye Afghanistan

01:25:31.540 land of shadowy ghosts 1.00

01:25:33.400 Yeah, no

01:25:36.120 it was excellently done

01:25:39.400 and like

01:25:40.100 it's really delightful

01:25:43.800 you know what it is?

01:25:46.020 It's like Red Dawn 0.96

01:25:47.520 but with like the americans as the reds even though like they're supposed to be russians

01:25:54.140 they're the ones speaking unaccented english so it's like red dawn but with the characters reversed

01:25:59.500 and it works incredibly incredibly well and it has this wonderful mood uh if you want to do a

01:26:06.180 double feature watch watch the beasts of war and then watch uh the bounty the version with uh

01:26:14.200 um noll gibson and anthony hopkins they both have a very similar synthy soundtrack and they're both

01:26:20.020 representing something that is like completely alien to 1980s america you know you know a tank

01:26:26.940 tank lost in the desert of afghanistan or like a a british royal navy ship in tahiti but uh they

01:26:35.700 both have a wonderful moods that like complement each other and the vast oceans of sand and the

01:26:42.820 Vast oceans of water also visually complement each other as a double feature.

01:26:47.480 That sounds like a pretty good evening.

01:26:51.200 But, uh, so we migrated from, speaking of Afghanistan and the Khyber Pass and stuff,

01:27:00.320 we migrated from Indo-Pakistan around Iran, Yemen, Israel.

01:27:09.940 Let's talk about Ukraine.

01:27:11.720 I know you want to talk about it

01:27:14.020 you're probably one of the people

01:27:16.560 I know who's followed Ukraine

01:27:18.040 most closely and you've been following the air

01:27:20.480 war in Ukraine which is like

01:27:22.040 which is really

01:27:24.760 hard to do because there's so

01:27:26.540 little information that gets released

01:27:28.600 publicly

01:27:29.120 come on there's so much information

01:27:32.380 haven't you been following the ghosts of Kiev

01:27:34.240 he's still out there

01:27:35.320 I see him posting and calling people slurs

01:27:38.560 all the time

01:27:39.300 yes but uh but tell me about ukraine uh what are you falling closely right now

01:27:48.820 so in terms of the air war i think it probably makes sense to sort of

01:27:54.440 describe the dynamics of it from the ground up sort of a day in the air war in ukraine

01:28:01.440 so in terms of operations that go on maybe i'll sort of start from the ground up

01:28:09.420 on the line of contact you have both sides which are plentifully equipped with modern

01:28:18.000 man pads man portable air defense systems handheld sams and in some cases vehicle mounted

01:28:24.880 sand and gun systems which are capable of making it very dangerous to approach the line of contact

01:28:32.980 and then further back from that you will have a relatively modern and capable integrated air

01:28:42.920 defense system which is capable of denying the higher altitudes and this is where you get into

01:28:51.000 a little bit of asymmetry because in general the russian air defense complexes books s-300s s-400s

01:28:59.580 are capable of denying high altitude blocks of airspace well beyond the line of contact and so

01:29:08.300 ukrainian aircraft can't operate at high altitude even within two or three hundred kilometers of

01:29:14.380 the line of contact whereas the ukrainian medium and long range sam coverage doesn't extend to

01:29:20.840 far beyond the line of contact but will still deny the high altitudes certainly over their own lines

01:29:28.140 and a little bit beyond that so basically the way that one has to operate in this

01:29:36.400 unprecedentedly threatening environment really no one has faced an air defense environment like

01:29:42.500 this before um is that as i mentioned before some kind of standoff capability is mandatory

01:29:50.220 You can't fly into the effective engagement envelope of the enemy's air defense systems without taking unacceptable losses, especially in a protracted war like this, where even a relatively low loss rate will compound into something that becomes unsustainable because it takes so long to build the aircraft and train the pilots.

01:30:12.120 they're very long lead time items so in terms of air operations that you'll see being conducted

01:30:18.300 on the ukrainian side you will see them fly usually low altitude combat air patrol missions

01:30:27.580 sometimes vaguely near the line of contact but usually a decent ways back from it and they have

01:30:34.880 to stay low because again the russian sams are capable of denying the high altitudes beyond that

01:30:40.940 You'll see them conducting basically, and you'll see both sides doing this, using helicopters and ground attack aircraft like C-25s, which will basically conduct loft attacks using either unguided rockets or sometimes various guided weapons, which will impart a range of 8 to 10 kilometers from the point at which they're fired.

01:31:07.000 although in the case of doing this with rockets, the level of accuracy that can be achieved with

01:31:12.600 this is a little bit questionable and kind of dependent on how good a ballistic computer your

01:31:16.880 aircraft is fitted with. And then again, the Russian side do this as well. You'll see them,

01:31:23.040 you'll see their Su-25s flinging rockets from usually about a 10 degree pitch up and helicopters

01:31:28.940 from about a 30 degree pitch up. And this creates a sort of large beaten zone over an area target,

01:31:36.380 which will probably be effective against

01:31:38.560 things like lightly armored or

01:31:40.480 unarmored vehicles in the open

01:31:42.100 or personnel in the open

01:31:44.300 but it's not probably not

01:31:46.660 immensely destructive

01:31:47.980 and then 0.98

01:31:50.060 on the Russian side you have

01:31:52.960 they're sort of

01:31:54.800 let me make sure

01:31:56.780 I got that

01:31:57.560 so like helicopters

01:32:00.260 with unguided rocket

01:32:02.580 pods or like hurried to rocket

01:32:04.760 pods but not like

01:32:05.800 not like the rockets themselves

01:32:08.620 have guidance systems

01:32:09.800 are going

01:32:11.880 10 kilometers out

01:32:13.760 and firing upwards at an

01:32:16.540 angle to beat an

01:32:18.500 area

01:32:18.900 uh

01:32:21.840 what do you mean by bait

01:32:23.500 uh beat an area

01:32:26.780 yeah yeah it's basically

01:32:28.560 something that produces an

01:32:30.520 effect on target assuming

01:32:32.000 you are accurate enough akin to

01:32:34.360 basically an mlrs barrage fascinating indeed yeah and so and the kind of bread and butter operations

01:32:45.820 that the russians are conducting on a day-to-day basis since um 2023 now is uh basically su-34s

01:32:56.520 and i think possibly some other aircraft are fitted to use them now but mainly su-34s which

01:33:02.180 is their primary uh sort of it's mainly a ground attack aircraft it's notionally multi-role capable

01:33:08.820 but it's supersonic rough equivalent of the f-15e um and what they are dropping are the

01:33:17.920 umpika glide bombs famed in song and story which are conventional iron bombs of the fab series

01:33:26.200 which range from 250 up to in the case of what they're using 3000 kilograms but 500 is the most

01:33:32.880 common fitted with a satellite guidance kit and a set of wings which converts it into a precision

01:33:40.760 glide bomb with a range of potentially up to around 70 kilometers depending on how high an

01:33:46.520 altitude it's dropped from and the prevailing winds so that creates a very robust standoff

