Diamond Tempest in a Teapot

Jeffrey Lewis 0:05

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:22

I'm Aaron Stein, the director of research at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. It's just like old times, Aaron. It is, and it's been a long time, so it's good to see you. We've both had really busy lives these past couple of weeks.

Jeffrey 0:35

Yeah, Anne's not able to join us because she's going through some family stuff at the moment. So it's just Aaron and I like the old days. I'm kind of loving a throwback Thursday that we're having here.

Aaron 0:48

Yeah, yeah. It's fun, you know. This is now, I think, my third location around the world. The fourth city around the world where we've done sort of these solo pods, including trips and travel. So it's good to join you again. Where are you at the moment? I'm sitting in my bathroom Jeffrey Lewis style, although I'm not on the toilet.

I'm sitting on the floor on one of those like Bosa balls. Do you know what I mean?

Jeffrey 1:10

Yes, I do. Does this mean your spouse is very fit?

Aaron 1:15

It's mine. I bought it. My spouse is in the home office. My five-year-old was with my parents who bought an RV, I'm not kidding, and drove from Los Angeles to Philadelphia because of our pandemic.

Jeffrey 1:28

Yeah.

Aaron 1:30

My nine-month-old is asleep, and so I'm sequestered away in our master bathroom trying to not be loud so the noise carries down the stairs. This is the life of how many months have we been in quarantine now? For me, since early March.

Jeffrey 1:44

Yeah, it's also early March for me, and I fear this is going to go on for a while. But we're not going to talk about the bad thing.

Aaron 1:56

No, no. Sorry. That's right. I forgot. Podcast rule number one.

Jeffrey 1:59

Yeah. Well, no. Podcast rule number one is to always mispronounce any foreign word.

Aaron 2:05

That's right. There's a lot of foreign words I think are going to be coming up in the next couple of minutes as we talk about your – Your latest creation for the NTI website. This is the, I have to admit it. I read this or you sort of walked me through this right before the podcast and this is really good.

So you, you, you, you, you and your team did something that's, that's really cool and really interesting. It'll be fun to talk through.

Jeffrey 2:28

Yeah. I felt like even though we have a lot of topical things that we can and will eventually discuss I sort of love this little interactive project, which started as a little interactive project and grew to a giant obsession that dominated the work day at CNS for myself, for Anne Pellegrino, for Bobby and Hins, for Adam Martin took a little of David Laboon's time probably some other people I've forgotten.

All centered on two English words, Diamond Tempest.

Aaron 3:07

Well, I think for listeners who aren't as familiar with the comings and goings of the United States and the Middle East, we should begin right there. What is Diamond Tempest?

Jeffrey 3:16

Diamond Tempest was a military exercise conducted by the armed forces of the United States and the United Arab Emirates. It's something called a high rain, which is a freaking awesome name. That's a high Mars rapid infiltration exercise. High Mars being the high mobility artillery rocket system that, Acronyms within acronyms within acronyms like the world's douchiest Matryoshka. But it was basically an exercise in which artillery launchers, mobile rocket artillery from the US and UAE, practiced loading up on a cargo plane and then practiced unloading and preparing to fire, which is, you know, a thing you might want to do if you were in a war.

Aaron 4:06

Right. And I mean, I think that I will actually, this was a question I say for the podcast, you know, so like you guys really did a number here where you went through multiple different sources to try and, you know, I guess geolocate where the exercise was taking place on the airbase and then build a timeline. So do you want to talk about that work first or why you did this in the first place?

Jeffrey 4:28

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I guess, you know, we can, Maybe we can tease why we did it. I mean, the general reason is we think that friendly missile programs are understudied. There just isn't enough attention given to South Korea and Saudi Arabia. And the UAE is one of those countries that bought scuds on two separate occasions from North Korea.

Aaron 4:57

Which they deny, by the way.

Jeffrey 4:58

Which they deny, even though they had to have the sanctions on them waived twice. So there is a U.S. government paper trail. Yeah. And yet we don't really talk about the UAE's missile and rocket forces. And so because it isn't something that's discussed, it's something that we have to snoop on a lot. And while I don't think that there is a whole lot there at the moment, I mean, I think it's probably just the really old Scuds and then the new HIMARS, like I say, the high mobility artillery rocket systems that they bought from the U.S., mapping out their infrastructure for producing and deploying and testing missiles is just a thing we want to do.

