Deep Dive on US Security Partnerships in Ukraine, and Beyond | Franky Matisek & Dr. Reno | Ep. 316

Dr. William Reno is a professor and chair of the Political Science Department at Northwestern University. He has conducted fieldwork and interviews in conflict zones across Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East for over thirty years, having authored three books: Corruption and State Politics in Sierra Leone, Warlord Politics and African States, and Warfare in Independent Africa. He has published over two hundred articles in peer-reviewed journals and policy-relevant periodicals, and edited volumes on civil wars, rebels, and military assistance. He is the principal investigator for the US Department of Defense Minerva-funded program studying how the United States can improve foreign military training. Lieutenant Colonel Jahara “FRANKY” Matisek, PhD, (@JaharaMatisek) is a military professor in the national security affairs department at the United States Naval War College, research fellow with the European Resilience Initiative Center, and United States Department of Defense Minerva co–principal investigator for improving United States security assistance. He has published over one hundred articles and essays in peer-reviewed journals and policy-relevant outlets on strategy, warfare, and security assistance. He is a command pilot that was previously associate professor in the Military and Strategic Studies Department at the United States Air Force Academy. Order Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" today! ⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/ Support the show here:⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse ___________________________________________________ Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️ https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnPodcast/featured —————————————————————- Today's Sponsors: GhostBed⬇️ https://www.ghostbed.com/house FOR 50% OFF!!! Fabric Gerber Life Insurance ⬇️ https://hello.meetfabric.com/term-life-insurance-partner-teamhouse?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=paid&utm_campaign=premium_podcast_vanityurl&utm_content=teamhouse ____________________________________ Pre-order Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" today! ⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/ —————————————————————— To help support the show and for all bonus content including: https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️ https://ko-fi.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: ⬇️ [email protected] 0:00 start #specialforces Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss.

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• 1:28Jack Murphy?

  Hey, guys, it's Jack. I just wanted to talk to you today about a way that you can help support the podcast if you're not already. To support the channel is to become a Patreon member. So we have Patreon memberships that start at just $5 a month. And when you sign up, you get access to all of our episodes ad-free. That's the big bonus for that. I mean, we also do some Patreon bonus episodes for our subscribers. But this is the biggest and best way that you can support the Team House channel and podcast if you'd like to, and we really appreciate that. So go and check us out at patreon.com/the team house.

• 2:08Speaker 03

  Special operations.

• 2:13Speaker 03

  Covert ops. Espionage. The Team House. With your hosts, Jack Murphy and David Park.

• 2:29Jack Murphy?

  Guys, welcome to episode 316 of the Team House. I'm Jack, here with Dave. We have some great guests here in studio tonight, talking about a specific topic, talking about how the United States and specifically the Department of Defense partners with foreign nations. But we'll also hear a bit from these gentlemen, as far as their backgrounds. We have Dr. and Lieutenant Colonel Frankie Matisek and Dr. William Reno.

• 2:56Jack Murphy?

  Why don't you guys, well, we have a topic to kind of focus on on this show. But before we jump right into that, let's hear a little bit from each of you with some introductions. Dave's gonna do a shout out.

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• 7:25Jack Murphy?

  And before we move on, one last thing. We defy the lost chapters of Special Forces history. My book is out this week. It's first week in publication.

• 7:33Speaker 04

  It's number one, right?

• 7:34Jack Murphy?

  In some of its categories, yeah. Available on Amazon, print or ebook, however you prefer.

• 7:41Speaker 04

  Look, if you don't read it, the commies win.

• 7:44Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I mean, the only reason why you would not read it is if you hate the troops. That's the only thing I can imagine.

• 7:50Speaker 04

  Or you hate freedom. You hate freedom. Do it for our country.

• 7:53Jack Murphy?

  So, okay, before, I want to hear about both of you gentlemen. But I will think, Frankie, you want to give your disclaimer upfront?

• 8:03Speaker 03

  Yes. The views of Lieutenant Colonel Matisek do not represent the official views of the Department of Defense, US government, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

• 8:13Jack Murphy?

  That was very good, Frankie. We'll see if that's enough to cover your ass through this interview. You know, what is it, you know, they say, don't do anything your pay grade can't afford or something like that?

• 8:23Speaker 03

  No, no, that's a fantastic point. I was telling him before we kicked off the podcast here. I do not want to be a Colonel, so anyone on the selection board watching this, I am trying to ruin my career, so you are welcome to get angry at whatever I say tonight, so.

• 8:37Speaker 04

  So, Blumenthal, go ahead and take everything out of context.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, I I I by the way, uh, and and for my back right now, can US Air Force pilot currently a professor uh, teaching at the US Naval War College right now.

• 8:50Speaker 04

  Well, that's not how we do it. So how did you grow up and what what made you think about going in the military and was it always a pilot?

• 8:58Speaker 03

  Oh, no, man, we gotta go that deep.

• 9:01Speaker 04

  We're going that deep. We want to know you guys. We

• 9:03Speaker 03

  Oh, man, Will, this is gonna get real deep because like, he probably should have been in the military and I I should have just been like a Berkeley hippie, just like protesting you people like, stop killing the babies and the baby seals.

• 9:16Speaker 04

  So you dropped flowers from your, well, is is yeah. So how did you grow up?

• 9:20Speaker 03

  I grew up in San Francisco, man.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 9:21Speaker 03

  So I'm probably the most like, I I don't I don't know that this catching the catching the fire. I might be like the most like left wingy liberal woke person you'll ever have in this room. And yet

• 9:30Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, it's a good thing you don't want to be Colonel because you're about to lose your job.

• 9:33Speaker 04

  Actually, I I don't I don't know that I don't know that that actually, I don't know that's a bad thing anymore.

• 9:39Speaker 03

  Losing your job?

• 9:41Speaker 04

  No, no, being being like, being woke and and I mean, that's

• 9:46Speaker 03

  No, no, I mean, I and I I'm obviously saying in jest, but yeah, no, I I I grew up in the in in the San Francisco area. Um, single mom, grew up really poor, food stamps, etc. And just sort of like, at some point, my mom got me into Boy Scouts. I was an Eagle Scout. Also, Will Reno was also an Eagle Scout as well. Well, I have four others in my family. Yeah, and so it's just sort of like, kind of came natural to me in one sense of like, I don't know what I want to do with myself. And then I got really, really dumb lucky that in high school I got really good at at wrestling in high school. Uh, I didn't know that was even a sport until I got to high school and got getting really lucky that I had a coach that had that was a army reservist and was like, hey, you should join the military. And I'm like,

• 10:30Speaker 03

  nah, I don't really want to be in a trench and do stuff like that. And he's like, oh, okay, maybe you should join the Air Force then. And I'm like, and I'm like, yeah, but I don't want to like, he's like, no, no, no, you stay in hotels. There's no trenches. For D M, you can fly airplanes. I'm like, okay, that just sounds

• 10:46Speaker 04

  Air conditioning, yeah.

• 10:47Speaker 03

  Yes. And so that's kind of how I ended up actually going to the the US Air Force Academy. I I it was lucky that I was pretty good at wrestling. I got recruited to wrestle there.

• 10:56Speaker 04

  Cool.

• 10:56Speaker 03

  And so I don't think I ever was supposed to ever serve per se, but it sort of it matched me and it fit me and

• 11:03Jack Murphy?

  So what what airframe did they Put you on.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  I ended up in the C seventeen.

• 11:06Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  So I did that two thousand eight through two thousand eleven. So lots of Iraq and Afghan runs.

• 11:11Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:11Speaker 03

  I'm, I probably took you guys around.

• 11:13Jack Murphy?

  You probably did.

• 11:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, two thousand eight, two thousand eleven, got over two thousand hours in the jet and then uh they sent me off to be an instructor pilot in the T six. And then I went off and got a PhD. That's where I met him as my advisor at Northwestern University. So I was at Northwestern.

• 11:26Jack Murphy?

  Flew a T six up to Midway Airport and took the, took the L in your flight suit.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  Yep, it was the coolest, I guess, interview you could ever do. It's like, yeah, I'm gonna fly my own airplane up to you.

• 11:40Jack Murphy?

  Pack of beer.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  Up, uh, yeah, up to Chicago and meet him and interviewed him. It was, it was a perfect fit for us.

• 11:45Speaker 04

  I mean, it's hard to get pulled over for that, isn't it? If you're flying.

• 11:49Speaker 03

  No, no, this is the best part of this whole trip of us going, of, of me going up to Midway in my T, my own, my own military airplane. Along the way, I stopped to go buy alcohol to go hang out with him and meet him because he was like, yeah, I like beer. A police officer in Chicago buy, ends up buying me like a twenty four pack of beer while I'm waiting in line to buy like my alcohol. He's like, what are you doing? Because I'm in my flight suit. And he's like, he's like, I should buy you this. I'm like, no, no, no, you're a police officer in, in, in Chicago. I should probably be buying you alcohol.

• 12:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:15Speaker 03

  Because this is a scary job.

• 12:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:16Speaker 03

  And then it was funny, other people online were like, hey, you're buying him, you're buying the pilot, Air Force pilot, like, you know, like free alcohol? I'll chip in five, ten bucks. So like, literally, like, it was like a, a, like a, a crowdfunding effort to buy me alcohol. Meanwhile, I'm like, I'm here, I'm being paid per diem to be here. Like, this isn't actually costing me money, but I'm like, fine, you want to give me free alcohol, take free, again, Air Force pilot. I, I have no problem. You want to make all the chair force diva pilot jokes you want tonight. It does not offend me or bother me because I love the joint force. You guys do the shit that I don't want to do and I would never want to do and I embrace and I love what you guys have done.

• 12:51Speaker 04

  I just, I'm surprised that they didn't like pack up pre-mixed martinis for you on your trip. Like, what, the Air Force was like.

• 12:58Jack Murphy?

  They, they can't treat officers like that.

• 13:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, how dare they? So I have a question about, about flying into Bagram because I know it's kind of in a bowl. But is it really that difficult of a landing or were the Spaniards just assholes?

• 13:15Speaker 03

  The Spanish were probably being assholes. Um, it's not that hard to land there. It's not like, at least in the C-17. If you want to do a proper, a proper tactical descent, you would just do the math and be like, all right, for every thousand feet, you are above the, uh, the airfield elevation, you add a, a nautical mile for like your slowdown. So typically it's like, hey, you know, we're usually hanging out 23,000 feet coming into Bagram. All right, 20,000 feet, airfield elevation there, Bagram was like, I think 4,000 ish feet. So you'd be like, all right, 24 miles, you know, basically 24 miles. Cause you want to use like a three or four mile s- slowdown, hanging out 20,000 feet above, 24 miles idle and just basically cruise down to about 230 knots the whole way down.

• 13:58Speaker 04

  So, so can you do a stream? I thought you had to kind of do a loop a bit, uh, because of the whole.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  We actually don't.

• 14:04Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 14:04Speaker 03

  We actually don't. It, it, that was a bullshit thing.

• 14:06Speaker 04

  It was the same. It was.

• 14:08Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. People, it was funny because I remember everyone kept talking about like, you have to spiral and avoid the man pads and the, and the dishka 12.7 millimeter. And then you actually do it and you're like, no, you can just do a straight in like 25 miles out.

• 14:24Speaker 05

  For the Russians, yeah.

• 14:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's probably different for the Russians. But for a C-17, 24 miles out, idle, 230 knots idle, and just throw out all your, all your speed brakes, gear, flaps, everything. And just, just do this whole thing and just do like a steep, like five degree fucking descent.

• 14:39Speaker 04

  Just glide it right in.

• 14:40Jack Murphy?

  So, uh, William, tell us a little bit about yourself and, and your journey. Where did you come from? You said you were an Eagle Scout?

• 14:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, I was an Eagle Scout along with, uh, four brothers. So we're a pack of Eagle Scout family members. Um, good at camping, uh, grew up in Baltimore, but traveled around quite a bit. And, um, yep, so just got into traveling to different places, doing the education thing. So I'm a professor at Northwestern University, but work with Frankie here, um, looking at foreign military training. So.

• 15:21Speaker 03

  But, but, but I was going to say, just throw, just throw it out. He can trace like.

• 15:26Speaker 00

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• 16:09Speaker 00

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• 16:56Speaker 03

  Almost everyone in his whole family, his ancestors were all in the military, even going back to the Custer's Last Stand. If you want to talk about Major Reno. Major Reno did get in trouble, though, at Custer's Last Stand.

• 17:06Speaker 05

  If anybody's a history buff, Major Marcus Reno. I'd say if he hadn't stood off on the other hillside with Custer, I probably would not be here.

• 17:19Jack Murphy?

  So where did you go for your post-doc work? How did that come about?

• 17:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, what was your course of study? Like, what were you interested in and why did you choose education?

• 17:35Speaker 05

  Why I chose education? I guess I'm kind of the post-Vietnam generation, so I had different family members. I mean, Colonel Reno, my grandfather, and visiting Fort Meade to do the shopping at what they used to call the PX and that kind of stuff. And Uncle Jim, who had the Green Beret thing.

• 17:57Speaker 05

  But you know, all the signals I got was that the people I went to school with who went in the military was like to do drugs and

• 18:04Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, it wasn't great.

• 18:06Speaker 05

  You know, hang out and have a good time in Germany or wherever. So I I chose the education route and ended up as a professor at Northwestern University. I mean, which is a job I love because it's a great day job. It gives you the platform to be able to do all sorts of things. So Frankie and I, we got two Department of Defense grants and and you know, I got a lot of students who were military, active military that earned their PhDs and so forth. And I mean, you know, my combination of camping is partly through,

• 18:47Speaker 05

  oh, now it's JSAL, you know, the Special Operations University at Tampa. Back when it was at Hurlberg, it was what I would consider kind of more flexible and versatile things. So I'd worked with them and you know, whichever elements wanted to request, I don't know, you know, you want to go camping in Afghanistan?

• 19:10Speaker 04

  What was, how did you get to that point, though? You like, what was your major in? And then what was your like, your, you know, your follow on schooling? And what were your interests?

• 19:24Speaker 05

  I mean, for the research that I did, I mean, I went to grad school and got PhD like Frankie here. I went to go study some stupid thing in West Africa, but I was in Sierra Leone and Liberia, and then a war broke out. And we didn't have the internet then. So I was kind of dumb animal. And what I did was I just stayed.

• 19:53Speaker 05

  That became my research was in the politics and non-state armed groups.

• 19:58Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 19:58Speaker 05

  Because that's who controlled the place where I was living. Something called National Patriotic Front of Liberia, run by a guy named Charles Taylor. So, you know, he was the sheriff in the town that I lived in. And learned how to get along in those types of environments. Like I say, I'm good at camping. And that was a lot of camping out and studying politics and non-state armed groups. Working at, you know, different places like Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq. So I'm the local context guy.

• 20:38Speaker 05

  So you go to a place, you want to fight, you want to do whatever you want to do. You have to know like what's going on on the ground. I'm not kind of like the native guide, but I know enough stuff that I can point you in the right direction. Maybe give you a few pointers about, you know, what you would do.

• 21:01Speaker 04

  Are you writing ethnographies?

• 21:04Speaker 05

  It's like ethnographies of armed groups.

• 21:06Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, yeah, I was gonna say, he actually, and this is why I'm so lucky. I got to train under him in grad school, under his tutelage, if you will. Because it's part political science, part sociology and part anthropology.

• 21:21Speaker 05

  Anthropology.

• 21:22Speaker 04

  So. Were there, so if I were to think of a non-state armed group, my level of thinking is very basic. What, what were some of the things that like stood out to you or that you like while you were there in Liberia? Like what were some of the things that were realizations that, that maybe people like us wouldn't know?

• 21:47Speaker 05

  I don't know, that's kind of a tough question, because I think the realization is that you gain an understanding of the environment around you, and when you shift from peace time to war time, it's like you go from one culture to another culture. And trying to get into the heads of the people that live there, that fight there, and, you know, all the moms and pops, and I don't know, guys who join militias and that kind of stuff. Trying to figure out what makes it tick, like, why are they doing what they do? And can you learn enough about it that you can anticipate what people are gonna do?

• 22:30Speaker 05

  And then advise outsiders how not to step into it. Like, being patient, being observant, looking at what's going on, being able to draw conclusions from that, and then being able to package that in some sort of way that's actually useful. So, you know, I think that, I mean, it's hard to explain in short form to an audience.

• 22:58Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 22:59Speaker 05

  In a way, you have to be there.

• 23:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:01Speaker 05

  And, you know, I think, judging from your audience, there are a lot of people who've been there. And, you know, it's tough, because you come home and you can't, you can't explain it.

• 23:11Speaker 04

  Right.

• 23:12Speaker 05

  So, I mean, I'm kind of caught in that. But as an academic, what I can do is I can try to formalize that as much as possible, so that, you know, bullet points, or some sort of longer form, something that people can understand, connect to,

• 23:32Speaker 05

  flip that switch, make that transition into that environment, and, you know, be able to...

• 23:40Speaker 05

  Understand, because there's all sorts of stuff around you. You know, like official government things, US government regulations and so forth. That, once you move into that world's just like total unreality.

• 23:54Speaker 04

  Right.

• 23:55Speaker 05

  And, you know, you gotta, if you want to survive, you gotta know what the real rules are.

• 23:59Speaker 03

  Well, I don't see, and the main thing that, in our research, when we go out to these countries, Africa, the Middle East, or Europe. The number one problem we usually can, you know, we usually encounter are US embassies basically being fucking clueless.

• 24:12Speaker 04

  Right.

• 24:12Speaker 03

  Clueless, risk averse, you have.

• 24:15Speaker 05

  Oh, I mean, make, I feel like my head's gonna explode sometimes, you know, when you deal with folks like that. Because the US, like, our power, there's such a narcissism that's associated with it.

• 24:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:28Speaker 05

  So you get into a place, and, you know, it's like our way, or, or the highway. And you're like, uh-uh, no, that's not the rules here.

• 24:37Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:37Speaker 05

  That's not the way it works. And, I mean, I think Frankie and I, we meet people in all sorts of official positions that realize sort of the way things really work. And they're very frustrated a lot of times because, you know, it's like the system doesn't allow them to actually use that information. And that's a big part of what we do, like, our research. Is that we're at that kind of inflection point, I think, with DOD money, but we're gonna use that money in a way to trick them. I mean, in a good way.

• 25:14Speaker 04

  Right.

• 25:15Speaker 05

  Because, you know, what we do is, you know, we're sort of like the fish that can swim in the sea. You know, it's like, for me, as a civilian, like, with the Ukraine stuff, I'm the guy who can go there. You know, and go see what our foreign military training's actually doing out there on the battlefront. And, you know, be able to deliver the hard reality, the, you know, stark fist of reality, the way it really is. And, you know, so that, back to the original question, I mean, that's my training. And, you know, so I'm the local context guy.

• 25:52Speaker 05

  Um, the guy goes camping, figure out what's inside people's heads as best as I can.

• 25:59Speaker 04

  And you, you probably, you like both of you probably have a certain level of authority that, because I, I guarantee you that like before we went into Iraq, there were probably some very brilliant analysts that were GS12s, GS13s saying, we don't have a plan for stabilizing this country. Like, we're gonna destabilize it, we're gonna give Iran, but who's gonna listen to a GS12? When it doesn't meet the, the threshold for what like the politics want? Where you guys are kind of outside of that system.

