Ukraine's Hidden Front: The Strategic Impact of Resistance Operations

Hey everyone, this is Ben Jeb from the Irregular Warfare Podcast. As we close out the year, we're re-releasing our most popular episode of 2025, Ukraine's Hidden From, the Strategic Impact of Resistance Operations. In this episode, we explore the costs and benefits of Ukrainian partisan activity and what resistance operations mean for Ukraine's broader war aims. Thanks as always for listening. from all of us at the Irregular Warfare Initiative. Happy holidays and keep warfare regular. Part of this is like, what are you asking people to fight and die for? You know, take enormous risks. If you look at like the nonviolent resistance that's still going on in the occupied territories where people have been like executed for having signal on their phones, You want to see how that's fitting into a bigger strategic picture. You're going to be asking people to put their lives on the line for that, right? Part of the regular warfare is also having the observers. So even though it's a long-range strike, there's someone out there watching it and pinpointing the target and saying, when they went with drones against some of the Russian bombers, there was someone there saying, the bombers are here, send it now. So it's not just the long-range drones, it is the observation on the other end that says, here's the effects you just had, because the effects and the assessment of the effects will drive future targeting. Welcome to the Irregular Warfare Podcast. I'm your host, Alisa Laufer, and my co-host today is Kyle Atwell. Today's episode examines the impact of Ukraine's irregular warfare and resistance operations on its broader strategic objectives. We recorded this episode in person from the West Point Department of Social Science's annual security studies seminar on February 6th, 2025. Our guests begin by describing the resistance activities being carried out by Ukraine in its ongoing war with Russia. They then discuss whether resistance operations matter, to include whether they accomplish battlefield effects, shift escalation dynamics, and whether they influence the population's perception of the war. Our guests conclude with a discussion on the use of technology in resistance operations and lessons we can take from Ukrainian resistance for future conflicts. Retired Lieutenant General Mark Hartling served for 38 years in the U.S. Army as a tanker and a cavalryman, serving at every level from tank platoon leader on the east-west German border to commander of the 7th Army. He retired in December 2012 after serving as the commanding general of U.S. Army Europe, where he led over 60,000 soldiers and partnered with the armies of 51 nations. Dr. Alexandra Chinchilla is an assistant professor of international affairs at Texas A&M's Bush School of Government and Public Service. Her research examines how powerful states use security cooperation tools, such as military advisors and arms transfers, to increase their influence over allies, partners, and proxies, to include extensive research on the war in Ukraine. Alex also serves as an advisor to the IWI Special Project on Proxies and Partners. you're listening to the irregular warfare podcast a joint production of the princeton empirical studies of conflict project and the modern war institute at west point dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals here's our conversation with lieutenant general hartling and professor chinchilla mark alex thanks for joining us on the irregular warfare podcast it is great to be with you it's going to be a good time today. Thanks for having me. So before we get started, I just want to say it's been really fantastic to be here in person with the two of you in West Point the last couple of days. We've both learned Kyle and I so much. And before we dive into our conversation about your research, Alex, I wanted to ask the two of you how you've enjoyed the conference and if there are any big takeaways that you're going to have from it. So the big takeaway for me actually is It just, it reminded me how hard it is to bridge the practitioner and scholar gap, but also how rewarding it is. And so I was in a presentation yesterday where basically I was looking at like very specific kinds of weapons that could go into special operations forces for the future. And I completely did not see how this was useful to me at all. But the implications, like once they were sort of fleshed out, just to see how people are thinking about this and how they matter for what you're able to do and how you might want to approach a regular warfare or conventional war are really important. And then you get to hang out with the fun IWI crowd, which is always a bonus. Yeah. What I'll say is from the practitioner side, first of all, there are just a bunch of phenomenal, a bevy of phenomenal researchers looking at everything imaginable in terms of conflict and warfare and how we approach things differently around the world. And that's been phenomenal. But what's also been awesome is to meet some just wonderful people who are in the academic side who care about this stuff. Sometimes when you're a soldier, you feel like you're all alone, you know, fighting for the country. Well, over the last couple of days, I've met so many great people like Alex and others who just are working their butt off to find solutions to some of our problem sets and to give us insight into areas that we may not know about. Yeah, it's very motivating. Yeah. Like talking to people like you. Yeah. Well, Alex, you presented some new research you're doing yesterday on a panel. We'd like it if you can discuss what your research is about and what is the puzzle that you're trying to solve and what motivated you to pursue this right now. Yeah, so the research I presented yesterday grew out of a project that I've been working on for a very long time. I'm nearly finished with a book that looks at military advising to partners in why states send military advisors to war zones. And one of the key studies that I worked on extensively was Ukraine from 2014 to 2022. And as part of what that involved were two fieldwork trips to Ukraine since the full-scale invasion. And one of the pieces that ended up being really important, I think, for Ukraine to stop Russia's invasion in the first place and then has shaped the overall direction of the war is the irregular warfare capability that Ukraine built through its special operations forces with the help of Western partners over that pre-war period. And what was interesting about studying this particular problem is that Ukraine was essentially hoping that it would get it out of the war that it's in right now, which is essentially a stalemate that's not really in Ukraine's favor because Russia has more people, they have better weapons, and the support from the partners can be a little bit tenuous. So I think Ukraine was looking for something that could, as the war shifted from this initial defense against Russia's invasion, which is when these special operations forces are really important, but then the war shifts into this conventional stalemate and Ukraine is thinking about a way out. So that's when you start to see the development of these long-range attacks and a lot of work that special operations forces are doing. And the challenge with studying this is that the data was not easily accessible. And I did have these conversations with Ukrainians working on this, and I wanted to see what I could get in the open source about these attacks to try to get a sense of the bigger picture and to understand how they were helping Ukraine solve that strategic problem that motivated the use of irregular warfare in the first place. You said something yesterday during your presentation that caught my attention, which was when you're talking about the Ukrainian military employing resources toward irregular warfare tasks, people start asking, well, what are we getting out of that when we're diverting resources maybe from the front line or our conventional forces? I'd be curious, Mark, if that's a dilemma or issue that you're observing now or if you've seen that in your long army career. No, I have. And it's been interesting, and I'll jump into what Alex was saying in terms of Ukrainian operations. And just to put a piece of the puzzle in here too, I started working