Because as we discovered in the Saudi case, When they started building a Chinese-supplied missile factory, they did it at a facility we had previously identified, and so we were able to spot it relatively quickly. So, you know, we kind of got interested, and, you know, it turns out that the units that handle the rockets and the missiles in the UAE don't make many public appearances.

They aren't described very much, and the only time you see them is when they come out to play with their American counterparts, and so they came out to play, and we decided to take a peek.

Aaron 6:16

Well, I mean, that's a good place to jump in right there. I mean, and we should say that the UAE, they were a purchaser of the HIMARS system themselves. They do operate their own, right?

Jeffrey 6:26

Yeah, this is an exercise in which both U.S. vehicles are put on the cargo plane, which is a U.S. cargo plane, and then Emirati vehicles are put on the cargo plane. And, in fact, I mean, one of the kind of fun things as we went through it is – You know, learning to spot the differences in terms of markings.

So, you know, they have different paint schemes, but they also have different arrangements when it comes to license plates. They have serial numbers in different places. They have different serial numbering conventions because we actually wanted to track each and every vehicle throughout the course of the exercise. But yeah, there are both UAE and US HIMARS launchers involved in this exercise.

Aaron 7:12

Yeah, so I think that, like, let's just start right there. I mean, I think one of the things that allowed you, well, this is a lot of work, so I don't want to say anything was easy, but they announced, or at least I believe they announced where the exercise was taking place, and so you were able to use your friends over at Planet to get an image of the exercise location.

Jeffrey 7:30

Yeah, that's right. I mean, this was not secret by any means. There was an official announcement and a small number of official images released through DVIDS, the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service. There were also some other images released in tweets at various command levels. And then there was, I don't know what you'd call it. The battalion made its own video, which is...

Maybe not completely official, but you know had lots more good stuff. But yeah, do this. Sorry.

Aaron 8:11

I mean like elements of the U S military, like they do this and I think they're doing it more now that you can stick like a GoPro or an iPhone. And I, I, I, Oh, there were some GoPro shots. Yeah. Let me tell you, there was a, there was some GoPro shots.

Jeffrey 8:28

Also some really, really dramatic instrumental music.

Aaron 8:34

I listened to it, but it was drowning you out as you were walking me through this before the podcast, because for listeners, I'm writing a book, so I'm not as up-to-date on Jeffrey as this. And I've always wondered if you thought that those were sort of winked and nodded at because they make it look cooler than maybe it is, and so it helps with recruiting, or it's really a no-no.

My guess is that it's winked and nodded at, and you're not technically supposed to do it, but they're not all that unhappy that this stuff gets out.

Jeffrey 9:00

Yeah, I think they see it as being good for morale and, yeah, maybe good for recruiting. You know, and the U.S. isn't the only military that does this. I mean, the Chinese famously disclose all kinds of information that they shouldn't in alumni videos. Because it's just you know it's important to people so you know I don't I don't want to give the battalion too hard of a time because I know I know why they did it it's just that when you collect all this information you know more than 50 images three different videos There's a lot of stuff in there.

And then in particular, there were a lot of embellishments in the semi-official videos, which we can talk about later. But, you know, stuff in there that didn't really happen. And then, of course, that's always interesting to me because when you embellish something, you're indicating that something's important to you. And then that was kind of fun. But yeah, the first step, happily, was just downloading an image of Al Minhad Air Base, which I believe is adjacent to the location where the, oh, I always forget its number, is it the 79th Heavy Rocket Airbase?

The first step, as always, was to get a satellite picture. And, of course, Planet had a picture of the location on that day. And, you know, it's pretty interesting to us because it's Al Minhad Air Base. And we think that the 79th Heavy Rocket Regiment, which is the UAE entity that handles or one of the UAE entities that handle rockets and missiles, is co-located with that air base.

So the fact that the exercise was happening there was pretty interesting. And we really wanted to go through and geolocate every picture to figure out where each event happened.

Aaron 11:03

Because, I mean, you think it's the Scud base. I mean, if I remember correctly.

