Are U.S. Special Operations Ready for the Drone Era?

In this episode of the At the Boundary podcast, Dr. Tad Schnaufer was joined by Lt Col. John "JAY" Patrich to talk about the need for innovation when it comes to strategic drone attacks, with a focus on the context of the Russia-Ukraine war, and in light of Lt Col Patrich’s recent decision brief on drone warfare. 

Lt Col Patrich dove into the need for creativity and innovation of drones to achieve air superiority or air denial, particularly within the air littoral space. The vast array of drones (in size and capability) lends itself to making progress with innovative research that could change the approach of irregular warfare. The rapid evolution in how Russia and Ukraine have been using drones in combat was a key topic, as were possible future near-peer conflicts and their potential to push drone innovation in a new direction.  
  
 To round out the conversation, they explored the necessity of policies to guide drone uses, and the necessity of drone education for those within the government and military who are tasked with acquiring and maintaining the drones. 

Links from the episode:

• Register for the Florida Security Forum: Port and Maritime Security

• Port Security Interview with Port Tampa CEO, Paul Anderson 

• What Can WWII Teach Us About Future Conflicts with China? GNSI Research Initiative with guest Dr. Craig Symonds

At the Boundary from the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida, features global and national security issues we’ve found to be insightful, intriguing, fascinating, maybe controversial, but overall just worth talking about.

A "boundary" is a place, either literal or figurative, where two forces exist in close proximity to each other. Sometimes that boundary is in a state of harmony. More often than not, that boundary has a bit of chaos baked in. The Global and National Security Institute will live on the boundary of security policy and technology and that's where this podcast will focus.

The mission of GNSI is to provide actionable solutions to 21st-century security challenges for decision-makers at the local, state, national and global levels. We hope you enjoy At the Boundary.

Look for our other publications and products on our website publications page.

Transcript

Tad Schnaufer: 0:00

Well, Jay, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Glad to be here. Well, you know you have an upcoming decision brief going to be published here with GNSI, and this covers Special Operation drone doctrine and operations, you know, and what that might look like for the future in a near peer conflict. Why don't we begin at first as we look at special operations forces and their use of drones. How does that compare to conventional forces and their use of drones? Where's, where's the big difference here, and why focus on special

Jay Patrich: 0:26

operations? Absolutely. So there are a lot of similarities. Obviously, I've been in Special Operations for 14 years, or something like that. Now. I've been doing drone things the entire time, and I've seen sort of us progress from we had MQ one, that was basically a prototype that they fielded immediately, just because the capability was critical to the MQ nine, RQ four, all doing different kinds of intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance missions. And these are larger drones right through our audience as we're progressing. It was primarily big capital fleet, ship style drones, things that are theater level, assets that geographic combatant commanders and Task Force commanders are managing, as opposed to something that's platoon or battalion level. We go and they are doing a lot of work in the global war on terror, especially with respect to manhunting, and our Q fours are doing things like, you know, characterizing I adds all that we go through. And we began working on smaller ones, right, either anywhere from a handheld drone that someone can keep in a backpack to something that you keep that's 300 400 pounds you keep in Pelican cases. It uses, you know, it requires a couple people to manage and set up and launch and maintain. And we start seeing these things progress. And then 2022 rolls around, and Russia invades Ukraine. And I doubt that people fully understood the impact that small and medium sized drones are going to have on that conflict, but people are studying it now for sure. And when we look at that, we didn't really they the Ukrainians, and now to the Russians, to a lesser extent, are using them in novel ways that we weren't using them, especially from the Western, especially United States side. So we see them doing things to mitigate, or basically go after the overmatch that the Russian hat Russians had on their fifth Gen fighters, their large bomber fleet that the Ukrainians did not have. They're using smaller drones to keep those things either out of the fight entirely or keeping them farther away from the fight, reducing their utility, mitigating that advantage. So as we look, when we look at the state of today in the US, we have a significantly wide family of drones that the US is employing all the way from, you know, Army company command, small held handhelds that are used to look over the next ridge line, those kinds of things, short range spotters for artillery, all The way to we're still using MQ nines, RQ fours. And then they have the Air Force has the collaborative combat aircraft, which is a loyal wingman AI driven, effectively, fighter plane that goes with the traditional man fighters. So I see advances happening. And as I reference in the upcoming work, I see a large amount of literature and research being done on the technical aspects of these drones. So how fast do they go? Are they vertical takeoff and landing, or do they require some other launch and recovery capability? What I don't see is a lot of creative research going into how might we use these in the future in a different way than we're using them right now. So there are some parts of the military I think that are facing a potential failure of imagination, right? So we have group three, which are the medium size drones that we can use, and we're making a lot of innovations on the technical aspects of those drones. What radio do they use? What munition can they carry? How quickly can we iterate on those machines? I'm not seeing us use those in ways that are different than we use the MQ nine fleet that exists today. So we're making this incremental improvement to where we do the same job with a different tool, as opposed to exploring what the new jobs are for the tools. And so back to your question, the difference between conventional and SOF, if you're asking about drone Dock. Doctrine. There really isn't any, and I don't think that you necessarily need specific drone doctrine, but we need some sort of guidance policy on what what we might want to achieve with these drones, as opposed to just getting better and newer technology to do old jobs. So and I liken it to the business use of AI, which you're seeing, some AI that is an interesting employment, some AI that organizes your calendar for you, and then, like the rental car company will come out and be like, Oh, we have our new AI capability. And I wonder that's sort of what you see with drones. You see, i These drones are the future. They're going to be critical in future conflicts. I need some drones. Get out there and buy some drones. But it's not, it doesn't come with and here is how we will change the way we fight. So,

