I’ve been working on transcribing, as in checking what the AI did, one thing it can do unlike say law or war, our old podcasts. All have been transcribed.

Here’s the first episode from Adjutants Lounge, all rights are Ben and Phil.

Half an hour for everybody, the rest for paid subscribers. Might release for free to everybody in future, might not.

Update: 30 November 2024 - free for everybody in light of this

Audio for free here

Transcript

00:00:00 Ben Skipper

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Adjutant’s Lounge. I'm joined today by Doctor Philip Blood, CJ4 locomotives, and author of the book Birds of Prey.

00:00:14 Ben Skipper

Which, if you haven't read, do suggest you get a copy, because that way Phil can afford to live the lavish lifestyle which he currently leads.

00:00:29 Ben Skipper

Phil, are you there, mate?

00:00:31 Ben Skipper

AC supply COCC supply OC bread basket. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:00:37 Dr Philip Blood

OC Supply bread basket.

00:00:42 Ben Skipper

I hit my weed.

00:00:42 Dr Philip Blood

Or known as Prefect on Harvest Festival.

00:00:50 Ben Skipper

My window box brings all the boys to the town.

00:00:56 Ben Skipper

Yeah. So actually.

00:00:59 Ben Skipper

John, is he not out of the way because but but we are going to talk about quite, quite seriously, aren't we, we've we've we've had a discussion already about today's podcast which is.

00:01:10 Ben Skipper

Not the off piece because there, there, there is always a serious threat to what we discussed, but there's perhaps more so.

00:01:17 Ben Skipper

And then this goes back to a thread you posted on the 10th of March.

00:01:21 Ben Skipper

Entitled to the Russian where war?

00:01:27 Ben Skipper

Subtitle Putin's Anaconda plan as it unrolls.

00:01:31 Ben Skipper

This is a really important and a very it's almost a full a foresight field thread, Phil.

00:01:39 Ben Skipper

Especially when we look at contemporary, you know the the maps that they're updating from various sources.

00:01:49 Ben Skipper

And you're pretty much on the nail with this one.

00:01:56 Dr Philip Blood

It developed oddly and we were all confused.

00:02:03 Dr Philip Blood

And as you know, I'm not going to immediately rush in to say, well, this is Stalingrad or this is Bagration or Battle of Berlin or.

00:02:13 Dr Philip Blood

Infamously, the finished war.

00:02:16 Dr Philip Blood

A kind of.

00:02:18 Dr Philip Blood

Applied Martin Edmonds philosophy when we were at university, when he was our mentor and teacher of Strategic Studies and civil military relations. And he said you just can't do.

00:02:31 Dr Philip Blood

Lottery job on, you know some past battle or some past history.

00:02:35 Dr Philip Blood

You have to.

00:02:36 Dr Philip Blood

You have to really look at what's been.

00:02:38 Dr Philip Blood

Message to you in the movements of operations.

00:02:42 Dr Philip Blood

And UM.

00:02:44 Dr Philip Blood

We got, we got we. We spent most of our time on the 1973 Arab Israeli conflict.

00:02:53 Dr Philip Blood

Which is long forgotten now in memory, but it was the time when you had.

00:03:00 Dr Philip Blood

The the Suez Canal and rivers and what have you and mountain districts and constant to and fro battle in what probably.

00:03:09 Dr Philip Blood

Pretty much looked like at the time as sort of an extension of Second World War warfare. Like some something out of the desert conflict and Air Force jets and missiles were destroying the Israeli Air Force and.

00:03:26 Dr Philip Blood

The Egyptians crossed a certain point of the Suez Canal and towards the Sinai you had a the Golan Heights, being a particularly interesting situation where there was lots of interdiction.

00:03:43 Dr Philip Blood

Air cover and tanks on the ground and centurions were chewing up Syrian Army and all of that good stuff and we would we, we actually sat down and deconstructed that war and those battles over a period of time and it it was kind of that discipline.

00:04:01 Dr Philip Blood

Which sent me.

00:04:04 Dr Philip Blood

To thinking about this war, my initial concern was if NATO was to then initiate a no fly zone, forget, or whether it was or wasn't, if it was going to initiate a response to the invasion. I think you remember we all had a discussion and my big concern.

00:04:25 Dr Philip Blood

NATO, whatever it does, must keep the Air Force intact.

00:04:32 Dr Philip Blood

Because I know from the missile screens that the the Russian army adopts wherever it moves, it creates a trap for air cover. And So what actually happens is NATO would have got caught up in some kind of crazy scenario of trying to locate and destroy ground.

00:04:52 Dr Philip Blood

Installations, anti aircraft installations and what have you.

00:04:56 Dr Philip Blood

So that was then. Then as the as the LODGEMENTS began to spring up all over the Ukraine and then certain developments happening here, there and everywhere thought about what was actually going on.

00:05:13 Dr Philip Blood

What appeared to be an armoured thrust from the north going to towards Kiev, which was really, as we now know, was just an armed reconnaissance move. We know that there's a lot of sprinkling of troops on the ground all over the place causing masses of confusion.

00:05:31 Dr Philip Blood

The response in the West was well, this isn't blitzkrieg or this is a Gulf War one or Gulf War two or any of this mobile warfare. This is this is an army in distress. It's getting weaker and weaker and weaker. My my problem with that.

00:05:48 Dr Philip Blood

Thesis is it's not getting weaker, it's killing more and more civilians and it's destroying more and more.

00:05:58 Dr Philip Blood

Municipalities within the Ukrainian area.

00:06:02 Dr Philip Blood

And also a lot of these lodgement areas are starting to join up and I've seen that in other major conventional.

00:06:11 Dr Philip Blood

Operations of the the Russians and and before when it was the Soviet Red Army. So the signals that I was getting were very different. And I started to look at it.

00:06:23 Dr Philip Blood

And while I called it the Anaconda plan, which is after Winfield, Scott, and the UM attempt to pacify the Confederate forces in the American Civil War, I'm looking at in a different way. His Anaconda plan was to starve by preventing.

00:06:43 Dr Philip Blood

Shipping and economic movements and support so the you know the the the.

00:06:49 Dr Philip Blood

The fleet couldn't couldn't move to Britain and get guns very easily, and the gun runners developed and all of that.

00:06:57 Dr Philip Blood

That's not the only kind of plan that I've been envisaging as it's been emerging, I see.

00:07:05 Dr Philip Blood

Rolling offensives across the whole of the digestion process, so if you imagine.

00:07:12 Dr Philip Blood

The the The the Russian forces have swallowed a large area of uh Ukrainian borders and frontiers. It's slowly digesting it and slowly digesting it by rolling offensives all along the lines all around that.

00:07:33 Dr Philip Blood

What's increasingly looking like a horseshoe shape.

00:07:37 Dr Philip Blood

And as pressure is applied to say Kiev and and around that area that attracts Ukrainian forces to Kiev to defend that area. And then suddenly there's movement down in the South where significant.

00:07:53 Dr Philip Blood

Advances have been made.

00:07:56 Dr Philip Blood

I've also been looking at it in a slightly more geographical way than perhaps some of our.

00:08:03 Dr Philip Blood

Leaks in the Strategic Studies world and that is to.

00:08:08 Dr Philip Blood

Consider this long river that these rivers like the Danica, which pretty much bisect Ukraine.

00:08:15 Dr Philip Blood

And and ask myself, well, if if in Stalin's time the aim was to get behind the Danica very fast.

00:08:26 Dr Philip Blood

What am I seeing in this in these operations?

00:08:32 Dr Philip Blood

Deal with that problem and it struck me that while Kiev, Kiev is turning into this.

00:08:41 Dr Philip Blood

I don't know large operations in a city down in the South. The the Russian forces have broken free and they're threatening Odessa.

00:08:52 Dr Philip Blood

The question is where they're going, and my impression is they're aiming for Uman.

00:08:58 Dr Philip Blood

Which is a major.

00:09:00 Dr Philip Blood

Junction on the motorway system, which would then, if they get there, would essentially separate.

00:09:10 Dr Philip Blood

Russia, Ukraine into two the east and the West.

00:09:15 Dr Philip Blood

And from that position they would dominate anything. And of course that would make the rivers and the lakes instead of an obstacle to a Russian advance, which the Ukrainian army probably hoped it's now turning into a wall in which they will be slammed against as the Russian army at the eastern edges starts to force.

00:09:37 Dr Philip Blood

Those Ukrainian forces back.

00:09:41 Dr Philip Blood

OK, people will say will no doubt say to me, but what about the logistics? And what about this and what about that? Well, the fact and matter is is actually happening.

00:09:50 Dr Philip Blood

And while we're listening to Ukrainian.

00:09:58 Dr Philip Blood

In the western world.

00:10:01 Dr Philip Blood

Outside of Western media, other broadcasters in the Middle East and the Far East are reporting a completely different development of the war, and I'm very concerned that what I'm seeing in those programmes is tending to confirm the kind of thinking that I was developing.

00:10:23 Dr Philip Blood

So I'm yeah, maybe I'm using the the the media of the West, the, the Middle East and the Far East to confirm my thoughts, but I just don't see.

