Scott Ritter & Lt Col Daniel Davis: Iran Hitting Our Bases Like No Enemy Before (Transcript)

I mean, there was no one more qualified than me to make this case. And I made the case with all the facts I had available to me, which turned out to be 100% correct. Why not? I was the guy who was doing the job. So of course I’m going to be accurate reporting what we did.

But I wasn’t able to convince people. I wasn’t able to convince the government. I wasn’t able to convince the American people. And this weighs on me. It weighs on me every day.

People may not realize this, but I was against the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Anybody who studies my resume saw that I was dead set against it. But when it became clear that we were going to go into Iraq, I was at that time out of active duty. I called the prior service recruiter and I said, “Please bring me back on active duty.” He said, “Why would we bring you back on active duty?” I said, “Because I can save Marines’ lives. I know Iraq better than anybody out there. There’s nobody who knows Iraq better than me. I’ve been to Iraq. I’ve been everywhere in Iraq. I can help save Marines’ lives because that’s my number one priority. I care about the Marine Corps. I care about Marines. I don’t want them to die in a war that they don’t need to be fighting in.”

The Marine Corps was happy about that. The CIA said no. So I didn’t get an opportunity to go off and do that, which is probably good. I was a little long in the tooth and soft in the belly. Wasn’t quite the Marine I used to be at the time.

But the point is, I don’t do this for gratification. I don’t do this to look in the mirror and say, “Man, I’m really good.” I do this because it’s the right thing to do. And as an intelligence officer, it’s my job to tell the people who matter what the truth is, to lay the facts out.

And in this case, I always have to ask myself, could I have done it better? Is there something I could have done better? I take no pride in getting it right because getting it right got it wrong. Getting it right for me, it looks good on the pages of history, but the reality is thousands of Americans died because our leadership didn’t do the right thing. And so I don’t sit there and pat myself on the back. I literally wrestle with it. What could I have done differently? Was I too egotistical, too insistent on my facts, unwilling to compromise and debate? Could I have approached this differently, sold it less forcefully so that —

History Rhymes: Iraq Then, Iran Now

DANIEL DAVIS: Yeah, no, I can tell you as a somewhat lesser whistleblower myself, I can confirm to you that there was nothing you could have done. These people were hell bent and there would be a war if Jesus Christ himself came down. I swear to you, I’m saying it’s literal. That would not have swayed anybody, because you had all the evidence and all the facts out there and they were self-evident. But it just didn’t matter because they didn’t want the facts. In fact, they wanted you hidden and they wanted you discredited, because they wanted anyone discredited because of that. So there’s nothing you could have done there.

And I totally get the issue about not patting yourself on the back for being right because of the consequences, but you were right. And so that is one of the reasons we are happy to have you on today.

And Gary, were we able to find that one for Witkoff? I was looking for it a second ago.

The Witkoff Negotiations with Iran

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: “Just to give you a little bit of a taste for how these three days of negotiations went. Three separate times, Jared and I opened up with the Iranian negotiators telling us they had the inalienable right to enrich all their nuclear fuel that they possessed. That’s how they opened up. We, of course, responded that the President feels we have the inalienable right to stop you dead in your tracks. They then went on to say that beyond the inalienable right to enrich, that was going to be their starting point. And Jared and I just sort of looked at ourselves, flummoxed, and said, ‘Well, we’re really in for it now.'”

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

DANIEL DAVIS: The reason why I play that sound bite there is because while history doesn’t repeat, it rhymes, as they say. And to me, when I hear him say this, and then you hear Foreign Minister Araghchi, who was on the other side of that table during that, and when you hear the Omani foreign minister characterize what they view — this six-hour, that last six-hour meeting — where he said they were flummoxed, the other side came out saying, “Well, what you told us, we thought we had the outlines of a deal, that we would have avoided war altogether.”

As someone who’s been in a similar situation and as an intelligence analyst, what can you say about those two contrasting visions?

The Diplomatic Deception: Negotiations, the Fatwa, and the Path to War

SCOTT RITTER: Well, first of all, we have to understand that when Donald Trump sent Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff to Oman to negotiate, he sent his two most highly qualified people. I mean, Jared has his PhD in nuclear physics and he’s… wait a minute, he doesn’t. He’s a corrupt real estate broker. And Steve Witkoff doesn’t know anything about nuclear weapons or nuclear enrichment either. He’s a corrupt real estate broker, and they work for a corrupt real estate broker. I mean, we’re already behind the curve here, when we have these two people representing, because they have no idea what they’re talking about.

When the Iranians said they have an inalienable right to enrich, it’s Article 4 of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which, because it hasn’t been walked away from yet by this administration, continues to be the supreme law of the land. I remind people that constitutionally, when we have a treaty that’s been signed by the President, ratified by the Senate, it is the supreme law of the land. The supremacy clause of the Constitution. For all you people out there that say you’re proud Americans, your MAGA and all this, we are a constitutional republic where the Constitution is the only thing that matters.

So right off the bat, these negotiators are showing their absolute ignorance. The President has no inherent right to do anything except what the Constitution allows him to do. He doesn’t get to go around and say, “I want to do this, I want to do that.” And so we went in there, not being honest about what our intent was. We brought people whose job wasn’t to succeed, but to fail. Now, the Iranians and the Omanis on their hand were looking to succeed.

Let’s remember what they started off with. We have 450 kg of 60% enriched uranium hexafluoride. That’s what they said. Now, if I were Kushner and Witkoff, I would have looked at it and said, “Okay, they’ve admitted to having it. So now what we need to do is get it. We need to get the Iranians to turn this over to us. We need to get this diluted down so that we eliminate the immediate threat of nuclear weapons,” which is what the President told us publicly what he wants to do. I would have been relieved at that point in time. I would have said, “We have a chance. Now we have a chance.”

And again, that’s what the Iranians and the Omanis did. They agreed to the procedures in which this 450 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium, which is only two cycles enriched through a 164-centrifuge IR8, IR9 cascade, which the Iranians have, to becoming 90, 92%, which is what makes fissile material for nuclear weapons. So here was our chance to actually get rid of this stuff, to do what the President said he wanted to do, to deny Iran a pathway to a nuclear bomb, verifiably.

Because the other thing the Iranians agreed to at the time wasn’t just the return of IAEA inspectors, international inspectors, but they would be accompanied by American inspectors. For the first time in the inspection history of the Iranian nuclear program, inspectors would be allowed on the ground to verify what the Iranians said. This is the biggest victory in arms control one could imagine, if this president was serious about arms control.

But the fact is, the day he initiated these negotiations was the day after he agreed upon the date to attack Iran with Benjamin Netanyahu. When he visited, they had already made the decision. We lied. And again, I just want to remind people, these details are important. Perfidy is a war crime. Perfidy, hiding behind a flag of truce, is a war crime.

Not only have we carried out an illegal war of aggression — and again, Justice Jackson, who was the prosecutor at Nuremberg, the guy who prosecuted the German war criminals and hung several of them, said that the greatest war crime is the crime of an illegal war of aggression, because from that, all other crimes emanate — the United States has just committed an illegal war of aggression, a surprise attack.

How many people out there, on December 7th, hang their head and say a prayer for those who perished in Pearl Harbor, when the Imperial Japanese Fleet carried out a surprise attack? A day that will live in infamy. President Roosevelt said, “A day that should live in infamy.” Well, we just trumped that, because what we did is, under the flag of truce, carried out a surprise attack against Iran that assassinated Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader.

Now, for the people out there who aren’t familiar, Iran is an Islamic republic. The Supreme Leader is the head jurisprudent. They call it the Vilayati Faqih. He’s the head jurisprudent of the faith. He is the equivalent, to Twelver Shia — which is a faction of the Shia faith, the major faction in Iran, Iraq, and elsewhere — of the Pope for the Catholic Church. So this is like us carrying out a surprise attack against the Vatican to kill the Pope. This is like the Archbishop of Canterbury — for the British, we just killed him. It’s like Kirill, the head of the Orthodox Church — for the Russians, we just killed him. We killed a major religious figure. That resonates deeply with these people, because they are, after all, the Islamic Republic.

