Judging Freedom - F-16s to Ukraine_ More Aid to Ukraine__ Zelenskyy at G7 - Tony Shaffer

Episode Date: May 19, 2023

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Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Friday, May 19th, 2023. It's about 2 o'clock in the afternoon here on the east coast of the United States. Lieutenant Colonel Tony Schaefer joins us now. Tony, always a pleasure. Thank you for coming on. There have been a lot of, I don't know if they're developments or just revelations of things that have happened that have come down in the past 24 hours that I wanted to address with you. Sure. The first, and I guess to you and your life in the military, this is not absurd, but to the average citizen, I think it is. The Pentagon says it overestimated Ukraine military aid by $3 billion.

But how could that happen? What's a few billion dollars between friends, Judge? Right, right. With other people's money, with taxpayers' money. Exactly. So, you know, I've been, I do talks and I've been asking the American, the folks just three billion, who counts three billion? And that's the issue at this point. We have both a policy elite who are not good stewards, the American taxpayer. We could talk a whole show about the tax issues and spending issues. But with that said, the Pentagon has yet to ever pass a single audit. Think about that.

And this is the most expensive one artifact that we, we, these taxpayers spend money on. And I, I I'm part of something called the Pentagon budget campaign. It's a, it's a transpartisan, all sides come to the table. And I always say I'm for an effective defense, not an expensive defense. And simply put throwing money at anything has never been a solution yet. That's exactly what the Pentagon is doing. Okay, so how a mistake of this magnitude. Were they counting used equipment as if it were new, or is this all just a fraud to allow old Joe to send another $3 billion over there without debiting the checkbook that Congress gave him? I think it's the latter. I think I'd have to go back and look

at the specifics, which speaking frankly, I don't think they're ever going to show us, but you'd have to go back and look at the specific programs, which programs are being essentially taxed internally to provide gear. Remember, a lot of this stuff going over, judges, are stuff that has been in either garrison and stored or in contolment as a contingency package. And so much of the specialty ammunition, which is expendable, are those things which we will not be able to replenish easily. And remember, everything's more expensive now. So anything we give them now from an old stock, we're going to have to pay three times more to restock ourselves. Okay. So I understand there are two or three ways we give them things

one is a direct presidential drawdown he says to the secretary of defense what have you got available in this spot in germany right and they just ship it stocks right okay ship it to ukraine this is right from our substance not from our surplus yes So that we don't, as a military, maintain that much surplus. We never have. We get, generally, you sell things off as quickly as possible. We're usually at about a penny to the dollar of what we paid for it. And then the other things are theoretically in place for contingency operations. That is to say that we've recognized that the U.S. military is a very logistics-heavy organization. We win by logistics. That's the simple fact. Any war that we've prevailed... By logistics, you mean getting the right stuff from point A to point B in a timely

manner? To the people who are trained to use it, absolutely. That was especially how we won World War II. All right. Second way that we supply them with material is direct credit so they order something from raytheon the federal government pays the bill raytheon makes the product and ships it to them or that that they basically take over an order the u.s military has already made and that credit then is then basically just expunged. I think that the Pentagon, I could see Pentagon basically allowing it a double bill. That is to say that they'll pay the Raytheon or some corporation to do it. And then the Ukrainians come in with their money.

And look, that's one of the things that Able Danger, when we were doing the Able Danger hearings, they didn't want to be revealed that S.A.R., S.R.A., S.R a s r a a triple bill the government for the same data for for three different times and same data same thing could be going on here this is why we have to have an audit judge because corporations are not beyond double billing you for something that they're going to provide the ukrainians so that's something else to be concerned about i'm speaking from experience third way we give them stuff is to give them cash. Now, I don't know if we are literally, you know, sending buckets of greenbacks over there as we did in Iraq, or if it's just a credit to the government's bank account at some international bank. But this is where our friend whose work we both admire, Cy Chase,

has reported that the Ukrainians have stolen Ukrainian military and political leadership over 400 million. The CIA knows that the CIA knows who the thieves are. I'm sure. The head of the CIA, Bill Burns, pointed out to President Zelensky, his own name was on the list. Zelensky just looked the other way and said it won't happen again. Now, Rand Paul, Senator, I've said this before, Senator Rand Paul in the Senate, Congressman Thomas Massey in the House, both libertarians from Kentucky, introduced legislation every time the Biden administration asked for more money and the legislation simply said nothing goes out until it's marked, observed, written down, checked by an inspector general.

