Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/19/22 Daniel Davis on Ukraine’s Twin Offensives

Episode Date: September 20, 2022

Scott talks with Daniel Davis about the situation on the ground in Ukraine. The news has been highlighting the recent Russian defeat in Northeastern Ukraine near Kharkiv. It has been less focused on the failed Ukrainian offensive in Southern Ukraine near Kherson. Davis has been working hard to sift through the media spin and state propaganda to determine what’s really happening on the front lines. In this interview, he shares some of what he’s found with Scott.  Discussed on the show: “Ukraine’s Twin Offensives Buy Ukraine Time, But May Not Be Enough To Beat Russia” (19fortyfive) Moon of Alabama blog 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 @DanielLDavis1. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and Thc Hemp Spot. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. 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 i've got daniel davis of course the great whistleblower from the afghan war in 2012 and uh here he is writing again at nineteen forty five dot com it's the digits

19 and then spelled out 45. I wish they would figure that out one way or the other. Anyway, welcome back to the show. How's going? It's going. Good, Scott. Thanks for having me back. Always a pleasure. Happy to have here. Oh, I should have said you were U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel. You were in Iraq War I, Iraq War II, and Afghanistan.

And that's why you know so much about driving tanks around and things like that. I don't have a little bit of experience of that. Yeah. Yeah. Uh-huh. And the book is The 11 hour in 2020 America, which is really great. And I do hope that people read it. Defense priorities is where you're a fellow, things like that. Okay. Now, the subject at hand is the war on the ground in Ukraine. And I guess my first question for you, because I have been, well, I have way too many jobs. I'm very distracted, but probably anyway, I would not be paying that too close of attention

to the actual step by step in the battles other than the major steps in the progress of the war in part because, you know, I don't know nothing about that stuff, you know, really. But secondly, I don't know who to believe. So I wonder, first of all, what kind of media you're consuming?

We could all just go with what the Kagan's want us to know over at the Institute for the study of war. Obviously, you got the moon of Alabama's got a real sharp eye, but there must be a hundred different telegram channels, and God knows what going on. So I wonder what you're looking at in order to help form your conclusions about all this stuff. Yeah, I am looking at just a ton of different sources because it is so difficult to discern, you know, truth from fiction, from misinformation, disinformation, partial information.

So I look at lots of Russian telegram channels. I look at some Ukraine channels. Of course, nearly all of the Western media comes straight from the Ukrainian general staff. So, you know, you can take that for what it's worth. But I have found that what comes out of official Kiev, what comes out of official Moscow is just almost completely worthless because they will both just say whatever they want to be the truth, not what it is. But when you get down into the granular level, and you see a couple of especially that have stood out, there is an Austrian colonel that's actually active in the Austrian army, who has Colonel Reisner, I believe his name is, has done almost from the outset of the war about every month or two the absolute hands-down best tactical scenario and description of what has happened on the ground. and he has been proven right on all of this stuff. There's actually also, ironically, a Russian blogger.

There's a number of Russian bloggers that are actually pretty honest about things. They don't hesitate talking about when they have failed, when their side has failed, and when their side is successful. And again, it's who's built the best track record. And so far, it's a little embarrassing that none of the sides on the West are in, like, the top 75%. They're like in the bottom 25% of in terms of what turns out to be accurate. But here's one of the things you can do is that when you see, you know, what is happening on the ground, there is not too much difference in descriptions about where the front lines

are, et cetera. The big difference is the definitions in the interpretations. In the West, it's uniformly all negative Russia, all pro-Ukraine, making everybody think that things are going well. And that's just not the case. It's much, much more complicated than that. And so I think that based on my personal combat experience in armored warfare, the fact that I was a second in command of an armored cavalry squadron in Germany, spent time on the border, preparing to fight Soviet forces, you know, did all kinds of maneuver, just, you know, hundreds of days over my career in Germany and Europe. So I think I've got a pretty good idea what's going on.

