Judging Freedom - Sending Cluster Bombs to Ukraine NOT the Way to Go w/ Col Doug Macgregor

Episode Date: July 10, 2023

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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, July 10th, 2023. Colonel McGregor joins us now. Colonel, always a pleasure. Thank you very much for your time. Let's start with really the oddball issue over the weekend or the news from over the weekend. And that's the latest on Yevgeny Progozhin. He was called into the Kremlin with 35 senior military leaders and had a sort of amicable, we think, conversation for three hours with President Putin himself.

I guess we still don't know what that march from Rostov-on-Don to Moscow was. Was it a temper tantrum? Was it a vanity project? Was it a coup? Was it a coup gone bad? Well, it obviously was not a coup and it was not an uprising. There was nobody involved in it, but Prigozhin and some portion of his Wagner group. Beyond that, I'm sure your intelligence experts who have connections can tell you whether or not this was staged for Western consumption or there was something more to it. My own view is Wagner was a very effective organization that has niche capabilities. And as a result, Putin had no intention of disposing of it and certainly was not going to arrest and execute Prokhozhin for treason. So I think whatever it was, it's over. Right now, I'm told that the Wagner Group is largely in

Luhansk, but will move to Byelorussia where facilities are being built for them. And Progozhin has been reported to be back in Petersburg. So I think this turned out to be a nothing burger for the West. But I do think it had an impact on Putin insofar as it alerted him to some of the discontent at the top of the Russian military establishment. The Wagner group did kill somewhere between 12 and 20 Russian pilots in their helicopters. So who knows what Prokofiev told them? They must have thought they really were waging some sort of a war. This is Russians, Russian military killing Russian military in Russia. Well, as I think we discussed before, I was told that an Air Force general, Russian Air

Force general committed those forces. They were not committed by President Putin. And the outcome was as you describe it. By the way, I sincerely hope that people in the West are paying attention to the vulnerabilities of these helicopters, because we in the Army have invested billions in that capability. And that capability is rapidly becoming a permissive environment only capability. So we should not invest heavily in that and expect it to perform in a high intensity conflict environment. What does it take to take down a helicopter?

Not much. Listen, if you get close enough, you can knock it down with a rock. The problem with helicopters is they're very fragile. And at one point in time, they were stealthy and hard to identify and hard to find. That's no longer the case. And almost any shoulder-fired air defense weapon, any radar-guided gun system will annihilate them long before they get a chance to fire anything that's really lethal. And that's why I think we've seen the Russians use them only behind the lines, behind friendly troops. And here's Wagner, which is largely, but not exclusively, infantry-centric. They obviously had air defense weapons, and they shot them. Over the weekend, President Erdogan of Turkey more or less betrayed President Putin by calling for and saying he'd be in favor of Ukraine joining NATO.

And now in the past half hour, he has said he will go along with Sweden joining NATO. I mean, these are two profound turnabouts and direct confrontations to his former friend, Vladimir Putin. Well, let's understand Mr. Erdogan and his view of life, which President Putin certainly understands. And that is that Mr. Erdogan is first and foremost about Turkish interests. And what is in Turkey's interests usually drives his decision-making. Secondly, and a very close second, by the way, he's concerned with Islamic interests, the extension of Islamic influence, power, and people. So those two things are uppermost in his mind. If he makes

a decision to go along with something like this, then there's a benefit to Turkey and to Islam. I think in the case of Sweden, he was lobbying very hard behind the scenes for guarantees or promises that Turkey would be admitted to the European Union. I'm a little surprised if he got those promises, because I think it's widely known in Europe that if Turkey were to enter the European Union, you would see an exodus of several large states out of the European Union, because opening the borders to the Turks would invite a flood of people looking for employment and in many cases looking to settle. They've already got more of the Muslims from Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa than anybody wants to be blunt.

And so I find that hard to believe. But if he were promised that, the danger over the long term is that Germany, Austria, Italy, France would all consider leaving the EU. Does the EU have a rule of unanimity the way NATO does? You know, I don't know. It could. It may well have that. Usually they've hidden behind conditions regarding rule of law, judicial processes, human rights, and so on, democratic norms, and those things have been used to keep the Turks out. Again, what we face today and what Erdogan is exploiting, to be blunt with you, are two conditions in NATO.

