Lawfare Daily: Drone Wars in Ukraine

[Intro]

“Jackie”: If you’re a drone pilot in position today, then you’re aware of the current state of drone warfare. And if you’re in a s- your safe house and you were on position seven days ago, y- you’re about seven days behind what’s going on in, in drone warfare in Ukraine. It’s move- it moves really fast.

Benjamin Wittes: It’s the Lawfare Podcast. I’m Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of Lawfare, with “Jackie.” “Jackie” is the call signal of an American Army veteran who has spent the last several years in active duty in the Ukrainian military.

“Jackie”: Where we’re fighting in Ukraine today is actually, we’re something like stage 4.4 maybe.

So we’ve got maybe a year or two until we get to the end of stage four. But we have weapons now where they are self-guiding, they are self-targeting, they are self-driving or self-flying.

Benjamin Wittes: We’re talking drones. Drone warfare on the ground, drone warfare in the air, how it has changed, how it is changing, and how much it is going to change in the future.

[Main Podcast]

So Jackie, I wanna start with who the heck you are. Most people don’t know that there are American soldiers in the Ukrainian military. First of all, what can you tell us about yourself, and how did you end up with the 3rd Assault Brigade or the 3rd Army Corps as it’s now called?

“Jackie”: And there, there are no American soldiers in the Ukrainian army, all as far as official status goes.

So if you’re an active-duty American soldier, you’re definitely in the American army. At the moment I’m an active-duty volunteer soldier to the Ukrainian Armed Forces. I’m an American veteran, so that’s the distinction is I got out of the military in 2014, and then when the invasion started in 2022, I was pretty aware of it.

I was watching how well the Ukrainians were doing in their defense of Kyiv in particular and really impressed with them pushing back against the Russians. So I decided that I would go join the Ukrainian military, and I left in March of 2022. This was part of the, a Ukrainian program called the International Legion initially and that’s where I started.

So I worked there for about six months until I transitioned over to territorial defense, and then eventually to the 3rd Assault Brigade.

Benjamin Wittes: And tell us about the 3rd Assault Brigade. I think most Americans probably have never heard of it or have heard of it by other names. It is a very celebrated unit in, or now corps in, in Ukraine.

What is distinctive about it, and what’s the w- what is the reason that it is kind of one of the small number of really real jewels of the Ukrainian military?

“Jackie”: Yeah, I mean, it’s the best large conventional unit in Ukraine. You could say, of course, you know, there’s a SBU Alpha. SBU Alpha is like Ukrainian’s CAG or Delta component.

Those guys are really good, but there, there’s not too many of them. You know, it’s a small unit just like Delta is a small unit in the American Armed Forces, where if you really need some weight to, to smash something, maybe you need to go to Ranger, and if you need more weight than that in the American military, you need to go to, you know, 82nd or 101st, you know, brigade size element, something like this.

So in Ukraine, the really, the only effective unit for controlling any piece of the battlefield that matters is gonna be a brigade sized element. And so the 3rd Assault Brigade is pretty much hands down it’s the best brigade in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. And then now that we have a corps, we’re at 40,000 soldiers, so we can...

we’re about seven brigades at this point by the numbers. And we’re holding down 15% of the front line ourselves, and we’re maintaining over, you know, the last six months, we’ve been maintaining a 20 to one kill ratio against Russian forces. We have three army, Russian army headquarters.

That’s an echelon of command. I’ve t- I was talking about brigade, and then I was talking about corps, and above corps is an army. So we have three armies against us in our sector in Kharkiv Oblast. So the performance of the corps at 20 to one against any other Ukrainian unit over a long period of time with a lot of troops involved, I mean, it’s unprecedented and it’s unmatched completely.

So it’s the kind of unit that can actually win the war, right? And what we really hope to do is we don’t wanna have, you know, just one unit that does this. We do really need the rest of the Ukrainian military to be able to perform at this level, and they can. And the reason we perform so well is because we’ve so, so earnestly adopted America, particularly American military, some people say NATO military, but it’s really American military mission command, which gives the lowest level commanders the initiative to fight their best fight on the battlefield.

