Speaker 1: Oh, it could happen here, and it's currently happening there
Speaker 1: there being Ukraine, which is in the midst of an
Speaker 1: invasion by the Russian government. I'm Robert Evans. This is
Speaker 1: a podcast about bad things and how to make them better,
Speaker 1: joined as often by Garrison and Chris my co hosts,
Speaker 1: and we are talking about some of the advice, good
Speaker 1: and bad, that's been going around on social media about
Speaker 1: how to disable and destroy armored vehicles. This is something
Speaker 1: we've kind of waited to do until the conflict was
Speaker 1: a little bit more of a mature state. But in
Speaker 1: brief if you have been following what's been happening in
Speaker 1: Russia through the lens of social media or what's pepping
Speaker 1: in Ukraine through the lens of social media, one thing
Speaker 1: that has happened is in the early stages of the invasion,
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of people flocked, particularly to Twitter, but
Speaker 1: also not this did not just stay on Twitter. There
Speaker 1: were large number of mainstreams news articles published on the
Speaker 1: subject of the things people were saying to talk about
Speaker 1: different ways civilians could disable Russian armored vehicles or otherwise
Speaker 1: stymy and thwart the progress of Russian military units through
Speaker 1: their cities. Um. And this has been accompanied by things
Speaker 1: like the Ukrainian government giving out information on how to
Speaker 1: make molotov cocktails. We talked about this in our Molotov
Speaker 1: Cocktail episode and putting out really neat infographics on where
Speaker 1: to throw molotov cocktails to disable armored vehicles. But it's
Speaker 1: also come with a lot of bad advice that I
Speaker 1: don't want people who are maybe looking at the potential
Speaker 1: of urban combat happening in their future to take away
Speaker 1: from this conflict, because there's also a lot of disinfos.
Speaker 1: So that's what we're talking about today. Yes, And I
Speaker 1: guess one of the first places to probably discuss this
Speaker 1: urban combat idea is they probably the guy who's tried
Speaker 1: to make kind of a career out of talking about
Speaker 1: ourban combat, which would be who wrote a relatively viral
Speaker 1: Twitter thread on this topic and has been writing about
Speaker 1: this thing for the past few years. Um. He's a
Speaker 1: he's the the chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West
Speaker 1: Points Modern War Institute and served for like a quarter
Speaker 1: of a century as an infantry soldier, including two deployments
Speaker 1: into Iraq. And yeah, the past few years he's tried
Speaker 1: to kind of make a name for himself as the
Speaker 1: guy who writes about urban combat. And obviously since this
Speaker 1: was happening largely when Russia started invading Kiev, John Spetzer
Speaker 1: put put together some of his thoughts that went pretty
Speaker 1: viral on this on this said topic, Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: it's frustrating. You've got a quote in here from one
Speaker 1: of the articles about he was giving out that says
Speaker 1: some of his advice such is preparing simple molotov cocktails,
Speaker 1: it's already being seen on the streets of Kiev, which
Speaker 1: is kind of framing it as if Spencer advised the Ukrainians.
Speaker 1: Absolutely not true. Before he made that threat, the government
Speaker 1: was urging people to rest. And also, like molotov cocktails
Speaker 1: got their name from people in Finland, not super far
Speaker 1: from Ukraine, resisting the Russian military in a very similar
Speaker 1: way to add, they're being used by Ukrainian civilians. Now, Um,
Speaker 1: what I I believe what John Spencer did. He's a
Speaker 1: guy with some qualifications. Um, certainly like not a random person.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about random people giving advice to on Twitter.
Speaker 1: But he's also all None of his advice is new,
Speaker 1: none of it is from him, None of it is
Speaker 1: counter intuitive. A good deal of it is bad, and
Speaker 1: most of what he said that is good is just
Speaker 1: him pulling things from US military combat manuals and from
Speaker 1: Ukrainian military combat manuals and then putting it up in
Speaker 1: social media in order to go viral and try to
Speaker 1: get another book deal by making it look as if
Speaker 1: he is giving advice that is being adopted in real time,
Speaker 1: which is not what is happening. Yeah, I mean, like
Speaker 1: a good, good instance of this is yeah claiming that
Speaker 1: they're making multiv cocktails due to his advice. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's a picture in that very article that was taken
Speaker 1: before he even posted that thread. So it's like, no,
Speaker 1: they're they're few people know how to make all have cocktails.
Speaker 1: That's not hard to find out. In a lot of cases,
Speaker 1: the Ukrainian Ukrainian government was giving out instructions on how
Speaker 1: to do it. And I mean, and if you if
Speaker 1: you look at this picture, um, it looks very similar
Speaker 1: to a lot of a lot of like the the
Speaker 1: almost like small defensive weapons factories that we saw across
Speaker 1: the States. You would often see just collections of bottles, uh,
Speaker 1: just ready to be thrown, all kind of laid out
Speaker 1: in in in milk crates very similar to this photo.
Speaker 1: Now there was there was less actual molotov cocktails, but
Speaker 1: the way that this is whole, the way this all
Speaker 1: set up looks, looks very similar to any kind of
Speaker 1: insurgency tactics of being like, yeah, there's gonna be spontaneous
Speaker 1: on the ground organizing because people are just kind of
Speaker 1: naturally gifted at that. And on a on an objective level,
Speaker 1: molotov cocktails have a place on an urban battlefield. They
Speaker 1: can be useful weapons for disabling armored vehicles, for causing distractions,
Speaker 1: for injuring and even sometimes killing soldiers. They are they
Speaker 1: are capable of doing that, and they that's part of
Speaker 1: why the Ukrainian government put out these guides showing like
Speaker 1: where to huck the sons of bitches in order to
Speaker 1: disable you know, transports and armored vehicles and whatnot. Now
Speaker 1: that said, attempting to attack a military column with a
Speaker 1: Molotov cocktail in most circumstances is very close to suicidal,
Speaker 1: and I've watched a number of videos of Ukrainians do it.
Speaker 1: In the times that seemed to be most successful is
Speaker 1: when you have areas where the Russians are attempting to
Speaker 1: establish control. You have small groups of vehicles that are
Speaker 1: moving down residential streets. You have a significant amount of
Speaker 1: traffic of civilian traffic occurring alongside those military convoys. And
Speaker 1: as they passed the convoy, a civilian hucks a molotov,
Speaker 1: or as they pass a building, a civilian hucksa molotov.
