Colonel Douglas Macgregor discusses the war in Ukraine with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Col. Macgregor graduated from West Point Academy and is considered "one of the Army's leading thinkers on innovation," He became prominent inside the Army when his book Breaking the Phalanx was published in 1997, arguing for radical reforms.
I'm very, very happy to be here today with a special guest.
Colonel Douglas McGregor is a decorated combat veteran, the author of five books, a PhD, and a defense and foreign policy consultant.
He was commissioned in the regular army in 1976 after one year at the Virginia Military Institute and four years at West Point.
In 2004, McGregor retired with the rank of colonel.
In 2020, the President appointed McGregor to serve as Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense.
He holds an MA in Comparative Politics and a PhD in International Relations from the University of Virginia.
McGregor is widely known inside the U.S., Europe, Israel, Russia, China, and Korea for both his leadership in the Battle of 73 Easting, U.S. Army's largest tank battle in World War II, in which Colonel McGregor commanded a tank and a unit of, I think, 19 tanks and about...
Actually, it was 1,100 men with 42 tanks, 42 Bradleys, and eight guns.
I believe it was during a sandstorm in the middle of the night.
Well, I was in the sandstorm late in the afternoon, but the battle lasted for over three hours, and we did have one man killed, six wounded, and we lost a Bradley, an infantry fighting vehicle.
So he is a warfighter.
He's written groundbreaking books on military transformation, one of them, The Breaking the Phalanx from 1997 and Transformation Under Fire in 2003.
McGregor's recommendations for change in force-designed and integrated all-arms effects operations have profoundly influenced force development in Israel, Russia and China.
In 2010, Colonel McGregor traveled to Seoul, Korea, to advise the Republic of Korea in its Defense Force design.
Transformation under fire was selected by Lieutenant Aviv Kavavi, the Chief of the Israeli Defense Forces, as the intellectual basis for the transformation of that military force.
In 28 years of service, McGregor taught in the Department of Social Sciences at West Point and commanded the 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry, and served as director of joint operations at SHAPE during the Kosovo air campaign.
In January 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insistence.
The U.S. CENTCOM commander listened to Colonel McGregor's concept for the offensive to seize Baghdad The plan was largely adopted according to his ideas, but he assumed no occupation of Iraq by U.S. forces.
He testified as an expert witness before the Senate and House Armed Services Committee and appeared as defense analysts on Fox News, BBC, Sky News, and many, many others.
I wanted to read that, and that's only a small part of Colonel McGregor's curriculum vitae.
He's really, as I said, an intellectual commander of U.S. military strategy around the world and extremely influential.
So I wanted to talk to you, Colonel McGregor, specifically about the Ukraine War.
And how would you summarize that, Warren, in terms of U.S. military strategy?
Well, I think first of all...
Geopolitical strategy and military strategy, we'll take them both.
Well, I think we need to establish up front that there has never really been a strategy.
That's part of our problem.
And it's been a problem for us for decades.
And by strategy, you usually mean that you have a clear, unambiguous, attainable political military objective.
You have a way to achieve it.
And at the end of that process, you have an end state in mind.
In other words, you have some vision of what you would like things to look like when it's over.
We tend to stumble into things and then muddle through as opposed to devising an effective strategy.
And right now, Ukraine is a good example.
We, as you know, and by the way, I want to take a minute here just to thank you for your pursuit of the truth.
Because today, when we talk about Ukraine, that's really what we want to get at more than anything else, is what's the truth?
Because the truth has been very difficult to discover, and very few Americans have heard the truth.
And it's not just Americans, it's most of us in the West.
So if you look at the situation today, we have to go back probably into the first part of this century at a series of discussions that Mr.
Putin, when he became president, held with leaders in the West, Trying to articulate to them his concerns about the expansion of the NATO alliance.
And in 2008, despite these discussions, we made it clear that we didn't care that we were going to advance the borders of NATO East to include Ukraine.
And now, keep in mind that Russia does already have a border with NATO. It's in Estonia.
It's a small border just south of St.
Petersburg.
But the Russians view whatever happens in Ukraine as a potentially existential matter for them.
And in 2014, we backed or staged or orchestrated a coup that put in power a very radical regime that was hostile to the interests of Moscow and to Russia.
