The Team House - What Happened with the Mozart Group? | Andy Milburn | Ep. 215

Episode Date: June 15, 2023

Andy Milburn served over 25 years in the US Marine Corps. After retiring, he started The Mozart Group, a private crowdfunded military training company that operated in Ukraine in 2022. Grab Andy's incredible book here: ⬇️ When the Tempest Gathers: From Mogadishu to the Fight Against ISIS, a Marine Special Operations Commander at War  https://www.amazon.com/When-Tempest-Gathers-Mogadishu-Operations/dp/1526750554 Andy’s Substack:⬇️ https://amilburn.substack.com/p/not-enough-soldiers?utm_campaign=post To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: ⬇️ https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️  https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️  https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: ⬇️ [e-mail] #marsoc #usmc #themozartgroupBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special Operations, covert ops, espionage, the team house with your hopes, Jack Murphy, David Park. Hello, everyone. Welcome to episode 215 of the team house. I'm Jack Murphy, who with David Park. Returning for his fourth appearance, I believe, on the team house as Andrew Milburn.

Tonight, he wants to announce the formation of the Beethoven group in Taiwan, right? This was not rehearsed. All right, Jack, you're going on that one. D's going to be CFO. But the problem is now that's gathered wings already. There you go. go on yeah let's let's get into the questions pretty quick yeah Dave will be S3 and I'll be handing out basketballs in the gym I'm nowhere near Taiwan

yeah so um this is your fourth time on uh we love having you in and and just hanging and it took us 40 minutes to figure out it's the fourth time on so without D I don't think we ever would have no we had to go back and count well D went back and count because because as the New York Times and many other have so generously pointed out this is a show where we drink

hard liquor in our living room setting I'm glad they appreciate the living room setting because we did a great job to work design of that you know make a homey sort of atmosphere

what they don't know is you guys actually do live here it's not a pretence yeah it's actually we'll be on the floor yeah yeah this is the living room the uh yeah the crash pad is visible sign that there being no safety net in the

welfare state there you go there you go um so a lot's happened since the last time we saw you where do we begin well i mean a lot happened right after we saw so as we strategized before this which we never do i think probably best i think probably the best approach because you guys asked excellent questions and your audience doesn't want to listen to me, wrap it on forever. I mean, Jack, you have a substack account now. Please subscribe to Jack's substack account with 3,500 subscribers. And you're an investigative journalist. The high side.

It's out there if you guys want to find it. Investigative. And Dave, of course, needs, I mean, a lot of times Dave was the only one left answering relevant, personal, understandable questions. look I just handle my booze better than you do. Well, long beyond when I was able to answer. Anyway, I point is, yeah, that's too wide. That's too wide in aperture.

What has happened since we last met? And it's only been four months. Yeah. All kinds of things have happened. You're an international man in mystery, so shit happens fast. I'm trying to de-not demystify myself. I'm actually trying to sink into the shadows again a little bit. How's that going on the podcast?

I'm not doing podcasts anymore. So, a regular warfare podcast, which actually really enjoyed doing. No, no, I wasn't fired this. I went to Ukraine. But the interesting thing about that, I know this is probably,

this is not something that's happened in the last four or five months, but on the topic of podcasts, your regular warfare podcast, which I know if you're listening or not, is doing very well, much better after I left that. I really enjoyed doing.

It got me out of my comfort zone, but the downside was editing and putting it all together. Yeah. That's why we took the lazy angle and we don't edit. Because, I mean, we have people out there like Max Blumenthal to do our editing for us. You know? Oh, my God. Okay.

All right. So, let's get into it. Sure. All right. Yeah, yeah. Let's kick it off. So, no, this is not really a mayor culprit. But, yes, for those of your...

I'm looking at this whiteboard that says road to 100k subscribers. Yeah, I'm supposed to tease out to people to like, share, and subscribe to the channel. There's a whole audience out there who does not know who Max Blumenthal is and all the... And they're better for it. Our audience doesn't give a shit, yeah. So let me just explain it very quickly. As, as, and all you have to do is read the New York Times article, all right? Jeffrey Goodellman, who's a Pulitzer White Prize winner.

I thought was very sympathetic towards me. And the way that article was written, I was lured into this den of inequity. And after being, it was like Searschool. And instead of being waterboarded, you use scotch. And after that, I started making comments. Actually, unseemly. Unseemly.

This is what Blumenthal got hold of. And then there's a bunch of other stuff that happened. He didn't need to slay. my voice down but he did and it you know and he made a big thing of it yeah we can talk about bloomethol later uh but uh his time in russia and his russian wife i'm sure came into bearing on that and i opened the aperture by coming into this place and and drinking hard liquid you guys that's what we do like we you know some men were women with with rich mahogany and Corinthian leather and booze.

We all of our leather bound book Anyway. Okay. It was very, look, I was a willing participant in that. And, but remember the conversation. I just, I want to make sure you're not blinking, like, doing an SOS. I was a willing participant in my last interview. Portia.

Yeah. I know. Remember, circle. All right. Stop it. Okay. Back to Blumentville. All right.

Remember, I can. conversation though guys yeah yeah no you don't you don't remember what comes I remember the context we were talking about war yeah okay and and you know my point was I mean I I was in Iraq when Haditha happened um the massacre and I wasn't in that battalion but when you know when when the news started breaking I knew my heart of hearts that had happened okay I've always been and as have you guys always been critical of your own government, of its policies when you felt they were wrong, of your own, even your own brothers in arms when they've done things that were wrong. And that's the way we are.

Right. So Ukraine doesn't, you know, so it's the same for any country. Right. We were, obviously. And if Blumenthal had, I mean, if the audience of, it doesn't matter. Again, I played into it. But my point is this, the death threats that came after. A lot of them were from people who had nothing to do with a war.

I mean, they were like all over Europe. I'm thinking, why are you angry about this? You know. And what's so weird, like, I felt we tried to have a nuanced discussion. Well, it was totally nuanced. Right? And we said, look, Russia is the aggressor. Yeah.

Russia needs to be rolled back. And Ukraine has some messed up stuff about it too. But that doesn't justify what's, going on and it's it's one of those situations where anybody who hasn't been in work and have this sort of this sort of black and white you know perspective especially when you're with indigenous people people who are fighting for their country yeah right the motions run high and well i mean war generally right i mean that's that's the understatement to to beat all understatements right and the point is unless you have

some kind of strong moral authority from the tactical level to the strategic level that reminds them of what they're representing and why their buddies are dying and the values they're representing

then everything goes to shit and that was my point and I stand by that point it was poorly worded and I'm now drinking Yerba Marty instead of but the point remains I don't think it was

I don't think in the I mean my personal opinion. And by the way, President Zelensky said, you know, just a few months later, he came out, he's an honest, you know, he came out and said, hey, we've got some problems

and I intend to fix them. Right. And you know why? I mean, he, he said that he said that yes, because he's always said that, but two, because he understands that you can't play if you're saying, I want to evolve and I want to, or evolve to be

part of the NATO or EU, there are some things we have to do to fix within our house. We've got this horrible thing going on right now. But we all know whatever happens to that, you know, whether the offensive, I'm not jumping around topics here, guys. So, I mean, there's basically three things that can happen now with this offensive, right? It can be just strategy. It can be astonishingly successful, in which case the Russians end up divided. their army south and east, and they're bottled up in Crimea, and the Ukrainians move enough an unassailable amount of their combat power

to within firing range of Crimea. That is the best case, right? And then there's a second case where they can't break through, or they do break through, but they can't exploit it. I'm talking about the main, you know, the Russian positions. And then there's a third case that I'll say will not happen, and that is the Russians counterattack, the offensively fails, Russians counter attack and they're getting even more grand. There's just not enough gas in the

tank for the Russians to do that. We all hope we are all praying that number one is the result, right? Yeah. Yeah. But even if that is the result, it's only going to keep Putin at bay if behind it is the assurance from the West, you know, it's not going to be NATO membership right away, but there's got to be security assurances very visibly from the West. And that goes hand in hand. Right. Everyone understands. You know that.

Yeah. And those assurances have to be solid because one could argue that Ukraine is in the situation because we, you know, are, because we made them denuclearized. Budapest, yeah, Budapest, they need something between Budapest and NATO, right? Uh-huh. Budapest didn't help them. Was it Budapest? The agreement that where they, they, was it, it, it, it.

where they surrendered all that in 92. I thought it's called the Budapest Agreement where they surrendered all their nukes. In return for an assurance of where you won't need them because we've got your back. It wasn't hey, you were going to bring you into NATO or anything but there was a security assurance.

Not as strong as someone we'd get into Israel or Taiwan, but nevertheless. My point is, why not give them an assurance like we've given to Taiwan or Israel? as an intermediary step, you know, to NATO. I mean, even Western, even Macron is looking this way now. Yeah, yeah, this is what we're looking at, like, long term, and it's not anytime soon.

We're talking about in the 2030s, potentially being brought into the European Union. Yeah, that's right. And then that laying ground more perhaps for NATO eligibility, but they can't. But what he needs now, yes, 100% what he needs now is to be able to say, he wants to say, or he wants. We're doing the right thing.

Hey, hey, you're going to be in the club, man. You're on the waiting list, and no one's going to fuck with you in the meantime. In order to do that, a lot of things have to be put in order. And so none of those things that we have said should be taken as being. There's a lot of, and I've encountered just a little bits and pieces of it, you know, here and there. There's a lot of like rah-rah for Ukraine right now in the West, and I mean for some very good reasons. But there are some people who let them. that kind of like blind them and they see it as a black and white issue where war is inherently

about details and minutia and these little nuances and not to not to blow off any issue or pretend it's not there to try to like you know people try to nuance the issue or something to try to hide from it but rather to confront it right yeah to say that you know this is a complicated thing and absolutely there are problems on the other side too yeah and those things should be talked about and discussed openly and candidly. And it doesn't mean any of us here are like going to go live in Moscow. No. So I thought it was like a fairly adult conversation.

But I mean, what did, you know, after we did that interview, you know, it blew up after it was clipped and by people who wanted to show, you know, for propaganda value, it was just called what it is. I mean, but what's your opinion, Andy, like how you felt when you saw some of those clips going around? and some of the responses to it totally tie it's that's a great question Jack just I'm just saying in free fall but at least in free fall you don't feel like you're falling right it's just you feel like you're on a cushion so I felt like I am I suppose I felt like I was an elevator where the cables being cut is the best you know and and there's no one else I know that sounds that may sound absurd but think about people have killed themselves through you know attacks

like that, right? I mean, they, a lot, reputation, everything else that goes with that. And there was an element of me too

that knew, yeah, I opened the door to that. So it was an awful feeling. It was, but I'm a, you know, I'm a big boy.

It made me think, too, though, I said, when I'm a big boy, look, I was playing in a game, not playing a game, that's a horrible expression.

I was in a venue where that was probably the kindest thing that was going to happen to me, right? Right. A lot of people are looking to take you out figuratively or a wriggler literally. Exactly. So, you know, I couldn't sit there and just go, oh, my God, that's so, you know, wrong. I mean, yeah, Blument, and we can talk about Blumenthal a little bit. But what damaged me in my own eyes was I'd opened myself up to that, not, oh, they did this to me. it was like, God, that, you know, I should have done that differently.

Now I've moved past the self-blame. Here's a really interesting part of this. We are, and you guys are all, I know, intelligent. And so you are. No, if you're thinking there was some pause when I said that, it was, when I looked at Dave. No, it's, no, we've just been having a conversation about this. But let's talk about, you know, just very quickly, AI, one of the scary things about AI, I mean, there was some reality truth at the basis of what Blumenthal did, right?

But pretty soon we're going to have, we're going to see politicians say things on camera that they never said. Right, right. And we've got to get used to that. But that's not the scariest thing. The scariest thing is politicians can say and do things and say, I never, what are you talking about? Right, right. Can you imagine a politician ever saying that? Yeah, yeah, there's, yeah, that's going to be.

i mean we are in a we're in a world where it's it's hit but yeah i it brought me down it it it brought me i mean it really did it brought me down like nothing what what was going on as as all that was kind of like snowballing in yeah on social media what was going on for you in the mozart group in ukraine at that yeah um a lot of things so you know i was pausing because there was a bang outside I don't want to be melodramatic. When we're talking about Ukraine and everything, it suddenly brought me back into that. And I realized I probably spent the last three months,

not trying to forget, but just going on with life. It was a very, yeah, it was a, we were being ripped asunder, basically. We went from being an organization that was tight-knit, competent, and based on mutual trust to one that, I mean, was just basically ripped apart. Now, I would say the core group of guys who I'm in contact with, you know, we all know what happened.

And it all comes down basically, and I'm not going to mention his name, you know, to the guy. Again, this gets back to, as General Nella commented on the rank, we used to tell me, when something goes wrong, you start at your own desk. And then you work in never expanding circles after you've apportioned all the blame that you And so plenty of blame

I went into that I went into that with a rotten partner But you know I wasn't founding a damn business I was responding to a request to train Ukrainian civilians to fight the Russians Who were literally at the gates surrounding Kiev That's not melodramatic that's what I was doing Right

The guy I was with at the time who I needed, to be fair, saw this as a business. He didn't give a shit about Ukraine. He'd been there since the 90s and made a lot of money that. These are all facts. I don't mean he didn't give shit about Ukraine, who knows, but he made a lot of money there. And that was his intention going forward.

I think those undisputed, because you go forward, fast forward, right? And again, this is me starting around my desk. You met Martin, right? Yeah. So the core group in the Mozart group were me, and Martin fellow Marine a guy named Wade way pretty you may know good guys isn't that one I don't think so yeah just an awesome dude and and then and then he who should

name should not be mentioned but you can look him up but me and Wade and Martin were having found ourselves having too many conversations of this something's going on you know we're training dudes I'm laughing now it wasn't funny at the time we're training dudes who have nothing to do with the Ukrainian military, we start to find out. One day early on in the war, one of these guys' cohorts, one of the guys whose guys we were training, left his bag in my room, basically. He dropped by. And I didn't know who's at was who opened it.

It was packed full of dollars, packed full, and there was a brand-new Glock. And now in Ukraine, a Glock is a Glock. I mean, you can get AKs everywhere and even M4s, but a Glock's a status symbol. I didn't count all the dollars, but, you know, so my point is, I, through my own naivety, in a sense, was, we were already buttressed against. Who's in control. People who were not, who were not, didn't have Ukraine at their best interests or using the war to do other things. Right.