Speaker 1: Um and those seem to be, broadly speaking, the situations
Speaker 1: in which people have kind of gotten away with it.
Speaker 1: We don't have any kind of I'm not aware of
Speaker 1: any kind of solid, uh overarching analysis of all of
Speaker 1: the use of molotovs in this but that is, broadly speaking,
Speaker 1: a potentially effective way to use a molotov cocktail UH
Speaker 1: in order to degrade military capacity of an occupier. What
Speaker 1: doesn't work, and what Spencer and a number of other
Speaker 1: people suggested is is huck and paint at tanks or
Speaker 1: other armored vehicles. And that may be surprising to a
Speaker 1: lot of people. I think there's a lot of folks
Speaker 1: who want to believe this, UH want to believe that
Speaker 1: that that could really work, because it's like you walk ship, right,
Speaker 1: it feels like the kind of thing should be doing. Yes,
Speaker 1: But here is the thing When you have police officers
Speaker 1: who are tear gas in an area and you huck
Speaker 1: a bunch of paint and you get it over their
Speaker 1: face masks and they cannot see, it reduces their ability
Speaker 1: to tear gas you for a while. It makes them uncomfortable,
Speaker 1: it makes them have less fun, and it damages gear.
Speaker 1: When you huck a bunch of paint at an armored vehicle,
Speaker 1: the armored vehicle will return fire with a fifty caliber
Speaker 1: mounted Dashka or some other similar gun which fires bullets
Speaker 1: that are large enough to take chunks the size of
Speaker 1: your head out of concrete, and you will be torn
Speaker 1: apart in your organs, liquefied in a hail of metal um. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the paint that you are attempting to throw at that
Speaker 1: vehicle is almost certain to have no impact on it. Um.
Speaker 1: Not only are you unlikely to get close enough to
Speaker 1: use the paint, because you have to be considerably closer
Speaker 1: to do that than you have to with a molotov
Speaker 1: in most situations, but also tanks are built with the
Speaker 1: understanding that it is possible that one or more of
Speaker 1: the ways in which they see will be obstructed. Tank
Speaker 1: drivers are trained to drive blind. There are ways of
Speaker 1: utilizing tanks when vision is obstructed, because in the kinds
Speaker 1: of fights that tanks are built to get into, they
Speaker 1: are often in situations where there is so much smoke
Speaker 1: around the exactly that there is effectively zero visibility, which
Speaker 1: is why when Spencer started talking about people throwing paint
Speaker 1: at tanks, a number of tank drivers came out and said,
Speaker 1: that's actually horrible advice, like they don't work that way,
Speaker 1: and I was, I was chatting with a couple of people. Um,
Speaker 1: there was one fellow former Green brand name Mike Nelson
Speaker 1: who was posting about Spencer and very angry that he
Speaker 1: was basically copying material directly from stuff published by the
Speaker 1: Ukrainian government, and then like getting up anytime journalists or
Speaker 1: media figures would comment about Ukraine, would like, there's a
Speaker 1: nasty post here where Anne Cabrera, who I think is
Speaker 1: some sort of reporter, was like, I feel heartsick upon
Speaker 1: the latest news out of Mariopol. My god, just like
Speaker 1: expressing horror and human terry and tragedy. And Spencer posts
Speaker 1: a link to his personal website and says me too,
Speaker 1: not sure if you saw my mini manual for the
Speaker 1: Urban Defender, but it is available in English and UKRAINI. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's so like anyway grifty ship like that. But because
Speaker 1: that it's all that's very different than also like throwing
Speaker 1: paint at like a squad car or like a riot
Speaker 1: like a riot truck that's coming through because if obscure
Speaker 1: their vision, the worst that they can do is crash
Speaker 1: into a wall. They're not going to start firing uh
Speaker 1: massive explosion rounds from a central Uh. Yeah. So they
Speaker 1: they do not like for one thing, the like the police,
Speaker 1: as bad as they can be, their default when they
Speaker 1: come under any kind of like attack is not to
Speaker 1: start firing machine guns wildly in all directions, which Russian
Speaker 1: not yet at least. Um. But you know, the other
Speaker 1: thing I was chatting with Matthew Mora, who's a is
Speaker 1: has been one of the guys who's biling ailing get
Speaker 1: spencer on Twitter. Matthew was a Marine Corps tank commander
Speaker 1: and was blown up in Afghanistan. So he was in
Speaker 1: a tank that was attacked several times and eventually destroyed. UM.
Speaker 1: So he's he has some firsthand knowledge about what works
Speaker 1: and does not work against tanks. And one of the
Speaker 1: things he pointed out is that the people who destroyed
Speaker 1: his tank put together I don't know, hundred two hundred
Speaker 1: dollars worth of various accelerants and random scrap metal and
Speaker 1: made a bomb that destroyed an Abrams tank that works
Speaker 1: a lot better than paint, and it's it's the kind
Speaker 1: of thing where I think one of the things that's
Speaker 1: frustrating here is you've got a lot of these like
Speaker 1: American kind of military academic guys. And I know Spencer served,
Speaker 1: but that doesn't necessarily mean much. That doesn't mean just
Speaker 1: being deployed to Iraq doesn't mean you did anything. But
Speaker 1: they were deployed, and maybe they did see urban combat.
