November 28, 2024 • 35 mins
Robert and James cover Ukraine's defeat of the Russian Black Sea Fleet using irregular warfare, and James looks over how Myanmar's rebels have stymied the junta Navy.
Original Air Date: 3.29.24
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
All Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to It Could Happen Here and our special
two part series Irregular Naval Warfare and You, where James
and I teach you how you too can challenge the
US Navy's dominance of the seas, or at least the
coasts for fun and profit. Actually today, last episode we
(00:25):
talked about people challenging the US Navy's coastal dominance. Today
we're talking about doing the same thing for the Russian Navy.
So that's going to be fun. And of course the
Navy of Myanmar, which is a bit of a different
class from the US and Russian Navy, but no less interesting.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Yeah, still fun. I'd love to see about lose.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Yeah. Well I just like boats going down, you know,
I just hate a boat.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Yeah, yeah, USS many many such cases.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Yeah, I'm going to start with Ukraine, and then we're
going to throw to James to talk about our friends
in Myanmar and how they have repurposed civilian technology and
stolen weapons to counter a navy without really having one
of their own. But first Ukraine. In twenty fourteen, when
the Russian Army invaded eastern Ukraine and took Crimea, Ukraine
(01:11):
lost a significant portion of it's already not that impressive navy.
Most of their boats were just taken by Russia, along
with a number of sailors who defected. A lot of
other sailors fled the region, leaving behind their homes and
cities like Sebastopol to continue serving their country in a
war that a decade later is still ongoing. One of
these sailors, who is a Sebastopol native and had to
(01:32):
flee his home, possibly forever, in order to continue serving
his country, is the current commander of Ukraine's navy, Admiral Nazpapa.
He leads a navy that is almost without manned ships,
and on paper, it is utterly incapable of challenging Russia's
legendary Black Sea Fleet. Since the age of the Tsars,
the Black Sea Fleet has been infamous as a pillar
(01:53):
of Russian military power. However, also since the age of
the Tsars, it's had a nasty tendency to get utterly
housed by enemies that should have been able to beat it.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Right.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, not the first time it's taken unexpected loot.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
It has a legendary history that doesn't mean good. There's bad.
Legendsy out there.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
You know, Yeah, it's well known.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Yeah today that enemy is Ukraine. Since the expanded Russian
invasion in twenty twenty two, just two years, Ukraine has
destroyed or badly damaged more than a third of the
Black Sea fleet. Despite having no battleships or destroyers in
the sea to counter Russian naval power. They have done
enough damage to reopen Odessa and at least one other
(02:36):
port on the Black Sea to international commerce, which has
provided Ukraine with a crucial economic and strategic lifeline. And
that's a remarkable achievement. Sinking a third of the Black
Sea fleet, and basically when you reopen a port, that
means that you have taken away naval dominance from a
country that has a navy and you don't. That's pretty good,
pretty good stuff. Over the last two years, had damaged,
(03:01):
irreparably or sunk seven active landing ships and one to
seven active landing ships and one landing vessel. I don't
know the difference. They've They've fucked up a lot of boats.
They have destroyed a submarine with seed to ground capability
that was docked for repairs. They have sunk a cruiser,
the capital ship of the entire Black Sea fleet, the Moskva.
They've also sunk a supply vessel and a handful of
(03:22):
patrol boats and missile boats, and a number of other
boats have been damaged. That's a significant rate of casualties,
especially when you consider that every actually destroyed vessel we're
looking at a year's multiple years lead time to replace.
You cannot make naval vessels very quickly anymore. Back during
the big Dub Dub dose, the US did, but nobody
(03:44):
really does that anymore, not with the big ones.
Speaker 4 (03:48):
At least you through that. We were just yeating aircraft
carriers into the sea, just flotting them out. Yeah, it
don't take them out a week.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
Yeah, it's because it's because Raisi de Rivetay was really
riveting at a high speed.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
She was quite a riveter. So at the start of hostilities, Turkey,
which controls access to the Black Sea forbade any additional
military vessels or at least military vessels of significant size,
from entering the area. What this means this has a
significant impact on how well Ukraine strikes work, because even
if Russia can replace the losses physically, they can't actually
(04:24):
get replacements into the Black Sea easily. They can't sail
new shit past the Turks. The Turks are not allowing
that right now. So again, this is a situation that
has kind of favored the way in which Ukraine has
adapted to countering Russian naval dominance. It is possible that
at the present rate of attrition, the Black Sea Fleet
could be rendered inoperable in less than two years. Like
(04:46):
if they keep going at this rates, like eighteen months
or something before, there's not really much of a fleet
anymore now. If Ukraine had accomplished this task with a
traditional navy using standard naval tactics, this would have been
an impressive victory given the disparity in resources between the
two nations. But they have done all this with a
mix of cruise missiles, many of which are produced in country,
aerial drones, and new bespoke locally produced suicide drone boats.
(05:10):
This irregular naval warfare has been successful enough that one
Rand Corporation engineer and analyst, Scott Savatz, described the Black
Sea Fleet as a fleet in being quote, it represents
a potential threat that needs to be vigilantly guarded against,
but one that remains in check for now. And I'm
going to quote from a New York Times article on
the topic, it brought a little more context. Ukraine has
(05:31):
effectively turned around ten thousand square miles in the western
Black Sea off its southern coast into what the military
calls a gray zone, where neither side can sail without
the threat of attack. James Heapy, Britain's Armed Forces minister,
told a recent security conference in Warsaw that Russia's Black
Sea fleet had suffered a functional defeat, and contended that
the liberation of Ukraine's coastal waters in the Black Sea
(05:51):
was every bit as important as the successful counter offensives
on land and Corsona and Kharkiv last year. The classical
approach that we studied at military maritime academies is not
work now, Admiral Nese Papas said. Therefore, we have to
be as flexible as possible and change approaches to planning
and implementing work as much as possible. That at articles
about a year old or so so. The Neptune anti
(06:11):
ship missile is one of the prides of Ukraine's nason
arms industry. Neptune missiles are credited with destroying the Moskva
in April of twenty twenty two. Ukraine also has access
to several Western anti ship missiles, including these storm Shadow
and Scalp missiles. I believe the storm Shadow comes from
your folks, right James, Yeah, prevention, Yeah yeah. And these
seem to be pretty effective missiles. These obviously much more advanced.
(06:34):
And these are modern naval weapons, right. These are much
more advanced than, for example, the weapons to who these have.
These are the kind of things that can counter to
some extent modern anti missile technology. For an example of
kind of how that tends to work, they used a
barrage of I believe it was mostly storm shadows to
rain death on the crime import of Sebastopol. Recently, seven
(06:55):
out of eighteen of the missiles fired made it through
Russian air defenses. And these damaged or just destroyed four
landing ships and a single strike. And these are sizable
naval vessels. This is the most recent attack, although as
after I wrote this, there was another attack on the
Kirch Bridge. I'm not really sure how that took place
yet that seems to have shut it down again. But
that gives you an idea of like what you actually
(07:15):
have to do. How much of these missiles you have
to put in the air to get some through. And
that's not too bad, right eighteen missiles seven get through,
four ships down. That's a really good rate of return.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
Especially when you consider that, like you know, we were
talking in our first episode about how the US is
spending significant resources on maintaining its defending its carriers, right
Russia does not have the same ability to keep good
lord munitions. No, and so like that's a finite resource,
right there, their means of defining that. Defending their ships
(07:46):
and defending really anything against missiles are a finite resource.
So any time you can, even if the ship doesn't
get sunk, if the ship has to deploy one of
these missiles, which it doesn't, which the whole country doesn't
have very many of, that's win.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Now, this is we are talking about irregular naval warfare.
And then this is not this is not what most
people would have considered a traditional naval conflict prior to
the expansion of hostilities in Ukraine. However, we are talking
this is very different than the case of the Huthis.
