Judging Freedom - How To Avoid War With China - Col Daniel Davis

Episode Date: May 30, 2023

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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, May 30th, 2023. It's about 11 o'clock in the morning here on the east coast of the United States. I am happily back in the U.S. after my most enjoyable trip to Switzerland last week. Colonel Daniel Davis joins us now. Colonel, it's always a pleasure. Thank you for spending your time with us. Earlier this morning, Moscow time, several drones, Ukrainian drones, were exploded in a high-end residential neighborhood not far from the official residence of President Vladimir Putin. There's one of them going off.

Now, that one landed in an empty field. But can you tell from looking at the residue of that if it was a significant event? They definitely did. At least some of the drones, it doesn't appear that they were all at the same time, but especially that one and apparently some of the others packed quite a punch and a very heavy payload.

So you could see if that had actually hit a building, it would have caused substantial damage. But then some of the others that actually did strike the high-rise apartment buildings in the high-end neighborhoods you're talking about, some of them caused only minor damage, so I guess they had different kinds there, but probably this was just a test of the Kiev regime to see what they could get through and how effective it would be, and I'm sure that this won't be the last time we see

Moscow attacked. Does this tell you anything about Russian air defenses? Or is there something about drones that, you know, educate us? Do they elude normal air defenses? A lot of them, in fact, most of them were shot down. And as you see, Ukraine's gotten quite good at this. They shoot down a vast majority of the drones that Russia sends to them, although there's various reasons for that, which I'll explain in a minute. But it is a bit of an embarrassment for Moscow that this many did get through because it's been warned about for many months the expectation that Moscow was going to be hit. So it doesn't look like they were completely prepared.

Vladimir Putin this morning actually acknowledged that, that there were some holes that has to be filled up, but that it largely did the job and the majority were shot down, but they definitely are going to do some tightening up, I'm sure. Why would they have sent these drones to residential neighborhoods? Well, that's a big question because on the Russian side, they're not bad of any morality per se. I mean, I guess you could say they do, but they send them to military targets. And especially this high intensity campaign that Russia is currently launching, both in Kiev and throughout Ukraine. There are military targets that are designed to thwart their potential offensive coming up. And that's what makes sense. If you're going to do any kind of long range strikes,

whether it's airstrikes or drone, you want to be able to hit something that's militarily significant that will weaken your enemy. This doesn't even appear that they targeted anything military just into Moscow, I guess, for the shock value of it. But Kiev has to be careful because this could have an opposite effect in that it could harden Moscow's reserve and harden the resolve of the people, not make them panic or want to quit the war. So they have to be careful when they take these actions. So Moscow is 620 miles from Ukraine. Can these drones fly that distance with that accuracy, or might they have been launched from somewhere else along the way, that is inside of Russia? I think that's what they're trying to do some forensic right now to try to find out. There's

definitely platforms that can make that trick. In fact, I think some of the analysis I saw coming out of Russia this morning was they think Soviet came from the Chernihiv and the Sumy regions, which are bordering areas of Russia. But like the attack that hit the Kremlin earlier in this month, that likely was launched from within Russia, probably not too far away. And some of these could well have been. So that's probably a combination. You spoke a few moments ago, Colonel, about President Putin's reference to holes in the Russian air defense. What's the status of the Ukrainian air defenses?

I mean, you'll recall when we discussed the documents that the government says were released exclusively by Jack Teixeira, the young National Guardsman from Massachusetts. No one's challenged the authenticity or accuracy of the documents. And among the takeaways from them is the view of the U.S. military senior command that by the end of May, which is tomorrow, Ukraine's air defenses will have been degraded almost down to zero. Is that happening? Yeah, I don't know that it's going to be down to zero because potentially in part because of that release, apparently a lot of the allies have been forking over a lot more missiles because they realize that it is running low. But that's part of the plan of Russia and why they're making a lot of these attacks uh and and on a near daily basis now

