Judging Freedom - Military Malpractice by NATO in Ukraine w/Larry Johnson fmr CIA

Episode Date: August 22, 2023

Military Malpractice by NATO in Ukraine w/Larry Johnson fmr CIASee 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, August 22nd, 2023. Larry Johnson joins us now. Larry, as always, it's a pleasure, my friend. Thank you. How badly is Ukraine losing the war? There's no other definition for it in terms of casualties, in terms of not being able to field a viable army anymore, lacking in equipment, lacking in ammunition. You know, any measure you want to take, Ukraine's not winning. And yet, despite those objective facts, we continue to hear in the West the exact opposite. It's almost delusional. And it's not just confined to the media.

It is actually rampant among some of our senior military officials. I found out last night, I asked a friend of mine, I said, well, I'm hoping now that the reality is starting to set in. And he goes, no, the generals are convinced that the Ukraine is fighting Russia to a standstill and that what's going to happen is that this will turn into Russia's Vietnam and he said the senior generals really believe this which is frightening that I mean it's it's so divorced from reality judge I don't even know where to begin well the senior generals must know what you and Phil Giraldi and Ray McGovern know, which is that the intelligence that reaches the president is filtered and has spin in it so that the briefer tells the president what they perceive the president wants to hear.

But they do this. The military does this at their peril. They must know what is truly going on on the ground. We have the documents that the government says were released exclusively by Jack Teixeira, but those documents have never had their accuracy or authenticity challenged. of this year. The Pentagon believed that Ukraine was losing and would have zero air defenses by June of this year. It's now August and they have zero air defenses. Are they delusional or lying? Lying. They're ignoring the intelligence. I believe Cy Hersh's latest reporting, which says that the CIA actually is providing briefings that are dictated, you know, making it very clear that Ukraine cannot win and Ukraine is not winning on the ground. And in fact, those intelligence reports have been leaked to a variety of press outlets that are normally very friendly to the Ukrainian side. And so there's not, on the media side of the house, in terms of Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Hill, Politico,

all of them have had a pretty steady stream of very negative reports about, negative but accurate reports about what is happening to Ukraine on the ground. They are getting massacred. There's no other word for it. You wrote a piece that came out this morning that is entitled, Why is Russia decimating the Ukraine counteroffensive. Is Ukraine making fundamental military errors at the bequest or insistence of

their NATO masters? Yes. You know, the lack of combat air is the number one factor. We're in a new age of warfare. This is not like World War II, where sides could move troops. The Germans could move troops, or the Russians could move troops, the United States, without the other side necessarily seeing it. In the modern world of intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, with satellites, drones, fixed-wing aircraft, it's virtually impossible for anyone to move large number of troops or vehicles or other equipment without the other side picking up on it. So your ability to mass forces is limited. Add to that what the Russians employ is what is called net-centric warfare. So in other words, some guy sitting and crouching in a trench up front can relay or receive information instantaneously from a drone overhead

or from some operation center miles behind the front lines. And they're able to integrate the movements of troops, movements of vehicles, movement of aircraft, movements of vehicles, movement of aircraft, detecting of threats, and get all that information integrated in a fully rapid time frame. Ukraine does not have that to the same extent that the Russians have, but worse, they're lacking combat air, which means as their troops advance and move forward, they're not being covered by aircraft that can shoot down Russian threats against those ground troops. So the troops are basically left exposed on open battlefields.

And these fields that they're crossing in Ukraine, I mean, that part of Ukraine is nothing but vast farmland with some, you know, forests on the edge or rings of trees for let's call them tree fences. And so they're completely at a disadvantage. They're running into minefields. They're getting hit with artillery that has already zeroed in or fixed those positions. And the vehicles are being destroyed. The troop carriers are being destroyed. And they don't have anything to cover them overhead. So what can they do at this point? What can they do at this point besides seek some sort of a ceasefire? It's either ceasefire or surrender. Are the troops demoralized, Larry, the Ukrainian troops? Do they know they're being put into a meat grinder?

Do they understand that they have zero chance at victory, notwithstanding what President Zelensky says on television? Right. There's quite a bit of video evidence showing uh units from the size of 50 uh up to 150 men surrendering to the russians and and to to a man that is the message they're delivering that they're they're being sent into the front lines without adequate training without adequate ammunition without without adequate weapons. And as a result, they recognize they're in an impossible situation

and they're turning themselves in. You don't see those kinds of videos cropping up on the Ukrainian side with Russian troops, which would be a sign of poor morale on the Russian side. And invariably, in a lot of these videos, you see guys that are almost as old as me. You know, they're well, they're over the age of 40. Some appear to be in their 50s. And, you know, the war is not an old man's game. It's a young man's game.

