Underground Warfare Reimagined

You're listening to the Urban Warfare Project podcast from the Modern War Institute at West Point. I'm John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at Ambit Roy and Host of this podcast. Today's guests on the podcast is Asher Cots, CEO and co-founder of Trasar Industries. Before founding Trasar, Asher served in the Israeli Defense Forces Elite Yahalome Unit. One of the world's premier mere organizations dedicated to combat engineering, explosive ordinance, disposal, special operations engineering. And most people know them as the special operations engineers for underground warfare. I've done a lot of work with them. But Asher deployed to Gaza has first trained experience confronting one of the most extensive sub-training military systems ever built. Today, though, through Trasar Industries, he is helping to develop technologies designed to address some of the most difficult challenges military forces faced or will face or can imagine underground. Asher, welcome to the show. Thank you, John. Great to be here. I love your work. I really appreciate that. We've had a few episodes on Underground Warfare, but I think it's been a while so, and I really don't want to get into not just the past or present, but that future conversation. But if you don't mind, I usually have like a scene setter that I do for some episodes and I, for some reasons, because it's been a while, I felt like I would do that for our listeners today about, you know, military thoughts towards underground warfare, what we call the sub-training and sub-T, and I'm really excited to learn about what Trasar I heard in their, one of their pitches called the sub-tera domain. For most of modern military history, underground warfare was considered a niche challenge. Armies occasionally encountered tunnels, caves, mines, or underground fortifications, and I'm talking modern times, of course we have a long history as ancient as warfare itself. But in modern times, militaries generally viewed it as a supporting feature of the battlefield rather than the decisive train. Well, today that's changing. In Gaza, Hamas built hundreds of miles of tunnels, beneath civilian infrastructure, and used them for command and control, logistics, leadership protection, of course, human shielding, hostage holding, maneuvering and combat operations. Hezbollah constructed an extensive underground facilities across southern Lebanon. Many of those being discovered as we speak deep inside of mountains, extensive networks. Iran has spent decades building underground missile bases, command facilities, hardened military infrastructure during Operation Epic Fury. Many of those underground facilities played an important role in preserving elements of Iran's missile capabilities, despite immense sustained strikes by Israel and the United States. In Russia and Ukraine, both sides have increasingly invested in underground command posts, logistics routes, workshops and factories, medical facilities, hospitals, defensive networks as drones and persistent surveillance have made the surface battlefield more lethal, especially along the front line on what we call that dead zone, ranging from 15 to 50 kilometers. North Korea maintains one of the world's largest underground military infrastructures with underground cities, underground even naval bases, and especially China. China has spent also decades expanding hardened underground facilities for strategic forces down to the tactical level, called the Great Underground Wall of China. So as battlefields become more transparent and lethal due to drones, sensors, artificial intelligence, precision and long range munitions, military forces increasingly seek protection and freedom of maneuver beneath the surface in the subterranean. Azure, does that sound like a fair description of today's underground reality to you? Extremely fair and well said. You know, I really think that even what we're seeing today with the situation with Iran and the negotiations, what people I think don't realize strong enough is that it's a direct outcome of Iran's strategic investment in subterra, subterranean warfare. And it's almost a cycle of Iran realizing that they have to survive enough time in order for the Western world to pay a huge price for the ongoing war and then be pressured into coming to some sort of deal. So I think that our biggest mistake up until now is we saw subterranean as a tactic while our adversary saw it as their main strategy. And the faster we shift to that mentality of realizing that this is a strategic realm of warfare, the faster we'll be able to solve this and bring back Western dominance in that area. I agree with you and I covered that actually early on with Hamas that the first time we've seen really the total strategy, the pursuit of the political goals resting on their subterranean capabilities, the central gravity for their strategy, right? So you know, Sunzu attacked their strategy and that element of attacking your opponent's weaknesses such as time, cost, resources, and I agree with you at the state versus state level. We've now seen that with Iran where there are heavy investment. Of course, there's always an offensive defense debate, right, maneuver, warfare, shock and all psychological impact, but the strength of the defense, depending on what the overall strategy and context, 100% right, we've seen that. But okay, before we get too far into that conversation and you almost took me on a side, could you tell the listeners a little bit about your background and what led you to YAHLOM and the work you're doing now? Yeah, so I'm a dual citizen, Israeli and America, but born and raised in Israel. And in my service, I joined the unit that works under YAHLOM, which is called the tunnel detection lab. And basically, it started during the years of 2015, 2016, similar to what's happening today in the hardware, is Israel after the operation in 2014 realized that although most of that operation was even done in order to prevent the tunnels coming in from Gaza into Israel, that there's still more that haven't been detected and there's need for technology that could detect it without having to maneuver the whole army to the entrances of these tunnels. So, my job in many ways was to find technologies in the civilian world and the oil finding world and implementing it both with amazing engineers who had to use it in different ways in order to be able to use it in a tactical way by units and then working with the fighters of YAHLOM to implement these technologies in the field and carry out operations where we were able to detect and then map out, which are two separate methodologies and technologies detection and mapping out of tunnels that were crossing in from Gaza. So, during my time, we found 22 tunnels coming over from Gaza and another seven crossing over from Lebanon. Yeah, and then, you know, ever since October 7th, I've been back in reserves working on this whole effort. I mean, pretty much until last week, I was still doing reserve duty on the whole effort of detecting, mapping and destroying these underground structures and all the areas around the world that we've been dealing with. Amazing. And now, I've spent a lot of time with the YAHLOM. I've done a couple of episodes expressing that written a couple of things. I mean, I do believe there is no other military in the world from my understanding, my travels, that has dedicated the amount of time and resources and a formation, right? So an over-aborgade