Judging Freedom - Larry Johnson: US Supplied ATACMS Target Troops Inside Russia

Episode Date: May 6, 2024

Larry Johnson: US Supplied ATACMS Target Troops Inside RussiaSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Yeah, so we can say not officially, but yes. And what that means is that by sending the French Foreign Legion, they're not really sending a military force of the French defense forces, but hey, they're French, they know how to operate artillery, and they've gone to the front lines. And hey, great for them. You know what? They'll get a full ride back to Paris. Of course, they'll be in a coffin if their bodies are intact.

But, I mean, this is craziness on the part of Macron. But it's just one other illustration of the desperation that set today in its announcement, okay, we're going to do tactical nuclear exercises. Be aware. It sent in a very clear message. Russia is not going to back down. The president of China, President Xi, was with President Macron and the Prime Minister of France yesterday. And within 24 hours of that, he must have been there to say, among other things, don't do it. And within 24 hours of that meeting, they announced they're sending 1,500 French Foreign Legion troops.

Well, the word on the, yeah, it is, the fact that they announced it, I find shocking. You know, but, and it's just, it's. The fact that they announced it, I find shocking, you know, but and it's just it's a it's an over provocation. I know Steve Bryan had reported on this on Friday. And so he had his sources. So it is true. And, you know, the majority of those French troops are going to be killed. And it's not going to make a difference on the battlefield. And so this comes at a time that Macron's popularity is plummeting in France. And Marie Le Pen, her support is soaring.

And it's a widening gap, not diminishing. So this is an example of irrational behavior by world leaders without any regard for what the consequences will be, because this is going to escalate this into a full-fledged war. like Macron? And before you answer that, doesn't he have sophisticated senior level military to tell him what you have just told us? No. I step back and watch educated people. I don't know, I saw the debate at the Council on Foreign Relations. You had John Mearsheimer and Danny Davis on one side with a couple of these women. Paula Dobryansky is one. She's of Ukrainian heritage. And here you get the likes of this Ambassador Dobryansky, and then others like around Macron, that paint a picture of Russia as an authoritarian communist state hell-bent on conquering the world. Now, they genuinely believe this. There's no foundation in reality for believing that, but they genuinely believe it. And so it's like once you lock yourself into a

worldview that all you're going to see is hammers and nails, that's all you see. You can't, you're so distracted, focused on the hammers and nails, you don't even see the bigger picture. And so we don't have rational actors. I mean, that's what's so frightening about this. With no understanding of history, no understanding of the capabilities of what Russia can actually do. So it's, you know, we're headed towards a catastrophe. So the Washington Post has a piece out just about an hour ago, very similar to what you just articulated. Russia is authoritarian. Putin is trying to rebuild the Soviet empire. It's a hard move to the right and to ultra-conservatism culturally.

And I thought, hmm, somebody at the CIA must have been bored this weekend and decided to feed all this nonsense to one of their pet reporters at the Washington Post. Yeah, no, exactly right. I mean, we're going that Russia's... Think about this. Russia has a problem because they don't think it's appropriate for men to dress up and pretend

to be women and then go teach children about sexual practices. God, how can Russia be so crazy? You know what? That's the conservative values they're pushing back on. What Russia is looking at in the West is the descent into degeneracy and perversion. I mean, just a week and a half ago, we had a retired Navy captain. That's the equivalent of a colonel. The very senior guy commanded the medical facility in Guantanamo, commanded the NATO base, a medical center in Afghanistan. He shows up at a hotel in Seattle to have sex with an 11-year-old and 7-year-old girl. Turns out it's a police sting. He gets shot, and as they say, takes the carpet temperature challenge, doesn't get out alive.

But, you know, do you think that that's just an aberration? I don't. It's a very sad, sick environment if that's just an outlier, if that's not just an outlier, and if there's more than one person with those with those attitudes. Hey, Judge, remember, remember, we've got reports coming out of Ukraine that children are being trafficked by the West, that they're being used for both sex. They're being used for harvesting organs. It's not isolated reports. They're very credible reports on this. And you come back and look at why is the United States so heavily invested in Ukraine? Because it's not because we're there to, quote, uphold democracy. If we're there to uphold democracy, we'd be attacking Ukraine. It's what you and Ray and the rest of us have been talking about for two and a half years, using Ukraine as a battering ram with which to drive President Putin from office. And of course, it's having the opposite effect. And the neocons will never admit that.

