Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/21/23 Daniel Davis on Why People Can’t Admit Ukraine is Losing

Episode Date: September 23, 2023

Scott was joined by Daniel Davis on Antiwar Radio this week to discuss the counteroffensive in Ukraine. They talk about why so many people have trouble admitting Ukraine is losing this war. They then look back at David Petraeus’ comments about the counteroffensive and observe how poorly they’ve aged. They also look at Zelensky’s visit before Davis gives his best estimate of the true number of casualties suffered so far.  Discussed on the show: “It's Time to Admit the Truth About the War in Ukraine—and Course Correct” (Newsweek) “Zelensky’s ‘Bad Moment’” (Substack) 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: 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

For Pacifica Radio, September 21st, 2003, I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all welcome the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm the editorial director of anti-war.com. And I'm the author of the book, Inult. already. Time to end the war on terrorism. You can find my full interview archive, almost 6,000 of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's

show. I gave a couple speeches recently. You can watch at Scott Horton Show there on YouTube, and you can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show as well. On the line, I've got retired U.S. Army colonel, Lieutenant Colonel, Daniel L. Davis, hey, no offense. He fought in Iraq War I and Iraq War II and Afghanistan. I don't know if he fought so much in Afghanistan as he told the truth, broke ranks and became a major whistleblower in the year 2012,

ratting on his boss, the great American fraud, David Petraeus, for lying to the American people and under oath to Congress about his success because they wouldn't dare call it victory in Afghanistan. Also, we wrote this great book called

The 11th Hour in 2020 America, which is an excellent book and he's been a great critic and analyst of the war in Ukraine as it's going on for unbelievably a year and a half already here. Welcome back to the show. How are you doing, Daniel? I'm doing good, Scott. Thanks for having me back, brother. Man, I'm really happy to have you here. And I got an important question for you to start off here, Danny. You know, you told us all along.

And you have this article, which you've come under some criticism for out there in the world and on Twitter. for saying, hey, it's time to admit the truth about Ukraine. But you've been admitting, quote, unquote, telling the truth about this war all along. I can see what you're doing here, is you're trying to make it okay for people to change their mind now and say, well, you know, here's some things to take into account today. But why don't you talk a little bit about that first, before we get too much into the war? Because I think people maybe misunderstood you a little bit here. Yeah, well, you know, I don't know if they misunderstood.

so much is it just doesn't fit a narrative. And it's really interesting. You say I've come under a lot of criticism. This is one of the first times that I can remember coming under criticism from both sides, the pro war and the side that's against it, whatever. One side is saying, you know, how dare you suggest that this war isn't going to be one or that Ukraine's not going to end up driving Russia out. And the other side is basically, I'm not hard enough on the Ukraine side. So it was kind of interesting in that point. But, you know, look, the purpose is, you have to give people space, you said it very well, to change their mind and to, if all you've been told is just this nonstop steady stream of Ukraine winning, Ukraine winning, Russia's terrible,

they're pathetic, they're crumbling, they had bad morale, whatever. But the result you don't see on the battlefield, but if you keep hearing that, and that's the only thing you're hearing on the major media, both print and TV, you know, it's, you got to have some space to say, well, look, there's a reason why it's not working out and here it is. And this is what we need to be able to do. Because if you just hammer away at the narrative and basically say anybody who's, you know, holding this position is dumb, then people are going to, they're not going to reflect well for that. And my interest is in getting more people to see what's really going on, people who are on the support Ukraine, no matter what side. And, you know, you just got to be wise in how you do that.

And, you know, in my view, I certainly don't say anything. think that's not untrue or inaccurate. I just bring things to a lot that I think somebody who's got an open mind might be willing to think because you're coming at it from, well, here's what they believe right now because it's what they've been fed, you know, nonstop forever. But it's not accurate and here's why. So I come at it from that perspective, but I come to the same conclusion that I have since well before the war began, before this offensive began. Nothing has played out any differently than my military experience and knowledge and study and training really says that it has to.