• 26:33Speaker 05

  We're outside, but I don't know, does anybody listen to us either?

• 26:35Speaker 03

  No, and, and that's why, you know, I, I joked early on about like, I don't care what happened, you know? I don't care about, about what we say because we've been writing highly critical articles for the last five plus years.

• 26:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, somehow this lieutenant colonel, I don't know how he survives, but I mean, I'm just a guy and.

• 26:53Speaker 03

  And, and, and from time to time, you get, you know, curious, um, individuals that are generals, SESs and other sort of higher up people in the food chain that will actually reach out to us like, thanks for writing this, I wish I could say this, but thanks for writing this, I'm gonna use this in the next meeting.

• 27:10Speaker 05

  That's right, you get the voice in the wilderness, people that have a sense of the reality that are sort of caught in the maze of the rules and regulations and so forth. I mean, I think, I mean, we can't overestimate the impact of the work that we do. But when we do get those types of contacts and we can develop relationships with people like that.

• 27:37Speaker 04

  Right.

• 27:38Speaker 05

  That are in positions where, you know, maybe they are making decisions or influencing people make decisions. Then, you know, that's important and what we wanna do is as the environment changes, like as geopolitics changes, I mean, I mean, how to put it bluntly, you know, we wanna win. And what we wanna do is, you know, we want our knowledge, like the research that we do to be as useful as possible.

• 28:13Speaker 05

  You know, try to help our country do better.

• 28:15Speaker 03

  And, and, and I was gonna put out too, and this is a good for like your whole audience to realize because people don't actually realize how important this is. So since the year 2000, the US has spent over $400 billion on security assistance, training and equipping all kinds of militaries around the world. $400 billion, that basically comes out to at least ish 20 ish billion a year since 2000. That's a lot of fucking money.

• 28:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:44Speaker 03

  To basically have not done anything.

• 28:46Speaker 04

  Right.

• 28:48Speaker 03

  Like, I, that's something that like, like, we tell people this.

• 28:51Speaker 05

  I mean, we, we do stuff with it, you know, but, but I mean, it's, it's.

• 28:57Speaker 04

  We, we, we arm, we, we arm the up and coming generation.

• 29:02Jack Murphy?

  We pay warlords for dump trucks full of gravel. Yeah, we're really good at that.

• 29:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, but sometimes, you know, sometimes we hit it right.

• 29:08Speaker 03

  Yes. And, and, but, you know, but, but that's always our.

• 29:11Speaker 05

  We can do it better.

• 29:11Speaker 03

  Yes, and that's, that's our point. That's our whole objective.

• 29:14Speaker 05

  That's our whole thing is,

• 29:17Speaker 05

  I think,

• 29:19Speaker 05

  I think about the Cold War and Cold War is the last time we were competing. In the Cold War, we had to try harder.

• 29:31Speaker 05

  So, you know, we got our rules, which I think are very important because our rules are partly about our values, which is our national interest. So the things that we will not do that our adversary will do.

• 29:47Speaker 05

  And that's the way it should be.

• 29:50Speaker 05

  In that context, we should also be aware of where we have to be flexible, adaptable,

• 30:01Speaker 05

  have knowledge on the ground and be able to move and to be able to move intelligently. And our system over the last three or four decades has forgotten how to do that. So our mission, like Frankie's and my mission is how to restore that kind of intelligence to the way that we conduct foreign military training.

• 30:28Speaker 05

  Do it with partners, do it in a way that serves our national interest intelligently, adeptly, and, you know, depending on the context, a small footprint or whatever, but.

• 30:43Speaker 04

  Is there?

• 30:44Speaker 05

  But, but not like we've been doing it in the past.

• 30:47Speaker 04

  Are, are there, like, I know that every non-government armed group is going to be different, and is there a way to strip away the politics, the religion, you know, the tribes and things like that? Are there some fundamental truths, truths about these groups that we deal with?

• 31:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think there's some underlying fundamental truths. I've been doing this for a long time.

• 31:16Speaker 03

  He hung out with the Bush and the Dean back in the nineteen, late nineteen eighties in Afghanistan, so this isn't like, you know, I was born in eighty-three, by the way, just the people know.

• 31:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, the bad people, like when this guy was crawling on a rug. I was in, you know, places like Corrigan when they were the good people. And one of the things is that when you get into the heads of, of people, I think in different parts of the world, what you realize is there's a lot of commonalities, like everybody cares about their kids.

• 31:48Speaker 04

  Right.

• 31:49Speaker 05

  Everybody cares about, you know, advancement and protecting what they have and these kinds of things. So I think that in a world where, you know, we're obsessed about, you know, who's a jihadist or who's fighting for freedom or these sorts of the issues which are referential to us, like, there's certain commonalities. So when I think about foreign military training, what I'm trying to think about, like, when I go to Ukraine or whether it's in West Africa and Somalia or whatever, what are they fighting for? What's their will to fight?

• 32:30Speaker 05

  These kinds of basic things that I think are generalizable across conflicts, different people, different cultures, these kinds of things. These are the points of contact to start to understand what's really going on. And if our country's going to be successful to build relationships where we need to.

• 32:55Speaker 05

  I don't give a whatever about,

• 32:59Speaker 05

  you know, what their domestic policy is, or, you know, what kind of garb their women wear or anything like this.

• 33:06Speaker 04

  Right.

• 33:07Speaker 05

  It's what are their interests? What are their objectives? Where can we partner?

• 33:13Speaker 04

  How how does uh anybody trust the United States to partner with them since we have been leaving our partner forces since Vietnam?

• 33:26Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, again, that's kind of a Cold War versus post Cold War. In Cold War, I think we're a better partner. Because in the Cold War, we understood what our interests were.

• 33:40Speaker 05

  Since then, you know, we've had discussion.

• 33:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:44Speaker 05

  You know, we can pick them and choose them and drop, you know, partner and then leave them and this kind of stuff. You know, I think that part of the challenge now in a more competitive geopolitical environment is understanding what our interests really are. And, you know, it's not that our partners, we have to love them for now until the end of time. They need to understand that, too. Um, but we're the coincidence of interests is genuine. If we care about our interests, we'll stick with them.

• 34:22Jack Murphy?

  Does that, I mean, not to get partisan about it, but I mean, I imagine that, you know, this post Cold War construct you're talking about, especially right now. Uh, it seems like we're internally divided about what our national values are.

• 34:37Speaker 05

  Yes, yes, we certainly are.

• 34:40Jack Murphy?

  Um, and and that I I can only imagine that must reflect and express itself in these partnerships.

• 34:46Speaker 05

  No, no, and and I think that's why we actually need to have this really tough conversation about. Uh, we're at a crossroads and the problem with the current crossroads we're at, we keep lying to ourselves as Americans.

• 34:59Jack Murphy?

  About who we are.

• 35:00Speaker 05

  About who we are.

• 35:01Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 35:02Speaker 05

  But also that we're not at war. And that we can keep on lying and telling ourselves that we're living in this liberal, rules-based international order.

• 35:13Speaker 03

  Laws and norms matter and that as long as you keep doing this, the US will triumph. And the problem is, we are not gonna fucking triumph if we keep doing the, the same dumb thing over and over again. So this actually takes us to the crossroads. This is, we are trying to avoid the fork in the road. And I've been having this conversation with like my students at the Naval War College because I had this epiphany a couple of weeks ago and I think you guys might as well appreciate this because we had this conversation and they all agreed as, as you guys are, are nodding along about like, yeah, we're, we're lying to ourselves about this liberal rules-based order and the system and laws and norms matter, the UN matters.

• 35:52Speaker 03

  None of this fucking matters anymore, but we keep lying to ourselves that it matters. And the reason why I say it's a fork in the road is because we have two choices right now. We either just basically commit to World War III. Or we commit to Cold War 2.0.

• 36:06Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 36:07Speaker 03

  And Cold War 2.0 has benefits, as is committing to World War III. Committing to World War III, basically, and, and it's not what you think, I know.

• 36:16Jack Murphy?

  I know what you're saying, yeah.

• 36:17Speaker 03

  No, you have two choices. If you commit to World War III. You're basically telling Moscow and Beijing, we are fully mobilizing the West against you. What are you gonna do about it? I'd like to bet they'd probably back down.

• 36:33Speaker 05

  You gotta kinda do both.

• 36:36Speaker 03

  And Cold War-

• 36:37Speaker 05

  You gotta be credible.

• 36:38Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 36:39Speaker 05

  World War III, if you challenge us, we'll challenge you.

• 36:44Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 36:45Speaker 05

  Maybe

• 36:47Speaker 05

  long-term is Cold War.

• 36:49Speaker 03

  And that's where Cold War 2.0 becomes more sort of politically palatable.

• 36:54Speaker 05

  You know where World War III ends?

• 36:56Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 36:57Speaker 05

  So, let's not do that.

• 36:59Speaker 03

  So that's why Cold War 2.0 becomes a logical outcome at this point.

• 37:02Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 37:03Speaker 03

  Because if we keep lying to ourselves about the liberal rules-based order options, just ignoring, we have to choose the fork in the road. You're gonna actually gonna get to World War III because we're gonna- Stumble into dumb escalation. So you actually have to choose, I mean,

• 37:16Speaker 04

  Right.

• 37:17Speaker 03

  The path of least resistance right now to me is you have to choose Cold War two point, Cold War two point O. And that means we have to start making hard choices and we go back to thinking like it's Cold War one point O. And you have to start looking at the world in a way of great power politics. And yes, human rights and norms and laws matter. However, if we can do something in country X or or region Y or this area of Z.

• 37:40Speaker 04

  Right.

• 37:41Speaker 03

  To counter and deter or, you know, spoil the ambitions or actions of Russia and China. You have to fucking do it. You have to do it.

• 37:50Speaker 04

  And that that it feels like so, you know, I feel like both the doves and the hawks. And I want to lay it on a political party because it's kind of swapping every now and again. But the doves and the hawks have both gotten it wrong. Right. That the doves are are are soft on the wrong stuff to be soft about like cultural relevant. Uh, relevancy and and and, you know, these things, they don't matter. We think they matter, but to the people we're working with, they don't. Like they have their own norms that.

• 38:20Speaker 05

  They got their own, they got their own world. I mean, I mean, this is part of narcissism. I think of the U. S. You know, you get dominant. You have a relationship with some other country and you go, okay. You know, we like you, but you gotta be exactly like us.

• 38:37Speaker 04

  Right.

• 38:38Speaker 05

  You know, here's L B G T plus or whatever. Great. Fine. Wonderful in domestic U. S. Politics. That doesn't fly in a lot of other countries. Or, you know, here's, I don't know, some other kind of rule that we think you should have.

• 38:53Speaker 04

  Right.

• 38:54Speaker 03

  Or expecting a country to have an exclusive relationship with America and not the Chinese and Russians.

• 38:59Speaker 04

  Right.

• 39:00Speaker 03

  You know.

• 39:00Jack Murphy?

  Depending on where you are on the map, you can't.

• 39:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, yeah, and and the best is I love to give this and I wish I could remember how to say the word in Thai. But I had I had a a Thai officer who talked about what it's like being competed over by the Americans and the Chinese.

• 39:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:16Speaker 03

  And he's like, you know, he gave the expression in his language, but he's like, he's like, the word translates, the expression we have is, we call ourselves the bamboo in the wind.

• 39:26Speaker 04

  A woman in the, a woman in the south would say she had many gentlemen callers.

• 39:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, many gentlemen callers. I mean, you know, you live in a particular place, the United States is far away, some other big countries close, that country's not moving anywhere.

• 39:40Speaker 04

  Right.

• 39:40Speaker 05

  The United States, maybe there's gonna be change of, and, and, next election, they're gonna move out. So what are they gonna do? They're gonna hedge their bets. So if you wanna have a relationship with them, you know, they understand, like, the way the world works. So, you know, you have to accommodate to that.

• 40:01Speaker 03

  And that's all part of the context too, is again, go back to like a Thai officer, or even the Indians, or any, you know, a lot of these countries that are in sort of like these areas of competition on the periphery between regional hegemon's, is you speak to these people.

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• 41:38Speaker 03

  Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. And they'll be like, yes, we want the, we want America here. We want to engage with the Americans. But the problem is, we don't know how long term your commitment is. And you know, go back to like that Thai officer, like the Thai officer would be basically telling our class. He's like, he's like, look, I'm here in America. I'm here. You know, I, I love this experience, everything about this. But at the end of the day, China was in our neighborhood 2,000 years ago. And China will probably be in our neighborhood 2,000 years in the future.

• 42:14Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 42:14Speaker 03

  America has barely been here and they prob, there's a good chance they probably won't be here in the future.

• 42:19Jack Murphy?

  I'd like to just ping you a little bit on, you know, what makes for a bad partnership versus a good one. Like, have you read, uh, I think Frank Sobchak's new book, Training for Victory?

• 42:31Speaker 03

  No.

• 42:31Jack Murphy?

  Okay, so he has five case studies in it and he, he points to some positive examples, you know, Colombia, El Salvador, Philippines. Maybe you could, I would probably throw South Korea in there.

• 42:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:43Jack Murphy?

  Oh, why are these ones effective? Why do they work? Whereas the Afghanistans, the Araks, the Somalis don't.

• 42:50Speaker 03

  I mean, you got a leadership in these countries that want the same thing we want. So you got a, you know, good coordination of interests. They're not going to undercut your effort.

• 43:05Speaker 03

  Versus like Iraq, Afghanistan, you have members of the government, I mean, I worked in Somalia.

• 43:13Speaker 03

  You know, Somalia is like the defense minister's cousin was Al Shabab. How's that guy gonna be credible?

• 43:19Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 43:20Speaker 03

  And it's not that that guy hates the project that you have. He has to think about his family, about who's gonna be the strongest sheriff on the ground. So he's gonna hedge his bets. He's gonna be passing information to his relatives, you know. So he's part of the problem. Same thing in Afghanistan.

• 43:44Speaker 03

  You know, it's like the thing that you want to change, the people who are in charge in that country are part of the problem.

• 43:51Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 43:52Speaker 03

  If they change, they're gonna be out of a job.

• 43:54Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 43:56Speaker 03

  In these other places, El Salvador, Colombia, South Korea.

• 44:03Speaker 03

  They want the same thing. So if you think about those circles, like here's our interests, here's their interests.

• 44:09Jack Murphy?

  They intersect.

• 44:11Speaker 03

  There's a lot of intersection there. You know, I think that some of these other cases could say same thing about some of the programs that we studied in Sahel Africa, like Mali, Niger, Chad. Woo, it's like circles are completely apart. I mean, there's this film from the early 1990s, The Crying Game. And it's about two people love each other. But it turns out that the other partner's like very different than the guy thought.

• 44:43Speaker 04

  Not so different today.

• 44:44Speaker 03

  In a weird perverse way, you have to look it up on, you know, check the Wikipedia or whatever. Oh, wait, but we can't imagine ourselves not being in that relationship. Everybody else is saying that's a terrible relationship. That that partner's not right for you. And, you know, that's the way we were, I think, in a lot of these relationships. I mean, I think for the future, you know, back to our research and, and, you know, stuff that we do, part of it is trying to identify what are good partners? Like, how do you pick those relationships, develop those relationships in a wise direction?

• 45:28Speaker 03

  So that, you know, it's not that you have to love each other, but you have similar lines of effort. And that is a genuine relationship, rather than trying too hard and deceiving yourself that, oh, I love you, but I can change you.

• 45:52Speaker 04

  Right.

• 45:52Speaker 03

  It's like, that never works. Well, and I want to interject on this point because, because you mentioned, obviously, like the case studies about, you know, even like Colombia. And what makes our, our research very different from anyone else that does this for the most part, usually most people just go talk to US and NATO advisors.

• 46:10Speaker 04

  Right.

• 46:10Speaker 03

  And just ask questions. We actually go talk to the other side and be like, hey, what's it like to work with the Americans?

• 46:16Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 46:17Speaker 03

  And then we develop a little bit of rapport and then they- It's a context thing, you know, it's like I'm like the squirrel on the ground or whatever. It's like, you know, it's like, let me see, you know, how's this working out for you guys on, you know, from your perspective? And, and so to that point, you know, I actually have asked, I, I actually asked a Colombian general, why did our efforts to train and equip you work better than compared to Iraq and Afghanistan? And he gave me such a simple, simple answer that I still have yet to actually write this down or publish it because I just don't know how to put it because it was such a simple answer. He's just like, he's like, first off, we're just closer to your country. We are geographically closer to your country.

• 47:02Jack Murphy?

  And culturally, they're closer too.

• 47:03Speaker 03

  That's the fucking best part. He's like, he's like number two. And he's like, and he's like, number, that's the fucking best part. He's like, number two. And he's like, we're just culturally more similar than you are to Iraq and Afghanistan.

• 47:14Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 47:14Speaker 03

  And I'm like, that's it? And he goes, he's like, as far as I'm concerned,

• 47:20Speaker 03

  geography and culture. That was literally like the Colombian general's answer as to why we were effective in training and equipping the Colombians. You know what? We also had the same adversary. We wanted the same thing.

• 47:31Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 47:32Speaker 03

  We wanted the same outcome.

• 47:34Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 47:34Speaker 03

  And, you know, I think that looking at some of these other relationships.

• 47:40Jack Murphy?

  The, the, the real kick in the balls though is though, after we have all this information and there are people like you that study it in depth, like, we still feel like we need to have our sphere of influence in these countries. And I mean, the Middle East, we just can't quit you. We're, we're the, we're in the ultimate toxic relationship.

• 47:57Speaker 03

  I mean, my, my message, America, everybody listening here, America, you love too much.

• 48:07Speaker 03

  Are you calling America a home?

• 48:08Jack Murphy?

  She's not gonna love you back.

• 48:10Speaker 03

  They're not gonna love you back. This is why, you know, Cold War gets a bad rap.

• 48:17Speaker 04

  She's just not that into you.

• 48:19Speaker 03

  Cold War gets a bad rap a lot of times. But the Cold War was the last time we had to compete. And one of the things about competition is it focuses your mind. And

• 48:32Speaker 03

  that's the point at which you say, what are we really interested in? What is our strategy? And, you know, part of the problem, I think, with a lot of what we've done in the last thirty years is we haven't actually had a strategy. We're loving too much.

• 48:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:54Speaker 03

  And, you know, it's like, that isn't... Like, when I'm teaching my students, you know, about development, American military strategy, or whatever, one of the things I keep telling them is, you know, it's like, when you fight, if you're gonna go fight for something, you have to be able to explain to people, what are you fighting for?

• 49:14Speaker 04

  Right.

• 49:15Speaker 03

  That is your strategy. What do you actually want? And how do you justify that to the American people? And, you know, I think that gets at the core of developing these kinds of relationships. If you know what you're fighting for, and you understand what your partner is interested in, this is where you develop genuine relationships. You know, Colombia, you know, beating the FARC rebels.

• 49:46Speaker 04

  Right.

• 49:47Speaker 03

  We had different interests than the Colombian government did, but we understood each other. And we were fighting for the same thing. Like, we're gonna beat those rebels. Colombians were good partners, not a hundred percent, but, you know, it's like, we were there, we could back them, they could understand us, and knew that, you know...

• 50:10Jack Murphy?

  It seems like in some of those countries, Colombia and the Philippines are two that come to mind where it's actually preferable and good that they're like, hey, we're a sovereign nation, we don't want you guys in here with all these troops and stuff, we just want a little help, you know?

