how how long does it take to teach a course is it like a pre-recorded thing yeah

yeah okay it's mainly pre-recorded it's work we work off a website so i i once you build the course it's a lot of effort to build it and record the videos and do all that stuff but after that it's you just got to grade papers what are

the six courses uh

evolution of military doctrine military logistics i teach uh u.s military or i from 2,500 to the present. I teach another variant of U.S. military history, and then I teach a variant of European history, and then I teach American Civil War. Not all at the same time. That's my portfolio, I guess. Civil War, war between the states, that's my favorite thing to teach. You been to Gettysburg a bunch of times? So my three daughters, whenever they graduate high school, the obligatory trip that they get is I take them to the battlefields where their ancestors fought, and they get to walk where their ancestors walk. And Gettysburg is one of the key places we go. Their ancestor, Confederate company commander, captured town of Gettysburg. Who was it? John Thomas Carson with the 12th Georgia Regiment. And on the first day of Gettysburg, when the Yankees retreated through Gettysburg, his unit pushed him out, spearheaded, and captured the town. Well,

there you go. I'm going to have to look into that a little bit more. We go there a couple times a year with my company, Aslan you got to come up to that sometime i'd love to yeah you you'd enjoy it i would it's awesome uh and so then you're you're working um you started at some point you got engaged when uh when russia invaded ukraine yeah

so I'm back doing my various jobs, having fun in South Carolina, wasn't really paying attention to Ukraine. When I was in Afghanistan, we actually had guys rotating down from Ukraine. And again, I mean, I was aware of it in general, but I couldn't tell you, I couldn't have told you at the time who the president was. And all of a sudden, this war kicks off. And I started paying a little bit of attention when the news was talking about it, because remember, the buildup was almost a year. But really didn't, like I said, really didn't pay attention to it. The war kicked off. And then I got real interested. And one of the interesting other parts of that is my undergrad degree in history from the Citadel. The focus is on the Eastern Front in World War II, and it turns out most of that's fought in Ukraine. So I got real interested, put the word out through the Ranger Regiment Network. I knew there was a bunch of volunteers going over, you know, NGOs and other volunteers. So I put the word out. If somebody sees an opportunity, I'd be in. And about two days later, I got a call that they wanted me to come over and take a position how'd

that go yeah

again another one of these once in a lifetime experiences um i literally got the call on saturday uh that newsmax needed a security guy and a team leader for a correspondent that was over there and by this time now, the Russians have Kiev surrounded on three sides. The war is only about two weeks old. And this Newsmax team was inside Kiev. And the guy doing the job needed to come out and do something else. He had another commitment, so he needed a replacement. And I got that call on Saturday morning if I'd be interested. A couple more phone calls got hired, and I was literally on a plane at like 530 in the morning on Monday. So packed my stuff, got all my gear together, flew up to New York to Newsmax. They said, okay, we're going to put you on a plane tonight. That means you'll get into Kiev probably like Wednesday morning, and then you're going to be on by six. And I said, what do you mean I'm going to be on? And they said, no, you're the nighttime correspondent. And so that was a-

So you went from security dude to nighttime correspondent?

I went from the log guy and security guy to being the nighttime correspondent. So I was actually pretty excited about that because I do some public speaking and I thought I could, I can do this, you know, so I was pretty excited. But I got over there me and another guy named Mike Grimm former congress from New York we he and I flew over there together and then we split right before the border again kind of something out of a movie we flew into Romania this is again with just about a day's notice flew into Romania and that's where I split from him he had another role I jumped in a taxi took a three-hour taxi ride to the border tried to cross the border that night that didn't work they said come back the next morning I got through the next morning and I met my contact which was a Ukrainian guy with a rental car on the other side of the border and he handed me the keys and said you're driving because I can't drive. So I jumped in the SUV, and then we had to find our way, drive all the way across southern Ukraine. There was one road left into Kiev that hadn't been cut by the Russians. There was actually some bypassed Russian units that we had to drive right by, but we found that road. There was very little gas. And so by the time we got over there, we rode a gas. Unfortunately, we found a guy selling Black Market out of the back of a truck right outside of Kiev.

