It Could Happen Here - CZM Rewind: Irregular Naval Warfare And You (Ukraine and Myanmar Edition)

Episode Date: November 28, 2024

Robert and James cover Ukraine's defeat of the Russian Black Sea Fleet using irregular warfare, and James looks over how Myanmar's rebels have stymied the junta Navy. Original Air Date: 3.29.24See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hey, I'm Jacquees Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or

wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T, connecting changes everything. Call zone media. Causal Media. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here and our special two-part series, Irregular Naval Warfare and You, where James and I teach you how you too can challenge the US Navy's dominance of the seas, or at least the coasts for fun and profit.

Actually today, last episode, we talked about people challenging the US Navy's coastal dominance. Today we're talking about doing the same thing for the Russian Navy. So that's going to be fun. And of course, the Navy of Myanmar, which is a bit of a different class from the US and Russian Navy, but no less interesting. Yeah, still fun. Love to see a boat lose. Yeah, I just like boats going down, you know, Love to see a boat lose. Yeah, I just like boats going down. I just hate a boat. Yeah, us the Yorkers, many.

Many such cases. I'm gonna start with Ukraine and then we're gonna throw to James to talk about our friends in Myanmar and how they have repurposed civilian technology and stolen weapons to counter a Navy without really having one of their own. But first, Ukraine.

In 2014, when the Russian army invaded Eastern Ukraine and took Crimea, Ukraine lost a significant portion of its already not that impressive Navy. Most of their boats were just taken by Russia, along with a number of sailors who defected. A lot of other sailors fled the region, leaving behind their homes in cities like Sebastopol to continue serving their country in a war that, a decade later, is still ongoing.

One of these sailors, who is a Sebastopol native and had to flee his home possibly forever in order to continue serving his country, is the current commander of Ukraine's navy, Admiral Nezpapa. He leads a navy that is almost without manned ships, and on paper, it is utterly incapable of challenging Russia's legendary Black Sea fleet. Since the age of the Tsars, the Black Sea fleet has been infamous as a pillar of Russian military power.

However, also since the age of the Tsars, it's had a nasty tendency to get utterly housed by enemies that should have been able to beat it, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not the first time it's taken unexpected loot. Yeah, it has a legendary history. That doesn't mean good. There's bad legends out there, you know?

Yeah, it's well known. Yeah, today that enemy is Ukraine. Since the expanded Russian invasion in 2022, just two years, Ukraine has destroyed or badly damaged more than a third of the Black Sea fleet, despite having no battleships or destroyers in the sea to counter Russian naval power. They have done enough damage to reopen Odessa

and at least one other port on the Black Sea to international commerce, which has provided Ukraine with a crucial economic and strategic lifeline. And that's a remarkable achievement, sinking a third of the Black Sea fleet and basically when you reopen a port, and strategic lifeline. And that's a remarkable achievement, sinking a third of the Black Sea fleet and re, basically when you reopen a port, that means that you have taken away naval dominance

from a country that has a Navy and you don't. That's pretty good, pretty good stuff. Over the last two years, Ukraine had damaged irreparably or sunk seven active landing ships and one to, seven active landing ships and one landing vessel. I don't know the difference. They've fucked up a lot of boats. They have destroyed a submarine

with sea to ground capability that was docked for repairs. They have sunk a cruiser, the capital ship of the entire Black Sea fleet, the Moskva. They've also sunk a supply vessel and a handful of patrol boats and missile boats. And a number of other boats have been damaged. That's a significant rate of casualties, especially when you consider

that every actually destroyed vessel, we're looking at a years, multiple years lead time to replace. You cannot make naval vessels very quickly anymore. Back during the big dub dub dose, the US did, but nobody really does that anymore. Not with the big ones at least. You just can't just roll through that.

We were just yeeting aircraft carriers into the sea back then. It's true, just fighting them out. Yeah, it'll take about a week. Yeah, it's because Rosie the Riveter was really riveting at a high speed at that time. She was quite a riveter. So at the start of hostilities, Turkey, which controls access to the Black Sea,

forbade any additional military vessels, or at least military vessels of significant size from entering the area. What this means, this has a significant impact on how well Ukraine strikes work, because even if Russia can replace the losses physically, they can't actually get replacements into the Black Sea easily.

