Transcribed automatically: it certainly contains errors. It’s pretty good, just not perfect. We provide it here because, for accessibility, it’s better than nothing.
Jeffrey Lewis 0:06
You are listening to the Arms Control Wong podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
Aaron Stein 0:20
And I am Dr. Aaron Stein, president of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, staring out at a glorious day on the east coast of the United States. I hope it's just nice in California.
Jeffrey 0:32
Oh, it is a beautiful, kind of foggy, but burning off Half Moon Bay morning, so I would rather be outside and not here with you, Aaron, but here we are. I do have my nice coffee from Dawn Patrol, my favorite cafe.
Aaron 0:51
Oh, I made myself a little... I don't know what you would call it. Sort of like a homemade latte. A flat white, maybe? A flat white. There you go. I like that. A flat white. I've been watching a lot of British television lately. For some reason, just hearing the British accent and knowing that there are problems abroad makes you feel better about problems internally.
Jeffrey 1:09
Can you hear the garbage truck outside?
Aaron 1:13
No, that could be either a promo for the upcoming episode of Love is Blind UK or Love Island UK. A lot of garbage. Or, you know, what we think about potentially US use of long range weapons in Ukraine. How about that?
Jeffrey 1:29
I like the segue. I appreciate that you gave it your best. So yeah, the Wall Street Journal has a pretty interesting article written by, I guess it's several people, but it's fundamentally Alex Ward.
Aaron 1:46
He's the lead author, yeah.
Jeffrey 1:47
Yeah, saying that the Trump administration has, since the spring, had a review process in place in order to make decisions about whether to allow Ukraine to strike targets in Russia with U.S. systems and systems that rely on U.S. intelligence. And that review process, which is under Elbridge Colby, has basically said, no.
Aaron 2:19
You know, I'm of two minds reading this story because it almost feels like we're going back in time to like the debates around 2023, 2024 around U.S. assistance to Ukraine. But the underlying assumptions back then during the Biden administration were that we don't want to die in sort of a fiery nuclear blast. Whereas I would say the assumptions on this one is that maybe they're, let's say they're muddled.
They're about as sort of... Unclear in terms of what the overarching demand signal is here, other than I think what's in the Wall Street Journal piece. Bridge is worrying about husbanding long range resources for a potential war with China.
Jeffrey 3:03
Yeah, I mean, so I guess there are multiple pieces of this because so one piece of the story is there's the revelation of the review process itself. Right. Which I think we didn't know. No. There is the mechanism by which the review process is able to exert authority. This isn't a case of you cough up the missiles and therefore they're out of your control and you can't do anything.
The Ukrainians need U.S. intelligence in order to be able to effectively use those systems. And that's true not just of ATACMs, but it's also true of Storm Shadow. Yes. And so we knew that the intelligence had been largely cut off since the spring. Right. That was reported in the spring.
Aaron 3:47
Yes. I mean, I think it was cut off for a couple of days and turned back on. And this was around the time of the Oval Office meeting.
Jeffrey 3:54
Yeah.
Aaron 3:54
This was to punish Zelensky for not wearing a suit.
Jeffrey 3:57
If I understand the Wall Street Journal story, though, it implies that that cutoff has basically continued. Although, you know, we'll see. But then there is... Then all the sort of other questions, which is the Wall Street Journal also reports that the Ukrainians are low on ATACMs and they need more. And it seems like they're unlikely to be getting them.
Aaron 4:22
Correct. Yeah. And so, I mean, I think what's worth talking about is. We got to this position of using ATACMs on Russian soil in response to Russian escalation in the conflict, either inviting the DPRK in. This is the Biden administration or the success rate of their glide bomb attacks on the front lines. And so they were allowed to use them by the Biden administration.
You know, in response to a specific need. And so taking it away sort of, I guess, reinforces the Trump administration's policy that the conflict is more or less frozen and there's no added value in strikes on Russian territory.
Jeffrey 5:04
Yeah, I guess the thing to say, to be fair, is that for most of the Biden administration, they didn't let the Ukrainians strike targets deep in Russia. Right. And the decision to allow it happened late, and it was in a pretty narrow window. Right. And while I was against that restraint and supported letting the Ukrainians go hog wild and get more stuff, It isn't like that was the Biden administration policy.
And in many ways, the Trump people are dialing it back to the spot we were for most of the Biden administration, which, again, I think is not good. It's not what I want. But it's also pretty consistent with the way that the U.S. has tried to control escalation in this conflict.
Aaron 5:58
Right. And It's like a weird tool of leverage with Trump, albeit not over – well, he tries to use it on both sides, right? So when things go – because we talked about Alaska last week. So when things go sideways in Alaska in terms of his expectations, which is to continue this sort of very pageant-oriented approach to peacemaking, which is – That is such a nice way to say that.