i think in large measure to cause them to deplete their missile capacity their anti-aircraft missile capacity and that's why you see in in uh especially in kiev uh ukraine has put the majority of their anti-aircraft systems around the capital to protect it. And of course, they've been boasting that they shot down 52, 54 drones in this last attack yesterday. But that comes at the expense of the rest of the country. So like in Odessa, in Kharkiv, in Dnipro, Trvoz, and several other important cities around, they don't have that much air defense. And so now Russia's taking advantage of that, and they're hitting these areas very effectively with almost none of the missiles getting shot down in some of the places

that directly hit their military capacity, especially to wage war. And so it's a complex event, but if it continues on and if Russia continues to do this, then the Ukraine side may even run short of missiles, even in Kiev. Going back to the drones that were exploded this morning in residential neighborhoods in Moscow, would American intelligence have known of this in advance? And if the answer to that is yes, would American either State Department or DOD have consented to this? Or is Zelensky a loose cannon, just sending drones to residential neighborhoods not far from where the President of Russia lives? Yeah, I think the answer to that is no, I don't think that we did. And that's one of the other things that the Tishara leaks has exposed is that there's a lot

of things that the Ukraine side doesn't share with us and doesn't tell us. And look back a week or so ago to that, the ground incursion into the Belgorod region, where they expressly used American armor to make this penetration into Russia, which of course we say we don't want them to do, they've told them not to, yet they did. And I think that this part of this is a test also of the Zelensky regime to see, is the West ever going to push back? They say we shouldn't do this, but if we do, what are they going to do? And I think that that's kind of what's going on here. I don't see any, at least public pushback on any of this. So I expect it will continue. Here's a clip of one of President Zelensky's staunchest supporters in the American government, Senator Lindsey Graham. In my view, what you're about to hear him say is truly reprehensible and even dangerous.

But he sometimes says these things let's watch and listen and then um be anxious for your thoughts thank you very much thanks united states people of the United States for all big support. Thank you so much. Free or die. Free or die. Now you are free. Yes. And we will be. And the Russians are dying. This is the best money we've ever spent. Thank you so much. The Russians are dying. It's the best money we've ever spent. I'm sure President Putin has heard that and has a very strong, even harsh opinion of it. What do you think? Yeah, what we found out is that the Ukraine side actually edited that soundbites together to put those two things together to make it sound worse than it was.

But in context, it was still pretty bad because you saw when Lindsey Graham was talking about killing Russians, how his face was beaming. So under any explanation, I find it troubling that an American is so happy for other people to be getting killed. Even in the case of a war, it's something as someone who's fought in war, I never was gleeful about enemy soldiers that we had to kill. It's just an unpleasant thing. But to celebrate it just is a problem, I think. And to your point about Russia's response, I believe we see that.

I believe hours ago they actually put out an arrest warrant for Lindsey Graham, which, of course, won't be enforced any more than the one for Vladimir Putin, but they are expressing their outrage. Do you see a slow movement toward a larger conflagration, Colonel, whether the U.S. is using Ukraine as a battering ram or whether people like Senator Graham just subliminally talk about American dollars killing Russian boys, it's almost as if there's a subconscious recognition of American physical involvement in this war, or of America's wish, I say America's, I mean the Biden administration's wish for a wider war? I don't know if it's the way I think or the way I hope, but I don't think that anybody wants a wider war. What I think is that there's a lot of people that are, like Senator Graham appears to be

there, gleeful at the possibility of, quote, harming Russia. And of course, that means translated into killing Russians and destroying their military. And I think they are happy to accept using Ukraine as the battering ram because Ukraine wants that. They desire to do it. And I think people are like in Washington are very happy to continue to support that as long as it goes. I don't think they want to expand the war. They basically want their cake and eat it too. Senator Graham from South Carolina, a state that is home to many, many military families, but he's also a general in the Air Force Reserve. Now, he's a judge advocate general, meaning he's on the legal side. He's not flying a fighter jet. But comments like this give me the creeps. It's almost as if we are sleepwalking into World War III.