Jeffrey 11:07

Yeah. I mean, I want to be careful how I say that because I'm pretty sure it was the Scud base. And what I don't know is whether it's still the Scud base, whether there's another Scud base, whether they've gotten rid of all the Scuds and have just gone over to HIMARS. But the fact that this exercise happened at this air base, which is co-located with the thing that we think used to be the Scud base and now has a name, the 79th Heavy Rocket Regiment, that seems to tie things together.

And in fact, one of the things we did when we were geolocating Imagery was to try to ascertain whether it looked like the vehicles showed up from the thing we think was the Scud base. Yeah, you know, which direction are they driving? And the answer is like, yeah, but I wouldn't, you know, it's like one picture and they could have driven around the block. Right? Right? Exactly. But I know for people, because I'm familiar with the base, because I remember the

Aaron 12:10

This is like a vintage pod, I think, you know, talking about this, but but anyways, to continue on, you know, so then you had the official imagery and, and, and, you know So then basically with the planet imagery, you were able to sort of root yourself in the day of the exercise to allow yourself to begin the geolocation, which I think flips you over.

Jeffrey 12:29

We used other pictures, too, because the picture from the day of was only three meters, which was still great because we saw a plane show up that we – it's really interesting. Sometimes when you fuse data together, you learn things like – When we looked really carefully at the imagery, we could see certain aircraft, but we probably wouldn't have figured it out except for when we looked at the overhead imagery, we could see all the aircraft from above and we could count them.

But then you start seeing those aircraft in the pictures and it helps you both orient yourself in the images, but also helps you start drawing conclusions about like maybe how certain people got there.

Aaron 13:12

Right. And then the other imagery that you looked at, and I always want to call it divids. Is that how you say it? D-V-I-D-S? Which the first time I saw it, I literally read this DVDs. But they then allowed you to sort of sleuth out some more information.

Jeffrey 13:36

Yeah, well, one thing we really wanted to do was to put all the images in order. So, you know, you want to figure out where each image was taken. But then you want to figure out when each image was taken. And so for a lot of the pictures on Flickr, those have file names. And so we can go ahead and put them in order, but not necessarily know when something happened.

And so then we had to kind of go back. Once we had them roughly in order, we had video clips we needed to kind of insert into the timeline, and then we had orphan images that we needed to put into the timeline. And the good people at DVIDS, God love them, right? These are the same people who threatened to bomb millennials.

I remember this tweet. You had to remind me. It's been a while. It was something like millennials. If you show up to area 51, this is the last thing you'll see. And it was a bomber. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. I would just like to say that if DVI DS hired more millennials, they might learn to properly delete their metadata.

Well, they tried, right? They did. They overwrote some of the metadata and, In the most easily accessible fields, but they left in place other metadata in fields that they clearly don't know about, which I don't feel any obligation to point out to them. And so we were able to take the times off those pictures. In other cases, like we used people's watches

Aaron 15:10

Yeah, I'm looking at the picture there. It's an Emirati guy. It's a digital watch. If you zoom in even just with my air, you can kind of make up the time right there.

Jeffrey 15:24

Yeah, he is – And his name. Yeah, I think it's Habsi. It looks like Sultan M. Al Hab something, Habsi, yeah. Mohammed Rashid Al-Habzi, he is the deputy commanding general of the Emirati land forces. So we were able to take the time off his watch. There's actually two Italians who are there.

Aaron 15:50

Like contractors, right?

Jeffrey 15:52

Yeah, never really figured out what the exact role of the Italians was, although that's kind of on our list to sort of puzzle out. They had very nice watches. And so we were able to do that to pull times off other pictures, which is then nice because, you know, pictures come in clusters, right? So you have the order and you don't have to determine the time of everyone to start breaking it down.

And then we had to get more clever after that. Okay. So let's talk about how you got more clever. Well, so the video clips are hard. Right. Because there's no timestamps on the video clips. And even though the video clips are pretty high quality, they're filmed at a distance. So you're certainly not going to be able to get somebody's watch off.

And interestingly, the video clips show parts of the exercise that don't have very much still photography. So there are parts of the exercise that only exist in the video clips. And so to figure out when those took place, we had to estimate the time from the shadows.

Aaron 17:07

Yeah. And I mean, I know there's an online tool called SunCalc, which allows you to do some work. And I see that you guys put that to work, but then you took it a lot further than I usually do with my rudimentary stuff, which is not nearly as advanced as what you guys just did.

