Ukraine offensive, progress or stalemate.

0:00 Speaker 1 What is today is thy McCoy, former Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, and again, so many things happening. Thy McCoy, tell us, where do we want to start today?

0:14 Speaker 2 Well, I think we want to start with some of the diplomacy that is taking place. But there’s a conference coming up in Jetta, Saudi Arabia with about forty countries to talk about some terms for a peace conference or a peace settlement between Ukraine and Russia. It looks like it’s mainly stacking up to be on the Ukrainian side

0:34 of things. So there’s a lot of positioning going on to see who is going to be able to get some of the terms they want in this particular war without starting a wider war.

0:51 Speaker 1 Understood. I mean, do you think we’re getting the truth out of what’s really going on over there and what’s going on in Russia or in Ukraine. I mean, I know Russia is making a ton of money with crude oil being back up to eighty dollars a barrow, So money is no object with them right now.

1:15 Speaker 2 Well, in some ways there’s no object, but they are having to sell their oil at deep discounts to China and India and trying to find ways to get it to market, and a lot of that Russian oil is going through third parties and then making it into the world market. But it is helping them with the higher prices,

1:32 even though they have to sell at a discount on the black market. I think that their defense budget and their expenditures have gone up so much also that they’re beginning to face some real pressures internally. Although the elite are still able to buy goods that are being smuggled in through Kazakhstan and through Georgia, which is turning into

1:55 a hub of black market goods for the elite. But the Russians are finding that they are not able to really bring to bear the combat power that they need to make any sort of offensive. They’re barely holding on where their defensive position, mainly because of all the preparations and all the trenches and all the mines and everything

2:25 else that they’ve placed during the winter. The Ukrainians are having difficult moving through those obstacles. They don’t have the overall combat power that they need. They don’t have the deep strip munitions and capabilities. Yet, they don’t have the air power that they need. They don’t have the tanks that they need to breach those defenses. So right now

2:49 there are probing attacks going on and there’s positioning going on by each side trying to show that they have the willpower for a longer war if need be, which is part of the setup for negotiations. In the meantime, they’re both trying to build their alliances as much as possible, trying to bring in African leaders, which just met up

3:11 in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Not as many of the African leaders showed up as Putin hoped. He was politicing and networking and trying to bring them over to his side, but he didn’t do very well. It ended up being sort of a bust at his summit with the Russia African Summit, and he got some criticism there. And now

3:32 he’s faced with this large negotiation and discussion going on in Saudi Arabia. The Chinese have been invited to that discussion, they have not accepted yet. So Putin is trying to hold as many countries as he can on his side.

3:48 The Ukrainians, of course, of trying to pull everybody over to their side. So in a way it’s a war of alliance building and in the meantime, the military on both sides is trying to build up their logistics and training and their intelligence on the other side. So it’s very difficult to get the truth from either side because,

4:11 as Sun Seu said, all war is deception, and so both sides want to not tell all the truth about themselves because they don’t want the other side discovering and finding out even the smallest thing about them. And so it’s going to make it always difficult in these situations to get the truth from even our allies, in this

4:37 case the Ukrainians, and because they don’t trust anyone to keep the information secret, and of course the Russians want to keep putting out disinformation. Even the Ukrainians are going to put out a lot of disinformation, some of which we’ll find its way here in the United States. So we’re going to have to be very alert as to

4:58 both what our adversaries are doing and what our allies are doing. As always, how.

5:05 Speaker 1 Is the China Saudi Alliance trying to bring in extra people? How is that working out? The last time we talked, they had Brazil, they had a few Venezuela and a few other countries, and New Zealand was going towards China.

5:24 What’s the latest on all that.

5:27 Speaker 2 Well, the Chinese are finding that their diplomacy is not working as well as they hoped. Their economy is sort of flatlined a little bit. The Communist Party trying to take over a lot of their industries and insert themselves have led to economic displacement. The foreign minister, who was a bright shining star that was in office for seven

5:48 months was suddenly disappeared and they brought back the previous foreign minister that had been in office for fourteen years. So there was some very unhappy results in the mind of the Chinese President z to have that occur, because he was like trying to rewrite history. So I think the Chinese feel like their strategy and their diplomacy has

6:12 failed in the Western Pacific, where we have renewed our ties with Australia, New Zealand, the Solomon Islands, and New Guinea, where we’ve had a blitz of activity American diplomacy. Also, the Chinese are finding that the Southeast and other countries are not so quick to leave the American embrace as maybe they had indicated. And so the Chinese, i think,

6:42 are finding that going up against their main enemy, as they call the United States, is not as easy as they thought it would be, and that the old United States is a little quicker on their feet and a little more able to rally and find alliances and bring people to the table, more in line with our views

7:11 than what the Chinese had presumed.

7:13 Speaker 1 What happened understood now we read the other day that it looks like the priority in the air force, in our military is to get the hypersonic missiles running and possibly using the B one bombers. I mean, we do need hypersonic missiles to react to the other side, what say you?

7:40 Speaker 2 And that, well, indeed we do. We’ve got to perfect our hypersonic missiles, some that can be air launched from aircraft, such as the B one or the B fifty two’s, which have been worked pretty hard. Some of them are seventy years old, if you can believe it. Some pilots are flying planes at their fathers used to fly. And

8:01 yet B fifty two’s and the others can be re engined new engines and they can be kept going. So there’ll be some hyper velocity missiles that will be developed that can be launched from aircraft, some from navy ships, maybe even some from Navy submarines, some from the ground, some for the army. So the hyper velocity missile family

8:25 that we’re trying to build and other countries are trying to build is very very important. And also at the same time that both sides are trying to build this capability to these types of missiles, each side is trying to figure out how to build defenses against these types of missiles, how to target, how to detect them, how

8:46 to figure out some way to understand where they’re going, because they can maneuver and flight some of them, and also they’re coming at you so quick that stopping them is going to be a very very difficult military and intelligence problem. And so the offense, so to speak, is becoming more powerful in that regard than the ability to

9:14 defend against this type of weapon. But both sides are very early in the hyper velocity game, so to speak.

9:23 Speaker 1 Well, it’s going to be a very very important tactic. I guess it’s hard to stop a hypersonic missile the speed is going yet time McCoy, thank you so much for coming on this Sunday morning, and God bless you, and God bless America, and thank you for everything you’ve done for America and continue to speak out for America.

9:47 Speaker 2 Well, John, thank you, thanks for the wonderful show that you have and bringing this information to the American people. And God bless you and your wonderful team. And we’ll keep our fingers crossed that we can prevail with our American valor and our American democracy to bring freedom to as many people as we have done in the past

10:11 thirty or forty years with the end of the Cold War.

10:15 Speaker 1 Thank you. Toy McClay, former Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, West Point graduate