They can't sail new shit past the Turks. The Turks are not allowing that right now. So again, this is a situation that has kind of favored the way in which Ukraine has adapted to countering Russian naval dominance. It is possible that at the present rate of attrition, the Black Sea fleet could be rendered inoperable in less than two years. Like if they keep going at this rate, it's like 18 months or something before there's not really much of a fleet anymore.

Now if Ukraine had accomplished this task with a traditional Navy using standard naval tactics, this would have been an impressive victory given the disparity in resources between the two nations. But they have done all this with a mix of cruise missiles, many of which are produced in country, aerial drones, and new bespoke locally produced suicide drone boats. This irregular naval warfare has been successful enough that one RAND Corporation engineer and analyst, Scott Savitz, described the Black Sea Fleet as a fleet in being, quote, it represents a potential threat that needs to be vigilantly guarded against, but one that remains in check

for now. And I'm going to quote from a New York Times article on the topic to provide a little more context. Ukraine has effectively turned around 10,000 square miles in the Western Black Sea off its southern coast into what the military calls a gray zone, where neither side can sail without the threat of attack. James Heapy, Britain's Armed Forces Minister, told a recent security conference in Warsaw that Russia's Black Sea fleet had suffered a functional defeat and contended that the liberation of

Ukraine's coastal waters in the Black Sea was every bit as important as the successful counter-offensives on land in Kherson and Kharkiv last year. "...the classical approach that we studied at military maritime academies does not work now," Admiral Ney's papa said. "...therefore we have to be as flexible as possible and change approaches to planning and implementing work as much as possible. That article is about a year old or so. So the Neptune anti-ship missile is one of the prides of Ukraine's nascent arms industry.

Neptune missiles are credited with destroying the Moskva in April of 2022. Ukraine also has access to several Western anti-ship missiles, including the Storm Shadow and Scalp missiles. I believe the Storm Shadow comes from your folks, right James? It does, yeah. That's a British one. Yeah. Yeah. And these seem to be pretty effective missiles. These are obviously much more advanced. These are modern naval weapons, right? These are much more advanced than, for example,

the weapons the Houthis have. These are the kind of things that can counter, to some extent, modern anti-missile technology. For an example of kind of how that tends to work, they used a barrage of, I believe it was mostly storm shadows, to rain death on the Crimean port of Sebastopol recently. Seven out of 18 of the missiles fired made it through Russian air defenses, and these damaged or destroyed four landing ships

in a single strike, and these are sizable naval vessels. This is the most recent attack. Although, as after I wrote this, there was another attack on the Kirch bridge. I'm not really sure how that took place yet. That seems to have shut it down again. But that gives you an idea of like, what you actually have to do,

how much of these missiles you have to put in the air to get some through. And that's not too bad, right? 18 missiles, seven get through, four ships down. That's a really good rate of return. Especially when you consider that like, we were talking in our first episode about how the US is spending significant resources on maintaining its, defending its carriers, right?

Russia does not have the same ability to keep producing munitions. And so like, that's a finite resource, right? Their means of defining that, defending their ships and defending really anything against missiles are a finite resource, right? Their means of defending their ships and defending really anything against missiles are a finite resource. So anytime you can, even if the ship doesn't get sunk, if the ship has to deploy one of these missiles, which the whole country doesn't have very many of, that's still a win.

Now this is, we're all talking about irregular naval warfare. And then this is not what most people would have considered a traditional naval conflict prior to the expansion of hostilities in Ukraine. However, we are talking, this is very different than the case of the Houthis. Ukraine is a state. It doesn't have a massive arms industry, but it has one and it has the support of nations with sizable arms industries.

Right? So we are not talking about this part. We are going to talk about the aspects of Ukrainian irregular naval warfare that are some guys that are hobbyists building shit. Yeah. This is not that part yet, but I think this, this information is kind of significant in that it shows the tactical use of anti-ship cruise missiles and their ability to significantly shape an operational environment. Even when the country using them has minimal conventional naval assets of their own, it is largely through the use of these missiles that Ukraine has been able to reopen their Black Sea ports That matters to people seeking to understand both this conflict in the future of unconventional naval warfare

I mean, I guess you could say this is the future of conventional naval warfare But I think we're still leaning on the unconventional side at the moment at least in terms of how Doctrine is changing as a result of this. So maybe I should update how we're defining this. But for our purposes, as people unlikely to have access to cruise missiles, but significantly likely to find ourselves waging an unconventional war than having cruise missiles, it's more relevant to look at the new weapons systems Ukraine has developed that have helped them lock down the Black Sea fleet using civilian hobbyists.