And that’s, all that is just a, an inverse of the Soviet model, and Ukrainians are really ready to adopt this. We have it at my unit. I’ve been a big part of implementing it there. And we’ve got it and we can do it for other units.

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah. So tell us about your role. I mean, you showed up, you say you’re a volunteer.

That is formally, obviously right, but you’re also a, I don’t know, a big wig in the, in, in the Third Army Corps. You’re like ... I have seen the way people interact with you, and you’re taken very seriously there. What is your what is your function?

“Jackie”: So now my function is to advise on the core command and staff on Western military doctrine.

So it’s, officially it’s on the, I’m the senior Western military advisor to the core In that role, I’ve actually needed a lot more, you know, help from other entities. We’ve gotten a lot of help from actually, you know, some of our foreign partners and American partners in the US.

You know, it’s been a really strange ride ‘cause I was in the U.S. Army, I was eight years as a scout, so I was a... called, something called a cavalry scout, 19 Delta, and a Bradley master gunner which gets me a little close to the staff in a battalion at the S-3. But I don’t have official, you know, officer training.

I don’t have official command and staff training, and I’ve had to make do with what I know in country on the ground advising on operations over the years that I’ve been in Ukraine. And it’s worked out really well. The Ukrainians are very adaptive in the same way that you see them adopting, you know, 30 artillery systems, you know, from different countries and then still managing to do the maintenance and making them run and operate.

That, that ingenuity also applies to the human systems such as military command and the staff operations that, that I advise on today. So let-

Benjamin Wittes: Not to mention keeping 50-year-old power plants going with duct tape and spit in the face of, you know, constant bombardment.

“Jackie”: Mm-hmm. So in, in 2020—Yeah they’re incredible people.

So in 2023 it was training the NCOs, which I’m well, well-equipped to do. In 2024 it was training the junior officers and s- establishing that training pipeline. In 2025 it was largely about training battalion staffs and then brigade staffs that were coming into the unit that maybe didn’t know what an S-1 does and doesn’t know that an S-1’s duty in combat is, for example, to commodify the people in the unit by h- making sure that you track your loss rate and project your replacement rate, and therefore get those numbers over to recruiting so that they can, we can do training on time and meet the, meet, meet this big machine big kind of big green Army machine that we now have.

And so just things like that.

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah, so in the West largely as a function of Russian propaganda over time, the 3rd Assault Brigade which is associated with the Azov Regiment has a bit of a rep because of some of the people who were associated with it at its origins. And in Ukraine it is a y- revered entity because it is effective and it controls human losses in a way that other brigades have not, other units have not, and a huge part of that is robotics.

And so first of all, talk to me about the disparity between the way foreigners or Westerners react when they hear the word Azov and the way Ukrainians react when they hear Azov or Third Army Corps.

“Jackie”: Yeah. Well, the people who actually know what Azov means, th- that’s the Ukrainians. Like, they live with them.

They’ve been... It’s their movement. They know that Azov is a great thing, and it is a great thing. It’s the Sons of Liberty, basically. It’s the guys who threw the tea into the harbor in Boston in 1775 and s- you know, started a revolution against their owners their oppressors, Great Britain.

You know, that’s what Azov is. That’s the guys who stood up for themselves and their country and said we’re not gonna be pushed around by Russia.” That’s the, “You don’t own us. We own our land,” and that’s what Azov is. Those can be tough guys, and they are really tough guys. Now, the Russians, what they’ve done for years, and there’s been American journalism that’s been kind of colluded on this several times.

It’s really bad. But the Russians have tried to push a narrative about the Azov movement into the West that it’s a, an extremist organization, that it’s related to, to, like, white power movements and it’s just not the case. So I’ve been there since 2023. I’m Asian American. I was... You know, at every turn and at every level, I’ve been accepted, I’ve been heard.

And now I’ve, you know, I really from the beginning, I’ve always had a major voice and there was never any ra- I never encountered racism at all at the unit. What you do f- definitely encounter at the unit is you encounter a lot of, like, Russian hate, so a lot of anti-Russian hate, and, like, that’s fair.

