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We know of new methods of attack. The Trojan Horde.

The fifth column.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, comrades, companeros, welcome back to another insanely good, I see that beforehand.

Ooh, really?

We set expectations, right? Okay, fine.

This is great.

It's great. It's just the two of us. We can make it if we try. Yes. but we have a guest today that i don't know how to introduce that's because you forgot what he said no but it was a thing but before i said to him this is true he had the thing which is like i'm a so-and-so but i was trying to narrow it down and he's too accomplished it's one of those guys like the people who make you feel bad about yeah yeah it's like the hamilton for madison i think it was madison was involved there you go madison but it's john spencer not of the blues explosion but john spencer uh who we all know and his work we've all appreciated for for for many years and i'm gonna just forget about your affiliations because there's some i can't say and there's some i will get wrong so why don't we just say john spencer i think our listeners know who you

are viewers too viewers too yeah because we're doing video now expert on urban warfare correct Which is something that has been in the news, I think, the last couple of years. The last, you know, about 100 years it's been in the news.

But, John, thank you so much for being here. But you served in Iraq. Tell us a little bit about your background there, because you're not just a guy who's pushing up your glasses in the library writing about urban warfare. You have a bit of experience in this yourself, too, right? A bit.

So I served in active duty army for 25 years, both enlisted and as an officer, did two combat tours. So I did the invasion of Iraq. I jumped in in a parachute in the middle of the night in northern Iraq, did the entire year of the first year of the invasion, which was great. Wrote a book about it. Went back in 2008, really during the height of the sectarian violence in Baghdad. So there was some urban fighting in the first year, more like urban policing. But you were up north. I was up north. Kurdistan, yeah. Some Kurdistan. Well, Kurdistan is them, yeah. Did some interesting things in Kurdistan. Yeah. That became international events. But in the second tour- Wait, it's not there.

We don't want to let that one go. Became international events that you were involved in.

What were those? There was an event where the Kurdish were reporting on Turkish special forces doing mysterious things out of their embassy in Northern Iraq. And my unit conducted an operation, let's say, that involved Turkish embassy site. They made a movie about it, like a B-rated movie about it.

Who starred as you? Gary Busey.

Yeah. That's a Gary Busey movie. I was just a platoon leader doing what I did. I knew it was a big deal at the time, but it wasn't until the investigation started later that I knew that it was a much bigger deal.

And that was that you intervened in the Turkish embassy in some way. I'm trying to use the same euphemisms that you were using. A little more detail, what actually happened? A raid.

Yeah. On the Turkish embassy. A consulate embassy, what they viewed as their embassy. Yeah. It made international news, a blip. But we also bagged and, what we call bagged and tagged everybody in the building and took them back to Kirkuk, which...

Oh, wow.

But we did find weapons, uniforms, all that in there. There was something going on. I wasn't involved in that. I knew it was a big deal at the time. But other than that, we had our year of...

Bag and tag seems to imply that people were dead.

No, no.

You zip-tied their hands, put a bag of their head. But Turkey is a NATO ally. Was it at the time? When did that happen? No, that's been with us for a while. Yeah, you were bagging and tagging a NATO ally. That mistake is a little bit older.

So when you think back, I mean, it's interesting that we almost entirely forgotten about Iraq in a way we don't talk about it in the ways that one would expect such a, you know, it was an event in American political life that, you know, Donald Trump still mentions and Republicans haven't said a good word about Iraq, you know, probably since 2006 or seven or something like that. But when you look back at your experience in Iraq, I mean, how do you kind of think about those times being there at the beginning of the invasion? And then coming back in 2008, I mean, this is, you know, at a time in 2008 where things are calming down a little bit, right?

No, no. 2008 is the height of the civil war almost, yeah. Not insurgency, sectarian violence. So at that point, they had transitioned to killing each other.

other no longer targeting us and the government you know shia versus sunni baghdad was the anbar

awakening it happened already right so six six and that had you know on paper made things a lot better for the americans there but things were worse for the iraqis right because now you had

the sadarists the shia kind of sect rising up because they didn't feel like they were part of the government yeah you just had politics going on yeah but you had a lot of armed how do you view

the Iraq war now as somebody who actually studies urban combat and was actually somebody involved in combat in Iraq. I mean, I study it. I removed my own experiences. Of course,

I had my own experiences as a young soldier after 9-11, being called up, jumping in, fighting another army. I was there for the transition to the insurgency. I was there on the day they made the greatest political mistake probably in American history, which is fire everybody in the bath party in the entire army. American history. Order number one, order number two. If it was the greatest thing that led to failure, it would be that. But it wasn't a military decision. That was a political decision. But I was on the ground when that happened.

Were there people actually that were in your universe that were opposed to that at the time? I know everyone's opposed to it now, right? Because the de-bathification was like the denazification in 1945. You had to have a card that was stamped that you'd been denazified. we were applying that we all know now that that was a catastrophic mistake but when you were there

were there people objecting to it i wouldn't say objecting to at my level you know i was at the infantry platoon level yeah definitely not understanding why when hundreds of soldiers showed up to our gate asking when their next paycheck would come yeah um and when we were told that that was the symbol of basically the former regime although it was every doctor teacher everything so we interview somebody like were you a part of the bath party of course i was you know and this is the going back to study it now having understood or interviewed some of that higher level most people don't understand that a military of course is following orders doing a mission what they know about the different levels of the war in general um maybe very little or even on the ground and things are happening and have no idea why they're happening on the ground and That came in 2008 as well when stuff just starts exploding or, you know, the entire nation rises up. You don't really know some of those higher level decisions that are what's going on. But that one was real, like real, like immediate and real time. You knew what was going on, let alone the chaos of when I jumped in, we were told by a two-star general, it would be a 90-day deployment. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And it's no more than 90 day. And I actually remember 40 days into it asking my leadership, battalion commander at the time, and, you know, there's a rumor we'll be here longer. And he just laughed at me.

Yeah.

And then CNN broke that we would be there for a year to our families. We didn't even know.

You know, I mean, we think of it now as, I don't think there's many people that, besides our friend Eli Lake, he's a great, he's still a great defender of the Iraq war. He's going to go down with the ship. do you think also as an enormous mistake uh a something that was not a mistake but could have been been been executed in a better way i mean how do you think of the iraq war now

in many ways because like you said i studied the urban battles of the iraq war from 2003 attack that's delugia talafari ramadi like all of those which are all vastly different you can see an entire army learning as they go. It took us, you know, six years to figure out counterinsurgency to even apply it. Yeah. As if it's right or wrong, good or bad. Of course, I, you know, even in Georgetown, I studied the intelligence failures, which led good people to make bad decisions like Colin Powell going to the UN Security Council. Like if I would have known, I wouldn't have argued for this. Yeah, sure. I understand the human errors. I don't believe in conspiracy theories that other people, whether it's, I won't name their names, I said, you know, there was a-

That we were lied into war. They lied to us.

Actually, Tucker Carlson just released something where he said, the day after 9-11, there were people conspiring to invade Iraq. Yeah. Whether it's Paul Horowitz or whatever. Wolfowitz. Wolfowitz. Yeah. I don't believe in that. I believe in the human errors that led us to that. I do believe we thought there was weapons of mass destruction because I was sent to places to look for them. on the ground but then you get to the higher like was it was it a good or bad thing for the region for the iraqi people all of these things i know why the united states did it based on the intelligence they had at the time and the risks that they thought and what saddam was saying so this can probably take us to even today like when somebody says they want to kill you believe them yeah now you have bad intelligence about their keeping ability to do that. Sure. I was greeted in Iraq and it's crazy to hear. And I actually write in another book by parades of Kurdish, as you said, who were, had been gassed and murdered and all of this and having that understanding, of course, they benefited from it, but did the United States benefit from it? Did the Middle East benefit from it? I also don't believe in this conspiracy that we made Iraq a worse place and that we created ISIS. No, people have free agency and the Iraqi people the day after we left implemented sectarian policies, which is what we spent the entire time trying to get them not to do, to the point where you created the rise of a minority thinking that they're being ostracized from the government and they rise up and created ISIS. But I mean,

war is a destabilizing thing. It creates reactions to every country that's involved, right? Even if you don't want to append direct responsibility, we created a situation. Situations then create

other situations like there's a this is the on the human war wars you know that's kind of my business and what i've been doing for a while and i it wasn't even until i taught at west point that i i even as a 20-year soldier understood some of the even the theories of war like what is it a soldier fights he his his mission is very clear and if instruments close with and destroy the enemy that higher level like you said war is human it's political always political always and it's uncertain so this gets to all the crystal ball people we have the problem with the revisionist historians right now people that go back and say they made that decision knowing this i mean i

think that there is there's decent enough paper trail that's not conspiratorial saying that you know obviously the psyche of this country of all of us at this table changed on september 11th absolutely understandably so like you suddenly were yeah we've been had been talking about saddam hussein's weapons of mass destruction for 10 years and operating no fly zones because of that because of other reasons for 10 years it had been on the lips of al gore when he was running for

