Kitbag Conversations - Episode 14: Lethal Minds Journal

Episode Date: June 20, 2022

This week we are joined by Graham, the curator and one of the leading members behind Lethal Minds Journal. Lethal Minds aims to deliver information and intelligence to the community through a militaristic angle. Meaning, Lethal Minds looks to collect both current and prior service members to assist in delivering the information that they would have wanted while they were in. We discuss:  - The mission statement for the Lethal Minds Journal  - The war in Ukraine - Personal stories and backgrounds while active in the U.S. Military  - And the way war continues to change 

Hello everyone, welcome back to the Crotone Report. This week we are joined by Graham, the curator from Weeful Minds Journal, an Instagram page and a journal that is dedicated to delivering focused information, getting it out to everyone in the world, and before I kind of butcher a lot of the narrative, I'm just going to hand it over to him so we can elaborate on what his organization is. Hey man, thanks for having us on. I'm Graham, I started Weeful Minds, a couple of you guys on Instagram. Our real goal is to establish an umbrella where independent media journalism can happen without having to deal with censorship that basically derives from someone saying,

I don't like what you're saying, it scares me. It's not something I want to hear. We're out there trying to put out information that is factual, honest, and more importantly needs to be heard. And just looking at the Instagram, it seems like you're only or predominantly just hiring or just scooping up military veterans. Is that kind of the goal or is there an alternative motive? So, first and foremost, the journal exists to support the veteran and service member community. I'm a service member in the Army about five years. I've just completed my separation from the Army, separated as a captain in the EOD community. Another one of our partners is an active duty Marine. He's a senior officer, another is a major. We have a Marine Sergeant Major as part of our

leadership team. And we wanted to create something that junior level guys really don't get told a lot. The most junior soldiers in the United States military, the military around the world, they're sort of told, shut up, sit down, do what you're told. And over the course of the war on terror, we're seeing that more often than not, it's junior soldiers having to make decisions, having to make being the guy in the arena at that moment and the less informed they are, the worst decision they make. So, we're creating something that the boys in the barracks can really use and they can really benefit from. So, they're always going to be our first focus. We're starting to expand out as there are people in the veteran community are saying,

you know, this is really useful. I wish I could show this to a civilian colleague and be like, look at this. This will explain it. This will make it make sense. And I think over time, we're going to grow into a larger audience. But right now, our audience is the military in that community. I'm going to step back. I definitely remember because I was a junior analyst in the Marine Corps. I was 19 years old, but I was the one in the know. So, every time I would leave like an op meeting or something, all the juniors would grab me. They're like, what do you know? Because nobody tells us anything. We're just told to pick up cigarette butts. And I was like, yeah, what do you need? So, building on that narrative of keeping the lower enlisted informed

really helps in the big picture because the Marine Corps had that strategic corporal policy where it's not a lieutenant and it's not a gunny calling for fire on a building. It's some 19, 20 year old corporal with like his four man fire team going, okay, what are we doing? Like, this is this is it. So, the better informed they are, the better, essentially, you make better decisions you make. And honestly, just a better well rounded warrior is a good way to put it. Because, you know, your philosophy on one side, you're well read, but also, you know, how to conduct military tactics. And so just well rounded individuals is a good way to put it. So, I really appreciate the direction you're taking the journal.

To that point, one of the things that really started this idea for me is the ED community is this weird animal where everyone has authority, right? Because you're the EOD tech on the scene, it might just be you, right? And I had a staff sergeant, really good friend of mine, named Jared Salter, big mentor of mine, as a junior officer. When he was an E4, he was one of two EOD techs available to the US military in Eastern Afghanistan. He was it. And one of his his team leader at the time was on mission. And he was back and they were like, hey, we need to give a IED in some brief to the commander of this this province. Who do we have? Like, what major can you produce to give this brief? And

my staff sergeant, then an E4 was like, well, I'm it, you know. And what we do in our community is we give that guy that knowledge, that authority and that training. And clearly he succeeded, he didn't get fired from giving a bad brief. So why don't we do that with everybody? Makes sense. That's whether you're a grunts or a motor T operator, or an EOD tech, or an Intel analyst, or an aviation mechanic, you should be pretty dialed into what's going on in the world around you. Because if you're supposedly going to Eastern Afghanistan, you should know what's going on in the country, because it's does nobody any good if you go there blind. So or at least be well spoken,

you have to put a sentence together intelligently and brief. And in the his case, like an O, or a field grade officer, because they're the ones making the decisions. And if you botch what you're trying to talk about, they're just going to throw you away. And well, if you're the number one guy in the country for this information, you just gave a community a huge disadvantage into they're like, they'll never look at you again. So right. It's that first impressions mean a lot. So it's really beneficial to be informed and well spoken. Yeah, absolutely. So I guess you just mentioned like EOD background. But if you want to talk about your background a little bit, because I know your the page is getting awfully popular. And

people seem to be interested in like, in my case, I talked to test run news before, and I get a lot of messages like, Hey, can you and test run talk about your military background? Because that's because the Instagram and each community is either like college kids or veterans. It's just yeah, kind of set of size. If you want to build on your past, just a little bit. So give everyone kind of informed. Yeah, absolutely. I can do that. So I went to one of the UCs for college. I studied Russian foreign policy, specifically security policy. How does Russia interact with its neighbors? How does it do it? Try to achieve its objectives? How does the America interact with that? Studied Russian language. Following that, I commissioned it out of RTC, became an EOD officer,

attended the Naval Explosive Ordnance Disposal School, the Naval School of Explosive Ordnance Disposal, MAF-spell EOD, which is the finest EOD school in the world. Graduated there, went to a unit, spent some time on the line as a platoon leader, spent some time in an office as an operations officer. As I came into the military, the deployments were winding down. This was 2018-2019, and especially for our community, the only guys catching deployments were in very specific companies. So there are a couple of companies that are directly tasked with special mission units, and they were the guys getting the work. So a lot of what we ended up doing was intelligence and analytics. It's port of LISCO, Large Scope Combat Operations, which is the new hotness.

