1134: Ukraine 2025 | Out of the Loop

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Speaker 1 Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger.

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Speaker 1 Today, a little update on the Ukraine war. We're talking about drones and drone warfare, electronic warfare, jamming, intelligence sharing.
Should we stop intelligence sharing?

Speaker 1 Did we stop intelligence sharing? Should we stop supplying weapons? Did we stop supplying weapons? All these confusing news items that seem to change every five minutes.

Speaker 1 We do a little update on that and what that means for the Ukraine conflict.

Speaker 1 We also discuss whether Europe should arm up, how they can arm up, can they arm up at all, and what it will mean for the future of this conflict.

Speaker 1 Thanks for coming back on, man. I had a slight lull in the angry emails about your episode, so I decided to have you come back on the show.

Speaker 2 I think I'm a sixth-timer now.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you might be the number one

Speaker 1 in terms of frequency. Not in terms of quality, in terms of frequency guest on the show.

Speaker 2 I am honored. I hope your fans badgered you into this.
I really appreciate the opportunity to talk again.

Speaker 1 It's funny because fans are like, you do a good job of distilling a lot of stuff.

Speaker 1 I watch all his videos, but it's good because you have a conversation, you go a little deeper and you recap everything.

Speaker 1 And then other people are like, this guy is as head up as ass and I hate everything that he says. But usually those people are like, they also send me crazy unhinged stuff at the same time.

Speaker 1 So that is not a point in their favor. It's interesting.
Look, there's reasonable people on all sides of most conflicts.

Speaker 1 There's like reasoned arguments, for example, why Russia felt threatened and like invaded Ukraine. And it's not like horrific genocide supporting comments.
It's just Russian Empire is going to expand.

Speaker 1 It's just a little bit like real politic. But the ones who are like, no, Ukraine is Nazis and they were forced into it by NATO expansion.
Those people are never calm and reasoned in their emails.

Speaker 1 They're always just angry and screaming.

Speaker 1 And I wonder if you have any thoughts about why that is, because you can talk Arab-Israeli conflict and each side can have a well-reasoned kind of calm argument about why they're right or why this is going on and happening the way it is.

Speaker 1 But with the Russia-Ukraine conflict, there's people who fall in the middle, but then the people who are really pro-Putin, they can't just be pro-Putin. They have to spit scream in your face about it.

Speaker 2 Well, it's because a lot of them are being paid.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's what I think.

Speaker 2 That's the truth of the matter, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, just a lot of them are just being paid, and it's their job. I can't really blame them all that much because they're getting paid to do that.

Speaker 2 And a lot of times they actually get paid for engagement. I see.
So if you come up with a post that gets a lot of engagement and a lot of comments, then you get a bonus for that.

Speaker 2 The advantage of that is, at least from the Russian standpoint, is that you want to write the craziest stuff possible, right?

Speaker 2 Because the whole point is to get engagement for that post.

Speaker 1 I see. So that explains the social media stuff for sure, but it doesn't really explain the email sent to me that's 17 pages long.

Speaker 1 Because that person is probably not getting paid because that's a really bad use of time, considering I just look at the AI summary at the top and delete it immediately. immediately.

Speaker 1 I read the first five you sent me, pal. You're not getting me again.
They're just people that have sucked down so much Kremlin propaganda that they're basically repeating Kremlin talking points.

Speaker 1 And again, I'm not saying anybody who has a Russian slant to their bias on this war is doing that, but there's certain people in my inbox where I just go, the only place I've seen this claim is RT, or the only place I've heard this claim is the Russian foreign minister.

Speaker 1 So clearly you're just looking at everything they have to say. And there's other stuff that's like demonstrably not true.
Russia only did this because of this.

Speaker 1 And actually they started in 2014 and this didn't even happen until 2016. So explain that.
That's what I don't really get. That's just like a purely brainwashed kind of person.

Speaker 1 I guess I answered my own question. They're just fanatical.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, a lot of it is if you go to work every single day and you hate your job and you can't really figure out what's wrong with your life.

Speaker 2 And then you go home home and you turn on the computer and all these people are telling you, this is what's wrong with your life because we're giving all this money to Ukraine instead of the American people.

Speaker 2 Then it's really easy to come to that point of view that Ukraine is the bad guy. Russia is a Christian nation that's just trying to get rid of the gay people.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Sorry, expand their empire. Actually, both of these things are true.
There's a whole list of things I could have said there. That's interesting and insightful.

Speaker 1 I hadn't thought about the guy who's just disaffected and is like, why am I single, lonely? My boss is probably going to fire me. How do they get to dot, dot, dot, Azov battalion.

Speaker 1 Ukraine are Nazis and they deserve to be part of Russia and Yada Putin. This there's got to be some sort of disaffection there because it doesn't make sense otherwise.

Speaker 1 Who the hell has the time is my first kind of gripe with this.

Speaker 2 Why is Harry Potter so popular?

Speaker 2 Because kids have no agency. Kids don't even get to decide what they eat.
When you read Harry Potter, Potter, it's about this powerful wizard who knows secrets that adults don't know.

Speaker 2 So when you're one of these people who can't figure out why their life sucks so much, it's like reading Harry Potter. I know the truth.
I know the secret.

Speaker 2 Biden is corrupt, and he was giving money to his cronies and laundering it through Ukraine. So it's really no different than Harry Potter.

Speaker 1 That is a funny metaphor slash analogy. And I hadn't really thought about that.
I just find the whole thing quite fascinating. Anyway, this is not why I brought you back on.

Speaker 1 That sort of ended up accidentally being how we started the show here. But I do want an update on Ukraine because we just stopped sending them weapons, supposedly.
Is that real?

Speaker 1 Even I'm at the point where I'm like, which news is actually real and which is just something I read on Reddit that was written by the sun, the Daily Mail that is just made up because they want clicks.

Speaker 1 It's getting harder now to even discern what's fake. And not even just fake news, but something that the U.S.
government changed their minds 24 hours later.

Speaker 1 And it's like, oh, I didn't catch the backtrack on this. So are we not sending weapons to Ukraine anymore?

Speaker 2 So we are sending weapons to Ukraine now. And this is being recorded on March 23rd, 2025.

Speaker 1 Right. So if you're listening to this on Monday, maybe not.
We don't know. Yeah, it

Speaker 1 could have changed by now.

Speaker 2 It's one of those things to back all the way up. Yes.
In the big scheme of things, essentially, the United States knows that it's going to be fighting China in 2027, 2028.

Speaker 2 president xi jinping has said you must to the pla the people's liberation army you must be ready by 2027 to attack taiwan my guess is that 2028 is probably a better date because that's when there's an american election i believe an election in taiwan as well so 2028 would probably be a better date we have essentially three years to get troops over to the Pacific theater.

Speaker 2 The easiest way of doing that is to cut the 84,000 troops that are in Europe. And in a lot of ways, it's kind of a shame, but Ukraine is becoming a victim of real politic.

Speaker 2 Essentially, we need to get troops the heck out of Europe, and I believe they want this war over. No one's going to win, but if Russia takes over Ukraine, that's fine.

Speaker 2 If Ukraine kicks Russia out, that's fine. If Russia takes some of Ukraine's land and leaves the rest alone, that's fine as well.
They don't care anymore.

Speaker 2 They just need to get the heck out of Europe to start putting troops in Taiwan, most likely the Philippines, Australia. So that's the basic strategy here.
And so the president really doesn't care.

Speaker 2 He just wants the war over. And if Ukraine has to make concessions for the war to end, that's fine as well.
Because at this point, it's going to become Europe's problem. Hey, go take care of that.

Speaker 2 Because the last thing the administration wants is Russia collapsing, which could happen around 2026 2027 maybe that's so much sooner than i thought they're running out of armored vehicles but haven't we been hearing about this since two days into the war maybe five days whatever i'm giving you a hard time because people have been writing about how russia's out of ammunition since like week two and now we're on year three yeah vehicles are a little bit different so you can actually look at vehicles and you can look at their marshalling yards and their storage yards and essentially they don't have any more cheap armored vehicles meaning stuff that was made during Soviet times that they can refurbish.

Speaker 2 I think maybe 200 or 400 vehicles left. Wow.
You can actually look at satellite footage and see these depots getting smaller and smaller.

Speaker 1 That's a small number. I thought you were going to add a zero or two to that.
That's crazy.

Speaker 2 No, they're out of MTLBs, pretty much. It's basically a box that carries troops.
Okay. Really, no guns on it.
And these are very useful as battle taxis. Get your soldiers to battle.

Speaker 2 So essentially, Russia, they're never going to run out of tanks, tanks, but instead of 12 tanks in a company, there'll be seven.

Speaker 1 I see.

Speaker 2 Or six. That's kind of the problem they're going to enter.
And you're already seeing Russian soldiers use things like mopeds or motorcycles to cross no man's land to perform attacks.