I mean, there's almost no way it can go anywhere besides an ultimate Ukraine defeat if we keep on our current policy. And I say that an ultimate Ukraine defeat, not that it'll end a negotiated settlement because we have that possibility right now. But if we keep going and not paying attention to the fundamentals of war and to diplomatic and negotiated realities, Ukraine could end up losing everything instead of, you know, the current line, the occupied parts that Russia has right now. They could end up losing a lot more. And that's one of the things that's motivating me so much. That and actually probably that's number two,

number one is the egregious personal cost that this is imposing on so many tens of thousands and probably hundreds of thousands of thousands of Ukrainian people and hundreds of thousands more of family members and sons and daughters and mothers. wives and children and all that, uh, no one seems to be taken enough consideration of the human cost on Ukraine to, quote, keep going as long as it takes.

You know, I get so sick and tired of hearing all this cheerleading and, uh, chest thumping among many commentators in the West, you know, some members of Congress that, you know, we're going to do the brave,

hard thing. Those guys are fighting. We're going to be there with them. Not taking into consideration that you're blindly supporting something that's demonstrably not worth. and is imposing this profound cost on human beings over there. So there's so many people, Scott, that are dying on a daily basis for no purpose. They're not helping their country.

They're not defending democracy. They're just getting sent into a suicide mission, and they're paying permanently with their lives. Yeah. But I guess the question is then it really does come down to if they had to admit that you're right, that the Ukrainians can't win, that this whole thing is an equation for them losing more and more men and more and more territory and having less and less and less to show for their effort all along, then they'd

have to admit, you know, they might even argue, Danny Wright, that well, so, the Ukrainians want to keep fighting so we should help them, but, I mean, that's not really true. It's a conscript army, a slave army, so, whose will are we talking about? You know, like Woodrow Wilson

saying he represents the will of all Americans united when he's drafting people, you know, makes no sense. So, I don't know. That's what it all comes down to, right? It's just what's true and what's a lie. Yeah, a couple of really important things to point out here that they really underscore nearly everything you just said. I want to say it was the 22nd of September 2022. So a year ago, you had retired U.S. Army General Ben Hodges, who used to be the former commander of U.S. Army Europe. So, you know, a very high-ranking position was on with Chris.

Christian Aminpore, and she said, you just tweeted a couple of days ago that Ukraine was on the march, that Russia was falling apart, and that Ukraine could actually win the war and win everything back by the end of the year, and that, you know, back to the pre-war lines, and that by the spring of 23 that they could have, they would complete the capture of Crimea. Do you still stand by that? And he goes, oh, yeah, absolutely, I do. Yeah, he said, they're just more, you know, they have higher morale. They're fighting for their country.

And, yeah, I think that by the spring, the chances are very high that they will have recaptured Crimea, basically driven Russia completely out of all the occupied territories. Well, that was a fantasy at the time. And yet, that's the kind of thing that persists. Do you hear anyone? Have you ever heard anyone? Go back to Ben Hodges and say, hang on, you said that they would be back. to the pre-war lines by December, and yet by the end of November, that small gains that they made

that you just referenced, that's all there ever was. There hasn't been any since then. In fact, they've lost territory since that time. So then you got, no one's asking Ben Hodges that question. More to the point. Your favorite general, Big Day, Dave Petraeus, on the 31st of May, about a week before this offensive began. He was interviewed by the BBC. And in that interview, He goes into such detail. The Ukraine side, you're about to see the biggest combined arms operation, you've probably ever seen, you know, the tanks, artillery, infantry, the drone warfare, the mine clearing operations, they're going to be doing all this stuff and they're going to succeed.

I think you're probably going to see them break through the Russian defenses. And by the way, the Russians are, they're tired, their morale is in the tank. performs really badly up to this point. And he said, I think that you're going to really see their defensive lines cracked. And then the troops themselves will crumble and they might even collapse. That's what he said on 31 March. Then on 29 August, sorry, that was on 31 May. On the 29th of August, so two months into it, or two and a half months into it, when none of that happened, none of it, when they, Ukraine just ran into a bus saw and had, you know, had everything blow up in the very first line of Russian minefields.