One is desperation. Desperation has set in because it's obvious to everyone that Ukraine is lost. Ukraine is on is really on the ropes in the worst sense of the matter. It's a catastrophe. And then secondly, disintegration. NATO is falling apart behind the scenes. There's no unanimity for anything except we don't want a war with Russia. And of course, the United States and Great Britain are pushing hard for that war with support from, of all people, the Poles and Lithuanians. But I rather doubt that the Latvians, Estonians, Slovaks, Hungarians, Romanians want to go down that path. For that matter, nobody else in the West. Well, we know that President Orbán

of Hungary will block any material expansion of NATO. I don't know if he has a veto power in the EU. You just mentioned that the Ukrainians are destined to lose the war, a view that you have articulated and substantiated many, many times, along with many of our other colleagues. Jack Devine, of course, along with many of our other colleagues. Jack Devine, of course, has a different view. Here's what he said when I asked him just a few minutes ago. He accused me of goading him just to get this clip for you. He can be a pretty funny guy.

I won't even tell you what the viewers say about him. It's so, so harsh that I just couldn't articulate it. But here's my question to Jack on this very topic. And here's his answer to you just a few minutes ago, Colonel. Do you think that the Ukrainian forces can drive the Russians out of Ukraine? What I've said all along is just hold them and they will collapse. Just hold them. They don't have to drive is just hold them and they will collapse. Just hold them. They don't have to drive them out. That's an American view. Drive them out. I'm saying you hold them and Putin will fall and you'll cut a new deal. I've been consistent at the thrills discussion, driving them out. Will they be able to regain their territories? I believe that that's

a possibility, not a probability, possibility. What do you think? Sounds like he's weakened on the margins there. Now it's a possibility, not a probability. It's a non-possibility and the probability is zero. He is going back to the original assumptions that underpin everything that we went in there to do, that have utterly failed and turned out to be invalid. Russia is not falling apart. Forget it. Putin is not going to be removed from office. That's nonsense.

And look, you've got at the same time that he's making these statements, you have the BRICS countries, Brazil, India, China, South Africa, Russia, they are all unanimous in trying to create a new currency that will be pegged to gold in terms of its value. And they have already been joined by 40 other nations. It is eminently possible that some European states that may be in NATO and the European Union right now may also opt to join BRICS and the 40 other nations. That's just the beginning. I wonder what Secretary Yellen really thought she could accomplish when she bowed to President Xi. Well, bowing in that part of the world is a matter of politeness. Americans misread that. That's not a demonstration of subservience.

I get tired of people saying that. That's what you do. But as far as she is concerned, I have no idea what's going on in that woman's mind. It's beyond my imagination. I'm sure she went over there expecting nothing, and that's what she got. Or maybe she went over there to nothing, and that's what she got. Or maybe she went over there to get them to buy more bonds and give her more money to waste. Yeah, well, they already own too many treasuries that are now worthless because they're just a little bit above zero interest rates. You know, that's the problem inside the United States and

small banks and big banks. Everybody bought these U.S. treasuries as collateral. Well, now the interest rates are rising and the interest rates are so low in those treasuries that everybody wants to offload them. But if they offload them in a fire sale overseas and here, that will crash the financial system. So I don't know how much longer that's going to continue. But the bottom line is that the BRICS and the 40 nations are probably going to be

successful at some point in paying this new currency to gold. I'm waiting for many of the nations whose gold holdings sit in the United States at either Knox or in New York City to ask us to repatriate their gold. Oh, boy. The Fed is not going to go for that. You know that. Well, I don't think the Fed is, strictly speaking, going to be allowed to decline. I think that these nations are going to demand it. The question is, is the gold there? That's what Ron Paul used to ask about all the time. We don't know. Any federal judge, in my view, would order that gold repatriated, but the judge can't order them to repatriate something that's not there. This may very well lead, you mentioned Ron Paul, whom you and I know well and both have advised, this may very well lead to his dream, which would be an audit of the Fed. A federal judge is going to accomplish what the voters were afraid to do.

