I’ve been working on transcribing, as in checking what the AI did, one thing it can do unlike say law or war, our old podcasts. All have been transcribed.
Here’s the first episode from Adjutants Lounge, all rights are Ben and Phil.
Half an hour for everybody, the rest for paid subscribers. Might release for free to everybody in future, might not.
Audio for free here
Transcript
00:00:00 Ben Skipper
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Adjutant’s Lounge. I'm joined today by Doctor Philip Blood, CJ4 locomotives, and author of the book Birds of Prey.
00:00:14 Ben Skipper
Which, if you haven't read, do suggest you get a copy, because that way Phil can afford to live the lavish lifestyle which he currently leads.
00:00:29 Ben Skipper
Phil, are you there, mate?
00:00:31 Ben Skipper
AC supply COCC supply OC bread basket. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:00:37 Dr Philip Blood
OC Supply bread basket.
00:00:42 Ben Skipper
I hit my weed.
00:00:42 Dr Philip Blood
Or known as Prefect on Harvest Festival.
00:00:50 Ben Skipper
My window box brings all the boys to the town.
00:00:56 Ben Skipper
Yeah. So actually.
00:00:59 Ben Skipper
John, is he not out of the way because but but we are going to talk about quite, quite seriously, aren't we, we've we've we've had a discussion already about today's podcast which is.
00:01:10 Ben Skipper
Not the off piece because there, there, there is always a serious threat to what we discussed, but there's perhaps more so.
00:01:17 Ben Skipper
And then this goes back to a thread you posted on the 10th of March.
00:01:21 Ben Skipper
Entitled to the Russian where war?
00:01:27 Ben Skipper
Subtitle Putin's Anaconda plan as it unrolls.
00:01:31 Ben Skipper
This is a really important and a very it's almost a full a foresight field thread, Phil.
00:01:39 Ben Skipper
Especially when we look at contemporary, you know the the maps that they're updating from various sources.
00:01:49 Ben Skipper
And you're pretty much on the nail with this one.
00:01:56 Dr Philip Blood
It developed oddly and we were all confused.
00:02:03 Dr Philip Blood
And as you know, I'm not going to immediately rush in to say, well, this is Stalingrad or this is Bagration or Battle of Berlin or.
00:02:13 Dr Philip Blood
Infamously, the finished war.
00:02:16 Dr Philip Blood
A kind of.
00:02:18 Dr Philip Blood
Applied Martin Edmonds philosophy when we were at university, when he was our mentor and teacher of Strategic Studies and civil military relations. And he said you just can't do.
00:02:31 Dr Philip Blood
Lottery job on, you know some past battle or some past history.
00:02:35 Dr Philip Blood
You have to.
00:02:36 Dr Philip Blood
You have to really look at what's been.
00:02:38 Dr Philip Blood
Message to you in the movements of operations.
00:02:42 Dr Philip Blood
And UM.
00:02:44 Dr Philip Blood
We got, we got we. We spent most of our time on the 1973 Arab Israeli conflict.
00:02:53 Dr Philip Blood
Which is long forgotten now in memory, but it was the time when you had.
00:03:00 Dr Philip Blood
The the Suez Canal and rivers and what have you and mountain districts and constant to and fro battle in what probably.
00:03:09 Dr Philip Blood
Pretty much looked like at the time as sort of an extension of Second World War warfare. Like some something out of the desert conflict and Air Force jets and missiles were destroying the Israeli Air Force and.
00:03:26 Dr Philip Blood
The Egyptians crossed a certain point of the Suez Canal and towards the Sinai you had a the Golan Heights, being a particularly interesting situation where there was lots of interdiction.
00:03:43 Dr Philip Blood
Air cover and tanks on the ground and centurions were chewing up Syrian Army and all of that good stuff and we would we, we actually sat down and deconstructed that war and those battles over a period of time and it it was kind of that discipline.
