Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - The Rise of Russia - With Curtis Fox

Episode Date: February 19, 2024

We are diving into the heart of Eurasian geopolitics with Curtis L. Fox, author of the groundbreaking book Hybrid Warfare: The Russian Approach to Strategic Competition and Conventional Military Conflict. Launching into a deep exploration of Russia's historical military strategies and its contemporary geopolitical maneuvers, Fox offers unparalleled insights into the Kremlin's objectives, its relentless pursuit in Ukraine, and the inner mechanics of its formidable military and intelligence apparatus. With Russia's economic tenacity and military prowess on full display, we dissect the nation's will to press on in the conflict, assess its strategic goals, and the potential ramifications on global stability. Curtis, a former Green Beret who mastered the Russian language and studied Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Tech before venturing into Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, provides a unique perspective on what Russia hopes to achieve and the lengths it may go to secure victory. This episode not only charts the course of Russia's military evolution from the Napoleonic era to its current engagement in Ukraine but also forecasts the possible outcomes of this conflict. Questions such as the impact of NATO's involvement, the financial sustainability of Russia's war machine, and the conditions for Ukrainian success are explored in depth. Wolf 21- Check out what they have to offer for the best sleep of your life: ⁠https://www.thewolf21.com ⁠ Use Code: "clearedhot" for 30% off of your 1st order The Speed of War Comic Series: ⁠https://www.thespeedofwar.com/⁠ Check out the newest Cleared Hot Gear here: ⁠https://shop.clearedhotpodcast.com/⁠

What is up, everybody? Welcome back. I hope you had a good weekend. Fascinating episode for you today. But before we get into that, let's talk about the business side of the house. Today's episode is brought to you by, that's right, Black Rifle Coffee, but something a little bit different. And for those of you who don't live on social media, perhaps you didn't know this. But Black Rifle Coffee has just partnered with the UFC. And to kick off this brand new sponsorship slash partnership, they are offering you the listener a chance to get third. 30% off of your purchase if you go to black rifle coffee.com by using the code cleared hot. And the way I'm looking at this, it's all uppercase and it's all one word. Black Rifle Coffee is veteran founded and veteran run. They take pride in serving coffee and culture to people who love America. Every purchase you make with Black Rifle Coffee helps them further the mission to support veteran and first responder causes. With everything from getting funding and equipment to first responders and helping veterans get

medical care, your money goes a long way towards giving back to those who have served our nation. Black Rifle Coffee also partners with many other veteran-owned and veteran-focused brands, including this massive new partnership with the UFC that started with a huge donation to the Hunter 7 Foundation to help veterans fight cancer. For those of you that are unaware, there has been a huge amount of data and research linking cancer to various hazardous exposures overseas. A lot of people have heard about burn pits. That's only a portion of it. And the Hunter 7 Foundation is dedicated and designed for specifically that. issue. Black Rifle Coffee sources, they roasts from award-winning farms all over the globe, and they have a wide variety of ground coffee, whole bean, and even K-cups, if you hate yourself and your life, ready to drink coffee if you need to grab something to go. And everything from the

coffee to the bag art pays homage to American culture and military history. They also make some of the coolest gear and apparel on the market, mugs, teas, workout gear, apparel, all sorts of stuff. And again, if you go to black rifle coffee.com right now, you're going to get 30% off your purchase with the code cleared hot. And as I said before, it looks to me as it's all one word, all uppercase. And that's it on the business side of the house. How many of you listening or watching this have heard about Russia in the news? Whether it's with the conflict in Ukraine or even back to the global war on terror where the United States stepped right into the shitstorm that the Russians had evacuated, talking about Putin. the rise of their government, their government in and of itself, the rise of their military power, what they're capable of. I've heard a lot about it, but I'm not going to lie. I didn't know that much about it. I was aware that the conversations were happening. And then I got an email from Mr. Curtis Fox. And I'm just going to read his bio so I don't miss any of this up or mess any of this up. Curtis is the author of the recently published book, Hybrid Warfare, the Russian approach

to strategic competition in conventional military conflict. Curtis studied mechanical engineering, at Virginia Tech, despite being accepted to the VT graduate engineering program, Curtis chose to enlist in the Army, where he learned to speak Russian and earned his Green Beret. After completing his time in service, Curtis studied at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business, earning a master's of business administration with a focus in financial services. He now works as a program manager in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning in northern Virginia. Strap in, ladies and gentlemen. You want to learn about Russia. You want to understand what Russia is doing now in Ukraine and why and what it may

potentially look like and the impact you could have not only on NATO countries but the world. Get ready to go. Episode number 324 with Curtis Fox. Enjoy. I'm looking at danger close now. Putin and Tucker Carlson, since somebody who we're not going to name them, but it's not you or me, was asking you questions before we hit the record button. We're going to unwind or rewind a little bit because the subject of Today, I hope, I mean, we can focus it on Russia. History, everything leading up to what's going on in Ukraine. I'm assuming you're probably tracking pretty closely what is going on in Ukraine.

But I mean, shit, Tucker and Putin just got together. I think within the past four or five days, right? Yep. Yeah, what are your thoughts? Well, first off, let me, to make sure I cover all the bases for my superiors here. I got a preface by saying all my opinions are my own and not the opinions of the U.S. government. Are they? Yes.

Are you a plant for the U.S. government? I might be. You never know. But yeah, I did watch all two hours of it. There are not a whole lot of revelations in terms of, you know, the narrative that Putin is casting his war in Ukraine. He's always asserted that Ukraine is drifting away from Russia. because of American or Western interference in Ukraine's, let's say, domestic political processes. So the first one, you know, there was a pro-Russian government in Ukraine after the Soviet Union collapsed.

And because of that, Moscow was willing to recognize them. So in 1992, they actually signed a treaty where Ukraine handed over all the nuclear ordinance that they had inherited from the Soviet Union to Russia in exchange for Russian recognition of their sovereignty. I think Russia kind of had to do that. That really undercuts. If Carlson had known about that treaty and maybe if he was a Russia guy and he had known about that, he might have brought that up to Putin and forced Putin to explain it. But he's a journalist, not a specialist. And so he doesn't know those things.

How much flexibility do you think he actually had to ask him what he wanted to? Do you think he went in there and was shooting off the cuff? Because I have so many questions like, A, how do you get Putin to agree to this? that in the first place. Sure. Obviously, not obviously. In my assumption, it would be Putin's going to be involved of that if he thinks it plays to his benefit, right?

He's not going to waste his time doing something that's going to paint him in a bad light. So it always makes me wonder about how open they actually are even able to be in that type of environment. I would be shocked if the, if the Kremlin did not demand some concessions in terms of editing. and I would bet he was allowed to ask any question he wanted to, but they were allowed to cut that piece out. I would be shocked that there was any other arrangement on the table. Putin apparently made him wait about two hours.

Fuck you. That's what I'm talking about. Shows up. You're doing it on my time is the important one here, right? That's how you establish who has the bigger one in the room. Like, oh, we're here. I'll be there when I'm ready. Yeah.

So are there important matters of state at play. here. But I do think the Kremlin absolutely wanted to do the interview. This is the way that they kind of throw a monkey wrench into Western politics, and this is not new. They've been doing this well before even the Soviet Union. The Russians exist on the periphery of European politics, and they're kind of always on the back end of any terms of political innovation or technological development. And so their policy is based around making sure that coalitions never become strong enough to ever march eastward. So, and, you know, there are two real nightmare situations where the Grand Armée under Napoleon

and then the Vermacht in 1941 being able to, you know, come forward in a real way. And so they try to frustrate and break up political consensus. And that's what they do is they look for the fissures and the cracks. And so doing a little interview with somebody that would otherwise be kind of insignificant to the Kremlin like Tucker Carlson is a really good. way to kind of stir the pot in American politics. It certainly got people's attention. Yeah.

I was aware that the interview occurred. I did not actually take the time to listen to it. And if I'm being totally honest, it's because I don't know how much I really give a shit about what Putin says. You mean, I'd rather look at what they do from a foreign policy perspective. I mean, look at any politician in the United States. Have fun with that interview. Good afternoon, sir. What do you think about this?

Oh, my favorite color is blue. And let me go right back into the talking points that I want to say regardless of your question. Right. So I, you know, Putin did answer in a real way some of his questions. And I'll give Carlson some credit that he advocated for the release of that American journalist that's under arrest for espionage charges in Russia right now. It's awful hard to give an interview to somebody when you, you know your passport. could be confiscated and you could be put in a political prison. What do you think the odds, though, of that happening to Tucker?

The journalist that I was aware of, and I saw, I did see snippets of that particular interview as a written one where Putin basically said, it's a matter of the state security service has that and the agencies are talking. So he kind of paddled that one downstream a little bit. I mean, do you really think there was any risk of a guy of high profile as Tucker getting his passport yanked? again, it's anybody's guess because you don't really know how the Russians perceive these things. Just to give you an example, right? One of the reasons the current invasion of Ukraine has been such a train wreck is because the GRU,

the Russian military intelligence service, that's by far their most capable intelligence service. And it's the one that went through the least reform after the Soviet collapse. In 2018, you remember that assassination attempt on Sergei Skry y'all in the UK. It was in Salisbury. The Russians came in and they smeared Novichuk nerve agent on this guy's door. He was a turncoat that MI6 flipped and he was living in exile in the UK. He didn't die though, right? Was he like perfectly disfigured? He, yeah, I think there were some permanent health complications for both him and his daughter, but a number of British citizens did die. But apparently MI5, if anything, they revealed a very impressive counterintelligence capability. Once they started their investigation, they had these guys. moving from their station post in Ukraine up to the National Counterterrorism Center in Moscow where they did training there for like one or two weeks. And then from the Moscow airport to London, Heathrow, on the metro to Salisbury, did a reconnaissance day, came back to London, stayed a night in the hotel that went back the next day, actually did the operation.

And then they were on a flight out of London again within five hours. and but the UK had all that had their false identities and everything. And one of the guys had been awarded the, the hero of the Russian Federation. It's like their Victoria Cross Medal of Honor. Yeah. That was such, what was happening was the GRU was, they work directly for the general staff.

And because of that, because the bureaucracy is kind of a competitive nature, especially in Russia, if they want to get noticed by the Kremlin, they have to do something that would kind of, let's say, please the boss without him asking for it. And this was one of those attempts. But the evidence against them and the fact that it was so ham-fisted and they were caught red-handed in such a dramatic way caused every country in Europe to eject 150 Russian diplomats, which many of them were probably covert intelligence officers that had years of. of foreign service experience, plus another 50 from the United States, all persona non grata. So the Russian intelligence community lost some of their crown jewels in collection from that act. And so the director of the GRU, his name was Igor Khorobov, Colonel General Igor Khorbov.

He was summoned to the Kremlin later, I think in September of that year, for an intense dressing down. and he died of stress in his home, you know, about a month later. And we'll never know if that stress was from accidentally tying himself to a chair and falling in a lake or what it was. I hate it when I do that. I hate it when it happens. So hard to get those last knots. But bringing the long story to a close for you, I guess, is just there's no telling who in that ecosystem is trying to do what and whom they're trying to please in doing it. And it's not clear to me at all that the Kremlin has total control all of

those institutions. Putin is, he's Russia's most important, most powerful power broker, but he's not Joseph Stalin. And he never could be. He represents about 150 to 200, Siloviki, former KGB men, foreign service specialists, maybe a couple of generals, who were kind of the collective, competent ruling body in Moscow. Each of them was, you know, they're educated in the late Soviet Union. And so they had a real education. The Soviet Union produced some of the best engineers in the world. They produced some excellent, you know, intelligence officers.

But that education system collapsed in 1991. And, you know, the Russian economy and the aftermath of that collapse by 1995 was about half the size of the United Kingdom and gross domestic product. And you simply can't support an apparatus of that size on an economy that small. Something has to give. And the education system was one of them. And it's never been rebuilt. So that group of Solowiki is, that's all they have. And that's the ruling class.

Can you walk me through Putin's rise to power? Yeah. The SparkNotes version, he was a. colonel in the KGB. How do you find his way into that? Do you have a family history of it? It's a very coveted job at the time. I don't know how he actually started into the KGB.

I'm not sure we have a good record of that. I don't know. Maybe somebody knows. But I know he was stationed in East Germany. And that's kind of interesting in and of itself because the Stasi in East Germany are recorded as perhaps history's most competent in domestic security. service, alarmingly proficient. And everything that you would consider about German efficiency, except I need you to inform on your neighbors.

And for him to be stationed in East Germany as a foreign intelligence officer would seem to suggest that he was either extremely important and he was considered extremely gifted or on the other end of the spectrum, he was not seen as particularly gifted in his craft by his superiors. And so they put him in a place where he could not possibly screw up. So it could be one of the other, who knows. But he started off in St. Petersburg working as a deputy mayor, and then he migrated to Moscow to start working for the Yeltsin administration. And he had a number of lower-level administrative jobs that were nevertheless very important, mostly for liquidating, you know, Soviets, former Soviet state assets and trying to privatize them.

And when you have that job, you get an enormous amount of influence. He was an oligarch creator. And he rapidly advanced through the ranks because the Yeltsin administration realized that he was a, he was a discreet fixture of problems. And he got results. There's a power broker of sorts. Yeah. Is an oligarch just a Russian word for a billionaire? Sure.

Extremely wealthy person. I mean, you always see the two tied together. I'm just curious if that's a uniquely Russian term. Yeah. And it's not a uniquely Russian term. you know, it's actually a Greek term. You know, the Spartans installed oligarchies. They prefer to deal with oligarchies in most of ancient history.

And that's a fascinating story in it of itself. If you ever, I don't know if we have time to go through the Spartan constitution and how they wanted to export it. What we got left on the ST card, Michael? A long time. But essentially there's two kinds of Russian oligarchs. They're the former Soviet state apparatchiks who, basically decided that they owned large segments of, large components of state property after the Soviet Union collapsed. And they either, you know, oversaw the privatization. And they, you know,

annoyed themselves as a CEO with enormous salary benefits and things like that. And then there's the Slovakie, the, you know, the KGB men that I just described to you. And they're, And they're not mutually exclusive, but the intelligence operatives are much more willing to work with organized crime in order to get the things that they want. I'm sure we'll get into the Magnitsky scandal a little bit later. But you'll get a really good taste for how it is that they enrich themselves kind of in the background. But that would be an interesting conversation just in terms of how the Russians tried to do military reform. and how everybody was getting their little shares off the pot. And becoming enriched off of that.

Enormously enriched. Far away, let's get into it. And we can go in any direction we want to at any time we want. So Putin realized, you know, especially after Chechnya, because he was the, when he came in as first the prime minister under Borr Scheltsin. So he was to cap off Putin's career, he was brought on shortly after as a deputy prime minister, and then the FSB director. And he was the FSB director for maybe six months

when they informed him that he was going to be the new prime minister, which means he basically, the prime minister in Russia runs the day-to-day operations of government, but primarily the internal operations of government. The president is the more powerful position, and he's the one that's going to oversee the security services, the military, you know, the things that really matter. When Boris Yelsohn's health was failing, he informed Putin that he was going to resign as Prime Minister,

Putin became acting president until he was officially elected in the spring of 2000. But he, when he came on as prime minister, one of his first projects was overseeing the second Chechen war. And the first Chechen war was an utter catastrophe for the Russians. The Chechens are as ruthless as the Russians by a large margin, in some cases more so. And they brought in foreign expertise to help them plan their defense of Chechnya when they broke off from Russia. And so they humiliated Boris Yeltsin in 1996 and basically chased the Russian army out. The Russian army proved to be incompetent, unmotivated.

