.Please join Dr. Eliot A. Cohen, the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy, for a discussion on the Ukraine War with GEN Wesley K. Clark, USA (Ret.), the 12th Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. Dr. Cohen and General Clark will discuss the current frontline, political situation in Kyiv and Moscow, and future direction of the war. This event is made possible by general support to CSIS. --------------------------------------------- A nonpartisan institution, CSIS is the top national security think tank in the world. Visit www.csis.org to find more of our work as we bring bipartisan solutions to the world's greatest challenges. Want to see more videos and virtual events? Subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications: https://cs.is/2dCfTve Follow CSIS on: • Twitter: www.twitter.com/csis • Facebook: www.facebook.com/CSIS.org • Instagram: www.instagram.com/csis/
.
a conversation with General Wesley Clark General Clark has a long and
distinguished career of military service he was a graduate of West Point a road scholar uh wounded and decorated in
Vietnam served in many capacities including as the head of plans on the joint staff and then as Supreme Allied
Commander Europe 1997 to 2000 and remains an active Observer and
participant in debates about National Security we're going to be talking with him about Ukraine about the war about
things that we might have done better that we need to do better and its larger implications General Clark welcome to
csis thank you very much Elliot so let me begin uh with the question how would
you assess the American government's performance in Ukraine what Have We Done Right what have we done wrong and what
consequences has it had well let's start by uh going back uh to the beginning
we've never handled Putin the right way we didn't handle him the right way in
the second Bush Administration uh because clearly uh he he's not a Christian and he doesn't really exhibit
Christian values despite having worn a cross when he met with h President Bush
um we didn't handle him the right way after he invaded Georgia during the Olympics of 2008 we didn't handle him
the right way with the reset in the Obama Administration we didn't handle him the right way when we invited him
into Syria and we didn't understand what he was doing in Ukraine in 2013 and 14
can can I just um pause you there and ask what why why do you think that's the
case I mean you've you've had a long career dealing with Russians first looking at them on the other side of the
inter German border but then negotiating with them after the end of communist ISM
what
what accounts for this misreading which you know if you think about the
different presidencies that you're talking about here uh Republicans
Democrats different flavors of both why we never really opened up the Soviet
Union after it collapsed the same people um rebranded themselves as um as as
parliamentarians many of them were KGB they'd been through a KGB School uh the
Putin's people uh lays all this out very clearly we didn't really understand it
at the time we sent a few economists from The Chicago School over there and said oh uh get rid of these uh these
state-owned industries we created oligarchs uh President Clinton thought he had a great relationship with Boris
yelson but even yelson told him we don't want NATO to expand and the people in
Eastern Europe understood this very well the foreign minister of of of Bulgaria told me in 1997 and she said look today
Russia's weak someday it's going to be strong again they'll be back and before that time we've got to be in NATO they
understand the Russian imperialist urge and it's been uh fostered and nurtured
by the by the Communist Party even more than the Zars did and so uh Putin is the
heir of that more than that he's totally uh the Apostle of it so from the
beginning in 1999 when he was at kochma in inauguration President C in Ukraine
he his speech went something like this he was the prime minister at the time not the president of of Russia he said
Ukraine and Russia we are more than Brothers we are in each other's
Souls the Polish national security adviser flew to meet me the next week and he said we're going to have big
problems with Putin he's trying to recreate the Soviet Union and he gave me some examples that they'd already seen
so our political leaders in the west just we can't imagine when we deal with
people and they speak and uh we have a dialogue and we share coffee or or or a dinner table we can't imagine they don't
think like us Putin doesn't think like us he is an intelligence agent who is
imbued with a mesonic Zeal to restore the greatness of the Soviet Union he
said as much in 2007 we should have taken his word but to go back to Ukraine
Elliott in 2014 we actually told the ukrainians to
give up Crimea they had the Russian green men in their sights they would have resisted they understood in their
military what this was about even then and we told them give up Crimea and then
of course there was a lot of confusion and uh suddenly these people showed up in in donbas and uh and people said well
they might be a Russ Russian intelligence agent yeah they were Russian intelligence agents they tried
to do what we do with our special forces which was create an indigenous movement it didn't work very well uh they did
assassinate some some Christian missionaries in there and they rounded up some Hooligans and and criminals but
ultimately to take over the part of donos they had to have the Russian army come in and to support them and in 2014
we had these poor Russian soldiers they took away their their phones they took their ID card so you're going on an