• 50:24Speaker 03

  Well, and if you're fighting for the same thing, I think you get a partner that's a lot more confident.

• 50:29Speaker 04

  Right.

• 50:30Speaker 03

  And, you know, it's good for us to make these kinds of strategic decisions. Cause we don't want to waste our energies with bad partners. You know, I, I hear all the time, it's like, oh, Russians are in this country or that country. Central African Republic, we should go do something about it. What? Central African Republic? I guess I know where that is. It's central. It's in Africa. It's a, well, it's not a republic. But, you know, look, if the Russians want to be there, good for them. You know, it's like, all right, I think that's a stra- strategic win for us. To see how that works out for them.

• 51:14Speaker 03

  You know, let them make the mistake. Right. Not us make the mistake.

• 51:18Speaker 04

  China's learning that now too with their, you know, with their expansionism, with, with spending money in places where people are your friend today and they're not, you know, and they won't be tomorrow.

• 51:27Speaker 03

  Let them learn the lesson we learned.

• 51:29Speaker 04

  What, the, um, uh, sorry, I lost my train of thought. It's, it's, uh, it's fascinating though. How do you feel as though China and Russia will be worried about the next Cold War when, and again, our hawks don't do it right either. In the sense of people like the Houthis are just running rampant, uh, and basically doing what they want.

• 51:56Speaker 03

  Well, no, so I, I like how you posed that question because for Russia and China, they don't want us in Cold War 2.0 mode. They don't. They like us. They like us continuing on this like this, this path, this self deception and lie that.

• 52:15Jack Murphy?

  The rules based order that every foreign affairs magazine talks about.

• 52:19Speaker 03

  China and Russia want us to keep fucking believing this.

• 52:26Speaker 03

  And unfortunately.

• 52:27Jack Murphy?

  They're changing the rules.

• 52:28Speaker 03

  Yes, they're changing the rules. Foreign affairs, foreign policy keeps publishing these articles. Each admin seems to keep hiring these people that keep pushing this narrative.

• 52:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:37Speaker 03

  That we have to keep doubling down on rules based order. And that's why it takes me back to this folk in the road. It's World War III or Cold War 2.0. If you don't, if you don't make that choice, you're gonna just fucking lose it all. And that's, that's my concern about.

• 52:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:52Speaker 03

  About this rules based order in Russia and China, which is, and also they have an incentive to actually shape the information space and influence operations, et cetera, to basically convince us that these things aren't worth actually fighting for.

• 53:04Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 53:05Speaker 03

  Right? So anytime, anytime any of you out there read an article saying like, you know, no American should die in Ukraine, no American should die in Taiwan, no American should die in country X.

• 53:17Speaker 03

  If you're Russian or Chinese, you want to promote that narrative.

• 53:20Speaker 04

  Right.

• 53:21Speaker 03

  And that, that.

• 53:22Speaker 04

  If Russia or China didn't pay them to say that, they should.

• 53:26Speaker 03

  Yes. And, and that's, that's the other part of this competition. Right. They want America to back off. Yes. Yes. You know, it's the United States. I mean, this is our critical juncture. Do we wanna compete?

• 53:37Speaker 04

  Right.

• 53:38Speaker 03

  Do we wanna back off?

• 53:39Speaker 04

  And, and, and not just back off, but stay like completely disorganized. It's like we're walking down the street and we keep on getting hit by random people in the face and we're like, oh, just you wait. And then we just keep on walking and, and nobody, like, people are not taking it seriously.

• 53:58Speaker 03

  Look, it's a hard road for me. I mean, I spend time in Ukraine.

• 54:03Speaker 03

  You know, it's like, I'm the guy gets to go, look, what's foreign military training doing for Ukrainian forces in frontline? And that is competition.

• 54:15Speaker 03

  That's competition. That's a major war in Europe.

• 54:17Speaker 04

  Right.

• 54:18Speaker 03

  Biggest war since 1945. It is bloody. It's very different than wars that Americans have fought. And when I'm there, I feel like I'm in the future. And then I come back here.

• 54:34Speaker 03

  Like, I don't know, you know, I'm visiting a dream world.

• 54:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:37Speaker 03

  Well, e- even a- anywhere in Eastern Europe, they're like, you know, any part of Eastern Europe, you know, Poland, Romania, Hungary, it's like, people are, you know, people are being killed by fucking Russian ballistic missiles a few hundred miles east of you, and yet it is business as normal in Eastern Europe. Look, I just came back, I, I, Wednesday, I came back from Ukraine.

• 55:00Speaker 03

  You know, part of our work, uh, what would I call it, embedding or whatever, I'm, I'm observing. Battalion, sixty days, five percent killed.

• 55:14Speaker 04

  Man.

• 55:14Speaker 03

  You look at the blood, I mean, I, it, it is hard.

• 55:20Speaker 03

  I mean, I, I don't know, how do I describe in words, you know, it's cold, there's snow.

• 55:29Speaker 03

  It's, it's, it's terrible, I mean. Americans have not experienced this since the First World War, I don't think they experienced in the Second World War. Like, the way that combat is organized, the way that people fight. In the twenty-first century, in countries that are developed, that have technology that we have. And, you know, we live here, we live in a dream world, and. You know, I look at competition, competition will find you.

• 56:05Speaker 03

  You don't have discretion about whether you can opt out of this, it will find you. And, you know, it's like our choice at this moment, how are we gonna deal with this issue? How do you prepare for defense? How do you prepare to protect our national interests? And what Frankie said, you know, that there's a foreign interest in sort of seducing us into this complacency, that, you know, it's like the nineteen thirties, you can opt out.

• 56:40Speaker 04

  Right.

• 56:41Speaker 03

  And, it will find you. You can opt out for a while.

• 56:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:48Speaker 03

  But it will find you. And, and the best example of this, actually, it, I mean, I'm, I'm glad you guys brought this all up, was because I submitted an.

• 56:55Speaker 05

  An article essay to like one of these traditional academic or not, you know, a foreign. I'm not gonna name the outlet because you're gonna, you're gonna laugh at the fucking response. I basically wrote an essay basically saying that with what's going on in Syria right now. This is a great opportunity for the US to basically make a better deal with the new Syrian rebel government. To push the Russian bases out of all of Syria.

• 57:25Speaker 03

  That's right, the NATO aligned Islamic State.

• 57:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 57:29Speaker 03

  But, but, but that's important because you know what? Do we care how Syrians rule themselves? Do we really care?

• 57:37Speaker 05

  We can't.

• 57:38Speaker 03

  What their domestic policies are?

• 57:42Speaker 03

  Is that our national interest?

• 57:44Speaker 05

  No.

• 57:44Speaker 03

  Or is our national interest where they fit?

• 57:48Speaker 05

  Right.

• 57:49Speaker 03

  Bigger geopolitical puzzle?

• 57:50Speaker 05

  No, and this way you guys will fucking love this shit. I don't even know, there's, uh, besides the two main Russian bases of in, in Tartus, like the big naval base and the big airbase up there by Latakia, there's almost about eighty Russian bases throughout the entire country of Syria, right? And most of those are all just a little outpost, little bases.

• 58:12Speaker 05

  The response I got to this article from a very high end outlet was, and my only argument was basically Washington needs to make a deal with the Syrian rebels to basically push the Russians out of Syria altogether. Give them a better deal than whatever Putin's gonna offer.

• 58:30Speaker 05

  To, to which if, if you are a fan of the Mediterranean or Europe in general, you do not want Russia having bases in the Mediterranean.

• 58:37Speaker 03

  That's, that's the way the game is played.

• 58:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:40Speaker 03

  And. You gotta compete.

• 58:42Speaker 05

  And the fucking response I got was

• 58:46Speaker 05

  what makes you think Washington can tell Syria what to do with?

• 58:49Speaker 03

  bases in their country.

• 58:51Jack Murphy?

  Well, we got a bunch in there now in Darazor in El Tanaf.

• 58:56Speaker 03

  Well, you know what? And I was just so, I didn't know how to respond to this. I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. So we're this great American military power economic, like we're this great, great American power.

• 59:08Jack Murphy?

  Hands off on everything.

• 59:09Speaker 03

  You know what Hillary Clinton? It's over. We're moving on. It's time to compete. But that's what, but that like, that's a great example when we're bitching about, about, about foreign affairs, foreign policy and other sort of high end outlets that just keep pushing the same narrative of like, like, who do you think we are telling the Syrians? And it's like, we're not telling them, we're just accepting great power politics in reality. Yeah. You know, it's like I read foreign affairs or foreign policy and I think, oh, this is really boring. It's the same, it's the same stuff over and over and over again.

• 59:44Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, we, yeah, we repeat the same lessons.

• 59:46Speaker 03

  You know, it's a different world and you know, Frankie and I, we're studying foreign military training. It's about partnerships.

• 59:55Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 59:56Speaker 03

  And partnerships with, you know, partners and allies, it's about competing. And what we want to do is like, our core mission is how to compete better. I mean, that's our little tab that, that we gave out, train harder. Train harder, maybe. Well, it's actually. We'll say from an academic perspective. Advise harder, Will. Advise harder. Advise harder. Sorry. I'm thinking more. He's had a few drinks. I'm, I'm thinking more in the field, you know, I'm thinking about training because I'm, you know, it's like, got to go observe. But you know, it's like advise harder and, and you know, it's like, what we have to do is we have to recall an old craft that we had.

• 1:00:41Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:42Speaker 03

  And you know, we've had a generation, we've had a vacation from history, which has been wonderful.

• 1:00:49Speaker 03

  And I wish the world would continue that way. But, but again, it's like, it will come for you.

• 1:00:55Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:00:56Speaker 03

  If, if you don't prepare for it, you know, it will come for you.

• 1:01:00Jack Murphy?

  I, um, I, I, I want to dive deeper into Ukraine because you guys both have recent experience there. Um, but one, one other thing I, I'd like to ask you about, I, you know, I talked to somebody who worked out of an embassy in Eastern Europe. And he pointed out to me the, the difference between how Americans do foreign military sales and the Russians. Like they'll come to us and say, we want like three black clock helicopters or three F-16s.

• 1:01:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, we'll say, okay, three years from now.

• 1:01:26Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:01:27Speaker 03

  If you're lucky.

• 1:01:27Jack Murphy?

  Where the Russians will say, we'll have it to you next week and you can pay us three years.

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  Give us a list. What do you need?

• 1:01:32Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. What, what do you got? How does that influence these relationships?

• 1:01:36Speaker 03

  Ah, it, it is the bane of our existence and, and it's, I, I'm glad you mentioned like the FMS part. So that's for military sales. Uh, because

• 1:01:48Speaker 03

  the Ukraine war has exposed over the last almost three years now, uh, this sort of, uh,

• 1:01:56Speaker 03

  disjuncture, if you will, in regards to what America says it can do and what it can actually do. And, and when I, I say that, I mean that in a sense that

• 1:02:07Speaker 03

  it's very clear if we.

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• 1:03:36Jack Murphy?

  Want to actually give a country a weapon system or capability? We can. We can't. It's not that we can't, we just don't want to.

• 1:03:43Speaker 04

  So this...

• 1:03:43Jack Murphy?

  Yes.

• 1:03:44Speaker 04

  This, we've been speculating, and it's pure speculation. We've been speculating about this for a couple of years now as to whether there is an element within the government who sees this as an opportunity to bleed Russia and to drain Russia's resources, and so has been slow-rolling the armament, you know, giving Ukraine weapons, but not necessarily what they need to actually get aggressive.

• 1:04:15Speaker 03

  I don't know, I mean, it's a...

• 1:04:17Speaker 04

  It's speculation.

• 1:04:18Speaker 03

  No, no, interesting question. I mean, you know, so if I try to get in the head of President Sullivan, and I'm trying to think...

• 1:04:26Jack Murphy?

  Leave Jake Sullivan alone, Will.

• 1:04:28Speaker 03

  You know, it's like, okay, slow escalation, you know, why don't we give the Ukrainians more to fight and so forth? I think that that's, that's being too rational in a way. I think that, that that is assuming that there's a larger plan. I think that, like, US policy in terms of equipping Ukrainians has been more reactive.

• 1:04:58Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:04:59Speaker 03

  That, you know, it's like, okay, the Russian invasion, you know, the full-scale invasion, they thought in Washington this was gonna be a three-day war.

• 1:05:09Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:05:10Speaker 03

  And, you know, it turned out that Ukrainians resisted. And what they've done is they've sort of played this catch-up to try to adapt. And, you know, it's like they draw their own red lines and so forth. I mean, if I try to get in their heads... I I would worry about red lines because I mean, this has pretty high consequences.

• 1:05:35Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:05:36Speaker 03

  I mean, Russia's a nuclear armed power, so that's important, but at the same time, I I think that saying that they're trying to bleed Russia as part of some kind of long term strategic plan gives them too much credit.

• 1:05:49Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:05:50Speaker 03

  Because I don't think they really have a strategy. I think that what they're doing is they're playing this sort of, um, you know, chapter by chapter and adapting as as Ukrainians go on and there's, I mean, this is part of the problem that we've had since the end of the Cold War, there's not a coherent strategic vision.

• 1:06:15Speaker 04

  Right, well.

• 1:06:16Speaker 03

  Because if I ask the the Sullivan administration, where does this end? What is your ends? Like, why are you doing this? I have a hard time answering that.

• 1:06:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:30Speaker 03

  You know, and that's that's a big problem. And again, it's only, I'll say it just real quick.

• 1:06:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:34Speaker 03

  I mean, the average American taxpayer may be watching. Thus far, it's only cost us forty seven cents per day per average American taxpayer to do this. We have weakened Russia, we have. I mean, I'm I'm totally for weakened in Russia. Like, I'm the guy who goes to Ukraine. I'm the guy who does the frontline thing. And, you know, so I'm kind of like irretrievably biased.

• 1:06:59Speaker 04

  There's a human cost to it that, and and I'm not saying, I'm not at all saying that Ukraine should roll over to spare, you know, their their young men and women. I'm saying that, you know, America, he he needs to shit or get off the pot sometimes, like, and and the thing is, when you say that there's no strategy, why would it? We couldn't even develop a strategy in a twenty year GWOT. Like, you know, people are kind of fretting over the idea of recalling generals and asking them, what did you do during the GWOT to earn your money?

• 1:07:32Speaker 03

  Oh, no, oh, no, no, that's a fantastic point, because nothing pisses me off more than any time I have to go to like a ceremony, or any sort of like formal, sort of like military, or an academic thing. And they're like, and this person was in command of the training and equipment mission to the Iraqis or the Afghans, where he successfully, and it's like, no, no, no, no. Yes, that's the Bronze Star he fucking got for doing that. But it was all built on a, on a, on a, on a house of lies. The amount of fucking people in Iraq and Afghanistan that submitted, as far as I'm concerned, yeah, false fucking mission reports. Yes, yes, you did train, you know, 10,000 Afghans or 10,000 Iraqis, but the quality you omitted intentionally.

• 1:08:16Jack Murphy?

  That's an entire generation of field officers who are groomed to believe it's okay to lie to their superiors.

• 1:08:23Speaker 04

  And, you know, and it's not.

• 1:08:25Speaker 03

  Because they're like, it's not lying if you omit. That's the fucking.

• 1:08:28Jack Murphy?

  Playing the game.

• 1:08:29Speaker 03

  That's the fucking problem, and I saw that when I was in Afghanistan in 2020. The amount of times I would see emails come out about how great the mission's going with the Afghans when I was in Kandahar in 2020.

• 1:08:40Speaker 05

  Well, that's a, that's a, that's a luxury, that's a luxury of dominance.

• 1:08:44Speaker 04

  It's, it's how, it's the job now, because, you know, you can't blame Bush, or Obama, or Trump, or, you know, or whatever. I mean, presidents don't know everything, they have to rely on, you know, on the people.

• 1:08:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, but also, I mean, you can lie when it doesn't matter.

• 1:09:01Speaker 04

  Right, right. In the bar, when you're talking to that girl.

• 1:09:04Speaker 05

  What does it matter? I mean, it's like, you know, I mean, ultimately, when we left Afghanistan, should we have left 10 years earlier? I don't know, would have been different, probably, I don't, you know, there'd be fewer Americans killed in that country.

• 1:09:21Speaker 03

  Did the American way of life change after August 21?

• 1:09:24Speaker 05

  What was the outcome?

• 1:09:26Speaker 03

  Did our lives actually change?

• 1:09:27Speaker 05

  Taliban government in Afghanistan, are we worried about that?

• 1:09:31Jack Murphy?

  Nope.

• 1:09:32Speaker 05

  Does that satisfy us? Is that a problem for us?

• 1:09:35Speaker 04

  We're funding them, right? I thought we're giving them money, so.

• 1:09:38Speaker 05

  Right. So, you know, maybe we'll buy their Soviet weapons and give them to Ukraine.

• 1:09:43Speaker 03

  And we need a lithium to make fucking batteries anyways. There's a trillion lithium in Afghanistan.

• 1:09:48Speaker 05

  So, you know, there you go. That's luxury. I mean, that is a vacation from strategy.

• 1:09:54Jack Murphy?

  Right. Let's, let's jump into Ukraine.

• 1:09:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:57Speaker 05

  Uh, yes.

• 1:09:58Jack Murphy?

  Tell us.

• 1:09:59Speaker 05

  Favorite topic.

• 1:09:59Jack Murphy?

  Let's, let's start, let's start sort of at the beginning-ish. The wall comes down, Ukraine is, uh, sort of, uh, for a long time, on the periphery of the European community.

• 1:10:10Speaker 04

  Oh, we're going back to eighty-nine.

• 1:10:12Jack Murphy?

  Like, yeah, if we, if we start there, and where, where America's, where America starts a relationship with now what is a sovereign independent state, um, and we start moving forward from there, and Ukraine's relationship, like you said, some of these countries that are pitted between two great powers, Ukraine smack there between the West and Russia. How does that relationship begin to develop?

• 1:10:34Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, I mean, well, at least from a US perspective, you have the California National Guard have a relationship with them through the State Partnership Program, also known as the SPP, beginning in nineteen ninety-three. So, in a weird way, and it was primarily air National Guard relationship, so the Ukrainian Air Force, basically over, over three decades, developed a pretty good relationship with the California Air National Guard. And when we say developed a really good relationship, this is probably a good template of how, if you want to do a security systems cooperation, cooperation correctly, you go all in. And this may be uncomfortable, like, like for a couple of people to listen, you know, for everyone that is listening to this right now, and the viewers,

• 1:11:16Speaker 03

  but like, when I say they all, like, they went all in, like, like, the current wing commander in California that is in charge of this mission to Ukraine, he speaks Ukrainian. Uh, and.

• 1:11:31Speaker 03

  Many pilots and other sort of, you know, air national guard personnel have married Ukrainian people they have met while doing these missions in Ukraine. So they have fully gone in and I'm and I'm not and I don't I don't think we're trying to say that we have to go like full T E Lawrence. In these countries, but in a weird way, you actually kind of have to if if you think this matters and you want it to matter and you actually want to have impact and you want to. You want to impact an adversary intentionally, you kind of actually need to identify people in the U S. Who can be your T E Lawrence in that country? And for just micro pennies on the dollar. Just devastate an adversary. With. Minimal escalation.