And this is where we get to drones. Ukraine's conventional aerial drones are a mix of actual military hardware. I'm talking about stuff like the Bayraktar, the Turkish drone, which is like, kind of like the Predator, all right. It's like an actual military product. But the majority in terms of numbers of drones

that Ukraine is fielding are civilian drones, or at least drones that started out as civilian technology. A lot of these are now built to be military, but they're still based on these designs that started with people hacking and cobbling together civilian drones. And outside of naval stuff, prior to the war, there had been a lot of veterans and hobbyists

who were veterans trying to convince the Ukrainian military that it needed to adopt drone warfare on a large scale, the kind of drone warfare that you can do with these less expensive drones. And they received a lot of pushback until the war started. And these guys just took to the field and started fucking murking Russian armed units

and infantry and killing generals and shit. And now Ukraine has integrated in a way that everyone is going to follow. Like a Ukrainian battalions have like companies now that are drone assault companies and like line battalions and every within infantry you have people use or artillery eating drones, Ford observers, all over. They have set a goal for this year, producing at least a million and ideally more like 2 million drones.

And at least from what I read, that looks like very plausible. And most of these are quite small, right? But that doesn't mean obviously ineffective. I know they buy a lot of their drones in the UK because the UK has consistently kicked itself in the nuts when it comes to like Brexit. And so the pound is significantly weaker. And so they're able to get the drones at a cheaper price and then drive them all the way across. Yeah. No people who have done that.

And I was going to go join them, but never worked it out. Yeah. And you know, there are a number of different, like these, these, these drones earlier in the war had an easier time being effective in causing casualties on the Russians than later. This is something that, um, you know, kind of the hoopla in support, which I think is necessary that Ukraine gets, lead some people to discount the degree to which Russian forces have adapted and gotten smarter.

And one of the ways in which they've adapted and gotten smarter is in blocking drones and using drones of their own. You know, one of the stories that last couple of weeks is that Russia has succeeded in carrying out strikes on advanced weapons systems like SAM sites, deep in Ukrainian territory. They've extended their kill chain beyond what they used to be capable of. And that's because they've adapted. They're also adapted with less efficacy at blocking drones and attacks on naval vessels.

Some of this has been kind of funny. I want to read a quote from a business insider article here. Russia is painting silhouettes on naval vessels on land to try and trick Ukraine, which keeps destroying its warships. And an intelligence update on Wednesday, the UK Ministry of Defense said that silhouettes of vessels have also been painted on the side of Cays, probably to confuse the uncrewed aerial vehicle operators.

They showed, there's some images of this, they don't seem convincing to me. I don't know if I think this is working. This is great. This is, I love this. They have a cardboard Navy neck. Yeah, it's a very Bugs Bunny. This is great. This is, I love this. They have a cardboard Navy neck. Yeah, it's a very Bugs Bunny. Yes it is.

But not working as well as Bugs would. They've painted a hole in the side of the cliff face and drones keep crashing into it. Ukraine keeps throwing drones at it. It's very funny. I mean, obviously they just, Ukraine just sank like, or damaged, badly damaged four boats. So I don't think this is,

I haven't seen evidence that this is working well. Their actual like jamming efforts have been much more successful. Right. Yeah, they always will be on civilian. One of the things that's really interesting compared to Myanmar is that Ukraine tends to rely on modified off the shelf civilian drones. Right. Your DJI is that kind of thing in Myanmar because of where a lot of the PDFs are because, well,

they increasingly do control the borders, but they haven't always. They have been making their own drones, the group called Federal Wings, you can find them on Telegram, who make their own drones. And I think those seem to be less, the jammers that the SAC, that the Tamadorador has are Chinese made, they're like jammer rifles. You see them all the time in captured weapon caches, but they don't seem to be having as much impact on these homemade drones, which is really interesting. Yeah, and it's, you know, I've mentioned a couple of times, we're doing this in part because the odds that people listening might be involved in an irregular conflict are not zero.

You know, what I, what I think about when I say that is not that there's high odds for any individual person fighting themselves in that situation, but there is given the number of people who listen to this podcast, probably someone who is not currently involved in a conflict that will find themselves that way in the future. And I based that in part on the fact that all of our friends in Myanmar who are currently fighting a war were a couple of years ago delivery drivers and you know, playing PUBG online and not really thinking they would wind up as insurgents.

