Latest / Reformed Thinking / The Drone Ledger: How Ukraine’s Cheap Interceptor Drones Are Rewriting Air Defense Economics

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The Drone Ledger: How Ukraine’s Cheap Interceptor Drones Are Rewriting Air Defense Economics · Reformed Thinking

• 0:00
  Hello and welcome to Reformed Thinking.
• 0:02
  It is good to have you with us today as we open up a new set of
• 0:06
  sources. It's good to be here.
• 0:07
  You know, usually when we talk about war or military strategy,
• 0:12
  the mind immediately goes to the visceral stuff.
• 0:15
  The explosions, the tanks, the, you know, the bravery of the
• 0:19
  soldiers on the front lines. It's all very kinetic.
• 0:21
  It's loud. It is.
• 0:22
  But today we're starting somewhere completely different.
• 0:25
  We're starting with a Ledger. A Ledger.
• 0:27
  Probably the most boring and yet maybe the deadliest weapon in
• 0:31
  the entire arsenal. That's it.
• 0:33
  And actually, before we even get to the math, I think we need to
• 0:35
  start with the foundation. I want to take us to Luke 14.28.
• 0:40
  OK, for which of you desiring to build a tower does not first sit
• 0:44
  down and count the cost whether he has enough to complete it?
• 0:47
  And it's a verse we hear so often, right?
• 0:49
  Usually in the context of personal discipleship, you know,
• 0:52
  what's the cost of falling Christ.
• 0:54
  But in the context of the magistrate, the government
• 0:57
  that's been ordained to bear the sword, that verse, it's not just
• 1:00
  a parable, it is a strategic imperative.
• 1:03
  Well, if you start a defense you literally cannot afford to
• 1:05
  finish, you're not just making a strategic mistake.
• 1:08
  You are, in a very real sense, failing in your duty of
• 1:13
  stewardship. And that brings us, I think,
• 1:15
  right to the mission of today's deep dive.
• 1:18
  We are looking at the air defense war in Ukraine, but
• 1:22
  we're not just looking at the maps or the frontline shifts.
• 1:24
  We're looking at what our sources are calling the cost
• 1:27
  curve inversion. Which is a bit of jargon, but
• 1:30
  it's this core idea that Modern Warfare has turned into a kind
• 1:33
  of a financial siege. A financial siege?
• 1:37
  That sounds chilling. It's a terrifying concept when
• 1:40
  you really dig into it. We're seeing a situation where
• 1:42
  cheap, mass produced threats are literally bankrupting defenders
• 1:47
  who are relying on what the sources call gold plated
• 1:49
  systems. So the goal for this discussion
• 1:51
  is to unpack that. We want to see how this shaheed
• 1:54
  equation, and we will get into the specifics of that math, is
• 1:58
  forcing a total rethink of military doctrine.
• 2:01
  It almost feels like a reformation.
• 2:03
  That's the perfect word for it. We're moving away from this,
• 2:06
  this kind of idolatry of complex, exquisite technology,
• 2:10
  and we're being forced back to something that looks a lot more
• 2:13
  like prudent, sustainable stewardship.
• 2:15
  OK, so let's unpack this. We have to start with the
• 2:17
  aggressors advantage. The sources call it the economic
• 2:20
  tyranny of the shaheed, right? Walk us through the hardware.
• 2:23
  I mean, what are we actually dealing with here?
• 2:25
  We're dealing with the Shaheed 136.
• 2:27
  The Russians call it the Jaron too.
• 2:30
  And honestly, if you look at it, it does not look like a weapon
• 2:34
  that could change the world. It is crude.
• 2:36
  Crude how the Ukrainians call them mopeds with wings.
• 2:39
  And that's because they use this really noisy, cheap MD550
• 2:43
  engine. It literally sounds like a
• 2:44
  lawnmower in the sky. So it's not exactly stealthy.
• 2:47
  Not at all. It's also slow.
• 2:49
  It cruises. It may be 180 kilometers per
• 2:51
  hour. A World War 2 fighter could
• 2:53
  catch it. Right.
• 2:54
  But that crudeness, that's the whole point, isn't it?
• 2:56
  It's not a bug, it's a feature. Precisely.
