January 6, 2024 • 56 mins
Curtis Fox is a former Green Beret and 10th Special Forces Group member. Fox is also a Russian speaker and the author of Hybrid Warfare, which delves deep into the Russian approach to strategic competition and conventional military conflict. He gives insight into the Russian perspective on security and their basis for wanting back the former Soviet states.
Fox talks about the naval capabilities of Russia, how their submarine fleet is a force to be reckoned with while their sole aircraft carrier is useless and only maintained as a point of national pride. In Ukraine today, Russia's goal is to attack the populace, power grids, and water supply as Ukraine is the fifth largest exporter of grain while Russia is the first, thereby creating demand for Russian grain and subduing Ukraine's capacity to fight back.
Learn more about Curtis and his work:
Website - https://www.hybridwarfare.info/
Get a copy of Hybrid Warfare: https://amzn.to/4aI6JHn
Join the SOFREP Book Club here: https://sofrep.com/book-club
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Lute force. If it doesn't work, you're just not using enough.
You're listening to soft web Radio Special Operations Military Nails
on straight talk with the guys in the community.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Hey, what's going on? It's rad and welcome back to
another episode of soft rep Radio. But before I introduce
the guests that I have on today, I want to
let you guys know to go check out the mert
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(00:58):
Slash book Club, so it's a book hyphen club. Just
go check out the Software book Club. Look that up,
Google it and who knows you might find this next author,
Curtis Fox and his book Hybrid Warfare, who we have
on the show today in our book club. Welcome to
the show, Curtis.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
How's it going ra nice to be here.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Hey, it's going great, Curtis. You've got me five y five?
I do okay, wonderful. Well, welcome. You wrote a book
called Hybrid Warfare. Because you're a former Special Operation Special
Forces soldier, I believe you're like tenth group, Is that correct?
Speaker 4 (01:35):
Yeah, it came from tenth Group, first fourth Battalion, and
then second Battalion. So I got out in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Oh, no, twenty sixteen. What I was going to say
is what did you enlist as? Like usually you know
how old were you when you did enlist if you
don't mind, and then what did you go in initially?
As was it a Bravo eleven bravo or.
Speaker 4 (01:54):
So I came in as an eighteen X ray And
so the default m O if you were to fail
out of any part of that pipeline process is leven Bravo.
But they stood up the eighteen X ray program as
a means of bringing civilian talent into the special forces community.
(02:14):
Prior to the War on Terror, you had to be
an E five before you could even put in a
packet to go to Special Forces selection. And then I
believe in two thousand and three or two thousand and four,
they decided that they would try to open it up
to the civilian world for people they felt were qualified.
There were a couple of key indicators that let recruiters
(02:36):
know they were talking to somebody who would possibly be
a qualified candidate. But I mean, there are a lot
of guys that start the eighteen X ray pipeline. They
played some call of duty and that's what they know
about it, and those guys don't do particularly well. But
there's also a lot of guys like myself that had
(02:57):
college degrees or maybe they'd run small businesses, and those
guys are the ones that end up doing very well.
They've they've had experiences that teach them how to think
long term, and so what they're going through in the
present is, you know, it's something that they're willing to
make the sacrifice for for a long term goal, and
those are those are usually the folks that do pretty well.
(03:20):
So you go through basic ait Airborne school and then
they send you to a to a preparation and conditioning course,
and then after that you go to Special Forces Assessment
selection and then if you get selected, you run the
Special Forces pipeline and you get mixed in with, you know,
all the guys that came from the army. If not,
you go to Needs of the Army. Most of those
(03:42):
guys are airborne qualified for that point to the eighty second.
Airborne's a pretty common place to go.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Sure, because they're already, like you know, right up their alley.
So really the eighty second, it's like if you're in
the eighty second, then you have a couple steps up
to try to go through a selections process. If you're right,
like that's a good place to be.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
Yeah, it's in.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
The airborne infantry too. I mean, the the Army genuinely
can considers them to be a cut above the rest
because they're they're double volunteers in a sense. They volunteered
for the Army and then they volunteered for airborne duty,
and then they actually have to volunteer multiple times to
jump out of the plane you know, every however often
that is to stay to stay airborne qualified exactly.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Yeah, So they.
Speaker 4 (04:29):
The Army, they treat the airborne Infantry is as you know,
an elite unit unto itself. And so when you have
somebody that's gone especially through the preparation and conditioning course
for special forces, if for whatever reason they fall out
of the pipeline, you know, maybe it's just a maturity issue,
or maybe it was an injury and they need to
(04:52):
they need to get fixed up before they come back.
The eighty seconds a pretty intuitive home for them and
a lot of those guys.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
You know, what they need is a sergeant.
Speaker 5 (04:59):
They can just sit down with them and teach them
a little while how to be a soldier, and once
they're part of that fire team or that squad for
a while, then they might think about coming back.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Do you know I of any like? Can I ask
you an off tough question about who's in SF? Like,
do you have any idea of any females that have
Is there a female SF? I know there's like some
other people who are clandestine. I guess, you know, I
don't know if they're quite SF. You know, is there
anybody who has put on the Green beret as a
female candidate? Yet?
Speaker 4 (05:32):
If there's more, you know, congratulations to them. I do
expect that to be relatively rare, simply because of the
physical requirements to go through Special Forces training. My understanding
issues this individual was an Olympian level athlete in her
own right. You will, I think it will be relatively
(05:54):
uncommon to see women go through, you know, the Special
Forces training pipelines simply be because of the physical demands
of the pipeline. But there will always be one or two.
They're very far out on the distribution, and if you
just think about it. In terms of a basic statistical analysis,
there are always going to be you know, a few
individuals who are several standard deviations ahead of the mean,
(06:17):
and because of that, I mean, they're you know, those
people are out there. Just to give you an idea
of how common that can be. My understanding is when
they opened Ranger School for women, they took a selected
group of ladies in ROTC and ROTC candidates and they
(06:39):
put them about six hundred of them through a special
six month preparation course to get them ready physically for
Ranger School. Out of that six hundred, I think there
was like twenty five or thirty that were given the
green light to move forward, and then they were rolled
into this pre Ranger School that I think was run
by the eighty second Airborne and from pre Ranger maybe
(07:03):
only about half of that thirty we're given the green
light to move on to Ranger School. And then of
those fifteen to eighteen women, three graduated Ranger School. So
you know, if you simply look at that, you know,
and I may have that wrong, two hundred original it
(07:25):
may have been. It may have been two hundred original applicants,
but that means one, about about one and a half
percent out.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Of about six hundred original applicants. That's almost, according to
the song, one out of let's see it. Yeah, yeah,
that's think a song where it says, you know, one
hundred middle tests today only three. So let's look at
(07:55):
the percentage there. So at three percent rate will pass
females coming two hundred applicants, let's go at that number
three of them qualifying, I'd say they're above the grade
of the song. That's awesome, now, I'd be really you
know if you think about the song, right, Barry Sadler, Well,
(08:20):
that's super awesome. I want to let my listener know
that like being a United States Special Forces Green Beret,
you know, is something that it's an Olympian athlete in itself.
Like you said she was an Olympian athlete. Well, you know,
growing up with the father who was SF, it was
always like, hey, come on, Aaron, we're gonna go I'm
gonna go run. And so I would ride my bike
while dad would go rock run around hill Air Force
(08:41):
Base in Utah here and airman would We were running
up this hill and it's kind of a big incline
and we were just going up at and it's a
normal thing for him. And someone pulled over and said
you need to ride up onto the base and he's like, no,
I'm good. He's just chugging right along up this hill
to go around and go back home because he's Army
and we were outside of an Air Force base, and
so everybody was thinking he was probably Air Force running
(09:03):
to the base with this. I don't know. It is
an interesting you know. I always walked around with him
holding his hand, thinking how come everybody doesn't have a
green beret at the base, especially at the Air Force base.
I was like, Dad, how come these guys don't have
a beret like you? And they'd walk out and put
their trucker cap on. I'm like, why are they putting
a trucker cap on? I don't understand what all these
big letters on there. It was just a different world
(09:24):
for a kid raised under the Green Beret flag, right.
So I just want to let you know you're you
guys are athletes. You're extream athletes. You guys are drinking
liquid protein to keep your bodies moving forward, and like
doing all of the hard marathons and you're out there,
you know, just breaking your feet and not saying nothing
about it.
Speaker 4 (09:43):
Yeah, I tell you what, the people that might really
get my admiration are the guys that stick with it
and do it for twenty or thirty years, and you
know when they get out, Man, the amount of abuse
that your body is taking, when you're pushing at that
in your late thirties and early forties and even going
(10:03):
into your fifties. The guys there are guys, man, that
they will still blow you away, you know. And how
quick they can crush a you know, five mile run
at fifty five years old. Serious, and you know, I
can't believe that some guys can perform at that level
that late in life.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Yeah, it's like a mind game. They just know it.
They just got it. They're just made to walk in
the boots that they wear. And you know, there's a
story out here of a guy that was retired, but
for like three four months he was still shuffling up
to jump, but he had retired, but no one said nothing.
They're like, didn't so. And then finally the what I
understood from the colonel was someone said, didn't so and
(10:43):
so retire like three months ago? Man? And they're like, yeah,
so he had to go approach him and say, hey,
you keep shuffling up to go jump on drills, But
these guys are just living that life. What do you
do with a guy like that, you know who his
whole life is, you know, Dale Pressel, to free the oppressed,
to like have this teacher mindset, to teach others to
(11:04):
be you know, free for themselves, free thinking. How where
does that guy go who's still try to shuffle up?
Speaker 4 (11:11):
Well, I tell you who who snatches up a lot
of them when they get out of service is professions
that have a they're very high stress, and they require
individuals that are okay with working unorthodox hours. Is the
first one that comes to mind is investment banking. So
you know, when I got out, the first place I
went was to do my NBA at Georgetown and then
(11:33):
you know, I specialized in financial services. The number of
guys I knew that were in there from the soft community,
or from the Marines, or you know, actually they're even
a couple of you know, silent service, you know, Navy
submariners in there.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
These guys are.
Speaker 4 (11:51):
Very used to working weird hours under an enormous amount
of stress. And you know, if you're working in investment banking.
You can be working eighty to nine hours a week
on a regular basis for you know, and the burnout
rate is very.
Speaker 3 (12:05):
Very high.
Speaker 4 (12:07):
And you know they're looking for people that fit the
the exact same personality bill it as a lot of
these you know, elite special operations communities, so you know
there there are places for them to go.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
You're right, you know, Like I was thinking about my dad.
He went through his MBA in business and finance and communications,
so it's in human resources, right, So again you're you're
exactly Yeah, I know it's true. Yeah he did. He
was working on his doctor until his heart really started
to stop that process. Yeah, heart surgeries and everything, but
he was chasing his degree up to his doctorate until
(12:45):
he passed.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
Yeah, hardcore, very cool.
Speaker 4 (12:49):
I tell you what, Man, in my heart of hearts,
I really really want to run into like a mall
cop one time that was like, you know, an airborne
ranger and like he's he's you know, driving around in
a golf cart now chasing kids when they mess up
with Macy's or something like that, and that person must
be out there, but I've never he's just.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
Trying to hold onto that uniform and that gigline and
just make sure that everything's still good to go. Hey,
we need that guy on the front lines of the
malls these days. That's the guy I want to driving
the golf cart. Give me Chuck Norris, Holy cow, Oh
my gosh. Now your book Hybrid Warfare. But writing a
(13:33):
book seems kind of what I get to interview you
guys about. There's a lot of you know, special operations
and veterans who are into writing their thoughts and bringing
out what their knowledge is. And it's like, I should,
you know, make a legacy, continue on with what I
know and put it somewhere in a book. Whatever your
thoughts may be, right, people can read it and understand
(13:54):
it for their own words, and then of course fact
check anybody's book out there, right, whatever you read, just
just go read a book, right, I'm all about that.
