The Delegates Lounge

A Canadian Officer Resigns to Join Belarusians Fighting for Ukraine, Part 3

• The Delegates Lounge LLC • Season 1 • Episode 10

Share episode

Join us for a firsthand account of life on and near the battlelines in Eastern Ukraine by Dave Smith, a former Canadian infantry officer who resigned to fight for Ukraine. This is the third episode in our multi-part series where Dave explores the evolving tactics and motivations that define the conflict. He offers listeners a deep dive into the experiences of soldiers and citizens that’s brimming with insights into how the geopolitical climate —including the election of former American President Donald Trump and the arrival of North Korean troops in Russia’s Kursk region — shape Ukrainian optimism despite the war weariness. 

J. Alex Tarquinio (https://x.com/alextarquinio) and Frank Radford, our hosts in The
Delegates Lounge, (https://x.com/delegateslounge) had three conversations with Dave Smith. The hosts spoke from New York, while Dave spoke from Ukraine via web conference in July and October, and from London in November.

References
In a background briefing by the U.S. Department of Defense in October, the Pentagon estimated that Russia had sustained at least 600,000 casualties, including killed and wounded, since launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Some estimates range much higher.
https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/3932364/a-senior-
defense-and-military-official-host-a-background-briefing-on-russias-wa/

The Pentagon estimated in November that 11,000 North Korean troops had moved into Russia’s Kursk region.
https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3968230/north-korean-troops-enter-kursk-where-ukrainians-are-fighting/

Radio Free Europe published an article last year citing some Russian contract soldiers and their families claiming that the state hadn’t honored payments or pardons promised in their contracts. A Reuters photo in the article was reminiscent of the Squid Games drama.
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-systema-investigation-contract-soldiers-pay-pardons-promises-broken/32676712.html

We shared some of our guest’s bylines with listeners in the show notes for the first
episode in this mini-series. Here is his latest essay about his life in Kharkiv for the online magazine Merion West.
https://merionwest.com/2024/11/27/at-home-in-the-war/

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Welcome to the Delegates Lounge. Pull up a chair. I'm Alex Tarquinio, a journalist based at the United Nations here in New York City and your emcee for this podcast featuring some of the most influential minds in the world today. Settle in for some riveting tete-a-tete, available wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome back.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Today we're bringing you the final episode in our mini-series with the Canadian volunteer on the Ukrainian battle lines. As returning listeners will know, dave Smith walked away from his career as a major with the Canadian Armed Forces to become a volunteer fighter with the Belarusian units supporting Ukraine, known as the Kalinowski Regiment. If you're just joining us, we interviewed Dave in July as he was rotating back into battle with the regiment for the fourth time, and again at the end of October as he was preparing to return home from Ukraine. Part one in this miniseries introduced listeners to Dave's story and motivations for leaving a secure military career. Part two featured Dave's impressions from the battlefield, focusing on the human aspects of warfare, such as fighting conscripts, capturing prisoners of war and receiving medical care for a shrapnel wound.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Geopolitical events are moving at such a rapid clip that shortly after we spoke in October, the Pentagon estimated that about 11,000 North Korean troops had moved into Russia's Kursk region. We spoke with Dave about this significant development a few days after the election of former American President Donald Trump. It should be noted that our third conversation happened well before the lightning-fast downfall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, a geostrategic shift of such importance that it might be viewed in the future as a turning point in multiple conflicts, with Russia losing a bastion of support in the region. During our first two conversations, dave spoke with us from Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine. In November, he spoke from London, where he was en route back home to Canada. This third and final episode is a compilation of Dave's musings on geopolitics and the military lessons he's learned the hard way in the unforgiving school of war. Frank, what did you find most compelling in Dave's take on the new tech and tactics that are evolving on the front lines of Russia's war in eastern Ukraine?

Frank Radford:

As Dave mentions, he and his fellow Belarusians encountered Russian meat waves, which describes the daily, persistent and often hapless Russian infantry assaults against Ukrainian defences. It is the key component of Russia's modus operandi. The meat is recruited throughout Russia by the coaxing or coercion of civilians into signing military contracts with the promise not always kept of big payouts should they be wounded or, even more lucratively, killed. Once inducted, these raw recruits receive barely minimal training and are rushed to the front to fill the ranks of the lead assault elements. These waves are normally tactically small in scale, but when executed across a wide front, they can at points dislodge or even, on occasion, overwhelm Ukraine's defences. Fortunately not Dave and his Belarusian comrades. As Dave points out, it is a methodology based on the acceptance of attrition as a viable military doctrine. Each meat wave is a targeted and desperate sprint to make it to the other side of no-man's land. They resemble a cross between the South Korean drama series the Squid Game and Hitchcock's the Birds. The Korean idea is not lost on Russian recruiters who seem so inspired they copy it. See the show notes. Once the meat wave is ordered forward, there's no escape Play dead and the drones the birds, as Russian soldiers call them will find you and make sure you are. Survival depends on innate Darwinian instinct rather than a regimen of expensive NATO-style training. Casualty rates are high but nonetheless, if the attack is successful and at the moment many of them are it is relative to a NATO army doing the same thing cost-effective. A Russian recruiter for this purpose may cost $50,000 or $60,000 if killed, whereas a trained-up NATO soldier employed the same way perhaps one day by necessity, as Dave warns would cost her anywhere from half to a full million dollars. Ironically, the North Koreans may be the next contestants in this real-world squid game. Only expect the payouts to go directly to Kim Jong-un. Expect the pass to go directly to Kim Jong-un.

Frank Radford:

Cynically, as Dave points out, putin has so far conducted an attritional war without their casualty rates, triggering a call for a potentially regime-toppling general mobilization. This crypto-mobilization, although expensive, is hidden from and demands no sacrifice of blood by the Russian majority, only their treasure. It impacts the undesirables, the marginalized, the desperate, in other words, the voiceless in Russia, and is therefore no great loss to their influential fellow citizens. Dave describes the repression used to keep Alexander Lukashenko's grip on power in Belarus. The repression used to keep Alexander Lukashenko's grip on power in Belarus, which his comrades feel intensely. Even before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many of Dave's comrades were already opponents of Lukashenko, who they believed had lost the 2020 presidential election in Belarus to Svetlana Tukuniskaya.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Incidentally, we interviewed Svetlana at NATO's Washington Summit and listeners can find that episode in our playlist. During this episode you'll hear Dave refer to the KGB when talking about Belarus. As I'm sure our listeners are aware, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation renamed its National Intelligence Agency and the acronym changed from KGB to FSB. But Belarus kept the old, unreformed name of its intelligence agency. So it's still called the KGB to FSB. But Belarus kept the old, unreformed name of its intelligence agency, so it's still called the KGB.

Frank Radford:

One last thing that needs to be pointed out, and that is there's a common military acronym that Dave uses throughout the interview, and that is TTP, which stands for Tactics, techniques and Procedures. These are guidelines that are constantly under development, that are followed by NATO soldiers so that they can accomplish their missions.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Dave spoke eloquently about the incongruity of his daily life in Kharkiv, a frontline city that he described in the previous episode as the last stop before Mordor. In recent months, he's divided his time between the frontlines and a rented apartment that he shared with a comrade from his regiment that was only 34 kilometers, or around 20 miles, from their position on the

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Zero.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Line. We'll include a link to Dave's most recent article in the online magazine Marian West describing the rhythm of life in Kharkiv. In the show notes for this episode, we started our third conversation by asking Dave about the lessons he had learned fighting in Ukraine. He focused on the big picture first, so that's where we'll begin.

