Daniel Davis on Russia's military strategy, US defeats in Iran and Ukraine, and NATO's vulnerabilities
Glenn Diesen interviews Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis about US military failures in Iran and Ukraine, and Russia's evolving strategy.
Summary
Glenn Diesen interviews Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis, a four-time combat veteran and host of the Daniel Davis Deep Dive, about the trajectory of US military engagements in Iran and Ukraine. Davis argues that the United States has a deep institutional failure to honestly assess its own military defeats — a pattern stretching from Vietnam through Iraq and Afghanistan and now repeating in both Iran and Ukraine. In the Iran conflict specifically, he points to the withdrawal of the aircraft carrier George H.W. Bush, reported troop morale collapse and suicides, and claims of over forty aircraft damaged or destroyed, all of which the administration publicly denies. He contends that Russia is not moving slowly because it is weak, but because it is deliberately building overwhelming military superiority across missiles, drones, air defense, and manpower while NATO depletes its own stockpiles. Davis warns that Zelensky's own admission — that Ukraine now has two and a half times fewer interceptor missiles than a year ago, while Russia has doubled its offensive missile capacity — exposes the hollowness of Western narratives about the war's direction. He also raises the possibility that Russian hawks are pushing for a direct confrontation with NATO while the alliance is at its most vulnerable, and that the window for a negotiated resolution may be closing.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and the failure to learn from military defeat
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back everyone. Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis joins us today, a four-time combat veteran and host of the Daniel Davis Deep Dive. Thank you for coming back on.
Daniel Davis: Thanks for having me back, Glenn. Always a delight to be here.
Glenn Diesen: We know that military successes are always good, but military defeats can also provide some wisdom if we learn the lessons — and to do this we need an honest assessment. As the US is looking at what appears to be a dual defeat, or at least that's the path we seem to be on, in Iran and also in the war against Russia, I was wondering what's gone wrong in your opinion?
Daniel Davis: It's interesting you bring that up about defeats having a very positive impact. After the US lost in Vietnam, we went through a pretty significant and sobering re-evaluation. We looked at ourselves and made some acknowledgements of things that had gone wrong both politically and militarily, and we realized that we had a culture problem — at least in the US Army. I joined as a private for the first time in 1985, about ten years after the Vietnam War. I came in right at the time they were really ramping up what was going to be the renewed focus on integrity, on doing the right thing, on hard work, on only going after attainable military objectives, and on holding people accountable. A wholesale change had occurred in those ten years, and I came in right at the beginning of the good phase, if you can call it that. It had dramatic effects because we were actually paying attention to doing the things that we had failed to do before — in our training, in our focus, in our preparations for combat, in taking care of our equipment.
At that time we were in the process of fielding the Humvee, the Abrams tank, the Bradley fighting vehicle — all the acquisition work that had been done in the seventies and into the early eighties. I saw all of that unfold. I was young, I was a private, I didn't know anything about what the army had been like before, but a lot of my leaders were Vietnam combat veterans. A lot of the guys who were training me in basic training were Vietnam combat veterans. I saw officers who had seen some of the worst of it — now colonels and majors — and they told us: we did some things wrong in the past, we've now corrected it, and we are never going to repeat that. We had a really good military then. That has disappeared.
The willingness to look at ourselves honestly has disappeared. We had disaster in the Iraq War. We were only saved — not because David Petraeus had this brilliant idea that he loves to take credit for to this day — but because he recognized something that the Iraqis themselves had done and took reasonable advantage of it. I've actually written things that gave him credit for what he did do, but he took credit for what he didn't do. Instead of acknowledging that we made a bunch of mistakes and that by sheer grace of God some of the Iraqi Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq — because the Sunni insurgency was being oppressed by the Shia, by al-Qaeda, and by the United States, and it was an existential issue for them — what we did was take advantage of that moment. A first armor brigade of the First Armored Division made a deal with them: what if we worked together to get rid of our mutual enemy, al-Qaeda in Iraq? And that radically changed everything. But what we failed to do was acknowledge that had that not happened, we were headed to strategic defeat there too. Instead of looking at any of the things we did wrong, we just looked at this one thing that went right, took credit for it, and pretended the rest of it didn't happen.
