Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 5/30/24 Daniel Davis: Things are Getting Worse in Ukraine

Episode Date: June 1, 2024

Daniel Davis returns to the show to talk about where things stand in Ukraine. Scott and Davis dissect the recent Ukrainian strikes on Russian long-range radar stations and the effort to greenlight strikes even deeper into Russia. The two discuss the danger of this escalatory cycle continuing and examine Russia’s recent move on Kharkiv. Discussed on the show: Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen Ted Postol on Davis’ new YouTube Show Colonel Markus Reisner’s recent report Daniel Davis did multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan during his time in the army. He is a Senior Fellow at Defense Priorities and is the author of the reports “Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leaders’ Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort” and “Go Big or Go Deep: An Analysis of Strategy Options on Afghanistan.” Find him on Twitter @DanielLDavis1and subscribe to his YouTube Channel. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; 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.4 you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys on the line it's the great daniel l davis two-time bronze star winner veteran of iraq war one iraq war two and afghanistan and um he wrote a book called the 11th in 2020 America and he hosts a one of the biggest foreign policy shows on all of YouTube that's for sure in a very short amount of time it's become a huge hit the

Daniel Davis deep dive where he covers well the wars day in and day out the best stuff welcome back to the show how you doing hey I'm always glad to be here Scott thanks for inviting me back oh yeah happy to have you here so I was talking with Ted Postel and he was like we're losing this war and I said hang on just one second I'm about to interview Danny Davis about that and he says oh okay you're in good hands then go ahead we were talking about the danger of taking out these early warning radars and how you don't want to mess with that since the entire existence of our species hangs in the balance and all that kind of technical stuff you know yeah yeah that's the subject matter expert tends to guy yeah I didn't have a

chance to ask him but I'm pretty sure based on some of the things that he said that he would have agreed that this new book, Nuclear War by Annie Jacobson, does a pretty good job of reasonably depicting what it would look like to have a full-scale thermonuclear war between America and Russia and, of course, Europe and the middle and all the mankind caught in the middle, really. And because he clearly was consulted for the book. He's cited in it as well. Well, you know, I actually had Ted on my show last week on exactly that subject. What would a nuclear Oh, is that right? What it looked like?

Yeah. So dial in there. It's just from last week. It was fascinating and terrifying. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, he really is great on that. And he did mention, and, you know, I got some arguments about this. People don't want to believe it.

One trident submarine could kill all of Russia. And then that'd be enough to starve all of us in the blowback anyway. You know what I mean? What we didn't get in the fallout, we'd still get in the blocked sunlight. It's certainly. I hear Putin all the time talk about how no one. one would win in any kind of a nuclear escalate, but I rarely hear Americans voice the same thing. No one would win, so don't fight it, which troubles me.

Yeah, I know. It's, you know, I don't live in D.C. I live out here. So it is kind of hard to gauge, but it does seem from here like there's this level of unreality about the danger of war that, look, it can't happen, so it won't happen. So I don't have to worry about that. So we just plan as though it's not even a consideration. Yeah, because I don't want it to be a war, so there just won't be. Yeah, that's all we got to do. Bam, problem solved. Yeah, like at Rock War II.

Look, man, we're going to go in there and get Saddam, and then we're going to have our way. What's the problem? Everybody knows that's how it's going to go. Everybody knows. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, well. And, you know, so, yeah, back to that point.

I think in the American media's telling the Russians keep recklessly threatening nuclear war but it's not really that, right? They're more like being sober adults and warning about the danger of the steps of escalation that we're on here whereas the Americans are more kind of just being childish

and preening for the camera and sort of acting like they live in this other world. That's the way I'm reading it which I don't really and in fact there have been some statements by the Russians that are more kind of threatening, and I don't appreciate that. But I've heard some things, too, where they're saying where Putin is almost like pleading for

reason. They're like, come on, guys, we don't want to walk this close to the edge here. What are we doing? Yeah, and listen, I've had some of my guests on this week that have been pointing out that, you know, in the past, you've had proxy wars, of course, been going on for a long time all during the Cold War, but what's distinguishing this one now that we're violating is that one of the sizes using the proxy to attack on the territory of the other. And so now then you had what Ted Posto was just talking about there, about the early warning nuclear strike