size, special operations, engineering, unit, directly-phosis on the subterranean. For those listeners that don't know, I'd love to hear your kind of brief overview of what is YAHLOM, what are their missions, what are their, those different components as you just explained. I mean, it's not just the engineers that go forth and once a tunnel is detected, they have their own R&D and all these other elements. Yeah. So I think what's very special about YAHLOM is, at the end of the day, it's almost this very cool combination between engineer mentality and a fighter mentality. So a lot of the complex engineering operations that you have to do, and I'll soon elaborate them, they require a certain level of knowledge, technology, ability to operate very complex systems, not something that you could sum down to holding a trigger or even aiming some sort of missile, but things that have many, many sequences of decision-making and work on the technological platform. And all of these have to be done in a way where they could be the most forward-deployed and used many times in the forefront of the battlefield and doing what you do. So YAHLOM has basically taken upon itself this mission where it trains its fighters both to be top tier tier one fighters in this area, but also it demands of them to have an extremely high knowledgeable base of the area that their expertise is, and to be able to combine both of those together. So today in Ya Long, there's many different segments within the unit and each soldier, they go through their basic Ya Long training where they become very elite soldiers. So I've always been kind of like an outsider to the unit working within the technological, but a classic fighter within Ya Long, he'll do his regular one year of just intensive high skilled combat training. And then he has to go into his high skilled engineering training. So the first unit, they're in charge of dismantling bombs, so their fighters are required to use robotic sensors, deep understanding of technology. And they have a R&D section was in the unit where only fighters who finish their time in the unit actually operative go back and they have a whole R&D study case where they study all the explosives that the enemy are using and build new methodologies of how to dismantle them, how to take them apart. So for example, when the first Iranian ballistic missile hit Israel, Ya Long were the first to come in their engineers, were the ones who brought it back to this case study study, how to dismantle it, what is it built out of and bring that knowledge back to the army, to the police, to everyone else. The second unit, they're in charge of crossing, so bridge crossings, land crossings. Right now what we're seeing in Lebanon, there's the Littani River, that's a very complex river where you need tanks that then to charge, so they're literally engineers who are building passageways and doing that. There are Ya Long fighters, engineers, they're in charge of demolition, how do you blow up homes, how do you blow up other the enemy's bridges, so they know how to place ordinance to order of placing ordinance all of the above. Then you have special breaching units, you even have a unit that they specialize in, if there is God forbid, any sort of chemical warfare going on, so how to fight with gas matsuits on, contain anything that was activated by a terrorist organization. And the last unit, which we call, somewhere within Ya Long, these are the tunnel fighters. And what's so unique about this segment within Ya Long is, you know, if you would sing at the gecko, and this is kind of how the unit started where they were just building the pedologies of maneuver within a tunnel. But today, Ya Long is the tunnel segment unit inside Ya Long. They're doing everything from locating the tunnel, to mapping it, to passing on that information to the rest of the army, so the army knows how to maneuver forward, to fighting within the tunnel, to destroying it all together. So, these young guys aren't just, you know, incredible fighters fighting within the tunnel, but also the ones who are leading, you know, probably over 45 different types of technologies for different use cases in order to do that. And I think that's something very unique to have, you know, such a large unit, and now they even want to make it larger. That is demanding of its fighters, such a high level of engineering and technological capabilities simultaneously to the regular military training. Yeah, thanks for that. I mean, I've argued, and I do argue, in many areas of expertise, the gap isn't capability is literally expertise. So by dedicating a unit for an extended period of time because some militaries will up and flow, Israel's face this challenge for decades, so they've had Ya Long. And not only does it create fighters and special skills and capabilities, it creates a body of knowledge and expertise like you who has a variety, a specialty, but a variety of expertise and understanding of the subterranean environment that other militaries just don't have because they haven't committed. I usually cover urban, but subtees connected, they haven't committed an organization and a great amount of individuals into maintaining advancing a body of knowledge, which is really the next question based on all that you know what makes the underground fundamentally different or underground warfare, fundamentally different from surface combat. So yes, so I think that for me, the thing that really makes it most unique out of everything, and I'll go a little bit more into detail, is that if above ground the main adversary that you're facing or the main threat that you're facing is your enemy itself and his military capabilities, in underground you have a dual challenge that becomes exponential, which is you're fighting the terrain itself as you're fighting your adversary, and your adversary could take advantage of the dangers of the terrain itself in order to damage you much more exponentially. So I'll go a little bit into detail. So for example, air circulation, one of the things you have to like people don't even realize when you're in a small tunnel like a Hamas tunnel, even if you're shooting a few bullets, though that explosion is sucking out oxygen, and you'll get wheezy after even shooting three to four bullets. So if you're even intentionally going in to a tunnel knowing that you're going to be you know getting into a crossfire, you already know that you have to bring an air system with you. Number two is the tunnel is you know it's not a very strong structure if you hit it in certain areas and if it collapses behind you, you're in a huge huge problem because it's extremely difficult to locate you, know where you are, the communication is usually mesh, so meaning if it's cut off, it's cut off and there's no way of getting towards you. So even the amount of excessive force that you would want to use forward towards your adversary, you also have to realize that that could also damage you and hurt you. So it's almost like needing to work you know with much less means that you supposedly could because you know that you could harm yourself. The other element is blast radius and a small confined space the blast is going to go through the air system and not you know sideways like a regular building or structure. What that means is that a lot of times you even any sort of explosive that you're going to use, you have to realize that the blast is going to go way further back and also your adversary knows that so he could