 So welcome everyone to today's session of the new voices in global security series. My name is Dr. Mark condos I'm a senior lecturer in imperial and global history at the Department of War Studies and I'm filling in today for Dr. Amanda Chisholm who wasn't able to be with us. The paper we have lined up for today is entitled tactical NATO military logistics and major war fighting, which will be delivered by Dr. Ronald T. Dr. T is a PhD candidate at the Department of or sorry at Defense Studies Department at King's College London. He has an undergraduate degree. Sorry, undergraduate medical degree and further postgraduate degrees in management business administration and tropical medicine. And most recently, as I understand it, an MA in military history and strategic studies from the National University of Ireland, may new Dr. T is also a recent graduate of the higher command studies course at the Baltic Defense College in Estonia. So welcome, Dr. T. We're also joined this afternoon by our discussant, Dr. Patrick Bury, who's a senior lecturer in security at the Polish Department at the University of Bath. Dr. Bury specializes in warfare and counter terrorism. And as I understand it also logistics, which is of course going to be very relevant to the topic at hand today. He's a former British Army captain and a NATO analyst. And without further ado, I'll turn it over to you, Dr. T. So please go ahead. Okay, thank you, Mark. Thank you, Patrick for being my discussant. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome this meeting. I'll now share my screen. Here we go. Reflecting three years ago, we wouldn't have been doing this online, but times change. Okay. So, Mark, can you see that first slide? And can you hear me? Yeah, everything. Right. Thank you very much. So welcome, ladies and gentlemen, Mark Patty to this talk on tactical NATO military logistics and major warfare. I'm usually disclaimer at the beginning, and I stress, this is all my personal opinion, not the official views of the Australian Department of Defense. Representations of commercial firms do not imply endorsement and the pictures are not all under open access. They're not copyright. I'm not going to read through the slides. The key one here is I am actually originally a medical doctor by trade. So I'm not a real doctor. It's a study that I'm doing at the moment. So perhaps I'll end up being a doctor doctor. But in and mixed in with all that is a background in the military and a work history as long as my arm with deployments and postings. Enough said, you can read that. Starting from the point of view of what's all this logistics stuff. There is a war going on in the Ukraine between Russia and Ukraine. If you're one of the folks who thinks it's a special military operation. This is not your seminar disconnect now. Okay, it is a war and logistics has come up. We've all seen the pictures of the Russian logistics column banked up north of Kiev, and we've seen abandoned Russian military equipment. The T80 sticker price of about 3 million US, not including GST 2.6 million pounds captured intact with intact fire control systems and everything. This logistics stuff is responsible for that tank falling into Ukrainian hands completely unblemished completely It's not available. It's logistics that stopped that tank. So this talk is aimed to you if you don't sleep with a logistics textbook under your pillow. It's to explain what's the logistics about and why does it matter and how does it affect us. This is about the following points. I will talk a little bit about resilience at the end. I will talk about future war but it's not really future war. And I will relate all this to the Russia Ukrainian war and how it's changing how we do military medical logistics in particular, because that's my area. I worked as a general logistician in the military, but military medical logistics is actually my PhD topic and it's my specialist field. It's that sliver of 2% that is actually quite critical to fighting and winning wars. Oh, quick audience question do not answer. This is not interactive. What is this a picture of five seconds. Think about it. This picture is totally this lecture in one picture. Everyone's seen it. Keep it in your mind. So first to logistics logistics is old. This is a quote from Alexander the great. Okay, it really matters. I think quoted from Ari and one of the contemporary writers. It's been around a long time. Logistics as you may know it this stuff. I mean the commercial world logistics is often using a really imprecise way. It's written on the side of trucks. It's on ads for logistics companies. But it's basically in the civilian and commercial world about warehousing stockkeeping and distribution of goods. It's actually quite straightforward. This is the NATO definition of logistics and the thing to point out here is it is a very wide definition from doctrine. And I put a red ring around medical and health service support because in the NATO military medical and health support on the battle space is logistics. Okay, so when I talk about military medical or military medical logistics, it is logistics. This is logistics as the military know it so right hand chair is a good old Australian Army setting up a deployable healthcare facility in the middle of nowhere for a fly bit and snake written Australian Army training area. And there we have the movement of material in the bottom left hand corner. And the top left hand corner is a reverse osmosis water purification system set up in Vanda arch a during the tsunami. So this is logistics as the military know it. The military know logistics has been different because we are often no role always working in a degraded damaged or non existent infrastructure environment. There is a factor called the enemy