Trump Tries to End War in Ukraine; U.S. is Dangerously Low on Weapons and Munitions Former Trump DoD Official Warns
Trump continues his efforts to end the Russia/Ukraine war while the D.C. foreign policy class clings to delusions about Ukraine's prospects. Plus: former Pentagon official Dan Caldwell explains why the U.S. lags behind Russia in munitions production and how this shortage informs U.S. foreign policy. ------------------------------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern and airs exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
You may note that I admitted the word every Monday through Friday there.
Thank you for indulging the last few days.
I was in New York for a debate on Tuesday regarding Trump's immigration policy, which you could watch online if you haven't already seen and then had to spend the next several days doing interviews and other events.
We are very happy to be back.
So tomorrow I will return the word every to that introduction, but in deference to the last few days, I decided to leave it out.
All right, tonight, the U.S. finance proxy war against Russia using Ukraine as its intermediary and pawn, which I think is the best way to describe this war, is now well into its fourth full year.
There has been almost no Ukrainian progress over the last 18 months, while Russia slowly, though inexorably, expands the amount of territory in Ukraine it now controls, roughly 23% of that country, with almost all of the frontline movements heading westward as Russia consumes more and more of Ukraine as the war goes on.
Although it was heresy in the West for at least two years to point out that Ukraine has no ability to achieve the goals of victory laid out by the U.S. and NATO at the start, namely the expulsion of every Russian troop from every inch of Ukraine, including Crimea, there is now virtually nobody.
willing to say with a straight face that this is an achievable goal.
Two years ago, if you said the Ukrainians can't manage that, they called you a Putin agent.
Now, of course, it's conventional wisdom.
All of that in that U.S. and NATO failure in Ukraine is really the critical context for the fury of efforts in which President Trump has engaged in the last seven days to try to finally forge a diplomatic solution to this horrific yet pointless war, going so far as to go meet Vladimir Putin in Alaska, and then hosting President Zelensky and European leaders in the White House today.
In some ways, Trump really is the only major Western leader to speak in the last four years of the urgent need to end this war and to stop its mass death.
I've been accused of being a Russian agent for his efforts.
are indeed crucial for so many reasons, but this predictably hysterical meltdown by much of the Western elite class overnight, they rejuvenated this whole Trump-Russia narrative about how Trump is controlled by Putin.
All of this is a great deal about their views on foreign policy, their love and quest and dependence on endless war.
and their desperate attempt to cling to a hegemonic power that they really have not actually exercised for years.
We'll look at these latest efforts and what their implications are.
Then, in the first few months of the Trump administration, some particularly vicious backstabbing and internal turf war among the highest levels of the national security state dominated that part of the administration.
This was vicious even by DC standards.
All of this resulted in the unjust firing of many top newly hired officials in the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and elsewhere.
And one of the best of those that got lost as a casualty in that war was the longtime ally of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who occupied a very senior position in the Pentagon.
His name is Dan Caldwell.
He was widely and is widely associated with the Foreign Policy School of More Non-Interventionism.
And he has become an outspoken critic of many of the stale yet ongoing dogmas of the Western foreign policy establishment.
He has used one area of his expertise to warn Americans of something most don't know, namely that the Pentagon, despite having the largest military budget in the world, is running dangerously low on stockpiles of vital weapons, including munitions and missiles.
and that this is severely limiting U.S. military options throughout the Middle East and is a source of pressure for why the U.S. wants and needs to end the war in Ukraine.
We'll talk about how it could possibly be that the U.S., despite this bloated military budget, is short on such basic weaponry and how that has affected conflicts all over the region over the last several years and continues to do so in Ukraine today.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
I think it's worth looking back at February of 2022, which is when the Russians escalated what was really already an ongoing war in Ukraine, just a much lower level one where the various province of eastern Ukraine that feel a great deal of loyalty to the government in Moscow and almost none to Kiev began a somewhat moderate civil war against the central government in Kiev,
largely out of grievance that the ethnic Russians who populate that region were starting to be severely discriminated against by the government in Kiev, all sorts of restrictions of rights, the inability to speak Russian as part of official Ukrainian documents, attacks on their churches, their media outlets.
And this had been brewing for a while.
And when the Russians actually invaded with a much greater economic and military force in February of 2022, the United States and NATO unified across party lines in order to decide that they were going to go all in in the war in Ukraine.
And this was something that had almost no opposition in official Washington.
In fact, every single member of the Democratic Party in the House and Senate, every single one, not one token no vote, supported Joe Biden's efforts to finance and fund the war in Ukraine.
And there were about five dozen more populist, anti-interventionist members of the House GOP and 11 Republican senators who voted no.
no so all the no votes came from the republican side of the aisle because joe biden was the president this is democratic war and every single democratic member of congress decided to support it and the media narrative on this was unified and the media narrative was we're going to defeat russia the west is going to defeat russia we'll do whatever we have to do give as much money as we have to as many arms as we have to in order to ensure ukrainian victory And they were very clear what they meant by Ukrainian victory.
What they meant was we're going to expel every single Russian soldier from every inch of Ukrainian territory, including from Crimea, which the Russians had seized in 2014 after the U.S. openly and explicitly supported and sponsored a coup that removed the democratically elected government of Ukraine in Kiev because they perceived it was being too pro-Moscow and replaced it instead with a pro-U.S.
leader right on the other side of the ukrainian border in response the ukrainians took the russians took crimea where And the same is true, maybe not to that same extent, but to.
the four provinces in eastern ukraine that have become the subject of this war and one of the problems was always and we talked about this from the very beginning i can go back to february 2022 and show you programs of ours not just myself saying this but many guests that we had on who were saying that the way in which nato and the us had defined victory in such maximalist terms and had also vowed they would never end their support for this war until those war aims,
of them were achieved, all but ensured that this war would go on forever, that there'd never be an end to it.
Because even if the U.S.
which they held by that point for eight years, filled with people who are far more loyal to Moscow than to Kiev, even if through some stroke of magic.
NATO and the US were going to be able to spend enough hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars, enough weapons, in order to somehow defeat the Russians in that sense.
The Russians had made very clear, and not since the beginning of this war, but for decades, as documents in Washington demonstrate, that they regard NATO influence and NATO presence inside Ukraine to be an existential threat to Russian security.
And that term existential threat has a very specific and important and weighty meaning in international relations.
It means this is not just something we find threatening.
or feel menaced by.
This is something that we regard as so fundamentally threatening to our ongoing existence as a country that it is a red line for us, meaning if this line is crossed, we will do anything anything in our possession in order to prevent it and of course when you're talking about a nuclear armed power like russia that is diplomatic speak for this is something you cannot do that if you do do can provoke and will provoke a nuclear response so there was never any way out of this war there was never any way out of this
war nato could never actually win because they weren't able to achieve their their maximalist goals that they described as necessary for victory On the other hand, NATO could never accept anything short of that because since they were so consistent and loud in defining victory.
as the expulsion of every Russian troop from every inch of Ukraine, including Crimea, that if any Russian troops were occupying any part of Crimea at the end, it would mean by definition that NATO and the U.S. had lost the war, which they could never accept, losing a war to Russia.
And at the same time, even if somehow the U.S. could have or NATO could have gotten to the point where those goals became achievable, the Russians would never have allowed it.
They would have gone to nuclear war.
I believe that absolutely to prevent NATO from controlling access to the Black Sea and occupying Crimea and that entire most sensitive part of the Russian border.
