Colonel Douglas McGregor is a decorated combat veteran, the author of five books, a PhD, and a defense and foreign policy consultant. He was commissioned in the Regular Army in 1976 after one year at the Virginia Military Institute and four years at West Point. In 2004, he retired with the rank of colonel. In 2020, the President appointed McGregor to serve as Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense. He holds an MA in Comparative Politics and a PhD in International Relations from the University of Virginia. He is widely known inside the U.S., Europe, Israel, Russia, China, and Korea for his leadership in the Battle of 73 Easting, the largest tank battle in World War II. He s written groundbreaking books on military transformation, one of them, The Breaking the Phalanx, from 1997, and Transformation Under Fire in 2003. He testified as an expert witness before the Senate Armed Services Committee and appeared as defense analysts on Fox News, BBC, Sky News, and many others. I wanted to read his curriculum vitae, because he s really, as I said, an intellectual commander of military strategy around the world, and extremely influential. I think you ll agree with me that he s a great man. - Warren Grichard, former Army Chief of Staff, retired from the United States Army and served as the Director of Operations for the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) from 2001 to 2006. - Thank you for your pursuit of the truth, Dr. Robert Downey, Jr., and for your courage in telling the truth about what s really going on in Ukraine. - The truth has been very difficult to discover, and very few Americans have heard the truth. -- President John McCain, 2009, The White House Press Secretary, 2011, 2015, 2016, 2017, and so much more. - John Avrahamson, 2018, 2019, The Facts, and so on. "What's the truth?" - The Facts: What's the Truth? - The Truth? - What s the Truth in Ukraine? "The Truth?" - What's a Problem in Ukraine, and Why Does It Matter? -- The Facts? -- -- And Why Does it Matter? -- And What does it Matter in Ukraine Really Matter? - And What Does It Really Matter to You? -- Is It Really a Problem? -- Or Not a Good Thing? -- and What Will It Matter in the Rest of It Matter to Me?
00:00:01.000I'm very, very happy to be here today with a special guest.
00:00:04.000Colonel Douglas McGregor is a decorated combat veteran, the author of five books, a PhD, and a defense and foreign policy consultant.
00:00:13.000He was commissioned in the regular army in 1976 after one year at the Virginia Military Institute and four years at West Point.
00:00:22.000In 2004, McGregor retired with the rank of colonel.
00:00:26.000In 2020, the President appointed McGregor to serve as Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense.
00:00:33.000He holds an MA in Comparative Politics and a PhD in International Relations from the University of Virginia.
00:00:42.000McGregor is widely known inside the U.S., Europe, Israel, Russia, China, and Korea for both his leadership in the Battle of 73 Easting, U.S. Army's largest tank battle in World War II, in which Colonel McGregor commanded a tank and a unit of, I think, 19 tanks and about...
00:01:02.000Actually, it was 1,100 men with 42 tanks, 42 Bradleys, and eight guns.
00:01:08.000I believe it was during a sandstorm in the middle of the night.
00:01:12.000Well, I was in the sandstorm late in the afternoon, but the battle lasted for over three hours, and we did have one man killed, six wounded, and we lost a Bradley, an infantry fighting vehicle.
00:01:25.000He's written groundbreaking books on military transformation, one of them, The Breaking the Phalanx from 1997 and Transformation Under Fire in 2003.
00:01:36.000McGregor's recommendations for change in force-designed and integrated all-arms effects operations have profoundly influenced force development in Israel, Russia and China.
00:01:47.000In 2010, Colonel McGregor traveled to Seoul, Korea, to advise the Republic of Korea in its Defense Force design.
00:01:56.000Transformation under fire was selected by Lieutenant Aviv Kavavi, the Chief of the Israeli Defense Forces, as the intellectual basis for the transformation of that military force.
00:02:08.000In 28 years of service, McGregor taught in the Department of Social Sciences at West Point and commanded the 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry, and served as director of joint operations at SHAPE during the Kosovo air campaign.
00:02:23.000In January 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insistence.
00:02:28.000The U.S. CENTCOM commander listened to Colonel McGregor's concept for the offensive to seize Baghdad The plan was largely adopted according to his ideas, but he assumed no occupation of Iraq by U.S. forces.
00:02:45.000He testified as an expert witness before the Senate and House Armed Services Committee and appeared as defense analysts on Fox News, BBC, Sky News, and many, many others.
00:02:56.000I wanted to read that, and that's only a small part of Colonel McGregor's curriculum vitae.
00:03:02.000He's really, as I said, an intellectual commander of U.S. military strategy around the world and extremely influential.