with Ukraine in 2004 in Iraq when they were part of the coalition force, and they were horrible. A force, their government was bad, their military was not trained well, and they were just occupying a space. So initial reaction to Ukraine and the Ukrainian military was not a good one. That continued for a while until about 2008. From a conventional force perspective, they got a new commander by the name of Henedai Vorobioff. And he was their ground force commander. He and I became very good friends and he wanted to transform the military. At the same time, I was getting messages from combatant commanders that were fighting in both Iraq and Afghanistan after I came back saying, hey, our coalition partners, specifically in Afghanistan that are part of ISAF are not meeting the bill. So you guys in Germany, U.S. Army guys in Germany have to start training these guys a little bit better. So we put a focus on expeditionary approaches to the Romanians, the Georgians, the Bulgarians, everybody who was occupying part of the ISAF space in Afghanistan. Ukraine was one of them. And because they had a new commander and he wanted to transform the army, we started working with him on the small unit kinds of things from about 2008 to about 2011, both at Grafenbeer in Germany, our training base, but also in Yavariv in Ukraine. At the same time, a guy named Mike Repas, who was a special operator, started doing the same thing to the special operations forces of Ukraine as an approach to how do you defend your own territory or put special operating forces into the fight in Afghanistan. Now, this is a very long story. But what was interesting is I hearken back to my time as a colonel at our national training center where we train conventional forces. And in the early 2000s, in fact, 2000, 2001, before 9-11, we were trying to bring special ops forces to the NTC to train with conventional forces. And it was just tension. We were beating our head against the wall because it was different approaches. But we learned a lot. Fast forward, we saw some things in warfare where special operations forces and conventional forces can certainly synchronize their actions and get a whole lot more bang for the buck. I think we employed some of that when Mike and I were working in Europe. He is the SOC, me as the USUR commander. We were doing the same thing for some of our coalition partners, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Ukraine. So I think what Alex was talking about in terms of how it's become part of the overarching dynamic of a force on the battlefield, it's really been exhibited by Ukraine, which gets to your point. And Alex brought it up very well. And I think this is the question you're asking. In building these special operations forces, is it taking away from conventional force capabilities? Sure it is. It's taking manpower and resources, all that. But what you get out of it, the return on the investment of having these synchronized forces doing combat operations is much more than anything you'll ever lose. So yeah, it does take away, but it gives back exponentially to the capability of the force. That's a great illustration from your experience. Thanks for sharing that. Before we move forward, Alex, I'd love to hear a little bit more in detail about the data that you collected to answer this question, as well as the definitions that you use to code your data. How are you defining regular warfare? And if there are any other key terms for our listeners to understand, that'd be great. Yeah, absolutely. So I just wanted to say from, I think, what Mark highlighted is the key role of special operations forces supporting conventional forces. And you definitely see that as part of, I would say, what we see special operations forces doing in Ukraine. But there's some pretty distinct phases to what Ukrainian special operations forces are doing depending on the period of the war. So in sort of the early period when we're talking about Ukraine being in this all out, you know, scramble to defend itself the first few months, what they're largely doing is a regular warfare inside Ukraine, basically harassing everything that we would think of like how to stop an invasion. It was a guerrilla war at the very beginning. And the guerrilla forces were part of the conventional forces and they were just trying to get to the right place at the right time on the battlefield with javelins and stinger. And that's so important. You cannot underscore enough like how disorganized is not the right word, but more like a swarm of ants where they're all going out with the same purpose. But there's no like unified. And so like these are people that like a team would just like pick up with a pickup truck and a bunch of javelins blending in with civilians to establish themselves to a place where they could then go and defend their country. So that's what you see in the early period. If I can give an example of that, because I think one of the great moments in the fight and being at the time a CNN analyst, the anchors kept saying, why don't they strike that 40 vehicle supply column? And my thought was they will. You don't have to have a bunch of tanks roll up on them. They'll get them. And sure enough, I think they let that 40 vehicle supply column come down the road, sit there and be trapped for a while. And then, as Alex just said, you get a bunch of sneaky little gorillas going through the woods with javelins and they start picking them off when they can't do anything. That is irregular warfare. And you can hardly think of something supporting conventional forces more than that, right? Because this is a conventional column invading Kiev. Right. And they're right there. You know, you just have like one brigade essentially defending the capital. So it starts like that. Then you get to the point where the war moves to the Donbass after, you know, May, June, after the Battle of Kiev wraps. and then you start seeing portions of Ukrainian special operations forces used in ways where they're essentially supplementing for conventional forces that might be weaker. But then after you kind of get to the point where the war stabilizes and it's clear that it's going to be really hard to make territorial gains, that's when you kind of see that what I alluded to at the very beginning of this attempt to use irregular warfare to break out of that. So how am I using irregular warfare? You could ask, somebody said, I heard a recent IWI podcast. You could ask five different people and get seven different answers. And that's so true. So I'm just going to talk about what it is, like components of it. And I think here, what I'm thinking about is that these are activities that are either being done by special operations forces or they're designed basically to try to impact the things that we think of in a regular warfare, like impact a population and how they support like either the occupiers or their own government. So these are when we think of attacks that take place in the occupied territories or in Russia, that's going to be a regular warfare because of that political component. And also things that we think of as like conventional strikes in Russia are still going to be a regular warfare in the way I'm thinking about it because they're being done in this early period by special operations forces in Ukraine because Ukraine didn't have that conventional capability. So what I set about doing was to focus on looking at those activities that happened after Ukraine kind of gets to that point where they need to develop this irregular warfare capability to get some sort of leg up on Russia. And I started collecting a data set of these long range attacks. So like basically attacks that took place in Russia that we could attribute to Ukrainian actors as well as attacks that took place in the occupied territories And then basically for that coding whether partisans like local resistance forces were involved in either the occupied territories or in Russia One of the things I been doing as the war went on, because I do feel an affinity to my Ukrainian brothers and sisters since working with them, is I have kind of kept track and put it in a strategic operational tactical fight approach to what's going on in Ukraine, where I get to talk to a variety of audiences on this. And by my count right now, there have been nine phases of