Lawfare Daily: Drone Wars in Ukraine

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If you're a drum pilot in position two day, then you're aware of the current state of drum warfare. And if you're in your safe house, and you are on position seven days ago, you're about seven days behind what's going on in drum warfare in Ukraine.

It's moved-- it moves really fast. It's the law fair podcast. I'm Benjamin Wittis, editor-in-chief of law fair. With Jackie, Jackie is the call signal of an American army veteran who has spent the last several years

in active duty in the Ukrainian military. Where we're fighting in Ukraine today is actually where something like stage 4.4, maybe. So we've got maybe a year or two until we get to the end of stage 4.

But we have weapons now where they are self-guiding. They are self-targeting. They are the self-driving or self-lying. We're talking drones. Drone warfare on the ground.

Drone warfare in the air. How it has changed. How it is changing. And how much it is going to change in the future. So Jackie, I want to start with who the heck you are.

Most people don't know that there are American soldiers in the Ukrainian military.

First of all, what can you tell us about yourself

and how did you end up with the third assault brigade or the third army corps, as it's now called? And there are no American soldiers in the Ukrainian army as far as official status goes. So if you're an active duty American soldier,

you're definitely in the American army. At the moment, I'm an active duty volunteer soldier to the Ukrainian armed forces. I'm an American veteran. So that's the distinction.

I got out of the military in 2014. And then when the invasion started in 2022, I was pretty aware of it. I was watching how well the Ukrainians were doing

“in their defensive key, even in particular.”

And really impressed with them pushing back against the Russians. So I decided that I would go join the Ukrainian military. And I left in March of 2022. This was part of the Ukrainian program called the International Legion initially.

That's where I started. So I worked there for about six months until I transitioned over to territory of defense and then eventually to the third assault brigade. And tell us about the third assault brigade.

I think most Americans probably have never heard of it

or have heard of it by other names. It is a very celebrated unit in or now core in Ukraine. What is distinctive about it? And what is the reason that it is kind of one of the small number of really real jewels

of the Ukrainian military? Yeah, I mean, it's the best large conventional unit in Ukraine. You could say, of course, there's an SBU Alpha. SBU Alpha is like Ukrainians, Cag or Delta component.

Those guys are really good. But there's not too many of them. It's a small unit just like Delta. It's a small unit in the American Armed Forces. Where if you really need some weight to smash something,

maybe you need to go to Ranger. And if you need more weight than that in the American military,

“you need to go to 80 seconds or 101st brigade”

size elements, something like this. So in Ukraine, the really the only effective unit for controlling any piece of the battlefield that matters is going to be a brigade size element.

And so the third assault brigade is pretty much hands down.

It's the best brigade in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. And then now that we have a core, we're at 40,000 soldiers. So we're about seven brigades at this point by the numbers.

Our selves, and we're maintaining over the last six months,

“we're maintaining a 21 kill ratio against Russian forces.”

We have three army, Russian army headquarters. That's an echelon of command. I was talking about brigade, and then I was talking about core. And above core is an army. So we have three armies against us in our sector

in Harkivoblast. So the performance of the core at 21 against any other Ukrainian unit over a long period of time with a lot of troops involved. I mean, it's unprecedented, and it's unmatched completely. So it's the kind of unit that can actually win the war.

And what we really hope to do is we don't want to have just one unit that does this. We do really need the rest of the Ukrainian military to be able to perform at the level. And they can.

And the reason we perform so well is because we've so earnestly adopted a American, particularly American military. Some people say NATO military, but it's really American military. Mission command, which gives the lowest level commanders the initiative to fight their best fight on the battlefield.

And that's all that is, it's just a inverse of the Soviet model. And Ukrainians are really ready to adopt this, we have it in my unit. I've been a big part of implementing it there. And we've got it, and we can do it for the units. - Yes, so tell us about your role.

I mean, you showed up, you say, you're a volunteer. That is formally, obviously, right.

But you're also, I don't know, a big wig in the third army corps.

You're like, I have seen the way people interact with you.

“When you're taking very seriously there, what is your function?”

- So now my function is to advise on the corps command and staff on Western military doctrine. So it's officially, it's on the senior Western military advisor to the corps. In that role, I've actually needed a lot more help from other entities.

We've gotten a lot of help from actually, some of our foreign partners and American partners in the US. It's been really strange, strange ride, because I was in the US army, I was eight years as a scout. So it's called something called the Cavalry Scout, 19 Delta.

