Security Confidential S10 E4 Mike Rice

Rory Meikle: Hey everyone, welcome to part two of Security Confidential’s episode with retired Navy SEAL Mike Rice. Let’s get back into it. Do you think it’s going to be more the future of war that we see, with more and more drone strikes? And I don’t want to say the word “robotic fighting,” but less and less boots on the ground infantry units and more cyberspace drone warfare, that sort of thing?

Mike Rice: Yeah, that’s a good question because there’s a lot of different opinions on that. I think drones for sure are here to stay. And I think some of the other technology—I’ll give you an example. So, there was this big project the Army embarked on called Land Warrior, and it was this effort to inject technology into infantry squads and provide these kind of connected systems that would allow the command—excuse me, the command and control of these infantry units in a more holistic way.

Not much came out of the Land Warrior project, from what I could tell, and I’ll tell you one of the biggest reasons is for those of us who’ve been on the ground. You know, there is a lot going on. So when you’re walking, you’re talking, you’re trying to maintain situational awareness, and you’re on the radio. As an officer, I would sometimes have two radios, and I’d have somebody talking in both ears, and then I’ve got my senior enlisted talking to me as well. So I’ve got literally three people talking to me at the same time.

So you’ve got all this going on, and you’re trying to wear night vision goggles, which, by the way, right now have no depth perception. So wearing NVGs at night when you’re stomping around the hills of Afghanistan is not easy. It’s not easy at all, even just without all that other stuff I described going on.

So things like these connected soldier systems—there needs to be, and I think there is, an effort to try to make them more useful instead of just more crap we’ve got to carry. Because that’s another thing we learned, in Afghanistan especially. Some of the areas in Afghanistan had some significant terrain, and we learned we had a phrase: “Our light is right.” Well, the guys were working very hard to lighten their loads and to get their gear—their kit. They’d take tags off. It was just like the mountaineers do, or ice climbers and mountain climbers. They go as light as they can. We had the same kind of approach; we really tried to lighten up our gear, only take what we absolutely needed. And if you throw all that other garbage on there, like you’ve got some helmet-mounted camera system and a backpack with a radio, but you have to have a battery you’ve got to carry with you—you’re talking an extra 20 pounds of garbage on you. And at the end of the day, some of it’s just distracting.

So, I think there’s going to be something in the future that will be more of an enhancement to your capability. But most of the stuff that I saw, outside of just basic night vision and some basic communication, ended up being a big distraction and a lot of extra stuff to carry—not value-added, essentially, from my point of view. So that’s from the infantry guy on the ground.

The other enhancements to command and control, to C2—all that definitely is needed. It’s necessary to fight more sophisticated adversaries like the Chinese.

And so that stuff is a big pain point, I think, right now in the Pacific. Because if you look at the distances that those units there have to travel and the fact that if there’s something like a Taiwan invasion scenario, the U.S. military will be fighting in the Chinese backyard, essentially.

And we’d have to travel from places as far away as Guam, Hawaii, and Australia. So it’s a very different calculus out there. Command and control is huge.

To go back to the SEAL on the ground in Afghanistan or Iraq, we tried to keep it as straightforward as we could. Some enhancements, but there wasn’t a whole lot of gadgets and whiz-bang stuff out there. We just didn’t have time for it; it was distracting.

Rory Meikle: Wow, that makes sense because you guys are more of a quick in-and-out unit to begin with, so speed is always something you rely on, right?

Mike Rice: Right. Speed—and you just know in the worst-case scenario, you don’t want to have a whole bunch of extra junk on you if you’ve got to shoot, move, and communicate for long periods of time.

Rory Meikle: Yeah, that makes total sense. Well, shifting to China a little bit, do you think that’s going to be our next country of engagement? I’ll use that term.

Mike Rice: Well, I think there’s no question that they are the biggest threat that we face. And I know that because they say that. I mean, they’re very open about their anti-American, anti-Western intentions.

And I’ll give you an example of what the Chinese do from an infrastructure point of view. There’s a growing realization now, thank goodness, in the West, that Chinese companies like Huawei are part of the Chinese Communist Party. And it seems kind of simplistic, but I think Americans really, prior to President Trump—because he was the one that was the first one to really raise the flag on this in a way that got people’s attention. For all his faults, that was definitely something that he did.