the campaign. And what Alex just talked about, I address in this briefing of here are the phases and when I think they changed and how different things occurred. And in each case, there were, you know, I don't call them special operations forces in the briefings I give, but they are a contributor to the conventional fight. And it's been fascinating because even in phase one and two, when Russia was still trying to go along six different axes to get into the country, the southernmost axes that was attempting to go into Odessa, which not a lot of people paid attention to, the territorial forces, the partisans, as Alex just said, played a monumental role in stopping that phase of the attack, which was critical to the Russians' objectives of breaching that line all the way across the Azov and the Black Sea, I think, to try and get into Transnistria and Moldova. They stopped them, and they didn't allow an amphibious assault into Odessa. That was mostly territorials and partisans because there was no Ukrainian conventional force down there at the time. So it's fascinating to see when you really dive deep into the campaign, the role of synchronized operations between the conventional and the special operating forces. And sometimes it was happenstance. I don't think they really started planning the synchronization until much later on into the fight, probably phase three or four. But it was pretty unique the way they were able to do it just because they care for their country and they wanted to defend themselves. There's a lot to chew on here. Just to go back to what the definition is of irregular warfare, because we talked about the initial attacks. But Alex, your research has looked at these type of activities throughout the conflict over the last couple of years. Can you just dig down a little bit more of what are some of the actual coding decisions you're making on whether something counts as an irregular warfare act versus a conventional act? Yeah. So if it takes place in the territory of Russia, that is something that is easy, I think, to code there as a regular warfare activity just based on who has the capabilities to do that. So in the early phase, if attacks that, you know, like people basically getting assassinated or things blowing up in Russia, they were done by special operators that essentially infiltrated Russian territory and either linked up with local resistance forces or operated on their own. And then they would have to actually bring in drones or whatever their explosives are or however they're going to use to take out the target. So when I was collecting these kinds of things by geographic boundaries, it's easier to see that. In terms of things in the occupied territories, once Ukraine gets long range weapons, it's a little bit more difficult. But then you can still see in terms of the organizations that claim responsibility for it. And I worked with a team of excellent research assistants, and we required there to be two public sources. And we ideally would like to see something that's either confirmed by a Russian source that this attack took place. And we tried to draw from Ukrainian and Russian language materials as we were able. And Vladimir, my research assistant, has those language capabilities. So that was really helpful. And there's a lot out there in the open source is kind of the implication. So we've heard a lot about your data strategy and the data that you collected on Ukrainian IW activities during the war. And I understand you're trying to answer this big question of the impact of IW activities on an overall conventional fight. So what were your dependent variables? What was your theory about what the impact of IW could be on a conventional fight? Well, the impact of IW in a conventional fight is the million-dollar question. So I'd like to kind of go back to what Kyle asked at the beginning of the podcast was to see like in this war that is so dominated by the conventional conflict taking place in the Donbass, like can we actually see a strategic impact for irregular warfare? And so that's kind of what motivated the collection. And so part of what we had to do to try to understand, to think about this, and this is kind of a first cut at understanding impact, is to look at Ukrainian actors that are participating in these irregular warfare activities and then seeing what they code as the major strategic impacts. And we identified essentially three. So the first, and this is articulated by General Bodanov, who's head of HER, the Ukrainian Military Intelligence Agency, which is a very unique agency without a direct US parallel. It has this robust special operations capability and are doing a lot of these long range attacks. So he has said that as recently as September 2024, that the main objective or the strategic impact that we can see is to show the Russian people that their territory can be actually targeted so that they would lose their will to fight. So kind of objective number one is decrease Russian will to fight. The second objective that we can see, and this was articulated by the former head of HUR, General Baleri Kondratchuk, who had worked extensively with Western partners in establishing the capabilities that HUR has. He has said basically that this strategy is to disrupt Russian military operations in the occupied territories and to make it more difficult for them to conduct these operations by hitting these targets. So he calls it like the thousand cut strategy, a thousand cuts and they bleed dry. So that's objective number two, disrupt military operations. And then objective number three, and we see a shift to this, I think in the period that where we started collecting the data in fall of 24, although we collected back to fall of 23, but you see a shift really in the late part of 2024 to a third objective, which is denial, which is to actually target Russia's military and economic centers of gravity to try to take out key things like oil refineries that are contributing to their ability to finance the war, as well as like ammunition depots that are contributing to their ability to resource the war. So those three objectives, disrupt the will to fight, disrupt Russian military operations, and deny Russia. These military and economic centers of gravity were the objectives as we saw them. Mark, you also said something that suggests there's a specific reason that software being used for some of these missions. And that is the idea that there are places where the conventional forces either can't go or they're just stretched too thin. And so conventional force commanders are trying to figure out how they can patch these holes. I'd be curious to hear your perspective on what is the utility of SOF specifically that joint force commanders, conventional commanders without a SOF background should understand on the employment? It was interesting because I think Alex really drove this point home in her presentation yesterday. And that is that these strikes can be strategic in nature, contributing to the strategic goals of the operation. They don't have to be big. They just have to contribute. So when you're talking about Ukraine specifically, it was missing some key components of a joint conventional fight like long-range bombers, like close air support aircraft in mass. When you're talking about the frontage that they're dealing with, like long-range strikes, these special operators can act in that way to really affect what we call the deep fight. That's what they were doing. We use missiles and aircraft to strike deep targets. They don't have as many as we do. And they were complaining about not having the aircraft to conduct the kind of operations that they needed to conduct. So the special operators can actually take the place of that. When they started getting more and more of the weapons, like the long-range artillery, even the storm shadow from the Brits, with the ATACMs and limited supplies for a reason. But they could design their targeting process to strike long range, deep targets in the three areas that Alex just pointed out. And those are critical to a joint force commander. Ukraine just early on could not reach those targets and they wanted to. What we've seen, too, from a conventional perspective, not from the folks who are driving the irregular warfare piece of this, but you talk about the conventional force