Good evening. I'm John Batchler, and to not only the show, I begin the conversation with Colonel Jeff McCawson in the United States Army Retired CBS News about the war in Ukraine in specific, the Battle Front.

We discuss an article by Lord Michael Ashcroft, a distinguished pollster in Great Britain, who travels for the fourth time to the Frontlines in Keefe, and on to the Frontlines in Donbass,

to observe the combat in the rubble of what is left of villages and towns, its small team action under a blanket of drones, some suicide drones to kill, some surveillance drones that are linked to artillery fire, mortar fire, or other combat teams on the Russian side crawling through rubble.

I find it discouraging. Jeff remarks upon the 2,000 drones, Lord Ashcroft, says they're in the air along a 700 mile battlefront for Ukraine, 2,000 a day.

This is not ordinary war as we understood it in the Second War, the Vietnam War, or even the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan recently concluded.

This is a war where each side sees the other. There are no particular advantages to a vehicle, because a vehicle would attract immediate attention from lingering emissions, sometimes known as a suicide drone.

It's a fascinating entry into something like Terminator, but this is Terminator on a battlefield at a small scale where three or four-man teams are attacked by another three or four-man team, and then they call in artillery rounds.

Also tonight a very careful discussion with Michael Bernstom about the Russian economy. I'm told by Michael of the Hudson Institute that the Russians have been selling their oil to China at a discount, but now China is buying less and less of Russian oil and more and more of Iranian oil. Why? Because the Iranians are very good at the Bazaar.

They've undercut the Russian price, even with the spike in price to Brent Crude near 100. The Islamic regime of Iran can undercut it because they've got a shorter distance to travel with their oil.

Also, Kazakhstan, here to for a Soviet client state under the Soviet boot, is an independent state, and it has been selling third-party selling. The parts that Russia needs, they acquire them from China, they repackage them and sell them to Russia, but they're now concerned about secondary sanctions from the United States and do not want to fall under the boot of Moscow again.

So certain kinds of electronics are no longer being passed on to Russia. And then a very careful conversation with my friend Gordon Chang about nuclear weapons, about readiness for a war in the Pacific by 2025 or later, 2026, 2027.

A conversation about the subcommittee in Congress looking at the Chinese Communist Party's bad acting, malign actors around the world from Ann Stevens and Yang, who was testifying to Congress to this committee that the apparent poor state of the Chinese economy based on the collapse of the real-state market is accurate.

That the Chinese have been misrepresenting their business plan for years no longer, and Wall Street sees it, the investor class sees it. The Chinese business plan is failing, has failed.

And then I turn to other matters such as Romania's point of view in the Black Sea Basin and Germany's struggles, I speak to Antonio Colabasano of geopolitical futures, that Germany's anxiety is based on that there's no going back to the previous business plan of export and trade.

The Chinese customer and Chinese client is absent now, or increasingly absent, aligned with Russia. Russian energy is entirely absent, so Germany needs a new source.

And the economy is bumping along the bottom, the consequence of this is political action from extreme units such as the populist parties, two of them now, operating in denial of the troubles outside of Germany saying it's all here in Germany and that the government is not providing answers.

I also speak with Cleopascal about Guam, the island of Guam is the anchor for the U.S. fleet and ability to respond to a Chinese attack in the Pacific. Guam is in the northern Pacific, part of the chain of islands that are under the protection of the U.S.

Guam is well defended, but it worries about it and Cleo has a conversation with the governor of Guam Carrero about how Guam suffered under the Japanese invention, intervention and invasion in the 1930s and 40s and does not intend to suffer that way again. They will defend themselves when and if attacked in the war in the Indo-Pacific.

And then a happy conversation with Bob Zimmerman about ingenuity, the flying toaster on Mars, is set a new altitude record, the 59th flight of ingenuity, 66 feet above the surface of Mars.

The question always is, can the mechanism of ingenuity be sustained at that level and higher in the thin atmosphere of Mars? Well, the answer is yes, 66 feet up, 66 feet down. All very happy. There's much more to the show. I hope you enjoy it. Thank you.