who is not just a commercial competitor. And in the situation the mission is paramount. So what are those two pictures on the left is Lollahoe in Bougainville where I served as a peacekeeper. This is not my picture. This is an entire port infrastructure that was destroyed by the tropical heat and rust. We couldn't use any of it, but we were based there on the right hand side as a healthcare facility that we rebuilt after 10 years civil war. And that was where we were conducting civil aid tasks and medical clinics. This is where we work. This is military logistics. A little bit of a word on fuel supply. So on the left is my beloved VW Passat estate 60 liter fuel tank goes about 500 K or 50 miles in an M 25 traffic jam. On the right is an M one a one main Abrams main battle tank 1900 liter fuel tank. It needs to be filled up every eight hours. It's 4000 liters a day. If you do a lot of maneuvering that leaderage figure can increase by 50%. So that's what we're talking about the logistics of supporting offenses and military operation. I'll spend a little bit of time on this funny squiggle diagram. Those of you in the know this is clear as clear as ABC. What this is is a tactical map. The symbols in blue are tactical symbols that represent military units. And this is the fantasy that we are still teaching students at military colleges about solid front lines, borders between and almost in Napoleonic lines which are impenetrable. This is no longer the case. The arrow looking at BSA not a UK motorcycle company of the 60s but a brigade support area. And this is where logistics and military medical logistics sits behind a front line supported by layers of troops that somehow magically stop the enemy from penetrating towards your soft logistic area. This is no longer the case still being taught in current NATO staff colleges. Let's talk about Ukraine and the four points that are in the the spiel on the on the internet about my talk. We're going to talk about technical logical advances, Russian targeting behavior, the use of hybrid actors and the nature of Russian offensive doctrine itself. None of this is new. Nothing in this talk is new. It's all been signed posted and indicated in the last 20 years regarding Russia. Okay, so it's more of the same. This is the technological advantages. There are a lot of these unmanned aerial systems or uninhabited aerial systems which is the new politically correct term. You've heard of the barat car TV TV to drone, I believe by Rutkar is the Turkish word for victory or triumph. The harap is an Israeli drone that's been around for 30 years these bad boys are at the altitude that you can see there. In particular can last for 27 hours in the sky. You can't hear it or see it from the ground, but it can hear and see you and you everyone in the audience will have seen the footage that Ukrainian media are putting out on YouTube of Russian soldiers being zapped by uninhabited unmanned aerial systems. They are out there and they're making a big effect on the battle space. What's not in featured are these medium altitude long endurance systems. So these two drones. $200,000 for the DX3 UAS has a three meter wingspan and a 1500 kilometer range 1500 kilometers. Well in Australia that's the difference between Melbourne and Sydney and back again. Okay, the Q double X triple two can go at almost 85% mark which is about 400 miles an hour 450 miles an hour. It can carry to 250 kilogram bombs up to two and a half thousand kilometers. Right. These are medium altitude long endurance systems that can reach out and strike in your rear area that no longer exists. I put it to you that if you load up enhanced explosive into those 250 kilogram bombs, it is not the effect of a 250 kilogram bomb. So putting a 10 fold increase in enhanced explosives, it could be the equivalent of two, two and a half thousand kilogram conventional explosives. So the point of all this is also that the space is constantly being monitored and we see this in Ukraine as well. Planet dot com you can subscribe to planet dot com they have 180 satellites and orbit and they will give you two meter resolution images of the of the globe. Refresh every 24 hours soon every six hours. So in the words of Joe Frazier, the boxer, he can run but he can't hide that there is no rear area. Okay. So the picture on the left hand side is an Azerbaijan drone feed. These are Armenian troops, I think 25 30 kilometers behind the line. They got out of their truck stretch their legs had a cigarette and this is the picture of them a second before they're all destroyed by a Azerbaijan drone. So there is no more rear area and this is certainly what we're seeing in Ukraine with civilians 1500 kilometers behind the line being targeted by Russian missile systems. The challenge is for logisticians to think tactically more on this in the moment. Oh, everyone's familiar with the concept no man's land in World War one. So this is an area that was swept by far that you could not enter dead ground. Raise your head you'll get it shot off the entire Baltic region now no man's land. So if you have missiles that have a range of 1500 kilometers. If you have bad boys like that Russian intermediate range ballistic missile. The whole of your country is a no man's land functionally effectively. And this is certainly what's being reflected in in Ukraine. We go into Russian targeting behavior willful disregard of international humanitarian law. Now, Russia has demonstrated system partner behavior, a couple of points there to do with placing targets of military value next to churches and places of cultural value targeting medical facilities directly I have that on first hand from colleagues in the Georgian military medical service. And the excuse is always that collateral damage the euphemism for