Then you have the Afghanistan War, and again I had a front-row seat for both of these. After twenty years of complete disaster, David Petraeus still claims to this day — as recently as last year in an interview I saw — that it was a mistake to leave and we should still be there. There has been no acknowledgement that anything we did was wrong. All we end up doing is making excuses. It was somebody else's fault — the politicians, George Bush, Barack Obama, whatever. Joe Biden's way of getting out was a disaster, so everybody gets blamed except us. We don't look at ourselves.
The current wars: Iran and Ukraine
Daniel Davis: And now here we are, as you point out, in the war in Iran and in the war we're supporting in Ukraine against Russia, and we won't acknowledge anything. No one wants to take any responsibility. No one will acknowledge anything is going wrong. We keep saying every day how great things are going. President Trump just a couple of days ago again said, "The war in Iran is going really wonderful. It's going well. Everything's going well." And then you look over into the Pentagon itself and we keep saying, "The Strait of Hormuz is open. We have control over it. The Iranians don't. We have escalation dominance. We have military dominance." Even though everything is physically — in some cases literally — falling apart.
Our major power projection, the symbol of American power and might, the aircraft carrier George H.W. Bush, is now limping back to port. It's going to be exchanged pretty soon because things are just falling apart. Our troops are killing themselves. Apparently others are attempting to as well because conditions are so bad. That's what's being reported in the press. I can also tell you because I've seen some direct communications between a friend of mine who has friends at the front, and what they're describing is even worse than what's being publicly admitted. But what does the administration and the Pentagon do? Does Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth say, "Holy crap, we have a real issue here. Let's fix it"? No. He says there's nothing wrong here. Everything's fine. We're doing a great job. It's all fake news. It's the fake liberal media spinning this out. At the same time, you're actually exchanging the aircraft carrier only after these things come out. Everybody knows it's not true.
The troops at the level — and I'm sure those on the aircraft carrier as well as those on land that my friend has communication with — they see all of this. They know what's happening on the ground. Just like when I was in Afghanistan and came forward in 2012 to talk about what I had observed in 2011 on my last combat deployment, I heard all these similar kinds of claims from senior leaders about how great things were going. We're on the right path. We've turned a corner. We've taken the momentum away. The Afghans are taking the lead. They're becoming less corrupt. I knew none of that was true, and all the guys who were deployed with me knew the same thing, and we found it disgusting.
Now I think it's even worse, because at least on the tactical level in Afghanistan, the Taliban could do nothing in a direct clash — they could blow us up with mines, but if there was ever a direct engagement, they lost 100% of the time. That's not the case now. Now we're seeing that even with this incredible armada — President Trump used that word at the beginning of this war, talking about it in February leading up to it, saying we're going to win, they're going to unconditionally surrender, no nuclear weapons, no power, I'm going to decide who the next Ayatollah is — the guys at the front know we can't do that. We don't have the power to do that. We can't do anything on the ground. We can't do boots on the ground. We don't own the air despite what's being claimed. We have air superiority, but not air dominance to where we can literally do anything, which was claimed. And when you have the senior leaders in the Pentagon and in Congress and in the White House always saying how we can do whatever we want — we destroyed their navy, their air force, they've got nothing left, no air defense, we can do whatever we want — the guys who are flying these missions know better. They know the truth. They've seen that we've had something like forty-odd aircraft damaged or destroyed so far, and we've cut that back a lot because we've stopped, at least for the moment, any offensive actions.
We are not willing to acknowledge any of this. Nobody — you said these losses at the beginning, the losses in Iran and in our efforts in Ukraine — we don't acknowledge that. We have not yet acknowledged it. In fact, we keep saying we're winning. We've turned a corner in Ukraine. We still have control of the Strait of Hormuz. And if we need to go back and teach them a lesson, that's what we're saying. But we can't do that.
