00:23:19 · Olaf Hichwa, Ty Morse
He was up all night doing mechanical CAD behind the initial birds, then we, you know, asked our friends to come and help and camped out in his basement in Vermont. But great, great times. [00:23:31] S0: You mentioned that you went to Ukraine recently. What was that like? What's changed since the first time you came?
00:23:36 · Olaf Hichwa
[00:23:36] S1: The the conflict has become more intense. Like, on the previous trips, like, my my reaction in Kyiv, which is, you know, pretty far from the front line, was just like You can probably almost forget the country as it were. Like there's long periods of time where it's totally normal. And life always continues. That's one of the big learnings. Like even, you know, 20 kilometers from the front line, you can have, had a great steak dinner with friends and discuss, you know, random topics. Like life always continues. But during the first few trips it was like... Kyiv seemed... It was like... It's like Paris, but, you know, in Eastern Europe. I'd say the the war has intensified a lot. The the strikes on civilian infrastructure by Russia, it's it's awful. It's it's, you know, an act of terror. And they're really... They're not pulling the punches. Right? They're they're purposely targeting apartment complexes of of civilians. And like, you hear Shaheeds, you know, up in the sky just buzzing by, and that's just like a thing that people have had to live with. What is a Shahed? It's a Group three, which is DOD speak for big drone. It's kinda like the size of like a minivan and it's just packed full of explosives. Just just packed. And they're super cheap. They're like tens of thousands of dollars. They have little rocket motors, they launch up. And they're little deltas. They're... Not little, big, big deltas. It was actually an Iranian or a German design initially, a long time ago. And the Iranians perfected it. That's why the name. And then there was this, like, crazy deal where Russia shipped bars of gold, literal physical bars of gold to Iran for the design, and then Russia started producing them. And now they send, you know, hundreds of these things every night to Ukrainian cities to to blow up Ukrainian civilians. And worse than just hitting the apartment buildings often, they're really... They're not holding any punches. They're blowing up power, which if you like... If your power station goes down, people freeze. They're they're really just trying to blow up anything that makes the the lives of ordinary Ukrainians trying to defend themselves hell. And those impacts are are more clear in in Kyiv now. On one of the one of the nights I was in Ukraine last time, I actually went out with a military unit that was hunting Shahids.
00:25:49 · Olaf Hichwa
And that was a really impactful experience, kind of hanging out with the guys. It's it's a much less official operation than you might think. It's like four guys that know each other really well. You know, two guys, they're nerdy, they sit back, they they build the the drones. I remember at the time they had like a fleet of five interceptor drones that they were very proud of, and they were like talking about maybe soon they'll get a sixth, but these are like really prized possessions. And they've got a van, and they take the, you know, pack the van full of, you know, a Starlink, a few of these interceptors, some really cool software, software, some some radio radio tech they've been experimenting with, and they go park in the middle of the field. And our our shift was like 8PM to 5AM, and we were stationed basically just looking for Shahids. And of course, like, you know, it's a lot of waiting, a lot of fucking with each other, and maybe, you know, rotating, sleeping a little bit. But I remember, like, there were, you know, a few false alarms. There was a Shaheed headed towards us. Often these anti aircraft phys... Or air defense positions, like, wanna take out. Right? You wanna blow them up so that way you can break a hole in the air defense and go through. So we got on high alert, but another unit went and killed the Shaheed before we could go and take it out ourselves. So, like, a few false alarms. The the Shaheeds, they... Like, we saw them on a map and and they would take the most nontrivial routes. Like, the goal is to hit Kyiv, usually, most of them, is to to hit civilian infrastructure in Kyiv. Like, depends, but a lot of them are trying to get there. And you'll see a Shahid, it'll go like two thirds of the way to Kyiv, and then it'll turn around. And the reason for that is it just learned that there's a gap in the air defense, and it's gonna send the rest of the Shahids to go exploit that gap, or it's it's it's trying to find another gap from the inside, that way they can send more. So sometimes it doesn't make sense to just go strike directly even if you're close. It makes more sense to gather information on where the air defense units are and where they could be taken down. I remember close to the end of the shift, one was getting closer and closer and actually got in our bubble. And so we launched.