president in 2000 in a way the iraq liberation act was 1998 uh and uh i mean the democrats signing

on to that bill clinton supporting it etc the people who say and i know a lot of them who say that like well the bush versus gore is so monumental because al gore wouldn't have taken us to war like dude go look at what al gore was saying like i don't know in october of 2000 when he was running for president that doesn't sound like someone yeah i and i've always said that

you know bush who is accused of being you know islamophobic you know that was the thing that the reaction after 9 at 9 11 is that i always said no it's the islamophilia because i mean george w bush who went and visited a mosque i think in within two or three days yeah and said this is a religion of peace. And that was actually, wasn't that Anwar al-Alaqwi's mosque, where he was somehow affiliated at some point. But it was also this idea in 2005 and 2006 in Gaza, in the same thing in Iraq, is that if we allow democracy to flourish, these people will choose the path that we want them to choose. And as you just said, John, that, you know, the sectarian stuff that we wanted to sort of knock out of them they were very very eager to put into place in a political way almost immediately after the invasion so days days days yeah and it was like that we had the saddam's boot heel as um the shia majority treated like a minority and it's time for us to get to get even in a way i mean that's kind of what you guys were dealing with on the ground there

right? Absolutely. I mean, from retribution to all the people who were moved and now coming back to take back their homes. This gets you to that whole, was there a phase four plan? Did we plan to stay there much longer? And the sheer anarchy that was those first few months after

the invasion. I mean, I wonder, one of the reasons why I at least have come to know you a lot over the last couple of years is after October 7th, you have been writing very forcefully and interestingly about israel's tactics in gaza whether this is a genocide or not you wrote a long piece just this week uh arguing forcefully that it is not um and using bringing to bear your knowledge about urban warfare in a comparative sense um i just in thinking it wasn't really sort of planning on going in there in that direction but like um phase four in iraq i mean when you're planning for wars you're not really planning that many phases out especially if there's a lot of politics involved and also the uncertainty of war i wonder if there is sort of an applicable lesson in israel's sense of whatever phase four is in gaza right because i on a basic level and we've talked about it a lot in the podcast just so you know where we're coming from um it's obvious that if hamas returned the hostages and the dead bodies it would be over in a second

And that there is a primary responsibility that lies with them. And this is – I was glad to see that this week in New York where we're taping this, that Trump said as much at the United Nations and other people did.

The White House tweeted as much.

And the White House tweeted. Also, the White House tweeted that we all need to believe in God. So there's that one too. Oh, okay. No word.

One out of two isn't bad.

No word yet about demons, but I'm sure we'll wait to hear for that. But that sense of, like, you can walk yourself in Israel's shoes, one can, I think, in saying this is intolerable to have our people held hostage and this regime that shoots rockets at us forever. We're just not going to do that anymore. And yet there's also like a phase four question. We are right now at a place where Israel is being denounced at the United Nations pretty vociferously this week. So the head of the humanitarian agency, Tom something or other, Mitchell, I think, say there's the one Palestinian child has died every hour for two years, and this is just an atrocity. um is there some kind of applicable lesson about the inability to imagine what phase four looks like that israel has on its hands regardless of israel's sort of sense of uh of reasonability or plausibility or righteousness even to go out and try to get their people back

i know that's a weird question no it's a weird question so again my after i left service even in 2018 started studying all these different wars and i'll spend a lot of time in ukraine before october 7th so when i take on that question of course like the phase four question like what's your day after plan yeah i found it and this is where i do do my i don't like to say do do a lot but where you do the comparative analysis of in any other war was that the question at that moment right was what's your plan for afterwards we we i worked in the pentagon to believe that there isn't you know 24 hours a day 365 a day people planning scenarios to include the iraq war phase four there was a plan doesn't mean it was a whole government plan of like well that's we don't build nations we take out enemies that's the state department that kind of element when you take that mindset of phase four which is almost a in my word a kind of a counterinsurgency hangover right so it's an iraq war afghanistan war hangover of you know what's your exit plan How does this end? Nobody during, especially since I was there in the Iraq war at the beginning was saying, okay, we're going to take out Saddam and then do what? Like the first thing is to conquer whatever it is you're seeking to conquer. So on for October 7th, the first step was, of course, eliminate Hamas's military capability and remove them from power, also returning the hostages, which has this uniqueness, but not completely in military history. There's a couple other examples. But there's a famous historian, Michael Howard, who says you have to study any military history with depth and context. Because this is Israel, because it's Gaza, the idea that Israel, after October 7th, or there are some people who have been critical of saying Israel didn't even have a plan to conquer the Gaza Strip. there's a lot of ahistoricalness and just in a war perspective on constraints put in even the thinking about the situation that are only applied to Israel because if you took Israel out and you just gave me a war game scenario of somebody attacking another person and they they launch a response and that place doesn't exist anymore basically especially in in this context for Iraq we brought the people with us that we were going to and and the scenarios are so vastly different that i've railed against since i've especially been writing about october 7th but i was in israel writing about their previous wars from 48 to now is that i can't understand i understand where people come from even a person just having good intentions like yeah but what's the plan

after this war what after hamas i'm like okay if even like before after hamas yeah what's the plan now like they're they're you know besieging gaza city yes and when by the time let's if they finally get rid of hamas it's going to be gruesome in there and one of the things that we don't

talk about and it must be difficult for you when you're when you you know have studied these things across history and particularly across the 20th century history is that there is one commonality that you see with Iraq and the war in Gaza is that I was at a hockey game last night with my daughter, and she was- Very much like the war in Gaza. Yeah, I mean, we won in overtime. It was fantastic, the Bruins. But it was a preseason game. But my daughter said to me at some point, she was like, wait, explain offsides to me. And so I was saying, look, you can't-

hang out by the goal, basically. And if you go across there, they blow the whistle. And if you imagine that one team didn't have offsides apply to it, and the other team did, they would be, this isn't hockey, this is something entirely different, in the sense that when you have the most important thing that no one ever discusses on this, is that when you're fighting an enemy who is already violating the laws of war by not wearing a uniform, by embedding themselves in a civilian population, by storing weapons in schools and UN buildings, etc. There is a parallel with Iraq in that, that we, you know, in Iraq War, I mean, the beginning of the Iraq War, I'm talking so much about, you know, 1945, right, about Germany and Japan. And it's like, okay, the difference here is, you know, the werewolf people, do you remember this, we talk about this quite a bit, that the people who fought along, you know, after in, you know, May and June for a few months, you know, fighting on behalf of the Nazis, taking potshots at people as the werewolf operation. It's like, that is the closest thing you get, because they are not wearing uniforms. But when you don't know who the enemy is, this is an entirely different way of fighting wars, right? I mean, you can't, like, the fact that this isn't mentioned or factored into any of the conversation about either Iraq, and much, much more so with Gaza, is that the rules apply to us, but not to them. And I say us broadly in the sense, like I say, Israel. They apply to the Israelis, and they're being judged by those rules of war, yet the enemy that they're fighting abrogates any responsibility to follow those rules of war. As somebody who's a kind of theorist of urban combat in warfare in general, that's a kind of new thing, right? I mean, can you think of a lot of examples where you have an organized army with patches on versus somebody who's just dressed

like they're going out to the market? There's a lot of nuances. I can find you similarities in some instance, but then I can find you that there is no history of things that are going on in Gaza from both sides. There's just no history. There's no example of a, I mean, ISIS, there are some similarities with ISIS tactics and Hamas tactics in that ability to try to blend in and use human shielding is what we call that lawfare that you talk about. But the human sacrifice that Hamas does, there's no parallel in an urban warfare context. Human sacrifice. Yeah, tease that out a little bit. So human shielding, and I teach at one of the only courses in the world for a very a high-level military organization to do this and to protect civilians while you're doing it. And Hamas has always been the example of human shielding, where they'll put their civilians in front of them, they'll occupy all the hospitals and all of this stuff. But the human sacrifice is where Hamas states and then has built an environment where the goal is to get the civilians killed. And actually- It's the goal. The goal. How do we know that? Their leadership stated goal. Like stated in interviews, they say, we need the death of our women children because in their warped ideology that's the path to martyrdom and their ultimate political goal which is the death and destruction of israel

so it's ideology but it's also religious yes which is the difference and radicalized yeah so

then it gets to the okay a radicalized population but just that one element of how hard it is to fight you're right a civilian or a a combatant or a terrorist or whatever that's purposely not wearing a uniform because he's trying to blend in yeah but ones that are trying to get their civilians killed and they have no responsibility for their own population there's that really there is no parallel not in the nazis the japanese i mean i was just thinking when you were posing

the question of hey you know what uh there was a revolutionary war here and we didn't have many uniforms just because we didn't have any money and we're doing it badly there were some some irregulars, but there was certainly no, like, let's create a massacre that makes us look sympathetic to world opinion.

