It is a thirty fifty five car. See the talk stations dating the obvious. It's Tuesday. For regular listeners, they know it's appointment listening. It's that time a week we do the Daniel Davis Deep Dive, the fort d's of Daniel Davis, not the five d's of Dodgeball. Welcome back, retired Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis. Have a deep dive. Let's talk about again. War's good to see my friend. Have you back on the program?
Yeah?
Yeah, where'd you get talking about something happy one of these days? But I know, I guess we got to know what we gotta know.
Trust me, you know, and I know you do this for a living too, But you know, I just every single day, you know, I've got stacks of just articles after articles, I always tell my listeners. At the end of the week, after doing five shows four hours a day, I usually have a reams worth of paper of articles that I didn't get to and sadly none of which has any good information.
It's a depressing job, man. Wow.
Anyway, speaking of depressing, not nearly as depressing as apparently the Ukrainians feeling. Right now, let's start with Ukraine. The more I read the more I read that Russia taking over more and more land in Ukraine. They're advancing, not retreating. They're holding onto what they have gained. Ukrainians obviously struggling with getting people to fight for them, people leaving the country rather than serve. They keep asking for more and
more weapons, ammunitions. I know there's kind of a slow drag on getting that. Can we provide them with enough that they could even defend or fight themselves or gain back the land? That remains a big question, And now they're pressing for NATO membership. What's your assessment on this one this week.
Daniel, Yeah, it's not very good from their Ukrainian perspective, because the biggest issue is not necessarily equipment and ammunition as it had been for a long time, but manpower that they are out numbered on the front lines. In fact, Secretary of Defense Austin is there right now, and then he just announced a new four hundred million dollar package and they're going to get more ammunition and high marsh missiles and a number of other things that they need.
But there's a second unexpected problem for some in that it's not just the number of artillery shells but the number of artillery tubes, the actual cannons are starting to wear out.
They're being of.
Course destroyed in battle, and they have a hard time getting enough because the West doesn't have enough to give them in the large numbers that they're needing. So the rate of fire continues to go down. But the biggest issue is the manpower issue. That's why all along, especially the southern half of the Eastern Front, is showing bigger and bigger and just sustained advances by the Russian side, and there's nothing that the Ukraine side has tried to do that's gonna get.
Rid of them.
And one of the other reasons is because Russia continues, according to US intelligence, to innovate even faster than the Ukraine side can on the battlefield about what works, what doesn't work. They shift to something new, they try a new tactic, they new technology, et cetera, and the Ukraine side just can't catch up, and they just keep getting pushing further to the west.
Whoa, and you're out numbered by that many men. If you're talking about soldiers versus one side versus another, I suppose it becomes impossible to react on the fly to these various changes. The Soviet I keep saying, the Soviets. I'm sorry, Daniel, I'm of that mindset. I'm fifty nine years old, I lived my whole life fighting the Soviet Union and anyway. But the Russians, they have that advantage of manpower, and so they have a strategic advantage over
maybe trying out different options. What can Ukraine possibly do? Is that why they want NATO membership, so that everybody gets drawn into it. They get soldiers from all the NATO countries. I can't see that as a viable option for us. It's not for us.
But that is one hundred percent what Zelenski wanted, which is why his victory planned that he announced last week centered on first, get me into.
NATO right now. Then give me all your.
Weapons and everything else so we can shoot longer range, et cetera. But look, I think we've talked before. Long range weapons are not going to change the course of a war. It's going to be just another piece added into it. But it's got to be combined with other things or it's just not going to have any impact.
But it could have disastrous consequences because if Russia takes that and it acts on what they said, then they could expand the warr in jeery and that's what's got a lot of the Western people unwilling so far, and I mean all of them to allow their long range weapons to be used by Ukraine into Russia. And for good reason, we shouldn't do that. But there's an additional
problem with the manpower on the Ukraine side. I did want to mention is that because they have so few The Associated Press reports this morning that now then ten million people have fled Ukraine since the war began. It's now up to that number, and of course all the battle casualties, and now then the people that they're recruiting,
they're not recruiting, they're actually grabbing off the streets. And when they get to the front, the commanders, the Ukrainian commanders are complaining that maybe one in ten actually fight. Many of the rest of them either refuse to fight or flee as soon as they get there, or unfortunately a lot of them die within the first few days just because of lack of knowledge and training.
It's a pretty bleak picture. I'm afraid.
Yeah, warm bodies is not just the answer to the question he'd have effective fighting forces. I mean, you think about, you know, one highly elite you know, like a Navy seal team can accomplish because they are such an effective, well oiled machine. Those are the highly as trained fighters.
