The Duran Podcast - Deceiving the public about our wars - Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen

Episode Date: February 6, 2024

Deceiving the public about our wars - Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen

Welcome. My name is Glenn Dyson. I'm joined by Alexander McCurs and also retired Colonel Daniel Davis. Welcome, sir. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here. So I've said many times before that, you know, patriotism is often now expressed, I would say, almost as self-delusion. We have this conformity to the extent, you know, we have to repeat narratives which we know are false and even damaging. And I think that in every war, we eventually discover that self-delusion does not produce good policies, and we become largely unable to pursue our national interests and increase our security. So I think this idea of committing to a narrative based on wishful thinking will result in, well, absence of accountability. Course correction is prevented.

We reward failures. So we also see that those who advocate for wars without any possibility of success often end up getting nice jobs for arms manufacturers, while those who push for accountability might have their loyalty questions. So the system isn't working the way it should is what I'm trying to say. And I think this is a great topic to discuss today with Colonel Daniel Davis, who has served in both Afghanistan and Iraq. and has also been at the forefront, I would say, of observing such a dangerous deception when the narrative deviates too far from reality. So if I'm not mistaken among the U.S. military officers, you were one of the first to really publicly criticize the war in Afghanistan. It wasn't going as, well, authorities and the media suggested it was. and proving evidence that the war wasn't being won

and pretending otherwise is not in America's interests. And, well, Mr. Davis, I feel a bit of a deja vu here because, you know, we see again that delusion, I would say, is almost celebrated as virtue. So the people have been chanting for not just in Middle East, but in Ukraine as well, those are chanting that, you know, this was an unprovoked invasion, you know, feel very good about themselves, even though, you know,

this tends to prevent a settlement. And also repeating that Ukraine and NATO is winning, it's also seen as being virtuous, even though, you know, the Ukrainians are being bled white and, you know, NATO's moving to the brink of nuclear war. So we obviously should discuss Middle East, but I thought we can first have a brief visit of Ukraine. Perhaps you can, you know, share with us your perspective or insights on where we are in this Ukraine war, how we got here. Has the narrative removed itself too far from reality? How do you see this? Yeah, the narrative has never been based on reality, in my view. I was arguing for at least six months before the war started that we should not have this war,

that we should avoid it, because it can't be won. And there were many off-ramps that were available. On the day that the war started, I again advocated that we need to get this cut off as quickly as possible, find a negotiated settlement that the two sides could at least live with as nobody was going to get a good deal back then. And of course, that was left off the scenes. I remember infamously once I was on CNN in the early hours of the war. And although they didn't realize it that there was an ambassador that was following me and I was still on the air. I could still hear my earpiece and the anchor came on with him. And then you said, who is that lieutenant colonel? That's crazy. We should definitely not, you know,

have a negotiated settlement now, we need to keep pressing. And I'm just thinking how many thousands, tens of thousands of men have died because no one was willing to do that. And then, of course, a lot of people talk about in March and April of 2022, you know, barely a month and a half into the war, there was a basic outline for negotiated settlement that both sides tentatively agreed to, and the war could have ended then, and they sabotaged it and continued to go with the myth. Now, what ironically positively happened on the battlefield for Ukraine perversely probably has condemned it to even much more significant destruction. And that's they had the Russian army bogged down because they way overestimated their capacity, way underestimated the Ukrainian capacity on their initial invasion. It bogged down.

And then Ukraine had a big success in the Kharkiv region and in the Kyrsone region, which made a lot of people think, Ah, Ukraine can win and Russia can be defeated. But it never was the case. Militarily speaking, if you take the emotion out of it, the reasons why Ukraine succeeded in both of those cases made sense. It was understandable. It was logical. But it was also clear from a strategic view. It was not going to change the outcome of the war, only going to delay it. And now that we've seen that play out in the last year where Ukraine tried to have this big offensive in the summer, which again, in the months before, I was arguing. very emphatically it was not going to succeed, laid out the very plain military reasons why it was

not going to, which was insufficient air power for the Ukraine side, insufficient air defense, insufficiently trained troops, not an adequate enough equipment set. They had lots of tanks and stuff, but it was just a mishmash, so they weren't properly trained on it. No one could be in that short period of time, and they didn't have enough mind clearing equipment. Those were all the things that made any attempt just suicidal, and that's exactly how it played out. Now then, today, we still have this fiction going on in both the United States and in NATO headquarters where they claim that, okay, we're going to hold for 2024 and then have an offensive in 2025, and then maybe it'll work, which is just condemning tens of thousands more Ukrainians to death. And I'm not convinced

that they can even hold on for the remainder of 2024. I think there's a higher shot that the Ukraine army collapses and breaks finally and that the overwhelming pressure Russia continues to build up could break through somewhere. That's not a guarantee, but there's much more likelihood of that happening than if Ukraine hanging on and then having an offensive in 2025 because that ignores the whole other half of the equation with Russia, that they're also making changes and improving their situation much faster than the Ukraine side. And there's other reasons I could go into it, but that's the basic gist of how I see the war. It's a question of resources. Ultimately, the Russians have more of everything.

