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Jan. 22, 2024 - Jim Fetzer
50:43
The Tucker Carlson Encounter - Col. Douglas MacGregor, January 21, 2024The Tucker Carlson Encounter - Col. Douglas MacGregor, January 21, 2024
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Pretty much everything that NBC News and the New York Times have told you about the war in Ukraine is a lie.
The Russian army is incompetent, they claim.
Ukraine is a democracy.
Vladimir Putin is Hitler and he's trying to take over the world.
Thankfully, the Ukrainians are winning.
None of that is true.
Every claim is false, the last one especially.
The Ukrainian army is not winning.
In fact, it's losing badly.
Ukraine is being destroyed.
Its population is being slaughtered in lopsided battles with a technologically superior enemy, or scattered by the millions to the rest of the globe as refugees.
Ukraine is running out of soldiers.
As that happens, the question will inevitably arise, who's going to replace them?
If the Ukrainians can't beat Putin, who will?
The answer, of course, will be us.
American troops will fight the Russian army in Eastern Europe.
That's most likely.
And the assumption is, we'll win.
But will we win?
Probably not, says former Army Colonel Douglas MacGregor, a decorated combat veteran who advised the Secretary of Defense in the last administration.
The U.S., says MacGregor, is on the brink of a catastrophic war that could very easily destroy us.
Few Americans seem to understand that, but they should.
Doug McGregor is now the CEO of our country, Our Choice, and we sat down with him recently.
This conversation is worth hearing.
Doug McGregor, thanks for joining us.
How would you assess and describe the state of the war in Ukraine right now?
That's an important question, and not enough people have good answers at this point.
I think all of the lies that have been told for more than a year and a half about the Ukrainians are winning, the Ukrainian cause is just, the Russians are evil, the Russians are incompetent, all of that is collapsing.
And it's collapsing because what's happening on the battlefield is horrific.
Ukrainians now we think have lost 400,000 men killed in battle.
We were talking about 300,000, 350,000 a few months ago.
In the last month of this supposed counteroffensive, which was to sweep the battlefield, they lost at least 40,000 killed.
We don't even know how many people have been wounded, but we know that probably upwards of 40,000 to 50,000 soldiers are amputees.
We know the hospitals are full.
And we know that Ukrainian units at the platoon and company level, that's with anywhere from 50 to 150 to 200 men, are in piecemeal fashion surrendering to the Russians.
Not because they don't want to fight, it's because they can't fight anymore.
They have so many wounded they can't evacuate them.
And commanders are saying, well, if I can't evacuate my wounded, I'm going to surrender because otherwise the wounded will die.
And so they call the Russians, they all speak Russian, and tell them on the radio, look, I've got 50, 60 wounded here.
I'm going to surrender because I don't want them to be killed.
And the Russians from the very beginning have always treated the Ukrainian soldiers very fairly and very gently.
And so they know they're not going to be abused or mistreated.
They know they can actually be exchanged for Russian prisoners in the future.
So they've surrendered.
And I think we're going to see this army that we've been spending so heavily on increasingly melt away.
And at the same time, as we're talking, if you look at this long banana-shaped strip of territory in southern Ukraine that the Russians control, if you go to the north-eastern corner of that, south of this city called Kharkiv, there are major offensive operations taking place there right now.
And the Ukrainian forces are being swept away in front of the Russians.
And again, all of this, all of this happens in a way that is just not reported in the West.
And in the meantime, rather than admit that this is a terrible tragedy that should be ended on humanitarian grounds, if no other, that the killing should stop, as President Trump said, stop the killing.
We're going to continue.
And this puts the Russians in the unhappy position of marching further West, because from the very beginning, Putin and his advisors were never interested in a war with NATO or the United States.
That's why you've had such incrementalism, this slow grind of movement forward.
Defensive operations for a long period to build up the force and then continued offensive operations.
They have over 300,000 combat troops in reserve in Russia.
And I think they're sitting there and not being released to fight because President Putin anticipates the possibility that we will intervene in Western Ukraine.
And if we intervene in Western Ukraine, the Russians will be ready for that.
And the consequences for us and for NATO will be devastating, because we are not ready to fight the Russians.
Why?
Oh, I think the readiness has been on the decline for a long time.
You've had an almost steady, uninterrupted decline in the discipline that makes soldiers fight.
Discipline is a tough thing.
We don't always understand it.
Discipline is really a form of habit, and you build those habits over time through repetition, but you also build it under stress, under pressure, so that it sinks in, and then you build cohesion within the framework of those units.
You don't build cohesion when you're dividing the force on racial grounds, when you're pushing people who are clearly unqualified up the ranks to command, when you're rewarding people for anything other than demonstrated character, competence, and intelligence.
All of those things are demoralizing, destructive to military establishments.
The Army and the Marines are suffering with it.
So is the Air Force and the Navy.
And there's no easy fix.