They couldn't conduct combined arms maneuver. They certainly couldn't conduct joint operations. I've heard the same things in a more common narrative in a different location. Yeah. It's annoying. Oh, how history repeats itself. It's alarming exactly how difficult real reform is when the culture is the way it is. So anyway, in 1999, you know, Putin basically waited for the opportunity to, you know, to pick the next fight with the Chechens.

But he had been supervising the background, the development of a special task force that was going to go into Chechnya and take Chechnya back. Chechnya sits on the Caucasus Mountains and that's one of those important strategic choke points that is kind of an entry, let's say a doorway into the Russian heartland. And they will not tolerate that being not Russian. So it was always just a matter of when the next war is going to happen. So when it kicked off, he had a specially trained task force of about 50,000 troops that started at the north end of Chechnya. And they just started advancing downward. There's a main river that runs through Chechnya. And they secured the countryside.

And they went house by house clearing out every small village and domestic dwelling. They didn't just go straight for the urban centers. So they cut off all the lines of retreat that come out. They cut off all the areas of resupply. Anytime somebody took a sniper shot at them, they answered it with artillery. And that was the, it's a slow moving steamroller. And when they got to Grozny, they raised it to the ground. And there was this horrible international outcry about this because it was one of the first wars that everyone saw on their television.

And when they were done in Chechnya, there was not a whole lot left, but they, they made a number of local allies that basically run it as a, you know, say, an appointed governorship that answers directly to Vladimir Putin. So they're autonomous provided they're autonomous under the Russian government. Yeah. But it revealed, again, you know, we can't do anything sophisticated. We can do a steamroller, but that's, it's expensive. And then it costs us our international relations.

It certainly costs them, you know, diplomatic standing and there there was a sincere intent at detente with the united states in the early putin years he recognized that the u.s was uh you know let's say the preeminent superpower he wanted to get along he offered us intelligence when we were going into Afghanistan he offered us uh you know some credible support my understanding is he actually pulled out a listening post from cuba uh like a signals intelligence listening post and the cubans were pleading with him not to do that but he did it and to try to win american favor Who knows how good that listening post was and whether they were getting anything out of it.

The fact that they removed it tells me that... Probably not that effective. Probably not that efficient. Anyway, all this was happening in the backgrounds. He increased their budget. His general thesis in running for office was that he can increase the standard of living for the average Russian by leveraging their oil and gas resources. So he quartered a bunch of Western super majors to come in and kind of retap all the

Soviet era oil fields. They're located in the Ural Mountains. A lot of them are in the permafrost. If they seize up, they have to be retapped. You can't just turn them back on. And when they seized up after the Soviet era, you know, Russian energy production collapsed, it took, you know, a lot of Western super majors, Shell, BP, Chevron, you know, things like that to retap those wells and get them back online. Once they were, he had enough revenue to actually run the day-to-day operations of the government. And he did honestly start to improve the lives of the average Russian. But the other half of his thesis was to restore Russia as a respected great power. And that's what he was, you know, he was working at. So a part of that was developing, let's say, a more

a more Western military, a military that can conduct joint operations at minimum ground forces that can conduct combined arms maneuver. And so they, you know, with all this increase in money, soldiers started finding out that they had a training budget. They had ammo that they could spend on the range, that, you know, they could actually repair their tanks and keep them functional. Pilots started getting flight hours. I mean, these are baby steps forward. Yeah, these are like, this is like military 101. Right.

So in the Russo-Georgian War in 2008, they tried a different strategy. and this is, you know, I guess the foundational thesis in my book, and what we call what we call Russian hybrid warfare, is essentially their, let's call it geopolitical judo. It's they're trying to instigate a conflict on their terms where they can control the narrative and control how the international community perceives their intervention. And then they need a relatively sophisticated military with a couple of select elite units that can rush in and seize a number of very discreet objectives that they can then reinforce with large ground forces and entrench those gains.

That's really the tactical level. If you look at it more at the strategic level, their in-state is eventually to restore what would be the Russian Empire. Putin is, he's pursuing the same geopolitical objectives as Catherine the Great and Peter the Great before her. The Russians are on the vast northern Eurasian step. There's no real geographic barriers except for vast open space. And so they've been invaded by literally anybody that you can imagine.

They've gone to war with the Poles, you know, 15 times in the last 300 years. And they've gone to war with the Persians. They've gone to war with the Mongols. They've got a war with the Ukrainians. They've gone to war with the Turks. And so their goal is to expand to anchor their political boundaries on hard geographic barriers. So that would be the Carpathian Mountains. That would be the Caucasus Mountains in the south, the Gobi Desert, the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea.

So Joseph Stalin really hit the apogee of that national defense strategy in 1945 when he had Soviet ground forces forward-staged in East Germany on the western side of the Folda Gap. And that's where they would love to be again. And that also means that they would have to dominate a collective populace that's about twice the size of the Rus ethnicity itself. So just to give you an idea of that's what would make them happy. So anyway, the Russo-Georgian war was them securing the caucuses mountains again. And Mikhail Shakishvili had come into power as a Georgian populist. The Russians keep Georgia under control through three autonomous enclaves. It was Abkhazia on the coast, South Ossetia, which is, there's a, there's a tunnel called the Roki Tunnel that goes through the Caucasus Mountains and in North Ossetia.

And north Asatia is on the Russian side of the mountain range. And then there was another one called the Jara in the south. And so the Russians used to those three enclaves to really keep Georgia under control. And they do this in some other places like Transnistria with Moldova or they did this with Donetsk and Lou tanks in Ukraine. It's a pretty well-established strategy for them. So they executed that war fairly masterfully. They needled and kind of instigated the fights with Mikhail Saakashvili by kind of arming these pro-Russian enclaves with artillery and then letting them conduct artillery bombardments across the border. Eventually, Sokishvili was put in a place where he had.

had to respond. And so he invaded South Ossetia. His goal was to eventually try to get up to the Roki Tunnel and plug the tunnel so that the Russians couldn't come south again. His field commanders got bogged down in the weeds and they kind of forgot that that was their objective and they got consumed with urban fighting around Tishkin Valley, which is the primary city in South Osatia. I'm getting way into the weeds here. But the core point is that the Russian had a good look at how their military performs in that war. And the strategic planning, the operational planning that they did was superb. I mean, they forced Georgia to engage and fire the first shots, so to speak,

so that they could immediately claim in the narrative that they were defending, you know. They were reacting instead of being proactive. Exactly. And the commanders seemed to understand their objectives well enough to me. move on them. One very peculiar thing happened. The overall ground force commander, I want to say, it was the 58th combined arms army. I can't remember the order of battle off top of my head. He was relieved. And part of the reason he was relieved is because Putin, he was coming in from China, I think, from the Beijing Olympics. He said this is entirely too slow. I'm putting somebody

more aggressive in charge and he picked one of the airborne divisions and that division command staff was actually given overall theater command and and everything got a lot more aggressive and people started pushing through fire and to hit their key to hit their key points in the aftermath of that they kind of did an after action review and Putin decided that like just giving the military more funding is not working like the officers are not reforming themselves this institution doesn't work. So even though that war turned out as good as it possibly could had for Russia, he brought in a new defense minister named Anatolese Sertiukov. And you've got to interrupt me here because my lectures go on for a long time.

Well, how complicated was the defenses that they were facing in Georgia? Not particularly sophisticated. There was one brigade, it was first brigade that was actually being trained in the West and it had actually deployed to Iraq to assist with the national counterterrorism mission in Iraq. Did they have full like defense and layers? Did they have air defense? Did they have an Air Force helo wing? And that's, I'm asking because, you know, you don't get too much of a sense of the capability

of your military. You know, it's, it'd be like saying, we're going to put up special operations forces against the Taliban in Kandahar in 2000. I'm going to tell you how that's going to work. And are the Special Operations Forces going to win because they're that much better or they just have an immense technological advantage? They did not have a technological advantage. Actually, the Georgians did.

The Georgians were using Israeli night fighting equipment and their tanks. A lot of their equipment is legacy Soviet Union, you know, T-72 tanks and the like. They had four primary brigades that were involved in the fighting. They didn't have an Air Force to really speak of. And after the first day of engagement, Saakashvili grounded the Air Force because he was worried he was going to lose what he literally he had. After the first day. So they did have a number of soft units.

Their overall, I guess you'd call him their equivalent of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he was actually the head of their national counter, let's say their national special missions unit. And so, you know, they had a competent individual at the top, but that's also a very specialist niche skill set. Yeah. Right. There's a reason, you know, let's say our, you know, force recon Marines don't go on to command a MU very often. And it's because you get, you're specializing to that point.

And you have to come out of that community and get the broader experiences in order to understand all the moving components of something is complex. as a mule. It's not something you can just step into. And I think that was also a problem for the Georgians. But fair to say then that Georgia was perhaps not evenly matched, but they were not a pushover adversary. They were not a pushover. And they really did try to take the initiative a number of times. They just kept going through the middle of the urban center in Tishkin Valley. And what they should have done was gone, you know, in a pencer movement around it. If they had been able to plug that Rookie tunnel. That's just one long little mountain pass that comes down from that tunnel and they could have plugged up the entire Russian armored convoy right there. But they just kind of lost side of their

goals. Sucks to be them. Sucks to be them. So Anatoly Serti Yukov was brought in to reform the Russian armed forces against their will. And his principal enemy in that was the general staff because the General staff was absolutely enriching themselves out of the operations budget. And he was a tax professional. And he's an interesting individual because he actually started life as a furniture salesman. But he ended up, you know, becoming an accountant. And then he worked in the Russian Federal Tax Service. And when he was brought in, he set up all of these financial control boards throughout

the Ministry of Defense that made them account for every single copiac that was being spent. and suddenly by magic, by magic, these R&D projects started to yield fruit. These, you know, like when they would issue an order for 35 new S35 fighter jets. And suddenly they would start receiving deliveries. We call that fraud waste and abuse in the U.S. military. I think the Germans, I think it was a German study came out in like 2014 that guessed that maybe 40% of the Russian defense budget was being embezzled. around 2014.

Holy shit. So these people were just siphoning at every opportunity. When the Russo-Ukraine war kicked off an enormous number of yachts that were stationed around the Crimean Peninsula and the Black Sea, they suddenly all picked up anchor and went straight to Turkey. Man. Okay. So Serti Yukov, he was exactly what they needed.

And he fought toothing out the general staff. And actually one of the ways he put them in their places, he started making the general staff run annual PT tests. And he would fire them when they failed their PT tests. And half these guys are, you know, there's alcoholism that's rampant. And they're, you know, they're in their 50s, 60s, 70s. And suddenly they were required to jog in order to keep their job. It's a tough one.

Yeah. And so he got rid of a lot of them. He fired an enormous number of deputy defense ministers. And then he replaced them with his people who were largely, financial specialists and tax professionals. And the military really did start to pick up speed and reform. So he had this program called the New Look. And the New Look had a couple of core pillars. He wanted to build a real NCO Corps, a Western-style NCO core. They fought him to the death on that. And they ended up winning that one. So their NCOs are considered technical

specialists. They're not leaders in any sense. And the reason is because that would, that would, they feel that that would undermine the officer corps. Interesting. We see that as very backwards, right? Like you see them as being symbiotic, right? Not antagonistic. You know, I mean, they each have a role. And if the system is working properly, they're working together.

And you kind of need both. Like the leadership from an officer level needs the NCOs or non-commissioned officers. And then the NCOs need the leadership that's looking up and out to orient. You know what I mean? It's a choreograph dance that should work well together. In personalities are important too and education is important too. You can't expect, let's say, a non-commissioned officer to be able to do the high level of operational planning that you'd need for a brigade combat team. Yeah, you'd never expect that.

But you couldn't expect a lieutenant to be able to run a platoon on his own. Yeah. The Russia still see it that way. So anyway, that was the first one. He lost. He did try to professionalize the force. So they went from a conscript model in the Soviet era to a conscript model to a combat. contract soldier model.

And their goal was to get the entire force to be contract soldiers. They ended up coming with kind of a hybrid system. They could never quite recruit enough people. Part of that is because they're just aren't that many Russian young people. They're not having kids. But the other part of it is that there's this horrible system of hazing and abuse in Russia. They called it Dead of China. And it's basically the conscript soldiers are supposed to come in for two years.

And in your first year, you're a junior guy and you get the abuse hanged on hunting on you in the barracks. And then in your second year, you're a senior guy and you get to do the abusing. And there's New York Times reported on one particular egregious case. This guy had a drunk superior that made him squat on his knees for like 18 hours straight. And he was finally relieved and he woke up in the morning with blood clots in his legs. Yeah. And he had to, excuse me. He ended up having to have his legs and his genitals amputated for this.

And that was bad enough that it actually made it to New York Times out of Russia. So that those barracks are prison-like conditions. And so it's really hard for the Russian government to convince anyone to have their sons enlist in the military. Yeah, that's tough to put on the recruitment poster. Yeah. So what they did was they started, okay, you can do a conscript thing for two years or you could do a contract soldier gig for three years. If you sign a contract, then you get to choose your job. And so the conscripts, they do a lot of the, you know, the admin work, some of the grunt work.

There's going to be your cooks, your chefs, your trucks, drivers. The VDV, which is their premier fighting force, that's their airborne unit. They have probably the highest proportion of contract soldiers. The Spetsnazbergades all get, you know, let's say their pick of the litter. But they've got conscripts in their ranks because they just couldn't fill their rank. otherwise. Yeah. And then the rest of the conventional forces gets the rest.

Who's ever left? You can't really become an NCO unless you're a contract soldier, which is an interesting increase. The next thing was they changed up officer education. They had about a, what was it, like a hundred general officer academies? And they close that all down to, I think, like three. And that really helps because, you know, not everybody can say that they're qualified for senior command anymore.

Like you have to go to a real school and get a. a real, you know, get a real background and how you're going to run a division. It allows you to put more assets into those three schools as well and control the curriculum. Right. And make sure that, you know, the instructors are of higher quality. And then they tried to eliminate all of these reserve units. They used to have these like skeleton units that were basically officers that kept the lights on. And then in a national crisis, they were supposed to, you know, surge in conscripted soldiers to respond to this national crisis. and they should just be able to fall into these skeleton units,

jump into their tanks, and drive to the front under the leadership of their platoon company battalion, whatever. It was a Soviet-era idea, and it's never been tried. It's never been proven. Those officers have nothing to do on a day-to-day basis except for figure out how to embezzle funds out of the Army. So that was gotten rid of. The general staff fought him tooth and nail on that,

but that's one of those things that he won. And then he tried to start rotating, he tried to figure out a system of how we're going to, let's say, evaluate and move forward the best officers. And I kind of appreciate his struggles with that because I think we struggle with that in the United States too. Like how do you compare two resumes? And how do you compare two people's combat experiences?

Hopefully you have two people to compare. Yeah. Sometimes it gets to a point where it's, It's rock paper pulse. And the people who are rock stars are tired of the system. And the people who are average or below performers hang it out. They just hang on tooth and nail. And the next thing you know, the advancement board is there.

And it's a thin herd for competition. I've seen it happen many times. You know, I was listening to a lieutenant colonel told me about some of his time in special forces. And he had insisted on rotating back to South America over and over and over again to become a regional specialist. And so he had this fascinating experience where he'd been in and out of a dozen embassies on a dozen different jobs.

And he had hit the command wickets to continue to move up to lieutenant colonel, but he had no hope of ever getting a special forces battalion because the way to get to that position is by being, you know, the battalion S5. the S3 and then the XO and then the battalion commander. They'll, you know, that maybe, maybe working at like a T-Soc is like the J5 so that you're actually writing soft missions based on how to achieve policy objectives in some sense. That could be, you know, a good resume builder because you're going to have to leave the battalion at some point to get other professional experiences.