Speaker 2 So I think what we're afraid of is essentially Ukraine missed its window not to win, but to lose less. Okay.

Speaker 2 And because of that, what we're afraid of is that if Russia collapses internally in 2027, 2028, we're trying to fight China.

Speaker 2 Now we have Russia dissolved into multiple warlord states, each of which have nuclear weapons. Now, granted, those nuclear weapons are controlled from Moscow.

Speaker 2 They still have the permission of action links. They still have the codes to operate those weapons.
But that's not good.

Speaker 2 And so the last thing we want is to be running around Russia trying to recover all these nuclear weapons while we're simultaneously trying to fight China.

Speaker 1 That makes sense.

Speaker 2 Horrible as it is to say, it's easier to let Russia win.

Speaker 1 So other Soviet states ostensibly have nuclear weapons, or did Kazakhstan say, hey, we'll give these back?

Speaker 2 So it was Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine. When the Soviet Union fell, there were nuclear weapons in Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine.

Speaker 2 And again, those permissive action links, the things that actually the code to make the nuclear weapon explode, they were still controlled by Moscow.

Speaker 2 But Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan signed a treaty saying, we promise you won't attack us if we give these nuclear weapons back. We encourage Ukraine to do this.
Hey, we got your back.

Speaker 2 We'll protect you if you give these nuclear weapons back. And apparently we haven't been sticking to that promise.

Speaker 1 That makes sense. I guess my question is, people online, they say things like, oh, don't worry.
You can't launch a nuclear weapon if you don't have these codes and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 So it doesn't really matter.

Speaker 1 But for me, I'm thinking, if you have the missile in your warehouse, in your country or your territory that you can control, how long does it take to take the top off the rocket or whatever, find the computer that detonates the thing, rip that thing out, and put your own version of it in there?

Speaker 1 Yes, it requires some specialized knowledge, but theoretically, you can pay somebody to do that or figure out how to do that if you have the warhead in your possession.

Speaker 2 Yes, that's correct. Eventually, you will be able to do that.
That's what we're afraid of. And also, a lot of people don't know that you can't just...

Speaker 2 take a nuclear weapon off the shelf and detonate it.

Speaker 2 The reason we came up with these permissive action links is that originally our nuclear weapons were essentially protected with bike locks, like back in the 1950s, 1960s. Wow.

Speaker 1 These people have never seen an angle grinder, I guess.

Speaker 2 Yeah. One Air Force guy grabbed a plane that happened to have a nuclear weapon on it, took off, flew around for a while, and Russia went absolutely nuts that we allowed that to happen.

Speaker 1 He just sort of went for a joyride and he had a nuclear weapon on board.

Speaker 2 Don't even know if this guy knew whether he had a nuclear weapon on board or not, but yeah.

Speaker 1 That's mildly terrifying. I mean, we've had so many close calls with this thing.
Like, what's the story with the Russian guy? They saw the launch and he's like, this doesn't look right.

Speaker 1 And he didn't launch and it turned out to be like a reflection and it almost ended the entire world. You know what I'm talking about?

Speaker 2 The man who saved the world. Yes.
This guy, he noticed that there was an attack. This thing was Stanislav Petrov.

Speaker 2 This guy was on duty one night and he noticed, I think it was three nuclear weapons that were intended toward the USSR. He was like, all right, this is definitely an attack.

Speaker 2 We are within our rights to counterattack, but why would the U.S. only attack with three?

Speaker 1 They would launch all their stuff if they were trying to take us out, not just three missiles. It doesn't make any sense.
Basically, didn't sit right with it.

Speaker 1 It's like a Malcolm Gladwell blink moment where he's like, I can't 100% put my finger on everything, but one of the reasons is this. There's something else that doesn't sit right here.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And he just didn't launch.

Speaker 2 Well, correct. And he essentially saved the world that night.
Yikes. Stanislav Petrov.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So close call, along with dude joyriding out in an Air Force jet with a nuclear bomb attached to thing.

Speaker 1 Okay, so we're worried about Russia collapsing because the country of Russia, not the former Soviet satellite states, but the country of Russia, we're worried that that's going to devolve into what, regional sort of warlordism, feudalism, I guess is the right word.

Speaker 1 And then why is it the U.S.'s responsibility to go and clean up these warheads and how would we do that? Why can't Europe do this?

Speaker 1 Or is it just because they don't know what the heck they're doing when it comes to this and we would just automatically end up on the hook?

Speaker 2 It would certainly behoove us to make sure that no nuclear weapons were in Europe and Europe would certainly be helping.

Speaker 2 But, you know, those darn terrorists, if you're a warlord and you want some easy money and some terrorist goes, you know what, I'll give you a couple million dollars for this nuclear warhead.

Speaker 2 What are you going to do?

Speaker 1 I think I call Iran and just say, do you have a billion dollars in untraceable U.S. currency that you can give to me right now?

Speaker 1 Because I have a warhead with your name on it and you could disassemble the thing and threaten everybody with it.

Speaker 2 Well, they'll figure it out. Yeah.
Eventually they will figure out it was you because every nuclear weapon decays in a certain way and you can figure out where this thing was manufactured.

Speaker 1 Okay, so I've already sold it. Yeah, it was me.
What are you going to do? You're already trying to kill me anyways, probably. I don't have the nuke.

Speaker 1 Your problem is not solved if you just drone strike my house. Yeah, I don't know, man.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think we'd probably do that anyway, just out of pure spike.

Speaker 1 I hope so. Don't sell those nukes.

Speaker 2 That's the biggest issue. And as crazy as it is and horrible to look at Ukraine and say, you know what?

Speaker 1 Sorry, Charlie.

Speaker 2 We need to worry about China.

Speaker 1 That's the truth. It's terrible.
I mean, as someone whose family is originally from Ukraine, I mean, you know, way back/slash back

Speaker 1 Russian Empire, you got some history there. But the idea that we don't want Russia to fall is sort of interesting, right? Because it's like we need a controlled dissent.

Speaker 1 Isn't China kind of also in the same boat? Probably also because of the nuclear weapons.

Speaker 1 But two, if Russia is continually busy in Ukraine, they can't really push back on China dictating harsh, low oil prices and, hey, we might just start pushing your borders a little bit, but hey, you need us for Ukraine, so maybe you're going to pick your battles.

Speaker 1 Isn't this kind of their best case scenario? Russia's Russia's being ground down to a nub in the west, and they're in the east buying cheap oil and pushing their luck a little bit.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I so this war has been great for China and it's been great for India because they've been getting all sorts of cheap oil. And China has essentially been ignoring sanctions.

Speaker 2 In fact, just today I made a video about there were GPS modules that could help avoid jamming that were showing up inside of Ukraine on Russian missile copies that came from China.

Speaker 2 So essentially they're using Chinese chips to put into these missiles that can help avoid GPS jamming. They're called CRPA chips.

Speaker 1 First of all, what do they do slash how do they work in brief?

Speaker 2 Absolutely.

Speaker 2 So what these chips do, if you look at a military grade GPS or even perhaps the GPS that's in the marine GPS, like the thing that's on your boat, these chips, they detect false signals and it can detect them because because it'll say, all right, I know how loud a GPS signal actually is.

Speaker 2 And if you know how loud a GPS signal is, then you can figure out, like, all right, you have this place over here that's louder than what the normal signal should be.

Speaker 2 So I need to concentrate on this signal over here. So imagine a pizza, right? And there's a bunch of pepperoni on that pizza.
Each one of those pieces of pepperoni is an antenna.

Speaker 2 This is called a controlled reception pattern antenna, CRPA.

Speaker 2 And essentially, if you're getting a lot of signal from a bunch of pepperoni on one side of the pizza, then you know, okay, well, let me look toward this other side of the pizza where I'm getting the correct signal.

Speaker 2 And a lot of those chips are manufactured in China, and Russia has somehow been able to get their hands on these chips and is using them in Ukraine. Huh.

Speaker 1 Okay, so China either doesn't care that we know that, because if you know that, then the CIA knows that, military intelligence knows that.

Speaker 1 So, either China doesn't care or the United States doesn't care, also.

Speaker 1 Because couldn't we maybe do something about that if we really wanted to or not? I don't know what's going on here.

Speaker 2 That's the scary part. The scary part is we could say to China, listen, you need to do better at making sure that these chips aren't falling into Russian hands.

Speaker 2 And if you don't do that, we're going to sanction you or we're going to put tariffs on your goods coming in. If there's one thing China doesn't like, it's when you take their money, right?

Speaker 2 There's a limited market for GPS chips, but there's a huge world market for like cheap toasters.

Speaker 1 So we have a bigger lever.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we have a bigger lever here. There's a limited number of people you can sell GPS to.

Speaker 2 So it's one of those things where we could probably stop this if we wanted to stop this, or China doesn't care, which is scary as well.

Speaker 1 That is scary because if they're thinking we're going to supply these and the US can't do anything about it, or they can and we don't care about that, that is a scary scenario.