The Fatwa, the Nuclear Threat, and the Consequences of Killing Khamenei

This is the man who issued a fatwa. Remember, President Trump says he doesn’t want a nuclear bomb. This is the man who issued the fatwa, which has been recognized — not only by Barack Obama when he signed the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, back in 2015, where he recognized that Iran has a religious fatwa or edict that prohibits them from developing nuclear weapons, and we take this seriously — but also by Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence for Donald Trump, who made the same statement before Congress and mentioned the fatwa. She said, “There’s a fatwa. We have seen no political move by the Iranians to reverse this fatwa. Therefore, there’s no evidence of them pursuing a nuclear weapon.”

The guy who issued the fatwa in 2003 and kept it relevant, we murdered, we killed. And now they replaced him with somebody who says maybe that fatwa is not all it was. And guess what? The Iranians have today 450 kilograms of uranium hexafluoride enriched to 60%, that they can, within a matter of two weeks, turn into uranium metal enriched to 90%, which can be used to produce 5 to 10, 15 to 20 kiloton nuclear bombs the size of those we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that can be put into warheads mounted on the Fatah-4 missile, which is now operational, striking Israel as we speak. The weapon that we said we don’t want them to have, we just opened the pathway for them to have.

DANIEL DAVIS: By the way, we just had, just before you came on here, Ambassador Chas Freeman, who went further than John Mearsheimer has previously on our show, saying he doesn’t understand why they haven’t. Chas Freeman said he now thinks they will. Where do you fall on that?

SCOTT RITTER: 100%. We know that there was a lot of pressure placed on Ali Khamenei starting in the fall of 2024, and the people around him were saying, “The Israelis and the Americans are getting ready to attack us. This will be a war of existential survival for Iran. We need nuclear weapons to deter them.” And Ali Khamenei said, “No, under no circumstances.”

I met with the Iranian president in September in New York City, and I asked him that. I said, “Is your ballistic missile deterrence capable of actually preventing these nations from attacking, or do you need to have a nuclear weapon?” He said, “We don’t want a nuclear weapon. We believe our missiles are enough. But moreover,” he said, “we’re prohibited from even thinking about it because of this fatwa.”

But Khamenei was under a lot of pressure. And what happened is some of the ayatollahs did get him to admit that if the Islamic Republic of Iran is under existential threat from powers who possess nuclear weapons, then the fatwa can be set aside, and it will be religiously acceptable to produce nuclear weapons as a way of preserving the Islamic Republic in the face of this nuclear threat. Today we have nuclear-armed Israel and nuclear-armed United States attacking Iran with existential desires.

So we’ve just literally created justification. If the Iranians couldn’t have asked for a bigger favor from us — because if there were people in Iran that wanted a nuclear weapon, what was preventing them was a fatwa issued by the Supreme Leader — we killed the Supreme Leader and the fatwa. There were conditions set where it could be overcome, and we created those conditions, and now we’ve empowered them.

Moreover, we’ve proven that there is no diplomatic path out of this, because regardless of what Iran may want to do, the United States and Israel can never again be trusted, ever, across the board. And every American should be ashamed.

Unconditional Surrender and the Trajectory of the War

DANIEL DAVIS: Aside from just the practicality of what you just said, there’s also the literal letter that Trump wrote today on Truth Social, demanding, saying that there would be no negotiated settlement and only unconditional surrender is now on the table. What does that do to the move that you just described?

SCOTT RITTER: That means that the United States will have to unconditionally surrender to Iran when we lose this war, because we are going to lose this war. We can’t win this war. We don’t have a plan. Our plan changes every 24 hours. We don’t have the ammunition. That’s proven. I mean, Hegseth and Trump can talk about unlimited ammunition, but we’re literally talking about gravity bombs.

Up until now, the weapons we’ve been using are standoff munitions. We have a finite number of them, and we’re running out of them. And when we run out of them, we’re going to have to put our airmen at risk. Because now, instead of being able to stand off and strike targets, we’re going to have to close with the targets, which means we have to bring in the Wild Weasels, clear out any air defense, and we’re going to put people at risk.

Anybody who thinks that claiming air supremacy means we don’t lose anybody — look at the Gulf War, look at Desert Storm. We were losing aircraft up until the very last moments of that war, because even if we had air superiority, we don’t have air supremacy as long as any means are left to defend. And when you force airplanes to close with the enemy, they are vulnerable to being shot down. So this president is going to put American lives at risk because we didn’t think this war out.

But air defense is the big problem. The Iranians have shown a proclivity to destroy the totality of our Middle East infrastructure. Colonel, I don’t know how many THAAD batteries we deployed into the region — the THAAD being the more advanced of our air defense systems, so that’s probably a classified number. What I do know is that there’s photographic evidence that five radars associated with THAAD batteries have been destroyed by the Iranians. The Iranians are precisely picking us apart. They’re taking us apart piece by piece by piece.

They took out our early warning eyes in Al Udeid. A $1.1 billion early warning radar, gone. They’ve taken out other radars. They’ve destroyed five THAAD batteries, which I believe, and I wrote this earlier, is the maximum number we have deployed in the region. So our THAAD is no longer operational outside of Israel, and they are now picking us apart, destroying that.

There are people who are saying the amount of destruction done to American military infrastructure is the greatest in the history of the United States. That outside of the Civil War, nobody has ever inflicted this much harm on the United States. Nobody has attacked American military installations to this degree. And the Iranians are just picking us apart piece by piece by piece. They’re using intelligence provided by the Russians and the Chinese that specifically identify locations, and they have the weapons systems that are able to strike these locations. And we don’t have the ability to defend ourselves. So ask yourself, who’s winning this war? The trajectory is in favor of Iran.

The Israeli Perspective: “We Are Winning”

DANIEL DAVIS: I can tell you, if you ask an Israeli general — Zamir — he thinks we are. Watch this.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

ZAMIR: I am in continuous contact with my American counterparts, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States, General Dan Caine, and the commander of CENTCOM, Admiral Brad Cooper. We are fighting based on shared interests and values in this war. Shoulder to shoulder, they are true friends. Through coordinated action, we are stripping the regime of its military capabilities and bringing it to strategic isolation and a point of weakness in which it has never been before.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

DANIEL DAVIS: Yeah, so pretty much game over. I mean, you saw the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, said, “Yeah, they’re toast. We are definitely winning. And boy, you ain’t seen nothing yet.” He said yesterday, “Much, much more is coming.” What do you say to that?

The Futility of Bombing and the History of U.S.-Iran Relations

SCOTT RITTER: Well, I believe much, much more is coming. I believe we’ll continue to drop bombs on Iran. I think we’re going to continue video of things blowing up. I saw on your resume, Colonel, that you were a participant in Operation Desert Storm. So you know full well that we blew up a lot of infrastructure in Iraq as well.

I was one of the people to help design the strategic air campaign, and I monitored it as a battle damage assessment officer. And then I went into Iraq afterwards as a weapons inspector and visited all the places that we blew up, all the places that were in our target package. And what I found is that we blew up a lot of buildings.

I was told by an Iraqi general, very senior Iraqi General, he said, “Mr. Scott, you guys are really good at blowing up buildings. Really good. And we’re pretty good at pouring concrete. And the thing is, when you blow up the buildings, they’re all empty. But when our concrete cures, we put everything back in, and we’re back in business.”

And that’s what happened to us after Desert Storm. We didn’t destroy anything. I’m just here to tell you that, straight up. We blew up everything and we destroyed nothing.

I can guarantee you right now, this is a war that the Iranians have been preparing to fight for over 20 years, since Dick Cheney threatened to invade them back in 2005. And they have broken their country into 12 autonomous military districts. And each one of these has been prepared. They’ve been going underground.

Fordow, the enrichment facility that Trump bombed, Operation Midnight Hammer — that place wasn’t carved out to put in centrifuges. That was part of over 100 different places prepared around Iran to evacuate material so that when they think they’re going to be attacked, sensitive material is evacuated. This one was converted to be used as an underground enrichment facility. But around Iran are hundreds of others that are there to receive all of the precision equipment, all the production equipment, all the sensitive stuff that’s very difficult to replace, very expensive — is now in hiding.

We’re blowing up empty facilities, and we will continue to blow up empty facilities. And then we pretend that it’s victorious, that we’re doing some great stuff. We’re not.

The Lessons of Strategic Bombing

And I also want to remind people, if you study history, just take a look at a simple thing. Messerschmitt fighter production in Nazi Germany during World War II. Plot the number of Messerschmitt fighters built by the Germans in 1942, in the 1940s, and then overlay the strategic bombing campaign. And what you will see is the more we bombed, the more fighters were produced, because the better the Germans got at adapting to our bombing. Bombing doesn’t accomplish anything unless it’s attached to sound targets.