00:04:01 Dr Philip Blood
Which sent me.
00:04:04 Dr Philip Blood
To thinking about this war, my initial concern was if NATO was to then initiate a no fly zone, forget, or whether it was or wasn't, if it was going to initiate a response to the invasion. I think you remember we all had a discussion and my big concern.
00:04:25 Dr Philip Blood
NATO, whatever it does, must keep the Air Force intact.
00:04:32 Dr Philip Blood
Because I know from the missile screens that the the Russian army adopts wherever it moves, it creates a trap for air cover. And So what actually happens is NATO would have got caught up in some kind of crazy scenario of trying to locate and destroy ground.
00:04:52 Dr Philip Blood
Installations, anti aircraft installations and what have you.
00:04:56 Dr Philip Blood
So that was then. Then as the as the LODGEMENTS began to spring up all over the Ukraine and then certain developments happening here, there and everywhere thought about what was actually going on.
00:05:13 Dr Philip Blood
What appeared to be an armoured thrust from the north going to towards Kiev, which was really, as we now know, was just an armed reconnaissance move. We know that there's a lot of sprinkling of troops on the ground all over the place causing masses of confusion.
00:05:31 Dr Philip Blood
The response in the West was well, this isn't blitzkrieg or this is a Gulf War one or Gulf War two or any of this mobile warfare. This is this is an army in distress. It's getting weaker and weaker and weaker. My my problem with that.
00:05:48 Dr Philip Blood
Thesis is it's not getting weaker, it's killing more and more civilians and it's destroying more and more.
00:05:58 Dr Philip Blood
Municipalities within the Ukrainian area.
00:06:02 Dr Philip Blood
And also a lot of these lodgement areas are starting to join up and I've seen that in other major conventional.
00:06:11 Dr Philip Blood
Operations of the the Russians and and before when it was the Soviet Red Army. So the signals that I was getting were very different. And I started to look at it.
00:06:23 Dr Philip Blood
And while I called it the Anaconda plan, which is after Winfield, Scott, and the UM attempt to pacify the Confederate forces in the American Civil War, I'm looking at in a different way. His Anaconda plan was to starve by preventing.
00:06:43 Dr Philip Blood
Shipping and economic movements and support so the you know the the the.
00:06:49 Dr Philip Blood
The fleet couldn't couldn't move to Britain and get guns very easily, and the gun runners developed and all of that.
00:06:57 Dr Philip Blood
That's not the only kind of plan that I've been envisaging as it's been emerging, I see.
00:07:05 Dr Philip Blood
Rolling offensives across the whole of the digestion process, so if you imagine.
00:07:12 Dr Philip Blood
The the The the Russian forces have swallowed a large area of uh Ukrainian borders and frontiers. It's slowly digesting it and slowly digesting it by rolling offensives all along the lines all around that.
00:07:33 Dr Philip Blood
What's increasingly looking like a horseshoe shape.
00:07:37 Dr Philip Blood
And as pressure is applied to say Kiev and and around that area that attracts Ukrainian forces to Kiev to defend that area. And then suddenly there's movement down in the South where significant.
00:07:53 Dr Philip Blood
Advances have been made.
00:07:56 Dr Philip Blood
I've also been looking at it in a slightly more geographical way than perhaps some of our.
00:08:03 Dr Philip Blood
Leaks in the Strategic Studies world and that is to.
00:08:08 Dr Philip Blood
Consider this long river that these rivers like the Danica, which pretty much bisect Ukraine.
00:08:15 Dr Philip Blood
And and ask myself, well, if if in Stalin's time the aim was to get behind the Danica very fast.
00:08:26 Dr Philip Blood
What am I seeing in this in these operations?
00:08:32 Dr Philip Blood
Deal with that problem and it struck me that while Kiev, Kiev is turning into this.
00:08:41 Dr Philip Blood
I don't know large operations in a city down in the South. The the Russian forces have broken free and they're threatening Odessa.