01:33:54.900 strike system that's capable of hitting tactical and operational targets out to a decent depth

01:34:01.260 beyond the line of contact and that's pretty much the extent of your day-to-day operations you'll

01:34:08.180 also see large periodic missile strikes conducted whereby ballistic and cruise missiles will be

01:34:16.900 fired at various targets all over the country and this is kind of goes towards russian air

01:34:23.240 doctrine in that they don't really

01:34:25.180 believe in doing

01:34:29.060 deep strikes with manned aircraft

01:34:30.980 because they correctly as it turned out

01:34:33.040 considered this to be impossibly

01:34:35.260 dangerous and pretty much

01:34:37.380 relegate that entirely to

01:34:39.520 well

01:34:41.060 standoff systems like ballistic and

01:34:43.240 cruise missiles

01:34:43.740 interesting so like

01:34:50.540 this

01:34:52.000 this all makes sense

01:34:54.740 this all like

01:34:55.980 the tactical logic you've laid it out

01:34:58.780 wonderfully

01:35:00.360 this

01:35:02.480 I hope so I really wish I could

01:35:04.840 have drawn a big picture of it on a whiteboard

01:35:06.680 somewhere

01:35:07.100 no that

01:35:09.420 air power has

01:35:12.560 basically turned into

01:35:14.120 like a

01:35:15.800 like a long range

01:35:18.680 artillery system that's just

01:35:20.580 Oh, instead of launching the explosive from the ground, we're going to fly it up and then set it off from an equivalent distance almost.

01:35:31.280 Yeah, the one thing I'll add to that is that the other thing that helicopters are doing, and more so Russian helicopters than Ukrainian ones, because they're more capable in this regard, is that sort of the proliferation of manpads on the front lines pretty much denies the space out in front of it, out to a distance of around four or five kilometers, and up to an altitude of about 3,500 meters.

01:35:58.240 so helicopters have

01:36:00.160 been like K-52s

01:36:02.280 and such like can also employ their 0.85

01:36:04.380 Vicar

01:36:06.180 ATGMs which have a range of about

01:36:08.460 8 to 10 kilometers so they

01:36:10.040 also fulfill the kind of conventional

01:36:12.460 role of the attack helicopter as a

01:36:14.360 flying anti-tank reserve

01:36:15.480 okay so the anti-tank

01:36:20.460 missiles outrange the

01:36:22.140 man fats this is something that

01:36:24.500 like you will not see

01:36:26.700 really depicted

01:36:28.300 on any of your

01:36:30.780 video games that you guys play

01:36:32.480 at home. It's depicted in DCS

01:36:34.800 which is what I play.

01:36:37.100 DCS? I don't know this one.

01:36:39.640 Digital combat simulator.

01:36:41.400 Anyway.

01:36:41.600 Ah.

01:36:46.640 That's like

01:36:47.580 a fascinating

01:36:48.460 logical thing that like the

01:36:51.120 helicopters are

01:36:53.520 standing off like

01:36:54.780 five to eight kilometers behind the front line

01:36:59.780 trying to snipe armored vehicles

01:37:03.800 one to two kilometers over the line of contact.

01:37:09.860 That is not how you visualize it at all, naively.

01:37:14.720 And there is actually also a newer weapon that's been fitted to at least the K-52

01:37:19.140 and I believe the MI-28 newer modifications as well,

01:37:23.520 which is a missile called the lemur which is a uh somewhat longer ranged missile which is a um

01:37:30.860 man in the loop capable weapon meaning it's uh it has a camera on the front which is data linked to

01:37:36.820 the helicopter which allows the gunner to make terminal corrections which means you can sort of

01:37:40.960 shoot it over a hill into a building or something like that all right fascinating this uh you won't

01:37:50.080 have heard it yet you listeners well you listeners will have heard it yet but uh i just uh one of the

01:37:58.380 episodes coming out soon for uh goppy is uh me discussing with hyposomata the uh the drone

01:38:08.220 revolution and the argument we we're kind of discussing is that a self that the drone revolution

01:38:16.080 It actually started in the 50s and 60s, if not sooner, with guided missile systems.

01:38:24.600 And that the logic of quadcopter drones has actually been evolving over the past, like, 50, 70, 70 years.

01:38:34.520 And these man-in-the-loop camera-guided missiles really bridged that cap in a lot of ways.

01:38:46.080 I think I can agree with that premise.

01:38:50.840 Yeah, this was...

01:38:52.080 I can't take credit for it.

01:38:54.260 Bean over at Naval Gazing was the one who said it,

01:38:57.660 that the drone revolution already happened in the militaries.

01:39:00.780 It was called the Missile Revolution.

01:39:04.840 And...

01:39:05.320 And...

01:39:06.400 Yeah, that logic of...

01:39:09.260 of hammer-guided missiles, like...

01:39:13.880 As soon as you...

01:39:16.080 As soon as you see video from one of those missiles fired, it makes that argument, like, very, very keen to your imagination.

01:39:29.560 But, uh, so what has been, like, the effect of all the, these airborne standoff weapons?

01:39:38.380 Like, uh, obviously we haven't seen either line truly break.

01:39:44.680 We've seen maybe attritional exhaustion.

01:39:48.400 But what has this done to kind of the logic of the modern battlefield?

01:39:54.000 So I think the main thing that has specifically been a byproduct of the mass availability of the glide bombs in particular is, as you say, it's in some ways an attritional weapon in that it's definitely a casualty generator in a very serious way.

01:40:14.260 in that if you detect a squad of enemy soldiers hunkered down in a building you can now just

01:40:21.260 delete that building and it will also pretty reliably do terrible things to a squad or platoon

01:40:28.480 fighting position it's yet another asset in the panoply of russian firepower and the other thing

01:40:39.640 that it can kind of enable is if you have a situation where you need to concentrate them

01:40:47.380 to put a lot of boom on target to say bomb out the transport network immediately behind

01:40:52.360 the front line in order to create friction in enemy movements you can do that and there was

01:40:59.320 quite a lot of that done during the fighting in Kursk region at a very inconvenient moment a bridge

01:41:08.100 would fall down that kind of thing yeah no i i'm picturing a lot of the large bridges that i have

01:41:16.680 been on in my life lifetime and like usually those would be like kind of hard classically those would

01:41:24.240 be kind of hard targets to take out because like usually you'd have to do like a a deep strike kind

01:41:30.920 a high maneuverability airstrike to take out like a massive bridge,

01:41:37.720 like 80, 200 kilometers behind enemy lines.

01:41:44.140 And the kind of plane that can do that

01:41:47.380 and the kind of explosive you can load onto that plane,

01:41:51.180 like there's kind of inherently a tension there between, you know,

01:41:57.980 So this is, like, this logic is, like, in everyone's mind, because this was what the damn Busters was, and that became Star Wars.

01:42:07.280 And now every movie in the world is largely about an airplane strike mission on, like, a hardened-ass physical asset that's in a fixed position,

01:42:21.800 but is behind a lot of air defense and, like, scrambleable fighters and stuff.