And as a Russian guy, I spent most of my time reading Soviet technical diagrams about ordnance. One of the functions EOD serves beyond just blowing things up, creating breaches for special operators, being special operators and dealing with IEDs is we're weapons technical experts. If it shoots, is shot, or in some ways deployed in war, the EOD community probably has somebody who knows everything about it. I've got a couple guys in my phone who are EOD techs in the 60s. These are old dudes, but they used to memorize guidedness, and these guys can describe everything about them, how it works, who made it, why it was made, etc. So I've been doing for the last three, four years is creating products for armor officers, etc. On the capabilities of the Russian

military, what it can and cannot do in the field with the weapons systems it has. And you've worked in the analytics world. So like, well, our mindset is, is if you can understand the tools the enemy has to play with, you can understand the tactics that they're going to use, because their tools reflect their tactics, or their tools reflect their mindset. I'm separating, I'm heading out to DC to work federal, and that's, that's where I am right now. It's a really interesting background, man, because I'm glad you touched on the overall, I guess, quality of an EOD tech, because I know when I was in, and because I was a marine background, and working with our EOD techs, when I was deployed, they were the most dialed in focus,

all they would do is read, and then they would go to the chow hall and eat and come right back from the mess deck and keep reading. And regardless of the background, whether it was an assault man, or an aviation mechanic, or someone straight out of the academy, these guys were very dialed in, put a sentence together, build the narrative, and like you just said, they're like, I don't give a, I don't care why, like why they put a device on the side of the road, I want to get into the psychology of why they did this, and why they're using this specific tool. Why don't you use, you know, the anarchist cookbook, because A, it doesn't work, but two, the IRA tried it, and they were like, Oh, who are we talking to? Yeah, we know where they got their trainers, it's not going

to work, they're not going to, they're not going to do that. So it's really cool, especially because you mentioned the war on terror, that you can't, especially looking at analytics, you can't just put the same, it's not the same puzzle everywhere you go, there's some of the same pieces where say like, an IED trainer was trained in Yemen, but he came from Iran, but his trainer came from Afghanistan from the 80s, you know, one of those guys, so you can kind of see a pattern, but there's no way to take the same concept and apply it across the board. But looking at very simple, I guess in your case, IEDs or in my case, like just TTPs or trans tactics and procedures going, okay, there's definitely a picture being formed here. And then from there,

you can take it a step further and go, all right, well, I've read a lot about, say, insurgent cells from Gaza to Sinai to Yemen to Ethiopia, and you're going, okay, I think there's a pattern, I think I know where this is coming from. And then from there, because we've built the narrative, but it's, it's, there's a lot of pieces that go into it. And so going back from my Marine Corps background, it was the EOD guys that I worked with were pretty, pretty A1. It was, they were good guys. I mean, just to give a shout out, there's a page, Financial Enabler and his partnership with the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Team, they're both on Instagram. Yami Andrus is an incredible EOD tech giant of our EOD community, Marine EOD. And I've had conversations with him,

and he was like, I can tell looking at an IED on an incident, who made it? Because he got that dialed in and he was like, Hey, this is a simple pressure plate. This is definitely an Afghan bombing. Because the stuff they make is to work, right? They stay simple. And then he could look at another one and be like, wow, that's some import guy. That's a foreigner. That's a Pakistani, Iranian, whatever, because it's got all these bells and whistles and extra shit and fail saves and anti tamper. And, you know, that Afghan is making a device, basically just building a mine. He's like, they step on it great. They don't, they don't. I wanted to work 100% of the time. And it was just, you could see that psychology in the TTPs behind decision making. And it's the same thing with

Conventional Ordnance. When you really look at how a country like Russia develops its weapons systems. Where it puts its money. What does it want to use these tools for? What is its intent? So going on that, just looking at a simple IED picture on Instagram and going, I know exactly where this comes from, kind of reminds me of 2005 era Iraq, where the Iraqi army got routed and our guys were moving into Baghdad, but our guys, the West, NATO, whatever, were going into Baghdad. But that's where al-Qaeda started getting popular. And they were the ones doing the uncertainties across the country and across the Eastern side of the country. And they're like, these, these VB IEDs and these IEDs look often similar to the ones we're seeing in

Afghanistan. And so, you know, from there they go, well, we know that al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan, but then from there you're going, Oh, hold on. No, let me go read the bear one over the mountain. Oh, the Russians had the same thing. It's the same guys. So it's, it's just drawing that linear narrative of, of, or progression rather, just moving down the road going, I know who did this. And then you can go down to say, like, reading the TTP of an Islamic Insurgent called Management of Savagery, where they have a whole chapter dedicated to how to make an IED. And it's completely different to what the, the IRA in Northern Ireland we're doing, or if you want to get really interesting, you can look at Soviet improvised explosive manuals that this, they gave to the

Vietcong in the 60s. And then you can look at the IEDs being given by the Pakistanis to the Afghans during the Soviet Afghan War. They're effectively the same thing. Right. So really, you know, we talked about blowback. The Soviets invented the bomb makers that trained the bomb makers that were killing their guys in Afghanistan. It's a self-licking ice cream cone. Yeah, it's a horrible self-licking ice, sorry, there's noise. I apologize. It is completely a self-licking ice cream cone. And you can sort of, if you go back far enough, you can see where these initial errors, like, oh, this will be fine. We'll give them this, nothing bad will happen. Man, you, you can't even begin to estimate all the bad things that could happen.

What's, you could either apply that to either a, like just Soviet short-term site, like a 50-meter target going, this is going to work right now. We'll get to the rest later. It can be applied to the exact same thing with the U.S. going, who are the Mujahideen fighting? The Russians? All right, let's just give them stingers. Oh, we're going to Afghanistan in 2001. Guess we have a one job for all these stingers. So, or, um, yeah, I mean, it's that mindset. It's that mindset of, I don't care who wins. I just want this guy to lose, you know, and like, there's this whole period in American foreign policy where we were saying, anywhere communism is, we support the other guy. And what that demonstrates is just a lack of education about the world. Americans aren't

necessarily very good at knowing about the world. We're getting better, you know, and stuff like this pro-toner port that's fixing that slowly, but not understanding that, yeah, but understanding that Pinochet was a bad guy to give money to, you know, in South and Central America, and that supporting, um, you know, anti-Sandinist, uh, you know, anti-Sandinist forces, anti-liberal forces in South America would contaminate American reputation in South America for 500 years. That's short-sighted. We saw communism. We're like, we'll support the other guy. We don't care who. Russia's the same way. Exactly, exactly. And I guess like there's always that, the third option of that outlier who's kind of just right outside of the black and the white,

that gray area where you could look at South Africa and Rhodesia in the 70s and the 80s, where they're like, the Cubans are here, the Soviets are here. We know they are because we keep catching them. And everyone's like, now we're not talking to you. And they're like, no, no, no, no, you're not listening. Like all your bomb makers from around the world and all your TTPs and tactics that are being used against you in Vietnam, they're here. Like they're getting trained here in the jungle. It's the same thing. And so it's just, just Americans. I don't want to say like, you know, because South Africa and Rhodesia had that whole stigma against them because of obvious reasons, but I don't know if it's a stigma. If the Rhodesians are like black people, aren't people,

you know, there's, there's a dynamic there that is concerning to someone who has to report to Congress, right? Exactly. So they're going, Hey, we've caught the same guy in Vietnam who was also in Malaysia fighting the British who was also in Vietnam fighting the French who was just captured in, you know, Angola with the Cubans training to fight South South Africans and someone's going, I don't want to talk about that. And so that just completely across the board goes, well, you're just cutting out that piece of the puzzle. That's just, that's the face on the puzzle that you need to help build that international web where I guess Cold War, I'm supporting the other guy outside of comp or opposed to communism, could be applied to the war on terror where they're

going, who's doing what? The Sunnis are oppressed and the suit or she is on top. Let's just flip that. Oh, now we have the Shia uprising going on in, you know, Western Iraq. So it's exactly. There's a book. I don't know if you've read it. It's by this former KGB officer, Alexi Mitrokin. It's called The World Was Going Our Way. And it was written about this sort of what he calls the golden day of the Soviet KGB system, which was the 60s to the 80s. And, you know, how they didn't really see the collapse coming. But one of the things he touches on is there were a couple of Rhodesian and South African intelligence officers and field guys who were reporting whole networks of KGB assets across