And we saw, tragically, with the murder of over 170 schoolgirls on the first day of the war, that we have no idea what we’re hitting. We used a target deck that’s dated 15 years, and we had nobody. Where’s the intelligence officer whose job is to go through that target deck and vet it to make sure we have the most up-to-date information — that we’re not bombing a target based upon 15-year-old intelligence?

I did this in 1985 when I went through the war plan for the amphibious assault against Bandar Abbas and Chabahar. I had to go through each target because it was my job to do so, and to say: this is dated information. Update the information, vet each target to make sure that we have the most valid, updated information to justify this target still being in the target deck, and to ensure that when we bomb the target we get the results we want.

People need to understand that by bombing that school, we have destroyed our credibility not only in Iran, but around the world. Again, we are mass murderers. We, the people of the United States of America, are citizens of a nation that has carried out an illegal war of aggression with no legal authorization — an act of perfidy and mass murder. There’s no justification out there at all for murdering 170 schoolgirls.

DANIEL DAVIS: And you know, Scott, as it turns out, though I hope I don’t give you any PTSD with what’s about to come up — we are looking to replicate exactly what happened in that war there by convincing the American people that this is not only justified, but it’s like a moral imperative. And one of the people they trot out — they trotted out from the 2003 war.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: “The most important thing is to recognize that Iran has been at war with us for at least 47 years, all the way from 1979. People may forget they took our embassy hostage — 444 days. They were responsible for the killings of 300-plus Marines in Lebanon in the early 1980s. And if you ask people about Iraq, what was the source of many of our casualties in Iraq, you’ll get estimates as high as 75 or 80% of them were due to Iranian-made road bombs. If it is trying to deny them a conventional umbrella for their nuclear ambitions, that is a worthy goal. Now what comes after, people are of course concerned about that. But if you can render Iran essentially incapable of military action against us and against our allies, that’s worthy. And I think what they’re trying to do is to neuter Iran as a military power in the region.”

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

DANIEL DAVIS: You know, it’s strange to me that when we’re trying to sell a war, we’re going to bring somebody out who is known to have sold a fraudulent war in 2003. And there was — I think it was yesterday — we had a sound bite from an Iranian. I’m sorry, an Israeli general who was citing Tony Blair from the 2003 war as another way to justify what we were doing here. And I’m thinking that’s just weird on its own. But let’s get to the substance of what she said there. Do you believe that this is an imperative? And because the Iranians have killed all of us before, all we have to do is take away their military capacity?

SCOTT RITTER: Now, I hope I made it clear to your audience that when I — I apologize. The school bus is pulling up in front of my house. My dogs are going crazy.

DANIEL DAVIS: My dog does the same. So I got it.

Legal and Historical Context: Desert Storm vs. Today’s War

SCOTT RITTER: They do. So hopefully they’ll stop barking soon. But when I said that I was willing to go back on active duty, I was willing to go on active duty not because I supported that war, but because I support Marines. I want to keep Marines alive. And so no one can ever make the case that I would ever articulate anything that could bring harm to my fellow Marines, to soldiers, sailors, the Coast Guard, anybody. American life is sacrosanct. I’m an American patriot, and I will do what I can to preserve the lives of my fellow Americans.

But we also have to be realistic here. With all due respect to Condoleezza Rice — who is a war criminal, by the way — she was part of the cabal that led us into the last illegal war of aggression that we waged before this one, which was the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. No justification under international law or domestic law, unlike Desert Storm.

Again, I just want to remind people, because law is very important. Desert Storm — we had a Chapter 7 resolution passed by the Security Council that authorized the use of military force. And the United States Congress passed a war resolution before the bombs fell that gave us Congressional authority to do this as well. So everything we did in Desert Storm may not have been wise, but it was definitely legal. Nothing we’ve done in Iraq in 2003 was legal, and nothing we’re doing to Iran today is legal.

The Roots of U.S.-Iran Hostility

In 1979, the takeover of the U.S. embassy didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened because the CIA was working hand in hand with SAVAK, which was the secret police arm of Reza Shah Pahlavi. And they were committing horrific crimes against the people of Iran. And the people of Iran rose up, and they took over the embassy. I’m not in favor of that. I wish they hadn’t taken the embassy. But to pretend that it happened in a vacuum — that people just woke up one morning and said, “Hey, what can we do to really get America?” — no. It happened because they were furious at the United States. Because they were furious at how we had worked with the SAVAK to torture Iranians, that we were giving safe haven to Reza Shah Pahlavi, who had cancer and was in the United States. And Iranians said, “No, you’ve got to get him back here to be accountable to us.” So they took the embassy.

One of the things is the CIA was shredding documents back then. That’s before we had cross shredders. And so we had these long strips of 18-inch shredded paper, and these students actually pulled out the burn bags that didn’t get burned and put all those documents back together and published them. And it proves just how bad we were.

So when you want to sit there and say that Iran has been at war with the United States for 47 years, I would make the counter argument: the United States has been at war with Iran for even longer than that. Because you know who put the Shah in power? We did. How? Through a CIA-orchestrated coup that removed Mossadegh from power. In 1953, the constitutionally elected Prime Minister of Iran — we removed him from power using a CIA coup. We installed this fake Shah who then, with American backing, butchered the Iranian people until he was removed from power by the Islamic Revolution.

The Lebanon Precedent and the Iraq War

What happened in Beirut? Dead set against it. But ask the Marines who were there. They know that we chose sides. We walked into a civil war-like environment and we chose sides. We started shelling people, we started intervening. We became the enemy. And then we cry when we get treated like an enemy.

I don’t want those Marines dead. I don’t want them dead at all. I want them alive. But the best way to have kept them alive is to keep them out of Lebanon. We put them in a place where they shouldn’t have been, and then they paid the ultimate price. Don’t blame us when people choose to defend their homeland using the means necessary.

Everybody talks about the American Revolution. Of course we hid behind trees and we hid behind bushes to shoot the British redcoats marching in there, because that’s the way we had to fight. What do you want people to do when they have to go up against the Battleship New Jersey? When they have to go up against aircraft carriers, when they have to go up against Marines with helicopters and everything? You want them to line up and say “kill us,” or you want them to use the tactics necessary to achieve the results they want — which is the eviction of Marines from their territory? Again, I don’t want Marines dead, but we shouldn’t have been there.

The Hard Truth About Iraq

And then we come down to the toughest one of all, because there are a lot of veterans out now. They’re going to get really mad at me. I don’t care. I don’t care if you get mad at me now, because I’m going to tell you the awful truth.

If you were in Iraq in 2005 and you got hit with an explosively formed projectile that had been provided to the Shia of southern Iraq — Muqtada al-Sadr’s people — by Al-Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani and the Iranians, and it killed your comrades, wounded you, wounded other people — you shouldn’t have been there.

You do know that you illegally invaded and occupied a sovereign state, that there was no justification for you being there whatsoever. And the people who resided in that country didn’t want you there and they resisted you. Now, what would you do if a foreign power invaded your hometown, kicked in your door, took your family out, lined them up in the streets? Your younger brother came down a little too fast, so the guy shot him because he felt threatened.

You don’t belong there. We didn’t belong in Iraq. We illegally invaded and occupied that nation, and the people who live next door to them — co-religionists — supported the resistance. It was a resistance movement, and we paid the price. We shouldn’t have been there.

Do I want any Marines and any soldiers to have died in that? Absolutely not. I wish they were all home doing the right thing, training for a legitimate conflict — one that posed a real threat. This was a war of choice in Iraq. A war of choice. We didn’t need to be there.

DANIEL DAVIS: And can I just say that — I mean, I’m sure that you’ll probably resonate well with this one as well. It’s hard for me to hear those arguments that she made there about the EFPs and all the stuff that we suffered there. And a lot of it is legit — that number of 600 probably is close to being right. But I’ve got to think: what in the world? How do we point a finger at Iran and say that they’re worthy of death, when we do it on a four-year basis in Ukraine against Russians for the purpose of killing Russian soldiers? We are doing on an industrial scale what you’re saying they did on a moderate scale, and we lost 600 soldiers.

