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June 22, 2022 - Viva & Barnes

02:01:02

Sidebar with Armchair Warrior - Russia, Ukraine, and more! Viva & Barnes LIVE!

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Time	Text
	America is a nation that can be defined in a single word.
	America is a nation that can be defined in a single word.
	I was going to put him in a...
	America is a nation that can be defined in a single word.
	I was going to put him in a...
	I swear to you, this is not a question of laughing at someone who has...
	Compromised faculties.
	If this were a movie starring Leslie Nielsen, the great Canadian comedian, this would have been the punchline.
	This is literally what they would have.
	He has his moment.
	How did he describe it here?
	America is a nation that can be defined in a single word.
	This is supposed to be the most moving, powerful, unifying moment of his speech.
	America as a nation can be described.
	In one word.
	America is a nation that can be defined in a single word.
	And that's, I mean, it's terrible in a sense, because I think everybody can understand what's going on, but nobody can say it publicly because it's politically incorrect.
	Which then leads into the other side.
	If there's nothing wrong with what's going on, then that is, on the one hand, comedic gold and comedic tragedy.
	And my observation.
	Covfefe was headline news For a week?
	If not more?
	Covfefe, Donald Trump's insane, idiotic, absurd accident of a tweet, a butt tweet, was news for a week.
	He said, look how unstable.
	This guy has the codes to the nukes.
	Covfefe, covfefe became a thing.
	The only problem is, this flub, you can't even...
	You can't even, what's the word I'm looking for?
	When you phonetically spell it.
	Okay.
	We'll start off on a light note.
	Some housekeeping as well.
	James Topp is the Canadian, people will call him a patriot, who is marching from the Terry Fox Monument in Vancouver to Ottawa.
	Is in Ottawa today, was in Ottawa today, meeting with members of parliament who agreed to meet with him.
	He has been marching across Canada and he drove in from wherever he had reached in Ontario to meet with some MPs.
	I was going to go down today to live stream that meeting, but they were not letting members of the public in because I can understand their meeting with members of parliament and don't necessarily want some dude like with me with the camera sitting there live streaming a meeting.
	So I would not have been able to get in.
	So I decided not to go down.
	They have...
	They had streamed the interview anyhow on James Top's channel, which is called James Top on the YouTubes.
	Live from the Shed with David Paisley was also restreaming it.
	I restreamed the second of the two interviews on my second channel, Viva Clips, in its entirety.
	So you can go see James Top, Tom Morazzo, Dr. Paul, I keep forgetting his last name, addressing members of parliament, those who had the courage or at least the intellectual curiosity to go see.
	On the second channel, Viva Clips.
	So I feel very naked when I naked re-stream someone else's stream, someone else's content.
	You never know what they're going to say that might get you into trouble.
	Thus far, demonetized, re-monetized, and still up on YouTube.
	So go check it out after this to learn about James Topp, what he's doing if you don't know about it, to watch it if you do know about it, and to share and spread the word for the world.
	Tonight, we've got Armchair Warlord.
	I'm not going to put an H in a warlord, because I was rehearsing that joke in my head, and Armchair Warlord, if I were to add the H, it might sound like something else.
	Armchair Warlord, Tyler, a real human.
	We're not going to have a pulsing avatar tonight.
	We have an actual face.
	Is an interesting character, interesting take, military experience, veteran.
	And has become something of a social media, not saying influencer, a voice of insight as relates to geopolitics and more specifically, more currently, what's going on in Ukraine and Russia.
	I have been told that the chat might be a little saucy tonight.
	In fact, now that I remember, people, I'm going to go put it into slow mode because I forgot to do that.
	Slow mode, it's a 15-second slow mode right now, so stop messaging.
	Stop chatting.
	Stop commenting.
	You're going to lose it.
	We're in slow mode.
	I've been told that the chat is going to be saucy.
	So I'll be keeping an eye out for that.
	Thank you for the Super Chat right in time for the standard disclaimers.
	No legal advice.
	No election fornication advice.
	No medical advice.
	YouTube takes 30% of Super Chats.
	I'm going to get to this question in a second.
	YouTube takes 30% of Super Chats.
	If you do not like that, we are simultaneously streaming on Rumble, where I just put out a funny tweet.
	I didn't realize that Andrew Torba of Gab referred to me as the Jewish lawyer, David Fryhead.
	Whatever.
	We're simultaneously streaming on Rumble, and Rumble has a thing called Rumble Rants, like a YouTube Super Chat, except Rumble takes 20%, so better for the creator, better for the platform.
	Best way to support?
	The channel, merch, vivafry.com, and there's some good Barnes stuff in there as well, or vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
	Everyone's in the house.
	Let me just say, Viva, did you have to show proof of Vax at both borders last week?
	The U.S. asked and did not ask for documentation.
	Canada, the Arrive Can app, they already have.
	If you've downloaded it and used it once, they have your...
	Picture your passport, your vax documents.
	And as of September, those who have been double vaccinated may no longer be up to date and may have to go through the exact same persecution, unscientific abuse of if they don't get up to date with whatever up to date means next September and going forward, they may have to quarantine upon a return to Canada, which is enough to rightly make people leave this country and never come back.
	Okay, setting all that aside.
	Armchair warlord, Barnes in the house.
	If I do not bring up your super chat and you're going to be miffed about that, don't give it.
	I don't like people feeling miffed, whatever.
	And let us break into the conversation, people.
	Going to bring in Tyler first.
	Going to bring in Barnes.
	Going to change the order so that I block only my ugly face like such.
	Okay.
	Gentlemen, how goes the battle for the evening?
	It's going pretty well so far.
	Can't complain.
	Thanks for having me on.
	Thank you for coming.
	We're only seven minutes into it.
	So, Tyler, I don't know if you're sensitive about chat.
	If you are, or it might distract you.
	You may not want to read the chat while we go, but you seem like a thick-skinned individual.
	I've got rhino hide from my time in the Army.
	I'm not too worried about it.
	Okay, so now, we always start with a 30,000-foot overview.
	For those on this channel who may not know who you are, 30,000-foot overview before we get into some of the standard.
	Intro questions.
	Well, I mean, just to sort of explain who I am, I certainly wasn't expecting to be where I am today three months ago when I decided to start commenting on the war on Twitter.
	So I'm an 11-year U.S. Army veteran.
	I was in the artillery.
	I was commissioned in 2009.
	I spent nine years on active duty as an officer and another couple of years in the reserves.
	And so after I got off of active duty, I went to law school and actually just graduated that.
	So right now you're interrupting my bar prep.
	Congratulations on the law degree.
	Thank you.
	What was some of your family background?
	We often explore, you know, what leads people to be independent of thought, willingness to challenge, question, contest, establishment, institutional, credentialed, pedigreed narratives.
	And as part of that is, you know, exploring sort of family background as well as professional background and unique life experience.
	What was your upbringing in terms of parents, siblings, occupations, things of that nature?
	Well, I grew up in a grew up in upstate New York on my my my So, I grew up in upstate New York.
	My dad, he was in the Navy for a long time.
	After that, after he got out of the Navy, worked in the nuclear power industry for a long time.
	So, got a very...
	I mean, honestly, he was the whole reason I joined the military in the first place.
	I'm sort of fearing the...
	You just get the best stories out of the Army.
	You'll be telling them for the rest of your life to your kids.
	And then people wonder why...
	People wonder why, you know...
	The children of veterans always end up going back and going into the military.
	They've been hearing all the war stories and all the good ones and none of the bad ones.
	I grew up there.
	I also went to school up there.
	I'm actually an engineer by training.
	I did ROTC when I was in college.
	I'll tell you, it was very nice having a job lined up.
	I graduated I got out of undergrad in 2009.
	And it was very nice having a job lined up at that point because all of my colleagues were just in despair because the economy had just fallen out from under them.
	And I was like, all right, well, I'm going to the Army.
	I don't have too much to worry about.
	So you have to get into this experience in the Army.
	It's foreign to me.
	I've never done it, never done the training.
	How does that start?
	How do you decide to go into the Army, and what do your parents say about it?
	I guess based on your life experience, they're going to be eager for you to do it?
	Well, honestly, they weren't, because I started doing ROTC in 2006.
	What's ROTC?
	Oh, it's the Reserve Officer Training Corps, so basically it's a way to get commissioned if you're going to a normal, to get into the military as an officer, if you're going to just like a normal college.
	Because you can go into a service academy and that'll commission you.
	Or there's some, like, private service academies in the U.S., which also are sort of auxiliary west points, I'd almost call them.
	But also there's a big program which graduates a lot of officers.
	It's called the Reserve Officer Training Corps.
	And it's basically a...
	You sort of do it part-time while you're just going to school.
	And as it happened, I was actually my sophomore year at the time, and I was...
	And I had sort of toyed with the idea of joining the Army and getting a scholarship when I was in high school.
	And then I didn't end up doing that right away.
	But I was able to...
	I actually had some space in my class schedule.
	And I was like, well, I'll start doing ROTC and see how I like it.
	And see if they can get me on contract.
	And three years later, I was getting commissioned on the drill field at Fort Lewis.
	You said you went into artillery.
	What was your experience in the military?
	I went into the artillery.
	You do training on both sides.
	There's really two sides of the artillery in the U.S. Army, at least.
	There's basically a fire support side and a gunnery side.
	There's the general officer work of planning and managing units.
	They initially sent me to school just to learn how to...
	Let me back up a little bit.
	Artillery officers really do two things.
	They both liaise with infantry units or armored units and they plan fires for them.
	You have to really learn how the guys on the front line fight and how operations work to...
	So you can go in and plan all these artillery fires and airstrikes and so on so you can support the troops and tanks as they move across the battlefield.
	And the other thing I learned how to do was actually do the back-end work of moving around cannon systems, calculating firing data, and so on.
	And so I got through that, spent...
	I actually basically won the assignment lottery as a lieutenant.
	I got stationed in Hawaii for three years, which was very, very nice.
	I want to say that I can caveat that a little bit by saying living in Hawaii for three years was really nice.
	The 25th Infantry Division when I was there was not a happy unit.
	You have to elaborate.
	What do you mean by that, not a happy unit?
	I mean, I could just say I mean, morale was low.
	A lot of the units I was in had some problems of whatever nature.
	I mean, skill-filled barracks in particular, when I was there, the problem was that skill-filled barracks had got pushed to the back of the line.
	Basically, when the big money spigot opened up for the War on Terror and the army started building new facilities for all of its bases, well, skill-filled barracks was at the back of the line there.
	And the money spigot got cut off under Obama at the point before Schofield Barracks actually got money to modernize its facilities.
	The base itself was having some issues when I was there.
	The units I was in were not super happy, but at the same time I was able to live in Hawaii for three years and get paid to do it.
	What lived up to your expectations in the Army, and what was a disappointment compared to your expectations in the Army?
	Well, I mean, I tell people this all the time, but being in the military is far more and far less than it's cracked up to me.
	Because on the one hand, it's, I mean, at some points, it's like, you know, a real band of brothers stuff, and I apologize if there's street noise in the background.
	On the one hand, it's real Band of Brothers stuff some of the time, and you make incredible friends, and you sort of come face-to-face with, like, how far can I go?
	How far can I push myself?
	I mean, you do the craziest stuff, and even just in training, you do the craziest stuff.
	But on the other hand, it's also like it's a workplace.
