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Hello there.

Welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

We'd like to welcome all of our listeners.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution.

and the Wayne and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

This is the weekend edition where we look at things in greater depth.

And this weekend, we're going to go into strategy.

Victor is currently at Hillsdale College teaching a course on grand strategy.

So maybe we'll get a bit of wisdom from it.

But first, let's take a break.

and go to some messages and then we'll come right back and address a few news stories first and then we'll go on to our discussion of strategy.

We'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

And Victor, Victor,

how are you doing

before we get into everything?

I am in my second and final week at Hillsdale College teaching an intensive course.

And such a radical change.

This is my 19th year, but I'm always

stunned at culturally, sociologically,

environmentally, climatology, weather, how much different.

I mean, you go from one day at 90 degrees clear to humid and rainy.

And whereas after April 30th in the San Joaquin Valley to probably November 1st, it's the same weather, dry and hot.

This is very humid and unpredictable.

So it's a change of pace.

It's always good to have a change of pace.

I'm using more strategies to combat this long COVID.

And as I said, I'm on the uphill.

My targeted date is November 10th, where I strangle it completely.

And I'm upbeat and I'm not going to.

Only thing I'm worried about is I'm here now on a desk and I'm only worried about two things.

You should see this makeshift microphone.

It's precipitously perched on a book.

The laptop is on a book.

I'm trying to make kind of a studio here by closing the windows.

And I have brain fog.

So anything can happen today.

Let's see what happens.

Yeah, let's see what happens.

This sounds like fun.

Before we go into strategy, and I know you're teaching about people and writers or thinkers like Sun Tzu and Machiavelli and Klaus Wich and Jomini, we're really excited to get into this.

But

the news came out that Queen Elizabeth II died, and I was wondering your thoughts on her seven decades of service.

She's the longest reigning British monarch in illustrious history.

She did everything that was asked of her.

She was sober.

She was

discreet, judicious.

She

toured the globe.

It was unfortunately her fate to oversee the decline of the British Empire in its last and final stages, that is, from the late 40s until the present.

And the remarkable fact about her is contrast her with her progeny or the people in the royal family, her two sons or people they married, except I can go on and on, but she was from a different generation.

This is what I want to get at.

If you look at clips of hers in her

early 20s, she was absolutely stunning.

And she had a better figure than any of her offspring or their offspring's, her offspring's wife, I should say.

But they were very risque and they were glamorous and they tried to be very revealing and they were jet-setters, that whole extended royal family.

But none of them had the innate beauty or grace that she did, and yet she was very reserved.

And it reminds me so often in classical literature where to suggest is to create and to overemphasize is to destroy.

So

people

that did not have her

intelligence, her social sense of presence, her natural beauty, were exhibitionists.

They talked too much, they revealed too much in their clothing, they jet-said it, and the result was that they became boring and monotonous.

And she was always a little bit discreet.

And so she always had that charm.

When she was in her 20s and 30s, she captivated foreign leaders.

We forget that because of her natural beauty and sobriety and everything.

So

she did Britain a great service.

And unfortunately, I'm afraid that her son Charles, we are going to see his climate change obsessions, great reset stuff, and it's not going to be good.

Yeah, a very sad day for England, nonetheless.

All right.

Also, I know that they're in California, you're not there, but I understand that they're having these warnings come across people's cell phones that they need to turn everything off.

Oh, you did?

Everything off from 4 to 9 p.m.

That's incredible.

So we'll see how California energy disaster moves forward, but it certainly is off to a roaring start, it seems like.

Okay,

let's then turn to grand strategy and as different from just

immediate strategy and immediate battle or tactics.

And hear a little bit about, I have some questions for you, but you probably will have a lot more answers to a lot more questions than I can possibly ask you about this.

But the first and the big questions are: what's the difference between preemption and preventative war?

Well,

preventative war is usually

a major power and often the greater power in a struggle of two powers.

And they feel that sooner or later,

the situation is not going to be as favorable as it is in the present vis-a-vis an adversary.

So they decide to start a war on this premise that A,

my opponent someday in the future may, and B, they will be in a better position than they are now to do that.

So

I'll give you some examples.

Hitler,

he was in no danger of being attacked by the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941,

but he

felt that

given information from the Soviet Union and given their testy

non-aggression pact, that if he went in in June, he could strike before the Soviet Union was prepared, re

completely, fully mobilized.

It didn't work out that way.

Sparta is another example.

Sparta invaded Athens in the spring of 431 BC on the premise that the growth of Athenian power, its cosmopolitanism, its navy, its empire, its radical democracy, all was a more dynamic

sort of Greek city-state than the oligarchic, Doric, inward, infantry-based, parochial society of the Spartan oligarchy.

So they felt that time was not on their side, so they decided to preempt.

And so preemption is kind of different, though.

It's usually the weaker power

feels, or

the less aggressive power feels that

an attack is imminent any day, and they're going to be blamed, they understand, but they want to get that blow-in before they're crushed.

Think 1967 and the Six-Day War, where Israel's just sitting there

all of April and May, and Nasser is just on Radio Cairo every day telling the Muslim world and the Baathist world and the communist world that he's going to crush Israel and his Navy and his whatever it was and his Air Force and it's just going to crush the Jews.

Then they get intelligence that he may well launch an attack.

And so Israel in the early hours

preempted and destroyed 80 percent of the egyptian air force while it was on the ground and that was basically the war was over at that point they went on for six days but that was a preemptive attack

and you could argue that israel may decide that it has to attack the iranian nuclear center and they feel that it's just a matter of time before iran sends a missile at them it's not quite a preventative war because there's a real danger that Iran at any moment it becomes nuclear will use it.

And so they will preempt on the idea they have to get the blow in first.

So the difference is, one is the relative size of the combatants.

Usually a preventative war is by a major,

the major power, not always, but often.

And preemption is by the less powerful.

antagonist.

But most importantly,

it's one on timing and expectation.

Preemption means there's a looming threat.

And preventative war means there is a threat, but it's not immediate right now.

It would seem that the preemption might also be decided.

I mean, you just made me think of this, on

the relative powers of the two.