This one may require — unlike Vietnam, which was basically a political and strategic defeat but not a physical one, where we won every engagement with the North Vietnamese Army and inflicted massive casualties but couldn't break their spirit and finally acknowledged it was an unwinnable and unpopular war and just left — this one, Glenn, may end up being a military necessity. You may lose physically on the battlefield in the Iran war. Ukraine is heading now towards a significant and dangerous period, more so this coming fall and winter than at any point in the war other than maybe the opening rounds, for various reasons we can discuss. That could literally turn into a Russian military victory, and then you don't get the chance to even pretend anything differently.
I think it may require a physical loss in both of these to have a massive realization and a humiliation of our senior leadership — both political and military — and then a cleaning of the decks: fire all those people and elevate some new people who are good. And let me be very clear: just like the case when I was on that combat deployment in 2011, there are still to this day some great men, some great officers, some great enlisted in all the branches of service who know the right thing to do, who know how to have a good force, who know how to train properly, who know how to equip the force properly, and who know what missions are foolish and should never be attempted because they're militarily unattainable. If we get the deadwood knocked out of the way and elevate those kinds of people, then we can have something going forward like what I observed on the back side of the post-Vietnam period.
But this time, I think the cost in both blood and treasure will be profoundly higher. And we just have to be honest — who's to say that after that repair, our standing in the world will be substantially lower? I argue that we likely will never get back to the point where we started these twin fiascos. I don't think we'll ever get back to that position of global dominance that we had.
Glenn Diesen: No, it appears to be gone. It's interesting what you say — that's an important point about learning lessons from mistakes. We've robbed ourselves of this. When you hear all this talk —
Daniel Davis: We robbed ourselves of it. That's a great way to put it.
Glenn Diesen: What they say is: the Strait of Hormuz is open, the US is in control of it, the Iranians are begging for peace, the Iranians — according to Trump — killed 52,000 of their own citizens, there's no weapon shortage at all, the troops aren't actually exhausted or been deployed for too long. It's just nonsense. And you see the same now with the war on Russia — the Russians aren't really worried about NATO, even though we had this ongoing conversation for thirty years about the problems that were building up. Ukraine is winning yet again, apparently, for no good reason. Russia, we are told, is taking much higher casualties than the Ukrainians. And the only possible peace is an unconditional ceasefire. It's not just spin. It's really dumb and it's very dangerous as well.
Daniel Davis: It's delusion. Not even dumb — delusion.
Russia's strategy and NATO's misreading of Russian patience
Glenn Diesen: But you were talking about what's happening in Ukraine, and if the situation is horrific now, it can become much worse during this winter. Overall though, the Russians seem to have been, over the past years, careful and restrained to the extent that they wanted to avoid a direct war with NATO. But what many now see as having been essentially appeasement of NATO has come at a very great cost — that is, the collapse of the ceasefire trends and also the deepening and deepening involvement of NATO into this war, much more openly as well. There seems to be forming a new consensus in Moscow — a consensus expressed both in rhetoric and in action — that the days of appeasement are now over. How do you see the war changing now, because the Russians are doing things they didn't do before?
Daniel Davis: The patience is definitely running out on the Russian side, and that patience has been misinterpreted in the West as weakness. I've lost count of the number of people I've talked to here in Washington DC who say, "Well, look at the map. Look at the battle map in Ukraine today and look at what it was a year ago." Especially when you're looking at it at the national level, you can't even see any difference. That means Russia has been unable to conquer any meaningful territory. Yes, there's been some square kilometers continued to be acquired by the Russians, but by and large it doesn't look much different. And the conclusion drawn is: that's all they can do. They can't go any further.
But that's not the Russian way of war, and we are misinterpreting that as incapacity. So the view in Washington is: there are no red lines. Russia is ultimately weak. This is as fast as they can go and they can't do anything else. The last thing they're ever going to do is trigger an Article 5 deal because they know they'll lose — they can't even defeat this one country, so how are they going to defeat a thirty-two-member alliance? So goes the thinking.