And I think because of that, I have a better eye to be able to see when someone's, you know, basically blowing smoke, when you're saying something that's just not, it just doesn't pass the smell test, so to speak. And overall, I think that I've, you know, my assistance have been pretty much, pretty much on track from what I've been able to gather over time. I'd say so. Well, now, here's the thing. And I don't know what your position was on this back then.

If I knew it then or if I just forget. But I know that essentially everyone, including. the Russians, well, seemingly including the Russians, but definitely including the Americans, thought that the Russians were going to steamroll right over the Ukrainian military, that they would be from the very beginning stages

backing an insurgency against the Russians, rather than a state army. Now, here we are, two-thirds of the way through September, still talking about this war. And the latest news, at least from the American

and Western interpretation, is that the Ukrainians are making major gains, got the Russians on the run. But you have a recent piece says that's not so simple. Yeah, it's not. It's, that's an inaccurate view, or maybe an incomplete view, I'll put it at. There is no question. It is an absolute accurate that Ukraine made a bold stroke in the Kharkiv area and made substantial gains, caught Russia completely by surprise,

and genuinely did make a lot of territorial gains. But the big, big difference comes in what was actually accomplished and what the status is right now. What Ukraine did, it wasn't just everybody likes to talk about what happened in the Kharkiv area. Nobody wants to talk about what happened in the Kersone area in the West. There's a reason for that. Now, slow down just a second here. Okay.

So we have, so when we're talking about Harkiv, this is, If I understand it, right, this is essentially just outside of what's officially considered Lujansk in the northeast of the country. And then Kersan is, or however you pronounce these, the wife says Harkiv, I don't know how she says Kerson. I think she just calls it Kersen. Anyway, this is just northwest of Crimea on the way to Odessa, in fact. And so there were sort of twin offenses going on at the same time. what you're saying. That's correct. They were actually sequential. It started in the south in Kyrsson. And then second one launched, I want to say, a week later in the Karkiv area.

And, you know, at the beginning, this is one of the ways you could really tell what's actually happening. When the Kirsten, which was first, was launched, as you may know, I've been writing for weeks ahead of this battle that it was going to be disaster for the Ukraine side. They shouldn't launch it. They had, tactically speaking, everything was going to be against them. And all the things that I put on there is exactly what turned out to happen. They had to pull out of covering concealed positions. They had the Ukraine side, had defensive positions that had been built for months, and they were pretty successful in fending off the Russian artillery, et cetera. But to attack the Russians, they had to come out of those positions, and they crossed what they

called a steppe, which is basically a large open area in meadows, et cetera, with no overhead cover, making them completely vulnerable to Russian artillery, rocket fire, and airstrikes. And they were just annihilated. And you see the Ukrainian side, the whole time, they were saying, well, Operation Security. We're not going to talk about what's going on down there until the thing's done. And no Western reporters are going to be allowed into the area because, you know, national securities involved you, et cetera. But you see that when they actually did gain some ground in the Carthead in the North, they were throwing videos left and right and they were telling everybody every single thing that was going on

because they actually did have some success there. But when you look at what happened, and this is what I cover in the piece you're referring to in 1945, Russia had been since May, or really since April, had been conducting in what's called an economy of force, in the north and in the south to where they put as few troops as they feel they need to to keep Ukraine from redeploying all their forces to fight in the Donbass, which the Russian had declared is their primary of effort. Now, that makes sense for a while, but because Russia was taking this super go-slow process, after a while, Ukraine kind of figured out what the status was, what was going on, and then they very covertly, and this is where they genuinely

deserve some credit. They built up some combat power in both the south and in the north. And in the south, everybody knew because Zelensky was telling people for three months that the attack was coming, which was part of the reason why it was beaten so badly. But no one knew there was a big one coming in the north. And they succeeded in doing that. Now, Russia had foolishly, their intelligence was terrible. They didn't see it coming. They weren't prepared for it. And they had only put their, it's not even reservists, it was like their National Guard and their local militia, so to speak, on the northern part there. And then they thin that out to send some of it down to Kyrsson. So there was a very small number of Russian troops up in that

whole area, this, you know, 3,000 kilometers, square kilometer area they're talking about. There was hardly any troops up there. So when Ukraine comes rolling in with this very large force, that was built with the very best, you know, the consolidated the best of the, you know, the armored and artillery and drones and all kinds of other things that, in training, they had trained up troops in Britain and some other places. They put the very best they had up in that area. And so it was not even a fair fight. It was like eight to one on the attacker side against the poorest of the Russian forces that were in that area.