Speaker 1 But it seems almost more likely that there's got to be some aligned incentives.

Speaker 1 Like, all right, they found out about this, but what we're telling them is here's how many we're sending, just enough to keep Russia bleeding out, not enough to make a big difference.

Speaker 1 I mean, am I a conspiracy theorist talking like this?

Speaker 2 No, I don't think you're necessarily a conspiracy theorist. I don't really see that as a possibility.

Speaker 2 I say that because if Russia didn't have this tech, it would make it a lot harder for them to launch missiles. And nobody's winning on this.
I see.

Speaker 2 If we can attrit Russia, it would have been better if this happened two years ago, but if we can get Russia to the point where they literally can't wage war anymore, they can't fire these missiles, they can't fire these small cheap drones, they can't attack Ukraine's electric infrastructure, the story on the ground would have been a lot different today.

Speaker 1 I see. But doesn't this go along with the idea point you just made that China doesn't want Russia to collapse completely and the U.S.
also doesn't want Russia to collapse completely.

Speaker 1 So it's almost like we have to allow China to help keep them in the game, at least for a while.

Speaker 2 Yeah, maybe that could be a thing. That's a very real politic kind of idea as well.

Speaker 1 I suppose it's speculative, so we should probably just move on. I just thought I'd throw that out there because it seems like a logical conclusion based on the stuff that you just told me.

Speaker 1 Tell me about the drones.

Speaker 1 I keep seeing drone footage on Reddit where I live these days because I don't sleep anymore because I have small kids, but there's a lot of videos where drones are going around on the battlefield.

Speaker 1 Some are really graphic and horrific and all that, but some of them are just kind of interesting where it's like a wired drone is driving up to a vehicle.

Speaker 1 And for me, being an RC car enthusiast along with my five-year-old son, that seems weird. I would never drive a wired RC car.
So I asked you about this via text, like, why are they using wires?

Speaker 1 And you said, they're fiber optic, so they can't be jammed. It's almost like we play records here because our Spotify is not working.
So we have vinyl now. It's like going back to analog almost.

Speaker 1 I know fiber optic, not really analog, but my point stands, going wired seems like a weird step back somehow.

Speaker 2 Yes, and no. So at the start start of the war, remember the Barak Tar?

Speaker 1 No, what's that?

Speaker 2 Yeah, they had songs about Barak Tar and they had a little music video and all that.

Speaker 2 So, the Barak Tar, the Barak Tar TB2, Turkish drone, Ukraine was using that thing for ISR intelligence surveillance reconnaissance.

Speaker 2 They're also dropping micromunitions from that drone to hit various platforms, especially on that Russian 40-mile-long convoy that was headed into Ukraine. After

Speaker 2 July, September of 2022, you didn't really see the barak tar in the air anymore because Russia figured out how to do electronic warfare against it.

Speaker 2 And then by 2023, for the most part, you didn't see the drone anymore at all. It just wasn't effective.
So we all thought, all right, well, fair, we're going to use electronic warfare against drones.

Speaker 2 That's where you saw these Star Wars drone guns, these massive-looking black guns that you had pointed a drone.

Speaker 2 And essentially, with that, when the drone is flying, you point the drone gun at the drone and the gun fires a very high-powered shutdown signal.

Speaker 2 So it essentially cycles through every single possible shutdown signal in its dictionary.

Speaker 2 You also have regular GPS denial, GPS jamming, signals jamming, essentially the 900 megahertz band that you'd use in your cell phone for moving drones around, that's no longer usable.

Speaker 2 So you're at like 300 megahertz or you're at one gigahertz now. So you're using essentially UHF to control a lot of these drones and send signal back or L-band.

Speaker 1 So this is like cat and mouse with the signals and the frequencies.

Speaker 2 SPY versus SPY. You're absolutely right.
It is SPY versus SPY. One guy comes up with an idea.
The other guy comes up with a countermeasure.

Speaker 2 And one of the ways to prevent jamming is to use fiber optic. Essentially, you have your drone and on the back of the drone is a spool of fiber optic wire and it unspools as you fly.
Now,

Speaker 2 there's some disadvantages to this. The first disadvantage is that this drone, it can't really be recovered.
It's going one way.

Speaker 2 You could theoretically fly it back, but then you lose half your distance. So a lot of these drones are one-way attack drones.
These fiber optic drones are one-way attack drones.

Speaker 2 They're going one-way.

Speaker 2 Initially, the range was about 10 kilometers, five miles or so, 15 kilometers. Now we're getting up to 50 kilometers.
So we're talking 30 miles of range.

Speaker 1 Of wire. Holy smokes.
I want to know what that spool looks like. That's got to just be enormous.

Speaker 2 Fiber optic is pretty small, but the spools are getting pretty big.

Speaker 2 The fiber optic thing, I'm actually giving a briefing in Ohio in a couple of weeks to a bunch of Intel guys about the current status of drones in Ukraine.

Speaker 1 They're that small, can't they snap?

Speaker 2 Oh, absolutely. You can't really use them in urban areas.
You can't really use them in areas that are filled with foliage because they could snap.

Speaker 2 The other disadvantage is that you can't fire from the same place twice because now you have looks like Christmas garland. They glint in the sunlight.

Speaker 2 And there are pictures in Ukraine of wires everywhere, in the trees, everywhere. Yeah, with the fiber optic drone, that's a new thing.
But the advantage of it is that it can't be jammed.

Speaker 2 And if you can make it fiber optic and also put a little bit of artificial intelligence on it, now if the wire does break, it might continue on until it sees a target that's in its database and attack that.

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Speaker 1 Geez, how much of this is automated? Isn't AI but no wire the next thing? You can jam whatever you want. The thing's not remote control anymore.

Speaker 2 It's already a thing. Ukraine actually has, it's almost like a copy of the Shahid.
Seth, that was the name of it. Seth kind of looks like a mini Iranian Shaheed.

Speaker 2 But Ukraine has a drone where they essentially set the drone up and they say, okay, you need to go after a target that looks like this.

Speaker 2 And if that target isn't available, then you need to find another kind of target. So you essentially program the Seth drone where you say, all right, find something that looks like this tank.

Speaker 2 If you can't find a tank, find an armored personnel carrier. If you can't find find an armored personnel carrier, find a truck and so on.
And then they just launch that and it's totally automated.

Speaker 2 We already have computer-controlled killers.

Speaker 1 That's already here. Just getting closer to Skynet with Terminators every single actually.
How long is the evolution? Okay, we're going to come up with this. Oh, actually, they can jam that.

Speaker 1 All right, we're going to come up with this. But now they're jamming that.
They'll come up with the wired version. Now we have the AI version.
What is that cycle like?

Speaker 2 It's six to eight weeks now.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 1 Six to eight weeks.

Speaker 2 At the start of the war, it was six to eight months. It's down to six to eight weeks.

Speaker 2 Ukraine just recently in September, I think it was the 13th Brigade of their National Guard, they did an all-drone attack.

Speaker 2 They call them ground drones, but essentially drones with machine guns mounted on them. These drones that have machine guns on them are controlled by aerial drones.

Speaker 2 So you don't have line of sight to one of those drones, but you can't bounce a signal off a hovering drone.

Speaker 2 So people were controlling these ground drones with machine guns on them through drones that were hovering and they actually were able to attack a Russian position and they were able to hold that ground.

Speaker 2 That's already here.

Speaker 1 I see. So maybe it's using like laser or something like that that's hard to jam.

Speaker 2 So no, they're using radio.

Speaker 2 Okay. So one of the ways you can cheat jamming is by going up and down a frequency all at the same time.

Speaker 2 So imagine everybody has a decoder wheel and you all know what letter to flip it to at a certain second. Imagine that, but it's at a certain frequency.

Speaker 2 So you might be at 2255 for one millisecond, then you bump up to 2270, then you go down to 2258. That's actually one of the reasons GPS was invented.

Speaker 2 It was for something called PNT, precision time navigation. The GPS sends out a time signal.
So every single American military radio in the world is getting the same exact kind signal.

Speaker 2 So it knows when to jump up and down that frequency spectrum.

Speaker 2 So when you you can talk on the radio, and to you it sounds perfectly normal, but you're actually jumping up and down the radio dial, kind of like you're in a car with one of those old knobs going back and forth.

Speaker 2 But the song is exactly imagine the same song playing on every channel.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's really interesting. That's a good metaphor to explain this.
Does it make sense to jump into the intelligence sharing thing?

Speaker 1 Because that seemed like a huge problem when we were like, hey, let's no longer share intelligence. First of all, what is Ukraine using U.S.
intelligence for? Targeting?

Speaker 2 Yes, and for air raid warnings. So essentially, there's an airbase called Ingels.
It's in Russia, and this airbase holds a lot of their bombers.

Speaker 2 There's other bomber bases around Russia, but we have, I think it's about 250 some military satellites. I believe all of Europe has maybe 13 or 20.