non targets of non military value being hit is that is targeting is imprecise. From what we can see and we don't have enough data to support things at the moment conclusions at the moment we haven't been here long enough to make conclusions. It looks like the Russian Federation up to the same tricks in Ukraine. This is a demonstrated and consistent pattern of behavior. Now, if you say that well it's due to targeting being a very imprecise science. This argument is consistently not holding much water as Tom goes by. With medical facilities in particular getting to the question of military medical logistics. In the new barbarism of war the laws of armed conflict have moral power to whole parties responsible anymore. Now this is a hospital in Syria, hit by accidentally possibly by a Russian or Syrian piloted vehicle launching a missile. That's a whole argument about laws of armed conflict and the erosion of the nation state I won't go into it here but this is one of the symptoms of that. I've ratified the Geneva Conventions that's the good news you get a smiley for that. But you also get a non smiley for how many times medical facilities were targeted in Syria by Syrian and Russian planes in the eight month period, according to two sources between 200 and 300 times by my math. That's at least one to two times a day. Right, the next point is the use of hybrid actors such as private military companies and other proxies. In the rogue's gallery you see the little green men in the middle, the left, Islamic State on the on the middle to the right, Dennis push shillen and the other bloke on the left. Let me move this icon, Pashashnik I'm sorry for the Russian speakers in the audience. They are respected the leaders of Luhansk and Donetsk People's Republic, not recognized by anyone. Pardon my pronunciation. Vladimir Putin's ex celebrity chef is actually the worst kept Kremlin secret, the founder and owner of Wagner Group, which is a Russian extension of foreign policy. Proxies and little green men, none of these parties or entities can be a party to international humanitarian law. IHL international humanitarian law wrongly referred to as the Geneva Conventions, they form part of it, they're not all of it, can only be agreed to and ratified signed and ratified by nation states. If you don't have a nation state, IHL doesn't really apply into this point, being what will future war look like. After Rob Johnson at the future warfare conference in Amsterdam two weeks ago, his answer was how will you know you are in a war. So how will you know you are actually in a war, this is the other problem. Nature Russian offensive doctrine itself is another point I'd like to make here. I won't go into this in detail. Now, most of you, some of you may have heard of Glubokhaya operation which is Russian for deep battle. It's a form of combined arms tactic that was used to success in the Eastern Front in the Second World War by the Red Army. There are several key features of battle artillery which I've outlined there in red is a key feature of deep battle intense artillery barrages saturation of grid squares and areas with high explosive. Russian army, everyone thinks it's a tank army is it has tanks, less of them after going into Ukraine. However, it is more an artillery army with tanks. This very quickly is an organizational chart of a Russian motorized brigade. The little symbols are tactical symbols. The point of this tree diagram. If you look at the red rings, the left hand side red ring actually shows you the number of artillery units in a Russian motorized rifle brigade. That is three to four times the equivalent of artillery in a British Brigade, a US Stryker Brigade or Australian Combat Brigade. They have a lot of artillery. They also have a lot of air defense, which is the one in the middle and they situate the electronic warfare down at brigade level for all of those of you in the know. These assets are intense and focused. The Russian army is an artillery army and artillery is a big factor of the way they do war. And the way they do war is to go into urban areas and just simply destroy them. So the Western approach generally is to identify targets and go after targets of interest. The Russian approach, as has been shown in Grozny in 1994, as has been shown in Aleppo in 2013, as has been shown in Homs in 2013 is about saturating grid squares with high explosive and just destroying everything in that area. And we have evidence of this. That's how they do it. And if you've got a lot of artillery, that's how you do it. The picture at the beginning is actually a picture of the modern logistic battle space. This is a battle space packed with sensors. All movement is seen. You are 100% observed when moving to contact. So as the lady in her dress moves across that red carpet, she's 100% observed. There is nowhere to hide on the red carpet. So even if you employ camouflage trying to cross the red carpet, you will leave tracks. I've seen drone footage of tanks under camouflage. You will see them because you follow the tracks from the drone. There's no point putting a camouflage net or turning a radio. You will see it. It tanks a 70 ton vehicle will leave tracks and grass. There's nothing to it. And lastly, this logistic room services knocked on my door. This logistic target is a soft skin unarmored target with nowhere to hide. And if you put a red sign on the back of that model, it doesn't really provide that much protection. This is an analogy of the modern tactical logistic space. A couple of words on resilience. The definition of resilience of use for this talk is this one by Christopher and Peck, very well known in the supply chain management business. Academia returning to an original state, moving to a new state after being adaptive, being