Right. Neither Chuck Schumer in the Senate nor at the time Nancy Pelosi in the House would permit that legislation even be voted on. So not only is there no inspector general, Congress knows it and didn't even vote on it. At a minimum, they should have approved it by the fact that they had a special IG CINGARS for Afghanistan, which by the way, it didn't do any good other than to say, yeah, we wasted all this and they can do a better line item accounting for what we wasted. But I think at a minimum, you should have that oversight. And yeah, especially on the cash piece.

Look, cash is fungible to do all sorts of things beyond military spending. I don't necessarily know that if we spent C-130s into Ukraine like we did Iraq, literally packed to the gills with pallets of $100 bills, which I personally saw pictures of and talked to the people who did that. But the moment you basically send cash, any cash, either digital cash through transactions or physical pallets, you have literally fueled corruption, especially in these cultures, Judge, where Zelensky is giving us lip service, like all he's saying is I'll be more careful next time to hide the corruption. That's all he's saying. But you're telling us, Tony, that there is corruption inherent and accepted in the very process of an American manufacturer billing the American

federal government more than once for the same product? Is this understood, accepted, and expected in the accounts payable department of the Pentagon? The answer is, I don't know how accepted it is, but it's common practice. Why is it common practice? I mean, a 15-year-old would know that this is criminal. Because the people involved are enriched by allowing the process to proceed. Remember, Eisenhower warned us correctly of the military-industrial-congressional complex. Those things were all related, and people often leave out the congressional complex. Right, right.

Everybody is on the gravy train. That's why everybody gives really good lip service to oversight and to whistleblowers, but when push comes to shove, they don't want to know because everybody who is in the know kind of makes money off of this, either by the process of allowing it to happen or looking the other way and pretending they don't know. That's why I've said you need to have a rigorous outside third party doing auditing of every transaction, especially anything over, I'd say over $10 million. Have presidents since Eisenhower of both parties known of this?

Yeah. Look, once you start studying the process and understand the acquisition process and the billing process, there's an inherent set of spaces for these things to happen. Judge, when you're talking about billions of dollars, millions can go missing easily. It's like this whole thing we're talking about today is the premise, the $3 billion that the Pentagon misunderstood. There was no misunderstanding. It's people who understand very well that budgetary process and use it to their advantage, either to the corporations which they support or to the members of Congress who benefit within their district of having all this money come in there. Remember, all that money that's going to Ukraine, it's not going to Ukraine except for those things which we mentioned like the actual currency that's being paid. Everything else, all these credits are spent in Washington to enrich US corporations. So nobody

wants to stop that gravy train. And I would argue it's one of the reasons Biden and his administration are so sloppy on strategy because the defense industry doesn't care. They're going to make money off this no matter what. It's just the way life works. And I don't like it. I'm just speaking to my understanding of the process. And I think it's corrupt. I mean, is this generally understood amongst the military state? You're ranked lieutenant colonel and above.

I don't expect the police to understand that. No, not all Lieutenant Colonels know this. I mean, Judge, I worked at a strategic level most of my career. And I was in a room, as you know, with a lot of the principles we talk about often. And so, no, I was exposed because of the level of work I did with the Joint Chiefs, with the White House, with the actual war plans at that level of where we would have to figure out the resources available, the intelligence necessary to drive the proper strategy, and how to put everything together and implement it. So I've seen these things from the perspective of someone who was in the room with, you know, I've advised

more than one chairman of the Joint Chiefs, I've advised more than one director of the CIA. And because of the nature of kind of the work I get pulled into, it's like a mafia judge. We never retire. We get pulled back in. So when I mentioned this to Colonel McGregor, Larry Johnson, Phil Giraldi, they're going to say, what else is new? I think they're going to back me up on this, yes. Wow. And that the American public doesn't know this, and these schemes have been going on, and members of Congress know about it, and you say presidents of the United States have known about it as just beyond the pale. Yeah. And then the other thing, I mean, certain members of Congress like Thomas Massey and Rand Paul know it, but they fight it. And, and I, you know, I've looked, I've been in a room

with, with both of their staffs with, with Thomas several times talking about some of these issues and the best we can do is try to instruct them properly. Danny Davis, Dan, you know, I was a, I helped Danny Davis when he became a whistleblower on some of these issues. So I think a number of us try to speak truth to power, but the incentive is not there to be able to be successful because there's so much money involved. Okay. As we speak, the G7 is meeting at the site of one of the great mass murders in history, Hiroshima, where Harry Truman killed tens of thousands of innocents on a Sunday morning and the days and weeks following by dropping an atomic bomb on Japan right before it was ready to surrender anyway. Okay, I just had to get that in. However,

