Sea Control - Sea Control 362 - Amphibious Lessons Learned from Ukraine with Tim Heck & Walker Mills

Episode Date: July 14, 2022

Links:What can we learn about amphibious warfare from a conflict that has had very little of it? A lot, by Walker Mills and Timothy Heck, Modern War Institute, April 22, 2022.

Hey folks, it's Jared. Today I'm joined by Tim Heck and Walker Mills, and we'll be examining some of the early amphibious lessons learned from the Ukraine War. This episode was edited and produced by Alexia Boulaghi. I would like to pause here to highlight some of our local chapters. Whether you're in South Korea, Egypt, Singapore, France, New York, India, or the Caribbean, chances are there's a SimSec local chapter near you. You can find a full listing of our local chapters and contact information on the website at simsec.org. So if you're interested, please reach out and get involved. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, The Village Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of

iron brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. With that, Kimber's Men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Hello, Hashemates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guests today are my Sea Control co-hosts, Walker Mills and Tim Heck, and we'll be discussing their article for Modern War Institute entitled, What Can We Learn About Amphibious Warfare from a Conflict That Has Had Very Little of It, A Lot? So, Tim, I'm going to start by, first of all, complimenting MWI, because you guys have had a lot of maritime content lately.

I understand you're a Marine Corps officer as well as an MWI employee. So I feel like you are our insurgent there a little bit. And by our, I mean the Naval Forces. So, but can you tell us a little bit about your MWI and your professional background? Hey, Ixnay on the insurgent A stuff. No, yes. So I work at MWI as the Deputy Editorial Director. I host their podcast, The Spear, involved in a lot of the other projects that go on

there uh up here at west point and you know as this ukraine war kicked off walker and i had been talking because we're working on another amphib volume together and are finishing up a book for army university press right now so you know walker and i were talking about it and was like something's going to happen and we should talk about this thinking like what would be the outlets to get this out and mwi has been doing a lot on the war in ukraine and so we you know we put our heads together and came up with this article and it's been pretty well received and i think you you do nail it a little bit with the worthy you know i'm the insurgent a uh up there that walker winds up publishing pretty prolifically with us and you know we do wind up doing a lot of naval content

and that's um i think there's a you know there's a gap that simsec certainly working to fill uh in in this think space uh about naval operations so that probably didn't answer any of your question But certainly, I think, framed, you know, kind of what I do at MWI on a daily basis and why we went there with this article. Yeah, that's fine. Can you tell us a little bit more about your Marine Corps background as far as what your professional specialty is? Yeah. So I'm an artillery officer by training. I did four years on active duty as a lieutenant and got out as a young captain, joined the reserves immediately, and then have bounced around in a variety of kind of reserve roles, both traditional line unit, one week in a month,

two week a year type drill units, and then staff jobs at other places. Currently, I'm a joint historian with Marine Corps History Division. So I spend my time working for the Marine Corps, interviewing folks about recent operations. So we've done a lot on the Hamid Karzai International Airport evacuation and the leaving of Afghanistan last year. But today I was interviewing a man who was a Marine Corps captain in the 1950s.

And so talking about the impact of Korea on his training and his upbringing in the Marine Corps, he was a 90-year-old man. And it's a pretty great gig because I get to do, you know, I go from modern incidents, you know, how are we experimenting with force design? How are we experimenting with the ABO? You know, capturing those initial reactions

from the units that are out testing it and also get a chance to talk to to the Marines that came before us so it's a pretty great gig for for me right now and blends the the academic with the Marine Corps in a pretty unique way well thanks Tim Walker you're literally quote-unquote on the air with us quite a bit I don't want to skip you though so can you can you tell us a little bit about your background aside from being the quote-unquote poor man's Brian Kirk yeah thanks jared it's it's fun to be on the the sea control podcast again as a guest and not as a host um bit a little bit of a hiatus for me but i i see that stare and i i need to get back to making uh making some more episodes taking the uh the load off your back um so yeah i'm walker mills uh marine

corps infantry officer getting ready to transition into the uh unmanned systems community i have a way shorter uh career than uh than tim um i was a platoon commander second time first marines and the Marine Corps sent me to Spanish school. And now I'm, I'm down in the Caribbean at the Colombian Naval Academy in Cartagena, Colombia, teaching classes to cadets and supporting stuff here. And then kind of in my, in my spare time, you know, I like to write and publish and do some podcasting and also a fellow at the Brut Krillak Center for Innovation and Future War at Marine Corps University. So I can use that as a little bit of a top cover for writing. And then I should say, and Tim may say something similar, but we wrote this, but we're definitely not like