Speaker 1: But I have watched United States soldiers in an intense
Speaker 1: urban combat environment, uh, and most of what they did
Speaker 1: was be inside of m wraps because it's very hard
Speaker 1: to blow those up. While the Iraqi military did a
Speaker 1: great deal of the fighting, and when US soldiers did
Speaker 1: engage in fighting, they did so with absolute air supremacy
Speaker 1: and with artillery supremacy. Um. Which isn't to say that
Speaker 1: it wasn't dangerous, but it is a profoundly different situation
Speaker 1: than engaging in urban combat when the air space is
Speaker 1: contested and when you do not have artillery supremacy. So
Speaker 1: what does that mean in terms of like what can
Speaker 1: people actually take away that's useful from this, UM. Well,
Speaker 1: on an individual level, somethings have been extremely effective. Ukrainian
Speaker 1: territorial defense militias have been very effective at doing things
Speaker 1: like picking up small arms, going out in small patrols
Speaker 1: into uh rural environments around the area where Russian troops
Speaker 1: are moving in small convoys, and oftentimes, because of the
Speaker 1: way the advance went, you would have a single or
Speaker 1: a couple of Russian munition trucks essentially alone and unsupported,
Speaker 1: trying to find their way around. UM. You had civilians
Speaker 1: doing stuff like turning signs around, like removing signs, which
Speaker 1: they were instructed to by the areas Kraatian officials as well. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: and which I'm sure some people just started doing because
Speaker 1: it seemed like a good idea. UM. But that sort
Speaker 1: of ship causes them to burn fuel, causes them to
Speaker 1: abandon vehicles. You had these kind of independent groups of
Speaker 1: farmers towing away abandoned vehicles. You had small raiding parties
Speaker 1: attacking convoys and attacking isolated units. You had cases where
Speaker 1: you know, Russian military units early in the fight would
Speaker 1: get into Kiev uh kind of on accident and be
Speaker 1: ambushed by territorial defense units and wiped out. And those
Speaker 1: are all very effective examples of of decentralized kind of
Speaker 1: ground up resistance against a major military force. Now, one
Speaker 1: thing we don't know that is important if you think
Speaker 1: about the potential that you might have to endure something
Speaker 1: like this, is we have no idea what the casualties
Speaker 1: were like among those kids. It is a total black box.
Speaker 1: And it's it's probable that part of why Russian forces
Speaker 1: did the war crime they did in Bucca Um was
Speaker 1: because they had an attitude that all civilians were insurgents,
Speaker 1: which is, you know what happens when you have kind
Speaker 1: of a people's war, which doesn't justify an act of
Speaker 1: genocide um, but it is something people should keep aware of.
Speaker 1: When you start fucking with the signs and ambushing the
Speaker 1: convoys and throwing Molotov's, one of the things that will
Speaker 1: happen is it will accelerate the violence that is being done. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it makes to the civilian justified target in some
Speaker 1: you know propaganda lens, Yeah exactly. And that doesn't mean
Speaker 1: like it's you should resist if you are invaded. Um,
Speaker 1: But these are things that also should be noted, is
Speaker 1: this is what happens when you resist, right that this
Speaker 1: is what a modern war of this type looks like.
Speaker 1: Other things that I'm not sure if they've been effective,
Speaker 1: but they're certainly not bad strategies. Is the construction of
Speaker 1: a lot of vehicle barriers, tank traps. But next is
Speaker 1: the barricade thing, both than what we've been kind of
Speaker 1: seeing or speculated about in the East, and then how
Speaker 1: we've seen you know, barricade set ups a lot in
Speaker 1: the past few years in various resistance movements to you know,
Speaker 1: a variety of success levels and non success levels. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and and these are like, you know, barriers tank
Speaker 1: traps of a very long history in warfare. So they
Speaker 1: absolutely can be and have been effective many many times
Speaker 1: on the battlefield. So this is not an area of
Speaker 1: does this thing work, but it is a question of
Speaker 1: like and and this is something we just don't seem
Speaker 1: to have perfect data on did it Did it particularly
Speaker 1: play a role in what's happening here? And Um, that's
Speaker 1: harder to tell. Um, And it's probably going to be different,
Speaker 1: you know, depending on the tactical in an area you're
Speaker 1: talking about, which kind of like theater you're talking about.
Speaker 1: But um, you know one thing that's like the way
Speaker 1: in which these kind of barriers hedgehoggs and like whatnot work.
Speaker 1: Is there there an area denial tool. It's like an
Speaker 1: area denial tool four vehicles, um. And it makes military
Speaker 1: units slow down, it makes them take more time in
Speaker 1: clearing area. Um. They have to tow things away or
Speaker 1: blow them up. Um. And they also can provide, depending
Speaker 1: on the type of thing, cover for infantry and in
Speaker 1: urban combat situations, which obviously can cut both ways a
Speaker 1: little bit. But there's a reason why you see these
Speaker 1: kinds of things in every conflict and also a reason
Speaker 1: why people put them up in protests. It can be
Speaker 1: very useful to deny the vehicles of the enemy access
Speaker 1: to an area temporarily, and a big pile of metal
Speaker 1: always does that of the time. It requires something to
Speaker 1: deal with it. Yeah, that was something that was very
Speaker 1: kind of considered when there was an increase in like
Speaker 1: vehicular attacks, UH, during like a lot of vehicles running
Speaker 1: into a massive, massive marches, there was definitely a concerted
Speaker 1: effort to try to block off streets where stuff is happening,
Speaker 1: whether that be like you know, corkers for marches of
Speaker 1: people who specifically block off the sides of streets with
Speaker 1: their own cars to follow the march around, or you know,
Speaker 1: less less effective arricades like throwing a chain lenk fence
Speaker 1: in the middle of the street, which is I guess
Speaker 1: better than nothing sometimes but also maybe not the most
Speaker 1: effective thing. Yeah, in terms of trying to like build
Speaker 1: layered barricades, that's not just you know, one flimsy wall,
Speaker 1: but it's a series of things that can compress down.
Speaker 1: And when you're talking about barricades in a kind of
Speaker 1: militant situation, there's there's broadly speaking, got to be two purposes.
Speaker 1: One of those purposes is to create a to add
Speaker 1: to the friction that you are attempting to create for
Speaker 1: the enemy. And that's that's all insurge. All insurgeon warfare
Speaker 1: is about creating friction, right, because friction degrades assets. It's
Speaker 1: over time. It it called basically like, Okay, so say
Speaker 1: you've blocked off a bunch of roads and you've added
Speaker 1: fifteen twenty miles to the transport distance that this convoy
Speaker 1: has to go. Well, generally speaking, in the case of war.
