In a sense one might describe the air war in
Ukraine as a fundamentally attritional struggle, albeit one defined by constant
adaptation and counter-adaptation. The chaos and Russian deep strikes
of the opening weeks quickly gave way to a conflict more defined by stand-off
engagements and mutual air denial. We've seen the Russian VKS increasingly turn
towards long-range munitions like glide bombs, while Ukraine has sought to leverage
a wide range of technologies, including Western air-launched cruise
missiles, long-range kamikaze drones, and the sometimes very aggressive use
of Western SAM systems like Patriot to offset to some extent their
disadvantage in airframes. Now as the war enters its
third year, the Ukrainian Air Force probably finds itself at
something of a low ebb, with pilots and maintenance crews
presumably having to be pulled off the line to prepare for the
conversion over to F-16, while the near complete breakdown of
US aid has left much of the Ukrainian military on a starvation diet when it comes
to critically needed munitions. While the VKS has to push to
maintain its operational tempo despite losses and
potential sustainability issues. And so today I really want to zoom in on
where the air war stands as of February 2024. Doing that probably means
asking first what the major changes in the air war have been
from 2022 until now. Assessing the impact of some of the key
systems and tactics we've seen deployed, everything from Russia's glide bombs
and Ukraine's very nomadic Patriot systems, through to issues like the what and
why of friendly-fire aircraft shoot-downs and the apparently reignited
interest in potentially supplying Ukraine with American
A-10 attack planes. Then, given the attritional nature of the struggle,
I want to zoom in on some potential pinch points, and where some of the limitations might be in terms
of things like munition or airframe availability. Before zooming out and
looking at the broader picture, asking what the impact of the air war might
be on Russia, Ukraine and their various allies. To answer those questions, today I am
fortunate to be joined by Professor Justin Bronk. Justin is the Senior Research Fellow
for Air Power and Technology at the Royal United Services Institute, holds a professor position at the
Royal Norwegian Air Force Academy, and was an author of a November
2022 report which stands as one of the more detailed publicly
released reports on the air war in Ukraine. Of course November 2022 is a long time and about a thousand Taylor Swift
releases from February 2024. And so after a brief welcome,
the first question I wanted to ask was how has the air war
changed between then and now? Alright Justin, good morning, thank
you very much for joining us today. - My pleasure, thanks for having me.
- So my question to you is essentially back in November 2022 you and your colleagues
at RUSI published a report on the air war in Ukraine. And at that time we were sort of transitioning from
that somewhat chaotic February/March phase to one that was more dominated
by long range engagements. How then do you assess the air war's
evolution over the course of 2023, and what are some of the prominent
features of the current campaign? - So, the course of the air war through 2023 I think is one of cautious
adaptation by both sides, but largely denial of effective ability to
operate fixed wing in most areas of the front. And therefore the kind of strategically
important parts of the air war were essentially attack aviation ... in
a defensive sense for the Russians, which had a really significant impact on Ukrainian
breakthrough attempts in the match offensive. And the strategic
long-range aviation campaign. So both Tupolev 95, Tu-160s, Tu-22M3s, so the bombers plus MiG-31Ks
launching <i>Kinzhal</i> ballistic missiles, coupled with
ground-based launchers. Some cruise missile attacks continuing
from the Black Sea, although increasingly Ukraine contesting the surface vessel's ability
to operate sustainably there in certain bits. And then of course the continued
use at scale of the Shahed 136 as a sort of cheap long-range
bombardment munition both to hit smaller targets and also
to complicate the task of air defence. As a result of that long-range campaign
and the Ukrainians starting to play with first of all using Western
long-range cruise missiles, particularly UK and French
supplied Storm Shadow and SCALP, and then later in 2023 starting to use a range
of relatively low-tech, relatively cheap, (although again I say "relatively")
long-range one-way attack UAVs against targets in Russia including air bases,
as well as more symbolic things like Moscow. And as a result of those kind of
evolutions in the long range strike scale, a lot of effort has been going in
on both sides to improving air-defence capability from
ground-based air defences. Which of course further complicates matters
for piloted aviation near the front lines if those air defences are being
improved near the front lines. Russia already had very strong ground-based
air defences, and in fact in some ways it's actually gone the opposite way for
them because they've had to distribute somewhat more of that capability
that they have away from the front to try and protect air bases and reinforce
defences around Moscow and other cities. But for the Ukrainians it's been
a case of transitioning steadily from really heavy dependence on
S-300PS/PT and S-300V1s towards more and more reliance
on Patriot and ... the French SAMP-T coming in towards the back end. And then at the sort of tactical level,
increasingly supplementing SA-11 and SA-8 <i>Buk</i> and <i>Osa</i>
with NASAMS and IRIS-T. As well as a range of kind of
Frankenstein (so-called) type assets. What that's meant is that throughout 2023,
and certainly into the beginning of 2024, Russia has actually found
its own ability to push sorties up to the front lines on their
own side increasingly contested by that improving Ukrainian
air defence on the ground. Even as the Ukrainian Air Force
continue to take losses and along with having to take
pilots out of front-line service to try and put them into transition
programs for F-16 for example, you've seen sort of a
diminution of the Ukrainian ability to fly effective sorties anywhere near the
front lines, but equally the Russians as well. - So there's a couple of elements to unpack there:
GBAD, sustainability, F-16 entering the field. But one element I think I want to jump
into first, which I think couples with your comment about both the
Ukrainian counter-offensive and the difficulty of Russia
pushing sorties up to that forward edge of the battle area, which
is the use of more stand-off munitions. Particularly the VKS employing
a larger number of glide bombs, both against the counter-offensive and most
recently, and quite famously, at Avdiivka which was being hit very, very heavily,
and we got the footage of that. I was wondering what comments you could
make, or observations you could make, about those glide bomb attacks, their scale,
the method of use, the scaling and sustainability. - So one of the key responses from the
Russian fixed-wing fast-jet fleets to that inability not only to cross
the Ukrainian front lines and operate, which became clear
very early in the war, but also increasingly being
contested even for their sort of stand-off laser or TV-guided weapon
attacks with things like Kh-29 throughout '23 has been ... increasingly to rely on
stand-off glide bomb attacks. This is both with dedicated glide
bombs that are designed as such, as well as increasingly heavy use
of essentially ... glide wing kits for more traditional and much more
plentiful 500 and 1,500 kilogram bombs. These weapons are not hugely accurate in so far as while the kind of
purpose-built KAB series of weapons can typically hit buildings fairly accurately, ... you are talking about hitting large
buildings as part of a salvo usually. Whereas for the kind of
glide kit adaptation versions, you are talking slightly less
reliable at hitting buildings. But it's ... a series of weapons that
they can use at relatively large scale that can provide a means of really quite heavy
bombardment even compared to artillery ammunition. Because a 500 kilogram bomb is
a really substantial warhead payload, and a 1,500 kilogram
bomb is enormous. So in that sense they have heavy
firepower which they can draw on and they can lob from ...
