August 17, 2017 Show with Col. David M. Glantz on “I’m So Afraid of the Russians…But Should I Be?”

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Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another. Matthew Henry said that in this passage quote we are cautioned to take heed when we converse with and Directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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Afternoon Cumberland County, Pennsylvania Lake City, Florida and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming at iron Sharpens iron radio .com. This is Chris Arns in your host of iron sharpens iron radio wishing you all a happy Thursday on the 17th day of August 2017.

Colonel Glantz's Background and the Soviet Military

And today we are going to be speaking about something quite different Than our normal topics on iron sharpens iron radio today. We are talking about the Russians. That's a blast from the past. I'm so afraid of the Russians.

Well Should I be afraid of the Russians. We're gonna talk about that today with retired colonel David M Glantz who is a US Army retired colonel and he is also an American military historian an author of nearly 40 books on the Red Army during World War two and chief editor of the Journal of Slavic military studies.

And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to iron sharpens iron Colonel David M. Glantz.

Well, thank you very much. It's really an honor to be invited to share my experiences with your crew. I've been blessed by a career that has allowed me to study the Soviet Union and today the Russian Federation.

That experience goes back quite a few years to time when I was a graduate student taking courses in Russian history at the time those courses being most interesting because of the vacuum in which Russian history seemed to exist if you knew much about it and I ate it up.

I was an army officer for a number of years when I decided to go into the foreign area program and Decided the one thing I did need most was the Russian language ability to read more and Communicate possibly with Russians if given the opportunity to do so.

That that was invaluable. I studied three years.

Under.

Soviet emigre instructors some of them all Marxists who had gone over to the other side My. As an artilleryman in the army I then decided that perhaps the best place I could use my experience was in Studying the Russians and preparing to deal with them better If the occasion arose in the future and I did that in intelligence positions beginning in the 1970s.

That combined with my penchant for research in military history Resulted in essentially going in and establishing or helping to establish several shops Army offices responsible for studying how the Russians conducted war obviously at that point From the viewpoint of dealing with them should they begin war.

There are certain ironies in all of this and the irony show that life in fact has its unexpected moments. And it was in 1988 when Gorbachev and Reagan affected their famous handshake that suddenly the mission my mission and the mission to my office changed abruptly to Dealing with the Russians militarily to establishing some sort of basis to make the end of the Cold War a.

Real reality. And let's pick up on that in a bit. I just want to make sure I interview introduce I should say first of all on the phone. We have one of my two co-hosts today Dr. David C Innis who is chair of the program in politics Philosophy and economics and associate professor of politics at the King's College in New York City.

Welcome back to iron sharpens iron. Dr. David C Innis. Thank you Chris. Pleasure to be here and then in the studio. With me is my second co-host the Reverend buzz Taylor.

It's great to have you back and today is going to be very interesting because I know nothing about what we're talking.

Well, we'll make it a day. Just like any other day.

I will be listening from the sidelines and.

And.

Conversion Testimony and Providence

Dr. Glantz what I'd like you to do before we even get into the subject at hand. And even your military career. I want to just have a summary as I usually do with first-time Guests on iron sharpens iron.

I want you to give a summary of your conversion testimony and how. You became a believer in Christ through the providence and grace of God. What was the religion of your upbringing if any and what? Providential circumstances that our Lord used to actually bring you to himself and save you.

Well, it's a very interesting prospect.

Prospect and procedure how it passed and it's really one of those unique cases. Where? Experiences. The teacher. I was brought up in a Christian household Methodist mother Baptist father. I was brought up in the suburbs of New York at a time when when religion was really in decline and decay I would say Sunday schools were chair-throwing ceremonies and and so on and basically basically, although I Appreciated the goals of religion.

I did not appreciate the means And the origins of how those those goals were achieved. I was a Christian Mildly, so throughout my army career. We attended church on Christmas and we attended church on Easter and.

