Camp Gagnon - Chaos: Russia’s Strategy For Expansion

Episode Date: November 27, 2024

Curtis Fox is a former Green Beret and author of Hybrid Warfare: The Russian Approach to Strategic Competition and Conventional Military Conflict. Ground News: https://ground.news/gagnon Curtis is in the tent to explain Russia's military strategy, both past and present. He tells us how their military history dictates their current goals, their plans for expansion and what it means for the war in the Ukraine. WELCOME TO CAMP! Shout out to our sponsors Ground News and Huel! Huel: https://huel.com/camp TIMECODES 0:00 Intro 1:42 Russian Warfare 8:10 Countries Ready For War 10:50 Hitlers Warfare Tactics 13:44 Infiltrating Countries With Diverse Ethnics 19:40 Hitler’s Social Classes + Uganda Fleeing 24:05 French Revolution 29:07 Hybridized Warfare 32:58 KGB Funded Green Movement 39:12 Russian Influence In America 42:48 Origin of Crimea Extraction 49:19 Iran Influencing Protests 53:56 Building a Stronger Democracy 1:02:21 Past Democracy’s Influence on Today 1:13:13 Tactical Elements + Spetsnaz + GRU 1:19:29 Russian Special Forces + Jack Barksy 1:26:20 Recent Russian Spies Busted 1:33:06 Annexation of Crimea + Putin’s Biker Gang 1:38:44 Creating Chaos To Win War 1:46:40 Invading Syria 1:50:48 Hybridization On American Soil 2:05:48 3 Topics of Hybridization + FSB 2:20:43 Who Is Putin? 2:19:10 Influence To Join NATO 2:25:30 Turkish Army

There was a very politically useful narrative that the Russians were fighting for Donald Trump to win the 2016 election, and that turns out to not be true, and the FBI knew that a long time ago. This is Curtis Fox. He's a former Green Beret who has now dedicated his life to researching and analyzing Russian military strategy. The Russians really, really stepped on their crank when they invaded Ukraine. Zelensky's presidency was on the rocks. The Russians created that monster. They made a war hero.

That's a great way to say it, a living murder. That's right. There are very few people that know the Russian military better than this guy. And today, he's going to take us through everything. To create riots and public displays of displeasure, they use the Night Wolf's Biker Gang, of which Putin is a member. Putin is a member of a biker gang? Yeah.

He explains Russia's hybrid warfare tactics, using a mixture of chaos, propaganda, and ethnic division to successfully conquer their enemies. They start slowly surging in assets into South Ocean and Abkhazia to train these local militias, and then they started doing exercises on the northern border, and then they start needling the Georgians. I'll be honest, I didn't know a ton about Russian military strategy. I mean, I understood that Russia invaded Ukraine and that they also tried to beat up Rocky, I guess.

But other than that, I didn't know anything. But after this episode of my conversation with Curtis, I feel like I know much more why the Russian military is doing what they're doing, what Vladimir Putin's ultimate plan is, and how we as Americans are just as susceptible to the same propaganda and chaos hybrid warfare strategy as any other country. So, without further ado, zip up your tents, get cozy in your little sleeping bag, and enjoy Curtis Fox.

Welcome to camp. Curtis Fox. Good morning. How are you, brother? I'm going to make it. How are you? I'm doing excellent, man. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

I'm really, really excited to talk. There's all sorts of crazy things happening in the world, one part of the world specifically. All right? We are pretty close, some would say, I've heard, to, you know, getting some nuclear threats from Putin and from the Russian state. again, some random headlines that I've read. There's prisoner exchanges going on. There's all sorts of wild hybridized warfare that you've discussed and written about in your book. So I'm curious, as an American, as someone that loves America, how do we defend ourselves from the hybridized and futuristic warfare technologies coming from Russia? What do we do?

That is the, there's no easy answer to that. I would tell you, uh, when you start to understand the Russian methodology, and this is what they do in hybrid warfare, and let's say in Russian grand strategies, it's something that they've repeated, you know, throughout their history. The tactics that are used, you know, presently under the Putin regime

would be very familiar to Catherine the Great or Peter the Great. All the way back. Yeah, Lenin and Stalin. It doesn't really matter which regime is governing in Moscow. Their strategic paradigm, is their strategic paradigm. And, you know, they operate under, you know, let's say, maybe the right term is political warfare.

They operate beneath the threshold of overt conventional war to try to move the ball forward in the margins wherever possible. And when you do that over 200 years, you can really advance the lines and grab the things that you need to grab. Yeah, you can create a little rolling occupation. to speak. Right. And, you know, they, they, uh, what they would like to be able to get is a certain defense in depth. Um, what they're after is hard geographic barriers. Um, and this has been going on since Catherine. Oh, yeah, Peter the Great and even before that. Oh, wow. And this has always been a

feature of sort of Russian military strategy because of the geography that they're sort of dealt. Yes. So they don't have any natural boundaries. They're the world's largest country and the ruse ethnicity is located on the vast northern Eurasian step. And so they have nothing that they can do to achieve security except to expand and grow out. And, you know, in the 13th century, that meant Russian, you know, Rus' tribes, you know, clashing with tribes around them and then eventually conquering them and subsuming them into their ranks. The Mongols, right? Yeah. He's damn Mongols.

And, you know, Putin gave a very interesting interview with Tucker Carlson, you know, a few months back, where he lays this out and he talks about, you know, how Russia and Ukraine have been intertwined since the 8th century. Yeah, which I actually think a lot of people watch that and they were like, that's not what Tucker asked. Why is he going on this long soliloquy about ancient Russian history? But I think that it is actually intrinsic to understanding his position and just the Russian sensibility when understanding the geographical implications of how the country is actually laid out. They have a huge vulnerability to the West. So if you put yourself in his shoes, you're like, I mean, from north and south, they've expanded so far. You have a little bit of, you know, mountainous kind of protection. And then on the east side, you have a coast, you know, and that gives you, obviously, unless someone's going to do some type of beach landing on a hostile shore, which is pretty tough.

but to the West, you just got sort of flat land going all the way into Western Europe. And that could potentially raise a problem as we look through history. I mean, Russia has been invaded every 60 years on the dot since the beginning of time. You know what I mean? Like, whether it's Hitler or whether it's, you know, Napoleon or whether it's, some would say, you know, NATO expansion, you know, into the region. So you can kind of see his perspective where you're like, oh, there has been a lot of. of expansionist ideals through this very fertile and flat plane directly into, you know, Stalingrad.

It's, I don't know, I can see his perspective. And, um, am I being overly sympathetic here? Am I, I, I think you're, I think you're grasping the paradigm. The, the, the thing I would point out is that I would love to be able to create some sort of a grand detente with them. Um, the problem is that there's not really a whole lot of middle ground. What the Russians really want is to be back where they were in the, 1945

The strategy, you know, I said that Peter the Great and Catherine the Great and Lenin and Stalin were all pursuing Stalin hit the apogee of that strategy at the end of World War II. He had 300 divisions Ground forces of about 13 million men and the vast majority of that was forward stationed in East Germany And so they were on the western side of the fold of gap and they controlled all of the entryways into Russia, whether that was through the Caucasus mountains. They, you know, they pushed out to the Gobi Desert. They've pushed out against the Carpathian mountains. So when you say 45, you're not saying Soviet states, you're saying occupation all the way up to East Germany. All the way up to East Germany. What we would consider

that what was called the Warsaw Pact, which was a counterbalance to NATO. So every one of those Eastern European countries had an authoritarian socialist regime. posed on them once the Soviets liberated them from Nazi occupation. And, yeah, if you give them that and you let them forward station, not just heavy ground forces, but tactical nuclear ordinance in East Germany, then they tend to relax. And that's what they consider acceptable defense in depth. I don't know if they'll ever get that defense in depth without some bloodshed. I can't imagine that.

I can't imagine the East Germans. and then, you know, the polls and the Ukrainians, I can't see them just being like, all right, you guys can, you guys can have a bad. So, you know, this is, I just published a paper in military review called Who and NATO is Ready for War. And the short answer is only Turkey and Poland outside of the United States. Most of our European allies are grossly underprepared for any sort of real conflict. But the polls are kind of looking at this. And they've been dominated by Germany and Russia and different. forms for, you know, the last 400 years.

Tough neighborhood for the polls. Tough neighborhood. That's a great way to say. And they, the moment Russia went into Ukraine, they decided they were not screwing around. And the polls have expanded to a six division army, which makes them the most powerful ground forces in Europe. Wow. So the polls can field more in terms of, you know, sheer combat power on the ground than the Germans and the French put together.

Wow. I had no idea. Yeah, so Germany and France are both building three division militaries or three division, three division armies. And so are the British. But the polls, they are not going to, you know, after systematic extermination of the Nazis and then 50 years of slavery under communism, they are never going to allow themselves to be dominated by either of those powers again. Yeah, yeah. There's going to be no more like, oh, Churchill's going to help us out. You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah. Rely on the British, they'll come in. Yeah, they've been burned by that before. If I'm pulling out. Yeah, I'm not going to be like, that whole Churchill thing I think was, actually, maybe it was Chamberlain at the time. But I think that whole Chamberlain thing, I think was, that would have left a bad taste of my mouth.

Like, oh, yeah, we're going to rely on the British to help us out. And the British are like, well, we'll let you guys get around a little bit. And then we'll step in a little later. I don't know. I feel bad for the pulse. And I get their position. You're kind of putting your finger on how to confront hybrid warfare too as well, because you might you might think of these tactics in the way that adolf hitlish seized territory for greater

germany prior to the actual outbreak of war two is a very similar strategy he makes territorial claims um you know in the sarland he makes uh territorial claims in the sudatine land these are the german speaking regions of checklessovacia um and he the nazi party is setting up very very strong satellite arms in Austria. And then, you know, he goes into Austria to give speeches and rallies and there's basically a quiet coup and the entire government in Austria collapses and everybody wakes up the next day and finds out that they're a part of Germany now. And, you know, with the Sudatenland in Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain, you know, that was his famous piece in our time deal. So we'll let you have the Sudetenland land if you'll promise to make me.

more territorial claims in Europe. Well, the moment that they give, the moment that they make that agreement and Chamberlain brings back home peace in our time, Hitler and the Nazis don't just take the sedate land. They just annex the rest of Czechoslovakia and the Brits stick their head under a rug and pretend that that doesn't happen. And Churchill is the one that's thundering about it in Parliament. The famous line is you had the choice between peace and war and you, or excuse me, you had the You had the choice between dishonor and war.

You chose dishonor and you will have war. A bar. Yeah. That's awesome. So, yeah, the polls were the last straw and the polls were, you know, they were, you know, if you make territorial claims in Poland, we're going to war. And he did. And he invaded Poland.

And the term the Germans used about the French and British response was Sitzkrieg. Sitzkrieg is hilarious. Yeah, which means they did nothing. They all said they were at war, and the British and French, they've just got these horrific memories of World War I in the Battle of the Psalm and, you know, Verdun, right, where there's millions of young men are snuffed out in these exchanges. And so they're reluctant to get into the fight. And so the Germans use the operational space to just annex Poland in a matter of weeks. Wow. And do you think there's analogs from this sort of World War II expansionist idea from Hitler that we could see happening in the east?

with Russia now? Absolutely. And what are the analogs? Well, it's similarly territorial claims. They make points of, you know, okay, we've got a, you know, an entwined history with Ukraine, for example, which is true. They do. But Germany also had an entwined history with, you know, the Austrians.

That doesn't mean, yeah. You know, that doesn't, just because you speak the same language doesn't mean you can just throw their government away. But that doesn't be like a strategic element, you know, like, I forget exactly. I think Stalin had done this after World War II, but intentionally displaced Russian-speaking, like, Serbs and, like, put them into different countries

and sort of move them around in order to have actual Russian speakers in different nations so that they would have some type of, you know, tacit emotional connection back to the Russian motherland despite being of different nation states. Absolutely. That's a yes. That's and no one has ever, other than maybe Mao, no one has ever really attempted social engineering on the scale of the communists and the Soviet Union.

Mao would give them a good run for their money. But yeah, Stalin absolutely did things like that. And he didn't just move ethnic speaking Russians to places, you know, let's say like Azerbaijan, which is an ethnically Turkish country. Well, we need them to, we need them to know that they're Russian and they're tied to Moscow. So we're going to move a bunch of Russian speaking people in there to, you know, impose our culture over top of them, so to speak. The other thing that Stalin did was he saw certain ethnicities as threats to the larger war effort in World War II and to the regime, the communist regime in Moscow. So for the Chechens, he deported something like 400,000 Chechens, sent them all to Siberia. And so, like, the entire male Chechen population was sent to Siberia to work in Gulag.

and they weren't allowed to come back until Stalin died. I want to say Khrushchev is the one that allowed them to come back. If you're like me, you probably read a news story and you're like, this is crazy, what is the truth about this? Is this a partisan spin? Is this funded by some media company or some country by their state-sponsored media to try to warp my brain? I genuinely read news articles now with so much skepticism because I have no idea if this is from the right

or the left and what the agenda is and why it's being presented. presented in front of me. And that is why I follow and support ground news. That's right. So even before I started working with this company on the podcast, I've been following them on Instagram because I just thought they gave a very, very great, unbiased, nonpartisan approach to media. It's awesome. Basically, you're going to get a headline and they will show you sort of the different media splits as it comes to understanding the story. They will compare the reporting from different outlets across the political spectrum in one place to show you how the framing and word choice can affect our understanding of a story. I mean, here's a story that my mom sent me from a couple months ago. Robberies, assaults,

surge in Central Park, leaving New Yorkers and NYC tourists terrified. What is the purpose of this story? Who is writing it? Where is it coming from? Now I can go to ground news, read this headline, and be able to make an assessment as to whether or not this is predominantly being reported by the right wing or by the left wing and make some type of deduction like, oh, this is actually being used, you know, as some sort of political apparatus. So if you're like me, if you're a truth seeker, if you're trying to find unbiased news, I would absolutely recommend ground news. It is a completely independent, nonpartisan, subscriber funded. It allows readers to think critically about the world around them and it doesn't tell them what to think, but instead lets them think for themselves.

And ultimately, it avoids misinformation and tries to heal polarization within our country, which I think is absolutely amazing. So don't let misinformation and sensationalism influence how you think. Save a massive 50% on Ground News's top tier vantage plan with my link, ground. dot news slash Gagnon, J-A-G-N-O-N-N-O-N, or scan my QR code right here, or go to the description and click on the link. This unlocks access to all of their news analysis features, something that I think is, I don't know, super important to have. Yeah, make decisions based on facts, not spin, check them out. Let's get back to the show. It's actually very similar to China. Now that you're putting it in these terms, like didn't Mao move like all the Han sort

of dynastic Chinese people across the whole country. And then any, like, basically Muslim Chinese, Uyghurs kind of like push them into their own little pocket and their own little city in the same way that the Russians kind of saw, like, you know, these Muslim Chechens and like kind of pushed them into Serbia. It's almost a one for one. It's kind of interesting. Yeah. And, you know, that's a, man, that's a domain of history.