But that view assumes Russia is trying to conquer Ukraine and just can't, and that this is all they can do. When you look at the Russian way of war as I interpret it — from listening to Russian speakers, looking at what's happening on the ground, talking to people who've been fighting at the front lines on both sides — to me it looks like Russia is conducting a sustained offensive over a very broad front, whatever it is, a thousand kilometers or something like that, maybe longer when you add in Sumy and everything, maybe Chernihiv all the way across down to Zaporizhzhia. They are keeping non-stop pressure all along so that Ukraine can't move from one place to another or take troops away from one area to reinforce another because there's equal pressure all along. At the same time, they are continuing to use this extraordinary overmatch in firepower.
That's why these claims that Russia is suffering this massive casualty imbalance — three to one, five to one, all kinds of crazy numbers, more Russians dying than the Ukrainian side — are not even logical. The side that has the glide bombs that Russia can nearly drop at will all along the front area — there's no defense against them on the Ukraine side at all. There's now no defense even against the ballistic missiles. And of course we already know about the long-range drone situation. A significant percentage of those get through all throughout the country. You can't possibly have it that the side with this massive firepower advantage — and you add artillery, still at least a two-to-one advantage on the Russian side including mortars, and then somewhere around parity on drones — is going to somehow suffer more casualties. That's illogical. You have to have firepower to kill the other guys, and Russia certainly doesn't use meatwave tactics on the ground.
As a matter of fact, they're doing the opposite. The gray zone — the area on either side of the line of contact — has expanded because of the effectiveness of drones on both sides. So there are no big tank movements, no big infantry carrier movements, no big infantry foot soldier movements either, because you just can't do it. Russia has therefore prioritized not losing its troops by avoiding those kinds of attacks, contenting themselves for the time being with just attrition warfare, with just having this big firepower imbalance on their side to cause more casualties and more damage, and then over time they're going to weaken Ukraine.
Russia's military buildup and the interceptor missile crisis
Daniel Davis: At the same time — and this is the part that almost nobody in the West either acknowledges or is willing to accept — Russia is saying: one day there may be a war between us. There may be an Article 5 situation, because at some point we're going to get tired of allowing the West to help target, to provide intelligence, to provide weapons or weapons components for long-range strikes into our country, and we're going to have to do something about it. But before we do, we need to make sure that we have an overmatch in all of the categories of weapons and ammunition that we would need in that fight.
While the NATO side has been depleting all of its resources — especially its interceptor missiles and even some of its longer-range missiles, not that they had many of them anyway — the Russians have been massively building up stockpiles of all these things. They have interceptors for the S-300, S-400, S-500, and those things continue to expand. I was talking to somebody who had been up near the front on the Russian side just a couple of days ago, and they said that Russia now has drone defense in depth all the way through Russian territory to try and mitigate some of these strikes — the wild berries facilities that have been hit, for example. Those Ukrainian successes that produce spectacular video — what's of course not reported is that a substantial percentage gets shot down before they ever get there, because of gun trucks and a lot of different integrated and massive capabilities the Russian side has to defend. At the same time, they're building up offensive capabilities in all these different categories of long-range missiles, more drones, new categories of drones. They never stop with this kind of thing.
So if there is a war with the West, the Russian side is in a position to dominate it. Our vulnerability was exposed just this week where Zelensky was interviewed on CNN and talking about how he's asking Europe to give him just 10% of their existing interceptor stockpiles — whether that's IRIS-T or whatever — and he'll destroy every Russian missile there is, which is patently absurd because the intercept rate is way less than that. But he did say: we're basically out. He was point-blank asked: are you out of interceptor missiles? And he wouldn't answer that question directly. He used some percentages. He said, "Here's what I'll tell you" — and I don't think he realized how important this admission was — "right now, we have two and a half times fewer interceptors than we did a year ago. Two and a half times fewer. Russia has two times more offensive missile capacity than they had."