Africa to Western partner forces. And like they could name names, they could prove everything. And they weren't listened to because the government of those countries were saying, you can't associate with Indonesia. You know, that's unacceptable, right? You can't support them. But we were perfectly willing to support guys like Pinochet because no one looked, right? We backed up, you know, the government of Panama because no one was really paying attention to what was happening with Noriega until, you know, we burned this country down. Yeah. And that just made a whole other mess outside of that. Absolutely. You know, contaminated our relationship in South America completely.

Yeah. There was, are you familiar with the British Malaysian emergency or melee emergency from the little bit? I know a little about it. So when it comes to, I guess, just drawing a line, like every country has their Vietnam, essentially, you know, the Afghans were in the Soviet or the Soviets had Afghanistan, the French had Algerian, of course, Vietnam, we had Vietnam, but the British weren't in Vietnam because they were fighting Chinese, communist insurgents in Malaysia. And at first, there were very gung-ho, shak-naw, burn everything down, just blow villages and they're like, hold on, this isn't working. They're like, we just need to change every TTP we have because we're not fighting

Germans on the Western front and we're not fighting, you know, Frenchmen in North Africa, we're fighting a completely different beast. So the way they, they just rewrote the entire book and gave it to the Americans, they're like, this is how you win. And so the Americans were like, yeah, I'm not doing that. I'm just going to level every single city in Vietnam. And so they gave it to the Australians and the New Zealanders and they used that and they were very successful and they're coin. But yeah, and I don't want to sound too just negative about American but it's, if they listen for a few little bit. There's a very interesting analysis by Nguyen Ben Gap, who is the commander of the North Vietnamese Army. He wrote an after-action report

in English, which he actually apparently mailed to General Khriton Abrams. But yeah, I think it's funny, you know, because I, the Vietnamese don't think of the Vietnam War as like, oh, America's so evil. They view it sort of as, look, the French were our colonial master. They had an ally called America. They call their ally, I'd be American, see what they had to do, you know, and then the evil Chinese invaded and America armed us, right? Their war of independence is not with France, it's with China. He goes a little further back with, it was the French, then it was the Japanese, and then it was the French, no, then it was the British, then it was the French again, then it was the Americans, then it was the Chinese and they had

50 years of conflict where they were like, bro, just please, please calm down. Yeah, but the great thing is that the Vietnamese were willing to cooperate with American military assets and intelligence assets immediately after the Vietnam War, right? They became incredibly cooperative. And one of these gaps says is, look, the Tet Offensive was actually our last gas. That's all we had left in the tank. We couldn't do anything else. And if America had basically not had, you know, the war in Vietnam was lost moment, you know, when a major news reporter gets on TV and says that we've lost the war in Vietnam, and if we hung tough, they'd have surrendered because what we were doing was

effectively reducing the fighting male population in Vietnam to zero, you know, and it's a method. It's not a good method, but it's a method. And to your point about Malaysia, the British have always maintained a little bit of a colonial army, right? They have ethnic minorities in fighting regiments in their military, which also means they retain cultural knowledge. You know, the Gherkas aren't that and the Indians in their army aren't that far away from Cambodia, Malaysia, Vietnam, right? There's going to be some cultural overlap there. You know, and I think that played a big role in them being able to be like, wait, we're doing the wrong thing. Let's, let's go ask someone that lives like these people live about how to get along with these people.

There was also a different, and there's a book called Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife by John Nagel, and it's a old T.E. Lawrence quote where he's like, to understand the era of like, they're, they're not, because, you know, T.E. Lawrence was in World War I and fought in the Middle East, need to, you know, Jordan and all that, but he's like, you have to invent your special operations. 100%. He's like, we have taken Acaba, like who, like our people, our side. But anyways, in the book, John Nagel keeps, he starts directly from day one. He's like, both Americans and the British tried shakuna, and they're like, this isn't working. So quickly the British went, okay, I have a different idea. They're a British dominion, but they're not citizens. So they

rounded up, they burned all the, essentially they got rid of all the food. And they were handing out bags of rice. And they would walk into a village with like a company instead of where Americans would roll in with like a brigade or a regiment reinforced plus or minus. But the British would roll in with like a company, maybe a platoon plus and just go to a little village and they're like, I have a bag of rice. You get a bag of rice if you hand it. Yeah, they're like, you give me one communist and you get a bag of rice. You give me two communists and you get five bags of rice. You give me five communists and you get British citizenship and you can go to England if you want. And so immediately they just started turning them in because the Brits and they call it draining

the swamp. That's their, their big thing. They're like, Oh, there's a problem. Let's just drain the swamp. You can't have mosquitoes if there's no water. So they've got all water. It's yeah. Have you heard of the, the Russian revolution, the Decemberists going to the peasants? Not, I'm not a little obscure. So in the 1800s, there was a revolution of young, they're not quite socialists yet. They're like French revolutionaries sort of. Not you. And they're young aristocrats and they feel that they can go to the peasants of Russia and they can educate them and then they can get them to rise up against the Tsar and free themselves. Right? So what the Tsar does is he says, Oh, really? If you give me one of these people,

I will give you 10 acres of his land from his noble family to have. And uniformly across Russia, all 3000 of these guys are rounded up and turned in by peasants, but they arrest them themselves. And the Tsar just turns up their land. It's the same thing. He just incentivizes cooperation with the government and problems sort itself out. So taking a step back and thinking about, and this podcast is definitely all over the place, but just taking a step back, like we're leaving Vietnam. And so there's a very large Vietnamese community in Texas. Because after I got him was falling, we put all the Vietnamese that were pro-US or the South Vietnamese rather, put them on ships and just drop them off in Texas

to like figure it out. And it's almost like the Americans, when we were leaving Afghanistan, picked up all these Afghans that were supporting the US for 20 years, we dropped them in Arlington that we were like, figure it out. It's like, I see them walking around the DC area. And I was like, I know what these kids, I know where these kids are from. Like I, I know what language they're speaking. And it's just, it's completely different than in the Malaysian case where the Brits are like, no, we'll give you a place to live. We'll make you a British citizen. The Americans were like, figure it out. This is America. But so, and again, I don't want to seem like I'm talking on the US, but it's just that, that real short side of like, oh, Afghanistan is not sexy anymore.

