George Barros
speaker
576 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 6 Jun
George Barros’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I'm less sanguine about US intelligence estimates as well, because at the end of the day, in order to count the casualties, you actually have to physically control the territory. And even then, it's actually very difficult to do. So, these are always going to be ballpark estimates.
I think that's about right. There's the combat footage, there's classified documents that one can collect or the table of contents of organization of Russian units when they go get wrecked. How many times have Russian units been reconstituted? We know what the doctrinal end strength of what a Russian battalion should be, what a Russian brigade should be.
And so, when you see a unit have been sent back to a training ground or be reconstituted or filled with replacement a certain number of times, that gives you a sense for how many casualties has been taken. But there's also a great repository of Russian publicly available information that can be exploited as well.
There are Russian legal documents, for example, that have to do with things like wills, so you can count the number of wills that have been processed. There are cemeteries that exist that have had additional annexes built onto them. There are entirely brand new military cemeteries that have been established since 2022, which you can see from space.
You can also look at the number of obituaries that are posted online. The British BDC's Russian service has an excellent, I mean, truly excellent research, investigative research program where they look and they scour the Russian language social media internet to look for obituaries of service members posted by friends and family.
And last I checked, if I recall correctly, they've identified at least 90,000 plus confirmed obituaries. And of course, this is a sliver of the number of full casualties because not everyone gets a written obituary. But it's another data point that you can use to confirm to build towards the whole picture.
Yeah, thank you. So, it was a very quick trip. Just spent a couple days in Kyiv with some meetings, some officials, some military officials, some warfighters, and it was great. My first trip in Ukraine this year and got to go meet with some very interesting warfighters that are innovating, changing the nature of contemporary land warfare.
And I was also able to pick up a couple of data points for the current, the challenges that both sides are facing and get a sort of a bit of a tactical picture for what the fight is like. What was your key takeaway from this trip that you took? Sure. Neither side can conduct operational maneuver. Both sides are completely preoccupied with tactical and sub-tactical problems at the front.
It is pretty much how do you manage to move a squad, 10 guys? How do you move a platoon, 20 to 50 guys and get them from point A on a battlefield, 800 meters or 1200 meters to point B?
That has become incredibly difficult because the Russians and the Ukrainians within about a maybe 15 to 20 kilometer distance from the zero line, it is incredibly difficult to maneuver because the drone game that both sides are bringing out there is so aggressive.
Basically, anything that has a signature larger than a vehicle gets schwacked immediately and is resulting with some very interesting technological and tactical adaptations to try to overcome it.
Sure. So, both sides are trying to figure out how to be able to restore tactical maneuver, restore operational maneuver. So, on the Russian side, for example, they're experimenting now with new types of specialized units. So, these drones can fly very fast and they hit stuff. So, the Russians for the most part have greatly reduced
their use of armored personnel carriers and even providing vehicles for basic infantry maneuver as one would expect them to do by the Russian and Soviet textbook. They're now using motorcycles and they're actually building out a tactical doctrine for motorcycle platoons, motorcycle battalions, or how many motorcycles should be in an infantry battalion, for example.
And there's a coherent table of equipment for how many ATVs, how many buggies, how many motorcycles should these tactical units have? And the concept of operations is this, Mike. Because a armored personnel carrier has a big signature and it moves relatively slowly than a drone, it's an easy target for a drone.
But if you could put a guy on a motorcycle, with two guys on a motorcycle, and if they can blitz a line very quickly, if they can simply get to a glintage or a field fortification, like a trench or something, then there's about a 50-50 chance that those Russian infantrymen can take the trench.
And so, what they're doing now is they're trying to use vehicles that enable less protection, but more speed to carry a fewer number of people, but in a dispersed manner. That is the Russian tactical innovation, which is interesting. Mixed success rate, but it's the bleeding edge.
And then for the Ukrainian side, for their own tactical innovations, they are currently working on how to have machine vision for drones. how to have it so that you no longer need to have a physical pilot that will take out the enemy vehicles and enemy targets.
They're working to develop drones that are trained on AI models so that they can identify, hey, this is what an enemy tank looks like, this is what an enemy vehicle looks like, and then have a drone in the terminal phase take out the enemy object. This already actually exists in part for drones in air defense. This is not just land warfare.
The Ukrainians are using quadcopter drone interceptors with light payloads to intercept Iranian Shahed drones that the Russians use to strike across Ukraine every night. And they've gotten to it by putting specialized sensors on these drones. They're able to have the drones partially lock onto the Iranian one-way attack drones, and then a
FPV drone pilot being assisted by an automated radar will help guide the drone interceptor to take out the drone. That's very interesting because you're now in a place where you can take out an Iranian with a relatively cheap Ukrainian drone as opposed to a very expensive shoulder launch missile like an Igla or a Stinger or an even more expensive Patriot interceptor. So that's really fascinating.
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