Retired Lt. Col. Daniel Davis...decorated combat vet...background in infantry and armor...interviewed by Breitbart.
A guy with no political ax to grind. He's simply looking from the perspective of national strategy and military tactics at what we're doing and where things are headed...and saying: this is insane.
There are uncanny parallels between the Regime's pandemic response and its Ukraine folly. In both cases, a disastrous policy is promoted by our rulers and their legions of experts, the media propaganda machine runs full throttle, dissent is shut down and dissenters demonized.
We're still picking up the pieces with regard to the pandemic as now, two years after the fact, the points made by the dissenters are vindicated while the Regime quietly tip-toes away from its horrible blunders. But at the rate we're going, tip-toeing away may not be an option in the case of Ukraine. I mean, you can only phuck with Lady Karma so long before she turns around and requires her due.
Anyway, below in italics are some excerpts of Davis's comments to Breitbart.
>>From someone who has done combat operations in tank-on-tank fights; in operations patrolling the East-West border during the Cold War and its potential Soviet invasions; and was the second-in-command of an armored cavalry squadron for the First Armored Division in the mid 2000s in Germany, I can tell you that just having NATO tanks does not equal battlefield success.
The problem is that what works on video games and on paper — you have to make it work on the ground. And very few people anywhere in the western media or anywhere in the other media, for that matter, understand how combat power is made. It’s not just the platform, though that is very important, but roughly 90 percent of the success is the people who operate the equipment.
...you have to have a trained platoon, platoons in a company; and a company in the battalion; and if you’re talking about the inner-level operations, battalions within brigades etc. You can’t send 500 [Ukrainian] dudes to Germany and conduct six weeks of maneuver training and think you’re going to get the same output, because those guys don’t have the experience. They don’t even have the baseline understanding that we had a whole career and our whole training before we even arrived at that one year preparation. I mean just on the surface of it, it's ridiculous...it’s people who just don’t have any idea of how actual combat power is generated that would believe that.
Because maybe it works for movies and in video games — just getting this capacity on your video game and poof, you’ve got the full capacity as though you were fully trained, but it just doesn’t work that way in reality...The expectation that so many in the West, and certainly those in Kyiv, have been professing: that they think the possession of these Bradleys, Abrams, Leopards, AMX-10, M109 Paladins, etc. combined, is going to allow them to go on a NATO-type offensive maneuver is just not going to happen because it’s way more than the platforms required to enable that kind of offensive operation.
All you’re doing is making Russia want to go to war. Far from wanting to deter Russia or making them hesitate and count the costs – it’s having the exact opposite effect across the board in Russia. If anything, it makes them want to be more aggressive. It makes them absolutely think we cannot lose this and double down on their efforts...even the general Russian population — you don’t see any protests anymore and you barely see any kind of negative social media comments, and that’s usually people who aren’t even in Russia. In Russia you don’t see any of that, because people are for the most part convinced that this is what has to be done because [they feel] it’s a very valid position to say all of NATO is against them.
We’re providing intelligence. We’re providing ammunition. We’re providing weapons systems [and] repair facilities, literally everything but the pull of the trigger. Imagine during the war with Afghanistan that Russia or China had just completely got behind the Taliban, gave them everything they had, including all their modern gear to kill American soldiers. Do you think we would have accepted that? Would we have been OK with that? We’d go crazy. We’d have potentially gone to war with them.
We think that, like Biden said hiding behind a fig leaf today, when he announced this change, that ‘we are not going to war with Russia’ and ‘we’re not a direct participant,’ as though just saying those words means anything to Russia...I think that there’s not enough recognition of just how much risk and gamble we’re taking right now...We have no strategy. Nobody is asking what comes next.
We're just giving all this stuff, nobody's talking about, not even ethereal kinds of overarching statements. What is this supposed to accomplish? What is the outcome you see by giving [these tanks]? What are you trying to produce on the ground? How is this going to benefit the United States of America as opposed to not doing it?
Define "win". Because you had the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff one week ago repeat what he’s been saying a lot, and one of the few things I agree with him on, [that] he sees no military path for Ukraine to win this war in the foreseeable future, meaning throughout the entire 2023...And he’s right. Even with all this stuff, of course, he knew what we were going to offer before he made that comment. And he’s right, but no one pays any attention to that, they just pretend it didn’t happen, [as if] he didn’t say it.
One of the things that’s been from the outset that it just has not come to grips within the West [is that] this is not Syria; this is not Iraq; this is not Libya; this is not Yemen; this is not even Iran. We have basically done whatever we wanted to do in all these places and didn’t even care about what they might do because we know they don’t have the ability...We’re having that same mentality in Russia...the biggest nuclear stockpile in the world. They can do something. The rules are different. You cannot behave and act...like you can against Syria.
I fear that one day, Russia’s going to say, ‘OK, you finally did cross a red line this time and we’re going to take action.' For example, [Russian Foreign Minister Sergey] Lavrov recently said that based on all this stuff about the tanks, they reserve the right to attack any provider of NATO gear, NATO tanks, NATO vehicles, their ammunition – no matter where they are, meaning Poland or in some other NATO country.
There is zero chance – and I mean zero – that Russia could ever militarily defeat NATO in a conventional sense. It’s a physical impossibility. They’re just struggling even now to defeat Ukrainians in part of the Donbas, their next-door neighbor, so they certainly couldn’t take on a 30 member NATO military alliance; they know that. So the only way they can defend against NATO, is through nuclear weapons, of course. So if we try to think we’re going to trigger Article 5 and not trigger nuclear war. I mean, we’re just insane and fooling ourselves.<<
A guy with no political ax to grind. He's simply looking from the perspective of national strategy and military tactics at what we're doing and where things are headed...and saying: this is insane.