Yeah, I've spoken to a number of people who are currently fighting down in Myanmar who have listened to our Myanmar podcast and realize the capacity of 3D printing to be very useful in it. So like even in that sense, it's already happening. But yeah, no one in Myanmar, like many of them said, their entire combat experience was playing PUBG.

And now they are working ships. Yeah, so anyway, it bears thinking about this stuff. And this brings me back to Ukraine's irregular drone warfare units, which again, a lot of these guys started out as civilian enthusiasts who expanded, responded to the outbreak outbreak or at least expansion of hostilities by expanding their hobby into a real world military effort that had a real world effect. Civilian drones were crucial in the Battle of Kiev, allowing Ukraine to do severe damage

to that massive Russian armored column heading towards the city and providing Intel that led to the assassination of multiple general level officers. So it is perhaps not surprising that Ukraine looked to the same group of volunteer hobbyists when it came time to expand their naval arsenal. And there's a really good article I found in CNN by Sebastian Shukla, Alex Markat and Daria Tarasova. And I actually want to give you the title of this article. Yeah, I'll try to throw those in show notes is exclusive rare access Ukraine's sea drones, part of Ukraine's fight back in the Black Sea.

Haven't really seen the word fight back used that way, but there you go. So I'm going to read a quote from that article. A government-linked Ukrainian fundraising organization called United24 has sourced money from companies and individuals all around the world, pooling funds to disperse it to a variety of developers and initiatives from defense to soccer matches. The entire outfit is very security-conscious, insisting on strict guidelines on filming and revealing identities. Those who seen and met with decline to give their full names or even their ranks within

Ukraine's armed forces. On a creaky wooden jetty, a camouflaged sea drone pilots as he wants to go by shark. In front of him is a long black hardshell briefcase. He unveils a bespoke, multi-screened mission control, essentially an elaborate gaming center complete with levers, joysticks, a monitor, and buttons that have covers over switches that shouldn't accidentally be knocked with labels like BLAST. The developer of the drone, who asked to remain anonymous, said their work on sea drones only began once the war started.

It was very important because we did not have many forces to resist the maritime state, Russia, and we needed to develop something of our own because we didn't have the existing capabilities. So again, these are hobbyist design and this guy's not really a hobbyist anymore, but that's how he started. He's only not a hobbyist because the military recognized the value of what he was doing in the current iterations of this sea drone, way a little over 2000 pounds with an explosive 661 pound payload, a 500 mile range and a max speed of 50 miles per hour.

That is a significant weapon system. Multiple sea drones have been used to strike Russian assets in the Black Sea and drones were involved in a successful attack that severely damaged the Kerch bridge last July, rendering it impassable until September. So these have had a real battlefield effect and they probably will continue to do so. The developer of these drones told CNN these drones are a completely Ukrainian production. They are designed, drawn and tested here. It's our own production of holes, electronics and software.

More than 50% of the production of equipment is here in Ukraine. And that's really significant because, you know, I think we're all aware of the difficulty Ukraine has had getting weaponry lately from the West as a result of fucking around in Congress. And so it is a necessity for them to be able to develop weapon systems like this that can interdict and counteract more advanced and expensive weapon systems and can be produced indigenously. You know, I don't think we have seen a mass suicide boat attack. I'm interested in what happens when we do, like with more significant numbers than we've seen deployed. I kind of wonder the degree to which the Russians have gotten good at spotting this stuff. I've come across at least a couple of stories of these boats likely destroyed on approach,

so they certainly don't always work even a majority of the time, but given the cost of these things, they don't have to get through the majority of the time. Very much worth it. Now in that interview with the New York Times, Admiral Ney Pappa cautioned that Ukraine is still outgunned in the Black Sea, even though the Russians no longer have supremacy. They still have air superiority. They are still able to launch from the sea long range missiles at Ukrainian targets, including civilian targets. So this is not, again, a situation that should be portrayed as them having their own way.

Their ability to kind of interdict the sea has been, the primary effects of it have been number one, the reopening of trade in the Black Sea. And earlier in the war, by locking down the ability of these landing ships to put more troops on ground and by doing damage to the Kerch bridge, they were able to slow Russian reinforcements and Russian material from entering the war zone in order to, and this, this aided in some of the advances, particularly in like areas like Khrisun. At this moment, the situation has changed because again, the Russians aren't just kind of like sitting around doing the same thing over and over again, or at least not always.

