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Sept. 23, 2024 - RFK Jr. The Defender
54:42
Sleepwalking Into World War 3 with James Webb

Join Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former US Marine and journalist James Webb for an in-depth discussion on the Ukraine conflict. Webb, drawing from his military expertise, argues that the recent Ukrainian offensive was a strategic trap set by Russia. They analyze the conflict's impact on US foreign policy, military strength, and the global balance of power.

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Hey everybody, I'm really happy my guest today is somebody I've known for a long time, greatly admired, somebody who worked on my campaign at a senior level.
James R. Webb is a third generation Marine journalist, writer, political consultant.
Who has worked in the U.S. Senate and on political campaigns, including the 2024 presidential election for my campaign.
Incidentally, Jim's father is James Webb Jr., who served in the United States Senate.
Who was also in the Marine.
And I think actually your family may be a third generation Marine, but I think you are in the military all the way back almost to the Revolutionary War.
As I recall, I read your father's biography, which is a fantastic book that I highly recommend.
Was it Born Fighting or Born to Fight?
It was Born Fighting, which I read it 20 years ago.
In 2004, He spent a summer embedded with U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
As a journalist, he then dropped out of Penn State and enlisted in the Marine Corps as an infantryman, serving from 2005 to 2010 in Iraq.
He served in Iraq.
He fought at the Battle of Ramadi between 2006 and 2007 as part of a weapons company Following the Marine Corps, he finished his college degree while working as a defense contractor.
He also began writing opinion pieces for multiple outlets.
Those caught the attention of Senator Rand Paul, who hired him in 2018 to work on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate defense veterans and foreign policy portfolios.
In 2020, James stepped away from politics To focus full-time on writing, he wrote a lot about trout fishing in Missouri and other great subjects.
He led coverage of the Afghan withdrawal and the resignation of Lieutenant Colonel Stu Scheller in 2022.
He returned to politics as a campaign consultant for Senator Eric Schmidt of Missouri.
Following Schmidt's successful election, Jim took a job in a D.C.-based think tank focusing heavily on U.S. involvement in Ukraine.
In 2023, he came to work for me and served as my senior advisor for my campaign on defense, foreign policy, and veterans policy.
And, you know, I heard you.
I've always admired you.
And, you know, you played such a critical role in our campaign, just giving us extraordinary advice and insight.
I heard you on the Duran podcast, and one of my kids asked me the other day what podcasts I consider indispensable, and if I had only one podcast that I would listen to, it would be the Duran podcast.
I think anybody who wants to understand...
U.S. foreign policy, but also foreign policy.
Alexander on that podcast has such an encyclopedic knowledge of politics around the globe and Latin America and Africa and Asia and Russia and China.
It's really quite breathtaking.
And to me, it's just a joy to listen to.
And I never miss any of his podcasts.
I don't always agree with everything, but I would agree with probably 90% of the stuff that they say on there, and everything they say is brilliant.
Everything they say is just brilliant.
But you were on there, and it was really one of the most...
I think, you know, your podcast should be mandatory on...
Duran should be mandatory listening for every member of Congress because you really kind of laid out these horrendous errors that we're making now in Ukraine and that from a military point of view, from a military and strategic, how weak our Secretary of Defense and our Secretary of State are today.
The enabling behavior that is encouraging This very, very corrupt Ukrainian regime to embroil us in a nuclear war.
And that actually is their objective.
And I've said this since the beginning of the war, that this war is unwinnable.
It was crazy for them.
They've convinced the American press that we're going to win this war.
The American press parrots that propaganda.
It would be like the United States losing a war to Cuba or losing a war to Mexico.
It's not going to happen.
It can never happen.
This is a vital interest for Russia.
It is a critical interest for Russia.
It is not critical to anything of the United States.
It's not a treaty partner.
We have zero political or strategic interests in the Ukraine.
The Russians have been invaded three times through Ukraine.
The last time they were invaded, Hitler killed one out of every seven Russians.
For them, it's absolutely critical.
And if NATO moves to Ukraine, we will be able to put Tomahawk missiles and other missile systems four minutes from Moscow.
We can decapitate the entire Soviet leadership.
That's not good for our country.
It's not good for the world because it destabilizes everything.
And the Russians are correct in wanting to keep that out of there, just like we would want to keep missiles out of Cuba.
But the Zelensky strategy, since he knows he can't win, he's making these foolhardy and reckless gestures that are calculated to bring NATO into the war.
Which is the only way they can triumph.
It's a full scale.
World War III, United States against Russia.
That's the only way Ukraine can prevail.
And that's a strategy and we're letting them do it.
And yesterday, the New York Times reported That the Biden administration is considering, you know, giving medium and long-range permission for Ukraine to use medium and long-range missiles to hit targets directly in Russia, which is insane.