And I'm thinking: hang on. Aren't the Russians running out of missiles? We've been talking about that from the beginning. Aren't they using chips out of refrigerators, fighting with shovels? How is it possible that in the fifth year of war they have doubled their offensive capacity while Ukraine is running out of interceptor missiles? And the reason Ukraine is running out, Glenn, is because no one is going to give them any — because we're running dangerously low already in Iran, and from what we had given to Israel, and what we had previously given to Ukraine, and our replacement capability in the defense industrial base is minuscule. We're trying to scramble to get that built up, but it will be — and I'm not making this up — seven years before we can get back up to a place that's even still not that significant when you're talking about a war of attrition. We're talking about 2,000 per year. By comparison, Saudi Arabia is reported to have used 2,700 interceptors in the first forty days of the war. 2,700. That's what we hope in seven years to be able to produce — less than what was used up in forty days. What does that tell you about the system we have designed?
Meanwhile, Russia is just making missiles hand over fist. Iran is making missiles hand over fist at a much higher rate than anything we have. Our literal systems are running out, and the systems we have aren't even effective. Ted Postol — I think you've had him on your own show — says the intercept rate is maybe two or three percent. Others have said maybe as high as ten percent. Even if it's the higher number, that means ninety percent of everything is going to get through. All of NATO is basically open.
I saw Sean Bell on Sky News earlier this week. He said the UK basically has no air defense. He said most of Western Europe is woefully inadequate on air defense. So if there is a conflict, I don't think we have to worry about hordes of Russian troops rolling over the landscape like we worried about during the Cold War, but we do very much have to worry about lots of missiles coming down on the surface. I'm sure some aircraft and fighter aircraft can do some serious damage because we do have some capability there, but it's limited in number. We just don't have it.
Lavrov's warning and Putin's tit-for-tat declaration
Daniel Davis: And by the way, Sergey Lavrov released a video just today from an interview in which he said they have basically sent representations to Washington demanding an answer to the following: we have lots of information that you're helping Ukraine target Russian territory — providing intelligence, providing weapons or weapons components — and they want some answer to this. Because I think, to your point a second ago, they're getting tired of this.
You had Putin a few days ago at what I think was Pacific Fleet headquarters saying: the West is taking out ships — these so-called shadow fleet tankers we have in the Black Sea, Sea of Azov, wherever. He said: you know what, tit for tat works two ways. We are now going to do the same thing. We will hold ourselves free and fair to do the same thing you do to us, anywhere — it doesn't have to be in the same areas, we'll do it wherever we want to. So now it looks like they're at least preparing to expand in that direction too.
And you see it just keeps going up. Nobody's trying to ramp this down. Zelensky is begging for 10% of the missiles and making this ridiculous claim that he can destroy all the Russian ballistic missiles — not going to happen because he's not going to get them. President Trump about a week and a half ago was asked about Zelensky's plea to him. In fact, during the CNN interview, the journalist asked Zelensky: are you out of missiles, and have you said anything to President Trump? And he said: yeah, I'm on the phone with him all the time. Every time I see him at a conference, I pick the phone up, I talk to his people. And then when they asked Trump that same question a bit earlier, he said: yeah, I mean, I need missiles too. I'm not going to be giving him any. Biden gave too many away in the past. Message very clearly: you ain't getting any of ours.
We're scrambling to try to replace what we have while the US is still trying to find any way they can to restart the war in Iran. They're going: all right, we're going to need more interceptor missiles and more protection and more offensive missiles, we need to make up more, we need to buy a little time so we can get more off the production line and get them delivered. So they're sure not going to give Zelensky any. Whatever he's thinking, the air is effectively wide open to Russia right now. And you're seeing it in Odessa, in Mykolaiv, in Zaporizhzhia, in Kherson, in Kharkiv, and of course into Kyiv itself, because it's basically defenseless. The entire front line is getting just pulverized with glide bombs because there's no defense against them.