And expecting that Ukraine can somehow pull some magic trick that's going to turn that round, it's very difficult to understand. Now, Colonel, I have to say, I've been reading lots of pieces that you have written about this war. As I mentioned just before we started this programme, you are an officer, the first officer, the first military man I have had a direct encounter with, who's actually been there in battle, and who's actually led men in actual fighting. And you've seen the face of war.

And I worry very often that many of the people who are making the decisions about wars today in my country, which is to say in Britain, in Germany, perhaps to an even greater extent, in France, perhaps less so in the United States, but still to a great extent in the United States, are not familiar with war. They don't really understand how complicated and difficult war is

and how difficult it is to keep soldiers moving forwards in battle and to keep armies operating on the field. And all of those mistakes that you've mentioned, the lack of their power, the mishmash of weapons, the lack of training, they all seem to me the kind of things that politicians, very easily can do. They say, give them tanks, give them infantry fighting vehicles, give them, you know, a certain amount of training,

and it will be enough. And what's that your feeling because it's absolutely mine? And I am not somebody who knows anything about war, but at least I have the humility and the degree of self-knowledge to understand that. Well, see, what just aggravates me and just depresses me, I guess, to a certain extent, is that, I mean, you're sitting here and you're saying, well, you don't have the combat experience, so you don't understand a lot of these things or whatever,

and yet your view is absolutely accurate. You don't have to have combat experience to understand the fundamentals. If you could read and if you have the willingness to see things as they are, which is a key requirement, then you can come to the right conclusions, even if you've never been there before. But it just baffles me that I've seen so many people, especially in the U.S., that's obviously what I pay more attention to. And I'm talking senior level officials, the National Security Advisor, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, obviously the president. I see them making these statements that I'm just thinking, if you went to high school and you had history, you can understand how some of those things just cannot be met with reality. But they have access to all of the top

secret information, and they should never come to those conclusions, which, of course, makes me wonder what is the real intent here? Because if you can rationally see that the resources are heavily weighted in Russia's favor, that politically the political will is virtually equal on both sides, it's, you know, Ukraine's obviously off the charts, they got invaded, but Russia's is also off the charts because they feel like it's the whole West against them. So they are definitely feeling this is an existential battle, so they will pay whatever price is necessary. If the political will is equal and the resources are not, they're heavily weighted in one favor, that it's suicidal to continue to tell the side that's on the lower side, and I mean way on the

lower side, that it can continue to pursue a military strategy to achieve victory that is just not in the courage, and there's no rational path to get there, and yet we still support it. And the billpayers are the Ukrainian people, the Ukrainian citizens, their cities. It just breaks my heart to see that they're allowed to continue to go down this path that we keep supporting them, knowing that they can't actually succeed because all we do is harm the very people we claim to want to help. But if this is the situation. I mean, we see that it's so dark at the moment and still nobody wants to talk about diplomacy or negotiations. What are the, is there any possible avenue for, for this to be resolved through negotiations?

There is. There is. And look, you're also seeing the, while the Ukraine side has plenty of will, they also are fracturing internally in their politics. As everybody's been seeing, this huge thing blow up between their commanding general Zalusini and their president Zelensky. and before that it was the mayor of Kiev. It was one of the former spokesman for Zelensky has said he's now turning into a basically dictator. He never tells the truth. So you see all kinds of chaos in here. I assure you, those troops who are fighting on the front line are paying a lot of attention to this, and it can't do anything besides sap their will.

And of course, they heard all during the previous year, the 2023, that their president told them that they're going to win, they're going to succeed. They're going to get all of their territory back to the 1991 borders. None of it happened. And they saw hundreds of thousands killed and wounded of their fellow countrymen. So imagine how much less they're willing to fight and die now because they see they were lied to and they can see for themselves. This stuff is just not working. And they see how Russia is improving, building more tanks, more airplanes, more helicopters, obviously millions of shells of artillery, which they, Ukraine side, can't match. So if you can see those realities, then those are just truths.