This was a war destined to either fail or last forever.
And right now it's doing both.
And the position of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and pretty much the entire Democratic Party, not just in that first year, but ever since, and most Western capitals has been, look, we don't really care that this war is going to go on forever.
We're prepared for it to go on forever.
It's not our people dying.
Our populations are not really angry about it because they're not seeing any soldiers from Germany or France or the UK or the United States coming back in coffins.
Bill Crystal, the neocon warmonger who exerts great influence in the Democratic Party, boasted about what a great war this is because it's only Ukrainians who are dying.
And this is very much the attitude in the West is, yeah, let this war go on forever.
Just keep funding it.
It'll just be a permanent war destroying all of Ukraine, eliminating an entire generation of men of 25 to 45.
just eradicating that whole population, leaving women with no one to marry or raise their children with.
Absolute generational destruction in Ukraine on top of physical destruction of the country, to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of Russians who were going to be killed because few Western elites were affected by this.
The only Western elites who were affected by this were the ones who were profiting greatly from the massive sale of arms that was needed in order to keep this war funded.
Something they particularly needed because only eight months prior to the initiation of this conflict and the decision of the U.S. and NATO to get involved, the war in Afghanistan ended and that cash cow finally came to an end.
And lo and behold, they got a new one, as they always do.
So you had Joe Biden, Kamala Harris never uttering a word about trying to have this war.
Never.
They were so happy.
It was almost off the table was to say, yeah, this is yet another war that's just going to go on forever.
We're going to pay for it forever.
We're going to arm it forever.
Yeah, it's dangerous.
It involves the U.S. on one side, Russia on the other, the two largest nuclear powers on the planet that almost destroyed those species in the world a couple of other times.
But it's worth it.
We had articles in the Atlantic saying, oh, the dangers of nuclear war are overrated.
We could probably have a limited nuclear war.
It'd be fine.
Like the recklessness was so palpable.
And over what?
Over what?
This was always a war about one question.
And that question was, who's going to govern four provinces in eastern Ukraine that most Americans have never heard of and couldn't place on a map for good reason because it's not relevant to their lives.
And Crimea, same thing.
You can't find a war that has less of an impact on the actual material lives and interests of the American people than this one.
And yet the U.S. foreign policy on a bipartisan basis, the community, the Europeans were utterly content with keeping this war going forever.
And the one person who wasn't, This is a war that is killing enormous numbers of people.
It's like World War I trench warfare where tens of thousands of people die for inches and feet being moved every couple of weeks in the front line.
It's just a war of massive destruction on the one hand and yet little consequence on the other.
And Trump has been saying for years this war should end.
He vowed during the campaign he would end it in 24 hours.
I think that was clearly hyperbolic, as he said.
I don't think anyone, including him, expected that to literally happen.
But I do think it reflected a little bit more of a ability of Trump to dictate to Russia than he actually had.
I think he really thought he could pick up the phone and tell Putin, hey, Putin, look, I'm here now.
It's time to stop.
And Putin would say, okay.
And Trump didn't really realize that Russia is a country that's a big, important country.
They have a lot of other allies besides the U.S. to turn to, including China.
They're part of BRICS.
They do business with Iran and lots of other countries.
But mostly when a country of that size considers a war truly existential to their security.
as the Russians, for better or worse, do, they're not going to just stop because Trump picks up the phone and tells them to.
They're going to need an achievement, a fulfillment of their war aims, especially given how much they invested in it.
Invested in terms of money, but also their standing in the world and especially the lives of their citizens.
Now here, as I said, are the statements that really got us into this problem from the first place.
Here's the Financial Times.
This is as late as June of 2024.
So in the middle of the campaign last year, Joe Biden vows that the U.S. will support Ukraine, quote, until they prevail in the war.
The president says Washington will send more Patriot air defense systems to Kiev as G7 steps up support.
So as late as last year, the front line kept moving, not eastward back to Russia, but westward toward the more of the country that the Russians were consuming.
And Biden's position was, we're never stopping.
We're going to keep funding this and arming this until we win, even though them winning wasn't anywhere close.
All right, I think we have another graphic here, which is Joe Biden.
This is January of 2025, so it's after he lostost the election or after Kamal lost the election, and he's on his way out nine days or ten days from then, Trump is about to be inaugurated.
Biden holds a press conference and doing the best that he can given his brain capabilities.
He was asked about Ukraine, and this is what he said.
I had a long talk with Zelenskyy today.
And I think that as long as we continue to keep Western Europe united in its relations with Ukraine, that there is a real chance that the Ukrainians can prevail because the cost to Russia is incredibly high, over six hundred thousand dead or wounded.
The Koreans they brought in is having high mortality rates as well.
And I made it clear that I was I provided every bit of funding that authority I have as president to be able to do that now.
And I know that there is a significant number of Democrats and Republicans on the Hill who think we should continue.
I mean, a lot of what happened in the war in Vietnam, when people were obviously extremely dissatisfied and kept saying like, what's going on?
This war seems endless.
And the U.S. government kept saying, oh, look, we can say with a lot of confidence, we're on the road to winning.
We're close to winning.
And of course, Daniel Osberg almost went to prison for life because he had the Pentagon papers where internally they were admitting they had no chance of winning the war, that they could at most fight it to a stalemate.
None of these people thought they were going to win this war, not by 2024 anyway.
Some of them were delusional enough to still in 2023 think it was possible.
That was when the great surge was coming, the counteroffensive from all the people who promised a surge in Iraq.
But by 2024, it became very apparent the Ukrainians had no ability to expel the Russians.
The front line, in fact, was moving in the wrong direction from the Western perspective.
And they will just stand up in line and say, yeah, we're getting there.
We're probably going to win.
We think we can really win.
Here is a top U.S. general testifying before the U.S. Senate.
This is June of 2025.
So this is just a couple of months ago.
Let me ask this question.
This Ukraine-Russia war has been going on for a long time.
A lot of people kill.
We've spent a lot of money.
Can Ukraine win?
Senator, I think Ukraine can win.
I think any time your own homeland is threatened, you fight with a tenacity that's difficult for us to conceive of if we haven't found ourselves in that same situation.
Yeah, they haven't.
All right.
So that's the level of high-level discourse, geopolitical and military analysis.
I will say raising dogs, it is an interesting phenomenon.
It's not untrue.
I think it's part of instinct.
If you have dogs who aren't particularly good at fighting and some other dogs who clearly are bigger and stronger come onto your dog's territory, your house, your property, whatever, the dogs who are defending their territory usually are much more vicious and aggressive and will win the fight against dogs that are the invaders.
And so there probably is some extent to which this is true, but it goes only so far.
Like a rottweiler is still going to devour a poodle no matter whose land they're fighting on.
And the Russians just simply, through their size, have, I mean, who's going to fight this war for Ukraine?
They're running out of people.
And the people they have have been there years and they're just worn out and tired and using bad equipment.
I mean, it's a disaster on every level.
The Russians have infinitely more people to just keep sending.
This is all nonsense.
They know this is a lie.
But they can't admit we have no chance because that will end the gravy train that the Pentagon and all the allies in the military-industrial complex need.
This is how this always works.
But there's also just a kind of humiliation aspect that NATO and the U.S. stood up over and over these exact same people and said, we're going to win in 2022 and 2023.
We're never going to stop until we win.
We must win.
Losing is not an option.
