Judging Freedom - Scott Ritter: Explaining Ukraine’s Military Failures

Episode Date: February 26, 2024

Scott Ritter: Explaining Ukraine’s Military FailuresSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Bay with WGU. With courses available online 24-7 and monthly start dates, WGU offers maximum flexibility so you can focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu. Hi everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, February 26th, 2024. Scott Ritter joins us now rounds of the talk 31,000. During the course of one of the interviews, and we'll play this one for you in a minute, he said millions have died. And then he corrected himself and said millions will die. on the Speaker of the House of Representatives to get the House to vote affirmatively and support the aid package that the Senate passed, which is between $60 and $61 billion. You have pointed out that it's not going to come all at once, that whatever we send them will come over the course

of time, and that it's too little too late. What is the present day comparison from your professional observations of the Russian military to the Ukrainian military in Ukraine as we speak? I mean, there's no comparison today between the two services. The Ukrainian military is a shell of its former self. The United States and NATO spent a considerable amount of time and effort to train and equip a modern Ukrainian army. Between 2015 and right before the Russian invasion of February 2022, we ran major training missions inside Ukraine and outside Ukraine. At one time, the United States was training a Ukrainian battalion every 55 days to NATO standards. And that's the Ukrainian army that existed at the time of the Russian invasion. And that's the Ukrainian army that fought the Russians initially. According to the

Ukrainians themselves, that army had largely ceased to exist by May, June of 2022. Their heroic resistance wasn't done without a cost. They suffered egregious losses. And, you know, then they replaced them. The guys they replaced them with were people who were trained in Europe to NATO standards, a more rapid training. But you can do a lot. You can cut out a lot of BS in basic training. You can take guys and just focus on combat skills. You can come up with a competent force. And so the army that was rebuilt at that time is the military that carried out the successful offensive operations in the fall of 2022. But that army was ground down in the fall and in the winter of 2022, leading to the third incarnation

of the NATO-trained Ukrainian force. And this is the one that was built up to carry out the summer counteroffensive of 2023. That army was destroyed and now there's nothing left. What's left is an army of people who are poorly trained, not very motivated. Their equipment is largely destroyed and there's no reserves. So even this military, you can't rotate them out. The guys on the front lines are getting ground down. There's nobody to replace them. Contrast that with the Russians who started this war with a professional force. They took some casualties, but, you know, nowhere near the losses of the Ukrainians. They were built up with a combination of mobilized reserves, 300,000, and around 460,000 volunteers, many of them whom had prior military service, all of whom received

extensive training and fell in on new equipment. And today, while the Ukrainians are busy trying to thump guys on the head and Shanghai them off to receive eight days of training before they go to the front lines, where their average life expectancy is under four days. The Russians are getting over 1,500 volunteers per day. 53,000 Russians volunteered to serve in the Special Military Operation Zone from January 1st until, I think it was just about a week or so when the Russians announced this statistic. 53,000, the average age is in the mid-30s. That means that the guys that are volunteering are men who have families, who have jobs, who have children. Why would they leave this to go fight in this war?

Because they love Russia. They're not doing it for money. They're leaving well-paying jobs to go take a military salary. They're doing it because they believe in the cause, so they're motivated. The Russian army is orders of magnitude better, more professional, better equipped, better trained, better motivated, better led than their Ukrainian counterparts. And it's showing on the battlefield. I don't want to get into Gaza yet, but I want you to compare and contrast the professionalism of the Russian army in Ukraine and its concern for targeting legitimate military targets versus the slaughter by the IDF in Gaza and its rampant killing of any Palestinian it can find? I think the big difference here is that the Russians view the Ukrainians as their brothers. Of course, the Russians have a bitter hatred towards the Bandarists, the Nazis, the ideological

descendants of the force that the Soviet Union back in the Second World, when they were allied with the United States, sacrificed 27 million people to destroy. And it's back in Ukraine, fostered by the United States. So the Russians have no sympathy for this ideology. But for the Ukrainian people, for the Ukrainian soldiers that they're fighting, they have nothing but sympathy and empathy for. They encourage the Ukrainians to surrender the soldiers and they treat them well once they have surrendered. The Russians are assiduous in their targeting. That doesn't mean that civilians don't die. Of course, civilians die. It's a tragic reality of any war, but they've kept

the numbers very low because of the way they have targeted the civilians that die, generally die because the Ukrainians use them as human shields. You know, if you take a look at modern war, when you talk about large scale ground combat, the correlation of combatant deaths to civilian deaths is roughly one to one. This is how it played out in World War II. You take a look at the liberation of Normandy. The Normandy, the Normandy campaign cost France about 60,000 civilians. And you total up the casualties of both the Allies