commanders in Ukraine. This gives them a benefit. You know, now I have something that I can strike this with. I didn't have it before. I want the Russians to take their air defense and put that somewhere else so I can get at them with the limited aircraft I have. I want the Russians to disperse their forces to protect targets that they weren't protecting already so I can get to them on the front lines. So it's not the way we would do it necessarily, but it ain't bad. And it actually is using limited resources to conduct a campaign against an enemy, in in my view, that is not reacting very well. And a key element of warfare is, boy, you've got to adapt much faster than your enemy. And I think Ukraine has done that with limited resources. Mark, this is so important. And I think this is why, in sort of the way I was thinking about it, the special operations forces are really important to substitute for that conventional weakness. So you see basically Ukrainian soft being involved in even the production of a long-range drone for Ukraine when the partners were not willing to provide that. And the naval drones too. Absolutely. So that was them basically innovating. And they were able to do that because of their connections to society, because of their unique position within the Ukrainian armed forces or security sector, rather, unique authorities. So I think that they were able to innovate and do all of that. But that's important for us when we think about what are the lessons for special operations forces and how they fit into conventional. Because I think for me, Ukraine is not necessarily example of how Western allies or partners would fight, but rather the bigger lessons are perhaps about what it's like to work with a partner force under conditions of political risk that are limiting what can be provided. I'd add to that too, because one of the things I tried to train myself to do as a senior commander, in fact, I used to have a sign in our operations center in Iraq, which said, what's the enemy doing? What are they thinking? And how can I screw up their thinking? And that's what Ukraine has done. I mean, they have forced the Russians to do things that the Russians aren't doing to them. The Russians aren't forcing them to do things. I mean, when you talk about a military that doesn't have a Navy to sink the number of ships they've sunk because of targeting procedures and naval drones and hitting them with limited HIMARS, man, that's awesome. I mean, and it's causing the Russian commander to say, where are they going to go next? I mean, I have no clue what they're going to do next to me. And that's exactly the position you want your enemy to be in. Alex, I think you're right that Ukraine provides a good observation and a good battle lab to understand what warfare might look like for America in the future. And it's not an exact analogy. However, if you look at the history of SOF in conventional wars like World War I, World War II, I think you see the same trends now, which is what you're suggesting, which is the way I envision SOF now with joint force commanders, you have a conventional commander who has his main effort and shaping effort one, two, three, and four on the map. And some of those shaping efforts aren't the main effort. They're not going to take the brunt of his conventional forces, but they're still extremely important to either tie up the enemy in the periphery, or often, as you're suggesting, it's places that conventional forces physically can't go. They just don't have the insertion methods, or often it's just politically can't go. You can't have large numbers of conventional forces. So I think it's an interesting observation that Ukraine, I think we're actually seeing, based on your research, the same thing where it's a substitute or supplementing where conventional forces just can't go. But I think what you're saying, Mark, is conventional forces, commanders need to know how to use this. And I'll jump in on that because that's a great point. And you're right. Commanders, when they develop their campaign plan and they start planning their battles and what they're going to do in terms of initiatives, the shaping actions are important. But that doesn't mean that they are your major event, but you still got to monitor them. And if you see one or two your shaping action suddenly becoming unbelievably successful, good God, let's pour some more stuff into that and make it more successful. So it may be something small that suddenly has all kinds of, to use a business term, return on investment, then invest some more so you can get some more return. And maybe that shaping action may become a main attack route eventually. Yeah. But you said the magic words, Mark, which is successful return on investment, which means that we have to have some idea for how to assess this, right? And this is the key issue, right? Because what you don't want is just, you know, if the conventional component is dominating the fight, it's easy to just say, well, you know, this is not really relevant. We don't see how this matters. And sometimes even how, you know, we look at like how special operations forces are used, you know, it's great to do a lot of things, but ideally you'd want it to be coordinated in a way where there's very clear strategic objectives that we can measure and then see if that is leading in that direction. So that's where we have to have this conversation, even if we're wrong, right? I think I asked you that question yesterday, because that was a thought that came to mind of early on in the war, there was a bunch of, for lack of a better term, Ukrainian free-floating electrons. There were a lot of people doing a lot of things, and you were pointing it out on your map where you showed where the strikes were, although you said you were limited and you only had, what, about 50% of the true strikes, you think? Yeah, we've collected about 200, and we think that's probably about less than 50% of the total. Yeah, but it seemed when you showed that map, my thought was, man, they're all over the place. And is it contributing to something specific from a commander's perspective? And I think you pointed it out later on in your presentation. Well, they're getting there and they're now doing that. But early on, they weren't. There were a bunch of, again, free floating electrons on the battlefield and good on them because the whole society wanted to fight the Russians. And that's OK. But, you know, they had limited amounts of stuff. So you really got to kind of rein that in a little bit. I think that's what Sierski's done a little bit. Yes, absolutely. So that's part of the issue, too. And then also, I think it really matters when we think about resistance forces, right? Because part of this is like, what are you asking people to fight and die for? You know, take enormous risks. If you look at like the nonviolent resistance that's still going on in the occupied territories where people have been like executed for having signal on their phones. You want to see how that's fitting into a bigger strategic picture. You're going to be asking people to put their lives on the line for that, right? We had a staff ride in U.S. Army Europe one time, and I happened to get to meet an 88-year-old woman who was part of the French resistance in World War II and have a conversation with her through an interpreter. She could only speak French and I could only speak English. But she told me she was the most important person in that particular province of France because she had blown up so many railroad tracks. her personally. I mean, she used to hide in a cave and carry a rifle around. And I said, well, how did you know that you were the most important? She goes, because everybody was telling me I was. And she was acting all by herself, just going out, planning her own missions. Now, I don't know if that's correct or how much of it was her bravado, but it's kind of people you want in the fight That for sure Well I think this conversation about the effects is a perfect segue into my next question which I really want to get to Alex which is what were your findings And I know this research is still in stride but so far on those three outcome variables that you described hopefully this will provide some insights to military leaders like you once were, Mark, about what the overall value and