April 7, 2022 • 44 mins
We discuss Urban Combat tactics brought to you by Twitter dot com, and how conflict presents windows of possibility.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Oh, it could happen here, and it's currently happening there
there being Ukraine, which is in the midst of an
invasion by the Russian government. I'm Robert Evans. This is
a podcast about bad things and how to make them better,
joined as often by Garrison and Chris my co hosts,
(00:26):
and we are talking about some of the advice, good
and bad, that's been going around on social media about
how to disable and destroy armored vehicles. This is something
we've kind of waited to do until the conflict was
a little bit more of a mature state. But in
brief if you have been following what's been happening in
Russia through the lens of social media or what's pepping
(00:48):
in Ukraine through the lens of social media, one thing
that has happened is in the early stages of the invasion,
a whole bunch of people flocked, particularly to Twitter, but
also not this did not just stay on Twitter. There
were large number of mainstreams news articles published on the
subject of the things people were saying to talk about
different ways civilians could disable Russian armored vehicles or otherwise
(01:10):
stymy and thwart the progress of Russian military units through
their cities. Um. And this has been accompanied by things
like the Ukrainian government giving out information on how to
make molotov cocktails. We talked about this in our Molotov
Cocktail episode and putting out really neat infographics on where
to throw molotov cocktails to disable armored vehicles. But it's
also come with a lot of bad advice that I
(01:32):
don't want people who are maybe looking at the potential
of urban combat happening in their future to take away
from this conflict, because there's also a lot of disinfos.
So that's what we're talking about today. Yes, And I
guess one of the first places to probably discuss this
urban combat idea is they probably the guy who's tried
to make kind of a career out of talking about
(01:53):
ourban combat, which would be who wrote a relatively viral
Twitter thread on this topic and has been writing about
this thing for the past few years. Um. He's a
he's the the chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West
Points Modern War Institute and served for like a quarter
of a century as an infantry soldier, including two deployments
(02:15):
into Iraq. And yeah, the past few years he's tried
to kind of make a name for himself as the
guy who writes about urban combat. And obviously since this
was happening largely when Russia started invading Kiev, John Spetzer
put put together some of his thoughts that went pretty
viral on this on this said topic, Yeah, and it's
it's frustrating. You've got a quote in here from one
(02:37):
of the articles about he was giving out that says
some of his advice such is preparing simple molotov cocktails,
it's already being seen on the streets of Kiev, which
is kind of framing it as if Spencer advised the Ukrainians.
Absolutely not true. Before he made that threat, the government
was urging people to rest. And also, like molotov cocktails
got their name from people in Finland, not super far
(02:59):
from Ukraine, resisting the Russian military in a very similar
way to add, they're being used by Ukrainian civilians. Now, Um,
what I I believe what John Spencer did. He's a
guy with some qualifications. Um, certainly like not a random person.
We'll talk about random people giving advice to on Twitter.
But he's also all None of his advice is new,
(03:20):
none of it is from him, None of it is
counter intuitive. A good deal of it is bad, and
most of what he said that is good is just
him pulling things from US military combat manuals and from
Ukrainian military combat manuals and then putting it up in
social media in order to go viral and try to
get another book deal by making it look as if
(03:41):
he is giving advice that is being adopted in real time,
which is not what is happening. Yeah, I mean, like
a good, good instance of this is yeah claiming that
they're making multiv cocktails due to his advice. I mean,
there's a picture in that very article that was taken
before he even posted that thread. So it's like, no,
they're they're few people know how to make all have cocktails.
That's not hard to find out. In a lot of cases,
(04:02):
the Ukrainian Ukrainian government was giving out instructions on how
to do it. And I mean, and if you if
you look at this picture, um, it looks very similar
to a lot of a lot of like the the
almost like small defensive weapons factories that we saw across
the States. You would often see just collections of bottles, uh,
just ready to be thrown, all kind of laid out
(04:24):
in in in milk crates very similar to this photo.
Now there was there was less actual molotov cocktails, but
the way that this is whole, the way this all
set up looks, looks very similar to any kind of
insurgency tactics of being like, yeah, there's gonna be spontaneous
on the ground organizing because people are just kind of
naturally gifted at that. And on a on an objective level,
(04:46):
molotov cocktails have a place on an urban battlefield. They
can be useful weapons for disabling armored vehicles, for causing distractions,
for injuring and even sometimes killing soldiers. They are they
are capable of doing that, and they that's part of
why the Ukrainian government put out these guides showing like
where to huck the sons of bitches in order to
(05:06):
disable you know, transports and armored vehicles and whatnot. Now
that said, attempting to attack a military column with a
Molotov cocktail in most circumstances is very close to suicidal,
and I've watched a number of videos of Ukrainians do it.
In the times that seemed to be most successful is
when you have areas where the Russians are attempting to
(05:27):
establish control. You have small groups of vehicles that are
moving down residential streets. You have a significant amount of
traffic of civilian traffic occurring alongside those military convoys. And
as they passed the convoy, a civilian hucks a molotov,
or as they pass a building, a civilian hucksa molotov.
(05:48):
Um and those seem to be, broadly speaking, the situations
in which people have kind of gotten away with it.
We don't have any kind of I'm not aware of
any kind of solid, uh overarching analysis of all of
the use of molotovs in this but that is, broadly speaking,
a potentially effective way to use a molotov cocktail UH
in order to degrade military capacity of an occupier. What
(06:11):
doesn't work, and what Spencer and a number of other
people suggested is is huck and paint at tanks or
other armored vehicles. And that may be surprising to a
lot of people. I think there's a lot of folks
who want to believe this, UH want to believe that
that that could really work, because it's like you walk ship, right,
(06:32):
it feels like the kind of thing should be doing. Yes,
But here is the thing When you have police officers
who are tear gas in an area and you huck
a bunch of paint and you get it over their
face masks and they cannot see, it reduces their ability
to tear gas you for a while. It makes them uncomfortable,
it makes them have less fun, and it damages gear.
(06:54):
When you huck a bunch of paint at an armored vehicle,
the armored vehicle will return fire with a fifty caliber
mounted Dashka or some other similar gun which fires bullets
that are large enough to take chunks the size of
your head out of concrete, and you will be torn
apart in your organs, liquefied in a hail of metal um. Meanwhile,
the paint that you are attempting to throw at that
(07:14):
vehicle is almost certain to have no impact on it. Um.
Not only are you unlikely to get close enough to
use the paint, because you have to be considerably closer
to do that than you have to with a molotov
in most situations, but also tanks are built with the
understanding that it is possible that one or more of
the ways in which they see will be obstructed. Tank
(07:37):
drivers are trained to drive blind. There are ways of
utilizing tanks when vision is obstructed, because in the kinds
of fights that tanks are built to get into, they
are often in situations where there is so much smoke
around the exactly that there is effectively zero visibility, which
is why when Spencer started talking about people throwing paint
at tanks, a number of tank drivers came out and said,
(08:00):
that's actually horrible advice, like they don't work that way,
and I was, I was chatting with a couple of people. Um,
there was one fellow former Green brand name Mike Nelson
who was posting about Spencer and very angry that he
was basically copying material directly from stuff published by the
Ukrainian government, and then like getting up anytime journalists or
media figures would comment about Ukraine, would like, there's a
(08:23):
nasty post here where Anne Cabrera, who I think is
some sort of reporter, was like, I feel heartsick upon
the latest news out of Mariopol. My god, just like
expressing horror and human terry and tragedy. And Spencer posts
a link to his personal website and says me too,
not sure if you saw my mini manual for the
Urban Defender, but it is available in English and UKRAINI. Yeah,
(08:44):
it's so like anyway grifty ship like that. But because
that it's all that's very different than also like throwing
paint at like a squad car or like a riot
like a riot truck that's coming through because if obscure
their vision, the worst that they can do is crash
into a wall. They're not going to start firing uh
massive explosion rounds from a central Uh. Yeah. So they
(09:07):
they do not like for one thing, the like the police,
as bad as they can be, their default when they
come under any kind of like attack is not to
start firing machine guns wildly in all directions, which Russian
not yet at least. Um. But you know, the other
thing I was chatting with Matthew Mora, who's a is
(09:31):
has been one of the guys who's biling ailing get
spencer on Twitter. Matthew was a Marine Corps tank commander
and was blown up in Afghanistan. So he was in
a tank that was attacked several times and eventually destroyed. UM.
So he's he has some firsthand knowledge about what works
and does not work against tanks. And one of the
things he pointed out is that the people who destroyed
his tank put together I don't know, hundred two hundred
(09:53):
dollars worth of various accelerants and random scrap metal and
made a bomb that destroyed an Abrams tank that works
a lot better than paint, and it's it's the kind
of thing where I think one of the things that's
frustrating here is you've got a lot of these like
American kind of military academic guys. And I know Spencer served,
but that doesn't necessarily mean much. That doesn't mean just
(10:15):
being deployed to Iraq doesn't mean you did anything. But
they were deployed, and maybe they did see urban combat.