Tad Schnaufer: 5:56

right? Since that imagination piece, and so you know, you talked about the MQ nine, which is the Reaper drones, or the RQ four, which is a Global Hawks. These are large, almost aircraft size drones, right, larger than many aircraft. So as they've gotten smaller, we still have those drones in operation the US, particularly, they're expensive, and we're not a little bit risk averse with them. We're not willing to necessarily get those shot down in mass, as you would have these smaller quadcopter drones, like in Ukraine, where both the Ukrainians and the Russians are producing millions of year. So are you recommending, or at least looking forward, seeing how the US can acquire and then employ these smaller drones in mass, and in mass, when we're talking about hundreds or 1000s of them on the battlefield at one

Jay Patrich: 6:39

time, I would say, I would push back on our risk aversion to those platforms, because you can look at the Middle East, especially Yemen and the Red Sea, and see how many of those we've allowed to be shot down. Sure, and I would argue that they do have more risk tolerance because they view them in comparison to manned aircraft. To answer your question, am I looking into how we should get or develop these en masse? That is beyond the scope of the research that I intend to do, and that's just because, you know, a simple search on any of the academic databases, you will find reams and reams of research, advancing the generative manufacturing, advancing how we create and how we use These, how they are, how they swarm, how they interact with each other. So additionally, I don't know how to do those things, but I am interested more in because all these people are doing all this great work, and all of these, you know, hundreds of manufacturers in the United States and China and elsewhere are making better and better, more advanced drones. I'll just let them do that. But I do want to figure out. I don't want to miss an opportunity to innovate, right? I don't want to keep I don't want to use aircraft carriers like battleships, right? And that's kind of what we're doing. In some ways, there are lots of advancements going, like I said, with collaborative combat aircraft, which I think is a critical capability. Critical capability, no criticism, but it is a new kind of fighter plane. And I see that there are many scenarios where we are using small drones to just look over the next next ridge line, or we use them in the same way that we would use any other guided munition, as opposed to something different, like the way they are. So if the Ukrainians were just sending drones at, you know, just random targets, or using them like artillery, they probably would not have this, the same effect that, or the same success that they're seeing, because the Russians can just overpower them. It's a war of attrition at that point. But they're using them in new creative ways, which I think is really interesting, right?