For example, Israel and its Arab neighbors were relative, might be if they hadn't preempted and had a basically textbook example of how effective preemption can be in the six days of war.

But that if war had gone on without that preemption, they probably would have been more or less equal.

And so that well, they were way outnumbered in every category of, if you look at the combined Soviet supply militaries of Syria

and

Egypt, and then you look at British French supplies and American to Jordan, and then you look at the subsidiary allies like Iraq

and places like Libya, they all chipped in a little bit.

The Israelis were overwhelmed on paper.

And remember, we were not supplying the Israelis in 1967.

So that force that they used was a conglomeration mostly of French Mirage jets, whatever they could buy on the open market.

So they felt that they,

if they struck and

they could be successful, and they were.

In 1973,

that was a preventive war, the Yom Kippur War, in the sense that nobody in the Arab world felt that Israel was going to attack them.

Israel didn't think they were going to attack them.

Israel didn't think they would attack Israel.

But Sadat made the determination that

he would never get back to Sinai.

And each day that he didn't get...

get it back, it would be harder to get back.

And

there was starting to be a change in his relationship with the Soviets.

He kicked them out and they were threatening to cut off the parts and supplies to his arsenal.

And then he felt, this is the moment where if I attack now, a surprise attack, even if I don't win, a lot of things are in motion.

They're fluid.

Maybe I can reach out to the Nixon administration and flip and be an ally of America if I show myself to be worthy on the battlefield.

Maybe the Soviets will supply me now in hopes that they can weaken Israel and the United States, but they might not in the future.

So they thought that that would be an opportune time and they waged a surprise.

But they're both surprise attacks, but that surprise attack for the first four or five days, given state-of-the-art Soviet SAM missiles and anti-tank weapons.

I mean, it was horrific, but the damage they did to the Israelis in the first three days.

And then, by the same token, had the war gone on another three days, the Israelis would have absolutely obliterated the Egyptian Third Army.

By what you're saying, it seems like the attack on Pearl Harbor was a preemption then, right?

No.

No, it's not.

They thought it was prevented.

There was no way, nobody in the Japanese Imperial Navy, Yamamoto especially, thought the United States was going to attack them.

They were convinced of it.

They were not convinced that things favored them.

And what do I mean by that?

On December 7th,

they understood that the United States was rearming at a fast rate.

And the Carl Vinson, the various naval resupply and rebuilding of the Navy, they understood that

in December 7th, they were looking in the Pacific at the Saratoga, the Lexington, the Yorktown, and the previously transferred Hornet.

and the wasp, that little wasp would come over later.

However, they understood that there was a

naval crash program that were going to build new battleships, new Essex carriers, and that by 1944-43, the United States Navy, which it was, by the end of 1944, it was larger than all the navies in the world.

And they understood that that very moment

there was no such thing as the Netherlands.

There was no such thing as an independent France.

Britain was fighting for its life during had the Blitz.

The Soviet Army was

beleaguered, and the Nazis on January 7th, Army Group Center, was only 17 miles from the Kremlin.

So, in the Japanese way of thinking, they thought, wow, we're never going to get a situation where the Dutch East Indies and shell oil is going to be there for the taking because there's no Dutch.

We're never going to get a situation again where Southeast Asia and the Asia, the breadbasket of the Pacific, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, all of that area is

open.

There's just a bunch of Vichy apparatus.

We can take it.

And we're never going to get a situation where the British and the second largest fleet

Actually, it was the largest fleet in the world in 1939.

But if they went into Singapore, they would have all the Malaysian rubber.

So in their way of thinking, this is the last time we should do it because we're never going to get a chance like this again because the United States is rearming.

It's got a huge economy.

Its depression is over.

And

it looks like the Germans will knock out the Soviet Union in a matter of weeks.

So we will get rid of the United States or push them back.

We'll pile on maybe with the Soviets against the Soviets.

Who knows?

They had options.

They discussed it.

But they were going to get all these resources.

And they were right for six months.

They ran wild.

But

they had

no inkling.

no, even they didn't claim that the United States was about to attack the militarily.

You could argue that wily FDR wanted them to attack, and he oil embargoed them and hoping they would attack, but you cannot say that the United States would have attacked.

The Congress would have not,

they were isolationists on both parties.

They were not going to sign a declaration of war.

Yeah.

You know, you're teaching a lot of the big strategists.

Do any one of them address this particular topic

in particular?

Napoleon, you know, he doesn't, he didn't write things.

He had something called the memoirs, and they were collected for the most part after he died, and they were cobbled together by secretaries that looked over his messages, his correspondence, people's letters that they received from Napoleon, and they had a lot of

maxims.

But he's the closest

to these ideas of prevention and preemption.

And he says that there are certain times when there's not going to be

that type of

take the Battle of Ulm.

I mean, that was sort of a preemptory idea where he trapped the entire Austrian army in a double envelopment.

It was almost without losing very many people at all, but it was a preemptive attack into Austria to eliminate that threat.

And he did that a lot.

In the ancient world, the most famous example is of Pamanondus of Theban.

And after destroying the Spartan army, he knew they were going to come back, but an army at Leuctra in 371, the next, you know, nobody marches in the winter.

And he preempted.

He said, they're not going to come here next spring.

I'm taking a huge 70,000 person Panhellenic army.

I'm going to march down to the Vale of Laconia and trap them in their city.

And then I'm going to go over Mount Taegetas and free the Messenian helots.

That's what he did.

And that was the end of Sparta as

a major power that could project force, you know, all over the Greek world.

Not the end of it as a state, but pretty much as a formidable power.

So there's plenty of examples of

thinkers that cite these historical examples.

And

you've got to remember one thing about Napoleon.

He changed warfare because the pinnacle of warfare up to his time was Frederick Frederick the Great.

And that was a monarch who was a brilliant guy and he fought the Seven Years' War and he had an aristocratic Prussian

military clique around him that were very bright and knew what they were doing.

And then they had mercenary troops and small armies.

But this was new.

When Napoleon came on the scene, you know, from 1799, I think you could go all the way until he was sort of stopped at Leipzig.

That was new.