So it was completely reasonable and understandable from a military perspective, why the Russians lost. But I will say that they actually recovered a fairly good order and went back to what's called the Oskull River, which is farther to the east, and beyond which the Ukrainian really, in fact, so far they have not been able to breach. So that's the new line over there. And there was somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 kilometers on the other side of it. They had been cleared out of Russians because the remainder of the Russians, they couldn't

defend it, so they actually escaped to the north back to their side of the border. And that's kind of where the tactical stuff has ended up. There's no gains in the South, and the Ukraine sites of tremendous losses, and there are substantial gains in the North. But then as you want, we can talk about what that means now. Well, and as far as there's substantial gains in the North, you talk about how there's this sort of gendarme force, how you pronounce that there, that kind of just retreated, gave that ground.

But did they suffer major casualties along with the loss of all that territory? the way the Ukrainians suffered casualties in Kurson, or they really just turn around and left? They did not just turn around and left. That was another thing that the Russian side deserves some military credit, because they conducted a fighting and withdrawal. They did not just, you know, basically just panic and turn and run, because if they had it, then they would have been slaughtered even more than it. They suffered a lot of casualties. That is genuine.

But they also inflicted a lot of casualties. by some reports the Ukraine side suffered almost as many if not more casualties than the Russian side did and so they paid for that territory with quite a bit of their own blood there here's the net net though because of what they they concentrated all their striking power for those two offenses they don't have much left and so that's how I was about to ask you is you know where are they at in terms of reserves and everything yeah because see what the common narrative is that, man, Ukraine's about to go on the, you know, they're just going to keep rolling, Russia's out, and they're going to drive them out. And there's almost

no chance that happens. There's very little chance that that happens because battlefield math actually comes into play here. When you take a look at the sum total of everything the West, and especially the United States, has given Ukraine from the beginning, you take that against what Ukraine had admitted that they've lost in terms of tanks, artillery, rocket launchers, And true, well, they haven't said true numbers, but they have said the equipment. And then you see what they had in these two offensive. You see there's just not that much left. They don't have enough to drive out Russia where they're entrenched in the Donbos, for example, or even in the Kirstone area.

That's why they had such a hard time because Russia was prepared for that one, and they had more troops down there. They had reserves and everything else. And so now then, you know, Russia has been moving more reserves in there. That's why they stopped the Ukrainians at the Oswald River. They haven't gone any further than that because now it gets a lot, a lot harder. They caught the Ukraine caught the Russian spy surprise and had a huge success there. But that surprise is over. Now it's back into that grinding phase that really both sides have been on for a while.

And now I was reading at Moon of Alabama blog, which for people who don't know, it's this brilliant military analyst from Germany named Bernard. And that's some lyrics from a song is why the website is called that. But it could just very well be like some good old boy Green Berets from Alabama, but no, no, no. It's a German analyst. And he was saying that, look, in this part of Lujansk, the Russians were holding this one piece of territory there near Izum, because they were trying to use that to stage attacks on this other area near there. And that just wasn't working because the Ukrainians were dug in so deep. there. And so they were giving up on that. So that was all the more reason for them to have drawn

down their force that they had previously been attempting to do a thing, and it changed their mind about that already before this withdrawal. Is that right? I'm not sure I would go so far to say that the Russians had given up on it. They were not being successful. They had planned on using Izzyum to attack the Slavians-Kromat-Torce conglomerate, which is what they're called in that area. This was the last two big areas of the Donboss that they've been trying to capture for a long time. They were trying to do a pincer movement where they came in from the south and then came down from Isium in the north and completed it off.

But they had just not been able to break through. That's part of the grinding nature of this, that Russia hadn't been success. But in addition to not being able to use it as a launchup point, they were using it as a resupply point. So they were bringing, you know, whether it's artillery shells, supplies, other ammunition, fuel, they were running that stuff through isium. And so with the loss of that now, it's a pretty significant loss because now that means they have to go a lot farther to get stuff into the rest of their church in the Donbos,

especially. And, of course, they lost all the stuff that they had there because they didn't have any kind of a chance to, you know, move that stuff out. So they did lose a lot there. Yeah. Sorry. Hang on just one second. Hey, guys, anybody who signs up to listen to this show by way of Patreon will be invited to join the Reddit group. And I'm going to start posting stuff over there more. That's patreon.com slash Scott Horton's show. Thanks. Hey, y'all, libertasbella.com is where you get Scott Horton's show and Libertarian Institute shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, and stickers and things, including the great top lobstas designs as well. See, that way it says on your shirt, why you're so smart. Libertas Bella, from the same great folks who bring you ammo.com for all your

ammunition needs too. That's Libertasbella.com You guys check it out. This is so cool. The great Mike Swanson's new book is finally out. He's been working on this thing for years and I admit I haven't read it yet. I'm going to get to it as soon as I can but I know you guys are going to

want to beat me to it. It's called Why the Vietnam War Nuclear bombs and nation building in Southeast Asia 1945 through 61. And as he explains on the back here. All of our popular culture and our retellings and our history and our movies are all about the

height of the American war there in, say, 1964 through 1974. But how do we get there? Why is this all Harry Truman's fault? Find out in why the Vietnam War by the great Mike Swanson available now. Yeah, I'd read, I'm sure the numbers were probably exaggerated, but I read that, you know, about some of the equipment that they had taken, Russian tanks and so forth. But now, So I guess some of the war skeptics in the initial reaction to the news of this major, you know, forward advance by the Ukrainians near Harkiv there in Lujans, was, oh, no, now what's Russia going to do? They're going to have to call up a full scale, you know, mobilization and conscription and stop calling it a special police action military operation like, you know, Harry Truman, and instead call it a war, maybe use nuclear weapons, they're saying. In fact, that's the hawks who keep bringing that up, I think, just to try to demonize Putin.

I don't know. But I guess the question is, it sounds like what you're saying is, nah, they don't necessarily need to double down at all. They keep doing what they're doing. This was a strategic retreat, and you could call it, you know, a tactical loss. but in terms of their overall war effort you don't seem to think that it's been diminished whatsoever while at the same time you're saying the Ukrainians expended a hell of a lot

in order to make this happen especially with their you know kind of distraction attack on Curzon at the same time or right before Well I don't I think you have to you know to really give Ukraine its credit there they did inflict a pretty significant tactical defeat

on the Russians of So I won't say it didn't matter. It did matter because it cost them some trouble now. And now the reason they set up is economy of force missions in the north and the south and so that they could focus on the Donbos. Well, now they lost the northern part of that. And so now that Ukraine can reinforce the Donbos. Now it's going to make that one even harder. So the net net of all this, though, because Ukraine basically expended its striking power. And I put in this two-piece article you're referring to here, a lot of the reasons why Zelensky really had them to now. There's several reasons for that. Number one, Russia was just about to conduct a

plebicide in the south in the Kyrsson area that was going to do the precursor to annexing the south of the part of Ukraine into the Russian Federation itself. And they wanted to act before that happened because even though no one would recognize, it's still a lot more difficult once something's actually been annexed into your country. The second reason, though, is because just before they launched that offensive, there was about a week before a big meeting in Ramstein Air Base with all the Western defense ministers to decide what they want to give to Ukraine and the next front. Well, there's been some concern that if they don't, Ukraine side doesn't show enough progress, then the West is going to start saying, hey, why should we keep giving you

all this stuff when you're going to lose anyway? So they wanted to demonstrate that, no, no, no, we really can. So we're going to show you this big victory, which is why they played it up so big to make it sound like they drove, you know, they drove the Russian front line troops out of contested areas, whatever, when it was really nothing like that at all. In fact, they didn't drive Russia out of anywhere where it's contested. They're still being moved back in those areas. And then the other reason, the other thing that is the fall rains are going to begin pretty soon, and it's going to make it just extremely difficult to move armored forces across open terrain, which they had to do. Because once it happened, they call it,