Dave Smith:

I would just like to thank you guys once again for inviting me back, and I can't tell you how happy it makes me to talk to you again. I know for a fact that my mom and my wife both listened to your podcast because they both messaged me to point out how Alex was on their side regarding the seriousness of my fake shrapnel injury. So I can tell you that there's at least two listeners that you gained from the last podcast. The first thing I would say and it's not really Ukraine specific is this is just the context that I'm coming from for the rest of our discussion. It's a Ukrainian phrase and it goes. It means I am just a soldier, and it's what you say when someone asks you a question. You don't know the answer to my experience in Ukraine. It gives me some perspective on what's going on geostrategically, but that perspective is extremely limited.

Dave Smith:

So here's a very simple way to think about strategy. You wake up in the morning, you look out the window, you look at the world and you ask yourself two important questions. The first thing you ask is what do I want this world to look like? How do I want it to change or how do I want it to stay the same and how you answer that line of questioning is your strategic end state. It's your objective, it's your North Star, it guides all your decisions. The second question you have to ask yourself is how am I going to bring that new world about? What do I need to change and how am I going to cause that change to happen so that I achieve my strategic end state? You'll hear this called the theory of change or the theory of victory the free world.

Dave Smith:

Right now we have no strategy. We know generally what we want Our leaders, our presidents, our prime ministers. They recite platitudes about free and fair elections or the rules-based international order, territorial integrity and a bunch of other jargon that no one understands or even cares about. I can tell you from firsthand experience no soldier ever ran out on the battlefield and died for the rules-based international order. It means nothing. But we've never articulated what we want to change or stay the same to make the world more free.

Dave Smith:

Then, on the flip side, dictators. They're looking out the window and they know their strategic objective. It's destroy the free world and they're quickly figuring out how to make that happen. And I would say what's happened from the time that I left Canada to when I'm coming home now is a year and a half ago. I actually thought we had a chance to stop them, and now I'm just convinced we don't like. They're winning. It's like 1938, except that we're facing half a dozen Hitlers and all the Hitlers are working together, and the rest of the world is run by Chamberlains and we're pretending there is no war going on. And this is what I mean when I say the free world is being strategically defeated by the unfree world, and we all see the same world, and that world is becoming more the way they want it and less the way free people want it to be. So that understanding of strategy is the context for all my answers to your questions.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Maybe you can start by telling us about your journey from Kharkiv and all the machinations you had to do to get safely out of Ukraine.

Dave Smith:

So my journey from Kharkiv to here was about two weeks long. I left Kharkiv it was the day before the US election, it was November 4th, so I went back to Kiev on November 4th. It was sad, to be honest, leaving my apartment in Kharkiv. I lived there for about four months with my Belarusian comrades. The hardest thing to explain it's just what it's like living in a place that's at war, because people have asked me questions like what do you eat? They just assume we're in a war zone all the time. They don't really realize we're actually in a functioning country. And where I lived in Kharkiv, I had a points card to my favorite grocery store. I had a gym membership. There was a post office I went to regularly enough that they knew my name and they knew my address. So living there was really one of the unique experiences of being in the conflict, the occasional missile strikes.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

You arrived in Kharkiv not long after Ukraine's successful counteroffensive in late 2022. How have you seen Kharkiv change over the last two years?

Dave Smith:

So, first of all, the people that are there. You could evacuate the city. Russia could come back like they're never going to leave and even when the city was going to be evacuated last spring, very little of the remaining population left. And I will say the city is scarred, like it is wrecked. There are bombed out buildings. It's a hipster paradise Like there are cafes and tattoo parlors everywhere. When I walked right outside my apartment, there was like a skate shop that sold like American skater apparel and that never closed. You walk two blocks away and there's a building that's literally just, it's a shell of a building because it's been bombed so many times. So it's normal in that. You know the. You know the, that meme from World War II the Brits had keep calm and carry on. That kind of encapsulates the attitude in Kharkiv. But it wouldn't be keep calm and carry on. It would be keep calm, kill invaders. Do you need a hipster coffee while you're waiting?

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Have you spent much time in Kyiv and have you noticed any changes there?

Dave Smith:

Things have definitely changed in Kyiv. I made a conscious effort to talk to as many Ukrainians as I could, and Belarusians as well, about the US election, trump winning and everything, and I definitely get the impression in Kiev the civilians are just worn out, they're tired. Everybody's actually quite reluctantly happy that Trump won, because whatever happens might be cuckoo banana pants insane, but at least something's going to happen. You know what I mean, and it's the indecisive nature of what's been going on, especially since the counteroffensive started last year. That's really what's grinding people down, is the indecisiveness of it.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Well, we're speaking after the presidential election in the United States and, for listeners, we're recording this on the day that Biden and Trump are meeting. So Biden is a lame duck. Is there anything you would hope for before he leaves office in January?

Dave Smith:

One would hope a Biden administration or an EU would have a strategy to affect the kind of change that I was talking about earlier. When I look out the window, I want the world to be more free and I say, how could we achieve that? Well, we definitely got to get all the Russians out of Ukraine for starters. Well, how do we go about making that change happen? Okay, let's develop a theory of change and then work towards it. Right, the West has had two and a half three years almost, and they haven't done it Like they had no one. No one has had that conversation. They've done lots of virtue, signally support for Ukraine, but nobody's had an actual strategy.

Dave Smith:

Now Trump's going to show up and he's very good at bending the world to his will and making it how he wants. I don't think he's like a master military strategist or anything. To quote the great strategist Tony Soprano, a bad decision is better than indecision, and right now the free world is run by indecisive leaders and therefore can't have pursuable strategies. Donald Trump's lots of things, but he's not indecisive. He's going to show up in his first week, get briefed and be like here's what I want to happen, and he's going to make it happen and you know the rest of us are just going to have to deal with it.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Are you worried about whether Trump will enforce NATO's Article 5 in the event that any NATO allies were attacked? I mean, there's the campaign quote by Trump saying that if countries didn't pay up, whatever that means, then he would encourage Russia to do quote whatever the hell they want.

Dave Smith:

That statement by Donald Trump. I've thought about it a lot since it happened because on the surface of it it's so easy to agree with him. I actually would say I do agree with him. It's like if you join a gym and you don't pay the dues to the gym, they tell you you're not allowed in the gym.

Dave Smith:

I think what was so shocking about him saying it is and it's kind of obvious from his first term the guy is just opposed to alliances. And it's kind of obvious from his first term. The guy is just opposed to alliances. Everyone watching could tell he's just out to destroy this alliance relationship. He's not trying to effectively manage the alliance, he's trying to tear it down.

Dave Smith:

I think that's where the real fear of him not supporting Article 5 comes from. Is that you can kind of sense this attitude coming off of him right, because the secret of their power is alliance management, and it has been for 80 years or longer. The Russians had like an avowed policy, like the goal was to keep Turkey and Hungary and all these NATO countries destabilized in the NATO alliance, so that an Article 5 reaction couldn't be triggered, at least since 2014, but since long before then as well. Well, now it's like the only guarantor of the European security umbrella seems kind of questioning the mandatory nature of an Article 5 trigger. So it's like they've basically achieved what they want. At least the seat of doubt is there.

Frank Radford:

Once NATO becomes a paper tiger, then how can you possibly draw up a strategy that is even plausible? I mean, once he undermines the deterrence effect of having a NATO, then it percolates down to the even, to the tactical level.