impact of these kinds of operations can be on the bigger strategic picture. That's great. So I'll take that one by one for those three strategic objectives. Very linear thinking here. So number one, degrade Russia's will to fight. So that part is in my initial assessment of this, and I got a little bit of pushback from the panel, which I'll get to in a second, was to think that this had relatively limited impact. Because if you look at opinion polling, for example, you still see that around 60 to 70 percent of Russians support the war, even though this is more ambiguous. There's been a lot of recent reporting from people that are still able to do field work in Russia about how people will say they support it, right? But then, you know, me and Mark have a private conversation and we actually start talking about how we don't support it, even though, you know, in front of the audience, we're going to say, yes, we support the war. So there's some of those dynamics going on. But then sort of the key question I got from the panel, which made me sort of reevaluate this a bit, was, well, we should really think about this in terms of different audiences. And so one of the types of attacks that we saw, for example, are targeted assassinations. And so this was designed essentially to get people that have been responsible for things like civilian casualties in the war and then give them a form of vigilante justice where they just, you know, get killed in Moscow or take out key components and almost like a leadership decapitation strategy similar to what is used against terrorist groups. And I've had these conversations with Ukrainian special operators where they're like, you have to treat Russia like a terrorist organization, take out the leaders, right? So maybe in that sense is actually very effective because I didn't have a way of measuring like morale among senior Russian military officers who are actually really important for keeping the war going. So back to the drawing board on that question, I think. That question bothered me a little bit because as a commander, you don't base your operations based on polling. And to say, OK, the Russian polling is still high in terms of support of the war. But I got to tell you, if you're a Russian commander and you're back in Moscow working in the Kremlin somewhere and you see one of your buddies getting whacked coming out of his apartment driving to work, you're going to be a little bit more concerned about whether or not you're going to die by lead poisoning someday. So it may not have affected polling, but I think it affects morale within the force for sure. But that's the art of irregular warfare is you have to understand the audience that you're trying to impact, right? And that's key. And so for the second objective of disrupt Russian military operations, I definitely punted a bit here because you can see the things that were attacked, but it's really a question about like you're trying to prove a negative, right, which is that Russian operations would have, in the absence of these attacks, have been more substantial than they actually were. And we have anecdata about this, but it's hard to measure. So that is the sort of thing where you might think, like, is the impact greater than the potential cost? And given the relatively low cost of some of these operations, the answer is probably yes. So that's where I said it's had potentially moderate impact. For the part where I thought was potentially more promising is this denial strategy. And I'm working on some ways and I got some good feedback about how to think about measuring impact on the ammunition depots or oil refineries more effectively. But there's been some recent claims in terms of reporting on the Ukrainian side that it has actually degraded Russia's ability to, like Siersky has said, Russia's been able to bring half the amount of ammunition supply it had at critical periods. And all you need are kind of these momentary pieces of weakness for it to have potentially bigger effects. So that's where I think it seemed very promising. And what we need to do more work to find out, I think this capability is still developing, is to see whether these targets are being hit and being hit often enough to have these bigger effects. That's the part that's still not really clear to me because a lot of this looks like it's potentially targets of opportunity rather than sort of fitting into this bigger picture. So I have a question about the desired effects of an individual attack, let's say, and the difference between the information operations component of it and the actual kinetic effect that's had. So it's argued that irregular warfare has to do with legitimacy of the population, legitimacy of the government to the population. And a lot of these attacks are extremely complex to do. Like let's just say conducting a rail sabotage in denied enemy territory, especially when we know Russia has such strong population control measures. Is the main benefit of coordinating one of these attacks, the main objective, the actual physical damage that's done to a railroad or an individual who's assassined? Or is it actually the information operations of signaling to the Russians or the population that either the Russian government actually doesn't control this like you think they do, or to the Russians, hey, you're not safe even in places where you think you're safe right now. Why can't you do both? I mean, my answer to that is yes. I'm sorry for injesting myself. You're a yes and man here. You're like, let's do all of it. But do militaries do a good job? Does the U.S. military do a good job of synchronizing that IOPs? Well, that's a different question. But it appears, and I'll let the pro answer this one, it appears Ukraine's doing a pretty good job of it. Honestly, I need to do more work to think about the occupied territories and the effects there. I'm a little bit skeptical of their overall impact because I still think, and this is what, if you look at the Ukrainian campaign to be able to use long-range weapons, you get the permission from the allies. I think they bring up a very valid point, which is that Russia's centers of gravity here, the things that actually matter are all in Russia. And in the occupied territories, sure, you can slow them down, you can make it more difficult for them to control that territory, but they're ruthless and repressive, and they've managed to do that quite effectively, even though there's a lot of brave people that are literally putting their lives on the line to keep things like nonviolent resistance. And I'll highlight Jade McGlynn, a professor at King's College, has done excellent research on this for people that are interested in learning more about it. But there is a question of what the overall impact of changing the minds of people in the occupied territories or making Russians there more uncomfortable, what impact that's going to have on the overall conflict. So it seems very different to me in that sort of way than the way we think about irregular warfare in the counterinsurgency context. So to me, I kind of like if you had if you put a gun to my head and made me choose, I would say that the bigger impact is the things that are happening in Russia. I'm not sure. But, you know, I think this would be if we were having this conversation in Ukraine right now, and I would love to wish we could have some Ukrainian partners here to talk about this. It might be very different because for them, like being able to actually show that they can claim their occupied territories is really important for a domestic political reason. Yeah. And I also think it's important because it's a tit for tat. And what I mean by that is part of Russia's strategy has been attempting to affect the will of the Ukrainian people by bombing their infrastructure. And the more they can subject them to pain, it will mean eventually Zelensky will fall and the government will collapse and all that other stuff. Well, that hasn't happened yet, but it might be a little different in Russia. I just think it will contribute to an eventual change in the polling, which Alex talked about earlier. I just believe that you get in an inflection point where suddenly the Russian population is going to be saying, golly, they're hitting us everywhere. Just like Ukraine was saying, golly, they're