They're now losing.
They know they're going to end up losing by the, again, the terms they defined it as being no one thinks all Russians are leaving Ukraine, let alone Crimea.
And it's like they can't admit it.
And they'd rather just keep up a war that is completely fruitless, that's killing huge numbers of people, just not their own citizens, but Ukrainians and Russians, rather than just admit that yet again they got everything wrong, these same Western foreign policy elites.
Here's the NATO chief Mark Ruda meeting with Anthony Blankin.
This was December of 2024 talking about ukraine again maybe most importantly also thanks to american leadership ukraine has prevailed and russia has not won and obviously we have to do more to make sure that ukraine can stay in the fight and is able to roll back as much as possible the russian onslaught and prevent putin from being successful in ukraine That was November 2024.
The Russians have rolled back almost nothing since then, nor had they rolled back barely anything in the months before he said that, while the Russians continue, not rapidly.
It's not like a blitzkrieg, but certainly you look at the map and it's clear in which direction it's headed and it's not the direction that Ukraine and its Western backers want.
Go back to 2022 and you had extremely triumphalist statements like this from the Kiev Independent, the EU unelected president Ursula van der Leyen who loves war.
I don't know what it is about German officials.
I really don't, not trying to suggest it's in their DNA, but And she said, quote, I'm deeply.
convinced that Ukraine will win this war.
Yeah, you might have been deeply convinced or you might not have been, but that statement in 2022 turned out to be not just false, but laughable.
So into all of this steps Donald Trump, who of course has made clear from the start that he wants to end this war.
He's tried.
He has not really gotten very far.
He's expressed extreme amounts of frustration, both with Zelensky and Putin, because I said, I think he came in with this understanding of the power of the U.S. presidency that's not realistic.
It might have been realistic in the 90s into the 2000s when the U.S. was the only superpower.
But that's not the world in which we live.
And the Trump administration has wars with multiple countries on multiple fronts.
You can only fight so many.
You have China and India that are very formidable.
You have BRICS, which is, I'm not saying yet a competing alliance, but certainly on its way to becoming something.
And, you know, maybe if the United States brought all of its power to bear on one situation, it could prevail.
But the U.S. is in conflicts of trade and military and so many other countries that we're still financing the war in Israel and the destruction of Gaza.
We just got out of protecting Israel and their war against Iran.
We spent a month bombing Yemen, all of which is depleting our resources, depleting our forces.
And there's only so much that you can do.
And I think that Trump got frustrated with both because neither is willing to just do what Trump says and jumps through his hoops because he doesn't have that power.
Both of them perceive, look, this is our country.
We're going to just take orders from Trump and stop a war until we perceive we've got what we can get and what we want.
But in the last, you know, 10 days, he has really accelerated his efforts.
And I think to his great credit, I really do.
There is nobody else trying to end this war but Donald Trump.
Here from the New York Times, this is August 18th, Trump returns to Washington after Putin talks yield no Ukraine deal.
Now, this framing is so preposterous.
No one thought that Trump was going to Alaska to meet with Putin and come out with a deal.
The Ukrainians weren't even there.
The Europeans weren't there.
No one thought there was going to be a deal.
That's not the...
So the fact that they didn't get a deal doesn't mean that that was a failure.
Quote, President Trump returned to Washington early Saturday after a summit meeting with President Putin ended without a stated agreement on any issue, much less on ending the war in Ukraine.
At a joint appearance after their nearly three-hour meeting at Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson in Anchorage, Mr. Trump gave a vague but positive assessment that progress had been made with Mr. Putin, saying, quote, many points were agreed to and there are just a few left after that.
But he did not describe these points or even specify that they had to do with Ukraine.
Quote, we've made some headway, he said, so there's no deal until there's a deal.
Moments earlier, Mr. Putin had signaled no change in his hardline position on Ukraine, claiming it, quote, has to do with our fundamental threats to our security.
We're convinced that in order to make the settlement lasting and long-term, we need to eliminate all the primary causes of the conflict, he said, repeating the phrasing he and other Russian officials have used to refer to a list of Kremlin positions that Ukraine and for the most part the West have called unacceptable.
All right, so just to be clear, you know, so often we just are incapable, maybe not incapable, but unwilling, but maybe both also incapable, of looking at the perspective of our enemies in a certain situation or who we've decided are enemies by reference to how we would see things.
So I've certainly said this before.
Others have imagined if there were some Chinese-led force accumulating and assembling on the border between Mexico and the U.S. or in Cuba or some close with great proximity to the United States,
and China was arming those factions and specifically saying go and use them against the United States, against U.S. forces, even inside the U.S. Imagine if China at the same time were changing the government of Mexico, changing the government of Cuba, changing the government of various Caribbean countries or places in South America to make them more anti-American and more pro-China, do you think we would consider that to be a grave and existential threat?
To ask the question is to answer it.
That's how the Russians see NATO interference in governance in and engineering coups in and threatening to include NATO membership for Ukraine.
You don't have to agree with the Russian position, but you should understand it if you want to understand this position.
And so the Russian view is The Russian, even though the New York Times calls it hardline, I can guarantee you the U.S. would do a lot more if the situation were reversed.
In fact, we almost went to nuclear war with Russia over the Cuban missile crisis, where the government of Cuba invited Russia to put their nuclear weapons and nuclear submarines because they were afraid the U.S. was going to attack it again, as the U.S. tried to do in 1961 in the Bay of Pigs operation that failed to change the government.
So they called on the Soviets, their allies, to protect them.
And the U.S. said, you're way too close to our border.
And the Soviets said, we're in a sovereign country.
You have no right to tell Cuba what they can have and what they can't have.
Same thing that we're now saying on behalf of Ukraine.
Ukraine is a sovereign country.
They can have whatever they want, though.
They can belong to whatever military alliance they want.
That was in our view when it came to the Russians and the Cubans.
And that's what precipitated the Cuban missile crisis, where we came very close to nuclear war.
And so the position of the Russians is we need a buffer.
And that buffer should be this zone in the Donbass of these four oblongs, which we already control.
The Russians already control them.
It's not like the Russians are asking for control of them.
The Russians have acquired control militarily of almost all of them.
And they're saying, if you recognize that we have this in Crimea, we can protect the Russian ethnic citizens who are there.
We get the buffer zone that we want.
Ukraine never goes into NATO and Ukraine for the most part demilitarizes, not entirely but enough to prevent them from attacking us, from being a threat to us.
They want to deneutralize.
They want to eliminate and neutralize the threat that Ukraine poses and has posed to Russia from their perspective because of NATO and U.S. backing there.
Those are their demands.
And in order to do that, they need to have Russian troops stationed in what We've been calling Ukraine, which are those four provinces as well as Crimea.
And remember, the NATO-U.S.
view from the start was victory means expelling all Russian troops.
So any attempt to accept a Russian deal that includes that is an admission of defeat from NATO and the U.S. And that was always a problem from the first place.
You could see it coming a mile away.
You define victory in a way your enemy can never accept.
And either you have a war that goes on forever or you have something extremely dangerous that happens.
And that's what this war has become.
And that's the obstacle Trump is trying to overcome is to find a deal that Putin can live with, but that the Europeans and the U.S. don't have to admit was a complete defeat, even though, of course, it's going to be be because part of ukraine what was ukraine is now going to belong to Russia because Russia won the war.
Russia took over parts of Ukraine, significant parts of Ukraine, and those aren't coming back.