In reflection if you look back at your entire my entire military career in particular after my retirement in 1992 you suddenly realized that Things you cannot plan what happens what happens is planned for you.

The number of times that my wife said we should pack for a DAC. That's a little site in the Aleutian Islands where you're said if you do something incorrectly Religion and and yet my career developed in a pattern whereby I got to do what I was most interested in doing and I had success in doing it and Quite frankly, I felt myself blessed by the entire process.

To make a long story short there came a time in the late 1990s when I hit myself on the head and said you are dumb you have been ignoring The things you should not have ignored someone has been watching over you paving the way for you.

There were some personal experiences associated with my mother's illness and hurt ultimately moving in with us that showed me that if you need help and ask for it it is there and Ironically I then Became born again and joined the church in Carlisle.

I have not regretted it because it involved lifting Tens of pounds if not hundreds of pound off my back and putting my mind at ease.

Praise God and it was just a providential occurrence that I even knew of My guest background. I just knew him by sight as a quiet and polite Gentleman who was an usher at Grace Baptist Church in Carlisle where I'm a member and I happened to be Having a conversation with one of my elders Mike van Graal and he said, you know.

You should interview you should interview David Glantz, you know one of the ushers. And I said, yeah why and he said well. He's one of the foremost experts on Russia in the Soviet Union in the United States.

Said really.

So I got well if I might interrupt in a world full of experts Self-proclaimed and many of them unjustified there are very few experts on anything and right humility is the name of the game, right?

That's right. Well, I'm so glad that I found out about that and have you on the program today and One of the things I wanted to find out initially is how you went from An enlisted man in the military to all of the sudden.

I mean, of course it wasn't all of a sudden but Over a period of time coming to the point where you were making regular trips to the Kremlin and were actually Charged with that focus of responsibility involving the Soviet Union as a.

Enlisted military man. How did that all come about? Well, what you're doing is entering the realm of the inexplicable. It's that inexplicability that that had finally had the in the impact it did on me I I was commissioned in a second lieutenant in the army graduating from college, Virginia Military Institute.

I Did what an officer was supposed to do. I went into a combat arms in this case artillery. Why I went to VMI and why I did what I did. I can't tell you exactly why I grew up midst history books. My father was a lifetime lifetime history teacher and I guess the Civil War history.

Which was one of my first passions led me to that college and it's unique ambiance associated with it. If you track my career. And artillerymen in Europe and artillerymen in Vietnam, albeit in a bunker most of the year planning artillery fires.

Going through the rudimentary schools officers basic officers advance and finally Finally in Vietnam one morning temperature 120 degrees the door to my hooch opened and I was laying stark naked on a bed a little cot and in walk this Natalie dressed colonel who said how would you like to teach at West Point?

I Said to him I said to him look around and essentially essentially I made that leap from. And artillerymen in a hooch in Vietnam to a teacher at West Point, I'm not a doctor incidentally I'm a colonel.

I have a master's degree and that was did I call you a doctor? Yes, you did.

Oh, I'm sorry. I did that. I have to be careful.

That's not an insult now because my one of my daughters is and I don't really call her that and she cringes.

I I just meant to call you colonel. I don't know how doctor slipped up.

Call everybody doctor, you know.

In any case I came back from Vietnam I was supposed to go to West Point and teach at about a year's time and we were sitting around a table and my wife's parents house in North Carolina on a Saturday night playing I think Canasta and the phone rang at 10 o 'clock and I picked the phone up and it was West Point.

Can you come up and teach Monday morning? I said no, I'm on leave from Vietnam, but I'll do it in a week. And so there I was a week later in West Point teaching modern European history. I taught it for four years.

I enjoyed the tour thoroughly and I've never read more in my entire life than I read during those four years. Finishing up there. I went on to Fort Leavenworth the commanding general staff college and which is a routine assignment for someone who makes major and There I made a decision having picked having studied and loved Russian and Studying and loving history.