How are you feeling when you're rolling into Kiev through the last open road? Yeah. So this is the Russians are still advancing at this point?

Well, it was – Did you feel like the tide had turned them? The tide had turned. I mean, by no means were the Ukrainians winning at this point, but it was siege and it was static. It was static. So at least where I was, there was not a lot of advance going on at this point. And I was in touch with the guy that I was replacing. He's a former Ranger, actually, a former Rangeranger from A Company 375, Chuck Holton. So I was in touch with him. He actually came out and met me in Romania. So I kind of got the debrief. And he said, you know, I know it sounds crazy, but you're going to have to see it when you get up there. You know, the center of the city is stable. The Russians are about 10 miles in three directions, but the lines are holding. And so, you know, a little bit dicey, but he assured me that it was doable. So I said, okay. And we had a whole plan. We had a bug out plan. We had safe house network established. We had vehicles. We had liaison with the Ukrainian military. So found this highway, got up into the city, and linked up downtown with a correspondent and cameraman and and started uh started doing operations there and started covering the fight so what

can you tell us and what can you teach us about the evolution of war and what we're seeing in this this is a this is a new type of warfare that's happening with the drones the robots like it's it's it's a different scenario also like very brutal um what can you what what do we need to learn about what's happening in ukraine and i and you know just but you've spent what years now in ukraine two years various different things so the lessons what do we need to know what do the young military people need to know about what's happening in ukraine what can we learn from it well

i think the first thing people should understand the context um and especially for the older guys like me who've done 20 years 30 years of war on terrorism and insurgency you know this is like real war ii this is like the Battle of the Bulge. This is tank, infantry, artillery attacks, attack helicopters, fixed wing fighter strikes, I mean, that you're on the receiving end of. And all the weight of a conventional army, you know, against you. I never thought I'd be on the receiving end of an enemy Navy. Never thought I'd be on the receiving end of an enemy Air Force. And so that's the first thing to realize. You are in a conventional fight. Just like you've imagined from any movie on World War II, that's what you're in. You know, we often say over there and comment that it's like World War I with drones. They don't have, they're not as, neither side, the Ukrainians or the Russians, are dynamic enough to use tanks in like a blitzkrieg fashion like we used in Desert Storm, the Germans used. So it's more of a slow-moving static war like World War I with drones. So you've got all that high-tech sensor array, and you've got drones. And it's not a matter of, are you going to be detected on movement? It's when you're going to be detected and then how the enemy is going to react and how you're going to react. So you will be detected. I spent a lot of time at the front, almost all that time, even up to about 20 kilometers behind the front, you know, under the observation of the Russian intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance platforms, their fixed wing platforms like the P-3 Orion, their versions of that, the Russians can see you. And it's just a matter of are they going to be able to react? The good news is they're very slow at reacting. You just don't want to be in when they have something in position that day, you know, because then it's going to be a bad day because they will do they will do counterfires, just like we were we were taught way back when. And they're going to be able to see you. So that's what I think people need to look at is not am I going to be able to stealthily infiltrate without being detected? You will be detected. They're very smart, especially in defensive mode. They do some really fascinating things when they build their defenses down there with technology, the Russians do. So you will be detected. It's going to be how are you going to react to that. That's one of the first things. The second thing is it's all about combined arms warfare. And the better you're at combined arms warfare, you know, the more successful you're going to be. And I'm a huge fan of the Ukrainians, and I think their soldiers are excellent. But one of the things they just don't grasp, because their foundations are a Soviet-style military, is what combined arms means. And they tend to think, and the Russians definitely, this is how they fight, is if tanks and infantry and artillery are together on the battlefield that's combined arms it's not you and i know that they've all got to work together they got to work off the same sheet of music and it's all got to be synchronized and if you do that if you have a combined arms force you can be successful but you got to go back to my world war ii statement is you're going to take a lot of casualties even when you're

successful one of the things that i um was surprised at and it's just because my lack of understanding i haven't been on the ground there but i was very surprised that the ukrainians engaged in this type of conflict conventional war and didn't go more insurgent warfare and guerrilla warfare out of the gate. Is that because the Russian was just too big and would push too fast to make that effective? Well, so there's a couple