And as a result of this, Mr. Putin and his colleagues in the Kremlin were convinced that the United States Navy would very shortly end up docking in Crimea, in Sevastopol, and take over the naval facilities there.
And that's one of the reasons that Putin struck quickly and seized control of Crimea, because he wasn't prepared to cede dominance in the Black Sea to the United States and NATO.
Subsequently, the Ukrainians began attacking citizens inside their borders who were Russians.
And almost a third of the population certainly is first and foremost Russian-speaking, and probably 20 to 25 percent are, frankly, Russians, living in the part of ukraine where today the fighting is occurring And these people were treated as second-class citizens.
They were told to become Ukrainians.
To abandon their heritage, their language, their culture, or they would be subject to harsh treatment, which of course many of them were.
At the same time, there were two oblasts or provinces in the east, Luhansk and Donetsk, that indicated they wanted to retain their Russian culture.
They would stay inside Ukraine, but they wanted to continue to live as Russians inside Ukraine.
This was unacceptable to the new regime, and the new regime began shelling them.
And in the space between the outbreak of the current war on 22 February last year and 2014 when this crisis first began, 14,000 people were killed in that area.
And the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe has reported very clearly that all of this was started not by Russia, but by the new Ukrainian government.
Now, over time, it became very clear that some solution had to be found to avoid expanding this war.
And that is one of the reasons why the Minsk Accords were drafted.
And they were simply drafted with the goal in mind of providing equal rights before the law for the Russians in eastern Ukraine and putting an end to the violence and the killing.
This, unfortunately, never occurred.
And now we know from the statements from Chancellor Merkel in December of last year and more recently from President Macron that these agreements were in fact a fraud.
That these agreements were designed to simply buy time for Ukraine while we poured billions of dollars in extraordinarily good modern equipment and training into the Ukrainian armed forces, specifically the army.
Can I interrupt you, Colonel?
Yes.
You can explain to the audience about who drafted the accord and who were signatories to it.
Well, it was France, Great Britain.
I think it was Great Britain and Germany and Russia.
And of course, we were not really signatories to it, but we were co-sponsors, if you will.
We were backing it.
And the Ukrainian government refused to ratify it.
It was voted on, I believe, by the citizens of Donbass.
Yes, I mean, everything that was contained in those accords was acceptable to Russia and acceptable to the citizens of Ukraine who were Russians.
Unfortunately, there was never any intention to impose any of it.
I want to interrupt you one more time because I don't want to spoil your train of thought.
No, no, I understand.
I think it's important to establish because the Minsk Accords show what Russia at that point was willing to settle for.
So that's if you look at this current military exercise, which has now killed 300,000 Ukrainians, it would be it's almost unimaginable that at the end of this, they're going to get back.
Ukraine is going to get back what it could have gotten with just a signature on that agreement with the Minsk Accords.
Can you just tell, as my understanding is, that it was that NATO would not move into Ukraine, that I believe that the missile launchers that we have in the Ukraine would be removed, that the people, the Russian, ethnic Russians in the eastern Ukraine, that some of that would be an autonomous region within Ukraine.
Ukraine.
So it would continue to be part of Ukraine, but the people would have some rights.
Yes, you're talking about something that the Russians were willing to accept, which is effectively a multi-ethnic, multinational state, which is not a new development in Europe.
We've had them over the centuries.
Austria-Hungary, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Tsarist Russia were all multinational states.
So there was no interest on Russia's side in breaking up Ukraine.
Far from it.
They were happy to have it intact.
Now, this, of course, does not address Crimea.
And at the time, they were unwilling to address Crimea because, from their standpoint, with considerable justification, the majority of people in Crimea are Russians and wanted to be part of Russia.
But more important, it had been part of Russia since 1776.
And it was an accident of history created by our friend Khrushchev and a drunken stupor that changed the Hands of Crimea and put it in the camp of Ukraine.
Bottom line is, there was no interest in the West, in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, in changing anything that would benefit Russia, certainly not changing what they had planned for Ukraine.
And by the time you reached December of 21 and January of 22, it's very obvious to the Russians that this force that has Grown up in Eastern Ukraine is actually very formidable, well-trained, well-equipped, and was poised, frankly, to attack those two breakaway provinces with the goal, ultimately, of retaking Crimea.