Sure. I mean, I always thought, like, if you look at a Google map of Tel Aviv, and you can turn on this feature for bomb shelters, there's one on every corner. You can find them very, very quickly if you need them. If you live there, you know exactly where there are, and people will guide you to them. There was an interview with a Hamas leader soon after October 7th, and I'm sure you've seen this, John, in which he is asked by somebody, I think from Egyptian television, why do you not have such things? There are no bomb shelters. There's an enormous complex, an underground city in which people have been held hostage to this day, and we don't know where they are. And, you know, the Israelis blow these things up as much as they can, but an enormous, very well-engineered—you and I went down into a—

The Hezbollah tunnel.

The Hezbollah tunnels in the border of Lebanon.

amazingly engineered it's actually pretty breathtaking i've been in that one when when

you're like oh good lord the idf guy was like gotta tip your cap yeah you gotta hand tools that

they got at the lebanese version of home depot to make these whole things and there's no such thing for civilians and when asked by an i think an egyptian journalist they said well you know that's on purpose that's not our responsibility the un could do that if they wanted but we don't care about that sort of thing. To your point, that seems like a bit of deliberation to make sure that people do not have hiding places. I mean, they outlaw it. So there's 300 to 400

miles of tunnel underneath Gaza. Just that alone is ahistorical in the history of war.

Yeah. And Gaza's not big, let's have it.

25 miles long, five to seven miles wide. Most people, us, because I also did underground warfare for many years as well, didn't, like, that's not possible, but it's a reality. And they've put out written guidance, not a single civilian is allowed in a tunnel. And like you said, that interview, he says, that's the UN's problem. These tunnels are for fighters, not for civilians. And there's not a record of one civilian outside of Yaya Semwar's family when they were escaping, being in those tunnels. And I had just got back from Ukraine. I think I was in Ukraine December of 2023. The Ukrainian civilians often seek refuge in the tunnels when Russia attacks the cities. It's just crazy that in this war, everything that Hamas does, all of it, like the documented use of the hospitals, the starvation of the people, all this, they just get a pass. They don't even get talked about. This is all about what's Israel doing. And it's all Israel's fault. If they have a number, they'll attribute it to Israel, nothing to do with Hamas. Not even think that Hamas would even kill civilians when they've killed their own civilians. Their rockets, like 20% of the 14,000 rockets they've launched have landed inside of Gaza, killing Gazans. But if there's a single death, it gets attributed to Israel, as in Israel killed them in a bomb strike.

Including those that were shot this week that we saw.

That's right. Those will be on the – I've had to play this numbers game, and I write case studies, which I didn't know how useful they would come until later, of this tracking numbers game. Yes. tracking bodies game, which is impossible. But every number is, it's either nefarious in design or it's just inaccurate. Like there's no way to have a number. But John, talk about this a little

bit. I mean, if you see in 1945, there is incredible footage, and everyone can see this on YouTube, of American planes flying over Berlin, for instance. And you see basically not a standing building for miles. I mean, there's just shells of buildings. And the closest thing that you can see these days is if you go on usually TikTok or Instagram, which is where a lot of this stuff is propagated, and you see a similar vision of Gaza, right? When people see that, they have a very visceral response to it. Is that necessary? When people say like this, Israel's, you know, public opinion of Israel has always been a tough in Europe. It's been pretty good in America. It's at its absolute lowest, especially amongst young people, because they see images like that. And if they sit down in front of you, they say, John Spencer, you know a lot about this stuff. Why on earth am I seeing these images? That seems unnecessary. Yeah. It's a lot there. One,

again, the ahistorical part of this is nobody's ever fought a war of this intensity under these conditions with social media algorithm driving the photos and the images to every civilian in the world. And actually the algorithm, once you click on it once, will drive more of those photos too. Yeah, I've noticed that, yeah.

Yeah, it doesn't matter. And part of this, I would assume we would maybe agree is a good thing to be able to have visibility on a place, a theater of war, as opposed to having everything sort of censored and blocked off gives us a sense of the horror of it. And we should know the horrors

of war yep there's a so the history of like you know the cronkite effect the cnn effect like none of this had offensive being a loss but actually in battle way that you know it just happened to be when cronkite visiting like it's all bad yeah but it's a fact you know societies go to war so i understand that a part of this condemnation is that these people don't know what war looks like like even the 1945 i could tell you the differences between bombing in 1945 and what after the 4th Geneva Conventions and bombing later. When you get into that urban terrain, given the context of a defender like this, even the biggest urban battle of history, Stalingrad, or the other ones, Leningrad, Berlin, Aachen, Ortona, none of those did somebody get into that environment and prepare it for war for 20 years. Yeah. Which is, we used to bomb indiscriminately. That's a war crime.

now but the photo will look similar because of the nature of the environment which hamas built with the tunnels with the explosive in the buildings with the the type of the size of gaza the size of just the the pre most urban battles of history are median engagements where two militaries moving and then they decide to have the battle in that urban or you're attacking a capital city or something like that you're right that if i had this conversation with somebody who's seen the video i was like i don't care john this is this is intentional yeah and this is where I'll argue purposely, having now been on the ground in Gaza with an understanding of urban warfare, but being on the ground five times with the idea, if I can say that your conclusion, your deductive conclusion of this is intentional, is not true.

What do you see, just because I saw an image today of people fleeing Gaza City, and there was the beach on one side, and it was sort of raised with people walking down, and it was a broad shot and i saw something i hadn't seen actually which was a picture of a lot of building standing actually there was in i've only seen the kind of rubble looks like you know hamburg in 1943 or berlin or dresden in 1945 is are we getting an image of gaza that is accurate in the sense that there is some because you know i also see videos of people in shawarma shops and things like that i don't know what to believe and as someone who has been there what what is right about the image and what is wrong about the image that people have gaza right now so the image that

that that quality is the same thing with the number right so it's it's a distortion to make something as bad as possible probably out of good intention like this is bad i want to show you the badness of it yeah they don't show you anything that conflicts with that agenda of what you're seeing you're right like according to every video for the last year and a half every building in gaza is gone yeah and this and oh here we have the u.n statistics saying like 90 percent yeah although by nature you see these other videos start popping up like wait a minute none of these buildings gaza city a city of a million hasn't been touched outside of al-shifa hospital once like and then you see all the vibrant shops and the markets and everything like wait a minute what aren't we seeing here and like it's that same drone footage of that same area but there it's not denying there have been massive amounts of damage in this war for many reasons to include what was in that environment already that the bombs in every building under every road in every tunnel and rafa much of it destroyed and even when you get into the close fight this is again And like, why is so much of Gaza destroyed? Because it's a contested urban battle where the enemy has prepared for 20 years for that battle. But you're right. We're not seeing, why do we keep seeing these buildings that aren't, or these neighborhoods or whatever, even when you see the, now the high rises that they give notice for. And of course, when they give the notice, everybody sets the cameras up to watch this basically controlled detonation. And I thought everything was destroyed, but it's not. So this is the distortion of somebody is telling a story for a certain reason. I've come in, and I've been accused of being very pro-Israel for some reason. I believe in Israel's right to exist, but I'm very pro-truth. And if we're going to have a conversation, an objective about, okay, here's some really bad information. Like, will you allow kind of the rest of the information be included? No, no. I just want to talk about this, this number. Or whatever, like you said, this person saying that this many children have died a day. One per hour for two years. Right. And that's a lie, clearly, right? Is it? Yeah. Okay, why? How do you know? One, I know if you took the number, the Hamas Gaza Health Ministry, and that's not biased, that's fact, right? Just kind of like the bath party. You didn't work in Gaza unless you're a member of the Hamas bureaucracy, political. You could not be in the military wing. the Gaza health ministry number is anybody who's ever died for any reason. So they, until I see a diet of natural calls list over the last two years, it's going to be real problematic for you to take that number and say, okay, but then they'll do the children, right? So children being everybody 18 and below, according to, I know that that number from the United Nations will include anybody who's 18 or below. Okay. I have some questions as a former 17 year old soldier.

and knowing the radicalization of the Gazan people. So during every summer for 10 years before this war, if you were five to 15 in the summers, you went to summer camp to learn how to kill Israel and fight and be a martyr and a soldier. Israel is not even contested that the average age of a Hamas recruit right now is 16. In my world, there's, so there's, of course, children, right? There's children who have died, like young children. We've seen gruesome images every day. And that's awful. I would like to include the fact that Hamas should have some ownership to preventing that, like allowing people to leave combat areas and where they put their military headquarters and all of that, which we can have this conversation about what is proportionality? What would any other country do in the same situation? and what is the legal kind of law say about, but when you start talking about kids, because that's really drives, no child should die in a war, right? Like we're being disingenuous when you're talking about Hamas and you say this number of children, right? And then they'll say this number of women, women and children, okay? Child, you're talking about 18 and below. Okay, who is partaking a part of the hostilities, right? If you go to Iraq, Afghanistan, anywhere, soldiers have had made really bad decisions when they're facing a child soldier or who's pointing a rifle at them or whatever it is. So maybe there is, although there's not, that many people who are below the age of 18 that have died. Does that mean that it is illegal? No. Does that mean that they were intentionally killed? No. Like there's so many variations of this statistical warfare that's been employed that without any context to the situation on the ground or how it compares to any other battle or war.