00:10:34 Dr Philip Blood

Any discussion on the western side, which is quote objective?

00:10:39 Dr Philip Blood

It's all about that. We must whatever we do, defend NATO.

00:10:43 Dr Philip Blood

And what I mean by that is NATO isn't doing anything other than supplying guns or weapons to the Ukrainian forces. It's saying it's going to stand there and nothing's going to come over the border, but it's actually not doing.

00:10:55 Dr Philip Blood

Anything. And while that's not doing anything and there's been somewhat to a certain extent strategically neutralised in these operations.

00:11:05 Dr Philip Blood

Putin is is running riot.

00:11:08 Dr Philip Blood

And so the Western presses, in particular the, the, the more jingoistic press in in Britain and America have been pushing this idea that somehow.

00:11:22 Dr Philip Blood

The the great Ukrainian army can hold off the Russian army and there'll be this great victory and Putin will be deposed and.

00:11:32 Dr Philip Blood

Then there'll be a regular warfare and then we'll turn into chaos and then eventually everybody will go back to normal.

00:11:39 Dr Philip Blood

I actually don't think that's going to happen. I think it's turning into a much more complicated, more complex scenario.

00:11:49 Dr Philip Blood

And long term, we are opposing, we are receiving warnings of threats well in advance, but I can see them coming over things like energy, food, strategic situation, VIS A VIS NATO, European forces.

00:12:09 Dr Philip Blood

And my biggest fear, of course, is if on the borders of Poland, Hungary and Romania, and we suddenly have.

00:12:16 Dr Philip Blood

Screens of anti aircraft systems as Ukraine is swallowed. Also there's been discussions of.

00:12:27 Dr Philip Blood

Belarus one minute. Belarus was going to pull out of this and now this morning there's talk that Belarus is going to join in and support Russian operations. So.

00:12:37 Dr Philip Blood

You know you you from. From my perspective, you need to be able to rely to a certain extent on what the sources are saying to you for the next day, what the the Western sources have been saying. One thing on one day and the next day something completely different and and it just is not so.

00:12:58 Dr Philip Blood

The Al Jazeera journalists in Key Kiev yesterday.

00:13:03 Dr Philip Blood

Were very downbeat because suddenly they were announcing that the Ukrainian forces were preparing for a complete encirclement of the.

00:13:14 Dr Philip Blood

My concern is.

00:13:17 Dr Philip Blood

Those forces that are on the West flank, those Russian forces are on the West flank of the city, is if they don't go for encirclement but go South.

00:13:28 Dr Philip Blood

Then, increasingly, the possibility of closing the whole of the Ukrainian forces in the east.

00:13:37 Dr Philip Blood

Occurs and that's a more dangerous situation because I'm led to also believe from what I've from, from what the again, these other sources are suggesting.

00:13:49 Dr Philip Blood

Is that Ukraine no longer has any air cover and the whole of the airspace now is dominated by the Russian Air Force. Well, if that's the case.

00:13:57 Dr Philip Blood

And the cities are being flattened with cruise missiles and other heavy bombardment. And and I heard this morning that they were dropping, uh, stupid bombs on the on the city. You know, those weren't that don't need to be guided, they just fall out the aircraft.

00:14:13 Dr Philip Blood

But then we're in a very serious position for, you know, if we're supporting Ukraine, obviously we want Ukraine to survive.

00:14:21 Dr Philip Blood

But these messages that are coming to us are now very big warnings of a breakdown in the defence systems.

00:14:30 Dr Philip Blood

And that tells me that the Anaconda plan is just, I think a term you used of nibbling away at the at the defences.

00:14:39 Dr Philip Blood

And the nibbling is getting is is actually.

00:14:43 Dr Philip Blood

You know, 14 days of nibbling has done serious damage, and while the while the Ukrainians capture.

00:14:52 Dr Philip Blood

The odd tank and pull out aeroplanes from museums. I mean, this is all glorious stuff. And don't get me wrong, it's great to see.

00:14:59 Dr Philip Blood

But deep down I have this very great fear that the Anaconda plan is actually strangling the Ukrainian defence slowly.

00:15:08 Dr Philip Blood

And in a very ugly way. So when I decided to put my.

00:15:15 Dr Philip Blood

Thread together which some people have said were very good. I mean had an awful lot of people saying I was being unpatriotic towards the Ukrainians and not supporting them. The fact of the matter is, I would like the Ukrainians to start thinking that they might actually be in a very serious situation and that trying to defend everything might not actually be a very good idea.

00:15:37 Dr Philip Blood

And you know, if they've been compromised, if I suspect is what's happened, they're being compromised and umam is.

00:15:45 Dr Philip Blood

The target, you know the actual.

00:15:49 Dr Philip Blood

Physical target. Then it strikes me that the other thing that I'm thinking that I have been thinking about is that.

00:15:58 Dr Philip Blood

Instead of having a short term plan.

00:16:02 Dr Philip Blood

Putin might have a plan, which is to have complete open to have completed operations by the 22nd of June of this year, which of course is an anniversary date, which we all know about the the invasion of Russia Barbarossa.

00:16:16 Dr Philip Blood

So if he completes the occupation of conquest of Ukraine by the 22nd of June.

00:16:25 Dr Philip Blood

We are we, the West are in a very, very serious position because they will have tanks on the frontiers, the refugees will have nowhere to go.

00:16:36 Dr Philip Blood

Once they're out of the country, there's no way that they'll ever be able to get back very, very easily.

00:16:42 Dr Philip Blood

The frontier will become an armed area. The Black Sea will be totally dominated by Russian forces again.

00:16:49 Dr Philip Blood

UM.

00:16:50 Dr Philip Blood

And I'm wondering, and I hate to say it, but does that mean that the Hungarians are going to remain wanting to be half in and half out of Europe? Will that mean that the Romanians want to stand and fight or even to be involved in a slapping contest where aircraft?

00:17:10 Dr Philip Blood

Being hit and struck and counterattacks from Russian forces and all that kind of niggling kind of.

00:17:19 Dr Philip Blood

Skirmishing along the frontiers. I'm not sure those sustain.

00:17:24 Dr Philip Blood

Morale in Western nations and frankly.

00:17:31 Dr Philip Blood

I'm worried about the whole attitude that somehow the Russians are a broken force and combat morale is declining.

00:17:41 Dr Philip Blood

I've yet to know an army that doesn't grumble.

00:17:44 Dr Philip Blood

When they they become prisoners of war or B.

00:17:48 Dr Philip Blood

They're in the cold.

00:17:50 Dr Philip Blood

But once an army starts to advance, it kind of changes its mind very, very quickly.

00:17:56 Dr Philip Blood

And suddenly which? Ohh, we're on the we're.

00:17:58 Dr Philip Blood

On the March.

00:18:00 Dr Philip Blood

And, you know, people say to me, oh, you can't cite the World War Two period. But I would this at.

00:18:04 Dr Philip Blood

This point.

00:18:04 Dr Philip Blood

I would refer to a a combat morale change.

00:18:09 Dr Philip Blood

And that was, you know, after 1941 when the Russians pushed the Germans out to Moscow area, the Germans were fleeing and chaos. And it was the end of the war and everything was over. And the Fury had sold as a pup.

00:18:24 Dr Philip Blood

UM, on the March to Stalingrad. I'm not talking about being in Stalingrad, but on the March to Stalingrad. It was the other way around to other furs leading us into victory and we're going to have the greatest victory ever over Russia and we'll be in the euro soon and everything's great and we're going to have.

00:18:41 Dr Philip Blood

Coffee and caviar and and.

00:18:44 Dr Philip Blood

Who we are heroes of the Vermont. So the problem with morale is it can swing from one way to another and it's like logistics. You get if you think, OK, there's no fuel coming in.

00:18:56 Dr Philip Blood

Fine. They missed planned fuel or?

00:19:00 Dr Philip Blood

Or did they just have enough fuel to get to where they wanted to be and then decided that would be the point where they'd start refuelling?

00:19:07 Dr Philip Blood

Cause the problem with. If you go too much down a certain view which is either logistics or failures of command or what have you, it leads you to logical conclusions. The question is how much is the rest of it being?

00:19:22 Dr Philip Blood

Undermined or changed, or what's actually happening and that's why I came up with that other part of my discussion earlier this week, which is linked to this, which was the use of the railways because the railways, if a train is flying through tracks which have not been broken, smashed or bombed.

00:19:41 Dr Philip Blood

It means aid that Ukrainian army has not gone out of its way.

00:19:46 Dr Philip Blood

To prevent traffic movement too, that the Ukrainian army isn't thinking like an irregular force. And three.

00:19:55 Dr Philip Blood

Where is the train going?

00:19:58 Dr Philip Blood

And what does that mean to the supply system? Because if you can get that train through and the load bearing is working to your advantage, you can pretty much make a strategic movement and have.

00:20:12 Dr Philip Blood

100 trains an hour going through the lines into Odessa, forming up units to go towards Uma.

00:20:21 Dr Philip Blood

So then the next thing in all of this and where I get my ideas from is I've been looking at a lot of.

00:20:28 Dr Philip Blood

The American institutional studies from the various departments of war studies and.