fairly significant distances, albeit as we've seen from a series of Ukrainian
Patriot engagements, they are still at risk. So it's not free from risk. And the further out that they
lob these munitions from, the higher they have to go
and the faster they have to go. So the longer they have to spend at
a very high altitude in full afterburner. Leaving themselves
potentially open to ambushes, if there is a SAM in the right place
at the right time, which is a big if. So there's a bit of a kind of trade-off, ... initially
when they started using the glide bombs they were coming in fairly close,
20 kilometres, 40 kilometres from the front. As the Ukrainians have got better at
periodically engaging them with Patriot, which of course they can't do all the time
because they are having to balance the risk of putting a launcher fairly close to the
front lines with the radar further back. And also trading off that Patriot
launcher then not providing defensive capacity ...
around a Ukrainian city. But as they have got better at
conducting these engagements, you've seen the Russians
pull further and further back and now sometimes seeing launches as
far as 50 kilometres, or even slightly more. Which is a very long
way for a glide bomb. And at those kind of ranges
the accuracy does tail off. There is GLONASS, so the Russian equivalent
of GPS, GLONASS guidance on the tail kits. But with the sort of errors that creep in with ... particularly the amount of electronic
warfare there is around in the field, the further out you push those weapons,
the more will fail to ... get to the target and also you ... do see a bit
of a diminution of accuracy. So yeah, it's another form
of firepower for the Russians and they've used used it very heavily
around Avdiivka and against Kharkiv. They are using them around
the front in large numbers. But it's not necessarily a kind of capability which fundamentally changes
what the Russians can and can't hit. In the sense that they can't go after
dynamic targets with these things, so they can't find and hit
things that are moving. In that sense, something like Lancet 3,
the loitering munition they use a lot, is far more substantial in terms of the impact
it's had on how the Ukrainians have to fight. It's just another
really heavy form of fire that they can bring down alongside
all the artillery and rocket artillery. But it gives the VKS fighter
fleet a continued purpose in terms of actually trying
to influence the battlefield. And where you have Ukrainian
positions that are particularly exposed, as in Avdiivka until
just before the withdrawal, there you can see that it actually can be used as a
really heavy kind of consistent form of bombardment. Because ... a) it's easier to know what
you are aiming at the targets don't move, and b) that you can get
settled into flight patterns and sortie generation, and the
mission planning is much easier. And the targeting is much easier, so in
terms of getting weapon coordinates. So you see where there is a
particularly isolated Ukrainian position or an area of really heavy fighting,
you see the VKS actually generating really quite significant
sortie rates for these glide bomb attacks. - I think one interesting element you touched on
there is the interaction between those attacks and Ukraine attempting to fend
these off using those ambush strikes using presumably a Patriot PAC-2 I think is
the prime suspect for those ambush attacks. Obviously this is not a conflict which is ...
alien to the concept of longer-ranged SAMs. I believe back in 2022 you were
commenting on the risk posed by the S-400 combined with the
48Ya6 for detecting at all altitudes. So my question then is: this seems like
a bit of a departure from the use of Patriot by Western militaries largely in the static
defence role that we have seen up to this point. Are there any observations or lessons
we might want to make about the use of a longer ranged, almost
strategic range, SAM in this way? - ... The sort of SAM ambushes with
Patriot certainly is a departure from the way that the West has used
Patriot pretty much for its entire service life. And ... you see that in for example the fact
that the more modern PAC-3 missiles MSE PAC-3, MSE types, are significantly
less well-optimised for that kind of task. ... You can have more of them in
a launcher, they are more capable in a ballistic missile and a
cruise missile defence role than PAC-2. But they are lighter and
they don't have as much booster, in terms of they don't
carry as much boost fuel. So actually in terms of really long range
engagements against aircraft, they are not ideal. And also the fact that
just the warhead is smaller, because it's a smaller, more efficient missile that
aims to do a kind of hit-to-kill type of engagement. So it's interesting that a lot of these
engagements are likely to be PAC-2. Which speaks ... exactly to your point that
the Patriot is being used in a way that is kind of quite old school by Western ground-based
air and missile defence evolution terms. So in that sense, yes, it's a bit different. Equally the Ukrainians have
been using Patriot extensively in the role for which the West has kind
of optimised it over the last 20 years. Because Ukrainian cities continue to be under fairly
intensive cruise missile and ballistic missile attack. And it's performed extremely well
there, including against the <i>Kinzhal</i>. For these kind of SAM ambushes I think one
of the key elements that's likely to be in play is that some of the Patriot
systems that have been delivered are on self-propelled
sort of truck chassis. So they do have a greater degree of mobility than
the standard American trailer-mounted systems. Also that Patriot is networked in such
a way that you can have the launcher quite a long distance from the radar. And so in terms of conducting SAM ambushes, the only thing that a fighter crew or a
helicopter crew on the Russian side would see is that there is a Patriot radar
in roughly that direction. But of course given that the Patriot
radars are have very, very long range and the Russians are typically
operating at medium to high altitude when they are reasonably far back
from the lines and think they are safe, they are likely to see a
Patriot radar quite regularly, not just when there's a
SAM ambush being planned. So from their perspective the threat picture
doesn't necessarily change a whole lot, which is good for the Ukrainians because
it means that the Russians have to potentially treat it as though,
any time they see a Patriot radar spike on their radar warning receivers, that they
are potentially in range of an engagement. Even though the radar
is really quite far back. And because they can use
track-via-missile as an engagement mode (which the S-400 can do as
well with some of its missiles), if the aircraft subsequently
for example were to go to low level, but the missile itself is able to see the aircraft when
it's in active mode and getting relatively close, not only should the
missile be able to home in, but if it still has kind of ... radio line of sight
in terms of a data link to the launching battery then it can take advantage of the much greater
computing power for guidance adjustment in real time that the
ground-based system has compared to what can be
carried inside the missile in flight. So it's quite a nasty system
for pilots to be engaged by. It doesn't give you a whole lot of
warning that you've been engaged, and the position of the radar can be
really quite a long way from the launcher. Which makes judging ...