00:03:13.000So I wanted to talk to you, Colonel McGregor, specifically about the Ukraine War.
00:03:19.000And how would you summarize that, Warren, in terms of U.S. military strategy?
00:03:50.000And at the end of that process, you have an end state in mind.
00:03:53.000In other words, you have some vision of what you would like things to look like when it's over.
00:03:58.000We tend to stumble into things and then muddle through as opposed to devising an effective strategy.
00:04:05.000And right now, Ukraine is a good example.
00:04:07.000We, as you know, and by the way, I want to take a minute here just to thank you for your pursuit of the truth.
00:04:15.000Because today, when we talk about Ukraine, that's really what we want to get at more than anything else, is what's the truth?
00:04:21.000Because the truth has been very difficult to discover, and very few Americans have heard the truth.
00:04:27.000And it's not just Americans, it's most of us in the West.
00:04:30.000So if you look at the situation today, we have to go back probably into the first part of this century at a series of discussions that Mr.
00:04:38.000Putin, when he became president, held with leaders in the West, Trying to articulate to them his concerns about the expansion of the NATO alliance.
00:04:49.000And in 2008, despite these discussions, we made it clear that we didn't care that we were going to advance the borders of NATO East to include Ukraine.
00:05:00.000And now, keep in mind that Russia does already have a border with NATO. It's in Estonia.
00:05:09.000But the Russians view whatever happens in Ukraine as a potentially existential matter for them.
00:05:14.000And in 2014, we backed or staged or orchestrated a coup that put in power a very radical regime that was hostile to the interests of Moscow and to Russia.
00:05:28.000And as a result of this, Mr. Putin and his colleagues in the Kremlin were convinced that the United States Navy would very shortly end up docking in Crimea, in Sevastopol, and take over the naval facilities there.
00:05:42.000And that's one of the reasons that Putin struck quickly and seized control of Crimea, because he wasn't prepared to cede dominance in the Black Sea to the United States and NATO.
00:05:53.000Subsequently, the Ukrainians began attacking citizens inside their borders who were Russians.
00:06:00.000And almost a third of the population certainly is first and foremost Russian-speaking, and probably 20 to 25 percent are, frankly, Russians, living in the part of ukraine where today the fighting is occurring And these people were treated as second-class citizens.
00:06:18.000To abandon their heritage, their language, their culture, or they would be subject to harsh treatment, which of course many of them were.
00:06:26.000At the same time, there were two oblasts or provinces in the east, Luhansk and Donetsk, that indicated they wanted to retain their Russian culture.
00:06:35.000They would stay inside Ukraine, but they wanted to continue to live as Russians inside Ukraine.
00:06:40.000This was unacceptable to the new regime, and the new regime began shelling them.
00:06:45.000And in the space between the outbreak of the current war on 22 February last year and 2014 when this crisis first began, 14,000 people were killed in that area.
00:06:59.000And the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe has reported very clearly that all of this was started not by Russia, but by the new Ukrainian government.
00:07:08.000Now, over time, it became very clear that some solution had to be found to avoid expanding this war.
00:07:16.000And that is one of the reasons why the Minsk Accords were drafted.
00:07:20.000And they were simply drafted with the goal in mind of providing equal rights before the law for the Russians in eastern Ukraine and putting an end to the violence and the killing.
00:07:33.000And now we know from the statements from Chancellor Merkel in December of last year and more recently from President Macron that these agreements were in fact a fraud.
00:07:42.000That these agreements were designed to simply buy time for Ukraine while we poured billions of dollars in extraordinarily good modern equipment and training into the Ukrainian armed forces, specifically the army.
00:08:17.000And the Ukrainian government refused to ratify it.
00:08:21.000It was voted on, I believe, by the citizens of Donbass.
00:08:26.000Yes, I mean, everything that was contained in those accords was acceptable to Russia and acceptable to the citizens of Ukraine who were Russians.
00:08:35.000Unfortunately, there was never any intention to impose any of it.
00:08:38.000I want to interrupt you one more time because I don't want to spoil your train of thought.
00:08:44.000I think it's important to establish because the Minsk Accords show what Russia at that point was willing to settle for.
00:08:52.000So that's if you look at this current military exercise, which has now killed 300,000 Ukrainians, it would be it's almost unimaginable that at the end of this, they're going to get back.
00:09:07.000Ukraine is going to get back what it could have gotten with just a signature on that agreement with the Minsk Accords.
00:09:14.000Can you just tell, as my understanding is, that it was that NATO would not move into Ukraine, that I believe that the missile launchers that we have in the Ukraine would be removed, that the people, the Russian, ethnic Russians in the eastern Ukraine, that some of that would be an autonomous region within Ukraine.
