Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 3/6/23 Douglas Macgregor on Ukraine, China and the Military Industrial Complex

Episode Date: March 8, 2023

Douglas Macgregor is back on the show to talk about the war in Ukraine. Macgregor gives his assessment of where things stand on the ground. They talk about the astounding casualty numbers and the horrifying nature of the battle over Bakhmut. Macgregor then gives some predictions for the next stages of the war. They talk about the rising tension with China. They agree there is no need to go to war with China but discuss what may explain the sudden attention shift towards Beijing. Lastly, they talk about the effects of cronyism in the weapons industry and the probability of a nuclear war.  Discussed on the show: “This Time It’s Different” (The American Conservative) “Ukrainian soldiers in Bakhmut: ‘Our troops are not being protected’” (Kyiv Independent) Douglas Macgregor, Col. (ret.) is a senior fellow with The American Conservative, the former advisor to the Secretary of Defense in the Trump administration, a decorated combat veteran, and the author of five books. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton show all right y'all on the line i've got colonel douglas mcgregor of course he's the hero of the great big tank battle of iraq war one in 1991 and he wrote the margin of victory and happy to have you back on this show colonel how you

doing great thanks uh good happy to have you on the show here and so we got important news to talk about if i could find the right tab i have your very important piece here the last one you wrote for the american conservative this time it's different and it's about well how we've essentially had our soldiers and Marines patrol and poshtuns in Pactica for the last 20 years. And seemingly the likes of Biden think that that's what war is like. And those wars have been absolutely horrible for the Iraqis, the Afghans, and the Americans fighting them too. But this is an altogether different type of war. And it has so far moved at 7,000 miles from America's eastern most point. And so, you know, we're still very far removed from it. And I think the reality of the war

has not really sunk into the American people or even to the American leadership, other than in talking point format that look how cruel the Russians are, which there's some truth to that. But this is a total war going on over there in East Ukraine right now, huh? Well, the other thing is the potential for this thing to widen and ultimately draw us in thanks to this administration is enormous. And if we're drawn into this conflict in any way, whether it is just on the high-end conventional side or, God forbid, worse, and escalates to the nuclear level, it will be devastating for us.

And Americans need to understand that this will be unlike anything they've experienced, because frankly, those other wars that you mentioned were in the realm of colonial conflicts. What we normally refer to as low-intensity conflict. It's not the best label because if you're being shot at, there's nothing low intensity about it. But nevertheless, it's a huge difference. And the tens of thousands of casualties, tens of thousands of dead should frighten Americans. And right now, they're not paying that much attention, and they could easily be drawn into this by the Biden administration. Well, now, so for the war in the East itself, what could you compare it to in recent?

history, maybe the Iran-Iraq war, something like that? Well, if you imagine, if you go back to Vietnam, we lost 58,000 men killed over the space of nearly 10 years. And within the last 12 months, we now estimate that close to 200,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed. And there are 3 to 400,000 Ukrainian casualties. And more than half of those casualties involve injuries that are so severe, these men will never return to duty. And then you have to look at the Russian side. We estimate now 70 to 80,000 casualties and 20 to 25,000 dead. Now, the reason they're so disproportionate is that 75% of the losses on the Ukrainian side involve losses to artillery, missiles, rockets, drones. In other words, standoff attack weapons.

And the Russians outnumber those weapons that the Ukrainians have by 10 to 1. So tens of thousands of artillery rounds are falling on human beings virtually every day across Eastern Ukraine. And it's no wonder that the southern Ukrainian defense is crumbling and their casualties are mounting. And they have no way to stay there with any certainty and survive. So I think you're going to see a massive exodus north and west. out of the Donbos, which of course is what the Russians want.

But until Zelensky gives the order, thousands more will die needlessly in places like Bakhmut or Kupyanksk or any number of different places. All right. Now, then again, they do have a home field advantage. They've got American weapons. And we're a year into this war. And they have held the Russians at not just the Donbass,

but the eastern part of the Donbass. They haven't, they're, you know, The lines obviously are, you know, somewhat fluid, but the Russians aren't occupying too much more territory than the pro-Russian rebels were before the war broke out at this point, right? Well, other than, I guess I should say, the land bridge in the south to Crimea, of course. Well, the Russians occupy 22 to 23 percent of the country. They're sitting on top of all the nation's industry and, frankly, 90-plus percent of its

gross domestic product. In other words, everything that produces income for Ukraine. that's of any real significance is currently under Russian control. That's not really surprising because most of the people that lived there to begin with are Russians and historically it was Russian. And that really is the only area that Putin was really interested, liberating from Ukrainian occupation and oppression. But I think we need to understand something that when the Russians went in to begin with,

they went in with a relatively small force on the assumption that demonstrating the seriousness with which they took what happened in Ukraine, their legitimate security interests, that we would respond with negotiations. And it took a few months for the Russians to finally discover, well, the Americans are not only disinterested in negotiating, the Americans see this is an opportunity to fatally harm Russia. So the Russians went back, re-examine their options, and decided that they had to go to war.

and it's taken them several months to prepare for what you call total war. I wouldn't go that far. I would just say high-end conventional war. And now they have hundreds of thousands of troops in Belarusia, in Western Russia, and in southern Ukraine, and I think they're ready for it. The problem is that the winter was short. They only had about two or three weeks of frozen ground, which would have facilitated some maneuver, but it wasn't enough time in the estimation of the rest of the war.