Here is Donald Trump talking to Sean Hannity August 15th.
And I think this is really interesting dynamic because Trump has now realizes now the reality.
He understands anymore.
He can't order these countries to stop the war.
He can't force them to stop the war.
He has a lot more leverage over Zelensky because we fund that war than he does over Putin.
As Putin said, what do you mean you're going to sanction us?
You've already sanctioned us so much.
There's basically nothing else left to sanction.
And then Trump's new threat was we're going to impose secondary sanctions on you, meaning any country that does business with you, we're going to sanction them too.
But then both India and China went out of their way to embrace Russia after that, basically daring the U.S. to try and sanction India and Russia.
or India and China.
The U.S. cannot sanction India, China, Russia, and every other country that decides to do business with Russia.
And Trump kind of painted himself into a corner with that threat.
Remember, he said the Russians have 50 days to wind down the war.
They're going to get secondary sanctions.
And by agreeing to the the meeting with Putin, that was Trump's, Trump kind of got out of it.
He said, look, I have this meeting with Putin.
It shows he's back at the negotiating table.
I don't need to do that anymore.
And so Trump has shifted his rhetoric now to, it's not up to me.
I can't end the war on my own.
Putin has made enough concessions.
He doesn't want all of Ukraine.
He's not trying to condemn He just wants his buffer zone in the places he already has.
Whether you like it or not, the Russians have that part of Ukraine.
They occupy it.
They govern it.
No one's getting them out of there unless the U.S. and NATO want to go go fight them in an actual combat war, the Russians aren't leaving.
That belongs to Russia.
You can recognize it or not, but that's the reality.
So I think in Trump's mind, Putin has a deal that maybe the world doesn't love, maybe isn't what we accept in an ideal world, but in the actual world we live in.
It's kind of a deal that I think Trump thinks Putin has a rational case for.
And he shifted the burden now on whether this war ends.
It used to be on Trump.
I'm going to get this war done.
Then it was on Putin.
I need him to make a lot more concessions.
Now look at where he's putting the onus to end this war in his interview.
with Sean Hannity.
Let's play this clip.
I don't think I can hear it.
We were together almost three hours, and it was very extensive, and we agreed on a lot of points.
I mean, a lot of points were agreed on.
There's not that much.
There's, you know, one or two pretty significant items, but I think they can be reached.
Now it's really up to President Zelensky to get it done.
And I would also say the European nations, they have to get involved a little bit.
But it's up to President Zelensky.
I think we are, and if they'd like, I'll be at that next meeting.
They're going to set up a meeting now between President Zelensky and President Putin and myself., I guess, you know, I didn't even ask you about it.
Not that I want to be there, but I want to make sure it gets done.
And we have a pretty good chance of getting it done.
No, I don't say at all that Trump's ability to get this war ended is remotely guaranteed.
And I think he's come to the understanding that it's not remotely guaranteed.
He talks a lot differently now in terms of his tone about his ability to get it done.
It used to be, oh yeah, I'll get it done.
I'll pick up the phone.
I know both of them, and I'm going to say, knock it off.
And remember, that was his tone.
For the first couple months, he would tweet, Vladimir, knock it off.
I'm not happy.
And you can imagine what the reaction in Moscow was to that.
And I think Trump has given up the idea that he can unilaterally dictate to these parties that they have to end the war, that it's going to require delicate diplomacy, and there may be no diplomatic solution that both sides can reach.
And that's why I nonetheless say that I do think Trump deserves a lot of credit, along with Steve Whitcoff and those working on this, because the Europeans have no interest in ending this war.
And that has been clear from the start.
This is driven almost entirely now by Trump, this diplomatic effort to end the war.
And I think the United States has a lot of reasons and its own interests, which we're going to talk about with our guest in just a minute, as to why maybe it needs to end this war.
But it's certainly been something that Trump has been saying for a long time.
And at the end of the day, it's hard to imagine many people continuing to argue for the usefulness and the nobility of this war that is killing huge numbers of people with barely any effect any longer, other than, as I said, incremental consumption of more Ukrainian territory by Russian forces where both sides are enduring.
enormous amounts of losses.
You almost have to be a sociopath to want this war to continue, kind of like Brussels leaders seem to be and large parts of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, which we've seen in many other instances where wars, despite having no real value, even geopolitically, just kind of keep going on their own inertia because enough people have invested their identity and their pride and their profit motive in them that they just prefer that those things not be injured,
then this war that is killing huge numbers of people to no real effect continues.
So if there's any chance this war is going to end, right, anytime soon, it's going to be because of Donald Trump.
And as I said, for that, he deserves credit.
All right.
We have a few other items that we wanted to go over today, including what happened at the White House when Trump and Zelensky, along with European leaders, which we're going to get back to, but we want to get first to our guest who we are very excited to talk to, who has a lot of interesting things to say, We will speak with him right after this short break.
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Dan Caldwell is a former senior policy advisor to Secretary of Defense Pete Hagsath.
He's a veteran in the United States Marine Corps where he served during the Iraq War before moving to Capitol Hill to focus on veterans and defense policies.
He brings over a decade of experience shaping national security debates in both government and the nonprofit sector.
He's a frequent commentator on defense, foreign policy, and veterans issues, especially after his short but consequential stay at the highest levels of the Pentagon.
And we are delighted to welcome him here tonight.
Dan, it is great to see you.
Thank you for taking the time to talk to us.
Glenn, thank you for having me on.
Absolutely.
So I want to get to this observation that you offered earlier today in the midst of all of this.
talk about efforts to end the war in Ukraine and all the different reasons why it may or may not be done, why it should or shouldn't be done.
There was a tweet from Fox News correspondent.
I think he's the Pentagon correspondent.
Lewis Tomlinson, and he said this.
He was quoting the NATO Secretary General Mark Ruda in June, quote, Russia produces as much ammunition in three months as NATO produces in a full year.
So Russia produces munitions as much in three months as it takes NATO, all of NATO, in three years.
And the economist added, at current rates of procurement, it will take seven years to bring America's ammunition stocks back to where they were.
military age Ukraine began and then you said about all that you said this more than any other influence issue So I want to talk about that point in a second, namely how it's affecting Ukraine strategy.
But first, I want to talk about the underlying fact because, you know, as Americans, we've always been hearing for a long time now about the enormous sums of money we spend.
on our military budget, both in absolute numbers and compared to all the other countries in the world.
Trump boasted we're going to have our first trillion dollar defense and annual defense budget.
We've spent $850 billion in the last few years.
All the different ways to understand that we spend more than the next 12 countries, 12 or 15 countries combined.
We're talking here about the Russians who I think spend 1 15th or 1 12th, maybe it's a little more now with the war on their military budget as we spend in ours.
And so I think a lot of Americans would be listening to this.
I know I am.
And I'm thinking to myself.
Given the astronomical military budget we have, like in a different universe than everybody else, how is it possible that we're running low on things like munitions and are so far behind the capability of the Russians, not the most technologically sophisticated or economically powerful country in the world at this point, to produce these kinds of basic weaponry?
Well, Glenn, there's one thing I also, I think it's important to point out here, is the Russians are achieving that level of munitions production while I believe they are the most sanctioned country in the world.
North Korea and Iran may have more sanctions, but again, we impose, along with NATO, massive amounts of sanctions on the Russians, and they're still able to outproduce us by 3 to 1 or 4.
four to one.