But, you know, he was explaining to me that he had just been off in country too much. And so he hadn't tagged the right administrative jobs in order to move up. I think that's a fair argument against that person taking command at a certain level. I mean, on the Navy side, it's a joint tour or a disassociated tour, meaning you have to leave the seal community proper pipeline to avoid the things that you're talking about where, you know, we would use N codes instead of J. So Navy instead of joint. I know N3 is operations two is Intel. What is N5? Is that like?

Is that plans? It might be. I don't know. Beyond N3, I'm like, I don't think I need to talk to any of these people, because I didn't know what they did. But you'll get to, you know, you'll do an operational tour as an officer, probably as an incident, JG, very junior officer, too, in an operational element. You'll cycle through for your OIC tour officer in charge as maybe an O3. So, you know, a lieutenant versus would that be in the army of captain. And you might go to the next one, the, troop commander. That's going to probably be your 04 tour, which would be lieutenant commander or major in the army. And beyond that, your operational career is looking thin. And it really you're going to go and you might go to like SOC Africa. You might go over to SOC Europe. You know, you're going to start doing designated staff billets outside of the SEAL community in the joint world and then maybe come back for EXO. Then probably another joint billet. Then you're going to bounce back in for your CEO. I think you have to do that. I mean, having the guy who's the

Clint Eastwood lead slinger, that's fantastic. At the tactical level, I'm not sure that's great when he has his hands on the wheel of the ship. Fair enough. An argument can be made for both. I think in a perfect world, you'd have a great blend of both of those things. But if you want to be a tactician and you dedicate yourself to that, I think it's important people realize you're going to glass sealing yourself out. And I, you know, with this individual, I think that's, I think he was explaining me exactly that. And he was like, I made my choices. And I know, I'm comfortable with where I am and where I landed.

And I'm hitting 20 years happy. Yeah. And some people prefer the joint world. And I mean, I was never one to nerd out on the planning stuff or just the interagency, you know, just the entire joint world in and of itself. There are some people that that fills their cup and more power to you because we need it. We need all of those things. Yeah. Well, anyway, the Russians have been grappling with this issue, and they don't have an answer at all.

What year are we at this point when they're grappling with this issue? 2008 to maybe 2012. Okay, so this is not that far in the riverview mirror. No, this is fairly modern. Yeah. And so their solution was that, well, first off, we can do, you know, some purges. If we catch anybody, you know, moving money in ways that they shouldn't be. We can get rid of them for that.

but the other thing is that we can start rotating them into combat experiences. So, you know, they, you know, they do these little interventions and little places on their periphery all the time. And so when they, when they, somebody rotates in as a rising star into one of those things and they get some real command and control experience, you know, that's a good thing. The Syria intervention from 2015 forward was a big proven ground for a lot of people. And that was an even bigger deal for a lot of Russian ground forces officers and aerospace officers, aerospace forces officers, because they could claim that they had joint experience off of that. The 2014 Crimean annexation, that was quick. I mean, that was over within, you know, by the end of March 2014. That was started in February 22nd, I believe, and that was over by the end of March.

But the war in Donbuss that went on over the summer of 2014 and 2015, that was a golden opportunity for anybody in the Spetsunas community who was an officer and wanted an opportunity to work with any of these little militias that they were standing up. And then on into that winter, the Russians had to intervene directly in order to kind of rescue this insurgency that they had created in Donetsk and Lou Hanksk. from really August forward. And so they searched in, you know, conventional forces, a number of rifle brigades. And so those officers, they were handpicked out of the entire armed forces, you know, for a golden opportunity to go to go to war and kind of prove themselves. And gain critical combat experience. So they're getting people, they're rotating people through for that real world.

I'm not going to call it a golden ticket, but it absolutely makes a difference when you can turn. conceptual into practical. Right. And, man, that's, you know, there's no training exercise that really proves that you can do a combined arms maneuver at a regimental level, a brigade level, or a division level, you know, quite like actually the real thing. Yeah. And the amount of ammunition that a unit of that size expends compared to a training exercise is enormous. And being able to run the logistics to make sure that you can actually maintain your momentum. And that kind of a campaign is, it's a non-trivial task.

Or just deal with the real world contingencies that you can't think of in all the training evolutions. I mean, of course, in a well-put-together training evolution, you're going to have those things, but you know as well as I do, the real world will present you with things you're not prepared for. And you can problem-solve in real time. Yeah. So, anyway, the, you know, the war in Donbuss, you know, it didn't really end, but it came to a stalemate kind of, you know, what, March of 2015, April of 2015. the Russians signed what they would call the Minsk agreements. They got the Ukraine to sign the Minsk agreements, which basically recognized those two autonomous enclaves to a certain extent.

And it was supposed to be a pathway to a permanent ceasefire. The moment the ink was on paper, the Russians realized that their strategic position was actually untenable. And so they basically conducted another month of combat operations to advance the line forward so that they controlled a number of gateways into the region. you know, key road hubs. You know, and then after that month ended, they, for the rest of, you know, from 2015 to present, they've claimed that the Ukrainians refused to implement the Minsk agreements.

You know, that's one of their propaganda levers that they keep coming back to. Putin mentioned it in the Tucker Carlson interview. So you mentioned, I think, when we first started, that when Ukraine was first recognized, one of the, you know, concessions was one they'd hand over the nuclear arsenal. but they had a pro-Russian government. What was the shift in that to switch it to an anti-government Russian? And how long did it take? Yeah, that was 2004.

They called it the Orange Revolution. A lot of these little, these, you know, former Soviet republics when they became, I hate to call them populist democracies because that's not really the right word. But this is the first time they had actually held real elections since the rise of the Soviet Union and, let's say, World War II. And so, you know, all of these little countries, they had their little kind of populist government changeovers to a new regime. And the Communist Party, if it continued to exist, became, you know, let's say one party of a multi-party system for the first time. And so they called these color revolutions in a lot of different ways. And, you know, the orange revolution that they called Ukraine was 2004.

And the ousted president, I'm struggling to remember his name, but the new administration that came in, their prime minister was Yuli Temashenko, and she was a real reformer. And that government very much wanted to pivot towards the European Union, especially in trade. This is one of those things where Russian propaganda, good propaganda has to be based on a kernel of truth. and very often it plays to legitimate resentments. And we kind of, in this whole thing that we're doing these days to try to rid the world of propaganda and targeted messaging, we kind of forget that, you know, people have legitimate grievances. And that was certainly the case in Ukraine.

The eastern Ukraine was primarily ethnically Russian. The, how far back in time you want to go. but Ukraine was, it's, Putin gave a very good narrative of Ukraine and Russia's joint history and his Tucker Carlson interview. He monologued for a good 25 minutes, you know, starting his dialogue at the 8th century and then walking it forward, you know, war by war and century by century and how the land had exchanged hands. Were you surprised by his knowledge of their history? I know Michael had made the comment. Did you watch the interview, Michael? I'm like halfway through it. But wasn't it you made the comment that he basically did a history lesson about

Yeah, I mean, it was the history of Russia pulling dates out and seemed very cognizant of it. At Carlson's request, he was like, I'll start adding dates to all these timeline things I'm giving you. And he could just switch it on like that. I don't know of a single U.S. senator that can speak to our history at that level. I mean, how about a let alone a U.S. citizen? Yeah. He sounded like me, honestly. You know, like he was, and, you know, I wrote a book about this stuff.

I have no idea where he has the spare time to do that much reading. I mean, I'm going to be honest. I like the shotgun videos where college campuses, and these are completely set up, and I'm sure the people who give the correct answers are edited out. But they'll say, what year was the United States founded? And the person will say, 1942. Who won the Civil War? And they'll say, California.

I'm like, okay, that's awesome. You know, again, I understand that the people who are answering it correctly there on the editing room floor. But that's probably more in line with the norm than the anomaly. It's, you know, the fact that he was able to rattle that off alone, and I'd be interested to just to watch him as he's going through that. Yeah. He sounds almost like he has a little bit of the tism. You know, maybe he has DefCon 3 level tism where he can just pull that stuff out of the ether. I don't know.

I don't know. He had an earpiece. Maybe he had some reading the script offline. Who knows? Can he speak English? Yeah, he can speak English. It's, it's, uh, I mean, I would, um, if they, if I spoke Russian to a certain degree and I was going to do an interview like that, I probably would answer in English as well. Yeah. His, his English is probably about as good as my, my Russian. Okay. I, I, I couldn't speak Russian at one point. It's, it's pretty bad now. It's rough. It's a Cyrillic language. Yeah. I took it in eighth grade. Why? I don't. know. Your high school offered lessons in Russian? Eighth grade. Excuse me, middle school. Yeah. Yeah. My parents obviously didn't like me very much, so they signed me up for a school for people who are gifted. And let me just tell you who is not. I think the reason I got in is that my grandfather wrote a check for the entire year's curriculum.

And they said, welcome aboard. So pretty sure that's how I got there. You know? Yeah. I did a little Japanese as well. I can still count to 10 in Japanese. Yeah, but I remember the alphabet. Holy shitballs. There's no sounding out some of those. Oh, my gosh. I would love to walk into a sushi bar and just surprise the guy by ordering in his language. That would make me so happy. There's a great channel on YouTube where a guy does exactly that.

He speaks like fluent Mandarin Chinese and the reaction on not only the staff but the other people there because he'll do it in very ethnic areas or go over to China. It flores them. It's awesome. I love that. Yeah, and a lot of times he'll just be kind of listening. And maybe they're not even necessarily talking about him, but he'll hop into a conversation completely fluently. I'm talking like you can hear jaw hit table. We do too just expect the world to speak English.

It's the global business language, I guess. I don't know. It's a little chivalistic. It's the global language of aviation as well, too. You know, pilots especially pilots are going to fly internationally coming into the U.S. are expected to be able to communicate in English. and it should go both ways. But I'm just curious.

I mean, I'm thinking of somebody in position like Putin's, even if he did speak relatively fluent English, again, it puts the power back in his position or stable by answering in his native tongue. It gives him a control again on the cadence and how he wants to answer. So I get it. I'm just curious. I have heard him speak English. And it's good.

It's good enough. I would understand him. So then he was, did Tucker have an earpiece as well? because I'm curious. Okay. Yeah. So they definitely had a translator between them. He could have been being fed some bullshit.

God, what if he was just repeating what he was hearing it? People like, this motherfucker knows more about our country than anybody in the history of Russia. And he's just got a guy in his ear just flipping through a textbook. Andy, the Russians would never cheat. They would never cheat on the Olympics. They would never cheat on the United with the U.S. Well, first off, the Olympics are clean. Nobody in the Olympics is cheating anyway.

Ever. Yeah. I don't know why people actually believe that. I think they want to believe it. They want to believe that we live in a world where everybody makes you feel safer. I did see somebody put forward an idea that's never going to go anywhere, but it basically was the dirty Olympics. You can do whatever you want to do. You just have to be totally honest about what it is that you're on.

And I'm not against that at all, except for the fact that it wouldn't look a lot different than the current Olympics. I'm thinking of that Ben Stiller movie Dodge Ball where... If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball. Yeah, that cheer squad. that they lose to, like one of the girls test positive for like four anabolic steroids and a beaver tranquilizer. Good God. Michael, is that interview worth watching?

If you're interested in Russian history. Yeah. I think it's interesting just to see him talk because I've never really, I don't know, listened to an interview with him. Hmm. How long do you think he was looking at invading your? Ukraine. Not from it like a desire perspective, but I mean like literally edging towards actually doing

that. I mean, they've been planning, you know, they've always assumed that they might have to take action in Ukraine. And so I'm sure they always had something on the drawing board. But in terms of a real intervention to take Ukraine, my guess would be that they really started taking this seriously when Turkey started supporting this seriously. when Turkey started supplying Ukraine some better drones

that could actually conduct credible strikes on those Donbust militias. And the Russians realized that they couldn't keep the status quo anymore. The moment the Ukrainians demonstrated that they had some real leverage

to try to stamp that insurgency out, that was when the Russians started taking this seriously. Putin, he makes the claim that the Ukrainian, like, the orange revolution that I was telling you about, that was the CIA. The CIA, you know, overthrew the existing and legitimate government. His candidate, the pro-Russian candidate, victory Yanukovych lost in that one.

He comes back again in the next election, I think, was in 2010. And Yanukovych wins that time. I think we can fairly make the case that there was a lot of Russian influence in that election. and they were probably, they were almost certainly paying a large portion of the Ukrainian parliament to kind of stall legislation and reform to kind of maintain a political gridlock until we can do another election. And Yanukovych, he, he was a Russian puppet, but he was also in a very delicate position and he seemed to understand they had to do a balancing act between the ethnic Russians and Eastern. Ukraine and the ethnic Ukrainians and Western Ukraine. The eastern Ukraine economically is deeply, deeply tied to Russia, and that's a Soviet legacy. There's an enormous number of manufacturing centers over there.

Most of the steel for the Russian Navy came from Ukraine. All their tank steel came from Ukraine. Ukraine is a massive exporter of wheat and pig iron and neon. What is pig iron? Pig iron. You say iron or arm? Iron. Yeah, I've heard of iron, obviously, but not pig iron.

Yeah. So when you have the raw iron ore, right? And then you refine that into pig iron. And then pig iron is what you actually superheat and burn the impurities out of in order to create steel. And that steel and the pig iron, there has to be a dramatically reduced carbon content. And what happens is when that iron superheats, the molecule spread a little bit further part and it opens up the lattice works so that carbon can actually nest in between the iron molecules or the iron atoms and so when the when it cools that that carbon becomes nested in between and it

forms a much more hardened steel and that i mean that's that's that's that's the base ingredient for most of our you know construction materials what does it say about me that i was hoping that it was like smelting livestock i mean because that's the first thing that my head head went to. It's like pig iron. Does this mean, uh, you kind of melt those things down and you make a pork chopper? Yeah, you can melt some pigs there. I like it. Okay. Um, see, uh, neon. Um, so you remember, remember the Star Wars initiative under the Reagan administration. Vaguely. They were going to, I remember the term. I could, I would struggle to define what the term actually meant, but I do remember them. I remember distinctly the term Star Wars. So like,

the idea was that we would put satellites up, uh, that would use chemical, lasers or maybe a kinetic interceptors. Sharks with laser beams. And that would shoot down ICBMs as they're rising out of a, you know, a country before they could reach their apogee. I like this idea. It's a great idea. I feel like it was a little bit ahead of the technology at the time.

Yeah. I don't think we had the tech to pull that off in the 80s. But there was a, it was on the drawing board. And I think we gave it a credible thought. We thought, well, we can't really do that yet. When Reagan was negotiating with the Soviets about this, the Soviets absolutely didn't want us to have missile defenses. They knew they couldn't develop them themselves. And one of the responses of Gorbachev was, hey, we've really got to figure out first off how we're going to do chemical lasers and a number of other things.

So they had, they built a neon industry in Ukraine, which actually is, you know, neons and noble gas. and that's a needed input material in developing, you know, high-powered lasers. Wow. So, yeah, that. I would not have guessed those two things would be associated, that country and that noble gas. Well, now that the Soviet Union's gone, they had to figure out what they were going to do with that industry. And it turns out neon is also an important input material in creating microchips. Really?

Yeah. So when you write onto a silicone, you know, if you do that in open air, you know, you're going to get a, you know, relatively polluted chip. And so for a long time, they were doing that in clean-maroon environments. And they started coming up with different ways to do that. And, you know, neon, because it's non-reactive, what you could do is do it in, you know, under that noble gas. Wow.

And, yeah, so when Ukrainian neon production went out, you know, that was one of many hundreds of different inputs into semiconductors production, um, that, that the world is missing out on, and we've had to find alternative sources of it. That's wild. What was the tipping point for Russia? Why do you think Putin gave the go when he did? For Ukraine, obviously speaking about the current conflict.