Those are opinions. That's the reality on the ground. So the question would be, why can't Ukraine do what is necessary and say, acknowledge the truth that they can't contain the political outcome they want. So let's take a negotiated outcome that we can possibly get. And look, the longer they wait, the less Boscai was willing to listen to them. because if it keeps going on, because Moscow sees this too, they know that they could have been over in April of 2022,

and now that here we're rolling in toward the two-year anniversary of that date, even. So they're a lot less likely to want to give accommodating outcomes, and short of their maximalist objectives, which are probably all of the Donbos and a neutral Rump Ukraine. They don't want to capture all of it. And let me just point out here. There's this fiction I hear all the time in the United States about why we have to keep supporting Ukraine is because if Russia wins here, they'll keep rolling west into

NATO and all of a sudden all these Western countries will fall. That is sheer nonsense. There is this much, zero possibility of that. It doesn't matter if Putin wanted to. He doesn't have the capacity to. And you don't have to look any further than a map of Ukraine right now that after nearly two full years of war, they have one little like banana-shaped rump after the of the side of Ukraine. And that's all they've been able to. to capture. The idea that suddenly they're going to be able to beat NATO countries, a 32-member alliance, is just insanity. It's irrational. It's illogical to the extreme. And yet, that's what some of our leaders are expecting people to believe. So there is a negotiated settlement that could

be had. It's already not going to be good from Ukraine side, but it can succeed if they're willing to do it. So far, they haven't been. If the Ukrainians won't do it, why don't we? And I say we, I mean, people like us in the West, Britain, the United States, even more, Europe. What do we gain by prolonging the war which Ukraine is going to lose? This is something I ultimately, I could come up with all kinds of explanations for it, but they're just explanations. There is no reason that I can see why it is. certainly in the interests of the United States to continue supporting and prolonging a losing war

when defeat is going to be even greater than if we negotiate it now. You've worked in the Pentagon. You've worked with U.S. military people. Surely they can see this. Is it that the politicians are not listening? Is it that there's a group of people in Washington in the White House and the National Security Council? Well, I'm not asking to identify specific people. But what is this inability, especially in Washington, to understand this?

Yeah. In my view, there are three things at play here. Number one is arrogance and hubris, is that we think we can do anything we want to. We think, as Biden infamously said in, I think it was October, when asked on a 60 Minutes program, can the United States help Ukraine and Israel at the same time because of the significant requirements that each have? And Biden looked at him like, hey, we're the greatest power in the world, in the history of the world. Of course we can do it. He has this mentality that, yeah, if we want to, we can do anything and there are no limits, which is nonsense.

And it's absurd. There are limits. Even a global superpower has constraints on what it can do and what it can't do. It doesn't matter what you want to do. It only matters what you can do. And we can't do all the things that he's asking. That's the first problem. The second problem is that there are people who are saying, yeah, I recognize that we're not going to win.

But I'm okay if we keep fighting because that makes Russia weaker. The longer the view is, the longer that Russia keeps fighting, the more Russian troops will get killed, the more of their stuff gets blown up, and it'll drag out for a long time. Some people are even saying they know that Ukraine is eventually going to lose, but they're even okay with that too because then they'll just transition into a counterinsurgency fight, and they'll fight a guerrilla warfare, which will, again, you know, maybe take into years. If Russia tries to occupy these territories, you know, it'll be a nonstop, just like another Afghanistan for them, you know, their version in the 80s where they had to pay a lawyer price,

and they think that it would be fine. The immoral view of that is that, hey, it ain't my people that are dying. It's not my country that's sucking in. We can keep throwing a bunch of missiles and some number of dollars indefinitely if it hurts Russia. But here's aside from the gross immorality of that because you're letting the Ukrainian people be a bill payer to something that can't succeed while telling them that it can. There's also the issue that perversely, Russia is no longer getting weaker. That was the case earlier in the war. And if we had stopped it in April of 2022, then I think that the net net would have been a significant loss militarily and strategically for Russia.

But because we didn't stop it then, now Russia has recovered a lot of that economically and militarily. Now then they have developed entire new categories of weapon systems. They've improved a lot of the things that they had done before. And now they're building up a large amount of combat experience in modern, large-scale warfare that we don't even have. We've done nothing, but since I fought in Desert Storm in a large tank battle, and we just absolutely crushed Iraq because we were exceptionally well-trained. We had been training for, you know, many years before that, and we had a large focus through the Cold War. That's all gone, because now then, that's been replaced by a counterinsurgency

fight. That's just like going against the Taliban, ISIS in Iraq and in Syria. They don't have navies, they don't have air forces. You know, they don't even have formal aramis. So we've gone against basically people we can do whatever we want tactically. If we had to fight Russia or China or North Korea or even Iran, it would be a very, very different ballgame because we don't have combat experience at that level of that time. And we would find out, I will tell you in my view, if we fought a large conventional war, just like Russia was exposed to it and not being as good as they think,

thought they were at the start of this, we would also be exposed as not being as good. And I think that goes for Britain as well, is that our conventional forces are nowhere near as good as we think they are, because they don't have any of this kind of combat experience. And they do have the wrong kind of experience where you think that operations run at a certain speed and tempo. You don't understand how the enemy can hit you with much larger weapon systems where you don't have the freedom to do anything you want. And they do have Air Force, Air Defense, Navy's, etc. And, and It would be a different ballgame. So all the way around, this is not working out well for us.