So let's talk about that, and then, you know, let's talk first about the Kursk offensive and How that came about and, you know, I love what Alexander says, you know, it was a trap.
It was a Russian military trap and you make that case too.
Again, you have the international press saying this salient by Ukraine into Russia is a sign of the victory and the strength of Ukraine.
It's actually the opposite and explain that.
Sure.
Well, first, Mr.
Kennedy, thank you so much for having me on your show.
One of the primary reasons I wanted to work for you in the first place is your courageous stand on the war.
It really separated you from all the other candidates, and I wish that things had turned out differently in terms of your candidacy for the presidency.
We need really sane leadership in Washington, particularly on foreign policy right now, and I hope that President Trump rolls you in somewhere where you can make a difference, particularly on that issue.
And it's great to see you again.
Absolutely great to see you again.
So in terms of curse being a trap, there's a couple of things that you need to look at, you know, on the ground, precursors that led up to it.
And also, you know, you have to take into account the Russian way of war.
Which is far different than the way the United States fights.
They have shown historically, going back to Napoleon, the Mongols, you know, there's a counter-argument for this, that they were penetrated by these forces or the Germans who rolled in, you know, saying, hey, they were weak and they took ground, but they've proven historically to cede ground in order to buy time for their own forces, stretch logistics lines, you know, and Have the terrain eat the opposing force over a period of time.
Secondly, you have to look at the way the Russians fight wars generally, specifically in the case of what they have declared they're doing to the Ukrainian military, which is their objective has not been To seize ground in Ukraine.
You can take a look at perhaps Crimea or Donetsk as a couple of regions that they wanted to take, but that's primarily because those regions are full of Russian-speaking people.
It's 90 plus percent in those areas.
They view those as part of their diaspora, for lack of a better term.
And the final point to take a look at is, what were the precursors to this invasion?
The key indicator that this was a trap, in fact, designed to suck the Ukrainians in, was that they demined the areas directly in front of where the Ukrainian forces came across.
You can say, oh, okay, well, maybe that's a target of opportunity for the Ukrainians.
It's a bold stroke.
But that belies...
The fact that the Russians have electronic warfare or EW dominance, and I'm probably going to say that phrase a bunch of times while we're sitting here because it's a big deal.
In that area, they can target a cell phone within seconds that turns on wherever they have their, say, EW bubble.
They intercept all communications.
They know what's going on.
And the closer you get to Russia proper, the more dominant that becomes.
Let me just talk about that for a second, because the Russians really are a generation ahead of us in electronic warfare.
Absolutely.
And we don't acknowledge this.
They have 1,000, 1,200 more nuclear missiles than we do.
They have defensive weapons systems that are much better than anything that we have.
Correct.
And, you know, my son fought in the Ukraine.
I don't know if you know this.
My son, Conor, joined the Foreign Legion, and he fought for a special forces group in the Ukraine.
And the first part of his service, he was a drone operator.
He later became a machine gunner.
And as a drone operator, that was the most dangerous Assignment that you could have, because the second you turn on that drone, the Russians knew exactly where you were.
And at that point, it was really an artillery war.
He had firefights at night with the Russians at closer quarters.
Most of it was an artillery war.
And as soon as you turned on that drone, they would send a missile over that would kill everything within 300 feet.
And Connor's job was to get the drone into the air Very quickly, he would sit in the back of a pickup truck, and then the pickup truck would start moving as soon as he got that drone operating, so that it was a moving target that was harder to hit.
But, you know, it was very frightening and very, very, very dangerous.
And the Russians have this capacity now, you know, these electronic warfare capacities that are very much more sophisticated than what we have.
Right.
Oh, no, that's absolutely true.
And it's something, you know, the United States military hasn't run into serious artillery since probably the Vietnam War.
And the last 20 years that we fought in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, we were fighting mainly insurgents.
And we had the advantage and it didn't take much to disrupt them or to figure out their communications.
You know, we've been, you know, we've been on, you know, the forefront, I guess you could say contextually to our situation.
The Russians have been working at the conventional fight for a long time.
And they've honed these skills in the last couple of years against Ukrainians that are basically pure necessity.
And when you roll that into, you know, where they are now and what they've been trying to do with the Ukrainians in a, you know, strategic or operational sense, they're trying to wrap up what has been going on in the Donbass.
They want the Donbass.
It's one of these, you know, it's the last remaining real Russian speaking area that they have to take.
And within that, they have a very stubborn defender, you know.
When you go into offensive operations against an enemy, you want at least a 3-4-1 advantage if you're just launching any kind of conventional attack against whomever.
It's way harder when you're out in the open to take ground, to lay suppressing fire, basically just to survive.
