00:00:03.320Before we get started, I just want to remind you that Anarchonomicon is a purely listener-supported podcast.
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00:07:46.380I promise you, listeners at home, I've had paid subscribers breathing down my neck about this for like a year.
00:07:52.720But there is another half coming out to the dream of the motorcycle warlord, where I will actually go into, like, the operational logistics and, like, lay out my very complex theory of motorcycle operations.
00:08:11.780but uh the the trend you talk talk about uh this is one of the things that has
00:08:18.440has been like a hobby horse of mine forever but uh if you look at the way modern armies are stuff
00:08:26.240and the way modern armies move on the battlefield and the way modern armies interact with space
00:08:31.720itself uh it hasn't really changed since uh the 1950s actually if anything like modern
00:08:39.420militaries have kind of slowed down like uh the peak of a movement speed for modern mil
00:08:46.640militaries uh uh there's it's either the veramacht in at like the very start of world war ii when it
00:08:59.100was still the veramacht the majority of its movement was still cavalry based it was still
00:09:04.560like having all its logistics done by horses it was like an actual cavalry unit like it's a
00:09:10.380salt cavalry um they had they had um been converted to like panzer divisions but the actual like speed
00:09:18.860of its movement like its operational speed how how fast the military can cover like 200 kilometers
00:09:25.060how many days that takes with the logistics and everything that their ability to do that with
00:09:31.880horses was actually kind of might have been a peak for army movement speed. And you see another
00:09:37.520peak of army movement speed around the time of Napoleon. And you wouldn't think this because,
00:09:44.600of course, you know, we motorize everything. You know, you have supersonic jets and whatnot.
00:09:51.740But an actual land army, the limiting factor of how fast it can cover territory, how fast it can
00:09:57.560take and hold territory is not determined by the speed of its vehicles. It's determined by the
00:10:02.620speed of its logistics and how quickly it can set up a logistical supply hub so they can keep those
00:10:08.620vehicles gassed and can keep those men fed and they can keep the ammo coming in and they can
00:10:12.660keep spare parts coming in. And if anything, like the movement speed of a lot of armies kind of
00:10:21.700peaked peaked in the 20th century like between the world world wars and the what all this
00:10:29.500motorization has done is it has allowed a lot of tactical maneuver warfare or operational
00:10:37.880maneuver warfare but the strategic level uh the actual speed of how many kilometers a day
00:10:44.860is an army moving during a war has, if anything, maybe slowed down a bit. You look at stuff like
00:10:53.680Desert Storm or the assault on Baghdad during the 2003-2004 Iraq War, like the amount of time
00:11:07.980it takes the U.S. Malta to cover the 200 kilometers between Kuwait and Baghdad is remarkably slower
00:11:16.440than it takes Napoleon to cover 200 kilometers during the Napoleonic Wars. And this is one of
00:11:25.740the great gaps of the modern world, because at the same time, armies have been slowing down due to
00:11:32.220the intensity and the weight of their logistical chains uh consumer vehicles and consumer mobility
00:11:40.460has gone through a revolution uh in the world wars uh traveling across country
00:11:47.520was still a feat like uh if you were in new york and you want to go to california
00:11:53.940yeah and you had the budget like you could maybe try to do that in the car but like basically you'd
00:12:00.460have to do it by train because cars run reliable you have to fix them repair them uh the lifespan
00:12:07.300of an automobile is actually a shockingly short amount of time and and just the prospect of like
00:12:15.620bonnie and clyde's style traveling across country in automobile is actually a bit of a logistical
00:12:21.260cool feed in just keeping the automobile running as late as like the 40s as we get into the 50s
00:12:28.020And as we get really into the 60s, 70s, 80s, and, like, the modern consumer vehicle world that, like, every American lives in now,
00:12:38.420the speed at which an ordinary consumer with consumer vehicles has 10x'd and the reliability of which they can travel has likewise 10x, you know.
00:12:51.200So it used to be if your car made it to 100,000 miles, like people would celebrate that.
00:16:41.660in the French Revolutionite context was able to draw upon,
00:16:45.960even as expressed in things like how willing were their commanders
00:16:51.280to get up in the morning and move their troops earlier in the day.
00:16:55.860When Napoleon has his first successes in Italy,
00:16:59.520it's against the capture of Padua and the various maneuverings against the Austrians.
00:17:07.140He's maneuvering against septuagenarian generals.
00:17:11.660Who are just more worn down than he is, and who are thinking more in a seven years war context than a Napoleonic war context.
00:17:20.260So, between the imposition and the ability to sustain a dramatically faster pace of march at the lowest level of the maneuver hierarchy, that of the infantry, and the explicit foraging tactics for logistics, which is not new, it's not novel to Napoleon, but this recurs every so often.
00:17:46.540And you see, ah, Sherman in his march to the sea in Georgia, Napoleon in his revolutionary
00:18:52.120I would be curious to know how it compares to certain maneuvers in the Prussian Wars of Unification
00:18:58.200when there's a mass transition to movement of troop by rail.
00:19:04.600I would have to actually chart that on the map, how fast the Prussians are able to make it to Sudan from their marshalling area and compare it to how they perform 70 years later in World War II.
00:19:18.940So with regards to consumer transport, and specifically consumer transport during the 1940s versus military transport, we also must recognize that there's a tremendous amount of investment made outside of just the vehicles.
00:19:35.660So the entirety of the interstate system is not something which the consumer has any direct control over. It's not something which automobile manufacturers have control over. It's an external investment that allows for fast and reasonably direct movement from point A to point B.
00:19:51.620The point still stands that one of the bottlenecks or one of the reagents in this equation, that of the individual vehicles, has definitely improved, but then there are others surrounding it.
00:20:04.180And in the military context, if you had a Humvee going down the highway, it's not going to be appreciably slower or less reliable than an SUV going down the highway.
00:20:22.640but now the limiting reagent in the speed of maneuver is the increase in friction on the
00:20:30.480battlefield that friction which is increased due to the volume of fire both that you're exposed to
00:20:37.580and that you have to be able to deliver yourself and compare the infantryman in world war ii
00:20:42.560carrying maybe a hundred rounds for his m1 grand on him and now the basic loadout being 210 rounds
00:20:49.720uh you're expected to have all of that and to face all of that which means that your rate of
00:20:57.660movement and your friction the friction that you're moving against is uh going to be impaired
00:21:02.860um and then the time the time to resupply if you look at videos of like how long it takes
00:21:10.760to reload all the links in the chain for a gatling gun like every single one like a 20
00:21:18.42020 millimeter gatling gun or something every single one has to be manually and loaded into
00:21:24.040the link of the belt it takes forever and you have maybe 30 seconds of full auto fire
00:21:29.580so that then has that shifts where your friction is in the production of speed from
00:21:39.900how many steps can i take per second to how long do i have to need to wait after i've moved to be
00:21:47.100able to move again. And in general, this notion of breaking down observations into their component
00:21:55.880factors is what leads me to think that light individual or small group troop transport
00:22:03.940is incentivized by the current limiting reagents in maneuver in warfare.
00:22:10.600yes so um we so so putting a plug in that for a second now obviously a lot of people have um
00:22:30.280have complimented me and complimented like several other people i wasn't the only one
00:22:36.160predicting this but uh a lot of people have um said oh we we've seen this revolution now uh
00:22:44.260the russians are using motorcycles on the field fields of ukraine but the thing is what we've
00:22:51.920seen the russians and ukrainians do with motorcycles and e-bikes is not really what
00:22:59.780what i expected or what you necessarily they expected with uh regards to like how they've
00:23:07.580been employed like uh the use of the light highly maneuverable vehicles has not actually been here
00:23:16.460as firm maneuver uh the uh motorcycles have been used to um kind of bridge gaps in logistics that
00:23:26.500that roadways and other paths that had been like subject to to drone attack attack that
00:23:37.440both sides have been able to bridge gaps like that and get people in and in and out of a region
00:23:44.900by having like the last five 10 kilometers be covered by by motorcycles and stuff and we've
00:23:51.320seen this in syria where uh in syria uh the syrian civil war and several other wars and millies
00:23:58.840uh motorcycles have been used as like logistical resupply to like navigate bombed out cities that
00:24:05.840you couldn't really get a trucker vehicle through safely you can get a motorcycle through and you
00:24:10.160can carry uh depending on the motorcycle you can compare you can carry like 50 to even 150 pounds
00:24:17.200of kit on a motorcycle um i had about a hundred pounds of kit on per cycle when i was traveling
00:24:23.540across country but uh the like nine of these are actually like really what we'd consider
00:24:30.980like maneuvered advances uh you also see e-bikes being used to insert snipers and allow snipers to
00:24:38.100get in get out quickly uh at get up up to speed and they'll do like a 20 30 kilometer like uh
00:24:47.460insert and extract from whatever hide they're sneaky sneaking up to that's also like a very
00:24:55.600interesting implementation of it but it's not really maneuvers uh what have you seen on the
00:25:01.660modern battlefield that like uh ties ties into this and then we'll get into uh we can go from
00:25:08.820there to uh your theories that you were telling me about uh before we started and uh in our
00:25:15.500previous conversations the consistent report is of infiltration tactics and like assault like
00:25:27.480That's how it gets reported in Western media.