hitting us everywhere at the very beginning of the war when they were striking the entire territory of Ukraine. Yeah, and then some of those strikes are actually just making it economically more difficult for Russia to continue the war. And I think the economy is Russia's big, soft underbelly and is really their vulnerability. Well, I think that's another great segue into my next question, which is for you first, Alex, in your research, what you've found in terms of Russia's responses to Ukrainian IW activities, both inside the occupied territories and inside Russia. But I'm curious if there are any lessons here specifically with respect to the use of IW in a conventional conflict in terms of the escalation dynamics. Yeah, that's an excellent question. And I think a very important one is we see that, I mean, the entire discussion we've been having is shaped by both how like the partners respond, both how Ukraine is sort of thinking about these attacks, about who does them, right? Like we had that conversation earlier, that's all shaped by these questions of political risk. And, you know, both for domestic political audiences and also for how Russia would respond. And I think what you see, at least from just like observing the way Ukraine kind of talks about these attacks, is that once it became possible to have a long range attack drones, like Ukraine had its own indigenous capability to strike Russian targets that were far away, Ukraine felt much more comfortable talking about that capability. And I think that's because before it was potentially more escalatory in the sense that doing these types of attacks required infiltrating people, which is a pretty significant violation of territory in a way that is different than sending, I think, a conventional weapon. So there's questions about how you're doing it and not just the effects of what you're doing that I think really matter. And the escalation literature and political science really picks up on this. But also the war has changed. I think Kursk is actually huge in terms of, I think, from the Ukrainian side, like they view it as something that demonstrated that they could do something really dramatic. And if we think about irregular warfare and all that was involved in making that happen with shaping the informational environment and going in. But I think after that happened, I think there's very much the sense that Russia's escalation options are potentially pretty limited. And that's what Ukraine's been trying to sell the partners. I'm not sure the partners agree with that. But also we saw in the middle of December when there was that attack that killed the head of Russia's nuclear forces. There is a lot made out of that in the news. But that attack is just one of many that we sort of picked up in the data. So I think the overall reaction is fairly limited. If I can add to this, one of the things I think a lot of people forget about is even with the long range strikes, you kind of think, OK, they're sending a drone to hit something. And it's now we can go further away. And that's great. And it gives them capabilities. But part of the regular warfare is also having the observers. So even though it's a long-range strike, there's someone out there watching it and pinpointing the target and saying when they went with drones against airfields against some of the Russian bombers, there was someone there saying the bombers are here. Send it now. So that's part of the targeting methodology that I think a lot of people forget about. So it's not just the long-range drones. it is the observation on the other end that says, here's the effects you've just had, because the effects and the assessment of the effects will drive future targeting. Yeah, I think that's a good pivot into a question about the mechanics of conducting resistance in occupied territories. I'll start with you, Mark, but I think you both have insights on this. How has technology changed both the ability to conduct resistance activities, but also the ability of the Russians to deny or force a constrained environment in the occupied territories? Well, from the standpoint of conducting, I hate to turn from a tanker into an artilleryman who taught me this, but you got to use the targeting methodology. So if you look at the decide, detect, deliver, assess methodology, those four key elements, the decide piece, I always thought was kind of weird. I thought it was always the detect should come first. But the more I look at it from an operational level, it's the decide, and it gets to what Alex was saying before, what targets are you going to hit? What are you going to go after? And then once you've decided I'm going to strike these targets, then you find out where they are, the detect phase, and then you deliver it and assess the implications of that. Getting to your question of how has technology affected that? Well, you not only have the strike drones, you have the reconnaissance drones, and you have the ability to target based on help from allies like, oh, I don't know, us in terms of overhead platforms that could provide information to the Ukrainians saying, hey, okay, you want to hit this target? We've just picked it up in some of our long-range surveillance capabilities, and here it is. So they've just detected it. They've decided what they want to hit. They've detected it. Now all you got to do is provide the stuff to hit it, whether it's a self-made or Ukrainian-made drone or a potential gift like a storm shadow, and then you go after it. And then you have the eyes on the scene or the overhead platforms to say, here's what we hit to not only assess your capabilities, but also to use it in messaging, information operations. It's interesting you noted that that doesn't obviate the need to have people on the ground still for spotting or whatever it is. I think it'd be easy to envision a world right now where it is just robots attacking robots. You could have that world, but I don't think if you're asking people to fight for their country, you've got to use it still with no kidding people on the ground. But I think it matters, though, for escalation management, because if we believe the political science literature on this, what is important for managing escalation, governments are mostly trying to manage the reactions of their own domestic political hawks, right? And if you're able to blame it on a drone, most people are not familiar with what you have to do to actually target something. So they're like, well, we're firing drones on Ukraine. Ukraine is firing drones back on us, no problem, right? So even though what we're really missing the fact here is that if the Russian public was paying attention, is that the government is not preventing these bands of roving Ukrainians armed with weapons from going on their own territory, which sounds like a loss of their own sovereignty, right? Their government's doing a pretty bad job of protecting the Russian people. So I think Ukraine is trying to highlight, look at the axis we have, and Russia's trying to be like, oh, everything's fine. There's just a few drones. We shut them down. Do you want to know how many drones that we hit Kiev with yesterday? Right. So but it gets to that second order effect of that, too, which gets to your technology piece, because if you have drones striking inside of Moscow, Putin is going to start putting air defense pieces of equipment on top of his house and in the Kremlin. So it disperses the capability to defend along the front line, which is another advantage for the operational level commander, which is what Ukraine wanted us to do for them, completely cover all of Ukraine with air defense pieces. You can't do that. I mean, that's just physically impossible. So you have to disperse and really defend the targets that you want to defend. Russia's got to do the same thing. And when you've got someone like a Putin, he's going to defend his own house in Moscow to make sure his people don't revolt, et cetera. That gets to the second and third order effects of that kind of stuff. Yeah. If you look at the resistance fighters in World War II before the invasion of Normandy. They were supposed to prevent reinforcements to the beaches, but they were also supposed to divert Germans from the front line, essentially. So same thing you're talking about. If you can do an attack where you're