and the Germans during that campaign, it's around 60,000, one to one. Right now, when you add up the Ukrainian casualties, and it ain't 31,000, it's in excess of 400,000. That's just based upon obituaries that have been published in Ukraine. The Russians have suffered maybe upwards of 400,000. That's just based upon obituaries that have been published in Ukraine. The Russians have suffered maybe upwards of 80,000 dead. So we're looking at over a half a million dead. And yet the numbers of civilians that have died is in the 20,000 range. This tells you that because it's a fraction of the number of combatant deaths, that there's something going on that is different, that the Russians aren't targeting haphazardly. The Russians are being very careful in their targeting. In fact, the Russians are sacrificing

their own soldiers to save civilians. When the Battle of Mariupol, when the Ukrainians dug into an apartment building, they'd keep 50, 100, 120 civilians hostage in the building, knowing that the Russians wouldn't level the building with airstrikes. So the Russians had to advance across open terrain, take casualties, close with the basements, rescue these people, evacuate them, taking more casualties before they could assault the building. And even then, they wouldn't take the building down because they were told by the civilians there that, you know, grandma and grandpa, you know, Smetovich is on the third floor and they haven't left their apartment. So now the Russians had to assault the building and go up carefully in each room, taking casualties until they find the grandpas and grandma and evacuate them. Now we go to Israel. The Israelis, basically,

they hate the Palestinians. I mean, I never saw this kind of hate. I've been to Israel many, many times, and I never saw what I'm seeing today, this visceral hatred, this genocidal anger towards the Palestinians where they can justify not only the slaughter of combatants. Again, I tell you, the Russians encourage Ukrainians to surrender and treat them well. The Israelis aren't taking prisoners. They're killing all military-aged men, assuming that they're Hamas, but they're doing the same thing to women and children, slaughtering them. They encourage them to gather in tent cities, saying that they're safe. They drop leaflets, making that happen. And then they bomb them, slaughtering them, killing them by the thousands.

There's no comparison at all between the way the Russians approach this war and the way the Israelis approach this war. One is a professional military that adheres with the international laws of war. The other one are genocidal maniacs who are just committing mass murder. Back to Ukraine. Over the weekend, President Zelensky's office said that the number of Ukrainian casualties was 31,000. How far off is this and how ludicrous is this that they would expect the Western world or anybody to believe this? Look, as you said, it's easily an order of magnitude or more off. It's a ludicrous figure. Nobody believes it. I don't know why the Ukrainian president is throwing that number out there because if it's designed to convince the West, the West knows better. I mean, the people that are in the know, know better. Even the highly deflated numbers that the West

puts out there puts the Ukrainian deaths in over a,000. So it's just a ridiculous number. What I see with the Ukrainian president is a man who is increasingly detached from reality. He's somebody who has lost his bearings, so to speak. He's a desperate man. He understands what's happening. He understands that he's being abandoned. He understands he's being defeated. He understands that there's no hope. And so he's falling into this delusion, you know, where he is trying to convince himself of an alternative reality. And in doing so, he's trying to convince others.

But it doesn't matter. The Russians really don't care what he says. They don't act on anything he says. They do what they do on the battlefield. And as we see, the West increasingly doesn't care what Zelensky says either. Here's President Zelensky over the weekend. This is where he says millions have been killed, and then he corrects himself. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. English is not his native tongue, and says millions will be killed. But this is an interview with CNN over the weekend.

It starts out with some criticism of Senator J.D. Vance, but then it gets into the meatier subject matter about which I want to ask you. Senator J.D. Vance, who was in Munich at the security conference but didn't meet with you. He said that even if you got the 60 billion dollars in aid, it is not going to fundamentally change the reality on the battlefield. What's your response to that? I'm not sure that he understands what's going on here. And we don't need any rhetoric Δεν χρειάζεται κανένα ρητορίο από άνθρωποι που δεν είναι σκληρά στη δύναμη. Να καταλάβεις ότι πρέπει να έρθεις στην πρώτη στήρα για να δεις τι συμβαίνει, να μιλήσεις με τους ανθρώπους, μετά να πας σε πολίτες για να καταλάβεις τι θα γίνει με τους ανθρώπους και τι θα γίνει με τους ανθρώπους χωρίς αυτό το υποστήριο. Θα καταλάβεις ότι διότι έχουν σκληρά στρατηγείς, θα σκληραστεί.