Well, my concern is that there may be many that have this belief that, yes, sure, we can just keep going, you know, supporting this at this certain level. And even the Biden administration has limited what they've given in terms of amounts of equipment, et cetera. So they haven't given them enough to really, you know, have a great rolling thunder, so to speak, of large scale tanks and aircraft and other kinds of things. But I think that the danger is that you think, well, we can manage this and just keep it contained there. We succeed because Russia gets hurt. And then eventually it'll end, it'll come to some kind of negotiated settlement and we'll move on. But that assumes that you can control it, that the Russians act like they're supposed to and that they don't escalate things because they get hit in their capital or if something else happens later on, or they just get tired of all the help that the West has given and they expand the target list. I mean,

so many things could happen and it could escalate beyond our ability. And that is the biggest danger for America and why I'm so an advocate that we need to get this thing wrapped up so that we don't have that risk. Why do the neocons hate Russia? Why do they hate President Putin? What do they really want to achieve? Yeah, they never escaped the Cold War. For many people, Judge, in my view, they didn't like losing the Cold War. And when I say losing, I mean like they didn't have it to hold on to anymore. And the hatred for Russia was built in all during that time and it never left. And of course, we immediately turned them into the enemy immediately upon the drop of USSR. And that's why NATO began to expand almost immediately and never stopped. You know, that's still the issue right now.

And I think they just never escaped the Cold War mentality. Here's one of their cheerleaders with one of her latest outbursts, Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. This is from May 27th, so this is this past weekend. On Saturday of Memorial Day weekend she says this, and even as you plan for the counter-ensive, which we have been working on with you for some four or five months, we are already beginning our discussions with the Ukrainian government and with friends in Kyiv, both in the civilian side and on the military side, about Ukraine's long-term future. So is this kind of a public comment from a civilian leader in the State Department? Normal. We've been working with you on this offensive for four to five months. I mean, could you imagine the Secretary of State of the United States or the Secretary of Defense of the United States having said publicly to the British in the weeks before D-Day, we're working on this offensive? And there's another analogy, too, that's possibly more disturbing to me. Imagine if while we were still fighting the Afghanistan war before that ended, you had the one of the senior Russian diplomats saying, hey, we've been working with the Taliban to kill Americans and we've been doing this for months.

I mean, we would be going crazy. And that's exactly what this is going to do in Russia. This completely validates the Russian claims that this is the West against them. In fact, Lavrov, again, this morning at a speech said, look, this is just a full-scale war of the West against us. And they're just using Ukraine as the tool, but it's against us. And this validates that because she expressly says the United States is working with Ukraine to attack Moscow and Russia. So, I mean, it couldn't be any more clear than that. And it's not in America's interest to do that. And I think that sometimes silence is the much better course of action. You think the spring offensive is I guess it's going to be a summer offensive. Now, there's only three weeks left of the spring, but without getting semantic here, do you think that this Ukrainian offensive is going to come, or do you think that

all this preparation and all this announcement of it has given the Russians so much notice that when the offensive comes, it'll be like, it'll be a pipsqueak. Yeah, I fear that that is what's going to happen. There's lots of analogies in a military history where the defenders had, you know, lots of advance warning and were prepared. And the offensive was, when it did strike, it was just bloodied in a bad situation. And I think that's what's going to happen here because Russia definitely is prepared. But you had just two days ago, I think, the National Security Advisor Danilov for Ukraine. And yesterday, Zelensky both basically said we're ready. And within days, this thing could launch.

So I think they're going to try to do something at some point on the front. But I think it's a high risk gamble because if it fails, they've got no striking power left. And then they would be very vulnerable to a large scale Russian counterattack, which according to many reports, they actually have a force in waiting now. So it's a high stakes gamble. Is it realistic to think that the Ukrainians, whether they're going to use tanks or whatever, I know tanks is your field, can take back land that President Putin signed a decree is now part of Russia. They've issued a million and a half Russian passports to those people there. The overwhelming majority, well more north of 90% are Russian speaking and Russian culturally? Is it realistic to think, no matter what Victoria Nuland and President Zelensky say, that the Ukrainians can take that

