Deep Dive
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Hello, everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us. And I'm Rima Kareis. Today is Thursday, June 26. The ceasefire between Israel and Iran appears to be holding for now. But as this conflict has unfolded, it got us thinking, what does war even look like in 2025?
Yeah, there are so many things different about just the way that war is waged. And so today we are talking to somebody who has seen this in action. Deborah Amos has covered foreign conflicts for decades. Most folks will know her from her years as a foreign correspondent at NPR. And she's currently the Ferris Professor of Journalism in Residence at Princeton University. She's joining
us from Ukraine, where she's on a reporting trip with the International Women's Media Foundation. Welcome to the show, Deb. Glad to be here. Well, first of all, thank you for joining us from an active conflict zone. Yes, thank you. Where are you exactly? And tell us a bit about what you're doing there.
So I am in Kiev. I'm in the capital of Ukraine. We spent a couple of days in Lviv right near the Polish border and now we're here. We're right in the middle of town, which is important and I'll get to that. But what this is, it's a reporting grant and I applied for it because I wanted to come here. I wanted to see this one up close.
And the International Women's Media Foundation picked me and also Joanne Levine, who's come as a producer and a partner in this caper. And we're looking at this war up close. And it is remarkable to be here.
Well, you've reported from conflict zones in the past, specifically in the Middle East. I'm very familiar with your work. I'm sure many of our listeners are, too. I'm curious, what feels different about being on the ground in Ukraine today compared to your past experiences in conflict zones? So let me start right from the beginning. One of the things they do with us is we have a hostile environment training two-day course before we come to the Capitol.
And what surprised me about it is how different it is from any other course I've ever taken.
So there's no work on getting through a checkpoint because you don't do that here. There's no work on kidnapping because that's not a problem here. You never see the Russians. There's no work on here's what you do if they shoot at your car. That is not what's going on here. What we practice for is what happens when a drone hits.
What happens when a ballistic missile hits? And we learned that there's two kinds. There are the drones that drop grenades, and you do one thing for that scenario. And there are drones that drop these bomblets, and there's a whole other set of actions that you take when that happens to you. But the key here is you learn tourniquet, tourniquet, tourniquet,
Because if you are someplace where drones hit and people get hit, you're going to have to deal with, you know, mass bleedings. And that's what the biggest training is here. I have never been through a training like this before. And it was the first time that I understood, oh, this is a war like I have never seen before.
And for folks who aren't familiar, like I've been through hostile environment trainings a couple times myself. This is often a prerequisite for journalists to go in there and they teach you like all those things that Deb was saying. But like that is to set you up so you don't die while you're covering the conflict. But you mentioned, Deb, that it mattered that you were in the center of the city. Why is that important?
Because the embassies are in the center of the city, much more important for our safety in some ways is embassy staffs are in these hotels. I see them when we have gone down to the bomb shelter here. And the Russians have been wary about causing any diplomatic activity.
event here if they were to hit any of these hotels downtown and kill embassy staff. So most of the ballistic missiles, the cruise missiles on Monday early morning, 3 a.m., there were 352 drones that were aimed at the Capitol. Wow.
And I started the night down in the bomb shelter. It was my first night here. And I thought, you know, I think I won't even fight for a bed down there. I'll just start the night there. And by three o'clock in the morning, you know, you hear it in the corridors. You set up your phone so you hear it. So there's no doubt, you know, when the warnings come that you're supposed to go down. It's two floors down.
Below the hotel, it used to be a parking garage and there's beds, there's beanbags, there's Wi-Fi, there's coffee. And so these beds are lined up like kids camp and you just go pick one and that's where you spend the night and hope you can go to sleep. We've had two nights like that.
And then we had two nights that were not like that. So you kind of catch up on your sleep. Wow. I can't imagine what that must be like. Yeah. Yeah, that it's very different from your previous experiences of being deployed in an active war zone where you're kind of like out there in the grit and the grime and the bullets flying. Yeah.