All right, Federal Reserve. Jay Powell, who lived across the hall from me at Princeton, where is all that gold? Well, I think in Washington, the motto is death before dishonor. And so I think everybody will sink with the ship before they'll admit anything. So I wouldn't expect any audits of the Pentagon, let alone the Federal Reserve, to happen anytime soon. It eventually will all implode. The question is when and under what circumstances. You know, Nassim Taleb spoke very recently, and he gave a brilliant speech. And one of the points he made was we've been using monetary policy to try and address structural economic problems. He said, you can't do it. It won't work. Then he went on to talk

about the rising interest rates and the continuous unfortunate habit of adding to the money supply. His point was, you don't have to look very far to find Armageddon. It's staring you in the face. Now, nobody wants to admit that in Washington. Everybody wants to say debt doesn't matter. And you know the rest of the arguments. Right. Nothing will change for years. Right. But I think we're on that trail. And again, this goes back to my two points. Two things we got to keep in mind. Everything happening now relates to desperation and disintegration. Washington is desperate. London is desperate. Kiev is desperate. There's no easy way out other than to say, look, we've got to stop. This can't be done. We have to settle for talks

and we'll have to take what we can get because we're not in a position to dictate anything. Sending more things over there changes nothing. It's too late. It's done. The debt is everything, of course, is where the Congress is now. Most of the Republicans, nearly all the Democrats, I think Bernie Sanders voted against the new debt bill because there wasn't enough dead in it, but all the others voted for it. It's a terrible, terrible state of affairs that we're in. Colonel is switching gears. Are cluster munitions, are the use of cluster munitions in a potentially civilian environment, the commission of the war crimes? Oh, I don't know if I would consider it a war crime.

I'll leave that up to the people at the International Criminal Tribunal. I'm not in the business of making those calls. All I think is that, first of all, their utility is questionable. They don't do sufficient damage, frankly, to make it worthwhile to use them. Let me just stop you for a minute. Chris or Gary, whoever has that clip, could you run it and the colonel can talk over it? It's the testing, U.S. government testing cluster munitions. You'll see it in a second. There it is.

Now, who knows, Colonel, if all the little bomblets went off or if there are many of them still there on the ground? Well, absolutely. In 1991, we actually had a lot of trouble with bomblets that we passed when we were mounted in our tanks and armored fighting vehicles. They didn't make any difference. You could drive over one and detonate it. It had no impact. However, for all of the wheeled vehicles following behind us, they were hazardous. They destroyed wheeled vehicles, you know, Humvees, trucks. If you were dismounted,

you could lose a foot, a hand, an arm, whatever. So we actually asked during the advance across Arabia and Iraq, please stop firing cluster munitions. These things are more trouble than they're worth. I don't think it's something that is going to do any good for the Ukrainians. And remember, we have something now that we did not have 30 years ago. We have a degree of precision with all of our munitions that really doesn't make it necessary to use these clusters. These clusters were really designed at a point in time where you expected to see masses of people, masses of equipment. You weren't able to hit everything with perfect

precision, so you dumped these cluster munitions on them. I think it's a mistake. And I think we made a mistake by pushing it because now, of course, we look like shameless hypocrites, which, of course, we are. Here's Admiral Kirby on whether or not clusters should be banned, recognizing that most of the world has banned them. I want to ask you why the US has never banned them before. We are very mindful of the concerns about civilian casualties and unexploded ordnance being picked up by civilians or children and being hurt. Of course, we're mindful of that. And we're going to focus with Ukraine on demining efforts. In fact,

we're doing it right now and we will when war conditions permit. But these munitions do provide a useful battlefield capability. And I will remind that while Russia is using them in Ukraine in an aggressive war on another country and indiscriminately killing civilians. The Ukrainians will be using these cluster munitions, obviously, which have a very low dud rate, but they'll be using them to defend their own territory, hitting Russian positions. Does the Admiral know what he's talking about, battlefield capability?

Not really. I think he has a dated view of things. Remember, an awful lot of these capabilities were actually devised in the aftermath of Vietnam where we were fighting in jungles and fighting large numbers of dismounted men with rifles. And we were looking for any conceivable way we could find to harm them and defeat them. I just don't think it's necessary, and I think we're simply desperate.