	It's a government workplace where a lot of the time you show up, do PT in the morning, then you work 9 to 5. Sometimes I was in my office literally doing paperwork or answering emails or planning the FRG cookout.
	It's both a workplace and a really crazy adventure at the same time.
	I'm going to ask you the just outright upfront question.
	Did you see active combat in your time in the military?
	So, no.
	I was never shot at in my time in the military.
	So I deployed to Iraq once during the...
	It actually wasn't the earlier war.
	It was during the war against ISIS.
	So this was actually pretty late in my career.
	But when I was there, I basically exchanged one office.
	One office at Fort Bliss for another larger office in Iraq doing pretty similar stuff.
	The place where I was was safe.
	Particularly at that point, the place where I was was safe.
	We never got engaged.
	We never even got engaged with indirect fire or anything.
	I've never been shot at.
	The most dangerous thing I did in the Army, the way I actually got hurt doing this, was...
	I was doing airborne operations.
	Actually, after my last job in the Army, the Army decided to send me to airborne school when I was 30. You're not as flexible when you're 30 as you are when you're 18. I've got nine jumps and nine pins on my leg.
	Now, what led you to leave the Army?
	Well, I...
	Really, I sort of accomplished when I started doing it.
	I was a company commander for a little while.
	So I did a...
	Basically, you...
	I almost explained it as you sort of have certain milestones in your career when you have to make a decision.
	Like, do I want to get out of the army or do I want to stay until the next milestone?
	So I did my lieutenant work.
	Sort of did the initial set of fun stuff.
	You do as a junior officer, lead troops.
	I did a little bit of that.
	I actually spent a lot of my time as a lieutenant on staff for weird reasons.
	I did some fun stuff as a lieutenant.
	For a lot of officers, your initial service obligation is only three or four years.
	So you're making capping it three or four years.
	And so...
	That's sort of your first point in which you can say, I don't want to be a captain.
	I've done what I came here to do.
	I'm going to get out.
	Or maybe the army doesn't agree with you.
	I knew plenty of people who got out for years.
	They weren't really cut out for it.
	They got out.
	I decided I'm going to go be a captain.
	I'm going to see how this goes.
	I'll get command.
	I'll do my next step.
	So I did that.
	I did basically all of the captain stuff.
	Served as a battalion fire sport officer for a little while.
	Honestly, it was probably the hardest job I did in the Army.
	It was harder than commanding.
	When I was actually out there, I was planning fires for an infantry battalion.
	I did all kinds of stuff with those guys.
	Then I had a command after that, which was also successful.
	And then I started getting a really good look at, well, what does the field grade life look like?
	What do things look like as a major?
	And the major career track is not...
	You really have to kind of be a careerist and put your nose to the grindstone.
	Be like, okay, I'm going to be on a division staff for two years until I get a chance to do a staff job battalion for a couple of years.
	Let's me actually get promoted.
	And you're not going to do anything.
	It's a grind.
	I was like, you know what?
	I've always wanted to be a lawyer.
	I'm going to...
	I've always wanted to be a lawyer.
	I think it's time for me to go to my backup career.
	I'm going to get to four Super Chats because one of them I think is a question we want to ask.
	What type of engineering?
	That was actually not a Super Chats.
	That's just a regular comment.
	What were Tyler's pronouns in the Army?
	I think that's a humorous comment.
	And best prep advice, I applied for AF pilot, given a psych test.
	One question was, would you rather attend opera, baseball game, a hanging?
	For pilots, answer is baseball.
	Guest number three is for lawyers.
	Archer, I won't ask what you answered for that, but what type of engineering did you do?
	So I'm a mechanical engineer.
	Okay.
	And now you're back to law school.
	Yeah.
	And you just finished law school.
	Now you're studying for the bar.
	Now, in between there, you wrote a book.
	Yeah.
	What led to that?
	Well, so I guess I've always been a little bit of a storyteller.
	I mean, even when I was a kid, I was writing.
	So when I was actually when I was when I was a lieutenant, I started outlining this book.
	And when I was a little while after I got promoted, when I was going to the captain's course.
	So because they send you back to school as a captain to learn.
	Learn those jobs.
	Learn how to do your job at a higher level.
	I started writing my first novel.
	It took me about four years to do in my spare time.
	It's kind of funny, the amount of it that was either written at the National Training Center or written in Iraq.
	But the...
	So I published that right as I was getting out of the Army, and then I started working on my second book, which I've been writing in my spare time during law school, and I'm just about to finish that one.
	And what's the book about?
	What's the gist of it?
	What inspired it?
	So it's a World War I-esque military fantasy novel, which you don't see very many of those, so I think it's at least a little bit of a fairly Fairly original work, and I just sort of found the World War I period compelling.
	It was sort of the last traditional war, and sort of the last gentlemanly war almost, but at the same time it was a very modern ugly conflict.
	And I think it sort of let me use some sort of more traditional fantasy themes in it almost.
	So I thought it was a sort of compelling premise.
	How, if I've been asked the totally indiscreet question, how has it sold?
	What's the level of interest in that type of very specific niche genre?
	Well, I would say it's...
	Because I'm an independent author.
	I self-published it.
	And for a self-published book, it's done extremely well.
	For a...
	I mean, I think I've probably sold more copies than some of the, you know, Trump administration tell all memoirs that have come out, but that's not a high bar to clear.
	Now, what led to your willingness to engage in the court of public opinion on a range of issues concerning Ukraine and the rest?
	I forgot to give the opening statement version.
	There are different parts of our audience that want to know what's the context, what's the history.
	Our natural tendency in these questions to do a direct examination like a lawyer would.
	So we're leading people to the conclusion.
	But some people want the opening statement version beforehand.
	Some background of Armchair Warlord.
	Came to my attention because of, on social media, countering a lot of the incredibly bad intel and information that's out there by the so-called open-source intelligence community, mocked as though, you know, the Brosent community, of blue checkmarks, think tanks, Western media.
	The UK Ministry of Defense is willing to just hop onto this insanity.
	The Pentagon stays somewhere in between in their official statements, but some of their unofficial statements go off the res.
	Some preposterous claims.
	We've seen General Milley make some ludicrous claims at the beginning of this conflict, said Russia was going to conquer Ukraine in 72 hours.
	Given the size of Ukraine, the largest country in continental Europe other than Russia, it's the distance between New York to Chicago, down to Memphis, all the way over to North Carolina, to give people a comparison.
	And the idea you're going to conquer that 72 hours with a quarter of a million trained military troops and up to four million mobilized troops that have been trained for almost a decade by billions and billions of dollars of U.S. and NATO aid was always ludicrous.
	But, you know, people bought it extraordinarily.
	But was it seeing the absurdity and inanity of explanation?
	Because I compared it to the public health experts during COVID-19 who all disproved and discredited the credentialed and pedigreed professional class of public health experts and would-be public health experts.
	Just basic analysis and information before you came along was very difficult to get.
	In terms of logistics, in terms of fortifications, in terms of morale, in terms of psyops.
	Basic training that members of the American military have or should have was not being shared by, you know, instead we got the ghost of Kiev and the mighty rebellion at Snake Island and, you know, one lie after the next lie after the next lie, false flags and staged events, Ukraine do something terrible, accused of Russia of doing it, things of this nature.
	What led you to be willing to publicly engage in the court of public opinion on these issues?
	Well, I'd say I've never been afraid to have an unpopular opinion in public.
	I mean, God, I'm sure many people working in the Army can say, I mean, I was infamous in the Army for when we were doing ARs.
	I would always come up in front of God and everybody and say, like, we really screwed something up here.
	We really need to work on this.
	Even during AARs, when people were, and AAR is an after-action review, so we did the operation, we're trying to review the operation, see how we can improve.
	Well, I took that literally.
	And sometimes people are trying to, especially when the general's there or whoever, they would like a somewhat sanitized view of the operation to be promoted.
	Here's Captain Weaver being like, yeah, so this did not go well and we really need to approve this in the future.
	And then, I mean, I've been...
	On top of that, I've certainly said to my friend group my unvarnished opinion about any number of cause celebs over the last...
	Several years, whether it was the various incidents of summer 2020 or the subsequent election or the pandemic.
	That's sort of how I ran into both of you.
	How I knew both of you was either pandemic or election-related stuff.
	I'm going to ask you this, because when did you get active on Twitter?
	Because you have the book, you're sort of not a solitary individual, but when did you create the account?
	When did you amass the following that you amassed?
	So the funny thing is, I've actually had that account forever.
	I actually created the account, and if you look at my account, I created it in March of 2014 for the purpose of actually following news on Twitter about the invasion of Iraq by ISIS.
	Because that, I mean, Twitter was where all the news was at the time.
	It was a really, really crazy place.
	And I was like, I need to actually get an account.
	And I think also at the time, Twitter started kind of cracking down on letting you access the platform if you didn't have an account.
	So I made my account then and engaged a tiny little bit on it then.
	And then I think March, and then this war kicked off.
	And prior to this, I never posted.
	And then this war kicked off, and I decided, well...
	And I'd just been seeing all of this...
	And honestly, I just got...
	I was seeing the same thing you were seeing, was this avalanche of nonsense coming out of sources that I thought were reputable.
	And the canary...
	I mean, I started following a lot of these OSIN accounts, either previously or during the...
	A lot of them I started following during the Afghanistan debacle, which was only nine months ago, astonishingly.
	Because they've been passing news on this.
	Well, I was still following them when this Ukraine stuff started kicking off.
	And the canary in the coal mine for me was pretty much when everything kicked off, and I think right before when it kicked off, the Ukraine government put out a statement saying, Don't talk about our losses.
	Don't post any of our, don't post our troop movements.
	Don't post anything about our soldiers.
	And as one, as a single entity, the entire OSINT enterprise on Twitter decided we are going to act as agents of the Ukrainian government and censor ourselves.
	And we're only going to report on Russia and we will, like, when it comes to Ukraine, it's just the Ukrainian party line.
	I'm like, I follow you people for analysis.
	Warlord.
	First of all, I think I might have referred to you as warrior and not warlord, armchair warrior.
	I read a thread on Reddit.
	Robert, you tell me if this is total gibberish, that apparently on Reddit, there was a thread to the effect that people who had gone to fight or support Ukraine had actually doxed their position by taking selfies, posting them to social media, resulting in Russian...
	bombardment or retaliation.
	Do either of you know if those stories are actually true or is it internet lore?
	I'm pretty certain that's I mean, I'm not dead certain that's what happened, but I'm fairly certain that's what actually happened.
	When the war first kicked off, it was a big cause to lab.
	People on, I guess, certain Reddit communities were recruiting people to go to Ukraine to be foreign fighters, which there's legal implications with that, which, I mean, I'm not super up on those, but this is a...
	So I think the government...
	Go ahead.
	To strike you as a good idea, that from the get-go.
	No, not the slash.
	Because it was amazing that people in the West were encouraging a bunch of idiot kids to rush over into this conflict that Ukraine was unprepared to acclimate them to, and they were unprepared to actually fight.
	Were you shocked?
	I mean, because I hadn't seen that in the modern age.
	I'd seen it, you know, in the Islamic world and other places where they encouraged this behavior.
	But then I'd seen the West say, hey, kids.
	You know, we had the foreign secretary of the United Kingdom, Elizabeth Truss, saying, let's go, let's go, let's send him over there.
	Go over, you idiot 20-year-old, you know, the idiot 30-year-old.