So from their vantage point, this was a preemptive strike to prevent that war from breaking out.
And for those who say, well, this is evidence for Russia's desire to expand and rebuild the Soviet empire, We ought to keep something in mind.
When the Russians went in, they went in with a remarkably small force.
Ukraine's the size of Texas.
They went in on the ground with 90,000 combat troops.
The Ukrainians of course put up fierce resistance because they were already present and ready to fight.
But most important, Moscow seemed to think that once this began, there was a willingness in the West to become serious and finally negotiate an arrangement.
And it took several months for Mr.
and his colleagues in the Kremlin to realize no one wants to talk.
There will be no negotiations.
And you'll recall that in April, Boris Johnson, the prime minister, flew to Kiev and essentially told Zelensky, don't negotiate with these people.
We'll provide you with whatever you need.
We'll stick with you until you win.
And, of course, in March, that's exactly what President Biden had said.
So they wanted to stop any potential movement that would have resulted in some sort of compromise, particularly a compromise that would have made Ukraine neutral.
And of course, neutrality was always very attractive.
Austria was made neutral in 1955 and in large part because Eisenhower was anxious to make more states neutral in Europe because he said we can't possibly protect them all.
Well, here we are now insisting that nothing can be neutral.
Everything must belong to NATO and it has to happen on our terms.
This is something Russia can't accept.
And so the Russians decided, well, now we're at war.
We're going to have to go over to the defense.
Build up our forces and prepared to end this war on our terms.
And that's essentially what you've watched since late September, October, Russia on the defense while the Ukrainians launched countless counterattacks against them.
And this has turned out to be a catastrophe for the Ukrainians.
They've lost, as you point out, over 300,000 dead.
The Russians, in contrast, contrary to what the mainstream media says, have had perhaps 30,000 killed and perhaps 40 or 50,000 more wounded.
But the difference between the Ukrainian wounded and the Russian wounded is profound.
The Russians rapidly evacuate people, and most of the wounded return to duty, whereas the wounded Ukrainians rarely get the medical attention they need in time, and they don't usually return to duty.
So the losses are irreparable.
And at this point, we have a very desperate regime in Kiev that will do anything to try and drag the United States, preferably, into war on its behalf.
And that's why you see these ridiculous drone strikes against Moscow in the hopes that someone will say, well, see, the Ukrainians have some life left in them.
We just need to help them a little more.
When in reality, they are definitely on the ropes.
And they know that when the ground finally dries out, there are hundreds of thousands of Russian troops who will come out of their defensive positions and attack.
And that will probably happen at the end of May or in early June.
And the fact is the Russians will not lose this war.
No.
Because they cannot.
It is an existential battle for them.
This is not, you know, if we were fighting a war over Canada or Mexico, this kind of war, it would be existential.
We would throw everything, the last human being in our country at them.
Absolutely.
And this is not a core strategic...
Ukraine is not a core strategic interest for the United States.
It's an afterthought for us.
It's an opportunity, but it's not a core strategic position for us.
And of course, to strengthen or reinforce your point, that was effectively what Khrushchev concluded when he confronted President Kennedy in 1963 in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Cuba was not a core strategic interest for Russia.
Exactly.
But at that point, just to enlarge that point, Turkey was.
We had Jupiter missile systems in Turkey, and the secret arrangement that my father and my uncle arranged with Ambassador Dobrennin at that time, and with Khrushchev, with whom they had a very, very cordial and close and trusting relationship.
Was that we would remove those missile systems from the Russian border, which is very analogous to what's happening in the Ukraine today, as long as they remove the missile systems from Cuba.
So there was a recognition that This was our sphere of interest here in our hemisphere, and that the Russians also had a sphere of interest.
And we have to remember, my uncle, President Kennedy, used to always say, you need to be able to put yourself in your enemy's shoes and understand the worldview that he's looking at if you ever want to settle any kind of dispute.
And he made this very famous speech to American University The summer before he died, in which he said, we have to understand the Russians won World War II for us.
They lost a third of their countryside.
One out of every 13 Russians was killed in that war.
Russia has been invaded three times from the east with cataclysmic impacts on the country.
We've never been invaded in this country.