Speaker 2 So people think with a satellite, oh, I'm in my satellite. When I go over an area, if it orbits 90 minutes, then I have 90 minutes until I can see that picture again.

Speaker 2 And that's not true because the Earth is moving below you. So it might be 15, 18 hours before you go over the exact same spot again.

Speaker 2 So the way to fix that, the way to get constant ISR on a runway or on something else that you want to look at is to have multiple satellites in orbit.

Speaker 2 And one satellite is coming over the horizon just as the other one is leaving. So essentially, Ukraine is using a lot of our intelligence on what the Russians are doing with their aircraft.

Speaker 2 So that way they know, okay, the Russians just launched a raid. So now we need to get our fighters in the air to try to shoot down any glide bombs or any cruise missiles that are being launched.

Speaker 2 Without that intelligence, they're still going to detect the raid, but it's going to be after the missiles have entered Ukrainian airspace, and then you're playing catch-up.

Speaker 2 It's better to have assets in place, and you can pretty much guess where those cruise missiles are going to end up by the path. that the bombers are taking.

Speaker 1 So did we stop that or did we go back on that and now we're sharing again too?

Speaker 2 So we stopped that and now we're sharing that information again.

Speaker 1 Okay, good. Because it seems a little unconscionable to be like, we're going to let tons more of your people die by not sharing this information.

Speaker 2 That probably wasn't our proudest moment.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I definitely had a hard time trying to explain that to people who were asking me. And I was like, God, I got to text Ryan and find out what the logic is here, man.

Speaker 1 What is going on?

Speaker 2 Well, the logic was we can turn this off anytime we want. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Your people are going to suffer.

Speaker 2 Make whatever concessions you need to make to end this war that's the logic you can call it wrong but i don't know if you remember uh the army of darkness right with good ass shoots bad ass and he goes good bad i'm the guy with the gun and sometimes it really does come down to that we're the people with the intelligence we can save your country or we cannot save your country it would behoove you to do what we say yeah interesting now Europe can't step into the gap.

Speaker 1 You mentioned that we have, what is it, 20 times more satellites satellites or something?

Speaker 2 I'm doing this off the top of my head. I'm sure someone's going to write you and go, technically, it's 249.
Right.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And Europe has 19, not 13, which your percentage is off by a decimal.
I'm not too worried about that. I just mean that they can't basically go, fine, stop sharing intelligence.

Speaker 1 We've got it covered. And the UK and France can't say, we got the whole area covered.
Don't worry about it. That's not something that can happen.
What about with weapons? I know we supply.

Speaker 1 a lot of shells to ukraine and things like that i know europe's big thing is we need to scale this up and they're saying we're going to spend billions of dollars on this.

Speaker 1 Can this even be done or is it just, all right, we're going to start building factories. But they're looking at each other like, right, guys, is it going to happen? Is it possible?

Speaker 2 It's certainly possible to build factories. Now, putting satellites in space is always going to be hard.
There's a limited amount of lift capacity that Europe has via the European Space Agency.

Speaker 2 They do have the ability to launch satellites, but not at the cadence, not at the operational tempo the U.S. has, especially with SpaceX.

Speaker 2 So, Europe can certainly start building more factories.

Speaker 2 There is an effort in Germany right now to take some of the old car factories and some of the old people who used to work in these car factories and put them to work building tanks.

Speaker 2 I never once thought I would see a Europe or Spain have more tanks than Germany. You know, but kind of, here we are.

Speaker 1 Yeah, geez. Isn't there a lot of overspending on this kind of stuff, though?

Speaker 1 One of the critiques that somebody had sent me was one of the problems Europe is having is the UK has a tank, France has a tank, Germany has a tank, Poland has a tank.

Speaker 1 They all have different weapons, and it's like, hey, how about Germans make tanks? UK makes planes, France makes munitions. Come on, guys.

Speaker 1 We don't all need a different platform for each country at this point. That was what this person had been saying.
What do you think about that?

Speaker 2 That's actually probably not a bad idea. Having Germans make the ground vehicles, it worked twice before.
they did a pretty good job with that one. Yeah, that probably wouldn't be a bad idea.

Speaker 2 Although, France is always going to make its own equipment because it's France. They've decided to be independent kind of from the get-go.
I think the Fram frigate is a

Speaker 2 French-Italian combination. But for the most part, France goes its own way when it comes to manufacturing weapons.

Speaker 2 That might not be a bad idea, but of course, some countries might not like the idea that their weapon systems are outsourced to somebody else.

Speaker 2 If the politics changes, then poof, all of a sudden they're out spare parts of their aircraft.

Speaker 1 Fine, but not to be too much of a dick about it. But weren't they totally fine with the United States having all of their weapons platforms and outsourcing everything to us for 80 years?

Speaker 1 They didn't seem to be complaining until we took it away. And now it's like, oh, I don't want France to have it.
Why? You didn't even have it on your continent last week.

Speaker 1 Now you're mad because France is going to have it and you're not. I guess the thinking has changed, but come on, man.

Speaker 2 Look, we make some of the best weapons platforms on earth. The F-35, which it is a US-made weapon, but it receives parts from all over the globe.

Speaker 2 Like the tires are actually named by Dunlop in England. So the United States couldn't necessarily build the F-35 without help from the UK.
There are Canadian parts in the F-35.

Speaker 1 So far.

Speaker 2 Yeah. There's parts from all over the world.
Every country is specializing on the stuff they do well.

Speaker 2 Now, I can also tell you that

Speaker 2 what some countries have said, we shouldn't use American weapons. And essentially, there is nothing on this planet that can compete with the F-35.
Nothing. Now,

Speaker 2 you can have very, very capable fourth-generation fighters. One good example of that is the Rafael, which is a French fighter.
You can call that like a 4.5-generation fighter. Like an F-15 is...

Speaker 2 a fourth generation fighter, then the F-35 is a fifth-generation fighter, then like the Rafael, you can call that like a 4.5 generation fighter, where a lot of the information flowing into that plane involves coordination.

Speaker 2 So, it's coordinating all these other weapon systems. So, you can think of the Rafael as like a flying supercomputer.
It's just not as

Speaker 2 great as an F-35, especially when it comes to things like stealth.

Speaker 1 We're getting a little bit in the weeds. I was just bringing up the idea that shouldn't Europe manufacture their own weapons? Maybe, yes, Europe-wide.
Yes, individual countries are doing it.

Speaker 1 And you're saying it is possible for them to scale up production of, what is it, 155 millimeter artillery rounds that Ukraine needs?

Speaker 2 It would be 155, 155 millimeter artillery rounds. It's certainly possible for them to scale up.
They just need to start building the plants to do it. There's one thing that we've seen.

Speaker 2 Artillery is of predominance. on the battlefield in Ukraine.
When you do something like fire an FPV drone, first-person view drone, it has an explosive on it, anything flies toward a target.

Speaker 2 You're using a camera system, you have a flight controller, you might have audio-visual processing, right? You have all of this stuff on this thing that you just throw away.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's just single-use. It's like an iPhone that you just use once.

Speaker 2 Yeah. But if you use something like a drone for ISR for intelligence reconnaissance, and then you use artillery to destroy that other target, you can continually use that drone again and again.

Speaker 2 That is a huge advantage. It's the artillery.
There's a reason they call artillery the king of battle.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's fascinating. Before I forget, the United States is sharing intelligence with Ukraine.

Speaker 1 A lot of people don't know this slash discount Ukraine sharing a ton of intelligence back with NATO because they're seeing how Russian weapons work, Chinese chips. I mean, this is like a gold mine.

Speaker 2 You're absolutely correct. It's called JTEC.

Speaker 2 It's this this school in Poland that was, they conceived of it and they actually implemented it within six months, which is like the fastest Europe has ever moved.

Speaker 1 The fastest Europe has ever moved.

Speaker 2 I've often said that NATO is like an unstoppable snail. Seriously.
NATO's main advantage is that they have all of this tech that they standardize.

Speaker 2 So I can take a French bomb and put it on an American fighter. These are all incredible advantages, especially if you might have to use French bombs one day and British bombs the next.

Speaker 2 There's a reason I have a thing right here, this ammo box right here, full of 5.56 NATO ball.

Speaker 2 And I can take this ammunition and I put it into any NATO weapon that takes 5.56. That is a huge advantage that all of our ammunition is interchangeable.

Speaker 2 That doesn't mean every gun is interchangeable, but it means all of our ammunition is interchangeable. And that is a massive logistical advantage.

Speaker 2 There's certainly some definite soft advantages when it comes to NATO. So Poland founded this school and they have Ukrainians working working at the school rotating in and they teach classes.

Speaker 2 So people from NATO can come to JTEC and they can learn. Here's what Russia is doing.
And it's not just about Russia. It's about what the next war is going to look like.

Speaker 2 Ukraine made all the mistakes initially, so we don't have to. One of the things that they came up with was

Speaker 2 when people are attacking trench lines, they're now wearing ghillie suits. You know what a ghillie suit is?