Russian high command to support major offensives that they want to succeed. And so they held back and what we see now is the mud season. We have vehicles. I get video all the time from all sides showing me trucks and armored fighting vehicles mired in six, seven feet of mud that they can't get out of. So for the moment at any rate, the Ukrainians are being helped by the fact that there's no mobility. And the Russians can pursue them to a limited extent, but not to the extent they could if it were dry. Now, this mud is going to dry out. But it will probably take most of March and April for that to happen, which means we won't see the massive movement of forces until May and June. When that occurs, I think they'll rapidly sweep over eastern Ukraine. And I suspect they will

then probably cross the Jeper and start moving west, because one of their goals is to cut off the Polish border from Kiev and cut off Ukraine and its army from any further assistance from us. Now, how difficult is it from here to keep track of how many brigades and divisions and this and that are left on, you know, and these are those positions on this and that side? Well, on the Ukrainian side, right now in eastern Ukraine, we estimate there are 16 brigades. most of those are at 60 or 50 or 40% strength. And if you do the math, you start out with 4,000 in a brigade, and you cut that manpower in half,

you have an appreciation for the losses, which have been horrific. And they're starting to feed new recruits into the system. I sent you earlier a lengthy comment from people on the ground in Ukraine who are watching the Ukrainians bring in these new recruits. And these are overwhelmingly boys, 15, 16, some even younger, some women, and large numbers of older men in their 50s and 60s. And these people have almost no training, perhaps two, three, four weeks of familiarity with weapons and so forth, and they're being hurled into the breach.

Now, Ukraine still has a few so-called elite formations left, that they've been holding in reserve, and I'm told now they're starting to funnel them as a last-ditch effort into what remains of Bakhmut. But the bottom line is the Ukrainians are now scraping the bottom of the barrel for people. In addition to those, you've got about 35,000, maybe a little bit more Ukrainian soldiers' officers training in Western countries that will eventually come back.

They're supposed to have the training that's necessary to operate the more sophisticated equipment because right now, anything like rocket artillery and your various radars, some of the logistics and the distribution system, the higher staffs, those are populated by NATO military manpower. And without that NATO military manpower, American, German, whatever, in Ukrainian uniform or simply unidentifiable uniforms, I think the whole effort would fall apart. so it's a it's a tragic situation ukraine cannot win it has no chance of winning and you would think under the circumstances someone with a degree of some humanity would intervene and say enough is enough the ukrainians have done more than anyone could reasonably expect and it's time for this to

end but no one in washington wants to admit that they were wrong well Doug uh you know the new york Times says that they want to give the Ukrainians long-range enough rockets and permission to use them to hit Russian targets on Crimea in order to let the Russians know that their rear is not safe and we can reach out and touch them whenever we want and that will put the Ukrainians I'm defining we broadly to include the American Empire and Ukraine together here and us little old Texans dragged along with them. that the Ukrainians then will be in such a position of strength that then they'll be able to negotiate well with Russia.

Well, you know, that's delusional. We started out by saying that they had thousands of javelin missiles and this was a game changer and would turn defeat into victory. The Russians figured out how to counter those and captured large numbers of them. I could go down the list of all the various weapon systems that have shown up that have not been a game changer. Historically, we know that no one silver bullet weapon system dramatically changes the battlefield. It never does. It's always how you integrate it within a broader framework.

And right now, the key thing that we're pushing, as you know, are F-16s. And we're currently training two Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16s. My concern is it will become increasingly obvious if we provide this, that the pilots will have to be, once again, contractors, NATO military manpower in contractor garb to fly them. And then secondly, I would expect them to be shot down by the very thick and effective Russian air defenses. The Russian air and missile defenses are quite good. They've managed to massively reduce the numbers of rockets and missiles that get through, and they've effectively erroneously. erased the Ukrainian Air Force, what there is of it from the sky, because if they fly, they die. I think that will happen to us as well.

So I hope we don't do that, but if we do, and we have even modest success, it's like everything else, no one can protect anything perfectly. So if there is any penetration at all, the Russians may conclude that they might as well go ahead and attack our rear areas. And that means Poland and probably Lithuania, at least insofar as it includes, you know, facilities that are stockpiling weapons and equipment and training Ukrainian forces. But again, the Russians thus far have exhibited tremendous restraint, principally because they don't want a war with Europe, but they don't want a war with us. And I'm not sure they need to do that to win. But we ought to understand.