Now he's saying that, well, yeah, we thought they'd go a little bit further, but well, that was before we realized just how big the Russian minefields were. No one knew then. And I said, you have got to be kidding me. I mean, the New York Times on 14 December of last year published just exhaustive display of what the Russian minefields looked like, how elaborate they were, how far. far they were. And then you had the Washington Post Newsweek, BBC, and the Wall Street Journal all did their own versions of that all the way up until April, I think was the last one I saw

with some detail. I mean, I'm talking satellite imagery, detailed maps to show exactly where the minefields are and all this. And now then this general wants to go on national television and tell everybody, well, we didn't know how deep their minefields were. Well, of course, everyone knew, especially the Russians and the Ukraine side knew too. So why would you be surprised that they wouldn't succeed when militarily? It's insane to launch this operation that he bragged on on the 31 May that didn't have air superiority, didn't have sufficient air defenses, didn't have as much artillery shells to this day. They don't. They didn't have as many men to attack as the defenders had to defend. And they had barely a quarter of the mind.

clearing equipment that anyone would need. There's just fundamentally no way that can succeed. And yet, here's Dave Petraeus telling everybody that it would have succeeded and then making excuses on the other side. But Scott, I've got to ask, why do people keep listening to these guys who were disastrously wrong every time they make a pronouncement? And yet it happens to this day. Yeah. I mean, David Petraeus especially, here's a guy who escalated and lost two wars and then moved to CIA where he committed high treason and backed al-Qaeda in Libya and in Syria before being run out for leaking above top secret documents pertaining directly to his conversations with the president of the United States that he leaked to his mistress and hagiographer.

And this guy ought to have retired to exile in Egypt or something by now. The fact that anyone's letting him go on TV and talk about what's true and who ought to get blown up if they do this or that is beyond me. Even in the American Empire, it's inexcusable. It's just ridiculous. Yeah. I mean, it was the CIA who overthrew him when he was their leader. They hated him. The first thing he tried to do was force them to do a new estimate on Afghanistan where they would have to go and ask his sock puppets in the military that he just left behind there.

what they thought. And they refused to do it. And then they turned him over to the FBI for leaking, for espionage. Anyway, sorry. David Petraeus, the great American fraud. That's what all those medals on his chest mean. He's never want to fight in his life. It's a pathetic loser. And, you know, and look, Scott, I actually have written on this in the Armed Forces Journal back when I was still in active duty. I did give him a little bit of credit. He deserves some credit for the 2007 surge because it did have a significant impact? No, all he did was help Iran win the war. Well, that's the result of it. I mean, I'm just saying that on the surface of it, all those things, you know, with the sons of Iraq and all that, those were things that were happening outside of his control.

He didn't do anything except facilitated. He supported it, and it kept a lot of Americans from getting killed from the rate that they were. So he does get credit for that, but this was not his creation. And that's why I also wrote that when he was heading to Afghanistan to try and reprise it, I said that the conditions are so radically different. It's not going to work because it's not arising naturally within Afghanistan. And you saw the disastrous results of that. So your overall assessment is correct that he was just a very poor general who got lucky one time and made one good decision. And now that because of that, everybody always says he won the Iraq war.

They don't recognize what actually happened. and now he has credibility to this day, even though he was the architect of the disaster of the Afghanistan war, and somehow they don't remember that part. Hang on just one second for me. You guys know that I consider the Defend the Guard movement, led by the combat vets at Bring Our Troops Home.us and Defendtheguard.us, to be the most important thing happening in American politics today.

