Judging Freedom - How Weak Is Ukraine Military? w/Matthew Hoh

Episode Date: September 26, 2023

How Weak Is Ukraine Military? w/Matthew HohSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, September 26, 2023. Matthew Ho joins us now. Matt, always a pleasure. Thank you for coming back on the program. You sent me an interesting email recently about a huge percentage of the American defense budget. judge thanks for having me back now it's good to see you and thank you for everyone for watching and listening uh but if you look at the defense budget over the last decade uh every year 55 of that defense budget goes to contractors goes to the weapon makers so goes to the large weapons makers all the way down to the small firms that populate the United States. The amount of money that spread through this racket is enormous. My town, which is a town of about 50,000 people, has millions of dollars coming into it every year from the defense budget.

And that's replicated across the country, right? I think famously the F-35. And how does it come into your town? What is there in your town that would receive millions of dollars? You'd be surprised the number of different firms that have defense contractors, primarily as being subcontractors. So whether they're performing services, maybe they're performing some type of graphics design work, maybe they're doing some type of manufacturing. So putting together some piece of a cog onto another cog that then feeds into a bigger cog. I mean, software and in services as well.

So certainly you could have translators that you need for wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, et know, this also plays into the larger military industrial complex in terms of when you look at the United States overall. Our biggest export from the United States is fossil fuels, oil and gas, right? But the second biggest export last year for, I believe, the first time ever was weapons. We exported more weapons last year, military weapons, than we did agriculture products. I believe about $205 billion in weapons were exported from the United States, while there's about $195 billion in agriculture exports. Okay, let me get back to the budget. Is 55% of a nation's defense budget an appropriate or standard number or is it a reckless number for that much to go into the the defense industry well i think the reckless nature of it and why

this is so corrupt is because that type of capture of the budget by that industry drives the budget making it drives the policy making right that money then gets put back into washington dc in the form of lobbyists famously there are more lobbyists defense industry lobbyists on capitol hill than there are members of congress by a factor of one right amount of money that goes into the campaign coffers and all the think tanks that have been established that receive defense industry money who then are the ones who are quoted in the wall street journal new york times they are the ones who are going on msnbc and fox news and you know and then they're the ones who are going into congress to say to congress i'm dr so-and-so i'm an expert on foreign policy, I'm from the foundation

for more money to the military, right? You should give us more money type of thing. I mean, it's a racket. Was it you who sent me a piece by President Eisenhower's granddaughter about the original draft of his farewell address, warning about the military industrial complex? I may have. I don't remember, but certainly Susan is very good on that. Okay, so according to the granddaughter, the original draft said military industrial congressional complex,

and Ike had them take out congressional, because even though it was the tail end of his term as president, there was still some legislation he wanted out of Congress, and he didn't want to offend them. But in his heart of hearts, he understood it to be military, industrial, congressional. I think you could add deep state intelligence, law enforcement, and bankers today, but at the time that he coined the phrase, I think he had his finger on the pulse of it just right, and you've underscored that. It's self-fulfilling. The Defense Department spends money, it lobbies members of Congress, gets them to spend more money. The Defense Department has more money to spend.

It goes on and on and on. Right. And then they're the ones who are putting the people on television and putting people on the news to, you know, manufacture the consent for war, right? To give the public the information. And the media is all tied into it. And we can get into how this is also all tied into big oil and gas. Who is the biggest purchaser of fuel from Exxon Mobil? It's the Pentagon. It's the Department of Defense.