that, you know, if you do certain things and you think you can do it with impunity, you're nearly always wrong. There are other ways for your opponent to respond. And things are not good in NATO. NATO is deeply divided behind the scenes. People are very unhappy with what's happened. Many people think they've been betrayed by us because we've led them down this garden path. We promised them Ukrainian victory. And they know that's never going to happen. And they now have in front of them something they haven't seen for 30 years, which is an enormous and powerful Russian Army and Air Force because Putin and his friends have built in a very short period of time this enormous force, which they plan to increase to 1.5 million. Right now, it's over 800,000

and focused on Ukraine, 600 to 700,000. So I think the Europeans want to put an end to this. they just haven't figured out how to do it without upsetting their relationship with us yeah well and it's funny because a year ago you told me well our hope lies with the germans that they will put their foot down and say this is just too much chaos in europe we can't have this that was what led to minsk one and two back in 14 and 15 and it hadn't been enough pressure on them yet which is just amazing i guess they've been subsidizing everybody's energy costs right and helping to relieve that political pressure, but that's a stopgap measure, right? They've got to print that money or borrow it from somebody to pay for all that. Well, I think that's true, except that I would point out

that Schultz, at least if you look at the polls in Germany, is in real trouble. There's almost an overwhelming majority, and I'm talking about 70, 80% of the population that thinks that his foreign minister, this Annalena Baerbach, should be removed. And she's sort of the Americanized German who runs around wagging her finger and fist at the Russians for being bad, for not respecting whatever she thinks is appropriate and deserving the worst. She's the one that announced that Europe and Germany were at war with Russia, which deeply troubled and upset the German population, which has absolutely no interest in being at war with anybody.

So I think she's going to go, and I think Schultz is going to have a tough time surviving. Now, when does the no-confidence vote come? Under what circumstances, who knows? But I think it's inevitable. I don't think Mr. McCrone is on particularly strong ground either, but his presidency is a little bit more robust than Chancellor Schultz's position. And you see London, London is chaos.

So the bottom line is, I think something will give in Europe. And when it does, and when things crack, we're going to see the edifice collapse rather dramatically, at which point in time, you know, the question is, what do we do? Because we brought this on. Remember, the Biden administration insisted over and over and over again that they were going to strengthen NATO. They were going to build it up, and now NATO is stronger than ever.

Well, all you have to do is look at the promises made to deliver equipment and what actually showed up, and it's very weak. And that was a message that Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense, delivered at his last meeting with the various NATO, allies and other partners asking for equipment. And he gets a promise of three tanks from Portugal. He gets a promise of X number of tanks from Germany, and thus far, nothing's shown up. Now we're being told that if the German tanks do show up, they're probably going to have

to be manned by Germans and Poles and others, because the Ukrainians can't be trained up to do it. In fact, just yesterday, we received reports that a German. and leopard tank was already captured in the vicinity of Bokhmut, and it was manned entirely by Polish soldiers. So the Polish soldiers were captured along with a tank. We'll see what that looks like when the media gets a hold of it, and we get pictures. Well, and all right, so presuming the Ukrainian military is at some point just exhausted.

I mean, as you're talking about that article you sent today, in fact, let me refer the readers to that. make sure it's in the show notes and everything too it's at the kiev independent it's kievindependent dot com ukrainian soldiers in bachmout our troops are not being protected and yeah it's a he says you know if you go to the front you got a it's a 30 to 70 chance that you'll make it back at all these people are being killed and of course blown to pieces right by artillery shells is what most of the fighting is so it's just an absolute horror show going on over there and this article is a really in-depth thing. The guy spent at least a few days at the front here, interviewing different guys about what's going on. Remember, Scott, that is a Ukrainian newspaper.

Yes, and clearly a very pro-regime one. Yeah, it's, this is not some... It's not pro-Russian. It's just telling you the truth. Right. Yeah, and it's, you know, you got to figure maybe some of the worst is left out, but what remains is really bad. And they're talking about, essentially a big part, good. The other thing to keep it on. The other thing to keep in mind is the Ukrainians have already fired a million artillery shells. That doesn't include their use of drones and rockets and so forth. And now they're effectively running out. One of the points that the author of that article makes is that in most cases,

they're getting no artillery support at all from their own side. And the artillery they have is literally from World War II. Yes. Yeah. And I mean, the problem is everyone who looked at this war from the beginning, is getting an education because just about everybody underestimated

the amount of ammunition and the losses that would be taken and people overestimated the effect of many weapons and many of the weapons that we produced we thought

would be superstar performers both German and American didn't turn out to be that way so everybody got something wrong on this but right now the people suffering are the Ukrainians and the real question is

you know what's next and I think next is collapse. And the question is, what do we do when this becomes clear? What do we do when the Russians break out and simply overrun all of eastern Ukraine? Are we going to go into this ourselves? You know what? Which is my great nightmare. But, Doug, aren't we, well, let me get back to that in just one second, because I have that in the notes.

I'll put an asterisk spot so I don't forget. But go back one year. I mean, I think we're fighting Plan B right now because Plan A. I was just reading one this morning from the Washington Post from last March, that, well, the Ukrainians have done pretty good in blunting the Russians advance, but everyone here in D.C. and at the Pentagon expects that Kiev will fall within a few weeks or so. And then we'll go back to plan A, which was backing an insurgency, as they talked about in December 21 and January and February 22 in, I don't know, 15 different press releases and statements here and there that we're going to replicate Afghanistan. Just a few months after finally losing Afghanistan themselves, after, you know, supposedly taming the blowback from the last time they did this to the Russians in Afghanistan, they said, this is the model. This is what we're going to do. We're going to give them javelins and all this, but we're going to be backing essentially the Azov Battalion because the Ukrainian military, they expected to be completely smashed within the first, you know, month or so. And so I wonder if that's the answer that, yeah, when and if at some point the structure of the Ukrainian state and its military forces east of the river finally are just broken, then that's fine.