00:25:29.660And I think that's more or less correct.
00:25:30.860Oftentimes the Russians are just making advances with motorcycles in open assaults because it is faster, because it's a better chance of dodging drones, because they have a higher order operational incentive for maintaining tempo.
00:25:49.600and due to both the drone question and the uh the destruction of a lot of their heavy equipment
00:25:57.200motorcycles are available and they can use them um so logistics yes uh infiltration yes
00:26:05.920very narrow time frame assaults and something that you often hear reported is that
00:26:13.640It'll be like, assaults don't happen as one thing.
00:26:19.200Like, the Russians engage in multi-wave assaults, which all get counted individually.0.58
00:26:26.400Like, if you read the ISW report, they'll count dozens per day.
00:26:30.160But the only way for that to actually be feasible is for there to be a constant trickle of between one to ten soldiers at a time.
00:26:39.900they navigate through the gray zone which spans between five and 30 kilometers depending on where
00:26:46.180you are in the front and the gray zone being the area of mutual interpenetration of assets so
00:26:52.100broadly speaking where the drone coverage overlaps with each other and then they accumulate
00:26:57.880and after they have accumulated then they conduct more conventional
00:27:31.940We're not seeing big arrow pushes on the map driven by motorcycle warfare. In much the same way, we're not seeing big arrow pushes on the map driven by drone warfare. We instead will see hundreds of drones utilized in a relatively small place and over long distances, 20 kilometers at a stretch, but they all get destroyed.
00:27:54.620They're all one-way operations. And when we think of maneuver, as opposed to this kind of positional warfare, for you to be able to plan a maneuver operation, there has to be an expectation of persistence, of being able to start from one place, move to another place, and then be able to continue operating once you've reached that place.
00:28:20.800And the culmination point of these infiltration ops or these narrow assault operations, the culmination occurs almost as soon as the initial maneuver is completed, and so the initial movement is completed, and so you don't actually get maneuver as classically considered.
00:28:39.760um i'll also note that i this discussion our discussion comes at a good time because we were
00:28:48.900actually in a lull of motorcycle uh implementation so the russians were really hot on it for about
00:28:56.000half a year they started um organizing their independent training centers and pushing it hard
00:29:02.660and all of their assaults, and now, due to a combination of multiple factors, including
00:29:11.020the increased use of heavy armor or heavy vehicles again, you don't see the same mass
00:29:19.700motorcycle assaults that you were in February of this, even of this year, and this points
00:29:24.840to the really tremendous experimentation going on on the Ukrainian front between both sides.0.67
00:29:35.460So perhaps the Russians or the Ukrainians will surprise us and find some new way of
00:29:43.980employing these same tools in larger scale maneuver.
00:29:48.620But broadly speaking, yes, we've not found like this is one of the places for experimentation
00:29:54.780for the resurrection of maneuver if it can be resurrected at all but we've not seen it yet
00:30:01.920yeah and so um i have this this theory that like um motorcycles especially but also atvs and
00:30:13.820technicals that um there is this massive gap in modern warfare uh that i call the ultralight
00:30:22.760infantry gap that uh there's a lot of roles that uh very in types of warfare that are very common
00:30:30.620on the modern battlefield that um are very very similar but generally do not overlap so you have
00:30:41.480um so you have uh urban warfare you know uh dismounted urban warfare operations you know
00:30:48.920traditional uh stuff like battle of ortona or like or like uh the taking of berlin uh urban
00:30:56.980warfare operations conventional conventional uh room clearing operations you have force recon
00:31:03.200where uh where you have a a like a patrol or a light light force going out and basically their
00:31:15.740job is to like chaotically find or encounter the enemy or like spot the enemy from a position of
00:31:25.080like concealment and then call in fires on it, you know, call in artillery strikes or air strikes
00:31:33.060or what have you. You have special forces assault operations, you know, stuff that you see Navy
00:32:09.920more mixed operations guerrilla inter intermingled with civilian maneuver yeah and there uh the way
00:32:19.160i conceived it i divided up into like kind of these six modes of warfare and the thing is the
00:32:25.140loadout of like what would your force have on hand for all these is actually shockingly similar like
00:32:31.020uh you know force recon might have like heavier heavier weapons you know true insurgency might
00:32:37.480have lighter stuff but it's a very very similar load on they're very similar types of engagement
00:32:42.220but but of these six you know they can't very few of them can dynamically switch from one to the
00:32:51.540other like like they can maybe switch the wets like just most similar to them but you can't
00:32:57.560really dynamically switch an operation between one and the other you know an urban warfare operation
00:33:03.420is not able to really become an insurgency operation within any reasonable stretch of time.
00:33:10.040You know, a guerrilla campaign, like, struggles to become an espionage campaign.
00:33:16.340A special forces raid can't just dynamically on the fly decide that they're going to sit around for a week in the field.
00:33:28.100You know, they probably haven't brought kit for anything like that,
00:33:30.860But they can't dynamically decide that they're going to, like, do a grill-style, like, slow-burn Fabian tactics type thing.
00:33:37.420That there are all these forces that you'd think would be able to dynamically switch between each other the way that, like, a tank platoon can dynamically switch between multiple operations.
00:33:48.420Or that a, like, U-boat or a naval asset can dynamically switch between all its types of operations at time.
00:33:56.460whereas ultralight infantry just is really locked into whatever role it leaves leaves the base set
00:34:04.640out to do and a big part of this i think is just like the failure to like properly conceptualize
00:34:14.420the use of uh of modern like ultralight vehicles uh because you don't see this problem necessarily
00:34:48.000the intact parts of the Iraqi National Army.
00:34:52.960And then they're able to switch off from occupation, guerrilla warfare, and do that all dynamically, whereas I don't think there's a Western force able to do that dynamically because of the vehicle loadouts and a lot of doctrinal stuff.
00:35:10.960So this is like one of the concepts that I've been playing around with and trying to theorize this ultralight infantry gap. Does that make sense?
00:35:25.560so there is a um yes this tension between generalism versus specialism um i think in
00:35:34.820especially the american context because we are so replete with various special operations
00:35:41.540forces and that i include things like airborne divisions and a ranger regiment and so on so
00:35:47.540forth. We have a very wide toolbox of much more particular tools so as to improve our success
00:35:56.940rate for particular kinds of operations. The Russians, at the outset of the special0.97
00:36:04.780military operation, similarly were engaging their various assets in various things which
00:36:13.280they were specialized for. The VDV went into Hostamel. They all died, but they were employed
00:36:20.980in their particular role. Now the VDV is a grenadier unit and motorized infantry unit,
00:36:29.720not much different except for its underlying quality than any other army unit you care to find
00:36:38.000in Rue 4. So, yes, I agree that we do not see a lot of switching contexts, and that is partially
00:36:50.460materially driven, but even more so doctrinally and operationally driven, because especially
00:36:56.220if you include things like direct action raids by Delta or SEAL teams or what have you,
00:37:03.440So the amount, like the tooth-to-tail ratio of that versus a recon patrol versus urban fighting is tremendous.
00:37:16.860The SOF raids are planned like it's a NASA mission.
00:37:20.440And one of the major transitions that we're seeing in the post-GWatt era is precisely that realization that you don't actually have NASA mission scale tooth-to-tail ratios for every single door-kicking mission that you want to run if you're fighting a near-peer, Russia or China, what have you, because you're conducting dozens.
