Hello, my name is Jerry Torres.

I'm a retired United States Army Green Beret during my military career.

I served in combat, counter-draug, counter-terrorism, peacekeeping, and foreign internal defense missions around the world.

The topic for this podcast is the volatile situation in Ukraine, where there are more than 100,000 Russian troops in the eastern border and northern border of Ukraine and on the black sea.

We will also touch a little bit on how this relates to the tense situation between China and Taiwan and last year's departure of our U.S. forces from Afghanistan.

I'm joined by a very distinguished guest, who was my unit commander as a captain when I was a young corporal in the United States Army field artillery.

I introduce Mr. Bob Wood, Lieutenant General, United States Army Retire.

General Wood, please highlight your very distinguished United States Army career and touch a bit on what you're doing today to get our veterans to vote through your organization named American Veterans Vote.

Thank you very much, Jerry. It's great to see you again.

It has been a long time since you were a young corporal, and I was a young captain.

It's been a pleasure, though, to meet you and really get involved in this, I think, important discussion.

It's been a long time since I was in Europe as a major and a Lieutenant Colonel working in Germany and NATO forces at a career that really started there in Fort Lewis, Washington,

and then through a variety of jobs, the range of Italian. We were in Germany for a number of years, as well.

We were over in Bosnia, a variety of tours in Korea. All of them focused on the operational army.

When I wasn't doing operational stuff as a field artillery officer or as a general officer, I was involved in some interesting staff work that took me all the way to Bosnia,

and in Korea, it allowed me to operate in the joint force. So it's been a pretty interesting and broad run of activities since we first served together.

What I've learned in all that is you have to constantly focus on the mission and understand, frankly, the enemy or the situation you're in.

In Europe, it was clear that as a NATO soldier at the time of the Soviet Union was definitely posed and ready to attack, and we always felt that every day we turned up and trained and realized that the threat was real.

After the fall of the wall and the changes that we saw in Germany and in Europe, there was a moment there where we saw peace and peace with prosperity, as well as the opportunity for a whole new Europe to grow.

Unfortunately, it's clear from what's going on at the border with Ukraine and frankly in Belarus that Russia is once again looking at empire.

As I did in the past, as I considered the area around their borders to be their domain, it's really clear that they're out to establish that empire.

It's probably one of the key goals that President Putin has, and it's really time for us to really be serious about deterrence again.

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