James R. Webb is a third-generation Marine, writer, and political consultant who has worked in the U.S. Senate and on political campaigns, including the 2024 presidential election for my campaign. Incidentally, Jim s father is James J. Webb Jr., who served in the United States Senate, and was also in the Marine. His family may be a third generation Marine, but I think he is in the military all the way back almost to the Revolutionary War. As I recall, I read his father's biography which is a fantastic book: Born Fighting or Born to Fight? It was Born Fighting, which I read 20 years ago. In 2004, he spent a summer embedded with American troops in Afghanistan. As a journalist, he then dropped out of Penn State and enlisted in the Marines as an infantryman, serving from 2005 to 2010 in Iraq. After the Marine Corps, he finished his college degree while working as a defense contractor. In 2011, he returned to politics as a campaign consultant for Senator Eric Schmidt of Missouri. After Schmidt s successful election, he took a job in a D.C. based think tank focusing heavily on Ukraine. In 2017, he came to work for me and served as my senior advisor for the campaign on defense, foreign policy and veterans policy. And, you know, I heard him on the Duran Podcast. I don t always agree with everything he says, but if I had only one podcast that I would listen to, it would be The Duran. - Alexander V. Zelensky, The New York Times, The FiveThirtyEight, and The SixThirtyEight - The Six Sigma - And so on and so on, and so forth. And so much so that I never miss an opportunity to listen to something that I think is absolutely brilliant, and it's a joy to listen and think about what he's been doing. And to me never miss any of his thoughts on what he s been doing in the past, and what he does in his own life, and how he's got it all right on the internet, and why he's so good at it, and I think you should listen to it all, too, you should be listening to it, right? Thank you so much for being a friend of mine, I really appreciate it, I mean really, really really do. Thank you, really do? - Tom and I really do appreciate it. -- A very special thanks you, Sarah?
00:00:00.000Hey everybody, I'm really happy my guest today is somebody I've known for a long time, greatly admired, somebody who worked on my campaign at a senior level.
00:00:14.000James R. Webb is a third generation Marine journalist, writer, political consultant.
00:00:21.000Who has worked in the U.S. Senate and on political campaigns, including the 2024 presidential election for my campaign.
00:00:30.000Incidentally, Jim's father is James Webb Jr., who served in the United States Senate.
00:00:41.000And I think actually your family may be a third generation Marine, but I think you are in the military all the way back almost to the Revolutionary War.
00:00:49.000As I recall, I read your father's biography, which is a fantastic book that I highly recommend.
00:00:56.000Was it Born Fighting or Born to Fight?
00:00:59.000It was Born Fighting, which I read it 20 years ago.
00:01:05.000In 2004, He spent a summer embedded with U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
00:01:12.000As a journalist, he then dropped out of Penn State and enlisted in the Marine Corps as an infantryman, serving from 2005 to 2010 in Iraq.
00:01:26.000He fought at the Battle of Ramadi between 2006 and 2007 as part of a weapons company Following the Marine Corps, he finished his college degree while working as a defense contractor.
00:01:41.000He also began writing opinion pieces for multiple outlets.
00:01:46.000Those caught the attention of Senator Rand Paul, who hired him in 2018 to work on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate defense veterans and foreign policy portfolios.
00:01:59.000In 2020, James stepped away from politics To focus full-time on writing, he wrote a lot about trout fishing in Missouri and other great subjects.
00:02:13.000He led coverage of the Afghan withdrawal and the resignation of Lieutenant Colonel Stu Scheller in 2022.
00:02:23.000He returned to politics as a campaign consultant for Senator Eric Schmidt of Missouri.
00:02:31.000Following Schmidt's successful election, Jim took a job in a D.C.-based think tank focusing heavily on U.S. involvement in Ukraine.
00:02:41.000In 2023, he came to work for me and served as my senior advisor for my campaign on defense, foreign policy, and veterans policy.
00:02:55.000And, you know, you played such a critical role in our campaign, just giving us extraordinary advice and insight.
00:03:06.000I heard you on the Duran podcast, and one of my kids asked me the other day what podcasts I consider indispensable, and if I had only one podcast that I would listen to, it would be the Duran podcast.
00:03:21.000I think anybody who wants to understand...
00:03:25.000U.S. foreign policy, but also foreign policy.
00:03:29.000Alexander on that podcast has such an encyclopedic knowledge of politics around the globe and Latin America and Africa and Asia and Russia and China.