But Ukraine lacks the manpower. And so they've been scraping the bottom of the barrel in order to get these people onto the front lines. Is General Zeluzhny, for whom you and Colonel McGregor and Scott Ritter and Ray McGovern have some respect, is he still in charge, the Ukrainian commander. So far, yes, although there has been criticism within Ukraine from the Zelensky forward to cover what's happening because they said it jeopardizes the operation of the 82nd units designated as the 82nd Battalion or 82nd Brigade. The problem with this is if Ukraine was succeeding and if they were penetrating Russian defenses, if they were killing Russians by the scores, if they were penetrating the first defensive line. They'd have the press out there. You bet every dollar you got, the press would be there filming it. There'd be videos of Reif all over the Internet. There'd be videos rife all over the internet. They'd be celebrating. Well, they're not doing that. And in fact, they're trying to blame the

press for the failure of the operation. So, I mean, it's just one other sign of the trouble that Ukraine faces. Do you have a handle on either the kill ratio, number of Ukrainians killed per Russians killed, or on the actual casualties, number of Ukrainian soldiers dead or disabled from the battlefield versus the number of Russians in those categories? For me, it's a pretty simple calculation. Russia is firing between five to seven times the number of artillery rounds that the Ukrainians are. Okay? So think of it as if you're holding a gun and you got one bullet, and I'm holding a gun and I've got seven bullets, you might be able to kill one of me, but I'm going to kill seven of you.

And it's that simple and crude. That's what's going on. And Ukraine, just by definition, by the sheer volume of fire, is suffering significantly more casualties than the Russians. It's not to say the Russians are not suffering casualties. But again, you've got social media, and you've got overhead satellites, the number of new graveyard graves being dug, the number of new cemeteries cropping up in Ukraine is readily visible. You're not seeing the same thing in Russia. So the just those two indicators

from an intelligence analyst standpoint, tell me that Ukraine is suffering a grievous number of casualties compared to Russia. Here's President Zelenskyy yesterday, actually, in Copenhagen, praising the Copenhagen government for sending him something he may never be able to use, which are F-16s. When Ukraine needs weapons, you help. And I thank you and the whole of Denmark, all the weapons you are giving to protect freedom. And for F-16s, we agreed it on. Thank you so much. Today we are confident that Russia will lose this war. It looked more Hollywood to you than a realistic statement made in a time of great distress. I mean, you and our other colleagues have pointed out how long it will take to untrain Ukrainian pilots to fight Soviet MiGs, fly Soviet MiGs, and then retrain them to fly American F-16s.

You're talking about a time where Zelensky will probably be living in his townhouse in Paris or his villa in Miami. Yeah, well, you're looking at a minimum, minimum, to just be barely competent, a three-month training program. Then even if you get the six months, okay, so you got a pilot who can fly an airplane. Well, let's say they've got 12 of these. It's still not a game changer. Actually, the thing that changes in this is if they can attach some missiles to the bottom of that aircraft that are capable of penetrating into Russia, all this does is raise the possibility of Russia striking back at targets in Europe, such as Poland or Romania or Germany or even Denmark,

if they're facilitating attacks on Russian territory. And the fact of the matter is the Russian air defense is very robust and it's very powerful. And so these planes are not going to survive that long. They'll just survive enough to maybe create an incident that's going to require greater retaliation by Russia. It's not, you know, this search for these miracle weapons that will change the situation on the ground is just, it is a sign of the desperation on the part of the West. I want to show you two clips, one of which I know you've seen because we played it for you before. It's President Biden in Helsinki last month in July, insisting that Putin has already lost the war. And then we're going to follow it with a clip just this past

weekend from Camp David by Jake Sullivan saying, no handicapping, no predicting the outcome. Watch this, Larry. There is no possibility of him winning the war in Ukraine. He's already lost that war. Imagine if even if anyway, he's already lost that war. I will say that over the course of the past two years, there have been a lot of analyses of how this war would unfold coming from a lot of quarters. And we've seen numerous changes in those analyses over time as dynamic battlefield conditions change. So what we have said from multiple podiums and multiple briefings remains the same, which is we're doing everything we can to support Ukraine in its counteroffensive. We're not going to handicap the outcome. We're not

going to predict what's going to happen because this war has been inherently unpredictable. What we did this week is formalize through a letter from Secretary Blinken to his counterparts in Europe that upon the completion of that training, the United States would be prepared in consultation with Congress to approve third-party transfer of F-16 aircraft to Ukraine. There have, for reasons I don't fully understand, been questions about whether we were actually going to do that. So to put all of those questions to rest, then in fact, the training will be followed by the transfer as we work with Congress to effectuate that and with our allies. So is the government confronted with reality? Is it seeking an off-ramp or does Jake not listen to Joe? Yeah, no, they don't listen to the intelligence. Look, let's take one very clear example of the complete failure of both Ukraine and NATO.