I honestly think he was waffling. I think he was on the fence, and he wasn't really sure what he was going to do, and he was watching Western reactions. They sent out this ultimatum, or I don't know, listed demands, so to speak. You know, and they wanted basically to control the foreign policy and security policies for most of the Soviet spear. To include NATO members, they wanted NATO to commit to only ever being able to conduct field exercises in Europe at the brigade level.

They wanted to get rid of any American production of intermediate missiles. And this was all kind of, you know, non-starter stuff. I mean, they really just, everything that we don't like, let's compile it into one document and just throw it at them and see if they'll give it to us. And it was kind of dismissed out of hand. Yeah, most of those things you described are ridiculously unreasonable. Yeah. And, you know, you know, as I said, you know, they, the definition of Russian security is dominating a collective populace that's twice the size of the Bruce ethnicity itself. And they feel honestly that that is their right.

And I think they were expecting to get something out of that. So that was one of those pieces, was they didn't get anything of substance from us at all. And they really thought they were going, if they huffed and puffed that they would. Putin was in that position that he loves being in where everybody in the world was coming to him and saying, please don't do this. Please don't do this. This is going to be really bad. They really were coming to the Kremlin and kissing the ring,

and I think he really made a bad judgment error. And he, this is where the narrative with why he did it kind of gets fascinating. So the way I described a hybrid war, you know, with the Russo-Ukorean War, or with the Russo-Georgian war and then the Crimean annexation in Dombus, they really did want to do something similar in Ukraine this time. So remember I told you about the GRU and the Assessianian, assassination of Sergei Scrip. Yes.

Right. So the GRU, because of that massive blunder, they have been in exile, you know, from the Russian security apparatus. Even though they're a part of it. Yeah. I mean, no one will talk to them. No one cared what they thought. And they, you know, they were basically removed from the planning process in this war. So it was handed off to the FSB, which is the by far Russia's most corrupt institution.

It's the premier inheritor of the KGB. So you have the GRU and the, what did you say, the FSB? What would those be in equivalent U.S. if there's a close approximation? The GRU would be the DIA if the DIA controlled U.S. Socom. Okay. That is going to be a tough one for the listeners to wrap their heads around and I don't know how to unpack that easier for you. So get on some Google. Yeah.

DIA is the Defense Intelligence Agency. U.S. Socom is US OCOM, the relationship between the two, that's a conversation in and of itself. So leave that there. The GRU, the Russian Spetsnows Brigades, what they are is deep reconnaissance elements. And that's what they're designed to do. They very often get used as elite trigger pullers. And that's because they're, you know, they're competent fighting soldiers and they're specially selected and specially trained.

But they're not actually designed for urban warfare or any of the things that they usually get tasked with. I mean, they always get tasked with some of the heavy lifting and heavy urban fighting, especially in places like Chechnya, because the Russians can't depend on anybody else not to run away from the fight. Syria was probably the first time in 30 years where they were used, maybe at least since Afghanistan, where they were used precisely for the purpose they were created for, which was that deeper condescence and then, you know, oversight of terminal guidance, let's say, of air strikes from the aerospace forces. And so they were a core component of all of Russia's, let's call them hybrid wars, up until this point. And they all work for the Russian military intelligence service, even though they're the strategic reconnaissance assets for each of Russia's military districts. Well, the GRU is removed from the planning process now. So those units weren't tasked with doing a lot of the preparation, the environment work that they would have normally done. One.

Not to interrupt you. What was the FSB in the American equivalent? The FSB is, it's a very, it's a bad comparison, but they would be the FBI. Gotcha. Okay. They're the domestic security service, let's say an internal security service. They're also a secret police. You know, the, and, you know, they're the primary inheritor of almost all the KGB's assets.

Almost seems like they're a blend between like the agency and the FBI. Seems like they have, like, the agency and the FBI. like they have an overlap of Venn diagram, overlap of roles. So the agency equivalent is called the SVR, and that was the first chief director to the KGB back in the day. And their headquarters was located outside of Moscow a little bit, well, let's say a little bit further from the Moscow City Center. And so they were able to stay outside of all of the political turmoil. And they're able to maintain this narrative that they were, they're very foreign focused and we're not involved in domestic politics. We're just here to serve Mother Russia. So.

they were able to basically transition to be their own independent agency after the Soviet collapse. But as you say, the FSB, they go into that Venn diagram of foreign intelligence a lot. And it's mostly under, it's supposed to be under the ages of counterintelligence, right? I run a spy abroad to tell me who is spying in our country. Very circular definition. Yeah. And, you know, it doesn't take long for them to just start. collecting abroad for their own sake. Of course. And, and who's going to stop them. So the,

the FSB have a director, I believe, is it Bortnikov? He's a very competent individual. And the Russians see him as a, he's maybe a little bit of an ultra-nationalist, but he's, he's generally accepted as a straight shooter as far as Russia goes. He can bring information to the Kremlin. The fifth director to the FSB is the director that conducts foreign intelligence, and they're the ones that analyze that intelligence into, you know, let's say analyze the raw information into actionable intelligence. Okay. The general that was running that directorate was arrested about two weeks after the Russo-Ukrainian War kicked off. and he was accused of incompetence, which is a massive understatement, but also for enriching himself out of their covert operations budget. What's his life look like now?

That's a good question. Never been seen again? Shocker. I haven't seen anything on what he is doing since he was arrested. I'm sure he's at a beach on France somewhere, just enjoying a Mai Tai. Fuck. I feel like when people in Russia aren't heard from in a while, it's because they're never going to be heard from again. Yeah.

Sorovican, you know, the general Armageddon, I am astonished that he lived through the Wagner coup. And Wagner's the dude who crashed in the airplane? Yeah, yeah. Pergozin? Yeah. Yeah. He added, unfortunately, a mechanical failure. Crash.

We still don't know if that was a bomb on board or a surface to air missile, but it was an accident, whatever it was. Certainly. It was an accidental surface to air missile or an accidental bomb. Yeah. I imagine what it sucked to be the pilot on that flight. How much would it suck to be just wanting to go from point A to point B and then you see this dude's name on the manifest? Like, fuck, I need to get a different flight.

I'd change planes. I wouldn't have been on that one. I mean, seriously, imagine the pilots. They had to have known if it wasn't that day. It was going to be a day. Can you imagine just sitting in the pilot seat with a parachute on, just waiting for something to happen so you can crawl to the exit door? I mean, that's not how that works, but I can appreciate the headspace.

So they cut the GRU out of the planning for Ukraine, even though that that is kind of their prep of the battle space. Wow. Every other intervention before this, the GRU, you know, all those little spets nest attachments, so they would have been all over the place, you know, stirring up local support, you know, everything that we would consider under the guise of special recovery. Yeah, fully prepping the battle space. We're getting a better idea of what's going on there. Yeah.

And they're actually pretty good at that. That's what they're, the closest American analog might be force recon. Okay. It's not a perfect analogy, but it's good enough. And yeah, there were none of those cross-border preparatory activities. The Russians started building this force up started as 40,000, you know, from their, from their annual exercises. Lukashenko. Remember that sham election that he had in Belarus? I do not.

So he was... I'm going to say right now you pay far more attention to that part of the world than I do. I can find it on a map, but holy fuck, you, I think, spend a little bit more time reading about this than I do. Well, you know, this is why I miss things like the Super Bowl. I was aware that it occurred a few days ago and I saw who won, but that was my limit of involvement. My wife needed to tell me that Travis Kelsey didn't propose. She was very disappointed. I don't know if I could pick him out in a lineup. I mean, I get it.

I understand that I know that he's, Michael's a Swifty. He's been to a few concerts, so don't shake your head over there. I mean, I know who she is. That is not true. I think I could probably point her out in a lineup just because my 15-year-old daughter has been known from time to time to belt out her music at full volume in a close proximity to my ear. So I can point her out in the lineup, but not the other guy. So Lukashenko is the grand exalted Puba in Belarus. Okay.

And he's always maintained a balancing act between Moscow and the West. He's maybe Russia's only real ally, but he doesn't want to be controlled by the Kremlin. He wants to be, I run Belarus, not you. And Russia has always wanted to be able to station forces in Belarus to forward position them. And he had this re-election that was an absolute sham. He probably won it, really. I mean, he's been in charge of that country for 25 years now, something like that. But he has to run for a reelection, and they're mostly for show.

And the opposition candidate gave him a credible run. He probably won by, you know, 53% to 40, you know, you know, 41%. or something like that in the vote. But when the national announcement came out, he had won like 80% of the popular vote, which is just impossible. And there were all of these riots across Bellet Roos about it to try to oust him from power. The opposition candidate was basically arrested and then deported from the country and her citizenship was stripped. And the anyway, his job, the, the, the, the, the, the job. The Egyptians have put on a good clinic about how you do this if you're kind of an authoritarian country.

And the Russians studied what the Egyptians did when they got rid of Morsi. Remember when the military got rid of him? You cut the internet trunk lines so that no one can move information. And then you just wait. You make sure that your core generals agree that you should remain in power. And eventually people that are rioting get hungry and they have to go home. And that's, you know, Lukashenko wrote it out for about a month. We can probably infer that there were some Wagner operatives in country to help him reinforce his security detail a little bit.

The Russian security service has probably fed him a lot of information about atmospherics. And once he wrote it out, you know, Putin said, okay, no more distancing. I want to put forces in Belarus. And I want to put him on the Ukrainian border. And Lukashenko was not in a position to say no anymore. So this buildup starts happening, you know, from those fall exercises into the December and January. And, you know, it goes from about 40,000 to 80,000 to 120,000, 150,000 to 200,000. At 200,000 troops at the time, that's probably the full expeditionary potential of the Russian ground forces.

So you remember when I was talking about the differences between the Russian conscript soldiers and the conscript soldiers. Contract and conscript, yes. Yeah. The contract soldiers can actually deploy abroad. By Russian law, the conscript soldiers can't unless it's a national emergency. So like if they're in a World War II, conscript soldiers can't leave Russia. And they're not supposed to be put in direct combat. And that's kind of a little tidbit that they throw to the Russian masses that look, you know, it's hard on your boys to be in the Army, but they're not going to be in real harm's way.

A veil of safety, if you will. Yeah. So most of those troops that were on the border were, you know, whether it was in the Crimean Peninsula or in the Donbos region of Ukraine or it was in Belarus, those were all, you know, Russia's contract soldiers. The way Russian brigades work, well, you've got the standalone brigades, which have their own support assets, the logistics assets, so they can maneuver independently. And then you have the regiments, which are, you know, still commanded by a colonel, but they maneuver as a part of a larger division. And so whichever of those it is, there's a, you know, maybe two thirds of that could be conscript soldiers. and then they'll make one battalion, you know, which is three or four infantry companies, contract soldiers. And that battalion will get reinforced with maybe half of brigade's support assets.

And they call that a battalion tactical group. You can do maybe two of them or, you know, out of a brigade, depending on how well staff the brigade is, or maybe two of them out of a regiment, depending on the regiment. But that was the Russian's primary measurement. of force. How many battalion tactical groups can I deploy? And it's a, it's a really interesting instrument compared to a brigade combat team because, I mean, a battalion, let's let's, let's, let's, uh, let's give them the benefit of the doubt and say it's four fully manned infantry companies, uh, you know, with a half of brigades worth of artillery, rockets, uh, air defense

artillery and everything else behind it. And then tanks, you know, maybe, maybe there's an attached tank battalion to it or a tank company to it. I mean, going up against, you know, an American battalion with a combined arms unit like that should be a slaughter. Yeah. But there's a couple of weak points. First off, all of those support assets, you know, like let's say you're going to set up your artillery in that way, you know, and whatever fan that's going to be, you actually have to protect those assets, right? And you've only got three or four infantry companies to do that with. So it's a, it's a, you've got an enormous amount of firepower, but it's,

and maybe a lot of the, a lot of their artillery is designed to be able to reach out and touch a little bit further. And they really started emphasizing building precision artillery units. They're not using that at this point. They've expended all that ordinance. And they're using the old Soviet era stuff now.

But it's kind of a brittle unit because if it impacts something of similar size, especially if it's something flexible and maneuverable, all those support assets. are horribly, horribly exposed. You don't send tanks ever against, you know, light infantry directly. They need infantry support, particularly to protect their flanks.

And, you know, there's dozens of historical examples as to why this is the case. And then on top of that, you've got a colonel that's running this combined arms battalion. And, you know, the amount of command and control that would have to be in place in order for me to wield those assets is robust. Yeah.

So we found out pretty quickly that first off, that was actually a really bad unit of maneuver. It gets worse because the VDV, this is their airborne infantry, that's probably the most capable combat unit at scale in the Russian armed forces. There's, you know, maybe, scrapping my brain here. There's two primary airborne divisions and then two primary air assault divisions and then a couple of independent brigades. But they get close to fully manned and they get the premier pick of the litter in terms of contract soldiers and officers. They definitely have the best fighting spirit. They deploy based on the IL-76 transport aircraft, which is like their C-17. A little bit smaller, though.

And that IL-76 can load a couple of infantry-fetched. fighting vehicles on board. And so the idea is that maybe three or four planes could move a whole company to the battlefield. So the size of their companies is actually constrained in terms of dismounted troops that can actually maneuver in the field is actually constrained by how many people you can squeeze onto that aircraft with your infantry fighting vehicles in town. And then how many you can deploy to theater based on the available aircraft you have.

And we, you know, it's pretty rare that units are always fully manned. I mean, that's the case in any military, right? I have a good friend who's a retired seal captain, and he was telling me about what the seals were like in the 90s, and he was like, I can't remember ever having a seal troop that was fully manned. You always have a shortfall or somebody dual-hadding something. Yeah. Anyway, imagine, so they're filling a smaller company,

and that, you know, a typical Russian company, maybe that's, you know, 50, 60, 70, you know, dismounted soldiers. For a VDV company, that might be 44 completely manned, but you're running a shallow manning. And so maybe that's 30 to 35. And so the companies that the VDV are maneuvering with that are protecting all of these assets in a battalion tactical group look a lot more like platoons in the American lexicon. And I mean, this is taking your best troops with your best equipment and forcing them to go into combat with a boat anchor tied around their neck. Yeah. And so this was really, really stupid.

And they didn't, my guess is they just don't do enough credible field exercises to really expose these weaknesses. I mean, didn't they get decimated? Yeah. They absolutely got decimated. The VDV was responsible for securing Kiev. They were the first units on the ground. They jumped in, right? They jumped in.

And then got their shit pushed in. Yes. And I don't blame the soldiers. A lot of those boys were told that they were going to war after they were on the aircraft. The Kremlin's... That's a strategy, I guess. Okay. Fuck.

The hundreds of VDV guys that were captured all tell the same story. They were told they were dropping into a combat zone. once they were on the plane. Okay. Like I said, that's a strategy. It's like in, you know, for the listeners, like in Normandy, like when, you know, like famous Banda Brothers Easy Company, they had, you know, objectives that they had to capture. And, you know, towns like Khan and Carantan, they were retired.

They were told what their objectives were going to be months in advance and they were able to all memorize sand table. Rehears, all sorts of things. Yes. And so they rehearsed the stuff for months. And then when they were all scattered by these unusual wind patterns and bad weather on the actual D-Day invasion, even though they were scattered all the hell throughout the invasion, the officers were able to rally them and actually get them onto their objectives within 24 hours. Imagine if they had gone with a Russian approach to Ukraine with that. Gentlemen, load the aircraft.

When the green line turns on, get some. I mean, it would be, yeah. I mean, the fog of war is real, right? Every plan is great until the enemy has a vote in your plan or it touches the real world. But if you remove that level of understanding, like your commander's intent, the mission statement, having just a general idea of what is going on, I mean, the people in Russia who committed those forces absent that level of planning and preparation, they sacrificed their most high-quality soldiers. Yeah. I mean, there's really no other way around that. The human capital that they committed with the likelihood that they were going to be successful being so low is, I mean, irresponsible doesn't even necessarily describe that.