He likes visuals. I mean, he likes a beauty pageant. He likes a beauty pageant that's been well documented. He used to own Miss USA. He likes stacking up.
Jeffrey 6:34
Wait, was it Miss USA?
Aaron 6:36
Or Miss Universe? Was it Miss Universe?
Jeffrey 6:37
Wait, I thought it was a teen beauty pageant.
Aaron 6:40
You know, my knowledge of Donald Trump's sort of vast holdings on the beauty pageant circuit, let's say, are about as, or let's just say, are very low. Yeah, you know what? He owned a pageant. Some kind of beauty pageant. I think it was Miss Universe. Doesn't matter. So he likes to stack with visuals. He likes the visual.
But when the visual doesn't yield to... What he wants, he threatens Russia with these vague promises that he'll unleash the Ukrainians. And so it becomes this tool for him, which is like, we'll let them- In two weeks, Aaron.
Jeffrey 7:14
In two weeks.
Aaron 7:15
In two weeks. Everything is in two weeks, right? Everything's in two weeks. It's like paying back your loan chart. It's like, I got the money. Don't worry. I didn't gamble it all away on the Lakers game last night. I'll pay in two weeks. Just don't kneecap me. Pay in two. I got the money. I'll pay in two weeks.
I'm just waiting for a couple of deals to come in. And so it feels like that's where we're at, right? It's like this review mechanism is a tool for the Ukrainians to say, like, do what we want. And on the Russians, it's like, do what we want. And I don't think anybody's really listening because the Ukrainians are developing their own stuff to get around it.
Jeffrey 7:44
Well, I think that's really the interesting development. You know, there are these twin programs. You know, we know that prior to the initiation of the Russian invasion, Ukrainians had a program to develop their own variant of the Iskander. Which never seems to have come to fruition. And in part, that's the Russians claimed in August that they had actually destroyed the facility where that work was being done, or at least two facilities.
But we have seen the flamingo. The flamingo. Great name. Love the name. Not the most beautiful looking bird.
Aaron 8:27
It is so Soviet vintage. Like it's almost beautiful in how retro it looks, right? Like I can see like a shell of that, like sitting in some sort of like hipster bar in San Francisco in the mission I used to go to in like 2004. You know what I mean? It is so ugly that I love it.
Jeffrey 8:46
Yeah, I mean, so for listeners and Fabian Hoffman in Missile Matters did kind of a nice write up of this. You know, it's a cruise missile. It's got a turbofan engine. It carries like a thousand, I guess, 1150 kilogram payload. It's pretty powerful. Big, right? It's like a 6,000 kilogram missile, which, you know, is like with a turbofan engine, you know, like that's a lot of fuel, right?
And because it's a cruise missile, it's just basically an airplane. It's going to fly, it runs out of fuel. You know, there are claims that the thing can fly 3,000 kilometers, which is, you know, like, you know, we'll have to model it, but it's big. It's got a lot of fuel.
Aaron 9:39
Yeah, no, it's big. Yeah, I mean, and it builds on Ukrainians have a turbofan, you know, industrial base.
Jeffrey 9:50
And so it seems like they just sort of whacked one of their... Yeah, Motor Sich, which, you know, is like a spinoff of like the cruise missile engine making...
Aaron 9:59
Characters, you know, like, yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's what they do. And so they have these things, it seems like, they put them together. And I think they need the bigger warhead because they've been using these sort of like One-way drones, which we also should just call cruise missiles, but we know that they're not cruise missiles because they're really slow and they carry a small...
It's like, how do you update the MTCR? You sort of know it when you see it. That's a Cessna with some warheads in it, with some C4 in it. It seems like this is their real first effort to approximate capabilities of long-range strike.
Jeffrey 10:41
Yeah. I mean, I have some questions about guidance because, you know, Hoffman says it's solely GPS-assisted inertial. So there's no Turcom, there's no terminal guidance. So that would suggest to me it's not real accurate, especially at 3,000 kilometers.
Aaron 11:00
Yeah, and I'm not sure about that. They've made so many advancements in sort of like non-GPS guidance with their drones, like at distance. It's the distance that comes into it, right? So like with their drones, the distance you're able to do it with like basically television cameras, like the two-way television cameras. But if you get that far out, I don't know how you do it.
Jeffrey 11:23
Yeah, 3,000 kilometers is pretty tough.
Aaron 11:25
You can't do it. And so it has to be either INS or GPS. So I agree with you. It's probably not going to be very accurate.
Jeffrey 11:31
Yeah. But I mean, I do think, and I think we've seen this with some other Ukrainian systems, the longer this drags on, the more incentives the Ukrainians, and then I will add dot, dot, dot, others, You know, have to start making decisions about how much they really want to rely on the U.S. Because I think it's pretty interesting that Storm Shadow needs U.S. targeting assistance.