01:42:26.800 You know, you've seen this movie a thousand times, but now that you have, like, glide bombs and you can just, like, the bomb can guide itself to the target, like, gliding her via, like, just satellite guiding.

01:42:45.180 And, you know, Luke Skywalker doesn't have to do an assault run on the Death Star anymore.

01:42:49.900 You know, he can fire the missile from like, from like several planets distance away from the Death Star.

01:42:57.860 And the, the rocket will, the, the missile or the, the bomb will guide its, the thermal detonator will guide itself into the, the Death Star, what was it, an air vent or something?

01:43:13.000 Exactly. 0.64

01:43:13.720 You know, size of a whop rat. 1.00

01:43:15.180 Yes. And yeah, it has made that sort of thing easier, although I should clarify to dispel any ambiguity. This is not a Russian innovation. If anything, they were a little bit late to the party on this. The fact that they didn't come into the war with this kind of capability that they could field en masse, at least. They did have a full suite of guided weapons, they just didn't have that many of them. It was a bit of a problem. 0.82

01:43:38.480 yeah but uh the the glide bombs i find interesting because like usually guided weapons we expect them

01:43:48.800 to be expensive weapon systems we expect like you know u.s guided munitions are like every time one

01:43:55.900 of those goes off a lockheed barton uh executive gets his wings you know you know every every one

01:44:04.160 of those someone's getting a yacht but uh the glide bombs it on paper it seems very cheap like

01:44:14.060 a very cheap very simple conversion of just like a satellite guidance system and like some fins and

01:44:20.440 flaps and like i don't know a raspberry pie to convert like one of their old soviet surplus

01:44:26.680 dumb bombs into like something that has an extra 70 kilometers of range so

01:44:34.480 in a way there isn't a massive breadth of difference it's a in many ways a very similar

01:44:42.060 system to the american jd am although just because of the nature of the two countries

01:44:46.700 military industrial complexes it's probably still far cheaper to produce in that the jd am is also

01:44:52.800 essentially a conversion kit

01:44:55.340 for an ordinary iron bomb

01:44:57.300 that converts it into a guided

01:44:59.340 weapon and the JDAM

01:45:01.360 ER, which is fitted with

01:45:03.420 wings, is very similarly

01:45:05.260 a glide

01:45:07.780 bomb of nearly identical

01:45:09.100 specifications. Although the Americans

01:45:11.480 also produce the 0.83

01:45:13.560 JSAO Joint Standoff Weapon

01:45:15.500 which is a somewhat more

01:45:17.960 high-end piece of manufacturing

01:45:21.580 because it's a purpose-built glide bomb

01:45:24.480 that's shaped to be low-observable to radar.

01:45:28.300 And then you sort of get into the higher end

01:45:31.460 of more expensive weapon systems working on up from there.

01:45:35.940 Ah, yes.

01:45:37.900 Well, that's the nature of U.S. weapons procurement.

01:45:42.480 There will be something that is simple

01:45:45.920 and kind of accessible,

01:45:48.800 but that's entry-level.

01:45:50.420 You know, you want to get the features on your new car.

01:45:54.360 You want to get the low radar profile on your disposable weapon.

01:45:59.740 You want to get the cup holders, too.

01:46:03.180 You know, there's an entire suite of things you can add to it.

01:46:09.440 But, no, so that has been, like, that has been fascinating to me,

01:46:17.260 What you think of as air combat, dear reader, what television has taught you to think of as air combat, basically doesn't exist anymore.

01:46:29.340 that it's a that's all this uh stand standoff weapons logic it's all it's all weapon systems

01:46:37.580 carrying weapon systems from like not even beyond visual range because like beyond visual range

01:46:43.940 like which usually like a few a few kilomers is like beyond traveling range it's like

01:46:52.240 minutes or beyond this is

01:46:54.800 you know

01:46:58.920 the longest

01:47:00.880 range of like a

01:47:02.700 sea torpedo

01:47:04.680 from the world wars

01:47:06.720 is like close range now

01:47:08.680 yeah and I can actually

01:47:12.980 also touch on the air to air combat

01:47:14.940 over Ukraine if you'd like

01:47:16.680 I'd be very interested

01:47:18.880 in that

01:47:19.280 yeah so i kind of neglected to include that in my sort of day in the war picture but um well i did

01:47:29.500 mention that the ukrainians often fly low-level fighter combat air patrols or caps some distance

01:47:35.720 back from the line of contact usually the russians will fly high altitude combat air patrols also

01:47:43.060 some distance away from the line of contact and uh on the occasions where the two come close

01:47:49.340 enough to each other to be worth engaging this tends to uh well the russians enjoy a

01:47:56.320 very decisive advantage in this arena because their aircraft and missiles are a generation

01:48:03.640 newer than their ukrainian equivalents plus they're firing their missiles from high altitude

01:48:08.760 which imparts far greater kinematic performance to them so you'll have a situation where say

01:48:16.440 a ukrainian ground attack aircraft tries to approach the line of contact to conduct some

01:48:21.760 kind of pop-up attack with rockets or i think at least some of their su-25s are fitted to

01:48:28.480 drop american jdams that they sometimes do on the loft profile anyway it gets close it's detected by

01:48:35.260 a Russian AWACS or just a Russian fighter,

01:48:37.740 which will be a MiG-31 or Su-35.

01:48:41.240 I think Su-30s are on these cap stations as well.

01:48:44.420 And if they can get close enough,

01:48:47.160 they will fire usually the R-37M long-range air-to-air missile.

01:48:52.700 The MiG-31 can carry four.

01:48:55.500 The Su-35 can carry a single one or maybe two on the center line.

01:48:59.420 I think it's standard just to carry one, though.

01:49:01.580 um and those have been consistently scoring air-to-air kills at ranges of 150 kilometers

01:49:10.600 or so and have well have done so to uh i mean it's it's a trickle but over time they've

01:49:21.060 basically whittled away most of the ukrainian air force between the russian sams listeners at home

01:49:30.140 That was a lot of technical detail.

01:49:32.840 I want you to put yourself in the position of the Ukrainian pilot and visualize this.

01:49:39.360 You're doing the Luke Skywalker Death Star run.

01:49:44.540 But you're in a Ukrainian ground attack plane.

01:49:49.860 You're flying in towards the front line.

01:49:52.840 You're flying low because you're staying below the enemy air defenses.

