 We're back where live. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Sink Tech, of course, at 2 o'clock on a given Thursday, and it's the military in Hawaii. Standing with Ukraine, I love that term, and we have thoughts and comments with Lieutenant General Dan Figleaf today. He's one of our directors, and he's also a host in multiple shows here on Sink Tech. So thank you for joining us, Ben. I really appreciate you appearing on Military in Hawaii, and I also appreciate your thoughts on Ukraine. I'm looking forward to your thoughts. Thanks, Jay, and I'm proud to do this as part of the Military Affairs Council of the Chamber of Commerce here on Oahu. So we have a situation where there's a renegade among us, Putin, and we can talk about his psychology some other time, but here he is using a whole bunch of tricks in a hybrid war, an invasion, if you will, of Ukraine, for reasons that are hard to understand. But the bottom line is he is involved in a genocide. He's trying to make rubble out of the whole country, and Western Europe not clear exactly what to do to stop him. The U.S. not clear exactly what to do to stop him, and we have to find a moral position, and we have to do what we can to stop him, and so far that hasn't happened. Jay, go ahead. No, Jay, I think you're right. There's been a lot to punish him, but not measures that have made him stop. And the whole thing is about nuclear war. It's about threatening nuclear war and threatening, which is a serious threat, and threatening chemical war and biological warfare. And all this has kind of gotten the world stymied, and the United Nations, because he's on the Security Council, can't really do too much about it. So the United Nations is really not actively involved. And so the question is, and you're an essential thinker from and with the United States military, we are very interested to hear your thoughts about where we are on this, what we can do, what our options are, and how it affects the liberal world order and other relationships in the world. Well, I'd start by saying it affects the fundamental underpinnings of civilization, and try not to resort to hyperbole in the modern world, in the modern interconnected by both information and economy world, because you have somebody who is basically flipping a nuclear tip middle finger to the world order. And that's bad enough. But he's doing it with the tacit support of another nuclear tip. And I wouldn't say that Xi Jinping in China are as much flaunting the world order, but they're not supporting it either. And that's a ripping of the fabric of peaceful civilization that we should all be worried about. And this is a big deal. And being mad as hell about it is not good enough. So sanctions, which also have second and third order consequences, there's collateral damage. And I'm not against them. I'm just saying, as you alluded to in your lead in, until it stops, and Putin's invasion of Ukraine is thwarted and his ambitions, which are likely the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine and Black Sea port access for him denying it to Ukraine. If he gets either of those, and certainly both of those, then he's actually won no matter how deeply stained his image is. And we, we the world can't afford that. And it has very significant future consequences, the outcome of this, well, very significant future consequences for the US, even for the military in Hawaii. And, you know, we are, we are in our beautiful state and that it isn't as much of a situation we're involved in as as we have been, say in Iraq or Afghanistan, sending forces here. But this matters to all of us. Do you mind if I say that even the end won't be the end, that it's likely to change the border? But then if you look at, you know, Europe, but especially Eastern Europe over the past thousand years, the borders of those countries has changed over and over a hundred, a thousand times in that period. And so if he gets a piece of Eastern Ukraine, you know, the Balkans, and, you know, the countries in, you know, the northern area on the Baltic, they're also at risk. If he takes one piece, it will embolden him to go for other pieces. Don't you agree? Kind of. But, you know, that's a little reminiscent of the domino theories around Southeast Asia in the 60s and 70s. I'd look more in your lawyer case. So I shouldn't even use this word in your presence, but it's more a matter of precedent. Do we allow this kind of a challenge to the established rules-based order in the international community? Because it's different. There's been internal strife. There have been transnational terrorism threats, but one sovereign nation invading another, occupying its territory, Crimea was a little different. But this is in your face challenge to the fabric of a relatively peaceful world. So how far should we rise up now? We haven't stopped him yet. The sanctions, he blows off the sanctions. He's still selling oil. You know, he's still selling oil even on Nord Stream 1, which is active to Germany right now. He still sells oil to India and to China for that matter. We haven't stopped him. And of course, we have held back, not wanting to create a ground war, even though we're in kind of a- You're a miracle or butch. It's a ground war. We're just down in it. Yeah. So that's a very difficult question. The second sort of the elephant in the room of tolerating this invasion, even if you get all upset about it and sanction it, is the fact that our reluctance is based largely on his military on Putin and Russia's military capability. Understandably, I was an F4 nuclear strike