And as an attacker, that puts you naturally at a disadvantage no matter how technologically advanced or how good you are at your job.
So if you look back at really any fight, you can go back to the Civil War, you can go back to the French and Indian War where my family started fighting on behalf of America.
The key is to bring a stubborn defender out of the defense.
And I believe, and I think it's really apparent with the situation on the ground right now, that the Russians recognize an opportunity to draw the Ukrainians out.
I'm going to go in a little bit of conjecture here, but I think it adds up when you start looking at the ground truth that they saw the Ukrainians trying to open up another front to try and get the Russian mass in the Donbass to move somewhere else.
So that they could solidify their defense there.
And the Russians, with a counterstroke, recognized that and, in effect, allowed them to walk in.
And in the middle of this, they allowed them to invade the Kursk region.
And kind of, what is the Kursk region or the Kursk Oblast in Russia?
It reminds me a lot of, I used to live in the Ozarks in Missouri.
And it's generally uninhabited.
It's rolling terrain, kind of mountainous.
Kursk has about, you know, I think it's 5,000 miles of rivers, rivers and streams.
And each one of those is, you know, it's a pain if you're attacking.
It's a gift if you're in the defense because it slows your attacker down.
And it's either densely forested or it's wide open, cleared forest that has become, you know, arable farmland in the area.
Another key component of this is the fact that in the entire oblast, which is roughly, you know, it's roughly the size of Missouri.
I think actually it's a little bit bigger.
There's only about a million people.
So there's not a lot of risk to, you know, the Russian people proper, and it can be easily evacuated.
And it's kind of the perfect battle space in which to have a conventional fight.
And as they let the Ukrainians come in, the Ukrainians very much use Western-style tactics using Western equipment.
It's, in effect, what remains of the cadre that had been trained by NATO. And at the same time, the remainder of all of our really good equipment.
They used strikers, Bradleys, you kind of name it, the hodgepodge of different really high-end Western gear to penetrate through the Russian defenses, which largely turned out were border guards.
Can you imagine what would happen if the Mexican military, which is not very good, put a force up against the Customs and Border Patrol?
They're just not equipped to do anything with it.
And they strung the Ukrainians out.
The Ukrainians had two or three routes which they could go through.
And at each key point in terrain, they offloaded their vehicles and they seized it, which is a fundamental piece of American doctrine, quite frankly.
And you can see we did that very effectively invading Iraq in 2003.
And the idea behind it is you get through the defenses with your armor, you get behind your defender, and then the infantry kind of creeps up and mops up.
What, you know, what the Russians did in response, and this was a very key indicator to me, this was in fact a trap, is they didn't meet them with a large force.
They let them come in, they use their indirect fire assets, airstrikes, drones, artillery, to systematically eliminate the equipment that was on the ground, which provided mobility for the Ukrainians, and left the infantry out there to just kind of die on the vine, if you will, to borrow a term from MacArthur in the Second World War.
And that's due to the fact that your average infantryman hasn't been able to carry more than about 100 pounds for the last 1,000 years.
And in today's context, you're carrying about 40 to 50 pounds of body armor, and that's half your load.
Then you need to carry water, food, ammo, and the rest of it.
And so you're looking at your average guy having about, I don't know, maybe 1,000 rounds in three to four days of water and food.
And that is not going to get it done.
And as we've seen, you know, after the initial success of Ukrainians going in, which my take, and I believe it's Alexander's take, is that They were just let in to do what they wanted to do.
They ran out of space to move.
They were fixed in position.
They came under overwhelming indirect fire.
And now you have a couple of different flanks collapsing under the weight of a massive Russian counterattack.
And I forgot to mention this on the front end.
It should be noted that that was the avenue which had been identified previously.
As the site for a potential Russian counterattack, Ukrainians have been reporting, the Russians have been massing in that area, and when they launched their attack, nobody was home.
However, those forces apparently are still there.
And I've followed this exceptionally closely for a number of years.
And it appears that only one battalion from the Russian military has been moved from Donbass up into Kursk.
And it's an elite battalion of Russian airborne troops which have been sent in to prosecute the initial phases of this attack.
So, you know, the Ukrainian plan didn't work.
They're finding themselves incredibly outnumbered.
And the key part of this is the fact that it is the remainder of their best guys who are trapped up there.
And it looks like, to me, at least, there's one main supply route that is remaining for them to leave.
And they're going to have to walk out if they want to survive.
You can't describe that in any sense as a success at all.
And there's probably 10,000 to 15,000.
This is based off of some unfortunately sketchy reporting.
There's Ukrainians who are trapped up there on foot.
And, you know, we could talk about this in a second, but you talk about sketchy reporting, and that's kind of the basis of the entire conflict here in the West, that everybody's understanding at least.
