Judging Freedom - Larry Johnson : US Wasting Its Missiles

Episode Date: June 24, 2024

Larry Johnson : US Wasting Its MissilesSee 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 June 24th, 2024. Larry Johnson is here in just a moment on the United States wasting its military supplies in Ukraine. Ah, but killing children on a Russian beach. But first this. You all know that I am a paid spokesperson for Lear Capital, but I'm also a customer, a very satisfied customer. About a year ago, I bought gold and it's now increased in value 23%. So $100 invested in gold a year ago is now worth $123. You have $100 in the bank.

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So over the weekend, somebody, probably Ukrainians, pressed the button after the Americans programmed it, sent a cluster bomb to a beach in Sevastopol and killed children. And I think five or six is the number now, and 100 or so wounded. Why on earth would something like that have happened, and how dangerous is this for the United States? Yeah, no, this is now incredibly dangerous. Let's be clear that this is not the first time that Ukraine has fired off Western-supplied armaments, rockets, missiles, mortars, artillery rounds, that have killed civilians in Russia.

In Belgorod, those attacks have been going on for over a year. But over the last three weeks, the West became more open about, okay, yeah, we're going to give Ukraine permission because the Ukrainians were demanding it to fire deeper inside of Russia and made it very clear that the United States was going to be enabling attacks against Russia on behalf of Ukraine. And the Russians in response made it very clear, Vladimir Putin, Foreign Minister Lavrov, Deputy Foreign Minister Rubkov, others within the defense ministry, that if the United States did this, they'd be crossing a red line and that they would be

opening themselves up to retaliation. They made that very clear, explicitly so. So this attack yesterday in Sevastopol consisted of at least four attack missiles, and one of those detonated over, at least three of them were shot down, but one of them detonated over this beach. Now, there is a military base that is nearby, but this thing detonated over the beach. And there's no doubt that the U.S. was involved with providing intelligence that was used to program that missile so that it could hit in that vicinity. The United States is culpable, and the Russians very quickly were out acknowledging and stating that it was the United States and that the United States will pay a price. They were unambiguous with respect to that. And, you know, it wasn't just here. You had another, this other terrorist attack in Dagestan, where the synagogue was attacked, a priest and an Orthodox church was

attacked and murdered, and police were ambushed. Those who think that these were isolated, separate incidents are kidding themselves. This was a coordinated, in my view, Western-backed terrorist attack against Russia, whose purpose, goal is to try to create division inside of Russia and hoping that that will get rid of Putin. Here's a map of the area. You can see the Belbeck Air Base in red, and then you can see the beach struck by the cluster bomb. Right. I mean, aren't cluster bombs illegal under international law,

or are they illegal for everybody but the U.S. and its vassal states? No, it's supposed to be, you know, not be, shouldn't use them. And, you know, what makes this,, you know, there's a video out. You can see it that when that munition goes off, it's, you know, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. These are going off and they create shrapnel. And there is no justifiable military reason in the world to target people who are out on a beach trying to swim in the Black Sea. They're wearing bathing suits, not ninja gear. And they're not carrying weapons.

You know, the biggest weapon is a kid's got a shovel and a sand pail. And it's a small, tiny thing. So this has created justifiable outrage in Russia. And, you know, I expect at a minimum, Russia will, they'll either declare a no-fly zone for military aircraft over the western half of the Black Sea. Or they'll just start shooting down U.S. drones, the Global Hawk, the G3, G4. Those could come down. Or they may just go ahead and start downing the aircraft.

There are other fixed-wing aircraft that U.S US personnel fly. One's called the Rivet Joint. It's an AC-135. And on top of this, over the past three weeks, the United States has been sending B-52s and other combat aircraft flying up to the border of Russia and then getting turned around. These are the kind of provocations. Russia's done that kind of thing in Alaska, but they've never done it off the coast of the United States. If Russia was doing that off the coast of, say, San Francisco, Los Angeles, or New York, we would be furious. And American politicians would be clamoring for the Department of Defense to shoot down those aircraft, to stop it. So again, I come back to this. United States lives in this fantasy

world where we do unto others that which we don't want done unto us. Do you think that the Russians will attack American personnel involved in the construction, manipulation, programming use of this equipment, whether it's in Poland, Romania, or Ukraine? Wherever the Americans are, the FSB knows it. Yeah, the potential for attacks in both Romania and Poland are now high. And again, I think the Russian response is still going to be measured but firm. They will take out assets that are, let's say, within their territorial reach. So if it's inside Ukraine before they ratchet up and go into Romania or Poland. Up to this point, the West doesn't believe Putin. They think he's bluffing. Ah, he's just talking.