Tad Schnaufer: 9:10

So what are some of these new creative ways you could imagine that these drones would be used, particularly, like we said, focusing on your decision briefs, focusing on special operations forces,

Jay Patrich: 9:19

USF, right, right? Yeah. So over the past 20 years or more, now, we've been laser focused on the global war on terror. We've not had to deal with integrated air defense. We've not had to deal with a peer out adversary. We've not had to deal with an enemy air force, any of those things. And I wonder, and I don't humble enough to admit that. I don't know what the answer here, but I wonder if now is the time to start shifting Special Operations focus back to a regular warfare I believe that some of that has occurred, and. They, if you look at SOCOM literature, they have a focus on campaigning now, which I think is is a good step. And I wonder if there's more that can be done to move into that irregular warfare campaigning, especially across the Special Operations Air Forces in both usasoc, United States Army Special Operations Command and AFSOC, the air force component to SOCOM. So I'm looking, are there? What should we expect to do? You can also look at the Air Force new one Air Force Concept, their new force design structure, and it's broken into those mission areas. And mission area one has close in under fire, moving. Who does that sound like to you? That sounds like Air Force, or it sounds like Special Operations operators. So I would ask, then, what would they be expected to do? What effects would they be expected to create? Is this a soft seed scenario. Are we doing suppression of enemy air defense? Are we doing it in a new way? Are we empowering existing capabilities so that they can have effects that they weren't able to have before? Are they able to use small teams to make these operational level impacts? And you mentioned air superiority before. So SOF, you know, you could say that SOF has no role in air superiority, and I would say that that's not accurate. I would say that they they have a small role, but there are scenarios in which SOF soft impact will be outsized in especially if we're considering pulsed operations, like the seat the Chief of Staff, the Air Force talks about, people are no longer talking about, like air superiority, air supremacy, like one would think about in Desert Storm, where we're the only one flying. We can do anything we want in the air. Nobody else can do anything. The adversary's got no play. We should expect to have moments of air superiority. We should expect to have areas that we have air superiority that are against another area where we don't have air superiority. So I think there's special operations role in that. I don't see us committing to just counterterrorism in the permissive environment, and then irregular warfare, and then when major combat kicks off, us sitting on the sidelines going, you guys got it now, I don't think that's in the soft DNA

Tad Schnaufer: 12:34

well. And you mentioned, we should mention when we're talking about drones here, we're specifically focused on air aerial drones

Jay Patrich: 12:41

in this case for me, yes, but I think the lessons are the same, sure. So if it's a maritime autonomous vehicle, I think they need to look at it and make sure that they're not just using it like a mine or a torpedo, that they're doing something different, especially within the realm of ISR or implanting cyber devices or, I mean, it's whatever is up to your imagination, I think,

Tad Schnaufer: 13:08

right? So, like you said, trying to achieve different effects, using drones as the instrument to do so. And one thing we're seeing with drones in Russia Ukraine is that most of them are happening in the air littoral space, this concept of air littoral. Could you describe what that space is, and what does that looking like in the next near peer conflict? Is that where a lot of the air combat is going to take place, and it's

Jay Patrich: 13:29

air littoral To answer your second question, I think the answer is yes, this. So this space cannot be ignored for any future fight. You can see it in Ukraine to answer the first part of the question, the air littoral, I think, is a really good name for what we're describing. So you can look at the the Navy. There's a blue water Navy out in the ocean, deep water, and you can equate that to high flying aircraft, bombers, fighters. And then there's the littoral Navy, which is just rivers and more shallow water, you know, close to the close to the shore. And we equate that effectively to a lot of people just use 10,000 feet and below, 10,000 feet down to the surface. And so if you look in Ukraine right now, the air littoral environment, 10,000 feet and below is just buzzing with drones effectively all day. And those drones are doing different things. They're doing ISR. They are doing deep strike or strategic attack, we might say, in doctrinal terms. And they're doing not air superiority, but air denial strategies to say, you know, I'm facing, I'm facing a superior opponent, an opponent with far more and better aircraft than me, with an integrated air defense system that I don't have. So it is unlikely that I will be able to achieve air superiority over that opponent. So the best I can hope for is air denial. To say that if I can. Use the air to go after you. You can't use the air to go after me. And that's sort of what I was mentioning at the beginning, where, with enough drones and enough unpredictability, enough capability, you can go after aircraft that are on the ground. And a lot of people are doing a lot of research to deny this capability, but it is a real capability that people are having a really hard time with. Dealing with a drone swarm. They are hard to track. They don't necessarily emit if they're GPS, only if they're able to navigate that way. So these capabilities are really hard to deal with, and an aircraft is incredibly vulnerable on the ground, so that does things like make you move your strategic forces further away from the battlefield, which gives you logistical problems. It gives you time on target, decrements or degradation, and even in some cases, if there's enough drones, the threat of collision could be enough to drive people further back from the forward line of troops, and just create those strategic dilemmas for the adversary.

