Judging Freedom - Will Ukraine ever have enough Fire Power_ Col Doug Macgregor at 3_00p est TODAY

Episode Date: December 23, 2022

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Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Friday, December 23rd, 2022, two days to Christmas. It's about five minutes after three here on a snowy, about to be five degrees, northwest New Jersey. Welcome to the show. Colonel Douglas McGregor, of course, is our guest. He needs no introduction to the Judging Freedom Office audience. Colonel, it's a pleasure. Welcome here. Since we spoke last, which honestly I thought would be the last time we spoke before Christmas. President Zelensky visited the United States. We have two short clips of him with President Biden. President Biden does the speaking.

But I want your your thoughts on this. Gary, play these clips back to back, please. The American people are with you every step of the way and we will stay with you we will stay with you for as long as it takes he continues to be wrong the sooner he makes it's clear that he cannot possibly win this war that's when the time we have to put this president in a position to be able to decide how he wants the war to end. Why does the president of the United States say things like that when he must know that they can't be true? Well, he also subsequently said,

we will stay with Ukraine as long as it is there. Wow. That sounds more like the president of Poland than the president of Ukraine. We'll get to the vice minister of Poland in a minute. You wrote a piece about him. But is the president receiving truthful intel, or is this just for Ukrainian consumption that he made this statement standing next to President Zelensky? No, I think it's for the consumption of the collective West I remember this narrative cannot be dropped it cannot be abandoned

until it's unambiguously destroyed and that narrative says Ukraine is winning and Ukraine is going to win and anything that deviates from that line is unacceptable remember he's asking for billions and billions what 45 billion in addition to the defense budget, which is, what, $858 billion. And how do you do that unless you insist that your client state that's fighting this proxy war for you is not only winning, but can win and will win? The numbers, Colonel, are staggering. In the original appropriation for Ukraine, there were two of them. It came to $65 billion. President Biden asked for another $37 billion. The Congress gave him $45 billion. So we're up to $110 billion. Now, that $45 billion is part of the $1.7 trillion. Like I said, the numbers are confusing,

which the House passed just a few minutes ago. So it seems as though all this is going to make its way there, either in hardware or in cash. And as we know, over the objections of Senator Paul in the Senate and Congressman Massey in the House, mutual friends of yours and mine, who offered amendments to have an inspector general certified that this is what we sent and this is where the cash is going and this is where the armaments are going. No inspector general, no American to receive the stuff whatsoever. I did learn, I don't know if it was from you or elsewhere, that it can take up to 100 crew members to operate a Patriot missile system. Is that true? And if so, how do we train that number of Ukrainians to operate this very expensive hardware? Well, the answer is yes. And let me just go back and revisit the money one more time, because people need to understand that

what we're doing is moving money from one pocket to another as far as the taxpayer is concerned. We're taking money from the Treasury and essentially divesting ourselves of it through the Department of Defense, moving it over to the defense industries and their constituents. And subsequently, money flows back to the Congress as a matter of gratitude for the enormous wealth transfer. So it's wrong to think of all this money showing up. Secondly, when you start talking about the equipment, much of this equipment may never get there. Much depends on how much longer Ukraine lasts.

And as we'll discuss in this hour, this 30 minutes or so, I'll point out I'm not sure they're going to be around long enough to absorb and assimilate anything. Now, as far as Patriot goes, it's one battery, presumably eight launchers, 128 missiles per launcher, and about 93 men in the battery, probably a few more because we're ostensibly supposed to train people. But frankly, if we try to train people, it'll be three to four to five months before this thing ever gets into action. I suspect we'll end up with contractors, U.S. soldiers and, you know, retired or former operating as contractors making this equipment work.

It's only point defense. You can protect portions of things, a portion of Kief or key military installations, but it's not going to have any significant impact on the battle once it arrives anyway. You wrote recently about the Vice Minister of Defense, I think I have the title. Deputy Minister of Defense, I think I have the title. Deputy Minister of Defense, right. Of Poland. Right. Who sounds as antagonistic as the president of Poland and as promoting, much promoting war as the president of Poland. What did he say and how do you analyze it?

