It Could Happen Here - Lessons On Combat and Discourse from Ukraine

Episode Date: April 7, 2022

We discuss Urban Combat tactics brought to you by Twitter dot com, and how conflict presents windows of possibility.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Oh, it could happen here. And it's currently happening there. There being Ukraine, which is in the midst of an invasion by the Russian government. I'm Robert Evans. This is a podcast about bad things and how to make them better. I'm joined as often by Garrison and Chris, my co-hosts. And we are talking about some of the advice, good and bad, that's been going around on social media about how to disable and destroy armored vehicles this is something we've kind of waited to do until the conflict was a little bit

more of a mature state but in brief if you have been following what's been happening in russia through the lens of social media or what's happening ukraine through the lens of social media one thing that has happened is in the early stages of the invasion a whole bunch of people flocked, particularly to Twitter. But also not this is not just stay on Twitter, there were a large number of mainstream news articles published on the subject of the things people were saying, to talk about different ways civilians could disable Russian armored vehicles or otherwise stymie and thwart the progress of Russian military units through their cities.

And this has been accompanied by things like the Ukrainian government giving out information on how to make Molotov cocktails. We talked about this in our Molotov cocktail episode and putting out really neat infographics on where to throw Molotov cocktails to disable armored vehicles. But it's also come with a lot of bad advice that I don't want people who are maybe looking at the potential of urban combat happening in their future to take away from this conflict because there's also a lot of disinfo. So that's what we're talking about today. Yes. And I guess one of the first places to probably discuss this urban combat idea is the probably the guy who's tried to make kind of a career out of talking

about urban combat, which would be John Spencer who who wrote a relatively viral twitter thread on this topic and has been writing about this thing for the past few years um he's uh he's the the chair of urban warfare studies at west point's modern war institute and served for like a quarter of a century as an infantry soldier including two deployments into Iraq. And yeah, the past few years, he's tried to kind of make a name for himself as the guy who writes about urban combat. And obviously, since this was happening, largely when Russia started invading Kiev, John Spencer put together some of his thoughts that went pretty viral on this said topic. Yeah. and it's frustrating.

You've got a quote in here from one of the articles about who he was giving out that says, some of his advice, such as preparing simple Molotov cocktails, is already being seen on the streets of Kiev, which is kind of framing it as if Spencer advised the Ukrainians to make Molotovs. Absolutely not true.

Before he made that thread, the government was urging people to resist. And also like Molotov cocktails got their name from people in Finland, not super far from Ukraine, resisting the Russian military in a very similar way to how they're being used by Ukrainian civilians now. Yeah. What I believe what John Spencer did, he's a guy with some qualifications, certainly like not a random person. We'll talk about random people giving advice too on Twitter. But he's also, none of his advice is new. None of it is from him.

None of it is counterintuitive. A good deal of it is bad. And most of what he said that is good is just him pulling things from US military combat manuals and from Ukrainian military combat manuals and then putting it up in social media in order to go viral and try to get another book deal by making it look as if he is giving advice

that is being adopted in real time, which is not what is happening. Yeah, I mean, like a good instance of this is, yeah, claiming that they're making Molotov cocktails due to his advice. I mean, there's a picture in that very article that was taken before he even posted that thread. So it's no they're they're people know how to make molotov cocktails that's not hard to find out in a lot of cases the ukrainian ukrainian government was giving out

instructions on how to do it and i mean and if you if you look at this picture um it looks very similar to a lot of a lot of like the the the almost like small defensive weapons factories that we saw across the states in 2020 you would often see just collections of bottles uh just ready to be thrown all kind of laid out in in in milk crates very similar to this photo now there was there was less actual molotov cocktails but the way that this is whole the way this is all set up looks looks very similar to any kind of insurgency tactics of being like, yeah, there's going to be spontaneous on the ground organizing because people are just kind of naturally gifted at that. for disabling armored vehicles, for causing distractions, for injuring and even sometimes killing soldiers. They are they are capable of doing that.

And they that's part of why the Ukrainian government put out these guides showing like where to huck the sons of bitches in order to disable, you know, transports and armored vehicles and whatnot. Now, that said, attempting to attack a military column with a Molotov cocktail in most circumstances is very close to suicidal. And I've watched a number of videos of Ukrainians do it. The times that seem to be most successful is when you have areas where the Russians are attempting to establish control.