01:49:57.400 you're trying to keep below the radar and as you approach the front line you pop up above the tree

01:50:04.600 tree line to fire off your payload whether that be jdams bombs whether that be some missile system

01:50:14.080 etc and from 150 kilometers away there is some russian fighter that's flying in pretty close

01:50:26.460 the high altitude how high would they be up so probably between 25 and 30 000 feet

01:50:37.140 they're 150 kilometers away at the height i just realized i'm not being consistent with

01:50:45.960 my measurement systems it's like six to twelve thousand meters

01:50:51.140 i'm canadian i'm used to mixing these units of measurement that's fine

01:50:56.900 yeah and i'm a pilot so i think but uh but a 150 kilometers away behind the russian lines like

01:51:08.040 like back nearly maybe over the russian border border is a russian fighter

01:51:15.140 flying at the level of like a a transport port heavy lift like uh flying at the level of like

01:51:26.240 a Boeing passenger aircraft like 30,000 thousand feet it's up there to text you pop up above the

01:51:33.840 tree line and it fires from 150 kilometers away a an ant an air-to-air missile down upon you

01:51:44.460 and this is where i this is why i wanted to uh do this for our listeners of as an exercise

01:51:53.980 because it's firing the missile down upon you you no matter how much you maneuver because it

01:52:02.100 takes a long time for a missile to travel for even a very fast missile to travel 150 kilometers like

01:52:08.400 that might be minutes

01:52:11.040 that might be

01:52:11.880 that's certainly minutes

01:52:13.640 like that's all

01:52:14.800 like up to two or three minutes

01:52:18.800 it fires it you detect it

01:52:20.780 fire it

01:52:21.240 and you have to maneuver

01:52:23.860 and the thing is

01:52:25.860 it's coming down and because it's

01:52:28.540 coming down to you even as you

01:52:30.380 try to climb to maneuver away from it

01:52:32.860 it always has the

01:52:34.640 advantage on you it has

01:52:35.800 uh in in the nautical terms of like the 18th century it has the weather gauge it's always

01:52:41.660 upwind of you it's always above you it always has the greater maneuverability and and momentum

01:52:47.720 and everything because it has the high ground for two to three minutes it has the high ground

01:52:54.240 coming down on you and you just have to and you're maneuvering and you're hoping that like

01:53:01.160 your chaff or your your jamming or your counter messers manage to throw it off or that you like

01:53:08.280 manage to go go by or near a tree line or something metal that like throws off its its detection that

01:53:15.780 it that's like terrifying and the thing is even if even be even though like it's probably not

01:53:25.700 going to i i can't imagine this these have a kill rate like greater than 50 percent like

01:53:32.620 chances are if you're in that position you're going to survive that one missile at maximum

01:53:38.540 effective range range but the thing is the missile only has to hate you once your job is to go out

01:53:46.880 do that do that dozens of times across months and those russian fighters are there 30 000 feet

01:53:58.140 feet up 150 100 150 kilometers away and they're just there waiting to detect you and snipe you

01:54:05.160 with one of those missiles and and eventually you know this war has been going on three years

01:54:12.420 it's gonna get you and that's like that logic is something that like

01:54:20.100 they're like i've never seen like that kind of um almost like french warfare pop-up logic depicted

01:54:31.260 in in like aircraft before maybe maybe you could find an analogy in something like catch-22 but

01:54:40.700 that's like completely not in all yes because it's you know fire bombers flying above air defense

01:54:48.140 fences and stuff like uh that's a completely different way to conceptualize like air warfare

01:54:55.480 than i think anyone has seen depicted and you go to see films like top gun or uh or watch fiction

01:55:06.900 that's supposedly about modern

01:55:08.960 fighters and stuff, and

01:55:10.960 that's, like, not what's being

01:55:13.080 depicted at

01:55:15.040 all. And

01:55:16.760 it jumps

01:55:19.060 out to me because they're like, there is quite

01:55:21.140 the drama to that.

01:55:22.920 Like, if an old-timer

01:55:25.160 at a bar told you that story in, like,

01:55:27.140 20, 30 years, your ears would perk up

01:55:29.100 and you'd listen,

01:55:31.080 but no one wants to hear

01:55:32.980 those stories today.

01:55:36.900 yeah i don't think i've ever seen a movie that depicted beyond visual range air-to-air combat

01:55:45.300 remotely correctly with the possible exception of that one scene in air force one which actually

01:55:51.820 kind of gets it right um but i can actually add some details that make this fiery melodrama get

01:55:59.260 off my plane harrison ford got it right kind of

01:56:02.380 yes when the f-15s engage the spoiler alert by the way when the f-15s engage the big 29s at

01:56:09.900 long range they actually pretty much do that the way that they would this is one of the things

01:56:14.960 that like the movies you think are like so realistic and accurate never are and the movies

01:56:20.820 you think are like goofy and completely inaccurate some of those are like the veterans themselves

01:56:28.060 would say that that's the real deal this is where like uh and this is true going back to like the

01:56:34.300 odyssey like like uh veterans for thousands of years have said the odyssey is like the most

01:56:39.640 realistic depiction of warfare it's like what but there's monsters no no no but like the parables

01:56:45.960 and like the tactile situations and the stories like ring so true and then you get other stuff

01:56:52.020 is trying to like

01:56:53.140 eat the aesthetic of realism so heavily

01:56:56.180 and it's just fake as hell 0.57

01:56:57.580 but

01:57:00.200 yeah I was going to

01:57:04.160 add a few more details to

01:57:05.900 this fiery melodrama

01:57:08.140 in the sky the main one being

01:57:10.160 that well you mentioned

01:57:12.200 that you might detect this missile being

01:57:14.320 fired at you but actually

01:57:16.160 you might not

01:57:17.320 because especially the

01:57:20.120 R-37M is

01:57:21.900 an active radar homing missile meaning it has its own radar on board for terminal guidance

01:57:27.540 so it's launched from the aircraft that fires it using a radar mode called track while scan

01:57:33.520 which is only directing part of its radar energy at the target so when it's fired in that mode the

01:57:40.000 target aircraft is probably not going to receive a launch warning from their radar warning receiver

01:57:45.880 they will only get a warning when the missile itself goes active when its own internal radar

01:57:51.940 switches on in the terminal phase so you might get that warning a lot later and uh i mean you

01:58:00.880 mentioned that yes they usually they're the probability of kill especially at the ranges

01:58:07.340 at which these are being fired is not that high but again having to do it over and over eventually

01:58:14.540 your number is going to come up what the the effect that they very often do achieve is turning

01:58:19.260 back the enemy aircraft which is effectively a mission kill yeah okay that is interesting that

01:58:25.860 you just explained to me a mechanic of uh the the game high fleet and i never quite understood

01:58:31.840 uh the radar when the rigging when you want your radar the radar of the missile to turn on

01:58:39.280 i never quite understood the purpose of that but now i do uh

01:58:43.940 uh so so achieving a missile kill on one of these uh forcing them to turn back

01:58:54.740 what impact does that have on like if they just force uh the aircraft to turn back or like not

01:59:03.520 launch its payload what impact does that have on like the operational tempo because like

01:59:08.880 like is that just a wash because like you've had the uh air-to-air plane plane up also

01:59:17.240 countering it so if it the ground attack plane has to turn back the air-to-air plane fired a

01:59:22.980 missile and like has to go back and refuel like uh is that a wash because um because both planes

01:59:33.820 had to operate for about the same time or like uh is that imposing more of a cost on one side or

01:59:39.320 the other so um let's say i mean for the russian side it means a ground asset doesn't get hit that

01:59:50.520 otherwise might have and i say might because again the dubious accuracy of uh lofting rockets with

01:59:58.920 older aircraft and also the fact that when they're employing things like JDAM's

02:00:03.420 Russian GPS jamming has been pretty effective in causing most of the U.S. supplied GPS guided

02:00:12.320 weapons to miss their targets so that's not exactly a guarantee either but usually the

02:00:18.300 aircraft that are sitting up on these cap stations have I mean I'm not sure how exactly how long

02:00:23.540 they're up there it's probably three or four hours if they engage a target they're going to

02:00:27.000 burn some fuel doing so but they're probably just going to reset to their position and continue

02:00:31.440 until the end of their scheduled time all right so from their perspective they just press a button

02:00:37.380 and a a missile went off and they're out the missile but they didn't have to maneuver much

02:00:44.300 uh what what's the cost of maneuvering on like one of these ground attack uh

02:00:50.060 one of these ground attack uh aircraft like is that putting a lot of strain on them or

02:00:57.000 What's the logistical check there?