00:37:47.440dozens like you're in any given unit might be conducting up to a dozen attacks throughout the
00:37:54.200course of the day like uh the russians have a different structure than we do because they
00:37:57.960and because they used to have the battalion uh tactical groups and now they're trying to
00:38:03.940switch over to a closer to brigade or division scale structuring and so they end up kind of like
00:38:09.660falling back on their regimental structure um unpack that first like uh lay that out with like
00:38:16.560kind of numbers. I'm like, what the decision process looks like, the difference between them.
00:38:22.360Most of our listeners won't be able to make that distinction.
00:38:29.840So in the West and under NATO, current NATO doctrine, the independent unit of maneuver
00:38:37.200is the brigade, the brigade combat team. And so then a division becomes an administrative unit,
00:38:43.500fundamentally administrative logistical unit fundamentally that supplies the forces
00:38:48.180that combatant commands in the form of brigade combat teams actually employ and this what are
00:38:55.940the size of these uh uh that like uh just sort of it's a ballpark yeah brigade is three to five
00:39:03.580thousand people a division is about 10 000 people um and that's all in that's uh shooters and
00:39:10.800uh cooks and and everything else i want to say the united states probably a division's probably
00:39:17.100larger than that but like a little bit larger but on paper the table of organization if you go by
00:39:22.980the standard a platoon is 40 men a company is three platoons of uh 40 for about 120 to 150
00:39:29.200a brigade is about 500 um sorry battalions about 500 a brigade is about 1500 and then
00:39:37.920A division is about 5,000, and then you have a little bit of additional echelon organic units at each higher level, like divisional artillery.
00:39:52.080Brigades may not have organic artillery, but instead have to relay requests for that kind of fire support to their higher administrative unit.
00:40:02.640um any kind of i don't recall at what level you have integrated air assets
00:40:10.040but one of the interesting things about drones is that you can have integrated air assets
00:40:17.000at the level of the squad or the fire team and you don't have to have some kind of
00:40:23.280fire support radio man all up the chain get approval get allocation of an asset that isn't
00:40:31.680organic to your chain of command or rather say organic to your echelon the chain of command
00:40:37.520and then have it employed and so drone units or drone assets have a very very rapid turnaround
00:40:44.880time they have very high agility as it were and this agility is one of the things which makes
00:40:52.080them attractive over and above their force generation properties which is to say it's
00:40:59.840easy to force generate drones to build them and distribute them. So that's what it looks like
00:41:06.820roughly in the West. The Russians had a different system with battalion tactical groups. Battalion
00:41:11.480tactical groups were about the size of our battalions, but they were staffed by skeleton
00:41:18.220crews of professional soldiers and then were expected to be filled out. Their table of
00:41:24.860organizations were expected to be filled out during the buildup, during the mobilization
00:42:15.420They then relatively quickly stopped using the battalion tactical group as their canonical independent unit of maneuver.
00:42:24.820They have recently announced that they are increasing the size of various units to divisional size, and that this appears to be how they are structuring their force generation slash logistics slash administrative echelons going forwards.
00:42:43.760But then when you read the reports as to who's actually fighting where, you see things like this regiment is fighting here, or detachments from this regiment are fighting over here.
00:42:55.220And a regiment is somewhere between a, and it can be smaller than a battalion, it can be almost the size of a brigade, depending on its history.
00:43:12.060So that is roughly what we see. That is roughly how the table of organization is laid out in East and West. Oh, yes, the VDV.
00:43:21.460So, when you read the reports as to what units are attacking where and how they're attacking, you will read about VDV units, Russian airborne units, being employed in basically the same way as militia from the LDR, the Luhansk and Donetsk breakaway republics.
00:43:49.500They had various volunteer militias that were formed, and they've been gradually nationalized by the Russians. And they are involved in the same thing that the Marine infantry or Naval infantry are, the Russian equipments of the Marine infantry and the VTV are doing, the same thing that line infantry are doing, the same thing that they had the North Koreans doing in Kursk.
00:44:06.960There has been a general homogenization of their line infantry into motorized infantry.
00:44:19.180And then the big distinction on both Russia and Ukraine is, like the big new distinction, is the creation of centralized unmanned forces units.
00:44:30.700So for Russia, that's the Rubicon Center for Advanced Unmanned Systems.
00:44:34.660and for the ukrainians that is just called the unmanned system forces i believe
00:44:41.300and in both cases this is kind of like creation of space force it is a new well again okay in
00:44:48.600western contexts we have force generation and we have commands so the army the air force the navy
00:44:54.320the marines the coast guard space force they have they are the recruitment and outfitting pipelines
00:45:00.840for the assets, which then get allocated to particular commands, CENTCOM, AFRICOM, PACCOM,
00:45:07.320so on and so forth. And then those commands utilize, like they request, and they utilize
00:45:12.260the assets which they're given and the responsibility of the forces to produce
00:45:16.420and supply and sustain those forces. With at least the Russian Ukrainians, to the extent that I've0.78
00:45:23.840able to study them, it looks like these unmanned system forces on both sides are doing both0.80
00:45:31.640force generation, even up the supply chain to the point of controlling or running the
00:45:39.740drone fabrication locations themselves, mostly for FPV drones, and then all the way down
00:45:46.980to training the drone operators and potentially commanding them in the field, or at the very
00:45:52.860least being part of the chain of command that then attaches the drone operators to commands in the
00:45:58.280field. So the United States obviously doesn't have anything at all like that. The most
00:46:06.700sophisticated proposal for drone integration that I've read is in the Marine Force Development 2030
00:46:13.020document, and it is. To give it its full credit, it does propose that every unit type and every
00:46:21.700echelon from the squad up will have some variety of integrated drone asset, integrated unmanned
00:46:28.360asset. And this is good because that's what you want. That's the advantage of drones is having
00:46:32.900zero turnaround time, or I should say no more turnaround time than throwing a grenade or
00:46:37.940requesting mortar support or heavy suppressive fire from a squad integrated automatic weapon.
00:46:43.680um but we've not seen the same kind of we've not seen the transition from having armor in every
00:46:56.680infantry division to then panzer divisions we've not seen and i've only i even though even with
00:47:04.600Russia and Ukraine have only begun to see drone-led, drone-led unit organizations.
00:47:15.900The United States still, sorry, yeah, and I'll cut it off there, because I think my
00:47:23.360original point was that the United States has so many special operations teams that
00:47:27.020if we want to fight in urban areas, like take an airfield, we'll send in the Rangers, or
00:47:31.800if we want to do a Helleborn assault, we'll send in the 82nd or 101st. If we want to kill
00:47:38.360Osama Bin Laden, we send in SEAL Team 6. And it could easily be the case that when we go into a
00:47:46.860near-peer conflict, and you have to spend all the resources that you have much faster than they can
00:47:53.080be force-generated, we'll see homogenization of some of these specialized roles, and we'll also
00:48:01.380see new divisions that arise in specialization, e.g. the specialization between manned versus
00:48:07.100unmanned. All right. That has been a wonderful deep dive into the doctrine and how specialization
00:48:21.680has been changing over the past two years now uh now your specific theories uh the reason
00:48:29.020the reason i had had you on is because you think of the combination of um unmanned
00:48:37.460in drones with uh recent advancements in e-bikes and uh and the rise of like light consumer vehicles
00:48:48.300is you hinted at this, that this is actually going to allow a significant revolution in operations.
00:48:57.040I remember you telling me stories about experiments you'd run with your e-bike,
00:49:06.100seeing how far you could push it and how operationally interesting an e-bike could get.
00:49:14.400And what can you tell us about this theory in your own personal testing
00:49:23.140about the modern light vehicle, the modern ultra-ultralight vehicle,
00:53:42.440whether it's for a scheduled maintenance program
00:53:47.440or if it's part of an invasion, if you have an e-bike rolling down the road, then that raises
00:53:55.320almost zero, almost zero flags over and above someone being present at that place in time
00:54:02.620regardless. And so this kind of increasing intermingling of dual use or of, there's a term
00:54:13.200which I can't remember the name of, but it refers to the ability of Japan to very quickly
00:54:17.080build a nuclear weapon and delivery system if they had to. It's like their timeline to
00:54:23.340nuclearization. And their timeline to nuclearization is very short, engineering-wise
00:54:29.000and technologically speaking. It's almost purely a matter of regulations and operational restrictions.