00:20:35 Dr Philip Blood

Military institutions and what have you, and there's an awful lot of reliance on the idea that counterinsurgency is going to be a or insurgency, and then counterinsurgency is going to be the next generation of the OR the next stage in this in this war.

00:20:51 Dr Philip Blood

Which again compromises their original ideas, because if the ideas are that the Russians are losing, then you're not going to have counter insurgency and insurgency warfare if the rations start prevailing and do occupy the cities, then you're going to have counterinsurgency and insurgency warfare. Well, fine.

00:21:10 Dr Philip Blood

But what you're not noting, which I find very interesting, is all of these American studies go on about how the Russians behaved in Syria. In flattening cities, I mean, I do not mean just getting rid of a building and taking out a group of Taliban fighters or who.

00:21:26 Dr Philip Blood

Without but actually flattening the entire building.

00:21:31 Dr Philip Blood

And you know, if you look at what happened or in the comments made in the United Nations programme on Friday night, yesterday, one of the specialists on chemical weapons interjected during the screening of the discussion in the United Nations and started to talk about what happened in Syria.

00:21:55 Dr Philip Blood

And he was saying that they were using dustbins.

00:21:57 Dr Philip Blood

Filled with chlorine.

00:22:00 Dr Philip Blood

Which were dumped on people.

00:22:04 Dr Philip Blood

Well, if you're going to do that, you don't. You're not only spoil the ground.

00:22:08 Dr Philip Blood

But the nature of the damages that you cause to civilians is so heinous.

00:22:14 Dr Philip Blood

Who wants to stand and fight underneath a helicopter that's dumping out chlorine?

00:22:19 Dr Philip Blood

So I'm I'm in this strange place where I've got all this.

00:22:24 Dr Philip Blood

Strategic information coming from on one side.

00:22:28 Dr Philip Blood

And then being ignored and.

00:22:32 Dr Philip Blood

Not used in the calculations for the war that's happening at the moment and you know.

00:22:39 Dr Philip Blood

I'm not springing to conclusions. I'm raising questions, and when I raise the questions, I'm then asking what's happening.

00:22:46 Dr Philip Blood

And then I'm looking at the map and I'm saying to myself, well, that map point there looks to me to be the strategic point on the whole thing.

00:22:53 Dr Philip Blood

And then you know, you take the time. I could take a random time. I could say the 23rd of April. Or I could take the whatever. But I do think that this Putin dude has got some historical thing in his mind and the 22nd of June is.

00:23:11 Dr Philip Blood

Is there?

00:23:12 Dr Philip Blood

You know, so that's the Anaconda plan and where I've got to and how I got here.

00:23:20 Ben Skipper

Thank you for that. And and as you're speaking, Phil, I was, I was making several notes.

00:23:27 Ben Skipper

And so almost cases back to friends on this, your comment about Putin that there is there has been certainly over the past of two decades.

00:23:38 Ben Skipper

On almost an industry built around a great patriotic war in its portrayal by the Russians and huge amount of state investment in films.

00:23:52 Ben Skipper

And literature that's supporting the, you know the and this is not to decry the losses of the Great Patriotic War, but this is very much an over politicisation of the Great Patriotic war.

00:24:08 Ben Skipper

And when you're sort of talking about Putin and he has this timeline there, the other that's starting to make sense because looking at the current rate of advance.

00:24:18 Ben Skipper

He's definitely going slow and steady.

00:24:21 Ben Skipper

And and again the the the the guys on the ground for the Ukrainians and the supporting Foreign Legion troops are doing absolutely wonders. Convinced. You know, when when they compared them against one of the most, one of the largest armies in the world, you don't seem to have an easy time of it. However, you know, we've discussed that.

00:24:40 Ben Skipper

Is he following that Russian tract that is being?

00:24:44 Ben Skipper

The the the form of most military doctrine is to to put your most inexperienced troops at the forefront. Now, with the exception of the V.

00:24:52 Ben Skipper

Troops that were taking out in the early stages of the campaign, I would say, yeah, he's he's still in that position, isn't he? He's he's feeding the ground, he's testing resistance testing areas of resistance and just looking at contemporary maps.

00:25:06 Ben Skipper

Ice to add. These are only as relevant to the information and the intelligence that the the the map maker is getting, but you can see very clearly that this, this horseshoe effect, you know with, with, with the problems coming out from to the West of Kershaw and to West of Key, and they are.

00:25:24 Ben Skipper

Geographically, going to meet the Duman, which is almost in the centre point of the country and then it sells warring because that grabs a huge amount of land mass of Ukraine.

00:25:41 Ben Skipper

It traps quite a few Ukrainian army units behind the NEPA.

00:25:51 Ben Skipper

And what is interesting and contemporary?

00:25:55 Ben Skipper

Well, definitely intelligence has been received as of current day.

00:25:59 Ben Skipper

Is the way that the Russians are forming their lines to the north and to the South. They are now getting the divisions ready.

00:26:07 Ben Skipper

Interestingly, on the the eastern edge of the offensive, that is, they are deploying brigade strength units almost sort of penny pocket, like holding the line.

00:26:19 Ben Skipper

The divisional boundaries are now starting to shape up. The army boundaries have not really changed between West and South OSK.

00:26:27 Ben Skipper

But the the next pushes I think will be from. Personally speaking, I think they'll they'll go for the encirclement of Kiev and then push southwards to our two men.

00:26:39 Ben Skipper

And then push northwards from Odessa.

00:26:42 Ben Skipper

Driving up that way, using the Moldovian border.

00:26:46 Ben Skipper

As the western boundary.

00:26:49 Dr Philip Blood

Well, there's two things that's there. The Moldavian boundary borders, sorry, could operate as a hinge.

00:26:57 Dr Philip Blood

Swinging the forces up because if you lock there, if they lock on that.

00:27:04 Dr Philip Blood

And then use it to swing up.

00:27:08 Dr Philip Blood

Stat inputs Turner, Paul, Will, Turner Pill, Livv, Lutsk.

00:27:15 Dr Philip Blood

Those areas then suddenly come under threat, and what struck me about the air strikes on those two cities.

00:27:28 Dr Philip Blood

If you're.

00:27:31 Dr Philip Blood

If we assume what NATO and the leaders and Biden and all of these dudes are going are talking about saying, well, we'll get him on a limited victory or we'll reduce him on his limited strikes or we'll we'll we'll force him out of office and all.

00:27:47 Dr Philip Blood

The rest of it.

00:27:48 Dr Philip Blood

Why is he attacking up there?

00:27:51 Dr Philip Blood

I think he's attacking up there to warn people that he's coming.

00:27:56 Dr Philip Blood

And I think.

00:27:58 Dr Philip Blood

To go back what to what you're saying with these historical this historical legacy of the Great Patriotic War, I don't think for a second he's fighting the Great Patriotic War again, although a lot of people think so. I think he's fighting his own war.

00:28:15 Dr Philip Blood

But within the bounds of the experience.

00:28:18 Dr Philip Blood

Of the great Cape shot at war when you've had Russian forces running through this region.

00:28:24 Dr Philip Blood

That experience of how you got across the river left them a legacy and a lesson which is enshrined in their military culture. This is why I use the term the Russian way of war. Everybody's talking about the Russians being fairly inept and and not working.

00:28:44 Dr Philip Blood

The plans and all the rest of it to me.

00:28:47 Dr Philip Blood

I haven't seen anything yet that tells me that the Russians haven't done anything are are doing now anything different than they did in the last 20 years? So here's me saying, well, you know, the Great Patriotic War is a lesson. Well, it is as much as it's used in the France Military Academy or in Moscow.

00:29:10 Dr Philip Blood

It's not functioning in Putin's world because Putin fights are very complex style of warfare. We saw that in Chechnya and we saw it in Georgia. We saw it in.

00:29:21 Dr Philip Blood

In the Ukraine, when he when he took the Crimea.

00:29:26 Dr Philip Blood

He doesn't fight wars the way the West fight wars.

00:29:31 Dr Philip Blood

Because if he fought wars the way the West fought wars, he'd probably never have won any of those places.

00:29:37 Dr Philip Blood

Right. Because we know what happens, we know we we actually know how ineffective the West has been in winning wars since 9:11. Not very effective at all. And we've become.

00:29:51 Dr Philip Blood

Engrossed in the insurgency surge, counterinsurgency paradigm, which has done nothing but undermine everybody's military forces. So, I mean, I remember only just, what, 10 years ago, when everyone was saying no, forget the big conventional forces. You need small forces and special forces to fight insurgents and the Taliban.

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00:30:13 Dr Philip Blood

In the streets of London, well, actually.

00:30:16 Dr Philip Blood

Putin is showing and has done since 1999 that all of that is a completely miscalculation of how war has been fought. Also, it's it it. It totally ignores the fact that I don't know since 9:11 there's been hundreds of wars all over the place where conventional forces.

00:30:36 Dr Philip Blood

Have been, you know, have been very prominent fighting your old style battles. I do believe that we have come to the stage where.

00:30:48 Dr Philip Blood

The conventional forces are not used in the way that we we always saw them in the past.

00:30:54 Dr Philip Blood

And and what we're seeing with this Anaconda plan is a series of political.