And that isn't even counting the support that they're getting from North Korea or Iran.
So they are beating us at a massive scale after, as you've pointed out, we have spent significantly, particularly the last few years, in trying to scale up our munitions productions.
And we're in this mess for a couple of reasons.
So first, really after the end of the Cold War, the United States de-industrialized.
But our defense spending was really focused on producing high-end precision munitions and what you could call prestige massive acquisition programs.
So think of the F-35, think of the Gerald Ford aircraft carrier, which President Trump has complained a lot about.
A lot of these acquisition programs were disasters, but it wasn't focused on building stockpiles of weapons or building weapons and munitions in scale to fight extended war.
We were really building to fight these brushfire wars and places like Iraq and Afghanistan or short, quick conflicts like Desert Storm or the opening invasion of Iraq.
All those factors came together to leave us in this situation along with the rest of NATO where we really simply don't have the capacity to achieve a full victory.
And that's not even getting into the problems that you've talked about with Ukraine's manpower situation, where the Russians not only have a munitions advantage and a weapons advantage, but they also have a three-to-one manpower advantage.
So really...
So that, I think, more than anything is going to force a conclusion of this war, whether it's now, whether it's in a few months or maybe a year, then, you know, what may or may not happen in terms of peace negotiations over the next few months.
And I want to be clear, I want President Trump to be successful.
I'm praying for his success.
But a lot of our foreign policy establishment still operates under this delusion that, as you pointed out, that we're still this arsenal of democracy and we can produce whatever we want whenever we want.
And it's simply not true.
And it's very scary that so many of our leaders, particularly in the Biden administration, including President Biden himself, don't recognize that.
or didn't recognize that.
Okay, so I have several questions that I wasn't even necessarily intending to ask you about that arise from what you just said.
And I want to start at that last one, which is you say it's a math problem.
The math problem, one of the math problem things, a very simple math equation., which is that Russia is much bigger than Ukraine and therefore has a lot more men to send to the front line to fight the kind of conventional war that was obviously expected these two countries to engage in.
And I had people on my show, you know, in early 2022 through 2022, saying exactly this, you know, that Look, maybe the Russians, the Ukrainians are going to have some feisty, impressive victories, which they did.
I don't know if you heard, but I was talking about how, you know, being around a lot of dogs, raising a lot of dogs, dogs that defend their property, even if they're weaker, often can.
win fights against much stronger dogs when they're defending their actual property that is a very real instinct i think in all animals including humans and there were some impressive you know feisty ukrainian victories that were maybe a surprising or whatever nonetheless like at the end of the day the russians were going to always win because not just the population problem which is bad enough but also this issue of munitions and the lack of focus on producing them,
even though those are going to be crucial to the war, had to have been known at the highest levels, not just the Pentagon, but NATO policy planners.
So what explained all of this triumphalist talk in 2022 and 2023, even into 2024 that they were so sure Ukraine was going to win.
Were they just deluding themselves?
Was this deceitful propaganda?
Like where did this group thing come from that they convinced themselves Ukraine could win despite these very clear reasons why they couldn't?
It's really two things, delusion and denial.
And, you know, there were people in the highest levels of the Biden administration who knew this was a problem.
And one of them, you know, I'm not his biggest fan, and I think he did a lot of really bad stuff, particularly at the end of the Trump administration, was Mark Milley.
He knew this was a problem, which is why he said at the end of 2022, when Ukraine achieved very stunning victories in pushing out the Russians from most of Kharkiv province and pushing out Herzog City, is that he said that now's the time for Ukraine to drive on negotiations because going forward, they're going to be at an increasing military disadvantage because now the Russians are mobilizing.
But he was dealing with an administration that was delusional at the highest levels.
And there's one story that I think really hammers this home, one episode.
And I was reminded of it listening to you playing Biden clips earlier.
So if you remember, after October 7th, Joe Biden went on 60 Minutes and he was talking to Scott Pelley and Scott Pelley asked him, do we have the capacity to support both Israel and Ukraine?
And Joe Biden got angry at him and said, of course we do.
We're the most powerful country in the history of the world.
And he said the history of the world multiple times, of course we can support both countries.
What happens a few days later?
The United States is forced to redirect artillery shells from Ukraine to Israel because we had drawn down war stocks in Israel to support Ukraine and we weren't producing them fast enough throughout 2024 both the Ukrainians and Israelis thought we were withholding weapons from them But the reality is we just didn't have enough to give both of them to sustain their operations.
So we had to dribble it out.
It wasn't deliberate policy.
It was driven by real constraints.
And that is what this administration is dealing with.
I have to say, you know, I have a lot of friends still in the administration.
There's a lot of people both at the Pentagon and the White House who know this.
And that, I think, is informing a lot of their thinking about how they're approaching this problem.
Let me I want to get to that as well, but let me just ask you the other thing that I have difficulty understanding in response to your first description is you know the Pentagon is this gigantic entity It has I think the most it's the biggest employer in in the United States in the public or private sector, if I'm not mistaken.
You have a lot of people who are career military professionals who have risen to the top levels of war planning, of procurement, who are extremely smart.
I mean, they study military history, they study military conflict.
These are very, very smart people.
And they also have, compared to pretty much every other country on Earth, like virtually unlimited resources.
So I understand what you're saying, especially in the wake of the war on terror and the kind of special forces operations and the quick strikes and the kind of the posture that we were engaged in other than the full-scale invasion of Iraq, that you would focus on these kind of fancier, high-tech devices that aren't particularly good for the kind of ground war we're seeing between Russia and Ukraine or even what we saw with Israel and Iran.
There had to be a recognition inside these upper echelons of Pentagon planning that those kinds of wars aren't over.
Like how did we become so neglectful of building the types of systems and weapons that would be needed for those more conventional wars?
I think this is a very good question and there's a couple different reasons why.
So I think first and foremost, you know, one observation that I had, you know, from my time in the Pentagon and then working around it is that there's a lot of incentives to talk big, but very little incentives to actually follow through.
And I think that this is most.
prominent with what the Marine Corps did a few years ago is that General Berger at the Marine Corps did some pretty radical reforms to the Marine Corps that recognized the reality that we're facing that the Marines were facing constrained budget environment that they needed to readapt for a potential war against China and that they couldn't still have a force that was built to fight desert storm and then Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
And General Berger, who was common on the Marine Corps at the time, you know, he cut the Marine Corps by 12,000 Marines.
When's the last time you've heard of a service chief cutting 12,000 Marines?
But he did.
that to free up money to buy new and better weapon systems and scale.
And he ended some major acquisition programs.
He did exactly what all these generals going to all these big think tank events had talked about for years, is transformation and innovation.
Well, what happens to him?
He's attacked by almost every living Marine Corps general with these nasty open letters.
You have people trying to undermine the reforms in Congress.
So the point of that story is, is that it's very easy to talk a big game about innovation and transformation, but when the rubber meets the road, there's so many people that pop out of the woodwork and try and stop and undermine you.
And I would say in terms of the types of systems that you need for these types of wars, like look, a lot of these drones that you're seeing in Ukraine and that the Houthis have built and Iranians have built, they're cheap.
They don't cost a lot of money.
Therefore, they don't have a lot of big profit margins.
So a lot of these systems don't buy big beach houses in Rehobooth, Delaware.
A lot of these systems don't buy second homes in the Shenandoah Valley out here in Northern Virginia.