So everything is trending against our side, and verbally you would never know that. I think we've so often said that we're doing good and everything's fine and don't worry about this, we're doing great — said it enough times that people have come to believe it. And eventually even you've come to believe the fiction. If you make decisions based on this perverted and twisted belief that you're actually doing well and that you can succeed, you may blow yourself into a major loss one of these days, and then the wheels could just come off. I fear that's where we're heading.
Glenn Diesen: This is a weakness in the human condition which political propaganda takes advantage of — the human mind has a tendency to conflate what sounds familiar with what is true. If you say something over and over, people tend to think it sounds true because they've heard it before. That's more or less how the brain works in terms of learning. I find the lack of evidence to be shocking — the whole huge media campaign that Ukraine has turned the tide, yet everyone recognizes that Russia dominates on all the heavy weapons. We see Ukraine and NATO running out of weapons as Zelensky has recognized. And even when there are successes, the narrative either has to be: they intercept 100 out of 100 Russian missiles because they're so amazing, continue to fund us — or: we need more weapons, we can't intercept a single one. It's narratives. But as you said, Zelensky confirmed the Russian military is growing while theirs is being diminished, as are their NATO sponsors. And whenever there is a handover of dead soldiers, you always have just absolutely crazy ratios — forty or fifty Russians versus a thousand Ukrainians.
I did want to ask you about what you think the strategy is here for the Russians. Because I do agree that NATO is being quite irrational — they keep talking about escalation, they keep talking about war with Russia, at the same time as they're depleting all of their weapons. At the same time, they know the Russians are pumping out thousands of armored vehicles, but they're not appearing on the front. We know that they have the ability to mass-produce the Oreshnik but it's not being used on the front. I don't have the evidence, but I have a pretty good idea that these are being prepared in case we get this war which we keep talking about. As you said, they don't want to enter a direct war empty-handed. So I think you're right — they're preparing. But ideally they want to avoid a direct war with NATO. What do you see happening moving forward? What is the Russian strategy? Because logistics seems to be a key focus, but they also go after energy. They seem to want not just to landlocked Ukraine but to cut off the southern parts. Do you see any structure in the chaos being unleashed?
Competing camps in Moscow and the question of a direct war with NATO
Daniel Davis: I think I do. And I think you and I have talked about this before — there are competing camps inside Russia, and Putin is trying to navigate all the different camps together to have a single policy that they follow. I think he is being pushed on one hand by the war hawks who say there will be no more negotiated settlement. Minsk I and II shattered that myth. And everything the American and Western side has done — like with Iran, pretending to be negotiating twice and doing a war within an eight-month period, and then immediately going back and trying to change the terms on the southern corridor and the Strait of Hormuz — you can't trust anything the Americans say. And then we see them constantly saying they're doing well when everyone knows they're not. So the hawks say: don't even try, let's just take care of this militarily. Let's just go in and have this big war that they're not ready for.
Putin himself alluded to this, I don't know, six or eight months ago, saying: listen, we're fighting a special military operation. It's not the same as a war. If we were fighting a full-on war, it would be dramatically different tactics and we would do things differently and it would be a much bigger, more violent thing — something probably closer to what they call the Great Patriotic War, the Second World War. And I think they are preparing to go down that path. I think Putin would definitely prefer, if not a negotiated settlement, then a capitulation — where the Ukrainian side recognizes it's now futile to continue on and they will literally lose everything. And I think he's providing a military that will eventually accomplish that task, however long it takes, even going on this go-slow approach. The inertia and the military fundamentals are what they are. Wars of attrition will work out that way.
I put up a chart the other day. I did some research to see that the military-age males remaining in Russia and in Ukraine — Russia has about thirty-something million to about five and a half million on the Ukrainian side. So even if it was actually a one-to-one personnel ratio exchange, Russia just has the manpower to absorb all five and a half million and go from thirty million to maybe twenty-five million, and Ukraine's is gone. They can do that. And then in the firepower realm it's not even close to one-to-one — it's way above on the Russian side and only growing as we're going through both offensive and defensive missiles. In time, it's a nearly mathematical certainty that the Ukrainian side would lose.