the missile engagement zone essentially of the system based on
in-cockpit signals very difficult. It should be said the Russians can do this too,
in the sense that the S-400 and S-300 systems (the more modern ones anyway)
can have a reasonable spread between the various
radars and the launchers. Albeit, it tends to be a little bit closer
together, and ... because it either relies on a ... microwave frequency link, which the range is about 2 kilometres
for that and you need line of sight. Or you are relying on
field cables, in which case they tend to be at pre-sited locations
where those field cables have been dug. So the Russians can
split these things too, but it's considerably less flexible
than the way Patriot does it. - Well then I think those Russian
systems are a good pivot, because in many ways they may represent
the second greatest reported threat to VKS aircraft operating in Ukraine at times. And this is of course the question of
friendly fire, particularly on the Russian side. Because often the defence we've seen
stated by the Russian Ministry of Defence is when Ukraine claims a Patriot
shoot-down, often the rebuttal (if an aircraft is admitted lost)
is that it was lost due to friendly fire. My question is: in terms of
what we can assess externally, to what extent has friendly fire
been a problem for the VKS? And do we have any indication
why deconfliction and their friend or foe identification may not
have prevented those incidents? - So friendly fire has been a consistent
problem for the VKS. It's also been a consistent problem
for the Ukrainian Air Force. And that is the case for both fixed-wing and rotary
conventional aircraft. It's also the case for UAVs. So the last time I was in Ukraine,
the Ukrainian UAV operators reckoned that more than half of the UAVs
that they lose are due to friendly fire in terms of both people shooting at them
but also particularly electronic warfare. I think there's a couple of
components to why friendly fire on the Russian side with aircraft
seems to be consistent problem. And one that we know for sure was friendly fire,
they ... shot down one of their own Sukhoi 35s near Tokmak about 4-5 months ago now. And the aircraft was not hugely close to the
front lines, it was well on the Russian side. And you think well, given how rigidly the Russians do their mission planning and
their in-flight control (as do the Ukrainians), this is ... still an adaptation of the old
Soviet model of how to use air power. So sorties are very rigidly planned
and they are executed extremely rigidly, so that, for example, weapons release decisions
need authorisation in real time from a controller. And even things like how you set the radar,
what you are doing with the radar is often interfacing with and being
told what to do by the controllers. It's a very alien way for
Western air power speakers, because that's just not
how we do in-cockpit process. You would expect that that degree
of pre-planning and that rigidity and centralised control of air operations
would really help with deconfliction, because pilots aren't necessarily doing things
that are unexpected and are not part of the plan. Having said that, the
Russian system is quite slow at transferring information
between different bits of the system. So if a plan does have to change, let's say an
aircraft gets engaged and has to go defensive, and therefore is doing things
that it is not intended to do, it may be slower
under the Russian system than it would be in a Western combined
opposite air operations for example, to be able to share data on where
that aircraft now is and what it's doing. Equally the impact of electronic warfare
is likely to be quite significant, in the sense that you are both having regular
degradation for both sides of the radar picture. So systems are potentially
taking longer to get locks, getting locks that
are less high fidelity in terms of they are not
getting good ... range data, because of both potentially friendly
and hostile electronic warfare. I mean one of the consistent things is that
Russian electronic warfare is highly effective, but it's not well integrated in the sense that the systems don't
play well with other Russian systems. So if they're using heavy electronic warfare
in order to try and do something in the same area of operations that a
fixed-wing sortie is going on on their own side, then it may be that that creates sufficient
ambiguity in what the SAM operators are seeing and ... where the pilot thinks they are
that you can get these engagements. Equally, I think for the most part Russian
claims of friendly fire as an attribution for losses are likely to be mostly trying to avoid crediting
the Ukrainians with shooting down key assets. I mean certainly the attempt to attribute
the loss of the A-50 AWACS a month ago ... - Does seem like a strange mistake
for air defence to make. - Right, like as a mistake to make in terms of shooting
something on your own side down with air defences, the AWACS is about the most
surprising and difficult to understand. Because not only is it a system
that is so far back from the front lines over what was assumed
to be a very safe orbit. ... It's over the sea, ... well behind the front lines,
about 100 kilometres plus from the front lines. No Ukrainian fixed-wing
aircraft is going to be there, there's no way they
could get an aircraft there. And the error in terms of
sensor data and sensor calibration that you would have to have
in order to think that that aircraft was anywhere near the front lines
is too far, for my mind, to be credible. Also the AWACS is a key integration node for
ground-based air defences and air operations, particularly in the Russian system where
the operations of both are tightly controlled. One of the key C2 nodes
(command and control nodes) is the A-50 as well as the Ilyushin 22
which was also fragged. And they managed to land,
but with a lot of new holes in the tail. So the idea that you would have an
engagement of these two key C2 assets that are way, way
behind the front lines in a place that no Ukrainian
fixed-wing aircraft could possibly be, by long-range Russian
air defences is not credible to me. And equally we've seen consistently
the Ukrainians managing to achieve these SAM ambushes with
Patriot from longer ranges. And we know that some of them are definitely
Patriot because we've seen Ukrainian footage of Patriot ... radar vehicles, which have
particular engagement dates and silhouettes on them that correspond with
some of those shoot-downs. So yeah, ... a lot of it I think it's just Russians
trying to avoid crediting the Ukrainians. They'd prefer to be accused by ...
their own people of gross incompetence rather than credit Ukrainians
with those sort of engagements. - Now before we move on from equipment and
tactics, there's one other discussion point we had a little bit later
that I think actually belongs here. And it's the only time in this interview
that I am going to distort the flow of time. Because it has to do with what I would
regard as one of the main potential risks when it comes to Ukraine requesting and
receiving new equipment and support in 2024. With Ukraine, it's often the case
that when you see debates about whether or not a particular
piece of equipment should go, the discussion probably really
should go beyond whether or not a piece of equipment would be useful or not,
but also how much space it would take up in the limited aid budgets that
are being voted and authorised. Sending Ukraine something that is near the end
of its service life and the military may throw away, might still end up counting
against the available aid budget. Plus money has to be allocated for transportation,
training, sustainment and support. And so in an environment where aid
is constrained, and the share of aid that can be dedicated towards the
air war is perhaps even more constrained, it's always interesting to see the
occasional bright idea make an appearance. And recently for example Ukrainian military
leadership once again floated the idea that perhaps the American A-10 might
be a useful addition to Ukraine's inventory. Given that the Sukhoi 25 fleets in
Ukraine have mostly been limited to pitch up attacks using unguided rockets,
and the fact that there would inevitably be costs in converting Ukrainian air crews and
ground crews over to the A-10 platform, I couldn't resist a chance to insert just a little
bit of levity by asking Justin what he thought of sending Ukraine what might be one of
the most polarising aircraft in US inventory. - Let's just say US aid was pass tomorrow and
you are given the credit card for the full amount, why are you not spending
any of it on artillery ammunition or your Joint Air to Surface
Stand-off Missiles, your JASSMs, and instead spending the
entire amount on A-10 Thunderbolts? - Ah, the good old A-10.