I say naivety. But on the other hand, we're American dudes coming in trying to help these guys. We didn't know the way, you know, the rules. What we did know, and I stand by is the Ukrainian soldiers who are the salt of the earth. And I'm not just saying that. We developed, we wouldn't have stayed there for a year if we didn't develop a huge. There's no other word than affection for those guys, the guys who are volunteering, continue to volunteer.

volunteer. It's hard not to get emotional when you think about that. And so everything else, everything else was we wanted to pretend it was a distraction, but unfortunately it was not a distraction. It was going to derail us. When I say we, it was, that was my fault. I didn't understand the rules of the game. What did those rules start to become as you discovered them when well when when um when we started to realize that and and you've heard martin say this too and you can read the new york times i'm not going to say anything that's not ready in the media there was an opacity opacity all right that's a big word it's a big word for i think i can use the word like opacity with your audience anyway there was just no transparency on donor

funding coming in and this guy was a chief financial officer that was that was number one endless arguments but the problem is we still needed him right okay in fairness so it wasn't just naivety hey you guys we needed him because he had contacts um infrastructure that we couldn't have survived without jack you commented hey it's really difficult to start an organization like this and you cannot do it unless you have a some kind of anchor point i was i was going to point out you know, I, this isn't maybe something to put on a resume, but like I've known a lot of mercenaries over the years. I've known a lot of people. We don't use the M. Wood. I know we don't. I've also known a lot of people who are foreign volunteers, contractors. I've known people who have

gone overseas into Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere trying to start up something like what you did. And I really admired how much you were able to accomplish over there and create a sort of cohesive group. And that you and Martin and these other guys were not like, war. junkies looking to get your kill on. It was something else. You were being more mature about it and going to try and offer training and mentorship for the guys who need it. Yeah. And I really respected that. And I would say you got a lot further than most people I know. But at the same time, I think like you ran into at a certain point, the rules of the game. Like it's a messy world. It's a, it's incredibly messy world. So you can imagine, the only, the only thing I can compare it

I think, and I wasn't there, is the breakup of Yugoslavia. And by that I mean, we're used to Iraq and Afghanistan. There were pretty close theaters, right? I mean, they were. Yes, we had to deal with a couple of Italian bicycle tourists in Afghanistan. And there was occasionally some knucklehead who would think that Baghdad is a place the way he could wander around and take photographs. But with the most part, those idiots stayed out of a place like that.

But if you have somewhere that, like Ukraine, like former Yugoslavia, that's very kind of European feel. It's not a closed theater. You've even got the president saying, how I'm going to form a foreign legion? You get the flotsam and the jetsam of the world. You don't get, generally speaking, the guys who have a solid military resume or have seen war,

don't flot to a place like that. That's one of the biggest misconceptions people have about that world. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right. And that you're going to have first world kit and you're going to have all this, all this air support. You're going to have, the people build up this vision in their mind when really it's running around with a rusty Kalashnikov in a third-month country. And there's no. Okay.

Who's Mike? Oh, okay. Is it giving me an English accent or something? We're going to have to tape test you in because your neck, you got bull neck. Where were we before? About the messy world. Yeah, the messy world. Well, yes, you know, I mean, we, the Walter, so the Brits called them Walter Mitty's.

Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, which is interesting because James Thurber was an American playwright. James Thurber wrote Thurber's Carnival, right? And Walter Mitty was a character in Thurber's Carnival who was always pretending to be something. For some reason, the Brits picked up on that, but if you mention Walter Middy in the United, no one's, no one remembers James. It's always like that, man. Every case study you have.

look at. It's, you know, the guy who got kicked out of the Foreign Legion. It's, you know, in, uh, looking back like in Angola, where like one guy who showed up to fight the war was a street sweeper, you know, that's right. Yeah, yeah. And we're going to come back to that, but I'm going to follow through with your excellent questions. Um, so that was, those were all indicators. And then this, all right, um, this, by November, mid-November, we had, kind of decided that this was untenable. You know, even if we were going to collapse and die, we needed to break with this guy.

He helped us along a little bit by coming to me, and this is getting the New York Times and saying, Andy, I want to leave. And, you know, so sorry, dude, we're going to miss you. But you need to buy me out. Okay?

You know, I was thinking, maybe what we paid for. The sandwiches just now. $5 million. That is in New York Times, so you can look it up. Where the hell are we going to get $5 million? And even if we did,

it would be illegal from donor funding to give it to this dude. So it's just, so yes, I was naive, but we're dealing with people who are not necessarily wide. War zones that attract that type of personality. Well, he was already there. Yeah.

But to your point, anyway, which is a very, interesting point about the war zone, an open war zone. And the Ukrainians have sadly learned this lesson with their Legion. I'm not going to knock the Legion because they have

a tremendous amount of very brave, very capable guys who did volunteer and continue to serve with the Legion. But they've had problems too. Anyone who's in the Legion would tell you all the problems that they have had with the Flotsam and Jetsam. I've sat in a bar in Kiev and watched

dudes carry you know with drop holsters and sniper rifles drink themselves into oblivion and throw up and you know they've never walked outside Kiev I know for a fact they've ever walked outside yeah and that continued you know so we attract you know attracts those sort of people we had a few towards the end in the Mozart group not you know and that was part um as you get bigger and bigger right um that's part of the problem right again as I look back at how You know, things I would have changed. I'm never going to start an organization like that again, but that would be one of those things.

But at the same time, you can't, you know, I was trying to bring in donor funding, everything you did. Something's going to give in that environment. And sure enough, yeah. I mean, so we had a few, we had a few, very few bullshiters come in. A lot of guys now are claiming to have been in the Mozart group. I noticed that online. There's even, you guys can look this up.

There's even a place in Bulgaria run by a Brit. Simon Feek, it's called Prep You, and it claims to have Mozart Group, cadre of Mozart Group, training, you know, exactly experience what it's like on the front in Ukraine. And I'm looking at his line of characters. No of those dudes was anywhere near the front. A couple of them did work for us, but their names, I remember, because they were the guys who said,

no, I'm going to do training. I'm not doing evacuations. Because, you know, getting back to what we were doing, and Jack, this plays into what you were saying, yes, you need funding, but you also need a niche to be able to tell donors, why should I give to you? What are you doing? That's so different. So what we did, we did very high risk evacuations. We didn't say, oh, we're going to do high risk or evacuations out of Barclan or beyond Barclan when Barclan was a safety area, which just gives you an indication of the high risk. We would take. We would take a detain, I mean detainees, oh my God, wrong war. We would take evacuees from towns beyond Barmwood into Barmott as a safe haven. All right, that gives you an idea of, you know, because there was a need. Right. The Ukrainians couldn't do it.

The military was fighting for their lives. Right. And so number one, number two, we were training Ukrainian soldiers near the front. because no shortage of volunteers. The sad thing is a lot of guys who would have been trainers had volunteered early in the war and had become casualties. And now their training institutions were empty, at least when we were out there,

I know the Ukrainians are fixing this. So there was an absolute critical need. And we were there for a year to help that. But if you want to use the term high stress, of course, by nature of it, we weren't war junkies. I'm proud of that. We were very careful if we had guys we felt were just there for the adrenaline. To get some.

But you know what, guys, here's what I noticed there. The guy who comes in is an adrenaline junkie wants to get his gun on. He doesn't want any part of what was happening there. One, you know, it would take one far for effect. And he's like, I'm done. Yeah. So we had a lot of guys, though, who are really solid guys. but they knew how I will train, I'm just going to train.

And that was not risk-free. That was in Dombasa. It was within artillery range of the Russians, but it wasn't the kind of really high-risk stuff of driving into direct fire of the Russians. And we were fired up a couple of times in B&Ps. So there was, again, where I'm getting this point is you could choose your place within the organization,

but there was nothing that was risk-free, but there was no room to be a pretender. Right. Right. You couldn't. And that's, I was, that's just the way it kind of fell out. As things fell apart, now I look back guys and I'm really, I just, I've always struggled in my life, at least post school, you're going to get complaints about this.

But I've always struggled with belief in a kind of divine entity. You know, maybe like a lot of us who've seen all this horrible shit happen in the world, it's hard to correlate anyone in charge, right? Yeah. Who in charge of all this would allow this stuff to happen? I've changed that. I've changed my views drastically, and I do believe that there is a good, I don't know how I want to.

Sort of like a benevolence. Yes, there is a God, okay? All right. Absolutely. But nevertheless, what we were dealing there with was such a, it was so draining for anyone who has any sense of anything. And it wasn't just civilian casualties. It was the poor dudes who were volunteering and we could drive in and out.

And those guys were in trenches every single day. Not a lot of top cover. You know, their trenches were not. What do you do to shelter from that kind of artillery? You either move or you dig deep or you're doing. disperse you've got those three choices right Ukrainians didn't have any of those three choices that's why they took such horrendous casualties

during that period that I found heartbreaking I find Russian casualties heartbreaking you know we talked about this I don't watch videos of Russians getting blown up I someone sent me a video of a drone chasing a Russian soldier the other day and then he looks up and he tries to surrender and he gets killed And I found myself getting choked up watching that because he's as much a, I relate more to him than the dude who sent me that.

Right, right. Yeah. Anyway, though, my point is, I'm all the guys, anything that, for which I'm proud of what we did, I'm proud of the people that we helped. I'm very glad that none of our guys were, were killed. But that is a very superficial type of pride because some of them remained and were killed. Yeah. and so I'm I guess I'm

I'm not coming to any logical conclusion except it's it's a shit situation what we were doing couldn't have continued without bad things happening to a lot of good people yeah and what what so when this is why I'm asking you guys to ask

the questions because it's like no it's very very inarticular no you have a lot of conflicted feelings about it yeah yeah yeah I think everyone involved probably does you know And you're right. Like there are people on both sides that are watching these shows like Kill TV.

And it's cheering it on in kind of a gross way. I hate it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, I've always hated that actually. I've never, I mean, we've all got to get through. Looking back at what we did, you know, in our profession. Of course, it's about killing the enemies.

Of course it is. So I'm not, you know, I'm not being hypocritical, but I think there's a difference between that and then rejoicing in it. You know, I thought that, I think that part is, it doesn't matter how bad you think they are. And even like watching, you know, of course we killed thousands and thousands of Islamic State dudes when I was in the siege of soda. Right.

Of course, that was our job. But it isn't, I never sent people videos of it. Right. I just don't understand that I don't It's not entertainment What was the beginning Of the end for you

Like where you knew That was the end of most art group It's a really good question Dave In fact all your questions are Very good And I like the way you've shaved your beard And the color too Thank you

So I'm thinking of an answer I don't need the No I don't need to die I'm I you know what's I think have you guys ever been in a position where you just couldn't you were so caught up in something you couldn't step back and get a good perspective yeah you can't see the forest for the trees yeah I was there and so problem would pop up because we had some we had some internal stuff back in the states to going wrong then too the problem that whenever you have an

organization that's running like that and accruing attention, media attention, you're going to get people who want to be part of the organization, but not to add to it, but to reflect their own, you know. So anyway, my point is that a problem would pop up, I'd feel, we'd feel, okay, I fixed that, and then something else. And then finally, I don't think there was a single point. I think it was just, it just became too difficult. You know, our vehicle. vehicles were rounded up. This is, our vehicles that we were using to evacuate civilians were impounded by this guy. Oh, right?

By the guy. Yeah. By the guy in the Mozart group? Yeah, yeah. For what reason were they impounded? Like, how did, why did he? Well, he, his name was on the, on, on the paperwork. Now, as co-owner of the Mozart group, but only he speaks Ukrainian.

and he's a lawyer, henchman. So, you know what I'm saying? So I'm not suggesting that he paid anyone off. I'm just saying that our vehicles were impounded and a lot of civilians could not be, you know, civilians undoubtedly died because our vehicles were sitting in Kiev and pounded by him.

You see what I'm saying. When that starts happening, I'm thinking, what the hell are we doing? Right. But it took, you know, we're fighting to get vehicles. released in order to save the citizens of the country. I mean, it is...

Did you ever think there was the possibility? And I don't want to, you know, throw it out allegations, I guess, just a thought exercises of split loyalties there? Or why would somebody intentionally try to impede? Dave, I, there's... Anything I say is speculation. Okay.

He's bad, you know, one thing I... I've done an enormous amount of learning self-growth in this, which I know Jack early on told me there's no such. When the colonel says I'm learning, he's full of shit. But I have. I've learned more in the last year and a half than maybe 15 years. Well, 30 years on the Marine Corps, not quite that.

It's certainly a very accelerated learning process. But one thing I've learned is you can't speculate about other people's motivations and you cannot get you cannot allow their motivations to piss you off because there's no end to it right and that's why I'm absolutely without anger right now I mean it yeah he was I do believe there's some kind of karma I do believe that he and some of these other people who are involved in this will meet their at their end it's not my part to bring it around What am I going to do sit here and rail about them? No, I think the important thing here,

and your, you know, your subscribers, your audience probably don't want to hear me use this as a platform to hit back at people. I think the experience is interesting. The Petri dish of Ukraine, of a war zone, the people that attracts, how to navigate your way through. All these are interesting topics. But I can't rail about, I don't know. Yeah. It's horrible thought.

It's impossible. Now, we had heard rumors, and maybe you can confirm or deny these, that at one point in time, that... Or not. Or just simply say nothing. That somebody had attempted to sell half of the Mozart's group to Afghanistan, to the Taliban. Yeah. So this is a good friend of mine. Not a good friend of mine sold the Mozart group to the Taliban.

But, yeah, the same guy was involved in that. Good friend of mine wrote an article about it on Sub-Avon. up stack Jeff Jeff car Jeff's probably listening now and he is a well-researched article but yeah the yeah I forgot you know see I forgot even about that the same guy because he couldn't get five million from us and then apparently and there is some evidence to support this went to the government in Afghanistan which was still sanctioned to try and phrase five million they you know he's It does hurt me. I mean, I've got a lot of reasons to hate the Taliban, but now even more so that they weren't interested.

They weren't going to pay five million dollars to partner with me in the Mozart group. That's crazy. I mean, that would have been. You can't make this stuff up. I mean, it's just surreal. No, it is. You can't make it up. That's what I mean.

I mean, I am writing a book. I've got a very kind agent who's guiding me through the process. but the stories within the stories I mean it's almost like in the end he gave me great advice he said this is a series of episodes

you know just just spill them out this is the Andy Milburn web redemption oh gosh well I mean I'll say because you've written a book

when the tempest gathers which comes out in paperback wait it's a phenomenal book at the end of this month yeah Yeah. Yeah. It's a phenomenal book and I highly recommend it to anybody because, and we've talked about this on the show before, that it's very moving.

