Ben Connable, "Ground Combat: Puncturing the Myths of Modern War" (Georgetown UP, 2025)

And now, a message from McAfee. I'm not a real kid. And I'm not a real grandpa. We're deepfakes. And we're making it harder to tell what's real online. The good news? McAfee can help. McAfee's scam detector automatically identifies text and email scams and even deepfakes. So if you whippersnappers meet one of us, you'll know. If they're faking it, they're not making it past us. Get award-winning scam detection today. McAfee.com slash keepitreal. This episode is brought to you by Wayfair. Podcasts follow us everywhere. Whether you're cooking in the kitchen, chilling in the living room, or pretending to fold laundry in the bedroom. And with Wayfair, every one of those rooms can tell a story of its own. Their curated collections of furniture styles and prices make Wayfair the trusted destination to turn your home into your happy place. Shop everything home at Wayfair.com with free and easy delivery straight to your door. ♪ Wayfair, every style, every home. ♪ ♪♪ ♪ Well, I was down on my last dollar, then I started saving. ♪ ♪ Cause the bank said fiscal restraint is what you're craving. ♪ ♪ So I put my earnings in a high-yield account. ♪ ♪ Let the savings compound and the interest mount. ♪ ♪ I'm optimizing cash flow, putting debt in check. ♪ ♪ Now time is my friend and not a pain in the neck. ♪ ♪ And we've got a little cash to rebuild the old deck. ♪ Boring money moves make kind of lame songs, but they sound pretty sweet to your wallet. BNC Bank, brilliantly boring since 1865. Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Leo Bader, and today I'm talking to Ben Conable, executive director at Battle Research Group and adjunct professor in Georgetown University's Security Studies program. Ben's book, Ground Combat, Puncturing the Myths of Modern War, takes us through a meticulously arranged database of hundreds of ground combat cases spanning from World War II to 2022, and the entire world, examining the impacts of new technologies and force structures, and ultimately illustrating the difficulty of making accurate military forecasts about the future of combat. The book is a valuable contribution to military analysis, both for the insights it provides and for the foundation it lays for future research. Ben, thanks for joining me today. Thanks for having me, Leo. So why don't you start a little bit by talking about what the impetus was for both writing this book and for compiling this database, which I imagine was almost as much work as writing the book. Oh, it might've even been more. Yeah, books write themselves after you have the, after you do the hard work on the data, right? This started as a kind of a series of frustrations when I was working at the RAND Corporation as a senior political scientist from 2009 through 2021. And during that time period, I was able to engage extensively with both US military, partner military, allied military forces, but also go around the world and see combat action reporting and seeing the ways in which various military organizations were recording or failing to record the things that were happening on the ground. And then I was seeing less and less effort being put into the kind of on the ground field collection of primary source material that's so essential to help us understand what actually has happened. It's the same material that we refer back to now when we look at World War II battles. And a lot of times it's paper evidence or photographs or recorded interviews. A lot of that is just absent from 21st century warfare. So when I left RAND, I immediately went out and got a grant from the Smith Richardson Foundation and I built a database of battles that I knew had been kind of overlooked, but also the ones that we were commonly familiar with. My objective was to be all inclusive, to help explore what has actually happened and then to step back as I wrote the book and to say, okay, well, what does this tell us? Even though the data themselves cannot be fully representative, which for statisticians is gonna be frustrating, but we don't know how many battles have been fought globally. We don't have a good accounting of everything. And the word battle itself is highly subjective. I mean, you could break a large battle down into 50 smaller battles or aggregate in the other direction. So I built the database. We can get into how I did that. And then I wrote the book to do two things. One, to explain the findings from the database and then to kind of trace the evolution of technology throughout the history of warfare in about the last hundred years, to examine the claims that revolutions in military affairs have occurred and to see how the data from at least the 21st century reflected or did not reflect those assumptions that war is changing dramatically or has changed dramatically in various periods throughout history. And I did some anchoring cases in World War II. I did some anchoring cases in the Cold War period for a comparative analysis. And then I wrote the book, Ground Combat with Georgetown University Press. It was published in March of this year. So let's talk about that distinction that you make between evolution and revolution, which is sort of at the core of how you trace ground combat throughout all these years. Where do we draw the line between those two? Well, I