You have small groups of vehicles that are moving down residential streets. You have a significant amount of traffic, of civilian traffic occurring alongside those military convoys. And as they pass the convoy, a civilian Hux a Molotov, or as they pass a building, a civilian Hux a Molotov. And those seem to be, broadly speaking, the situations in which people have kind of gotten away with it. We don't have any kind of of I'm not aware of any kind of solid overarching analysis of all of the use of Molotovs in this, but that is, broadly speaking, a potentially effective way to use a Molotov cocktail in order to degrade military capacity of an occupier. What doesn't work and

what Spencer and a number of other people suggested is this huck and painted tanks uh or other armored vehicles yeah and that may be surprising to a lot of people i think there's a lot of folks who want to believe this uh want to believe that that that could really work because it it's like ewok shit right it feels like the kind of thing insurgents should be doing. Yes, but here is the thing. When you have police officers who are tear gassing an area, and you huck a bunch of paint, and you get it over their face masks, and they cannot see, it reduces their ability to tear gas you for a while. It makes them uncomfortable.

It makes them have less fun, and it damages gear. When you huck a bunch of paint at an armored vehicle, the armored vehicle will return fire with a.50 caliber mounted dashka or some other similar gun, which fires bullets that are large enough to take chunks the size of your head out of concrete, and you will be torn apart and your organs liquefied in a hail of metal. Meanwhile, the paint that you are attempting to throw at that vehicle is almost certain to have no impact on it. Um, not only are you unlikely to get close enough to use the paint because you have to be considerably closer to do that than you have to with a Molotov in most situations, but also tanks are built with the understanding that it is possible that one or more of the ways in which they see will be obstructed. Tank drivers are trained to drive blind. There are ways of utilizing tanks when vision is obstructed because in the kinds of fights

that tanks are built to get into, they are often in situations where there is so much smoke around them, so many things bursting. Exactly. That there is effectively zero visibility, which is why when Spencer started talking about people throwing paint at tanks, a number of tank drivers came out and said, that's actually horrible advice. They don't work that way. And I was I was chatting with a couple of people. There was one fellow, a former Green Beret named Mike Nelson, who was posting about Spencer and very angry that he was basically copying material directly from stuff published by the Ukrainian government. And then like getting up anytime journalists or media figures would comment about Ukraine would like, there's a nasty post here where Ann Cabrera, who I think is some

sort of reporter, was like, I feel heart sick upon the latest news out of Mariupol. My God, just like expressing horror and humanitarian tragedy and spencer posts a link to his personal website and says me too not sure if you saw my mini manual for the urban defender but it is available in english and ukrainian oh boy yeah it's so like anyway grifty shit like that but yeah because that is all that's very different than also like throwing paint at like a squad car or like a riot like a riot truck that's coming through because if you obscure their vision the worst they can do is crash into a wall they're not going to start firing uh massive uh head explosion rounds from a central uh yeah so they they do not

like for one thing the like the police as bad as they can be, their default when they come under any kind of like attack is not to start firing machine guns wildly in all directions. Not yet at least. Which Russian soldiers do. Not yet at least. But, you know, the other thing I was chatting with Matthew Mora, who's a is has been one of the guys who's been yelling at Spencer on Twitter. Matthew was a Marine Corps tank commander and was blown up in Afghanistan. So he was in a tank that was attacked several times and eventually destroyed. So he has some firsthand knowledge about what works and does not work against tanks. And one of the things he pointed out is that the people who destroyed his

tank put together, I don't know, $100, $200 worth of various accelerants and random scrap metal and made a bomb that destroyed an Abrams tank, that works a lot better than paint. Yeah. And it's the kind of thing where I think one of the things that's frustrating here is you've got a lot of these like American kind of military academic guys. And I know Spencer served, but that doesn't necessarily mean much. It doesn't mean just being deployed to Iraq doesn't mean you did anything. But they were deployed and maybe they did see urban combat. But I have watched United States soldiers in an intense urban combat environment. And most of what they did was be inside of MRAPs because it's very hard to blow those up while the Iraqi military did a great deal of the fighting. And when US soldiers did engage in fighting, they did so with absolute air supremacy and with artillery supremacy, which isn't to say that it wasn't dangerous, but it is a

profoundly different situation than engaging in urban combat when the airspace is contested and when you do not have artillery supremacy. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

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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. 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. So what does that mean in terms of like, what can people actually take away that's useful from this? What can people actually take away that's useful from this? Well, on an individual level, some things have been extremely effective.

