Angry Planet - U.S. Defense Contractors Are Using ‘Battle Tested in Ukraine’ As a Marketing Label

Episode Date: December 4, 2024

On today’s episode, I talked to Kollen Post about how and why Silicon Valley markets their drones as “battle tested in Ukraine.” We recorded it on Thanksgiving, Jason was busy spending time with his family, and Post and I went down some weird philosophical rabbit holes.Impromptu drone developersThe Western image of the Ukrainian drone operatorOpen source is kingThe decentralized nature of Ukrainian societyFundraising for warThe ignorance of the American peopleTrump’s promise: You can forget itAmericans want to be heroesPalmer Luckey is selling drone piece loot cratesiPhone vs. LinuxJamming with GithubOnshoring the drone manufacturing process‘Battle-tested in Ukraine’ — How US drone makers turned Ukraine into a tagline to sell westUkraine’s drones have a reputation for low cost. Buntar Aerospace wants to make them boutiqueHow Palantir Is Using AI in UkraineThe Anduril merch storeSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. I think I left shortly before they put Radio for Europe on the foreign agent list, but it might have been around the same time. But like even for the two years preceding that, like once I kind of realized what was happening, once I started being tuned into what was happening, it was like, you could see they had less official ways of doing, it's like denying X radio outlet of frequency or like cutting the licensing to this like dissident Russian channel. You know,

all the directors of movies that were at all edgy had already had to move to like Estonia. We say, kind of see how this was shaping up. When you say like less official, you mean that it was just kind of, there were fewer justifications. It was just kind of going.

Like the government clearly wanting to kill these media outlets and just not having quite the like the political comfort to come out and say we want to kill these media outlets because they are opposed to us, the government.

And eventually they did get to the point where like we're like, yeah, we straight up. We are just calling these people enemies of the state. I see. Yeah. get on that um so they maintain the like the enemies that it is actually called the like the enemies of the state list right uh in in no agente like foreign agents foreign agents yeah like but the people do call it the enemy of the state thing because that's like a that's the solemn term um

and it is it is a similar concept but then there is the um what's that called there's another list of like extremist organizations and that is one of the they started putting, like, it started off being like ISIS, you know, or like the Chechen freedom fight, like, the Chechen resistance. Right. You know, and then they eventually put like more Western NGOs into like the extremist organization camp. And then they started putting people who were like journalists or just, you know, general all purpose dissidents on that same list. All right. I'm going to hit my redundancy recording.

Not rock and roll. I just like, I just re-in, I just did a clean install of windows on them. It's a whole, you don't care. It doesn't matter. Like, everything's not where it should be. Anyway. I do want to know about the origin of that quilt at some point, though. Oh, this?

I'll tell you about the quilt. So before I was a journalist, the last, like, normal person job I had, I worked at a bookstore in Plano, which is outside of doubt. It's like one of the big suburbs. And I worked with an old woman named Melody and she was wonderful and she made this quilt for me. And it's kind of like an inside joke from a book that she and I were both reading at the time. So it's my it's my boo-you-moon quilt. Booyamoon. Boi-moon, which is a reference to a Stephen King novel.

Uh-huh. And I've just, it's very, it's, the colors are very striking and kind of ugly and very like 70s. And I just, I just like it. And it, uh, it's like a perfect bookstore, uh, elderly colleague named Melanie, uh, gift to have, you know, to carry on in the future. Well, it just reminds me of, um, I worked in retail for a very long time before I finally broke in. And it just reminds me, I like to. I like to remember that. Because I think, like,

this is a tangent rant, but, like, I think people do not treat retail workers and service workers, especially in America, particularly well. And I live that for a long time. So I just, I want, I have this so that I remember that. And I never lose sight of that. And I don't ever forget that.

And that I'm not an asshole when I go to, like, a best buy or whatever. it's kind of funny because people there are people who are assholes to wait staff and you know service industry folks but I think there's a fairly general understanding that that's not okay but nobody talks about those ethics when it comes to retail workers in quite the same way no it is very strange there is a divide there I've noticed and I don't know if it's because it's like it's often a lot of teenagers or you think that I don't know I don't there's a like I can do a whole, I could talk for an hour about the way people treat retail workers specifically, but that's not what we're here. That's not what we're here for. Hello and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. I'm Matthew Galt. It is Thanksgiving Day and we're recording. Jason is M.I.A. I hope he's eating turkey and maybe a little drunk somewhere, even though it's a little early in the morning in America for that.

but we are talking to someone who is in Ukraine, or I guess I'm so used to saying we, can you introduce yourself, please? Yeah, hi, everybody. My name's Colin Post. I'm coming to you from South Central Kiev. And you work at primarily? Primarily, well, Radio for Europe, Kiev independent, sometimes breaking defense. I'm freelancing.

So the two pieces. and others too, because you wrote another one since the last time we set this up that I thought was very good. And it's kind of on theme. These two pieces in the Kiev Independent, battle tested in Ukraine, how U.S. drone makers turned Ukraine into a tagline to sell West. And Ukraine's drones have a reputation for low cost. Bunter Aerospace wants to make them boutique.