Ukraine is a state. It doesn't have a massive arms industry,
but it has one, and it has the supportive nations
with sizable arms industries, right, So we are not talking
(08:23):
about this part. We are going to talk about the
aspects of Ukrainian irregular naval warfare that are some guys
that are hobbyists building shit. Yeah, this is not that
part yet. But I think this information is kind of
significant and that it shows the tactical use of anti
ship cruise missiles and their ability to significantly shape an
operational environment even when the country using them has minimal
(08:44):
conventional naval assets of their own. It is largely through
the use of these missiles that Ukraine has been able
to reopen their black sea ports. That matters to people
seeking to understand both this conflict and the future of
unconventional naval warfare. I mean, I guess you could say
this is the future of conventional naval warfare, but think
we're still leaning on the unconventional side at the moment,
at least in terms of how doctrine is changing as
(09:05):
a result of this. So maybe I should update how
we're defining this. But for our purposes as people unlikely
to have access to cruise missiles but significantly likely to
find ourselves waging an unconventional war than having cruise missiles
it's more relevant to look at the new weapons systems
Ukraine has developed that have helped them lock down the
Black Sea Fleet using civilian hobbyists. And this is where
(09:26):
we get to drones. Ukraine's conventional aerial drones are a
mix of actual military hardware. I'm talking about stuff like
the Bairaktar, the Turkish drone, which is like kind of
like the Predator, all right, it's like an actual military product.
But the majority in terms of numbers of drones that
Ukraine is fielding are civilian drones, or at least drones
(09:46):
that started out a civilian technology. A lot of these
are now built to be military, but they're still based
on these designs that started with people hacking and cobbling
together civilian drones and outside of naval stuff. Prior to
the war, there had been a lot of veterans and
hobbyists who were veterans trying to convince the Ukrainian military
that it needed to adopt drone warfare on a large scale,
(10:07):
the kind of drone warfare that you can do with
these these less expensive drones, and they received a lot
of pushback until the war started and these guys just
took to the field as started fucking murking Russian armed
units and infantry and killing generals and shit. And now
Ukraine has integrated in a way that everyone is going
to follow. Like Ukrainian like battalions have like companies now
(10:28):
that are drone assault companies, and like line battalions, and.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
Within infantry you have people used artillery eating transport of zebibusters.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Yes, all over. They have set a goal for this
year producing at least a million and ideally more like
two million drones and at least from what I read,
that looks like very plausible, and most of these are
quite small, right, but that doesn't mean obviously ineffective.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
I know they buy a lot of their drones in
the UK because the UK has consistently kicked itself in
the nuts when it comes to the breaksit and so
the pound is significantly weaker, and so they're able to
get the drones cheaper price and then drive them all
the way across.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
I know people who've done that. I was going to
go join them, but never worked it out.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Yeah, And you know there are a number of different
like these drones earlier in the war had an easier
time being effective and causing casualties in the Russians then
later this is something that you know, kind of the
hooplaw and support which I think is necessary that Ukraine gets.
Lead some people to discount the degree to which Russian
(11:27):
forces have adapted and gotten smarter. And one of the
ways in which they've adapted and gotten smarter is in
blocking drones and using drones of their own. You know,
one of the stories the last couple of weeks is
that Russia has succeeded in carrying out strikes on advanced
weapons systems like samsites deep in Ukrainian territory. They've extended
their kill chain beyond what they used to be capable of,
(11:48):
and that's because they've adapted. They're also adapted with less
efficacy at blocking drones and attacks on naval vessels. Some
of this has been kind of funny. I want to
read a quote from a Business Insider article here. Russia
is painting silhouettes on naval vessels on land to try
and trick Ukraine, which keeps destroying its warships. In an
intelligence update on Wednesday, the UK Ministry of Defense said
(12:09):
that silhouettes of vessels have also been painted on the
side of k's probably to confuse the uncrude aerial vehicle operators.
They showed there's some images of this. They don't seem
convincing to me. I don't know if I think this
is working.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
This is great. I love this. Have a cardboard navy next.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
Yeah, it's very bugs bunny. Yes, they're not working as
well as bugs would.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
More like a hole in the side of the cliff
face and crushing into keeps throwing at it.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
It's very funny. I mean obviously they just Ukraine just
sank like or damn it badly damaged four boats. So
I don't think this is I haven't seen evidence this
is working well. Their actual like jamming efforts have been
much more successful. Right.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
Yeah, they always will be on civilian One of the
thing that's really interesting compared to me and is that
Ukraine tends to rely on modified off the shelf civilian
drone Right your dji is that kind of thing in
Mianma because of where a lot of the PDFs are,
because well, they increasingly do control the borders, but they
haven't always. They have been making their own drones. The
(13:13):
group called Federal Wings you can find them on telegram,
who make their own drones, and I think those seem
to be less the Jammas that the sac that the
Tamadoor has are Chinese made like Jamma rifles. You see
them all the time in captured weapon cases, but they
don't seem to be having as much impact on these
(13:34):
homemade drones, which is really interesting.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Yeah, yeah, and it's you know, I've mentioned a couple
of times we're doing this in part because the odds
that people listening might be involved in an a regular
conflict are not zero.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
You know.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
What I think about when I say that is not
that there's high odds for any individual person fighting themselves
in that situation, but there is, Given the number of
people who listen to this podcast, probably someone who is
not currently involved in conflict that will find themselves that
way in the future. And I based that in part
on the fact that all of our friends in Myanmar
who are currently fighting a war were a couple of
(14:08):
years ago delivery drivers and you know, playing pubg online
and not really thinking they would wind up as insurgents.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Yeah. I've spoken to a number of people who are
currently fighting on in Mianma who have listened to our
Meanma podcast and realized the capacity of three D printing. Yeah,
to be very useful and so like, even in that sense,
it's already happening. But yeah, don't know one in Memma,
Like many of them said, their entire combat experiences playing
pubg Yeah, now they're murking ships.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
Yeah. So anyway, it bears thinking about this stuff. And
this brings me back to Ukraine's irregular drone warfare units,
which again a lot of these guys started out as
civilian enthusiasts who expanded responded to the outbreak or at
least expansion of hostilities by expanding their hobby into a
real world military effort that had a real world effect.
Civilian drones were crucial in the Battle of Kiev, allowing
(14:58):
Ukraine to do severe damage to that mass Russian armored
column heading towards the city and providing intel that led
to the assassination of multiple general level officers. So it
is perhaps not surprising that Ukraine looked to the same
group of volunteer hobbyists when it came time to expand
their naval arsenal. And there's a really good article I
found in CNN by Sebastian Shukla, Alex Marcott, and Daria Tarasova,
(15:19):
and I actually want to give you the title of
this article. Yeah, I'll try to thriller in the show
notes is exclusive rare access to Ukraine's sea drones, part
of Ukraine's fight back in the Black Sea. Haven't really
seen the word fight back use that way, but there
you go. So I'm going to read a quote from
that article. A government link Ukrainian fundraising organization called United
twenty four has sourced money from companies and individuals all
(15:40):
around the world, pooling funds to disperse it to a
variety of developers and initiatives, from defense to soccer matches.
The entire outfit is very security conscious, insisting on strict
guidelines on filming and revealing identities. Those who see in
and met with declined to give their full names or
even their ranks within Ukraine's armed forces. On a creaky
wooden jetty, a camouflaged sea drone pilot says he wants
to go by shark. In front of him is a long,
(16:01):
black hardshell briefcase. He unveils a bespoke multi screened mission control,
essentially an elaborate gaming center combined complete with levers, joysticks,
a monitor, and buttons that have covers over switches that
shouldn't accidentally be knocked with labels like blast. The developer
of the drone, who asked to remain anonymous, said their
work on sea drones only began once the war started.