flexible, adaptability, transformation. This is one of the senses of resilience. However, resilience is an overused word. So in the recent integrated review, UK integrated review in 2021, I counted as I was used 85 times in the UK integrated review. And there were not a single definition was given of what resilience actually was in NATO. There are a lot of definitions going around in the system, especially in the latest NATO doctrine that's been released. It's not really that well defined. That's actually one of the reasons why I'm doing this PhD. It's an overused ill defined word. It's a catch all that I think in the end means nothing unless you define it. Very common resilient response curve. Most of you in the audience will have seen it, ladies and gentlemen, it's about a big stress. You've got performance on the left, time on the right, big stress performance drops. Resilience is a measure of how quickly, how readily you return to a functioning state or a new functioning state. So resilience is in that red ringed area of the curve. So when we're thinking about future resilience in NATO with military medical logistic systems, we need to think about dispersal, not being in one place. We need to disaggregate. So we have a central system of command and that central system of command is knocked out the system knocks out systems need to be more self functioning. That's what I define as disaggregation. We have to stop thinking about fixed territorial defence depots. So you recall about eight slides before, either was that squiggly map of the tactical area of operations with the BSA, the brigade support area. It's a fixed aggregated, non-dispersed group of logistic assets, fuel, medical engineers, workshops that can be hit. The aim of all this is logistic resilience. This is a slide of the European Union battle group medical treatment facility I took a month ago when I was part of the evaluation team. This is how they operate. This is how military medical logistic units operate in NATO during article five exercises. So the last article five exercise that I attended, all the military medical units were aggregated like this in an article five conflict. The red, the correction, the yellow ring is the radius of one one hundred and twenty two millimetre Russian dumb artillery round, no laser guidance, no smart anything. It's just an artillery shell. If it lands in the middle of that, it takes the whole facility out. This is what I mean by dispersal and disaggregation. And what we as NATO military medical logisticians need to do is to think about operating in a way that's not so aggregated. That may be difficult to do with doctors and medical staff who used to working in these sorts of situations. So word from our sponsor. My PhD is on resilience. It's on how do we deliver military medical logistics in an article five battlefield, which is a NATO article five and attack on one. Is it a take on all major war fighting? How do we assess that resilience? And most importantly, how do we assess define and assess that resilience so that an operational commander can actually assess how resilient their unit is that will save their lives and the units and their function. Anyway, that's the end of my talk. That's my email address with the usual ACL dot ac dot UK domain name, and I'll turn it over to you, Mark. Thank you. So I'll stop sharing. All right, thank you, Ronald. I must say I'm impressed you got through all 30 slides in under half an hour. So well done. I definitely had my doubts. Let's turn it over right now to Patrick could leave had some some comments for discussion. And then after Patrick has given his comments then we'll open it up for questions from the audience. So Patrick, please go ahead. Well, yeah, I just echo Mark's comments that run that was impressive. And if you should start doing some lectures pretty quickly, so you can rattle through your slides that well. Thank you for the interest and stuff. Thanks for that. And there's loads. I thought there was lots of interesting tidbits in there of in terms of like the T80 and the cost of that and the drones as well little tactical pieces of information. But I suppose what I would do is, is wanting to, you know where you sort of finished up about how do you see the Western response to this changing battlefields, you know, and there's a few questions to unpack from that I suppose. So the, the start one is looking at the medical facilities and the way that it's set up in NATO. Yeah, and then looking at Russia's conventional capabilities. Do you think that we need to be as worried about those capabilities as we were before Ukraine or not. They're also there in their will and intend to target, for example, medical facilities against the West. It's a different, it's a different bag of kettle of fish, you know, to attack to do it in Georgia in 2008 versus a NATO hospital. Gosh. I think I'll answer that question at two levels. We have learned. No, wrong. We have seen what they do. And we haven't learned the lessons. Suddenly it comes close to us and it becomes a concern, or it might be a concern. I assess that in the NATO military medical area, there is very little concern. Because the senior people in NATO military medicine are a certain generation that didn't have to worry about that they grew up in a place where the nation state did war, and we followed the laws of armed conflict I think that's the first I think it's slightly a generational I think it's also a denial problem denial not being a river in Africa, but a question of well look really that can't happen to us. As to whether well, there were Georgians, they were Syrians they couldn't possibly do it to NATO. I think that's an assumption I think that's an assumption with respect as valid as saying you know what the Japanese will