And these cracks that are just cracks at the moment will become giant fissures if you go to war.
So you spent the bulk of your adult life as an Army officer, went to West Point, commanded troops in battle.
You're a combat veteran, decorated.
But you entered the Army right at the tail end of Vietnam.
That's right.
When it was famously at its name.
Yes.
How would you compare the readiness of the current U.S.
Armed Forces to, say, 1975 at the end of Vietnam?
I think that in terms of morale and discipline, we are close to where we were in the late 70s.
We have a lot of people that are confused about what needs to be done.
We've lost a sense of what's right.
In other words, you don't have people that have served long enough in formations to know what right looks like, so that you can see a battle group.
Whether it's a battalion size or brigade or larger.
And you know what makes things work.
You know what it takes to fight in battle.
We don't have very many people like that because since 2001, most of the fighting has been on a very small scale against a fleeting enemy.
You know, running around in sandals with an AK-47, relying heavily on explosives, mines to kill and maim Americans.
about 87% of our losses were really a result of explosives that came from mines.
This is not an army that is accustomed to fighting anybody who can fight back.
If I were gonna compare it to an army, a better comparison would probably be the French army before the Franco-Prussian war, because the French had fought Mexican bandits, Mexican rebels, They'd fought Arab bandits, Arab insurgents.
They'd had a little experience fighting disgruntled, demoralized European troops, Austrians in northern Italy.
But they hadn't faced a truly modern enemy.
But people were convinced that the French army was the greatest army in the world because they'd fought in North Africa, Indochina, Mexico, all over the world.
That war was a catastrophe for France.
And that army was decimated in months by a Prussian army that was a modern force, highly disciplined, very competently led, trained and equipped.
So we're not there.
We have equipment that is decades old.
The tanks that I served on, for instance, when I went to war in 1990, were virtually brand new, state-of-the-art.
Those tanks are still out there.
They've been rebuilt, but they're not new anymore.
They're no longer as capable as they once were.
Here's a quick example.
We have a turbine engine in the M1A1 series tanks, and that turbine engine burns up as much fuel sitting still as it does moving.
Because it's a turbine engine, it was designed to be used on an aircraft.
We put them in the tanks.
So that means you've got an eight-hour tank.
Every eight hours, if you're operating, you've got to refuel this thing.
This thing also burns fuel at a very, very high temperature, over 1,000 degrees.
And there are 40-plus connections around the engine that are very brittle that can easily cause fires if accidentally they touch these little tubes that carry various types of fluid, if they actually touch this engine that's burning so hot.
So the engine is so hot that you can track the movement of U.S.
Army ground forces with tanks from low Earth orbiting satellites.
So if you think you're going to hide or conceal yourself, Or outpace somebody.
You're just a glowing target from space.
To this must be added the ridiculousness of not having replaced that engine with a reliable, state-of-the-art diesel-electric engine, which is much cooler, which can go for 24 hours or more without a refuel.
And these things are extremely problematic when you go to war, because you have to pull forces back, refill them, return them to the front.
That's not easy to do when you're operating as frequently as every eight or six or nine hours.
They say, well, we put it all, I guess, a generator on there to make up for this when you're sitting still.
The problem is that you don't sit still for very long in combat, because if you do, you're going to be targeted and destroyed.
And that, of course, is what we're seeing in Ukraine.
Persistent surveillance from space, from overhead surveillance, makes everything visible all the time.
So if you're going to embed yourself in the ground, if you're going to set up a permanent position where you try to fire from that, you're going to be targeted and destroyed very, very quickly.
So that's why this defense right now looks a lot like World War I. Because anybody who moves is identified and killed.
The only limitation on your ability to target and destroy the enemy is ammunition.
The Russians, of course, have no shortages whatsoever.
You recall at the beginning of this, we have all these shortages, right?
The Russians can't keep up with missiles.
The Russians can't keep up with shells.
Well, they have multiple manufacturing facilities operating seven days a week at 24 hours a day.
We have no surge capacity in the United States.
It would take us many, many months to come up to that kind of standard where we could actually compete in high-end conventional warfare.
And that's why people like me and others worry that if we get into a confrontation that we cannot win because the world has changed, warfare has changed, integrated air defencers will knock virtually everything that flies out of the sky, that we will then fall back on a nuclear deterrent.
A tactical nuclear weapon that says, if you keep advancing, we'll have to use a nuclear weapon.
We don't want to go there, because the notion that there are so-called tactical nukes, you've heard that expression?
Yes.
Oh, it's just a little duke, so that won't precipitate a major war.
The use of any nuclear weapon is going to precipitate escalation very rapidly, because your opponents will assume that if they don't use their nuclear weapons, they're going to lose them.
So we're living in a terrible dilemma right now.
The smartest thing that we can do is end this war.
What is Russia's objective, do you believe?
Assuming that objectives change over the course of a war.
Of course.
Well, the original objective obviously was very different.