00:31:00 Dr Philip Blood

Missions within the military mission.

00:31:03 Dr Philip Blood

And I think a lot of people find that very confusing. And I'll give you an idea.

00:31:09 Dr Philip Blood

The cruise missiles that have been fired into civilian areas is purely political. There's nothing to do with military.

00:31:15 Dr Philip Blood

It's purely political and it's the politics of mechanised genocide.

00:31:22 Dr Philip Blood

No. A lot of people have said to me, no, you not killed the whole population. They can't be genocide. Well.

00:31:28 Dr Philip Blood

Actually, you destroy a culture as much as you destroy the population.

00:31:33 Dr Philip Blood

And what these missiles are doing is destabilising.

00:31:38 Dr Philip Blood

Culture. So the first indication of this was the destruction of archives.

00:31:42 Dr Philip Blood

Of course, you gave rid of archives. You got no history.

00:31:46 Dr Philip Blood

So if you take out schools, you've got no learning, you've got to take out all the.

00:31:52 Dr Philip Blood

Secure the you know the protection services like the Fire Brigade, the police, the ambulance. You've got no protection for your civilian population. Suddenly you're degrading life.

00:32:04 Dr Philip Blood

And the first levels of degradation in in life is when you can't do the ordinary things. And then I got news earlier this earlier this week that there were food rationings in some of the cities.

00:32:19 Dr Philip Blood

And that this was probably a little bit more severe than we've expected because somebody pulled a picture of a young boy being whip.

00:32:28 Dr Philip Blood

By Ukrainian militia having been captured, uh arrested while trying to plunder stuff. Now, funny enough, that reminds me of what happened in Arkan in 1944 when young kids were accused of plundering and the general in command had them shot.

00:32:49 Dr Philip Blood

214 year olds now what? What actually happens there is that causes ripples through the civilian community and the civilians decided to play. Had said that we've had enough.

00:33:02 Dr Philip Blood

And a significant number of civilians stayed in Arkan and refused to do what the government said they were going to do.

00:33:09 Dr Philip Blood

Now if.

00:33:11 Dr Philip Blood

Militia start beating young children or.

00:33:15 Dr Philip Blood

Teenagers, when they steal a bit of bread.

00:33:19 Dr Philip Blood

That that doesn't actually work for the militia that works against the militia because the civilian population say, well, whose side do these people on?

00:33:30 Dr Philip Blood

So I noticed very quickly that that film disappeared.

00:33:35 Dr Philip Blood

One of our friends, Nick, said. It's possible that it's evidence of plundering, so I then went and looked and there are reports on Al Jazeera and other places that there are now food rationings, uh long, long, long waits for bread and and what have you so.

00:33:55 Dr Philip Blood

I suspect yes, it is true. I suspect that we have a more serious food situation.

00:34:02 Dr Philip Blood

And basically the staples, you know, water, bread, sleep, those things are going to be under pressure. And I think that pressure is already happening.

00:34:17 Dr Philip Blood

So really not a good summary. One last point on the counterinsurgency thing. I don't think the Ukrainian army is anywhere near Configurate for.

00:34:27 Dr Philip Blood

Irregular warfare.

00:34:30 Dr Philip Blood

And to break.

00:34:32 Dr Philip Blood

Out of a defensive position and suddenly become.

00:34:38 Dr Philip Blood

The fighters.

00:34:41 Dr Philip Blood

It's possible it happened. It happened in Warsaw in 1944. It happened in the ghetto in 1943. It happened in Stalingrad with, with the Russian soldiers who were caught in the pincer movement.

00:34:58 Dr Philip Blood

But that's not what happens under. If you apply the Syrian model model, because what happens in the Syrian model is you've got nowhere to hide. And not only do you have nowhere to hide, you've got no stockpiles of supplies and troops. And if you've got no aviation to bring in supplies and equipment.

00:35:19 Dr Philip Blood

Because the the air is dominated by the enemy.

00:35:23 Dr Philip Blood

Where's the irregular war? Where's the irregular scenario? Because you've got nowhere to hide. You've got nowhere to prepare yourself. You've got no point where you're running some kind of pivots of operations. I mean, what would the point be just to run violence in streets of Kiev?

00:35:44 Dr Philip Blood

Or or cahue or or in Odessa or in Crimea.

00:35:50 Dr Philip Blood

Wholesale violence is just going to be met by even more wholesale violence, so I don't see that the the Ukrainian army at the moment is configured for irregular warfare.

00:36:02 Dr Philip Blood

And the more these dynamic points are.

00:36:07 Dr Philip Blood

Unhinged from controlled by the Ukrainian army.

00:36:11 Dr Philip Blood

I see less opportunity for irregular warfare.

00:36:16 Dr Philip Blood

They also fear that bringing in Syrian mercenaries.

00:36:20 Dr Philip Blood

It's a very bad sign because I don't think they'll be used against Russian against Ukrainian forces. They'll be used against civilians.

00:36:29 Dr Philip Blood

And and that's like the big threat, you know that the Red Army used to play. So you wanna play hardball? SS men. OK, here's the Cossacks.

00:36:40 Dr Philip Blood

And that threat here are the Cossacks. You know, that ripples from that doesn't just ripple to the Second World War. It doesn't just go back to the First World War doesn't go back to the times that the surf serves and the Pale of settlement in in Russia of Imperial Russia goes all the way back to the the retreat and Napoleon in 1812.

00:37:02 Dr Philip Blood

That, that, that, you know, here comes the here come the Cossacks. That's a frightening prospect.

00:37:09 Dr Philip Blood

And I think if he is saying, well, here come the Syrians, that's the message.

00:37:15 Dr Philip Blood

That's a really harsh message to throw at the people of Ukraine.

00:37:21 Dr Philip Blood

He's playing hardball and you know.

00:37:25 Ben Skipper

It it it's it's interesting that I I believe you know personally think that he you're you know you are spot on about how the the Russians are playing monetarily they're not following it almost said peace but I think what we're seeing.

00:37:37 Ben Skipper

Is Putins's previous life in the KGB and KGB tactics on again placed against a nation state?

00:37:46 Ben Skipper

As opposed to a an individual or an organisational state. And he's got the.

00:37:54 Ben Skipper

The assets in which to cause the most chaos and the the most discomfort.

00:38:01 Dr Philip Blood

Do you remember back in the day we used to have these studies of Stalin as probably being regarded of all the dictators, the most evil man that ever lived, because he'd been in a uh, he'd been in a cloister at a of a church.

00:38:17 Dr Philip Blood

He been whipped and beat, and he'd been made to live rough and he then became a revolutionary and he was always.

00:38:27 Dr Philip Blood

Kicked and beaten and bullied and all the rest of it. And yet this man goes through all the way through the ranks and and even even at the height of the battle, he's killing the people who are supposed to help him win the battle. And he still kills them because his mind is I'm going to get what I want.

00:38:47 Dr Philip Blood

I don't care about any of these people who get in my way, whether they're on my side or not.

00:38:52 Dr Philip Blood

And so we used to come to the conclusion that the most evil man was actually not so much Hitler, but Stalin.

00:38:59 Dr Philip Blood

Because he was there longer, he killed more millions and he was infinitely.

00:39:07 Dr Philip Blood

Committed to his task, my concern with Putin.

00:39:12 Dr Philip Blood

I don't particularly like using terms evil, but he strikes me as a neo Stalinist.

00:39:18 Dr Philip Blood

And he's got all of that training from the KGB period combined with the legal training which he had at university, combined with all the experience of being face to face with all of the world's leaders.

00:39:33 Dr Philip Blood

And he's, you know, he what's been put together is.

00:39:40 Dr Philip Blood

Pretty horrible.

00:39:42 Dr Philip Blood

And and to be able to sit there and play ice hockey and then come and talk to Oliver Stone and and and simply say, well, you know, we have to see how the Georgians are gonna take this and how the Ukrainians are gonna take that and blah blah blah.

00:39:58 Dr Philip Blood

It strikes me that his mask.

00:40:01 Dr Philip Blood

His own personal mascara, ofka, is so.

00:40:06 Dr Philip Blood

Is so deep.

00:40:09 Dr Philip Blood

That nobody can get in there and say, well, you know, what's the latest? Oh, he's off his trolley. He's got bowel cancer. He's this that and the other to me. I wouldn't want to be in the same room trying to negotiate with him because I don't think you, you, you, you can't trust him. You wouldn't know what he's gonna do.

00:40:29 Dr Philip Blood

This whole history of negotiations in ceasefires is, yeah, I'm negotiating with you. And by the way, my tanks are rolling up that road. My other set of tanks are rolling up that road. And when I when I sign this, my tanks are then gonna come in and they're occupy your country and then you're dead.

00:40:45 Dr Philip Blood

That's not diplomatic negotiation.

00:40:49 Dr Philip Blood

That's a guy who says.

00:40:51 Dr Philip Blood

I don't care what you do.

00:40:54 Dr Philip Blood

I'm going to have what I want.

00:40:58 Dr Philip Blood

And that makes him the problem that we have.