never do at night time in 1942 because they can't fly at night they don't have good vision. It's not a good assumption. I think we have to assume that will be targeted. I think it is better to assume that will be targeted and redo our doctrine and our tactics techniques and procedures more than assuming that we won't be targeted and the enemy will continue to respect the laws of armed conflict, especially since that enemy may not be a recognized nation state, as I pointed out in the middle of my talk they may be a private military company, they may be a in Islamic state type insurgency they may be a rogue state. I to answer your question. Yes, I believe that this needs to be looked at rather than not looked at. And I don't believe that we want to be targeted. Sorry to put a double negative in there as barbarism advances and as we find mass graves in Ukraine. Why can't that happen to NATO. If you want to win a war and you knock out the military medical logistics which is 2%, you will knock out the capability to continue operations. It's the quickest way to do it. In theory anyway, I would say you're totally right about you have to prepare for the worst and hope for the best. And I agree. Nevertheless fighting NATO, if you take out for example a NATO hospital in a conflict with NATO guess what's going to happen to your centralized hospitals, etc. Now the Russians will go well we don't care we don't care about casualties in the way that NATO do so. No I agree with you I agree with you I was just sort of being I was just sort of pushing the envelope a little bit. In in in terms of future. So, like what does this look like to you if if you know we've had centralized hospitals and as they do you have generally centralized echelon logistics, it was different in Afghanistan because of the nature and in some way NATO has got a more or has practiced a more. What sort of protected tactical focus logistics in terms of its we surprise in Afghanistan and the Russians have done so far with their soft skin vehicles and absolutely no protection in Ukraine. But what do you see that is kind of what does it look like the logistics of the future done by the West and what where do you see like is it going to be drones warms deliveries over the last tactical mile and robotics obviously what's your kind of sense of how does this work obviously you're going to have to be dispersed and another element of this is not only dispersed but limited comms. Probably, you know. Yes, what what do I see interesting question as a really good question. Unusually from an Australian Army Reserve officer. A lot of my experience has actually been in the Baltics and in the closed space of Estonia Lithuania and Latvia. What we are seeing is the application of. I don't want to go down a tangent your resistance operating concept so it's it's total defense based on making a nation's facilities resilient and that includes health facilities. So what we will be seeing I believe much like the special forces community is will be breaking our centralized treatment areas are logistic nodes into much smaller nodes. And look across the Pacific is what the US Marines are thinking of practicing with contested logistics in the in the South China Sea in the China area of operations if I put it that way. They are looking at many disaggregated nodes that are all self functioning and able to to function when the overriding network of command control is disrupted. And we know that the Chinese protect practice what they call the three warfare's and one of them is systems destruction that is actually written in PLA military doctrine back to this talk. So I believe that we're going to have dispersed nodes. We're going to have decentralized command known as mission command. And we're going to have. The technological advantages of unmanned aerial systems but more to the point unmanned ground systems. So a single unmanned ground system is done by mil cyst in Estonia now can carry one stretch a casualty or two on a totally unmanned vehicle. That has artificial intelligence that can actually work out its best its best route. Its maintenance schedule is all defined by the algorithms in its AI. So I think we're looking at a constrained battle space. We're not going to have the kind of helicopter evacuation you saw and I saw in Afghanistan because helicopters are not flying. There is YouTube video after YouTube video Russian attack helicopter is getting zapped by man pads man portable air defense missiles. We can't do that now. We're going to have to move them out somehow or maybe we don't move them out at all. So one commentator said to me US Army medical officer. This is not blood far forward. This is blood far rear. So instead of pushing blood forward and saving lives. Maybe we just keep it in the rear area for the ones who managed to survive that we can get them back. That's a totally different paradigm. So I think in response to your question summarize it's about dispersal desocrogation nodes, limited battlefield movement, use of unmanned vehicles, changing thinking and changing thinking with casualties and what we're prepared to tolerate. So if it's nodes, does this mean kind of stocks and I'm not just talking medical here, but stocks actually push forward into packs almost and then and then more resilience and I guys this is what you have if it kicks off that's it like you're not going to be in comms you're likely to get anything back so you're you know when you run out of that you're going to be overrun essentially is that what we're looking at. It has to be just once that run before you answer that I just for the audience, could you if you guys have questions we'd like us to field after Patrick and Ron are done the discussion. Could you put them either in the chat, or in the q amp a button