Irregular Naval Warfare And You (Ukraine and Myanmar Edition)

So that's going to be fun. And of course the Navy of Meanmar, which is a bit of a different class from the US and Russian Navy, but no less interesting.

a decade later is still ongoing. One of these sailors, who is a Sebastopol native and had to flee his home, possibly forever, in order to continue serving his country, is the current commander of Ukraine's navy, Admiral Nazpapa. He leads a navy that is almost without manned ships, and on paper, it is utterly incapable of challenging Russia's legendary Black sea Fleet. Since the age of the Tsars, the black sea Fleet

has been infamous as a pillar of Russian military power. However, also since the age of the Tsars, it's had a nasty tendency to get utterly housed by enemies that should have been able to beat it.

sea to counter Russian naval power. They have done enough damage to reopen Odessa and at least one other port on the Black Sea to international commerce, which has provided Ukraine with a crucial economic and strategic lifeline. And that's a remarkable achievement. Sinking a third of the Black Sea fleet, and basically when you reopen a port, that means that you have taken away naval dominance from a country that has a navy and you don't. That's pretty good, pretty

good stuff. Over the last two years, had damaged, irreparably or sunk seven active landing ships and one to seven active landing ships and one landing vessel. I don't know the difference. They've They've fucked up a lot of boats. They have destroyed a submarine with seed to ground capability that was docked for repairs. They have sunk a cruiser, the capital ship of the entire Black Sea fleet, the Moskva.

They've also sunk a supply vessel and a handful of patrol boats and missile boats, and a number of other boats have been damaged. That's a significant rate of casualties, especially when you consider that every actually destroyed vessel we're looking at a year's multiple years lead time to replace. You cannot make naval vessels very quickly anymore. Back during the big dub Dub dose, the US did, but nobody really does that anymore, not with the big ones. At

least you just roll through that. We were just yeating aircraft carriers.

that right now. So again, this is a situation that has kind of favored the way in which Ukraine has adapted to countering Russian naval dominance. It is possible that at the present rate of attrition, the Black Sea Fleet could be rendered inoperable in less than two years. Like if they keep going at this rates, like eighteen months or something before, there's not really much of a fleet

anymore now. If Ukraine had accomplished this task with a traditional navy using standard naval tactics, this would have been an impressive victory given the disparity in resources between the two nations. But they have done all this with a mix of cruise missiles, many of which are produced in country, aerial drones, and new bespoke locally produced suicide drone boats.

This irregular naval warfare has been successful enough that one Rand Corporation engineer and analyst, Scott Savatz, described the Black Sea Fleet as a fleet in being quote, it represents a potential threat that needs to be vigilantly guarded against, but one that remains in check for now. And I'm going to quote from a New York Times article on

the topic, it brought a little more context. Ukraine has effectively turned around ten thousand square miles in the western Black Sea off its southern coast into what the military calls a gray zone, where neither side can sail without

the threat of attack. James Heapy, Britain's Armed Forces minister, told a recent security conference in Warsaw that Russia's Black Sea fleet had suffered a functional defeat, and contended that the liberation of Ukraine's coastal waters in the Black Sea was every bit as important as the successful counter offensives on land and Corsona and Kharkiv last year. The classical approach that we studied at military maritime academies is not

work now, Admiral Nese Papas said. Therefore, we have to be as flexible as possible and change approaches to planning and implementing work as much as possible. That at articles about a year old or so so. The Neptune anti ship missile is one of the prides of Ukraine's nason arms industry. Neptune missiles are credited with destroying the Moskva in April of twenty twenty two. Ukraine also has access to several Western anti ship missiles, including these storm Shadow

and Scalp missiles. I believe the storm Shadow comes from your folks, right, James, Yeah, convention, Yeah yeah. And these seem to be pretty effective missiles. These obviously much more advanced. And these are modern naval weapons, right. These are much more advanced than, for example, the weapons to who these have. These are the kind of things that can counter to

