Memorial Day is a day to remember those who gave their lives in defense of their country. On this episode of the War Room, Steve and his guest Jack Posoby discuss the horrific toll of the Battle of Kharkiv, and the lack of media coverage of it.
00:17:18.760Okay, welcome back. It is our Memorial Day weekend special. We kick off today. I have Jack Posobiec, a former naval officer, and of course, Patrick O'Donnell in the next hour. And then on Monday, we have Patrick O'Donnell, myself, and Captain Maureen Bannon.
00:17:36.260Jack, go back to Bakhmut, because we're going to talk South China Sea and Taiwan in the next segment. But I want to make sure everybody's got there. This has kind of fallen off the front page.
00:17:50.980And the reason it's fallen off the front page is because the Biden regime and the media don't want to talk about what's actually going on. And they certainly don't want you to know what's going on in Bakhmut. Go back to that New Yorker piece.
00:18:01.700Because I'd like you if you reread that right now, and let's talk about Bakhmut and what actually happened there.
00:18:07.760I mean, Steve, I highly encourage everyone to go and read this report out of the New Yorker because, you know, I know people will say they'll say, oh, well, Posobiec, you know that you're just following stuff on Telegram.
00:18:21.100You don't know who's putting that out. I say, well, there's your source videos from on the ground.
00:18:24.000Or they'll say, we see something on Twitter. You don't know who's putting out. OK, here's the New Yorker. All right. This is the same the same reporting that you could stand up anywhere.
00:18:32.700This is a mainstream and honestly, center left kind of publication. And you can read that these reports always seem to be the same narrative that you find from people who are on the ground.
00:18:44.940It's not the mainstream narrative that you're getting every night on CNN, even Fox News to some extent.
00:18:50.060But when you talk about this and here's here's an example from a Ukrainian.
00:18:56.100The Wagner forces brought in waves of convicts that proved too much for the Ukrainians were still reeling from Kherson's battle, had not yet replenished their ranks and materiel.
00:19:07.560The commander of the battalion, a 39 year old lieutenant colonel named Pavlo, said of the Wagner fighters, they were like zombies.
00:19:14.380They use the prisoners like a wall of meat. It didn't matter how many killed. They kept coming.
00:19:19.360Within weeks, the battalion faced annihilation. Entire platoons wiped out in close contact firefights.
00:19:25.400Some 70 men encircled and massacred. The dwindling survivors, one officer told me, became useless because they were so tired.
00:19:32.760One Russian said that. That because they're losing so many of skipping ahead a little bit here because they're losing so many troops, they're now on the Ukrainian side forced to bring in new draftees.
00:19:44.380But the problem with the new draftees is that every time you do a mobilization, you're now running out of experienced trained fighters.
00:19:50.600And Ukraine's already seen several waves of general mobilization at this point.
00:19:55.260That means the people you're getting in, you're getting civilians, you're getting people with no experience, people who spent maybe the first time they've ever held a gun is the one you gave to them.
00:20:03.620And you're sending those kids up to the front lines now.
00:20:06.080This is basically Germany at the very end of World War II and the Battle of Berlin, where it's all kids and senior citizens that are holding the line at the very end because all of the trained fighters in the Wehrmacht had been completely wiped out at that point.
00:20:18.740And then you hear things. These guys don't have the stamina. They get scared. They panic.
00:20:29.860There's a phenomenon that they're seeing because of the high attrition rate called reverse natural selection, reverse natural selection, because seasoned infantrymen, and it mentions a few of them here, became extremely fatigued and then go AWOL.
00:20:44.900Because they say they get into a bad place psychologically and they need a break, then they run back home, then they're running back to the trenches out of a sense of guilt and a sense of loyalty.
00:20:54.560But that being said, keep in mind, when you're on that zero line up there, every single night you are under the rain of hellfire from the Russian artillery.
00:21:02.640So, again, when we keep reporting, this is, I mean, this goes on. It's easily a 10,000-word article.
00:21:08.080And if you're looking for some reporting this weekend that you can say, look, this isn't human events.
00:21:13.960This isn't the war room. This is from the New Yorker saying that you are putting people into the meat grinder over there.
00:21:21.740And, in fact, it's cannon fodder. That's what's going on.
00:21:24.640You've got cannon fodder on both sides that are being thrown at each other.
00:21:27.800And if the United States continues on this path, then you might start to see Americans being drafted up and called for this specifically because we've got some obsession with winning this fight.
00:21:40.640You've got – you've had, I think, Orban and others this week starting to say there's impossible for Ukraine to achieve a military victory in any time of the foreseeable future.
00:21:51.380Orban said it's obvious there will be no victory for the poor Ukrainians.
00:21:57.060But this means eventually – look, they've got your money now.
00:22:00.700We're in the middle of this huge debt ceiling debate, right, in the middle of this.