exercise and suddenly they're being shot at and shooting back at the ukrainians
inside Ukraine and we let all that pass
when poreno was elected in in 2014 and came to to to Brussels and asked for
military assistance and he gave prison Obama the list of what he
needed we laughed but we said no no M1 no f-16s no
mlrs and until 2022 there was an 8-year war with 10 12 14,000 people killed just
holding the line in donbas that's where it starts so is
there a problem with American policy sure goes back a long way I think you
know you and I both have been in keev and one of the things I know that struck me in my first visit is that wall with
pictures of all the soldiers who fell in 2014 and since before right this uh the full
scale the full scale Invasion let's um well first I want to ask you just on the Obama administration's decisions do you
think this is naive te at work or fear I think it was a naive and there
were people inside the White House and out I went to Les gel but the conference on foreign relation Council on Foreign
Relations after I got fact Les is an old friend of mine and he was a Democrat and he was considered you know uh sort of
left uh of where I was when I was working for alh and I said Les you got
to help us on this I mean this is a war of conquest of
Ukraine but the people he had he knew that were advising Obama were like no
this this a misunderstanding and you know Ukraine's not really a separate country and there's always been these
frictions and this is about money and and and organized crime and don't take
this seriously uh we need Putin to help us with the Iran nuclear agreement and
so the Obama Administration at least from what I could see from the outside had made two fundamental mistakes number
one when they announced the pivot to Asia it seemed as though we weren't
interested in what was happening in Europe it it's that snatch of a quote
that Obama said maybe innocently to Putin said I'll have more Freedom after
the re after I'm reelected and and maybe that whatever it was we somehow gave the
nod to the Russians to say look we're interested in space and we're interested in Asia don't mess with us there but uh
you can do what you want in Egypt be good friends with the ger in Europe be good friends with uh the the the Germans
and do what you want and uh you know we're going to have a good relationship and I think the drive toward the problem
with Israel the Iranian nuclear thrust trying to Forstall a a conflict in the Middle East
led the Obama Administration to bring Putin in let him into the Middle East uh and also uh not really take seriously
what he was doing in Ukraine so let's move forward to 2022 I think uh most of
us would probably agree that the um the Biden Administration did a pretty good job of alerting people that this was
going to happen uh that you know they shared more intell Ence I think than was normally
the case but then the question becomes Aid and assistance and advice and that's
the story now that's been going on for more than two years because after all the ukrainians been asking for various
kinds of weapons for a very long time could you assess that and particularly assess it as a as a military
professional looking at the kind of assistance we've given them how much when and and also the critical question
of advice because you know we've played a role there too so if you open up on that ell here here's what I think
happened and of course we may never know the truth of all this but um um when
President Biden met uh Mr Putin in the summer of 2021 I think they had a very
civil conversation and according to the readout President Biden said look uh we'd like you to be a responsible
Statesman and and so forth at that point we already knew that there were plans
that Russia had to invade Ukraine they rehearsed it in the spring
of 2021 they moved forward but there were some reasons why they didn't do it then but after the
Afghanistan coming apart and so forth and having the meeting with Putin um I
was rooting for President Biden to say don't you dare go into Ukraine we
will block you we will oppose you and you will fail but apparently uh it was a very gentlemanly conversation then the
information started to come out as the Russians maneuvered in the fall of 2021 and apparently there was a meeting
between the head of the Central Intelligence Agency and either Putin's
number two patev or Putin himself and we don't know the details on this but
somehow uh I'm sure it was like uh we told the Russians don't do this don't
invade this is a big mistake don't do it and um and Putin or his guys probably
said what are you talking about that's not even even a country that's just Ukraine that's part of Russia that's
like us telling you you can't do anything in Texas we this is our country
and then it must have morphed into something different in which there were red lines discussed maybe like if you go
in there you're risking a confrontation and something well if you don't give the ukrainians weapons to strike us maybe
you know you you'll be safe in NATO and we won't we won't hurt NATO at this point or maybe there was some Exchange
like that somehow red lines must have emerged from this because from the
beginning we were worried about red lines Putin's red lines not our red
lines now the secretary of state was giving speeches about the importance of the rules-based international order to
me what that meant was U National boundaries legitimate boundaries there are sacran but instead of standing on
that Principle as the attack approached and the day of the
attack and it became more and more ominous we pulled our trainers out of