The idea that you would have a whole nation in arms with revolutionary fervor, and you'd have these guys called the 17 marshals of France, and it would be merucratic.

Both aristocrats and commoners could be in there.

I mean, he assembled some of the most brilliant minds, Saint-Cyr, Soul, crazy Marshal Ney, Marat, all of these people.

And then they infused that army with a revolutionary fervor, and they said, we're not a static army anymore.

We're a nation in arms, and we move.

And each component of

the Grand Army will be independent.

So these corps, you know, 30 to 40,000 people, they had their own food, they had mobile artillery and they would go into Prussia or they'd go into Austria or they would go into Eastern Europe.

And they were always outnumbered by the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth coalition.

But he was able to,

at a fixed, designated point, suddenly they were like magnets.

They just came together.

And then he had interior lines of supply and the enemy was spread out everywhere and he systematically destroyed each of his enemies before they could fully coalesce against him.

That was the plan at least.

Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk about interior versus exterior lines and the strategy of annihilation versus attrition.

And we'll be right back.

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We're back.

And Victor, you were just mentioning Napoleon's interior lines.

And I was wondering if you could go ahead and explain the

importance of the interior and the exterior lines and just what they are for some

Luddites like me.

I would like to know.

Well, you know, if you read Joe Minis, The Art of War, that is sort of the theme of the entire treatise.

Remember, he was born just a decade after Napoleon, but the guy lived to be 90 years old.

He wasn't as brilliant as Klaus Witz.

He wasn't a combat veteran.

He was a chief of, he was at present in a lot of battles at Jena and Austerlitz, but he was a meticulous chronicler of the mechanics of how the Grand Army fought.

And one of his key precepts that he got from Napoleon's successes and occasional failures was

interior lines.

And all that means is that if you're stationary, I'll give you an example.

Everybody will understand it.

When Adolf Hitler was,

when Army Group Center and Army Group North and South were 2,000 miles, 50, way off in the Caucasus, those were exterior lines.

They were vulnerable to partisan attacks, weather.

Every time you advance forward, you have to slough off army, members of your army to guarantee your supply line logistics.

However,

by early 1945, the Third Reich didn't,

its extent had gone from maybe 3,000 miles of the Atlantic Ocean, Channel Islands, all the way to the Caucasus, down to,

I don't know, 400 miles in Germany.

And so they had interior lines where they were supplying each army on the Western and Eastern Front back and forth with rails inside Germany at very short distances.

And that means that everything then starts to work in reverse.

The offensive army that is just making, and it happened to Hitler when he was on the offensive, it happened to

Stalin when he was on the pushback when on the it happened to us when we left Normandy.

We started patents, started rolling the whole entire month of August 1944.

And guess what?

Those exterior lines got longer and longer and longer and fewer and fewer gallons of gas reached him.

The same thing,

not as

dramatically, but the same thing was true of Montgomery and Bradley.

By the token, German resistance stiffened.

So, the problem was: how do you do the how do you deal with that when you're on an army of offensive like Napoleon?

Because you have to go on the offensive, you're outnumbered.

These people want to destroy this revolutionary,

you know, dangerous experiment in France.

So, you're going to have have to push forward

and have exterior lines but

uh you don't want to expose yourself you want to be on the offensive with interior lines is what i'm trying to say and he kind of got around it is that until he went into russia most of the battles that he fought were among the german-speaking peoples the austrians the prussians and he got When he went into the peninsula campaign, he had exterior lines.

When he went to Russia, he had exterior lines but when he kept uh

sort of a horseshoe idea that he had he spread out his his corps at jena or austerlitz he could be they could resupply each other and they were not vulnerable to the same extent that his enemies that were all coming from you know disparate places

and to

It's very important that people understand that.

And Sherman was, you know, he went to

he went to the

West Point, which by in the 1840s and 50s, the only foreign

author they read was Jomini.

And basically, he was told that if you leave Tennessee and you go into

Atlanta, that's your point.

You're going to have exterior lines.

And if you go from Atlanta to Savannah, you're going to have exterior lines of supply.

And if you're going to go from

Savannah up into the Carolinas to meet Grant, You're going to have exterior lines.

And he solved the problem, as B.H.

Liddell Hart said, in brilliant fashion.

He said, I'm not going to supply any, nobody's going to supply me.

I'm going to be a self-supplying army like Napoleon was.

And Napoleon tried to, you know, ravage and live off the land.

And that's exactly what Sherman tied his campaign cycle when he left Atlanta to the harvests were brought in.

He made a 50-mile swath all the way on the march to the sea to Savannah.

He had everything from tobacco to wheat to corn, sorghum, pigs, cow, everything was right after harvest.

And he just,

it was like an enormous mouth that just ate Georgia compulsively.

And then it went up to the Carolinas.

And he had no exterior lines.

And he was taught not to do that, not to have exterior lines.

And when he left, people said, Lincoln said, He went, I don't know where he is.

He went in some hole.

I don't know what hole he's going to pop up.

And Grant was

not a great student, but he had been taught at West Point, you don't do that.

You don't leave your base of supplies and then venture way off and leave a long exterior line.

But Sherman revolutionized warfare by doing so.

Yeah, it sounds like Sherman was really innovative.

He was.

That's very, it sounds like it was very risky what he did.

He was.

But he was, we're talking about grand strategy.

You know, strategy, tactics is the operation of the battlefield, you know, putting this corps this place and this division that place and encirclement or feigned retreat or Fabian tactic, all of that.

And strategy is how to use tactics for the political goal.

What Clauswitz said, you know, war is continuation of politics with, with, not by, with, other means.

And

but.

In the sense of Sherman, he had grand strategy and economic.

Think of what he did.

I don't think people really appreciate it.

You know, everybody makes fun of B.H.L.

Liddell Hart, but his biography of Sherman and the indirect approach was absolutely brilliant.

What he tried to show was, and I tried, I footnoted him a lot in the Soul of Battle when I wrote about it.

What he was trying to show people was

this manic depressant, this Uncle Billy that everybody wrote off, who was kind of crazy, he was absolutely a political grand strategy genius.

So he said to himself, McClellan, Freeman is challenging Lincoln from the left, and McClellan is charging him in the general election, challenging him from,

you know, the right, Copperhead position.

