“It has been a week of adversity. It has been challenging. And speaking to you from understanding a little bit about world championships, you have to be able to embrace adversity. Adversity either breaks you or unifies you. And what Russia did last week is testing that with the resiliency of NATO.
And what’s happened from our perspective is unification. And last Friday, we saw the Supreme Allied Commander, Grench, put forward a mission. And that’s how you win military-wise. Your combatant commander owns the mission and puts forward the mission. And that mission is to defend the Eastern European nations. It’s called Eastern Sentry. And that is a complete, layered capability to defend from anything on that. And there is no question that the air dominance and the air superiority of NATO is second to none. Second to none. Russia doesn’t have that Air Force capability or ability to challenge that in that full capacity. And that was used for the defense of NATO nations and explicitly put forward by Grench. We also know the Eastern Flank Deterrent Line is part, will be a significant part of the Eastern Sentry part of it.
We at MDAA have been involved heavily with Ukraine. We began that relationship in November 2023 in London, bringing forward their new technologies of being able to defeat drones with cheap, distributable, attributable capabilities. Our ability to help advocate that and move that forward, we took it to R&E in January, to the Pentagon, to our Northcom Commander, Indo-Pacom Commander. That eventually moved into a demonstration of that in Ramstein in ‘24. It moved into the Yuma Testing Grounds. And it moved from there last summer into Smârdan, Romania, where we demonstrated a cheap, attributable, distributable data, open data architecture in front of 11 NATO nations. We further took that to Oahu, Hawaii, and a similar aspect of it. And then earlier this year, NATO purchased 17,000 of these for Ukraine.
So it is real. And one of the issues that we’re trying to advocate for is why haven’t these NATO nations that have been on the border of Ukraine the last three years, watching exactly what’s on as it escalates to the 700, 800 a night, why haven’t they had and put forward the same sort of capabilities that Ukraine’s doing: cheap, distributable, that works. And they’ve waited now until this moment where that’s going to happen now, but it should have been in place. That’s a question we would like to address to understand that. But I believe that is coming forward with the eastern flank deterrent line and with the eastern century aspect of it.
Another big point is how are we deterring Russia from doing this? It’s not Article 5. It’s not our nuclear capabilities. It’s not our air superiority. Russia is doing this. And we haven’t been able to deter that. And does that mean what we’re doing now is having to have a defensive capability, along with an offensive capability that we’re not willing to strike back at, but we definitely have to think through this. What is the future to be able to deter someone like Russia putting capabilities, you saw, I think there were 19 of them on the 10th of September that came across the line. And this is by far not the first time they’ve done this. They skirt the borders of Ukraine with their drones before going in Ukraine. They’ve skirted it on the Danube River. They’ve skirted on the Poland border. And there have been incidences over the last three years, reoccurring of Russian drones on NATO territories. But the sensitivity to react to shooting down these things, and what that escalation is, we haven’t addressed that until now, until last week. And it took a couple days to address it. And here we go.
So, I think this is a timely discussion. We have experts from Ukraine, in Ukraine, to have a great discussion today on this important topic. Because we have to deter against nations, nuclear nations, and non-nuclear nations, when our nuclear deterrence doesn’t work or allied partnerships doesn’t work. So that’s what I think our discussion will be today.
And we have three great guests with us, great teammates, great wingmen, great sailors, shipmates. So we do have “Corky” Charles Cochran, who was at the beginning of this. He was the Deputy DECOM for U.S. Air Force Ops when this fight started with Ukraine. Very prominent air fighter on that. And he’s over in Ukraine. Both him and Mark will be in Ukraine next week, advising. They’ve been doing this the last two or three years. We have Mark Montgomery, who is one of the smartest guys on this subject. We’re lucky to have him here. He’s formerly the planner for EUCOM. And we have KT, who this is his second time here, who is an expert on Ukraine and been in the fight for Ukraine with the first war way back in 2014. And in this war, with technologies and aspects for it.”
“From my perspective, I think this is the turning point. I think we’ve already recognized that that Eastern Flank Deterrent Line, led by C.D. Donahue, by Hinds, Bigby, by Tom Goffus, by the coalition of the willing, which are those Eastern Front countries that have the most to lose. What happened, I believe, is the tipping point.
They’ve got the mechanism with the Eastern Flank Deterrent Line to lay this down. It could be done by November, December. They could lay this thing down.
It’s cheap, distributable. That’s there. I think those countries have to do it, be part of it, and then to have Grench come in as the Supreme Allied Commander, the COCOM, saying “this is the mission, and we’re going to integrate, and we’re going to add to our invincible, superior, dominant air power.”
The lower end of it is what we have to do. And like you said, Mark, the credibility is gone. They have to do this to be credible, to be credible at all as a NATO organization, and to Russia.
So I think this is the tipping point. They’re going to go forward with it, and everybody’s going to benefit from that. So that’s where it’s going to go.
I think the cloud, the open architecture, not at the secret level, right now at the unclass level to build the trust between different nations. We can’t fight Russia by ourselves, and we have to share data with other nations. We’re not doing that.
And we got to take whatever the heck Ukraine’s stored up for three and a half years of data of everything flying in their airspace, and that has to be given to our countries, to NATO, to be able to fight this fight, to be able to not have a World War. That’s where we’re at. And I thank you for contributing to this conversation and this discussion.
Timing’s everything. There is momentum. There’s energy. There’s leadership. There’s political will. There’s money.
It’s all there. So I think we’re at a different stage than we’ve ever been with integrated air and missile defense in Europe, ever. So that’s where I’m at.
So thank you. Thanks for the discussion today, gentlemen. I appreciate it, ladies and gentlemen.
Thank you for listening.”
Mr. Riki Ellison, MDAA Founder and Chairman
Speakers:
Major General (Ret.) Charles “Corky” Corcoran
MDAA Board Member
Konstantin Tymonkin
Ukraine Military Technical Expert
Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mark Montgomery
MDAA Board Member
Mr. Riki Ellison
MDAA Founder and Chairman
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