• 2:58
  In a fallen world, we often mistake complexity for quality,
• 3:02
  but here the quality is the cost.
• 3:04
  OK. So what is the cost?
• 3:05
  The estimates in our sources vary a bit, but we're looking at
• 3:08
  a production cost of maybe 20,000 to $50,000 per unit. 20
• 3:13
  to $50,000. Yeah, even the upgraded ones
• 3:16
  with little jet engines might only hit 80,000.
• 3:19
  It's made of fiberglass, cheap electronics.
• 3:23
  A lot of it's just off the shelf components you could probably
• 3:25
  buy on the Internet. Which in the world of military
• 3:28
  hardware, where a single tank is, what, $10 million?
• 3:31
  That's basically a rounding error.
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  It's negligible, and that low entry cost allows the aggressor
• 3:38
  to use a strategy of saturation. Saturation, meaning they just
• 3:41
  send a ton of them. A ton of them.
• 3:43
  They don't need these drones to be perfect.
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  They don't need them to be smart.
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  They don't need sophisticated guidance systems.
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  They just need them to be numerous.
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  And that leads to this terrifying math problem for the
• 3:52
  defender. The sources mentioned that the
• 3:55
  cost for Russia to successfully strike a target, even when you
• 3:59
  count the ones that fail, is wildly low.
• 4:02
  Right. Let's look at the kill chain
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  cost, as they call it, right? Let's say Russia launches 10
• 4:06
  Shaheds, and maybe nine of them get shot down or miss or fail,
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  but only one gets through. That total strike package still
• 4:13
  cost them maybe $350,000, maybe $500,000 for all 10.
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  And what's the comparison point for that?
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  Well, compare that to a traditional Soviet era cruise
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  missile like AKH 22 that costs over $1,000,000 just to launch
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  one. Wow.
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  So the Shaheed lets the enemy sustain this high tempo
• 4:31
  bombardment that would be financially impossible if they
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  were only using their high end missiles.
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  So the drone doesn't even need to hit the target to win, does
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  it? No, and this is the core of the
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  financial siege concept. The drone wins if it hits the
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  power plant. Obviously that's a clear win.
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  But it also wins if it just forces you to spend your
• 4:49
  treasury to stop it. It's an economic attrition
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  weapon. Which brings us squarely to the
• 4:53
  defender's dilemma. Because Russia launches a, say,
• 4:56
  a $20,000 drone, Ukraine, and by extension the Western coalition
• 5:01
  supplying them, has to stop it. They have to.
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  But up until recently, what were we using to stop them?
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  Well, Western doctrine has relied on those gold plated
• 5:10
  systems I mentioned before. We're talking about things like
• 5:13
  the Patriot missile battery or Nasms.
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  And these are the best of the best.
• 5:17
  Right. They are incredible machines.
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  I mean, they're engineering marvels.
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  The Patriot Pack C3 is designed to hit a ballistic missile
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  falling from space at hypersonic speeds.
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  It's designed to kill high performance fighter jets.
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  But using a patriot, a system like that against a moped with
• 5:34
  wings, it just seems disproportionate.
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  It's economically ruinous. A single Patriot interceptor
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  cost somewhere between 3:00 and $5 million. 3 to 5 million for
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  one shot. For one shot, even the AMRAM
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  missile used in the NASAM system is over $1,000,000.
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  So you do the math. You're firing a $3,000,000
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  missile to stop a $30,000 drone. That's 100 to one loss ratio.
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  It is. It's painful just to say it out
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  loud. It's completely unsustainable
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  stewardship. You're burning down your own
• 6:04
  house to keep it warm. It's that simple.
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  But the sources, they point out this loss, loss scenario because
• 6:10
  the skeptic might say, well, just don't shoot, it's too
• 6:12
  expensive. But you can't do that can.
• 6:14
  You. No, you can't.
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  And the enemy knows this. This is the cruelty of the
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  entire equation. So lay it out, what are the 2
• 6:20
  losses? Option A You fire the missile,
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  you lose millions of dollars, and you deplete a stock of
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  weapons that takes months, sometimes years to replace.
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  That's your first loss. Option B, you don't fire and
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  that drone hits a transformer, a factory, maybe an apartment.