It was very important because we did not have many
(16:22):
forces to resist the maritime state Russia, and we needed
to develop something of our own because we didn't have
the existing capabilities. So again, these are hobbyist design I mean,
this guy's not really a hobbyist in anymore, but that's
how he started. He's only not a hobbyist because the
military recognized the value of what he was doing. And
the current iterations of this sea drone weigh a little
(16:42):
over two thousand pounds with an explosive six hundred and
sixty one pound payload, a five hundred mile range and
a max speed of fifty miles per hour. That is
a significant weapons system.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
Multiple sea drones have been used to strike Russian assets
in the Black Sea, and drones were involved in a
successful attack that severely damaged the Kirch Bridge last July,
rendering it impassable since until September. So these have had
a real battlefield effect. And they probably will continue to
do so. The developer of these drones told CNN these
drones are a completely Ukrainian production. They are designed, drawn
(17:14):
and tested here. It's our own production of holes, electronics
and software. More than fifty percent of the production of
equipment is here in Ukraine. And that's really significant because
you know, I think we're all aware of the difficulty
Ukraine has had getting weaponry lately from the West as
a result of fucking around in Congress, and so it
is a necessity for them to be able to develop
(17:35):
weapon systems like this that can interdict and counteract more
advanced and expensive weapon systems and can be produced indigenously.
You know, I don't think we have seen a mass
suicide boat attack. I'm interested in what happens when we do,
like with more significant numbers than we've seen deployed. I
kind of wonder the degree to which the Russians have
(17:56):
gotten good at spotting this stuff. I've come across at
least a couple of stories of these boats like destroyed
on approach. So they certainly don't always work or even
a majority of the time. But given the cost of
these things, they don't have to get through the majority
of the time very much worth it right now. In
that interview with The New York Times, Admiral Najpapa caution
that Ukraine is still outgunned in the Black Sea. Even
(18:18):
though the Russians no longer have supremacy, they still have
air superiority. They are still able to launch from the
sea long range missiles at Ukrainian targets, including civilian targets.
So this is not again a situation that should be
portrayed as them having their own way. Their ability to
kind of interdict the sea has been the primary effects
of it have been number one, the reopening of trade
(18:40):
in the Black Sea, and earlier in the war, by
locking down the ability of these landing ships to put
more troops on ground and by doing damage to the
Kurch Bridge, they were able to slow Russian reinforcements and
Russian materiel from entering the war zone in order to
and this aided in some of the advances, particularly in
like areas like Carson. At this moment, the situation has
(19:01):
changed because again the Russians aren't just kind of like
sitting around doing the same thing over and over again,
or at least not always. And we don't tend to
talk as much about successes on the Russian side of things,
but that is an important part of the story. And
one of the things the Russians have done is kind
of acknowledge that the Black Sea Fleet may not be
a fleet in being forever and certainly cannot be relied
(19:23):
upon to handle everything they initially thought it would handle.
And so Russian engineers spent a significant period of time
building a sizeable new railroad that connects Rostov and southern
Russia to Mariopol and occupied southern Ukraine. This has allowed
them to get high volume shipments into the area and
supply troops to the area along Ukraine's southern front without
(19:44):
relying on that bridge or relying on naval landings.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
Right.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
So the fact that Ukraine has been able to take
out for landing ships recently is good. That's a win
for Ukraine. It reduces Russian capability, but it is not
half the same effect that it would have had, for example,
two years earlier. Yeah, because Russia has also evolved, and
among other things, railroads are a lot easier, are a
lot harder to destroy to like take out, right, it's
easy to damage a railroad, but they're easy to fix.
(20:11):
It's not. It doesn't take a lot to get some
guys over to fix a damage sunk of railroad. Fixing
a bridge that's been blown up or a sunk boat
is a lot harder.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
Yeah. Absolutely, I mean, and there are people within Russia
even who are sabotaging railroads, but as you say, it's
like it's very high stakes for them, and it's relatively
low cost for the Russian state to fix that stuff,
so like it's not as effective.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
Yeah, But I think this gives you an idea of
kind of like what we're looking at when we look
at this kind of ongoing irregular conflict is the side
that does not have access to a functional navy, not
able to interdict or destroy fleets, but able to stop
them from dominating the coast. And when you can stop
them from dominating the coast, you have effectively denied them
(20:54):
terrain that they can act in without being countered, and
you have also denied them from stopping you from acting
in that same terrain, even if you don't have total
safety in that area. That opens up the operational possibilities substantially.
And this is something that I kind of don't think
is going to get put back in the bag. Even
if some of these Star Wars ass weapons systems do
(21:16):
come out in the near future, you know, maybe that'll
have an impact in the immediate term on people like
the Houthis, but I don't think that it really will
on you know, for example, what what Ukraine's doing right?
Speaker 1 (21:28):
Yes, yeah, Russia can't keep up with getting decent small arms,
body armor, grenades and ship It's there's no way it's
going to implement some kind of massive Star Wars system
over its navy. Not right now in the middle of
a conflict. That's it's struggling to supply.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
Yep, you know what, here's an ad break.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
All right, we're back and we are traveling around the
world's been your little globe in your head, and look
for Meanma, which is of course in Asia. Now I'm
talking about two different I guess anti ship sabotage or
attack or two different ways the ships have been sunk
in the EMMA. I'll start with the first one, which
is undoubtedly the flashiest, just because it's fun. So a
(22:22):
ship in the port of Yangon about about a month ago,
so we're recording on a twenty. It's about the first
of March. It was in the river, in the river
in yangon right, and it was carrying allegedly carrying jet fuel. Now,
if you follow Burmese activists, people in the Burmese Freedom Movement,
they will one of their demands for a long time
(22:42):
has been to stop supplying the Hunter with jet fuel,
which would in turn stop it being able to bomb villages, schools, civilians,
PDF formations, just about anyone in the country. It's bombed
at some point in the last couple of years. And
they haven't been to exactly right, they haven't been able
to stop the supply of jet fuel coming to the Hunter.
(23:03):
So they've taken it into their own hands. And what
they did on the first of March was that they
snuck onto a boat. So two this is the story
from the Burmese National Unity Government's Ministry of Defense. Anyway,
combat divers snuck onto this boat planted a kilogram of
TNT or a charge equivalent to a kilogram of TNT.
(23:25):
Robert and I've both spoken to people who make explosives
in memis we do. We definitely know the PDF has
access to a range of explosives. They set it on
a five hour fuse and it blew up in the
middle of the night, and there's definitely footage of a
ship on fire having blown up. Now, this is pretty
remarkable forever. This is why the United States has units
(23:47):
like the Navy Seals, right, like the higher speed guys,
because it is not easy to scuba dive across a harbor,
climb onto a ship, set an explosive charge without being detected,
and then leave that ship and have the charge go
off and sink the ship without you being compromised, without
the charge itself being like compromised, and the ship being saved. Right,
(24:09):
this is some like. This is some classic like. This
is why they are special units within the US military. Now,
the PDF very obviously did not have combat divers. Two
years ago, I was looking into hobby scuba diving in Yangon.
The rivers in that area are extremely muddy and visibility
is very low. So the people who you find diving
(24:32):
in that area are not so much like hobby scuba
divers or free divers. But there's salvage divers and there's
a whole little industry of people. And these people are
diving in equipment that I would not consider safe or reliable.
It's clamping an air hose in between your teeth and
diving down and trying to find there's a large deposit
(24:55):
of coal in one of the rivers in Yangon because
of a ship that's sunk. There was, of course copper,
which everyone all around the world, including the big Coong
in Santia, are stealing copper. There's iron, right, so these
people are diving down and trying to collect scrap and
sell that for whatever minimal amount they can. Right. It's
an extremely dangerous and extremely low income. It's one of
(25:19):
the sort of really high risk, low reward jobs that
you get in economies where people are really struggling to
make ends meet. Right, So those are the only divers
I can find evidence of in Yangon. I don't think
it was them who did this, because you have to
have a boat above you with a pump if you're
diving with a rubber hose in your teeth, right, So
it seems like somebody within the They said it was
(25:43):
a Yangon PDF, that's what they attribute it to, So
that would be one of these. It would likely be
an underground group within the PDF, right, some people living
in the city who were able to sneak onto this
boat set a charge and blow it up, and they
would also had to have intelligence at the boat where
it was, what it was carrying, et cetera. It's a
pretty pretty daring mission that this is the first one
(26:06):
like this we've seen, and we haven't seen anything since.