Companies like Huawei are arms of the Chinese Communist Party, so it’s all one system; it’s all connected. There is no such thing as a private sector in China; it’s all the Chinese Communist Party.

And so they use Huawei, for example, in Bahrain. So when I went there, I was able to interact with some government folks that were pretty sophisticated in this, and they were actively fighting against Chinese attempts to tap into Fifth Fleet command and control systems. They did it all the time. And they were able to do this because Huawei had built out all of the telecommunication infrastructure in Bahrain.

So they built out all the infrastructure, and so Huawei, of course, had a backdoor. So that means the Chinese Communist Party was able to surveil everything on the island of Bahrain.

And they’re able to do that and replicate that all over the world. So everywhere that Huawei has built infrastructure, they have backdoors into it. They have ways of tapping into it, they surveil everything.

So the Chinese are very aware of our weaknesses in the West and our lack of sophistication, until recently, of what their intentions were, what their actions were, and the way that they leverage their own companies like Huawei.

And so I think that the Chinese are playing all kinds of these different asymmetric threat ways of attacking us here in the United States. Of course, they have all kinds of people that are embedded in our university systems. They communicate and they steal information and send it back to the Chinese Communist Party all the time.

Our university systems are inundated with Chinese Communist spies. And there are all kinds of ways that they leverage their ability to pressure Chinese-Americans through family ties back to China. This is not anything that’s controversial; this is a known fact that the Chinese Communist Party makes threats to people all the time who have families back in China. So they leverage that to get what they want.

There are all kinds of stories about Western professors that are simply bribed by the Chinese Communists to give away secrets.

And also, of course, everyone should know this as well, but the Chinese are also the main drivers behind this fentanyl crisis in the United States—that’s the opioid crisis in the United States. The Chinese provide the precursors directly to the Mexican drug cartels, who put the precursors together, make fentanyl, and then they ship it across our porous southern border. They’re doing this because they know that it actively weakens our country.

It takes up resources, it takes up an enormous amount of time, it takes a lot of attention, and it’s very damaging to our country and to our culture what fentanyl and some of these other drugs do. So the Chinese are direct actors in ensuring that they try to pump as much of that garbage into our country as possible.

They also use their social media platforms—again, this is nothing controversial, everyone should know this. TikTok and the rest of these Chinese applications—they leverage those to influence our young people in ways that should really be concerning to every American who cares about our culture and our country.

So yes, the Chinese are across the board attacking us all the time, to say nothing of their cybersecurity attacks on us, which are—they’ve stolen hundreds of billions of dollars in IP. They directly steal from all these American companies that have their goods made in China. It’s all copied; all of it’s replicated. They steal military secrets from us, they steal commercial secrets from us, they brazenly just copy all of our stuff. So it’s an across-the-board attack on our culture and our country, and we’re just now sort of waking up, I think.

Rory Meikle: Yeah, I mean, the TikTok thing is a huge conversation, not just in the cybersecurity world, but if you turn on the mainstream news, you’ll hear them talking about it too. And now, finally, there’s some government pushback to the application as well and everything that it can get into.

But you’re totally right in that, from TikTok’s standpoint at least, their attack isn’t meant to be on the adult population. But they’re grooming and shaping the mind of America’s youth—of these young kids who are just starting to come up, who in 15 or 20 years are going to be the ones who have the say, who have the pull. It’s crazy.

Mike Rice: Yeah, again, the Chinese are very sophisticated. They’re playing a long war against us. They don’t want to get into a shooting match with us right now. I think the chances of them directly invading Taiwan, from everything from my relatively uninformed position, I don’t think they’re going to invade Taiwan.

I think Russia’s debacle in Ukraine has kind of put whatever thoughts they had of that aside, because they’re seeing the effects of Western sanctions on the Russian economy. And our ability to impact their economy is exponentially greater than our ability to attack the Russians economically.

So there is a real effort on the Chinese part to look at how they can achieve this next generation.

Rory Meikle: So what do you think those balloons were that were floating over the United States? People are saying they were Chinese spy ones, other people are saying they’re UFOs, and other people are saying they’re weather balloons.