We're not going to talk about that. And nobody likes Vietnam anyways, we're not going to talk about that. So America thinks in four year periods, you know, oh, 100%. It's almost like our military, of course. And it's almost like our military makes two to three year SMEs. And what is a SME, a subject matter expert? How can you be a subject matter expert on Russian foreign policy in three years? When a third of the time you're in the field, in the other half of the time, you're like, you know, picking up cigarette butts is in the list. So it's really hard. Sorry. That's when, when my unit was doing this stuff, they actually went and asked who's done any, you know, what officers do we have that have actually done anything involving Russia? And I was able to put

my hand up because I had four years of academic study and language skill. Right. So again, I'm by no means a SME, but I had that and they looked for it. But that's a community specific thing. For the most part, the Army's like, you're the guy that's the subject matter expert now. Because we say so. Go get read up, you know. Yeah, it's exactly. I just know that I went from, I was, I bounced around the Marine Corps a lot within five years. I was in five different units, you know, and, or five and a half years, whatever. But I went to Japan and I was supposed to be the SME on China. I was like, I just got here. How do you expect me to know every single inch of this, the second largest country in the world?

Yeah, next to Egypt, I was like, how do you expect me to do this in two weeks? And they're like, Oh, by the way, you have to brief the, the MEPH general. I was like, excuse me. It's like, it's like, I can do it. It'll be, it'll be, I'll be at work in this gift every single day. But it, yeah, it's, yeah, it's just one of those. I don't know. It's an institutional thing. And you and I both know that it's a bureaucracy thing too. We don't want to pay for, we don't want to pay for that guy that does nothing but China in case we need him. We want to just make that guy whenever we want it. Of course. They're like, why would we hire some, you know, some college road student who goes around the country talking about Russian group think in Crimea in the 1850s against the

British and the French? No, let's just pay some, let's grab one of our, our E threes who just showed up and say, you're the Russia guy. Get ready. Yeah. It's, yeah, I think it's because the war's over and it, of course, and I think it's because the war's over and it's really, and of course budget comes cuts come right out after the war ends and it's almost like guys are just trying to figure out what to do. And so I got out trying to justify their existence. Exactly. Yep. So, you know, you know, again, like, again, officer perspective, I was writing NCOERs for NCOs who've done tremendous things over the last two, three years deploying against insurgent forces across the Middle East, right? Some in support of tier one assets. And I was told, dude, do not put anything involving

insurgency or coin in that NCOER. Try to make it LISCO. Try to make it large scale combat operations, because that's what's going to push his career, not the stuff he's doing or has done the stuff that we can say he kind of did. Yeah. Yeah, you gotta fluff the wrong, you know, fluff the, the back catalog there, because I know in the Marine Corps, we have fit reps. And there are like, put quantity, put total numbers, how many times did you write an insum, like one of those? It's like, you did coin? Yeah, completely get rid of coin. Nobody cares. They're like, I don't care if you deployed. Just say you deployed and just make it up. You're like, well, what is this helping? Because at that point, all the guys who are, because at that point, all the guys who are

genuinely passionate about the job, they're going to go get fatigued and want to quit. But then the other guys in the other set, so they're going, yeah, I'm excellent on paper. They're like, cool, well, you're just going to keep rising to the top. And then by that point, you know, it's, it's, I don't know, it's like an ice cream cone of self-hate. And also like, are we sure we're never going to fight an insurgency ever again? Are we sure? You know, most of America's wars have been against insurgencies, you know, a nation by terrorist for terrorists, man. Like, yeah, like we were an insurgency. All our wars against the Native Americans were insurgency or counterinsurgency wars.

It's kind of cool and interesting to read about the banana wars with the Marine Corps and Central America going, you know, there's no way in hell we're going to fight another insurgency. But then at the same time, it was around when the Americans and the Philippines were fighting an insurgency and they're like, there's no way in hell we're going to fight another insurgency. And then after World War I, they were like conventional, cool, cool, cool. And then we fought World War II, they were like, cool, cool, cool. And then Korea, they were like, that wasn't an insurgency. That was like force on force. That's cool. And then Vietnam, we got absolutely, tactically, did very well, strategically just botched it, you know, like, you know,

whatever, you could talk politics all day. But then after that, there was all those interviews coming out with all these Marines, soldiers, airmen, sailors going, yeah, there's no way in hell we're going to fight another prolonged insurgency. It's the same thing today where after Afghanistan, there's veterans going, oh, yeah, there's no way in hell we're going to fight another insurgency. It doesn't work. But yeah, it's also like people saying, oh, tanks aren't, you know, tanks aren't a thing anymore because the javelin exists, you know. Oh, tanks are getting killed. Yeah. And also, like, if you're properly supporting armor, armor should have protection against an infantryman or the missile launcher.

That's why your infantry and support exists. That's what it's for. But your point about World War I, what's fascinating to me is a lot of our senior cadre from that period, senior officers, training NCOs, senior NCOs, were veterans of the Philippines and the wars in Central and South America. Oh, yes. And there's a phenomenon that I've done a little bit of reading about World War I. British officers talk about how they describe it as suicidal. American troops wouldn't leave positions, right? So American troops would stay in trenches rather than withdraw from them, right? And they'd fight for the trench and they'd take casualties, but more often than not, they held the trench. British forces and French forces who've been

fighting on the front for years, if they thought they were going to lose a trench, they'd just bail, right? And then come back later. On that, on that. So have you read the book The General by C.S. Forrester? Yes. So you know that the officers in World War I were actually really lower in listen, officers in the war, fighting insurgents in South Africa, fighting the, the, the orange freezing. And so what's really interesting about The General is it was a completely fictitious book, really a capsule, just captured the British way of thinking where their essential policy of the way they look at war is it takes three years to build a battleship, it takes 100 years to build a new tradition, just keep throwing guys at it. We'll

figure it out later and refuse to break tradition. So the Germans went, Oh, every NCO and officer, this is mandatory reading. This is the first thing you're reading, because this is how you get inside the mind of a British office, the British, because we know how to beat Russians, like they had their indoctrination with my com for whatever, and everyone just goes like the French are pussies. They're like, they're, they're going to roll up with a brist. That's our biggest adversary in Europe. So they're like, this is just read their doctrine, which in military terms, our military terms, it doesn't make any sense why, and this just might be my, my experience, but it's almost, you're told not to read most like indulge yourself in your enemy's culture, where