00:41:04 Ben Skipper

I think Anderson right and his his behaviour has thus far. Yeah, exemplified this. You know, you you look at these these briefings.

00:41:14 Ben Skipper

The the one that sticks out in my mind was that particularly it was a particularly odd briefing where he had his sort of his, his cabinet and and he's barking orders and.

00:41:25 Ben Skipper

And he he was going to be his way out of the highway it was.

00:41:27 Ben Skipper

Very, you know, and and and it was, it was a moment of him exerting his own personality through through intimidation to prevent dissent and and.

00:41:41 Dr Philip Blood

You know, I I mean, yeah, the thing I get from looking at all of this, it's like when I was looking at the Oliver Stone programmes of his interviews with Putin from 2016, I think there were.

00:41:53 Dr Philip Blood

Is that?

00:41:56 Dr Philip Blood

It's all staged.

00:41:59 Dr Philip Blood

Whatever he does, it feels rehearsed.

00:42:03 Dr Philip Blood

And and I can't get away from the from the feeling that what's the message he wants to send out and who's who's actually seen that message. And now I know he in Ghana has been doing a lot of good work saying this is what's going on in the in the minds of the Russian public opinion and what have you.

00:42:21 Dr Philip Blood

But even Russian public opinion has.

00:42:25 Dr Philip Blood

Confusion. I mean, what's going on in Moscow and the quote Western side of Russia is all very trendy and all very much stuff we can understand. But if you go to the to the east, to Dagestan and those far off places.

00:42:41 Dr Philip Blood

I'm not sure they see Putin as a head case.

00:42:45 Dr Philip Blood

I think they see Putin as somebody who is.

00:42:49 Dr Philip Blood

The representative of Mother Russia.

00:42:53 Dr Philip Blood

And I think their values are.

00:42:57 Dr Philip Blood

Well, I just don't see the same values. I mean, Jonathan Dimbleby interviewed, UM, a whole load of Russian kids in Lubyanka in I think it was 2018, and they were arguing with him. Why diplomacy doesn't work and that's that. And I'm thinking to myself.

00:43:17 Dr Philip Blood

OK. So that's just four years ago. Young people who've been through the Western style education system are arguing with.

00:43:28 Dr Philip Blood

The Westerner, wide diplomacy, wide democracy, doesn't work. What got me was.

00:43:34 Dr Philip Blood

Did would be 1 instead of listening to what the kids were saying, so he could have learned more. He wanted to impose his moral.

00:43:42 Dr Philip Blood

Ideas on the kids? And it struck me that, you know, he spent all this time studying Russia and he's learned nothing.

00:43:51 Dr Philip Blood

Simply because he hasn't listened to anybody he wants his opinion and that's.

00:43:55 Dr Philip Blood

And and that to me, is the BBC way of everything. You know, it's the BBC way or it's.

00:44:00 Dr Philip Blood

No way at all.

00:44:03 Dr Philip Blood

Probably why I don't watch them, even if I'm in the UK, but by the by, you know, I back in the day when I was in a position of something, I met John Simpson and some of the good people and they were.

00:44:17 Dr Philip Blood

But I I have a lot of admiration for people like John Simpson. I have a lot of admiration for somebody like Richard Holbrooke, who people forget I used to work with.

00:44:28 Dr Philip Blood

My my big problem is there's no Richard Holbrooks around anymore.

00:44:33 Dr Philip Blood

We've got these.

00:44:36 Dr Philip Blood

He sipped little characters who want to make excuses for why the West isn't going to do anything. My my concern with the No fly zone is not so much that no fly zone is not is not happening now as to why the No fly zone wasn't put in place when the Crimea first happened, which is what, six years ago.

00:44:55 Dr Philip Blood

So all of this NATO complacency, I I I'm sorry. I don't buy into it.

00:45:02 Dr Philip Blood

All of the excuses that Western academics and Western media are trying to pull to defend NATO not doing anything, and I mean what, what, what, what, what we're going to end up with? Well, 40 million Ukrainians living in Western Europe. How? I mean how is.

00:45:19 Dr Philip Blood

That going to work.

00:45:24 Dr Philip Blood

Actually, nobody's actually thinking that maybe everybody who is suddenly at the point of being on that border are going to step over and going to end up in Poland. What the hell does that mean for for Western civilization? If the whole of the Ukrainian people or a large part of them, suddenly decide they want to live freely in the West?

00:45:48 Dr Philip Blood

You know, we thought we had a problem with the Afghan refugees last year or the year before, and then we also thought we had a big problem when the Syrians arrived in, in, in Europe and we know that we've got this ongoing problem in Greece and Italy.

00:46:03 Dr Philip Blood

But the idea of driving all these Ukrainian people.

00:46:08 Dr Philip Blood

By simply landing bombs in Lutsk and Livov.

00:46:13 Dr Philip Blood

Driving them into into Western countries.

00:46:20 Dr Philip Blood

Is a horribly.

00:46:24 Dr Philip Blood

Devious way of destabilising Western strategy and that's why I went back to that humanitarianism thing earlier this week when I said, you know, strategic humanitarianism has ended in Britain. The problem is, nobody's seen what's actually happening.

00:46:42 Dr Philip Blood

It's. Ohh. Well, we'll we'll take a few refugees here and we'll take a few refugees there.

00:46:48 Dr Philip Blood

Well, we're like 2 weeks into the war. He hasn't crossed over that.

00:46:53 Dr Philip Blood

Point where mass refugees shift and start fleeing to the West.

00:47:00 Dr Philip Blood

And people forget.

00:47:02 Dr Philip Blood

Even when they had nowhere to go.

00:47:05 Dr Philip Blood

Up to 2 million French people were on the roads in 1940, and where did they go?

00:47:11 Dr Philip Blood

And now we've got the situation of all of these people. Once the bonds start landing, they're going to go running to the West and that's going to flood the capability of the West to not just feed itself and strategize for itself. It's but to feed a population that's suddenly exiled in Western Europe.

00:47:33 Dr Philip Blood

And that magnifies problems way, way out of the realm of, you know, well, the tanks over in Kiev haven't got any logistics and all of that stuff.

00:47:46 Dr Philip Blood

You know the the the.

00:47:48 Dr Philip Blood

The sheer volume of horror that we're facing, I mean, I know you've said to me that the Ukrainian bread basket isn't most important, but there is an importance to it.

00:47:58 Dr Philip Blood

And if he poisons that or he takes it and doesn't use it and it gets spoiled.

00:48:05 Dr Philip Blood

That has a strategic implication.

00:48:08 Dr Philip Blood

Refugees have an implication. If the large numbers of refugees flood into places like Romania and Hungary, what happens to those nations?

00:48:18 Dr Philip Blood

And I'll tell you, a lot of nations are going to say well.

00:48:21 Dr Philip Blood

This isn't going to happen to us, so we surrender before the burger has even got here.

00:48:28 Dr Philip Blood

And once you start taking links out of the chain, then what?

00:48:33 Dr Philip Blood

So then suddenly, you know.

00:48:36 Dr Philip Blood

The flanks on Poland are compromised. The Baltics become destabilised and and you know, I'm hearing stories that people are not consistent across the whole of Europe about the idea of this being a bad war. I understand that there are people in Hungary who do support you and.

00:48:56 Dr Philip Blood

Putin's efforts, I understand, also that in Serbia there's a lot of people who are on the Russian side simply because.

00:49:03 Dr Philip Blood

They want the Croats and the Albanians and everybody else taking a kicking for one so.

00:49:09 Dr Philip Blood

You know what? What? What Putin is doing is reopening old wounds, which we thought were closed 20 years ago.

00:49:17 Dr Philip Blood

Is destroying all credibility for NATO.

00:49:21 Dr Philip Blood

Because the West does not know how to physically respond and the sanctions aren't working.

00:49:27 Dr Philip Blood

Is turning the whole of the Central European plane into into a melting part of chaos.

00:49:36 Dr Philip Blood

And and the people who should be saying, you know, we're not having this, we're going to do something, are too frightened to do anything because he's called the bluff with the nuclear missile. So he's tied everybody up in knots psychologically and physically, I mean.

00:49:55 Dr Philip Blood

What is that? That's KGB player, isn't it? That. That, that's Kate.

00:49:59 Ben Skipper

Absolutely. Classic.

00:50:00 Dr Philip Blood

Right. Yeah, yeah. You put prisoners in different boxes and then you make them denounce on each other, and then they will turn on each other. And then you walk away. You've got all the evidence, and then you execute whichever ones you want and all the others follow you. I mean, the the the dude is horrific.

00:50:18 Dr Philip Blood

And everybody is playing him like he's some kind of little fool.

00:50:23 Dr Philip Blood

This is really it's a huge mistake.

00:50:26 Dr Philip Blood

It's an absolutely huge mistake.

00:50:30 Dr Philip Blood

And all we're doing is watching is, you know, people have said, oh, no, you're too early to talk about war. Well, you know, there's that other argument. When did the Second World War start? Was it when Adolf Hitler was born?

00:50:41 Dr Philip Blood

Was it 1914? Was it 1918? Was it 1931 in Manchuria? Was it 1932 when the when the Nazis nearly won the election, and then that caused the farce? And then in 1933, Hitler got power?

