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

Episode Date: March 29, 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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline Podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into Tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished 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. 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. Call Zone 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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? I just hate a boat. Yeah, us, the Yorkers, many such cases.

I'm going to start with Ukraine and then we're going to 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. 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 an unexpected loot.

Yeah, it has a legendarity 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 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 U.S. did, but nobody really does that anymore. Not with the big ones, at least. You can't just roll through that. We were just yeeting aircraft carriers into the sea back then. Yeah, it's true.

Just farting them out. Yeah, it'll take about a week. Yeah, it's because Rosie the Riveter was really riveting at a high speed. 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 Nevespapa 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 Kerch 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, you know, 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. No. And so, like, that's 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 are 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 aspects of Ukrainian irregular naval warfare that are some guys that are hobbyists building shit. This is not that part yet. But I think 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 and 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 weapon 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, 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 Ukrainian battalions have companies now

that are drone assault companies and line battalions. And within infantry, you have people using artillery, using drones as forward observers. Yes, all over. They have set a goal for this year of producing at least a million and ideally more like 2 million drones. And at least from what I read, that looks like very plausible. 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 and causing casualties on the Russians than later. This is something that, you know, kind of the hoopla and 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. One of the stories of the last couple of weeks is that

Russia has succeeded in carrying out strikes on advanced weapon 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. In an intelligence update on Wednesday, the UK Ministry of Defense said that silhouettes of vessels have also been painted on the side of k's 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 uh i love this like

they'll have a cardboard navy next yeah it, 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, Ukraine just sank or badly damaged four boats.

So I don't think this is... I haven't seen evidence that this is working well. Their actual 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. It's a 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, the Tatmadaw 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, 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 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 base 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, not in Myanmar, who have listened to our Myanmar podcast and realized the capacity of 3D printing to be very useful. And so, like, even in that sense, it's already happening.

to be very useful. And so like, even in that sense, it's already happening, but yeah, no, no one in Myanmar, like many of them said that their entire combat experience was playing PUBG.

Yeah. Now they are murking ships. Yeah. So anyway, it, 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 expand, responded to the 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 Markot, and Daria Tarasova. And I actually want to give you the title of this article. Yeah,

I'll try to throw those in the show notes is exclusive rare access to Ukraine's sea drones, part of Ukraine's fight back in the Black Sea. I 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 United 24 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 declined to give their full names or even their ranks within Ukraine's armed forces.

On a creaky wooden jetty, a camouflaged sea drone pilot says 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. I mean, 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. And the current iterations of this sea drone weigh a little over 2,000 pounds with an explosive

661 pound payload, a 500 mile range, and a max speed of 50 miles per hour. That is a significant weapons 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 Because 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. 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.

Right. Very much worth it, right? Now, in that interview with the New York Times, Admiral Nezha Papa 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 materiel from entering the war zone in order to, and this aided in some of the advances, particularly in areas like Kherson. 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. 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, and certainly cannot be relied upon to handle everything they initially thought it would handle. And so Russian engineers spent a significant period of time building a sizable new railroad that connects Rostov and southern Russia to Mariupol in 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, right? 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, right? Yeah. Because Russia has also evolved. And among other things, railroads are a lot easier or a lot harder to destroy, to like

take out, right? It's easy to damage a lot easier or 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 cost for the, for the Russian state to fix that stuff. So like say it's like it's very high stakes for them and it's relatively low cost 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 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 uh 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. There's no way it's going to implement some kind of massive Star Wars system over its Navy. Not right now. Not in the middle of a conflict that it's struggling to supply. Yep.

