About this episode
“I don’t think America, or the West in general, is prepared in any sort of way to fight a static war like we’re seeing over there in Ukraine.”
[Editor’s Note: One of the twelve key conditions driving the Operational Environment (OE) in the next ten years is its increased lethality. According to the TRADOC G-2‘s recently published The Operational Environment 2024-2034: Large-Scale Combat Operations:
“LSCO will be increasingly lethal due to the intersection of sensor ubiquity, battlefield automation, precision strike, and massed fires.”
We’ve seen an increase in the production, employment, and success of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) on the battlefield in recent years. These systems were integral components of the Azeri victory in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War – specifically the Turkish Bayraktar TB2 and Israeli Harop – and are proving vital in the on-going Russo-Ukrainian war. Indeed, during this latter conflict, the ever evolving Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS)/Counter-UAS (C-UAS) fight has led to rapid adaptations on both sides as they seek to achieve battlefield advantage. Yet any advantage achieved is fleeting — as observed by Daniel Patt, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, “The peak efficiency of a new weapon system is only about two weeks before countermeasures emerge.”
In our latest episode of Army Mad Scientist’s The Convergence podcast, we sat down with Wolfgang Hagarty to learn first-hand about the on-going war in Ukraine, its rapidly evolving UAS/C-UAS fight, and the overarching impacts of technological innovation on the changing character of warfare — Enjoy!]
Wolfgang Hagarty — a United States Marine Corps veteran — joined the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) in 2022 as an intelligence officer. He took part in the UAF’s Kharkiv offensive as well as the Kherson offensive. He became a team leader and focused primarily on the UAS/C-UAS fight as well as Electronic Warfare (EW) and counter-EW.
Army Mad Scientist sat down with M