Οπότε δεν καταλάβει αυτό. understand that millions of people have been killed, will be killed. So he doesn't understand it? Because he doesn't understand it. Of course, God bless, you don't have the war on your territory. Bad night the night before. I don't know, he looks exhausted and doesn't appear very persuasive. Well, first of all, on this number, the number that you gave north of 400,000, McGregor says around 500, that's an objective number based upon grave sites and obituaries, as opposed to a subjective number based upon what the Ukrainians want, the Ukrainian government wants people to believe. Am I right? Right. Look, Zelensky has said once before when people were publishing numbers, he gave an interview and he said that that's highly classified information,

that he doesn't want to speak to that because whoever leaked that information to the press is committing treason because it's a very sensitive number. He's talking about casualties. And that time, I forget the number that had been put out there, but it was closer to 300,000. And Zelensky was saying that whoever leaked that has committed treason. So we know it's a sensitive number because the reality of this number is so horrific that if the Ukrainian government was ever to openly acknowledge it, I'll give you an example. I mean, the Ukrainians that have buried their sons, their husbands, their brothers, they know that they're dead. And like I said, there's 400,000 obituaries published that back up

that number, but there's over a hundred thousand missing. And these are people that are dead, whose bodies have been abandoned on the battlefield, or as there's over 100,000 missing. And these are people that are dead, whose bodies have been abandoned on the battlefield, or as there's increasing evidence, buried in mass graves by the Ukrainian military and not reported because of corrupt battalion commanders who continue to receive the salaries of these dead soldiers and enrich themselves. This just shows you, again, you know, the state of the Ukrainian leadership. I mean, the fact that you have battalion commanders who aren't reporting back their casualties, it means they don't care about their men. They view their men as a mechanism of enrichment.

This is a level of corruption that's beyond imagination, but it's real. And so Colonel McGregor's numbers are actually closer to reality. 400,000 obituaries, over 100,000 missing, believed, strongly believed to be dead. That puts you over 500,000. And this is dead we're talking about, not casualties. Dead. You can triple that for wounded. And so we're talking, you know, 1.5 million wounded, 500,000 dead. That's 2 million casualties. And now we see where Zelensky's

talking about millions, because it is millions. Millions of Ukrainians have fallen in this conflict, dead and wounded. Is Senator Vance correct when he says, even if the 60 million were to pass the House of Representatives, it's not going to show up right away and it's too little too late? 60 billion, forgive me, 60 billion. How can I confuse million for billion? Pardon me. 60 billion. Judge, you put a million in front of me or a billion. It's just more money I've ever seen in my life. So it really doesn't matter at that point in time. Maybe for people in Congress, billions, they're used to it, but it's just a lot of money. But Senator Vance is 100 percent correct. First of all, there's no amount of money that can be thrown at Ukraine right now to reverse these problems.

Even if Zelensky's desk suddenly was overflown with, you know, packs of tightly packed, freshly printed one hundred dollar bills. How do you turn that into a trained soldier? You still have to find a soldier who is physically fit and mentally capable and morally willing to engage in this war, to receive the training. Training takes time. The equipment doesn't instantly get turned into, you know, from dollars into equipment. Somebody has to produce it, et cetera. The money that is being offered to Ukraine that hasn't been approved yet, the vast majority comes back to the American defense industrial base, which will be used to produce weapons from scratch. The weapons have not been produced. It's not like you go to, you know, call up Amazon and say, all right,

I finally got my allowance. I get to order those books I always wanted to order. And you do, and the books are freshly, they're already printed there. They pull them out and mail them. No, it's as if somebody has to hire the author who has to write the book, who then has to send it to the printing press and get it all done and then ship it to you. That takes time. And most of the weapons that will be built using this money aren't going to Ukraine or going to replenish US stocks that have already been drawn down because of previous shipments. So the vast majority of that money doesn't manifest itself into aid for Ukraine. It manifests itself into production for the United States. What production does go to Ukraine is production from scratch. And that means that the Ukrainians aren't going to see this until it's built. And most of this isn't going to be built until the end of 2024, in some cases, into 2025.