Aaron 12:06
Well, to me, that's just, I envision like it's the ISR and all the sort of imagery and all the target, the things that go into creating a targeting package, right? So from SIGINT to all sorts of your ints, we just have it and the others don't. And so like you can want to do things without US assistance, but like that's an aspiration a decade from now with proper funding, right?
Whereas if you're the Ukrainians on their side, you're willing to cut some corners because you're getting bombed every single day, I guess is what I'm thinking.
Jeffrey 12:42
But I mean, I find this to be sort of inherently interesting. And I know this is also true in the US. Like in the US, it's very hard. Like it's much easier to get money for the sexy piece of hardware and much harder to get money for all of the intelligence that would make the hardware useful. Yeah.
Right. Admittedly, like I'm an OSINT analyst, so I'm like kind of like... Primed to think that the analysis is what is actually going to allow you to use the thing. But it really is interesting to me how sharply that capability drops off in foreign countries. It's like a cliff.
Aaron 13:19
Yeah. I mean, we're kind of guessing because so much of this is extremely classified, but I would suggest this is not a Tom Schelling slope. It is like, you know, it's a boom.
Jeffrey 13:30
Well, I mean, we know that the Ukrainians can't use storm shadow without U.S. help, which presumably means that the British themselves don't fully do it themselves.
Aaron 13:44
I think in this scenario, too, I would hesitate to say like in all cases. Right. But I think all the ints are very U.S. dependent. Let's say anything in space.
Jeffrey 13:56
But these are capabilities that these countries could have, right? Because a lot of these capabilities are now held commercially. Correct. But there is this strange, they don't have the analytic component that sends the demand signal. And so then they don't build the ISR capabilities that then satisfy the demand signal because they don't have the people who can process it.
And then if they get really excited and then they want to build the platforms, They still don't have the people to look at them. And so I maybe it's a little bit of a chicken and egg thing. But you got to think that the Ukrainians and like some allies like the French and the Poles have to be looking at this going like this.
This they I hope they're realizing this is a capability that they should want to hold on their own.
Aaron 14:43
Well, it's such a high barrier to entry. You know what I mean? I always like to think about the size of these European defense budgets. And I realize it's not an apples to apples comparison, but they're typically smaller now than the Department of Homeland Security. I think ICE has a bigger budget than most European militaries. Considerably larger budget than most European militaries. And again, I understand, you know, not apples to apples, much smaller bureaucracy, whatever. But we're talking about figures of dollars here. Yeah, they just aren't very big. And so when you're talking about what are we gonna buy, especially when you've atrophied to the point where the Germans cannot sustain a brigade in Lithuania without like hemorrhaging half of their sort of spare parts from other stuff, like Deploying all the cool stuff in space to allow you to use Taurus, like in Moscow, it's like, eh, we'll do that in five years.
Jeffrey 15:39
Yeah, there was that reporting. They were going to need German planning, right? To help them come up with the target sets. And yeah.
Aaron 15:47
Yeah. It's like, It's like when you – it's like if you – like a slumlord. I'll just do that maintenance in five years because I'm just renting it to college students. The college students will be fine with the dirty bathroom. I don't care. I'll do that maintenance next year. You just keep pushing it and kicking it until you get a pipe explosion.
Jeffrey 16:04
This is my push and maybe I think about this a lot in the Asian theater, like the Taiwanese and the Japanese and the South Koreans. Really, really, really, really should be investing, not just in the sharp pointy things, but in the ability to target those sharp pointy things by themselves.
Aaron 16:26
Especially with how much the technology is now held in private sector.
Jeffrey 16:30
Yeah.
Aaron 16:31
Like the high fidelity satellite imagery, SAR, so much of like the apparatus, SAR especially, is now consumable You know, like with a Visa card.
Jeffrey 16:47
By the way, this is crazy. You know, it's the SAR as a technology and as a US intelligence capability was declassified in our professional lifetime.
Aaron 16:58
Yeah.
Jeffrey 16:58
It was in the early 2000s, maybe early, late 2000s. And like now there are commercial imaging companies. How weird is that?
Aaron 17:07
Right. It costs a lot. But like if you're a government and you're thinking about like
Jeffrey 17:14
See, it's only the stuff I like where people don't make the, like, we can't afford not to. Like, it's some stupid nuclear weapon that we're never going to use. And it's like, oh, we can't afford not to. But then I'm like, how about you buy some more satellites to know where to point the things? And they're like, oh, that's real expensive.
Aaron 17:33
It's expensive. And they don't own the launch capabilities, too. Elon Musk does. Good old Elon. Maybe he should have stayed in South Africa.
Jeffrey 17:43
They have some launch capabilities. Anyway, you were right, but it's crazy to me I mean, I understand that it is true, but it is really interesting to me to go back to this original story that the entirety of the ability to restrict Ukraine's ability to use these systems is based on intelligence sharing, which is a capability that countries could and should develop on their own, in my opinion.