pilot in the 70s, certified to go against targets in the Warsaw Pact. That's not something we want to see. And the nuclear weapons are more different than the world can imagine. Here's the question for you. But here, let me get to this, Jay, if I can. But if we let him use nuclear blackmail, that we're opening the door to proliferation and more nuclear blackmail by other powers. So I think we've got to be pretty imaginative about what we do to compel him to cease and assist. Now, the notion of deterrence over the entire duration of the Cold War was that we didn't want to do it and they didn't want to do it. And we might threaten and posture, but neither one of us really wanted to do it. Does that still play or should we believe that he will do it if pushed? Are we in a different kind of deterrence now? I think we're in a more complicated deterrence based on two elements that I've already touched upon, one being the global interconnectivity of economics and information and the other element being time since 1945, time since nuclear weapons were last used in combat and the fading of the stark memory of everybody who wasn't around then, including me. But I've been to Hiroshima and I've sat in an F-4 with a nuclear weapon on it. So I get a pretty good appreciation of nuclear weapons and nuclear war differently. We can't be fully deterred by his threats because we have a very capable nuclear arsenal. God, I don't even want to go there. But we can't let Putin and Russia control the world. How do we stop him from that blackmail? I think everything that makes his situation in Ukraine unsuccessful and untenable is how. I think a lot of that has been done. I mean, there's a lot good. We can be pretty optimistic. J.U. and I could be sitting and sipping a beer in the name of the bar and ytk and I could be talking about all these things. The Russian plan is not survive first-time tech. No plan does, but this one in particular looks awful. The Ukraine's resolve and the quality of their national leadership is far beyond what anybody expected. Russia has an established air superiority. My last figment, the power of imagination, talks about that in detail. Please check that on the think tech playlist. Ukraine is winning information ops hands down. You're alluding to genocide and war crimes. Frankly, I'm going to be a bit of a devil's advocate and say we don't know yet because I've been in wars where war crimes were both alleged and committed. We don't know yet. It's likely if I have to put my money on who's the bad guy here. It's Russia and Putin, but we don't know. It doesn't matter because Ukraine has won the information operations for. The Ukraine's have been incredibly innovative using hobby drones and other things. I mean, they are doing some really good stuff that as somebody who thinks about war more than I should, perhaps I'm really impressed with. And by the way, the Moscow is now an artificial reef on the bottom of the Black Sea. And that's a big deal. Absolutely none of that guarantees that Ukraine will win. What about this notion of war without attacking civilians? I mean, back in the days of the revolution, the civilians would stand alongside the field and the Redcoats would shoot at the revolutionaries. And the ordinary civilians were not at risk, but that everything has changed now. It's a matter of range and explosives potential. Okay, so back then I'm going to guess at this, but I suspect the maximum range of any weapon on the battlefield, including artillery, was approximately 200 yards, maybe 300. I don't know what a revolutionary cannon could shoot, but it wasn't five miles or 50 miles. Okay. And the explosive weight was, you know, ball above the size of a volleyball. And so you could, it wasn't precision. It was potential. So civilians were relatively close. Doesn't mean that if you go through history and look at the Mongols and Romans, there have been atrocities against humans. They were just up close and personal, but they weren't a target. That changed with the Japanese bombing of China in World War II in the Japanese incursion into China. And it became an accepted, horrible practice. Civilian casualties became accepted. And that's a whole mother PhD dissertation. I'll never do it about the acceptance of civilian casualties, but it became normalized. And while we seek to avoid it, it is going to happen now because of the range and explosive potential to weapons that are used. Well, do you think that more ammunition, more artillery, more missiles and anti-aircraft type devices will help? I mean, more than we are standing over there now. I mean, every day or every couple of days, you hear about the United States sending hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons to Ukraine, but will it help? Do we have to step it up to some other level entirely? Yeah, step it up to some other level doesn't necessarily need to be, I mean, more bombs, bullets, missiles, or boots on the ground. And I'm not in the Pentagon or at UConn or my former colleague, Todd Walters, has got the interesting job of being a spring ally commander. So I don't know what's being done, but I hope we're being very imaginative because what should be done is to, it is a number of efforts to thwart Putin's ambition by making it really difficult for in imaginative perplexing crap. Now what ways? And I'll give you an example. As I said, on figments, no fly zone discussion drove me crazy. First of all, we shouldn't have been discussing it in public. That should have been done in secret. And secondly, no fly zones aren't an instrument of