And if people do go down this path in the West, they're going to find probably I fear that it's going to undercut our own security in the future. I'm wondering if the issue, because we're fighting Russia with Ukrainians, that again, this removes our incentive, as you said, for peace because the assumption is we can drain Russia. I'm therefore wondering if it's the only way to have a negotiated peace if the Ukrainians come to the conclusion that, well, our interests and the Ukrainian's interests are not necessarily the same and they want to and they should go back to negotiations. Because what's often left out of the media when, you know, we talk about the narrative being rescued is we always made this argument that, you know, the Russians, they just want to conquer Ukraine. you know, there's nothing to do with NATO and we can't talk to Putin, but what we often neglect is on the first day of Russia's invasion on the day after on the 25th of February, there on the first day, Zelensky, you know, if you go to Ukrainian's presidential website, he made a statement saying, listen, the Russians contacted us on the first day now. They still want to talk to discuss

neutrality. And so this kind of, but this, we can't put in our media because this goes against our old narrative. And anyways, on the third day, on the 27th, of February, 2022, the Russians and Ukrainians announced together, you know, we're going to have, or both of them, announced that now we're going to have negotiations without any preconditions. But at the same time, on the American side,

you had Ned Price, the spokesperson, saying, listen, we don't accept this, no idea of no preconditions. You know, they first have to pull out and then we'll talk. And I think this is when the whole, this is when this logic began, that, well, why would we have any incentives for negotiations? Because there's Ukrainians who will do the dying.

And I think now, after two years at some point, the Ukrainians must be seeing that with the can't win and keeping throwing them at the front lines. And the only logic is, you know, as NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg recently said in the US, well, you know, we're killing a lot of Russians there. They're being weakened. is good for American arms industry. Let's continue. I mean, this is not a great pitch for the Ukrainian in the trench who is now being slaughtered.

So do you see any possibility of the Ukrainians seeking to negotiate with Moscow on its own? Because I always thought it was Washington had to talk with Moscow. But I'm starting to think it has to be here. And so far, it's been basically both the U.S. and the Ukrainian leadership have been absolutely adamant about not doing any kind of negotiations, at least since that Istanbul meeting in March and April of 2022 collapsed. And, you know, the Ukrainian people themselves, at least a good portion of them, especially in the East, absolutely despise and hate Russians with a white-hot intensity,

which has only, of course, been fueled by the fact that their country has been attacked and now invaded for two years. and who's to blame them for that? I certainly wouldn't have any positive views towards a country that invaded my country. But at some point, one would imagine that the people will finally recognize, well, resistance is not only futile, but it's counterproductive because the more we fight, the more we die, the more territory we lose, this can't go on. But so far, Zelensky has not been willing to do that. He just keeps on with the fiction that, no, we're going to turn things around. We need just a little more time, a little more ammunition, and a few more men. I mean, that's historically what people like to say if they can't acknowledge reality.

Now, I've laid out here, you've seen just in your unemotional analysis that that's a fantasy, they're just not going to. There's no rational path to accomplish that objective. And one wonders how long the Ukrainian people will keep allowing Zelensky to order men into combat that can't succeed towards near certain death or dismemberment for their loved ones. And they're not, and they're going to lose more territory. Now, I think that what could change that is if some of these tactical situations that are going on along the line of contact right now, one of the key ones is in Avdivka and a couple of other places in Kupyansk, if some of those start to actually break and the Russians do start pouring through and it becomes clear that the line could actually buckle,

that could change the viewpoint of the people who are in the rest of the country. But until that happens, it just doesn't look to me like that there's enough willingness of the Ukrainian people to push back against their leadership. I get to qualify that. There's a lot of Ukrainians in London, and I have some context. And my impression is that there is now an enormous amount of war weariness in Ukrainian society. and we would not be having a political crisis in Kiev of the kind that we're having now, a conflict between the Zelensky and Zalusini and all of this,

which we're not going to go into details off, because why would we want to? But it would not be happening if morale was strong and people were confident and determined to continue the battle. Ultimately, there is a general understanding that somehow, some way, the war needs to end. The problem is they're still getting this encouragement from the West to keep fighting.