And then they just go right back to hiring right sector and C-14 and Azov to go do, I don't know, suicide attacks, you know, moderate rebel antics, stuff like that. Well, as we said earlier, you know, everyone misjudged the situation, the Russians included. And what we have today is the result of everyone's misjudgment. We underestimated the Russians based on the first few weeks because the Russians deliberately went in there in pursuit of a very different set of goals and objectives. and we imputed to them. All they were interested in was making the Minsk Accords actually work to get Ukrainians,

Ukrainians who were living in Ukraine, equality before the law and get the two breakaway republics the recognition they deserve as effectively Russian enclaves and recognize the legitimacy of Russia's rule over Crimea. And then, you know,

neutrality for Ukraine, which I always felt would be a blessing. And indeed, I think it would be a blessing. be now but unfortunately that didn't happen now here we are a year later and the russians have said okay you want to wage war we're going to wage war and they build a force to do that but they also have to confront the reality that the weather has to cooperate and it took them until December to really get this force in place and trained and when january came they didn't get the level of freezing that they wanted it would support maneuver and so they reverted to long range

attack and incremental moves in the south to consolidate control over the Donbos. When Bachmood Falls and the towns to their east, east of Bakmood fall, that effectively is the end of the battle for the Donbos, which is what everybody wants because it's the income-producing area. So once that's over and you get a dry season finally and get past this muddy season, which is horrendous, then I think the movement begins and how far will that go? Well, you just said something. It's very important. If you're sitting in Moscow and you're hearing people say, we will stay with this to the bitter end. Our goal is to fatally weaken Russia, to drive out Putin, to potentially even dismember the state. And failing that, we're going to

launch an Afghanistan-style insurgency. You hear this. from Moscow, you're sitting in Moscow, you hear this, the only conclusion that you can reach is that I have to end this war. And the only way I can end it is to march several hundred thousand Russian troops all the way to the Polish border. That's the problem. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And, you know, war is a government program. And so, you know, the self-licking ice cream cone and all that. I mean, if they, and in fact, I think we talked about this a year ago, that if the Russians succeed in taking the east, well now what? Now they've left an enemy rump state dominated by the hardest right-wing Ukrainian nationalists in alliance with NATO and the polls that is going to be

even worse thorn in their side or as an equal thorn in their side to the previous situation. So then they're just going to have to solve that problem. Then once they solve that problem, now they've just picked up two new NATO nations on their borders. well that's right and that's something they obviously wanted to avoid my supposition and perhaps I'm wrong but my supposition is that by the time they've closed under the yeper the Europeans will say that's enough and they don't want this sort of unrelenting insurgent warfare in western Ukraine under any circumstances it's very difficult to wage it there to be blunt because other than the Carpathian mountains that are in the far west. The rest of Western Ukraine is largely

open rolling countryside. So that's a tough place to run an insurgency. It ends up becoming simply a set of targets on a daily basis for Russian standoff attack weapons. But I think the Europeans will oppose that because there's always the danger if this drags on how long before it starts spilling into Poland, Slovakia, Romania. Lithuania. And the Russians aren't interested in that. They don't want it to go on. The Europeans don't want it to go on. Of course, there's always the outside possibility that someone in Washington, D.C., wakes up and smells the coffee. I think that is possible because now I'm beginning to detect this new groundswell to justify enormous defense bending by talking about

the looming China threat. And you've got to stop and ask yourself a question. If we're happy with what's happening in Ukraine. Why are we now shifting the conversation to China? And of course, you know, the Chinese are many things, but they're certainly not a military threat in the way that they're being described and far from it.

I don't see any evidence for any Chinese interest in attacking the United States. I don't see any interest in the Chinese attacking Taiwan. In fact, we know that the Taiwan government and Beijing are constantly talking to each other on back channels. It's not going to be a war there.

So why are we talking about suddenly China again? I think they're trying to change the subject in anticipation of everything falling apart in Ukraine. Yeah. Well, you know what? I would hate for them to hawk it up against China, full stop, even if it's an excuse to change the subject from Ukraine. But I'll take it sort of the way they finally shut up about COVID when the Ukraine thing broke out. You know, like, well, at least that. they shut up about COVID.

So I don't know. And let's get back to China in a minute because I'm interested in your takes on that. It's really important stuff. But on the question of the presumed sooner or later medium-term future here, loss of the Ukrainian military. And then the choice being either, you know, we discussed the possibility of an insurgency. And then as you're saying, the Russians will need to take the whole west of the country. if we do them like that and the Europeans are going to want to stop. What about the other option that you brought up a couple times now, which is what John Mearsheimer warned about last summer,

which is that he thinks that Biden and his people are so committed to their rhetoric about making sure that this works, that they will escalate. They'll use the U.S. Navy. They'll send in the Marines. They'll do something crazy and turn this into a real war between America and Russia. Now, I guess changing the subject to China is one way out of that, but do you think that that is a real worry? Well, I don't know what the Marines would do. They're pretty light other than go if they were to enter the current theater of war, they'd be killed. They're not the U.S. Army. They don't have massive quantities of armor.

