It's Friday, March the 4th, and welcome back to Goodfellows, a Hoover Institution broadcast exploring social, economic, political, and in this case, geopolitical concerns.

I'm Bill Whalen, I'm a Hoover Distinguished Policy Fellow. I'll be your moderator today.

Glad to report that I'm joined, as always, by the stars of our show.

Three of my colleagues we jokingly refer to as the Goodfellows.

That would be the historian, Neil Ferguson, the economist John Cochran, the Geostradist, Lieutenant General, H.R. McMaster,

the H.R. McMaster, they are Hoover Institution Senior Fellows, all. So gentlemen, we're going to do a truncated version of Goodfellas today because we're going to pick up the same topic in just a few days. And obviously, we're going to talk about Ukraine and the

various ramifications. HR, let's start with you. I want to talk about the military side of the equation.

We are all four of us, children in the Cold War during which we were taught to fear and revere the

Russian fighting machine, Russian military might. What we've seen in the Ukraine, though,

suggests something different. Reports of Russian soldiers who didn't know they were actually

invading Ukraine, Russian soldiers who said they didn't want to fight, stories of Russian machinery

breaking down, questions of strategies, supply changes don't work, a shock and awe strategy

that's now on day nine of fighting.

HR, is the Russian military?

Is it sclerotic like other aspects of Russian society?

What's going on here?

It is sclerotic.

And what you're talking about are really the human and qualitative dimensions of combat

effectiveness.

And what I see are formations who are not well trained.

I mean, they're not conducting effective combined arms operations, especially in close combat, right? And, but,

but, you know, it's not to say they're not dangerous because as we've seen from Kharkiv,

...