Well, his statement was to an audience, a mixed audience, not military, but civilians as well as military, simply said this war is growing more and more intense. And with each passing day, we are more likely to be involved in it. And we are now going to adopt measures to prepare ourselves effectively for the eventuality that we may be involved. Then subsequently, there was some discussion of mobilizing 200,000 Polish reserve soldiers. Now, when that's going to happen, I don't know. Somebody mentioned recently that it may already be underway. I don't know. It could be. I thought it would happen after the new year. Colonel, are there elements in the American globalist establishment? All right, I got to define the term.

The State Department, their buddies in Europe, members of Congress, the West Wing, that want the United States in a hot war, soldier to soldier, against Russia? I would hesitate to say yes, but you can't say no. So let me try to explain what I'm talking about. All right. And throw in the name of, this is to raise your blood pressure, Colonel, no matter how much I love you, Senator Lindsey Graham. Yeah, Lindsey Graham. Yeah, Lindsey Graham.

Well, first of all, let's understand that I don't think anybody in their right mind wants a direct military confrontation with Russia. The problem is that we in the West do not see Russia as Russia is. We see it through this distorting lens. We either impute to it Soviet-like attributes or evil attributes, whatever you want to call it. We tend to view it through the lens of our own notion of economic power and wealth. And you reach utterly false assumptions about Russia. Assumption number one, Russia is really weak. Russia can't stay the course. All we have to do is double down and we'll attrit them. We'll wear them out. No, it's the exact opposite. That's an impossibility, as they've demonstrated already economically. Secondly, their military is no good.

It's no good because when they came in, they were soft. They didn't come in hard. They didn't do very well. They seemed to have been defeated, all of which is erroneous nonsense, completely misunderstands what Putin was about, what the Russians were trying to achieve. So they believe in their heart of hearts that if we were to show up on the battlefield in Western Ukraine, cross the Polish border with Polish allies, maybe some Romanian forces too, that the Russians would be so intimidated and so afraid that they would immediately say, stop, let's stop, please don't come into this. And they're wrong. They're very wrong. In fact, there's a real appetite in Russia, to be perfectly blunt with you, to do real damage to our forces if they get the opportunity.

So I think you've got a misapprehension of the danger and the level of response that it will elicit. And now we have a much larger, very different Russian army in the field. This is now a wartime theater. Ukraine is no longer being treated with kit gloves. Initially, they said, no, the Ukrainians are our brother Slavs. We don't want to harm Ukrainians. We don't want to do damaged infrastructure. We want to get along so that we can build a new peace. That's gone. The Russians now have decided there is no way to negotiate an end to this. No one will negotiate in good faith. Therefore, we must crush the enemy. That's what's coming. Let me play for you what your former colleague, General David Petraeus said about Putin's miscalculation about his ability only to go so far as what is domestically palatable, his phrase,

and about, I think you'll really take issue with this, the absence of training or the poor training of the Russian military. Gary? He is obviously completely miscalculated from the very beginning. He has reacted as Ukraine has seized the strategic initiative as it launched counteroffenses, first won the battles of Kyiv and other northern cities of Kharkiv, retook part of the area that is to the west of the Dnipro River down in the south, and launched a very impressive counteroffensive in the east. He's tried everything he can that would be domestically palatable to mobilize additional forces. It's not going well. They aren't training and equipping them adequately at all. That was from my friend and former

colleague, Neil Cavuto, at Fox News, his program two days ago. Colonel. Well, the kindest thing I can say is that Dave Petraeus is largely divorced from reality. And once again, David Petraeus has embraced this fictional narrative along the lines that I described before. And that's part of what he's going to do because he is a product of the very people that are trying to push us into war with russia now they pushed us into iraq and syria and afghanistan not just to defeat the enemy not just to remove the regime but to stay and occupy and transform and he was in the forefront of all of that so i think he's just he's just sort of punching his ticket as a member of

the in club with the status quo and that's the status quo that's ruling us in Washington they are largely divorced from reality the Russian forces are not poorly trained they're very well trained as I think I mentioned before I've watched several films that were made available to me through various sources in Europe. I was very impressed with the way the Russians operated. The Ukrainians, on the other hand, have taken such horrendous losses. They now admit to 35,000 missing. They admit to more than 100,000 killed. You start adding up the numbers, you're looking at 150,000 plus who are dead. Now they're trying to force teenage boys at the age of 13, 14, 15 into

uniform. They're now telling the disabled that you're going to be mobilized. They're literally scraping the bottom of the barrel. And these are hundreds of thousands of untrained people. The very thing that Petraeus is accusing the Russians of absolutely fits the description of the Ukrainian force arrayed against the Russians. Let me the description of the Ukrainian force arrayed against the Russians. Let me show you, play you another clip also from Fox News of General Petraeus saying things like, Russia cannot out-suffer the United States and Ukraine and and Europe, because Russia has suffered more casualties in 10 months in Ukraine than in nine years in Afghanistan. Gary?