00:03:51.000I don't always agree with everything, but I would agree with probably 90% of the stuff that they say on there, and everything they say is brilliant.
00:04:01.000Everything they say is just brilliant.
00:04:05.000But you were on there, and it was really one of the most...
00:04:10.000I think, you know, your podcast should be mandatory on...
00:04:17.000Duran should be mandatory listening for every member of Congress because you really kind of laid out these horrendous errors that we're making now in Ukraine and that from a military point of view, from a military and strategic, how weak our Secretary of Defense and our Secretary of State are today.
00:04:38.000The enabling behavior that is encouraging This very, very corrupt Ukrainian regime to embroil us in a nuclear war.
00:06:01.000It's not good for the world because it destabilizes everything.
00:06:05.000And the Russians are correct in wanting to keep that out of there, just like we would want to keep missiles out of Cuba.
00:06:15.000But the Zelensky strategy, since he knows he can't win, he's making these foolhardy and reckless gestures that are calculated to bring NATO into the war.
00:06:27.000Which is the only way they can triumph.
00:06:31.000World War III, United States against Russia.
00:06:34.000That's the only way Ukraine can prevail.
00:06:36.000And that's a strategy and we're letting them do it.
00:06:40.000And yesterday, the New York Times reported That the Biden administration is considering, you know, giving medium and long-range permission for Ukraine to use medium and long-range missiles to hit targets directly in Russia, which is insane.
00:07:00.000So let's talk about that, and then, you know, let's talk first about the Kursk offensive and How that came about and, you know, I love what Alexander says, you know, it was a trap.
00:07:17.000It was a Russian military trap and you make that case too.
00:07:22.000Again, you have the international press saying this salient by Ukraine into Russia is a sign of the victory and the strength of Ukraine.
00:07:31.000It's actually the opposite and explain that.
00:07:37.000Kennedy, thank you so much for having me on your show.
00:07:40.000One of the primary reasons I wanted to work for you in the first place is your courageous stand on the war.
00:07:47.000It really separated you from all the other candidates, and I wish that things had turned out differently in terms of your candidacy for the presidency.
00:07:55.000We need really sane leadership in Washington, particularly on foreign policy right now, and I hope that President Trump rolls you in somewhere where you can make a difference, particularly on that issue.
00:08:11.000So in terms of curse being a trap, there's a couple of things that you need to look at, you know, on the ground, precursors that led up to it.
00:08:22.000And also, you know, you have to take into account the Russian way of war.
00:08:27.000Which is far different than the way the United States fights.
00:08:31.000They have shown historically, going back to Napoleon, the Mongols, you know, there's a counter-argument for this, that they were penetrated by these forces or the Germans who rolled in, you know, saying, hey, they were weak and they took ground, but they've proven historically to cede ground in order to buy time for their own forces, stretch logistics lines, you know, and Have the terrain eat the opposing force over a period of time.
00:09:01.000Secondly, you have to look at the way the Russians fight wars generally, specifically in the case of what they have declared they're doing to the Ukrainian military, which is their objective has not been To seize ground in Ukraine.
00:09:18.000You can take a look at perhaps Crimea or Donetsk as a couple of regions that they wanted to take, but that's primarily because those regions are full of Russian-speaking people.
00:09:35.000They view those as part of their diaspora, for lack of a better term.
00:09:40.000And the final point to take a look at is, what were the precursors to this invasion?
00:09:46.000The key indicator that this was a trap, in fact, designed to suck the Ukrainians in, was that they demined the areas directly in front of where the Ukrainian forces came across.
00:10:00.000You can say, oh, okay, well, maybe that's a target of opportunity for the Ukrainians.
00:10:08.000The fact that the Russians have electronic warfare or EW dominance, and I'm probably going to say that phrase a bunch of times while we're sitting here because it's a big deal.
00:10:17.000In that area, they can target a cell phone within seconds that turns on wherever they have their, say, EW bubble.
00:11:16.000And as a drone operator, that was the most dangerous Assignment that you could have, because the second you turn on that drone, the Russians knew exactly where you were.
00:11:29.000And at that point, it was really an artillery war.
00:11:32.000He had firefights at night with the Russians at closer quarters.
00:11:38.000And as soon as you turned on that drone, they would send a missile over that would kill everything within 300 feet.
00:11:46.000And Connor's job was to get the drone into the air Very quickly, he would sit in the back of a pickup truck, and then the pickup truck would start moving as soon as he got that drone operating, so that it was a moving target that was harder to hit.
00:12:02.000But, you know, it was very frightening and very, very, very dangerous.