Ukrainian territorial defense militias have been very effective at doing things like picking up small arms, going out in small patrols into rural environments around the area where Russian troops are moving in small convoys. environments around the area where Russian troops are moving in small convoys. And oftentimes, because of the way the advance went, you would have a single or a couple of Russian munitions trucks essentially alone and unsupported trying to find their way around. You had civilians doing stuff like turning signs around, like removing signs. Which they were instructed to by various Ukrainian officials as well. Yes, yes. And which I'm sure some people just started doing because it seemed like a good idea. But that sort of shit causes them to burn fuel,

causes them to abandon vehicles. You had these kind of independent groups of farmers towing away abandoned vehicles. You had small raiding parties attacking convoys and attacking isolated units. You had cases where, you know, Russian military units early in the fight would get into Kiev kind of on accident and be ambushed by territorial defense units and

wiped out. And those are all very effective examples of decentralized kind of ground up resistance against a major military force. Now, one thing we don't know that is important, if you think about the potential that you might have to endure something like this, is we have no idea what the casualties were like among those. Yes, it is a total black box. And it's it's probable that part of why Russian forces did the war crime they did in Buka was because they had an attitude that all civilians were insurgents, which is, you know what happens. When you have kind of a people's war. Which doesn't justify an act of genocide. But it is something.

People should keep aware of. When you start fucking with the signs. And ambushing the convoys. And throwing molotovs. One of the things that will happen. Is it will accelerate the violence. That is being done. To the civilian population.

It's a justified target. In some propaganda lens. Yeah exactly. And that doesn't mean like it's you should resist if you are invaded. But these are things that also should be noted is this is what happens when you resist. Right. This is what a modern war of this type looks like. Other things that I'm not sure if they've been effective, but they're certainly not

bad strategies is the construction of a lot of vehicle barriers, tank traps, blockades. That was what I wanted to talk about next. Is the barricade thing most than what we've been kind of seeing or being speculated about in the East and then how we've seen barricade setups a lot in the past few years in various resistance movements

to a variety of success levels and non-success levels. Yeah. And these are like barriers, tank traps of a very long to a variety of success levels and non-success levels. Yeah. Yeah. And these are like barriers, tank traps of a very long history in warfare. So they absolutely can be and have been effective many, many times on the battlefield. So this is not an area of does this thing work?

But it is a question of like, and this is something we just don't seem to have perfect data on. Did it particularly play a role in what's happening here? And that's harder to tell and is probably going to be different, you know, depending on the tactical area you're talking about, which kind of like theater you're talking about. But, you know, one thing that's like the way in which these kind of barriers, hedgehogs and like whatnot work is they're they're an area denial tool. It's like an area denial tool for vehicles. And it makes military units slow down. It makes them take more time in clearing area. They have to tow things away or blow them up. And they also can provide, depending on the type of thing, cover for infantry in urban combat situations, which obviously can

cut both ways a little bit. But there's a reason why you see these kinds of things in every conflict and also a reason why people put them up in protests. It can be very useful to deny the vehicles of the enemy access to an area temporarily. And a big pile of metal always does that 100% of the time. It requires something to deal with it. Yeah. That was something that was very

kind of considered when there was an increase in like vehicular attacks during 2020 of like a lot of vehicles ramming into massive marches. There was definitely a concerted effort to try to block off streets where stuff is happening, whether that be like, you know,

corkers for marches, the people who specifically block off the sides of streets with their own cars to follow the march around or you know less less effective barricades like throwing a chain link fence in the middle of the street which is i guess better than nothing sometimes but also maybe not the most effective thing yeah in terms of trying to like build layered barricades that's not just you know one flimsy wall but it's a series of things that can compress down and when you're talking about barricades. That's not just one flimsy wall, but it's a series of things that can compress down. And when you're talking about barricades in a kind of militant situation, there's broadly speaking got to be two purposes. One of those purposes is to add to the friction