00:22:04.720And they refuse to even talk about defense cuts.
00:22:08.140More importantly, they will not give up the hundreds of billions of dollars they're sending over to Ukraine right now.
00:22:13.600When you say meat grinder, that's why I want to go back and compare and contrast because we don't have this now.
00:22:17.040If you look at World War II, of the great heroism that we provided in World War II, and you talk about D-Day, you talk about the Eighth Air Force over Nazi Germany, you talk about Patton breaking out of the hedgerows and his journey across France.
00:22:36.080The West, particularly the British and Americans, were always particularly focused on not having tremendous combat casualties, right?
00:22:44.400When Kazarine Pass happened early in the war, a ton of generals got fired because you just weren't going to throw even untrained American kids just in his cannon fodder.
00:22:55.080The Russians and the Chinese, this is how they fight, particularly the Russians.
00:22:58.380Talk – go once again about the difference between the Western mentality of war and the Russian mentality of war and how that delivered – really delivered victory for us in World War II by destroying the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, sir.
00:23:11.000Right. So, again, this is the idea – this is how the Russians won Stalingrad.
00:23:17.500They didn't win Stalingrad because they had the best tanks.
00:23:19.680They certainly didn't have the best planes.
00:23:22.020No one was ever going to accuse Russians in World War II of having air superiority.
00:23:26.100They have a lot of Russians, and they have a lot of people, and they just keep coming.
00:23:30.660You know, Bismarck had a line about the Russians years ago where he said the thing about fighting the Russians is that you have to shoot them twice, once to kill them, and then one more time to knock them over.
00:23:39.340And it's this idea that you've got a people that have lived through so many invasions and fight in a very different way.
00:23:47.740They fight in a way where it is an idea of no surrender whatsoever, that you are going to keep coming.
00:24:07.520Then you get the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which essentially takes them out.
00:24:11.380But then what happens in the interim is that you get the Soviet Union becomes formed, which obviously was a terror and a horrific disaster for the entire world.
00:24:21.100So we tried these regime change operations in Russia before.
00:24:35.820We think of these various different movements in Russia.
00:24:38.600It's we are going to send people and we are going to continue sending people until we've taken that land, whether it's Bakhmut, whether it's Kursk, whether it's Stalingrad.
00:24:46.480It's no step back and this blood soaked land that they fought for and into destroying, by the way, destroying the Nazi army.
00:24:55.080OK, getting all the way to Berlin, climbing to the top of the Reichstag and knocking that eagle off and tearing its wings off and crashing it to the ground.
00:25:03.700I think a lot of Americans miss out on how that plays into the Russian psyche, because we sort of in our World War Two history, we you know, we remember D-Day.
00:25:54.760All right. You're missing the fact that you're missing the fact that the Red Army did push all the way through, joined, joined up, by the way, with the Poles at one point towards the end.
00:26:04.140Then Ukrainians, Belarusians, this massive Slavic force, which makes it all the way in to Berlin under Marshal Zhukov.
00:26:11.300And of course, they send in the Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians first with 6000 tanks as battering rams through the German defenses into Berlin.
00:26:19.720Now, there have been air campaigns by the Americans and the British, to be sure.
00:26:24.820These strategic bombing campaigns like, of course, Dresden, we know about that were absolutely horrific and just slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Germans.
00:26:33.560Many times, by the way, these strategic air campaigns happen in France, too, which did end up taking this is if you read Kurt Vonnegut.
00:26:39.520This is where Slaughterhouse, his Slaughterhouse novel comes from, because he had been shot down and then ended up being in one of the POW camps.
00:26:47.440He was in this this meat house in the basement while the strategic bombings were going on as a prisoner of the Germans.
00:26:53.600And yet we miss so much of the ground battle that took place on the Eastern Front and then marched up into Germany because, by and large, these American, you know, the American Band of Brothers and our troops were not involved.
00:27:06.160But if you're missing that out, the Europe, I guarantee you, the Europeans remember it.
00:27:10.300And I certainly guarantee you the Russians and everyone in Eastern Europe remember it.
00:27:14.260OK, we need to avoid any American combat troops, special forces and others in anything to do around this Ukraine war.
00:27:23.600We take a short commercial record. We come with that.
00:27:25.580Also, the inevitable kinetic war in the South China Sea, in the Straits of Taiwan and the defense of Taiwan, given the feckless nature of the Biden regime.
00:27:36.140OK, short commercial break. We're going to come back with the kickoff to our Memorial Day weekend here in the war room.
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00:30:40.680OK, welcome back. You're in the war room.
00:30:56.100Jack Posobiec, how do we avoid, walk me through how they're going to try to suck in American combat troops into this, into the Western front now of the war in the Eurasian landmass, sir.