parts to that. One, yeah, the war moved a lot faster. One of the things I can't explain and a lot of people can't explain is when you talk to Ukrainians, most of them will tell you we just didn't think they were coming. And I've talked to people in villages that have been overrun, and they didn't take it serious until tanks were coming in the north end of the village. And then they tried to get in their car and flee, and it was too late. So I don't understand that mindset, but many of them say we just didn't think it was going to happen, that the war was actually going to come. The second thing is it did move a little bit too quick for them. But the third piece is they are doing that. They do have a partisan tradition, and they're executing that over there. There's organized and I would call them spontaneous partisan groups, but there is an extensive behind the lines efforts or effort going on, an asymmetric effort on the part of the Ukrainians, and they're very good at it. There's also an asymmetric effort on the part of the Russians, and they're good at it too. But with the wartime conditions, the Ukrainians have in many ways gotten their areas locked down so they can find, they're good at counterintelligence. They got some good counterintelligence efforts I've worked with, so they're able to root out a lot of the Russians, but there's a robust partisan effort going on in the occupied areas what

do you what's your assessment of like the casualty levels because that's one thing that's neither side will talk about um you know i've heard in the hundreds of thousands killed yeah so and i and i

tell the ukrainians that i deal with this so i'm'm not afraid to say it now. From an information perspective, and they've got a job to do. Their job is to convince the West that they can win, and so they should be supported. I got that. But they are putting out mainly propaganda. The casualty figures are nowhere near what they claim. And I'll give you just a couple metrics that'll underline that. The whole invasion began with a force of about 220,000 Russian soldiers. I think the last time I read the Ministry of Defense casualty sheet. This is from Ukrainian

Ministry

of Defense? This is from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense on claims of casualties they've inflicted on the Russians. They claim that they've inflicted somewhere around 700,000 casualties on the Russians. It's pure fantasy. It's pure fantasy. And it's fantasy to the point where they're basically discredited. And I try to tell them that. You can only put this kind of thing forward so many times till people are going to see right through the BS. They claim that they've destroyed like 8,000 tanks. I'm not sure the Russians had 8,000 tanks at the beginning of the war. So, you know, I, I obviously I've not counted every tank that's been destroyed, but being a professional soldier, I understand what types of units are getting into a fight, and I can see certain things developing on the ground. And when I identify these things, I know what size unit there are. And I have walked many of the battlefields and counted the vehicles destroyed. And it's nowhere near, it's a fraction of what the Ukrainians claim. So I know for a fact that the casualties are propaganda and overinflated. One of the things that shocks me, though, is that the U.S. military accepts these facts. And I recently was dealing with some people on the chairman of the Joint Chiefs staff, Milley, and he was spouting some of these casualty figures. And I had to call contact and say he's he's talking in complete fantasy where does he get this and i naively thought he had some sort of top secret you know pipeline and assessment now he was taking ministry of defense casualty figures so that's from the top down accepting these claims now that's all sounding like i'm busting on the ukrainians you know but again they've got a reason that they're doing that to try to convince people to support them and stay in the fight. What I think and what I've watched and what I've counted on the battlefield, I think the Russians are probably up around 60 to 70,000 KIA, which is a huge number. Again, that's more than we lost in Vietnam. We're talking about in about, you know, just over 24 months of fighting. So they've lost, I think, probably around 65,000, 70,000, 75,000. The other tragedy of that is that Ukrainians aren't far behind. They've probably lost 45,000, 55,000. One of the really interesting things is, and it's brutal, I'm not saying it's acceptable, but you got to look at how the Russians are approaching this. They're cleaning out their homeless shelters. They're cleaning out their prisons. They're cleaning out their juvenile detention halls. They tell these people, you join a unit and we're going to give you such and such rewards or we'll commute your sentence or whatever it is. And they march those people into the machine gun fire. But to them, they're cleaning out their juvenile detention hall and their mental institutions and their prisons. The Ukrainians are losing doctors and lawyers. I can't tell you how many platoon sergeants I've met that speak English, and I'm like, what do you do in real life? Well, I'm the district attorney in my state, and that guy's dead in a week.