some extent modern anti missile technology. For an example of kind of how that tends to work, they used a barrage of I believe it was mostly storm shadows to rain death on the crime import of Sebastopol. Recently. Seven out of eighteen of the missiles fired made it through Russian air defenses. And these damaged or just destroyed four landing ships and a single strike. And these are sizable

maple vessels. This is the most recent attack, although as after I wrote this, there was another attack on the Kirch Bridge. I'm not really sure how that took place yet that seems to have shut it down again. But that gives you an idea of like what you actually have to do. How much of these missiles you have to put in the air to get some through. And that's not too bad, right eighteen missiles seven get through, four ships down. That's a really good rate of return.

So any time you can, even if the ship doesn't get sunk, if the ship has to deploy one of these missiles, which it doesn't, which the whole country doesn't have very many of, that's win.

So we are not talking about this part. We are going to talk about the aspects of Ukrainian irregular naval warfare that are some guys that are hobbyists building shit. Yeah, this is not that part yet. But I think this information is kind of significant and that it shows the tactical use of anti ship cruise missiles and their ability to significantly shape an operational environment even when the country using them has minimal conventional naval assets of their own.

It is largely through the use of these missiles that Ukraine has been able to reopen their black sea ports. That matters to people seeking to understand both this conflict and the future of unconventional naval warfare. I mean, I guess you could say this is the future of conventional naval warfare, but think we're still leaning on the unconventional side at the moment, at least in terms of how doctrine is changing as a result of this. So maybe

I should update how we're defining this. But for our purposes as people unlikely to have access to cruise missiles but significantly likely to find ourselves waging an unconventional war than having cruise missiles, it's more relevant to look at the new weapons systems Ukraine has developed that have helped them lock down the Black Sea Fleet using civilian hobbyists. And this is where we get to drones. Ukraine's conventional

aerial drones are a mix of actual military hardware. I'm talking about stuff like the Bairaktar, the Turkish drone, which is like kind of like the Predator, all right, it's like an actual military product. But the majority in terms of numbers of drones that Ukraine is fielding are civilian drones, or at least drones that started out a civilian technology.

A lot of these are now built to be military, but they're still based on these designs that started with people hacking and cobbling together civilian drones and outside of

naval stuff. Prior to the war, there had been a lot of veterans and hobbyists who were veterans trying to convince the Ukrainian military that it needed to adopt drone warfare on a large scale, the kind of drone warfare that you can do with these these less expensive drones, and they received a lot of pushback until the war started and these guys just took to the field and started fucking murking Russian armed units and infantry and killing generals and shit. And now Ukraine has integrated in a

way that everyone is going to follow. Like Ukrainian like battalions have like companies now that are drone assault companies and like line battalions, and.

blocking drones and using drones of their own. You know, one of the stories the last couple of weeks is that Russia has succeeded in carrying out strikes on advanced weapons systems like samsites deep in Ukrainian territory. They've extended their kill chain beyond what they used to be capable of, and that's because they've adapted. They're also adapted with less efficacy at blocking drones and attacks on naval vessels. Some of this has been kind of funny. I want to

read a quote from a Business Insider article here. Russia is painting silhouettes on naval vessels on land to try and trick Ukraine, which keeps destroying its warships. In an intelligence update on Wednesday, the UK Ministry of Defense said that silhouettes of vessels have also been painted on the side of K's probably to confuse the uncrude aerial vehicle operators. They showed there's some images of this. They don't seem convincing to me. I don't know if I think this is working.

to be less. The Jammas that the sac that the Tamadoor has are Chinese made like Jamma rifles. You see them all the time in captured weapon cases, but they don't seem to be having as much impact on these homemade drones, which is really interesting.

will find themselves that way in the future. And I based that in part on the fact that all of our friends in Myanmar who are currently fighting a war were a couple of years ago delivery drivers and you know, playing pubg online and not really thinking they would wind up as insurgents.