00:09:37.000So it would continue to be part of Ukraine, but the people would have some rights.
00:09:42.000Yes, you're talking about something that the Russians were willing to accept, which is effectively a multi-ethnic, multinational state, which is not a new development in Europe.
00:10:08.000Now, this, of course, does not address Crimea.
00:10:11.000And at the time, they were unwilling to address Crimea because, from their standpoint, with considerable justification, the majority of people in Crimea are Russians and wanted to be part of Russia.
00:10:21.000But more important, it had been part of Russia since 1776.
00:10:25.000And it was an accident of history created by our friend Khrushchev and a drunken stupor that changed the Hands of Crimea and put it in the camp of Ukraine.
00:10:37.000Bottom line is, there was no interest in the West, in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, in changing anything that would benefit Russia, certainly not changing what they had planned for Ukraine.
00:10:50.000And by the time you reached December of 21 and January of 22, it's very obvious to the Russians that this force that has Grown up in Eastern Ukraine is actually very formidable, well-trained, well-equipped, and was poised, frankly, to attack those two breakaway provinces with the goal, ultimately, of retaking Crimea.
00:11:12.000So from their vantage point, this was a preemptive strike to prevent that war from breaking out.
00:11:18.000And for those who say, well, this is evidence for Russia's desire to expand and rebuild the Soviet empire, We ought to keep something in mind.
00:11:26.000When the Russians went in, they went in with a remarkably small force.
00:11:32.000They went in on the ground with 90,000 combat troops.
00:11:36.000The Ukrainians of course put up fierce resistance because they were already present and ready to fight.
00:11:41.000But most important, Moscow seemed to think that once this began, there was a willingness in the West to become serious and finally negotiate an arrangement.
00:11:59.000And you'll recall that in April, Boris Johnson, the prime minister, flew to Kiev and essentially told Zelensky, don't negotiate with these people.
00:12:10.000We'll provide you with whatever you need.
00:12:13.000And, of course, in March, that's exactly what President Biden had said.
00:12:17.000So they wanted to stop any potential movement that would have resulted in some sort of compromise, particularly a compromise that would have made Ukraine neutral.
00:12:27.000And of course, neutrality was always very attractive.
00:12:31.000Austria was made neutral in 1955 and in large part because Eisenhower was anxious to make more states neutral in Europe because he said we can't possibly protect them all.
00:12:42.000Well, here we are now insisting that nothing can be neutral.
00:12:46.000Everything must belong to NATO and it has to happen on our terms.
00:12:49.000This is something Russia can't accept.
00:12:51.000And so the Russians decided, well, now we're at war.
00:12:53.000We're going to have to go over to the defense.
00:12:56.000Build up our forces and prepared to end this war on our terms.
00:13:00.000And that's essentially what you've watched since late September, October, Russia on the defense while the Ukrainians launched countless counterattacks against them.
00:13:11.000And this has turned out to be a catastrophe for the Ukrainians.
00:13:15.000They've lost, as you point out, over 300,000 dead.
00:13:18.000The Russians, in contrast, contrary to what the mainstream media says, have had perhaps 30,000 killed and perhaps 40 or 50,000 more wounded.
00:13:26.000But the difference between the Ukrainian wounded and the Russian wounded is profound.
00:13:32.000The Russians rapidly evacuate people, and most of the wounded return to duty, whereas the wounded Ukrainians rarely get the medical attention they need in time, and they don't usually return to duty.
00:13:45.000And at this point, we have a very desperate regime in Kiev that will do anything to try and drag the United States, preferably, into war on its behalf.
00:13:55.000And that's why you see these ridiculous drone strikes against Moscow in the hopes that someone will say, well, see, the Ukrainians have some life left in them.
00:14:05.000We just need to help them a little more.
00:14:07.000When in reality, they are definitely on the ropes.
00:14:10.000And they know that when the ground finally dries out, there are hundreds of thousands of Russian troops who will come out of their defensive positions and attack.
00:14:18.000And that will probably happen at the end of May or in early June.
00:14:22.000And the fact is the Russians will not lose this war.
00:14:56.000It's an opportunity, but it's not a core strategic position for us.
00:15:01.000And of course, to strengthen or reinforce your point, that was effectively what Khrushchev concluded when he confronted President Kennedy in 1963 in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
00:15:13.000Cuba was not a core strategic interest for Russia.
00:15:17.000But at that point, just to enlarge that point, Turkey was.