But it's of course possible that this is a story
that we're being told. In fact, they had like someone
undercover on the ship, right, or like they had some
other means of getting this charge onto the ship. But
one way or another they managed to blow up this
ship carrying fuel, which is a significant detrima. Right, that's
(26:28):
how they get most of their ship. It's not over land,
especially with more.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
The terrain there is just absolutely, like even with modern
technology difficult to get significant amounts of shit through.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
They're resupplying some of their outposts that are ten miles
from a town with helicopters right now, like a the
terrain is burly, and B they don't have They PDF
has denied them access that any time they send out
a convoy, it gets attacked, so sending out plus you
know that their land board crossings are increasingly falling into
(27:01):
the hands of the PDFs and the eros, So getting
stuff through the ocean is one of the ways that
they can still get stuff. And if this keeps happening,
then they will make that more expensive for them. And
they're not exactly a wealthy hunter, even though I guess
Minna Lang just made himself an air Force one recently.
I was just looking at it today. He's God, he's
got himself too luxury. Yeah, they called it dictator class,
(27:24):
like he's upgraded from president class.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
Nice class.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
Yeah, yeah, yes, he has in many ways. So yeah,
that's one way that the PDF has been blowing up
ships in the yang On. Robert, do you know who
else has been blowing up ships in the in Yangon?
Speaker 2 (27:41):
Well, we are sponsored entirely by the British Navy circa
the mid eighteen hundreds, so I would guess them, that's right, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah yeah. Lots of repressed, repressed feelings and glowing up
a lot of cabin boys with deep trauma. Anyway, it.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
Eric Rebeca, We hope you enjoyed that. That pivot one
of our best ones yet. And we're talking about the
Arakan Army now, So the Arakan Army are not to
be confused with the Arakan Rahine of Salvation. Army different group.
Arakan is the name of what is now a kind
state before it was colonized by the Burmese. That was
I think Arakan was a king before it was colonized
(28:32):
by the Burmese, so that that's where that refers to.
It's a geographical appellation rather than like necessarily an ethnic one.
The Rakin would be the ethnic group. So what the
AA have done is sunk. I think at least four
Hunter ships now, and most of these ships are kind
of they're like the They look like big Higgins boats.
(28:53):
They're like landing craft or like car ferries, like flat
bottom with a bow that goes down. Right. I ride
around a lot in the Marshall Islands in little landing
craft like that because they can get them in. They
don't have like docks, so they can just ride that
right up to the beach and then drop the front
and off you go. And they use them a lot.
The Hunter doesn't have like per se marines that they
(29:13):
don't have maritime infantry, but they use them to transport
their regular army around, right, and they use them to
transport them up river. They also use them a lot
in Rakhine State to shell AA positions and any townships
that they've decided they want to wipe off the map
and kill all the people in right, So, these these
boats have been a real thorn in the side of
(29:35):
the Arakan Army. After Operation ten twenty seven when they
joined with two other groups to form the Three Brotherhood Alliance,
a launch attacks on the Hunter all over VMA. And
so what they've been doing, it appears, is using underwater
mines to think these ships, which is interesting, right. I
guess the mines are like a very old technology, right,
(30:00):
Like it's probably one hundred years plus underwater mines have existed.
It seems the way that like the reason they're able
to get away with using what is their relatively dated
technology is because the Hunter just doesn't expect to encounter anything, right,
and so has not equipped its ships as such. Like
they do have stuff like submarines, but that's not what's
getting sunk. What's getting sun to these big kind of
(30:22):
landing craft riverboats, And it seems that they're using mines
and then once they disable the ship, they're then attacking
it with small boats, small arms like indirect fire mortars
and stuff. I saw one post that suggested they'd use
which is pretty cool if they did. The Burmese military
has these like tank destroyers. It's a tank, it's what
(30:44):
it is. And they've captured the AA has captured a
number of these, right, and I've seen suggestions that they're
using some of these on like they just set up
an ambush along the banks of the river, right and
as a ship comes in they can they can maybe
disable it with a mine and then attack it with those.
But there are videos online you can find them of
the AA sinking these ships, and then they've done some
(31:04):
amazing drone photography of like they obviously they then like
staged their units on the ships, like all saluting the
drone and they had the Arakan Army flags and they're
actually really cool photos of them taking these ships. But again,
like I think this might be the first sinking of
a Bermese naval ship since since independence from Britain. Like
(31:27):
I can't think that they were. They al really haven't
played much of a role at all in its conflicts
with the Eros, aside as from like basically kind of
just shelling places when they want to do that. But
there's never really been any significant opposition to them, and
that's changed now they have to obviously, just like everywhere
else watch out for drones. Drones have been used to
a massive extent in Myanmar, and like the AA doesn't
(31:52):
have as many like associated PDFs, I haven't seen them
doing as much of the drone stuff as the PDFs.
The pdf tend to be like the more urban folks, right,
the younger folks and the gen Z folks that we've
spoken about before, and a lot of them have been
very savvy with their use of drones. Like I said,
you can look up Federal Wings and you can see
them dropping bombs with drones on all kinds of stuff
(32:15):
with their heavy metal soundtracks, so they like. But what
it wasn't even drone to It's pretty simple. It was
just mines. So things they do love mines and mea
ether of mines all over that country. But in this case,
these I guess massive what mines in the rivers. Given
that the Hunter is the only only entity sending big
boats up and down, you could set them at a
(32:36):
certain depth where these small boats wouldn't hit them, and
eventually one of the Hunter boats is going to hit them,
I guess. And so it's pretty basic technology, but it's
still a massive step forward in terms of like a
place where the state had complete impunity, It now doesn't. Right.
They can't just cruise up and down these rivers shelling people.
They were actually using some of the ships to evacuate
(32:57):
soldiers and their families from a position, and the soldiers
they were trying to, like, rather than surrendering, they were
trying to evacuate them and move them to somewhere else.
The AA asked them to surrender, and they didn't. They
tried to evacuate them, so then they mined the ships
and took those out. I think the hunters like tried
to spin this as like the AA is attacking civilians,
(33:17):
but I think a Burmese navy ship with a Burmese
Navy flag, when the ships have just been shelling you,
seems like a legitimate target to me. And I think
it's very hard. It's you know, it's a hunter, but
children on one of their naval ships rather than the
AA who attacked the ship because it had children. You
can hear in one of the things you can hear
the AA are like attacking the ship in small boats
(33:38):
and they're shouting like there are children on board, and
you can hear them acknowledging it. And there are videos
of the AA rescuing people who jumped overboard, rescuing them
from the river, and then like, I guess they just
held as POWs.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
Cool.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
Yeah, it's cool. It's interesting. Obviously, not many of us
have access to underwater mines, but you know, maybe in
a fictional future we might.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
Yeah. Well there you go, folks. Uh, this has been
a regular naval warfare, and you a podcast about a
regular naval warfare, and you.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
Yeah, send us to your videos of yourself in irregular
naval war Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
Absolutely, go out there. Look how about this, Every listener,
go out and sink one naval vessel, you know, don't
matter who's just any boat. Any go sink a boat,
any boat, take supery, knock it out. You see a dinghy,
take that fucker out, people kayaking, fuck them up.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
You know.
Speaker 2 (34:38):
Banana boat, absolutely, a banana boat for sure. One of
those weird duck boat car things that they have in
some city. Oh yeah, actually, you know what, you don't
need to do anything with that. That'll kill everybody on
board on it. Those things are dead traps. Just pray
for those people. Yeah, any any other boat. Yeah, you
see a doughnut. You know, behind being behind a speedboat?