Civilian drones were crucial in the Battle of Kiev, allowing Ukraine to do severe damage to that mass of Russian armored column heading towards the city and providing intel that led to the assassination of multiple general level officers. So it is perhaps not surprising that Ukraine looked to the same group of volunteer hobbyists when it came time to expand their naval arsenal. And there's a really good article I found in CNN by Sebastian Shukla, Alex Marcott, and

Daria Tarasova. And I actually want to give you the title of this article. Yeah, I'll try to thriller in the show notes is exclusive rare access to Ukraine's sea drones, part of Ukraine's fight back in the Black Sea. Haven't really seen the word fight back us that way, but there you go. So I'm going to read a quote

from that article. A government link Ukrainian fundraising organization called United twenty four has sourced money from companies and individuals all around the world, pooling funds to disperse it to a variety of developers and initiatives from defense to soccer matches. The entire outfit is very security conscious, insisting on strict guidelines on filming and revealing identities. Those who see in and met with declined to give their full names or

even their ranks within Ukraine's armed forces. On a creaky wooden jetty, a camouflaged sea drone pilot says he wants to go by shark. In front of him is a long, black hardshell briefcase. He unveils a bespoke multi screened mission control, essentially an elaborate gaming center combined complete with levers, joysticks, a monitor, and buttons that have covers over switches that

shouldn't accidentally be knocked with labels like blast. The developer of the drone, who asked to remain anonymous, said their work on sea drones only began once the war started. It was very important because we did not have many forces to resist the maritime state Russia, and we needed to develop something of our own because we didn't have the existing capabilities. So again, these are hobbyist design I mean, this guy's not really a hobbyist in anymore, but that's

how he started. He's only not a hobbyist because the military recognized the value of what he was doing. And the current iterations of this sea drone weigh a little over two thousand pounds with an explosive six hundred and sixty one pound payload, a five hundred mile range and a max speed of fifty miles per hour. That is

a significant weapons system. Yeah, multiple sea drones have been used to strike Russian assets in the Black Sea, and drones were involved in a successful attack that severely damaged the Kirch Bridge last July, rendering it impassable since until September. So these have had a real battlefield effect and they probably will continue to do so. The developer of these drones told CNN these drones are a completely Ukrainian production. They are designed, drawn and tested here. It's our own

production of holes, electronics and software. More than fifty percent of the production of equipment is here in Ukraine. And that's really significant because you know, I think we're all aware of the difficulty Ukraine has had getting weaponry lately from the West as a result of fucking around in Congress, and so it is a necessity for them to be able to develop weapon systems like this that can interdict and counteract more advanced and expensive weapon systems and can

be produced indigenously. You know, I don't think we have seen a mass suicide boat attack. I'm interested in what happens when we do, like with more significant numbers than we've seen deployed. I kind of wonder the degree to which the Russians have gotten good at spotting this stuff. I've come across at least a couple of stories of these boats like that destroyed on approach. So they certainly don't always work or even a majority of the time.

But given the cost of these things, they don't have to get through the majority of the time, very much worth it right now. In that interview with The New York Times, Admiral Najpapa caution that Ukraine is still outgunned in the Black Sea. Even though the Russians no longer have supremacy, they still have air superiority. They are still able to launch from the sea long range missiles at

Ukrainian targets, including civilian targets. So this is not again a situation that should be portrayed as them having their

own way. Their ability to kind of interdict the sea has been the primary effects of it have been number one, the reopening of trade in the Black Sea, and earlier in the war, by locking down the ability of these landing ships to put more troops on ground and by doing damage to the Kurch Bridge, they were able to slow Russian reinforcements in Russian materiel from entering the war zone in order to and this aided in some of

the advances, particularly in areas like Carson. At this moment, the situation has changed because again the Russians aren't just kind of like sitting around doing the same thing over and over again, or at least not always, and we don't tend to talk as much about successes on the Russian side of things, but that is an important part

of the story. And one of the things the Russians have done is kind of acknowledge that the Black Sea Fleet may not be a fleet in being forever and certainly cannot be relied upon to handle everything they initially thought it would handle. And so Russian engineers spent a significant period of time building a sizeable new railroad that connects Rostov and southern Russia to Mariopol and occupied southern Ukraine.

