Ukraine's Persistence, Baltic 'Gray Zone' Attacks & Russia's Weak Spots: Mark Montgomery

0:00It's not out of the realm of prosperity in my mind that it goes on for three more years. I'm host Michael Allen with Beacon Global Strategies. Today I'm joined by Mark Montgomery, the senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation and a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. In addition to his 32-year career in the Navy, Mark Montgomery previously served as the executive director of the Cyber Space Solarium Commission and as the policy director of the Senate Armed Services Committee for Senator John McCain. Admiral Montgomery joins us today for a discussion on his recent trip to Ukraine, developments there, and the status of the conflict. Stay with us as we speak with Mark Montgomery. Admiral Mark Montgomery, welcome back to Natsick Matters.

1:03I thank you very much for having me, Michael. Mark, today I want to talk to you about Ukraine. You were recently there and I've detected some reports of, you know, the ground situation there is a little bit different than I think many people assume here in Washington. Can you first tell us about your trip? So I go every quarter or so for a couple of weeks, usually associated with the courses that are being given by the nonprofit I support there, you know, and these courses tend to be like core commander, staff courses, they have 16 cores in the country and they get training on mission command or on, you know, proper integration of weapon systems. We also do some work with the F-16 program in terms of the air operating centers. And we've done some maritime classes as well. So we're about, we're providing training to kind of more senior officers who can't leave the country and therefore don't get to benefit from the US or NATO training over the last

2:06four years. So I'm in there for that. But as a result, you get a reasonable view of how things are going and I'm not surprised that the Ukrainians have gained some territory over the last month and a half and I'm not surprised that Russia has now started its spring, summer offensive in earnest. But I think both of them lead me to one conclusion, which is that I continue to believe that Ukraine won't lose this militarily. In other words, they will not give up more than like tenths of a percentage of territory over a year, which is what they've been giving up over the last couple years, you know, one tenth year, one tenth year, over a year, not meaningful losses. And I don't think they'll meaningfully lose along their, their belt of, you know, their fortress belt of cities. I don't think they'll lose those either. So what that means is Putin is not going to be successful for a fifth year in this war

3:09militarily. And there's a lot of reasons for that that we can break down. To me, the big takeaway is, you know, at what point does the United States recognize that he's not, he doesn't have all the cards as President Trump likes to say and that it's now time to bring pressure on Putin and Russia to make some concession so that we can actually get to a ceasefire because that has been absent from US negotiating. Great. Yeah, I definitely want to get into all these issues. So, but let's just click through what, what are the good things that are happening for Ukraine right now? As I understand it, they've retaken some territory and that's been helped by Elon Musk taking out Russia's ability to use Starlink. They're having personnel trouble filling some of their frontline brigades. And also I hear that the economy is really in rough shape.

4:10And then finally, they have their own precision strike weapon, the Flamingo, that's able to range some of these refineries, which I think actually packs a punch on the Russia economy. Is that accurate, Mark? Yeah, so I think if you take all these pressures on Russia together, you know, that things are not going great for Russia, I would add in that Russia is hitting Ukraine with everything it has, you know, several, probably, you know, 1500 to 2,000 drones a week, 50 to 100 ballistic and cruise missiles a week. So, you know, every week Iran gets what, you know, the Arab states have gotten from Iran over the last three weeks. Ukraine gets at every week, two weeks a year. And I immediately the drone numbers are going up. But overall, that kind of impact and there's a solder resistance to stage strong. They've gotten better and better at counter UIS that is countering the drones from Russia.

5:15And that's helped some ballistic missiles still hit, hypersonic missiles definitely hit, cruise missiles sometimes hit. And they hit because Ukraine has, when it comes to those higher end weapon systems, has to ration or conserve its missiles and defend only the most valuable target. So things get hit. But I'm telling you, societal resilience is not cracking in Ukraine. And morale is high. Marau, highs might be a tough word. Marau is fixed. It's fixed on the idea that they will not become part of Russia. I think Ukraine's always got a little bit of cynicism laced through everything, you know, pre-war, you know, probably going back to the Soviet times and moving before then. But you know, they're not going to buckle is what I would say. So civilian resilience, military resilience, you know, at some point, the United States has to recognize this and recognize the end of this war that Zalinski does have cards.