So, and we’ve seen that play out in 2022. Basically in 2014, a lot of Ukrainians weren’t really sure that Russia was their ideological enemy. And even in 2021, a lot of Ukrainians don’t understand, didn’t understand that Russia was the country kind of keeping their heads down and pushing them down.

But Azov did. Azov understood from the beginning that their opponent, that the people who were suppressing their freedom was Russia, and it became obvious in 2022 when Russia started bombing all of Ukraine and then invading and killing them.

Benjamin Wittes: Talk about robotics. The incredible thing about 3rd Army Corps is the disparity between its casualty figures and the comparable casualty figures in other regimens, and a huge part of this is creative and pervasive use of robotics.

We’re gonna talk about aerial drones momentarily, but let’s start with what happens when you use ground robotics to do your logistics to the extent to which the Ukrainian military now more generally is starting to do, but 3rd Assault Brigade really pioneered.

“Jackie”: Yeah. So a- obviously dr- you know, we could say air robotics.

Air robotics are really common in Ukraine, but yeah, for us, we’re, we are the pioneers of the use of the ground drone ground robotics. And, you know, one of the strengths of the U.S. military is gonna be our logistics, the fact that we can supply, you know, our entire active-duty force effe- effectively over in the Middle East for 20 years straight.

I mean, that’s a logistics, you know, that’s a m- logistics marvel, basically. No other military can do that. So as the unit is trying to understand the strengths of the American military that’s one of the ones they really focused on, is the logistics and ground drones were the obvious answer to be able to do that.

So that’s their primary job. We also have, you know, a really special unit called NC13, which is our assault drone component, our assault ground drone component. And what they do is they do special missions and, you know, look for opportunities to use the ground drones in a kinetic way, offensive way even.

Now, they do some really interesting operations, but they definitely are the minority of all ground d- drone operations. The majority of all ground drone operations are gonna be logistics, and with a secondary on basically suicide bombing, but instead of, you know, how we encountered it in the Middle East where they would use a jihadi as the brain to drive the suicide vehicle they’ll...

The Ukrainians just go ahead and use a robot and a soft- some software to do that.

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah, so when you do this high a percentage of your logistics by remotely operated vehicle and, you know, I visited the sch- the ground drone school where you guys train people on these things. What does it do to casualties?

“Jackie”: Oh, well first, casualties go way down because the most difficult operation we have is basically just a relief in place. So a relief in place is just the daily mundane task of a soldier being in a position, kinda isolated in a defense, and then he’s got to be replaced by another soldier or two soldiers, and then he has to leave.

And during the moment where both soldiers exchange places and may- whatever the reason they have to exchange, maybe they’re tired, but more often maybe they ran out of food or water and they have to run that stuff back up. But during the movement of that position, then you’re exposed to the sky and you’re much easier to see than when you’re static and underground.

And so if we can use ground drones, which are, you know, much smaller, they can be very small and they can carry... Even a small drone can carry, you know, several days worth of food, water, and ammunition. Now the casualty rate really goes down because most of the casualties were being produced by people who were moving around trying to resupply each other for example.

Benjamin Wittes: And what about medical evacuations? I mean, you guys basically are, are- evacuating people on with ground drones now.

“Jackie”: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So medevac is for 2024 and 2025 in particular, that was a Russian TTP, like broadly across the front line, that if you were doing a medevac, the Russians would actually hold fire if they knew what was going on, and they would attempt to...

They would deliberately hold fire so that once you turned around and you were on your way back from the medevac, that’s when they would open fire and start attacking because it’s free, it’s a free shot, basically. You know, when you’re moving forward, you know, you’ve got all this security and then when you’re moving back, you’re less able to defend yourself.

And so medevacs being targeted, especially on the rear movement you know, at the very beginning stage of that rear movement, that was accounting for a lot of casualties in particular. It’s also, you know, disgusting practice. But the Russians like to target medevacs. And so if we can use ground drones, which are lower to the ground, which risk the lives of less soldiers in order to get that, that medevac done, it’s much, much better, much safer, and we’ve done a lot of really cool innovation in medevac.

Like our drones are fitted a certain way. You know, there’s creature comforts in there for the guys who are being evaced. And it’s been a very successful program, and we don’t have anything like a golden hour in this f- in this fight. You know, we’re not dispatching, you know, UH-60s for CASEVAC. And these really shorten our dispatch time and our recovery time for these casualties, which really helps us save their lives.

