WarTalk: Kofman on Why Russia's Doing Badly

The ChinaTalk team is going to CoRL (the Conference on Robot Learning) in Austin! Reply to this email if you’d like to hang out between November 9th and 12th. We’re also doing karaoke on the 11th — RSVP here if you’d like to join! Ukraine and Russia have rebuilt their armies around drones, deception, and long-range strike. What should the U.S. military take from it? Michael Kofman joins WarTalk regulars Jordan Schneider, Justin McIntosh, and Tony Stark. We discuss: How the Starshield throttle grounded Ukraine’s mid-strike drones and jet-powered interceptors, and why no one, Ukrainians included, knows what Washington wants in exchange. How much leverage the U.S. still has over the war, and why Europe can’t replace America’s role in NATO. Why buying drones means nothing without drone platoons and companies to fight with them. Why no one owns the night anymore, and why the U.S. military has no culture of decoys. The difference between a lesson and an observation, and why wet-gap crossings are harder than Twitter thinks. What Congress should push on: force design, airbase hardening, and hard questions about how the U.S. plans to fight. Plus: the perks of being a military analyst and Oregon Trail merch. Starshield Gets Throttled Jordan Schneider: Michael Kofman, the leading analyst of his generation, has taught me more about this war over the past four years than anyone else. Reading Mike’s tweets and articles , and listening to his podcast The Russia Contingency , honestly got me into this field. Today we’ll cover recent developments in Ukraine, starting with the Starlink–Starshield drama and Operation Vivaldi, then broaden out to lessons from the war — and some meta-discussion about the discussion of lessons. We won’t stay at the 101 level. Justin McIntosh: One thing before we get serious — Mike, is that Jean-Luc Picard on your wall? Well done. Michael Kofman: It is. It’s a very serious painting of him in the garb of a Napoleonic-era officer. I put it up during COVID, when we were all stuck at home taking meetings in front of a blank blue wall. Since then it’s been a lot of fun. When people see me on PBS, I get messages from random couples saying, “My wife and I have been arguing — is that Patrick Stewart?” Those are my favorite emails to reply to. Jordan, I’m sorry if I got you into the field. I’ll tell you something you’ve probably already figured out: ain’t no one gotten rich by becoming a military analyst. You’ve never heard somebody say, “That’s it, I’m cashing in. I’m gonna go make money, I’m gonna do military analysis.” So good luck. Jordan Schneider: It’s all about the friends we make along the way. Justin McIntosh: We didn’t start WarTalk to make money. Justin McIntosh: That’s a good kickoff for the news of the last week and a half. Someone in the United States — blame has fallen on both the administration and Elon Musk, increasingly on Musk — slowed the Starshield network in Ukraine to the point that it could no longer keep up with incoming Russian drones and missiles, so Ukraine’s interceptors stopped working. That has contributed to more civilian casualties in the bombardment of Kyiv. Mike, what are you hearing about that decision and its impact? Michael Kofman: What was throttled was specifically Starshield, not just Starlink. In Ukraine, they’re effectively two different subscriptions. Both run on the same SpaceX constellation, but Starshield is managed through government contracts — I believe Germany and Poland pay for Ukraine’s Starshield subscriptions. Starlink has been velocity-limited since the beginning of the year. Ukrainian forces use Starshield for what they call mid-strike: long-range strike drones operating 50 to 300 kilometers deep. There are two groups. Light mid-strike — Hornets, Darts, typically with around 10-kilogram payloads — targets Russian logistics and troops, normally 100 to 150 kilometers deep. Then, there’s heavy mid-strike, which consists of big drones like the FP-2, with payloads in the hundreds of kilograms, operating out to 300 kilometers against command-and-control nodes and other larger targets. What happened is a throttle to 100 miles per hour. The first night it barely worked at half that, so almost nobody could fly. Eventually it started operating at upwards of 80 miles per hour, then became unstable between 80 and 100. Lots of units began losing drones because connectivity was inconsistent. That has created three big problems. First, drones have to fly below a speed limit that is itself inconsistent — nominally around 160 km/h, but unstable as low as 130. Flying that slowly, many get shot down by Russian interceptor drones. Second, some of the heavy drones simply can’t fly that slowly; they aren’t designed to. Just because somebody woke up and decided to cap the data connectivity Ukraine needs to directly control these drones at 160 km/h doesn’t mean the drones can operate at that speed. Third, Ukraine has been scaling production of jet-powered interceptor drones. Russia’s jet-powered strike drones, the Geran-4 and Geran-5, are basically ground-launched cruise missiles. Their altitude and velocity price out traditional interceptors: they come in at roughly six to eight kilometers of altitude and several hundred kilometers per hour. Ukraine has mostly intercepted them with F-16s and traditional air defense, which isn’t sustainable, so it has been scaling up a new jet-powered interceptor. Those also run through Starshield. Bottom line: the throttle has hampered both types of mid-strike, Ukraine’s effort to control operational depth, and its ability to scale up jet-powered interceptors . Yesterday there was a sense that something had changed and some units could fly faster, but in general a throttle still seems to be in place. Connectivity drops out a lot. That’s the worst part: it’s one thing to be told the speed limit, another when the limit isn’t what they said, you don’t know what it is, and you lose the platform mid-strike because the connection dropped. Remember, these drones are dynamically flown and targeted, typically over Ukrainian territory and surrounding areas like the Black Sea. They aren’t autonomous. I’d say 99% of systems in Ukraine are at best semi-autonomous, and usually remotely operated. That’s why Starshield matters. Jordan Schneider: Before we get to the fallout, can we get some strategic context on why this is happening in the first place? Michael Kofman: Speculation is rife. The Wall Street Journal ran two days of stories on this. Trump has clearly been frustrated with Zelensky and has been trying to get him to stop striking Russian refineries — that’s been the story for the past two weeks. That blew up into a spat because the United States signed this ridiculous deal to import tiny volumes of Russian diesel. I think the total amounts to about one day’s worth of U.S. consumption — which is super useful, and I’m being sarcastic, considering we’re a major exporter of these products and don’t need to import them from Russia to begin with. As the Journal covered it, Elon Musk may have pitched the throttle to the administration, they approved it, and Starshield got throttled. Ukrainians received official notice with no explanation. Everyone involved in working on this issue got blindsided, and they’ve been trying to get it fixed since. The latest story is that Trump may have talked to Musk about removing the limit — I’m just repeating what I’ve read. Hopefully it gets fixed soon, because the United States is now actively hampering Ukraine’s ability to conduct military operations in very impor