And Bradley Master Gunner, which gets me a little close to the staff in a battalion at the S3. But I don't have official officer training. I don't have official command and staff training. And I've had to make do with what I know in country on the ground,

“advising on operations over the years that I've been in Ukraine.”

And it's worked out really well. The Ukrainians are very adaptive. In the same way that you see them adopting, you know, 30 artillery systems from different countries and then still managing to do the maintenance

and making them run and operate. That ingenuity also applies to the human systems, such as military command and the staff operations that I advise on today. So not to mention keeping 50-year-old power plants going with duct tape and sped in the face of, you know, constant bombardment.

So in 2020, yeah, they're incredible people.

So in 2023, it was training the NCOs, which I'm well-equipped to do. In 2024, it was training the junior officers and establishing that training pipeline. In 2025, it was largely about training battalion staffs and then brigade staffs that were coming into the unit

that maybe didn't know what an S1 does. And doesn't know that an S1's duty and combat is, for example, to commodify the people in the unit by making sure that you track your loss rate and project your replacement rate and therefore get those numbers over to recruiting.

So that we can do training on time and meet the big machine, big green army machine that we now have. And so things like that. Yeah, so in the West, largely as a function of Russian propaganda

over time, the third assault brigade, which is associated

with the Azaf Regimen, has a bit of a rep because of some of the people who were associated with it at its origins. And in Ukraine, it is a revered entity because it is effective and it controls human losses in a way that other brigades

And a huge part of that is robotics.

“And so first of all, talked to me about the disparity”

between the way foreigners or Westerners react when they hear the word Azaf and the way Ukrainians react

when they hear Azaf or third army corps.

Yeah, well, the people who actually know what Azaf means, that's the Ukrainians, like they live with them. They've been, it's their movement. They know that Azaf is a great thing and it is a great thing. It's the, it's the sons of liberty, basically.

It's the guys who threw the tea into the harbor and Boston in 1775 and started a revolution against their owners. Their oppressors, great Britain. You know, that's what Azaf is. That's the guys who stood up for themselves in their country

and said, we're not going to be pushed around by Russia. That's, you don't know, us, we own our land. And that's what Azaf is.

“Those can be tough guys, then they aren't really tough guys.”

Now, the Russians, what they've done for years and there's been American journalism that's been, kind of colluded on this several times, it's really bad. But the Russians have tried to push a narrative about the Azaf movement into the West

that it's an extremist organization that is related to, to like white power movements and it's just not the case. So I've been there since 2023. I'm Asian American. I was, you know, at every turn and every level,

I've been, I've been accepted, I've been, I've been heard. And now, I, you know, I, really,

from the beginning, I've always, I always had a major voice

and there was never any great. I never encountered racism at all, at the unit. What you, what you do definitely encounter at the unit

“is you encounter a lot of like Russian hate.”

So a lot of anti-Russian hate and like that's fair. So, and we've seen that play out in 2022, basically. In 2014, a lot of Ukrainians weren't really sure that Russia was their ideological enemy. And even in 2021, a lot of Ukrainians don't understand,

didn't understand that Russia was the country kind of keeping their heads down and pushing them down. But Azaf did, as I've understood, from the beginning that they're opponent, that the people who were suppressing their freedom was Russia.

And it became obvious in 2022 when Russia started bombing all of Ukraine and then invading and killing them. Talk about robotics.

The incredible thing about Third Army Corps

is the disparity between its casualty figures and the comparable couch will two figures in other regimens. And a huge part of this is creative and pervasive use of robotics. We're going to talk about aerial drones momentarily,

but let's start with what happens when you use ground robotics to do your logistics, to the extent to which the Ukrainian military now more generally is starting to do, but Third Assault brigade really pioneered. Yeah.

So obviously, you know, we can say aerobotics. Aerobotics are really common in Ukraine, but yet for us, we're, we are the pioneers of the use of ground ground robotics. And, you know, one of the strengths of the U.S. military is going to be all the logistics, the fact that we can supply,

you know, our entire active duty force effectively over in the Middle East for 20 years straight. I mean, that's that's a logistics, and you know, that's a mental logistics marvel, basically. No other military can do that.