I like to read books. Now, I'm going to keep
kind of talking here about Hybrid Warfare The Russian Approach
to Strategic Competition and Conventional Military Conflict by Curtis L. Fox,
who is now author former Green Beret Olympian athlete. In
(14:17):
my mind, okay, I'm just going to give him that credit.
So what the book Overview says, here is dive into
the shadowy world of Russian military strategy in hybrid warfare.
In hybrid warfare, the Russian approach to strategic competition and
conventional military conflict, you are not just reading a book.
You're embarking on a gripping journey through the dark corridors
of Russian military strategy, where intrigue and danger lurk at
(14:41):
every turn, From the enigmatic Little Green Men to the
chilling echoes of poisoned doorknobs. This book unveils the cloak
of mystery shrouding Russians approach to the global power. Authored
by Curtis L. Fox. Our guest here are a former
Green Beret, Russian Speaker, tenth Special Forces Group alumni. Book
is a masterclass in strategic analysis. Fox skillfully connects the
(15:04):
dots here from the era of Peter the Great to
the modern day. Is it what is it? Machinations of
Vladimir Putin?
Speaker 3 (15:12):
Yep, that's yep, you got it.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
You know he's a dick. Okay, I'm just gonna say
how it is.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
Right.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
I grew up in a warsaw family, you know, growing
up in the eighties and nineties. My dad being all
Green Beret and learning all the tanks and all the
different weaponry, and the Cold War doesn't ever have seemed
to have stopped. It still seems it's the same weaponry,
same aks, same you know, cold furry hats on their heads,
standing in the you know, red square with you know,
(15:44):
saluting one guy who has the power over all the people.
An auto cross auto autoocracy, I believe, where he's just
the guy in charge with a few other people who
are running the town. Let's talk about it.
Speaker 4 (16:02):
Sure, and well, you know, the first thing the Russians
would say, you know, is who told you that the
Cold War was over? They see the Cold War as
unfinished business in a lot of ways. But it actually
runs deeper than that the Russians are pursuing. It wouldn't
It wouldn't matter who is in power in the Kremlin,
(16:24):
even if the Russia was a democracy, which I don't
think is ever going to be on the table, at
least not in my lifetime. The Russians, by their geographic
location and the nature of the land that they sit on,
have always needed to expand in order to survive, and
so the rut of ethnicity when it emerged in the
(16:45):
ninth century has only ever been doing that. And when
it runs into another neighboring tribe or people, they either
you know, subsume them or subordinate them, or conquer them
in one form or another until the empire can expand.
And that's when you're located on the vast flat northern
Eurasian step, that's really the only options. There are no
(17:08):
geographic barriers like the Alps, there are no major bodies
of water that really separate you from the neighboring peoples.
And so they pursued that strategy for you know, hundreds
and hundreds of years. And during that process there were
there were times where the Russian people themselves were conquered.
They were conquered by the Mongols. And what merged under
(17:31):
Peter the Great when he came to power was a
strategy where Russia was finally large enough to start trying
to plug the holes on its periphery, and so it
had gotten big enough where you could expand and to
hit those hard geographic barriers, whether that's the Caucasus Mountains
in the south, or the Baltic Sea or the Black Sea,
(17:52):
or you know, even pushing more eastward you could or
more westward, you could look at the Carpathian Mountains, you
could look at the what is the Vulgar, the Vogelsberg Mountains.
You know, once you're in eastern Germany, you know their
strategy by the end of the Cold War was to
forward station heavy ground forces there alongside tactical nuclear ordinance.
(18:15):
They had successfully condensed many, many thousands of miles of
borders down to just several hundred miles of terrain where
they needed to be able to station military forces to defend.
When you have blockades like the Gobi Desert in the
far east and then the Caucasus Mountains in the south,
(18:37):
you know that you can't march an army across. And
so that's how the Russians kind of play the game.
That entire security environment and it reached its apoge under
Joseph Stalin. But that entire security environment collapsed in nineteen
ninety one. All of the Warsaw packed states and the former
(18:57):
Soviet republics all broke off. They had what the Russians
would call color revolutions, which basically means that some sort
of a populist sometimes liberals, sometimes not, but some form
of a populist government came to power, you know, and
they basically, you know, mobilized, you know, a plurality of
(19:22):
the people to overthrow the standing communist regime which was
favorable to Moscow. Once that happened, they lost all of
that defense in depth. And Sivladimir Putin is he's pursuing
that strategy again and trying to restore those that the
Russian He's trying to restore the Russia's traditional definition of security.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
And what should really keep us awake.
Speaker 4 (19:45):
At night is that in order for the ethnicity to
really feel secure, they have to dominate a collective peoples
in Eastern Europe that are about twice as large or
twice as numerous as the roof ethnicity itself, and that
that is the Russian definition of security.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
Say that in a in a like, explain that just
a little bit more in layman's term, they want to
dominate a whole more, a bigger chunk than what they
are right is out you're trying to tell me, is
what you're saying.
Speaker 4 (20:14):
Yeah, you know, maybe twice as large. You know, all
of these former Soviet republics Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, you know,
you know, look down at Ukraine and what they're doing
in Ukraine right now, you know, and then former FORESAW
members like Poland and Romania, or Czechoslovakia or what became
the Czech Republic in Slovakia. You know, these are all
(20:37):
countries that they would like to be able to put
into a client state status at the minimum. Georgia, you know, yeah, yeah,
Moldova actually, and that that's another A lot of analysts
that I hold in high regard believe Moldova's next if
the Russians successfully annex Ukraine as they're trying to do
(21:00):
all those was the next on the menu. And it's
the low hanging fruit because it's not a NATO. It's
not a NATO, right.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
And so you know we're here. This is the current
thing he wants. And when I say he, I'm talking
about the current you know, person in charge of Russia,
of the dictator of Vladimir Putin. You know, he is,
you know, trying to go back to Peter the Great,
trying to get you know, McDonald's has left. Okay, places
have left. The things that came in in the late
(21:27):
eighties early nineties when Gorbachev tear down this wall was happening,
is leaving he's coming back with you know, he's imprisoning
you know, his political rivals like Nolvanney's still in prison.
No one's heard from him for a minute. You know.
Pussy Riot they opposed him and said a prayer on
stage at a concert and they were in prisoned for
(21:48):
multiple years because they're you know, a female band that
opposes Putin and his autocracy. And then there's you know,
just simple people who want to say something. And then
when you go and see some type of documentary where
they're talking to the doctors over there, and the doctor
lives in some type of little apartment with a bathtub
in this in his kitchen, and then he puts his
(22:09):
tabletop on the bathtub to eat his dinner. And he
is a doctor. And then the other people don't even
have that much and he's living in a kitchen with
a bathtub with a table that he has to make shift.
And he's one of the most educated people in Russia.
So it's like, you know, when do the Russian you know,
young Russians, the thirties, the forty year olds, when are
(22:31):
they going to say, hey, enough is enough? What's your
thought on that? Uh?
Speaker 4 (22:36):
I don't think that points out there at least. Yeah,
I don't think that point will be out there in
my lifetime. Or maybe maybe the better way to say
it is.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
The people.
Speaker 4 (22:48):
Vladimir Putin is not the return of Joseph Stalin. He's
not that powerful. He's Russia's most important power broker, and
he rose to power mostly by playing off a lot
of the different factions against one another. He knows how
to grant favors, he knows how to discreetly handle problems.
And when he was, you know, deputy mayor St. Petersburg,
(23:11):
and then when he moved to Moscow, and one of
the very first things he became responsible in Moscow under
Boris Jeltzen was taking former Soviet state assets and trying
to figure out how to privatize them. And he collected
an enormous number of IOUs and favors in that process.
(23:34):
And it's no coincidence that he jumped rapidly up to
being director of the FSB and then he was tapped
to be prime minister. I don't think he was even
in charge of the FSB for a full year before
he jumped to being prime minister. And then when Yeltsin retired,
he became the acting president until he was formally elected
in two thousand. But there are power brokers within his
(23:56):
party who he has to maintain faith with. One of
those people is Serga Shorgu. So and currently the current
name of Russia of Plutin's party is United Russia, and
Serga Shorgu is one of the most important power brokers
within the party itself. And Putin would never have gotten
his shot for president without Shoygu. So when you look
(24:18):
at all these really incompetent things that have happened in
Ukraine under Shorgu's watch as Defense minister, you know, one
of the things you have to keep in mind is
he's in the inner circle and there's no replacing him.
Speaker 3 (24:30):
And you know, you can't.
Speaker 4 (24:31):
Putin can't get rid of him anymore than I could
get rid of my mother, not that I would, I
love my mother. But you know, their family and they're connected,
actually their kit I think Putin's daughter is married to
his son. Actually, so that's who that's who runs Russia.
(24:52):
It's a click of about one hundred and fifty to
two hundred former they call themselves, you know, the world
calls them Slovaki, but their former national security professionals, whether
they came from the intelligence community and the KGB, or
whether they came from the Foreign service like Sergei Lavrov,
(25:13):
or whether they came from the military. They consider themselves
national security experts and they they are the individuals in
Russia who really have the education and the background and
the experience and the multiple languages to be able to
run Russia's institutions. The problem is they run it kleptocratically.
They run it mostly for themselves in this closed circle oligarchy.
(25:38):
Now the young people, there's this hope in the West
that you know, the youth of Russia are going to
eventually resent this and they are going to fight against it.
And I think, you know, they have always resented it
and they've always fought against it. But it's not really
that unique in Russian history. There's always been this kind
(25:58):
of a kleptocratic regime in Moscow. You know, Communism made
it worse, but and Stalin made that system work by
pretty much guaranteeing that anybody who opposed his regime would
be arrested and executed or at minimum sent off to
the Siberian Gulags. But under the Tsarist regime and the
old you know, the Tzar had the you know, the
(26:21):
the old Cheka. You know they this is very normal.
Russia has always, uh had a you know, a relatively
despotic regime and power, and some of that's kind of
owed to their geography as well. If you have a
regime in you know, Saint Petersburg, which is, you know,
the historical capital of Russia, but you have a you know,
(26:43):
a populist in Keemchatka or of Vladivolstock, you know, that
is string the pot. The best way to deal with
that person is to have the secret Service arrest him
and disappear him. It takes you know, years to marginal
army all the way out that far. So the best
way to hold the empire together is to, you know,
(27:05):
make sure every town has you know, a local chapter
of your selected special security service that's listening in on
all the conversations and has a has an eye in
eyes and ears in the room of pretty much any
private conversation. And that that's a legacy in Prussia. And
that's a legacy that Putin fell into right.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
And then you know, he's always seemed to have dabbled
with the leadership, whether he was prime minister or somehow
put into be prime minister and now he's the president
of Russia or he's at the head of you know,
like you said, the FSB or his the KGB or whatever.
You know that. Growing up with my father, he was
just always saying, you know, the thing you got to
(27:46):
think about is just submarines, right, it's not so much
like Russia's, you know, not around us as as a nation.
You know, he'd always say, you know, it's the it's
the subs off the coast you got to think about.