And we don't really know who was actually told of the Kremlin's intention on this. So I told you the GRU was removed from the planning process. The fifth directorate of the FSB gathered all the intelligence for this. They told Putin that Ukraine was very pro-Russian, that the government in Kiev was effectively a Western puppet government, that Zelensky was unpopular, that if they invaded, his government would collapse. Everyone in Russia, or everyone in Ukraine would rally to Russia. A lot of the Ukrainian armed forces would, you know, basically join the Russian side. Literally none of that was true. Even by that point, even the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine were so tired of the Russians.

meddling in their affairs and all of the economic turmoil that had been foisted on them by these insurgencies in Donbos, they were viciously, viciously anti-Russian by this point. They had had enough. Yeah. So safe to say, though, that the Russians, whether they were telling Putin the truth or not, the initial people that went into that country, though, it sounds like were the best that they had to offer at that point. Yeah, and the best they'll ever have to offer.

Yeah. then the collapse of Russian demographics is another thing to go into here. But there's not a rosy future for Russia. And the fact that they've taken, I don't know how many 100,000 casualties now, doesn't spell good things for their workforce in the future. No. And, you know, I don't know how, I mean, it sounds to me like you're keeping a far better pulse on this than I am. but it sounds like the people that they are now, and I've seen videos of legitimate trench warfare that is damn near eerie and reminiscent of World War I, slightly different gear. Those people, it sounds like they are being conscripted at this point.

So I'm assuming at some point that lever switched where the conscripts are now going external to the Soviet Union. He's basically ignoring the wall. They probably had no choice, right? They have no choice. It's either face a humiliating strategic defeat or escalate. And so they've escalated. What do they do when the conscripts run low? I mean, obviously you could conscript more, but that doesn't, you know, there's the training, equipping, deploying all that aspect that would have to go with it as well.

So Wagner, this is what you do if the conscripts run low. The Russians, this is a lot more typical of how the Russians actually fight their wars historically, especially pre-Soviet. you know, the fact that they're unmotivated and they're conscripted and a lot of them were torn out of their farms or maybe they were emptied out from prisons. It doesn't make them unique. It just makes them more typical of a traditional Russian army. These are the kinds of armies that Suvorov fought with, you know, which actually speaks to his generalship that he's able to win with troops like that. Wagner, you know, Dmitri Pogoza, there's a bunch of videos of him going to Russian prisons and saying, hey, look, six months. of frontline combat service and your sentence will be commuted.

And they emptied out the Russian prisons. So that was a lot of the Wagner operatives. I mean, so that gets you bodies. That doesn't necessarily you trained soldiers. And maybe to hell, if you're telling, you know, if I'm staring five life sentences in a row because I'm a savage and it's like, hey, I can get out and kind of play Lord of the Flies for real absent consequences and my record will be expunged.

Okay, I'll take that. But that doesn't necessarily mean I know what the fuck. I'm doing in a military environment. It's absolutely true. They demonstrated, well, going back just a sec. I think that they could have done combined arms maneuver, particularly maybe the VDV could have done combined arms maneuver a lot better that was demonstrated. You're talking about on the onset, though. At the onset.

My general, I feel like in the West we kind of glowed over this a little too much. and we was like, look how incompetent they are. And I don't know, it makes us feel good about ourselves. Well, it's also easier to Monday morning quarterback somebody else's operation. Yeah, fair. I think particularly the VDV, they could have done a lot better, or the first guards tank army could have done a lot better if they had actually known what they're getting into. To be able to plan the maneuver of a division, you know, you have to, you know,

at minimum fuel, ammo and food are the things that you would know, right? Well, they were all told that they were deploying on the border, to, and they were going to be conducting field exercises. And so they planned logistics accordingly. And then suddenly you're told that, no, you're going into Ukraine. And maybe they were given some sort of a skeleton plan of what that was supposed to look like. But it wasn't, there was no intelligence, really. I mean, the FSB doesn't know what to give them.

Certainly not at the level of the GRU does. And so everybody's driving forward blind. The only real intelligence that you know for sure is what you're, your, let's see your own in-house reconnaissance assets are reporting back to you. And you're driving on the fuel that you had stockpiled for that field exercise that you didn't think you were going to be, you know, telling every regiment in your division to move forward under. And so they demonstrated in pollingly poor capability to conduct combined arm's maneuver. But I think it's a symptom of the lack of planning that went into this.

You're going to say, I don't think they really got a chance to execute it well. Because absent the planning, I mean, there's a reason that people who meet at a basketball court and play pickup basketball aren't going up against an NBA team. It spends all their time practicing, right? Right. This player is going to do this and block. And for clear, I don't know shit about basketball, but nor do I watch basketball. But I feel like if there is a team sport, like the Lakers, which is probably one of the only NBA teams I could name, I think they spent a lot of time practicing. They would annihilate a pickup basketball team just because they can operate well together.

At least they have SOPs and TTPs. I would bet that the Lakers could destroy an All-Star team. You know, if you put that team to- Oh, if you brought in disaggregate players, yeah. Yeah, you just, you know, the pick of the litter from the, you know, from the best teams, you know, the best five that we can put together for one game. Yeah. And they go straight up against the Lakers.

I think that would be a loss. I would say even U.S. special operations, who I think are do a very good job of non-linear problem solving, if you don't tell them what they're going to be doing and where they're going to be doing it and you throw them into an environment absent any level of intelligence, I don't know if you would really expect an outcome that would be much better. Seems likely. The performance on target is directly related to the things that you do before you get to target in my experience.

So do you remember that convoy that went south after the VDV was repelled from Kiev? Yeah, didn't they just get lit? it up? Yeah, the 51st combined arms army. They drove south down a single road from Belarus to to Kiev. And the idea was

that we're going to hit them with so much firepower that we'll just overwhelm them. But they forgot to pack enough fuel for the trip. And so after three days, the convoy stalled. And they had like 40 miles of stretched out tanks and infantry fighting vehicles that

were just out of fuel. And then another five days later, all the soldiers got out of their tanks and they just walked back to Belarus because they didn't have any food. Strong. To quite strong. You can just picture this Russian general standing there and be like, no, don't be a coward. We've got this plan. Don't worry about it.

It's your job to go fight, go fight. And just telling his division commanders to step off and make it happen. And the division guy is telling their brigade commanders to, or their regimental commanders to step off and make it happen. And meanwhile, weren't the Ukrainians starting to pick off things in the convoy as well? Yes. Yeah. Yes.

Yes. Surface to air missiles. They started out with, what is it? Strzroba. I can't remember it. I don't know why you're asking me. I mean, I can make up some Russian-sounding shit, too, but I don't know what I'm talking about. It's the Russian equivalent of this statement.

Oh, is the Stroganov. Stroganov. Yeah. I just made that up. That's not a missile. It sounds delicious. Yeah. It was the Russian equivalent of the Stinger.

It was a Soviet-era weapon that they kind of mass produced. And they were taken down, you know, VDV helicopters full of paratroopers with those things. Then they got a hold of some javelins. And then they got javelins. And things get real, real quick. Yeah. Can you imagine, I can imagine, because I dream of things like this, having a truck full of javelin missiles and just one clue and 40 miles of armor that is out of gas. It's like, do I go left to right or right to left?

Let's start in the middle. Let's start in the middle. And how can a country replace that? My God. You know what I mean? That was the, they took the best that they had. What did you find, Michael? You're about to pull something up.

No, that was an accident. Damn, I thought you were going to find some YouTube videos. I did a picture of the accent. I do have some YouTube videos of. I distinctly remember this because there was so much coverage of running out of gas. And people, like, and that was. I don't know when it got into people's view, but I distinctly remember thinking, huh?

What this shit? Out of gas, huh? Out of gas. Yeah. So now that they've used all of their best soldiers. And the best equipment, it sounds like. And the best equipment. All their T90M main battle tanks, the T72 B-3s, B-4s that have the night fighting equipment on them, all that stuff.

the reactive armor, all that was wasted. It's all just been vaporized. They have some domestic manufacturing capability, but it's not nearly as robust as we thought. Yeah. That's why they're sourcing things like artillery shells from North Korea and Iran. And so actually, we're getting a really good look at what North Korea's armament manufacturing is actually capable of now. North Korea is probably getting U.S. dollars for those things. They're probably getting paid out of the Russian Treasury for that.

I bet that was their exchange. So anyway, the conscripts that are now manning the force, you know, Wagner, I think they had a maximum of like 30,000 at their peak. And those were the guys that were doing all of these meatwaves, you know, over strategically irrelevant places. And it was really just to keep the pressure on the Ukrainians and force the Ukrainians to spend ordinance that they don't have. By meatwave, do you just mean forward movement regardless of?

what's happening around them. Yes. Awesome. That's a very civil war tactic. Throw some bodies at it. It doesn't really matter. They're, you know, the worst. If they go back to prison, we're going to have to feed them.

Yeah. Well, how does the Wagner group fit into all this? So, Wagner for a long time, it evolved out of the Slavonic Corps, which was an older PMC. PMCs have been illegal in Russia for a long time because... Private military contractors? And the reason is because... Because, you know, you don't want these oligarchs with several billion dollars of cash on their hands to fund their own armies.

That's how Russian leaders get assassinated, especially, you know, when you have so many Spetsnaz troops that get out of the service and they don't want to, you know, live on $600 a month. Yeah, you don't need eight billionaires with eight different armies. Yeah. So they were grossly legal for a long time. Progozen and Demetriy Utkin were able to basically be able to basically be. make the pitch that, look, this doesn't need to be a PMC that serves our purposes. This can basically be an unofficial arm of the Russian government. For a long time, Wagner, they would give the Russians an extra bite at soldiers who were

frustrated with life in the Russian army and they got out, but then they couldn't adjust to civilian life very well. Take those skills that they had learned and utilize them under another banner. And, you know, if you were driving tanks, that's a, and, you know, the Russians are funding a militia in Syria that happens to use, you know, T72 made battle tanks. Who better to go teach them, right? And, you know, if you're, obviously the VDV men and the Spetsnese men that got out were, they were getting picked for premier missions. And it basically acts as an unofficial arm with the Russian government. And whenever they do something disreputable, you know, the Russia gets, it's not us.

That's a private military contractor. That's all bullshit. In fact, they spent most of their time training at the Fifth Spetsnazbergades training ranges. Like, that's where they train their guys in pre-mission. And that's the way it was for a long time. You know, Wagner was the primary means of Russia supporting the Libyan Civil War. you know, that was the primary means of them. Wagner's active in Mali.

It's active in Central African Republic. You know, they're doing a great job of driving the French out of the Sahel. It was probably Wagner, along with some Cuban intelligence operatives, that convinced Nicholas Maduro in Venezuela not to board an aircraft and go into exile. And they augmented his personal security detail so that he could ride out those protests, you know, against his rules. in the same way that Lukashenko did. As I said, they've come across the recipe now. Where did the revolt come from, though,

that terminated a man with a mechanical issue in an aircraft? Didn't he say he was going to march on Moscow? He did. He probably got within 60, his most advanced units probably got within 60 miles of Moscow. But he's had a pissing contest with the Russian Ministry of Defense. they took on a new role in Ukraine and it was helping, they needed a fast mechanism to pull people out of the prison population and put them into service. And Wagner seemed to be a fairly intuitive tool for that.

And, you know, and of course, you know, when we do these mass meat assaults against Ukrainian machine gun positions, you know, whoever in the Russian citizenry might miss those individuals, You know, they can't say that the Russian Ministry of Defense was callously and indifferently throwing their sons into harm's way. That was Wagner. So there's a number of narrative incentives that, you know, make Wagner a useful tool. It's quite a shell game, it sounds like. Yeah. Wagner was kind of where they do kind of a, I don't know, what do you want to say, a soft mission abroad in a certain sense, military assistance.

You know, covert action when it's necessary. And then a lot of private security work. They guard diamond mines and all sorts of things like that. And they just expect mineral concessions. In Ukraine, they reorganized Wagner to function more like battalion tactical groups. Only it's not really a combined arms battalion. And so the, you know, it's just light infantry. And they call them assault, assault attachments.

Well, Pergozen, when he was seen, when he was. successful. The Russian ministry defense definitely didn't want to give him credit for that. And they often would get in these pissing contests where they would deny him, you know, artillery support or they would deny him, you know, a new ammunition to continue moving

forward and things like that. To kind of keep him in check. And they got in this kind of pissing contest online and he started he started daring to criticize how the war was being run

which fair enough. Fair enough in many countries other than Russia. Other than Russia. I want to say, I'm trying to run through the list of generals in my head that the Russians put in command of this. But starting off, there was no overall commander for the invasion of Ukraine. Really? Yeah. It took them about four months to appoint a single general to oversee the theater.

They tried to run it out of a national command center in Moscow. And they found out that the IT, you can't run a war by teleconference. And they found out that they didn't have the IT to support that. Four months is a long time not to have a unified command. Yeah. The next general came in and he started, it depends on how sycophantic that, you know, the different generals came in, but they all realized that the Kremlin doesn't want to hear what's really happening. They don't want to hear the bad news.

And they're either relieved because they bring bad news or they're relieved. because they recommend making changes to theater, you know, to the theater plan that the Kremlin found nationally embarrassing. And they come across General Armageddon, you know, his name, Sarovican. And Sarovican was the ground forces commander in Syria who realized that we could develop a real strategic advantage

by just bombing the population directly. Refugees don't fight by definition. And so if we create, refugees, the enemy resistance will collapse. The other thing that will happen is that the insurgents that were fighting, particularly to, you know, to the extent that the people they were fighting were associated with like ISIS, the communities will realize that harboring those individuals is a great way to get an airstrike into your community.

It's the calculus is extremely ruthless. Yeah. But there's one thing about the son of a bitch, I do have to point out. and that's he's empirical he's actually able to read a battlefield and figure out what's going on to make adjustments based on what he's seeing he is not tied to a political narrative he's a vicious vicious critic there's a story of one of his uh colonels um getting dressed down in his office and he he basically had a breakdown walked out of the office came back with a pistol and put it in his mouth and blew his brains out right in front of syrovacan at his desk um and

And that's how he treats his own staff. This guy was finally put in charge. And he realized that the Russian position was strategically untenable. They were hanging out on the wrong side of the Nipur in a couple of places, like, let's say, Kurson. And he realized that they were going to lose about an army's worth of soldiers and equipment if they didn't, if they didn't withdraw and consolidate their positions. And so at Kerson and like Harkiv in a couple other places, he pulled back and he started the entrenchment process. They laid out these massive fields of landmines. At this point, you can see their fortifications from space with the naked eye.

It's a World War I style trench warfare. You can see it on YouTube. It's unbelievable. It really is reminiscent of World War I. That was all his doing. But he brought the Kremlin news they didn't want to hear too many times. And so Valerie Gerasimov, who's the chief of the Russian general staff, he's like there, he's like combination of like their secretary of defense and their chair.

of the Joint Chiefs, or maybe the deputy secretary of defense of the chairman of the joint chiefs. He decides that he is going to take a direct hand in running the war. And Sarovicen is demoted to a deputy theater commander. And Garasimov comes down to the Southern Military District headquarters in Rastavandan. And that's where they're running this war. And Progozen is having this pissing contest. you know, with the Ministry of Defense. And he's had just about as much as he can stomach. And he,

he has this idea that maybe I can force Putin side with me. Sergei, after Anatoly Serti Yucco, the Minister of Defense, was relieved, and he was relieved in 2012, because he was implicated in the Magnitsky scandal. He was at the, he was at the height of this kind of pyramid scheme. they were filing fraudulent tax return claims under a number of shell corporations. And they basically got these tax returns for like $400 million that got distributed to this organized crime ring amongst the Russian Ministry of the Interior and the federal tax police. And Sertiukov was implicated at being close to the peak of that pyramid.

