Jack Carr on How Far Putin Could Go and How to Stop Him

BUCK: “How America Can Help Ukraine Cripple the Russian War Machine.” That’s a Fox News opinion piece that I co-wrote with our guest coming up right now, Jack Carr, the man himself. He is a former Navy SEAL sniper and number-one New York Times best-selling author of The Devil’s Hand, which you should all go check out. Jack, thanks so much, sir, for joining us. Appreciate you being here on Clay & Buck.

CARR: Oh, thanks for having me. What crazy times. Who would have ever thought that in 2022 we would be talking about a nuclear confrontation between the United States and Russia, especially for those of you who grew up in the Cold War era and saw it come to end in the early nineties. It’s quite surreal.

BUCK: Jack, right now there’s a discussion about no-fly zones. Clay was talking about some great questions. I don’t know if you heard some of it right before you came on about what could we do. First of all, Russian military doctrine when it comes to a nuclear first strike is what, as far as we know, and what are the chances we could even counter it before it went off? What can you tell us about this component of the equation, the most terrifying component of how things could go terribly wrong in Ukraine and in the region?

CARR: Sure. So, the Russian military doctrine does integrate the use of tactical nuclear weapons, which means they have them and they could be employed, and they also have this policy of escalating to deescalate. So, either a threat or maybe an attack not on a major city but on a minor one just to show what they could do to a major city or to infrastructure. So, that’s all part of the playbook.

But when we’re looking at this, we often look at all of these things through a Western lens. That continues to come back to bite us. We have a history of doing that and we’re doing that in this case as well because the Russian population has been on the steep decline since the end of the Cold War, and Ukraine has the largest ethnic population, ethnic Russians outside of Russia.

So, they need those people to continue to survive. They need that to field an army if they want to continue to field an army at its current level. So, they really needed to do this, not for energy, not for anything like that, but so they could continue to survive. So, what we look at that through that lens that means that the Russian people, the Russian government, Putin in particular, feels like they’re backed into a corner and they need this ethnic Russian population to survive, which means that they will probably do anything to get it.

And that means that they could use tactical nuclear weapons. So that is something that is on the table and it is a scary proposition, and that has to be factored in to the U.S. calculus when we look at what is in United States’ best interests, which at the top of that list should be avoiding a nuclear confrontation with Russia. They have about 6,000 nuclear weapons. I think we have about 5,000. Regardless, we both have the largest stockpiles of nuclear weapons in the world, and we want to do everything we can to avoid using them ’cause no one wins in that scenario.

CLAY: No doubt, Jack, and I appreciate you coming on, and this is kind of the questions that I have that don’t seem to be discussed that much in the media or the larger discussions surrounding these issues. So a couple things building off what you just said. A tactical nuclear weapon has the capacity — I’m sure there’s different loads, for lack of a better term, in terms of the damage that they can do.

What kind of damage are we talking about a tactical nuke being capable of creating? And what kind of defenses, what is the likelihood that in Europe, let’s say, Russia deploys a nuclear weapon, that it could be shot down before it actually is allowed to explode? Do we have any sense for that? And who would be doing that? Is that a NATO defense? Would they just allow it to land in Ukraine? How would this be handled by the larger universe of geopolitical actors?

CARR: Right. So those are all great questions. They have a variety of nuclear weapons. So they have everything from nuclear weapons, obviously ballistic missiles on submarines, to tactical ones to if you go back, looking back in the eighties and even seventies, they called them “suitcase bombs” back then. They’re a little bigger than a suitcase, obviously, but you can see those online, see pictures of them. So they have a variety of ways.

They don’t even need to launch a missile. I would guess that they still have those two case bombs somewhere after the end of the Cold War and they can certainly drop those off in the middle of the city and leave just to show the world, “Hey, this is a smaller city. We destroyed the entire thing. Do you want us to do this to one of the larger cities?” And of course, the implied threat there is that, “If we can do it here, we can do it elsewhere in Europe.”