The War Powers Act and Legal Justifications

SCOTT RITTER: I think that is an accurate number. I wouldn’t dispute that number. We are responsible. We, the United States, are responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Russian soldiers because of what we provided to the Ukrainians. And remember, that war started when we instigated a coup in 2014 and replaced the legitimate government of Ukraine with a Ukrainian nationalist movement that had been supported by the CIA since 1948. If you guys want to get into history lessons with me, I’d be more than happy to do it.

DANIEL DAVIS: I bet you can.

SCOTT RITTER: But I, again, the facts are on my side.

Marco Rubio’s Legal Claims

DANIEL DAVIS: Yeah, I want to get to the Russia-Ukraine thing here in a second, but I want to hit another topic that you brought up already, a little bit about where we are right now. And you talked about how that was an illegal war. You’ve talked about how other things we’ve done have been illegal. The Secretary of State, Marco Rubio yesterday went to pains to say, okay, no, this deal is totally legal. In fact, we are over compliant with the law. So we’ve complied with all — we’ve over complied with the law and what it requires.

SCOTT RITTER: “This is an action by the President to address a real threat. A real threat.”

DANIEL DAVIS: “This is hostilities designed to eliminate a threat to the safety and the security of the United States and to our allies.” I almost hear a little Donald Rumsfeld in my ear. But anyway, what do you say to that?

SCOTT RITTER: Well, again, I’ve studied law. When he’s saying overcompliant, he’s talking about the War Powers Act of 1973 and any subsequent modifications that have been made by the United States Congress. This is basically where Congress punted on its constitutional responsibilities and has given the President of the United States the ability to engage in military action if there’s an imminent threat to the United States of such a scope and scale that he can’t go to Congress.

So Congress is saying, okay, we’re going to let you go to war for 45 days, maybe 90, maybe up to 180 before you have to come to us and get permission. But it has to be an imminent threat.

So here’s where Marco Rubio falls apart. The threat cited is Iran’s nuclear weapons program as defined to Witkoff and Kushner, which they apparently took seriously. It wasn’t a nuclear weapons program, meaning that the 450kg of 60% enriched uranium hadn’t been turned into something that could be a weapon. Moreover, we were engaged in a negotiating process, an ongoing negotiating process that the Iranians had not walked away from, and they were negotiating in good faith.

So there’s literally no case that could be made under any notion of the War Powers Act that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States insofar as it has been articulated as such. It’s that Iran was preparing. I mean, if you remember, initially we had to preempt the Iranians who were seeking to attack us. Well, then the Pentagon had to come to the Congress and admit, now, actually, the Iranians weren’t going to attack first. We know they weren’t going to attack first. But what they were going to do is that when Israel attacked them, they were going to strike back at us. So therefore, we had to join Israel in attacking them to preempt their response. Marco Rubio, this is the problem. We don’t know our own laws.

Constitutional Failures and the Cult of Personality

DANIEL DAVIS: The thing is, we don’t know our laws, or we just don’t care about our own laws.

SCOTT RITTER: We don’t care about our laws. Again, I’ve been told by my wife, don’t read the comments, don’t read the comments. So I’m doing my best to comply with her desires. But I just see so much ignorance in there about people who, I can guarantee you right now, if I gave you a test of the Constitution, you would fail. If I asked you what Federalist 10 was, you would have no idea. You would know who wrote it. You wouldn’t know what they were talking about. You wouldn’t know its relevance to the current situation, nor would you know about Federalist 51.

These are foundational documents the Supreme Court relies upon when they study constitutional issues that are brought before them. Issues that pertain to separation of powers, issues that pertain to the importance of the constitutional republic functioning as it is.

Marco Rubio’s words prove that this constitutional republic is not functioning the way it should be. We are a nation that has lost its moral compass. We are a nation that has been taken over by a literal cult of personality. Prove me wrong.

We have a president who says, “I don’t believe in the rule of law. I believe in my own personal moral compass.” That’s an impeachable offense right off the bat. There’s no reason why he should be president after that. No Congress worth its salt would tolerate a president saying that. He has said before the World Economic Forum, “I am a dictator.” Well, gosh, I can’t disagree with you. It’s one of the few honest things he said.

And we have a Congress that has punted. When you have the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, saying, “I don’t know, this isn’t a war, it’s a defensive operation. This is a defensive series of defensive things that are defensive in nature.” Dude, we attacked them. It wasn’t defensive. We attacked them.

DANIEL DAVIS: Give out a declaration of unconditional surrender from the President of the United States in a non-war situation. I mean, it’s so absurd. It’s just hard to even get your head around. And yet that is what we’re saying. It’s so bizarre. I just can’t even hardly get my head around that. It’s reality.

We the People — Not the President’s Country

SCOTT RITTER: No, again, Colonel, I wake up every day just pinching myself, hoping this is all just a nightmare. Because I love my — I know you love your country. I know you, I follow you, I listen to you, I respect everything you say, and I know you love your country. Our country. We love our country. And that’s what the people need to understand. This isn’t President Trump’s country. The Constitution doesn’t say “the president of the United States.” It says, “We the people of the United States.” We the people of the United States. It’s our country, our document, it’s everything we’re supposed to stand for.

And yet we’re standing by passively allowing this cabal to just lead us down this path of destruction. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to lose this war. We’re going to — we have already lost this war. If this is a war of regime change and it was supposed to be precipitated by the murder of Ali Khamenei on day one, you know, what were we supposed to —

DANIEL DAVIS: We’re going to fail to achieve the objectives. And so by definition, that is a loss.

SCOTT RITTER: I mean, that’s a loss. And now we don’t know what the objective is. What is our objective now? Unconditional surrender of a nation that’s kicking our ass. Okay.

No Ground Force, No Victory

DANIEL DAVIS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We went from an incredibly hard set that he laid out on the first day of the war to something that’s virtually impossible. With no ground force, with no army, you can’t compel compliance. But I don’t want to go back —

SCOTT RITTER: Because you brought this up, okay. I’m glad the President now says that he’s not going to send ground troops, because that’s reflective of — you were in Desert Storm. I see Old Ironsides up there. Okay. I assume that you were in Desert Storm with Old Ironsides.

DANIEL DAVIS: I actually served in Old Ironsides in the 2000s, but I was with the 2nd US Cavalry in Desert Storm.

SCOTT RITTER: Okay, well, you were with a ground force, so you know what a TIPFIDDLE is. And you know what it takes to move ground forces. You’re probably of an age where you participated in some REFORGERs.

DANIEL DAVIS: Absolutely, absolutely.

SCOTT RITTER: So you know, there was a time, ladies and gentlemen, where we had 300,000 American troops in West Germany. And in the space of 10 days we could fly in 200 reinforcements who would marry up with pre-positioned equipment and be ready to fight the Soviet horde coming across the border. That’s what we trained for in the Cold War. I was in the Marine Corps as a junior officer doing the exact same training. But it doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because you train, you train, you train, and you have the equipment pre-positioned.

Today, it takes — if Old Ironsides is even up and running nowadays, I don’t know, because I know we’ve shut down a number of armored divisions. But let’s say we wanted to move a heavy brigade of Old Ironsides from its base in the United States to Europe to participate in the rotational forces of the heavy brigades. They need a six-month advance notice. Then they need another three months to make the deployment — nine months under peacetime conditions.

When you landed in the Middle East, the ports weren’t under attack, the airfields weren’t under attack. You were able to come off, join up with your equipment, and in a very controlled, non-violent fashion, move to your assembly area and begin the war. Everything all up. If you tried to do that today, you’re not going to make it. There’s no ports we can go into, there’s no airfields we can land at. And when we get on the ground, we’ll be hit by drones. We’ll never be able to assemble, and we don’t have the force structure. We do not have the ability to put 500,000 boots on the ground today in that theater. We also don’t —

DANIEL DAVIS: Have 200,000 boots on the ground.

SCOTT RITTER: Bingo.

DANIEL DAVIS: Period.

Fighting a Country Four Times the Size of Iraq

SCOTT RITTER: So everybody out there saying that we can do this — you literally have no idea what you’re talking about. And one of the things that frustrates me is debating with the ignorant. I mean, it’s like wrestling a pig. We’re both going to get muddy, but one of them is going to be happy. You’ve got to learn your facts.

We are going in with one-third less air power than we had in Desert Storm, and we’re fighting a country four times the size of Iraq, with an infrastructure that hasn’t been devastated by war and everything that’s been spending 20 years going underground. And you think we’re going to win this? You think we’re going to win because we’re blowing up —

DANIEL DAVIS: You’ve got to add that to it. And no army. And no army.