And we don't tend to talk as much about successes on the Russian side of things, but that is an important part of the story. And one of the things the Russians have done is kind of acknowledge that the black sea fleet may not be a fleet in being forever, um, and certainly cannot be relied upon to handle everything they initially thought it would handle. And so Russian engineers spend a significant period of time building a sizable new railroad that connects Rostov and Southern Russia to Mariupol and occupied Southern Ukraine. This has allowed them to get high volume shipments into the area and supply troops

to the area along Ukraine's Southern front without relying on that bridge or relying on naval landings. So the fact that Ukraine has been able to take out four landing ships recently is good. That's a win for Ukraine. It reduces Russian capability, but it does not have the same effect that it would have had, for example, two years earlier because Russia has also evolved. And among other things, railroads are a lot harder to take a lot harder to destroy, to like take out, right? It's easy to damage a railroad, but they're easy to fix. It's not, it doesn't take a lot to get some guys over to fix a damaged

sunk of railroad, fixing a bridge that's been blown up or a sunk boat is a lot harder. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and there are people within Russia even who are sabotaging railroads, but as you say, it's like, it's very high stakes for them and it's relatively low costs for the, for the Russian state to fix that stuff. So like it's not as effective. Yeah.

But, but I think this gives you an idea of kind of like what we're, what we're looking at when we look at this kind of ongoing irregular conflict is the side that does not have access to a functional Navy, not able to interdict or destroy fleets, but able to stop them from dominating the coast. And when you can stop them from dominating the coast, you have effectively denied them terrain that they can act in without being countered. And you have also denied them from stopping you from acting in that same terrain. Even if you don't have total safety in that area, that opens up the operational possibilities substantially. And this is something that I kind of don't think is going to get put back in the bag,

even if some of these Star Wars ass weapons systems do come out in the near future. You know, maybe that'll have an impact in the immediate term on people like the Houthis, but I don't think that it really will on, you know, for example, what what Ukraine's doing, right? Yeah. Russia can't keep up with getting decent small arms, body armor, grenades and shit. Like, it's there's no way it's gonna implement some kind of massive Star Wars system over its Navy. Not right now, not in the middle of a conflict that it's it's struggling to supply. Yep. You know what? Here's an ad break.

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and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back and we are traveling around the world. spin your little globe in your head and look for Myanmar, which is, of course, in Asia. Now, I'm talking about two different, I guess, anti-ship. Sabotage or attack or two different ways ships have been sunk in Myanmar. I'll start with the first one, which is undoubtedly the flashiest, just because it's fun. So, a ship in the port of Yangon about a month ago, so we're recording

on the 20th, it's about the 1st of March, it was in the river in Yangon, right? And it was allegedly carrying jet fuel. Now, if you follow Burmese activists, people in the Burmese freedom movement, one of their demands for a long time has been to stop supplying the junta with jet fuel, which would in turn stop it being able to bomb villages, schools, civilians, PDF formations, just about anyone in the country. It's bombed at some point in the last couple of years. And they haven't been successful, right? They haven't been able to stop the supply of jet fuel coming to the Hunter. So they've taken it into their own hands.

And what they did on the 1st of March was that they snuck onto a boat. And so to this is the story from the Burmese National Unity Government's Ministry of Defense anyway. Combat divers snuck onto this boat, planted a kilogram of TNT or a charge equivalent to a kilogram of TNT. Robert and I have both spoken to people who make explosives in Myanmar, so we do, we definitely know the PDF has access to a range of explosives. They set it on a five hour fuse and it blew up in the middle of the night. And it, there's definitely footage of the ship on fire having blown up.

Now, this is pretty remarkable for Never Read. This is like why the United States has units like the Navy SEALs, right? Like the higher speed guys, because it is not easy to scuba dive across a harbor, climb onto a ship, set an explosive charge without being detected, and then leave that ship and have the charge go off and sink the ship without you being compromised, without the charge itself being compromised and the ship being saved. This is some classic, this is why there are special units within the US military. Now the PDF very obviously did not have combat divers two years ago. I was looking into hobby scuba diving in Yangon. The rivers in that area are extremely muddy and visibility is very low. So the people who you find diving in that area are not so much like hobby scuba divers or free

