Offensive success depends on suppressing enemy drone units

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 24:52

   How do you gain territory given these drone units, this huge amount of drones, this gray zone? Also mentioning artillery, like you mentioned, and tanks. How do they work together in order to be able to do something like gain territory well they're doing it differently now we're seeing a very different approach from ukraine than we are from russia i can try to speak to the russian part if you want to maybe take the ukrainian offensive here in a second but uh russia has defaulted to more of a infiltration type tactic where rather than large formations they get spotted again 10 20 30 kilometers away from the front and they're then hunted down with long-range drones they don't even have the opportunity to get near the front line so they stopped doing that we started to see russia move towards more motorized assaults with just pickup trucks atvs even a lot of motorcycles at a point

2. 25:42

   now it's mostly just individual infantrymen they have checkpoints on a map there's they're released and they're sent forward 5 10 20 kilometers trying to move to a forward location where they can consolidate and again the the ukrainian lines they look clean on a map they're not there's a lot of gaps in there because a lot of it is being held with overhead drone coverage to just monitor approaches and the russians will get through and one is a bit of a headache three becomes a bigger problem and all of a sudden they're they're harassing supply lines and that forces ukrainian units to move back a little bit forces ukrainian drone pilots to move back a little bit and that opens up the battlefield for more russian soldiers to come forward just a little there's a reason that the lines are moving so slowly right now that infiltration is incredibly costly we talked

3. 26:33

   I talked with an American volunteer, a Marine, fighting with the 1st National Guard Corps, Azov, in the Dopropili direction a little over a year ago. He described this as an incredible tactic if you don't care about losing soldiers. He said, it's great. You can just kind of chew through terrain. You can get there eventually. You're just going to lose 90%, 95% of your guys along the way. That's generally what we've seen from Russia over the course of the last at least six months, maybe a full year.

4. 27:03

   Ukraine has been going about it in a different manner, especially with some of their recent counteroffensive stuff. The way I look at it is first that in 2025, this war really began to be much more of a tug of war over who has superiority in this drone engagement zone, which forces locally call the kill zone. And the side that is able to suppress the other side's drone units through drone strikes, traditional artillery strikes, For Russia, also heavy use of glide bombs, standoff glide bombs launched by Russian fixed wing aircraft. That side is then able to push the drone support further away from the front line. And then by displacing it, then be able to actually advance in that way.

5. 27:48

   And so a lot of it's been a tug of war actually over who has superiority in drones and fire support. And increasing on the Ukrainian side, where we see successful offensive operations is because you have a very well thought through plan to set the conditions for the operation, begin to suppress Russian drone units, begin to interdict logistics behind the drone units so that they don't get sufficient supplies, begin to figure out how to potentially channel them by essentially pushing them into certain zones of operations where you can then localize, figure out what they're going to be when you're going to do the assault. Then having a coordinated strike plan for how you're going to suppress them during the assault. And then now you've actually established the conditions for your forces to advance with some mobility and to dramatically

6. 28:39

   reduce your losses because ukraine cannot afford to fight the way russia does it doesn't have the manpower and it doesn't even if it did have the manpower it's not a question of numbers it's a question of culture ukraine would not treat its forces in the same way it wouldn't accept those kind of losses of its own troops um and so you've seen a couple different approaches on the ukrainian side probably the past year and different assault units experimenting with them you know you have I think some advanced drone assault units like Code 9-2 and 1st Separate Assault Regiment that often work together who are essentially using a combination of drones and very well equipped and adapted mechanized formations to try to return maneuver to the battlefield and try to take terrain in a more mobile way

7. 29:29

   do it faster rather than having a kind of slow moving grinding creeping offensive And you've seen all the way down to maybe the opposite side of the spectrum, air assault brigades very effectively employing three-man fire teams with drone support, systematically clearing tree line by tree line by tree line, slow and steady, but keeping their casualties low. This would be in the south and Zaporizhia.

8. 29:54

   And on a broad front, still over time over the course of this year, taking back a significant amount of terrain and a bunch of other methods in between.