00:08:52 Dr Philip Blood
The question is where they're going, and my impression is they're aiming for Uman.
00:08:58 Dr Philip Blood
Which is a major.
00:09:00 Dr Philip Blood
Junction on the motorway system, which would then, if they get there, would essentially separate.
00:09:10 Dr Philip Blood
Russia, Ukraine into two the east and the West.
00:09:15 Dr Philip Blood
And from that position they would dominate anything. And of course that would make the rivers and the lakes instead of an obstacle to a Russian advance, which the Ukrainian army probably hoped it's now turning into a wall in which they will be slammed against as the Russian army at the eastern edges starts to force.
00:09:37 Dr Philip Blood
Those Ukrainian forces back.
00:09:41 Dr Philip Blood
OK, people will say will no doubt say to me, but what about the logistics? And what about this and what about that? Well, the fact and matter is is actually happening.
00:09:50 Dr Philip Blood
And while we're listening to Ukrainian.
00:09:58 Dr Philip Blood
In the western world.
00:10:01 Dr Philip Blood
Outside of Western media, other broadcasters in the Middle East and the Far East are reporting a completely different development of the war, and I'm very concerned that what I'm seeing in those programmes is tending to confirm the kind of thinking that I was developing.
00:10:23 Dr Philip Blood
So I'm yeah, maybe I'm using the the the media of the West, the, the Middle East and the Far East to confirm my thoughts, but I just don't see.
00:10:34 Dr Philip Blood
Any discussion on the western side, which is quote objective?
00:10:39 Dr Philip Blood
It's all about that. We must whatever we do, defend NATO.
00:10:43 Dr Philip Blood
And what I mean by that is NATO isn't doing anything other than supplying guns or weapons to the Ukrainian forces. It's saying it's going to stand there and nothing's going to come over the border, but it's actually not doing.
00:10:55 Dr Philip Blood
Anything. And while that's not doing anything and there's been somewhat to a certain extent strategically neutralised in these operations.
00:11:05 Dr Philip Blood
Putin is is running riot.
00:11:08 Dr Philip Blood
And so the Western presses, in particular the, the, the more jingoistic press in in Britain and America have been pushing this idea that somehow.
00:11:22 Dr Philip Blood
The the great Ukrainian army can hold off the Russian army and there'll be this great victory and Putin will be deposed and.
00:11:32 Dr Philip Blood
Then there'll be a regular warfare and then we'll turn into chaos and then eventually everybody will go back to normal.
00:11:39 Dr Philip Blood
I actually don't think that's going to happen. I think it's turning into a much more complicated, more complex scenario.
00:11:49 Dr Philip Blood
And long term, we are opposing, we are receiving warnings of threats well in advance, but I can see them coming over things like energy, food, strategic situation, VIS A VIS NATO, European forces.
00:12:09 Dr Philip Blood
And my biggest fear, of course, is if on the borders of Poland, Hungary and Romania, and we suddenly have.
00:12:16 Dr Philip Blood
Screens of anti aircraft systems as Ukraine is swallowed. Also there's been discussions of.
00:12:27 Dr Philip Blood
Belarus one minute. Belarus was going to pull out of this and now this morning there's talk that Belarus is going to join in and support Russian operations. So.
00:12:37 Dr Philip Blood
You know you you from. From my perspective, you need to be able to rely to a certain extent on what the sources are saying to you for the next day, what the the Western sources have been saying. One thing on one day and the next day something completely different and and it just is not so.
00:12:58 Dr Philip Blood
The Al Jazeera journalists in Key Kiev yesterday.
00:13:03 Dr Philip Blood
Were very downbeat because suddenly they were announcing that the Ukrainian forces were preparing for a complete encirclement of the.
00:13:14 Dr Philip Blood
My concern is.
00:13:17 Dr Philip Blood
Those forces that are on the West flank, those Russian forces are on the West flank of the city, is if they don't go for encirclement but go South.