But I have watched United States soldiers in an intense
urban combat environment, uh, and most of what they did
was be inside of m wraps because it's very hard
to blow those up. While the Iraqi military did a
great deal of the fighting, and when US soldiers did
(10:35):
engage in fighting, they did so with absolute air supremacy
and with artillery supremacy. Um. Which isn't to say that
it wasn't dangerous, but it is a profoundly different situation
than engaging in urban combat when the air space is
contested and when you do not have artillery supremacy. So
(11:01):
what does that mean in terms of like what can
people actually take away that's useful from this, UM. Well,
on an individual level, somethings have been extremely effective. Ukrainian
territorial defense militias have been very effective at doing things
like picking up small arms, going out in small patrols
into uh rural environments around the area where Russian troops
(11:26):
are moving in small convoys, and oftentimes, because of the
way the advance went, you would have a single or
a couple of Russian munition trucks essentially alone and unsupported,
trying to find their way around. UM. You had civilians
doing stuff like turning signs around, like removing signs, which
they were instructed to by the areas Kraatian officials as well. Yes, yes,
(11:46):
and which I'm sure some people just started doing because
it seemed like a good idea. UM. But that sort
of ship causes them to burn fuel, causes them to
abandon vehicles. You had these kind of independent groups of
farmers towing away abandoned vehicles. You had small raiding parties
attacking convoys and attacking isolated units. You had cases where
(12:06):
you know, Russian military units early in the fight would
get into Kiev uh kind of on accident and be
ambushed by territorial defense units and wiped out. And those
are all very effective examples of of decentralized kind of
ground up resistance against a major military force. Now, one
thing we don't know that is important if you think
(12:27):
about the potential that you might have to endure something
like this, is we have no idea what the casualties
were like among those kids. It is a total black box.
And it's it's probable that part of why Russian forces
did the war crime they did in Bucca Um was
because they had an attitude that all civilians were insurgents,
which is, you know what happens when you have kind
(12:47):
of a people's war, which doesn't justify an act of
genocide um, but it is something people should keep aware of.
When you start fucking with the signs and ambushing the
convoys and throwing Molotov's, one of the things that will
happen is it will accelerate the violence that is being done. Yeah,
and it makes to the civilian justified target in some
you know propaganda lens, Yeah exactly. And that doesn't mean
(13:09):
like it's you should resist if you are invaded. Um,
But these are things that also should be noted, is
this is what happens when you resist, right that this
is what a modern war of this type looks like.
Other things that I'm not sure if they've been effective,
but they're certainly not bad strategies. Is the construction of
a lot of vehicle barriers, tank traps. But next is
(13:31):
the barricade thing, both than what we've been kind of
seeing or speculated about in the East, and then how
we've seen you know, barricade set ups a lot in
the past few years in various resistance movements to you know,
a variety of success levels and non success levels. Yeah,
and and and these are like, you know, barriers tank
(13:52):
traps of a very long history in warfare. So they
absolutely can be and have been effective many many times
on the battlefield. So this is not an area of
does this thing work, but it is a question of
like and and this is something we just don't seem
to have perfect data on did it Did it particularly
play a role in what's happening here? And Um, that's
harder to tell. Um, And it's probably going to be different,
(14:13):
you know, depending on the tactical in an area you're
talking about, which kind of like theater you're talking about.
But um, you know one thing that's like the way
in which these kind of barriers hedgehoggs and like whatnot work.
Is there there an area denial tool. It's like an
area denial tool four vehicles, um. And it makes military
(14:34):
units slow down, it makes them take more time in
clearing area. Um. They have to tow things away or
blow them up. Um. And they also can provide, depending
on the type of thing, cover for infantry and in
urban combat situations, which obviously can cut both ways a
little bit. But there's a reason why you see these
kinds of things in every conflict and also a reason
why people put them up in protests. It can be
(14:56):
very useful to deny the vehicles of the enemy access
to an area temporarily, and a big pile of metal
always does that of the time. It requires something to
deal with it. Yeah, that was something that was very
kind of considered when there was an increase in like
vehicular attacks, UH, during like a lot of vehicles running
into a massive, massive marches, there was definitely a concerted
(15:20):
effort to try to block off streets where stuff is happening,
whether that be like you know, corkers for marches of
people who specifically block off the sides of streets with
their own cars to follow the march around, or you know,
less less effective arricades like throwing a chain lenk fence
in the middle of the street, which is I guess
better than nothing sometimes but also maybe not the most
(15:40):
effective thing. Yeah, in terms of trying to like build
layered barricades, that's not just you know, one flimsy wall,
but it's a series of things that can compress down.
And when you're talking about barricades in a kind of
militant situation, there's there's broadly speaking, got to be two purposes.
One of those purposes is to create a to add
(16:02):
to the friction that you are attempting to create for
the enemy. And that's that's all insurge. All insurgeon warfare
is about creating friction, right, because friction degrades assets. It's
over time. It it called basically like, Okay, so say
you've blocked off a bunch of roads and you've added
fifteen twenty miles to the transport distance that this convoy
has to go. Well, generally speaking, in the case of war.
(16:25):
When we're talking about war, it's assumed that about one
mile is in terms of wear and tear like tins
plus miles um. Because of how much more difficult the
strain on vehicles is in those situations. So you've added
a great deal more strain on the vehicles. That increases
the chance that one of them is gonna blow a tire,
one of them gonna crack an axle, one of them
is going to have an engine block go like blow
(16:46):
or whatever, um. Which means over time, if you're doing
this a bunch, if you're setting up de ricades and
you're effectively increasing or all the amount of travel time
or at least the amount of idoling time that forces
have to go in by a significant amount, you're guaranteeing
a certain number of those vehicles are going to break
or be rendered inoperable in that time. And you're also
(17:06):
the other thing that they do is they allow you
to deny area and funnel the enemy into a specific
into a place more advantageous for you, right, And this
can be advantageous if you're trying to set up an ambush,
if you're just trying to buy time for forces to
move back to a better position. UM it can you know,
there's a number of uses for it. But if you
(17:26):
set up a series of obstacles like this and guarantee
that they're going to have to find an alternate route,
and you know, broadly speaking, because it's your terrain, what
kind of route they're going to take, UM, then you
could do stuff like drop throw a drone at them,
or if because of the damage you've done to the
roads and the difficulty of how difficult you made it
to advance, they wind up just parked for a long time.
That's also a great situation to bomb people with a drone,
(17:49):
which is by far the most effective weapons unit that
we have seen built by civilians in this war. By
the way, UH, it's not molotovs, it's certainly not paint.
It is UH civilian volunteers who put together combat drones
using generally d j I drones that they have upgraded
with thermal imaging cameras in order to see at night,
(18:13):
and they have used three D printed parts in order
to drop bombs from UM and they have done carried
out for weeks now hundreds of extremely successful nighttime raids
on Russian positions. This has been effective for a couple
of reasons. One of them is that the Russian military
does not widespread half effective night vision. Um. We don't
need to get The reasons for this are complicated, based
(18:35):
in a mix of like appropriations, corruption, issues with the
technologies they do have, YadA, YadA, YadA, but they do
not have the capacity in large scale to carry out
operations at night to the extent that the Ukrainians do. UM.
And so you get when nighttime comes, these forces that
were advancing in places like Kiev clustering up and huddling
for the night, and then these hunter killer drones would
(18:56):
sneak in at night and they are impossible to fucking
see in data them. I can tell you from experience
at night, their ghosts just dropping bombs on on armored
vehicles and on groups of soldiers. UM. And these you
know what you have seen with these units which have
been integrated. They are like started out as civilian volunteer groups.
They have been integrated into the military to a significant extent.
(19:18):
And I think what you do have some of this
is conjecture on my part, but you've had a lot
of Russian officers in generals killed generally because they have
been communicating over open phone lines, and I suspect some
of what's been going on is when they figure out
where one of these guys is, they send some of
these fucking drone units and to blow them up, because
it's not hard if you know where someone is to
kill them with a drone in this way, I think
(19:40):
the other thing to talk about in terms of, you know,
building obstacles building barricades is the whole cover versus concealment
thing where a lot of people think that if they
hide behind a barricade, there now impervious, which obviously isn't
true if a drone is gonna get you, and obviously
isn't true for a large a large number of the
ammunitions that get fired, whether they be blitz or tank grounds. Yeah, yeah,
(20:03):
I mean it's and I think that's something in videos
I have watched of Russian soldiers responding to contact, you
have seen a lot of people in ambushes that they
lost hiding behind vehicles, um which if it's an armored
vehicle definitely can protect you from small arm fire, but
if somebody shoots that vehicle with a with a javelin,
(20:23):
you may find yourself next to a cooking off tank UM.
And I've seen like people hiding behind fucking fences, which
is terrible to hide behind, UM, failing to go to ground,
which is always your best bet is to kind of
get behind a burm or something, get load of the
fucking ground. And it's It's interesting to me a lot
of the worst videos of responding to contact that I've
(20:45):
seen on the Russian side have been there the Ross
Guardia units. I'm not great at pronouncing Russian, but they
are essentially police special forces units. That actually makes sense.
They have every video I've seen of these guys hand
being ambushed very poorly because they're not trained for that.