Because one of the things I think that there are a lot of books about the wars written. There are a lot of books about, you know, autobiographs about their people's time and service. But one thing that really struck me about your book is how reflective you were. Too much so from a Marine. Is that what you're about it? No, I would say. You know, like a millennial marine mayor. No, no, I'm just kidding.

No, but... I'm a philosophy graduate. As, you know, a... Philosophy in law. A leader in war, you know, you really gave voice to the doubts that you had, you know, to, am I making the right decision here? Am I sending guys to their death here? Like, those are very challenging questions for a leader during war.

And I think that a lot of leaders just sort of try to shut that down because you know, Nobody wants to like knowingly send people to death possible. Dave, that's great. Okay, I keep telling you, I've got to, I've got to stop. Well, we have a crush on you too, Andy. So I know, I mean. Pour it on. No, that's a really, that's a great point.

So you want a leader who questions himself without sinking into paralysis because we've all worked for the other sort of leader who is constantly paralyzed. And normally when he's paralyzed, though it's not. questions about his guy, it's more about his career. Right, it's more about what is going to, what are they going to say up top? But I'll give you, you know, so I'm not even, it's, as a trainer, watching the dynamics within units that come through, I see time and again commanders who, who are struggling with this.

Not, not, I don't see criminals. I see guys who are. my God, you know, I just lost half a battalion. I don't want to do that again. Can you train, help, you know. But from the guys, a lot of times it seems unfeeling. Because now I'm looking at it from their point of view. And they're like, dude, we attack that village five fucking times.

And he's, you know, but I realize the pressures that he was under. And, you know, it gets back to very, very, you know, which is a very basic point, right? one of you two made today in Twitter. Yeah, the war is just fucking horrible. Yeah, that's one of the worst things as a commander. So if you're a commander and you love the fact that you've got your name on a coffee cup and you don't have to look for a parking place, you're a first time in the rank or army, right? It's right there.

And your wife, fiance, boyfriend, whatever, comes to, you know, change. I mean, it's all this. Wow, this is so fucking great. You can never forget. You're just a steward. This is not about you. Because, as we all know, when you go to combat, every single death does weigh on you, but at the same time, you've got to do the things that you need to do.

So I'll give you a very quick example. See anything, I'm just like waxing lyrical about the shit. In 2009 in Iraq, do you remember, you know, the mantra then was, hey, it's, you know, hand everything over to the Iraqis. It's going to be their war. It's a rock of fiber war. So, you know, remember, it's kind of a reminder of venomization. And so we were working hard to do that in Anbar Province, at least.

It was an uphill struggle at times. But we genuinely wanted that to happen. But I was in the shithole of Anbar Province. And anyone who has been to Ambar Province will recognize them not exaggerating. So Ambar Promise is the shithole of Iraq. and karma is a she. And if you're Iraqi, this is not a criticism of Iraq as a country, which I understand that is a very beautiful country.

Karma, all right, ironic. Worst place, worst place of Iraq. So karma refused to be a good place. My predecessor, the guy I took over from, was killed there. Max Gallier is the only battalion commander to have been lost in Iraq. And it just continued to foment and throughout all the... this Iraqification process. So,

so I said, listen, we've got to go in and I know this sounds like such a cliche. We're going to clear karma once and for all, right? Remember that coordinates search and go in and take all their weapons and no one can do this shit again. And how many cordons and searches did we do? It was like, it was like, I didn't know, I'm trying to think of an analogy, but the cordons were like,

You're forming cordons with vehicles. And we fooled ourselves. If we just move that night into form a cordon. Bottom line is, how many real bad guys do you catch during one of those battalion cordonant? No one, nothing. But I was just frustrated, you know, so we go in my heart, and I'm briefing to the regimental commander and he's like, Andy, it should be the Iraqis doing this.

I'm like, sir, who's going to go into karma and do this? And he's like, all right, this is your last, last event. last stop. Well, we lose the Marine on that. A guy named T.J. Riley is 21 years old. His Humvee was hit by... What are the Iranian grenades that you throw and they go into a shape charge, right? They were RKG 33s. They were EFP hand grenades?

Yeah. So it's the first time we'd seen one of these things. They went straight through the top of his Humvee. wounded everyone else and took his head off. I know for a fact he'd be alive if I hadn't given that order. And what did that order achieve? You know, nothing. And a guy is dead, you know. And I obviously met his mother and his sister.

And I learned, like all of us who are commanders, you learn more about your Marines or soldiers after their deaths than you do during their lives. I'll never forget that. I don't know it's a wrong decision. You know, I don't even know if I can tell you I regret that decision because it was at the time the right one. Right.

I do, I'm desperately sorry that he is dead. Yeah. You know, so multiply that by tens, 20s, thousands. I understand. Right. The, you know, the weight of this. Not, and I'm not, I'd be the last point to be critical of Ukrainian commanders for taking casualties because they've got a horrible Hobson's choice.

Right, right. I don't know how we go on this topic. Well, they... But your question is. But I remember, like, some of the offhand comments, you know, about our show was, oh, you have to teach people not to commit or not to commit, you know, like, war crimes during war. It's like, yeah, you do. Like, you have to give classes.

You have to give counseling. Like, if you think... that your hometown got invaded and then you were just going to go out there and

and not want payback yeah like I don't I don't you live in a world that you're very fortunate to live in

if you don't have to wrestle with that idea in Iraq and Afghanistan they were shitty wars they were pointless fucking worthless wars you know and I'm sure you read

You'll have readers complain about me saying that. I was like you guys were deeply involved in both of them, but they were worthless wars. Who can say otherwise? Right. Look at Afghanistan. Look at Iraq. Look who's in, they've just named a,

they've just named a construction company, the biggest Iraqi construction company after Mahamas, the guy who was taken out in the drone strike 2020. The PMU guy? Yeah. So, I mean, the Iranian

I mean the Iraqi government right now I mean look who is in the government right now they're all they're all PMC dudes or pro-Iranian the Sunnis are giving up there

right right so who knows what's happening those poor bastards right it's so what was it all for my point is that as better at those

all we had all we had was the fact we represented our values right and all we had were the guys with us represented those values too right even the ended and who were with us yeah no absolutely yeah yeah and and so that was why that was very important yeah now totally different i mean same principles different dynamic when it depends everything the scale slides totally when you've got your family and and behind you Right? Your personal risk calculus changes.

Right. Right. You don't. Right. I mean, in a counterinsurgency, it's a little bit different. You get a lot of guys who are crazy, some guys who are crazy brave. But in the end, everyone wants to live. Right.

But in a war like this, you've got guys who are absolutely willing to die, and they're not zealots. Right. They're not suicide bombers. They're dying because the choice, you know, that's what they feel really is their obligation in order to defend their families. And that is, I find that immensely poignant. But what I find even more poignant is it's the guys who feel that way are the guys that any country can least afford to lose.

Because they're always going to be a percentage of any country's population who don't want to do shit. Right. Right. And don't care about that. And what's someone else to do the fighting. Right. And that is my concern for Ukraine right now is. They've got, they've had no shortage of awesome dudes, very brave.

But it's not, it's not an inexhaustible stop. Right. Right. Right. No, it's, yeah, I, none of us have been there, right? None of us have had to defend our families from tanks rolling into our town. Can you hear that? Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Tell me it's not all to the refire. No, it's, it's, we have a wait room next door. Is somebody dropping weights? Yeah. Brilliant. Make them stop it, Dave. I would like to, you know, at one point, talk about what you just mentioned, kind of like, is the war sustainable and where we're at today, what the current offensive looks like. Before we get there, I would have like to ask you to kind of complete your story as far as like, what were the last weeks and days leading up to your exit from Ukraine?

What was that like for you, what you experienced? You know, honestly, Jack, I'm not making this up, but a lot of it was just a blur. Yeah. The one thing that really solidified for me was there's a point where there's a point, you know, we're all taught you have agency, right? you know and and so it does and we've all learned i mean in our cultures even in the army uh s f um that all of us are problem solvers um and all of us pride of cells on that that's generalization uh i just i felt i just lost my ability to affect you know to appoint us like okay i don't mind how many problems you bring i think we can solve them and then i said

Fuck, man. Yeah. I'm done. And then the sad thing after that, after saying I'm done, everyone's like, Eddie, let's start it up again. Let's do this. Let's do that. And I felt like I was disappointing so many people by saying, no, we're done.

You know, we are. There's, you know, I won't go into it all. But I don't know. It was a huge blow. I went to England where I saw, you know, have family. I needed cataract surgery badly by then. By the way, guys, if you don't delay cataract surgery, I was almost blind by then, you know,

which is, I think, helped in Dombas because you could, if you couldn't, if you could, I'd be much more scared now if I could see things clearly. Well, holy shit, man. That's scary. So I ended up in London to get my ice fix and visit my sister. And it was a great time in a sense of, just getting my breath back, you know, a chance to think about things.

And then I came back here. Answer is, Jack, I don't know I'm still processing. I think the harder, hey, listen, this, of course, the organization had to be out in the open. There had to be a lot of going online to get funding and everything. So I think probably those people thought that I really enjoyed doing that. Actually, I did not. I didn't. I hated the raising.

I hated the kind of prostituting. I hated, I felt, you know, but we needed to do that to bring in. It was a relief. Now, that part was... All that media exposure is like this double-edged sword, right? Of course. Yeah. Of course, yeah.

And so I knew that. And that takes us to, you know, like we talked about, you're a journalist and you, just like in the Melissa, We've got good and bad people represent our profession. Same thing in journalism. But even the people who are what we call, you know, think of as dicks, but are still competent journalists are filling a really good function, watchdog of democracy. It's absolutely important.

But you can never get lulled into thinking, oh, wow, you know, it's under media attention because there's always a backside of that. And certainly, you know, I used to, I gave you one example. of someone who was very, you know, shark circling very, as soon as there's blood in the water, he moved in. But I created, you know, in its sense, I created that environment where they could do that. I can't then turn around and say, hey, man, that was so unfair. I created that environment. But I created the environment because how else we're going to raise fucking money? Right. That's, you know, I had guys from the agency handy. You need to move back into the shadows.

Like, dude, you could work in the shadows because you know. never had to worry about money, right, Dave? Right. Yeah. I mean, if you lost the pit of some kit, did someone come on after you with a, you know, to reimburse the government or anything like that? Right, right. Yeah.

So it was, I couldn't be in the shadows. And I, and frankly, I was scared. I was scared too because I knew I was so visible. I know this may sound melodramatic to you, but there's that, who's a guy who, some American businessman worked in Russia, Ukraine jumped off the building here in D.C.

A couple years ago. Oh, I do remember what you're talking about, but I don't recall his name, I'm afraid. Yeah. Anyway, his son, you know, reached out to me just because he wanted to help support Mozart

Group, then his school told him he couldn't, which is kind of said. But, you know, all that, so all of this coming together, There's a lot of questions, of course, whether we really did jump. I mean, the Russians have a long reach.

I may not, initially, for a long time, I thought, they don't give a shit about me. I'm so low. But then I thought, no, they probably just for the fun of it might. When I, you know, while you were gone, you let me stay at your house when I was visiting Tampa. I was down there for soft week, staying at your place. When I come home, I come to your house at the end of a long day, it's like 11 o'clock at night. walking up to your front door and there's a package. It's all like busted up.

Like it had a rough ride in the mail. But there's a box like this and it's all like busted out. Is that why you got an early flight? And I'm looking at it. I'm kind of like walking around like I'm some like half-assed EOD guy like, I don't know. Like does this have Russian stamps on it? You can see how Jack Kiz about me, right?

So there's a package. You're sleeping in my bag. Yeah. There's a package in your backyard that he wants to tell you about. He's telling me about it now. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've been back in the house. After a thorough examination, I brought it inside.

It was, uh, it was, uh, water softener. Oh, it was like the salt or whatever. Yeah, yeah, that does look pretty scary, doesn't it? I'm from the outside and I'm like, this is like, I mean, if I was, like the return address is the Wagner droop in St. Petersburg. I, yeah. If I was the G.R.U. Overchuk or water softener.

Yeah. Are the two quick ways to. Yeah. I just didn't feel like taking your bullet. No, I, no. I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I love you, but I wasn't going to jump on that. I just got scared when you started talking an open forum about staying in my house in Tampa.

That's not necessarily where I live, everyone. When he said Tampa, it could be anywhere in the United States. It's definitely not Des Moines, so don't really need any of the way. And by the way, that's the only reason why, you know, very happy developments in my own personal life. But I don't talk about them publicly because of that, because I don't. Sure. You know, I mean. I get it.

If I'm sounding paranoid, bear with me. Andy, if you want to plug your only fans paid, you can do it here. We don't mind. I think there's been

multiple requests for you to take your shirt off again, so. No, I can't do that. But please, so now we're talking a substack. We weren't talking about substank. But we're going to talk about it now.

Please do, if you're interested in anything I say, my subscriptions are free, unlike Jacks, who you have to pay for. At some stage, though I want to say that I do want to become like Jack only in that way. Not in the way of casually using a friend's house and then ignoring danger to his

His life or property. Sorry. No, no, that's fine. Bring it back to a serious. Yeah, no. We're very serious here on the team house as we get our guest drunk and make them expose the living room setting. Yes.

Are you getting questions? online? Not yet. People are just like, rant, you know, chatting. They're chatting. Is they're not going to complain if I go for a P in a little bit? No. Yes, someone will complain. Okay. I mean, whatever. Let's talk about like what happened with, what was it the New York Times that started the Max Blumenthal thing? Or was it Max Blumenthal? No, no, no. No, let me, yeah, let me, so, so, um, Max Blumenthal, all this, all this came out while, I had to use it to my partner because it makes it sound like some romantic relationship. But in the Mozart group, the dude, the bad actor, as he was unraveling stuff.

So I was only paying half attention to what Blumenthal. I noticed all the hate mail, but that's not unusual for me. But even, that was a joke. But at some point, the hate mail reached a crescendo where I felt compelled to pay attention to it. Right. All right. Hate mail turning into a lot of debt threats. And I'm thinking, why is Severin so pissed off? And then I saw Blumenthal say that videos had 2 million views.

You know, I didn't know Blumenthal. I had no idea. He didn't even link our video, which is kind of bullshit. Yeah. No, it's, you know, dude. I mean, all you have to do is look at his background. For Christ's sake, he lived in Russia's wife's Russian. Right.

He's done part-time work for RT. Right. I mean, he is, he's not an independent observer who decided, oh my God, Andy Melbourne needs to go on the wagon, which is his comment. It's like, well, thank you so much, dude. Yeah. I will remember you in the 12th step program. Yeah, yeah. In the meantime, go back to Russia.