In fact, the U.S. Army isn't the U.S. Army anymore. I think we'd be lucky to get 50,000 combat troops on the ground for any length of time out of this army of what, 450,000, 460,000. We just don't have that many people in the combat units with the right equipment. I don't think that happens. If you widen this to the use of the Navy, well, then surface vessels will be sunk in great quantities. The Russians rely heavily on their submarine fleet. and submarines are extremely difficult to deal with. We'd end up in some long and tiring exercise with our submarines attacking theirs, or trying to find them.

And then, of course, that would halt all transatlantic movement immediately, so that means you can't resupply anybody over there unless you use aircraft. And even then, I think that would be hazardous. The Russians may decide to shoot everything down that comes across the Atlantic. I'm not sure that's true. My own thinking is that they will try to change the subject as it becomes clear that this is a disaster. What happened when Washington left Vietnam, which was clearly a disaster? Well, they stopped talking about it.

The same thing happened when we left Afghanistan. And in Iraq, too? The mainstream media stopped talking about. When Ukraine is destroyed or in ruins, they probably won't say much about it. But, again, I think NATO will split rather dramatically along many, many lines. there will be a push for talks with the Russians. It will have to be from new governments in places like Germany and Berlin. Russians aren't going to pay any attention to Schultz.

And they certainly aren't going to pay attention to the Biden administration as long as it's around. So it'll have to be new governments in Europe. And then I think we'll just walk away. And the focus will turn entirely to China, which is crazy. Because, you know, I hear people contact me, so, well, look at what the Chinese are doing to us with fentanyl. Well, the Chinese aren't doing anything to us with fentanyl. The Chinese are supplying the ingredients for fentanyl to the so-called drug cartels in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.

They are in turn weaponizing those and sending them back into the United States. Well, if you want to stop that, it's a very straightforward solution. You secure your border. You secure your ports. You control immigration. Somebody told me recently over in DHS, Doug, 20,000 Russians entered the United States last year. Okay, where are they? What are they doing?

I'm sure most of them are quite happy to be in the United States, but it would seem unlikely that out of that 20,000, there weren't several agents working for Moscow. Well, you know, Doug. That doesn't begin to address the thousands of Chinese that have been pouring into our country over those open borders. Where are they? No, what are they doing? Don't worry. You can trust the FBI counterintelligence. They're not too busy framing the last president for treason. They'll take care of that.

Well, folks, sad to say, they lied us into war. All of them. World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq War I, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq War II, Libya, Syria, Yemen, all of them. But now you can get the e-book, All the War Lies, by me, for free. Just sign up the email list at the bottom of the page at Scott Horton.org or go to Scotthorton.org slash subscribe. Get all the war lies by me for free. And then you'll never have to believe them again. Hey, y'all, Scott here. Let me tell you about Roberts & Roberts Brokerage, Inc.

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Yeah, that's right. But, you know, I got to point out, you know, it's the comedian Eddie Griffin said this that, you know, it was all deliberate, but it doesn't have to be deliberate for the joke to still land that. This is all just turnabout's fair play anyway. America has helped to increase the opium supply in Eurasia by 10,000 trillion percent over the last 20 years. And no doubt, addicting and destroying the lives of however many Chinese in that time, too. And so not that it's right or fair or even presuming that it's Chinese government policy or, again, even that it's American government policy to deliberately do this, but it sure is the effect of what we've done in the Afghan war. But the whole world is they're just supposed to sit there and take it.

They're not allowed to resent us for stuff like that. But if the Chinese sell opium base products to Mexican cartels, well, that's an act of war, I guess. And we need to, what, risk H-bomb conflict with this country over something like that, which is a purely ironic kind of reversal of America's role in the world anyway? Well, I think China, as you point out at the moment, is kind of an attractive scapegoat. You know, whatever's wrong, you blame it. What happened to our manufacturing base will or went to China? Nobody points out the people that sent it to China started that process under Reagan.

and it accelerated under Bush and Clinton and continued into this century. It had nothing to do with the Chinese. The Chinese simply offered space and people wanted to come in and they made lucrative arrangements and the rest is history. Our so-called ruling class, Scott, sold us out.

But if you go to China and, you know, I've been to Northeast Asia and you talk to Koreans, Chinese, Japanese in some cases, but the Japanese aren't always willing to talk. but the Koreans and Chinese will and the Chinese will point out to you very rapidly well you know the opium wars that were fought in the 1840s and 50s to open our ports

so that opium could be forced into China well that was the Royal Navy well that's true that was the Royal Navy from Great Britain but you had lots of people who became millionaires and billionaires as a result of funding it and one of those was Vanderbilt so these people in Asia haven't forgotten any of that And that's one of the reasons the South China Sea is a sore spot because for centuries

it became a lake of the Royal Navy. And the Chinese could do nothing to keep these things out of their ports. They had no control of their own borders. So, you know, I guess all I'm saying is that I'm tired of people that want to wage war, as you point out, against China for things that really are largely our own fault, that we could correct most of those problems ourselves. If you don't want the Chinese in your laboratories, then don't let them in. I mean, the Koreans and Japanese that I've done business with say,

do you see any Chinese in our manufacturing facilities? Do you see any Chinese in our universities? Do you see any Chinese in our corporate laboratories? I said, no. They said, of course not. Why are you so stupid? The Chinese have been doing these things for thousands of years. They steal whatever they can find and send it back home.