There's that.
And I'd also just say, too, there's a final component here that you can't underestimate is that a lot of these generals and a lot of these civilians still have these emotional attachments to where they made their careers.
And for most people in the Pentagon right now, that's two places.
That's Europe.
And that is the Middle East.
So they constantly want to still focus there and fighting the last wars there, whether it's in Europe, like defending the Fulda Gap during the Cold War, which was the dividing line, you know, between the Warsaw Pact and NATO, or continuing to still fight the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
And that, that more, sometimes more than even like a financial incentive or a career incentive, really pushes people to maintain a status quo that isn't working.
I think it's by the way that's an interesting dynamic that I've noticed before in journalism and even other professions where people who say come of age as a journalist and find success in say the Clinton years will always look at everything through the prism of the politics that prevailed in the Clinton years.
you know, the need to like become the Democratic Party more moderate, more attached to corporatism, and it worked then, so it must work 30 years later.
I think it's a very common problem But let me ask you, you mentioned this focus on Europe and the Middle East.
And for as long as I remember now, let's go back to the Obama years where the whole idea was, oh, we need to pivot to Asia.
This emerging threat from China.
We spent way too much time in the Middle East.
Even Europe is no longer the fulcrum of where our defense interests lie.
And it seems like, I mean, we have done more in the Pacific than previously, but to some extent, but clearly, like everything that we talk about, you know, all the wars that we discuss, the conflicts we're constantly faced with continue to have their epicenter in the Middle East and in Europe.
Why is it that we just simply can't extricate ourselves from those regions, even though you talk to every policy planner and they will say there's far more U.S. interests at stake in Asia?
So there's a line that I heard Steve Bannon and Jack the Soviet use that I always have to steal because I thought it was so good is that Washington, D.C. is still a CentCom company town.
And I think you could also say it's still a UCom European command company town and that again it has to do with some of the dynamics i talked about earlier where people have this still personal you know attachment to those regions but also too there's a lot of special interest here and i'm not even really talking about the military industrial complex in some ways the opportunity for them to make money on certain systems is bigger in the Pacific,
but you have a lot of think tanks and you have a lot of media here in town that really informs the debate and creates not just advocacy pressure on members of Congress or decision makers, but also social pressure.
Like when your neighbor, for example, the coach of your kid's soccer team works for the Atlantic Council, you know, you're kind of going to be a little worried about, you know, advocating a massive withdrawal from Europe because that may create your social pressures if that's all your neighbors and whatnot.
You can apply that, too, to some of the special interests that you have around the Middle East.
So that's another dynamic here is that you have so much money.
And again, a lot of people focus on the Middle East money, but it's hard to overstate and.
i think you've covered it um how much money particularly after the ukraine war flowed in from ukrainian oligarchs and other eastern European interests and even countries like Norway that you don't hear a lot about.
Countries, you know, foundations attached to parts of like the French or British government, they flow into a lot of think tanks here in town.
And then those think tanks sponsor media events.
So that helps fund the media here.
So there's an incentive there that helps keep people focused.
And I also just say this too, is that for part of the debate, for part, excuse me, for part of the political spectrum, there is more kind of this belief that, particularly when it comes to Europe, that there's a political affinity dynamic of this that the Europeans for the the left liberals and even some people on the center left on the center right like those are our our ideological allies those are our people that they're going to ally with us to push back against this global surge in populism and
And we need to be with them and back them no other what.
And any time you do something like pull troops out of Europe, or you talk about cutting off aid to Ukraine, you're helping the evil forces of global populism or the axis of autocracy, which really doesn't exist, you're helping them win.
And I think that gets down to, and again, you've talked more about this than I have, but the political dimension of the Ukraine war.
And we can't forget that for a lot of left liberals, including ones that were very anti-war when it came to the Middle East.
East is that Russia is this regressive evil power that helped get the orange man elected and therefore we need to do everything that we need to do to defeat it.
So even if you had people like rightly opposing, supporting the Saudi-led war in Yemen or oppose the Iraq war or the war in Afghanistan, they're all in for dumping arms and weapons into Ukraine and doubling up in NATO because Russia is this bad regressive power that helped elect Donald Trump here in the United States.
Yeah, which is, I mean, it's ironic for so many reasons including the fact that the left and and american liberalism during the cold war you know was vehemently opposed to exactly that argument like yeah the soviets are bad we wouldn't want to live there they're repressive but we don't want to exaggerate the threat they pose nor go to war with them in every place we can find and i always thought russia gate and my contempt for it from the start was in part the fact that I thought it was a journalistically based scandal,
but my bigger concern was that it was intended to rejuvenate this kind of visceral hatred for and fear of Russia to lead to exactly the sort of thing that we're now seeing where the entire Democratic Party is united in the belief that no matter what, you have to defeat it.
All right, let me ask you, because this is something I've seen, a point I've seen you make, not just with respect to Ukraine, but other conflicts as well.
And I want to get to those in a second, but before I leave Ukraine.
So this idea that, look, We're standing by Israel.
We're going to continue to provide weapons to Israel.
Israel is now expanding its operations.
They are absolutely fully committed to this complete occupation of Gaza, whatever that might entail for however long it might entail.
It's going to take a lot of U.S. support and a lot of U.S. weapons, which presumably at least maintains our difficulty in supplying Ukraine, if not makes it even more difficult.
I have to assume there are a lot of people in the Trump administration now who are telling Trump this.
He seems to want to end the war.
In part, you suggest that's a reason.
But what if we can't get this deal done?
Because it's far from guaranteed that no matter how much Trump wants it.
that a deal can be had.
Will the U.S., do you think, simply continue to arm and fuel the Ukrainian effort against the Russians, or will they be kind of forced to pull back simply because they don't have the equipment and ammunition?
So again, I'm not in the administration anymore.
So these are just observations from the outside.
But, you know, I was watching what happened with the new plan to fund Ukraine or excuse me to support Ukraine with weapons.
And you may disagree with this, Glenn.
I have some other very smart friends, some who are smarter than me who disagree with this.
I actually viewed that, and you've seen both Vice President Vance and President Trump allude to this, is that that was a way of actually taking a step away from the war.
And let me explain why.
So essentially what that deal was, was that the Europeans were going to send forward their own stocks of gear, and then they were going to buy backfill of those stocks from the United States.
And what the United States was to do to, in the short term, refill those stocks, was actually redirect sales that were in the works from other countries.
So the Germans in some other countries were sending Patriot missiles, and to backfill those, we redirected an order from the Swiss.
And that was an acknowledgment, one, of our constraints, that we can't draw down our own stockpiles much anymore without severely undermining our own readiness.
And two, that our own, we have other production pipelines that are responsible for backfilling and supporting our own stocks that we didn't want want to redirect from those.
So to me, that was almost a first kind of step away from the war.
And you also haven't seen the Trump administration yet tap into the remaining presidential drawdown authority left over from the Biden administration, which is authority to send weapons directly from American stocks.
They have not tapped into that yet.
So to me, that shows that they are reaching the, they're trying to find more options to continue to support Ukraine, to give, I think, diplomatic leverage, but they're recognizing there's the end of the war.
So I think that if this is still dragging on, meaning these diplomatic negotiations for three or four months, there is a world where President Trump makes the difficult decision to walk away.
Because I, again, I could be proven wrong on this.
I have been wrong about President Trump before.
But I kind of see them already laying the groundwork for that.