I decided perhaps I needed the Russian language. So I entered the foreign area program which gave me in three years the Russian language although I would not recommend learning it at age 32 because Your mind is not as supple for the receipt of a Complicated language as it would have been if I was 15 or 16.

In any case I did pick up a good reading knowledge of Russian a halting speaking knowledge of it that led to an intelligence assignment in US Army Europe Seventh Army where I worked in the estimate shop playing with things like estimates and doing assessments of the Soviet military a Very humbling job for a major who had several courses in Russian history and not much more.

That led to an assignment at the Combat Studies Institute brand-new organization at Fort Leavenworth Which for the first time would do research in history? Obviously military history and my expertise was in Russian.

A call came through about a month after I reported there in 79. The call was from the Japanese and the Japanese internal defense force wished a self-defense force decided they wanted to do an exchange a historical exchange between The two research organizations I ended up doing the Russian portion of the program and the topics the Japanese wanted me to address were Manchuria the Soviet Manchurian offensive August 45 followed by Soviet airborne operations and Soviet amphibious operations.

If you understand the date 1979 you'll understand the reason for that concern that Essentially brought me into the field of research. I produced two Leavenworth papers Many studies about 150 pages each on the Soviet offensive there as a student in college I'd read all the German authors Guderian Manstein The generals who wrote in the 50s and 60s and of course they portrayed a very inept Red Army large cumbersome An army which really should not have been victorious in the war and yet doing the Manchurian study I saw a very efficient military machine vanquish a Very large sizable Japanese force in a period of two weeks in essentially a theater of military operations.

Which Manchuria was. My question was how on earth did they go from the inept? Body of troops that they had at the beginning of the war to something that was far more capable at war's end that Also dovetail with what I had been asked to look at when I was in the estimate shop at USAR.

That is how are the Soviets reconfiguring their forces in the event of war. All those things tied together. I then moved on to the War College after four years at CSI the War College. I did the same thing studied Soviet military operations with a desire to Just glean out of those operations why and how they would operate today.

Is that the War College right here in town? There's the War College. Yes right here in town. That's when I bought the house here. That that three-year tour at the War College enabled me to look in depth at Soviet military operations in 1944 and 45 and I had already become convinced by reading Soviet periodicals journals military history Materials that that in fact was the period in which they tested many of the things that they were considering in the 1970s and 1980s in the contemporary Soviet Army.

All of this then culminated in the foundation of the Soviet Army Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth. Chief of Staff of the Army decided to create it to do open source analysis with a group of hand-picked Individuals both civilians and military that could look at the Soviet Army so we could better contend with it.

That was 1986. Two years later we had the astounding process of Reagan shaking hands with Gorbachev. And immediately our mission changed our mission very abruptly changed into developing the basis for a possible US-Soviet strategic partnership in the future if common ground could be found.

I Then spent I and all of my office members spent the next four years 1988 to 1993 actually five years Largely traveling to the Soviet Union meeting with counterparts exchanging materials at one point.

We brought our chaplain over and brought boxes of Bibles over to the Soviet Union. We came back with textbooks from the Friends Academy the Voroshilov General Staff Academy. It was a genuine discussion between folks on the other side who understood the Cold War was over and the conditions that had given rise to it had also changed Fundamentally and that some sort of new arrangements had to be reached.

We saw what happened to the Soviet Union in 89 when the Warsaw Pact collapsed and they lost basically all of Eastern Europe. We saw in 1991 and these this was not a US victory I might add it is we say that and that makes the Russians very angry.

It was essentially a decline and failure of the Soviet state itself, which resulted in the birth of the Russian Federation this Russian Federation 1992 1993. Continued that process of trying to found the basis for a partnership.

It was a program advanced by Senior President Bush. It was a program that we were very active in and it was a program. I had very high hopes for I Retired from the army and late the last day of 1992. For the reason that I saw in the winds a change in that program.

