Michael Kofman

“I think that the Russian military has just not been able to generate substantial reserves or expand the force, given the losses they've been taking over the course of 2025 I think they can sustain the fight maybe at this intensity or a bit less, but it's increasingly clear that they can't do significantly more or better, at least right now, than the way we saw them perform last year.”

“What happened by the time we get to this point in the war is that most of the fight is not between infantry or soldiers at all on the ground. It is about the drone units of one side, their fire support, their artillery, but particularly their drone units, being able to displace the drone units of the other side. And once they're able to suppress them, and they're able to displace them to push out that support, then the line shifts because there is no line.”

“And you'll remember in the first year of the war, we did this episode with a few colleagues. It was Chris Doherty, I think Daryl was there, and John Jenteel, and we were talking about this same piece of land, the same part of Eastern Ukraine was being fought over between the German Army and the Red Army in World War II. And these were multi-million size forces. There was no front that you could just sneak through quite so easily, because there were just so many people. And now you have a couple hundred thousand on each side, and this robotization, it's just an interesting snapshot of how in the same piece of territory and the same part of the planet, warfare has evolved and changed so much in the last 80 years.”

“A lot of people, I think, have the wrong impression. They believe, because they see on videos posted of drone strikes, one FPV, one first person view drone hits a soldier and kills that soldier. Okay? Look, I will tell you this from both general statistics, but also just my own numerous anecdotal experiences, that's not how it plays out. There are many times where it takes multiple FPVs, multiple bomber drones to even kill one individual person. And the same thing with vehicles. It maybe takes 15 plus drones to stop a well-protected armored fighting vehicle. For a tank, it's often 30 or more.”

“What I used to talk about is the fact that if you wanted to have something at 30 kilometers, Ukraine had an incredible number of means. And if you wanted to have something at 1,000 kilometers, it didn't move. Ukraine had the capabilities to do that too. But if you wanted to have anything in between, that's where the problems were. And that's where a lot of Russian advantages were too. And you see Ukraine steadily solving this problem.”

“But the biggest issue is ballistic missiles. At the end of the day, you can't get away from high-end capabilities. Russia is increasingly using ballistic missiles, it's getting more out of them. And here, Ukraine is very limited because it really depends on U.S.-provided PAK-3 air defense, missile defense.”

“The Iran war has very negative effects for Ukraine's negotiating position because it doesn't solve Russia's structural economic problems, but it does solve Russia's budgetary problems to some extent for this year if they're able to capitalize on... I'm still of the mind that looking at the overall course of the war, time is definitely not necessarily on Russia's side, but the Iran war is doing no favors for that calculus, and it is definitely buying time for Russia.”

“Here's what I think the more private concern is that after this war, the US might say, you know what, we spent way too much ammunition here, we expended way too many interceptors, and now new production is just going to have to go to replenish our stocks. Sorry, Ukraine and Europeans, you didn't do much for us in terms of help in this war. You know, Ukraine is your problem. I think that's a reasonable Ukrainian concern.”

“Iranian drones, in terms of what they have, 4-channel like CPR antenna are easy to jam, fairly rudimentary. Compared to these drones, the Russian variants are very evolved, and will be much harder to jam, be much more accurate, and could offer a lot of opportunities to Iran. Iran currently doesn't have in terms of employment.”

“One thing, this is a total non-sequiturable. I'll tell you one thing I saw just looking at THAAD radars. We really don't have a culture of decoys, do we? I mean, it's the most visible thing on satellite, and I don't know this for a fact. I just know it to be true, Ryan, that all the radars- I believe that all those radars that were lost likely had zero decoys anywhere around them, and that I just strongly, we just don't have a strong culture of this at this point.”

“The feedback loop and the cycle that I see isn't very good, which is, you know, if you want to improve the kit, most Western kit that shows up there doesn't work out of the box or doesn't work very well. That's just the reality. And it needs modification. It needs improvement. The first versions of whatever gets deployed often don't do that well. And the improved versions do a lot better. But you have to work closely with the folks who are using it.”

“If you want to get your system certified by Ukraine's MOD, it actually would take on a fast cycle, something like six months. And by the time it gets certified, it will already be obsolete in this war. So that is also true, okay? And lots of folks have challenges working through your bureaucracy. And this is why the common advice is find whoever has a problem first and foremost needs solving that your kit can solve and work directly with those people.”

“I learned from this war now something that we'll never forget, which is no matter what went wrong, did you fail to properly calculate the grids? Did you, is the product fail half the time coming out of the tube? You can safely blame adversary EW for the problem. And I suggest the rest of you using this in your life. Like if something went wrong, just say it was Russian EW, because that's what a lot of people do in Ukraine.”

“By 2024, drones began to evolve as a counter to drones. So people were using drones to intercept other drones, and you started to see drones being used as a way of negating drones.”

“The companies going there are looking primarily to Western defense sectors as the people they want to sell their products to. What people are willing to buy here are not necessarily the same things as what Ukraine needs right now or vice versa, right? So there is a mismatch to some extent of incentives. And there could be really great technology solutions, but they're not solutions to problems that Ukraine has on the battlefield.”