00:54:34.100And so similarly, I propose that to restore the kind of maneuver which has an increasingly smaller interval over which it can be viable will require increasing pre-emplacement of assets, increasing utilization of logistical stealth.
00:54:53.140That is, things which, even if you're looking at them, even if you're looking at how they came to be in a place, do not raise any red flags.
00:55:00.840And short timelines to militarization.
00:55:06.740So e-bikes are an obvious, or I should say they are one of the technologies which I've been experimenting with to see, okay, you can definitely get an e-bike almost anywhere in the world.
00:55:17.660and it can definitely offer some degree of maneuverability and utility in a dual use
00:55:23.460circumstance, how much utility could it actually offer? And one of the experiments I've done is
00:55:32.300go to Milsim games with an e-bike and travel to the Milsim games via e-bike and take a day
00:55:39.180and go 100 miles while wearing a simulacrum of light infantry kit, but still around.
00:55:47.66070 to 100 pounds and arrive and play the game and then come back and this is totally viable
00:55:55.400and it doesn't raise any suspicions and i you know it is something which i could do under even
00:56:05.400like that was just for fun i could easily see myself doing it even more aggressively under
00:56:10.280duress if i had to if i were compelled to move that fast that far with that much gear
00:56:17.720and i think that uh while this would be difficult to it's difficult to see how this would be
00:56:26.220realized in something like an army field manual at the level of staff colleges and war planning
00:56:34.580more broadly a recognition of this kind of necessity of pre-emplacement which is almost
00:56:42.440like an like a intelligence operation mindset will then in turn ask questions like what can
00:56:50.200we do that looks no different than what a civilian would be doing and i'll leave it at that
00:56:58.740fascinating and and now you said you had personally uh written an e-bike you said
00:57:09.54080 100 kilometers to a milson some game and back how many how many times did you have to
00:57:15.740like stop to recharge it on that uh so 80 to 100 miles um and with that i carried two batteries
00:57:25.480with me uh each battery is pretty heavy so they're not like state-of-the-art lithium ion they are
00:57:30.900instead lithium iron polymer which is better for uh temperature robustness it doesn't care as much
00:57:39.900what the temperature is but definitely has a lower energy density and so each battery was like
00:57:44.180a kilowatt of of power and a kilowatt of energy and they weighed like
00:58:40.800So with my current batteries and current charger,
00:58:43.760it is about six hours, and you carry two chargers,
00:58:46.480so you can charge both batteries in parallel.
00:58:48.340But if you had a more aggressive battery chemistry, if you had a more aggressive charger, if you had a smarter and a better battery management system than the cheap Chinesium that's on mine, I think you can get that down.
00:59:05.100Like you'd have that, you could have that pretty easily, I think.
00:59:10.500And then, of course, if you, like it's a very brute force approach, if I carried multiple smaller batteries and multiple chargers for each of the, one for each battery, then I could just hot swap, say, every hour and then charge a bunch of them when I get to wherever it is I'm going.
00:59:30.820Okay, so that's deeply, that is interesting.
00:59:34.780And of course, e-bike that's going like 15 kilometers an hour, that looks like no different than a bicycle.
00:59:43.540That looks like, you know, no different than like a kid or like someone commuting to work or someone or, you know, lady out for a stroll around the neighborhood.
00:59:55.480like that's a i'll convert to metric measurements um but if we're talking 15 to 18 miles an hour
01:00:04.100that's uh going to be around 25 kilometers per hour yeah between 25 and 30 kilometers per hour
01:00:13.360yeah so you just look like a like a and the usually fit person like it's not
01:01:12.740um yeah it's like you're going you're look you look like a person going on a camping trip
01:01:21.180um you don't look like you're and you are not doing anything nefarious
01:01:26.520so the same sort of constraints that you think of like if independent you so there's this notion
01:01:35.740or there's this this concept space that you'll counter on the internet sometimes
01:01:40.200called like civilian defense, which is a little bit like self-defense plus plus.
01:01:46.860And part of that is taking into consideration what are the characteristic constraints on
01:01:54.660the procurement, maintenance, and operation of the martial capacity as a civilian.
01:02:01.600And I think that this is a fruitful area of regulation for military planners and for future war theorists, because many of the same constraints, especially on the logistics side of things, are going to increasingly apply to official military units.
01:02:23.280the mere notion of logistical austerity like civilians compared to the military
01:02:30.180are poor you don't have resupply as a civilian like your gun is a major
01:02:35.500investment of time and money to to buy and to train how to use and in the military you know
01:02:42.920if you break a 1500 night vision headpiece you just get a new one from the quartermaster
01:02:49.340um you can't do that increasingly on the zero line in ukraine that's why you have all of these
01:02:58.820extremely fine-grained resupply missions where they push one wheelbarrow full of supplies by
01:03:06.880unmanned ground vehicle or they send one quadcopter with water to restock uh a uh a drone
01:03:15.800observation post like because of the amount of counter pressure and of the fine-grainedness of
01:03:24.700that counter pressure due to the agility especially of drone assets and the surveillance
01:03:32.360that the transparency that surveillance via drone assets offer and it could be something else like
01:03:38.160it could like it could be starlink looking or it could be a successor to starlink which
01:03:41.320looks down with a meter scale or submeter scale resolution like whatever the point is that there
01:03:46.780is this granularity and because there's this granularity of transparency i you then have a
01:03:55.160comparable granularity of pressure and counter pressure which means that to be able to perform
01:04:01.780some kind of movement you have to slip in under the awareness of that pressure and counter pressure
01:04:08.720or in between its coverage and so we then see that the microcosm of maneuver being very difficult
01:04:18.160is that any motion at all is very risky on what we're seeing in the modern battlefield
01:04:24.720and until we get to the point where we have strong enough and widespread enough
01:04:31.380sensor countermeasures like broadly speaking ew but also contra electro optical
01:04:37.540you're going to continue operating under those conditions and those are the conditions and those
01:04:44.240conditions have approximations in the civilian defense or civilian consideration world because
01:04:50.780if you're a civilian or if you are a little green man pretending to be a civilian infiltrating into
01:04:57.320Crimea you also can't just go back to the quartermaster and get resupply if you lose a critical piece of kit
01:05:02.680no exactly uh so you and i have been thinking very very similarly uh how are we've been thinking
01:05:16.620very similarly about very different pieces of equipment so uh you've been thinking about uh
01:05:23.180e-bike insertions and uh this kind of deniability um uh seemingly indistinguishability from
01:05:32.320a civilian movement and i've been thinking about um because there's two ways to hide something
01:05:38.860right you can hide you can hide something by um harder to identify so like the e-bike makes it
01:05:47.980very very hard to identify a military asset getting in position however you can also hide
01:05:54.740something by moving it farther out increasing the space within which is hiding and part of this is
01:06:01.520because i've motorcycled uh across across north america i i think of the vastness of like how
01:06:09.600huge a continent is but uh but uh the it's interesting because we're both focusing on
01:06:18.240two wheels whereas you focus on like kind of the the uh narrowest lightest two wheels vehicle
01:06:27.500was I've been eyeing the heaviest, which is the modern ADV dual-sport motorcycle.
01:06:35.720This is like your BMW GX, there's various numbers attached to bikes,
01:06:43.240your Kawasaki KLR650s, which were actually used by the Marine Corps for a while
01:06:48.500as their motorcycle messenger bike, but the Marine Corps has not used motorcycles for hardly anything.