00:50:57 Dr Philip Blood

Was when Joe Starling took power. I mean, when did the Second World War begin?

00:51:02 Dr Philip Blood

A lot of people no longer have limits to when the war started and don't say 1939 to 45 and certainly don't. If you're in the Far East, cause people there say well, it's 1931 to 1949. OK. So back in the day when I was also doing things in the city and business I had.

00:51:22 Dr Philip Blood

The kind of interesting privilege to work with several people who've been on Mars Long March.

00:51:32 Dr Philip Blood

And one of them asked me to go to the Imperial War Museum because he wanted to walk around it and understand it.

00:51:38 Dr Philip Blood

And the interesting thing he kept saying was, well, you know, your Second World War started in 1939. Ours started in 1931.

00:51:48 Dr Philip Blood

And and it struck me then that we're, you know.

00:51:52 Dr Philip Blood

The way the West, the way everybody creates and understands war.

00:52:00 Dr Philip Blood

Is not unique, but and.

00:52:03 Dr Philip Blood

It strikes me all of this.

00:52:05 Dr Philip Blood

Discussion that I'm advancing World War 3 without any kind of platform or any structure. It's just totally mistaken. It's the fact that people no longer want to understand where they've been.

00:52:21 Dr Philip Blood

We've been in conflict with Putin one way or another since 1999, when he became Prime Minister, if we assume.

00:52:30 Dr Philip Blood

As we once did that, we are humanitarians. We've been in conflict with Putin since 1999.

00:52:37 Dr Philip Blood

And that therefore, you know my concern with all of of of what we're doing here is we've got too much no memory of the past confronting circumstances, which is way beyond anybody's ever had to come to terms within their lives, especially young people who were born after 911.

00:52:59 Dr Philip Blood

And and have only seen the demise of Afghanistan and Iraq in as it tailed off at the end. They've not seen conflict.

00:53:08 Dr Philip Blood

Whereas some of us you know.

00:53:11 Dr Philip Blood

Have seen conflict and and and see the repercussions of conflict and it and how it how it hits cultures.

00:53:21 Dr Philip Blood

And so yes, I am very much in the opinion that the World War Three was already started. We're in it and we have to do something about it pretty damn quick before it runs all over us.

00:53:39 Dr Philip Blood

I'm ruining your Saturday afternoon.

00:53:43 Ben Skipper

Not at all at all, because because it's it's a fair point that you, you, you and and it all centres around one man and and going back to the.

00:53:52 Ben Skipper

The the sort of the, the, the, the Putin echoing Stalin.

00:53:59 Ben Skipper

The baby patterns and as well as the the the how.

00:54:04 Ben Skipper

Russians identify with power. You know this. I don't know if you ever seen Stalin. The film with Robert Duvall.

00:54:14 Ben Skipper

Early 90s and it's quite an interesting film because there's this wonderful scene where he's discussing his boots.

00:54:22 Ben Skipper

And this is of course echoed in in Orwells 1984, where he's saying that you know the best boots are Georgian boots because they used for.

00:54:32 Ben Skipper

Thank you.

00:54:33 Ben Skipper

And he goes. And there's one of his one of his ministers, and he and he sort of starts pretending to kick him in the face with this book. And that sums up a lot of the, the, the, the mentality of of the time, you know, he going right back to.

00:54:48 Ben Skipper

You know the 11th century that there is this sort of recognition that might is right and and that whoever comes out of the fight is the leader, you know it it's very it's not a brutal way of doing things. It's just the way it is with, with, with the culture. It's the cultural way of doing things.

00:55:03 Dr Philip Blood

I I don't think it's any different.

00:55:07 Dr Philip Blood

Anywhere else, what I think what I think's happened.

00:55:10 Ben Skipper

Way more subtle.

00:55:12 Dr Philip Blood

I think what's happened in the West is we've applied all these things that we think are good to make us feel better about ourselves, but in the long.

00:55:21 Dr Philip Blood

Run. It's not, you know.

00:55:26 Dr Philip Blood

We could, we could have at this point we could have a discussion when we're looking at these bomb cities, we could have a discussion about bomber.

00:55:33 Dr Philip Blood

Harris, we could say. Well, Bomber Harris decided that the best way to defeat Germany was to bomb.

00:55:40 Dr Philip Blood

German cities.

00:55:42 Dr Philip Blood

There was a logical argument and all the rest of it.

00:55:45 Dr Philip Blood

When it got to the end of the war and Dresden had happened, all the rest of it, everybody suddenly decided, well, no, actually, bombing was a bad thing.

00:55:53 Dr Philip Blood

And then we went through the process of constructing all kinds of.

00:56:00 Dr Philip Blood

Agendas and narratives.

00:56:03 Dr Philip Blood

To say, well, we were right at the time, but then it was wrong and now we are right because we've understood that we were wrong. What we were doing. But it was that, right.

00:56:11 Dr Philip Blood

At the moment.

00:56:13 Dr Philip Blood

And and and that kind of confusion of.

00:56:16 Dr Philip Blood

Of interpretations and stories.

00:56:20 Dr Philip Blood

Is the western problem. It's the predicament. It's like saying, well, you know, the greatest man that ever lived was Churchill and everything that we did was because Churchill was the greatest man. And he stood up to Hitler.

00:56:31 Dr Philip Blood

In 1940.

00:56:33 Dr Philip Blood

Well, that, that, that's a fair enough argument.

00:56:37 Dr Philip Blood

But Churchill got ****** one night and decided to write on the back of a beer man or whatever. How the whole of the Yalta Agreement was going to pan out and spheres of influence here, there and everywhere we we, which have literally been our nightmare ever since.

00:56:57 Dr Philip Blood

But what do we say about Yota? Oh, well, that was just one of those little moments. And ohh, the Russians were going to capture Berlin anyway, so that was always going to be East Germany. And, you know, we have found excuses.

00:57:11 Dr Philip Blood

Since 1945, for how everything has been done and an awful lot of it was scripted into, you know.

00:57:19 Dr Philip Blood

Those that horrible hit series of Second World War, you know which church where Churchill used the the Secrets acts to his benefit so he could use documents which nobody held had access to and he could get his narrative out of the Second World War before anybody else.

00:57:39 Dr Philip Blood

And then we're all left to say, OK, Well, Corelli Barnett's going to do this. And this historian is going to do that. And by the time we get to the 1980s, we've got the we've got Churchill saying one thing, and then we've got Brigadier Hackett or General Hackett telling us we're now about to enter the Third World War. And you think, you know, you look back on all.

00:57:58 Dr Philip Blood

Of that and you think?

00:58:00 Dr Philip Blood

That's an interesting trajectory of how the how war was understood in the West.

00:58:06 Dr Philip Blood

And then you suddenly find.

00:58:09 Dr Philip Blood

30 years after that was irrelevant. What are people reading? They're reading Hacketts third World War and Churchill's peoples history of the Second World War. And you thinking, do we never learn?

00:58:21 Dr Philip Blood

Does you know why are we going through this all over again?

00:58:27 Dr Philip Blood

And I think to to a certain extent, something's happened in history in the West where we've found a solution to making everything a feel good scenario. So.

00:58:39 Dr Philip Blood

Bomber Harris is a feel good is he's turned into a feel good character. Not because we somebody puts a statue up for him, but they find the conclusion that somehow bombing wasn't wasn't that good. But in the end it made a contribution.

00:58:55 Dr Philip Blood

And so we get into these strange arguments that, you know, if only Bomber Harris had bombed Auschwitz.

00:59:04 Dr Philip Blood

If only Bomber Harris had bombed the railway lines.

00:59:08 Dr Philip Blood

All, all of these, all of these nuances, which then philtre into the history of the Second World War, which then philtre into the into the history as it's written today and and and and our imagination of how how things occurred. We're suddenly going through this revisionist.

00:59:24 Dr Philip Blood

Process and everything seems to be ohh well wasn't it good? I don't think it was good for one moment.

00:59:31 Dr Philip Blood

I don't. I you know, I had so many relatives in the Second World War, none of them told me anything that was nice or positive about the Second World War. It was just horrible from the moment it kicked off when they were involved in the fighting right away through to the end. And similarly as I've spoken to people who, you know, who were on the other side.

00:59:51 Dr Philip Blood

Or Russians and Japanese and Americans.

00:59:55 Dr Philip Blood

You know, outside of the banter, when they're all together and everything was great and it was all jolly war when you sat and listened to those people and it was horrific.

01:00:06 Dr Philip Blood

And that we've created this story and you know I.

01:00:10 Dr Philip Blood

You mentioned my book. I mean, I don't write pleasant books and I don't write pleasant things because I don't see any point in making or something very funny.

01:00:18 Dr Philip Blood

Or jolly or something nice because people are killed in very, very large numbers, and the consequences of war continues for decades, if not for centuries later. And we're stuck with the legacy of all of that. So.

01:00:36 Dr Philip Blood

That's the end of my that's the end of my moment. We lecture because I get upset about these things. I don't like believing the trivialization of war.