00:12:08.000And the Russians have this capacity now, you know, these electronic warfare capacities that are very much more sophisticated than what we have.
00:12:25.000And it's something, you know, the United States military hasn't run into serious artillery since probably the Vietnam War.
00:12:33.000And the last 20 years that we fought in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, we were fighting mainly insurgents.
00:12:39.000And we had the advantage and it didn't take much to disrupt them or to figure out their communications.
00:12:46.000You know, we've been, you know, we've been on, you know, the forefront, I guess you could say contextually to our situation.
00:12:52.000The Russians have been working at the conventional fight for a long time.
00:12:56.000And they've honed these skills in the last couple of years against Ukrainians that are basically pure necessity.
00:13:02.000And when you roll that into, you know, where they are now and what they've been trying to do with the Ukrainians in a, you know, strategic or operational sense, they're trying to wrap up what has been going on in the Donbass.
00:13:17.000It's one of these, you know, it's the last remaining real Russian speaking area that they have to take.
00:13:23.000And within that, they have a very stubborn defender, you know.
00:13:27.000When you go into offensive operations against an enemy, you want at least a 3-4-1 advantage if you're just launching any kind of conventional attack against whomever.
00:13:38.000It's way harder when you're out in the open to take ground, to lay suppressing fire, basically just to survive.
00:13:45.000And as an attacker, that puts you naturally at a disadvantage no matter how technologically advanced or how good you are at your job.
00:13:53.000So if you look back at really any fight, you can go back to the Civil War, you can go back to the French and Indian War where my family started fighting on behalf of America.
00:14:04.000The key is to bring a stubborn defender out of the defense.
00:14:08.000And I believe, and I think it's really apparent with the situation on the ground right now, that the Russians recognize an opportunity to draw the Ukrainians out.
00:14:18.000I'm going to go in a little bit of conjecture here, but I think it adds up when you start looking at the ground truth that they saw the Ukrainians trying to open up another front to try and get the Russian mass in the Donbass to move somewhere else.
00:14:33.000So that they could solidify their defense there.
00:14:35.000And the Russians, with a counterstroke, recognized that and, in effect, allowed them to walk in.
00:14:42.000And in the middle of this, they allowed them to invade the Kursk region.
00:14:48.000And kind of, what is the Kursk region or the Kursk Oblast in Russia?
00:14:53.000It reminds me a lot of, I used to live in the Ozarks in Missouri.
00:15:36.000So there's not a lot of risk to, you know, the Russian people proper, and it can be easily evacuated.
00:15:42.000And it's kind of the perfect battle space in which to have a conventional fight.
00:15:47.000And as they let the Ukrainians come in, the Ukrainians very much use Western-style tactics using Western equipment.
00:15:55.000It's, in effect, what remains of the cadre that had been trained by NATO. And at the same time, the remainder of all of our really good equipment.
00:16:06.000They used strikers, Bradleys, you kind of name it, the hodgepodge of different really high-end Western gear to penetrate through the Russian defenses, which largely turned out were border guards.
00:16:22.000Can you imagine what would happen if the Mexican military, which is not very good, put a force up against the Customs and Border Patrol?
00:16:31.000They're just not equipped to do anything with it.
00:16:37.000The Ukrainians had two or three routes which they could go through.
00:16:39.000And at each key point in terrain, they offloaded their vehicles and they seized it, which is a fundamental piece of American doctrine, quite frankly.
00:16:49.000And you can see we did that very effectively invading Iraq in 2003.
00:16:53.000And the idea behind it is you get through the defenses with your armor, you get behind your defender, and then the infantry kind of creeps up and mops up.
00:17:04.000What, you know, what the Russians did in response, and this was a very key indicator to me, this was in fact a trap, is they didn't meet them with a large force.
00:17:12.000They let them come in, they use their indirect fire assets, airstrikes, drones, artillery, to systematically eliminate the equipment that was on the ground, which provided mobility for the Ukrainians, and left the infantry out there to just kind of die on the vine, if you will, to borrow a term from MacArthur in the Second World War.
00:17:33.000And that's due to the fact that your average infantryman hasn't been able to carry more than about 100 pounds for the last 1,000 years.
00:17:39.000And in today's context, you're carrying about 40 to 50 pounds of body armor, and that's half your load.
00:17:45.000Then you need to carry water, food, ammo, and the rest of it.
00:17:50.000And so you're looking at your average guy having about, I don't know, maybe 1,000 rounds in three to four days of water and food.