And so, you know, I hear, I don't know if
I'm just spreading rumors. I'm gonna call it a rumor
instead of fake news. So I might spread a rumor.
I hear there might be a submarine at the bottom
(28:08):
of the ocean that they command that has all of
the cable in its like little snips that connects the
underwater connectivity of all the you know, Internet and everything.
It could just like snip it. There's a huge underwater cable.
And my understanding is that just sit they sit there
ready for the go. You know what do you think?
Speaker 4 (28:33):
Yeah, Submarine engineering has been a it's been a high
priority for the regime. In Moscow for the last seventy years.
They realized that the U boats allowed Germany to go
toe to toe with the world's two most powerful navies,
you know, in World War Two, and I mean in
(28:55):
World War One as well, and they identified it early
on as a tool that they need to adapt.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
And so they've they've always they've always.
Speaker 4 (29:03):
Had, you know, a high priority on you know, submarine
technology and the old Soviet vessels they weren't afraid to
make them big and because of that, you could have
a double hole whole format, and so the outer hole
is your pressure hole in the inner hole. Uh, you know,
it simplifies internal design. It gives you all of this
(29:24):
extra space to really you know, create these you know,
much more functional and much more lavish living spaces and
so like you know, the old Typhoon class boats had
like a sauna and a you know and a and
a hot tub and stuff and swimming pools inside of them.
In the modern era, they you know, they still have
you know, it's a part of their nuclear triad. Is
(29:45):
they call them the was it the Berete class nuclear subs.
And then they still have the Delta Force that are
online and those are most of those were made in
the Soviet era, but they still have the delta force.
So the Berets have the what is it, the be
Lava ICBM, and then I think the old delta forges
are still using the R twenty nine and those are
(30:06):
both effective ICBMs. You know that that's something that should
give us real pause. You know, they have that technology
available and they could fire on anywhere. They could fire on,
you know, the United States, from anywhere in the world,
including their home port.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
They don't really need to be parked off the coast.
Speaker 4 (30:25):
So the Soviet strategy for years was actually to take
one of these subs and park them underneath the the
Arctic ice cap, where they'd be relatively hard to find,
and they were just supposed to sit there and then
in the event of war, they could surface, burst through
the ice cap, and fire off a couple of rockets,
and then go back down again. So the sub that
(30:46):
you're talking about, they are making a number of special
missions submarines. There's some details about this on the book website.
I didn't include these in the book because it's interesting information,
but it doesn't doesn't quite tie into the thesis of
hybrid warfare. But yeah, they want to be able to
(31:06):
interfere with the with the fiber optic trunk cables that
are running under a lot of the world's oceans. They
want that as an option, and they have engineered a
number of specialist submarines that are that are designed for
those kinds of special missions.
Speaker 3 (31:21):
And they don't even have to be able to dive
that deep themselves.
Speaker 4 (31:24):
They can always just launch an underwater autonomous vehicle and
that that robot will go down there and do the
dirty work for them. But they're also incapable of taking
like a you know, a SPETSNAS detachment from the Russian
Naval Infantry. They call them, uh you know, uh, you know,
(31:44):
reconnaissance teams, and they could, you know, they can offload
them onto you know, a battlefield the same way our
Navy seals would come out of a Virginia class sub
And those are all capabilities they keep and the Russians
have from the Akula classes forward, and to be specific,
what we called the Typhoon class submarine, you know, the
(32:04):
classic hunt for Red October. Those are very actually but
called the Akula class by the Russians. Akula means shark.
What we call the Acula class and NATO parlance is
an attack submarine that was meant that was meant to
be at parody or better with our Los Angeles class
submarines in the United States. Now, whether they are at
(32:26):
parody or not, I don't I don't know. And we've
faced out the Los Angeles class and we're in the
Virginia's and my understanding, the Virginias are extremely good. The
Russians have moved their Coula classes forward. They still have
the aculism Solves are very venerable boats as attack submarines,
but they don't do those kinds of special missions, even though.
Speaker 3 (32:47):
They're very quiet.
Speaker 4 (32:48):
But they have developed what they're calling the Yasin class
submarines attack and these are from the open source information
that we have about the Yas attack submarine. It's probably
the best and the most quot submarine the Russians have
ever fielded, and NATO analysts have stated publicly they're very,
very impressed with it. It's also extremely expensive. The first one,
(33:11):
with the first one, I think it is called the severe,
the sevierro Dvinsk, came off the line at something like
two billion dollars, which for the Russians is not pocket change.
They don't have that kind of money lying around, so
each subsequent boat is supposed to be another billion dollars
out of pocket. And so we'll see if they can
maintain production.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
No, they don't even really even have like aircraft carriers
comparatively speaking with a budget. I don't even john that.
I know, we're kind of like a little delay. I
just wanted to get in there. Like the Russian Navy,
they do focus so much energy on their sub mariners,
you know, and the navy itself, right, Like one of
the most disciplined militaries in the Russia is the navy,
which is why they're Spetsna's where with the blue stripes
(33:55):
are more revered than the other stripes of Spetsna's. But again,
the thing is is that they only have a few
aircraft carrier, right, They're not very like robust on that, right.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
They have one aircraft carrier.
Speaker 4 (34:09):
It's a Kuznetsov class carrier, and it's it's it's pretty worthless.
It's they had during the Soviet Union in the eighties.
They had they started off with the Kiev class carriers,
which I think they made three of, and that was
(34:29):
meant to give them a fast ground attack capability against
NATO surface ships, and they realized that their subs would
be very vulnerable with that air cover, and so they
wanted to try to be able to project some degree
of air power.
Speaker 3 (34:43):
Even though they knew they could never have parody.
Speaker 4 (34:45):
With with you know, the United States, the UK and France.
But the Kuznetsov class was meant to be the next
four A forward and they're about you know, the boat
itself is about twenty f five thousand tons. It had
a sister ship that was actually after the class of
(35:06):
the Soviet Union was left in Ukraine and the Ukrainians
first turned it into a casino and then they sold
the hull to the Chinese and that is what became
the li and Ying in China. But the Kuznetsov class,
at about forty five thousand tons can support something like
a squadron of twenty five planes. I think they were
running the mid twenty nine K. I don't know, I
(35:30):
can't remember what it's been upgraded to at this point.
But it breaks down all the time, and the fumes
from the motor runs on this kind of it's almost
a tar. It's meant to run off a very low
refined petroleum derivative you could almost call tar and they're
(35:51):
just a very poorly constructed boat. They suffocate the people
that operate inside of them. They tried to bring it
down for the war in Syria. They had to have
it paced by an ocean going tug boat in case
it broke down, which it did multiple times. And then
when they started actually releasing planes to conduct combat operations
in Syria, they had to close all air ops for
(36:13):
the boat itself and then have all the planes land
at their at their Hyinenem air base in Syria and
just fight from a from an airfield on the ground
because the carrier was, you know, it was prohibiting their
their success. They haven't retired it because simply having an
aircraft carrier is a is a point of national pride
(36:35):
and it should be retired. It's caught on fire multiple times,
but they just won't let it go. The issue is
they don't have the existing naval facilities enable shipyards to
actually build a boat of that size right now, and
certainly not staffed with the subject matter expertise it would
take to build a boat of that size. So until
(36:57):
they until they update their infrastructure in their workforce, you know,
having a real aircraft carrier is probably not going to
be on the table for them.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
Yeah. Really that is a big deal. I mean with
considering you know, air superiority and having aircraft that can
just like be right off the coast or take off
and you know, just dominate the airspace within landing back
on its carrier group right, let alone just their carrier,
which I understood was also like you said, I think
sold over to China and it's a nineteen fifties fifty
(37:28):
five version aircraft carrier that they've modeled their aircraft carrier
off of, which has like that lip at the front
of it when they try to take off so they
can fall or something. I don't know. I mean, why
is it that I feel like when I think of
Russia equipment, it's frozen cold and not functional.
Speaker 4 (37:46):
Well, that's a common problem. The Russians inherited the Soviet Arsenal,
and when Russia collapsed or what let's say, and the
Soviet Union collapsed, Moscow went from having an economy that
was maybe half the size of the United States.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
They always fudged.
Speaker 4 (38:10):
Their numbers, so we don't really know exactly how large
the Soviet economy was because the data that they created
around this is always very inflated. But by nineteen ninety three,
the Russian economy was about half the size of the
United Kingdom, and those are numbers that we can trust.
And so with an economy half the size of that
(38:30):
of the United Kingdom, they were trying to maintain an
armed forces that could compete not just with the United
States but with the entire NATO alliance, and maintaining that
equipment is physically impossible. They simply didn't have the resources,
and so this was all put in. It was all,
you know, it was put in dock, and the ships rusted,
and the tanks were put into you know, storage storage yards,
(38:53):
and they you know, they had weeds grow into the tracks,
and that's what's happened ever since. They didn't really start
modernizing and updating their armed forces until the mid two thousands.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
Right after other countries had already had a run in
the game trying to get up on them. Now they're
trying to catch up, so they are. And in the meantime,
you know, in the nineties, they did sign that agreement
to like you know, allow Ukraine to be its own
self with the nuclear proliferation act red or where they
got rid of all their nukes and quote unquote said, okay,
(39:26):
you get to have your own sovereign nation. You're now Ukraine.
And then, you know, two thousand and twelve jumps up
and they start to attack into Crimea and then they
putin says don't fly your civilian airliners in the airspace
or it will be shot down. You know, it's a
war zone. But they shot down the airliners of the
(39:49):
civilians that were just flying over. And you know, so
now he's trying to say that it's annexed. He's like,
this is ours now because we went in and fought
on it, and you've got you know, Zelensky, President Zelenski
of Ukraine trying to you know, keep it together, keep
a positive mission for his troops who are either in
(40:10):
their fifties and have old Russian experience or they're in
their twenties and they have airsoft wargame experience. And so
you have this war going on right now over there
where it's needed to be defended because Ukraine is its
own stone state. Okay, I recognize Ukraine, and just because
(40:33):
they attacked in February of twenty twenty two doesn't mean
that it's not been going on for some time, and
for him to want to go back to the Peter
the Great, the Peter of the Vlatimir the Great, whatever
he wants to be thought of, I don't think it's
quite doing it because you know, my understanding is they've
lost around three hundred thousand plus Russian soldiers since that
February initial invasion of Ukraine. You know what is Putin's end.
Speaker 3 (40:58):
Game, well, you know his endgame.
Speaker 4 (41:03):
His endgame is to restore the former buffer states to
their subservient position. I don't think that that full game
is in the cards in the next five years for certain.
Speaker 3 (41:16):
But what he can do.
Speaker 4 (41:17):
With Ukraine, even though they've floundered so badly on the
war when it started in February of twenty two, what
they can do at this point is wade out Western support.
The Ukrainians rely on foreign donated weapons, they rely on
foreign financing, and increasingly they rely on foreign fuel and
(41:37):
foreign food. The Russians will attack the Ukrainian economy and,
wherever possible, the Ukrainian population itself. If they can destroy infrastructure,
the power grid, the port facilities, the railroads that are needed,
you know, Ukrainian grain is you know, it's an important
staple in the world, you know, food supply chain. Right,
(42:00):
they're the fifth largest grain producer. That's a backbone of
the Ukrainian economy keeping them from exporting those things. First off,
that increases the price of wheat, and that's you know,
Russia is the world's largest grain producer, and that creates
demand for their own produce, but that destroys the capacity
of the Ukrainian economy to support the government. And it
(42:22):
the more you attack the power grid and the more
you attack the water supply, the more you tend to
create refugees, you know, especially in you know, as you
do this in heavy population centers, and refugees have a
number of characteristics, but one of the big ones is
that they don't fight back, at least not in an
organized way. They tend to drift into Europe and they
(42:45):
become the European Union's problem, which is absolutely okay with
the Russians, and that means that they can slowly roll
the ball forward so they don't necessarily have to conduct
you know, the bold Heinz Guderian style, you know, armored
spearheads into Ukraine and surround Ukrainian forces and defeat them,
(43:08):
you know, in a chest like victory on the battlefield.
