Things Michael Kofman Has Said on Podcasts

“There's no culture of decoys. It's one of the most important things in the Russian framework. There's like no culture of decoys. U.S. military will take a $500 million asset that's hard to replace and just put it out there, visible in commercial satellite imagery with no effort to mask it and no decoys.” — Michael Kofman, ChinaTalk

Kofman draws a lesson from the Iran war: unlike Russian doctrine, which leans heavily on deception, US forces leave expensive, hard-to-replace assets in plain view of commercial satellites. The hosts had been joking about the B-2 feint as the great military deception of 2026.

ChinaTalk · 2026-10-25 Permalink → Listen →

ChinaTalk Around 39:32 into the episode

Speaker 2

bomber to the left and everyone thought it was going left, but it went. Right. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 4

Even that, that's our great, our great military deception of 2026 was we made B2s. I remember

Speaker 1

deceived all the OSEN guys tracking them. Exactly. Brief comment. But one thing you can see in just in the Iran war, there's no culture of decoys. It's one of the most important things in the Russian framework. There's like no culture of decoys. U.S. military will take a $500 million asset that's hard to replace and just put it out there, visible in commercial salary. Imagery with no effort to mask it and no decoys. I mean, it's not lethal,

Speaker 3

Michael. That's it. Yeah.

Speaker 2

Yeah. Well, I guess, Michael, you know, like one of the themes of your research over the past few years is just Russia, like, they need to get punched in the face before they figure something out. It's like the helicopters need to get blown up, like, the bombers need to get. This thing needs to…

Speaker 4

We've forgotten most of them is the problem. And like, we have to Michael's point earlier, where we've had air superiority for so long and we've had space-based superiority for so long that it didn't matter. Like, we didn't have to think about how we actually protect our assets when they're in safe…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

“Usually, when the military first deploys something in the battlefield, they just duct tape it to the way they fight. They're like, there's a new thing, and we're gonna add it as a plus-up to how we fight now. And then somebody else might come along later and say, that's interesting, but it's actually much more interesting if you build more of the force around that technology instead of having that technology just be an add-in.” — Michael Kofman, ChinaTalk

Asked whether the US and Europe can absorb the lessons of the Ukraine war, Kofman points to the tank and the aircraft carrier. The army that first fields a technology is often not the one that works out how to use it. He worries the US is treating drones as an add-on.

ChinaTalk · 2026-10-25 Permalink → Listen →

ChinaTalk Around 45:11 into the episode

Speaker 1

…salt formations to try to bring that back to the battlefield. So neither side accepts those dynamics. So that's why I'm saying we should be following this closely because you're seeing still both sides experiment and try to evolve out of the positional dynamic they first helped establish.

Speaker 4

…that got them to the ability to be able to do that. That's not accounting what's happened in Crimea and kind of a whole of society operation and whole of society effort to be able to do that. Where is the European US capability to replicate that without that same level of effort or does it exist?

Speaker 1

I mean, look, I think the U.S. point of view is like, this is not how we would fight, how we would prefer to fight, right? I've heard this a lot. Because like the monster of U.S. forces, this is not how we would fight. And I was seeing, I'm like, oh, really? Tell me, how would we fight? And also, it is true. We wouldn't fight this way. We are very different as a force in terms of how we operate. That's true. Uh, but it doesn't mean that the way we do plan to fight doesn't have problems, right? People often say that as though there's no problem with the way we plan to fight. Um, and they're supposed to say, if not problems, at the very least, there are interesting questions to be asked about how is it that we plan to fight. Now, we know a couple things for certain. We do have a good sense of how our opponent plans to fight Russia. With one big caveat, is that unlike the way they are forced to fight now in Ukraine? They want to be able to return the force to large-scale offensive maneuver. They basically optimize themselves for small-scale combat operations, primarily using fire teams or infiltration to individual infantry. But that's not the way they would idealize the fight. But we already have a decent sense…

Speaker 2

from what I see, the way we see

Speaker 1

drones and all this, we are taking the traditional conservative approach of that is just an add-in. So, we should find a way to somehow add that to the way we fight. Sorry if this is an incomplete answer, but I think, yeah, I think for us, the lessons learned is a work in progress and active…

Speaker 3

Can we? So, to that point, can we talk about wet gap crossings for a second? Because I think one of the sorry, this is like one of my like, you know, pet issues. I don't know where that came from, but

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