there they are. They're actually laying wreaths at the site of where people were incinerated and obliterated. President Zelensky is going to join them tomorrow. Now, he's obviously, Ukraine is obviously not in the G7, Tony, but they are preparing new sanctions against Russia. How crazy is this? They're going to deny their own countries, every single one of which is hurting, every single one of which is suffering from rampant inflation, from the United States to Germany, from Great Britain to France. They're going to deny their countries the ability to import raw materials from Russia, of which Russia has plenty. Right. So the first round of sanctions didn't work because Russians knew they were coming and they'd already made plans to, you know, so there was a bump in the road. They did take a hit, but they knew it was coming. They prepared for it. I suspect the Russians have done similar here. Remember, 75% of the current transactions, as I recall it,

this is a rough order of magnitude estimation, 75% of all Russia's transactions are with nations who continue to work with them, which is two big ones, India and China. So yeah, Russia is going to be able to plan around this, and there's going to be people who are willing to either buy their oil and their resources and sell them goods in return. And these other folks, I think, are spitting in the wind, so to speak. It's like, OK, yeah, you can you can do the sanctions, but they're not going to have the effects you think they are. And they're just going to essentially come back, boomerang back on their own economies, which is what we're seeing. This makes as much sense as tariffs, which of course are just the cost of which are just passed on to the consumers of the country that imposes the tariffs. Yeah. So goods and services are not something that Russians are going to have a hard

time working around. And that's what, you know, again, the fundamental issue here, Judge, is that G7 and Ukraine are not willing to fundamentally address the core issue of what's going on here. Russia has said historically they need to feel secure. The fundamental issue is that they do not feel secure, and they're willing now to fight to retain their need for security. They've been invaded several times. This goes back to a czar. I can't remember which number czar, but it was one of the czars. They've been invaded over and over. So as long as you fundamentally ignore the fact that the Russians feel, not how you feel, not how we feel, as long as you ignore the fact the Russians feel that you are imposing on them

territorially in such a way that makes them feel threatened by us, then nothing's ever going to get better. Before we get into the F-16. And I'm not pro-Russian, just saying. I know that. But before we get into the latest on the F-16s, which is the 800-pound gorilla in the room this afternoon, I just want to read you what one of our commenters wrote. We get

hundreds, sometimes thousands of comments per second. You draw a lot, Tony. You have a lot of fans out there who followed you for years. Thank you. I won't read the person's name or even their handle. Sometimes it's not even a real name. It's pretty impressive that the entire West is throwing weapons and money at Russia and the West still can't win. This will be a historic victory for Russia if it can win. So I think it's a pretty, it's a prescient comment. Look, the F-16s, we keep going weapon system to weapon system to weapon system, somehow thinking that's going to be the key to victory for the Ukrainians. It's insane strategic thinking and understanding uh how to counter specific uh military capacity and capabilities is how you win this is not how you win let me give a a kind of analogy of what's going on here but getting even if they give f-16 to the Ukrainians, if they do, giving the F-16 to the Ukrainians is like giving an Audi TT, Audi 2002, Audi TT to a team racing at the Indy 500 against cars 20 years better and faster.

I love the F-16. It's like a little sports car, but it's not adequate to have any net success on the 21st century. I got to read this comment because it's hilarious on a Friday afternoon. Can I have an F-16 too? I'm out of beer and I'm out of F-16s. Well, maybe. I hear there's a lot of Bud Light available if you go down to the local. Oh, God.

We know where you can get Bud Light, and that's where they make it because they can't sell it. OK, so is it a game changer for President Biden to say to our NATO allies, we built and sold you F-16s. We did so under conditions that you can't give them away without our consent. We're now consenting for you to give them away. And at the same time, there's one right there. You tell us about it in a second as soon as I finish talking. And at the same time, we're going to take Ukrainian pilots who've been flying 30 and 40 year old Soviet pieces of garbage and trained them to fly F-16s. Yeah. Let's break this down.

First off, the F-16 at its time, it was part of the Boyd Revolution. Boyd and his guys came up with a lot of effective weapon systems, the F-15 Eagle, and this was one of them. The F-16, F-100 engine, it's like a little sports car. It was actually designed to compete against modern then in the 80s Soviet aircraft, the Meg-29 being kind of the equivalent of it. Anyway, the Russians have long moved past the Meg-29, and we have too. So this is not modern. It is not something upgraded. At least for the F-15, they have the F-15Xs, which are coming into service, which are truly upgraded and able to hold their own.