They can simply slowly advance the ball on each front
and slowly chip away at Ukraine as a whole until
there's simply isn't a population left to defend it, and
there's no economy to support. And you know, it's becoming
a very expensive endeavor for the Western Allies to invest
(43:32):
in Ukraine's continued independence, and that seems to be the
strategy that they're pursuing right now, and that it's a ruthless,
ruthless calculus that they're going through. It's what's going to
be done to the Ukrainian people over the next five years,
is it? Well, we've gotten a sample of it. We
got a sample of it, you know, and the war
(43:54):
crimes that we saw in Bhucha and a number of
other places around the the occupied areas.
Speaker 3 (43:59):
In northern Ukrain and you know that they have absolutely yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
You know, I talked to some people who have been
over there. I've talked to a guy who got captured
by Ukrainian forces. He was with a guy that had
a Russian passport. It was very hairy, you know. They
were like, look, look, look, this is why he has
a passport. It was just like in the beginning of it,
he was just trying to get some folks out right,
and boy, you know, it is a thing I don't
(44:23):
want here. You know. I've said it on previous episodes
where I was talking to my oil changed homie over
here at my local oil change place and we were
just bsing about an episode and I said, yeah, we
were talking about are you ready for a hypersonic missile
to blow up the grocery store across the street just
out of nowhere? Bro? I said, are you ready for
that right now? Because that's what's happening over there in Ukraine?
(44:45):
And he looked at me. I said, are you really
ready to go bandage your neighbors blown up children because
their houses got blown up out of nowhere like like
these things. And he looked at me. I said, are
you ready for that? And He's like no. I was like, no, no, bro,
these that's what's happening over there. And if if we
let it happen and fight it over there, it doesn't
(45:06):
happen here, right if we can help prevent it and
thwart it and maybe help fight that battle and get
Congress to you know, see the need to do that
and not maybe sympathize, you know, like World War two.
Let's let world War two Congress. Some people in Congress
sympathized with with Hitler. Okay, they were sympathizers. There was
(45:27):
German sympathizers that were involved in politics that were like,
what's the big deal, He's just doing it. He just
let him do it. What's the big deal. It's his country,
it's his place, nah man, Look what happened. Right. History
books are written based off of exactly all that stuff.
So if we continue to let this guy do the
same thing, are we just like what? You know, what?
(45:49):
What do you think of that?
Speaker 4 (45:52):
There is definitely something to be said for maintaining the
status quo internationally. It's not acceptable to be in the
Community of Nations and to be integrated into the global
economy and to just invade your neighbors because you want
something that they have and that the United States and
(46:13):
NATO and the European Union have a that is our
defined interest in Ukraine that I think is absolutely one
hundred percent right and absolutely one defensible. There is an
added component that I think NATO really needs to keep
in mind, and that is that they do not want
Russia butting up directly against NATO allies.
Speaker 3 (46:35):
We would also be better off with a.
Speaker 4 (46:37):
Buffer between US and Russia, because the Russians if they're
if they butt up against the country like Poland or Romania.
There's a historian I really like named Victor Davis Hansen
who talks about deterrence as the principal reason why people
go to war. He makes the argument that it's, you know,
(46:57):
World War One and World War Two, you know, these
effectively laboratories of national power that kind of revealed to
us through a very ruthless and brutal process what we
should have known at the beginning. Right, So, if Germany
had looked at the number of countries that would be fighting,
you know, in nineteen forty five, before they invaded Poland
(47:20):
in nineteen thirty nine, they would never have done it.
They would never they would never have the generals and
I don't even think Hitler would have been crazy enough
to believe he could fight the United Kingdom and the
Soviet Union and France and the United States all at
the same time. But it's the loss of deterrence that
makes them believe that they can do these things that
(47:42):
at the end of World War One, the Allies were
absolutely certain that they never wanted to fight a brutal, ruthless,
industrialized conflict like that. Again, whereas the Russian excuse me,
the Germans came out of World War One and they said, oh,
we almost won that. I mean, we were like this
close if the Americans hadn't come into the keep making cars, right,
(48:07):
you know, So there's this. You know, Adam Hitler took
all of Czechoslovakia. You know, he remilitarized the Rhineland, and
he took the the Starland and took you know, in
the Anslas he took he took Austria, he took the
Sudate Land and Czechoslovakia then and he was a peace
(48:27):
at he was pointing in that process. And so the Germans,
both from political leadership in the West and then just
from a cultural sense, they read weakness in the United
Kingdom and France particularly, and that's what motivated them to
do what they're going to do. If Vladimir Putin is
you know, he's got forces stationed on the border of
Ukraine or.
Speaker 3 (48:46):
Belarus, and they're.
Speaker 4 (48:48):
On the border of Poland or Romania, you know, then
we start getting into a world where they might think
that they can conduct military operations in a NATO country
because they read that NATO won't do anything about it.
And that's a real nightmare scenario. We do not want
them ever thinking that they could start sending you know,
(49:12):
spetsnazed troops across the border to you know, you know,
conduct false flag operations in a place like Poland.
Speaker 3 (49:19):
Or something like that. That's how world wars get started.
Speaker 4 (49:24):
That's how that's that's how you risk something like a
general nuclear exchange. So the Western Allies have a definitive
interest in making sure that the Russians do not conquer Ukraine. Now,
the one thing I'll say, and this is this is
something for our domestic politicians to meditate on, is I
(49:45):
have not heard that case clearly articulated to the American people.
And that is the And if you if you're to
go back to nineteen thirty eight, thirty nine, nineteen forty,
nineteen forty one, leading up to per Harbor, Roosevelt, he
is he's very sympathetic with the isolationist views that were
(50:08):
in the United States at the time, especially after World
War One, and he sees, you know, getting involved in
the European conflict, as you know, a, we don't want
to do that. This is Europe's problem. But be this
distraction from my domestic initiatives, right like we're in the
Great Depression stole. But a number of his core advisors,
(50:30):
and the big one being George C. Marshall, with his
in conjunction with Roosevelt, Secretary of the Treasury, and for
the life of me, I'm struggling to remember that man's name,
but he was one of Roosevelt's closest confidants. They make
a case to Roosevelt that, hey, look that the United
States military only has you know, two hundred and fifty
(50:51):
three hundred thousand soldiers in the US Army. We're across Europe,
everyone is fielding an army of two to five million
men minimum. We're are at the beginning of World War Two.
Our army was smaller than the army of Portugal. We
are hopelessly and hilariously outgunned. And if we get into this,
(51:11):
you know we're going to lose badly. We need to
arm and you need to take this seriously. And Roosevelt too,
he he you know, he's a political grand master and
he knew how to listen to his advisors and make
the case to the American people that this was in
the national interest. He got the American people's he got
(51:31):
Congress to vote for a peacetime draft. And you know,
there's no such case that's been made. And you know,
we we get told that this is important by a
lot of the core figures, but you know, it's it's
not nearly at the same level, on the same scale
as Roosevelt's you know, attempt to communicate with the American
people about the issues at the time.
Speaker 2 (51:53):
I would love to hear the case be made on
behalf of what you just said, just like how Roosevelt
came out and said, here's the case, you know, listen
to his trusted advisors. Are I like how you said,
you know, our national politicians need to like you know,
meditate on that, you know, and like think about it,
(52:14):
you know, and find their inner self and you know
whatever they pray to and just come to terms with,
you know, being bipartisan and just seeing the greater need
of the good of the situation here. And that's it
and for all of us, you know, really represent us,
really represent what they're there to do, and and and
swing the bat and hit it out of the park.
We want to believe in that system. So I do
(52:36):
as an American. I want the world to believe that
we believe in that. My listeners that listen in the
UK and everywhere else, I want them to feel that
I have the confidence that we can overcome anything that's
between ourselves too, for the greater good of mankind. Right,
war is all you know, there's no peace without the
word war. Right, I hear that, but I mean, damn,
let's have some peace.
Speaker 4 (52:58):
Yes, And you know, to Roosevelt's credit too, he respected
the isolationist position.
Speaker 3 (53:06):
And there were a lot of.
Speaker 4 (53:08):
Luminaries, uh, you know, in American society. Charles Lindberg was
one of the big ones who were isolationists or even pacifists,
and there, you know, the Midwest especially was very isolationist.
And in all of his speeches he absolutely there was
not this kind of down finger wagging and shame on
(53:28):
you, you need to tone my position or else you're bad.
It was explaining to them that yes, that's noble, and
I agree with you, and I see your point. There
are some things to consider here that that change the math.
And that's the way the case was made, and you
know they are these these makes the notable speeches when,
(53:49):
especially when he introduces the draft, he starts the speech
by saying, I hate war, and uh, the people in
our time now that do not want to be in
broiled in Ukraine are worried that US troops are going
to be committed on the ground in the Ukraine. They
have a point, and it's a point that I think
we should all really pay attention to. And those those
(54:13):
we do not want to go to war with Russia,
but we do need to maintain deterrence, and we do
need to make sure that this country that wants to
maintain its independence can because it is in our absolute
national interest to do so. We just have to communicate
to the American public. White it's international.
Speaker 2 (54:29):
Interest, it's a global interest that it stays.
Speaker 3 (54:31):
And that's you know, that's a job for our political class.
Speaker 2 (54:35):
Oh yeah, and we're just stewards in our country to
do the best we can. Uh, what we have as
others around the world are stewards and theirs and together
they all seem to like steward together for the most part. Okay,
everybody seems to try to get along for the most
part that there's just these actors out there launching things
into space, setting them up all this different stuff. I'm
(54:56):
gonna go do this. You can't tell me what do
the Internet belongs to U? Look, I think you've been
a great guest on our podcast here at Soft Rep Radio,
and I've really it's really been awesome to have you on, Curtis.
I just want to say thank you for just going
back and forth about Russia and all of your knowledge.
Speaker 4 (55:14):
Hey, thank you for having me on. It's been great.
And man, I can talk about this stuff all day.
It's been it's been fantastic to speak with you.
Speaker 2 (55:24):
Well. I appreciate the objectivity you bring to the conversation.
And you know, I am going to also be a
better person and say I want our politicians to meditate more. Okay,
find it on the inside. And I also want to.
Speaker 4 (55:41):
Pitch certainly, couldn't hurt a little objectivity and a.
Speaker 2 (55:45):
Little a little exactly and hybrid warfare right on Amazon right,
Please leave a comment and a review once you go
check out his book, read it, leave a comment down there,
let him know that you're reading his book. It really
makes authors feel really good when they see somebody leave
a re spons anywhere that you are picking up his book,
if it's at the local mom and pop shops or
if it's at the airport. But Hybrid warfare the Russian
(56:08):
approach god to conflict. Hold on, you do have a
long title. One second, let me get it right. Hold on,
hold on, hold on, hold on those Russians. Hybrid warfare
the Russian approach to strategic competition and conventional military conflict
by yours right here, Former Green Beret Curtis L. Fox,
Thank you, Thank you, Red. And with that, that's Rad saying,
(56:32):
don't forget to go to the merch store. Keep that going.
