Military Matters: Episode 11

Charles Malet (0:25)

Welcome to Episode 11 of Military Matters with UK Column. I'm Charles Malet, and I'm joined again by Brian Gerrish. Brian, good to see you again, here we are.

Brian Gerrish (0:35)

Already, it comes around very quickly, doesn't it?

Charles Malet (0:38)

It surely does. Now, we left our loyal and intrepid audience with a cliffhanger in Episode 10, which was a question you asked towards the end of that episode. And we had been talking, I think in fact about, it was in a sense a generic war conversation, of course, we had talked about the situation in Iran, but also Russia and Ukraine. And the question you asked was, what is this war designed to do?

And I think fairly sensibly, we decided we weren't going to try and deal with it in a sort of five minutes on the end of Episode 10, but that gives us freer rein now to look at it. I mean, it is a really big question because I think there are so many different ways in which we can look at it. Obviously, our focus in a lot of these episodes has been the impact on either the British armed forces or British society or what the United Kingdom perspective is on it. But I think we've got the chance today to look quite a lot further afield as well.

Brian Gerrish (1:44)

Well, it's good and it needs doing because of course the war is a truly terrible war.

We could say all wars are, but for me, this one is particularly brutal in the fact that we now have human beings operating drones to hunt individual soldiers on the battlefield, including wounded soldiers. So I think there's technology has produced another layer of horror to war, and of course we've got war on a really substantial scale with the casualties in the hundreds or the thousands per day in some cases. So the war is a very unpleasant war, and my mind continually comes back to how was this started and why was it started. I've been able to see some very interesting material in the last, we'll say the last few weeks, where a particular individual has been looking simply at the public statements made by politicians or security services from a number of different countries. Obviously the UK and the US feature very strongly in that, but also commentary from the Germans and other European nationalities, where the vitriol against the Russians is truly astounding. And you have people talking about the needs to increase the attacks against Russia. And some of the statements that have been publicly are absolutely along the lines that we need to kill more Russians.

It's that brutal. Not we need to win the war, but we need to kill more Russians. So I've found that particularly interesting, and I'm giving a little bit of an advert here, because we will be able to get into some of this stuff a little bit deeper, but at the moment, I can't act immediately on the material that I've been given, but I have sat and looked at the genuine quotes from senior political people, where their statements to ramp up the war, to increase the violence, to kill more Russians, they're making these public statements as if that's a perfectly normal thing to do. And so I find that not only astonishing, but a very dangerous situation, that we've got politicians who are being so aggressive in their desire to kill Russians. But I've also been able to see some very interesting diagrams showing how Russia would be broken up into what I'll describe as manageable administrative regions, we'll call them cantons, because I think that's appropriate probably for that part of the world.

Very interesting where you see a map that has been produced with some quite complex border arrangement. So it's not as if somebody has taken a map of Russia and drawn some arbitrary boxes and said, you know, this will be region A, this is B, C and D. No, the border areas are very carefully constructed and often quite complex, which to me indicated that whoever produced the map was taking into account what we call it community, social or to some extent, racial differences within particular areas. But the whole point of the map was that this was where the West would like to take the Soviet Union. It wants to achieve regime change, and it wants to be able to control, sorry, did I say Soviet Union? I did, yeah.

Charles Malet (6:09)

But I assumed that was deliberate because it does seem that we are just going through yet another cycle of, in effect, saying the same thing.

Brian Gerrish (6:19)