Right. And there are a lot of Americans getting wealthy in the process. I mean, this is, you know, Ukraine was a money-making effort. Why do you think BlackRock has invested, you know, billions to get, supposedly get control of farmland and other mineral resources? And that's, you know, that's what's one of the things that's going to blow up on them. They're going to lose money. And, you know, because Russia is on a roll right now. The, you know, I've said for a while that I thought that they were, their offense was underway, but it wasn't what we normally expected in the West as an offense, you know, with the tanks lined up and then somebody blows the whistle and everybody goes charging forward.

But they absolutely now are just chewing up the Ukrainian army all along the front. And the Ukrainians are faced with this dilemma. They don't know where to put their troops. And no matter where they put their troops, they don't have enough support in terms of artillery and air support to hold the Russians off. So it's just this is going towards an inevitable end. And I know that many have been surprised, even some that have been predicting that Russia would prevail at the rapidity of this change. What's undergoing right now is a collapse of the Ukrainian front in the Donetsk region. And then Russia has a variety of other cards to comply that's going to

push this. And so this is why you're seeing some of the extreme reaction from the West. They don't know what to do. And they think that if we're a saber rattling, we're going to put some of our soldiers in there, that'll stop the Russians. Good luck with that. ray mcgovern reports that seven uh french foreign legion soldiers are dead already at least that's what the french are reporting it's probably a larger uh number there was a report over the weekend i i need you to evaluate it for me uh about u.s missiles fired on inside of Russia. Do you know if that's credible? Oh, yeah. Well, they fired attack them into Crimea.

And, you know, as far as the Russians are concerned, that's Russia. That's not some, you know, foreign province. So, yeah, you know, the United States is doing it. You know, the Brits, Cameron walked back, or at least he took down his tweet last week where he claimed he was encouraging the Ukrainians to launch British rockets, storm shadows into Russia proper. And just today, the Russian foreign ministry called the ambassador in to, you know, basically ask him, what the hell are you doing? You want to start a war? That's going to be the message. What do you think Putin's reaction is when he knows that Russian troops have been

attacked and may be injured by American artillery or by British artillery? They press forward with their offensive and they're going to destroy the Ukrainian militarily and in the process, any NATO personnel, any NATO equipment that are in the way, they're going to be destroyed too. Including American advisors on the ground supposedly, not boots on the ground.

Yeah, yeah. The time of which we're going to keep hands off on Americans, that's over. So if you're going over there, it's going to be big boy rules. The Russians are going to hit and destroy command centers. It doesn't matter whether it's got Poles, Germans, French, Americans inside those command centers, they will be destroyed.

And Putin and the Russian general staff really have gone to great lengths to try to warn the West that they're serious. But the West hasn't heeded these warnings. There's a great article out in the Royal United Services Institute by former Colonel Alex Vershinin. And basically what he validates is what Scott Ritter and myself and Ray McGovern and Doug McGregor have been saying for more than a year and a half, that the West has been blinded by looking at the war in Ukraine in conventional Western terms, or like how we beat the Saddam Hussein's army, and don't understand, that's called really a war of maneuver. And what they've come to the realization is that the Russians are conducting a war of attrition, which means they don't intend

to rush their forces forward. They're going to take small little bites, bite here, bite there, bite here, but it's going to be cumulative over time. And it requires a level of integration of forces and use of weapons that are able to be easily picked up and used by newly trained recruits. I mean, it's a very complex picture, this article that Rashinian lays out, but that's exactly what Russia is doing. And, you know, they've got their plan. They're moving forward. They've made very clear they're not giving up this territory. There's no negotiation about, oh, okay, well, we'll ignore Kiev and we'll stay out of Odessa.