radars in Russia, which are instrumental to their survival as a nation, which of course makes them really worried about that. But there's been all kinds of other attacks throughout Russia, not just in Crimea, not just in the occupied territories, but in Russia proper already. And look, that I you can tell they're starting to get kind of tired of that and and they're not willing to just absorb it anymore so that's why we keep talking about even more let's use some of the f-16s to strike into russia let's use a long range of american weapons to strike into russia you keep hearing more and more talk about this and why do we think that russia's just going to go okay and just not do anything about it but i just i don't understand why we're keeping going down that path well it's back to the nukes you know i mean they they essentially have said Danny Wright in the Washington Post and other places they kind of relay these sentiments that look they haven't nuked us yet but they never will but as as Dave DeCamp has shown repeatedly at anti-war dot com in the news there that every time Ukraine with American help escalates against the Russians they do escalate back right like we hit their

bridge and then they start taking out electrical power plants we hit Bellograd and then they start attacking Odessa with missile strikes or whatever it is, the exact correlations. I don't have the whole map in my head. But essentially, it's been like that. So they always say, well, we can keep pushing our luck and we keep pushing our luck. And they haven't reacted yet, as though the only reaction they'll recognize is nooks or some kind of like heavy bomber campaign or something that hasn't happened. But there have been escalations all along. As you're saying, and as we're witnessing right now, they're carving out a piece of territory near Hart.

Keeve just to protect Belagrod, right? Yeah. Yeah, no, that's completely right. There has been, but yeah, because, frankly, those aren't our cities. Those aren't our people. So we don't even notice them. We don't even count them. And I'm not being serious.

I'm talking about the senior people in the United States and especially these ward cheerleaders like Lindsey Graham, Jack Keene and et al. They don't even consider that a retaliation because it didn't hurt us. So cool, keep pushing because it hurt Russia. That's all we care about. And unfortunately, we've missed the fact that it does happen in that Russia has been doing a tit for tat. They haven't escalated above it. So whatever we have done or our side has done, they have matched on the other side.

And so far, they've just matched it. But, you know, I don't know if you saw it. But there was, I literally just got off doing one of my own shows here where Gary Villipiano, our executive producer, found a quote from Putin last night that was different than anything. seen him say. He said, it is time for our people to act and fight or conduct themselves as though they're on the front. You should all consider yourselves as mobilized so that we can accomplish our objectives. And he said it in a tone of voice and with a chiseled face that I've never seen him make, or at least not since the first month of the war. And so I think we better start paying a little bit more attention because I think maybe he's starting to get fed up with

this stuff. In other words, he's called it a special military operation like Truman's police action in Korea or some because there's another stage of conflict, real war, short of nukes still, but an actual ass Russian mobilization, the likes of which we have seen before. That's what he seems to be threatening there, right? That's what it said. I mean, you can't miss that analogy in that language. Now, they've not done that before. And they've been very careful not to talk about that kind of mobilization of the entire population in the industry. I mean, their economy, the entire war economy, not just the industrial capacity, which is already cranking at full speed.

But he said something he's never said before. So, of course, I'm paying a lot of attention to what follows and what comes now. But given that that came just after the Ukraine side hit those two nuclear warning radars, after they keep hitting things in the Crimean area and launching other attacks into Russia and talks of much more, it just seems to me that Putin is finally saying, hey, we've had enough. And I don't know what that may mean, but it doesn't sound good. Well, you know, they still don't control half of Donetsk.

Why is that? They took a Viet and all that. Yeah, right now, Russia has chosen. There was a great piece in the RUSI, Royal United Services. Services Institute piece done by an author that I actually know, a former combat vet that says, we need to understand Russia is not fighting this the way we do. We think collecting territory as fast as possible and defeating the other side so that you win, that's the objective. But Russia is fighting a different kind of war with different objectives, which is the destruction of the Ukrainian

armed forces. So they're not trying to take territory per se. They're trying to destroy as many troops as they can. And that's exactly what's happening in this Kharkiv area. They only put about 10 kilometers in with a really small number of troops, 14, 15,000, but then they brought this heavy firepower in so that when Ukraine moved eight different brigades up to try to stem the tide here, the Russian side started digging in. They didn't continue on to try to take more territory. They started digging in, bringing in lots of aerial and artillery firepower, and they're pummeling all of these brigades, which, by the way, according to many reports I've seen, is the last

theater reserves that Ukraine has. So if Russia breaks in anywhere else and there's allegedly, according to their Ukrainian defense minister, a couple hundred thousand Russian troops ready to strike somewhere, they don't have any more reserves. So if Russia keeps destroying them all along the line of contact and now that in this northern part here, they'll eventually just destroy the armed forces and they can just drive into the country. Meanwhile, let me add this point, because meanwhile, that also exposes few.

