Judging Freedom - Ukraine & the Globalist War Mongers - Col Doug Macgregor (1)

Episode Date: April 20, 2023

Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, April 20, 2023. It's about three o'clock in the afternoon here on the east coast of the United States. Colonel McGregor joins us now. Colonel, it's always a pleasure. We have been hearing lately from a variety of sources, not the least of which, or maybe the least of which, is General Petraeus, that we should be, and actually even from the Secretary of Defense when he testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, in my view, untruthfully, but he was there, that we should expect an offensive, whether you want to call it spring or you want to call it summer. Here we are in the middle of April. Spring is a month old. Something in the next month or two from an offensive by the Ukrainian military.

What are they facing? Well, right now, the Ukrainian military is woefully undermanned, at least in terms of trained manpower that can actually employ equipment and technologies with any degree of success. And that's a continual complaint. And they are standing across in front of an army that is growing with each passing day. It's now beyond the 750,000 that I predicted back before Christmas. I think we're looking at the arrival of a million troops at the front between now and sort of mid-June. And why I say that is that Putin has called up more reservists and they've also brought in the usual draftees.

And I think this is largely because they've concluded there's no alternative but to fight this war to the finish and end it on terms that they will accept for their own security. The Ukrainians have no chance whatsoever against this. And the temporary defense will remain in place to wait for this last possible offensive that the Ukrainians want to launch. But I think it's important to keep in mind that just now, the Wagner group, with support from various regular army units in the Russian army is closing off the last open road to bakhmut and the reason for that is that uh zelensky has apparently announced he's not going

to send any more Ukrainian troops into bakhmut so the very successful operations that the Russians have run costing tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives is about to end so they're going to close it off and wait for this counteroffensive that presumably will come end of April, sometime in May, who knows. I don't think it will amount too much because I just don't think they can concentrate the forces that are necessary to break through Russian defenses and make any difference whatsoever to the outcome of the war in Ukraine. I know that you and I and nearly all the people watching you right now put little stock in what General Petraeus has to say, but he appears to be a mouthpiece for the globalists.

Here he is talking just the other day, it may have been as recent as yesterday, about Ukraine prevailing in Bakhmut. It may be that Russia ultimately is able to own Bakhmut and perhaps the other location that's embattled. If they do, they will have paid an incredible price for communities that are completely destroyed. Now, President Zelensky is determined not to let them have it. If he can, he sees the symbolic value, importance of this. But what we really need to watch is not what's happening in the battlefield right now. It's what's happening at training centers that U.S. runs in Germany, Grafenwoehr-Hohenfels, UK, Poland, Ukraine itself, where entire new brigades are being established, largely with new recruits from Ukraine, but also with some seasoned commissioned and non-commissioned officers.

What is he talking about? Training centers in Great Britain, in Germany, and Ukraine itself preparing new brigades. Where are these human beings, in his view, coming from? Well, the last time I looked, there were between 30,000 and 40,000 Ukrainians outside of Ukraine being trained in Great Britain, Germany, the United States, the Czech Republic, several other places. How good is this training? How much impact has it had? Well, most of the people that were trained there previously are now dead. They died months ago. These are presumably replacements. Are they going to learn enough to make any difference to the outcome of the war? There's no evidence for that at this point. We've already seen training accidents inside Ukraine with Leopard tanks and other kinds of armored fighting vehicles. And the equipment the Ukrainians are getting are extremely maintenance

intensive. And we all know the problems with Ukrainians are getting are extremely maintenance intensive. And we all know the problems with the infrastructure when it comes to maintenance and moving repair parts forward and so forth. So short answer is I don't think it's going to make any difference. But I don't know anything beyond what I've told you about exact numbers, 30 to 40,000. Given the hundreds of thousands of Russian troops and their capabilities, I don't think it makes any difference. Do you know what this training is like? I mean, when I was an undergraduate, nothing like what you went through at West Point, I was an Army ROTC at Princeton, and my basic training was Fort Knox, Kentucky. You've probably been to Fort Knox. It was six weeks long, and I was ready to become a second lieutenant. I mean, is the training even six weeks long? You know, it could be.