And so he was at that time, he had made so many enemies amongst the Russian general staff and the national security establishment that they immediately pounced to get rid of him so that they could go back to running Russia without all of his interference. Going back to running the ministry defense without his interference. The moment he was gone, well, first off, the general staff went back to business as usual. but Putin needed to put somebody in minister or defense that he knew wouldn't turn the institution against the Kremlin. Sergei Shogu is a power broker in the United Russia Party. He was actually one of the individuals that Greenlit President Putin's candidacy for prime minister and then president originally. They have a son and a daughter who are married. They vacationed together.

They're close friends. He's also one of the most corrupt individuals on this planet. But he was pulled in to run the Ministry of Defense, and he has used it as his personal means of gaining influence ever since. And he, in order to make nice with the Russian general staff, one of the very first things he did was fire every deputy defense minister that Serra Yukov had put in place. He got rid of the financial control boards and everything else. And they went back to doing things the old way. It's part of why they're performing so poorly. Yeah.

So. Yeah, he took out all the control. He took out all the controls. Pergosen was trying to, he was not trying to overthrow the Kremlin. He was trying to force the Kremlin to side with his faction in the Russian security establishment and throw out Sergei Shogu and Valerie Gerasimov. And to do that, he tried to capture them at the Rostovandan southern military district headquarters because they were both there.

And so he took a contingent of about 8,000 Wagner. mercenaries. And he sprinted toward Rostovandandan to do this. Now, the FSB had already, I mean, they penetrated Wagner, left, right, and senator. And they were, they were monitoring what was going on. And they knew this was going to happen. But I think there was a certain degree of like disbelief that this, that they were really, that it was actually happening. That it was actually happening. They would really do this. But they warned Garasimov and Shogu to get out of town. And they did. And so he captured the southern headquarters. He captured all of Rostovandan. They locked it down with about 4,000 troops. And then he decided that, okay, I'm all in now. There's nothing else to do.

And so he made a move on Moscow. He took about half that force, roughly around 4,000. And he made a mad dash to Moscow. They got, most of that got about halfway. And then they suddenly started getting strafed with fire from Russian helicopters. The advanced, let's call them, cavalry reconnaissance elements got within about 60 miles of Moscow. But that was the moment where he, and they shot down maybe eight Russian helicopters on the road. But that was the moment that they realized that they were all alone. He had expected a lot of the Russian soldiery to side with him and just give a finger to the officer corps and the general. generals that would throw them to the meat grinder.

And none of that happened. With 4,000 troops, even if that whole contingent had gotten to Moscow, Moscow is 13 million people. That's not even enough to hold the government quarter. That's not even enough to hold the Kremlin. And so he, you know, Putin got on a plane for St. Petersburg. He got out of Moscow quick. They started setting up fortifications on the southern end of the city to wait for him. and that's when he got a call from Lukashenko and Lukashenko basically talked him down and told him he could go into exile in Belarus, which never happened.

And the moment he was vulnerable in that flight, they killed him. Sorry, that was a long explanation for a simple question. No, I think it's not a simple thing. It's not a simple thing. It's a very Russian solution to a modern problem. People are expendable. Is the Russian prison population at an all-time low right now? Yes.

and that probably also gives them the ability to restaff a lot of those guards towards other tasks. That's all ministry of the interior affairs. How do you, I mean, what's your estimate on how the war in Ukraine continues? They don't have an ability to conduct joint operations or combined arms maneuver, but they are bringing a lot of their, it's taken a while, but they are bringing a lot of their arsenal, you know, military munitions manufacturing online. line. They can make relatively unsophisticated tanks. They can't, they can't source the, these semiconductors for digital electronics very well. They'd have to go through an intermediary in the bricks. Like they'd have to get the Chinese or South, you know, South Africa or Brazil or some other unaffiliated country to order that microchip from an American manual, you know, from like Taiwan

semiconductors, which is American intellectual property, and then export it. risk exporting it to Russia in violation of the American and European sanctions regime. And that's a hard problem to solve. They are solving it for certain things. So like they keep making hypersonic cruise missiles. They keep making the, you know, the lower grade, you know, just conventional cruise missiles. You know, and that's that stuff that they can throw at the Ukrainian infrastructure. That's the stuff they can throw at the Ukrainian population centers.

The reason they keep doing that is it's the same strategy Syrivican was pursuing in Syria. Refugees don't fight. If the Ukrainian economy takes damage, eventually it may not be able to support the army in the field. They do not need to go on the offensive and leave their fortifications in order to win this. They just have to wait out Western support, and they have to hope the Ukrainian economy collapses and that army can no longer feed itself. And that's their strategy.

What are your thoughts on the Western support? I mean, in the news today, the U.S. passed. Michael, can you fact check me on this? But I think it was 93 billion. But that was cut across Israel, Taiwan, and Ukraine. I think 60 of that, though, might have been dedicated towards Ukraine. So that would be close to 140 billion. Actually, no.

The original one was 98 billion. I think. So that would be about $150 billion. So first let me assuage the American taxpayer. We are not, we're sending them primarily military hardware. Correct. And it's

hardware that we don't use. It's deadlines. It's stuff that we have decided is now antiquated. And we no longer would service in a real war. But it's, it occupies warehouse space. And that's the stuff we're sending them. People have really kind of wrung their

hands about this and they worry that we're emptying out our own domestic arsenals. And, and the answer is yes, but the answer is that, you know, the Stinger crew, the Stinger surface air missile is antiquated. And, uh, you know, we're not going to commission a new contract with Raytheon to manufacture them because there's, there, the technology has moved forward. Yeah. Their time has passed. Right. And, uh, you know, that's a case for a lot of the stuff that we're sitting the Russians. And we are sending them some financial support, but it's mostly

material support. The Europeans are the opposite. All of the European arsenals are very, very Thetton. I actually wrote an essay on this. I forget which publication I submitted it to. I'm waiting to hear back from them. But it's called entitled, Who in NATO is ready to go to war? And the short answer is only Poland. Poland's always down for a good scrap.

Yeah. They're fucking hard people, man. I've met some Grom guys and I was very impressed. They, yeah, they're not fucking around team. They're hard people. They will fight. I mean, who can blame them? Like, you know, they spent the 1940s getting systematically exterminated.

And then they spent another 50 years under slavery and communism. And their national policy is that they will never allow themselves to be dominated by an outsider. Sure as hell not Germany or Russia ever again. And who can blame them? Yeah, I agree. So the U.S. is funding largely with a term that I'll pick, I'm going to say extinct or equipment that is nearing is extinction. Yeah. And that way they can allocate that money.

What do you got here, Michael? This is a list of all equipment. All right. Not all, but what's being sent over. So air defense. Yeah. With, I'm assuming, the goal being to backfill this with newer equipment. So it's a way to empty out the warehouse space to then fill warehouse space up with newer, more sophisticated equipment.

It gives us the ability to order the new thing. But that's still us funding a proxy war. It is. I think that's a fair characterization. And as I said, the Europeans are the inverse. They don't have near as much military hardware to send them, but they're overwhelming financial support. And that financing is running the day-to-day operations of the Ukrainian government. We're giving them Bradley fighting vehicles?

We're giving them Bradley's. Strikers. They're going to get Abrams. You see 31 Abrams tanks at the top of the list there. Now, those are the old Abrams. Those are probably not the, I don't know, whatever the latest in-grim. greatest is the A3 or whatever M1A3. I bet it's cheap, whatever it is.

M. A4. I'm sure it's not expensive at all to produce. Keeps going down, Michael. You know, I'm really interested to find out how the Abrams stacks up compared to the German leopard, leopard two and the British challengers. I had known nothing about either of those. So there's always been this question of, is this all from the U.S.? I believe so. What are we doing with MI17 helicopters in our inventory?

Oh, I'm sure those are extremely useful, man. Those are... The Penguin UAS? That's a dope name and have no fucking clue what that is. I'm trying to remember. Is the MI-17, is that that transport helicopter or is that the alligator? MI-17, isn't it a hind? Is that the hind?

Can you... Google in a different one, because I want to point that we are giving them 10,000 javelin. Is that what you said? 10,000 javelin missiles. All I want is two. Just two for my personal inventory. I'll put him in a safe. Yeah.

I did a great interview with gray dynamics. They're kind of like a Jane's open source Intel company in Europe. Yeah, that's the hind. And the MI17, that's a transport. Click on that Wikipedia, Michael. It's never wrong. But they had this article about a, it was a surface to air missile that could be mounted as like a technical on the back of a Toyota truck and it was made by L3.

They called it the vampire. Good name. The L3 guys were demonstrating this on the back of a Toyota Tacoma and like I was looking at this and was like how many guys would want that for their own truck? 100% of them. Tacos are great vehicles. All right. So what else we get?

10,000 jamblers. I have a fucking issue with that. I'm writing my congressman. 35,000 grenade launchers. That's okay. For what is that? 400 million rounds of small arms. laser-goat rocket system.

Keep on going, Michael. Harpoon missiles. Good, God. Claymore's C-4. 100,000 sets of body armor and helmets. Satcom antenna. Wild. Four sat-com antennas.

All right. That's very specific. That's a guy going into the warehouse saying, we got four boss. Wow. What are your thoughts on sending that much military equipment? knowing what happened when we did the exact same thing to the Taliban when they were fighting the Russians. And then Americans being killed by the own weaponry that we provided.

So there's that's an absolute concern. That's an absolute concern that we're arming somebody that we could be fighting in the future. And granted, that is, I'll call it legacy equipment, but it is not unsophisticated. No. The stuff on that list, there are countries that would fucking kill to get a small percentage of that. And my mind is actually immediately running to Libya when, you know, Western governments so curiously decided to remove Gaddafi and then, you know, all the regional insurgencies seized his arsenals. And that's the reason that Sahel is so chaotic. And J&I.M and a number of other emergent groups are so well armed.

Let me offer you the strategic thinking on this. And this is something I feel passionately about, is that in a lot of ways, civil and military discourse is kind of broken down in a way that it really shouldn't have. And it's a, and it's not, this isn't the first time it's happened. There's a very good book on this written by Tom Ricks. It's called The Generals. And it sets George C. Marshall as the standard and the architect

of the American military system in the World War II era. And it explains his process for managing his subordinate generals in theater. And then it explains how that system broke down the moment the single man that made it work was gone. And Vietnam, our war in Korea and our war in Vietnam were a product of the United States Army, not being able to effectively communicate with the civilian leadership. So anyway, that's a fascinating read for anybody that's interested. But one of the things that happened during the Roosevelt administration that was so very effective was that Roosevelt, he was a political grandmaster in a lot of ways, but he was able to explain to the public why what we were doing is in the national interest in a way that no one else could. He was absolutely against arming for World War II.

I wouldn't say he's an isolationist. He was always an internationalist, but he saw it as a distraction from the more important domestic issues, particularly in terms of the Great Depression, which we were, the Great Depression was resurgent in the late 1930s. It was, and he was having to deal with that in a very real way, the new deal. This, we could digress into a much deeper discussion about economics and how some of those things work. We couldn't because I'm an idiot. I mean, you could explain it. But, anyway. But he had his own domestic problems to deal with and trying to explain to the Congress why a multi-billion dollar program to rearm to rebuild the American army after they had just fought a world war in Europe and lost, how many 100,000 troops did we lose at World War I?

Yeah, Michael can pull that one up. It's going to be a larger number than either you and I want to hear, but it's going to be a big one. He kind of looked at it and he said, you know, absolutely not. And George C. Marshall was watching in 1940 as the Germans captured France. That, you know, the U.K. is now fighting the Battle of Britain. And, you know, Operation Barbarossa hasn't happened yet. So the Soviet Union isn't in the war yet. And he's looking at what's happening with the Japanese and their, you know, their threatening of the Philippines.

And what? 320,000. 320,000 casualties, World War I. So he correctly says the army at the peacetime army prior to World War II was 230, 240,000 soldiers. And he comes to Roosevelt and he says, we have an army that is smaller than the army of Portugal. And we're going to get pulled into this war. And we're going to be hopelessly and hilariously outgunned. Roosevelt doesn't want to hear it.

And so he goes and talks to Roosevelt's secretary of the treasury. I'm struggling to remember the guy's name, but he was one of Roosevelt's principal political confidants. And the two of them approach Roosevelt together. And Roosevelt is angry at being approached, and he doesn't want to hear it from either of them. And he tells so to his secretary of the treasury. And Marshall stands over him and looks down at him so that Roosevelt has to look up at him from his wheelchair. And he always says he felt very guilty about doing that. But he says, please, Mr. President, I need three minutes of your time.

And in those three minutes, he made the case successfully to Roosevelt that it was in the national interest. And we had to do something or he was going to be the president that lost America's strategic position forever. So I understand that position. His position, though, didn't give all of that military equipment to another country. Well, this is what Roosevelt starts the campaign for. When he gets through the election season, he goes from being an isolationist, and he keeps making the case. We have to arm the country for World War II for our own national defense to defend our interests. And he has to make the case to a very skeptical public.

And he tasks Marshall with the job of taking this case as the subject matter expert on it to Congress. And to Congress's credit, even though it was very, very politically unpopular to do, they initiate the Lend-Lease Act. They initiate a peacetime draft, the largest peacetime draft in history. And they construct the United States Army out of it, you know, the army that fights World War II is, is eight million men. My point is just that nothing of the sort has happened in this war. We have a strategic interest. We do not want Ukraine to collapse simply because we need a border.

We need a, we need a buffer with Russia. as much as Russia might like a buffer with the West. We do not want the Russians thinking that they can send Wagner operatives into a place like Warsaw or Romania or Turkey. These are NATO members. And the polls, to think about how the polls would react if the Russians decided that they could fire a couple of artillery shells or across the border. Or this crap that they're doing with Fenland now, where they take migrants and refugees from Central Asia, like from places like Kazakhstan. and then they bust them up to the Finnish border and then they release them over the border

into Finland just to create a problem that the Finnish government has to deal with in terms of supplying health care to, you know, migrants and figuring out how they're going to process them and who's going to get citizenship and what that timeline's going to look like. If the Russians, you know, decided, and Victor Davis Hansen is another author.

I'd encourage you to read. He wrote a great book on the Peloponnesian War. It's called a war like no other. But one of the things that he talks about as a military theorist is that wars are basically this very brutal laboratory that tells us things that we should have always known from the very beginning. Germany was never able to fight the Soviet Union and the British Empire and the United States all at the same time. And if they had done that math at the beginning, no one would have ever told, you know, Hitler would never have gotten into that war. Hitler actually said he didn't even know that the T-34 tank existed. When he found out the Russians had the T-34 tank, he said allowed to his generals,

I never would have gone into the Soviet Union if I'd known they had that kind of technology. If it looked like that, their destruction would have been assured. Right. So what happens is that we lose deterrence. And in a situation where the Russians are on the Polish border or the Romanian border, and they perceive that the West won't respond. if they try to seize a little more territory and they try to push their border out,

which is their national strategy. If that deterrence is lost, they perceive us as weak for whatever reason. That's the pathway to a general nuclear exchange. That's the pathway to the regime in Washington and the regime in Moscow actually getting into a conventional shooting war. Do you think it would ever get to that point,

a nuclear exchange? I mean, again, that's another one if you look at. The odds of the world surviving that, or the impact globally, that's a, that's a tough one to mentally get yourself across, that hurdle to get over. Like once one of those comes off the chain, you know what I mean? It's not going to be a one and done. So there, I don't know how eager the Russians would actually be willing to fire,

but the problem that we've seen now is that because they can't conduct joint operations, they can't do combined arms maneuver. They outman, you know, NATO forces in Europe, you know, by a considerable margin. but simply because the NATO forces that they're going against are considerably more sophisticated. They have functional air forces. Those air forces are capable of supporting the advance of their ground elements. The thinking, as far as I know in Washington right now, is that if that exchange were to happen, the Russians would get absolutely destroyed.