So HIMARS and ATAKOMs and 155-millimeter artillery shells, those things are not sitting in a warehouse ready to be shipped tomorrow to Ukraine. They've already been to Ukraine and been depleted or been to Israel and been used there. Well, we have, understand we do have a U.S. military and we do have reserves of ammunition, but those are for our military contingencies. You know, God forbid, you know, the balloon went up in Europe and we have 100,000 troops there who would have to go to war. They need this ammunition. Our artillery battalions there need 155 millimeter shells. They need the HIMARS. They need the ATAKAMs. If they give them to the Ukrainians and then they're called upon to fight and they have nothing,

they're going to lose. So we have to protect our stores of munitions. We can't allow them to drop down to dangerously low levels, and they're already dangerously low because our planning, even before the Ukrainian conflict, never took in the level of ammunition expenditure that the new reality of war is mandating. So we have to build more ammunition to get our stocks up to where we can competently wage war ourselves. This is, in addition to any ammunition that's extra that we then give to the Ukrainians. So it's, you know, this, this, yeah, we have to build a whole bunch of new ammunition. Chris, run the clip. It's very short, but it'll get you going a bit.

From Fiona Hill. Putin thinks that he's winning because we've blinked, because we don't seem to have the courage, either politically or morally right now, to stand up and support Ukraine and fending him off and fending Russia off. I mean, I remember her from her testimony against President Trump in the first impeachment. I don't remember exactly who she is because she's got a British accent, and yet she was something in the State Department or the National Security Council. But this is the typical Victoria Nuland neocon line, is it not? Well, first of all, you know, she's, I forget the name of her book. It has Putin in it, but she's part of this category of what I call the Putin whisperers,

the new academics that emerged in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, who, when they talk about relating with Russia, speak in terms of a Western domination of Russia. Her ideal is Russia of the 1990s with a compliant president, Boris Yeltsin, who did whatever we wanted him to do, a Russia that was weak, that allowed us to exploit them politically, economically, weak military. That's her ideal. So she's deeply resentful of Vladimir Putin, who emerged in 1999, 2000 as a new Russian leader who said, no, Russia will stand on its own two feet. Russia will be a sovereign state, the last thing Fiona Hill wanted. So that's her mindset from the start. So anytime, anything Putin does that doesn't

replicate Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, she automatically takes umbrage at. And it's reflective here. I mean, Putin thinks he won, she said, because we blinked. Well, that's sort of what happens. I mean, have you seen two fighters look at each other as they're weighing in, taking measure of each other, and the fighter that looks away and blinks, he's generally the guy that gets knocked out in the second round because he's not there. We're not there. Putin is there.

He ain't blinking. So, Fiona, go home. We're done with you. I'm going to transition, but I'm going to keep the same metaphor. The IDF and Hezbollah, who will blink first? Look, neither one wants a war. That's the reality. Hezbollah understands what will happen if they go to war against Israel.

They understand that Israel will bomb Beirut. Israel will bomb Beirut. Israel will bomb Lebanese towns and villages, and there will be a horrific cost paid by the Lebanese people. And Hezbollah isn't just a militia. It's a political party. It's part of the Lebanese government, and it has duties and responsibilities to the Lebanese people. If they didn't have these responsibilities, they already would have gone to war against

Israel because militarily speaking, Hezbollah is prepared to fight a war that Israel isn't prepared to fight. Hezbollah is ready to take this war to Northern Israel, to occupy Israel, to make Israel fight in the village and towns of Northern Israel. And the Israelis know this. They know that if they push too hard and Hezbollah comes across the border, that they could lose northern Israel, that they could lose the Galilee, they could lose the Golan Heights. So neither side wants this fight. Both sides are sort of looking away. They don't want to make eye contact because once you lock in those eyes, then somebody is going to blink. And I believe it will be the Israelis to blink because they understand that this is an existential issue for them, that if they do engage in a full-scale conflict with Hezbollah, not only will Hezbollah prevail, but Hezbollah

have the backing of Iran. That's a whole different ballgame when it comes to what Iran and the pain that Iran can bring down on Israel. In the same weekend, Amos Hochstein, Israeli-born IDF fighter, now an American citizen, Joe Biden's chief negotiator, supervisor of all the negotiations over there, says the settlers must settlements in the West Bank are illegal. Well, the settlements in the West Bank are clearly illegal. It took the United States a long time to recognize this. How can the government speak out of both sides of its mouth in a matter that involves life and death on a daily basis? Well, Judge, the problem is you say life and death, but the lives and the deaths are Palestinians primarily, and we don't care about them. We really don't. I mean, you can tell that just with the callous indifference that we hear all Americans say, too many Palestinians have died. How many is enough? I mean, that's just the most ludicrous, morally corrupt statement imaginable. Too many have died.