But grabbing some eighteen year old kid out of a bar and he doesn't want to even go fight, not only are you facing the challenge of trying to get them motivated to do it protect your own country, dammit, but learning how to effectively operate a fight, even as something as simple as an AK or an M sixteen that requires training. You can't just grab one and start shooting accurately at a four hundred and five hundred yards You can't.
And you know, there's another another interesting dynamic associated with that is that because Russia has more just raw numbers of men, they have the luxury.
Of actually training them up.
And I actually, for the first time on my show this past week, got to talk to, oddly enough, a UK volunteer who was fighting for the Russian side and was pretty open about how they conduct their side of
the of the fight. And he said that he spent about four months of different kinds of training at different locations before he even got into combat the first time, and the most common comment from the Ukraine side is they get there in a number of days in some cases, so the Russians do have time to so that when their guys get there, they actually do have some decent training,
whereas the Ukraine side don't. And you see, every time you want to look at this, the comparative analysis just goes worse and worse against the Ukraine side, and it's a there is no path to them to avoid being defeated at this point, and I think it's going to take something besides just a wild hope to get into NATO.
Well, and the exclamation point on all that is the Russians do have longer range, more effective weaponry, they're sort of keeping it on the back burner, like those supersonic hypersonic missiles. Russia has those that the disposal they only I don't know if they've necessarily used them yet, but it seems like they're keeping their powder dry to some extent.
Well, they have periodically, but because they've been striking, especially deep within Ukraine on the energy system, YEA to keep them knockdown. But what's not been reported very much is that there's a bit between forty and sixty long range drones per day that are being fired throughout the Ukraine, and their air defenses are almost incapable now, so most of those are getting through.
It just doesn't make much news, but it continues.
To just degrade the ability to even fight at the front on top of the manpower issue.
All right, and that provides a nice pivot to get back to Israel. You and I've had this conversation before. Israel has a finite number of anti surface to air anti missile missiles of a variety of different types, but they're really bloody expensive. There's a finite number of those, and seemingly an infinite number of very inexpensive drones and rockets and all the equipment that the various terrorist organizations have received from outside sources like Iran. But Israel's doing
a very effective job and knocking off leadership. I only just got another guy and apparently just launched the strike on the what the banking industry, right.
Yeah, they're just completely dismantling everything in Hesbala, that's up in Lebanon where they've been taking that out. I'm not sure how effective it is to take out a physical bank building, just because most transactions these days are done electronically, right, But I mean, I guess if that's where servers are,
it could certainly have an issue there. I don't have a lot of granularity on exactly what was in those buildings that they struck, but I do know they're going after the financial capabilities, which which is a pretty common
thing in modern warfare to go after. But there's been a couple of strokes actually are one today from Hesbala launching a small number of drones, two of which one got all the way through the Israeli distance or air defenses, didn't even signal any alarms, which is concerning to them because they didn't track it coming in and it did land and kill a number of its Israeli soldiers inside of Israel today, so they've got to try to figure
out what's going on with their air defense shield. Well, it seems to me that flying low and quote unquote under the radar, is that still a viable option these days? Apparently it is, because whether it's an electronic issue or they physically got under the radar is unknown, but that certainly did get through.
So phase next phase for Israel, do you think they're still going to plan to launch some sort of strike on the Iranians, or where are we on that?
Based on that leaked intelligence that came out in the US, a top secret document was released. But then even without that, you had President Biden last Friday was pointedly asked on the tarmac I think in Germany if he knew what Israel was going to do and when they were going to do it. He said yes and yes. Of course
he refused to say what that was. But by all accounts, I mean, you take what was in that intelligence information, along with what Biden said, along with what the Israel leaders have said, it seems only a matter of time before something pretty major is launched by Israel against I Rotten.
Hmmm.
I guess the only thing we can do is keep our popcorn out because the Israelies seem to me like they're gonna do what the Israelis want to do, regardless of what Biden wants them to do.
I think that's a pretty clear statement. Yeah.
Daniel Davis always a pleasure. Search for him. You'll find Daniel Davis podcast. Just search Daniel Davis Deeve Dive. Always enjoy our conversations, as sad and depressing as they may be. Got to talk about reality. Daniel.
Oh, we got to know what's really going on. I appreciate it.
Amen, brother, we'll talk next week. Have a wonderful week. My friend eight forty coming up with eight forty one. If you have KR see the talk station more to talk about, you can feel free to call in flopen the phone lines up five one, three, seven, four, nine, fifty, five hundred, eight hundred and eight two three talk pound fight fifty on AT and T phone. Stay right here at fifty five krs the talk station