And that undercuts those people in Ukraine and Kiev who might potentially say, look, this has gone as far as it can. Let's sit down the talk. I just wanted to make that because that's my impression from what I understand, people in Ukraine, in Kiev, are increasingly coming around to. I just wanted to talk about some of the mechanics of this because there were things that you said that you've written about, which I found incredibly interesting,

and which contradicted, by the way, things that I'd assumed before war started. For example, and it's a fact I've seen this, I was just reading today about a very senior Ukrainian officer, and he was giving some explanations to a Western journalist, and he was a chief of staff of, I think, of a brigade, and he was 30 years old. And another officer was 28 years old.

He was actually leading a brigade. And your point was, in that article, these people are almost certainly too young for the jobs that they are doing. They won't have the experience that is needed for that. And the training that they were. have received will not be sufficient. Now that's, as I say,

conundit in what many people think, many people think, you know, you're young people in charge with all the dynamism and energy that goes into it. That's certainly what I would have thought a couple of, you know, about two years ago.

Can you explain this a bit more? Because it also goes very well. And I think it's a point which people need to remember. I remember you making this point before the offensive about the fact that your people in desert,

storm, I think it was called, whatever it was, the battle, which you won, how very well-trained and experienced they were. And what a long time it took to bring people to that pitch where they can actually fight a battle. Yeah. So there is this dynamic. It's a comprehensive system of fighting that you had to build over. decades of time, many, many, many years. And that is that when you have a brigade, and we'll use that

because that's directly correlated with what happened in Ukraine, you have, you know, you have your troops, which have anywhere from like six months of training to two or three years of time operating in their unit. So they've spent time as a tank crewman, as an anti-tank guided mission missile crew member, you know, they've learned how to fire their weapons. They've learned how to do all that. So that's kind of on the baseline. And then you have like your squad leaders, platoon sergeants, a platoon leaders, you know, the lower level officers who have three to five years of experience. So they have proper formal schooling. Then they also have several years of training at that level of how to lead men and whatever. So you have like a crew now, not just a guy who

could fire his tank, but you have a crew member. So a guy who may teach a tank member, all right, all right. You have the gunner, you have the loader, you have the driver, you have the track commander, you know, and some of ours, and similar in others, where now then we all have to learn how to fight together. And so you'll spend two or three years on doing that. Then you have the company commander and the first sergeant who have anywhere from five to six years of experience commanding at the lower levels and the first sergeant who has like 12 to 15 years at the other levels. Then you get up to the battalion level where it's 18 to 20 years for those leaders. And then the brigade command team, which has 20 to 22 years of experience on those levels.

And they have successfully gone through all those levels. So they understand every nuance in detail how everything works. So when you get into a battle situation, you have trained as a year. unit ideally like we did prior to Desert Storm at the Battle of 7-3 Easting the tank battle I mentioned earlier. We had been together as a unit for well over a year and had gone through many, many training exercises in Germany on top of all the people that had all of those many, many years of experience up to 20-something years. So when you now try to form a Ukrainian one where the top guy doesn't have 22 years of training but a year and no formal training,

just whatever he's learned on the fly. That means when you come into any myriad of multiple different kinds of things that may happen, you don't have that knowledge ready at your hand and understanding of how things work out. So if you're thinking, hmm, should I pivot left here and block and then go and hit the flank on the enemy, or should I hold fast here and bring another unit around? You know, you don't have any knowledge about which one of those may work and which one. one not because you've never done it. You've never trained for it. You haven't seen it work right. You haven't seen it work wrong in training. And so that it tells you what you need to do.

These guys are from scratch. I mean, they don't know many more than the platoon leader down there. Or the guy who just joined the army six months earlier. They're about the same. And that's exactly what I pointed out prior to the offensive where they featured the 47th brigade, mechanized brigade of Ukraine. and they talked about how great it was that they had all these young guys at the top. And I'm thinking they don't know what they're doing. And as it turned out, that's exactly what happened. They ran into a bus saw right off of the bat because they didn't know that that didn't make any sense. They didn't know that what they were being asked to do was suicidal.

And I think within a couple of months, you had several of the key leaders resigned because they said the brigade commander had no idea what he was doing. and he was sending people on missions that were getting everybody killed and it was failing. And he didn't know any better. He was eventually fired himself. But that just underscores that you cannot build an army on the fly without all these different levels here and think they're going to succeed while you're trying to fight a major war and defend against your territory. It just can't rationally be done. And people just don't want to. That's one thing where you can't just figure it out from reading a book or whatever.

That's something you don't know unless you're. lived it or studied it really intently, which of course I've done both of those. But it's self-evident the way it's played out in the battlefield. And I'm telling you, it's not going to change next year either. Yes. And I mean, just to quickly, quickly say, one of the things I've understood about war is the amount of intellectual energy that it requires from the commanders. It's exactly what you say. They have to have to have to have to have a sense of how to do the right thing in any particular given situation. And that doesn't come naturally. And that means that an army, it needs its non-commissioned officers and it needs its officers to be doing things very well.