They're trained to go bust into a house and arrest somebody,
(21:06):
you know, like this is not where they're what they're
supposed to be doing. The other thing that Spencer really
focuses on is this whole like um sniper idea of
of being afraid of someone, of someone just cutting you
down from above, which obviously kind of is you know,
more of a thing with the drone stuff as well,
(21:27):
but this idea of not even being good at firearms,
but just having the threat of taking fire from somewhere
as you can't see in terms of like knowing your
terrain better than whatever invading force does and knowing how
to set up spots where it's it's less you're less
likely to get shelled. Um, I mean yeah, and that's
(21:47):
that's very I mean, this is very basic and old
military doctrine. But this is like, you know, the way
a sniper can work in a deserve and environment is
you have a large number of guys and are trying
to move to a specific area and if they take fire, Um,
that limits their options from forward movement unless they're willing
(22:08):
to just risk getting hit, and generally they're not, And
then you find yourself kind of holding up for time
to take out the sniper, which can be uninvolved in
difficult process for just a single sniper. And yeah, that's
definitely a thing like that. You don't have to be
the fucking of Chris Kyle in order to effectively work
in that kind of situation. Now, what makes that effective
(22:29):
Because if you just have a sniper attacking police officers
or soldiers in an urban environment, generally speaking, there exists
the ability to deal with that pretty fucking quickly. But
if you have small units of snipers kind of oftentimes
just like civilians with hunting rifles who are doing that
within the context of soldiers also being resisted by other
(22:51):
soldiers and dealing with like an active combat environment, then yeah,
a handful of people with rifles can be a significant
force multiplier. It's a lot extra to deal with. And
I suspect ship like that has been part of why
you have seen cities like Mariopold resists so long under
overwhelming forces that there's a pretty wide comprehensive amount of
(23:13):
resistance going on in those areas. UM. And yeah, a
single person, if they're not like the only person engaging
with the enemy in that in that area, UM can
make it a lot harder for them to effectively respond
to contact. I think the last thing I wanted to
(23:38):
kind of get into today is the whole I mean,
this kind of ties them too, the weaponize on reality
aspect of being like all of these people who are
giving you know, I'll just listen to advice on Twitter
dot com, whether they be John Spencer, whether they be
you know, the wife of a former marine, whether they
be tank mechanics, whatever, Like everyone's every is doing this
(24:00):
now and it's all seen as like completely valid. Right,
We're giving instructions on how to do urban insurgency online. Um,
and this is totally fine. Yet when you know, when
information from Hong Kong gets used in protest kind of
uh propaganda for urban insurgency instructions, then it's like international
like organized like terrorism. Yeah. Yeah, if you're telling people
(24:23):
had to use fucking laser pointers, yeah, it's like the
selective thing. How but you're like, Okay, we're allowed to
tell people how to do urban insurgency right now, but
when this is over or in the past, it's it's
it's not allowed, right. You have John Spencer, who I
doubt would be giving I doubt was a big fan
of any Black Lives Matter demonstration justly, but but I
(24:44):
mean I certainly doubt was giving people instructions and how
to disable bearcats. Yeah, I don't think he was giving
instructions on how to ambush police officers or anything like that.
So you have this whole coalition of people on Twitter
dot com giving all this advice out how to do
urban insurgency and whatever. Well, also, you know, whenever something
is happening like that where they live, it is that
(25:07):
that is obviously bad and obviously not a good thing.
Whether you know, for you know, you could talk about
whatever like ideological drive people have, but I think this
is just an interesting thing worth talking about in terms
of how we will offer, we will view. You know,
this type of discussion of urban insurgency is always like
a bad thing, all right. It's always this thing that
like terrorists do, you're helping, you know, you're you're always
you're rooting for the destruction of civilization or whatever. Um.
(25:30):
And then it just takes a few things for you
get you know, an instructor at West Point to start,
you know, posting threads to help sell his new book
on these very same topics. Yeah, I mean there's I
think a little degree to which I might push back
on some of that, not necessarily with Spencer, but I
can't remember during like the Fed War in Portland, which
was the probably the part of Portland that like most
people are aware of, when you had a bunch of
(25:51):
federal agents snatching people. It was the most warlike part
of the you you had for this brief period of
time a lot of folks because I took parts like
giving out advice on Twitter to respond to and handle
police munitions. Um. That when I think that certainly went
more viral than it would have gone in a different
(26:12):
sort of situation. Um, And I think you do have.
I think part of what you're seeing in Ukraine, and
this is just sort of a general thing that happens
online is when something a news moment, blows up in
a way that is like big enough it disrupts the
norms and suddenly, for a while you can talk about
things like how to disable government armored vehicles and fight
(26:32):
like you know, reality suddenly becomes to so much bigger
and what is what is acceptable? Discourse suddenly expands out
much bigger than what it usually tells. It becomes a
lot more permeable. And I do think broadly, like we're
shooting on Spencer here because he's frustrating to me. Um,
But I do think that, like, really really broadly. Um.
It's good when stuff like it's good for people to
(26:54):
think about. Even if I don't, I certainly don't. I
certainly do not want there to be I don't want
anyone listening to this who has not experienced urban warfare
to experienced urban warfare. I will absolutely, I will, I
will say that right now. But it is not bad
for people to be thinking about and talking about the
ways in which a civilian population can do damage to
(27:15):
an invading organized military force. That's not a bad discourse
to exist, and it's not bad for people to be
thinking in this way, and it's not bad for the
people who are potentially in power to have that in
the back of their heads. You know. Yeah. I mean, like,
the one of the first things you sent me when
(27:37):
I started working for it could happen here was the
was the city is not neutral peace? Um on Urban
combat is hard? Um. Yeah, it's definitely. It's the thing
that Yeah, it's it's always it's it's worth thinking about.
But you don't want to We're not trying to wish
it on anybody. And I think you can. You can
look at all of like the weirdos on the internet
(27:59):
who have like, you know this, you know this is
some degree of like Nazis who have done this, but
also just like random other people who have like flown
to Ukraine to help join fight off the Russians because
they think it's going to be cool and they'll be
able to work with the ASAF batalion or something, who
then get stationed to basically be cannon fodder because they're
this like twenty year old from America who has never
actually held a gun before. I hope that one's true.
(28:21):
It is just like a post because if it's true,
then it means that someone in the Ukrainian government is
consciously making the choice to use one of the Azov
veterans as cannon fodder, which is funny, extremely funny. If
it's happening, right, we don't, that's not that's not confirmed. Certainly,
a percentage, probably not an insignificant percentage of dudes who
have done shown up to do this have like been like,
(28:42):
oh my god, what the fuck? Um. Some of them
I'm sure just didn't have much experience. I'm sure some
of them were dudes who had experience being on the
side with overwhelming air power um, and we're like, oh fuck,
but you also do It's fair to note like the
stories of people like having like freaking out go viral. Um.
There's plenty of videos of like mixed foreigner units in
(29:03):
heavy combat, including a bunch where you can hear US
and British dudes like because a lot. There's a lot
of people who have legitimate, like hard combat experience who
have have volunteered to go do this. Yeah. The one
thing I also do find kind of uncomfortable is I mean, no,
it's not super unlike what what what we're doing now
that we're trying to come at it from a more
(29:24):
uh like critical standpoint, but like Americans who maybe have
gone to a protest or two but no real experience,
just going on Twitter dot com and talking about how
they think beating an army is best done, how that works. Yeah. Well,
and like you know, if if you look at like
the okay, like the times that like the US has
(29:45):
actually attempted to fight its own army, right Like the
last time this happened was the l l A Riot
and ninety two and they got their ship pushed in
like it it went really really badly. The people on
this was really ugly. There was yeah, and like and
you know, and part part of what you know, and
I will say, like part of what's I guess you
(30:07):
still about this is like yeah, this is I mean,
this is the thing that is. I mean I wasn't
alive for it, but like at like Robert you were
alive for that, like like that that that is a
thing like in living memory, the army has been deployed
on American soil. And one of the things that went
wrong is that the people on the ground had basically
no time. And this is something you can read from
(30:28):
from like the armies accounts of this, is that like
the people that they were dealing with had no tactical
experience what wherever they did it, they had no conception
of tactics, and the army was able to very quickly
crush them. And you know, if if you don't want
that to happen to you, yeah, like that there there
there is a way, which is stuff is important to
be thinking about. But also like, dear God, that is
(30:49):
the worst ship, Like, yeah, you didn't want that. Here
here's what's what's important to understand about that. Anytime you
are dealing with any kind of conflict, like physical conflict
that involves violence, and and that can be as narrow
as like a protest, you know, where people are squaring
(31:12):
off with the cops, or an actual like full on
military conflict, the winner is the person who is most
disruptive to the enemies. Ode loop, right, um, observe, orient,
decide act. That's the loop that you go through when
you are trying to decide how to act in any
kind of a kinetic situation um on the streets and
(31:34):
a protest. One of the things where I where we
have all seen people be the most successful against cops
is when you change the rules on them. Is when
they are in a situation they did not anticipate being in,
because they tend to freak out and they tend to
respond and effectively, right, you do not want to if
you see them preparing to act in a certain way
because they believe you are doing a specific thing, you
(31:56):
ideally do not then do the thing they are preparing for,
because that is a situation which you're gonna mind a
battering yourself against a riot line. Right. Um, that's what
the that's the core of the move be like water
thing from Hong Kong is the idea that do not
engage them in a way they are prepared for, and
that that that is a that is a piece of advice.
Broadly speaking, that's just as true in a war as
(32:17):
it is in a protest situation. On their own terms.
What this also means is that you don't want to
be playing by a set of rules that are ineffective
in the situation you're getting into. So like when you
had protesters in in l a engaging with the military.
They were playing by the rules of how do you
deal with cops and suddenly they were dealing with soldiers,
(32:39):
and boy, howdy are the rules different? You know? Um?