You know, nobody here in America really has a real, concrete understanding of what's going on.
We're hearing every single day that this is a great success and that the Ukrainians are defending brilliantly, which I'm not taking away from them.
It takes incredible gumption to get up there when you're outnumbered and continue to do it.
But the reality is they've taken horrendous casualties doing this, and it's in effect wiping out large segments of their population.
And I find that...
As a former infantryman, absolutely terrifying, this kind of war.
But as an American, it's pretty grotesque that we have been enabling this to go on, like you said at the beginning of the show here.
Yeah, and the strategic background is that the Russians have been steadily advancing, despite U.S. propaganda, into Bosnian gods and taking apart, particularly with the deployment of these glide bombs.
Have been dismantling and taking apart, systematically, little by little, at an accelerating rate, the defenses.
And the lines, the Ukrainian lines, appear to be deteriorating.
And the Ukrainian strategy, and they keep telling us different stories about why they did this.
But originally, the original story was They made this salient into Russia because they believed that the Russians would then have to divert some of their troops from Donbass and Lugansk to deal with this.
But the Russians didn't do that.
As you said, it was one unit.
It's only one unit that's been moved over there.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainians put their best men, their NATO-trained forces, The cream of all their forces into Donbass and Lugans.
And it appears, like you said, it was a trap.
And incidentally, this is the same strategy that Stalin used and his generals used.
In World War II and the original Battle of Kursk, where they did the exact same thing.
They sucked the Germans in and then cut them off and destroyed their equipment and then rolled up the infantry with millions of men dead, millions of Germans dead, and it broke the back of Hitler.
They've done this a number of times.
You can go back to the Napoleonic Wars for concrete examples of it, but specifically what you're talking about with the Second World War, it happened twice, right?
The first was Stalingrad, where they...
Got the German 6th Army to completely commit itself to fighting inside the city.
The Germans protected their flanks with largely Italian and Romanian troops who did not have the combat capability or the will to fight.
And in one quick stroke, at the point at which they recognized that the German army was at its most vulnerable, was the furthest into the city it could get, they struck from the flanks, trapped, and eliminated 250,000 German troops.
The following, what you're talking about here specifically with Kursk, what is now, I guess, the first Battle of Kursk in 1943, the Germans once again masked the absolute cream of their army a little bit further to the northeast of where are these actions taking place.
And they launched an offensive into a defense in depth that the Russians had set up, or the Soviets at the time had set up.
And once the Germans had once again reached the absolute depth of that defense that The Soviets felt that they were the most vulnerable.
Zhukov launched a massive counteroffensive.
And in the process, eliminated...
This is the parallel I like to draw with the current situation, is they eliminated the core of the equipment that was available to the German army.
The German armored divisions never recovered.
And they found themselves outnumbered on the battlefield without the equipment to support the infantry on the ground.
And it was just a steady...
It was a steady rollback, you know, all the way to Berlin.
This gets into another point you mentioned about the actions in Donbass, where what the Russians are doing to the Ukrainians right now is contrary to Western understanding in terms of doctrine.
We have mission-based tactics, which focuses, to boil it down to your viewers, it's capture the flag.
Where, you know, you have the objective, you punch in, you seize the objective, you finish the operation.
That's what we did in Baghdad.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And it worked in the short term.
It didn't really work in the long term.
But with the Russians right now, they're not launching a big aero offensive, as some people like to call it, which would be, say, the capture of Baghdad.
They're moving incrementally and using the weight of their firepower and the weight of their now manpower advantage, which is, in some cases, 10, 12 to 1.
And completely inverted from the beginning of this conflict, by the way, just to continue to pressure the Ukrainians.
And then every now and then, they'll launch a localized offensive, seize a little bit better terrain, and then rinse and repeat.
And that gets into what Putin said at the beginning of this war, which is, you know, his objective is not to take Kiev.
His objective is not to take the rest of Europe.
It's to eliminate the Ukrainians as a threat to his border.
And the best way to do that is to, in effect, kill off the military or force them to quit and disarm them.
And that's always been the two options that Ukrainians have.
It's either a negotiated settlement where we can say, hey, we're basically done with this.
Or the other option is to render them completely incapacitated.
And the disgusting thing about that is that we're pushing, we continue to push this forward and enable them to hang around on the battlefield long enough just to continue to die.
And it really needs to stop.
Yeah, I have so many questions for you, but one of the questions I think everybody asks, we don't really know what the comparative kill ratios are.
Some, I've heard as much as five to one, in other words, that the Russians are killing five, because this is now a war of attrition.
And the Russians have a lot more people than Ukraine.
Ukraine's 40 million people.
The Russians are, you know, close to 200 million, right?