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upcoming training sessions and help support at bring our troops home.us and defend the guard.us. Hey, Scott Horton here for the Libertarian Institute at Libertarian Institute.org. I'm the director. Then we've got Sheldon Richmond, Kyle Anzalone, Keith Knight, Lori Calhoun, Jim Beauvard, Connor Freeman, Will Porter, Patrick McFarlane and Tommy Salman's on our staff. writing and podcasting. And we've also got a ton of other great writers, too, like Walter Block, Richard Booth, Boss Spliet, Kim Robinson, and William Van Wagonin.

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We Libertarians don't have the power, but we do have enough influence to try to lead the left and the right to make things right. Join us at Libertarian Institute.org. Book club on Monday. Gym on Tuesday. Date night on Wednesday. Out on the town on Thursday. Quiet night in on Friday. It's good to have a routine.

And it's good for your eyes too. Because with regular comprehensive eye exams at Specsavers, you'll know just how healthy they are. Visit Spexavers.caver's.cai to book your next eye exam. Eye exams provided by independent optometrists. Well, look, I'm sorry, as long as we're doing Petraeus in Iraq. The first thing he did was arm al-Qaeda in Iraq up in Mosul. He armed them and trained them and gave them a bunch of money and eggs to eat in the morning and guns. And then they broke off and became the insurgency.

Then he came and he is the one who. trained the Bada Brigade, the Iranians backed militia of the Supreme Islamic Council and made them into the army and started the civil war. And then he took their side. And then as you say, yeah, he got in front of the parade of the supermajority backed by the Iranians next door and helped them exterminate all their enemies driving the survivors into the arms of al-Qaeda. That was what he did in Iraq War II. You know, funny that, no one ever talks about that part of it. They just talk about the getting in front of the parade part, and that is the only thing anyone

talks about in the mainstream media. The biggest fraud ever. These other things that you mention are kind of important. Yeah, seriously. All right, anyway, Slu, back to what Petraeus is currently lying about the war in Ukraine. It's Daniel Davis, former armored infantry officer in the U.S. military here, and great war critic now. He writes for 1945, and he's got one in Newsweek here about, admit it, the jig is up. The game is over. The only question is how much more the Ukrainian is going to lose now? And I don't know if you saw this one, Danny, but Seymour Hershey's morning email today, you know, he's talking to CIA and they're criticizing DIA. And that's

the defense intelligence agency over at the Pentagon. And CIA saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, these guys in there, all the smoke there blowing. But look at the reality here. When they say, you know, the New York Times says, oh, the Ukrainian military is becoming too casualty averse. Hirsch characterizes that and says, yeah, they're mutiny averse is what they are. Their army is on their last leg and they're not just going to go marching in there on a suicide mission. And just get torn to shreds like that. There's not going to keep doing it. Yeah, I actually, someone mentioned that I personally have not seen it.

But on a possible good note, I saw a clip, I think, from yesterday, yesterday afternoon, where John Kirby was on Fox and he was trying to just sell the same narrative that we're giving them everything they need and they're succeeding, whatever. And you had the Fox anchors push back pretty hard. And more than I'd seen at any point, one of the anchors said, well, how come nothing's ever moving the needle? You keep saying you're giving them all this stuff, but nothing ever changes. And so that's one of the first times I'm starting to see.

see media on air push back against the official narrative. And let's just do everything we can to feed that movement so that more people keep asking these obvious questions and making it more and more uncomfortable for the official people to give answers that do not match what people can see with their own eyes. And that's really the issue here. And I'm really eager to hear that read the Hirsch part because from what you've just said, it sounds like it also matches what we see on the ground. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, and he's pretty regularly talking to CIA critics of this policy for the last, you know, half a year or more. That's what he's been putting out on his substack there. And for the young and Seymour Hirsch is an extremely well-connected investigative reporter who's now in his 80s, sharp as attack still, but has been breaking important stories since the My Lai Massacre in, I forgot, 1967 or whatever. He broke the story.