And the only thing to happen after that is either to face a humiliating withdrawal that might destabilize your regime in Moscow. Or scorch the earth. or you can escalate. And the only way to escalate is in the nuclear domain. It's an interesting Jacob's Ladder, though. Because you can just keep going up and up. If we don't do this, then they are going to do that. And they are going to do this, so we have to do that.

And you could, depending on the lens that you took, you could just escalate yourself to nuclear war from a variety of different angles. So it's not from the grand point I'd make for you here is it's not for me to say whether or not, the amount of support we've given to Ukraine as appropriate. My point is to say that we do have a strategic interest in making sure that the regime in Kiev survives. And it is absolutely incumbent on our political leadership to communicate that with the American public in a real way so that we can have a real political discourse about this issue in the way the democracies are supposed to. I would never push back against that. My concern is one of the things that I strongly, I

struggle with the most is that 24 hours after the United States left Afghanistan in a pretty sloppy fashion, the Taliban was flying Blackhawks with people strung underneath them of things that we had left behind were not always the best when it comes to equipment and material. And we could have the best of intentions and sending things over there, much like we had the best of intentions in Afghanistan by with and through, right? And now I would say either the Russians or Chinese probably have Bogram Airfield, one of the most strategic fucking airfields in that area of the world. Well equipped. Well built up by the U.S. taxpayer dollar.

I mean, I get it through the lens of, you know, we have a strategic imperative to be involved there. What the fuck are we doing that is going to make it different than what we have done in the past to make sure that that stuff isn't pointed at us one day? Well, let me really make you bad. A number of the individuals that were recruited into Wagner include the commandos and the special forces that we trade in Afghanistan. Of course. They were contacted by the Iranians and they were given passage through Iran to go join Wagner. And a lot of them were promised that you could actually join your old platoon or your old unit. A lot of your guys are going to be there with you.

And so some of the guys we trained are actually in Wagner now. That doesn't surprise me at all. I mean, we literally had U.S. service members killed by. equipment and weapons that the U.S. provided when they were fighting the Russians. To think that that's not going to repeat itself, if we don't change our behavior at some point in time, that becomes my concern. I mean, I want to know, and again, perhaps this is impossible in pie in the sky, but what's our metric for whether or not we are being successful?

Just the Russian line hasn't moved forward anymore while we, and then what will the argument be? Well, now we need to stockpile them, right? Now we need to make sure that they have enough that they can hold it indefinitely. So it keeps building and building and building. I mean, I don't know a lot about Ukraine. But when I hear things like Zelensky canceled elections, that causes concern for me just from a general principle. I'm not saying that there can't be reasons why you would maybe not want to do so. But as a general principle when somebody does that for their ability to stay in power, that concerns me.

I mean, where Ukraine has set on the scale of corruption, you know, like, it's not, it's not great on that list. But yet all of this equipment going over there, this is like, that's outfitting a modern military. Sure. Yeah. I worry that it's going to get pointed back at us. It's, it's always a concern. You know, and honestly, I mean, think about all the support we delivered to, you know, China. during World War II, and we had the flying tigers.

And then later when we actually conduct operations in Vietnam, we find out that some of the Viet Cong elements are shooting at us with Thompson submachine guns. Yeah. And I'd say those are very well-founded concerns. My understanding is that we are actually keeping a pretty good track of the arsenal that we are sending them. It's the U.S. government, so I'm skeptical.

One plus one, he goes 84. Yeah. as to how good that is. But my understanding is we are keeping pretty good track. A lot of that is actually because we don't want the Russians getting some of this stuff. We certainly don't want the Russians capturing one of our old Patriot batteries. I'm less worried about the Russians capturing an old Patriot battery than being sold one of our old Patriot batteries. Possible.

I mean, and now it's going to be geographically located right across the border. but you're right Zelensky did cancel elections not traditionally a solid move I'm again maybe there is a legitimate reason for it I be willing to be proven wrong what do you I have one of those fellow coffee holders Michael what are you trying to show me what was the ad up top oh just this headline who that's rough but I mean it actually doesn't take that long to get to a

billion dollars in military gear I mean, that's like, not that I think they lost track of a tank, but that's like three tanks. I'm remembering finishing the Q course and I was waiting to ship out for my unit. And one of the training elements out at Camp McCall lost a pair of night vision. And they're out there for like a week. Just looking for night vision to hand across. Circle search, online search, get all box day search, get them all in. I would love to know why there's no accountability for, you know, all the equipment we left in Afghanistan.

that when we treat our soldiers that way. I feel like they don't want there to be accountability because the accountability would be directly associated with a price tag and who we paid, you know what I mean, where that money actually went. I'm assuming, did you ever eat at the Chow Hall and Bogg? No. Kellogg Brown and Root run Chow Hall with people from Africa serving you food. and there's boxes outside that say grade F stake for prison and military use only.

But you know that the U.S. government was paying fucking top dollar for all of that. And what do we pay? Like that's prime rib. Of course. And then all of the other equipment that was associated with that. I mean, one, I think it would be a staggering and sickening number if you were to put an actual number to what we left behind. Then you'd have to have more questions like, well, if it was worth that much, Why? Why did we leave it behind? Why did we exit in the way that we did? And then maybe we ought to take a look at the profit margins of some of these organizations inside of the military industrial complex. I don't know. These are thoughts I have as an idiot. But I mean, like I understand a tactical perspective of warfare, but even just looking around, you're like, huh, something seems to miss here.

I'll tell you, you know, if you really, if you feel like scratching the edge, you can look at, you know, how many, how much trouble the U.S. Navy is having with getting ships out of dry dock and actually into service now. The number of times that you have to, like, upgrade and then re-upgrade those combat platforms that are all running on, you know, an Aegis Destroyer, you know, Arlie Burke Destroyer. So, like, you, you, by the time you've installed all that stuff, the technology has moved forward. and so the whole thing has to be updated again. And then, of course, they'll field like the Ford carriers. Right? Those Ford carriers had so many different, you know, systems on them that had never been tried before. So we put a new robust nuclear reactor that generates four times the electricity of the old ones.

And then all of the fighter launch platforms, that's going to be an electromagnetic catapult now instead of a steam catapult. All of our elevators up to the carrier deck. Those are all going to be electric now instead of hydraulics. We've got to go green, bro. Yeah. But all that stuff they're trying to develop on the fly while they're building an aircraft carrier and then installing it for the first time. And surprise, surprise, it doesn't work very well.

You know, like you got a field test that stuff before you can install it. And, you know, the amount of money that is wasted doing that kind of stuff. And to shock you, the number I've always been tracking is that at this point, the Chinese have four times the shipbuilding capability that we do. But I've heard people throw out that it could be 10 times. Wow. And we shut down half of our naval shipyards in the 90s. Yeah. And, you know, that submarine that ran aground, that Sea Wolf Cross submarine that ran aground in the South China Sea in 2021, that's still in Drydok.

It hasn't been fixed yet because they haven't had the time or the bandwidth or the crew to do it. it. What'd you find, Michael? Holy shit. According to a declassified Office of Naval Intelligence slide, China's shipbuilding capacity is 232 times greater than the United States. The slide also shows that China's shipyards have a capacity of over 23.2 million tons compared to U.S. capacity of less than 100,000 tons. That's a larger number than we were talking about. Yeah.

I don't know exactly how they got that. number, arrived at that number. That's not the one I was operating on. I mean, it's in the direction you were talking about, just an order of magnitude. Yeah, just an order of magnitude carrier. We keep saying, well, we've got more tonnage and stuff, but I do worry, you know, very much, you know, having the most battleships entering World War II would mean nothing in the age of the aircraft carrier. And having the biggest and the baddest and the most capable aircraft carriers, you know, that, you know, those. They're going to be challenged by the emerging cruise missiles, the hypersonics, the drone swarms.

The Ukrainians just took out a Russian corvette, I think, with just a drone that probably costs something like 200 bucks. Have you seen the drones taking out individuals, like chasing them down and then exploding? No. Dude. I mean, Michael's already going to prison for his Google search anyway, so he might as well. He's furiously typing. Michael, you went to prison for Google searching? No, he's going to if the FBI ever gets a hold of his search browser.

I would still let you work here, Michael, if you had gone to prison for your Google. I mean, obviously, I would need to take a look at it. Thank you. Yeah. It's looked like a DJ. I mean, I'm going to say DGI because it's a commonly recognizable company. I'm not saying it was a DGI, but it looked like an inspire-sized drone. This dude knows it's coming, and he's like running around a vehicle.

It's chasing him. gets to close proximity and fucking sets itself off. What to hell? And I don't know if that was autonomous or a guy with one of those. Like a joystick. The headset and the controller, but you may not be able to fight it. It was sent to me over social media. I found a different one.

I know the one you're talking about. I'm trying to find it. Yeah. It's, man, you want to talk about scary. Where'd your interest from Russia come from? So I came from 10 Special Forces Group. And so, you know, my assigned language was Russian, and we studied a lot of Eastern European cultures. And one of the funniest things about that is all my deployments were to Africa.

So, you know, a lot of use of my Russian language, right? You know, the guys that tried hard in French turned out to be, you know, a lot more functional in that part of the world. Yeah. But, yeah, it was this project actually started. I was 2015. I was waiting for, you know, my next assigned team. and I had a little bit of downtime and I sat in the team room

and somebody threw me this binder it was about the, you know, the Crimean annexation and it was like a RAND Corporation study or Jains or something like that. And I was just going through it and I was absolutely fascinated at the different Spesnaz brigades and what

they were used for. Like this is the wrench that you use for that kind of nut and this is the screwdriver that you use for this. And their process was meticulous and that campaign was very well executed. And, you know, that started the interest that formed the backbone of a thesis that became a chapter that I started adding meat to that eventually became a long book. Well, what's your book called?

And what's it about? I'm going to guess. Well, I mean, I know what it's called. So that's cheating. But for people listening, you might guess it's about Russia. So my book recently published by 30 Press is hybrid warfare, the Russian approach to strategic competition and conventional military conflict. and it's been a fun project. If you see the website here, you know, I've got a number of appendices that were not included in the final product of the book.

Isn't that the beauty of the digital age? Yes. If they can, like that's the, if you have a physical book, it's like the spine that people can find and then they can find all the other limbs and the arteries and you can keep updating it. And, you know, that's part of why this got so big is I just kept. add into it. Yeah. You know, but yeah, you can look at the post-Soviet arsenal that Russia inherited and you can find out like how many SU27 fighter jets the Russians had, you know, in 1991. And then you can go into their government procurement programs, GPV 2020 and 2027. So you can figure out how, what, what hardware they were buying to outfit the army that Serda Yuccov

was trained to create and, you know, under his 2020 program. And then, you know, the, you can look at Russian submarine procurement, you know, their improved kilo-class submarines, the diesel electric, so that they keep putting into the Black Sea. It talks about their aircraft carrier, the Kuznetsov, which is just kind of a liability, but they won't get rid of it because it's a national symbol. It talks about their Kirov-class battle cruisers, which, you know, are actually pretty formidable fighting ships. I go into everything you could ever nerd out on. What do you think is next after Putin? And how long do you think he'll be in power?

My guess would be as long as he can claw and keep his self in the seat. But what do you think comes next after Putin for Russia? It'll be somebody from the same national security clique. It's replacing him. Doesn't really get us anywhere. Let's say in terms of our relations with Russia, he represents a consensus amongst the influential in Moscow. So whoever comes after him, they might be a little more, you know, willing to talk maybe. And maybe that would be good, but not necessarily so.

There's plenty of ultra-nationalists over there who might decide that they want to make a run on the Kremlin. Yeah. With Russia, I think you always have to be very conscious of what the, you know, the director of the FSB might try to do. You know, he's, you know, probably one of the more influential people. after Putin. There's also the heads of Gazprom and Rosneft. Those are the Russian state-owned energy conglomerates. Gas prom is natural gas and Rosneft is oil. But they're extremely powerful. They have more money than you could possibly imagine and they have the ability to leverage enormous political influence. But it will still be even those, those are all people from the same clique.

You had mentioned earlier that people in Russia just aren't having babies. Yep. So obviously, that's not, I've heard the same thing about China. You know, their one child policy in the short term might have helped the situation that they were dealing with. But for a long-term population stability, off a cliff, because I think the data is you need to have 2.1 kids per couple to even sustain population, let alone grow. Yeah. And I think China is a little bit farther along into that. So where is the lack of reproduction coming from from Russia?

When did that start? Well, starting the post-Soviet era. Part of that is, you know, the standard of living just collapsed. Yeah. But it's not just Russia. It's the world. The U.S. is one of few countries that is actually holding right at or slightly above the 2.1. We're like rabbits over here.

Well, you know, we've got a lot of the Catholics and the Mormons are really telling there. How many kids do you have? See, I have three. I got you. Thank you very much. Michael? Doing your part. Michael is doing my best.

He's trying to. Let me just tell you. He is newly in love. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's move on from this time. So new that it's from this week. But, you know, this is kind of a domain that's a weird thing to talk about in a national security podcast. But it needs to be talked about, you know, in the aftermath.

of the birth control pill, having children has become a function of, let's say, discretionary spending in an economic sense. You know, families, when they have the ability to plan at that level, you know, and decide when they're going to have kids, they decide that they're going to have kids after they've paid off their student loans, after they've bought a house, after they're comfortable in a stable career. you know, women used to spend a primary school preparing to be mothers and wives. And that was, you know, that was just a normal facet of life. You know, in the modern era, they, you know, they prepare for careers. And, you know, it might not, you know, it might not be good that we decide to try to figure these things out in our 30s, you know, a little haphazardly. You know, it might be good if we were actually a little bit more deliberate in our, you know,

education system about how we, you know, teach people to plan their lives. But, you know, it's actually the same case than the rest of the world. The Japanese are by far the furthest down the road in terms of, in terms of, you know, collapsing demographic. There's a reason that they're the world's leader in automation and outsourcing. And they've figured out better than anybody how to have a first world economy without a first world workforce. And then after them are the Koreans. The Koreans are right behind them. The Germans are very far down that road. The Italians are very far down that road. And the Russians are right behind the Germans and the Italians. If you look up, there's a there's a guy that has a really good chart on this. It's Zion, Peter Zion. Yeah. Yeah. And he's got a great chart of population demographics that you might be able to find. But in the post-Soviet era, the Russian birth rate collapsed. The education. system was never really rebuilt. The Russian standard of living has never really recovered.

And so, you know, Russian families aren't really having kids. They've got, they've got an HIV epidemic that the government is not even collecting data on. They will not use state resources to collect data on it. So if you don't collect data on it, then it's not happening. Again, that's a strategy. That's a strategy. They have a tuberculosis epidemic.

They have an antibiotic resistant bacteria epidemic. And then, of course, they're infamous for alcoholism. And, you know, the average life expectancy for men in Russia is about 59, 60. And the engineers that were trained in the Soviet era that are maintaining all of Russia's infrastructure and the technicians that are maintaining all of Russia's infrastructure are now in their 60s and early 70s. and they're just not having they're not having kids and the kids that they are having are not being educated at the level that they need to. You know, when the Japanese have a child, the amount of state resources that are invested to make sure that that child has a world-class education and can absolutely achieve their full potential regardless of what their IQ is, is, you know, it's very deliberate and it's very well-planned out. And you're seeing it right now and you can you create. The Russians are they're waging a war.