He's in a very difficult position. I don't think he is yet willing to acknowledge that Russia cannot out-suffer the Ukrainians, the Americans, and the Europeans, which I think he still believes is possible. But I think there is going to come a point, and we need to hasten that moment, when he realizes that this war is not just unsustainable because of the terrible losses on the battlefield, which are now many times what they sustained in over nine years in Afghanistan, just in the first 10 months of this war, but also the damage that's being done to their economy, their financial system, his personal confidants, the sanctions against them, and the export controls that are bringing their industry to their knees.

Bringing their industry to their knees. I don't know where he could get that from. Oh, I think he's just reading from the from the script that is disseminated widely in Washington. He and Lindsey Graham and a whole whole range of people in Washington just keep repeating this stuff as though it were true, and it's not. And we know that Russian industry is by no means on its knees. Quite the contrary, it's booming. And they're exporting more oil and gas than they ever have. They're swimming in cash. That's completely wrong. The Russian population, if anything, is far more exuberant and enthusiastic about this war than I think Putin privately would like. He's acted to restrain some of the more radical

nationalist elements who would like to go in and do the equivalent of wiping Ukraine off the map. But of course, that's something that Putin thinks is ridiculous and has no intention of doing. What kind of casualty numbers have the Russians suffered? And is General Petraeus comparing apples to oranges when he compares, you know, an intense street by street urban warfare in Ukraine with trying to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan? Well, no, that is apples and oranges. And there's something else worth mentioning, that after the initial entry into Afghanistan, the Russian-dominated forces that had gone in there to begin with

were largely withdrawn. They relied very heavily on reservists from neighboring Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and other Central Asian republics, as they were called. Now they're independent countries. And, of course, they were not terribly excited about being there. And they didn't do very much, to be quite frank. So it's a very different war, the one you're describing. This is existential for the Russians.

There's nothing existential about Afghanistan. How bad or what's the category, what are the numbers if you know them, of Russian casualties? You opined earlier, educated opining, that Ukraine may have 125,000 to 150,000 dead. How many Russians are dead as a result of the entry of the military into Ukraine? I'm told somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 at the most, maybe 35,000, and an equal number of wounded. But bear in mind, the Russians have set up a very elaborate medical support structure, and they've gotten very good at evacuating the wounded so their wounded have been have survived much more successfully than the Ukrainian wounded

uh so that's that's about right if you look at it from a one to five perspective which is pretty pretty much the standard right now of course at this point in time they've been killing Ukrainians uh eight Ukrainians for every one Russian or 10 Ukrainians for every one Russian. Bakhmut has turned into a particularly terrible Ukrainian bloodbath and hugely beneficial to the Russians. From your experience as a tank commander, winter is here. The earth is frozen solid in Ukraine. Who does this help, the Ukrainians or the Russians?

Well, actually, it's not frozen throughout Ukraine. Right now, during the day, in southern Ukraine, this is down near Odessa, Kherson, it rises to about 34 degrees during the day and drops down to about 20 at night. So you still have standing water in those trenches. So the South is not ready to support large quantities of tractor-wheeled vehicles. The North is absolutely frozen solid, but it looks more and more as though the Russians would like to complete their task in Donbass first. They want to eliminate all the Ukrainian forces that are in Donbas. So who gains by frozen ground? The Russians immediately. That is very much in their, to their advantage. I mean, nobody likes fighting in the mud. I mean, the mud is

ugly for both sides, but the mud makes it harder for a swift offensive than it would be if it were frozen. How do the Russians move? They don't move on foot. Do they move in tanks? Do they move in trucks? Do they move in trains? How do the troops get from the Russian-Ukrainian border into the inner parts where the fighting is? Well, they go a certain distance in tracked or wheeled vehicles,

but most of the fighting that you see happening along the line of contact, which is about 400, 300, 400 miles, is actually on foot. And it's very grueling, very demanding physically, very slow and incremental. But remember, this was always an economy of force measure. It was designed to grind up as many Ukrainians as possible at the lowest possible cost to the Russians. That's what's been going on in southern Ukraine. It continues. It's worked brilliantly. And Sorovikin, the theater commander, has said that continues until he's ready to launch his offensives. When the offensives are launched, it will be a very different battle.