Let's let the South succeed and call it even.

And Lincoln won't win.

He needs a dramatic event.

I am going to go slice

the Confederacy in two.

I'm going to get to Atlanta, but I got to get to Atlanta before the election.

Because if I take the second most important city in the South, a rail hub, Atlanta, and he did, and he sent a telegram, Atlanta is ours, Mr.

Lincoln, and fairly won.

And that was the end of the McLean campaign.

It was just, it just sputtered to a close.

Everybody who had trashed Lincoln, because remember,

Grant, you mentioned the strategy of annihilation.

He was pursuing the strategy of annihilation.

And that was, I'm going to get to Richmond.

And even if I don't get to Richmond, and he never did, at places like Cold Harbor in that summer of 1864, which

Mary Lincoln said he's a butcher, he bled us

white, but he lost 100,000 casualties.

And he never got to Richmond, but he tied

Lee down.

And Sherman really went wild.

And his idea was

you can win the war without losing 100,000 casualties if you humiliate the aristocratic slave-owning class by going right through

their possessions and you burn down the plantation of Howell Cobb and you're careful not to burn down houses of the poor white class and you're careful to make sure you free African slaves, African-American slaves, black slaves.

And think what he did.

And so he basically said,

these people all said they were better warriors than we southern, you know, Scotch-Irish Pride.

They're the Cavalier class.

You know,

where's Wade Hampton?

Where's the Devil Forest?

Where are all these people who have been telling the North that we're a bunch of industrial Irish and German immigrants that don't know what we're doing?

I have an army of,

you know, Michigan, Minnesota, Indiana, Ohio.

yeoman farmers, and they're the toughest people in the world.

We're going to go right through this Confederacy of two classes rather than three.

And then you can't stop me.

And

that's what he did.

And it was political.

And he gave Lincoln the election.

And had he not done that, Lincoln would have lost the election of 1864

because they would have focused on Grant and Grant could not take Richmond.

Lee turned out to be a master of what?

Interior lines.

Lee turned out to, oh, he was, he made a horseshoe around Richmond.

Oh, and he dug in.

And it turned out that where he was iffy or problematic when he was an expeditionary commander going into Pennsylvania and doing the exact opposite of what Sherman did when he went into the south, that is, in a Klauswitzian fashion, trying to find the grand army of the North.

I'm going to invade Pennsylvania and then I'm going to hunt out and collide full blast, you know, little round top cemetery, all that stuff.

Whereas if he had just bypassed that army and ravaged and put the fear of God into Pennsylvania and flipped a wide circle and came down behind the army of Meade and gone in and burned Washington, that's what Sherman would have done.

Sherman didn't go and say, hmm, I've got to go find a Southern army so I can collide it.

No, I'm going to make sure the Southern Army is starving to death, is humiliated, and I need every man I can get.

I'm going to be mobile, fast, and dead.

And that's what he was.

He fought

very few pitched battles.

Yeah.

And wasn't, was it Sherman who said war is hell or something?

And it's all war is, war boys is all hell.

And

he meant that because he had been at the first battle of Bull Run.

He had been at Shiloh and almost killed.

And so when the people said, well, he doesn't like to fight, well, he'd been wounded at Shiloh, shot in the hand, and he'd lost three horses to bullets under

so he he was

he practiced the strategy of attrition when you mentioned that or exhaustion that is he was going to wear the south down

and by that i mean

when you had the anaconda strategy of no uh southern ships could leave their ports very easily and then you had sherman slicing through and cutting up rail lines and destroying armories and confederate locomotives and postal service behind the lines, let loose and they couldn't stop.

His army was 65,000 men and freeing 20,000 slaves and then, you know, going right into Savannah and taking that city and then going right through the Carolinas in winter, corduroying the roads and the mud.

That was, he was exhausting the South by destroying their crops, destroying their communications, destroying their morale.

Whereas Grant was,

he was looking for a battle of annihilation, something where he would get Lee out in the open, hopefully, and crush, because he was a wonderful tactician in open battle.

I don't think that he was the grand strategist of Sherman.

He was more of a man like General Thomas, who was really smart.

Sherman was more like Sheridan,

and they looked at the entire grand strategy.

Yeah, Victor,

you have moved on to the strategy of annihilation and attrition, but could could I go back just for a little bit to interior and exterior lines and just ask about our modern military?

I mean, when they're way out there in the hills of Afghanistan or Pakistan, that's an example of

exterior lines being extended.

But

how'd that work out in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya when we're attacking people within the interior or they're being supplied across the border in Vietnam?

It's very difficult for an expeditionary army of a democracy to go halfway around the world and supply itself and then fight

lengthy, asymmetrical battles within urban centers where the enemy is being supplied across the border, you know, like in the case of Iraq

by Iran, case of Afghanistan by Pakistan, and we can't do anything apparently to stop those supplies.

Those are basically interior lines.

We have exterior line.

yeah

um you know i was also thinking now that you mentioned our

our young men it seems that it it they must have to be that much braver to fight modern warfare i mean i don't know i know they have a lot of equipment and that kind of thing but the

the

places that they're sent and urban warfare that they have to fight, it seems to me that really requires something even more than the average soldier maybe 100 years ago to, I could be right.

I'm probably wrong.

That's a tragedy of the American military soldier today.

That as my entire family, my father, the person I'm named after, Victor Hansen, that was killed on, they were wonderful soldiers.

But if you look at the lethality of the individual American combat soldier today,

there has never been

soldiers in combat units that are as healthy, as large, as strong, as smart, as educated, and as lethally equipped.

And so the reason that we weren't completely humiliated with these strategically inept commanders and presidents was that we had this wonderful group of people fighting.

But

the problem the U.S.

military has is right now, when a politician says

diplomacy has failed or we cannot achieve our objective, as Klaus Witz said politically, so we have to turn to a military element and the military says, okay, what is your strategic objective?

They don't have any strategic objective.

You know, did George Bush or Barack Obama or even Donald Trump, did they ever say, this is what we want Afghanistan to look like.

This is the likely cost.

These are the benefits.