Jeffrey 17:21

Well, so when you're measuring shadows, there are two problems. One is the nature of shadows, which is that... They're kind of fuzzy and amorphous. And so they're very hard to, it's very hard to figure out if you're trying to get the angle to properly align the angle with a measuring tool. That might sound really weird, but if you ever try to do it, it, it's just, it's, it's blurry, you know, it's not a sharp line.

And so you're constantly changing the angle. And when you change the angle, then the time changes. But then the other thing is You know, when you're looking at a shadow, it's necessarily a 3D picture, right? Because you have the sun up in the sky, there's some object that's standing up, and it's throwing the shadow on the ground.

And so you have to do photogrammetry to correct for the effects of perspective.

Aaron 18:20

What does that mean?

Jeffrey 18:22

Well, like, if you're like, I'm going to measure the angle of this shadow... That would be, you could do that if you were up in space looking down. Right. But once you're on the ground, the angle that the shadow appears in a two-dimensional photograph is not the actual angle it is in three dimensions. Right? Because photographs have perspective in them.

And so what we ended up having to do for some of the more difficult videos was literally recreate 3D modeled scenes. So we have like a still image of a high Mars on the tarmac. And we put, we built a 3d model of that high Mars, put it into blender and then moved the sun. So you could match the totality of the shadow, solving both problems, solving both perspective and, and the kind of amorphous nature of shadow edges.

And then we were able to pull the times off that. And even then, you know, it's kind of imprecise. I mean, you know, You're good to within a half hour if you're really good at it, and nobody really knows if they're very good at it. You know, you can get down to within like five or ten minutes. I think you guys think, I mean, at least on the, on the, and we'll put a link to the show notes, things that you got it somewhere between. It's basically about 2:30 in the afternoon, give or take five minutes. Yeah, I mean, we're, we worked really hard on that one, and we're pretty Pretty confident in it. you know, maybe some enterprising future graduate student will come along and be like, no, you've got it all wrong. Some of those millennials? Yeah, some of those, some of those damn millennials that DVIDS wants to bomb, and I want to hire. Actually, it's not even millennials anymore. That's also my favorite annoying thing about old people. I'm a millennial. I learned that

Millennials are like – my students are now the next generation. Yeah, which I don't even know what it is. Just millennial, I guess, for old people sounds better than you kids today. I'm the oldest millennial, I think.

Aaron 20:30

I was born in 83. So, I mean, whatever. Yeah, whatever.

Jeffrey 20:35

I mean – That was Adam Martin working with David Laboon and Kira Welch to really try to improve our ability to match shadow. So eventually, right, we had all the images lined up. And, you know, we had a sort of maybe minute by minute is too strong. But, you know, we had a timeline with times on it that were, you know, estimated to within a few minutes of one another.

So we knew what happened and it was great because, you know, it turns out the big gap was in the middle of the day, probably where it's the hottest, right? Totally. When it's, when it's expected to be the hottest. I have to be careful, it's not when it was the hottest necessarily, because they didn't know that when they planned the exercise, but it's when they expected it to be the hottest. Yeah, they probably broke for lunch.

Aaron 21:30

Yeah, yeah, because if you, right, right, and just bring it together, they probably want to go have a little food. I mean, wouldn't you? I tend to eat my lunch at about 12 o'clock, which is before 2.30, isn't it?

Jeffrey 21:43

I am also an early lunch eater. It's because my children get me up at 5 a.m. Exactly.

Aaron 21:48

So I'm ready to eat at 11.30.

Jeffrey 21:51

Yeah, I mean, I'm up at 5. I've had some toast by, you know, 6. So you come 11.30. It's been five hours.

Aaron 21:59

Yeah, it's time to put it down. Yeah, and then we have the airplane landing.

Jeffrey 22:07

Yeah, so it turns out once we got everything in order, that process – once you geolocate everything and you put everything in order, you are left with things that aren't real or things that don't fit.

Aaron 22:21

I was wondering, you know, like – because when you fly into these really hot places, there's – because the air density of how hot it gets during the day is maybe the time is because it was just simply too hot at that time to fly these big planes in.