I actually want to do some real research on. But yeah, essentially, that's exactly what Mao did. He had a peasant army of Han Chinese. And, you know, the narrative under communism is we're freeing ourselves from oppression. And the oppression and the classical Marxist sense is economic oppression, but you can convey that very easily into social oppression of some kind. And when you have these different ethnicities that have, you know, they've been at odds with each other in many ways. Sometimes they work together. Sometimes they don't.

Marxism gives you a very convenient power-based narrative for, because that's every, in Marxism, that's how everything works, is it's all power dynamic. You and I aren't having a conversation to try to meet some sort of a mutual understanding. It's a power game between you and me to try to figure out who's going to take the upper hand. And whatever logic and rhetoric we employ is simply in service of this, there's no enlightened self-interest. It's just self-interest. So we can sort of, you know, oppress borderline and slave, depending on the definition, an ethnically disenfranchised group of Muslims because it's at the benefit of the class struggle.

Yes. Yeah, which... That's a very apt way of putting it. If any other circumstance, you'd be like, hey, should we oppress them, you know, a minority religious group in our country? People would be like, no. But if it's for the sake of, you know, preserving the class struggle and, you know, season the means of production.

All of a sudden, you're like, wait a second, we can, let's impress them. That's a very good way to put it. Yeah, it's a shame that you can really justify a lot of evils of man by seeking the greater good. And, you know, Hitler couched, you know, we consider Hitler to be on the right where communism is an authoritarian left ideology. But Hitler, first off, you know, Hitler was a devout socialist, right? You know, that's what Nazi is the national socialist party. Right. So, you know, right and left, these are terms that we're kind of playing with a little too loosely, I think. But he couched almost everything that he did in terms of, you know, make the systematic purging of, let's say, homosexuals, Jews, gypsies, pretty much anybody that didn't fit the Aryan narrative. Yeah, he couched all that in oppression. You know, these, and it's fascinating.

Because if you actually examine the 1930s rhetoric leading up to, you know, things like Kristallnacht, the Jews are attacked in Nazi rhetoric almost as though, because they are in a certain sense of privileged upper class. Like in if you kind of think about how Jewish communities have survived in Europe throughout the centuries, right? Like they've, they've always had their own kind of autonomous communities that have their own cultural norms. And, you know, no one goes to church on Sunday. We're going to the synagogue on the Sabbath. And a very insular community, right? Like, if you don't have a nation to call home, whatever nation you're now exiled into, you're going to become very close and bonded very tightly with.

That's, yes. And, uh, it's. You know, and those communities are successful in a lot of ways first because their culture imposes self-discipline. It insists on higher ed, on strong education for their children. And it creates a very tight-knit family unit, not just around a nuclear family, but around an extended family of aunts and uncles and grandparents that are all setting expectations for how the children are going to perform and behave. And so, you know, it's no surprise that when Adolf Hitler is arguing for, you know, the parasites, you know, we've got to arrest and expel the parasites in our communities. He's in the terms of the Jews, he's talking about all the bankers, all the jewelers, all the business owners. In the university system, he's talking about all the Nobel Prize winners.

These are the, this is a, this is a segmented off aristocracy. And he's basically arguing for, in a lot of cases, for resting an upper class segment, seizing their wealth and then putting that to use in service of the larger public. Right. And there's a very Marxist element to that. Yeah, which is an interesting thing. I just read about this recently. So I don't know enough about it to make the comparison. But I notice the same thing happened in Uganda under Ediamine, almost the same exact.

thing where basically he comes into power as a dictator of Uganda and says the upper class of our country is almost the same exact language and uh like they've infiltrated they're parasitic da and they need to all get out and they weren't you know jewish people or some other type of like a religious ethnic group that was living it was uh largely like southeast asian so it was like Pakistani and indian and they were running all of like the stores they were you know dealing often in like the financial sectors and they were like extremely wealthy in that part of Uganda at that time. And overnight, they all had to leave. Literally, there was like an ordinance by like Tuesday, you know, the fifth. If you're not out of the

country, you're going to be imprisoned or killed. And all of them had to flee. And so there's thousands and thousands of the wealthy, well-to-do centers of the community that then all of a sudden have to leave. And then as a result, it really leaves like a labor vacuum in the nation as a consequence. And I'm sure a capital vacuum. Exactly. But it's one of these things where it's like, yeah, when people come into power, they look at who is, who they can blame. And if there is some type of, you know, other that they can, you know, cast the blame onto that, you know, is, you know, somewhat successful within the nation. They'll do it. It seems like every time. So it's, this is probably a good time to bring it up. So, you know, I am, I'm doing research on my next book right now.

And it's, it's a detailed analysis of the French Revolution, which, you know, is, You know, that's maybe the first major revolution that explores exactly the ideas that you're talking about in Uganda, right? You know, we're, this is the oppressed people that are throwing off the shackles and chains of, of convention and tradition and aristocracy. And we're, you know, creating a republic to, you know, to be for us. And there's elements of that that are true, but it absolutely becomes unhinged and comes off the rails. Like you, they try to set up a constitutional monarchy in the British model under the Constitution of 1791. And the most extreme radicals that had really pushed, you know, the rhetoric and mobilized the public against King Louis decide that they didn't, you know, first off, they're not at the negotiating table and they can't get the policy that they want through the new regime. So they basically find ways to destabilize the new government and overthrow the regime.

I would love to dive into the French Revolution. It's not really a conversation for today. When the book comes out, you'll come back on and we're going to get into it. I would love it. Yeah. But the thing to point out of this is that the French Revolution and the mass executions that happen under the reign of terror are shockingly similar to the Holocaust. Wow. And both the French Revolution and the Holocaust are very good examples of what happens when psychopaths.

And I mean that in a clinically diagnosable way. Like, they're psychopaths are an ineradicable percentage of the population. And, you know, we can talk about that under the Big Five personality model and what psychopaths clinically are. But there is a point where if they seize public office and they get enough of them into public. public office, they start to do things like mass executions. And they always couch it in this very righteous rhetoric to kind of conceal who and what they are and what their intentions are. Wow. That's an interesting idea. I've never heard the comparison between French Revolution and any type of modern genocide. That's interesting. It is a soul-wrenching amount of research to do

on mass executions. Yeah. But you gotta go play with like a puppy after that. Yeah. It wears on you a little, I can imagine. I work on it in about 30-minute segments. Yeah, that's probably, that's probably all you should do. Yeah, or else your brain will start to go a little.

I tell you what, it's a dark experiment to, but it's probably a necessary experiment. It's one we don't do in our education system at all to help people, young men, especially, but people that are growing up and they're in their teenagers to understand how you could absolutely have been a guard at Auschwitz. And that's within your character. And you just haven't been put in a position where you've had to make those choices. Everybody wants to pretend that they'll be the guy that hides Anne Frank in his attic.

But the reality is that those people are actually rare. And there's a good moral goal to try to be that person. But, you know, the evidence suggests that, you know, the vast majority of us are not quite that good. Yeah. And I think it's also important to note that these atrocities of history are not necessarily, you know, sort of vanquished to history, right? Like, these things could happen again. Obviously, like, if you have Jewish friends, they'll remind you that the mantra of the Holocaust is, you know, never again. And I think that is an apt mantra because it's very, I don't think this will be the last, you know,

ethnic cleansing event in history, unfortunately. And I think having an awareness that of these things could happen again in some capacity, maybe in a different nation or at a different time, but it probably likely will happen again in some sense. You know, I mean, some could even argue that's happening now and different civil wars that are, you know, breaking out across the world that, again, be a convo for a different time. But all that to say, these events have persisted throughout history and young men and women will be at that crossroads where they're going to be like, wait, do I represent my nation and support the military force that I'm sort of conscribed to? Or do I stand up for what is moral and ethically right and, you know, stop the, you know, destruction of an entire

group of people in my country? Especially if it's going to cost you everything that you have and everything that you could have. Yeah, you put your life on a line. And it's a very real decision that many people in history have had to make. And I mean, again, someone argued that there's young men in Russia that are making that decision now and, you know, some extent. So I'm curious, circling back onto the Russian idea. Can you describe what exactly hybridized warfare is and how that's playing out now and why that term is being used and how this conflict is different than previous conflicts with Russia? Sure. So let me, I've talked about, you know, let's see the Russian grand strategy, the strategic picture.

To really understand hybrid warfare, you have to understand the strategic picture and those gains is what they're pursuing. And then at the operational level and the tactical level, what hybrid warfare is, it's a methodology and a sequence of tools that they might use to make those gains, to, you know, let's say to push their outer boundaries out without the horrible expenditure of personnel and resources that would normally accompany a conventional war. So in the book, what I used to illustrate this is the second Chechen War, you know, requires the Russians to dedicate very serious combat power to Chechnya. It's very, it's very taxing in terms of the number of casualties that they take.

It's very expensive. They can set up a steamroller and then slow walk that steamroller in a World War II style, you know, across, you know, a province like Chechnya and pacify it. But especially in the 90s, we have mass community. By that point and the world is kind of watching in horror as you know what is a very brutal Slogging match and ethnic cleansing happens in Chechnya and the Chechens are They're ruthless in a way that no one else is they'll get right down to the Russians level and I mean they they have no problem You know you know getting their hands dirty so to speak yeah these are tough motherfuckers These are tough tough people

These are the guys that come out of Chechnya and they teach al Qaeda operatives how to do sniper operations and stuff yeah they they're um they are some dangerous people they also fuck up people in the ufc yeah you know you know you notice that you know i mean like those are the nice ones but those are the ones that are like yeah i don't want to kill people i just want to hurt them yeah you know i mean and those are the scariest guys in the world i don't want to kill people i just want to choke them yeah you got to think like those are like the those are like the pacifistic intentions that's scary so when we get into russian soft a little bit later i'll tell about one of history's more brutal hostage rescues to kind of bracket, you know,

what the Russians are willing to do in terms of, you know, extremism in that part of the world. But with hybrid warfare at the operational level, they're employing targeted propaganda. They're using economic sanctions and financial sanctions. They will manipulate their oil and gas exports and their, you know, their gas pipelines to try to coerce and antagonize a country, let's say, Ukraine, into remaining in Moscow's circle. And they can, that can come in the form of debt diplomacy and that can come in the form of, let's say, revising your natural gas contracts to give you a preferred deal. But if you're going to move away from us, then all of a sudden we want you

to pay for your gas up front. And you can't buy any of it on credit. But, which was a smart strategy, I would say, to the, you know, to the Russians to create such a fuel dependence. Yeah. I mean, all of Western Europe, for the most part, I mean, with varying degrees, the farther out you get, has a real reliance on Russia, or at least used to, you know, for fuel and gas. So I'm going to blow your mind for a second here. Please. So I don't want to imply that they're connected now. That's not fair.

but the green movements, the anti-nuclear branches of the green movements, both in the Europe and the United States, were both founded with KGB seed money in the 1960s. Wow. The Russians realized that in order to do global trade, with any of their industries, and the Soviet Union had almost no service economy. But, you know, they were very, very good in state planning at doing the heavy industrial world. And so to interface with the rest of the world, you know, that was what they could offer in the supply chain. But to trade with the rest of the world, you need hard currency in a, you know, reserve currency, right? Well, you get that through oil and gas exports. And so, you know, they realized as nuclear energy was becoming, you know, the next thing in the West.

And we've got the first generation and second generation nuclear reactors coming online. And they realize that that could be a threat to their oil and gas networks. So the KGB founded with, you know, they were the ones that provided the seed money to start the anti-nuclear components of the green movements in both Europe and the United States. That is wild. And so when you, it's so funny now when you hear these activists, you know, fighting, we've got to stop carbon emissions because it's going to kill us all, like climate changes, you know, the climate catastrophe is going to kill us all. We've got a mature technology and nuclear energy that can be plugged in almost anywhere where there's a coal-fired power plant, and the grid in the United States and Europe is already perfectly set up to harness, you know, third generation and fourth-generation nuclear reactors. and the cherry on top is that a simple rubics cube size of uranium or plutonium holds enough energy to supply my energy needs or your energy needs literally for the rest of our lives.

And it is true that there is nuclear waste that's produced as a byproduct with using nuclear fuel, but all of that remains self-contained at the nuclear power plant, right? With any carbon-based fuel, the pollution is, you know, it's spread, know, through the environment. And we try to spread it out as much as we can so it doesn't become too concentrated. It is not a perfect solution. They're downsized to nuclear energy. But if you wanted to, but the French were running 80% of their power grid on nuclear energy.

The Russians run, they run, they use tons of nuclear plants. Wow. But they're exporting, you know, oil and gas that they drill out of the ground because that is the natural resource that they have. Yeah, that's the, that's one of many. commodities that they have that the world needs. Wow. So you gotta wonder there's so many people that are probably you know pushing this anti-nuclear energy idea or at least definitely were probably earlier on in like the 90s I imagine just at the behest of you know Russian propaganda without even knowing it just useful idiots that are pushing this idea. I mean what a crazy thing and they make for easy

targets right when people people go out and they wave placards at things and they're all courage and all courage and heart. And, you know, you just have to give them the cause to fight for. I mean, kids below the age of 22 have this messianic complex that they need to save the world. And you just got to give them a cause. Wow. I mean, that's just really smart from the Russian intelligence perspective. I'm being able to see that on the horizon and being like, okay, how do we subvert this narrative?

Nuclear energy is not the future. It's actually going to be the destruction of the planet. It's going to lead to nuclear fallout, et cetera. et cetera. Yep. Wow. And it just takes a few, it takes a few disasters. You know, I can, you know, three mile island. And you know, that was that was a problem. But I mean, we've, you know, we've had changes in nuclear engineering that makes that have ensured that their reactors are fail safe now. That three mile island can never happen again in a modern nuclear plant. And but the public doesn't know that. And they don't get into the details. And there's probably a decent

amount of money push behind the idea that it could happen again very easily. And it doesn't have to be Pushed by the Russians anymore. I mean, these, you know, these movements are self-funded. Right. After you. They're 50C3s. After you get them going. 501c-3s, you know.