	Now, of course, they're complaining because they're getting captured and the Donetsk and other militia's authorities, local political authorities, wanting to prosecute him.
	But were you shocked when you first saw that, that there was actually organizing on Reddit to go fight in Ukraine?
	Yeah, I mean, I was not...
	I mean, I wouldn't say I was shocked at it because it was sort of an extension of earlier recruiting activity that we'd see online.
	Like Aidan Aslan, the British guy who was captured, he had actually initially gone to fight for the YPG in Syria.
	And so there had sort of been a, I'd call it a rat line, to recruit Westerners to fight for the Kurds initially, which had been tolerated in the West.
	Well, and so this was really an extension of stuff I've sort of seen sort of small scale in Syria.
	And then, but as far as, you know, this becoming a giant cause to lab, I was, I mean, I was, I wasn't surprised at this existing, but I was very surprised.
	I'll tell you what I was very surprised about it was that Western governments were A-OK with allowing this, right?
	I mean, the Ukrainians, they're desperate, they remain desperate, and they're going to...
	They're going to take whatever help they can get.
	The fact that, you know, we had Liz Truss saying, go and fight in Ukraine.
	Go fight the Russian army.
	Like, it's nuts.
	Can you explain to people why it's nuts?
	Why this is a very bad idea?
	In case anybody's out there thinking about it right now, thinking, Call of Duty, hey, maybe I could live it.
	Well, I mean, I'll tell it.
	The reason it's nuts is because you're fighting the Russian army.
	They have a very large army, a very modern army, and they're very good.
	And if you've been following my Twitter feed, the Ukrainians are taking something between 200 and 500 soldiers killed in action every day.
	I mean, it's likely the Ukrainians have lost more soldiers in four months of combat than the United States has lost in the entire Vietnam War.
	I mean, they've...
	Let me stop you there because that seems so shocking to ordinary individuals who might be watching the news.
	200, you're estimating 200 to 500 a day killed, not casualty, killed a day.
	How do you get that?
	What's the evidence?
	I mean, how do you even support that claim?
	Well, I mean, the Ukrainians said it themselves.
	Out of, I mean, directly out of Zelensky's mouth.
	There are other Ukrainian government officials.
	They've gone from admitting 100 a couple of weeks ago to 200-plus.
	I think it's 200 to 500.
	And this is what the Ukrainians themselves are saying.
	There was an incredible admission last week by one of the Ukrainian deputy ministers of defense who admitted that their army, even with all the replacements that have been flooding in, they've been conscripting people as fast as they can.
	They've been pulling military-aged men off the streets and throwing them into the Army within a week of training.
	Can you explain why that's not a great method of manpower for military service?
	Because one of the things that shocked me is so-called open-source intelligence, OSINT, military experts on network news, think tank folks, seem to think that this will be no problem.
	You'll just take a 20-year-old, drag him, or sometimes 50-year-olds, depending on the Ukraine, drag him in, give him three days of training, throw him to the front line, and think that's somehow going to really work against the Russians.
	Can you explain the problem with that, how modern military successful warfare requires professional soldiers with real training?
	Well, if you look at the amount of training that it requires to have, not just a soldier, but to have a unit, I mean, in the U.S. Army, we send soldiers to train for, you know, months.
	Three, four months before you get a trained infantryman out of that.
	And that infantryman is not...
	That's a trained private, right?
	He can move and shoot.
	That is not a...
	And then you put that guy into a unit which has NCOs in it who have years of experience, who have officers in it, who have years of experience, and they've gone to...
	New and different schools to learn how to lead and so on.
	There's an immense amount of institutional knowledge that goes into building an effective military unit.
	When the war kicked off, the Ukrainians started taking pretty catastrophic casualties in their professional army.
	They had a very large standing army pre-war.
	In fact, they had an army which was pretty comparable in size to the U.S. Army pre-war.
	And much of that professional force is gone.
	It's been taken out of action, to use a euphemism.
	And to...
	You were able to predict...
	You're one of the people that...
	One way I tell people to measure someone's capability or analytical skill...
	It is less on credentials and pedigrees and more on short-term predictability.
	The degree to which they can be accurate in the short to middle term gives you a much better sense of that.
	You, Jacob Drazen, and just a few other people in the military space on the Western side, I mean, a lot of the pro-Russian side predicted this, but putting that, they had a reason to predict, a motivation to predict it.
	But not as many people in the West did.
	What led you to believe that from the get-go, this was not a conflict Ukraine could likely prevail in?
	Well, I mean, the short version of this is that I trained to fight the Russians for most of my military career.
	I'm highly familiar with their...
	And moreover, I didn't just train to fight them.
	I also paid attention to the war in Georgia in 2008 and to the war in the Donbass in 2014 when the Russians did commit some of their forces.
	And I think I had a pretty good idea going in of sort of exactly what the Russians...
	We're capable of and what the Ukrainians would be going up against.
	I'd say my main flubs as far as prediction, particularly early war, were I didn't have a very good idea of what the Ukrainian military looked like, actually.
	I've got a YouTube channel.
	I did a few shows early war.
	And I didn't have a very good idea of how well Ukrainian brigades were staffed.
	Some of my earlier assumptions were these were skeletal units similar to what they were deploying in 2014.
	It turned out they were fully manned.
	And so the Russians were really going in and fighting a very large, very prepared military.
	And they have really, I mean, if you look at what the, and then you sort of look at where the Ukrainian military is now, and they've been devastated.
	I'm going to bring this up not to troll you, Armchair.
	These guys have zero facts.
	I'm going to leave that there for one second.
	While I just, because I fact check in the background, I trust but verify, from the BBC people, Ukrainian casualties, Kiev, losing up to 200 troops a day.
	Zelensky aid.
	This is from June 9. We can go read that afterwards.
	A senior Ukrainian presidential aide has told the BBC that between 100 and 200 Ukrainian troops are being killed on the front line every day.
	Some people in the chat say double that or triple that for the true number.
	But wait, there's more.
	Let me just bring back.
	When you say about the Ukrainian army, this is where I have great difficulty Pulling up these videos, rolling them.
	I know nothing.
	I know nothing.
	You retweeted this today.
	I don't know the context.
	I don't know who's in the video, when the video's from, so I don't retweet these things because I can't vet it.
	But you retweeted this.
	And apparently, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to know that the base plate should be flat on the ground to absorb the shock.
	But, and so this thing goes off, and does it go off again?
	Who knows?
	It'll only fire once.
	I've seen a mortar fire twice, but it's very hard to do that.
	One of the problems that I think that you and others have pointed out is that incorporating random people from foreign locations, just conscripting people off the street, grabbing them out of bus stations, grabbing them out of wherever they can, throwing them into this because they're not part of a cohesive, well-trained unit.
	There have been many reports that the media and the rest have tried to suppress, but there's increasing reports coming out from the Ukrainian military themselves at different times.
	Of friendly fire problems.
	Of taking them...
	That this is kind of a predictable problem.
	I mean, even the most professional militaries in the world have had this problem in certain foreign zone conflicts.
	Arguably, that's what happened with the famous defensive back from Arizona who died.
	And they kind of hid that for a long time.
	Special forces, man.
	Tillman.
	But it appears to be a real problem in Ukraine.
	And it's another example of...
	When people lie, like let's say you're out there and you're on the Ukrainian side, you hate Russia, you believe whatever you want to believe on that side.
	Lying repeatedly only deserves people.
	It sends people to the front who aren't prepared and aren't ready.
	You get more and more of these kind of friendly fire problems and other problems like it.
	Can you explain that from a military perspective why this was a bad military strategy for Ukraine to just be throwing people into cannon fodder in the front lines?
	Well, it's...
	I mean, I'm not sure if they have a choice at this point, if they're trying to, but it's not a recipe for success.
	I mean, we've seen this many times before in the past.
	I mean, the collapse of, you know, Germany, 1944, 1945, they were doing similar stuff, you know, pulling people off the street, creating Volkssturm units, you know, sending anyone and everyone they had to the front line to try to stop the Allies.
	I mean, one of the points you pointed out was, also, they tried a lot of desperate, ridiculous counterattacks.
	Like, Ukrainian marketing pitch for the last month.
	Oh, yeah.
	I mean, the extent to which, like, the Ukraine government, you can sort of template, like, okay, what would, you know, Germany do in 1945, or 1944-45, and what would the Ukrainians do?
	It's spooky.
	And I...
	And, you know, I'm not sure if we want to talk about this on YouTube necessarily as far as, you know, the sort of level of, I'll call them, ultra-nationalist influence on...
	We go with Yahtzees on YouTube.
	Yahtzees.
	And it's just we're talking about a game called Yahtzees.
	Yeah, so there's a lot of YEO Yahtzees in Ukraine who are in positions of incredible authority and influence.
	And there's entire units of YEO Yahtzees in their National Guard.
	And the extent to which you can template or sort of template like, okay, what would Germany do in 1945 and then Ukraine's doing the same thing is honestly kind of remarkable.
	Because they're doing things like making completely pointless and making counterattacks that have just zero chance of success.
	And they're throwing entire tank battalions into these things.
	It's hardly the Battle of the Bulge, but when you see See reports like an entire Ukraine, like an intact, fully manned.
	The Ukrainians put together a full tank unit, which had a huge amount of combat power, and they threw this at the Russians.
	And instead of setting it down to defend somewhere and using it intelligently, they attacked with it against a superior Russian force that destroyed it completely.
	This has happened multiple times.
	I mean, in the Kerasan region, they've been...
	They've been throwing intact units from their operational command south.
	Guys who were in Odessa and who were never touched at the start of the war.
	They've been taking intact units from there.
	They're trying to attack a very well-prepared Russian line north of Kherson.
	And they're just losing unit after unit after unit.
	And the only thing they're doing is shorten the war.
	Yeah.
	Can you explain the importance of logistics in modern warfare?
	Because, like, you go back to, you know, it was partially the Russians that sort of created, originated deep status, deep battle policy.
	The idea being that logistics were increasingly important in mechanized warfare and organized warfare compared to the past.
	They were explaining the Russian failure in the decades leading up to the 1920s.
	Could have been a great general during World War II, but, of course, Stalin had him waxed.
	We had a lot of them whacked.
	That's why they got embarrassed in Finland in 1941 and weren't prepared for the Germans initially.
	But a lot of it, like when this war started, I was like, okay, if you look at deep battle policy, you can kind of predict that the Russians are going to be focused on logistics aspects, that they're probably going to want to seize the South early to get a...
	One, solve the Crimean water supply and the land bridge to Crimea, but also they're securing logistics from native Russia all the way through that entire region, and that they secured that region effectively, and that then they were going to continue to take out the train support, the armed support, the other means of support for logistics purposes, and then slowly go in with these cauldrons and these army, and that would be their strategy.
	And yet I was startled.
	Entirely in the West, I didn't even hear the word deep battle policy used.
	It's like, did our army quit training on it?
	Or is everybody just lying about it in the OSINT world, in the think tank world, in the professional military of ex-military on Fox News, CBS, and Main Street Network?
	Can you explain some of the importance of logistics in mechanized warfare?
	And you did a good job of explaining how there's ways to measure.
	Going back to that fact question the person had, there's ways to measure successful logistics.
	You can get a sense of, is Russia really running out of logistics support?
	Are they running out of certain weapons?
	And what's amazing is they keep saying things about Russia that are really basically true of Ukraine.
	There's been massive confession through projection.