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  Block. The damage to the
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  infrastructure, not to mention the loss of human life, is worth
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  far, far more than the missile you saved.
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  So you're completely trapped. You lose money if you shoot, and
• 6:47
  you lose critical assets if you don't.
• 6:49
  That's correct. You're caught in a pincer
• 6:51
  movement of economics. And this whole thing exposes a
• 6:55
  massive hole in how the West thinks about war.
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  A hole? Yeah, we have these amazing
• 7:00
  silver bullets, these perfect weapons, but they're failing us
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  here because we never, ever anticipated a war of cheap
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  volume. That brings us to our second
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  section, the idolatry of the silver bullet.
• 7:11
  That's a really strong word, idolatry.
• 7:13
  But looking at the sources, it feels, well, it feels
• 7:18
  appropriate. It really fits.
• 7:19
  For decades, I mean NATO and western doctrine, it all assumed
• 7:23
  we would always have air superiority.
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  That we'd own the. Skies.
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  We'd own the skies. We assume the threats would be
• 7:28
  few and high value, other jets, maybe a couple of big
• 7:31
  intercontinental missiles. So we built our entire industry
• 7:35
  around that assumption. We built exquisite things.
• 7:38
  We focused on just in time efficiency, right?
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  I'm thinking like the auto industry model.
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  Exactly. We treated defense manufacturing
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  like it was commercial logistics.
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  Lean, efficient, low inventory. But war isn't efficient.
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  War is wasteful. War demands redundancy in a
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  fallen world. As the sources note, quantity
• 7:58
  really does have a quality all of its own.
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  It's almost like the foolishness of the cheap drone confounds the
• 8:03
  wisdom of the complex missile. That's a great way to put it.
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  The industrial atrophy that the Sun has mentioned is shocking.
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  We're not just talking about money here, we're talking about
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  sheer capacity. It's artisanal versus
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  industrial. That's the best way to think
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  about it. Making a Patriot missile is like
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  making a Swiss watch. It requires clean rooms, rare
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  earth elements, highly specialized technicians, months
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  of calibration. Right.
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  Making a Shaheed is like making a toaster.
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  You can do it in a garage. In fact, they are.
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  The numbers are staggering. The sources say Russia is
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  cranking out 50 to 70,000 of these drones a year. 50 to
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  70,000 Meanwhile, the West struggles to produce just
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  hundreds of Patriot interceptors in that same timeframe.
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  It's a complete mismatch of industrial metabolism.
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  And the enemy is using this disparity as is a trap.
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  The sources talk about a tactic they called decoy and depletion.
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  Explain that how does the decoy work in this context?
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  Well, it's a classic bait and switch.
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  The enemy knows we have a limited number of these high end
• 9:01
  Patriot missiles. They are finite.
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  A limited magazine. Exactly.
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  So they flood the sky with these cheap drones, wave after wave.
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  They want the radar operators to panic.
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  They want us to fire the patriots at the drones to
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  protect the cities. And once the battery is empty.
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  Once the magazine is exhausted, that's when the real killers
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  arrive. The Iskander and ballistic
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  missiles. The hypersonic Kinzel.
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  The ones the Patriots were actually designed.
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  For the very ones, if you've spent your shield stopping the
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  decoys, you have nothing left for the existential threats.
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  So solvency, just being able to afford the fight, is literally a
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  prerequisite for survival. It is.
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  You cannot defend a nation if you go bankrupt doing it.
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  And that realization, that shock, has forced what the
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  sources are calling a reformation of air defense.
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  I love this analogy. Let's get into Section 3, the
• 9:51
  Reformation. The sources draw a direct
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  parallel to the Protestant Reformation.
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  It's a very helpful heuristic. I think the Protestant
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  Reformation was fundamentally a call back to simplicity.
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  Back to the source. Stripping away the extra.
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  Step right, stripping away the costly man made traditions, the
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  indulgences, the gold, all the things that it obscured the
• 10:08
  truth. In a military sense, this crisis
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  is forcing a return to the simplicity of economy and
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  volume. So we're moving away from the
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  gold plated rigidity and trying to find cheap interceptors.