SCOTT RITTER: We have no army whatsoever. We’re going to rely on the Kurds. How many times are the Kurds going to be fooled? Because literally the Kurds get lied to every generation by Americans. We’re the greatest liars in the world.

America Betrays Its Allies

The other thing I want to point out to people — somebody who’s been around the world, and Colonel, you have too, I know you have — you know, we always position ourselves, we say, “We’re your friend, we’re your ally.” But the harsh truth is coming home to roost. America is the friend of nobody. We betray everybody. We have no allies. We will sacrifice you for our best interest. And we have done that to literally everybody.

We’re sacrificing Israel as we speak. Would America allow its ally to be struck the way Israel is being struck today? And the answer is no, especially if it was avoidable. So we just can’t be trusted. I mean, this is a horrible thing for me to say as an American, because back in the day, I used to travel with that blue passport around the world. And you got off with your backpack or whatever, and they loved to see you. We’re the most hated people in the world today. And there’s a reason why. Because we stand for nothing.

The “Religious War” Narrative

DANIEL DAVIS: Because we have a question kind of on that term there about how people can’t trust us. So one of the things that’s being trotted out right now to try again to build support at home for this war, so people don’t ask a lot of hard questions, is they’re trying to go back to something we did a lot after 9/11 — that the Muslims are the scary people.

So now, you’ve had a number of people, and I’m going to show you here from Senator Kennedy, who wants to make this a religious war. Lindsey Graham is the other one who’s really, really played this up here. But I’m going to play this and tell me if you don’t see some problems with some of our allies who might be under the same category. Watch this.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I see a country that is run by Jack Nicholson in The Shining. These are religious zealots — if you don’t agree with their version of Islam, you have to die. I see a bunch of religious zealots who are determined to get a nuclear warhead. They’re never going to stop. I see religious zealots running a country that even after we bombed their nuclear facilities in June, they’ve already started back and they’ve lied about it. I see a powerful country that’s amassing anywhere from 200 to 600 missiles a month — a month — so that eventually they’ll have enough missiles to threaten the whole world and prevent us from doing something about their nuclear capability. So they’re going after the whole world, first of all. But this is a religious war and they want to kill everybody who’s not a Shia Muslim.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

DANIEL DAVIS: What do you say to that?

Religion, War, and the Dangers of Mixing Faith with Military Action

SCOTT RITTER: I mean, what do we call Israel? Is Israel a non-religious state? I mean, it is a Jewish homeland. They bought into a biblical notion of Greater Israel. That’s what it’s all about — religion. What do we call Christian Zionists? The people who are actually surrounding Donald Trump as we speak, making the decisions.

When we hear Ted Cruz say that he became a United States senator to save Israel, I thought he became a United States senator to represent the people of Texas as part of the union of the United States. When you hear Mike Huckabee, a former governor who’s now the ambassador to Israel of the United States, saying, “No, I think Israel has a right to Greater Israel,” meaning they have a biblical right to take over the territory. This is a Christian.

There are some disturbing things too. Again, I don’t like the ages too much, Colonel, because we are of a certain age. We have been there, we have done that. We got the t-shirts — we got several of them. The former Delta Force commander, gosh, Charlie Squadron, Mogadishu, went on to become a general, and he’s the one after 9/11 that basically talked about how this was a Christian crusade against the Muslims, and he was shot down. I can’t remember his name off the top of my head. I had it on the tip of my tongue. But we all knew him. We all knew who he was, and we knew that when he spoke out that way, that’s just language that American military officers can’t use. We don’t get to do that. We’re not crusaders. We’re not a Christian army. We’re an army of professionals. We’re a corps of professional Marines. We don’t embrace God this way. And yet that’s what he did. And he was rightfully shut down, because at that time, basic principles mattered.

Today we have soldiers talking about how their commanders are saying that this war is a good war because it’s going to bring about the end of days. It’s going to bring about Armageddon. And I’m, as a military professional, like — if we have to win by invoking God, we have problems. We win because we’re tactically better than the enemy. We win because we can close with and destroy them with firepower and maneuver. We win because we have a better strategic air campaign, because we are logistically prepared for this. God has nothing to do with it. What it has to do with is the professionalism of the men and women who wear the uniform, implementing the sound instructions given to them by their civilian leadership.

DANIEL DAVIS: By the way, I have to just throw out there — I am a genuine born-again Christian, a follower of Jesus Christ. And that just grinds my teeth when I hear that kind of stuff, almost implying God needs our help and he can’t do things without us, and so we need to help him move this stuff along. That is deeply offensive to the Almighty if you’re actually a follower of his. So we might want to rethink that part too.

SCOTT RITTER: I’m glad you said that, because the hubris of any human who believes that through our actions we can help facilitate Armageddon — what you’re implying is that God needs our help. Last time I checked, God doesn’t need our help; we need God’s help. The ignorance of people who say that we’re doing this because we have to create the conditions for the end of days — I think if there’s going to be an end of days, it’s going to happen on God’s timeline, not your timeline.

Again, I avoid religion because it gets a lot of people angry. But I’ve probably irritated just about everybody in your audience today, so why not keep going?

Islam, Peace, and the Absurdity of a Religious War

SCOTT RITTER: The point is, now we come to the Islamic faith. I have spent a lot of time in the Middle East, more than the average bear. My father was stationed in Turkey for two and a half years in the 1970s, and I have been back throughout the ’80s and ’90s as a military officer, as a weapons inspector, and as a historian, as somebody who just travels to collect information. I’ve interfaced with religious officials in a number of countries at the highest level.

What I can say is this: there’s no doubt that Islam produces some very bad actors. Wahhabism, Salafism, the extremism there — it’s bad. But I can also say this: Islam produces men of peace, a significant number of men of peace.

Just to throw something out there — behind me, that flag there is the flag of the Akhmat Special Forces. Abdi Al-Adinov is the commander of it. That flag has a Christian cross and the Islamic moon and star. What it represents is the ability of Christians and Muslims to come together in support of a single cause. The notion that Christians and Muslims are bound by history to fight one another — that it’s us versus them, good versus evil — is absurd in the extreme.

The Russians have set an example of how Christianity and Islam can work together for peace. The Russians fought two wars against the Chechens in the 1990s and early 2000s. Horrible wars. Look at the photograph of Grozny, 2002 — flat, looks like Stalingrad. I’ve been to Grozny. It’s a modern city today, better neon lights than Las Vegas. And the people there live in peaceful harmony with their Russian counterparts. There are Russian Orthodox churches, there are Muslim mosques. They live in peace and harmony. So the notion that we are bound as Christians to fight Islam is absurd.

DANIEL DAVIS: Great point.

SCOTT RITTER: Some of the greatest men of peace are Islamic scholars and Islamic imams who have flocks, just like Christian pastors have their flocks. They have their flocks, and I listen to them. They are promoting peace, they’re promoting harmony. So this idea that this is a war between Christian America with our Jewish allies against Islam is insulting — deeply insulting. And it’s just wrong. It’s just straight-up wrong.

The Russia-Ukraine War: Attrition, Collapse, and Who Is Winning

DANIEL DAVIS: We are so right now just focused on the only instrument we have in our international toolkit — the military — to such an extent that we have literally mothballed diplomacy. And that extends everywhere.

Well, listen, before I let you go, I appreciate all this stuff you’ve been telling us here. It’s incredibly knowledgeable and very useful. But I’d like to ask you a little bit about the Russia-Ukraine war, because I know you spent a lot of time covering that. Since so much focus has been on this war here, for obvious reasons, a lot of people have kind of lost the ball on what’s been going on over the last couple of weeks in the Russia-Ukraine war — other than Zelensky saying that he’ll sell us some of his drone killers as long as we give him PAC-3 interceptor missiles. But aside from that, what can you tell us about what’s been happening on the war? Has it been mothballed or has it continued on?

SCOTT RITTER: No, the Russia-Ukraine conflict continues to go on. Tragically. It’s a war of attrition that Russia is winning hands down. The Ukrainians are in a bind.

As you know, Colonel, war is an extension of politics by other means. That’s something we learned from day one. Clausewitz, and those who follow Sun Tzu, know that corollary exists in the Art of War. So we can’t just look at what’s happening on the battlefield. The Russians have been waging what’s called a special military operation, which means it’s not a war, but a special military operation designed to achieve a specific outcome. That means the Russians are factoring in not just what’s happening on the battlefield, but economic issues, political issues, et cetera.