Russian troops to contact because they, you know, they can bring five to one or ten to one in different parts of the front firepower on the Ukraine side. So they don't have to have these bulrushes with lots of armor or lots of infantry troops. They have some. They have to have some or they can't go forward. But they limit it and lead with firepower so that the death rate is far exaggerated in the Ukrainian side than in the Russian side. So ultimately, even though Russia has more troops, they're killing a lot more of the Ukraine side and they don't have anything to replace them with. So it looks to me like their objective is to make the Russian or the Ukrainian army break at some point. And then all of a sudden there's no more organized resistance.

I think that's what they're trying to do. People say to me, Scott, how do you get so much work done all the time? Coffee. It helps keep me from falling asleep. And it tastes really good because I get it from Moondose Artisan coffee at Moondoseartisan coffee.com. Moondos is kind of the anti-starbucks in that their coffee tastes real good. They have lots of great choices, representing all kinds of regions, blends, and flavors. I'm drinking the Ethiopian presently. Hey, wait, also, do you like saving money on good tasting coffee? Right now, you can get 10% off and help support this show if you just go to Moondoseartisancoffee.com slash Horton. Find the link and the QR code in the margin at Scotthorton.org.

That's Moondoseartisan coffee.com slash horton. Hey, guys, I had some wasps in my house. So I shot them to death with my trusty bug assault 3.0 model with the improved salt reservoir and bar safety. I don't have a deal with them, but the show does earn a kickback every time you get a bug assault or anything else you buy from Amazon.com by way of the link in the right-hand margin on the front page

at Scott Horton.org. So keep that in mind. And don't worry about the mess. Your wife will clean it up. 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 Scotthorton.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. so back to ted postal for a second one of the things he was ending with there is that they're completely desperate they lost and that's why they're doing this kind of crazy stuff is because there's essentially nothing that can be done to pull their ass out of the fire now and so instead they escalate but i mean i don't know exactly what they think they're doing if this is just sort of a symbolic thing or they think they're going to hit enough massive you know with with real barrages they're going to hit bases and targets inside Russia, enough that it's going to stem the tide rather than just pissing people off.

In fact, I saw a, do you know who Colonel Marcus Reisner is of the Austrian Army? Have you heard of him before? No, go ahead. Okay. He's, since this war began, he has published periodic military tactical updates of the war, the best, most unbiased reports. Oh, I think you mentioned him to me before. I just lost track.

Well, he just published another one. I think it was yesterday, just yesterday, that, made an incredibly important point, actually a couple of them, but he laid out that basically there's no path to military victory, which of course I've said forever, but he said two things that were important. One is that he pointed out that a lot of the American equipment that's going over there is less effective over time because of the Russians' ability to defeat it with electronic warfare. So we keep sending a lot of these high mars. That's why you hardly hear about Highmar strikes anymore because almost all of them are shot down or directed off course by

electronic warfare. The attack them's too. Same with the attackans, yeah, because they use similar guidance. And then you've got the glide bombs, and almost everything we've sent is suffering that same degradation. Meanwhile, the Russian side is not, because our electronic warfare is not matching the Russian side so far, so more their stuff gets through. But the one thing he talked about was these one-off shots that are going deep. He said, there's this thing in the military called saturation of target density or something

to that effect. I may have gotten the exact term wrong. But he said, if you can't, and you actually touched on it, if you can't maintain the volume of fire so that you have a degradation on the target area, then it's meaningless because it'll just be repaired shortly. And then they'll move on. It won't they won't even notice. And he said that is the case right now. So all this does is it pisses off Russia, but it doesn't hurt them operationally or strategically. It's just, you know, making them more angry and more likely to strike back. Yeah. So that was my intuition about the thing, right, is they can get some one-offs. They can support some Nazi militias attack in Belagrata and American APCs, and they can launch some rockets and some missiles here and there, but they can't wage any actual campaign in Russia. Exactly. That is exactly right. It's an act of desperation as they lose, but one that could really escalate the war against them and us. Well, you hit the, you hit it on the hit. That actually is the most viable possibility from the Ukrainian side that you can get.

And I think that's exactly why they hit those two defense radars, the nuclear early warning radars, because they have no impact on the fight at all. I think one was like 1,800 kilometers from it. It's not even related to the actual tactical fight, but they know how it's strategically important it is, and they want to draw Russia into a retaliation that's huge that will then get sympathy and draw us into the fight. That, I think, is what their objective is and why they're doing this. we should just tell him, pound sand, because if you keep doing that, we're leaving.

