The TRUTH About China's 6th Gen Fighters & UFOs/UAPs | Alex Hollings | Ep. 326

Today we're joined by friend of the show Alex Hollings, former Marine and current editor of Sandboxx News and host of Airpower on YouTube. We talk Chinas 6th gen aircraft capabilities, stealth, & ufos. Find Alex here: https://www.youtube.com/@UCNPMEL4N_kfEC-w2A6CuPGg https://www.tiktok.com/@alexhollings52?lang=en https://www.sandboxx.us/author/alexhollings/ New merch, patches, and stickers! ⬇️ https://theteamhouse-shop.fourthwall.com Support the show here:⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse ___________________________________________________ Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️ https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnPodcast/featured —————————————————————- Today's Sponsors: GhostBed⬇️ https://www.ghostbed.com/house FOR 50% OFF!!! The Perfect Jean⬇️ https://theperfectjean.nyc use code "HOUSE15" at checkout for 15% off & free shipping ____________________________________ Pre-order Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" today! ⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/ —————————————————————— To help support the show and for all bonus content including: https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️ https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouse Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: ⬇️ [email protected] #ufos #6thgeneration Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 2:32Speaker 03

  Special operations. Covert ops. Espionage. The Team House. With your hosts, Jack Murphy and David Park.

• 2:52Jack Murphy?

  Hey folks, welcome to episode 326 of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy. Returning on the show for, I believe this is his third appearance, is Alex Hollings. Alex is a former Marine and he now does mostly aerospace news for Sandbox. You've been doing that for quite a while now. I mean, ever since I've known you, you've been a big aerospace buff. And obviously doing really good at it now. So welcome back to the show.

• 3:25Speaker 05

  Hey, it's a pleasure to be here. I am honestly always glad to talk tech, but in particular with you guys.

• 3:30Jack Murphy?

  Appreciate it, man.

• 3:31Speaker 05

  Having me.

• 3:32Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, we appreciate your time. And I mean, we can just jump in wherever you want. I mean, let's just start off, you know, what's on your mind these days in defense tech? What are you looking at? What are you interested in?

• 3:48Speaker 05

  Well, you know, I think one thing that is, right now, we're on the precipice of a crazy revolution in aerospace technologies that I don't think we've seen really since the late 60s going into the 70s, when we were sort of transitioning from third generation fighters like the F-4 Phantom to fourth generation fighters like the F-15 and the F-16. Now, I am on record as saying that sixth generation is marketing bullshit. It's not, it doesn't mean anything right now, but the way aerospace technology is changing is very similar to the way it was back then in that. We are once again, and when I say we, I mean the United States, but also a number of adversary states,

• 4:30Speaker 05

  particularly China, are investing heavily into not just sort of iterative improvements on the existing technologies we've had for a long time, but on actually new emerging technologies.

• 4:42Jack Murphy?

  Big leaps.

• 4:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, you know, things like collaborative combat aircraft, AI-enabled drone wingmen that will be flying alongside crewed aircraft. They're not going to replace fighter pilots, but they are going to fly with fighter pilots. And I think one of the biggest changes that we're looking at is we're doing away with the idea of fighters and bombers sort of in general, or at least that's what I think it's we're trending toward. Back in the day, there was eight different classifications of fighters, right? You had interceptors, you had fighters that were better at, you know, close-in, two-circle or one-circle fighting, but now we just kind of have multi-role fighters that we expect to not only do everything a fighter does, but also everything attack jets used to do, right? Now, every

• 5:29Speaker 05

  fighter does air-to-air and air-to-ground operations. Well, now the B-21s emerging with the same avionics suite and then some of the F-35, it'll be capable of leveraging air-to-air weapons, and it'll certainly be capable of controlling those drone wingmen that carry air-to-air weapons. And I think likewise with China's J-36, which was one of the new stealth aircraft that sort of emerged in testing in December, they're going in the same direction. We're leaning towards multi-role bombers, where large aircraft that can carry a great deal of payload will be able to engage airborne targets on their own. They'll be able to use their drone wingmen the same way the next generation of fighters

• 6:11Speaker 05

  will. And we're, the lines are blurring, basically. And what air warfare is going to look like in 30 years, 40 years, is going to be dramatically different. And that is something, because 30 years, 40 years ago, air warfare looked pretty much the same as it does right now, you know? So I guess when I say what am I looking at, what's my focus on? It's on the, those inflection points. Drones are a big one. Artificial intelligence, which is a term that means nothing, but... You know, can be used in this in this context is gonna change things quite a bit. Uh, but then the other thing that's gonna change things quite a bit is just money, man. Uh, we're worried about China, so we're throwing a bunch of money at defense again in that way.

• 6:56Speaker 05

  We haven't really since the Cold War ended.

• 7:00Jack Murphy?

  So the the key technologies you're talking about drones, AI, are there any others that that you're kind of focused on that maybe we haven't heard of? Uh, most of us?

• 7:10Speaker 05

  The other two things that are really, really important for this shift are our next generation propulsion systems, new turbofan technology. Not necessarily just about producing thrust or getting good fuel efficiency, which are important, you know, for competition. But for electrical production and that really comes down to heat management. Uh, the engines we have in fighter jets today could already produce more electricity than we let them. Because they would run so hot, they'd burn through the fuselage if they did. Uh, so the F thirty five is getting a coolant upgrade right now that theoretically will allow it to produce more electrical power. But these new next generation adaptive cycle engines that GE and Pratt and Whitney are building. Will be able to produce maybe twice as much electrical power.

• 7:55Speaker 05

  And that is when we're starting to get into the the realm of directed energy weapons or lasers actually being viable. I think that's still iffy, uh, but microwave weapons and especially electronic warfare capabilities. All reliant on that power production, right? Uh, and then the other side, which is also tied to that power production is transitioning away from kill chains. Which I know you're familiar with to kill webs, which, uh. To put it really sort of succinctly, a kill chain is sort of the six steps. That you need to execute in order to engage a target and then assess that you did. Uh, but if you interrupt that kill chain by stopping one of the platforms that does one of the steps, you can stop the engagement. With a kill web, which is sort of networked assets all throughout the battlefield.

• 8:40Speaker 05

  If you lose an asset, you did, it's a self healing mesh network. It just moves to the next asset and you can still complete that kill chain.

• 8:47Jack Murphy?

  It it sounds a bit like, uh, the strike cell model that we've used in the past.

• 8:52Speaker 05

  It is.

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• 9:23Speaker 06

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• 9:53Speaker 05

  Nailed it. You know, so, and of course, that relies on powerful sensors and a whole bunch of electricity, you know? So, it's the engines, it's new stealth aircraft that are sort of blurry between what's a bomber, what's a fighter, what's a cruise missile, what's a ballistic missile, what's an aeroballistic missile? The stuff's all kind of blurring together. They all do a lot of the same stuff. So what really is going to matter is the detection methodology. How stealthy can the airplane be? How much electrical power can it produce? And how well are they networked together?

• 10:25Jack Murphy?

  So, I want to get into the stealth stuff, but I don't want to brush right past directed energy weapons, which is always something I'm fascinated with. So, if I understand correctly, you're saying the engine can be used to essentially turn a shaft and generate electricity while, you know, using its own power? And that can create a sort of reservoir or a deep magazine to power these weapons?

• 10:51Speaker 05

  That's it. You would, you'd have to basically do it that way using like a capacitor to like, store up a great deal of.

• 10:57Jack Murphy?

  Cause it can't carry, a, a plane like that can't carry a battery big enough to do that.

• 11:02Speaker 05

  Exactly. Nailed it. Now, we used to use airborne directed energy weapons, lasers that were really powerful, like one megawatt class lasers in like a 747, these were chemical lasers that would produce that electrical power through chemical reactions that were really dangerous. Uh, the material was hazardous. We effectively scrubbed the premise, uh, because it wasn't worth the trouble. Uh, but in recent years, we've been making direct, or excuse me, solid state directed energy weapons, you know, they're much lower power lasers, at least thus far, uh, but they're much more practical, you know? And these are the lasers we've seen on the Navy ship. There was, uh, pictures and, and, uh, video of Helios being tested recently.

• 11:43Speaker 05

  They've had laws on Navy ships, uh, for, you know, 10 years now, and they're moving toward a system called Hellcap. Uh, and the whole idea here is that power output. So, according to the Navy's assessment, you need certain levels of power output to take on different types of threats, right? So right now, Helios is a maximum power output of 120 kilowatts, which is around on par with like the iron beam that Israel's putting in service. It's effectively enough power to take down a mortar or an unguided rocket, something like that. But really nothing better than that, right? Uh, Hellcap, they're aiming for a 300 kilowatt class range, which at that point,

• 12:26Speaker 05

  you could burn through the side of a drone or even the side of the fuselage of a cruise missile, but you couldn't burn through the nose cone of a cruise missile and definitely not a ballistic missile. Uh, they just, those nose cones are designed to withstand a great deal of heat and friction and pressure, and you're not going to burn through that with 300 kilowatts. You gotta get up towards like one megawatt to be able to burn through the nose cone of a ballistic missile or use it for hypersonic defense. And we are, and, and experimental lasers about halfway there. Lockheed Martin's got a 500 kilowatt class laser that they're developing. But to be honest, I don't think we're ever going to see. Lasers as a truly viable means of ballistic or hypersonic missile defense.

• 13:06Speaker 05

  Because of atmospheric physics, there's issues like thermal blooming or an atmospheric dissipation. If you ever take like a flashlight and spray water in its beam and you can see the particulate. That's basically what atmospheric dissipation does because of that. Lasers tend not to be very effective outside of 10 miles.

• 13:24Jack Murphy?