And so they have a lot more access to troops, and it's become a war of attrition.
But the Ukrainians will not release their casualty numbers.
And, you know, estimates are as hard as 600,000 or 700,000 dead.
And that the Russian kill ratios are from two to one.
In other words, every Russian that dies, there's two Ukrainian troops who die, who five to one.
So, you know, just talk a little bit about that.
Sure.
Yeah.
I don't think your assessment is that far off.
I like to go with it's 500,000 dead.
What's 100,000, 200,000 at that point?
It's a bad cynical joke, but you're completely correct.
And the ratios, who knows what the ratios are?
I believe MediaZona has gone out there and done a number of assessments.
They tried to, in effect, parody, turn into a parody.
the Russian official estimate or releases on their own dead, but then back that up with doing satellite photography, taking death notices out of the papers.
And they came back with basically the same amount that the Russian Ministry of Defense had put out.
Does that include folks like Wagner or perhaps not conscripted, but people who are in effect penal battalions pulled out of prisons?
I'm unsure about that, but that number can't be too far off.
But the best place to look if you want to take a look at Ukrainian casualties is to bring up or to take a look at the rounds of conscription they're on.
You have officially, I believe it's between 20,000 and 25,000 admitted dead from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.
The last time they updated that was the first couple months of the war.
But you have the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth round of conscription.
It seems like every couple of months they're trying to muster another couple hundred thousand guys out of the population, dropping the age at which people can be drafted lower and lower and continuing to hollow out their society.
And the needle's not moving.
And if you start to read The Economist, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Time Magazine, CNN, any of these places that were so hard over on supporting this to begin with, you're starting to see the mask slip a little bit where all of these units in the front line are talking about how they're undermanned by as much as 75%.
The Russians now outnumber them 8 to 1, 9 to 1, 10 to 1 in different battle spaces.
And it's a real indicator that they're straight up not producing or they don't have enough manpower to field an army at this point.
And the only way with a conscripted army like theirs that you don't have the manpower is if you're out of guise.
And it's pretty eerie when you slow down and start to think about it.
Now, the neocon dream was to do this war in order to weaken Russia and to get rid of Putin.
And the irony is that Putin is now stronger than ever.
His economy is stronger, more resilient.
He's profited, actually, by figuring out ways to live under the pressure of all these embargoes and sanctions against Russia.
It's actually made them sturdier, more self-sufficient.
Putin is more popular than he's ever been.
He has extraordinary popularity.
The economy is strong.
Inflation is low.
The national debt is one of the lowest in the world.
Everything in Russia is essentially prospering.
And Russia is getting stronger militarily.
They've rebuilt their industrial base.
I remember Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense in April of 2022, was asked, why are we in this war?
And he said to exhaust the Russian army and degrade its capacity to operate anywhere in the world.
Well, the war has done exactly the opposite.
It's made them stronger.
It's pushed them into this war.
Very dangerous alliance with China.
China has the best industrial base in the world, and Russia has some of the best technology, the best warfare technology in the world.
They have, as I said, more nuclear missiles than we do.
They have larger nuclear power, the largest nuclear power in the world.
But they're also weakening America, not only economically, But also, this has given them the opportunity to figure out how to resist Americans' high-tech weaponry.
And they've broken the code on many of our best weapons and figured out ways around it.
Talk about that.
Sure.
And I'll talk about that.
There's two points.
You hit on a great point, which is the Russians, in effect, realigning how they do trade and how they are making money internationally.
And If you look at the rise of BRICS and what their relationship is with OPEC plus now, this is a response to our response.
It's an international response to our response to the conflict in Ukraine, where there's a number of countries.
We've pushed Russia and China into a de facto military alliance if they don't already have a piece of paper signed between the two of them, where they're sharing technology.
The Chinese are undoubtedly testing their equipment on the battlefield and refining it with each other.
And then you have the economic part where we sanction, we like to, if you pay attention to the Senate, I worked there for a number of years.
Everybody loves to brag about the aggressive sanctions that we're placing on different countries.
Those only work if they're completely unilateral.
Everybody has to be on board.
Otherwise, you're just closing a market and you're shifting the market somewhere else.
A byproduct of our sanctions on Russia has been to sanction the Chinese defense industry.
And there have been a number of protests which have gone underreported here in the US media from the Chinese about that.
And I'm not saying necessarily whether China or Russia is a good actor, but that's something you should pay attention to because both of them are ignoring what we're trying to do and increasingly working with each other out of necessity.
And you have Russia as the largest possessor of natural resources in the world, working hand in hand with China now, who is the number one industrial economy in the world.
And those goods and services are going back and forth, you know, unhindered and making both countries, you know, more profitable and closing markets to the United States left and right.