I mean, if they'd made peace with the Russians back in, let's say, March or April, I think the Russians would have retained very little territory, probably only Luhansk and Donetsk, the two so-called breakaway provinces.
And I think there would have been guarantees of neutrality for Ukraine and guarantees of equal rights before the law for Russians.
That's what people don't understand.
Most of this has to do with abuse meted out to Russians in Ukraine by the Ukrainian government.
And this, of course, is this radical nationalist government that came to power in Kiev in 2014.
And they almost immediately, as soon as that government came into power, they started launching a war against the so-called breakaway provinces.
And Putin kept trying and trying and trying.
The Minsk Accords were another good example.
Trying to get to a solution that would not involve confrontation.
Now we know, of course, thanks to Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, that the Minsk Accords were just a ruse, a way to kill time and give the Ukrainians more time to build up their forces.
To build up their forces for what?
And it's pretty clear they were building up for an offensive against Russia.
And of course, the next step was that we bring in our missiles and station them in eastern Ukraine, which puts them in a couple of minutes away from all of Russia's cities and all of Russia's nuclear deterrent.
So this was unacceptable.
So that original deal is gone now.
And the question is, what will the Russians accept?
Well, they'll, I think they're going to demand that whatever remains of Ukraine, rump Ukraine is what most people are calling it now.
Most of what's probably west of the Dnieper River has to be neutral.
It can't be part of NATO.
We will, the Russians will never tolerate NATO forces on Ukrainian soil because we've demonstrated conclusively that we are fundamentally hostile to Russia.
So that's the minimal requirement.
How that's governed, that's another question.
Who knows?
I'm sure Moscow would want to have some say in that government and who is there to ensure that behind the scenes they are not once again subjected to the treatment that we subjected them to in the Minsk Accords.
What is the Ukrainian objective?
I think more and more Ukrainians just want to survive this.
And that's becoming very hard.
And Zelensky and the radicals around him are basically committed to fighting this war to the last Ukrainian.
And of course, I'm sure that Mr. Zelensky and his friends are anxious at some point to retire to their estates in Florida or Venice or Cyprus to collect on the billions that they've managed to steal or siphon from all the aid that we've provided.
Remember, Ukraine is probably one of the most corrupt places in the world.
A friend of mine who had spent time in the old Soviet Union and also lived in Mexico came back from a visit to Mexico and he said, it's hard to believe this, but Ukraine is more corrupt than Mexico.
Wow.
And I think that's true.
So this is a world-class disaster.
14 million Ukrainians have left the nation, presumably never to return, because when they're asked in Germany or France or Croatia or Spain or wherever they go, we will never go back.
So, what are you going to do with this country?
And then, of course, we have the usual suspects, the great agricultural business conglomerates, along with BlackRock, who have their eyes on the fertile Ukraine ground in Western Ukraine.
I suppose there'll be a big effort to get control of that in some fashion.
That may not work, though, once this war ends with the complete and utter defeat of the Ukrainian regime.
Who is Zelensky?
Exactly.
How would you characterize Zelensky?
Well, Zelensky... George W. Bush called him our generation's Winston Churchill.
Well, this is W, right?
Yeah.
Not a very thoughtful man.
He was a comedian who made a living acting on stage, frequently pretending to be a transvestite, doing things with various body parts that I won't go into.
And he was picked up by an oligarch named Kolomoisky.
Kolomoisky is the individual who is probably more responsible than anybody else for funding this atrocity we call the Azov Regiment that runs around with the swastikas and Nazi gear and so forth.
And he was picked and then blessed by Victoria Nuland and the State Department as their man.
Now, when he originally ran for office, he ran on a peace platform.
And he was overwhelmingly elected across the country because he said, if I am elected as your president, I will make peace with Russia.
The Ukrainians didn't want to go to war with Russia.
They were looking for a way out of this and a resolution to the crisis.
Of course, once he was in there, he took a different road.
And I can't help but think that that road was defined for him by us.
Who is Victoria Nuland?
Oh, goodness gracious.
All these hard questions.
I do not know Victoria Nuland personally.
I know Fred Kagan and his brother Bob is married to her.
And she's a long term committed neocon.
This is someone I would not characterize as either Democrat or Republic.
These are people with this agenda.
And the agenda says until the entire world is garrisoned by U.S.
forces and is converted forcibly to some form of democracy that we approve of, the world will not be safe and we must continue to fight.
And I think in the case of Russia, Russia has special appeal because I think these people have ancestors who came from that region of the world and have a permanent axe to grind with the Russians.
Which, of course, I don't.
I don't think most Americans do, nor do I think anybody in government should shape policy based on whatever unhappiness their ancestors experienced in a place like Russia.
So that's a nutshell, but I think that's enough.
And wherever she goes, usually there is conflict, crisis, and fighting.
And she's a strong opponent of fighting to the last Ukrainian.
Hmm.