00:13:28 Dr Philip Blood
Then, increasingly, the possibility of closing the whole of the Ukrainian forces in the east.
00:13:37 Dr Philip Blood
Occurs and that's a more dangerous situation because I'm led to also believe from what I've from, from what the again, these other sources are suggesting.
00:13:49 Dr Philip Blood
Is that Ukraine no longer has any air cover and the whole of the airspace now is dominated by the Russian Air Force. Well, if that's the case.
00:13:57 Dr Philip Blood
And the cities are being flattened with cruise missiles and other heavy bombardment. And and I heard this morning that they were dropping, uh, stupid bombs on the on the city. You know, those weren't that don't need to be guided, they just fall out the aircraft.
00:14:13 Dr Philip Blood
But then we're in a very serious position for, you know, if we're supporting Ukraine, obviously we want Ukraine to survive.
00:14:21 Dr Philip Blood
But these messages that are coming to us are now very big warnings of a breakdown in the defence systems.
00:14:30 Dr Philip Blood
And that tells me that the Anaconda plan is just, I think a term you used of nibbling away at the at the defences.
00:14:39 Dr Philip Blood
And the nibbling is getting is is actually.
00:14:43 Dr Philip Blood
You know, 14 days of nibbling has done serious damage, and while the while the Ukrainians capture.
00:14:52 Dr Philip Blood
The odd tank and pull out aeroplanes from museums. I mean, this is all glorious stuff. And don't get me wrong, it's great to see.
00:14:59 Dr Philip Blood
But deep down I have this very great fear that the Anaconda plan is actually strangling the Ukrainian defence slowly.
00:15:08 Dr Philip Blood
And in a very ugly way. So when I decided to put my.
00:15:15 Dr Philip Blood
Thread together which some people have said were very good. I mean had an awful lot of people saying I was being unpatriotic towards the Ukrainians and not supporting them. The fact of the matter is, I would like the Ukrainians to start thinking that they might actually be in a very serious situation and that trying to defend everything might not actually be a very good idea.
00:15:37 Dr Philip Blood
And you know, if they've been compromised, if I suspect is what's happened, they're being compromised and umam is.
00:15:45 Dr Philip Blood
The target, you know the actual.
00:15:49 Dr Philip Blood
Physical target. Then it strikes me that the other thing that I'm thinking that I have been thinking about is that.
00:15:58 Dr Philip Blood
Instead of having a short term plan.
00:16:02 Dr Philip Blood
Putin might have a plan, which is to have complete open to have completed operations by the 22nd of June of this year, which of course is an anniversary date, which we all know about the the invasion of Russia Barbarossa.
00:16:16 Dr Philip Blood
So if he completes the occupation of conquest of Ukraine by the 22nd of June.
00:16:25 Dr Philip Blood
We are we, the West are in a very, very serious position because they will have tanks on the frontiers, the refugees will have nowhere to go.
00:16:36 Dr Philip Blood
Once they're out of the country, there's no way that they'll ever be able to get back very, very easily.
00:16:42 Dr Philip Blood
The frontier will become an armed area. The Black Sea will be totally dominated by Russian forces again.
00:16:49 Dr Philip Blood
UM.
00:16:50 Dr Philip Blood
And I'm wondering, and I hate to say it, but does that mean that the Hungarians are going to remain wanting to be half in and half out of Europe? Will that mean that the Romanians want to stand and fight or even to be involved in a slapping contest where aircraft?
00:17:10 Dr Philip Blood
Being hit and struck and counterattacks from Russian forces and all that kind of niggling kind of.
00:17:19 Dr Philip Blood
Skirmishing along the frontiers. I'm not sure those sustain.
00:17:24 Dr Philip Blood
Morale in Western nations and frankly.
00:17:31 Dr Philip Blood
I'm worried about the whole attitude that somehow the Russians are a broken force and combat morale is declining.
