Technology, the Battlefield, and Beyond in Ukraine
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Okay, welcome back to another episode of the Russia Contingency. Today joining me, I have once again, Rob Lee, my fellow colleague and friend. We are going to spend today talking a bit about what is happening at the front line, give a quick overview of sort of the current situation in the war. And then we're going to get back to some of our findings and notes from our recent field research trip to Ukraine, which was a couple of weeks ago.

We still have a lot of material from that trip we haven't covered that's going to come out over the course of several podcasts. And so once we do a bit of an overview of where I think we are in the war right now, we're going to turn to some more narrow band topics on where technology is going, where drones are going, what have we learned from the most recent trip, and then see where the conversation takes us. And hopefully this will be a good episode that folks can listen to over the Thanksgiving holidays.

Okay, so with that introduction, let me offer a few brief thoughts on what I think is currently going on in this war, which is that, you know, the Russian forces have continued to advance in Ukraine's east, the worst spot, and I'll start right there.

is south of Pokrovsk and around Kurokhova, where after the loss of a fairly lynchpin position in Bulgodar, the Russian force have been advancing at a much faster pace. And essentially, they're trying to push through south of Pokrovsk. They were stopped at the third line of defense of Pokrovsk some months ago, right, and are attempting to essentially go push through south and get around the city. And the challenge is that they're not accepting a large exhaustive battle for Pokrovsk

It's not really a siege yet. And so unlike some of the previous fights in this war, see the Russian military is essentially trying to work their way around and also increasingly threatening the city of Veliko Novosilko further southwest. We've seen recent Russian gains in Tourette's, also gains in Chasseviar and Chasseviar

I think this is trending negatively. If we look further to the northeast, there have been steady Russian gains on the left side of the Oskil River by Kupyansk. And at one point, there was even a brief, very brief Russian entry into the northeastern part of the town, but it looked like they got beaten back.

And lastly, if we go to Kursk, the front of the Kharkiv is stable, and that's part of the reason we don't talk about it much on this podcast. But if we go to Kursk, there were several attacks by Russia's 810th Naval Infantry Brigade and other units. They were beaten back, but Russian forces seem to be steadily pressing in both on the left and a bit on the right flank of the positions that Ukraine is holding in Kursk.

Crane's lost probably about 40% of what it initially took in the curve salient. In that situation right now,

looks, for lack of a better word, stable but also trending negatively. And it's unclear how it's going to develop. But I've been pretty skeptical about the trajectory of the fight for Curse, looking at how it's been going the last few months. So with that very brief overview, Rob, is there something you might want to add to help fill in the picture? Yeah. So I think one thing that was important was the loss of Uldar. I don't remember if that was October or September because I can't keep things together anymore.

But the loss of Avdiivka in February was, Avdiivka was a really strong fortress. It was a really strong point of the Ukraine's defensive lines. It's why Russia made it such a priority.

And we're still very heavy losses getting into that deep cup. But once they took it, that has led to all the basic advances to the pocket since then. And so in many cases, the Russian advances are not kind of linear. They're not just, you know, gradual. It really depends on breaking through certain points. And once that happens, that can lead to, you know, further gains after that, because, you

get past Ukraine lines in one direction. And since Russia took Volodara, they advanced pretty quickly to the west and northwest of it. So there's a pocket south of Kurokovo, that pocket seems to be kind of closing. I think Ukraine is pulling back from it. And that was in part because of Russian advances west and north of Volodara. And now we see that Russia has been advancing very close to the Vilikon-Vasylkovo last week.

apparently just in an area where Ukraine did not have the strongest defenses, didn't maybe have enough units. And so Velikonovskaya, it looks like there might be a battle in the near future in that town. And so the trajectory of what's happening in the southern part of the Dniester pocket where Ukraine still controls, a lot of this, I think, is being affected by the loss of Uldar and that maybe they weren't the best fortifications right behind it. And look, Russia continues to advance at a pretty fast rate, pretty fast since 2022. And so the

The overall issues of why it's happening are things we discussed before. On the Ukraine side, it's still a manpower problem. Russia has a significant manpower advantage. That is really the most significant factor here. It's not the artillery advantage so much anymore. Of course, in some battles, Russia will have an important artillery advantage, but it's not really decisive. It's really the infantry side that's become much more important.

And Russia's adapted by operating in quite small, dismal infantry assaults in many parts of the front. And again, it varies on different parts of the front, the nature of the terrain, the way Russia fights, but much of the Pokrov's kind of pocket has become fireteam assaults and infiltration tactics, not even squad or platoon level operations.

And it's really hard to stop those kind of fire team infiltration movements because it's kind of hard to know where they are at all times. And because Ukraine doesn't have enough infantry to hold all their positions, this kind of dispersion is quite difficult to counter, especially because Ukraine's best options are UAVs and UAVs are okay for when you concentrate them on responding to a kind of single attack and canalized terrain, much more difficult when it's more dispersed. So that's still a difficulty, I think,

Some people were hoping that the weather would lead to Russian operations slowing down. That has not happened in large part because it is an infantry fight. And so just because the ground is muddier does not mean infantry can't move forward, even though it's more difficult. And I suspect over winter, we're going to continue seeing Russia press as much as they can because they know that they have an advantage. I think they want to keep pressing before Ukraine could potentially kind of recover and improve its manpower situation.

So, you know, the trajectory is the same thing we talked about a few weeks ago. I think basically the problem is that the situation has just deteriorated further and ultimately it comes back to sustainability. And that's really the biggest, the key issue. And this comes up a lot on Twitter and elsewhere. It's a question of what, you know, how sustainable is the war for both sides? Yeah, I think you get into...

silos where if you look on some people, they'll talk a lot about Russian economic problems, which are obviously, they are real problems. There are problems with Russian recruiting. We know that for new soldiers, the signing bonuses keep going up in most regions. That indicates they're having trouble getting enough guys at the rate they were paying before.

At some point, maybe they start running out of getting sufficient number of soldiers through volunteer methods. Maybe they have to do mobilization again. That part's not clear. We know there are really significant issues in the Russian economy with inflation and other issues. But the question is, who is this war more sustainable for right now at this pace?

Because the war is not sustainable for either side. The issue is that I think, you know, I think this is our kind of joint opinion here is that it looks as though it's less sustainable for Ukraine at the current nature of the fight, right? In terms of manpower, in terms of other issues. And that's, you know, a serious concern. And the concern is that if things don't change...

Russia may be able to make a larger breakthrough at some point. It might not just be these kind of relatively fast incremental gains. It might turn into something greater. And of course, it is the war of exhaustion. And right now, Russia has having some success in that kind of strategy of exhausting Ukrainian forces.