	Oh, yes, absolutely.
	Can you explain some of the importance of logistics in the modern warfare and how it's applied in the Ukrainian context?
	Well, I mean, it's absolutely critical, and particularly when you're dealing with a heavy war.
	Which is an army turn of art, but it's heavy as far as what we're seeing in Ukraine is the sort of war where you're seeing a lot of tanks, a lot of tracked artillery, versus what we saw a lot of the time in Afghanistan, infantry on foot skirmishing and so on.
	So, I mean, in particular, if you're dealing with the heavy forces, tank forces, those things will suck logistics like nothing else.
	I mean, they require...
	You have to push so much fuel and so much ammunition, particularly at heavy units, just to keep them functioning.
	And, I mean, the thing is, you can tell, because you can tell...
	All kinds of things about the Russian operational and strategic logistics, just from what we can see them doing and the figures they themselves release.
	I wrote a very big thread on this last week where basically due to some admissions by the Ukrainians, I was able to determine that the The figures the Russian military themselves put out at their daily press briefings, those are real figures.
	They're not the product of a propaganda process.
	They're the product of the Russian military's internal reporting on, hey, this is what we did and this is what we think our battle damage assessment for the day is.
	It doesn't mean it's completely accurate, but it means it's what they think they themselves did.
	And you can sort of take those Take those figures and say, well, yeah, I mean, the Russians are firing usually somewhere between 500 and 1,000 fire missions per day.
	We know a little bit about what a Soviet fire mission looks like.
	And so I was able to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations about, well, this is what the Russians will usually shoot at a target.
	And I was able to say, well, the Russians are probably firing 80,000 rounds a day, 80,000 artillery shells per day at the Ukrainians.
	Lo and behold, this was an analysis I did in April, and lo and behold, a couple of weeks ago, a Ukrainian official came out and said, well, the Russians are shooting 50,000 rounds a day at us, and we're only able to shoot 5,000 back.
	Which, I mean, completely validates the process I used and shows the disparity in the logistical fight here, because the Ukrainians are having trouble supplying 5,000 rounds to their troops, and the Russians are...
	I mean, I calculated that.
	I mean, 50,000 rounds per day is every Russian battalion tactical group on the front line.
	They're getting a convoy with 10 trucks full of artillery ammunition every day, and they're shooting out of the Ukrainians every day, day after day.
	And then, I mean, we can look at the strategic side of things, which is because it's fairly obvious how many long-range missiles the Russians have fired into Ukraine in the...
	Just because we can a lot of the time see them launching and we can see them hitting.
	The number of cruise missiles the Russians have fired is terrifying for somebody coming out in the West because they've fired I think something like 2,000 long-range missiles into Ukraine.
	These are numbers of cruise missiles which the Russians shouldn't have.
	Right?
	And people are saying, oh, the Russians, they'll run out of missiles, right?
	Because that's something that NATO has always been very concerned about in the West is running out of missiles.
	That's been our bugaboo as far as sort of the elephant in the room about any kind of large-scale war in the U.S., in NATO, is we're worried we're going to run out of smart bombs.
	Well, the Russians, not only have they fired a terrifyingly large amount of Cruise missiles and ballistic missiles and so on into Ukraine.
	They're clearly making more of the damn things.
	They're making enough of them fast enough that they can just continue shooting them into Ukraine apparently indefinitely.
	Armchair, let me ask you one question.
	Sources.
	Your armchair, and I think that's where it comes from, armchair war-lording from North America.
	Do you have sources on the inside?
	I saw you tweet, Gonzalo Lira, but do you have any credible or reliable sources on the inside to relate to information that might not be accessible to the rest of us?
	I don't personally have any sources at the front.
	When the war started, my main source for news on the conflict was Twitter.
	These days, my main source for news on the conflict is actually Telegram, which is a There's a lot of telegram channels, both Russian language and English language channels, which will sort of translate stuff that's coming out of Russian language channels.
	And they have all kinds of really good, like, really good information on what's happening.
	And so in filtering through, like, the analysis on, like, one of the things you did with logistics is just...
	How rations and food works.
	Oh, yeah.
	And how things like that can ultimately be essential to a functioning war in a mechanized operation like we're seeing.
	I mean, we're seeing like a World War II style battle in Ukraine to a certain degree.
	It was more like that than in some other conflicts that we've had after World War II.
	Could you explain like how that interacts with things like morale?
	How a lot of these things...
	That winning the logistics battle is often the key to winning the battle, and that includes how food supply is done, how other things are done that maintain a sense of belief in success that is critical to maintaining morale, particularly for a lot of draftees and conscripts on the Ukrainian side.
	Oh yeah, absolutely.
	So to get into that...
	I mean, and actually, this is one of the most ridiculous things that came out early in the conflict, was people saying, oh, that the Russians have terrible morale.
	Which was ridiculous, because the Russian army that went into Ukraine was, it's their professional army, right?
	They didn't even send their conscripts into Ukraine, by and large.
	A few of them went in, but it sort of, against orders, but it was, like, they sent their professional army, and professional soldiers are not gonna, they have a, it's what we do for a living, right?
	So it's not a...
	You're not going to see a rapid morale collapse among professionals.
	But to sort of get back to the topic at hand, sort of abstract ideological questions like how just is the cause we're fighting for?
	Those kind of questions, those go away real quick on the front lines.
	Nobody thinks to compare how Russia and Ukraine do on the Democratic Index.
	When they're getting shelled.
	Keeping morale high among the troops, and by morale, I mean, how good are the troops feeling right now?
	How willing are they to accomplish the mission?
	A lot of that ties into how well are they being treated and how dangerous is the war for them?
	And moreover, how dangerous for how long?
	Right.
	And what we've seen from the Russians, they're more than capable of supplying their troops.
	Everything we've seen out of the Russians so far indicates their troops are quite well supplied.
	And they've been fighting the war thus far a lot of the time in a manner which does not...
	They've been shelling a lot and they have been attacking occasionally.
	It's sort of the pattern of Russian operations you see in there.
	And usually when they push in, they're able to push with a lot of guys, and they're pretty successful.
	Well, the Ukrainians are absolutely not getting supplied for a while, and they're not shooting back a lot, and they're just getting plowed under with artillery constantly.
	And moreover, because so much of the Ukrainian military at the front right now is made up of People who were pulled off the street weeks ago, made up of basically civilians, right?
	They get pulled off the street, stuffed into a uniform, put on a truck, and said, hey, you're going to the Donbass.
	You're going to go die for Ukraine.
	They probably do not know their people to the left and right, and their commanders are strangers to them.
	And, I mean, they're not getting fed, and they're getting shot, and they're getting shelled constantly.
	I mean, that leads to morale being very low.
	It leads to soldiers abandoning their positions or mutiny.
	We've seen a lot of mutiny videos on the Ukraine, which is astonishing.
	Basically, the whole unit surrendered.
	And publicly broadcasting their surrender.
	And I was like, the number of people who believe Russian soldiers have bad morale, that's pure mythological.
	Whenever I hear that, it's like, okay, that's someone not to take seriously.
	It's a ludicrous proposition.
	It never had...
	I mean, at times, it's Baghdad Bobish.
	The Americans are really one in a fold right now.
	It's just always gibberish.
	But can you explain, like, what's on Telegram is, because Twitter doesn't allow it for the most part, is whole Ukrainian units surrendering and broadcasting it on TikTok.
	Can you explain some of that?
	And that's really a function of...
	When somebody thinks they don't trust the people around them, they think they're just going to die, that they're not going to get food, they're not going to get medicine.
	They're just going through the living, hellacious...
	The other reason for the disparity, which we'll get into next, of death counts, is because one side's getting 300 to 500 sorties a day against them.
	One side's getting missiles hitting them every day.
	One of them's getting shelled at a 10 to 1 artillery ratio every day compared to the other one.
	That's why one's going to have a much higher death count than the other.
	Then you throw in untrained people, friendly fire problems, and all the rest, and it's going to get much worse.
	But then you throw in logistics problems.
	Lack of medicine, lack of adequate food, lack of adequate basic supplies.
	People live in underground cellars, effectively, with these fortifications they built up over the eight years.
	Can you explain that that's a sign of a real break in morale and how that can collapse an army very quickly if it has too many units about it?
	You see routinely these days where just Ukrainian units often composed of...
	I mean, a lot of these guys are either brand new conscripts or territorial defense guys who are basically the last line of reserves, and they all got mobilized and thrown to the front to plug holes in their active units, and now they're getting wiped out.
	I mean, you see there have been tons of videos coming out of entire units making...
	Literally making a video appealing to their command.
	Like, hey, the only thing we have are assault rifles.
	We haven't gotten supplied in two days.
	Two, three days.
	And you're telling us to go fight the Russians.
	They have tanks and they're shelling us constantly.
	And we can't do this.
	We'll just die.
	And you see entire organized units doing this.
	And...
	I mean, there's videos that have come out recently about a Ukrainian officer shows up and tells some unit to go into the line and they're arguing with the guy and filming it because they don't want to.
	They know what's waiting for them there.
	Go ahead.
	I'm going to bring this up because I bring up good and bad comments.
	I personally have no sources on the front.
	All of the front of Ukraine is made up of conscripts.
	The person might think they're making a point.
	And it's a legit question.
	I don't want to load my question with an answer.
	How do you verify the information you're getting?
	If you see a video from the Ukraine that purports to be conscripts surrendering, how do you know what language they're speaking?
	How do you know what they're saying?
	How do you know it's authentic?
	How do you know the date?
	How do you do all this independent verification to make sure that you're relying on accurate information?
	Well, I...
	Well, my method is usually I see, well, okay, is this being widely reported, right?
	Is this something I'm seeing multiple people saying?
	And then at the same time, I have any number of sources I look at, people who I know are not just blowing smoke at me.
	They're out there, they're trying to report accurate news.
	Then you can sort of tie...
	I'm getting reports saying that this is what's happening.
	Then you sort of look for consistency.
	Look for...
	I'm getting told this narrative often from Russian sources.
	Is this narrative consistent with what's happening on the ground?
	Again and again and again, I've...
	I've learned that Russian sources, which you can look up on Telegram, they're by and large, by and large, they're pushing fairly accurate news.
	I've been trying to explain to people that the reason why the Russian military is going to be more reliable is kind of like, for the most part, with exceptions, the U.S. Army, in actual theaters of war, don't tend to overtly lie a lot.
	And the reason is they know that if they get caught too many times, nobody's going to believe them anymore.
	Nobody's going to trust, as is being leaked out and being put out in the Washington Post and other publications, the U.S. military is saying we can't trust anything the Ukrainians tell us.
	Because of that, the reason why the Russians were going to be...
	Much more reliable is because if they got caught misrepresenting things, they would damage their credibility in a wide range of domestic circles that would undermine confidence.
	You know, impair morale, a whole bunch of undermined political, domestic, public support, undermined support in the global south that they need, China, India, amongst those countries.
	And that's the same reason why the U.S. military generally, with the requisite caveats, is a pretty reliable source when the U.S. itself is in a military conflict, with obvious exceptions.
	But like, for the most part, not a lot of, there weren't a bunch of ghost of Kiev by the U.S. in the Iraqi war.
	There weren't snake islands.
	There weren't fake events.
	They weren't saying the Russians bombed a train station and it turned out to be the Ukrainian missile.
	There weren't, you know, faking false flagging events in the suburbs of Kiev.