00:17:41 Dr Philip Blood
I've yet to know an army that doesn't grumble.
00:17:44 Dr Philip Blood
When they they become prisoners of war or B.
00:17:48 Dr Philip Blood
They're in the cold.
00:17:50 Dr Philip Blood
But once an army starts to advance, it kind of changes its mind very, very quickly.
00:17:56 Dr Philip Blood
And suddenly which? Ohh, we're on the we're.
00:17:58 Dr Philip Blood
On the March.
00:18:00 Dr Philip Blood
And, you know, people say to me, oh, you can't cite the World War Two period. But I would this at.
00:18:04 Dr Philip Blood
This point.
00:18:04 Dr Philip Blood
I would refer to a a combat morale change.
00:18:09 Dr Philip Blood
And that was, you know, after 1941 when the Russians pushed the Germans out to Moscow area, the Germans were fleeing and chaos. And it was the end of the war and everything was over. And the Fury had sold as a pup.
00:18:24 Dr Philip Blood
UM, on the March to Stalingrad. I'm not talking about being in Stalingrad, but on the March to Stalingrad. It was the other way around to other furs leading us into victory and we're going to have the greatest victory ever over Russia and we'll be in the euro soon and everything's great and we're going to have.
00:18:41 Dr Philip Blood
Coffee and caviar and and.
00:18:44 Dr Philip Blood
Who we are heroes of the Vermont. So the problem with morale is it can swing from one way to another and it's like logistics. You get if you think, OK, there's no fuel coming in.
00:18:56 Dr Philip Blood
Fine. They missed planned fuel or?
00:19:00 Dr Philip Blood
Or did they just have enough fuel to get to where they wanted to be and then decided that would be the point where they'd start refuelling?
00:19:07 Dr Philip Blood
Cause the problem with. If you go too much down a certain view which is either logistics or failures of command or what have you, it leads you to logical conclusions. The question is how much is the rest of it being?
00:19:22 Dr Philip Blood
Undermined or changed, or what's actually happening and that's why I came up with that other part of my discussion earlier this week, which is linked to this, which was the use of the railways because the railways, if a train is flying through tracks which have not been broken, smashed or bombed.
00:19:41 Dr Philip Blood
It means aid that Ukrainian army has not gone out of its way.
00:19:46 Dr Philip Blood
To prevent traffic movement too, that the Ukrainian army isn't thinking like an irregular force. And three.
00:19:55 Dr Philip Blood
Where is the train going?
00:19:58 Dr Philip Blood
And what does that mean to the supply system? Because if you can get that train through and the load bearing is working to your advantage, you can pretty much make a strategic movement and have.
00:20:12 Dr Philip Blood
100 trains an hour going through the lines into Odessa, forming up units to go towards Uma.
00:20:21 Dr Philip Blood
So then the next thing in all of this and where I get my ideas from is I've been looking at a lot of.
00:20:28 Dr Philip Blood
The American institutional studies from the various departments of war studies and.
00:20:35 Dr Philip Blood
Military institutions and what have you, and there's an awful lot of reliance on the idea that counterinsurgency is going to be a or insurgency, and then counterinsurgency is going to be the next generation of the OR the next stage in this in this war.
00:20:51 Dr Philip Blood
Which again compromises their original ideas, because if the ideas are that the Russians are losing, then you're not going to have counter insurgency and insurgency warfare if the rations start prevailing and do occupy the cities, then you're going to have counterinsurgency and insurgency warfare. Well, fine.
00:21:10 Dr Philip Blood
But what you're not noting, which I find very interesting, is all of these American studies go on about how the Russians behaved in Syria. In flattening cities, I mean, I do not mean just getting rid of a building and taking out a group of Taliban fighters or who.
00:21:26 Dr Philip Blood
Without but actually flattening the entire building.