So as the unit is trying to understand the strengths of the American military, that's one of the ones they really focused on is the logistics, and out of ground drones were the opposite answer to be able to do that. So that's the primary job. We also have, you know, really special unit called NC13,

which is our Assault drone component, our Assault Ground Ground Component. And what they do is they do special missions and, you know, look for opportunities to use the ground drones in a kinetic way, offensive way, even, now they do some really interesting operations, but they definitely are the minority of all ground of drone operations.

The majority of all ground ground operations are going to be logistics, and with a secondary on basically suicide bombing, but instead of, you know, how we encountered it in the Middle East where they would use a jihadi as the, as the brain to drive the suicide vehicle. The Ukraine's just go ahead and use a robot and a soft software to do that.

Yeah, so when you do this higher percentage of your logistics by remotely operated vehicle,

what does it do to casualties?

“Oh, well first casualties go way down because the most difficult operation we have”

is basically just a relief in place.

So a relief in places is just the daily mundane task of a soldier being in a position, kind of isolated and in defense, and then he's got to be replaced by another soldier or two soldiers, and then he's has to leave. And during the the moment where both soldiers exchange places, and what are the reason they have to exchange, maybe they're tired, but more often, maybe they ran out of food or water, and they have to run that stuff back up.

But during the movement of that position, then you're exposed to the sky and you're much easier to see than when you're static and underground. And so if we can use ground drones,

“which are, you know, much smaller, they can be very small, and they can carry even a small drone,”

can carry, you know, several days worth of food water in ammunition. Now that the casualty rate really goes down because most of the casualties were being produced by people who were moving around trying to resupply each other, for example. And what about medical evacuations? I mean,

you guys basically are evacuating people with ground drones now. Yeah. So Medivac is for 2024

in 2025, in particular, that was a Russian TTP, like broadly across the front line, that if you were doing a Medivac, the Russians would actually hold fire if they knew what was going on, and they would attempt to, they would deliberately hold fire so that once you turned around and you were on your way back from the Medivac, that's when they would open fire and start attacking. Because it's free, it's a free shot, basically. You know, when you're, when you're moving forward,

you know, you've got all the security, and then when you're moving back, you're less able to defend yourself. And so Medivac's being targeted, especially on the rear movement, that at the very beginning stage of that rear movement, that was accounting for a lot of casualties in particular. It's also, you know, disgusting practice, but the Russians like to target Medivacs. And so if we can use ground drones, which are lower to the ground, which risk the lives of less soldiers,

in order to get that Medivac done, it's much, much better, much safer, and we've done a lot of really cool innovation in Medivac. Like our drones are fitted a certain way. You know, there's creature comforts in there for the guys who are being a evacued. And it's been a very successful program. And we don't have anything like a golden hour in this fight. You know, we're not dispatching, you know, UH60s for, for Casavac. And these,

these really shortened our dispatch time and our recovery time for these casualties, which really helps us save their lives. And another part of increasing that, that's when you need to win ratio, right, which is where we, you know, is one thing to focus on the 20, another thing to focus on the, on the one, you know, and, and everything we can do to focus on that one is important. All right. So let's talk about aerial drones, which get all the, the attention.

When I started writing about drone warfare, it was a giant reaper or predator, and, you know, a drone strike was a kind of an event, right? And now, now we're in a very different world where, you know,

a drone is basically like, you know, many troops, you know, M16 or something. I mean, it's, it's,

it's the day-to-day weapon of a very large number of people. You guys have been on the leading edge

“of that as well. Talk to me about it. Where's, how far has it come and where's it going?”

Well, what, what I, I really like to do is, you know, there's so much to talk about in drone warfare. It's hard to keep a mind on your eye on the ball, and really it changes so much every day. I mean, if you're, if you're a drone pilot in position two day, then you're aware of the current state of drone warfare. And if you're, if you're in your safe house and you are on position seven days ago, you're about seven days behind what's going on in, in drone warfare in Ukraine. It's moved, it moves really fast. And what I would tell you,

I came up with this kind of way to, to categorize your thoughts on, on this, particularly for people who are outside of Ukraine, particularly for our military members, called, uh, I called the five stages of drone warfare in Ukraine, and in talking to our military partners who are

for the unit as well. This has been a really good way for them to, to hear about what we do in Ukraine.

