Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome back, everyone, to another unfiltered edition of Truth in the Barrel.
Chapter 2: What is 'The Drone Hunters of Kherson' documentary about?
The world is on fire. Prices for everything are up. We're still in this sort of dumb war of choice in Iran. But today, I'm really excited because we're bringing back Ken Harbaugh. Ken is a Midas Touch host and president of Valor Media, who has a new documentary that just came out that we're going to dive into about Ukraine. Ken, welcome to Truth in the Barrel. Amy, thank you for having me.
It's great to see you. I want to start out with your documentary. It's called The Drone Hunters of Kursan. Talk to us about why you went there and what did you film?
Well, it was a long time in the making. You don't just get to show up with a unit like this. I embedded...
Chapter 3: How does the documentary highlight the bravery of Ukrainian soldiers?
This was last October with one of the teams, a small three-man team that goes out on the highway of death that runs through Kherson along the Dnipro River and is literally the last line of defense for the Russian FPV drones. And I'll explain that term in a second. But the Russians launched these drones across the river to attack civilian targets.
And this is one of the – I mean, they've got to be some of the bravest people in the well, not just in the Ukrainian military, but in the history of combat, because they literally put themselves out there as bait to soak up these suicide drones that the Russians are sending before they're able to kill civilians. And that's the Russian tactic.
The UN, in fact, declared that the Russian drone operations in Kherson are tantamount to a depopulation campaign. They are trying to terrorize and depopulate civilians these areas of Kherson. In fact, all of Kherson. They want it back. They occupied it for many months at the beginning of the war until they were driven out. And this, in a way, is their revenge.
Killing, and I've seen the tapes, because the Russians post them themselves, killing old ladies walking back from the market with arms loaded with shopping bags. That's who they're going after, and they brag about it when they get these killed.
So what the Ukrainians are doing is basically having drones that go and hunt the offensive drones.
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Chapter 4: What criticisms does Ken Harbaugh have about Trump's speech on Iran?
So that's what this is all about. Defensive drones going and killing offensive drones to some extent.
They're shooting them down with rifles, Amy. It's wild. Not even shotguns.
Chapter 5: How has the war affected the economy according to the hosts?
And you'd be amazed at how much advice that I received to pass along to the Ukrainians on how to do their jobs better. But the fact is you can't shoot these things down with shotguns because the kill envelope of a shotgun is within the kill radius of the warhead. It's too late by the time they're within shotgun range.
drones that are about the size of a pigeon moving at 100 kilometers an hour with rifles, with AK-47s, because they have to hit them that far away. And they literally have seconds in that last, the terminal phase of this drone's approach. And because they're fiber-optically guided, there's no other way to detect them. They emit no electromagnetic signature. There's no
like, radio signal from the drone back to the operator. You have to either see it or hear it and then engage it. And it also means there's no way to jam it. The only way to stop these drones from killing civilians in Herson is to put your best fighters between the Russian lines and those civilian neighborhoods. By the way, that is something the Russians would never do.
They would never put their best soldiers between the enemy and a civilian population. But it is a testament to the value that the Ukrainians place on human life, that they're willing to risk their best people to do this.
That's incredible. Incredible bravery. It really is. So I just want people to understand a little bit more about the Russian drones. And you talked about the fact that they are not controlled by radio waves.
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Chapter 6: What lessons can the U.S. military learn from the Ukraine conflict?
But what we're seeing now is the fiber optic cables. So what is that? I mean, when you look, and this was something that we saw in the documentary, it's these very thin sticks. Silky things that are kind of everywhere.
Silk is a great way to describe it because if you look at some of these areas right up against the battle line, some of these populated areas that have seen these waves of fiber optic activity, drone-controlled attacks, it looks like a web of spider silk has been laid over the entire neighborhood.
And the wires themselves are hair thin, but when you have thousands and in some cases many thousands of drones flying being launched over these neighborhoods after the drone detonates, it just lays this thin, silky wire down in its path. And you're right, they can't be jammed. They can't be detected because there's no signal that is going through the air from the drone back to its operator.