And an- and another part of increasing that 20 to one ratio, right? Which is where we fo- You know, it’s one thing to focus on the 20, another thing to focus on the one, you know? And everything we can do to focus on that one is important.

Benjamin Wittes: All right, so let’s talk about aerial drones which get all the attention.

When I started writing about drone warfare, it was a giant Reaper or a Predator and, you know, a drone strike was a kind of an event, right? And now we’re in a very different world where, you know, a drone is basically like, you know, many troops’, you know, M16 or something. I mean, it’s the day-to-day weapon of a very large number of people.

You guys have been on the leading edge of that as well. Talk to me about it. Where’s... How far has it come and where is it going?

“Jackie”: Well, what I’d really like to do is, you know, there’s so much to talk about in drone warfare, it’s hard to keep a mind on your eye on the ball, and really it changes so much every day.

I mean, if you’re a drone pilot in position today, then you’re aware of the current state of drone warfare. And if you’re in a s- your safe house and you were on position seven days ago you’re about seven days behind what’s going on in, in drone warfare in Ukraine. It’s mo- it moves really fast.

And what I would tell you, I I came up with this kind of way to, to categorize your thoughts on this, particularly for people who are outside of Ukraine, particularly for our military members, called I call it the five stages of drone warfare in Ukraine. And in talking to our military partners who are inside Ukraine and I talk to those guys a lot I do some international sort of relations for the unit as well this has been a really good way that for them to hear about What we do in Ukraine.

So, if you don’t mind-

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah, so let’s just go through them.

“Jackie”: Yeah.

Benjamin Wittes: What’s phase one?

“Jackie”: Yeah, I’ll t- Yeah. So, well, l- actually it’s, you already alluded to, to the actual phase zero is the start of it f- and that’s Reaper and Predator and there’s advantages to, you know, the original American drone warfare with these large platforms nestled at the operational level, mul- multi-million dollar platforms that are flown from Nevada but the ground crews are in Afghanistan.

And because you’re flying what’s essentially a, an Air Force jet without a pilot in it, one advantage is you can fly it over places like Iran or North Korea, and you’re not risking the life of a U.S. pilot in order to do, you know, more risky operations. So that’s where the original drone warfare starts.

And then what we started to do in Ukraine, and this actually so I, you know, my soldiers are the ones who really developed this over... And it wasn’t a short time, it was over a long period of time. My soldiers started doing this in 2014 actually with the phase one. So phase one is in s- or stage one, ‘cause you don’t have to run through these in order necessarily.

But stage one drone warfare is instead of having one $20 million dollar Predator, you know, you divide that into, you know, 70 or 100 Mavic, DJI Mavics. So you democratize or multiply your ISR by a lot of small platforms. And this started in 2014 with things like the DJI Phantom.

Benjamin Wittes: And these are just, for those who don’t know this terminology, DJI is a Chinese company that makes hobbyist drones for flying around and taking pictures of volcanoes and stuff, and zooming around cities, and you guys just sort of modified them.

“Jackie”: The we- wedding drones. We call them wedding drones, right? That’s, they’ve been primarily been recording weddings. So in 2014 they started using the wedding drones. You know, not having access to something like a Predator and this thing like being much smaller. And the Russians had their industrial level equivalent, like the Orlan 10 would be like the Russian, Russian Mavic.

And what it does, stage one, is it gives the tactical guys on the ground, so the, you know, let’s say the actual door kickers, infantry gives them perfect situational awareness of what’s going arou- on around them. So they can I mean, we’ve had s- we have plenty of situations where we’ll take... If we have asymmetry, so we have, let’s say, one infantryman, and there’s 10 Russian positions, and we have one drone pilot in the sky, and the Russians do not have the drone pilot in the sky we can actually leverage that one infantryman and that drone in a combined arms way to kill those other, those 10 Russians, and we do this pretty frequently.

That’s assuming those 10 Russians don’t have symmetry on the drone warfare. What I mean to say is that, you know, having a drone w- as part of your setup gives you a lot of tactical leverage over your enemy, significant amount. And where it also helps stage one comes big is in artillery, comes in big.