00:21:31 Dr Philip Blood
And you know, if you look at what happened or in the comments made in the United Nations programme on Friday night, yesterday, one of the specialists on chemical weapons interjected during the screening of the discussion in the United Nations and started to talk about what happened in Syria.
00:21:55 Dr Philip Blood
And he was saying that they were using dustbins.
00:21:57 Dr Philip Blood
Filled with chlorine.
00:22:00 Dr Philip Blood
Which were dumped on people.
00:22:04 Dr Philip Blood
Well, if you're going to do that, you don't. You're not only spoil the ground.
00:22:08 Dr Philip Blood
But the nature of the damages that you cause to civilians is so heinous.
00:22:14 Dr Philip Blood
Who wants to stand and fight underneath a helicopter that's dumping out chlorine?
00:22:19 Dr Philip Blood
So I'm I'm in this strange place where I've got all this.
00:22:24 Dr Philip Blood
Strategic information coming from on one side.
00:22:28 Dr Philip Blood
And then being ignored and.
00:22:32 Dr Philip Blood
Not used in the calculations for the war that's happening at the moment and you know.
00:22:39 Dr Philip Blood
I'm not springing to conclusions. I'm raising questions, and when I raise the questions, I'm then asking what's happening.
00:22:46 Dr Philip Blood
And then I'm looking at the map and I'm saying to myself, well, that map point there looks to me to be the strategic point on the whole thing.
00:22:53 Dr Philip Blood
And then you know, you take the time. I could take a random time. I could say the 23rd of April. Or I could take the whatever. But I do think that this Putin dude has got some historical thing in his mind and the 22nd of June is.
00:23:11 Dr Philip Blood
Is there?
00:23:12 Dr Philip Blood
You know, so that's the Anaconda plan and where I've got to and how I got here.
00:23:20 Ben Skipper
Thank you for that. And and as you're speaking, Phil, I was, I was making several notes.
00:23:27 Ben Skipper
And so almost cases back to friends on this, your comment about Putin that there is there has been certainly over the past of two decades.
00:23:38 Ben Skipper
On almost an industry built around a great patriotic war in its portrayal by the Russians and huge amount of state investment in films.
00:23:52 Ben Skipper
And literature that's supporting the, you know the and this is not to decry the losses of the Great Patriotic War, but this is very much an over politicisation of the Great Patriotic war.
00:24:08 Ben Skipper
And when you're sort of talking about Putin and he has this timeline there, the other that's starting to make sense because looking at the current rate of advance.
00:24:18 Ben Skipper
He's definitely going slow and steady.
00:24:21 Ben Skipper
And and again the the the the guys on the ground for the Ukrainians and the supporting Foreign Legion troops are doing absolutely wonders. Convinced. You know, when when they compared them against one of the most, one of the largest armies in the world, you don't seem to have an easy time of it. However, you know, we've discussed that.
00:24:40 Ben Skipper
Is he following that Russian tract that is being?
00:24:44 Ben Skipper
The the the form of most military doctrine is to to put your most inexperienced troops at the forefront. Now, with the exception of the V.
00:24:52 Ben Skipper
Troops that were taking out in the early stages of the campaign, I would say, yeah, he's he's still in that position, isn't he? He's he's feeding the ground, he's testing resistance testing areas of resistance and just looking at contemporary maps.
00:25:06 Ben Skipper
Ice to add. These are only as relevant to the information and the intelligence that the the the map maker is getting, but you can see very clearly that this, this horseshoe effect, you know with, with, with the problems coming out from to the West of Kershaw and to West of Key, and they are.
00:25:24 Ben Skipper
Geographically, going to meet the Duman, which is almost in the centre point of the country and then it sells warring because that grabs a huge amount of land mass of Ukraine.
00:25:41 Ben Skipper
It traps quite a few Ukrainian army units behind the NEPA.
00:25:51 Ben Skipper
And what is interesting and contemporary?
00:25:55 Ben Skipper
Well, definitely intelligence has been received as of current day.