Jeffrey 22:35

Well, you know, don't know. We actually think they may have flown during the break, but it's a pretty long break. So they could have flown it. You know, we don't see anything between 1130 a.m. and 227 p.m. Because you are looking at a different data source.

Aaron 22:57

Do we want to talk about that now?

Jeffrey 23:00

Well, wait, I don't know which data source you're meaning.

Aaron 23:02

I'm just saying... You're talking about flight tracker data.

Jeffrey 23:04

Oh, yeah, we'll come to that. But I just mean... So we don't have a track of the plane, unfortunately. I'm just saying they took a three-hour break between 11.30 and 2.27. Some of that may have been just it's too hot to be outside. We're going to eat lunch. Some of that may have been flying around a little bit.

Don't know.

Aaron 23:22

Okay, fair enough.

Jeffrey 23:25

But yeah, so one thing we noticed is that There are some images that are consistent with an aircraft that we think was there. But then there are other images that don't look consistent. So one thing is there are images of aircrafts taking off and landing on a dirt runway. Mm-hmm. With, with, with then secretary of defense, Mattis saying, you know, this thing can land on a dirt runway.

This is at an airbase. It's not a dirt runway.

Aaron 24:00

Right.

Jeffrey 24:01

And in some of the videos, there are actually mountains in the background, which this is the UAE flat. There are no mountains.

Aaron 24:08

And I, maybe someone's going to like complain that there's some hill someplace that I'm not thinking of, but like, it's not the mountains you see in the background.

Jeffrey 24:16

It's Dubai. I've been there. It's flat. It don't look like this. Right. And so we went and we pulled the numbers off the tails and noses and ran them through ADS-B exchange, which does do tracking of military aircraft. And that's a fun case study that I want to do for the future that maybe we can just tease.

Secretary of Defense in recent years. Months in the past year has said things that are demonstrably false when you look at ADS-B exchange data, but we'll come back to that with a different pod. We were able to figure out that we identified which plane was there and we didn't We didn't have a track of it in region, but we could track it going in and out.

But the other planes, you know, because there were multiple planes with different tail numbers and nose numbers, well, the other two planes, we were able to identify them as being at other places on the day of the exercise because they were flying over places where people could hear their squawks. So we were able to pretty much figure out that most of the plane footage, especially the dirt runway stuff, was added by the battalion to embellish, to make a point.

So I think that when the... The, well, okay, the first thing I would say is that in the little write-up I did, which is pretty pedestrian, right, it was just designed to introduce the interactive, there's a specific quote about the usage of the series of exercises of which Diamond Tempest was just one. There's a quote about using that for messaging.

And that's why they – this didn't leak out. They released these images. They announced this exercise. They were really trying to carefully send a message, but they were also avoiding naming anyone. So they were trying to sort of skate this fine line. And what was interesting about the dirt runway bit is I think it makes explicit – Something that was probably known to the battalion, but that they chose not to put in the messaging, which is, I think this is a threat to Houthis.

Because there are not many paved airstrips left in Yemen, and the UAE has overland moved HIMARS systems and has been using them in fighting the Houthis. And so my guess is that the implicit scenario that they were imagining... Right, I see what you're saying. ...was, you know, where in the Middle East would the U.S. and the UAE be jointly deploying HIMARS systems off cargo planes on dirt runways?

Aaron 27:10

Right, right, right, right. I see what you're saying.

Jeffrey 27:12

And you could guess it's Yemen, but they... The battalion embellished, right? They took that detail, which was left out of the official announcements, and they really hammered it home in their own material. So that you could tell that, at least to me, that was at the forefront of their mind. By the way, just totally a total distraction from all of this, of all the things I love about this case study more than anything else, is there's a picture of two soldiers, a man and a woman, standing next to one another, next to a HIMARS, and he is about two feet taller than she is.

And it is now the picture I use to illustrate Why we don't use human heights to estimate the size of things. Unless you have like four or five people, you could average them. Like he is like two heads taller than she is.

Aaron 28:09

Yeah, so he's a tall dude or she's really, really short.

Jeffrey 28:12

I think she is short and he is tall and watching them, looking at them standing next together was just really funny.

Aaron 28:17

Right, right, right.

Jeffrey 28:20

These two things are not the same species. Well, yes, they are actually. It's a little bit like when our dachshund is standing next to, I don't know, like a golden retriever or something. It's hard to believe.