And likewise, the Russian military was trained and blooded to
a large extent in conflicts in places like Syria, where
again they had air supremacy, um, they had artillery supremacy,
they were backing the state was fighting against these insurgents. Uh.
(33:02):
And so their soldiers gained the combat experience they had
with every advantage in their pocket. Um. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military,
if you're talking really about like because we've talked about
a lot of little things that have maybe had an
impact on the conflict here, and they're one of the
things that's had the biggest impact on how the Ukrainian
military has responded and and comported itself in this war
(33:24):
so far versus the Russian is for years, eight years
since this conflict started, the Ukrainian military has developed a
posture of having soldiers signed up for these brief contracts,
sending and rotating them through the battleground and the dawn
boss so that when this war started they had a
huge number more than anyone else in Europe of combat
(33:44):
veterans who got their experience fighting against a peer adversary
when they did not have supremacy and artillery or air
support when they engaged them. Um. And then the Ukrainian
military very intelligently spread these guys out amongst their their
their units, which is what you want to do. Any
military is going to want to like spread out your
veterans among units, because you're not everyone's not going to
(34:05):
be a combat veteran, but you want some guys who
know what it's like to be shot at and every
kind of unit that might get shot at because they
stiff in the back of everybody else. And this is
what So again, when when the war started to get
back to what I'm saying, the Russian military entered preparing
for a police action like the ones they carried out
in Czechnia, um like what they did have done for
Assad in Syria, and they got a war, and the
(34:28):
Ukrainians came into that fight prepared for a war. So
you you, I think one of the things that is
important when you look at consider any kind of possibility
of being involved in a conflict is you want to
know what are the rules your opponent is going in
ready to a bide by, Right, what are the things
they are expecting to happen? What is kind of the
(34:49):
rubric with which they are looking at what they expect
to occur in this conflict? And by god, you want
to be going in there with a different one, you know. Um.
And that again, depending on how you do it, that
can go badly or that can go really well. Because
like I said, if you're if you're going and prepared
to fight cops and you wind up dealing with soldiers,
that's not great. Um. But if you have prepared, if
(35:13):
you are able to kind of lock your enemy into
the kind of conflict that they're not ready to face, um,
then generally speaking, you'll win. We have twenty years of
experience in the War on Terror of more or less
that going down. Yeah, there's a there's a there's a
good example of this also with the like with the
i d F s a war against hes blonds and
(35:34):
six where it's like the IDEF is a really good army,
but they'd spent like I don't know, like they spent
like forty years basically just sort of like, yeah, there's
been about forty years doing police actions. Yeah, and then
they run into Hesbla and they expect hes Blah is
going to just you know, they've made Lebanon jails and
six and their expectations that Hesblah is going to go
to ground, They're gonna do a guerrilla war and instead
has bela like when they go into bunkers where they
(35:56):
stand in fight and the IDEF gets smashed and like
you know, they they pull out and they spent much
time just like murdering people from the air, but like
they don't win the war and like like that. That
happens a lot, especially with these armies that are used
to dealing, used to doing these sort of police action things,
and they losed enemies that like the fact that the
id F lost award has blow is like by like
(36:18):
balance of forces. It's like this is inconceivable, like how
on earth did they possibly lose this? But it's like, yeah,
this stuff happens because they weren't like, yeah, they they
were they were doing they were doing this police action
thing and they weren't used to They hadn't fought an
enemy that was actually going to stick it and fight
them since like the seventies. Yeah, I mean a lot
of the great defeats in military history are because a
(36:39):
force came into a situation expecting a different kind of
fight than what they got. That was a part of
what happened to Napoleon when he invaded Russia, right, and
the Russians did not respond the way that he expected
a state to respond to having their capital occupied, um
and effectively kind of starved him out. There was other
ship going on there, Attrician had really depleted the French
military before it got there. But but yeah, because yeah,
(37:03):
how how I went on, how I would want to
wrap up This is basically saying like and all of
that stuff regarding how this war has really prompted a
lot of things that were seemingly more unexpected and seemingly
thought to be previously more impossible. UM in terms of
how fast both rhetoric around these these types of conflicts
can spread and more and the role in which like
(37:25):
disinformation and misformation is used for you know, both both
sides to to gain digging ground on the other and
how you know, relating back to it could happen here
is MS in terms of like the urban crumbles or
like you know, the small, small like urban collapses, um,
and you know, escalating escalating like inter inter country conflict
(37:45):
in various places around the world. How fast certain things
can happen that we once thought are kind of more
impossible or improbable at the very least, you know, how
how fast you can get people giving advice on how
to take out ourmored vehicle on Twitter dot com. How
fast you can get you know, people like people who
are you know, seemingly are part you know, seemingly not
(38:07):
not tied to certain just certain like ideas or theologies,
giving out you know, information on types of types of
ways to resist invading or oppressing forces. It is, it
is an interesting kind of it's like case studies the
wrong word because it is it's it's obviously having horrible
effects with you know, thousands and thousands of people being
(38:28):
slaughtered um, but it it is it is intriguing to watch,
how you know, in terms of like the microcos of
macrocosm idea of of eventually you know, conflict, if conflict
breaks out in other places around the world, and the
next in the next few years, How are current like
social media landscape, how are kind of rules around like
(38:49):
urban conflict like urban conflict and all of these things
kind of interact with each other and how we view Yeah,
what is what is likely and what we you know
who who you're going to predict is gonna do X
thing based on people invading a city that it's not theirs? Yeah, Um,
I mean I think in terms of stuff that that
people can take out of this, you know, without necessarily
(39:12):
needing to prepare to fight in an urban insurgency. One
of them is that anytime big ship happens and and
more big ship is going to keep happening for us,
you have a window of opportunity through which you can
get things across to people that they would not normally
listen to. Um. And that is a really important time,
and it helps to think about the kind of situations
(39:34):
that might occur and the kind of things that you
want to push out into the world. UM. Because this
is this is is true with climate change as it
is with war. Right, We're going to have more disasters,
and when those disasters hit, it will be easier to
get people to talk about radical solutions to things like
climate change, and it will be easier to do things
like get out in the fucking streets and get large
(39:57):
groups of people agitated. You know, we're we're at some point,
fucking God willing, we will have the climate change equivalent
to what happened in where something so terrible and fucked
up happens that a lot of people take to the
streets and hopefully we will succeed to a greater extent
in forcing actual change than maybe we did in But
(40:20):
but that's that's something like that could very well happen.
And so that's one of the lessons I think you
can take out of this again without sort of obsessing
over military technology or getting into gunfights with fucking soldiers.
Is Ukraine is hard evidence that that is the way
the media environment works. You get these moments where you
can really push some wild ship to people. That's that's
(40:43):
why I like the whole uprising or insurrection model more
than the revolution model, because the uprising model posits that basically,
you have you know, base base society based reality, you know,
always at like the baseline level, then uprising happens. It's
like it's like shooting up onto a graph sudden. So
many things that are just outside the normal way that
we view you know, systems, the governance systems of you know,
(41:06):
social control. So many things become so much more possible
in this like heightened place. Um. And that's what the
uprising does. It gets things that were suddenly that were
once so far away and once just only in the imagination.
It almost it makes them so much closer. Right, There's
this feeling in like July during the height of the
fed War, being like so many things feel possible in
this one moment, nothing is true and all is permitted,
(41:29):
like you can you can get away with some ship. Yeah,
And so using the uprising model, yeah, it can really
and or or the or the instruction model like it
can really, it can really make things feel so much
more possible than what they usually feel like. And that
there's you know, brief moments in time where massive social
change can happen, and you know you have to learn
(41:50):
how to recognize when this moment are happening and then
organize effectively when they do happen. Yeah. Yep, well I've
leave that does it for us today? Um? Yeah, we
when we've been wanting to talk about this topic for
a while in terms of you know, one of the
very first things that's not happening was various governments giving
(42:11):
guides out on where to attack armored vehicles with ball tops.
We're like, oh, wow, this is this is intriguing to
have a government giving out instructions. Um, this is probably
has some implications on how we view you know, uh,
collapse in the in a in a general concept. So yeah, Ever,
since that's not happening, we wanted to talk about it.
So yeah, it certainly leaves us with a lot to
think about. And I didn't get to go on my
(42:33):
rant about the structure of the Russian military VISAVI their
lack of an n c O core. But maybe we'll
talk about that in the future. I'm sure we'll have
enough time to talk without this in the future. Uh.
Well everyone, Uh, I don't know, do do something productive? Yeah,
do do something productive. I don't charge armored vehicles. Don't
charge armored vehicles with paint. Maybe think about the different
(42:57):
things you would like to get a bunch of people
suddenly radicalized on Twitter to do in the immediate wake
of a horrible climate disaster in which large numbers of
folks are suddenly willing to take to the streets seemingly overnight.
Maybe thinking about that and and trying to talking with
your buddies about it, and being like, hey, if everybody
(43:17):
gets out in the streets again, what kind of information
do I want to spread? What would be good to
get people talking about In that instance, when they're suddenly
listening for I don't know about two weeks. It feels
like you get about two weeks to honestly, yeah, well,
in the wake of the new I PCC report, we
have what we should certainly have a lot to think about.
(43:37):
All right, bye bye. It could happen here as a
production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool
zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com,
or check us out on the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It could Happen Here, updated monthly at
(43:58):
cool zone media dot COM's lash sources. Thanks for listening.