Yeah. Anyway, so all this was, so I started like, and it really picked up momentum. I told, hey, the Ukrainians are going to be really angry. actually absent from all this chorus of anger was a single comment by a soldier, a Ukrainian soldier or anyone in the military angry at me. They got bigger fish to fry. Well, not only that, they're like, here's the Russians. What do you expect?

Right. This is the way they operate. Right. Right. I mean, look at what's happened to other dudes who run organizations. Of course, you're going to get attacked. And what they took, what Max Blumenthal and others did is they took a three-hour conversation about the nuance.

And by the way, he's appeared on IT several times. This was a vehicle for him in Russia to talk again and again about me and that, which says a lot about it. Yeah. And they, you know, we talked about the challenges that Ukraine has as a country. And they're like, oh, here, here's this, you know, a drunken soldier, you know, talking about, you know yeah i know i mean i'm not upset about you calling me drunken right it's the soldier bit right right geez yeah uh you know here's this you know drunk well you know talking about about all these friend about all the who works for ukraine who's talked about the problems of ukraine it's like yeah like we can talk about that and still say that you know Putin and the russian government are

shit for the invasion that like you know there's there's this whole brand of like far out there just off the rails. I don't even want to call them left wingers. I mean, they're just off the rails lunatics. But they converge with extreme right wing too. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I mean, the blumenthales of the world, the Peter Mars from Intercept. Yeah. And guys like Tucker Carlson, in that weirdness, they come around like this. It's that, it's that horseshoe theory. It's this interesting like, you know, Western imperialism bad. Eastern imperialism. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, I don't, I don't, yeah, there's, they're not, they're not guided by any

sort of like principle or anything if you're like logic train if you're just anti war you're like full stop anti war i know some like far lefty people who are like just they're anti war of course they are of course it's like well okay you have a you have a perspective and you know you're true to it yeah i respect that you're a pacifist but these guys are not that yeah yeah yeah yeah they're not at all it's a very it's a platform for the sake of having a platform it's very difficult to you know you take i mean i mean a guy like, let's stop talking about Peter, let's stop talking about Blumenthal for a moment.

Let's take Peter Masse at the interstep, right? Okay. Okay, so I told you the story. A Marine goes missing. Is Jack really changing his socks? He's not wearing. Okay, all right. I was worried for a moment.

Jack's gone to the restroom. I was midway from answering a very good question, and he's gone to the restroom. He's got 35-500 subscribers. Okay, back. You're a huge deal. Okay, let's say, anyway, Peter Moss, so Marine goes missing. I forget exactly when it was.

It was, and I won't mention his name. It doesn't matter now. And Peter Maas from the Intercept call or contacts me saying he's dug up shit on this guy's during his career in the Marine Corps. This guy got in trouble. Can you imagine that in the Marine Corps? Yeah, yeah, right, right. Got a bad conduct discharge or no or a conduct under other than other than honorable Well at the same time this guy's family had asked us to help track him down and you know and and and and Mars is

generating this article that's going to say this guy was a shit bag right I'm like dude What the fuck man we it how how how how you represent yourself as your watchdog of democracy digging up shit so my point there was simply that yes you have journalists who should be fulfilling a role and reporting you may not like it you and i may not always like it but they need to be there right but when you get a guy who's simply just generating shit that's going to cause people heartbreak right and add to their heartbreak right salt in the wound right for the sake of selling stuff that that is you know that that that's getting off the platform right and and so a guy like mars who probably the heartbreak who probably the heartbreak who probably the heart height of his career wrote the topling, came out in 2010 in the New Yorker. It was a big deal for him. But that was the high watermark of his career. Right. The intercept.

And then he suddenly the intercept. And he came after me with a vengeance after that. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, yeah, the intercept. Yeah, the intercept. Don't even look at it. You can look up the intercept article about this whole, the Mozart group, very badly

written, very badly researched. the point is again i brought that on you know um and and i think i think i think i let it bother me too much i certainly it really was what was the i mean you mentioned so the intercept and and some of the other like let's say left-leaning organizations uh let's say a more like oh yeah yeah first all you know me i mean i'm i'm kind of center field right this is gonna piss off you so so let's let's say like a more center-left periodical like the New York Times or some of the other more mainstream outlets out there. I mean, what did they make of all this? New York Times was very fair. New York Times, I thought New York Times coverage, A of the Wall there, and the New York Times doesn't

pay me. I didn't, to say this, it was very good. I mean, really good. Whatever anyone thinks in New York Times before or after or elsewhere, they've done a tremendous. this job in Ukraine, I think, in their reporting coverage. Really good. And the articles written about the Mozart group by them were fair. Of course, they didn't, you know, they didn't go into the whole story. There's much that was left on said. I didn't like the slant of, you know, the latest article where it was, you know, there's kind of, it describes, describes me as, I forget what it was, something or other. Drifter.

Not a drifter, no. Whose adult life has been steeped in violence. A hard living, a hard living solo something. That's something to put on your resume. Yeah. And my adult life has been steeped in violence. They're making you sound like a badass. It's a hope in your company.

Anyway, no, it wasn't that part. And then, you know, it goes on to making it a little bit too much of, yeah, this is not an environment for, you know, this is an environment of people who, grizzled veterans struggling with PTSD, drinking themselves into oblivion when they're not at the front. You know, it's a little overdone. Yeah. Because it, because a lot of the heavy drinking and, and visiting strip bars was done by people who never went near the front, you know, the rest of the way, I didn't have time. What about that? I think there's a piece in the New Yorker about, um, you and, uh, New York or New York Times. Malcolm, uh, uh,

Sam Malcolm, what's his face? He's a little, he's a little other too. Oh, yes. Saying that you guys are mercenaries? Yeah, no, it wasn't you, of course, the Atlantic. It was the Atlantic. Yeah, Graham Wood, in the Atlantic. Don't fight wars on another country's behalf.

I've written for the Atlantic one article with that, but I'm going to keep saying that, right? But the point is, quite rightly, they fact-checked the shit out of me when I wrote that article. I mean, Graham Wood gets a buy because he's obviously. No one asked me what I was doing there, but he calls me a foreign fighter.

I mean, he says that. I'm like, how does, and so I wrote to the editor, there's no retraction anything. You and Malcolm Nance. Well, Malcolm Nance didn't have a problem with that because Malcolm Nance did join the Legion. It also elevated his profile.

Well, yeah. I have a problem with it, I didn't join the Legion. Right. And I didn't carry a weapon and I wasn't fighting that. You know, it's just a, it's not an emotional thing. It was just an inaccurate description. Plus, I have things like, you know, retirement and all that.

Joining a foreign military. Yeah, I mean, I'm not bashful about the M word, but it usually applies to somebody who fights for money. That's right. Right. Like you're getting paid by somebody to go and fight. Well, he didn't use that term. And it would be absurd to use that term in UK. Ukraine because they don't get paid a lot. You know, I think in fairness, most of the dudes who go there

are fighting for a cause. Of course they are. To include Malcolm Nance. And I don't, you know, we're just in separate categories. That's all. That's, he's a foreign fighter or whatever. He's, you know, he's serving in the Legion. He wouldn't have any problem with me describing him that way. I am not. And Graham Wood wrote that article, was full of inaccuracies, a staff writer for the Atlantic and he's allowed to get away with it. Right. Even after I wrote to the editor, it shows that the Atlantic is not the, it's not

publication that it used to be. I know that sounds old foggy, but I'd be interested to hear you. I mean, they should have came to you for comment. Of course. I mean, that's the kind of the, of the minimum to do, yeah. I know. And a very basic, very basic and Graham went

to my knowledge never even came out there. I never saw him. He never, you know, but he wrote this. article right and and it's funny too because you know like you know it's that one way he describes meeting an american who um smells of nicotine and b o and i want to add that was not me that was a part because i never met him sorry go ahead no it's just it's one of those things where if you no cigarette smoking b a that the you know to apply like the mercenary term to you or for people who don't take time to understand what you guys were doing in the Mozart group, like that you were doing

this training, that you were not conducting these operations, you know, it's just, it's very minimalist, it's very basic, and it's very like sort of ideologically driven to not try to understand the different elements that are out there. It's like saying that Doctors Without Borders is a CIA front, or it's like saying, you know what I mean? It's like, it's a very, um, it's a very emotionally unintelligent approach. Yeah. They're there, so they must have. They must have some reason for being there

that has nothing to do with trying to save lives. Right. You've got this dude. Right. They look military. I mean, you just read Peter Moss's article. He's like, he's dying to find reasons why we're there. Right.

And, you know, now they're planning this in Armenia. And, like, everything we... So what he did, as usual, bad journalists. He finds little drags the truth and he makes shit up. That's ridiculous. And all he had to do is ask questions of people involved. And we just said, yes, we did send a group to Armenia. We cleared it, you know, through the State Department.

And we checked him with the DAT in Yerevan. And we came in there. It was all out in the open. And it was looking at training programs there. We would never have done that if we hadn't, you know, if we didn't get. But he makes this as though. We're planning to help them against Azerbaijan. So that's some kind of crime.

It's very, but conspiracy. Yeah. It's bad. They read that article just to see what bad journalism is all about. Yeah. And then sadly, if you go back. And that's the Atlantic. No, no, it's not the Atlantic.

No, it's not the Atlantic. Oh, sorry. Oh, well, the Intercept, what do we need, what do we need to say about the Intercept? I know. Other than, other than the. other than the. That's like saying the Bino is. is not an intellectual.

Domino is a British cartoon. It's a very, very basic comic book that people read if they're semi-literate. John Walker Lynn wrote for the Intercept. Like what else do we need to know about The Intercept? He wrote for who? The Intercept. Did you really?

There's an op-ed he wrote in there, yeah. No kidding. About how America committed a bunch of war crimes against the guy. But actually, that's okay to bring someone to write an op-ed like that. It's not okay when you're the, editor of a of a media organization oh i suppose it is but if i suppose it is you can do whatever the whatever the hell you want but if you want to pretend to be a serious journalist yeah you don't make shit up yeah the way that mass made shit up yeah so what you got to use the the lavoratory

okay is this way you get your multiple advertisement people say um and today jack is wearing his um FDNY t-shirt, you can also buy one. This is dressed down Tuesday, man. Okay. Watch your mic. Watch your mic. Just unplug it down. You can unplug it down.

Yeah, down all the way to the box. No, down there where it attaches. You'll get it. Dave, that's making cracks at you earlier. Because we share marine DNA when it comes to electronics. Hey, so presumably I leave the mic behind. Just take it with you. Into the restaurant?

Yeah, but you won't be. hot mic while you're in there playing with yourself or whatever you got to do okay just be very careful with this saying

it's put in your pocket now if you come out of that bathroom wearing a shirt we're going to be very disappointed hey everybody so we are on

go use the bathroom don't take down my lights or my cameras on your way out there yeah it's happened before it's happened before it wasn't me

uh that's not the rest of the that's not the rest of you this right that's D's home, his little cave. We are at 78,000 subscribers. Everybody, please help us get to 100,000. We get a really cool YouTube plat

which would, you know, the whole reason we do this is for YouTube plaques. And please consider supporting the channel. If you guys want access to all these episodes ad free, there's a link down in the description to our Patreon. So you can sign up there. It's like five bucks a month and you'll get all episodes ad free.

And yeah, you support the channel. So we really, we really, appreciate what you guys do. I'll take a moment to also plug that this Friday, we're going to have Toby Hardin and Justin Sapp here in studio. Right, Dee, in studio? So Justin was one of the, he was the first Green Beret in Afghanistan during the invasion with one of the paramilitary teams.

And Toby Hardin is a journalist and author. His book is called First Casualty? Yes, First Casualty. I wrote a book all about it. So we'll have both of those guys in studio at the same time. So really looking forward to that. And of course. So you plugged that in and the grilling will continue.

All right. I'm back in business. So I wanted to ask you, you know, since you had quite a bit of experience over there, and I know you're following everything happening quite closely, if we could talk a little bit about, like, where the conflict in Ukraine is today. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up.

Pick up wherever you feel is a natural starting point. Yeah. So I've written, you're going to forgive me for plugging this. I'm not really plugging. But I've written three articles since the offensive began. And, you know, I'm not going to go through all that. Plug them. Where are they at?

They're in my substack. Okay. So you can, but they're also on LinkedIn. If you got LinkedIn, follow me on LinkedIn, Twitter. What's your substack so that people can sign up right now as they're listening? Oh, shit. Links in the description, guys. We'll find it there.

Yeah, A. Melbourne, substack. Anyway, thank you, Dave. So the first article I wrote about, because if I talk through this, it kind of gives you a sense. So the first article was centered on Bart Murt. I say, why Bart Mutt? Why are we hearing about this place over and over a fucking game? It was sort of like the Aleppo of Ukraine. It dominated the media.

It's a nondescript, you know, kind of shitty town. and why has it become so important. And it wasn't just a kind of historical interest is because the Russian offensive has already finished. The Russians have shot their bolt for their 20 to 23 offensive and it was centered on Bar Mood. Bar Mood was very important to them because they saw it as a natural stepping stone

towards taking all of Dombas. It's really not. Tactically, you can bypass Bar Mood. You could find out other. the ways of doing it but the Russians got it into their mind they needed to take barmurt now you need to take some places you needed to take list of chance you needed to take seven nets you need to take crematoosk you don't need to take palm but they ramped right into it 10 months ago okay remember i said it used to be a refuge i'm getting to to answer your question um no military value really

intrinsically to either side. Bar Mood is in a valley. For the Ukrainian perspective, they could set up defenses on the western part of Bar Mood and just forget about Balmurt. They could, you know, from a military perspective. But the Russians were determined to take that town. And so the Ukrainians,

their rationale was, all right, we're in strong positions. is going to become a Russian killing field, which it did. The Russians call it predictably the meat rider. They've lost, you know, I mean, you can, most conservative estimate, the most conservative estimate, which is from

UK MOD is 20,000 dead for Barmwood alone. I mean, it's just astonishing. Now, Progosian says he's lost 20,000 alone in Barmuth. So my point is this, it's a killing

field the ukrainians recognize that and and so they and then uh president selensky in his evening far side chats which you know i i don't speak ukrainian but i i you know i'm told are excellent um he started signing off with and bomb what still holds well now you know because you've got this klaus witsian thing going on of oh shit now it's become a politic it's become politically important and the Ukrainian commanders started to be in a bit of a bad position because

casualties on their side are mounting now you will hear various estimates that of relation of the ratio of

Russian to Ukrainian casualties what I've tried to do when I look at this is look at the most conservative estimates so some Ukrainian commanders said they're about 10 to 1 no at the most favorable that they were to the Ukrainians they were like 2.8 to 1 which is still significant you know the Russians were losing but the problem is

Ukrainians couldn't can't afford to lose that many people the Russians arguably can so it being an abattoir for the Russians wasn't perhaps good enough reason so Zelensky who you know being the leader he is I'm not you know no one's paid me to support but I I'm in a mirror of him he's shown tremendous his courage he said bombard would be ours in our hearts when asked about it in Vilnius you know and he

he basically said he didn't say it publicly but he told his guys look I don't want I don't want this I don't want you guys to defend and people died simply because I said it's important to right and to defend what's essentially a ghost town right exactly yeah right so this was happening around January, February, at the same time, a shit, two, an analyst, a Polish and military analyst visited Balmert around that time and he said that casualties had reached parody in the fighting for Bombard, which was added to this thing of fuck man, we can't hold on to this. And that place has to be,

has to be seen to be believed, you know, it really is. Are there any civilians left in bomb? Oh, yeah. Are there? Oh, yeah. Estimates very, we were told 2000 when we were there. They're in shelters.