And also check out the book club book hyphen Club,
soft rep dot com, Forward slash book hyphen Club making
a song, sing it all day long, go to it,
check it out, and I appreciate it. And this is
Rad saying happy holidays. It's probably twenty twenty four by now, Peace,
(56:55):
you've been
Speaker 1 (56:56):
Listening to Sink Rep Radia
Lute force. If it doesn't work, you're just not using enough.
You're listening to soft web Radio Special Operations Military Nails
on straight talk with the guys in the community.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Hey, what's going on? It's rad and welcome back to
another episode of soft rep Radio. But before I introduce
the guests that I have on today, I want to
let you guys know to go check out the mert
shop all right at soft rep dot com. Go check
out the merch store. Keep purchasing those cool things that
we've got coming out for you all the time, the
newest items. And then also soft rep dot com for
(00:58):
Slash book Club, so it's a book hyphen club. Just
go check out the Software book Club. Look that up,
Google it and who knows you might find this next author,
Curtis Fox and his book Hybrid Warfare, who we have
on the show today in our book club. Welcome to
the show, Curtis.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
How's it going ra nice to be here.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Hey, it's going great, Curtis. You've got me five y five?
I do okay, wonderful. Well, welcome. You wrote a book
called Hybrid Warfare. Because you're a former Special Operation Special
Forces soldier, I believe you're like tenth group, Is that correct?
Speaker 4 (01:35):
Yeah, it came from tenth Group, first fourth Battalion, and
then second Battalion. So I got out in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Oh, no, twenty sixteen. What I was going to say
is what did you enlist as? Like usually you know
how old were you when you did enlist if you
don't mind, and then what did you go in initially?
As was it a Bravo eleven bravo or.
Speaker 4 (01:54):
So I came in as an eighteen X ray And
so the default m O if you were to fail
out of any part of that pipeline process is leven Bravo.
But they stood up the eighteen X ray program as
a means of bringing civilian talent into the special forces community.
(02:14):
Prior to the War on Terror, you had to be
an E five before you could even put in a
packet to go to Special Forces selection. And then I
believe in two thousand and three or two thousand and four,
they decided that they would try to open it up
to the civilian world for people they felt were qualified.
There were a couple of key indicators that let recruiters
(02:36):
know they were talking to somebody who would possibly be
a qualified candidate. But I mean, there are a lot
of guys that start the eighteen X ray pipeline. They
played some call of duty and that's what they know
about it, and those guys don't do particularly well. But
there's also a lot of guys like myself that had
(02:57):
college degrees or maybe they'd run small businesses, and those
guys are the ones that end up doing very well.
They've they've had experiences that teach them how to think
long term, and so what they're going through in the
present is, you know, it's something that they're willing to
make the sacrifice for for a long term goal, and
those are those are usually the folks that do pretty well.
(03:20):
So you go through basic ait Airborne school and then
they send you to a to a preparation and conditioning course,
and then after that you go to Special Forces Assessment
selection and then if you get selected, you run the
Special Forces pipeline and you get mixed in with, you know,
all the guys that came from the army. If not,
you go to Needs of the Army. Most of those
(03:42):
guys are airborne qualified for that point to the eighty second.
Airborne's a pretty common place to go.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Sure, because they're already, like you know, right up their alley.
So really the eighty second, it's like if you're in
the eighty second, then you have a couple steps up
to try to go through a selections process. If you're right,
like that's a good place to be.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
Yeah, it's in.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
The airborne infantry too. I mean, the the Army genuinely
can considers them to be a cut above the rest
because they're they're double volunteers in a sense. They volunteered
for the Army and then they volunteered for airborne duty,
and then they actually have to volunteer multiple times to
jump out of the plane you know, every however often
that is to stay to stay airborne qualified exactly.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Yeah, So they.
Speaker 4 (04:29):
The Army, they treat the airborne Infantry is as you know,
an elite unit unto itself. And so when you have
somebody that's gone especially through the preparation and conditioning course
for special forces, if for whatever reason they fall out
of the pipeline, you know, maybe it's just a maturity issue,
or maybe it was an injury and they need to
(04:52):
they need to get fixed up before they come back.
The eighty seconds a pretty intuitive home for them and
a lot of those guys.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
You know, what they need is a sergeant.
Speaker 5 (04:59):
They can just sit down with them and teach them
a little while how to be a soldier, and once
they're part of that fire team or that squad for
a while, then they might think about coming back.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Do you know I of any like? Can I ask
you an off tough question about who's in SF? Like,
do you have any idea of any females that have
Is there a female SF? I know there's like some
other people who are clandestine. I guess, you know, I
don't know if they're quite SF. You know, is there
anybody who has put on the Green beret as a
female candidate? Yet?
Speaker 4 (05:32):
If there's more, you know, congratulations to them. I do
expect that to be relatively rare, simply because of the
physical requirements to go through Special Forces training. My understanding
issues this individual was an Olympian level athlete in her
own right. You will, I think it will be relatively
(05:54):
uncommon to see women go through, you know, the Special
Forces training pipelines simply be because of the physical demands
of the pipeline. But there will always be one or two.
They're very far out on the distribution, and if you
just think about it. In terms of a basic statistical analysis,
there are always going to be you know, a few
individuals who are several standard deviations ahead of the mean,
(06:17):
and because of that, I mean, they're you know, those
people are out there. Just to give you an idea
of how common that can be. My understanding is when
they opened Ranger School for women, they took a selected
group of ladies in ROTC and ROTC candidates and they
(06:39):
put them about six hundred of them through a special
six month preparation course to get them ready physically for
Ranger School. Out of that six hundred, I think there
was like twenty five or thirty that were given the
green light to move forward, and then they were rolled
into this pre Ranger School that I think was run
by the eighty second Airborne and from pre Ranger maybe
(07:03):
only about half of that thirty we're given the green
light to move on to Ranger School. And then of
those fifteen to eighteen women, three graduated Ranger School. So
you know, if you simply look at that, you know,
and I may have that wrong, two hundred original it
(07:25):
may have been. It may have been two hundred original applicants,
but that means one, about about one and a half
percent out.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Of about six hundred original applicants. That's almost, according to
the song, one out of let's see it. Yeah, yeah,
that's think a song where it says, you know, one
hundred middle tests today only three. So let's look at
(07:55):
the percentage there. So at three percent rate will pass
females coming two hundred applicants, let's go at that number
three of them qualifying, I'd say they're above the grade
of the song. That's awesome, now, I'd be really you
know if you think about the song, right, Barry Sadler, Well,
(08:20):
that's super awesome. I want to let my listener know
that like being a United States Special Forces Green Beret,
you know, is something that it's an Olympian athlete in itself.
Like you said she was an Olympian athlete. Well, you know,
growing up with the father who was SF, it was
always like, hey, come on, Aaron, we're gonna go I'm
gonna go run. And so I would ride my bike
while dad would go rock run around hill Air Force
(08:41):
Base in Utah here and airman would We were running
up this hill and it's kind of a big incline
and we were just going up at and it's a
normal thing for him. And someone pulled over and said
you need to ride up onto the base and he's like, no,
I'm good. He's just chugging right along up this hill
to go around and go back home because he's Army
and we were outside of an Air Force base, and
so everybody was thinking he was probably Air Force running
(09:03):
to the base with this. I don't know. It is
an interesting you know. I always walked around with him
holding his hand, thinking how come everybody doesn't have a
green beret at the base, especially at the Air Force base.
I was like, Dad, how come these guys don't have
a beret like you? And they'd walk out and put
their trucker cap on. I'm like, why are they putting
a trucker cap on? I don't understand what all these
big letters on there. It was just a different world
(09:24):
for a kid raised under the Green Beret flag, right.
So I just want to let you know you're you
guys are athletes. You're extream athletes. You guys are drinking
liquid protein to keep your bodies moving forward, and like
doing all of the hard marathons and you're out there,
you know, just breaking your feet and not saying nothing
about it.
Speaker 4 (09:43):
Yeah, I tell you what, the people that might really
get my admiration are the guys that stick with it
and do it for twenty or thirty years, and you
know when they get out, Man, the amount of abuse
that your body is taking, when you're pushing at that
in your late thirties and early forties and even going
(10:03):
into your fifties. The guys there are guys, man, that
they will still blow you away, you know. And how
quick they can crush a you know, five mile run
at fifty five years old. Serious, and you know, I
can't believe that some guys can perform at that level
that late in life.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Yeah, it's like a mind game. They just know it.
They just got it. They're just made to walk in
the boots that they wear. And you know, there's a
story out here of a guy that was retired, but
for like three four months he was still shuffling up
to jump, but he had retired, but no one said nothing.
They're like, didn't so. And then finally the what I
understood from the colonel was someone said, didn't so and
(10:43):
so retire like three months ago? Man? And they're like, yeah,
so he had to go approach him and say, hey,
you keep shuffling up to go jump on drills, But
these guys are just living that life. What do you
do with a guy like that, you know who his
whole life is, you know, Dale Pressel, to free the oppressed,
to like have this teacher mindset, to teach others to
(11:04):
be you know, free for themselves, free thinking. How where
does that guy go who's still try to shuffle up?
Speaker 4 (11:11):
Well, I tell you who who snatches up a lot
of them when they get out of service is professions
that have a they're very high stress, and they require
individuals that are okay with working unorthodox hours. Is the
first one that comes to mind is investment banking. So
you know, when I got out, the first place I
went was to do my NBA at Georgetown and then
(11:33):
you know, I specialized in financial services. The number of
guys I knew that were in there from the soft community,
or from the Marines, or you know, actually they're even
a couple of you know, silent service, you know, Navy
submariners in there.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
These guys are.
Speaker 4 (11:51):
Very used to working weird hours under an enormous amount
of stress. And you know, if you're working in investment banking.
You can be working eighty to nine hours a week
on a regular basis for you know, and the burnout
rate is very.
Speaker 3 (12:05):
Very high.
Speaker 4 (12:07):
And you know they're looking for people that fit the
the exact same personality bill it as a lot of
these you know, elite special operations communities, so you know
there there are places for them to go.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
You're right, you know, Like I was thinking about my dad.
He went through his MBA in business and finance and communications,
so it's in human resources, right, So again you're you're
exactly Yeah, I know it's true. Yeah he did. He
was working on his doctor until his heart really started
to stop that process. Yeah, heart surgeries and everything, but
he was chasing his degree up to his doctorate until
(12:45):
he passed.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
Yeah, hardcore, very cool.
Speaker 4 (12:49):
I tell you what, Man, in my heart of hearts,
I really really want to run into like a mall
cop one time that was like, you know, an airborne
ranger and like he's he's you know, driving around in
a golf cart now chasing kids when they mess up
with Macy's or something like that, and that person must
be out there, but I've never he's just.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
Trying to hold onto that uniform and that gigline and
just make sure that everything's still good to go. Hey,
we need that guy on the front lines of the
malls these days. That's the guy I want to driving
the golf cart. Give me Chuck Norris, Holy cow, Oh
my gosh. Now your book Hybrid Warfare. But writing a
(13:33):
book seems kind of what I get to interview you
guys about. There's a lot of you know, special operations
and veterans who are into writing their thoughts and bringing
out what their knowledge is. And it's like, I should,
you know, make a legacy, continue on with what I
know and put it somewhere in a book. Whatever your
thoughts may be, right, people can read it and understand
(13:54):
it for their own words, and then of course fact
check anybody's book out there, right, whatever you read, just
just go read a book, right, I'm all about that.