that you are attempting to create for the enemy. And that's all insurgent warfare is about creating friction, right? Because friction degrades assets. It's over time, it caused basically like, okay, so say you blocked off a bunch of roads and you've added 15, 20 miles to the transport distance that this convoy has to go. Well, generally speaking, in the case of war, when we talk about war, it's assumed that about one mile is in terms of wear and tear like 10 plus miles because of how much more difficult the strain on vehicles is in those situations. So you've added a great deal more strain on the vehicles that increases the chance that one of them is going to blow a tire. One of them is going to crack an axle. One of them is going to have an engine block go like blow or whatever, which means over time, if you're doing this a bunch, if you're setting up barricades and you're effectively increasing or all the amount of travel time or at least the amount of idling time that forces have to go in by a significant amount, you're guaranteeing a certain number of those vehicles are going to break or be rendered inoperable in that time. And you're also, the other thing that they do is they allow you to deny area and funnel the enemy

into a specific, into a place more advantageous for you, right? And this can be advantageous if you're trying to set up an ambush, if you're just trying to buy time for forces to move back to a better position. It can, you know, there's a number of uses for it. But if you set up a series of obstacles like this and guarantee that they're going to have to find an alternate

route and you know, broadly speaking, cause it's your terrain, what kind of route they're going to take, um, then you could do stuff like drop, throw a drone at them. Or if, because of the damage you've done to the roads and the difficulty of how difficult you made it to advance, they wind up just parked for a long time. That's also a great situation to bomb people with a fucking drone which is by far the most effective weapons unit that we have seen built by civilians in this war by the way uh it's not molotovs it's certainly not paint it is uh civilian volunteers who put together combat drones using generally DJI drones that they have upgraded with thermal imaging cameras in order to see at night. And they have used 3D printed parts in order to drop bombs from.

And they have carried out for weeks now hundreds of extremely successful nighttime raids on Russian positions. This has been effective for a couple of reasons. One of them is that the Russian military does not widespread have effective night vision. We don't need to get it. The reasons for this are complicated based in the mix of like appropriations, corruption, issues with the technologies they do have, yada, yada, yada.

But they do not have the capacity in large scale to carry out operations at night to the extent that the Ukrainians do. And so you get when nighttime comes, these forces that were advancing in places like Kiev, clustering up and huddling for the night. And then these hunter killer drones would sneak in at night and they are impossible to fucking see in daytime. I can tell you from experience at night, they're ghosts just dropping bombs on on armored vehicles and on groups of soldiers.

And these, you know, what you have seen with these units, which have been integrated, they are like started out as civilian volunteer groups. They have been integrated into the military to a significant extent. And I think what you do have some of this is conjecture on my part, but you've had a lot of Russian officers and generals killed, generally because they have been communicating over open phone lines and i suspect some of what's been going on is when they figure out where one of these guys is they send some of these fucking drone units in to blow them up because it's not hard if you know where someone is to kill them with a drone in this way i think the other thing to talk about in terms of you know building obstacles building barricades is the whole cover versus concealment thing where a lot of people think that if they hide behind a barricade they're now impervious which obviously isn't true if a drone's going to get you and obviously isn't true for a large a large number of the munitions that get

fired whether they be bullets or tank rounds yeah yeah i mean it's and i i think that's something in videos i have watched of Russian soldiers responding to contact. You have seen a lot of people in ambushes that they lost hiding behind vehicles, which if it's an armored vehicle, definitely can protect you from small arm fire. But if somebody shoots that vehicle with a with a javelin, you may find yourself next to a cooking off tank. you may find yourself next to a cooking off tank. And I've seen shit like people hiding behind fucking fences, which is terrible to hide behind failing to go to ground, which is always your best bet is to kind of get behind a berm or something, get low to the fucking ground.