All I would say on the A-10 is it's built to take hits and get the pilot home alive,
it's not built to take hits and fight another day. So even A-10s that have taken ... shoulder-fired
MANPADS (with quite small warheads) hits that have got their crews home
successfully despite incredible damage, it's an amazingly resilient airframe,
most of those have never flown again. So the idea that because it's a tough aeroplane
that it could survive in Ukrainian airspace near the front lines,
let alone be effective, with ... yeah, that level of
surface-to-air missile coverage with mostly quite big SAMs that even
an A-10 is not going to survive being hit by. And of course the air-to-air threat
against which it is completely helpless. The effectiveness of the A-10
as a close air support platform in almost all the wars that it's actually
fought in has very little to do with the gun. Except in extremely niche scenarios
where you really need danger-close fires, at which point, yep, sure,
it's better than anything else. But the vast majority of A-10 close air support
is conducted with precision munitions. So JDAMs, Paveway,
other things, ... Mavericks, which it fires from a medium level
with targeting pod designation. You just can't do that in Ukraine,
the medium level environment is so lethal from
surface-to-air missile coverage you would be down very, very
low just as the Ukrainians are whether you're flying a Su-25 or an A-10. And the resource required to put
it in, in terms of pilot maintenance, training, airbase preparation,
support contracts, everything, would be in many ways comparable to F-16
even though it's a cheaper aircraft to fly. For significantly less in
terms of actual output. One of my favourite memes
on the internet is that classic one of the bloke getting his gold medal and kind
of kissing the girl who had given it to him, and then biting the gold medal
and putting his fingers up at everybody, and showering champagne at
himself and then you zoom out and he's at the very lowest
rung of the podium. And there's a version of that which
is close air support in Desert Storm. And you've got F-111, F-16,
Tornado, all of the ones down and then A-10 at the bottom
and that's the guy doing that. It's a wonderful close air-support
platform, but I think a bit over-fetishised. - I'm Australian, I'm forced to endorse the F-111 and
its wonderful legacy. It's a patriotic duty. Now at this point in the interview I saw
an opportunity to pivot towards the stuff I know you are all really here for, particularly
questions of industrial production, munition supply, airframe availability, and the broader
sustainability of the efforts on both sides. For the Ukrainians, the inputs into their ability
to sustain activity are probably fairly intuitive. How many new aircraft can they
expect to receive from their allies? How many pilots and ground crews
will be trained on those new platforms? And what weapon systems and
support are going to come with them? But the question I wanted to put to Justin at
this point was how has the Russian sortie rate evolved over the course of the fighting, and how
the VKS has gone about sustaining that effort? - Well, on the Russian side the sortie
rates that they are generating are less than they were, particularly
during much of 2022 and '23. But that said, they're not massively less, and the impact ... of the continued rate of ops
as well as losses, varies a lot between fleets. So for example, you've seen a huge
impact on the ability of the Russians to sustain Kamov 52 helicopter
sortie rates ... of tempo. Because apart from everything
else, they've lost over half the pre-war fleet, and it wasn't
a huge fleet to begin with. And also the 52s have been overwhelmingly the most
heavily tasked of the Russian attack helicopter fleet. So there you are seeing a pretty understandable
drop off in ability to generate sorties, although equally it's worth saying that also
the requirement for them is much lower now because the Ukrainians are back on the
defensive, and therefore having them there as that kind of fire brigade to stop
breakthroughs and contain them if they look like they might happen
is not really there anymore. So there's an impact there. Whereas the Havoc, the Mi-28,
and the older Hind fleets still operating at a lower tempo,
but relatively consistently. And not doing a huge amount,
mostly just lobbing rockets. Equally, you see the Russian sortie
rates on Su-25 dropping off a bit. Again it's a fleet that
they have run pretty hard. And that, even though they have
a huge number of stored airframes, the number of modernised Su-25, Su-25SM,
and more modernised Su-25SM3s that they entered the war
with was about 130 to 150. And so again when you look at the
loss rates there, they've lost somewhere in the region of 20% to 25% of the fleet,
along with some of their better pilots. So again, it's not surprising that you
are seeing diminishing sortie rates there. Same with the Su-34 Fullback fleet, again
lost a really significant number of aircraft. It's a big complex machine, they used it
very heavily in the first two months of the war. What you're seeing now is a greater weight of
the effort being conducted by Su-30 and Su-35 so the fighters,
particularly for glide bombs. Because they have the performance
and they are perfectly capable of launching them,
to lob them from far away. They are more modern jets than
for example the Su-25s, Su-24s. ... Su-24 mostly Russian
naval aviation and Wagner, but they have been conducting
a lot of the sorties. And the Su-34s are continuing
to operate heavily as well. It's interesting, Russian industry seems to be
prioritising the output of Su-34 replacements. You are seeing continued replacement
production of Su-35 as well. Su-34 is coming out in greater
numbers and the Su-30s less so. Despite significant losses,
mostly on the ground, for Su-30. But yeah, I think the bigger bottleneck is likely
to be perception of need to funnel resource rather than anything particularly
problematic in a technical or logistical sense. There were ... hopes on the
Western side for a while that the Russians, having run
their air fleets for so long at such a higher tempo than they ... were
designed and resourced to be run in peace time, would mean that for example, they'd suddenly
go off a cliff in terms of engine availability because they'd all hit
their engine design life hours, or at least the hours at which they
need to be taken out of the aircraft and sent back to the
factory for a full overhaul. And ultimately the issue with
those sort of predictions, just as predictions early on in the war
in sort of March '22 that because some of the Russian tyres were failing, that that meant
that the whole system was about to fall over. The Russians are pretty good
at fixing these problems. And a lot of it's just a case of accepting technical
risk at a level that we wouldn't in the West. And one thing you have seen,
which to my mind at least, increases the credibility
of the assumption that they are essentially just ignoring a lot of
those more problematic pinch points that would be problematic for us in terms
of ... mandatory inspection intervals and things for engines and airframes, is that you have seen
an up-tick in Russian crashes from presumably technical
failures in the past year. Which suggests to me
that they are pushing past where their maintenance manuals
and where their design specifications say that things ought to be
taken out of service for a while, where it's engines or aircraft, and thoroughly
overhauled. They are just going on with it. Now that the Ukrainian
counter-offensive is done, and has been, unfortunately, very
successfully contained by the Russians and the Russians are back
on the offensive themselves, I think it's likely that the Russians
are taking a bit more of a pause, but also just not prioritising
really getting everything they ... can out of the tactical aviation fleets,
because they don't need to. The effectiveness that they have in terms of changing