Okay, I get it. I understand it. Why won't we take action? Well, Scott, you've pointed out over the years, and I think very accurately, that an awful lot of this is simply about money here in the United States. And the Defense Department has turned into this giant money machine. Yeah. All right. So let me get back to that in just a second, because there's actually a brand new Eli Clifton piece out today about that.

And that's such an important point, but it ain't the point I want to home in and on right now. It instead is this. It's that, look, it's so important that. And I think you understand this, too. It's so important that not just what you said about China and our relationship with China and the potential threat there as you perceive it, but that it's you saying it, right? Because the narrative is all conservative, macho, tough guys know that the yellow peril with its red flag, it's coming this way and we got to stop them and we stand on that wall like Jack Nicholson in that movie. and keep the bad guys away and it's not Russia dumb dumb

it's China all right-wingers agree supposedly according to the narrative and then here comes Colonel McGregor and everybody agrees that you're the toughest SOB on the East Coast and then you say oh come on that's not right and that in social psychology is everything

I'm convinced because I studied it for a couple of months in junior college and what is important is that people know that it's okay for them to not have to believe in that narrative if everybody who doesn't believe in that narrative is a left winger and a liberal

and a hippie and a wimp then they're not going to change their opinion about that but if Colonel McGregor doesn't buy into it it at least means that it's okay to question the narrative and just how concerned are we supposed to be about the Chinese who after all

Richard Nixon made friends out of them 50 years ago. Well, let's hope you're right. I'm not sure I'm quite that influential, Scott. Well, keep it up. But clearly, clearly China looks more and more like a scapegoat, and that's a war we don't need to fight that doesn't need to happen and can easily be avoided, but it compels us once again to look inward, to look at our own society, to look at our own government, to look

what we are not doing here that we need to do to protect ourselves and to defend the American people. I mean, this word defense seems so out of place in the conduct of American military policy. Everything's about offense, offense, offense. I don't hear anything about defense. And quite frankly, we live in a very different world today from what existed 50, 60, 70, 80 years ago. And we need to defend the country. That's different from intervening in the affairs of eastern Ukraine and a war that we hope will destroy Russia. That's not really a very intelligent national policy in my judgment. Yeah. Well, you know, it seems like when the neo-conservatives really seize control of American policy after Iraq War I, I guess in the aftermath of it, with the defense planning

guidance and then, of course, PNAC and all of that stuff, that, you know, Charles, Krauthammer called it the unipolar moment and they understood that now that the Soviet Union is out of the way that we have this period of time a generation if we're lucky to set the table on the planet exactly how we want it before naturally the rest of the world gets rich enough that their opinion will start to matter more and so India and Brazil and China and Russia again eventually, they will have to have a seat at the table and it will look more like a multipolar world. The whole contest was to see how well America can set the structure of the thing up by the time those nations rise up to fill their place. Now it's a generation later,

30 years later, but the Americans can't accept that what they thought was going to happen, happened. The time went on and those other countries got richer and more powerful, and now their opinion matters a little bit. China's not taking over the world, like they say on Fox News. It's just rising up to take its place at the table where America was taking up, you know, six of the ten seats or whatever it is, if I'm making sloppy metaphors. But so the point is, though, that why can't they remember that it only ever was to be a unipolar moment? That this is just the middle part of North America, that we can not, never mind may not, we can not be the dominant power in Eurasia forever. It just can't work. It doesn't work.

Well, I don't disagree with you. Obviously, I think you're right, but the problem is the neocons in particular believe in this notion, I think, of perpetual revolution and that America should be its instrument. And this is reminiscent of the Trotskyite Bolshevish. Ultimately, Stalin dislodged them and expelled as many of them and killed as many of them as possible because they kept arguing for this internationalist position that would drag the Soviet Union into war with its neighbors. And his argument was, well, the first thing we need to do here in the Soviet Union is consolidate and build. We don't need war with the West or war with anyone. Right now, what we need to do is consolidate, you know, our industries.

We need to reexamine what we're doing. We need to develop new economic policies. We need real security for the United States and the Western Hemisphere. No one wants to go there because this is not part of the larger money machine. Well, that money machine needs to stop. And the only way to stop it, I'm afraid, is probably with some measure of bankruptcy. And I think our economic or financial system is about to tip over. That's going to have an impact.

We're certainly back where we were in 2008, only much worse. These proverbial chickens will come home to Roos. And there will probably be an opportunity then to do some things differently and take care of a business here at home. But I don't see any other force arresting it right now other than the economic reality that we confront. Do you? No, sir.

I mean, that's always been the contest for 20 years is can the economic catastrophe, the impending collapse of our phony economic system and monetary system, save us from nuclear war? Ultimately, that's going to be the contest because, as Ron Paul said, no one will listen. It's just we're going to run out of money at some point. The question is whether we run out of money before the H-bombs start flying because the Americans, just can't stand the fact that Russia and China exist and without Yeltsons to just do exactly as they're told. But it's a pretty big planet, you know, I don't know. I don't know how they think they could run China out of Washington, D.C. if they had a guy in there, you know what I mean? He'd probably just let them alone. It's not a question of running them out. It's a question of

doing business in a way that is profitable and mutually beneficial. And we haven't done that. We've We have too many greedy people with too many short-term interests. There's no long-term consideration, and there's an acute lack of devotion to the country. It's a huge problem, and it's not going to fix itself quickly, but I think the economic dimension is going to facilitate some change in the right direction. How we react to it is another matter. But there are a lot of people in this country now, much more so than I remember at any time in the last 20 years, who seem to be angry.

and seem to be acutely sensitive to all of these things. We'll just have to see how it plays out politically. But right now, I think a lot of people have also discovered that these two parties don't really amount to much, that there has to be a third force, some new force in American politics, because the two parties are basically rooted in the same swamp. Are they not? Yeah, they certainly are. Well, we're trying over at the Libertarian Party.

