that s what we ve seen in the last two packages. a lot of artillery pieces, a lot of ammunition, a lot of intelligence-gathering capability with the drones and other intelligence asset and what you re talking about in this next phase is a counterartillery fight and a maneuver fight. i think what probably secretary austin and blinken talked about today is what s going to happen next, the long-term fight, and ukraine has been demanding and president zelenskyy has been demanding, excuse me, allots of equipment that would modernize his army on a grand scale. that may be part of phase three, but something like that takes on an awful lot of time to get training, to get the maintenance and logistics support and to get individuals would can provide the logistics tale for a modern army. ukraine can t do that in my view while they are also conduct warfare against the russians in the east. i want to ask you about some visits that have been going on
javelins and stingers. now, javelins and stingers are continuing to flow over to ukraine, but you re seeing howitzer a howitzer is a long-range artillery armored vehicle that can shoot over miles and miles. and you re seeing that go in, 72 in this package alone. and that is because they re preparing for the fight in donbas. they re expecting the russians to come over with their what the expectation is, is that the is russia, russian troops are going to come and start pounding donbas with their own artillery, so part of the package also includes counterartillery radar that the united states is sending to the ukrainians so that they can so they will be able to detect russian positions, russian artillery positions. this is all part of the whole expectation that russia s going to be coming over these open areas now, pounding them with
train on this kind of howitzer and how will it affect the fighting in the donbas. training is not hard. ukrainians know how to use artillery, just don t know how to use this particular artillery piece so they have got the basics. on the other hand, this is different. the technology is a little different. the maintenance will be different from what they re accustomed to so it takes some time to get service members accustomed to the maintenance of this new equipment. there s counterartillery, mortars, radar going with it and then there are 200 army personnel carriers. all of this requires training on maintenance. the other part is they re training the trainers. so the trainers have to go back and train the actual troops. what you re talking about is a process that will likely take weeks to unfold before the equipment is operational.
we don t believe i don t believe that russia can adjust the way they ve been conducting their operations. they are too high bound. their generals do not have the adaptability. the force itself is not well trained. they don t have the sergeants who will direct the forces that the soldiers cannot maneuver off roads. sometimes they don t even have maps to know where they re going. so ukraine forces have been taught this the last ten years. they ve gone through a transformation in their military. so we re going to see quick reaction forces from the part of the ukrainians countering some of the russian attempts to get off roads. intelligence will be critically important. all the new weapons systems we ve been talking about for the last several days are going to be crucial especially the counterartillery radar that can tell where russian artillery is coming from and then the ukrainians can fight back with long-range fires as well. the fact is we re going to see a
so ititself to better maneuver of forces. that s why, again, if you look at the package that president biden signed out yesterday, there s, you know, 40,000 rounds of artillery that we re giving them and 18 howitzers to go with it. a counterartillery radar will save ukrainian lives because it will them them anticipate and get ready for incoming artillery fire. we think this fight will look a lot different than what we ve seen in the north, more hilly and more cities. this will be a little more open warfare and we re doing everything we can to make sure that the ukrainians are ready for that. all right. we thank admiral kirby for being with us on morning joe today. let s bring in nbc news national security analyst clint watts. take us through the battlefield. what s it looking like today? yeah. fascinating, joe, that the russian navy meets any challenge at all. the ukrainian navy after 2014, after crimea was taken, had