01:00:46 Ben Skipper

And you're absolutely 100% and and and this again, this has been the subject of numerous discussions on social media about the, the, the anchoring of of concurrent events, 2 events of 80 years ago or beyond, I think is it is a false equivalency and I'm I'm resolute.

01:01:05 Ben Skipper

You know, we have for far more recent events there. There was a comment made.

01:01:14 Ben Skipper

About fallujah.

01:01:16 Ben Skipper

And then you could look at that beyond you know what where we had we had the events of Bosnia had the events of Croatia.

01:01:23 Ben Skipper

At Sarajevo and Mostar.

01:01:30 Ben Skipper

That there will always be Miranda. There'll always be something more. More.

01:01:35 Ben Skipper

More, more so contemporary to, to, to use as a vantage point. I think there's there's some discount and there's a little amount of discomfort around using those because they were so brittle because they were to them. We knew what was going on. And when we, when we, when we apply the.

01:01:50 Ben Skipper

You know, agrees that have come through the.

01:01:53 Ben Skipper

Second World War.

01:01:54 Ben Skipper

We are detached from those both generationally.

01:01:58 Ben Skipper

So therefore, you know we we in our experience, so it's easy, they're just words on paper now.

01:02:04 Ben Skipper

Or a snatched moment on a on a silly screen.

01:02:07 Dr Philip Blood

But I think what is very convenient since 1945, because it's always kind of broken out in places that nobody cares about far away from anywhere that camps. So, you know, let let's turn let's turn, you know, that infamous statement by Le May. Let's turn Vietnam into the Stone Age.

01:02:08 Ben Skipper

They're not real.

01:02:27 Dr Philip Blood

UM.

01:02:29 Dr Philip Blood

But it didn't really matter to do that to Vietnam because it was what a third world country, an enemy that had the goal to stand up to America. So let's throw Agent Orange all over the country. Let's just drop so much ordinance on it that it will suffer for many decades.

01:02:49 Dr Philip Blood

And let's tell a story somehow. That was a lost victory. I think the same happened in Northern Ireland.

01:02:58 Dr Philip Blood

My experience in Northern Ireland was that I ended up being with a friend of mine who was on the other side of the fence. Carefully. I was visiting and I saw the other side. I saw the British side operating and I wasn't at all oppressed. I thought it was.

01:03:14 Dr Philip Blood

I thought it's pretty amateurish actually. I just looked at it and thought this is incredible and then I found myself through civil military relations course at Lanco.

01:03:24 Dr Philip Blood

Mr, As I said, we've before we've, Martin Edmunds and we were looking at the.

01:03:30 Dr Philip Blood

British operations, how they were examining snipers and all of that stuff and it, and it struck me that.

01:03:38 Dr Philip Blood

While while on the one hand there's this kind of sophisticated war making machine of the British Army out in the field, there was another war making machine which wasn't very efficient at all.

01:03:53 Dr Philip Blood

And then you come to, you know, wars in the in the 1980s, which everybody forgets, you know, the Falklands, Grenada.

01:04:04 Dr Philip Blood

Afghanistan and the images it struck me that ever since I first watched BBC News, when the the guys before Simpson, the in the black and White Pictures would show pictures of children being burnt alive with napalm in Vietnam.

01:04:24 Dr Philip Blood

Suddenly, now in 1983, I'm watching Argies as they were called on The Sun newspaper, looking fairly pitiful on an airfield.

01:04:37 Dr Philip Blood

Grenada being turned into something like the the battle you know the Battle of Gettysburg and then we got the Afghanistan nonsense where?

01:04:47 Dr Philip Blood

We're hearing that the, the, the Russians are moving in Afghanistan and its illegal war and all rest of it. So what does that make the Americans 20 years later when they move into Afghanistan with their war and and and it's always we have the better excuse than anybody else, I'm not greatly.

01:05:06 Dr Philip Blood

Convinced. And then we had those images that came out of Yugoslavia and frankly.

01:05:12 Dr Philip Blood

That should have been enough for everybody.

01:05:14 Dr Philip Blood

We should have said then.

01:05:16 Dr Philip Blood

Humanitarianism has to take over, and I think you've been, you know, like myself, how to read of Chris Bellamy's book about United Nations operations.

01:05:25 Dr Philip Blood

And and why that period up to 911?

01:05:29 Dr Philip Blood

Was truly an opportunity lost.

01:05:33 Ben Skipper

Absolutely. And and that is what we can have the discussion about. Uh, nice and white armour definitely in the future because I think Bellamy raced and exceptionally good points and the UN has constantly been a missed opportunity and it's utilised.

01:05:50 Ben Skipper

Has been far from fully exploited and regardless of what people think it is a book well worth reading.

01:05:58 Ben Skipper

But you know.

01:06:00 Dr Philip Blood

See, I'm suspicious of what happened with the United Nations. Is something to do with Western white racism.

01:06:07 Dr Philip Blood

But the fact that United Nations was dominated, or increasingly dominated by people, sort of a different colour, different culture of places that nobody knew anything about.

01:06:16 Dr Philip Blood

It it struck, it struck me that that need that was just way out of what people, what, what the Western world wanted.

01:06:24 Dr Philip Blood

So the United Nations, you know, we're confronting peace and reconciliation, reconciliation in South Africa.

01:06:33 Dr Philip Blood

But at the same time, let's go and let the United Nations should really be doing something better, like supporting war in Iraq and Afghanistan when a couple of aeroplanes fly into a couple of buildings in New York.

01:06:50 Dr Philip Blood

And when when there was a debate as to whether there was a, a complete, a completely clear evidential link between what happened in New York and what happened and what was happening in Iraq and Afghanistan.

01:07:07 Dr Philip Blood

Once that evidential data was discovered to be false.

01:07:13 Dr Philip Blood

Look how compromised we became.

01:07:16 Dr Philip Blood

And by that stage there was no going back on United Nations, because United Nations had already been.

01:07:24 Dr Philip Blood

Dispensed with in the mind in the mindset of the West, as a place for the loonies in the Third world to to play their games, which was no relevance to the first world, which is, you know we we know best. We've got machine guns and they haven't so they can ****** off, which.

01:07:43 Dr Philip Blood

Is as far as I'm concerned, is imperialism in the post colonial world.

01:07:53 Dr Philip Blood

Sure, that will make a lot of unfriends on my.

01:07:59 Ben Skipper

But again, sort of at that point itself. This there is this and this has been marked particularly over the past couple of weeks where where various talking heads and commentators.

01:08:14 Ben Skipper

Have courted social media purely to grow their following this, as opposed to actually give reasoned, rational and informed feedback and consideration to what's going on, and that that has to include the unpleasant.

01:08:34 Ben Skipper

Elements of it. You can't. We can't keep giving this. And this goes back to this road stint.

01:08:40 Ben Skipper

And these are mother Brown attitude that we that we seem to have towards military studies, in particular within the populace where you have to confront sometimes actually some of this is unpleasant. So this is.

01:08:53 Ben Skipper

It it's possibly controversial because it it it's it's we're having to adjust our mindset.

01:09:02 Dr Philip Blood

I I think what actually happened and I think Britain has got swept up in it, but if you go back to about 1980 America, you started to see something called the Good War.

01:09:17 Dr Philip Blood

And it was emerging in American literature. I can't remember the the American author, but he was writing about the good war as the Second World War, and it was actually basically a response to.

01:09:29 Dr Philip Blood

Vietnam War, which was quote a bad.

01:09:33 Dr Philip Blood

So you have this this drift into anybody who thought in the good war was automatically good.

01:09:42 Dr Philip Blood

Anybody who fought in the bad war was automatically bad.

01:09:47 Dr Philip Blood

So you've got this kind of I think is it Marmite or vanilla or whatever the modern term is where everything's over black and white one or the other and you don't have the grey area and the grey scale that that really used to exist in people's thinking about what you know, you only have to look at.

01:10:08 Dr Philip Blood

Kipling, Kipling writes. And military history of the Irish Guards in the First World War, which is magnificent.

01:10:15 Dr Philip Blood

It's a horrible study to.

01:10:18 Dr Philip Blood

People don't want that.

01:10:20 Dr Philip Blood

They won't, you know.

01:10:22 Dr Philip Blood

The learning curve in the Great War and the trains are working, the logistics are fine and Hague was the best general ever. Well, really I'm not entirely agree with that because I know an awful lot of civilians who thought otherwise and they had to live with the with the losses.

01:10:41 Dr Philip Blood

And that's what actually happens with the American scenario.

01:10:45 Dr Philip Blood

You have the good war.

01:10:47 Dr Philip Blood

Which is easy to work with because you've only lost quote. You've only lost 360,000 people in a in in a period of conflict of where that you're in it for four years.

01:11:01 Dr Philip Blood

Whereas this short period of one war against this horrible communist enemy is a bad war, you've lost it and you've had significant losses.

01:11:13 Dr Philip Blood

What? Well, that and then suddenly, you see falling out of that good, where good war scenario, there's questions like, well, you know, this many people died at anteater. That was a Great War because it was to save the slaves.

01:11:29 Dr Philip Blood

And the war against Vietnam was a bad war because these people were communists and wanted to stay comma.