00:18:00.000And as we've seen, you know, after the initial success of Ukrainians going in, which my take, and I believe it's Alexander's take, is that They were just let in to do what they wanted to do.
00:18:16.000They came under overwhelming indirect fire.
00:18:20.000And now you have a couple of different flanks collapsing under the weight of a massive Russian counterattack.
00:18:29.000And I forgot to mention this on the front end.
00:18:31.000It should be noted that that was the avenue which had been identified previously.
00:18:37.000As the site for a potential Russian counterattack, Ukrainians have been reporting, the Russians have been massing in that area, and when they launched their attack, nobody was home.
00:18:46.000However, those forces apparently are still there.
00:18:50.000And I've followed this exceptionally closely for a number of years.
00:18:55.000And it appears that only one battalion from the Russian military has been moved from Donbass up into Kursk.
00:19:02.000And it's an elite battalion of Russian airborne troops which have been sent in to prosecute the initial phases of this attack.
00:19:10.000So, you know, the Ukrainian plan didn't work.
00:19:16.000And the key part of this is the fact that it is the remainder of their best guys who are trapped up there.
00:19:26.000And it looks like, to me, at least, there's one main supply route that is remaining for them to leave.
00:19:33.000And they're going to have to walk out if they want to survive.
00:19:37.000You can't describe that in any sense as a success at all.
00:19:41.000And there's probably 10,000 to 15,000.
00:19:46.000This is based off of some unfortunately sketchy reporting.
00:19:51.000There's Ukrainians who are trapped up there on foot.
00:19:54.000And, you know, we could talk about this in a second, but you talk about sketchy reporting, and that's kind of the basis of the entire conflict here in the West, that everybody's understanding at least.
00:20:05.000You know, nobody here in America really has a real, concrete understanding of what's going on.
00:20:12.000We're hearing every single day that this is a great success and that the Ukrainians are defending brilliantly, which I'm not taking away from them.
00:20:22.000It takes incredible gumption to get up there when you're outnumbered and continue to do it.
00:20:26.000But the reality is they've taken horrendous casualties doing this, and it's in effect wiping out large segments of their population.
00:20:35.000As a former infantryman, absolutely terrifying, this kind of war.
00:20:39.000But as an American, it's pretty grotesque that we have been enabling this to go on, like you said at the beginning of the show here.
00:20:45.000Yeah, and the strategic background is that the Russians have been steadily advancing, despite U.S. propaganda, into Bosnian gods and taking apart, particularly with the deployment of these glide bombs.
00:21:10.000Have been dismantling and taking apart, systematically, little by little, at an accelerating rate, the defenses.
00:21:20.000And the lines, the Ukrainian lines, appear to be deteriorating.
00:21:28.000And the Ukrainian strategy, and they keep telling us different stories about why they did this.
00:21:36.000But originally, the original story was They made this salient into Russia because they believed that the Russians would then have to divert some of their troops from Donbass and Lugansk to deal with this.
00:21:54.000It's only one unit that's been moved over there.
00:21:59.000Meanwhile, the Ukrainians put their best men, their NATO-trained forces, The cream of all their forces into Donbass and Lugans.
00:22:09.000And it appears, like you said, it was a trap.
00:22:12.000And incidentally, this is the same strategy that Stalin used and his generals used.
00:22:19.000In World War II and the original Battle of Kursk, where they did the exact same thing.
00:22:25.000They sucked the Germans in and then cut them off and destroyed their equipment and then rolled up the infantry with millions of men dead, millions of Germans dead, and it broke the back of Hitler.
00:22:46.000You can go back to the Napoleonic Wars for concrete examples of it, but specifically what you're talking about with the Second World War, it happened twice, right?
00:22:55.000The first was Stalingrad, where they...
00:22:59.000Got the German 6th Army to completely commit itself to fighting inside the city.
00:23:04.000The Germans protected their flanks with largely Italian and Romanian troops who did not have the combat capability or the will to fight.
00:23:13.000And in one quick stroke, at the point at which they recognized that the German army was at its most vulnerable, was the furthest into the city it could get, they struck from the flanks, trapped, and eliminated 250,000 German troops.
00:23:28.000The following, what you're talking about here specifically with Kursk, what is now, I guess, the first Battle of Kursk in 1943, the Germans once again masked the absolute cream of their army a little bit further to the northeast of where are these actions taking place.
00:23:46.000And they launched an offensive into a defense in depth that the Russians had set up, or the Soviets at the time had set up.