Right. And then the banks that are involved in all this. And of course, you see this all come to fruition then in a war like Ukraine. Right. Where you've had some more reporting in the last couple of weeks about what Ukraine is going to look like in terms of reconstruction after the war. And, you know, for my perspective, I look at what could possibly happen to Ukraine. And while they could lose and be ruled by Moscow, which I think is unlikely in the sense of I don't think Moscow wants to take over the whole country or wants to take over all of ukraine or they can they can quote win and then be owned by jp morgan black wall black rock state street you know wall street etc so my my friend um and former colleague charlie gasparino who thrives on breaking business stories broke a story last week, but not for publication. Of course, he found out about it. I mean, the press wasn't there. President Zelensky had a meeting with many of the Wall Street people talking about that. Of course, they're salivating at the thought that they could be out there

raising money to invest in the reconstruction of infrastructure. I mean, the other thing about our defense budget, of course, is it's an unbelievable number compared to everybody else's. Right. 680 billion is more than the top 12, the next 12 countries combined, which includes Russia and China. Right. And even with Russia saying they're going to double their defense budget, which is just along with some other economic indicators coming out of Russia,

really shows how Russia has not been weakened by this war. The sanctions that the United States and West have put on Russia have just been a tremendous failure. You've seen, you know, beginning of this month, the deal cut between Saudi Arabia and Russia to reduce oil production. I mean, so Russia is predicting that they are going to have more money in years to come, class of failure from the United States and all its promises of bringing Russia to its knees, et cetera. But even with the Russians doubling their defense budget, we're still going to be outspending the Russians on our defense budget by a factor of four or five. Well, you know, I inverted the numbers. I said 680. It's 860 billion. That does not count

the 113 billion in aid, which we'll talk about in a minute, that went to Ukraine. And it certainly doesn't count the 28 billion that, as we speak, Kevin McCarthy and Chuck Schumer, the leaders of the war party in Congress, are trying to get. So throw those numbers in there, and you're just about at a trillion, borrowed from the Chinese, largely, money printed by the Fed, not printed anymore, just digitally added to Chase Manhattan's account, for example, to pay the interest back. And one wonders why we have the inflation that we do. Did a top Ukrainian general recently give an interview, Matt, in which he gave some startling admissions about the size of military units, Ukrainian military units that have been trying to push back on the Russians? Yeah. So over the weekend, Judge CNN published an interview with Jonah Tarnofsky, who is the head of the Ukrainian offensive in the south.

So in the Zaporizhia region, the area we've heard about, Robitino, Vrbova, that area where CNN, among other U.S. and Western media, keep publishing one story after another about the success of this offensive. I think for a lot of us who have been observing, as we've noticed that, well, these breakouts, these breakthroughs, these piercings, breaches are not of anything of significance. The thought had been in many of our minds, many of us spoken about this, is that what we are seeing here are infiltrations by infantry units equipped with cameras so that they can find their way through a gap in the Russian lines and do a photo op on the other side. More for PR purposes than for anything else, right? To promote how well the offensive is going, the success of CNN, we get confirmation from that, from, again, the head of the Ukrainian offensive in the South, this General Tarnofsky, who says that we are limited to conducting operations on a scale of 12 to 15 men. So squad size operations. That

really took me by surprise because I thought at least they were conducting at least platoon size operations, company size operations. I knew they weren't doing anything above that. But there's a mission that we are doing operations that are only 12 to 15 men in size. Well, that means you're not conducting an offensive. I mean, just by the definition of what you're doing by sending these small assault units out from your lines to try and find gaps to penetrate, to make isolated, extremely isolated attacks, that's not an offensive, you know, and certainly, so what you're seeing here is a culmination of a number of things. It shows that the Ukrainians have issues with massing forces for a number of reasons, because of what the Russians can do with their artillery,

what the Russians can do with their helicopters, shows the success of the Russian defenses, shows an inability for the Ukrainians to command and control at tactical levels of brigade, battalion, company. You know, it also might show some morale issues on the side of the Ukrainians. You have we have plenty of evidence. We had this happen in the Iraq war, where American units were saying, we're not going out on patrol. The journalist David Finkel very famously documented one of those episodes. Certainly it happened in Vietnam, where American troops were saying, we're not going on patrol. Let's dive into this a little deeper. Why are there offensive units limited to 12 to 15 troops when the Russians have a few hundred thousand there? Is it just to get to the other side of the gray zone, which preced pictures for domestic political consumption? Is it not truly to achieve some militarily beneficial event? I think, of course, they are conducting a reconnaissance in force, if you will. They are hoping to find a gap that they can exploit and