Tad Schnaufer: 16:08

Because in the decision brief that will be coming out shortly, you you discussed that initial initial but the Ukrainian attack on Russian aircraft on the ground deep with inside Russia, and this is a operation which soft forces would be particularly skilled and, you know, prepared for. So could you go into a little bit of how that attack inspired your your work here

Jay Patrich: 16:30

absolutely. So I'll admit to not being an expert on those. I've just read a lot of similar things that everyone else has, but it was inspiring, and I was looking at, instead of just looking at the dollar amount of damage that was done, or thinking about where they the Russians now have to move their strategic bomber fleet. What choice, you know, making the adversary make choices that they don't want to. I was thinking more about the men and possibly women that accomplished that feat, and what kind of people were they? And then, to my I don't know if they in the in Ukraine, they would consider those people special operations, but that is a very well suited mission for United States, special operations, who can maybe have language skills, who are moved forward, who are not who are willing to be deep behind enemy lines, or well past the forward line of troops who can set up these things. And they can set up, set them up in creative ways, using the, you know, the back of a truck where they're all docked, and then they all activate at the same time the roof of the truck retracts, they come out. They go after, you know, they use $1,000 drones to go after billion dollar strategic bombers, and when I see that operation go off, I want to make sure that we don't miss out on the capabilities to pull off those big strategic wins with the small teams that just use boldness creativity do things in a different way, using existing technology,

Tad Schnaufer: 18:05

right? So even in the next if there's a major peer to peer conflict, you can see these soft elements potentially operating deep within enemy territory with a large amount of small drones that can have, you know, multi billion dollar effects on the enemy military infrastructure,

Jay Patrich: 18:21

absolutely, or, you know, it's that strategic attack that we, we could, the United States could try to do those things with jasmine, right? But that's, I'm sorry, it's for lack of a bird, a really good, long range missile, okay, they could use that, but perhaps those don't work, or perhaps the magazine of those strategic level assets is dwindling, right? But we still can make quad copters much faster than we can make high end missiles, so I can see Special Operations making those impacts. And perhaps it wasn't a strategic bomber fleet, perhaps it was an area surveillance radar that allows the conventional forces to come in and get those moments of air superiority, to get those operational level wins that really can turn the tide or, Yeah, either the strategic attack thing, or the suppression of them, enemy air defense, like I mentioned, with their surveillance radar. Or I'm going to say right now that I don't know what it could be. I'm not sitting there reading adversary capabilities, but I want to make sure that we begin the different thought that it takes to move on from I think they call it pathway dependence, right? So we have been using drones to do a couple things for a really long time, and we got good at it. And so when we continue to innovate with the smaller drones, we they fly farther, they fly longer, they fly with beyond line of sight. Control, they fly with automation. I want to make sure that we don't use those innovations to get these incremental improvements on HVI hunting right. And if there's, if there's nothing else for them to do, which I think is unlikely, then okay, we'll go back and and get really, really good at HVI hunting, so we don't have to use the very expensive MQ nines. HVI being high value individual, yeah, so finding those terrorist leaders doing that counter insurgency, going after old school al Qaeda people where they live, to make sure that we don't have another 911, another Madrid subway bombing, keeping the pressure on those violent extremist organizations so that the conventional forces can turn their efforts to whatever the nation needs them to at the time, as opposed to spending our conventional forces times keeping pressure on violent extremist organizations.