below. You can also use the hand function I can enable you to talk about sorry Ron your answer to Patrick's question. Yeah, we need to look at the special forces community for that Patrick, the special forces community I used to operating away from established support in a disaggregated disperse manner in nodes with self contained command and control. I think soft is the way we look at I'm not a soft expert I've actually never worked in a soft posting, but looking at their resistant operating concept that developed, especially to be applied in the Baltics. I think I feel that's probably the way we're going. Just a quick word on intergenerational stuff what we're teaching in staff colleges needs to change as well. So, NATO staff colleges still teaching this nonsense about front lines rear areas forward edge of battle area, as though they are solid trench lines and Napoleonic lines. The reason the Russians got zapped so badly was there was no frontline. They were pushing down roads and Russian hunter killer teams are getting behind the lines and zapping their logistic convoys. There is no longer a frontline. And this is reminiscent of Afghanistan. Very Middle East, but this is one of them. And I suppose so the next one is that the the kill to wounded ratio that we've all become accustomed to growing since Vietnam and even before is going to a trophy basically. And you'd see that if there's a major war and it will come back down to something much more because essentially for other listeners that it got up to I think in Afghanistan the US was able to have basically their medical evacuation was so good that it got to one one death for every 10 seriously wounded, you know, something like that around there because and then when it's usually like in a second or more one to three for a functioning and the Russians are operating at around one to three at the moment. So, so I suppose we'll expect that to go down. I think Ron, you know, with you and I could chat for ages on this but I should open it up or mark maybe what would like to open it up for some questions and comments from the audience. Yeah, there's nothing in the chat or the Q&A yet but does anyone have a question. Feel free to hit the raise hand function I can allow you to talk. Use your vocal chords instead of typing. Nothing yet. I've stunned them to silence. Yeah. I'll jump in then. What do you know you mentioned in the in your presentation about costs being subordinate, you know, to the mission, which, but like, you know, my own research on this is sort of like efficiency has kind of become almost certainly in peace time and to basically even in wartime. The primary judgment on certainly British military logistics, you know, how much is it going to cost and how efficiently you can do this to make savings rather than effectiveness, you know, and military effect which is ultimately what we're judged at in warfare. What's your thoughts on that. My thoughts on that very easy to reply to this one Patrick, I think defense procurement is, it's not schizophrenic that's the wrong use of the psychiatric term it's multi personality disorder. So at one hand, defense procurement is all at best value for money, lowest price, most technically compliant tender LPTC, having spent some time in that contracting procurement area both as a civilian bidding and as a military person designing the bids. It is multi multi personality disorder. What do I mean by that. On one hand, value for money and cost is paramount. However, there will be an urgent situation where that's all put aside and the example of M wraps in Afghanistan is a good one so an M wrap for those of you don't know is a mind resistant armored vehicle. The Pentagon resisted deploying these to Afghanistan, or is it Iraq, until Robert Gates the Defense Secretary actually personally intervened and made them buy it and send it to the troops. The US procurement people were not going to bother because it wasn't that area. There was that disconnect between the operational side and the procurement side. So when I say it's multi personality, what the operational guys often want is not what the procurement guys have programmed five years into the future and suddenly this urgent demand has come up. All the nations as you know Patrick they try and get round this with this urgent procurement program but the fact remains defense procurement is a stove pipe organization. One side doesn't often talk to the other and we don't really know what's going on. So both things are true. Cost is paramount cost containment is paramount, but the mission is also paramount. And I think it's a dynamic balance between the bean counters and the war fighters to oversimplify it, you know, very. The national sense of mission priority really do. Yes. Yes. Yeah, you can always borrow if you have to, essentially. You can support your cause but yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Now it's interesting I remember on the procurement from my own experience. They, they brought out a new blue force tracker personal one for a platoon level, and they've been developing this I think it was with Nokia or something for years, right. I think it had gone through all the infantry trials we got handed this is a new piece of kit it should be handy it was squatty proof. And they gave it to me and we use it for a day or two in Afghanistan, but they hadn't thought this through right, it took a batteries a triple a batteries per unit imagine to run it. Yeah, didn't think about that was for eight hours so you needed to be carrying each person count 24 triple a batteries out in the 40 degree Afghan heat we were just like this is just bananas how are we going to carry all this. Yeah, yes. And it was sacked off from that perspective. Like we were just like this is logistically