It does not mean that things are predetermined. Obviously, things can change and hopefully they will change. But right now, the trajectory is not in Ukraine's favor. And I think it's important to try and change the trajectory to get it back in the right direction.

Sure. I think the situation right now is fragile, not catastrophic, but definitely trending in the wrong direction. And I think we both agree that course correction, we're on a pretty unhappy path as far as where things go in 2025. One big question is, of course, the Russian ability to exploit. And at least right now, we're

Where I'm sort of seeing the situation is that they're steadily pressing through the front rather than being able to punch through with a fist. It's like a hand will spread open fingers, steadily pressing its way across the front, forcing Ukrainian units to retreat from their positions. The biggest challenge is that the Russian offensive isn't culminating. It's not being exhausted as people.

And the biggest reason for that is that Ukraine can't stabilize its manpower situation. It's made some choices on force management to create new brigades that are not going to become that effective that I don't think is paying off.

And there's issues with fortifications and also force employment, how the force is commanded, controlled. That's why I saw a recent announcement that I'm very positive on, that Ukraine's going to go try to create corps, and at least going to go to a corps and brigade structure, which I think many people have wanted to see happen in Ukraine for just the last two years. Well, again, we'll see if it actually happens, but there's positive, at least, trends that one can observe. Regarding...

The latest news we should cover as well, which is the change on policy restrictions to employ attackings missiles.

Apparently, in support of defense of Kursk, although the actual restrictions are not quite clear, they might be, one, functionally restricted, as best I can tell. It's things that are related to North Korean presence in Russia and also in defense of the Kursk salient. I don't think it's geographically restricted to Kursk, and the administration's being very coy about what the actual constraints are, because I think they want to have the option play to Kursk.

expand them or to interpret them more flexibly. It looks like British and French have followed suit. The latest reporting suggests that the British have transferred quote-unquote dozens of additional storm shadow missiles and maybe France transferred 10 more. But if we're

main sort of a big question mark out there, whether Ukraine is going to get any significant additional numbers of attack on its missiles, or if it's largely going to have to work with what's left in the arsenal. While the public reporting on this suggests that may have been expended. So this has led to an interesting series of developments with the Russian sort of demonstrative strike with Oreshnik against Yuzhmash facility in Dnipro.

This is a conventionally tipped IRBM that, as best I could tell, had multiple reentry vehicles on it. Did not look like multiple independent reentry vehicles to me, although many folks got excited about this feature of the missile. And then we had some active discussions online over what it was and how best to classify it. But this is, to me, fairly clearly a vehicle.

the latest version of what was the original RS-26 program and has led to a Russian development. I don't know if you want to add anything to the sort of summary of the latest news and where we are. So, you know, we didn't really talk about Kursk too much, so I mean, it's a useful kind of segue into it. You know, we talked before about what attack and strikes in the Russia could achieve. I think

A lot of this will be determined by the quantities that can be provided and the timeline. And so if this is a policy change that was going to involve sustained attack on strikes over a long period of time, it could have more effects. The question is, right, what are the quantities here of both storm shadow attack on attacks? If they're relatively limited, right, then the actual effects may be

they might be limited by time and by certain effects. They may be also localized where they're relevant. Maybe they'll help Ukraine hold Kursk for longer or strengthen their defenses. It may not have a significant effect on elsewhere on the front line. I think one thing we should keep in mind, we talk about attack on storm shadows. We know that Ukraine, they've had them since storm shadows since May, 2023 and attack them, they received the first batch and maybe what October, 2023. But

Ukraine has fired a lot of both, and they've certainly caused damage to Russia. They've certainly raised the cost and made things more difficult. But Russia has still been advancing on the battlefield. So I think it's important to keep in mind to not have, you know, unrealistic expectations here. And Russia's advantage here in manpower, long-range strikes aren't a great way of compensating for that.

They can raise costs in other directions. I think we saw some strikes potentially on Russian S-400 systems occur. So that might be able to facilitate more long range UAV strikes. That might be a benefit. But I think the effect on the battlefields in Donetsk is going to probably be pretty limited. I think we should just keep that in mind. And so I said before on Twitter that I think the Biden administration policy change on providing anti-personnel mines might have greater effects.

because the quantities are much more significant. And I think this is an example of where anti-personal mines can actually be really effective in war. And look, in this war, mines have played a very important role. They don't get as nearly as much kind of attention because people focus on the novelties. But, you know, we talk about the Battle of Uldar in February of 2023 or some of the big battles. Mines are often, you know, arguably the most important weapon system that decided them.

It's very difficult. And the same thing with Ukraine's summer offensive, right? When they're trying to breach through south of Luriehiv, breaching minefields is very difficult, especially when you're doing it under fire. And the mix of anti-tank mines and personnel mines is really significant. And also, UAVs increasingly, one of the most important roles of UAVs is to do distance mining. So instead of dropping mines through MLRS or artillery,

Also just to have UAVs drop them. In many cases, these can be improvised mines, right? We know Madhya does this quite a bit. He's now built, I think, building his own PTM-3 kind of analog mines. And this can be really effective. It's really effective both because oftentimes the terrain is quite candlelight. So there's only a few main roads. If you drop enough mines on them, you make it really difficult to use them.

But also, I get a tactical level and the company platoon level, companies will try and put any personnel mines on the routes leading behind enemy positions. And if you do that enough, you can make it so resupplying a platoon position is really difficult. And over time, you can isolate them quite effectively.

And you can basically be able to retake positions over time by doing this. And that happens at multiple kind of levels. So, you know, I don't know how many mines should be provided or all the kind of details about it. But I think the idea is that you might be the anti-personnel version of the FASCAM. And we provided the...

was like Ram is the anti-tank version which Ukraine has been using. But look, those can be quite effective. And especially, you know, trying to engage a small fire team with artillery is always kind of difficult because they're small and they're in the movie, the bracket. But if you see where a fire team or squad is moving, you can just blanket an area ahead of time where their avenue advances and

And blank that with anti-personnel mines, right? And that could be effective. So I think this could have more effect on the battlefield. And like, you know, the thing we've been talking about for most of the last year is that there's often a focus on high-end kind of high-tech weapon systems and very capable systems, but we don't necessarily focus enough on just the infantry fight. And this is mostly an infantry war.

And so it's often about how you provide Ukraine's squads or platoons with the right ammunition or other equipment that helps them fight in an attritional fight and helps them reduce their casualties and maintain a kind of favorable attrition ratio. And look, this is a war which Ukraine is fighting. It's a larger country with more personnel, with more ammunition, more resources, and Russia is tapping into those greater resources. So Ukraine has to be able to fight as efficiently as possible.