  Because the la- the laser is essentially light carrying the energy. So the light gets deflected by water in the atmosphere.

• 13:32Speaker 05

  Right, so like these systems can be very effective against slow moving threats. That aren't all that resilient, a lot of types of drones. They could be really good for quadcopter defense if we can make one that's powerful enough. To be able to take it down quickly, but you're never gonna hit something. You know, 20, 50, 100 miles away with one of these lasers. And actually have like an appreciable effect, at least not in my opinion, you know?

• 13:56Jack Murphy?

  It's a interesting that the way you're describing it because it reminds me a little bit of the Tesla coil.

• 14:04Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 14:04Jack Murphy?

  That it was this, this idea that, um, you know, you could basically fire a bolt of lightning and use it for, um. You know, initially, one of his ideas was to use it for the defense of England against the, the Nazis who were bombing.

• 14:17Speaker 05

  Oh, I forgot about power transfer, but I didn't know.

• 14:21Jack Murphy?

  It was, it was a plan at one point, it never got further than that, um, but I. What Tesla didn't know at the time, because he didn't know about the sonic boom. Was that, so he would need to use a medium for, to carry the electricity. So it was like firing a metal dust up into the air. And then they, you would fire the Tesla coil would file, fire the electricity. And that creates this bolt of lightning that goes off and hits the target. But there is something, uh, uh, someone much smarter than I am was describing to me how, because Tesla didn't, no one knew at the time about the sonic boom. That would actually destroy the device itself when they, when they launched it. Um, and so that was, that was the hiccup there and I, so again, it's, it's a question of range and, and, you know, resources.

• 15:06Speaker 05

  No, 100%, you know, and we and we will get to the point where we see directed energy weapons. I think more likely microwaves than lasers, becoming a really capable drone defense type of system. But in terms of airborne assets, like on fighters, for, you know, Lockheed Martin delivered a laser for testing on the F-16. Last year, we ended up sort of scrubbing the program. They didn't disclose why. I have a sneaking suspicion it has to do with power output. But you could use a system like that, and Russia claims they are with the SU-57. As a directional infrared countermeasure, so effectively infrared guided air to air missiles or surface to air missiles coming towards you.

• 15:48Speaker 05

  You could hit them right in the nose with a laser and effectively confuse that infrared sensor.

• 15:53Jack Murphy?

  I mean, you can, can't you do that with microwaves too? Because you can fire like a wider beam?

• 15:59Speaker 05

  Yes, and you can transfer more energy with microwaves than you can with directed energy weapons, at least right now. Which is why I think they're more likely, especially for like if we're talking drone swarm defense. The challenge of using directed energy weapons to take down 100 or 1,000 quadcopters. That, you know, you can only fire one at a time, and you have to get good target coordinates for each individual one, you know? And at that point, you could use kinetic, you know, systems. We've got some systems that are radar guided 20 millimeter guns, you know what I mean? And that, you know, long term, you know, you do have to replenish that magazine, you know, and stuff like that. But it's using logistics that exist. It's a more reasonable expense, in my opinion.

• 16:42Jack Murphy?

  I I've seen some of the the video footage that DOD has publicly released where they'll hook up like one of these laser systems to an AC-130. And you'd see it like burning through like a car engine block. And I think like, oh, that'd be pretty cool to have back in the day for like vehicle interdictions and things. But you think that it probably isn't ever going to be much more than that, that it's it's we're not going to be able to use it against high end targets.

• 17:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't think so. I mean, and the biggest, the biggest challenge being that the lower the power, the longer the duration of the beam, right? So like if you have a hundred and twenty kilowatt class weapon like Helios and you're trying to bring down a drone, we're talking like ten, twenty seconds of sustained fire on that drone to bring it down. You know, if you've got a five hundred kilowatt class one, well, now you only need one second on that drone, but you still need ten seconds on a missile, you know? And if you want to burn through the engine block of a car, you know, we're talking one megawatt class. And again, pretty significant sustained duration of fire, you know, and at some point, you're kind of given, you're either giving yourself away, uh, because one thing that is cool about lasers is they are invisible. So

• 17:51Speaker 05

  there are some really cool covert use cases for like a five hundred kilowatt class or a one megawatt class weapon, uh, but not as many conventional arms, close air support type options, you know?

• 18:03Jack Murphy?

  Havana syndrome?

• 18:05Speaker 05

  For instance, or you know, maybe microwaves for that? I don't know. I'm not sure.

• 18:10Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, it more, yeah, it's microwaves.

• 18:12Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah, I'd be willing to bet. Yeah. So yeah, I guess I'm a party pooper when it comes to lasers, uh, but I do think that they will have a place on the future battlefield, but I think that it tends to be overblown and sort of popular perceptions of it.

• 18:27Jack Murphy?

  Well, one thing to, to follow up on there that I'm curious about, um, what are the dynamics like for orbital based systems? Um, because I, the atmospherics must be completely different.

• 18:38Speaker 05

  That's a hundred percent true. Theoretically speaking, a satellite could use a laser to engage other orbital threats like other satellites at extreme ranges, you know? Uh, at that point, what you're basically dealing with is just how do you keep your beam as narrow as possible over great distances, right? Uh, but yeah, you're not worried about atmospheric dissipation. There's no thermal blooming. Uh, so thermal blooming is effectively superheating the air around the laser and it creates a lensing effect that will knock it effectively off target. You've got none of those concerns in orbit. But I can counter that by saying that in orbit, it is exceedingly easy to break stuff.

• 19:18Speaker 05

  Uh, so lasers are a really good option for depth of magazine, you know what I mean? But they're not necessarily a good option depending on power production on the satellite, you know? Uh, it's power using solar and capacitors.

• 19:33Jack Murphy?

  What, what do they call it? Solar sails?

• 19:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, uh, actually, I, uh, I helped crowdfund, uh, solar sale, man, a long time ago. Uh, I wonder if it ever actually went up, or if I just sent somebody my money.

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• 22:46Jack Murphy?

  That's, I mean, it's not, that's a technology that doesn't just have military applications. If they can figure out how to get that working, that solves basically the world's energy problems.

• 22:56Speaker 05

  You know, and also interstellar travel to some extent. So we're still, say, the only systems that we could conceive of right now that could reach some percentage of light speed eventually.

• 23:08Jack Murphy?

  Right? So let's, uh, let's change gears a little bit and talk about stealth. Uh, because you, you mentioned that, uh, just recently it came up. Uh, I believe Elon Musk was saying the age of stealth is over. Everything's going to be drones now. Um, and, and, and to be fair, I have heard an argument similar to this for a long time that basically our stealth is pretty easy to defeat with modern radar systems and so that the era of stealth is sort of over. But, I mean, you know way more about this than I do. What, what are your thoughts?

• 23:43Speaker 05

  So I can I can start with Elon Musk's uh what he was saying the solution to stealth is effectively using visible light uh which is just seeing the fucking airplane uh so that's that doesn't really solve the air defense problem when you're talking about beyond light of sight engagements like outside of a couple of miles. Elon Musk is very, very good when it comes to rockets and he's very, very good when it comes to cars perhaps. He does not seem to know much about air power technology or the current state of defense tech. Uh but he's right to some extent about drones. He's just not right about the types of drones, you know? He showed a tweet with like a bunch of quadcopters doing sort of a synchronized uh movement.

• 24:29Speaker 05

  Saying that, you know, some people still think the F-35 is a good idea as though quadcopters could do any of the things.

• 24:36Jack Murphy?

  That a F-35 does.

• 24:37Speaker 05

  A role fighter does. Quadcopters by their very nature are small and limited in range. The best quadcopters in the military use case today have a range of 30 miles ish. And those are the ones, you know, on the front lines of Ukraine and in experimentation in the American Southwest.

• 24:53Jack Murphy?

  I I think that's what's melting a lot of people's minds a little bit is the war in Ukraine and and people are seeing them use quadcopters a lot. Um what I would like in it too is like what I saw in the in the Syrian civil war. Some people made the claim that the Kurds over relied on snipers. Um but you have to understand is that these forces out there that are fighting for their freedom in this case are limited by their resources. And they're using what they have at their disposal. The Ukrainians have these quadcopter drones. Makes total sense for them to do what they're doing. Um but that's not necessarily the future of war between great powers, right?

• 25:31Speaker 05

  Nailed it. Quadcopters are definitely going to be in the battle space, right? And they're gonna leverage using lessons that we are learning in Ukraine right now. But you but you're 100% right. We're talking about Russia, which has mostly a Soviet era military apparatus. In a war against Ukraine, which is a definitely Soviet era military apparatus with like a bunch of piecemeal Western components coming in to help, right? The way that they're going to go about waging this war is inherently different than the United States would because America's biggest superpower is a giant pile of money, right? So, you know, if Ukraine's gonna use off-the-shelf quadcopters that can do pretty effective things, the United States is gonna use a Lockheed quadcopter that costs 20 times as

• 26:16Speaker 05

  much and does 10 times more. You know, it's not necessarily a bargain, but because we're not worried about the budget, it's extremely effective, right? And the future of air warfare is gonna be very reliant on drone systems, too. They're just going to be drones that look a great deal like fighter aircraft that we're familiar with now. There are a number of these systems in testing. General Atomics has got the XQ67A. Anduril has the Fury, Northrop Grumman's got the Vanguard. You know, these are, the Vanguard even has a cockpit for testing, it'll be a drone, but these aircraft look very much like conventional stealth fighters, just without a cockpit. And that's because the form factor of a stealth fighter is dictated by the mission, not the

• 27:01Speaker 05

  pilot, right? So, there are only so many shapes that are very good at deflecting radar, but also that can also carry a pretty significant payload and enough fuel onboard to go carry out the types of mission that you need to carry out. And quadcopters, like drone swarms, are very effective anti-infantry and maybe even anti-armor systems, but you have to replace all those quadcopters every mission, you know? So, the question shouldn't be which one either, or it should be, of course, both, but if we're gonna do the cost-benefit analysis, an F-35 can fly for 8,000 hours, you know, before it needs a service life extension. And it can drop, you know, two small diameter bombs on targets every day for the next 20

• 27:43Speaker 05

  years, you know, whereas those quadcopters have to be replaced every single op.