war. Okay. But there were other things that could have been done. It's too late now. In the Korean war, the Russians and Chinese flew mebs out of Untung near Dongdong, China, and operated out of sanctuary and really gave US F-86 and B-29 pilots and F-86 crews, F-86 pilots, B-29 crews, a very difficult time. Okay. That could have been an option. There are cyber options. There are other, you know, exquisite ways to make it tough for Putin and Russia. And I would not, I would not suggest that we can raise the price of victory to him because I don't think Vladimir Putin cares about price. We have to decrease the potential for victory by his definition. And I think to do that, we need to fully understand that his definition of victory is most likely annexation of the Donbass region and unimpeded access to the Black Seaports and denying said access to Ukraine. It strikes me. It strikes me. This is so interesting. And I really appreciate your thought on it. It strikes me that when, you know, he takes the position, it's an old Russian cultural point of attacking civilians. He's spending more time and more weapons on attacking civilians than he is on attacking the Ukraine army. It's almost like he wants to get out of the way of the Ukraine army because they create a more serious challenge for him and just kill civilians as much as possible. Avoid the Ukraine army. I don't know about that, but I do know that the Russians historically did not care about Ukraine civilians during Operation Barbarossa when Hitler invaded Russia, won the Soviet Union time. There were three access axes of attack. One of them, the southern one, was through Ukraine. And during retreat, the Soviet army breached a dam in Ukraine to impede Nazi advance that killed nearly instantly 100,000 New Camp Ukrainians, 100,000. So we ought not be surprised about anything, but that we ought not expect any consideration of human casualties from Putin and the Russian armed forces. And the other issue is, and we're getting to the point of humanitarian here in a minute. The other issue is, you know, the Russian troops seem to be out of control, shooting people, blindfolding them, shooting them in the head, in the eye, shooting them at random on the street while they're walking with groceries or riding their bikes. You know, it's outrageous and raping, raping the women, killing the children. And one says, well, this is what the Russians do. But gee whiz, in an army, shouldn't there be some discipline? Is it that they don't do discipline? They don't care. He doesn't care about how they conduct themselves day to day? Well, let's just look at war and back away from the specificity of Russia. This is war. And we've had some kind of unique, limited conflicts. This is real war in a country the size of Texas with 40 million people. And rape happens more. I'm absolutely not excusing it. I'm just saying this is it. It's made worse by an army of conscripts that is ill of this fund. It's been proven that way. But on the other hand, and this is a lesson I hope we'll get to talk a little bit about what China is taking from this situation with regard to Taiwan, because this is a pretty seasoned Russian military. They've fought in Syria and Afghanistan, etc. They've got significant combat experience, and they've got pretty good gear. If they're fairing this badly, there's a lesson there for any other adventurous. Well, let's talk about that. You know, what is the lesson? What is the lessons that we have learned or should learn? And what is the lesson that other autocratic governments in the world have learned or should learn? Yeah, let me start by saying I think the President Xi and the People's Republic of China are going to learn a lesson about international response, even though it hasn't stopped the military action by Russia. The international response when you get countries like Germany and Switzerland even weighing in against the Russian invasion, that is very significant. And now you've got Xi Jinping aligning himself with President Putin declaring a relationship that has no boundaries. That's a little weird, frankly. It's very unusual for China Russia, China Russia, USSR, PRC. It's always been a bit of an arranged marriage that broke up at the first argument. And boy, I'm not about to tell President Xi what to do, but I would not want to be, you know, find, I would not want to be on Putin's friend list right now in the international community. Not a good thing. But what should all of us learn with regard to military adventurism? And I'll use as an example the potential for a military unification of Taiwan initiated by China. Here's what we have to learn. First of all, people defend their homeland. When it's your house, you're going to fight for it. And the focus groups in Taiwan say that. Though it's long been doubted, would the Taiwan's fight for Taiwan? Both the example in Ukraine and what we know from from public opinion polls tell, yeah, they'll fight for it. History matters. I talked about some of the history between Ukraine and Russia when they were both part of the USSR. There's a long history in Taiwan. I don't have time to go into it. That matters not just between the mainland government and the people of Taiwan, but in how hard a place it is to occupy. Somebody else has succeeded. There is no, they ought to learn that access and resupply is really difficult in Ukraine. You saw the stalled convoys and everything else. Well, that's with several borders between Russia and Ukraine, Belarus co-conspirator. There's a lot of land access to the Ukraine. And it's still been very difficult