am not a proponent of the idea of revolution in military affairs. And in fact, I went into this whole process somewhat skeptical. So I acknowledge my biases upfront here and in the book itself. But I think I try to do a decent job of reflecting the opinions of others to include Andrew Krapinovich, Bob Work, William Owens, and even William Westmoreland. A lot of people aren't familiar with some of the things that he said about revolutions in military affairs. The idea then was in the book to say, okay, where does the evidence show that we've had a revolution? Is there evidence to back up these claims that something dramatic has periodically happened? Whether it's nuclear warfare, just kind of referring back to some of these claims, or precision guided munitions or drones, AI perhaps. Where is the evidence in battle studies that show that these things have occurred? And what I found in looking at the comparative cases, and then also in the detailed cases from the 21st century, is that in fact, there's no evidence that anything has changed dramatically at all. And a lot of the things that we would expect to see, particularly for ground combat. So you have to be careful here not to extrapolate up and out to air only or naval only battles. Specifically for land warfare and ground combat, you see a general slope of evolution. You see a consistency and continuity in the function of both technology and tactics over time. Well, even while the form of various things changes. So just as an example, we've had some kind of artillery in use on the battlefield since at least the Roman Onager, I apologize for my pronunciation. But the idea of launching a projectile from one place on the ground to another to destroy something and kill people is centuries old. So how has that evolved over time? Now we look at precision guided munitions launched from one place on the ground to another. And if you view that ahistorically, and if you don't put that in historical perspective with a range of cases in kind of a longitudinal analysis, it can seem pretty compelling that this amazing thing has happened. Then we can now launch a cruise missile from the ground and hit another point on the ground with a circular probability within a few feet. But if you think about it in historical context, it's very clearly evolutionary. And more to the point, as that evolution has occurred, the consistencies in warfare have remained. The functions have remained steady. Yeah. And you talk about how this historical knowledge is essential for military planners, essentially being able, hopefully, to make some sort of accurate forecast about what combat might look like in the future. You run through a lot of cases of sort of grand predictions that have been made about what things will look like. Some of them saying ground combat will cease to exist. Any real industrial warfare will cease to exist. So I'm curious about just sort of generally what is the importance of forecasting and overall military planning and how can we sort of incorporate history into that and deal with the ambiguities that are inherent? I'm gonna answer that in two parts. I'll come back to the forecasting part here. I think it's important to briefly review the literature on forecasting, in particularly the revolutionary forecasting that has occurred in the last, oh, 125 years or so because it is, it sets the stage for the discussion we're having now. And Lawrence DeFreedman wrote a book on the future of warfare. And so I drew some of the examples from his book and I went back and found the original sources. One of the more interesting ones is a book by I.S. Block who is a Polish econometrics expert. He published it in 1899 and he effectively said that ground warfare would be impossible because of advances in technology like the machine gun and the rifle. And that soldiers would be frozen in place with the idea that if they stood up, they would be shot from a long range. And of course, this was right before World War I. So that didn't bear out. And then you see the repeated forecasts by some pretty well-known historians to include B.H. Liddell Hart, who is still revered in many circles, particularly in the United Kingdom today. But if you go in and look at some of Liddell Hart's more obscure works to include Paris and the revolution of warfare, which I believe was 1947, or it was revised in 47, Hart says some of the same things that Block was saying, that the advances in technology effectively would make ground warfare impossible, that infantry could never fight against tanks or airplanes, which of course we now know not to be true. And then in an addendum to that book, he said, no, now that we've had nuclear warfare, no non-nuclear power could ever again fight a nuclear power. And that was right before the US-led UN force fought the Chinese, which was then a non-nuclear power in Korea. So again, doesn't bear out. And then I mentioned Westmoreland briefly. He gave testimony before Congress when he was chief of staff of the army in 1969, and he effectively described the future battlefield the same way that advocates of the revolution of military affairs describe it today, which is to say that we will be able to see everything that takes place on the battlefield, we'll be able to identify all enemy forces instantaneously and then destroy them instantaneously. And this