I like to read books. Now, I'm going to keep
kind of talking here about Hybrid Warfare The Russian Approach
to Strategic Competition and Conventional Military Conflict by Curtis L. Fox,
who is now author former Green Beret Olympian athlete. In
(14:17):
my mind, okay, I'm just going to give him that credit.
So what the book Overview says, here is dive into
the shadowy world of Russian military strategy in hybrid warfare.
In hybrid warfare, the Russian approach to strategic competition and
conventional military conflict, you are not just reading a book.
You're embarking on a gripping journey through the dark corridors
of Russian military strategy, where intrigue and danger lurk at
(14:41):
every turn, From the enigmatic Little Green Men to the
chilling echoes of poisoned doorknobs. This book unveils the cloak
of mystery shrouding Russians approach to the global power. Authored
by Curtis L. Fox. Our guest here are a former
Green Beret, Russian Speaker, tenth Special Forces Group alumni. Book
is a masterclass in strategic analysis. Fox skillfully connects the
(15:04):
dots here from the era of Peter the Great to
the modern day. Is it what is it? Machinations of
Vladimir Putin?
Speaker 3 (15:12):
Yep, that's yep, you got it.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
You know he's a dick. Okay, I'm just gonna say
how it is.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
Right.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
I grew up in a warsaw family, you know, growing
up in the eighties and nineties. My dad being all
Green Beret and learning all the tanks and all the
different weaponry, and the Cold War doesn't ever have seemed
to have stopped. It still seems it's the same weaponry,
same aks, same you know, cold furry hats on their heads,
standing in the you know, red square with you know,
(15:44):
saluting one guy who has the power over all the people.
An auto cross auto autoocracy, I believe, where he's just
the guy in charge with a few other people who
are running the town. Let's talk about it.
Speaker 4 (16:02):
Sure, and well, you know, the first thing the Russians
would say, you know, is who told you that the
Cold War was over? They see the Cold War as
unfinished business in a lot of ways. But it actually
runs deeper than that the Russians are pursuing. It wouldn't
It wouldn't matter who is in power in the Kremlin,
(16:24):
even if the Russia was a democracy, which I don't
think is ever going to be on the table, at
least not in my lifetime. The Russians, by their geographic
location and the nature of the land that they sit on,
have always needed to expand in order to survive, and
so the rut of ethnicity when it emerged in the
(16:45):
ninth century has only ever been doing that. And when
it runs into another neighboring tribe or people, they either
you know, subsume them or subordinate them, or conquer them
in one form or another until the empire can expand.
And that's when you're located on the vast flat northern
Eurasian step, that's really the only options. There are no
(17:08):
geographic barriers like the Alps, there are no major bodies
of water that really separate you from the neighboring peoples.
And so they pursued that strategy for you know, hundreds
and hundreds of years. And during that process there were
there were times where the Russian people themselves were conquered.
They were conquered by the Mongols. And what merged under
(17:31):
Peter the Great when he came to power was a
strategy where Russia was finally large enough to start trying
to plug the holes on its periphery, and so it
had gotten big enough where you could expand and to
hit those hard geographic barriers, whether that's the Caucasus Mountains
in the south, or the Baltic Sea or the Black Sea,
(17:52):
or you know, even pushing more eastward you could or
more westward, you could look at the Carpathian Mountains, you
could look at the what is the Vulgar, the Vogelsberg Mountains.
You know, once you're in eastern Germany, you know their
strategy by the end of the Cold War was to
forward station heavy ground forces there alongside tactical nuclear ordinance.
(18:15):
They had successfully condensed many, many thousands of miles of
borders down to just several hundred miles of terrain where
they needed to be able to station military forces to defend.
When you have blockades like the Gobi Desert in the
far east and then the Caucasus Mountains in the south,
(18:37):
you know that you can't march an army across. And
so that's how the Russians kind of play the game.
That entire security environment and it reached its apoge under
Joseph Stalin. But that entire security environment collapsed in nineteen
ninety one. All of the Warsaw packed states and the former
(18:57):
Soviet republics all broke off. They had what the Russians
would call color revolutions, which basically means that some sort
of a populist sometimes liberals, sometimes not, but some form
of a populist government came to power, you know, and
they basically, you know, mobilized, you know, a plurality of
(19:22):
the people to overthrow the standing communist regime which was
favorable to Moscow. Once that happened, they lost all of
that defense in depth. And Sivladimir Putin is he's pursuing
that strategy again and trying to restore those that the
Russian He's trying to restore the Russia's traditional definition of security.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
And what should really keep us awake.
Speaker 4 (19:45):
At night is that in order for the ethnicity to
really feel secure, they have to dominate a collective peoples
in Eastern Europe that are about twice as large or
twice as numerous as the roof ethnicity itself, and that
that is the Russian definition of security.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
Say that in a in a like, explain that just
a little bit more in layman's term, they want to
dominate a whole more, a bigger chunk than what they
are right is out you're trying to tell me, is
what you're saying.
Speaker 4 (20:14):
Yeah, you know, maybe twice as large. You know, all
of these former Soviet republics Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, you know,
you know, look down at Ukraine and what they're doing
in Ukraine right now, you know, and then former FORESAW
members like Poland and Romania, or Czechoslovakia or what became
the Czech Republic in Slovakia. You know, these are all
(20:37):
countries that they would like to be able to put
into a client state status at the minimum. Georgia, you know, yeah, yeah,
Moldova actually, and that that's another A lot of analysts
that I hold in high regard believe Moldova's next if
the Russians successfully annex Ukraine as they're trying to do
(21:00):
all those was the next on the menu. And it's
the low hanging fruit because it's not a NATO. It's
not a NATO, right.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
And so you know we're here. This is the current
thing he wants. And when I say he, I'm talking
about the current you know, person in charge of Russia,
of the dictator of Vladimir Putin. You know, he is,
you know, trying to go back to Peter the Great,
trying to get you know, McDonald's has left. Okay, places
have left. The things that came in in the late
(21:27):
eighties early nineties when Gorbachev tear down this wall was happening,
is leaving he's coming back with you know, he's imprisoning
you know, his political rivals like Nolvanney's still in prison.
No one's heard from him for a minute. You know.
Pussy Riot they opposed him and said a prayer on
stage at a concert and they were in prisoned for
(21:48):
multiple years because they're you know, a female band that
opposes Putin and his autocracy. And then there's you know,
just simple people who want to say something. And then
when you go and see some type of documentary where
they're talking to the doctors over there, and the doctor
lives in some type of little apartment with a bathtub
in this in his kitchen, and then he puts his
(22:09):
tabletop on the bathtub to eat his dinner. And he
is a doctor. And then the other people don't even
have that much and he's living in a kitchen with
a bathtub with a table that he has to make shift.
And he's one of the most educated people in Russia.
So it's like, you know, when do the Russian you know,
young Russians, the thirties, the forty year olds, when are
(22:31):
they going to say, hey, enough is enough? What's your
thought on that? Uh?
Speaker 4 (22:36):
I don't think that points out there at least. Yeah,
I don't think that point will be out there in
my lifetime. Or maybe maybe the better way to say
it is.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
The people.
Speaker 4 (22:48):
Vladimir Putin is not the return of Joseph Stalin. He's
not that powerful. He's Russia's most important power broker, and
he rose to power mostly by playing off a lot
of the different factions against one another. He knows how
to grant favors, he knows how to discreetly handle problems.
And when he was, you know, deputy mayor St. Petersburg,
(23:11):
and then when he moved to Moscow, and one of
the very first things he became responsible in Moscow under
Boris Jeltzen was taking former Soviet state assets and trying
to figure out how to privatize them. And he collected
an enormous number of IOUs and favors in that process.
(23:34):
And it's no coincidence that he jumped rapidly up to
being director of the FSB and then he was tapped
to be prime minister. I don't think he was even
in charge of the FSB for a full year before
he jumped to being prime minister. And then when Yeltsin retired,
he became the acting president until he was formally elected
in two thousand. But there are power brokers within his
(23:56):
party who he has to maintain faith with. One of
those people is Serga Shorgu. So and currently the current
name of Russia of Plutin's party is United Russia, and
Serga Shorgu is one of the most important power brokers
within the party itself. And Putin would never have gotten
his shot for president without Shoygu. So when you look
(24:18):
at all these really incompetent things that have happened in
Ukraine under Shorgu's watch as Defense minister, you know, one
of the things you have to keep in mind is
he's in the inner circle and there's no replacing him.
Speaker 3 (24:30):
And you know, you can't.
Speaker 4 (24:31):
Putin can't get rid of him anymore than I could
get rid of my mother, not that I would, I
love my mother. But you know, their family and they're connected,
actually their kit I think Putin's daughter is married to
his son. Actually, so that's who that's who runs Russia.
(24:52):
It's a click of about one hundred and fifty to
two hundred former they call themselves, you know, the world
calls them Slovaki, but their former national security professionals, whether
they came from the intelligence community and the KGB, or
whether they came from the Foreign service like Sergei Lavrov,
(25:13):
or whether they came from the military. They consider themselves
national security experts and they they are the individuals in
Russia who really have the education and the background and
the experience and the multiple languages to be able to
run Russia's institutions. The problem is they run it kleptocratically.
They run it mostly for themselves in this closed circle oligarchy.
(25:38):
Now the young people, there's this hope in the West
that you know, the youth of Russia are going to
eventually resent this and they are going to fight against it.
And I think, you know, they have always resented it
and they've always fought against it. But it's not really
that unique in Russian history. There's always been this kind
(25:58):
of a kleptocratic regime in Moscow. You know, Communism made
it worse, but and Stalin made that system work by
pretty much guaranteeing that anybody who opposed his regime would
be arrested and executed or at minimum sent off to
the Siberian Gulags. But under the Tsarist regime and the
old you know, the Tzar had the you know, the
(26:21):
the old Cheka. You know they this is very normal.
Russia has always, uh had a you know, a relatively
despotic regime and power, and some of that's kind of
owed to their geography as well. If you have a
regime in you know, Saint Petersburg, which is, you know,
the historical capital of Russia, but you have a you know,
(26:43):
a populist in Keemchatka or of Vladivolstock, you know, that
is string the pot. The best way to deal with
that person is to have the secret Service arrest him
and disappear him. It takes you know, years to marginal
army all the way out that far. So the best
way to hold the empire together is to, you know,
(27:05):
make sure every town has you know, a local chapter
of your selected special security service that's listening in on
all the conversations and has a has an eye in
eyes and ears in the room of pretty much any
private conversation. And that that's a legacy in Prussia. And
that's a legacy that Putin fell into right.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
And then you know, he's always seemed to have dabbled
with the leadership, whether he was prime minister or somehow
put into be prime minister and now he's the president
of Russia or he's at the head of you know,
like you said, the FSB or his the KGB or whatever.
You know that. Growing up with my father, he was
just always saying, you know, the thing you got to
(27:46):
think about is just submarines, right, it's not so much
like Russia's, you know, not around us as as a nation.
You know, he'd always say, you know, it's the it's
the subs off the coast you got to think about.
And so, you know, I hear, I don't know if
I'm just spreading rumors. I'm gonna call it a rumor
instead of fake news. So I might spread a rumor.
I hear there might be a submarine at the bottom
(28:08):
of the ocean that they command that has all of
the cable in its like little snips that connects the
underwater connectivity of all the you know, Internet and everything.
It could just like snip it. There's a huge underwater cable.
And my understanding is that just sit they sit there
ready for the go. You know what do you think?