deep Russia experts. I think it's interesting to kind of listen to some of the really good commentary. Like I was just listening, Jared, to the sea control episode with Michael Peterson and kind of compare that to some of the stuff that we're seeing in the Marine Corps. But yeah, that's me. No, and that's a good reminder. We should timestamp this. So we're recording this on Sunday, May 15th. So if this airs and the Russians have suddenly landed in Odessa for some reason, put a brigade ashore there, that's why we're not talking about it because it's Sunday, May 15th, and that hasn't happened yet. So thank you both for joining us. As a reminder, all opinions are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise

associated. Tim, first question to you then, what is the Russian amphibious capability in the Black Sea? So the Russians in the Black Sea have kind of traditionally thought of it as their lake. There are, you know, as you look at it, you've got other Eastern European nations along the Black Sea, but it's the Russian lake, right? You get through the Straits of Bosphorus, you get down into Turkey, you get to warm water. And so there's been a traditional Russian interest in that sea. Currently, and this was, you know, one of the things that got noted before the war kicked off was the Russians had moved amphibious ships in there. Commentators were calling it a task force, but they were moving landing ship tanks in through the Bosphorus, up into the Black

Sea, through the Dardanelles. And it's not uncommon to see Russian ships transiting through there, right? That's how they got ships down to sit off the coast of Syria. That's how they get into the Med. But before all of this kicked off, the Russians were moving those landing ship tanks, right? The Minsk, the Korolev, and the Kaliningrad were going through, each with the capability of landing a good number of forces. Since then, though, we haven't seen a lot, right? So the Moskva gets sunk last month. You've got another ship sinking at port. So it's there, but what it's doing is unclear. And I think that's, you know, maybe not the manpower calculations aren't the big thing in all of this, but the why. And I think that's a question a lot of us have been

asking about the war in general is, wait, why haven't we seen X or why have we seen Y? And And from an amphibious perspective, the Russians have this force, they have control of the sea, you know, the Sea of Azov, they can get from Novorossiysk, they can shorten their logistics lines, they can do all of these things, they have the capabilities, but they're not. And I don't know how much of that is the success of the Ukrainians, right? The Ukrainians introduced this Neptune anti-ship missile fortuitously just last year. The U.S. is starting to send and the West is starting to send more anti-ship capabilities. But to what extent is that, you know, the success of the defenders or the failures of the attackers? And it ultimately doesn't matter if you're Ukrainian because it means you don't have Russian naval infantry, Russian Marines storming your beaches. Well, can you explain the different types of amphibious operations for the listeners, the draw D, if you will? yeah so there are five types of amphibious operations and everybody kind of thinks of

amphibious operations as your tarawa's your it and john's your normandy's right over the beach had that assault you also have you've got withdrawals right so i can come off the beach just as easily as i can go on it you have feints so i can put a force in waiting off the shore and move like I'm going to do an amphibious assault or an amphibious operation of some kind. And the classic example of that is sitting the Marine Corps off the coast of Kuwait during Desert Storm and Desert Shield, right? I can pin down the Iraqis, and they certainly did, thinking that the Marines were going to come over the beach, and they didn't. So I've been calling it a feint. It's more technically termed a demonstration.

The other thing is you've got to raid, right? So this is, I'm going to hit the beach, I'm going to seize an objective, I'm going to destroy a port, and I'm going to come right back off. You also have non-combatant evacuation operations, which again, the Marine Corps has done a fair amount of, and humanitarian operations. You know, you kind of think of West Africa in the 90s and in early 2000s, Marine Corps and the MEWS and the Navy were sitting off of there, pulling folks out with relative frequency. So the Russians have the capabilities to do all of those things, but they really haven't. They've done a few attacks, a few small scale raids perhaps, but it's not the, you know, over the shore into Odessa that I think a lot of