And it's, it's interesting to me, a lot of the worst videos of responding to contact that I've seen on the Russian side have been there. The Russ guardia units, I'm not great at pronouncing russian but they are essentially police special forces units that actually makes sense yeah they have every video i've seen of these guys handle being ambushed very poorly because they're not trained for that they're trained to go bust into a house and arrest somebody you know like yeah this is not where they're what they're trained to go bust into a house and arrest somebody you know like yeah this is not where

they're what they're supposed to be doing the other thing that spencer really focuses on is this whole like um a sniper idea of of being afraid of someone of someone just cutting you down from above which obviously kind of is you know more more of a thing with the drone stuff as well but this idea of not even being good at firearms but just having the threat of taking fire from somewhere as you can't see uh yeah in terms of like knowing your terrain better than whatever invading force does and knowing how to set up spots where it's it's less you're less likely to get shelled um i mean yeah and that's that's very i mean, this is very basic and old military

doctrine, but this is like, you know, the way a sniper can work in a dense urban environment is you have a large number of guys and they are trying to move to a specific area. And if they take fire, that limits their options from forward movement unless they're willing to just risk getting hit and generally they're not and then you find yourself kind of holding up for time to take out the sniper which can be an involved and difficult process for just a single sniper and yeah that's definitely a thing like that you don't have to be the fucking uh chris kyle in order to effectively work in that kind of situation. Now, what makes that effective?

Because if you just have a sniper attacking police officers or soldiers in an urban environment, generally speaking, there exists the ability to deal with that pretty fucking quickly. But if you have small units of snipers, kind of oftentimes just like civilians with hunting rifles who are doing that within the context of soldiers also being resisted by other soldiers and dealing with like an active combat environment, then yeah, a handful of people with rifles can be a significant force multiplier. It's a lot extra to deal with. And I suspect shit like that has been part of why you would seen cities like Mariupol resist so long under overwhelming force is that there's a pretty wide comprehensive amount of,

of resistance going on in those areas. And yeah, a single person, if they're not like the only person engaging with the enemy in that, in that area can make it a lot harder for them to effectively respond to contact. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora, An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com.

podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hey, I'm Jack Peace 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. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture.

Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeart Radio 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. I think the last thing I wanted to kind of get into today is the whole, I mean,

this kind of ties into the weaponized and reality aspect of being like all of these people who are giving, you know, unsolicited advice on twitter.com, whether they be John Spencer, whether they be, you know, the wife of a former Marine,

whether they be, there we go, tank mechanics, whatever, like everyone's, everyone's doing this now. And it's all seen as like completely valid right we're giving instructions on how to do urban insurgency online um and this is totally fine yet when you know when information from

hong kong gets used in protest kind of uh propaganda for urban insurgency instructions then it's like international like organized like terrorism yeah yeah if you're telling people how to use fucking laser pointers yeah so like the the selective thing how be like okay we're allowed to tell people how to do urban insurgency right now but when this is over or in the past it's it's not allowed right you have john spencer who i doubt would be giving i doubt was a big fan of any Black Lives Matter demonstration. Yeah, I don't know personally, but I certainly doubt

was giving people instructions on how to disable bear cats. Yeah, I don't think he was giving instructions on how to ambush police officers or anything like that. So you had this whole like coalition of people on Twitter.com giving all this advice out

on how to do urban insurgency and whatever well also you know whenever something is is happening like that where they live it is that that is obviously bad and obviously not a good thing whether you know for you know you could talk about whatever like ideological drive people have but i think this is just an interesting thing worth talking about in terms of yeah how we will off we will view you know this type of discussion of urban insurgency is always like a bad thing right it's always this thing that like terrorists do you're helping you know you're you're always you're rooting for the destruction of civilization or whatever um then it just takes a few things for you get you know

an instructor at west point to start you know posting threads to help sell his new book on these very same topics yeah i mean there's i think a little degree to which i might new book on these very same topics. Yeah. I mean, there's, I think, a little degree to which I might push back on some of that. Not necessarily with Spencer, but I can remember during the Fed War in Portland, which was probably the part of Portland that most people are aware of when you had a bunch of federal agents snatching people.

It was the most warlike part of the summer. You had, for this brief period of time, a lot of folks, because I took part in this, giving out advice on Twitter to respond to and handle police munitions that certainly went more viral than it would have gone

in a different sort of situation. And I think you do have I think part of what you're seeing in Ukraine, and this is just sort of a general thing that happens online, is when something a news moment blows up in a way that is big enough, it disrupts the norms. And suddenly for a while, you can talk about things like how to disable government armored vehicles and fight. Reality suddenly becomes so much bigger. What is acceptable discourse suddenly expands out much bigger than what it usually does?