They're living, I mean, not shelters. They're living in their basements without food, without water, freezing conditions. They have to come up to get food. We were delivering food to them. They have to come up to get running water every time they come out in the streets. They're in danger.

They're fairly safe in their basements. But what a life. you know it's they're safe until a direct hit goes on their building right they're trapped right um are they people who just like refuse to leave or are they people who well they feel they have nowhere else to go that's second part okay so repeatedly the ukraineanian government has ordered an evacuation but they they haven't been in a position to provide the means to evacuate how do you do that you know and so it's being volunteer organizations like the mosaic group who are the only you know we were the ones evacuating them so in order it doesn't and and there was nowhere

for them to go now what we were doing was taking people first to palmer and then when that became too dangerous we'd take them with crematoosk there was a church group in crematoosk who would take care of them um and and send them on to places but the fact is that for internal internally displaced people in ukraine that there isn't a any safety net to help them that depend on relatives and it's not a it's not a government's fault it's a lack of resources right what can they do so a lot of you know there's so many dynamics so think about i mean jack you know this think about a think about a fucking hurricane sorry i mean to drop the f-b-borm with d but think about a hurricane here you know you always go through this people go i'm just going to stick it out this is where i live right right

and magnify that throw in the fact that you've got russian speakers who are not 100% perhaps trustful that they're going to be taking care of who think that perhaps they're regarded as outsiders by their own government their perception, not saying it's true Max all right all of these things

and they live there all their lives we got all kind of right right right right some of them are shell-shocked I mean 10 months of just fucking every day they're not in their right mind it's it's you know I told you it's heartbreaking it is heartbreaking

all of this anyway sorry bomb you asked me about the offensive okay right getting there so the Russians it's become as you as you're aware it becomes an internal struggle

amongst Putin's deputies Putin has kind of like here you guys fight it out all right so you got progoshin criticizing shogu who's the and garrasimov right

so he's criticizing the child basically and head of the Ministry of Defense saying, hey, these guys are not only, they're not only not taking Bamut, but they're preventing us from doing it, all right? Offensive kicks off, the Russian offensive, late January, early February. It's all centered on barmeut. The Ukrainians have already decided to give up the town, sensibly, but when they realize that the Russians are going to expend this attack, and they're going to try and insert it, Ukrainians seize the high they hold onto the high ground the Russians cannot encircle the town right

so they've they've ceded the center but the Russians know they've got to get there's no point getting the town and then being just you know having Ukrainians in high ground they cannot encircle it so the so uh progosian says you know his last effort you remember that he's talking about ammunition not getting ammunition when he started like ranting publicly yeah these are all the Wagner dead behind me we've lost one guy for everyone every yard taken, which is true story. They just try and hammer it, continue hammer the way through. Interestingly enough, Ukrainians start to take ground back. As the Russian offensive reaches its

culminating point, the Ukrainians take back an estimated 25 square kilometers. Okay, where am I getting those figures from? Several sources, but if you look for instance Perun on YouTube, who follows all this stuff pretty closely, he gets it from a YouTube from a Twitter thing called Ground Truth. You're aware of all. There's a lot of ways to check and double check whether they've taken terrain. This isn't Andy Milne making up, you know.

They've been taking back terrain in Bar Mutt. And then when, as the offensive starts to ramp up, and then it kind of kicks off, right? But really we've gone into a higher intensity and shaping phase, because something is missing so far the nine brigades

that the Ukrainians have trained as their main effort for the offensive have not appeared yet on the battlefield right and why am I saying that I'm not interesting but if you read even from Russian bloggers who are really keen to look out for the breaching equipment that was given them the leopard tanks

so what we're seeing right now is more like shaping operations yeah they're still working their way through the Russian and the units too in bomb work when you're looking at the Russians saying here we got attacked by the 30, I forget what it was, you know, the two Mec battalions there. Those battalions been fighting in Bar Mutt for a while. So it wasn't fresh offensive troops. So yeah, what we've seen over the last like couple weeks and what sticks out in my mind is Belgarad.

Yeah. And then on the eastern front, it sounds like, again, I don't follow the conflict as closely as some folks out there, do you know? I mean, special operations, Ukrainian special operations guys making some forward progress the last few days. and some tank offensive like it came out or someone's going to come at me because I said tanks but Bradley fighting vehicles being destroyed during the offensive some of that has come out as well

well if Bradley's are being spotted Bradley's were given to the assault battalions there were this last week and there was a what's a French vehicle AMX on it anyway so you get it there's a lot of these bloggers

who are geeks about vehicles who are looking very keenly for this equipment it has not shown up in mass to suggest that the main offensive effort is right yeah right so i would i i'm no expert but i would suggest that the ukrainians are still working their way through the russians main defensive positions okay what are they aiming for you know well of course they they want to separate east the russian forces in the east from the south the so-called land bridge to the crimea what that means to the Ukrainians, if they can break through, all right, to the C is off with a focus either on

Mariupil or what's the other place, I'm going to mispronounce it, Milipol. That is their key, all right, to bifurcate the forces. Yeah. See? But also to bring. It's a military term. But also, because long range, this is all about placement of long range precision fires, right? The Ukrainians don't have attack them.

They don't have anything that can range beyond what we've given them with the MRS. Right? I'm laughing a little bit because the MLRS has been good, but we haven't given them at Takams, which range out 300 kilometers. So they have to move their artillery and their rocket and cannon artillery up to range of Russian targets in the Crimea. That if they can achieve that, then that is a significant, it's not victory. They still have to unearth the Russians.

Right. We probably have a few more years. Yeah. But here's my concern and here's why I'm concerned that it's going to devolve. There's a high risk of this devolving into stalemate. Missing peace. Man trained. I'm sorry. Trained and equipped soldiers. Russians are desperately short. Infantry. Infantry. The Russians are out. Okay.

They went through mobilization at September. It was a draconian effort. And they raised 300,000 guys And they did a pretty good job of rushing them into units. And if you look in December, January, they had good units around Bar Mood, aside from Wagner Group. They had airborne units that were at first time in the war, 100% T.O, yeah.

Well, those have been vastly depleted. So those 300,000 guys, they're gone. I mean, they are. They've merged into combat. Yeah. So even at the most conservative, of estimates the Russians are losing a thousand guys a day right then you know you and and a thousand dead plus you know it's and they haven't gone to they haven't made Putin has not announced the second

mobilization so they cannot get here from there so my point here is even if the ukrainian offensive stores the Russians don't have enough gas in the tank to launch a counteroffensive that is good news there's a geometry to it the downside is the Ukrainians are facing a problem too right man trained of getting guys into the line who are an exploitation force. Nine brigades is not enough. What do you make? I mean, it's not a lot.

I wanted to query you a little bit about the Belgarad offensive that happened. And, you know, the Russian liberation forces that popped up kind of out of nowhere and for the first time jutted into Russia proper taking some terrain over there. I mean, do you see that as a faint as a delaying tactic? How do you do that? I'm not an expert. I have no inside knowledge. But here's, you know,

just from, not from me, just like watching YouTube, but from feedback. So call it an educated guess. Those guys are a welcome, they are helping the Ukraine. Yeah.

It's not uncoordinated. It is certainly coordinated. But the Ukrainians are very wary about being too, about being aligned too closely with those guys. That's why they're like, yeah. All kinds of weird shit's happening.

Yeah. And then you get speculation. It must be Ukrainian Special Operations Forces. I doubt it. I think that certainly those guys were equipped. There was some training involved. But you look at that background. There's two groups, right?

There's a Russian volunteer corps. No, I'm good, thanks. And I forget the name of the other one. But they have one of them as definitely neo-Nazi ties. I wasn't going to say it. Yeah. So the Ukrainians are. they realized it's a little bit of the devil's you know pack with the devil they don't want to be too aligned

but at the same time you know as churchill said by the way stand by for a historical quote when um when uh oh shit i forgot the name of the uh what was the name of the operation invasion of of of the soviet union but uh barbarossa thank you d off the top ropes Yeah, intellect, intellect in the audience. Right, when that was, when that kicked off, and Churchill was criticized for, you know, reaching out to Stalin, he said, if Hitler was about to invade hell, I would visit, you know, I would shake hands with the devil, you know?

So that's probably how the Ukrainians are feeling now. Yeah. Okay, I get it. These guys are not people we want to be aligned with. But when you've got a thousand mile front and you only have 12 brigades to, to play with. Any distraction is good. It's an ugly calculus, but if you are going to use people like that, you use them. Exactly. Exactly. So, and it's quite clever, because it is a distraction.

If you look at the Russian, I mean, not the Russian front, so if you look at a map of the, you know, basically the front, it's about a thousand kilometers, right? And it's like a crescent. And so you've got all this shit happening right at the north. Okay, you've got, I mean or within Russia itself those are distractions you've got the now the Ukrainians attacking around barmurt like prodding at the at an ulcerous tooth you know for the Russians and they're retaking ground and they know how emotional that is for Putin to watch

if they retake barmurt as shitty as useless so that town is that's a huge slap in the face it became a political target yeah they've erased all that and they know that they know it's a distraction but it's not going to be their main effort, right? You know, so solid all two, which is in front of the bottom of the bottom of. I think the main effort is driving south. I think that I think the main effort has to, we're not drive south, it has to reach the sea of his off. Okay, so there's a number of ways to do that.

Potentially you could do that from Bar Mood. You could go down to Maripo. I don't think that's what they would want to do unless they suddenly, you know, but if there's a gap there, I think, you know, I think into Zaporizia province, focused on Littapol is probably still their main effort

but I could be wrong because that's exactly what the Russians are expecting. My point is what they're probably doing is they're prodding there may be

two or three contingency plans they're prodding to see where the gaps are and that's Right, right you see where you can affect a breakthrough and then support that effort

because again you only have nine brigades right? You're only going to have one punch. Yeah. You can't have two breakthroughs

with nine brigades. You mentioned that like the Ukrainians have the MLRS, but not the attackans. Like the attackums. You know, on the last show we talked about... Which, by the way, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you, Dave. For the guys who are really geeky about weapons, the reason why the United States has such a huge shortfall in artillery tube and rocket artillery is a very interesting story. But we have a huge shortfall. And the one thing we could help with is with the attackers.

That's a pretty good. We are concerned, I think, that the Ukrainians would use it to attack Russia, right? That was actually what I was going to... No pun intended. That was actually what I was going to ask you is that, you know, we talked on the last show about what's going on with Ukraine and Russia, but also the U.S. policies there. And for some people in office, or not in office necessarily, but some policy makers, the Ukraine war, they don't necessarily, want it to be over quickly, that this is a chance for, in their minds. And this, I'm not saying Biden, I'm not saying his administration. I'm just saying people who are, yeah, there forever.

There are people who see the war as furthering U.S. interests at little cost to the U.S. To the U.S. So is, is it possible that one of the reasons, because you mentioned like attacking into Russia, but is it one of the, like, are we giving them more of the defensive and short-range stuff so that they're forced to defend? Do you think that that's somewhere on a policy level? I don't, Dave, I don't think we have, I don't know. I don't think there's a deliberate decision to, hey, if we do this, I think it's kind of cack-handed. Okay. I think it's, hey, we're going to give you this. How are you doing? Will the Russians adapt? And they're like, holy shit, the Russians adapt to that. Okay, we're going to give you that.

Right. Whereas perhaps, you know, those of us who've been in the military, you know, hey man, you fucking give them everything that needs. You're either in or we're out. Like, if you want to win it, like, these are things you give them. This isn't a game. Right. You give them everything because there's an interesting historical parallel in Afghanistan in the 1980s

when, you know, the CIA was famously arming and supplying the Mujah Hadin. Yeah. The Mouge did a attack, I believe, was on an ammo dump. and Uzbekistan, then proper Soviet Union. And it became a question, is the United States now sponsoring attacks inside Russia? You can read about that in Miliburton's book, The Main Enemy. I think it's a very interesting. I mean, of course it's a concern.

I would say, though, I would say if you look at kind of what's coming out of NATO and U.S. leadership within NATO and the administration, there is less talk of fear of escalation, right? Much less. And there's more talk about, hey, let's, you know, let's bring this to an end. By helping, you know, helping the Ukrainians we're all in. I have no criticism. I'm going to sadden you guys.

No criticism of the administration in that sense. I would say the way we did this in the past was not really good. We allow the Russians to adapt. Dave, to your point, the war in Ukraine continuing, is bad business for everyone. So anyone in the U.S. who thinks, hey, this is helping our interests, be honest.

It did. Certainly it really helped NATO. It just, it gave NATO. But now we're at the point of diminishing returns, right? The alignment is that our interest in what benefits America is a decisive defeat of the Russian forces in Ukraine. A hundred percent. Anything short of that, anything short of that,

any ambiguity is bad for the world, is bad for U.S. interest. That I couldn't agree more. And so the question is, is that worth the risk of escalation? I'm not going to answer to that. I'm just saying that. I am going to answer it. Yeah, no, the fears of escalation seem like they've largely been, I would think,

sideline. Yeah. There were, you know, lots of teeth gnashing about that. There always have been. But we've seen a number of things that were considered red lines. We've seen, you know, the Ukrainians taking back their own territory. That didn't cross so-called. red wines. We've now seen these

sort of paramilitary attacks in Belgarad and then we've seen all these Tanya units deep inside Russia, another video game reference drone attacks in Moscow. Which by the way we're all fuel depots, real ones.

All done for show, right? When you look at I mean you're what the, I mean the play not not show I mean the play but the play is you know if the distraction. In a sense but if the enemy is fighting a war over here.