• 1:12:16Speaker 05

  Well, that's, I mean, that's back to the question of are we using Ukraine to mess up the Russians?

• 1:12:22Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:12:23Speaker 05

  And to what ends?

• 1:12:24Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:12:25Speaker 05

  Yeah. And I mean, you know, I spent some time in Ukraine and.

• 1:12:31Speaker 05

  So forth and I don't know, you know, I'm kind of conflicted because. I want to. You know, be a hundred percent with Ukrainian brothers and.

• 1:12:44Speaker 05

  You know, I've had sort of on the ground experience with them. I just came back. Wednesday from. You know, a place and it was cold and. Changed my clothes after ten days and. Still didn't smell because. That's what it's like when it's really cold, you don't sweat. You know, but.

• 1:13:09Speaker 05

  You know, what are the Ukrainians fighting for? And should we care? I think they're fighting for their freedom. I think that that. Impulse has become a lot stronger because. One of the things about being invaded by Russia is that. Even if they're Ukrainians who had a kind of Soviet mentality. That being invaded by somebody and them kicking you in the face. It's kind of like you begin to think like. Maybe we are people. Maybe we are different.

• 1:13:43Speaker 03

  Right, yeah.

• 1:13:45Speaker 05

  And, you know, like, that's one thing that's really driving this.

• 1:13:49Jack Murphy?

  The, the, the famous, you know, Max Weber quote, that war makes states and states make war. It was Tilly. It was Tilly?

• 1:13:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, but boy, that is really, that's a big thing. Cause, cause, you know, I go there, you know, linguistically, sort of my preparations Russian. Ukrainians not same language as Russian. And, you know, you can understand stuff across the languages. So you think, well, what's, what's really your difference? I mean, it's, it's like Northern Ireland and Ireland. It's like, what, that's all it is? You guys all kind of look alike and sound alike and so forth. It's like, what's your difference? And, you know, it's like war. I mean, that's one thing that really focuses people's minds.

• 1:14:41Speaker 05

  So I think our dilemma, like with our relationship, is that, you know, there's a special foundational thing that's going on with the Ukrainians. But for the Americans, one of the things they have to decide is what's in it for them? You know, do we want to support this not out of sentiment, but out of our national interest? Does this help us? Do we, you know, are we better off as Americans if the Ukrainians are able to resist Russia?

• 1:15:24Speaker 05

  And, you know, for me, that's one of the things I'm really conflicted about. Because, like, I want to support Ukrainians. I mean, I go there partly to support them. But sometimes I think.

• 1:15:40Speaker 05

  I don't know, you know, I mean, is this our fight?

• 1:15:46Speaker 05

  I think it is, but when I think that, I think it's kind of about values. But if I'm more hard headed, I also have to think about, you know, geopolitics, where are we in the world?

• 1:16:03Speaker 05

  How does this help us? How does this protect our freedom, our prosperity? That's a harder question to answer. This has been part of the problem of the Biden administration. They've been supporting Ukraine, but they can't tell the American people why.

• 1:16:21Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:16:22Speaker 03

  So what we call it.

• 1:16:23Speaker 05

  That's a big problem.

• 1:16:24Speaker 03

  And which is why like, like we've written articles about like, this is the anti-strategy. You know, like the Biden admin has basically been doing this, this anti-strategy, which is basically, you don't, you are so afraid of escalation, you allow Moscow to escalate.

• 1:16:39Jack Murphy?

  That was the next thing I wanted to ask you guys to get into is this asinine conversation that we've been having for years now about the escalatory ladder and off-ramps. We need to help Putin find off-ramps. Why the fuck do I need to help some foreign dictator find off-ramps? Explain that to me.

• 1:16:54Speaker 05

  Look, I, you know, I mean, okay, I, I got a chance to take a look into Russia the last time I was there. Really sucks.

• 1:17:03Speaker 03

  Kursk is not as pretty as you think it is, apparently.

• 1:17:05Speaker 05

  Parts that, you know, you don't have to have border control.

• 1:17:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, boy, you know, you blow past 20 red lines and so forth, so you find out what, you know, the adversary is actually made of.

• 1:17:24Speaker 05

  But at some point, there is a red line.

• 1:17:26Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:17:27Speaker 05

  And, you know, if I do try to put myself in the head of people in the White House, I think, yeah, you know, I mean, maybe the Russians don't even know the red line.

• 1:17:38Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:17:39Speaker 05

  I go over there, I hope that one day is not, you know, 3,000 degrees and intense glare.

• 1:17:46Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:46Speaker 05

  Cause that's part of Russian. Doctrine.

• 1:17:50Speaker 03

  But.

• 1:17:50Speaker 05

  You know escalate to de escalate.

• 1:17:52Speaker 03

  But but even Russian nuclear doctrine right now is so like it's already been crossed. So like, for example, you know, in theory, Russia per its its original nuclear doctrine, they should they now should have been allowed to nuke Ukraine because you invaded Russian lands.

• 1:18:12Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:18:13Speaker 03

  Per their original, but then they updated it about two, three weeks ago after we made our announcement about allowing long range ATACMS strikes. And I have to use long range because as an Air Force pilot, the idea of launching something three hundred miles is not long range. That's a day trip. Or for me as an Air Force pilot, that's an hour or two of flying.

• 1:18:32Speaker 05

  That's an intermediate range.

• 1:18:33Speaker 03

  Yes. And so the reason why I find that, you know, and these narratives, these this context matters is because when we talk about this and we talk about escalation escalate de escalate, the fact that even in response to this these ATACMS that we basically said, yes, Ukraine, you can shoot them into Russia changed its its nuclear doctrine again. Ukraine had already crossed like the red line with Russia per their nuclear doctrine, which is they should have been legally allowed per their own doctrine to nuke the Ukrainians. They basically came up with new doctrine within two days, basically saying like, well, an attack on Belarus is an attack on Russia, so we can use nukes. And then they the other big thing that I thought was important about it about their

• 1:19:16Speaker 03

  new doctrine was basically if a country attacks Russia and they are trained and equipped and backed by a nuclear armed power, so that basically now makes the Brits, the French and the Americans complicit.

• 1:19:30Speaker 05

  Well, so what it does is it creates a riddle.

• 1:19:32Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:19:33Speaker 05

  And this is this is part of the problem of modern strategy. So the riddle is you have a, you know, sort of second or quasi third world country. It's got twenty million more people than Mexico, but its economy is smaller, not dynamic, uh, you know, has a hard time adapting innovation, resource dependent, but it's got nuclear weapons.

• 1:20:01Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:20:02Speaker 05

  And you're challenging it.

• 1:20:06Speaker 05

  Is it gonna fold? Is it gonna be third world about the whole thing? Or at some point, is it gonna stand up for itself? Is it gonna be backed in a corner, get desperate? Do something that is gonna be extremely unpleasant?

• 1:20:24Speaker 03

  And again, remember, Russia basically has an economy the size of Texas. They just happen to have six thousand nukes. And that's-

• 1:20:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's not in the top ten economies in the world.

• 1:20:35Jack Murphy?

  I mean, I know I speak like a little cavalierly when I say some of these things, but do you think that's the logic of the government? If there isn't a underlying logic that we are gonna take these little baby steps?

• 1:20:48Speaker 05

  We're taking baby steps. At some point, there is a red line. I think for the Russians.

• 1:20:52Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. But we don't know where that is necessarily, so we're feeling it out.

• 1:20:55Speaker 05

  And that's the problem is that I don't think they know where it is. And that is, that is, that is actually a big problem. And, and, you know, thinking about assistance to the Ukrainians, I don't think the Ukrainians are gonna go invade Moscow. So, you know, I think that, that, that would probably be a real red line. But, you know, were Russian armies to collapse? From exhaustion at some point? You know, domestic turmoil? I mean, here's a country that basically experienced a coup attempt a year ago. I mean, I was in Donbass region in Ukraine when, when-

• 1:21:40Jack Murphy?

  Prigozhin made his march.

• 1:21:41Speaker 05

  Prigozhin was doing his march. I mean, that was, that was weird, even for Russians.

• 1:21:48Speaker 05

  That was deeply weird. And, and, you know, it's like the passive aggressiveness of Russian politics, that they could just like paper that over.

• 1:21:56Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:58Speaker 05

  Blow the guy out.

• 1:22:00Jack Murphy?

  Putin eulogized him and said like, Prigozhin was a man with a complicated life.

• 1:22:04Speaker 04

  I, I feel like they should have had some folk singers marching along, you know, like, ah. Yeah, it's weird.

• 1:22:11Speaker 05

  Like Dune? But, you know, looking at world politics, I mean, this is kind of like this weird, fragile situation because- You know, we're moving into year three of the, you know, full-scale invasion war in Ukraine, which has been largely a stasis, sort of the stalemate. But that's not sustainable.

• 1:22:32Speaker 04

  Right, yeah.

• 1:22:33Speaker 05

  And, you know, what I would ask of, I think, the incoming political leadership in Washington is, what is the strategy? Like, what are we in this for?

• 1:22:43Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:22:44Speaker 05

  Because I think to say that we're not in it, that's not the correct answer. Because as I say, it's like, competition will find you. You can decide to opt out, but it will come for you.

• 1:23:00Speaker 04

  Well, and honestly, you know, when you talk about, is it our fight? And is it in our interest? Those are good questions. Because the idea of if Canada invaded the United States, if we're, you know, more powerful than the United States and invaded, are we really different people? I mean, they're way too fucking polite.

• 1:23:17Speaker 05

  Well, no, well, no. We'll figure that out.

• 1:23:19Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:23:20Speaker 05

  We will decide that question. But the other questions I have for Ukraine is...

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• 1:24:56Speaker 05

  Are they the right partner? I mean,

• 1:25:01Speaker 05

  you know, my Ukrainian friends are hopefully not watching this and excommunicate me, but like that society is not fully mobilized.

• 1:25:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:25:10Speaker 05

  And, and, you know, if I'm in front lines, you know, like freezing my ass off

• 1:25:16Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:25:17Speaker 05

  last week or whatever this time.

• 1:25:20Speaker 05

  And I'm thinking about, it's like, they're hipsters in Ukraine, they're not here.

• 1:25:24Speaker 04

  Are, are they treating it basically like people in the States treated the G Y? That is something going on someplace else.

• 1:25:31Speaker 05

  It's more than that because they're getting attacked every day in their cities.

• 1:25:34Jack Murphy?

  And they're getting, they are getting drafted.

• 1:25:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:25:36Speaker 05

  And they are getting drafted. And, you know, but, but there are ways out for people there. So when I think about, I'm looking for a partner. I want to

• 1:25:52Speaker 05

  figure out if our interests and their interests align. One of the things I want to see is, are they actually committed? Like, am I giving assistance to a society that wants to push hardest? And, you know, I think that the question for me in Ukraine is they have not fully mobilized.

• 1:26:13Jack Murphy?

  The question I want to pose to you guys about Ukraine is one that, you know, we had this conversation with Mike Vickers, talking about during the Reagan administration and, you know, we had this sort of strategy with the arming the Mujahideen during the 1980s of,

• 1:26:30Speaker 05

  Oh, yes, we did.

• 1:26:31Jack Murphy?

  Let's deny, let's, let's deny the Soviets an easy victory in Afghanistan. But at eventually some more aggressive people at the CIA and President Reagan had this question, okay, this is nice. How do we win it? And that's my question about Ukraine. How do we go from bleeding the Russians to degrading the Russians? How do we win this thing? That's what I want to know.

• 1:26:52Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, depends on your, your time horizon. I mean, we could say we want Ukraine to win in Ukraine's terms. And what Ukraine's terms would be, at least among some of them is, there is no Russia.

• 1:27:10Speaker 05

  Russia is like a big, you know, complicated knot. And you press on it and, you know, it's a big multi-ethnic empire. And you create tensions in it, you know, through aggressive war in Ukraine.

• 1:27:30Speaker 05

  And, and the knot falls apart.

• 1:27:35Speaker 05

  But I'm sitting in Washington and I'm thinking about a longer time horizon and I'm thinking about China.

• 1:27:42Speaker 05

  Russia might actually be an ally, or not an ally, a partner. Yeah. Because Russia is like one tenth the size of China.

• 1:27:52Speaker 05

  Its partnership with China now is very dangerous for Russia. Because China could swallow Russia. So I think if I want to contain China, I don't wanna, I don't want Russia to get really ground down. You know, but on the other hand, I don't want a nuclear armed power like Russia dictating some settlement that involves the transfer of territory of a non-nuclear power. Like that is also a very unpleasant world. Cause what that tells me is, you know, we're back to some pre nineteen forty-five Yeah, yeah. where you can just do conquest. Yeah.

• 1:28:37Speaker 05

  And, you know, I think about all the other countries in the world that might be eyeing the territory of their neighbor or whatever. And it's like, that's pretty ugly. So, you know, I want to deter Russia from doing that. But I also want to preserve the option in the future of a Russia that is my partner.

• 1:29:02Speaker 05

  Against China.

• 1:29:03Speaker 04

  Like World War Two where they were.

• 1:29:05Speaker 05

  It's like, look, we're partnered with Stalin.

• 1:29:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:29:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, no, no, and and this is.

• 1:29:10Speaker 05

  Cause we had a greater threat.

• 1:29:11Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:29:12Speaker 03

  And and and we've actually, and again, I've I've I've done sort of like mini war games about. Uh. What would the US and the international rules based order react to China invading. Uh, parts of Russia that used to be part of China back in the eighteen hundreds.

• 1:29:28Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:29:29Speaker 03

  And if you don't know about the narratives of the Chinese and how they think about.

• 1:29:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, like half of Russia was China.

• 1:29:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, and and the fact that the Chinese have actually.

• 1:29:36Speaker 05

  Which it already is.

• 1:29:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:29:37Speaker 05

  Cause there are tons of ethnic Chinese.

• 1:29:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:29:40Speaker 05

  Hop across the border and, you know, you get a pop up city of five million people and somewhere in Siberia and.

• 1:29:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, and and and the Chinese have already been like like producing maps and passing laws saying. You will refer to all these old places in current Russia. By their old original Chinese name, so they're already shaping the battle space, if you will.

• 1:29:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's pretty chilling, I think, in Moscow and and.

• 1:30:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:30:03Speaker 05

  So I think. You know, it's like Ukraine, tread lightly, tread lightly. Now, that doesn't go into our. Work related to Ukraine, uh, which also has to do with. Sort of how we fight wars in the future.

• 1:30:19Speaker 03

  And and and I actually think that's actually the most fascinating part is how much we. Spend time with like Ukrainians. Uh, that are being being trained to fight the current war, but also how much we also have to observe and watch. US and other. NATO militaries train Ukrainians for a war they don't actually.

• 1:30:39Speaker 04

  Know how to fight.

• 1:30:40Speaker 05

  I mean, segueing into. A different yet somehow related topic, I think. You know, in terms of our work for military training. Looking at how Ukrainians use the skills and resources that we provide to them, um.

• 1:30:58Speaker 05

  I mean, that's also a wake up call in terms of competition. Cause. This is a partner that's fighting a peer adversary.

• 1:31:09Speaker 05

  So what we're doing is we're providing. Support. For something that we haven't had to do since. Uh, up to nineteen forty five and. Looking at what that looks like in the twenty first century. And if that gives us clues as to the type of war that we might fight in the future. Like, that's. That, that's like us.

• 1:31:36Speaker 04

  It's a laboratory, basically, yeah.

• 1:31:37Speaker 05

  So that's a laboratory and. So when I go to Ukraine and I go to areas of combat. You know, I'm like a time traveler. So I get to, I get to travel into the future. Go see what it's gonna look like.

• 1:31:55Speaker 04

  What's going on in the future?

• 1:31:59Speaker 05

  It's.

• 1:32:00Speaker 04

  The past with drones.

• 1:32:01Speaker 05

  It's really bloody. I mean, it's, it's. I mean, I came from a world where. The battalion that I was.

• 1:32:13Speaker 05

  Sort of associated with, okay, sixty days.

• 1:32:17Speaker 05

  Five percent of them were killed. Uh, it's winter time there. So you get injured. Hemorrhaging is a big, bigger problem when you're really cold.

• 1:32:32Speaker 05

  You get.

• 1:32:35Speaker 05

  Pretty badly messed up. There's no helicopter coming in. There's no one hour evacuation.

• 1:32:42Speaker 03

  Which, which from a US perspective, we're used to like, oh, you get fucking medevac in an hour.

• 1:32:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's all out the window.

• 1:32:48Speaker 05

  Hour, it's out the window.

• 1:32:49Speaker 03

  It doesn't exist there.

• 1:32:50Speaker 05

  No golden hour. Okay, so C one medical care, so. You know, tactical. You know, medical care. It's soldier on soldier.

• 1:33:02Speaker 05

  You know, do what you can. You know, you got this environment where you're, you're under very constant attack. And, you know, it is cold and the cold, cold, cold is always beating down on you. And.

• 1:33:23Speaker 05

  The only way you can organize an evacuation is, you know, it's like you're looking at the cloud cover. It's like, you know, what's your exposure to drone attack?

• 1:33:35Speaker 05

  You have about a 10 kilometer zone, you know, close to the contact line, where, you know, you can't bring vehicles in. A lot of times evacuation is by foot.

• 1:33:47Speaker 05

  You know, for the injured person as well as a- anybody else who's assisting. Maybe if the weather's really bad, you're lucky, you can bring a- a- a four wheeler in. So you go to, uh, you know, like frontline surgical areas and stuff like this. You know, some sort of fortified medical assistance.

• 1:34:13Speaker 05

  You know, it's two, three days to get there. And,

• 1:34:19Speaker 05

  you know, it's like,

• 1:34:22Speaker 05

  American soldiers haven't experienced this.

• 1:34:24Speaker 04

  Right, for a long time, yeah.

• 1:34:28Speaker 05

  I mean, I don't want to brag, but I mean, I've got more frontline experience, I think than any American soldier, well, not any, but,

• 1:34:40Jack Murphy?

  But, but actual ma- actual modern warfare, not just doing GWOT, you know?

• 1:34:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, right, some 90 year old guy, you know, who might have remembered fighting in France and across Germany. So these are people, they don't have fobs. There's no green beans, whatever, you know, place to go, relax.

• 1:35:05Speaker 05

  It's all in civilian housing. It's all in do it yourself fortified positions.

• 1:35:16Jack Murphy?

  It's interesting, William, that you're not talking about quadcopter drones. You're not talking about electronic warfare, cyber warfare, or any of the things that like, we're talking about here in the West a lot. You're talking about old school warfare.

• 1:35:29Speaker 05

  It's all the quadr- you know, it's like, I mean, some of the pictures I sent you. I sent you something with a, you know, glide drone.

• 1:35:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:35:39Speaker 05

  Glide bombs and I can't send you drone pictures because I don't have clearance for those yet. I mean, that is, you know, it, I mean, it's like this hybrid world because on the one hand, you have this high tech. Where like there's no, I don't know where the air littoral is. Because you got.

• 1:35:59Speaker 04

  Air littorals, air littorals.

• 1:36:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, because you got drones that are flying. You know, that are flying at twenty thousand, twenty five thousand feet at four hundred miles an hour.

• 1:36:10Speaker 05

  That, you know, I don't know what that means for civilian aviation now in the future.