• 27:50Speaker 05

  So again, both of them have their places in warfare. The new drones that will be flying alongside fighters, there will be variances and and value, but a lot of them will be reusable aircraft. We expect to get 8,000 hours out of because that's just way more cost effective than single use platforms, you know?

• 28:06Jack Murphy?

  I I have noted, uh, I I think I'm probably like one of the two nerds out there that actually read like these publications that come out of Fort Benning and places like this, but I noticed that they are definitely concerned with counter UAS, that the war in Ukraine has presented this problem like, how do we protect the infantry squad infantry platoon from this type of attack? Um, they're definitely looking at it seriously.

• 28:34Speaker 05

  And for good reason, because I, you know, one of the things that I think a lot of people mistake when we're talking about, for instance, drones being spotted over US military installations stateside that shouldn't be there. Or, you know, drones mounting a successful attack against US forces overseas. People always say, don't we have systems that can counter this? And the answer is yes, but the problem really is, don't we have enough of these systems fielded in all of the places? And that's that's sort of the the the challenge that we're facing now is that there's a number of technologies we have that are really effective at countering these types of threats, but we have to field them and we have to field them effectively everywhere, you know,

• 29:16Speaker 05

  if if we want to be able to mount this type of defense everywhere there are American personnel. And that's not the type of challenge we're used to dealing with. We're used to sending air defense assets to a theater based on the nature of the threat that they might face. Ballistic missiles or cruise missiles or fighter jets. The idea that we need effectively ubiquitous quadcopter defense uh is a massive expense, but I also think that that's why the eventual impact of quadcopters on the battlefield will be lessened because we need defense against it everywhere. So it's a a real area of focus, you know?

• 29:51Jack Murphy?

  You you mentioned the drones over America, which I I want to ask you about that one because that's an interesting topic. Um, but before we move on, um, just to put a a finer point on it, the relevance of stealth technology itself as we move forward into the 21st century. I don't know. It's it's okay. We can go down some of the some of the rabbit holes. It's interesting. Um, but is it a relevant technology? Is stealth going to be able to hide our aircraft in the wars of tomorrow?

• 30:19Speaker 05

  So that's a great question, and the answer is yes or no, depending very much on perspective. I always like to say that stealth is sort of a catch-all term. It's a really generalized term that we use to describe a collection of technologies that we use to delay or prevent detection, right? And then beyond that, targeting. So what was considered stealth, the stealthiest aircraft you were gonna run across in 1983, was the F-117 Nighthawk, which managed its electromagnetic signatures by just not having any. You were flying in the dark and all by yourself in the F-117. No radio comms with anyone, no radar to identify incoming threats.

• 31:02Speaker 05

  You are naked and alone in the F-117. Now, the F-35 is also stealth. It's a stealth fighter, we use the same terminology. But the F-35 is significantly more difficult to detect from more different angles, and importantly, relies a lot on electronic warfare, right? So the F-117 used to fly with an EA-18G Growler, an electronic warfare aircraft in the neighborhood to help mask it. Now, our stealth aircraft carry their own electronic warfare capabilities. The next generation of stealth aircraft are leaning more into what we call all-aspect stealth, and that's why the renders don't have those standing vertical tail surfaces like you can see above my head on the F-14, and instead, they look more like a stealth bomber.

• 31:47Speaker 05

  And the idea is twofold. The first is that your radar cross-section is variable, depending on the angle of observation and the frequency, right? So if you have a radar array that's pointed directly at the nose of a stealth fighter, it'll usually have a much harder time detecting it than if it's perpendicular, if it's looking at the side of that stealth fighter, right? Now, without those standing vertical tail surfaces, it'll be much more difficult to detect them from the side, which right now is feasible to do. But also, different radar frequencies are better at detecting things differently. So low-frequency, early-warning radar systems are not effective at producing what we call a weapons-grade block.

• 32:29Speaker 05

  Fidelity to guide a missile into an airplane up in the sky. But they can detect a resonance against stealth fighters. That's produced by those standing vertical tail surfaces and the big gaping jet inlets. Not always, but frequently enough that you could use it to cue a high frequency targeting radar array. And that's what more advanced radar arrays are doing now, like Russia's S five hundred. Uses the Nibo M radar array, which is actually multiple radar arrays in different frequencies. So if you can spot an incoming stealth fighter with that low frequency array. It helps you point your high frequency array at it.

• 33:08Speaker 05

  So the minute that stealth fighter is close enough, which probably would need to be around twenty miles with a Nibo M and an F thirty five. Then you can get a target grade lock and launch an interceptor at it. And because that low frequency array oriented you to start with. You can do it five seconds faster, maybe ten seconds faster, and that can make a an appreciable difference on the battlefield. But then you also have to contend with multi static radar arrays, which are effectively just networked arrays in different locations. Uh, and then they're kind of creating a fused view of the battle.

• 33:41Jack Murphy?

  Like a three D view, yeah.

• 33:43Speaker 05

  Right, but this is why uh the planning of stealth flight operations is probably just as if not more important than the technology. Uh, and this is sort of the secret weapon that the US military has, even as China, you know, is fielding a larger stealth fleet. The US has forty years of experience operating stealth aircraft in combat environments. And importantly, doing that planning stage where you use the best intelligence you have to determine where those different radar arrays are positioned. And then you plan your egress and your ingress based on presenting the best possible aspect of your aircraft to those arrays.

• 34:25Speaker 05

  To minimize the chances of detection and then targeting after, right? So you use really effective mission planning to mitigate a lot of that threat. And then in the best case scenario, it is a very boring flight, right? Being a bomber pilot in a well planned mission is the lamest job in the world. You just like sit in your cockpit for thirty eight hours and like hit a button at some point.

• 34:47Jack Murphy?

  We, yeah, we we interviewed a, uh, I think it's called a Wizzo or like a weapons officer on a B one B uh bomber. Talked about some really long flights.

• 34:58Speaker 05

  Exactly, right? You know, but that's good mission planning, right? As I'm sure you're probably familiar, it's probably the same on the ground. I don't know, but good mission planning makes missions pretty boring, right? Uh, the idea with, the idea is that eventually quantum computing and these multi-static radar arrays could make stealth compromised to an extent that our very fancy stealth designs and our very expensive radar absorbent material isn't benefiting us as much as it used to, right? And at that point, we're going to have to turn to new technologies, better electronic warfare capabilities, or the other thing, maybe better radar absorbent materials that are ceramic based rather than polyurethane based.

• 35:40Speaker 05

  But when we do that, we're going to call those new technologies stealth also, right? So, so the technologies that we call stealth today and that we rely on for success today will change, but stealth will still be here and it's going to stay important forever, right? Uh, because the, the idea that you can obfuscate detection and prevent targeting is always important. Just the way we go about doing it is going to shift over time, you know?

• 36:08Jack Murphy?

  So, I, the, the drones over New Jersey story, uh, you, you, you mentioned it briefly, so we gotta go there though. So I, I wish I could say it was all bullshit, but I have friends in New Jersey, of course. I live in New York, including some people who actually saw these things. Um, so it's not purely war of the worlds hysteria. Um, it was happening and then, uh, I believe when the, uh, Trump administration came in just a few weeks ago, they put out some sort of a statement or there was a tweet or something and I cannot remember, I, I apologize folks, I cannot remember exactly what was said, but the gist of it, as I recall, was, don't worry about it, guys.

• 36:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was all FAA approved, everything's cool.

• 36:50Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 36:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:51Jack Murphy?

  Which, which, which tells us what?

• 36:53Speaker 05

  You know, either one of two things, either it was all bullshit, or the things that were being tested, those really exotic looking things, were probably things that we didn't really want to tell everybody about quite yet, right?

• 37:05Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 37:06Speaker 05

  So I had a bit of a kerfuffle with this whole drone story because when I was trying to research, you know, viable explanations for what was going on, I came across a press release put out by NASA about a year ago, a year and a half now, where NASA and the FAA and a number of other organizations were establishing a drone testing corridor between military installations in Delaware and New Jersey.

• 37:31Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 37:32Speaker 05

  And so I, you know, found all that material. I reached out to them. I didn't get a response in a day or so, and I posted a video saying, well, this is probably what we're looking at here. And the, the way they established the drone corridor was that you don't have to take off and complete your flights from those military installations that can take place anywhere within the corridor.

• 37:51Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 37:52Speaker 05

  Uh, it's just effectively a general warning. And the idea is that they were testing technologies they could use for drone infrastructure in the future, transporting people, transporting goods, things like that.

• 38:03Jack Murphy?

  Interesting.

• 38:03Speaker 05

  So I posted a video saying, hey, this is probably what it is. And that video got a lot of traction. And then I got a very angry phone call from NASA the next day saying, that is not us. Uh, we've got nothing to do with this. We have not flown a single drone. Uh, they pointed me towards, uh, oh man, now I'm blanking on it. Air Force, uh, Logistics Command, but they're not called Logistics. At any rate, so I reached out to them. They said, well, we're not flying anything, but we are managing the corridor. Uh, and I said, well, then can you confirm that?