was in 1969. And he said, we're gonna achieve this in about 10 years. And that's a recurring theme. You see this 10-year prediction. If only we can buy these things and make these changes, 10 years from now, we'll see the revolution bear fruit. Andrew Krupinovich kind of replicates that argument to some extent in 1992. William Owens in his book, Lifting the Fog of War in 2000, a very strong kind of advocacy position on the idea of revolution. And he makes one of the more personal kind of almost purposefully argumentative, it's almost a diatribe against people that don't buy into the concept of revolution. He said, just buy these things and we'll get there. And 10 years later, we still didn't have it and so on and so forth. So what that means for forecasting is that when we're faced with very complex decision-making, war is inherently uncertain. We still buy into that idea, at least in theory, but we don't like to accept that. We don't like to accept that there's uncertainty in war. We don't like to accept the fact that maybe some things aren't susceptible to technological solutions, that we're not going to find the thing right around the corner that's gonna solve a problem for us. And there are periods in time where we become collectively, culturally more vulnerable to these technophilic and technophobic arguments that kind of align with the revolution of military affairs. And we're in one of those periods right now. And the challenge that presents for decision-makers is that we're being barraged by fairly compelling arguments that if we just invest in AI or just invest in drones or just invest in a combination of AI, drones and precision munitions, that we won't need infantry anymore. We won't need artillery anymore. Land warfare is just not gonna happen anymore. And we're making these arguments, even as the largest land war in modern European history is taking place right under our noses. And I'd be happy to get into Ukraine if you'd like, but it's a rather odd circumstance. And the forecasting that's taking place right now, I argue, is not necessarily well thought through. And do you think these cycles are sort of maybe a little bit endemic to military planning and that it relies on a lot of decisiveness that relies on being able to say, okay, here's what we're gonna do. And that makes it difficult to say, well, actually, we don't quite know what's gonna happen. And we have to reckon with that in a way. Yeah, Leo, I think that's a fair argument. And I also think that we have to question some of the tropes that we have about military planning. the old, uh, I don't know if you'd call it a trope or saw or whatever, whatever term you want to use that generals are always trying to fight the last war. That's, that's actually not really true. And in fact, good generals or at least competent generals and politicians are always scrambling to figure out what's coming next. And they're always there. They live on this kind of bleeding edge of, of gambling, right? They're, they're, they're trying to figure out what technology, which tactics, what geographic area of the world is going to present the next threat and the next opportunity. So really they're just making a series of, of educated guesses, um, and try to figure out where to spend their money to, to improve their force so they don't get caught off guard. So that's really how forecasting happens. Um, and you know, that, um, I would argue that that is, that leaves open a tremendous vulnerability, um, because the, the very, like you said, the very nature of this decision-making process is uncertain. And, you know, I'm writing a piece right now. Um, it kind of goes hand in glove with the, with the ground combat book and with some previous things I've written that we, we accept at face value, um, the, the kind of Clausewitzian notion that war is inherently uncertain. It's dynamic. It's, there's friction. Um, there's a fog of war, so on and so forth. Um, all of all American and for the most part, Western military doctrine very plainly states that, uh, that they accept that at face value. And then we do nothing to kind of accept it in practicalities. So, uh, you know, that, that is a, there's this, there's this tension between this idea of uncertainty and then the very kind of thoughtful middle ground effort to try to reduce that uncertainty. And then on the other side, this kind of hyperbolic, overly enthusiastic embrace of the idea that you can eliminate uncertainty. Well, why don't we look at some examples? I thought we could talk about tanks and drones, but feel free to guide me away from that if there are better ones. So, you know, with tanks, when, uh, infantry carried anti-tank missiles were created, a lot of people said, okay, tanks aren't really going to be worth much anymore because they can be destroyed pretty cheaply, uh, by troops with a lot of mobility that obviously hasn't panned out. So where do we see that sort of, uh, prediction of revolution then ultimately turning into a much smaller evolution? And then also, is this a dynamic that we can kind of generalize onto different innovations or, uh, do different technologies take different paths? Would you say, uh, to, to evolution? Both, you know, in both cases for tanks, for drones, I would argue for any case of, of emerging technological advantage, there's a, there's a kind of, it's not