Speaker 1 That's the thing that the snipers wear that looks like a bush and then you stand up and you walk.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it looks like a bush, right? They wear this floppy burlap kind of bush. A lot of them make it themselves, right?

Speaker 2 Because like a Jedi constructs his own lightsaber, a sniper must construct his own ghillie suit. They're wearing these ghillie suits.

Speaker 2 And when I saw this, I was like, why the hell are you wearing this hot-ass ghillie suit when you're trying to assault a position?

Speaker 2 And as it turns out, the ghillie suit actually lowers your thermal profile.

Speaker 2 So it used to be we were kind of worried about like the sensor of the human eye eye and movement and how fast can we get to the fighting position.

Speaker 2 Now we're worried about thermals and that's where the ghillie suit comes in. So you send that first group in with ghillie suits on.

Speaker 2 Then after that, once you take that trench, then you can send other people up who can help clear the trench without the ghillie suit on.

Speaker 1 So this is just stuff you find out when you're fighting a trench war in 2024, 2025?

Speaker 2 Absolutely. Absolutely.
And it's been very useful. And that's how Ukraine is paying us back.

Speaker 2 They're They're paying us back with knowledge and all this information that we would have to learn the hard way in the next war.

Speaker 1 God dang, that's fascinating. It's sad how Ukraine is paying the price for this knowledge, but just from an intellectual standpoint, it is quite fascinating.

Speaker 1 How quickly this cycle is really sort of terrifying. Six to eight weeks.
I still can't get around that. That's such a short time.
Even if you'd said six to eight months, I'm like, wow, that's so fast.

Speaker 1 How do they keep innovating? Six to eight weeks. You barely put the little sensors together before they're obsolete at that point.

Speaker 1 That's faster than they design a new phone or a new graphics card for a computer. I mean, it's just crazy fast.

Speaker 2 Well, there's a couple of reasons for it. The first is that Ukrainians are very well motivated, right? They're defending their country.

Speaker 2 The second is that their production, it's not like American production or Chinese production or even Russian production. Essentially, in Ukraine, you have literally thousands of factories.

Speaker 2 thousands upon thousands of factories that are in people's basements.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 they are usually sponsored by a brigade and a lot of times one of the reasons you see these drone drop videos and then they have the brigade watermark top right corner of the video it's so that people in europe know where to donate money to so essentially these people in these little shops they're able to make a drone and then give it to the Ukrainian military and give it to their brigade right that sponsors them the brigade says hey this worked well but this didn't work well and that goes right back to these guys in the shop.

Speaker 2 And these guys in the shop can make the change immediately and send one out maybe the next day or within a week.

Speaker 1 This is too shiny. Oh, I'll spray paint it with some black paint.
Actually, that's more visible because it really stands. All right, I'll spray paint it with some blue, cloudy looking paint.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 1 Hey, these fans are really loud. Let me find some quieter fans.
Let me put some tape on the parts that are vibrating and see if that makes it quieter. Yeah, that's really interesting.

Speaker 1 They're really iterating on this stuff. Yeah, just day by day.

Speaker 2 Yeah, absolutely. Day by day.
Now, the disadvantage of that is sometimes not everybody talks to each other, right?

Speaker 2 So if you're the 13th Brigade and you come up with this new idea, you might not necessarily let the 50th Brigade know about it. So there might be people who are trying the wrong ideas.

Speaker 2 Again, the stuff that you've already fixed, just because they don't know about your change, and you might be able to get that change pushed out to them, but you're probably motivated to get these drones out the door, right?

Speaker 2 You have a finite amount of time.

Speaker 2 What about NATO nato crumbling people are saying oh it's obsolete now and if the u.s leaves it's over what do you think about that i don't ever see the u.s actually leaving nato let's say the war in afghanistan that took probably about 30 days to execute from the september 11th terrorist attacks to when we actually went into afghanistan with the rangers i want to say that was october 19th but again try and do this out of memory so it took us a little over a month to actually get boots on the ground in Afghanistan just for a raid.

Speaker 2 And we were able to do that because we had all these bases in Europe. So there is an advantage to having bases in Europe specifically for logistics.
That's like super important.

Speaker 1 Okay, so you think we would keep those even if we push our troops to the Pacific theater?

Speaker 2 Yeah, we would almost definitely keep those bases. Every soldier was wounded.
If they had to be evacuated, they went to, yeah,

Speaker 2 in Germany. Something like that is critical.
So I don't really see us giving that up. Plus, the standardization is very useful.

Speaker 2 It's good for everyone to be kind of on the same page when it comes to weapon type and so on.

Speaker 2 And also having this market of weapons is useful, although it seems like we're throwing that one in the trash. I've been to NATO headquarters.

Speaker 1 Flex. Okay.
Continue.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 the U.S. has two floors.
I can't even imagine what it would cost to like move all the secret documents out of there. Just the idea of moving the documents seems a little difficult.

Speaker 2 I don't see us leaving NATO, but what I do see is us scaring NATO straight. In 2014, it was President Obama who said to NATO, like, you need to start paying your way.

Speaker 2 And in 2016, President Obama said, stop buying so much Russian oil.

Speaker 2 We've been saying this for over 10 years.

Speaker 1 Then they said, sure. And when I'm dead, the next guy, he might start listening to you.
What's the joke about Europe?

Speaker 1 They're going to have a meeting to talk about when they might might start having the meetings needed to implement this particular plan. I mean, it's just completely ridiculous.

Speaker 1 They just had no incentive to actually do anything.

Speaker 2 Well, now they do, right? Now they do.

Speaker 1 I don't love that, but I like the idea that Europe has to arm up. And look, people are going to get angry when I say that.
It's safer this way, don't you think?

Speaker 1 I don't like that they can't rely on the U.S. That sort of is embarrassing, but I do like that they eventually, hopefully, won't have to.

Speaker 1 Because if something really serious does go down and Europe cannot defend itself, that's really terrifying for everybody, is it not?

Speaker 2 I think you're absolutely correct. Europe should be able to defend itself.

Speaker 1 Even now. You mean, as a matter of principle, they should scale up and pay their way for defense so that they can.

Speaker 2 Look, when they joined NATO, there was an agreement. You're going to spend 2% of your GDP on defense.

Speaker 2 And some nations still have done that. It's been three years since the war in Ukraine and Canada still doesn't have their defense spending up to 2% of their GDP?

Speaker 1 They neighbor Russia, for God's sake. Yeah.

Speaker 2 They do that. So do we.
Yes. Technically.

Speaker 1 Alaska.

Speaker 2 We're on Russia's border, too. That's right.

Speaker 1 We have defense resources and Canada has very little. I don't want to crap on Canada.
It's good people. It's a good place.
I understand they need to spend more on defense.

Speaker 1 I just don't want people to think I'm picking on Canada. I'm from Michigan.
I'm basically a Canadian with shitty health care.

Speaker 1 I grew up north of parts of Canada, right? As many people from Michigan are fond of saying.

Speaker 1 And I grew up drinking in Windsor with a bunch of nice Canadians who I would not like to see going up in a fiery inferno as a result of some sort of issue.

Speaker 1 And their economy as well, I'd like to see that stay strong. I love our previous relationship we had with Canada.

Speaker 1 But tell me more about Europe being able to defend itself because right now it almost looks like Poland is the military superpower in Europe, which is weird.

Speaker 2 I believe Poland is trying to get to, I want to say six divisions. So you figure a division is 15,000 soldiers.

Speaker 2 One thing, I was just in Poland recently on a NATO trip, and in Poland, it's cool to be in the military.

Speaker 1 Really?

Speaker 2 Good for them. It is a cool thing.

Speaker 1 They don't have a choice now, but yeah.

Speaker 2 I've said, like, I don't know how true this is, but if you're in college and you want a girlfriend, you better join the reserves because she's probably in the reserves.

Speaker 1 Oh, so you meet women in the military. That's not what I thought you were going to say.

Speaker 2 Poland has really stepped up to the plate. But look, when I was in Poland, I spoke with this woman.
She's a teacher, like a kindergarten teacher, and she's dealing with

Speaker 2 all of these Ukrainian refugees. And it's horrible.
These are kids who've lost their fathers. These are kids who can't go home.
And it's horrible.

Speaker 2 And this was right after our Secretary of Defense went to Europe and defended Europe. And these people are mad at me.

Speaker 2 I'm like, damn, I'm on your side here.

Speaker 1 Sorry, you just happen to be standing here. So you're going to get it.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I I just happened to be standing there. That was kind of an issue for these guys.
But I wanted to hear what they had to say because Poland is a major U.S. ally.
We're very lucky to have them.

Speaker 2 They're taking things seriously to the point where, look, Poland just bought more HIMARS missile launchers. High Mars is a multiple rocket launch system that's basically fired off a truck.

