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JN: We've been hearing lately from Gen. Petraeus and the Sec of Defense when he testified before the Senate Armes Services Committee, in my view untruthfully, that we should expect an offensive by the Ukrainian military sometime in the next month or two. What are they facing?
DM: Right now the Ukrainian military is woefully undermanned in terms of trained manpower that can actually employ equipment and technology with any degree of success. And they're facing an army that's growing with each passing day, it's now beyond the 750,000 I predicted before Christmas. I think we're looking at the arrival of a million troops between now and mid-June.
I say that because Putin has called up more reservists and they've also brought in the usual draftees. I think they've concluded there's no alternative but to fight this war to the finish and end it on terms they'll accept for their own security.
The Ukrainians have no chance against this and the temporary defense will remain in place to wait for this Ukrainian offensive. But I think it's important to keep in mind that the Wagner Group with support from various Russian regular army units is closing off the last open road to Bakhmut. The reason is that Zelensky has announced he's not going to send any more troops into Bakhmut.
So the very successful operations the Russian have run costing tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives is about to end. So they're going to close it off and wait for this counteroffensive that presumably come end of April, sometime in May, who knows. I don't think it will amount to much, don't think they can concentrate the forces necessary to break through Russian defenses and make any difference to the outcome of the war.
JN: We all put little stock in what Petraeus has to say but he appears to be a mouthpiece for the globalists. Here he is talking recently about Ukraine prevailing in Bakhmut.
(clip - "need to not watch what's happening on the battlefield but what's happening at training centers the US runs in Germany, UK, Poland, Ukraine itself where entire new brigades are being established, largely with new recruits but also with seasoned commissioned and non-commissioned officers.")
JN: Where are these human beings coming from?
DM: The last I looked there were 30-40,000 Ukrainians outside of Ukraine being trained in Britain, Germany, the US, the Czech Republic and several other places. How good is the training, how much impact will it have? Well, most of the people they previously trained died months ago, these are presumably replacements. Are they going to learn enough to make a difference to the outcome of the war? There's no evidence for this at this point. We've already seen training accidents inside Ukraine with Leopard tanks and other kinds of fighting vehicles. And the equipment they're getting is extremely maintenance-intensive and we all know the problem with infrastructure and moving the repair parts forward and so forth. Short answer, I don't think it will make any difference but I don't know anything beyond what I've told you about the numbers. Given hundreds of thousands of Russian troops and their capabilities, I don't think it makes any difference.
JN: any idea what this training is like? My basic training lasted 6 weeks, will this be as long as that?
DM: Could be, maybe even longer. My grandfather got 6 weeks training and was shipped off to WWI, it made no difference at all because the firepower, machine guns, mines, barbed wire, artillery killed people regardless of how well-trained they were. We're operating in that kind of environment right now. Remember Ukraine's theater air and missile defense is largely gone. When you add that to these new, fresh formations that haven't been together for any length of time that you're going to hurl at the Russians, who've had months to hone their defensive skills. If there's one thing the Russians have learned to do it's to mobilize firepower and direct it accurately at great distances to any great concentrations at their front.
And stop and think - I think Larry Johnson pointed this out in an article the other day. Who in their right mind announces the imminence of an offensive unless you want to guarantee its failure?
JN: You've spoken highly of the military commander of Ukraine but have been harshly critical of his political boss. Who would have announced the offensive?
DM: Looks like Zelensky, he's been announcing it up and down the hallways of Congress. I think he was told he had to say this or we can't fund you or ship you more equipment, people are losing faith. And indeed, all the statements coming out of political leaders in NATO right now are I think designed to stiffen resolve, build up support. This thing is dying, NATO allies are beginning to walk away from it behind the scenes and as we've discussed before I think these governments in France, Germany and Great Britain are in a lot of trouble.
JN: more from Petraeus on what can be expected from the offensive, he says in May or June and his opinion of his likely success (clip).
DM: Dorothy will return to Kansas with the Wizard in his balloon, too. This is the man who said he singlehandedly won the Iraq War, IOW his surge that cost us 1000 dead and a few thousand wounded was this big success story. Ultimately he did manage to put the Shi'ites in control and make Iraq largely an Iranian satellite but when we finally withdrew from Iraq we had to leave in the middle of the night, to go without telling anyone we were leaving because if they'd know we were leaving in columns from Bagdhad they'd have killed us. That's one example of his victory, then go to Afghanistan. How many lies were told by him and others about what a great success story it was? Remember Petraeus was the man who built the Iraqi army and we know how well that performed.