Economically, Ukraine is a basket case. Their economy has been destroyed. They are reliant totally upon hundreds of billions of dollars in euros that are gifted to them every year. If you remove that, their economy collapses. Politically, it’s a mess. Zelensky is in a political crisis right now. You have the British supporting General Zaluzhny, a former commander. You have the Americans supporting Budanov, the former head of intelligence and current head of the presidential administration, as alternatives to Zelensky — which means this man has already lost favor.

Corruption is beyond belief in Ukraine. You give a dollar, the dollar’s gone. They just arrested people going through Hungary with cars full of cash and gold bars that are being secreted out of Ukraine into the bank accounts of Ukrainian politicians who are going to jump ship. The reason I bring this up is that when we talk about the collapse of a nation, it’s not just the collapse on the battlefield — it’s the collapse of the society. You need economic collapse and political collapse that leads to societal collapse. When the society collapses, it cannot sustain the military.

Right now you have a Ukrainian military that has to basically forcefully conscript — that means thump them on the head — about 10,000 to 30,000 guys a month. They’re losing all of them. They’re losing more than they can replace. The Russians, on the other hand — and I’ve been there, and I know this to be the case — have volunteers that are well in excess of the casualties they’ve suffered.

Don’t believe anything you hear about Russian casualties. I will tell you right now that I have it on the highest authority in Russia. I have a rough idea what the casualties are. It’s a little less than 200,000 deaths over the course of this conflict. That’s a lot — don’t get me wrong. But when we say that the Russians have suffered casualties equivalent to the Ukrainians, they have not. Not even close. It’s about a 10 to 1 ratio.

The Russians are winning this war. They have amassed reserves. They’ll be able to commit these reserves. They’ve converted their defense industry — they’re pumping out munitions like you’ve never seen munitions pumped out before. We haven’t done that. Nobody in Europe has done that.

And they’re winning the war geopolitically as well. They have more support around the world. When we try to strangle them — we tell India, “You can’t buy Russian oil” — India’s buying Russian oil. We tell China they shouldn’t — China’s buying more Russian oil. And now we’ve given Russia the greatest gift of all by creating an energy crisis in the Middle East. We see Vladimir Putin just saying, “I guess we’re going to have to go out and get new markets,” because all of the places that aren’t getting Middle Eastern oil now need energy, and Russia is going to find those markets. We thought we were strangling Russia’s ability to sustain this war financially. We’ve just guaranteed that the Russian budget will be sustained.

The European gas cutoff will be the death of the European economy — it will collapse.

Trump, India, and the Unraveling of U.S. Energy Pressure

DANIEL DAVIS: Let me ask you a question there, because it seemed to kind of come as a surprise. Trump has been talking about putting more pressure on India — tariffs on them to keep them from buying Russian oil and all this. And then seemingly out of nowhere, all of a sudden he goes, “Okay, that’s cool — I think it’s for like 30 days — you can sell some oil to Russia.” Everybody’s been focused on the Iran war, and there hasn’t been much commentary going on in the United States, but a lot of people are going, “Wait a minute — what? We’re supposed to be putting pressure on them.” What do you understand about why that changed? Why did he do that?

SCOTT RITTER: Because of reality. First of all, the Indians told him no. Sadly, we have to understand that Donald Trump doesn’t tell the truth about anything to anybody. He likes to posture. He likes to believe he’s in charge. So he says, “I put pressure on India.” Remember, he bragged, “India will not buy Russian oil. I got Modi to say that India won’t buy Russian oil.” And the Indians were silent. And then later on, the parliament came out and said, “You have to remember, we’re a democracy. Modi doesn’t get to make that call. We get to make that call, and we’ve decided we’re buying Russian oil.”

And so Trump says, “Oh, I’ve given them a 30-day window to buy Russian oil. That’s my decision, not their decision. I did this.” No — they’re going to do it regardless. And it’s going to get even worse, because India receives 15 to 20% of their energy from the Middle East that they’re not getting anymore, and they’re going to have to go to Russia to get that energy.

Japan — our great ally, though we’re not really allied with anybody because we betray everybody — Japan, if this continues, gets 90% of their energy from the Middle East. Where are they going to replace that? The United States? We don’t have excess capacity to do that. It’ll come from Russia. They’ll reopen Sakhalin. They have no choice.

DANIEL DAVIS: By the way, the price of oil since this started on 28th February has gone from 67 to 91 as of right now.

SCOTT RITTER: I think you’re going to see $120 oil if this continues for another week or two. And welcome to — everybody who’s like me, at the end of each month piling the amount of dollars you have left over after you pay your bills into a thin little pile like this, and taking your wife to dinner and a movie — that’s gone. Because you’re going to have to fill up your gas tank and you’re not going to be able to afford it.

Russia’s Role: Intelligence Support for Iran

DANIEL DAVIS: Let me ask you about this, by the way, if you need to leave. I know we’re a little bit over the time.

SCOTT RITTER: No, no, I’m here for you, Colonel. I’m here to go.

DANIEL DAVIS: Okay, great. Gary showing you this headline here. This is Washington Post. Today is from this morning. Russia is providing Iran intelligence to target US forces. One of the questions people had at the beginning is what is Russia and China going to do for Iran? They’re not going to get into a fight. They’re not going to be a military ally. But the question is what would they do, if anything at all? And based on this, what can you tell us about what the Russians are going to do?

SCOTT RITTER: Well, we know that the Russians and the Chinese have provided Iran with some capabilities, I think, primarily in the electronic warfare.

Colonel, one day they’re going to write a book about this war, and you’re going to get the truth from the American operators out there right now. And I’m going to tell you what chapter one is going to say. We were jammed the entire time. Half the weapons we sent in didn’t function because they were jammed by advanced electronic warfare capabilities that we didn’t know the Iranians had. All that equipment we provide the Ukrainians — HIMARS, ATACMS and things — most of it gets jammed. It just doesn’t work because the Russians have figured out how to defeat it.

But the other thing, too, is why are the Iranians able to carry out these very effective pinpoint attacks against the United States on a daily basis? They’re getting the intelligence from somewhere. It appears now it’s from Russia.

Now, for all the people out there saying, “My God, how dare the Russians do it?” I just want to remind you that on December 28th of last year, while President Trump was on the phone with President Putin talking about potential peace, the CIA gave intelligence to Ukraine drone operators and 91 drones with CIA intelligence were launched by Ukraine to strike the building, the residence in Valdai, that President Putin was ostensibly there taking the phone call from Donald Trump.

So before you get a little bit out of shape, you know that we tried to kill President Putin using CIA-provided data to send Ukrainian drones in there.

The CIA’s Role in Ukraine and the Double Standard

DANIEL DAVIS: Ukraine tried to kill President Trump or President Putin?

SCOTT RITTER: Putin. I’m sorry. Trump tried to kill Putin. And the CIA has admitted, through a big New York Times article that was clearly planted in advance, that they’ve enabled the Ukrainians to take out Russia’s strategic oil infrastructure — specific places to strike, et cetera. We’ve provided the targeting for HIMARS to take out Russian command and control centers so that we kill Russian generals and colonels, and we brag about it.

Imagine being the family of an American colonel or general, lieutenant colonel or captain or major or sergeant or corporal or PFC who is killed by the weapons provided by an enemy that Russia guided in. I mean, my God, we lost it when we lied about Russia putting a bounty out on American troops — straight up lie, straight up lie. We lost it because three Americans died outside of Bagram. We said that happened because Russia paid a bounty — straight up lie. They died because the Taliban got them.

But if Russia provided the intelligence that led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans, we’d be freaking out as a nation. And yet this is what we do. We have provided the intelligence to Ukraine to strike Russian soldiers, to strike their command posts, to strike their strategic infrastructure.

We enabled Ukraine to strike Votkinsk. That was the factory that I worked at as an inspector — the missile factory, 1,300 km away from the front line. It’s the place where Russia’s strategic intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles are made. It’s the most important strategic facility in Russia. And we allowed Ukraine to attack it.

Imagine again if that happened. Imagine if Morton Thiokol went up in Utah. Imagine if what used to be Magna, Utah got blown up by Mexican drones enabled by Russian intelligence — we’d be freaking out. We’d be sad to strike against our strategic infrastructure.