Wow. I mean, that is just a, it makes you wonder about everything, though. Right. Like, if there's someone that can benefit from some type of political message, you got to wonder, like, are they involved in it somehow? Yep. And now, is this, the KGB seed money in this, you know, certain sections of this movement, guarantee like 100% or is that like still somewhat of a rumor you know quasi conspiracy or is that

no we know they did it it's on the books the you know the to defend I don't want to slander these people too much but you know the they don't have any connection with Russia today sure but I mean this is what the KGB did for a very long time you know there's you know we you know the Marxist elements in the American higher-ed You know the university system at you know there are a number of universities and you've heard of what is it the The terms escape in my brain right now But you know a lot of these people these European intellectuals that fled Europe during World War II and stuff and came to American universities and set up shop a lot of a lot of the Marxists that came to the United States were funded with KGB money and there were there were principal universities in the United States including a

you know, Harvard and UPenn and, uh, um, Columbia, Columbia and Yale, the Yale humanities department was a big one. And, you know, the KGB would, you know, fund people to come over and set up shop. And, you know, I think, anyway, it's, uh, you know, that they, uh, that's how you, that they, uh, that's how you know, that was their way of ideologically subverting the American system. And, you know, that's, I mean, there was a reason the FBI was so eager to monitor Marxist students for so long. And it's not unlike even what happened in 2016, right, with the election. I mean, the, you know, Russian finance is going into paying for social media ads and,

you know, paying, you know, doing paid social to try to influence the election. You know, I, again, I think it's kind of like clear to say that Trump didn't collude with the Russians to get elected. but it does seem like the Russians or, you know, certain, you know, vested areas of the Russian government were putting money into trying to get, you know, on one specific candidate elected. Well, that, so here is again where the public was kind of misled by the American government for a long time. And this is a good component of hybrid warfare, right? Like, this is part of the Russian grand strategy. you, you listed some of the events, you know, the Russians have had to deal with, whether it was the invasion in 1941 by the Vermacht or the Grand Armand or Napoleon, like they want to prevent grand coalitions from ever being able to march eastward. And so they're very good at disrupting political consensus.

In the case of the 2016 election, the FBI now has very grudgingly conceded and the CIA have very grudgingly conceded this. they weren't trying to promote Hillary Clinton. They weren't trying to promote Donald Trump. They were trying to disrupt all parties. They were trying to, they saw in Donald Trump, they wanted Hillary Clinton to win because they saw in Donald Trump everything that we see in Donald Trump. He's chaotic. He's unpredictable.

And if you're Russia and you're trying to set policy and you're trying to figure out how it is that you're going to confront and move around the U.S. government, you need somebody who you, in the White House is a known quantity. And so they wanted Hillary Clinton to win. Now, what they were doing in social media for the most part was, you know, if Black Lives Matter sets up a rally, then maybe we'll ensure that there's a MAGA rally that accidentally happens at the same time and the same place. And if, you know, we want to, we want to sow as much evil, let's say, opposition information about all the candidates as possible to try to, you know, and we'll tar. target those messages to the right people to create a little bit more outrage and turn up the temperature in the discourse It's not really obvious that they moved the needle in any direction, but this is stuff they do in Europe all the time and we we don't talk about it because it's not on the American radar But the FBI concealed that and the CIA concealed that from the American public. It didn't really come out until about 2022 that you know, because there was a there was a very politically useful narrative that the Russians were fighting for Donald Trump to win the 2016 election. And that turns out to not be true. And the FBI's knew that. And they

knew that a long time ago. Wow. And that's a frustrating thing. Yeah, it makes sense. Again, I don't think that any one of these nations has like any vested interest. Again, I think the narrative is kind of pointed out like, oh, Putin and Trump are boys and they're calling each other and he's a puppet of like, again, I think all of that is bullshit. I just think sewing dissent and, you know, in the words of Abraham Lincoln and, you know, probably many people before that, I'm. house divided can't stand. So just creating some type of internal dissent where people are at each other's necks is ultimately at the benefit of. And that's exactly the way the Russians perceive it. Yeah, I think it's completely right. I mean, the more dissent and conflict you can sow within a

populace, I mean, it's, they can't, they can't go anywhere. And this is a core component of how they manage at the operational level in hybrid warfare. This is how they managed Kiev and Ukraine for a very long time. So, and, you know, let's say 2004, there was a, they called it the orange revolution in Ukraine where, you know, there was reformist candidate for president and reformist prime minister and they were running against the Russian puppet candidate. And they won. And so first off, the Russians, I think they poisoned the guy. He didn't die, but he was very sick for a while. But they basically bribed everyone in the, in Ukrainian parliament to try to freeze most of the the reform legislation in place.

And they, they just froze the legislature with, with, uh, you know, black male bribery. Is this the dude that they poisoned in like his skin all like change or something? I forget who this was. Uh, oh man, what was the guy's name? There's a minister's, the prime minister's, the premier minister's Yulia Temachenko, um, but the president's name was. He didn't die from the poison, right? No, you think, I think you're thinking to Sergei Scripial, which was 2017.

That was in the UK. Oh, that was recent. Yeah. I thought that was from back then. So the, but yeah, they poisoned this president. He didn't die. And then they were finally able to have a presidential election again in 2010. But this time, the Russians really took it seriously.

And their candidate, Victor Yanukovych, won. And that's what sets us on course for the Ukrainians call it the revolution of the revolution of dignity. But, you know, effectively they overthrow the government. There's the Euro-Maid in protest because Yanukovych wants to pivot towards Europe. And so the Russians, they're leaning on him heavily not to do that because he does owe his presidency to them. But he's just reading the tea leaves with the Ukrainian people. And so he promises all these reforms and, you know, we're going to file for entry into the European Union. And then Moscow leans on him and he backtracks on all that stuff.

And it creates these riots. And then to put down these, these protests, he becomes a very, very heavy-handed. And he deploys police forces en masse and kills hundreds of his own people to try to put it down. And then he loses his nerve and he has to flee to Russia. The, the GRU, a couple of GRU officers are sent to extract him. Wow. And so he flees to Russia. And that's what sets up the Crimean annexation.

So if you look, from Vladimir Putin's perspective, he claims that it was all orchestrated by the CIA. And he just, he, that's what he tells everybody. The CIA overthrew a democratically elected government, you know, and this guy is now leading a government in exile in Russia. And that's what set this crisis off. It was the CIA's fault. And the reality is, first off, CIA is not that competent. They're good at some things, but they're, and. But they're, you know, they're quite, American intelligence is quite risk averse.

And, you know, we generally have a consensus that was, we created an enormous amount of backlash against the United States by involving ourselves in foreign politics and Latin America, Iran, you know, Cuba. I mean, pick the, pick the regime change, you know, that we, that we, there's a general consensus in the intelligence community that those were not. you know good for our country in the long run and they they didn't yield fruit and there's and we shouldn't involve ourselves and stuff like that and the notion that the CIA you know could have or would have overthrown the government in Kiev and then orchestrated this movement out of thin air is uh it's farcical uh at this point you don't think the CIA is is conducting like color

revolutions or like coup d'etaz no and when do you think that ended uh uh I don't know if the ending is the right word. Pivoted? Yeah, I would say risk averse is the right word. They, there's a really, I need to do a deep dive on this. But my perception of the CIA, most of that I get from my friends in the state department who interact with them on a regular basis. and it's that at some point, you know, it used to be a relatively, I don't know, I guess you would say, you would say conservative, very nationalist organization. And at some point, due to who they were recruiting out of the American university systems, they started becoming very liberal.

And, you know, the State Department has always been known as being a very liberal, you know, component of the U.S. government. And they have interactions now with CIA officers where they're like, ooh, reel that in a little. bit and so it's some of the texture of the organization in terms of you know I don't know how else to say this you know they just they they just don't see that we have a moral right to interfere in other countries and I think that's that's becoming fairly well institutionalized in the CIA and some of those some of those changes are healthy and some of them are not and you know we have to be strong enough to advocate for a national interest at the same time you know they you know Kuta

is not something that the CIA is up to at present yeah I wonder if after like Saddam I wonder if that was like the turning point where it was like oh this is becoming a real issue could be that seems probable I mean it was a you know it was a big, you know, the Iraq war was a big turning point for a lot of the U.S. government. Yeah. Who knows? If I ever get a job in the CIA, I can call you and tell you all about it. I don't think you should do that.

I don't want to, I don't want to be on the record. I don't want to be on the record of getting secret leaks from the CIA. I am cool with the CIA, right? You and I, we're friends, okay? I don't want to be a patsy one of these days. I just feel like it's going to happen. I don't know. I don't mess with the CIA.

Okay. So this is, this is interesting how the high. hybridized warfare elements sort of play into American lives. Like the fact that it's, again, this is a warfare that is affecting like civilians in a real way that I think people don't always acknowledge or understand. I even wonder if there's things that we'll find out in five or 10 years. Like, oh, this protest about this, you know, political event, whether it's, you know, free Palestine or support Israel. And the fact that these things are happening in close proximity, I wonder if even that is at the behest of, you know, some type of, you know, Russian intelligence operation or, you know, like, oh, the drag queens are reading to kids at some random library in Minnesota, and that is front page news.

And again, people can have the opinions about these cultural war things, but I really wonder if these are all done intentionally and sort of promoted and amplified by external military forces. So with the Palestinian protest, I can tell you, um, that a lot of that is sponsored by Iran. And actually the FBI is looking into that. There have been some reported on FBI inquiries into organizations that were, you know, effectively founded with Iranian money. And a lot of them are foreign nationals who have not, you know, registered as agents of foreign governments.

And the FBI is looking into some of those things. A lot of the, and they know where to create the movement, just like the old communists used to is they bring these to the students and they you know they they use the students and turn them out in mass uh you know with the protests at columbia and a few of the others uh you know one of the claims that was made repeatedly in the press that yeah some of these are students at the university but a lot of these people are full-time professional protesters um and uh you know that's an that's an interesting conversation and of itself because you know some of that is you know organized professional protesters that are being funded with you know American 501c3 money

some of that is foreign money some of that is you know Iranian money and they they know how to they understand how US policy is made in a very real way and they understand that US politicians have their ear to the ground and they're they're observing things like that and they they don't want to be they don't want to cross the street without looking for traffic Hmm. So it's a little bit of yes and. Yeah.

I mean, at this point, I just don't trust anything. No, and you shouldn't. Maybe this is like the end. Like this is just like late stage hybrid warfare where I'm just completely disillusioned by all things. If something comes across my news feed or my Instagram or whatever, and it's like, this is the story that everyone needs to be looking at. Immediately I'm like, okay, what type of dissent is this going to sew into the nation? and what kind of division will this cause? Secondly, what is the cover up for some type of bigger event that's happening that's, you know,

this is trying to take the place of immediately I'm just like, I don't, yeah. Like all the culture warship, I'm like, I just don't think it matters. Like in the grand scheme of understanding like how other nations are trying to usurp America as, you know, global number one, I just, I don't see any of these other things as really being that consequential. Am I being reductive? So I

Gosh, do I have a good answer for that? Again, not to say, I'll put a caveat Not to say that like any You know, social movement or Political event happening within the United States Is unimportant. You know what I mean? Like if you are a Palestinian-American living in America

And you are wanting to go protest You know, on behalf of your people in Palestine I'm like, yeah, I understand That is a very legitimate reason to want to go, You know, exercise your right and, you know, for free speech, that makes complete sense. But, you know, like we've kind of pointed out, there are some people that are being utilized by foreign forces

to go do something that they don't necessarily understand the implications of or why they're doing it. And again, I don't want to lump everything in as like a sci-op, but there are certain people that are being utilized in greater siops that maybe, you know, have good seeds and good elements of part of them, you know, across the spectrum. But I don't know, I just, I get skeptical when I see anything that seems like a real big, like, cultural sort of linchpin. I think where I am on it is I want all foreign agents to be registered.

I think that's in a democracy that absolutely has to be the case. Democracy works. You know, our democracy works for our people. It doesn't work for, you know, we're not here to represent the Chinese popular opinion in Congress. And how does that work? What does that mean foreign? Foreign agents? Foreign agents. So if you're representing the interests of a foreign government, and we have foreign lobbyists in the United States. So, you know, if you're, you know, you have foreign

lobbyists that are, you know, arguing for certain nuances in U.S. energy policy on behalf of Saudi Arabia or maybe they're arguing for certain, you know, military export policies on behalf of Israel, right? And they might be involved in like a conflict or an embassy within the US. Some of them are working out of an embassy. Some of them are nominally working as a, you know, this, you know, private capacity as an activist, something like that. And I think we got to do a much better job of requiring all those people that register as foreign agents, number one. It probably is a little too easy for people who are working for foreign interest to get U.S. citizenship or at least U.S. legal status.

and, you know, that's, that's a hard policy to get right. And I don't know that I have an easy answer. And that's, but that's, you know, that's definitely a real issue, right? And maybe I'll leave that to better minds to figure out. But the Greeks had an idea of a polis, of a city-state, right? where it just belongs to the people of that polis and they have like these little obelisks that are actually set you know a certain number of miles outside of the city that actually show you where the city state begins and the idea is that the laws of the city state apply

within those obelisks for the people within those obelisks and anything else outside of that is not their purview or their domain um and that That's important for making sure that policy actually serves the people that have to live under it. It's extremely localized. Yeah. And there's a famous political saying as all politics are local. And that's where that comes from, essentially. And there's a really good classicist historian Victor Davis Hanson who talks a lot about these nuances of the Greek city states.

They actually had remarkably sophisticated governments. And for democracy to work, you need a relatively educated population, number one. But the Greeks actually invent a term called mezzoy, which is literally middle class. It's like the middle people. And the mezoic come about, especially in ancient Athens, because they build the fleet of Athenian triremes. the Athenian Navy, which allows Athens to build an empire. And they have this silver mine outside of Athens that they discover and they're exploiting and they're using this. It's basically, it's like an expansionist monetary policy.

So it's a high times at the golden age of Athens, you know, in the fourth century or the fifth century under Pericles where, you know, they're building this fleet. And if you are a young man in Athens and you need work and you need to get good pay for work, you can simply grab a rowing seat on the tri-ream. And you can, you know, go out on the tri-room for a few days and come back and they pay you when you get off the boat. And then you've got cash in your pocket to go do whatever and you can come back. It's almost like Uber. Right. And like any guy that gets off the plane in the United States can immediately drive for Uber or lift.

Right. You could do like DoorDash. Yeah. Like there's even, you know, companies even in New York where like you don't need to have a bike. You don't need to really have a phone. Like they'll kind of supply you everything on sort of like a lease basis. So you can just show up and start making money. Yeah.

It's kind of like a little universal basic employment. Very little training is required and all these things need to be done. Right. And if I move to it, that's probably what I would do first job and be like, yeah, give me on a bike. I'll deliver food, make a couple hundred bucks and keep them moving. And that, that, that injection of, of capital into the working class, creates the Athenian middle class, which defines Athenian democracy.

And that works very well until that paradigm starts to break, until the, you know, the paradigm starts to break down in the middle class. But what we conceptualize in terms of, let's say, individual freedoms and liberty, all of the countries that really develop what we would consider individual rights are countries that developed a robust middle class and that robust middle class is demanding individual rights to protect them from an aristocracy that largely means to rule over them and if Athens was no different they you know and they do eventually overthrow an Athenian democracy and they set up an Athenian aristocracy and they set up a very radical democracy it's also a lesson of how radical democracy

can destroy itself and that that happens during the Peloponnesian war which is a fascinating discussion in and of itself. But one of the other principal places where a middle class creates itself is in England under the yeoman class. And you, like the Robin Hood stories are about Robin Hood, the yeoman bowman who uses a U-Bo, right?