the situation on the ground is relatively limited. The glide bombs are a nightmare
for those who are in a position that is repeatedly under attack by them, but they
are not going to swing the war one way or the other. And with ... at least the steady pace
of those Patriot engagements, yeah, there's probably a bit of a change
of the risk/result trade-off for the Russians. So yeah, a bit of a decline in ops tempo
on the tactical fleet side of things, but I don't think it's because they have
any particular logistics bottlenecks. Equally, you're still seeing the strategic aviation
in terms of the Long Range Aviation group operating at a very high tempo. It's kind of impressive, annoyingly,
that with ... particularly the ancient Tu-95s that the Long Range Aviation group
has consistently been able to meet these mission plans for
really large groups of bombers in the air at once from
what is a relatively small fleet, consistently launch these
large salvoes of cruise missiles and also maintain ... most of
their usual deterrence training. Because these are nuclear assets as well. And some of the sort of
long-range SIGINT flights. Which given how old these assets are
is sort of undeniably slightly impressive. Equally, they are constrained in terms
of missile production and other things. So ... they are probably fairly close to
the limit of what they can consistently do in the Long Range Aviation department,
but it's not really having strategic effect. And I don't think it's going to go off
a cliff any time soon in terms of that limit. - Well you've started to touch on that point of the
depth of the Russian bench, so to speak. Their ability to substitute even if the
preferred airframe might not be available, where else can airframes be pulled from,
or what other airframe can be used? I remember back in Syria, if a PGM
was being used by the Russians it was likely a Sukhoi 34
dropping it or deploying it. Whereas now a larger number of airframes
are being used to deploy those glide bombs. So if we have Long Range Aviation, where
potentially you could scale down deterrence patrols if you needed to pull
airframes for Ukraine urgently. And case of the glide bombing attacks you can
substitute to some extent Sukhoi 30 or 35 for 34. Are there any points where that ability
to substitute is more limited than others? I'm thinking potentially
of key enablers like the A-50s. Or perhaps the Mig-31s which were not
blessed with a tremendous service life, and I remember being very important
in the CAP role early in the war. - Yeah, so their key pinch points I think would
be firstly the availability of MiG-31K, because the Russians are producing
more <i>Kinzhal</i> ballistic missiles than they can fire easily at once. And also they are aware that in order to get
them through where there's Patriot cover, they need ... big salvoes ideally. And because one of the limitations
on that is the number of MiG-31Ks that they can get in the air at any
point, which typically is around 6, they are working to, and have
already made some progress, on getting <i>Kinzhal</i> incorporated
on other ... airframes. So various Ukrainian reports that
they've been firing them from Su-34. I'd be interested to see the integration there because
that's a big missile for the Su-34 to be carrying. I know the Su-34 is a big airplane ...
- But it's not MiG-31. -Yeah, and I would guess if it's
... between the intake trunks that the clearance on the
front gear would be interesting. But certainly there have been reports
that the Russians are also working to integrate <i>Kinzhal</i> on the
Tu-22M3, so the Backfires. Which have consistently been lobbing these
not particularly accurate but extremely powerful and therefore regularly caused these horrible civilian
casualty instances, the Kh-22 anti-ship missiles. Which are themselves enormous
and ... quasi-ballistic in nature and they can carry three of them,
typically they'd carry two. So you see the Russians putting resource
into integrating <i>Kinzhal</i> on them, so that they can increase the number of <i>
Kinzhals</i> they can get in the air simultaneously and thereby have more effective salvoes. The employment of more PGMs
from Su-35 in particular is I think less to do with overcoming the core limitations of Russian
cockpit design and PGM design. Which are the reasons why
they really focused on the Su-34, and to a slightly lesser extent the Su-30
(both two-seaters) for using PGMs in in Syria. Because just it's too much cockpit workload without
a targeting pod using their slightly clunky weapons and much less advanced kind of
interfaces ... compared to Western jets. They need that extra capacity to
work those weapons effectively. What you're seeing with the glide bombs
is a much simpler kind of PGM employment. It's not conducting TV-guided or
laser-guided weapon attacks, ... when the Russians have been
doing those, they're still using the Su-34 for the overwhelming majority of attacks
and occasionally Su-30SM. Instead with a GLONASS or GPS guided bomb you basically just fly it into the launch
acceptable region and release it. And so for that, yeah, it makes sense that they've been heavily employing the Su-35
and the Su-30s to take pressure off the 34s. So there's a fair degree of adaptation. But also it's worth remembering
that strategic bombardment, which is what we're talking about when we
are talking about <i>Kinzhals</i> and cruise missiles (and even to a degree light bombs,
although that's more tactical bombardment) it's a force multiplier for other effects. It creates friction and cost, and forces your
opponent to distribute things in an inefficient way, and have to have redundancy, and every so
often things are hit that are difficult to replace. But there are almost no examples
in history of that kind of thing (in a conventional sense anyway,
nuclear is different) having a decisive effect. And I think the Russians do understand
that, so the amount of extra resources they are pumping into the air environment
at the moment is significantly less. And you can see it in the
prioritisation of resource than the enormous resources that
the Russians are pumping into improving their ground forces
training capacity near the front lines. So on the Russian side of the lines,
but these training regiments that they've now managed to get
enough breathing space to set up to provide basic training to recruits as they
come through from each wave of mobilisation. Obviously huge resource are being poured into
production of artillery ammunition, artillery barrels, and also increasingly MLRS ammunition,
that their multiple launch rocket systems. Partly because rocket artillery
systems don't rely on barrels, and barrels wear out almost as fast
as munition stocks in normal artillery. So if you are looking at where the Russians
are really putting priority in terms of resource, it's that continued ability to
grind forward with lots of armour and huge amounts of artillery
and troops that are not well trained, but they're much better trained than they were
in the kind of heady days of ... spring last year. And particularly the Ukrainian counter
offensive in October and November '22 where the Russians really were
just throwing bodies into trenches straight from being plucked off the street
pretty much, maybe a week or two training. The force quality is much closer now, the
Russians are much more consistent in their training. Which is one of the reasons
why things are going worse, but of course the main one
being ammunition shortages. - On that note at that point in the interview
I then wanted to pivot the discussion towards potential pinch points and the supply
of munitions, specifically air-launched munitions. And so having discussed cruise
missiles and glide bombs in the past, at this point I instead posed the question:
have we seen any significant change in the rate of Russian consumption of various
air-to-air munitions, particularly things like the R-37? - Yes, so the R-37 firing rate is much
lower on the Russian side, although that's mostly because the