for Russia to resupply its forces to invade and then resupply. There's only water around Taiwan. So the notion that the China can sustain a military operation there, good luck. And I'm not being flippant. Good luck. Because what access there is, I've been on, or actually been on almost every square mile of the main island of Taiwan. And the beach access is very difficult, what there is. And as soon as you finish that, you are in agricultural wetland, urban area, and then very quickly abrupt mountains that would remind you of the Kolaus. Good luck on a country that there are 13,000 square miles to Taiwan, I think in 233,000 to Ukraine, but they've got 24 million people in Taiwan. So what land there is is heavily populated. Why is she so friendly then with Russia now? What is needed for him? I don't know. And people speculate that he thinks that if Putin succeeds in Ukraine, that that will somehow be a message to him that he is more likely to succeed in Taiwan. He will be emboldened by Putin, any success by Putin in Ukraine. Are you saying that that is not happening or it is happening? I think it could happen, but it would be a bad idea. Any in my military judgment, any military action to forcibly take Taiwan is doomed to long and bloody failure. And I just think that the problem set is so much more complex than that in Ukraine. We've already seen how complex it is. But my concern is that maybe the motivation is to try to deliver a death knell to the rules-based order that's sustained our civilization for a few decades. What does that mean? Oh, that means that to know how you feel, you know, that would work out. That would work out with not Russia because Russia is not as other than its nuclear weapons into a lesser degree of its energy. It's not as significant as China. Sorry, Russia. It's not. China is a very significant player. It would mean a circumstance where people's republic in China could dictate terms of damn near everything to the rest of the world. South China Sea is our lake. We are going to take the fish from the Indo-Asia Pacific region and feed our people first and your people last. We are going to control the global economy through cyber currency on their terms. And that's, let's see, who else does that benefit? Nobody. Nobody. So what about Hawaii? You know, we have significant forces here and equipment here. And we see Hawaii is projecting power all across the Indo-Pacific area. How would we play out in any contention with Taiwan? How would we play out in any change, which I guess you'll have to agree that it's changing in the Pacific Indo area? How does that affect Hawaii? How will it affect Hawaii? Well, I can't. I don't have a crystal ball. I don't think I'll check my closet after we drop off here. But I don't know how it's going to play out. I hope my prayer is that Putin fails and withdraws. But we still have to, the forces have to learn. And we have to, not just as a military, but as a government, understand the need for practical deterrence. Deterrence fail. And that's because the terms of deterrence were insufficient. President Putin was told that he would be mad as hell if he went into Ukraine. Is that different than what it is now? I don't think he cared that we'd be mad as hell. And deterrence is perhaps the most complex subject in military and political thought. We've got to think about what deterrence works without sparking conflict, because that's always the balance that you strive to achieve is being confrontational enough to deter legitimately without sparking conflict. China is not our enemy. They're our competitors. And Americans ought not want China to fail. But we also don't want them to succeed in running the world. We sure don't. We do not run the world. And I don't think we seek to run the world. So if there's anything we should learn, we should learn, think about and adjust our efforts at deterrence to be credible and not spark conflict. Will you agree with me that this signals a change in war? And we've seen it coming for a long time that war now is not only kinetic shooting war. War is everything you can think of. It's asynchronous, asymmetrical in every way. It includes propaganda. It includes public opinion. It includes trade and sanctions. I mean, so many non-kinetic weapons are on the table. Has this changed the asynchronous quality of modern warfare? And does that affect the United States? Should we be thinking and planning, perhaps, for more hybrid types of war going forward? Yes, and a little in a small, lower case, no. Yes, I mean, look at the economic sanctions and warfare, the cyber hacking threats that have been out there, the use of information, the Moscow it appears from my research on the internet, so not guaranteed. It's thinking may have been facilitated by a naval hobbyist website that tracked the movements in Moscow and said, hey, it's doing the same thing all the time. So there are many elements that are very relevant to warfare that might not have been, and both in an offensive and defensive capability or from offensive and defensive perspectives, we should think about what that means. But the bottom line is still steel on steel, flash on flash. And this should also, or this should remind us of the human tragedy of war. And because it's so visible. It's not that that hasn't been occurring in this century or the last one, the last part of the last one, but this is just more visible. And yeah, well, that's still worse. And we remember it. And if we remember it, it acts as a turn, a turn for maybe a generation, maybe two. And then we forget it. Go back for