I saw it to be To be direct that it was going to be canceled and I said if that's canceled then I have no reason for staying around here. I was living on six-month extensions. I retired and by doing so I escaped into history where I have been ever since writing and researching on the subject.

I love.

Yes, and nearly 40 books later. Here you are. And by the way, I want to let you know ahead of time that Rather than answer a question that I might have that would force you to kill me later Just if I ask you anything that you don't want to answer just tell me.

But I know that David Ennis Over at Kings the Kings College in New York City has a couple of questions of his own and I since I can't see David I want to give him the opportunity right now to Pop in and then later on David as you know If you ever want to ask a question just jump in when you find a moment to do.

So you don't have to wait for me to ask you to ask your own question, but if you could David.

I know you have a couple of your own questions. Yeah. Well since we're in the Autobiography, I thought I would ask Colonel Glantz. Do you have any Advice for aspiring authors. That's a lot of books For anyone to write and I assume you do other things aside from eat.

Your wife.

Things like this. I was gonna say you perhaps ought to talk to my wife about that. It does preclude lengthy vacations. It does preclude Doing things you would ordinarily do. I guess I haven't. I took up golf two years ago.

I hadn't played a lick of golf in my life. But yes, it is time-consuming and you have to be to a certain extent driven By something and the driving force for me was was a passion to find out what really happened to fill in those gaps.

I might add that life has become a heck of a lot more difficult now because in the last two years The Russians have opened their archives substantially and we're now receiving. I think my wife said they're trying to kill you with documents.

And I think I think she's correct. What used to take a year is now taking two and I'm running out of years very frankly.

So.

It takes a certain passion and love for the subject because you cannot do it unless you have a cushion to sit on. You cannot. Earn money as you probably know writing military history or history at all.

For that matter I have a cushion of military retirement. Without that. It would have been impossible. I.

See and any advice for anyone seeking a career in the military. Any advice for anyone?

Well, I I do have advice and and it's more and more difficult today I think for a variety of reasons I won't get into but First don't try to predict what's going to happen. If you have a general desire go for it.

Don't worry about Doing this or that punching this or that ticket. Set your sights on what you want to do. Do it as well as you can and let let the chips fall where they may. We do need researchers. As I said, the Russian archives have opened at just the time when there are a dearth of Military historians in general and Soviet military or Russian military historians in particular.

So I lament the fact that much of that material is going to go unused unread and simply it'll be out there. And that's a genuine tragedy. 30 years ago. I was at a conference in Academy of Sciences in Moscow and October 1987 and I said to them at that week-long conference It is better to tell your own history than have someone tell it for you.

It has taken over 30 years for that to come to fruition and We need to have more folks working in the field.

The Collapse of Tsarist Russia and the Rise of the Soviet State

Well, I'd like to ask you to. I know this is difficult in summary form because you could spend a week.

Or more.

Talking about the history of Russian government, but I'd like you to just give a overall summary of what occurred when the Tsarist Russia of the past of the 19th century Collapsed and the Soviet Union rose to power.

Lenin Stalin and those figures that were intricately involved in that and. Then of course the the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Russian Federation. So give us a summary of that and and if you could compare and contrast The government of the Soviet Union with what we find in the Russian Federation today.

Wow, I just finished seven years work on what was supposed to be a single volume History of the Battle of Stalingrad and it ended up a trilogy in five books. And you're asking me yes, I know I'll simplify.

Tsarist Russia was a was a nation in change in 1917 -1918. It was a nation in change and as so often happens events Intervene that caused that change to take a strange direction a direction. You might not have have thought it would take.

Russians had abolished serfdom back in the 1860s. They were industrializing and modernizing the state the last 20 years of the 19th century they began having political reform. In the early 10 years of the 20th century, but as so often as the case war disrupted those reforms.

The Russo-Japanese War very costly very embarrassing 2004 when 1005 caused turmoil that plus the industrialization the peasants moving to the cities Created a large proletariat a large working class to quote.