detonate something that above ground wouldn't be that dangerous but below ground could wipe out a unit if you include the air it will suck out the blast radius of you know of what will be flying through. The next one is also you know these systems if you and John you've walked through them you know that the moment you walk even a few feet inside of them you already lose orientation of what angle you're going and where you're going. So you could be in a tunnel that's a loop that you were sure the whole time you are walking completely straight and suddenly you see someone above you who's actually your fellow soldier that you see him now as adversary and shoot at him. So if you're not marking if you're not putting where you are you could completely get lost with yourself and also get into a battle with yourself. So I think all that put together on sorry I forgot to mention one last one which is that you know let's say I mean you're an expert at urban warfare so you know a lot of these methods but even if you're going to a building where you don't know the exact floor plan of the building you could assess more or less the size of the structure you're about to go inside the chances of there being side rooms because you know where you are in retrospect to the side of the building. In a subterranean structure you never know what's going to happen. So we've literally had tunnels in Gaza where we came in in drills and we are drilling every two to three feet a hole in the wall just to make sure that there wasn't some secret passageway where an adversary could come from around kidnap you or get you. So you never even know even the parameters of where you're going to be moving in and where it could get to. So I think in many ways in subterranean warfare what you realize is that first of all your biggest threat is actually not the adversary in the tunnel but it's the terrain itself and only after you really become an expert of the terrain then you could start you know learning how to do tunnel warfare and I think this is where a lot of this is exactly what you were talking about about building an expertise in a knowledge base is if you were to take you know regular anti-terran structures and tell them to build a methodology of fighting within a tunnel they would build very good methodologies of maneuver of shooting of protecting of all kinds of different elements like that of that that are similar to urban you know fighting within buildings but at the end of the day there are so many other considerations that you have to take into mind that you have to take one step back and say number one how am I not you know threatening myself and number two afterwards and I've actually seen this a little bit when we've done mutual delegations with soldiers from other militaries that one of the things that afterwards we gave them feedback about is we felt that they were way too aggressive in their approach and maneuvering it in the subterranean and we felt that that aggressiveness would lead to major accidents and threaten them more than it would benefit them you know in the long game absolutely sound like you're describing that no offense US military subterranean operations doctrine there at the end where there is a lot of similarities to which is focused on clearing a tunnel but a lot of similarities like well this is very a lot like your combined spaces CQB closed quarters battle aspect and what you're missing like you said I really like that I might use that often as soon as you step into the tunnel you're in a fight with the terrain itself I would say also in a fight for survival as you mentioned yeah every element of your physiology is impacted by the environment and the most the greatest thing that you need to survive and in life oxygen and the impacts on that what I usually tell people that is more similarities so the question of how is underground combat different than surface combat and I think that analogy is almost like a false dichotomy because they're so vastly different that it's more like surface naval warfare compared to underground underwater because once you enter the underwater it's a completely different environment and I think that's a lot of land forces view the subtrain in a tunnel or whatever just as an extension of the surface when I think the analogy compared better to surface warfare is what they call the USman Navy calls the kind of the on the surface of the ocean compared to under deep sea basically operations one thing I wanted to mention and that you didn't is but I think it really implies to the development of capabilities is that what I tell people if you visit some military you know doing some training everything they're currently using in some way relies on line of site GPS some other sensor that won't work once you shove it underground yeah like you said the weapon you got to have protection even hearing protection the the things you use to shoot move and navigate provide aid all those things you need completely specialized equipment and it's not gonna work underground so it's not just an extension of the surface yeah so we could keep on going with just those challenges and I know that that leads to okay what are the challenges what are the capabilities but I want to get through some of the kind of pick in your brain about some of the experiences since that was such a big question you could really do so much with that and I to break the paradigm of what the way people think about it and you would think that that scene setter I gave where it's it's not a special environment it's a completely different domain that is dominating based on the evolution of the character warfare and a failure of imagination but it's the reality of it because we're getting so lethal persistent on the surface you operate in in Gaza what I could ask you to kind of explain the Hamas tunnel system but I've done a couple episode on that I was just I was there rather right before the current pause or whatever you want to call it was called in a Gaza city with the 98th division dealing you know still still a major problem there's still a daily challenge it will be a daily challenge with the IS the international civilization force if it if it deploys that's all somebody just joined it if it deploys but what do you think is the most misunderstood aspect of that tunnel system so I think that I'll divide it into two even though you asked for the most misunderstood I think number one is and this this took us a very long time in the idea of to realize this is the worst thing you could do in approaching conquering the subterra domain when you're also conquering above ground is in above ground you're basically gaining ground and you know you're holding a certain you know the moment you gain that ground you're holding a line of defense and you know that the area behind you is pretty much the urban warfare it's a bit more difficult but it's pretty much clear and usually the way you draw out these lines are lines that are being pushed forward and even you know when you see on the news today Gaza and where the IDF is that's kind of how it draws is drawn out is how much is the IDF moved forward into Gaza and I think that at the beginning that was a little bit how we were approaching the tunnel system where we were basically saying okay we got to here let's try to clear all the tunnel systems behind us but one thing that is misunderstood is the level of complexity of these tunnels and the you know the vast array of how they were built and it was almost