us were looking at kind of expecting from the beginning which is interesting because traditional russian amphibious or soviet amphibious operations during the second world war the great patriotic war in their terminology a lot of them happened in ukraine coming out of crimea going into crimea and in the ukraine and so to not see any of that in this is an interesting kind of an interesting take i don't know i don't it takes not the right word but it is an interesting gap perhaps i'm to ask you about the historical piece in just a second, but Walker, you mentioned an uncontested landing as part of the 2008 war in Georgia. What happened in that operational? So we don't have a ton of information about the role of the Russian Navy in the 2008 Georgia conflict. It was mostly

happened on land. It was only a few days long. And actually the first time I heard about the amphibious component of that was when I was doing some background reading and research to write this article. But we know that coming on some of those same landing ship tanks, those amphibious ships that Tim was talking about, they landed about two battalions of naval infantry. In Russian, naval infantry is usually motorized or mechanized. So it's a bit heavier than what we think about in the Marine Corps in Abkhazia, which is one of the separatist regions in Georgia. So at that time, it still is part of Georgia, but it was controlled by these separatist forces. So it was an uncontested landing. And that's probably about as much as they could have done. You know, remember

in 2008, that was before the, you know, I'll use air quotes here, modernization of the Russian military, because it doesn't seem like it was terribly effective. And, you know, we're seeing a lot of the same issues that they had in 2008, manifesting themselves in Ukraine in 2022. But basically, they're just kind of moving troops, probably from their base in Sevastopol, where they have the headquarters of their Black Sea Fleet to get them into the fight in Georgia. And I don't think they were terribly relevant operationally. So it was probably at the time as much an example of inter-service jockeying and the Russian Navy was trying to get some play on the situation, right? So they can kind of take home a piece of the pie and say, yeah, we also

got to participate in the conflict in Georgia. And I think that's probably a piece of what we're also seeing in Ukraine or what the Russian Navy wants to do is that, you know, you can just kind of look at the geography and what you see in the news, and it's obviously the conflict in Ukraine right now is dominated by what's going on on land, right? We see a lot about tanks, a lot about Javelin missiles, infantry fights or urban fights, et cetera. And amphibious operations are a way for the Navy to get a piece of the action, you know, and sometimes it's operationally relevant, but sometimes it's just a way to get that service in on the action, right? So the admirals can kind of justify their relevance in their budgets, et cetera, et cetera. And I think

also important when we're talking about the Georgia conflict is that was kind of a premature end of some Russian potential amphibious capability. So if the listeners remember, Russia was in the process of purchasing these two Mistral-class helicopter assault ships from France. And that would have been kind of a major, perhaps revolutionary advancement in the Russian amphibious capability because they don't really have the ability to launch helicopters from ships in support of an amphibious operation, which, you know, anyone familiar with what the U.S. Marine Corps is doing or the Royal Marines are doing, you know, helicopters are sometimes even the primary method by which we're moving from ship to shore. So not having those kind of

makes you a second tier or third tier amphibious force. And then we also know that the Russian military generally relies heavily on helicopters. So that's kind of extra limiting for them. And these larger assault ships would have given them that capability and probably played a big role in the 2014 seizure of Crimea and in the current conflict. But France obviously didn't end up selling them. And I think they went to Egypt at probably kind of bargain bin prices. So in some ways, the 2008 war and the performance in Georgia triggered this military modernization for the Russian military, but it was also kind of the end or a big, big issue in amphibious development. And so in that way, they're kind of limited now, I think, still to doing what we saw in Georgia, which is basically using amphibious ships not to pull off a contested landing or something like that, but really kind of using them like trucks and just moving around some of their naval infantry within the theater. Kim, what's Russia's history with amphibious operations?

I mean, I alluded to it earlier, the Russians are, as the inheritors of the Soviet legacy, have do have a tradition of amphibious operations, but again it's not a lot of what we think of when it comes to the amphibious assault right so in December of 1940 pre the Second World War, the Russians didn't have a single ship of special construction and they only had one brigade of naval infantry as Admiral Gorshkov, who was, you know, the father of the modern Russian Navy, talked about in some of his memoirs. Over the course of the Great Patriotic War, though, the Russians wind up conducting over 100 landings, some being small company sized at the tactical level and some being operational and strategic level. And that would be your strategic ones would be the landings that happened in Manchuria and in the Japanese islands in August of 1945. right so russian amphibious troops or soviet amphibious troops land in north korea they land in the cure aisles they land jumping and leapfrogging ahead in in manchuria helping the russian helping the soviets seize ground from the retreating japanese army so you've got a strategic background of those as well interestingly in the area that we're talking about now two operational