Tad Schnaufer: 20:55

We'll see that demand for both really continue, as you see in the Middle East now, with these different Iranian proxy groups still operating there, and in some areas of that are lacking governance, the resurgence of Islamic terrorist groups. But we also see the need for the near peer availability to deploy these teams forward, deep behind enemy lines. And we're seeing also the defense piece of it. So we have this littoral aerospace, you know, below 10,000 feet, or however you want to define it, even in Europe today, we had, just the last couple months, many European airports being shut down from drones, and they can't identify, necessarily, where they're coming from. Is it civilian drones, or those Russian agents, or those people that Russia has just paid to do this, just to be disruptive. So what does that look like even, maybe not even in a near peer war, but in this kind of hybrid war sense?

Jay Patrich: 21:46

Yeah, I think that's that's very, very interesting. And there, I'm glad to say that part of the reason for my work in this upcoming decision brief is the acknowledgement that there are a lot of people working on that. One of the when the small we'll just call them smalls, when smalls became a really important national security issue, a lot of people started working on how to defend against these Smalls. Do you jam them? Do we? Are there kinetic effects that we can take after them? And that's good. And the people who are working on it are the people probably that are most vulnerable to it. So the army is very interested in not having grenades dropped on them by quadcopters. And I totally understand. So since they are working on it, I wanted to focus on Okay, instead of defending against them. How will we, the US, use them and share that with our allies. Do we start doing aviation foreign internal defense again? So foreign internal defense is a core Special Operations activity where, you know, go to partner nation and help them build up resistance to whatever it is that is aligned with our national security objectives and our so do we start doing aviation for an internal defense for allied drone forces? And I mean, the most obvious choice for that would be Taiwan, right? So is that a is that a new I guess it wouldn't be new. Is that a mission that we should go back to? And I don't really know the answer. There are a lot of people who have a lot of thought on that and how expensive and how valuable it is, but those are the kinds of things that I want to explore, and that's really the purpose of this decision. Brief, is to pose questions for future research. And there's, you know, I only get 10 months here, so there's likely not all the I won't be able to get to get to all of those questions, and the people who have read it, I've gotten a lot of really good feedback, and there are parts in it that they say I would just push back on this, or I disagree with this component, or I don't think this is going to pan out. And to that, I say, Thank you and good, right? Because that's this decision. Brief doesn't produce solutions or doesn't, doesn't recommend actions for decision makers. Right now, I have more research that will come off come subsequently to this, in which I'll hope to try to answer maybe one or two of the questions, right? Or at least get closer, probably not answer. But

Tad Schnaufer: 24:19

well, and one thing about this field, particularly since the war in Ukraine started, is the rapid evolution of it. So if you look at the drones that the Ukrainians and Russians were using at the beginning of the conflict in 2022 and how those have evolved. So you go from just basic quad copters, right off the shelf, and now they're being modified, you know, greatly to now they're using, you know, fiber optic cables so they cannot be jammed. So this, this is a field that's rapidly evolving, so your research will likely keep up. Have to keep pace with it, not nonetheless, just catch up.

Jay Patrich: 24:49

I hope it keeps evolving and and that's an example of the creativity that I'm talking about with the Ukraine's like or the current Ukrainians, excuse me. And when I knew. Actually heard about drones dragging fiber optic cables. I thought, you know, if somebody brought that to us, we'd say, Not in a million years, right? But it is a tool that is solving a problem for them, either tactically or operationally. I want to make sure that we are in the same headspace to where we look at not just what technological solutions are available, but also what Creative Employment and CR and I would say at the end of it, I talk about, you know, doctrine, organization, materiel. I think, I don't think if we are going to use drones for more irregular warfare topics and major combat operations. I don't think that we're structured for that right now. We are set up to deploy forces based on the global force management allocation plan that the Joint Chiefs put out so those we in FSOC, at least, we are set up very well to satisfy those requirements, and those requirements are almost exclusively counterinsurgency and counterterrorism requirements, so I don't get to make choices about what Our priorities are, but if the priorities change to where we want to use the special operations drone forces to make irregular warfare contributions, I think that it is likely that we'll have to reorganize at least some way, especially if you want innovation to come out of the The tactical level. Right now the there's not places or Centers of Excellence or anything like that that do that advancement. It is done out of hide, in addition to all of the training requirements and everything that it takes to go forward to satisfy that gift map. What's a

Tad Schnaufer: 26:58

gift map the global force

Jay Patrich: 26:59

management allocation plan. It's the Joint Chiefs plan of how we send forces places.