the yavare camp in Western Ukraine where they could have served as a deterrent
there were a number of us said this thing's getting bad send an air expeditionary Force to Romania put the
ambiguity in there that will underscore American
deterrence but we didn't do that we made sure we didn't do that and when it came
time in the second or third day of the operation when it was clear we were going to have a problem with air power
there were some of us who suggested to the White House you need to don't give up the airspace to Russia it belongs to
Ukraine if you believe in the rules-based international order you have to act on that belief that's our
airspace if Ukraine says to come in and we should support them with that Harry
Truman did it in 1950 but in instead what we said is oh my God no no a confrontation with Russia
we mouth the words of the rules-based order but we didn't act on it and then
all the military assistance we gave was Penny parceled out it was agonizing in
the White House it must have been really difficult what are the red lines what will Putin do can the Ukrainian and
there were a lot of excuses the ukrainians aren't smart enough well they got more educated
people than we do in our Armed Forces to be honest with you much better science and technology in the schools in Ukraine
than we have in the United States well the terrain is no good for an M1 tank really then why do we sell
them to Poland well they're not it's too complicated really so we left them in Iraq and the Egyptians have them the
ukrainians can't I mean it was a combination of um double talk misleading
information request that weren't answered do do you think that was on the military side as well as the civilian
side because I think there was a certain arrogance in our military now look I'm
I'm sorry we did a lot of things right okay I don't want to say we didn't do everything right we built the alliance
we got out the warning we held NATO together we didn't have a confrontation with Russia okay plus plus plus plus but
you're asking me how could it have gone better so I take all those things for
given as given of course we tried to build an alliance maybe Donald Trump wouldn't have but we did and we did that
very well and we won the information War at the beginning because we alerted
everybody to what was going on so I don't want my friends uh to think that you know it's all negative it could have
been a lot worse and we did give them stingers and and and and some javelins
not enough but really we're in the fourth phase of the war the first first
phase was the failed Russian offensive they weren't ready they didn't understand there the second phase was
the Ukrainian grab everything and build up the third phase the counter offensive
uh which ran into the big barrier system and now we're in the fourth phase and the point
is we've got thousands of tanks in the United States we've sent 31 we have a
whole Fleet of A10 warthogs out there sitting in the desert we're going to get rid of them they're still sitting there
we have hundreds of f16s that are around and um and we delayed it and delayed it
and delayed it we have a attacks that are obsolete we've still got5 Dual
Purpose ICM Munitions that we didn't send it was it was measured the response
was measured it was calibrated and what many of us in the military try to say is look I understand you know the policy is
we don't want Ukraine to lose and we don't want Russia to win okay that's the
policy but you can't calibrate combat like that you either use decisive Force
to win or you risk losing and what's happened is we refused to give the
ukrainians decisive force or the means for decisive Force when they could have won more easily and instead we've sort
of bled out our Ukrainian Force and we've got guys in their 30s and 40s in
there fighting and some of them have been in the line for a year two years the ukrainians had to put reservists in
they had to put people in there who drove their own povs up to the front line and dismounted walked in with
nothing but AK-47s and a helmet some of them didn't even have a helmet so they did an amazing job given the
restrictions that were put on do you think we gave them bad military advice I'm talking at the military technical
levels well I think uh I think um at the I think we were overly restrictive in
terms of um how we approached the sort of legal responsibilities I know we
don't want to become a party of the conflict okay but you know we could have gone in there and uh with surveying
contractors we could have organized people to take care of the five of the 777 artillery
pieces no sooner did they they get those artillery pieces in the summer of 2022 then a third of them were
inoperative U because didn't have the maintenance parts and the channels weren't prepared and we tried to do
everything at that point through a small office in the US Embassy in keev and the defense ate was probably going crazy
with it there were guys in the US Military and GS who did heroic work and
they put their hearts and souls into this but starting at the top the idea
was that we don't want a confrontation keep NATO out of this um well Ukraine
we're really surprised Ukraine can fight no kidding and they are going to fight
but we didn't take the risk we didn't see it right we didn't give the right
military advice in there to say you can't find tune a conflict it has
momentum it has a life of its own you got to go in there to win and we never
said as a policy that we wanted Ukraine to win that's absolutely right I mean I've I've always uh thought that there
there
was something really deeply problematic about saying you know we're