	I mean, Ukraine does it on such a daily basis, they had to fire one of their own ministers because she kept making up crazy stories about things like rape and sexual assault and just horrific things that just were so fake, even the Ukrainians were embarrassed by how fake it was.
	Whereas Ukraine doesn't have that.
	Ukraine, as a president that's an actor, his entire cabinet is made up of people, for the most part, who came from a Hollywood production.
	That's why he has Ben Stiller over.
	That's why he has Bono and U2 singing in a cellar with him.
	This is how the guy thinks.
	He thinks in terms of a reality TV show.
	And in their world, they can just make up any story they want.
	Whereas the Russians really can't.
	Through this conflict, using the same metric, because my metric isn't what's the pedigree, what's the credential.
	Someone can be on the front line and be feeding you totally false information.
	What you want is someone that consistently, what they tell you, is borne out.
	Short-term predictability, mid-term predictability is high.
	The reality is...
	The Russians, you, Drazen, have been very accurate at the short and midterm.
	And the other problem is, of course, the Russians don't like to really fully disclose their military strategy.
	It goes all the way back to Maskarovka.
	The whole thing is to deceive the enemy.
	So they're never going to be, in terms of forward-looking strategy, they're not going to tell you what they're really doing.
	They'll give you a little bit here.
	They've done more of that in this conflict than any conflict because they got so much blowback for being so silent about what they were up to.
	Can you explain that that's why the sources that have been reliable in this conflict are generally not on the Ukrainian side?
	Because the Ukrainian side has been willing to just make up any story, hope people believe it, and figure hopefully they'll forget in 24 hours.
	The Russian and those people that have looked at the war from a less Ukrainian sympathetic perspective, in the sense of military outcomes, have concluded otherwise.
	And my guess, and I'm curious with your own, My guess is Army intelligence is not doing the nonsense that's being pushed in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Blue Checkmark crowd, and think tanks.
	That they have assessed this war as one, as very differently than what they've been publicly saying.
	What do you think about that possibility?
	Well, I'd actually say that's, yeah, I think that's correct.
	And I'll tell you why I think that's correct.
	It's because...
	You see the narrative sources, right?
	The whole British intelligence update, the stuff coming out of the Institute for the Study of War, which they're basically the study for the Institute of Getting Ratio on Twitter by this point.
	But occasionally you get a Western official who sort of says the quiet part out loud.
	The thing that I think is kind of remarkable is I've been able to consistently, at least I think fairly consistently, provide takes.
	My analysis, I think, tracks fairly closely with the released internal thinking of Western intelligence and where they actually think the war is going.
	Because occasionally you get a Western official like Jen Sultenberg a while ago.
	The Secretary General of NATO, he said, because I put out a take a while ago saying, like, hey, the Russians have a lot of troops in the reserve.
	We haven't seen them actually start pushing yet.
	And a couple of weeks later, the Secretary General of NATO said the same thing.
	The Russians have this giant army hanging out in Belgorod, which is not engaged.
	And, you know, really what they're doing with them mostly is just rotating troops in and out of theater from them.
	They're not...
	They're not using it to open up another front, but they could very easily.
	Two weeks after I said this and got all kinds of flack on Twitter, the Secretary General of NATO came out and said the same thing.
	I think given my background, given where I come from, my thought process is fairly close to a lot of what professional soldiers in the West were telling each other behind closed doors, not for public consumption.
	Armchair.
	I mean, for those of us...
	I've been following it.
	I think I appreciate that the fighting is going on largely in the West.
	Maybe...
	Never eat.
	Never eat.
	No, sorry.
	The East, not the West.
	Largely...
	Am I totally mixed up on the map here?
	No.
	Largely in the East, in the region between Ukraine and Russia.
	Maybe in the North.
	When you say that there's...
	When we see in the BBC 200 soldiers, Ukrainian, dying a day.
	The bombing, the shelling.
	How is that happening when we don't really see videos of it?
	We don't really see any real-time stuff, unless you're seeing it on Telegram, but not on Twitter and YouTube.
	As far as, I mean, how do you verify that?
	How do you verify that?
	And also, how do you explain where the conflict is occurring?
	And are they shipping soldiers out to these regions?
	Are there civilians there?
	If there's 200 Ukrainian soldiers dying a day, how many civilians are getting killed every day?
	A multi-pronged question, but elaborate, please.
	Part of that, like one of the reasons why this conflict was going to take long, I think you put end of July as your prediction very early on, was the degree of fortifications.
	I mean, the fortifications along the Donbass border that they'd been building for eight years, and this even has a further history.
	Russia all the way back.
	Was scared about this region of being an attack region.
	And of course, they experienced it during World War II.
	So they had actually instituted fortifications and at least had road mapped out geographically where to put fortifications to protect against the border.
	So they had the benefit of that.
	They did it throughout the Soviet Union days.
	And then Ukraine has had eight years to build fortifications.
	And like you looked at the maps, they had hundreds of fortifications.
	And so two things on that, in terms of Viva's question as well.
	Can you also add, you know, what are fortifications?
	You did a long sort of Twitter thread on what fortifications are, where they're strong, where they're vulnerable, and how that has played a major role into why this war has gone the length it has and has gone the way it has.
	Yeah, I mean, one of the...
	Big things the Russians have really had to crack through is the fact that the Ukraine's been digging into the Donbass for eight years.
	And also, the Russians had to deal with Soviet-era fortifications because the Soviets were nothing if not prepared.
	They dug in the cities of Ukraine during the Cold War because they were concerned, like, what if we lose the war in Germany, right, and NATO attacks us?
	and they're they're marching through ukraine we need to dig it we need to put fortifications around all these cities um so that there's the old fortifications around a lot of cities in ukraine or i mean kiev and there are plus the ukrainians have since 2014 been digging crazy stuff in the donbass i mean not not just you know trenches but tunnels all kinds of bunkers and they're they're well prepared and also they have a I mean,
	even at the start of the war, they had a ton of troops in the region.
	I think about 100,000 hanging out in the Donbass region in a pretty small area, and going into that is militarily very difficult.
	The Russians are just now starting to make a decent amount of progress in punching into the deep Donbass, punching into sort of the remaining regions of the Donbass.
	I mean, as far as your point about, well, sort of conferring what's happening on the ground, I mean, one, there's a decent amount of comment footage that gets posted on Telegram and all kinds of, you know, some other stuff, which...
	Yeah, they have video footage.
	Ukraine has banned it in Ukraine.
	So that's why you're not seeing it being published by the Ukrainian side.
	But where it's coming out and leaking out is on Russian-speaking telegrams, sometimes from Ukrainian sources.
	But that's where you're seeing it.
	And there's people who just spend all day aggregating it.
	There's additional people that help confirm and corroborate this, people like Defense Politics Asia, who does a fun little YouTube channel that breaks it down each day.
	And I've seen, I've watched, you know, like defense politics, pretty independent guy, no bone in the fight.
	But you've seen him look at the same sourcing on a day-to-day basis, try to track the war using traditional open source intelligence that wasn't politically contaminated like the blue checkmark OSINT crowd was.
	And he's come to the same conclusions over time that you and Jacob Drazen and others were predicting much earlier.
	And I think the advantage you and Drazen have is your military background, your ability to filter through what's realistic, what's not, what's likely, what's not, how to corroborate information.
	Okay, if this is true about logistics, then it should show up here.
	If this is true about fortifications, it should show up here.
	If this is true about desertion rate, it should show up here.
	And where it's shown up and where it's not.
	And it's just overwhelmingly, the Ukraine side has just been full of crap.
	There's no other way to put it.
	They remind me.
	I'll agitate a different crowd in the chat.
	They remind me of Hamas and the Palestinians.
	Every time you turn around, they're lying about something.
	Nine times out of ten.
	That's how I came partially to my conclusion about the Israeli conflict.
	I learned I just couldn't trust anything the Palestinians said.
	Because within a week, half of it would have been proven false.
	Ukraine's been worse.
	I think Ukraine is the worst.
	I mean, it's like Egypt during the Six Days War.
	We're on the radio.
	They're saying, oh, we're taking out the Israelis.
	We're whooping them.
	We're sending them back to the sea.
	And all of a sudden, all the Egyptians wake up and they're like, hold on a second.
	Our troops are walking back into our city, looking all beat up.
	How did this happen?
	You know, only Nasser could dodge that with his brilliant political move to resign and thus create a resurrection of his career and the rest.
	But, I mean, is this the worst you've seen?
	Especially with think tank crowd, blue checkmark crowd, OSINT crowd.
	I mean, I'm on these sub stacks.
	Where they are still sending me delusional stuff.
	You know, tomorrow, Ukraine will win.
	Russia's about to fail.
	Putin has cancer.
	It's all about to collapse.
	And it's like, this is ludicrous nonsense.
	We look like idiots.
	The UK Ministry of Defense will never be trusted again in a war conflict because they say the dumbest, most inane stuff.
	Of course, they're talking about taking on the Russians yesterday, the new general.
	Somebody tell the Brits, they haven't been an empire in a century, and it took us saving their rears twice, and that wasn't even against the Russians.
	That was just against the Germans.
	So they're going to whoop Russia.
	I mean, come on.
	That's why Lafroff is laughing to BBC and saying, bring it on.
	Bring it on, Brits.
	And that's why they're putting on Russia, you know, little tsunami weapons in the U.K. underwater.
	But have you been surprised at the scale and the scope of just outright crazy false story after false story after false story from Ukraine and the Ukraine war supporters?
	On the Ukrainian side, not only from Ukraine, but from so much of the Western respected credentialed community.
	And I think it's a good bridge.
	You also had a good Twitter thread about the problem with military credentialism.
	Could you explain part of that in the context of this conflict particularly?
	Well, I'll tell you, I haven't just been astonished as to why I decided to go hot on Twitter to begin with.
	Because I was just seeing...
	Institutions are respected, like the Institute for the Study of War, Think Tank, I've followed for a decade now.
	They've been covering the Iraq conflict forever, and they were one of my main sources of news on what was going on in Iraq.
	And then this war kicks off, and they have done nothing but...
	It's nothing but PSYOP nonsense coming out of their feed.
	They're just pushing whatever the Ukrainians are pushing themselves and the Ukrainians are lying.
	And I mean, every...
	It's a...
	The number of credentialed people, like real professionals, like retired generals.
	I mean, HR McMaster, I think, has said some crazy things, and I used to respect them.
	I mean, this Australian fellow, Mick Ryan, who blocked me on Twitter after I did a thread pointing out why his reasoning was insane.
	Like, real, genuinely respectable people have just taken their reputations and burned them to ashes with their willingness to just push the Ukraine party line.
	And it's astonishing, and to tie that back into your point about credentialism, like, you have a lot of people in the West who have incredible credentials, impeccable credentials, who should be Great commentators on the war who should be providing real analysis.
	And they're not.
	And you can immediately tell them not because it doesn't comport with what's happening on the ground.
	A lot of people in the chat are asking in your estimate, like we're talking about Ukrainian casualties.
	What casualties, and I say fatalities, are the Russians taking?
	And I'm also, you know what, I'll save the Ukrainian civilian casualty for after this.
	But what do you think, what are your estimates?
	What do you think is going on with Russian?
	I mean, I think overall Russian fatalities at this point are somewhere around 10,000.
	The DPR actually just releases what their casualty figures are.