It’s re- it has replaced forward observers. I’m sorry to my FISTer and my scout friends, but the fact that the gun crew that’s firing an artillery piece can just have live video feed of where their rounds are landing in relation to their target, and they themselves can conduct their corrections, it’s much faster than having to verbally communicate that over radio with a human operator.

So-

Benjamin Wittes: And for a lot of purposes, it’s replaced artillery altogether, right?

“Jackie”: Well, so that’s what you’re talking about in stage two. Okay. So, so stage one is just the drones can look at things, you know? That’s stage one. You got a bunch of little drones that can look at things, and you need to have enough processing power, enough bandwidth on your command and control system so that instead of looking at two Predator feeds, you’re able to look at 70 Mavic feeds and actually process all of that data.

So phase one is not as simple as flying a DJI Mavic or flying a, flying an Orlan 10. You have to be able to process all of those feeds and then actually take, be able to take action off that plethora of new intelligence that you have. That’s one of the secrets to the Ukrainians that the Western militaries under- underestimate is how well they’re doing this command and control.

But so that’s stage one. Stage two is when we start to strap a lethal component, a lethal bomb of some sort onto the drone, the famous one being the quad race FPV. But this includes dropper rigs from the wedding drones like the DJI, so you can drop a hand grenade off a DJI, or the heavy bombers, the Baba Yaga style heavy bombers, Reaper and Nemesis, Vampire, that are gonna carry much larger bombs up in the air and just drop gravity bombs down.

So what you get there in stage two is you get the ability to have a big cost curve difference between your munition and your target. The famous being the $500 dollar race drone is gonna destroy a $1 million dollar tank and or a $20,000 dollar boat drone maritime drone is able to destroy a $20 million dollar boat. So that’s what’s distinct about stage two.

In stage two drone warfare, you are putting a lethal bomb onto a drone, and the number of operators you have and the number of platforms you have is still quite limited so that you only go after high-value targets when you’re in stage two of drone warfare. Basically, you’re just starting to do this. And in stage two, you’re not replacing artillery at all.

You absolutely need artillery. Your drones are different and distinct from artillery. They have a long travel time but they are very precise. They’re very precise, and so when you have a high-value target you want to engage they’re very good for engaging that high-value target and shaping the battlefield and enabling other forces like artillery and infantry and armor to do what they need to do.

So that’s stage two. In stage three is where you get the drones starting to effectively replace artillery. So stage three is instead of having a restriction on the number of operators trained to do stage two operations, there’s no restriction. It’s everybody knows how to do this. And the number of platforms or the number of drones that you have available, because you’ve now industrialized the production of these drones it’s effectively unlimited.

So that’s the difference between stage two and stage three. Stage two is before the Ukrainian government authorizes the unmanned systems forces as an official component of their military, and then stage three is after the Ukrainian military does this and ba- basically makes it a formal part of their military.

So in stage three, you don’t go after high-value targets. You go after every target regardless of value, and that is where most people think we’re fighting today is we’re fighting the Ukrainian war in a stage three capacity. And stage three, that includes all of the hardware advances we’ve made in drone warfare.

So that includes unmanned ground vehicles, that includes fiber optic drones, that includes all the EW and countermeasures that we use against each other. And one thing that’s really important to understand about stage three drone warfare in Ukraine is that all of it is, nearly all of it is commercially available hardware.

It’s on Temu and Amazon. So if you are, you know, a cartel lord over in South America, you can actually buy a full stage three component commercially now. The only thing you’re missing is the the energetics, the explosives. But-

Benjamin Wittes: And the know-how.

“Jackie”: And the know-how. And the know-how. And know-how, you know, can spread.

And maybe it is right now, and then we go... People need to really worry about that in the American security sector. So stage three is where most people think we’re fighting in Ukraine today, and stage four is where we’re actually fighting today. So the difference between stage three and stage four, stage three is about the hardware, stage four is about the software, about the AI models, about autonomous weapons and semi-autonomous weapons.