“So, uh, if you want to, let's just go through, what do you want to face one? Yeah, yeah, so, well,”

actually, it's, you already alluded to, to, um, the actual phase zero is the start of it. And that's, that's, that's Reaper and Predator. And, and there's advantages to, you know, the original American

drone warfare, um, but these large platforms is nestled at the operational level, multi-million

dollar, um, platforms that are flown from Nevada, but the ground crews are in Afghanistan, and because you're flying, what's essentially an air force jet without a pilot in it, one advantage is you can fly it over places like Iran or North Korea, and you're not risking the life of a U.S. pilot in order to do, you know, more risky operations. So, that's where the original drone warfare starts. And then what we started to do in Ukraine, and, uh, this actually, uh, so at, you know,

my soldiers are the ones who really developed this so far, and it wasn't a short time. It was over

“long period of time. My soldiers started doing this in, in 2014, actually, with, um, the phase one.”

So, phase one is in our stage one, because you know, have to run through these in order necessarily,

but stage one, drone warfare is instead of having one, 20 million dollar Predator, you know,

you divide that into, you know, 70 or 100, uh, Mavic DJI Mavix. So, you, you democratizer or multiply your ISR by a lot of small platforms. And this started in 2014 with things like the DJI Phantom. And these are just, for those who don't know this terminology, DJI is a Chinese company that makes a hobbyist drones for flying around and taking pictures of volcanoes and stuff and zooming around cities, and you guys just sort of modified them. The wedding drones, we call them wedding

drones, right? Like they've been, they've been primarily been recording weddings. Um, so in 2014, they started using the wedding drones, you know, not having access to something like a Predator,

and this thing might be much smaller. And, um, the Russians had their, their industrial level

equipment like the Oralon 10, uh, would be like the Russian, Russian Mavic. And what it does stage one is it gives the tactical guys on the ground. So the, you know, let's say the actual door kickers infantry gives it gives them perfect situational awareness of what's going around them. So they can, I mean, we've had, we have plenty of situations where we'll take, if we have asymmetry, so we have, let's say one infantryman, and there's 10 Russian positions. And we have one drone pilot in the

sky, and the Russians do not have the drone pilot in the sky. Um, we can actually leverage that one infantryman in that drone in a combined arms way to kill those other, those 10 Russians. And we do this pretty frequently. That's assuming those, those 10 Russians don't have symmetry on the drone warfare. What, what I mean to say is that, you know, having a drone as part of your, your setup gives you a lot of tactical leverage over your enemy, significant amount. And where

it also helps stage one comes big is in artillery, comes in big. It has replaced four observers. I'm sorry to my, my fister and my, my scout friends, but the fact that the gun crew that's firing in artillery piece can just have live video feed of where their rounds are landing in relation to their target. And they themselves can conduct their corrections much much faster than having to verbally communicate that over radio with a human operator. So, and for a lot of

“purposes, it's replaced artillery all together, right? Well, so that's what you're talking about”

in stage two. So, so stage one is just the drones can look at things, you know, that's stage one. You got a bunch of little drones that can look at things. And you need to have enough processing power enough bandwidth on your command control system. So, the instead of looking at two predator feeds, you're able to look at 70 mammic feeds and actually process all of that data. So, phase one is not as simple as flying at DJI, Mavic or flying at flying in oil on 10. You have to be able

to process all of those feeds and then actually take, be able to take action off that plethora of new intelligence that you have. That's one of the secrets to the Ukrainians that the Western Military's under underestimate is how well they're doing this command control. But so that's that's stage one. Stage two is when we start to strap a lethal component, a lethal bomb of some sort onto the drone, the famous one being the the quad race FPV. But this includes dropper rigs from

the wedding drones, like the DJI, so you can drop a hand grenade out for DJI or the heavy bombers,

much larger bombs up in the air and just drop gravity bombs down. So, what you get there in stage two is you get the ability to have a big cost curve difference between your munition and your target.

The famous being the $500 race drone is going to destroy a $1 million tank and or a $20,000