And look, mines are one of those ways, right, as well as getting more armored vehicles. We know that rallies have always been a kind of a key priority. And just, you know, even basic armored vehicles, they have enough to be able to transport to and from the front line, not have to use unarmored trucks, which, you know, unfortunately, Ukraine has to rely on. So a lot of this fight is really pretty basic. It's really about how can you give Ukrainian infantry squads the best ability to survive. And, you know, mines play a really important role in that.

But as you're talking about Kursk, not to go on too much tangent, Russia is still chipping away at it. I think we've seen more Seoul to the last couple of weeks. There's been a lot of news about North Korean troops. We haven't seen any kind of open source evidence that confirms their year. I've not seen it. Just to be clear, for all the reporting on it, I've yet to see North Koreans make contact. And we're recording this on, was it Tuesday, November 26th? And there's still been no sightings of them.

Yeah. So we haven't seen that yet. There's some mixed news about them might be in Kharkiv oblast, but I think O2 Kharkiv says it's not true. So that part's not fully clear yet. But in Kursk, Russia is chipping away at Ukraine's control there. I think maybe they only had 50% of what they took initially. But Ukraine's really elite units there. And the overall view of whether or not Kursk was a good idea is that Ukraine has committed a lot of its best units there, multiple aerosol brigades,

You know, the unit's like 225th assault per time. And those units, because they're quite effective, right? They're doing a very good job of holding the territory they're in, even in a very tough position. And the terrain in Curse is not great for defending. It's hard to often do a trench because it's kind of boggy, swampy type of terrain.

And of course, you know, some of the leaves have fallen, so it's probably more difficult to get the same, because see what they had before. And we know it's a priority for Russian glide bombs, right? Russia did not really move that much artillery there, but they've been compensating itself with glide bombs. It's really hard to kind of deal with that threat for the Ukrainian forces. But look, you know, they're putting up a good fight the entire time. And, you know, the recent attacks with Russia, a lot of times, you know, they're driving on the kind of main roads. But there is a concern that if Russia actually mounts more effective offensive operations in this direction, and they can actually, you know, do combined arms operations,

battalion or kind of larger assaults, they could be really tough for Ukraine. They might be able to make greater inroads. And there's really that one main road leading from Suzhou to Sumy, which means that a withdrawal route for Ukraine is somewhat constrained, somewhat catalyzed too, and that could pose problems for Ukraine too.

We're still waiting to see exactly what happens here. Obviously, Russia is committing more force in that direction. And look, maybe these assaults over time, Russia continues to lose too many forces and it becomes somewhat of a more useful operation for Ukraine. But as we've been talking about the last couple months, the concern has been that Ukraine has devoted really scarce sources to Kursk that could have been potentially more used in Donetsk or elsewhere to plug gaps in that direction. And without those reserves-

Ukrainian brigades on the front line there were not getting rotated as quickly as they could be. They didn't have enough units to kind of plug those gaps. And I do think this probably contributed to Russia's rate of advance being the fastest since 2022 and the decision to kind of hold terrain in Kursk. Yeah, it's a debate. You know, the arguments on different sides of it are, on the one hand, it pulled maybe 50,000 Russian troops, including 810th, which is a very large naval infantry brigade, 83rd, 7th,

Some sightings, maybe people suggested 76 was even moving down there. And so it has some of the better Russian troops fighting there on the one hand. On the other hand, it also required the best of Ukraine's military to do 5th, 82nd, 80th, 47th, parts of 36th Naval Infantry, so on and so forth.

maybe 30,000 of them. And yet it pulled more Russian troops than Ukraine had deployed in Kursk, but Russia has more troops. Russia actually has a lot more troops available for the same frontage. So it's a bit of a wash. I still don't know how best to think on it. To me, bottom line, has it significantly changed anything in the dynamic of this war?

I don't think so. Has it led to significant change at the operational level? There's a dramatic slowdown of the Russian advanced South Oprecruz. My answer to that right now is no, but we'll see how that develops.

Last kind of saved round on the whole attack on his business. I think the whole point of the changing his policy restriction was to signal to Russia that a widening of North Korea's involvement in the war will have consequences, consequences that they don't want. Right. In order to prevent, you know, 10,000 North Koreans or 12,000 turning into 40, 50, 60,000 plus. Right.

It's interesting to me because the initial arguments we were making for why, you know, a change in policy might be successful was one, strikes against Russian critical infrastructure to get Russia to enter an agreement to halt strikes against Ukraine's infrastructure, right? Two, degrading Russian air defense in order to enable a broader, more successful strike campaign by drones. Since most drones do get intercepted, the interceptor rate against those drone strikes you see is very high and it could be quite lower. You know, three,

a operational sort of effect where you sap the momentum from the Russian campaign by targeting logistics and command and control inside Russia, forcing a couple months for your organization, right? And as best I can tell, the administration's reason for this decision was none of the above.

You know, they circled in D and that has to do with trying to signal to Russia that they shouldn't widen North Korea's involvement in the war. But I don't think that this is going to come with a substantial sort of expansion of the ammunition that's going to be supplied to Ukraine as best I could tell. And the reason I have that reading is because they clearly weren't willing to change their mind on this when Zelensky came to Washington with the victory plan not long ago.

And one of the reasons that had been circulated throughout in the papers was reticence on behalf of the Pentagon looking at readiness and other issues. So we'll see if that holds true, how that plays out. Let's nerd out for a little bit on drones and miltech, right, and get an update, folks, on where that conversation is going.

And just to be clear, there's a lot of opinions on us, as always. There's lots of folks who follow the evolution of employment of uncred aerial systems in Ukraine. It's a pretty good, lively conversation. It's not nearly as bad as sort of the F-35 or the F-16 fan club. Word of advice, if you ever feel like going on F-16s forums and posting something negative about F-16s, don't.

And same thing with F-35s or any other type of tactical aviation. When it comes to military nerds, there are different sets of communities, but I think the most intense are definitely the

Definitely aviation fans. Here's my view of kind of broad overview of where we are on U.S. production in Ukraine. I think this has been a bright spot over the course of this year. Ukraine had a comparative advantage in taking the funding that was available and including Western support and then significantly expanding its own domestic production of various types of drones. My own impression, current figures, that the initial target for this year was one million drones, primarily domestic.

FPVs, first-person view drones. Ukraine has likely made and delivered at this point more than 1.3 million. That's a big checkmark for probably ministry most responsible is maybe the Ministry of Digital Transformation. But in Ukraine, there are several ministries involved in this. There's Ministry of Defense, Digital Transformation, Ministry of Strategic Industries, and what have you. So there's a lot of folks in the mix.