00:31:07.860Well, Steve, this is what Mearsheimer has warned us about, and we call it Mearsheimer's warning because he looks at the twin crises that are escalating on America's two fronts, whether it be the South China Sea and Taiwan on one end, and then the Eurasian landmass and the land battle, the proxy war that we are already in with the Russian Federation.
00:31:31.260And he says if the United States escalates both of these conflicts at the same time, that you are now going to find yourselves in a two front world war.
00:31:40.560This is a situation that would be absolutely disastrous for the United States.
00:31:45.080We would certainly lose our standing in the world, not to mention the standing of the U.S. dollar, which, of course, BRICS, the yuan, the ruble are already working to undercut.
00:31:53.660And so the way to avoid this and avoid what, of course, is referred to as the great trap of the Peloponnesian War is this idea, the Thucydides trap, this idea that if you can push this to de-escalation, if you can push for peace, and I've only ever heard one person calling for peace, and that's President Trump.
00:32:17.260We just had the G7 meeting last week up in Japan, and everybody's out there crowding around Zelensky, we're going to give you more money, we're going to give you more F-16s, we're going to give you more fighters.
00:32:25.800And keep in mind, this is on the back of losing in Bakhmut.
00:32:29.000And you can argue about how many soldiers were lost and et cetera.
00:32:32.060This is the largest battle of this war that's been fought since, the largest battle of Europe since World War II, the largest battle for the 21st century.
00:32:52.660You've got to find a way to call for a peaceful resolution here, because the next step, Steve, I'm going to explain to you what the next step is.
00:32:58.840Because they're going to say, well, who can service these F-16s?
00:33:02.160And then they're going to say, well, we're going to need American mechanics and American engineers, and they're going to service the F-16s.
00:33:08.600And then you're going to have Americans or maybe other NATO fighters, NATO soldiers, troops that are in, they're going to say, well, they're going to say, you know, we can't fly them all the way back to Poland or NATO safe territory to be able to maintain these things.
00:33:21.420So we're going to establish a NATO, you know, a conventional maintenance center inside of Ukraine, close to Lviv, you know, far away from the front.
00:33:30.260And then we'll fly everything back there.
00:33:32.860This is what, and over at humanevents.com, this is exactly what Alexander Vindman, remember, Colonel Vindman, was trying to work on.
00:33:41.240He wanted to send American contractors and American engineers over there, he was looking to raise money for this, raise funding for it, so he could send Americans over there to be in harm's way to maintain equipment.
00:33:52.120And so they're going to say, well, we need the maintenance center.
00:33:54.220But in order to have the maintenance center, we're going to need to establish a NATO safe zone, a NATO green zone, a diplomatic corridor.
00:34:01.600And that's going to be in the Lviv area.
00:34:03.620And at some point, the Russians are going to point out this and say, you know what, enough is enough.
00:34:08.740And just in the same way that Nixon and Kissinger bombed, carpet bombed Cambodia, because that's where the Viet Cong were running over to hide into, because, you know, it was the secret bombing campaign, which we're not going to be able to do anymore, because he can't do secret campaigns in the age of social media, that he's going to say, you know what, enough is enough.
00:34:24.780We have to cut off their supply lines, so we're going to go in.
00:34:28.340And then you're going to lead to, what, a couple of NATO soldiers dying, possibly Americans dying, maybe it's American contractors.
00:34:35.000And every single day, we are inching closer and closer and closer.
00:35:00.020I will push back on something on that, Steve.
00:35:02.260Like, do you, do you really think, and I'll say this to everybody listening, do we really think that we don't have American special forces on the ground in Ukraine right now already?
00:35:32.740We do not want combat troops into Ukraine.
00:35:35.700Are you saying right now, Jack, do you think there's a high probability of American special forces already in Ukraine?
00:35:41.300Steve, I don't need to think that because we know that this was, this is what came out in those leaked documents from that Air National Guardsman up in Massachusetts, Dak Chachera.
00:35:52.860He specifically said that of the special forces detachments that were in Ukraine, it was pretty much every major NATO country to include the U.S., to include the U.K., soft special operations forces, boots on the ground in Ukraine conducting operations right now.
00:36:07.040Jack, one more time, before we pivot to the South China Sea and Taiwan, I just want you to go over the scale.
00:36:16.000And this is what people don't understand.
00:36:17.120Since the biggest battles in late 1944, including the Battle of the Bulge and into 1945, the Battle of Berlin that led up to the collapse of the Nazis in May of 1945, the biggest land war fought since then has been around this strategic hamlet, I guess, of Bachmut, a town of 70,000.
00:36:45.780Walk me through your best, what people are banding about, what the casualties, civilian and military casualties around this town have been.
00:36:55.640So there's a line here, I'll pull it up, I've got it in my message here, where you've got people on both sides calling out what the casualty numbers are.