“boat drone, maritime drone, is able to destroy a $20 million boat. So, that's what's distinct about”

stage two. In stage two, drone warfare, you are putting a lethal bomb onto a drone and the number of operators you have and the number of platforms you have is still quite limited so that you only go after high value targets when you're in stage two of drone warfare. Basically, you're just starting to do this. And in stage two, you're not replacing artillery at all. You absolutely need artillery. Your drones are different and distinct from artillery. They have a long travel time, but they are

very precise. They're very precise and so when you have a high value target, you want to engage. They're very good for engaging the high value target and shaping the battlefield and enabling other forces like artillery and infantry and armor to do what they need to do. So, that's stage two. In stage three is where you get the drone starting to effectively replace artillery. So, stage three is instead of having a restriction on the number of operators trained to do stage two operations,

there's no restriction. It's everybody knows how to do this. And the number of platforms are the number of drones that you have available because you've now industrialized the production of these drones. It's effectively unlimited. So, that's the difference between stage two and stage three. Stage two is before the Ukrainian government authorizes the unmanned system forces as an official component of their military. And then stage three is after the Ukrainian military does this and

basically makes it a formal part of their military. So, in stage three, you don't go after

high value targets. You go after every target regardless of value. And that is where most people think we're fighting today is we're fighting the Ukrainian war in a stage three capacity. And stage three, that includes all of the hardware advances we've made in drone warfare. So, that includes unmanned ground vehicles that includes fiber optic drones that includes all the EW and countermeasures that we that we use against each other. And one thing that's really important to understand

about stage three drone warfare in Ukraine is that all of it is nearly all of it is commercially available hardware. It's on Timo and Amazon. So, if you are a cartel lord over in South America,

“you can actually buy a full stage three component commercially. Now, the only thing you're missing”

is the the energetics, the explosives. And the know-how and the know-how and know-how and know-how can spread and maybe it is right now and we people need to really worry about that in the American security sector. So, stage three is where most people think we're fighting in Ukraine today and stage four is where we're actually fighting today. So, the difference between stage three and stage four, stage three is about the hardware. Stage four is about the software, about the AI models,

about autonomous weapons and sending autonomous weapons. So, where we're fighting in Ukraine today is actually where something like stage four point four, maybe. So, we've got maybe a year or two until we get to the end of stage four. But we have weapons now where they are self-guiding, they are self-targeting, they are the self-driving or self-lying or they're swarming so we can have

one pilot moving 10 drones instead of one drone. And basically we're able to leverage the hardware

utilizing the software. You know, there's a there's a few good American platforms out there that are doing stuff like this like the mirror ops, the mirror ops interceptor drone, which has been

“pretty important to help defend the Gulf States, I believe, and it's helping in Ukraine as well.”

You know, it's a drone that has AI final guidance targeting, which is really important when you're doing an air interception operation. You know, it's very human's don't have time. It's hard. Yeah, it's really hard. And so, so that's where stage four is another example of, you know, spider web operations, spider web that you saw where we, that's really the first stage four operation. So, spider web for those who don't remember or don't remember the term is the Ukrainian

on the ground in a variety of locations in very, very far from from the Ukrainian border.

“Yeah, so I would say that was the first stage four operation.”

And their stage four countermeasures, for example, you know, the Russians had put light are sensors on the back of the shot head, so that before when we were intercepting shot heads, we'd be able to fly a drone that was only slightly faster than a shot head, kind of fly it up from behind it, and then, you know, it's static, you know, it's it's it seems static in the air, it's just flying a straight path, and we're able to

to just fly another drone behind it and hit it, right? But now the shot head is going to have a

light are sensor on the back, for example, and then when it automatically detects that any

thing is behind it, because it's in the air, and nothing should be behind it, it'll automatically

“drop elevation or increase elevation, and so it's going to force the intercept to pilot to”

actually miss that shot head. So that's an instant example of a stage four countermeasure. And what is the most autonomous system? I mean, as you know, there's been this battle between the defense department and anthropic about the use of anthropic and fully autonomous systems. What is the most autonomous system conceptually that I'm not asking for details of any particular system? But what when you when you in actual use today, how far

down stage four is there? Have we gone? What's the what's the most autonomous thing that we've seen?

That's actually lethal. Oh, that's actually lethal. If you're talking about an anthropic and the issues over there where you're talking about the most autonomous system, let me just make sure I define when I say platform, I mean like, you know, an M16 is like a small alarm is platform. It's just like one little thing, you know, and then there's like a whole system, you know, systems different systems bigger, and it could system could be really big, you know, we have a