You know, he's not going to do anything. The Russians are going to do something. I don't know if it'll be today, tomorrow. I think it'll be this week for sure. And it's going to, I think it's going to provoke howls of outrage in Washington and in London. You know, how dare they? Well, we started this, and I think Russia's going to finish it. Here's a full screen of Foreign Minister Lavrov's statement last night.

The U.S. is responsible for this massacre. This is just what you were saying, Larry. And they will get an answer. All flight missions for American ATAKOM's missiles are programmed by American specialists based on their own U.S. satellite intelligence data. Therefore, the responsibility for the deliberate missile strike against the civilian population of Sevastopol lies primarily with Washington, which supplied this weapon to Ukraine, as well as with the Kiev regime from whose territory this strike was launched. Such actions will not go unanswered.i Lavrov, Foreign Minister of Russia. Yeah.

I mean, look, Lavrov's not like Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic, you know, when he's floating there at the end of the movie, ready to die, and said he's going to write a strongly worded letter to the White Star line. Lavrov, they're not going to write a strongly worded letter. They're going to hit us. And they're going to hit us. They're going to take out some of our military assets. And at that point, in this political season, it's going to be up to the Biden administration to figure out, are they going to respond? Are they going to

escalate? Are they going to retaliate? If they try in any form or fashion to retaliate, the Russians will meet it and exceed it. We're now in a poker game and all of a sudden Russia's sitting with all the pot of money. They're ready to go all in and we're not. Here's President Putin on June 20th in Vietnam saying that Zelensky should realize he's a tool and the minute the Americans don't need him, he'll be gone. Number two, Chris. And there is a decision of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine of 2015, which says quite clearly that the term of the Ukrainian president is five years, no more, no less. What are we even talking about? In the West, I think they just don't want, the West just doesn't want to change a president for a different figure. It's obvious that they have their hands full with other things.

And it's Zelensky who will be charged with making all the unpopular decisions and after they are done with him, he will be replaced. They are done with him, he will be replaced. Yeah. He hasn't studied history.

The United States has a long track record of telling people hey, we got your back. Then they turn around and go, hey, where'd they go? Yeah. So, I mean, Zelensky is, he himself is going to become cannon fodder, I believe. He's, I'll be surprised if he survives and continues to live after he was allowed to have a quiet retirement. I don't see that in the cards for him, but maybe it'll work out. you and I were going to talk about a piece that you wrote on your Sonar 21 website about how the United States is really, really, really running low on munitions, partly because now Biden has put

not Israel, but Ukraine at the head of the line. How dangerously low is the United States supply of weaponry we would expect to have available to us if Russian B-52 bombers did show up off of Long Island? We're close to running out. The cupboard is bare. When they first built the Patriot, and let's recall that, you know, this was not something that was just built in the last 20 years. There were over 10,000 missiles. So each Patriot battery has, they have launchers, and each of these launchers can fire, I believe it's 16 missiles. So you got to put those missiles in them.

Well, right now, on a yearly basis, Lockheed Martin, who makes those missiles, makes a total of 550 a year. And in my article at sonar21.com, I cited just one day in Ukraine. It was December 29th of the last year, 2023, where's going to require two Patriot missiles for each inbound Russian missile. So do the math. Right there on that one day, Ukraine would have used up 448 Patriot missiles, which is 90% of what Lockheed Martin produces in a year. Wow. So for God's sakes, folks, wake up. Doesn't Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense, understand that? I don't know.

I don't know how he did on his math scores at West Point. But what we're looking at is it's not just Ukraine. Hey, the Saudis had some Patriot missiles that they were firing at the Houthis. You know, the Saudis had as much trouble dealing with the Houthis as we are, which means they couldn't stop them. And then Israel has used a bunch of patriots. So it's not like there's this enormous stockpile and reserve. In fact, that's been whittled down. Since the start of the special military operation, Russians have fired over 7, almost 7,400 missiles, I believe is the figure.