it's like, if you're reading about China, they're like, why are you getting really into China? Why are you learning Chinese? They're like, you seem like an insider threat. You're like, no, I'm trying to get into the, just understand what's going on. I don't care about the gun. I care about who's pulling the trigger, you know, one of those, why are they doing this? So it's, yeah, I think. And with China, yeah, with China, a country that is incredibly authoritative and regimented in its thinking, it's not a bad idea, you know, because the way they perform in the field will be regimented and highly structured. Oh yes. And so after looking at how the Russians perform in Ukraine, you could just go, didn't they base their entire military off of the FSU? Who else

based their entire military off the FSU or the former Soviet Union for the listeners, the Chinese? Everyone knows if you shoot the Chinese officer, they have no idea what to do. It's almost like shooting a British officer in World War One. They're like, well, who's in charge? Because that's how their whole mindset is of, oh, there's just the top, it's top down, not bottom up. So, yeah. China is a little different, though. They got a lot going on, but I'm pretty sure they're going to hold here. They are. They are a lot of, and it's because their economy is so interwoven with the world, because they're the number one producers of toothpaste lids. You know, A, if I start brushing my teeth, the Chinese are really going to feel it,

but it's a completely other beast. And so you can't really apply the Soviet Union to the Russians to the Chinese, but 25% is very similar because they really riff off each other. Yeah. And also, when the Russians and the Chinese train, the Australians and the New Zealanders get to train at the United States. I've never done one of these rotations, but I'm sure you may have as a Marine, especially Pacific Marine. The Aussies get to do op-for training against the US Marine Corps. They get to do it against the US Army. They get to experience that and make decisions based on that and learn based on that. The Chinese have to do it against themselves or the Russians. And if they're doing very similar

stuff. So in hindsight, it's almost like the Russians should have fully sent it in 2014, because the Ukrainians were essentially walking around in old Soviet fatigues. And as soon as push came to shove in Crimea, they absolutely rolled over and buckled because, hey, they don't have any appropriate training to fight a larger Tier 1 force, essentially a superpower force, because they're the poorest country in Europe, and they are absolutely strangled by the oligarchs in this deep state. You can do whatever you want with that. They're a mafia state, but their military was in no condition to fight a conventional force. But leading into like 2015-16 timeframe, they absolutely started to prove themselves, I guess, in Donbas.

Yeah. I mean, you're absolutely right. In 2014, the Russians had a window where the Ukrainian military, for one of a better term, just didn't exist. It was corrupt generals, basically unarmed and unequipped militiamen who were pretending to be trained soldiers, fighting Russian regulars. And the problem is the Russians gave those guys a year of training in the field, and then all of a sudden, those guys could fight. And now, we can see it. We can see it in the field. Ukrainians know how to fight now. And so if I was just an average guy, and I look at a picture of the Ukrainian military, it would almost look like our military, the U.S. military, the British, based on

their wearing multi-cam. They have AK-74s, but outside of that, it looks like a very western force applied in Eastern Europe. And so compared to 2014, where they were no better off than the Georgians in 2008, just running around with, essentially, they had a couple mags, and then they had their moistened guns in the truck behind them, just in case, you know, things got hairy. But it's looking at, and I don't know if you saw the headline that came out yesterday or the day before, but it said, the British are now going to start training a thousand soldiers a week for the Ukrainians out of Lviv or something, and Eastern Ukraine to send them out to fight the Russians in, or in Western Ukraine and Lviv, to go fight the

Russians in Eastern Ukraine, because, and you may have seen this, both the Russians and the Ukrainians are starting to throw their reserves at each other, because the Russians, when the war started, didn't really seem like they were doing that leapfrog or yo-yo of some guys fight for a day, they take a break, the next guy comes up behind them, there was nothing like that, they were just throwing the same guys into the meat grinder, and the Ukrainians were on the defensive, but now the Russians retrograded, put all their guys to go, arrested up, they got new ammo, but now they're going forward, and the Ukrainians are having their counter-offensive, which is really cool, but that only lasts for, what, a week? Maybe two? Because you have 72 hours

when you invade to gain as much territory as you can, and then if you do a counter-offensive, you really have to keep that momentum up, but you're going to run out of steam, and then your combat soldiers are going to get a little tires, and then you have to use the reserves, and those guys aren't trained, so. Well, so it's interesting to me about what's happening in Ukraine, sort of, on the ground, is the Russian army behaved the way it did, because they thought the war would be over in 108 hours, like we have documents saying that that's what they thought, they were wrong, but they threw 100% of their men in, and there wasn't really, you know, there wasn't a deep bench, you know, there wasn't a deep batter's box,

team to go into and be like, hey, you know, let's put men in the field, you know, and figure it out. They couldn't do that, you know, so what they had to do instead was they had to just keep everyone there. The Ukrainians had this massive mobilization of the territorial defense units, and those guys are now, by my judgment, at least partially trained, you know, they've been in combat, they know what to do, so I think the Ukrainian bench is much deeper than the Russian bench, and that's why you're seeing gradual, but substantive forward movement. They also had full mobilization of every male in the country will go fight, and so if you're a Russian force of 200,000 plus or minus going up against millions of men,

you can see what you want, where it's like quality over quantity, cool, quantity kind of comes in handy. So just look at the Soviets on the eastern front. Germans were way better trained, but as soon as they started losing momentum, just that you can't stop the human wave, it's, it's going to come, it's not going to stop. I also don't think that, you know, we can necessarily say that the Russians are trained. Do you know the term Diazhevka? So Diazhevka refers to the hazing culture in the Russian army. Where you're coming as a conscript, the contract privates, the regular army privates, steal your money, they beat you up, they steal your equipment, they make you do stuff for them,

their corporals do the same thing to them, their sergeants do the same thing with the corporals, and the officers do the same thing to the sergeants, and it's this culture of I get 10% of your paycheck, you do what I want you to do, you do what I tell you to do, and I beat you up all the time. So yeah, I am, I didn't know there was a word for it, but I'm very familiar with the culture. And did you read Zinke Boys? It's about the Soviet, the Soviet VDV and Soviet army in Afghanistan. And it's a, it's just a little collection of essentially letters that were coming back from the war. And about a third of it's about the mothers reporting on their sons who were killed. And

the other half are soldiers that were in country and sometimes nurses, where the nurses would show up very optimistic, almost like those Z-thirsts that are showing up and wearing the Z's and whatnot, very patriotic about Russia. And then they would go to Afghanistan, they're like, all of our guys are drunk, they're out of money, they're selling all of their equipment to the local Afghans who are giving it to the Mujahideen. And then at that point, our guys are wearing Adidas running shoes because they think it's better than combat boots. And all the guys, he was like, the more we get more casualties from either force on force or accidents than we did with the Mujahideen, because the Russians just take a shot. And I was talking to a mic

reports about this. And it's almost like a same culture of how the Germans, not the Germans, the Georgians like to take shots before they go out into patrol. And so essentially, by the time they get on the, the foot patrol, they're drunk. And so that's how the Russians were in Afghanistan, outside of like some specific VDV units where they're like, if I catch you drinking, I'm going to beat the hell out of you. And at that, at that point, it's just reinforcing that, that fear tactic of if I slip up, I'm going to get jumped. So yeah, and it's, it's, and I hate interesting, it's my buzzword, but it's interesting to see that there has been zero progression from the Soviet hazing method until today.