Do they, has the Gaza health ministry or anyone affiliated with Hamas or Islamic Jihad or any of the quote-unquote militant groups ever released a number of combatants that have been killed?

No, of course not. Never? Of course not. According to their list, they say they just don't do it. But if you took kind of their list at full face, there is nobody that's a combatant that's died.

And how would you assess Israel's ability to either come up with numbers of its own or allow neutral observers to have access so they can make assessments?

Yeah, I mean, to Matt's point, one of the criticisms is that, you know, independent journalists are not allowed into Gaza.

Yeah. And run the risk of dying at kind of ahistorical numbers. Yeah.

Yeah. It's a separate question. And I get that from like Chris Cuomo, like, it's like, they don't allow journalists in. What he's actually saying, because I mean, there are plenty of wars around the, like Ukraine war, others that journalists aren't allowed to embed, right? Embed with frontline troops. I mean, anybody can, if you really want to, you can go in through the Egyptian side, get on a truck and make your way in there and good luck what Hamas does to you. There's hope for you, Michael. That's right. Yeah. I mean, and there's Al Jazeera.

Maybe Camille. It's on Camille.

There are, we could get to this conversation about how many journalists have been killed in Gaza, but the question about wanting an independent observer, so why doesn't Israel do like other nations and do an embedded media program where they let any journalist from any, any source. Or they handpick them, but like let some. Yeah. And they have, and then they'll get, then the people like CNN or whatever will complain. Although Fox's Trey Yanks has done a really good job of doing as much as he can and going into Gaza, but it's not in the battle.

And been criticized by the Israelis too, for being a little too pro-Palestinian.

Yeah. If you want to throw any like, hey, they're doing good work in Gaza to any journalist because our, you know, this is kind of a media literacy podcast, feel free.

Yeah, trade's great. And there's been some others who, but I can, one, what the IDF is, is always hard to explain to people too. It's like, it's not a professional force. So it's a reserve citizen military. It's like a militia on steroids with a professional portion of it and they mix them together. But I've seen journalists that have embedded with them to go see something like Al-Shifa Hospital or the tunnel in the cemetery or whatever. And then that journalist say, well, I can't confirm or deny because they're not giving me freedom to do what I want. Because what they're really asking is a free media embed program, which the US military didn't really start until after the first Gulf War. I mean, you could go like Vietnam and like you said, like Cronkite. He wasn't going anywhere he wanted and just walking into the jungle, which is what some people want, that capability. But the question about the why doesn't somebody independent than Hamas validate the deaths of people? I can't answer why they don't. I can answer as a war researcher that nobody's – the number's never been a question in a war. like all all these other wars and battles there's nobody saying today how many civilians have died

and how many combatants died oh i remember like uh both in iraq and afghanistan there

or being outside kind of research efforts to do daily kind of daily or monthly tracking of these numbers, right? Relying on some...

Often bullshit, like the Lancet study. The Lancet study, yeah. And many oftentimes... They got to a million very quickly. They got to a million very quickly.

We defeated the Ba'ath regime in Saddam's army in two weeks. I can tell you pretty confidently during those two weeks, there was nobody counting the numbers. We defeated the Taliban in a matter of two weeks equally. So now you get into, again, we remember what we know, counterinsurgency phases, nation building, all of this stuff. And there is a whole field of study of this. There are groups that count casualties and they count the impact of war on civilians and all that, which is all actually a very nuanced variation of context. in a i can tell you from fallujah like all these case studies i've written there was nobody during the battles the hot war is uncountable yeah and what it takes to have an accurate number like the battle of massul right 2016 to 17 most people know about it the biggest war the biggest urban battle since world war ii it was a year later they still didn't know how many civilians died i can tell you what the number came out to be. It was 9,000 to 11,000. But PBS is on the ground a year later and asking the mayor, and he's like, I think it's around 40,000. And I can tell you what the total number of defenders we think were in the city, around 5,000 at most, maybe. But we don't know how many combatants, because this is the challenge that we live in, back to this asymmetrical warfare we're talking about, is the idea that there is somebody, independent even, that can point to a body and go, that body had nothing to do with this war. They weren't partaking in the war in any way. They're a non-combatant or they were partaking in the war and they were a combatant because that's the difference that I have to explain to everybody. There are combatants and there are non-combatants. Civilians are, of course, protected non-combatants. They want nothing to do with the war. And they're just like in Gaza, just trying to get out of the way if Hamas will let them. And we can talk about what Egypt's done, which is no country's ever done that I know of. But then you have combatants. Like you said, it could be Hamas and Hamas being kind of the person who initiated the war. And I can kill Hamas, doesn't matter what they are doing, where they are by name. I know that's a Hamas member, but then you have Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the 15 other terrorist organizations in Gaza who are partaking in the hostilities. Or you have that civilian doctor who's holding a hostage in his house. He's not a civilian anymore. He's a combatant. So when he dies, like when Israel did that hostage rescue and they said within minutes, again, never happened, not realistic. And it's awful to even think of. Within minutes, all major international media were reporting 200 civilians dead. Similar to the hospital thing, yeah. Yeah, similar to the hospital thing. But that one's really unique because those are civilians holding, the civilians started shooting at the IDF, trying to do the rescue, everybody.

I mean, much like there are combatants and non-combatants, there are historians and political actors. And so when we see something, it takes a long time. I'll give an example of this from the Second World War, which is Dresden. Yeah, a lot of them must talk it. You know, this is something very specific. When you think about historians whose horrible careers have been revivified by horrible people, David Irving wrote a book about the bombing of Dresden in which he had an upper number of 200,000 civilians who had died in two days of bombing, mostly by the RAF, but the American Air Force was involved too. There was a historical study of this that actually was, you know, the city of Dresden post East Germany, right? Because Dresden was part of East Germany, that came up with a number of 25,000 to 35,000. And even that is kind of vague in some way. 25,000 to 35,000 versus 200,000. That was weirdly the one that David Irving, the sort of Nazi sympathetic historian came up with. so when you have in the iraq war something like the lancet study that said a million people very kind of early in the war too um we realized that there was a political valence there there was a reason that people were coming up with these numbers and there was a reason people during after october 7th wanted all of these numbers to be higher than they were i mean i want to know the truth if the numbers are high the numbers are high and to that point when you go you say people accuse you of being pro-israel you're just pro-truth when you've embedded when you've gone into gaza when you've gone to israel is there something that you've seen the israelis bullshitting you on i mean we've talked about the gaza health ministry and the fact that everybody who has a you know a cold in fall

over is going to become a victim of the idf what are the israelis doing that has kind of you know arched an eyebrow for you and said well i don't think that's right i think it is this information

operations component of it right the it this kind of israeli sense of why they don't embed media journalists because they're they're going to lie about the idea why they don't fight the disinformation more because nobody's going to believe what israel says anyways the i because i analyzed even i mean earlier december and then february of 2024 like okay what what are you doing to combat the misinformation whether it's the public uh spokesman unit or all these different spokesmen they just don't do it yeah um and it it is crushing as much as war is politics for people

who constantly complain rightfully so about how they're treated in the international media and having lived in Europe, particularly in Sweden, which really does not like Israel, they do an incredibly bad job, considering that they've had this for so long, of viewing themselves as on the other side of honest media. Do you have that sense that I have too, that they've just not done a good job at public relations in this war in particular?