What have we got? And we may not have sufficient 155 artillery rounds left in our inventory. We're discovering once again that the general officers in command of our forces have not done their jobs. You go back to 2003, we went into Iraq and discovered that the body armor we were wearing was dated. It was the same body armor that I wore in 1991. Nobody had made any effort to keep up with the threat, to deal with the lethality on the battlefield. And Shinseki's comment was, well, that's because of my predecessors. We've had a series of generals over many, many decades who have failed to prepare us in peacetime for the exigencies of

war. And that's because a lot of these people figured, well, we'll never really fight. Why worry about it? And if we do, we'll mobilize and we'll produce whatever we need. It's a huge problem. Should Secretary of Defense Austin resign because he is allowing the White House to tell him to deplete artillery rounds to such an extent that we don't have them anymore for our own use? God forbid that we need it or to give away to the Ukrainians. So now we're giving away something that kills indiscriminately. Frankly speaking, if he was doing his job, he would have raised objections six to eight months ago and pointed out that we were exhausting our war stocks and that we did not want to do that because we had no idea whether or not we might be compelled to fight somewhere. That would have been a legitimate thing for him to do. He decided not to do it then. So at this point, it's academic. I think that he, along with all of the four stars, will fall into the same boat. They did not anticipate any of this. Remember

the original assumptions. Go back to Jack Devine. If we just hold on long enough, well, you know, the Russians will collapse, they'll fall apart. Nobody wants to admit that the Russian military and its society are stronger today than they were when this began. The Poles and their militaristic leaders, are the leaders of Poland itching to put boots on the ground across the border in Ukraine? And are we in danger of the White House sending American soldiers to join them? You know, the Poles are wonderful people. They have a streak of romanticism in them that is laudable under the right circumstances. But I think there are too

many people in Poland and apparently also in Lithuania who have dreams of reconstituting the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. That was formed in about 1459 and went out of existence in 1794. It's not coming back. And the problem they have is they don't seem to understand that simply standing out in front of their capital buildings or in front of the group at Vilnius and saying, well, we Poles and Lithuanians are going to go in on our own. We don't need NATO backing. We don't want NATO backing. Doesn't make any difference. They're members of NATO. And if they should go in, whether it's a brigade of 5,000 or 6,000 or a division of 8,000 or 10,000, it doesn't make any difference.

If they go into Ukraine, they will be seen as a Trojan horse for NATO. And the Russians will regard them as such, and they will be attacked, and they will be destroyed. And then we're in a position back in Washington and London of asking, well, what do we do now? You know, we let them go. They went in. They've been shattered. Now the Poles want to commit more forces. Lithuanians want to commit more forces.

What should we do? Well, first of all, we should never let them do it. We should tell them if that's what you want to do, then you should leave the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Get out. If you want to pursue your own territorial interests, your own narrow national strategic interests, that's fine. We have no objections. But you can't do that in a way that jeopardizes the security of the entire alliance. We are not prepared to fight. You know, how many times have we been over this, Judge?

War is a matter of flesh and blood, no question about it. It's also a matter of organization, training, leadership, discipline, and the right technology and the right combinations with people to be effective. That takes years to develop. We have been pretending that we could build a large and powerful Ukrainian army on the fly. It can't be done. It has no depth. And as a result, Ukraine is now in very terrible straits. The Polish-Lithuanian incursion, if it happens, will only add to the disaster. It will change nothing. But if they're serious, if they want to address these territorial matters,

renounce NATO and then fly to Moscow and sit with Vladimir Putin and say, look, we want to do the following. And you might be surprised at what he's willing to entertain. But otherwise, it's impossible for the Russians to go along with this. Colonel, it's always a pleasure. Thank you so much. We'll be dark for two weeks while I'm on vacation, unless there's major breaking news, in which case I hope we can find you. Well, I hope that we can meet under more favorable circumstances in two weeks.

I'm hoping for something good to come out of the NATO meeting. I'm not optimistic about that. Are you? No. But it would be nice to smile and laugh instead of dwelling in all these doomsday scenarios. It's annoying. And we can all avoid it. It can all stop.

Thank you, Colonel. All the best. Same to you. Bye-bye. Thank you, Colonel. All the best. Same to you. Bye-bye. Thank you, my dear friends. More as we get it when it happens. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. We'll see you next time. Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Bay with WGU. WGU is an online accredited university that specializes in personalized learning. With courses available 24-7 and monthly start dates, you can earn your degree on your schedule.

You may even be able to graduate sooner than you think by demonstrating mastery of the material you know. Make 2025 the year you focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu.