Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling
speaker
460 appearances
6 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 7 Jul
Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The Bulwark Daily · S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America · 8 Apr 2025
podcast
And so it's not that you, oh, we have this information that comes out from a stable world and then we navigate it. It's not that. It's that we're surfing and causing the waves at the same time. And so our ability to master anything is, or when things go wrong, we don't have. You know, someone once pointed out to me that if you look at all the history of utopian schemes, none of them have prisons.
They're ideal cities. You know, there's no sense that anything could go wrong. Right. And the tech futurists are like that. They don't seem to want to recognize the limits of what we can take in and our need. You know, we can't wake up every morning asking ourselves whether today is going to be a day when our parents love us or it's one of those days when they're not. Right.
We need to have a kind of continuity in our beliefs just to get through the day. If we changed our beliefs, every second that we got new information, we'd be frozen in time. So we need to kind of commit to an opinion for a while.
Well, with regard to politics, I guess the first thing is to notice what is happening. I mean, to notice this will to ignorance, and how it pops up. And it can pop up on every side. I mean, if you just look at the reaction of the White House under Biden and the press in his last years, the strong refusal to believe their lying eyes was extraordinary, right?
But the other thing in the moment is that, as you said, conservatism is dead. These people are not conservatives. And that you're up against reactionary forces that are all about will and not about understanding. And they have to be met by other sorts of means. But we can give up our own quest for understanding precisely these things.
So checking your priors and also just trying to get used to uncertainty when things change so much all the time. It's very hard to just sail forward and at least to be aware of that and what you're doing with regard to that. It just means more self-awareness.
Yeah, I'll just say from the very beginning, I'm very, you know, I was skeptical of the Hamas-Israel ceasefire. This one, I'm very pessimistic because I agree with Peskov. The administration is getting out in front of their, way out in front of their skis, thinking they're going to
drive this deal through Russia the same way they did with Ukraine, because they don't have any tools to extort Russia that I know of. And what's going to happen is this could very easily follow the paths of other frozen conflicts which Russia has instigated inside of Europe. And I think there are all kinds of challenges
with what Secretary Rubio and National Security Advisor Walz agreed to even with Ukraine yesterday. It was a horrible negotiation. I wasn't in the room, obviously, but you can tell that Ukraine went into this with their hands tied behind their back.
They couldn't do much else because they had to get that intelligence sharing back and they had to restart the flow of arms and ammunitions to just survive on the battlefield today because they were taking some pretty good They were taking as many good hits on the battlefield as we were taking in the stock market yesterday.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think, too, we can't ignore the fact that there were moral implications to this. I mean, it's one thing to cut off intelligence when someone's on the battlefield and fighting. But what Russia has been doing is not just...
attempting to retake ground, which is typical of any kind of war fight, but they were continuing to destroy Ukrainian infrastructure, kill Ukrainian citizens. Those are all war crimes.
So I would even go to the point, Tim, where we were complicit and maybe even accessory to war crimes over those couple of days where we just kind of unplugged the intelligence servers within Kyiv and in the front lines, not just for the tactical fight, but for the defense of Ukraine infrastructure and citizens.
Which they've been doing since the very beginning, by the way.
Yeah, absolutely.
And when you think about the Russian way of war, where they do area fire as opposed to precision fire, where they really don't do the targeting process the way most modern militaries do, where you're attempting to destroy the enemy's military and their enemy's capability, they were really focused primarily, as they have been from the start of the war, on causing pain to Ukrainian citizens and their government.
And that's the part that just kind of continuously. I mean, the Hague has said Putin is a war criminal and all the people who are executing his his operations, the special military operations are war criminals. And if that's the fact, if we're giving them an advantage, then we we do become complicit in their war crimes and maybe even accessories to to the act.
Yeah, well, I left the military in 2013. And at the time, Russia had not yet invaded Ukraine the first time in 2014. But prior to that, on a daily basis, when I'd go into the office, I'd get something called a black book, which showed intelligence capabilities of the U.S. force and what we were collecting on and how we were collecting it.
At the time, there were three major frozen conflicts in Europe. And it was interesting, Tim, the other night I was with a group of Americans and I said, has anyone heard the term Transnistria or Norgano-Karabakh or Kaliningrad or South Ossetia and Abkhazia?
So it's not too bad. None of them had heard of any of those places. Well, these were places where the Russians had invaded or had stoked conflict within Moldova, Georgia, between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and then most recently in the Donbass and Crimea. And in every single one of them, they have continued to stoke that over the years and the decades to disrupt governments.
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