6:16They're not the cards Trump is used to. They're not the cards word used to the United States. But Zalinski has cards that matter. And the United States has to deal with Russia in a more direct and forthright way. Am I right that last year when we were, we the West were still giving the Ukrainians missiles around the time Trump said no to giving them Tomahawks that they had to stop targeting Russian refineries. Is it true now that Flamingo is a, you know, fully operational fair substitute for the storm shadow and any other Western, Western munitions? You know, so it's a, I'm not unpacked that question because a lot of facts in there. So when we turned on the Tomahawk, one of the reasons they wanted that was that they

7:19were able to service the targets that were close enough, you know, that, that were, you know, 500, you know, kilometers away by storm shadow by their own kind of mid-range, you know, mid-range strike weapons. And they had not yet gotten Flamingo and some other longer-range strike weapons to really hit. But just at the time is that when the Tomahawks were all, you know, how, you know, asked for Trump entertained it for a couple of weeks, but then in the end, no action was taken. Just about time, you're exactly right. We started to see some, not the Flamingo, but another long-range strike, but with a much smaller warhead weapon, start to very accurately hit. It didn't just hit a refinery, it hit the core in the refinery where the, some of the separation was done that really without this, you cannot operate the refinery. So by hitting a tank, you know, where there's 15 or 20 tanks and, you know, you could go on.

8:20So very accurate hitting. And then, as you mentioned, the Flamingo, which is basically a long-range, very long, long-range cruise missile with a very large warhead, not Tomahawk-like in the sense that it has very few survivability features. I mean, it's a hunk and missile, you know, it's a gray-owned bus that if properly seen by an air defense system will be engaged, but it's gotten through. It's gotten through because over time, now that they can range so much of Russia, Russia's air defense is getting spread thinner. Russian air defense is getting hit by, by targeting, sometimes by stormshadowing other things. You know what I mean? So, you have this overall degradation in Russia. This is why Russia is not providing any air defense to Iran, by the way. You know, their air defense is going down, their SA-21-22 systems that would have protected these are becoming less, there's less of them and, and these are hard to build fast. You know, you don't just get to bring these back rapidly. And, and then, as a result, the flamingo is getting through. And when it hits, it leaves a mark, you know, and it's, you know, it's lack of absolute

9:25accuracy made up for by punch of warhead. So, from my perspective, things are getting worse for Russia. And if I were a Russian defense industrial base company within, you know, 1,500 miles of, of, you know, the front line, I would be worried. I would be worried that eventually I'm going to be targeted, that weapon systems are getting slightly longer, slightly, it's only, things are only getting more and more Russia is being exposed, more and more Russian critical infrastructure, more and more Russian economic power is being, which is basically fossil fuels, is being exposed and will be attacked over the, over the next year, with or without Tomahawk. Right. So, the Ukrainians are, you know, less dependent on us now than ever, but of course, they still need many, many items from the West. What do they need? What do they need the most?

10:26You know, what do they ask you about when you're there? So, first and foremost are air defense weapons. These will be treated differently by the United States, but first and foremost, the air defense weapons, Patriot and NASAMS, even pre though, conflict with Iran, those were both an extremist. The NASAMS is called an AMRAM missile that fires off of it. And the Patriot has a pack three, pack two or pack three missile fires office almost all pack three at this point. Both of those were already hard to deliver, even if they were purchased through Pearl, the delivery dates would be extended because the U.S. needed to, was still trying to respite self pre February 28th and the start of this four weeks so far, war, now even more so an extremist. So, I think they're going to be challenged with Patriot and, and AMRAM, you're going to see even less delivered.

11:26And what that means is fewer. So the way they do air defenses, they do, there's a counter drone that has, and we'll talk about this later, some aircraft and fixed systems. But then for their high end systems, they defend them, their high value targets, certain airfields, certain military facilities, certain government facilities, they protect with Patriot and NASAMS, there's just less and less to the weapon systems to deploy. They've used less Patriots than in four years and have been used in four weeks in the combat and the Arabian Gulf. And when I say less, like 30% less, and getting, you know, that, that number will grow as we fire more and more in the Middle East. So my point on this is that's the number one system. The number two system are drone defense weapons that are fired by aircraft. The Ukrainians are the champions of ground-based drone defense. But there's a system called the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System where we, we're really

12:28accelerating our production of these, but they're fantastic. When used by the Ukrainians in a Magyver mode, not properly with a sniper pod, they have about an 85% success rate. I think when used by the United States, it's above 90%. It's our primary means of actually shooting down shaheads right now. So it's useful. It's then backed up by a ground-based system for which the Ukrainians are the champions that protect specific targets with a ground-based kind of UAS. So that, that Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System is the second grouping. Let me give you one last one. Mid-range strike. So a couple years ago, a lot of us were pushing hard to get them a low-cost cruise missile, air-launched cruise missile, like a Jazz MER for dummies. Some are between 215-500-mile missile, long-range, slightly smaller warhead than you'd probably want on a Jazz M, but accurate air-launched cruise missile. In their 250,000-a-piece, Michael, that is so cheap in a cruise missile.