(35:00):
Oh yeah, market Anyway, everybody go away.
Speaker 3 (35:10):
It could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It could Happen Here, updated monthly at
coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
All Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to It Could Happen Here and our special
two part series Irregular Naval Warfare and You, where James
and I teach you how you too can challenge the
US Navy's dominance of the seas, or at least the
coasts for fun and profit. Actually today, last episode we
(00:25):
talked about people challenging the US Navy's coastal dominance. Today
we're talking about doing the same thing for the Russian Navy.
So that's going to be fun. And of course the
Navy of Myanmar, which is a bit of a different
class from the US and Russian Navy, but no less interesting.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Yeah, still fun. I'd love to see about lose.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Yeah. Well I just like boats going down, you know,
I just hate a boat.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Yeah, yeah, USS many many such cases.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Yeah, I'm going to start with Ukraine, and then we're
going to throw to James to talk about our friends
in Myanmar and how they have repurposed civilian technology and
stolen weapons to counter a navy without really having one
of their own. But first Ukraine. In twenty fourteen, when
the Russian Army invaded eastern Ukraine and took Crimea, Ukraine
(01:11):
lost a significant portion of it's already not that impressive navy.
Most of their boats were just taken by Russia, along
with a number of sailors who defected. A lot of
other sailors fled the region, leaving behind their homes and
cities like Sebastopol to continue serving their country in a
war that a decade later is still ongoing. One of
these sailors, who is a Sebastopol native and had to
(01:32):
flee his home, possibly forever, in order to continue serving
his country, is the current commander of Ukraine's navy, Admiral Nazpapa.
He leads a navy that is almost without manned ships,
and on paper, it is utterly incapable of challenging Russia's
legendary Black Sea Fleet. Since the age of the Tsars,
the Black Sea Fleet has been infamous as a pillar
(01:53):
of Russian military power. However, also since the age of
the Tsars, it's had a nasty tendency to get utterly
housed by enemies that should have been able to beat it.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Right.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, not the first time it's taken unexpected loot.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
It has a legendary history that doesn't mean good. There's bad.
Legendsy out there.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
You know, Yeah, it's well known.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Yeah today that enemy is Ukraine. Since the expanded Russian
invasion in twenty twenty two, just two years, Ukraine has
destroyed or badly damaged more than a third of the
Black Sea fleet. Despite having no battleships or destroyers in
the sea to counter Russian naval power. They have done
enough damage to reopen Odessa and at least one other
(02:36):
port on the Black Sea to international commerce, which has
provided Ukraine with a crucial economic and strategic lifeline. And
that's a remarkable achievement. Sinking a third of the Black
Sea fleet, and basically when you reopen a port, that
means that you have taken away naval dominance from a
country that has a navy and you don't. That's pretty good,
pretty good stuff. Over the last two years, had damaged,
(03:01):
irreparably or sunk seven active landing ships and one to
seven active landing ships and one landing vessel. I don't
know the difference. They've They've fucked up a lot of boats.
They have destroyed a submarine with seed to ground capability
that was docked for repairs. They have sunk a cruiser,
the capital ship of the entire Black Sea fleet, the Moskva.
They've also sunk a supply vessel and a handful of
(03:22):
patrol boats and missile boats, and a number of other
boats have been damaged. That's a significant rate of casualties,
especially when you consider that every actually destroyed vessel we're
looking at a year's multiple years lead time to replace.
You cannot make naval vessels very quickly anymore. Back during
the big Dub Dub dose, the US did, but nobody
(03:44):
really does that anymore, not with the big ones.
Speaker 4 (03:48):
At least you through that. We were just yeating aircraft
carriers into the sea, just flotting them out. Yeah, it
don't take them out a week.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
Yeah, it's because it's because Raisi de Rivetay was really
riveting at a high speed.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
She was quite a riveter. So at the start of hostilities, Turkey,
which controls access to the Black Sea forbade any additional
military vessels or at least military vessels of significant size,
from entering the area. What this means this has a
significant impact on how well Ukraine strikes work, because even
if Russia can replace the losses physically, they can't actually
(04:24):
get replacements into the Black Sea easily. They can't sail
new shit past the Turks. The Turks are not allowing
that right now. So again, this is a situation that
has kind of favored the way in which Ukraine has
adapted to countering Russian naval dominance. It is possible that
at the present rate of attrition, the Black Sea Fleet
could be rendered inoperable in less than two years. Like
(04:46):
if they keep going at this rates, like eighteen months
or something before, there's not really much of a fleet
anymore now. If Ukraine had accomplished this task with a
traditional navy using standard naval tactics, this would have been
an impressive victory given the disparity in resources between the
two nations. But they have done all this with a
mix of cruise missiles, many of which are produced in country,
aerial drones, and new bespoke locally produced suicide drone boats.
(05:10):
This irregular naval warfare has been successful enough that one
Rand Corporation engineer and analyst, Scott Savatz, described the Black
Sea Fleet as a fleet in being quote, it represents
a potential threat that needs to be vigilantly guarded against,
but one that remains in check for now. And I'm
going to quote from a New York Times article on
the topic, it brought a little more context. Ukraine has
(05:31):
effectively turned around ten thousand square miles in the western
Black Sea off its southern coast into what the military
calls a gray zone, where neither side can sail without
the threat of attack. James Heapy, Britain's Armed Forces minister,
told a recent security conference in Warsaw that Russia's Black
Sea fleet had suffered a functional defeat, and contended that
the liberation of Ukraine's coastal waters in the Black Sea
(05:51):
was every bit as important as the successful counter offensives
on land and Corsona and Kharkiv last year. The classical
approach that we studied at military maritime academies is not
work now, Admiral Nese Papas said. Therefore, we have to
be as flexible as possible and change approaches to planning
and implementing work as much as possible. That at articles
about a year old or so so. The Neptune anti
(06:11):
ship missile is one of the prides of Ukraine's nason
arms industry. Neptune missiles are credited with destroying the Moskva
in April of twenty twenty two. Ukraine also has access
to several Western anti ship missiles, including these storm Shadow
and Scalp missiles. I believe the storm Shadow comes from
your folks, right James, Yeah, prevention, Yeah yeah. And these
seem to be pretty effective missiles. These obviously much more advanced.
(06:34):
And these are modern naval weapons, right. These are much
more advanced than, for example, the weapons to who these have.
These are the kind of things that can counter to
some extent modern anti missile technology. For an example of
kind of how that tends to work, they used a
barrage of I believe it was mostly storm shadows to
rain death on the crime import of Sebastopol. Recently, seven
(06:55):
out of eighteen of the missiles fired made it through
Russian air defenses. And these damaged or just destroyed four
landing ships and a single strike. And these are sizable
naval vessels. This is the most recent attack, although as
after I wrote this, there was another attack on the
Kirch Bridge. I'm not really sure how that took place
yet that seems to have shut it down again. But
that gives you an idea of like what you actually
(07:15):
have to do. How much of these missiles you have
to put in the air to get some through. And
that's not too bad, right eighteen missiles seven get through,
four ships down. That's a really good rate of return.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
Especially when you consider that, like you know, we were
talking in our first episode about how the US is
spending significant resources on maintaining its defending its carriers, right
Russia does not have the same ability to keep good
lord munitions. No, and so like that's a finite resource,
right there, their means of defining that. Defending their ships
(07:46):
and defending really anything against missiles are a finite resource.
So any time you can, even if the ship doesn't
get sunk, if the ship has to deploy one of
these missiles, which it doesn't, which the whole country doesn't
have very many of, that's win.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Now, this is we are talking about irregular naval warfare.
And then this is not this is not what most
people would have considered a traditional naval conflict prior to
the expansion of hostilities in Ukraine. However, we are talking
this is very different than the case of the Huthis.