So these kind of these pieces that are nitty-gritty dives into something that we hear about a lot. America, and I think we only get kind of a surface level understanding, which is how drones, especially these like smaller quadcopter drones are being utilized in Ukraine. You know, we're told that, you know, it's World War I with drones and it's a drone war, and this is the turning, you know, it's revolutionized war. And also, especially here, we hear that, you know, these American companies are going over there and they're using Ukraine as a test ground and it's going really well. and they're learning a lot about drone warfare.

And the truth, as it always is, is more complicated than that. So what does start with? I think a lot of people have this, well, not a lot of people. People who are following this war maybe have this image in their head. And I'm sure you've seen it, at least online, of what a Ukrainian drone pilot looks like. It's like a 20-something. They've got VR goggles on and a video game controller. Vap smoke is pouring out of their mouth.

how true is that image? That's a fairly accurate image, to be honest with you. But it's not, I think there should be a little bit more focus on these people who you never see, who are not necessarily the drone pilots, but the sort of impromptu drone developers. And these are, you know, some of the most dangerous men in Ukraine, but they do not lower. like it. They, uh, you know, they, they, they're in like informal workshops. A lot of them are pretty close to the front, but they're not personally like in the trenches. What, what makes these men men the most dangerous men in Ukraine? Mm-hmm. Well, um, functionally, uh, actually, there are a lot of

misconceptions around the, like the drone war in Ukraine. And I think a lot of the, the language is baffling. One of the terms that people use is like the, I don't know if they call it the turnaround time or the development time or whatever, the lifecycle for new developments. But a lot of that is just literally your geographical proximity to soldiers who have used your thing and need to bring you something that is not working and say, hey,

can you fix this? So a lot of these dudes who are the kind of impromptu drone developers, these are guys who you know more often than not come from Ukraine's IT industry they got extremely good at handling like open source software and

modifying whatever came across their desks for whatever purpose usually you know in their professional lives for some Western business that was asking for something like a short time frame turnaround and they're kind of applying that to you know we need these drones

to like respond to X thing that we're encountering, even if it's just something like a shift in the frequency of what's being jammed on the other side of the line. So, there's this thing that you've kind of alluded to here. Is there no Western support structure for repairing and maintaining these drones? Like, because I hear, you know, because to hear Anderrell or Skydeo or Palantir tell it, You know, they're coming over here. They're selling them, you know, we're selling X, Y, and Z, and it's going fairly well. But it sounds like the drone army is actually built on the back of tinkerers and hackers.

Yeah, that would be accurate. I do allude to this in the article. It is difficult to prove the absence of something, especially. across a very, you know, there's a combination of weird things happening with the information space at the front. A lot of the videos that come out of the front are because those are units that are looking for funding. And a lot of the units that are the most effective don't need to hunt for public funding

so you will never see what exactly they are up to. Are you saying the corn group isn't effective? Who's to say? Who's to say? But basically, I can't say for sure that these companies have not operated or have not had some functionality at the front line. But I would say from everything that I know, it has been greatly overstated, certainly in their advertising campaigns. As far as I can tell, Western drones have not been particularly helpful. Certainly not at this point.

Like, they are not what Ukraine has been relying on. Well, Ukraine has been relying on. Absolutely not. So what is, what is it about, I guess let me back up further and get some basics. Like, again, this is a, as you said, this is a complicated, chaotic war zone. And everybody along the front line is going to be doing whatever works in the moment, right? But who are the Western drone companies that are operating there? Like, what are they selling exactly?

this is kind of what I'm saying. Western drone companies, as far as what has been publicly acknowledged and what I could get anybody to acknowledge, anything they've sold, they have sold it to somebody in the West who has maybe given it for free to the Ukrainians. Gotcha.

I don't know of any major instance when the Ukrainian government or even, and this is where again, the information space gets very tricky to say that no brigade has ever bought any of these things. But I don't know of any instance. where any of these kind of these, especially

these like Silicon Valley drone companies have actually sold anything directly to Ukrainian hands. I mean, I would love for somebody to provide me with evidence otherwise, but I don't think anybody's can pay

that much for it. Like, Ondoril recently announced that roadrunner, and I think the roadrunmer, and they sold 500 of those things for either $250 or $350 million. Like the Ukrainian military, does not pay, you know, 500,000, $650,000 for a drone.

That is just not something they're prepared to do, certainly not for, you know, a drone whose design is to take down a single other drone. Right. The whole point of those things is to just destroy. It's a suicide drone, right? Right, right. And they also, they advertise, like, Underwell advertises in that case that it will return to base if it doesn't hit anything. Like, if it doesn't encounter the thing that it needs to blow up, it will survive its suicide mission. but it is still a suicide drone, like a kamikaze drone. So what are, so what is actually flying in the air over there then? So along the lines with this being a, like a very complicated information space and Ukrainian society is also pretty decentralized.

So it's overall a pretty complicated information space, even pre-war. I think something that people, I know like Rob Lee and Michael Kaufman are pretty frequent commentators and they do acknowledge this. There is a huge survivorship bias to drones as we get to see them. Right. There's most of what we understand about drones either come from accounts from soldiers or you are seeing something on telegram that has been shared by a telegram. was almost certainly aligned with one of the governments involved or one of the units involved and has every incentive to show, you know, this amazing, like, destruction of a really valuable tank with a single drone.