01:11:37 Dr Philip Blood

And and those kind of cheap moral equivalencies and ill equivalences kind of fed their way into British military history. So you you started certainly to see, I think it was round about the time field Marshall Carr that produced his book about them, about the the British Army.

01:11:57 Dr Philip Blood

Going from being crap to very good and.

01:12:01 Dr Philip Blood

And then you then you saw at the beginning of the 90s, there was the school of the we're not going to accept the Lions led by donkeys thesis anymore. We're going to start showing that that battles were better in the first.

01:12:13 Dr Philip Blood

World War.

01:12:14 Dr Philip Blood

I still can't understand why if there's a learning curve, the battle of Passendale is as bad as the battle of the song.

01:12:21 Dr Philip Blood

For surely if they're going to learn the curve and it's going to get better, then the passion, their losses aren't going to be as big, if not heavier than they were in the battle of the Sun. And then by the time we get to the end of that period, well, what we've got we've got.

01:12:36 Dr Philip Blood

That we've had the 50th anniversary of the Second World War.

01:12:40 Dr Philip Blood

Everybody's learned how wonderful those soldiers were and everyone was a hero and there was the point.

01:12:46 Dr Philip Blood

We all know our relatives would tell you that for every decent soldier who was dying and fighting and killing, there was at least ten soldiers who weren't.

01:12:58 Dr Philip Blood

And that's not necessarily that they weren't brave, just they weren't fighting. But come the end of the Second World War and then come to 1994 when you're doing the anniversaries of the.

01:13:09 Dr Philip Blood

Second World War.

01:13:10 Dr Philip Blood

You've got all these veterans who were at the entry battle.

01:13:15 Dr Philip Blood

And I wasn't convinced. I'm. I'm still not convinced.

01:13:19 Dr Philip Blood

Because you only have to look at the number of units and the scale of casualties, I can I can. You know, it's very hard for a German to turn around and say, you know, I managed to go through the war and didn't see any combat. I'm not sure it's so easy for a British person to turn around. You know, the British soldiers always to turn around and say, well, you know, we were in.

01:13:40 Dr Philip Blood

We were in the war in 1940. We stayed in it and I was fighting at every front right the way through.

01:13:47 Dr Philip Blood

And so we then get into these other stories. And then one thing leads to another and then we're in 9/11 and we're rebuilding A narrative, which was what? Oh, I know, let's take Malaya. Let's say we are the experts at counterinsurgency. Let's go and live in the Afghan mountains and show how good we are and what actually happens.

01:14:07 Dr Philip Blood

The parents go to the Afghan mountains, they're there for six months and BBC comes to visit them and says what's going on and they said nothing because we can't find anybody.

01:14:19 Dr Philip Blood

Excuse me.

01:14:21 Dr Philip Blood

Excuse me? You're the best counterinsurgency forces in the world by your own self. And you can't find the enemy.

01:14:32 Dr Philip Blood

And then a few years later, you have somebody like Richard Holmes who goes out to see his regiment, who's Colonel of the regiment, and he goes there, he sees the circumstances in which the British soldiers are fighting. He sees how bad the equipment is. He sees how badly supported they are. He sees the mess. It all is.

01:14:52 Dr Philip Blood

He wants to talk about it, but he's sat on because he's told you can't talk about it.

01:14:57 Dr Philip Blood

And then what happens? Well, you've got this idea that somehow we've got scholars telling us that we fought the greatest wars ever, while at the same time gradually, gradually eroding away as British defence policy. So we end up with what?

01:15:14 Dr Philip Blood

Two aircraft carriers with no aircraft tanks that don't work or wobble, and every shake, everybody to death inside them when they when.

01:15:21 Dr Philip Blood

They start up.

01:15:23 Dr Philip Blood

Guns that are are no good boots that melt and then at the end of that period when we've been through all of that and Afghan Afghanistan has been lost and Iraq's turned into a into a lunatic asylum.

01:15:37 Dr Philip Blood

We get into a point when we're supposed to do something humanitarian. We don't do it. We save the dogs, we cast the human beings aside. And then when we face the conflict.

01:15:48 Dr Philip Blood

We start saying, well, actually look how inefficient those boys are because they can't drive their tanks on the roads.

01:15:55 Dr Philip Blood

Yeah, we've got 2 aircraft carriers flying around, sailing around the globe doing what?

01:16:02 Dr Philip Blood

I'd like to know what these two aircraft carriers are going to do when it comes to Ukraine.

01:16:09 Dr Philip Blood

And I bet the Royal Air Force, with its 400 aircraft, which you and Matt were telling me about and maybe 125 combat aircraft, I mean only going to last more than half an hour, maybe maybe.

01:16:21 Dr Philip Blood

A couple of hours.

01:16:23 Ben Skipper

That's an interesting.

01:16:23 Dr Philip Blood

One, and then you've got the fighting troops. You know, we've got apparently 1000 troops are going up to fight somewhere in the Baltics.

01:16:33 Dr Philip Blood

How long they going to last?

01:16:36 Dr Philip Blood

You've got 1000 troops against what? 4 divisions?

01:16:42 Dr Philip Blood

So I assume because Britain is, you know, a nation of exceptional warriors, they're going to hold out and defeat, they end up in Moscow.

01:16:51 Dr Philip Blood

None of it adds up.

01:16:56 Dr Philip Blood

And the more we hear these stories about how bad the the Russians are, the more we're actually glossing over how bad we might be.

01:17:06 Dr Philip Blood

And that worries me because we've seen to if we if we avoid.

01:17:12 Dr Philip Blood

The harshness now when it really gets very, very difficult, what's going to happen.

01:17:18 Dr Philip Blood

That worries me.

01:17:20 Dr Philip Blood

Because if nobody's prepared to bite the bullet now and deal with the problems that we're facing, like mass refugees and displaced persons, then what's going to happen?

01:17:31 Dr Philip Blood

Mobile Chrome.

01:17:36 Ben Skipper

I think at that point that's actually a very good way at this point to stop.

01:17:41 Ben Skipper

Because this actually will lead to our our our next discussion about humanitarianism within.

01:17:49 Ben Skipper

To do the global scheme of things in in in the post Iraq.

01:17:55 Ben Skipper

Afghan war world. That's quite important, Phil. Thank you so much for your time today.

01:18:03 Dr Philip Blood

Sorry, it was gloomy.

01:18:08 Ben Skipper

So because these things have been talked about it.

01:18:10 Dr Philip Blood

She wants to say two things here. One is a lot of guys said, why don't? Why are you so gloomy? And I've I've responded and said.

01:18:19 Dr Philip Blood

I don't want to go any deeper because what I've seen and what I fear is even worse and I don't because I do.

01:18:28 Dr Philip Blood

I have a sense of how bad this is going to be.

01:18:31 Dr Philip Blood

And that doesn't just come from Holocaust studies. The genocide studies, the security studies and all the rest of it. I just know that this isn't going to go well because we've seen it in Grozny.

01:18:41 Ben Skipper

Yeah, yeah.

01:18:42 Dr Philip Blood

A little.

01:18:44 Dr Philip Blood

And the second thing I want to say because I mentioned the second, the First World War in there somewhere is that I'd like to put a shout out to Rob Thompson and say, you know.

01:18:54 Dr Philip Blood

Rob, your morale and your.

01:18:59 Dr Philip Blood

Standing up to the your personal battles are just something else. So here's to you mate.

01:19:09 Ben Skipper

And yeah.

01:19:11 Ben Skipper

Rob, there is no bar chip for you ever. At the entrance lounge, there'll always be a part on the bar for you, mate.

01:19:18 Ben Skipper

Absolutely. He one of these champs who yeah, doesn't have to.

01:19:23 Dr Philip Blood

I think he could do a good talk on tryings his knowledge, his knowledge of trains in the First World War is quite good. So.

01:19:24

Right.

01:19:31 Ben Skipper

We we we need, we need, we need. We need to get trained. We need to get more more trained and locomotive content. Listen this this has been we I do understand a very heavy.

01:19:42 Ben Skipper

Podcast for us, but the subject and the subject nature is here.

01:19:48 Ben Skipper

We're not going to trivialise it here.

01:19:52 Ben Skipper

At all. There's there's no point. We we don't need to. We do hope that you've enjoyed it. We will return. There'll be a couple more where we will have a round couple of round table discussions in the future with a a couple of well informed members of the mass.

01:20:10 Ben Skipper

But in the mean time.

01:20:12 Ben Skipper

You know.

01:20:14 Ben Skipper

I hope you enjoyed today's session. Phil, thank you so much for joining me.

01:20:20 Ben Skipper

I'm showing showing your origin insights and they've been absolutely spot on.

01:20:26 Ben Skipper

Do you feel a follow?

01:20:29 Ben Skipper

He's he's pretty pretty.

01:20:32 Ben Skipper

It's all over the show on Twitter based return handles will be in here.

01:20:38 Ben Skipper

I'm just gonna say goodbye.

01:20:42 Ben Skipper

Wherever you are, wherever you are, do take care.

01:20:47 Ben Skipper

If you say.

01:20:48 Ben Skipper

And yeah, just just take care and look out for one another. And so that's me signing out from the Adjutant’s. Many thanks. Bye now.