Oh, it could happen here, and it's currently happening there
there being Ukraine, which is in the midst of an
invasion by the Russian government. I'm Robert Evans. This is
a podcast about bad things and how to make them better,
joined as often by Garrison and Chris my co hosts,
(00:26):
and we are talking about some of the advice, good
and bad, that's been going around on social media about
how to disable and destroy armored vehicles. This is something
we've kind of waited to do until the conflict was
a little bit more of a mature state. But in
brief if you have been following what's been happening in
Russia through the lens of social media or what's pepping
(00:48):
in Ukraine through the lens of social media, one thing
that has happened is in the early stages of the invasion,
a whole bunch of people flocked, particularly to Twitter, but
also not this did not just stay on Twitter. There
were large number of mainstreams news articles published on the
subject of the things people were saying to talk about
different ways civilians could disable Russian armored vehicles or otherwise
(01:10):
stymy and thwart the progress of Russian military units through
their cities. Um. And this has been accompanied by things
like the Ukrainian government giving out information on how to
make molotov cocktails. We talked about this in our Molotov
Cocktail episode and putting out really neat infographics on where
to throw molotov cocktails to disable armored vehicles. But it's
also come with a lot of bad advice that I
(01:32):
don't want people who are maybe looking at the potential
of urban combat happening in their future to take away
from this conflict, because there's also a lot of disinfos.
So that's what we're talking about today. Yes, And I
guess one of the first places to probably discuss this
urban combat idea is they probably the guy who's tried
to make kind of a career out of talking about
(01:53):
ourban combat, which would be who wrote a relatively viral
Twitter thread on this topic and has been writing about
this thing for the past few years. Um. He's a
he's the the chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West
Points Modern War Institute and served for like a quarter
of a century as an infantry soldier, including two deployments
(02:15):
into Iraq. And yeah, the past few years he's tried
to kind of make a name for himself as the
guy who writes about urban combat. And obviously since this
was happening largely when Russia started invading Kiev, John Spetzer
put put together some of his thoughts that went pretty
viral on this on this said topic, Yeah, and it's
it's frustrating. You've got a quote in here from one
(02:37):
of the articles about he was giving out that says
some of his advice such is preparing simple molotov cocktails,
it's already being seen on the streets of Kiev, which
is kind of framing it as if Spencer advised the Ukrainians.
Absolutely not true. Before he made that threat, the government
was urging people to rest. And also, like molotov cocktails
got their name from people in Finland, not super far
(02:59):
from Ukraine, resisting the Russian military in a very similar
way to add, they're being used by Ukrainian civilians. Now, Um,
what I I believe what John Spencer did. He's a
guy with some qualifications. Um, certainly like not a random person.
We'll talk about random people giving advice to on Twitter.
But he's also all None of his advice is new,
(03:20):
none of it is from him, None of it is
counter intuitive. A good deal of it is bad, and
most of what he said that is good is just
him pulling things from US military combat manuals and from
Ukrainian military combat manuals and then putting it up in
social media in order to go viral and try to
get another book deal by making it look as if
(03:41):
he is giving advice that is being adopted in real time,
which is not what is happening. Yeah, I mean, like
a good, good instance of this is yeah claiming that
they're making multiv cocktails due to his advice. I mean,
there's a picture in that very article that was taken
before he even posted that thread. So it's like, no,
they're they're few people know how to make all have cocktails.
That's not hard to find out. In a lot of cases,
(04:02):
the Ukrainian Ukrainian government was giving out instructions on how
to do it. And I mean, and if you if
you look at this picture, um, it looks very similar
to a lot of a lot of like the the
almost like small defensive weapons factories that we saw across
the States. You would often see just collections of bottles, uh,
just ready to be thrown, all kind of laid out
(04:24):
in in in milk crates very similar to this photo.
Now there was there was less actual molotov cocktails, but
the way that this is whole, the way this all
set up looks, looks very similar to any kind of
insurgency tactics of being like, yeah, there's gonna be spontaneous
on the ground organizing because people are just kind of
naturally gifted at that. And on a on an objective level,
(04:46):
molotov cocktails have a place on an urban battlefield. They
can be useful weapons for disabling armored vehicles, for causing distractions,
for injuring and even sometimes killing soldiers. They are they
are capable of doing that, and they that's part of
why the Ukrainian government put out these guides showing like
where to huck the sons of bitches in order to
(05:06):
disable you know, transports and armored vehicles and whatnot. Now
that said, attempting to attack a military column with a
Molotov cocktail in most circumstances is very close to suicidal,
and I've watched a number of videos of Ukrainians do it.
In the times that seemed to be most successful is
when you have areas where the Russians are attempting to
(05:27):
establish control. You have small groups of vehicles that are
moving down residential streets. You have a significant amount of
traffic of civilian traffic occurring alongside those military convoys. And
as they passed the convoy, a civilian hucks a molotov,
or as they pass a building, a civilian hucksa molotov.
(05:48):
Um and those seem to be, broadly speaking, the situations
in which people have kind of gotten away with it.
We don't have any kind of I'm not aware of
any kind of solid, uh overarching analysis of all of
the use of molotovs in this but that is, broadly speaking,
a potentially effective way to use a molotov cocktail UH
in order to degrade military capacity of an occupier. What
(06:11):
doesn't work, and what Spencer and a number of other
people suggested is is huck and paint at tanks or
other armored vehicles. And that may be surprising to a
lot of people. I think there's a lot of folks
who want to believe this, UH want to believe that
that that could really work, because it's like you walk ship, right,
(06:32):
it feels like the kind of thing should be doing. Yes,
But here is the thing When you have police officers
who are tear gas in an area and you huck
a bunch of paint and you get it over their
face masks and they cannot see, it reduces their ability
to tear gas you for a while. It makes them uncomfortable,
it makes them have less fun, and it damages gear.
(06:54):
When you huck a bunch of paint at an armored vehicle,
the armored vehicle will return fire with a fifty caliber
mounted Dashka or some other similar gun which fires bullets
that are large enough to take chunks the size of
your head out of concrete, and you will be torn
apart in your organs, liquefied in a hail of metal um. Meanwhile,
the paint that you are attempting to throw at that
(07:14):
vehicle is almost certain to have no impact on it. Um.
Not only are you unlikely to get close enough to
use the paint, because you have to be considerably closer
to do that than you have to with a molotov
in most situations, but also tanks are built with the
understanding that it is possible that one or more of
the ways in which they see will be obstructed. Tank
(07:37):
drivers are trained to drive blind. There are ways of
utilizing tanks when vision is obstructed, because in the kinds
of fights that tanks are built to get into, they
are often in situations where there is so much smoke
around the exactly that there is effectively zero visibility, which
is why when Spencer started talking about people throwing paint
at tanks, a number of tank drivers came out and said,
(08:00):
that's actually horrible advice, like they don't work that way,
and I was, I was chatting with a couple of people. Um,
there was one fellow former Green brand name Mike Nelson
who was posting about Spencer and very angry that he
was basically copying material directly from stuff published by the
Ukrainian government, and then like getting up anytime journalists or
media figures would comment about Ukraine, would like, there's a
(08:23):
nasty post here where Anne Cabrera, who I think is
some sort of reporter, was like, I feel heartsick upon
the latest news out of Mariopol. My god, just like
expressing horror and human terry and tragedy. And Spencer posts
a link to his personal website and says me too,
not sure if you saw my mini manual for the
Urban Defender, but it is available in English and UKRAINI. Yeah,
(08:44):
it's so like anyway grifty ship like that. But because
that it's all that's very different than also like throwing
paint at like a squad car or like a riot
like a riot truck that's coming through because if obscure
their vision, the worst that they can do is crash
into a wall. They're not going to start firing uh
massive explosion rounds from a central Uh. Yeah. So they
(09:07):
they do not like for one thing, the like the police,
as bad as they can be, their default when they
come under any kind of like attack is not to
start firing machine guns wildly in all directions, which Russian
not yet at least. Um. But you know, the other
thing I was chatting with Matthew Mora, who's a is
(09:31):
has been one of the guys who's biling ailing get
spencer on Twitter. Matthew was a Marine Corps tank commander
and was blown up in Afghanistan. So he was in
a tank that was attacked several times and eventually destroyed. UM.
So he's he has some firsthand knowledge about what works
and does not work against tanks. And one of the
things he pointed out is that the people who destroyed
his tank put together I don't know, hundred two hundred
(09:53):
dollars worth of various accelerants and random scrap metal and
made a bomb that destroyed an Abrams tank that works
a lot better than paint, and it's it's the kind
of thing where I think one of the things that's
frustrating here is you've got a lot of these like
American kind of military academic guys. And I know Spencer served,
but that doesn't necessarily mean much. That doesn't mean just
(10:15):
being deployed to Iraq doesn't mean you did anything. But
they were deployed, and maybe they did see urban combat.