And this is how we're going to do it.

And now you find a

strategy and tactics to accomplish it they don't think like that just go off there and then when you get into the politics of it and the clock ticking and you've got cnn covering it and you've got the un and you've got europe

and it's not it's not a formula for success and then these these brave young people go out there and you know if they call in an artillery strike

CNN or some investigative reporter from the New York Times is saying they're a war criminal, that they hit the wrong

house and they're going to bring them up on charges, or the International Criminal Court should look, it's just a hopeless situation.

And remember what the Russia,

do you think anybody right now in the world is worried about what Russia is doing in Ukraine?

They are just blowing up civilian apartment buildings, power stations, everything.

They're committing war crimes every day.

Nobody's talking about that.

India doesn't say to them, well, we're not going to buy any oil, Putin.

What you're doing to the Ukrainian people in this war of aggression is imperialistic and it's neocolonial.

Qi's not saying the Chinese People's Liberation Army is just aghast at what you're doing, Vladimir.

No, Iran's not North Korea.

But if we went in there,

same thing with Israel.

I mean, they can go.

Right now, we learned from Israel this week that the entire international news

mafia, that's what they are,

when they go in to Gaza and they have to deal with Hamas for reporters' clearances, they're assigned a minder, just like I was in Libya with Qaddafi.

I had two minders.

And that minder, they tell the journalist, if you report something that is embarrassing to us, we're going to take it out on your little friendly minder that you've got, you know, acquainted with.

And so what do I mean by unfavorable?

I mean that when they send rockets into Israel, they're so inept that they killed more of their own people by failed rockets than the Israelis did by retaliation.

That can't be reported.

And so

these are things that Klauswitz or Jomini, that

19th century mind was not equipped to handle instant communication.

Klaus Witz was right when he said civilization progresses, but it does not change the rules of war because human nature is fixed.

But I'm not sure that we, I don't know what to call this, is when we use military force

with all these preconditions.

And we've had this new word that

I don't, I look for it in the text of Clauswich or Jomini.

I look at it and, I don't know, Machiavelli's Prince, Maxims of Napoleon.

I just had a look at Sun Tzu.

I don't see the word proportionate or disproportionate in there.

And that tells me that they assume that disproportionate response was the only response to aggression.

But when Israel is hit, you know, 10 rockets go into Israel, then the world community says, oh, you can only send 10 back.

No, classical military doctrine throughout 2,500 years or going back to Sun Tzu, 5th century maybe BC.

is you have to be disproportionate.

You send 100 rockets back and they won't do it again.

It's like going down the street in New York.

Somebody comes up and plays the hit game and he swings and hits you in the head.

And you turn around and you said, okay, I get a free swing back at you.

And I'm just going to hit you one time to pay you back.

No, you hit him five times so he won't ever do it again to anybody.

This is the modern, postmodern, I should say, mindset.

Yeah.

Well, and as you were

indicating, our modern soldier perhaps is braver because he has to face political consequences as well.

The single-everything is against him.

He reminds me of the modern American soldier, reminds me of the military historian in the academy or the Greek.

These are dying

subjects: military history, classical Greek, the homestead family farmer, the independent truck driver, the independent shopkeeper.

All of these people

are being overwhelmed by cosmic forces of globalization, uniformity, corporatism.

You can see it.

And these individual soldiers from these families, that was what's so tragic about Mark Milley.

When he got up there in front of Congress with Gilgad or whatever his name was, at the chief of naval operations and Lloyd Dawson, and they all virtue signaled in performance art that they were going after white privilege and white rage.

And then the military started to issue these cartoon-like

C-spot run commercials about gender and transgender.

I don't know what it was.

They were sending a message that we, and then when they went after anybody who think about that,

they discharged people from the U.S.

military that were not vaxxed by the lie that said vaccination is a gold standard.

That will prevent you from being infected and infecting other people.

And I can tell you, as somebody who got two

Moderna shots and got COVID twice, it's not true.

But more importantly, they let 3 million people come across the border without a wink whether they were vaccinated and yet they went after the military so the point i'm making sammy is at some point in a fragile landscape where the the demography is changing where the population is shrinking people are watching video games you don't have a pool of very many people

who want to fight in god-awful places and are in good shape and have a family tradition of dying in their demographic at twice the numbers in the general population.

And what do you do to that demographic?

You go after them and you lie about them that they're vaccination deniers, you know, or that they're white rage racists.

And guess what?

The military is 50, U.S.

Army right now is 50%

down on its recruitment figures.

And we know from the Reagan Libraries, I mentioned in a prior broadcast, that 45%,

I think it's higher now, don't have confidence in the U.S.

military as they used to.

Mark Millie, remember what he said about the photo op on May, after May 31st, where Trump walked over with a Bible at the burn church.

And then afterwards, the left went after Millie, and Millie, without a lot of

fortitude, just kind of collapsed.

Oh, I was so sorry.

I should not ever take a picture with the president.

This was not a presidential speech.

It was obviously partisan.

Please forgive me.

And I'm thinking, no, they all do that.

But since you set the standard, I expect that when Joe Biden has his phantom of the opera sets and his

two U.S.

Marines with,

what do you call it, triumph of the will glowing red in the background, that Mark Milley now is going to say, hmm,

as you know, I'm bipartisan and I'm a man of principle.

And just as I was used in a photographic sense by Donald Trump, and I had to apologize, so our armed forces were used by Joe Biden because that dress was not presidential.

He called half the people existential threats.

And I think the Marine Corps is not going to do it.

He didn't do that.

He didn't say that.

Now, you know what's really weird is the Defense Secretary, since we're on

the topic of defense.

Did you see where the Defense Secretaries today

and

the former defense secretary, former chairman of the joint chief, they said, we're getting too politicized.

And because they were so embarrassed about Joe Biden's speech, right?

And half the country, and they can't make their enrollment figures.

And all of a sudden, half the country thinks the FBI rightly hates them.

After all, we have the text exchange from Peter Stroke and Lisa Page, where they said that people stink up Walmart and they have no teeth and all this stuff.

And so now they're worried and they're saying, we as these distinguished secretaries of defense,

we insist that the military stay

nonpartisan.