00:15:22.000We had Jupiter missile systems in Turkey, and the secret arrangement that my father and my uncle arranged with Ambassador Dobrennin at that time, and with Khrushchev, with whom they had a very, very cordial and close and trusting relationship.
00:15:39.000Was that we would remove those missile systems from the Russian border, which is very analogous to what's happening in the Ukraine today, as long as they remove the missile systems from Cuba.
00:15:52.000So there was a recognition that This was our sphere of interest here in our hemisphere, and that the Russians also had a sphere of interest.
00:16:02.000And we have to remember, my uncle, President Kennedy, used to always say, you need to be able to put yourself in your enemy's shoes and understand the worldview that he's looking at if you ever want to settle any kind of dispute.
00:16:17.000And he made this very famous speech to American University The summer before he died, in which he said, we have to understand the Russians won World War II for us.
00:16:31.000They lost a third of their countryside.
00:16:34.000One out of every 13 Russians was killed in that war.
00:16:38.000Russia has been invaded three times from the east with cataclysmic impacts on the country.
00:16:44.000We've never been invaded in this country.
00:16:47.000And the sensitivity, not just from Vladimir Putin, but from every Russian, is acute.
00:16:53.000There's threats coming from Europe and abroad.
00:16:57.000Well, I think that's true, but there's another feature that we should not overlook.
00:17:01.000Both President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev wanted to avoid a cataclysmic war.
00:17:10.000Neither side wanted a nuclear exchange or a war that would end up being global and hopelessly destructive.
00:17:20.000It seems to me that in the current administration there is an acute lack of fear of just how devastating a nuclear exchange could be, number one.
00:17:29.000And number two, no appreciation for high-intensity conventional warfare is something that we do not want to wage anywhere in the Western world.
00:17:40.000For that matter, why would we want to wage it in Northeast Asia?
00:17:46.000The military solution to every problem is the wrong solution.
00:17:50.000And that is a huge problem in Washington.
00:17:53.000There's this lack of appreciation of just how destructive war is, not just for your enemy, but for you.
00:18:00.000Part of the propaganda campaign for Every war that we get into is that people like you who question the war, your patriotism is questioned, you're accused of being sympathetic with Vladimir Putin.
00:18:15.000How do you react to that kind of accusation?
00:19:46.000He wants to negotiate an end to this, but if he can't, He will go as far as he needs to in Ukraine to ensure that his country is secure.
00:19:56.000Now, I think we should intervene along with our allies.
00:20:00.000We should offer to hold talks, no preconditions, drop all this nonsense about the Russians have to commit national suicide in order to qualify as partners for negotiation.
00:20:13.000We need to treat them as equals, not as enemies.
00:20:16.000In fact, I worked with the Russians in the early part of this century when I was at Supreme Headquarters of Allied Powers Europe, and I interacted with them when I was on active duty in the 90s.
00:20:26.000The Russians did not behave like enemies.
00:20:29.000In fact, they bent over backward to assist us when we were dealing with Islamist terrorism, provided us with enormously important intelligence.
00:20:37.000We could never have gotten into Afghanistan the way we did without their help in 2001 and 2002.
00:22:08.000And contrary to popular belief, having been in that part of the world, I can tell you that there are not hundreds of millions of Chinese anxious to move north and live in Siberia.
00:22:18.000That is not an appealing idea for them.
00:22:21.000So the notion that somehow or another they should be at war with each other is nonsense.
00:22:30.000By the way, even the Japanese and the Chinese have largely buried the hatchet.
00:22:35.000They're not going to go into a war with each other.
00:22:37.000They understand how mutually destructive that could be.
00:22:40.000We've got to get out of this war business.
00:22:42.000Now, that doesn't mean we'll never fight again.
00:22:45.000But the problems that we may face in the future don't need to be in Eastern Europe.
00:22:49.000They don't even need to be in Northeast Asia.
00:22:52.000When President Biden made his statement that he thought we needed regime change in Russia, and then Lloyd Austin in 2022, who's his Secretary of Defense, said that one of the objectives, the mission objective in Ukraine was degrading the Russian the mission objective in Ukraine was degrading the Russian military force and exhausting it so that it can't fight anywhere else in the world.
00:23:17.000Would you consider that an objective, a military objective exhaustion?
00:23:43.000They actually would like to do business with us.
00:23:46.000I think what we need to understand is that what we're getting now instead of what Lloyd Austin described is the opposite.
00:23:53.000Russia had a very small standing professional army at the beginning of this process.
00:23:58.000The plans are now to maintain an army of over a million men.