Ukraine is a state. It doesn't have a massive arms industry,
but it has one, and it has the supportive nations
with sizable arms industries, right, So we are not talking
(08:23):
about this part. We are going to talk about the
aspects of Ukrainian irregular naval warfare that are some guys
that are hobbyists building shit. Yeah, this is not that
part yet. But I think this information is kind of
significant and that it shows the tactical use of anti
ship cruise missiles and their ability to significantly shape an
operational environment even when the country using them has minimal
(08:44):
conventional naval assets of their own. It is largely through
the use of these missiles that Ukraine has been able
to reopen their black sea ports. That matters to people
seeking to understand both this conflict and the future of
unconventional naval warfare. I mean, I guess you could say
this is the future of conventional naval warfare, but think
we're still leaning on the unconventional side at the moment,
at least in terms of how doctrine is changing as
(09:05):
a result of this. So maybe I should update how
we're defining this. But for our purposes as people unlikely
to have access to cruise missiles but significantly likely to
find ourselves waging an unconventional war than having cruise missiles
it's more relevant to look at the new weapons systems
Ukraine has developed that have helped them lock down the
Black Sea Fleet using civilian hobbyists. And this is where
(09:26):
we get to drones. Ukraine's conventional aerial drones are a
mix of actual military hardware. I'm talking about stuff like
the Bairaktar, the Turkish drone, which is like kind of
like the Predator, all right, it's like an actual military product.
But the majority in terms of numbers of drones that
Ukraine is fielding are civilian drones, or at least drones
(09:46):
that started out a civilian technology. A lot of these
are now built to be military, but they're still based
on these designs that started with people hacking and cobbling
together civilian drones and outside of naval stuff. Prior to
the war, there had been a lot of veterans and
hobbyists who were veterans trying to convince the Ukrainian military
that it needed to adopt drone warfare on a large scale,
(10:07):
the kind of drone warfare that you can do with
these these less expensive drones, and they received a lot
of pushback until the war started and these guys just
took to the field as started fucking murking Russian armed
units and infantry and killing generals and shit. And now
Ukraine has integrated in a way that everyone is going
to follow. Like Ukrainian like battalions have like companies now
(10:28):
that are drone assault companies, and like line battalions, and.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
Within infantry you have people used artillery eating transport of zebibusters.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Yes, all over. They have set a goal for this
year producing at least a million and ideally more like
two million drones and at least from what I read,
that looks like very plausible, and most of these are
quite small, right, but that doesn't mean obviously ineffective.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
I know they buy a lot of their drones in
the UK because the UK has consistently kicked itself in
the nuts when it comes to the breaksit and so
the pound is significantly weaker, and so they're able to
get the drones cheaper price and then drive them all
the way across.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
I know people who've done that. I was going to
go join them, but never worked it out.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Yeah, And you know there are a number of different
like these drones earlier in the war had an easier
time being effective and causing casualties in the Russians then
later this is something that you know, kind of the
hooplaw and support which I think is necessary that Ukraine gets.
Lead some people to discount the degree to which Russian
(11:27):
forces have adapted and gotten smarter. And one of the
ways in which they've adapted and gotten smarter is in
blocking drones and using drones of their own. You know,
one of the stories the last couple of weeks is
that Russia has succeeded in carrying out strikes on advanced
weapons systems like samsites deep in Ukrainian territory. They've extended
their kill chain beyond what they used to be capable of,
(11:48):
and that's because they've adapted. They're also adapted with less
efficacy at blocking drones and attacks on naval vessels. Some
of this has been kind of funny. I want to
read a quote from a Business Insider article here. Russia
is painting silhouettes on naval vessels on land to try
and trick Ukraine, which keeps destroying its warships. In an
intelligence update on Wednesday, the UK Ministry of Defense said
(12:09):
that silhouettes of vessels have also been painted on the
side of k's probably to confuse the uncrude aerial vehicle operators.
They showed there's some images of this. They don't seem
convincing to me. I don't know if I think this
is working.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
This is great. I love this. Have a cardboard navy next.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
Yeah, it's very bugs bunny. Yes, they're not working as
well as bugs would.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
More like a hole in the side of the cliff
face and crushing into keeps throwing at it.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
It's very funny. I mean obviously they just Ukraine just
sank like or damn it badly damaged four boats. So
I don't think this is I haven't seen evidence this
is working well. Their actual like jamming efforts have been
much more successful. Right.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
Yeah, they always will be on civilian One of the
thing that's really interesting compared to me and is that
Ukraine tends to rely on modified off the shelf civilian
drone Right your dji is that kind of thing in
Mianma because of where a lot of the PDFs are,
because well, they increasingly do control the borders, but they
haven't always. They have been making their own drones. The
(13:13):
group called Federal Wings you can find them on telegram,
who make their own drones, and I think those seem
to be less the Jammas that the sac that the
Tamadoor has are Chinese made like Jamma rifles. You see
them all the time in captured weapon cases, but they
don't seem to be having as much impact on these
(13:34):
homemade drones, which is really interesting.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Yeah, yeah, and it's you know, I've mentioned a couple
of times we're doing this in part because the odds
that people listening might be involved in an a regular
conflict are not zero.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
You know.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
What I think about when I say that is not
that there's high odds for any individual person fighting themselves
in that situation, but there is, Given the number of
people who listen to this podcast, probably someone who is
not currently involved in conflict that will find themselves that
way in the future. And I based that in part
on the fact that all of our friends in Myanmar
who are currently fighting a war were a couple of
(14:08):
years ago delivery drivers and you know, playing pubg online
and not really thinking they would wind up as insurgents.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Yeah. I've spoken to a number of people who are
currently fighting on in Mianma who have listened to our
Meanma podcast and realized the capacity of three D printing. Yeah,
to be very useful and so like, even in that sense,
it's already happening. But yeah, don't know one in Memma,
Like many of them said, their entire combat experiences playing
pubg Yeah, now they're murking ships.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
Yeah. So anyway, it bears thinking about this stuff. And
this brings me back to Ukraine's irregular drone warfare units,
which again a lot of these guys started out as
civilian enthusiasts who expanded responded to the outbreak or at
least expansion of hostilities by expanding their hobby into a
real world military effort that had a real world effect.
Civilian drones were crucial in the Battle of Kiev, allowing
(14:58):
Ukraine to do severe damage to that mass Russian armored
column heading towards the city and providing intel that led
to the assassination of multiple general level officers. So it
is perhaps not surprising that Ukraine looked to the same
group of volunteer hobbyists when it came time to expand
their naval arsenal. And there's a really good article I
found in CNN by Sebastian Shukla, Alex Marcott, and Daria Tarasova,
(15:19):
and I actually want to give you the title of
this article. Yeah, I'll try to thriller in the show
notes is exclusive rare access to Ukraine's sea drones, part
of Ukraine's fight back in the Black Sea. Haven't really
seen the word fight back use that way, but there
you go. So I'm going to read a quote from
that article. A government link Ukrainian fundraising organization called United
twenty four has sourced money from companies and individuals all
(15:40):
around the world, pooling funds to disperse it to a
variety of developers and initiatives, from defense to soccer matches.
The entire outfit is very security conscious, insisting on strict
guidelines on filming and revealing identities. Those who see in
and met with declined to give their full names or
even their ranks within Ukraine's armed forces. On a creaky
wooden jetty, a camouflaged sea drone pilot says he wants
to go by shark. In front of him is a long,
(16:01):
black hardshell briefcase. He unveils a bespoke multi screened mission control,
essentially an elaborate gaming center combined complete with levers, joysticks,
a monitor, and buttons that have covers over switches that
shouldn't accidentally be knocked with labels like blast. The developer
of the drone, who asked to remain anonymous, said their
work on sea drones only began once the war started.