“logistic system in the US military. So the most autonomous system is targeting. That's what”

they're talking about with like anthropic or that's what that's what Palantir does is, you know, large area, how fast are we identifying and actioning targets? Because we have so many soldiers, we have so many sensors, we have so many drones, and between two forces who are going to fight each other, let's say this is going to be really important in into pick-up with a potential conflict on the Taiwanese island, is between the two sides, which one is able to find all these targets,

and then process them in a way that gets a ammunition onto them. So that's the most autonomous system is targeting, and that's not, that's not only on the ground, that's in the air as well. So you know, all the radar, radar targeting, air targeting, that's the most autonomous system. And then for platforms or like the most autonomous platform, I'm not sure, and I could think of some examples, but I also can't really talk about them right now. Fair enough, but you talked about drones

that are piloting themselves, and that the end stage of their attack is fully autonomous, in the sense that they are not really in communication with a human anymore. How far back does that go? Where, you know, somebody decides to launch it, but once you've decided to launch it, it's really not meaningfully under human control anymore. Yeah, so I know that there's like a lot of debate about how far back that should be in like development circles in America right now.

There's no debate in Ukraine. It's like we need to leverage as much capability as much lethal capabilities we possibly can. I mean, the opponent we're fighting is a, is a, a life, and it takes a lot of energy every day to hold that, a life back, and they're trying to get it the whole country every day. So we're probably, we're probably not in a comfortable space as far as that debate goes. We're, we're, we're, we're a little on the, on the edge there.

I mean, it's, it's fair to say that in Ukraine the day, the day that you can press a button and say to a drone go kill some Russian soldiers with these priorities and these priorities and these priorities and de-emphasize these sorts of targets and you have high confidence that it'll be effective at that. That system's going to get deployed. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, in our case for our operational theater, we're not fighting a low-intensity conflict where there's like a lot of civilian

or not, not only on a linear, but also on a depth, where there's, you know, hundreds of

“kilometers of space that's just occupied by the Russian army and only the Russian army. So”

you'll do your de-confliction just based on where you're targeting and, and you're very unlikely to to inflict any civilian casualties or any friendly fire or anything like that. So, but it's a test bed on the front, the front line, it's a test bed for this right now. We don't have solid answer on, I, you know, I don't have a solid answer, and I don't think anyone has solid answer on exactly what the, the right line is. For this, we are not using the platforms that are basically fully

autonomous. We're not using them in any scale. So, the, you know, the guys with, the special unit guys, maybe unmatched of some forces, they're going to be using that stuff. We use some things that are in that realm, but one of the things I want to point out is, you know, there's this, there's this famous quote about drone or drone warfare that's going around the military right now.

Don't, don't block the arrow, kill the archer, and, you know, that was never possible, even in

phrase 0, drone warfare, where we have the, we have the, the drone pilot flying in at a Las Vegas right, he's, that's the archer, he's in Las Vegas, and then the, the drone is in, in a, in Afghanistan, you know, so you're not going to kill that archer. We're at the point now in Ukraine, where we've got the same stuff. So, how most of our drones are going to operate, including our ground drones today, is we're going to have a pilot somewhere that's nowhere near the front line, possibly,

possibly in Kiev, even, and we're going to have the platform with a ground crew being set up for him

“on the front line. All right. So, what's phase five?”

Phase five. So, phase five is, we're fighting now in phase four, and phase five doesn't exist at this moment, and it's, it's kind of where, where I suggest American defense thinkers put their thoughts into, into phase five, or stage five. And what stage five is, is it's all of what we did in Ukraine. So, in Ukraine, we did one, two, three, and four, and we did it off Ukrainian ingenuity, and importantly,

we did it off Ukrainian resourcing, which is really tough. I mean, we're always, we're always,

we always need more weapons, we're always asking partners for, for more weapons and, and supplies and just, just cars, just vehicles. And, you know, I've been fighting there for four years. I could tell you, we really need that stuff. I mean, it's, we're fighting, if we find 100% of this war, we're fighting it with 20% of the stuff we need to fight it with on a daily basis. It's a big struggle. So, in the midst of that, in the midst of having a, one fifth of what we actually

need to fight this war, we're still building and inventing things to leverage ourselves over the enemy. And what would happen if you applied all of our ingenuity, our one through four stages, one through four, but you did it with a first rate military industrial complex from a first rate country. Basically, what if you applied the resourcing from the Americans phase zero to the capabilities that we've now built in Ukraine? That is what stage five looks like, and a stage

a proper stage five platform I would tell you, it's going to be a little more expensive than a Ukrainian equivalent, but not much more, because if you go too high, then you defeat your own cost curve and the usefulness of having that weapon at scale. And so, we'll really, first of all, let me make sure I talk about like three pillars of drone warfare. So, this is, this is going to apply at a stage stage five platform. It's three pillars. That's going to be, number one, cost curve. So,

if a Patriot missile hits a shot head, you didn't really win that fight. You know, because the

shot head is so much less expensive. It's 70 grand in the Patriots for a million dollars. So,

two is going to be mass and mass deployability. And so, you can even just overwhelm the enemy with more expensive platforms by having just too many cheaper platforms. And third is going to be

“your processing bandwidth or command and control C2. So, how much can you control all that mass?”