It becomes a lot more permeable. And I do think broadly, like we're shitting on Spencer here because he's frustrating to me. But I do think that like really, really broadly, it's good when stuff like, it's good for people to think about,

even if I don't, I certainly don't, I certainly do not want there to be, I don't want anyone listening to this who has not experienced urban warfare to experience urban warfare. I will say that right now. But it is not bad for people to be thinking about and talking about the ways in which a civilian population can do damage to an invading organized military force. That's not a bad discourse to exist. And it's not bad for people to be thinking in this way.

And it's not bad for the people who are potentially in power to have that in the back of their heads, you know? Yeah. I mean, like one of the first things you sent me when I started working for it could happen here was the was the city is not neutral piece um on why urban combat is is hard um so yeah it's definitely it's the thing that yeah it's it's always it's it's worth thinking about but you don't want to we're not trying to wish on anybody and i think you can you can look at all of like the weirdos

on the internet who have like you know this you know there's some degree of like nazis who have done this but also just like random other people who've like flown to ukraine to help join fight off the russians because they think it's going to be cool and they'll be able to work with the asf battalion or something who then get stationed to basically be cannon fodder because they're this like 20 year old from america who's never actually held a gun before i i hope that one's true. It is just like a post, because if it's true, then it means that someone in the Ukrainian government is consciously making the choice to use wannabe Azov veterans as cannon fodder,

which is very funny, extremely funny if it's happening. Right. We don't that's not that's not confirmed. Certainly a percentage, probably not an insignificant percentage of dudes who have done shown up to do this have like been like, oh, my God, what the fuck? Some of them, I'm sure, just didn't have much experience. I'm sure some of them were dudes who had experience being on the side with overwhelming air power and were like freaking out go viral. There's plenty of videos of like mixed foreigner units in heavy combat, including a bunch where you can hear U.S. and British dudes fighting Russia. Like because a lot there's a lot of people who have legitimate like hard combat experience who have volunteered to go do this. Yeah. The one thing I also do find kind of uncomfortable is, I mean, it's not super unlike what we're doing now, though we're trying to come at it from a more critical standpoint. But like Americans who maybe have gone to a protest or two, but no real experience just going on Twitter.com and talking about how they think beating an army is best done. How that works yeah yeah well and like you know if you look at

like the okay like the the times that like the u.s has actually attempted to fight its own army right like the the last time this happened was the la riots in 92 and they got their shit pushed in like it it it went really really badly for the people on the streets. It was really ugly. There was a lot of bodies. Yeah. And like, and you know,

and part, part of what, you know, and I will say like part of what's, I guess useful about this is like, yeah, this is, I mean,

this is a thing that is, I mean, I wasn't alive for it, but like a boat, like Robert, you were alive for that. Like, like that,

that, that is a thing like in living memory, the army has been deployed on American soil and one of the things that went wrong is that the people on the ground had basically no tactics and this is something you can read from like the army's accounts of this is that like the people

that they were dealing with had no tactical experience whatsoever they had no conception of tactics and the army was able to very quickly crush them and you know if you don't want that to happen to you yeah like there there there is a way in which this stuff is important to be thinking about but also like dear god that is the worst shit like yeah you don't want that here here's what's what's important to understand about that Anytime you are dealing with any kind of conflict,

like physical conflict that involves violence, and that can be as narrow as like a protest, you know, where people are squaring off with the cops or an actual like full on military conflict. The winner is the person who is most disruptive to the enemy's Ota loop, right? Observe, orient, decide, act. It's the loop that you go through when you are trying to decide how to act in any kind of a kinetic situation. On the streets in a protest, one of the things where we have all seen people be the most successful against cops is when you change the rules on them, is when they are in a situation they did not anticipate being in because they tend to freak out and they tend to respond ineffectively, right?