02:01:00.300 Not really. I mean, they can do it.

02:01:02.280 If you're operating at low altitude, you're necessarily going to burn more fuel,

02:01:05.700 but not necessarily a debilitating amount.

02:01:09.880 But in practice, if, I mean, I say they get turned back in that they return to base

02:01:15.240 without having employed their air-to-ground payloads.

02:01:18.280 So that's the mission killer aspect of it.

02:01:22.300 So the cost is the risk then.

02:01:25.220 It's not imposing any, like, strain or exhaustion or anything like that on them, really.

02:01:34.540 That's, like, not quite the cost of forcing them to launch five planes with suppression of enemy air defense type operations.

02:01:44.480 Like, we're seeing the exhaustion pile up on the Indian Ocean, let's say.

02:01:51.460 yeah i mean i'm sure the pilots are thoroughly frazzled by the experience and again if you're

02:02:00.700 doing this day after day after day your chances of survival in the long run are pretty low all right

02:02:06.520 so that's that's an interesting unpacking of like the air to air logic that i had

02:02:12.960 i haven't seen anywhere else so like you're you're adding to the conversation

02:02:19.380 out of what we've surveyed so far we're coming up on the two hour mark uh was there anything

02:02:27.240 else you wanted to dig into anything you're feeling passionate about

02:02:31.000 so one thing i'll add specifically to the air to air thing is that um the exact physics and

02:02:43.020 mechanics of beyond visual range combat are kind of a funny thing to try to explain and

02:02:49.520 nearly impossible without visual aids so what i recommend actually is there is a youtube channel

02:02:57.700 called the op center by mike solion which has a video called introduction to beyond visual range

02:03:04.300 combat it's 14 minutes long and it explains it very thoroughly all right link that to me and i

02:03:11.580 will be sure to add it to the show

02:03:13.760 note. That's

02:03:15.200 all the things I never have, like

02:03:17.700 good things to add to show

02:03:19.700 notes, and I

02:03:20.500 often forget to add them.

02:03:23.940 So,

02:03:25.400 perfect.

02:03:29.540 So,

02:03:31.620 because it's a bit of a, it's a

02:03:33.460 complex process in a way, but

02:03:35.500 for the pilot who's actually doing it,

02:03:37.560 it's a surprisingly simple

02:03:39.200 application. All right.

02:03:40.700 Yeah.

02:03:41.580 Interesting. Yeah. So, listener, either I remembered to add that to the show notes, in which case you have a wonderful piece of content for yourself, or I forgot, in which case you're just sitting there frustrated and I'm laughing at you right now, and I'm being a bad host.

02:03:58.340 But beyond that, going back, surveying the Middle East, surveying the ethnically leading Third World War, Third World War in India-Pakistan, what are you following most closely right now?

02:04:19.700 so in the last two days it's definitely been um india pakistan uh just because that's what's

02:04:31.540 grabbing all the headlines right now and all that but there's also really like i said before not a

02:04:38.000 ton to say about it right now because the fog of war is quite heavy um and in terms of what's been

02:04:44.560 on my mind i mean since you suggested this topic before what's sort of been bouncing around in my

02:04:49.080 head is if i were in somewhere in the uh senior ranks of the u.s military leadership it's like

02:04:56.280 sort of thinking a little bit about how i would plan a uh an air campaign against iran

02:05:03.620 and how i would maybe draw up a day one air tasking order for a thing like that so i've

02:05:10.320 given some thought to that um but really uh probably most of the time the war in ukraine

02:05:18.080 monopolizes my attention more than most things for one it's something that i take a pretty

02:05:24.140 strongly held personal position on which i really don't with most of the other things and

02:05:29.200 for another it's one where i have i think i have a pretty decent grasp on the technology

02:05:34.740 and tactics involved yeah the ukraine war is insane because i'm 100 convinced that for like

02:05:45.140 the next 20 30 years we are going to be seeing war after war after war where it's very plain

02:05:51.520 that one or both sides have like not learned any lesson of the ukraine war that like that like

02:06:00.900 probably through 2050 the ukraine war is going to be like the technological and like logical

02:06:08.820 pinnacle of modern warfare and like a lot of the the tactics and uh and kind of advanced techniques

02:06:19.360 of it are going to be like slowly lost to time because like a lot of the stuff that is being

02:06:25.520 done in ukraine like uh obviously like there's technical things that are like being followed

02:06:31.500 very closely by defense contractors and whatnot uh keenly looking for new requirements they can

02:06:38.820 tell congressmen that they absolutely need

02:06:40.860 in their procurement

02:06:42.700 project.

02:06:44.780 But a lot of the stuff being, like,

02:06:46.600 done by the men or the commander

02:06:48.680 in the fields are, like,

02:06:51.600 very technically

02:06:52.620 minded and, like,

02:06:54.700 have their own, like, very

02:06:56.580 in-depth logic.

02:07:00.680 Very little of this is getting

02:07:02.400 written down or talked about

02:07:03.960 anywhere, and

02:07:06.560 there's just, like, this well

02:07:08.440 of expertise that is developing

02:07:10.360 and this well of techniques

02:07:12.360 that are coming out

02:07:14.300 and I don't think

02:07:16.480 they're going to get standardized across modern warfare

02:07:18.420 I think a lot of this stuff is just like

02:07:20.140 going to get lost the same way

02:07:22.600 like the details of how to like

02:07:24.400 launch a World War I

02:07:26.720 trench raid

02:07:28.160 like there probably

02:07:30.320 isn't a commander in like any

02:07:32.320 western army who could

02:07:33.780 lead a trench raid day

02:07:36.160 with a

02:07:37.600 with uh

02:07:39.800 wubs and everything

02:07:40.980 else that

02:07:43.580 all of this stuff is

02:07:45.280 is maybe

02:07:49.600 good maybe bad that's not going to

02:07:51.600 like hercolate out

02:07:53.380 everywhere it's not going to get standardized

02:07:55.060 across you know the Middle East

02:07:57.340 and stuff but also

02:07:59.200 but also like

02:08:01.120 if you're paying attention

02:08:02.760 attention if you're like

02:08:04.820 someone's in the field of arms

02:08:07.580 or someone who's, like, fascinated by this stuff, you know,

02:08:12.200 there's a lot of things that are, like, being developed right now

02:08:15.160 and, like, tricks of the trade that are, like, cropping up

02:08:18.660 that if you take note of right, like, you might be the only person

02:08:22.780 who, like, remembers them or knows the trick in, like, 10, 20 years.