When you start talking about technology, and this is something I wrote about last year, specifically around HIMARS. Any kind of technology you have on the battlefield has a very, very short half-life.
The machine gun, for example, in World War I, it was state-of-the-art.
Nobody knew what to do with it, but within a few months of the war, and that was combined with advanced modern artillery backing it up, Everybody understood how to subvert it.
They dug back into the ground.
You had the advent of tanks.
You had aircraft become more prevalent.
It became less of a death dealer.
With our technology, 100% of our technology that came out of the 80s and 90s, which is on display, Yeah, it's in Russia, unfortunately, but mostly in Ukraine, was designed to fight the Soviet army.
It's supposed to be kind of like our trump card, right, on the battlefield.
Bradley's, the M1 Abrams tank, long-range artillery, the HIMARS system, ATAKAM's missiles, which are now being threatened to be fired deep into Russia.
All of these things were designed to give us the initial edge in a confrontation.
And when employed properly and in mass the way they're supposed to be done by professionals in our military, it retains an edge and saves American lives in the event that some kind of conflict occurs.
Unfortunately, what we've done is we've handed all of these systems off in piecemeal fashion to what is in effect a Ukrainian military, which by comparison is amateurish to ours, and more importantly, has absolutely nothing to do with our own national security has absolutely nothing to do with our own national security or our own national interest.
And we've exposed them in bits and pieces to the Russian military's electronic warfare systems, to their battlefield commanders.
And we have what Raytheon tells us or North Roman tells us about the actual capabilities of these systems.
And then you have the Russians on the back end who are dealing with the results of them and adjusting appropriately.
And I believe it's every six weeks they figure something out.
And if you go and take a look at the HIMARS system, which we initially deployed to Ukraine, I believe it was about 18 months ago.
It was pretty effective right out of the gate.
I think 4 to 12, I don't know the exact number, but it was a handful.
We're effective at hitting Russian logistics sites.
And almost immediately, there was an adjustment made, you know, which will then be applied if we're ever in a conflict with anybody who they support and we don't like.
And that comes down to a couple different things.
Like, one, like, how do you prevent, you know, an effective high mark strike just at a tactical level, like, by spacing your people out?
But more importantly, we are completely reliant on GPS. And Russian EW has been adapted to interfere with that, and it's rendered everything from missiles to bombs falling from the sky are guided bombs, to being, you know, I wouldn't say completely ineffective, but to a degree where it doesn't give us an edge anymore.
So there now, we have essentially handed it to Russia.
The capability to counter our frontline weapons systems that were supposed to protect American troops in the case of a large conflict with a large country like Russia, China, or Iran, for example.
Now those countries all know our best secrets.
They know how to counter them.
And we've now lost our primary battlefield advantage.
And it's worth saying that during World War II, We were the arsenal of the world because we had this extraordinary industrial base.
We had the steel, the ball bearings, the automobile companies that were quickly repurposed to build airplanes, jets, a ship a day.
I mean, airplanes, tanks, a ship a day, etc.
We no longer have an industrial base.
We've outsourced that to China.
So China now has the industrial base that can be repurposed.
One company in China makes 75% of the drones in the world.
And they're way ahead of us in drone technology, which is the weapon of the future.
Both of them have these hypersonic weapons that we have not been able to master.
We keep assuming that we have the big weapons arsenal and we're the big owner because we spend all the money on it.
But actually, they are arguably much better prepared for war than we are.
Absolutely.
We can't get troops across the Atlantic anymore.
It's really...
The assumptions that President Biden has been making about this war that I don't even know what, you know, I know that Vice President Harris is very naive about U.S. capability,
military capability, you know, very confident, very belligerent, very bellicose, very pugnacious, having no idea about the failures over the past decade of the U.S. military and what that says about And our capacity to bluff the world has now disappeared.
Absolutely.
Because they've shown what they can do against the top-line U.S. weapons.
It's really been a disaster for the U.S. and for the U.S. military fighter, military personnel, because we've given away the systems that were supposed to protect them and to minimize their body counts.
Absolutely.
And there's two points.
One, it's kind of cynical.
I would think that Kamala Harris's greatest foreign policy achievement as vice president was to convince the Russians to cross the border.
If you remember back, I think it was the day before the Russians went across the start line, she was at a conference with NATO and stated that Ukraine will be part of NATO and was bragging about it and laughing about it, you know, in her typical cackle.
And the next day, boom, the Russians went across the line because that has always been their red line.
They could not have a hostile nation directly on their border.
They've always wanted a buffer.
And if you literally translate Ukraine or the Ukraine, it means the borderlands.
It's the buffer.
And as you said at the beginning of the show, three invasions now have come through that territory.