the Rasputita, I think, Poutista, sorry, in that area, which basically, when the rains come in the fall and when the snow's melt, you know, in the spring, it just turns it into just this miry muck that's really hard to move across. And you just can't make it surprising maneuver, because then you get stuck at it, and then you're just dead because artillery is just going to, you know, hammer you. So he had to move before all that. Now that, you know, it's now almost in that rainy season, they've used their striking power, probably no. Nobody's going to do anything big for the rest of this year because now winter's coming. You've got energy problems and everything else. So I don't think this is going anywhere until the winter comes hard and the ground freezes and makes maneuver possible again. All right.

Now on Twitter, there's this whole kind of village of hawkish, you know, supposed open source type analysts led by Bellingcat, which is obviously just MI6, you know, front. But there are others kind of like that. And I saw some of those guys discussing about how, well, you know, it was the harm missiles, the American, I guess, anti-radar missiles that they use that gave them the Ukrainians this extra reach over the Russians and how the, you know, sort of a separate question from what you're saying about, yeah, but they're running out of men. But the men that they do have, they've had a chance now to train them up on all this American weaponry. and that's really what's made the difference is the transformation of the Ukrainian military into very much Western force.

Do you think that's really right? No. I don't think it at all. Without question, they're better than they were, but they are still miles away for being a Western anything. And it's also very telling. Look at the weapons that have been given. I actually looked again just a couple of hours ago

at the sum total of everything the U.S. is given from February 24th on. And you see millions of rounds of small arms, ammunition, tens of thousands of various kinds of anti-armor, anti-air missiles, et cetera, and 126, 105-55-millimeter howitzers, 205 millimeter howitzers, 16 hammars, and then 200 armored personnel carriers from the Vietnam area that we don't even use anymore. So basically, and Humvees, the junk that we don't even fight with anymore. what that tells you is there's no tanks there's no still propelled artillery and there's not even large numbers of the high mars or anything else all that is defensive in nature that just not even give you the the technical capacity to large to launch a theater level offensive that could drive people out of contested area like it's on boss for example so that tells you that the west is not really thinking this is going to be one i think that they just want it to continue to go on so that russia continues to get chewed up and uh I don't think that they mind if this goes on for years. I just looked at what they're doing and what they're saying. The Biden administration admitted to Defense 1 in a publication last week, that they have four objectives in here,

one of which is to harm Russia, none of which is to help Ukraine win. Nobody's thinking, I don't think any in reality, anybody in the administration thinks Ukraine can win. I think they know the reality that I do. But they do know that with all this weaponry we've given, it'll just keep the fighting going on. almost indefinitely, because Russia is not strong enough so far without mobilizing to continue to just sweep across and capture Ukrainian territory. Man, that's something where they forget to even lie and pretend they have an endgame other than just to these people up.

Yeah, just harm Russia and not let them lose, but not to win. And so we're not giving them the stuff they would need to win, which is good because we shouldn't, because that would mean that we're going to diminish our own national security. And that's why nobody else in Europe has given their front line tanks or self-propeller, artillery, or armor personnel carriers. There's a reason why they haven't done that. Well, you know, in fact, I was just reading Aaron Mante's new piece, and he quotes, Lindsey Graham, this, I had missed this from the beginning of August, saying we're going to continue to fight to the last person there. As long as we give them the weapons, you know, to fight them to the last Ukrainian.