breach through. But primarily to me, this seems to confirm that much of what we're seeing is for PR purposes, is for the purposes of demonstrating progress, showing progress. These villages that are being fought over are tiny villages. I don't think we have anything like this in the U.S. or it's very hard to find places that have less than 100 people living in them, which is what these villages are that are being fought over. So I think a lot of it, Judge, is just, as you said, this idea of trying to demonstrate progress. But it also, again, all the complications that are discussed, the problems the Ukrainians may be having with their command and control, with their morale. But it also shows how

drones have really changed this war. How if there is something to talk about in terms of a wonder weapon, if you will, and we don't like to say that, right? We dismiss that all the time. But if there has been a technology, a weapon system that has had a profound impact on how both armies can operate, it has been the drones because the drones are so prevalent and they're so pervasive in their ability to conduct not just a surveillance, but attack on any type of enemy formation that is larger than maybe say a dozen men is what is defining this. I think certainly we saw that in the spring with the Russians. Why were the Russians just launching these kind of small unit attacks into Bakhmut?

Why weren't we seeing the Russians putting their tanks online? Well, because of the drones. And this goes back a few years. We saw this happen in the war in summer of 2020 between Armenia and Azerbaijan, where the Azerbaijani drones just decimated the Armenian armor forces. And one of the reasons why the United States Marine Corps famously gave up its tanks a couple of years ago. Does President Zelensky understand what you just said? Because he's been crowing about the arrival of tanks. Yeah.

I mean, all of what, 31 Abrams tanks, which the head of the Ukrainian military intelligence, the SPU, General Budanov, said in an interview this week, those tanks are not going to be game changers. And if we don't use them wisely and effectively, they're all going to be destroyed, which shows exactly the position that they're in here, where one, again, it's a limited number, but also two, because of the Russian defenses and their use of drones, putting tanks out in the open is very difficult. It's very dangerous for that tank crew. And this is, again, it goes back to this idea of how limited this war has become on a massive scale. So you see these small unit operations that are a necessity because of the defenses, because of the drones, because of manning issues, command and control issues. But then also, too, you see the very large volume of artillery fire, missile fire, rocket fire, the use of landmines that cause tremendous amounts of casualties. At the same time, too, we see this escalation of the war, right, throughout Ukraine, into Russia, into Crimea. I mean,

in something that, of course, will only continue because if you can't kill enough Russians on the front line, you can't kill enough Ukrainians on the front line, well, better start killing more outside of those places in the cities because you're facing a lot of criticism that you're not doing enough. Here's President Zelensky just over the weekend on tanks and F-16s. You tell me if this makes any sense militarily or if this statement is just for domestic political consumption. The first American-made Abrams tanks are already in Ukraine. We are preparing them to reinforce our actions against the occupiers, and it will be a significant reinforcement. We are also working to get all the other weapons capabilities we need.

This includes F-16S. We are preparing pilots and infrastructure. The best thing for us is to be able to produce air defense and other advanced weapons. This is the only way to guarantee Ukraine's security. I'm assuming by F-16s, that's just the translator. They mean F-16s. So are these tanks too little too late? We know that by the time the F-16s get there and by the time Ukrainian pilots are qualified to fly them, there's probably not going to be much military engagement still going on. I think the tanks, the Abrams, are going to run in the same problem that

all the other tanks have run into. Again, this issue of drones. You know, Judge, I would, if I had met Zelensky last week, President Zelensky last week, what I would have said to him is just what I said to you about the U.S. Marine Corps giving up its tanks. And the fact that the U.S. Marine Corps just gave up, I don't know how many tanks we had, 250, 300 tanks in cemetery. Why didn't we just give those to Ukraine? Right. Why did it take us however many months, eight months to give them 31 Abrams tanks that were built before the Persian Gulf War. Right. And with you know, I mean, so there's so much here that's going on in the sense of Ukraine being used as a pawn. And what is the shelf life of an Abrams tank? Ten years, 20 years, 30 years. I mean, at some, they've got to be obsolete because of a higher level of

sophisticated armor equipment that's out there, no? Right. What they do is they do these upgrades. So they get different engines, they get different guns, they get different sensors, the whole computer system that drives and shoots the gun and targets and everything else. That all gets updated over time. And that's one of the things why they take us this long. How come we just didn't give? You know, why didn't we just give the tanks that the Marine Corps' first tank battalion gave up a couple of years ago?