Ukrainians are just flying a lot less. A lot of the pilots ... and maintenance crews
are in the West doing conversion training. So that means the Russians have
far fewer aerial targets to shoot at. The other thing is with R-37 the
production rate is actually pretty high. In the sense that they were never particularly
concerned with ammunition consumption rates at least from what I could see
in terms of Russian discussion. And certainly the continued efforts
to incorporate them in more platforms, increase the number of
Su-35s that could fire them with the spiral subsequent software
updates that they did for that, away from the core MiG-31 platform
for which the weapon was designed, work to integrate them
potentially on the Su-30SM2. That has a data length that means
it is potentially worth using that missile. The earlier SM can't support
the weapon far enough. I think part of it is that it's a much easier missile
to produce for the Russians than most of them, because it doesn't have lots
of Western components in it. I've taken apart an R-37
and I've looked inside one, and ... there's almost no
Western components of any sort. Because it's a really big missile that actually in terms of computing
requirements has a relatively simple task compared to something like a cruise missile
or an anti-ship missile or a ballistic missile. And so you probably gain less by taking
the cost from a design point of view of going with those lighter, better, faster
Western chips in something like an R-37 than you do in smaller missiles
- so the R-77 and more complex ones. And in that sense there's also as
a result probably lower bottlenecks in terms of the Russian ability
to scale production of R-37, because they're not
having to import components that require them to get
around the sanctions. Which they are doing, and they
are getting around the sanctions. They are importing in many ... categories more
Western chips than they were at the start of the war, but they're doing so at
a massively higher cost and with less predictability about where
and when shipments are coming through. So people saying the sanctions
are a bust, they didn't work. Well no no, the sanctions have
had quite a significant effect, it's just they were never going to have a
decisive effect on a country the size of Russia when a large part of the world's economies
are not taking part in the sanctions anyway. But what they've done is significantly
limit the expansion of Russia's production capacity
of complex weapons despite enormous resources being
poured into increasing that production. The situation in terms of Russian
production would be massively worse if the sanctions weren't in place, and equally
we could have a significantly greater effect on limiting Russian production,
and delaying it, and reducing its size, if Western countries were a bit more
proactive in terms of enforcement of sanctions. There's a sort of tacit
assumption in a lot of policy circles that once you've legislated and put
sanctions in place that they'll work. They only work if you enforce them,
and enforcement is difficult and time consuming,
and also requires politics. Because for example a lot of the companies
doing smuggling of Western components are ... Chinese companies in Hong Kong. Well, we don't have any jurisdiction in Hong Kong,
so Interpol can't easily go after companies there. So ... for example, trans-shipment companies
routes that they are getting things from and those companies that are selling to those
shell companies in Hong Kong from the West, there are ways that
enforcement can be played there. So yeah, sanctions could be more of a problem for
Russia than they are, and they are a significant issue. But they are certainly not going
to be decisive on their own, and I don't think anyone ought
to have expected them to be. - My reflection on that question is that it highlights
the importance of understanding that Russia's ability to scale production
of different systems varies greatly. And that's apparent even if you
look at the official Russian statistics where they claim several 100%
increases in some niche categories. And much more
humble increases in others. Increasing the rate at which
you are reactivating old T-62 tanks or building missiles that don't use
particularly many (or any) Western components is obviously going to be a very different proposition
to something which is normally full of them. For Ukraine however, the driver of any
bottlenecks is not so much going to be sanctions, but rather what rate and what type of
support are they receiving from their allies? And so we moved on to discussing potential
pain points in Ukrainian munition supply. - Pinch points? Obviously on the
Ukrainian side, it's just about everything. Because, yeah, the US has just stopped
supplying since the beginning of January. And while European production is increasing,
particularly on simpler things quite quickly, in terms of artillery production for example,
ammunition and to a lesser extent barrels, it's nowhere close to
enough to replace the US. And so there is a limit to
how much Europe can do. It's quite interesting, a lot of the
US narratives at the moment are that ... well Europe just needs
to finally pay its fair share. If you look at the percentage of GDP
that Europe is spending on Ukraine aid, it's massively higher than the US, and in fact
in absolute terms it's now higher than the US. This narrative that Europe is not paying its fair share
on Ukraine is absolutely inaccurate at this stage. The US is not even providing
the majority in financial terms. But of course it's utterly irreplaceable
in terms of the industrial might that it has, and the ability to produce particular
types of munitions at scale. So it is almost impossible to
overstate how important it is that the US finds a way to pass the
aid supplemental through the House. The Ukrainians are losing thousands of people
because they don't have enough ammunition. ... It's kind of a political game in Washington,
it's an election year, people going across. But thousands of people are dying
unnecessarily because of this. And the impact that we've already seen
in Avdiivka, I mean this is the start, but it takes months for any decision
to have a visible effect like this. And so equally, [assuming]
they fix it, it will take a while for ... that flow of ammunition to really get back into place,
and to the units, and to stabilise the situation. And all the while that they wait, things are going to
get worse and worse at an increasingly fast pace. You know holding the Russians, it really, really
does require artillery ammunition at huge scale, because they have just more bodies. And what happens if the Russians aren't
getting shelled on their way across the lines is that Ukrainian casualties skyrocket
even where they do hold ground. Because you have a lot
more hand to hand combat with grenades and small arms,
and clubs and knives. Which, yes, Ukrainian soldiers are more motivated,
yes, they actually tend to hold positions, but casualty rates go up massively if they can't
shell the Russians coming across the ground. And also as mud season starts to dry up,
the vegetation will also come up which means that the Russians will have
more cover so will be able to get closer. And the requirement for suppressive
artillery fire will increase to hold the lines. And Russian vehicles will have
more ability to manoeuvre quickly. So again, ... it's not a catastrophe yet, but it could be really quite quickly if the US
policy position in Washington isn't unjammed. - And I think to illustrate that then with a specific
focus on the munition side of the equation, where ... it's much more practical for the US to
provide a certain sort of assistance than the Europeans. A lot of focus on the effort of the European
states for example to introduce F-16, or to provide Patriot batteries,
but those systems don't function without the interceptors to fire
from Patriot, or a munition set that actually gives the F-16 utility
in what is a very dangerous battle space. To what extent is Europe actually