Speaker 2 It was very effective in Ukraine. Poland bought more high Mars launchers than we have.

Speaker 2 They bought M1 tanks. They bought Korean K2 tanks as well.
What do you got? We'll take it. And I believe it was Latvia who wants to start mining their border again.

Speaker 1 Mining which border? I assume the Russian border and the Belarusian border?

Speaker 2 Well, technically, Poland borders Russia as well, Kalingrad.

Speaker 1 They're not mining the border with Lithuania or Estonia, I assume. They're mining the border with Belarus and Russia.

Speaker 2 So that would be ideal. I think Poland is part of the landmine ban treaty, the anti-personnel ban, the Ottawa Treaty.

Speaker 2 They're considering pulling out of the Ottawa Ottawa Treaty just because landmines have been pretty darn effective.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they're useful in war, unfortunately. Now allow me to share some intelligence regarding the fine products and services that support this show.
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Speaker 1 this is really something so Poland military superpower, I use that in air quotes because they don't have nukes and stuff like that, and they probably don't have as large of an air force or nuclear submarines like Britain and France do.

Speaker 1 How many troops do Britain and France have? Look, the British Empire is no more. This is no longer a massive landing force a la World War II.
Britain's just kind of chilling.

Speaker 1 They make good weapons, but I don't know how much they have in terms of personnel.

Speaker 2 Britain can field, I believe, two divisions. France, I want to say they can field three,

Speaker 2 and Germany, they want to get at the point where they can field three and an additional fourth of reservists.

Speaker 2 I believe Germany is actually considering bringing back conscription, which they ended in, I think, 2012.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, because they still had it when I was an exchange student there, but you could also choose to like work in a hospital or in old folks' home. And most of my friends did that.

Speaker 1 In fact, I didn't know anybody in the former East Germany who went to the actual army. You just didn't do that.

Speaker 2 The German soldiers that I have met

Speaker 2 have been incredible. They are highly professional.
They're motivated. It's just that their government just failed them.
Their government let their military go to hell.

Speaker 1 But there's a lot of good German soldiers there who are dedicated dedicated and are committed they're very serious about the threat it looks i've been to europe recently and the further you go east the scarier russia gets and the more concerned people are i'm sure yeah whenever i explored eastern europe even well into the late 90s the early aughts those people in romania poland they did not like russia it wasn't russian people they were scared of russia and i remember thinking oh legacy from your past you guys were under the soviet thumb you had secret police.

Speaker 1 I totally understand why you were oppressed. East Germany was the same.
There's all these tales. If you ever see a Russian driving, get out of the road because they're drunk.
They'll run you over.

Speaker 1 There's no repercussions. That's kind of what you learned growing up in the former East Germany.
Older people would tell me this, right?

Speaker 1 Because they were occupied and they were treated like they were occupied, not like they were a friendly country.

Speaker 1 They were treated like they were under a hostile occupation, which is interesting because West Germany was a completely different situation with the Allies, at least in the 80s and the 70s.

Speaker 1 By then, it was generations.

Speaker 1 Former Eastern Bloc never really forgot how much of a threat russia was and of course estonia and latvia lithuania and these countries have been for the last 20 plus years getting cyber attacked non-stop by russia they kind of never put their guard down because they never really even had a chance to maybe there was a period of 10 years where russia wasn't screwing with them but maybe not even that long estonia has some of the best cyber troops on the planet that's because of the soldier of tallin There was a statue of a Russian soldier that this town, I think it was in the town of Tallinn, and they decided to move it to a Russian cemetery.

Speaker 2 When Russia found out that they did that, Russia cyber-attacked Estonia.

Speaker 1 They turned off the electricity, didn't they? And the internet?

Speaker 2 They turned off banking. They turned off a lot of stuff.
After that, Estonia said this is never going to happen again.

Speaker 2 And so they probably have some of the best cyber troops in NATO.

Speaker 1 That's kind of a cool place to specialize going into the 21st century here. Very interesting.

Speaker 2 Yeah, when you look like Lithuania, their major brigade is the Iron Wolf Brigade. So, brigade

Speaker 2 4,400 to 4,700 people.

Speaker 2 And their brigade is actually kind of neat because the king of Lithuania, back in whatever century, he went to sleep and he had the dream of an Iron Wolf that howled with the voices of a thousand wolves.

Speaker 2 Where he woke up, they decided that's where they're going to start the city of Vilnia. So there's a lot of history to that brigade.
And the Lithuanians in that unit are very highly motivated people.

Speaker 2 But there's only one brigade, right? Lithuania is only so big.

Speaker 1 Yeah, interesting. Lithuania recently found out that those are also, in part, my family history.
So I have a renewed interest in that whole area.

Speaker 1 Man, there's so many fascinating things to talk about with this conflict. And I know I might be trivializing a little bit because I seem really hyped up and interested in it.

Speaker 1 And it is a war, which is really disgusting and sad.

Speaker 1 I guess I'm trying to just take a different spin on it because it's happening regardless of whether or not I act sad about it on this podcast, right?

Speaker 1 We're all upset about the fact that there's a war anywhere of this scale and elsewhere in the world. It's just scarier, I think, because of the threat from Russia.

Speaker 1 Now, tell me what you think about this. A lot of people go, I don't get why Europe is so worried, why people in the United States are so worried.
Putin couldn't even take down Ukraine.

Speaker 1 It's been three years. They barely had a developed military.
What makes anyone think they're then going to also go into NATO? Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, and Poland. That's insane.

Speaker 1 They'll get their asses kicked. Putin's not that dumb.
What do you think about that counterargument?

Speaker 2 The problem is that they have to. The ultimate plan is taking the Baltics and then taking Poland.
They have to do that. Russia has to do that.
Why?

Speaker 2 Because right now their border is about 1,600 miles or so that's undefended. There's no major rivers.
There's no massive mountain ranges.

Speaker 2 So if you take Ukraine, then you have the Carpathia Mountains to the west.

Speaker 2 And then if you take Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and then you take Poland, then you've taken a 1,600-mile border and you've shrunk it down to 150 miles.

Speaker 1 I see.

Speaker 1 So Russia could protect itself from a land invasion, essentially?

Speaker 2 That's their belief, because for very many years,

Speaker 2 Russia has essentially relied on General Winter to defend itself. When the French invade, then General Winter comes out and destroys your army.

Speaker 2 When the Germans invade, General Winter comes and destroys your army. And it worked until one day it won't.
So that's Russia's feeling that they feel like they need space so they won't be invaded.

Speaker 2 Nobody's invading Russia.

Speaker 1 That's the counter, though. I find that argument a little bit medium persuasive.

Speaker 1 It's not weak, but it's also, okay, that made sense before we had airplanes, before we had drones, before we had massive warships that could come on land from anywhere that you have coastline.

Speaker 1 you had to march people through the mountains. And so Hannibal went over the mountains with elephants or something like that.
Surprise. That's not how it is anymore.

Speaker 1 That seems like 18th century military thinking. I don't really find it totally persuasive.

Speaker 2 It does seem a little odd, but that's just how Russia feels. That's their basic psyche.
to secure our borders. We used to have that with the Warsaw Pact.
We no longer have that.

Speaker 2 So we need to secure our borders from the West.

Speaker 1 How do we know that Russia thinks like that? Has Putin straight up said, hey, we need to go and take these areas because we'll be safer that way.

Speaker 1 I know like the queen of the czar or something said it 300 years ago, but what about now?

Speaker 2 I don't believe Putin's ever come out and actually said that. But logically,

Speaker 2 why are you going to invade Ukraine? You could say, well, it's for resources. You could also say, well, it's because there are family members who live in Russia, who also have relatives in Ukraine.

Speaker 2 And if Ukraine is kind of moving toward the West, then it's really tough when your family members in Russia call Ukraine and they have all these freedoms and you don't. That's a tough one to swallow.

Speaker 1 What about the NATO expansion argument? You want to poke some holes in that? Because people say, well, yeah, we expanded NATO all the way up to their border. Of course, they push back on this.

Speaker 2 You know, look, every country has a right to enter into a defensive agreement with any other country. Look, Russia had a defensive agreement with Cuba.
They put missiles in Cuba.

Speaker 1 I was just going to say, yeah, and then they tried to move nukes there and we were like, no way, man.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we were like, no way, man. But we're allowed to say that and they're allowed to enter into an agreement with whatever country, right?

Speaker 2 We've had a communist country across the border with the U.S. and 90 miles away, right?

Speaker 1 And I know that I'm not arguing for this, just so people are clear, but how is Russia invading Ukraine not similar or analogous in some way to nuclear missiles being put into Cuba and the U.S.

Speaker 1 is like, fine, we are going to blockade the island with the Navy and possibly sink yours?

Speaker 2 I think the difference here is that NATO is not an offensive organization. NATO is a standards organization.

Speaker 1 But Serbia has entered the chat, right? And they're not buying it because they got bombed by NATO.