But I have watched United States soldiers in an intense
urban combat environment, uh, and most of what they did
was be inside of m wraps because it's very hard
to blow those up. While the Iraqi military did a
great deal of the fighting, and when US soldiers did
(10:35):
engage in fighting, they did so with absolute air supremacy
and with artillery supremacy. Um. Which isn't to say that
it wasn't dangerous, but it is a profoundly different situation
than engaging in urban combat when the air space is
contested and when you do not have artillery supremacy. So
(11:01):
what does that mean in terms of like what can
people actually take away that's useful from this, UM. Well,
on an individual level, somethings have been extremely effective. Ukrainian
territorial defense militias have been very effective at doing things
like picking up small arms, going out in small patrols
into uh rural environments around the area where Russian troops
(11:26):
are moving in small convoys, and oftentimes, because of the
way the advance went, you would have a single or
a couple of Russian munition trucks essentially alone and unsupported,
trying to find their way around. UM. You had civilians
doing stuff like turning signs around, like removing signs, which
they were instructed to by the areas Kraatian officials as well. Yes, yes,
(11:46):
and which I'm sure some people just started doing because
it seemed like a good idea. UM. But that sort
of ship causes them to burn fuel, causes them to
abandon vehicles. You had these kind of independent groups of
farmers towing away abandoned vehicles. You had small raiding parties
attacking convoys and attacking isolated units. You had cases where
(12:06):
you know, Russian military units early in the fight would
get into Kiev uh kind of on accident and be
ambushed by territorial defense units and wiped out. And those
are all very effective examples of of decentralized kind of
ground up resistance against a major military force. Now, one
thing we don't know that is important if you think
(12:27):
about the potential that you might have to endure something
like this, is we have no idea what the casualties
were like among those kids. It is a total black box.
And it's it's probable that part of why Russian forces
did the war crime they did in Bucca Um was
because they had an attitude that all civilians were insurgents,
which is, you know what happens when you have kind
(12:47):
of a people's war, which doesn't justify an act of
genocide um, but it is something people should keep aware of.
When you start fucking with the signs and ambushing the
convoys and throwing Molotov's, one of the things that will
happen is it will accelerate the violence that is being done. Yeah,
and it makes to the civilian justified target in some
you know propaganda lens, Yeah exactly. And that doesn't mean
(13:09):
like it's you should resist if you are invaded. Um,
But these are things that also should be noted, is
this is what happens when you resist, right that this
is what a modern war of this type looks like.
Other things that I'm not sure if they've been effective,
but they're certainly not bad strategies. Is the construction of
a lot of vehicle barriers, tank traps. But next is
(13:31):
the barricade thing, both than what we've been kind of
seeing or speculated about in the East, and then how
we've seen you know, barricade set ups a lot in
the past few years in various resistance movements to you know,
a variety of success levels and non success levels. Yeah,
and and and these are like, you know, barriers tank
(13:52):
traps of a very long history in warfare. So they
absolutely can be and have been effective many many times
on the battlefield. So this is not an area of
does this thing work, but it is a question of
like and and this is something we just don't seem
to have perfect data on did it Did it particularly
play a role in what's happening here? And Um, that's
harder to tell. Um, And it's probably going to be different,
(14:13):
you know, depending on the tactical in an area you're
talking about, which kind of like theater you're talking about.
But um, you know one thing that's like the way
in which these kind of barriers hedgehoggs and like whatnot work.
Is there there an area denial tool. It's like an
area denial tool four vehicles, um. And it makes military
(14:34):
units slow down, it makes them take more time in
clearing area. Um. They have to tow things away or
blow them up. Um. And they also can provide, depending
on the type of thing, cover for infantry and in
urban combat situations, which obviously can cut both ways a
little bit. But there's a reason why you see these
kinds of things in every conflict and also a reason
why people put them up in protests. It can be
(14:56):
very useful to deny the vehicles of the enemy access
to an area temporarily, and a big pile of metal
always does that of the time. It requires something to
deal with it. Yeah, that was something that was very
kind of considered when there was an increase in like
vehicular attacks, UH, during like a lot of vehicles running
into a massive, massive marches, there was definitely a concerted
(15:20):
effort to try to block off streets where stuff is happening,
whether that be like you know, corkers for marches of
people who specifically block off the sides of streets with
their own cars to follow the march around, or you know,
less less effective arricades like throwing a chain lenk fence
in the middle of the street, which is I guess
better than nothing sometimes but also maybe not the most
(15:40):
effective thing. Yeah, in terms of trying to like build
layered barricades, that's not just you know, one flimsy wall,
but it's a series of things that can compress down.
And when you're talking about barricades in a kind of
militant situation, there's there's broadly speaking, got to be two purposes.
One of those purposes is to create a to add
(16:02):
to the friction that you are attempting to create for
the enemy. And that's that's all insurge. All insurgeon warfare
is about creating friction, right, because friction degrades assets. It's
over time. It it called basically like, Okay, so say
you've blocked off a bunch of roads and you've added
fifteen twenty miles to the transport distance that this convoy
has to go. Well, generally speaking, in the case of war.
(16:25):
When we're talking about war, it's assumed that about one
mile is in terms of wear and tear like tins
plus miles um. Because of how much more difficult the
strain on vehicles is in those situations. So you've added
a great deal more strain on the vehicles. That increases
the chance that one of them is gonna blow a tire,
one of them gonna crack an axle, one of them
is going to have an engine block go like blow
(16:46):
or whatever, um. Which means over time, if you're doing
this a bunch, if you're setting up de ricades and
you're effectively increasing or all the amount of travel time
or at least the amount of idoling time that forces
have to go in by a significant amount, you're guaranteeing
a certain number of those vehicles are going to break
or be rendered inoperable in that time. And you're also
(17:06):
the other thing that they do is they allow you
to deny area and funnel the enemy into a specific
into a place more advantageous for you, right, And this
can be advantageous if you're trying to set up an ambush,
if you're just trying to buy time for forces to
move back to a better position. UM it can you know,
there's a number of uses for it. But if you
(17:26):
set up a series of obstacles like this and guarantee
that they're going to have to find an alternate route,
and you know, broadly speaking, because it's your terrain, what
kind of route they're going to take, UM, then you
could do stuff like drop throw a drone at them,
or if because of the damage you've done to the
roads and the difficulty of how difficult you made it
to advance, they wind up just parked for a long time.
That's also a great situation to bomb people with a drone,
(17:49):
which is by far the most effective weapons unit that
we have seen built by civilians in this war. By
the way, UH, it's not molotovs, it's certainly not paint.
It is UH civilian volunteers who put together combat drones
using generally d j I drones that they have upgraded
with thermal imaging cameras in order to see at night,
(18:13):
and they have used three D printed parts in order
to drop bombs from UM and they have done carried
out for weeks now hundreds of extremely successful nighttime raids
on Russian positions. This has been effective for a couple
of reasons. One of them is that the Russian military
does not widespread half effective night vision. Um. We don't
need to get The reasons for this are complicated, based
(18:35):
in a mix of like appropriations, corruption, issues with the
technologies they do have, YadA, YadA, YadA, but they do
not have the capacity in large scale to carry out
operations at night to the extent that the Ukrainians do. UM.
And so you get when nighttime comes, these forces that
were advancing in places like Kiev clustering up and huddling
for the night, and then these hunter killer drones would
(18:56):
sneak in at night and they are impossible to fucking
see in data them. I can tell you from experience
at night, their ghosts just dropping bombs on on armored
vehicles and on groups of soldiers. UM. And these you
know what you have seen with these units which have
been integrated. They are like started out as civilian volunteer groups.
They have been integrated into the military to a significant extent.
(19:18):
And I think what you do have some of this
is conjecture on my part, but you've had a lot
of Russian officers in generals killed generally because they have
been communicating over open phone lines, and I suspect some
of what's been going on is when they figure out
where one of these guys is, they send some of
these fucking drone units and to blow them up, because
it's not hard if you know where someone is to
kill them with a drone in this way, I think
(19:40):
the other thing to talk about in terms of, you know,
building obstacles building barricades is the whole cover versus concealment
thing where a lot of people think that if they
hide behind a barricade, there now impervious, which obviously isn't
true if a drone is gonna get you, and obviously
isn't true for a large a large number of the
ammunitions that get fired, whether they be blitz or tank grounds. Yeah, yeah,
(20:03):
I mean it's and I think that's something in videos
I have watched of Russian soldiers responding to contact, you
have seen a lot of people in ambushes that they
lost hiding behind vehicles, um which if it's an armored
vehicle definitely can protect you from small arm fire, but
if somebody shoots that vehicle with a with a javelin,
(20:23):
you may find yourself next to a cooking off tank UM.
And I've seen like people hiding behind fucking fences, which
is terrible to hide behind, UM, failing to go to ground,
which is always your best bet is to kind of
get behind a burm or something, get load of the
fucking ground. And it's It's interesting to me a lot
of the worst videos of responding to contact that I've
(20:45):
seen on the Russian side have been there the Ross
Guardia units. I'm not great at pronouncing Russian, but they
are essentially police special forces units. That actually makes sense.
They have every video I've seen of these guys hand
being ambushed very poorly because they're not trained for that.