That's not going to happen. And the West better come to grips with it because the Russians are going to press forward. They're going to defend themselves because they have been under unrelenting attack by the West for more than 10 years.

And this crap that's put out suggesting that this was just Russia out of the blue invaded Ukraine. Here we were standing, minding our own business and those nasty Russians. Oh, come on. You know, when you go back and review that every year, especially it heated up after 2014, NATO and the United States were conducting major military, joint military operations with Ukrainian military forces on a variety of issues. Sometimes there were two or three exercises a month. In every

single case, the enemies, the Russians. You think the Russians weren't aware of that? So if you're watching your potential adversary carry out military exercises. In some cases where they're landing U.S. Marines on the beaches of Ukraine in the Black Sea. You think Russia's sitting back and said, oh, those guys, they're just kidding. Yeah, no big deal. Let's not take them seriously. No.

And so Russia watched this and developed, you know, began recognizing it's going to have to build up its force. And that's what's underway right now. It's building up a force that can defeat a NATO response. And they're going to use tactical nukes if necessary. Everybody wrap their minds around that. It's a great summary, Larry. Does the United States Department of Defense and does the CIA know when American missiles, in advance, when American missiles are going to be launched into Russia? And if the CIA and the DOD know it, does the FSB, the Russian intelligence services?

Well, they may not know specific launches coming up being planned for the attackings. But I tell you this, Russia is clearly expecting, they're anticipating that there's going to be an attack against them. Note that the U.S. Embassy in Germany put out what I call the Crocus City Hall warning again. Oh, there's going to be terrorist attacks. You know, be careful. Stay away from Germany. So that's coming out now. I know from a friend whose wife is still in Russia,

she is Russian, that she has been stopped twice in the last two days driving around the city by the police. They're looking for something. They're looking for something, someone. So the Russians obviously know something's afoot. And if there's any attempt to carry out a terrorist attack, a significant attack surrounding the inauguration down in Latin America about the people mistake being good with being a fool. And we mistake Russia's patience as weakness. And it's anything but weakness. We don't recognize we're the weak ones. When you

go through the information that comes out, it's like every Abrams tank that operates for one hour has to get eight hours of maintenance. Yeah, I mean, think about that. Every F-16 that flies, one hour, 17 hours of maintenance. We're spending $13 billion on an aircraft carrier. We've got F-35 jets. Only 29% of them are flyable. And we're out there beating our chest like we're the Incredible Hulk.

You analogized earlier the war of attrition versus a war of maneuver. Does the American military have the cultural mentality, the patience, and the equipment for a war of attrition? Absolutely not. We wouldn't last a week.

We would not last a week. We might get two weeks, maybe. But that's it. No. You know, As I pointed out, we've got all this expensive weaponry, like the M1 Abrams. So it's designed, we're going to run it for one hour, but then you got to take it back and you've got eight hours of maintenance. I mean, just think of that from a comment. You weren't exaggerating when you said one hour of operation and then eight hours of maintenance. No, I'm not exaggerating.

That's a piece of junk. Why do we have something like that? Well, it made, I guess, General Dynamics or Raytheon, whoever made the tank, quite happy. And the shareholders quite happy. We've got a military that was built and designed to benefit members of Congress and to benefit shareholders. The equipment and weapons that we have deployed for the Army are not designed around a coherent strategy of having to fight a pure opponent. And so we've got all this terribly expensive, terribly sophisticated equipment that doesn't work. I mean, what the Ukrainians have reported with respect to all the Javelin missiles,

you know, anti-tank guided missiles that were put into theater. It turns out they were too damn complicated to use. And when they were used, they were not that effective. So that's why, you know, I think the Ukrainians decided, well, let's just see if we can sell this junk on the international market. And let's see if some other fool will buy it. Because it requires a whole variety of steps. It's not like picking, you know, it's one thing to give somebody a revolver, where all you got to do is if as long as it's loaded pick it up press the trigger boom it goes off these aren't those kinds of weapon systems you have to open tab a slot tab c open this slot do that and then calculate this measure the weather that

and so when you got something that requires 20 steps before you can fire it, not very useful in a combat environment. Here's Congressman Matt Gaetz examining under oath an embarrassed and uncomfortable Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin about these jets that you just mentioned. Is the F-35 program a failure? No. So let's go over it. How much does the F-35 program a failure? No. So let's go over it. How much does an F-35 cost?

