Judging Freedom - Ukraine War Weakening America Around the World w Tony Shaffer fmr DoD

Episode Date: August 30, 2023

Ukraine War Weakening America Around the World  w Tony Shaffer fmr DoDSee 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 Wednesday, August 30th, 2023. Tony Schaefer will be with us in just a moment, and I'm going to ask him what happened to the spring offensive and how desperate is the Ukraine military as we speak. But first, this message. You must start taking care of your liver now more than ever. But why? The American Liver Foundation says that more than 100 million Americans have fatty liver. We are throwing everything at our livers, cholesterol, alcohol, toxins, cigarettes. For decades, your liver has helped you with over 500 liver functions daily. It's time you help your liver. There is a solution, Liver Health Formula, an all-natural supplement which contains 12 clinically proven botanicals which help recharge and protect your liver.

Manufactured right here in the USA and approved by American doctors. Over 2 million bottles of Liver Health Formula have been sold already. Listeners of my show can take advantage of their special offer. You can try liver health formula and get a free bottle of omega-3 to help keep your heart healthy. Join their happy customer list. Visit getliverhelp.com slash judge and claim your bonus gift. Tony, thank you for coming on and welcome to the show again. Good to be back. Why did the Ukrainian offensive, originally spring offensive and then summer offensive, fail so spectacularly?

I think there's three things to summarize very quickly. First, too many cooks in the kitchen. You didn't have a Schwarzkopf in charge of the overall military planning, operational deployment, and basically the combat operations itself. So when you don't have someone who's actually unifying the command, you don't have good outcome. And so that brings me to my second point, is because you did not have unity of command. You had basically General Sersky, Colonel General Sersky focused on Zaporizhia. You got Zeluzny, who's looking at Crimea. They didn't work together well. President Zelensky didn't referee. He couldn't referee. He did not play the lack of effective training.

What goes to war is what I've called it. Basically, they had, I don't know, every NATO nation did something. There was like hands across NATO. And they basically sent out all these Ukrainians to be trained in all these NATO nations, resulting in a completely ineffective military force. You don't want to do that. It may be great for college to send kids out to go explore. It's not good to put together a well-equipped, precisely trained and well-led group. You want unity, Judge. You don't want

disparity. You don't want, dare I say, you don't want diversity. This is diversity goes to war. And so the very last point I want to make is that when you have people who are looking over your shoulder telling you what to do, who have objectives which are not necessarily in the interest of Ukraine, Victoria Nuland to name one, Tony Blinken to name another, you're never going to have good results because the interest of Ukraine is not the interest of Newland or Blinken. How involved in unity of command or in command at all is NATO? Well, NATO essentially is the force provider here. They are the ones who have to validate all the requirements. Judge, we talked a little bit about the chain of custody of a request not American, on the ground advising the generals, or are there NATO officials in Brussels telling the Ukrainian generals what to do?

How involved in day-to-day combat decisions are NATO officers? I'm going to say something that the audience is not going to like. They're not enough involved. Let me be clear on this. What do you mean not enough involved? The way the Ukrainians have executed their battle plan at the operational and tactical level has been insane. I've watched some of these videos. Judge, you don't send Bradley fighting vehicles, M2A2s, as your penetrating attack force. That's what armor's for. They finally just recently apparently started using the Chieftains and the Leopard 2s. Just finally. You're supposed to do it the opposite.

And look, I'm not a military genius, but I do tend to know what works on the battlefield. And so if you send in your infantry, lightly armored infantry against heavy weapons, you're going to lose. You're not going to breach anything. And that's why we've seen no breaching. They have not put together an effective, you know, our friend Doug McGregor. Doug can explain this better than me. We have effective armor formations which are designed to penetrate the enemy's sphere. We developed these. They worked well in Iraq. And the Iraqi strategy tactics were all based on Soviets, on the Russians. So what I'm telling you is if we did this, if we were telling them what to do, we wouldn't have done it the way they did it. So I don't think they're reading it that way. Don't the Ukrainian commanders know this and aren't their NATO advisors telling them this?