And of course, what's happened over the last two years, and this is not, I think, challenged, is that Ukraine has lost a lot of its most senior and most experienced officers. So this talk about rebuilding, this is what I'm going to finish. And in fact, I think that I read that a British analysis, I believe it was a British intelligence publicly announced one, said that of all of the 220,000 Ukrainian active forces that were in the field on 24 February of 2022 are virtually all killed or wounded or off the battlefield. So that tells you that then that means almost the entire army is about this thin. have no more than two years of experience, any of them or less than that. So rebuilding on that basis, reproducing even, I mean, you're never going to get a Ukrainian

army as well trained as yours, and that would be an ideal. But even getting to the level where they could perhaps, you know, resist the Russians and go on the offensive again. I mean, it is an impossible task putting aside problems of, you know, equipment, ammunition and all of these kind of things, understanding new weapons and all those things too. I mean, so it seems to me. So when you say you can't see how it can be changed in 2024, I would say that must follow logically from what we've been talking about. I think so.

Well, I was curious, on the topic of not being equipped for war, it brings us nicely a bit to the Middle East because, again, I think not just the United States, but NATO as a collective, we've been fighting this very weak governments for 30 years, mostly defined in terms of being, well, counterinsurgencies, fighting terrorists. So, well, what we see in the Middle East as well, my impression is, are we ready for this? Because it seems sometimes a bit delusioned. People are referring, for example, to a country like Iran in the same way as we're discussing Afghanistan or Iraq. But this is a humongous, very powerful country, though. But, of course, the United States is not a mouse either. This is, well, again, the largest military.

But how do you see the prospect there? Does the United States have all the capabilities? Because, again, this is on the other side of the world, and the Iranians aren't weak anymore. So how would a war like this play out, do you think? Yeah, it would be an unmitigated disaster. And the course that the United States has set ourselves on right now cannot succeed militarily. First, let me back up. All of this is predicated on what's been happening between Israel and Hamas.

You can't talk about any of these things without going to the source of, all this instability because all these issues we have in the Red Sea are exclusively tied to the Israeli incursion into Gaza after they suffered the terrorist attack by Hamas on 107 and all of these this huge spike in attacks against the U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria are also expressly tied to what happened with the Israelis going in and killing large numbers of Palestinian people. All of it is in support of them to the extent that even earlier today where there was an attack on the Derizor base where the U.S. is in Syria, which killed several Syrian Democratic force members, Kurdish people, which they were apparently trying to kill Americans, but they got the Kurds instead.

So obviously, all these things we do are having zero effect, no deterrence whatsoever, and they're not going to because we're focused on using bombs and missiles to deter militarily these groups, when that's not what's motivating them to act already. they're acting in defense of their co-religionists in the Palestinian enclave of Gaza. And until that gets resolved, it doesn't matter how many of them you kill because they're willing to die for their cause. They're already clearly willing to do that. And if we needed any more proof than that, I mean, we can see what we tried to do in Iraq since 2003 or in Afghanistan's, you know, since 2001 and how disastrous that ended up. But even contemporary, you see that the Houthis in Yemen,

Saudi Arabia tried for almost a decade to militarily conquer them with all kinds of superiority from air power and whatever. It never worked. And now that they were trying to sue for peace and get that thing off the table when this thing blew up here. But look, the Houthis have experience with this. They're not going to be deterred by a few missiles from the United States. And of course, these groups in the Middle East, they've been fighting us like this for, I mean, I've lost count of the number of years, but all the way back at least to 2020, when we assassinated the Kutzfors' leader, Soleimenea in Iran, they've been attacking us all the time since.

There was 80-some-odd prior to 10-7, and then, of course, it's just gone off the charts with an additional 165 or nearly 170, maybe, as of today. So they're not going to be deterred by these kinds of actions. They're just going to be spurred onward. Now, so far, we haven't crossed that magic line into Iran. proper, but there are major requests and demands by many of the, I call it war firsters in America that they've been lusting to go after Iran, and they're already saying, well, see, the deterrents aren't working, you've got to go into Iran, and then they'll be deterred, which of course is insane, because almost the only prospect that's going to have is that you're going to actually spur a large-scale war

that if, because if Iran retaliates like they almost certainly will and kills more Americans, now then what are you going to do? You're going to back down? Of course not. Then we're going to step it up again. And then now that it, you know, just a few more rungs up that ladder and we're at full out in war, which we can't win at an acceptable cost. That's the real problem is all these people who are so eager to, yeah, throw some more missiles into Iran.