Dave Smith:

Just to be clear. I think the world order that we've already moved into is scary and frightening. But it's not scary and frightening because I don't think Donald Trump will honor an Article 5 trigger. It's that he probably is going to end wars. There probably is going to be a ceasefire in Ukraine within the next three to 12 months or whatever, because of Donald Trump, of Donald Trump, and maybe he'll have some sort of impact on the Middle East. But if those wars end and they end because of deals that he brokered they're not going to end because of the rule of law, because of some sort of liberal, democratic understanding of justice that we've all agreed to. You know what I mean. If you attack one of our friends, we're all going to come to their aid. There's going to be a world order based on fear, because Donald Trump is going to say like I will guarantee the world order, but it'll be the world order that I and America want it to be and it will be imposed through fear.

Dave Smith:

And I think the other thing is Americans rightfully there really are. I think there is an awakening going on in Europe and in the US. There really are. I think there is an awakening going on in Europe and in the US. America either can't or won't defend the global order the way it has for the last eight decades, and I actually think Trump's more of a symptom of this than a cause, right? I think it's just the luster of globalism has really worn off, and anyone who thinks that 2% of GDP is the absolute maximum they should have to pay to live in a secure, free world is delusional. And there are literally countries in Europe that will pick slavery over increasing military spending. They will default to no, we don't want to spend more than 2%. And whatever if Russia invades. If you start at the Baltics, what I just said doesn't apply at all, and as you march West, it becomes more and more true.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Do the Ukrainians feel that Biden should make any changes between now and the end of his term on January 20th? For example, do they think that he should remove restrictions on using attack and missiles to hit targets inside Russia?

Dave Smith:

Yes, absolutely. The general consensus and this kind of goes for military people as well is Biden is a coward and Putin called him on it, and they knew that if Harris won, it was going to be more of the same. It was just going to be the status quo of the same. It was just going to be the status quo. Here's the weapons, but you can't use them to strike targets that matter, and the fighting was just going to go on indefinitely until Ukraine had bled enough soldiers that they had to admit defeat. That's been the status quo for almost two years now, since December of 2022.

Dave Smith:

So average citizens, tired, worn out, they want the fighting to stop. They want there to be a ceasefire. The further west you go, the less they care about territorial integrity, right, like people in Kiev don't care about Donbass. The military dudes are just sick of going on pointless missions, knowing that it doesn't matter what we do. It's not going to affect the battlefield, and that goes for my Belarusian regiment, but I think it also goes for the Ukrainian units that I've supported as well. Everyone is just sick of not being able to change the behavior of their adversary, which is the point of warfare, like, not pointless. For me personally, I was like I did everything that I could, but I mean I wish my actions could have had a greater effect to the big picture. I don't think they did. The world isn't a much worse place now than when I got here.

Dave Smith:

You know, I talked to a couple old dudes, one who is the landlord at the flat I was staying and he was animated. He made a lot of good points. He said Russia's playing this long game. There's going to be a ceasefire, they're going to rearm, they're going to try this again in five years or two, whenever they're ready to do it again, they're going to go for it again.

Dave Smith:

The Ukrainians know that is coming and they need a break. They don't have the bodies to throw at this that Russia does. They also just don't have the physical resources. Developing drone technology takes time. Ammunition takes time, especially now that Ukraine has pretty much accepted that they have to build it all themselves. And I would also say the other thing that I have noticed more and more people talking about, which I don't see being reflected in the English language media, is Ukrainians know how nuclear technology works and their citizens are more than willing to be like we should just build our own nuclear weapons. It was a mistake to give away our nukes and the idea that we can survive as a country without nuclear weapons is ridiculous. It doesn't matter who wins this phase of the war. We need nuclear weapons, otherwise we'll never be safe. They could probably have a nuclear weapon in like six months to a year, and I don't see any policymakers talking about that taking that seriously.

Frank Radford:

I do have another line of question what is view of the belarussians in your unit regarding belarus? Has it changed at all? Are they just waiting for the day that this war ends and then they're going to?

Dave Smith:

yeah, no, it's. Oh, man, I, I could talk about this, uh, for days as well. So the belarus is the the deciding factor in this war in Eastern Europe, in the fight against totalitarianism in Russia, because it is like the land bridge from Russia to Europe. That's how it is the threat vector and Belarusians, I think, naturally understand that, but Westerners do not. I think naturally understand that, but Westerners do not. So they really do see their territory as occupied territory. They consider it part of the same war. It's the exact war that we're in now and Ukraine is. We call it gray zone. It's contested and I would say since 2020 and the revolution happened there.

Dave Smith:

The repression apparatus in Belarus like to say that could they have another revolution that will overthrow Lukashenko. It's like they're not up against the same regime. The repression apparatus and the punishment system and the concentration camps and everything that's going on in Belarus is so much worse than four years ago. I know you guys have had Svetlana Tsikhanouskaya on your show. The challenge she's up against now is way worse than four years ago. I know you guys have had Svetlana Tsikhanouskaya on your show. The challenge she's up against now is way worse than four years ago.

Dave Smith:

I think a lot of the guys that are fighting here. They know full well that Lukashenko and his KGB have their sights set on the guys fighting here, because they know these guys are like actual threats. Dudes with guns are an actual threat. These guys are like actual threats. Dudes with guns are an actual threat. Protesters waving flags and singing patriotic songs like they were in 2020. That's not a threat anymore. That's not going to happen. They've neutralized that. So the dudes that are here fighting as partisans it's a small group relative to the amount of people that fled Belarus after 2020, but they know that they're being hunted and my best friend, like he, can't talk to his parents anymore.

Dave Smith:

His parents have been threatened by the KGB. Everybody has stories like that Guys that have kids who they're pretty sure they'll never see again. So it's quite bleak and I think the dynamic of the conflict is really hard to explain to people that haven't spent a lot of time looking at a map. But if you look at a map you basically see there's freedom on one side and unfreedom on the other, and in the middle there's a box with three compartments the Black Sea, ukraine and Belarus. The Soviet religion, which is what the Belarusians call it, still controls Belarus and their eyes are quite open to how bad it is there now.

Frank Radford:

So this is tragic, but are the numbers being replenished? Belarusians and volunteers in general?

Dave Smith:

I mean no, the numbers are down and they're continuing to go down, like the longer the war drags on, the less volunteers there's going to be. I think the hard part for attracting Belarusian volunteers is all the ones that were international outside of Belarus when the invasion of Ukraine started. If any of them that were going to come here, they've all come here, so the only guys left that you could get guys and gals, because there's female volunteers as well you would have to get out of Belarus, and I think it's becoming much harder to get out of belarus, and I think that so many of those people are compromised, like so many of you know your partisan protesters that were out waving flags in 2020 that you could convince to come learn how to be a soldier in ukraine. Like they know, they're compromised. They know that the government's following them, tracking them, threatening them. I think the entire protest movement in 2020 existed on Telegram.

Dave Smith:

In Belarus, telegram is the FSB's app, so I think the odds that you're going to get them out of that country are really, really low.

Frank Radford:

Did you get medals for actions?

Dave Smith:

I got two from my regiment, yeah.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

And these are medals particular to the Kalinowski regiment.

Dave Smith:

I was pretty honored to get them. Man, it's pretty dope. One is like the regiment's medal and then the other one is from the chaplain.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

From the chaplain.

Dave Smith:

Yeah, the regiment has its own chaplain and he has his own official medal that he can give out.