	The Donetsk People's Republic, the Lugansk People's Republic, they're not quite as good at reporting, but they also put their casualties out sometimes.
	The Russian MOD has put their own casualties out a few times.
	Actually, the BBC checked behind them.
	A couple of weeks ago, the BBC did a study and found like 3,500 Russian soldiers had been killed who they were able to track down on social media.
	That was for the whole war up until June, basically, mid-June.
	And so, I mean, if you sort of put these figures together, it comes out to about 10,000, which is no joke.
	It's a lot of soldiers killed.
	Is it nearly as many as the Ukrainians have suffered?
	No.
	As far as the civilian side goes, I believe the last figure I heard out of the...
	The latest figure I've seen is that the UN monitors have seen something like 4,000 civilians killed, which is no joke.
	It's a lot of civilians.
	On the other hand, people out there are claiming...
	Actually, this is a big talking point.
	People out there are claiming...
	Completely straight face.
	The Russians are flattening cities.
	They're committing genocide.
	It's like 4,000 civilians?
	That's like invasion of...
	I would need to look at iraqbodycount.com, but that's like invasion of Iraq 2003 numbers.
	I don't think anybody ever accused the United States of committing genocide because we bombed Baghdad a few times.
	They've admitted it's a quarter of a million civilians that died through the Iraq war.
	Nobody criticizes them.
	I want to bring this up.
	I want to address it.
	Irene Walgen, I'm not trying to put you on blast, but this is the discussion we're going to have.
	I don't understand why Viva and Barnes are condoning Russian destruction and killing of Ukraine and its civilians.
	It's the Russians threatening nuclear weapons if they start losing.
	I'm not sure about the second part of that.
	I can just tell you about the first part.
	Nobody's actually condoning anything here.
	What I think, and Armstrong, correct me if I'm wrong, what we are all saying right now is that this is a stupid war that would have been resolved I don't know.
	their civilians killed, the West treating the Ukraine like a tool in its proxy war against Russia, where otherwise this would have been resolved probably the way it ought to have If Zelensky had respected his election campaign promises to negotiate a peace in the East, am I wrong?
	And just, I'm not condoning anything.
	I think the Ukrainian civilians are the casualties caught in the crosshairs.
	But is anything I just said wrong?
	If so, why?
	Well, I would say it's a bifurcated issue.
	So on the one hand, like, tonight's discussion is just the military analysis of the war.
	But what this question reveals is the reason why Americans in the West are not getting honest information.
	It's interpreted that if you raise questions about Ukrainian propaganda, you are pro-Russia and anti-Ukraine.
	No, that all you're doing is giving honest, accurate information from the front.
	Indeed, my view is you can be on the Ukrainian side and be anti-Russian, and it does not help your cause to lie to yourselves in the world about what's happening militarily.
	It doesn't at all.
	When you become so unreliable that U.S. government military officials on your side are leaking to the press, they can't trust a single word you say, that's not good for you if you're in your Ukrainian position.
	So independent of, the problem is people want to confuse and conflate the support for the war, either side, with whether you embrace propaganda or honest news.
	And my argument is, no matter which side you're on, You should embrace honest news.
	And that's part of the problem.
	The second question is totally false.
	The West has wanted to propagate this myth that Russia will use nuclear weapons.
	Putin is the most restrained in this regard.
	So, frankly, that's just reality.
	It isn't Russians floating in...
	It isn't Russian media, Russian think tank people, Russian politicians, Russian diplomats floating the idea of using nuclear weapons in this war.
	It's Americans and people in the West who are doing so.
	That's who's been saying, well, maybe we could win a limited nuclear war, maybe we shouldn't be so scared of a nuclear war, et cetera, et cetera.
	And in fact, the Western common belief is that the reason why they're playing the games they're playing with Kalinegrad is they don't believe Putin ever will.
	Use nuclear weapons.
	They don't think he'll use his tsunami weapons, you know, weapons that can induce tsunamis on a range of coasts, things like that.
	Now, that's a big gamble to take and a stupid gamble to take.
	But at least from, you know, like that comment reveals the problem with American and Western news coverage.
	When you associate saying anything is not going the way you want with being on the side of your adversary.
	That's the flaw of the chatter.
	That's the flaw of the community that believes that.
	You should always seek honest information because without it, you will never be able to achieve whatever side you're on.
	Yeah, I mean, I think my bottom line on this is that the...
	I mean, this is a war which the...
	I mean, I'm an American, right?
	We're all...
	I mean, you're American, Viva's Canadian.
	This is something which...
	The way I see it, this is a problem between Russia and Ukraine.
	And given the, again, given the significant Yiyo Yahtzee problem that we've seen all over the Ukrainian state, I think this is a problem that the Russians and Ukrainians need to sort out between themselves.
	There is no American national interest.
	Ukraine isn't our ally.
	They're a charity case.
	There's no American national interest in the Ukraine.
	Schmioschlabs.
	Someone said, I'm joking, Biolabs.
	People are going to say Ukraine is an ally only in so much as it is a new stepping foot of NATO into Eastern Europe.
	So it's an ally.
	It's an involuntary ally.
	And to go further into this, why are...
	Why is the establishment in the U.S. and the U.K. so incredibly willing to...
	I mean, I call it a neoliberal Russian killing project on my Twitter all the time, right?
	Why is the establishment in the U.S. and the U.K. so incredibly willing to throw guns and money into a country that's at war with Russia?
	And by the way, I also mentioned this, throw guns and money in violation is what I thought.
	What I'm pretty sure is...
	A violation of federal law.
	If you've ever heard of the Leahy Amendment.
	Because there's all kinds of dirty units in the Ukrainian army who should not be eligible for U.S. military aid.
	And yet, suddenly all these people have javelins.
	If this was any other country, there would be alarm bells ringing all over the Pentagon.
	Why are these dirty units getting all of our weapons?
	Ukraine?
	Pentagon doesn't even care where our weapons are going.
	They're just shoveling them off trucks on whoever's willing to grab them.
	It's been a huge arms laundering operation, a huge money laundering operation, too, and a lot of other things.
	One of the things you've been pointing out, like, what's interesting about this is right now it looks like aspects of the Pentagon.
	Are concerned with where this conflict is going because objectively, I think they always knew Ukraine couldn't win, despite the billions that they justified spending lots of training and arms on.
	But the other aspect is some Ukrainian military can't keep their mouth shut about how poor some of these weapons actually are.
	And you also do separate Twitter threads on just certain weapons and their utility or lack of utility.
	And what has seemed to come through to me in aspects of this conflict.
	Is that it's highlighted how many weapons systems we may have that are about what lobbyists lobbied for, not about what's actually good for the U.S. military use.
	And we've seen that exposed in the javelins and some other weapons.
	The Ukrainian conflict has been a bad ad.
	For aspects of the military-industrial complex.
	Some of these weapons don't work anywhere near what we claim they could be.
	I remember when they sent over certain drones that had cute little names attached.
	That was going to be a game-changer.
	Then the howitzers are going to be a game-changer.
	Then the next rocket launcher is going to be a game-changer.
	And you've been identifying the practical issues of transporting them there, the amount of weapons, the way in which they work with current systems, whether there's enough training to be able to employ them as being one list of problems.
	But some of these weapons don't appear to be well-suited for this particular conflict, and some of them maybe not as well as advertised.
	How much is it lobbying has corrupted this process, both in terms of what weapons got sent and what weapons got developed in the United States versus other factors?
	I mean, I guess I wouldn't necessarily pin it on lobbying ahead of time because, I mean, I think our weapons are pretty good, right?
	But the problem is that while our weapons are pretty good, they're not game changers, right?
	There is no technical solution to a geostrategic problem.
	That's the entire problem that...
	That's our entire...
	I mean, that almost sums up our policy in Ukraine since, I mean, the Trump administration.
	Which is, we're trying to have a tactical solution to a geopolitical problem in Russia by saying, we'll just give Ukraine some javelins.
	It's a magic wand.
	They'll kill Russian tanks.
	It's an anti-tank missile like any other anti-tank missile.
	You know, the Ukrainians have plenty of anti-tank missiles, some of which are probably much better than javelin.
	Because that particular missile has not really performed very well in the battlefield this war.
	And with every one of these systems they send over, and there's not very intelligent or sophisticated commentators going out there and saying all these weapon systems are going to somehow change the game.
	Well, I used to be a professional soldier.
	There are not a lot of capabilities you can give a modern army that are actually going to dramatically affect the battlefield.
	Why use that?
	Well, it's...
	I wrote a whole thread on this.
	It's because the...
	Modern armies spend...
	They both have so many countermeasures to everything that's going on in the battlefield.
	And they spend so much of their time...
	Most modern armies, when they're on the battlefield, are camouflaged in the terrain.
	If they're moving, they're moving from cover to cover.
	You're only going to see...
	Even if they're on the attack, you're only going to see...
	A couple of infantrymen at a time, maybe a tank moving from a piece of cover to another, because armored vehicles use cover like infantrymen do, really.
	And meanwhile, you're getting shelled, right?
	And it's a situation in which you can have arbitrarily sophisticated weapons or arbitrarily lethal weapons, but you're not going to see enough of the enemy army to be able to use them effectively.
	Or to be able to really kill them faster than what you already have.
	Because one of the things that's fascinating is watching a lot of the videos that come out.
	And I try to avoid a lot of the war porn stuff.
	When people were saying they were making up allegations about dead Ukrainians, the response of, like on Telegram and various channels, is they started documenting the dead bodies of Ukrainian soldiers.
	But I had no interest in seeing that.
	But showing the actual military conflict has been interesting because it's what you described.
	I think the image in our heads is still like old armies meeting on the battlefield and you expect to see like 50 tanks running in and, you know, the infantry behind and the Air Force above.
	And instead what you're seeing is like house-to-house urban warfare, two guys behind a building going here, then trying to get in there, then trying to get in here.
	And it shows really more the importance of the quality in certain respects, or the quantity at least, but of logistical support and then the quality of the soldier.
	It seemed to me that those were going to be the two strongest factors ultimately in the conflict.
	What are your thoughts?
	Yeah, I think you're absolutely correct.
	Almost the most remarkable thing about this conflict is how little has changed since World War II.
	I'd say that the big change is almost that there's very good anti-aircraft missiles these days.
	So, I mean, air forces are almost less effective than they were in World War II, right?
	It's almost like that sort of game-changing element of the massive U.S. Army Air Corps or U.S. Army Air Force swooping out on the Wehrmacht and just devastating them as they're trying to counterattack us.
	I mean, a lot of that has gone away because anti-aircraft missiles these days are so lethal.
	The air battle has changed significantly with missiles.
	But as far as the ground fight, I mean, there's not a lot of...
	I mean, particularly with this, just to give you an example, one of the things which actually has sort of had a lot of impact is there's a lot of small drones on the battlefield these days.
	A little pocket drone, you can put it up and you can observe with that.
	Those are for observation purposes.
	And they have a limited range.
	I mean, I know this from drones.
	I mean, you're lucky if you get a kilometer, let alone three.
	This is just to survey near enemy position?
	Yeah, so you can sort of put that up overhead and look around for the enemy near you.
	And that's a level of overhead surveillance the armies aren't really used to.
	And so that changes sort of how you think about, hey, how am I going to move through the terrain a little bit?
	At the same time, people are saying, oh, well, all these kamikaze drones are going to be some game-changer.