There are uncanny parallels between the Regime's pandemic response and its Ukraine folly. In both cases, a disastrous policy is promoted by our rulers and their legions of experts, the media propaganda machine runs full throttle, dissent is shut down and dissenters demonized.
We're still picking up the pieces with regard to the pandemic as now, two years after the fact, the points made by the dissenters are vindicated while the Regime quietly tip-toes away from its horrible blunders. But at the rate we're going, tip-toeing away may not be an option in the case of Ukraine. I mean, you can only phuck with Lady Karma so long before she turns around and requires her due.
Anyway, below in italics are some excerpts of Davis's comments to Breitbart.
>>From someone who has done combat operations in tank-on-tank fights; in operations patrolling the East-West border during the Cold War and its potential Soviet invasions; and was the second-in-command of an armored cavalry squadron for the First Armored Division in the mid 2000s in Germany, I can tell you that just having NATO tanks does not equal battlefield success.
The problem is that what works on video games and on paper — you have to make it work on the ground. And very few people anywhere in the western media or anywhere in the other media, for that matter, understand how combat power is made. It’s not just the platform, though that is very important, but roughly 90 percent of the success is the people who operate the equipment.
...you have to have a trained platoon, platoons in a company; and a company in the battalion; and if you’re talking about the inner-level operations, battalions within brigades etc. You can’t send 500 [Ukrainian] dudes to Germany and conduct six weeks of maneuver training and think you’re going to get the same output, because those guys don’t have the experience. They don’t even have the baseline understanding that we had a whole career and our whole training before we even arrived at that one year preparation. I mean just on the surface of it, it's ridiculous...it’s people who just don’t have any idea of how actual combat power is generated that would believe that.
Because maybe it works for movies and in video games — just getting this capacity on your video game and poof, you’ve got the full capacity as though you were fully trained, but it just doesn’t work that way in reality...The expectation that so many in the West, and certainly those in Kyiv, have been professing: that they think the possession of these Bradleys, Abrams, Leopards, AMX-10, M109 Paladins, etc. combined, is going to allow them to go on a NATO-type offensive maneuver is just not going to happen because it’s way more than the platforms required to enable that kind of offensive operation.
All you’re doing is making Russia want to go to war. Far from wanting to deter Russia or making them hesitate and count the costs – it’s having the exact opposite effect across the board in Russia. If anything, it makes them want to be more aggressive. It makes them absolutely think we cannot lose this and double down on their efforts...even the general Russian population — you don’t see any protests anymore and you barely see any kind of negative social media comments, and that’s usually people who aren’t even in Russia. In Russia you don’t see any of that, because people are for the most part convinced that this is what has to be done because [they feel] it’s a very valid position to say all of NATO is against them.
We’re providing intelligence. We’re providing ammunition. We’re providing weapons systems [and] repair facilities, literally everything but the pull of the trigger. Imagine during the war with Afghanistan that Russia or China had just completely got behind the Taliban, gave them everything they had, including all their modern gear to kill American soldiers. Do you think we would have accepted that? Would we have been OK with that? We’d go crazy. We’d have potentially gone to war with them.
We think that, like Biden said hiding behind a fig leaf today, when he announced this change, that ‘we are not going to war with Russia’ and ‘we’re not a direct participant,’ as though just saying those words means anything to Russia...I think that there’s not enough recognition of just how much risk and gamble we’re taking right now...We have no strategy. Nobody is asking what comes next.
We're just giving all this stuff, nobody's talking about, not even ethereal kinds of overarching statements. What is this supposed to accomplish? What is the outcome you see by giving [these tanks]? What are you trying to produce on the ground? How is this going to benefit the United States of America as opposed to not doing it?
Define "win". Because you had the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff one week ago repeat what he’s been saying a lot, and one of the few things I agree with him on, [that] he sees no military path for Ukraine to win this war in the foreseeable future, meaning throughout the entire 2023...And he’s right. Even with all this stuff, of course, he knew what we were going to offer before he made that comment. And he’s right, but no one pays any attention to that, they just pretend it didn’t happen, [as if] he didn’t say it.
One of the things that’s been from the outset that it just has not come to grips within the West [is that] this is not Syria; this is not Iraq; this is not Libya; this is not Yemen; this is not even Iran. We have basically done whatever we wanted to do in all these places and didn’t even care about what they might do because we know they don’t have the ability...We’re having that same mentality in Russia...the biggest nuclear stockpile in the world. They can do something. The rules are different. You cannot behave and act...like you can against Syria.
I fear that one day, Russia’s going to say, ‘OK, you finally did cross a red line this time and we’re going to take action.' For example, [Russian Foreign Minister Sergey] Lavrov recently said that based on all this stuff about the tanks, they reserve the right to attack any provider of NATO gear, NATO tanks, NATO vehicles, their ammunition – no matter where they are, meaning Poland or in some other NATO country.
There is zero chance – and I mean zero – that Russia could ever militarily defeat NATO in a conventional sense. It’s a physical impossibility. They’re just struggling even now to defeat Ukrainians in part of the Donbas, their next-door neighbor, so they certainly couldn’t take on a 30 member NATO military alliance; they know that. So the only way they can defend against NATO, is through nuclear weapons, of course. So if we try to think we’re going to trigger Article 5 and not trigger nuclear war. I mean, we’re just insane and fooling ourselves.<<