Notice the emphasis on Mrs. Biden's war.
We're not funding it anymore.
It almost seems like they're laying the groundwork increasingly for that possibility in a way you didn't see in the first six months of the administration.
Let me ask you about the whole issue involving China, because so often, I don't know how many times I've heard this argued before in pretty much response to every war, but certainly the one in Ukraine, which is, okay, look, even if you don't think there's a lot of American interests at stake in who governs various provinces in eastern Ukraine,
whether it's some semi-autonomous, you know, body that's more loyal to Russia or Russia annexes itself or remains central to Kiev, like who cares from the American perspective?
The reason you should care is because it sends a very important signal to the Chinese about our ability or willingness to stand by allies in defense when some other bigger country attacks them.
Namely, if we let Ukraine go to Russia, that basically tells the Chinese, oh, you know, we're never going to really— To me, it seems like as I'm listening to you, if I'm in Beijing, and I really do have my design set on taking Taiwan in the near future.
And I'm not at all convinced they do, but let's assume since a lot of people claim that that's the case.
It seems to me like given how depleted we are and how many different commitments we have between the Middle East in general and Israel in particular and still some residual commitments with Ukraine and we haven't built back and replenished our stockpile, that this seems like it would be a good time if the Chinese really wanted to take Taiwan.
Has our spreading ourselves too thin with financing all these wars and arming all these wars created the exact kind of threat that we claim is the one we're most concerned about?
You know, this argument that we have to support Ukraine and maintain our credibility to China is, I'm sorry, it's utterly ridiculous.
The Chinese are going to make a decision around Taiwan based on a variety of factors, political, whether or not Taiwan is declaring or moving away from independence.
That's a much longer conversation.
about what their intentions are.
ultimately what they're going to look at is the hard power balance in the Pacific.
The ability of Taiwan or the Philippines or the United States to ultimately deter or defeat or raise the cost substantially of a Chinese invasion of either Taiwan or a potential other country in the region.
Now, I'm not, I'm somebody who believes that China is a,
And I got to be honest with you is President Trump is actually much more pragmatic and realistic about China than President Biden was, who constantly undermined strategic ambiguity.
But I will tell you, indisputably, our support of Ukraine is undermining Taiwan's ability to deter an invasion.
Now, the Taiwanese are doing a bunch of dumb stuff.
They aren't investing enough in their own defense.
They're buying their own weapon systems.
But right now, there is a $20 billion plus backlog of arms sales to Taiwan in large part because the Biden administration redirected munitions from Taiwan to Ukraine.
And, you know, I, when Nancy Pelosi went over to Ukraine or Taiwan in 2022 and undermined strategic ambiguity and was beating her chest about how important Taiwan is, at that same time, the Biden administration was delaying deliveries of things like Stinger missiles and HIMARS missiles that were critical to the Taiwanese plan to defeat a Chinese invasion.
So what do you think the Chinese are more afraid of?
you know, copies of the Atlantic being distributed in Taipei or, you know, speeches about the glories of liberal internationalism from Nancy.
Pelosi or Taiwanese with Stinger missiles and HIMARS and Patriot missiles.
I think we all know the answer to that.
Let me just ask you about a couple other things before I let you go because you've been generous with your time.
But there's, I just need to, we're going to harass you to come back on with more frequency because you always offer a perspective that I think is so often missing.
But, you know, like I said, I've seen you make this argument before.
uh you made it about ukraine namely that our depleting stockpiles play a role has played a role in our need to end conflicts maybe sooner than a lot of people wanted us to i always found it so interesting and there wasn't a lot of great reporting about why it happened that President Trump at first was convinced to restart and even escalate Joe Biden's bombing campaign in Yemen against the Houthis,
even though by that point the Houthis had all but said they were going to stop attacking U.S. ships because of that ceasefire that Trump and Steve Whitcoff engineered.
And the idea was, oh, it's going to have to be about nine months or a year.
We're going to bomb them and we're going to finally get rid of the Houthis.
And Trump put a stop to it.
after 30 days that shocked the Israelis.
Nobody really expected it, but Trump obviously didn't like what he was seeing in terms of the progress being made, in terms of the expenses that it was incurring.
And I remember you making a comment about how much that was depleting our stockpiles.
But then also when this war with Iran and Israel erupted and the U.S. joined for about four seconds in a kind of one-day bombing raid of those three facilities, you know, Trump himself said, look, the Israelis were getting hit very hard, even though the Western press wasn't really reporting that.
I think a lot of people expected that war to go on for a lot longer.
There was a lot more ambitious effort to undermine the Iranians, to create destabilized regime.
And I remember you saying publicly at the time that, look, one of the reasasons we ended it is because we kind of had to.
The Israelis were running out of defense systems and missiles, more Iranian missiles were getting through.
We didn't have the capabilities to protect them.
And I don't think very many people understood that was a factor.
Can you explain between Yemen and the whole American effort surrounding Israel why our depleted stockpiles played such an important role there?
Yes.
So let me just let me go back to 2024 again.
So towards the end of 202024, there was a day where the United States shot a year's worth of production of SM-3 and SM-6 missiles.
These are missiles that you shoot off of a destroyer or cruiser.
They're highly advanced.
They're designed to shoot down ballistic missiles.
And we, in one day, fighting off a Hootie drone and missile attack in the Red Sea expended a year's worth of production.
And that hammered home like, okay, there's a huge problem here because we aren't prepared to fight this war.
And going back to what we were talking about earlier, those Houthi drones cost maybe $25,000 to $50,000 a piece, and the missiles we were shooting at them cost $3 to $6 million.
So both from an industrial capacity standpoint and from a financial standpoint, that's not sustainable.
So the Houthi stopped shooting at ships and the Israelis when there was that ceasefire that Steve Whitcoff helped drive.
But after the ceasefire broke down and after Operation Rough Rider, the Houthi stopped shooting at American ships, but they continued to shoot missiles at Israel.
And during that time, Israelis were using their ballistic missile interceptors to shoot down those rockets along with American FAD missiles that had been deployed to Israel to shoot them down.
So you get to the 12-day war.
And by that point, both Israel and the United States had been firing more missiles, ballistic missile interceptors, either Houthi missiles and drones or Iranian missiles and drones.
Because remember, Iranians tried to attack Israel twice in 2024 for nearly a year at that point or over a year at that point.
So you get to the 12-day war.
And it really was a race.
It was a race between Iran and Israel, Israel with American support, to see which side could out.last each other's offensive military capabilities?
So in the case of the Israelis, it was outlasting the Iranian ballistic missiles.
And for the Iranians, it was outlasting Israeli strikes on the air defense systems and on their ballistic missile launchers.
And by the end of the 12-day war, particularly the day after the strikes on the Iranian nuclear facilities, it became pretty clear that the Iranians were getting more missiles through the Israeli air defense network.
and that the Israelis were running out of arrow missiles.
And again, this is all publicly reported, you know, mainstream outlooks of Wall Street Journal have reported this.
I'm not revealing any classified information here, that they were running out of missiles and we were running out of FAD missiles and SM-3 and SM-6s in that theater to continue to repel Iranian ballistic missile strikes.
So the point of all that is, is that had the war gone on, say, three, four, five, maybe six, seven, eight more days, is that more Iranian missiles would have gotten through and you would have had more catastrophic.
attacks on Israel that would have inflicted more casualties and then potentially, God forbid, on American bases and diplomatic facilities.