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  We have to. The sources outline 3 pillars of
• 10:23
  this reformation, and the first one is well, it's the return of
• 10:27
  the gun. Specifically the flak Panzer
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  Gepard. It sounds like something from a
• 10:31
  World War 2 history book. It effectively is a throwback.
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  It's a German anti aircraft tank with these twin 35mm cannons.
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  For years, Western planners thought it was obsolete.
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  Why bother with a dumb gun when you have a smart guided missile?
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  That was the thinking, but against a slow, loud, non
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  maneuvering drone, it turns out it's perfect.
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  So how does the math work on the GET part?
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  What's the cost per kill? A burst of dumb rounds.
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  We're just talking simple kinetic projectiles cost about
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  $5000 to kill a drone. $5000. Compare that to the $3,000,000
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  Patriot. You have completely restored the
• 11:12
  economic balance. Suddenly you're spending less
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  than the enemy again. You're on the right side of the
• 11:16
  Ledger. Right, but it's not just about
• 11:17
  digging up old tanks. The second pillar is what the
• 11:20
  sources call Common Grace and Frank and Sam's.
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  Frank and Sam, I'm assuming that surface to air missile like
• 11:26
  Frankenstein's monster. That is correct, yeah.
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  And this is where human ingenuity, you know, common
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  grace, yes, just shines. Ukraine had a lot of old Soviet
• 11:36
  radar systems and trucks, the book systems, but they didn't
• 11:40
  have enough of the old Soviet missiles for them.
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  Meanwhile the West had plenty of old air to air missiles, things
• 11:47
  like sidewinders, Sea sparrows just sitting in warehouses.
• 11:50
  But those two things don't talk to each other.
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  They're not supposed to. It sounds like trying to run an
• 11:54
  iPhone app on a Commodore 64. It's a massive engineering
• 11:58
  challenge. But the engineers, they built
• 12:00
  adapters. They build hardware and software
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  bridges that allowed the Soviet radar to guide the American
• 12:05
  missile. They stitched them together.
• 12:07
  What's the stewardship angle on that?
• 12:09
  It's the definition of it. It's repurposing what you have
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  rather than coveting what you cannot afford.
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  They mentioned one of these programs, Project Hornet.
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  Converting one of these systems cost about $340,000.
• 12:20
  That's a lot of money, but. But it gives you a fully
• 12:22
  functional air defense system for a fraction of the cost of a
• 12:26
  new battery, which would be a billion dollars.
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  A billion, so it's incredibly resourceful.
• 12:30
  But the third pillar, this is the one that really feels like
• 12:34
  the future has arrived. The drone wall.
• 12:37
  The FPV interceptors. And the radical thesis here is
• 12:40
  to kill a cheap drone, you have to use an even cheaper drone,
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  yes. We are talking about small agile
• 12:48
  Quadcoters systems with names like the Sting or the Bullet.
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  These are flown using first person view goggles.
• 12:57
  Wait, so there's a human pilot on the ground wearing goggles,
• 13:00
  steering this little drone into the big drone?
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  Currently yes, though automation is coming fast.
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  They either ram into the shaheed or they detonate a small charge
• 13:09
  right near its engine. And what's the cost on one of
• 13:11
  those? Between 1:00 and $5000.
• 13:13
  That's amazing. That is a total inversion of the
• 13:16
  cost curve. It is if you can knock down a
• 13:18
  $50,000 threat with a $1000 interceptor, you are now
• 13:22
  actively winning the economic war.
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  You're making them waste money. The sources even mentioned
• 13:27
  something called the Pro trawl, which is a drone that deploys a
• 13:29
  net to tangle up the enemy drones propellers.
• 13:33
  A net that's practically medieval, but also incredibly
• 13:36
  futuristic. It is, and that drops the cost
• 13:39
  to maybe $500 because you don't even need explosives.
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  You preserve your explosives for the harder targets.
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  It is pure efficiency. So we have guns, we have these
• 13:48
  Frank and Sam's, and we have interceptor drones.
• 13:51
  This seems to lead us into a deeper discussion about how we
• 13:54
  actually measure success now. Section 4.
• 13:57
  The deep dive into the economics of the sky.
• 14:00
  Right, we have to stop looking at the battlefield as just a map
• 14:03
  of explosions and start seeing it for what it is, a Ledger.