It might even be a little bit longer, but keep in mind, you know, my maternal grandfather enlisted in the Army within three or four months, went off to be trained as an officer. He was a six-week wonder in 1918 and sent to France. The training made no difference at all because the firepower, machine guns, mines, barbed wire, artillery killed people regardless of how well trained they were. We're operating in that kind of environment right now. And remember, Ukraine's theater air and missile defense is practically annihilated. There are bits and pieces of it. There are pockets of it, but it's largely gone.

When you add that to these new fresh formations that have not been together for any length of time, now you're going to hurl them at the Russians who've had months to hone their defensive skills. I mean, if there's something the Russians have learned how to do, it's how to mobilize firepower and direct it accurately at great distance against any concentrations to their front. And by the way, stop and think from it. I think Larry Johnson pointed this out in an article the other day. Who in their right mind announces the imminence of an offensive unless you want to guarantee its failure? So, you know, ultimately, have you heard the Russians talk about a breakout offensive

in pursuit of what remains of the Ukrainians in June? No, I expect that. But no, they're not going to say anything about that. And they're not going to talk about their defense either. All right. You have spoken highly of the military commander of Ukraine, but you have been harshly critical of his political boss. Who would have made the announcement that an offensive is coming?

Well, it looks like it's Zelensky. He's been announcing this up and down the hallways of Congress and everywhere else. And I think it's because he's being told, you have to say this, or I can't fund you, say this, or we can't ship you more equipment. People are losing faith. And indeed, all the statements coming out of political leaders in NATO right now, people like Stoltenberg and others, are all designed, I think, to quote unquote stiffen resolve, build up support. This thing is dying. This is a dead end. The NATO allies are beginning to walk away from this behind the scenes. And as we've discussed before, I think these governments in Germany, France, even in Great Britain are in a lot of trouble. Before we get to Stoltenberg and Germany, here's more of general, I was about to say nonsense. I want to respect four stars, whoever got them. But here's more from General Petraeus on what can be expected of the Ukrainian

offensive, which he talks about openly in May and June. We're two weeks away from May right now, 10 days away, and his opinion of its likely success. Late May, early June, there is going to be a heck of an offensive from the Ukrainians, very likely in the south. It probably has to be roughly the Melitopol area. And they will try to sever the ground line of communications that Russia has established along the southeast coast of Ukraine, linking into Crimea. I believe that they are going to achieve for the first time in this war, true combined arms effects, because they will for the first time in this war true combined arms effects because they will for the first time russians have not at all done this they've failed from day one they have sent

tanks just right down the road without infantry the ukrainians will have tanks with imagery in infantry fighting vehicles keeping the enemy's infantry and their anti-tank guided missiles off those tanks they will have engineers and EOD to reduce obstacles and defuse explosives and mines. They will have air defense to keep the Russian air off them. They'll have electronic warfare to jam the Russians' networks. They'll have artillery and mortars to suppress the enemy forces. They'll have good command and control. They'll have logistics pushed right up behind them with additional arms fuel water food medical support and they'll have reserve forces which they did not have in the offensive in the

harki very last fall that was very impressive uh dorothy will return to kansas with the wizard in his balloon too. I have great confidence in that. This is the man that told you that he single-handedly won the Iraq war. In other words, his surge that cost us a thousand dead and a few thousand wounded was this big success story. Ultimately, he did manage to put the Shiites in control and make Iraq largely an Iranian satellite. But when we finally withdrew from Iraq, we had to leave in the middle of the night. We had to go without telling anyone we were leaving, because if they had known we were leaving in columns from Baghdad, they'd have killed us. So that's one example of his victory.