But just based on numbers, like, the vast majority of drones just, like, drop out of the sky. No matter who's flying them, right? No matter what their provenances, the vast majority of drones, like, just kind of die or they, like, fall into the woods or whatever. like they're hit by counter warfare measures, they're shot out of the sky, or they just fail, or is it all of them? I would say,

yeah, like the electronic warfare is a really big one. Also, I mean, friendly fire is another one that like you never see videos of this happening. And it's also hard to tell exactly who fired, you know, first,

like friendly fire is another big one because a lot of the units are not communicating with each other along the line. like it again fairly decentralized a lot of these a lot of the different you know units at the line are operating with a high level of autonomy themselves so they don't know which drones are theirs or which are their neighbors or which are Russian drones so they'll kind of by default to shoot them down. But that being said, I wouldn't dismiss the fact that there are a lot of really interesting technological technological developments happening that are making some of these drones better. although I do think it's important to acknowledge like these things there is no technology that anybody has told me about that seems to be this silver bullet

you know if anything like the most unstoppable thing flying out there is the glide bombs and that's just because they're really heavy and you can't just shoot them down something that I haven't heard before that I think is very interesting wondering if you can kind of explain to me is

Ukraine society is decentralized and that kind of has spread throughout the way the war is conducted. In the U.S., I'm so used to like a top-down view, federalist almost view of like everything. How does it work there? What do you mean when you say that the society itself is decentralized? That's a huge question. Let me think about how to answer that.

It is, there are a fair number of regulations involved in a lot of like business activities, but there are a fair number of regulations that nobody ever listens to when they are engaged in any of these business activities, right? There are, um, there is a high degree of

like disconnect between, maybe not disconnect, but like, it is almost, it's like the US system with the federated states, but like, like Ukrainian cities are, you know,

fairly. independent. And in a lot of ways, they kind of pride themselves on this as a contrast to Russia, which is always, you know, like very historically been top down, like, you know, Tsar, like, whatever. Um, you know, uh, got our current guy, um, very much like, this is the person who controls everything. Um, and Ukrainian society is not like that. And this is, I don't want to harp on too much about like the corruption thing, but I think there's also this interesting, spectrum between like the degree to which things in Ukraine are handled informally or like very

person to person and like how that does end up relating to the fact that like corruption is a problem and I mean it's hard to parse where this is just you know a more informal society and where this is you know where this is like actually something to be concerned about because a lot of communications like like if you're in if you're in a major American city or if you're dealing with like a governor of an American state, uh, they have like a comms team. So they have, you know, somebody who's handling their communications to the public. And is doing so with, there's a lot of back and forth. There's a lot of acting by, you know, committee. Whereas I'm always astounded at how, how open a lot of like Ukrainian politicians or even like a lot of Ukrainian, you know,

ministers and bureaucrats are on just Facebook, like their own personal Facebooks. And everybody's got a telegram channel. And yeah, some of those might have people who are like the social media managers for those telegram channels, but a lot of them, these people are just kind of saying what they're thinking with maybe a slight delay behind the thought behind it. We're talking about a lot of people voicing things, a lot of people voicing their opinions about what is happening. with regard to how that affects the military,

these, like the brigades oftentimes, there is the TISCA, which is the organization that handled the mobilizations, but the brigades do their own independent recruiting oftentimes. And there are certain brigades that have the most prestige for being like the toughest, you know, or these like these are ones who will actually,

uh, take offensive charges. And people will directly communicate with those brigades. It's oftentimes through Cisdusufus. somebody you know. You need to know somebody who knows somebody who's in like the third you know, stormava like you need to know somebody who's in that brigade and then they'll connect you or sometimes this is handled through telegram channels. But it's a lot more yeah, I say decentralized and it's a it's more informal. It's less formal. Have I explained

that enough or is it's kind of a broad question. No, no, no. I mean it was I know it was a broad question, but like I'm wondering how you then, how do you, how do you, how do you you prosecute a war with that kind of structure if you're if you're the military leader over the whole operation, how do you coordinate all these different

groups that are along the front line to do X, Y, or Z or can you at all? I mean, they there's my understanding is a fairly minimal amount of micro-management. And again, they do have like those

units do have a fairly high degree of autonomy within their, like, this is your sector, this is what you're doing. You guys are like based here and here's your goal. I don't really care how you get to it, right? I mean, similar, like what I was saying before, a lot of the best footage from how drones are behaving in the war is available because those units are to certain degree accountable for their own financing. So they're trying to gather donations.