Well, if the patriot was involved in trying to defeat all of those, we're talking almost 15,000 missiles, which basically would represent the entire, almost the entire inventory of what the United States has in place. But judge, this is not just isolated to Patriots. It's a problem with 155 millimeter shells. It's a problem with the artillery barrels that go with the M777 howitzers. So it's across and it's with the attack of missiles. The United States no longer is we spend billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars on this defense technology, but it's not actually being used to produce amounts and quantities that are replaceable if they're used in war. Are we using cluster bombs because we've run out of the more conventional 155s? Yeah, that's really the primary reason

those are showing up over there. Not that the United States said, oh, we're going to teach those Russians, man. We're going to use some cluster bombs on it. It's like, this is all we got. So, you know, let's give that to them. I mean, it really is the state, the discrepancy between, you know,

as you talked about in your show last week, where the United States has just approved like an $880 billion defense budget. And yet we can't do more than, we can't build more than 200 or 550 cruise missiles, Patriot missiles in a year. America, America's got, you know got the most expensive military in the world, but this is certainly not the best. And the people making judgment calls are giving away to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Ukraine that which is from our necessity, not from our excess. Is there any dispute about that, Larry? Oh, no, no. And look, the problem, Judge, is that whether you're talking Antony Blinken,

Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden, that whole crowd, they're the type of people that would look at some foreigner that they were asking to fight a war and they asked that foreigner to put on a hundred pound backpack and walk 10 miles in an hour. And they would think nothing of it. Why? Because they've never done that. They would be asking people to do something that they themselves are incapable of doing, they've never experienced. So here they are moving these chess pieces about on the board without a clue about the logistics that's involved with making. If you want to do something like, okay, yeah, we're going to provide air defense to Ukraine. We used to then start counting up. Well, you know, how many missiles a month are the Russians firing?

Oh, they're firing about 500. Okay. That means we're going to need at least a thousand Patriot missiles to try to take those out. And yet we're only producing 550 a year. So we've either got to figure out how to do, you know, 12 years of production in one year, or, you know, we actually actually our solution's not going to work. Do you think American intelligence was surprised by the agreement entered into between Russia and North Korea? Probably. I would doubt that the United States had any credible sources reporting on that other than what they came out with with SIGINT intercepts.

I think it's highly unlikely that we've got any decent human reporting on it. You would hope that some analysts just by virtue of logic would have figured it out. But, you know, Russia is, we talked about it again last week with this horizontal escalation. As Russia moves out and builds these relationships with other countries, it broadens its the complete collapse of the U.S.-led international world order. You know, the rules-based order, the economic order, the military order. You know, the United States has been calling the shots the last 60 years. That's coming to a rapid end. Because across the board, China's fed up with us.

India's fed up with us. And our strategy, our playbook says, okay, hey, we're going to go out and bully people. We're going to tell them what to do. And if they don't do what we tell them to do, we're going to sanction them. I mean, really, it would be comical. This is like a Monty Python sketch, except they're actually playing with the lives of real people and they're dealing with real countries that have real weapons.

When Putin went to North Korea and then Vietnam, did he basically outfox the West? It's tough to outfox him when you got Joe Biden at the helm. I mean, you know, he can't figure out which parachute jumper to look at. He goes wandering off. Okay. Did he outfox Tony Blinken? Well, there's no strategic thinking.

It's like, what is the United States? What's our goal? But let's put this simply put, we would like other nations to like us, to be our friend, and to work with us collaboratively on issues that we think are important. That's not how we're thinking. We're thinking very much in terms of, you know, how do we stop country X from doing Y tomorrow? And without any thought about what it means down the road, just like with this, what happened in Sevastopol. Yeah, we've got to give Ukraine these attack of missiles so that they can stop the Russians so that we don't have a Russian victory before our election, and it will look, you know, so we don't look weak.

That's their thinking. Without anybody going, oh, wait a second. What happens if the Russians blame us for those missiles, which rightly is, they'll rightly do so because we're the ones that provided it. We're the ones enabling this. And then they strike us, and all of a sudden we're facing a potential war. That's never going to happen. That's their thinking. Here's President Putin in Vietnam four days ago talking about the American reaction to his agreement with North Korea cut number five and I don't think that

one should expect such a such a reaction because we openly speak about this you don't need any kind of intelligence you don't need any kind of agents to understand where things are going and at which stage the things are all these things were discussed previously, yes. Certain articles were discussed behind the closed doors. But I guess one could just read the agreement from the 1960s that is basically a carbon copy of this current agreement and learn everything from there. So it's weird if it comes as a surprise for the

American intelligence service. Isn't that interesting? It should not have been a surprise that I was going to North Korea and signing a mutual defense pact with them. Yeah, well, there is this assumption among, I think, most of your audience that the CIA is staffed with experts, people that have, you know, that speak Korean, that have had some exposure. They've lived either in South Korea. They've had years of experience in Asia. Hogwash. Absolute hogwash, absolute hogwash. You know, I interviewed another former CIA officer, a friend, Robert Baer, who was, you know, he really had some, he's written several books and he was very active on the DO side.