Working class and factories can be organized much more easily than the peasants in the in the fields. To make a long story short. They went through a political evolution Seriously disrupted by war which ultimately not only disrupted the system, but brought the system down.

The Soviet the jerk the Russian decision to enter World War one an honorable decision. Honoring their allies France and England brought them into a war that turned out disastrous for them. Disastrous for the Russian people and in the turmoil turmoil and and costs harsh.

Consequences of that war you had political movements arise the Social Democrats the Bolsheviks. Ironically the minority party who call themselves the Bolsheviks because Bolshe means majority in Russian the Mensheviks the larger segment of the Social Democratic Party political infighting where organization and leadership and Platforms mean something well it was the Bolsheviks that came up with the organization and the platform and the slogans peace land and bread and then put together the organizations through organizing committees in the factories and the army and to a lesser extent in the countryside that essentially Turned what was initially a democratic revolution the the revolution in February 1917 into what was a coup d 'etat in October November depending on which calendar you use 1917 where this small well-organized band Managed to seize control in the cities and what you had in a fairly accelerated process was the consolidation of power by Lenin a Democratic revolution supposedly which Given the system the dictatorship of the proletariat almost inevitably resulted in the most the most crude and the most skilled member of that upper elite Stalin to seize power in the mid 1920s.

Take total power in the early 1930s conduct a bloodbath in collectivization and industrialization and Eventually political and military purges in the 1930s that made his power absolute. In reality, that is what revolutions do they go through stages and the stages inevitably become harsher and harsher.

Sometimes you have a reaction. Sometimes the resulting regime is so powerful and it seizes and holds control that is. Then they went through what is probably the most disastrous period of their entire history the so-called Great Patriotic War.

Malik, I ought to just when I avoid now where the Germans invaded Stalin although he was aware. It was possible had not accommodated it well, the Russian army to subway army, the Red Army was not able to to To do well in the opening months of the war and because of that lost some five million Soldiers by in the first six months, which is essentially losing your entire peacetime army.

The war was a cauldron in which Deprivation desperation Extreme discipline all coalesced to produce ultimately a fighting machine by 1943 that was able to vanquish the Germans the Germans simply bit off more than they could chew and that became apparent.

There were many Russians who hoped that that war and the tremendous privation Associated with it would produce something less autocratic after the war. They were disappointed and Stalin emerged from the war were the same sorts of policies and apparently in the early 50s was about ready to institute new purges this Idea when Stalin died or was helped along.

We don't know for sure the truth of it. His successors were more akin to Controlling power amongst themselves a small group at the very top Stalinism was never renewed and returned but nevertheless the system that that was so highly organized and Whose ideology precluded economic and social change Led to the sorts of conditions plus this penchant for never allowing World War two to happen again for for not forgetting What had transpired in 1941 led them into a essentially a militarized state which by the mid Mid 1980s could not function as a normal state and could not sustain political change.

The money ran out very simply and we're gonna pick up right where you left off when we return from our first Commercial break. If anybody would like to join us on the air with a question of your own or our email address is Chris Arnzen at gmail .com Chris Arnzen at gmail .com.

Please give us your first name at least your city and state in your country of residence. If you live outside of the good old USA, don't go away. We'll be right back with Colonel David M Glantz and more on Russia.

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Join us this Saturday at 12 noon Eastern Time for a visit to the pastor's study because Everyone needs a pastor. Welcome back.

This is Chris Sarnes and if you just tuned us in our guest today for the full two hours with about 90 minutes to go is retired US Army Colonel David M glance. We are speaking about Russia and what threat it actually poses to the United States in the 21st century.

And Co-hosting with me are dr David C Innis chair of the program in politics philosophy and economics and associate professor of politics at the King's College in New York City. And in the studio with me is the reverend buzz Taylor.

If you'd like to join us on the air. With a question of your own our email address is Chris Arnson at gmail .com. Chris Arnson at gmail .com. And please remember to always give us at least your first name your city and state and Country of residence if you live outside of the USA.