Mike Rice: Yeah, so whoever—I actually had a conversation with a friend of mine who works for a government agency just about this last week, because I was curious too.

And so I don’t know really anything other than what anybody else knew up until just this conversation. But I’ll pass on a couple of things because I think it’s getting out there; it’s relatively open source right now.

But yeah, there were mistakes made after the big balloon was shot down—a couple of big balloons were shot down—where some of the other ones were some students’ weather balloons or something like that. It was kind of tragic.

Yeah, it was like the size of a beach ball.

Yeah, a little bit of an overreaction, but they’re trying to make up for their mistake.

But at the same time, it may not have been a mistake, because here’s what I learned: This absolutely was a spy balloon, but if anything, it’s an indication of just how President Xi, the President of the Chinese Communist Party, has so much control over that country and has removed any sort of really smart people out of his cabinet that nobody wants to tell him “no.” Nobody wants to countermand anything that he says.

And there’s sometimes not a lot of sophistication—a surprising amount of unsophistication—in the Chinese approach to things. So they put together this gargantuan balloon that was full of Chinese surveillance technology. And we were tracking it pretty much the whole time, and we were able to…

I’m sure all the cybersecurity folks on this call know, when you’re doing surveillance, you can also be surveilled. So it’s a two-way street once you open up that line of communication; it can go back the other way as well. And so we were able to do some really good data gathering on their technology.

They flew this balloon; they were trying to get information, supposedly, about some of our nuclear silos because they’re still trying to learn how to build these nuclear silos like we have. So we just closed them up, shut them down, and didn’t really get any information that was useful because we were tracking it the whole time.

And yes, it was embarrassing politically, of course it was, and handled very poorly—of course it was. The Biden administration did an awful job telling us what was going on and why it was happening.

But at the end of the day, there was not much useful information sent back to the Chinese. They really were kind of embarrassed because it made them look really stupid, and we were able to collect pretty much all the stuff that was on that weather balloon. Once it got shot down, we had assets go over and collect it all up out of the ocean. And now we’re able to reverse engineer all this stuff that was on that balloon.

So overall, it was not a win for the Chinese; it was more of a win for us. I think the political damage was more on our side. But yeah, it definitely was a spy balloon for sure, but not a very sophisticated effort to try to collect information. Pretty amateurish, frankly, from what I understand.

Rory Meikle: Wow, that’s crazy. I mean, it definitely goes to show how whatever media source wants to sway the conversation is exactly how the public is going to take it. Because how you put it makes it look and seem like a total win for the U.S. for us gathering this information about them. And they really weren’t getting anything in return.

But if you’ve watched any news in the past three or four weeks, it’s been all “China spied on us and we didn’t even know about it,” and this, that, and the other thing.

Mike Rice: Yeah, of course we knew about it, but that’s about as much as I know. Everything else I would say is beyond speculation. So yeah, we knew about it; we knew about it the whole time. There were just some decisions made, I think, which probably could have been communicated a little bit better.

Rory Meikle: Well, where do you see the war in Ukraine heading?

Mike Rice: The whole thing in Ukraine, I think it did expose the Russians. From my understanding for years—from talking to Army Special Forces guys that were really focused on this problem for a long time—I was focused in PACOM at the beginning of my career in the Marine Corps and then in CENTCOM. So those are really the only two areas. I never deployed to EUCOM, but I talked to some guys that did.

There was always a real sense that we didn’t think they were very good; we just didn’t have any way to really prove it. Like their command and control systems, their logistics support, their whole way of fighting just all seemed very clumsy and unsophisticated.

So there was a lot of skepticism about how professional they were. And the bottom line is that’s what’s been exposed here in Ukraine: the absolute buffoonery that is the Russian army. I mean, they are absolute idiots and some of the least sophisticated soldiers on the planet.

And there’s just example after example in this war about how they can’t even do basic things right.

At the beginning of the war, remember the big convoy that came down—a 40-mile-long convoy or something ridiculous? Thousands of vehicles. Well, they didn’t bring enough fuel for them, so they ran out of fuel. So they all had to walk back, and they ran out of food along the way, so half of them were starving when they got back, too—the ones that made it back.