able to equip those platforms with the supply of interceptors, to what
extent is there a reliance on the US? And I think also the second elephant in
the room is to what extent are people reliant on the US to give permission
even where munitions are available? Say the more advanced versions of AMRAAM,
to release those without US permission? - European F-16 countries that
are donating aircraft and providing training to Ukrainian pilots
and crews are doing as much as they can. They are just giving all the aircraft they can,
and putting a lot of effort into getting them to a suitable condition that they could be sent
and to providing that training in Romania. ... Remember, these are modernised
1980s aircraft, they are not state of the art. The reason they are available is the
countries that have them are replacing them. The US is the only possible source of most of the key munitions, ... and potentially upgrades in terms
of components, sensors or whatever. - I saw ... the Ukrainians had requested new radars
potentially be fitted before they go into service. - Yeah, so there is also just an element of the
Ukrainian expectations on Western aircraft are often informed by taking
essentially promotional materials, or even things like
Wikipedia at face value in terms of ranges, in terms of
track performance, that kind of thing. And anybody who works in the sector knows that
those figures are not accurate in real life conditions. Those are best case, especially
for systems that are quite old. But also, the reason why
F-16 is highly effective and has been in all the conflicts that
the US and its allies have used it in is because it's part of a large scale,
layered, composite air-operation model with loads of other enabling capabilities,
very, very good communications, a wide range of weapons systems,
but also crucially very complicated tactics that take years and years and years for
formation leaders and mission leaders to learn. And the Ukrainian pilots will have a hard
time absorbing ... those sort of tactics to the degree that they can
lead formations with them. And also there's likely to be friction around Ukrainian
pilots, some of whom are very combat experienced, being told that they should do
things a completely different way. From what we've seen with for example
armour when it's been supplied, Ukrainian respect for Western tactics is,
"Yeah well, they weren't designed for this kind of war, so, yeah, we know how to fight." That's not the case all the time, but particularly
among the more experienced troops it is. And the problem is that our weapon
systems aren't designed for their tactics. And particularly with the F-16, even if the
US does authorise the weapons transfers for, for example, later model AMRAAMs to give
them more competitive range in an air-to-air sense. So things like JASSM potentially,
the Joint Air-launched Stand-off ... can't remember what the acronym stands
for off the top of my head, it's terrible. Anyway, JASSM, the mission planning is
quite complicated for those weapons, and it still won't have
a decisive strategic effect. So yeah, the US is critical, but also
expectations need to be managed. The main benefit of providing F-16
to the Ukrainians for them is twofold. One, it's a guarantee that the Ukrainian Air Force
can continue to operate and exist long term. They have to transfer ... across to
Western types from a support perspective. And b) it should significantly
increase pilot survivability. Because one of the things
that will definitely be superior is the radar warning receiver
and the ... defence systems. They will give a much more
accurate bearing, and ID, and the ability to be notified when certain radar
modes for example are being used against them. Than the really old old-school SPO series sort
of Soviet RWS that the Ukrainians are flying with. So it will significantly
improve their survivability, but only the US can authorise the weapon
supplies and supply the weapons to make them potentially effective in
some degree across wider mission sets. And that goes for a lot of stuff.
Patriot for example, the interceptors, there is a line being set up in Germany to
produce Patriot, but you know they'll take time. The French are supplying SAMP-T, that's good. It's not quite Patriot, but it's in
a sort of vaguely similar class. And for example Germany is trying to increase
production of IRIS-T as a complement to NASAMS. Highly effective system, but
the rounds are very expensive because they've always been
produced in pretty low quantity. And again, all of this,
the key factor is time. Europe is now doing
mostly the right thing. There is a lot of investment starting
to go into increasing production. A lot of the countries that have kind of
gained a reputation for feet dragging, particularly Germany, are actually supplying
huge amounts of stuff to Ukraine now. And a lot of money as
well in terms of support for people and the economy
and reconstruction and things. But they can't quickly replace what the US has in
terms of ready production of key munitions. ... That will take time, and the
Ukrainians don't necessarily have time. Time costs a huge
number of lives for them. So political games in Washington
around the next election, yeah, it's very interesting to see
quite how badly it's going down. Of course with the Ukrainians,
but not just in Europe, but with US key allies in
the Asia-Pacific as well. Who are looking at Washington essentially
just deciding to take a vacation on Ukraine while they desperately plead for ammunition under
heavy attack having made these commitments to them, and going, "Well OK, so do US
security commitments and alliances mean what they said they meant
viz China and the Indo-Pacific?" And so for example for the
Republican policy hawks who argue, "Well, we shouldn't be sending loads of ... military
aid to Ukraine because we need to focus on China." What [the US] is doing in Ukraine ... at
the moment is massively undercutting the entire alliance network that the US
relies on as a containment strategy and as military alliances ... for a
China scenario in the Indo-Pacific. Because allies are watching
this with just despair really. - Now while there was potentially a lot to
unpack there regarding the impact of Ukraine on the security
situation in the Asia-Pacific, by this point we were
running pretty tight on time. And so as I like to do in these interviews for
the final question I essentially opened the mic. I said people who watch this channel
are usually going to be those who follow the war in Ukraine fairly closely,
be fairly invested in the outcome, and be looking for something they
probably won't get on their nightly news. So I asked the Professor if he thought there
were any issues that don't get discussed commonly enough in the
public sphere, with <i>carte blanche</i> to dive into some of the potential risks
that Ukraine and its allies face in 2024. - So there's quite a few issues that I think don't necessarily get discussed
enough in the public space. But I think one of the
key underlying issues is that ... if we go over the
sort of cliff edge as it were, where the situation actually
becomes impossible to recover. We won't know that we've
gone over it when we do, it will only become clear
when it's far too late. So in terms of reading the dynamics
of the way that the initiative and the movements back and
forth on the front are going, ... it's worth bearing in mind
that there is a significant lag between the policy implications and
the sort of time frames within which policy decisions to change
things could have an effect. By the time you are observing something
fairly clearly in the open source in public, the decisions that people then think,
"Well, they should do this." Those would have to be been done a few
months back at least in order to change that. So there's a lag time which I think
people don't necessarily appreciate. And also on the political side
in terms of the consequences of essentially abandoning the Ukrainians, in terms of not providing the support we need.