This has allowed them to get high volume shipments into the area and supply troops to the area along Ukraine's southern front without relying on that bridge or relying on naval landings.

guys over to fix a damage sunk of railroad. Fixing a bridge that's been blown up or a sunk boat is a lot harder.

them from dominating the coast. And when you can stop them from dominating the coast, you have effectively denied them terrain that they can act in without being countered, and you have also denied them from stopping you from acting in that same terrain, even if you don't have total safety in that area. That opens up the operational possibilities substantially. And this is something that I kind of don't think

is going to get put back in the bag. Even if some of these Star Wars ass weapons systems do come out in the near future, you know, maybe that'll have an impact in the immediate term on people like the Houthis, but I don't think that it really will on you know, for example, what what Ukraine's doing right?

of March. It was in the river in the river in yangon right, and it was carrying allegedly carrying jet fuel. Now, if you follow Burmese activists, people in the Burmese Freedom Movement, they will one of their demands for a long time has been to stop supplying the Hunter with jet fuel, which would in turn stop it being able to bomb villages, schools, civilians, PDF formations, just about anyone in the country. It's bombed at some point in the last couple of years. And

they haven't been to exactly right. They haven't been able to stop the supply of jet fuel coming to the Hunter. So they've taken it into their own hands. And what they did on the first of March was that they snuck onto a boat. So two this is the story from the Burmese National Unity Government's Ministry of Defense. Anyway, combat divers snuck onto this boat planted a kilogram of TNT or a charge equivalent to a kilogram of TNT. Robert and I've both spoken to people who make explosives

in memis we do. We definitely know the PDF has access to a range of explosives. They set it on a five hour fuse and it blew up in the middle of the night, and there's definitely footage of a ship on fire having blown up. Now, this is pretty

remarkable for never real. This is why the United States has units like the Navy Seals, right, like the higher speed guys, because it is not easy to scuba dive across a harbor, climb onto a ship, send an explosive charge without being detected, and then leave that ship and have the charge go off and sink the ship without you being compromised, without the charge itself being like compromised, and the ship being saved. Right, this is some like. This is some classic like. This is why there are

special units within the US military. Now. The PDF very obviously did not have combat divers. Two years ago, I was looking into hobby scuba diving in Yangon. The rivers in that area are extremely muddy and visibility is very low. So the people who you find diving in that area are not so much like hobby scuba divers or free divers, but they're salvage divers. And there's a whole little industry of people. And these people are diving in equipment that

I would not consider safe or reliable. It's clamping an air hose in between your teeth and diving down and trying to find there's a large deposit of coal in one of the rivers in Yangon because of a ship that's sunk. There was, of course copper, which everyone all around the world, including the big Coong in Santia, stealing copper. There's iron, right, So these people are diving down and trying to collect scrap and sell that for whatever minimal amount they can.

divers I can find evidence of in Yangon. I don't think it was them who did this, because you have to have a boat above you with a pump if you're diving with a rubber hose in your teeth, right, So it seems like somebody in within the They said it was a Yangon PDF, that's what they attribute it to, So that would be one of these. It would likely

be an underground group within the PDF. Right. Some people living in the city who were able to sneak onto this boat set a charge and blow it up, and they would also had to have intelligence at the boat where it was, what it was carrying, et cetera. It's a pretty pretty daring mission that this is the first one like this we've seen, and we haven't seen anything since. But it's of course possible that this is a story

that we're being told. In fact, they had like someone undercover on the ship, right or like they had some other means of getting this charge onto the ship. But one way or another they managed to blow up this ship carrying fuel, which is a significant detriment. Yeah, right, And that's how they get most of their ship. It's not over land, especially with more the.

then they will make that more expensive for them. And they're not exactly a wealthy hunter, even though I guess Mina Lang just made himself an air Force one recently. I was just looking at it today.