• 38:37Jack Murphy?

  Well, what the, what the hell are you managing if you're not flying anything?

• 38:40Speaker 05

  Exactly. And I said, well, then can you tell me if anybody is using the corridor? You know, and they said, we don't have any that we can discuss. So whether that means-

• 38:48Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 38:49Speaker 05

  We're not involved, sure. I think what's most likely is that there were probably a small number of pretty wacky exotic looking drones, maybe even large ones like electric vertical takeoff and landing passenger drones, which we know are something that have been tested commercially in the past in the United States. And I think people spotted those things and started talking about it. And when they did, everybody else started flying their drones too, you know, including law enforcement, who started flying their own large drones and tried to hunt out these other drones. And the problem a lot of people in New Jersey had is that when they aren't accustomed to looking up at the sky very often, especially at night, and then they do, and they see an airplane, they go, oh,

• 39:32Speaker 05

  drone, and then they tag me in it on TikTok, and I get 6,000 of those in two days. But also, if you just see a regular drone, you don't know if that's...

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• 40:40Speaker 05

  Timmy testing his Christmas present, the local sheriff's department looking for a missing kid, you know, a wedding photographer filming a wedding nearby, you're gonna go, well, that's one of those mysterious drones. So I do think that there was a handful of pretty exotic drones that were probably being commercially tested, maybe even in that drone testing corridor.

• 41:02Jack Murphy?

  What do you mean? I mean, you mentioned passenger drones. What do you mean commercially tested rather than militarily tested?

• 41:09Speaker 05

  So the line gets awful blurry, right? So if you are a company who makes your money making electric vertical takeoff and landing.

• 41:18Jack Murphy?

  And you and you have black budget contract money.

• 41:20Speaker 05

  That's the thing. Your only revenue options are to find a way to get flying cars into the private sector, which isn't going to happen with a human at the wheel because we're dumb, right? Or you've got to find someone in the government to buy it from you, right? So if you are a company producing something like this, you either have a DOD contract or you're pursuing one. Those are really the only options. So you might be conducting your own testing in pursuit of ultimately securing that contract or maybe doing testing as a part of that contract. But the DOD may not be directly overseeing it. A good example that's not drone related is Hermes. They're a small Atlanta based startup that's raised a lot of money over the past few

• 42:04Speaker 05

  years to build reusable hypersonic aircraft. And when I went to their facility a couple of years ago, it was a bunch of like 25 year olds with titanium 3D printers and like a big empty factory space. Now they, you know, raised a hundred million dollars from Raytheon and others. The Air Force gave them another hundred million with promises of up to a billion, and they are building these aircraft. And right now they're about to start test flights of their first test article turbine based combined cycle engine aircraft, which is called Corder Horse. But the Air Force wasn't involved in testing at all up until fairly recently. Until then, it was them having to demonstrate that they could do this to get the DOD to

• 42:48Speaker 05

  actually come in and sort of play a role in testing. And drone manufacturers sort of follow that same trajectory. If you're trying to, if there isn't a stated need for something that's got a line of accounting assigned to it, you got to convince somebody at the DOD that you're worth some money. So you got to do some testing first.

• 43:04Jack Murphy?

  So do you think some of these companies are trying to get Uncle Sam to fund the flying car? Or does DOD, they have a real interest in, you know, a drone that can insert troops essentially?

• 43:16Speaker 05

  Absolutely, hundred percent. They often characterize it as a medevac platform slash resupply platform. The idea being that it could get to remote areas to bring you equipment or gear, you know, supplies that you need, or it could get injured troops out of remote areas really quickly. And they are autonomous electric VTOL aircraft. The idea of it being electric isn't just about, you know, sort of going green. It's not really about that so much as they're significantly quieter. So it makes it potentially safer for you to like medevac somebody out of there. But yeah, there are already firms with DOD contracts testing that kind of technology. The name of them escapes me. But it's definitely

• 43:58Speaker 05

  something the DOD's expressed interest in for a good five years or so now.

• 44:02Jack Murphy?

  Interesting. Okay. And then another topic that I want to pick your brain about is the Chinese supposed sixth generation fighters that appear to be emerging in social media and places like that. There have been some pictures taken and some sightings. What's your take on where China is with these technologies right now?

• 44:23Speaker 05

  I think that the internet hyperbole machine, you know, tends to make a lot out of these things. It's important to remember that what we saw, so preface, on December 26th, two new Chinese stealth aircraft were photographed and videotaped flying over China, right? One of them, we've sort of dubbed the J36. That's the way bigger one. It looks like a Dorito. It's a three-engine platform, which is pretty unique. And then the other one is a smaller platform. It looks like it's an intermediate to heavy fighter, but it's significantly smaller than that J36. And we, I couldn't tell you if there's a cockpit or not on that second one. But both of them, as far as we can tell, made their

• 45:07Speaker 05

  first test flights, if not on December 26th, very recently to that, right? So we're talking about aircraft that in the best of circumstances are five to 10 years out of service at best. You know, it took Eleven years to get the J twenty from prototype to in-service, we're creeping up on sixteen years for China's J thirty-five. You know, it's a pretty long development cycle from first flight to service, right? I'm not worried about these platforms entering service anytime soon, but what they definitely point toward is how significant China's progress has been in recent years. It wasn't long ago, it was, you know, twenty-five years ago where China

• 45:48Speaker 05

  was struggling to make fourth-generation aircraft using purchased production lines from Russia, you know, and now they're fielding, you know, they've got likely between two-hundred-and-fifty and three-hundred J twenties. You know, what their readiness rates are, I couldn't tell you. You know, if any have crashed, nobody could tell you, but probably in that neighborhood. There's one or two J thirty-fives right now, but they're going to go into production soon. And now they're testing two new stealth aircraft that probably have different roles. The larger one, I think, is probably more of a regional bomber. But again, the difference between a bomber and a fighter doesn't matter all that much, and it likely could leverage air-to-air weapons. But the fact that it's got three engines is really weird and interesting. It

• 46:33Speaker 05

  probably points toward being a pretty high-altitude aircraft that wants to supercruise or fly at supersonic speeds without its afterburner to cover a lot of distance, probably to reach targets like Guam, for instance. Whereas the other one, which appears to be built by Shenyang Aircraft Corporation, is more of a conventional stealth fighter-type design. I mean, conventional, it's like a weird modified lambda wing. For the airplane nerds out there, if you look up a Boeing YF-118G, Bird of Prey, it's like an airplane they built out at Area 51 and tested there and then never did anything with. It looks a little bit like that. It's a really exotic-looking aircraft. But it being in testing doesn't

• 47:16Speaker 05

  mean anything, really, other than where China's emphasis is, you know. They're clearly motivated, and, you know, intelligence analysts suggest that China's probably spending north of seven-hundred billion dollars a year on defense. You know, when you think of purchasing power parity, they can go further with that than the United States can with eight hundred plus. So China certainly has the money to be sort of fast-tracking the R and D in systems like this. But I would also very much caution people to ignore anyone telling you that China's got sixth-generation fighters. Nobody could tell you what a sixth-generation fighter is right now. And we don't even know if those are meant to be fighters.

• 47:59Speaker 05

  Right now, they're prototype aircraft in testing. It's interesting, it points toward trends that we need to pay attention to. And I like to think that maybe it'll kick-start NGAT funding for the Air Force, because right now it is on hold. But right now, what we know is that China can make something that looks like a Dorito chip fly. And that in and of itself isn't all that important, you know?

• 48:22Jack Murphy?

  There's another one I wanted to ask you about regarding Russia. This happened just recently, maybe a little over a month ago now, where it was suspected that for the first time in combat, they used an ICBM. It came out later, I believe it was actually an intermediate hypervelocity missile, rather than an intercontinental missile.

• 48:49Jack Murphy?

  But I mean, we all saw the footage, and I mean, it was pretty crazy seeing these different re-entry vehicles coming in.

• 48:55Speaker 05

  It was the first time a multiple-independent re-entry warhead had ever been used in combat, you know? So, yeah, the first and foremost, the difference between an ICBM and an IRBM really just range, right? The amount of fuel onboard, the size of the weapon, right? And Russia was very cognizant of that, because the warhead, that multiple-independent re-entry vehicles warhead, is the warhead that they use in their ICBMs. Weapons like the RS-28 SARMAT, which has got multiple-independent re-entry vehicles that Russia claims collectively can deliver about fifty megatons worth of destructive power, which is exponentially bigger than an American ICBM.

• 49:39Speaker 05

  Like, you wouldn't see the American ICBMs yield on that bar graph. In fact, I did an article, you know, years ago when I worked for you about that, and I tried to make the bar graph and it was worthless, because you can't see, you know, the thirty kilotons or three kilo, you know? But- What was really important about the use of that weapon was not necessarily what it did on the battlefield in Ukraine. It had limited battlefield impact. That was definitely meant to scare the hell out of the West. The idea was to remind the West that Russia's got this nuclear arsenal and they rewrote their own nuclear doctrine six months or a year ago

• 50:19Speaker 05

  to make it easier for them to leverage within their own rules. The idea really is that, you know, you guys should think twice about supporting Ukraine because we might blow you all up in a, in a nuclear war. And in my opinion, I think that that reeks of a bit of desperation. Not that Russia is running out of people, they're not, they're, they could keep feeding people to the wood chipper for a long time to come. They won't run out of, you know, Cold War era equipment for some time either. But, you know, we are three years into them taking 20% of a country the size of Texas that's on their own border. And at this point, it's not even about Russia's further success. It's about Putin's survival.