And of course we want to avoid triggering Article Five of NATO so that we don’t have to get into a nuclear conflict with Russia. So the good thing, I think, if you look at weather patterns — quickly scanned weather partners and using them right now — it doesn’t look like it’s beneficial because the winds aren’t quite right for that ’cause you use one of those missiles and it blows back on you?

Then it’s obviously, you know, that’s not doing you any good. And right now, we have some… The winds are in our favor, but those winds will shift at some point. But I would think that our intelligence services are looking at this extremely closely right now and figuring out the best way to counter and avoid a nuclear confrontation.

BUCK: We’re speaking to former Navy SEAL sniper Jack Carr, also author of The Devil’s Hand about the situation right now in Ukraine. Jack and I co-wrote a piece on FoxNews.com. You can check it out at ClayandBuck.com on how America can help Ukraine cripple the Russian war machine. Jack, let’s dive into that for a second here. In terms of the ground combat, it has been mostly ground combat so far.

The Russian aerial advantage has been substantial but not totally dominant the way that some had anticipated. So what is allowing the Ukrainians to put up a stronger fight than anticipated, and what do you think the American hand in this…? We’ve already made the decision that we’re helping them; so how should we help them, what should we give them with logistics and support?

CARR: Right. So it’s interesting that the Russians are not dominating the skies right now, ’cause you would think that that would be one of the first things they would do because I think they can. They have that capability. So how do you counter that? Well, you can counter that with Stinger missiles and we know that because we looked at the Soviet experience in Afghan from 1979 to 1989.

And when we got those Stinger missiles in there and trained the mujahideen how to use them, that turned the tide of the war. And that was September 26, 1986, outside of Jalalabad when they shot down three Soviet Hind helicopters. And after that — up to that point from 1979 until 1986 the Soviets dominated the skies over Afghanistan. After those Stingers were introduced three years later, they were out.

They lost that dominance in the sky. So that’s one, and you can look to history for that. And then you can look at our experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. And you could see the IEDs, specifically the EFPs that came over from Iran and how that weapon — tactical-level weapon — really gained a strategic importance because it defeated the most technologically superior armor in the world and undermined support for the war effort.

So those on the ground that studying warfare in Ukraine can look to both of those examples and also look to the other things that are working for them right now namely the Javelin anti-tank missile right there. So you get Stingers, you get javelins, you get homemade essentially IEDs, EFPs on the ground there and you’re in for a pro refracted fight and again that Russian army wasn’t really built to invade countries.

It was built to occupy countries where governments had been installed by the Kremlin and then there’s an intelligence apparatus that is more actively described as a secret police that silence and eliminates dissidents. But on to invade and then battle a well supplied decade long insurgency as we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s difficult. And it’s even more difficult when your army is less prepared for that than we were in Iraq and Afghanistan.

CLAY: Jack, you learn from every conflict and every struggle. What has surprised you the most that you were not anticipating so far in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?

CARR: I thought… Well, I thought that they would take over Ukraine in about three days. They massed their forces, and I thought they would roll through. But I think what really turned the tide and really what prevented that from happening is leadership. We saw leadership at the top. Of course, we offered to bring the president of Ukraine out and he said no, and the world got to see that.

And they didn’t get to see that through our press secretary. They got to see it real time on social media. So the messaging at this time is extremely important, that leadership is extremely important and that really rallied not just the Ukrainian military but Ukrainian citizenry as well and most of the West. So I think that is something that surprised me the most because had the Russians just rolled through in three days, we would be in a different position right now.

They’d probably be holding Ukraine. Maybe there’d be an insurgency, maybe there wouldn’t be. But the government would be decapitated and there wouldn’t be that leadership at the top. So it surprises me. That’s one. And then two is that they didn’t assassinate the president of Ukraine and have that be the trigger for the situation. So those things were the most surprising I think thus far.

BUCK: Former Navy SEAL Jack Carr. Go check out at ClayAndBuck.com the op-ed we co-wrote on how, essentially, the ground war can be turned against Russians with U.S. armaments. And, Jack, appreciate it, also check out The Devil’s Hand. Jack, thanks so much for your time today.

CARR: Thanks so much for having me. Appreciate it.