And, you know, he's written, rewritten in the later stories as a nobleman. But in the originals, he was a yeoman. And, you know, it's, it's, the yeoman class develops in the United Kingdom because unlike, you know, France, the king doesn't have to maintain a large standing army to patrol the land borders. England is, you know, the Britain is an island. And so the only threat is to the north from the Scots.

And, you know, for a large portion of their history, that was the case. And so you can, you know, that you don't need this large standing army. And it develops an entirely different standard of civil liberties. and it eventually results in the, what they called the familiar councils, which are kind of the prototype parliament before the 1225 Magnicardo is signed. We're getting way in the weeds here.

I'm tracking. How does this apply to the middle class in America today? Well, it's a fascinating, both Greek and England are fascinating case studies, right? because what you see happening in the United States today, and this actually goes back to the earlier practices of hybrid warfare with the Soviet Union. I've got to get into the tactical elements of it, right? We're talking about operations still because the tactical stuff is juicy and interesting and kind of sexy.

But with the, I'm going to come back to the, American middle class, I promise. But I got to lay some ground, some groundwork. We finally conquer the Germans during World War II. You know, the Soviets did about 80% of the fighting on the ground. And, you know, they're the first to occupy Berlin. We meet them. We partition Germany up.

And one of the very first problems we have to contend with are the death camps all over the place. And so we're trying to figure out how. to how to try these German officers, you know, not just in the SS, but you know, in the political class and in the Vermecht for effectively crimes against humanity. And the Germans are kind of indignant at the idea and they try to insist many times that this is simply the justice of the victors. You're executing, you're trying us and executing us because you won. you know, this is, and they're trying to deny the allies any, any real moral superiority on that ground, on those grounds.

And one of the arguments that is partially conceived by Churchill over them is that, no, you've broken some sort of a universal law, you know, a universal law of humanity. And universalism, universal rights, human rights, this concept kind of goes back to the French Revolution, which again is why I'm studying it for the next book. And the French Revolution, the intellectuals of the French Revolution, they're also kind of, let's say, history's first, atheists. They try to reinvent their culture entirely. And they write the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. This is endorsed by Lafayette, you know, our famous Lafayette. And they try to universalize everything. So they, you know, they create a new system of measurement based on the density of water that's base 10.

And everything's going to be 10. So we're going to have 10 months in the calendar. And we're going to have 10 provinces in France. And all of the roads are going to lead to Paris. And we need to make sure that the roads are equidistant. This is an element of the intellectual movement of the revolution? Yeah. It's rationalism.

They want every, it's from Descartes. They want everything to be rational. And so they, they want to build a perfect. you know rational society and immediately where that starts to lead to is well we have to get rid of old mysticism and so the you know first they nationalize the french branch and the catholic church and then they start engaging in mass executions of priests um so you know all the people that are getting walked to the guillotine aren't just aristocrats they're they're nuns and it gets really nasty um and these are the first enlightened you know atheists that are that are doing this too

Anyway, Churchill is trying to come up with some and the others, you know, not just Churchill, but, you know, Eleanor Roosevelt and, you know, the great minds that eventually come up with the United Nations. They're trying to come up with some sort of a rationale to judge the Nazis under and what becomes the Nuremberg trials. And they come up with this idea of universal rights. When the UN is chartered, one of the very first things that the Eastern Bloc countries do is they start, adding a lot of the implementation language to, you know, the UN creates its charter of human rights, which is loosely based on the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. And one of the very first things that the Eastern Bloc countries all start doing is in the implementation language of those high-level listed rights is they start transforming a lot of those rights.

you know, these, in our constitution, we have the Bill of Rights, right? So the first 10 amendments to the Constitution. And these are all prohibitions against the state. They're prohibitions, you know, that deny certain authorities and privileges to the state to protect the individual from the overreaching power of the state. And the Soviet bloc, the Eastern Block, what they do in the United Nations, and when the way in the way that they conceptualized and they define human rights when they when they

write some of the subordinate language below the statute the way they try to reinterpret the Western beliefs and rights is by saying that we need to protect intersectional groups we need to protect you know minority ethnicities and and select groups that have been oppressed and marginalized from the majority and so we need an overall overarching state with the power to protect all of these different factions and groups within a culture from one another. And so it's a completely reinterpretation of rights. One of the very first things that the Soviets try to implement into the language is that is a prohibition against the freedom of speech. And it's that something can't be, the governments can't be fascist.

And the moment a government becomes fascist, you know, they become illegitimate and, you know, essentially, the Soviet Black says they have the right to overthrow that government. Well, what does fascist mean? It's not in the language. And it turns out that fascist means literally anything that the government in Moscow doesn't like and it wants to get rid of. Right. So like we can all say, we can all agree that we don't want to live under a fascist regime.

But there's really no clear definition of fascism. Right. And who's going to define what fascism is? And in any, you know, it's exactly the person you would not want to define. fascism. The people with the power. Yeah. And it's kind of like hate speech laws now, right? And I don't want to go too deep into a culture war issue, right? But the problem is not that there's no such thing as hate speech. The problem is not that people aren't cruel to each other. And, you know, honest to God, if you've never had a conversation with somebody about something that is real,

like if you ever, if you ever had a fight with, you know, your wife or if you've ever tried to convince your father to stop drinking, you've probably uttered some hate speech. Yeah. Right. And literally everybody on earth has said something that was hurtful. May have been truthful, but you know, and you've probably said something that was really hurtful. Yeah, I've got some hate speeches under my, yeah. I hit one today probably. It's even driving over here, you know what I mean? My hate speech cut me off. I had to let him know, you know what I mean? I got pissed off. There you go. That's a choose your own adventure. That could be whoever you. you want. You can pick whoever in that car.

Yeah, I grew up in Texas and, uh, you know, I, I don't speak Spanish, but I understand Mexican fairly well. And it's the kind of Mexican that you shout at somebody when they cut you off in traffic. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The guy that cut me off was white, by the way. Yeah, just so you know. Yeah, I would never say it to a minority. You're crazy? No, no, no, no, he's a dumb white guy. Yeah, entitled, privileged. Ugh. The worst. Yeah, what are my, uh, one of my buddies, like, you know, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, He grew up in Guatemala. And I was just like, hey, man, like, what does this mean?

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All right. Sudden alarm. Let's get back to the show. If you've never had a serious conversation about anything, then you might be free from having never uttered hate speech. But the people that define that are exactly the people that you don't want defining those things. Now, again, this is the Russian interpretation of their own laws. This is the, this is the, the Eastern Black worked very hard in the United Nations to write the implementation language for a lot of the high level rights that were put into the UN charter.

Within the UN. Yeah. Oh. And so there's a permanent nesting for a lot of these ideas. And so when you start to, and, you know, when you start to look at these ideas outlived the Soviet Union and they outlive Mao. They outlive You know, they outlive Pol Pot And they're all ideas that argue

For an expansive state that has the responsibility Of controlling the public And this is done intentionally by the intelligentsia Of the Soviets. Yes, the Soviets all did this. At the end of World War II, they say, hey, we're going to implement language That basically as the governing bodies, we will control and we have an obligation to protect the minority groups of, you know, the intersectional groups

of any specific population. With the intention, do you believe it was a malignant intention that they were saying, oh, we can use this as a tool for control? Because it does, it sounds good on its face. You know what I mean? They sound very cuddly. All of these ideas sound very cuddly at face value until you actually look at how they're being implemented.

And you can look at like the, you can look at how it is that the UN, you know, is, you know, intervened in Marxist conflicts and let's say Africa to really understand what these what these words on paper actually create and result but bringing this back to the American middle class the American middle class is a very different understanding the British middle class is a very different understanding of what rights are and it creates a fundamental conflict and clash with you know a ruling class especially university educated ruling class that doesn't understand understand rights in exactly the same language. And that is definitely something that is worth exploring.

And I'd love to hear somebody, you know, write a deep book about it. Can we get into the tactical elements of hybrid warfare? Let's do it. So the GRU is the Russian military intelligence service. It's one of three. So it used to be the GRU and the KGB. The GRU is the oldest, you know, in the Soviet Union. You know, I think its first head was actually Trotsky.

And the KGB was founded after World War II. And it was like they've gone through a certain number of secret police organizations and the KGB was created. When the Soviet Union collapses in 91 and the KGB collapses with it, the first chief director to the KGB becomes the SVR. the the Russian foreign intelligence service and the first chief director was the one who was doing all the foreign operations second chief director of the KGB becomes the FSB which is the largest and most powerful of the Russian intel services and it takes the lion's share of the KGB personnel and infrastructure with it and it you know that's their that's their new secret police in a lot of ways and it's kind of a It's like a cross between, it's like if the FBI, it's like if the CIA was inward looking and the FBI had four or five times the budget that they have.

Wow. It's in the SVR is the smallest intel service in Russia. It's, and it's very boutique. They're very selective about who they bring on. And they're known for being kind of chic and sophisticated in comparison. So it's FSB, GRU, KGB. Well, the KGB is gone. So it's FSB and SVR come from the KGB.

The GRU is independent from the KGB throughout all of Russia's history. And then the GRU is the only one that survives the Russian, the Soviet collapse and remains in relatively its same current form. So KGB dissolved in the 90s? Yeah, it dissolves. And well, it's dissolved when the Soviet Union collapsed in 191. I didn't realize that. Yeah.

So it's gone. And what we're dealing with now is, you know, two, two pieces of the remnants of it. And then the GRU, which was always independent. And the GRU is, they run maybe six times more operatives abroad than the SVR. Um, but they're supposed to be, they also own all of Russia's Spetsnage Brigades. So this is interesting because the Spetsnazbergades. belong to Russia's military districts. So each military district, you know, western military district, southern, you know, central, eastern.

They have a Spetsnese brigade that basically serves as an in-house strategic reconnaissance asset. You know, asset. These, these Spetsonized brigades are supposed to do deep reconnaissance way ahead of ground forces, maybe, you know, do some targeted assassinations, you know, see if they can destroy. erupt enemy command and control and feed information back as the ground forces advance in a major war. But even though they belong to the districts, they're operationally controlled by the GRU, and the GRU centralizes all military intelligence under its house. Separately from the Spets and those units, GRU has what they call agencheri, which is just a Russian word for agent, and those are the trained intelligence operatives of the GRU.

And it's interesting because a lot of those guys are former Spetsnesteman, which gives this agency kind of a, it's not just a military feel. It's kind of like, here's the objective, and this is the result that we want to achieve. And so this is the amount of leverage that we need. And, you know, this is the tool we're going to use. This is the amount of leverage and force that we have to apply in order to achieve that result. And it's kind of disconnected from. the sensitivities of international relations, let's say. And so remember the assassination attempt on Sergei Skripiol?

That was the GRU. Got it. And they answer to the Russian general staff. They actually answer to the chief of the Russian general staff. And so in order to, you know, assuming military bureaucracy is a zero-sum game, in order to get noticed by the Kremlin, they often, they kind of had to do these little, yeah, and I'm over here still games. And I think that's kind of what that was.

They, that was kind of a very ham-fisted, stupid thing to do. And apparently no one in the Kremlin asked for it. And so they were, they were trying to get noticed. And they created not only an international incident, but like using nerve agent on a foreign soil of another country and killing some of their citizens with it. Is crazy. Crazy. They got noticed. They got noticed.

and 150 career Russian diplomats and intelligence officers were ejected from Europe and another 50 from the United States because of that. So the collective intelligence losses to Moscow were so appalling that the head of the GRU, Igor Korbov, was basically called into the Kremlin the late that summer for an intense dressing down. And apparently he collapsed in his home from stress about a month later. Um, we'll never know what, you know, what that stress was from. It might have been a bullet behind the air. Maybe he accidentally tied himself to a chair and then accidentally fell in a lake. I think he was anxious. You think he was anxious? I think he was doing. I think he was probably drinking too much coffee. And I think he got a little anxious. And I think his heart gave out.

That's my- I hate it when that happens. That's my theory. All right? I don't want to get killed, Curtis. I'm on the side of propaganda, okay? I bet you the Russians are telling the truth. I think he was stressed out. never lie. So these are the guys that in a good hybrid war are going to be very active. There's a couple of other specialist units, right? So the VDV or the Russian airborne forces, airborne infantry, and they're actually a separate

military service. So you've got Russian ground forces, Russian Navy, the aerospace forces, and then the VDV, and those guys are the, they're ground forces, but they're all airborne or airspace. mobile and they are basically like a quick reaction force for the Russian president so he can yeah and they're they're considered the elite trigger polers of the Russian system and they have one Spatznass Brigade inside them as well called the 45th then you've got a couple of boutique special missions units the ministry defense has one that's crafted loosely off of Western special missions units like the SAS or you know some of the elite units in the US

arsenal. They actually call that the KSSO, which literally just means special operations forces command. Very, you know, very original. And then they've got, and that is, they're, that's, it's an interesting unit and how they run it and how they're doing a very good job of recruiting people and building teams within that unit. And then the FSB has a couple of special missions units inside of it. So the two that are, you know, the most prominent are Alpha and Vimple. which are both Cold War holdovers. They used to work for the KGB. So Altho had the job of protecting Soviet political leadership,

and it was used a lot internally within the Soviet Union to conduct counterintelligence operations. Vimple was actually, it's a sword rather than a shield, and it's designed to decapitate foreign governments. And so the Vimple operatives in the old KGB days could speak like three or four. for foreign languages. They,

and all of those guys were recruited from the KGB's illegals program. So, you know, the illegals program would, they would place these, you know, they would find like a child that's died in childbirth or something like that, but there's a birth certificate out there.

And, you know, this child would be in like Canada, let's say. And then they would build a paper trail around this birth certificate as though the child had grown up and hand this. identity off to one of their operatives and like they uh though you know they might even have like a husband and a wife uh you know they'll recruit two agents to be like hey look like we think you'd work

together in the field you guys want to get married here in russia and then you're gonna you're gonna go to the west uh lead separate lives and then you're going to meet by chance in university and you'll get married and everybody and you'll have people attend your wedding and everyone will think that you're a normal western couple Barski did this. Are you familiar with him? I'm not familiar with the name. He's a former KGB agent that, I guess, defected in a way. He came on the show and he spoke about his time, basically in the KGB, came to America in the,

what was it, the 70s and lived here and kind of worked his way up through corporate America and was, like, communicating with, you know, with the Soviets through a satellite base in Cuba. Wow. Crazy life. Ended up falling in love, had a child, stayed here. they tried to sort of get him out. Insane story, I digress. But I believe when he came to America, he came through Mexico.

I think he went from, I think, I believe it was East Germany to Canada, to Mexico, to Chicago. And he basically was able to get fake documents through the government, through obviously the Soviet government. But furthermore used this illegals program where his name, Jack Barski, came from a child. who had died and was able to use his birth certificate and basically usurp his identity. So he's an actual case of someone on the record that says, you know, this is exactly what I did in order to get his name, Jack Barski. That's not his real name. Dude, I don't know if you ever have me back on the show, I wonder if we could do like a three-way, you know, you and me and Jack Barski and talk. That would be a fun conversation.