like you know the difference between people having their own garage to having a driveway to have you know a small street in a community and having central highways there are so many tunnels connecting into each other it was obvious that sometimes people weren't even if every person who dug a tunnel wasn't aware of the other tunnel being dug that when we the shift that we had to made in dealing with tunnels is suddenly from dealing with it as a line that we're trying to push forward as if we're conquering above ground it were we turned it into squares that we had to contain and actually move within the square until we met each other in the middle to really ensure that everything um was you know cleared and taken out so the complexity is so wide and the problem and the challenge here is if you don't clear it 100% you're still at the same threat you were from the day you began so even you know above ground if you missed a certain hideout of your adversary he is at a huge disadvantage in carrying out what he wants to carry out because he's so exposed and he basically has to continue to hide but in a tunnel if you missed one little branch the enemy has completely continual maneuverability he could access his logistics he could offer access his life support he could retreat he could go back so unless you've done it a hundred percent you're almost at 0% in many ways because he has that one avenue that connects him um to the main branch um so that's number one and number two and i think this was our biggest mistake in Israel and and i think this is what i'm very and you as well are very passionate about waking up the world on is subterranean in our adversary's approach is not a tactic it's the in-core depth of their strategy and one of the things that we saw that made us really realize it is that when we started going into these tunnels one of the most surprising things were the amount of um supplies they had the amount of food they had waiting for them and what it showed us is that this was their tactic from the gecko and by the way i think this is exactly what's happening right now in Iran as they said you know we're going to carry out this attack israel's going to have a few weeks of international justification to do what it does we have to survive during that time and the more we could prolong it since we're a terrorist organization that doesn't care much for civilian population if we could continue to survive israel will lose its legitimacy over time and over time it will have to give up and then we could just come up and rebuild what they're doing and i think what people don't even realize is that that's something that they were thinking about also in a span of years because even now we're there's still areas that we control that we're finding these small little outlets where terrorists have been staying for months and you see that that's their strategy they just have to survive enough time to go back and rebuild because they understand how western society works and they understand what are the limits of where israel is willing to go and that at some point israel will be pulling back and when they pull back they'll just be able to go back and rebuild whatever it is that they wanted to do because that's never been their challenge so i think you know if i had to put that all together i think that the at the end of the day the sub-terror threat when you're dealing with adversary especially a terrorist organization is number one it's a zero you know it's a zero-sum game i mean if you don't clear it completely you're in many ways you didn't make 50 percent progress you didn't make 75 percent progress you're still at zero percent and number two is that that is the core strategy of these terrorist organizations is to just survive enough move enough from one point of the tunnel to the other point because they'll always have an access point to continue surviving and by doing that at some point they know that will retract then they'll be able to you know gain what they wanted to gain and and then it goes again and again and again yeah i think you're spot on and actually and like you said i of course iran is not a it makes a terrorist state but it's a nation state who has invested in that Hamas strategy of it's almost like reverse engineering the western way of war of attacking your enemy's strategy and it's the weaknesses in it's strategy that it needs to finish things quickly and their ideal is well i just have to survive no matter the losses you know long as i attack whoever's attacking me is commitment how much time they have extrapolate this to iran north korea others who have developed a very grand strategy of any time their actions are going to warrant an operation they're attacking the western way of wars ideals about fast decisive operations which would be extremely hard especially without using ground forces great article with the modern wars to this morning about even drone warfare none of this prevents you if you want to go take ground and remove something from power it's very you know military theory clause with everything is that you have to have the capability depending on what type of word is to seize ground take what the enemy values the most it's power in all of whether it's logistics or everything i think you're spot on okay for expanding like we want to because this is about global underground reality if i want to put it that way um i'm sure trades are in you and y'all know i'm in everybody keep an eye on everything from you know even wrote about the the Syria operation where the Syrian military had this deep buried um military objective and you know how deep they put it it's it's just going farther and farther underground can we talk about Ukraine for a moment most people if you mentioned the word Ukraine they think drones um are they missing the underground warfare reality of the Ukraine Russia work? I think 100 percent. I think what people always imagine the drones in the sky, but what they forget is that there's people operating those drones. There's literally cables pointing to where they're operating those drones from. And the only way that you could continue mass producing, mass sending off, controlling that whole area is protecting yourself as you do it. And a big component of what Ukraine has been doing is, you know, underground, not in the sense of what we imagine in Ukraine and China, but it's these trenches that they're basically dug in. And actually, sometimes when you see the videos inside them, me there reminded me a lot of a Hamas tunnel, like very narrow alleyways where they're building the drones, operating the drones, and sending them off. And I think that that, you know, in general, John, I think there's like a lot of, and it's a good thing, a lot of excitement about defense tech and everyone are really talking about it. But I think it's become a conversation that's very, you know, excited by the visuality of lethality, of this precision and this, you know, direct strike. But what people, you know, sometimes miss is that so much of war is also about survivability. It's about your ability to continue to operate, even though you're under that first wave of attack. And Ukraine has completely implemented that where they're doing, you know, the perfect combination of lethality, which is crucial, but also of survivability. And today, the Ukraine-Russian front is reminding us more than ever of actually World War I. It's a trench warfare where so much, you know, has to be dug in and so much has to be