Dave Smith:

So I got one from him for being like a team builder or whatever. It's funny that you ask that because when I was going across the border like I had all my gear with me and I was literally the only guy on the bus who they searched my luggage, because I'm an obvious army guy they have to inspect you because they're very worried about people like stealing equipment and leaving or fleeing the military or anything like that. And the border guard who was searching me the first thing he opened was my rucksack and it also had my medals and he looked at them and then he took his phone out and showed me a picture of him getting his medal, because I guess he's like National Guard or something, and we shook hands and hugged and then he just went through the motions of searching the rest of my stuff. I was really worried about crossing the border with my Kevlar and my helmet and everything, but he just packed it all up and then helped me carry it back to the bus.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Can we step back for just a moment on your story? This is your fourth tour in Ukraine. Can you tell us how you spent those four tours?

Dave Smith:

in Ukraine. Can you tell us how you spent those four tours? Yeah, I was in Bakhmut, chernihiv, kupyansk and Kharkiv, but those are a bit misleading. I would say I was in those directions. So I was in Bakhmut direction.

Dave Smith:

By the time I was actually on the ground, it was falling and we were doing like our last missions in there, where Progozhin was basically taking it over. So I spent most of my time south of the city, in an area called Klishchivka. There's a really important canal that divides that area north and south. I was on the side of that canal with 3rd Assault Brigade when the counteroffensive started in the spring of 2023. And then in the middle of the summer, progozhin had his little insurrection, march for justice, whatever he was calling it. When the dust settled on that, he was going to Belarus. That was what. So obviously my regiment, which is the Belarusian regiment, thought that was really big deal.

Dave Smith:

So we actually came off the line and went north in Chernihiv to kind of like, if you look at the intersection of the borders between Russia, belarus and Ukraine, we're sort of right in there doing some stuff that was highly unpublicized, in my opinion, not really that effective, because it was kind of like the Russia didn't really have the A-team up there, so they weren't really trying any maneuvers of the border, even though Putin and Lukashenko like to make it seem like there's a huge threat to Ukraine emanating from Belarus. I've never actually seen it. It was like our C team fighting their C team up there, because you could tell they don't have any intention to launch offensives, and neither did we, because we don't want to cross that border and start another front. That was kind of end of summer, early fall 2023. Then we went to Kupyansk and we were there for two or three months when the weather started to get really horrible. It's bisected by the Oskil River, which is a very natural boundary that the Russians were trying to push to before the winter, when was this.

Dave Smith:

Early or mid-October of 2023. And then we were there right up until about Christmas. It was all defensive the horrible videos that you see on social media of doing defensives in the mud. We were doing that. It was cold. There was very little maneuver or action going on, it was mostly just dodging mortar rounds.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

I'm sorry to jump in here, but there's actually some reporting now that the Allies, particularly in the European Union, which has pledged to produce a lot of the 155 millimeter artillery ammunition, may actually not have as much capacity as originally estimated and deliveries have been slow. Are you feeling that at the front?

Dave Smith:

Yes,

Dave Smith:

100% it's terrifying when we were in Kupiansk I remember going on a mission where the fire's officer who was Ukrainian called me over to his desk and he's like, Canadian, come look at this. And he pointed at the whiteboard where they track, like the rounds they have and the rounds they used. And we were going out on like a four or five day mission. And he pointed at the column with the rounds they had and it was, if I remember correctly, the number was 48. And I was that's for today, right, and he's that's what we have, and I was. But you're getting more, right, because I mean for our infill, just to get to the zero line, they'll probably spend 20 or 25 rounds and then when they're hunting Russian guns that are shooting at us, that could take easily in the morning, you could use 20, 25 rounds. So he's telling me we're going out with 48 rounds and there's more coming, right? He's like I don't know.

Dave Smith:

So we got on the back of the pickup truck and drove out there and I was in my mind. I was thinking we might only have mortar cover for half a day, maybe, you know, maybe daylight hours while we're out there, and then it will spend three, four days just getting shelled by Russia and there's nothing we can do about it. And that's terrifying, as a soldier, just knowing this is not like a big theoretical political debate. When are they going to get the ammo there? It's no dude. Dudes are dying because European capitals can't figure out how to produce mortar rounds that Napoleon figured out how to produce. Yeah, it's terrifying.

Dave Smith:

In

J. Alex Tarquinio:

the

J. Alex Tarquinio:

last three months to fight in eastern Ukraine. What's changed?

Dave Smith:

I'm

Dave Smith:

still kind of processing it myself. I was in Kupyansk for quite a while and then I went on leave and the unit went and did another rotations somewhere near Kharkiv, but I forget exactly where. And then I came back, we went into a training cycle and we knew that the next rotation we were going into it was going to be much bigger, because we knew we were going to Kharkiv and Russia was signaling that they were going to start another massive offensive towards the city. So we actually spent a long time in training and the infantry guys we actually stayed in training for considerably longer than everyone else because they deployed the headquarters and the drones and the mortars and all the enablers. They were actually needed pretty quickly by the Ukrainian brigades that were there because they really really felt like if you remember back to April, may of this year, putin and Lavrov were using the phrase sanitary zone or sanitation zone all the time. They were really telegraphing that they wanted to pretty much reform the international border through Kharkiv Oblast. So everybody international border through Kharkiv Oblast so everybody, including the Ukrainians, the Western media, decision makers and all the capitals really thought that the offensive was going to make a run for Kharkiv again and the last one was a vacation compared to this one we just finished north of Kharkiv.

Dave Smith:

I think there's a couple of observations I could make. The war is not static. There's a couple of observations I could make. The war is not static If you took a snapshot every three or four months.

Dave Smith:

It's a dramatically different war. Each side is adapting and their use of drones, compared to six months ago, a year ago, is just astronomically better, whereas in the fall of 2023, I don't want to say move around the front whenever we wanted or whatever, but there wasn't this idea that, like the moment I step outside of the vehicle, there's going to be 30 drones trying to kill me. And now there is that feeling and those drones have thermal cameras and they're dropping grenades on us and they're literally tracking our every movement. So it's a dramatically different style of soldiering that you have to do, because your camouflage and concealment from the air is so much more important, to a degree that I couldn't even explain If I had to go back to Canada at the infantry school and tell them you're going to be doing assaults in ghillie suits. For your listeners, ghillie suits are like what snipers use to sneak around the battlefield. We're doing assaults.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

So

J. Alex Tarquinio:

a type of camouflage suit.

Dave Smith:

Yeah

Dave Smith:

, Imagine you know the movie Predator with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Dave Smith:

It's like if I could have ghillie suit, like Predator had, where I basically just melt into the forest. That's what all of us would be wearing. We spend so much time making overhead cover for the trench. What we're doing now is more serious than world war one. In world war one, your trench had to have some overhead protection because mortar rounds or artillery rounds might send a fragment up into the air that came down onto your trench. But now it's beyond that. If you are exposed at all, you're going to get hit, and both the Ukrainians and the Russians have turned into absolute snipers with their mortar rounds. They don't need a human observer anymore, right, they have a drone to do the observation for them. You don't need a forward artillery officer looking at a target anymore. You have 24-7, 365 drone coverage on any potential target that's in the battlefield and their mortarmen are on both sides, are absolute snipers at this point, like if they find your trench, they can get around right into it.

Dave Smith:

It's

Dave Smith:

not an aerial weapon, you don't need a person, but someone is still looking through the lens of that.

Dave Smith:

Looking at it from the op center through a camera on a drone is way different than being a forward observer, where you have to be within visual danger of the target

Frank Radford:

it

Frank Radford:

sort of begs the question, though, that, based on what you've explained about where you were the tree line and that you were actually engaged in an offensive action, what motivates a soldier today? What form of command style will get them across that no man's land?