level landings happened around kirch the city of kirch which is in the eastern part of crimea the first one that happened in 1941 to 1942 big battle a lot of that has come out because it's in manstein's memoirs because his unit winds up fighting uh in kirch which the russians get on the beat or the soviets get on the beach they hold for months and months and months but ultimately wind up getting defeated in november of 43 they come back the other way right so they're no longer retreating to the east they're fighting back their way to the west and they seize two bridgeheads one in the town or one in the town of kirch and one in the town city of eltingen which winds up getting crushed that pocket and it just sits so the soviets sit in crimea for five months until they

kick the door in through the perikop isthmus in the north but these are kind of the biggest landings they're operational there are a few there are a few regiments they're you know a small part of a front. The Independent Coastal Army is what hits Crimea in 1943-1944, which sounds big, but compared to a lot of the other Russian armies is not, or Soviet armies is not. So there's a background there. There is this naval infantry tradition, but it's not quite the same as ours. Walker mentioned it earlier that the Russian naval infantry is particularly heavier than the Marine Corps, right? We are light infantry in nature, the Russian a lot more motorized, a lot more mechanized and you see that after the great patriotic war the russian naval infantry gets

disbanded and then comes back in the 1950s uh in 1960s they start standing up and you'll see articles in the marine corps gazette kind of looking going what is this new russian naval infantry threat they wind up going around the world part of the soviet military diplomatic efforts but they don't have a large play right where the soviets were fighting afghanistan hungary putting down the rebellion there there's not a large role there was some soviet operations in egypt in the sinai in relationship to the israelis and we've got a chapter in our forthcoming book about that by some very knowledgeable experts um genoa ramez and and and isabella his wife they're talking about you know what the soviet naval infantry were doing

as a crack force supporting the Egyptians in their fights against the Israelis. But really, this kind of the bulk collective memory of the Russian naval infantry coming out of the Second World War and coming out of that Soviet thing is a lot of company-sized leapfrogging raids and just let me get in behind these German lines and disrupt as an auxiliary force for the front armies or the, you know, the regiments that are coming in over land. And so the sea is a way to increase your maneuver space, but it's not a primary focus. And you, you know, kind of reading a lot of the old Russian naval theory, you know, the Red Navy is supporting it to the Red Army throughout all of it. There's no independent vision of the Red

Navy out kind of outside of supporting the Red Army. And that goes through some of Stalin's purges in the 30s and who you know who lives and who dies but it was always second fiddle to the army and even gorshkov who tries in the 60s through the 80s to build the russian navy or the soviet navy he's still second fiddle to you know to the forces in in east germany so you mentioned how heavy the the uh soviet naval infantry was do you think if they had tried to transition to a lighter force there would have been a bunch of retired soviet guys complaining about it? Yeah, I was going to jump in there and say, yeah, Tim, I mean, the Marine Corps has definitely gotten a lot lighter recently. But yeah, and I mentioned this in the intro, but

that's kind of one of the reasons that I thought this was particularly interesting to look at is what kind of lessons and how can we inform, you know, some of the changes, the force design that's going on in the Marine Corps based on what we're seeing and how can we look at it. But at the same time, I think, and this is something that the Commandant General Berger has said, you know, you also have to be really careful drawing any conclusions from a war that, you know, could still be kind of in its infancy and stuff like that. And especially when you don't have all the information, right? I mean, getting informed by, you know, there's some great podcasts and news coming out of the U.S. Naval Institute. News is doing a great job, you know,

podcasts by guys like Michael Kaufman at the Center for Naval Analyses and stuff like that. But still, you know, you get this feeling that we're only getting the tip of the iceberg in terms of information about what's going on. So, Walker, what amphibious operations have you observed today during this war? Yeah, so kind of right back into that tip of the iceberg idea, there was a bunch of buzz that, you know, the first or second day of the conflict and kind of over that first week about Russian landings in the Sea of Azov, which would have been probably in support of their attacks on Mariupol. And again, you know, apologies if I'm just absolutely butchering these place names. But it doesn't seem like they were either that big in terms of scale,