protected. And that's why the maneuver is happening so slow. It's not a war of drones just bashing against each other to sky. It's a war of a combination of being able to trench in, progress forward, and trench in again without being hit as you're making those progresses. So I think, you know, that's something that we all have to take in mind. And it's also a calling, I think that, you know, for young people who are excited about, you know, this world, we don't need another 20 drone companies, but we need people thinking about, you know, more original, sometimes not the most advanced tech, but the ways to protect our troops so that they could continue to carry out whatever it is that they're carrying out. Yeah, spot on. And this is the article, very simple article that I read this morning. It's something I've been pitching beyond just the fact that all warfare is a combination of the most advanced things you can imagine, but of the old as well. You still need to be able to maneuver and the analogy that's in this article is exactly that. The World War I, once the machine gun was created and line infantry marching towards the other side no longer became feasible because there was no solution to the machine gun mowing people down trenches were the solution until, you know, this box piece of metal on tracks was developed and the tank was combined with also the creation of the airplane, radio communication, stormtrooper tactics that were changed. And that's the, I think the reality of the vulnerability of formations today, right? That survivability with the presence of drones drones haven't made tanks obsolete drones have made tanks vulnerable and formation is vulnerable until you have a solution. And it isn't just that it's precision guided munitions satellite imagery. I mean, it's it's a whole combination of things and that's the need to keep what you value protected and destroy what your enemy values has always been present. And I think you're right about that the what people are the way people are thinking. And what was missing from that article is the reality of the solution for now as everybody advances on drone counter drone absolutely is a evolution of warfare that isn't ever going away until there's strong solutions, but you still need to maneuver formations forward to seize and to hold and the elements of what the goal is, whether it's to protect your borders or to exfill an invading military, all these things is the presence of the underground in Ukraine over the last two years. And I'm not talking just taking trench lines, which was initially just covering them up. And like you said, that's basically now a tunnel. I'm talking full out highways underground. And I saw Trasar's pitch even mentioned, which I have an article. I think it's in the works. I have many articles in the work about the gas lines. And most people don't understand that there are there's lots of gas lines actually criss-crossing Ukraine's eastern border as getting resources out is a thing. And how many I think there's at least four different incidents where Russian formations are trying to use gas lines to infiltrate past these dead manzones and come up in a point of advantage against Ukrainian formations. But also, this isn't just like, although there was a heavy use of construction equipment to dig tunnels, which is a whole other conversation is like, how do you dig a tunnel in geology and physics and all these things? GPS, like you said, navigating all of these things. But Ukraine has got major construction companies developing massive underground complexes because of the state of the warfare there that I think people are missing. Like, there's an underground war happening in Ukraine today that's just being undercover because of the fascination and some of it being need, but almost fascination with the drone aspect when the reality, if you go visit Ukraine is how much you're going to be talking to somebody to include drone manufacturing in a deep buried underground facility because of the need. That really brings me to some of the things that I'm excited about some of the work you're doing now. Like Tracer, something you said, and I'll be honest, I've been doing this for a long time. The word, you know, sub-training underground tunnel warfare, underground warfare, and sub-t, or kind of like the norms, like been around for years. But something I saw Tracer, I recently argued that militaries think about warfare in terms of air, land, sea, space, now cyber, that they still fail to think about what you call the subterra domain, which I think is great. It just, it sounds really, it fits. But what do you mean by that? So we basically as part of our process of, you know, building this company, we really felt, and it was also a lot of times thanks to conversations with people like yourselves who had the expertise and the knowledge who validated a lot of what we were imagining and envisioning. But that was that anything that has to do with underground is a domain of itself that's just going to become larger and larger. And, you know, in many ways you could say, well, okay, you want to call it a domain, but it's exactly what you said. I think that when we start giving a name to something, when we define something as a domain, that's when military units are built specifically for that domain, just like there's an Air Force, and that's when whole areas of R&D are focused just in that area. And you know, part of our work to try to shift out of something that's niche was the problem that there's so many words that you could give to the, to the same element. So we decided to phrase a word subterra and the idea of subterra is anything that has to do with fighting underground, whether it's you're taking advantage of this domain to maneuver forward, to protect your troops, to do any sort of thing, but also how do you strike your enemy into subterra? How do you not enable him to take advantage of this domain? And our big belief is that where aerial warfare was 120 years ago, this is where subterra warfare is going to be in the next 100 years. And just like today, when, you know, we talk to people and you say the Air Force no one is saying, well, wait, but what is aerial warfare? Is it logistics? Is it dropping bombs? Is it maneuvering troops? You know, people very simply realize that aerial warfare has to do with everything. It's everything from logistics to dropping bombs to maneuvering people, etc, etc. And this is kind of in many ways how we see this subterra is subterra becomes something that when someone says subterra people can envision in their mind just like a plane has many use cases both the technologies that are being used here have many use cases. And that's in many ways what our company is working on technologically is machines of different sizes, different diameters, different geologies. There's so many other considerations that you have to come with a huge amount of humility to, but different machines that know how to carry different packs of payloads, packages, pipelines through the crust of the earth to enable this to become a domain of itself. And we feel that the word for this is subterra. And we truly believe in three years, just like drones and something that just now has come up, you know, at least three years. People are going to be talking about air land, sea and space, cyber and subterra as a domain of warfare of its own. Yeah, I actually, you know, somebody who's been studying underground warfare, which urban warfare, calling for research