And in order to do that, using social media to get people to be like, yo, those guys are doing awesome stuff with whatever we give them. We're going to send more money to them. But again, the elitist units, the most elite units or whatever, are less likely to be doing that. So a lot of the stuff, like, a lot of stuff, deep strike drones, there's not a ton of publicly available information on whatever's working. Like, whatever's happened with these brand-newest deep strike drones or, you know, whatever is happening with Ukraine's ballistic missiles program. stuff we're kind of all speculating at this point. We're talking the ones that they're sending into, you know, Moscow,

the ones they're getting like hundreds of kilometers on the other side of the line. So I guess this is how we kind of end up in this situation where we were in a couple weeks ago, where Russia rolls out a new medium-range ballistic missile. Ukrainian Air Force goes on to Twitter, says, hey, we just got hit by an ICBM. Western press runs with it. And for the first like six hours of that day, oh my God, Russia used an ICBM,

even though that's not quite what happened. And maybe in a more disciplined information space on the Ukrainian side, Ukrainian Air Force would have not just tweeted that out. Right, right, right. And in a more disciplined space on the Western media side, we would have waited and maybe asked some people, right? Right. Well, I mean, for all the miracles of Ossin, I mean, for one of the, one of the core things is if this is something we have never seen before, there is no expert who can, like, visually identify this thing. It's a, it's like a whole chorus of speculators. There's no offense to speculation. No offense to speculation, but it's just like, yeah. It was scary. It was a very scary day that was like the morning after was that by the U.S. Embassy.

announced that it was closing down on last Tuesday and then that strike happened around like 8 or 9 a.m. in Newpro, like the next morning, but you know, within Kiev, there was like an air alert that had everybody in the metro

stations. I had not been that scared for an air alert in a while. Like, I'd never, the U.S. Embassy, since I've been here, it's not closed down. announced it's like packing up for the day. Yeah. So anyway, in a fear-driven information space like that, you know, it's, we're all, everybody in the metro station in Kiev was like scrabbling through their phone. Incidentally, there are also telegram channels that are, you know, likely affiliated with various parts of the Ukrainian government that give you slightly more details and the official, you know, like the air forces that give you, they just tell you there's an alert in this town.

and there are less of visual sources that will tell you X drones are flying across the border there in this obelist or like missiles are being launched from here or a MiG 31 has taken off from this airbase again you are dependent on flicking through telegram to find out okay do I need to go underground or not sorry I've you're taking me on some kind of I know this is not quite all quite what we were supposed to be talking about

day, but you're kind of picking at things that I'm interested in. So I hope you don't mind going on some tangents. No, absolutely. I was not, I was not dedicated to like sticking with this up. Also, I do want to, like, I want to clarify it. I hope this is all right. Like, I, I'm speaking a little impressionistically. Like, this is, this is, some of that is very lived experience stuff.

I'm not, I can't, I can't fact check exactly what's going on in all of what I just said in the same way that I would an article that I'm writing. I hope that's, you know, an okay. Yeah, yeah. Of course, this is like the podcasts, that's what they are, right? It's just, you know, this is not, this is not serial or something that the New York Times is going to put out in six months after a team has pulled through. This is just an informal conversation with a, with a reporter on the ground, right? And those are valuable too and important.

I'm glad to, yeah, glad to take the conversation in conversational directions then. So you're talking about how important kind of this fundraising aspect. And it struck me that there are relationships that some of these units, military units, build with Westerners and get funding. If you are able to get the attention of NAFO, then you're going to get some. you're going to get more equipment, right? Do you think that this kind of weird new way that units communicate back

with the outside world and like start fundraising? Do you think that that has an effect on how they conduct themselves in the battle space? Oh, God. Okay, that's... That's like, that's fairly philosophical at a certain point. I suppose this gets back to what we were talking about with, you know, the drone companies and like the kind of price American, you know, soldiery is prepared to pay. I think if you, if you're talking about like the lower threshold of like, I don't know what we would call professionalism, it's definitely different.

But at the same time, you know, the U.S. military has social media. managers as well. And they've put out some cringe content over the years. To be clear, I'm not judging. I think like if you're in a war zone and you are fighting against an enemy that does things that we have seen Russia do, I am not, I'm not bagging on anyone at all. I just, but I do find it interesting. And I think that like this is a new thing, right? Yeah. It, yes. I would say that that that. does, you know, that does affect behavior of people involved in the war, but this is

kind of, like they say Vietnam was the first televised war, right? So the VC, like the Viet Cong did not need to militarily beat the United States. What they needed to do was beat the will of the American people, which was significantly easier than

you know, like, actually taking positions from, like, American bases or anything like that. In terms of what has been happening here, this is one thing I do think is really interesting because I actually started studying Russian about like four, now, five months before Russia annexed Crimea

and then had their little green men. And the level to which American interest in 2022 it was a whole different galaxy of interest in what was happening in Ukraine like I remember you know we talked about it in my Russian

classes and like this is my junior year of college but I didn't really hear much about Ukraine getting invaded in the regular civilian world maybe you know it was something mentioned on news but it wasn't something that people got like

emotional about in the U.S. and this time and that was like that was a problem that was just like apathy like broad apathy um and this time around it was like

the virality was so intense and so immediate um that it I suppose there is a relationship between like how you know like Ukraine has depended upon that

very heavily has depended upon like the engagement of the American people and um they have gotten that through a kind of informal you know social media channels um and now I don't know there's like this is part of like the broad sense of like disappointment that was not like that was not maintained like the it was not an attention from the US of A that uh was actually going to stick this time it was kind of uh you know it was a longer blitz than we've had in a long time geopolitically, but like American audiences did kind of fade away eventually. So it wasn't like,