• 14:07
  Air defense is now an accounting problem.
• 14:09
  The sources list some key metrics for this new kind of
• 14:12
  accounting. The one that stuck out to me was
• 14:14
  expected cost per kill. That's a crucial one.
• 14:16
  It's not just the sticker price of your weapon.
• 14:19
  It's more complicated. It's the cost per shot
• 14:21
  multiplied by how many shots it takes you to get a kill.
• 14:23
  Let's say an FPV interceptor drone is hard to fly and you
• 14:26
  miss half the time, a 50% miss rate.
• 14:29
  That sounds pretty bad. In the old world of multi
• 14:31
  $1,000,000 missiles, yes, that would be a catastrophe.
• 14:34
  But if the drone only cost $1000, you can launch ten of
• 14:38
  them. That's $10,000 total.
• 14:41
  If even one of those ten hits, you just spent $10,000 to kill a
• 14:45
  $50,000 target, you still win. The logic changes from
• 14:50
  perfection to probability and price.
• 14:54
  And then there's magazine depth. This is a concept listeners
• 14:57
  really need to grasp. It's simply how many shots do
• 15:00
  you have before your launcher is empty?
• 15:02
  How much ammo is in the clip? Exactly.
• 15:04
  In a saturation attack where they send 50 or 60 drones at you
• 15:07
  all at once, your accuracy matters less than your volume.
• 15:11
  If you only have 20 missiles in your battery and they send 21
• 15:14
  drones, you lose. It doesn't matter how good your
• 15:16
  missiles are. You run out of bullets before
• 15:18
  they run out of targets. Precisely, and replenishment
• 15:21
  rate is the other side of that coin.
• 15:23
  It's not just what you have now, it's how fast your industry can
• 15:27
  make more. So there's an equation for this.
• 15:29
  Sustainability equals the shots you have plus the shots you can
• 15:33
  make divided by the shots you are consuming.
• 15:36
  If that consumption number is higher than production, defeat
• 15:40
  is just a matter of time. The sources also talk about this
• 15:43
  idea of winning twice. What does that mean?
• 15:46
  It means you have to win tactically.
• 15:48
  You have to shoot the thing down South.
• 15:49
  It doesn't kill anyone or destroy anything.
• 15:52
  That's victory #1. Obvious enough.
• 15:54
  But you also have to win strategically.
• 15:56
  You have to do it without running out of money, without
• 15:57
  running out of ammo. You can easily win the battle of
• 16:00
  the night and still lose the war of the budget.
• 16:02
  This leads to the idea of a layered defense.
• 16:05
  It's not just throwing everything you have at the sky,
• 16:07
  it's more of an architecture. It's an economic architecture.
• 16:11
  You use the cheap layers, the machine guns, the gap bars, the
• 16:14
  FPV's to handle the mass threats, all the junk that's
• 16:17
  aimed at exhausting you. You filter out the noise.
• 16:19
  You filter out the noise and you save the premium layers.
• 16:22
  The Patriots strictly for the capital assets, the nuclear
• 16:26
  threats, or the ballistic missiles that the cheap stuff
• 16:29
  simply can't touch. It's opportunity cost.
• 16:31
  Every single patriot you fire at a drone is 1 less patriot you
• 16:36
  have for a nuke. Spot on.
• 16:38
  It is a terrifying form of battlefield triage.
• 16:41
  Now I want to play devil's advocate for a minute here.
• 16:44
  This all sounds great. Use cheap drones, use old guns,
• 16:48
  problem solved. But Section 5 is about stress
• 16:51
  testing the Reformation. It's not magic, is it?
• 16:55
  No, there are reasons we moved to missiles in the first place.
• 16:58
  Absolutely not, and we have to be honest about the friction of
• 17:01
  war. The sources are very clear on
• 17:03
  this. Guns has serious limitations.
• 17:06
  Like what? What?
• 17:07
  For one, gravity exists. Bullets come down.
• 17:09
  If you're defending A dense city like Kiev, you can't just spray
• 17:12
  35mm rounds into the air without worrying about where they're
• 17:15
  going to land. And they must have a short
• 17:16
  range. Right.