This goes back to my second point in the opening. All these Ukrainian commanders have been trained all over NATO. It's like a diversity stew. So you may have Sweden telling officers one thing. You'll have Portugal telling them something else. You have the Italians telling them something third. It's like there's no way you're ever going to put together a cohesive battle plan if you've got people from all these different areas. Are American generals, again, presumably not physically there. If they're physically there, the American people need to know about it. Are there American generals advising or telling Ukrainian generals how to wage war? I don't think so. No, I don't. I think Washington's been giving advice. I think Mark Milley's been talking to Zelushny on almost a

daily basis. I think there's a lot of contacts, but nobody is there directing it. I'm telling you, the battle plan as unfolded would not be, this is not what we would advise them to do. And again, I would talk to McGregor about this because McGregor, let me just play devil's advocate. Colonel McGregor was deployed to Ukraine and told, Doug, get these people in shape, go fight the war. I'm telling you, he would put together a cohesive, effective force with whatever he's got available, and it would breach the lines probably within 30 days. So I'm telling you, either we have the most incompetent colonels and generals on the battlefield, which is possible, or that the Ukrainians just aren't

taking direction and not listening. So I don't know which is which. How desperate, how depleted is the Ukraine military today? So Zelensky, President Zelensky has announced that he's going to have to go out and recruit another 300,000 people. So where is he going to get them from, the old and the young? It's going to have to be. This is reflective of post the Battle of Kursk, 1944. I'm going to say it, Nazi Germany, where the Germans had to fall back and start pulling the elderly and the youth into military service.

I think that's all the Ukrainians have left. And if President Zelensky's comments are going to be taken seriously, what he's planning on doing essentially is drawing another 300,000 people. That's a lot for a small country like Ukraine. And then putting together a plan for a defensive configuration.

That is to say, I don't care what the American press or British press say. If you're talking about calling up 300,000 folks at a time when you're losing, you're probably going into a defensive configuration. And I think that's what he's planning to do right now is trying to plan a defense for the fall. What is Zelensky doing to getting bodies? Is it conscription or is it kidnapping? Are we talking about 16- olds and 60 year olds?

You're talking, yeah. And you're talking about that's what, what is left that is not military age. They, they have gone through judge, the military age folks, they're all on the battlefield right now. And for those who are fit to serve. And so the answer is, I don't know how they're going to do it. I think it's aspirational at this point. That's something that I think that is a good question to ask Zelensky and his government how they're going to do it. saying the first rung of the Russian defenses has been breached, followed by Patrick Lancaster's observation. So while Gary's getting that together, Tony, we interviewed Patrick Lancaster yesterday. I don't know if you know him. He's the American video journalist who's in the Donbass region. That's where he lives, that's where he works, and that's the place from which he broadcasts. And he has reminded us that the Ukrainians have been shelling the Donbass, what they consider to be Ukraine, and killing people there

whom they consider to be Ukrainians for the past eight years, and they've intensified it today. And Patrick saw children being hit by Ukrainian shrapnel, Ukrainian children hit by Ukrainian shrapnel. Yeah, because they live in a Russian speaking area that voted overwhelmingly to be under Russian jurisdiction, which under Russian law is under Russian jurisdiction and which arguably has been Russia since the 1760s. Right. How can Zelensky justify shelling his own people? Again, this is a war not about the interest of the Ukrainian people, either those who are of Russian orientation, culture or not. This is about a war between the forces of the EU, world governance concepts, Newland and the one world order crowd and Russia. And that's what it is. So I don't think Zelensky at this point cares about who this happens to. Judge, the other thing that's not been underreported, what happens to all those missiles?