13:30That is pocket-length of the Jazz MER program, right? And so this is a big deal. This is what a lot of our senators have been calling for. This is what Pete Hexets has been calling for. His team was already doing it, and they delivered. And the first, like, 128 or wherever the original buy was, and Ukraine's security system was flowing to the Ukrainians, and there's 1,000 under Pearl, the U.S. is probably still trying to get safety wise, so we don't want it just yet. I mean, that's the beauty of the Ukrainians, they're like, we'll test it for you, down-range. So I'm hoping we can get the first 1,100 there before the Americans get greedy and start cutting into the line, because 1,100 would make a big difference. It would make a year's worth of pounding Russian critical infrastructure. We're marching through these things that seem to be going the Ukraine's way. We started with sort of territory. The Ukrainians are making some territorial gains.

14:32Moral while not high is hanging in there, and they seem to be more self-sufficient, although they definitely still need things from the West. And the other ones on my list were, you know, the Russian economy. There seems to be more consensus among experts that it is really doing poorly. Mark, I don't know if you tracked that or not, or whether you got a feel for it. I do. Well, first, it's a wartime economy that is heavily invested in the defense industrial base, and at the same time, which is not the way to drive an overall economy. That's not a healthy, you know, that's not, I mean, when you think about, would the size of our defense industrial base versus our country, this might the fact that it is a big defense industrial base, it's a small portion of our GDP, reverse in their country, and on top of it, it's sucking up 44, 43, 44 percent of federal spending. Like our federal spending on defense is 11 percent, you know, under Trump, it might get

15:32to 12 with this year's defense budget. I mean, these are small numbers. It is 4X that. And for a large economy, that is not a good thing, and it leaves very little room for critical infrastructure for other for discretionary spending, because I tell you, there's a big chunk of discretionary spending that is payments to Putin's base. That's even bigger than, in fact, I think at least, you know, his discretionary spending is 3 or 4 percent of overall spending it this way. If you don't consider the defense spending discretionary at this point, and you don't consider the babushed repayments discretionary at this point, he has very little money to grease the economy, to fix things, to dug out with it. So I think the people who say his economy is in trouble are correct, because I don't think there's any flexibility left in it. I see. That is what, you know, we, you know, all our fights are over the flexibility in the economy, how you make your investments with money, what you do with interest rates, all these kind of things. That's all about flexibility.

16:32They have none of it. Yeah. The fifth, I think, is the Russians are having more trouble filling out their brigades with personnel. I think I saw either a CSIS or a report from somewhere that the killing is absolutely astronomical. Maybe it's 25,000 or 30,000 per month. Do you have a good feel for this? Yeah. I think the casualty rigs that high, so here's what I think. I think they've lost, it's really hard to pin this down, 350 to 400,000 dead in four years, about 100, you know, 100,000 a year. But I think equally 700,000, 800,000 wounded, and I got to tell you, there's no VA in Russia. So a chunk of that, I wouldn't be surprised there was another 400,000 are dead by suicide or alcoholism or their wounds within a half a decade. I mean, this is a gutting of their population. Now, the first year was minorities who they conscripted, you know, from mostly from east

17:39of the yearals. The second year was a mix of that in prisoners. The third year was the rest of the prisons and, you know, the prisons were addition by subtraction, right? They got rid of the bill of the prisons, plus the prisoners died. But now they're into a different kind of thing. I would be careful, I say this, but it's like the loser, is the drags of society and or desperate people. So they catch people who've committed minor crimes and offer them significant jail time in a Russian jail, which isn't great, or a bonus to enlist. Then they go to people who have lost their jobs and have family or their parents are dependent on them, and they offer them a significant enlistment bonus. It's several years salary, and should they die a healthy bereavement bonus? So their families are set if they just go down and die. And so that, they're trying to recruit 400, 700 people that way. So I agree with CSIS that that's the least, you know, that is the, that's the hardest