• 17:17
  They're very short range and you have line of sight issues in
• 17:19
  cities, a building gets in the way, a radar can't see through
• 17:23
  skyscraper, and then there's the whole world of electronic
• 17:25
  warfare or EW. The invisible battle.
• 17:28
  We hear about jamming a lot. Jamming is huge, but it's
• 17:33
  variable. It's not a silver bullet either.
• 17:35
  The enemy adapts. They harden their signals.
• 17:38
  They use special CRPA antennas that can filter out jamming
• 17:41
  signals. So it's a constant back and
• 17:43
  forth. Or they just use inertial
• 17:45
  guidance. The drone doesn't even need AGPS
• 17:47
  signal to fly straight for the last few miles.
• 17:50
  And jamming can blind your own guys too.
• 17:52
  That is correct. That's a huge problem.
• 17:54
  If you jam the frequencies to stop the shaheed, your own FTV
• 17:58
  interceptor might just drop out of the sky because it uses the
• 18:01
  same bands. It's a messy, chaotic
• 18:04
  electromagnetic environment up there.
• 18:06
  So given all that, why do the cheap interceptor drones still
• 18:09
  matter so much? Because they fill the middle
• 18:11
  layer, they perfectly bridge the gap between the really short
• 18:15
  range guns and the invisible, sometimes unreliable EW.
• 18:18
  And it's a kinetic kill, it's certain.
• 18:20
  It is a kinetic certainty, unlike jamming.
• 18:22
  If you hit a drone with another drone that is a confirmed kill.
• 18:26
  You don't have to wonder if your jammer worked.
• 18:28
  And unlike missiles, you can scale them.
• 18:29
  You can make them in a garage. You can produce thousands of
• 18:32
  them. The sources highlight this mini
• 18:35
  case study of the Kiev city defense.
• 18:38
  They were faced with this exact problem.
• 18:40
  Defend a capital city without bankrupting the entire state.
• 18:44
  So what do they do? They used mobile fire groups.
• 18:47
  We're talking about guys in pickup trucks with machine guns
• 18:49
  and searchlights and tablets connected to a network.
• 18:52
  It sounds like the London Blitz but with iPads.
• 18:55
  It is. They created this flexible mesh
• 18:57
  defense and during what they call surge weeks when the enemy
• 19:01
  increases the tempo just to tire you out.
• 19:03
  The goal is simply to survive the burn rate.
• 19:06
  Cheap drones allow you to do that.
• 19:07
  I found the iteration loop point fascinating to this idea of
• 19:10
  fail, learn, improve. This is absolutely critical.
• 19:14
  A Patriot missile system takes years to update.
• 19:16
  The software is rigorous, the testing is intense.
• 19:19
  If the enemy changes tactics, you are stuck with the old
• 19:22
  system for a long time. Right?
• 19:23
  But with a cheap drone you can 3D print a new frame or code a
• 19:27
  software fix in the morning and be flying it that evening.
• 19:31
  The iteration cycle is measured in weeks, not years.
• 19:34
  It's agile development, but applied to national survival.
• 19:36
  That's exactly what it is. Let's shift gears now.
• 19:39
  We are reformed thinking, after all.
• 19:42
  We need to look at the theological and moral
• 19:44
  implications of all this. Section 6.
• 19:47
  This is where the rubber really meets the road.
• 19:49
  For the Christian worldview we have to look at Romans 13.
• 19:53
  The magistrate is God's servant for your good.
• 19:57
  They bear the sword to protect the vulnerable.
• 19:59
  That is the God ordained function of the state.
• 20:02
  So how does economics fit into that moral duty?
• 20:05
  I mean, isn't counting pennies a bit secular for that?
• 20:09
  Not at all. Not when you think it through.
• 20:11
  If you waste the Treasury, if you burn through your arsenal
• 20:14
  inefficiently, you are being derelict in your duty.
• 20:17
  You are leaving the populace exposed to future threats.
• 20:20
  So there's a moral imperative of efficiency.
• 20:22
  I think so. It's not just about saving money
• 20:24
  for the sake of a balanced budget, it's about ensuring you
• 20:27
  have the means to protect life tomorrow and the day after that.