The Russians under General Serovikin started constructing these defensive lines. There are three lines of them that consist of trenches, pillboxes, dragon's teeth, barbed wire, minefields, etc. So three levels of these that are in southern Ukraine. They started constructing that last October. At no time during that entire construction process, which U.S. and NATO satellites and other ISR could see being constructed. They knew where it was. They knew the activities that were going on. At no single point in that entire process

did the United States, NATO, or Ukraine try to destroy or disrupt the construction of those defensive lines. Why? Because if you see that being done, you should destroy it because it's going to create an obstacle for you. Instead, they let it proceed.

It gets fully constructed, activated, in place. And now, you know, now Ukraine hasn't even penetrated one of those lines. And yet I know for a fact that some of the senior U.S. military officials are being briefed by people that, in fact, Ukraine has breached one of the defensive lines. I mean, it's just a lie. So you've got American generals that are lying to themselves. And the Defense Intelligence Agency, which ought to know better, instead of presenting really hard-hitting facts,

is soft-peddling what's going on do you think that war has become so profitable for so many people that it fails to shock or we sugarcoat it follow the money you put your finger right on it judge so what what's happening is the united states is taking a bunch of old junk, dressing, you know, oh, we're sending F-16s. Those F-16s are almost as old as I am, okay? So you're sending, and I'm older. Larry, you're not old junk.

So you're sending aircraft that's, you know, 50 years of age or older, and oh, here's our new stuff. Well, and so, yeah, Denmark, they're going to give them up. Okay, we'll give you our precious F-16s, but we get new F-35s in exchange. So they're upgrading the aircraft. Well, who benefits from that? The U.S. defense corporations, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Raytheon, you know, go down the list. And really, there are hundreds of other smaller firms that are making money off of this. The cost, this was really shocking, the estimated cost of what we're going to end up putting into Ukraine.

This is according to Steve Bryan, a former Defense Department, U.S. Defense Department official, $500 billion. Think about that. Our U.S. defense budget. To do what, Larry? $500 billion. That's five in terms of economic aid, military aid that's going into Ukraine. $500 billion. When the bill's all said and done in terms of what we've given, what's in the pipeline, and what's going to be given. How could the American people, I realize that we have the big government war party in Congress, which is 90% of the Republicans and 90% of the Democrats, but how could the American people possibly tolerate something like that?

They shouldn't, especially when, if you're in Hawaii, you get a $700 check for having your home burned to the ground. Oh boy, compare that to a half a billion dollars. Is Ukraine a humanitarian crisis? It's beyond humanitarian crisis. So, you know, the population of Ukraine used to be around 40 million. Now it's estimated down to 27 million.

So it hasn't been at that level for over 120 years, I believe, going back into the end, tell end of the 19th century. So, and on top of that, the human trafficking, women being forced into prostitution. So it is just that the society is being decimated in a way, and put the casualties into the proper context. Estimated 400,000 Ukrainian men have died out of a population of 27 million. In World War II, when the United States had around 150 million people, our total casualties in World War II killed in action were 472,000. So think about that. We had a population that was about seven times the size of Ukraine, and yet Ukraine's suffering about the same level of killed in action that we suffered over four years of warfare. This has only happened to them in a year and a half.

How is this more likely to end? President Zelensky facing reality or a coup against him or the generals just just saying to the troops go home guys it's over the the Ukrainian General saying to the Ukrainian troops go home guys it's over uh I I think the most likely scenario is zielinski's going to be overthrown um the second most likely is he'll be killed um I do not see Zelensky doing a backflip and coming to the Russians saying, okay, let's negotiate, because I don't think the Russians are in any mood to negotiate. What are the terms? The only terms for negotiation is for Ukraine to surrender,

Ukraine to stop attacking Russian territory, and Ukraine to not agree to go into NATO to stay away from NATO and provide a security guarantee to Russia I I don't see Russia uh relenting on any of those positions Larry Johnson always a pleasure my friend we'll have you back Friday afternoon with Ray McGovern I don't know what the topic will be, but something hot as always. Much appreciated, Larry. Thank you. Oh, boy.

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