00:23:53.000And once the Germans had once again reached the absolute depth of that defense that The Soviets felt that they were the most vulnerable.
00:24:04.000Zhukov launched a massive counteroffensive.
00:24:09.000This is the parallel I like to draw with the current situation, is they eliminated the core of the equipment that was available to the German army.
00:24:18.000The German armored divisions never recovered.
00:24:20.000And they found themselves outnumbered on the battlefield without the equipment to support the infantry on the ground.
00:24:27.000It was a steady rollback, you know, all the way to Berlin.
00:24:31.000This gets into another point you mentioned about the actions in Donbass, where what the Russians are doing to the Ukrainians right now is contrary to Western understanding in terms of doctrine.
00:24:49.000We have mission-based tactics, which focuses, to boil it down to your viewers, it's capture the flag.
00:24:56.000Where, you know, you have the objective, you punch in, you seize the objective, you finish the operation.
00:25:09.000It didn't really work in the long term.
00:25:11.000But with the Russians right now, they're not launching a big aero offensive, as some people like to call it, which would be, say, the capture of Baghdad.
00:25:21.000They're moving incrementally and using the weight of their firepower and the weight of their now manpower advantage, which is, in some cases, 10, 12 to 1.
00:25:31.000And completely inverted from the beginning of this conflict, by the way, just to continue to pressure the Ukrainians.
00:25:38.000And then every now and then, they'll launch a localized offensive, seize a little bit better terrain, and then rinse and repeat.
00:25:46.000And that gets into what Putin said at the beginning of this war, which is, you know, his objective is not to take Kiev.
00:25:51.000His objective is not to take the rest of Europe.
00:25:53.000It's to eliminate the Ukrainians as a threat to his border.
00:25:58.000And the best way to do that is to, in effect, kill off the military or force them to quit and disarm them.
00:26:05.000And that's always been the two options that Ukrainians have.
00:26:09.000It's either a negotiated settlement where we can say, hey, we're basically done with this.
00:26:15.000Or the other option is to render them completely incapacitated.
00:26:20.000And the disgusting thing about that is that we're pushing, we continue to push this forward and enable them to hang around on the battlefield long enough just to continue to die.
00:26:33.000Yeah, I have so many questions for you, but one of the questions I think everybody asks, we don't really know what the comparative kill ratios are.
00:26:45.000Some, I've heard as much as five to one, in other words, that the Russians are killing five, because this is now a war of attrition.
00:26:53.000And the Russians have a lot more people than Ukraine.
00:27:46.000What's 100,000, 200,000 at that point?
00:27:48.000It's a bad cynical joke, but you're completely correct.
00:27:53.000And the ratios, who knows what the ratios are?
00:27:56.000I believe MediaZona has gone out there and done a number of assessments.
00:28:00.000They tried to, in effect, parody, turn into a parody.
00:28:05.000the Russian official estimate or releases on their own dead, but then back that up with doing satellite photography, taking death notices out of the papers.
00:28:17.000And they came back with basically the same amount that the Russian Ministry of Defense had put out.
00:28:23.000Does that include folks like Wagner or perhaps not conscripted, but people who are in effect penal battalions pulled out of prisons?
00:28:35.000I'm unsure about that, but that number can't be too far off.
00:28:39.000But the best place to look if you want to take a look at Ukrainian casualties is to bring up or to take a look at the rounds of conscription they're on.
00:28:49.000You have officially, I believe it's between 20,000 and 25,000 admitted dead from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.
00:28:55.000The last time they updated that was the first couple months of the war.
00:28:59.000But you have the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth round of conscription.
00:29:04.000It seems like every couple of months they're trying to muster another couple hundred thousand guys out of the population, dropping the age at which people can be drafted lower and lower and continuing to hollow out their society.
00:29:19.000And if you start to read The Economist, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Time Magazine, CNN, any of these places that were so hard over on supporting this to begin with, you're starting to see the mask slip a little bit where all of these units in the front line are talking about how they're undermanned by as much as 75%.
00:29:40.000The Russians now outnumber them 8 to 1, 9 to 1, 10 to 1 in different battle spaces.
00:29:47.000And it's a real indicator that they're straight up not producing or they don't have enough manpower to field an army at this point.
00:29:56.000And the only way with a conscripted army like theirs that you don't have the manpower is if you're out of guise.
00:30:03.000And it's pretty eerie when you slow down and start to think about it.
00:30:09.000Now, the neocon dream was to do this war in order to weaken Russia and to get rid of Putin.