Well, it depends on the variant. $100 million? Safe to say? $100 million a copy? Okay, so we just had the Air Force in here, and I said, what percentage of these F-35s are fully mission capable? And they said 29%. Do you have any

basis to disagree with that assessment? I don't have any basis to disagree with, Secretary. At 100 million a copy, 29% being fully mission capable, does that seem low to you? It's a complex airframe, and again, there are a number of reasons why a platform could be not operational at any one given time. Right, but I mean, how many... Having said that, it is probably one of the best aircraft in the inventory. The best aircraft in the inventory. Well, Mr. Secretary, there's a GAO report that takes a very different view. Mr. Chairman, I seek unanimous consent to enter the GAO report entitled, F-35 Sustainment Costs Will Continue to Rise While Planned Use and Availability Have Decreased. Without objection, so ordered.

It reads, costs to sustain the F-35 fleet keep increasing from $1.1 trillion in 2018 to $1.58 trillion in 2023. Yet DOD plans to fly the F-35 less than originally estimated partly because of reliability issues with the aircraft. The F-35's ability to perform its mission has also trended downward over the last five years. Is there any of that in the GAO report that you disagree with? I don't. Okay, so how many $100 million paperweights do we own? I would not categorize the F-35 as a paperweight. Whatever you think of Matt Gaetz, that was a brilliant, brilliant, terrific examination,

and the secretary looked foolish, ill at ease, indifferent, and ignorant. Yeah. No, look, I've got a friend who's involved with the F-35 program at one of the U.S. Air Force bases. They're supposed to have eight. They've got one. The other seven haven't shown up because of software problems. So that's even less than, you know, the whole 29%. So what the United States has built is a very expensive military system that does not work in combat. And in contrast to what we had during World War II, where we were able to turn out airplanes in a single day. And now requires a year or more sometimes to produce one of these modern aircraft. Well, there was the understanding in World War II that, hey, we don't worry attrition, equipment's going to get blown up, men are going to get killed. And so what the Russians have done today is they're

minimizing the risk of their troops getting killed. They're focused on using weapons systems that can kill a lot of Ukrainians and destroy a lot of their defensive positions. And especially now using these glide bombs, which are bombs that are dropped from a distance of, say, 30, 40 miles away from target, but they have the ability to be guided into the target and hit with accuracy. And they're enormous, 1,500 kilograms, over 3,000 pounds, 3,000 kilograms, that's 6,000 pounds of explosives, big, big bombs, and they're just blowing away what's left of Ukrainian defensive positions. The United States is not anywhere prepared to do that. We do not even have integrated electronic warfare capability. We haven't trained our forces on how to combat in

a drone environment. That's not something we do because we've been fighting Afghans and Iraqis and Syrians that don't have any of these advanced weapons systems up against us. Not the case with Russia and China. And we can construct a variety of scenarios with the Chinese and with the Russians where everything that the United States wants to do to Russia or China means we have to deploy troops. And unlike the Gulf War or the 2003 invasion, where we had five to six months to build up forces in Saudi Arabia, we had complete control of the air, we didn't have to worry about being attacked. We had that luxury. We won't have that luxury. If we decide that we're going to put 500,000 troops, which we don't have, into Poland to go into Ukraine, that's going to take five to

six months. Do you think the Russians are going to sit back and let that happen? No, those bases will be attacked and U.S. troops will be destroyed before they get to the battlefront. That's the only thing that makes sense from a military perspective if you're trying to defend yourself. Before we go, switching gears to the other hotspot, what is the axis of resistance about which you have written recently? Well, I'd love to take credit for that article. It's written by a fellow who writes under the name of Observer R. But what he's pointing out is that Iran is now forging

relationships with groups throughout the Middle East that are thwarting U.S. policy, thwarting U.S. efforts to try to assert its control. And we've seen that most prominently with the Houthis. Here are the, you know, think about this, Judge. The United States purports to have the greatest Navy in the world. Whoa, we're so powerful. We got all these aircraft carriers. Man, we can project force. We got planes. We can bomb. All right. Houthis shut down the Red Sea. Is it any ship that's flagged for Israel or that's headed to Israel? You're not going to make it. We're going to blow you up. The United States, oh, well, we're not going to let that happen. We're going to stop that. And we put our terrier task force into the region. And what happens? We blow up a lot of sand and rock in Yemen, and we've killed a few Yemenis. But guess what? The missiles keep coming.