Then go to Afghanistan. How many lies have been told by him and by others about Afghanistan? What a great success story it was. And remember, Dave Petraeus was the man that built the Iraqi army, and we know how well that performed. Why does the establishment put forth spokespersons like this? What is their goal, to persuade the U.S. Congress to authorize President Biden to spend more money on Ukraine? Well, obviously, that's a critical goal. But there's something else. Remember, Churchill once said that the key to success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. And the globalist neocons have taken that to heart. We've had nothing but failure, failure and failure. We've had nothing but failure in Ukraine. And what are we going to do? We're going to double down and repeat it again

because we know if we do it and do it and do it, it'll eventually work. We went through this in Vietnam. This is nothing new. What is the likelihood of the Ukrainian offensive announced by General Petraeus being successful in the manner in which he described it. Is this all fanciful or is there any likelihood or reasonable likelihood to what he said actually happening? I'd give it five to 10% success probability. Again, warfare has changed. He's talking about warfare as though this were 1942, 43, 44. He's talking about tanks and infantry and so forth. Warfare today is decided by much greater powers. We don't talk about combined arms warfare anymore.

Anybody who understands it, if you stop and talk to the Russian general staff and others, they'll talk about all arms integrative warfare. these things backed by mountains of ammunition and careful positioning and study of the terrain, which is easily dominated in that part of the world. And finally, hundreds of thousands of troops with lateral routes of movement up and down the front to rapidly move wherever it is necessary in order to stop any of these attempts at an offensive. So the first thing is you've got to get within 10 to 20 kilometers of your opponent. That's almost impossible now. They'll be obliterated before they come to grips with anybody. And anybody walking around out there is going to go away just as rapidly as unprotected tanks. They don't have the air defense capability to stop any of

this. And that's the problem. So we can give them great intelligence. We can even tell them where we think they should attack. It's not going to make any difference. We know from the documents that were revealed, whatever you think of the morality of their revelation, they were revealed, they're out there. And the government says by this fellow, this young man, Jack Teixeira, we know from those documents, it is the opinion of senior officials in the Pentagon that the Ukraine air defenses have been substantially degraded and will be useless by the end of May. Well, I think they're telling you the truth. And remember, they talked, this is what, two months ago, I guess, when these documents were prepared, or at least some of them.

Right. They talked about the inability to do very much about the air defense, but they also said that the kill ratio was one to seven at that point in time. And we know that the kill ratio is varied from at least one to seven up to one to ten and higher. And that's the advantage today of the defense. That is the Russians killing seven or in some cases ten Ukrainians for every one Russian that the Ukrainians kill. And remember, they're a historian, Colonel. Has any military, as far as you know in history, survived a kill ratio like that? Only when they've been reinforced and backed up by additional allies. The French were taking those kinds of casualties at the beginning of World War I. And the British came in and ultimately they survived the first six,

seven months of the war. But they were on the verge of losing until we committed our forces. Remember, we brought two million men into the fight in France, and that's ultimately what won the day. So the short answer is, under very rare circumstances, and the Ukrainians already have at least, we think, 20,000 Polish soldiers fighting for them, plus several thousand foreign mercenaries. And it's gotten to the point where many of these Ukrainians, and I don't blame them in the least, these are the recent, I guess we could call them draftees, but some of these people are being picked up at gunpoint, shoved into vans and sent to the front. They've died in such great numbers that they won't attack. They simply won't attack.

Why would you? Here is Secretary General Stoltenberg, Secretary General of NATO, making one of the more outrageous and deadly comments that he or anybody from NATO has made. I think you'll probably agree with me. Let me be clear. Ukraine's rightful place is in the Euro-Atlantic family. Ukraine's rightful place is in NATO. NATO stands with you today, tomorrow, and for as long as it takes. What could he possibly mean by NATO stands with you today, tomorrow, and for as long as it takes? Is NATO going to treat the military incursion into Ukraine as if it were an Article 5 of the NATO treaty, attack on a NATO member, they want to treat Ukraine as if it were a NATO member? If that's the case, the Russians will go all the way to the Polish border. Well, to answer your question, he's essentially arguing that, but he's arguing from a different

