Phillips Payson O’Brien: Ukraine Military Attack Was Very High Cost in Brain Power and Low Cost in Economics

GEIST: “... you shed some light for our viewers on how Ukraine pulled this off. It’s really an extraordinary story. As you say, relatively inexpensive given the cost-benefit that you factor in. How did they do this?”
O’BRIEN: “It was very high cost in brainpower and low cost in economics.”
GEIST: “Yeah.”
O’BRIEN: “They took 18 months to plan this. I mean, it’s really quite extraordinary. It’s one of the reasons I always get so angry when people say Ukraine can’t win the war. Russia has all the cards. Russia is so strong. The Ukrainian military is more adaptive. It’s more creative. It actually has the ability to plan these kinds of operations that so far the Russians don’t. Ukraine can win the war. But how did they do this? They started realizing that Russian bases, particularly a long way from Ukraine, were really still poorly defended. The Russians were sort of not thinking the Ukrainians could reach them. So they had to come up with some way to get these drones to these bases. What they realized was actually traffic was going on as normal around the bases. You know, the Russians weren’t paying any kind of security concerns. So what they did is they found a way to put false bottom top — really quite extraordinary — false tops on pickup trucks, trailer trucks, which they stuffed full of drones, very cheap drones. I mean, you could make these things for a thousand dollars. And then they were able to find a way to get them by the bases, maybe using actually drivers who didn’t know what they were doing so that they could all be launched at one time. It really was extraordinary. But they had used some really impressive stuff to plan it, like they had used AI to try and understand where the weak points were in the Russian aircraft. So they said, OK, well, we’ll have a one shot to get these aircraft without any protection. We’ve got to make it out. So they were able to program these drones to not only fly out at the Russian aircraft, but hit really, really damaging points. So overall, it was an intellectual and strategic campaign of great, great effect. It just didn’t cost that much.”