18:43of the three, you know, of the patterns they've gone through between conscripting minorities to prisoners. This is the hardest version. But he is paying the money. I'm told that if you die, your family gets them, you know, the Russians aren't stupid. That Putin's government isn't stupid. If the rumors get spread that you're not paying, people will flee being conscripted. Okay. So that's at least five things that are sort of new that are going Ukraine's way. It's not to say they're winning, but they're, I think you said the good way to put it is, maybe they're not winning, but they're, they're not losing. And I think you want a big, big one going your way. They just got some new friends in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, maybe the United States, although we feel, you know, pathologically, we feel compelled to say that we don't need Ukraine. Right.

19:44But they're going to these countries and saying, look, we have counter UAS systems. We have counter Shahed drone systems that you can, for fixed targets, we can help you defend your, your military targets, your airfields, your radars, your Thad and Patriot radars. But we can also help you protect your desalination plants, your power grid, your, your burge hotels. You know, we can help you with all these things. And they've set 200 plus, probably close to 300 people down from their counter drone units. And they can do that. They actually have a, a frickin brigade, like 4,000 person counter drone unit. In addition to counter drone units that are embedded, I mean, this is an, not an excess unit, but an overall unit. So they could spare people, they can spare systems. They're producing systems at a five or six different high end counter UAS systems, systems that work at 60 to 80% probability of acquisition and kill. They're producing, you know, costs of 2000 to 10,000 or maybe 15,000 in one case, per round.

20:46And the Saudis will take this and then they will make a long term deal to get more of them. The UAE will do this. You know, I remember Emirates will do this. I think the smaller Emirates will do it, I mean, the smaller Gulf Country Cooperation Council States will do it as well, but not as fast as UAE and Saudi Arabia who do everything first as fast as. Right. Right. Yeah. That's good. They have an X Ford. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back with more of our discussion with Mark Montgomery. Beacon Global Strategies is the premier national security advisory firm. Beacon works side by side with leading companies to help them understand national security policy, geopolitical risk, global technology policy and federal procurement trends. Beacon's insight gives business leaders the decision advantage, founded in 2013, Beacon develops and supports the execution of bespoke strategies to mitigate business risk, drive growth and navigate a complex geopolitical environment with a bipartisan team in decades

21:47of experience. Beacon provides a global perspective to help clients tackle their toughest challenges. You mentioned a little while ago, the fortress belt. And this is a point that's consistently made in the publications of the Institute for the Study of War, which is, as a diplomatic and military objective, the Russians would like to control or have the entirety of Donbass. The Ukrainians are holding them off and have been for some number of months with superior fortifications, sometimes called the fortress belt. The United States seems to have the position or has agreed with Russia that Ukraine should give off the rest of the Donbass except the Russians would be achieving at the negotiating table that which they can't achieve by themselves on the battlefield.

22:50And they wouldn't just be getting any run of the military territory. They would be getting territory that allows them to skip over huge defense earthworks and the rest from the Ukrainians. So that's seemingly a really terrible idea. Do I have this right? I mean, do you endorse this here? I agree completely that first the four cities, Slavans, Kromotorsk, Turgiska, which also is like Shaviz Yar, and then there's the last one. Constantia. The four of them are, they have invested so much since 2014 in the tunneling, the anti-mine, anti-tag, anti-personnel movement, the defensive line. They should not, this is not trade space. This is a sovereign defense line that they can't, I believe they cannot part with. I mean, if they lose it, they lose it.

23:50If they lose it in combat, they lose it. There's nothing you can do there. But to trade it away would be negligent by Zolinsky, and he's not going to be negligent. And the United States has, I think Keith Kellogg understood it, which is why he's no longer advising the president. And now on the outside is much more, Keith Kellogg, General Keith Kellogg, his former vice president, Pence's national security adviser, the first term and someone who was close to the president throughout the last nine or 10 years. But on this issue, I think he tired of Steve Whitkopf, and when his time came up, he left January. But he's now publicly starting to say the obvious, which is that the negotiating, you know, that the U.S. approach to negotiations has been biased in a way that's not helpful. And this is the key area, if there was one area where the president's got it completely wrong. It's on the requirement for Ukraine to divest itself a sovereign territory along this

24:53critical defensive line. After this defensive line, it doesn't mean they couldn't recreate this, but it took them 10 years. Yeah. And the Russians would immediately foment some fake problem and immediately start marching. And it, I mean, it's pretty flat, pretty good agricultural land to the west of this and not far to key of. Yeah. I think they can, even if the UK and the French said, we will put troops in the cities. You know, I would not trust the Russians at this point, and I wouldn't trust the Europeans if I were him either, to not bolt, you know, when the pressure got too high. But the, he just can't make this decision. And the president, continually spending the last year trying to force this on to Solensky has been completely counterproductive. Yeah. Mark, let's talk a little bit about what some people worry of, which is a Russia that might reach out and strike the, the Baltics.