a law, but it's an informal law of human nature that if somebody gains an advantage over you and you want to survive, you're going to do something to develop a countermeasure against that advantage. And so the history of technological advance in warfare is always a series of, kind of imbalanced, uh, trade-offs, um, and the advance, counter-advance, counter-counter-advance. Um, and you can look at the history of any military technology currently in use, and you can, you can pull that thread back to its origin. Uh, so you, of course we have the tank, which appears in the battlefields of World War I, uh, Arras, Cambrai, you could go through the battles there, debatable as to whether or not it had the impact that some people claim it had. Um, but it certainly had a shock value the first time it was seen. And then very quickly people started figuring out, well, you could, you could use an anti-tank rifle to penetrate it, or you could, uh, plant an explosive on it because they can't, they had poor visibility. And then you improve the tank and then you improve the counter measure. And so there are periods in time that mirror or align with the, uh, revolutionary military affairs, um, debate in which experts will say, no, the, the tank is dead. Vandiver Bush, I believe in the 1950s. Um, and then you have the tank advocates pushing back, uh, Stephen Biddle, uh, in his 2004, uh, book, military power, uh, points out that people said, well, in the 1973 war, the, uh, Soviet Mallorca, uh, Sager missile was used to such great effect that it rendered tanks unusable on the battlefield. And then a decade later, less than a decade later, tanks are dominating the battlefield in the Gulf war. And you see this back and forth ebb and flow, by the way, the 1973 war data actually does not show that. Um, happy to talk about that separately. Um, and then you emerge, you emerge into the kind of modern era and we look at the tank on the battlefield in Ukraine now. And if you actually look at the tank losses on a daily basis from February, 2000, late February, 2022 to today. And I have a chart in my book that goes up to 2023, but the numbers, the averages have remained consistent. It's about four tanks loss per day collectively on both sides for that compares with the about 136 tanks loss per day in the 1973 war. Uh, and even 11 tanks loss per day in the Nagorno Karabakh, the brief Nagorno Karabakh war in 2020. So actually fewer tanks loss per day on the battlefield in Ukraine. So you have to ask yourself, what does that tell you? And, and if you are, if you think the tank is useless, well, then you say, well, that's just because nobody's using tanks anymore because they don't work. Um, but I could pull up videos, uh, that are issued every day from both sides that show tanks being used on a regular basis. So that's not true. Well, it's cause tanks, there are fewer tanks. Well, it's certainly true. They're not concentrated as much. That's certainly true. But one of the more compelling arguments is that we're in a phase of static warfare where tanks are not being used in aggressive offensive operations at a large scale. And so you're seeing a reduced loss, tank loss ratio, uh, in part because of the static battlefield. So there are some idiosyncrasies to each of these periods in time in each of these battles that should directly inform the way that we think about the, the value of technology, but we don't, um, I'll shift to drones, but I want to let you redirect if you want. At New Balance, we believe if you run, you're a runner. However you choose to do it, because when you're not worried about doing things the right way, you're free to discover your way. And that's what running is all about. Run your way at NewBalance.com slash running. This episode is brought to you by White Claw Surge. Nice choice hitting up this podcast. No surprises. You're all about diving into tastes everyone in the room can enjoy. Just like White Claw Surge. It's for celebrating those moments when connections have been made and the night's just begun. With bold flavors and 8% alcohol by volume, unleash the night. Unleash White Claw Surge. Please drink responsibly. Hard seltzer with flavors, 8% alcohol by volume. White Claw Seltzer Works, Chicago, Illinois. Imagine fast hydration combined with balanced energy, perfectly flavored with zero artificial sweeteners. Introducing Liquid IV's New Energy Multiplier Sugar-Free. Unlike other energy drinks, you know, the ones that make you feel like you're glitching, it's made with natural caffeine and electrolytes. So you get the boost without the burnout. Liquid IV's New Energy Multiplier Sugar-Free Hydrating Energy. Tap the banner to learn more. Well, why don't we talk a bit about Ukraine since you brought that up. My impression of what the battlefield looks like right now from, from reading about it is essentially the sky being full of drones and both sides being locked in their trenches. Because if anyone goes out or if you try to drive in any vehicle, you're going to get killed by a drone. Does that represent some sort of fundamental shift? Because it seems to me that, that it's sort of freezing any, any ability to do anything else. On the other hand, maybe that's sort of a regression almost to sort of a world war one type scenario, but it does seem like these drones are impacting every other aspect of