And the missile systems which we were going to provide, should they be in NATO, which is called the Aegis Ashore, something I worked on pretty heavily in the Senate, is, It would have been, you know, in these areas they're fighting right now.
And it's three to four minutes to Moscow.
If you go to the website, four ages ashore, I believe it's a Raytheon product.
You know, it's billed as a defensive system.
But right on the front of the website, it says, hey, you know, a...
A quick software update turns this offensive and it could launch nuclear-tipped missiles, which the Russians would have absolutely no chance to respond to.
And we nearly went to war with Cuba over something far less menacing.
It's really unfortunate.
And when it comes to the weapon systems, you would hope that we would be in a position to respond to update this, but we don't have the know-how or the understanding of this next generation of Russian systems that's coming out.
I had the opportunity in 2019 to visit Fort Campbell and a couple of the units there, and the Special Forces Group is based there.
And they had just come back from Syria, and they were showing me what is still the current U.S. Kamikaze drones called a Switchblade, which has proven, by the way, completely ineffective in the battle space in Ukraine.
And also, it's...
It hasn't been updated.
However, what the Russians have done is they're on their second or third generation of suicide drones, which allegedly, big air quote, allegedly have AI capabilities.
But regardless, they own the skies with these.
They're producing them at a ratio that the Ukrainians can't keep up with.
We won't even approach.
And it's not good.
We're way behind.
But one more point is that basic artillery, basic artillery that we use every day on the battlefield.
I believe we're producing, I think it's tens of thousands of rounds per month, where the Russians are expending millions of rounds per month.
And we can't keep up with that either.
And no one's really looking at this.
We've tipped our hand.
Yeah.
Well, it's a sad thing for a country, and it's very, very frightening to think that Kamala Harris may be our commander-in-chief with the absolute darth of any kind of knowledge or instinct or curiosity about history, about the uses of power.
About the reality on the ground.
It's all sort of deep state propaganda.
And it's very, very, very sad for our country.
And that's one of the reasons that, you know, I'm in this fight right now, is that I think it'll all cost at SN because we'll end up in a new game.
The Russians have already changed their first strike policies.
They specifically warned us that they were going to do that.
They said, you know, up until now, they've always said, we will never use a nuclear weapon in a first strike, a preemptive strike.
And now they've said, we may do it.
They changed that specifically in reaction to...
I mean, you know, what the Russians were saying from the beginning is this is not a territorial land grab.
We have this comic book depiction saying, oh yeah, you know, he's like Hitler.
He's trying to march across Europe.
They were very clear from the beginning.
This has nothing to do with the territorial.
We don't want the territory.
We want security.
This is a security issue for us.
It is not territorial.
We don't want the Ukraine or we don't like Ukraine.
We want our security.
We want our national security.
And, you know, the U.S. has ignored that legitimate security needs of Russia.
And, you know, treated it, you know, these comic book depictions about what's really happening there.
And it's very, very dangerous for the whole world.
And, you know, just talk for a second about the changes.
Because we also had two nuclear weapons treaties, missile treaties with the Russians that we unilaterally walked away from.
Absolutely.
It's so crazy what we're doing.
It is.
It is.
And it gets back to the only thing I can really liken it to is it's hubris.
It's the hubris of Washington.
It's commonplace to refer to Russia as a gas station with nukes, and they're not.
They are a historic empire.
They've had ebbs and flows.
We don't have to be their friend.
We don't have to think that they're our friend, but you have to treat them with the respect that we also...
You know, requests from other nations.
And that's not happening.
And when you look at, you know, potentially what is going to be happening with the, if it's not already done, the green light to use deep strike capabilities into Russia, that is absolutely terrifying.
It doesn't need to happen primarily because it's just not going to change anything on the battlefield.
Their Ukrainian justification is twofold.
I believe it was the spokesman for their foreign minister said that Putin has said that he has red lines.
They've always been ignored.
Therefore, there are no red lines and we have nothing to worry about.
And the second thing that comes out of his mouth is that we are going to hit airfields and supply hubs and troop concentrations, which are going to enable us to do things on the battlefield.
Quite frankly, that's bunk.
They have capabilities.
They have other airfields.
They've already pulled most of their aircraft back out of the range of these systems.
No matter how many of these missiles you lob into Russia, you're not going to be able to take out the necessary amount of equipment and manpower to make a difference, particularly when the Ukrainian losses are so high.
To think that we can change that with...
A limited number of missiles is absolutely ludicrous.
I've seen estimates where we have maybe a thousand of these left in our own inventory.
They're not easy to make, they're very sensitive, it takes time, and we need them for ourselves.
If we have 1,000 left in our inventory, if we have 2,000 left in our inventory, how many are we really going to give them?