02:08:30.940 So I think a lot of armies that are observing this

02:08:36.220 are internalizing some of the lessons but often sort of selectively in a way that maps onto what

02:08:46.900 they already wanted to do like um i promise this really isn't a tangent uh i keep an eye on a lot

02:08:56.560 of uh the sort of more public facing but still sort of internal trade publication-y uh

02:09:04.720 media produced by particularly the u.s army but all of their branches really like um the uh joint

02:09:13.580 readiness training center which is a large training range at fort johnson in louisiana

02:09:19.960 has a podcast where they bring on people who've participated in training exercises there to talk

02:09:27.100 about their experiences and lessons learned and i'm kind of shocked that all of this is available

02:09:32.100 to the public but the link it to me and i will surprisingly show notes as well if you go and look

02:09:37.520 for it sure i'll do that and like some of the things that they talk about it's like okay they're

02:09:43.800 doing actual or simulated uh ubiquitous observation of the battlefield by quadcopters and occasionally

02:09:55.080 simulating but seemingly in pretty token numbers like grenade drops and fpv strikes and that kind

02:10:03.420 of thing but probably in a way that is designed to still be overcome by u.s maneuver doctrine so

02:10:11.240 it's like they're not completely blind to this uh for a long time it did look like they were and

02:10:17.440 there does still kind of seem to be this sense in the u.s armed forces and nato as a whole that

02:10:25.760 their kind of magical jedi art of blitzkrieg maneuver warfare will magically overcome all of

02:10:32.160 this so i'm sort of halfway to your position on that i i maintain that like blitzkrieg maneuver

02:10:40.360 warfare like classical prussian maneuver warfare is going to be reinvented and it's going to

02:10:47.400 totally work and it's going to be done entirely by non-state actors that like they're like the

02:10:56.180 defining factor of blitzkrieg maneuver warfare is not going to be like uh uh uh you know

02:11:04.220 powerfully planned planned tank rushes and whatnot it's it's who can make their army load up in

02:11:13.160 pickup trucks and drive 3,000 kilomers, you know, across a continent. Now, this second,

02:11:20.340 this exact moment, we're going now type thing where, where, you know, instead of, uh, tensions

02:11:27.200 building up for weeks and like this kind of pit for tat back and forth, oh, are we going to do it?

02:11:33.200 Are we not? Are we going to do it? Are we not? You know, we got to wait for the president and we

02:11:37.320 always for political options to exercise like uh like like in the time it takes for like one

02:11:45.920 decision cycle in the news or like uh you know a general to prevent present a planning paper

02:11:53.180 for a lot of for the tempo of what we see in irregular warfare you know anyone listening to

02:12:00.880 this who has a vehicle who drive just 30 hours across an entire continent and like if you if

02:12:10.280 you can make a thousand ten thousand people do that just hop in their pickup trucks and drive

02:12:15.660 30 hours this second you know i don't think there's much of a military formation on earth

02:12:22.940 that is like really equipped to counter that at no notice you know you know they'd be dealing with

02:12:32.880 police more than formations and that's probably how blitzkrieg maneuver warfare is going to work

02:12:39.140 is what happens when you use men with the violence and speed and tempo and the like

02:12:47.820 zero notice deployment that you'd use nuclear weapons but i can't really see maneuver warfare

02:12:55.540 working otherwise for like you're letting you know armies train and position and like call up

02:13:02.680 call up and stuff stuff at the same time that we have so many weapon systems are fashion led and

02:13:12.900 especially earth moving equipment that is that is like in a lot of ways faster than the armories

02:13:21.080 like uh like uh with modern like backhoes and earth moving equipments you know digging a tank

02:13:27.340 trench line is actually like faster than getting like a tank formation to move to a line

02:13:35.380 which uh you know was certainly not the case in like the world but is 100 the case case now

02:13:45.340 because like the the vast like the vast differences between like what technological

02:13:54.700 logistical capacity is available to like incredibly small numbers of people like

02:13:59.720 one person can have a backhoe and a pickup truck and a and a like trailer to haul the backhoe on

02:14:08.980 the pickup truck truck with like uh if you have like a ram you know 2000 or whatever or whatever

02:14:18.860 like one of the two four-ton pickup trucks you can probably haul the backhoe on the pickup truck

02:14:23.740 like it crosses across several states uh like like that logistical capacity available to the

02:14:31.480 individual person is so much faster and so much more capable than uh the actual bureaucracies

02:14:39.440 and decisions that are making these decisions that i i suspect blitzkrieg and like minero warfare is

02:14:46.480 going to be dead right up until the point where it's a non-state actor that no longer has to deal

02:14:52.480 with those bureaucracies using it against state actors which like we already saw twice we saw this

02:14:59.320 happen in the fall of mosul and the fall of damascus where were non-state actors isis and

02:15:09.100 then well isis again uh just overran major cities that have like massive garrisons because they were

02:15:18.240 able to move with a

02:15:19.940 decisiveness and an aggression

02:15:22.420 against forces that weren't

02:15:24.100 properly deployed, deployed

02:15:26.040 at a speed where they could, you know,

02:15:28.920 take major cities

02:15:30.120 before those forces could redeploy.

02:15:33.780 And

02:15:34.240 so

02:15:36.300 the U.S. doctrine of maneuver

02:15:37.980 warfare, it's fundamentally right, but it's

02:15:39.920 also almost

02:15:42.160 certainly fundamentally wrong because there's no way

02:15:44.220 they'd be able to, like,

02:15:46.080 actually

02:15:46.640 foreign maneuver warfare in any way resembling what it needs to be with their current like

02:15:55.780 vision structure you know the u.s can't tank rush uh this is one of the things with like the

02:16:03.340 fold of gap logic and whatnot that i'm still not sure how like the decision logic

02:16:08.720 work that they defend the fold of gap and like redeploy hour by hour

02:16:14.100 when like i'm not sure how the bureaucracy even gets the people in the tanks in less than like

02:16:23.100 two three days

02:16:24.060 yeah and this is something that actually the what we now know the soviets were actually

02:16:32.640 planning for and kind of banking on in the event that um a war like that were to happen was would

02:16:38.540 be that basically they would try to isolate say one nato member politically and delay their

02:16:48.600 decision making sufficiently to be able to exploit their indecision as a strategic gap

02:16:54.460 and i'm actually kind of glad that this moved organically back to the cold war because yes

02:17:01.320 this has happened with non-state actors in mosul and damascus as you say and quite right about that

02:17:05.780 the ability to just sort of show up so far behind where the enemy's army expects you to be

02:17:11.520 in such a short period yeah that works really well but it also sounds a lot like the soviet

02:17:19.280 invasion of czechoslovakia in 1968 for instance where they were able to basically achieve total

02:17:25.760 political and strategic surprise occupy the entire country basically overnight disarm the