not supposed to be, that means there's some military capability that's going to be diverted from other places to that point. And that's where I think it gets into this is a supporting effort for a larger conventional operation. Absolutely. Yeah. I wanted to say one last thing about technology, if I can, which is that I think it may change. And this is sort of me moving into just my qualitative knowledge of this and less about like the particular things I collected in these data, but is about how technology might alter the ability for resistance forces to organize. Because with all the new communication platforms, there are basically platforms essentially for Ukrainian resistance forces, different kinds of resistance that they can provide, where everything's anonymous. You essentially just join these online communities that can help you figure out ways to do small pieces of resistance which is a little bit different than the way we been talking about resistance is providing support to kinetic operations But I think the online and like whether that and new forms of communication technology whether that makes it easier to work with resistance forces And I can wait for like all the declassified documents on this. But like, I think that's an important thing to think about as well. We saw that in counterinsurgency and counterterror operations in our own experiences. When you can shut down the communication networks of the terrorists or the insurgents, that's step one of making good things happen. So if Russia can shut down the proverbial tactical yodel networks, pardon me for jumping into that weird space, but if you can shut down the yodel between the insurgents or the guerrillas or the partisans or whoever you want to call them, you take a leg up. Russia has not been able to do that just yet. And I don't know why. Again, it's once you get some of your information, as things open up a little bit, that'll be important to figure out. Yeah, and here I'll just kind of like armchair pontificate. But I think part of it is like it's really impossible to shut down the information space because civilians require access to like information technology to continue to exist. And you see like so what that results in is like this entire war being live blogged, which is great for my data collection and hopefully for like the resistance organizers as well. So one more question here, building on this theme of people versus computers, which is more valuable. I wanted to ask to what extent the two of you think Ukraine's success with IW is attributable to work that it did before the war to build networks with humans? Or was it the effects of the war itself on Ukrainian will or the innovation that's happened in the UAS space that has made this so successful after the war began? I'll start off by saying I think the seeds of it were there, but I think the threat caused those seeds to grow fast, which happens in war. But I also say one of the other effects of this is there are a bunch of other countries in Europe right now who are really ramping up their training of their insurgents and their IW campaigns when they don't have the conventional force to defend themselves. I could name those countries, but I won't. But I think we all know who they are. Yeah. Yeah, the usual suspects. So I think the pre-war preparation is really important, both because it establishes the organizations like the special operations forces that Ukraine goes into the war with. And so these include a very complicated and conflicting group of actors. So one is like the Ukrainian special operations forces, UKRASOF, which is its own service in the armed forces. And this is more like a parallel to how we think about U.S. or allied SOF. Then you have the military intelligence organization that I already alluded to earlier. And then the SBU, which is like the FBI, CIA meld that can do paramilitary operations on Ukrainian soil and also do counterintelligence activities. So to some extent, I think we see this in the data I collected, that there is tactical innovation that took place during the Donbass War, particularly in the targeted assassinations, which is what the resistance forces were and are doing a lot of. That was all honed before the war. So I'm not even sure like how much major innovation we see there. So these pre-war legacies really matter. In terms of the resistance forces, though, from what I understand, I think that there was a lot of important work that was done here, but the overall development was still a work in progress. Like the law of national resistance that was passed was in July of 2021, giving the legal authority to run resistance forces to Eukersoft. And that was sort of just established. And I think they hadn't really kind of figured out all the ways that this would work and how this would work, particularly in this complicated soft space, like who would actually own this resistance problem. So I think that one of the things we see is that that may have, you know, this plus like the strong Russian counterintelligence response may have limited the effectiveness of some of these early networks, but they've been able to adapt and kind of regenerate them over time. I'll add to that too. And this may be a naive question, but I'm wondering how much at the end, and this is something you'll probably be looking at, is how much the territorial defense forces of Ukraine have morphed into more special operations forces as the campaign went on. I mean, these guys were set to be local militias, basically. But how many of them have gone underground and continue the fight as a new kind of special operation capability? Yeah. And also, I mean, part of what you see in the Ukraine context, too, is that it's like a big cast of characters doing these special activities. And so it'll be like sometimes like a pickup team, they're like, you know, we need 10 guys to go do this. And like, they're just drawing from what they have, like largely based on personal connections, even, and like what capabilities people have, you know, what skills and then they'll go do this. So, I mean, that's definitely like, I know people that were like in territorial defense forces then in SOF and vice versa. So like, it's possible. The territorial defense forces were, you know, they were fighting like conventional forces, but like in that way that we described in the beginning of the war. So, you know, how do we even code that? So we're going to pivot into lessons to take from your research and your experience, Mark. And I actually have multiple questions, but I'll just start with Alex. What are the lessons that we can take from your research in Ukraine for both Ukraine itself and the war moving forward, but also for its neighbors who may feel like they are under threat of a future Russian invasion? So I think one thing that we kind of talked about, and I want to make sure I sort of start with this disclaimer, is that Ukraine is a pretty unique case. And we should be important not to overgeneralize from some aspects of that experience, which include this crowded and competitive soft space, as well as conventional inferiority and the need to kind of figure out ways to get around that, which may be very different if you have the U.S. or NATO allies actually fighting as part of the alliance, you know, and some future contingency that involves Russia. So that's kind of one piece there. But also Ukraine is really leading the forefront in terms of what it means to essentially do like unconventional warfare in Russia. And so that might be something that, you know, other allies should be thinking about if they would want to do that type of activity themselves. A lot of lessons learned from how to, I guess, to organize resistance forces, but that's less the focus of this particular research. I think it also has lessons for what it means to try to support partners that are doing that. And one thing I really am interested in following up on this research is to try to understand how conditions within Russia or within the occupied territories lead to differences in being able to do these kinds of attacks. And understanding those conditions will be really important, I think, for the U.S. or working with partners in the future. I'm thinking, as Alex is talking about, the enemy has a vote and the Russian vote has not been too enormous. I mean, we can't