Well, it's hard to fix, you know, because one of these also to consider is that it does work for what they're trying to do structurally, you know, it does work, you know, when the Russians attack something, and they're doing it their way, you know, the Russians are looking to hammer something with artillery until it basically no longer exists as a structure, kill everyone with artillery, and then roll over what's left in tanks and, you know, tanks and infantry. And if, if that's the system you have, you don't care if the guy's doing the mop up or drunk, you don't need them. Yeah, that's, that's true. That's very true. And so that's an institutional

culture where it's, it's not upper shut up essentially. And yeah, in our military, it's, we've really gotten away from it in the last 10, 15 years, but where if you have a problem, you just drop blouses and settle the problem, but now they're like, we'll just do paperwork. So it's, especially in the Marine Corps, where it's supposed to be this real tough branch, but at this point they're like, if you touch anybody else, you, you get a lot of trouble. And so regardless if it was, because I've seen, I've seen a sergeant and a lieutenant just getting into a serious argument and they were like, let's drop blouses and they were like, you sure? Do you want to try that? So it's, well, because like nine times out of ten, you know, there's

rank out ways, anything. So there's a, and I'm really impressed by this. There is a combatives, combatives day on, on hood with some of the cabinets. And you will see, you know, it's good training, you know, soldiers should be doing combatives. It makes them better. It makes them better at their jobs. And every once in a while, you'll see some dudes doing combatives and, you know, it is not training. It is them settling an issue, right? But that issue remains settled, you know? And, you know, that's, I think that's a good thing, you know? Or is that having the ability to, you know, they have that in the Marine Corps too. It's essentially combatives, but it's McMap and it's genuinely clowned on in the Marine Corps,

just calling it lame. But whenever there's two guys that really want to settle something, go grab an instructor and go like, can you mediate this? Because we just need to do this. So they're like, oh yeah, I'm a black belt and I'm an instructor and let's get the corpsman and we'll make sure everything's okay. So yeah, it's training. It's just two Marines motivated about training. Oh, yes. And if you walk back with a black eye, you're like, I deserved it. I left the mop out. It's okay. They're like, okay, we'll go to EO and then. Yeah. I think when you look at Western style militaries, which I think now includes the Ukrainians, against Russian Chinese forces, the willingness of lower level leaders to make decisions.

You know, because like one of the things we're also seeing is that in the TDF, the territorial defense forces, a lot of people who became real leaders in the TDF were just the guy that was good at making the decisions at that time, right? No one had any rank. It was just civilians with guns. And you know, the Marine Corps and the Army always talk about small unit leader, right? That the strategic corporal, the Army strategic sergeant, you know, the squad leader who needs to be able to make battlefield decisions, right? I don't think the Russians have that. I don't think the Chinese have that. And it's why whenever you'll see like, hey, general's dead. Oh, wow, this Russian column is now going to stop for four

days until a new one shows up. They're just going to sit there and wait, you know, a colonel's dead. Same thing. Or if you leave your a single tank crew to its own devices, they're going to smash their equipment because they're going, there's no way in hell I'm going to Kiev. I'm not going to die for some stupid idea. So, right. You know, but if you left a squad of Rangers on their own, they'd try to figure it out, you know? Oh, yeah, I've worked with the Rangers and those are some inventive individuals is a good way to put it. They find it. Oh, yes, them and, you know, reconnaissance Marines or anything, they're just, they're like, there's a wall, we'll climb over it or go through it. It's, there's no stopping. Yeah. But that's a mentality and a culture thing. And

again, three years to build a battleship, 100 years to build a culture, you know? So I think the Russians not having that Chinese, not having that is just strategic weakness. So are you dialed in and speaking about the Chinese a little bit and they've had zero conventional combat experience and you could talk about, you know, bullying Uyghurs into submission is not anything. That's not the same thing or fighting the Vietnamese 10 to one in the 70s is not the same thing or throwing rocks at Indians two years ago. It's not the same thing. They have zero conventional experience. And so the Marine Corps and our military or the Brits who are pound for pound, probably one of the best fighters in the planet,

the British, they are hundreds and thousands of years of doctrine. They're like, well, we learned, we just learned. And so we keep building the doctrine. But the Chinese, like I mentioned earlier, just referenced each other and go, this looks good. How did your guys perform? Oh, we got overran. We'll just make it look like half your guys died and that you won the, you won the scrimmage. And then they send guys to do humanitarian missions. They call it humanitarians, but it's essentially just protecting their interests in Africa, where they just set up a little road blockade. And because they used your booty as the one hop. And then from there, they go into the Horn of Africa or wherever to set up their own position.

They set up a road blockade. They're like, let's call this one a victory. Yes, good. And so, and so, yeah, if you look at footage of Chinese exercises, which is actually something you can, it's pretty easy to do, you can see them doing it. Almost uniformly, it looks like a Chinese war movie, where you'll see the commander, right, will be a colonel, the general, he's older, and he'll have his cadre of officers with him, and he'll have his stick and I'll have his map, and he'll point at the map and like, say, we're going to do this. And it's very, you know, it's very Sun Tzu, Art of War, right? And then I think their mentality is if I do this, and I am, you know, sage enough in the way, and my guys on the front are brave enough and committed enough,

what I want to happen will happen, right? I mean, we know that doctrinally, the Chinese think about the chosen reservoir as a victory. Yeah, I was about to mention that. And so, they had that movie that just came out where it painted them as the winner, that they won, and they let the Americans go. They committed 20 divisions. To one, I guess, patterned marine division, and then just, and one army division, you know, two American, and they lost half their troops, you know, compared to 20% losses on the part of the Americans. And this is not killed. America retained the lives of most of its men. They successfully extracted those troops, and they bled the Chinese dry. But for the Chinese,

that's a victory. Yeah, because they don't see. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. I was just going to say, you could also see that. Yeah, go ahead, man. You're going to pause. We're going to pause. I'm sorry, you'll have to edit that. They don't see that, you know, sort of the, how to put this, the mechanics behind why, what happened happened, right? So their doctrine doesn't tell them, hey, you're spending more troops to achieve an objective than you really should. You know, like, you know, the US military has a percentage where it's like, this is, this is a no go. We can't continue. You know, this is not worth what we have to spend to make it happen. Let's try it a different way. You know, this is not worth resource