going to be with you to the end but we we don't we're not willing to say
we
want you to win and by the way we want Russia to lose one question I've always
had is uh it always seemed to me it would have been a good thing to have had a military Advisory Group there that is
to say to have American soldiers not in combat but in country advising training
but among other things establishing relationships with Ukrainian officers and um and military leaders and getting
a better simply getting a better sense of the reality on the ground I mean my my own feeling is we've had a lot of
quarterbacking from a distance uh from people who some of whom
have never been in Ukraine because the government won't let them go not because they don't want to go is that a
legitimate criticism I think it's a legitimate criticism yeah and I think there there's something else and uh and
I don't want to be overly critical of our own Armed Forces because the volunteer force and the Army has done
incredible work and how we held together during the 20 years in Afghanistan and
the time in Iraq and the great work done by our special forces and the generals
who pulled all this and getting the recruits in there and building the equipment and now having to face China I
mean it it's just that what happened is that the expertise of facing the eighth
guard's Army across the inner German border was lost in all of that and could
you explain what you mean by that because I think you and I both know that during during the Cold War period we had
about 300,000 US Army in Europe and uh all the
heavy Force leaders uh and I was a tank officer and you had repetitive tours you
went there as a lieutenant or Captain you were back as a major Lieutenant Colonel or Colonel or as a general and
you saw it again and again and you had to deal with the reality of what was on the other side of the inner German
border which was a formidable complete Soviet Force I was in Ukraine as the
NATO commander and met with the minister of defense and we had a nice talk in 19 in 2000 and he'd been the commander of a
of a tank army during the Cold War and he told me he said we'd have been on the English Channel in 5 days did you
believe him so um it's the kind of um
professionalism that was there in the Soviet Armed Forces it wasn't like our
Armed Forces but they had a powerful uh group of artillery tanks
pushing the East Germans first radio electronic combat uh nonis safe laser rang finds on
their tanks so they had blinding weapons um and um as one of their spns guys told
me he said before the war over started we would have assassinated all of your generals we knew where everybody lived
and we would have had the people in there one guy told me he said oh I came across many times as a truck driver to
Roder Dam and we looked all through your forces and reconed everything so but the
leaders who did that they're they're retired the intelligence assets that we had who spent a career studying the
Soviet Union they they were gone they became terrorist export or something else and um and so during this critical
period leading up to the conflict we didn't have the eyes and ears focused we
didn't really understand what was going on it probably didn't get up to the policy network but for whatever reason
um we started at a huge disadvantage and our Armed Forces leaders were suddenly
looking at China and long range fires and suddenly it's about tanks and
trenches and and and obstacles and um so I think um there's a lot of learning
that has to come out of this I would love to see a group of retired generals
who there's still some alive who really worked it during the Cold War as
advisers in there but but that hasn't happened and um and so um we could have
done more even within the framework of the policy could we shift a bit um I me
time is flying by to could you give me your assessment of where you think the
war is today you know you said that there are four phases uh we're in the middle of the fourth phase which is a
Russian offensive it's had a major success in terms of taking uh the town
of of divka um could you talk about well where do
you think this goes from here what what are some of the the following phases I there obvious VI ly different branches
and sequels here one of which is of course crucially the American election but could you walk us through your you
know your expert analysis of of the war well I think if we pass the um
assistance bill and we treat Ukraine the same way in crisis as we've treated
Israel in 1973 we actually took stuff out of our own forces in Germany and
flew it into Israel um and uh and we needed to have done so and we're doing
almost that today if we treated Ukraine that way and actually brought the stuff to them and really got that distributed
we could we could stabilize where we are right now and then um with the right
additional equipment and 12 to 14 months of work there's a chance they can break
through the Russian lines somewhere it could be donet it could be Crimea um it
could be uh an air envelopment um but they've got to have uh the tools of
Modern Warfare they you can't expect them to fight without air superiority
the drones are great build more drones and they're ingenious and they their their action development cycle is faster
than the Russians but the Russians will catch up and so uh it's a moving Target you're going against we have to
recognize that uh this war is in a very dangerous stage right now and if that
bill isn't passed the Ukraine ianian forces are not like
um they're not like what we envision the American Army to be they're not all armored mobble and uh all connected the