Does she, do you think, have relevant experience that would qualify her to be in charge of this war?
Well, obviously she does.
But, you know, it's sort of like asking somebody who has never snaked a drain or replaced a garbage disposal to be a plumber.
And I think we have a lot of those in Washington.
She's not the only one.
So no, I don't think she understands the gravity of the situation.
These are the same people.
Tony Blinken is in this.
What's his name?
Sullivan.
I keep mixing up Sullivan with the previous O'Brien who was in the White House.
Not much difference.
And Sullivan will all tell you, well, you know, the Russians are weak.
The Russian economy is fragile.
The Russian armed forces are poor.
Their generals are terrible.
And they can't possibly win.
All we have to do is to keep up the pressure and they will collapse.
Well, that's been a hell of a strategy.
And it's killed large numbers of people and created millions of refugees and destroyed the country.
But it hasn't hurt Russia.
And Russia today is stronger than it has been in 30 or 40 years.
You have a Russian military establishment that is now more potent and more capable than the Russian military was in the mid-1980s.
Why?
Wars typically, don't they degrade a military force?
Well, the Russians have been very, very careful and deliberate, very cautious about the expenditure of life.
What do you think the casualty numbers are in Russia?
You know, that's a hard one to estimate.
I think probably 50,000, 40 to 50,000 killed, maybe another 40 to 50,000 wounded.
Wait, total?
Yes.
As compared to the Ukrainian?
maybe another 40 to 50,000 wounded.
Wait, total?
Yes.
As compared to the Ukrainian?
400,000 dead, yeah.
Oh, so this is- The ratio is one to five.
And you believe those numbers are roughly accurate?
Yes, yeah, absolutely.
And these are... 50,000 to 400,000, that's a larger country, or with a much smaller country, with a much smaller military, I mean, that's a grotesque... Oh, it is.
And the manpower is leaving Ukraine as quickly as it can get out, because people don't want to be thrown into the meat grinder.
You can't defeat what the Russians have built.
They were the first back in the 1970s to understand the criticality of linking intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance in space as well as on land and at sea with strike weapons.
What's a strike weapon?
Rockets, missiles, guided artillery for precision.
They've done that extremely well.
So that's one of the reasons they have thousands of guns, hundreds of rocket launchers, hundreds of ballistic missile launchers, cruise missiles and so forth.
And these are then linked to that ISR.
So the response time is almost instantaneous.
A Ukrainian formation is located at this spot next to this building on the outskirts of, say, Kharkov.
They can have missiles on the way to those targets or rockets or drones within the space of perhaps five, six, seven minutes.
So this is a very well-structured, well-organized machine.
And the machine is grinding up everything in front of it.
And it's not going to be defeated.
But what about the space-age military technology that we've been sending to Ukraine?
That hasn't brought parity?
Well, first of all, a lot of the equipment we send over there is, quite frankly, obsolete.
It's very old.
It's not new.
We've given them a few new items, but not much.
And remember what I said about missiles.
We sent them some Patriot missiles, and I think at this point in this newest round of money, what, 750 million, something like that, we're sending 33 missiles, you know, Patriot missiles.
These are missiles that are used to shoot down aircraft or cruise missiles, incoming opposing forces.
Every time you're in air defense, people will tell you if there's a target out there, you shoot two missiles at it as a minimum to make sure you get the target.
Well, you run out of our missiles in the space of a few days.
33 missiles will be gone in two or three days.
You can't possibly defeat the thousands of projectiles that are being hurled in your direction.
And the radars, of course, emit.
And so your radars light up and become targets.
This is a no-win situation, because the Russians, though they were not prepared in February 2022 for this kind of war, they are now.
And they're continuing to prepare, which includes continuous mobilization.
There are up to 750,000 troops in and around Ukraine.
Most of them are on the outskirts, Belorussia, Western Russia, down in Southern Ukraine.
That number is going to rise over the next year, I would expect, to 1.2 million.
And people are being reservists, being called out of universities.
People are being through the military now, working in universities to become engineers, architects, mathematicians, whatever.
They're being pulled out, put in uniform, and readied.
Because, again, our intransigence, our demonstrated hatred and hostility for Moscow and for Russia has convinced the Russian people, as well as the leadership in Moscow, that they are going to have to fight us.
and anyone who has allied with us.
So they're preparing for that eventuality.
That's why it's so important that we have to wake up, understand what we've done has backfired.
Whatever we set out to achieve has failed.
What we need to do now is stop this and come to a settlement that we may not like, but it needs to happen, and soon, before this thing is out of control.
Eventually, you keep this up, within the next six, eight months, you'll see hundreds of thousands of Russian troops on the Polish border.
That is not what we set out to achieve.
No, it's a terrifying disaster.
And what cost do you think to the United States?
The latest estimates since 2001, including the spending in Ukraine, all the military spending designed to support these interventions, conflicts, wars, whatever you want to call them, about $14 trillion.