Tad Schnaufer: 27:04

So in Ukraine, we've seen that the pressure, obviously, of the war, this existential threat, the rapid changing of the front lines at the beginning of the war, now a little bit more stagnant. That That, along with really a low sense of bureaucracy within the Ukrainian forces, allowed them to adapt rapidly so they weren't afraid, in a sense, of taking something off the shelf and adapting it. Obviously, the United States is a much more bureaucratic structure for acquiring new technologies and then for fielding them, and then for actually putting them on in a front line unit. So do you see that and possibly hindering this evolution, maybe within the US structure, or do we just need to be able to move faster?

Jay Patrich: 27:42

There's ups and downs to all of this, I think. And so the bureaucratic nature of what we've got right now has benefits. Everybody loves to rail against it, and I do too, but with the size of our enterprise, you can't exist without it. Thankfully, right now, we're not in major combat operations with a peer, which is why I think it's critical that we start working on this right now, so that we don't have to figure out new tactics when we are under fire. I think Secretary hegseth memo about AI, or, excuse me, drone dominance that he put out a while ago is good. But that was actually one of the inspirations for this work as well. So in Secretary hegseth memo, I think it pushes some authority to make purchases, procurement, in the bureaucratic term, to buy drones down to the battalion level, which is the Lieutenant Colonel level. So these, these men and women, have been in the Air Force or the army for 16, 1819, years, something like that. They've been infantry officers, they've been armor officers, they've been artillery officers. What have you Special Operations officers? What do they know about buying drones, what policy or guidance have they been given for, what effects they are expected to achieve with these drones? And the answer to my knowledge is not much. And so we'll get back on that pathway dependence thing, that failure of imagination. So if I'm a infantry battalion commander right now and I get the authority to buy some drones, I'm going to buy some long range spotting drones. I'm going to ask if they have some that have kinetic capabilities for me to go after somebody who's holed up in a building or on the other side of something, or if I can't get artillery quickly, those kinds of things. So that's good because that that person can use those for positive effects on the battlefield. But wouldn't it be better if they knew a little more about how drones might be employed, what the best practices are, and also. So are there a different effects that they are expected to achieve? Are they supposed to use their drone money for drone defense, or are they supposed to be buying offensive drones? And I don't know the answers, and I wonder if they do.

Tad Schnaufer: 30:12

It's interesting. And obviously, with any new technology, there's a learning curve there. And like you mentioned your whole piece here looks to engage the decision makers in a sense of we need to start thinking about this now, because you don't want to be trying to figure it out on the battlefield. It's better to figure it out at a Combat Training Center at Fort Polk or out in the desert in California, compared to actually doing it on the battlefield. So this implementation will be, will be coming. But typically, it's the pressure of the conflict, kind of, going back to the Russia, Russia, Ukraine piece, that actually makes it happen.

Jay Patrich: 30:50

It's the pressure of the conflict. Or general Mackenzie said it best. Sometimes it takes civilian leadership for us, in the D in the military to make big changes, and the one he referenced was Goldwater Nichols, right? So I don't think there's any reason to think that military leaders in the 70s were interested in reorganizing and creating combatant commanders and creating so common those kinds of things, and it took civilian leadership. Right now, I don't know that there's any pressure for civilian leadership to make those choices, or that they even know that that's a choice that I think should be made. So I would be interested in who's thinking about that right now? Is anybody doing any work on this stuff? And I don't know the answer. And when this comes out, I would love to hear from some people who are working on this. I keep thinking that somebody's going to email me and tell me, I'm an idiot, and people are working on this, and we've got this capability already, which I would love to hear.