And the sensitivity, not just from Vladimir Putin, but from every Russian, is acute.
There's threats coming from Europe and abroad.
Well, I think that's true, but there's another feature that we should not overlook.
Both President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev wanted to avoid a cataclysmic war.
Neither side wanted a nuclear exchange or a war that would end up being global and hopelessly destructive.
That seems to be missing.
It seems to me that in the current administration there is an acute lack of fear of just how devastating a nuclear exchange could be, number one.
And number two, no appreciation for high-intensity conventional warfare is something that we do not want to wage anywhere in the Western world.
For that matter, why would we want to wage it in Northeast Asia?
We live in a different world today.
The military solution to every problem is the wrong solution.
And that is a huge problem in Washington.
There's this lack of appreciation of just how destructive war is, not just for your enemy, but for you.
Part of the propaganda campaign for Every war that we get into is that people like you who question the war, your patriotism is questioned, you're accused of being sympathetic with Vladimir Putin.
How do you react to that kind of accusation?
Well, you're right.
We tend to demonize anyone that we want to essentially dethrone or where we're planning regime change.
And this regime change thing has gotten us into severe trouble.
All we have to do is look at what's happened In Iraq and Afghanistan, look at what happened in Libya.
The notion that we would try to impose regime change on Russia is sheer lunacy.
It's not going to happen.
As far as what is President Putin, I don't know the man.
I've never met the man.
I don't speak Russian.
In fact, I grew up in North Philadelphia with large numbers of Ukrainians and Poles.
So I'm very familiar with them.
And I studied Soviet and German operations and strategy in school.
But the point is that it doesn't matter, frankly, who is sitting in the Kremlin, as long as that person is someone who doesn't want a war.
And I think it's very clear that Vladimir Putin does not want a war with the West.
He's not prepared for it, doesn't want to go to war with us.
There is no evidence at all That he wants to reconquer Eastern Europe, the countries occupied at the end of the Second World War.
Far from it.
That's more trouble than it's worth.
It's a losing proposition economically.
He's not interested in that.
We are the ones that have pressed this issue with him.
We are the ones pressing to the East.
He's not pressing to the West.
He wants to negotiate an end to this, but if he can't, He will go as far as he needs to in Ukraine to ensure that his country is secure.
Now, I think we should intervene along with our allies.
We should offer to hold talks, no preconditions, drop all this nonsense about the Russians have to commit national suicide in order to qualify as partners for negotiation.
That's a lot of nonsense.
We need to treat them as equals, not as enemies.
In fact, I worked with the Russians in the early part of this century when I was at Supreme Headquarters of Allied Powers Europe, and I interacted with them when I was on active duty in the 90s.
The Russians did not behave like enemies.
In fact, they bent over backward to assist us when we were dealing with Islamist terrorism, provided us with enormously important intelligence.
We could never have gotten into Afghanistan the way we did without their help in 2001 and 2002.
So I reject this notion.
That the relationship that we have with Russia must be hostile.
I don't think it needs to be.
Doesn't mean we should become bosom buddies and friends.
But we need to understand their interests, which was essentially President Kennedy's argument.
They are willing to understand ours.
All of this is about interest.
This is not personal.
This is not an emotional fight.
This is about interest, and you're absolutely right.
We have no core strategic interest in this area, nor should we.
But we do have an interest in ending conflict.
That's what we should be focused on.
And what about the geopolitical implications of pushing Russia closer and closer to China, which should be happening with this war?
You know, China and Russia have become natural partners for reasons that have nothing to do with us.
And that's simply because Russia has an abundance of resources, an abundance of food, minerals, timber, you name it, coal, iron.
Everything that China needs for its scientific industrial expansion lies in Russia.
Russia alone can largely fuel China, if that's what it comes down to.
At the same time, Russia needs secure borders in the East.
As you pointed out, Russia has had wars with Japan.
Russia was conquered by the Mongolian hordes.
It wants peace in Central Asia.
It wants peace on its borders.
And contrary to popular belief, having been in that part of the world, I can tell you that there are not hundreds of millions of Chinese anxious to move north and live in Siberia.
That is not an appealing idea for them.
So the notion that somehow or another they should be at war with each other is nonsense.
There's no reason for conflict.
They buried the hatchet.