Frank Radford:

and that's a hard sell. Nato has that mission command where it's. It's almost like everybody sits down for a powwow and then says let's do this, whereas the vagna method is okay, you don't go across that no man's land and we'll put a sledgehammer to your head. It's also, from the recruitment point of view, not very inspiring to think that this is not just worse than a World War I, it's almost guaranteed suicidal if it's not done to perfection. You know, with the whole combined arms thing working like clockwork to the second. So I don't know how you experienced that or how the Belarusians overcame that trepidation. I get the impression that you're all highly intelligent actually and that you know that this has to be done. But for a NATO army to instill that, that's tough. How do you as an officer, order troops to cross no man's land and what is the incentive?

Dave Smith:

So

Dave Smith:

I think you're really hitting on the crux of the issue, like why we fight. The reason I joined the Belarusian unit is because I knew they have a why to fight. Their why is so strong? And the other foreign fighters? I don't think not all. There's lots of good, there's a range of foreign fighters. Lots are really good, lots have a really strong why. You know your motivation evaporates the moment artillery starts falling on you or anything like that In the situations I've been in on the battleground here, everybody knows what the point is.

Dave Smith:

The point is get the Russians out of Eastern Ukraine.

Dave Smith:

So when we go and we're trying to clear a tree line, the point is push the Russians back to the Russian side of the border. And many of the dudes I work with are extremely intelligent. There's one guy who's a doctor in my unit. There's dudes that did IT. There's all these guys from backgrounds that aren't military who are extremely intelligent and because they know why they're fighting and they know what they're trying to achieve, they arrive at really good solutions Like how do you cross no man's land and kick the Russians out of their trenches and then take their trenches and continue to pressure them to cross back to the other side of the border out of their trenches and then take their trenches and continue to pressure them to cross back to the other side of the border? Well, that's an that's a question that has an answer. There is a solution to that problem. We sometimes have to learn it the hard way, through injuries and deaths and casualties and stuff, but we do learn it because everybody knows what we're trying to do.

Frank Radford:

But

Frank Radford:

did you feel in your particular rotation, your operation, operation with the Belarusians, that they were part of a larger scheme?

Dave Smith:

Yeah

Dave Smith:

, absolutely. A lot of it has to do with the death toll. We were working with two other Gore units that are quite elite and then a ZSU unit, our regular army brigade, who were there when we got there and definitely the level of coordination between the four units was the highest I've ever seen. I would say because of the nature of the terrain we definitely were doing stuff that was like battalion level operations, but the individual objectives themselves in this wood line you couldn't really attack them with more than like a platoon minus, just because of the nature of the terrain.

Dave Smith:

The coordination and the synchronization in particular was really really good because we were like canalized into this area where it's like, well, we need the artillery to fall in this one particular spot in front of us while we advance forward.

Dave Smith:

And we can only advance in very small teams and we're, you know, working with Ukrainian teams that are also really well oiled and we've had lots of time to work with them and learn how each other does business and exchange lessons learned. So I would say it's like we were doing a battalion level operation, but the tip of the spear was usually like section or squad size. So I definitely did feel this rotation. It was the most time I have seen like our team leaders working with team leaders from other units and it was the most time I spent in other people's trenches. And just to sorry, just to give another shout out to that medic that treated me so just knowing man, I got injured and some regular army Ukrainian unit medical staff was that close to me at the front and gave me immediate treatment. It's an organizational feat. We all worked together and it really worked out.

Frank Radford:

Did

Frank Radford:

you work with the mech units?

Frank Radford:

Did you see armor or

Dave Smith:

I

Dave Smith:

don't know who the M113 unit was, but they were definitely meched and they were definitely supporting us. Because they were definitely supporting us because they were saving our guys' lives left, right and the center.

Dave Smith:

So they were there.

Dave Smith:

I didn't see any mech assaults or anything, though, but we were in absolute light infantry terrain. It's not that there weren't mech units around. There were, but they weren't doing what I was doing, because what we were doing you had to do dismounted. Basically, I felt like I was in a simulator on a career course. It was exactly the way they told me it would be when I was in training as an infantry officer.

Dave Smith:

There is one thing if there's any Canadians in uniform listening to this, or even just NATO soldiers generally, but especially Canadian Armed Forces members I was over-prepared for this war. Canadian Armed Forces members, I was over-prepared for this war. Everything I was trained to do I never I was scared. I was. Definitely. There was shit going on all around me that was intimidating, but I never didn't know what to do from every level. From when I first joined the Russian speaking unit. I was the only English guy there, and they just plopped me in the forest outside Bakhmut, and they were like okay, this is going to be our fighting position. And I just started digging a trench with some Belarusian who only spoke Russian. I knew exactly what I was doing. I was like okay, we got to dig this to level one so that it's defendable. And then we got to put some overhead concealment up because there's going to be drones looking for us. And then, as I progressed along and you know, they started to realize I wasn't just like a noob and they gave me more responsibilities and I started getting invited to planning meetings and stuff, the planning and the whiteboarding. And, like I told one of the Russian speakers and the Ukrainians, whiteboards win wars, like that's my mantra Whiteboards win wars. We should do everything on a whiteboard. And then they all had whiteboards all of a sudden and we would literally sit in front of a whiteboard with interpreters and try to work out plans together. And I was literally just doing exactly what I was taught on my captain's career course. I was just doing it with guys that didn't speak English and didn't have the same training as I did.

Dave Smith:

Granted, I was only in the Canadian military, but I think mission command is really good at training junior leaders junior, you know, your young lieutenants and your master corporals and sergeants.

Dave Smith:

It's really good at training them to explain the why we have sorry, I'll drop some terminology here but we use commander's intent statements, we use mission statements, we give main efforts right, like anytime you get orders for a mission, you are told what the main effort is right, because they want every soldier to know, right down to the no-hook privates, what is the most important thing, what's the vital ground that we have to take here.

Dave Smith:

So we're really good at taking the why we fight and turning it into a process, delivered, shared reality. If you will across the ranks, right right from the generals down, everybody knows what the point of the operation is. But the Canadian army, like over, prepared me for this, for this conflict, and I feel like there's so many people in the West right now who are like soldiers, that are seeing what's going on, and they're like, oh my God, we would get annihilated on the first day of this war if we were doing what the Ukrainians are doing. And to them, to them I would say, man, trust in your training, we're not as ill prepared for this as you think this is. This is exactly the fight that our that our militaries have been training us for.

Frank Radford:

But one would hope that a major from an infantry background would be prepared for what you went through.

Dave Smith:

Most of the time I was not doing stuff that an infantry major. I was an above average rifleman at best a lot of the time. And I know in my army there's a lot of young corporals and master corporals that could show up here and totally be rock stars just absolutely know exactly what they were doing. Their navigation skills, their shooting skills, their field craft are beyond the level of this battlefield. And it's not because I was a major. I would actually say a lot of them would be better than me.

Frank Radford:

Well, again going back to our previous interview, you made some remarks about the operational level of war. As I understand, the Ukrainians may have done pretty good in Kursk. Are you noticing that kind of level of expertise now at the staff operational level of planning?

Dave Smith:

So, first off, we didn't have anything to do with Kursk. I didn't even know Kursk was going on until five days after it started. Regardless of how it turned out or what Dave Smith thinks of its strategic significance, some serious planning went into that. That was definitely a flawlessly executed operational level to the point where, I think, the Russians were so stunned I think it took them days to even figure out that it had happened or what was happening. So it was good that way. But I'd say, if you don't have a strategic objective that changes your adversary's behavior, it's almost, it's a rehearsal, it's practice, it's training.