My best guess is that by the end of the year, they're probably going to make somewhere between 1.5 and 1.6 million drones altogether, which significantly exceeded the targets originally had when you look at how the year began. And that makes a big difference. Like, training and output, domestic production of drones has gone up markedly. I think what's important to note is that over time, the emphasis has shifted on what types of drones are needed, right? Whereas you might have needed tons of FPVs early on. You know, a lot of what's required now is still bomber drones of various types, right?

The Mavic 3 and particularly Mavic 3T remains essential, especially since we're moving into winter and it's going to be long nights.

My own view is that heavy multi-rotor drones are kind of the unsung heroes and overall tend to be the most versatile and probably inflict some of the higher levels of attrition, not all of which is seen on video footage. But overall, these productions had a significant impact on the correlation of drone capabilities, where you see that on large parts of the front and folks we talked to,

Ukraine either had drone parity or they had an advantage. In some areas, Russia still may have a localized advantage in employment of different types of strike drones. It depends where you are on the front. But overall, Ukraine's done a lot better in this department. And that's because they have invested very significantly in drone production and expansion of the drone force, going from drone companies, from bubaks to battalions.

going from battalions in some cases towards regiments. And battalions getting drone platoons, that is basically you have the force structure expanding along with the capabilities. Still one of the biggest deficits I think overall is munitions. And many drone units are constantly looking for resources to get munitions or to make their own. I think one of the differences between Russian drone units and how they get their supplies and Russian ones is that

Russia may be making less drones now, which is probably the case in Ukraine, but many of those units are essentially getting their supplies from the warehouse, whereas many Ukrainian UAS units have to figure out how they're going to get drones, who they're going to get them from, where they're going to get the money for more drones, where they're going to get the resources for munitions.

And have to keep crowdsourcing those things. And the more elite drone units have their own suppliers, right? They have their own custom-made or custom, you know, specially procured capabilities. So they're not basically pulling them from the main government supply sources or ministries.

Overall, drones are an adaptation, not just to a lack of fires, which we saw earlier in the war. The fire situation has improved markedly in Ukraine. It's an adaptation to a lack of manpower, right? And Ukraine's been holding large tracts on the front, compensating for lack of manpower by employing UAS. I'll offer a few more thoughts here, Rob, and then maybe turn to you on where we are in the U.S. fight. And we'll go down a couple of rabbit holes.

I think another area is the extent to which UAS have been very effective at intercepting Russian reconnaissance drones. I've heard numbers of upwards of 400 to 500 per month. These are the types of drones like Orlon, SuperCam, Zala.

Earlier in the year, Russia had fairly visible dominance at ranges of 50 to 100 kilometers behind the front line with these types of sort of class 2 ISR. And Ukraine started to come up with scalable solutions to them using FPV drones to intercept them and then using radars that are imported in order to guide the FPVs to the target. And that's gone up significantly.

Although, this is very telling because if... And there's different numbers depending who you talk to and what part of the front you are. Some people feel like they're intercepting, you know, a third of Russian ISR flights. Some people feel like they're intercepting less. But it's just very telling, Rob, that if Ukraine is intercepting, let's say, 500 per month, just a rough, you know, through a data board. And that's not all of them. Although they do have running tallies and they do have like a point system now for drone units, meaning so there's a...

an incentive to show videos of your intercepts because you're going to get something for it, right? Let's say that that's 90% of them. Let's say it's even a bit more. That means that to sustain the ISR coverage that they have at the front, Russia's got to be producing quite a bit more than 500 of these systems per month even, potentially, unless we're going to see them

start to really run out, then the production rate has to have been ramped up dramatically compared to what they had when they started the war. Remember when they started the war, they were bragging that they had a couple thousand drones overall in the inventory. And now they're sustaining FPV expenditure rates in many, many thousands per month. But they're even sustaining expenditure rates of these ISR drones in the hundreds per month. Yeah. So I guess I go in a couple different directions.

The first one you said, Ukraine is taking down a lot of Russian ISR UAVs with FPVs. It is one of the bigger developments kind of over the summer that occurred.

I think, as you said, it's still a quantities game. So obviously Ukraine has had success doing this. It requires a lot of coordination and it requires training and other things to do it at scale. Russia still has a lot of ISR UAVs. And so when we were in Sumy, I think we asked this question of one of the commanders and he still showed us that there's still like 10 Russian ISR UAVs overhead in Kursk at the time behind their positions.

So it's still showing, even with this new capability, Russia still has an ISR component. And we can still see Russia still conducting its counter-strikes from, they were guided by UAVs. There are still Lancet strikes, although I think the numbers of strikes on Zala UAVs has probably decreased the Lancet threat somewhat.

So that has had a benefit, but it's still a significant threat. And we mentioned this, I think either in June or the last two before then, that really the Russian ISR UAV is one of the biggest problems. And so this is one of the solutions to it. And it's one of the things we've seen throughout the war is one side will develop a capability, the other side will counter it, and then there'll be countermeasures to the counter. And it keeps kind of going that process.

Taking a quick break from this episode of the Russia Contingency to tell you more about OneBrief, which is actually a really exciting company. And if you're into AI and military software and military problems, you're going to want to listen to this little clip from my conversation with Grant Demery, one of the founders of OneBrief.

Grant, it's great to have you on the show again to tell us about what is happening with OneBrief. You had two big new wins with customers. I know you can't tell us who they are exactly, but tell me why you're excited about them. Oh, yeah, we're super excited. We got two new contracts that we'll be able to announce very shortly. The reason I care so much is that every new large customer needs more product usage and in a network-effective

product where everybody shares data, every new customer makes the product more valuable for all the old customers too. Tell me about military hiring because I know this is an important issue for you and your company. Okay. Yeah. We hire a lot of people straight out of the military. So I take it really seriously and I try to give a lot of thought into what makes good direct from military hire.

And I mostly hire folks straight out of the military into a customer relations role. That's about implement our product and make new military customers very successful with it. And I actually prefer to hire people straight out of the military for that because I'd rather have someone who didn't learn another way and just learns our way. A lot of people want to go straight into sales roles.

I'd rather have people do really well in customer relations, prove themselves out, learn the product, learn our offering. And we've moved a lot of people from there into sales after six months to a

We're trying to do two things with the product. And one is make the U.S. succeed at our broader defense objectives. But one is that I think there's a lot of waste of the prime working years of folks who are serving on staffs. So think the skilled, a major lieutenant colonel who will spend many, many years working really hard on some tasks that often amount to making slides look a little bit better.

fulfilling staff processes that are perhaps not the very best use of your abilities. And I want you to stop doing that.

and automate as many of those things and simplify as many of those things as we can so that humans are only working at the very highest possible abstraction level. And when you leave your two to three year tour on a giant staff, you say, yes, I'd do that again. I am really glad that I spent some of the prime years of my working life on this giant staff.

