Posted on 11/20/2022 5:05:19 PM PST by Cathi
Excellent MacGregor interview about what prompted Gen. Milley to leak private briefing of Biden. Interview discusses negotiation possibilities...not likely.
Huge Russian offensive being prepared for. Milley is concerned that this conflict will end in defeat for the collective West.
Let the Euros handle it from here. America should never have gotten involved in the 2014 coup that started all this.
Oh puleeze.
Doug MacGregor never gets it right because he’s a Russian propagandist.
This must be the OTHER Russian offensive, not the last 6 he predicted.
Simple question. Russia has such a big offensive up its sleeve, why didn’t it do that rather than suffer worse and worse setbacks during the last year?
“There are none so blind as those who will not see.”
Col. Douglas MacGregor is a Trump favorite.
November 12, 2022 Responsible Statecraft
Macgregor, a West Point graduate, is an acquired taste: outspoken and controversial. He has flagged reporters with his statements about immigrants (we need martial law at the U.S.-Mexico border), Iranians (we need to look for areas where we can cooperate), Afghanistan (we have no business being there) Iraq (we should have left, long ago), and Syria (we should get out immediately). Those views aren’t to everyone’s liking, but they’re especially controversial in the military, whose staid stance on foreign interventions does not countenance the kind of dissent in the upper ranks that Macgregor represents. Macgregor, it is said, has refused to “stay in his lane,” has been too outspoken, too vocal, and not really a team player.
Yet, senior military officers quietly admit that in terms of sheer intellect, no one quite matches Macgregor. Several years ago, I asked a senior U.S. Marine Corps officer to name each of the services’s most creative thinkers. His answers were entirely predictable to anyone with even a passing knowledge of those in uniform, except when it came to the Army. He didn’t hesitate: “It’s Doug Macgregor,” he said. “He’s the best thinker they have, living or dead.” Retired Gen. Tommy Franks would probably disagree.
Franks, the former commander of Operation Iraqi Freedom, brought Macgregor (then still in uniform), to U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa in the run-up to the Iraq War in early 2002 to brief his war planners. Macgregor took a roundabout, but effective route, in getting there: he had briefed Newt Gingrich on his own war plan for Iraq, and Gingrich was so taken by what he had to say that he recommended him to then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who insisted that Franks hear him out.
Macgregor’s appearance in Tampa is now a part of Army legend. The U.S. military can take Baghdad with 15,000 troops, Macgregor announced to the room of uniformed experts. The statement stunned Franks, as did Macgregor’s advice on “Phase IV” (postwar) operations — which had not been mentioned in his briefing. Why wasn’t it there? Macgregor was asked. “The reason it’s not there,” Macgregor said, “is because we’re not going to need it. We’re going to turn the governing of Iraq over to the Iraqis, then we’re going to get out.”
Whereupon Mike Fitzgerald, one of Franks’ most senior planners, got up from his seat and left the room. “I think it was at that point that Doug’s career ended,” a fellow West Point graduate says. That’s probably true, but only in part.
While Macgregor retired soon after his Tampa appearance, he did so only after talking with then-Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki. Macgregor told Shinseki that the Army needed to get lighter and faster, cutting away its logistic tail and its top-heavy officer corps. Shinseki not only agreed, he was planning his own Macgregor-like series of reforms. But the talk with Shinseki wasn’t the first time Macgregor had made his mark. Shinseki’s immediate predecessor, Army Chief of Staff Dennis Reimer, required his senior staff to read “Breaking the Phalanx,” Macgregor’s 1997 book on how the Army should fight. Reimer helped to put Macgregor’s innovations on the map. This is where we need to go, Reimer told his staff.
And then there’s 73 Easting.
Arguably, none of Doug Macgregor’s later influence would have been possible without the Battle of 73 Easting (named for its map coordinates — its “phase lines”), which is still studied by armored officers as one of the most significant, and most lopsided, tank victories in the history of American warfare. The battle took place on February 26, 1991 — when elements of the U.S. 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, under Macgregor, took on the tanks of the Tawakalna Division of Saddam Hussein’s vaunted Republican Guard. Macgregor expertly maneuvered his tanks through the enemy lines — directing his tank leaders, one of whom was H.R. McMaster, through the enemy lines. Macgregor lost one man killed, but his tank squadrons destroyed dozens of armored vehicles. The battle had a deep effect on Macgregor, who remembers talking with one of the Iraqi prisoners after the battle: “Why do you not go to Baghdad now?” the prisoner asked him. “You have the power. Your army rules the heavens and the earth. Do you think we love Saddam?” In the years that followed, the Iraqi prisoners’ words haunted Macgregor. The road to Baghdad was open — but America didn’t take it.