land back? Look, the reason why Ukraine had their one signature success last fall, where they took back massive swaths of territory in the north in the Kharkiv area is because they caught Russia's napping and Russia had only a thin line of defense on the northern part because they didn't think an attack was going to come. They thought it was coming to Kherson. To Ukraine's credit, they massed a large force down there and just rolled over and moved them back. Russia learned from that and now then there is elaborate belt defensive in depth throughout the whole line. Now that there is no soft area for Ukraine to find an attack like that. So they're going to, I'm sure they've been probing to try to find where is the weakest spot. And

they're going to try to find that spot and to at least get something so that they can have a narrative that they have some success. But the problem is even those weak spots comparatively are stronger than what they faced last year. And it's possible that they could just get chewed up because they have to attack out into the open. And there's always a lot higher risk to that. And that plays right into Russia's strength, which is significant artillery advantage over the Ukraine side. And so I fear that it could be a very bloody and unsuccessful event, but we'll wait and see. We're going to run the Victoria Nuland clip again. I want you to pay attention to the Colonel, to the second half of what she says about preparation for the future,

which we have not yet discussed. I'd like to ask you some questions about it. Gary, can you run? And even as you plan for the counteroffensive, which we have been working on with you for some four or five months, we are already beginning our discussions with the Ukrainian government and with friends in Kyiv, both in the civilian side and on the military side about Ukraine's long-term future. What is she talking about? Isn't Ukraine a sovereign, independent country? Why would the United States be talking to Ukraine and friends in Kyiv, I guess that means the CIA and their sources, about the future of the Ukrainian government. Yeah, that's something that the Ukraine side needs to be worried about, as opposed to the Russian side.

What is the expectation there? Because frankly, we've got a horrible track record at trying to help some other country govern itself and trying to give them ideas about it. So I think that's a bad plan, but it is a little concerning that there appears to be plans to try and help out with that. And I don't think that would go over very well with the Ukrainians anyway, who already don't like us meddling. They like all of our stuff and everything we give them, but they don't like us interfering too much. And that's why you see

that some of the times they've actually hide things from us that we would probably like to know. I know your field is military and not intelligence, but is the type of statement we just saw twice now from Secretary Nuland normal? That type of announcement? Well, it didn't used to be. And I think that you see a blurring of the lines between information operations, so to speak, where you try to shape the narrative and intelligence and some things you want to signal and some things you don't. And this unless it's a deception where they're trying to make Russia think something's going to happen in one place and it's really another. It's you've got a question. Why? Why would you give that kind of information? But it could also be, frankly, hubris and arrogance that, hey, I can say whatever I want. It doesn't matter what Russia hears because they're not capable of doing anything anyway. And if that's the case, that's even worse because arrogance is always a precursor to making big mistakes. foreign policy establishment represented by the views of Secretary Newland is aware of the

dangers of all of this given the nuclear capability of Russia? No, I don't think they are. I think that most in the West have just dismissed that possibility and said they'll never do that. I've actually heard people say that even in print in some places, they say it's overblown. They're never gonna do that because they know that retaliation would be certain and swift. And that kind of careless attitude about something that is literally catastrophic for mankind if it went completely bad is a dangerous step

and a big problem because we need to keep front and center that there has to be limits to what we can do and where we can go because they have that nuclear capacity. And you don't ever want to put Russia in a position where they feel desperate or where they feel like their existential threat is being imposed on them because they could act on it. And as I've said several times, I think even on your show, there is no chance that Russia would ever be driven from the field, especially when you start getting into Crimea and then not use tactical nuclear weapons. So if we succeeded like Victoria Nuland is talking about, then the chance of nuclear

escalation goes through the roof. And that is not in American interest. And we need to really recalibrate just what our goals and that is not in American interest. And we need to really recalibrate just what our goals and objectives in this war really are. Well said, Colonel. Well said and brilliantly explained. Thank you so much for joining us today. Much appreciated. Always my pleasure, Judge. Thank you. Of course. More as we get it. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.