too difficult for us to use not really that it's sort of half work but so sometimes the things that come through exactly until they meet contact with with the reality which changes, you don't actually know. You don't. Yeah, but I did see the chief of the defense over here say that actually maybe going urban urgent operation requirements off the shelf. You know the future it's for British procurement. And he just said that in the last couple of days so we shall see. We shall see. No, and what about your run with your PhD like are you how are you conceptualizing change, like what, what's your kind of theoretical route on on things. The practical route on things is that I originally started off to design a resilient resilience assessment methodology to be applied at the tactical level. That's too big a project. Yeah, I'm actually limiting it to the first part of that process which is identifying inputs to resilience for a tactical commander. So it's quite a modest PhD achievable objective. The trouble with resilience assessment methodologies as they require extensive databases and you have to be able to examine outputs. You have to be able to examine the result to see the system is resilient. That is much too big for a PhD thesis. That's postdoc stuff. Yeah, yeah, and beyond. Systems systems systems stuff basically you need a whole team. Just very quickly, I've got a two phase research methodology. The first one look talks to experience military medical logistic practitioners and ask them what are the inputs. The second one is, I don't want to jinx this and we're amongst friends here but 99% certain they're going to run my PhD research as part of a Estonian national defense exercise next year. And they're integrating my logistics war game into the exercise to assess how we can engender resilience within the training audience. So that's going to be big. It's a very real world application of a PhD theory, I think. That's pretty impressive. And you've kind of come up with this war game yourself rather than. Yes, yeah. I've come up with a war game myself and I think it's had, I think three or four iterations, UAE jumped onto it, the Estonians jumped onto it, Belgium, Lithuanian and NATO at big risk warrior so it's had a few iterations and it's now in like Mark five so. Amazing. Yeah, that's, that's, that's where I'm going on. I hope that answers your question. Yeah, no that's really, really interesting, you know, really interesting. You can get me an invite for the exercise. Do you want one? Yeah, definitely. I'd be really interested to see is anyone is there any questions there are we. Yes, we do have some questions. All right. First question for you Ron is from Patrick Hinton. I'm not sure if you can read them in the Q&A yourself but I'll just read them out for everyone. Do military medical stockpiles suffer from the lack of resilience and industrial capacity that has been seen on the Western munitions side. Our solutions being pursued in light of Ukraine. Patrick, what a great question. This is why I'm doing a PhD in military medical logistic resilience because class 8 which is the US Australian classification of medical supplies are the least resilient logistic items in your logistic family of items you know of your 36,000 items with NATO stock numbers medical supplies and blood. They're the least resilient. So that's why I've picked them because they are the least resilient. They have shelf life issues. Absolutely. So ammunition goes off. So to speak, we don't have enough of it. This is the denial about 2030 in Libya. The West ran out of munitions we had to use we had to get it from the Americans. The shortage of ammunition is is ignored denied the same with medical supplies but medical supplies are even less resilient. So a unit of blood after one hour at room temperature loses the ability to coagulate it loses ability to do any of the things that we wanted to do to save lives in a resuscitation. Absolutely. They're not resilient. They're the least resilient and absolutely have shelf life issues. They are thermo labile. Very sensitive. We've got another question for you as well run. This one's from Danny Looney. Not sure if it's Danny Danny. The question from Danny is you discussed visual detection with us. How does the increased signal detection compete with the visual. Danny says dispersed forces may need to talk more often. Yes, Danny. That's a great question. I talked about UAS but understand this is a very limited lecture. I can't go into every single part. I made the point that the battlefield is is under constant vision the model walking across the carpet. So there is ground movement target indication radar that can actually detect movement out to 200 kilometers. It's very gross. However, if we see a group of metal objects moving at two miles an hour through a forest, it's probably an infantry unit. Okay, you can then queue in more refined methods of detection. So there's not just the good old turn the radar off stuff, which can lead to accidents. The whole electromagnetic signature and you know, as I know, a brigade headquarters, a company headquarters lights up like a Christmas tree. So when you actually see it across the electromagnetic spectrum, it lights up in infrared. It can be seen from space. Yeah, totally. So your question about, well, are there a whole lot of other modalities? Yes, it's more than just visual visual is important. But yes, there's all sorts of other things to consider in the concept of military medical logistic resilience. It may be virtually impossible to reduce the electromagnetic signature of a military medical logistic unit or will it. We haven't done that yet. We haven't tested that we can disperse and disaggregate them. We actually haven't seen what sort of signature they give