I was much more scared and, you know, was questioning my sanity by crossing the border into Syria or even in the second Gulf War when, you know, we were in Baghdad and you didn't know where ISIS was and whether they'd spot you. It
It's a weird way to think here because your logical mind says to you, okay, I'm pretty safe. The chances of me being injured where I'm staying is low. Yet, you know, these alarms come at 3 a.m. or the second night it was 11 a.m. So you're aware that
that the city is being hit. And then the next day, we went to the bomb site and you begin to see what 352 drones look like and something like 11 ballistic missiles that
And three cruise missiles. That's an interesting number because you may remember that the Ukrainians pulled off this remarkable attack on planes inside Russia. It took them 18 months, I think, to plan this thing where they brought drones in. Operation Spiderweb? Yeah.
You bet. And they hit all these planes. Now, what a military analyst told me today is that's why the number of drones are up and the number of ballistic missiles and cruise missiles are down.
And so the drones don't make as much damage as the ballistic and the cruise missiles do, but they do make damage. And since May, Ukrainians here will tell you that the Russian strategies have changed. And there's a cat and mouse game between the two. Somebody changes, one side changes, the other has to, you know, has to respond to it. Have you had a chance to talk with folks on the ground, with civilians? Like, what are you hearing from them today?
Do they have thoughts about these shifts in warfare that we're seeing?
Yes, they do. And the analysts here say the same. You know, it usually happens on Sunday and Monday. It's like the beginning of the week is the terror attacks. But it's astonishing to see the street in the morning. So, you know, you have an alarm, you try to get some sleep. About six o'clock, you give up, you get up and you walk outside and people are jogging.
Yeah, that's so surreal.
you know, when it's dark, that's when the, the, the crazy part starts, but it's a resilience that I find extraordinary, uh, to, to, and how normal I, we're going to a concert this weekend. Uh, we're going to go look at a, a, a nail place where they also do Botox. I've never heard of that before. Uh,
You know, we go into bakeries. You can go shopping here. I am in a neighborhood that reminds me of the West Village in New York. You know, it's hipsterville here.
You want orange juice with your coffee. You want coffee tonic. It's so bizarre. And the food, it is so bizarre. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of civilian casualties. That's why. Okay. Yeah. There are, and there's also memorials everywhere.
I want to zoom out from Ukraine and especially given all of your experience, kind of talk more broadly about modern warfare. One thing I've noticed, and this was particularly clear in this recent U.S.-Iran conflict, is that there is a lot of messaging ahead of certain major moves or strikes, meaning that sometimes you end up with very few or no civilian casualties, even when they're destroying infrastructure. How
How new is that? And how do you read that? You know, I was, I was thinking a lot about that because we get, we get these alerts and when the alert is over, what you hear is the alert is over. May the force be with you every single time they do that.
And you can have an alert on your phone. You can look at the map. If where you are is deep red, go to the basement. If it's light red, you can wait. You don't have to go right away. It's quite extraordinary how much warning you get. This didn't happen in Iraq.
This didn't happen in Syria. This didn't happen in Lebanon. It is quite new for these messages to come. But I think that lives were saved certainly in Israel in the latest round, not so much in Iran. They complained that they didn't have any warning. I feel like in Israel and also in Ukraine,
They're getting these warnings because they've got alert systems. There's technology that lets them know it's coming. But I'm thinking about sort of Iran basically letting everybody know that they were about to strike a U.S. military base and so everybody was out of there. Does that matter in the broader scheme of things if you're still blowing up somebody's base?
Look at what happened. The U.S. president thanked them for giving a warning. Everybody knew it was performative. This has happened before. And the last time they hit a base, you may remember that there was a lot of injury. It was brain injury more than anything. So people didn't understand it right when it happened. But nobody thanked the Iranians that time. This time, everybody's better at it.
And I was shocked, to be honest, that President Trump said thank you to the Iranians for warning us. We understand that you had to do that. And so that's enough of that. Thank you. It was unusual, in my view, from what I have seen in the past. The Russians...
are not as kind about their strikes. They have changed their tactics here. Now their drones are up higher in the sky.
They have these decoy drones that come and when the Ukrainians shoot those down, then the real ones up higher come through the hole and explode and are not shot out. They get about 95% of them. The problem is that 5% that they don't has gotten bigger because the number of drones coming here are expanding.
Yeah, well, because they're cheaper, right? Than other kind of warfare. Yes, they're cheaper and the Russians are making them themselves. You know, they were buying them from the Iranians, these Shahid drones.