centers on urban operations, which would have a sub-T component to it. But if I truly believe what I what I talk about that it is as foreign to the surface as deep sea is to the surface of the ocean, then you need something different to break that mindset that it's just an extension and a specialty as, as we've been arguing, like more and more warfare from the state actor to the non-state actor from the terrorist to the terrorist regime is investing their strategies and resources to the underground because of the advantage they get against the Western way of warfare. And we're almost seeding the intellectual domain of it, let alone the capabilities development of of being able to protect our own forces because we're always maneuvering, right? We never have to stop for anything. Although, if you're a student of Ukraine, you were exactly right. Well, Ukraine has not only did it master certain elements and necessity became the mother of all innovation, it's not new, but they were attacking Russian force protection vulnerabilities, right? Every command post when a general officer was visiting the Russian front was, you know, a beacon and then they developed ways to attack that using limited resources for strategic effects, 100% agree with you. Okay, there's so much to talk about, especially all the investments and capabilities development. Let me back up, I have a question, but I forgot to ask this question in Gaza, could I actually think it's really important and I've talked about it? And it came up a lot since October 7th, which is harder in your mind, locating in a tunnel or destroying a tunnel? Oh, 100% destroying a tunnel. Why? So I think that the, and this is kind of, you know, what you were talking about, this shift of how foreign, sometimes thinking about subterranean warfare is. So if you're thinking about, you know, destroying a structure above ground, you basically have to just cause it to collapse and it takes a lot of work to rebuild it. But what a tunnel is below ground, is earth that used to exist, that was taken out and put somewhere else, meaning if you really want to destroy a tunnel, you have to fill a void that doesn't really exist, that doesn't have the physical parameters in order to do that. So then you're basically, you have two options. You could number one, you could try to refill it again, which is what Israel is now attempting to do with cement in Gaza and that's right now, Israel's main investment. It's extremely, extremely expensive. And you're always going to have to pay a price because you want to cover as much ground within the tunnel as you can. But the more you want to cover more ground, the more the material has to be less dense. And then at the end of the day, a lot of times you're creating something that isn't that hard to dig through and it could even strengthen the tunnel. So there's a lot of conversations going on now in Israel about the cement. And then if you want to create collapseation, you're basically, you know, I spoke about this a little bit about blast radius. If you're blowing up something in a tunnel, it's not just like in a building where the, you know, the airwaves are trying to get out and it causes some sort of collapse, it's structural collapse within. A lot of times you'll just travel, you know, and the easiest way it has to travel. So a lot of times you have to place, and this comes from the mining world, you have to place these explosives in extremely precise places. You need a time to explosion. You need to do a lot of things that create the ground from above to collapse in a way that actually fills it up and makes it unusable. And these are areas that are a level of expertise that today are used, you know, in very precision mining and tunneling where you have topped up engineers, scanning and monitoring the ground, you know, geologically for sometimes days, weeks, even months, before they even decide what's the game plan in placing these explosives. And this is something that you're trying to do in a combat scenario quickly, fast, you know, when all the parameters of what war requires from you. So this is definitely our biggest gap today. If you go, you know, up north to hard rock geology, it's even more difficult because no matter, you know, it's such a hard, you know, surrounding the tunnel that no matter how much you collapse it within, it will always be easier to just pull all that rubble out rather than fill it up. And, you know, a lot of people have been wondering why the explosions that the IDF has been doing. And the tunnels in Lebanon have been so huge. And that's because basically the IDF decided, we're gonna blow, we're gonna put so much explosives in these tunnels that when it blows up, it blows up all the way to the top of the mountain, meaning that no matter how much rubble you will take out, at the end of the day, you will just clear out the half of the mountain that you blow up. And that is extremely dangerous because the moment you're dealing with this amount of explosives, you know, in a tactical area, you know, it could blow up on you and the IDF had some horrible accidents. I lost a very good friend like that where the tunnel blew up above the team as they were working. So there's also a huge risk mitigating to that. And I think, many of these, you know, the mission of what we're trying, one of the machinery that we're building in our company is this ability to do this from far away at a precise level quickly and efficiently without risking troops. But it's such a huge challenge. And I could say right now in Gaza, we have many more kilometers mapped out and we have actually destroyed. - Yeah, I've seen some of those, actually like in how surprising it was, you know they're there, but the sheer amount of resources, time, thinking that has to go through, depending on which one, the shaft, all of this. And like you said, in the north, some of the explosions have been so big, they've set off small, what people thought were earthquakes in northern Israel. But with the limited amount of time, because we really had to just have you back to talk more. And I did do an episode, I mean, people are really interested in Gaza. What are the different methodologies that the idea have to use and have tried, but didn't work from liquid explosives to physically place explosives to what I was really, I've learned about what some of the capabilities that Trasar has developed, or has developed. So there's that category, I'd like to ask you like, okay, what had you been working with based on your operational experience, you identified a need for things, and then what capabilities did you develop? But then how you are this episode, I'm gonna call it really underground warfare, re-imagined, because I do think there needs to be a cognitive re-imagination like we've been talking about, but also on even thinking about the maneuver aspects, the future aspects, what if we could do aspects of it? Could you break it down to what had you developed, and what are you working on? - Yeah, so right now we have two technologies that we like to call in the US military terms, TRLs that technology ready in this level, that are at a prototyping level, where we're already demonstrating and seeing results. The first one is an excavator class robotic, that we took a lot of inspiration from the mining world, and we created a machine that, on one hand, has the remote controlled components that are built for a tunnel, so hard and fiber optic cable and all kinds of vision and elements within it