right way they're not capable I don't think of waging an effective war of movement and if there's a breakthrough
and uh and it slices in toward carke or even further toward ke and if you want
to put up that map I mean it's a long way but it's going to pose
that that that that's a thous that's a 600 mile front and you look over there keev is about 45500 miles away from
where that battle is right now but that's mostly rolling wooded and and
open terrain there are some River lines that have to be crossed but the toughest
terrain is where the fighting is right now and so we'd be we need a different f
Focus for the Ukrainian Army if it's going to fight a war of movement it
doesn't need 31 tanks and 100 leopard tanks it needs a th000 2,000 tanks it
doesn't need a few uh 300 towed artillery pieces it needs self-propelled
artillery and it needs not uh 25 f-16s it needs a couple of 100 f16s and a
couple 100 a10s and it's not it's not going to happen quickly enough so
they've got to hold this line and that means when that Aid package comes through we've got to put we've got to
find a way to get that that artillery ammunition and the new systems in there
and distributed as rapidly as possible do do your uh successors as general
officers and flag officers in the United States and elsewhere um understand things you think the same
way you do in terms of the scale of what's needed and the urgency of what's needed I mean we've we've talked about
the political leadership and about the fear of escalation and so on and so forth I'm curious on the military side
do you think that need is sufficiently well understood I think it's a staggering bill and I think General Cavo
over there understands it very very well if if we don't stop them here we're
going to have a 2500 mile front with the NATO and we we could we really couldn't
handle a 400 miles of the inner German Border in the cold War I can't imagine
what it will take to sort of mobilize NATO if Ukraine Falls and we're faced
with a threat that runs from the baltics all the way down to the Black Sea let me ask you just one uh one other kind of
military technical uh question and that is Russian performance um before the war
there was a a lot of talk about you know the Russians were going to roll over all of Ukraine in fact U I'm part of a
project here at csas with Philips O'Brien of St Andrews University on the initial analysis of the Russian
Ukrainian military balance which way way off I mean the Russians were far less
competent and effective than anybody anticipated that to such a degree that we we should think about it um but that
was two years ago and as somebody who's interacted with the Russians who's
studied them uh who's observed them closely how do you assess the evolution
of the Russian military throughout this you know they um first of all um they
didn't really the Russian military really never had much say in the first phase of the operation that was an
intelligence operation and it was set uh to um uh put a few helicopter landed
troops in there and then an internal uh revolt and then uh get rid of
zalinski and uh and then they assume assum that they could put uh yanukovich
back in and suddenly they'd have Ukraine it was like a kudaman and so they
weren't deployed for combat and when the dam was broken and the roads were flooded and they couldn't
get off-road uh they didn't have the logistics air defense electronic warfare or artillery actually deployed what they
had were Battalion tactical groups and some of them made it south of the leave uh ke Road and um but they ran out of
guidance and Logistics they couldn't get the logistics in it was a misreading of
true Russian military capabilities and then they tried to reorganize and then
that was a fumbling difficult thing also in combat and by the way we were
assisting the ukrainians um with uh some uh powerful assistance that uh is not
disclosable uh but uh but uh it contributed to the difficulties that the
Russians had in Phase 2 but when they put the defense in they they know how to
defend and they had a lot of mines and they had a lot of automatic M laying equipment the way the Soviets thought is
the way the Russians think we learned that for us battles are one at the
bottom it's the individual Soldier the guy with the rifle he's the one who actually makes the advance possible the
Russians operate exactly the opposite for them a soldier is like a bullet you
got
so many bullets you got so many soldiers you're going to use this many
bullets a day and that many soldiers throw them in there and so when we
look
at the horrendous losses the Russians have taken and we we we look at it we interpret it through our own value
system my God they're they're getting killed out there they surely they're going to stop well no no what they're
going to do is call for another round of mobilization put some more Warm Bodies up there to get shot
it doesn't have the same impact on the chain of command now it might have an impact on the mothers but Putin has
maintained very capable control of the information space inside Russia so you
know we knew early on we got to get some people in there to talk common sense to the Russian people we've got to find a
way to do it we haven't been able to do it so understand La that what we are dealing with is a totally asymmetrical
military relationship the ukrainians they're fighting like we would fight they love their people they're taking
care of their soldiers they want to save every life they can for the Russians
that's not the case orders come from the top down and you either perform as an