It was very important because we did not have many
(16:22):
forces to resist the maritime state Russia, and we needed
to develop something of our own because we didn't have
the existing capabilities. So again, these are hobbyist design I mean,
this guy's not really a hobbyist in anymore, but that's
how he started. He's only not a hobbyist because the
military recognized the value of what he was doing. And
the current iterations of this sea drone weigh a little
(16:42):
over two thousand pounds with an explosive six hundred and
sixty one pound payload, a five hundred mile range and
a max speed of fifty miles per hour. That is
a significant weapons system.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
Multiple sea drones have been used to strike Russian assets
in the Black Sea, and drones were involved in a
successful attack that severely damaged the Kirch Bridge last July,
rendering it impassable since until September. So these have had
a real battlefield effect. And they probably will continue to
do so. The developer of these drones told CNN these
drones are a completely Ukrainian production. They are designed, drawn
(17:14):
and tested here. It's our own production of holes, electronics
and software. More than fifty percent of the production of
equipment is here in Ukraine. And that's really significant because
you know, I think we're all aware of the difficulty
Ukraine has had getting weaponry lately from the West as
a result of fucking around in Congress, and so it
is a necessity for them to be able to develop
(17:35):
weapon systems like this that can interdict and counteract more
advanced and expensive weapon systems and can be produced indigenously.
You know, I don't think we have seen a mass
suicide boat attack. I'm interested in what happens when we do,
like with more significant numbers than we've seen deployed. I
kind of wonder the degree to which the Russians have
(17:56):
gotten good at spotting this stuff. I've come across at
least a couple of stories of these boats like destroyed
on approach. So they certainly don't always work or even
a majority of the time. But given the cost of
these things, they don't have to get through the majority
of the time very much worth it right now. In
that interview with The New York Times, Admiral Najpapa caution
that Ukraine is still outgunned in the Black Sea. Even
(18:18):
though the Russians no longer have supremacy, they still have
air superiority. They are still able to launch from the
sea long range missiles at Ukrainian targets, including civilian targets.
So this is not again a situation that should be
portrayed as them having their own way. Their ability to
kind of interdict the sea has been the primary effects
of it have been number one, the reopening of trade
(18:40):
in the Black Sea, and earlier in the war, by
locking down the ability of these landing ships to put
more troops on ground and by doing damage to the
Kurch Bridge, they were able to slow Russian reinforcements and
Russian materiel from entering the war zone in order to
and this aided in some of the advances, particularly in
like areas like Carson. At this moment, the situation has
(19:01):
changed because again the Russians aren't just kind of like
sitting around doing the same thing over and over again,
or at least not always. And we don't tend to
talk as much about successes on the Russian side of things,
but that is an important part of the story. And
one of the things the Russians have done is kind
of acknowledge that the Black Sea Fleet may not be
a fleet in being forever and certainly cannot be relied
(19:23):
upon to handle everything they initially thought it would handle.
And so Russian engineers spent a significant period of time
building a sizeable new railroad that connects Rostov and southern
Russia to Mariopol and occupied southern Ukraine. This has allowed
them to get high volume shipments into the area and
supply troops to the area along Ukraine's southern front without
(19:44):
relying on that bridge or relying on naval landings.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
Right.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
So the fact that Ukraine has been able to take
out for landing ships recently is good. That's a win
for Ukraine. It reduces Russian capability, but it is not
half the same effect that it would have had, for example,
two years earlier. Yeah, because Russia has also evolved, and
among other things, railroads are a lot easier, are a
lot harder to destroy to like take out, right, it's
easy to damage a railroad, but they're easy to fix.
(20:11):
It's not. It doesn't take a lot to get some
guys over to fix a damage sunk of railroad. Fixing
a bridge that's been blown up or a sunk boat
is a lot harder.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
Yeah. Absolutely, I mean, and there are people within Russia
even who are sabotaging railroads, but as you say, it's
like it's very high stakes for them, and it's relatively
low cost for the Russian state to fix that stuff,
so like it's not as effective.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
Yeah, But I think this gives you an idea of
kind of like what we're looking at when we look
at this kind of ongoing irregular conflict is the side
that does not have access to a functional navy, not
able to interdict or destroy fleets, but able to stop
them from dominating the coast. And when you can stop
them from dominating the coast, you have effectively denied them
(20:54):
terrain that they can act in without being countered, and
you have also denied them from stopping you from acting
in that same terrain, even if you don't have total
safety in that area. That opens up the operational possibilities substantially.
And this is something that I kind of don't think
is going to get put back in the bag. Even
if some of these Star Wars ass weapons systems do
(21:16):
come out in the near future, you know, maybe that'll
have an impact in the immediate term on people like
the Houthis, but I don't think that it really will
on you know, for example, what what Ukraine's doing right?
Speaker 1 (21:28):
Yes, yeah, Russia can't keep up with getting decent small arms,
body armor, grenades and ship It's there's no way it's
going to implement some kind of massive Star Wars system
over its navy. Not right now in the middle of
a conflict. That's it's struggling to supply.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
Yep, you know what, here's an ad break.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
All right, we're back and we are traveling around the
world's been your little globe in your head, and look
for Meanma, which is of course in Asia. Now I'm
talking about two different I guess anti ship sabotage or
attack or two different ways the ships have been sunk
in the EMMA. I'll start with the first one, which
is undoubtedly the flashiest, just because it's fun. So a
(22:22):
ship in the port of Yangon about about a month ago,
so we're recording on a twenty. It's about the first
of March. It was in the river, in the river
in yangon right, and it was carrying allegedly carrying jet fuel. Now,
if you follow Burmese activists, people in the Burmese Freedom Movement,
they will one of their demands for a long time
(22:42):
has been to stop supplying the Hunter with jet fuel,
which would in turn stop it being able to bomb villages, schools, civilians,
PDF formations, just about anyone in the country. It's bombed
at some point in the last couple of years. And
they haven't been to exactly right, they haven't been able
to stop the supply of jet fuel coming to the Hunter.
(23:03):
So they've taken it into their own hands. And what
they did on the first of March was that they
snuck onto a boat. So two this is the story
from the Burmese National Unity Government's Ministry of Defense. Anyway,
combat divers snuck onto this boat planted a kilogram of
TNT or a charge equivalent to a kilogram of TNT.
(23:25):
Robert and I've both spoken to people who make explosives
in memis we do. We definitely know the PDF has
access to a range of explosives. They set it on
a five hour fuse and it blew up in the
middle of the night, and there's definitely footage of a
ship on fire having blown up. Now, this is pretty
remarkable forever. This is why the United States has units
(23:47):
like the Navy Seals, right, like the higher speed guys,
because it is not easy to scuba dive across a harbor,
climb onto a ship, set an explosive charge without being detected,
and then leave that ship and have the charge go
off and sink the ship without you being compromised, without
the charge itself being like compromised, and the ship being saved. Right,
(24:09):
this is some like. This is some classic like. This
is why they are special units within the US military. Now,
the PDF very obviously did not have combat divers. Two
years ago, I was looking into hobby scuba diving in Yangon.
The rivers in that area are extremely muddy and visibility
is very low. So the people who you find diving
(24:32):
in that area are not so much like hobby scuba
divers or free divers. But there's salvage divers and there's
a whole little industry of people. And these people are
diving in equipment that I would not consider safe or reliable.
It's clamping an air hose in between your teeth and
diving down and trying to find there's a large deposit
(24:55):
of coal in one of the rivers in Yangon because
of a ship that's sunk. There was, of course copper,
which everyone all around the world, including the big Coong
in Santia, are stealing copper. There's iron, right, so these
people are diving down and trying to collect scrap and
sell that for whatever minimal amount they can. Right. It's
an extremely dangerous and extremely low income. It's one of
(25:19):
the sort of really high risk, low reward jobs that
you get in economies where people are really struggling to
make ends meet. Right, So those are the only divers
I can find evidence of in Yangon. I don't think
it was them who did this, because you have to
have a boat above you with a pump if you're
diving with a rubber hose in your teeth, right, So
it seems like somebody within the They said it was
(25:43):
a Yangon PDF, that's what they attribute it to, So
that would be one of these. It would likely be
an underground group within the PDF, right, some people living
in the city who were able to sneak onto this
boat set a charge and blow it up, and they
would also had to have intelligence at the boat where
it was, what it was carrying, et cetera. It's a
pretty pretty daring mission that this is the first one
(26:06):
like this we've seen, and we haven't seen anything since.