The Ukrainians fire up in the air to take down Russian missiles. Well, those that miss come down and hit population centers. I think there's been an underreporting of civilian casualties in other areas of Ukraine. Ukrainian civilian casualties. That's right. That's right. Yes. Yes. Gary, if you're ready, let's play. General Milley's on a farewell tour, as you know. Tony, I think his last day in office is tomorrow. Thank you. Either the Defense Department or the defense industry. So this is one of those interviews. It appears to be with an Arab station, but the interview is in English. And then we'll follow it with with what Patrick Lancaster told us live from Ukraine after he watched the interview.

They've attacked through the first main defensive belt. This is a defense in depth that the Russians had many months to prepare. It's got minefields, it's got dragon's teeth, it's got tank ditches. It's a very, very complex set of defensive preparations that the Ukrainians are fighting through. And they're fighting through it. The Ukrainians have a significant amount of combat power remaining. This is not over yet. So I think it's frankly too early to say whether it succeeded or failed. It clearly has had partial success. You're there. Your eyes and ears and soul and heart are right there. He's in Washington. He's just playing word games.

I mean, he's covering his you-know-what by just saying, oh, yeah, they've gone through the first line. Now, if you actually confront him about it and say, no, they're nowhere anywhere close to going through the real line, well, he'll say, well, look at this one little spot where they took 100 meters farther, say 500 meters, maybe took one village here and there when over here, Russia took three. It's just word games saying, okay, in one spot, maybe there is a little bit of forward action, but no considerable movement as far as the front line goes. It's just playing word games to confuse

people and to try to lead people into a certain way of showing them that their tax dollars aren't going to waste and their tax dollars aren't only killing civilians. Honey, who's more credible, Patrick Lancaster or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? Well, Patrick is obviously, I mean, look, I'm going to try to be polite about Milley. Milley is part of this alternative universe crowd who speak of aspirations, not of hard facts. Anybody who monitors this, and again, I'm not a Ukrainian expert. I'm a generalist. I look at the globe for threat issues. And the sources I rely upon for information that instructs my thinking all uniformly say the Ukrainians have not breached even the first layer of the Russian defense.

The only thing Milley got right is he described accurately what the Russians have done and what exists for the Russians to go through. They're not going to get through it. That is the Ukrainians are not because, as I explained in the beginning, they're not configuring the military forces that we've provided them effectively to breach those perimeters. And again, I almost think that someone's instructing them to fail i mean think about i mean how can you're talking about glow you know a complete set of incompetent leaders who have essentially been uh unable to convince the ukrainians to fight effectively or else something else is if i don't know what's going on, but Milley correctly described what they face.

He supposedly is advising Zeluzhny on a daily basis. So there's a disconnect somewhere, Judge. I don't know where it's at. Well, General Zeluzhny should take some advice from Patrick Lancaster, who's right in the midst of the battle. Not likely to happen. Here's, you talk about failed leadership, two failed leaders now coming up, General Ben Hodges and the famous or infamous or self-important famous General David Petraeus.

We'll do General Hodges first, arguing that the Ukrainians can still take back Crimea. Listen to this, Tony. I believe that the operational priority is to cause the Russian forces to leave Crimea. That, I think, is the most important thing that has to be done. In order to do that, Ukraine needs more long-range capabilities that could hit all the airfields, the seaport of Sevastopol, for example. But that also means they've got to get closer to the land bridge. So more progress that would enable them to bring up more HIMARS, for example, that could reach the road between Mariupol and Melitopol in Crimea to stop the logistics movement there. How realistic is that or how Victoria Newland-ish is it? It's completely Victoria Newland-like. And let me just summarize

my answer by a quote from Sun Tzu. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. All he's doing is talking tactics. Any general who has been through finishing school can talk tactics. You need someone like a Patton or an Eisenhower to talk strategy. And again, the most recent example I think that was effectively doing this was Schwarzkopf. So yeah you know, yeah, I can, I could go through, I could get a list of acronyms and sound very important. Judge, I could come out on here every time and list out all these acronyms and HIMARS and, and stealth this and Apache helicopters. He's a blithering idiot. It doesn't, it means absolutely nothing.