Now that $14 trillion is largely debt financed.
So then you have to move from the 14 trillion to where we stand now in national sovereign debt, which of course I know the economic luminaries think is meaningless.
But you have 130 million workers and you look at those figures and suddenly you realize that every adult male or woman in the United States who works for a living has a debt hanging over them of roughly $200,000, $240,000.
In order to deal with what the 14 trillion have added to the national sovereign debt.
And this is part of the issue that people are walking away from this war for good reasons.
Look, the average American earns about $31,000 a year.
That's it.
The average American pays about $16,600 a year.
Now the people in Congress, this doesn't affect them, or in the Hill or inside the Beltway.
We're talking about the real Americans who live out there, who are scratching out a living.
Keep in mind that a person who works all his life and then tries to draw on social security can expect a monthly payment of probably $1,400, if they're lucky, $1,400.
We hand every alleged asylum seeker, illegal migrant pouring into the border in Texas or wherever else, we hand them when they get their $2,200.
And we put them on that $2,200 diet From there on out per month.
Yet, somebody who works all his life, retires, and draws Social Security gets $1,400.
The Afghans who were hanging on to the planes in Kabul, trying to come to the United States, when they arrived, they received $2,200 a month.
Now if you can make sense out of this, please try.
Because I don't think most Americans can make sense out of this at all.
And that's one of the reasons people have said not because they know anything about Ukraine.
Most Americans don't.
If they knew anything about the history of Eastern Europe, they would all say, get out.
Because the wars and the blood and the hatred that have been characterized to that part of the world for hundreds of years is something we can't sort out.
We can't fix it.
We shouldn't try to arbitrate it.
We don't know anything about it.
We shouldn't be in this is the bottom line.
I think Americans have figured that out.
But now they're beginning to look at the numbers and the figures and they say, what happened to consent by the government?
Instead, we have contempt for the governed.
Whatever the governed want, they don't get.
Who gets it?
Well, the donors get what they want.
You know, somebody was joking the other day and said, you know, Doug, if the donors were cannibals, they'd feed the American people to them.
That's the attitude in Washington, D.C.
What's the donor what?
Give me more money.
It's a catastrophe.
It's the destruction of our whole republic.
I don't think people realize how far gone things are.
A lot of Americans sense it, and I think we're on the path to some sort of national come-to-Jesus moment, where we're tired of being the contemptibles.
We want to have a say in what our government does, and we really don't have it.
You mentioned the donors and we just had a conversation with Vivek Ramaswamy running for president Republican side.
He's rich and so he doesn't need big donors but he has said publicly that He can't get money from any big time Republican donor because his position on Ukraine is similar to yours.
He doesn't.
He doesn't buy the NBC News version of the Ukraine war.
Why are donors on both sides so attached to a war that's clearly hurting the United States?
Well, first of all, you've got to go through and identify the donors.
What's their background?
Where did they come from?
And why do they feel the way they do?
I think there are more personal issues here than we realize with many of them.
Secondly, you have to look at the monetary benefits to them.
It's not just being heavily invested in the defense industry.
You've seen that report from the Oakland Institute, which talks about arable land in Ukraine, the breadbasket of Europe, some of the richest, most fertile soil anywhere in the world.
A friend of mine who's Ukrainian said, all you have to do is take an old boot, stick it in the ground in Ukraine, come back in six months and something grows.
The booze transformed into something you can eat.
He said, that's how fertile this is.
So there are people that are interested in getting control of it.
Oligarchs.
They call them oligarchs in Eastern Europe.
I'm starting to think that we should talk about oligarchs in the West.
Of course.
Because they're also invested in this.
They have an interest in it.
So that's part of it.
Then, of course, you have the advantages of people on the Hill.
You have somebody like McConnell who says, We're so fortunate that we're doing so much damage to the Russians.
This will set them back for 10 years.
They've lost all this equipment.
The Ukrainians have done a great job.
Well, of course, all that's a lie.
That's a blatant falsehood.
And then he follows up by saying, and we're offloading equipment that we can replenish with newer equipment.
Well, unfortunately, the new equipment we're going to buy looks an awful lot like the old equipment.
So you're not necessarily getting new top-of-the-line material.
You're just getting new versions of what you've already got, which, of course, is what Congress wants.
Unfortunately, that doesn't prepare you for a future war because your probable opponents are investing in very different capabilities from the ones that you have.
And remember, again, all the things that we once monopolized, all the precision, all of that's lost now.
Everybody has it.
There's nothing that we can do that they cannot also do in Moscow, in Beijing, and probably in many other countries that we don't even know about yet.
But of course, it all means money.
You know, where does the money go?
Does it go into the Defense Department?
Sure.
But then it's transferred over into industry.
And industry then contributes money to PACs.
And the PAC money goes where?
Back to the Hill.
So it's a wonderful sort of recycling machine.
Where the wash is washed again and again.