They're trained to go bust into a house and arrest somebody,
(21:06):
you know, like this is not where they're what they're
supposed to be doing. The other thing that Spencer really
focuses on is this whole like um sniper idea of
of being afraid of someone, of someone just cutting you
down from above, which obviously kind of is you know,
more of a thing with the drone stuff as well,
(21:27):
but this idea of not even being good at firearms,
but just having the threat of taking fire from somewhere
as you can't see in terms of like knowing your
terrain better than whatever invading force does and knowing how
to set up spots where it's it's less you're less
likely to get shelled. Um, I mean yeah, and that's
(21:47):
that's very I mean, this is very basic and old
military doctrine. But this is like, you know, the way
a sniper can work in a deserve and environment is
you have a large number of guys and are trying
to move to a specific area and if they take fire, Um,
that limits their options from forward movement unless they're willing
(22:08):
to just risk getting hit, and generally they're not, And
then you find yourself kind of holding up for time
to take out the sniper, which can be uninvolved in
difficult process for just a single sniper. And yeah, that's
definitely a thing like that. You don't have to be
the fucking of Chris Kyle in order to effectively work
in that kind of situation. Now, what makes that effective
(22:29):
Because if you just have a sniper attacking police officers
or soldiers in an urban environment, generally speaking, there exists
the ability to deal with that pretty fucking quickly. But
if you have small units of snipers kind of oftentimes
just like civilians with hunting rifles who are doing that
within the context of soldiers also being resisted by other
(22:51):
soldiers and dealing with like an active combat environment, then yeah,
a handful of people with rifles can be a significant
force multiplier. It's a lot extra to deal with. And
I suspect ship like that has been part of why
you have seen cities like Mariopold resists so long under
overwhelming forces that there's a pretty wide comprehensive amount of
(23:13):
resistance going on in those areas. UM. And yeah, a
single person, if they're not like the only person engaging
with the enemy in that in that area, UM can
make it a lot harder for them to effectively respond
to contact. I think the last thing I wanted to
(23:38):
kind of get into today is the whole I mean,
this kind of ties them too, the weaponize on reality
aspect of being like all of these people who are
giving you know, I'll just listen to advice on Twitter
dot com, whether they be John Spencer, whether they be
you know, the wife of a former marine, whether they
be tank mechanics, whatever, Like everyone's every is doing this
(24:00):
now and it's all seen as like completely valid. Right,
We're giving instructions on how to do urban insurgency online. Um,
and this is totally fine. Yet when you know, when
information from Hong Kong gets used in protest kind of
uh propaganda for urban insurgency instructions, then it's like international
like organized like terrorism. Yeah. Yeah, if you're telling people
(24:23):
had to use fucking laser pointers, yeah, it's like the
selective thing. How but you're like, Okay, we're allowed to
tell people how to do urban insurgency right now, but
when this is over or in the past, it's it's
it's not allowed, right. You have John Spencer, who I
doubt would be giving I doubt was a big fan
of any Black Lives Matter demonstration justly, but but I
(24:44):
mean I certainly doubt was giving people instructions and how
to disable bearcats. Yeah, I don't think he was giving
instructions on how to ambush police officers or anything like that.
So you have this whole coalition of people on Twitter
dot com giving all this advice out how to do
urban insurgency and whatever. Well, also, you know, whenever something
is happening like that where they live, it is that
(25:07):
that is obviously bad and obviously not a good thing.
Whether you know, for you know, you could talk about
whatever like ideological drive people have, but I think this
is just an interesting thing worth talking about in terms
of how we will offer, we will view. You know,
this type of discussion of urban insurgency is always like
a bad thing, all right. It's always this thing that
like terrorists do, you're helping, you know, you're you're always
you're rooting for the destruction of civilization or whatever. Um.
(25:30):
And then it just takes a few things for you
get you know, an instructor at West Point to start,
you know, posting threads to help sell his new book
on these very same topics. Yeah, I mean there's I
think a little degree to which I might push back
on some of that, not necessarily with Spencer, but I
can't remember during like the Fed War in Portland, which
was the probably the part of Portland that like most
people are aware of, when you had a bunch of
(25:51):
federal agents snatching people. It was the most warlike part
of the you you had for this brief period of
time a lot of folks because I took parts like
giving out advice on Twitter to respond to and handle
police munitions. Um. That when I think that certainly went
more viral than it would have gone in a different
(26:12):
sort of situation. Um, And I think you do have.
I think part of what you're seeing in Ukraine, and
this is just sort of a general thing that happens
online is when something a news moment, blows up in
a way that is like big enough it disrupts the
norms and suddenly, for a while you can talk about
things like how to disable government armored vehicles and fight
(26:32):
like you know, reality suddenly becomes to so much bigger
and what is what is acceptable? Discourse suddenly expands out
much bigger than what it usually tells. It becomes a
lot more permeable. And I do think broadly, like we're
shooting on Spencer here because he's frustrating to me. Um,
But I do think that, like, really really broadly. Um.
It's good when stuff like it's good for people to
(26:54):
think about. Even if I don't, I certainly don't. I
certainly do not want there to be I don't want
anyone listening to this who has not experienced urban warfare
to experienced urban warfare. I will absolutely, I will, I
will say that right now. But it is not bad
for people to be thinking about and talking about the
ways in which a civilian population can do damage to
(27:15):
an invading organized military force. That's not a bad discourse
to exist, and it's not bad for people to be
thinking in this way, and it's not bad for the
people who are potentially in power to have that in
the back of their heads. You know. Yeah. I mean, like,
the one of the first things you sent me when
(27:37):
I started working for it could happen here was the
was the city is not neutral peace? Um on Urban
combat is hard? Um. Yeah, it's definitely. It's the thing
that Yeah, it's it's always it's it's worth thinking about.
But you don't want to We're not trying to wish
it on anybody. And I think you can. You can
look at all of like the weirdos on the internet
(27:59):
who have like, you know this, you know this is
some degree of like Nazis who have done this, but
also just like random other people who have like flown
to Ukraine to help join fight off the Russians because
they think it's going to be cool and they'll be
able to work with the ASAF batalion or something, who
then get stationed to basically be cannon fodder because they're
this like twenty year old from America who has never
actually held a gun before. I hope that one's true.
(28:21):
It is just like a post because if it's true,
then it means that someone in the Ukrainian government is
consciously making the choice to use one of the Azov
veterans as cannon fodder, which is funny, extremely funny. If
it's happening, right, we don't, that's not that's not confirmed. Certainly,
a percentage, probably not an insignificant percentage of dudes who
have done shown up to do this have like been like,
(28:42):
oh my god, what the fuck? Um. Some of them
I'm sure just didn't have much experience. I'm sure some
of them were dudes who had experience being on the
side with overwhelming air power um, and we're like, oh fuck,
but you also do It's fair to note like the
stories of people like having like freaking out go viral. Um.
There's plenty of videos of like mixed foreigner units in
(29:03):
heavy combat, including a bunch where you can hear US
and British dudes like because a lot. There's a lot
of people who have legitimate, like hard combat experience who
have have volunteered to go do this. Yeah. The one
thing I also do find kind of uncomfortable is I mean, no,
it's not super unlike what what what we're doing now
that we're trying to come at it from a more
(29:24):
uh like critical standpoint, but like Americans who maybe have
gone to a protest or two but no real experience,
just going on Twitter dot com and talking about how
they think beating an army is best done, how that works. Yeah. Well,
and like you know, if if you look at like
the okay, like the times that like the US has
(29:45):
actually attempted to fight its own army, right Like the
last time this happened was the l l A Riot
and ninety two and they got their ship pushed in
like it it went really really badly. The people on
this was really ugly. There was yeah, and like and
you know, and part part of what you know, and
I will say, like part of what's I guess you
(30:07):
still about this is like yeah, this is I mean,
this is the thing that is. I mean I wasn't
alive for it, but like at like Robert you were
alive for that, like like that that that is a
thing like in living memory, the army has been deployed
on American soil. And one of the things that went
wrong is that the people on the ground had basically
no time. And this is something you can read from
(30:28):
from like the armies accounts of this, is that like
the people that they were dealing with had no tactical
experience what wherever they did it, they had no conception
of tactics, and the army was able to very quickly
crush them. And you know, if if you don't want
that to happen to you, yeah, like that there there
there is a way, which is stuff is important to
be thinking about. But also like, dear God, that is
(30:49):
the worst ship, Like, yeah, you didn't want that. Here
here's what's what's important to understand about that. Anytime you
are dealing with any kind of conflict, like physical conflict
that involves violence, and and that can be as narrow
as like a protest, you know, where people are squaring
(31:12):
off with the cops, or an actual like full on
military conflict, the winner is the person who is most
disruptive to the enemies. Ode loop, right, um, observe, orient,
decide act. That's the loop that you go through when
you are trying to decide how to act in any
kind of a kinetic situation um on the streets and
(31:34):
a protest. One of the things where I where we
have all seen people be the most successful against cops
is when you change the rules on them. Is when
they are in a situation they did not anticipate being in,
because they tend to freak out and they tend to
respond and effectively, right, you do not want to if
you see them preparing to act in a certain way
because they believe you are doing a specific thing, you
(31:56):
ideally do not then do the thing they are preparing for,
because that is a situation which you're gonna mind a
battering yourself against a riot line. Right. Um, that's what
the that's the core of the move be like water
thing from Hong Kong is the idea that do not
engage them in a way they are prepared for, and
that that that is a that is a piece of advice.
Broadly speaking, that's just as true in a war as
(32:17):
it is in a protest situation. On their own terms.
What this also means is that you don't want to
be playing by a set of rules that are ineffective
in the situation you're getting into. So like when you
had protesters in in l a engaging with the military.
They were playing by the rules of how do you
deal with cops and suddenly they were dealing with soldiers,
(32:39):
and boy, howdy are the rules different? You know? Um?