Speaker 2 You're absolutely correct. And they deserved it, right? Like if you don't want to get bombed by NATO, maybe don't put people into rape camps.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I understand that. I just, I'm mentioning that because, of course, Serbs and other people go, well, NATO's defensive until it's not, in which NATO bombing Serbia was it justified.

Speaker 1 That's a whole different podcast. Of course, they were trying to kill kill all the Albanians, but those people, they weren't NATO members.

Speaker 1 NATO just went, hey, we're going to do this humanitarian thing and bomb Belgrade. So it's a little bit like they're not offensive, but it could be.
They can edge towards that.

Speaker 1 And who's to say that it's not eventually going to end up that way?

Speaker 1 Because the conspiracy geopolitics circles online would have you go, actually, the US pushed Ukraine into this fight, hoping that Russia would pick a fight with Ukraine slash eventually NATO.

Speaker 1 And that would be all she wrote. I don't necessarily subscribe to that, but it's not totally insane that NATO could be used offensively.

Speaker 2 No, it's not totally insane. When you think about it, although the mission in Afghanistan wasn't really a NATO mission, many NATO members, including Ukraine, supplied troops.

Speaker 2 A lot of those nations supplied troops for Afghanistan. You might be able to make that argument, but look, one of the deals is that a lot of NATO countries

Speaker 2 don't have the expeditionary capabilities. There's really only four expeditionary, four and a half expeditionary militaries in the world.

Speaker 2 That's the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, and to a lesser extent, China.

Speaker 2 And by expeditionary, these are nations that can, at scale, move troops and effectively get supplies to those troops in order to have those troops fight in a different area of the world.

Speaker 2 Most countries have a little bit of expeditionary capability, but for the most part, most armies of Europe are defensive armies.

Speaker 2 So the idea of saying, oh, well, NATO could invade Russia, for the most part, a lot of these militaries are purely defensive in nature.

Speaker 2 They just don't have the logistical ability, the logistical lift to move outside their own borders with very small exceptions like humanitarian work.

Speaker 2 like East Timor, or if there's an earthquake somewhere in Indonesia, you might be able to get some troops over to Indonesia to help out. For the most part, it's just not built like that.

Speaker 2 Their militaries aren't built to be expeditionary. Israel is another example.
I've had Syrians talk to me, and these Syrians have said, How come Syria doesn't invade Israel?

Speaker 2 Like, dude, Syria can't invade Israel. They could get a couple of miles into the border, maybe.
And you know what? Israel can't invade Syria either outside of a couple of kilometers.

Speaker 2 They just don't have the logistical capacity to do that. War is hard, and logistics is is even harder.

Speaker 1 I feel like I'm lawyering you, so forgive me here, but okay. So NATO, it's not an offensive alliance.
Surely Russia knows this.

Speaker 1 And so that sort of pushes back on the idea that they need to take over the Baltic states, Poland, and Ukraine in order to defend themselves against the invasion that can't actually happen.

Speaker 1 Surely they know that it's not possible. So why would they bother taking these places over at immense cost?

Speaker 2 Think about it this way. That is the argument that we can look at.

Speaker 2 But when you're Russia and you've always been in this tech backwater, when you're Russia and you don't necessarily have any defensive borders yourself, you might get a little concerned about that.

Speaker 2 Russians are thinking like Russians at this point. I'm thinking like an American, where I can look at NATO and go, Many of the countries in NATO don't really have any offensive capability.

Speaker 2 But if you're a Russian, are you really going to necessarily count on that?

Speaker 1 Of course not. No, that's a good point.
I'm also understanding that us saying NATO's not an offensive alliance, and they're like, hey, what's the source?

Speaker 1 And we just say, trust me, bro, that's also not very compelling for them.

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, the proof is in the pudding. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So I don't even know what militarily what it would take to actually perform an invasion of Russia.

Speaker 2 And actually, when you think about it, even though Russia has been attrited to a certain point regarding manpower and regarding vehicles, one of the huge issues is that Russia's been fighting for three years.

Speaker 2 You learn things. You learn things while you're fighting.
And so now Russia has all of this real-world experience, this genuine, honest-to-God, real-world experience in fighting a modern war.

Speaker 2 They are way more dangerous now than they were three years ago, even though technically their capabilities have been attrited to a certain point. They can build up their military again.

Speaker 2 They can certainly be a real threat, especially with all of this knowledge that they've developed.

Speaker 1 Ah, I see. That's really interesting and something that nobody has brought up, right? Because everybody's just saying, hey, they're ground down to a nub with no sign of stopping.

Speaker 1 They're not going into the Baltic states. They're not going into Poland.
And what you're saying is, don't be so sure.

Speaker 1 Because they're a trittid, they need to rebuild some vehicles and munitions and things like that. But now they're much more of a capable and flexible force than they were when they invaded Ukraine.

Speaker 1 And we're rolling the dice, just going, ah, they're too weak to invade these little Baltic Baltic states. It's like, okay, so are you willing to bet all of those people's lives on that?

Speaker 1 Because if so, then go ahead. But if not, then you might want to put some landmines on the border or whatever.

Speaker 2 You're absolutely correct. It's very scary when you think about it.
For the longest time, Russia just didn't have the ability to learn.

Speaker 2 The Russian army was very inflexible when it came down to things like call for fire. Let's say you have a unit advancing and they run into some trouble.

Speaker 2 And an American unit, oftentimes you might be able to call for artillery.

Speaker 2 And if that artillery has already been allocated to you, you'll be able to call that artillery and you'll be able to have that artillery land on the bad guys. You'll be able to call that artillery in.

Speaker 2 Whereas Russia, a lot of their artillery fires are pre-planned. About a year ago, they started using the Orlan-10, which was a drone, to

Speaker 2 actually perform

Speaker 2 on-demand artillery attacks against Ukrainian forces. And that's something they learned to do.
Like they slowly figured it out. And it used to be that the Russian army was very inflexible.

Speaker 2 And that isn't the case anymore. So they're a lot more dangerous than they were just a couple of years ago.

Speaker 1 I know we're closing in on time. I do have one last question.
Speaking of invading Russia, Kursk.

Speaker 1 So the Ukrainians ran in there, took a bunch of territory, were supposed to get pushed out or never get there. And they're still there, but they're getting pushed out slowly.
What do we make of this?

Speaker 1 Why is this important? Why does this matter?

Speaker 2 So that's a very good question. And there's a lot of guys who died in Kursk, a lot of Ukrainians who died taking Kursk.
And I believe their whole idea was we're going to take Kursk.

Speaker 2 It's going to force a lot of Russian units all the way over to another part of the front lines, pressure off our front lines.

Speaker 2 It was a gamble, and it didn't really work because instead of moving forces from one part of the front lines to Kursk, they managed to get North Koreans to fight for them.

Speaker 2 And it was a gamble and it didn't pay off. And for the most part, Ukraine has been pushed out of Kursk.

Speaker 1 And so why does that matter? I mean, look, not asking because I want to trivialize the deaths that are going on.

Speaker 1 Again, it's tough to be as sensitive as I need to be in this episode, but what is going on there? Why don't they just leave entirely and bring their troops back?

Speaker 1 What purpose does it serve for them to be there now?

Speaker 2 Initially, it served the purpose of, all right, we're going to take some land. That way, when we negotiate with Russia, we'll give back Kursk if you give back these other lands that we have.

Speaker 2 And right now, Ukraine is fighting a rearguard action. So I don't want to say they're no longer there.
They are still there, but they are slowly getting pushed out.

Speaker 2 And they're doing it in a way Ukraine is doing what's called a rearguard action. So they're still fighting to allow their troops and equipment to leave.

Speaker 2 while they still have them rather than try to stay and fight this onslaught.

Speaker 1 I wanted to know what you think of this latest ceasefire or or the prospects of a ceasefire in Ukraine, because you hear that we're willing to do something as the United States, but only if they give up mineral resources.

Speaker 1 And that seems, okay, maybe they're going to stop blowing up energy facilities in each other's countries or the Black Sea, something like this.

Speaker 1 But a lot of it seems to be changing and a lot of it seems to also be like something for nothing or unenforceable or no real plan.

Speaker 2 Well, you're absolutely correct. It is a very fluid situation.
And the fact is that Russia really doesn't have any motivation to stop the war.

Speaker 2 And that's mainly because when it comes to their goals, they haven't completed all of their goals yet.

Speaker 2 And their goal is, of course, to take over all of Ukraine and then eventually go to the Baltics and then Poland.

Speaker 2 They have to do that in order to secure their country from what they perceive as NATO aggression.

Speaker 2 So Russia is under absolutely no motivation because they believe if they can keep pushing and pushing, eventually Ukraine will collapse, at least according to them.

Speaker 1 So do we just think that there's not going to be a real ceasefire? Do we think Russia will agree to one, build up their artillery, build a few hundred more vehicles, and then just continue?