So imagine in Israel, the Iranians appear to be targeting their electric grid, their national electric system.
Imagine in the middle of summer in a high-tech economy that their electric grid went down, the impact of that.
So I think that after the nuclear strike, that created incentives for all sides to take an off-ramp and say, okay, we're going to end this war at least for now.
All right, last question I have for you, just because this is something we used to talk about a lot as it pertains to and by the way, I just have to interject and say, I'm still kind of amazed listening to you.
And I think most people would be, too, because we hear about it so rarely, that we do have this incredibly bloated, shockingly enormous military budget.
And yet, in all of these instances, we're finding ourselves in major problems because we simply don't have enough basic munitions to even fight or continue wars that we otherwise might think are in or not.
It's kind of shocking when you think about it.
I just got to say something real quick on that when i deployed to iraq in 2008 2009 at the height of the tail end of the surge with all these tens of billions of dollars one problem i had was In my squad, I couldn't get enough sites for the grenade launchers we had.
So about half my guys with grenade launchers, they were worthless because we couldn't get $20 sites for these grenade launchers.
It was M203s.
And so they were basically worthless.
All you could do with them is launch players.
But at that point, $150 billion was being spent on the war.
And across all of the Marine AO, there was a shortage of this $20 part that was critical to the functioning of a key weapon system in an infantry rifle squad.
But we had all the fancy M-RAPs and stuff.
And so this is a problem that goes back a long time and unfortunately isn't new at all.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I remember stories, you know, from back then, when, you know, after 9-11, it was the sky's the limit.
You spend whatever you have to.
And a lot of the trucks were just insufficiently insulated against roadside bombs that easily could have been with small amounts of money, cost a lot of soldiers their lives and their limbs, simply because those resources were allocated so poorly.
All right, let me ask you this last question.
It pertains to this idea of these Nazi battalions that still exist in Ukraine.
And early on, it got very stigmatized because one of Putin's justifications for the invasion was we want to go in and denazify Ukraine and this Any mention of Nazi battalions inside Ukraine was immediately demeaned as Russian propaganda,
even though before February 2022, you could find endless numbers of accounts in Western media outlets warning of the dangers of all sorts of Nazi influences, that the most important influences in the Ukrainian military were these battalions who had allegiances to the SS.
After February 2022, it all got rewritten.
They were called now extremist or nationalist groups.
It was kind of bizarre to watch war propaganda being rewritten in real time in the Western press.
But there was this quote that you noted today.
It was reported by the New York Post's Caitlin Dornbosch and she quoted what she called an American spokesman for Ukraine's 3rd Assault Brigade and he said and this is in response to all of this talk about ending the war and Trump trying to negotiate and then if you think Ukrainians are going to give up Kramostork and Slavyansk,
I suggest asking a Texan if David Crockett should have given up the Alamo.
And, you know, basically saying, look, you can negotiate this all you want.
I'm an American.
I'm here to tell you, we're not giving up.
We're not surrendering.
And you said, why doesn't it?
Why does a Ukrainian army brigade, especially one commanded by Andrei Bolecki, a neo-Nazi, have an American spokesman?
How much of a problem do you still think that is that there are Nazi elements inside Ukraine who are getting a lot of these most sophisticated weapons in?
And what do you think the dangers are at the end of this conflict that those are going to find their way to various problems and hotspots around the world or create their own problems?
So, Glenn, last year I went to Odessa, Ukraine, and, you know, I kind of, I had been talking a lot about Azov before that and um i was like all right you know you got to go in there with an open mind and you know not try and look at this stuff but you just you couldn't ignore it it was just so in your face every other recruiting poster was azoff i saw an azoff poster there or excuse me protest um there was an azoff
recruiting office it's become an incredibly powerful political military and economic movement within Ukraine.
So why is that a risk?
Well, I think the best parallel is to what happened in Iraq is that you had the popular mobilization forces, which were these militias that sprung up with Iranian support, but also the support of the Shia clergy in Iraq, that essentially these were the units that helped defeat ISIS.
And they established themselves as a political.
uh force with with affiliated parties they took over a lot of parts of the economy and they're a real military force that that is part of the iraqi government i note that they're part of the iraqi government that we support but they also attack american troops that are in iraq to support said government but that's a whole nother story but the the point is, is that I've been accused of regurgitating Russian propaganda around this.
what I am concerned about is that you could create a similar situation.
What do you have in Iraq?
You have these extremists that are a They maintain high levels of corruption.
They maintain authoritarian systems of governments and they prevent Ukraine from moving forward.
I want Ukraine to have a bright future.
I went to Ukraine, have a lot of respect for the Ukrainian people.
And I could see a path forward to them as a protected and armed neutral country.
But with people like an Azov in control, they're constantly going to agitate for more aggressive actions, not just against the Russians, but other ethnic minorities in Ukraine, whether it's the Poles, the Hungarians.
There's a long history there of the Banderaite factions having tension with countries like Poland.
The new Polish president has talked about this.
So it just blows my mind that people are so defensive of Azov and so pertinent.
protected of them and not not being willing to to look and see like two three steps down the road how it can be they can be a problem you know glenn i gotta tell you one of the first I can't review all the details, but one of the first meetings I went to at the Pentagon discussing Ukraine, I asked a question and a very high-ranking general within the joint staff pretended not to even know what Azov was.
And it just blew my mind.
And mind you, like three months before this, there was a mini scandal because Azov.
uh movement veterans had shown up in the Pentagon they took like pictures of themselves in the Pentagon press room and we didn't you know under secretary Hexeff and others we didn't want any of that imagery we didn't want those people in the building but you had had senior American officials that that either I don't think they they didn't know who Azov was that they didn't.
That's even in some ways more disturbing, but trying to pretend like, oh, these guys aren't a problem.
And that's, I think, it's not just about like, you know, trying to give credence to some of the Russian concerns.
It's if you care about the future of Ukraine, you don't want a movement like Azov or Right Sector to be powerful because they're just going to keep causing problems for the future of that country.
All right, Dan, well, it's always great to talk to you.
Part of me laments the fact that you're not still at the Pentagon post that you ought to be occupying, if not for that fabricated leaking investigation.
But I guess the selfish part of me is happy that that means that you're able to speak so freely about so many of these issues and your commentary is really invaluable because I do think you bring so many vital points that otherwise get overlooked by people who don't have the same knowledge of the military as you do.
I know I found our conversation really enlightening and as I said we're going to be harassing you to come back on so look for that harassment and I want to thank you for your time tonight.
Thank you so much, Glenn.
I really enjoyed this conversation.
Yeah, me too.
Have a great evening.
Have a great evening.
Huh?
Oh, I'm still on the air.
I thought that after we have an interview like that, it means we usually go off here.
But I had previously said that actually we have a whole part of the first segment.
We had prepared about what happened at the White House today and other things.
But I think that probably is enough for tonight.
We've got on 90 minutes.
I thought the conversation with Dan was fantastic.
I knew it would be, but I thought it was even better than what we expected.
And this whole stuff with Ukraine and the ongoing negotiations.
certainly are going to continue throughout this week and so we can continue to report on it.
Tomorrow I felt like I said a lot of what I had to say on it and then I think the conversation with Dan supplemented that very well.
That was my fault so this is actually going to be the end of our show despite the fact that for a second it didn't seem like it would be.
Does that mean I'm going to just say goodbye to this camera?
Okay, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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