• 50:59Speaker 05

  And, you know, the last thing that he can do is appear to back down and appear, he needs this to be a win for Putin, or Putin will not be in power, you know? And that, I think the only real risk of nuclear war is if there is a chance that Putin would lose power. I don't think that we would see any real risk of nuclear war otherwise.

• 51:20Jack Murphy?

  It does, it does reek of desperation, as you point out. I mean, that, you know, yeah, they're clearly trying to demonstrate the, you know, we have this nuclear capability as a propaganda message. But, like, are they really gonna go nuclear for Ukraine? Like, I don't, yeah.

• 51:40Speaker 05

  Like, it's, so admittedly, so Ukraine is pretty resource rich, as we're sort of seeing now with the Trump administration, you know, trying to get, you know, rare earth mineral rights out of Ukraine, which in and of itself is a bit of a quagmire, because as far as I know, and I could be wrong, most of those rare earth mineral deposits, the, the significant ones are in eastern Ukraine, which would mean Ukraine would have

• 52:04Jack Murphy?

  There's also no rare earth mining industry in Ukraine. Like, that industry would have to be stood up from the ground up and matured. So it's Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how pertinent an issue it really is right now.

• 52:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a pretty big significant, you know, but conversely, as far as natural resources go, the natural gas deposits off the coast of Crimea are certainly significant, you know, and potentially could, you know, help Ukraine replace Russia as a big energy provider for Europe.

• 52:37Speaker 05

  But I just, there, Ukraine was supposed to be a step towards something larger. And I do fervently believe that the decision to take Ukraine was based on Alexander Dugin's book, The Foundations of Geopolitics. He's a pretty prominent, you know, Russian political philosopher. He wrote this book back in the 90s about how to bring Russia back to a Soviet era.

• 53:02Jack Murphy?

  Third room neo fascism.

• 53:04Speaker 05

  Exactly. And he outlined a number of the steps that Russia's foreign policy has taken in recent years, including using reflexive control methodology and things like that to influence foreign elections. He wrote about using those same methods to try to encourage, you know, English people from separating from the European Union, which one could argue they successfully managed to do. And he also argued that you need to take Ukraine because it's a buffer state between NATO powers and Russia. And according to him, it's ethnically useless. So obviously worth taking.

• 53:40Jack Murphy?

  Isn't Dugin a little bit on the outs with the regime? Because he, I believe he may have spoken out or criticized the war in some capacity.

• 53:49Speaker 05

  He criticized Putin initially back in 2014 for stopping at Crimea.

• 53:56Speaker 05

  Putin should have taken the rest of it. And he's kind of gotten increasingly outspoken since then. Ukraine, you know, killed his daughter.

• 54:03Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, Dugina.

• 54:06Speaker 05

  But the fact that Dugin is still alive today, I think is the extent of his continued political leverage. I think at this point, the plan to follow Dugin's book has fallen through. And the value that Dugin offers Putin has similarly waned. But he's still got enough pull left to not get pushed out a window, I think is where he's at right now, you know? But yeah, I don't see Russia going nuclear over Ukraine because as far as, as far as I believe and understood the plan, Ukraine was never the end game. Ukraine was supposed to be the first step and they just really fumbled the ball.

• 54:44Jack Murphy?

  You, you mean the first step to like Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland?

• 54:50Speaker 05

  Potentially, yeah. At, at the very least, the first step toward sort of planting, you know, using that reflexive control methodology again, which is information operations. To start creating, you know, turmoil within those border states. To sort of try to affect the same sort of eventual change that they managed to do in Ukraine where they, you know, held phony elections and things like that. It, it's important to remember that we like to think information operations wouldn't work on us because we're so smart and savvy. Information operations are just marketing. It's just advertising. And the same way that, you know, I've been in meetings for news outlets with Twitter or X or whatever.

• 55:31Speaker 05

  And they say, yeah, we can get somebody to download your app for $4.56 per user. And the way we do it is we show it to them in this succession. It'll be on the banner this time. It'll be in the middle of that time. It'll be over here next time and we can get you this many users for this much money guaranteed. We know we can do that with downloading an app. It is not any different kind of convincing someone to vote against their own best interests, you know? So I do think that, that Ukraine was meant to be a step toward a new empowered Russia. Especially because once Ukraine was a part of Russia, it would help solve some of their demographic issues. They've got a new population to pull from.

• 56:11Speaker 05

  But at this stage, I don't see Russia being a prominent regional player after this conflict is over.

• 56:19Speaker 05

  For a long time, you know?

• 56:21Jack Murphy?

  They we we uh or I should say the Ukrainians, but with Western assistance, knocked them back a few decades, it seemed. I I would suspect. I mean, because their their economy is fucked.

• 56:32Speaker 05

  Yes, they're right now. Their economy is just reliant on war and

• 56:35Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 56:36Speaker 05

  That worked for a certain amount of time, but eventually you're gonna kind of run out of the spoils of war. Uh, and then you're just kind of borrowing against yourself to keep the war machine going and like Putin, when planning for an exit strategy, cannot afford an exit like the American exit from Afghanistan.

• 56:55Speaker 05

  It has to be a win. It's gotta at least look like a win for him.

• 56:59Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 56:59Speaker 05

  Or he's doomed. You know what I mean?

• 57:01Jack Murphy?

  Mission accomplished.

• 57:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. He needs a mission accomplished banner, you know? Uh, even if it's not that much of an accomplished mission, you know? So like, I I don't see it going nuclear, but I'd also don't see an end anytime soon because you you need an exit strategy for the Russian economy as much as anything.

• 57:19Jack Murphy?

  I I had somebody, you know, who who's pretty focused on Ukraine, uh, tell me the one scenario that Russia may consider going nuclear, which is a little unlikely, but we've seen the incursion into Kursk. Uh, and if the Ukrainians like actually made an even more aggressive effort to take Russian territory, that could potentially trigger a nuclear response.

• 57:44Speaker 05

  You know, I think I could, you know, if if Ukraine's at the risk of taking Moscow or St. Petersburg.

• 57:49Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 57:49Speaker 05

  You know, I think that we would see Russia get pretty wacky. Uh, like if not nuclear weapons, uh, we would see, you know, the you know, it's a cornered animal, I suppose, is the best way to describe it, you know?

• 58:03Jack Murphy?

  You're gonna see it. The way the way it was described to me was like, we would do the same thing. Like if America was about to be completely overrun by an adversary, we would probably use nuclear weapons defensively.

• 58:14Speaker 05

  You know, especially if it was a limited engagement, you know what I mean? Like?

• 58:19Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 58:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, I can honestly see it. I genuinely could. But conversely, I don't think that we're going to see Ukraine make those kind of

• 58:26Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I don't think so either.

• 58:27Speaker 05

  Ukraine's logistics alone would really make that a challenge, you know, we, I know you don't, but people in general tend, you know, I know everybody loves to say that, you know, amateurs talk tactics, experts talk logistics, but it's true, like, American logistics are insane and unparalleled, and it actually really is difficult to mount combat operations outside your own borders. It's very difficult to do, and Ukraine just doesn't have it.

• 58:55Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I mean, you mentioned it earlier about how Ukraine inherited the Soviet system, and some people who are involved with Ukraine from 2014 up until this more recent conflict, or the same conflict, but the more recent invasion. Someone was explaining to me the Ukrainians had a push logistics system that they inherited from the Soviets, meaning that, like, each unit in the military is allotted, like, X number of bullets, X number of canteens, and so on and so forth, and each year, every unit gets that allotment. It just is what it is. Whereas the American system is by request, it's a, it's a, it's a pull logistics system.

• 59:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, based on needs, right, based on mission.

• 59:36Jack Murphy?

  Right, right, like, we, we do our, oh, oh, my gosh, what, we...

• 59:41Speaker 01

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• 1:00:12Speaker 06

  On September 30th, 2026, Tennessee gave Krista Pike two doses of penobarbital, and she survived both. States have been botching executions for nearly 400 years, and my new book, Botched Executions, tells the true stories of 81 of them, from a hanging in Oxford in 1650 to that gurney in Nashville. Botched Executions is on Amazon now, in Kindle and paperback, and it's included with Kindle Unlimited. Find it at weirddarkness.com/books.

• 1:00:43Jack Murphy?

  There's, there's an actual term for it, like an, like an infantry squad. You, you say that, you know, I'm five magazines down. I lost my canteen cup. Uh, we, we have one guy who took a grazing wound to the shoulder and that's the report that gets pushed up. And so you get resupplied with what you need to replace that.

• 1:01:02Speaker 05

  And like, and even that is remarkably difficult to manage in a combat zone.

• 1:01:08Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:08Speaker 05

  The is, you know, and on top of that, I, you know, and I, I've heard this from people that I know who were in Ukraine, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's the gospel truth. I've also heard that there's been some challenges with, it's just been a bit of first come, first serve and commanders that are in the room when shipments arrive can say, I want that. Uh, and, and other guys that might need it a lot more, uh, aren't necessarily getting served, you know?

• 1:01:33Jack Murphy?

  It's like, where, where did all our energy drinks and protein powder go? Oh, the guys back at headquarters got it.

• 1:01:39Speaker 05

  Well, you know, as the guy back at headquarters running the A-LOCK usually, I needed those snippets.

• 1:01:43Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. Well, I, I know you used all the protein powder too, Alex, cause I, I've, I've seen you in person numerous times. Um, I don't know. Any, any, uh, final thoughts on, on Russia before we move on?

• 1:01:58Speaker 05

  Well, I think, I think the one thing that people need to recognize that I see in the comments underneath every discussion like this about Ukraine is that there's room for Russia to be doing really badly and to still have plenty of fight left in them.