Aaron 28:32

Anyway. Okay. Yeah, and the other thing now is just – so we got the – they drove off. I mean the other thing I was thinking with the dirt runway is it could be a signal. I know you said the Houthis, and I know you also meant Iran wrapped up in that, but we don't necessarily operate from an airbase where the Iranians could maybe target.

You know what I mean?

Jeffrey 28:56

Yeah. In the article, I identify the Houthis and their Iranian backers. But yeah, I think it's I think Iran is definitely the intended recipient of this message. Right. Yeah. And it's just that the scenario, the scenario is one that I think fits Yemen very well in a way that they weren't willing to say.

Aaron 29:15

Right, but embellished.

Jeffrey 29:16

Maybe I'm wrong. You're the Middle East expert.

Aaron 29:18

No, it makes sense to me. I mean, I do think that the scenario is basically in a degraded environment. Can we land these things somewhere and still go? And Yemen fits that. Yeah, I mean, Yemen makes perfect sense. I'm just going down the thing here because you guys didn't just leave it at all of that stuff, which you could have, but then you wanted to measure.

There is some test footage in the videos as well.

Jeffrey 29:42

Yeah, I mean, this is just us being – this is just us showing off, I guess.

Aaron 29:47

It is, but it's still interesting to me.

Jeffrey 29:50

Yeah, so the – DVI DS and official videos don't say that there's a launch. They also don't say that there isn't a launch. But if you sort of read between the lines, you know that there probably wasn't. The battalion video has launch footage in it. And that was really strange to us because, you know, one thing we do is we try to geolocate where they do test launches and that's at a different place.

And There was just some stuff about the video that didn't seem right. And so we, when we really looked at it closely, we could see that the things that they're loading, the, the, the, the launch pods on the HIMARS are all marked training pod, which means they don't really have missiles in them or rockets, I guess I should say kind of missiles.

And so we were really skeptical about that. But then we went ahead and we, because we could identify the type of missile being launched, the type of artillery rocket, we knew its mass. We went ahead and looked at its acceleration to confirm what was being fired and the angle it was being fired at. And the geolocation showed us the direction it was being fired at.

And if they had actually fired rockets from the locations that they were set up to, it would have impacted near a populated place, which is, of course, why they launch from other places.

Aaron 31:17

Yeah.

Jeffrey 31:18

And so it was just pretty clear to us that they weren't, you know.

Aaron 31:23

But those guys wanted their own personal video to look cool.

Jeffrey 31:27

It's a better ending. You know, it's not a great ending if you just point the, point the launcher up at the sky and then, you know, flip the hooties, the bird.

Aaron 31:38

I think the big takeaway here is if you're really willing to put in the work, people leave in a lot of digital clues that you can obviously track down. And I mean, Maybe it takes the sting out of potential propaganda a little bit. You know, I hesitate to use propaganda because, you know, I do think that the people who film this, you know, at the battalion level, we're just maybe having a good time on the long, on the long flight back.

You know what I mean? I want to make, you know, and having a good time, but you know what I'm saying?

Jeffrey 32:10

Oh, I do. I do. I use propaganda in the article and I, I went back and forth over it because there is a, you know, there is the, The way we react to the word propaganda. Is maybe a bit different than its initial meaning. I've always seen propaganda as a kind of value neutral term. Everyone engages in propaganda.

You're propagating your views, but I know what you mean. And so we were at pains to say that there are embellishments of basically a true account and that they're hardly scandalous, but that they are interesting because they draw out The things that interest the people who made the videos, right? Like if they say, oh, we wish we had done this, or we wish it had had this piece, or we wish it had shown this, then that tells you that they value it, right?

And anytime you're doing any kind of textual work, it's not just propaganda analysis, just any kind of textual analysis. Knowing the choices that an author is making is, I think, really important to sort of getting at the underlying meaning. And then, you know, the other thing is, which, you know, I don't want to make too much of a big deal over, but we're still really interested in whether the thing sitting next to Al-Minhad Air Base is a heavy rocket unit.

And this video gives us a name. It gives us some circumstantial evidence that, yes, these people were from that place. And it gives us the name of the commander of the unit who is not mentioned in any of the materials, but you can read his name and his rank off his uniform.