And likewise, the Russian military was trained and blooded to
a large extent in conflicts in places like Syria, where
again they had air supremacy, um, they had artillery supremacy,
they were backing the state was fighting against these insurgents. Uh.
(33:02):
And so their soldiers gained the combat experience they had
with every advantage in their pocket. Um. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military,
if you're talking really about like because we've talked about
a lot of little things that have maybe had an
impact on the conflict here, and they're one of the
things that's had the biggest impact on how the Ukrainian
military has responded and and comported itself in this war
(33:24):
so far versus the Russian is for years, eight years
since this conflict started, the Ukrainian military has developed a
posture of having soldiers signed up for these brief contracts,
sending and rotating them through the battleground and the dawn
boss so that when this war started they had a
huge number more than anyone else in Europe of combat
(33:44):
veterans who got their experience fighting against a peer adversary
when they did not have supremacy and artillery or air
support when they engaged them. Um. And then the Ukrainian
military very intelligently spread these guys out amongst their their
their units, which is what you want to do. Any
military is going to want to like spread out your
veterans among units, because you're not everyone's not going to
(34:05):
be a combat veteran, but you want some guys who
know what it's like to be shot at and every
kind of unit that might get shot at because they
stiff in the back of everybody else. And this is
what So again, when when the war started to get
back to what I'm saying, the Russian military entered preparing
for a police action like the ones they carried out
in Czechnia, um like what they did have done for
Assad in Syria, and they got a war, and the
(34:28):
Ukrainians came into that fight prepared for a war. So
you you, I think one of the things that is
important when you look at consider any kind of possibility
of being involved in a conflict is you want to
know what are the rules your opponent is going in
ready to a bide by, Right, what are the things
they are expecting to happen? What is kind of the
(34:49):
rubric with which they are looking at what they expect
to occur in this conflict? And by god, you want
to be going in there with a different one, you know. Um.
And that again, depending on how you do it, that
can go badly or that can go really well. Because
like I said, if you're if you're going and prepared
to fight cops and you wind up dealing with soldiers,
that's not great. Um. But if you have prepared, if
(35:13):
you are able to kind of lock your enemy into
the kind of conflict that they're not ready to face, um,
then generally speaking, you'll win. We have twenty years of
experience in the War on Terror of more or less
that going down. Yeah, there's a there's a there's a
good example of this also with the like with the
i d F s a war against hes blonds and
(35:34):
six where it's like the IDEF is a really good army,
but they'd spent like I don't know, like they spent
like forty years basically just sort of like, yeah, there's
been about forty years doing police actions. Yeah, and then
they run into Hesbla and they expect hes Blah is
going to just you know, they've made Lebanon jails and
six and their expectations that Hesblah is going to go
to ground, They're gonna do a guerrilla war and instead
has bela like when they go into bunkers where they
(35:56):
stand in fight and the IDEF gets smashed and like
you know, they they pull out and they spent much
time just like murdering people from the air, but like
they don't win the war and like like that. That
happens a lot, especially with these armies that are used
to dealing, used to doing these sort of police action things,
and they losed enemies that like the fact that the
id F lost award has blow is like by like
(36:18):
balance of forces. It's like this is inconceivable, like how
on earth did they possibly lose this? But it's like, yeah,
this stuff happens because they weren't like, yeah, they they
were they were doing they were doing this police action
thing and they weren't used to They hadn't fought an
enemy that was actually going to stick it and fight
them since like the seventies. Yeah, I mean a lot
of the great defeats in military history are because a
(36:39):
force came into a situation expecting a different kind of
fight than what they got. That was a part of
what happened to Napoleon when he invaded Russia, right, and
the Russians did not respond the way that he expected
a state to respond to having their capital occupied, um
and effectively kind of starved him out. There was other
ship going on there, Attrician had really depleted the French
military before it got there. But but yeah, because yeah,
(37:03):
how how I went on, how I would want to
wrap up This is basically saying like and all of
that stuff regarding how this war has really prompted a
lot of things that were seemingly more unexpected and seemingly
thought to be previously more impossible. UM in terms of
how fast both rhetoric around these these types of conflicts
can spread and more and the role in which like
(37:25):
disinformation and misformation is used for you know, both both
sides to to gain digging ground on the other and
how you know, relating back to it could happen here
is MS in terms of like the urban crumbles or
like you know, the small, small like urban collapses, um,
and you know, escalating escalating like inter inter country conflict
(37:45):
in various places around the world. How fast certain things
can happen that we once thought are kind of more
impossible or improbable at the very least, you know, how
how fast you can get people giving advice on how
to take out ourmored vehicle on Twitter dot com. How
fast you can get you know, people like people who
are you know, seemingly are part you know, seemingly not
(38:07):
not tied to certain just certain like ideas or theologies,
giving out you know, information on types of types of
ways to resist invading or oppressing forces. It is, it
is an interesting kind of it's like case studies the
wrong word because it is it's it's obviously having horrible
effects with you know, thousands and thousands of people being
(38:28):
slaughtered um, but it it is it is intriguing to watch,
how you know, in terms of like the microcos of
macrocosm idea of of eventually you know, conflict, if conflict
breaks out in other places around the world, and the
next in the next few years, How are current like
social media landscape, how are kind of rules around like
(38:49):
urban conflict like urban conflict and all of these things
kind of interact with each other and how we view Yeah,
what is what is likely and what we you know
who who you're going to predict is gonna do X
thing based on people invading a city that it's not theirs? Yeah, Um,
I mean I think in terms of stuff that that
people can take out of this, you know, without necessarily
(39:12):
needing to prepare to fight in an urban insurgency. One
of them is that anytime big ship happens and and
more big ship is going to keep happening for us,
you have a window of opportunity through which you can
get things across to people that they would not normally
listen to. Um. And that is a really important time,
and it helps to think about the kind of situations
(39:34):
that might occur and the kind of things that you
want to push out into the world. UM. Because this
is this is is true with climate change as it
is with war. Right, We're going to have more disasters,
and when those disasters hit, it will be easier to
get people to talk about radical solutions to things like
climate change, and it will be easier to do things
like get out in the fucking streets and get large
(39:57):
groups of people agitated. You know, we're we're at some point,
fucking God willing, we will have the climate change equivalent
to what happened in where something so terrible and fucked
up happens that a lot of people take to the
streets and hopefully we will succeed to a greater extent
in forcing actual change than maybe we did in But
(40:20):
but that's that's something like that could very well happen.
And so that's one of the lessons I think you
can take out of this again without sort of obsessing
over military technology or getting into gunfights with fucking soldiers.
Is Ukraine is hard evidence that that is the way
the media environment works. You get these moments where you
can really push some wild ship to people. That's that's
(40:43):
why I like the whole uprising or insurrection model more
than the revolution model, because the uprising model posits that basically,
you have you know, base base society based reality, you know,
always at like the baseline level, then uprising happens. It's
like it's like shooting up onto a graph sudden. So
many things that are just outside the normal way that
we view you know, systems, the governance systems of you know,
(41:06):
social control. So many things become so much more possible
in this like heightened place. Um. And that's what the
uprising does. It gets things that were suddenly that were
once so far away and once just only in the imagination.
It almost it makes them so much closer. Right, There's
this feeling in like July during the height of the
fed War, being like so many things feel possible in
this one moment, nothing is true and all is permitted,
(41:29):
like you can you can get away with some ship. Yeah,
And so using the uprising model, yeah, it can really
and or or the or the instruction model like it
can really, it can really make things feel so much
more possible than what they usually feel like. And that
there's you know, brief moments in time where massive social
change can happen, and you know you have to learn
(41:50):
how to recognize when this moment are happening and then
organize effectively when they do happen. Yeah. Yep, well I've
leave that does it for us today? Um? Yeah, we
when we've been wanting to talk about this topic for
a while in terms of you know, one of the
very first things that's not happening was various governments giving
(42:11):
guides out on where to attack armored vehicles with ball tops.
We're like, oh, wow, this is this is intriguing to
have a government giving out instructions. Um, this is probably
has some implications on how we view you know, uh,
collapse in the in a in a general concept. So yeah, Ever,
since that's not happening, we wanted to talk about it.
So yeah, it certainly leaves us with a lot to
think about. And I didn't get to go on my
(42:33):
rant about the structure of the Russian military VISAVI their
lack of an n c O core. But maybe we'll
talk about that in the future. I'm sure we'll have
enough time to talk without this in the future. Uh.
Well everyone, Uh, I don't know, do do something productive? Yeah,
do do something productive. I don't charge armored vehicles. Don't
charge armored vehicles with paint. Maybe think about the different
(42:57):
things you would like to get a bunch of people
suddenly radicalized on Twitter to do in the immediate wake
of a horrible climate disaster in which large numbers of
folks are suddenly willing to take to the streets seemingly overnight.
Maybe thinking about that and and trying to talking with
your buddies about it, and being like, hey, if everybody
(43:17):
gets out in the streets again, what kind of information
do I want to spread? What would be good to
get people talking about In that instance, when they're suddenly
listening for I don't know about two weeks. It feels
like you get about two weeks to honestly, yeah, well,
in the wake of the new I PCC report, we
have what we should certainly have a lot to think about.
(43:37):
All right, bye bye. It could happen here as a
production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool
zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com,
or check us out on the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It could Happen Here, updated monthly at
(43:58):
cool zone media dot COM's lash sources. Thanks for listening.
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