00:28:01 · Olaf Hichwa, Ty Morse
We launched the interceptor to try and blow up the shock heat and we we got close, but another another unit actually blew it up right before and we were able to hear the boom. That was terrifying. But just the kinda realness of like... It's kinda like a video game in that you just have a map with like all these birds or drones flying over Ukrainian airspace, like, you know, hunting. And it feels very, you know, fake. Like it's just like you're looking through a screen until you hear the bang. And you're like, oh shit. It's very, very real. Like, there is a there is a real world on the other side of this, you know, camera lens. But I think it's the future of conflict. Like, I think people are gonna be, you know, more and more just fighting through screens. It's really obvious. But it's more and more gonna be, you know, drone on drone. And drones are like, you know, this kind of like apex predator of the weapon ecosystem. It's like, you know, rock, paper, scissors, drone all the way at the top. [00:28:57] S0: Because it costs almost nothing and is super like precise and able to deliver a lot of force. [00:29:02] S1: Yep. Yep. I think people will soon realize that like basically, you know, the only way to defeat a drone is another drone and then there's gonna be this drone war where, you know, one side is gonna deplete all of their drones and then the other side is probably just gonna surrender. There's no point in fighting a like man on drone war. You'll lose, and when people know they lose, like they generally don't fight.
00:29:02 · Olaf Hichwa, Ty Morse
[00:29:02] S1: Yep. Yep. I think people will soon realize that like basically, you know, the only way to defeat a drone is another drone and then there's gonna be this drone war where, you know, one side is gonna deplete all of their drones and then the other side is probably just gonna surrender. There's no point in fighting a like man on drone war. You'll lose, and when people know they lose, like they generally don't fight. [00:29:23] S0: That's one thing that I saw earlier today. You collect some footage when the operators like send it back, and I saw something that I just like, I don't know, never even occurred to me, is like a soldier getting targeted by a drone, turning around, and then trying to shoot at it before it blew him up. And you said that like 40% of drones get taken out this way or [00:29:45] S1: Something like that. [00:29:46] S0: Something like that? How is kinda like warfare evolved and the way that like people... Because I imagine like being that guy, I'm like what the fuck am I doing out in this field, you know, getting targeted by a drone?
00:29:56 · Olaf Hichwa
[00:29:56] S1: I think this is a good lesson in, like, contact with reality. Like, I'm sure if, like, before Ukraine, you sat down like a weapons expert, they would tell you about, like, oh, we're gonna do laser laser defense. The lasers are gonna work. You're gonna you're gonna use, you know, directed energy weapons to take out the drones. You're gonna hack the drones or something. You're gonna use AI to take out the drone somehow. I'm sure there would have been, like, a really, really complex, like, plan of what defeats the drone. When you look at, you know, reality, like, I saw this shotgun that came out, branded like Drone Buster AI or something like that. AI stands for advanced impact. It's just a regular shotgun, with anti drone rounds, because that is the most effective weapon system in taking out FPVs close range. And in war, have to kind of make do with what you have, and kind of the non optimal solution is is often what you have to work with. And and so now Ukrainians have mastered the art of, like, anti drone schools. Like, you know, infantry members, they'll they'll go to these schools, they'll learn how to shoot down a drone with with a, you know, an assault rifle that they have or a a... Their just... Their main their main rifle that they have. And, yeah, it's it's... You gotta make do with what you have. I watch a lot of, like, YouTube about how these weapon systems are used and it's it's it's really heavy stuff. Right? Like behind these videos, there's lives that are lost. It's it's really impactful, like heavy heavy content. But you learn a lot about the tactics. And obviously, you know, tremendous respect for the people that actually fight. They learn so much more, but you can learn a lot via just, like, watching YouTube. And and these these, you know, highly trained Ukrainian operators are insane. They'll hear an FPV, bang, bang, five bullets later, the the drone's taken down.