I like to quote the Times of Israel chief editor David Horowitz in saying, They're not bad at PR. They just don't do it. Period. And it's like even Israeli journalists will ask for information after events or after an operation, and there will be zero information put out. Fighting a war of this scale alone, let alone your Israel, this is Hamas, this is the strategy of the Hamas. I just wrote the case study of the first Gaza war. And it's like identical to this, but just on steroids because of the scale of the IDF's incursion into Gaza to get to the hostages, to get to Hamas before they would go up to a certain point. But the same information, the numbers of the civilians, all that stuff, they just don't do it. And they don't have the I don't care perspective to it. There are some, of course, it's political, right? the Israel government's political, again, this is the sense also where I can't even look at another war and apply that political context to this war. When I go in bed and I see something that's insane that the IDF are doing to protect civilians. Like I went into Khan Yunus in February of 2024 with the division commander of the 98th division. And he was talking about how he had surrounded neighborhoods um with the civilians still in them like 200 000 and then called them out through him and his forces which is a great risk to soldiers and use facial recognition to pick out in the crowd the 900 hamas nukba fighters they had captured in this crowd like you got to tell the world that you're doing this you're basically fighting without shooting or doing anything and he's like oh that's not my job and then you go to the idf spokesman and go that's That's not our job to do a daily briefing on what we're doing. That's the Ministry of Defenses. And you go to the Ministry of Defense, well, that's the prime minister's office. If this was another military that follows the law of war and cares about information operations like the U.S. or Westerns, you would have a daily briefing of the Pentagon, right? So you'd have that general with the pointer and the board going, this is what we're doing. and then you'd have the political department of state or whatever daily press briefings every day of the war just to be put out information that other people can use so it is the not knowing i think that and we also in this post-covid like i don't trust anybody right so i want to make my

own story so you have people making millions i mean i being in israel and talking to people about this you know and sympathizing with them in the sense that um they're never going to believe us we're always going to be the bad guy so therefore we surrender therefore we don't do anything to counter it because it doesn't matter what we do you know it's hasbara right that's right that's what they're going to say so it's like yeah i don't think that's the best strategy no and hasn't

worked out for them so but i mean i i do remember in the especially the early months of the war war seeing a lot of you know jonathan konrikus and we met in israel and elon levy uh like being a presence out there in the world and talking and idf uh doing daily things fired by the way yeah that was unclear how that all happened and um but you were with idf um uh and you've already mentioned one case of that what did you learn like what do you learn that is pursuant to um both the general pursuit of truth and also what people are talking about and how they are characterizing the

war? What did you see that we don't know? Oh, it's a, I mean, I've written over 50 articles since October 7th. One, the reason that I'm there is for a reason.

in my world. So that would be different to me being an embedded journalist, is that I'm not there to report. I'm there to- What happened today. I'm researching how they're approaching these challenges that nobody has ever attempted, like the presence of this density of civilians, right? So the fact that Egypt closed this gate on October 8th and built a new wall, sent an armor brigade down and said, not one civilian comes out of Egypt.

And is that still true? By the way, has a single civilian crossed through like Rafa gate?

So 100,000 Gazans have passed through that gate if they have enough money.

Yeah, if they have enough money.

So $2,000 to $10,000 can buy you a ticket out that door.

And so for people who haven't looked on a map recently, Gaza is basically a rectangle. One side is the ocean. Many sides are Israel. And a little tiny corner here on the slim side is Egypt. And that could be something that it currently is not.

There is no history of a single country having the ability to prevent, reduce, alleviate civilian harm and not only refuse to do it, but insist that they're not going to be a part of it. And why don't they do it? So there's a list of reasons. I wrote this article as well. Well, they actually on, it was November of 2023, they had sent a unit to the border and were building a fenced-in area to create a humanitarian zone in the Sinai Desert. Something happened politically that that became a no-go at the very highest Sisi government political level where you can't be supporting the erasing of the Palestinian causes.

That would be ethnic cleansing.

Right. He didn't use that then. That got used later.

Westerners used that. Yeah. Yeah, but it would erase the-

Yeah, a population transfer, yeah. Right, which is not true. What he was doing would have been the most humane and again, all of these urban battles in time, what is done. You get the civilians out of the combat area and then you set up a IDP, a humanitarian, whatever.

Yeah, displaced persons camp, you know.

So that's one of the reasons. You can't erase the Palestinian cause toward the government. There is the security supposedly concerned, right? The Muslim Brotherhood, just instability. There's an economic, he says, reason. He doesn't have the money to do it. It's just insanity, and nobody cares. Well, the money thing is clearly a lie. It's a lie.

Saudi Arabia or somewhere.

I mean, the United Nations, everybody would pay for that. And it would alleviate all of this stuff, all of these food insecurities, potable water, medical services, vaccinations, all of that stuff that Israel has had to do for the population in Gaza. again, ahistorical. There's never been a military in the history of war that has provided services to the enemy's population during the battles in which the enemy still controls the areas and especially holds the other side's hostages. Just never happened. But because of this, you could create a humanitarian zone. Again, like you said, Sadr City. I fought in the neighborhood of Baghdad of 2 million. The scale seems like a lot, but actually it would be within weeks for outside of combat area for the international community to build a city, a tent city, for every single living person in Gaza that wasn't Hamas to be moved just a few kilometers away from Hamas. And it's just insanity. One, most people don't know where it is on the map, but the fact that it hasn't been the number one call of the United Nations going, look, I understand your concerns, Egypt, and those are valid. But even Dermer, right, the Minister of Strategic Affairs said, sign a UN Security Council says that every single one of these people get to come back after Hamas is just like this the other idea that Israel wants to kick everybody off and then take it yeah like he's like even in February 2024 it's like sign a declaration it's just crazy that so when I'm on the ground it's what Israel has still has success of destroying Hamas's military despite that one constraint of the civilians have to be moved around this small little box yeah you got to move them then you got to fight Hamas here if they stay there. Just that, what they've done.

We have to deal with the Egyptians and the way the Egyptians have responded to this. And as a result, one of the complaint is far too soft of a word, but we hear the accusation of famine, right? Because, you know, I mean, we've been, Matt and I have both been together to a point right close, not on the Egyptian border, but on the Israeli side of where humanitarian aid comes in to, or just any sort of aid and trade comes in to Gaza. It is very often said by people who, you know, otherwise I would think are credible people, that there is a roiling, ongoing famine that we should be concerned about in Gaza, and people are starving. I mean, which, if I know nothing else about this conflict, is something that would concern me. I don't want, you know, people who are civilians to be

starving to death what do you make of those charges either having seen what you've seen or knowing what you know about what's happening in gaza that they are continued distortion of the

reality on the ground how so that of course there are there is the great variant of people that have storehouses of flour sugar free aid everything to those that are actually dependent on somebody to cook it for them and are have at times because of Hamas not had access to that food but in this

there's been a very sharp argument in response to say that Hamas does not steal aid I mean you've

seen these arguments I've seen the argument but then I've seen the UN like I'm I live in the world of trying to get be objective as possible and and not I'll listen to that where one report will say the un says 92 of all aid that's gone into gaza has been confiscated by armed groups they won't name hamas and then other people will say the united nations saying there's no validity to armed groups taking the i've heard both of those right it's hard to determine what's true but then you get to even these ipc reports the famine reports and how they're distorting the information even this genocide commission look i don't have to like you said if i knew nothing of the war you just gave us this part of the data, but what about the rest of it? Or like the, what's gone into Gaza, right? So how is that not part of the conversation of, we believe there's a, some people believe there's a famine in Gaza, but there has been 2.2 million tons of food. And you could do it by commodity, right? You could do it by flower, the number of bakeries that have been running, like you said, that the markets, but nobody wants to hear any of that. Like, no, no, there's a famine, according to so-and-so like where'd all this food that went in go to just disappear it was and then you see the pictures of stockpiles of it in different areas it's all one a historical that if there is somebody starving in gaza it's israel's fault which gets you back to what is the attacking military in the war's responsibility there are some you get into legalities of allowing free access and then you get to the whole u.n thing of u.n refuses to let the idf escort them in to gaza but then they said they have to have secure routes to get into to gaza so the two

things are um starvation and genocide right and so the thing that i found pretty interesting was there's been a lot of conversation about wikipedia and about who controls wikipedia There's been, you know, our friends over at Tablet have written about this. I thought one of the interesting things about your own Wikipedia was that there was, you know, you have these subheads, you can expand them. One of the, I thought this was really fascinating, that the title of this subhead was Denial of the Gaza Genocide. Denial of the Gaza Genocide. That sounds bad, man. Sounds bad. So that's the presumption in that is that there is a genocide and you are denying it. it says in this i don't know who wrote this that aap which is the australian associated press i think is that what it is the aap fact check team analyzed your claims that there was not a genocide in gaza um that the gaza population had increased by two percent according to the cia fact book and declared it to be false as the cia sourced the figures from the u.s census bureau's international population estimates and projections and the projection was an estimate using data from august 2023 before the conflict began so in your own wikipedia there is something that says denial of the gaza genocide and says that you're wrong about that because you're using dodgy figures

so i've tried to address my wikipedia which is don't even bother i i did i was silly and i tried for weeks oh like with the editor saying why are you only listening what you can find or somebody has said something yeah not my actual biography or anything that i've written i'm i that but it's not debate about gaza genocide yes denial yeah i do that actually kind of shocked me i do deny because that of the three categories again i didn't start studying war on october 7th of the three categories of a violation of the law of armed conflict war crimes crimes against humanity genocide yeah genocide is the hardest to prove specific intent and everything that i've ever collected i've never published that cia fact book fact yeah um i retweeted somebody who posted the image which is a fact the what the if you go there the cia fact book says this that's a fact does it yes absolutely does it have the access to information to say that no i never used that in my defense of... What every single individual who says there's a genocide, not the, you know, the protesters, but like an Omar Bartov or the supposed genocide. The Israelis, Iran, yeah.

Every single Irish person alive.