Ironically, in one of those odd twists of history, Macgregor’s role as the commander of his tank squadrons is often ignored, while McMaster is remembered and celebrated. Then too, as any senior Army officer will testify, Macgregor’s outspoken and often too-public critique of his own service hurt his chances for promotion. Macgregor questioned everything: why are we staying in Afghanistan? Or Iraq? Or Syria? Why are we prosecuting these endless wars? Doug Macgregor had lots of time to ponder these questions, particularly during Operation Iraqi Freedom, as his kinsman and fellow officer, McMaster, was adding to his laurels during the Anbar Awakening, where he performed brilliantly. Macgregor, meanwhile, was sidelined and marginalized, with a position at the National Defense University.
And so, it seems the McMaster-Macgregor narrative was set. McMaster got his stars, while Doug Macgregor went on to a career as a military historian. McMaster became the acolyte to greatness (the up-and-coming friend of David Petraeus), a controversial president’s national security advisor (one of the “adults in the room”), a gruff-voiced patriot (warning us incessantly of looming threats in Russia, China, Iran, etc.), and all-around “team player.”
Macgregor has always shrugged this off: his old friend deserves his stars, deserves his praise, and has proved his courage. Team player? It’s true: McMaster has been so fitted to his uniform that he looks like a throwback, a latter-day Patton. He’s the quintessential team player in a service that prizes staying in your lane, that rewards teamwork. And Macgregor? Oddly, and ironically — and for all of his outspoken views on ending America’s endless wars, Doug Macgregor has also been a team player.
He’s just been on the wrong team.
yeah we’ll let YOU divide up the countries in Europe, that will work.
There isn’t a country on this earth without distinct ethnic areas.
Question. Why are you arguing with youself?
Col. Doug MacGregor is one of the few telling the truth and with accurate analysis and has called it right all along. It is so easy for ill informed persons to simply call him silly things like a Putin or Russian supporter because it goes against the false narrative of the Biden administration, all the fake news, and the woke leftist world agenda. Eastern Ukraine has always been ethnically Russian and it is insane not to come to a negotiated peace. The only other outcome as an all out war of annihilation of the enemy. That means the west interdicting itself is forcing a world war we have no business fighting. These idiots think they can poke the bear and defeat Russia and have it fall into the west without nukes being used. That is an insane and stupid risk. Russia has been given no choice but to now go to total war and it is coming unless cooler heads in the west prevail and dump Zalinski. Nobody is doing what is best for Ukraine. The Biden criminal enterprise is going to have the whole world be devastated.
Pray for the complete collapse of the military hubris and Neocon intervention of the West. It's a terrible legacy.
We also likely know, with certainty, that the launch was not triggered by the trajectory of any inbound Russian missile. FF is likely, and/or rogue UKRs stirring up trouble. This whole thing stinks and no one is telling the whole story yet.
I do. The only way back for the people of the United States is a Deep State defeat of the rules based international order that will allow us to go back to being a government of the people; by the people and for the people.
Zelensky didn’t know a word of Ukrainian prior to being thrown into the presidency by one of the oligarchs. He has been taking lessons though he has a tendency to drift into Russian when he gets excited...:-)
Never should have gotten involved? WE MADE IT HAPPEN.
Heavy shelling at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
Who is shelling it? The Polish missile attack didn’t work so well.
https://thehill.com/policy/international/3743865-ukraine-nuclear-plant-shelled-un-watchdog-says/
Can you point to a single predictions the Colonel has been right about in the six months of war?
For an “expert” he seems to know awfully little.
How big was Doug’s bonus from Russia Times News this year? He’s clearly working hard for his Russian bosses so he deserves it.
The Ukrainians have been shelling it for months and the international authorities have deliberately not disclosed who is doing it. Instead they have suggested that to protect the facility the Russians should leave and give the power plant to Ukraine. Apparently they have a good sense of humor...:-)
This is how Russia has been trying to protect it.
The radar system for detecting unmanned aerial vehicles, which has been successfully used for four months at the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant, has been shown to a wide audience for the first time, said the head of the laboratory for external piloting and operation of unmanned aerial vehicles of the Scientific Research Institute of Computer Complexes named after. M. A Kartseva Vitaly Dolgov. TASS 21.11.2022, 03:30 MSK
Mark
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