ground combat in a way that perhaps other technologies haven't as, as broadly. I mean, they certainly are in the Ukraine context and, you know, our inclination is to look at one case, because we're in large part ignorant of all the other cases, hence the database that are taking place around the world. And we just say, well, that's how ground war is fought now. And if you, if you rewind to late mid 2022, the argument would have been, well, it's all about javelin anti-tank missiles. Drones were not the narrative. So has war as a phenomenon really changed that dramatically in just those, in just the ensuing years and that we're going to see this blanketed dense, you know, dense network of blanketed drones everywhere we fight. And that, you know, that, that the, the nature of perhaps the very nature of warfare has changed. I think that's a very, it's a species argument. In what other context would we take one case and extrapolate out a global phenomenon? I don't think there's a reasonable way that we do that in any other context, but we seem to be doing that from the Ukraine war. And what's remarkable, and I'm not the only one to observe this. We have folks like Rob Lee and Mike Kaufman who have made this point. That in fact, we're seeing a change in, in the, this one war from a war of maneuver and, and flexible operations to a war of degraded attrition along a more static line. You have the industrial might of both countries effectively co-located with the battlefield. There are every battalion, every brigade has a drone factory or four or five drone factories that are co-located with the, with the front line. And the whole world is dumping all of their drones and all of their munitions into this battlefield. I mean, the United States, Europe, China, North Korea, Iran. I mean, this is really a global fight fought along this 1200 kilometer front. So of course there's this enormous deluge of drones and they're fighting kind of in many cases on a pool table, you know geographic setting the terrain allows for it as well. So and then you have the lack of aviation capability on both sides. So they're compensating. So static mass industrial production co-location of industrial support to the battlefield, a static part of you know, the situation, the war degradation and attrition to the point where it becomes more difficult for them to get mass that is idiosyncratic. And you know, you have to ask yourself if we just notionally, for example, fought the Russians during an offensive combat operation into the Baltics and they were advancing, would either side have that blanket network of drones? The answer right now is absolutely not. And so then you have to roll back the clock and say, well, how would we fight? And we would fight much like we had been planning to fight the Russians up until February, 2022. So let's say you're, let's say you're a German government official and right now you have a big pool of money in the political support to make big investments in your defense industry. I imagine one of the biggest questions is, okay, looking at Ukraine, it seems like cheap couple hundred dollar drones are much more important than these expensive flagship tanks that, that we've been manufacturing. How do you sort of think about the trade off with the limited pool of money that you have that, you know, you want to stay ahead of the curve on new military innovation, but precisely as you say, you don't want to sort of generalize the idiosyncrasy of each conflict to then sort of turn around your whole defense industry. And I think that really works because it highlights the other side of the problem, right? So drones are cheap and disposable. And our tanks in particular and a lot of cases, our aircraft are not cheap and disposable. And we have over time because we've become risk averse, technophilic, technophobic, casualty averse for a variety of reasons, both in the United States and Europe, we've designed more and more exquisite systems. And the more exquisite they are, the more expensive they are, the fewer of them you can produce. And so we have things like the Leopard 2A7 tank, the you know, the advanced versions of the M1 Abrams the AMX 56, and these things cost upwards of $20 million a piece now, if not more. So of course you're having to make decisions here. Do I buy more Leopard 2A7 tanks? I don't know what the per cost per unit cost is, but let's say it's $18 million. Okay. That's a, that's a, that's a big investment. And by the way, all the maintenance is very difficult. And if I lose one now I've, I've, I've had a big loss. What we really have to think about here is how we got to this point of, of exquisite acquisition. And does it make sense for the way that wars are actually fought? And my perspective on this is no. And then in fact, the, the Russians have a, and this is hard to say, because I don't like agreeing with anything Russian at the moment, but you know, the, the idea of weapons and equipment being somewhat disposable in war is unfortunately the way that we have to think about these problems. And then we're not going to be able to protect everybody in a bubble, that there are going to be casualties. The United States lost about 5,000 helicopters in the Vietnam war, 5,000. I think if the United States lost 50 helicopters in any war, now we might even consider, you know, surrendering. I