perspective. Judge, we've already treated the Russians as unambiguously as the enemy. We haven't joined the fight directly in most cases. Ukrainians have done most of the dying, but there are others in there dying along with Ukrainians now. And we're going to fund and support it as long as we possibly can. That's obvious. But I think what he's also signaling, which to me is far more dangerous, he's essentially saying, you know, there will be no negotiation over this matter. There is only one outcome that we are going to tolerate. Now, remember, Stoltenberg is a puppet of Washington. He doesn't say anything that Blinken and Biden and Susan Rice and Samantha Powers and whoever else is there, Jake Sullivan, telling.

So he's just repeating what he's hearing from us. And that means if you're sitting in the Soviet or Russian high command, and you're talking to President Putin, you're saying, they've left us no alternative. Not only do we have to conquer Eastern Ukraine, which they're going to do in pretty short order in June, they're going to have to turn west, cross those bridges, head south, take Odessa, and then march continually towards Poland. And this has always been the danger. And this is why, from the very beginning, you know, you and I talked about the danger presented by this coalition of the willing that our friend General Petraeus mentioned. The Poles, you know, the Americans,

maybe some British SAS or something, maybe some Lithuanians, I don't know, who decide to intervene in Western Ukraine. Well, the Russians have taken us at our word and they have built a force that once it launches is quite capable of getting to the Polish border. They've taken us seriously. I've asked you this before and I don't think we know the answer.

Does the U.S. have an off-ramp here? Well, it looks like our friends in Washington have refused an off-ramp. You know, at least Nixon, when he was elected, had a mandate from the American people to find an off-ramp. Now, we can debate how good it was or how flawed it was, but ultimately it worked, and we extricated ourselves. Right. The American people have really never been consulted on this. And that, again, is something we've discussed previously. And there's no willingness to go to the American people and say, I want a mandate from you to do these things. Well, Colonel, not only have the American people not been consulted, but unless the sheriff fabricated those documents,

and it doesn't appear that he did, the American people have been lied to. The government is utterly and totally unworthy of belief when it comes to this conflagration. Yeah, listen, I think many of us have sensed that for a long time, but this is in black and white now. It's unambiguous, thanks to the documents. I'm beginning to think that there's only one thing that holds together both the government in Kiev at this point and the government in Washington. Greed. Greed holds the military and the political leaders together because the politicians benefit. We've been through that before. We know that most of the cash is simply transferred to the building, the Pentagon, transferred to the various contractors and the defense industry.

Then the equipment flows over there. Trainers flow over there. People flow over there. But the majority of the wealth is just transferred here in Washington. And that transfer is something everyone wants to protect. And certainly if you're a three or a four star looking at retirement in the near future, you want to make sure that you get your cut. You're not going to walk away from another cash bonanza that this war represents. Here's a member of the German parliament. I don't know the fellow. It's a small minority party. His name is Rudiger Lukasen. We can't say that these weapons will bring victory to Ukraine or will lead to peace or even to a reduction of escalation. Therefore, yes, I would not send weapons to Ukraine, but would try to find an opportunity to start negotiations as soon as possible, because it cannot go on

like this any longer. No one in the American Congress, no one in the British Parliament, I don't know if anybody in the French General Assembly has said it, this may be the first in the Bundestag to say it, but he said it and it's out there. Well, I think you had a Miss, Mrs. Wagenknecht. She leads the hard left who's made a similar statement arguing for an end to the war. And that's essentially what this gentleman did. The AFD controls 15 percent right now of the votes, but it could double in the space of a few weeks and it could overwhelm most of the opposition. They call it some sort of radical right or extremist bunch of nonsense. These people are just common sense, right-wing conservatives that would be very comfortable with us. And they're nationalists, and they respect the Russians for their interests, and they respect other people's legitimate security interests. So he's simply stating the truth. None of this equipment is going to change anything. This war is decided for all intents and purposes.