00:30:17.000And the irony is that Putin is now stronger than ever.
00:30:21.000His economy is stronger, more resilient.
00:30:25.000He's profited, actually, by figuring out ways to live under the pressure of all these embargoes and sanctions against Russia.
00:30:40.000It's actually made them sturdier, more self-sufficient.
00:30:46.000Putin is more popular than he's ever been.
00:31:31.000China has the best industrial base in the world, and Russia has some of the best technology, the best warfare technology in the world.
00:31:41.000They have, as I said, more nuclear missiles than we do.
00:31:46.000They have larger nuclear power, the largest nuclear power in the world.
00:31:50.000But they're also weakening America, not only economically, But also, this has given them the opportunity to figure out how to resist Americans' high-tech weaponry.
00:32:09.000And they've broken the code on many of our best weapons and figured out ways around it.
00:32:19.000You hit on a great point, which is the Russians, in effect, realigning how they do trade and how they are making money internationally.
00:32:32.000And If you look at the rise of BRICS and what their relationship is with OPEC plus now, this is a response to our response.
00:32:43.000It's an international response to our response to the conflict in Ukraine, where there's a number of countries.
00:32:49.000We've pushed Russia and China into a de facto military alliance if they don't already have a piece of paper signed between the two of them, where they're sharing technology.
00:33:00.000The Chinese are undoubtedly testing their equipment on the battlefield and refining it with each other.
00:33:07.000And then you have the economic part where we sanction, we like to, if you pay attention to the Senate, I worked there for a number of years.
00:33:15.000Everybody loves to brag about the aggressive sanctions that we're placing on different countries.
00:33:21.000Those only work if they're completely unilateral.
00:33:27.000Otherwise, you're just closing a market and you're shifting the market somewhere else.
00:33:30.000A byproduct of our sanctions on Russia has been to sanction the Chinese defense industry.
00:33:35.000And there have been a number of protests which have gone underreported here in the US media from the Chinese about that.
00:33:41.000And I'm not saying necessarily whether China or Russia is a good actor, but that's something you should pay attention to because both of them are ignoring what we're trying to do and increasingly working with each other out of necessity.
00:33:54.000And you have Russia as the largest possessor of natural resources in the world, working hand in hand with China now, who is the number one industrial economy in the world.
00:34:05.000And those goods and services are going back and forth, you know, unhindered and making both countries, you know, more profitable and closing markets to the United States left and right.
00:34:17.000When you start talking about technology, and this is something I wrote about last year, specifically around HIMARS. Any kind of technology you have on the battlefield has a very, very short half-life.
00:34:33.000The machine gun, for example, in World War I, it was state-of-the-art.
00:34:38.000Nobody knew what to do with it, but within a few months of the war, and that was combined with advanced modern artillery backing it up, Everybody understood how to subvert it.
00:35:01.000With our technology, 100% of our technology that came out of the 80s and 90s, which is on display, Yeah, it's in Russia, unfortunately, but mostly in Ukraine, was designed to fight the Soviet army.
00:35:15.000It's supposed to be kind of like our trump card, right, on the battlefield.
00:35:19.000Bradley's, the M1 Abrams tank, long-range artillery, the HIMARS system, ATAKAM's missiles, which are now being threatened to be fired deep into Russia.
00:35:28.000All of these things were designed to give us the initial edge in a confrontation.
00:35:34.000And when employed properly and in mass the way they're supposed to be done by professionals in our military, it retains an edge and saves American lives in the event that some kind of conflict occurs.
00:35:45.000Unfortunately, what we've done is we've handed all of these systems off in piecemeal fashion to what is in effect a Ukrainian military, which by comparison is amateurish to ours, and more importantly, has absolutely nothing to do with our own national security has absolutely nothing to do with our own national security or our own national interest.
00:36:05.000And we've exposed them in bits and pieces to the Russian military's electronic warfare systems, to their battlefield commanders.
00:36:15.000And we have what Raytheon tells us or North Roman tells us about the actual capabilities of these systems.
00:36:23.000And then you have the Russians on the back end who are dealing with the results of them and adjusting appropriately.
00:36:31.000And I believe it's every six weeks they figure something out.
00:36:34.000And if you go and take a look at the HIMARS system, which we initially deployed to Ukraine, I believe it was about 18 months ago.
00:36:41.000It was pretty effective right out of the gate.
00:36:44.000I think 4 to 12, I don't know the exact number, but it was a handful.