Check out more about One Brief at warontherocks.com slash onebrief, and you could find career opportunities on their website. Now back to the conversation with Mike and Rob.

And at this point, UAVs are obviously playing a very important role. I would say the majority of casualties are probably caused by UAVs of some type, right? Whether it's FPVs, Mavics dropping grenades, night bomber UAVs, I think all total. I think most likely, I would say most casualties are produced by UAVs in some respects. We don't have hard data on this, right? Different parts of the front, you get different... Commanders will give you different estimates of what's produced in casualties, but I do think that's probably an overall correct figure, right? Or sense of the

the how calories are being produced. FPVs keep developing. As you mentioned, night bomber UAVs. I think this is mentioned publicly elsewhere that they played a really key role, I think, in some of these key battles. They don't get as much attention because the Ukrainians don't post as much footage from them. And actually, a lot of the footage you see is some Russian telegram channels

of the kind of results of the Baba Yaga strikes, but you don't see the Baba Yaga is doing a lot of the strikes themselves. So again, it's part of the selection bias problem we have. If you're only analyzing the war based on open source footage you see on social media, well, some units, if they are not, as you mentioned before, a lot of Ukraine units depend on private support and they depend on crowdfunding to

buy UAVs to buy munitions and so on, right? They require this kind of public crowdfunding support, and there is a correlation between that and their combat effectiveness. So those units will pose as much footage as possible to demonstrate the kind of results and the success they have.

All the units that get funding from other sources may not do the same thing, right? So it will depend. That's true, I think, on the Ukrainian side. I think it's true on the Russian side too. And I don't think we necessarily get a good perspective on quantities of UAVs used from just social media by itself because some units don't post any footage because they don't want to post any footage. And so you may not get that sense, right? So I think that's one thing that key minds. But as you said, FPVs are still very important. Mavics dropping grenades are still a critical role too. In some cases, they might be producing more of the casualties than FPVs.

There's an increasing number of FVs using bombers, so they're reusable. So the developers are interestingly confused seeing what direction they're going in. I think also what's notable is that Western military are not adopting them yet in the same way. And it's been somewhat frustrating to see this because there are Western companies that are developing loading missions and other things. Some of those can play a very key or important role.

But in many cases, if we're talking about a short range loitering munition as a purpose designed munition, well, you have to justify it compared to an FPV. FPVs are quite cheap. They don't require that much in terms of the systems and they give you pretty good range. And so FPVs can get, what, a 15 kilometer range. You can get more than 20 depending on having a retransmitter or other kind of factors.

Well, if you get 15 kilometer range, you compare that to the last thing I, I think Marine Infantry Battalion is the same equipment when I was in them that, you know, for anti-tank guided systems, you have javelins, you have tows. Well, they have a range of less than five kilometers. The longest range weapon system in Marine Infantry Battalion before was 81 millimeter mortars. And that was 5,700 meters. So five kilometers, 700 meters. So FPVs give you three times the range of that, right? Or more if you have retransmitters.

And they give you an ability to kill tanks at a much greater range, like four times the range of ATGMs we currently have. And look, they're man-portable. They're light. They're relatively simple to use if you train on them. And so there's some obvious benefits right now of units of U.S. military that can use them. We would not need them to the same extent the Ukrainians need them because Ukraine has to compensate for a variety of other things. They don't have the manpower, as you mentioned.

UAVs are now more than a, for compensating for lack of artillery ammunition, they are compensated for lack of infantry. And they can only do that partially, right? You can't really fully compensate for lack of infantry with anything else. But, you know, as I was saying, I think there is a role for NATO militaries to think about

testing them, experimenting them, getting them into service, you know, technology changes very rapidly. One benefit of FPVs too is you can change the frequencies on them. And so good FPV units will know when Russia is jamming some direction, they'll bring different FPVs at different frequencies once, and they'll do reconnaissance before they arrive.

And they will use that PV as not being jammed or the friendly units are not using the same frequency. And then once the Russians kind of adapt and they start jamming that frequency, well, you've got a different PV you can use. You can't always do that on some looting missions that are provided by Western companies because they had it already set and you can't kind of manipulate that.

So I think there are some places to look at the short range where FPVs are as good as what we are producing right now at that level. I think there are Western companies that are making better things at longer ranges. But again, the price point is an important kind of consideration here. So look, FPVs are very important. But as you said before, the nature of the battlefield is important to give that context where it is a highly fortified front line.

Many of the places are the terrain is candle-wise. So FPVs are more effective when it's just a couple kind of roads. I think it's also important to keep in mind that one thing that's happened in this war is that it has been hard for both sides to keep the infantry component to retain experience and capability there. Because attrition just, it makes very difficult to kind of...

maintain that experience, guys will get promoted. They will get wounded or killed. It's hard to kind of keep that cohesive element. And so I think the infantry component on both sides has degraded over time, but the supporting arms have gotten better because they are not taking the same level of casualties. And so their experience continues to increase, right? So our TORI crews are better, FPV crews are better and so on.

And so we're now in a war in which the supporting capabilities are more capable, more experienced, but the infantry is less experienced. And that also kind of gives you a somewhat distorted view of how this might apply in a different kind of war. And I also think it's important to keep in mind when you look at Kursk, because Kursk is a good example of you didn't have the same kind of well-built defenses there. I mean, not quite as well-built defenses.

Russia didn't have the same level of infantry and their forces and location. And so you had a much more kind of fluid type of fighting going on, especially in the beginning. And that might be more similar to what we would see in a conventional conflict potentially. And it's important to keep in mind that, you know, the Ukrainian units, they drove so fast the first couple of days, they started outrunning the Mavics because Mavics could not keep up with the range. They had their line fixed when UAVs for a lot of the reconnaissance support. And so a lot of those kind of, you know, the nature of the fight we're seeing in Ukraine was somewhat different.

And the equipment needs are different. The capabilities of training needs are different. And I think it's important to keep in mind that, yes, we're seeing UAVs play a very important role here. And look, one of the important developments too in Curtis we haven't mentioned is the role of fiber optic cable FPVs. That was one thing that in particular...

All the commanders I talked to who were fighting Curse mentioned them specifically, unprompted, that this is a really big problem. In the first couple of weeks, it wasn't clear to us just from open sources about how much of a problem is this. For one brigade, they are destroying most of their vehicles. Most of their vehicle losses are from fiber optic FPVs. The range is – they were telling us it's 10 kilometers.