Tad Schnaufer: 32:01

Well, we'll see about those emails. I can't wait. So one of the, you know, other points to note is that we've seen, obviously, the discussion of drones has been huge over the last few years. But you know, the commander in the Pacific just a few months ago talked about, if China was going to make a attack on Taiwan, they turn the straight of Taiwan into a drone hellscape. So obviously, there's this idea of just using drones in mass on in future battlefields. Are you saying that soft forces would need to do anything different than that? Or just, I

Jay Patrich: 32:33

would say soft doesn't often operate in mass. That's more for conventional forces. There are fewer of us, we're a smaller portion of the budget, especially when compared to the larger air force and the larger army. So something like blunting the advance across the straight is I'm sure that SOF will have a contribution just because we're not, not going to sit on the sidelines, but that kind of thing is more conventional, so I picture more if a longer conflict occurs and making those small team insertions Having effect moving getting out, or at least getting back, and then doing it again, reconstituting. And so right now, I don't know that we're set up for that kind of thing. I think that's what mission area one in the Air Force, in the new one air force, force design is describing. But they don't really say that, and they don't task FSOC, Air Force, Special Operations Command, they don't task AFSOC with anything differently. Neither has SOCOM. And so if SOCOM is interested in those capabilities, then I think that we should start working on them, as opposed to continuing to advance our abilities to go after a single terrorist leader or financier things like

Tad Schnaufer: 34:00

that, right? Because it's also a question of money, of using these large, expensive systems, compared to, again, a couple $100 quad clock copter that can operate in the littoral space. So it's kind of getting away from where the US has been recently, with being the most advanced technologically, which means very expensive and systems that you don't necessarily want to lose tons of them on the battlefield.

Jay Patrich: 34:24

I'll say that I am not advocating for going away from that. I think, you know, we still need an F 35 we need an F 47 I wish they hadn't stopped making F 20 twos sequestration happened. And I would say that if we look at smalls, meaning like I am thinking about group one, two and three, which means all the way from the handheld backpack carried drone to a 400 700 pound vertical takeoff and landing quadcopter. That's the size of a dining room table, right? Yeah, and I think that you need that suite of capabilities because you don't know what the mission will be. There will be some things that will be appropriate for a handheld, hand launched quadcopter. There's some things that will be that will require more electricity, will require the capability to carry a larger munition, those kinds of things. So I think that it's important that we focus on that, that broader spectrum, and those group three, the larger of the ones that can still be pretty expensive, but to the tune of, like, $700,000 as opposed to however much an F 35 costs.

Tad Schnaufer: 35:38

Yes, so with all that in mind, where do you want to take this research after this publication?

Jay Patrich: 35:47

Yeah, thank you. I am working on an article right now that looks at sort a little bit of the history of Special Operations innovation, that looks at what's happening in Ukraine right now, and sort of moves forward with the concept that there that drones are important for regular warfare. And so I'm working on that paper right now. I hope to have that done this year, and then we'll look to at the various venues to which we can try to get it published. So I am going to more narrow focus on maybe one of the concepts and reference some of the other concepts. So focusing on irregular warfare, what that's like? What are the what's going on in irregular warfare, what's been in the past, what's been going on, and then how drone forces could be employed in gray zone, kind of irregular warfare, stuff with reference to and then, if we ended up in major combat operations, here's how, here are some ways that they could be utilized, with the goal of saying, we need to continue to look at our force design. We need to look at how we innovate. We need everybody wants to say, innovation comes from the lowest level. Or, I've heard a lot of times like there's an airman in your formation who can innovate on these things and that, yeah, they can. They can innovate within their sphere, right? But we also need some policy, some guidance, so that the day to day work of counterterrorism and all the other stuff that we end up doing doesn't have an outsized influence on the innovation work that we do so that we can get off that pathway dependence and move to some more creative solutions for what our next conflict may look like.

Tad Schnaufer: 37:56

Well, it's excellent. You know, we look forward to seeing this is this is republished, and we'll keep an eye out for your other papers as they come come out during your fellowship. Yeah, thank you. Thanks, Jeff, yep.