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When I think particularly of Ukraine, I see an environment that has become, if not totally transparent, then at the very least you would say translucent. What's happened is the profusion of what we would call sensors, which include cameras on drones, but would also be things like uh synthetic aperture radar satellites that can see through cloud. They could be sensors on ground vehicles, have made it easier to spot things. and a profusion of firepower. So what we might call uh precisiong guided munitions which were once very expensive and scarce and have now become very numerous and widespread has made it easier to strike the things that you can see. I remember
talking to one general telling me about Iraq and Afghanistan saying if I heard something above me or saw something above me I knew I had maybe five, six minutes to get out of the way. on the Ukrainian battlefield, you may have a minute, you may have seconds. Uh, and that's why when you look at the most lethal parts of the front, Ukrainian soldiers are crawling on their belly through forest to get to the front line. That's before they even get to it. And that is what that transparency and lethality means in practice. Well, you've you've mentioned Ukraine. Rley, I'd like you to tell us about a top drone commander who you met recently, Madia Broadvi, who's pioneered a lot of the unmanned warfare uh that's so
prevalent in Ukraine. I mean, he's the architect of hundreds of thousands of Russian casualties. He's not the only person responsible, but you know, the figures since he took over last summer speak for themselves. Um, you know, since December, we've been looking at an average of about 35,000 uh killed or severely wounded Russians a month, which is coming up to the actual capacity of Russians to train the soldiers themselves. Um, so, you know, he's when we went to see him a couple of months ago in Eastern Ukraine, he was, you know, we were sent there pretty much blindfolded. I he doesn't leave any anything to chance. And he's running this kill shop like a business. and he's Ukraine's big hope. He's
probably, you know, the nearest thing they have to a theory of victory right now. The idea that, you know, by bleeding the Russians dry, they will lose the actual sense of fighting on. I mean, it's a big question whether it's true, but it's it's the one big hope Ukraine has now. Once upon a time, if you wanted to precisely hit someone moving on a battlefield, you needed what was a fairly expensive and scarce precision guided munition. in extremist a big Tomahawk cruise missile which had all sorts of computer chips on board incredible technology and you could have that 30 years ago. The point isn't that precision is new. The point is that precision is democratized. The point is
that on a weapon that the Ukrainians could build for a few hundred, yes, with limitations. I'll be the first to admit that. Uh you can zoom into someone and hit them for the cost of, you know, far cheaper than a NATO shell. And it's that marriage of precision, cost, and volume that is the revolution if you believe in one on these battlefields. In these last four and a half years, the front line has fundamentally transformed. Things have become pretty frightening for the interview. Uh with a battlefield saturated with drones with eyes and precision weapons everywhere. So if you're on the front line, essentially you're dead. In fact, you know what you're seeing is a dead zone
of between five and seven kilometers either side of this so-called line of conflict where anything mechanical is destroyed with a near 100% probability. And then beyond that, I mean, it really depends on how you measure, but there's a contested kill zone of it's pushed between 15 and 20 kilometers to 30 to 35, even 40 kilometers because you have an awful lot of new weapons coming online, new uh fixedwing drones, larger quadricopters, and so on and so forth. So, what you've got at the moment is, as I say, it's never been uh a worse time to be in the infantry. It sounds utterly terrifying. Anchel, I want to bring you in. So we've heard from both Shashank and Ollie the idea that there's ever more transparency.
It's harder and harder for especially the infantrymen to hide. And yet that's not true of all warfare, is it? Well, there's no question that there is this, as Shashank called it, the profusion of sensors. And I've been in Israeli command centers where you can see on the screens the battlefield for so from so many different angles and you can see and you can have everything being tracked on maps and as you know it really is very much a transparent battlefield. But that profusion is also uh in some cases an illusion because you don't get that everywhere. You have wide expanses of territory which are not uh the front line, not the battlefield where you expect it to be, but things are happening there. The Iranians have been able to hide many of their missile launchers in
these wide expanses because despite all those many, many senses that the Americans and the Israelis have from satellites and from drones and from other types of surveillance, you still can't be looking everywhere all the time. need to have some kind of idea of where to look. So old-fashioned intelligence still comes in here. Is it changing the strategic outcome of wars in any way? All these operational changes, do they actually change what happens in the end? So big powers have always blundered into bad wars. You know, I remember studying Thusidities in the Pelpeneisian war and you know the Sicilian expedition.
Stupidity in war and leaders launching wars of folly is an eternal thing. It goes to antiquity. But I can't help but feel some of these changes have um essentially given weaker powers options they didn't previously have to stave off bigger ones. Whether that is Iran using ballistic missiles that are more precise and numerous than those that Saddam Hussein had 25 years ago or whether that's Ukraine with a smaller army, a smaller country, fewer resources essentially holding Russia at bay and inflicting enormous casualties on it. Uh, and I it makes me think if you're Xiinping looking at the prospect of an invasion of Taiwan, although transparency doesn't operate in the same way over the vast distances of the
Pacific for reasons we've talked about, you know, there are putting a drone over that distance from Okinawa to Taiwan or from Japan to Taiwan is more expensive, more difficult, more costly. I wouldn't relish the prospect uh as a Chinese amphibious commander of landing on a Taiwanese beach faced with this environment of precise mass of sensors everywhere of infantrymen or indeed marines um who have to contend with the potential buzzing all around them and looking up um uh in which air superiority counts for less because there is this new layer of airspace that is more lethal more formidable. And so when I reflect on all of that, just what I come back to, Adam, is that war is still always this irreducibly human
activity. It's never just the robot.
