He served as Commanding General, US Army Europe. He has been the Senior Advisor to Human Rights First (formerly known as Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights) since June 2022 and also serves as the NATO Senior Mentor for Logistics. He previously held the Pershing Chair in Strategic Studies at the Center for European Policy Analysis.
The video uses an AI-generated image of him and AI-generated version of his voice for practical purposes as he constantly travels and so cannot do a real recording, but the analysis is his, voiced by AI. So there are a lot of illogical breaks in sentences and wrong pauses.
He also uses verified sources, and media outlets regarded by the media as factual and neutral. It also includes casualty numbers, whether the casualties by deliberate targeting of civilians (which is a war crime) or unintended casualties caused by debris, etc.
His reports are of the sort a professional analyst would produce.
As I have said before, Ukraine is fighting a strategically brilliant war, redesigning technology in ways unexpected to achieve intelligent goals. Various experts have said that Ukraine's use of drones has arguably reinvented the methodology of war, producing a paradigm shift as significant as the invention of the heavy machine gun in the late nineteenth century or the invention of the tank in World War I. Paradigm shifts in war effectively create a before and after, with everything changed utterly by the paradigm shift. Ukraine's change of methodologies of war is so profound that wars of the future will be fought differently to wars before Russia's war in Ukraine. For example, the appearance of heavy machine guns and tanks entirely changed war, making the traditional cavalry obsolete. (Poland fought against the change, still trying to use cavalry in World War II before finally realising it was now obsolescent.)
Neither Ukraine nor Russia invented the use of drones, but Ukraine's radical re-imagining of their use will be copied by all militaries in the future. Indeed Iran in its war against the US studied Ukraine's tactics and learned from it, whereas the US did not.
One radical change Ukraine has perfected has been the use of drones to hit locations far from the battle front, disrupting critical supply chains and funding chains in ways not previously used. That has turned one of Russia's biggest advantages, its size, into a weakness as it cannot protect everywhere from attack.
Often in asymmetric warfare, the smaller state is forced by necessity to move away from traditional tactics where it is at a disadvantage to radically new ones that the larger state is unprepared for. One example was in the Irish War of Independence, where Michael Collins' Flying Columns reinvented tactics that Britain struggled to cope with.
In traditional warfare, the battlefield was central. Arguably, Ukraine has made battlefield less important if not obsolescent. Ukraine's drone wall has effectively made it since March almost redundant, as Russian soldiers cannot advance without each soldier being hunted down and killed by drones.
Instead the war has moved to oil fields, ports, individual shadow fleet vessels and warehouses - throwing Russia's export of oil into chaos, so disrupting the income flow Russia is critically dependent on.
Hodges mentions attacks by Ukraine last weekend on a major Baltic Sea port and on shadow fleet vessels, their significance and the complexity of hitting targets in the Baltic Sea, given that it is almost totally controlled by NATO as only two small pieces of land around the Sea are not controlled by NATO.
What Ukraine has effectively done is lock the battlefields down with drones and instead opened new battlefields all over Russia.
Though he didn't mention it, one possible though outside chance is that the attack on Wildberries warehouses could collapse the Russian banking sector, as much of the sector's debt is tied in with that company. Its failure could pull down the banking system and so Russia's economy and state. The war would end as the ability of the state to fund it would collapse.
It is a long shot, but one example of the remarkably innovative thinking in Ukraine - as it spotted that the sheer size of Wildberries meant its failure might collapse Russia's banking system. Think of Wildberries as potentially being the Anglo-Irish Bank of Russia.
Even long-time cheerleaders for the war of Russia are now deeming Russia's war "unwinnable". The most decorated Russian soldier in the war, praised as a hero by Putin, two months ago said "the war is lost" in an interview. A retired Soviet general now living in the west said the same. He said that at worst for Ukraine, the war is a stalemate. But he reckoned the war is "advantage Ukraine." He said Ukraine was fighting an "astonishing war" whereas Russia had fought an "incompetent" one.
Russia's long term advantage, that due to its size it can "outbreed and outbleed" rivals no longer applies. Firstly Russia is facing its worst demographic crisis in two hundred years, meaning it has far fewer men of fighting years. It is now recruiting up to 15000 men fewer than it is losing every quarter. In addition the Ukrainian zone wall means the average soldier's lifespan on the front line is thirty-five minutes. Massive payments to soldiers are failing as men won't join up if all they have are thirty five minutes to enjoy being wealthy.
Recruitment numbers are now falling quarter by quarter, while casualties rise.
In addition in the last ten days Russians have been withdrawing their money from banks as they fear Putin is so running out of money that Putin may try to seize their savings. They judge it safer to have their money under their mattresses than to have it in banks where Putin could seize it
The innovation of Ukraine's drone's are are not only changing warfare tactically but economically --a swarm of cheap drones can out perform individual 1-5 $M missiles. But it is also getting close to becoming a real ethical problem --so far operators have made the last call --but smart drones are being developed to think for themselves without human interaction on who is a target --It's fine, drones can identify different vehicles and decide which is a higher priority target -jeep v missile launcher type targeting -- but when they start selecting humans on their own -that is dodgy.
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