Speaker 1: When we're talking about war, it's assumed that about one
Speaker 1: mile is in terms of wear and tear like tins
Speaker 1: plus miles um. Because of how much more difficult the
Speaker 1: strain on vehicles is in those situations. So you've added
Speaker 1: a great deal more strain on the vehicles. That increases
Speaker 1: the chance that one of them is gonna blow a tire,
Speaker 1: one of them gonna crack an axle, one of them
Speaker 1: is going to have an engine block go like blow
Speaker 1: or whatever, um. Which means over time, if you're doing
Speaker 1: this a bunch, if you're setting up de ricades and
Speaker 1: you're effectively increasing or all the amount of travel time
Speaker 1: or at least the amount of idoling time that forces
Speaker 1: have to go in by a significant amount, you're guaranteeing
Speaker 1: a certain number of those vehicles are going to break
Speaker 1: or be rendered inoperable in that time. And you're also
Speaker 1: the other thing that they do is they allow you
Speaker 1: to deny area and funnel the enemy into a specific
Speaker 1: into a place more advantageous for you, right, And this
Speaker 1: can be advantageous if you're trying to set up an ambush,
Speaker 1: if you're just trying to buy time for forces to
Speaker 1: move back to a better position. UM it can you know,
Speaker 1: there's a number of uses for it. But if you
Speaker 1: set up a series of obstacles like this and guarantee
Speaker 1: that they're going to have to find an alternate route,
Speaker 1: and you know, broadly speaking, because it's your terrain, what
Speaker 1: kind of route they're going to take, UM, then you
Speaker 1: could do stuff like drop throw a drone at them,
Speaker 1: or if because of the damage you've done to the
Speaker 1: roads and the difficulty of how difficult you made it
Speaker 1: to advance, they wind up just parked for a long time.
Speaker 1: That's also a great situation to bomb people with a drone,
Speaker 1: which is by far the most effective weapons unit that
Speaker 1: we have seen built by civilians in this war. By
Speaker 1: the way, UH, it's not molotovs, it's certainly not paint.
Speaker 1: It is UH civilian volunteers who put together combat drones
Speaker 1: using generally d j I drones that they have upgraded
Speaker 1: with thermal imaging cameras in order to see at night,
Speaker 1: and they have used three D printed parts in order
Speaker 1: to drop bombs from UM and they have done carried
Speaker 1: out for weeks now hundreds of extremely successful nighttime raids
Speaker 1: on Russian positions. This has been effective for a couple
Speaker 1: of reasons. One of them is that the Russian military
Speaker 1: does not widespread half effective night vision. Um. We don't
Speaker 1: need to get The reasons for this are complicated, based
Speaker 1: in a mix of like appropriations, corruption, issues with the
Speaker 1: technologies they do have, YadA, YadA, YadA, but they do
Speaker 1: not have the capacity in large scale to carry out
Speaker 1: operations at night to the extent that the Ukrainians do. UM.
Speaker 1: And so you get when nighttime comes, these forces that
Speaker 1: were advancing in places like Kiev clustering up and huddling
Speaker 1: for the night, and then these hunter killer drones would
Speaker 1: sneak in at night and they are impossible to fucking
Speaker 1: see in data them. I can tell you from experience
Speaker 1: at night, their ghosts just dropping bombs on on armored
Speaker 1: vehicles and on groups of soldiers. UM. And these you
Speaker 1: know what you have seen with these units which have
Speaker 1: been integrated. They are like started out as civilian volunteer groups.
Speaker 1: They have been integrated into the military to a significant extent.
Speaker 1: And I think what you do have some of this
Speaker 1: is conjecture on my part, but you've had a lot
Speaker 1: of Russian officers in generals killed generally because they have
Speaker 1: been communicating over open phone lines, and I suspect some
Speaker 1: of what's been going on is when they figure out
Speaker 1: where one of these guys is, they send some of
Speaker 1: these fucking drone units and to blow them up, because
Speaker 1: it's not hard if you know where someone is to
Speaker 1: kill them with a drone in this way, I think
Speaker 1: the other thing to talk about in terms of, you know,
Speaker 1: building obstacles building barricades is the whole cover versus concealment
Speaker 1: thing where a lot of people think that if they
Speaker 1: hide behind a barricade, there now impervious, which obviously isn't
Speaker 1: true if a drone is gonna get you, and obviously
Speaker 1: isn't true for a large a large number of the
Speaker 1: ammunitions that get fired, whether they be blitz or tank grounds. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's and I think that's something in videos
Speaker 1: I have watched of Russian soldiers responding to contact, you
Speaker 1: have seen a lot of people in ambushes that they
Speaker 1: lost hiding behind vehicles, um which if it's an armored
Speaker 1: vehicle definitely can protect you from small arm fire, but
Speaker 1: if somebody shoots that vehicle with a with a javelin,
Speaker 1: you may find yourself next to a cooking off tank UM.
Speaker 1: And I've seen like people hiding behind fucking fences, which
Speaker 1: is terrible to hide behind, UM, failing to go to ground,
Speaker 1: which is always your best bet is to kind of
Speaker 1: get behind a burm or something, get load of the
Speaker 1: fucking ground. And it's It's interesting to me a lot
Speaker 1: of the worst videos of responding to contact that I've
Speaker 1: seen on the Russian side have been there the Ross
Speaker 1: Guardia units. I'm not great at pronouncing Russian, but they
Speaker 1: are essentially police special forces units. That actually makes sense.
Speaker 1: They have every video I've seen of these guys hand
Speaker 1: being ambushed very poorly because they're not trained for that.