We're, it's a grand reopening over there and we're doing everything we can. But let me ask you this, Colonel, because, you know, you have this legendary experience in the U.S. Army and all of that. And even though it's like Eisenhower himself who coined the phrase military industrial complex, it's not the way they tell the story on TV. And in fact, that's a conspiracy theory, even if it's not the Freemasons. it's still too corrupt for America to be run that way. And so whatever Eisenhower said, he must not have known what he was talking about, something like that.

But I was just wondering if you could tell us about your experience actually in the Army and just what you know about what effect money has on things, like whether you guys are driving the kinds of tanks that you would be driving if it was up to you or whether you're driving the kind of tank that a lobbyist sold to a congressman for reasons that have very little to do,

with, you know, you guys and your performance out in the field or whatever, things like that, to let people know the degree to which you believe that you have this kind of perverse incentive of just built in from these various contractors and arms manufacturers and the role that they play in setting the policy in the Pentagon and in the rest of D.C. Well, keep in mind that most of the soldiers, sergeants, lieutenant, captains, warrant officers, majors, lieutenant colonels, colonels have very little exposure to what you're discussing. They simply follow orders and do the best they can with whatever they're provided.

And occasionally they will raise questions about the quality of something. But just the same is true in the Navy when I was doing some work years ago for the office of Secretary of Navy, one of the things that we found out when we talked to people from the fleet was that the fleet would ask for effective shotguns as an analogy. And several years later, they were given laser pistols that didn't work. In other words, whatever you ask for isn't necessarily what you get because decisions are made at a very high level to invest in something that may not be proven, that may be problematic. But it's a moneymaker. In other words, it's a money pit and the money pit is what you get with shipbuilding it's what you get with

tank building all these kinds of things have supporters on the hill as well as an industry and then in the districts and states where they're manufactured not the right decisions are not always made you know when we came out of desert storm virtually all of us that served on m1a1 tanks pointed to the enormous problems associated with the tank's turbine engine. It burns at a furious rate. It's basically the seven and a half to eight-hour tank. Whether you're sitting still or moving after seven or eight hours of operation, the tank runs out of fuel.

It's jet fuel. And it burns at a very, very high temperature, which means that you emit a thermal signal that can be viewed from space. certainly from low Earth orbit. So those are problems. And then, of course, being a turbine engine, it sucks in a lot of air in order to work effectively because it was designed to be used in the air.

And that creates enormous problems for maintenance and fires and so forth. So we all said get rid of it and replace it with a solid, high-performance diesel engine, much like the one that went into the leopard tank, which is an excellent engine, very, very efficient, 1,500 plus horsepower. The Israelis use a version of it in their Merk of attacks.

Well, nothing ever happened. We didn't change it. It's still theirs. Why? Well, someone has an interest in Washington, D.C. and keeping it that way. But it's not in the interests of war fighting. It's certainly not going to help us in the United States Army or whomever uses it.

So I can't say much more other than to point out that the people that are on this runaway train tend to be politicians on the one hand and three and four star generals and admirals on the other. They exert enormous influence. And then you have the industries that build these things

that step in and say, well, if you can't figure out what to build, we have to build something or we can't keep everybody employed. So we'll build whatever we think is appropriate. I had people from various corporations tell me that over and over and over again. If the Navy can't figure out what it wants,

well, we're going to build ships anyway. The hell with the Navy. the Navy will have to use whatever we build. It's a problem. So I think Eisenhower was right. Of course, he was in a different era, and he was worried about it. But I don't think he even, in his wildest imagination, envisioned what we confront today. Yeah.

And we're back to the original question. Will the economic downturn that we all agree is coming help us solve this problem? Yeah. I don't know. It depends an awful lot and who ultimately ends up in. power in the midst of the chaos. We have no way of knowing who or what that will be. Yeah. Well, and you know what, too, like Ron Paul says, that ultimately, even in the Soviet Union, the people get the government that they deserve and demand. And if people won't go along with it

anymore, then it won't work. And it really is up to us. And even if we don't control exactly the levers of power, if we had a real consensus in this country among the hundreds of millions of us, that we don't want to do this anymore, then they would have to stop. So it's- Well, that's true. And I think just to circle back a little bit to what's happening in Ukraine, today, the Russian population is overwhelmingly behind Vladimir Putin and his government. They are incensed at what we've tried to do to them in Ukraine, and they want blood. And we should be very grateful, ultimately, that- Putin has exercised tremendous influence and restraint over these people because if the Russian

populace was to have its way, Ukraine would probably go out of existence. They'd steamroll in a place. That's how angry they are. And so you're right. Popular sentiment makes a difference and it has made a huge difference in Russia. We need to be more sensitive to it than we are. But again, this is back to the original proposition. When you get chaos as a result of this coming economic downfall, we will find out who is going to step in and who is going to lead. And the population will have a chance to either support or reject what they don't want because they'll be interested. They'll be interested because they want to eat. They'll be interested because they want to heat their homes.