In fact, Yemen's, the Houthis are now claiming, hey, we're not content with just setting down the Red Sea. We're going to start targeting into the Med. Nothing we can do about it. You know, we could, what, similar aircraft carrier groups? The Eisenhower was on duty there off the shore for more than six months and did not accomplish that mission. So what we see happening is that the traditional control that the United States exerted over people, over the Saudis, over the Turks. That's starting to shift because Syria has emerged intact out of the Western effort to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. Iran now today is stronger than it ever has been, and it's going to get stronger because of its alliance with Russia and China. What Iran's

trying to do is forge a relationship with the likes of Saudi Arabia and the Egyptians who traditionally have shunned those relations with Iran. Iran is actually much more open to saying, hey, Sunni, Shia, we're all believers, let's get together. It's been the Sunni side of the equation that's always resisted integration with the Shias. And the most extreme manifestation of that was ISIS, where ISIS deemed anybody that was Shia to be an apostate and made it a priority to try to kill them, which is one of the oddities here, if we're really looking for a common bond where we could bring peace,

is that Russia, the United States, and Iran all agree that ISIS is a bad thing and ought to be stopped. We could all agree on fighting that form of real international terrorism if we wanted to, but the West doesn't want to. All right, before we go, just on a lighter note, because he has such a character and the two of us know him. Congressman Jerry Nadler on Politico recently gave a very interesting opinion of Prime Minister Netanyahu. Here's what he had to say. So as much as you dislike Netanyahu, think he is, as you've said in the past, one of the worst leaders, not just of Israel, but of the Jewish people. Yes. That goes back a long way. I think he's got only one competitor for the worst Jewish leader in history.

And that would be the Hashemitean king, who in the first century BC BC in order to help him in a factional dispute invited in the Romans. Now is that Chuck Schumer saying, is that like Chuck Schumer saying what the White House wanted him to say or are major Jewish leaders in America getting disgusted with Netanyahu? Yeah, no, major Jewish leaders are getting disgusted because they see that Netanyahu has become the ugly face of the Zionist regime. And, you know, if you look at the Jerusalem Post today, I think they had an article telling that, man, Israel is just getting hammered, hammered on the

PR front around the world. It's never been this bad. So, you know, they're going to blame Netanyahu for that. Meanwhile, they're still talking, they're now saying, hey, they're going to go forward with RAFA, the invasion. The Biden administration, interestingly, is

announcing that it's cutting off ammunition supplies for now. If that's true, that's significant. But the crowd around Netanyahu are hell-bent on expanding this war. They think they can get away with anything, and that's where Nadler and Schumer, their voices are, well, perhaps make a difference. I did not hear that the Biden administration is cutting off ammunition. All ammunition or just certain types or just a certain group of super orthodox soldiers? No, the headline said that the Biden administration had suspended supply and ammo, didn't specify which, to Israel. That was about an hour or two ago.

That's profound. Larry, it's a pleasure, my dear friend. I will miss you and Ray on the roundtable, since as you know, I'll be in Italy, but we'll see you back with our usual routine next week. Thanks for coming on today. Safe travels. Stay away from the pasta. Okay. Thank you, my dear friend. Much appreciated. Coming up at noon today, Aaron Matei at one o'clock, Anya Parampola at two o'clock, Matt Ho at three o'clock, Phil Giraldi at 4.30, Scott Ritter, and at 5.30, Professor Jeffrey Sachs. Justin Napolitano for Judging Freedom. MUSIC