officer and throw your people into the breach and go into it if you have to or else but let me um push the question a
little bit further so they've I mean I absolutely take what you say but still
by British estimates Ukrainian estimates they've taken somewhere on the order of
about 400,000 combat casualties dead and wounded who are effectively off the
battlefield or uh prisoner um we have I mean amazing thing
these days you can document equipment losses using open sources they've had
extraordinary losses of equipment um which they don't really seem to be able
to replace I mean their own military industry can't do otherwise they wouldn't be turning to North Korea and
Iran and and so on and even with the human losses while they're there are plenty of
you know they they'll keep on sending Warm Bodies into the fight they've also been losing the captains and majors and
Lieutenant Colonels and even the generals to a degree that you know we we really never have does that um degrade
their overall effectiveness to some extent sure because experience
matters on the battlefield and you don't get the experience and you don't use it unless you survive but on the other hand
the Russian and before them the Soviet troop leading procedures are very different from ours could you say a
little bit more about that so in the western Army and the way we've tried to work with the ukrainians over the years
is um The Troop plating works at the bottom you get a mission it's a Zone you
give it to the command down below you he thinks about it he subdivides it gives
it down and then it rolls back up and in the um Russian system and the Soviet
system it's all done on Norms so that this unit for an attack has this
Zone and the commander plans the operation in the American Western system
we teach a staff work the staff in the in the Russian system only does the
execution the plan is the commanders and he alone is responsible for it and he
must do it what this gives has historically done is made the Soviet
system very flexible at the top and very casualty prone at the bottom and what
it's the exact opposite of the way we've tried to work so the losses they've taken would have
been absolutely is totally destructive for Western Force but for the Russian
Force there's certain rules you follow this is the way you do it here it is it's a cookbook you do it or you're a
Traer and so uh it's easier for them to fill in The Replacements at the bottom
not necessarily at the top but at the bottom it is and um they're still having
problems and uh you know all is not lost in this by any means for the west or for
Ukraine but we have to understand what we're up against and
Elliott the United States has to understand we're in a new era there's a coalition of forces Nations forming up
against the United States it's Russia it's China it's North Korea it's Iran it they're increasingly well-coordinated
exchanging information plans tactics Munitions
technologies that our principal potential adversaries starting with
Russia are willing to use force in a major way we didn't see this in the
postc Cold War it's a it was a shock when Russia really invaded Ukraine and
we're looking at China we're looking at Iran we're looking at North Korea which has just said it's no longer aiming for
a nice peaceful reunification with the South so the third thing is that our
nuclear deterrent is in play in away it it hasn't been before say say more about
what you we've taken the nuclear deterrent for granted since the end of the Cold War nobody likes nuclear
weapons there could cause nucle a nuclear Global Winter we could shut down
civilization uh the bulletin of atomic scientists Doomsday Clock is 2 seconds
from midnight and on and on and on but the truth is we stopped our nuclear
program in 1983 when President Reagan said we're not going to do uh the
enhanced radiation warheads and the Russians didn't and
they've brought out new nuclear technology and new Delivery Systems they're way ahead of us they must think
there's value in it the Chinese are doing the same thing and there must be value in it because the first thing that
uh we've been nervous about in supporting Ukraine is Putin and Medvedev and other people giving the these
nuclear threats and we keep saying that's irresponsible as though uh you're
sitting around a coffee table don't be talking like that but for them it's highly responsible because what they see
is they see timidity on the part of the West when confronted with the reality
that Russia has nuclear weapons and might use them in this case and then you
have to ask and this is what our Western leader have to ask how strongly do we
believe in this rules-based International System strongly enough to fight for it or we're going to say it's
NATO well if you won't fight for Ukraine when they're fighting how do you think the people in the Baltic states feel
they're on the edge out there do they think the United States is really going to risk nuclear confrontation with Putin
to save talin will we do that we say we will legally but will we what's the real
credibility and so our deterrent is in question in a way it hasn't been and
this latest flap over the Russian nuclear weapon in space um I this is we've worried about this
for a long time and back in the 1980s back when you were a young man why would
somebody put a nuclear weapon up in space could you explain that if that weapon goes off in space it creates an
electromagnetic pulse that can disable satellites but of course it also
disables things on the ground depends on the altitude the size of the nuclear weapon Etc but it could completely Wipe
Out the US electricity grid for much of the United States with just one weapon depending on where it is its altitude