it wasn't some new sense of like internet or like national commitment. That's super speculative. I, uh, yeah, I don't know. Of course. Like again, this is a conversation where,

you know, we're, we're talking about broad vibes that can't be fact checked. Right. Right. Right. Um, do you think that it's kind of,

well, it's kind of fucked up to me that there would even be a sense of disappointment that the West isn't paying attention. Like it shouldn't, our attention shouldn't matter that much, but it seems to quite a better, right? Like, Ukraine is a feature of American domestic politics and has been for a long time. It's certainly not like the most important thing. But it's, but it is a big part of it. do you like how and I know that this is like

it's a very decentralized society it's a very big country there's a lot of different opinions everyone's going to feel different ways about it like what is the sense of like what do people say about this kind of relationship between America and Ukraine

and where it stands are they worried are they mad what's the spectrum okay I will say the average Ukrainian has this very like deep ballast of pessimism

that has lasted them for the past 300 years and like they were not going to be taken in by this idea that like the US cares about us forever they were not. That was never the average person I think was you know the average person doesn't trust much of anything

that being said you know like politically and like the soldiers soldiers who got used to like depending on donations for you know funding um uh like i think there is a sense like there is a sense of grievance that i'm not sure how we're going to uh like i don't know how like the united states is going to make up for it um i don't know what's going to happen i i like ukrainians do have like long memories um but then there's also the sense, like, yeah, the idea that every geopolitical event needs to somehow position the United

States at its very axis, that's suboptimal. As somebody I do, I'm a pretty patriotic American here, and I do believe in America, but I don't think we can, like, hold up that end of, like, a, like, a, geopolitical bargain. I think that that's been, I would say that that's one of the themes of the show and one of the themes of my thinking and reporting

on basically anything is that Americans are not the center of the world and we're really, really, really bad about making ourselves the center of the world and thinking that everything, every single thing revolves around us. And like I,

I see that a lot with Ukraine. You know, like, Biden needs to end this war. It's like, well, it's not, it's not up to him. Right. Right. Well, this is also, I mean, you were, you know, I think, like, your initial question is asked about, like, what is actually changing, what is actually working? And, like I say, like, most drones go down, they die, right?

But what has been changing, like, they're doing some super clever things, but, like, the way they're handling the frequency hopping, all that stuff. but they have been onshoreing their, like, the extended version of their supply chains. Right. So I think everybody, I think you mentioned this as well, a lot of the drones are made in Ukraine these days. That was largely, I mean, it started out informal. And it started out with like the DGIMavics, like off-shelf consumer stuff. And it was really in like 2023, the government said collectively, hey, we do need to be able to continue making these things on our own. So they started making them.

At the time, it was still with components that were shipped in primarily from China and a lot of machining tools from China and India. That's actually still happening. Like the machining tools, they haven't figured that out. But the components themselves and like the materials, the frames, all that stuff, an increasing proportion in that, including the very high-tech elements of a drone, like a nice drone, not just a kamikaze drone that's going to, you know, like die. those

an increasing proportion of those components are made in Ukraine and increasingly with like Ukrainian materials I don't know yeah like I'm not convinced this whole somehow as soon as the election happened everybody just started saying like oh well Trump's going to end this thing as soon as possible like you're saying I don't

you know I don't know if this is I feel like people are simplifying a lot of what has to happen a lot of other people have to say yeah yeah like um there is yeah like i will what he thinks will matter but he won't just get to say like okay this is done you go in your corner you go in your corner like this is yeah this is not a gym class and he's the teacher just suddenly showed up late i think well i think i think what he promises to the american people is um not that the war will end but that they get to stop the thinking about it.

That's interesting. That's what I think. I think that that's maybe not overtly stated, but I think that's like what's implicit in electing him. That's super, okay. I hadn't thought about it like that, but I guess that does bring me to something that kind of the silicon valification

of the drone industry and the way they were marketing the drones. This does play into, I think, part of the appeal to Americans right off the bat was that we were like Ukraine was heroic right and then we by supporting them were being heroic which

I mean probably better than not supporting them at all but a lot of our support was not all that great and then it really was like there was it was like a very rare opportunity for a lot of people and I think people mentioned this in interviews at the time

like the outset of the war people who came here to volunteer people who came and fought the Foreign Legion talking about how they wanted you know the like Americans had who had been fighting in like Iraq and Afghanistan forever talking about how they had wanted to like fight in a some kind of righteous war

they wanted to be on the side of like an unallied good they wanted a noble conflict right right and you can like you can can still get that sense from a lot of like a lot of the Americans

roaming around in Kiev. Like they kind of still want to be seen as having been doing something like heroic. They don't want it to be like a waste. I'm on team. There is a middle ground between like

heroism and wasted time. But I may be in the minority there. Yeah. The idea that like in this conflict, America and like American weapons and the American military and the American, every element of it had to be seen as heroic. That might be part of like a broader trend at play and the idea that we're, you know,

marketing our weapons off of this. Yeah, I mean, I would say that that's definitely what Palmer Lucky is doing. And I think that he does not like me, but I think he's absolutely fascinating. I think he's very important figure to watch. And he's doing, he's succeeding at something that I have not seen the American, I think he's succeeding at something that I've not seen the American defense industry succeed at in a long time, which is part of his, like, yeah, he's doing all these things. Like he's putting out the ghost and the, the roadrunner, et cetera, et cetera, that are perhaps not doing well. But he's great at marketing. And he's great at selling young people, the image of the American,

military being, or defense contractors, not the American military, defense contractors being cool in saying that there are existential enemies that need to be fought against. He's doing it with cringe anime stuff, but I think that it works.