So where we’re fighting in Ukraine today is actually we’re something like stage 4.4 maybe. So we’ve got maybe a year or two until we get to the end of stage four. But we have weapons now where they are self-guiding, they are self-targeting, they are self-driving or self-flying, or they’re swarming, so we can have one pilot moving 10 drones instead of one drone And basically we’re able to leverage the hardware us- utilizing the software.

You know, there’s a few good American platforms out there that are doing stuff like this, like the Merops interceptor drone, which has been pretty important to help defend the Gulf States, I believe, and is helping in Ukraine as well. You know, it’s a drone that has AI final guidance targeting, which is really important when you’re doing an air interception operation.

You know, it’s very-

Benjamin Wittes: Just humans don’t have time ...

“Jackie”: it’s hard. Yeah, it’s really hard. And so, so that’s where stage four is. Another example of, let’s... You know, Spider Web, Operation Spider Web that you saw where we, That’s really this first stage four operation.

Benjamin Wittes: So Spider Web, for those who don’t remember or don’t remember the term, is the Ukrainian operation that put drones all over Russia that attacked Russian jets fighter jets and bombers on the ground in a variety of locations in very far from the Ukrainian border.

“Jackie”: Yeah, so I would say that was the first stage four operation, and they’re stage four countermeasures. For example, you know, the Russians had put LiDAR sensors on the back of the Shahed, so that before when we were intercepting Shaheds we’d be able to fly a drone that was only slightly faster than a Shahed, kind of fly it up from behind it, and then, you know, it’s static.

You know, the... It’s, it seems static in the air. It’s just flying a straight path, and we’re able to just fly another drone behind it and hit it, right? But now the Shahed is gonna have a LiDAR sensor on the back, for example, and then when it automatically detects that anything is behind it, because it’s in the air and nothing should be behind it, it’ll automatically drop elevation or increase elevation, and so it’s gonna force the interceptor pilot to, to actually miss the, that Shahed.

So that’s an example of a stage four countermeasure.

Benjamin Wittes: And what is the most autonomous system? I mean, as you know, there’s been this battle between the Defense Department and Anthropic about the use of Anthropic in fully autonomous systems. What is the most autonomous system conceptually that, I’m not asking for details of any particular system. But what... When you when you... W- In, in actual use today, how far down stage four is there, have we gone? What’s the most autonomous thing that we’ve seen that’s actually lethal?

“Jackie”: Oh, that’s actually lethal. If you’re talking about Anthropic and the issues over there where you’re talking about the most autonomous system, let me just make sure I define...

When I say platform I mean, like- You know, an M16 is like a small arms platform. It’s just like one little thing, you know? And then there’s like a whole system, you know? Right. System’s different, system’s bigger, and it could... System could be really big. You know, we have a logistics system in the U.S. military.

So the most autonomous system is targeting. That’s what they’re talking about with like Anthropic or that’s what Palantir does, is in a large area, how fast are we identifying and actioning targets? ‘Cause we have so many soldiers, we have so many sensors, we have so many drones. And between two forces who are gonna fight each other let’s say this is gonna be really important in INDOPACOM with a potential conflict on the Taiwanese island, is between the two sides, which one is able to find all these targets and then process them in a way that gets a munition onto them.

So that’s the most autonomous system is targeting, and that’s the—that’s not only on the ground, that’s in the air as well. So h- you know, all the radar targeting, air targeting. That’s the most autonomous system. And then for platforms or like the most autonomous platform, I’m not sure.

And I’m, I could think of some examples, but I also like can’t really talk about them right now.

Benjamin Wittes: Fair enough. But is... I mean, y- you talked about drones that are piloting themselves and that the end stage of their attack is fully autonomous in the sense that they are not really in communication with a human anymore.

How far back does that go where, you know, somebody decides to launch it, but once you’ve decided to launch it, it’s really not meaningfully under human control anymore?

“Jackie”: Yeah. So I know that there’s like a lot of like debate about how far back that should be in like development circles in America right now.

There’s no debate in Ukraine. It’s like we need to leverage as much capability and as much lethal capability as we possibly can. I mean, the opponent we’re fighting is a Goliath, and it’s takes a lot of energy every day to hold that Goliath back, and they’re trying to get the whole country every day.

