The Ineptness of Douglas MacGregor
Bitter Colonel; Russian Shill
Those still supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are proudly quoting retired US Army Colonel Douglas MacGregor as an “expert” who asserts that Russia will flatten Ukraine… any day now. “The battle in eastern Ukraine is really almost over," MacGregor predicted in 2022 after Russia’s full-scale invasion began. He forecast that if Ukraine refuses to “surrender in the next 24 hours,” Russia would annihilate the country.
Well, here we are, more than three years later.
Russia has suffered more than a million casualties, its economy is in the toilet, its access to the global financial system has been severely curtailed, and its best friends are now China, Iran, and North Korea, two of which are global pariahs.
Nonetheless, MacGregor continues to issue dire predictions about Ukraine’s demise. He’s been wrong numerous times about Ukraine’s ability to hold off the Russian hordes, and yet the vatniks are still happy to quote him as an expert on everything from Russia to war.
My personal assessment is that MacGregor is still bitter about not getting his promotion to Brigadier General, so he contradicts the Pentagon—regardless of who is in the White House—on everything in hopes that some piece of spaghetti will stick to the wall and he can prove how “brilliant” he is and what the Defense Department is missing by not having him around.
Background.
MacGregor was actually a respected officer back in the day during the first Gulf War, but the problem was that he was a bit of a “renegade,” according to Richard Newman writing for US News in 1997. Describing MacGregor’s time at the Army National Training Center at Ft. Irwin, Newman writes, “He took unconventional risks. At one point his moves anticipated the OpFor's tactics so adroitly that observers thought he had cheated. In a series of five battles, most units typically lose four, draw one; Macgregor won three, lost one, drew one—still the best showing since the Persian Gulf war.”
One would have thought that the unconventional risks that ultimately led to his successes would have made MacGregor a shoo-in for a star, but he was denied. Three times. Apparently, he was a bit of a jerk.
Newman also cited MacGregor’s bluntness—taken by many to be arrogance—as another reason why he was passed over for promotion. Later, he also has spewed some apparently anti-Semitic garbage, calling Jewish people “rootless cosmopolitans” in a 2021 speech, which didn’t endear him to anyone.
For those understandably unfamiliar with this terminology, “rootless cosmopolitans” is an anti-Semitic euphemism for Jews that was popularized under Stalin in the Soviet Union. Adolf Hitler also repeatedly referred to Jews as disloyal cosmopolitans, lamenting in his manifesto Mein Kampf that “it is no longer princes or their courtesans who contend and bargain about state frontiers, but the inexorable cosmopolitan Jew who is fighting for his own dominion over the nations.” In other words, there is exactly one type of person who uses this sort of language in everyday conversation.
The relevant language starts around 36 minutes, if you want to trigger your bulimia.
The Washington Post in 2002 described MacGregor as “one of the Army’s leading thinkers on innovation.” As Thomas Ricks wrote in the article, “But now Macgregor finds himself transferred to an Army staff job, where friends say he feels muzzled. Instead of working on a vision of a new Army, he is contemplating retirement.”
Two years ago he was shunted aside into a dead-end position at the National Defense University. Despite a distinguished 25-year career during which he earned a doctorate in international politics, fought in the Gulf War, and helped plan the U.S. peacekeeping effort in Bosnia and the 1999 Kosovo air campaign, it looked as if he would ride out his Army career alone in an office at the school, where he was given no teaching responsibilities.
Thanks to the military’s apparently unwillingness to see his “genius,” MacGregor went from a somewhat revolutionary, innovative military thinker to bitter old man who seems to exist to peddle his “expertise” to contradict the Pentagon, no matter what.
Oh so wrong! Oh so many times!
MacGregor often arrogantly and confidently predicted that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will end with Russia "annihilating" Ukrainian forces and winning the war. He is Uber-Vatnik Tucker Carlson’s favorite guest, having appeared on his show numerous times to predict Ukraine’s demise.
He claimed that the reason Russia was still mired in Ukraine and losing thousands of troops and a ton of equipment was because Russian forces were "too gentle" in the early stages of the Ukraine invasion.
They’ve corrected that, he claimed, and should achieve full victory in 10 days. Time must flow differently in MacGregor’s world.
Russia destroyed civilian infrastructure and murdered civilians, kidnapped, tortured, and raped thousands of Ukrainian children, and engaged in war crimes, among other things. Well, they’re no longer “gentle,” and three years after the full-scale invasion began, the Russians still can’t declare victory.