Too many civilians have lost their lives. Well, how many is enough? Well, then they'll say, well, one's too many. Dude, we're up to 28,000. 15,000 of them are children. We're well past the one stage, and yet we still have government officials saying, well, it's war. War is hell. There will be casualties, but these aren't casualties. Again, these aren't collateral damage. This is deliberate targeted murder by Israel of Palestinians, but the United States government doesn't care. We had a U.S. congressman confronted by a reporter, said, kill them all. Then later on, he meant to say, I meant all Hamas. No, he meant all, and that is the sentiment in the U.S.

Congress. Behind closed doors, just kill them all. And it has to be that way. If you say, as a U.S. lawmaker, that Hamas must go away, you do know that Hamas is the only legitimate governing authority of the Palestinian people. The Palestinian people recognize it as such. Russia right now recognizes it as such. Other nations recognize it as such. It's organizing itself to be the post-conflict governing authority. They're not going away. And so the only solution you have if Hamas refuses to go away is to kill them all if your bottom line position is we won't negotiate with Hamas. And that's what's happening right now. And the United States is compliant and complicit in this. Here's Prime Minister Netanyahu yesterday making that same standard sick defense for the slaughter of the Palestinian people. Well, if you extrapolate the numbers that died on October 7th to as if it were America, the numbers would be catastrophic and the American people would want to do the same thing. Look at what George Bush did.

You're comparing yourself to George Bush as a model of moral uprightness. Well, here he is. What would America do, Margaret, if you face the equivalent of 29-11s, 50,000 Americans slaughtered in one day, 10,000 Americans, including mothers and children, held hostage? Would you not be doing what Israel is doing? You'd be doing a hell of a lot more. And all Americans that I talk to nearly all say that. So Israel has gone to extraordinary lengths, calling up people, civilians, Palestinians in Gaza, telling them, leave your home, sending pamphlets. We have done that effort. Hamas tries to keep them at gunpoint. We'll clear them out of

harm's way. We'll complete the job and achieve total victory, which is necessary to give a secure future for Israel, a better future for Gaza, a better future for the Middle East, and a setback for the Iran terror axis. That's in all our interest. It's in America's interest, too. Suddenly he's interested in a better future for Gaza. Look, on the one hand, Benjamin Netanyahu is right. America would do something. We know this. Look, in Vietnam, we had a situation where, you know, in 1969, 1970, American troops were tired of getting ambushed by the Viet Cong. We know that American troops are capable of rounding up civilians, shooting them in a ditch, raping the women in front of their

children, ripping children out of their mother's arms, bayoneting them to death, and worse. We know Americans can do this because we still have people like Seymour Hersh alive who report on this. So Benjamin Daniel, I'm not debating with you about America being capable of committing the kind of murder that Israel's committing. We know we can do it, but this doesn't make it right. And please don't insult the United States. We don't have a Hannibal directive. All right. October 7th was a military defeat. October 7th was where the Hamas came across the border and took you by surprise. They killed nearly 400 Israeli military personnel. The remaining people, about 800, the majority of them were killed by you, you and your military, who hunted them down because of the Hannibal Directive. We now know

that the vast majority of Israeli civilians killed on October 7th were killed by the IDF, by Apache helicopters, by tanks, by your own soldiers. The Israelis say as they were driving us, the hostages, as they were driving us back into Gaza, we were attacked by helicopters. One lady, you killed my husband, you killed my child, I was wounded. We know the Israelis slaughtered their own people. Benjamin Netanyahu, do not equate America with that, because as bad as we are, we don't kill our own people, you son of a bitch. Thank you, Scott, for your passion. One other story to relate to you. This airman that immolated himself in front of the Israeli embassy,

Aaron Bushnell, our friend and colleague, Max Blumenthal, who's a latter-day Seymour Hersh when it comes to digging things up, found his orders. There it is.

That he was ordered to be ready on a moment's notice to deploy to Israel. And it was, listen, I don't defend suicide. I don't defend what he did, but the American people need to understand it and the media needs to address it. Not with an Israeli flag waving in the background like NBC did and not without stating what it was about like all the, look at those headlines,

like all the major newspapers in the U.S. did. Only rats gave a headline that said what it was truly about, a protest of American support of Gaza war. But the American public needs to know what we didn't know until Max reported this a few hours ago. That American airmen have been told to get ready on a moment's notice to deploy and it's mandatory. As soon as we tell you, you'll go. And this, I'll put it up again, Chris, I think it was November when this,