Now, what happens in Ukraine?
Well, the equipment shows up.
Some of the equipment reaches the troops.
A lot of it is sold off, ends up in arms bazaars like Kosovo.
Or we see it now being used by the drug cartels.
We saw somebody working for one of the major cartels that is also involved in human trafficking walking around with a Javelin missile.
The whole kit?
Well, where did that come from?
Well, it came from Europe.
Probably may have gone from Europe to Afghanistan, Europe to North Africa, Europe to the Balkans, and then over in the United States, south of the border.
What?
I mean, you can't be the only person who spent your life as an army officer has reached these conclusions.
Like, what are they thinking at the Pentagon?
There have to be people who have Come to the same positions.
Tucker, we have right now, I think, 43, could be 44, it's usually 43 or 44, four-star generals and admirals.
You have to think about that.
We have a force of 1.1.
It seems like a lot.
Well, let me explain just how much it is.
We have 1.12 million people in the armed forces.
In other words, you add up all the armed services, that 1.12 million.
In World War II, at the height of the war, end of '42, beginning of '43, when we had 12.2 million men under arms, we had seven four-stars.
Seven Four Stars.
I can tell you who they were.
You had George Marshall, Chief of Staff of the Army.
Douglas MacArthur, commanding in the Pacific.
Eisenhower, commanding in Great Britain and in the European theater.
Hap Arnold, for the Air Force.
Unofficially, he was the Vice Chief, but he was effectively commanding the Air Forces.
And then you had Leahy, who was in the White House.
Admiral Leahy is the liaison officer.
He was effectively the unofficial chairman of the Joint Chiefs, per FDR.
Then you had Nimitz and King.
King was the CNO, and Nimitz commanded in the Pacific.
Now somehow or another, with only seven four-stars, we managed to survive the greatest, most destructive war in history, and fortunately end up on the quote-unquote winning side.
Now we are blessed with 43 to 44 four-stars organized into multiple commands designed to blanket the globe with American military power and interest.
I think it borders on lunacy, especially since we don't live in the world of 1920, 1945, this is the 21st century.
Today, if you have forces forward, they're easy to identify, easy to target, easy to destroy.
So what's the point of having a lot of forces forward?
Well, we can always reinforce them.
No, you can't.
How do you get across these vast oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific, when your opponents have submarine fleets?
How many ships do they have to sink?
Supply ships, transports before everybody says, that's it, we're not going.
Same thing true for aircraft.
Well, we have better aircraft.
We may have better aircraft, but we don't have very good air defenses.
We've neglected air and missile defenses for years.
In the Army, they always treated theater air and missile defense as sort of the redheaded stepchild, because we haven't fought anybody that compelled us to defend ourselves from missile and air attack.
Well, those days are over.
In other words, if you press this war, With Russia in Central East Europe, it will reach us here in the United States.
People aren't thinking about that.
How many Americans do you think are assisting or fighting on the side of Ukraine right now?
Well, I don't know, but I imagine it must be hundreds because the President of the United States, as you know, has authorized combat pay for Americans in uniform in Ukraine.
Now, didn't specifically say uniform, just that Americans serving in Ukraine.
So I imagine large numbers are in other uniforms, not necessarily American.
Some may be assisting contractors or working with them, but a substantial number.
And again, thus far, the Russians have been very careful about not necessarily targeting them.
And it would be a mistake to assume that the Russians don't know where they are.
The latest strikes that we've had over the last couple of months have been all the way out on the border with Romania, the border with Poland, the border with Moldova.
Precision strikes, Kinzhal missiles carrying thousand-pound warheads.
Great accuracy.
Very destructive.
Why?
The Russians are sending a message.
If you think you're going to hide from us if you come in here, you're not going to do that.
If you cross these borders, we will annihilate you.
You'll never get to the Dnieper River.
We won't permit it.
And we need to come to terms with these realities because we can't defeat it.
And see, this is the sad part.
Somebody will say to me, well, Doug, you know, you don't sound very patriotic.
I'm not patriotic.
I put my life on the line for the country.
I have no compunction about fighting or killing anybody if we need to do it.
Don't get me wrong.
We don't need to do this.
That's the point.
This is unnecessary.
So I think a lot of Americans suspect that maybe our military force is weaker than we think it is.
You're saying it's much weaker than we think it is.
Think of it like an engine.
You have a 500 horsepower engine in 1991 and a 500 pound 500 horsepower engine goes from 500 to 400 to 300 to 200 down to 100.
Now you don't notice very much because you don't put the pedal to the metal.
It's good enough to get to the grocery store.
It's good enough to drive on 95 for 50 miles.
But if you put your foot down the pedal, you're going to discover that this is a very weak engine.
It's not performing very well.
It doesn't have what it once had.
In other words, we've gone down in the horsepower arena, militarily.
This is the warning.
This is what people need to understand.
People say, well, what about all the money we spent?