You know, he's selling, I don't know if you saw, a couple days ago, they launched a store on their website for like an Andorrell gear store. You can buy bomber jackets. And you can buy what he calls relics, which are, yeah, you got to see this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it sounds like Arterix is what we're about to do here. Okay, on our old gear store. Yeah, I made, I made our, my, the Angry Planet Discord, which you can get onto by going to Angry Plant Pod and signing up. I made them talk me out of buying one of the flight jackets. And now they're sold out so I can't, so I can stop myself from doing some. thing from giving Palmer Lucky money directly. Man.

What are these relics? Are these like actually drone pieces that have like blown up? I don't know the source of them, but yes. Okay. Yes, they are drone pieces. Oh, damn. Yeah, the, the Hawaiian show. Recovery crash component on an Anderol research and development test.

So they're not from directly from a war, but they're like pieces of the, pieces, you know, test pieces, basically. Oh, yeah. Okay. I like the one, the, there's blind loot for $120. You're getting a relic, but you can't see what it is before you get it. It's like very video gamifying your merch. Yeah.

And like, there is something to this that feels like it's the direction defense companies are moving in. if they are forward-thinking and smart. Like, I just think that, like, when you have Elon Musk, who's going to be involved in the government in some capacity, tweeting out about how Lockheed Martin's F-35 is a piece of garbage,

and you have people like Palmer Lucky being more nimble and selling merch and attempting to, like, I feel like this stuff is going to connect with people. people, young people, oh my God, he's using a picture of himself to sell one of them. I'm going to have to put this in the show notes. Jesus.

There's something about this that feels like it's the future, or maybe the now in a way. And I know we're completely like off of Ukraine and now talking about America again, which I didn't necessarily want to do. But yeah. So I'm sorry I had to be the one to break the news to you about the Andrew Lgear store. Yeah, no, I did not. I did not know about the Andrew Lerle Gear store. So, yeah.

So again, like, I've never, I've had very limited interactions with the Andrel folks, except for, like, reaching out for this article, right? I've been, like, my coverage of military matters have been pretty much since I came to Ukraine. But I did notice, I was in D.C. before this, and I did go to, you know, just out of interest for, like, an extended period of time. I went to a lot of like military focused events involving people who were various points in the contracting chain. Um, you know, former ambassadors, whatever. The, the excitement, there was something like, these people had not gotten anything to be like publicly excited about in a while, right? There was something where these like defense contractors had, you know, and I do think it's kind of funny. like, who's the CEO of like RTX?

I can't remember that guy's name. I think it's Michael's something. I have no idea. It's always going to be right. To me, but, but. Right, right, right. But yeah, like, um, but these people are not,

I'm sorry, no, they're like not, they're not known figures, right? Like, Elon Musk, anything he does, that's a headlining name to put into, like, as like a news story, you can put Musk into a headline. perfectly understandable. Any of the CEOs of like

Lockheed Martin, Raytheon slash RTF, Grumman, those people don't have that recognition. I suspect they never wanted it, right? It's a totally different way of running business and they are used to the idea like the way you get armed sales is by kind of being part of this long,

long term system. And that is problematic in its own right. but like the Silicon Valley marketing of active war is seems separately unwholesome. Yes, absolutely. You know, because Lucky is not just selling drones. He is selling a lifestyle brand of active war. I think that's a good way to put it. He's giving he's going to colleges or this wasn't at the college.

he's giving talks about how the Navi are or a stupid society in the Avatar movies, which is ridiculous that America is so like lodged into fantasy land that one of the big disruptor defense companies is using these fantasies to sell weapons. and that feels dangerous and weird to me and new. And maybe Lockheed and these other, and Raytheon and these other companies have always done that. They've always used fantasies to sell weapons. And maybe what I'm actually reacting to is that I'm seeing the particular fantasies from my childhood being used.

And that's what's off-putting to me. What do you mean? The fantasies from your childhood? Like Palmer Lucky is big on neon Genesis Evangelion. and he's big on, you know, Andrews named after Lord of the Rings. You know, like... The flame of the West.