You do not want to, if you see them preparing to act in a certain way because they believe you are doing a specific thing, you ideally do not then do the thing they are preparing for because that is a situation which you're going to wind up battering yourself against a riot line, right? That's the core of the move, be like water thing from Hong Kong is the idea that do not engage them in a way they are prepared for. And that is a piece of advice, broadly speaking, that's just as true in a war as it is in a protest situation. Do not meet them on their own terms. What this also means is that you don't want to be playing by a set of rules that are ineffective in the situation you're getting into. So like when you had protesters in 93 in LA engaging with the military, they were playing

by the rules of how do you deal with cops? And suddenly they were dealing with soldiers. And boy, howdy, are the rules different, you know? And likewise, the Russian military was trained and blooded to a large extent in conflicts in places like Syria, where, again, they had air supremacy. They had artillery supremacy. They were backing the state that was fighting against these insurgents. And so their soldiers gained the combat experience they had with every advantage in their pocket. on the conflict here and there, one of the things that's had the biggest impact on how the Ukrainian military has responded and comported itself in this war so far versus the Russian is for years, eight years since this conflict started, the Ukrainian military has developed a

posture of having soldiers sign up for these brief contracts, sending and rotating them through the battleground in the Donbass so that when this war started, they had a huge number more than anyone else in Europe of combat veterans who got their experience fighting against a peer adversary when they did not have supremacy in artillery or air support when they engaged them. And then the Ukrainian military very intelligently spread these guys out amongst their their their units, which is what you want to do. Any military is going to want to, like, spread out your veterans among units because you're not everyone's not going to be a combat veteran. But you want some guys who know what it's like to be shot at in every kind of unit that might get shot at because they stiffen the back of everybody else.

And this is what. So, again, when when the war started, to get back to what I'm saying, the Russian military entered preparing for a police action, like the ones they carried out in Chechnya, like what they did have done for Assad in Syria, and they got a war. And the Ukrainians came into that fight prepared for a war. So I think one of the things that is important when you look at, consider any kind of possibility of being involved in a conflict is you want to know what are the rules your opponent is going in ready to abide by, right? What are the things they are expecting to happen? What is kind of the rubric with which they are looking at what they expect to occur in this conflict? And by God, you want to be going in there with a different one, you know? And that,

again, depending on how you do it, that can go badly or that can go really well. Because like I said, if you're going and prepared to fight cops and you wind up dealing with soldiers, that's not great. But if you have prepared, if you are able to kind of lock your enemy into the kind of conflict that they're not ready to face,

then generally speaking, you'll win. We have 20 years of experience in the war on terror of more or less that going down. Yeah, there's a good example of this also with the IDF's war against Hezbollah in 2006, where it's like the IDF is a really good army, but they'd spent like, I don't know, they spent like 40 years basically just sort of like,'t know like they spent like 40 years basically just sort of like you know they've been about 40 years doing police actions yeah and then they run into hezbollah and they expect hezbollah is going to just you know they've made lebanon 2006 and their expectations that hezbollah is going to go to ground they're going to do a guerrilla war

and instead hezbollah like they go into bunkers but they stand and fight and the idf gets smashed and like you know they they they pull out and they spend a bunch of time just like murdering people from the air but like they don't win the war and like it like that that happens a lot especially with these armies that are used to dealing used to doing these sort of police action things and they lose to enemies that like the the fact that the idf lost a war to the hezbollah is like by like balance of forces it's like this is inconceivable like how on earth did they possibly lose this but it's like yeah this stuff happens because they weren't like yeah

they were they were they were doing they were doing this police action thing and they weren't used to they hadn't fought an enemy that was actually going to stick it and fight them since like the 70s yeah i mean a lot of the great defeats in military history are because of a force came into a situation expecting a different kind of fight than what they got. That was a part of what happened to Napoleon when he invaded Russia. Right. And the Russians did not respond the way that he expected a state to respond to having their capital occupied and effectively kind of starved him out. There was other shit going on there. Attrition had reallyeted the the french military before it got there but

but yeah um i guess yeah how i would want how i would want to wrap up this is basically saying like in all of that stuff regarding how this war has really prompted a lot of things that were seemingly more unexpected and seemingly thought to be previously more impossible um in terms of how fast both rhetoric around these types of conflicts can spread and morph and the role in which disinformation and misinformation is used for both sides to

gain ground on the other and how relating back to what could happen here in terms of the urban crumbles or the small urban collapses and escalating inter-country conflict in various places around the world, how fast certain things can happen

that we once thought are more impossible or improbable at the very least. How fast you can get people giving advice on how to take out armored vehicles on twitter.com. How fast you can get people giving advice on how to take out armored vehicles on twitter.com how fast you can get you know people like people who are you know seemingly are you know seemingly not not tied to certain to certain like ideas or ideologies giving out you know information on types of types of ways to resist invading or oppressing forces it is uh it is an interesting kind of...