“We need to remember that Ukraine is fourth from the bottom of 158 countries in the world that is corrupt. Russia is perhaps three or four places above them. This is not the liberal democracy, the shining example everyone says it is,” MacGregor has claimed. In late 2024, once again asserted widespread corruption in Ukraine, calling the political and military leaders complicit in a "giant grift" lacking European support.
Let’s remember a couple of things here, which indicate MacGregor is either a Russian shill, ignorant, or an outright liar:
Ukraine last year was actually tied with Serbia at 105 in Transparency International’s 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index, despite having dropped by one point from the previous year - not even close to the bottom.
In 2023, Ukraine ranked 104 out of 180.
MacGregor’s beloved Russia ranked at 141 that year, and last year tied with Lebanon, Honduras, and Azerbaijan at 154/180 on the corruption scale.
Despite daily attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure by the Russians, Ukraine has continued to fight corruption and improve its anti-corruption infrastructure.
Despite claims to the contrary, the aid given to Ukraine is tracked pretty well.
In 2022 MacGregor claimed that not only will Russia not suffer as a result of our financial sanctions, but that the global financial system will be destroyed if we continue to sanction Russia.
Well, we’re still here, and Russia is drowning under the crushing stone that is its own wartime economy.
I’ve written about this spurious claim numerous times, including on the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale attack and have described just how difficult things have become for Russia.
Here are a few highlights:
Rostec CEO Sergey Chemezov in October said (link in Russian) that even the arms trade is not profitable enough to service Russia’s debts. Chemezov said that the current high cost of money is "a serious brake on further industrial growth."
Import substitution isn’t working; China’s only buying Russia’s basic commodities at big discounts while keeping their market closed to other Russian products. There’s also no meaningful investment or technology transfers from China or other Global South countries, according to former Russian Deputy Energy Minister Vladimir Milov.
Energy exports continued to drop as of a year ago.
Meanwhile, the US economy continued to grow, as did the economies of the majority of our European allies, albeit at a slower rate. MacGregor errs again.
MacGregor has also voiced his support for Russia’s illegal annexation of Donetsk and Luhansk, claiming that referendums there about joining Russia showed overwhelming support. Let’s remember that those so-called votes were were:
Illegal under Ukrainian law
Had no independent international monitors at polling stations, where the voting was secured by armed Russia-backed fighters
Did not actually have any kind of legitimate counting of the votes, since results were predefined and known a week before the event itself, and the ballots were printed on regular office black and white printers
MacGregor’s spurious claims about Ukrainians being Russians are easily disproven as well. “We now have a demand for recognition that the people that live in those [East-Ukrainian] areas are in fact Russians, not Ukrainians,” he claimed, echoing Putin’s twisting of history to assert that Ukrainian nationality was always part “triune nationality: Russian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian.”
In fact, the history is much more complicated than this bogus, overly simplified claim.
Over the course of centuries, the area that is today Ukraine has been alternatingly swallowed up, controlled, or taken over by the Mongol Empire, later the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Russian Empire, while Crimea was at one point a client state of the Ottoman Empire. Between the World Wars, portions of western Ukraine were ruled by Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia.
And although there are some Ukrainians who want to be part of Russia, the majority of the country supports Ukraine’s sovereignty—even in Crimea, illegally annexed by Russia in 2014 under the claim that the residents demanded to be Russian.
My assessment.
MacGregor is not stupid. He’s not naive. He hasn’t been tricked by Russian propaganda.
My assessment is that his claims are all about his ego.
The Pentagon sidelined him.
His nomination to become the US Ambassador to Germany was rejected by the Senate after his claims that US support for Israel was due to Jew money.
The Russians respect his continuously wrong predictions about the impending Russian victory over Ukraine and quote him on their state-controlled media, no matter how many times he’s been wrong.
So instead of being “booed off the stage,” so to speak, for being an anti-Semitic jerk and ignored for his repeated wild inaccuracies about Russia’s invasion, the history of the region, and Russia’s economy and military capabilities, the Russians elevate him to the status of expert.
The fact that anyone continues to quote him as a foreign policy expert (here’s looking at you, Tucker Carlson, 👀) is an indicator of confirmation bias. Those who want to believe that Russia’s vicious invasion of its neighbor was justified and that Russia will be victorious any day now, despite all indicators to the contrary, will continue to view MacGregor as their “expert.”
They will continue to stroke his oversized ego, invite him to speak at their events, and do no research to corroborate his claims.