Bro, you would love to talk to him. He would be, he was a really, really interesting guy, really, really sharp. I mean, this guy was so smart. Obviously, he was a, you know, intelligence asset for the Russians. They found him through university because he was like top of his class at university when he was in East Germany. And dude, he came to America, became, went to Baruch College in New York City, became the valeditorian again of his college here, spoke at Madison Square Garden for the validatorian address. A known KGB spy was speaking at like the height of the Cold War. I think this is like, I don't even know. This is. There's probably mid-70s.

They don't recruit stupid people, man. But like, I think for me at least, I kind of, and this guy, and Jack is an older guy now, and still incredibly sharp, like, just dialed in. And extremely good of pattern recognition, a really good social navigator. And I ended up falling in love with a guy and he's American woman and had a baby and stayed here ever since. I'm going to go find him on YouTube now and see what you. I'll send you the episodes.

Really, really, really cool. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, pretty crazy. Yeah, I mean, his whole, the whole story. Because it's a spy story, but if he really doesn't do it, it's really a love story. It's unbelievable. But anyway, so this is exactly to your point. They used his name is a name from, you know, a child and something happened to him and basically usurped it.

So imagine a covert special missions unit where these guys are given the absolute pentacle of military training in special operations. but only the Jack Borskies are recruited for that unit. And it's Jack Borski and people like him. Yeah. And there's only about, you know, in the modern iteration of VIPPEL, I think there's about 300 guys in the whole thing. Yeah, I think he said even at the time when he was deployed in the U.S., they had like no real known agents.

They had a consulate and an embassy and, you know, there was like diplomats, but obviously the diplomats were all spies. And so he had no connection with them because all the diplomats were being tracked by, you know, FBI and American agents. And so basically he was like, I think there was like eight or ten other spies at the time during the entire duration of his program from like, you know, 60s, 70s all the way up until, I think it was probably more like 70s, 80s. But that the entire time, there's only like 10 other spies that he was disclosed for like in the United States operating. So it was extremely selective, extremely small at that time. And I'm sure it's grown now.

But it's a really, really elite level, you know, intelligence asset. That's uh I'll tell you what it's it's a little shocking some of the links to the Soviets were we're willing to go to in certain instances like that and Still going on today though It's still going on today You know and I talked about in the book in 2010 You know the FBI had a mass roundup they they they got like 10 deep cover operatives That were operating in the United States you know under under under uh, under uh, they got a mass roundup they they they got like 10 deep cover operatives uh that were operating in the United States you know under under under uh, you know, false names and stuff.

In this exchange that just happened, you know, so with the war going on in Ukraine right now, the Europeans are taking counterintelligence very seriously. And so they're monitoring the Russians. The Russians have had a ton of spies expelled from Europe in the last few years. And so they've had to do a lot of the more mundane reporting using some of their crown jewel intelligence assets. You know, these are deep cover agents that are, you know, are supposed to be getting into the boardrooms of Europe. And they're doing, you know, atmospheric reporting.

And, you know, it's like, it's like delivering newspapers with a Ferrari. Like, you can do it. It's just, like, why would you? Like, it's why, why put the, you know, the wear and tear on the transmission? And that's what they're doing with some of these guys. And so more their deep cover operatives are getting, are getting caught. And in this recent exchange, you know, we just. What I was telling you when we were about when we were walking over to the studio, you know, we got a bunch of journalists and like Alexei Navalny, you know, political dissidents from the Russians.

And what the Russians got was a bunch of deep cover intelligence operatives that had been, you know, that had, you know, been hiding out in Europe and the United States and other places. At an exchange rate of two to one, right? Yeah, I think I would say it was 16 and we got 16 and they got eight. But again, this is not a parody. I think it's important to drive this point home that it's 16, you know, American journalists and, you know, political dissidents, so to speak, for eight extremely specialized, extremely competent intelligence assets that now are back released free to walk around Moscow and potentially get redeployed back around the world. That's the one piece of good news is that they'll probably never get redeployed. I think a lot of them will be sent to the training pipeline and they'll become trainers and things like that. Makes sense.

If you redeploy them, we already know who they are. We've already got their fingerprints. We already know to watch them. The biometrics are probably tagged. Yeah. And so there's not a lot they can do without being a greater liability than an asset. The other thing is you can't really, they can ever become decision makers in, you know, the SVR or the GRU or the FSB, right? Like they can't move up the hierarchy anymore.

They can't work as, you know, mid-level bureaucrats in those agencies because one or two of them might have flipped. And the Russians can never fully trust those people again. Wow. Because they, you know, who's to say if they did or didn't? But, you know, they can never actually, those guys are burned now. Wow. And so the ones that they really trust might get to, you know, train the next generation. In some sense.

But you're never going to climb up the ladder. Yeah, they're never going to climb the ladder. Wow. Because some of these guys might have been an American, you know, captivity for eight years, 10 years, you know, like who's to say what happens in that timeline? You know, maybe they get some funding. Maybe they met an American woman. Who knows? But there is some level of compromise that the Russians will never be fully, you know, content with.

That is really, really interesting. Wow. So I know Anna Chapman, you've heard her? Look her up on your phone. She's cool. Yeah, like she's a model now in Russia. How sick. She was one of the ones captured in 2010 that the FBI exchanged to Russia.

And, you know, she was trying to climb political circles in the United States to get into the Hillary Clinton campaign. Well, Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State. And, you know, she was living in New York and she was hitting like all the Cognopolitan New York parties and stuff like that. And, you know, she is the quintessential Russian honeypot. She looks like Black Widow from the Marvel comics. She's cute. Yeah, she's pretty red hair and stuff.

And when she got back to Russia, you know, she was not a particularly gifted agent. She was a, you know, a good social ladder climber, but, you know, as a covert intelligence operative, she was a nobody. Um, but what she does now in Russia is like modeling and interviews, like she's a celebrity over there. Oh, wow. And, uh, and she lives in Russia now. Yeah. She just, uh, well, I mean, she can't leave Russia.

She'd get arrested, right? But, but, but she couldn't defect to the U.S. No. Like she couldn't, you know, cooperate and hand over secrets. No, she probably didn't. I would be astonished if she had anything of value. Wow. Um, but, uh, yeah, she, uh, you know, she does these photo shoots and they'll give her like a pistol and some's a little

a sexy, you know, black, black widow adjacent outfit and she'll, she'll do these little speeches and she meets with kids in high school. Yep, yep, that's a great example right there. I never heard of this. Wow. But, yeah, she'll go talk to a bunch of high school boys and girls and she'll tell them about the glamorous life of working as a spy. And, uh, whoa, that's wild. So do you think she got anything? I mean, she was just like operating within social circles. Did she ever get up into the political ranks? No, she was trying to. Do you know how she got compromised?

Man, I'm scratching old brain cells. Like for example, with Barski, the way he got compromised, the different agent got compromised in London. And then that guy went and cooperated with the federal authorities in England. And then basically it was like, hey, look out for this guy, Barski in New York. It's an assumed name. I can't remember the guy. guy's name, but I think it was a Russian

turncoat. It was somebody that got flipped and they dimed out these 10 deep cover operatives in the United States. I think that's what it was. There's a book about it. It's called Russians Among Us. Crazy. And you can dive into that book and it'll tell you all about it. Wow.

But so anyway, all of these different elements are employed tactically in hybrid warfare. So if the Russians determine, you know, when they're they're deploying the targeted propaganda and the economics coercion, the financial sanctions, the debt diplomacy, and they determine that they can't get the outcome that they want through

those means, they might try something a little bit more direct. So in the, you'll say in the Crimean annexation, you know, Ukraine is destabilized as a government because of the Uremian protests. Victor Yanukovych has now fled the country. Vladimir Putin went into an overnight planning session with his principal military advisors and intelligence advisors, and they came up with the plan for annexing Crimea, because Crimea has the Sevastopol naval base, and it's how Russia projects power into the Black Sea and from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean and the Indian oceans. Losing that port would be catastrophic. And so they, you know, they go into a deep planning on how they're going to take an annex Crimea. Isn't that the only Russian port that doesn't freeze over? Well, Vlad Vostok in the east, but I mean, that's, you know, how many thousands of miles away.

Fair. But this one in Crimea is strategic because it's operational all year. Yep. Got it. And they've got some, they've got, you know, ports in the Baltics. But, I mean, these are deep water ports are a rare commodity for Russia. Right. So anyway, they immediately come up with a list, a limited list of key objectives that have to be seized immediately.

And they employ local militias. They start putting intelligence operatives into Ukraine to keep the government paralyzed. They threaten public officials. They bribe police chiefs to keep their police officers interfering in riots. They turn out GRU operatives or FSB operatives to create riots in public displays of displeasure. You know, and then they use the night wolves biker gang of which Putin is a member. What? Yeah, the night wolves biker gang.

Putin is a member of a biker gang? Yeah. You see like when he goes out and meets with him, you'll stand there in a leather jacket and some sunglasses. It's really funny. I've never seen this. There's some of the hardest, like you picture what hard-looking bikers look like

and then picture them with like Russian prison tattoos. Wow. It's a funny bunch of guys. And this is like 2014, 2015 time? What year? 2014. This is February of 2014 and then on end of March, the Crimean annexation.

And it's done by April. Wow. So anyway, the, the Spetsnaz units on the ground, they're given a series of objectives that they have to seize. They use all of these popular protests that have been generated to kind of paralyze the institutions around them so that they have enough chaos to seize gains in those objectives rapidly. And then once the Spetsanized units hit those, you know, those road intersections, they, you know, or with the Crimean Peninsula, there's two isthmuses where, you know, they seize those bridges and nobody can get in or out like they've seized the island or, you know, the peninsula. They, you know, key railroads, air strips, and they seize those things rapidly. They cordon off and surround Ukrainian garrisons immediately. And then once those Spetsnizs, detachments have made those gains, then they surge in either the Russian naval infantry, it's their version of the Marines, or they surge in the airborne troops, which are larger and have more firepower, and those larger conventional forces seize those gains made.

And once those larger conventional forces are in place, you know, the idea that you could muster enough firepower to dislodge them is unlikely. number one, but number two, if you did, you'd start a major war. And the Ukrainians were either too disorganized or lacked the political will or lacked the kinetic firepower in all those situations to confront Russian forces in a real way. And so at the tactical level, that's how they make the gains. You know, you create chaos that allows you to grab some sort of a hand position and then you surge forces in to create a foothold and then you expand that foothold. And that's, you know, at the tactical level, how hybrid warfare works. Wow.

So this is where the Ukrainian, so they did this in Georgia and the three case studies I give in the book are the Russo-Georgian war in 2008, the Crimean annexation in February and March of 2014. and then the war in Donbuss, which was the Russians had sponsored an insurgency in eastern Ukraine, the Donbuss region of eastern Ukraine from April of 2014 on through the winter of 2014 into 2015. And then they create like a new status quo with the Donetsk and Lou Hanksk, People's Republics, acting as buffer states. Wow. And could you just reiterate again like sort of those pieces? You say there's an operational element, create the foothold, expand the foothold. expand the foothold. Yes.

So create chaos that allows you to, that gives you the space, the room to maneuver and operate and then create and then establish a foothold with elite forces that can rapidly seize limited objectives and then surge large conventional forces in to secure those footholds and entrench your gains. Okay. That's a really clear. I like that as like an infrastructure. I understand how this works.

because I think that's pretty clear, and I wonder if we can kind of go through some examples in Georgia and Donbass. So you have chaos that's created. This is sort of like the operational side, and this is why it's hybridized, obviously, because you have chaos that is coming in, which again is not tactical military. And then you have an elite force that goes and creates, you know, you just need an inch. They can just get a foothold and then bring in reinforcements that then will expand the foothold. So it's kind of those three steps. Is that fair? Is that too reductive?

No, I think that's good. Okay. So can you take me through? Obviously, we discussed kind of how that happened in 2014, but in Georgia, for example, 2008, how does that similar hybrid warfare happen? So Georgia is a really good success story of hybrid warfare. I would argue that if hybrid warfare had a woodstock, the Crimean annexation would be it. Okay.

But Georgia is another good success story because the Russians got the Georgians to engage on their terms. So this was all centered around South Ossetia, which was the, you know, the Russian controlled autonomous, one of two Russian controlled autonomous enclaves in Georgia. There was a third one. There's a second one called Abkhazia that's on the coast of the Black Sea. South Ossetia is located in the center of the country, but it's on the northern border with the northern Caucasus mountain range. And on the other side of the mountain range is Russia proper, of which, province is north north ausatia and then there's a third one called a jara so in 2003 2004 the there was a new georgian president a populist that was elected and he brought in a new

government that was uh very much uh you know georgia nationalist right and uh he he was trying to the the russians want to be able to control that regime in tbilisi um and uh because they they've very much value the Caucasus range. You know, that's the Caucasus region. That's North Ossetia, Dagestan, Chechnya. This is a place that gives the Russians a lot of heartburn. And it's one of the gateways into Russia. So when Saakish really comes to power, one of the very first things that he does when

it becomes president is he repeats his kind of populist election in when he becomes president, Tbilisi, in this autonomous republic of Ajarra, which is, you know, which is, you in the South and he kind of re-annexes a Jara back into Georgia proper and this Russian de facto governor has to board the plane of the Russian foreign minister and go into political exile. And so, you know, Putin sees that and you realize like, holy crap, like, we're losing Georgia. Yeah, like this guy is going to, he's, we're going to lose Georgia if we let this guy continue. So he gives Sakish really a very stern warning not to try that again in any of the other two.

And then they start planning in a very serious way about how they're going to deal with Sakashvili. They being the Russians. The Russians. And so what Vladimir Putin does, I'm just my, I've got a little thing helping my back here. Some lumbar support? Yeah. Not the most comfortable chairs, but they look cool. They do look cool.

Well, I'm in a campsite, right? Exactly. So they start this plan to figure out how they're going to deal with Georgia. And they start slowly surging in. assets into South Ossetia and Abkhazia to train these local militias, stand them up, arm them. They even build an academy to build to train local officers. And then they start, they start doing, you know, exercises on the northern border. And then, you know, once they're at a certain level of competence by 2006 and 2007,

they start needling the Georgians. And why do the Georgians let them bring in, you know, weapons and training? Well, first, there's not a lot they can do about it, right? Unless you want to go to war with Russia, which, you know, a tiny little Georgia would lose. But the second issue is that Saakish really had a lot on his plate. I mean, he was, you know, he was transforming the entire Georgian government. He's got political adversaries. Many of them are Soviet-era holdovers.