So we’re probably not in a comfortable space as far as that debate goes. We’re a little on the edge there.

Benjamin Wittes: I mean, it’s fair to say that in Ukraine, the day that you can press a button and say to a drone, “Go kill some Russian soldiers with these priorities and these priorities, and de-emphasize these sorts of targets,” and you have high confidence that it’ll be effective at that system’s gonna get deployed.

“Jackie”: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, l- in our case for our operational theater, we’re not fighting a low intensity conflict where there’s, like, a lot of civilian considerations. We’re fighting a really huge front line, not only in horizontal space, or not only on a linear, but also on a depth.

Where there’s, you know, hundreds of kilometers of space that’s just occupied by the Russian ar- army and only the Russian army. So you’ll do your deconfliction just based on where you’re targeting and you’re very unlikely to, to inflict any civilian casualty or any f- friendly fire or anything like that.

So, but it, it’s a test bed on the front line, it’s a test bed for this right now. We don’t have a solid answer on I don’t have a solid answer and I don’t think anyone has a solid answer on exactly what the the right line is for this. We are not using the platforms that are basically fully autonomous.

We’re not using them in any scale, so the, you know, the guys with, the special unit guys, maybe m- unmanned system forces, they’re gonna be using that stuff. We use some things that are in that realm, but one of the things I wanna point out is you know, there’s this there’s this famous quote about drone, drone warfare that’s going around the military right now.

It’s don’t block the arrow, kill the archer.” And you know, that was never possible even in phase zero drone warfare where we have the drone pilot flying in out of Las Vegas, right? He’s... That’s the archer. He’s in Las Vegas, and then the drone is in Af- in Afghanistan, you know?

So you’re not gonna kill that archer. We’re at the point now in Ukraine where we’ve got the same stuff. So the... how most of our drones are gonna operate, including our ground drones today, is we’re gonna have a pilot somewhere that’s nowhere near the front line possibly in Kyiv even, and we’re gonna have the platform with the ground crew being set up for him on the front line.

Benjamin Wittes: All right. So what’s phase five?

“Jackie”: Phase five. So phase five is we’re fighting now in phase four, and phase five doesn’t exist at this moment. And it’s kind of where where I suggest American defense thinkers put their thoughts into, is into phase five or stage five. And what stage five is It’s all of what we did in Ukraine.

So in Ukraine, we did one, two, three, and four, and we did it off Ukrainian ingenuity, and importantly, we did it off Ukrainian resourcing, which is really tough. I mean, we’re always ask—we always need more weapons. We’re always asking partners for for more weapons and supplies and just cars, just vehicles.

And you know, I’m, I’ve been fighting there for four years. I can tell you, we really need that stuff. I mean, it’s we’re fighting... If we fight 100% of this war we’re fighting it with 20% of the stuff we need to fight it with on a daily basis. It’s a big struggle. So in the midst of that, in the midst of having a one-fifth of what we actually need to fight this war, we’re still building and inventing things to leverage ourselves over the enemy.

And what would happen if you applied all of our ingenuity, our one through four, stages one through four, but you did it with a first-rate military industrial complex from a first-rate country, basically? What if you applied the resourcing from the Americans’ phase zero to the capabilities that we’ve now built in Ukraine?

That is what stage five looks like. And a stage, a proper stage five platform, I would tell you, it’s gonna be a little more expensive than a Ukrainian equivalent, but not much more, because if you go too high then you defeat your own cost curve and u- the usefulness of having that weapon at scale.

And so, really, first let me make sure I talk about, like, three pillars of drone warfare. So this is g- this is gonna apply to stage five platforms. Three pillars of... That’s gonna be, well, number one, cost curve. So if, you know, if a Patriot missile hits a Shahed you didn’t really win that fight, you know?

Benjamin Wittes: Because the Shahed is so much less expensive than the Patriot.

“Jackie”: It’s 70 grand, it’s 70 grand, and the Patriot’s $4 million dolalrs. So two is gonna be mass and mass deployability, right? And so you can ov- you can just overwhelm the enemy with more expensive platforms by having just too many cheaper platforms.