divers but they're salvage divers and there's a whole little industry of people and these people are diving in equipment that I would not consider safe or reliable. It's clamping an air hose in between your teeth and diving down and trying to find, there's a large deposit of coal in one of the rivers in Yangon because of a ship that sunk. There's of course copper, which everyone all around the world, including the Vietcong in Santia stealing copper. There's iron, right? So these people are diving down and trying to collect scrap and sell that for whatever

minimal amount they can. It's an extremely dangerous and extremely low income. It's one of the sort of really high risk, low reward jobs that you get in economies where people are really struggling to make ends meet. So those are the only divers I can find evidence of in Yangon. I don't think it was them who did this because you have to have a boat above you with a pump if you're diving with a rubber hose in your teeth. So it seems like somebody in within the, they said it was a Yangon PDF that's who they attribute it to.

So that would be one of these, it would likely be an underground group within the PDF, right? Some people living in the city who were able to sneak onto this boat, set a charge and blow it up. And they would also have to have intelligence at the boat, where it was, what it was carrying, etc. So it's a pretty, pretty daring mission that this is the first one like this we've seen and we haven't seen anything since, but it's of course possible that this is a story that we're being told. In fact, they had like someone undercover on the ship, right? Or like they had some other means of getting this charge onto the ship, but one

way or another, they managed to blow up the ship carrying fuel, which is a significant detriment to the Hutto, right? And that's how they get most of their shit. It's not over land, especially with more and more- The terrain there is just absolutely, like even with modern technology, difficult to get significant amounts of shit through. They're resupplying some of their outposts that are 10 miles from a town with helicopters right now. Like A, the terrain is burly and B, they don't have, the PDF has denied them

access that anytime they send out a convoy, it gets attacked. So sending out, plus, you know, that their land border crossings are increasingly falling into the hands of the PDFs and the EROs. So getting stuff through the ocean is one of the ways that they can still get stuff. And if this keeps happening, then they will make that more expensive for them. And they're not exactly a wealthy like Hunter, even though I guess Min Aung Hlaing just made himself an Air Force One recently. I was looking at it today. He's got himself two luxury. Yeah, they called it dictator class.

Like he's upgraded from president class to dictator class. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, he has. Yeah. In many ways. So that's one way that the PDF has been blowing up ships in the Yangon River. Robert, do you know who else has been blowing up ships in the Yangon? Well, we are sponsored entirely by the British Navy circa the mid 1800s, so I would guess them.

That's right. Yep. Yep. It's yeah. Yeah. Lots of repressed repressed feelings and blown up. A lot of cabin boys with with deep trauma. Anyway, here's the ads. I Heart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shape-shifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

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one of our best ones yet. And we're talking about the Arakan army now. So the Arakan army, not to be confused with the Arakan-Rahinja Salvation Army, different group. Arakan is a name of what is now Rakhine state before it was colonized by the Burmese. I think Arakan was a king before it was colonized by the Burmese. So that's what that refers to. It's a geographical appellation rather than like necessarily an ethnic one. The Rakhine would be the ethnic group. So what the AA have done is sunk I think at least four

hunter ships now and most of these ships are kind of they're like the they look like big Higgins boats they're like landing craft or like car ferries like flat bottom with a bow that goes down right. I rode around a lot in the Marshall Islands in little landing craft like that because craft or like car ferries, like flat bottom with a bow that goes down, right? I rode around a lot in the Marshall Islands in little landing craft like that because they can get them in, they don't have like docks, so they can just ride that right up to the beach and then drop the front and off you go. And they use them a lot, the Hunter doesn't have like per se marines, so they don't have maritime infantry, but they use them to transport their regular army around, right? And they use them to transport their regular army around, right.

And they use them to transport them up river. They also use them a lot in Rakhine state to shell AA positions and any town ships that they've decided they want to wipe off the map and kill all the people in. Right. So these, these boats have been a real, uh, like thorn in the side of the Arakhan army after operation 10 1027 when they joined with two other groups to form the Three Brotherhood Alliance and launch attacks on the Hunter all over Myanmar. And so what they've been doing, it appears, is using underwater mines to sink these ships, which is interesting, right? Like, I guess the mines are like a very old technology, right?