that can enable it to maneuver over a long period of time within a structure, but still has the force element strong enough like a mini excavator. One of the gaps that I really identified is I felt that there was amazing work done on building special robotics and drones, just now in Lebanon, you're seeing unbelievable drone footage of drones inside tunnels, and that's a lot of human expertise there, and it's great. But at the end of the day, and it's crucial, and it's so important that it happens, and I'm sure these, the people that have been developing it, we're actually, we're helping our companies, helping a few of them now sell it outwards, so other militaries have these capabilities, but the fourth factor is crucial, because our adversaries learn from us again and again, and they're putting so many obstacles in the way, because they see these drone footage, and they see these robotics, and they see the dogs that we're sending in, and your ability to actually have force and strength in order to push through, clear through, take out blast doors is crucial. So this machine has a very diverse set of abilities, but at the end of the day, it could maneuver through a underground structure, and we're building it actually, in our vision, we don't want this to be tier one unit. We imagine every unit in the army having one of these, just like every unit that army has an engineering team with excavators and d9s and things of that sort, and it maneuvers through the tunnel, it maps it out, and it gives you a picture of what the tunnel is. And on the way back, it could do two things, it could or structurally collapse the tunnel, which I differentiated between destroying the tunnel, meaning it makes it unusable, you know, immediately, but very easy to rehabilitate, but another element in it that we're now developing is, and we took this from the mining world, is we're building an arm that knows how to drill and insert explosives within the structure of the tunnel itself, so that it could cause real collapseation and real destruction of the tunnel that, that for me, the definition of destroyed tunnels that the adversary prefers to dig a new one rather than go back to the old one. So this machine will also know how to go and do it, and this isn't, you know, unique to Gaza. At the end of the day, a lot of the challenges that we have in Iran was how do we, you know, in possibilities that were played as, how do you maneuver and a structure like that, and it all comes back to heavy engineering machinery that knows how to maneuver in subterranean areas. So that's our excavator class focus, and our other team were working on, you know, you could call it an underground torpedo, but it's basically a drilling methodology that I won't bore you too much with details, but how in one push, 'cause a lot of times in directional drilling, you have to do a few lines before you could do it, but how in one push could you carry a payload to the point of where you want? And that payload, there's a huge amount of a variety of what you could do is that it could be carrying explosives and blow up, you know, next to the structure that you wanna collapse in a very precise way. It could carry sensors, so it could give you information of what's anticipated ahead of you before you're maneuvering there. It could carry utilities if you're expeditionarily building bases or things like that. It could quickly do that. So giving the Army already the first product that enables it to maneuver things in the crust of the earth at small diameters and small packages to do that. And the way you know we're building the teams and the engineering and the culture of the companies is the realization that everything we develop today has used cases for the next product. So other than these two products that are at a prototyping readiness level, we have probably 50, yeah. not probably. We have 58 products that are all one or two TRLs, meaning conceptual ideas, but we believe that then they are going to be implemented and our engineers are required for everything they're developing today to think in the back of their mind, how could this also help you when you're building the next product, whether it's navigation, understanding what's ahead of you and different mechanisms of digging and taking advantage of thrust energy, and I could go on and on about all of that. But you could actually I was involved with a small project. I mean, you can look it up under a minor. Oh, yeah, yeah. Off of the, which I love the name. Your naming means a lot. A lot. And actually, your excavator, don't you call it the Pac-Man? We, I mean, we do, but now we have to change it because of we're afraid that we're going through like it's not our name to use. So we're very devastated. Oh, man. Under minor comes from the incredible, if you have a little kids, a minor program, they can steal it. Why can't you steal Pac-Man? It actually gives you an immediate visual of what you're talking about in this, this eating machine. Yeah, and I'll just add to that, which I think is very exciting. It's DARPA just came out now with a RFI that anyone could search on the web, basically saying we need new methodologies of structural shockwaves to collapse underground complexes that aren't kinetic, meaning they're not dropped from the air. And I think this is already the hints of showing, but there's a real, I think it's based off of what happened with Iran, but that's an assumption of mine. I don't know how to base that, but there has to be new methodologies of creating these structural collaborations. And that's a whole topic in itself. But I think we're starting to see the shift happen. That's right. Yeah, I mean, the who operates in Midnight Hammer, if anybody knows that bomb was designed, the decades designed for that mission and already to go just keep going deeper, it's not going to be as effective and arguably people argued that it wasn't effective, you know, until that's declassified, 100% agree with you. I can't let you go asher without mentioning, because it got some attention. I do believe there have been evolutions of underground warfare. Of course, the enemy was doing it of the world we weren't looking, but even when I wrote about how even the idea flipped their own cultural way of thinking about a tunnel to trying to decipher that highway system in Gaza, like you were talking about to the point where they could enter a tunnel, immediately know what type of tunnel it was, a super highway, you know, or an alley, and then maneuver into it, which is the one of the problems with the why underground warfare needs to be reimagined is because we only do it as an obstacle to deal with if we us maneuvering on the surface encounter rather than, hey, you need to be able to dig in at a level that's going to offer you some force protection, but I couldn't let you go. And also, like you just said, about one of the things that I wrote about because I think kind of missed was was that operation that Israel did to Syria because they because there was a deep buried target, you just couldn't take out, but you can also just put people on the ground and insert things and blow it up from the inside, which was a, you know, of course, a historic operation that deserves its own book. Yeah, but I can't let you go without talking about Palmer Lucky's prediction of the future that the Earth's crust will be the next major war fighting domain predicting militaries will move troops logistics and weapons beneath the surface like submarines in the