And by the way, I mean, send your younglings to the Middlebury Institute. We train a lot of future intelligence analysts.
Aaron 18:21
Yeah, and they aren't even paying us for this.
Jeffrey 18:23
Maybe they should, you know, a promo for Miss. We'll slightly train them up, and then they can go back to their country and set up a proper system with even better capabilities.
Aaron 18:38
Yeah. Arms control wonk pod linked to rogue proliferator of... You know, Johnny, why did you decide to build a sort of rogue targeting cell that you had for hire that you incorporated in Dubai?
Jeffrey 18:59
Taiwanese do a missile strike and kill Xi Jinping. And they're like, well, you know, that's a mystery. Monterey really was useful.
Aaron 19:08
Yeah, you know, I went to Monterey and I could have gone to work for, you know, my home country's National Intelligence Service, but they were only paying like $25,000 a year. I realized I could just do it myself and just offer bespoke niche capabilities at $250,000.
Jeffrey 19:21
Okay, well, don't do that. But the countries should hold their own intelligence capabilities. I mean, we spend so much time focusing on the pointy stuff because we love it because the hardware is cool. It is really, it is, I think, profoundly interesting that We are able to exert control through the control of intelligence.
Aaron 19:41
Yeah. And just to be serious, the Biden administration was, you know, rightly or wrongly concerned about escalation in that if you were to unleash these things and you were to hit leadership targets, I think that's what they were really concerned about, right? If you start hitting leadership targets in Moscow with US weapons, that takes you to another sort of Step down the slope and you have to be concerned about unintended escalation.
And so while I think we both disagreed on some of the restrictions that they put in place, they were from like not a leverage over Ukraine thing. They were worried about becoming entangled in a nuclear war thing. Whereas the Trump administration, this has quite clearly become leverage. And they're not so worried about escalation and nuclear holocaust, although I think Trump does worry a lot about that.
It's more like we don't want to do this because we think this war should end, A. And two, they shouldn't be using our stuff anyways because we want to use it against the Chinese. Right.
Jeffrey 20:49
And I think it's – I mean I don't know what you think, but it does seem like it's pretty unlikely that there will be more shipments.
Aaron 20:58
Not directly, right? Because there's not going to be any more aid package coming out of this Congress. It'll be this very convoluted, the Europeans are increasing defense spending to buy stuff from us to ship to Ukraine, which is just very Trumpian in that they're going to pay us to support Ukraine. And if that's what it takes, that's what it takes.
But it's just – It's just sort of what it is.
Jeffrey 21:24
I keep saying, I know it's going nowhere, especially with this South Korean government, but South Korea ought to send one missile to Ukraine for every North Korean missile that shows up in Russia.
Aaron 21:37
Fair is fair. They are self-deterring.
Jeffrey 21:45
Yes, they are.
Aaron 21:47
They have a real incentive structure, in my opinion, to sell a bunch of stuff and they just aren't. And I do realize there are stuff here. But, you know, anyways. Anything else we need to hit before we wrap this one up?
Jeffrey 21:59
No, just, I mean, I think... You know, it's a, it's a good story and it's worth reading because it goes into some of the detail about the review procedure. And, and so I, you know, I think that's pretty great. Having, having said that, you know, we know that this has been true since the spring. And, and there was some reporting about this at the time.
And I think what the wall street journal has done is note that it's been actually pretty consistent and bring it up to date. And so, you know, it's, it's a, It's a great story, but it also, not really a but, it really does describe a thing that's been ongoing for some time and probably won't come as a huge surprise to people who have been following this.
And honestly, it's the reason you see the Ukrainians trying to develop their own capabilities.
Aaron 22:47
Yeah, which I still think we have questions about, just in all fairness. It's really ugly in a very Soviet way. I'm not sure how accurate it will be. And we've talked a lot about – it could be very accurate, by the way. And we've talked a lot on this podcast about inaccurate long-range missiles, conventionally armed, even with a 1,000-kilogram warhead.
And when it's that big, I do wonder about its ability to sort of penetrate air defenses. But that's a whole other podcast.
Jeffrey 23:13
A whole other podcast. Yeah, it's a whole other podcast. The kind of thing you could discuss.
Aaron 23:20
In our Slack channel, where you can discuss what the Flamingo, its lineage, its heritage, the engine, anything you want is going to be talked about in the Slack channel. And you can also talk about Borovishnik, a.k.a. Skyfall. And all sorts of open source matters. It is actually the place where little Johnny is training to be the next generation of Intel analysts for hire.
Patreon.com slash ACW podcast. $3 if you're a student, $5 if you're not. Join the Star Wars bar collection of people who do this work for a living. Patreon.com slash ACW podcast. Jeffrey, it's good chatting with you. Always great to talk to you, Aaron.