JN: Why does the establishment put forth spokemen like this? What's their goal, to persuade Congress to spend more money on Ukraine?
DM: That's a critical goal but remember Churchill said the key to success was going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. The globalist neocons have taken that to heart, we've had nothing but failure. We've had nothing but failure in Ukraine. And just double down again and again. We went through the same in Vietnam.
JN: What's the likelihood of Petraeus being right about how he described the offensive and its anticipated success? Is this just fanciful or is there any reasonable likelihood to what he said actually happening.
DM: I give it 5-10% success probability. Again, warfare has changed, he's talking like it's 1942, 43, 44, tanks and infantry and so forth. Warfare today is decided by much greater powers.
We don't talk anymore about combined arms warfare, anyone who understands it. If you talk to Russian general staff they'll talk about "all arms integrative warfare". IOW those ISR platforms and sensors of all kinds, manned and unmanned, that are overhead; all the strike systems - drones, artillery, missiles, rockets - backed by mountains of ammunition; and careful positioning and study of the terrain, which is easily dominated in that part of the world; and finally, hundreds of thousands of troops with lateral routes of movement up and down the front, to rapidly move wherever it's necessary in order to stop any of these offensive attempts.
So the first thing is you've got to get within 10-20 km of your opponent. That's almost impossible now, they'll be obliterated before they come to grips with anybody. Anybody walking around out there is going to go away as rapidly as unprotected tanks and they don't have the air defense capabilities to stop any of this. So we can give them great intelligence, even tell them where we think they should attack but it's not going to make any difference.
JN: We know from the leaked documents that senior officials at the Pentagon believe Ukraine's air defenses have been substantially degraded and will be useless by the end of May.
DM: I think they're telling the truth. These documents, or at least some of them, were prepared two months ago. They said there wasn't much that could be done about the air defense problem but also said the kill ratio was 1:7 at that point. We know the ration has varied from 1:7 up to 1:10 and higher.
JN: As far as you know, in history, has any military survived a kill ratio like that?
DM: Only when they've been reinforced and backed up by additional allies. The French were taking those kinds of casualties at the beginning of WWI, then the British came in and they survived the first 6-7 months of the war. But they were on the verge of losing until we committed our forces - remember we brought 2 million men to the fight in France.
So the short answer, rarely. And the Ukrainians already have, we think, 20,000 Polish soldiers fighting for them and several thousand foreign mercenaries. It's gotten to the point where many of the recent Ukrainian draftees picked up off the streets and sent to the front have died in such great numbers that they won't attack.Why would you?
JN: Here's Stoltenberg making one of the more outrageous and deadly comments that he or anyone from NATO has made (clip - "NATO will stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes"). What does he mean by this? Is NATO going to treat the incursion into Ukraine as an Article 5 violation, as though Ukraine was already a member?
DM: He's essentially arguing that but from a different perspective. We've already treated the Russians unambiguously as the enemy. We haven't joined in the fighting directly so far but there are others there dying along with the Ukrainians. And it's obvious we're going to fund and support it as long as possible.
But I think what he's also signalling, which to me is far more dangerous, is that there will be no negotiation over this matter, there's only one outcome we're going to tolerate. Remember Stoltenberg is the puppet of Washingon, he doesn't say anything that Blinken and Biden and Sullivan, etc. doesn't tell him.
So if you're sitting in the Russian high command talking to Putin, you're saying, they've left us no alternative, not only do we have to conquer eastern Ukraine but we're going to have to turn west, head south and take Odessa then march continually toward Poland.
This has always been the danger as you and I have discussed about this "coalition of the willing" - the US, the Poles, maybe some Lithuanians - who decide to intervene in western Ukraine.
The Russians have taken us at our word and built a force that once it launches is quite capable of getting to the Polish border.
JN: I've asked you this before and I don't think we know the answer: does the US have an off ramp here?
DM: It looks like Washington has refused an off ramp. At least Nixon when he was elected in 1968 had a mandate from the American people to FIND an offramp. We can talk about how good it was but ultimately it worked and we extricated ourselves.
The American people have never really been consulted on this. And there's no willingness to go to the American people and say, I want a mandate from you to do these things.
JN: Not only have the American people not been consulted but unless the leaked documents were fabricated, and it doesn't appear they were, the American people have been lied to. The government is totally unworthy of belief.