• 1:36:15Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:36:17Speaker 05

  So it, it, it's like this whole scrambling, I mean, you know, it's like there's, there's no air power. Outside of drones, no helicopters, no aircraft, no evacuation, none of this. So in that way, you're kind of like in a world war one, pre air power battlefield. And, you know, but, but at the same time, like the ISR is intense. You know, there's, there's, it's winter time. I mean, thank God for bad weather because, you know, it's like

• 1:37:00Speaker 05

  you've, you've got an infrared and you can see everything otherwise. It's like where the guy pees.

• 1:37:08Speaker 05

  You have to sit in a hole.

• 1:37:12Speaker 05

  You know, anything you do, you, you gotta have Reb, you know, there, you know, what they call Reb.

• 1:37:20Speaker 05

  Electronic warfare.

• 1:37:24Speaker 05

  You know, it's like your anxieties are about battery power.

• 1:37:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:29Speaker 05

  It's like, you know, how long's the equipment gonna run? How long's the IW gonna run? And so you're constantly embattled with this. So that's the high-tech, modern stuff. The low-tech is that that modern stuff creates like a civil war battlefield. Where it's just the humans. It's on foot. It's, it's being eighty meters from the adversary. It's, uh.

• 1:38:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, you know, it's very human.

• 1:38:08Speaker 04

  The constant surveillance must be, especially, you know, during the winter, you got thermals out there, so everything pops. But the constant surveillance of the drones, like you said, the ISR,

• 1:38:24Speaker 04

  it just must be like brutal.

• 1:38:27Speaker 05

  I mean, it's, it's a lot of tension. I mean, I'm like still trying to unwind. I mean, cause you're always under surveillance. Like.

• 1:38:42Speaker 05

  There are times I wanna go pee. I can't go, I can't take a piss.

• 1:38:46Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:38:48Speaker 05

  You know, you wanna go take a shit. You got thirty minutes of battery power. You have to go out and do it then. So, you know, it's like you're regimented by technology.

• 1:39:00Speaker 04

  Right, right, right. Yeah.

• 1:39:01Speaker 05

  All of this kind of stuff. Yet you're in this world where you're under tech. And you are no better off if you were injured than if you had a horse come and get you.

• 1:39:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:39:17Speaker 05

  And even then.

• 1:39:20Speaker 04

  Might be better in horse.

• 1:39:21Speaker 03

  Honestly, because it doesn't give off the same.

• 1:39:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:25Speaker 03

  Fucking signal, no way, like it, and that's what's makes us so weird that we have to like weirdly go back to how we fought in like the eighteen hundreds and like in nineteen fifteen because of these weird fucked up dynamics, the fact that like you have to.

• 1:39:39Speaker 05

  I mean, that's a message. That is a message I want to bring to Americans, American soldiers. Is think about getting your arm blown off and waiting two days.

• 1:39:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:39:52Speaker 05

  To get evacuated.

• 1:39:53Speaker 04

  Where it's gonna get necrotic even faster, like, you know, any circulation that you stop, uh, you know, is, yeah, it's brutal.

• 1:40:01Speaker 03

  No, no, and, and, and, and when we talked before, like, we even got here into like, you know, like, before we actually got here, like, again, maybe because I'm a typical chair force pilot, I was under the impression that like, oh, when it's colder outside and you get injured, it's actually better. And he's like, no.

• 1:40:17Speaker 05

  No, it's much worse.

• 1:40:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:40:19Speaker 03

  I, I, I thought like, oh yeah, it's colder, it's cold, like, it'll freeze the blood. And he's like, no, it's not.

• 1:40:24Speaker 05

  No, it never stops.

• 1:40:25Speaker 03

  Typical chair force pilot, my apologies.

• 1:40:28Speaker 04

  You know, it's, it's.

• 1:40:28Speaker 05

  You know, it's like, I mean, we were watching an evacuation and, and we were at C two collection point and

• 1:40:38Speaker 05

  you know, there's this young soldier who, you know, hadn't had a problem the day before. And this guy, I mean, he was brought in on a four wheeler.

• 1:40:51Speaker 05

  And, you know, I think it took about two hours to get there. And in the process, he had become hypothermic.

• 1:41:03Speaker 05

  What a mess.

• 1:41:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:41:07Speaker 05

  I mean, it was, it was terrible.

• 1:41:12Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, because then even the rewarming process can create shock that will start cascading.

• 1:41:19Speaker 05

  And they had thirty people who came in that day.

• 1:41:29Speaker 04

  Do you think that there-

• 1:41:30Speaker 05

  Just like that. I mean, that is the tempo. That is the type of conflict of the future. I mean, right now with the balance between, you know, sort of like the technology of offense and defense. So if we're thinking about, you know, what if we have a conflict in, in, you know, Taiwan or something like that? And US wants to become involved? We're not gonna have that kind of comfort that we had in Iraq and Afghanistan. I mean, it's gonna be a real war.

• 1:42:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:42:06Speaker 05

  So I think that, you know, the thing that Ukraine and, and that kind of thing. I mean, there are two dimensions of it. One is, do we wanna do it? Like, do we wanna support them? You know, the higher level geopolitics. The other is, let's learn about how this stuff works now. And how do we prepare for this so that we're more intelligent about how we approach it? And, you know, I think for us, studying military training, we need to learn from them. Because they are in a fight of our future, potentially.

• 1:42:47Speaker 05

  So, you know, we need to figure out, how do we adapt to that type of situation? Where if we're in the fight, a lot of Americans are gonna get killed. And we're not gonna be used to that. And, you know, like, Ukraine's not that much different than us in terms of, like, how the society's organized, what kind of technology they have, the capabilities. You know, it's not, sort of, you know, I mean, no offense to Somali friends and so forth, but, you know, it's a lot more rugged there.

• 1:43:30Speaker 05

  And, you know, it's like Ukrainian cities, Ukrainian people, they don't think a lot differently than us about, you know, what they're willing to do, you know, what their will to fight is, these types of things. But that's a fight that they're in. And-

• 1:43:50Speaker 05

  I mean, it's very hard for me to paint a picture in words how bloody it is.

• 1:43:53Speaker 03

  No, and.

• 1:43:54Speaker 05

  How much, how much blood on that snow?

• 1:43:57Speaker 03

  No, and.

• 1:43:58Speaker 05

  How much, how much?

• 1:44:01Speaker 05

  Like, when you talk to soldiers who are in elements that are losing significant numbers, like, you know, they're going through comrades, just one after another, who are killed, who are convinced they're gonna die.

• 1:44:22Speaker 05

  Yet they fight. And what kind of support that, that, that takes? That's a fight. I don't, I don't think we've had that. Even in World War II, you know, we had lines of support. World War I was brief for us.

• 1:44:40Speaker 05

  I mean, it's, it's a time that we don't recall. I mean, which is the Civil War.

• 1:44:47Speaker 05

  Like, the devastation that that caused in our people. The number, you know, the percentages of soldiers that were lost. The difficulties of those fights. And that's what Ukraine's gone through.

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• 1:46:31Speaker 05

  But that is warfare today. That is a hard reality. And, you know, I think that that's part of the value of this types, this type of observation. And I think that's part of the message that we have.

• 1:46:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, and, and the bigger point of this too is, and this is something that we've been trying to engage across like the broader DOD. The fact that like,

• 1:47:04Speaker 03

  I don't think we've actually generated leaders that can accept losses of 5% over, over two months.

• 1:47:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:47:14Speaker 03

  Because the way we act.

• 1:47:16Speaker 05

  You know what? The offensive has not yet begun.

• 1:47:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:47:19Speaker 05

  This has been, this has been two months of kind of stasis.

• 1:47:24Jack Murphy?

  But you think there's going to be an offensive that the battle?

• 1:47:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:47:29Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, that they're going to change drastically?

• 1:47:31Speaker 04

  And, and I, I agree. I don't think our leaders have the will. They don't, they're, they're all politicians at that point. And, you know, they, they.

• 1:47:40Speaker 05

  At some point it gets real. I mean, that's why I'm, I'm,

• 1:47:46Speaker 05

  I almost say agnostic or sitting on the fence in Ukraine about whether it's our fight or, you know, whether we should leave it to Europeans. I'll leave that to other people to decide. All I'm saying is when it is our fight, if it is our fight at some point.

• 1:48:03Speaker 04

  That is part of our future.

• 1:48:04Speaker 03

  No, and and and that speaks to like into my point about like, do we have the right kind of a leader to this because you look back to World War Two and again, I'm I'm throwing out the Air Force perspective here, but like you had General Curtis LeMay that had no problem saying, I'm gonna send out a bunch of bombers on this mission and half of you are gonna die.

• 1:48:24Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:48:26Speaker 03

  I I can't imagine the pain and personal agony he probably felt doing that.

• 1:48:30Speaker 04

  And we're gonna kill a lot of civilians. Yes.

• 1:48:32Speaker 04

  During the bombing run.

• 1:48:33Speaker 03

  Yes, and the fact that he could do that and maintain some composure. I I I I can only assume it probably caused immense alcoholism and other sort of issues, but like we are not ready to make these types of fucking decisions right now anywhere in the US military because we have not trained or fostered develop people to accept the reality that you're gonna send people to go die like like not just like, oh, go do a combat convoy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yeah, you might get ambushed and a few, but like this is like, no, literally fucking half of you are gonna die. And oh, by the way, if we're talking like an Indo-Pacific sort of China type of scenario, not only you're gonna die, even if you eject

• 1:49:15Speaker 03

  and survive, we can't get anything out there to do CSAR to rescue you.

• 1:49:21Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:49:22Speaker 03

  Even if you do, because it it's such a huge area denial, anti-access area.

• 1:49:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, we live in a dream world.

• 1:49:29Speaker 03

  Yes. Fucking dream world.

• 1:49:31Speaker 04

  Do you think that, you know, you we have been, we have been out, like you said, we have chosen uh not to engage in a lot of ways and we act like we are, but it's we followed a a the same plan we did during the GW. Do you think that there's room for for the next administration, the incoming administration, to even if even if we can't broker a peace and partly I feel we owe it to Ukraine because when we told them to, when we encouraged them to get rid of their nukes, part of them getting rid of their nukes, part of their determined or deter uh deterrent was us saying, we got you.

• 1:50:14Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:50:16Jack Murphy?

  We're gonna protect them.

• 1:50:17Speaker 03

  A security guarantee of the Brits and the French.

• 1:50:21Speaker 03

  It was a security guarantee, wasn't a treaty. Yeah. A treaty is different from a security guarantee.

• 1:50:25Speaker 05

  The assumption was that Russia, Russia friend.

• 1:50:27Speaker 04

  It was like, we got you boo.

• 1:50:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, but not really, because Russia is our friend.

• 1:50:33Speaker 04

  But, but, so we, we owe them that, but also, I think that people have become very hawkish in the United States without knowing, like, nobody was crying about Crimea in 2014. Everybody just ignored it, for the most part. And now, you know, you hear people in the, in the States saying, you know, no, you know, like, no quarter given, like Crimea, everything back, and it's like, where were you?

• 1:51:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, because Ukrainians resist. We like resistance. I mean, like in 2014, they were not resisting.

• 1:51:07Speaker 04

  I understand the Ukrainians. I'm wondering why people in the States are, are so hawkish about it. It's like, if we can find a way, and, and so what I was wondering is, do you think there's a way for, because it just goes back to building our image, you know, to, to being a country that gets involved and gets involved in a, in a positive manner, hopefully. But do you think there's a way to go to Russia and Ukraine and say, look, we don't know how to stop this war. We want to work on stopping this war, but how about we take these steps, these humane steps, that if you set up a, a field surgical team in this area, it can be this large, it can have this many people, will you both agree not to hit each other's field surgical teams?

• 1:51:52Speaker 05

  Oh, boy, that'd be nice. I'd love that.

• 1:51:54Speaker 03

  We would all love it.

• 1:51:56Speaker 04

  But if you don't, if you don't ask.

• 1:51:57Speaker 05

  I mean, the pictures I didn't send you are of surgical, you know, tactical surgical teams in, you know, protected locations.

• 1:52:13Speaker 05

  They'd just be attacked. I mean, it's

• 1:52:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, and that's the thing is if you don't ask, if you don't ask, it's not gonna happen. But if, but if you can at all like bring people to the table over something that is mutually beneficial to both of them. Like if a, if a, if a guy or girl is going to a surgical team, if they're like messed up, let him go.

• 1:52:36Speaker 03

  No, no, no, I, I, I think it makes, I think it make, so to his point, what I think David's saying here is that.

• 1:52:45Speaker 03

  I do, again, I'm, I'm speaking from a sort of a hypothetical perspective.

• 1:52:49Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:52:50Speaker 03

  But I'm pretty confident these conversations have been likely been made.

• 1:52:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:52:56Speaker 03

  And I mean this in the sense that there are certain hotels in Kiev, in downtown Ukraine, in, in, in downtown Kiev in Ukraine.

• 1:53:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, sure, they're not gonna target the

• 1:53:05Speaker 03

  That, that the Russians have not targeted these certain hotels. There are some hotels, if you were in Kiev, if you ever wanna go visit Ukraine, there are some hotels in downtown Kiev. You are basically at a hundred percent assured that you will not be hit by a Russian missile.

• 1:53:22Speaker 04

  You won't be targeted.

• 1:53:23Speaker 03

  You will not be targeted and, and we are pretty confident the fact that there's probably been a conversation made that if you targeted or blew up these hotels, you would kill a lot of Americans and Europeans that may or may not be in government and military service.

• 1:53:39Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:53:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, but that's a fucking retarded, I mean

• 1:53:42Speaker 03

  Yes, that's, this is what's fucking stupid about this. Like, it's

• 1:53:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:53:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, but because, but, but the problem is, we know these conversations must have been fucking had because if Russia wanted to kill American or, or European forces in Ukraine, there's a few hotels in Kiev, they could easy fucking blow up.

• 1:53:59Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:54:00Speaker 05

  And they have to not. They know, they know the address of the US Embassy.

• 1:54:02Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:54:03Speaker 05

  Look, they don't even target Ukraine's government, so

• 1:54:06Speaker 03

  Yes. Obviously, there are limits. That, that's why I think it's important to have that kind of conversation as well about like, are we prepared to have American and NATO forces die in Ukraine? Which also becomes this own little fucking discussion because everyone jumps so quickly to like NATO Article Five and thinks like, oh If an American or you know a Dutch or a German officer or personnel is killed in Ukraine, it automatically triggers Article Five and um I'm gonna you know invoke the the great Michael Kaufman.

• 1:54:34Speaker 05

  Well, if I get killed in Ukraine, I want there to be nuclear war.

• 1:54:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it but but if you guys know who who Michael Kaufman is, he always says, you know, from the times of Michael Kaufman, about like Article Five is not a suicide pact. Like if you actually go and read Article Five and the whole NATO Charter, it's not a suicide pact.

• 1:54:56Speaker 05

  Frankie, you keep going.

• 1:54:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, and the reason why this is important to like to at least discuss is because everyone just says like, oh, you know, you know, there was explosions in Romania from a drone from Russia or in Poland missile. And we automatically just sort of like, everyone just jumps like Article Five, Article Five, and it's like, no, no, no, no. Much like Clausewitz is on war, you know, often cited, rarely read. It's the same thing for NATO and the Article Five, which is everyone just assumes like, you you know, you think you know what it means, but it doesn't actually know what it means.

• 1:55:30Speaker 04

  It's like HIPAA.

• 1:55:31Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, and and there's why I say this is because

• 1:55:36Speaker 03

  it basically says like there has to be a collective defense and military response if you actually invoke Article Five. It's not automatic, you actually have to have a, you know, you actually have to meet and talk about it. There's why it's important that we have that type of discussion as well about like, what does it actually mean? Is the fact that a military response can be as something as fucking simple as just a mean tweet?

• 1:55:59Speaker 03

  And that's that's, you know, information warfare.

• 1:56:03Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:56:03Speaker 03

  People don't realize that Article Five can can literally just be a tweet as a as a collective defense response. And I think that's an important sort of thing that gets l- lost in the minutia of sort of like, well, what happened? You know, it seems like things happen in Romania and Poland all the time with, you know, a missile or something like that. And it's just, people don't realize it, it actually matters.

• 1:56:22Speaker 04

  Russia's election interference then automatically like sets that off, right, and the United States?

• 1:56:28Speaker 03

  No, because that's what's fucking comical about this is the fact that like.

• 1:56:33Speaker 03

  Russia can do all, I'm gonna say Russia, any adversary can do all kinds of non kinetic things

• 1:56:39Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:56:39Speaker 03

  against NATO countries. And it doesn't, there is no Article Five mechanism for this.

• 1:56:46Speaker 04

  Really, interesting.

• 1:56:47Speaker 03

  And, and that's something that, again, that we talk about constantly by the fact that like, there are things that can happen in space and cyber and attacks against our homeland in sort of the cyber domain, space domain, that if Russia is trying to does it, which they already have at this point,

• 1:57:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:57:05Speaker 03

  we have to accept it, it's reality. We don't have an official mechanism to say like, this is an act of war.

• 1:57:11Speaker 04

  Right, yeah, we don't treat it like a hostile act, activity.

• 1:57:15Speaker 03

  We don't, and we actually should, and the problem is because we don't and our doctrine doesn't reflect that, guess what? You exploit that as an asymmetric sort of loophole in the way we look at war legally. And so, again, if you're Russia and China, you're just gonna keep doing space and cyber shit against us because right now, as far as our doctrine and Article Five exists,

• 1:57:38Speaker 03

  it does not, it does not result in that. And oh, by the way, again, like I said about like, you actually have to go fucking read, like, the article, you know, the articles in the NATO Charter. Um, it also, people don't realize, like, in theory, China and/or Russia could actually attack and invade Hawaii and Guam. And because of the way the treaty is written, because we were concerned about sort of all the colonies being at risk of causing World War Three, they're actually omitted in the Charter.

• 1:58:11Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:58:12Speaker 03

  So if you go look at actual Charter, they don't explicitly mention all these sort of like fucking colonies and territories, but it basically makes it very clear about like, Article Five applies within like this very like concrete box.

• 1:58:25Speaker 04

  Like CONUS.

• 1:58:26Speaker 03

  Yes, basically, CONUS America, these parts of Europe, and that's basically it. So if you get invaded in the Caribbean, you know, fucking Saint Martin for the Dutch, sorry, Article Five doesn't apply in there. Same thing with Guam and Hawaii. It does not apply to these sort of weird territories.

• 1:58:45Speaker 04

  That's wild.

• 1:58:46Speaker 03

  So again, and I'm not, I'm not citing it perfectly, but I'm just telling you.

• 1:58:53Speaker 03

  The Chinese or Russians could easily invade fucking Guam or Hawaii or attack it. And we could not use Article Five because it does not apply for those parts of American territory.

• 1:59:03Speaker 04

  That's fascinating. You reminded me with the cyber stuff. If you don't follow him, check him out, Andrew Thompson, at Imposed Cost. He talks about that all the time.

• 1:59:13Speaker 03

  Really?

• 1:59:13Speaker 04

  That the idea that the United States needs to come to grip with cyber as a hostile act. And these ransomware groups or whomever they are. Like, we need to stop looking at it just in a law enforcement perspective. How does the whole, you know, when we talk, even not talking about Russia and Ukraine. When we talk about these non-government or non-state armed groups. Cyber is a whole new arsenal for them.