00:25:59 Ben Skipper
Is the way that the Russians are forming their lines to the north and to the South. They are now getting the divisions ready.
00:26:07 Ben Skipper
Interestingly, on the the eastern edge of the offensive, that is, they are deploying brigade strength units almost sort of penny pocket, like holding the line.
00:26:19 Ben Skipper
The divisional boundaries are now starting to shape up. The army boundaries have not really changed between West and South OSK.
00:26:27 Ben Skipper
But the the next pushes I think will be from. Personally speaking, I think they'll they'll go for the encirclement of Kiev and then push southwards to our two men.
00:26:39 Ben Skipper
And then push northwards from Odessa.
00:26:42 Ben Skipper
Driving up that way, using the Moldovian border.
00:26:46 Ben Skipper
As the western boundary.
00:26:49 Dr Philip Blood
Well, there's two things that's there. The Moldavian boundary borders, sorry, could operate as a hinge.
00:26:57 Dr Philip Blood
Swinging the forces up because if you lock there, if they lock on that.
00:27:04 Dr Philip Blood
And then use it to swing up.
00:27:08 Dr Philip Blood
Stat inputs Turner, Paul, Will, Turner Pill, Livv, Lutsk.
00:27:15 Dr Philip Blood
Those areas then suddenly come under threat, and what struck me about the air strikes on those two cities.
00:27:28 Dr Philip Blood
If you're.
00:27:31 Dr Philip Blood
If we assume what NATO and the leaders and Biden and all of these dudes are going are talking about saying, well, we'll get him on a limited victory or we'll reduce him on his limited strikes or we'll we'll we'll force him out of office and all.
00:27:47 Dr Philip Blood
The rest of it.
00:27:48 Dr Philip Blood
Why is he attacking up there?
00:27:51 Dr Philip Blood
I think he's attacking up there to warn people that he's coming.
00:27:56 Dr Philip Blood
And I think.
00:27:58 Dr Philip Blood
To go back what to what you're saying with these historical this historical legacy of the Great Patriotic War, I don't think for a second he's fighting the Great Patriotic War again, although a lot of people think so. I think he's fighting his own war.
00:28:15 Dr Philip Blood
But within the bounds of the experience.
00:28:18 Dr Philip Blood
Of the great Cape shot at war when you've had Russian forces running through this region.
00:28:24 Dr Philip Blood
That experience of how you got across the river left them a legacy and a lesson which is enshrined in their military culture. This is why I use the term the Russian way of war. Everybody's talking about the Russians being fairly inept and and not working.
00:28:44 Dr Philip Blood
The plans and all the rest of it to me.
00:28:47 Dr Philip Blood
I haven't seen anything yet that tells me that the Russians haven't done anything are are doing now anything different than they did in the last 20 years? So here's me saying, well, you know, the Great Patriotic War is a lesson. Well, it is as much as it's used in the France Military Academy or in Moscow.
00:29:10 Dr Philip Blood
It's not functioning in Putin's world because Putin fights are very complex style of warfare. We saw that in Chechnya and we saw it in Georgia. We saw it in.
00:29:21 Dr Philip Blood
In the Ukraine, when he when he took the Crimea.
00:29:26 Dr Philip Blood
He doesn't fight wars the way the West fight wars.
00:29:31 Dr Philip Blood
Because if he fought wars the way the West fought wars, he'd probably never have won any of those places.
00:29:37 Dr Philip Blood
Right. Because we know what happens, we know we we actually know how ineffective the West has been in winning wars since 9:11. Not very effective at all. And we've become.
00:29:51 Dr Philip Blood
Engrossed in the insurgency surge, counterinsurgency paradigm, which has done nothing but undermine everybody's military forces. So, I mean, I remember only just, what, 10 years ago, when everyone was saying no, forget the big conventional forces. You need small forces and special forces to fight insurgents and the Taliban.
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