Basically, and can all that mass be cheap. So, a proper stage five platform that meets those three pillars and needs to meet those three pillars. You cannot make a stage five platform 20 million dollars. It's not going to work. So, it's going to be something like per shot. It's going to be $150, $300,000, something like this. It needs to be able to defeat its equivalent cost in stage three drones. Let's say, stage five drone can defeat 100, 200, stage three drones

on its own. And it's going to have all the capability, all the AI, all the pixel locking,

financially in industrial and industrial base behind it. All right. So, I would be remiss if I let you

“out of this podcast studio without asking you about the current state of the war. I know that,”

you know, when I was in Ukraine, it was only a few months ago, you know, like, and you and I had dinner, things were pretty bleak. You know, Russia wasn't gaining a lot of territory, but, you know, there was a grinding attrition war going on, and it was really cold. And there was a lot of pessimism. And it does, I can't tell if it's that the weather's better or that starlink isn't working for the Russians anymore. Like, you know, there, but something has really changed, and the

tone out of Ukraine is a lot more optimistic. So, how much of this is Hopium? How much of it is real? Where are we today relative to, you know, five, six months ago? So, the optimism is very real. I had written down my predictions on January 1st of 2026 new years as I do every year. You know, we talked about those over dinner. They were all bad. And there were three bad ones, and I had one sort of neutral one in just with some a little bit of hope in there, but that that that last one was a long shot.

And what it would actually happen, well, let me just tell you what the Russians did over the winter.

“Over the winter, I think they're not, I think, I mean, I'm pretty sure they were really hoping”

that negotiations would be able to take the strongholds, last strongholds in Donbass, which is Slovenian skin cramotors. They were hoping that they wouldn't have to take them by force. And in conjunction with the negotiations, they were pushing as much force as possible into us. So,

you know, these two big armies, they always maintain a reserve, right, a defensive reserve.

Just in case there's an emergency in something, they make a mistake at the strategic level, and they've got to flex the troops over somewhere to solve a problem. So, the Russians actually dumped the whole reserve over the winter. They just sent everybody. And that was really tough. This winter was really tough. It was really tough, not just from my unit, but for everybody, and everybody fought really well. I mean, we held on to Prokrovsk. The guys we were fighting

down there is really impressive. In my sector, it was, it was a lot, we were, you know, there we have this rating system for all the units in Ukraine, and it's called E points, army of drones, E points, and we were number one on E points, like through the whole winter. That's not because we were going and finding Russians, because Russians were coming to us, you know, so all these Russians were coming out, so we were number one on the E points system for

like months. So, yeah, so we, we weathered the storm. What happened is around March,

that defensive reserve basically ran out from the Russian side, you know, because you can't just

expend more men than you're recruiting, and the Russians didn't do that. So the Russians didn't, they, they thought they, they burned up their guys in the hopes that they could negotiate for Kramontorsk and Sloviansk. It didn't work out at the strategic level at all. Luckily, they were not too many big effects at the tactical level. So we held on to the decent

“territory that we can push back on now. So the Russians are in a really weak position, right?”

The Russians are in a super weak position right now. And the question for us is, do we have enough offensive capability from our own reserves to be able to respond to the situation that we have right now? And we're going to, we'll see you over the summer. We're not going to do anything unless it's worth it. I'm completely sure of that on the Ukrainian side. So we'll see, we'll see what happens in the summer. Of course, I hope that we can make Russia cryonkel,

and we'll see over the next over the summer and fall if we're able to look at the lies on the current Russian weakness on the battlefield. And we will have a time limit on that because Russia can recruit a Russian can subjugate their own people further and find people they've got people. So we'll see. Jackie, thank you so much for joining us today. Stay safe and keep your people safe and come back and talk to us anytime. Yeah, thank you so much, Ben.

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Alibi Music. As always, thanks for listening. I'm just a bit more interested in the next six months. I'm just a bit more interested in the content.