They'll be interested because they want to drive their cars. If you get by drift. Yeah, I think it is going to be like that. And look, it's clear absolutely that a huge part of our problem right now is that the Biden government is the Obama government, the people who did the coup of 2014, who started the war and who can never take responsibility for any of it. So never even mind if it was Donald Trump up there or anyone like that, but just if it was some random Democrat governor from out west somewhere, I don't mean that. horrible guy from California, but some guy you never heard of, but just some Democrat politicians sitting in that chair, that would be one thing. But this is Biden and Sullivan and Blinken and Newland, the ones what got us into this mess in the first place. So it makes it really, you know,

difficult. So you're definitely right that, you know, it takes both sides, right? It takes the American people understanding what the problem is and being determined to do something about it. and then that thing being removing people like this from the decision making because, I mean, look at what they've got us in. I mean, people are talking about. And in fact, I'll let you go after you answer one last one here for me. You mentioned this earlier at the top of the show, and it has been brought up over and over again, the possibility that this could come to a nuclear war. That if you just have, you know, one or two steps, it's not that slippery slope of a fallacy to say that. that within the space of a week or two,

this thing could really escalate to war between NATO and Russia and even H-bombs. Well, I think it's possible, but unlikely, simply for the following reasons. First of all, the Russians want nothing to do with it, and they've made that pretty clear routinely, by their actions as well as their words. They know under what circumstances something would happen,

and it will not happen unless we attack them. And then secondly, I see no evidence that anyone at the top of the Defense Department, even though I think these are some of the least impressive people that we've had in the history of the United States, one thing I can say for them is that they very clearly don't want a war with Russia, and they absolutely have warned against the use of any nuclear weapon. I also think that Blinken understands the gravity of the situation

when you involve nuclear weapons. Now, I can't vouch for the rest of the bunch. I don't know who calls the shots, Susan Rice, who, Samantha Powers, whoever, I don't know what they think. I don't know what the neocons that they're listening to think per se. But at least in those two instances,

there's an understanding that what she just described is the ultimate nightmare and it's one that we absolutely want to avoid. But, you know, I keep reading them. I'm actually collecting for the book. I have a section where these guys are getting braver and braver and talking about, well, they ain't nuked us yet

and they haven't reacted as, geez, we thought that they would be a lot more touchy than they are. You know what we're doing? We're boiling the frog. We're slowly turning up the heat. And they just keep talking that way openly in the New York Times and everywhere else about, you know, how fun it is, basically, to push the envelope. And we'll know that we went too far when they knew New York City, I guess. Well, let's hope not, you know, I certainly stand by what I've said, at least that the people that are at the top of the Defense Department and Mr. Blankin over in state. I think they're very sober-minded on this subject, whether or not they,

have the common sense to get together and tell the president that we need an off ramp and we need an off ramp quickly. We need to end this war, make whatever territorial arrangements are necessary and move on. I don't know. I hope so. Because the longer we wait, as you know, the danger multiplies. And is it Millie specifically that you're thinking of there? No, I think it also applies to Lloyd Austin as well as Mark Millie. These people aren't idiots and that. sense they understand what nuclear weapons mean and the consequences and i think behind the scenes they have been very blunt with the president about about things i mean they may come back and apologize because they want to keep their jobs and say stupid things mean that's what milly did

but milly did make it very clear a couple of months ago that the ukrainians had done pretty much all they can do right and this would be a good time to negotiate i mean that's kind of a polite way of saying you know those places on the verge of collapse let's cut the best deal we can and get out. And he was told to shut up in color, which he's done. But, you know, that said, notwithstanding, I think they understand the nuclear dimension is absolutely out of the question under any and all circumstances.

Well, and I guess the idea is that the Russians wouldn't break them out unless they were about to get completely creamed or they just had gotten completely creamed by American B-52s or something, which is not happening anyway. No, that hasn't happened. And as I said, unless we were foolish or stupid enough to attack them directly with a nuclear weapon, they're not going to use it. And they're not going to lose this.

They're sitting in the driver's seat. They have time. They're well equipped. They're well armed. They have a huge force. They're ready to take decisive action when the weather improves and we get rid of these mud pits. And then I suspect it's going to look. very, very ugly for NATO.

And again, we should not, don't fall in, we don't want to fall into the trap of what I call the linear equation. This is what we've seen in the past. Therefore, the future will look like the past. No, the future is going to be very different from now on. And this war will be judged in retrospect as having been a huge strategic inflection point in the history of planet Earth. Yeah, I'm afraid that's right.

and with Joe Biden driving, it's just, it could be worse, but it's pretty bad. All right, well, listen, thank you so much for your time again on the show, Doug. I really appreciate it. Sure, thank you, Scott. All right you guys, that's Colonel Douglas McGregor. You can find him mostly over at the American Conservative magazine. The Scott Horton Show, an anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com.

anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.