Scott Ritter’s Firsthand Account from Russia

So we’ve been providing intelligence to Ukraine to facilitate this war, but it’s not enough. The Russians are winning. The Russians are dominating on the battlefield. I’ve been there, I’ve toured the special military operation. I have interviewed the officers that fight there, and I’m pretty good at interviewing. I’m the guy that covered all of the Iraqi lies over the course of seven years by sitting down and interrogating them. I’m very good at what I do.

So when I sit down with Russians, I can tell when I’m having smoke blown at me, I can tell when they’re telling the truth. Plus, I don’t accept anything at face value. I verify everything. And what I’m telling you right now is that sitting down with the Russian commanders, they are very honest.

First of all, they all admit how hard this war is. When have you seen a lying soldier come in saying it was easy, we kicked their butts? Why do you have an artificial leg? The Russians are just honest. This is the hardest thing they’ve ever done. They say the Ukrainians just fight like wild animals. They don’t surrender. They fight hard. Their tactics are good, the equipment’s good.

Akhmat Alaudinov, the man who gave me that flag — the commander of the Akhmat special forces — talks about US equipment. He said, “When the Ukrainian army went into Kursk in August of 2024, they came in with the best command and control equipment that NATO had. New computers linked to satellites, providing AI-assisted maneuvering, etc. We don’t have that. You guys did a great job. That’s really good stuff. Then we figured out how to beat you.”

And they do that. They’re just honest. They are honest about their casualties, they’re honest about their shortcomings. And I have no reason to doubt that everything I was told by the Russians is the truth, because it’s hard truth. When people are lying to you, they’re trying to create a certain impression. These guys are telling the hard truth, which means it leaves you with some questions. If you’re going to lie to me, sell it so that everything’s perfect and it’s all roses. Don’t tell me a truth that is a hard truth that causes me to ask follow-on questions that are difficult to answer. The Russians tell the hard truth.

Is Russia Going as Fast as It Can?

DANIEL DAVIS: Let me ask you a question. Tell me if this has ever come up in your conversations. There is a line of thinking in the United States at some of the highest levels in our government — I’ll say in some of the contexts that I have — that yes, Russia has all these advantages. They have the manpower, they have the industrial capacity, but their soldiers just aren’t that good. And you can tell that because in four years, they’ve still hardly been able to go anywhere. In the last two years, they haven’t gone very much farther because they can’t. That’s as fast as they can go. And that shows that they’re really just not that good against this little tiny Ukraine. What do you say to that? Is this as fast as they can go, or is it a conscious decision? And if it is a conscious decision, why wouldn’t they go faster?

SCOTT RITTER: It’s a conscious decision. First of all, people need to understand that Ukraine has been digging into this territory since 2014, especially in Donetsk in the Donbas. The defenses they have prepared are extensive, reinforced defenses. They’ve been preparing for this for a long time. So it’s like fighting a fortified position.

And Colonel, I know you know this, and maybe there’s some people in your audience that know this — taking on a fortified position is the hardest thing you can imagine in ground combat. And you’re going to get chewed up. We talk about a three-to-one advantage, but for a fortified position, you need about a five-to-one advantage because there’s just a lot more complexity involved in the assault.

And yet the Russians went into this conflict with little around 200,000 troops going up against the Ukrainian military that had 700,000 to 900,000 troops. People need to understand that when this war started, the Ukrainians had 700,000 to 900,000 troops, many of whom were trained by the United States. Since 2015, the United States and NATO have been training Ukrainian forces in western Ukraine — one battalion, 500 troops every 55 days — and we admit they would go over to the Donbas so they could fight Russians and kill Russians. And we were proud of that. We openly bragged about how we’re training Ukrainians to fight and kill Russians. Our special operations forces were working with Ukrainians to teach them deep reconnaissance, direct action, covert action, etc. We’ve been helping Ukrainians for this fight for some time now.

So the Russians came in hoping they could get the Ukrainians to resolve this thing through negotiation. The purpose of the special operation was to get the Ukrainians to the negotiating table. Less than a week after the war started, Ukraine was at the negotiating table — three rounds of negotiation: Gomel, two rounds in Istanbul. And by the end of March, we had a peace plan that was going to bring peace and prosperity. And Boris Johnson went in and killed it. And now we have a war that’s dragged on.

So the Russians have had to build up forces — 300,000 partial mobilization in September of 2022. Since then, they’ve been relying upon contract soldiers and volunteers. To advance rapidly, you need that three-to-five-to-one advantage, and Russia isn’t mobilized to do that. To this day, Ukraine has more manpower than Russia. Russia’s not in the business of taking territory quickly. Russia’s in the business of a war of attrition.

And that’s again because of the expansion of NATO. People have to understand that when you bring in Sweden and Finland and you extend the Russian front, Russia has to respond. And they put a 70,000—

DANIEL DAVIS: They’re at 1.5 million right now. Right. So that’s a 900,000 increase.

The Drone Revolution and Its Implications for Modern Warfare

SCOTT RITTER: Yep, they started at 900,000 and then after this they went to 1.5. And so while they’re reinforcing this war, they’re also expanding their military. They have the defense industrial capacity to do that. People don’t ever reflect on that, that in addition to supplying a war, they’re building an army that’s bigger than our army. They built it by 600,000, and now they’ve gone up by an additional 800,000. And we, I don’t want to get into it, but we just can’t do it.

The point is, the Russians are very good at what they do. But here’s the other factor that came in right about the time that the Russians solved the tactical problem. Meaning, for instance, look at the summer 2023 counter offensive in Robotino. Big NATO offensive. Ukraine was supposed to roll through, and the Russians just wiped it out because they brought a General Romanov. General Romanov was the Deputy Commander, 58th Army operating in the Zaporizhzhia area. He was taken out, sent to the Russian General Staff Academy, and told to rewrite Russian defensive doctrine based upon what you’ve seen. And he rewrote it, came up with a manual. And then they said, now take your manual back to Zaporizhzhia and build your defenses. And he did. And he built the defenses using new doctrine that crushed this NATO offensive. Crushed it absolute.

Right about that time, the Russians were starting to get breakthroughs. Wagner and the paratroopers were breaking through at Bakhmut. And things look good. Enter the drone. And this is the thing that people — I see one on your shelf back there — drones have changed everything. Drone warfare has just changed this. And the Ukrainians were better than the Russians at drone war. I know this because I’ve spoken to Russian drone commanders who still today say there are certain things that Ukrainians do better than we do. They’re just straight up honest. These people are honest.

But the drones changed everything, because you had to change the entire way you fought business. And initially, the drones caused Russian casualties because they didn’t know how to deal with it. Russia has been adapting to this. They now have a drone hunter unit called Rubicon. When the Ukrainians come in with their reinforced drone units, Rubicon is deployed. And Rubicon’s job is to kill Ukrainian drone operators. And they do it with a vengeance.

The Russians are dominating the drone battlefield, but you can’t move. To get to the front line, you have to start low crawling about 10km out because you have drones out there looking for you. And when you get to the front line, you’re not running around. You don’t get to have your command post. I mean, anything I learned as a Marine, I’d be dead. Because if I tried to operate, put my company online, maneuver — we’d all die because of drones. They have tens of thousands of drones. They can expend a day as rounds of ammunition and they can hunt down individuals. So you have to build defensive capability. You have to jam them, you have to learn how to shoot them down. And the Russians are doing a very, very good job.

But this means that the pace of advancing is very slow. The Russians are advancing at an extraordinarily strong pace right now, but it is slowed down by drones because if you outrun, you have to put a drone barrier on the battlefield, have drone dominance in order to advance. If you tried to advance without drone dominance, you die. And so the Russians have to come in and win the drone war. They have to win it 20km deep, and then they can begin to advance, until which time the Ukrainians reinforce with drones. And now they’ve pushed back the line of contact over the Russian line. The Russians have to go down. You thin out your line because you have to reduce the number of targets and then you have to come back in with drones and continue to fight again. This is a kind of war that we in the west don’t understand. We have no clue about what’s going on.

DANIEL DAVIS: Right.

SCOTT RITTER: And the truth is Operation Hedgehog 2025, the most recent NATO war games that took place, I think in Estonia, they brought in a small number of Ukrainian drone operators and they went up against the NATO armor brigade and they killed it. That’s what’s going to happen to NATO. That’s what’s going to happen to the United States. If we go to war against Russia, they will kill every single one of us because we don’t know how to do drone warfare.