Speaker 1: They're trained to go bust into a house and arrest somebody,
Speaker 1: you know, like this is not where they're what they're
Speaker 1: supposed to be doing. The other thing that Spencer really
Speaker 1: focuses on is this whole like um sniper idea of
Speaker 1: of being afraid of someone, of someone just cutting you
Speaker 1: down from above, which obviously kind of is you know,
Speaker 1: more of a thing with the drone stuff as well,
Speaker 1: but this idea of not even being good at firearms,
Speaker 1: but just having the threat of taking fire from somewhere
Speaker 1: as you can't see in terms of like knowing your
Speaker 1: terrain better than whatever invading force does and knowing how
Speaker 1: to set up spots where it's it's less you're less
Speaker 1: likely to get shelled. Um, I mean yeah, and that's
Speaker 1: that's very I mean, this is very basic and old
Speaker 1: military doctrine. But this is like, you know, the way
Speaker 1: a sniper can work in a deserve and environment is
Speaker 1: you have a large number of guys and are trying
Speaker 1: to move to a specific area and if they take fire, Um,
Speaker 1: that limits their options from forward movement unless they're willing
Speaker 1: to just risk getting hit, and generally they're not, And
Speaker 1: then you find yourself kind of holding up for time
Speaker 1: to take out the sniper, which can be uninvolved in
Speaker 1: difficult process for just a single sniper. And yeah, that's
Speaker 1: definitely a thing like that. You don't have to be
Speaker 1: the fucking of Chris Kyle in order to effectively work
Speaker 1: in that kind of situation. Now, what makes that effective
Speaker 1: Because if you just have a sniper attacking police officers
Speaker 1: or soldiers in an urban environment, generally speaking, there exists
Speaker 1: the ability to deal with that pretty fucking quickly. But
Speaker 1: if you have small units of snipers kind of oftentimes
Speaker 1: just like civilians with hunting rifles who are doing that
Speaker 1: within the context of soldiers also being resisted by other
Speaker 1: soldiers and dealing with like an active combat environment, then yeah,
Speaker 1: a handful of people with rifles can be a significant
Speaker 1: force multiplier. It's a lot extra to deal with. And
Speaker 1: I suspect ship like that has been part of why
Speaker 1: you have seen cities like Mariopold resists so long under
Speaker 1: overwhelming forces that there's a pretty wide comprehensive amount of
Speaker 1: resistance going on in those areas. UM. And yeah, a
Speaker 1: single person, if they're not like the only person engaging
Speaker 1: with the enemy in that in that area, UM can
Speaker 1: make it a lot harder for them to effectively respond
Speaker 1: to contact. I think the last thing I wanted to
Speaker 1: kind of get into today is the whole I mean,
Speaker 1: this kind of ties them too, the weaponize on reality
Speaker 1: aspect of being like all of these people who are
Speaker 1: giving you know, I'll just listen to advice on Twitter
Speaker 1: dot com, whether they be John Spencer, whether they be
Speaker 1: you know, the wife of a former marine, whether they
Speaker 1: be tank mechanics, whatever, Like everyone's every is doing this
Speaker 1: now and it's all seen as like completely valid. Right,
Speaker 1: We're giving instructions on how to do urban insurgency online. Um,
Speaker 1: and this is totally fine. Yet when you know, when
Speaker 1: information from Hong Kong gets used in protest kind of
Speaker 1: uh propaganda for urban insurgency instructions, then it's like international
Speaker 1: like organized like terrorism. Yeah. Yeah, if you're telling people
Speaker 1: had to use fucking laser pointers, yeah, it's like the
Speaker 1: selective thing. How but you're like, Okay, we're allowed to
Speaker 1: tell people how to do urban insurgency right now, but
Speaker 1: when this is over or in the past, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's not allowed, right. You have John Spencer, who I
Speaker 1: doubt would be giving I doubt was a big fan
Speaker 1: of any Black Lives Matter demonstration justly, but but I
Speaker 1: mean I certainly doubt was giving people instructions and how
Speaker 1: to disable bearcats. Yeah, I don't think he was giving
Speaker 1: instructions on how to ambush police officers or anything like that.
Speaker 1: So you have this whole coalition of people on Twitter
Speaker 1: dot com giving all this advice out how to do
Speaker 1: urban insurgency and whatever. Well, also, you know, whenever something
Speaker 1: is happening like that where they live, it is that
Speaker 1: that is obviously bad and obviously not a good thing.
Speaker 1: Whether you know, for you know, you could talk about
Speaker 1: whatever like ideological drive people have, but I think this
Speaker 1: is just an interesting thing worth talking about in terms
Speaker 1: of how we will offer, we will view. You know,
Speaker 1: this type of discussion of urban insurgency is always like
Speaker 1: a bad thing, all right. It's always this thing that
Speaker 1: like terrorists do, you're helping, you know, you're you're always
Speaker 1: you're rooting for the destruction of civilization or whatever. Um.
Speaker 1: And then it just takes a few things for you
Speaker 1: get you know, an instructor at West Point to start,
Speaker 1: you know, posting threads to help sell his new book
Speaker 1: on these very same topics. Yeah, I mean there's I
Speaker 1: think a little degree to which I might push back
Speaker 1: on some of that, not necessarily with Spencer, but I
Speaker 1: can't remember during like the Fed War in Portland, which
Speaker 1: was the probably the part of Portland that like most
Speaker 1: people are aware of, when you had a bunch of
Speaker 1: federal agents snatching people. It was the most warlike part
Speaker 1: of the you you had for this brief period of
Speaker 1: time a lot of folks because I took parts like
Speaker 1: giving out advice on Twitter to respond to and handle
Speaker 1: police munitions. Um. That when I think that certainly went
Speaker 1: more viral than it would have gone in a different
Speaker 1: sort of situation. Um, And I think you do have.
Speaker 1: I think part of what you're seeing in Ukraine, and
Speaker 1: this is just sort of a general thing that happens
Speaker 1: online is when something a news moment, blows up in
Speaker 1: a way that is like big enough it disrupts the
Speaker 1: norms and suddenly, for a while you can talk about
Speaker 1: things like how to disable government armored vehicles and fight
Speaker 1: like you know, reality suddenly becomes to so much bigger
Speaker 1: and what is what is acceptable? Discourse suddenly expands out
Speaker 1: much bigger than what it usually tells. It becomes a
Speaker 1: lot more permeable. And I do think broadly, like we're
Speaker 1: shooting on Spencer here because he's frustrating to me. Um,
Speaker 1: But I do think that, like, really really broadly. Um.
Speaker 1: It's good when stuff like it's good for people to
Speaker 1: think about. Even if I don't, I certainly don't. I
Speaker 1: certainly do not want there to be I don't want
Speaker 1: anyone listening to this who has not experienced urban warfare
Speaker 1: to experienced urban warfare. I will absolutely, I will, I
Speaker 1: will say that right now. But it is not bad
Speaker 1: for people to be thinking about and talking about the
Speaker 1: ways in which a civilian population can do damage to
Speaker 1: an invading organized military force. That's not a bad discourse
Speaker 1: to exist, and it's not bad for people to be
Speaker 1: thinking in this way, and it's not bad for the
Speaker 1: people who are potentially in power to have that in
Speaker 1: the back of their heads. You know. Yeah. I mean, like,
Speaker 1: the one of the first things you sent me when
Speaker 1: I started working for it could happen here was the
Speaker 1: was the city is not neutral peace? Um on Urban
Speaker 1: combat is hard? Um. Yeah, it's definitely. It's the thing
Speaker 1: that Yeah, it's it's always it's it's worth thinking about.