This is not. And then the other thing to remember, Judge, just so the weapons system itself is antiquated, I don't think it will have any net positive effect. These things are not – we could talk for 10 minutes. We don't have the time. All right. So it is the – Tony, you obviously know more about this than journalists. The press this afternoon, the mainstream media, including my buddies and former colleagues at Fox, are calling this a game changer. You're telling us it's not.

It's not. The second thing, so even if – What does the F-16 do? Do they get in dogfights with other planes or do they carry a bomb or a missile? It's a multi-role fighter. It can do a little bit of both. It can do fighting. Look, it's a very sporty little aircraft. It's designed to do air-to-air combat. It does it very well, but it's not stealthy. It does not have 21st century countermeasures for stealth. It's not that. It can do ground attacks. It can carry a good amount of ordnance. It's not as good as an A-10. A-10 is optimal for that. A-10s will probably serve for another 20 years. F-16s do not have,

they can do some of that. So it's kind of a Swiss army knife in many ways, but dot, dot, dot, it's not designed or upgraded to the 21st century, to the modern combat threat. And let me hear one other thing real quick. The other thing is training. That's what I was going to ask you. How long does it take and what does it cost to train a pilot? Well, it costs very expensive. I mean, those things cost a lot because of fuel, maintenance, upkeep. You're talking about probably $10 million a person to get them adequately trained to go in there.

That's a rough order of magnitude based on everything. I wonder if that's even coming out of the $113 billion. Well, a lot of that will be absorbed by the Air Combat Command in the United States who trains all these folks. It's just, you know, it's going to be incidental to the Air Force. You've got a 25-year-old, hypothetical, a 25-year-old Ukrainian pilot, well-trained but trained on Soviet planes that are older than he is. How long will it take to bring him to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and train him to fly these things? You're better off taking in someone who's 20, 21, because the last thing you want, Judge, is someone who's already been trained in Soviet aircraft, Russian aircraft.

Why is that? Because you get flying an airplane, I used to fly helicopters. Look, you've got to understand the process. You understand checklists. You go through. You understand how everything works. And for the instrumentation, the Russian system of teaching and what they used for that is completely different than what we do. So the idea here is that you have to basically untrain a Russian trained pilot and then retrain them.

And then in times of stress, the things they were originally trained to do may come back. There are some incidents I've seen happen. This is a bit of an obtuse but apt comparison. A few years ago, there was a 737 that blew out the entire front cabin, Hawaiian Airlines. And so during that incident, one of the pilots was a former Navy pilot. And they reported that during that stressful moment, he kept trying to reach up and pull down, reach up and pull down. What happened, Judge, he reverted to his Navy training. And that's how you eject out of an F-14. You basically do that. So what I'm saying is that whatever you're inherently first trained to do, your instincts are to go back to that. So you've

got to be untrained from all those bad habits that you got from learning Russian. So what I'm saying is- It's almost like muscle memory. Exactly. It's very, very difficult to unlearn. It's very difficult to unlearn. And then you put them in weapons system and technical, in our controls with our weapons systems, it's completely different, literally. Let me go back to my question. A 19 or 20 year old, intelligent and healthy Ukrainian member of the Ukrainian Air Force. How long will it take Americans to train this young man or woman to fly an F-16? You're talking months or years? We're talking about at least a year and enhanced training.

So if you're talking about someone who's coming in with no background, kind of from scratch about a year. If you're talking about trying to unlearn someone bad habits, it could probably be longer than that. And you're talking about 10 million bucks per human being being trained. To go through the entire cycle, yes. Wow. Tony Schaefer, no matter what we talk about or when it is, it's a beautiful, sunny spring, summer-like Friday afternoon here in northern New Jersey. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for enlightening our viewers and listeners on all of this. We'll see you next week. Thank you. Thank you, my dear friend.

If you like what you saw, like and subscribe. We're just on the cusp of 150,000 YouTube subscribers. Boy, would I like to break that number very, very soon. Oh, and I'm back here in about 10 minutes on the breaking news of today, a dissent by Justice Neil Gorsuch, which I couldn't have written better. One of the greatest defenses of civil liberties and attacks on the American lockdowns during the COVID years that I have ever read. More as we get it in just a few minutes. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.