All you're going to do is start a war that now that it's going to cost even more American lives. and look, we've given so many of these weapon systems to Ukraine over the last two years and now plain loads of it almost daily, not almost daily to Israel. We don't have enough to actually sustain combat over time. We would run out of these key materials before we ever would win because Iran is not just going to lay down like these other groups aren't either. So this has the potential to be even more disastrous for American nationalists than the situation in Russia and Ukraine. It's very frustrating because, just to say to love you, as we, you and I appear together on a podcast where we were invited by David Sacks on Twitter.

I remember that well. And I remember you describing the problems an Israeli incursion into Israel would face. And they have the actual events, everything that has happened in Gaza, This is before the Israeli incursion into Gaza began. Everything that's happened since has followed exactly. It's tracked precisely what I remember you saying on that program, that there would be massive civilian casualties, that the Israelis would get bogged down into heavy street fighting,

which they're not really prepared for or trained for, that the Israelis would suffer losses, that it would not be the walk in the park that many people were expecting. And this is absolutely correct. And yet, in spite of all of that, and you know, I'm sure that you're not the only military officer who's pointing these facts out. In spite of that, we see this thing in Gaza continue, which is going to go on for months, year even, so the Israeli government are telling us. And we have all of these people who are now telling us we must strike at Iran as well. And again, I am sure there must be people who are giving it the advice and saying,

please don't go there. And in the meantime, we get all of these strikes across the Middle East. Now, I mean, again, I assume that when militaries go to war, they have a plan. I mean, you know, the people are supposed to have a plan. I am not able to understand what the military plan of this bombing campaign is. Now, perhaps there is what, and if there is, perhaps you can expect. I haven't found it, but maybe there is. No, what else you're going to say was, again, you see very clearly than this,

but I'll tell you why some of these things are going on, which to you and me seems self-evidently suicidal and just can't possibly succeed, but it could. possibly get a lot worse for us is because if you just take a cursory look at that in American TV channels over the past two or three days, you'll see why, because you have all of these retired four-star generals, former cabinet officials that are going on and saying, see, I told you that Biden was weak and that this was not going to deter them. You should have listened to me and you should have gone into Iran in the first place. So now imagine if you're just an American person, and just, you know, a businessman, a teacher, whatever.

And you've never been in the military, so you don't know. And you see all these, the whole list of four-star generals telling you, I told you this wouldn't work, we have to go into Iran, then it'll work. And you see like a handful of people, maybe one, they go, okay, well, that guy was in the Army, but he was just a lieutenant colonel, so relatively low rank compared to a four-star general. So if one guy's telling me that's going to be disastrous and another guy's telling me that that's what we need to do, then I guess he makes sense. So I'm going to listen to this guy. Now, if they don't actually look at the track record, because one of the worst is David Fetreus,

who has been telling all kinds of things that were wrong for so long, to include the Ukrainian counteroffensive where he famously went on BBC right before it started on them. I believe it was the 30th or 20th of May, something like that of 2023, and said that the Russian army might actually collapse based on it. They would probably get to the sea. And he'd laid at all these things which was disastrously wrong. No one goes back to look at that video to find out how wrong he was, and they keep listening to him now too, which, of course, drives me crazy. But most people don't have time to do that.

They watch a three-minute news show, and they see former four-star general, CIA director, or lieutenant colonel, who they don't know as well. And so they listen to it. And as long as those guys keep trotting out there, it's going to be easier for the people to listen to it because they don't do what you did is look at the track. records. And unfortunately, it will be until disaster strikes on us. Then they'll start to look when they see that it's actually costing us something, and they were disastrously wrong. Unfortunately, I fear that that's what it'll take.

Remember, Petraeus, not just in Ukraine, but Afghanistan. That's why I began this talk by pointing out. It seems... Yeah, in 2012, I went out and I said, he's telling you, he's lying to you. It's not true. Of course, in April or August of 2021, when that war disastrous collapsed, I thought people would finally go, I told you, this is what I told you, he was lying. And instead, they called on him to explain why it failed. So, go figure. Well, this is accountability problem, I meant. There seems to be a tendency to reward failure if there is no accountability.

But, you know, there is always this focus on being, you know, show that you're strong and, you know, to deter. As you pointed out, when obviously the adversary is not going to be deterred when it's an issue of this importance, you know, we end up escalating to this point. I'm just wondering, being we are where we are now, hopefully there won't be any direct attacks on Iran. But what are the U.S. options at this point? Because on one hand, one's saying that, you know, there has to be retaliation because of all the strikes, which continues on U.S. basis in Syria and Iraq. However, the more the U.S. continues to get more involved in strike, if it doesn't deter, it will likely do the opposite, just intensify this attack. So I don't wonder, what are the options?