Speaker 1: But you don't want to We're not trying to wish
Speaker 1: it on anybody. And I think you can. You can
Speaker 1: look at all of like the weirdos on the internet
Speaker 1: who have like, you know this, you know this is
Speaker 1: some degree of like Nazis who have done this, but
Speaker 1: also just like random other people who have like flown
Speaker 1: to Ukraine to help join fight off the Russians because
Speaker 1: they think it's going to be cool and they'll be
Speaker 1: able to work with the ASAF batalion or something, who
Speaker 1: then get stationed to basically be cannon fodder because they're
Speaker 1: this like twenty year old from America who has never
Speaker 1: actually held a gun before. I hope that one's true.
Speaker 1: It is just like a post because if it's true,
Speaker 1: then it means that someone in the Ukrainian government is
Speaker 1: consciously making the choice to use one of the Azov
Speaker 1: veterans as cannon fodder, which is funny, extremely funny. If
Speaker 1: it's happening, right, we don't, that's not that's not confirmed. Certainly,
Speaker 1: a percentage, probably not an insignificant percentage of dudes who
Speaker 1: have done shown up to do this have like been like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, what the fuck? Um. Some of them
Speaker 1: I'm sure just didn't have much experience. I'm sure some
Speaker 1: of them were dudes who had experience being on the
Speaker 1: side with overwhelming air power um, and we're like, oh fuck,
Speaker 1: but you also do It's fair to note like the
Speaker 1: stories of people like having like freaking out go viral. Um.
Speaker 1: There's plenty of videos of like mixed foreigner units in
Speaker 1: heavy combat, including a bunch where you can hear US
Speaker 1: and British dudes like because a lot. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of people who have legitimate, like hard combat experience who
Speaker 1: have have volunteered to go do this. Yeah. The one
Speaker 1: thing I also do find kind of uncomfortable is I mean, no,
Speaker 1: it's not super unlike what what what we're doing now
Speaker 1: that we're trying to come at it from a more
Speaker 1: uh like critical standpoint, but like Americans who maybe have
Speaker 1: gone to a protest or two but no real experience,
Speaker 1: just going on Twitter dot com and talking about how
Speaker 1: they think beating an army is best done, how that works. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: and like you know, if if you look at like
Speaker 1: the okay, like the times that like the US has
Speaker 1: actually attempted to fight its own army, right Like the
Speaker 1: last time this happened was the l l A Riot
Speaker 1: and ninety two and they got their ship pushed in
Speaker 1: like it it went really really badly. The people on
Speaker 1: this was really ugly. There was yeah, and like and
Speaker 1: you know, and part part of what you know, and
Speaker 1: I will say, like part of what's I guess you
Speaker 1: still about this is like yeah, this is I mean,
Speaker 1: this is the thing that is. I mean I wasn't
Speaker 1: alive for it, but like at like Robert you were
Speaker 1: alive for that, like like that that that is a
Speaker 1: thing like in living memory, the army has been deployed
Speaker 1: on American soil. And one of the things that went
Speaker 1: wrong is that the people on the ground had basically
Speaker 1: no time. And this is something you can read from
Speaker 1: from like the armies accounts of this, is that like
Speaker 1: the people that they were dealing with had no tactical
Speaker 1: experience what wherever they did it, they had no conception
Speaker 1: of tactics, and the army was able to very quickly
Speaker 1: crush them. And you know, if if you don't want
Speaker 1: that to happen to you, yeah, like that there there
Speaker 1: there is a way, which is stuff is important to
Speaker 1: be thinking about. But also like, dear God, that is
Speaker 1: the worst ship, Like, yeah, you didn't want that. Here
Speaker 1: here's what's what's important to understand about that. Anytime you
Speaker 1: are dealing with any kind of conflict, like physical conflict
Speaker 1: that involves violence, and and that can be as narrow
Speaker 1: as like a protest, you know, where people are squaring
Speaker 1: off with the cops, or an actual like full on
Speaker 1: military conflict, the winner is the person who is most
Speaker 1: disruptive to the enemies. Ode loop, right, um, observe, orient,
Speaker 1: decide act. That's the loop that you go through when
Speaker 1: you are trying to decide how to act in any
Speaker 1: kind of a kinetic situation um on the streets and
Speaker 1: a protest. One of the things where I where we
Speaker 1: have all seen people be the most successful against cops
Speaker 1: is when you change the rules on them. Is when
Speaker 1: they are in a situation they did not anticipate being in,
Speaker 1: because they tend to freak out and they tend to
Speaker 1: respond and effectively, right, you do not want to if
Speaker 1: you see them preparing to act in a certain way
Speaker 1: because they believe you are doing a specific thing, you
Speaker 1: ideally do not then do the thing they are preparing for,
Speaker 1: because that is a situation which you're gonna mind a
Speaker 1: battering yourself against a riot line. Right. Um, that's what
Speaker 1: the that's the core of the move be like water
Speaker 1: thing from Hong Kong is the idea that do not
Speaker 1: engage them in a way they are prepared for, and
Speaker 1: that that that is a that is a piece of advice.
Speaker 1: Broadly speaking, that's just as true in a war as
Speaker 1: it is in a protest situation. On their own terms.
Speaker 1: What this also means is that you don't want to
Speaker 1: be playing by a set of rules that are ineffective
Speaker 1: in the situation you're getting into. So like when you
Speaker 1: had protesters in in l a engaging with the military.
Speaker 1: They were playing by the rules of how do you
Speaker 1: deal with cops and suddenly they were dealing with soldiers,
Speaker 1: and boy, howdy are the rules different? You know? Um?