But the interesting part is that the Ukrainians have taken so many casualties in the south, we're beginning to hear reports that they're on the verge of collapse. And that's why we're hearing about teenage boys age 13, 14, 15, pressed into service, the disabled. And we're getting videos that are coming in now from Ukrainian soldiers. They disappear almost as quickly as they appear naturally, where some of the Ukrainian soldiers are saying, well, the people in Kyiv better be hopeful that the Russians get to them before we do, because the Russians will probably put them in jail.

If we get to them, we'll kill them. There's a lot of- Wait, these are Ukrainian soldiers talking about the people back home? Yes. Why would they say that? People in the government. Because they see Zelensky's government is largely remote from them. They see no evidence that anybody gives a damn about them. They're running out of food. They don't have proper clothing. They're freezing. They're taking heavy casualties.

They're being driven back. Did President Zelensky do himself any good with that speech to a joint session of Congress two nights ago? I don't think Zelensky was talking to anybody in Ukraine. I think he was basically talking to the collective West, and he spun the narrative. I think behind the scenes, he was very, very blunt. I mean, he came close to it a couple of times in his speech when he said, you've given us a lot, but it's not enough. And you go back to that interview that was conducted by The Economist. Right.

You listen to Zelensky, read that interview, read what Zeluzhny, the general, says. These people are at the end of their tether. And they told the people at the CIA, they told the people in the Pentagon, they told the people in the White House, if you don't come in and rescue us, we are going to be annihilated. We are not going to withstand what is coming. They're not fools. They know what's coming. We have satellite coverage. We've shown them the pictures. They know what kind of force is going to attack. Last area of our inquiry, President Putin, just about 72 hours ago, made some interesting statements. I'd love your take on them, Colonel. Here's President Putin. Our goal is not to spin the flywheel of military conflict, negotiations on the diplomatic track. Sooner or

later, any parties in a state of conflict sit down and make an agreement. The sooner this realization comes to those who oppose us, the better. We have never given up on this. Is he sending the West a message? I think he's sending the West a message. He's also telling the Ukrainians quite clearly that what he will launch, when he finally launches it, sometime in January, early February at the latest, is a war-winning offensive. In other words, this is designed to terminate the conflict. He understands the longer that this lasts, the greater the danger of unwanted confrontation between us and him. He's very sensitive to that. He's not a fool. He doesn't want that. We shouldn't want it either. And then he's also saying, even when this happens, and I launched these offensives, and I crushed the enemy, when the enemy surfaces and said, we've had enough, he will talk to them. And he will negotiate an end to this. We are the ones that keep saying no negotiation.

We're the ones that say unconditional surrender to you, Mr. Putin. That was effectively Lindsey Graham's comment. Mr. Putin, unless you go out in the middle of Red Square and shoot yourself through the head and commit suicide, there can be no negotiated settlement. This is absurd. Is anybody whispering? Is anybody whispering into Tony Blinkenloid, Austin, Ron Klain, Joe Biden's ear, it's time to sit down and talk? Well, just remember, he channeled deliberately. I mean, I assume that Bob Kagan, somebody like that, wrote the speech for Zelensky because he channeled the neocon hero FDR.

Yeah. What very few people understand is when FDR demanded unconditional surrender in Tehran, Stalin told him, why did you do that? This has made this war much worse than it would have been. We wanted people to give up so that we can end this war and stop losing people. You've made this war last longer. And FDR just sat there and looked at him like, uh, that's what we're doing. We are prolonging this war. Colonel, I can't thank you enough for all the invaluable information you have given to the Judging Freedom audience. I look forward to working with you next year. It's been just terrific.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and your family. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, Judge. God bless you all. Thank you. Thank you, Colonel. You're a great man. To the Judging Freedom audience,

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all of you. A year ago at this time, Judging Freedom had 93 viewers a week. We now have, thanks to Colonel McGregor, Scott Ritter, and others, and your faithfulness, we now have north of a million viewers a week. This is an extraordinary, extraordinary growth in just one year. We'll have some exciting news about more from Judging Freedom after the first of the year. We'll be quiet next week unless there's some great news event here or abroad. I wish you and your families Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.