Today we’re going to come in and think we can put an armor battalion online and do this and do that and do the other. Bring the artillery in and mass fires. We’ll lose everything because we don’t know how to fight this war. The Russians are masters of drone warfare. So are the Ukrainians. But this is why the advance is so slow, because it’s a different kind of war.

The West’s Dangerous Gap in Drone Warfare Readiness

DANIEL DAVIS: I had seen some comments from the Ukraine side six, eight months ago when the US Armor community came out with the new tactical manual for the armor platoon. And it was of course changed to reflect the presence of drones or whatever. And the Ukrainian — not the Russian, the Ukrainian — veterans mocked it and laughed at it and said, “Are you kidding? That’s your change? Because you wouldn’t last a week on the front line here if you use those tactics. You’d be wiped out. You have to do it radically different.”

And that’s a problem that I have, and I’m real concerned about as a guy. I was in the First Armored Division. I was the second in command of an armored Cav squadron. And I totally validate what you just said. If I used the tactics I did in 2007 when I was in that unit, we’d get wiped out just like the Ukrainian side did in June 2023, because we’d have been using the same tactics. And now it looks like that we’ve recognized that there’s a change, but we’ve changed about this much when we needed to change about this much. And that worries me.

SCOTT RITTER: I was in Russia last fall and talking to the commander of a drone unit. And people need to understand, when I go to Russia, I defend America like you wouldn’t believe. I mean, I am fighting tooth and nail to defend the United States. I don’t badmouth. As an American citizen in the United States, I have a First Amendment right to say anything I want. And I have a duty and responsibility as a citizen to call out my government when they’re doing things bad. But I don’t criticize my government overseas. That’s not my place. And so it’s sometimes hard to have conversations because these guys are pointing things out that it’s hard to defend.

But they were talking about how the US Army in Europe has a drone school now, and they published some videos. And there’s a video of this soldier getting his drone. He’s bragging about how he’s going to take a hand grenade and he’s going to put it under the drone. And now the drone is going to fly out over the target and they’re going to drop the grenade down and they hit it and they’re like, “Yeah, we’re masters.” Guys, do you know that that’s like the very first thing they did when they started using drones back in 2022? 2023 was a grenade drop. But today you don’t get to drop grenades unless you have total control aside, because you’ll be shot down, you’ll be jammed or whatever. That tactic won’t work. So we are literally adopting drone tactics and trying to learn drone tactics that won’t work on the battlefield.

If you look at some of the modern battlefields right now — go to Pokrovsk, where there was heavy fighting — the fields over Pokrovsk are covered with fiber optic lines. Covered. Literally covered. It’s like woven in. Think about it. Each one of those lines is a single drone fiber optic, which means it can’t be jammed. So they’re flying at you with a fiber optic drone that can’t be jammed. Once they lock in on you, unless you can shoot it down, you’re going to get hit. And that field is covered with them going both ways. That tells you the reality of drone warfare today.

We’re not even close, Colonel. You know this and I know this. We try and get a lance corporal to be issued a $2,500 piece of equipment. And he’s like, “I don’t want this. I don’t want to sign for this.” And then tell him that he has permission to crash it. And they’re going to be like, “No, my paycheck isn’t good enough.”

In order to train on modern drone warfare, you have to have a budget that allows you to buy dozens of expensive drones so that your Marines and soldiers can crash them, can train to do it right. And there can be no consequence for crashing them. If they take it off and it crashes into a tree, you can’t say, “That was a $2,000 piece of equipment, soldier.” No. Because in drone warfare, you’re going to be literally flying these things non-stop, and they’re expendable rounds of ammunition.

We had people get in trouble in Afghanistan for firing Javelins at the wrong target, because Javelins are expensive. But drones — you just fire them, you fly them, you crash them, you do whatever. They’re expendable rounds of ammunition. And they are literally using tens of thousands of them a day on a particular part of the battlefield. It’s a whole new way of war that we in the west have no understanding of.

DANIEL DAVIS: 100% agree with you. And I fear that one day we’ll find out the hard way. But listen, we’ll leave it there for now.

Iran’s Growing Drone Capabilities and the Risk of Ground Escalation

SCOTT RITTER: Just so you know, Colonel, I’m sorry to interrupt. Today the report came out that the Iranians are starting to use FPV drones. This is the very drone weapon — the Iranians are starting to employ FPV drones against American targets and against, for instance, the Kurds. Now that the CIA is trying to get them to advance, the Iranians use FPV drones to interdict them up to 15, 20 kilometers into their rear. So if we ever did send ground troops into Iran, the Iranians have mastered drone warfare.

DANIEL DAVIS: Okay. And that’s actually what I was going to tell you about, because I’ve just gotten a note from a friend, somebody that you probably know. I’ve gotten two things. One is that there was an alert that the 82nd Airborne Division canceled suddenly an exercise to go back for potential deployment somewhere. Then just now I received — and this is from the Stars and Stripes Media Service — it says the Armed Services Blood Program is asking Kaiserslautern, and that’s in Germany, the military community to step up and donate ahead of possible increased demand. This is in Germany.

So I don’t know if those things are connected or not, or if there’s just some reason they think that there’s going to be a lot of civilian need for blood all of a sudden. But there are some actions that seem to be in line with somebody thinking they’re going to do something on the ground. God help us if anybody’s even thinking about that.

And it looks to me like — and we’ll end with this — it looks to me like we had a Plan A that we’re going to come in and kill the ayatollah, that they were going to collapse, fall down, and we would get some kind of Maduro-like deal to where it was over nice and clean in a week and out, or a few days. And now that it hasn’t, they’ve solidified and their resistance has hardened. And now it looks like we’re scrambling for something different to do. And God help us. Do you think that anybody’s actually thinking about, if the Kurds can’t do it, maybe we can send in some of our troops? What do you think about that?

SCOTT RITTER: Well, first of all, I still have respect for the politicized generals who are in charge of our military today. They’ve been politicized, and that’s just a sin. But I still believe that they’re professional. And so I don’t believe there’s anybody in the US military who thinks putting the 82nd Airborne anywhere on the ground in this conflict, anywhere, because they can’t. The 82nd Airborne cannot fight this fight. They’ll all die.

What they can do, though, is reinforce embassies. And so we know from the past that the 82nd Airborne and the Marines were called upon to reinforce the Green Zone. The Green Zone is under threat today. We may need the 82nd Airborne to be a rapid deployment force because we have American forces in Iraq that are increasingly under risk. And so we have to be careful — we might find Irbil, in risk of being overrun. Maybe the 82nd is going to go to reinforce Irbil. We’re building up zones of operation in western Iraq that could potentially be used for special operations incursions into the Middle East. I hate to speculate about this kind of stuff because —

DANIEL DAVIS: And that’s all we can do right now. But it is.

Closing Thoughts and Where to Find Us

SCOTT RITTER: No, but I mean, it’s just because if they’re doing it, then nobody should be talking about it. But unfortunately, there’s a lot of media reports about how they went out there to do something. The Iraqis found them and there was a firefight and all that. But the 82nd Airborne might be needed to secure a forward operating base.

So I think that’s what the 82nd is there to do. I think it’s being called upon to come in as emergency reinforcement for embassies, for consulates, for already deployed American forces in Iraq, and maybe for the creation and the securing of new forward operating bases for other American forces who may or may not be eventually involved in this fight.

DANIEL DAVIS: Well, we’ll have to wait and see on that, like all these other things. But we are very grateful for you, your insight on all these issues today. Super interesting and we’ll look forward to having you back real soon, actually.

SCOTT RITTER: Well, thank you very much for having me. It’s a pleasure to finally be on your show.

DANIEL DAVIS: Thanks a lot, Scott. We appreciate you a lot. And we appreciate you guys, too. Be sure and like and subscribe if you haven’t done that, by the way, for any of our new viewers here.

We’re also on podcast. We are on Spotify podcast, Apple podcasts, Podcast Addict. Just type in Daniel Davis Deep Dive. You’ll find us there. We’re also on Substack. We have the written word out there just about anything you’d want. We’re on X. Believe me, there’s many ways to get your information.

We are unintimidated and uncompromised to bring you the truth, no matter what it is, even if it makes people unhappy. Unfortunate about that. But people deserve to know the truth. Find out what we have here, share it with other people who desperately need the kind of truth we heard here today. Folks, we appreciate you. We’ll see you tomorrow on the Daniel Davis Deep Dive.

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