• 1:59:48Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:59:49Speaker 04

  Right? And they don't even have to be good. They can hire people. They can, you know, get script kiddies. They can like download stuff. How does that now figure into this asymmetrical situation? And our relationship with these groups? Whether they exist now or will?

• 2:00:12Speaker 05

  See, it takes advantage of our strategic narcissism. I mean, you can be under attack and not acknowledge that you're under attack. I mean, that's the way it works. It's like, it's asymmetric warfare. How do you take a battle to a stronger adversary? I mean, the United States with all its power and its might. Do things that undermine it, but are...

• 2:00:46Speaker 05

  Under the radar enough that there's no response.

• 2:00:49Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:00:51Speaker 05

  So I think cyber warfare, information warfare, things like this.

• 2:00:55Speaker 04

  Is, is, to your knowledge, is this something that you guys work on and to your knowledge, is there anybody in the government that's raising alarms and saying, look, we need to rethink these policies?

• 2:01:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think so. I mean, but part of the problem is that if information warfare, if the attack surface are, you know, domestic groups in the United States that are part of the legitimate political debate in the United States. If you wanna counter it, you say, okay, well, you know, we're gonna control that kind of information. Well, that's censorship.

• 2:01:30Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:01:31Speaker 05

  I mean, that's like checkmate. That's where, that's where they get you.

• 2:01:35Speaker 03

  Though, and, and, and a lot of like, like my research, you know, if I'm not doing like a security systems cooperation, I'm also doing information warfare and, you know, Willis nice enough like to use my book in one of his classes.

• 2:01:47Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:01:48Speaker 03

  The old and new battle spaces book.

• 2:01:49Jack Murphy?

  If you wanna have my students buy, uh, my book as well, that would be great.

• 2:01:53Speaker 03

  We defy, yup, we defy. You want me to hold it up?

• 2:01:56Jack Murphy?

  No, it's okay. I'm just joking with you.

• 2:01:58Speaker 03

  No, no, no.

• 2:01:58Speaker 04

  But you need the university edition, which is like a hundred and twenty bucks.

• 2:02:01Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.

• 2:02:04Speaker 03

  Kinda pick on those rich Northwestern kids. No, but like, uh, it's the fact that I, I, I think what's changed when it comes to information warfare is the fact that like American adversaries used to like go for like a political angle and in a sense of like, let's just promote communism.

• 2:02:22Jack Murphy?

  Our ideology.

• 2:02:23Speaker 03

  Our ideology. And what now they've gone towards the model is

• 2:02:26Jack Murphy?

  Which is cause chaos.

• 2:02:28Speaker 03

  Chaos. So there's, there's a great term called schismogenesis, which is basically just, it's a fancy old anthropology term to basically cause schisms and divisions in a society. And why is that important is the fact that like, you wanted to support everyone being crazy.

• 2:02:42Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:02:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, you support everyone being crazy.

• 2:02:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, you take something that are already

• 2:02:46Jack Murphy?

  That sounds familiar. Yeah, it's very familiar.

• 2:02:48Speaker 05

  Something that's indigenous, something that already exists.

• 2:02:51Speaker 03

  Because it's too cheesy if you try to insert as a Russian or a Chinese person, you know, your own agenda. It's like, no, just find the craziest shit.

• 2:03:00Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:03:00Speaker 03

  Like Texas exit, that was known as, as Texit or, or Cal exit. Cal exit, or as we saw it worked out in, in Britain. Brexit from the EU. And it actually fucking works. You just, you find these sort of these. You know, fucking grassroots.

• 2:03:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, you try to, you try to find accelerants. I mean, it's, it's, it's like a good. Any good intelligence operation does not leave footprints. That what you wanna do is, you wanna. Create the effect, but do it in a way that it appears to be entirely indigenous.

• 2:03:36Speaker 04

  But does it, does it even, at this point, does it even matter if they leave footprint? Like, if we know that the Chinese are funding an organization in the US. We're not gonna take action against the US, and then the people that are part of those organizations, they don't care where the money's coming from. So does it even matter?

• 2:03:56Speaker 05

  Well, they may not even know where the money comes from. I mean. It, it, I mean, you get tough calls. I mean, okay, Tulsi Gabbard, she repeats. You know, it's like Moscow talking points.

• 2:04:09Speaker 05

  Is that legitimate? I mean, she's a legitimate part of American political discourse.

• 2:04:13Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:04:14Speaker 05

  Should I say, you know, she's an agent of Moscow? I don't know, you know, I mean. That, that, that's a tough one. I mean. Yes, no. Uh. I act against her. I mean. You know, I'm doing a really messed up thing in domestic American politics. Checkmate. I mean.

• 2:04:41Speaker 05

  That's kind of, I mean, that's a dilemma. You know, we have a First Amendment. We don't limit political speech.

• 2:04:50Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:04:51Speaker 05

  We moved to limit political speech because we think it's influenced by, you know, Russian or. You know, some other kind of foreign.

• 2:04:59Jack Murphy?

  It seems that we could do a better job, though, of targeting foreign entities that are specifically trying to hurt America and Americans like TikTok and others. That like. Why can't we just kick them the hell out?

• 2:05:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, no, no, but, but, but this is another problem too, is, you know, so I, I've talked to the folks at, at Northcom in the J thirty-nine. So the J thirty-nine. Uh, at Northcom is responsible for basically identifying and dealing with any sort of foreign adversarial influence operations against the US. The problem is. If they identify something and it has a domestic IP address, they have to hand it out to FBI.

• 2:05:35Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 2:05:36Speaker 03

  They cannot touch it at Northcom. They cannot at that point. That becomes problematic because does FBI have the resources or ability to even deal with this? In a way, more than likely whoever is doing this or promoting it is actually in Russia and China anyways.

• 2:05:49Speaker 04

  But they're coming in through a VPN, they're bouncing so like you don't.

• 2:05:52Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 2:05:53Speaker 05

  I mean, we have our rules. I mean, what do you do about Tucker Carlson? I mean, Tucker Carlson, I think for any professional in counterintelligence is like a security threat. And, you know, I mean, it's like, okay, there it is. I mean, you look at it, I don't know, you know? Is it what it is? Yet suppressing Tucker.

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• 2:07:51Speaker 05

  Carlson's speech is a big problem in our domestic politics.

• 2:07:56Speaker 04

  It defeats who we want, who we are.

• 2:07:59Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 2:08:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:08:00Speaker 05

  So what do you do? Do you educate the American public and say that this guy's, you know, recycling Moscow's talking points? Well, duh. But I don't know. You know, I mean, he also has points that are legitimate, I think, in terms of questions about American policy.

• 2:08:21Speaker 03

  And this is where we have to leave with our values and transparency. And this is, this is becomes, this is very difficult for us to accept and handle. And I say this now, having, again, taught at the Naval War College the last couple of years now, because I have officers from lots of other countries that have gone through a war college or a training education experience in Russia, China, et cetera. And I'll ask them, like, what was it like? And the thing I do appreciate is they feel comfortable enough that I create a very safe space. I'm very big in safe spaces. But like, they'll admit that, like, yeah, you know, the Russians or the Chinese, when we go there for training education, tightly control us.

• 2:09:05Speaker 03

  They only let us see what we're allowed to see. We can't ask questions. It's very sort of like transmission only. We can't, you know, we're very controlled. And, you know, as much as like, we see the value and benefit of the Chinese and Russians in terms of our relationship, when we're here in America, you take us to Detroit, you take us to Montgomery, Alabama, you take us, you know, obviously to LA and other nicer parts of the country, but you take us to these places and you don't control us.

• 2:09:33Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:09:34Speaker 03

  And you have us in these classrooms. In the US and you have these frank, honest, open discussions with us in a way that no other country.

• 2:09:44Jack Murphy?

  Would never happen.

• 2:09:45Speaker 03

  Would ever have and never had. I mean, the best, the best thing I ever heard was like an Algerian officer is telling me, I've been to Russia and China so many times and I'm loving my experience here because you treat me like you're, you treat me like I'm an American, you talk to me like I'm an American and you don't hold back and you show me everything. The Russians, Chinese don't do this for us as Algerians and that's, that's our greatest fucking shrink. But the problem is at the same time, back to Will's point, it's also easily targeted and it's, it's a, it's a leverage point that if we don't, you know, educate our own people on this, the fact that like it's easily attacked.

• 2:10:24Jack Murphy?

  Do we have questions for these guys?

• 2:10:26Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, yeah, we ask questions. It's, it's hard too, though, in a sense of, because I, I don't, like, I don't listen to Tulsi or, or, um, Tucker Carlson in terms of like knowing what their talking points are. But it's tough too, because if, like, if somebody spoke out against the war, the invasion of Iraq, then we could have said that they were, you know, giving, you know, Hussein, Saddam Hussein or Iraqi talking points. So it's hard to say.

• 2:10:55Speaker 05

  That's why it's like chick, chick bait.

• 2:10:57Speaker 04

  Yeah. It, it's hard to say, like, are they on that side or do they see things differently than the rest of us do? Like, I don't know.

• 2:11:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, Scott Ritter.

• 2:11:08Jack Murphy?

  Who has been a guest on this show oddly, yes, a number of years ago.

• 2:11:12Speaker 03

  Okay, many years. Many, many moons ago.

• 2:11:16Speaker 05

  Spent a lot of time in Moscow.

• 2:11:17Jack Murphy?

  He, he, he was problematic, but that, this was before he started hanging out with Katarov.

• 2:11:22Speaker 03

  Okay, I'm like, have you washed like the couch or the chairs?

• 2:11:28Jack Murphy?

  Brother.

• 2:11:30Speaker 04

  It, it's a new studio.

• 2:11:31Jack Murphy?

  You can go back in time and watch that three hour interview for yourself and you tell me what you think.

• 2:11:40Speaker 05

  It's a new world.

• 2:11:42Jack Murphy?

  Yes, it is.

• 2:11:43Speaker 03

  What are these questions?

• 2:11:45Speaker 04

  Alex Bennett, thank you very much. Hey, guys, I'm on an oil tanker in the North Pacific right now. The weather is really bad, but I should have a connection or at least part of the episode. Have a great time. Thanks, Alex, man.

• 2:11:55Jack Murphy?

  He's in the merchant.

• 2:11:57Speaker 03

  Oh, good for him. Yeah, man. Good on you for doing that shit, man.

• 2:12:00Speaker 04

  Yeah. M. Corbin, thank you very much. By chance, did you come across a Dr. George Babchuk? He is 72 years old, primary care physician for Northwest Indiana in Ukraine currently.

• 2:12:13Speaker 05

  I have not, but I was hunkered down in my little area, so.

• 2:12:20Speaker 03

  In part of our little research project on Ukraine, we've identified at least 500 civil society actors and groups that are doing NGO types of things like this in Ukraine, so. If you want to actually send me that note, I can track him down because we're like, we're trying to actually code and identify every single sort of like organization, person, or group that is doing things.

• 2:12:46Jack Murphy?

  Are you tracking the foreign fighters also?

• 2:12:48Speaker 03

  We're trying to, yes.

• 2:12:49Speaker 05

  It's a little tougher.

• 2:12:50Speaker 03

  It's a little tougher, but I said, we're trying to.

• 2:12:53Jack Murphy?

  I get it.

• 2:12:54Speaker 03

  We're trying to, so I, no, that's, I really appreciate it because we're always, I feel like every week a person's like, do you know about this person or doctor or organization or actor that's doing something in Ukraine? And you're like, halftime, it's like, yes or no? And please tell us more because we would actually love to know this person because we're always trying to figure out, let you know what's going on there.

• 2:13:15Speaker 04

  New Bob Dole, thank you very much. Am I crazy? Had the epiphany, part of the GWOT motivation could be interpreted as a secular iteration of crusades, thus regionally counterproductive.

• 2:13:26Speaker 05

  Whoa. A little throwback with a secular GWOT crusade, I mean.

• 2:13:35Speaker 03

  There's enough, I think, at least in terms of of data, interviews, polling and elite interviews to suggest that after nine eleven, we just got really angry as a country. And just wanted to fucking take it out on everybody that that wasn't on our side.

• 2:13:54Jack Murphy?

  If you're brown, you're down.

• 2:13:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's a and you're either with us or you're against us like it was one of those things of like like. We had a a traumatic event, over three thousand Americans killed. And it's just one of those things of like, you're either with us or you're against us, or we're gonna fucking murder you. And I I honestly think, when I say think, to me, and I don't know if you will, I there seems to be enough sort of fucking research that's been done now, like the consensus, like, because there's been so many articles done about this at this point, at least. I I in our field, the consensus basically seems to come down to the fact that like. Lots of bias in the Bush admin, there was no conspiracy, lots of just just plucking, you know, things that fucking support. You know, like your cause to go to war.

• 2:14:39Jack Murphy?

  Ideological fever dreams.

• 2:14:41Speaker 03

  Yes, and then you just basically go down the GWOT fucking, you know, fucking slide of just like, yeah, we're doing this because everyone needs to pay, you know, it has to be punished for this and that, I mean.

• 2:14:51Speaker 05

  It's a vacation from strategy, you don't have to think about what, you know, what hard choices you have to make, everybody can be your enemy, everybody can, everything can be a threat.

• 2:15:01Speaker 04

  The GWOT, the GWOT, like the, not the GWOT, the invasion of Afghanistan.

• 2:15:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:15:07Speaker 04

  Was one of the best military actions we've had, uh, in a very, very long time. It was well planned, well executed, we won, and we won, we won our war. Uh, and when I say we, I mean, America, I wasn't part of that invasion.

• 2:15:23Speaker 03

  Small footprint, lots of air power.

• 2:15:25Speaker 04

  We won that war, took out AQ in a very, very short period of time, and then the party was over. And the hosts were trying to go to bed, and we sat down on the couch and turned on the TV. And then we, because the Taliban was never our enemy, right?

• 2:15:42Speaker 05

  That's right, so so the war ended in two thousand four, two thousand five.

• 2:15:46Speaker 04

  Exactly, and then and then we just.

• 2:15:49Speaker 05

  And then we're done.

• 2:15:49Speaker 04

  And then we just kicked it for a while.

• 2:15:51Speaker 03

  No, and and this is the important thing that that we have to talk about as well, I think it's important for the audience and this all to acknowledge, recognize. There are a few groups that we call terrorists. That actually aren't terrorists, they're just sort of like regional, local insurgents. And the reason why I say like the terrorism really matters is the fact that like-

• 2:16:09Jack Murphy?

  Like the PKK?

• 2:16:11Speaker 03

  Yes, the PKK, uh, even the Taliban, even Al-Shabaab in Somalia, even Boko Haram in, in, in West Africa.

• 2:16:19Jack Murphy?

  They're not expeditionary.

• 2:16:21Speaker 03

  Yes, and the reason why I say it's fucking ma- why this actually fucking matters is because they don't follow us back home to the American homeland. This actually fucking matters because in a weird way, they easily could, e- especially like for example, in Somalia with, of Al-Shabaab, like-

• 2:16:36Jack Murphy?

  There's a big Somali population.

• 2:16:38Speaker 03

  Up in Minnesota, St. Paul.

• 2:16:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, but what they fight for is they wanna make Somalia great again.

• 2:16:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:16:46Speaker 05

  You know, it's like, okay, alright, fine, whatever, whatever your, your weird thing is and, you know, what you wanna organize. I mean, look at the change now from GWOT to Syria in, you know, recent days. I mean, here you got like affiliates of the Islamic State. Are they the good Islamic State? Like NATO-aligned Islamic State? Or are they the bad Islamic State?

• 2:17:18Speaker 03

  No, no, no, I, I, I think the best quote was from our buddy, um, Michael Weiss, that he, he called them like, like the woke jihad or, or, or DEI, uh, jihadists.

• 2:17:31Jack Murphy?

  We're the secular Islamists.

• 2:17:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, and, and it's, it's a really funny joke in one context because the fact that like, all they're saying is institutions, institutions, institutions.

• 2:17:41Speaker 05

  But you know what?

• 2:17:42Speaker 03

  Praise institutions, like they read why nations fail.

• 2:17:46Speaker 05

  Believe it or not, there might be the Islamic State.

• 2:17:50Speaker 05

  We'll be okay with them, as long as they're gonna align in terms of our interests internationally. You know what? Whatever they wanna do in Somalia, knock yourself out. I mean, in, in, in Syria.

• 2:18:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:18:04Speaker 03

  But we're also thinking about fucking Somalia too as well.

• 2:18:07Speaker 05

  Somalia, whatever. Knock yourself out. You know, make Syria great again. I don't care how you do it. All I care about is, you know, how you align what your interests are, what our interests are. And, you know, it's like, that's a sign of the big change. Because GWAT, it'd be like ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding.

• 2:18:31Speaker 03

  Just kill them all.

• 2:18:32Speaker 05

  Kill them all. You know, Islamic State jihad jihad jihad jihad. And, you know, it's like, we're not, we're not there now. And that's a big point of inflection. And that's a really big change in terms of.

• 2:18:47Speaker 03

  Which, which again takes us back to the original point earlier on, which is basically in Syria.

• 2:18:53Speaker 03

  We need to, we need to just engage. And the problem that pisses us both off right now is the fact that like, as far as we are aware and concerned right now, there is no American presence on the ground. State or any other sort of like, the United States, as far as we're aware of right now. Why is that concerning? If we are not engaging the Syrians right now in this current moment, other than fucking CNN.

• 2:19:17Speaker 04

  Someone else is.

• 2:19:18Speaker 03

  Someone else is. And again, it takes me back to my original point, which is I don't want Russian bases in Syria. Because that's a base of Russian military power in the Mediterranean. And it's an ability for them to project military power into Libya and beyond into Africa.

• 2:19:36Speaker 04

  It's, it's also though, I am curious because it's not bad to see Russia get tied up with the, like, like they aren't going to get along with the Islamic State for very long. You know?

• 2:19:51Speaker 03

  Oh, no, no, no, no, no. And, and I think that's a good point as well, but at this point, like.

• 2:19:56Speaker 05

  It's like, it's like, let them be like us, you know, back in the day. Let them step in it in all kinds of really bad relationships.

• 2:20:07Speaker 03

  But I also think there, I think there is an inflection point that is Russia is very weakened right now. Forty percent of their economy is tied up in just the war machine.

• 2:20:18Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:20:19Speaker 03

  The ruble is in shambles. I, I, like to me, if, if we have to.

• 2:20:24Speaker 05

  I mean, earlier this week, I looked into Russia and I, I was not impressed.

• 2:20:30Speaker 05

  Granted, it was.

• 2:20:32Jack Murphy?

  A war zone, but.

• 2:20:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:20:33Speaker 03

  The Ukrainian occupied part of Russia, but.

• 2:20:35Speaker 05

  But, uh, yeah, I was.

• 2:20:38Speaker 03

  No, but I think that's an important point is, is to point to the fact that. Like, this is an inflection point, and it's like, if we're not acting right now and immediately and, and, and quickly and with allies and partners to basically push and box out the Russians from fucking Syria, and also even Libya. Like, you can force a really great fucking strategic dilemma on Putin in Moscow by basically saying, you know what? You can have your bases, or you can keep your bases, or you can lose your bases. But that's our choice, and that can be determined how he decides to negotiate with us over Ukraine.

• 2:21:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, but also, I mean, interprets of Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Central African Republic, Mali, whatever these places that Russia wants to engage.