later, but, um, and including W. Bush's torture and all kinds of stuff. So anyway, yeah, he's saying that the CIA guys are very dubious about this whole thing to put it politely, you know. Um, so, but now, so Zelensky just came to town, gave a speech in New York. He gave the interview with the economist. Do you want to talk about that? Did you see that? Where he kind of said, boy, you better not backstab us now, because I got all my stay behind forces in your countries now. I'm paraphrasing, but it was a pretty tough talk. Yeah, and then you also saw in his UN General Assembly speech where he's also taken to task some of his European friends

who are now starting to look to their own interest. So things are already starting to fall apart. And you probably also saw right after that speech, you had the president of Poland, André Duda, who said, you know what, Ukraine's like, a drowned man and they're going to drag us down with them. So we have to be really careful about what we do. Two hours after that, the prime minister of Poland tweeted out that they're no longer going to be giving weapons to Ukraine. So the wheels are starting to come off there. And look,

let me just tell you, I have great empathy for Zelensky because the weight of the world is on his shoulders. And even though I have a lot of problems with some of the decisions he's made and what he's been doing. I mean, he feels clearly that the wheels are starting to come off. And God only know, and especially with this piece coming out now by Hershey, if it's anything like what you're saying, that's probably just going to feed that movement. And things could really fall apart pretty quick here. And man, can you just imagine the pressure that's on that guy's shoulder? Because now that he's made his whole stick about, you know, fighting as long as it takes, and we're not going to quit until we get everything back, which he repeated again on 60 minutes on Sunday.

but dude it's never going to happen and so now then to try to do what i'm advocating all along is that they make a negotiated settlement how does he sell that to the people who've kept him in power how does he sell that to his countrymen because then they're going to ask the obvious question hang on we had a deal at Istanbul in march 22 one month into the war you could have ended it then through negotiation why did you keep going this far and now you're going to make a negotiation so he's he's afraid to do what's right because of what he's said in the past but man at some point he's got to do that so that there's not any more soldiers just thrown into point those battles where they're going to be you know have their arms and

legs blown off or killed and he's just got to do it i just but i have a lot of sympathy for his situation yeah he is in a very tough position there i mean this is a real mess as far as where we go from here even if we could get a good ceasefire right now you know there there won't be any winners per se uh we just need to get the war ended so that the death and the killing and the destruction stops, and then let's get a generation, you know, before any kind of reconciliation happens, like with Vietnam. You know, we were mortal enemies for all this time, and now you've got the president going there on a, you know, on a smile and happy tour, whatever, because a generation can pass and that can go. But it won't, it'll take a

generation at least, and maybe even longer for this situation here. But that'll be possible. But we don't even have to worry about, you know, any kind of a generational change later. Let's just get the war stopped and the killing, the pointless destruction stopped so that we can at least get people, you know, continuing on what they're trying to rebuild their lives. And then, you know, so no more have to die because the cost is already, Scott, I mean, we don't have time to talk about it here. But, I mean, the mines that have been sown throughout this, this, the land here, which is, you know, one of the best producers of grain in the world is now going to be devastated for decades. you have PTSD and traumatic brain injuries are off the charts that are, I don't know how they're going to handle that. They don't have the budget that we do to handle our own hundreds of thousands from our

comparatively very small Iraq and Afghanistan wars by comparison. These guys are going to be off the charts and they don't have any money for this. I don't know what they're going to do and what kind of impact that's going to have on society or the loss of the manpower to try to rebuild their country. They already are, they can't even run a lot of their industries because they don't have the manpower for it. They're either dead or in the army. And all these things have to be have long-term consequences. But until this war gets shut off, they just are going to continue to compound. Yeah. Well, and the Dombas was their industrial base anyway, and they've been

at economic war against that for almost a decade already. Yeah. You know, since the coup. So, yeah, I mean, they're in such dire straits. And for people who haven't seen the footage, I mean, you're better off in a way because it's just as ugly as can be. I mean, this war, anybody's ever been to the movies can imagine we're talking tank shells and artillery rounds mostly blowing guys apart landmines blowing their legs off and then they're bleeding out there and there's no you know even if their guys get a hold of them they don't have u.s 21st century you know swoop in a helicopter and take them away like afghanistan save a guy's life they bleed out and die out there it's just and speaking of which here and this i guess we'll wrap up with this dan