00:37:06.060So Prigozhin, who is the head of the Wagner group, so you're going to assume that he's going to deflate the Russian numbers, inflate the Ukrainian numbers a little bit, but it's pretty close to what you're seeing in some of the media.
00:37:17.400He's saying that the Wagner group, the PMC, had up to 50,000 troops in Bachmut.
00:37:27.020The armed forces of Ukraine had 80,000 troops in Bachmut and 40,000 dead.
00:37:32.080That's a four to one ratio, Steve, four to one ratio he's claiming out of this.
00:37:36.880Now, I'm sure that they're going to claim otherwise in terms of it, but I don't think those numbers are too far off when you look at the general scale of things in terms of even what Western sources are saying.
00:37:48.720And so this idea that, OK, sure, Battle of the Bulge, we're not seeing that scale yet, but we're getting close.
00:37:54.600Because when the Russians start moving, keep in mind, the Wagner group, this is a mercenary company, Steve.
00:38:00.600This is like this is like, you know, send Eric Prince and his guys over and give Eric Prince 50,000 troops and have him go take Fallujah, go take one of the cities in Iraq.
00:38:09.700Right. It's just it's something that we've never seen in the United States.
00:46:29.980I've got a couple minutes here, and I want to turn it over to Jack Posobiec.
00:46:33.540Jack, we're trying to, in the kickoff hour of a Memorial Day commemoration, we're trying to make sure we don't have any more Section 60s, which was opened up for the Iraq and Afghanistan vets.
00:46:43.500The American military, the American people have bled enough in these foreign wars.
00:46:48.480We don't want another one on the Urasian landmass.
00:46:51.040Although it looks like we're heading to one in the South China Sea in the Straits of Taiwan.
00:46:55.200I know you know China better than anybody.
00:46:56.600What is your thoughts and how bad it will be if we actually get into a kinetic war, sir?
00:47:02.080Getting into a kinetic war with China would be one of the most, I think, bloody and disastrous.
00:47:12.400For the United States, for particularly, of course, my beloved United States Navy, you look at some of the issues the United States Navy's had over the past couple of years, particularly in the 7th Fleet, which is the fleet that would bear the brunt of any military operations.
00:47:28.640That's the fleet that's forward deployed to Yokosuka, Japan, where I worked out of, where I served out of many times, as well as serving out of stations in Guam and other parts of the East Asia Theater in the Pacific.
00:47:39.260So when we look at the situation there, what the PLA is doing, the People's Liberation Army and Navy, they are tightening the noose around Taiwan militarily, not only in terms of their ability to build up their own forces.
00:47:56.400And I talked a little bit about the hypersonic glide vehicles, these hypersonic missiles that would have the ability to take out a U.S. carrier group that we are essentially unable to defend against.
00:48:04.200By the way, if you want to piggyback off of Ukraine, we just saw a Russian hypersonic missile, and even though Raytheon doesn't like to hear it, a Russian hypersonic missile, a Kinzhal, just took out a U.S. Patriot battery.
00:48:16.880This is supposed to be our best anti-air defense system, and a Russian hypersonic missile just took it out a couple of weeks ago.
00:48:22.700So you better believe that even though they're not talking about it publicly, the war planners over at the Pentagon are freaking out at seeing this.
00:48:31.400That's supposed to be the best of the best.
00:48:33.260And if you can take out their batteries, then guess what?
00:48:39.320They don't have a lot of ability to defend themselves.
00:48:41.560That's why the term carrier battle group exists.
00:48:44.080It's essentially a floating city of 5,000 people, but with the squadron air crew, the air wing of the pilots, the fighters, the bombers, different complements for different ships.
00:48:54.300But, of course, you're surrounded by usually a couple of submarines, cruisers, destroyers, to provide that air defense and the early warning system should any of those situations arise.
00:49:04.020We saw this in terms of World War II as well with the Battle of Midway.
00:49:07.860The reason that the Battle of Woodway was at the turning point was because we took out the carriers.
00:49:12.020But at Coral Sea, we were shot out of the water.
00:49:15.460Real quickly, we've got about a minute.
00:49:23.000You were a naval intelligence officer on the mainland for the United States.
00:49:26.920You know the Chinese military as well as anybody I've ever met.
00:49:29.740Do you believe if we get into a shooting war in the Straits of Taiwan, South China Sea, East China Sea, that what's the probability an entire carrier battle group can end up on the bottom of the Pacific, sir?
00:49:43.180I mean, there's no way we would get out of a battle with a direct military conflict with China without losing at least one or two battle groups or one or two carriers.
00:51:16.160I know it's the first weekend of summer, but it is a weekend in which we acknowledge not our veterans and not those who are wounded, all the great heroes, but those that gave their lives in defense of this republic.