It's probably 100 years plus that underwater mines have existed. It seems the reason they're able to get away with using what is a relatively dated technology is because the Hunter just doesn't expect to encounter anything, right? And so has not equipped his ships as such. They do have stuff like submarines, but that's not what's getting sunk. What's getting sunk are these big kind of landing craft riverboats. And it seems that they're using mines and then once they disable the ship, they're then attacking it with small boats, small arms,

like indirect fire mortars and stuff. I saw one post that suggested they'd use, which is pretty cool if they did. The Burmese military has these like tank destroyers, self-propelled, it's a tank, it's a tank is what it is, and they've captured, the AA has captured a number of these right, and I've seen suggestions that they're using some of these on, like they just set up an ambush along the banks of the river right, and as the ship comes in they can maybe disable it with a mine and then attack it with those. But there are videos online, you can find them, of the AA sinking these ships. And then they've done some amazing drone photography of, obviously they then like

staged their units on the ships, like all saluting the drone and they have the Arakan army flags. And they're actually really cool photos of them taking these ships. But again, like I think this might be the first sinking of a Burmese naval ship since it's independence from Britain. Like I can't think that they were, they really haven't played much of a role at all in its conflicts with the EROs, aside as from like basically kind of just shelling places when they want to do that. But there's never really been any significant opposition to them.

And that's changed now. They have to obviously, just like everywhere else, watch out for drones. Drones have been used to a massive extent in Myanmar. And like the AA doesn't have as many associated PDFs. I haven't seen them doing as much of the drone stuff as the PDFs. The PDFs tend to be like the more urban folks, right, the younger folks and the Gen Z folks that we've spoken about before and a lot of them have been very savvy with their use of drones. Like I

said, you can look up Federal Wings and you can see them dropping bombs with drones on all kinds of stuff with their heavy metal soundtracks that they like. But that, well it wasn't even drones here. It was pretty simple. It was just mines. So things that they do love mines in Myanmar, mines all over that country. But in this case, these, I guess, massive mines in the rivers, given that the hunter is the only entity sending big boats up and down, you could set them at

a certain depth where these small boats wouldn't hit them and eventually one of the hunter boats is going to hit them I guess. So it's pretty basic technology, but it's still a massive step forward in terms of like a place where the state had complete impunity, it now doesn't, right? They can't just cruise up and down these rivers shelling people. They were actually using some of the ships to evacuate soldiers and their families from a position the soldiers They were trying to like reap rather than surrendering. They were trying to evacuate them and move them to some else The AA asked them to surrender and they didn't they tried to evacuate them So then they mined the ships and took those out and I think the the hunter is like tried to spin this It's like the AA is attacking civilians

But I think a Burmese Navy ship with a Burmese Navy flag, when those ships have just been shelling you seems like a legitimate target to me. I think it's very hard. It's, you know, it's a hunter who put children on one of their naval ships rather than the AA who attacked the ship because it had children. You can hear in one of the things you can hear the AA are like attacking the ship in small boats and they're shouting like there are children on board and you can hear them acknowledging it and there are videos of the AA rescuing people who jumped overboard rescuing them

from the river and then like I guess they just held us POWs. Cool. Yeah, it's cool. It's interesting. Obviously, not many of us have access to underwater mines, but, you know, maybe in a fictional future we might. Yeah. Well, there you go, folks.

This has been Irregular Naval Warfare and You, a podcast about irregular naval warfare and you. Yeah. Send us your videos of yourselves in Irregular Naval Warfare. Yeah, absolutely. Go out there. Look, how about this? Every listener, go out and sink one naval vessel, you know?

Just a boat. Doesn't matter who's. Just any boat. Go sink a boat. Any boat. Go take out a boat. You see a fucking super yacht? Knock it out.

You see a dinghy. Take that fucker out. People kayaking, fuck them up. You know? A banana boat? Absolutely. People kayaking, fuck him up. You know? Banana boat? Absolutely a banana boat, for sure. One of those weird duck boat car things that they have in some cities.

Oh yeah, yeah. Actually, you know what? You don't need to do anything with that. That'll kill everybody on board on its own. Those things are death traps. Just pray for those people. Yeah. But any other boat, yeah.

You see a donut, you know, behind a speed boat. Oh yeah. Merk it. Anyway, but any other boat. Yeah, you see a doughnut, you know, behind a speedboat. Oh yeah, Merk it. Anyway, everybody, go away. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, CoolZoneMedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Dre and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends

and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline Podcast, and we're kicking off our second Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to better offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions.

Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award.

Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking, it's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hey, I'm Jacquees Thomas, the host of a brand new

Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners into the rich world of black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T, connecting changes everything.