They want to do business.
By the way, even the Japanese and the Chinese have largely buried the hatchet.
They're not going to go into a war with each other.
They understand how mutually destructive that could be.
We've got to get out of this war business.
Now, that doesn't mean we'll never fight again.
But the problems that we may face in the future don't need to be in Eastern Europe.
They don't even need to be in Northeast Asia.
When President Biden made his statement that he thought we needed regime change in Russia, and then Lloyd Austin in 2022, who's his Secretary of Defense, said that one of the objectives, the mission objective in Ukraine was degrading the Russian the mission objective in Ukraine was degrading the Russian military force and exhausting it so that it can't fight anywhere else in the world.
Would you consider that an objective, a military objective exhaustion?
No, I mean, it's absolutely absurd.
It's ridiculous.
How are you going to do that, and why would you want to bother?
I mean, the supposition is Russia is a danger to us.
And we have to somehow or another reduce that danger by harming it.
I don't sign up for the notion that Russia is a great danger to us.
They're not planning on invading us.
They don't want to destroy us.
They actually would like to do business with us.
I think what we need to understand is that what we're getting now instead of what Lloyd Austin described is the opposite.
Russia had a very small standing professional army at the beginning of this process.
The plans are now to maintain an army of over a million men.
They've already got over 750,000 in the field.
And then you go beyond those that are in the field in the east, there's another 150,000 to 200,000 out there in Siberia and along the border.
You're now looking at the restoration of Russian national military power on a scale that we haven't seen since the 1980s.
That's the outcome of this stupid war, the very opposite of what we said we wanted.
On the other hand, our military is in ruins.
It's in terrible condition.
We've wasted decades of stupid spending on the wrong solutions, the wrong force structure, the wrong strategy for the wrong reasons.
These chickens are coming home to roost.
And we're not even talking about the damaging social engineering that someone like your father or your uncle would have dismissed out of hand as lunacy because he served in the Navy and he had some concept of what discipline and cohesion meant.
We have people now that don't have any idea, and yet they've decided to act like God and tinker with things that are destructive.
So we have a huge morale problem, a discipline problem.
These things are not what you want if you're going to tempt your potential adversary into conflict.
And we still have roughly, what, 30,000, 40,000 troops in Poland, another 10,000, 15,000, maybe 20,000 in Romania.
And we keep urging the Poles to be prepared to join with us to do what I can imagine.
Fortunately, the Polish chief of staff has spoken out recently and made it very clear that the Polish military is not ready to fight in Eastern Europe.
It doesn't have the ammunition to sustain itself.
So hopefully, more sober-minded people will prevail, but at the moment...
It seems like we have the finest yes-men in the history of the armed forces who will repeat stupidity without interruption.
And that has got to stop.
Ultimately, what is the chance of nuclear war and how does the nuclear weapons of the Russians compare to the U.S. forces and U.S. capabilities?
Well, the Russians have probably a thousand or more warheads than we do on hand.
They may have some additional launchers, but to be perfectly frank, we have thousands of launchers and weapons.
They have thousands.
We have more than enough nuclear capability to annihilate life on planet Earth.
So it's not so much a question of numbers.
It's a question of thinking and intent.
The Chinese declared a long time ago no first use.
They just simply said, we will not use a nuclear weapon if we are attacked.
That's our last resort.
If you don't use it, we won't use it.
I think the Russians take the same position.
I read through their doctrine, looked at it very carefully.
They have recently stated that if they see evidence that we are on the verge of using a nuclear weapon, they would consider attacking us.
But that is not something they expect, and it's not something they want.
We are the ones that have changed our attitude.
President Biden spoke in Warsaw.
At the same time he was in Warsaw, they rewrote the nuclear doctrine.
And we had essentially adopted the same position.
If you don't use nuclear weapons against us, we won't use them against you.
We've now altered that and said that we may consider certain conditions involving only high-end conventional forces.
If we judge that to be threatening enough, we may use nuclear weapons.
I think that's catastrophic.
I think they should be taken off the table.
This is the new wave in Washington.
They think strategic ambiguity is a good thing.
I think it's a catastrophe.
And what about the fact that we've walked away from a series of treaties that limited short-range or medium-range nuclear missiles and anti-ballistic missiles?