And how many of those is it going to take if you really wanted to take down the entire Russian military with a system like that, which A, is not possible, but it would take far more of these than we even possess or could make in the near future.
And the only thing it's really going to do is inflame tensions.
And Putin is already on the record saying that if they start launching them, then...
We are in a state of war.
And what that means- A war with NATO. A war with NATO and the United States.
And you have these real, I gotta call them like children, emotional children and intellectual children, Anthony Blinken, Sullivan in Washington.
And they're saying, oh, we're calling his bluff.
You know, we poked the bear six times, and he didn't do anything, so we're going to poke him six more times.
And Poodle until now has been acting with extraordinary restraint.
And Russia, unlike our country, is sensitive to the opinion of other nations.
And, you know, Putin has been saying from the beginning, this is about our security.
It's about our right not to be invaded and intruded on.
Ukraine has done the very thing that he predicted, which is they've invaded Russia.
They've used NATO equipment and NATO approval and NATO training to actually invade Russia.
And now we're going to attack Russia with missiles, and all the rest of the world is looking at this and saying, okay, Russia— We get it.
You acted with restraint.
You did what you needed to do.
These people are completely unreasonable.
They're utterly out of control.
And you need to do what you need to do to protect your territorial integrity.
And the world is giving him now permission to use nuclear weapons.
And he said he's going to do it.
And we have these really insane people in Washington who know nothing About history or foreign policy or about the uses of power.
And they are leading America into destruction.
I wouldn't give them so much credit, Mr.
Kennedy, as saying they're leading anybody.
I think what they're doing is they're cowards.
You have a client state, in effect, of Ukraine, which is telling you what to do.
And that is not how this is supposed to work.
We are the senior partner in this relationship and somebody in government should have the gumption to stand up and assert that.
And it should not be controversial.
Like whose feelings are you going to really hurt if you're saying I'm looking out for the American people?
The second part of it is when you start taking a look at, you know, what could potentially the response be?
I don't think that, and I would hope not, that Putin would not go directly to nukes.
There's always the potential.
You start playing with fire, you're going to get burned.
But there's any number of ways that he could respond, which could absolutely be destructive of the United States.
And when you take a look at the transparent fact, we've admitted this in print, that everything that has to do with targeting when the Ukrainians are firing these different platforms into Russia, when they're planning their offensive like Kursk, when they're planning their failed counterattack in the southern part of the country last year, It all comes from Washington.
It all comes from American advisors.
And everything but actually pushing the button on these things is done by Americans or NATO advisors.
And the most critical vulnerability we have is the GPS system in America.
Everything from your cell phone to how a missile flies through the air is tied to this.
I don't particularly know.
I'm good with ground combat, but I don't know how space works or what the Russian capabilities are up there.
But if I was them and I really, really wanted to deal a non-lethal blow short of nuclear war, that's where I would go.
Because you could effectively...
You could take our economy offline in about 10 minutes.
And it's something we shouldn't even have to think about.
The other thing they could do is cut the transatlantic cables and shut down the entire global banking system.
And they're invulnerable because they've been cut off from the banking system.
They've had to develop a parallel system.
And, you know, it would be...
It's excusable because we blew up the Nord Stream pipeline to cripple their economy.
Oh, you know, like you said, they don't have to use nuclear weapons.
They can bring down our country, destroy our economy overnight with a lot of different non-conventional approaches to warfare that are available to them today.
It's a reality that I would hope that people in Washington, as they continue to barrel into a really terrible scenario, consider.
But I don't have any confidence they're doing it.
Because if they were, you wouldn't be hearing that we're even considering allowing the Ukrainians to do this.
I could allow the argument for this kind of employment of weaponry if it was truly going to make a difference on the battlefield.
In a scenario which was in the core national interest of the United States.
Neither one of those are true.
So what the heck are we doing?
In all reality, what is this?
Why are we doing this?
Other than the fact that You know, perhaps there are some in Washington who really do want to see this.
And you have people like Victoria Nuland and Hillary Clinton, where this is the last gasp for their ultimately totally failed color revolution scheme.
From Egypt to Syria to Ukraine and beyond.
Absolutely.
And this is the last one that's still going.
It has any life.
And in terms of their own legacy, if this completely falls off the table, what do they have left?
Their disgrace.
I mean, they're already a disgrace, but the ego that's involved, it's beyond evil.
Because they're extinguishing hundreds of thousands of lives and they're risking hundreds of millions of more lives just for the sake of their own personal aims and self-gratification.
That's the only way I can rationalize this.
Yeah.
Alright, I'd like to talk to you for another four hours, but thank you so much for joining us.
Hey, no problem.
I appreciate you.
Really good to see you.
You too, Mitch.
I'll see you again soon.
Yes, sir.
I appreciate it.
Have a great evening.
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