ocean. That sounds a lot like what we were just talking about. I would argue that we're almost already there, but I think some of it is the Germans actually were trying to invest in this tunneling system much like if you watch the Incredibles, the underminer. Yeah. A device that could dig a tunnel for you rapidly, which gets you into the whole Elon Musk boring company. We can't dig a tunnel of that size faster than a snail is Elon's quote, right? That's the speed of a tunneling system is a snail. But I think Palmer Lucky's almost like a, I mean, created like this almost like Field Elfia project of imagine what one he thinks that's the evolution, but you could of course speed this with innovations to provide warfare is always trying to achieve a decisive capability. And I think we demonstrated that in Iran, right? The United States and Israel together demonstrated a capability that no militaries ever demonstrated in the history of war by being able to start the campaign eliminate the entire political and military hierarchy of the enemy at the opening round just never happened. So if we were to re-imagine the underground, what if I didn't of course, if you knew about the underground space like in Gaza, if you could understand it quickly and then use it to your advantage. But what if you could create these? If I understand what the second point of your project is to be able to laterally drill and push something into an environment that isn't already there, whether it's a, like you said, a payload, a resupply or whatever. Troops, if we could reimagine and develop capabilities to be able to dig tunnels rapidly for force protection and maneuver all of that, but I don't think we're too far from a Palmer's prediction that the crust of the earth's surface as much as four submarines deep under sea waters will become a decisive advantage for whoever can get there first. I 100% agree, although so I'll give, I mean, first of all, I think that for me, when people ask me, okay, we get you, you were literally crawling in a tunnel for the past three years. But how did Palmer come up with this theory? And I never spoken to him about it, but I think that Palmer saw what he's capable of achieving above the ground. And he said very quickly, we're going to have to find a additive advantage because it's just so advanced. But I will give one hint. And it's actually something that there's a big conversation of has this been done already by the Soviets, but we're seeing an America renaissance of these small nuclear reactors. And so much of tunneling at the end of the day is energy. And if you have something that could feed the same amount of energy at the digging point, as it's pushing forward, you could dig endlessly. A lot of what limits the how far you could dig is just how much you could continue feeding whatever that thing is that you're pushing forward and needing to do. So I, you know, and one of the theories is that the Soviets created something called the subterrain, which was just like a nuclear submarine. And this isn't something that's completely science fiction. We have many today vessels under sea that are operated in this way. But just like the nuclear submarine, there's a claim that the Soviets developed a nuclear boring mechanism that basically was constantly feeding itself and digging through the crust of the earth, through actually expenditure of gas, which kind of eliminates also the need for earth removal. So, you know, I know that Palmer is also an investor in one of these companies, but I wouldn't be surprised if, you know, you know, I mean, Trump defined that by July 4th, these nuclear reactors, these small nuclear have to become critical. So I would be surprised if two or three years, our companies are going to be doing some sort of collaboration where we're building infinite energy vehicles that could dig tunnels in the crust of the earth and maneuver troops for them. And I hope we get there quickly. Yeah, I mean, we do it for like deep sea cables. I mean, why wouldn't you be able to do it? You know, I could take that what you just said and go so far, dealing with so many like army research labs and everything where actually some of the current capabilities were predicted in sci-fi decades and decades ago. Yes, many examples. That's a whole different article podcast, but I had one of the guys like on my my good friend Drew Stedman is what's the chief engineer for the British army and you know, the whole we could do a whole episode on like, okay, here's the idea of what are the challenges today, just like in sci-fi where they imagine the capability, but there are challenges today with getting past the physics and for this one, it'd be like, you know, the heat generation, the the spoil, the burden, the geology variations and the GP, you lack of GP, you know, navigation, like all of these things, but I would argue that we're not that far in from a science fiction aspect of it to the point where, you know, most of the things that are present today were predicted in the past. So the fact that the Soviets were imagined something but couldn't get there based on these challenges doesn't mean that it isn't a worthy endeavor because would it and for how long would it create a decisive advantage for the military that could get there as the surface continues to be more and more lethal and that's why the drones are a cheap man's air force that gives a capability that has to be combined with all other capabilities. Yeah, yeah, I'm excited to maybe we'll come back and just talk about that. Yeah, it'll be fun to sit with Palmer and sync out all the crazy ideas that we imagined, but as I said, because I imagine it's going to be a aerial, like it's going to be what aerial warfare is on during the years, like a lot of times people say, okay, you develop this so they could just do this. And I say exactly like we develop the plane till people created the Samusel and then it's a never ending, you know, back and forth game. And I think that's where subterra will be, you know, very soon. Right. And this is again, the reality of today, and we do have to cut it or kill me, is that much of what was happening in war one is happening in Ukraine, even in the subterranean, right? So if you if you know of the underground environments and investments and the taking of all the coal miners to create the tunnels and then the development of acoustics. So in Ukraine today, the Ukrainian soldiers are dealing with some of the challenges, but they're now, they can be technologically advanced at the same challenges that the World War I soldiers were dealing with with. Okay, I'm digging a tunnel, but so is the other guy and the acoustic sensors and the soft digging, things like that that you need, because there is this race of the old combining with the new. So I think I'll end up with that, even in the subterra domain, it will be a combination of the old and the new. 100%. Couldn't make it more. All right, thanks so much, Asher. Thank you, John. Thanks for listening to the Urban Warfare Project podcast. The podcast is produced by the Modern Wars II at West Point. What you hear in each episode are the views that are participants and do not represent the positions of West Point, the Army, or the U.S. government. You can subscribe to the Urban Warfare Project podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast app. And be sure to check out Indioize Other Podcasts, as well as the new articles we're publishing every day on our website. Thanks again for listening.