The classic move is to start up a little bushfire war in their rear areas. No, I'm agreeing with you. I'm agreeing with you. They were all, you know, material damage relatively little. Get the security forces bogged down, chasing people. Yeah. The, all the emotional turmoil. Keep the FSB busy with that.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that stuff happening is part of it. A very cleverly opaque series of announcements, quoting DeFesbeth. Modesh, you know, words are, I know Dave was a Depeche mode fan. I was, I'm a Depeche mode for you know. Words are unnecessary, something or other. I'm like, wow, that's the first in modern warfare, Depeche mode.

And then you, you know, you've got, you've got a series of probing attacks using armor down in Zaporasia. But again, yeah. So it's going to be weeks before we find out really we get a sense of progression of what's happening. I think the biggest challenge facing Ukrainians is that exploitation force. Because there's no doubting their aggression. There's no doubting their courage. But they just need a violent penetration. They don't get like that.

And then they need to have that exploitation force. to push through in a hurry. And the problem is how do you, how do you posture that? Because as soon as that force appears anywhere in the battlefield, you've got a hundred mill bloggers who are going to point to it. Oh my God, they're coming, they're coming. So this is a problem facing, you know, the battlefield is so transparent. Yes.

And that is what they're wrestling with right now. So they're doing it very well. They're creating all this weird, you know, smoke going on. Not to be, or sound alarmist or anything, but I mean, I wonder, from some of the things you've been discussing, is this sort of a make-it-or-break-it moment from Ukraine when it comes to what you were talking about as far as sustainability? I think it is.

So it's militarily, I can't see there. I mean, this is it, right? You know, so think about three, think about those three scenarios. Success, right, breakthrough. By the way, you know, let's, let's, there's really two viable alternatives, but let's talk about four,

all right not to not not to boy you but the first one is just catastrophic success you know they unasked the russians totally internet or you know and and and seal off Crimea breakthrough then the concern haps his escalation because Putin if is it is it now he's in a corner right he's going to fail or he's going to fall right within Russia because you can hear the voices starting to raise in Russia what the fuck is going on. Yeah. You know? Okay, so that's number one.

Unlikely. Number two, you know, the objective, they meet modest objectives. Or, you know, they don't get all the way to see a resolve or maybe they do. But at least they, you know, they made some headway.

They've broken through the Russian main defensive positions. Solid. That's where really, that's where the, the, that's going to leave the way, really, for the U.S. and the UK. and NATO then to pile in with security assurances, weapons.

The F-16s. Exactly. All right. Let's continue momentum. The third one is it just peters out. All right? It just totally fucking, I mean, because there's just no more gas in the tank. You know, they're taking heavy casualties and they're not defeated,

but they just haven't broken through the Russian positions. That's my biggest concern. That really is because that is. that's a victory for Putin. If he can hold on to status quo, believe it or not, he will turn that into a victory. Yeah. All right.

The fourth one, which is unlikely, say the least, is a Russian counteroffensive that actually takes back additional territory. They just don't. So I would say, you know, we're looking at those two things. And I can't give you, I'm not an expert enough to tell you, I think this is all that. I can tell you what I've worried about. And I can tell you what they really need for that to turn something.

success into victory on the battlefield and a lot of it's going to be political assurances. So we'll see you know, let's see where that goes. Do you, do you see any kind of... There's a lot of shit. I'm sorry, David. There's all kinds of dross being talked by

military pundits about we're not helping the Ukrainians by overestimating their capacity here, right? You know, and we talk about, hey, they will, of course, they'll do this. It's a hard grind, hard fighting. We're sitting here in a nice living room, but dudes are

dying in the hundreds, you know, in almost hand-to-hand fighting, even as we speak. It's, it's like, yeah. Is there a, um, do you, do you see the geography, the possibility of like the geography changing? What do you mean? Like, if we get to the stalemate, um, or you know if things happen like if if if Ukraine cannot push Russia all the way out of all their objectives Donbos, Crimea, all this stuff places that you know it do you see a shift in like the maps is there a point where the war is in name only and Peter's out oh you mean like a frozen conflict Yeah. Yeah, like Donbass.

I think that's probably the Ukrainian's biggest fear, that this will devolve into stalemate. International pressure for negotiated settlement will rise. Even the UK and the US will start, you know, leaning towards that way. I think in that situation, Dave, to avoid what you're talking about, the U.S. and U.S. and U.K. and political, and I keep bringing up U.S. and U.K., I'm not talking about NATO because they're the staunchest, you know, allies of Ukraine.

I think that that's when they start to have to pile in with assurances to make sure it doesn't become a frozen conflict. You know, say, hey, guys, this isn't like done deal. This is a ceasefire. I'm going to take it forward from here. But the Ukrainians are, they're only going to listen to that, I think, that they've taken extraordinarily heavily losses on the battlefield. Yeah. And they've reached that culminate point. Yeah.

It's, that's why this is such a fraught period. You know, I mean, and of course, I'm not saying anything that the administration doesn't always already recognize. I'm just saying that there's a tremendous amount at stake. Yeah. And anyone who thinks there isn't a tremendous amount of states for the United States is smoking whatever I was accused of smoking journalists. On that note, a friend of mine and a friend of the show texted me just now, and he wanted me to send his regards and remind you to please not drink so much.

Well, actually, I'm drinking Yerba, aren't they? Here it is. Thank you. That's always good advice. I received a lot of kind advice after the last time, along with never hang out with Jack and Dave again. I do want to point out, though, and I'm not making light at this, guys,

but this is our fourth one, right? Each of us has had a bad episode when it comes to drinking, except for Dave. That's, okay, that narrows it down. Did you remember we lost Jack one time? We did. Yeah, we did. He was supposed to go to the restroom. It was the old building.

So in Fennis to him, the restaurant was a long way away. In Fennas to him, he's a green beret, so. It wasn't that far. Kind of a land nap, no-go at that point. There was definitely a moment in that show where I got to a point where I didn't know what I was saying anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I walked him home then.

That was probably the best show. Yeah. Yeah, it's... Anyway, here we are. Thank you. That's good advice. No, but... But you're...

You know, and that was one of the... Like, somebody said something and it's like, oh, I'm like, and he's a good front of the show. Like, fuck you for, like, any criticism you have. Like, you know, the first time you were on, it was because we had read your book and had you on about that. And then... And now we just love you. And then the second time we had you on the show, you and I, what's the term prosticate? No, no.

Where were you heading on this? Cognostication. Thank you. Thank you, Dave. We had a prognostication that Russia would definitely not invade you. Yeah. I'm more embarrassed about that one than the one when it was storing my words. Yeah.

Yeah. It's out on the website right now. It's out on the wall. Yeah, it's out on our YouTube. Sometimes we get it wrong first. You know, I think that most people got it wrong. Yeah. I wasn't the only one.

In fairness to us. And I wasn't like, I wasn't right. I didn't think they would. It was like a week before. I just didn't know. Yeah. Yeah, it was. It was like a week before.

And then, yeah, it didn't age well. But, you know, that's what happens when you do this stuff live. And you're honest about stuff. It's like nobody gets the right 100% of the time. All right. I love your show. And I'm not here paid by you guys, although that's a thought, right? There must be a stage where you fly me in and put me up in a nice hotel.

Yeah. No, Dee, don't get me wrong. I'm happy to be staying on your sofa tonight. It's not that nice. What's that? Not that nice. Your sofa? Anyway, at some stage, I know we can all upscale.

Well, if we can get more people to join our Patreon, that would be great. No. Okay. Yeah. Hey, join our Patreon and house a Marine Colonel for a night. Five dollars a month can help house homeless Marine Corps. Retire from colonels. That's not going to handle the whole population of homeless Marine Colonels, Faith.

But that's very kind. Man of dubious repute. Jack knows two of them already. Who's the other? Martin. Martin. I would love to have Martin on the show sometime. He's fun.

Yeah. He is a old old friend. He was at our Christmas party. And, you know, I'm talking to him. I'm getting a feel. He's an old school Marine. And, you know, just in like, I slip in a conversation at one point. I'm like, man, back in your day, like, it was just iron sights.

All we had was iron sights. That's the only thing was. It was like his button. The button was like this big. And I was like, Kek. Don't. Don't, don't know. I knew exactly.

Did he tell you you couldn't handle the truth? no no but martin's awesome yeah Martin's an old old friend he's such an awesome no I would I would love to have him on the show sometime he's should one guy to talk to yeah reach out to him he's great human being he was he and Wade and a number of other guys you know I don't want to drag the names into this forum oh shit now I've just mentioned Marty in this forum that's okay he's he's a moving target he's he's literally he owns an RV he can I ran the country. The GRU will never find him the places he goes.

Anyway, yeah, you should bring him on. Where were we before we got on this? Jack, before we even got down this road, you were edging towards what sounded like a really interesting topic. On occasion I get there, but, you know, in these roundabout conversations. I felt it emerged. You felt like this intelligent thought was finally coming out of me, but it didn't quite reach fruition. It didn't quite get there. This is. is why we're in our fourth episode. Yeah, well, anyway, come back to it. Seriously, so we, there's something about the, oh, oh, no, it's, I know it's gone to me now.

Gone to me. But the only other thing that I, that I would add, and with good intentions, you know, so many military pundits, they love, if anything weird happens, they love using the term UW and SOF, you know, getting back to what's happening within Russia now. It's Ukrainian soft doing this and that. I'm sure Ukrainian soft is involved in some training and some I doubt very much it's Ukrainian soft dudes in there doing those things online, you know, working side by side for all the dynamics that we talked about. But it doesn't matter, as you pointed out, the Ukrainians are smart enough to realize here's an opportunity, let's use it. Right.

And they're doing well. Yeah. I mean, maybe with like long established like sleep. but I imagine it would be very hard to get anybody in I've had arguments with people about this I'm not gonna go there again yeah because don't you think we all Jetboat teams it's like yeah it's like what we were talking about earlier they you read so much dross by our from our own community yeah claiming because we always want to think soft the hand of soft is behind everything and it's what you're probably looking at is a group of dudes

who are working to make things happen and align what you might call happy circumstances on the battlefield. I could tell you exactly who it is, but I'm not going to. Come on, Jack, don't tease us like that. Do we have to subscribe to yours and the show on a sub-stack? No, I still won't. All right. Not on that one.

Any state in my house. Yeah. Okay, so where, have we exhausted? everything. We got some questions. Let me ask some questions, okay. Andrew Dunbar, what is Andy's opinion on Malcolm Nance? Malcolm, I don't really know him.

I'm not sidestepping, and I just don't really know him well. He's every time, we've, you know, frankly, we asked him to help us with publicity a couple of times because he has a million Twitter followers. And I don't know anyone else who's had a million Twitter followers. And he very graciously did, pushed out stuff on our behalf. So you know how it is. People who pop up and become visible people that become visible targets to some. And I know Malcolm is struggling with that as are a number of us. But I have nothing, honestly, I have nothing negative to say.

And he has always been extremely positive. Yeah. Yeah, I think he had a bit of reputation before Ukraine. Yes. Yeah. I mean, I can only, I think I'm, you know, I can only comment on my own experiences with him. Yeah. And what, so not Malcolm Nance.

And I don't want to, like, relate this to him because there was, there was an individual, I don't even call his name now, who was huge on Twitter. Vasquez. Yes. Yeah, I don't, I don't know him at all. And so, you know. What happened with that? Did he, did it turn out? Because he was posting stuff about fighting at the front?

He was posting about fighting at the front. and then it came out that basically he wasn't at the front at all and people were sending him a lot of money Jesus. Wow. A lot of money. See, why wasn't that shit coming to us?

Yeah, I don't, I don't see, I've got no comments on that. I will say this though. If you look at his videos that he's posting, none of them were like of combat or of something, he would, he would shoot plates and then say... Or they'd be at his foot, they'd be at his foot and it's like, I'm not posting him because

of opsec but we're at the front yeah yeah yeah because no one in no one that kids yeah yeah or he would or he would take

like videos with like I with Ukrainian soldiers like showing like food that he had brought in sure but there's no telling yeah

you know where yeah so yeah I mean I you know this I mean as we talked about it sadly these these circumstances

war zones bring it and dross from all over. Yeah. I'm not calling him dross. I'm just saying bringing people who, yeah, whose intentions are not always pure. Let me put it that way.

Yeah. Thank you for the very generous donation, Kayla or Kala Davis. Nothing but respect for what you guys do. Thank you. Andrew, thank you. Can Milburn share his thoughts on prevision latest drama and the Russian power structure? Interesting topic.

Yeah. I'm really, I'm really beginning to wonder what is in it for Progoshan by doing all this. You know, I got it. I understood earlier. I understood earlier as it was, you know, the Russian military was clearly having problems. So Progossian being able to come in saying the Wagner group, we're here. But the Wagner group has reached its culminating point now. So him continuously banging the drum and, you know, and being very vocal. obviously means he knows he's not going to be put in check by Putin. Right. And obviously means he's hitched his wagon to Putin. But he's saying the kind of things that get you liquidated over there.

Yes. But it's just supremely, at this point, earlier, it was risk and reward. I understood what the reward was and the risk seemed minimal. Now it seems like extremely high risk, but he's got nothing that he can back it up with because the Wagner group has, you know, I mean, unless he brings in more dudes, or unless he's now as, you know, just blaming his failures on, on, on, on, on, on the Russian military. Does he crazyness, though, have you, have you seen the video about,

and that, uh, of Wagner of a, um, Russian colonel clearly being beaten? No. No. Oh. I. And, and confessing to. targeting Wagner he's he's being interrogated by Wagner and he's like doing a he's being taken prisoner by Wagner Russian army colonel I'm not making this shit up you can look it up so the internecine fighting I mean it's become fighting right you know it's it's it's extraordinary I don't know but it only it only uh can be good for the

Ukrainians that's right I can say so I welcome it but at some point you know I and and everyone's wondering why you know Putin seems almost disinterested in the war you know so in the day that the ukrainian offensive kicks off he has two appointments that day none of neither of which involve any discussion of the war and it's as though now his subordinates are just talking shit to one another their soldiers are battling it out in an uncoordinated fashion you know all of this suggests i don't know breakdown yeah i mean you've got guys who are far more uh well-versed in criminology than me, but it does suggest kind of a breakdown, doesn't it?

And Andy, thank you for Andrew Dunbar. Thank you very much for the genocidination. How about answering a full-on stupid question, a serious manner? Javelin missile system plus horse cavalry troop equals viable wrecky element. You can now clone a horse for $85,000. I think the remount is cheaper than in the past. What? I'm going to let Jack.