So I mean, it’s just… look at their armor tactics; they are very rudimentary, not very sophisticated. They’ve got some tough soldiers, but now they’re throwing the Wagner Group, which has got a bunch of criminals. This is like classic, almost World War II-style frontal assaults using criminals.

Rory Meikle: What is the Wagner Group exactly? Because I saw something on them today and I didn’t drill down into it too much, but it seems like they’re just kind of mercenaries for hire.

Mike Rice: That’s what it is. Yeah, they’re led by this politically connected guy, a friend of Putin’s, and they do stuff all around Africa and some other parts of the Middle East. They’ve been in Syria for a long time now. Some guys have some military training; there’s a lot of criminal types there. They’re just like a mercenary organization that goes around and helps out Russian causes around the world, essentially.

Rory Meikle: Okay, yeah. Wow. Yeah, I mean, it makes a lot of sense as far as how bad Russia is performing because, in my opinion and what little I know, if you look at the size of Russia and you look at the size of Ukraine, just from that aspect alone, you would think that they would just be able to go in there and roll that country in three or four weeks. I mean, it should be a landslide victory for them. And the fact that we’re going on a year now just blows my mind.

Mike Rice: Yeah, it’s essentially at a stalemate right now. But I don’t know—I honestly haven’t spent a ton of time looking at it. I know some guys that are working hard to get stuff over to the Ukrainians, giving them some supplies and Western stuff.

I think that’s probably the right thing to do. I think this is not something which we should be tolerating from any country. This isn’t the 1820s or the 1600s; you can’t just be invading countries now. We’re supposed to be a little bit more cultured as a species at this point, but Putin is a bit of a throwback.

And look, his perspective is that he was feeling threatened by the expansion of NATO. That’s one of the positions that he’s had, and I think there’s some actual truth in that. I think NATO has been kind of aggressively expanding towards the borders of Russia, and he’s been warning them for a long time: “Don’t do it, you better stop.”

They continued to expand. The Europeans didn’t think he would attack, and he certainly did.

So I think it just goes to show, like, when you push somebody into a corner—or they feel like they’re in a corner—they could respond in ways that don’t make a lot of sense sometimes. But if you look at it from his point of view, he’s defending his borders, he’s defending his country.

There are a lot of Russian speakers down there; it’s kind of similar to what some of those justifications for invading Crimea were as well. It’s part of his effort to keep his country physically secure.

Rory Meikle: Yeah, I listened to some guys talking about it, and essentially they were taking the position that what Putin is doing is the same as how America would deal with China if they wanted to put a military base and bring Canada into their communist republics. Look what we did back in the ’60s, right, when the Soviets tried to put…

Mike Rice: Exactly.

Rory Meikle: Yeah. So there is some—I think sometimes we need to be a little more introspective and realize like, yeah, we in the United States are blessed with two large oceans on either side of us, and the geography of other places just is not quite the same.

Mike Rice: Yeah, the Russians have been invaded many, many times in their history, and there’s a sense of paranoia about those folks. Putin has tapped into some of that paranoia and that nationalistic fervor. He’s trying to secure his country.

But we wouldn’t necessarily look at it the same if the Chinese had established bases in Mexico, or something, and they were trying to bring Mexico into some sort of alignment with them.

Rory Meikle: Well, with them pushing fentanyl through there, it might not be long before that’s the actual reality.

Mike Rice: Well, yeah, our country really needs to get serious about this southern border issue. I know we’re getting way off topic here, but if you talk about threats to our country, you want to come up with like a top five, the southern border issue has got to be one of them.

I mean, there are so many things that happen that are just weakening our country. Good people are caught up in this. I mean, I’ve read some statistics about the fact that most of the girls and young women, or even middle-aged women, that embark on this journey are raped along the way. They’re exploited; it’s just a human tragedy. It’s a giant human tragedy with all kinds of politics being played.

Rory Meikle: Yeah, you’re totally right. You’ve got to fight for what you want, and sometimes that fight isn’t necessarily a physical battle, but more just saying the truth—saying what’s on your mind, saying what you believe. And there’s got to be more of that.

Thanks everyone for tuning in to this special episode of Security Confidential. If you guys like this style, the shorter videos broken up into series, please let us know in the comments below and we’ll continue to keep doing more of this stuff. Until next time.