25:58You know, on a, at a surface level, the problem with that seems to be the Russian militaries pretty exhausted already. You know, why would they start another war someplace? What's your, what's your feel for all this? Well, I think there's two different ways to do it. I do think they're going to pressure the Baltics. I think they're also going to do pressure in the Balkans. But let's pick the Baltics here. There's two ways going to do it is, and it's Lafayette, Lithuania, Estonia, and Poland. By the way, four countries that are all, the three Baltics will be above 5% spending on defense this year. Poland, like just a shade underneath with a much bigger GDP than the other three. They are, they are exactly what Donald Trump wanted Europe to do. In fact, when I say 5%, I don't mean like 3.5 plus 1.5 to get to 5%. You know, they're 5% core defense spending. They mean business. But they, Russia's going to attack them first with what they call new generation warfare, which is a mix of cyber, influence operations, physical sabotage, blowing crap up, which

27:05they're doing in these countries. And weaponize migration, you know, little just about an election. If you have a border with Belarus, which is just a lackey of Russia, the cut a hole in defense and let 20,000 mid-eastern immigrants through to test your, you know, to basically hurt the moderates in an election cycle. I mean, it is a, it is a very comprehensive, okay, they were world class at this, by the way, throughout the Cold War. I still don't fully understand why they walked away from this in 2022. It's what worked in 2014 for them. The little green men kind of in Beijing, that was taking it to the hill. But this new generation warfare, we would call hybrid warfare, is definitely going on. And it's definitely aimed at the bolts and Poland. They do a little bit elsewhere. They've done some crazy stuff in Bulgaria and Romania and Moldova. But it's really aimed at the... It's a gray zone. It's a gray zone. It's a gray zone. Yeah. Now, one thing I will say is they, certain, certain equipment has been spared from the

28:09Ukrainian front and put in the, in the St. Petersburg district, you know, the district that would lead a Baltic serve, Kaliningrad has not been weakened. Yeah. It had not been pulling the strike and air defense weapons significantly out of Kaliningrad, even though they would be useful in Ukraine. Right. The Kaliningrad being a rump Russian territory, located between Lithuanian, Poland, and separated from even Belarus, much less Russia, by what's called the Suvlaki gap, which is a Polish Lithuanian belt that connects the two countries. Right. So, you know, from my perspective, when, you know, Russia is still ready to do something there. I'm not, I think they would have to, the US, look, what's happening right now with the run, makes it more likely, because for, for Russia to do this, the US would have to look disinterested in NATO. Yeah. It's interested in European defense.

29:10Now, I just came back from a week in Bulgaria and Lithuania looking at exactly these kind of issues, and particularly in Lithuania, I have to say, I've been pleasantly shocked, surprised, impressed, with the German work there. The German, each of us, the US, Germany, I think the UK and Canada signed up to do brigade level defense in Poland, Lithuania, Stony Latvia, they grabbed Lithuania. They're actually looking, acting like the United States, they're building bases for permanent deployment, forward stationing, families, schools, commissaries, you know, what we've do. Right. For a very large brigade, you know, 4,500, you know, a good, healthy brigade that's supplemented by battalions from other countries, including the United States. That's a real fighting force, a, a, a, a budding and alongside the Suvlaki gap.

30:11Yeah. That matters. Yeah. The US has a significant division, minus brigade, plus in Poland. There's rotates, some of them are permanentization, but the vast majority rotate. And then the Brits and the Canadians do slight, do smaller and things in Estonia and, and Latvia, which are themselves smaller countries, yeah, population wise, that's significant investments by NATO. That's a post, it was supposed to start post 2014, it went into high year post 2022 and you can see it. And the only person that was doing it post 2014 was the US. We actually made investments and, and military construction all throughout those countries. We did something called the European deterrence initiative in the Obama and first Trump administrations to really build up our force structure, the infrastructure for US involvement. So we're actually in really good military shape there. Yeah. We just, you got to believe there's a credible belief the US will do something. So when you ask me, will Russia do something? I think it's tied, it's tied to what would the US do in response?