I mean, they say it themselves. This is really incredible. It's very discouraging to me because they love to chest beat and they love to pound their, you know, arrogance and presumption and yeah, we're going to get against the Russians, we're going to help the Ukrainians, who themselves also, the Zelensky regime, et cetera, they are also a part of this, so I don't diminish that. But the net result is we don't care how many Ukrainians die in the process. We don't care about the cities getting shelled. I do. That's what's motivated me from the beginning, is that I want to see them more than live, the people who just want to. have a normal life and yet they're caught in the middle of this and they're the ones that are

getting blown up every day yeah well you know it's funny because ever since i wrote fools there in the afghanistan book which you're in of course and which i keep telling the story because it's a good one that that's where the title comes is from a conversation between you me um about how and you know i give speeches about that book and i always kind of take time to mention because it is important you know i don't know uh it's not like a day disclaimer or spin or anything. I just feel like mentioning it that when bin Laden talked about, you know, what we want to do is replicate the 80s war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, only this time against

the United States. A million people were killed by the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. And here bin Laden is essentially saying, who cares? Kill all the Afghans, let God sort them out, as long as we can bog down and break the Americans. And this is the point of view of Osama bin Laden. Well, then you got the Americans saying that exact same thing. This year, at the end of last year, at the beginning of this year, and continuing through, yeah, we want to replicate Afghanistan in the 1980s. Not Afghanistan since 2001C. That's different. But Afghanistan, the 1980s, where a million

Afghans were killed, where Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan were with. willing to fight to the last Afghan to bog down and break the Soviet Union, Bill Casey, too. Oh, yeah, no, that's perfectly fun. We'll just write that in the New York Times, that that's exactly our point of view. That's the U.S. government, the Joe Biden administration, quoting bin Laden, quoting Reagan. And, of course, we're going to couch that in all the flowery, lovely language of freedom and democracy. This is about defending democracy and about ensuring the freedom and the territorial integrity of the people of Ukraine. We're actually doing it for them, and we're not.

We're not doing it for them, Scott. I mean, I think that's plaintively obvious. Yeah, it's really sick, man. And now, so listen, since Ukraine cannot win the war and the Russians, as you say, can't win it without a massive, I mean, let's say they wanted to take all the Dombass and all the way to curse on. I mean, to me, from a government program point of view, it only makes sense at that point that they would try to take everything east of the Nipa River or something. But that would take this massive effort. And then even then, the Ukrainians are going to give up. As long as they still have West Ukraine to fight from, they're going to keep fighting all the way back to the old border again if they have it their way, as long as they have American support to do it.

So we really are stuck in a real problem here, man. And I wonder, in fact, you know, I was going to ask you anyway, but this sort of leads to that. How many people have been killed in this thing already? And it seems to me like some of the claims of Russian casualties, for example, must just be absolutely fantastically exaggerated. You know, they've been claiming tens of thousands of dead Russians from almost the very beginning. But then, I don't even know what the Russians admit their casualties are and how much higher. you think they might be than that or anything like that. Yeah.

But also there's the number of dead Ukrainian civilians caught in the crossfire of this thing. I know a lot of people have fled, and that's its own tragedy, all the refugees. But as far as civilians being blown to bits in all these artillery exchanges and airstrikes and all of the rest, I mean, how much do we know or have any kind of reasonable estimate of the death toll here? You know, I don't think we have any, I guess, plausible or, anything close to being official, but just looking at how the combat is being taken place. Russia's objective was demilitarization of Ukraine, and they defined that as the destruction of

the UAF, the Ukrainian armed forces. So even though they didn't capture a lot of territory since April, they did capture a number of significant cities, they did so by limiting the exposure to their combat troops, their maneuvered troops, to their infantry force, et cetera. highlight their artillery, rocket, and airstrikes. So, you know, the poor Ukrainian side was just relentlessly bombarded just day after day, multiple times every single day. And, you know, they were suffering up to 1,000 casualties per day. I mean, that's been going on for a long time. I've seen what I consider some reasonable estimates of somewhere around 190 to 200,000 Ukrainian total casualties.

That's not all killed. And that's reasonable, given what the Ukraine happened. periodically admit it. And now, can you give us proportions on that? How many are killed versus wounded there? Some suggest, you know, upwards of 60,000, 70,000 are dead, and, you know, 180 or so wounded. Hey, caveats included. There's no way to be confident about this, but that's all I'm asking for is ballparks here to try to understand.