expenditure. This is not that vital. The methods we're using aren't working, right? Or they're not working well enough for this to be good. You know, it's almost like looking at the Soviets on the Eastern Front, and especially Leningrad, where they were like, we beat the Russians, we beat the Germans. They're like, you were under siege for 900 days and your people were eating each other. And I guess that's a victory. Yeah, well, the Germans left. You're like, you beat the Germans, but it's only because they stopped. Yeah. Or a Mario, the Chinese and the same thing, but Japan. Yeah. Or, or you could just look at the Russian, like, yeah, or the Russians, very Manchuria going, we beat the Japanese or

like, they were already spent. They were, they were gasped by the time the Americans got to Okinawa. And you invaded. It's like kicking a, kicking a kid when he's down. You're like, all right, yeah, we did it. You know, but yeah, Mary Opal is another example of they destroyed the city and killed hundreds of thousands. And they're like, we did it. They also lost thousands. Yeah, you know, they lost thousands, Ukrainian forces delayed them for weeks and tied up Russian troops for weeks when they could have been needed elsewhere. You know, and there's this concept of the hero city in Eastern European military doctrine, right, where you strong point something to force someone to engage it, to allow you to maneuver around, right? Yeah, Mario Paul got taken,

but it got taken weeks later. And after the Ukrainians had been able to mobilize their forces and go on the counter offensive. So good job, guys. You beat 2000 guys in a factory with 10,000 men. Well done. So I want to kind of sidestep a little bit and you and I are both military men. Do you think the offensive against Kiev was a faint just to kind of keep pressure on the Ukrainians on all sides? Because tactically, it makes no sense to attack a city barely one to one, where you should use probably five to one. But they took Kyrsten pretty quick, and then they opened up the waterway into Crimea. And it's almost like, because at the time, it just didn't make any sense to me. It still doesn't make any sense to me why they invaded Ukraine at the first place. But

today I'm going, okay, looking back, it goes, okay, I think it was a faint. And they keep just re inching into Harkov to go, oh, we're still here. Yeah, we're still here until they take over Donbass. And I think that's what it was. And it's almost like at first they were playing the doctrine day by day. They're like, well, that didn't work yesterday. So let's try something. But looking back, I think it was definitely a faint to keep pressure on all sides. Respectfully, I disagree. And, by the way, the reason Russia invades Ukraine, historically speaking, is because of A, the need for a warm water port, B, the need for grain, right? Ukraine, the other name for Ukraine, during the Russian Empire, it's Black Russia, right? Black Earth

Russia, because it is where 90% of Russia's grain came from. No, I'm familiar with all this, the background and whatnot. But looking at Crimea, they were doing a very good job of Dorezmo doctrine. They were doing very well. And throughout I don't know where it goes, balls to the wall, go like, oh, we're invading the whole country. It's like, what you were doing before was working. And this quick 180, it's, I don't know, at the time, I was like, this doesn't really make any sense. But it was like, maybe they just, maybe it is as simple as securing borders and wanting ports. Maybe that's just the old, I think they thought, I think they thought they could take the whole country. Yeah. I 100% believe the Russians said, we can take Kiev in 24 hours.

We can seize the government. We can put a gun to the Zelensky's head and say surrender. And establish a new government and the country will surrender. You know, I think they also intended to take Karkov, Sumi, you know, all these major cities they got stuck on, on the Northern, Northern Park, Kiev to Karkov to Sumi, where they got stuck. They attacked all those cities because they intended to take them. And in my opinion, right, I believe that what the Russians did in attacking Kiev is, you know, they, that was their primary line of, excuse me, their primary line of advance. I think that was really their first objective. Karsan was great, we can take Karsan, you know, we can open the water back up. But I think they're now saying that,

oh, you know, it's a faint and the Russians are saying that their real objectives are the Donbass and, you know, the Donetsk and Wuhan's republics and establishing a road to Transnistria, right, which is what they're saying now. But I really believe they wanted the whole country. I, I really think that was their objective and they were just flat out wrong and not equipped to do what they thought they could do. Yeah, I can, I can definitely see that it's, it's completely different looking at the North and the East compared to the South where comparatively, it looks like the Ukrainians just went, yeah, I'm leaving, there's no way in hell I'm trying to protect this and they kind of ran away, essentially just to retrograde and better

defend, right, and Nikolayev and whatnot on the other side of the river and blew all the bridges on their way out. But in just across the board, like, and I just might be thinking American tactics, but it's, it didn't make any sense. Just, just one to one, like, I'm sure the Russians have something in there, because they don't have any ROE, they were just shooting anybody. So it's number one, that's a pretty good scare tactic and you can call more criminals all day, but what are you going to do, go into Russia to get them and try them? No, there's no way you can do that. So it's, yeah, they're like, well, one of the Russia again, yeah, I don't think he cares. So yeah, he doesn't care. He also probably has a form of cancer. So he's not probably going

to live very long. That's another thing. Yeah. Yeah, which may be driving this whole thing. You know, let me snag what I can. Well, I'm, you know, on my way out, I'll be the guy that takes the blame, the guy that comes after me will be like, look, we have it, we're sorry, but we're not giving it back. You know, yeah. So I think that I really think I was going to say, I think that's another reason why, yeah, that's why it's, it happened so quickly because they were going really slow for 20 years. And then in February, they just went, we're doing everything right now. And then so at that point, you're like, maybe there's something medically wrong with Putin. That's why he jumped the gun and went, I am Russia. There is no second. It's, I will take this whole

country down with me or I will fix it. It's, and so that's why I think kind of came down to. I also think the loss of Trump in the White House did that. And again, this is going to, you know, this is a political thing. People have their views on Trump, but I think that forget the politics behind Trump, you know, was he or wasn't he, you know, connected to Russia? But I think having someone whose view on the world was America's first, right? I'm not interested in coalition building. I'm not, you know, like he wasn't interested in old relationships. And you know, every time a new, an old relationship was like, we need support. He was like, really, do we? You know, I think the Russian view was, hey, we can continue to creep along and get what

we can get if this guy's going to stay in for eight years. And you know, we have eight years to take as much as we can weaken the alliance further, right? And then you get Biden in and Biden is very much an old school war hawk foreign policy guy, right? Number one advocate for intervention in Yugoslavia. Yeah. So right. And, you know, the Russians are like, that's our window. You know, we have to do this now. You know, we got to do this while COVID is keeping the United States busy. Well, you know, while there are domestic issues preventing America making foreign policy moves, you know, while they're still tied up in Afghanistan, right? I also think to, if you want to get a little conspiratorial, that's why China is getting