31:15Mark, as we begin to wrap up here, let's talk a little bit about China's role in enabling Russia. It's economic and military, isn't it? It is, you know, so it does two things. One, it initially backstopped them, shifting, taking, increasing their imports next towards 25% as Europe and, you know, the US at that point was pretty detached anyway. But in 2022, 2023, 2024, it was that. But also increasingly beginning in 2023, as Russia expanded its inventory of, of cruise and ballistic missiles, it began to provide microelectronics that are critical. And we're now seeing the weapons hitting in Ukraine are, you know, fabricated in January of 2026 or fabricated in November of 2025. So clearly, there's this, and they have Chinese parts in them. So China's really helped there, so they've helped economically, helped militaryly.

32:15But let's be clear, this help is kind of a bleeding dry as well. And what I mean by that is, while they provide a lot of DJI drones that make up the bulk of Russian FPV first-per-view, you know, Kamikaze anti-personal drones, they also make up, still make up about 40% of Ukrainian FPV drones. They're being, despite being sanctioned, not supposed to be delivered, they're clearly being delivered through third party countries to the Ukrainians. Now, the Ukrainians are trying hard to get off of Chinese, off of the DJI drones. They can't get off of all Chinese parts. They need Chinese magnets. They're still using a lot of Chinese cameras. They're still using a lot of Chinese motor controllers and windings. There's three or four parts that they're slow to come off of China on. But China is very explicitly allowing these parts to get to Ukraine to bleed Russia dry. So yes, they're helping them. But I also think they're making sure that Russia is increasingly the junior partner in

33:16the Russia. China access. Right. Are the North Korean soldiers still around or what are they doing? So they are. So I think both North Korean and Chinese forces are in Russia, not Ukraine. And I think the, you know, interesting, the North Korean forces were never in Ukraine proper. They fought the Russians at the, at the, where the Russians had broke, they fought in the first, yeah. And Kurtz, where the Ukrainians had broken through. But they're also, believe me, Russia, North Korean ammunition is everywhere. They gave five or six million rounds of mortar and artillery fire inventory, which is more than Europe has, you know, built since World War II. They gave that to the Russians as being used daily. So the North Koreans are present that way. I think the North Koreans and the Chinese are both learning aggressively about how Russia does the adaptive warfare, you know, improving how Rubicon improves the Rubicon, one of the big Russian drone units, how they improve their technology, improve their tactics, set

34:21these some processes, every three or four months. They're lagging Ukraine by three or six months, but in terms of adaptive warfare, the second most adaptive military in the world, yeah, the Russians. One more thing before I wind up with some questions on how this war might end. When you were in Ukraine recently, did you get an update on how they're using air power and have 16th? They're, they're FCC's, they're still doing a fantastic job on counter drone as an air defense weapon. They, you know, they do counter drone two ways, they use air power to thin the herd and then localized ground-based systems to protect specific assets. And they're still doing a great job thinning the herd, you know, I think I mentioned publicly that I watched a guy, a guy came back from a mission, he shot that 11 drones in one mission, one F-16 pilot, 10 with the advanced precision co-weapons system, one with his guns. As long as they're getting the APKWS rockets, they can do a fantastic job with that.

35:21What they haven't done yet is kind of made the F-16, the potent offensive strike weapon it is. A lot of this has to do with lingering Russian, slant, Soviet thinking about air power, which is that it is a secondary element to ground power and that it is, you know, and it's, you know, it's tethered to ground control interceptors. F-16 has a kick ass radar, two F-16s have two kick ass radars, and two of them working together in a flight can really maintain great situational awareness, they have good weapons when they have their AM-RAM, the AM-RAM air-to-air missile, that's one that could also be on the NASAM's air defense I mentioned, but there's an air-to-air variant. When they have those up, they can defend themselves and they can have strike weapons in the belly and really go do some damage. And I'm hoping that they can integrate their drones to cut open holes in air defense and jamming, allow the F-16s through do some damage, deep, you know, into Russian territory