00:24:01.000They've already got over 750,000 in the field.
00:24:05.000And then you go beyond those that are in the field in the east, there's another 150,000 to 200,000 out there in Siberia and along the border.
00:24:14.000You're now looking at the restoration of Russian national military power on a scale that we haven't seen since the 1980s.
00:24:23.000That's the outcome of this stupid war, the very opposite of what we said we wanted.
00:24:28.000On the other hand, our military is in ruins.
00:24:32.000We've wasted decades of stupid spending on the wrong solutions, the wrong force structure, the wrong strategy for the wrong reasons.
00:24:41.000These chickens are coming home to roost.
00:24:43.000And we're not even talking about the damaging social engineering that someone like your father or your uncle would have dismissed out of hand as lunacy because he served in the Navy and he had some concept of what discipline and cohesion meant.
00:24:59.000We have people now that don't have any idea, and yet they've decided to act like God and tinker with things that are destructive.
00:25:06.000So we have a huge morale problem, a discipline problem.
00:25:10.000These things are not what you want if you're going to tempt your potential adversary into conflict.
00:25:15.000And we still have roughly, what, 30,000, 40,000 troops in Poland, another 10,000, 15,000, maybe 20,000 in Romania.
00:25:24.000And we keep urging the Poles to be prepared to join with us to do what I can imagine.
00:25:30.000Fortunately, the Polish chief of staff has spoken out recently and made it very clear that the Polish military is not ready to fight in Eastern Europe.
00:25:38.000It doesn't have the ammunition to sustain itself.
00:25:41.000So hopefully, more sober-minded people will prevail, but at the moment...
00:25:46.000It seems like we have the finest yes-men in the history of the armed forces who will repeat stupidity without interruption.
00:25:56.000Ultimately, what is the chance of nuclear war and how does the nuclear weapons of the Russians compare to the U.S. forces and U.S. capabilities?
00:26:09.000Well, the Russians have probably a thousand or more warheads than we do on hand.
00:26:14.000They may have some additional launchers, but to be perfectly frank, we have thousands of launchers and weapons.
00:27:43.000And what about the fact that we've walked away from a series of treaties that limited short-range or medium-range nuclear missiles and anti-ballistic missiles?
00:27:56.000Can you just talk a little bit about that and what kind of signal that sends not only Russia but the rest of the world?
00:28:02.000Well, the precondition for arms control to be successful is that you maintain an arsenal that is strong enough, flexible enough, capable enough That no one in their right mind is going to challenge it.
00:28:16.000Now, we did sign on to certain treaties that removed from our standpoint at the time a potentially destabilizing weapon system, and that was the INF Treaty, the Intermediate Nuclear Force Treaty.
00:28:29.000We fielded something called the Pershing II. Most of your viewers are not aware of this, but the Pershing II was a hypersonic missile.
00:28:36.000Once launched, you couldn't shoot it down.
00:28:39.000And putting those in Germany put Russia's arsenal at high risk.
00:28:44.000The Russians eventually came to the table and we decided to take it off the table because we saw it as very destabilizing and dangerous.
00:28:52.000I think it was unfortunate that we left that treaty.
00:28:55.000Now, there are other areas that are a little more vague.
00:28:59.000We left that treaty when in 2019 or something, right?
00:29:41.000If you and others like you in the political arena demand the truth, fight for the truth, represent the truth, then I'm optimistic because I think we can turn around the disaster that we have in our hands today inside the Beltway.
00:29:56.000But other than that, if we don't move in that direction, I don't see much good on the horizon because I'm worried that our fragile economy and corrupted financial system will both implode.
00:30:09.000And the danger that I think about on a routine basis is the fire sale of US treasuries overseas first.
00:30:17.000Whether it's the Chinese, the Japanese, the Saudis, whomever that owns our treasuries, starts to sell these things off.
00:30:24.000That puts the economy into a tailspin into the dirt.
00:30:57.000And that means, you know, if you're the chief law enforcement officer of the United States, as the president is, you've got to enforce the law.
00:31:26.000You have pursued the truth in spite of enormous opposition presented by the pharmaceutical corporations and the huge money that they can contribute to people on the hill to stop you.
00:31:39.000You have demonstrated not only that you can find the truth and reveal it, you've also demonstrated that there is an appetite for it in the American population.
00:33:03.000Most of them, by the way, are not from me that show my or repeat my speeches and so forth.
00:33:09.000But there's also a website, and you can find anything that I've written, and you can see that all of the things you and I are discussing Have all been written and spoken about over the last several years.
00:33:19.000So again, I just want to thank you for everything you are doing.