And, you know, they're above 300,000 casualties at this point. And, you know, these are the young men that would have formed the backbone of the Russian workforce. So I found a few countries. It doesn't have a lot on here. So there's India. I don't know how to unpack this. What are we looking at here? So if you look at India, you know, and this is Zion, Peter Zion geopolitics.

at the very bottom is the youngest people born in 2020 that are born in you know the projected to be born in 2025 and then those that were born in 2015 2005 and you know moves up and you can see that as it gets thin people start you know as you go up people start to die as they get older and then you know there's very few people in india that were born in 1935 that are still alive now and one of the really interesting things that you can see is that India is actually moving up uh you know you know you're born in 1935 uh you know, in wealth. And so you can see there's a little blip at the bottom where they're starting to have fewer children. Yeah, it is retracting a little bit. Yeah. And that's a function of their rapid urbanization. Here's France.

Ooh, yeah. France is actually the best case scenario in Europe. Really? Yeah. That's the best demographic in Europe by far. And that's a pretty drastic retraction between 2015 and 2025 at the bottom there. Yes. It's actually the farthest to the right other than people born in.

in 1940, which probably should be the case. So people keep saying that, you know, in the United States, our demographics are collapsing. People aren't having enough kids. And amongst the urban white intelligentsia, that's true. But we have a lot of immigrants that come to the United States. We were pretty good at absorbing them, and they all have children. And then, you know, the flyover states, as you might call them, they all still have kids.

The southern United States still has kids. But France, in comparison, Yeah, that's South Korea. France is comparative to Florida. Florida is considered a retirement community in the United States. And the best case scenario in Europe is best compared to our worst case retirement state in terms of aging demographics. Scroll down, Michael. That's that one's startling.

That's South Korea. Japan is worse. Keep going, Michael. I don't know if this one has Japan on it. there's Thailand yep not looking that's spectacular I'm gonna look for some more all right wow what a graphic depiction that is he doesn't even know what these buttons do I'll do this on the other he's blinded by his love passionate oh god how long did you spend in the army uh five years okay it was a very young green beret um uh I won't I would planned on making

the army pay for my master's agree when I got in. Which is a good plan. And I wanted to stay in 10 years and the idea was I was going to get out in my early 30s. And unfortunately, in my very first deployment, they ran out as senior guys. And so they tasked me as a E5 sergeant to do this job where I was in and out of a U.S. embassy a lot. I shared an office with a Marsok element. There were two force recon guys that were told congratulations now you're raiders and uh i learned i learned a lot from them they were they were great guys um and but it was it was me and them i was separated from my team for about six months i was the first guy on the team into that country i was the last guy of that team

out of the country um i got rolled up in the the r so's security plan he gave me my own little fire team of marines for uh you know emergency uh issues and i live by myself i had my own trucks I had my own interpreters working for me and that was my first deployment. Wow. Yeah, and I was so mad about it. I was so angry about it. I wanted to be with the team doing Green Beret things.

And they were going out in the desert and they were standing up a, you know, a CT unit in this nation and they were going out in the desert and they were just cooking in the sun while they did this recon mission trying to catch AQIM guys as they came across the board.

border and they were using this country as a as a let's say a safe place to kind of relax and and hide out for a second and so I wasn't missing anything earth-shattering and I was getting I was I was in an embassy seeing how the sausage was made and that was really cool but you know I was also I just had free reign of a of a foreign country I mean no one was keeping track of me I was the guy that did our E&E route down to we had a country to the south of us and I us, you know, and that was, you know, how we were going to escape and evade if something went wrong. I did that route. I took, you know, one of my interpreters down there, and, you know, I was the guy that mapped

all of that out and brought it back. And it was a great deployment. And in hindsight, I had a ton of fun. When I came up for re-enlistment, the deputy chief of mission at that embassy reached out to me, and she's like, hey, remember you said you wanted to go to grad school? I'd write your recommendation. And so that's how I ended up at Georgetown. Okay.

And unfortunately, I had wanted to spend more time in, but you can't tell somebody no like that and then come back and ask for him later. That is correct. That's a one-time offer. Yeah. Okay. It was fun. So I got two deployments to Africa and then I got out. What does life look like for you now and going forward?

other than writing deeply researched and educational books about Russia. How else do you spend your time? Thank you for the kind words. Do you like take apart VCRs and shit in your off time? No, I'm a Pisces. I enjoy long walks on the beach. Okay. I work for the DoD.

I'm an R&D project manager. That makes sense. I thought you were going to say D&D for a second, which also would have checked out. Yeah. You know, most of my projects are in AI stuff. We're not building Skynet. It's, you know, a little one-off. I think Skynet's going to build itself by the little one-offs.

They're going to start going to start talking. And I don't know why I made that noise, because I don't think that's the noise they would make to talk with each other. But I give us seven to ten years before we work for the robots for our daily water ration. Please, Mr. Robot, can I have some food? In exchange for oiling their lugnets for them. I think AI is an amazing thing And I'm not sure as a species We are smart enough to knock it out in front of our skis

I would agree The one thing I can tell you is that real AI has not been invented yet We're still doing machine learning The singularity you mean Yeah And the I don't know man there there's nobody that's holding You know individuals back at all

They're just playing with the idea of what could Hadidio? next? What could I do next? Well, what do you think about other? What do you think about other nation states, though? I feel like, for the most part in the U.S., we try to do a good job of putting some governors on experimentation. What do other foreign actors that just don't give a shit and they want to get there first? Do you think that there's been a singularity anywhere on Earth or that there are other places that are closer? Not yet.

And I think part of the reason for that is perception. Let me give you an example. What we would consider a glass is defined by the functionality of the object. Okay. Right? Or a chair. All right. Well, for a computer, there's no anchor point like that.

Actually, remember the HBO series Westworld? I didn't watch it, but I am familiar that there is an HBO. series Westworld. I only watched the first season, but I've been told the others were really good. But Anthony Hopkins character toys with this idea a little bit. So when they're creating this world that has these animatronic, you know, characters that are so lifelike and human,

part of the, part of how they construct their personalities is that have an anchor point memory that serves as the foundation for the rest of their personalities. There's no anything like that that we can do with computers at present. We have to get an algorithm to identify your face when you walk through airport security. It has to have training data on your picture in order to recognize you. And what it's doing is constructing a probability-based model that has a number of features in terms of your cheeks and the bridge of your nose and how your lips are formed.

And then it's comparing in each scan, you know, the image that it receives to those data points. in the model and and it's coming back with a rendering of a 50% or a 97% probability that this is a positive match. And that's how that's how those algorithms work. But all it is is a series of decision points that are optimized through probabilities and then there's a forcing function between them. And that's that's not really artificial intelligence. Yeah.

And no, I don't know of anyone that is. come up with a real AI. Large language models are fascinating. Like chat, GPT. Yeah. Yeah. But that's just a function of computing power. That's taking that same methodology.

But we're shoving so much training data into the algorithm. So, you know, if you wanted to hyper, you know, just going back to the facial recognition analogy, right? If I wanted to make a hyper-efficient model at identifying your face from any angle and in any position at any time, I would need a lot of different photos of your face at different angles in different positions and under different lighting conditions in order to train the algorithm to do that. What they're doing is effectively loading the English language into a large language model.

And, you know, that, depending on how big the model is, that could be, you know, 70 million data points. That could be, you know, for a more limited circumstance, that could be 20 million data points or 3 million data points. And it depends on the use case that you need it for and how functional the model needs to be. But it's the same methodology. Yeah, that makes sense. You're going to write another book?

I'm thinking about it. I have a two-year-old that takes a lot more time now. Enjoy them at that age while you can. She loves to crawl up on my lap and play computer too. Yeah. She just starts typing things over top whatever thing. I would be really, I'm not sure. The next book I've been thinking about,

I'm not sure anybody would want to read it. Because it's kind of a, I don't know, a morose subject. How much reading have you done in the French Revolution? Oh, exactly zero. Exactly zero. Yeah. So there's an English historian that I've developed a lot of respect for named David Starkey. He's kind of their preeminent constitutional historian, which for England is interesting because they don't have a written constitution in a real sense.

They kind of have a tradition that anchors back to the Magnus. And maybe some practices before that. But he talks about the French Revolution being the fundamental catastrophe of Western civilization that gives rise to, you know, to all the subsequent doctrines of Marxism. And one of the one of the problems in the French Revolution that comes to light is this universalizing of everything. So all roads must lead to Paris. And they really, in the French Revolution, after they first, you know, they, they, they, they, they. They come up with a number of quasi-constitutional bodies to kind of rewrite a new French constitution. They end up executing King Louis, Mary Antoinette, and then that accelerates.

And they start executing all of the aristocracy and then the church clergy, the Catholic Church clergy. And that's happening at the same time as they're writing this declaration of the rights of man and the citizen, which is kind of this document of like these are the universal human rights that everybody should be able to enjoy. way. And so on the one hand, you have this, you know, Bill of Rights document, this quasi bill of rights document. And on the other, you have these mass executions. And the reason that they're both happening is because they can both say, yes, it'd be nice if everybody had these things. Also, there's a lot that's in the way of us ever being able to create a rational system. And it's a fascinating case study to realize that the, you know, history's, you know, first real

atheists, you know, this was Voltaire, you know, the philosopher that was really producing this. And they were trying to, we keep being told in the modern era that rationalism is good. We get a very good look in the French Revolution at what rationalism produces when it's untethered. The great luminaries, you know, let's say the great observers of human nature, St. Augustine and his city of God, maybe, you know, Hobbes, Machiavelli, Chaucer. and then Edmund Burke when he writes his critique of the French Revolution. And he becomes a genuine profit because in the last year, you know, the last months of his life, he predicts precisely what's going to happen once the French revolution gets started. He predicts the executions. He predicts the rise of Napoleon, all of it. But what all these people point out is the givenness of our societies.

We're not, you know, we've got this line in our Declaration of Independence because, you know, we were losing French Enlightenment literature at the time. We were consuming it at the time. The reason our institutions worked so well during and after our revolution was because they were fundamentally English. We were English. And we were arguing for a constitutional system of limited government that comes from the English tradition.

The French were nothing of the sort. And they hadn't had any traditions of self-governance or self-rule or representative government. And so they produce this document declaring all these rights, but it's not in their culture and it's not anchored in their history in any way. And so it's meaningless. Just because the words are on paper do not mean you. Correct. Put these things in people's hearts.

Yeah, it's not magic. Yeah. And so they go on this rampage and the enlightened rationalists, they start coming up with, well, the guillotine is really inefficient. And we've walked like 30,000 people to the gallows at this point. but we need to come up with some more efficient ways to liquidate, you know, the oppressors of society. And so in particular with Catholic priests, they actually come up with these ideas of, you know, baptisms in the muse where they'll take, you know, 50 or 100 or 200 priests and they'll tie them to a barge and float that out in the river and then sink it because that's a faster way to kill them. And what's interesting about that that needs to be explored is that's the exact same. rationalism that comes into play in the Holocaust.

The Nazis do the math and they realize that making German soldiers execute civilians, you know, you know, after they've taken a new urban area, making the German soldiers arrest all the Jews. That's, you know, that they don't like doing that first off. And it's hard to get soldiers to be committed to the war when you keep making them violate their conscience. but the second thing is that it's really inefficient and bullets cost money and so they come up with this system where we're going to bring all these people on trains to centralize locations

and then we're going to herd them into what they think is going to be a shower and we're going to use, was it Zyclone B? I think so, yeah. That's a lot more efficient and we can kill more people faster that way. And that's how, and the French are thinking we're going to create this perfect system

that's going to be rational and enlightened, the Germans are thinking, we're going to create this perfect system by expelling the undesirables. We're going to get rid of the undesirables. And the thing to explore in that that I think needs to be explored is how it is that society keeps producing individuals

that think that they have the right to re-engineer society. and because I think you can tie I think you can tie that directly to that hubris and that would be a very interesting thing to explore I just not sure that anyone would want to read that write it for yourself I might I might I mean fuck it but you know we'll see and I don't know we'll see

if I get enough I get enough help from from Jenny and begging on my computer. Fair enough. Dude, we've been at for almost three hours. What do you want to... Goodness gracious. Yes. What do you want to close out with?

Are you hopeful about what's going on in Russia? Concerned? Indifferent? Not definitely not indifferent. So you're going to say you're far too educated to be indifferent about what's going on. I'll take the compliment. I would say that all the stuff. struggles that the Russians are going through, these are lessons that we need to learn for our own

institutions. We, you know, the Russians, Vladimir Putin puts incompetent generals into certain positions because of their political loyalties because he at least at minimum, you know, he knows that they won't turn against him. You know, how do we promote our own people? And for what reasons are we doing that? I was just reading last week about a Navy captain. She was captain of a cruiser. I think it was a Taekondroga cruiser who had been slapping around her junior officers, grabbing them by the collars, chewing them out in public, humiliating them in front of, you know, their colleagues on the bridge of the ship. Apparently the chief of the boat didn't feel like he had the right to stand up to her.

And all of this came out, not in, not in her performance reviews, but in the, what do they call it, the climate surveys that they send out to the soldiers. Command climate survey. Yeah. Yeah. And that's how she got relieved. And for her to be put in charge of that ship, first, she would have had to have done a destroyer command. Yeah, it didn't happen overnight.

It didn't happen overnight. My suspicion is they overlooked who she was in the promotion board a number of times. Because of who she was. Because she was filled out a demographic in some sense that the Navy needed to see representation for amongst their 06s. and how many good junior officers did she did in did she you know she they've they will refuse to serve in the United States they're not going to you know they're not going to do another tour because they don't want to be around another officer like that or maybe it's I wouldn't blame them changed their perception of the institution uh you know we're doing stuff like that and we do

that kind of stuff because we have this hubris that we're the preeminent superpower and you know we can you know, we don't have to prioritize, you know, strictly, you know, let's say combat readiness and competence. Only we do. And if you want to, the Korean War is a case study. It's an absolute case study of what happens when the dregs of the Army officer corps are put in charge to run a campaign. And the running of the Eighth Army, the campaign strategy that's, you know, the breakdown in civil military communications that Douglas MacArthur as the theater commander presides over, and then he breaks down as a general, and basically Truman has to relieve him because he's fighting the administration directly.

That war was effectively an affirmative action program for all of the officers that had to do staff time in World War II and wanted their chance at a combat command in the next war. And the soldiers in the early hours of that war that got, you know, completely got the, you know, the bad end of that, let's say, they deserve competent leadership. Yeah. And so my, my cautionary tale is that we're kind of, we're looking at all the Russian struggles, and that could very well be us. And, you know, there but for the grace of God, go I. It's powerful funding. I like it.

Where can people find you and your book? So I can find my book on Amazon. First off, there is a hard cover and a paperback, and there is going to be an audiobook version in the near future. And we should be doing select bookstores. I think actually the very first place that's going to be released is at, like, the PX, the NX, Coast Guard Exchange. It's a good audience for it. Yeah, I figured, like, who else would want it? I'm trying to get it out, and I think, you know, Costco and, you know, there's a couple of

other bookstores, but I know my audience. Okay. And then how about social media? Anything, any way people can follow you, connect with you? The best way to connect me would be through the book website. You know, I'm not, it's a happier life. I'm just not on social media. I want you to be on social media with the handle Sputnik.

Sputnik. Yeah. Or fucking Yuri Grasoff or whatever he was talking about in Hunt for Road October. Which is where I got about two-thirds of my Russian history. Sean Connery is a good teacher, you know. I'm reminded of Yurikigar when they trembled at the sound of our rockets. That was a dope movie. And I like how they transition from Russian into English because subtitles suck.

Yeah. They only have six of those ever, those Typhoon class subs. They only ever had six of them. It doesn't surprise me. They're all decommissioned now. They should be, probably. But they've got better ones now. Curtis, thank you for your time, Matt.

I really appreciate it. Hey, thank you. I appreciate the opportunity. Yeah, man. My pleasure. Thank you.