Speaker 1: And likewise, the Russian military was trained and blooded to
Speaker 1: a large extent in conflicts in places like Syria, where
Speaker 1: again they had air supremacy, um, they had artillery supremacy,
Speaker 1: they were backing the state was fighting against these insurgents. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so their soldiers gained the combat experience they had
Speaker 1: with every advantage in their pocket. Um. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military,
Speaker 1: if you're talking really about like because we've talked about
Speaker 1: a lot of little things that have maybe had an
Speaker 1: impact on the conflict here, and they're one of the
Speaker 1: things that's had the biggest impact on how the Ukrainian
Speaker 1: military has responded and and comported itself in this war
Speaker 1: so far versus the Russian is for years, eight years
Speaker 1: since this conflict started, the Ukrainian military has developed a
Speaker 1: posture of having soldiers signed up for these brief contracts,
Speaker 1: sending and rotating them through the battleground and the dawn
Speaker 1: boss so that when this war started they had a
Speaker 1: huge number more than anyone else in Europe of combat
Speaker 1: veterans who got their experience fighting against a peer adversary
Speaker 1: when they did not have supremacy and artillery or air
Speaker 1: support when they engaged them. Um. And then the Ukrainian
Speaker 1: military very intelligently spread these guys out amongst their their
Speaker 1: their units, which is what you want to do. Any
Speaker 1: military is going to want to like spread out your
Speaker 1: veterans among units, because you're not everyone's not going to
Speaker 1: be a combat veteran, but you want some guys who
Speaker 1: know what it's like to be shot at and every
Speaker 1: kind of unit that might get shot at because they
Speaker 1: stiff in the back of everybody else. And this is
Speaker 1: what So again, when when the war started to get
Speaker 1: back to what I'm saying, the Russian military entered preparing
Speaker 1: for a police action like the ones they carried out
Speaker 1: in Czechnia, um like what they did have done for
Speaker 1: Assad in Syria, and they got a war, and the
Speaker 1: Ukrainians came into that fight prepared for a war. So
Speaker 1: you you, I think one of the things that is
Speaker 1: important when you look at consider any kind of possibility
Speaker 1: of being involved in a conflict is you want to
Speaker 1: know what are the rules your opponent is going in
Speaker 1: ready to a bide by, Right, what are the things
Speaker 1: they are expecting to happen? What is kind of the
Speaker 1: rubric with which they are looking at what they expect
Speaker 1: to occur in this conflict? And by god, you want
Speaker 1: to be going in there with a different one, you know. Um.
Speaker 1: And that again, depending on how you do it, that
Speaker 1: can go badly or that can go really well. Because
Speaker 1: like I said, if you're if you're going and prepared
Speaker 1: to fight cops and you wind up dealing with soldiers,
Speaker 1: that's not great. Um. But if you have prepared, if
Speaker 1: you are able to kind of lock your enemy into
Speaker 1: the kind of conflict that they're not ready to face, um,
Speaker 1: then generally speaking, you'll win. We have twenty years of
Speaker 1: experience in the War on Terror of more or less
Speaker 1: that going down. Yeah, there's a there's a there's a
Speaker 1: good example of this also with the like with the
Speaker 1: i d F s a war against hes blonds and
Speaker 1: six where it's like the IDEF is a really good army,
Speaker 1: but they'd spent like I don't know, like they spent
Speaker 1: like forty years basically just sort of like, yeah, there's
Speaker 1: been about forty years doing police actions. Yeah, and then
Speaker 1: they run into Hesbla and they expect hes Blah is
Speaker 1: going to just you know, they've made Lebanon jails and
Speaker 1: six and their expectations that Hesblah is going to go
Speaker 1: to ground, They're gonna do a guerrilla war and instead
Speaker 1: has bela like when they go into bunkers where they
Speaker 1: stand in fight and the IDEF gets smashed and like
Speaker 1: you know, they they pull out and they spent much
Speaker 1: time just like murdering people from the air, but like
Speaker 1: they don't win the war and like like that. That
Speaker 1: happens a lot, especially with these armies that are used
Speaker 1: to dealing, used to doing these sort of police action things,
Speaker 1: and they losed enemies that like the fact that the
Speaker 1: id F lost award has blow is like by like
Speaker 1: balance of forces. It's like this is inconceivable, like how
Speaker 1: on earth did they possibly lose this? But it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: this stuff happens because they weren't like, yeah, they they
Speaker 1: were they were doing they were doing this police action
Speaker 1: thing and they weren't used to They hadn't fought an
Speaker 1: enemy that was actually going to stick it and fight
Speaker 1: them since like the seventies. Yeah, I mean a lot
Speaker 1: of the great defeats in military history are because a
Speaker 1: force came into a situation expecting a different kind of
Speaker 1: fight than what they got. That was a part of
Speaker 1: what happened to Napoleon when he invaded Russia, right, and
Speaker 1: the Russians did not respond the way that he expected
Speaker 1: a state to respond to having their capital occupied, um
Speaker 1: and effectively kind of starved him out. There was other
Speaker 1: ship going on there, Attrician had really depleted the French
Speaker 1: military before it got there. But but yeah, because yeah,
Speaker 1: how how I went on, how I would want to
Speaker 1: wrap up This is basically saying like and all of
Speaker 1: that stuff regarding how this war has really prompted a
Speaker 1: lot of things that were seemingly more unexpected and seemingly
Speaker 1: thought to be previously more impossible. UM in terms of
Speaker 1: how fast both rhetoric around these these types of conflicts
Speaker 1: can spread and more and the role in which like
Speaker 1: disinformation and misformation is used for you know, both both
Speaker 1: sides to to gain digging ground on the other and
Speaker 1: how you know, relating back to it could happen here
Speaker 1: is MS in terms of like the urban crumbles or
Speaker 1: like you know, the small, small like urban collapses, um,
Speaker 1: and you know, escalating escalating like inter inter country conflict
Speaker 1: in various places around the world. How fast certain things
Speaker 1: can happen that we once thought are kind of more
Speaker 1: impossible or improbable at the very least, you know, how
Speaker 1: how fast you can get people giving advice on how
Speaker 1: to take out ourmored vehicle on Twitter dot com. How
Speaker 1: fast you can get you know, people like people who
Speaker 1: are you know, seemingly are part you know, seemingly not