He's got to figure out how to expel those people. He's transforming the officer corps of the army. They actually send a brigade to participate in NATO operations. operations in Iraq in 2008. So the first brigade when this war happens, the first brigade's actually at war in Iraq. And so they're observing. They know the Russians are starting to become more active and soon the Russians start to needle them. Suddenly, you know, there are mortar rounds that are accidentally going over the border into Georgia. Suddenly there are artillery bombardments that are, you know happening on georgian terrain suddenly you know fighter planes start violating georgian airspace

um and the russians uh you know as these militias become more and more active start to needle the georgians more and more and more and then you know the russians are actually can they start conducting field exercises large scale field exercises on the northern side of the border uh uh and they they kind of set the condition for the war so that when Sokishbili is finally forced to respond by invading

South Ossetia to deal with all these provocations that they can claim first off the Georgians are invading and we're defending an ethnic Russian enclave And then they immediately had a plan in place to surge conventional Russian ground forces into country And it's the same strategy it's this rapid surge of elite forces to seize limited objectives

objectives, they, and then entrenched those gains. Wow. And it's, it was remarkably effective. The whole conflict was only, what, 10 days? Not even that. Like the real, the real ground fighting was five days, but the whole, you know, the whole thing was, you know, was wrapped up with a nice, nice, neat little bow by 10 days. And it was over before it started. I mean, the Russians knew, and again, this is, I think, why it's so important and shouldn't be

underestimated sort of like the cultural elements of placing ethnic Russians, Russian speaking people into other nations, is that you have this little like border area where again, these borders are manmade. There's no like direct mountain range directly in that area. So it's a, you know, manmade border that says, hey, the people in this northern region, they speak Russian, they're autonomous, they love Russia, they love Putin, you know, these are, these are ethnic Russians and we need to protect them. And they create. enough provocation where now when the Georgians go in because they have to, they look like the agitators, they look like the aggressors, and then Russia can wrap it up in, you know, a couple

days. It's, yeah, it's just really, really cunning, strategic effort on their part. It makes, when you frame it that way, it's all of a sudden, yeah. A lot of things fall in the place, right? What are you going to do? And then you can see how that's sort of replicated in Crimea. And in some ways, I'm curious, like, does this kind of hybrid warfare, track to the invasion of Ukraine that we saw just a couple years ago? It does, but that's where this gets real fun. So let me, there's a couple of things to point out maybe in the intermediate space before we get to it. But so there was a whole war in Syria, right?

The Syrian Civil War and the Russians, the way I talk about in the book is that it was not a hybrid war, but it was a hybrid-ish war. The Russians aren't denying their involvement. And they're not really using targeted propaganda in any real way because, you know, they... It's a proxy war ultimately. Yeah, it was a proxy war. And they were, they were operating through Syrian ground forces and they were using spetsnest attachments to do basically terminal guidance and deeper connoissexence against isolated enclaves of, you know, of, of the Syrian Democratic. forces and the and then ISIS. Isis was a secondary objective. They talked a lot about that and what and you know, Western facing media to try to create some legitimacy for their combat operations in

Syria. But the reality is that Assad was an ally. They wanted to preserve his regime. They wanted to preserve the Russian naval base at Tartis. And then, you know, they they certainly did not want the United States to, you know, be successful in supporting the Syrian Democratic forces. And they wanted to cast Russia as a credible alternative to American strategic power in the Middle East. And in that facet, they were very effective. They really did embarrass, you know, the United States and some of those engagements. Because, you know, they, you know, as long as you don't care about civilian casualties,

you can make very strong military gains. And Sarovican, who we'll talk about, you know, a little bit later, was one of, he was the ground force commander in Syria. He was one of Russia's most ruthless generals. They call him General Armageddon. And, uh, sick name. Yeah, he, uh, he was the one that suggested that, uh, bombing the civilian population directly would create strategic gains in Syria.

Oh, God. And he was, his observation was correct. Uh, he's in, he, he's a ruthless. son of a bitch but he's empirical and what he put his finger on that's true is that refugees don't fight back they will flow northward into turkey and ultimately the Turks will let them pass through into Europe and it becomes a cultural issue for the Europeans to deal with so there's no downside here and that as we've seen has sort of played out yeah that's exactly what's happened wow um in fact that was a core you could argue that that was a core component

of Brexit. Wow. The unfettered, the, you know, the Germany, Angela Merkel decides for the rest of the European Union that they're going to have a policy of accepting all the refugees that are flowing in from the Middle East and Africa. The middle class in the United Kingdom looks at that and says, well, like, look, we're having a hard time making ends meet as it is. Like our government works for us, not for, you know, the people of Syria. And, you know, when the Brexit referendum comes up, it shocks everyone that they voted for Brexit, but they did. Right. I mean, yeah, only in the past couple years.

I think it was Sweden started checking paperwork from people coming in from Denmark, I think, or something to that effect. Which effectively, if every country is checking each other's papers specifically in Europe, it's like, well, what is the point of having an EU? Like, what is the purpose of it if, one, we're taking on, you know, a lot of the financial burden from these other nations, you know, like of Greece, gets an economic ruin, all of a sudden, we got to take care of them. That's, you know, feels like some bullshit. And then on top of that, we got to check all the paperwork of people coming into our country. It's like, do we even have a, you know, unified European state, or are we just individual states under this sort of fake, phony umbrella? And so you can see how, do you think that's intentional? Do you think, like, engaging in this proxy war in Syria was like,

because you can look at the downriver effects and kind of draw this conclusion to say, like, oh, who does it benefit, therefore we can draw intentionality to it? But have you read or is there like things that you've looked at where you say like, oh, this was an intentional effort that by probing this proxy war, displacing these people throughout Europe, it's going to create chaos, which again is part one of this hybrid warfare tactic. Yes, that that tactic was absolutely deliberate. I mean, they didn't, you know, it's a little bit too complimentary of Russian planning to, you know, assume that they actually knew what the results were going to be. Right. Yeah. I don't think they could have predicted.

that Brexit necessarily was going to be a component. They just know that, oh, this looks valuable. It's, you know, let's throw a monkey wrench in those gears. And, yeah, you know, they're, and they're doing that now. They, I mean, they dump, they try to dump refugees into Poland through Belarus. They'll, they'll route them from, like, Kazakhstan or from, you know, they've got a, you know, they've got a, you know, borders with a bunch of different, you know, Muslim majority countries. and they'll take somebody from a different religion and a different ethnicity that doesn't speak any Polish, probably not any English, and they'll just drop them off in Poland or they'll drop them off on the border of Finland. All right, they're your problem. Go.

It's just shame. Everyone's screwed there. You know what I mean? These refugees that are being displaced, right? Like there's a civil war happening in their country. Like, they are legitimately without a place to go. And then, you know, these European countries that have. a social infrastructure and have a you know they have a status quo for how they operate is

all of a sudden now being disrupted by this influx of this new population that doesn't necessarily assimilate or take some time to assimilate that's going to create chaos yeah yeah it sucks for everyone in russia happens to benefit from this chaos it seems like yep and that's what that's where they thrive is if they can create some chaos they know they know how to make gains in chaos So, you know, the Syrian Civil War, that's they brought, they, they, they, that was a good maturing experience for the Russian aerospace forces. Um, they, they start rotating pilots through to get joint operations experience and they start this iterative development process with their ordinance so that they can create

ground attack ordinance that, um, that's a little bit more sophisticated, a little bit more precise. They use dumb bombs before. before the Syrian Civil War. By the end of Civil War, they're using smart bombs that can, you know, be pretty precisely dropped onto targets. And the Spetsnaz guys loved it for, you know, the way they say it is they'd been training for that exact mission for 30 years and they finally get to do the mission that they're

training for. Casualty free. Like, they don't lose any Russians in the process, right? You lose a few, but it's trivial compared to. But you're not fighting a home battle. You know what I mean? Like, in terms of like your civilization, you're populace. Like, you get to try out all of these.

military ops without any real risk to like losing ground, losing influence, or looking like a global bad guy because it's sort of fought on proxy. And that's a real benefit of hybrid war, which is one of the reasons I call it a hybridish war. They, how deep do I want to dive here? So they, they, let's call the Syrian Civil War a very real success because right? Russia establishes themselves as the dominant power broker in Syria. They set up all these air defense networks.

But there's this moment in 2018 where they're trying this hybrid warfare tactic on American forces. There's a U.S. Special Operations Force that's guarding the Daryl-Zor oil platforms. and that unit ends up getting reinforced with some rangers who gets again they get reinforced with like an ODA and Marine quick, quick reaction force. And the Russians, you read about this maybe in the New York Times, I think the Times reported on it. But, you know, the Russians basically it's the Wagner mercenaries. They decide that they can take this platform. And so they assemble a tank column.

And they start the deconfliction line between Russian and American forces is the Euphrates River. And they've got this massive tank force that starts assembling on the other bank of the Euphrates River. And we're watching this with aerial reconnaissance. And we're just like, well, we know they're Russian. And so Secretary Mattis, you know, calls Valerie Grasimov, the chief of the Russian general staff on a deconflict. collection line and he's like hey we see what you're doing knock it off and grass and i was like no those aren't russian forces they're they're not um i don't have any control over them and uh mattis says okay well they're they're all about to die um and the moment they cross uh what he didn't tell

garrasim off is that he'd stacked up on like like several layers of american air support assets and so the moment these tanks crossed the euphrates river and all these armor personnel carriers. They get crushed with wave after wave after wave of close air support. And the units on the ground are literally citing them for the planes and calling in airstrike after airstrike after airstrike on these guys. So they get pounded for a couple hours and, you know, the few survivors crawl out of the wreckage of their vehicles and basically flee back across the river. And in the aftermath, we counted something like 200 Wagner operatives that were dead. And the idea that they weren't Russian was preposterous.

Like we can hear them talking on open radio channels in Russian. And so anyway, what they had been hoping for was that the prospect of actually shooting at real Russian forces would be a political hot button. It would be a political hot potato that everyone would be, they would be loathe to. decide to do themselves as an officer on the ground like you know they're there Russian guys that have crossed the Euphrates we don't know what to do somebody tell me if I have permission to engage and what they were hoping was that that decision would climb up the chain of command to a political level where a politician you know whether it's the Secretary of Defense or the president would

waffle for a moment on making the decision of what to do here and they would scramble to call the Russians and the Russians would say they don't know anything about it and they would use that moment of indecisiveness to seize the platform and probably overwhelmed the U.S. Garrison. And Mattis, and you know, it's not just him, it's the ground force commander and the theater commander, whoever the U.S. Sentcom commander was at the time, they had all done a very good job of requesting the delegated authorities from the President of the United States and the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense.

that they could make the decisions in real time. Quickly. And so, and that turns out to be the recipe to really defeating the hybrid warfare at the tactical level is, is you can't give them any ambiguity. The response to hybrid immediate and decisive. Hybrid warfare relies on very limited kinetic force to seize relatively unguarded objectives. And then they surge in the real firepower after the, after they've, already made gains. You also, I think, need the firepower to respond decisively, right? Like,

Georgia could have responded decisively to, you know, military operations and sort of, you know, military theater and exercise is happening on the border. But they don't really have the might in order to, like, execute a decisive or quick response. There's truth to that. Yeah. I mean, I mean, America can combat it. I mean, yeah, Mattis had to authorize, or let's say the U.S. sent combat. The U.S. Com Commander had to authorize, you know, significant feeder assets to be made available to the Ground Force Commander in order to create that recipe, right? And that had to be done days beforehand. And so, yeah, there's a lot of truth in what you're saying. Again, not that I think

it makes it moot at all. I mean, I'm just trying to think through like the other times, like the other examples you're giving like Georgia, Crimea, if they were more decisive, if they were able to work faster, could they have quelled these sort of like chaotic uprisings before they even got a foothold? Maybe. Yeah, I mean, especially if they could get like some like reinforcements

or like allies. Yeah. That had like firepower. I'm trying to think in Crimea specifically if that would have worked. Like I wonder if that little gap where you're talking about the hybridized warfare like, you know, moment of indecision.

I'm not sure the Russians had such a massive advantage in Crimea because they've already got one of the world's largest naval facilities at Sevastopol. And they've got garrisons that are under Russian control. They're actually leasing base space in Crimea. Right.

And so their access is unparalleled. Yeah. I don't think there's anything you can do there. Yeah. Hey guys, really quick. Did you know that on this day in history in 1582, Pope Gregory introduced the Gregorian calendar, which most of the world still uses today? Or that in

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Now let's get back to the show. In eastern Ukraine, the Ukrainians, you know, in the war in Dombos, they finally get their crap together. And the Ukrainian ground forces start bringing in sufficient firepower, like all these little Russian insurgencies, are creating these people's republics and these uh you know these people's mayors are popping up and saying i'm you know i'm running this autonomous town and you know whichever little locality

and the ukrainean ground forces they've expelled the police in a lot of these places and ukrainean ground forces basically comes over as a steamroller and they have setbacks in the beginning um the russians humiliate them a few times but by august of 20th 2014, despite all the setbacks in early summer, the insurgency is collapsing. They just don't have enough firepower to confront the Ukrainian ground forces in a real way. They're getting pushed back. Donyatsk and Lou Hanksk, you know, the capitals at the center of this insurgency are about to be captured almost entirely. and the leaders of the movement are kind of hiding in their command centers as artillery shells kind of rattle, you know, drywall out of their ceilings.

And it was, I think, August 15th is when the Russians decide to surge in heavy ground forces to reinforce the dying insurgency. And so the Russians, they have a couple of border crossings from Russia proper, the Rostovandan region, which is where the Southern Military District is for Russia. and their district headquarters is actually in Rostovand Don. And that's the logistic staging point. And they start surging in heavy ground forces to reinforce the surgency. And then they tell the world that these aren't Russian units. These are, these are, you know, Don Yitzkin, Luke Hanks, people's republic. You know, they originate from Don Yotskin, Lou Hanks, which is, you know, nonsense.

And what is the benefit of that? They're able to, like, sort of shirk responsibility for whatever they do by saying it's a local militia that we're not in charge of? Yeah, essentially they can guard themselves from a degree of public backlash. I don't think anybody really believed them, but, you know, some degree of plausible deniability so that, you know, we're not responsible for, you know, whatever happens. And, you know, this is an unfortunate conflict. But we're willing to play the peace broker whenever all the sides agree to come to the negotiating table. It's a fig leaf, but it's a useful fig leaf.

Hmm. That's interesting. So, I mean, shout out to Mattis for being quick on. on that response and actually knocking these guys out. And at least having a good enough relationship with the president that he could be, you know, the president thought he could delegate him those authorities, right? I mean, because we were talking about shooting at Russian, you know, they might be Wagner operatives, but I mean, you know, these are de facto Russian forces. Wow.

And so that's a massive political liability. Yeah. I mean, yeah, that could go left really easily. And so that, that, turns out to be the recipe and Grasimov was stupid enough to tell them on the phone that these aren't Russians and we don't, you know, and we're not going to, and we claim no, no connection to them. Yeah, I wonder if that's different where they go, those are Russians, but I guess then he would have to take responsibility and be like, we're not going to tell them to stand down, in which case, you know,

same outcome. Sure. And they're on the line for it because it's like, yo, this is your fault. Or then they have to tell them to stand out. So I don't know if they had any other choice, right? you kind of have to say, we don't control them, we don't know what those guys are doing.