would be the ethnic group. So what the AA have done is sunk. I think at least four Hunter ships now, and most of these ships are kind of they're like the They look like big Higgins boats. They're like landing craft or like car ferries, like flat bottom with a bow that goes down. Right. I ride around a lot in the Marshall Islands in little landing craft like that

because they can get them in. They don't have like docks, so they can just ride that right up to the beach and then drop the front and off you go. And they use them a lot. The Hunter doesn't have like per se marines that they don't have maritime infantry, but they use them to transport their regular army around, right,

and they use them to transport them up river. They also use them a lot in Rakhine State to shell AA positions and any townships that they've decided they want to wipe off the map and kill all the people in right, So, these these boats have been a real

thorn in the side of the Arakan Army. After Operation ten twenty seven when they joined with two other groups to form the Three Brotherhood Alliances A launch attacks on the Hunter all over MA. And so what they've been doing, it appears, is using underwater mines to think these ships, which is interesting, right. I guess the mines are like a very old technology, right, Like it's probably one hundred

years plus underwater mines have existed. It seems the way that, like, the reason they're able to get away with using what is their relatively dated technology is because the Hunter doesn't expect to encounter anything, right, and so has not equipped its ships as such. Like they do have stuff like submarines,

but that's not what's getting sunk. What's getting sun to these big kind of landing craft riverboats, And it seems that they're using mines and then once they disable the ship, they're then attacking it with small boats, small arms like indirect fire mortars and stuff. I saw one post that suggested they'd use which is pretty cool if they did. The Burmese military has these like tank destroyers.

them of the AA sinking these ships. And then they've done some amazing drone photography of like they obviously they then like staged their units on the ships, like all saluting the drone and they had the Arakan Army flags and they're actually really cool photos of them taking these ships. But again, like I think this might be the first sinking of a Bermese naval ship since since independence from Britain.

Like I can't think that they were. They al really haven't played much of a role at all in its conflicts with the Eros, aside as from like basically kind of just shelling places when they want to do that. But there's never really been any significant opposition to them, and that's changed now they have to obviously just like

everywhere else, watch out for drones. Drones have been used to a massive extent in Myanmar, and like the AA doesn't have as many like associated PDFs, I haven't seen them doing as much of the drone stuff as the PDFs. The pdf tend to be like the more urban folks, right, the younger folks and the gen Z folks that we've spoken about before, and a lot of them have been

very savvy with their use of drones. Like I said, you can look up Federal Wings and you can see them dropping bombs with drones on all kinds of stuff with their heavy metal soundtracks that they like. But what it wasn't even drone here, It's pretty simple. It was just mine. So things they do love mines and meat of mines all over that country, but in this case,

these I guess, massive what mines in the rivers. Given that the Hunter is the only only entity sending big boats up and down, you could set them at a certain depth where these small boats wouldn't hit them, and eventually one of the Hunter boats is going to hit them, I guess. And so it's pretty basic technology, but it's still a massive step forward in terms of like a place where the state had complete impunity. It now doesn't right.

They can't just cruise up and down these rivers shelling people. They were actually using some of the ships to evacuate soldiers and their families from a position, and the soldiers they were trying to, like, rather than surrendering, they were trying to evacuate them and move them to somewhere else. The AA asked them to surrender, and they didn't. They tried to evacuate them. So then they mined the ships

and took those out. I think the hunters like tried to spin this as like the AA is attacking civilians, But I think a Burmese Navy ship with a Burmese Navy flag, when those ships have just been shelling you, seems like a legitimate target to me. And I think it's very hard. It's you know, it's a hunter, but children on one of their naval ships rather than the

AA who attacked the ship because it had children. You can hear in one of the things you can hear the AA are like attacking the ship in small boats and they're shouting like there are children on board, and you can hear them acknowledging it, and there are videos of the AA rescuing people who jumped overboard, rescuing them from the river, and then like, I guess they just held as POWs.

That'll kill everybody on board on it. Those things are dead traps. Just pray for those people. Yeah.