• 2:21:35Speaker 05

  There are a lot of ways in which you can kind of mess them up with a much smaller footprint than they have, and you know, they're in these places with partners that really didn't work out so well for us.

• 2:21:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:21:48Speaker 05

  And what you can say is, it's like, okay, you know, give it a try. Let's see how that works out for you. And, you know, I think, like, recent events in Mali with the death of a lot of Russians at the hands of, of, um, you know, these separatists, it's like, it's not working out for them.

• 2:22:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:22:12Speaker 05

  And.

• 2:22:13Jack Murphy?

  Chinese trying to like, set up economic deals in Afghanistan.

• 2:22:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:22:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, get on with your bad self.

• 2:22:19Speaker 05

  It's like, yeah, we've been there, you know, been there, done that.

• 2:22:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:22:22Speaker 05

  GWOT, um, strategic overextension. Uh, you know, it's commitment in places where it's like, bad, bad partners. And, you know, it's like, what you can do is, like, if your adversary or competitor is, is like, in committing self-inflicted harm.

• 2:22:51Speaker 05

  Who are we to intervene and, you know, potentially disrupt that process? So I think that having, I mean, the bottom line, I think, in a lot of this discussion is that for thirty years, we've not really had strategic focus.

• 2:23:08Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:23:09Speaker 05

  And now we're at a point where we have to have that. You know, I mean, it's it's our peril if we don't do that. So in all of these cases, it's like I tell this to my students. It's like, in a serious engagement, you ask yourself the question, why do we fight? You have to be able to tell soldiers, you have to be able to tell the American public, why do we fight? But in a larger strategic sense, you have to be able to explain to the American people in a coherent fashion, why do we care?

• 2:23:52Speaker 05

  Why would we give assistance to Ukraine? Why do we care about whether, you know, Russians are in Mali or in Chad or something like this? Rather than doing it as a reflexive thing.

• 2:24:09Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:24:10Speaker 05

  Because if it's totally reflexive, I mean, that's the invitation to mistakes. If you ask yourself the question, why do we fight? You know, why do we commit? Then you have an approach that, I mean, it's more conservative in a in a classical sense. And, you know, ultimately, you end up with better partners. Same lines of effort and, you know, it's like that is a much better approach for competition.

• 2:24:51Speaker 05

  So this is where we are now. And, you know, as a people, I think that there's a major readjustment that's going on.

• 2:25:01Speaker 00

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• 2:26:32Speaker 05

  And, you know, new leadership in Washington. We'll see where this, where this leads.

• 2:26:39Jack Murphy?

  We got more for these guys?

• 2:26:43Speaker 04

  Luis Vasquez, thank you very much. Thank you for another amazing podcast. Well, thank you for listening.

• 2:26:50Speaker 04

  M. Corbin, thank you very much. I've been expecting the same for Kursk. How many battle hardened fighters would we expect to see lost?

• 2:27:01Speaker 05

  Well, oh, how many, okay, I mean Battalion that

• 2:27:08Speaker 05

  I was associated with, I mean, lost 5% in 60 days.

• 2:27:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, that's a hard question.

• 2:27:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:27:19Speaker 03

  I mean, I mean, the problem is the fact that like, you know, depending who you talk to on the front lines in Ukraine, the average like commander.

• 2:27:32Speaker 03

  Oh, sorry. My mic's bad. My bad. Oh, shit. All right.

• 2:27:36Speaker 05

  I think, I mean, okay, Ukrainians that I've talked to. I mean, it's a weird war in Ukraine because there are a lot of people that aren't mobilized. And then there are people who are mobilized who kind of get stuck being mobilized because they never get relieved. Most of them expect to die. And there's a sort of fatalism that

• 2:28:06Speaker 05

  they see people all around them getting killed.

• 2:28:11Speaker 05

  I mean, I've been going back and forth for, you know, becoming on three years.

• 2:28:17Speaker 05

  There are all kinds of contacts, you know, people I've met, people I've become friendly with who are no longer alive.

• 2:28:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:28:25Speaker 05

  And it's, it's just, it's very different, you know, than American experience in warfare.

• 2:28:33Speaker 04

  Do, do they share, because the Russians have almost like culturally that fatalism, you know, like, you know, you look at Leningrad, like you look at some of these big battles. Do, do the Ukraines, is that something that they have in common culturally?

• 2:28:49Speaker 05

  I think they do and, and, you know, Ukrainian folks might be down on me, but, you know, they're also Soviet. And, you know, I don't mean that in a negative way. I mean, that country had a heroic struggle against Nazism.

• 2:29:10Speaker 05

  That

• 2:29:12Speaker 05

  The resistance was such a devastating impact on that collective society, Russian and Ukrainian, that is several generations away, but I think is ingrained in the consciousness.

• 2:29:27Speaker 04

  Right, it's just a trauma.

• 2:29:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, so when they fight, to lose 5% of your population is a terrible thing, but it's one of the things that happens in warfare. And, you know, I don't, I don't know, we'll see. I mean, in the year to come, whether Ukrainians really will have to mobilize more.

• 2:29:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:29:52Speaker 05

  Uh, but, but it's, it's a battle that, you know, here we are. I mean, it's, it's a major land war in Europe of the scale that we have not seen since 1945.

• 2:30:06Speaker 04

  Do you get a sense from the general Ukrainian population, the young people? And I know that a lot of people are rogering up, or they're getting drafted, they're going. But you get a sense that if they were to get pressed and the draft were to expand and the hardships increased, that they would want, that they would settle for a peaceful solution outside the border of their living experience. So, you know, out at the border of Ukraine, or, or, you know.

• 2:30:39Speaker 05

  That's our question too. I mean, that's, that's, I mean, when I come back to this country, people we talk to, they always ask, they say, what's your assessment about the will to fight? And the will to fight is contingent.

• 2:30:56Speaker 05

  It's how much is the adversary in your face?

• 2:30:58Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 2:31:00Speaker 05

  And Russia is in their face in a way that's changed in the years since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. Ukrainian cities are dark now.

• 2:31:14Speaker 05

  It's cold. The air alerts are constant. The hardship is increasing. That focuses people's minds. A lot of people left that country. You know, I mean, there are millions of Ukrainians that live outside that are not part of the fight.

• 2:31:34Speaker 05

  But in some situations, you know, the fight comes to you.

• 2:31:39Speaker 04

  Yeah. And.

• 2:31:40Speaker 05

  And, you know, it's like the whole issue about, you know, the creation of a nation. This is the creation of a nation. Ukrainians are gonna hate Russians for generations now.

• 2:31:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:31:54Speaker 05

  Whereas ten years ago, the difference between Russians and Ukrainians, not so much.

• 2:32:00Speaker 03

  It was like Canada, America.

• 2:32:02Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 2:32:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:32:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, everyone had a cousin or relative in Canada.

• 2:32:05Speaker 05

  That border was, that border was open, but when you find somebody in your backyard

• 2:32:12Speaker 05

  threatening you who's in your face, then that changes the mentality, and I think it, it's true on the Russian side too. Because there are Russian soldiers who thought that they were invading people who forgot that they were Russian.

• 2:32:30Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:32:31Speaker 05

  Who.

• 2:32:32Speaker 04

  Hundred percent.

• 2:32:32Speaker 05

  Wake up one day and discover that they're fighting a war in a foreign country. So for Ukrainians, the thing that they have is they have home turf advantage. They have a growing sense of nationalism. Even if the United States steps away, I think Eastern Europeans who are concerned about Russian, Russia are gonna step in.

• 2:32:56Speaker 05

  And the war's gonna get worse. And what that's gonna do is that's gonna have a, um, a counterbalancing effect, which is Ukrainians are gonna.

• 2:33:07Speaker 05

  Discover a even stronger sense of nationalism and you know, it's it's their country. They're fighting for their sovereignty, they're fighting for their freedom. Russians are fighting to subjugate a foreign country.

• 2:33:22Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:33:23Speaker 05

  That is a hard, hard battle for them to win.

• 2:33:27Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:33:28Speaker 05

  And what history shows us over the last hundred fifty years is nationalism, a sense of national identity is very hard to crush. And for Russia, the fate, even if they can subjugate that country and somehow incorporate it. It's gonna become a virus, it's gonna become a cancer in their own system.

• 2:33:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:33:53Speaker 05

  And you know, whether it's it's you know, suicide bombers in the Moscow metro. You know, the millions of ethnic Ukrainians in Russia. Who you know, begin to wonder about, you know, where they fit in this conflict.

• 2:34:14Speaker 05

  It, you know, it's a tragedy for Russia.

• 2:34:16Speaker 04

  It'll be like the IRA at an exponential level.

• 2:34:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, no.

• 2:34:20Speaker 04

  People who blend in, right?

• 2:34:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, and and that's and that's what I think is really tough about this is the fact that, you know, like to Will's point. You know, again, I was there a few months before the war kicked off in August, August, August of twenty twenty one. And the fact that like every Ukrainian would like would tell me and my whole research team. That the idea of Russia invading us. Was so just not like a thing you would ever consider. Like it was just like, and then they'd be like, it'd be like if if you're a Canadian and the Americans invade you.

• 2:34:59Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:34:59Speaker 05

  It it doesn't make sense. It's like we're all the same people, basically.

• 2:35:04Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:35:05Speaker 05

  And it's like, and and it make and made sense when I I spent two, three weeks in Ukraine. And I would meet people and be like, oh yeah, I have a cousin or an uncle or a brother or a mother or a father or a a mother in law in Russia. And I and I'm in Ukraine and I interact with them, you know, with the Russian language. Yeah. Which most people speak.

• 2:35:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:35:25Speaker 05

  Which is not the same as Ukrainian.

• 2:35:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:35:28Speaker 05

  But is integral to the way that they were raised and but the strength of the identity.

• 2:35:35Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:35:36Speaker 05

  The the formation of a sense of them as a people.

• 2:35:42Speaker 05

  And I mean, at a point now where a country of, I don't know, maybe there are thirty five million people who still live in Ukraine and in which you have half a million of them are now casualties of war.

• 2:35:58Speaker 05

  With many more to come. That begins to transform their sense as a people and, you know, to the question of what is the future of warfare there, the will to fight.

• 2:36:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:36:13Speaker 03

  Which, over the last month, polls have now come out in Ukraine that the average Ukrainian is actually more open to the idea of actually seeking peace. And when I say seek peace, it's basically, you know, it it's not you want peace, it's just like, all we want is peace, like, like.

• 2:36:37Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:36:37Speaker 03

  The idea of.

• 2:36:38Speaker 04

  We're not gonna surrender, but we want.

• 2:36:40Speaker 05

  Well, what they want is they want their country.

• 2:36:41Speaker 04

  Right. Yes. Right.

• 2:36:42Speaker 03

  And and they don't want to be fucking dealing with the blockouts and and the terror strikes against fucking schools, hospitals, and and and you have to, you have to like.

• 2:36:53Speaker 05

  But if they don't have peace, what are they gonna do?

• 2:36:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:36:56Speaker 05

  I mean, what if what if the adversary doesn't give them peace?

• 2:36:59Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:37:00Speaker 05

  I mean, people are very, very tired, but they don't have a choice.

• 2:37:06Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:37:07Speaker 05

  They're gonna fight.

• 2:37:09Speaker 05

  And, you know, because what's the alternative?

• 2:37:13Speaker 05

  I think for some people, you know, at least, I mean, I'm dealing with maybe a self-select group because I'm in, you know, among people who are fighting. That, you know, what they say is, they say, well, what is peace in parts of Ukraine that are occupied by Russia? It's, it's sort of this political cleansing. You know, adult males know what will happen to them. They know what their fate will be. And many of them judge it's better to die fighting than to live in that kind of subjugation.

• 2:37:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:37:50Speaker 05

  Because they know that they will be subordinate in this empire. And they also see the people who are called to fight against them. You know, people who are the dregs of Russian society, of people who are ethnic minorities, people who are socially disadvantaged. They see what kind of system that is.

• 2:38:13Speaker 05

  So, yeah, they're fighting for their freedom.

• 2:38:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:38:18Speaker 05

  So what do they have to lose?

• 2:38:21Speaker 03

  And, and, and, and obviously back to like the losses question, which was the very important question was, you know, like depending who you talk to, certain parts, certain parts of the front that we've been able to interpret is, like the losses is basically three Russian casualties to one Ukrainian. Some parts of the front, it can be five to one, and some parts of the front, it can be fifteen or even twenty to one.

• 2:38:48Speaker 03

  While that sounds awesome from their American perspective, because, uh, at least from a, a, a, a US perspective.

• 2:38:55Speaker 05

  Ukraine's about a quarter the size of Russia, so who's gonna run out of people first?

• 2:38:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, but from a US military perspective, we do love this sort of like, this, this weird standard of like, well, if you can maintain a fifteen to one kill ratio or fucking casualty ratio, it makes it better.

• 2:39:11Speaker 04

  It briefs, it, it, it briefs well on PowerPoint.

• 2:39:14Speaker 05

  But it's like World War One. I mean,

• 2:39:15Speaker 04

  Yes. Yeah.

• 2:39:16Speaker 05

  It, it's like, who, who's, who's will to fight is, is gonna break first? And.

• 2:39:26Speaker 05

  You know, I don't know. I mean, like I say, home turf advantage. I mean, Ukrainians have home turf advantage. Because they have nowhere to go.

• 2:39:36Speaker 03

  But I also think that.

• 2:39:37Speaker 05

  The Russians, they're invading a foreign country. They have a place to go, back to Russia.

• 2:39:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I also think, you know, you have to always put an asterisk next to these fucking Russian losses because these are not normal Russian losses either. When I say not normal Russian losses is the fact that like, this isn't like, like, like they're losing.

• 2:39:59Jack Murphy?

  People from Saint Petersburg or Moscow.

• 2:40:02Speaker 03

  Or like the VDV.

• 2:40:03Speaker 05

  But they're still losing Russians.

• 2:40:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, or, or they're losing people from the prison system, or they're losing people from Mali and Niger.

• 2:40:12Speaker 05

  These people all have families, you know?

• 2:40:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:40:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, or North Korea now, but like, but, but, but I think that's, that's the problem with this, this conversation as well as like, cool, you can inflict fifteen to twenty-one, you know, fifteen to twenty fucking, fucking losses on the Russians. If you're just killing off the, like, like the prison population and a bunch of mercenaries, does it really have that much of an impact? Because as far as we know from, like, I from Russian tactics, is the Russians just, you know, like the VDV, which is basically, you know, like, you know, like their version of like.

• 2:40:48Jack Murphy?

  Paratroopers.

• 2:40:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, paratrooper, green berets. They basically force these meat wave assaults to be, you know, go attack these positions. They obviously don't say you're all gonna die, but just go attack these, these positions and use drones to identify.

• 2:41:07Speaker 05

  What's the will to fight?

• 2:41:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:41:08Speaker 05

  I mean, when, when you have a command that the soldier next to you know, you know is expendable versus a command where they're trying to motivate you to fight, but they're also trying to protect you.

• 2:41:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:41:25Speaker 05

  I mean, that's a big difference.

• 2:41:26Speaker 04

  I mean, honestly, taking over Ukraine is probably the worst outcome for Russia at this point. Because now you have a population that looks just like you, can you can speak your language. And eh like.

• 2:41:39Speaker 05

  Everybody in the Moscow metro is a potential suicide bomber.

• 2:41:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:41:44Speaker 05

  And, you know, I mean, it's a it's a terrible war and and it's it's a terrible strategic error on the part of the Russians. I mean, if it had been the three day war.

• 2:41:55Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:41:56Speaker 05

  They had anticipated and it was a close thing.

• 2:41:59Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:42:00Speaker 05

  Maybe at that point, they could have imposed themselves, you know, indirectly forming a government of their preference for Ukraine. It's too late now.

• 2:42:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:42:10Speaker 05

  Because Ukrainians have gone through that experience. They've, I mean, it it it's a tragedy and a liberation at the same time.

• 2:42:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:42:19Speaker 05

  Because they've had the the experience, the collective experience of oppression by a foreigner, by a foreign government and the act of collective resistance. That's what I like about it.

• 2:42:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:42:35Speaker 05

  When I go there, I mean, that's where I feel the freedom of, you know, my engagement with Ukrainian forces on front lines. I'm not sure that's in our national interest, by the way. You know, looking at our larger project in terms of, you know, foreign military training, are they the perfect partners and so forth? I think that that's a political decision for our leadership to decide. So, you know, yes, no, maybe, but looking at the situation for for what it is, you know, that's that's a stark fist of reality.

• 2:43:15Speaker 05

  At the very least, I think it's important for us to engage with it because the way that Ukrainians fight tell us a lot about what warfare in the 21st century is like against a peer adversary.

• 2:43:31Speaker 04

  It's horrifying.

• 2:43:32Speaker 05

  And it's, it's, it's new, yet it's very old.

• 2:43:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:43:36Speaker 05

  And it's a reminder of us that our vacation from that type of warfare is over. And that these things that we've relied upon, for example, air superiority, sort of which is like almost an engage, you know, an ingrained reflexiveness.

• 2:43:57Speaker 03

  You guys assume that air, air force will be there and you, you get it.

• 2:44:01Speaker 04

  Unless it's daytime.

• 2:44:02Speaker 05

  Well, but, but, I mean, this is what I see in terms of the medical part, you know, it's like tactical medicine, evacuation, these types of things. And then you realize it's like, oh, wait, yeah, that's so dependent on air, air, air power, air supremacy. And then when you have to do that when that's absent and, and, you know, it's like, okay, drones and all these kinds of things are new, but when you've got a 10 kilometer zone where the evacuation of the critically wounded soldier may be by foot.

• 2:44:34Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 2:44:35Speaker 05

  You know, that's like ancient Greece.

• 2:44:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:44:40Speaker 05

  You know, fighting the Persians or, or something like that because that's what you have. I mean, you might have a few techniques and a few drugs and things like that that'll sustain in that, but, but that, that foot travel is, is just that.

• 2:44:57Jack Murphy?

  What else do we have for these guys? Cause it's starting to get weird.

• 2:45:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, we gotta head back to.

• 2:45:03Speaker 04

  Uh, RS, thank you very much. Uh, Dave, please let Malcolm Nance know that Sniper is out on all digital platforms.

• 2:45:10Jack Murphy?

  Sniper is an outstanding film with Tom Barringer.

• 2:45:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:45:15Speaker 04

  You're deeper into the series.

• 2:45:16Jack Murphy?

  I've seen all 10.

• 2:45:17Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:45:17Jack Murphy?

  I'm, I, I have my, I have my card punched.

• 2:45:20Speaker 04

  And, uh, I, I will, I will let him know that. I'm sure that he will have some solid critique for the sniper tactics used in that. Um, M. Corbin, thank you very much. Uh, uh, thank you for answering my question, Dr. Reno. Um, Dee, did we have anything on Patreon?

• 2:45:36Jack Murphy?

  Okay, cool. Guys, um, both of your, uh, work is non-classified and published publicly.

• 2:45:44Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:45:44Jack Murphy?

  Where can people go to find, like, if they're interested in these topics and the types of things that you write about, where can they find you?

• 2:45:51Speaker 03

  I honestly, Will Reno and Jarrah Madison.

• 2:45:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, I know, we should keep a page and consolidate all that stuff.

• 2:46:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's...

• 2:46:01Jack Murphy?

  There's not a repository?

• 2:46:03Speaker 05

  Oh, good lord.