And many people thought, okay, now what's going to happen now that Iran is kind of busy with their own troubles? But I asked about this in the past couple of days, and I am told that the Russians are building their own. So are the Ukrainians. I will give you one example that I was told about today in New Technology, New Warfare. Okay.
And it is this. There is now an app that soldiers have in their phone called eScore. And it's for the drone operators on the Ukrainian side. So you set off your drones and some authority within the military gives you a score. How many things did you hit? What did it cost the Russians? And if you, it's like a video game. If you do well,
then you get more drones the next time. And if you do badly, you get less drones. So there's incentive to be more accurate with your drones, know what you're targeting and make it cost the Russians. And it was developed by a top woman at the top of the Department of Defense here. Hmm.
That's interesting. So as with the drones, with the battlefield moving more into the digital space, with things like cyber attacks, frozen assets, disinformation campaigns, and you're answering this a bit, but how are governments and institutions adapting? Like when you're talking to people in power, what are they most worried about? What are they preparing for?
Well, you know, I don't think they know. So what happens here is I'm in the gym, I see a guy, and I start talking to him. And it turns out he is from a Scandinavian country. I said, what are you doing here? He said, I'm an investor. Really? Investing in what? Ukrainian defense.
Because they are in the future. And every country knows that this is the future of warfare, but all of this is being tested here. And so this experience will be incredibly important for everybody.
And so I think that when this is over, hope soon, that the lessons learned from the Ukrainian defense establishment will be something that everybody wants to learn from, including the United States. We don't have a drone program that I know of that's as sophisticated as what is happening here in Ukraine, and everybody's going to have to learn this.
For sure we don't. There was actually just a congressional hearing a little bit ago about exactly that, that we don't have the drone infrastructure that we need for this moment. And it feels like there are so many shifts, but I'm wondering what else you've seen just over the arc of your career in terms of the way that war has changed and how that changes the way that you teach and cover wars. Yeah.
Yeah, it does make it very different. And you have to include. So the digital part of war also expands to
war crimes investigations. So now we have open source investigations. And, you know, when I teach this to my students, they lap it up because it's the world they live in. And this is the information now that is going to be brought to all war crimes trials. It already is. Because for the first time, researchers are able to investigate war crimes in real time.
Because you don't have to leave the office. I will give you an example. Yale University did an investigation of Ukrainian children kidnapped by Russia and brought to Russia. They did not leave New Haven to do that. That's a change.
from any of the wars that I've been... It started in Syria, actually. Bellingcat starts in Syria. That's the most well-known of the open source investigators. I remember when they were called Brown Moses in the beginning of the Syrian war. It expands like crazy once this war begins. So I've watched it
from a blog to Bellingcat to very serious investigations on the Malaysian airliner that was shot down over Ukraine, the attack on a Russian dissident, Navalny. That was done by Bellingcat, and they named the Russians who had brought the poison when they tried to kill him. It's very interesting to watch
the expansion of this open source investigations and my students are fascinated by it absolutely fascinated by it it's so fascinating
I feel like we could keep talking to you, but this has been really great, super insightful. Deborah Amos, please stay safe. Thank you so much for this conversation. Yeah, thanks, Deb. We really appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thank you. Nice to talk to you. Yeah, so Deb Amos is a Ferris professor of journalism at Princeton, in residence, I should say, at Princeton. And yeah, was there in Ukraine. What you mentioned about the technology and the cyber attacks that are so prominent in warfare now, I think is...
So important. And I was very fascinated to hear her talking about other people from other countries almost using Ukraine as a lab for what the future of war is going to look like. Yeah. So many things from this conversation are going to stick with me, especially her just painting the different...
the surreal dystopian reality of being in Ukraine right now. Yeah, we want to hear from you about what you think about the changing ways that wars are fought. You can leave us a voicemail at 508-UBSMART or email us at makemesmart at marketplace.org. Tomorrow, don't miss Economics on Tap. That's, of course, the YouTube live stream that starts at 3.30 Pacific, 6.30 Eastern. We'll end the week as we always do with some news, drinks, and a game.
Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergseeker, and today's program was engineered by Juan Carlos Dorado. Daisy Blasios is our supervising senior producer. Nancy Fergali is executive producer of Marketplace Shows. And Joanne Griffith is our chief content officer.
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