Oh, yeah.

That's why General McCraffrey, retired, said that Donald Trump was a liar.

That's why Admiral McRaven said he should leave sooner the better.

That's why General Mattis said that the people who were defending the Normandy beaches, the Nazis, the tactics that we were using under Trump were similar.

Trump was similar to that.

Oh, that's why

CIA Director and Force Guard General Hayden just retweeted Michael Bescheloff's suggestion that Donald Trump was the convicted Rosenbergs like them and should be executed because he sold nuclear secrets, apparently.

That was the

insinuation.

So my point is that when you put all of that together and you look at a family who the father, grandfather fought World War II or the Korea, the father fought in Vietnam or maybe finished out with the first Gulf War.

And the child,

the grandson, is now in the 30s and he has been in second Gulf War in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And the fourth generation is coming up and they're saying, you know what?

My son is not a white racist.

He's not a white racist.

He's not going to go to the military and have a big target on his back.

And you know what?

If they send him to Afghanistan or another place, god-awful place in the Middle East, and he dies for what?

Because you people cannot translate operational and tactical success into strategic advantage and resolution.

And then nobody takes the blame.

Who did they fire after Afghanistan?

No one.

And so what did we hear about Afghanistan?

Oh, we're getting all of every, all the Afghan refugees are going to have culturally sensitive meals when they land.

Oh, we have a pride flag at the embassy.

Oh, we have George Floyd mural.

They don't want any part of that.

And so now the military is paranoid.

They say, well, it has nothing to do with politics.

We haven't offended anybody.

It's because everybody's, I think, what did the guys say?

Yesterday, they're all too fat.

And there's not enough of them, maybe,

but you sure didn't help things.

No, they sure didn't.

Victor, let's go ahead.

It's hard to get in here to

get a break for advertisements because what you're saying is so fascinating.

But let's take a break and then come right back.

And I have some questions to ask you about the current Ukrainian war and then maybe to look at Machiavelli and Sun Tzu's place in this whole picture of grand strategy.

We'll be right back.

Thank you for coming back, Victor.

What's happened?

You know, the Ukrainian war has kind of gone off the front pages.

I mean, not completely, but it seems to have wound down to some sort of stasis or something.

What's going on currently in the UK?

Well, I'll try to.

Because you wanted to talk about strat.

Let's try to talk about what's going on right now in terms of classical strategy.

So

the Russian army tried to be an expeditionary army at first in February.

Remember?

You had long lines, exterior lines.

It was a shock and all thunder road.

Remember that long supply line that was just sitting out there in a road saying, please bomb me.

And

people said the Russian army is going to take Kiev in seven days.

Well, as we said before in a podcast, look at the expeditionary record of the Russian army, whether Soviet or Russian, whether it's the 1904 Japanese five Japanese, Russo-Japanese war or it's contemporary Afghanistan or it's 1921 in Poland or 1930, it doesn't do very well.

It's not a combined army where it combines logistics and engineering and air and sea.

And they failed.

And so that was a war of mobility and fluidity.

And they were going to decapitate the government.

That was almost Machiavellian.

And Machiavelli would have approved how to work.

He would have said to Putin,

you were ruthless, you killed people, you lied, and

that was the way you secured your position.

And people will criticize you, but they will fear you.

And whether it's a choice of being loved or feared, while it's better to be loved and feared, but if you don't have the and in the equation, it's better to be feared.

He got that from Suetonius' description of the Emperor Nero.

So

then

the world said the the Ukrainians were doomed.

And Joe Biden said, we'll get you out of there, Zelensky.

And then they fought back.

They got re-equipped.

And the Soviet army doesn't do well abroad, i.e.

in another person's country.

And that's what Ukraine has become.

So now the war has been refocused to the border of Russia, hasn't it?

And now it is not going to be a war of annihilation.

I don't think the Ukrainians are going to get a huge army and the Russians are are going to get a huge army and they're going to just duke it out in some Klauswitzian-Mayhan decisive battle, like an Austerlitz or something, or Battle of the Ball.

It's not going to happen.

It's a war of attrition.

And right now,

they're near the Russian border and they're in Russian-speaking territories.

And Ukraine says we want the borders of 2013.

And basically, Putin is saying to the world silently, I can't do do that.

I wanted to take half of Ukraine.

It failed.

But I'm not going to go back and tell the Russian people that I lost 100,000 dead, wounded, and missing to lose the borderlands that were de facto ours before we started this war.

So I'm going to institutionalize these disputed borderlands, and I'm going to go back to the Russian people and say, well,

Stage one of this century-long war, I got the Donbass and Crimea institutionalized.

That's where we are.

And

so what is Ukraine's strategy right now?

It is to get more sophisticated, more sophisticated, more sophisticated weapons.

And it has them.

And they are starting to hit Russian depots, supply centers,

massing areas.

And they're making it very, very difficult for the Russians to supply their expeditionary forces, such as they, if I could use that word, right near the border, because Ukraine is starting to hit things with these 50, 60, 70 mile artillery and

GPS guided missiles that are in Russian territory along the border.

So they pulled all of their depots way back, and they have longer lines to, and the Ukrainians have shorter lines.

So now, even though it's outnumbered, it has a smaller area, it has a fraction of Russian GDP,

it's got the combined, I guess, wherewithal of NATO, Europe, and the United States is supplying it.

And so

we're going to enter in some very dangerous territory because I want Ukraine to win.

I don't like Putin.

I think that was a horrible thing he did.

But I don't want to have a nuclear war.

And there are people in their giddiness in the West, especially in this particular country, United States,

that see

this as a proxy war and they want to use the Ukrainians to destroy putin and they have this dream that if they kill enough russians and these are just conscripts and they humiliate the russian army then there's going to be a bunch of generals in the russian army or there's going to be a bunch of oligarchs and they're going to have a coup d'etat and they're going to get rid of putin they're going to withdraw and then they're going to reintegrate as step one to a liberalization of the Russian regime, i.e.

analogous to Poland or, you know,

I don't see that happening.

I just don't see it happening.