• 1:02:13Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:15Speaker 05

  Russia's fumbled the bag every way that they can over the past three years, but they started out with 10 times the military footprint that Ukraine had, you know? And that buys you a ton of slack. I mean, three years worth and counting. Uh, so I think it's important that when you're staying on top of the news regarding Ukraine and you hear about Russia losing another ship in the Black Sea, or you hear about Russia losing another AWACS, which is an asset they genuinely won't be able to replace for years to come. That's bad. That all hurts Russia. Sure. But Ukraine is in a worse position than that.

• 1:02:48Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:50Speaker 05

  So the fact that Ukraine has managed to prolong this fight for this long is absolutely incredible and commendable. I don't see a lot of avenues for this conflict to end with Ukraine sort of regaining all of its lost territory, not without a big influx of support. But the truth is, that support genuinely is based on idiots on the internet, like me. So it's important not to lose sight and not to sort of go, oh, well, what are we doing in Ukraine anyway? Just because they're still fighting for their lives.

• 1:03:21Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:22Speaker 05

  They're still fighting for their lives. We want immediate gratification, but we should expect it to take a while. And it's gonna be expensive. I promise you that it is cheaper than fighting Russia would have been. Right? Let's let Ukraine utterly degrade Russia's ability to mount combat operations anywhere in the world. And while they're at it, let's let them fight for their own freedom. That's my own kind of take. But that is what I'd like to leave people with regarding Ukraine.

• 1:03:50Jack Murphy?

  So, uh, production has told me that I'm obligated to ask you about UFOs. Uh, my least favorite topic. I mean, I'm happy to have a reality-based conversation about classified aerospace programs that maybe we don't know a whole lot about. But, um, this UFO thing, I mean, we've seen throughout history, these like sorts of ups and downs of public interest in UFOs, and we came up on another one of those in the last couple of years. I don't know if you think it's on the downslide now, uh, or where it is. But I mean, nonetheless, it never really goes away, right?

• 1:04:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think it never did go away. But I do think that, uh, the American people are sort of inundated with news, you know?

• 1:04:36Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:38Speaker 05

  And because we're inundated with news, and on top of that, the UFO community, just my opinion, is like 90% grifters, who are always promising that like something big is gonna happen next week, or this month, or next book, or next show, or next podcast.

• 1:04:57Jack Murphy?

  Tune in next time, kids.

• 1:04:59Speaker 05

  Exactly, and I think that a lot of people have just burned out on it, you know. But, that said, so I was in a PBS documentary about UFOs a few weeks ago. That we actually recorded like six months ago. And I really appreciated how the documentary approached it. It was Nova. They were very skeptical but willing to listen. You know, and which tends to be my approach. Usually I'm the party pooper that gets invited onto these shows. But this time I wasn't. But after that, I did a Q and A on their YouTube channel with Ryan Graves. Who was the Navy Lieutenant who wasn't the person who recorded the gimbal footage, but he was present when the gimbal footage was recorded.

• 1:05:42Speaker 05

  And according to Graves, that was one of multiple sightings that they had off of Virginia Beach. In like 2013, 2014 timeframe, when they were doing training off the coast of Virginia Beach in sort of a blocked off area. And according to Graves, they saw these things just about every day. And some of the stuff he said was really interesting and not something that I've heard covered in the media a lot.

• 1:06:09Speaker 05

  First and foremost, these sightings, as far as he's concerned, seemed to start when the Super Hornet got a radar upgrade. So, for a long time there, the Super Hornet was running an older mechanically-scanned array radar. Back in the 2000s, we upgraded it to an active electronically-scanned array radar. These are, you know, generational leaps in capability and infidelity for target tracking, even very small targets. They're so powerful that they can assess, you know, differences in barometric pressure. Holy shit. So sometimes it's important to look at other sensors, to make sure that what you're seeing is really there and not, you know, an environmental or a weather phenomenon. So according to Graves, they could detect these objects on the radar pretty much as soon as the new radars were installed.

• 1:06:54Speaker 05

  So then, they went to try to close with them, to try to figure out what they were. And the most interesting case he told me about was when he was flying towards one. He detected it on his radar, so he's flying toward it, has no visual on it. So he looks to his FLIR, which is a forward Forward looking infrared camera. That's what the gimbal footage was recorded with. And the FLIR could see whatever this unusual object was, and the radar could see whatever the object was, but he had no visual on it. He saw nothing with his naked eye. And then as he got close, he said it was a AIM nine X, pretty sure it was a AIM nine L. Regardless, Sidewinder missile. I don't think they had AIM nine X's on the Super Hornet back then. Uh, the missile started whining. Uh, now the Sidewinder is an infrared guided weapon.

• 1:07:37Speaker 05

  Uh, so when it gets a heat track that it says that it could chase after and potentially engage.

• 1:07:43Jack Murphy?

  Gotcha.

• 1:07:44Speaker 05

  And the pilot's headset to let him know it's got a weapons bay block. It could go after a target. So he's seeing it on radar. He's seeing it on his forward looking infrared camera. And now independent of either of those systems, his weapons also tracking an infrared heat source that it says that it could engage. But he never saw anything with his eyes and that's really interesting to me. That's something that I have trouble explaining away.

• 1:08:09Jack Murphy?

  That's, yeah, that's, that's part of the issue that I've always had with this, that if you're a highly trained pilot, you have access to all these sensors, uh, all this high tech equipment. If you see something totally bizarre on your, on your instruments. Is it more plausible that something from outer space is coming down to earth and, uh, doing something that violates all of our known laws of physics? Or is it more possible that your instruments are broken or not calibrated right? Or, uh, they're being spoofed, meaning somebody is out there trying to trick them through electronic means.

• 1:08:51Speaker 05

  Exactly. And I think that question or, you know, that line of thought begs us to, to separate this topic into two questions. The first question needs to be, is there something? Like, is there something that pilots are seeing and interacting with? Is there something that we can't identify that's operating in American airspace? Because if there is, we need to engage and address that. The second separate question is, where is it from? Right, uh, it could be from China, it could be from Saturn, but regardless, that question in my mind is separate from the is there something? Right. Is there something? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:29Speaker 05

  And the, the question is there something is a tough one to answer for the same reason why the New Jersey drone question is a tough one to answer. Because of the noise on the channel, there are thousands and thousands of reports of UFOs and UAP. And there are, at this point, you know, dozens, if not hundreds of military aviators reporting seeing UFOs or UAP. But they're still humans, they're still people that are capable of making mistakes, they're still operating in a very stressful environment. And, you know, when something is a mile away from you and it's more or less stationary and you're traveling at 500 knots, you've got a second or two to try to assess what it is as you zoom by, right?

• 1:10:11Speaker 05

  So it's important to remember that these pilots are people, they're well-trained people who have a lot of experience in assessing, you know, relative motion and things like that, because you use that to determine where an aircraft is likely to go in basic fighter maneuvers, things like that. But they are still people, so that's why it's so important to focus on the sensor data. And Jack nailed it 100%, if you see something on one sensor and not on the others, that's an artifact, that's a glitch, that's just a problem with the sensor. If you have independent sensors that detect something simultaneously, well, then something is there. It doesn't mean it's an alien, it doesn't even mean it's a drone, you know what I mean? It could be- But there's a phenomenon, yeah. It could be ball lightning, but there's something there, right? Right.

• 1:10:56Speaker 05

  More data that we're able to collect from those sensors, it gives us the ability to look for patterns. And then we can use that looking back historically, but only so long, because active electronically scanned array radars, for instance, weren't really a thing in fighter jets until the 21st century, you know? Uh, but like whether it's a radar frequency, whether it's a certain, you know, infrared light, if there's a pattern that we can identify, we can use that to look for things in the future, and that helps us narrow it down. We get to go, alright, we figured out that this one thing is a weird Aurora and it's not aliens or drones. So now we know whenever we see that again, we can cross that out, right? That's not an unusual phenomenon anymore.

• 1:11:38Speaker 05

  And that's the way that we get to the answer eventually is by sort of weeding through all those. But the only way we can do that is if we get consistent quantitative data. And that's tough because you don't have the same sensors everywhere, you know? Like you're gonna use an ANAPG 79 here and a 63 there.

• 1:11:56Jack Murphy?

  It's, it's interesting that you said that these sightings started when they installed the new radar.

• 1:12:05Jack Murphy?

  Which is an interesting inflection point, right?

• 1:12:08Speaker 05

  That's what Graves said, but Commander Fravor, which was the Tic Tac incident, that happened about 10 years prior.

• 1:12:15Jack Murphy?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:12:16Speaker 05

  And that was pre-new radar, but I always have a but. So the Nimitz incident was back in 2004. That's when Commander Fravor saw the Tic Tac.

• 1:12:26Jack Murphy?

  And they saw it with their eyes, right?

• 1:12:28Speaker 05

  They did see it with their eyes.

• 1:12:29Jack Murphy?

  Yes.

• 1:12:29Speaker 05

  And it's worth noting, that was one of the first deployment workups in that carrier strike group, the Nimitz carrier strike group, that was using integrated target tracking data across all the platforms. Effectively, kind of creating that Kill Web we were talking about earlier, an early version of it, where the Super Hornets might not have had a radar with the fidelity required to identify and track something like this, but the Aegis ships, the destroyers and cruisers, did. So that's why they had target data that they were also able to release, along with the fighter jets. In effect, you know, you might not have been able to spot this on radar. The Super Hornets may not have been able to intercept, were it not for the fact

• 1:13:12Speaker 05

  that they had fire control radar integrated across sort of the battle space. I can't say for sure that they wouldn't, but it does kind of point to that same idea that you need a pretty capable radar array with pretty high fidelity to be able to figure out something's out there.

• 1:13:27Jack Murphy?