Yeah. Yeah, I don't, I don't see it. Yeah, I don't see any other outcome. I guess maybe you could try to work thematically and be like, yeah, I don't know. You'd have to strong arm, I guess, and be like, if you shoot at our guys, then we're going to fire back

and we're going to be an all-out war. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I don't know. That's a wild. That was a crazy moment of brinksmanship. What year was that? 2018. Wow.

Wow. And have more moments like that occurred since then into the Ukrainian invasion? Not really. So the invasion of Ukraine is unique. And one of the reasons that Russians tried to make it a hybrid war, but it was a failure on every way that you can imagine a hybrid war unfolding. So the three terms that the Russians invent around hybrid warfare are Maskerovka, which is camouflage, vinyazepnosed, which is a sort of. surprise, which is essentially, essentially that's, you know, the speedy maneuver. And then, um, Activinus, which is all the things that you do to paralyze activities, all the things that you do to paralyze the host nation government.

And every three of those, they work pretty well in Georgia. They're, those three principles are applied pretty well in the Kermin annexation. Um, they, the vinyasupnose principle breaks down in the war in Donbuss. They're working through insurgencies almost entirely. And so there is no speedy maneuver to secure objectives in the way that there could have been. In the Ukraine war, in the Ukrainian invasion in February of 2002, every one of those principles breaks down. So the first thing, you know, we talked about the assassination of Sergei Skrip Y'all and the black eye that that gave the GRU. Well, the GRU is that they were the ones that masterminded the Georgian War.

They were the ones that masterminded the Crimeanac station and the war in Donbos. They're responsible for giving the Russian general staff all the information that they need to plan these military interventions. But now all of a sudden, their main guy gets addressing down at the Kremlin and then dies in his home a month later. Right. And so they're on the outs. No one wants to involve them in Russian policymaking at this point. and they don't have any credibility with the Kremlin or the other decision makers. So the Kremlin, they give this, the planning to the FSB, which is very, very corrupt.

And it's, well, let's just say, it would be like, okay, we're going to invade a country, you know, let's we're gonna we're gonna invade Syria the United States is and the FBI is going to be responsible for planning how we invade Syria How would they have that? How would they be able to do that? Like what assets does the FBI have to know what information? All of the American brigade combat teams would need in order to facilitate that? How would they you know? Be able to answer the priority information requirements Like that's not their job. That's not their institutional role like how could they how could they possibly do that? Yeah, yeah, they would need some crazy intelligence or like just basically refit their entire outfit or so. I don't know. I don't think it would be possible. You would need 20 years to flip the organization on its head and completely transform, you know,

the missions that the institution supports and how its people are trained before you could, before they could adopt that role. And the FSB had a year? Yeah, maybe,ish. I think there, started taking a potential intervention into Ukraine seriously they probably already had something on the drawing board they've probably had something on the drawing board since the 90s um but the turks uh surged into ukraine these uh what is it bi rectar two drones i'm not sure if i'm pronouncing that turkish word right but they're you know their kinetic strike drown similar to our predators and they gave them to the ukrainian ground forces and so ukraine was you know able to do these drone strikes on the on the you know the donbuss militias and you know donyatsk and lou hanksk

uh and that seems to you know that kind of altered the strategic calculus in favor of the ukrainians and i think the russians were worried that they might lose their foothold if the status quo continued to ride forward and so they started taking some sort of work in ukraine seriously the second thing that happened was that alexander lukashenko and belarus had a sham re-election. And he absolutely relied on Russian support to write out the populist backlash for basically rigging the election and declaring himself grand exalted poohba of Belarus. And he's been there for, I don't know what, 20 years. He's been in charge there for a long time. Well, he's always tried to do a little bit of a balancing act between Moscow and the West.

He wants Russia to be an ally, but he doesn't want to be dominated by Moscow, and he doesn't want to have Moscow dictate to him his policies. Well, what Russia has always asked for was the ability to forge stage military forces in Belarus, which, you know, he always said no to. Well, now that he owes his reelection to support from Moscow, he can't say no anymore. And so immediately what that gave Russia the ability to do was stage ground. forces on the northern border of Ukraine. First time they've ever been able to do that since the Soviet Union collapsed. So now we're starting to get to a point where an invasion is possible, right? And Ukraine must know this.

Oh, there's reinforcements set up right on the border. That makes us nervous. Yep. But there's not a lot they can do about it. Right. So the next piece that kind of falls into place is the Russian start. or the FSB starts building this, you know, Intel packet that tells the Kremlin that, you know, Ukraine's actually very pro-Russian.

Vladimir Zelenskyy, Volodymyr Zelensky is actually, he's not very popular. He's CIA-backed. And all the rhetoric that we're hearing from the Ukrainian ground forces, you know, that's all just propaganda. You know, they're not, they're not anti-Russian and they're not going to fight us in any real way. They all just, they expected to capture Ukraine in about 10 days. To give you a perspective, Ukraine's about as big as Alaska. Hmm. The idea that any sizable military force could capture territory of that size in 10 days is nonsense.

Yeah, right? Like, Alaska's pretty big. Yeah. I mean, granted, the population is not maybe super dense. I don't know exactly what the population or what the actual arms forces of Ukraine is, but it's a lot of land to cover. You know, one of the most successful military invasions of all. time in a conventional war was the German invasion of Poland. And the Vermecktus was astonishingly competent as a fighting force, which is why they could go toe to toe to

with the world twice, you know. And, you know, they can capture Poland in 10 days. Right. Even when Russia and, you know, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east. And so they actually sandwiched Poland and divided it in two. Even then it didn't take 10 days. So where do this 10 days thing come from? It was just bad intelligence? No, it's just them. It was just idiots telling the Kremlin what they wanted to hear. Two weeks into the invasion of Ukraine, I'm struggling for his name, but the head of the fifth director to the FSB, which is responsible for running foreign agents.

that's like the foreign intelligence collection branch of the FSB, even though the FSB is a domestic security agency. And they're the ones for processing that intelligence. That guy was arrested. And there were two charges against them. One was incompetence, which was a gross understatement. And the other was basically an interpretation of fraud. And what we can gather from the charges is that he was.

probably enriching himself from his own covert operations budget. So like all the money he was supposed to be paying to foreign, that his operatives in the FSB were supposed to be paying to foreign agents in Ukraine, he was skimming out of that money or we don't know how much of it. I mean, he's in a gulag somewhere, right? I mean. Presumably so. That is, you don't, that's a crazy fuck around and find out.

I mean, that's wild. Yeah, they'd be like, you know, one of the deputy directors of the CIA. you know, deciding that, well, you know, I'm in a pocket, you know, our operations budget. Like, how the fuck did you do that? Yeah, especially right before a major, like, military operation. Like, this is, you said two weeks before? It was two weeks after the war went off, which means it took Putin two weeks to discover that he'd been lied to.

Wow. Oh, that's a, that's a fuck up. So the third issue is that Sergei Shogu, who was the defense minister at the time, He's moved on since they have a new one named Billy Yusuf. But Sergei Shogu is one of the most corrupt individuals in the history of Western civilization. Like he, that man has embezzled so much money out of the Russian Ministry of Defense to support his own personal influence campaigns and his own personal wealth and his own, you know, to make sure that his own political star is rising and to create people that only serve him in positions of influence and power around the Russian government. The reason he was made defense minister was because Putin needed somebody that would not turn the institution against him. And Shogu happens to not just be a personal friend, but their kids are actually married.

Oh, really? Yeah. And Shogu was one of the power brokers in the United Russia Party that actually enabled Putin's rise to power in the first place. So there's no separating them. And so, you know, every Putin knew everything he was about. And the hope, I think, from the criminal's perspective, was that if you can take a very stalwart, incompetent and well-respected general like Valerie Gerasimov, you make him chief of the general staff, he can check the horrible institutional mismanagement coming from the minister of defense. And as it turns out, it doesn't work very well that way. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, that just seems like a huge sort of wound kind of in the military infrastructure of Russia that they're trying to like put a Band-Aid on. It's out. Right? Like they finally, he's out now and there's a new one in and the guy's name is Bel Yusov and he was Russia's preeminent economist. I'm shocked that Putin would tolerate so much like gross incompetence and like Borland, you know, intentional like corruption. It seems out of character for him that he would prioritize like a personal relationship. He telegraphs this image of himself as a strong man, but he's not. He is not the second coming of Joseph Stalin. He just tells everybody that he is.

And so, you know, he does these like... Photo shoots on a horse. Yeah, or he's like riding around on a horse without a shirt on or fishing in Siberia without a shirt on. Yeah, anyone that's doing that kind of makes you think like, oh, they want us to think he. is that, which then may indicate, oh, is this a paper tiger? I will tell you, he is a, he is a real judo black belt. He is a, or the Russian, uh, Russian judo, they call it Samba, but he's a real black belt. Um, and so like he's a, he is a legit martial artist.

Well, fair, but being a martial artist doesn't necessarily mean you're like a, a real hard-ass dictator, you know, second coming of Stalin. You might just be a, you know, technician that could fuck people up. So he is Russia's most important power broker. And that's the way to think about him. And he plays factions off of one another and he creates political alliances. And he maneuvers. But he is not, it's fairly rare for him to just use, you know, raw punching power to, you know, eliminate individuals from institutions.

He's not going to, he's not going to hurt people that are serving him faithfully. And so that's where this guy kind of comes in who's a good and faithful servant to Putin. Yes. And doesn't get ousted in the right time. Where does he end up going? What does he do with all his riches and... Well, he's buying himself yachts and retirement resorts. And he's probably got himself a couple of tigers.

So he sailed off in the sunset, literally. I mean, yeah, he's worth billions of dollars. Yeah, he's chilling. Good for him. He's on the Russian Security Council now. I think he's the head of the Russian Security Council. Wow. So I see how these little incompetencies are adding up.

Yeah. Now, did the actual enforcement of like military exercises and actually putting troops on the border of Ukraine and Belarus, did that make them want to join NATO? Did that influence their NATO decision at all? Yes. I would say, though, that pretty much like every other country in Eastern Europe, they would join NATO as fast as possible if they could. I mean, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, like, the reason they're all NATO members is because they're tiny states or let's say Montenegro. And, you know, they realize that if they are not a part of the NATO alliance, then they could get bulldozed by a larger power like Russia. Right.

Um, you know, and, uh, Poland is another example, like the moment that they were able, they joined NATO. So Ukraine is in the hard spot because they border Russia. Hmm. Again, they understood for years, hey, if you join NATO, then we're going to, we're going to see that as military aggression. So I understand. They've wanted to join for the longest time.

They just couldn't because of the sort of leverage put on them by Russia. There's also a problem of would we accept them? And, you know, the idea that we're going to, we're not going to accept a country who's actively at war with Russia. Like the regime in Washington has been trying to avoid a large-scale war with the regime in Moscow since 1945. Right. And we're not going to go to war with Russia over Ukraine. Yeah. And it's a, yeah, Ukraine is a defensive liability for NATO and for the U.S.

But just like the Russians want to buffer with us, it's good for us to have a buffer with Russia. And that's one of the reasons that the D.C. Belt. way has made the decision to support Ukraine is because if we if we allowed Ukraine to collapse then suddenly we have uh you know the potential for a Russian ally to be bordered up against against Poland and uh so you know like you know these little green men that popped up in the Crimean Peninsula or the what the the crap that they pulled in Georgia with you know south Asatia and Abkhazia they tried that crap in Poland the Poland would the poles would kill all of them. And the polls are having none of it. And if little green men started popping up in Warsaw,

that's the pathway for NATO to go. Poland would. That's real go time. Yeah, that's real go time. Poland would pull up Article 5 of the NATO charter and call the rest of NATO into war with Russia. And the way we've seen Russian ground forces perform at this point. seems to suggest that NATO, in a conventional war, NATO forces would run over them very quickly. It would be a route. Russia is, they're an artillery-based force. They can do kind of a slow steamroller conventional war approach that's very reminiscent of the old Soviet tactics. And, you know, the NATO forces would bring air power to bear.

We would, you know, strike their air defense systems and knock those out with, you know, advanced fighters that are undetectable by radar. And that would be the first couple days. And then once those things are out, it would be a route because it would be, you know, we'd basically be target practice from the air. So what's the concern with that as a military strategy? It creates a very dangerous Jacobs ladder because if you had, you know, let's say we had a conventional worth Russia. in Poland, something like that, the Russian army would get routed very quickly, and they would, that would create a regime destabilizing route. And so if you're Moscow, you can't let that happen. The only thing to do is to escalate. And the only way to escalate is in the nuclear

domain. And that means bringing out tactical nuclear ordinance in order to shore up your conventional forces shortcomings. And that, that is the pathway. to a general nuclear exchange. And Russia knows this, which kind of gives them a little bit more confidence to say, hey, we have overall leverage. We don't want nuclear war. They don't want nuclear war, but we have the capability to do that. So if we exercise this military strategy in Ukraine, maybe we can fold them over in 10 days.

We have some bad intelligence, da, da, da, da, and I can see how we get into this position now. Yeah. Where they think, like, oh, if we get into Poland, I don't think they want, we can find some type of diplomatic negotiation because neither one of us would want nuclear war. They definitely know it's on our mind, which is why they're doing some of this nuclear saber rattling. One of the things that's troubled me the most is that they've withdrawn from the start agreements, which were the basis for all of our nuclear negotiations with Moscow. They've been violating our intermediate nuclear forces agreements for a long time, but now we finally said, okay, if you, we were willing to renegotiate,

provided the Chinese would also join the negotiations and the Chinese are having none of it. So we just told the Russians will look, you're already not in compliance with the old ones. So we're not doing this. Wow. That's concerning. Well, it's concerning. I'm not sure that there was another choice on the table. But what really troubles me is that the Russians are withdrawn from start.

And that was the basis for almost every diplomatic, you know, taunt that we had with them, especially the nuclear stuff. Um, we're not going to get them back to the negotiating table until whatever is done and Ukraine is done. Um, and they're so angry at us right now that they'll hardly talk to us. The, the thing I would say is, is, uh, we don't want the regime in Kiev to collapse. And that's important. Um, we do want to buffer with Russia. Um, and that's important that when we definitely don't want them to ever be on the border with Poland. Yeah.

Yeah. Um, I'm actually, I'm quite worried about. about the Turks ever firing a shot in anger at the Russians. They compete over the Black Sea. They complete over the Caucasus region. All those countries in the Caucasus, they're all ethnically Turkish. You know, Georgian is a, I mean, that's a dialect to Turkish. And the Turks have a very sophisticated army.

It's the second largest army in NATO. Their armies over 400,000 troops. Oh, wow. They have a very, they have quite a sophisticated army. sophisticated air force. So it could be a similar situation of Poland. Yeah. In the sense that they're ready to go.