so aggressive about Taiwan, because they have an ally who's got most of the world tied up in Europe. You know, I do think major American commitment in Ukraine. So, and I mentioned this with Chase Baker, the fifth American back in when the war started, I think it was like episode three or four. But I think it was a linear, linear progression. And it was really just from not in America, but every other angle go, wow, this is, it was almost beautiful the way they executed it was. Biden tripped up a flight of stairs in Air Force One. And then immediately the Russians were like, all right, we're going to start putting our guys on the border of Ukraine. And then America botched the withdraw of Afghanistan,

because the whole world saw that. Then the Chinese flew over Taiwan and left leaflets going, oh, look how America treats its allies, you're next. And then, so there's a power vacuum in Central Asia, which is historically just been that they call it the great game between essentially an Anglo nation and the Russians debating about who owns that key area, but now the Chinese are involved. So the Russians go, you know, we're not really friends with the Chinese, but we need them. So they, and I don't know what happened in, and I know exactly, you know, I both know what happened, but in Kazakhstan, where out of nowhere they had that quasi revolution, and it was almost like a dry run for the Russian VDV to secure airports. And for the Russians to rapidly mobilize their

military and secure in Kazakhstan, it's huge. And they took the whole thing very quickly. And so they seized it. So it was like, and that was January, just a month before February or the war in Ukraine. But that was just this. Yeah, it was a test run. It was just a linear progression of they were, they were moving fast. And so after, and so after the Russians invade, and there was that really intense 72 hours where, like I said earlier, you have 72 hours to really seize as much ground as you can before that momentum runs out. And then the Iranians started rocketing Erbil. And they, for the first time in forever claimed like, Oh, we did this. It wasn't the IRGC. And it wasn't a, it wasn't a Iranian proxy. It was us. It was the Iranians. The Americans were getting all palm

thoroughly. It seemed for a second there, because the Chinese also sent their Navy around Taiwan and did a flyover. And we had a single destroyer out there essentially saying go away. And it seemed for a second there that it was like, wow, this whole world is in the current situation because just just an old guy tripped up a stair. But it's well, but to that point, you and Baker have a and Baker, by the way, is an amazing guy. We hope he gets back safe. He's in Ukraine right now. He's doing amazing stuff. And he's going to be in lethal minds. He's, you know, writing up something for us. Those countries are leader oriented, right? I mean, how much pop music is generated in Russia by how sexy Putin is, right? I mean, there's a Russian pop song where supermodels

sing a man like Putin is what I need, right? It's a really weird song. Right. You know, China does the same thing. It's leader ideation. Iran, you know, the Ayatollahs, when they see an American president trip, they're like, oh, look, look, America's weak, because the president trip, right? They don't think in structures, they think in leaders. And, you know, yes, the pullout of Kabul was, that's going to be armchair general to death over the next hundred years. You know, every major in the army at the war college is going to write a paper on how he'd have done the pullout from Kabul, right? Yeah, that's, and it's almost disrespectful at that point. It's like, oh, if I

was there, it's like saying if you were, if you never once were in the military, you're like, well, if I was in, you're like, well, you weren't. So shut up. Yeah. Yeah. If I was at Valley Forge, be quiet, dude, you know. Yeah. No, but like dudes do that, you know, and it has to be said for all that, how annoying that is, the United States, Britain, the Western states have self-critical militaries. I mean, I hear more often than not that America's in a bad place in a war against China. I never hear a Chinese guy go, a Chinese officer go, you know, we haven't actually fought a war ever, you know, since Japan. I'm afraid to say it though. I'm not sure. Right. But that's the problem. I think with the attack on Kiev, the FSB, and you remember

that video, the FSB director was basically grilled by Putin on live TV and told to say, you know, we think that the strategy will work. He didn't do that. You know, that guy definitely did not think that. You know, that guy was seeing stuff on the ground. Real quick. So we're getting close to that time. And so speaking about the FSB, who lied to Putin, do you think? Was it the army or was it the FSB? Because the FSB was put under house arrest almost immediately. And so at first, I thought, maybe the FSB told him, this won't work. And so, but Putin going, yes, it will send in the army. But then on the other half, I thought, maybe the FSB went, this will work. And the yes, man, Putin is submission. And so Putin, if you could say he has a tumor or cancer or whatever

went, yeah, and the army went, no, but the army's so corrupt, they just didn't know what they were working with. And so it was like, okay, he was like, I have an opinion on this. Okay, what's up? I have an opinion on this. I think the only guy who didn't lie to him is the FSB director. So I think the FSB told him, bro, this is not going to work. This is not working. I think the GRU, which is the military intelligence arm of the Russian state, who competes with the FSB, and the Interior Ministry, as well as Sergei Shoigu, who is the Russian Minister of Defense, right, who's never been in the military, by the way. He's just a plutocrat. Yeah. Yeah, just a dude. All said, bullshit, they're lying. We can do this. And then when it didn't work,

those guys got together and went, he compromised us. Right. He was a naysayer. He didn't believe in Russia and in you, Mr. Putin, right? So the two FSB guys got snagged up. And then Shoigu was gone for like a month in April. He disappeared, right? No one knew where he was. Yeah, everyone thought he was dead. Right. And then he came back and it turned out he'd been in hospital, right? And you know, we're never going to see under the rug, you know, where this stuff's happening. But I really believe that the FSB, the FSB is a serious service. And it's as independent as intelligence services in Russia get, right? You know, it's not the GRU, which is under the Army. It's not MVD, which is owned by the Interior Ministry. You know, it's not Rosgarde, which is, you know,

the Chechens and the Russian National Guard, it's its own thing. And I think they were honest to Putin, like, dude, don't do this. He didn't want to hear it. And the guys around him didn't want to hear it. So when it went wrong, and they're like, we need a scapegoat. Oh, yeah, you, the guy we don't like. Yeah, that's goes and I just want to close with that. It goes right back to how the American military works of if everything goes right until it's like, Hey, you did your job. But if everything goes wrong, they look at Intel, they're like, Hey, dude, what the fuck? Why didn't you do your job? You're like, Hey, well, I did the best I could before I had. So and it's that right back to where we started with the SMEs, where it's you have one to your

to maybe three year if you're lucky, subject matter experts in the area. And how can you be a subject matter expert? If you're brand new, it's going to keep popping around. But yeah. All right, so I think we're going to close this out. If you have anything you would like to plug. Yeah. Lethal Minds volume two comes out January, excuse me, July 1st at midnight. Crouch on report, S24 at all kinds to other provisions, Meridian News and a couple others are going to be joining us for a newsletter. They'll be releasing biweekly every month on starting the second week of July. Lethal Minds is going to be monetizing. We're going to make a post about that soon. Subscribe, join us. We think we're what we're doing is cool. We hope you

think so too. All right. And I'm really excited to be a part of the journal and really appreciate you coming out today. Thank you for having me, man. Any time