Speaker 4 (28:33):
Yeah, Submarine engineering has been a it's been a high
priority for the regime. In Moscow for the last seventy years.
They realized that the U boats allowed Germany to go
toe to toe with the world's two most powerful navies,
you know, in World War Two, and I mean in
(28:55):
World War One as well, and they identified it early
on as a tool that they need to adapt.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
And so they've they've always they've always.
Speaker 4 (29:03):
Had, you know, a high priority on you know, submarine
technology and the old Soviet vessels they weren't afraid to
make them big and because of that, you could have
a double hole whole format, and so the outer hole
is your pressure hole in the inner hole. Uh, you know,
it simplifies internal design. It gives you all of this
(29:24):
extra space to really you know, create these you know,
much more functional and much more lavish living spaces and
so like you know, the old Typhoon class boats had
like a sauna and a you know and a and
a hot tub and stuff and swimming pools inside of them.
In the modern era, they you know, they still have
you know, it's a part of their nuclear triad. Is
(29:45):
they call them the was it the Berete class nuclear subs.
And then they still have the Delta Force that are
online and those are most of those were made in
the Soviet era, but they still have the delta force.
So the Berets have the what is it, the be
Lava ICBM, and then I think the old delta forges
are still using the R twenty nine and those are
(30:06):
both effective ICBMs. You know that that's something that should
give us real pause. You know, they have that technology
available and they could fire on anywhere. They could fire on,
you know, the United States, from anywhere in the world,
including their home port.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
They don't really need to be parked off the coast.
Speaker 4 (30:25):
So the Soviet strategy for years was actually to take
one of these subs and park them underneath the the
Arctic ice cap, where they'd be relatively hard to find,
and they were just supposed to sit there and then
in the event of war, they could surface, burst through
the ice cap, and fire off a couple of rockets,
and then go back down again. So the sub that
(30:46):
you're talking about, they are making a number of special
missions submarines. There's some details about this on the book website.
I didn't include these in the book because it's interesting information,
but it doesn't doesn't quite tie into the thesis of
hybrid warfare. But yeah, they want to be able to
(31:06):
interfere with the with the fiber optic trunk cables that
are running under a lot of the world's oceans. They
want that as an option, and they have engineered a
number of specialist submarines that are that are designed for
those kinds of special missions.
Speaker 3 (31:21):
And they don't even have to be able to dive
that deep themselves.
Speaker 4 (31:24):
They can always just launch an underwater autonomous vehicle and
that that robot will go down there and do the
dirty work for them. But they're also incapable of taking
like a you know, a SPETSNAS detachment from the Russian
Naval Infantry. They call them, uh you know, uh, you know,
(31:44):
reconnaissance teams, and they could, you know, they can offload
them onto you know, a battlefield the same way our
Navy seals would come out of a Virginia class sub
And those are all capabilities they keep and the Russians
have from the Akula classes forward, and to be specific,
what we called the Typhoon class submarine, you know, the
(32:04):
classic hunt for Red October. Those are very actually but
called the Akula class by the Russians. Akula means shark.
What we call the Acula class and NATO parlance is
an attack submarine that was meant that was meant to
be at parody or better with our Los Angeles class
submarines in the United States. Now, whether they are at
(32:26):
parody or not, I don't I don't know. And we've
faced out the Los Angeles class and we're in the
Virginia's and my understanding, the Virginias are extremely good. The
Russians have moved their Coula classes forward. They still have
the aculism Solves are very venerable boats as attack submarines,
but they don't do those kinds of special missions, even though.
Speaker 3 (32:47):
They're very quiet.
Speaker 4 (32:48):
But they have developed what they're calling the Yasin class
submarines attack and these are from the open source information
that we have about the Yas attack submarine. It's probably
the best and the most quot submarine the Russians have
ever fielded, and NATO analysts have stated publicly they're very,
very impressed with it. It's also extremely expensive. The first one,
(33:11):
with the first one, I think it is called the severe,
the sevierro Dvinsk, came off the line at something like
two billion dollars, which for the Russians is not pocket change.
They don't have that kind of money lying around, so
each subsequent boat is supposed to be another billion dollars
out of pocket. And so we'll see if they can
maintain production.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
No, they don't even really even have like aircraft carriers
comparatively speaking with a budget. I don't even john that.
I know, we're kind of like a little delay. I
just wanted to get in there. Like the Russian Navy,
they do focus so much energy on their sub mariners,
you know, and the navy itself, right, Like one of
the most disciplined militaries in the Russia is the navy,
which is why they're Spetsna's where with the blue stripes
(33:55):
are more revered than the other stripes of Spetsna's. But again,
the thing is is that they only have a few
aircraft carrier, right, They're not very like robust on that, right.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
They have one aircraft carrier.
Speaker 4 (34:09):
It's a Kuznetsov class carrier, and it's it's it's pretty worthless.
It's they had during the Soviet Union in the eighties.
They had they started off with the Kiev class carriers,
which I think they made three of, and that was
(34:29):
meant to give them a fast ground attack capability against
NATO surface ships, and they realized that their subs would
be very vulnerable with that air cover, and so they
wanted to try to be able to project some degree
of air power.
Speaker 3 (34:43):
Even though they knew they could never have parody.
Speaker 4 (34:45):
With with you know, the United States, the UK and France.
But the Kuznetsov class was meant to be the next
four A forward and they're about you know, the boat
itself is about twenty f five thousand tons. It had
a sister ship that was actually after the class of
(35:06):
the Soviet Union was left in Ukraine and the Ukrainians
first turned it into a casino and then they sold
the hull to the Chinese and that is what became
the li and Ying in China. But the Kuznetsov class,
at about forty five thousand tons can support something like
a squadron of twenty five planes. I think they were
running the mid twenty nine K. I don't know, I
(35:30):
can't remember what it's been upgraded to at this point.
But it breaks down all the time, and the fumes
from the motor runs on this kind of it's almost
a tar. It's meant to run off a very low
refined petroleum derivative you could almost call tar and they're
(35:51):
just a very poorly constructed boat. They suffocate the people
that operate inside of them. They tried to bring it
down for the war in Syria. They had to have
it paced by an ocean going tug boat in case
it broke down, which it did multiple times. And then
when they started actually releasing planes to conduct combat operations
in Syria, they had to close all air ops for
(36:13):
the boat itself and then have all the planes land
at their at their Hyinenem air base in Syria and
just fight from a from an airfield on the ground
because the carrier was, you know, it was prohibiting their
their success. They haven't retired it because simply having an
aircraft carrier is a is a point of national pride
(36:35):
and it should be retired. It's caught on fire multiple times,
but they just won't let it go. The issue is
they don't have the existing naval facilities enable shipyards to
actually build a boat of that size right now, and
certainly not staffed with the subject matter expertise it would
take to build a boat of that size. So until
(36:57):
they until they update their infrastructure in their workforce, you know,
having a real aircraft carrier is probably not going to
be on the table for them.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
Yeah. Really that is a big deal. I mean with
considering you know, air superiority and having aircraft that can
just like be right off the coast or take off
and you know, just dominate the airspace within landing back
on its carrier group right, let alone just their carrier,
which I understood was also like you said, I think
sold over to China and it's a nineteen fifties fifty
(37:28):
five version aircraft carrier that they've modeled their aircraft carrier
off of, which has like that lip at the front
of it when they try to take off so they
can fall or something. I don't know. I mean, why
is it that I feel like when I think of
Russia equipment, it's frozen cold and not functional.
Speaker 4 (37:46):
Well, that's a common problem. The Russians inherited the Soviet Arsenal,
and when Russia collapsed or what let's say, and the
Soviet Union collapsed, Moscow went from having an economy that
was maybe half the size of the United States.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
They always fudged.
Speaker 4 (38:10):
Their numbers, so we don't really know exactly how large
the Soviet economy was because the data that they created
around this is always very inflated. But by nineteen ninety three,
the Russian economy was about half the size of the
United Kingdom, and those are numbers that we can trust.
And so with an economy half the size of that
(38:30):
of the United Kingdom, they were trying to maintain an
armed forces that could compete not just with the United
States but with the entire NATO alliance, and maintaining that
equipment is physically impossible. They simply didn't have the resources,
and so this was all put in. It was all,
you know, it was put in dock, and the ships rusted,
and the tanks were put into you know, storage storage yards,
(38:53):
and they you know, they had weeds grow into the tracks,
and that's what's happened ever since. They didn't really start
modernizing and updating their armed forces until the mid two thousands.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
Right after other countries had already had a run in
the game trying to get up on them. Now they're
trying to catch up, so they are. And in the meantime,
you know, in the nineties, they did sign that agreement
to like you know, allow Ukraine to be its own
self with the nuclear proliferation act red or where they
got rid of all their nukes and quote unquote said, okay,
(39:26):
you get to have your own sovereign nation. You're now Ukraine.
And then, you know, two thousand and twelve jumps up
and they start to attack into Crimea and then they
putin says don't fly your civilian airliners in the airspace
or it will be shot down. You know, it's a
war zone. But they shot down the airliners of the
(39:49):
civilians that were just flying over. And you know, so
now he's trying to say that it's annexed. He's like,
this is ours now because we went in and fought
on it, and you've got you know, Zelensky, President Zelenski
of Ukraine trying to you know, keep it together, keep
a positive mission for his troops who are either in
(40:10):
their fifties and have old Russian experience or they're in
their twenties and they have airsoft wargame experience. And so
you have this war going on right now over there
where it's needed to be defended because Ukraine is its
own stone state. Okay, I recognize Ukraine, and just because
(40:33):
they attacked in February of twenty twenty two doesn't mean
that it's not been going on for some time, and
for him to want to go back to the Peter
the Great, the Peter of the Vlatimir the Great, whatever
he wants to be thought of, I don't think it's
quite doing it because you know, my understanding is they've
lost around three hundred thousand plus Russian soldiers since that
February initial invasion of Ukraine. You know what is Putin's end.
Speaker 3 (40:58):
Game, well, you know his endgame.
Speaker 4 (41:03):
His endgame is to restore the former buffer states to
their subservient position. I don't think that that full game
is in the cards in the next five years for certain.
Speaker 3 (41:16):
But what he can do.
Speaker 4 (41:17):
With Ukraine, even though they've floundered so badly on the
war when it started in February of twenty two, what
they can do at this point is wade out Western support.
The Ukrainians rely on foreign donated weapons, they rely on
foreign financing, and increasingly they rely on foreign fuel and
(41:37):
foreign food. The Russians will attack the Ukrainian economy and,
wherever possible, the Ukrainian population itself. If they can destroy infrastructure,
the power grid, the port facilities, the railroads that are needed,
you know, Ukrainian grain is you know, it's an important
staple in the world, you know, food supply chain. Right,
(42:00):
they're the fifth largest grain producer. That's a backbone of
the Ukrainian economy keeping them from exporting those things. First off,
that increases the price of wheat, and that's you know,
Russia is the world's largest grain producer, and that creates
demand for their own produce, but that destroys the capacity
of the Ukrainian economy to support the government. And it
(42:22):
the more you attack the power grid and the more
you attack the water supply, the more you tend to
create refugees, you know, especially in you know, as you
do this in heavy population centers, and refugees have a
number of characteristics, but one of the big ones is
that they don't fight back, at least not in an
organized way. They tend to drift into Europe and they
(42:45):
become the European Union's problem, which is absolutely okay with
the Russians, and that means that they can slowly roll
the ball forward so they don't necessarily have to conduct
you know, the bold Heinz Guderian style, you know, armored
spearheads into Ukraine and surround Ukrainian forces and defeat them,
(43:08):
you know, in a chest like victory on the battlefield.