mean, there's no, there's no way that we're going to absorb the quantity of losses that we have, but. With the acquisitions we have right now. We're gonna run out of everything So the answer is not to run in one direction or the other It's to find a viable middle ground that is consistent with not only the the history of warfare and the evolutionary nature of warfare But the way that war is being fought broadly outside of this one immediate contest You mentioned in your book. I forget the name, but you mentioned Marine Corps officer that traveled to Japan before World War two He'd Ellis. Yeah, exactly and and helped the Marine Corps sort of prepare the forward-based strategy that helped it succeed then in World War two And this was a case of kind of one voice as you say without any particularly generalizable approach Nevertheless actually making very good predictions that because they were adopted Gave the u.s. A big upper hand in the eventual conflict How can we Try to sort of make sure that these voices do get a chance to break through even if they're going against the grain without Disrupting this balance that that you talk about. So yeah, Pete Ellis was a marine major sent out into the Pacific Theater to examine the Japanese basically advanced across the Pacific and he accurately forecast the approach the Japanese would take to To attacking the United States and he accurately forecasted to some extent The island hopping campaign that would occur after after that that would ensue from that attack My point in the book is that yeah, this was a this was a great job by one person he he had tremendous foresight, but that's not a process and We cannot as a country rely on individuals to guess correctly Even if their guesses are well-informed and well-educated that is not a process and yes We can get bogged down in bureaucracy. You can get bogged down in process to the point that you're you you become Incapable of actually thinking in an innovative way in a thoughtful way that's true and that's a constant tension, but the tension should be there and Unfortunately the way that we're living at the moment. Everything is essentialist We want to be in one direction or the other so either you believe 100% in the most cutting-edge innovation and you take the the tech profit at is at face value or You're a neo-luddite and you don't believe in innovation and you're you're just an obstacle to progress I mean those are those are two extreme positions but somehow we've evolved to the point where that is the way that we're debating modern warfare and and and the future of war and So you can look at Pete Ellis and now let's think about And I just mentioned him on another podcast. I mean, I think he's kind of a lightning rod Palmer lucky the head of and rule Young guy he loves wearing Hawaiian shirts long hair does it has no background in military history or military theory? Not not a combat, you know person at all doesn't really understand the history of warfare and has this kind of bleeding-edge vision of what Autonomous systems are going to be able to do for the United States and not only is lucky able to kind of Encourage investment in the things that his company is building, but it's almost like he's crafting our new strategy for fighting the Chinese like this this guy from the outside in military industrial complex has gone from Reacting to the things that that the military says it needs to driving openly, you know This is almost like Dwight Eisenhower's nightmare come to life The military industrial complex is openly now driving the way that we think about warfare. That is not healthy And you know the Pete Ellis were lucky that we had him We want to have a process that makes people like Ellis more more valuable and and and we can check, you know Check against other information but but this this is You know this embrace of just kind of the wild lands of the the cutting-edge I think as high risk for us Well on that note, maybe where do you see your database coming in? How can it be put to use? How can future research build on it to correct these swings from technophilia to technophobia and back? Yeah, there's no correction. I mean, it's always a poll, right? We're always going to be in the middle of this argument in this debate And all you can do is inform people and what I cite and I cite a Soviet actually Soviet I hate to know referencing the Russians twice here, but 1975 piece by a couple of Soviet authors called forecasting and I'm gonna get the title long It's about forecasting and war and the the idea is, you know Let's take a structured approach and apply it to the way that we think about the future of military Activity and so they say look in order to understand it's very simple and I you don't take everything They say at face value, but you pull what you can and what I found that was really compelling was this very very simple idea that if you want to understand the future more effectively you have to understand where you are in the present in an objective thoughtful and empirically derived way and then also understand the past so you you can see the the Longitudinal change over time So you can then think about past evolving into present and present evolving into future with the expectation Perhaps that something dramatic there's going to be a black swan That's going to shift you in one direction or