And third is gonna be your processing bandwidth or command and control, C2. So how much can you control all that mass, basically, and can all that mass be cheap? So a proper stage five platform that meets those three pillars and needs to meet those three pillars, you cannot make a stage five platform $20 million.

It’s not gonna work. So it’s gonna be something like per shot, it’s gonna be $150,000 dollars, $300,000 dollars, something like this. It needs to be able to defeat its equivalent cost in stage three drones, let’s say. A stage five drone can defeat 100, 200 stage three drones on its own—And it’s gotta, it’s gonna have all the capability, all the AI, all the pixel locking, all the all the new features that we have in stage four drones, but now with a much larger resource backing financially and industrial base behind it.

Benjamin Wittes: All right. So I would be remiss if I let you out of this podcast studio without asking you about the current state of the war. I know that, you know, when I was in Ukraine, it was only a few months ago, you know, like w- and you and I had dinner, things were pretty bleak. You know, Russia wasn’t gaining a lot of territory, but it, you know, there was a grinding attrition war going on, and it was really cold, and there was a lot of pessimism.

And it does... I can’t tell if it’s that the weather’s better or that Starlink isn’t working for the Russians anymore. Like, you know, there... But something has really changed, and the tone out of Ukraine is a lot more optimistic. So how much of this is hopium? How much of it is real? Where are we today relative to, you know, five, six months ago?

“Jackie”: So the optimism is very real. I had written down my predictions on January 1st of 2026, New Year’s, as I do every year.

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah, we talked about those over dinner.

“Jackie”: They were all bad. I, they, and I, there were three bad ones, and I had one sort of neutral one in just with some, a little bit of hope in there.

But that that last one was a long shot. And what, what actually happened, well, let me just tell you what the Russians did over the winter. Over the winter I think they were... Not I think, I mean, I’m pretty sure they were really hoping that negotiations would be able to take the strongholds, last strongholds in Donbas, which is Sloviansk and Kramatorsk.

They were hoping that they wouldn’t have to take them by force, and in conjunction with the negotiations, they were pushing as much force as possible into us. So, you know, these two big armies, they always maintain a reserve, right? A defensive reserve just in case there’s a, an emergency and something...

They make a mistake at the strategic level and they’ve gotta flex the troops over somewhere to, to s- solve a problem. So the Russians actually dumped the whole reserve over the winter. They just sent everybody, and that was really tough. This winter was really tough. It was really tough, not just for my unit, but for everybody, and everybody fought really well.

I mean, we held onto Pokrovsk. The guys we were fighting down there is really impressive. In my sector it was a lot. We were, you know, that we have this rating system for all the units in Ukraine, and it’s called E-points, Army of Drones E-points, and we were number one on E-points, like, through the whole winter.

That’s not because we were going and finding Russians, ‘cause Russians were coming to us, you know? And so all these Russians were coming to us, and we were number one on the E-point system for, like, months. So yeah, so we weathered the storm. What happened is around March, that defensive reserve basically ran out from the Russian side, you know, ‘cause y- you can’t just expend more men than you’re recruiting, and the Russians didn’t do that.

So the Russians didn’t... they thought... They w- they burned up their guys in the hopes that they could negotiate for Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. It didn’t work out at the strategic level at all. Luckily, there were not too many big effects at the tactical level, so we held onto decent territory than, that we can push back on now.

You know, so the Russians are in a really weak position, right? The Russians are in a super weak position right now, and the question for us is: Do we have enough offensive capability from our own reserves to be able to respond to the situation that we have right now? And we’re gonna... We’ll see over the summer.

We’re not gonna do anything unless it’s worth it. I’m completely sure of that on the Ukrainian side. So we’ll see. We’ll see what happens this summer. Of course, I hope that we can make Russia cry uncle, and we’ll see over the next, over the summer and fall if we’re able to capitalize on the current Russian weakness on the battlefield.

And we will have a time limit on that, ‘cause Russia can recruit Russia can subjugate their own people further and find people. They’ve got people. So, we’ll see.

Benjamin Wittes: Jackie, thank you so much for joining us today. Stay safe, and keep your people safe, and come back and talk to us anytime.

“Jackie”: Yeah. Thank you so much, Ben.

[Outro]

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