01:06:54.940special forces complain about this that'll get the motorcycle train and they'll never be allowed
01:06:59.120to touch the motorcycles anyway. And other bikes like this, the Tenere 700, the Honda Africa Twin,
01:07:13.520there's this category of bike called adventure bikes, or they're also sometimes called dual
01:07:21.140sports but they're on the heavier end end of deal sports and what these bikes are designed to do if
01:07:25.860you've ever seen um long way around with ewan mcguire which is a great series i highly recommend
01:07:32.140it um ewan mcguire and charlie boardman motorcycle from uh london england to new york city going long
01:07:39.940way around through the road bones in siberia and like across montcoria uh what these bikes are
01:07:45.800designed to do is uh go on highways and off-road and like do like river crossings and stuff like
01:07:55.120that while carrying a rider and 100 pounds of equipment and require like and be designed that
01:08:02.060like a hobbyist in his like 40s and 50s uh can get out in the middle of nowhere and if there's
01:08:09.760problem he can like probably fix it on the road with like a minimum of effort uh you see i saw
01:08:17.500hundreds of these guys up in in the arctic when i was there that this is like the going up to the
01:08:23.320yukon or alaska or the northwest territories it's like kind of one of the big things to do on these
01:08:29.620bikes the other one is to go from like america to argentina but uh the unique thing with these
01:08:35.060these bikes is they're they're civilian vehicles and they're motorcycles but uh they're fully
01:08:43.200off-road capable and they have this incredible lift capacity of like i rode i rode my uh klr with
01:08:52.900a hundred pounds of kit on it like a full camping setup clothes laptop everything to like live off
01:08:59.840the bike plus um you know spare tire tubes uh spare parts um all the things that i could like
01:09:08.100change it change frockets or change uh chains or any anything why is it out out on the road
01:09:16.620and the unique and my thinking has been uh very similar to yours but pretty different
01:09:24.320is that of that platoon or like small elements uh infiltration forces like maybe two to four
01:09:32.840up to a kind of a subplatoon size element of like 20 20 bikers could insert on these motor
01:09:42.880motorcycles um their gas tanks get like a 500 kilometer ranges ish of a very small amount of
01:09:52.700gas so like uh basically for like a large force if you just found a car like living off the land
01:10:00.140like napoleon's forces and just punctured a gas tank you could probably fill fill up like four of
01:10:05.140these bikes off one off one car in the middle of the country and of course you could have spare
01:10:10.640gas i i rode with a um an additional 10 liter gas tank that balanced on like my side pannier
01:10:17.640bannier which like added 20 pounds and was actually like throwing off the weight of the
01:10:23.300bike a bit but it was fine like you ride ride hundreds and hundreds i rode like a few thousand
01:10:30.180kilometers like that um that you can load all this weight weight on these bikes and what you
01:10:38.200could do is insert with them or like go through the extreme rugged long way it's possible blank
01:10:46.580like through terrain that should be relatively impassable these disappear immediately because
01:10:54.620is uh turn off the field petcock lie them down and then cover them up with uh you know some
01:11:01.580leafy camouflage uh they hide about as easily as a man and of course you do this under tree cover or
01:11:09.420um or or if you had a building or whatnot hide them in in the building but doing this you could
01:11:16.720very easily insert sort of forces across borders or across the extreme upper edge of borders where
01:11:24.620it's very hard to patrol and keep keep an eye on like uh like i said ewan mcgregor and charlie
01:11:30.940Borman crossed from London to Siberia, like going through Mongolia and Kazakhstan, that
01:11:39.800an extra 500,000 kilometer maneuver under cover of night across multiple days is perfectly
01:11:49.520fine for these bikes, that doing this, you could get into position.
01:11:55.940And the thing is, because you have a hundred pounds of life capacity that you have on this, you can, for weeks on end, you can just be hiding there.
01:12:10.960You know, instead of, like, carrying extra food, you could just carry, like, one or two guys, like a small .22 caliber pistol or, like, a compact rifle, like an AR-7 that folds up.
01:12:26.300And, you know, hunt your own food with, like, a silenced .22, like, bag some rabbits, bag rabbits and whatnot.
01:12:34.900And doing this, you'd be able to sustain yourself for weeks or months at a time, combining around your caches that were already hidden in country.
01:12:48.780You can have caches rearranged by local assets and very trivially just get into a position where you can just be sitting there waiting with this incredible sustainment capacity and this incredible, again, a small cache of gasoline could restock an entire 20-bike platoon-size element.
01:13:15.740But then you have 100 pounds of kit that you can have on these bikes.
01:13:21.380So relatively, you know, not a lot for a campaign, but a lot of weight, a lot more weight than what a normal foot control has available to them.
01:13:33.020So you could have these assets in place, dynamically decide, like a U-boat on the prowl, decide, okay, we're going after these targets.
01:13:46.220Okay, we've gone ahead to strike critical infrastructure.
01:13:50.620sure okay we have we've had a like asset identified for assassination uh or oh we have a
01:13:59.440we smuggled a man pad into this country a man portable anti-air system there a rocket launcher
01:14:07.360designed to take out aircraft and uh we're going to try to get as close as we can to uh an enemy
01:14:15.800airfield and trying to take out one of their air air assets then uh scoot away as fast as possible
01:14:21.420and the thing is this this element this incredibly uh this is an incredibly high risk mission but
01:14:29.040it's not actually that complex in terms of like the amount of skill required compared to like a
01:14:34.580scuba insertion or a uh high altitude low out uh uh halo jump it's not actually that
01:14:42.740complex a skill set like again tons of middle-aged dads have have this skill set it's just
01:14:50.180just it would be high risk so any mid-sized force that's willing to just accept casualties or want
01:14:56.980to compensate these peoples in accord with the risk could have tons of these forces and just
01:15:03.680accept some casualty ratio for them like oh yeah one of the one platoon one or two platoons out of
01:15:12.02010 are going to get like caught out and you know a helicopter gunship is going to pick them apart
01:15:17.760and that those are thems are just the brakes but uh because they're they're divided across
01:15:25.380only bikes a they can go to ground very easily infectively they can split up and just disappear
01:15:33.740and slowly across the course of hours or days trying to make their way to,
01:15:42.460or if they've expended all their ammunition, they can't get you a resupply point,
01:15:49.360and all of them have basically an escape vehicle and can try to extract, you know, a seer type escape.
01:16:01.640and every one of their vehicles has a second seat that you go with with 20 men and 20 bikes
01:16:09.960you only need 10 bikes at the end of the day to get those 20 out and this ability to just
01:16:18.700disappear into into any uh leafy lands landscape and this ability to just uh sustain yourself
01:16:26.880for an extended period of time in enemy territory,
01:16:37.760either resupplying from a cache or extracting him,
01:16:42.380that this strikes me as the natural extension0.96
01:16:47.380of how a lot of modern girl thought works
01:16:51.900with how conventional warfare already worked0.90
01:16:55.380worked in the uh in the first and second world war for submarines and uh wolf pack tactics that
01:17:04.380um we've already seen the creation of like small units of 20 to 40 40 men uh natively having their
01:17:14.240own their own operational independence natively having their own internal um electronic order
01:17:23.120You know, to track what's around them, what's where, to try and visualize a space, to gather intel on their own, using sonar and radar and various electronic systems, which actually you can use on land.
01:17:38.320You can use parabolic microphones and other other things to get a good audio picture for a good parabolic microphone can go about it can go like one to two kilomers, which is like shockingly effective for like picking out stuff, stuff around you.
01:17:56.880And, of course, electronic warfare suites, detecting electronical interference and analyzing the spectrum,
01:18:05.860also gives a hidden element, a ton of visibility into the world around them
01:18:11.880without necessarily having to rely on just visual range.
01:18:21.000Not necessarily so that they can send out messages or even accessing internet or, like, this cell services of the country to insert, too.
01:18:33.940Not necessarily so they can send out messages and reports to their command, but so they can receive or, like, look into hidden packages and get reports on targets of opportunities or receive orders or stuff like that.