	Well, there's really no difference between spotting somebody using a commercial drone and shooting artillery at them versus spotting them with a kamikaze drone and kamikazzing the drone into them, right?
	And you have armies here who are already used to this sort of drone-infested environment.
	Well, just because some of these drones have grenades on them or whatever doesn't really change anything that much.
	Yeah, because that's what I was going to ask you.
	What's interesting to me was the CSIS had a recent conference.
	And aside for a lot of delusional talk, you know, the Russian elite was clearly going to overthrow Putin just next week.
	You know, that kind of language.
	Pretending a wide range of things.
	But what was interesting is one of the guys who's an ex-military guy, ex-defense department guy, was predicting that the effect of this war would be more marketing, more support for various forms of drones.
	But he was including armed drones.
	And I thought, if anything, That aspect has not been promoted by the surveillance, yes.
	Using them as a method of bombing someone or hitting someone, the kamikaze drones.
	What do we call the fame, the one in the U.S. that when we sent over is all going to be a big game changer?
	Is that the great, oh, the Switchblade, the Switchblade.
	Yes, I mean, they come up with cute names, right?
	Switchblade is going to cut through to Ukraine just like that.
	You know, is that kind of, well, that didn't turn out.
	I mean, the Russians, just like that.
	Eh, not so much.
	How much do you think what you've seen, what weapons out of, and just in general, what lessons can military folks learn from how this Ukrainian conflict has unfolded?
	I mean, I would say the big, I'd say that there's really two big takeaways.
	Maybe three.
	First big takeaway is pocket drones are going to be with us for the foreseeable future.
	If you're operating in the modern day, you need to have a drone operator.
	You need to be able to fly commercial drones and have a lot of them up.
	As far as the big development side of those four, that's the biggest one.
	Little commercial DJI drones, those are big.
	Beyond that, there's a Yeah, beyond that, it's...
	Don't expect...
	I mean, beyond that, that's a big game-changer.
	How much has there been a surprise at how a lot of the other weapon systems have not really changed things?
	Like, what weapon systems took a setback in the impression of the military because of this war?
	I'll tell you what has actually really taken a setback is heavy...
	Heavy, high-altitude armed drones, which for some reason people decraned.
	They bought these drones off the Turks, called Byraktars.
	It's basically a little thing about the size of a Cessna.
	They could hang a few little glide bombs off of, and they thought they were going to defeat the Russian army with the most effective integrated air defense system on Earth.
	An army that can shoot, that can kill, you know, F-35.
	An army that can kill, yeah, Kill F-35s, maybe.
	I mean, there's never been a...
	Well, you know, there might have been.
	Because the Israelis have been flying F-35s into Syria.
	And the Russians have certainly been getting radar looks at those things.
	But, like, if you look at the performance between an F-35 and, you know, supersonic, stealthy, highly maneuverable, and there's, you know...
	Missile systems that the Russians have designed to take those things down from 100 miles away.
	You look at an S-400.
	An entire layered air defense system designed to kill things that are small, fast, stealthy, highly maneuverable, and to kill them in large numbers, to keep Russian troops safe as they push through the fold of gap.
	Then you have manufacturers and arms dealers saying, hey, we're going to put up something with the performance of a Cessna 170, and it's going to defeat the Russian army.
	Like, no, these things just got shot down in droves and have had very little effect.
	They had a little bit of success early in the war when the Russians were just pushing in and things were sort of chaotic on the ground.
	They hadn't quite gotten their air defense network up, and also the Russians were sort of working out their kinks.
	There could be some stuff slipping through the cracks.
	It's gotten bad to the point where the Ukrainian government is just not even...
	They stop buying them.
	The only thing they use those things for is they fly them at very high altitude, far behind their own lines.
	They use them to observe targets way in the distance.
	That's the only thing they use them for.
	Now, the other thing is, like, you look at now the sort of sequence of conflicts of NATO that NATO's been involved in at some level.
	Second Iraq War, Syria, Libya, you could argue aspects of Somalia, Afghanistan, now Ukraine.
	This will be a long litany of losing.
	It's not achieving the political objectives, ultimately, that they sought out at the beginning of a conflict.
	What does this mean from sort of the perception of military power of NATO?
	If any, if they lose in Ukraine as well.
	I don't think it's going to do anything good for it.
	Coming off the heels of Afghanistan, it's a...
	I mean, Afghanistan at least was remote.
	We could sort of make the decision.
	Well, we decided to leave.
	Well, NATO has given Ukraine a blank check practically as far as...
	I mean, God, the Poles have given them over, like, 232 tanks.
	A significant, like, NATO countries have been just emptying out their national armament stockpiles to give weapons to Ukraine.
	And what's probably going to happen out of this is Ukraine is going to lose anyways, and they're going to make significant territorial concessions.
	And all of this equipment that NATO donated is going to be in Ukraine or possibly Russian scrapyards for...
	You know, getting sold for scrap over the next 50 years, depending on scrap metal prices.
	Or it's going to fall into the hands of other militias, criminal organizations who are going to use it for nefarious purposes.
	Oh, yeah.
	I mean, this was astonishing.
	It was in Syria.
	The United States refused point blank for the entire Syrian insurgency to supply the rebels there with Stinger missiles, right?
	With any kind of anti-aircraft capability, because we were terrified this stuff is going to end up in the hands of some terrorist group.
	We've given thousands of stinger systems to the Ukrainians.
	Thousands.
	So much to the point it's significantly depleted our national stockpile of stingers.
	And with no idea who's using it, with no idea if this stuff is getting immediately taken to the Middle East and sold, right?
	It's like the entire set of standards that go around, the entire set of standards of That have gone into our decision making to arm people for generations.
	It's got thrown completely out the window in Ukraine.
	We're going to be paying the price for this for decades.
	How do you see the military conflict ending in Ukraine?
	I still see the Donbass being over at the end of July.
	What I've said from the get-go is I thought it would always be South Ossetia Plus so that it would definitely be the Donbass.
	They would secure a land bridge to Crimea and they would secure water supply to Crimea.
	And then the only question would be, if it went a certain way, they may add historically Russian areas, Kharkiv and Odessa, secure the Sea of Assoff, secure the Black Sea.
	That's also all the farm-rich areas.
	That's all the industrial areas.
	That's all the oil-rich areas.
	That's the mineral-rich areas.
	And just leave rump Ukraine, you know, from Kiev to Lviv.
	For the Poles to come in and try to reconquer like they did during the Polish-Lithuanian Empire days.
	But where do you see it ending militarily?
	And what do you think the timetable practically is in that capacity?
	And how hard or easy is it for Russia to expand to a Kharkiv front or an Odessa front?
	I'd say the end state of the war right now is in the hands of Ukraine.
	The war is going to end when the Ukrainians decide they want it to end.
	I think the existing lines plus the entirety of Donbass would be an acceptable end of war condition for Russia if they got certain political guarantees out of Ukraine.
	The Ukrainian government thus far seems very intransigent.
	So I would not be surprised in the slightest if after the Russians polish off the Donbass.
	I've said previously I thought this would be the end of July.
	Judging by their current rate of marginal, they did make some very significant gains recently.
	This might be more like the end of August, maybe going into September.
	But this is making detailed timetable predictions in...
	For military operations, it's very, very difficult.
	And even when you're planning the operation yourself, oh my god, you never hit your time to.
	In particular, when I don't have insight into what the Russians are themselves planning to do.
	I'd say if Ukraine does not sue for peace after the Donbass is secured, then there's already word on the street the Russians are starting to push into Kharkov.
	And so I think Donbass goes, and if the Donbass goes and the Ukrainians don't want to talk Turkey, then probably we're looking at Kharkov, Zaporozhye, and then probably looking at pushing on Odessa.
	How long would that take, and what is the probability that they would be successful if the Russians tried to take Odessa militarily?
	Well, I mean, considering this would be a state in which the Russians have already taken the Donbass.
	They've already destroyed the Ukrainian army in the Donbass.
	They would have, by this point, likely taken Kharkov and destroyed significant Ukrainian forces there.
	By that point, they could probably quite easily mass a very large number of troops into the Kyrgyzstan region and push onto Odessa.
	And I think that's well within their capabilities.
	I mean, I think the entire discussion about, well, did the Russians have the troops for this?
	Did the Russians have the equipment for this?
	That's a decision the Russians themselves can make.
	Because they have the...
	I mean, the Russians have been, by and large, fighting this war with their professional army and volunteers.
	And if the Russians need a bigger army to do something, the Russians need a bigger army for their victory condition, they'll get a bigger army.
	Thus far, they haven't done that.
	And that's sort of the...
	One of the bottom lines of the war for me is the Russians have a vast degree of national power.
	The vast ability to generate power that hasn't been tapped yet.
	Ukraine is already scraping the barrel.
	And so, I mean, if the war is progressing in a certain way, it's because the Russians want it to progress in a certain way.
	Before we get into the 14-starred superchats or comments that I have, Robert and Armchair, you'll field this one respectively.
	The recent, I guess it's not so recent now, the cluster bombing incident at the train station.
	Has there been any more information, new details to identify who launched that, where it came from, who's responsible?
	Last we heard it was Russia.
	Has there been any news on that catastrophe?
	The cluster bombing definitely came from the Ukrainians.
	They hit Donetsk, and they've used it repeatedly.
	The question is whether it's legality, which Armchair talked about.
	What about the Ukrainians using cluster bombs, which they've done repeatedly throughout the conflict going back to prior to this war, this part of the war, and the legal aspects?
	Because you had kind of a different opinion on aspects of that.
	Yeah, I mean, as far as the, I think that the specific incident you were talking about was the missile attack on the Kromotors train station.
	That was one, but it's also the recent one where it kind of didn't even fully go off.
	But it's the Ukrainian solution to getting Western military aid that had extended range was let's bomb the residential areas of Donetsk.
	Oh yeah, I've been banging the drum about this for the last week.
	And as near as I can tell what the Ukrainians are trying to do is they're trying to get the Russians to shift forces from...
	Right now they're fighting in the north of the Donbass.
	They're trying to get the Russians to shift forces away from rolling that area up.
	And they're trying to get them to send them south.
	Basically to push Ukrainian artillery out of the range of Donetsk City.
	Because the way the 2014 ceasefire line worked out was Donetsk City was right on the front line.
	And over the last week, the Ukrainians have been shelling Donetsk at random with Western-provided artillery.
	French and American howitzers, French and American ammunition, firing into random shelling.
	Residential neighbors.
	Things that have no military objective whatsoever.
	Law of armed conflict, if there's troops in a civilian area, you can shoot at that.
	You can't just shoot at civilians.
	There's been no suggestion that any of the stuff the Ukrainians are hitting in Donetsk is military targets.
	They're just randomly shelling the city.
	It's a war crime.
	The only reason I can see they're doing this is to attempt to go to the Russians and the DPR and to attack them.
	And pulling troops out of the north, out of the Lissachansk-Severodonetsk area, to trying to push them out of range of Donetsk.
	And it's horrifying to me.
	We're not only seeing this done, but we're seeing it done with weapons we gave them.
	Now, what about the legal aspects of using cluster munitions?
	Well, yeah, so there's an international treaty on cluster munitions banning effects.
	And Russia is not a signatory.
	Although Russia hasn't used that many of them.
	I know that they've used a few, but there have been some reports of it that by and large they're just using unitary munitions.
	Ukraine has been used them on a number of occasions despite being a Ukraine joined the Convention on Cluster Munitions, I want to say, in 2006, and they should have destroyed their entire stockpile in 2010.