And we both started talking about the same thing, which is it is remarkable that at the CIA, they put more importance upon people getting, quote, management experience, whether or not they actually speak the language. And ditto for the US military. You would think you would want, if the guy that's going to command the European command, for example, would have a background in Russian studies, would have, you know, some language over there. A lot of times that's not what happens. So they'll put people who have got some academic credentials, but they actually don't have any substantive expertise in a particular area. They can all, they'll learn it as they go along. Well, sorry, there are some things you've got to,

you learn because you're familiar with the culture, you're familiar with the people. And I would just note that when I was the analyst in the Central America branch at CIA, out of 10 analysts, I was the only one that spoke Spanish at a level four and had actually lived in Central America. The only one. And yet everybody's doing Central American analysis.

Well, those years that Jack Devine was in charge of Russia, does he speak Russian? Who knows? No, no. Yeah, he did. He did. Well, he did. He did a stint in counterintelligence too. But I first ran across Jack when he was on the Central American task force. So we're both really old this was before the attack on the Sevast South Korean weapons in Ukraine targeting Russia. Cut number one. As for deliveries of lethal weapons to the zone of combat operations in Ukraine,

that would be a grave mistake, and I'm certainly hoping that won't happen. If it does, then we're going to make specific decisions that will not be to the liking of the current existing leadership in South Korea. He's talking about South Korea, but does the West still think he's a paper tiger and he bluffs? Yes. Yeah. They think that he says these things, but he's not really going to act. And that's where I come back that we've really crossed the red. Sebastian Paul represented a red line that was crossed. It would have been, you know, the terrorist attacks in March and Crocus Theater.

That would have been the red line if there was immediate objective evidence that the West was behind it. There's certainly strong suspicion. And there's now, I think, confirmation that it was Ukrainian hands involved. But what happened in Sevastopol could not have happened without the United States, because the United States supplied the missile, the attack of missile, and the United States supplied the intelligence data. You know, go back to your days as a judge. If you've got a person standing before you who gave the gun and bought the ammunition and provided the entry to get into a family's home, and that person is the one that went and killed a family of 12, you would hold the person that enabled them to use the weapon and to get into the house in the same level of responsibility as the person who did it.

Of course, of course. And the Russians know this, and they're going to need to do something. The pressure on President Putin will be extraordinary. Ray told us that the Orthodox Russian priest where this church was attacked had his throat slit. Right. I think you're probably of an agreement. You may have said it earlier, so forgive me if I'm repeating. This is not a coincidence.

The attack on the synagogue, the attack on the church, the attack on the beach, all the same day. Yeah. And this was not, let's call it, this was not what we'd call organic terrorism. You know, a dissatisfied group of locals who woke up and said, hey, I got this great idea. Let's go burn the synagogue, Let's kill a priest and let's see how many policemen we can shoot. Now, from a standpoint of Western intelligence, encouraging, promoting, enabling this, I believe absolutely that's what happened. I don't think that this was something where they just learned that the CIA or MI6 learned about it incidentally and go, oh, well, that would be bad, but we're not going to warn anybody? No. I think there was definitely foreign intelligence assets involved with this. And Russia is certainly going to pursue it from that standpoint. And again, the broader strategy

is we want to create so much chaos in Russia domestically that it will weaken their ability to carry out the military attacks against Ukraine. And it will potentially force Vladimir Putin from office. I mean, this is what's so crazy about it, Judge, that we've got it so personalized that, boy, if we just get rid of Vladimir Putin, all our problems will be solved. I mean, good Lord. Larry, thank you very much, my dear friend. You know, as I say all the time, no matter how horrible are the subjects which we discuss, your analysis and your knowledge is extraordinary and deeply appreciated. Who knows how this will play out by the time we meet next with McGovern on Friday, but we'll see,

and we'll see you both then. We'll have something to talk about, I'm sure. We sure will. Thank you, my dear friend. All right. Bye. Thank you. Sure. Coming up later today at two o'clock Eastern, Kyle Anzalone at 4.30 Eastern, Scott Ritter, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. you