Jay Weber Show transcript 6-3-25
Boy- the details on how the Ukrainians pulled off one of the most surprising -major-military missions in the history of warfare.
Most of us in the west heard about this ‘surprise attack’ airstrike the Ukrainians conducted on Sunday...and heard 40 Russian planes were damaged. Vlad and his regime were caught off guard, etc.
But- the details of this are really ‘something’...with this being labeled the ‘Russian pearl harbor’ in Moscow...and with international military advisors saying, ‘Ukraine just changed the nature of modern warfare’.
Really.
Because-in this age of radar and satellites- when you can see drones and missiles coming from long distances away- everyone kind of thought that they’d see any air attack on their military bases or major power structures ‘coming’.
And in this situation: heck, Ukraine doesn’t even have an air force...and any drone or rare fighter attack across the Ukrainian border would require a raiding mission into Russian airspace that would be spotted from a mile away. Plenty of time to respond to it.
It wasn’t just Vladimir Putin and the Russian army who were thinking in those terms: it’s pretty much the entire modern world.
Well, we’ll see any air attack coming and have time to respond to it.
Nope.
Not in an era of modern drones and ingenious planning. Folks- Ukrainian leaders apparently planned this attack for over a year....and when they finally struck...they struck five different Russian air bases and destroyed or disabled at least 40 Russian planes.
The Russian military has hundreds of planes-but not of the types the Ukrainians chose to hit- and that’s already got experts suggesting that this one attack, alone, has crippled Russia’s ability to either attack-or defend itself- in any sort of future, larger war.
Real damage was done to Russia here- both to their physical military and to their psyche.
What the Ukrainians did here-was ingenious- in its simplicity: over the course of 18 months. They constructed hundreds of low-cost drones that are about the size of a riding lawnmower. Then fitted them with explosives and smuggled them into Russia on trucks.
They were packed into mobile trailers that had roofs that could be remotely raised to let the drones out at the right moment...so the drones were activated remotely...flew out the top...and bombed the nearby airfields.
There were no ‘high flying’ predator drones to be detected on radar. No long-distance bombing mission by expensive aircraft that could have been detected, anyway.
No trillion-dollar stealth fighters needed.
Low cost-relatively low-tech drones launched out of the top of semi-trailers with retractable roofs.
Ingenious.
And the attacks knocked out about a third of the planes Russia uses to deliver high-tech cruise missiles that have been devastating targets and killing people in Ukraine.
And no, Washington DC did not provide support. In fact, President Trump wasn’t ‘tipped off’ to the mission ahead of time. He wasn’t told when Ukraine’s leaders chose to spring this trap, or strike.That’s got some trump supporters and pro-Russia ‘right wingers’ in this country, like Steve Bannon, all upset.
Tough. I wouldn’t have told president trump either, if I’d been President Zelensky, given how deferential and pro-Russia Trump has seemed to be in the early going of his second administration, here.
I hate to liken president Trump to President Biden in -any-way-
But after it became clear that Biden and Anthony Blinken were going to work against Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu every step of the way in Israel’s war against Hamas-
I was saying: Bebe shouldn’t share anything with Biden. No. Why let Blinken turn around and tip off Hamas leaders...in some gambit to weaken Israel and end the war before Hamas can be eradicated?
It would have been dumb-
And -in fact- Bebe only stopped sharing information and giving Biden’s regime a ‘heads up’ after they got burned by it once or twice.
And so-here we are in Ukraine. Their decision-makers know that trump has some soft spot for Putin and has been more ‘anti-Ukraine’ than ‘anti-Russia’ since he’s retaken office: i wouldn’t have given the trump admin a heads up, either.
Why give him a chance to spoil the mission and/or use the information in some effort to gain Putin’s trust...and ‘prove’ you can be trusted in ceasefire negotiations?
Nope. Not when Putin’s been brutally bombing Ukraine and refuses to stop...and has been playing trump and his team ‘for fools’. No. Just ‘spring your trap’.
And that’s what Zelensky did.
And the big worry from the international community now is: how will Putin respond to this global embarrassment? He’s got nukes, after all.
And that’s a valid worry.
And by the way: that’s the best reason Ukraine has for ‘not telling Trump’ or letting any other foreign leaders know what was coming, here: so that they have plausible deniability on the international stage and it doesn’t give Putin a convenient excuse to claim this is a ‘wider war’ now and touch off World War Three.
Those worries related to how a mad-man like Putin reacts-are-valid. This is a man whose life-long strategy has been to never back down.
But-‘what Putin does next’ also depends on what resources he has at his disposal- and having one third of his most high-tech warplanes erased in a single attack-on a single night- changes any equation.
Putin is deeply paranoid...and this will probably have him doubting everyone around him- and his own military leaders- even more.
That could lead to more instability in Russia.
But-as for how this attack ‘changes global warfare’-
Well, this relatively inventive, low-tech way to get around radar and satellites already has military planners around the globe-including here at our pentagon-saying ‘holy cow, we’d never really considered this sort of attack. We haven’t planned -in any way- how to address these sorts of vulnerabilities- in the age of drone warfare.
And we haven’t: if a small group of Ukrainians can filter into Russia...prep and arm the drones out of some remote warehouse they found in some city or village...because Russia is such a vast geographic expanse-
Well-then they -or any terrorist group- could do the same thing here.
Folks-as ingenious as this attack on Russian military bases was-it just gave global terrorists some new ideas- on how to strike against western targets. Military and civilian. Correct?
Drone warfare is changing everything-and the Ukrainians just rewrote the rules of war in several ways.
This was -really impressive-if you were an outside observer....and it was – mortifying and alarming-if you were a Russian on the receiving end of it.
Putin isn’t the sort to give up when it looks like he’s losing-or has just been delt an embarrassing blow like this.
It’s not in his DNA to get so rattled by this that he capitulates and immediately looks for an exit strategy.
Now is the time for trump’s negotiating team to be ‘extra convincing’...and it’s a great time for Trump- or congress- to put genuinely crippling economic sanctions in place that slam any country-hard- that dares to buy Russian oil.
Trump hasn’t even ‘talked tough’ on Russia until just recently. And he’s not ‘acting tough’ toward either Russia or Iran yet.
Not really.
It’s time for him to follow through on the sort of sanctions that he’s threatened on both of these countries as a way to help out our allies-and the western world.
photo credit: Fox News
audio version of the segment here > The Ukrainians changed modern warfare forever