Aaron 34:01

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 34:02

I mean, I guess it's implied that he's the commander of the unit just by looking at the insignia on his uniform and whatnot and who else is there. And so, you know, the UAE is pretty opaque about its rocket artillery and missile forces. And so this is one of the few glimpses we get into its organization structure and personalities and, you know, like a lot of what we do.

These are a couple of little details that we were able to glean, and we'll put those details – they're going to sit on a Google Drive someplace, and maybe we'll get another detail next year. And pretty soon we'll piece them together, and we'll be sending the guys pizza.

Aaron 34:42

The last thing to bring up, though, is – People keep doing this. I would say you guys were at the forefront of this, but a lot of people are doing this. I wouldn't say as well as you are. I mean that truthfully. When do they stop doing the videos? Do you know what I mean? When do you stop allowing these people to do the GoPro so they put us all out of business?

Jeffrey 35:08

Well I think they should stop. You know, because I just want to, I just want to, I just want to creep on there. Just want to creep on their deployments. I don't, you know, I don't want to hurt anybody, but, but not everybody's so nice.

Aaron 35:26

Not everybody's a researcher in sunny California. Some of them are sitting in other places.

Jeffrey 35:30

Yeah. And we certainly have done this to the Russians and the Chinese.

Aaron 35:35

Yeah, we all remember Vadim.

Jeffrey 35:38

And the Russians have really tried to clamp down on that stuff. They have. So I think the answer is now people stop doing it. But at the same time, you know, it's not as easy because what's, you know, what's changed is it's not like soldiers suddenly got real stupid. It's that technology changed. And so it enables someone to make mistakes that they couldn't have made 50 years ago.

Like 50 years ago, like maybe you were lugging a camera around Vietnam, but even if you were, you still had to get the film developed. And then, you know, There's not like there's any metadata in the pictures and you got to give the pictures to someone and they're not going to have any idea of provenance. And, you know, think about how much work that is.

So we're talking about a handful of images if you're really lucky. You know, whereas today it's like everybody's carrying around a camera in their pocket and, you know, All that information can be put online instantly and shared, and it comes with all kinds of data. And so even if they really crack down on it, I think you're still going to see really significant disclosures because just information yearns to be free.

Aaron 36:56

There's a metaphor we can make about our own current predicament in the U.S., but I'm not going to say it at the moment, about the rapid sharing of videos and uncovering sort of some ugly truths.

Jeffrey 37:07

Yeah, yeah. There's a whole other conversation to have, which I find myself having a lot here about why things feel so much more intense. And I think it's because it used to be that you could pretend things weren't happening or didn't exist. Because, you know, reasonable people could disagree because there wasn't enough information to disagree. Right, right, right.

Now there is enough information, and when you still disagree, you realize the other person's an asshole.

Aaron 37:43

Or has their name and rank across the front of their uniform, along with a nice, easy-to-read watch.

Jeffrey 37:49

Exactly. So, you know, I just think we live in this era where people are going to – information is going to get out, and maybe not in this scale. I mean, this was a pretty big collection of data. But we picked it because it was a big collection of data, and we wanted to show off all the tools that we were currently using, which, you know, frankly, are quite fun.

Aaron 38:13

It is fun. It was fun to chat. Is there anything else we didn't hit that we should hit on before doing the sign-off here?

Jeffrey 38:22

No, I was delighted to share this. I mean, we've been working on this for more than a year, and it became a little bit of an obsession. The more we dug, the more we found, and maybe it's not the world's most interesting military exercise, but the amount that we could surface, it was a really good training run for maybe some harder problems that we might encounter in the future.

Aaron 38:51

I can think of a lot of stuff you could throw at this, bigger exercises and maybe from an adversary too. But maybe we'll leave that for another podcast. So if you enjoyed the podcast and you enjoyed this type of open source, I guess Bonanza. I mean, this is an open source Bonanza. There's a lot that goes on in our Slack channel.

Which you can get access to by heading on over to patreon.com slash ACW podcast, where there's a lot of fun stuff that goes on there. And some of that open source stuff ends up in top tier publications like the Washington Post, even if you are not a presenting podcaster on the show. That's patreon.com slash ACW podcast, $3 if you're a student, $5 if you are a normal person.

Jeffrey, as always, it was good to chat. Great to talk to you.