The entire nation of Ireland. Like, let's do a little, it's an assault on critical thinking. How did you prove specific intent for the Israelis to eliminate the entire Gaza? Talk about the intent, right?

Talk about why specific intent is important in the definition of genocide. yeah i mean people don't people use the g word without like yeah knowing the legal number of

people who died basically that's right and it's not quantitative actually you have the holocaust with six million then you have like sabranichia with a very few thousands not thousands and tens of thousands there's not a number that gets to okay you killed that many you win that yeah yeah and then again you killed versus this how many people died in the war sure okay but every number that's ever been created is israel's fault for that number being

whatever it is but it is the desire of it is the desire to kill people the intent to kill people

specific intent specific intent gross intelligence negligence yeah even if you had you were intended to kill the enemy but you grossly you know the way you're doing it you're grossly doing like that's not i mean the genocide conventions like you don't have to be a law of war expert it's like

four pages long so but let's give those people who make that claim yeah some sort of credit let's not give them a ton of credit, let's give them a bit of credit and say that there are people that are within the Netanyahu coalition, the Smotriches and the Ben Gavirs, who've said some pretty nasty stuff, right? Let's pave it. Yeah. That kind of thing is that it's always in those reports about intent, right? And you can talk about Ben Gavir and Smotrich and people in their coalition of sense of very, very nasty things. Then there's some other stuff. It's like they're animals, right? Which is clearly in the context talking about Hamas fighters. It's not talking about the people of Gaza are animals. But there are some pretty nasty things said by some pretty nasty folks like Ben Gavir and Smotrich, right? Yeah. And then you get to, again, intent of the

political apparatus and the military conducting the operation. I guess this would be like taking Marjorie Taylor Greene's statements and saying that's the US government's position. yeah yeah that's the level soon enough so that's right um so this is what i did like when i deny genocide or say that it's false it's not even in the world of that word is i take the statement they're making i'm not making my position like you said because the prime minister of israel said remember amalek yeah yeah the amalek thing is which is it which is literally posted on the memorial in the hague yeah for the holocaust and also israel's that and he so this is where the do is that there's only that actually to people who don't understand the amalek reference yeah remember amalek is a biblical verse it means remember those who are rising up to destroy you and it is on the actual memorials for the holocaust in both israel and in the hague in geneva it's on the actual monument remember amalek and this is where i get in there the other terms the gallant terms of their animals she was talking about hamas or any other statement like that and you of Gallant who's had some difficulties with the government himself. Yes. And I've published with General Gallant on the two-sided face of this. But here's, again, when you exclude any information that would contradict your assertion. So it doesn't matter how many times the prime minister after that, remember, MLX statement came on and said, our fight is with Hamas and not the people of Gaza. No statement like that is included in the packet that would analyze it. Same thing, General Gallant, immediately after that, days later, says, our fight is with Hamas, not the people of God. Like every one of those intent statements, right? Because usually it's an intent like that, a specific intent is a written order, an oral instruction to the military. Or you can, and there is a historical, like when the Nazis talk about the final solution in public speeches, you can use those statements. They're not present in Gaza. And then you have the actions. So then they'll try to use the actions because you can actually, if you didn't have intent, you could have certain actions being taken. Like let's say Russia's taking of 10,000 babies out of Ukraine and giving them to Russian parents. That's a genocidal act. There's actually only four acts listed in the genocide convention and giving away the babies is one of those acts. So you could take these acts and say Israel, which is what the latest report said, Israel is killing Palestinians. That's one of the genocidal claims. It doesn't say Israel's killing Palestinian civilians. It says because of this number that they have, that's proof that Israel is intentionally trying to kill everybody in Gaza because they've killed this number. It doesn't even say that they're trying to get Hamas and these people have unfortunately died as well. Well, presumably they'd have a plan for the people in the West Bank too.

right yeah no i i get that where they're that dumb they they're they're just they're just saying gaza right so the palestinian people they're trying to eliminate the people of gaza but for gosh sake if you're going to make these claims then include any any information that would go along with that assertion like the starvation right so the starvation claim they won't say about how many how much aid has gone in at all the airdrops the trucks the foot the pier that floated away that i i saw it they just want to talk about these numbers that say this is the level of famine or whatever that's there even the vaccination i mean israel has vaccinated two million people every child in gaza trying to kill them all as bobby would say some polio

that's that is a genocidal thing to get to vaccinate them right and then they take i mean

it doesn't help you when you take such distorted information. Like the latest one said that 83% of the people who have died in Gaza are non-combatants. And it's from a telegraph in a 972 article. That was the title of the article. And then in the article, it debunks that title.

972 is a sort of lefty Israeli publication, kind of like. Almost Haaretz, but worse. Yeah.

Haaretz, Betsalem. That's right. That's right. And they had gotten leaked information about a list that the IDF was in the process of collecting that has named Hamas members they have killed. And it had like 8,000 on the list. And they took that and just deducted, well, they only can name 8,000 Hamas, so everybody else was a civilian. So that's where they get to 83%, even though the article says this does not account for all the unnamed individuals that the IDF have killed that were likely part of the conflict.

And keeping in mind also that one of the things in Holocaust historiography is that there is no written order. There's no written order from Adolf Hitler. And there's no, I mean, you have the Posen speech and you have Wannsee and things like that, but there's no direct order. So this stuff becomes difficult. but you um we've been going for a bit so i want to get to ukraine you've been to ukraine i've been to ukraine right after the war started um you just mentioned it um donald trump the other day was that yesterday is that today i have no fucking idea these days all uh blend together that uh said that the ukrainians should take all the territory back from the beginning of the war that would not be everything by the way it's the beginning of this crime yeah yeah parts of Donbass. And parts of Donbass. The question I want to ask you about this is the one that has driven me a bit mad, is that, and I think Matt too, is that people on the right, and I know that you're not a political person, you're more of a sort of researcher on this stuff, people on the right have been a bit weird about Ukraine. And you mentioned Marjorie Taylor Greene, somebody who accuses the current Ukrainian government of all sorts of kleptocracy. And it has a Nazi army, a Nazi army and oppressing the churches. And, you know, it's, I think because of that stuff in the MAGA world, it's actually pretty consequential that Donald Trump said, you know, the Ukrainians should, and they can, because the Russians are

quote a paper tiger and also that the estonia and poland should shoot down those drones when asked

very very quick answer by the asked by a journalist said if there are you know either drones or aircraft over nato airspace should they be shot down he said absolutely what does that mean to you as somebody who's been up close in ukraine and followed this that the administration has taken what seems to be a pretty dramatic turn on this it could be you know we've seen the president do

this before in statements and true social and everything that then don't become the reality of like the number of days he's giving putin to come to a deal right same thing with hamas number of days where it's over the president communicates in a very unique way yeah it's very nice of you to say yeah i try to again i i do war which is politics but i don't do politics yeah um ukraine Ukraine's another great case study. Like you said, we've both been there. I was there many times after the invasion, studying the urban battles, since it's an urban-centric war at a wholly different scale. But then you immediately see the misinformation. One, why aren't there numbers of civilians that have been killed in Ukraine?

Correct, yeah.

Like Mariupol, mass graves, things like that. One of the reasons is that every civilian who wanted to participate in the conflict wrapped a piece of yellow or blue tape around there, and they're just soldiers at that point. yeah so which to my point previously is not what is done in right it's not done in guys at all

it's purposely done the opposite yeah and ukraine sold

soldier is like 18 to 60, right? Or some like- No, they're actually older. There's an age difference. So most of their middle-aged veteran, that are actually the fighters. And the younger one actually just passed a lulled into younger one because they don't want to kill their generational one. Holy cow. Yes. It's in the 30s and above. Like the average age is like in the 30s of a fighter in Ukraine. Then there's the distortion of information in the, I wouldn't say MAGA, let's um, about even the economics aboard. So the idea that we're spending all this, that we just give money. Yeah. We just, we just give money when like most of from for two years during the Biden administration that we gave Ukraine was what we call a drawdown presidential drawdown where we give them our stuff and then we buy new stuff. Yeah. So we're getting an upgrade. Same thing with Israel. And when, when somebody says like a, like a Dave Smith or someone says that we give Israel 300 billion or whatever it is a year, that we don't give them anything. We give them money and then tell them that they got to buy- They have to buy from us. 90% of that money gets spent on the US economy, factories, workers, all employed. How significant is that statement? Of course, that's massive if that statement stays that reality, that he's basically fed up with Putin and that Ukraine can. And of course, he put at the end of it, NATO, he gives weapons. So he's basically saying that also for me, what I read in that, that economic model of giving Ukraine our stuff because it's distorted in the U.S. politics as us giving Ukraine anything. But doing that drawdown and us getting new equipment because we gave them older stuff. We gave them some new stuff, but a big majority of it. He's saying that's changing because of politics where we will give NATO.

It wasn't for our javelins, for instance.

Yeah.