• 2:46:06Speaker 05

  Caught us with our pants down. I mean, it's, it's, it's one of the things we've been thinking about, we gotta get it, we gotta get a separate webpage for that.

• 2:46:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, we have to do it, we have to do it.

• 2:46:14Speaker 05

  But, but, but, but Google us, um, you know, what's our best and greatest, I mean, you and Jay Mann's book, uh...

• 2:46:23Speaker 03

  I mean, like...

• 2:46:23Speaker 05

  New Wars.

• 2:46:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, yeah, like, we publish in, you know, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Modern War Institute, War on the Rocks, like, I mean, like, the good thing for you guys, you know, if you're watching this right now...

• 2:46:38Speaker 00

  Sponsored by GSK, the makers of Extenture, Depomocamab ULAA. If your asthma keeps interrupting, it may be time to try something else. Extenture is an ultra-long-acting prescription-maintenance treatment for severe asthma, eosinophilic type, ages 12 and older. It isn't for sudden breathing problems. Extenture is the first and only add-on treatment that can help deliver protection from asthma attacks with two doses a year. Just one dose every six months. That's a lot of time for everything in between. Serious allergic reactions can occur. Get help right away for swelling of face, mouth, tongue, or trouble breathing. Don't change or stop medicines, including steroids, unless told by your doctor. Report if you have a parasitic infection.

• 2:47:21Speaker 00

  Common colds, sinus infection, inflammation in the nose, flu or fluke-like symptoms, joint pain or sore throat may occur. Carry on with fewer attacks and ask your doctor about Extenture. Learn more at extenture.com or call 1-833-393-3678. Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal...

• 2:47:46Speaker 05

  Manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:48:09Speaker 03

  There's only one Johara Matisek in the whole world. So more than likely, if you type in Johara Matisek, you'll find my stuff and you'll find Will Reno's stuff.

• 2:48:20Speaker 05

  You'll find me, but you know, problem is there's Reno, Nevada.

• 2:48:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's always the problem. So at least like, you know.

• 2:48:27Speaker 05

  Just named for a relative.

• 2:48:28Speaker 03

  And those are my apologies that if you logged on hoping to see like an actual Johara, I do not look like Mia Khalifa. My apologies. And if you're laughing about that Mia Khalifa joke, you should delete your browser history.

• 2:48:43Jack Murphy?

  Our audience is well familiar. Wait, what are we talking about? Mia Khalifa? Yeah, way to play that one off, Dave. Way to play that off. Very smooth. I'm pure. You're teaching at Northwestern. What class can you teach? Where should students go to sign up for your classes?

• 2:49:02Speaker 05

  Well, I teach a course called The American Way of War. And it's about the evolution of American military strategy. And teach courses of politics of violence and other things that don't always fit neatly in the curriculum. But things I like to engage students.

• 2:49:26Jack Murphy?

  Guys, final thoughts. We've kept you for like almost three hours here.

• 2:49:30Speaker 03

  No, this is impressive. Like I thought it was like nine o'clock.

• 2:49:34Jack Murphy?

  It was a great conversation. If you have any final thoughts, I'd love to hear you share them. But I think the final thing that I have anyways, I'd like to hear you articulate if you were President Sullivan and you had to articulate this argument or this point that you've made during this interview, that it's important for our government to articulate to the public why we're supporting Ukraine and what the point is. If you were to make that argument to the American public, what would you say?

• 2:50:07Speaker 04

  And you're on the board of a major defense contractor, so it's on in your benefit to keep it going.

• 2:50:13Speaker 05

  No, if I'm if if I'm if I'm honest about it, because I could have a Ukrainian point of view.

• 2:50:20Speaker 04

  Like a pragmatic point of view.

• 2:50:22Speaker 05

  Because I'm often there and among Ukrainians that are fighting. If I'm honest about it, I think that part of it's about credibility.

• 2:50:34Speaker 05

  I mean, we're in Russia's face at this point, so that's already an established fact. And, you know, we can't sort of back sort of rerun that phase of history again. I think it's important to show China that our commitment to Ukraine may be like our commitment to Taiwan. So, you know, I think that that's a factor or our commitment to Philippines or Japan or South Korea. So if we think that that's important, we should think that Ukraine is important.

• 2:51:12Speaker 05

  I think that solidarity with our NATO partners and allies, that that's a thing. I think that withdrawing from Ukraine also inherently means withdrawing from Europe to some extent.

• 2:51:34Speaker 05

  So we have to think, would Europe without American strategic presence be a better or worse place to be? You know, and and would that affect us? So I think there'd be pretty serious consequences for that.

• 2:51:51Speaker 05

  But at the same time, our objectives are not the same as Ukraine's objectives.

• 2:51:58Speaker 05

  I don't think that our definition of winning is is the same as theirs.

• 2:52:05Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:52:06Speaker 05

  So.

• 2:52:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, that that's part of it, too. So I don't know where that ultimately leads. But I think it's important to explain to the American people what all of this assistance is actually about, you know, why it should matter to them.

• 2:52:26Speaker 05

  You know, notice in my explanation, I've tried not to be sentimental. Because I think that being sentimental, you know, which I will be on a personal level, very deeply so. But that's my commitment. That's not my country's commitment. My country's commitment is about its interests. And about its security and and, you know, its protection. So, you know, defining our engagement with Ukraine, you know, I think that that's ultimately what it's about.

• 2:52:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, you know, and if I had to like, give sort of like, my sort of more American military perspective is.

• 2:53:09Speaker 03

  Yes, I want to see Russia defeated in Ukraine. But what does that look like? And, you know, at a personal level, if if I could be, you know,

• 2:53:22Speaker 03

  a general or the czar for the day and basically dictate the events in Ukraine right now. It would, i- in my mind, what I think would be achievable is basically push all Russian forces out of all of Ukraine, except for probably Crimea and probably the far eastern parts of of of Ukraine as well. So. You have to almost accept the fact that like, there are places like Crimea. Even if we actually, from a Western perspective, actually could actually put. Like that part of of Ukraine under under duress. And actually actually stress it and actually push, you know, all the Russians out. That's not really practical. It's not.

• 2:54:05Speaker 03

  And, you know, so you know, you have you have to live in the world of of of practicality and the fact that like. Yeah, at this point, you may have to accept at this at the at this. Critical juncture. Is you're gonna fight for whatever ever land you can get until January twentieth. When Trump becomes president and then the next day, everything might just fucking freeze in place. And we have to accept it and that that might be what it becomes. And that's that's a harsh reality that I don't think any of us like, but it might become the reality. So. You know, if you're Russian or Ukrainian right now, that's what you're fighting for.

• 2:54:46Speaker 03

  You're fighting for leverage of whatever happens on January twenty. On on the on the twentieth, that's my first is right right now.

• 2:54:54Speaker 05

  Um, the underlying factor that too is is their will to fight.

• 2:54:58Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:54:59Speaker 05

  I mean, if if if we're gonna assist the Ukrainians, I wanna see, I wanna see evidence of their will to fight.

• 2:55:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:55:06Speaker 05

  I don't wanna, I don't want Afghanistan. I don't want Iraq or anything like that.

• 2:55:10Speaker 03

  You have to mobilize younger people, not just right now, the average age of the average conscript in Ukraine is like forty five, forty six. That's highly fucking problematic.

• 2:55:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, makes me feel good, you know, when I'm there, cuz I'm like, whoa, there are a lot of people like me.

• 2:55:27Speaker 04

  Wow, that's wow.

• 2:55:28Speaker 05

  It's it's an interesting experiment that do older soldiers make smarter soldiers?

• 2:55:33Speaker 03

  Which we've actually have asked, like, the Brits and the Germans and the Poles. What's it like to train a younger Ukrainian versus an older Ukrainian? They say. Well, the younger the Ukrainian, the more cowboy they are. The older the Ukrainian, the more sort of like like reserved and sort of like.

• 2:55:51Speaker 05

  Think it through. In this type of warfare.

• 2:55:53Speaker 03

  They think about it and they don't, they don't like taking risks.

• 2:55:55Speaker 05

  In this type of warfare with the technology of warfare. I in some ways, I think older might be better. I it it's. You know, it's not. Sort of, you know, hand to hand combat. It's, uh.

• 2:56:12Speaker 05

  You know, looking at the technology, I mean, this last trip, you know, visiting Ukrainian bomb factories, visiting drone innovation cells and so forth. Like, that type of skill, that type of expertise takes years of training. And, you know, it's not a war for nineteen or twenty-one year olds. It's, you know, it's a more adult war now. Mind you, and, you know, when it's ten degrees Fahrenheit and the snow's blowing and humidity's a hundred percent and you've been out there for a bunch of days, you know, when you're in your forties and fifties, it's, it's maybe a little different than-

• 2:56:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, in your bones.

• 2:56:59Speaker 05

  It is in your bones. And I'm sixty-two years old and I felt very cold and I think I'm still fucking freezing, but-

• 2:57:07Speaker 04

  Fire maneuver, fire maneuver must be very loud. I'll be, ah. Hips popping. Yeah, the groaning.

• 2:57:14Speaker 05

  It, it's, it's, you know, there are a lot of underlying health conditions.

• 2:57:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, you know, you, you, you see all, I mean, you see soldiers that are having difficulties where at first you're kind of thinking it's about the situation that they're actually in, but then you realize it's like, oh no, that's actually an underlying condition.

• 2:57:41Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, it's just arthritis in the knees.

• 2:57:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's arthritis or, and, I mean, the oldest, I think we met in the training programs is seventy-two and I've definitely met soldiers in their sixties that are, I've met Afghan war veterans. Warms my heart. People who are in Afghanistan, same time I was in Afghanistan, Soviet period, that are, you know, it's like, you know, you can have a reunion and-

• 2:58:09Speaker 05

  You know, it's like your war is my war.

• 2:58:12Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:12Speaker 03

  This is fucking again, fucking insane. You fought Afghanistan in the eighties and now you're fighting Ukraine against, against Russia in twenty twenty four. That's fucking insane.

• 2:58:21Speaker 05

  I mean, I, one of the things I like to do is visit Afghan war memorials. Uh, you know, different Ukrainian towns. I mean, these are sort of, there's a Soviet aesthetic to them. Um, but I always zero in on them and, and try to take a photo, cause you know, it's like, in a way.

• 2:58:43Speaker 05

  I don't, you know, do I feel kinship with Soviets or am I feeling kinship with Russians or Ukrainians? It doesn't really matter, cause it's the Afghan war and, and you know, that's the human aspect of it.

• 2:58:57Jack Murphy?

  Uh huh.

• 2:58:58Speaker 05

  Sort of the perversity of modern politics that here we are.

• 2:59:04Jack Murphy?

  Everybody pulling on the same thread at different points in time.

• 2:59:08Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 2:59:09Jack Murphy?

  Thank you guys for coming in and having this conversation with us. And, uh, you know, hearing some, some point of views that people don't normally get to hear.

• 2:59:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure.

• 2:59:17Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:19Speaker 05

  All right, well, happy to, happy to oblige.

• 2:59:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I, I, we thought we'd be here an hour in this.

• 2:59:26Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, good luck.

• 2:59:27Speaker 03

  And it's been like almost fucking three hours and I, and I hope you're, uh, like you're, you know, your fans have all jumped off.

• 2:59:33Jack Murphy?

  No, no, this was, this was a really great conversation.

• 2:59:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was fantastic.

• 2:59:37Jack Murphy?

  And, uh, yeah, I, I would love to have you guys back again sometime.

• 2:59:41Speaker 05

  All right.

• 2:59:41Speaker 03

  No, no, it's awesome to get fucking Russ, uh, well, his brother is Rusty Reno. Who has his little, you know, his little journal, you know. First, you know, first things, little Catholic journal.

• 2:59:54Speaker 05

  Little Catholic journal. It's like the founding journal of the Catholic church, but.

• 2:59:58Jack Murphy?

  The founding journal, the Catholic church.

• 3:00:00Speaker 03

  Uh, about American foreign policy, but through a Catholic lens. No, no, no, this has actually been like.

• 3:00:06Speaker 05

  We, that's all they call.

• 3:00:08Speaker 03

  I didn't, I didn't realize that we were about to stop until like a fantastic conversation.

• 3:00:12Jack Murphy?

  What, they're, they're here in New York?

• 3:00:13Speaker 05

  But we gotta blow, we gotta get back.

• 3:00:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, his, his brother lives in, in, uh, over in Manhattan.

• 3:00:19Jack Murphy?

  No shit. Okay.

• 3:00:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, so like.

• 3:00:20Speaker 05

  Sutton Place, uh.

• 3:00:22Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:00:22Speaker 05

  North of New York.

• 3:00:23Speaker 03

  This was fantastic, cause like we.

• 3:00:25Speaker 05

  And we gotta go to Germany tomorrow. We gotta go to.

• 3:00:28Jack Murphy?

  Oh my god.

• 3:00:29Speaker 03

  We're about to go see Ukrainians get trained tomorrow.

• 3:00:31Speaker 05

  US Army Bavaria.

• 3:00:33Jack Murphy?

  Crap. All right, well, we'll let you guys go, man. Thank you for spending so long with us.

• 3:00:39Speaker 03

  Thanks for tolerating us.

• 3:00:41Jack Murphy?

  For Monday, we're gonna be back with Wade Ishimoto.

• 3:00:47Speaker 00

  Sponsored by GSK, the makers of Extenture. Depamocumab ULAA. If your asthma keeps interrupting, it may be time to try something else. Extenture is an ultra-long-acting prescription maintenance treatment for severe asthma, eosinophilic type, ages 12 and older. It isn't for sudden breathing problems. Extenture is the first and only add-on treatment that can help deliver protection from asthma attacks with two doses a year. Just one dose every six months. That's a lot of time for everything in between. Serious allergic reactions can occur. Get help right away for swelling of face, mouth, tongue, or trouble breathing. Don't change or stop medicines, including steroids, unless told by your doctor. Report if you have a parasitic infection.

• 3:01:30Speaker 00

  Common cold, sinus infection, inflammation in the nose, flu or flu-like symptoms, joint pain or sore throat may occur. Carry on with fewer attacks and ask your doctor about Extenture. Learn more at extenture.com or call 1-833-393-3678. Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank.

• 3:02:14Speaker 00

  OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 3:02:18Jack Murphy?

  The plank owner in Delta Force. I'm like two-thirds of the way through his book. It's called The Intoku Code. Just got through the eagle claw part of it. So that's coming up on Monday. Really excited to talk to him. And then on Friday, I believe, is Andrew Bragg. That's good. And I think you have.

• 3:02:38Speaker 00

  Sponsored by GSK, the makers of Extenture. Depamocumab ULAA. If your asthma keeps interrupting. It may be time to try something else. Extensure is an ultra-long-acting prescription-maintenance treatment for severe asthma, eosinophilic type, ages 12 and older. It isn't for sudden breathing problems. Extensure is the first and only add-on treatment that can help deliver protection from asthma attacks with two doses a year. Just one dose every six months. That's a lot of time for everything in between. Serious allergic reactions can occur. Get help right away for swelling of face, mouth, tongue, or trouble breathing. Don't change or stop medicines, including steroids, unless told by your doctor. Report if you have a parasitic infection.

• 3:03:21Speaker 00

  Common colds, sinus infection, inflammation in the nose, flu or flulike symptoms, joint pain or sore throat may occur. Carry on with fewer attacks and ask your doctor about Extensure. Learn more at Extensure.com or call 1-833-393-3678. OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at OnDeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota.

• 3:04:05Speaker 00

  All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 3:04:07Jack Murphy?

  ...of his book, The 82nd.

• 3:04:10Speaker 04

  Oh, The 82nd?

• 3:04:10Jack Murphy?

  82nd-year-old guy.

• 3:04:12Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 3:04:14Jack Murphy?

  So we'll have him on Friday.

• 3:04:17Speaker 00

  Sponsored by GSK, the makers of Extensure, Depamocumab ULAA. If your asthma keeps interrupting, it may be time to try something else. Extensure is an ultra-long-acting prescription-maintenance treatment for severe asthma, eosinophilic type, ages 12 and older. It isn't for sudden breathing problems. Extensure is the first and only add-on treatment that can help deliver protection from asthma attacks with two doses a year. Just one dose every six months. That's a lot of time for everything in between. Serious allergic reactions can occur. Get help right away for swelling of face, mouth, tongue, or trouble breathing. Don't change or stop medicines. Including steroids unless told by your doctor. Report if you have a parasitic infection.

• 3:05:00Speaker 00

  Common cold, sinus infection, inflammation in the nose, flu or fluke-like symptoms, joint pain or sore throat may occur. Carry on with fewer attacks and ask your doctor about Extensura. Learn more at Extensura.com or call 1-833-393-3678. Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at OnDeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota.

• 3:05:45Speaker 00

  All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 3:05:47Jack Murphy?

  Otherwise, everyone have a nice weekend out there. Thanks for joining us tonight.

• 3:05:52Speaker 05

  All right. Take care.

• 3:05:54Speaker 00

  Cheers. Sponsored by GSK, the makers of Extensura, Depamocumab ULAA. If your asthma keeps interrupting,

• 3:06:04Speaker 00

  it may be time to try something else. Extensura is an ultra-long-acting prescription maintenance treatment for severe asthma, eosinophilic type, ages 12 and older. It isn't for sudden breathing problems. Extensura is the first and only add-on treatment that can help deliver protection from asthma attacks with two doses a year. Just one dose every six months. That's a lot of time for everything in between. Serious allergic reactions can occur. Get help right away for swelling of face, mouth, tongue, or trouble breathing. Don't change or stop medicines, including steroids, unless told by your doctor. Report if you have a parasitic infection. Common cold, sinus infection, inflammation in the nose, flu or fluke-like symptoms, joint pain or sore throat may occur.

• 3:06:46Speaker 00

  Carry on with fewer attacks and ask your doctor about Extensura. Learn more at Extensura.com or call 1-833-393-3678.

• 3:06:56Speaker 01

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips. Manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 3:07:26Speaker 00

  Sponsored by GSK, the makers of Extenture, Depamocumab ULAA. If your asthma keeps interrupting, it may be time to try something else. Extenture is an ultra-long-acting prescription maintenance treatment for severe asthma, eosinophilic type, ages 12 and older. It isn't for sudden breathing problems. Extenture is the first and only add-on treatment that can help deliver protection from asthma attacks with two doses a year. Just one dose every six months. That's a lot of time for everything in between. Serious allergic reactions can occur. Get help right away for swelling of face, mouth, tongue, or trouble breathing. Don't change or stop medicines, including steroids, unless told by your doctor. Report if you have a parasitic infection, common cold, sinus infection,

• 3:08:11Speaker 00

  inflammation in the nose, flu or flulike symptoms, joint pain or sore throat may occur. Carry on with fewer attacks and ask your doctor about Extenture. Learn more at extenture.com or call 1-833-393-3678. Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota.

• 3:08:55Speaker 00

  All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. What would you like today? Can I get a number two? Anything else?

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  Same shift. Different day. I need a smoke. What can I get you? Can I get a number four, number seven, number eight? Same shift. I need a smoke.

• 3:09:12Speaker 00

  Different day. Using nicotine to relieve stress might just make you feel... worse. Break the cycle and quit nicotine with free daily texts, expert tips, and community support from X Program. By Truth Initiative. Visit Xprogram.com to start your quit journey today.