00:36:49.000We're effective at hitting Russian logistics sites.
00:36:53.000And almost immediately, there was an adjustment made, you know, which will then be applied if we're ever in a conflict with anybody who they support and we don't like.
00:37:03.000And that comes down to a couple different things.
00:37:05.000Like, one, like, how do you prevent, you know, an effective high mark strike just at a tactical level, like, by spacing your people out?
00:37:13.000But more importantly, we are completely reliant on GPS. And Russian EW has been adapted to interfere with that, and it's rendered everything from missiles to bombs falling from the sky are guided bombs, to being, you know, I wouldn't say completely ineffective, but to a degree where it doesn't give us an edge anymore.
00:37:36.000So there now, we have essentially handed it to Russia.
00:37:41.000The capability to counter our frontline weapons systems that were supposed to protect American troops in the case of a large conflict with a large country like Russia, China, or Iran, for example.
00:37:55.000Now those countries all know our best secrets.
00:39:19.000The assumptions that President Biden has been making about this war that I don't even know what, you know, I know that Vice President Harris is very naive about U.S. capability,
00:39:37.000military capability, you know, very confident, very belligerent, very bellicose, very pugnacious, having no idea about the failures over the past decade of the U.S. military and what that says about And our capacity to bluff the world has now disappeared.
00:39:57.000Because they've shown what they can do against the top-line U.S. weapons.
00:40:02.000It's really been a disaster for the U.S. and for the U.S. military fighter, military personnel, because we've given away the systems that were supposed to protect them and to minimize their body counts.
00:40:21.000I would think that Kamala Harris's greatest foreign policy achievement as vice president was to convince the Russians to cross the border.
00:40:31.000If you remember back, I think it was the day before the Russians went across the start line, she was at a conference with NATO and stated that Ukraine will be part of NATO and was bragging about it and laughing about it, you know, in her typical cackle.
00:40:48.000And the next day, boom, the Russians went across the line because that has always been their red line.
00:40:53.000They could not have a hostile nation directly on their border.
00:41:07.000And as you said at the beginning of the show, three invasions now have come through that territory.
00:41:12.000And the missile systems which we were going to provide, should they be in NATO, which is called the Aegis Ashore, something I worked on pretty heavily in the Senate, is, It would have been, you know, in these areas they're fighting right now.
00:41:26.000And it's three to four minutes to Moscow.
00:41:28.000If you go to the website, four ages ashore, I believe it's a Raytheon product.
00:41:35.000You know, it's billed as a defensive system.
00:41:39.000But right on the front of the website, it says, hey, you know, a...
00:41:42.000A quick software update turns this offensive and it could launch nuclear-tipped missiles, which the Russians would have absolutely no chance to respond to.
00:41:54.000And we nearly went to war with Cuba over something far less menacing.
00:42:05.000And when it comes to the weapon systems, you would hope that we would be in a position to respond to update this, but we don't have the know-how or the understanding of this next generation of Russian systems that's coming out.
00:42:23.000I had the opportunity in 2019 to visit Fort Campbell and a couple of the units there, and the Special Forces Group is based there.
00:42:34.000And they had just come back from Syria, and they were showing me what is still the current U.S. Kamikaze drones called a Switchblade, which has proven, by the way, completely ineffective in the battle space in Ukraine.
00:42:52.000However, what the Russians have done is they're on their second or third generation of suicide drones, which allegedly, big air quote, allegedly have AI capabilities.
00:43:02.000But regardless, they own the skies with these.
00:43:05.000They're producing them at a ratio that the Ukrainians can't keep up with.
00:43:15.000But one more point is that basic artillery, basic artillery that we use every day on the battlefield.
00:43:24.000I believe we're producing, I think it's tens of thousands of rounds per month, where the Russians are expending millions of rounds per month.
00:43:32.000And we can't keep up with that either.
00:43:40.000Well, it's a sad thing for a country, and it's very, very frightening to think that Kamala Harris may be our commander-in-chief with the absolute darth of any kind of knowledge or instinct or curiosity about history, about the uses of power.
00:44:01.000It's all sort of deep state propaganda.
00:44:07.000And it's very, very, very sad for our country.
00:44:10.000And that's one of the reasons that, you know, I'm in this fight right now, is that I think it'll all cost at SN because we'll end up in a new game.
00:44:20.000The Russians have already changed their first strike policies.
00:44:28.000They specifically warned us that they were going to do that.
00:44:30.000They said, you know, up until now, they've always said, we will never use a nuclear weapon in a first strike, a preemptive strike.