The flame of the West, exactly. Like, which is, you know, picked for a very... Because it is the Flame of the West. Right. And, you know, like, what are all the names of, like, you know, the F-35 Lightning? Maybe they're just, they just... All of that branding is very, like, boomer-coded.

and it was always that gross, but I'm just so used to it. And it wasn't ever connected to anything that, like, I was raised with. Huh. Huh. Yeah, that's, well, like, this whole object of, like, rebuilding the American arsenal, right? That was part of, that's,

that's the thing Androlls pitched itself on, right? And I guess there are different ideas of how to rebuild the American arsenal, but this it has been so long since the US actually squared off against anything remotely resembling

like a a pure competitor like an army that you know where there might be a line and like we never had to worry about

you know like nobody had to worry about like Al Qaeda reverse engineering predator drone right whereas if one of those things ended up flying over Russian lines, there was a very good chance that they would

shoot it down and they would definitely try. And if it could be done, somebody in Russia would be able to do it. And so the idea, I guess, another one of these terms that comes up with the whole drone, like this revolutionary drone warfare, whatever, like modularity, like modularity, right? That's like another one of these terms that nobody really knows what it means,

but like, Anderl is making products the Silicon Valley way. So, Anderl is selling weapons that are iPhones. But this war, as it is actively happening, is running on Linux. And like,

there's no, like, you can't extend something that immutable into the hands of a technologically peer or near peer military and expect to not have to change it and this is a point that I have seen a lot of like the old school

defense contractors and a lot of people within the military argue like they need to shorten the cycle for procurements I don't know as much about that as they do I know they have incentive for shortening those cycles but I think it sounds pretty legit to me. But also, like, the idea that you would be able... But it doesn't happen unless you meet the pressure of an active conflict, I don't think, right? But are you talking about, like, you changing your weapons of pace?

And shortening your procurement cycle, right? Like you said, the war runs on Linux. War is open source. Right. So the whole reason that the drones have become such a big thing is because Russia invaded Ukraine and that both sides used the current technology available to them to fight. And while fighting, that current technology changes.

And people figure out what works and what doesn't. And you have like, you know, you have the guys in the workshops. in Ukraine tinkering with the drones and fixing things. So Andrewl comes in with one of these ghosts and tries to sell you an iPhone. And you're out here with your cobbled together thing that you know that works and that you have control over. Right. Well, this is the thing. I'm not even talking about substantive changes to the operations of somebody's drones.

I'm talking about like a jammer can like switches what frequency it's operating on. And it does this back and forth. Like, the Ukrainians and Russians are constantly trying to probe, like, which frequencies are they not jamming right now? Like, GPS is gone. GPS is gone for miles on either side of the line. Like, GPS will tell you that you are, you know, like, if you're in Kharkiv, GPS will tell you you're in, like, like, five miles north of Kharkiv. But even within the line, like, people are figuring out ways by finding sort of, you know, grooves in what is being jammed at a given moment. and they're syncing that up with their own jammers.

Like, they can't jamming their stuff as they're going over. And that's, like, that's a software update. Like, that's straight up a software update that is not a hardware development. That doesn't need to go back to the factory. But you're also, you know, like, only one unit needs to patch it like that. Like, there's one unit for this one, I don't know, a couple of days stretch of time, maybe. they're like this is the frequency we want to be operating on and then as soon as Russia figures that out

Russia is doing that. So I mean people are talking about an arms race but sometimes they're just chasing each other around the frequency ladder. So it's even smaller scale than what we're talking about. Right. I'm not even talking about like this is a revolutionary I mean there is kind of crazy stuff like the thermal vision on these night time drones. That stuff's getting pretty spooky. like the thermite ones.

The S.F. is kind of terrifying. Like they're... Well, the ones they, like, fly over and drop the thermite down and, like, burn through. Yeah. That stuff's terrifying. But, like, that... Not everybody is doing that. Whereas, like, everybody is searching, like, the frequency spectrum.

Everybody is, like, reconfiguring in accordance with the frequency spectrum that they are able to operate in for... X amount of time. And that's ongoing, right? And I don't even know, that's not an arms race. That's just like continuous tinkering. Is any of that automated?

Like, has anyone written a program that does it for you? I mean, there's I mean, like the frequency hopping, yes. That's actually, that's on GitHub. You can find like frequency hopping algorithms on GitHub. But like, yeah, the frequency hopping,

that stuff is written. and yeah, I mean, in terms of in terms of like resetting what you're like where you're operating, I'm not sure how easy that is within a certain degree of like fineness. Like a certain degree of kind of like what that word would be, precision. So you said that you were, when were you in, when were you in DC? Like at the. For like five years.

up to March 2023. Oh, I mean, um, you, let me ask it a different way. Um, to try to bring it all back to where we're at the beginning of the conversation.

Uh, this has been a good Thanksgiving day record because it's just kind of like, very conversational and all over the place. It's been really great, though. Um, what does it even mean when a drone company says that it's gear, has been battle tested in Ukraine.

I wish the audience could see your face. I would not be confident answering exactly what that means. I would say, I would bet those big companies have had the resources and the, you know, they can hire a fixer to get them to the front. I would bet that they have flown their stuff at the front. I know like the arrow environment, those switch plays, those have been, you know, the, like, I would bet that, well, the bolts have been at the front, did not, you know, do amazingly. The ghosts, I'm not, I'm not sure where I've seen those, whatever, I'll bet they've all been at the front, but there are different fronts, right? like there are different parts of the line that have different levels of defenses and this is

not every part of the front is in like firestorm mode all of the time and they generally do not like having foreigners at like the zero line what they call it and they generally don't like you know um they generally don't like foreign people dying uh in like at the front unless they are like in the Ford Legion. So yeah, I would bet all those people have had their drones fly over the line, but they were not like, I struggle to come up with an example of any of that like seemed to have been particularly impressive, certainly not relative to its Ukrainian equivalent. That was like one-tenth of the cost and a Ukrainian can update at any given moment.