That's a damn good question.
You spend all this money, what are you getting for it?
Where did the money go?
Who's making the decisions?
And you have separate services.
Each service lives in its own world, has its own doctrine, its own bureaucracy, its own way of war.
All this jointness is just, you know, fugazi nonsense.
And you've got lots of generals, and every general has a reason to exist.
And every general has a thousand men in his headquarters, every four-star.
And every four-star needs money for his projects.
And this becomes a giant trough feeding frenzy for people on the Hill.
And nobody ever bothers to stand up and say, why?
What are we doing this for?
I mean, just look at what's happening in Africa.
Niger decided they'd had enough of their French overlords.
You know, the French retained ownership of virtually 50% of everything of value in their colonies in Afrique du Nord.
Now, that's French business.
Whatever the French want to do, it's fine with me.
But my point is, We're involved there because we built an airstrip in Niger and we marched in there to defeat Islamists.
The truth is, there weren't very many Islamists until we showed up.
Now there are lots of Islamists.
What's wrong with that picture?
And now it turns out the whole population, in addition to hating the French, has decided they hate us.
So we've had a coup in Niger that's now being backed by the Algerians, as well as the neighbors.
And people are saying, well, we trained them.
We gave them assistance and they're turning on us.
Oh, it must be the Wagner mercenaries.
Are there any Wagner mercenaries in the place?
In other words, that we may have gone in there and blown it on our own, made mistakes of our own, backed the wrong horse, whatever you want to call it.
Doesn't occur to anybody.
Well, it must be those Russians or maybe those pesky Chinese.
We have this unfortunate habit of seeing ourselves as always wearing the white hat.
Always doing everything right.
And we miss the truth.
And the truth is, soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines do what they're told.
They'll go wherever you ask them to go.
They'll put their lives on the line.
But it doesn't always make sense.
And sometimes it may be for profit.
Not for national interest.
Not for the interests of the American people.
And that's the problem.
And no one's been watching this thing.
They see the flag.
Everybody salutes.
Everybody listens to the music.
Everyone's enthralled.
But the old 500-horsepower engine is gone.
We're down to 100 horsepower.
And the 100-horsepower engine is trying to make it all over the world.
It's not going very well.
And we haven't even talked about our economy, obviously.
Um, given all of the, I mean, what you're saying is, is horrifying.
Um, and some of it with respect does seem kind of obvious.
Almost nobody in the Congress is saying what you are saying.
Chris Christie never served in the Congress, but he was a governor.
He's been on the national stage for quite a long time.
He's running for president now.
He recently went to Ukraine to meet with the world's highest paid actor who runs it.
I think we have a clip.
I believe that the overwhelming majority of the American people understand that we need to be with Ukraine on this fight.
Do you maintain the current commitment?
Do you expand it?
How do you respond to that?
When we were in Vietnam, I was 16, and I remember General Westmoreland telling everyone, If we don't fight these people in Vietnam and to fight them here, we'll be fighting them in Los Angeles and in all our major cities.
So we have to stay here and win this or that's what's going to happen.
A lot of them did go to Los Angeles and build thriving businesses.
Actually, in the end.
Well, my hat's off to them.
That's fine.
I have no problems with that.
But I think it's a lot of nonsense.
Same thing with Ukraine.
But Chris Christie's not stupid.
He's very dishonest, obviously.
But he's not stupid.
Well, he has donors.
That's what that is.
Of course.
Where's he going to get his money?
Well, Governor Christie, we want this war in Ukraine.
We want to see that man Putin removed.
We've got to get rid of him and his regime.
Why?
Well, you know, it's not democratic.
Most of the world is not democratic.
There are a lot of people who don't think we're very democratic anymore.
We're not.
So, who are we kidding?
I think Americans are waking up.
And Christie is probably there for name recognition and more money, but I don't see him winning anything.
No.
But he does, I mean, in a blusterier way, he's expressing the same thing that the rest of them, Nikki Haley and all the rest.
Well, doesn't this also divert attention from far more serious matters here at home?
It really does.
What does it cost Christie to say, we have to beat those Russians?
Nothing.
It doesn't cost him anything.
It costs the country a great deal in terms of money, prestige.
What Fitch just downgraded our credit worthiness one more time.
And people say, oh, it's not a problem.
You know, the bond yields are on their way up and prices are on their way down.
When is the Treasury bond fire sale going to happen?
One who banks offload these treasury bonds that they bought when they were at zero interest because they're now worthless.
What's going to happen in China and Japan, Saudi Arabia, where they have lots of bonds?
I mean, we're fragile.
We're vulnerable.
Nobody even mentions it because nobody wants to fess up and tell the truth.
We've overreached.
We're running on fumes.
What about this economy?
What are we building?
What are we producing?
That's what made us a great power between 1865 and basically 1920.
That's when your industrial base was created.
That's when you had people like Edison and Tesla, Rockefeller, all these people.