But the question is what's going to happen on the NATO side? Because those same hawks in Russia are saying: hang on a second. I don't want to just spend all this time, all these years, and all of the Russian troops that have died — and I'm told by some who claim to have some knowledge on the Russian side that the killed in action is somewhere around 150,000, which as a means of comparison, America lost 100,000 in World War I. So Russia has suffered a substantial number, especially for a country of 140 million people. Nothing close to what it is in Ukraine, which is probably well over a million. Some suggest it's even over two million. I don't have any way to determine that other than it is definitely high.
So the hawks are saying: let's not just take all these costs and then let all of Europe off scot-free, paying no price at all for the literal physical demolishment of the entire country of Ukraine, their entire manhood — they've almost wiped out the country. And now Europe gets off scot-free and does this buildup and then, who knows, maybe we have a war in the future? So they're saying: let's have that war now, before they do this buildup, while they don't have offensive missiles, they don't have defensive missiles, and we could actually launch.
And let me point out one other thing. There's a belief right now that the nature of war on the ground has changed, and what we've seen on this line of contact over these years is just the way wars are fought now. On the one hand, people say: well, Russia can't even take all of Ukraine, so they certainly couldn't go into Western Europe. But here's the thing. The reason why especially the Slavyansk-Kramatorsk area — which is kind of the linchpin of all the fighting right now — is so difficult is that it was prepared from 2014 onward and has only been deeply reinforced in the last few years. It is literally a fortress belt with incredibly difficult fortifications. And of course you have all the drones going back and forth. That's because you have a mature battlefield.
But look what Russia did in the opening rounds before there was a mature battlefield. They just literally drove into the country. And they only had, I think, less than 100,000 troops — which is not a fraction of what you would need if you were trying to militarily conquer somebody. That was to put pressure for political reasons so that Kyiv would recognize the futility and say: all right, let's just have a deal. And it nearly worked, because everybody knows now that in Istanbul two months in they almost had that deal. But because that deal didn't happen, Russia hadn't resourced Plan B — which was: oh snap, we now need another five, six, seven hundred thousand troops to continue fighting — and it took two years to get up to that point.
If on the other hand Russia says: okay, we're actually going to fight a war on the ground against NATO countries because whatever they've been doing — supporting this war, being direct combatants, whatever they would end up saying — you can roll over that not with 100,000 but with five, six, seven hundred thousand. And they have them now. As you pointed out, they're making T-90s and a bunch of other modern tanks. They've been refurbishing a lot of old ones. They've been using T-55s, T-62s, T-72s in large numbers because they have those and they're more than adequate for the job they're doing in this war on the ground — they're not using them in conventional maneuver warfare. But the better ones they have — the refurbished T-80s, the new T-90s, and whatever these new ones are called, the Storm Breaker or something like that — you take those and you go where there's not a mature battlefield, where there's not this line of contact and the fortifications and the whole system of drones with rapid technical evolution. That doesn't even exist over there, Glenn — in Western Europe, in the United States, in NATO. We've given lip service to it and tinkered around the edges with expanding some things, but not a fraction of what Russia could do.
They could then have a large-scale ground operation and seize some key terrain in maybe two or three countries. I think they would have a constraint going much further than that because the lines of communication would then be very vulnerable and even limited NATO air power could start to put a big dent in that. So I don't know that Russia could go that far, but they could go really fast and really far if they had the numbers. For example, the Baltics — what do you have there? Maybe a combat brigade, maybe two with the Germans. That's it. They could roll over that in a day. I'm not being exaggerated here. You could literally roll over them in a day by just sending enough combat power in there. Poland would be the biggest difficulty because they are aware of this risk and they do have defenses set up. But some of the other countries — not so much.