Can you just talk a little bit about that and what kind of signal that sends not only Russia but the rest of the world?
Well, the precondition for arms control to be successful is that you maintain an arsenal that is strong enough, flexible enough, capable enough That no one in their right mind is going to challenge it.
We've done that.
Now, we did sign on to certain treaties that removed from our standpoint at the time a potentially destabilizing weapon system, and that was the INF Treaty, the Intermediate Nuclear Force Treaty.
We fielded something called the Pershing II. Most of your viewers are not aware of this, but the Pershing II was a hypersonic missile.
Once launched, you couldn't shoot it down.
And putting those in Germany put Russia's arsenal at high risk.
The Russians eventually came to the table and we decided to take it off the table because we saw it as very destabilizing and dangerous.
I think it was unfortunate that we left that treaty.
Now, there are other areas that are a little more vague.
We left that treaty when in 2019 or something, right?
Yes.
And I don't think that should have lapsed.
I think that's something that we should have retained.
But again, we're at a point now where we are seen as having been so dishonest in our dealings with Moscow.
One wonders what the Russians would sign that we were willing to sign.
I mean, this is a huge problem.
Our credibility is gone.
I don't think the Russians are ready to sit down and talk to us about much of anything.
That's why I think it's very dangerous.
If nothing else, we should step forward and say, no first use.
We will not use nuclear weapons.
And that's absolutely vital today, right now in Eastern Europe.
Do you have optimism for the future?
What do you see the future as?
If you and others like you in the political arena demand the truth, fight for the truth, represent the truth, then I'm optimistic because I think we can turn around the disaster that we have in our hands today inside the Beltway.
But other than that, if we don't move in that direction, I don't see much good on the horizon because I'm worried that our fragile economy and corrupted financial system will both implode.
And the danger that I think about on a routine basis is the fire sale of US treasuries overseas first.
Whether it's the Chinese, the Japanese, the Saudis, whomever that owns our treasuries, starts to sell these things off.
That puts the economy into a tailspin into the dirt.
There's no easy solution to that.
We're already watching the bank runs increase in frequency and number.
That's not going to go away.
The biggest issue is confidence.
There is a lack of confidence in the banking system, a lack of confidence in our government.
That lack of confidence is here at home and it's overseas.
That's not going to be easy to fix, but we need new faces, new people with a fresh approach.
It's the only way to save us.
And that means, you know, if you're the chief law enforcement officer of the United States, as the president is, you've got to enforce the law.
We're not doing it.
We're not doing it on our borders.
We're not doing it in our cities.
It has to happen.
I think your most important contribution right now is twofold.
First of all, you've done something that very few political figures in this country have undertaken in a long time.
You have insisted on the truth.
You have pursued the truth in spite of enormous opposition presented by the pharmaceutical corporations and the huge money that they can contribute to people on the hill to stop you.
And you have been successful.
You have demonstrated not only that you can find the truth and reveal it, you've also demonstrated that there is an appetite for it in the American population.
That has to continue.
We need the truth on Ukraine, just as you found the truth on the COVID issue.
And the vaccine.
Secondly, you are now talking about unifying people across party lines.
It doesn't take a PhD to figure out that most of the people sitting on the hill today are part of the same cabal.
They are a uniparty.
And they're all about, sadly, far too much money.
We've got to turn that around.
There are lots of Democrats and Republicans who agree with each other on the big issues.
They've got to set aside whatever minor differences they have and unite to correct these major problems.
We've got to do that or we will lose our republic.
And I think that's the message that you've been sending.
And that's why your popularity is rising and will continue to rise.
Where can people find you and where can they support you?
Well, hopefully, you know, on the street and not in jail in any near term, but...
Same here.
Just kidding.
Look, you can Google Colonel Douglas MacGregor, just spell it right, and you'll find anything you want.
There are lots of things on YouTube.
Most of them, by the way, are not from me that show my or repeat my speeches and so forth.
But there's also a website, and you can find anything that I've written, and you can see that all of the things you and I are discussing Have all been written and spoken about over the last several years.
So again, I just want to thank you for everything you are doing.
Don't stop.
Thank you very much, Colonel Douglas McGregor.
And thank you for your patriotism, your love for this country, and your courage and vision.