• 20:31
  That's a powerful way to put it. So wasting a Patriot on a cheap
• 20:34
  drone isn't just a strategic error, it's a moral failure
• 20:37
  because you've left the city vulnerable to the next ballistic
• 20:39
  missile. Precisely.
• 20:41
  It comes down to prudence. The prudent steward in the
• 20:44
  parable is the one who ensures he can fight one more day than
• 20:48
  his enemy. If you run out of resources
• 20:51
  before the enemy runs out of aggression, you have failed your
• 20:54
  people. And the sources touch on this
• 20:56
  idea of idolatry again here. Yes, we have to abandon the idol
• 21:01
  of technological supremacy. There's a certain humility
• 21:05
  required in using simple, effective tools.
• 21:07
  There's a humility in admitting that sometimes a $5000 gun is
• 21:12
  better than a $3,000,000 missile.
• 21:13
  We want the flashy solution. We often do, because it makes us
• 21:16
  feel powerful, makes us feel like we're the masters of the
• 21:19
  universe. It reminds me of David and
• 21:20
  Goliath. Saul tries to put his heavy,
• 21:23
  expensive armor on David. But David takes the sling.
• 21:26
  He takes the simple, effective tool.
• 21:28
  That is it. In a fallen world, sometimes the
• 21:30
  simple stone in the sling is more effective than the gilded
• 21:33
  armor of Saul. It forces us to acknowledge
• 21:36
  reality. We aren't gods.
• 21:37
  We have finite resources. We have limited capacity, and
• 21:41
  stewardship is about managing those limits under the eyes of
• 21:43
  God. So bringing this all together,
• 21:46
  we've talked about the cost curve inversion, this
• 21:48
  reformation of air defense, and now the moral weight of these
• 21:52
  decisions. What's the big take away here?
• 21:55
  I think the big shift is from the gold plated era to the drone
• 21:59
  wall era. We're realizing that security
• 22:02
  doesn't come from a missile that can fly incredibly fast, it
• 22:05
  comes from an economy that can endure.
• 22:08
  The new equation is sustainability under saturation.
• 22:10
  That is the phrase to remember. Can you sustain your defense
• 22:15
  when the enemy is determined to saturate the sky?
• 22:18
  It really changes how you look at the news footage, doesn't it?
• 22:20
  When you see those tracers lighting up the night sky over a
• 22:23
  city, you realize you aren't just watching a battle.
• 22:26
  You're watching a balancing act of a national Ledger.
• 22:29
  You're watching a desperate attempt to balance the books
• 22:31
  while simultaneously saving lives.
• 22:34
  It's an incredible burden. I want to leave our listeners
• 22:36
  with a final thought, something to chew on.
• 22:38
  We've talked a lot about Ukraine, but this really applies
• 22:41
  to the West in general. It does.
• 22:43
  And here's the question If Modern Warfare is becoming a
• 22:47
  battle of ledgers and industrial capacity, a battle of frankly
• 22:52
  boring, gritty sustainability, are Western nations spiritually
• 22:57
  and industrially prepared for that?
• 22:59
  What I mean by spiritually prepared?
• 23:00
  Well, we love the flash. We love the silver bullet.
• 23:03
  Are we prepared as a culture to prioritize boring sustainability
• 23:07
  over flashy tech? Are we humble enough to build
• 23:11
  the simple things we need, but in massive quantities?
• 23:14
  Or will we continue to build powers?
• 23:16
  Yeah, these exquisite, expensive towers that we ultimately cannot
• 23:21
  afford to finish. That's the question from Luke 14
• 23:23
  brought into the 21st century. Are we building a defense that
• 23:26
  looks good on paper, or one that actually works when the push
• 23:29
  comes to shove? And are we willing to do the
• 23:31
  hard, unglamorous work of counting the cost before the
• 23:35
  crisis begins? A lot to think about.
• 23:37
  Thank you for guiding us through this.
• 23:39
  It is a complex topic, but I feel like we have really gotten
• 23:41
  to the bottom of the why behind the what.
• 23:44
  It was a pleasure. It's a critical conversation to
• 23:45
  be having. And thank you to our listeners
• 23:48
  for joining us on this deep dive.
• 23:50
  This has been reformed thinking. We will catch you next time.