Yeah, that was one of the really striking things about your piece. to me, two bits that were like going and asking people about specific pieces of equipment and they'd never heard of it. These things are being, you know, sold as battle tested. And the other being that the support

from the companies on the back end is like completely lacking. And like if you, like if you are in a life and death situation, you're always going to go with a thing that you know that you can tweak to your needs, right? You don't, you don't want to be calling,

back into California trying to get something updated when you're in a war zone. Right. And I would also say like the presentation of having been doing so much to help Ukraine, like that

is also and I think the, yeah, I could be confused in this. You know, uh, yeah, I believe the air of Ireland, the switchblade 300's package was like the largest publicly

acknowledged like this is a number of drones like 700 drones is nothing here and those are kamikaze drones they're like two launched kamikaze drones um like 700 drones like ukraine like ukraine goes through that i mean they just made their current numbers for this year they're saying it's something like 1.4 million drones they've made this year inside of ukraine uh like the ministry of strategic industries i just saw like yerman smithanian speak at an event here in Kiev and he was saying it was they were planning on 4.5 million in 2025 so the numbers here are insane and even if like the switchblade 300 was you know uh better right like 700 of them is it's a drop in the bucket it's nothing right right and like who's like distributed i don't know

how they were distributed. Like you presumably need to train everybody on a new system that they get. So you just give like 701 unit, like went through it in, you know, that was their month's rations. I'm very confused about how the stuff was distributed. Also, if there are new drone makers, like American drone makers who, you know, want to demonstrate to me what their stuff has been doing on the Ukrainian battlefield, would love to see more, would love to see more, you know, more proof.

but as it stands, yeah. What are you working on now? A couple of things. You know, don't want to... Yeah. What can you tell me about what you're working on? Yeah, no, it's not like cloak and dagger. It's just like, I don't want to, you know,

I don't want to lose leads, but like, I've got something in the chamber about, like, this whole onshoreing drone supply chain thing. And another story about like another story about slightly different, but in the same same vein. Like the military's

IP activities, the intellectual property, they're trying to patent more of their stuff within the like the Ministry of Defense, which they have not done historically at all. They actually just put out their first patent. The Ministry of Defense for the first time is the holder of a patent as of the beginning of November. like along the lines of what I'm saying things being pretty decentralized like forever

like the Ministry of Defense just didn't care about like anything that invented staying the sole intellectual property of the Ministry of Defense and that's kind of changing now we'll see how it all works out um on on shoring how do you solve the lithium and silicon the chips the chips do seem to be a major sticking point. Also, historically, the motors, I've heard about a new, like, I've heard about a new Ukrainian, Ukrainian motor company.

I am, I don't know, I want to see, I want to see this stuff for myself because I have heard, you know, rumors, rumors forever that a lot of these things may possibly be, like, imports from, like, Autel, uh, re-stamped and sent out from like, workshop in Ukraine. So it is difficult to tell on some of those things. But yeah, the lithium and silicon are, you know, currently issues. But also, I don't know, like, the stuff that you use for thermal lenses,

that's, uh, those are all, those are all, yeah, heavy metals that are predominantly from China. There's not a good source of the white, like Germany. I think selenium. I could be mixing that one up. Yeah. Some of the core materials are going to be difficult to find elsewhere. But the actual, you know,

sort of the finicky informational stuff is kind of what they're most interested in, what you want to call, like, dislocating, like, removing from Chinese affiliation. sooner rather than later. Yeah, as far as, yeah. Makes sense. As far as lithium, I mean, lithium people are struggling to figure that one out.

I mean, I think Skydeo, yeah, I need to reread the sanctions, like, what the actual announcement was, but China's sanctioned Skydia specifically shortly after that article came out. And it was about, like, in theory, Skydeo's activity in Taiwan, but, you know, just the realization of how much, you know, that American company is still dependent for, certain key components. I think it was the motors, but again, I would need to reread that thing. Yeah, I think it's the motors or was it the... I think it was the motors. Yeah.

Fascinating. I could do a whole episode about Skydeo specifically, but they're like being wrapped up in local policing in America and the taser company and all kinds of fun things, but that's a whole other episode. thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through this and kind of wandering down these weird paths with me where can people find your work i mean keep track of my stuff on uh keiv independent radio figure out also another one that's new uh counteroffensive pro there's strictly it's the more wonky side of like ukrainian defense tech uh who started up in september um and that's that's another good place to follow my stuff i host very little on Twitter, but I do sometimes post my stuff. So yeah, Colin K-O-L-L-E-N post. Thank you so much. Yep, thank you very much. Cheers. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners.

As always, Angry Planet is me. Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin Odell. It was created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, go to Angry Planetpod.com. You get access to the Angry Planet Discord. You get commercial-free versions of the mainline episodes, and you get the episodes early. Again, that's at angry planetpod.com.

We will be back again soon with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.