I see much more likely that Putin is going to continue to blow up cars,

throw people out of the windows, terrify people, and then as things get more into a war of exhaustion and attrition, he's going to say,

as Medevid did the other day,

we're not going down alone.

If you dare go beyond 10 or 15 miles into Russian territory with missiles and you start blowing up major depots with American weapons

and you try to take out major more capital ships of the Black Sea, we're not going to play by the rules of Vietnam when we did that to you or

the rules of Afghanistan when you did that to us.

Those were Cold War rules.

These are new rules, and we're going to hold you accountable.

Now, they can't hold us accountable economically, politically, culturally, but they can,

in a sense, of nuclear weapons, and they're going to start threatening them and threatening them and threatening them.

And they're going to try to lower the threshold.

And at some point, if Ukraine ethnic gets them all out, they're going to start using tactical nuclear weapons.

Just watch.

And

I think it's really part of the problem of Ukraine is it's been superimposed onto the domestic landscape of the United States in a very inexact fashion.

Because what's happened, the left, who was completely humiliated and disgraced with their fraudulent Russian collusion hoax and the fraudulent Mueller investigation, has constructed Russians, not Putin, but Russians as white, Orthodox, Christian, reactionary, racist.

We have the woman basketball player they think is being detained because she's black or transsexual or whatever, transgender.

And then everybody who is the least bit reluctant

to

feed another 50, we've already put in almost 60 billion now, but put another 60 billion while our own border is wide open for the principle of sanctity of borders.

Think of that.

Disconnect.

Oh, we have, we believe in sanctity of borders.

He crossed the border.

We're going to give him $100 billion.

We're going to give the Ukrainians $100 billion to protect their borders, but we're not going to give one ounce of support for our brave border patroller trying to keep 3 million people out of invading, which they've already done, who entered.

And so

they've said that this is basically Trump equals Russia,

and Biden and Obama and the good people are Ukraine, and they're wearing, you know, they're flying Ukrainian flags or getting medals, but it's not that simple.

All Americans, I think, with very few exceptions, deplore the invasion of Ukraine by Putin.

They don't like Putin,

but they don't want the United States to

say that they are going to ensure a complete, total, overwhelming victory, that every Russian is out of Ukraine, that Putin is disgraced, the Russian military is attrited,

and

that was a wonderful thing that happened.

250,000 people got killed to prove that point.

We don't know how many people Ukraine, and there's some other things to say.

Ukraine is one of the most corrupt governments in the country.

This idea that Zelensky represents this wonderful democracy, he's a sympathetic character because he's been attacked by a thug.

But

heretofore, what we know about Ukrainians are they interfere in elections.

They interfere in the 2016 election, the embassy in Washington.

They were writing, the ambassador was writing op-eds.

They were involved in the Russian collusion hoax.

They they were involved in the first impeachment and they get involved and we know from burisma that they pay people that are incompetent like hunter biden millions of dollars to leverage u.s government policy and

we know that in the 2014 that we had americans that essentially helped stage a coup and interfered in the interior politics of ukraine And so, and we don't know where the 100 billion, if that's what the ultimate figure, where it'll go.

But there's already reports that there's millions, hundreds of millions of dollars that have been absconded within Ukraine.

So this is not a morality play.

It's

Ukraine has the moral edge.

People on the left and the right want it to prevail.

But when you get to the next step, there is disagreement.

Does the United States want to be the main supplier in a proxy war designed to hurt Russia

and risk an escalation of the war when there might be a diplomatic solution.

The diplomatic solution being

that there would be some agreement about the Donbass regions

and

they would have a plebiscite or something.

Not that you can trust Putin, but I just don't think, I don't see why the left thinks it's moral to fight to the last Ukrainian to humiliate Putin.

To pay him back for what?

Interfering supposedly in the 2016 election?

Yeah.

Well, it seems like what you're saying, though, that even worse is the view or the perspective of Russia that if we weren't involved with the Ukrainians, their war might already be over and that their

target, they would have been done with.

They would have won the war by now.

What's stopping them is

What is stopping the Russians are tens of thousands of anti-tank weapons supplied by the British and the Americans and Scandinavians, and thousands of

shoulder-fire

anti-aircraft

missiles, and thousands of small arms, and increasingly armor, and the most sophisticated artillery and missile platforms in the world today

that can once a Russian artillery platform shoots within a matter of seconds they can find out exactly where it is and land a shell within a minute right where it is yeah and that we have the most sophisticated ship-to-shore missiles in the world as putin found out putin knows that and he's trying to and he's saying that if you keep you sending your weapons and make me and this is a laboratory of war of spanish civil war as it is

and i keep getting humiliated and i have nothing I can show for it.

And you keep saying, well, you started the war and you've interfered in our elections and therefore we're going to punish you.

And

you're pretty much synonymous with the half of the country that Biden hates, a deplorable, that's how it's becoming politically.

And

that's where we are.

Yeah, it's hard to see the end to it.

I would like to see.

a diplomatic solution.

And then I don't quite understand why Ukraine, we don't know know the feeling of the people along the border that are 70% Russian speaking.

Prior to this war, you could make the argument that they had had, that the people on the Russian side of the border were wealthier than they were.

And maybe

you could argue that when it filtered down to the nitty-gritty, the Ukrainians were not that much freer.

for that under that corrupt democracy or whatever it was.

But after the war started, my impression from reading accounts is that a lot of the 70% Russian speakers may want to not join

the Russian.

So let's see and find out.

Yeah.

But everybody wants, you know, it's so weird how the right has become the left and the left has become the right.

The right has become kind of, hold on.

Let's not get bogged down in another expensive war, especially as a proxy war with the Russians.

And the left is saying, oh, let's go ahead and make sure we have a strong democracy and do what we should have done in Iraq and Afghanistan and spend $100 billion and all these Ukrainian lives to prove a point that Putin is an evil monster.

Yeah.

Well, maybe if I can sort of look at the or play the devil's advocate and

say, well, if let's say they did diplomatic

solution and they said what that putin go ahead you can have the crimea and add it to russia and you can have i think it's the dunbob or that other territory it seems to me that a man like putin would eat up those two and then look for the next course

yeah if if if it's done from a position of weakness absolutely yeah had you tried to do that in february absolutely he would have said, okay.