And I know that before the break we reached a point where Stalin had died and there was some question as to whether that was a natural death or not. And the collapse of Economy in the Soviet Union. And so if you want to pick up right where we left off there.

The End of the Soviet Union and Putin's Russia

Yeah, picking up where we were I left off at the last half hour. We. By the 1980s, it was clear the Soviet Union faced major problems. Anyone who says that they could predict that this would happen and that there'd be collapse in the near future I think is a scoundrel.

I traveled extensively there in the 70s some travel in the 1980s. I saw signs that That may be concerned but they were signs like grass growing between The cracks in sidewalks and monuments broken glass and windows along the street.

Building part product shops that had nothing but cans of Bulgarian great beans Green beans the hotel Ukraina one of the bigger hotels in town Where a 50-page menu had one item on the menu at any given time.

There were signs of decrepitude and we now know that those signs extended all the way through the political system. In effect by 1987 and 1988 many leaders in the Soviet Union realized that Something had to fundamentally change if the nation was going to continue and certainly the Cold War with its huge expenses and great great potential threats Could not go on.

This led to the famous handshake between Gorbachev and Reagan. The handshake was an admission that Circumstances around the globe had changed. Our argument was with our Russian counterparts that There were new challenges new global challenges and that that many of these challenges affected Russia and the United States equally.

This would take time to gel. The discussions were extensive. They went on here and over there. Frankly by 1992 I was fairly confident that this partnership program would indeed work and there were certain elements of the partnership the Cold War would end.

Military blocks would either disappear. But certainly NATO would not be expanded extensively toward the east at the expense of the falling or the collapsing Soviet Union.

The.

Question of international crime international narcotics the question of what will China do in the future what will Iran do in the future and in the 90s the question of Islamic fundamentalism Roasts its ugly head and in fact our office Foreign military studies office at Leavenworth organized to address those problems.

What prompted me to leave the army was when I heard that those initiatives the initiative of fostering partnership the initiative of addressing fund on Islamic terrorism the initiative of countering international crime was not an important one and it would no longer be allowed for Organizations such as ours to address them.

My response was to Call up, Washington have them pull my extension and go home and tell my wife we're through. I'm going to write history. It came to pass a year later that exactly what had been rumored took place.

All of those functions were taken away from operating units around the military. There were many many offices looking at those questions and they were withdrawn back the NSC for better or for worse.

I.

Did escape into history. Russia escaped into ten years of chaos. I'd call it the wild wild east where political change under Yeltsin economic attempted economic reforms too hastily adopted led to not only a complete lessening of productivity, but also to what the emergence ultimately of a kleptocracy of the old leaders simply picking up the Industries and continuing them without reforming them.

There were a whole series of things but I guess what most characterized the 90s my visits there was when you walk along the Arbat and see veterans of the Great Patriotic War selling their orders of Suvorov and Kuznetsov and even here over the Soviet Union badges for whatever the traffic would bear from foreigners.

This More than anything else indicated to me that that this that the Russian Federation was now in serious problems. We know the Soviet Union itself fell in 1991. It essentially collapsed of its own weight with many of the constituent republics becoming independent again.

Yeltsin tried to establish a Commonwealth of independent states which in theory still remains as a loose Confederation of former member states of the Soviet former Soviet Union. What happened in of course again war had its impact.

The Chechen War in this case the inability of the Russians to handle the problem is of Islamism of Islamic fanaticism and Spreading force to them. It was a major threat because the entire Central portion of the Russian Federation was Muslim up the Volga River as far as Kazan.

They tried to stop it in Chechnya were embarrassed in Chechnya when they lost the first Chechen War. This more than anything else prompted Russia to look for someone who could restore some sort of effective leadership some court Sense of unity and some sort of pride in what was left of what was once a very great nation enter stage right stage left Putin.