there are so many claims about casualty numbers from all sides and you have well whatever the russians claim this many ukrainians dead but only this many russians and vice versa on the other side you do have the discord leak which i don't know if that's honest or not but that's what i guess general milly's staff is telling him as well as true as of a few months ago that kind of thing but we hear some really high numbers but i'm always really skeptical when people kind of extrapolate ratios and things, you know, but I don't know who can be relied on either. I wonder what you think the numbers are in terms of dead and wounded on either side or if you're even willing to make a ballpark estimate and if you can tell us how you think

you know. Yeah. One of the things I think can give us a decent idea is that the Ukraine side claims that they had some between 700,000 and a million in uniform. I want to say in the summer of 2022, so maybe six, six, seven months into the war after they did their, you know, big mobilization. People were, you know, volunteering to serve at the beginning. And now that they're saying it's, it's like about 450 or 500,000. So you're saying, okay, you had 700,000. Now you have 500,000. And, of course, you know you're constantly mobilizing and bringing new people in. So that tells me that the number is probably north of probably 300,000 total casualties. Otherwise, you wouldn't have to continue to be bringing all these new people in because you would have, you know, enough to get the job done.

On the Russian side, it just just. Wait, I'm sorry. Can you break down when you say total casualties? Can you tell us how many of those you would call dead and how many wounded? Yeah, based on what you mentioned. a second ago about the medical issues and the paucity of their ability to get people off the battlefield and into the trauma medical centers that like that we have you know all the way back even into Vietnam where we you know saved a pretty good percentage of the troops this one I've been

told by some people who claim to have knowledge that it's more like the American Civil War where almost 50% of everybody dies because they can't get them to the triage centers they can't get to surgeries because they just don't have the facilities or the ability to transport them off the battlefield like you just mentioned. And so so many are dying from wounds that otherwise that they could survive if they'd have been able to get to triage on time. And so I think it's probably a ballpark probably pretty accurate that probably half of those 300,000 are dead.

And it could be way more, but it's just such a secret that no one really knows how many actually were mobilized. you know, what the actual numbers are. It's just impossible to say. But I believe that there's no way it's any less than 150,000, or I'd say it's unlikely to be less than 150,000 dead when you just look at the differences in firepower. Russia has from day one had, you know, sometimes ratios of 10 to 1, 15 to 1 in artillery shells. And at the low, I've seen 3 to 5 to 1 in different parts of the battlefield. And just battlefield math and just the laws of physics. There's no way that the side that's on the bottom side of a one to five or one to ten firepower ratio has the lower number of casualties. There's just no way. I mean, it's impossible. So I think that the chances that Russia has more casualties is just belied by the fact that they have 10 times the firepower or five times the firepower. Well, I guess the argument is, but they're advancing on fixed positions and so they lose more. I mean,

that's the logical part. That's the reason why you want a three-to-one troop advantage when you're attacking a prepared defense because you're typically going to cost you more. Though I have seen recent evidence that it's closer to a one-to-one in this particular case because of the precision fires and the drones especially, that both sides can inflict a lot more casualties than it been historically. But see, here's the thing, Scott. Ukraine can't afford a one-to-one. Even if that's the case, even if the numbers were identical, for example, despite the firepower advantage for Russia. Russia has millions more men from whom to draw, and the Ukraine side can never win an attrition battle. I mean, it's just a slow death, or do you want a fast death? But there's no

path to a military victory here, only more death. Man, that's Daniel Davis, retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel with the bad news for you there on anti-war radio. Thank you, Danny. Appreciate it. All right, Sean, that's the show for today. I'm your host, Scott Horton. Check out the full interview archive at scot horton dot org sign up for the podcast feeds there and all that or at youtube.com slash scott horton show follow me on twitter at scott horton show and i'm here every thursday from two 30 to three on kpfk 90.7 fm in l a see you next week