there's a date on there somewhere. 21 November, 2023. There you go. Your thoughts. You know, it's interesting when you go through this man's social media, he has a posting that says, a lot of people wonder, there it is. Many of us like to ask ourselves, what would I do if I were alive during slavery or the Jim Crow South like to ask ourselves, what would I do if I were alive during slavery or the Jim Crow South or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide? And the answer is, you're doing it right now, which is nothing. This is the harshest

indictment of American citizens that has been put out there by anybody in modern times. And it's done by an airman of the United States Air Force. He has exposed the American people for the moral hypocrites that we collectively are. We claim to be somebody who is a nation who stands for right, doing the right thing. And we all sit there and speak of this, but how many Americans have actually got off their butts and gone out and done something? At least, I'm not perfect, but at least when I say I want to improve relations between the United States and Russia, I get off my ass and I travel to Russia and I put it all on the line and trying to improve relations. I'm making, I'm doing my best effort. There's other people out there that do the same thing for Gaza, doing the same thing, but the

vast majority of the Americans are sitting at home doing nothing. And I think this man, this, this, this kid who has apparently a moral conscience that just consumed him. He's somebody who just said, I've got to do something. And he looked at the examples of history. I mean, if you study war, one of the more telling moments during the Vietnam War is when the Buddhist monk immolated himself in protest of the conflict. It's an act that many people would say is an act of desperation, but how desperate was this kid? He had orders to go to Israel in a war that he couldn't support. And he's on active duty. He has to obey these orders. So does he bottle this up inside and say, well, I'm against all this, but I'm going to do my job.

I'm going to do my duty. Well, apparently he couldn't. But then he said, what do I do about this? How do I let everybody know about this moral crisis that faces not just me, but all of America? And he burned himself to death. I wouldn't do it. I don't have the courage to do that. There's no way I would do that.

But a lot of people say, well, he's mentally unbalanced. Maybe what I say is this man's a freaking hero. Excuse my language. But this is a guy who believed in something and he paid the ultimate price to send a message to get people to talk and reach in deep inside and say, what am I going to do about this genocide that's being committed in our name, our collective name? And it's not just being committed in our name, our government's actively complicit. And that makes us, we the people of the United States of America, this democratic republic that we have,

we elected these people to act in our name and they're doing things in our name that is criminal, that is genocidal. What are we going to do about it? And as he said, many people talk about it. They say, what would we do? Ask yourselves. Everybody watching the show, look in the mirror. What would you do? And the answer is, you're doing it.

Nothing. Last question. And thank you for your passion. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, aren't they taught it is unlawful to obey an unlawful order? Oh, from day one, the first thing that's drilled in your head is about the Constitution and that you have a moral obligation not to obey an unlawful order. And they get into what an unlawful order is, you know, murdering people, torturing, you know, prisoners of war, things of that nature. But the problem comes when

people start talking about the unconstitutionality of an order. And here's where there's, the issue is that it's not the soldier's purview. It's not the officer's, junior officer's purview to decide on the constitutionality of an order. That's the job of the United States Congress. And again, this is where Congress has failed. Congress has not talked at all about what we're doing with Israel. The fact that the Biden administration has bypassed constitutional requirements of power of the purse belongs to Congress, but not when it comes to Israel. All money is allocated to Israel. Munitions are diverted without any congressional authority. U.S. troops are being deployed to Israel without any congressional authority.

Has Congress declared Israel to be a conflict where War Powers Act reporting is required? Why are we deploying American troops to Israel? And this is, I think, where the soldier is saying, I can't do this. The fact that we have allowed this to become such a gray zone where a soldier now is confused as to the constitutionality of an order shows you the moral depravity of our leadership. The United States Congress has a constitutional responsibility to declare war. They also have a constitutional responsibility to talk about where military force is authorized, where military deployments are authorized. That is their job. And they have abrogated that responsibility, thereby creating this constitutional gray zone that makes morally righteous people like this airman confused and to this point, confused to the point where he felt so powerless that he had

to do something this tragic and this dramatic. Scott Ritter, you're a great man. Thank you, my dear friend. Thank you for your knowledge, for your intellect, for your courage, and for your passion. This has been an extraordinary, extraordinary interview. I'm deeply grateful that we are friends and colleagues. I think you know that already, but I have to say it again. And thank you for helping us reach 300,000 subscriptions, which we reached just about an hour or so ago. So congratulations on that and congratulations to your viewership thank you thank you my dear friend we'll see you again soon

all the best okay thanks whew fabulous uh coming up tomorrow our usually our usual uh tuesday how do you follow that you don't our tuesday Tuesday regulars, Karen Kwiatkowski and Matt Ho. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.