But it's of course possible that this is a story
that we're being told. In fact, they had like someone
undercover on the ship, right, or like they had some
other means of getting this charge onto the ship. But
one way or another they managed to blow up this
ship carrying fuel, which is a significant detrima. Right, that's
(26:28):
how they get most of their ship. It's not over land,
especially with more.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
The terrain there is just absolutely, like even with modern
technology difficult to get significant amounts of shit through.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
They're resupplying some of their outposts that are ten miles
from a town with helicopters right now, like a the
terrain is burly, and B they don't have They PDF
has denied them access that any time they send out
a convoy, it gets attacked, so sending out plus you
know that their land board crossings are increasingly falling into
(27:01):
the hands of the PDFs and the eros, So getting
stuff through the ocean is one of the ways that
they can still get stuff. And if this keeps happening,
then they will make that more expensive for them. And
they're not exactly a wealthy hunter, even though I guess
Minna Lang just made himself an air Force one recently.
I was just looking at it today. He's God, he's
got himself too luxury. Yeah, they called it dictator class,
(27:24):
like he's upgraded from president class.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
Nice class.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
Yeah, yeah, yes, he has in many ways. So yeah,
that's one way that the PDF has been blowing up
ships in the yang On. Robert, do you know who
else has been blowing up ships in the in Yangon?
Speaker 2 (27:41):
Well, we are sponsored entirely by the British Navy circa
the mid eighteen hundreds, so I would guess them, that's right, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah yeah. Lots of repressed, repressed feelings and glowing up
a lot of cabin boys with deep trauma. Anyway, it.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
Eric Rebeca, We hope you enjoyed that. That pivot one
of our best ones yet. And we're talking about the
Arakan Army now, So the Arakan Army are not to
be confused with the Arakan Rahine of Salvation. Army different group.
Arakan is the name of what is now a kind
state before it was colonized by the Burmese. That was
I think Arakan was a king before it was colonized
(28:32):
by the Burmese, so that that's where that refers to.
It's a geographical appellation rather than like necessarily an ethnic one.
The Rakin would be the ethnic group. So what the
AA have done is sunk. I think at least four
Hunter ships now, and most of these ships are kind
of they're like the They look like big Higgins boats.
(28:53):
They're like landing craft or like car ferries, like flat
bottom with a bow that goes down. Right. I ride
around a lot in the Marshall Islands in little landing
craft like that because they can get them in. They
don't have like docks, so they can just ride that
right up to the beach and then drop the front
and off you go. And they use them a lot.
The Hunter doesn't have like per se marines that they
(29:13):
don't have maritime infantry, but they use them to transport
their regular army around, right, and they use them to
transport them up river. They also use them a lot
in Rakhine State to shell AA positions and any townships
that they've decided they want to wipe off the map
and kill all the people in right, So, these these
boats have been a real thorn in the side of
(29:35):
the Arakan Army. After Operation ten twenty seven when they
joined with two other groups to form the Three Brotherhood Alliance,
a launch attacks on the Hunter all over VMA. And
so what they've been doing, it appears, is using underwater
mines to think these ships, which is interesting, right. I
guess the mines are like a very old technology, right,
(30:00):
Like it's probably one hundred years plus underwater mines have existed.
It seems the way that like the reason they're able
to get away with using what is their relatively dated
technology is because the Hunter just doesn't expect to encounter anything, right,
and so has not equipped its ships as such. Like
they do have stuff like submarines, but that's not what's
getting sunk. What's getting sun to these big kind of
(30:22):
landing craft riverboats, And it seems that they're using mines
and then once they disable the ship, they're then attacking
it with small boats, small arms like indirect fire mortars
and stuff. I saw one post that suggested they'd use
which is pretty cool if they did. The Burmese military
has these like tank destroyers. It's a tank, it's what
(30:44):
it is. And they've captured the AA has captured a
number of these, right, and I've seen suggestions that they're
using some of these on like they just set up
an ambush along the banks of the river, right and
as a ship comes in they can they can maybe
disable it with a mine and then attack it with those.
But there are videos online you can find them of
the AA sinking these ships, and then they've done some
(31:04):
amazing drone photography of like they obviously they then like
staged their units on the ships, like all saluting the
drone and they had the Arakan Army flags and they're
actually really cool photos of them taking these ships. But again,
like I think this might be the first sinking of
a Bermese naval ship since since independence from Britain. Like
(31:27):
I can't think that they were. They al really haven't
played much of a role at all in its conflicts
with the Eros, aside as from like basically kind of
just shelling places when they want to do that. But
there's never really been any significant opposition to them, and
that's changed now they have to obviously, just like everywhere
else watch out for drones. Drones have been used to
a massive extent in Myanmar, and like the AA doesn't
(31:52):
have as many like associated PDFs, I haven't seen them
doing as much of the drone stuff as the PDFs.
The pdf tend to be like the more urban folks, right,
the younger folks and the gen Z folks that we've
spoken about before, and a lot of them have been
very savvy with their use of drones. Like I said,
you can look up Federal Wings and you can see
them dropping bombs with drones on all kinds of stuff
(32:15):
with their heavy metal soundtracks, so they like. But what
it wasn't even drone to It's pretty simple. It was
just mines. So things they do love mines and mea
ether of mines all over that country. But in this case,
these I guess massive what mines in the rivers. Given
that the Hunter is the only only entity sending big
boats up and down, you could set them at a
(32:36):
certain depth where these small boats wouldn't hit them, and
eventually one of the Hunter boats is going to hit them,
I guess. And so it's pretty basic technology, but it's
still a massive step forward in terms of like a
place where the state had complete impunity, It now doesn't. Right.
They can't just cruise up and down these rivers shelling people.
They were actually using some of the ships to evacuate
(32:57):
soldiers and their families from a position, and the soldiers
they were trying to, like, rather than surrendering, they were
trying to evacuate them and move them to somewhere else.
The AA asked them to surrender, and they didn't. They
tried to evacuate them, so then they mined the ships
and took those out. I think the hunters like tried
to spin this as like the AA is attacking civilians,
(33:17):
but I think a Burmese navy ship with a Burmese
Navy flag, when the ships have just been shelling you,
seems like a legitimate target to me. And I think
it's very hard. It's you know, it's a hunter, but
children on one of their naval ships rather than the
AA who attacked the ship because it had children. You
can hear in one of the things you can hear
the AA are like attacking the ship in small boats
(33:38):
and they're shouting like there are children on board, and
you can hear them acknowledging it. And there are videos
of the AA rescuing people who jumped overboard, rescuing them
from the river, and then like, I guess they just
held as POWs.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
Cool.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
Yeah, it's cool. It's interesting. Obviously, not many of us
have access to underwater mines, but you know, maybe in
a fictional future we might.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
Yeah. Well there you go, folks. Uh, this has been
a regular naval warfare, and you a podcast about a
regular naval warfare, and you.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
Yeah, send us to your videos of yourself in irregular
naval war Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
Absolutely, go out there. Look how about this, Every listener,
go out and sink one naval vessel, you know, don't
matter who's just any boat. Any go sink a boat,
any boat, take supery, knock it out. You see a dinghy,
take that fucker out, people kayaking, fuck them up.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
You know.
Speaker 2 (34:38):
Banana boat, absolutely, a banana boat for sure. One of
those weird duck boat car things that they have in
some city. Oh yeah, actually, you know what, you don't
need to do anything with that. That'll kill everybody on
board on it. Those things are dead traps. Just pray
for those people. Yeah, any any other boat. Yeah, you
see a doughnut. You know, behind being behind a speedboat?
(35:00):
Oh yeah, market Anyway, everybody go away.
Speaker 3 (35:10):
It could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It could Happen Here, updated monthly at
coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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