  It's, you know, I mean, it brings up more questions than answers, right? I mean, is it possible that there, the government is red teaming these new radar systems, right? But. But it is, I I mean, I have, I even have problems with that, too, because, I mean, okay, yeah, we want to test our radar systems under the most realistic conditions possible, but am I not going to brief the pilots on that? Like, I don't want to cause an accident and get a pilot killed over this.

• 1:13:55Speaker 05

  That's exactly how I feel. You know, obviously, there is historical precedent for for pretty disruptive red teaming, you know, red cell.

• 1:14:03Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:05Speaker 05

  But it's not, it's, it is anything but common practice, right?

• 1:14:09Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:11Speaker 05

  I guess, though, I will also say this, whatever it is, and I'm not, I honestly don't have, I have no idea. Like, normally, I'd be like, I think it's probably this. I genuinely, whatever those tiny fraction of a percent of really unusual sightings are, I really don't know what they are. I am the opposite of convinced that they're alien, but I also don't know what they are. So maybe they're alien. But I have a lot of trouble buying the idea that it's red teaming, even though there is historical precedent for it. But whatever the explanation is gonna be a weird one, right? Whatever's going on is weird, so by nature, the explanation's gonna have to be weird, too. Red teaming is more realistic than Martians. I don't think it's more realistic than China,

• 1:14:56Speaker 05

  depending on the circumstances and the environment of the sighting. I don't think China's flying anything off of Virginia Beach, but certainly in some places. A good example, and I'm not sure if I've talked about this with you guys before, but back in 2018, the Navy filed a patent for laser-induced plasma filament hologram countermeasures for missiles. The idea is basically just using a laser to superheat the air a couple hundred meters away from the aircraft to produce a plasma ball that that's a significant heat signature to confuse an inbound infrared-guided missile. Now, the Army has used this technology to create what they call, like, floating flashbangs. And there's videos of them doing it in a

• 1:15:40Speaker 05

  laboratory setting about 10 years ago, where they can even relay human voice. It sounds mechanical, but it's a ball of light that's just talking, you know? That is more likely to me than a physical craft that defeats inertia, you know, that being broadcast from a submarine or an aircraft. But again, to your point, you don't do that against a carrier strike group without telling anybody.

• 1:16:04Jack Murphy?

  Right, right. And but and so then the other, you know, maybe speculation is these new radar systems come online, these new technologies, are they able to see something that previously we just couldn't see before? Is that what's happening?

• 1:16:21Speaker 05

  And I guess what frustrates me is that my answer is I don't know.

• 1:16:25Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:26Speaker 05

  And that drives me nuts, you know, because, so according to Graves, because there is, I forgot who it was, I think McWest, presented a pretty viable explanation for the gimbal footage, where he was saying the weird way that the the object moves might be attributed to the way the gimbal camera actually moves as it's kind of staying locked on it, which you can't, you couldn't dispute that with what's released. But according to Graves, the classified version of that footage includes the radar telemetry that shows the relative distance to that object was only three or four miles, not, you know, forty miles or something like that. But until we actually see any of that data,

• 1:17:08Speaker 05

  it's just like a thing a guy told me. Don't get me wrong, Ryan Graves is a very credible witness, you know, he still works within the defense apparatus for a number of defense contractors. I don't question his credibility. But but it is just a thing a guy told me. And until we can actually see this data and go, yeah, I think that this is this and this isn't this, it frustrates the hell out of me that I don't have a reasonable explanation, you know?

• 1:17:37Jack Murphy?

  And I I mean, the the third option, of course, is that, you know, is it all basically a disinformation campaign, either targeted on our adversaries or, you know, to conceal some of these things that we're testing? What to what extent does that play into it?

• 1:17:56Speaker 05

  I think it, all right, I guess the best way I could answer that is that if I were, if I were testing some kind of advanced technology that really seems to like blur the edges of what physics can do, uh, the very first thing I would do if I were flying that over Iran or China or Russia would be to fly it over Kansas City and be like, yeah, me too, guys. Uh, it's crazy. Nobody knows what that thing is, right?

• 1:18:21Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:22Speaker 05

  What a mystery. It is, it is a good plausible deniability type explanation, uh, which is interesting, but anytime I kind of start going down the rabbit hole of those types of conspiracies, I always run into this wall, which is sort of the government's competence and ability to keep these kinds of secrets. It would have to be a very compartmentalized program.

• 1:18:45Jack Murphy?

  I, I spoke to somebody who I'll just say works in an office where they basically do what's called, you know, Alex, called MILDEC, military deception. And he was like, brother, if we had 10 times the budget we actually have, we still wouldn't be able to do what you're talking about.

• 1:19:02Speaker 05

  Yeah. You know, uh, like at the end, you know, just like trying to fake the moon landing, right? There, there would be so many people involved that you couldn't keep a secret. But that's where our human pattern recognition habits can really benefit an IO campaign. And what I mean by that is just like with the New Jersey drones, or maybe a handful of them were exotic, really crazy looking things. But then pretty soon every 737 or every quadcopter were sort of lumped into that category. Uh, and the DOD can absolutely benefit from that as well. Right? So we know that the Defense Department is testing classified

• 1:19:44Speaker 05

  aircraft. As a matter of fact, right now, we know better than we usually do because we know that. Since 2020, at least, there's been one or three flying prototypes of the next generation air dominance fighter that to date, there's been not a single picture of. We know the B-21 Raider is conducting flight tests. We know the RQ-180 exists, and we don't even know if that's what it's called. We just know it's a big crazy looking flying wing that flies at very high altitude, and there's been a few pictures of. Then we've got, you know, the stealth Black Hawks that were used in the bin Laden raid that we still haven't seen pictures of. We haven't seen any evidence of. There are claims that there was a second production run because those were two prototype rotorcraft. We still haven't seen any of

• 1:20:29Speaker 05

  those. So, we know objectively that the United States Department of Defense is testing classified aircraft and is even operating, you know, boutique ones. But I don't mean like a deployment-ready force, but certainly a handful of pretty exotic prototypes, especially when you think about, you know, the technology emerging in new fighters. The NGAV prototypes in testing are not the most advanced aerospace technology we can build. Through the most advanced aerospace technology, we can cram into a jet that fits under a certain price point that we can mass produce, that we know will perform reliably. Look at iPhone, you know, this isn't the latest and greatest telephone technology. It's what met the price point, what they could build.

• 1:21:14Speaker 06

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• 1:21:56Speaker 06

  And my new book, Botched Executions, tells the true stories of 81 of them. From a hanging in Oxford in 1650 to that gurney in Nashville. Botched Executions is on Amazon now in Kindle and paperback, and it's included with Kindle Unlimited. Find it at weirddarkness.com/books.

• 1:22:15Speaker 05

  They had the resources for what they knew they could build a million of and move the products. That's what production fighters are. But that doesn't mean technology demonstrators for platforms like the SR72, Project Mayhem, which was an Air Force research lab effort that was very similar. You know, these types of really exotic programs definitely exist. They're definitely being tested, and they do benefit from that cloud cover of bullshit.

• 1:22:41Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:22:41Speaker 05

  You know, that kind of floats just beneath them.

• 1:22:43Jack Murphy?

  Even if it's not a counterintelligence program, the UFO hysteria is something they're able to blend into.

• 1:22:50Speaker 05

  Exactly. You know, and we've even seen it over the years with what UFOs look like in pop culture. You know, they were saucers, you know, back in the 50s. But then by the time I was a kid, they were triangles. You know what I mean? And now, because we know airplanes can look like that, now they're cubes with spheres inside them and stuff like that, you know? It changes with the times, and I think that that says something about them probably being more in our heads than in our skies in the vast majority of cases.

• 1:23:22Jack Murphy?

  I want to bring the saucers back. I think it's time for the saucers to make a comeback. I want to see them. Let's do it. On the cover of Popular Mechanics again. Let's do this.

• 1:23:32Speaker 05

  Let's do it. As a matter of fact, I have.

• 1:23:36Speaker 05

  I'm gonna do a shameless plug. This was my first ever.

• 1:23:39Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, there you go. Awesome.

• 1:23:41Speaker 05

  And it's NGAD, what we were just talking about. This artwork was by a guy named Rodrigo Avella. He is incredible. Find him on Instagram. He's a really.

• 1:23:49Jack Murphy?

  What's that aircraft called?

• 1:23:51Speaker 05

  Uh, so this is like a concept of the NGAD, the next generation air dominance fighter.

• 1:23:56Jack Murphy?

  So thi- this is the one you say that they're flying, but we haven't seen yet.

• 1:24:01Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:24:01Jack Murphy?

  No shit. Okay.

• 1:24:03Speaker 05

  Rodrigo Avella is an artist who made this and I, it was a really, really cool experience where I got to say, well, it shouldn't have standing vertical tail surfaces. You know, we're gonna wanna have recessed jet inlets and Rodrigo was able to produce this, which is.

• 1:24:17Jack Murphy?

  That's cool.

• 1:24:19Speaker 05

  Incredible, you know, and Rodrigo's work is the most stolen in the aerospace community. If you see like YouTube thumbnails of like airplanes that don't exist, it's almost always his artwork that was stolen. So I'm glad I got a chance to kinda plug him on here.

• 1:24:32Jack Murphy?

  That's awesome. So tell us, uh, what you're working on right now. Um, any other big pieces, big news items that you're working on that you want people to know about?

• 1:24:42Speaker 05

  Uh, so actually I just finished, uh, recording a video about Iran's new drone aircraft carrier, uh, which is hilarious to be honest. It's not, they, they took a cargo vessel that was built back in the year 2000 by Hyundai Heavy Industries. And they spent the last two years just kinda building a flight deck on top of it. And then they unveiled it as their terrifying new drone carrier, uh, this past week. You know, operating drones off of it that have a combat radius of like 30 miles. It is, it's military theater at its finest. It's all, it's not as good as like North Korean generals.