That's Jack's answer. actual field of expertise. Genetics and javelin missiles. Yeah, he's written an article that's coming out on his substack. It's a pay-pay only. With the javelins, I mean, I have to suspect they've pretty much blown their load with the jabs at this point. Yeah. But it's not a, it's not, well, let me point it this way. Phase one, right, was very much a javelin wall. Right. Phase two was not, the ranges were such. But now they're getting back to close fighting, but not necessarily, an anti-tank weapon, but bunker buster, you know, the javelin is, I mean, it's an expensive bunker buster, but it's an extraordinarily effective one if you're going to the offense. I haven't heard

reports of the Ukrainians using them. They probably don't have enough, but yes, that would be... I wrote an article for Connectingvets.com about the, kind of like the history of the javelin and its introduction into Ukraine prior to the recent outbreak of fighting. You'd find it on there if you're interested. It's like deep dive on javelins in Ukraine. I can't remember the exact title. Where is it? On connectingvets.com. You have a, you have a very impressive resume of. I don't know if it's impressive. I don't think, you know, I stay busy. I'll say that. I follow in your wake picking up scraps. But yes, I will certainly read that with great intent. And I just, uh, fact check that.

$70,000 a missile. And you can clone a horse for $85,000. I don't know why you would. That's the cost of a javelin missile I believe around $70,000 yeah but a missile the clue is like a hundred and twenty or 130 or something it's a lot of money then yeah I got my ass tube in Iraq once for in in never mind but in Fulujia yeah we used the java I mean because they're great against the defensive positions we use javelin rather than send in guys into a building yeah being explained having my battalion commander the battalion I was attached to explain exactly how much $70,000 worth was, which was... You used it in the direct fire mode and blast it right into a bunker?

No, it was into a building, huh? Yeah. Well, I mean, that sort of... It's actually a minaret of a mosque, but before everyone jumps on to criticize me for war crimes, the Mouge were, of course, defending. Yeah. I eat that one out slowly.

Yeah. I was trying to decide how much to tell you. It was... Yeah, but no, that became a... a very popular strategy once they realized. Max Blumenthal, it was not a war crime. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yeah, I just want to rag on Max Blumenthal a little bit more, you know. I have a couple of questions from Isaac. On Patreon? Yeah. You want to read them? Yeah, let's answer the questions from, uh, yeah, the team house is always kind of like riding that edge of like, are we going to end up in like some, uh, with our shirts off? Well, there's that, yeah.

but also are we going to end up in like a hit piece and some newspaper or something we're trying hard i welcome it i guarantee we'll end up in the intercept hopefully we'd get up but you know what that any article that comes out in that rag is probably not doing us justice i think we need to shoot for uh i thought i thought the reference from the new york times was awesome that we encourage people to come into our living room setting and drink hard liquor which isn't pretty that's accurate yeah it's not It's not inaccurate. We have fact-checked that as true. I mean, if you read that in New York Times, would you believe it?

Yes. Accurate. Wasn't that we used to be told the New York Times test, right? Lieutenant, if what you just did appeared on the cover of New York Times, would you be happy? Well, I've had to answer. I had no choice, so I must be. But yes, I mean, I think that would be fair. Sorry.

What's the next question? Isaac's question is, will you go back to Ukraine or maybe even Taiwan down the road? The Beethoven group is coming, man. I'm pushing for it. No, that's not in my, not on my plan. So you're saying there's a chance. Like, it's on the drawing board, the Beethoven group. Right now it's just.

Right now it's not, yeah, Taiwan is not on my list. No, no, serious answer. I have no plans to do either of those things. you know i've got a family to take care of a life to continue so your mword days are over is what you're saying yeah yeah definitely it may not seem like much of a life to you guys but it's mine it's what it happens yeah well i mean look you could always sit back and edit people's videos and write hit

pieces for a living apparently for a communist it's a good living it's quite lucrative i mean but enough about you yeah yeah yeah i Love writing, as you know. Yeah. It's therapeutic for me. I told you, too, I've got, I've got back into skydiving, which I love. Well, I hate. Yeah.

I'm shit scared every time. But I love it. It's, you know, so I'm enjoying life again. Yeah. That's awesome. And a very personal level. I love, love spinning time with my family, my kids. That's great.

The dog, Richie, we rescued from Ukraine. And he alone is keeping my hands full. Yeah. A little bastard. I mean, he's so distilled. destructive. Who can blame him? Right. Russians destroyed his home.

Right. He's going to destroy every other fucking home he lives in. Right. Right. It's like humans, you guys can't give me shit for chewing up your sofa. What is, obviously, obviously people in Ukraine support Ukraine's war effort because they don't want their country invaded. But we also, like, we saw that video like a bunch of kids out at a club party. And like, that got a lot of flack, but it's also like people are going to, people still have to live

their life. They're not going to take in austerity measure in their own town. I was in in the, I was in Damascus in the middle of the Civil War at one point. And I actually happened to be there on Halloween. And it's very odd because it's an American holiday or Dutch holiday

that came to America. But anyway, in central Damascus, there were kids out on Halloween dressed up like vampires and stuff like that. Yeah. German holiday, wasn't it? Was it? Wolf Pegas tonight. I didn't know. You have a higher... But that's for a...

but I mean life goes on life goes on their kids that's the point yeah yeah in any that's one thing that always regardless of war zone it isn't just Ukraine and yes I found it jarring six hours from Dombas

I'm in Kiev and Kiev is like any Western city right right and yet Dombas is like the is Passiondale it's Verdun you know the contrast was jarring Stalin grad but Ukrainians have explained to me they want it that way even soldiers have said

I said you know do you get do you feel pissed off you want to go home to somewhere when you come back and there's all these dudes you know with man buns nothing wrong with a man bun if you might you know but there's no reason for one right right i mean it's a luxury there's no there's no reason yeah right for a man bun you know but ukrainians value that because they don't want to see a blacked out city right you know right and and you think about it that pattern probably is being unchanged throughout time you read about first world war you know I mean the villages or towns behind the front line were the scenes of great not celebration but kind of a well yes you know it almost desperate right right sense of

embracing life right I would say it's desperate but it's certainly life goes on there. Very much so. You'd be surprised. If you went to Kiev now, I think most people would be very surprised. It's interesting that that was like, that people attempted to try that, try to put that out as...

A negative thing. A negative thing. Like a PR, like... People are under pressure, under stress. Like, no shit they want to go out and think of something else other than that. Right. Of course. It's not surprising.

Yeah. I mean... it's I you know in the end I I find it quite I find it inspiring yeah I remember

you know when the first cruise when the first back in October when the first missiles started and drones started coming in and everyone was down in the in the metro and you could see kids there doing school in the metro

and I found that depressing right I'm like shit the city's come to a halt right you know and then gradually people started to realize, yes, it's risky, but it's a calculated, it's not that, you know, it's a calculated risk. Right. Your chance of blah, blah. Life goes on. So I'm happy with that. You know, before the next question, something just occurred to me. When we're talking about democracies, even in the midst, even in the crucible of war, tolerating descent. So when the British started bombing German cities, okay, it was after, you know, the Germans supposedly bombed London first time through a navigational era. right and the bridge turned around and bombed

Berlin and then you know it was on but there was a I forget his name doesn't matter MP in Parliament a First World War veteran who would every would just rail away at the government about bombing German cities saying we're no better than them

blah blah blah and that was that was tolerated no one called him a traitor right you know right but it was and and if you listen if you look at because I'm a First World War geek. If you look at as a fascinating exchange between Churchill and this

guy, and it's no rankle in Churchill's yes, yes, that is one of my fears that we will be as bad as our enemies. Instead of telling shut fuck up, you're a coward or you're a traitor, you're a traitor, he listened them, they tolerated them and that was so much more powerful than trying to say no, you know, don't stick up for our enemies and crushing them. That to me was an example, not because I'm a heart British of how a democracy goes to war.

Right. There was this, a World War II veteran, he's a Brit who's taken as a POW, and I'm sorry I can't remember his name off the top of my head, but he's at POW and he's in Dresden during the bombing. Oh, man. And the account, like Sloat House 5. The accounts, the stories he would tell for the rest of his life are just the most horrific thing you can possibly imagine.

And I believe he turned into, if not a communist, like a pretty hardcore social after the war turned into a pacifist and just because he's so, I think he was so horrified by what he saw. Yeah. And credit to the Germans, because they had a number of allied prisoners in Dresden at the time.

Vonnegut, I wanted, because Slaughterhouse Five, I don't know if you read that, that book, Kurt Vonnegut. Years and years and years ago. Yeah.

So Kurt Vonnegut, the book is about a US P-O-W in Dresden. I mean, that's part of the book. I believe it was Dresden that bombed. and and I believe it was Vonnegut was a I can't remember if he was a POW

anyway it doesn't matter but it was based on you know a lot of it was obviously a great book but that but it was about the same thing you're talking about Jack the the feeling of empathy or the feeling

closer now to your enemy to your enemy then to you know the people who did the bombing yeah I mean is that in part is there any amount of Stockholm syndrome to that or is it just that like I think the I don't think in that guy's

case was Stockholm syndrome per se he wasn't he wasn't a Nazi or anything right right right right but he like I remember one of the stories he tells was that the fire was burning so intensely he saw civilians like pulled into the fire by the suction they're actually like pulled into the flames yeah yeah

and so I think that was you know kind of where he was coming from I know this is off topic, but much is made of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and obviously, you know, the nuclear, those are horrific. But the fire bombings, Tokyo, you know, that took place in Japan, Dresden, Cologne in Germany, by all accounts, almost as if not equally horrific. Yeah, as an atomic bomb. Yeah, you know, and for numbers themselves, obviously, you know, long-term nuclear, it is a matter, but the experience itself, the thousands and thousands of tens of thousands of civilians, you know, casualties. All this happened in the

name of Western democracies, and I'm not criticizing, and I'm just pointing out what a complex thing war becomes. Right. And those who want to see it in black and white are sadly mistaken. And those who think that hatred is helpful in war, just don't read history. Right. That's why you have to tamp down on that hatred constantly. Right. There's that difference between like fighting because you hate the enemy and difference between fighting for freedom. Yeah.

I mean, they're separate but related things at times. Yeah. And sadly, you know, I mean, in Ukraine it's become a real hatred. Understandable. And it's understandable. Again, like anybody who, I feel like anybody who, who says that, who observe, who sees war as this just this thing

whether as this thing that well of course you don't have to teach people not to commit war crimes that's just dumb like you're admitting that that these people are horrible people it's like yeah your neighborhood has never been we all everyone in this room all of us can

commit a war crime we're all capable and anybody anger fear I've seen it you've seen it I mean the frontal lobe shuts down and you are not Jack Murphy, you're not Dave Park,

you're not D, you become something. It's situation dependent. You could take that person, of course there's some psychopaths out there that are maybe exceptions, but the average person, you know, you could pluck them out of that environment,

even a guy who's like, who's an ISIS guy, 16 year old ISIS fighter, if he wasn't there and he was in a peaceful environment and he wouldn't be doing that crazy shit. That's 100%. The platoon,

Calais platoon, did very well during pre-deployment training. They had more high school graduates than was the norm in the United States Army. No disciplinary problems, fewer disciplinary problems than other platoons in that battalion. This was all, again, this was a great article that came out a few years ago in New York Times,

historically. The difference was Callie. I mean, that is what turned out platoon from a group of Americans American, you know, guys who are high school kids who wrote home to their grandmothers into a group of rapists and murderers. It was Cali.

It was anyone who reads the story of that platoon, Charlie Company, whatever it was, Ameri-Cal Division can never say, can never toy around with allowing your men or people

under you to talk in terms about the enemy that become really, you know, defamatory. Right. It's a thin line. So it started in Callie's case. It started with him slapping farmers around in front of the soldiers. A girl gets raped.

He doesn't investigate it. Right. And now the messages, the implicit messages are, wow, this is okay. And then Callie starts drawing a correlation. You know what? Every time we lose a guy, we're going to pay these fuckers back. Right. And 18-year-old brain?

okay that makes sense well i mean honestly even a 40 year old brain like the the thing is is that look at the stanford prison experiment like like like civility is it's there's a thin mind and you have to be very very clear in what you will and what you won't do and why you will and you won't do it and what always amazes me i think are like if you're a journalist and you're covering war crimes and you're covering those things, by all means. Like, it's an infestation, and it needs to be rooted out of the military.

And it's not going to get rooted out one time, right? It's something that needs to be addressed over and over and over again. And that's the U.S. military, Ukrainian, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, you know, it doesn't matter. It's across the board because it's human nature. But the thing is, is it's one thing to expose it. Right. And then it's another thing to sit on a moral platform where you've never been, you've never had to make a decision or you've never been in that situation. It is very easy to, um, uh, to obviously there's a moral judgment and, and that's okay.

Like war crimes are bad. Okay. Um, but there's also the idea that you would be immune to that influence and that that that's not you know that anybody oh you mean going into it right yeah yeah yeah but how do you represent that as a journalist though do you say like have a caveat at the end of the article

like if I was there I would have fucking executed the civilians too no no no how do you represent that no but I think that there's a difference between reporting on it fashionally you I think I think that's great so I think where you're hitting is it's very easy

by just simply painting these guys as evil men. Yes. You're avoiding the most important issue, which is, no, anyone can do this. So there's a book, I forget what it's called. It's called very, no, I remember what it's called. I forget who wrote it. It's called very ordinary men.

And it was about the German, you know, the battalions that followed the frontline troops in Barbarossa, just, you know, executing partisans and Jews and anyone. And that was their sole job. I forget extermination squads or whatever. And anyway, it's about those guys who, you know, who called their, you know, wrote home to their wives and their kids. And it's too easy and to just, it's a very, it's a very facile.

I think what he's saying is it's facile. It's not really doing an adequate job as in journalists. simply to report a massacre and just paint them as bad guys. Or they are bad guys if they do the massacre. But the country itself or... There's an institutional problem. It's like all Americans or all Ukrainians who are all Russians or all Germans or all Japanese or all Chinese or whatever.