They can simply slowly advance the ball on each front
and slowly chip away at Ukraine as a whole until
there's simply isn't a population left to defend it, and
there's no economy to support. And you know, it's becoming
a very expensive endeavor for the Western Allies to invest
(43:32):
in Ukraine's continued independence, and that seems to be the
strategy that they're pursuing right now, and that it's a ruthless,
ruthless calculus that they're going through. It's what's going to
be done to the Ukrainian people over the next five years,
is it? Well, we've gotten a sample of it. We
got a sample of it, you know, and the war
(43:54):
crimes that we saw in Bhucha and a number of
other places around the the occupied areas.
Speaker 3 (43:59):
In northern Ukrain and you know that they have absolutely yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
You know, I talked to some people who have been
over there. I've talked to a guy who got captured
by Ukrainian forces. He was with a guy that had
a Russian passport. It was very hairy, you know. They
were like, look, look, look, this is why he has
a passport. It was just like in the beginning of it,
he was just trying to get some folks out right,
and boy, you know, it is a thing I don't
(44:23):
want here. You know. I've said it on previous episodes
where I was talking to my oil changed homie over
here at my local oil change place and we were
just bsing about an episode and I said, yeah, we
were talking about are you ready for a hypersonic missile
to blow up the grocery store across the street just
out of nowhere? Bro? I said, are you ready for
that right now? Because that's what's happening over there in Ukraine?
(44:45):
And he looked at me. I said, are you really
ready to go bandage your neighbors blown up children because
their houses got blown up out of nowhere like like
these things. And he looked at me. I said, are
you ready for that? And He's like no. I was like, no, no, bro,
these that's what's happening over there. And if if we
let it happen and fight it over there, it doesn't
(45:06):
happen here, right if we can help prevent it and
thwart it and maybe help fight that battle and get
Congress to you know, see the need to do that
and not maybe sympathize, you know, like World War two.
Let's let world War two Congress. Some people in Congress
sympathized with with Hitler. Okay, they were sympathizers. There was
(45:27):
German sympathizers that were involved in politics that were like,
what's the big deal, He's just doing it. He just
let him do it. What's the big deal. It's his country,
it's his place, nah man, Look what happened. Right. History
books are written based off of exactly all that stuff.
So if we continue to let this guy do the
same thing, are we just like what? You know, what?
(45:49):
What do you think of that?
Speaker 4 (45:52):
There is definitely something to be said for maintaining the
status quo internationally. It's not acceptable to be in the
Community of Nations and to be integrated into the global
economy and to just invade your neighbors because you want
something that they have and that the United States and
(46:13):
NATO and the European Union have a that is our
defined interest in Ukraine that I think is absolutely one
hundred percent right and absolutely one defensible. There is an
added component that I think NATO really needs to keep
in mind, and that is that they do not want
Russia butting up directly against NATO allies.
Speaker 3 (46:35):
We would also be better off with a.
Speaker 4 (46:37):
Buffer between US and Russia, because the Russians if they're
if they butt up against the country like Poland or Romania.
There's a historian I really like named Victor Davis Hansen
who talks about deterrence as the principal reason why people
go to war. He makes the argument that it's, you know,
(46:57):
World War One and World War Two, you know, these
effectively laboratories of national power that kind of revealed to
us through a very ruthless and brutal process what we
should have known at the beginning. Right, So, if Germany
had looked at the number of countries that would be fighting,
you know, in nineteen forty five, before they invaded Poland
(47:20):
in nineteen thirty nine, they would never have done it.
They would never they would never have the generals and
I don't even think Hitler would have been crazy enough
to believe he could fight the United Kingdom and the
Soviet Union and France and the United States all at
the same time. But it's the loss of deterrence that
makes them believe that they can do these things that
(47:42):
at the end of World War One, the Allies were
absolutely certain that they never wanted to fight a brutal, ruthless,
industrialized conflict like that. Again, whereas the Russian excuse me,
the Germans came out of World War One and they said, oh,
we almost won that. I mean, we were like this
close if the Americans hadn't come into the keep making cars, right,
(48:07):
you know, So there's this. You know, Adam Hitler took
all of Czechoslovakia. You know, he remilitarized the Rhineland, and
he took the the Starland and took you know, in
the Anslas he took he took Austria, he took the
Sudate Land and Czechoslovakia then and he was a peace
(48:27):
at he was pointing in that process. And so the Germans,
both from political leadership in the West and then just
from a cultural sense, they read weakness in the United
Kingdom and France particularly, and that's what motivated them to
do what they're going to do. If Vladimir Putin is
you know, he's got forces stationed on the border of
Ukraine or.
Speaker 3 (48:46):
Belarus, and they're.
Speaker 4 (48:48):
On the border of Poland or Romania, you know, then
we start getting into a world where they might think
that they can conduct military operations in a NATO country
because they read that NATO won't do anything about it.
And that's a real nightmare scenario. We do not want
them ever thinking that they could start sending you know,
(49:12):
spetsnazed troops across the border to you know, you know,
conduct false flag operations in a place like Poland.
Speaker 3 (49:19):
Or something like that. That's how world wars get started.
Speaker 4 (49:24):
That's how that's that's how you risk something like a
general nuclear exchange. So the Western Allies have a definitive
interest in making sure that the Russians do not conquer Ukraine. Now,
the one thing I'll say, and this is this is
something for our domestic politicians to meditate on, is I
(49:45):
have not heard that case clearly articulated to the American people.
And that is the And if you if you're to
go back to nineteen thirty eight, thirty nine, nineteen forty,
nineteen forty one, leading up to per Harbor, Roosevelt, he
is he's very sympathetic with the isolationist views that were
(50:08):
in the United States at the time, especially after World
War One, and he sees, you know, getting involved in
the European conflict, as you know, a, we don't want
to do that. This is Europe's problem. But be this
distraction from my domestic initiatives, right like we're in the
Great Depression stole. But a number of his core advisors,
(50:30):
and the big one being George C. Marshall, with his
in conjunction with Roosevelt, Secretary of the Treasury, and for
the life of me, I'm struggling to remember that man's name,
but he was one of Roosevelt's closest confidants. They make
a case to Roosevelt that, hey, look that the United
States military only has you know, two hundred and fifty
(50:51):
three hundred thousand soldiers in the US Army. We're across Europe,
everyone is fielding an army of two to five million
men minimum. We're are at the beginning of World War Two.
Our army was smaller than the army of Portugal. We
are hopelessly and hilariously outgunned. And if we get into this,
(51:11):
you know we're going to lose badly. We need to
arm and you need to take this seriously. And Roosevelt too,
he he you know, he's a political grand master and
he knew how to listen to his advisors and make
the case to the American people that this was in
the national interest. He got the American people's he got
(51:31):
Congress to vote for a peacetime draft. And you know,
there's no such case that's been made. And you know,
we we get told that this is important by a
lot of the core figures, but you know, it's it's
not nearly at the same level, on the same scale
as Roosevelt's you know, attempt to communicate with the American
people about the issues at the time.
Speaker 2 (51:53):
I would love to hear the case be made on
behalf of what you just said, just like how Roosevelt
came out and said, here's the case, you know, listen
to his trusted advisors. Are I like how you said,
you know, our national politicians need to like you know,
meditate on that, you know, and like think about it,
(52:14):
you know, and find their inner self and you know
whatever they pray to and just come to terms with,
you know, being bipartisan and just seeing the greater need
of the good of the situation here. And that's it
and for all of us, you know, really represent us,
really represent what they're there to do, and and and
swing the bat and hit it out of the park.
We want to believe in that system. So I do
(52:36):
as an American. I want the world to believe that
we believe in that. My listeners that listen in the
UK and everywhere else, I want them to feel that
I have the confidence that we can overcome anything that's
between ourselves too, for the greater good of mankind. Right,
war is all you know, there's no peace without the
word war. Right, I hear that, but I mean, damn,
let's have some peace.
Speaker 4 (52:58):
Yes, And you know, to Roosevelt's credit too, he respected
the isolationist position.
Speaker 3 (53:06):
And there were a lot of.
Speaker 4 (53:08):
Luminaries, uh, you know, in American society. Charles Lindberg was
one of the big ones who were isolationists or even pacifists,
and there, you know, the Midwest especially was very isolationist.
And in all of his speeches he absolutely there was
not this kind of down finger wagging and shame on
(53:28):
you, you need to tone my position or else you're bad.
It was explaining to them that yes, that's noble, and
I agree with you, and I see your point. There
are some things to consider here that that change the math.
And that's the way the case was made, and you
know they are these these makes the notable speeches when,
(53:49):
especially when he introduces the draft, he starts the speech
by saying, I hate war, and uh, the people in
our time now that do not want to be in
broiled in Ukraine are worried that US troops are going
to be committed on the ground in the Ukraine. They
have a point, and it's a point that I think
we should all really pay attention to. And those those
(54:13):
we do not want to go to war with Russia,
but we do need to maintain deterrence, and we do
need to make sure that this country that wants to
maintain its independence can because it is in our absolute
national interest to do so. We just have to communicate
to the American public. White it's international.
Speaker 2 (54:29):
Interest, it's a global interest that it stays.
Speaker 3 (54:31):
And that's you know, that's a job for our political class.
Speaker 2 (54:35):
Oh yeah, and we're just stewards in our country to
do the best we can. Uh, what we have as
others around the world are stewards and theirs and together
they all seem to like steward together for the most part. Okay,
everybody seems to try to get along for the most
part that there's just these actors out there launching things
into space, setting them up all this different stuff. I'm
(54:56):
gonna go do this. You can't tell me what do
the Internet belongs to U? Look, I think you've been
a great guest on our podcast here at Soft Rep Radio,
and I've really it's really been awesome to have you on, Curtis.
I just want to say thank you for just going
back and forth about Russia and all of your knowledge.
Speaker 4 (55:14):
Hey, thank you for having me on. It's been great.
And man, I can talk about this stuff all day.
It's been it's been fantastic to speak with you.
Speaker 2 (55:24):
Well. I appreciate the objectivity you bring to the conversation.
And you know, I am going to also be a
better person and say I want our politicians to meditate more. Okay,
find it on the inside. And I also want to.
Speaker 4 (55:41):
Pitch certainly, couldn't hurt a little objectivity and a.
Speaker 2 (55:45):
Little a little exactly and hybrid warfare right on Amazon right,
Please leave a comment and a review once you go
check out his book, read it, leave a comment down there,
let him know that you're reading his book. It really
makes authors feel really good when they see somebody leave
a re spons anywhere that you are picking up his book,
if it's at the local mom and pop shops or
if it's at the airport. But Hybrid warfare the Russian
(56:08):
approach god to conflict. Hold on, you do have a
long title. One second, let me get it right. Hold on,
hold on, hold on, hold on those Russians. Hybrid warfare
the Russian approach to strategic competition and conventional military conflict
by yours right here, Former Green Beret Curtis L. Fox,
Thank you, Thank you, Red. And with that, that's Rad saying,
(56:32):
don't forget to go to the merch store. Keep that going.
And also check out the book club book hyphen Club,
soft rep dot com, Forward slash book hyphen Club making
a song, sing it all day long, go to it,
check it out, and I appreciate it. And this is
Rad saying happy holidays. It's probably twenty twenty four by now, Peace,
(56:55):
you've been
Speaker 1 (56:56):
Listening to Sink Rep Radia
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