36:22and get back, we're still months to a year away from that, I'm hopefully it's months, but they're doing great on that, I mean, they're doing great on the defense side and they're starting to think about the office, but they're not executing it. Final thing I'd say is we've got to get the maintenance right on them. We're still struggling with NATO on getting their F-16s through the proper maintenance cycles at the right speed necessary. So Ukrainian planes are in Ukraine and not at NATO repair sites. And the Europeans are they stepping up, give us some sense of how it's going. So they did. We dropped our military assistance 99.7% in one year in 2025, embarrassingly. We went from $40 billion a year and a $60 billion program to $300 million or something in a year. I mean, this year will be even less potentially. Despite the fact that the Congress passed like 600 million in Ukraine's security assistance, I don't know that the Trump administration will even give them.

37:23He doesn't like giving stuff for free to anyone. Yeah. And Ukraine would be top of that list. Right. Taiwan's probably next on that list. So I think that the Ukraine, your page is stepped up on the stuff they can't build, which is a lot of it. They're buying it from what's called Pearl, which is a programmer. They can buy it from US inventory or US companies and it's delivered to Ukraine. I'm, you know, they've put a couple billion into that already and I think there'll be billions more. So I think they've stepped up. They're not us though. They don't have our defense industrial base. When you need something fast, they're not, they don't hold it anymore. They've given almost all they have that is compatible that they could give right away. The US is the only person with that kind of of inventory and we're just not, I do not see it. I don't, I didn't see it happening before the war with Iran. I definitely don't see it happening now. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit as we end here on possible scenarios. There's a course idea of a ceasefire and then of course there would be a larger peace

38:29agreement either, either or or maybe the larger peace agreement follows the ceasefire. Talk a little bit about this. So I mean, if Ukraine is not losing and feels pretty good about where they are and they feel that if they were to compromise now, they would, you know, essentially be allowing Vladimir Putin to begin the war again, pass a problem down to their children and grandchildren. How does this end? What is it going to be a so-called frozen conflict or de facto ceasefire, North Korea, militarized zone? Where do you see this? So that's not out of the realm. I mean, a cessation of hostilities basically, along the line, patrolled hopefully by independent countries, although I don't think the Russians will accept that. I just think we're at this weird juncture where, as I've said, the president says, Zoloski

39:31has no cards. He has cards. The president has to come to the appropriate recognition that to get a cessation of hostilities, he has to bring pressure under Russia. We're past putting pressure on Ukraine. They've conceded all they're going to concede and it's a grunge. You know, Crimea is not theirs. 18% of the 85% of Donbass is not theirs, maybe higher. 20% of their country is occupied and they're willing to have a cessation of hostilities along that line. They're not willing to give any more land that isn't taken from them in combat and they are not willing to concede on how their democracies executed. And Putin's, you know, his maximalist demands haven't changed since 2022. The president is going to have to pressure him.

40:33So far, he and Steve Whitkoff have shown no desire to do that. So to me, this thing could go on for a while. I would tell you, it's not out of the realm of postponing my mind that it goes on for three more years until you get a different president who is more mature approach to negotiating with Vladimir Putin. Very few American political leaders would land on Putin where President Trump has landed on Putin that he's a guy he can trust, that he's a guy who he believes over his intelligence community. You know, he's a guy who believes over his own. I mean, the funny thing about the Russians is after saying it wasn't us, we didn't give any intel. They then agreed to stop giving the intel to the Iranians if we would stop giving it to the Ukrainian. So even when he's lied to within a 48 hour period by the Russian leadership, the president continues to call Zelensky silly and a clown and all these other ridiculous insults and never say a bad word about Putin. It's strange. I mean, I wonder sometimes when the president looks at this and he's saying the quickest

41:36point for me to be is for me to strong arm somebody into a compromise. And I think he just thinks, well, the mighty Russians versus the little Ukrainians and it should be easier for me to pressure them. And so that's what I'm going to keep doing. I don't know. It feels like that might be the extent of it. Well, I think you nailed it there. I honestly think that's it, Mike. It can't. I don't think it's compromise. I don't think it's anything else. I think it truly is how he views power. Yeah. Admiral Mark Montgomery, thank you so much for coming on that sec matters. Thank you for having me, Michael. That was Admiral Mark Montgomery. I'm Michael Allen. Please join us next week for another episode of Natsek Matters. Natsek Matters is produced by Steve Dorsey with assistance from Ashley Berry. Natsek Matters is a production of Beacon Global Strategies.