Why? They're sitting over in California. Why didn't we just give them to Ukraine? Well, it's because we don't want Ukraine to have the most up-to-date tanks because we don't want those tanks falling into the hands of the Russians. So what we did with these M1s, as I can understand it, is these are the oldest model M1s we still have. They're sitting in a factory, I mean, a warehouse someplace in a lot somewhere. You know, we have these what are called boneyards out in California, out in the southwest.

People have probably seen them, pictures of just hundreds of aircraft, hundreds of vehicles. These are all the things, if you drive past up 95, you drive through Philadelphia, you're crossing over the bridge, you see all those Navy ships there, right? All these things have been mothballed. Well, this is the type of stuff that we're giving to Ukraine. We don't give them the best stuff we have, the newest stuff we have, because we don't want the Russians to capture it. We don't want the Russians to learn how to use it. And by extension, then we don't want them to tell the Chinese how that works

or tell the Iranians how that works. The people that we, you know, think that we need to fight. Anybody who thinks that the Ukrainians can win this conflagration is just making a political statement. I am absolutely convinced after listening to you and your colleagues that militarily, General Milley, well, he's got four more days in his job. I forget the name.

General Jones, I think, of the fellow replacing him. Secretary Austin. These guys must know that Ukraine can't win this. Well, the moral horror of this, Judge, is again, this idea that we're fighting the Russia to the last Ukrainian. We hear this over and over again. You talk about this all the time. But McConnell, Romney, Lindsey Graham, Blumenthal. Blumenthal's statement and Romney was reprehensible. That's the money we ever spent because we're killing Russians, not Americans. That's exactly right. You had this column from David Ignatius, who is the scribe for the CIA

in the Washington Post and well-known as a scribe of the CIA. And that's why he's valuable, because you could read him and know what the CIA wants people to think. But he said in his column a couple of months ago how great the war is going. And he puts in parentheses, except for the Ukrainians, right? Except for the Koreans who have suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties. Their country has been devastated. They've lost a fifth of their country. 13 million of their people are refugees, on and on and on. But the moral horror of this, in the sense that the Americans know this, we're not even giving them everything they would need to win. If any of us were in their position, we would have said, screw you. We're not doing this. I'm not dying for you. But they continue to do it because we've hooked

into something with Ukrainians where they have a small band, a small element that believes that they are continuing this centuries long historical fight with the Russians. And these are the people that kind of have the gun that, you know, famously pointed the gun to Zelensky's head after he came into office. I mean, so but the moral horror of this is just, it's just astounding when you see how cynically and how purposely and deliberately the United States is allowing Ukraine to slaughter a generation of its young men for purposes simply to benefit the American empire. Purposes that I don't even think are, that are not well thought out, that are not well thought out,

that are not, certainly not well-attentioned, but most likely to be counterproductive. As we discussed, we're not seeing a weakened Russia here. We're seeing a strengthened Russia. And if we do get the regime change we want in Russia, who's going to replace them?

Probably someone who's going to want to drop an atom bomb on Kiev. So how astounding this is. Matt, you have your finger right on the pulse of it, and you make compelling arguments. Thank you very much for joining us, my dear friend. I hope you'll come back again soon. Absolutely. Thanks, Judge. Of course. There you have it. More as we get it. Tony Schaefer at four o'clock this afternoon, Eastern, and Professor John Mearsheimer, the foremost political theorist of our day, on who really started this war and why is it that Ukraine can't win right here at five o'clock, Eastern. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.