Speaker 1: not tied to certain just certain like ideas or theologies,
Speaker 1: giving out you know, information on types of types of
Speaker 1: ways to resist invading or oppressing forces. It is, it
Speaker 1: is an interesting kind of it's like case studies the
Speaker 1: wrong word because it is it's it's obviously having horrible
Speaker 1: effects with you know, thousands and thousands of people being
Speaker 1: slaughtered um, but it it is it is intriguing to watch,
Speaker 1: how you know, in terms of like the microcos of
Speaker 1: macrocosm idea of of eventually you know, conflict, if conflict
Speaker 1: breaks out in other places around the world, and the
Speaker 1: next in the next few years, How are current like
Speaker 1: social media landscape, how are kind of rules around like
Speaker 1: urban conflict like urban conflict and all of these things
Speaker 1: kind of interact with each other and how we view Yeah,
Speaker 1: what is what is likely and what we you know
Speaker 1: who who you're going to predict is gonna do X
Speaker 1: thing based on people invading a city that it's not theirs? Yeah, Um,
Speaker 1: I mean I think in terms of stuff that that
Speaker 1: people can take out of this, you know, without necessarily
Speaker 1: needing to prepare to fight in an urban insurgency. One
Speaker 1: of them is that anytime big ship happens and and
Speaker 1: more big ship is going to keep happening for us,
Speaker 1: you have a window of opportunity through which you can
Speaker 1: get things across to people that they would not normally
Speaker 1: listen to. Um. And that is a really important time,
Speaker 1: and it helps to think about the kind of situations
Speaker 1: that might occur and the kind of things that you
Speaker 1: want to push out into the world. UM. Because this
Speaker 1: is this is is true with climate change as it
Speaker 1: is with war. Right, We're going to have more disasters,
Speaker 1: and when those disasters hit, it will be easier to
Speaker 1: get people to talk about radical solutions to things like
Speaker 1: climate change, and it will be easier to do things
Speaker 1: like get out in the fucking streets and get large
Speaker 1: groups of people agitated. You know, we're we're at some point,
Speaker 1: fucking God willing, we will have the climate change equivalent
Speaker 1: to what happened in where something so terrible and fucked
Speaker 1: up happens that a lot of people take to the
Speaker 1: streets and hopefully we will succeed to a greater extent
Speaker 1: in forcing actual change than maybe we did in But
Speaker 1: but that's that's something like that could very well happen.
Speaker 1: And so that's one of the lessons I think you
Speaker 1: can take out of this again without sort of obsessing
Speaker 1: over military technology or getting into gunfights with fucking soldiers.
Speaker 1: Is Ukraine is hard evidence that that is the way
Speaker 1: the media environment works. You get these moments where you
Speaker 1: can really push some wild ship to people. That's that's
Speaker 1: why I like the whole uprising or insurrection model more
Speaker 1: than the revolution model, because the uprising model posits that basically,
Speaker 1: you have you know, base base society based reality, you know,
Speaker 1: always at like the baseline level, then uprising happens. It's
Speaker 1: like it's like shooting up onto a graph sudden. So
Speaker 1: many things that are just outside the normal way that
Speaker 1: we view you know, systems, the governance systems of you know,
Speaker 1: social control. So many things become so much more possible
Speaker 1: in this like heightened place. Um. And that's what the
Speaker 1: uprising does. It gets things that were suddenly that were
Speaker 1: once so far away and once just only in the imagination.
Speaker 1: It almost it makes them so much closer. Right, There's
Speaker 1: this feeling in like July during the height of the
Speaker 1: fed War, being like so many things feel possible in
Speaker 1: this one moment, nothing is true and all is permitted,
Speaker 1: like you can you can get away with some ship. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so using the uprising model, yeah, it can really
Speaker 1: and or or the or the instruction model like it
Speaker 1: can really, it can really make things feel so much
Speaker 1: more possible than what they usually feel like. And that
Speaker 1: there's you know, brief moments in time where massive social
Speaker 1: change can happen, and you know you have to learn
Speaker 1: how to recognize when this moment are happening and then
Speaker 1: organize effectively when they do happen. Yeah. Yep, well I've
Speaker 1: leave that does it for us today? Um? Yeah, we
Speaker 1: when we've been wanting to talk about this topic for
Speaker 1: a while in terms of you know, one of the
Speaker 1: very first things that's not happening was various governments giving
Speaker 1: guides out on where to attack armored vehicles with ball tops.
Speaker 1: We're like, oh, wow, this is this is intriguing to
Speaker 1: have a government giving out instructions. Um, this is probably
Speaker 1: has some implications on how we view you know, uh,
Speaker 1: collapse in the in a in a general concept. So yeah, Ever,
Speaker 1: since that's not happening, we wanted to talk about it.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it certainly leaves us with a lot to
Speaker 1: think about. And I didn't get to go on my
Speaker 1: rant about the structure of the Russian military VISAVI their
Speaker 1: lack of an n c O core. But maybe we'll
Speaker 1: talk about that in the future. I'm sure we'll have
Speaker 1: enough time to talk without this in the future. Uh.
Speaker 1: Well everyone, Uh, I don't know, do do something productive? Yeah,
Speaker 1: do do something productive. I don't charge armored vehicles. Don't
Speaker 1: charge armored vehicles with paint. Maybe think about the different
Speaker 1: things you would like to get a bunch of people
Speaker 1: suddenly radicalized on Twitter to do in the immediate wake
Speaker 1: of a horrible climate disaster in which large numbers of
Speaker 1: folks are suddenly willing to take to the streets seemingly overnight.
Speaker 1: Maybe thinking about that and and trying to talking with
Speaker 1: your buddies about it, and being like, hey, if everybody
Speaker 1: gets out in the streets again, what kind of information
Speaker 1: do I want to spread? What would be good to
Speaker 1: get people talking about In that instance, when they're suddenly
Speaker 1: listening for I don't know about two weeks. It feels
Speaker 1: like you get about two weeks to honestly, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: in the wake of the new I PCC report, we
Speaker 1: have what we should certainly have a lot to think about.
Speaker 1: All right, bye bye. It could happen here as a
Speaker 1: production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool
Speaker 1: zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com,
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