Because you can't really put this together anymore, I think. Even if the U.S. will just stop completely, now they would still go after the basis. Because we haven't gone into Iran proper or even targeted their personnel directly, as of the time we're making this video, we do still have options. The Biden administration could say, okay, we recognize this could go really bad, really south. So we're going to change course here. We're going to withdraw our troops from this area here. We're going to put some pressure on Israel to actually change significantly how they conduct this operation

and actually do intelligence-driven processes that focus on taking care of the civil population, just like the U.S., just like U.K. did. I observed it myself in Iraq and in Afghanistan. For all the mistakes we've made on the ground, the U.S. and the U.K. Armed Forces did actually a really good job to try and limit, genuinely limit civilian casualties. And Israel is doing none of those things, which is one of the reasons there's so much anger in the Middle East that's now being directed back against our assets. But if we don't make those changes and instead just give Israel this $17 billion, apparently they're going to vote on here

in the House of Representatives in a day or two with no strings attached and let them continue to do what they want. And if we don't withdraw our troops then, then like the attack a few hours earlier since before we made this video today, there were Syrian Democratic forces were killed on our base in Syria, which just could easily have been our troops. And if we keep going, we'll be more of our troops. And then the pressure to strike into Iran, I just don't know that Biden can resist it. if he had the power to resist it then, then he has the power now to not get to that point to take the actions that could lower tensions and prevent war. That's possible as of now, but I don't see him having the leadership or the courage to stand up to the pressure,

and I fear that's exactly where we're heading. It comes back to the point you were making earlier, which is about understanding that there are limits to what you can do, limits of limit, you know, that there are limits. There are limits. There are limits. But of course, acknowledging that there are limits is the secret of power. It's how you exercise power intelligently, diplomatic, economic, and above all military. You can't ask soldiers to do the impossible, however well trained and well-equipped they are.

Indeed, yeah, I couldn't have said it better myself. That's exactly right. And just imagine if you use that mentality and you had wise policy that's based on an accurate understanding of your power, your limits to power and what you can and can't accomplish, then we could cut off this disaster right now. We could nip it in the bud and say, we're not going to get any worse than that. We're just going to cauterize the wound. And then after a while, it'll get better. I'm sure Iran would, and some of these groups would grow about how, oh, they drove the Americans out or whatever, and they would. And for a while, they would be to say, yay. And then what? Then another week or a month or six months would pass. And everything is still the same. We still have the relative power over them. So they still can't go into other areas or they face our attacks. And our troops aren't vulnerable. So they can't even reach them anymore. Now then they're limited, while as we still have full power and we're not in a war. That's what, I'm looking six months from now, from what I recommended we do, we're in a much, much stronger position. But if we don't listen to what I said, and Biden does what I fear he's going to, six months from now, we can be in a catastrophic war that we can't win.

My great fear is that we always seem to go for these PR victories, and while ignoring realities on the ground, like in contrast, I think that's what the Russians did right, because when they decided to see territory in Karkova, as you mentioned, and in Herzogne, the main idea was, you know, when they abandoned Kierstone City on their choice, they didn't, they didn't try to hold a bad position. They said, you know what, we're just going to cut that off. That made incredible sense. And even though they did suffer a PR loss at the time, and Zelensky went there a few days later

with his flag and cameras, and everybody says, yay, we drove them out. And then what? Russia saved 40,000 troops. They didn't have to fight a battle that they would then lose. And now that those troops were available to go elsewhere, and they lost no more territory after that. But we're not willing to follow that sample that doesn't look like. No, but that's what I meant, because I think the concern is always the concern for PR losses. It will seem as Afghanistan, the idea that our credibility will be diminished if we withdraw from Afghanistan. But as you point out, it's a month's pass and we forget and we want to the next thing.

So I'm just wondering if it would be better to take that temporary PR loss and then at least strengthen one's position. Because I just don't see how this can succeed at this point. Yeah, and look, I'm afraid I'm going to have to leave here in just a minute. But let me just leave you with this because directly to your point there, a wise military, commander can say, and boy, there's some great examples of this from World War II, which if we had more time I could go into, where some of the commanders said, all right, we're going to seed large tracks of land, and we're going to give in some areas to the enemy so that we can strengthen other areas and achieve an operational victory. And a commander who's not willing to give anything anywhere,

ergo Adolf Hitler, who was, you know, famously said, not one inch of territory anywhere. We're going to hold on to everything. And, of course, that cost them everything because they couldn't do that. A wise general, a wise commander will say, we're going to give in here where we need to so that our strength can come to bear here and the end result is a good thing for our country. Until we're willing to do that, going for PR victories, as you put it, we're going to suffer big time in the end. I guess we have to round it up here. Just to say, Colonel Davis, thank you very much. I mean, what you just said reminds me, the great he once said didn't he he who deserves

defends everything defends nothing nothing well exactly perfectly said