You know what? Here's an ad break. Hey, guys. I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories,

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one which is undoubtedly the flashiest um just because it's fun so a ship in the port of yangon about about a month ago so we're recording on the 20th about the first of march the it was in the river in the in the river in yangon right and it was carrying allegedly carrying jet fuel now if you follow burmese activists people in the burmese freedom movement they will one of their demands for a long time has been to stop supplying the hunter 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 uh on the first of march was that they snuck onto a boat um so two 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 yeah 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 another reason. 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 um 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 uh 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 you know everyone all around the world including the vietcong in santee are stealing copper um there's iron right so these people are diving down and trying to collect scrap and sell that for whatever minimal amount they can right it's an it's an extremely dangerous and extremely low income like it's it's uh 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 right

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 right so it seems like somebody in within the they said it was a yangon pdf that's who they attribute it to so um that would be one of these uh 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 daring mission. 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 someone undercover on the ship, right? Or 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 yeah right and that's how they get most of their shit it's not over land especially with um 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 is burly and b they don't have like 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 they're getting stuff through the ocean it's 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 uh like hunter even though i guess min ah lang just made himself an air force one recently. I was just looking at it today. Oh, that's good. 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 in many ways. So yeah, 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 Yangon? Do you know who else has been blowing up ships in Yangon?

Well, we are sponsored entirely by the British Navy circa the mid-1800s, so I would guess them. That's right. Yep, yep. Yeah, yep, yep. Lots of repressed feelings and blowing up ships. A lot of cabin boys with deep trauma. Anyway, here's to that. Yeah. entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast

Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search,

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Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. All right, we're back. We hope you enjoyed that that ad pivot one of our best ones yet and we're talking about the arakan army now so the arakan army uh not to be confused with the arakan rahim salvation army different group arakan is a name of what is now a kind state before it was colonized by the burmese that that was i think arakan was a king before it was colonized by the burmese so that that's what that refers to it's a geographical appellation rather

than like necessarily an ethnic one uh the rakhine would be the ethnic group so what the aa have done is sunk i think at least four uh hunter ships now and most of these ships are kind of they're like the um they look like big Higgins boats. They're like landing craft or like car ferries, like flat bottom with a, uh, bow that goes down. Right.

I rode around a lot in the Marshall islands in little, 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, and they use them a lot.

The Hunter doesn't have like per se marines that they don't have maritime infantry but they they use them to transport their regular army around right um and they use them to transport them up river they also use them a lot in rakhine state to shell aa positions and and any townships 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 arakan army after operation 1027 when they joined with uh two other groups to form the three brotherhood alliance and launch attacks on the hunter all over myanmar and 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? Like, it's probably 100 years plus that underwater mines have existed. It seems the way that, like, 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 like 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 yeah i saw one post that suggested they'd use which is pretty cool if they did their burmese military has these uh like tank destroyers self-propelled it's a tank it's what it is and they've captured the aas 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 they can maybe disable it with a mine and then attack it with those but there are videos online you can find them um of of the AA sinking these ships and then they've done some amazing drone photography of like they've obviously they

then like staged their units on the ships like all saluting the drone and they had the Arakan army flags and there are actually really cool photos of them taking these ships but again I think this might be the first sinking of a Burmese naval ship since independence from Britain. I can't think

that they really haven't played much of a role at all in its conflicts with the EROs, aside as from basically 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. 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 the more urban folks, the younger folks, the Gen Z folks that we've spoken about before. A lot of them have been very savvy with their use of drones. Like I said, you can look up up federal wings and you can see them dropping bombs with drones and all kinds of stuff with their heavy metal soundtracks that they like but that what it wasn't even drones here it's pretty simple it was just mines so things they do love mines in miami i have a lot of mines all over that country but in this case these i guess massive what mines in the rivers given that the hunter is the only

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 and 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 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, rather than surrendering, they were trying to evacuate them and move them to somewhere 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. I think the hunters tried to evacuate them so then they mined the ships and and took those out and i think the the hunter has 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 uh 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 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're just held as POWs. Cool. Yeah, it's cool it's interesting uh obviously not many of us have access to uh underwater mines but uh you know maybe in a fictional future we might yeah well there you go folks uh this has been a regular naval warfare and you a podcast about irregular naval warfare and you. Send us your videos of yourselves engaging in irregular naval warfare.

Yeah, absolutely. Go out there. Look, how about this? Every listener, go out and sink one naval vessel. You know? Doesn't matter who's. Just any boat. Go sink a boat. Any boat. Go take out a boat. Super yacht? Knock it out. You see a fucking super yacht knock it out you see a dinghy

take that fucker out people kayaking fuck them 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 that they drive in San Diego 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 speedboat. Oh, yeah.

Merc 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 iHeartRadio 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. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Roffline. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from.

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