you know, maybe one or two battalions maximum, and also not really that important in terms of operational impact, because Russian forces advanced pretty quickly out of the Crimean Peninsula to the north. So since then, we've also seen, you know, the Russian forces took the now famous Snake Island from the stalwart Ukrainian defenders. But it's, you know, it's It's not clear how many, you know, actual naval infantry bodies that would have taken could have been as small as a platoon or company kind of coming in to occupy Snake Island because it's pretty small. A little bit more interesting is kind of seeing how they've tried to hold on to it and how the Ukrainians have seemed to have continually attacked it with both their jets, their remaining Air Force, and also their Turkish-made TB2 drones. And they've been, you know, kind of putting this footage out in the propaganda war, right, in the information domain. But it seems like the Ukrainians have been pretty successful in striking Russian patrol craft and resupply boats and even helicopters that come to try to resupply the defenders, the now Russian defenders of Snake Island.

And I suppose it's an open question if the Ukrainians may try to launch their own kind of small amphibious operation to reclaim the island, or if they're content to simply kind of hold it at risk for Russian forces. And we've also seen, again, similar to the Georgia example, Russian forces using their landing, larger landing ship tanks and amphibious ships as kind of resupply vessels. So probably most likely moving munitions and troops and supplies from their major base at Sevastopol and Crimea to Vernansk, which is one port town near Mariupol. So probably, again, moving munitions and troops in to support that fight in Mariupol and kind of using, perhaps using their naval assets as a secondary when their ground logistics are really, really not doing so well.

And again, it's also possible that that's just the Navy's play at having a role in the conflict and contributing, you know, so that those admirals can then go to Putin or the Minister of Defense and kind of say, look, you know, this is our contribution to the conflict. One of the sparks for this essay was in the early stages of the conflict when, you know, most people seem to think that Ukraine would fall relatively quickly. Tim and I were kind of interested in the the possibility of a major or at least a larger amphibious operation in support of an attack on Odessa right based on some of the messaging we've

seen from Putin's regime it seems like taking the rest of the southern Ukrainian coast all the way to Moldova would be a major strategic objective for them right and in that way Odessa is the the largest one of the largest cities in Ukraine and they'd have to take it right so I don't think that, you know, based on what Tim was saying, doctrinally or manpower-wise, that you'd see an independent amphibious operation against the city of Odessa, because obviously it would be well defended. But we were interested to see, well, would it be possible? Might they, you know, try a major axis of advance on land and then kind of support that with their naval infantry and with a smaller amphibious operation? Now that looks pretty much off the table, especially since

the sinking of the Moskoa and just kind of the other issues. And I think without it being in support of a major advance on land that, you know, that'd probably be suicide for Russian naval infantry, you know. But that was one of the things that we were thinking about kind of at the time, and it would be interesting to speculate, was that initially in the planning, there are a couple places, there was these photos of Lukashenko, the Belarusian president, and it seemed like he was standing in front of a map that might have shown, you know, amphibious axis of advance on Odessa. And one can imagine in a similar kind of skew and maneuver where you have Russian airborne forces land at an airport outside of Kiev and then quickly link up with rapidly advancing ground forces, you know, you could kind of imagine how it might have made sense to these planners to try and do the same thing with the Navy, but obviously we haven't seen it. And I think the longer we get into the conflict, the less likely we are to see significant, a significant amphibious operation.

Yeah, I think one of the things that Walker hit on there that maybe hasn't gotten as much play as it should is Ukrainian coastal defense, right? So thinking back again to America's military past, we used to have coastal artillery. You know, you think the Atlantic wall, you think of Japanese defenses in the Pacific. You know, there's a challenger that's going to meet you on the beachhead in some way. And what did the Ukrainians seem to have done? And, you know, from what we can tell, it's mines, it's anti-ship missiles, it's these drones by either the larger TB2s or they're these little ones that just cause enough uncertainty to hold, you know, to kind of want to keep that Russian fleet off the coast and not make that landing because they are going to be contested. And I think that's one of the things that we've really seen is, you know, an upset populace is not something, you know, the Russians kicked the hornet's nest. And I think that that also extends to coastal defenses, right? You would never think to mine the beaches around Odessa, but popular tourist destination. but once you have the threat of an amphibious landing hey all bets are off and i have to think