Some of the Russians are saying it's 15 kilometers. They often will fly FPVs at low altitude because it helps keep more of the cable so you can get longer range. They're like it operate more on roads, right? Or near roads because, but even with like tree lines, even with the wires, they can still fly over tree lines without being too disrupted. And so, you know, a lot of the kind of drawbacks

that people were mentioning are maybe not as much drawbacks as people think. And also I think we were told that like what, a five kilometer fiber optic cable is like $500, I think, right? And so you get 10 kilometer cables, like $1,000. That's really not that expensive, right? You add that onto a basic FPV costs. Okay, the FPV is still less than $2,000.

And now it's something that can't be jammed by EW systems and you have a digital feed. So the camera is very, the optic is very good and you might have a better chance of hitting, you know, like one thing we've talked about before is that ERA, Exposed Reactive Armor, is still quite effective against FPVs because most FPVs use RPG munitions.

That's what ERA was designed to defeat, and they do defeat it. And so FPVs, to achieve a cake kill, catastrophic kill on a tank or armored vehicle, you often have to hit a specific spot on the vehicle. Otherwise, it may not do that much damage. Well, with the digital feed and the terminal guidance, the video feed is not going to kind of degrade as you get closer to the target. So you potentially might be able to hit those sensitive spots and be more accurate as well. So you may need to use fewer FPVs to achieve same results as with an analog FPV,

And so that might actually also affect the cost calculation. So that's one of the interesting things. Those from our last trip, maybe the most interesting aspect of how UAVs have changed that fire optic cable, you have FVs are being a problem.

You know, we're seeing them at Pokrovsk, Turetsk, elsewhere too. You know, I think it's only a couple of Russian specialized units using them, but that will likely expand and that's going to be a big problem is what are the countermeasures to this because EW is not an option and so you have to find something else. Yeah, we heard about them on three other parts of the front other than Kursk, so they were spreading steadily. I was surprised by FireOptiCable FVs because initially I thought that this would be kind of like a lateral branch on the tree of drone evolution and that

they probably wouldn't be that successful. And what's ironic is Ukrainian colleagues first developed fiber optic FPVs too and played with them and also didn't think that much of them, right? It's not like Russia was the first to land on this technology.

But based on everything we saw and heard, it was clear this was wrong. They were capable of a lot of things that I would have thought that would have been much harder to do with a wire-guided FPV. And as you mentioned, much more effective. Actually, one of the main challenges that some of the aerosol brigades ran into in Kursk early on, and one of the biggest sources of vehicle losses up there and steadily proliferating across the front. Also, you can see

How they can be very effective at either mission killing a vehicle and then leaving it to be picked up by other drones or for going after high value EW or well-protected vehicles that have, you know, there's units that have five channels EW on them, counter FPVs.

counter bomber type UAS where you basically see five different antennas on this thing. It's a giant EW critter and it can be pretty effective at taking out those kinds of units. I want to touch on a few other aspects of UAS development.

We already talked quite a bit about mining, but I don't think people appreciate how important remote mining is with UAS and how different it is. For some units, even particularly elite units, about 45% of their missions today are just remote mining. And this is used with PTM-3 munitions. It's used with various types of innovative munitions and mines that Ukrainians have developed. Remember, one brigade we talked to had a particular munition that

They were using that was made in Ukraine and it was highly effective. It was dropped by Mavix. It had a motion sensor in it. It had a magnetic influence sensor. It could last, you know, for weeks on the battlefield. It had a self-liquidation timer, right? A lot of these munitions self-destruct. For those of you who are concerned about use of types of mines and anti-personnel mines, many of them have a timer and they can self-destruct after periods of weeks or even months. And, you know, depending on...

how they're employed, the most important thing to me is that remote mining via drones is much more efficient because you can put them down specifically down roads, down approaches, down ground lines of communication, and you can mark exactly where you put them on a map, right? So you have a digital interface where you can see where all your mines were put down

And you can regenerate those areas, those sectors that you have essentially closed off with mines as opposed to, you know, fast cam family and MLRS distance mining where, yes, you are putting down entire fields of mines. But it's a fairly inefficient way to lay down minefields in the sense that, yes, it's very efficient to your distance mining.

But you are mining a whole area as opposed to you could just be mining the road for the vehicles to approach, or you could just be mining specifically around your positions. And some units are defending very effectively because they're mining themselves and they're putting mines around their position. And that allows a much smaller infantry formation to hold terrain. That would be much harder to do if you were saturating the area with, you know, fast camps and things of that nature. It's much less imprecise. You'd be very worried about your own guys trying to do that.

If you look at the trajectory of these hard drones used in the near fight, most of them are now focused on kind of near zone defense, you know, seven to 10 kilometers. I would say that one of the biggest issue that US, particularly elite US units are dealing with today

is dispersal, right? And entrenchments on the battlefield. There's one unit explained to me that in the old days, dealing with Russians was sort of like going to hunt in a zoo. And now it's a lot like hunting in the actual forest. And FPVs, even though they still generate a lot of videos, the reality is that FPVs have to be distributed by distance and across different frequencies. You can't just really pile them on top of each other very well. You're really constrained on how many FPVs

can be used in the same time within the same sector of several hundred meters. And it's much more challenging to sort of employ them in a manner that delivers something close to volume of fires. And at best, what you can do with Mavics and these types of NFPVs is a carousel type effect where you have planned and staged enough of them, right, NFPVs on different frequencies with Mavics where you have enough teams, right?

that they're able to go in, drop their munitions, then leave, and you can bring more and more in. But that requires quite a bit of coordination, and it's quite harder to do. Three fights that I want to point to that are kind of like UAS versus UAS fights, and these to me are very interesting because they're sort of...

Drones as a principal counter to drones, right? We talk a lot about air defense versus drones. We talk a lot about EW versus drones. But one of the things that's really emerged in the last year of the war is drones versus drones. And the three matchups I might suggest is first-person view drones versus heavy multirotors, the Baba Yaga type, right? Where you increasingly see them being used against Ukraine's advantage in heavy multirotor drones.

It's not clear where that's going to go, but I see some of the more capable units are already looking into placing certain types of jammers on their heavy multi-rotor drones as a form of defense and adjusting tactics. The second is FPV interceptors as a form of short-range air defense against Russian recon ISR.