01:18:49.180that it's actually like uh what was would have been unthinkable for a platoon-sized ground
01:18:58.080element to have in the world war ii era but was taken for granted that a like aquatic submarine
01:19:05.360element of again 20 to 40 men would would have as a default on the level of um
01:19:12.920independence that they're expected to operate under that's perfectly achievable now on
01:19:18.980on the ground and in in the operational environment for an unconventional ground operation
01:19:28.540that uh it should be possible to have assets like this and the big advantage of that is
01:19:35.400these assets would be able to operate like insurgency like having a hidden asset on the
01:19:43.540ground. However, they could have a operational tempo and a strike tempo that's way faster and
01:19:51.020way harder than what you can expect out of insurgency. Because ultimately, at the end of
01:19:55.780the day, insurgents have to go back to their normal civilian lives, or they have to be disguising
01:20:03.860their maneuvers as civilian activity. Whereas when you're operating out of one of these
01:20:11.480of ADV-style motorcycle setups, or maybe you're able to operate out of ADVs loaded on a trailer
01:20:23.120on a pickup truck for extreme long-range maneuver, once you're at that level of operational
01:20:34.940independence and like native logistical capacity to the unit uh suddenly once you're in position
01:20:42.360you can strike way harder and and get away way way faster and not have the limitations on
01:20:51.120on force tempo and and security that necessarily comes with uh being an insurgent or being an
01:21:00.840espionage asset and at the end of the day having to like go back into a disguised civilian
01:21:09.720existence. Does that make sense? So the one critical advantage with which both submarine
01:21:18.380and guerrilla or espionage operations have over conventional military operations is
01:21:27.900the presumption of a horizon what we mean by this is that if you imagine primitive conditions
01:21:37.380of land warfare where the cavalry enemy cavalry shows up over the hill it rides down it raids the
01:21:44.140village and then it runs away before the tribe's own cavalry come to save it say on the american
01:21:51.600Great Plains. Once you're past the horizon, then the decision space as to where the pursuers
01:22:01.460continue the pursuit is effectively infinite. You're past the horizon. They could be basically
01:22:07.700anywhere. They could be functionally anywhere. This was also the case for much of conventional
01:22:14.380military history, if you operate fast enough to get around and back from a mountain stronghold
01:22:24.600or to maneuver in the night coherently, which is very difficult, but if you have the unit
01:22:30.960that can do it, then a small unit can dramatically increase their power-to-weight ratio.
01:22:38.220And in submarine operations, you also, broadly speaking, have some presumption of a horizon.
01:22:44.380Because if you go down deep enough and you cut all engines and enforce noise discipline, you can become rather opaque to any detection method.
01:22:58.220But the phenomenon of the globalized world more broadly, and then as reflected in military operations, is the recess of the horizon.
01:23:11.620The horizon keeps getting pushed further and further and further out.
01:23:15.960And now you can move across land at 60 miles per hour.
01:23:20.580And so if I just happen to escape across the horizon a moment before you return, you might be able to dash and catch up with me again.
01:23:30.660Or there are air assets and you can send up a balloon or send up a plane or with satellite overwatch, you can track me wherever I am.
01:23:37.860This is also a similar phenomenon held for surface vessel combat. There you're moving very slowly, like there's actually very little asymmetric information between two ships at sea.
01:23:50.860but nevertheless once you escape over the horizon or are in a plausible retreat trajectory that
01:23:56.860takes you over the horizon you might as well have made a clean getaway and that's no longer the case
01:24:01.540when you have ranged weapons that can go 10 miles and more or air assets that can see for hundreds
01:25:55.020And your opponent may not be able to see or to figure out
01:25:58.860what your means of attack are or are going to be
01:26:02.560because the search space for your possible modes of attack
01:26:05.960is so large that they can't exhaust that search space.
01:26:09.900That is to say, using the OODA loop analogy,
01:26:13.840they are not oriented so as to present counterforce to your force
01:26:18.940or countermeasure to your method of attack.
01:26:22.640I think that these circumstances are going to be
01:26:25.880more likely to be found early in the war
01:26:31.900um there's a line it might be in a neil stevenson novel that whoever thinks that a fight whoever
01:26:40.360first thinks that a fight has started is most likely to see the end of the fight so similarly
01:26:47.540if you're part of one of these uh sabotage assault reconnaissance groups these sargs
01:26:51.660operating on both sides of the zero line in the russo-ukrainian conflict um if you were doing that
01:26:57.860in 2014, or if you were doing that in January of 2022, then yes, your adversary is going to be
01:27:05.080dramatically misoriented with respect to your objectives, and you will be much more capable of
01:27:11.620executing compounding actions of this variety, as opposed to getting some sort of initial jump
01:27:19.360and then being detected and then being destroyed, as is very often the case with, or I should say,
01:27:25.680as is the case with things like the drone attacks, which we see.
01:27:29.340A drone attack, to be successful, a long-range drone attack, has to be able to have some variety of operational stealth
01:27:36.920in the sense of avoiding detection and interdiction until the point of impact.
01:27:43.260And after that, it doesn't matter because it's only on a one-way route.
01:27:46.560And so a drone attack inherently has no compounding effect because to have a compounding effect,
01:27:52.680you'd have to launch multiple strikes, one after the other after the other in some sort of rolling
01:27:56.820barrage. And once you've launched the first one, and once it's either been impacted or been
01:28:02.900detected and intercepted, then each successive one becomes much, much less likely to persist
01:28:08.580and be able to build upon the previous ones. So to summarize, I see what you're saying,
01:28:18.180And I really want that to be the case. I think that a lot more research and development effort should be directed towards seeing if that is the case.
01:28:26.300But from first principles, I continue to frame all discussion of e-bike warfare, motorcycle warfare, light infantry transport warfare, what have you, within the context of the broader trends of current and near future war.
01:28:50.020And those trends are not ones in which you can just assume you can sink into the background. Everyone has IR cameras now. Once a war starts, there are mines literally everywhere. You get very canalized areas of attack because you have to clear the minefields before you can even make the attack.
01:29:11.880um but you're you're assuming conventional war like uh i i'm deeply skeptical that anything
01:29:23.300resembling ukraine is like going to happen again not because of limitations that both sides have
01:29:39.460set on themselves, that A, NATO was not infinite ammunition to Ukraine, basically the entire NATO
01:29:49.560stockpile to Ukraine, but wasn't going to dedicate any troops. Whereas Russia was going to rebuild
01:29:57.180its entire industrial base, was going to remobilize the Russian industry, but again, also not mobilize
01:30:04.520militarily, like maintain the special military operation logic, and the odd agreements around
01:30:13.040limitations of the size of the front. Both sides have, like, kind of broken this,
01:30:19.680open up front side, but couldn't be distanced at the border. There's been an extended period where
01:30:30.280both sides were not operating along the majority of their own front uh this strikes me as like a
01:30:39.900very unusual uh environment firm modern warfare also just the amount of like expenditure in
01:30:48.900technology that was going into like the small area up front like technology and ammunition
01:30:54.200The amount of money spent on the Ukraine war for, like, the scale of the front is actually deeply, shockingly out-duperant, like, that basically two halves of the world economy all decide to dedicate this hundreds of billions to this, like, narrow, narrow line of friction between them.
01:31:22.140the that 99 percent of wars in the 21st century and 22nd century are are not going to be like that
01:31:32.860uh actually we're probably looking at like an era of like civil wars and these like
01:31:41.400like dirty border conflicts uh we've just seen like several operate between uh
01:31:47.500india pakistan and thailand kim cambodia that we're going to have a lot of little wars like
01:31:55.520that nagorno kar back and we're going to have like lots of civil wars if you follow david betts
01:32:01.740uh the eu and the uk are probably set for like several civil wars in the next next five ten0.89
01:32:10.44010 years that are all going to be like very quickly exhaust state capacity and very quickly
01:32:19.760reduce the operational capacity and the ability to process information and like economic activity
01:32:30.200from most states. We're seeing kind of the exhaustion of the US, of the entire NATO arsenal
01:32:38.820right now, that the U.S. and NATO very plainly do not have another Ukraine in them. And we're0.63
01:32:46.160very plainly seeing that they're quite stretched thin, both in Europe and in the Middle East,
01:32:53.940that what I suspect is going to happen in the next five years, maybe starting,
01:33:01.920it seems like the next few months, depending on how kinetic you think the U.K. and Ireland are
01:33:06.660about about to get but uh we're going to see kind of this degradation of the western western total
01:33:14.540state and the rise and the kind of sinking of the west into what we've seen from uh what you'd see
01:33:21.580in like mexico or the or the wider middle east where uh you we might see something akin to a
01:33:28.820Libya or Syria in Europe or a Mexico on the Iberian Peninsula or in Ireland where
01:33:39.600non-state and near-state actors, the state degrades and we see non-state and near-state
01:33:47.520actors crop up. And, you know, you can speculate if we'll see this North America or not as well.