that that's going through the calculus of russian naval and russian naval you know naval infantry commanders as they think about these things the other thing that walker mentioned was the use of the airborne right so the airborne troops are called the satni as are the amphibious troop right to descend basically is the rough translation you know the folks that land either from the air or over the shore kind of a similar concept right i'm going to be this spearhead and this tank army or this mechanized rifle regiment or whatever is going to come in and occupy and hold because I've sent these cracking elite troops ahead. Being used very similar, the attack on the airfield outside of Kiev didn't go very well. From what we can tell,

there hasn't been the use of the naval infantry as the Sainty and the Sainty attack mix as much here either. Walker, how has the sinking of Moskva affected Russian Navy operations? Yeah, so I mentioned this a little bit before, but basically not well. So the Moskva is obviously not an amphibious ship. It's an old 1980s cruiser that's really designed to sink NATO warships and then has kind of, you know, a secondary role of shooting down NATO airplanes. It doesn't have any, I should say didn't because it's, you know, past tense, it's now on the bottom of the ocean. It didn't have any land attack capability, so it wasn't particularly relevant for amphibious operations, right? I mean, it would have probably served in kind of an air defense role, potentially over providing some cover and air control for an amphibious operation.

You know, it would have taken out potentially any Ukrainian, small Ukrainian ships that were trying to defend against the amphibious operation. They don't really have much of a Navy left. And it might have provided some sort of a kind of command and control function, right? They could have had some of the staff who were running the operation on board, though, based on the age of the vessel and the fact that the major headquarters for the Black Sea Fleet is in Sevastopol, which isn't terribly far away, you know, it may not have made sense to put kind of a forward staff on board. But basically, the ship itself would have only had kind of a secondary or tertiary role in supporting an amphibious operation. So the loss of it isn't terribly significant in that way. However, I think that the loss of the ship is probably a huge psychological blow beyond the fact that we still don't know how many sailors actually lost their lives, or if there were any leadership or higher ranking officers aboard, right? Those are kind of open questions. The fact that the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet was sunk, you know, unexpectedly by these Ukrainian coastal defense cruise missiles, I would think would certainly make any planners or Russian Navy commanders really think hard about their opportunity to do an amphibious landing, right?

Where they'd have to get even closer to the shore, all the way up to the shore, and it would be much more difficult to hide what they were doing. Talking to Tim, we had started writing this article before the ship was sunk, you know, and I think I had an early line in there. Yeah, you know, Ukraine supposedly received these domestically made Neptune coastal defense cruise missiles. Can't really find more information about them, where there are, how many they are, may or may not be operational. Well, yeah, I had to kind of delete that and adjust it. Yeah, we know they're operational. There were at least two, and they were operational. There were at least two, and they were operational, which is all you need.

And they may or may not have been used in conjunction with one of these Turkish drones, right? And I think that's an interesting story, how are they used kind of in conjunction with each other that we may never get the full story on. And then perhaps I think actually more interesting and probably more relevant is the fact that the United States has come out and said, yes, the United States government was helping to provide intelligence that supported the sinking of that ship, right? And we kind of know nebulously that NATO and the United States has been supporting Ukraine with intelligence, but we don't often get a sense of how specific that support is. And I think both for the general public, but also specifically for the Russian military, if they didn't have a sense of what that means, now we know what it means. Because anyone who's kind of looked at some of these coastal defense problems, it's one thing to have the missiles, but much more difficult is finding and tracking and ultimately prosecuting these targets, right? So if the United States is providing near real time intelligence on the location of Russian ships at sea, that makes the Ukrainian missiles, you know, as long as they work functionally as missiles, much more effective. Whereas before the Ukrainians probably had a relatively limited ability to see what the Russians were doing with their fleet and not a ton of ability to track them.

So it also means that, you know, if there's only a small number of these missiles or one battery or two batteries, they may effectively be able to cover a much larger portion of the Ukrainian coast or the whole coast because they're being supported by much higher level intelligence from the United States and NATO. So I think ultimately, how is this thinking of the Moscow are going to affect Russian Navy operations? Well, they're probably not going to try any amphibious operations, which they may not have been going to try anyway. But this is going to be like a definite no. They're probably going to keep their ships farther out at sea. And you may see basically the Russian Navy's piece of the war in Ukraine fading into irrelevance. And a couple of people noted it was exactly 40 years ago that the Argentinian Navy lost their cruiser, the General Belgrano, to a Royal Navy submarine. And basically after that, the leadership decided that, you know, the Navy was too important to risk and the Navy left and went back to port in Argentina.