more. Yeah. And if I can, I know we've got to wrap up here. But an interesting thing is Google civilian casualties or percent of population casualties in World War Two. By far, the greatest percent of population per capita killed in World War Two is in where Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, right there, right where this is. So it's not that they've forgotten history. It's like they've consciously decided to repeat it. It's an extraordinarily tragic connection with the past. Yes, it is. So one other thing I wanted to ask you about, and that is humanitarian aid. The United States, as you said, is not interested in imperialism. It's not interested in making war. It's only interested in at least as far as my life, my observation is concerned in maintaining the peace in a moral, reasonable way. And a two-hour credit makes us feel good and makes us all the more patriotic. But one of the elements of dealing with a complex and sometimes violent world is projecting power, even not necessarily using it. And that power, according to the Kennedy School of Foreign Relations, includes soft power, smart power, different kinds of power. One of the kinds of power that we have engaged in fairly regularly is humanitarian aid. I think we care a lot as a country about that. And so here we have an opportunity to render humanitarian aid to Ukraine, which is being so horribly injured and harmed and maimed. And my question to you is, what effect does that have? Is that what I think it is, a projection of power and a projection of moral power? And are we doing enough of it? Never enough. I mean, you can... So I think there are two elements to the aid that's gone to the people of Ukraine. We're not talking about anti-tank missiles or anything now. One is to the refugees, the 4 million plus, I think, is their current count largely in Poland. And that what effect does that have? It alleviates suffering. It doesn't change the situation. It alleviates suffering. And then there's aid in Ukraine to the population. And this is... I am not unbiased. And what I'm going to say, I'm on the board of advisors of a group called the non-profit called Spirit of America. Jim Hake will be my guest Monday on Pigments Part of Imagination. Their focus is on aid to the people in Ukraine. And they're all non-lethal aid. They don't take any government money, but they're delivering first aid kits, body armor, helmets, and facilitating training for the large percent of the Ukraine population who's decided they're now in the Army. And that's American aid, Spirit of America, obviously, the name. Jim likes to say that Spirit of America is a non-neutral, non-government organization. They're on the side of the United States and our objectives. And they facilitate success for military and state department operations in that way. I think that kind of aggressive in-Ukraine support is, in some measure, beyond the bullets and bombs, what is inspiring the Ukrainians to hold fast. That will be enough, God, I hope so. I hope they don't just hold fast to kick the Russian army out of Donbass, regain the territory lost themselves. Well, in terms of an American effort, it seems to me that, yes, for the humanitarian and for maybe medical assistance, it's OK in the United States and its various NGOs and agencies should be operating in Ukraine to save lives, help people who have been wounded or who are starving for the lack of food or supplies. And I feel that if we're not there, we can be and we should be there. And the other, let me take it one more step and say that if we're supplying weapons and they're sophisticated high-tech weapons as they should be, we have to make sure that the Ukrainians understand them and know how to use them to the best effect. And for that, we can't stop at the border. We can't teach them all of that in Poland. We have to go into Ukraine. Our people have to go in and show them and educate them. So it's on both sides. It's on the kinetic side and it's on the humanitarian side where I believe the United States has a role to be and have its agents and its helpers be in Ukraine right now. Are they? Should they be? What do you think? I don't know. I know that civilians are. I don't think they're government-aligned, but I do know that, for example, during the war in Vietnam, the U.S. was very significantly constrained by concern about the potential for Russian advisors at airfields importance and things like that. Okay, we're almost out of time. I would absolutely do that. Well, a lot of people would like to do that. It's a thought that crosses many minds in this country. How can we help? So we're almost out of time here. We are out of time, General, but let me ask you, if we've covered all the areas you wanted to cover, if there's any final point to take away that you would like to leave with our viewers today? The only win for the world is Russia leaves Ukraine. Conceding territory is a failure. Secondly, I hope China will reconsider its partnership with Russia and there would be foolish not to look at the tactical lessons learned because Taiwan is a far tougher nut to crack militarily. And so the unification of Taiwan with the mainland has to occur through peaceful means. Vladimir Zelensky has said that Ukraine, the government, the army is doing our work for us in terms of protecting the liberal world order. Do you agree with that? Yes, I do. Can they succeed? Yeah. Thank you. General Dan Figli, thank you so much for appearing. Thank you for all your contributions. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at ThinkTechHawaii.com. Mahalo.