apply a lot of these lessons to other potential fights that people might get in. There might be a whole lot of countries out there that will do things a bunch better than the Russians have done things. So some of these things may not work in other conflicts. Yeah, and the degree to which, you know, like if we think about the United States, for example, getting involved in other conflicts in the future and what that support to partners will look like, I think could look very different. But we can learn some aspects of like what that looked like. one thing that was really interesting about the Ukraine context is just how close the United States has been able to get to Ukraine while at the same time keeping these walls of separation with the limited U.S. presence in country as well as limitations on what U.S. support could look like for something like long-range attacks inside Russia. So then we can ask questions like, what are the trade-offs involved in doing things like advising partners under conditions of political risk? Is it actually effective to be at arm's length like that? Or do you have to actually put some skin in the game to get to the better outcomes where you're able to influence how your partner conducts these kinds of attacks. Yeah, it's that risk assessment between how much you want to play in this. I have a more specific question for you, Mark. Given your role as a retired U.S. Army conventional commander at very, very senior levels, we've talked multiple times that it's important that within a broader campaign, these irregular warfare or soft activities are synchronized with the overall conventional plan. And yet, if you look at the United States military today, and essentially always, even we have trouble doing this, and yet we're advising our allies and partners, hey, you got to do this integration better. What are your reflections looking back on your career and the current situation on? What are the things both the soft side and the conventional commanders should be doing to ensure that this synchronization is happening? Yeah, truthfully, Kyle, we'll tell you that I got lucky. And what I mean by that is I had some really good mentors on the soft side. First, I mentioned earlier about the National Training Center and some guys that came in and said, here's what we can do to better integrate. And they were willing to open up in a tough environment of the National Training Center in California. The second thing that happened to me was coincidentally, I was a division commander getting ready to deploy to Iraq in 2007. The guy that was named as my ADC, Assistant Division commander had a problem and didn't go. I won't go into it, but it was a tough problem. He had to be replaced at the last minute about four weeks before he was supposed to deploy. The person that took his place was a guy by the name of Tony Thomas, who had never been in a conventional force before. Through his entire career, he had been nothing but special operator. So having him on the battlefield in Iraq, I mean, he taught me a lot of stuff about how we could integrate better. And in the final phase of that campaign, a guy who became a dear friend who I didn't know all that well, it was interesting. Toward the end of the war, Stan McChrystal started a fusion cell in northern Iraq because the surge occurred and Baghdad was cleared out. We still had the rat lines of terrorists coming in through Mosul and Tikrit and out of the west. So we became, to use a term from Ghostbusters, spook central in northern Iraq. And it was the forbearance or the predictor of ISIS eventually forming up there. Well, Stan came in, developed something he called a fusion cell, used it in our area first, and it was extremely effective in terms of using special operations to hunt at night while we were hunting during the daytime. So I had some really lucky breaks in terms of people that I got to work with. Not all conventional commanders get those kind of mentors, even though they're subordinates, mentors to you. What I would do in the future if I were to be reincarnated and come back as an operational commander, the first thing I would do would be to hire Alex Chinchilla and have her be a part. I'm not kidding, to be a part of the task force because her research and what she sees as a civilian PhD to drive action is something that I think we need more of in not just the conventional force, but the entire army. Well, that's very kind. But one thing. Yeah, I'm sucking up right now. I'll keep all my harsh feedback for after the podcast. So one thing that, you know, I think kind of where I sit, what is really important is that war is ultimately about politics. And it's going to be one in the political space. And I think the Ukrainians understand that very clearly. But then the challenge of trying to understand that at sort of the strategic level where we're talking about the politicians that are going around and doing the circuit with the allies and partners and translate that down to people in special operations forces thinking about this. What you want to see ultimately is not a bunch of like disparate, disconnected efforts, but you have to do something to sort of integrate that. And so I think these are important questions about like at what level do these conversations happen? Would this need to change? Is it different when we're sort of thinking about this in the context of a large scale, you know, conventional war versus in the context of how the United States or its allies were interested in this in the context of a counterinsurgency or counterterrorism campaign? It was very clear to see what some of the metrics were. And then it turned out those were also the wrong metrics that we shouldn't have been assessing or focusing on. So I think asking the really simple questions before we even get to implementation. But like, why are we doing this? What do we want to achieve? It might sound basic, but I think it ends up being really, really important. I think both sides can learn too. I think that's your point, that it's not only the conventional guys can learn how to use soft, it's the soft people that tell you, here's how we contribute to the conventional fight. And you got to have that open dialogue and not be territorial. You know, it's interesting to me that we have a thing called the Goldwater's Nichols Act that was a direct result of a disaster between the services. Well, I mean, is there the requirement to have an act or can we just do it on our own where we do a lot more coordination between SOF and conventional forces and take the lessons learned and apply them? Alex, you started us off by saying how difficult it is to connect policy with insights coming out of the academic world, but I cannot think of a better pair of minds to do just that. This conversation has been so fantastic and enriching, and I really cannot thank the two of you enough. We're going on the road after this. I said it's difficult, but rewarding. Like it's a must do. Like you have to. Like I'm so invigorated now. Like there's a lot I just want to like go out and write about and just being more in touch with like why it actually matters. Yeah. Well, conversations like this really just carry the mission of the podcast forward. So thank you so much for joining us today on the Irregular Warfare podcast. It's great. Thank you so much for having us. Thanks again for joining us on the Irregular Warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. In our next episode, Don Edwards will discuss state-sponsored proxies and proxy warfare more broadly with Dr. Teja Tillekainen, director of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, and Dr. Vladimir Rauta from the University of Reading, who is also the director of the IWI Special Project on Proxies and Partners. Following that, Julia will host a conversation on Chinese deception with Cole Herring, a career U.S. Army Special Forces professional, and Josh Bogman from the National Defense University. Be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. The podcast is a product of the Irregular Warfare Initiative. We're a team of all volunteer practitioners and researchers dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. You can follow and engage with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or LinkedIn. 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