Speaker 2 That's certainly a possibility. Now, the kind of ceasefire that Russia wants is one where Russia remains in possession of Ukrainian land.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 eventually there's going to have to be some sort of give and take.

Speaker 2 As much as I'd hate to put it like this, Ukraine is likely going to have to give up some some land in order to ensure some kind of peace.

Speaker 2 I foresee the Donbass, mainly Luhansk and Donesk, becoming a sort of not Russian satellite, but almost like a no man's land or like the Sinai Peninsula was in Egypt when Egypt and Israel agreed to peace and there were peacekeepers in the Sinai Peninsula.

Speaker 2 So perhaps the Donbass becomes a sort of free state that is perhaps aligned close with Russia and you have a peacekeeping force, D4, let's say, Donbass force, that patrols that area.

Speaker 2 Russia is limited to having a certain number of tanks near that area, and Ukraine is limited to having a certain number of tanks and troops in that area.

Speaker 2 And perhaps in return, they get Kherson and Zaporizhia back as territories.

Speaker 1 So who's going to patrol that? The UN? Europe?

Speaker 2 That's a good question. It could be the UN.
K-4 was a mainly NATO operation. That was the Kosovo Stabilization Force.

Speaker 2 The MFO, Multinational Force and Observers, is a joint, I believe it's 13 countries, United States, Japan, Norway, Colombia, Fiji. They have a military and Fiji actually does a rotation.

Speaker 2 So it could be something like that where a third-party force is used. The ideal situation might be some non-aligned countries like Brazil.

Speaker 2 Indonesia, they could supply troops and different countries would pay for the upkeep of those troops while they're on rotation. It could be something that lasts 20 years.

Speaker 2 The MFO, multinational force and observers in Egypt, have been around since the 1980s, I believe.

Speaker 1 Imagine being from Fiji and you get plucked and put in Ukraine. That would be the coldest you've ever been in your whole life by a factor of 100.

Speaker 1 That's a deployment you don't want if you're a soldier from Fiji, plopped into Ukraine in the winter.

Speaker 2 The Fijians, in my experience, are highly professional soldiers. They essentially have three battalions.

Speaker 2 One battalion rotates to Egypt, one battalion rotates to Lebanon, and the other battalion stays home. It's mainly a reserve army.
And these guys go back to their plantations and farming.

Speaker 2 They leave again and go on another rotation. They're highly professional soldiers.

Speaker 1 Lebanon and Egypt, not as cold as Ukraine in the eastern Ukraine in the winter.

Speaker 2 Absolutely correct.

Speaker 1 I was curious about this because I know it seems like Russia could just agree to something and break it.

Speaker 1 And if there's no one there to enforce it, we're just back to square one, especially if Ukraine's military is degraded and not rebuilt and Russia rapidly rebuilds, the incentives are all misaligned.

Speaker 1 There's no point in them maintaining a ceasefire if they have a better chance to take over more of Ukraine later on.

Speaker 2 That is the fear. The fear is that Russia would use any kind of time.
Ideally, a ceasefire will usually last for 30 days, and that just means, all right, there's certain agreements that ceasefire.

Speaker 2 You won't shoot at each other, and that'll give a chance for some soldiers to rotate out and rest. Now, you're not going to rebuild your forces over those 30 days.

Speaker 2 But ideally, a ceasefire turns into a permanent peace treaty. And after that, we have negotiations on what troops are allowed and what areas at the militarized zone and so on.

Speaker 2 So I could certainly see something like that happening eventually. And it almost certainly benefits Russia.

Speaker 2 But depending on the terms of the ceasefire, If Russia has very favorable terms where they say, okay, Ukraine's army is limited to 200 tanks and they're not allowed to join NATO and they're not allowed to raise an army larger than 100,000 troops.

Speaker 2 That's an issue. That's an issue for the defense of Ukraine.
And in 10 years, Russia could try again.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think that's what everyone's afraid of.

Speaker 1 Before I finally let you go, I'm curious about an update here in Syria, because I know one of the last episodes, which is our out of the loop about Syria.

Speaker 1 You and I both were kind of like, all right, we are cautiously optimistic about HTS, this Islamist group, taking over, and we're worried that they could turn into kind of like a sectarian conflict, a little bit of shades of ISIS, shades of al-Qaeda.

Speaker 1 But so far, so good. And now, when I look at news clips, I see Alawites being rounded up and shot and people getting killed all over the place.
And it's a little bit confusing as to who is doing that.

Speaker 1 And is that the government or is that rogue people taking out revenge? What's going on in Syria now with this?

Speaker 2 That's a very good question. I've actually been in touch with some Alawites who've been telling me that they have elements

Speaker 2 of HTS rolling through Alawite cities, just murdering military age males. They cut off water, they cut off power, so it's forcing people to leave their homes.
But hey, there's a curfew.

Speaker 2 Oh, you're on the street, bang, right? Left your home to try to find water, try to charge your phone. That does appear that seems to be happening.
I don't know whether that is government policy.

Speaker 2 Because you have the current leader is the current de facto leader of Syria right now who's now dressing up in a suit and shaking hands and looking like he's a perfectly normal politician.

Speaker 2 I don't know whether this is HTS doing this as a matter of government policy or it's a rogue group from HTS. One interesting thing is that the HTS could be considered the army of Syria right now.

Speaker 2 They reached out to the Kurds and it appears that the Kurds have said, yes, we will join. the federal army of Syria.

Speaker 2 Now, they might be separate Kurdish brigades, but it looks like they might be under a unified command.

Speaker 2 So as of right now, I don't know what's going on when it comes to who is actually committing these atrocities inside Syria.

Speaker 2 The other side of the coin is that there may be some Syrians who, I don't want to say don't care, but might be looking the other way because they're Alawites who were in charge for quite a few years and now they're getting what's due.

Speaker 2 That's a hard thing to say to a family who's just been murdered.

Speaker 1 And also, let's say that my ethnic group group was in charge of the country. I didn't do that.
I just go to school. I just go to college or I just raise my kids.

Speaker 1 Like, yes, maybe there's some privileges, like people of my ethnicity get better jobs, but again, it's not my fault. I didn't put Assad in power.

Speaker 2 One of the issues that you're running into is that we don't have a lot of media in Syria. So we're getting a lot of stuff secondhand.

Speaker 2 And so we don't really know exactly who is doing this. And the people who are doing this aren't necessarily going to tell you.

Speaker 2 Like I said, we really don't know right now, but it does seem like Alawites are being dragged out of their houses and murdered.

Speaker 7 Okay, awkward ending.

Speaker 2 It's a pretty awkward ending for the Alawites, too. Look, everyone has their fingers crossed that this conflict in Syria was going to maybe lead to an Islamic-ish democracy.

Speaker 2 It'll definitely be based on Islam, but maybe there'll be rights for minority groups in there as well. Maybe, look, we haven't seen Sharia law pop up in Syria.

Speaker 2 So I am still cautiously optimistic, but unfortunately, there's really no Western journalists in Syria that can kind of explain what's going on right now.

Speaker 1 Huh, we'll have to do another out-of-the-loop on that when there are more developments. Ryan Macbeth, thank you so much, man, for coming back on the show for the sixth time.

Speaker 2 Always a pleasure, Jordan. Thank you.

Speaker 1 You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger Show with geopolitics analyst Peter Zion.

Speaker 3 We're kind of in this soft moment in history where everyone's holding their breath and wondering if the next time there's an incident, the U.S. is going to intervene or not.

Speaker 3 And I would argue we are not. Safety on the waves is what allows us to have the East Asian manufacturing model.
Less than 1%

Speaker 3 of that shipping happens on land. And that is a recipe for 1910s and 1930s style conflict and competition.

Speaker 3 Countries are increasingly finding it in their best interest to kind of hoard what consumption they do have and not allow trade access to it, and then producing more locally.

Speaker 3 We were moving this way before the Ukraine war, before the Chinese started to break down, and before the German industrial model started to implode. This has just sped everything up.

Speaker 3 So we'll probably see significant drops in agricultural output next year, especially in the second half of next year, which should suggest that we're going to have significant problems with food supply on a global scale in the months that follow.

Speaker 3 I mean, the food issue is the issue that gives me nightmares because I don't see a way to fix it. The biggest loser by far is China.

Speaker 3 Everything about China's functionality is dependent on a globalization and a demographic moment that has passed.

Speaker 3 I think we're in the final decade of the European Union, because without that Russian energy, there is no German manufacturing model.

Speaker 3 And without the German manufacturing model, you don't have the money that is used to keep the EU in existence. The pace of the disintegration here is really difficult to wrap your mind around.

Speaker 3 We've had a really good run the last 75 years. It was never going to last.
And it's going to be a rough ride.

Speaker 2 So anyone who thinks that this is going to be easy is wrong in every possible way.

Speaker 1 For more about how globalization and our way of life will change dramatically in the coming decade, check out episode 781 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.

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This show is created in association with Podcast One.

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