Russians clearly saw that most of the videos are top-down attack profile on their drones. So they're now looking into putting jammers that are essentially rear and upward firing in that direction. Ukraine will probably have to adjust tactics of how they conduct intercept. But this is a really interesting evolution. We already touched on it. It's heavily dependent on

not just skill, but availability of radars, right? And the radars that they purchase for the units to be able to guide the drones to the target. I think it's one of the best areas of development this year. Third one, which we're not at yet, but I think we're going to get to, which is interceptor drones versus Shahed one-way attack drones, right? And people are working on this. There are multiple projects in development. And I think that that's going to be

probably something that we're going to see, if not by the end of the year, certainly next year. It will be interesting to see what percentage of Shaheds will start to be taken down by teams armed with sort of counter-Shahed optimized interceptor drones. And as I get into this discussion, if we look at the evolution of how Shaheds have been employed, typical sorties, maybe somewhere of 100, 120, most recently upwards of 140 drones being employed.

in any one strike, but about 20 to 30% of them could be other types of drones. They are not all Shaheds. We've seen a substantial evolution and complexity of Russian strikes. You got lots of imitators being used there with radar reflective surfaces on them. You have reconnaissance variants that have starlinks on them as well, right? That provide continuous basically data back to Russian forces.

You have a mixture of different types of drones there in the strike package. I don't think anyone has like 100% accurate, let's say, percentage of what percentage of the Shahed strikes are not Shaheds. Mobile groups are still responsible for shooting down over 40% of them, but Shaheds fly at very different altitudes. Some at low, down to 200 meters, some at high, all the way up to 2,500 meters.

You see in some areas, you know, helicopters flying daily on intercept missions, shooting them down. But this is a very costly, I think, and inefficient solution. Same thing with tactical aviation. It's very hard. You ideally have to be below the shot head looking up at it from lower altitude and still, you know, on a flight with a MiG-29, you're

you're going to at most get a couple of these on any one sortie. So it's, you know, with aviation, you can intercept Shaheds, but it's probably responsible for by far the lowest number of intercepts. And it is a rather costly way to do it. That's why I'm much more interested in how mobile air defense groups develop or counter Shahed FPDs. And I'm trying to think lastly on UAS and employment. I think the biggest issues I would raise

This is first, you know, what it tells about the evolution of mass precision, particularly in a close-in fight, and how much that zero to 30 kilometers really matters in this war. And the employment of U.S. here is what's responsible for holding a substantial part of the front.

I think we're heavily invested in long range when we attack, but the short range is actually where a lot of the money investments need to go. It's my own view. Part of the reason for that is folks don't really appreciate what it takes to build a drone unit, what it takes to build a formation. They think if you invest money in drones and you got the people, then you should be good to go. But that's not the case. It takes millions of dollars to set up a proper drone unit. They need vehicles. They need equipment. They need tablets.

They need several, you know, crews for several shifts. They need night vision because they're in deploy at night. They need personal equipment. It's quite a bit that goes into equipping a formation, expanding this part of the force. And that's the part of the Ukrainian military that's, I think, probably been the most successful in terms of expansion and both building out the tactics and the integration, how they fight. But there are big gaps you see in the resources that they have, right, in terms of what they need.

And then, you know, when we look at the conversation on mines and munitions, again, that's another very important area where I think we could be doing a lot more and looking at the impact that mines and general munition availability has for UAS drones. Because Ukrainians are incredibly innovative.

They'll pull things apart. They'll make new types of munitions out of them. They'll use things in mines that weren't meant to be mines. You know, they'll use things as anti-personnel munitions. All they need is the resources and they'll put it together. It's just a question of availability. And of course, there's lots of lessons for our military too, right?

We always encounter some friction, some views of people that basically say this is not how we would fight. But the problem from my point of view is that folks just don't appreciate the challenge for the close-in fight that we've seen in this war, the difficulty to conduct and combine arms maneuver.

The combination of traditional prepared defense, classical prepared defense, pervasive ISR, and the proliferation of non-line-of-sight capabilities that are precise and can deliver very effective point damage that you just haven't seen as much in other conflicts. I think that's the way I would put together maybe those three parts of the problem set. Yeah. Look, one of the reasons I think we should be procuring commercial EVs and getting them into, like,

platoons is that the young guys need more exposure to it, right? Even if we're not going to procure these numbers, both the Russian and Ukrainian military are adopting FPVs wide scale. They have, they've adopted UAV units into their structure. Any military that the U S military fights in the, in the future, whether it's a nation state, whether it's a paramilitary group, they're going to use FPVs. So we need to be at least ready to deal with them, know their capabilities, limitations, and yet know how to handle them. And if you know how to operate them themselves, you're,

That's the alert on the weaknesses, you know, the fastest. On the Russian side, so now motorized rifle battalions have UAV units, but have UAV like section in every battalion that has FPV teams. Within regiments, regiments now typically have a storm detachment.

The Storm Attachment will have its own UAV section, which also has FPV teams. And then divisions also have, it looks like they're kind of UAV platoons or companies, and they also have FPV teams too. That probably is true at the brigade level as well. So the Russian military, as part of the restructuring, we'll see exactly how it ends up after the war, but they are integrating FPV teams into the structure of the battalion level and to some company level positions.

And it is going to be a thing we're going to have to deal with in the future when we talk about how do you counter the Russian military. That's just one example, but it makes more and more sense for terrorist groups, for paramilitary units, because it gives them an anti-tank capability they wouldn't have otherwise. It gives them range they wouldn't have otherwise. And so we need to be able to deal with it.

I think one interesting thing about the development of UAVs and how they've been used, in Ukraine, a lot of this has been driven, the innovation has been driven by private organizations, NGOs, like Euro-Russiyskaya and other groups outside the military. Also, these charities like Pertula Foundation come back alive that do a lot of the developing some of the technology, purchasing some of the capabilities and figuring out what these gaps in the military has and how can we take care of those things ourselves. And also, in the Ukrainian military today,

It is a mobilized military. So many guys either mobilized or they volunteered beginning. And many of them were obviously were not professional soldiers on February 24th when the war began. And so many of the top Rupak commanders like Madya Arlo, they were not in the military February 24th before this, they joined after that.

And many of the most successful strike drone commanders had a kind of background that had some kind of initiative or innovation like businessmen or maybe they're politicians or some of that kind of thing where they didn't come up necessarily from a military background and their other civilian background actually lent itself to becoming in charge of this kind of innovative units that become somewhat self-sustaining, right? And so it's interesting for me just, you know,

military perspective to see the innovation where it's being driven from. And that a lot of times, you know, the Ukrainian military, like all militaries are conservative. So they often are resistant to change. I think the Ukrainian military eventually kind of saw the usefulness of this. Like, so, you know, General Zaluzhny, he made the choice in January, 2023, after he saw the FPVs were quite useful and they needed a kind of asymmetric response to deal with Russian advantages. So he made a decision to stand up RUPACs and brigades.