Dave Smith:

Yeah.

Dave Smith:

Okay, you did a divisional level off. That was dope. What was the point? Because if the point was to draw Russian forces away from the Donbass axis, it didn't work. But both sides are so good at the information operations side of the conflict that it's kind of shocking to Westerners because we're so unequipped for it.

Dave Smith:

Making sense of, like vehicle losses or ground gained and lost or whatever, is easier than figuring out the psychological or cognitive effect that particular battlefield actions have on the adversary's civilian population. Me, dave Smith, military guy, looking at Kursk, I'm like this is stupid. I don't know why they're doing this, but you know guys like Sersky and Budanov, you know they look at it and be like no, no, no, we had to scare the Russian population and this worked for what we wanted it for. Or we wanted to derail one of their narratives about Russian victory being inevitable, and it worked. So there are objectives I believe they're pursuing. They're not obvious to Westerners and they're definitely not obvious to Western military folks like myself, because we've just never thought that way. In fact, we kind of think it's ungentlemanly To psychologically affect the civilians of your adversary state how ungentlemanly, whereas the Ukrainians are like, are like, no, dude, we're definitely doing that. That's like that's the point of the mission okay.

Frank Radford:

So it sounds like that there is a learning curve that the ukrainian staff are overcoming and honing skills and getting better progressively absolutely faster than the russians.

Dave Smith:

I think definitely faster than the Russians. But I would say the tendency in the English language world is to seriously downplay how much the Russians are learning and adapting to we, the democratic world. We still want to believe that they're like the nincompoops, that they were three years ago, and it's not true from the the media.

Frank Radford:

There is a formula for the way they conduct an offense. The contemptible term of using meat waves, etc. Is associated with them, but it is quite clearly getting results yes, they do seem to have integrated not just mortars but glide bombs, and I think they're killed.

Dave Smith:

whoa, hold on one second. I like okay, I'm so glad you brought this up. They're not integrated. They use them, but they are not integrated. They like their air power and their indirect fire is not integrated with the meat waves. The meat waves are real. The meat waves run at us, we kill them, they die. It's great.

Dave Smith:

The meat waves don't have what you and I would think of as combined arms operations or joint operations. The glide bombs come out, the mortars fall and we do get by them, but it's not like a bunch of mortars hit me and then an assault ran over me, like a mortar hit me and the meat wave was somewhere doing something, getting ready or whatever. So they're not integrated. They're still not there yet and I actually think that I've been here a year and a half now.

Dave Smith:

I haven't actually seen the Russians do anything integrated, other than if you consider we're going to send out aircraft to drop. We call them Cubs I'm not sure what the Russian acronym is, but big bombs like the equivalent of a JDAM. They come out and they do drop thousand pound bombs on us, but then nothing like it doesn't add up to anything. It's not like they have a fire plan where they've decided okay, like at H minus 10, we're going to drop these huge bombs to stun this trench system. Then we're going to steamroll over the trench system with a dismounted attack or an armored attack. I have not seen that happen yet.

Dave Smith:

So they are getting better independently. The meat waves are getting better and the air power is getting better and the indirect fire is getting better, but I still haven't seen them do what like NATO would consider a joint operation. Does that make sense?

Frank Radford:

That absolutely does. Yes, so yeah, that applies to their most elites as well.

Dave Smith:

Well, that I don't know, because you got to remember, the infighting in the Russian military system is so huge that, like, their elites are pretty much severed by tribalism, essentially. So if you think, like, wagner was definitely the most elite uh founded light force that they had here and wagner imploded. We weren't fighting the elites this summer. I can tell you like we, we took lots of prisoners. I saw them. These guys were conscripts, they had no idea what was going on. They were not elite by any stretch of the imagination.

Dave Smith:

But in the Western context you would think the more elite the unit, the more assets they get right. So if you're a special forces unit or if you're some kind of soft unit, you get better indirect fire support, you get better aircraft, you get all of the kind of toys to play with. I don't really think Rush is there, man. I think the VDV and Spetsnaz or whatever, they're probably really good at what they do. The same way, wagner was very good at what they do. But the idea that you're very good at what you do, so we're going to give you the best of the best air support, I don't actually think they're there, because that requires a level of cooperation and coordination that I just don't think a totalitarian army can achieve, because they're so divided all the time.

Frank Radford:

As we've spoken before. You pointed out that Clausewitz emphasized the defense is stronger than offense. Yeah, now you were engaged in an offensive action. Engaged in an offensive action and despite the fact that Russia is taking exorbitant casualties in men and materiel, they are nevertheless conducting successful offensives, even though they're not breakthroughs. They are what seems to be battalion tactical groupings, generated quickly and with whatever they've got available in terms of manpower and equipment, they send it forward across a broad front. It's difficult to handle for the Ukrainians even though they are inflicting heavy casualties on the Russians, they nevertheless have to retreat and it seems that counterattacks are not effective.

Frank Radford:

Now, you were involved in an offensive action. The thing which was mentioned is that the ability to integrate the combat multipliers that you need to make sure that your element gets across the no man's land, whereas the other side, as you pointed out, is somewhat inept at that. Although the problem may be in command style, they they force them across the no man's land, whereas on your side, because your people were intelligent, they could discuss and get it done in a different way I would use a different word than command style.

Dave Smith:

I would. The word I would use is psychology. Like the r, the Russians accept that attrition is a viable form of warfare. They just think if you have more numbers and you can mass force greater than your enemy at the objective that you're trying to take, their casualty tolerance is higher. They's a forbidden word. It's like it's what you avoid, right? We want maneuver, not attrition. And the Russians don't have that psychological block.

Dave Smith:

And I would say the only reason my colleagues and I and the Ukrainians generally take a more maneuverist approach, it's not necessarily that they're psychologically more committed to it. It's just they have no other choice, like they're outnumbered and outgunned. The Russians, if they were faced with a similar situation, maybe they would maneuver more as well. But because they have such overwhelming manpower and especially such overwhelming firepower, I would just say their ability to sacrifice human lives to achieve what is, in my opinion, a relatively minuscule objective is incredible. Whatever you've heard in the media, it's understated Like they'll literally just throw bodies at it until they get it, if that's what the chain of command wants. So I think it's more of a psychological difference than necessarily a, you know, command style difference, or a tactician's difference. It's more of a mentally. They've just accepted what we consider to be the unacceptable.

Frank Radford:

The 700,000 casualties that they've presumably taken. I consider to be the unacceptable the the 700 000 casualties that they've presumably. I mean that's that's 70 british armies.

Dave Smith:

I I don't trust any numbers that come out. I'm sure it's, it's insane. So, whatever it is, it's not high enough in dave smith's opinion.

Dave Smith:

And, and the other thing is, both sides are so good at narratives to suit their purposes the information operations side of the conflict well,

J. Alex Tarquinio:

when

J. Alex Tarquinio:

you say that, whatever the casualties are and I I hear you about not trusting figures on both side but when you say that they're not high enough on the russian side to affect the russian mentality, they are putting different people into the fight. Obviously, there was all the prisoners you talked about the conscripts last time. There are people from the regions these are not the sons of the elite in Moscow or St Petersburg who are going. So what do you mean exactly when you say that the casualties aren't high enough to influence the decision making?

Dave Smith:

You're

Dave Smith:

talking more like influencing the populace psychologically. I was talking like influence them capability wise, like they're still force generating soldiers. The conversation we're having is how are you going to influence the will, understanding or capability of the Russian general staff and the Russian military to continue to conduct offensive operations in eastern Ukraine? Well, if the planning is to affect their capability by diminishing their ability to send soldiers there, it's not working and it doesn't seem like no matter how many you kill, it's going to work. So they're like the bad guy from the video game you kill him and he comes back. There's two of them and you kill both of them and then there's three of them. That's how Russian soldiers appear right now.