And yeah, the Turks, unlike the rest of NATO, almost all of Europe has an inverted demography now. There are more people that are old and retiring than there are young people in the workforce. And that's a real problem if you're trying to, you know, fill an army, you know, fill out the army with, you know, a bunch of young men, right? because, you know, that's all people you're pulling out of the workforce. Well, the Turks, they have a traditionalist Muslim population that, you know, has lots of children.

And they've got a very robust, very young demography that's only growing and expanding. And that creates a lot of young men that might have a future unless you could put them into the armed forces. And so, you know, their military ranks are full. They're very well trained. They're trained in NATO standards. And I pity the country that picks a fight with Turkey that will not end well for anybody. And has there been savor rattling from Russia and, you know, is it mostly proxy war over countries that are ethnically Turkish? Yeah, it's proxy wars.

The big proxy war that they've had is in Libya. So, you know, the Russians want to dominate oil and gas production from Libya because that that's, oil and gas going to Europe that's not coming from Russia and they want to make sure that the Europeans have to come to Moscow for for their fuel needs, right? And so, you know, they, they, they've involved themselves with, you know, one faction in the Libyan Civil War to, uh, to try to slant the outcome in their table in their way. The Turks have involved themselves the other faction and the Turks are, you know, they're trying to make it go their way. And, uh, this, this recent, um, this recent, um, In a Gorno-Karbuq conflict in Azerbaijan and Armenia.

So this was an ethnically Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan that Armenia has occupied for a long time. And Azerbaijan basically annexed it. And that was all done. You know, Azerbaijan is very incompetent as far as a military force goes. Well, it was Turkish officers that came in and trained to them and actually ran their ground forces. And so the Turks were the reason that was able to happen. The Turks just don't leave Armenia alone, dude. Yeah, yeah.

They just keep on going at them, bro. Wow. Yeah, they don't even talk about what. What is Armenia? Talk about what? There's nothing to talk about it. What do you mean? We don't acknowledge anything.

Anybody that gets into a war with Turkey deserves what's going to happen to them. Wow, I had no idea. They have so much military power. They've got a lot of military. power. Poland's number two with, I think I told you, you know, six divisions that they could deploy to a war immediately. And France, Germany, the United Kingdom, who we consider as like the principal powers in Europe, they're each running three division armed forces. Germany is acutely aware of their history. And for that reason, the ministry or, you know,

their defense, you know, apparatus is completely outside of public policy. Like that's the backwater. You can guarantee that your career isn't going to go anywhere and you're not going to be significant in government if you worked in defense. They do not want the defense establishment setting policy in Germany. Is it because of embarrassment from World War II? Yeah. They want to make sure that they want to make sure that nothing like that ever happens again, quite frankly. So the other piece of that is that they manage the Bundesware with a certain degree of deliberate incompetence. A lot of the Bundesware was not really, it was moribund. It's under-maintained. There are artillery batteries where, you know, majority of the artillery pieces don't fire. You know, the units are understaffed.

The Germans could credibly field maybe a single brigade within about a month, provided that brigade was allowed to cannibalize parts and personnel. from the mother division. And that's a, that's the way the Germans want it. The French can, you know, it takes some, you know, they can, they can feel a couple of battalions, let's say a combined armed battalion and then maybe a light infantry battalion

within a week. And then they could probably field a brigade within a month. They would be very well armed, very well trained. But they would kind of be threadbare. they're they've just got a limited budget and you know the french forces have been at war in africa for years and they've shown us one that they're very competent they're very well trained they're not afraid to stack up bodies um they don't have rules of engagement like we do and the french don't the french will lay some people out hmm um the french you know when they when they

fight insurgencies in malia uh you know if a french soldier pulls a trigger There is nobody in the in the French officer class or the government that is going to ask questions. Wow. They are, but they've also, you know, I think those are privileges that American soldiers would drool over. You know, they're always worried that somebody is going to question them and they're going to get hauled in front of a tribunal for making a bad choice at some point, right? Right. But the French have also kind of demonstrated in all their Africa operations that the way to a resolution of the conflict is not in being able to kill more of the enemy. This was a lesson that we learned in Vietnam.

Lyndon B. Johnson was the one that kept trying to figure out, like, how do we kill more Vietnamese? And, you know, like, we got to kill more Viet Cong. We've got to kill more Viet Cong. You guys just aren't killing the enemy. You got to, and the French are kind of proving that again that you can't defeat. insurgency necessarily through through attrition. They'll keep coming back.

There's always that population, if they hate you, will keep producing young men. This idea you'll never kill the idea. Yeah, you'll never kill the idea. And the more people you'll kill, the more you're going to make the community hate you. So they've demonstrated that in Africa, but nevertheless, they're very competent fighting troops.

And then there's the British, and the British have a three-division army. Sixth Division is a it's a division full of boutique units that all have very niche mission sets. That's where their Army Special Operations Brigade is. That's where that's where their like information operations operations is. That's where their military intelligence stuff is. Third Brigade is their heavy combat power. That's where their tank division or that's where their tank brigade is and their,

They're armored brigades. And then first division is their rapidly deployable forces. That's where the 18th Airborne Brigade Combat Team is and a couple of other, you know, let's say high readiness units that can deploy and get to a crisis quickly. The problem for the UK is they're very well trained. They're very well led. And they're, let's say they're all at a high state of readiness. like their kit and equipment's in pretty good repair. The problem is that as an economy, the British are, they're quite taxed and their capacity to support a conflict on the continent and their current state of economic belace is limited.

The spirit is willing, but their government just can't afford to do a lot of things that they want to do. Partially due to Brexit. Partially, there's a much larger conversation to be had about economics. The Tories have not delivered on any of the reforms that they were elected to implement in 2010, which is why they were completely routed by labor. The caveat to that is that the labor government is kind of illegitimate in its own right, even though they've won an unprecedented supermajority, because this is the lowest voter turnout in Great Britain in history. The reason the labor won in such a dramatic fashion was because all the people that had put the Tories in power became so angry and disillusioned that they just didn't vote. And so laborers won these historic gains. And so even though they have this unprecedented super majority, whatever solutions they deliver, it's solutions that the majority of the public didn't vote for.

Because the turnout is so low. The turnout was so low. And it's because people in the U.K. are so disillusioned with their political process right now. Wow. So that's its own conversation. Yeah. So as far as a war in Europe, the sort of ranks as far as like who is able to bang right now would be Poland.

Turkey. Turkey, France, England. Anyone else? I mean, some honorable mentions here and there from, I'm sure, German forces. Sweden just became, Sweden and Finland just joined. NATO and Sweden is the first country to join NATO in a very long time that is a net defense contributor rather than a consumer. But they're not a contributor in terms of heavy ground forces. They have significant air power and they have a very well-trained Navy. And one of the things

that the Arctic countries or the, say, the Scandinavian countries are offering to the rest of the Native alliance, they're saying, hey, look, we know the Russians are. We know the Russians are very active in the Arctic right now and that's something that's causing everybody some concern don't worry about it we got this that's nice that is nice and sweden is one of those countries that is a net contributor and they're their navy and you know their navy working with norway and with fenland and with denmark and to maybe at a lesser extent the british like they've they have much they contribute they can contribute but it's not in heavy ground forces smaller countries like Denmark for example

like the Danes are they're militarily insignificant but it's always kind of been that way because they're a peninsula but really they're kind of an island almost like they're you know they're no one's going to invade Denmark from the land right um they they actually work very closely with the Royal Marines

it's like if you actually look at how the British Royal Marines are structured there's a there is a Danish compliment within the British Royal Marines that just accepts British command and control. And that's how the Danes punch above their weight. And that's how the British help round out their numbers. Interesting. This is a little awesome. Do you know anything about Katerov?

Katerov? He's like, I don't want to call him a warlord, but he's sort of like a military leader and sort of an apparatus of Putin, I think, in Dagestan. Are you familiar with his name at all? No. I'll send you some articles on him. It's a really interesting character. It was a completely off topic. I wasn't sure if you would have heard of him before.

I don't know how broad his reach is, but I've just heard some interesting stories I can tell you later about this character and how he fits into like the Russian geopolitical game. It's on this kind of topic here. Where did Zelensky come from? He was a comedian. Right. Like that's how I understand him to be.

Like, oh, he's a comedian. He's an actor. he's well known and then he plays a president in a TV show and then becomes the president and then is also like this fierce leader that's just like loved by the Ukrainian people. Is that a fair narrative or is there some other type of, is he just a puppet of the United States? Like how, what exactly is going on? Well, you know, as given your professional choices, you can probably appreciate this better

than most people, right? you know the the the the role of the comedian or you know for you know or maybe we can go back further and say the role of the court jester so to speak right is to draw attention to things that no one can draw attention to and the whole art form is is remarking on the paradoxes that don't necessarily make sense and that's why they make us laugh right um and uh he was a critic of the regime He was a critic of policy for a long time. And it would quite frankly, it'd be like if you, if somebody was just like, hey, I really liked that stand-up show. Have you ever thought of running for Congress? And, you know, maybe that could happen. I don't know if, you know, if maybe there's a political party winking at you, but that's

what happened with Zelensky essentially. And as a critic. You know, he started to gain political notoriety and he ran for president and he won it. And then, you know, he was actually, this is, the Russians should not, and I'm sure they know this now, but like they really, really stepped on their crank when they invaded Ukraine. Because Zelensky's presidency was really on the rocks before, you know, they invaded in February 24th, 2022. And Zelensky was in a hard position. Like he was trying to institute reforms. He'd promised the Ukrainian people that he was going to join the European Union and he was going to end the war in Donbuss.

And, you know, he was way behind and instituting reforms. And a lot of that was because there's a pro-Russian segment of the Ukrainian parliament that wants to frustrate that process. but there's also tons of oligarchs around Ukraine that don't want their pocketbooks lightened. And when you change the status quo, you upset a lot of people. And so he was really struggling and his legitimacy was on the decline. And then the Russians invaded and suddenly, you know, he shows up in all these macho videos telling the West, like, I don't need a ride out of the country. I need ammo. And he looks like a Winston Churchill kind of hero.

And it builds this legend around the man. And so he's got, you know, 80% approval ratings now. And he's powerful enough now that he can fire Ukrainian generals and no one, or the defense minister. And he can make, you know, rearrangements in the government. And no one's going to fight back or question his judgment, which was never the case. Like his, like Petroporshenko, who was interim president for a while, you know, he didn't have that kind of power. Hmm. The Russians created that monster.

And if they had just left Ukraine alone, he probably his... He would have been outed. Yeah. Eventually, he would have lost re-election. Wow. And instead, they created him. He became like a living martyr in a way. Like, they made a war hero.

Yep. That's a great way to say it. A living martyr. Wow. That is so interesting. And the fact that he's a comedian, really. helps him like when he gives speeches he's very good and you can probably appreciate the skill set great performer you you have to look at people and understand how they're reacting to what you're saying and

just your words right um and he's got that skill set and it's uh so i don't know maybe you should run for congress maybe i should if you know some people in the state department tell them to call me yeah yeah i'll i'll do it i'll whatever they need i want to be CIA that honestly that'd be my dream job to be completely honest, to be an asset, and then go around, do comedy around the world, do some pods,

talk to people, but all the while, I'm an agent. Working for the U.S. What if they made you get a haircut? No, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, well, I'm out. I'm out.

I'm not doing all that shit. You got to wait until it falls out. There you go. And then maybe we'll look into it. Curtis, this has been awesome, dude. I feel like I'm not as dumb as when we started.

I feel like I've figured some things out. In your book, Hybrid Warfare, How much more of this conversation do you delve into? I mean, all the details, is there a lot more in the book that we haven't discussed? I tell you what, there's nuances and details in how the Russian special operations forces are run that I'd love to be able to dive in more on. So there's the epilogue is all about the current war in Ukraine. And it's about how it fell apart.

It's about what the Russians saw. It's about their failure to institute defense reform. And there's a really good chapter that features an old Russian defense minister, Anatoly Serti Yukov. And Serti Yukov is, he was ousted for corruption, which is ironic. He was implicated in the Magnitsky scandal. But he was a real reformer. And what he was doing was he was a tax officer. And he was brought in to run the Ministry of Defense.

And he set up all of these financial control boards that forced the general staff to account for every single ruble that they spent. And so by magic, you know, from 2008 forward, all of these Russian defense programs started yielding fruit. Like all of these procurement programs actually started delivering new, you know, MIG-29 fighters and tanks. You trap where the money goes. All of a sudden you start getting the shit you pay for. So these Russian generals started walking to finance meetings, like they were walking to the scaffold. And he started, he implemented this program with his generals where like they were fighting him publicly and trying to embarrass him. And so he would make the generals run a PT test, a military PT test.

And when they were, you know, these are guys in their 50s and 60s. And you'd make them do laps. And they're chronic alcoholics. And they have to job, they have to learn how to jog again to keep their job. And he would fire them the moment they failed these tests. Oh, what badass. That's awesome. And so, yeah.

He eventually replaces all of the deputy defense minister positions with tax professionals. And the department starts to, they build these two giant military procurement programs, GPV 2020 and then GPV 2027. I've got, they're on the book website. I go into detail on both of them. And they're procuring new ships, new planes, new tanks, electronic warfare. systems, they're investing in the, you know, the S-400 missile, you know, air defense system. And then he gets implicated in the Magnitsky scandal and all of his enemies within the Ministry of Defense pounce on him to try to force him out before he can go any further

in reform. Putin allows it to happen for whatever reason. And he eventually gets replaced with Sergei Shorgu. Shogu basically takes those headline procurement programs and shows those to the public as evidence that the Russian Ministry of Defense is really, really changing. And it's this, you know, high performing thing now. And he fools us. Like the Western, you know, all the Western governments really believe that Russia was running the world's second most powerful military. But there was rot underneath the paint.

And, you know, the longer Shogu was in charge, the worse it got. Wow. And so that's that's all in there. And I go deep into their defense reforms. I go into how they restructure the officer corps, the fights that they have about creating a non-commissioned officer corps, their military academies and all sorts of stuff. I mean, this is awesome. I think this conversation also sets up a lot of the understanding.

Like if you could track this, which for me, I'm pretty dumb. And I feel like I was able to track everything you were saying. So I feel like I'm actually set up to understand the book. a lot easier because I have a general understanding of what hybrid warfare is. I understand sort of the tools that are being used and sort of the main players that are using them. So I feel like I'll be able to read this and it's not going to be, you know, too dense for someone dense like me. That's the, that's the hope. Well, don't be too hard on yourself. But I've told my cousins and stuff, like if you read it, you know, it'll help you get to sleep. This is the kind of shit I like, though.

So this is, this is awesome. I'm actually, a lot of times people come on and talk about different books. and I'm always like, maybe I'll peruse through it, but I'm gonna 100% go through this. Thank you so much for the time, brother. I really appreciate it. Amen. This is awesome. Let's do it again soon, all right?

Thanks for having me.