I mean, Ukrainians fought valiantly and amazingly impressively against one of the largest armies in the world. But I mean, our materiel was really influential and without it, it would have been a very tough fight for them, right? Yes, and.

Yes, and. Okay, what's the and? Like the first, so the reason that Ukraine defended its nation in the first few months, and they had to do it by themselves. And yes, Trump had actually made the decision to allow Ukraine to get javelins. Javelin is an anti-tank weapon that shoots 2,500 kilometers. It's top down. It can take out any basic version of a tank that doesn't have an active protection system. But actually, it's not used that much in those first opening months. It wasn't the same. Is that right? Yeah, it wasn't the, it wasn't, of course, it was important because when President Trump made that, he actually had sent advisors and we were a part of the holistic reforming of their military. And it was important that they got the javelin, but that didn't stop the Russians. It definitely took out Russian tanks. What stopped the Russians? The Ukrainians, basically. Their incompetence.

Yeah, yeah, Russian incompetence.

So this is the whole thing with China as well. It's like, I used to sit in briefings in the Pentagon where Russia was viewed as our peer competitor. The second most powerful, not biggest, but most powerful military. And then it enters Ukraine and can't take a single city.

So I remember this, and I'd be interested in what you, that long line, a column. And I said, you know, there's something else that's happening here. They're sitting ducks, but they're doing something else. And it turned out they weren't doing anything else, right? They were just sitting ducks, that long column. of armored vehicles coming into Kiev where it was just incredibly stupid military tactics, right?

Absolutely. They had, I wrote the battle. That's actually why I went to Ukraine so many times, six visits to understand why the city of Kiev didn't fall and that they held off this long and kept that convoy there for weeks. There are a lot of reasons, mostly Russian incompetence. Like they tried to take one airfield, not two, one airfield. It didn't go well for them. And now their air, what we call a joint forcible entry plan had failed. So they're relying on these convoys coming out of Belarus and down from Russia over by the Sumy. And those are very narrow. It was wet. It was wet season. So they couldn't get off the roads because of the mud. Ukraine started blowing their dams, rising the rivers. So they rose all the rivers. They blew like 300 bridges in a matter of 48 hours. Wow. So they flattened all the bridges. So you had to be on that road. It couldn't go anywhere else. You could go like a long way around.

So you would judge that. I mean, it seems like they performed brilliantly out of the gates, right? The Ukrainians.

Yes, but not by design.

Not by design.

No, there was zero plan to defend Kiev before the war started. wow there was only 3 000 to 4 000 military in the city when russia invaded yeah the ukrainian people though this is where red dawn gets it wrong on you know everybody thinks you know texas is going to rise up and fight any invasion is the veterans so ukraine a former soviet country with a lot of conscripted old men yeah and from 2014 2014 coming back all of absolutely so it was the veterans and the civilians that started death by a thousand cuts stopping Russians who thought they were just going to drive in a long convoy like that into Kiev and be, and they thought they were actually going to take it down from inside, like saboteurs. They had this whole plan that failed for a certain reason as well, to be able to take the city from inside. So all these plans are failing. And then their untested military is now actually having to fight for terrain and for urban terrain. And I know you probably don't know this about me. I actually wrote a book at the beginning of the war for Ukrainians. So on February 27th, I was tweeting what to do in Ukraine to stop Russians from entering urban areas, how to park dump trucks in the streets, how to stay out of the open. And that manual got 20 million views that week. Holy cow. And then it got translated in Ukrainian and spread across the country from Lviv to Mariupol. because what i'm hearing is that he stopped the russians i'm proud i will never i can't visit russia like i want to go like the john spencer russia only only visit after they have been

vanquished no i once and for all i even then i'd probably i won't do it now and i had plans because

boulder ground you know stalingrad for me like i gotta i gotta get on the ground and walk it but it it was the civilians that were a big part of russians i have a number of photos and stuff

that I shot to from a movie theater in Ukraine that I was invited to from all these guys that said, oh, come with us. And went to this movie theater and it was packed full of men. And in the front of the movie theater where they used to show the movies that the screen had been pulled up and they were on stage and a bunch of people were sitting, all had balaclavas on because we were filming and they were being trained on how to break down a weapon, reassemble a weapon and how to shoot a weapon. And there were probably a hundred people in there. At the end of it, there was an air raid siren, and we went into a place where people could go for an air raid siren and sat with these guys for a couple of hours talking to them about what their normal jobs were, boring, tedious jobs. They were like, no, my job now is to defend the country. They were all ready to go and figuring out and being taught how to do that from just average citizens, not conscripted, just ready to go.

So they pulled up a semi-truck on February 25th and handed out 25,000 AK-47s to civilians. So you can have a civilian that wants to resist, just not have the means. Somewhere they had stockpiled semi-trucks full of AK-47s and they started handing them out on the day of the invasion to civilians. It also caused problems with civilians with no training.

A lot of vodka.

Shooting at anybody who they've seen. But that's the other thing. You can imagine that in New York City of like, it's everybody getting an AK-47.

I think there's a lot of people that do have AK-40s in the New York City. They're mostly in my neighborhood, but I don't think they've been trained.

But you talked about that they stopped the columns or they were part of that. So what did they do specifically to stop the columns? What happened?

Blocked the roads and attacked. And so Ukraine also had a couple other things. So the javelin was important as much as the Turkish TB2 was important to Ukrainians. So Ukraine had a very limited number of, it could attack that convoy that we could all see. The entire world could see it, right? Maxstar civilian satellites showing the world this convoy stuck. It was getting attacked. It just didn't make the news. But when they started dropping the bridges, flooding entire, they flooded a city, basically, north, northern of Kiev. The Russians were nowhere to go to get the logistics to the people that were actually fighting and running out of ammo. That's what they did to stop those. Then they started blocking all the streets. Even in Bucha where there was a massacre, a day or two before that, they actually eliminated a truck full of a hundred vehicles, had just driven into Bucha, thought they were going to just drive into Kiev. And then there was a grandpa on a roof with basically an RPG that they had gotten from the Russians a day before. And they start lighting up this entire convoy of a hundred vehicles. But the Ukrainians also had something that we don't have, which is they had a system called delta in especially the urban areas delta was a software package that could integrate any camera from any feed whether it was a drone feed a highway camera a bank camera whatever this program incorporated it all into a single location so they could see where the russians were at any time and that's why only three thousand

military could just move to where they needed to move to or use artillery on that Russian force, relatively small if you look at the scale of the city. And they sent maybe 25,000 Russians

for a city of 3 million. But we underappreciate the SB and the intelligence operations of the Ukrainians who seem to be very, very good at this and way ahead. And particularly after Maidan in 2014 and Crimea, they really, really ramped up their capabilities, didn't they? They ramped up

their capabilities and you can say the united states was also a part of reforming that apparatus as well right they were ukraine was leaning west and getting the same partnership information so yes the sbs and the police in ukraine were a big part on taking down that which is really the russian way you know the little green men whatever to take it down from inside that not fight it out just overthrow the government and then raise the flag how many russians have been killed i've seen

these numbers i mean i remember going into a bar in ukraine when you couldn't actually serve

alcohol they would prevent that for a bit although i think you found a way around it yeah i found i

was blind drunk for like seven days nervous but um there were these uh charts that they'd produced think i'm going to produce that this is how many people we killed this how many planes we'd shot so many tanks we'd taken out and they were clearly a little overstating it but when you see these numbers, I mean, I always point out to people that one of the things that made the Soviet Union, you know, a bit unsteady was the war in Afghanistan. It starts in 1979 and mothers are starting to protest this stuff. You know, we're talking, I think the total dead were 19,000, 18,000, 20,000, something like that, in Afghanistan, fighting, being killed by the Mujahideen. And that goes on for a number of years, right? And Gorbachev pulls that back because of the sort of public is upset about this, that seems to be a number that is wildly dwarfed by the number of Russians that have been killed in the special military operation, the war in Ukraine. Do you have a sense of how many that is? Because it seems to me that it's clearly over 100,000.

I've heard way bigger of our number. I have too. I just don't know what's happening. Yeah, what's your sense of that? So I know that there isn't a number.

Yeah.

There's nobody, you know- It's a hot war. We try to get to- No, I mean, when both sides are actively trying to prevent a number for their own political reasons, Ukraine does the same thing. They don't tell you, yeah. They don't tell how many are lost. I've heard up to a combined over a million soldier deaths. So 800,000. It's horrible. But the numbers are wild. So this is where I get into the caveats of the numbers. Now, the British military intelligence and everything has really tried to be the leader in estimating Russian casualties. But you also have to look at differences between the way that Russia fought before and where it gets the soldiers that it sends, how much money it's giving the soldier and its family. The 40,000, I mean, that's like Bakhmut, right? Bakhmut's an urban battle with no reason that it happens, but it becomes political, kind of like Stalingrad. It's to fight for Ukraine. It's not a strategic. It has no strategic or, no, it's a strategic, has no tactical operational relevance. It becomes only political, that city. But the Russians through 40 plus prisoners, they emptied, they sent Purgosian around to every prison in Russia and got volunteers saying, if you come fight in Ukraine, you do six months of service to come back, you're free.