It's like case study is the wrong word because it's obviously having horrible effects with thousands and thousands of people being slaughtered. But it is intriguing to watch how, in terms of the microcosm, macrocosm idea of eventually, you know, if conflict breaks out in other places around the world in the next few years,

how our current, like, social media landscape, how our, kind of, roles around, like, urban conflict and all of these things kind of interact with each other and how we view, yeah, what is likely and what we, you know, who you're going to predict is going to do X thing based on people invading a city that it's not theirs. Yeah. I mean, I think in terms of stuff that people can take out of this, you know, without necessarily needing to prepare to fight in an urban insurgency.

One of them is that anytime big shit happens and more big shit is going to keep happening for us, you have a window of opportunity through which you can get things across to people that they would not normally listen to. Yeah. And that is a really important time. And it helps to think about the kind of situations that might occur and the kind of things that you want to push out into the world, because this is this is true with climate change as it is with war, right? We're going to have more disasters.

And when those disasters hit, it will be easier to get people to talk about radical solutions to things like climate change. Yep. And it will be easier to do things like get out in the fucking streets and get large groups of people agitated. You know, we're at some point, fucking God willing, we will have the climate change equivalent to what happened in 2020,

where something so terrible and fucked up happens that a lot of people take to the streets. And hopefully we will succeed to a greater extent in forcing actual change than maybe we did in 2020. But that's something like that could very well happen. And so that's one of the lessons I think you can take out of this, again, without sort of obsessing over military technology or getting into gunfights with fucking soldiers is Ukraine is hard evidence that that is the way the media environment works.

You get these moments where you can really push some wild shit to people. That's why I like the whole uprising or insurrection model more than the revolution model, because the uprising model posits that basically you have, you know, base society, base reality, you know, always at like the baseline level. Then an uprising happens. It's like it's like shooting up onto a graph. Suddenly, so many things that are

just outside the normal way that we view systems like governance, systems of social control, so many things become so much more possible in this heightened place. And that's what the uprising does. It gets things that were suddenly, that were once so far away and once just only in the imagination,

it makes them so much closer. There's this feeling in July of 2020 during the height of the Fed War being like, so many things feel possible in this one moment. Nothing is true and all is permitted. Like, you can get away with some shit. Yeah, and so using the uprising model,

yeah, it can really, or the insurrection model, it can really make things feel so much more possible than what they usually feel like and there's you know brief moments in time where massive social change can happen and you know you have to learn how to recognize when these moments are happening and then organize effectively when they do happen yeah yep well i believe that does it for us today. Yeah.

We've been wanting to talk about this topic for a while in terms of, you know, one of the very first things that started happening was various governments giving guides out on where to attack armored vehicles with Molotovs. You're like, oh, wow, this is intriguing to have a government giving out instructions. This probably has some implications on how we view, you know, collapse in a general concept.

So, yeah, ever since that's not happening, we wanted to talk about it. So, yeah, it certainly leaves us with a lot to think about. And I didn't get to go on my rant about the structure of the Russian military vis-a-vis their lack of an NCO Corps. But maybe we'll talk about that in the future. I'm sure we'll have enough time to talk about this in the future. Well, everyone, I don't know, do something

productive. Yeah, do something productive. Don't charge armored vehicles. Don't charge armored vehicles with paint, but maybe think about the different things you would like to get a bunch of people suddenly radicalized on Twitter to do in the immediate wake of a horrible climate disaster in which large numbers of folks are

suddenly willing to take to the streets seemingly overnight. Maybe be thinking about that and trying to talking with your buddies about it and being like, hey, if everybody gets out in the streets again, what kind of information do I want to spread? What would be good to get people talking about in that instance when they're suddenly listening for, I don't know, about two weeks? It feels like you get about two weeks. Two, honestly, yeah. About two weeks. Yeah.

Well, in the wake of the new IPCC report, we certainly have a lot to think about. All right. Bye. Bye. certainly have a lot to think about. All right. Bye. Bye.

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