And not taking this seriously enough in terms of the amount
that we spend in Europe, as well as obviously the US political system
just having a sort of psychotic episode, ... I don't think they are
discussed properly either. If Ukraine loses, not only will
it be a catastrophe for them, but first of all the Western credibility in
deterrence terms will be completely destroyed because we'll have shown that we just
didn't care enough to take it seriously even when we weren't
being asked to do the fighting. The Russians will have
a significantly expanded army compared to what they
had before the invasion. Their production and mobilisation is
just going in that direction regardless. But they would then
be hugely emboldened. Europe would be facing a wave of
millions of refugees from Ukraine, traumatised, extremely bitter,
many of them with bad experiences. If you look at what happened to Europe's politics
with a wave of about two million refugees from Syria, people haven't thought
through what this would do. Even if you strip out the moral
side of it, of abandoning people desperately trying to defend themselves who
we pledged to support for as long as it took, whatever that message means. And in any case, Russia is
going to be a threat longer term. And that will suck in US
commitments either way, because Europe is the US's key market
for most of its manufactured goods and a lot of its services,
and they are completely interlinked. So either way this
is going to affect the US. And as I said, it affects the
deterrence envelope in the Indo-Pacific. So even for those who argue
that on the basis of realpolitik "Well, they should just do some sort of deal
and it's all got too expensive and whatever." A) the Russians will not offer a significant
deal, they think they're going to win. So if you look at what the Russians are offering,
the terms, it's essentially a surrender request. But the terms are essentially that
Ukraine gives up all of the four oblasts, not just the two that
are majority occupied, but all of the four oblasts that Russia
has claimed are now part of Russia even though they don't control the vast bulk
of two of them and not all of the other two. So Kherson, Zaporizhzhia,
Donetsk and Luhansk. And that's just sometimes chucked
in there, potentially Kharkiv as well, so Ukraine's second and third largest cities. But also to then say that Ukraine
must promised to never join NATO, but it can join the EU,
that's the kind of fig leaf. And Ukraine must maintain
a leader who is friendly to Russia. Now that latter bit is
incompatible with democracy, because no Russia-friendly leader
will ever be elected in Ukraine again. And if one were put in place and there was
democracy, they would be voted out immediately. So one of the requirements for joining the
EU is that you are a functioning democracy. So the Russian terms in
themselves are mutually incompatible. It's just a device to give ammunition
to people making bad faith arguments, and useful idiots in the West to continue
to try and undermine that support. The Russians are not interested in a meaningful
ceasefire, they're interested in Ukrainian surrender. And if they get a ceasefire, they will just come
slamming back in on their own timetable, having extracted all of those concessions and broken the trust that remains
between the Ukraine and the West. So there isn't a way out of
this that isn't disastrous, except to start taking it seriously
and to do so really urgently. We need to spend a hell of a lot more money
on urgently upgrading our defence production, and getting the Ukrainians
as much as we can. And rebuilding our own
stockpiles to enable us to go deeper in terms of giving away
what we haven't yet already. And in the meantime, accepting that even the best
case is the Ukrainians hold for the rest of 2024. The Russians are going to have a large
offensive in the summer almost certainly. And then get the Ukrainians into a shape
where they can go back on the offensive in 2025, hopefully against
a more exhausted Russia. But that's the best case. The alternatives
are really, really dark indeed. And that goes doubly for the US, because only the US can actually salvage
the situation in the immediate term. - Now at the risk of getting into territory
that should probably be covered in a Ukraine War Two Years On update, I think there's potentially a lot of value in that
relatively sombre closing big picture evaluation. The air war in Ukraine, and
the war in Ukraine in general, has been a highly attritional,
materiel-intensive conflict. One where munitions, materiel and
manpower are consumed at significant scale, and where time and time again
we've arguably seen a strong correlation between the rate of resupply and
the effects achieved on the battlefield. In the air war, time and time again
Ukraine has demonstrated an ability to be creative with
the equipment it is supplied with. The fact that a handful of very mobile,
very aggressively-utilised Patriot launchers are able to give a significant part of the
VKS in Ukraine pause for example, is a great illustration of the
power of that potential creativity. And in battles like Avdiivka, the Ukrainians
have demonstrated that they are capable of fighting hard defensive battles
that inflict (as far as we can assess) massively disproportionate materiel
losses on their Russian opponent. But Avdiivka may also arguably demonstrate that
if one side has massively asymmetric resources and is willing to sacrifice those
resources to achieve an incremental gain, then the hard attritional
maths eventually plays out. And so I think there is a good argument to
suggest that the way the air war evolves in 2024 is currently being decided not just in the air of
Ukraine, but in the skies of places like Romania where Ukrainian pilots are converting
over to their new F-16 platform. And also in the halls of
power in Washington DC where the outcome of the
present debates may help determine what those Ukrainian pilots have to fight
with once they head back to the battlefield. The situation still seems to be balanced enough that
a full range of outcomes are very much on the table. But again, that's a potential
thread we can pick up in the future. So with that I closed the interview. - Very good, well look, thank you very much
Professor Bronk for your time today.
- My pleasure. And a brief channel update to close
out on hopefully the last episode in a while that I'll be recording
on the go, but thankfully in the end the internet connectivity held up and
I was able to make this episode happen. There's a relatively small list of people that
patrons and others have repeatedly requested I bring on for interviews, and Professor
Bronk has long been on that short list. And so I do want to thank Justin for
agreeing to appear and giving his assessment. Obviously his views are very much his own, but
I hope that like other guests we've had on the channel that you did find some value
in his opinions and assessments. Next week it'll be back
to hearing from me again, and it's at that point I promise I'll finally include
my reflection on the growth the channel has seen. For the moment however, thank you for
your continued support and engagement. I hope you enjoyed the episode
and I'll see you all again next week.