01:33:53.800But suddenly a lot of, suddenly the kind of Homeric logic that you see in like wide swaths of the Middle East or like these kind of exhaustive war zones where there's this intense strategic ambiguity across most of North Africa and like most of the war zones in the Middle East where were non-state and near-state actors or just
01:34:23.800like little PMCs or tribal associations or criminal orbs or whatnot are acting like
01:34:31.880shockingly independently and having to do this complex of kind of dark forest navigation
01:34:40.700or, you know, trying to dodge the bigger fish, that this kind of ecosystem of degrading state
01:34:51.940capacity you can already see cropping up in like many different different places where all suddenly
01:34:58.280you have like overlapping non-compatible layers of of governance integrating state capacity
01:35:08.340you can see this a lot in like LA or many US metroplexes where there are just
01:35:17.060vast no-go zones, and you can see this cropping up in Europe, my expectation is that we're
01:35:24.660kind of approaching an apex of surveillance and intel assets that can be expended in
01:35:35.240any given conflict, and that the war on terror was kind of, kind of represent the peak of
01:35:42.580how much surveillance could be exerted at any given time on populations, because just the broad
01:35:52.800level of chaos and unpredictability and just hiddenness and gray and dark market activity
01:36:02.760is starting to grow at such a rate. And the belief in legitimacy in these Western states
01:37:28.980you've already sort of foreclosed on a kind of coherent
01:37:33.300large-scale operations which come maneuver. And so if we wish to distinguish then between
01:37:38.560the question, the relatively narrow question of what does it take to restore maneuver in
01:37:44.060conventional combined arms in the current and near future battle space, and what is the
01:37:52.820near future battle space going to look like, and where do motorcycle dragoons or e-bike dragoons
01:37:58.920fit into there i would just distinguish those two questions um if you have the reassertion of a
01:38:05.440then yes you can do the things you talked about with just blending into the populace
01:38:09.580so what i'd expect is we're going to see maneuver kind of can return but it's not
01:38:19.200probably not going to be from like the large state actors but rather from smaller smaller actors so
01:38:25.680But we saw with ISIS, the sudden flash taking in Mosul and most of northern Iraq, Iraq in like what was basically like a week, under a month.
01:38:42.200They had taken like a third of the Iraqi countryside, like a large metro area.
01:38:49.840And the reason they were able to do that in spite of being such a small force and not technical and logistically crippled force was because they are small and like logistically limited that they couldn't and didn't try to do it in the conventional way.
01:39:08.320They did it in a flash raid. They had this incredible operational and strategic speed that came from them just kind of YOLOing the right out which they were doing things.
01:39:27.260that from zero hour, they were in the thick of it in their target location within 24 hours,
01:39:35.780which is like not the case with any conventional forces today, you know.
01:39:44.620Basically, even the fastest like U.S. ground war, there has to be weeks of like diplomatic buildup
01:39:53.120and her positioning to even, like, the fast set-piece campaigns that you see,
01:40:02.120such as the raid on the Falkland Islands or Operation Just Cause,
01:40:12.420All these take this incredibly diplomatic build-up
01:40:15.960and this incredible logistical build-up,
01:40:17.900Whereas, if you go from diplomatic and logistical zero, and that's your zero time, and you're just striking it out aggressively from there.
01:40:33.460You don't have much, but also your opponents have nothing in position at that point.
01:40:39.620So I suspect we're going to see maneuver warfare return dramatically in the hands of non-state actors that at some point in the next 25 years, you're going to wake up and some like dinky guerrilla force that you had never heard of before will have taken a major, major city somewhere in the world, maybe in the West.
01:41:05.980and are declaring, I don't know, whatever the equivalent of a caliphate is in their little corner of the world.0.64
01:41:15.600You know, some dinky like third order, like IRA descendant or some football hooligans have taken Dublin or taken Edinburgh in the UK Civil War scenario
01:41:31.900or some aggressive anti-deportation force has taken the whole of a California city0.58
01:41:49.280and is holding it and declaring it Mexican territory,
01:41:53.720that these things are, like, kind of unconceivable out of, give it, political theories,
01:42:02.040but somewhere that, like, right now looks like a stable first or second world country
01:42:05.860where that's going to happen in the next 15 years.
01:42:08.840And it's not going to be the return of maneuver warfare from a conventional army perspective.
01:42:13.640It's going to be the combination of maneuver assets, like, big maneuvers
01:42:22.740with, like, kind of a revolutionary, combined with, like, a color of what this looks like
01:42:34.020in the breakout of ISIS and the taking of Mosul, that these non-state, near-state actors
01:42:42.420that are, like, kind of third and fourth rate and don't have the logistical capacity, they
01:42:48.320can just take a major city within 24 hours because they can move within 24 hours, whereas
01:42:56.740any large-scale nation cannot. They have to do this diplomatic dance for weeks, and they
01:43:05.540have to do a logistical dance in position, whereas the unity and belligerence of these
01:43:16.760small forces allow them to do do things that looks a lot like old school maneuver warfare but
01:43:22.880but uh is is this um entirely new thing
01:43:29.540with specifically the fall of mosul i there is the napoleon uh returns phenomenon where there was a
01:43:40.340sympathetic uh political environment and you had sort of compounding support as they're moving
01:43:45.560through or at the very least like you hit a checkpoint and the iraqi army doesn't shoot
01:43:50.300on them because of their either co-ethnicity or co-political orientation so i agree that there is
01:44:02.600there's lots of room on the bottom as it were for operations that would previously have been
01:44:13.660suppressed by an ambient hegemony that we can reasonably project at least for purposes of
01:44:20.260conversation is degrading and declining or contracting um but in the particular but i
01:44:27.480in the case of fall of mosul in the case of the conquest of kabul in a couple of these flash raids
01:44:35.300which have dramatic effects, there was more than just the material circumstances of the
01:44:44.720lightness of the forces and their rapidity of action.
01:44:48.240There was the, we don't necessarily call it intentional diplomatic and political preconditioning,
01:44:57.240but there were years of political preconditioning by virtue of the United States occupation
01:45:02.740that produced the conditions of ISIS's arrival.
01:46:28.860I would say we would definitely observe this if we saw something like, from below the ambient noise floor of force generation, a concentration arise, move, and seize an objective significantly distant from their marshalling area, then re-dissipate, return back to below ambient detectability.
01:46:55.900Arise again and conduct a compounding operation atop that previous movement.
01:47:05.020I would say that that would well satisfy the criteria for maneuver, and it would certainly be very different than almost anything we've seen in the past.
01:47:16.560All right, that is a very interesting thought.
01:47:20.460i i'm not sure if you want to unpack unpack that or
01:47:29.780so there's a that it sparked my imagination i'm not sure if that's that's sparking yours
01:47:38.820yes so there's a um so there's a book called strategy by b.h little heart and little heart
01:47:46.340is a bit controversial in military strategy spheres
01:47:49.160because he is one of the primary promoters
01:48:09.460So I just make it seem as though Little Hart
01:48:10.900was more influential than people like J.F.C. Fuller.
01:48:13.800But regardless, we'll set all those aside.
01:48:16.340I like Little Heart. I like his books, and I like his thinking.
01:48:20.640And in Strategy, Second Revised Edition, which is published in, I want to say, 56.
01:48:27.920So it's post-Maoist revolution, and it's post-Korea.
01:48:36.460If it's not 56, it's like 52, so it's almost at the end of the Korean War.
01:48:40.940And he has an addendum, an appendix, on guerrilla warfare.
01:48:44.100and little hearts concept of the strategic is that it is the goal of strategy so as to engage
01:48:54.600in indirect approach an indirect approach is that which follows the path of least resistance
01:49:01.460but not necessarily the path of least corporeal resistance that is to say a road or a riverway
01:49:07.580as opposed to off-road or a mountain, but the path of least psychological resistance
01:49:14.360or the path of greatest psychological disruption.
01:49:20.300So insofar as a military unit has a cohesiveness about it, it has a most significant element
01:49:32.300that imparts that cohesiveness, that element we call the commander.
01:49:37.580It is then between two commanders that military units are employed so as to attack and defend against.
01:49:50.820And so then the commander's role is to engage strategy so as to advance along the indirect approach such that he strikes the enemy commander at the point of maximum disruption.
01:50:01.020And so this might mean that you're Hannibal, and you go through the Alps, and you lose a third of all your forces, so that you take Rome unawares.
01:50:12.120Or it might mean that you go the long way around in your approach to Washington, D.C., if you're General Lee, and use the Appalachian Mountains to screen your advance so that you strike from the north.
01:50:31.020These sorts of things, where you're thinking of a more broadly construed configuration space of maneuver, and your approach is mapped through this configuration space that includes both the psychological as well as the material.