• 1:25:16Jack Murphy?

  The Iranians are good for that.

• 1:25:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, but it's, it's, it's nice to have something lighthearted to talk about, uh,

• 1:25:25Speaker 05

  uh, and I've also got some good stuff coming out about the F-15 EX over on my YouTube channel, which is sandboxed with two X's. Uh, the F-15 EX is just, it's a hot rod of a fighter. It doesn't need stealth. Uh, in fact, according to recent reports put out by the Director of Operational Testing and Evaluation, the F-15 EX has proven to be what they call operational. Feasible against fifth generation adversary aircraft. So we pitted the F-15 EX against surrogate adversary stealth fighters, aggressor F-35s. And it can, it's got the detection power with its APG-82 radar. Then it can spot very small targets very far out. So the F-15 EX might not be stealth, but it's definitely still got a place in warfare.

• 1:26:10Speaker 05

  And I've got a deep dive about that coming out pretty soon.

• 1:26:12Jack Murphy?

  Cool, cool. Um, you mentioned your YouTube channel, like where else can people go to find you?

• 1:26:18Speaker 05

  Well, you can find my written work on Sandboxnews.com, that's Sandbox with two X's. And you can find me on pretty much every social media platform at Alex Hollings 52. I post long form videos on YouTube and increasingly shorts lately. Uh, but I also post sort of my own, a little bit less professional analysis on my TikTok, which is at Alex Hollings 52. But if you're not on TikTok, I don't blame you. I, uh, I don't want to be. It's just, it's.

• 1:26:45Jack Murphy?

  Stay off the commie app, guys. Don't do it.

• 1:26:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:26:48Jack Murphy?

  Uh, we'll have, well, we, we will have links down in the description. Uh, for all of Alex's work. And also take two seconds, I want to remind you guys, there's also a link down there to our Patreon. You can go and subscribe for $5 a month. And you get access to all of the Team House episodes and Eyes On episodes ad free. And if you go, what is it? $10, D? For the patch?

• 1:27:11Speaker 07

  $10. If you become a $10 member, you get a patch sent to you in the mail.

• 1:27:15Jack Murphy?

  There you go.

• 1:27:16Speaker 07

  And if you don't want to be a Patreon member and you want to buy a patch or a sticker of our logo, there's a new merch website. That link is also in the description.

• 1:27:23Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, we got new merch. It's pretty cool.

• 1:27:26Speaker 05

  I'm in, I'm buying, I'm buying some merch. I'm in.

• 1:27:29Jack Murphy?

  We'll, we'll send you something. Uh, and then we will also be back on Wednesday with, uh, Jessica, who served with the CST program. She's a special operations soldier. Um, so we're excited to have her in studio in a couple of days. Um, Alex?

• 1:27:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, D.

• 1:27:48Speaker 07

  Uh, there's a question from, uh, there's a recent Eyes On episode where we were talking about like the viability of aircraft carriers and how they're not really viable anymore when it comes to China. What are your, uh, and that was Andy Milburn saying that blasphemous. Blaspheming the aircraft carriers. What are your thoughts on that, Alex?

• 1:28:09Speaker 05

  Well, you know, it's not that far off from the Air Force's recent 2050 assessment where they also think forward operating bases will be a thing of the past. Uh, because of the constant threat of long range ballistic hypersonic and cruise missile strikes, right? The, the answer can't be more effective air defense because you can always have a saturation attack. The more, let's say you've got a hundred interceptors to bring down threats. All they have to do is send a hundred and one missiles. So you build 200 interceptors. All they have to do is send 201 missiles. So to some extent, the only solution is distance. Uh, the Air Force believes you need strategic ranges for pretty much everything. Uh, and that would also mean carrier flight operations would have to take place,

• 1:28:52Speaker 05

  you know, north of a thousand miles by a wide margin, maybe 1500, 2000 miles away, uh, from your intended target. And right now we do not have aircraft that can cover that sort of distance. So the future of aircraft carriers in a high end fight is tenuous. It's tough to target them at that range and at the speed that aircraft carriers move, but it's feasible. Uh, however, aircraft carriers will have a long and illustrious history ahead of them for force projection in smaller regional conflicts and for posturing and things like that. If we were to go to war with China today, we would do some carriers. There is no real debate about that. Every war game carried out by the Center for Strategic and International Studies

• 1:29:37Speaker 05

  and the Navy shows losing one, if not two carriers in a conflict like that. But the fact that we're doing these war games right now is how we sort of come up with a strategy to prevent that from happening. So you need bigger aircraft that can fly a whole lot further to solve the aircraft carrier problem. But what we use carriers for today, which is primarily asymmetric conflicts, you know, regional conflicts where we're sending assets in there to be a show of force. All of the ways that we use aircraft carriers today and have for the past 50 years will remain viable for a very long time to come. But there will be edge cases like war with China where we need to pull them back and rely on strategic assets to sort of bore a hole through their defenses

• 1:30:23Speaker 05

  that we can start sailing carriers into. And that's a pretty tough nut to crack.

• 1:30:27Jack Murphy?

  Last plug from me, please guys, check out We Defy, The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History, my new book. Look, even Alex has it, it must be good. Go check it out, guys. Talks about some of the lesser known or totally unknown to the public aspects of Special Forces history. It's on Amazon now. And thank you, everyone who already read it and reviewed it. And I've gotten a lot of great feedback from you guys. So thank you for that. Alex, always a pleasure, man. Thanks for coming on the show tonight.

• 1:31:00Speaker 05

  Hey, it's always a blast. Thanks for having me.

• 1:31:02Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, it's great to catch up on some of these issues. I mean, I only like tangentially touch aerospace stuff, but like you're really deep into it. So it's interesting to pick your brain about some of these topics.

• 1:31:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, I love the opportunity because my wife is sick of hearing it. So you know, you know, I'm happy to come on.

• 1:31:20Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah. No, my girlfriend's sick of hearing about this stuff, I'm sure.

• 1:31:25Speaker 07

  There's one more question. Hold on one sec, I'm sorry. Jesus, I should be prepared. Oh, V asks, you versus Elon, one on one, no guns or space lasers, just hand to hand, who wins?

• 1:31:41Speaker 05

  I would fold that old man in half. I, I'm not a fighter anymore. I'm a lover, but there was a time when I was a fighter and there was never a time for Elon Musk.

• 1:31:53Jack Murphy?

  Or you can't, you can't tell from this stupid Zoom call, but like Alex is a huge dude. Like I, I've met you numerous times in person and like, holy shit.

• 1:32:03Speaker 05

  I appreciate it. I'm not, you know, I, I'm a dad now, so I've gotten a lot softer, but I definitely am still confident in my ability to fold him into a brochure and put him in the glove box of the Tesla. So.

• 1:32:18Speaker 05

  Jason Lyons, maybe not so much, but.

• 1:32:20Jack Murphy?

  Jason, Jason's a huge. Dude too.

• 1:32:22Speaker 05

  Jason's a monster.

• 1:32:23Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:24Speaker 05

  Guy.

• 1:32:25Speaker 07

  Um, there's one more Norm Anderson said the solution is submarines.

• 1:32:30Speaker 05

  Submarines are honestly the solution to almost every problem that ails the US military. Uh, the problem that we're running into is that we can't really build them for a very reasonable price or at a reasonable time.

• 1:32:42Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 1:32:44Speaker 05

  That's, that's the, that's the real challenge, but I am a big fan of submarines. Uh, especially, you know, the new Columbia class, uh, is an engineering marvel in almost every sense of the word. Uh, it's tough to get past the sticker shock, you know? But once you try to swallow the idea of spending fifteen, sixteen billion dollars on a boat, uh, it starts getting really cool, you know?

• 1:33:09Jack Murphy?

  Well, we'll have to do a submarine episode in the, in the future. Um, so Alex, thank you for joining us tonight. Well, uh, I'm sure we'll have you on again, uh, down the line as, uh, new things develop. New shit has come to light.

• 1:33:21Speaker 05

  We're always happy. Thanks a lot for having me.

• 1:33:23Jack Murphy?

  Thanks, Alex. Appreciate it. We'll see all of you guys on Wednesday for Patreon subscribers and Friday for, uh, people who are not.

• 1:33:33Speaker 07

  Yeah. So if you're a Patreon member, you can actually, you can watch these shows live, ask questions and all that, and you will see them a couple of days later on the YouTube if you're not. Thank you.

• 1:33:43Jack Murphy?

  Take care, guys.

• 1:33:45Speaker 07

  Hey, guys. There's a new Team House merch store. You can come and check it out. The link is in the description. You can get Team House stickers, Team House patches, which are really cool and really well done, American made. Team House t-shirts, hoodies, mugs. Shout out to that one person that bought the Eyes On mug. Love you. Mouse pads, Camelback tote bag. I don't know why we have the tote bag. I'm not a big tote bag guy. If you are, you know, all the more power to you. But yeah, we got a ton of cool stuff. Stickers, American made, patches, American made. T-shirts are also American made, but I don't fulfill them. I'm actually going to be the one shipping you the patches and the stickers.

• 1:34:25Speaker 07

  They're very cool. Check it out. The teamhouse-shop.fourthwall.com. That's a crazy URL. We'll change that, but don't worry. The link is in the description. Take a look. And in the show notes, if you're listening to us on audio, we really appreciate it. Thanks for the continued support.

• 1:34:41Speaker 06

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• 1:39:19Speaker 06

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