They were tough and they were intelligent and they were effective.
The only person I see out there now is remotely like that is Musk.
He's building something.
He's creating something.
When you do that, you create employment.
I don't see that happening.
High tech startups?
The hell are they?
What are they doing for us?
A new app on your phone?
We've got to wake up and say, oh, well, AI, AI, AI is better algorithms.
Better algorithms do not replace human beings, and they don't necessarily create opportunity for people to work.
We've got to think this thing through very carefully.
We haven't done that.
We haven't.
What about our energy sector?
Oil, gas, we've killed it.
We have what, half the refineries we once had?
California had something in the neighborhood of 43 or 44 refineries.
They're down to 23.
You know, how long before suddenly we're in another energy crisis and we need to rapidly refine fuel?
Can we do it?
Well, the answer is it's going to be tough.
It applies, the same thing applies to Raytheon.
We want 200 missiles and we want them now.
Well, we have no surge capacity.
There's no excess capacity built into anything.
What are we going to do with this scientific industrial base?
What about our agricultural sector?
What are we doing for that?
High-end manufacturing is dead.
We need to repatriate lots of industries.
That's what President Trump talked about.
We absolutely need to do that.
People say, well, we want free trade.
Well, I'm 100% for free trade as long as it doesn't kill us.
But if it kills us, then I'm for protection.
I think we need to understand how we got where we are today.
I don't see anybody talking about that.
I think Americans are going to turn these people off.
You know, Democrats, Republicans, it's the Uniparty.
Who are we kidding?
What are they doing for us?
The swamp gets bigger and richer.
The rest of the country gets poorer.
I don't see any good outcome right now from any of these candidates.
Perhaps I'm too harsh, but that's the way I feel.
Last question, and it's more a piece of tape that I want to get you to respond to, but I think it's come to a lot of people's attention, this is just so perfect, that one of the spokesmen for the Ukrainian military is an American guy, leftist, dressed up like a woman, who's now wearing a Ukrainian army uniform and talking about killing Putin.
Watch this.
If you look at Putin's mouth, you'll notice that blood drips from it.
He's a vampire carrying out genocide against both Ukrainians and Russians alike.
Vlad Putin bathes in the blood of innocent children and enjoys it.
And this is why the dictator of the Russian Federation must be deposed, and why peace talks have to be focused on President Zelensky's 10-point peace formula, And the full liberation of Ukraine.
There's something so perfect about that, the convergence of every ugly anti-human trend in modern life.
Is that a transgender person?
That's a guy with fake breasts, yes.
That's interesting.
Well, I think everything else is fake, too.
We estimate that at least 60,000 children from Ukraine have disappeared, vanished since this war began.
Where are they?
What about all of the women that have been sold into prostitution that once lived in Ukraine?
This war is a catastrophe.
The people bathing in blood are in Kiev and Washington, not in Moscow.
And this sort of thing is going to play well until it can't.
And that's the sad part.
We're going to see this whole thing collapse and implode.
It's coming.
And with it, NATO?
I would think so, because the Europeans right now, Germany is well into a recession.
It has systematically de-industrialized itself by casting its lot with the anti-Russian crowd.
And remember that in Europe, it was not very difficult to supply stereotypes left over from the Second World War of the Soviet Armed Forces.
The Soviet Army was You know, an exercise in barbarism and savagery, mass rape, you name it.
That's not Russia today.
Russia today is a very different society, very different state.
And that's been Putin's effort from day one.
He's been interested in restoring Russia as an Orthodox Christian state with a true national identity and a strong national culture.
That's probably another reason why so many people want to destroy Russia, because it's the last European state that has not been flooded with foreigners and turned into some sort of polyglot experiment, which is failing badly, by the way, because at some point, All of these unwanted people in Europe, and for that matter, here as well, I suspect, when things fall apart economically, it's going to get very hard on them.
Because people are going to look around and they go through this, well, wait a minute, I'm an American.
Who are you?
What are you doing here?
Why are you living that way?
Why are you being subsidized?
I'm a German.
You know, you don't belong here.
You need to go home.
I'm getting $1,400 a month in retirement that I paid into my entire life and you just show up from Congo and you're getting $2,200.
Well, here's another one.
The president announced yesterday on one of these tweets, somebody tweets for him obviously, That the people that have lost everything in Hawaii, thousands of them, lost everything, are going to receive a one-time payment of $700.
Now, I haven't been to Hawaii in a long time.
I'm not even sure I've ever been there.
But I know that $700 isn't going to take care of a family for very long.
No.
But in the meantime, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars continue to flow into this black hole called Ukraine.
Which I think is an exercise in fraud, deceit, and criminality, to be blunt.
So when's it going to stop?
When are we going to take care of Hawaii?
Let's go back to Ohio where we had the derailment and the chemical spill.
4,000 human beings living in this area.
The water is still not fit to drink as I understand it.
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