01:50:46.640so in his addendum on guerrilla warfare guerrilla warfare is very much or at least it has the
01:50:54.840prospect of being the apotheosis of the indirect approach because it is entirely predicated like
01:51:01.660its success is dependent upon striking at the point of maximum disruption at the highest of
01:51:10.880psychological and diplomatic levels even though it might be materially impoverished and in fact
01:51:17.220it may be a good benefit to be materially impoverished because then that increases the
01:51:23.280the feasibility it increases the likelihood that if this ragtag force of no names in the mountains
01:51:32.000is nevertheless able to conduct a raid on the imperial palace,
01:51:39.580well then, that is much more disruptive than the far more easily conceived of
01:51:46.400we see an army approaching our capital city, now let's man the defences.
01:51:52.060And so, if we were to have a synthesis of the conventional and the unconventional,
01:52:02.000If we were to have unconventional operations conducted with the full capacity of conventional forces, then what might this look like?
01:52:13.200And what this might look like is a rather immunological model of conflict where there's constant low-level probing, information is being relayed continually but without any clear, thick channels of communication that can be directly targeted.
01:52:36.820You have spontaneous or seemingly spontaneous emergences of force concentration, very lethal interactions that resolve without any steaming, like they don't last long enough for there to be a toehold for a counterstrike to fix itself.
01:53:02.740and this kind of like the natural operation of or at least the the first order of these sorts of
01:53:11.020events is the natural operation of a guerrilla campaign you i send your vanguard units out
01:53:21.400and they take targets of opportunity and while they're taking their targets of opportunity
01:53:25.200you have some constantly shifting hq that's engaged in propaganda warfare
01:53:30.260And through the complex of these two things, you attain political dominance over your adversary.
01:53:37.400Now, if you imagine conventional operations conducted with the vigor and the strength, the shaft behind the spearhead of conventional forces, it would, I conjecture, look like, yes, a division disappears into the countryside.
01:53:56.620And then a division reappears, 30 kilometers distant, strikes, well, more than 30 kilometers for a division, but strikes over the course of 24 hours, as you said, disappears again, and then is able to continue this tempo.
01:54:12.420As opposed to what we often see with raids or coups or other sort of decapitation strikes in civil wars, where there's really only one battle and everything after that is catch-as-catch-can, the cleanup operations, not really the same sort of coherent mission structure that you would expect from conventional operations.
01:54:34.420So, all this is to say that in the context of thinking about new technologies and what new technologies might enable in future war, I would consider it to be a successful demonstration of neo-maneuver.
01:54:55.800If you had this kind of emergent concentration, conduct of kinetic operations, dissipation below the ambient noise floor, and then a clear successor.
01:55:11.720And if you can just chain two operations together, have that kind of operational persistence, then I think that would accomplish the same sort of operational persistence that is at the core of maneuver warfare as we currently think of it, which is to say a big arrow on the map, and that arrow can conceivably and viably transit across the map.
01:55:37.300It doesn't just go 20 kilometers and then spend all of its ammunition and then halt.
02:03:59.340is what the Department of Defense is able to lean upon to appropriate various innovations in the civilian world.
02:04:10.680And this runs the gamut from infantry equipment up to, non-trivially, up to even high-level aviation assets.
02:04:23.740There's plenty of things which are developed, or I should say refined, probably developed in either research laboratories or universities under explicitly military direction that then get spun out to the private sector, to the civilian sector, refined, and then get reincorporated.
02:04:42.860optics for rifles is one of the classics like the holographic sight sorry the red dot sight
02:04:50.840and the holographic sight were not developed for the military first and foremost they were developed
02:04:55.440by civilian company and offered at like shot show 96 and then of course were integrated into
02:05:04.840military loadouts. The underlying martial culture of the United States provides a great deal of
02:05:15.880resources for exploring product refinement and product market fit outside of explicitly
02:05:23.960military-directed research and development that is just one of America's many assets that are
02:05:30.020absent in the rest of the world. You will never have the Chinese develop a drone internally in
02:05:40.340their military research centers and then have it be scaled through mass adoption in the civilian
02:05:48.700market and then be pulled back into the military. What you are seeing is just straight up civilian
02:05:55.660production independent of military motivation. And then the military absorbs it. You're never
02:06:03.860going to see the kinds of small arms innovation that you have in the United States in vast swaths
02:06:10.520of the rest of the world. Because if you design a gun, who's going to buy it? Cops and soldiers.
02:06:17.480And in the United States, who's going to buy it? Anyone. Any law-abiding citizen can procure
02:06:23.300a firearm that's designed for a civilian that's under .50 caliber and isn't fully automatic,
02:06:28.540and you can work out the kinks in the design. So between these two analogies which we've proposed,
02:06:35.880that of the two-wheeled U-boat, that of the modern Mongolian cavalrymen, the U-boat with their FPVs
02:06:45.580as torpedoes, Mongolian cavalrymen with his ATGM composite bow
02:06:52.520and his FPV falcon atop his two-wheeled steed.
02:06:58.880And also critically, when I say multifuel, that's very important
02:07:02.100because the closer you can get to actually living off the land,0.89
02:07:05.320the closer you can get to it being a modern horse,
02:07:07.540that doesn't require anything but the grass which you find.
02:07:09.620And I think these two analogies should be much more heavily explored and operationalized and tested in both military and civilian contexts, because we have, as we discussed previously in this conversation, comparable testing environments.
02:07:27.820If you can have Silent Hawk, the 2015 e-motorcycle with an ice range extender that was used for a year in Afghanistan, if you had that in the market today, there's a non-trivial market demographic that would buy it and play with it and test it and find all the bugs and then provide the impetus, the capital for the improvement feedback loop.
02:07:57.820And then in 10 years, when you have to fight a war in the Himalayans, you will have a refined e-motorcycle with ice range extender ready to procure.
02:08:10.560um i don't know whether like at this point i've reached the limit of the first principles and
02:08:18.740limited empirical testing as to um whether the neo-step warfare model or the submarine on land
02:08:28.160model makes sense i have ideas about how we could test that further but it if there were people with
02:08:38.540more resources than me, willing to experiment with this, we could get answers to these questions
02:08:43.940and fix which of these analogies is correct or find the conditions under which the analogies
02:08:53.820No, this is one of the great tragedies of the modern world.
02:08:58.320We don't have enough wars to test out all our different theories.0.91
02:09:02.720And sadly, all the militaries and all the non-state actors and terrorist organizations and various self-declared caliphates are not hiring random white autists to just develop experimental doctrines for them.0.75
02:09:27.800At least Saddam Hussein wanted that one Canadian to build him a supergun.0.97
02:09:32.720Ah, this is why they took out Stubb Hussain. He was going to, he was going to access, he was going to break the Non-Proliferation Treaty and access Wargamer government. You know, he's going to, he's going to break through the, the Arms Limitation Treaty, treaties around Wargamers that was established after 1945.0.95
02:09:56.260five but man was too beautiful for this world no one should have a mustache that glorious
02:10:05.240but uh yeah no that we we will see at some point in the century there will
02:10:13.260probably be a sudden world crisis and sudden innovation uh within 10 years on a par with
02:10:22.320the past hundred uh uh so so jpt for uh juliet papa tango for uh where can people follow
02:10:33.860uh so i've got a sub stack and i've got a twitter account um twitter is jpt 401 and i think that's
02:10:45.760also my sub stack or it's just jpt4 i'll send you the link to both uh sub stack military stuff
02:10:53.840so if you want that that's where you want to go i will include that in the show notes and you also
02:10:59.420mentioned um uh that historian heart what was that working in that you recommended of his
02:11:06.600b-h-littleheart l-i-d-d-e-l-l-h-a-r-t and it's just called strategy uh specifically
02:11:15.800strategy the second revised edition all right link me that um in the chat here and i will include that
02:11:24.820as well on the show oh no it's uh is there anything else we kept or that should be
02:11:31.180popped in there um i will i will link to my motorcycle warfare which right now is quite
02:11:38.860i mean it it also was a historical review up to 2022
02:11:44.420so um there there's a feather that's being not like the african piece of my motorcycle war lord
02:11:53.180lord siri stares out dear listeners i i have heard your complaints i've heard them um