Frank Radford:

Right, but it's axiomatic that if you're going to succeed at some point, you've got to take the offensive.

Dave Smith:

Yes.

Frank Radford:

Even if it's a counterattack to retake ground that was lost.

Frank Radford:

And.

Frank Radford:

I'm getting the impression that Ukraine is not able to do that.

Dave Smith:

They're not no, especially in particular sectors of the front.

Frank Radford:

So what's you know? You said it right there that attrition seems to be a dirty word in NATO. Yeah, as well.

Dave Smith:

There's actually sorry to interrupt, but because there's actually a few sacred cows that have been knocked down while I was here. One is attrition is a completely legitimate form of warfare, like it absolutely works. And NATO's the way. Nato kind of indoctrinates its officers, and I use that word like that's what they call it. They call it indoctrination I'm not using that as a pejorative Like they told me I was in indoc, like I was being indoctrinated. You know the fact that they just tell you like maneuver good, attrition bad, even if you're never going to do it.

Dave Smith:

It's extremely limiting in how you think about your enemy, right, if you think that obviously maneuver is the best way to go in every possible case and you suddenly are confronted with an adversary who's like that I do, I do attrition right.

Dave Smith:

Well, now you've never had to go through his thought process, you've never had to think like him. I think teaching junior officers and then majors and lieutenant colonels in staff college, teaching them that attrition is like this dirty word that we never talk about, is debilitating, right, because now you can't understand an enemy who thinks that way. So that's one sacred cow and the other one that I would say is like siege warfare is still a thing, the Russians and the Ukrainians. They regularly pick a town or a village and just decide they're going to siege it like it's medieval times. And when I say siege, I mean Bakhmut was a siege battle. There was no maneuver, it was not an attrition battle, it was just block by block, inch by inch, seize everything and destroy it if you have to, which predates, clausewitz and everybody. But Russia has proven a few times now it works. You destroy everything, but then you control it.

Frank Radford:

Well, one thing that's noticeable is that they can extemporize a force not adverse to attrition. Extemporize a force not adverse to attrition? Yeah, in fact they. They use it as part of part of their success mechanism, in a way, so their brigade staffs can throw together whatever's available into a battalion tactical grouping attack vector, with, you know maybe 100 guys who don't want to be there and vehicle drivers who also don't want to be there, and they can actually have the authority to order soldiers into a situation that the survival rate is so low, and they know it. Now. That is a technique which is just totally alien to NATO. How do you tell soldiers that this is where your start line is and that's where your end line is, and there's no ands, ifs or buts. That's where you've got to go.

Frank Radford:

But, as you pointed out, attrition works, but the fact that they can generate this so quickly and to use this kind of outflanking effort, whatever the stronghold is, whether it's Volodar or Chassivyar or wherever they've successfully done this, and it's very hard to respond to it, especially if you've got a command style that requires everybody to get, as you pointed out, the main effort, what we're doing, and every soldier to realize that this is why we're doing it. They don't have the, why they don't even bother with it.

Frank Radford:

It's like you know, we need to know you to follow down.

Dave Smith:

I wouldn't go that far. You got to remember having an objective that's understood, even if it's ridiculous or insane, is much more effective than not having an objective. The simpler your objective is, the more likely it is you are to achieve it. There's also just something different in the Slavic psyche about suffering this attitude of like, yeah, I'm going to go do it, I might die. It's pretty normal here. It's normal amongst the Ukrainians as well, less so than the Russians, but I think that 20 years of the global war on terror really really did damage to NATO. It's made us so risk adverse and so casualty adverse.

Dave Smith:

If you can't prove that every single dude is going to come home safe, you don't get to go do the mission. And that only works when the combat is optional, like when you don't have to go assault bin Laden's compound. You're just doing it because you can. Your risk calculus is way out of whack compared to conventional warfare. Conventional warfare is like you don't have a choice, like, yeah, you're going to take casualties, figure out how to minimize them and move on. Take the objective. And because NATO has gotten itself into these weird missions for the last 20 years, if you talk about, like Afghanistan post about 2005, 2006, or Iraq. The whole time we were there, nobody knew what the hell the end state was. Nobody knew what the main effort was. There was no unity of effort. You couldn't coordinate vast groups of people because nobody knew what it was they were trying to achieve.

Frank Radford:

You were a relatively high-ranking former NATO officer, okay, so it is a very rare phenomenon for a NATO officer to have been through what you've been through. You've experienced real combat, peer-to-peer. Now you say that NATO understands combined arms in theory, right, but they've never really had to practice it in this kind of environment. So would it be fair to say that the Russians are ahead or on a par? Or if something was to happen such that there was an armistice or a negotiated peace and Ukraine was in a holding pattern for the next offensive, is NATO ready for a Russian action on a large scale? I mean, that's a hypothetical. I know that some of Eastern European countries are suggesting something like that. Do you think there is an advantage that the Russians have at the moment over NATO?

Dave Smith:

I think, oh man, we could have a three-hour podcast just about this one question. So I'm just going to stream of consciousness some of the things that my mind has changed since I got here. Rather, I can't give you a straight up answer to your question. So the first one is my respect for NATO has skyrocketed since I got impressive. I spent four years as a joint terminal attack controller, which is like an army guy that calls in airstrikes from the Air Force, and I can tell you I did huge NATO exercises. I worked with in the double digits of NATO countries doing that job. We have like standardized procedures.

Dave Smith:

I was embedded with a, an infantry platoon from the Czech Republic, for three weeks on an exercise about 10 years ago and I was an infantry officer talking to airplanes and they were an infantry platoon and I knew exactly what they were doing all the time. They understood what I was doing all the time because we had the same doctrine, the same TTPs and even if we didn't have the same TTPs, we had the same points of reference. I could say like, hey, doctrinally this is the way I was taught to do this, but I don't always do it that way. What do you guys think and they'd be like oh yeah, we have the same doctrine, but we don't do it that way either. We do it differently than the doctrine and differently than you.

Dave Smith:

So so I feel like that shared approach to warfighting is kind of the secret sauce that makes NATO so threatening, and it's why totalitarian dictators are terrified of NATO, Iran, Russia, North Korea they all want the same things. They want to overthrow us, kill us, take our stuff. They're never truly going to have a joint doctrine that is multinational, because they never trust each other, Whereas me and my counterpart from the Czech Republic because they never trust each other, Whereas me and my counterpart from the Czech Republic army, we trusted each other. So we had the same doctrine.

Dave Smith:

And I would definitely say, being a former NATO officer watching Ukraine fight Russia, the analogy I use all the time is I feel like a jock watching two nerds fight. It's like two dorks from the drama club are fighting each other and I'm the captain of the football team and I have to watch it and be like, oh man, you guys really don't know what you're doing. And the reason for that is, like you know, former Soviet countries other than the ones that joined NATO the reason they don't know how to do combined arms operations. They haven't actually figured it out yet, they're just not there, and a first year captain from any NATO country could plan a better invasion than the Russian military planned in February of 2022.

Frank Radford:

That's a more positive outlook from our last conversation.