By the end of 2023, pretty much every marine mechanized aerosol brigade had a strike drone company. By the end of the year, some of those were becoming battalions. As you mentioned, now a lot of them are battalions. Some of them are becoming regiments like Madhya's unit. These are manpower intensive, right? So a company's more than 100 personnel. Battalions are more than 300 personnel. And Madhya, at least what he said publicly at the YES Forum, is that his regiment's going to be at least 1,000 personnel. So we talked about UAV usage. It's not...

small, right? FPV teams are four-man teams or larger, depending on what they're operating at. A lot of these units, like the strike drum battalions, about a quarter or more of the personnel are support personnel. So there's a tooth-to-tail ratio there too. Like you said, it's expensive. The funding is different. The training is different. So a lot of different things that need to be thought about, they're not necessarily thought about how you would use.

So yes, UAVs are cheap themselves, but all the structure around them that is part of it to make them effective is actually quite expensive. The key part of it too is they're complimentary. And that's something that you mentioned before. UAVs, they've not replaced any existing capabilities. They compliment a lot of capabilities in important ways. And when you talk to strike drone commanders, they're the ones who say the most, like, hey, we're not replacing artillery. We don't replace infantry.

They talk about the benefits of all these things. We don't replace tanks or anything along those lines. They are different kind of new capability that's often useful. But like the combination of artillery and FPVs is quite useful because, you know, we were told as one example, if Russia has a vehicle coming, an FPV might be able to use to immobilize it, to strike it. And then artillery will be used to target the dismounts.

So that combination or Artura can be used to suppress infantry. They take cover. And when they're in cover, a Mavic can come overhead and just drop a grenade right on a soldier and dug out. So the combination makes them quite effective. And as I said, everything is about combined arms. Everything is about how you employ all these capabilities together. You can have a very effective drone unit, but if it's not integrated into maneuver, it won't be nearly as effective as it could otherwise. And that's always true for any existing capability.

And also, we were told that this is a tactical level, but you mentioned about Shaheds. So the Shaheds by themselves have been very interesting how they developed the countermeasures and countermeasures. But they also, one thing we've seen is that the initial UAV strikes were quite effective on both sides. And then both sides started to shoot them down quite rapidly.

So she heads... When they were initially... When Russia started using like, what, October 2022, they had a number of strikes successful in cities. And then Ukraine figured out how to shoot them down and adapted. Well, Russians are the same as the Ukrainian UAVs, long-range UAV strikes. So yes, they have had success. But in many cases, it might be 100 UAVs sent at a target and maybe one or two get thrown. It might be very few. And then hopefully they hit the target. So these UAVs, they have not...

replaced cruise missiles. They have not replaced ballistic missiles. Those, all these kind of different aerial targets present a different type of target for air defense systems. They complicate it. And the combination of all these things, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, UDVs, makes it more difficult for air defense systems to counter them.

Right. And that's true on both sides, where, again, for Russia, when they have had strikes that have got into Kiev and actually targeted Kiev, it's often the combination of cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, same time that can sometimes make it difficult for the air defense systems to overwhelm them with kind of providing different kind of threats to them. So the combination of the two is still very important. The other aspect, too, is that the UVVs are often cheap themselves, but the countermeasures are cheap, too.

And so this has been talked about, but for Shahed, you mentioned mobile PVO teams are often just guys with a Hilux, with a heavy machine gun and a tablet and a searchlight, nothing that complex. And tablets can kind of link in together and you can get a picture of where Shaheds are coming from and so on. And you said the Russians are adapting to that. Sometimes they fly Shaheds at higher altitudes or outside the range of heavy machine guns, but they adapt as well. That happens for everything. And so

We talked about the naval drones that Ukrainians use very successfully, but also Russia has developed countermeasures too. And a lot of this comes down to just having helicopters shooting them down or Raptor patrol boats that are there that can actually provide close protection to ships because a lot of these naval UAVs are also slow. They're also pretty big targets. Machine guns can counter them, miniguns can counter them, and so on. So a lot of these things, the countermeasures are not that complex. Some of these countermeasures are things like SPAAGs, like the so-called...

anti-aircraft guns, which are having a kind of renaissance. Mini guns are so important. Heavy machine guns are so important. All those kind of things can be effective countermeasures. So I think a lot of times people will see some new technology inserted. It'll be quite effective, but they may exaggerate how effective it will be long-term until countermeasures develop, and then they actually become less effective over time. So again, it's like any other capability. In this war, we've seen constant kind of adaptation on both sides. It

constant development of new weapons, countermeasures to that, counters to countermeasures, so on. And again, my view is that it's not fully clear exactly what future wars will look like. All these things develop very quickly. Technology, FPVs change every month or two. The nature of the fight, TTPs, they change very rapidly too. And again, what we see in Ukraine is it is specific to the Ukrainian and Russian

the nature of this kind of war. It may not look exactly like the war. So, you know, the lessons we draw need to be, you know, somewhat reflective that we're seeing context that may not always apply elsewhere. But, you know, UAVs are going to be here. And because these are commercial, because anyone can buy them, right, can put together FPVs, because anyone can buy a Mavic, right?

Right now, it means that any adversary we see in the future will almost certainly be using these and we have to be ready to kind of handle those. Yeah, absolutely. And we don't know, six months from now, half the FPDs in this war could be fiber optic cable guided, wire guided, or none of them.

Could be that, you know, things evolve pretty quickly in this war and the next evolution of one way attack drones or drone interceptor technologies for we know Russia could really have have lost a lot of its ability to conduct ISR a tactical to operational depth six months from now. Or maybe we will see some new iteration of Russian drones that will be adapted and make it very hard to be intercepted by FPV. Things can go any number of directions.

Well, and apparently, you know, Russia's already been putting EW jammers on Orlans. So once they detect a signal, they can jam it or they develop them so they have some kind of ability to maneuver. So once they detect something nearby, the UAVs start maneuvering. And again, some of this comes back to just, you know, avoiding patterns. Don't set a pattern. If you have the operator operating correctly, changing altitude, changing direction, that could be enough to make it too difficult because the FPVs have limited range. So you have to fly right over where you are. If the UAV keeps moving different directions, that might make it difficult.

Yeah, absolutely. This has been a great discussion. I think maybe on a future episode, we should talk about the history of some of the operations and battles as we learned it too. And that could be a great follow-up. I want to thank everyone for joining us for nerding out on UIS and evolution of these types of technologies. And to be continued, Rob, thanks a lot for the conversation. Yeah, thanks for having me. Thank you so much for listening to this free episode of the Russia Contingency.

Don't forget to check out our friends at One Brief at warontherocks.com slash one brief. And if you want to listen to every episode of the Russian Contingency, you can become a member at warontherocks.com slash membership. Stay safe and stay healthy.