And then he would have taken Kiev and said, okay, well, let's negotiate.

And then five years later, he would have taken eastern Ukraine.

Absolutely.

But if he's from a desperate point of weakness, as he is now, and he knows that Ukraine will always be armed to the teeth, and it's integrated within the EU, and the NATO alliance is now just maybe added Sweden and Finland,

I think he will be happy for a deal and he won't do it again.

Yeah, and he was deterred from his war of kind of annihilation at first.

It seemed like he was sending his own.

He's trying to do now, he's trying to do to eastern Ukraine what he did to Chechnya, which was, it worked, didn't it?

He destroyed it to save it,

save it as a Russian counterpart.

Lost in all of this calculus is...

I mean, there was a thing called the 19th century Crimean War, and there was something called Army Group South South that went into Sevastopol.

And there was something called the heroic Russian defense of the Ukraine.

And there was something,

if you wanted, as I said earlier, if you wanted to look at who participated most eagerly with the Nazis when they came into Ukraine, it was mostly Ukrainian.

And they had, you know, people who did most of the atrocities against Jews were not always,

they were outsourced Ukrainian.

So my point is, it's a very complex history, and this idea that

after the Cold War, this was now part of the West at this line right here.

And we were going to bring it into NATO, and it's going to be in the EU, and it's going to be a buffer state that's going to pin Putin in, and maybe Georgia would have done the same thing, and Ossatia,

and we're going to corral them.

And now that the old buffer, the Eastern European, the historical buffer between Russia and

Western Europe no longer exists.

It's part of the West.

So now we're taking that buffer and pushing it further and further and further to Russian territory.

I'm not saying that I

subscribe to that point of view, but that's what the Russians think.

Yeah.

And that's dangerous because they've got 7,000.

If Putin had no nuclear weapons

and was eager to, he was 30, 40, 50 years old, and he was eager to reintegrate his economy into the Western globalized system.

I wouldn't worry.

I think we should say, okay,

punish him, you know,

get him out of there completely if that's what the Ukrainians want to do.

And maybe we should supply them within our means if we control our border first before we try to help them control theirs.

But that's not the case now.

He's got 7,000 nuclear weapons.

He's old.

He's probably sick.

And he's talking like a madman.

And we're not listening.

So that's what I'm worried about.

And even, you know, when Henry Kissinger in his late 90s,

you know, sort of very rarely weighs in on anything, but he did weigh in on this.

And he said there has to be some type of solution where we don't get to the point where we corner this monster and then,

you know,

he does something extraordinary

with his nukes.

Yeah.

I,

as somebody who grew up on a farm and I had all sorts of farm animals, when I, there was an animal that was wounded.

I know that I'm not telling a Jimmy Carter story, but

I used to shoot cottontails for my grandfather to eat when I was about eight or nine.

And once I shot a huge cottontail with a 22,

and it was very, they make a sound.

That's why I quit shooting them.

It was terrible to hear, watch them die.

But I walked over to it and it wasn't dead.

And it tried to jump on me.

You know what I mean?

A rabbit.

And I'm thinking,

a wounded animal of any size, or everybody knows from your own animal pet that if it has a thorn in its paw or something and you try to touch it,

And it's in a corner, you better be careful.

And that's what, that's what he is.

He's a wounded animal right now.

And he's got a lot of assets still.

Yeah, but I like the idea that you've at least convinced me of, or I read into what you said that

it's a ripe time for a diplomatic answer because he was unsuccessful in what he wanted to do initially.

And so maybe

he's losing.

What I'm trying to maybe clear so our listeners don't think I'm in any, even in a small iota, trying to

excuse what he did.

He's at the point now where the grand strategy of taking Ukraine is over with.

He's at the point where for the last 20 years, he's bragged about his arsenal, that he rebuilt this.

Russian military and they've got all these wonderful jets and wonderful helicopters and hypersonic, and they were better than anything, and they've got a new tank.

That is completely a lie.

He's incompetent.

The Russian army is incompetent when it goes outside its borders.

Its equipment, you look at it.

The tires were, they didn't even have fresh tires.

I mean, the tires were worn.

They were getting flats.

The conscripts, so the world is seeing that this army is just a bunch of young kids and a few professional thugs.

And the only way they can win a war is to do something like they did in Chechnya and just flatten things with all of their artillery.

So he's not looking good in the world.

The oil price is up.

And our plan that Biden bragged about, that we were going to bankrupt him by embargoing his oil, or the Europeans were going to pay him a certain price.

I thought that was funny.

We're only going to pay you, you know.

Think of the logic of that.

You're starving and you go into a supermarket and you see a steak and you tell the clerk, I haven't eaten in five days, but I'm not going to pay over $1.99 for that tea bar.

Yeah, it was pretty funny.

So

he's got 45% of the world buying his oil from India, China, etc.

So, in South America, so, but nevertheless, he's not in an enviable position.

And maybe, just maybe, the Ukrainians with our weapons have put enough pressure on him that he would be,

we can give him a bone where he can crawl back into Russia.

And that bone, I suppose, is some type of borderland that's predominantly Russian.

Yeah,

that might be.

We'll see what comes up, Victor.

We were going to talk about

the place of Machiavelli and Sun Tzu among all the modern military strategists.

We'll get another time, can't we?

Yeah, I was thinking.

No, no, I was thinking, yeah, we're running long, so we're going to have to end.

I went on and on, but I like to talk about Sun Tzu, the yin and the yang, the hot and the cold.

Yeah, yeah.

So

we'll work that that into another podcast in the future, but we'll go ahead and end this one here.

It was just fascinating discussion, especially this last one on the

current state of the Ukrainian war.

Thank you so much for all of your words of wisdom, Victor.

Okay, well, thank everybody for listening.

I hope we can talk about some more strategy, especially the prince.

It was on the index of Prohibitorum Liborum, you know, prohibited books.

The Vatican thought it was just too graphic about lying is good or useful.

All those things.

All right.

Thank you very much.

This is Victor Davis Hansen and Sammy Wink, and we're signing off.

Thank you, everyone.