02:17:31.800 local army and authorities before anyone had any idea what was going on the initial invasion of

02:17:37.360 afghanistan went a lot like that as well but obviously the eventual outcome yes uh this is

02:17:42.280 why you don't disarm your populations because you know your military and your your police forces

02:17:49.500 and get disarmed very quickly and those commanders are not going to you know stand and fight at their

02:17:58.140 like armories or police

02:17:59.920 stations

02:18:00.480 when they don't even know

02:18:03.660 where the force is coming from

02:18:05.500 from when they've heard nothing from

02:18:08.040 above they're just going to be

02:18:09.480 oh where are you defeated okay

02:18:12.080 yeah if you can't contact anyone above

02:18:17.940 or below you in your chain of command

02:18:19.620 are you gonna fight and if you fight are you gonna

02:18:22.080 fight effectively yeah no

02:18:23.280 exactly and this is where

02:18:25.600 you know

02:18:27.380 a few people who are like actually trained or like mentally equipped to do that who have been like

02:18:35.040 prepared for that logic uh probably like will decide the fate of nations sometime in the next

02:18:44.140 like a hundred years that like you know there'll be someone who actually does is able to resist

02:18:53.000 something like that through just their individual decisiveness and you know we've seen such such

02:19:00.500 figures in history where like uh one unusually decisive commander uh uh realizes what is what

02:19:10.780 is happening um maybe a junior commander and and manages to like physically run around corralling

02:19:21.040 people to to resist something like that and usually you see this in regards like who's and

02:19:29.600 uh other things uh if you watch the russian film union of salvation uh they break down this

02:19:36.200 logically very tightly of um trying to get people to show up at the right time to like uh perform

02:19:43.480 military action or launch a coup in an era where like you know you have no idea who's betrayed

02:19:51.460 you or not and it takes like hours to figure out where someone is just in like a city the size of

02:19:59.200 St. Petersburg uh but there are many examples from like the Napoleonic Wars and elsewhere

02:20:08.540 where where you see that exact logic like uh uh will and command in the face of like profound

02:20:15.320 surprises profound lack of information uh being incredibly decisive in like incredibly flash

02:20:23.420 moments and like this is something that i i've not seen like discussed or like trained in

02:20:31.600 any like military works

02:20:35.620 of the past

02:20:36.940 hundred years when this is what

02:20:38.940 this is what like first

02:20:41.360 gen armies were entirely about

02:20:43.240 was like burrowling people

02:20:45.320 in the face of this

02:20:47.460 like profound fog war.

02:20:53.120 And you've read 85 Days

02:20:55.380 in Slavyansk by now, right? Still on my list

02:20:57.460 man. I've got so many books to read.

02:20:59.220 Oh my god.

02:20:59.820 ah

02:21:01.520 probably my favorite modern example

02:21:03.960 of something like that

02:21:04.800 Igor Strelkov and his merry men

02:21:08.100 pulling off something very similar

02:21:09.680 walk us through 85 days in Slaviyas

02:21:11.560 so this is the work on

02:21:13.440 2014

02:21:14.580 the Maidan revolution has happened

02:21:17.200 and there's a

02:21:19.400 there's a question of

02:21:21.680 the Demets

02:21:23.740 region and 0.82

02:21:24.800 these ethnic Russians 0.98

02:21:27.160 who do not want to be part

02:21:29.660 of EU-Ukraine. 0.91

02:21:33.700 Take us into this world, Gabi. 0.76

02:21:38.440 Yeah, so basically

02:21:39.840 the siege of Slavyansk

02:21:41.700 and the events that transpired there

02:21:43.520 were the

02:21:45.400 early days of the

02:21:47.120 uprising in the Donbass

02:21:49.560 by the ethnic Russian population

02:21:51.580 whereby, again,

02:21:53.840 Igor Strelkov and

02:21:55.280 I think about 50 men that he

02:21:57.300 recruited who were various

02:21:58.780 like war veteran friends of his and things like that um snuck across the border from russia went

02:22:05.880 to slaviansk started recruiting locals and formed up a militia unit leveraged what heavy equipment

02:22:13.600 they had on hand and basically well held the city against the then very disorganized ukrainians for

02:22:19.940 as the title suggests 85 days which bought quite a lot of time for uh other

02:22:25.780 sort of militia units and such like to form in other places like Donetsk and other settlements

02:22:33.160 further back and in some ways was kind of a key enabler of the initial success of that

02:22:39.360 rebellion it's 50 guys 85 days dear dear listener 50 guys you know which

02:22:49.160 initially they recruited quite a few locals about 2000 yes but just like that's how little it takes

02:23:00.180 to alter the course of history when you move right at the start sorry when you move when no one else

02:23:08.160 is moving you know the the first the first minute of the rts with like the earliest scout unit uh

02:23:17.900 out into some corner of the map can can achieve that that if you're decisive at the mode of

02:23:26.020 crisis if you're like actually first on the barricade that uh your little individual action

02:23:35.240 with like your personal friends can change the course of history and like you know alter things

02:23:43.200 more than like maybe a year's worth of worth of grueling trench fighting between superpowers

02:23:50.440 has altered things yeah and basically a lot of the wars in the former soviet union are full of

02:24:01.360 stories like that of uh small wars fought by uh what dimitri bovich called uh motley crews of

02:24:10.540 very strange people who uh basically recognize the instability of the situations like as he put it

02:24:17.980 you know mountains are moving it's now or never if we few act now we can change the course of things

02:24:24.980 yes and we will almost certainly be seeing this uh in western europe and on the north american

02:24:32.280 continent at various points in our lifetime uh in a lot of ways we've already seen it like uh from

02:24:38.880 from lockdowns to uh to the border crises to again ukraine but these kinds of things are

02:24:50.220 going to multiply as like the world order shifts and change changes um you know we'd be living in

02:24:58.360 a vastly different like globalized totalitarian hellscape if like not for the canadian trucker

02:25:04.920 convoy which was a very similar like a motley crew of like like a few hundred a few thousand

02:25:13.640 uh random people with logistical capacity to do a heavy lift thousands of kilometers in the dead

02:25:21.020 of winter and in canada and because of that like the global lockdown and i remember that and i

02:25:27.900 remember that week it was oh it was so it was so very cold i had i had suffered like a crippling

02:25:35.860 injury uh that that year that was like still healing and that was like like my bones still

02:25:44.940 shudder at the thought of that time but like those those people alter altered history with just

02:25:54.100 decisive action in the face of uncertainty and like the will to be decisive in the face of

02:26:01.600 uncertainty and like because of that you know the lockdown regime they're like setting that up to be

02:26:09.700 something the equivalent of like the new the new global um like surveillance day like they were

02:26:18.020 going to use that to to like slow roll like like 9-11 over again of like new surveillance new

02:26:26.280 controls new everything and it just all fell apart within a month and then awesomely you

02:26:32.440 have war in ukraine began steamingly president putin sang a song exactly exactly which i i'm