And we're going to watch this happen over the summer. What is going to happen in Washington? I think Washington is going to be in the midst of a serious financial crisis. I think we're just at the beginning of that. And the more desperate we become on that side, the less interest we will have for what's happening in Ukraine or anywhere beyond our borders. I'm going to talk to a man you and I admire greatly on Judging Freedom Tomorrow, Congressman Andy Biggs of Arizona, who is, I suspect, going to tell me that the Republican Speaker of the House does not have the votes for raising the debt ceiling by one and a half trillion, no matter what kind of promises accompany it. So I think

you're quite correct. Washington is in for very, very hard times financially. Joe Biden has $40 billion with a B remaining in the bank, so to speak, of the $113 billion Congress authorized. My bet is that he's going to spend it. No matter how tough things are financially in Washington, he's going to spend that $40 billion, whether it's cash or whether it's military equipment. What do you think? Well, we're on one of two paths right now. One path, which is the path everyone in Washington has chosen for decades, is print more money. The problem is if you just print more money at this stage, you're going to go to hyperinflation. We're going to look a lot

like Weimar Germany or much worse, certainly Argentina, maybe Brazil. So that's one path. And that I think is probably what the left wants to do. The other path is to stop spending, cut spending, and negotiate a new deal with your creditors. That's called default. We did that twice in 32 and 34 under FDR. We had no choice. We defaulted. We said, we're restructuring the debt. Well, this is the last chance, Judge, to restructure the debt. And the first thing you cut if you restructure the debt in spending, overseas military commitments. Quickly. Halt. I know you have been critical of President Macron. I'm interested in your view of what he said as he was flying from Beijing back to Paris, where he said the words to the effect of,

Europe should not be subject to the American rhythm. I think he meant the American rhythm of endless wars. Where's France on this? Are the French providing troops or material, or is he worried about getting impeached if he gets France involved in this war? Well, we all know that General Charles de Gaulle, when he became president, made similar remarks way into the 60s. That's one of the reasons he decided to pull France out of the military dimension of NATO. So they weren't part of that structure. Gradually, we've enticed them back in, first through intervention in the Balkans and Kosovo, subsequently in other places.

I think he knows that that's a mistake. He probably has always known that, but now he's saying so in the hopes that he's going to get some credit for it. He's not. The population doesn't want to impeach Macron. They want him gone. If anything, he's on the path to becoming Louis XVI again. Tell our viewers what you told me about a brief conversation you had with President Trump when he asked you. I think it was about the Germans. I'm trying to remember what you said. You're ambushing me. I don't normally repeat what I discuss with presidents. And, you know, President Trump had great trust and confidence in me and I told you to make a point and the point is simply this that until we leave Germany

until we get out of Europe ultimately but certainly Germany which is the principal foundation for our military power in Europe the Germans aren't going to spend any money on defense. Why would they? Right. They're not going to spend money until they're forced to, until we're gone. Much to Trump's chagrin. Colonel, always a pleasure. Thank you so much for weighing in so forcefully and so in such a manner as to continue to teach all of us what's truly going on there. I don't know what it's going to take for the American government to tell the truth. I don't know what Lloyd Austin's going to say the next time he appears before the Senate Armed Services Committee. They must know that he lied the last time he was there when he said he expects a good spring and an even better winter

on the part of the Ukraine forces. Those documents had been in his possession for two months at the time he said it. Well, lying, whether you are a four-star or a senator or congressman, has been no bar to advancement. So I'm afraid that the lying is going to continue until finally the whole thing implodes. I think we're on the road to that. You know, Ben Stein, he likes to say, it'll go on until it can't. And I think your debt ceiling comment and observation is a very important one. And the question is, do we stop it now or do we just let it continue until we are Sri Lanka writ large?

Colonel, always a pleasure. Thank you very much. Thank you, Judge. If you like what you just saw, and I suspect you do, like and subscribe. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.