the other that that's always possible But in general that that's useful the more informed you are when you're making a decision the better informed you are the more likely in general you are to make a good decision and So that's the value of the database It's just informative take, you know Take it not at face value But let it inform that your understanding of the evolution of war over time if you don't see it as evolutionary You read the data different than I do. That's fine, too but I would just hope that the argument that emerges from that discovery is thoughtful empirical objective and open to depersonalized debate and You focus specifically on ground combat do we need the same thing for sea combat for air combat or are there differences between the three beyond the Environments that they take place in yeah I mean I make that point in the I make that point in the book and and look they're just not enough cases of distinct aviation warfare and distinct naval warfare To do the same thing that I've done with ground warfare by volume ground warfare ground combat land warfare It is the constitutes the vast majority of battle cases in probably throughout history And particularly in the modern era. There's been a kind of paucity of naval naval air air engagements I Don't think you could even split those out, right? I mean, you're not gonna have a naval battle today that doesn't have an aviation component in it That that would be that that would be highly unlikely. So yeah that that does need to be done I I think you're you're gonna have a much harder time building it But it also requires somebody that has the background and the inclination to do it So I'll throw this out there as a you know, not a challenge But I mean an encouragement to other authors that are naval historians that are aviation Historians to take up this challenge and to build that that version of the database It is needed and then we can start and by the way missile warfare as well and we can start to talk about Changes in warfare writ large. I think with a more holistic and ever more comprehensive understanding well If I can finish by asking you to speculate a little bit with this database in your head more than in anyone else's head Where would you? Tell u.s. Planners to look right now. How much should they be sort of buying into these new voices? like Palmer lucky as you talk about and Where should they sort of be restraining themselves and saying we need to keep these fundamentals in place From a technological perspective or geographic, let's say both Yeah from a technological perspective I think we just need to right now the more the the more thoughtful investment would be in counter Counter UAS counter drone systems than in just throwing drones out to people in particular there's a movement afoot to bypass all of the US Department of Defense bureaucracy for acquisition and there there are some very good reasons why those Why that bureaucracies in place as frustrating as it can be? And we might be up be on the verge of making some some serious acquisition mistakes. So let's focus on counter UAS Let's let's see if we can develop that rebalancing that I spoke about before and then geographic I think you know, one of the problems that I've raised in other articles in journal articles is the The fixation the strategic fixation that we have at the moment on trying to threat within the nine-dash line of the so-called nine-dash line And that myopia is is drawing us into The kind of conceptualization of warfare at its outer limits That's very air and sea centric But the more likely not necessarily more dangerous, but the far more likely scenarios are going to take place somewhere on on land And they're going to be in you know against adversaries that probably have Lower technology thresholds. So we think about getting perhaps drawn into unintentionally drawn into a counterinsurgency operation against the cartels in Mexico We have a warrant out I believe at the moment for the president of Venezuela that could evolve into something You know, certainly Iran or Russia or North Korea. Those are all still viable concerns and If we're only thinking about one theater one challenge, I would argue that we're we're doing a disservice to our global interests and then the very briefly the last thing on that is I think we can compete pretty effectively with China and Hold at risk some of their most valuable assets out of that so-called nine-dash line Globally in places like North Africa and that's something to think about when we try to tie together all of our global interests Well, if any DOD officials happen to be listening take note, I suppose Yeah That is all the time that we have for today Ben's book ground combat puncturing the myths of modern war can be purchased through the link on the new books Network web page If you're interested in more you can go to Ben Conable comm To keep up with Ben's commentary and continuing research Ben. Thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me though Doug Limu and I always tell you to customize your car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual But now we want you to feel it cue the emu music Limu That may have been too much feeling only pay for what you need at Liberty Mutual comm Savings very underwritten by Liberty Mutual insurance company affiliates excludes, Massachusetts