I mean, that's what we should do, but we won't do it. So there's a chance that Zelensky's going to succeed. I mean, they say in the New York Times that the Secretary of State is leading the parade for giving permission to hit targets inside Russia. And now, Dan, is it hyperbole when the Russians say, because the Brits were talking this way, too, David Cameron, who's now the foreign secretary, was saying, or is he the defense minister? Foreign Secretary, right? He is now, yeah, Cameron. He was saying, yeah, well, maybe we'll allow him to use Russian missiles to hit inside Russia. And they said, yeah, well, maybe we'll bomb the UK, or at least

they said British targets, which was a little more vague, but still, I wonder how seriously you take that. British targets outside of the combat zone. So they left it open, but said that we would be considered firing outside of the zone. But that could be in the Middle East. It could be anywhere else in the world. But so, but they, they left that possibility open. I have to say to, or I don't have to, but I want to, that if the Ukrainians want to kill Russians, then that's okay. But it's the problem is that America is involved in this at all. So no, they should be 100% forbidden from crossing those borders and attacking inside Russian territory whatsoever just because we aren't willing to take that risk for them.

As you were saying, we had proxy wars before. I said this right when the war started. When we fought a proxy war, because Russia did support Ho Chi Men, right? But when we fought a proxy war with Russia in Vietnam, we had an entire China between us and Russia.

So the Russians didn't really give a damn. They were totally insulated from any direct consequences inside Soviet territory. But here, we're two, 300 miles from Moscow and St. Petersburg and these kinds of things, which is they don't seem to see the difference, but I do. And it seems like the Russians certainly do. It does. And that's, I actually had a pretty emotionally engaging episode right

before I came on with you on my show today, because it just has the feel to me, this is moving in a bad direction. I've titled my show, How to Start a War with Russia, which harkened back to an article I published three years ago, almost to the day, talking about how we started war with Russia, which is to allow Ukraine into NATO. And so I've listed the things we shouldn't do and the risk that if we did, and of course, it all played out that way because it's easy to figure. It's not hard. It doesn't mean I'm any kind of brilliant, you know, an assessment.

I just look at what's actually happening on the ground. Well, now that same level of analysis is telling me we are getting dangerously close to stumbling into an actual war with Russia, which all too easily could go nuclear. And I think if we don't do something quick and wake up and quit doing some of the stupid things you just are articulated, we may end up stumbling into a war with Russia as hard to believe as that is. Well, you know, I mean, is there really anyone in Washington, even Rand Paul or anyone who's like really good on this and trying to lead on this or speaking reason to these people at all? Or it's just you got some friends on YouTube and then you got the people in power and their Venn diagram does not overlap anywhere. I mean, I saw you trying to talk to the lady from the Marshall Fund. It's really accurate.

And she's like stuck her fingers in her ears and started singing Mary had a little lamb because she just didn't want to hear what you had to say, you know. The Venn diagram does not work in our favor. Yeah. I mean, that's painfully true, but the answer to the first part of your question is none that I'm aware of. I don't see anybody who's leading the charge of this and just saying, what the hell is wrong with you? You can just slapping some people left and right, I guess, to try and wake them up before it's too late, because instead we're just stumbling into, yeah, whatever Zelensky says. So make that make sense to me, but somehow it's, that's how it's happening. Yeah.

I mean, this may be possibly the worst Joe Biden of all Joe Bidens. And he's been around for 50 years, so there's been a few different interpretations. But this one is just, man, like comatose at the wheel here in the middle of such crisis. It's crazy. Yeah. And, you know, I don't know that there's a whole lot of difference on the other side of the aisle, which is a big worry to me. I don't know that even if Trump wins, I'm not highly confident. that he wouldn't put a stop to some of this.

I certainly hope that he would, and I have some contact with a few folks, you know, that are on his team. It would probably be elevated if he did win. And I'm enthusiastically spreading it to them, but whether even they would have power over his decisions, I can't say, because there are other people that I've heard that are likely coming in on a Trump, too, if he should win, that are not much different than the ones we got right now. And that's just part of the unpleasant truth.

Yeah. I mean, I think if you're a betting man, you can put your money on Nikki Haley and Tom cotton and all the worst Republican hawks, you know. Anyway, I know you got to go. I do too. Thank you so much for coming back on the show, Dan. I appreciate your wisdom on all this stuff so much. Always my pleasure, Scott.

Thanks a lot. Don't you guys? That's Daniel L. Davis, the great whistleblower of the Afghan war in the year 2012. Read about it in the Washington Post. The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scott Horton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.