So the only way to know they're coming is to see it or... Or hear it. It is really ominous stuff. I make the comment at some point in the documentary that what we're seeing is a blend of trench warfare and Terminator. I mean, it really is the future of warfare and it's being invented and tested in Ukraine right now.
Chapter 7: What ethical concerns arise from military personnel's actions during protests?
In the documentary, Ken, you were there on October 7th, which is, why was that date significant? Can you talk about that?
Yeah, well, I mean, it definitely has resonance in the Middle East, but in Ukraine and in that part of the world, it is Vladimir Putin's birthday. And as a birthday present to himself, he, every year since the war started, has launched massive waves of drones against civilian cities.
On this particular October 7th, his attacks on Odessa and Kherson and every major city, Kharkiv and Dnipro and Kiev, represented the largest drone attacks of the war up until that point. They've since grown even bigger. But it is just an indication of the bloodlust of that motivates this campaign in Ukraine. And it filters all the way down to the frontline Russian soldier and the commanders.
I've heard Russian commanders or reports of Russian commanders describing their own infantry as human radar. Because they will send them in waves towards Ukrainian positions, and wherever the bodies pile up, that's where the Ukrainian strong point is. From the perspective of the Russian soldier, I already described how the reason we know that they're targeting civilians in Kherson –
completely defenseless, unarmed civilians, old ladies coming back from the market, I reference that specifically because I've seen these videos, is because they post the kills themselves on Telegram and other Russian social media channels, referring to their missions over civilian areas of Kherson as human safaris because they're hunting humans.
So it is, I mean, it's a way of war that I don't think we really appreciate here. You have to see it to believe it.
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Chapter 8: How does the discussion reflect on the political climate in the U.S.?
Yeah. I'm wondering, Ken, if do the Russians, when they post these things, are those posts getting back to Russia? Do the Russian people see their own army targeting grandmothers coming out of the market?
disassociation in the minds of the Russian civilians. There is a real attempt, and I'm not an expert on this. I haven't studied it as much as I have the battlefield itself, but you get the feeling like there is a real concerted effort to try to make the war in Ukraine seem like it's very far away, like it's very distant, and the Russian government itself is determined to
insulate and isolate its people from the horrors of what is happening at the front. It's the reason that their Rubicon is a general draft. They're trying not to reach that point because then it would be undeniable. But I haven't been to Moscow, but the reports I hear from people who go to Moscow say it is kind of a fantasy land.
It's Russia's Disney World, and they make every possible attempt to insulate their people from what is actually happening at the war. So I'm sure that information is available, but I think people are just tuning it out.
You know, you could say even here in the United States, we're kind of tuning out some of the things that are happening in the wars that we're in. Well, I want to ask you, what do you think is the most important lesson right now that the United States military can take from this?
what's happening in ukraine it's a great great question and if i had to boil it down to a single lesson it would be humility let's accept that we don't know everything just because we have the most expensive military in the world doesn't mean we have the most adaptable or the best military in the world the ukrainians are a drone superpower today and they have been begging for the opportunity to teach us what they know and i think
Largely because of hubris, we have said no. And you think about the first mass casualty event on the American side in this war of choice with Iran. It was inflicted by an Iranian Shahed drone that the Ukrainians have perfected in taking down over the last decade. many years.
It was a Shahed, a $20,000 drone that got past every one of our air defenses and hit a base in Kuwait that had no overhead protection and killed six Americans. A $20,000 drone that the Ukrainians have been trying to tell us how to take out of the sky. Our approach to shooting down Shaheds, which
are cheap a few tens of thousands of dollars there are fifty thousand dollar variants that's still not very expensive when we're shooting them down with multi-million dollar interceptors and sometimes it takes two or three interceptors to take down one of these twenty thousand dollar shahad drones so even if we do knock it out of the sky the iranians can call it a win they don't even have to they don't even have to get their shahads to the target if they're soaking up million dollar interceptors every time they launch one
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