	And actually, kind of the sketchy thing about this is France is also a member of the Convention on Cluster Munitions, and they should have destroyed their stockpiles some time ago.
	And yet somebody was looking through the shipping manifest of, like, ammunition the French had given to Ukraine, and they found cluster 155mm shells the French should have destroyed a decade ago.
	On a shipping manifest going to Ukraine.
	How much of this conflict is actually being exploited for the purposes of repurposing expired stockpiled weapons in Western countries to ship them out there?
	I don't know whatever tax benefit you get, but just to reuse, count it off as support, and let them dispose of old, useless weaponry that sits in the West.
	I think that's happening to an extent.
	I mean, certainly there's some of the Western aid that's going in as governments that are pro-Ukraine for whatever reason are genuinely drawing down their actual military stockpiles.
	I mean, we've given Ukraine like a third of our javelins so far.
	It's an incredible donation.
	On the other hand, you see stuff like, you know...
	Dutch M113s getting sent over.
	There's a lot of really clanky Western equipment which is showing up in Ukraine by onesies and twosies, which is very not-conscious.
	Well, I mean, God, the Portuguese...
	This one takes the cake.
	The Portuguese are giving the Ukrainians, like, a battery.
	Like, six or seven of M114 155mm howitzers.
	This is a World War II era piece.
	If you look, this is like the M1 howitzer 155mm, you know, designed in 1939, which the Portuguese army is sending over to Ukraine.
	If you're like, we're supporting you guys!
	The other thing you had mentioned was, like, people would suggest, like, I've told people this really is a NATO war at a certain level.
	Not formally, not legally, not officially.
	But you had pointed out that To a large degree in terms of armaments, even you could say professionally trained soldiers and aspects of it with some war experience.
	Like you compared Ukraine and Poland and pointed out that Ukraine actually probably had a better army at the beginning of this conflict than Poland did.
	Could you explain some of that?
	Oh yeah, so this is another talking point that goes around routinely is because the war starts and Sort of the OSINT, BROSINT enterprise sort of gets the...
	All the talking points go out like, oh, the Russians are doing terribly.
	They're not.
	But sort of the...
	And then you see NATO countries being like, oh yeah, well, Ukraine isn't even in NATO, but NATO could do so much better.
	We're so much stronger.
	We just stopped the Russians immediately.
	And then you look at what NATO's actual order of battle looks like, and Poland is a...
	Is, for a NATO country, extremely strong.
	I think it has the largest army in NATO.
	And their army is like a third the size of Ukraine's.
	And their equipment is not any better.
	It's mostly old Soviet stuff, which they had back from when they were in the Warsaw Pact, and some new tanks.
	And that's not remotely common.
	There were people unironically saying, oh yeah, the Poles could just march to Moscow tomorrow and it wouldn't be a problem.
	It's like, you people are on drugs.
	Okay, I'm going to get through these super chats so that people can get some answers in as much as they're short answers.
	Just being told, he should watch Sabaton videos.
	All songs are true wear events.
	This is Sabaton.
	This is heavy metal discussion again.
	Is he going back to the service in JAG Corp?
	That's not a super chat, but I wanted to ask you that one.
	No, I'm not going back to the military.
	I sort of toyed with the idea when I first went to law school, and I'm like, I like being a civilian.
	Let's see here.
	Armchair, did you see Zelensky's address to Canadian university students via Freeland today?
	It was incredulous.
	These guys have zero facts.
	I've addressed that one by showing you the sources.
	At the very least, if you have a disagreement, specific statements to contradict, not vagaries.
	What do you guys think about the US Pentagon not letting Ukraine get the MQ1C drones?
	I think the Pentagon is afraid that it would be used to attack Russian soil.
	IMO, what is the MQ-1C drone?
	So the MQ-1C, and I did another throw on this, actually, because this was the latest game-changer.
	The MQ-1C is a Predator with another sensor system on it.
	The old 2001 Hellfires in Afghanistan Predator.
	The Russians would shoot it down the same way they've shot down every other attack drone that's been tried to get flown around there.
	I think a Pentagon might be a little bit worried about getting embarrassed.
	Let's see what we've got here.
	Do your veterans agree with your conclusions?
	Well, just judging by the people who talk to me on Twitter, I'd say there's a lot of them do.
	Alright, we've got this.
	And Robert, I guess maybe you want to field this one if you know it as well.
	Do you know that Ukraine destroyed a huge corn warehouse in Mariupol?
	The corn could have fed many people.
	It was Ukraine, not Russia.
	I haven't heard about this particular incident.
	I haven't heard about this particular one, but Ukraine has been doing this all.
	I mean, they've been trying to blow up dams to basically drown their own population.
	Now, this is a common tactic, but they've blown up all kinds of their own bridges all over the country.
	Now, this did add one strategic issue that was a hot debate early.
	And I was wondering your theory on this or your points on this is sort of our last question before wrapping up.
	What was Russia doing going towards Kiev?
	Because I saw three different theories promoted.
	The main one from the Brosent crowd and the rest is, yes, Russia's going in to conquer Ukraine.
	They're going to win in 72 hours.
	And, oh, they didn't.
	That means it's a devastating blow for Russia and it's a big failure.
	There's that theory.
	Second theory popular within the Russian world was, this is a feint.
	This is a feint designed to...
	This was their official excuse afterwards.
	Shackle Ukrainian troops so they had free flow throughout the south, so they could encircle Mariupol, so they could get a land bridge to Crimea, so they could have permanent logistics controls from Kherson to Kharkiv that has direct from either the sea or the land for Russia.
	But a third one...
	Jacob Drazen was that it was a feint but for different purposes.
	The thought process was there was people within the Ukrainian political structure that if they saw Russian troops on the Kiev doorsteps, they would use it as a pretext to cut a deal with Russia, give them the Donbass, go home, have the war end.
	But you had pointed out there may have been other military tactical objectives in the way they went about disabling aspects of the Ukrainian army in that field.
	What's your take on what that was all about?
	Was it a, you know, a big gamble that just didn't work out?
	Was it a misgaged operation?
	Was it a feint?
	What do you think?
	Well, I think there were basically two purposes there.
	One would have been that the Russians were, I think going into the war, the Russians were planning to an extent for Ukraine collapse.
	So if the Ukrainian army had folded up and gone home like the DOD thought they would, then the Russians would have just marched into Kiev and everything would have been fine.
	It would have been a short war.
	They would have hit their objectives in a very short period of time, and to do that, they would have had to send troops into Kiev.
	As it happened, the Ukrainians were much more willing to fight than both Most Western analysts believe at the time, including myself.
	I'm not sure the extent to which the Russians expected this to happen, but once it became clear the Ukrainians were planning on fighting quite hard, well, then I think this operation turned into an operational-scale raid.
	I wrote a thread about this back in March, actually.
	Sort of back when the Russians pulled out.
	And you could tell they were not planning on sticking around and occupying the area because down south and sort of in the Donbass, they've been very consistent about setting up occupation governments.
	They've always set up a military government anywhere they went through.
	Up north, they never went.
	They never did that.
	Even when they had a lot of troops in the area, they just ignored the civilian side, which tells me they were not planning on sticking around on the ground, which tells me they made a decision very early on that they were not going to stick around.
	The thing was, Ukraine had an entire operational command up near the northern border with Russia, OC North, where, I mean, most of that operational command, we haven't seen those units since.
	There's, I want to say, six or seven brigades in OC North.
	Three of those, the Ukrainians haven't even bothered moving their flags to the Bombas.
	The rest of them, they've sort of claimed they moved them to the Donbass, but we've never seen, at least I've never seen any reporting saying troops associated with them were doing anything.
	Which tells me that there was at least one entire, at least OC North was basically wiped out during basically a large-scale raid.
	And this is in Russian doctrine, going back to the Soviet Union.
	It's called an operational maneuver group.
	It's sort of a detached ground raiding force that just goes deep in enemy lines and wreaks havoc and pulls out, which is what we saw up north by and large.
	And then on the west side near Kiev, they used a different strategy to sort of let the Ukrainians come to them after they realized that they were not going to be able to march on Kiev and take it with their...
	They had a lot of troops in sort of the Gostemol era, but nowhere near enough to take Kiev.
	That's a big city.
	But the Ukrainians threw a lot of troops at those guys trying to get them out, and they lost a lot of troops trying to get them out.
	And same thing, Ukraine's OC West, a lot of those guys, instead of going down south or going east, they went up north and they've picked a fight with the VDV, and a lot of those units we haven't seen since.
	Armchair, I'm going to post the links in the pinned comment, but where can people find you?
	You know what, even before we get there, Your avatar.
	Where did that come from?
	It's concept art for my book.
	If you look up my book cover, that's a different view of the character who's on the top of my book cover.
	I've been using him for my avatar.
	I'm thinking about getting a new one in discussions to commission a new profile picture.
	Sort of one that looks more like me and just isn't a character from my book.
	Don't sell it as an NFT.
	You'll avoid some problems there.
	No, NFTs are...
	Now, I'm going to post all of the links where we can find you, but to tell everyone before we say our proper goodbyes, where can people find you?
	So, I have a YouTube channel.
	It's called Armchair Warlord.
	Same as my handle here.
	Have that.
	I recently did an interview with Gonzalo Lira.
	Talked to him for a little while.
	It was a very good interview.
	Got great views on it.
	I've heard people have told me it was a great discussion.
	If you want to hear me talking some more, actually, I want to hear Gonzalo Lira talking a lot.
	Go listen to us talk there.
	Beyond that, again, I've got a book out.
	The link is already in the description, but it's called The Maiden's War, and it's very well-reviewed.
	And people who've read told me they really like it.
	Part of the reason behind that is I was a professional soldier for a long time.
	I can write and did a lot of research in combat in World War I, and I seem to have really gotten a lot of it right.
	And can you tell people, as our farewell, why they should not be Doomers?
	Well, it's a lot easier going through life as an optimist.
	There you go.
	You know what?
	I'm quoting you.
	Did you make it up or is that Mark Twain or George Orwell?
	I made that up on the spot.
	Okay, it's a lot easier going through life as an optimist.
	I'll tell you what.
	Until your life comes crashing down and you realize everything around you is a black.
	But that's the viva cynicism.
	Armchair, I like that.
	This was phenomenal.
	It's a mixed chat, but the chat is always open and uncensored, so we expect that.
	Stick around, Tyler.
	We'll say our proper goodbyes after this.
	Thank you very much.
	All of the links are going to be in the pinned comment of the pinned comment.
	They're all in the description.
	You're on Twitter.
	It's ArmchairW, right?
	Yeah, it's at ArmchairW.
	Okay, that'll be in the pinned comment.
	And by the way, people, if you think Armchair is wrong, follow him.
	Screen grab.
	And if you think he's been proven wrong, put it out there.
	That's what discussion is for.
	Nobody's infallible.
	But if people are more often than not right, you might want to listen to them.
	No doubt.
	And I'll be at the live chat after the show at vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
	And all the Torba fans and other race grifters, you got to pay a toll to troll over there, boys and girls.
	I told Torba on Twitter.
	Someone should let him know.
	We crafted the rumble rules based on Canadian and American law, not rabbinical law.
	So, on that note, Robert, stick around.
	We'll talk for a few minutes after this.
	Everyone else, enjoy the evening.
	See you soon.

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