DM: I think many of us have sensed that for a long time but it's in black and white now, it's not ambiguous thanks to the documents. I'm beginning to think there's only one thing that holds together the government in Kiev and the government in Washington, greed. Greed holds the military and political leaders together. We've discussed before that most of the cash is transferred to the Pentagon, who transfers it to the various contractors in the defense industry, then equipment and trainers and people flow over there but the majority of the wealth is just transferred here in Washington and that transfer is something everyone wants to protect. Certainly if you're a 3- or 4-star looking at retirement in the future, you want to make sure you get your cut. You're not going to walk away from a cash bonanza that this war represents.
JN: Here's a member of the German parliament, don't know the fellow, he's a member of a small minority party (AfD) named Rüdiger Lucassen: "We can't say that these weapons will bring victory to Ukraine or will lead to peace or even a reduction of escalation. Therefore, yes, I would not send weapons to Ukraine but would try to find an opportunity to start negotiations as soon as possible because it cannot go on like this any longer." No one in the US Congress or the UK Parliament, I don't know if anyone in the French General Assembly has said it, this may be the first in the Bundestag to say it but he said it and it's out there.
DM: I think you've had Mrs. (Sahra) Wagenknecht who leads the hard left make a similar statement arguing for an end to the war, which is what this gentleman did. The AfD controls 15% of the votes right now but it could double in the space of a few weeks and it could overwhelm most of the opposition. They call it some kind of radical right but that's nonsense, these people are just common sense right wing conservatives. And they're nationalists. And they respect the Russians for their interests. And they respect other peoples' legitimate security interests.
He's simply stating the truth, none of this equipment is going to change anything, this war is decided for all intents and purposes. And we're going to watch this over the summer.
What's going to happen in Washington? I think Washington is going to be in the midst of a serious financial crisis, that we're just at the beginning of that, and the more desperate we become on that side,
the less interest we'll have for what's happening in Ukraine or anywhere beyond our borders.
JN: I'm going to talk to a man you and I admire greatly, Congressman Andy Biggs of Arizona, who I expect is going to tell me that the Republican Speaker of the House does not have the votes for raising the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion no matter what kind of promises accompany it. So I think you're quite correct, Washington is in for very, very hard times financially.
Joe Biden has $40 billion remaining in the banks of the $113 billion Congress authorized. My bet is that he's going to spend it no matter how tough times are financially, whether it's cash or military equipment. What do you think?
DM: We're on one of two paths right now. One, the path everyone in Washington has chosen for decades, is to print more money. The problem is, if you just print more money at this stage, you're going to go to HYPERinflation. We're going to look like Weimar, Germany or worse. Certainly Argentina, maybe Brazil. That's the path I think the Left wants to follow.
The other path is to stop spending, cut spending, and negotiate a new deal with your creditors. That's called default. We did that twice in '32 and '34 under FDR. We had no choice. We said, we're restructuring the debt. This is the last chance to restructure the debt. The first thing you cut in spending if you restructure the debt is overseas military commitments.
JN: I know you've been critical of Macron. I'm interested in your view of what he said as he was flying back to France from China, to the effect that Europe should not be subject to the American rhythm - I think he meant the American rhythm of endless wars. Where's France on this? Are the French providing troops or materiel or is he worried about getting impeached if he gets involved in this war?
DM: We all recall that DeGaulle made similar remarks way into the 60s, that's why he decided to pull France out of the military dimension of NATO, so they weren't part of that structure. Gradually we've enticed them back in, first with the intervention in the Balkans, Kosovo; subsequently in other places.
I think he knows that's a mistake, maybe has always known it but now he's saying it in hopes he's going to get some credit for it. He's not. The population doesn't want to impeach Macron, they want him gone. If anything he's on the path to becoming Louis XVI again.
JN: Tell our viewers what you told me about a brief conversation you had with President Trump when he asked you, I think it was about the Germans...
DM: You're ambushing me. I don't normally repeat what I discuss with presidents. President Trump had great trust and confidence in me and I told you to make a point. And the point is simply this: until we leave Germany, Europe ultimately but certainly Germany, which is the principal foundation for our military power in Europe, the Germans aren't going to spend any money on defense, why would they?
JN: I don't know what it's going to take for the American government to tell the truth, I don't know what Austin is going to say the next time he appears before the Senate Armed Forces Committee. They must know he lied the last time he was there when he said expect a good Spring and an even better Winter. Those documents had been in his possession for two months at the time he said this.
DM: Lying, whether you're a 4-star, a Senator or a Congressman has been no bar to advancement. So I think the lying is going to continue until the whole thing finally implodes. I think we're on the road to that. Ben Stein likes to say, it'll go on until it can't. And I think your debt ceiling observation is an important one. The question is, do we stop it now? Or do we let it continue until we're Sri Lanka writ large?
there doesn't seem to be anything here