00:46:25.000And when you look at, you know, potentially what is going to be happening with the, if it's not already done, the green light to use deep strike capabilities into Russia, that is absolutely terrifying.
00:46:38.000It doesn't need to happen primarily because it's just not going to change anything on the battlefield.
00:46:44.000Their Ukrainian justification is twofold.
00:46:47.000I believe it was the spokesman for their foreign minister said that Putin has said that he has red lines.
00:46:55.000Therefore, there are no red lines and we have nothing to worry about.
00:46:58.000And the second thing that comes out of his mouth is that we are going to hit airfields and supply hubs and troop concentrations, which are going to enable us to do things on the battlefield.
00:47:15.000They've already pulled most of their aircraft back out of the range of these systems.
00:47:21.000No matter how many of these missiles you lob into Russia, you're not going to be able to take out the necessary amount of equipment and manpower to make a difference, particularly when the Ukrainian losses are so high.
00:47:33.000To think that we can change that with...
00:47:37.000A limited number of missiles is absolutely ludicrous.
00:47:42.000I've seen estimates where we have maybe a thousand of these left in our own inventory.
00:47:47.000They're not easy to make, they're very sensitive, it takes time, and we need them for ourselves.
00:47:54.000If we have 1,000 left in our inventory, if we have 2,000 left in our inventory, how many are we really going to give them?
00:47:59.000And how many of those is it going to take if you really wanted to take down the entire Russian military with a system like that, which A, is not possible, but it would take far more of these than we even possess or could make in the near future.
00:48:13.000And the only thing it's really going to do is inflame tensions.
00:48:16.000And Putin is already on the record saying that if they start launching them, then...
00:48:23.000And what that means- A war with NATO. A war with NATO and the United States.
00:48:27.000And you have these real, I gotta call them like children, emotional children and intellectual children, Anthony Blinken, Sullivan in Washington.
00:48:41.000And they're saying, oh, we're calling his bluff.
00:48:44.000You know, we poked the bear six times, and he didn't do anything, so we're going to poke him six more times.
00:48:52.000And Poodle until now has been acting with extraordinary restraint.
00:48:59.000And Russia, unlike our country, is sensitive to the opinion of other nations.
00:49:05.000And, you know, Putin has been saying from the beginning, this is about our security.
00:49:10.000It's about our right not to be invaded and intruded on.
00:49:17.000Ukraine has done the very thing that he predicted, which is they've invaded Russia.
00:49:22.000They've used NATO equipment and NATO approval and NATO training to actually invade Russia.
00:49:31.000And now we're going to attack Russia with missiles, and all the rest of the world is looking at this and saying, okay, Russia— We get it.
00:51:00.000You start playing with fire, you're going to get burned.
00:51:03.000But there's any number of ways that he could respond, which could absolutely be destructive of the United States.
00:51:08.000And when you take a look at the transparent fact, we've admitted this in print, that everything that has to do with targeting when the Ukrainians are firing these different platforms into Russia, when they're planning their offensive like Kursk, when they're planning their failed counterattack in the southern part of the country last year, It all comes from Washington.
00:52:32.000It's excusable because we blew up the Nord Stream pipeline to cripple their economy.
00:52:39.000Oh, you know, like you said, they don't have to use nuclear weapons.
00:52:43.000They can bring down our country, destroy our economy overnight with a lot of different non-conventional approaches to warfare that are available to them today.
00:52:54.000It's a reality that I would hope that people in Washington, as they continue to barrel into a really terrible scenario, consider.
00:53:04.000But I don't have any confidence they're doing it.
00:53:06.000Because if they were, you wouldn't be hearing that we're even considering allowing the Ukrainians to do this.
00:53:13.000I could allow the argument for this kind of employment of weaponry if it was truly going to make a difference on the battlefield.
00:53:22.000In a scenario which was in the core national interest of the United States.
00:53:35.000Other than the fact that You know, perhaps there are some in Washington who really do want to see this.
00:53:40.000And you have people like Victoria Nuland and Hillary Clinton, where this is the last gasp for their ultimately totally failed color revolution scheme.
00:53:53.000From Egypt to Syria to Ukraine and beyond.
00:54:09.000I mean, they're already a disgrace, but the ego that's involved, it's beyond evil.
00:54:15.000Because they're extinguishing hundreds of thousands of lives and they're risking hundreds of millions of more lives just for the sake of their own personal aims and self-gratification.
00:54:25.000That's the only way I can rationalize this.