So we may kind of see something similar with the Russian fleet that they just kind of are no longer willing to risk major vessels and get close. Tim, final question to you. What are some of the lessons learned from the continued fighting around Snake Island? I think the big lessons learned out of Snake Island, one, you know, you've got the propaganda piece, right? So amphibious operations do have an inherently propaganda or an inherent propaganda value, whether that's as the defenders or as the attackers. There's an image of what it means to come from the sea, both in a I can show up wherever I want and project power, or I can stop you from doing that. So I think there's there's that. And that's kind of speaks to the larger, you know, kind of the cachet of of being an amphibious force one way or another. The other one in Walker mentioned it earlier was the continued ability of the Ukrainians to prosecute targets on Snake Island. You know, whether that's hitting supply depots or hitting helicopters or, you know, mixing these things. Congratulations, you've taken it. What are you going to do with it? And I think from a Marine Corps perspective, as we talk about EABO, Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations, and seizing forward islands and seizing all of these terrain features, that's great.

what are we going to do with it how are we going to defend it and coming out of 20 years of of counterinsurgency where we've been able to stack aircraft from you know the deck to the moon at thousand feet intervals well that changes against a near-peer threat um and i think we're finding out that the ukrainians to the russians are a near-peer threat and certainly in at the tactical level in some areas but how do i set up my air defenses how do i set up my emissions control so you can't find me because if i can be you know again this this targeting cycle if you can be seen or if you can be found you can be killed true and snake island and you know the moskva are showing these things but how do we then go all right so i'm going to seize an advanced base

how am i going to defend it and we've you know as the marine corps and and i'm you know i'm certainly commandant and the think tanks at marine corps warfighting lab are doing these calculations But for 20 years, low-altitude aerial defense hasn't been a thing. You know, we don't have intermediate anti-aircraft missiles, right? We don't have the equivalent of the Hawk anymore. We don't have major units that are dedicated to air defense that have 20 years of experience, especially doing integrated air defense with Army, Air Force, whatever, because our air defenders were defending al-Assad and, you know, TQ.

They weren't, they were holding airfields. They weren't holding airspace. I think that's a big lesson that's going to need to be adapted chewed on both how do you integrate these drones right so the VMU units these unmanned units that walkers transitioning over to like, how do you integrate with them but also how do you defend that territory that a littoral regimen or a company or whatever has just seized. And how long do you hold it for. and I think that goes back to the amphibious withdrawal great I can seize the beach how do I want to be there and how do I get off it when I don't need it anymore so I don't become a fixed target and I think those are probably the big lessons that I'm looking at from an operational and conceptual concept of how the Marine Corps is going to take what's happening in Ukraine what's

happening at Snake Island and contextualizing it and turning you know Russian mistakes and Ukrainian mistakes into success on the battlefield for the Marine Corps. Well, unfortunately, that's all that we have time for. I'd like to thank my guests, Walker Mills and Tim Heck. Walker, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? Yeah, thanks for having us, Jared. You can find me on Twitter at WDMills1992. Working on a couple of different projects, but probably the biggest one right now is

wrapping up a book project with Tim called Armies in Retreat. It's a book of case studies on armies in retreat, and we've got some really fantastic chapter submissions from authors. And we're just kind of working on getting those edited up and making it work with the press. And then Tim mentioned earlier, he and B.A. Friedman asked me to help out with their second volume of On Contested Shores about amphibious operations. So I'm also super excited to be working on that project and hopefully contributing my own chapter. And actually, I interviewed them, both of them, about their first volume of the same project for sea control as well tim where can we find you and what's your next project so i'm also

on twitter i'm at tg heck one my next project are exactly walker's next projects and also taking a little bit of a taking a breather we just finished our semester so i just finished grading but it's it's back to the daily editorial work at mwi well again i'll salute mwi because you guys have been pushing out a lot of maritime content recently. I know we've got Jason Alito that I'm going to interview next weekend. I'm trying to think of the two gentlemen who wrote lots to be desired about army logistics. I got them coming up in a week or so as well. So I appreciate everything you guys have been putting out and look forward to seeing more maritime content from you. But thank you again for coming on. To listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time.

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