Yeah.

Like no matter what you did.

And they ultimately killed Purgosian too.

And they, you would use human waves and almost, I'd say 90 plus percent of that prison population was eliminated. And the ones who did go back, all kinds of trouble when you have a murderous rapist who You just served in Ukraine, now back in your society, and it caused the Russians' problem. There's no number. It's a lot. It's a lot. It's a whole lot.

I have a question for you as someone who, unlike me, is sophisticated about military tactics and such. I have spoken loosely about Poland, Poland, which obviously accepted four or five million refugees, some huge, amazing number. poland which doesn't need an excuse to defend itself against russia at all no poland who's part of nato ready to uh defend its airspace um and my basic untrained military uh mind is like if russia thinks it can take poland russia is wrong yes because poland ain't gonna have that but other people who are more sophisticated said you don't have any sense of the tactical size of various things. That is a skirmish that Poland is just too small to handle on its own.

And I'll add to that that I went to Lviv from Poland with an enormous number of Poles who were going to fight the Russians. Yeah, that's nuts. As vengeance against the things that had happened to their forefathers, like actual Polish fighters.

Yeah, there's a lot there. So Poland's probably invested the most in its military center.

yeah 2022 of all europe yeah i mean it's bought for south korean it's bought mlrs's i mean it'll be one of the strongest militaries and it really gets to which is legitimate criticism in the

freeloading of european notions on the idea and by european we mean not the baltics and not

like you look at the czech republic now you look like that like the british europeans the british military with all their you the way they talk you think they'd had this massive military when they have the smallest military since the 1800s like a division that they can deploy compared to what poland will deploy right now yeah mandatory service all the tech that they just bought billions of dollars that they've invested to be coming there nobody's going to roll through them and also the actual terrain because terrain does matter same thing with finland and like you said what what the russians learned a lesson there yeah this is this from a community teaches strategy if which is not true, Putin invaded Ukraine so it wouldn't go to NATO, then it just made the biggest strategic blunder of modern history because now it has doubled its border with NATO, with Finland alone. And now Finland is militarizing the border. Of course, it has a gun culture, like all this stuff. Nobody's running over Poland for dang sure.

No, I was out on the border of Poland in January. And the tech on that just for the migrants was insane but somebody touches the border like 7 000 people come in jeeps immediately it was it

was incredibly impressive yeah this is where your quantity has its own quality right so the number of soldiers that russia can but it's war is so much more than the data sheets yeah it is why you're fighting it is what technology you have as russia was deploying like 1950s tanks and things like that um north korean artillery round you're like when it's going to iran people and north korean for help you're not doing as good as you're telling people i mean it it one of the things that

trump said in his truth social was that russia's military is a paper tiger i wonder if he actually

read a memo he might have and it seems to be mostly true right i mean i mean you again like

we're going back to 2022 russia's military had never been hadn't been tested in a long time for large-scale combat operations it actually did large-scale combat exercises and they're really good at withdrawing yeah and that's not making fun of them they're actually had trained large-scale withdrawals and when they withdrew from places in april of 2022 they did a really good job they

did small-scale stuff i mean chechnya of course but georgia and they did large-scale exercises

Just to include, despite what Vivek said with China before the Ukraine war. But I don't discount how they have hardened themselves since 2022. The experience that some of the soldiers who aren't dead have gotten. The technologies that they have advanced. The industrialized military economy that they have created at a cost of themselves. So they're both weak, but also they've hardened. Hardened. They've hardened. It's become a drone war in so many ways, right? In some areas, it's positional, which allows – so the reason I go to Azerbaijan so much is because in 2020, they had the biggest war up to that point, and everybody's lesson was drones, when it actually had – it was a lot more than that. Drones are an amplifier to air power, and they're really powerful if neither size has air supremacy. So drones aren't a factor in Gaza.

drones aren't a factor and but the ukrainians can strike pretty far into russia as they did today actually i saw a video of some strike in some military i can't even remember where it was but it was some naval uh port that was hit by yes the long range and that's important and what they

did during their operation spiders web where they that was impressive historically yeah but you're talking like the battle line to be able to change anything where you know that's even in 2022, 90% of artillery was being called by drones in Ukraine. That's significant. So if you can see you, then I can call artillery and hit you. Because artillery is still king of the battle. Why did we all have this crisis in the world of artillery rounds? Because in war, you can have all the drones you want. Yeah, they can drop some things. You need grenades off of it. Yeah, right. But you need artillery. And now you have basically a drone warfare in static lines, very World War I-esque, but with the capability to send these drones on even fiber optic cables that can't be jammed. It's an evolution that will be present. And I think even the US military is behind the power curve with integration of drones. But the reason it's so lethal in Ukraine, I come up with the context of why is it so lethal? Because Russia, Ukraine are in this action, reaction, counteraction fight along fixed.

mostly although not completely positional lines you're right with the long range and i just saw the c drone thing that um even before we walked in here that more of the c drones with lethal

capability as well yeah john um if i can ask you a very brief question kept you for a long time is in this is the french goodbye question you ready for it is it going to involve the new york times yeah because we haven't asked that one yet no no we oh shit should we ask the new york that's in the New York Times. Yeah.

What's up? New York Times. New York Times.

Did they do a story on you or not? Yeah.

Did they probe your airspace? Yeah.

Did they send drones?

So the prime minister of Israel did an address to the US Congress by both houses. Yeah. Speaking mostly of you, yes. He mentioned my research. So he said, John Spencer says, well, that caused, I was already under attack, let's say, as who is this guy? what is this like his band sucks etc right right not the the facts in which i was stating like the fact that israel has done more civilian harm mitigation measures in war than any military in history because that's a fact on the ground trying to get civilians out of harm's way after that speech new york times put a hit a team to look into the my expertise in the veracity of my claims mainly looking at whether john spencer is an expert in anything good question which stands to itself my publications my teaching my running the courses my podcast all of that and then the veracity you're fighting in wars too right yeah i don't rely on my experiences at all though it's yeah it's the i'll throw it in there as well as interviewing anybody i ever served with for anything um and a lot of other stuff to to to find a conflict of interest

how much is israel paying me to say this did they did you find out about this because they knocked on your door or because your friends started telling you all of the above yeah they

knocked on employment doors they knocked on friends doors they knocked on anybody i was associated with doors, and trying to discredit me as an expert, but also discredit my position. So trying to find an expert, which I'll argue with anybody, like a four-star general, a secretary of defense, a comedian, whoever, on the veracity, like where is, in God I trust. Self-declare. All others bring data. Like what is the data which you're saying proves whatever it is you're trying to say. I'm making these statements based on a lot of research, and I'm giving you the receipts. This happened in Gaza, or this happened in Mosul, and Fallujah, and Ramadi, and Berlin, like you said. But they decided to attack that, and I don't know. How do you know they decided? Because they didn't publish, right?

Yeah, when was this inquiry started?

The day after the prime minister's speech. Which was when? July of 2024.

so it's been over a year correct and no no peace yet no but i don't want to wish it to reality

yeah have they asked you to sit down and talk to them uh they sent many many um fact checking yeah list but not somebody who said can you oh i did that originally because i do i usually talk to anybody i didn't so you talk to them i i was that was like two days later oh okay why do you say these things you know yeah how did you get into gaza like how do you do your research like

i thought you're you're basically israeli stooge you go in with them etc special access which is

not true you get paid not true yeah i i do war research around the world so it'd be interesting if again on october 7th i just popped up and started doing research on war and only in israel yeah like that's that's not true i have a unique base of knowledge on urban warfare so then they tried to bring other experts well this expert says this yeah like okay fine i don't know who that is but that statement is not correct yeah and here's the whatever conclusive peer-reviewed study that says it's not and so it never came out never came out but it was a to be honest it was a horrible process every friend getting an email or a call saying john do you know about this this is what they're asking me you know some would say after the fact like what were their questions and some of them were very benign like was he a good soldier was a good officer was a good teacher and then it gets into would he ever you know whatever proselytize about a particular political opinion or something like that have yeah you know is jewish does does associate with people that are jewish israeli like oh yeah really dark corners the time just

of you is jewish wow i mean i feel like that's we could almost john spencer answer the question are you jewish i'm not i bleed red white and blue yeah but that's not incompatible with being jewish true oh so you're an anti-semite that's what i'm hearing the last minute that's the french goodbye

i meant it's really yeah yeah i am not jewish i am american says john spencer that's what we're gonna go out on in new york city exactly we're gonna go out on that john spencer thank you so Thank you so much. I would list all of your things, but I don't even remember them at this point.

Madison was part of it.

Madison was part of it, but you know just from what he said that he's a smart and interesting guy. Thanks for joining us, John. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

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