You know, this blithering idiot until two years ago was the commander in chief of all forces in Europe. And this is the mentality that the American government put there because he, I'm going to use our CIA guy's language. He just sort of kissed his way up the ladder of success. Probably. Look, the army at this point worships mediocrity. That guy is mediocre. Here's General David Petraeus. We've got two clips from General Petraeus. One saying, when are the Russians going to crack? And another saying the Ukrainians can prevail in Crimea, believe it or not.

Here we go. The big question in my mind, I think, is whether or when the Russians might begin to crack and crumble. They've been in the line for over a year in many cases. Yes, they have actually established very impressive defensive belts, but they don't have the same motivation that Ukrainian soldiers do, who can look over their shoulder and see what it is that they're fighting for. They're very independent. They're survival. They're citizens.

That's not the case for the Russians, many of whom have been conscripted, not volunteers, clearly. The question is, when might that moment arrive? And it's very hard to answer, having been in a number of battles where the enemy all of a sudden cracked. But you couldn't predict that until that moment actually happened. The Russians have not distinguished themselves in many respects over the last year and a half or so, but this defense in depth is quite formidable. The Ukrainians I think have adapted very impressively. I do think that those in the West ought to acknowledge that the Ukrainians probably know best their own terrain. They know best their own troops.

They know their strengths and they know their weaknesses. And they're even going deeper into Crimea, for example, after the large bases there, maritime and air. They're trying to cut lines of communication that the logistics from the Russians use. And we ought to be doing everything we can to ensure that they have the munitions to continue that, to provide the longer range precision missiles for our rocket system, additional air defenses and munitions as well, so that they can make the most of the remaining four months, noting that they're only two and a half months or so into this at this point. So let me get this straight, General. They have not breached the first of the three rings of defense that the Russian military has

established, but somehow they are behind that and gotten into Crimea. Tony, this is just crazy. He either thinks we don't know the geography or we don't care or we'll believe whatever comes out of his mouth. Well, it's the latter. And by the way, Judge, I want his expense account. I want to be able to do hits on your show. I mean, man, I don't know who's paying his bills, but man, I want to be paid like that. I want to have the Taj Mahal behind me next time. I mean, man. The defense industry is probably paying his bills. Well, that's my point. That's why I said it like that. He's being given talking points. Those all are points. He has no idea what's going on in the ground, Judge. He wouldn't know one town from another or the motivation of troops. Someone should have said, well, when's the last time you spoke to Ukrainian? Have you spoke to anybody on the field?

He hasn't. I'm telling you, those are all Victoria Nuland drafted points. Mark my words. Those are all her points, probably given to him by some other general somewhere. And I wonder if Paula Broadwell is going with him on these trips to help continue his biography. That would be interesting to ask the same. So, you know. What do you think happens next? How much longer does this go on until either Zelensky flees the country or the Ukrainian troops drop down their arms or both sides come to a stalemate? We know that Ukraine is not going to take the Donbass region back. We know they're not going to take Crimea. We know that the spring offensive has failed. We know that they're running out of bodies.

We know that they're running out of ammunition. How much longer can this last? Until we say enough. Until Joe Biden says enough? As Dave Petraeus just said, we have to continue to provide them the weapons necessary to help them win. Well, if you stop the nonsense and cut off the support, the Ukrainians are going to have to deal with the Russians directly. Again, I am not pro-Russian. Let me be very clear, because I always say this. Putin is a thug. I fought a Cold War against the Russians,

against the Soviets to defeat them. So I am not a fan, but I'm a realist. And at this point, the aspirations of Victoria Nuland and the Biden administration do not comport with the on-the-ground reality the Ukrainians face. And continuing to fund it to the level we have would just add to the misery of the Ukrainian people with no positive outcome on the horizon. Tony Schaefer, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you very much for joining us. Thanks, Judge. Always good to be here. Of course. More as we get it, my dear friends here on Judging Freedom. We're up to 192,000 subscriptions still on that march, still climbing that ladder to reach 200,000 by Labor Day. Help us

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