and its strength so to say there's not going to be any impact on the ground is uh it's uh well I mean maybe if it's a
one/ tenen of a kiloton at 22,000 Mi maybe not but if it's a uh Megaton class
weapon at 300 miles it's a really serious problem and um so we're dancing
around all these things no we don't want a confrontation with Russia but like we
used to say in army training the enemy has a vote and Putin is pushing a
confrontation with us and he's lining up his allies this is this is
military it's diplomatic it's Financial with the bricks and other
efforts and I think um you know we have to recognize for the United States we're in a new era the the old ideas that uh
you know uh we we're a shining example President Reagan said we're a city on a hill everybody wants to live in a
democratic country like the United States and we certainly have a lot of people who want to live here but the
politics of democracy are difficult even in America and um and there are
alternative models and um with the development of uh economic developments
around the world there's wealth elsewhere and there are people looking to retain that wealth so the old models
the idea that we were the indispensable exceptional
power we'd like to be but the times they are a changing and we've got to adapt
our policies to this new era yeah well that's uh put a lot on the table
there let me go back to nuclear weapons for a moment do you expect that or how
would you assess the chances that sometime in the next 10 20 years somebody actually uses a nuclear weapon
for military purposes well we if you asked that question 30 years ago people
would have said it's high uh it it always is going to be possible but it's hard to find the
scenario of who's going to do it win so if we back away from a confrontation with Putin he's not going to use a
nuclear weapon he doesn't want to open that box either even though he has tactical weapons and we don't he has
artillery and and and short range rocket delivered weapons that would be actually
quite useful on the battlefield especially if the ukrainians are not dug in if they're in the open these enhanced
radiation weapons that he has supposedly they could be very uh effective but he
doesn't want to he doesn't want to cross that China doesn't want to cross it they want us to give without raising that to
the conflict to that level so it's what Putin said give back
Ukraine unroll NATO get these Baltic states back out of NATO give give up on
it let Russia have What It Wants What what would be the consequences in your
VI it could just sort of play out the scenario in which
um whether it's because of the outcome of the election or you know a deadlocked
Congress and we don't deliver Aid to Ukraine the Ukraine suffers a substantial defeat of some kind which
could be in a variety of ways what do you think just play out for
us what would be the kind of cascade of events you think that might follow that well I think um in some countries
in Eastern Europe uh you might have changes of government because there's there are Russian tendrils everywhere
especially in Eastern Europe and people say well you know this is too dangerous we don't have our army together NATO
can't really protect us yet uh we've got to buy for time on this so we've got to sort of acques to certain things I think
that's the the normal way that diplomacy unfolds in something like this but I
think um in this country of course they there'd be political repercussions I go
back to the Vietnam War and um I'm a little bit older than you um I was at
Oxford in 1968 when Ted happened and
just before that in the months before that the American Commander had said
there's light at the end of the tunnel we're we're successful in Vietnam going
to be over pretty soon suddenly there was what looked like a catastrophe and
out of the woodwork came these incredible forces that overran major parts of Vietnam northern
part of South Vietnam and even got inside the American Embassy and onto our air bases and um in the American news
media was portrayed as a catastrophic defeat for the United States well it
wasn't actually um it was a military defeat for the other side but we lost
the war of public opinion and a lot of the support for the United
by the United States to Ukraine has been primis on the idea these Brave Plucky
ukrainians can show the big bad Russians that they're not 10 feet tall democracy
is going to win but in
t that support for Vietnam was punctured and one thing you have to
respect about Vladimir Putin and the Russian intelligence network is they are students of history and they see this
and they're looking at this and they would love to have a repeat of T in the spring of
2024 well that's a pretty dark note on which to end the conversation but I
think um you know uh there's probably no human
endeavor about which it's more true than war that it pays to be sober about what
the Poss posibilities are so well Elliot I think you know um we have to look at
it with as much balance as possible ukrainians have done a
magnificent job and we've given them a lot of support but we didn't give them sufficient support at the right time in
in my view to be able to take advantage of Russian disorganization and now as general zusy
said it's a positional War and if we're going
to commit to the success of the international rules-based
order then we've got to help Ukraine restore its legitimate boundaries
otherwise it's a Russian Victory and it's the beginning of the unraveling of
that order agreed and on that note General Clark thank you so much for joining us
thank you
No comments:
Post a Comment