out, at least in the unclassified research I've seen. It's not a single study that looks at that with military medical units, which generate a lot of heat and signature like a company or battalion headquarters. I think that's for future research. It's well outside the scope of a single PhD. All right, does anyone have any other questions from the audience for Dr. T. Patrick, do you have any more questions while we're maybe. Well, on that point, it's really interesting. Actually, because I think in Danny's they're asking like, right, yes, disperse units would need to communicate more. I wonder if they'd be able to, depending on the conventional capabilities of the adversary and whether they're, you know, certainly this was something that was being bandied about before Ukraine that Russia had the edge on the EW, the EW front. But I don't know actually how it's still capable, but I don't know if it's to that extent, you know, capable in terms of it would force a disperse on it and a lack of use of comms. But it does, it does come down to that there's another element to this too, which is all tied in which is actually orders and the pace of orders and this ties in with what Ron was talking about in terms of training staff officers, all officers, because the orders process certainly if it's anything like I went through so cumbersome and slow, the tempo and disperse was, yeah, this is it. You know, and I remember looking at Libya and like, God, a militia in Libya could probably organize a company attack faster than a company, you know, over WhatsApp. Now, look, yeah, it's in the clear, it's hiding in the noise. The problem is, when the militia attack, they're not as well trained as the company. If they go through this is a balance to be struck. But there's certainly more to be done there as well. I think about pace and tempo. Yes, I think the militia would use signal. The Stony. Yeah, yeah. Signal, the obsolete use signal. Yes, thank you for reminding me about Danny's question. Danny, your question about units talking to one another is very important. I want to reference Jack Wattling at Roosie on this one. Jack makes the point that there is a tolerance in the west about not communicating. What does that mean? If you switch radios off and you move people around at night, you are going to get accidents. So even with the special forces training, there's only a certain amount of training they can do before they reach a point where people start getting killed during training. So the way the level at which we can practice noncommunication and dispersal may actually be limited by occupational health and safety considerations in the west. And we may not actually be able to turn off our radios as much or turn off our communications as much to practices as we could. Why? Because in the real world of training, people will start having accidents and people will die. And it'll turn up on the front page of pick a newspaper, International Herald Tribune, The Sun, whatever. So the point about communication is it's a balance between practicing dispersal, practicing limited communications, but balancing that limited communications against the risk of accidents and training accidents. Not my point, Jack Wattling's point, but a very good point to mention here, I think. This is not a wicked problem, but it's something that needs to be looked at more, I think, especially with military medical logistics, not just combat units, but logisticians. Patty, you had a point. No, I was just going to say, I'd say in the case of a general war, though, that risk appetite for occupational accidents would go out the window, essentially, you know, you have a member in the Second World War that had people jumping at the back of trucks to see if they land from a parachute. Yeah, I took Danny's question as, you know, what do we do in the steady state? I think with urgency, with the Ukraine, their nation is as an existential threat at its doorstep on its territory. So all those things tend to go out the window a bit, you agree. I think the real big one here is going to be Taiwan, actually, you know, as we move on. In some ways, Ukraine, and this is not to diminish the struggle there, but I think we'll probably see at the contours of how it may end over the next year or so. And Taiwan logistically would be absolutely fascinating. We could talk about that at Harmonum, you know. That's a big named area of interest for myself as an Australian military person. Yeah, looking at that area of the South China Sea, Chinese distance strike. Yeah, exactly. Chinese three warfare technique. Yeah, doctrine. Yeah, that's another, I think that's another session. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I don't know, Mark, is there any other questions or? Mark, I'll throw it out there when any last questions for Dr. T from the audience. If not, I think, Ron, we've worked you fairly hard already. Yeah. Seems like you've had a very good discussion with Patrick and some of the questions are quite informative as well. So I'd like everyone, you know, just to thank, thank Ron for his talk. So join me in a round of applause, if you will. Thank you. There we go. Thanks, Mark. Yes, thank you as well, Patrick for being such an engaged discussant before we end the session. I'd just like to remind everyone that the next event taking place in the new voices seminar is going to be on the 9th of November. Thanks, we're going to have Dr. Francisco Missola, who's a visiting lecturer in international relations and security studies at City University of London, speaking about community policing in Lebanon between counterinsurgency and cyberbullying. And again, that'll be 9th of November, same time as this session. So yeah, thanks again, Ron, for a fascinating talk and a good rest of the afternoon.