02:26:41.180 still not quite sure as to the

02:26:43.140 mechanics of how like

02:26:44.440 the end of

02:26:46.960 lockdown resulted in escalation

02:26:49.160 to Ukraine

02:26:49.840 might have been like

02:26:52.160 I think it's kind of the other way

02:26:54.900 No, I

02:26:57.000 there was like

02:26:59.300 they

02:27:01.080 chose

02:27:01.660 I mean the lockdowns were basically over by that

02:27:05.140 point and it was because largely

02:27:07.240 of the trucker protests certainly in Canada

02:27:08.860 but like the war just

02:27:11.100 made it go away completely just because it monopolized everyone else everyone's attention

02:27:14.840 we're not panicking about flu season anymore no uh what i think happened is um because of lockdown

02:27:23.180 and because of like the economic fallout of lockdown falling i think something about that

02:27:31.020 forced the decisions that caused the ukraine war to escalate like i i think the reason they played

02:27:38.440 extra hardball with Putin and demanded so much more and that there was like this geopolitical

02:27:43.620 fault line that occurred was in part fallout from like uh their lockdown schemes falling apart and

02:27:52.100 something about financial markets or whatnot needed it uh I don't actually have like a good

02:27:58.020 theory of what that mechanism is that like the end of lockdown causes uh the Ukraine war to

02:28:05.280 escalate but the timing is like so tight that i think

02:28:10.300 thing you know maybe the negotiators themselves don't know how the one caused the other but

02:28:17.600 there's certainly something there where that like caused a tension that needed an escalation

02:28:23.720 that needed them to play hardball where like before someone probably would have blinked

02:28:29.440 is that c an interesting idea it'd be probably worth like uh i don't know it might be like a

02:28:39.460 petrodollar thing it might be like uh the eu economies like need a lockdown to paper over

02:28:46.060 their inherent weakness and then as soon as lockdown is like crumbling and it's like

02:28:51.160 2d stabilizing to maintain lockdown it's like they need to play hardball with

02:28:55.000 russia till i prop them up again there's probably something there but i don't know

02:29:00.720 my economics is like my schizo macroeconomics is like a very rusty it's been a long time

02:29:11.460 since i've read books about central banking and stuff i have developed theories about the eu 0.94

02:29:18.020 economies and why they don't collapse and how their horrible horrible evil geopolitical

02:29:24.720 systems are designed to balance each other out yeah that's uh i i tend not to devote too much

02:29:38.780 time to thinking about that but it's probably worth thinking about like how do these economies

02:29:44.360 that are propped up upside down pyramids of piffle manage to yeah and i i suspect there was something

02:29:51.280 about lockdown that was um well there were several different things about lockdown that

02:29:56.940 are being used to paper over the fact that like like costs of living and quality of life are like

02:30:02.440 collapsing and there's no way to like drop up production in these places and their demographic

02:30:07.320 pyramids are like lopsided and like traditionally the same way you paper over that is like to have

02:30:14.560 an external war that that like also enables a lot of like papering over of these and like

02:30:22.820 the violent enforcing of um financial markets in ways in ways that are like profoundly unnatural

02:30:32.460 but do paper over other flaws uh some some economists listening to us as either having 0.89

02:30:39.960 a brain blast or things were completely retarded but probably you know all all all genius and 0.91

02:30:50.040 overlaps found retardation in some way or the other but uh we are approaching where are we at 0.97

02:30:58.420 now hour and a half two hours we're at two and a half hours right now uh we are that's a very 0.94

02:31:07.360 long very good episode uh do you have any final thoughts do you have anything we didn't get to

02:31:12.440 that you you're itching to dive into uh not really i mean my concept for an air tasking

02:31:23.680 order for an attack on iran was kind of in its infancy in my head anyway but really i mean if 0.92

02:31:29.240 the only target you want to hit is nuclear facilities then the b2s probably actually 1.00

02:31:33.540 could and probably should accomplish that 0.92

02:31:36.200 on their own, so there's not too much more to say about

02:31:38.240 that. I'll probably come up with

02:31:40.120 some profound thing that was

02:31:41.960 blindingly bloody obvious that I missed

02:31:44.020 that I should have said

02:31:44.980 about an hour from now.

02:31:48.640 You and

02:31:49.920 fly a seed mission with the beat, too.

02:31:52.420 Try to fly them in stealthy.

02:31:54.260 Try to, like, bird force

02:31:55.620 your way through all

02:31:58.060 of the Iranian air defenses. 1.00

02:31:59.820 Yeah, it's designed to evade

02:32:01.940 the air defenses rather than suppress them i could spend a very long time on the history and

02:32:08.220 doctrine of suppression and destruction of enemy air defenses and how that's evolved over time and

02:32:12.540 how the u.s air force and navy do it completely differently but that's like a two-hour this is

02:32:17.320 one of those things that like i'm tim that i've eternally been tempted to ask you about because

02:32:22.840 like i'm vaguely aware of and interested in like vietnam era doctrine and like like there are lots

02:32:31.580 of like interesting little tidbits that fascinate me about it like from the from the forestall

02:32:38.200 disaster to like the development of the wild weasels to like the fact that north vietnam

02:32:43.260 was consistently able to like shoot down u.s planes and like have have u.s hostages and stuff

02:32:51.220 to to whether or not rambo was right and those hostages were left behind enemy line

02:32:58.680 stuff like there's so many rabbit holes there that is such uh there's such a story that like

02:33:04.180 is not part of like all much of the popular conception of the vietnam war war along with

02:33:11.680 like the tunnel tunneling warfare and the like actual pretty in-depth sophistication of like

02:33:19.520 the vietcong and like how integrated they were with like the north vietnamese army but uh

02:33:28.680 This is why I haven't asked you about it, because I know that that would be its own episode.

02:33:34.700 It would probably be its own series of episodes sitting into that, like once we combine your Vietnam Autism with my Vietnam Autism.

02:33:48.200 Indeed, that could be quite a project.

02:33:53.440 Common!

02:33:54.080 As a halfway measure, I can recommend some books and stuff like that.

02:33:58.680 We already have too many show notes.

02:34:01.140 We have two.

02:34:02.200 We have two.

02:34:03.260 But, uh...

02:34:04.680 Fair enough.

02:34:06.140 But, uh, dear listener, if you are interested in just a deep dive into the Vietnam War with, uh, Goppy and I.

02:34:15.920 Well, Goppy and I asking dumb questions.

02:34:19.980 Uh, comment at anarchanalicon.com under the, uh, episode comments.

02:34:26.000 but uh yeah no this has been an excellent episode uh thank you so much for being on and

02:34:32.080 intend to have you back

02:34:34.480 yes thanks for having me anyway you listeners out there stay glorious

02:34:56.000 Thank you.

02:35:26.000 We'll be right back.

02:35:56.000 We'll be right back.

02:36:26.000 Thank you.

02:36:56.000 We'll be right back.

02:37:26.000 Thank you.

02:37:56.000 Thank you.

02:38:26.000 Thank you.

Anarchonomicon - May 15, 2025

Ep 11 Yemeni-Indo-Ukrainian Air War w⧸Goppy

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