So Russia could go rolling in there with the capabilities they have because we don't have the defensive fortifications, we don't have the drone capabilities that the Russian side does. We need to make sure we never test that out. But there are those in Russia who want to, because they say: this is our chance right now to solve this problem for a generation by denuding them. And of course in conjunction with anything that would happen on the ground, however far they may go, they are launching all of these missiles at known military facilities. They've got the address of every one of them.
Because unlike the Iranian side, who learned what the damage and the risk to missiles was two decades ago and started building all those underground tunnels — and I know Russia has some, China definitely has some, North Korea for sure has quite a few — I don't think there are very many, if any of any size, in the entire NATO alliance. It's like we don't have to do that. That's what they have to do because of our great power. No one seems to have thought ahead and said: hey, what if they come up with a bunch of missiles and all of our factories are above ground and they come in with a reign of death in a massive strike? You pointed out the Oreshnik and a bunch of others that are not being used in any great percentage on the battlefield, not even in Kyiv — it's a relatively small number from what's allegedly being produced. And we have no defense against any of those things, or hardly any anyway. In one fell swoop, you can burn to the ground our capacity to do anything for a generation. And then it won't matter how many tanks, planes, aircraft carriers, or whatever else you have if you don't have missiles to fire from them. It won't matter how many men you have if you don't have the logistics to sustain fighting.
You could have a situation like what happened in France in 1940, where the Nazis came in and had this spectacular breakthrough behind the lines, and everything that had been prepared — all the ideas the French and the British thought they had for defending — turned out to be the wrong war. The Nazis came in from behind and totally unhinged it. The entire British and French armies that were amassed there were undone in a month. Actually, a couple of weeks is when it was mainly over. That similar thing could happen here if things go poorly.
Now, I know to most Western ears they're going to say: that's never going to happen, that's absurd, we're way more technically capable, we're way more powerful. I heard President Trump say we're the most powerful country ever. But Glenn, I see a great vulnerability that could be exploited in the wrong set of circumstances if the risk level gets high enough for President Putin that he decides that's something he wants to go down. I hope he doesn't. It sounds weird, but I hope that they stick with the slow, methodical, anaconda-style death of Ukraine and then just set up new defensive lines and maybe even a new Cold War. That's better than having a continent-wide war, which all too easily could go nuclear. But that is the danger that I see.
The Kaliningrad scenario and final thoughts
Glenn Diesen: Yeah, you would hope that defeat in Iran would — the one benefit it might have — humble us a little bit, so that we think twice before taking on the Russians. But that does not appear to be the case. Well, I don't think the Russians are necessarily going to invade European countries. They don't really need the territory — I think it's more of a pain than a benefit. But as you said, what the main thing they would want to do —
Daniel Davis: Let me be clear. I'm not saying that would be a good idea. I'm saying it is a capability that Russia can exercise if they want to. And to give ourselves the thought that well, that would be dumb for them to do so, I'm not even going to worry about it — that leaves yourself vulnerable.
Glenn Diesen: No, what I was going to say is: I think, as they've already warned, what will be considered legitimate targets will be all those weapons manufacturers across Europe, and they've already said we know where they are, they are legitimate targets. So if they want to strike those and the logistic centers — that would be, let's say, a rational escalation. And while they're at it, they might also go for some energy installations as retaliation for NATO's participation and what NATO is striking within Russia. But for this, they only need missiles — the Oreshnik. The main problem is that I think once those first Oreshnik missiles begin to strike, all escalation control will be out the window. The most vulnerable part for the Russians will be Kaliningrad, which NATO has been very openly threatening — very openly. And if they go after Kaliningrad, I think that's when they need the invasion forces to connect Kaliningrad with the mainland, and that would mean the Baltic states, at least, if not a chunk of Poland. I just wish people would think twice before going down this road, but that appears not to be on the agenda.
Daniel Davis: Thinking twice or even once doesn't seem to be on the agenda.
Glenn Diesen: Well, thank you very much. I know you have a lot on your plate today, so I will let you go. Thank you so much for taking the time.
Daniel Davis: Always my pleasure, Glenn. Thanks for having me.