Frank Radford:

You were saying that the drone potential of the Russians would possibly take out an entire battalion and that would be a wake-up call for nato

Dave Smith:

I

Dave Smith:

do still think that is gonna have to be the price we pay, unfortunately, like I'm sorry to say it, but a whole bunch of my colleagues back in the nato militaries are gonna have to get utterly murdered before anyone wakes up and realizes not only how far along the totalitarians are but how motivated they are. I don't want to diminish the experience the Russians have, right. Like they are learning through blood, sweat and tears and especially a lot of blood. They're learning lessons that are going to give them an incredible advantage in any conflict in the future that we in the NATO countries don't have. And I still I hate to sound pessimistic, but I still think the NATO countries are going to have to learn those lessons in blood as well before they learn them. Like they're not going to learn them through a lessons learned campaign, unfortunately.

Frank Radford:

But

Frank Radford:

I think what you're saying is that, nevertheless, the NATO countries are a well-oiled machine waiting to be kicked into gear, as it were. But it's a time factor.

Dave Smith:

I

Dave Smith:

would just say divide that politically and militarily. Like militarily, yes, I agree with what you just said. Politically, no.

Dave Smith:

NATO as a political alliance sucks. If you put Estonia or Poland in charge of everything, maybe it would work, but you know, our problem right now is not like do we fight better than they do? Yes, we do fight better. Nato fights better than Russia does, but Russia has the will to fight and NATO doesn't. You know what I mean. So Russia produces more artillery rounds than the entire free world combined and Russia produces more tanks than all NATO countries combined. Russia can call up their evil friends like North Korea to be like hey, we want even more munitions, can you give us that? And they're like yeah, of course we can. We'll never cooperate with you, but in this one specific transactional instance we will give you stuff.

Dave Smith:

So NATO as a political alliance is an utter failure. No-transcript, really good at cooperating, coordinating, fighting according to common doctrine or whatnot, and just really bad at having the political will to do anything, forget fighting. They can't even have the political will to manufacture munitions. I honestly think Estonia could be invaded tomorrow, and until regiments of Canadians get annihilated the way they did in World War I, canada won't wake up and realize they need a military-industrial complex. It's great that NATO is this incredibly functional military alliance, but if you don't have the political willpower to employ your military and to use them to achieve policy aims, you have the greatest military in the world. If the politicians can't figure out how to employ it, it doesn't matter. And this idea that the fighting is going to stop and somehow, like the Russian military, will go back to sucking the way they did three years ago, that is a pipe dream. That's not going to happen. It's going to get worse.

Dave Smith:

It's fair to say that they will capitalize on the lessons that they've learned 100%.

Dave Smith:

The Russians also the thing we don't really give them credit for. The way they integrate military strategy into their political strategy is just so much better than the way Westerners do. Like they know, as long as they keep the fight going. Westerners are so terrified of escalation. They're invading another country and genociding its people. Like how much more escalation can there be?

Frank Radford:

Right. But a fear I've had, and that is that what we're seeing with the North Koreans is just the tip of the iceberg and that what really is going to happen is you look at NATO on one side, particularly during the Cold War, there was a Warsaw Pact. On the other, it is not inconceivable for the Chinese to send 10 to 20 brigades to the Russian NATO front as a part of their pact, their Shanghai Cooperation Organization Back in 1904, Mackinder, when he wrote about the heartland, saying that whoever controls the heartland controls the world. You've got Russia and China that are connected, and so is North Korea. They have interior lines. That's a huge advantage. To get from Europe to Asia, you just cross via the Belt and Road. I mean, obviously you can fly, but that's very expensive.

Frank Radford:

As some in East Europe are saying, the likelihood of Russia doing something is not necessarily 10 years from now, but rather in three. And we're talking the same with Xi Jinping. Now, if that is done, with a geostrategic plan that is somewhat coordinated with Putin and Xi Jinping, you've got a problem. If you're a NATO, because force transference is a huge issue, and if the United States is going to pivot even more to the Pacific and relegate to NATO to its own actions, and even though you're correct in saying that the dictatorships don't work together when it comes to ultimately wanting to win. They may go that far, and that is what we're seeing with these North Koreans. I think this is just a portent of things to come.

Dave Smith:

I would say two things about that. Number one for China and North Korea. Their militaries are black boxes to them. They don't know how they're going to perform. If you remember, russia had a pretty exercised military in 2022, and they grossly underestimated what they were getting themselves into. And they've been fighting wars consistently since the end of the Cold War. They've done Chechen Wars, georgia, syria, ukraine the first time, and they really didn't know what they're doing. North Korea to my knowledge, they haven't conducted a single military operation since like 1953. So they're going to suck.

Dave Smith:

You might be correct in that China and North Korea could seriously reinforce Russia's Western flank. I really do think one of the reasons Xi Jinping hasn't taken military action in any meaningful way yet is he knows his military is completely green and doesn't know what they're doing. The problem is, once you act, then everyone has a data point. His big comparative advantage right now is everyone's afraid of him because of the mystery. They don't know what's going to happen. I don't think the fear is like if you came to a head-to-head fight between NATO and call it the Eurasian Alliance or whatever. I don't think that's all that scary and like yeah, nato soldiers don't have combat experience like you would get in eastern ukraine. But they are very mentally prepared, like they're well trained, they have better doctrine, they have better equipment uh, they're used to working together. So they are. They're mentally more prepared. If I could make a really fine distinction that I hope you'll understand. They're mentally prepared, they're just not psychologically prepared, but the other side's not either. And they also also suck right Like just in military, in like sheer military terms like NATO would just fly circles around them.

Dave Smith:

To end on on a hopeful note here, I would say I spent a lot of time in a NATO military. I think NATO militarily is the greatest alliance, the greatest force history has ever known. But as a political alliance it's a completely dysfunctional mess and the best thing military people like myself can do. If we do have to go to war, it's like, okay, the politicians finally sorted their shit out, let's go be the rock star military alliance that we are. In Ukrainians we have this great term. I love it. I use it all the time. I'm thinking about getting it tattooed on me. It's pretzlium razum. We work together In NATO like pretzlium razum.

Frank Radford:

So is there a prospect of you possibly getting back into uniform?

Dave Smith:

My absolute dream would be if they'd let me rejoin the Canadian army and just be the chief instructor at the infantry school and just tell young soldiers I went to World War III and it was exactly the way the sergeant majors told me it would be. So take this stuff very seriously, because digging a trench and learning how to use overhead concealment will save your life, and the fight absolutely is coming and I don't want my country's next generation of young men to get slaughtered, which unfortunately right now I think they would.

Frank Radford:

People must appreciate what you've done.

Dave Smith:

Yeah, yeah, thanks, phone the chief of defense. Tell her that you said that.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Dave Smith. Thank you so much for generously making time to speak with us three times. I'm certain that our listeners will really benefit from your many insights. Yes, dave.

Frank Radford:

We're indebted to you for the time you spent with us. And yes, dave, we're indebted to you for the time you spent with us and it's been a privilege, and those medals they speak volumes. And good luck. And that's it from the Delegates' Lounge. We'd like to thank our esteemed guests who have graciously allowed us to share their hard-earned insights into what really matters. And then there's you, our listeners, who we hope are sufficiently edified to clamor for more of the same.

Frank Radford:

Do drop in for a weekly episode on Thursday, or from time to time if we're on the road, for special events, in which case there'll be a bonus episode. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and, if you like what you've heard, please take a moment to rate or review the show, as it helps others who share your abiding interest in world affairs to find their way to the Delegates Lounge. You can connect with us on many popular social media platforms or reach out to us directly at infothedelicatesloungecom. We're a small team so we can't respond to every message, but we will read them. Our show this week was written and produced by the host and by yours truly, executive producer Frank Radford. Until next time, keep calm and curious.