Yeah, I think that's, I think that's, 200, 250,000 total casualties, maybe 70,000. 50,000 killed and then the rest wounded based on how many artillery shells are going into where these troops are concentrated. I mean, because that's how you have it in there. And on the Russian side, I mean, it just stands to reason. If the Russians have, depending on where in the front they are, a 10 to 20 to 1 advantage in artillery, it stands to reason they're going to inflict five to 10 times more casualties than they receive because the Ukraine side simply doesn't have the fire to return. So they're not going to suffer as many casualties. piece. But whatever the number is, it's got to be extraordinary. I mean, it's got to be

tremendously high. But, I mean, could you guess, you know, between this many tens of thousands and that many 10,000? Yeah, I bet. I bet it's probably close to 50,000 itself. And there could be 10, 15,000 dead and maybe 35,000 wounded. That's, that's probably not unreasonable. But I bet that's, I bet that's less than half of what the Ukraine, maybe a third and what the Ukraine side has, just based on the battlefield's geometry and the battlefield math and how many shells are going in one direction and how many less are coming in the other direction. It just stands to reason that those numbers are going to be something close to being arrived. And all of the numbers that say that

the Russians have lost 50 or 70,000 dead and this kind of thing, those are all just come from the Ukrainian foreign ministry or defense ministry, right? Or the British intelligence. That's, in my view, the worst organization that there is in terms of misinformation, intentional disinformation. I think they just produce fiction every day. I don't think there's anything behind what they say. I think they'll just say whatever they think they want in the quote information war, which they view as a legitimate battlefield, which means they'll say whatever they want to say to get public to the West to continue to support the stuff. But I've seen, I mean, they've been wrong on nearly everything major from the very beginning, maybe from black.

April on, so I have very low validity in anything that comes out of the British intelligence. Yeah, sounds about right. Okay, well, listen, I appreciate a good half hour from you here. It's a hell of a war. I mean, I guess from kind of a military nerd point of view, you must, in a way, love it, right, in terms of the just tanks versus this and that and the strategy and the battlefields and the different topography and all. all like that part of it, aside from the counties. We haven't really had a state on state war like this since the Iran-Iraq war, really, right? Yeah, we really have.

I mean, you might can say Desert Storm for 100 hours worth. Kind of, but you guys had such an advantage there compared to their old military. It's sort of don't. This is much more evenly match, in it? Oh, without question. Yeah, no question about that. I mean, that's why I said 100 hours. I mean, we had, you know, I was in the one tank battle where it was genuinely force on force.

One of the very few been in the whole theater, but one of the few, I mean, we passed the First Armored Division through us, and they basically had nothing to do afterwards, because they were just weren't very many more Iraqi formations that were still fighting. But, yeah, this is, I mean, you might even go back. Yeah, I guess there ran Iraq probably would be the last one where there was two evenly matched sides, even though they were bad, but lots of casualties that were in there. Yeah. And to your question there, I really do. I got to focus on that kind of stuff because otherwise if I start thinking too much about the human casualties and this and the cost, it just, I mean, it'll just depress you can't even focus anymore because it's just so egregious. I know it is. It's absolutely horrible. I didn't mean to make it sound fun. I just, I used the word fun. All I met was, you know, I. Yeah, as a professional, I do. I mean, I spend hours a day every single day trying to, you know, keep track of what's going to. going on and check all sides to find out if I can have some idea what the truth is. And, you know, from a professional side, you know, I try to do the best I can. Right. And it is just a different kind of analysis than the, oh, the humanity part.

You leave that to me, you know. And you're good at that. Yeah, I'll leave the experts to that one. All right, man. Well, listen, I'm so appreciative of your analysis and all your great writing and your time on the show again, Dan. I appreciate it. Always my pleasure.

Thanks, Scott. All right you guys, that is retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Daniel L. Davis, the great heroic whistleblower of Afghanistan, 2012 there. And regular writer at 1945.com, senior fellow at defense priorities, and his great book is called The 11th Hour in 2020 America. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM. in LA. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, scothorton.org, and libertarian institute.org.