I think... Sorry, I mean... No, but that's what I'm saying. Of what you're saying, the squad in Haditha, all right? third battalion First Marines didn't matter I mean that squad could be any Marine squad

right you know and and in the General Mattis who was then who was then first Marine Division commander he stopped he he fired the battalion commander

even before the investigation had finished and he was criticized for doing that but enough had emerged about the battalion commanders in action to satisfy him and when he in I was at the time

at school not school I was going for a course for battalion commodities who'd been selected about to take battalions and I remember Mattis came to talk to us

after firing this guy and he was like you know and I knew the guy he's a good guy but Mattis I think was 100% right and Mattis said

hey guys here's what happened you know you had a battalion that had been through Fallujah they were like gung ho

they were used to door kicking get a new group of guys in all they're hearing the stories about flugia, man, you should be in here. And now they start

taking casualties, but it's not quite the same, but they think they can react. Right. In that kind of way. And there's no one to step in and tell them. Right. You know, I'll speaking from like some of my not direct experience, my like

things I've investigated journalistically on the United States military, part of the story is right. It's the individuals who commit war crimes. There is another part of the piece that's not so often. reported, which is, I think especially in the war and terror, about commanders who, I mean, not that they made the decision to deploy over and over again, but they came to this conclusion

that if their soldiers showed up at work in the morning, they were good to go. Yeah. And they deployed these guys, and these officers deployed these guys over and over and over again when a lot of them were not good to go, that they had lost teammates. They were abusing fentanyl. There was, you know, all the other sort of precursors that emerged, the substance abuse, the family's dissolving, all these sorts of things. But they kept deploying these guys. And in some cases, after incidents came to light, they just left them out there.

Yeah. They just left them out there in the hinterlands of Afghanistan. And that's a part of the story. And I think that part is not so often reported. I don't think that. I think the gunshot is the sort of kinetic. event that crystallizes the war crime stories. It's the background.

There is... It's what leads to it. There is another aspect of it that... Certainly in the soft community. Very true. And in fairness, though, and you know this is true, the real impetus for redeploying was the guys themselves. You know, so a lot of times people have to be saved from themselves.

Yeah, right. And, you know, I thought about this a lot because I had... to be saved from myself. But I really did. I mean, that's when, you know, I'm not bringing it back to me, but it makes me think now back and understand so much more,

understand so much more that we should have said, no, I don't care what the fuck you say you want to do. You're done training, all right? You know, and you need to sit this one out. Time for a J.R. O.C. Well, a little bit of time out, you know? Like, I mean, I don't mean to keep.

bringing this back to Max Blumenthal's treatment of you, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but I, but I, but I, but I have to in this instance. Yeah, but I have to in this instance and this thing and, you know, you said it was a very facile, uh, you know, like argument. It's either, it's, the way he was, it was, it was, it was just shoddy journalism. So, so, so, so the thing is, is, is he was either intellectually dishonest or he's just stupid.

to say that when you say we're trying to keep these people from doing the things, he goes, this shows Ukraine as a shit country. It's the first one. He doesn't give the shit about what was said. He cares about the two million views. Right. That his, now, most of those are within Russia, but that doesn't care that because his wife's Russian, she's probably impressed by that.

Right. You know, Max gets laid. He's a big hero. Yeah. All is good. And, but, you know, again, that's why I don't think we should pay too much attention to him. We needed to clear that up and talk about it. Yeah.

But he's just, he's not important. He's a proxy of the Russians. He thinks he thinks he has agency. He doesn't have agency. Right, right. They've got him by the police. He couldn't write an honest piece about Russia. No.

Right. No. Right. He's got too much invested in it. Right. Yeah. Right. do we have any other questions or is that we got one more donation from general discharge

he's got a pretty big YouTube channel does some cool stuff okay well thank you man thank you thanks general discharge was that general discharge under other honorable conditions general discharge could have a number of meanings yes that's true that is very true but let's go right now yeah no I mean it's it's very interesting you know war is horrible but war is also i mean it's where warriors want to go you know it's and i i think all of this is like a very like healthy conversation to have you know particularly in wartime right and i mean i don't say that um to like from the cheap sheets uh the cheap seats you know sitting sitting back and and lobbing spitballs that guys as you point out are you know

dying in hand-to-hand combat, but America is involved in the conflict as well in our own way, and we should have these types of conversations. I want to talk about, you know, and I want to answer all the questions. I just very quickly want to talk about something you touched on mental health. Sure. Yeah. I don't know what you said. Yeah.

You know, on my own, you know, my own, I don't say struggles, but, you know, just very quickly, those of your listeners, no audience. I mean, I've been, aside from as many of us with the backgrounds and combat places we've been and the bad experiences, I've had personal trauma, I lost my sister and my daughter, same time, you know, going through divorce, a lot of bad things happening. Frankly, I was in a very bad place. I was saved, I think, by luck. I think if I didn't have the coping mechanisms

if I was more junior, if I'd come out of the military more junior and rank, if I didn't have the education that I'd been given or the background or just the waster of being able to go to the VA and say I'm not happy with this or that, I would have been lost and I don't know what had happened and I'm not saying, you know, and that disturbs me.

I'm good. I feel whole, but I think about how, you know, I'll just use an example, when I was on this show and we talked about mental health and I said look I've tried you know I've come off I've got to be careful about this because you know it like a lot of us I was diagnosed with you know commerce stress P you know whatever and and prescribed so loft in all good intentions but I didn't like it didn't feel like it was helping me and I didn't like thought it putting those so so i so i talk to you guys about hey i tried cannabis in a state where it was legal

um and then i get a call when the show is aired about my security clearance um and very kind of threatening email yep and a series of interviews that were not pleasant and i think i'm talking about solutions here right i'm saying i needed help what i was getting wasn't helping that's not necessarily my fault. I found something that did help and no harm to someone else and it was legal and yet I'm facing loss of security clearance. Right.

That's everyone's biggest nightmare. That's why guys don't come forward. Right. Right. And it's just happened to me. So anyone who says it doesn't happen. Right. That's what they said. Fucking happens. Right. Okay. That's the line. That's the line. That's the line. That doesn't happen. Okay. Okay. So I'll be okay.

Yeah. If I, hopefully I don't, you lose my security clearance. Yeah. The fact, that's even a discussion. Yeah. I didn't beat my wife. Yeah. I didn't, you know. That's what you call a witch hunt. Exactly. That the U.S. government's combing through podcasts. That's what they got out of this. Right. Right.

And that's the thing is that you know, a lot of veterans go I don't want to go to the VA. I don't want to get treated for post-traumatic stress because of red flag laws. You get a You get, absolutely because of red flag laws, because of this, because of that. And then as soon as

And then, but the thing is, it's real. Yeah. And what if you're looking for? Right. Because I, you know, I don't know. Everyone's got, everyone's got a point at which they cannot sustain any more grief. To behave like you're a Seta threat because you tried marijuana to treat some of the issues. Right.

Because I'm struggling with grief from lost my daughter, sister. Look, if you were to come on and you're said, well, I'm pounding a fifth of Jack a night, nobody would have said shit to you problem. You know what I mean? Like it's, yeah, it's one of those things. In Venice, that would have been, that would have been a problem too. Yeah, no. No, I get it. But my point is, the impetus wasn't Andy.

Right. You're having problems. How can we help? Right. It was, let me go after you. Right. For your security clearance. Right.

Because you just fucking. And drag you into a room and interrogate. Right. And I said something. I didn't say it to, you know, I'd rather keep that secret. But my point is, we're talking about stuff that other people are probably dealing with right now. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. We know they are. We all of us have had multiple friends who've taken their lives. Yeah. And we can't. Yeah. We can say, hey, we can try and rationalize it, but we all of it.

It isn't a fucking coincidence. Yeah. That is happening. Yeah. Yeah. And so did they come after you for, talk about the post of my stress? Did they talk to you? Do they come after you for the cannabis?

It was just all about it. It was all, there's nothing about how I am. There's nothing about, hey, are you thinking about suicide? which I'm not. It was all the cannabis. I wish I, you know, I can, I'm not going to show you the emails, but maybe this is speculation, Andy, but did you feel that it was really about the cannabis or it was about the things we were doing in Ukraine and the Mozart group and that this was a sort of retaliation? Could be, yeah, good point. And the other thing is, is. Yeah, because it would be absurd. Is somebody an OPM watching every fucking episode of ours to see if somebody had missed us doing something? Maybe at this point. No, this was a few months after it came out. someone had gone trolling, looking, it's almost as though someone had come and looking for shit on me, which is, you can find plenty of shit on me on the internet, you know, I mean, I was essentially a public figure.

Yeah. Is that how that shit works? Like some fucking, you know, poor guy who was a Lance Corporal in the Marine Corps does a podcast and he admits that he used cannabis to deal with PTSD and they're going to shake him down over. That's what I wonder. Like, is that how it works? He probably wouldn't have a security clearance, you know. Right. He might depend on what his job was. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Meanwhile, on Discord. Got some slides to share with you.

Look at this, boys. No, that dude is clean, though, when they get him a piss test. Good to go. He was good for work, man. Yeah. All right. What other questions to be? No, the government's got a really, like, you know, going back to Bill Clinton, you know, who, who, who,

puffed but didn't inhale or whatever. But the government's got a really weird stance on this stuff that... It's like rooted in some sort of like 1950s moralism. Yeah. And the VA won't accept it. Well, I think, you know, I mean, it's very interesting.

Again, you find me saying that a lot because I find all this interesting. If you look back, history of, you know, the counterculture drugs, it's because drugs became too closely, became not too closely entwined with counterculture. Yeah. Timothy Lurie was a professor at Harvard. Yeah.

And had actually done serious research before he said tune in, drop out, and Nixon called him America's public enemy number one. Yeah. You know, so there was some science behind psychedelics psychedelic treatment of trauma. There was a

time, so there's a great series on Netflix called How to Change Your Mind. Yeah, I've watched that. It's great. And it talks about, it talks about, it talks about mushrooms, it talks about LSD, it talks about MDMA, and the research that was going on in like the 50s and everything, until it escaped the lab. Like it was, it was like all like, very effective and then escapes the lab, becomes part of the counterculture, like you say. And they're going to us like, oh, we can't have that. And so research gets shut down completely.

We interviewed on this show, my friend Jim Morris, a Vietnam veteran, and he talked all about how he came back from the war and he used LSD. Really? Yeah. Yeah. And then he probably didn't know about, you know, they talked about set and setting, you know, in other words, a very deliberate approach to using psychedelics to treat trauma. He probably didn't know about that. I don't think he, no, I don't think he, I wonder if he even really recognized that he was using it to treat PTSD initially. Yeah. Well, we talked to to Mike who spent like a winter, like a winter, like after Vietnam. he was a Vietnamese

he was on a Vietnam he was a Marine Corps Cap yeah yeah and like and went to yeah went to India and like

wintered with a Swami in a cave like smoking opium and what? Yeah oh after yeah after after and San Juan Sam

yeah who did the she went well opiates opiates a little different those are bad news you know I mean obvious reasons no I do I think it's important to keep. Well, I don't know it was opium or hashy. I don't remember what it was.

I think it's, so when we talk about things that do, yeah. So I think, you know, opiates and cocaine, bad, addictive, toxic. Yeah. Psychedelics, non-toxic. Anyway, I'm not here defending drugs. I, and I could be wrong with the opium too. I don't remember what it was, he said, actually. It was a long time ago. But we talked with Sam Juan, who, you know, did her post-traumatic stress, like did a like a sponsored program it was actually it wasn't ibegain

it was mushroom she said they did a hero dose mushrooms with with a counselor yeah and it helped a lot like and for the I know a lot of goods again again it goes back to what you said is that a lot of veterans will not come forward about the postmatic stress

you know like in the 70s it was all the made for TV series about a guy become you know thinking and Charlie's in the wire and shooting up his office space. Right? Yeah. And now it's, you know. Now Charlie's in the wire and you light up a joint and you lose your security clearance.

Yeah. Yeah. It's just, it's absolutely ridiculous. One more question. Yeah. Yeah. We should. Norm Anderson, please ask Andy what he knows about Fallujah April 12, 2004.

It was the worst friendly fire incident in Marine history and it was covered up. Was it covered up because Duncan Hunter was involved or because Duncan Hunter Sr. was the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. I read Tempest and it was excellent. Yeah. Who was that? D? Norm.

Yeah, Norm. I'm not, I wasn't in Flujer in April. I was there in the second battle in November. Not familiar with what happened. I haven't heard about that incident. If you, yeah, I would love to, I mean, I'd love to get a link or something to read about it. But sadly, I don't have any comments because I,

I hadn't heard about that. Man, so this has been a wide-ranging conversation. It's been really good. I like that. I can't wait to see what's edited out for character assassination. Probably nothing because, you know, they got what they wanted out of it. And they don't want to hear the actual story and the background and all things. And I'm no longer a thread or, you know.

Yeah. Right? I'm just Joe Blow sitting in unnamed. Until the Beethoven group's been. So you'll stop it. Sitting at unnamed town in the United States that in a house when it's not being sullied by Jack Jackson. Yeah.

Anyway, we love having you on. You know, people, many, many people have reached out to us and asked you to be like our third host. You should. And I would love to.

I'm all for that. Would you let me do that? Yeah. I'd like to take a few more vacations. So I would love to do that. Come on in. You are welcome anytime. Holy crap.

Yeah. Do I get paid? We'll maybe discuss your on probation. You're on probation. Jeez. Okay. That J. Jonah Jamesoneman, me, you want to be paid? We'll bring you on as an intern.

You mean there's a chance? We'll bring you on as an intern. Yeah. I don't trust you two, but D, I'll listen to you. D. D. All right. So we've kept your subscribers.

Hopefully we've answered that question. I think so. One about Duncan Hunter and Fuluger on April 12th. I'm going to look that one up. You're going to the bottom of that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I want to say thank you very much. And I want to say thank you to all of your, all of your audience subscribers. I'm not just saying this. But you can clearly say for most of the comments except the ones that are very adverse about me. that you've you've got a surprisingly high intellect average intellect among your audience we do

well the the folks that are like asking questions are like very engaged and very interested you know they're there they're there because they're interested so yeah well i want to say thank you to you know to to all of them um and to you guys it's been it's been great thank you for coming in doing this yeah i'll do well you know we're going to change some shit when i'm here as co-ho move things around a little bit deep that's okay big changes come so big changes so you can talk about it yeah so and he didn't drink at all during this episode nor before the episode so there can't be any swering of him next time you come in though we're getting hammered where's my book it might be on the other bookshelf over there you flicking people yeah i have a copy too of my house can you believe that

it's here it's we have two other bookshelves over there filled with books i've just so hurt um but buy his book when the tempest gathers. It's in the description for the Amazon link and the substack. Okay, cool, yeah. Don't wait on the paperback. Just go get it now. Yeah, just get it. It's better.

I'll sign it. It's hard. If you bring it to the studio, I will sign it, I promise you. All right. Final thoughts, anybody? Thank you, everybody. All out. Yeah, thank you, guys. Okay. Yeah, thank you, everyone.

Make sure you tune in on Friday. We'll be here with Toby and Justin. Look forward to seeing all you then. and until then we'll see you on Friday. Good night.