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
I'll use the case of both Moldova and Georgia. They have prevented from attempting to join NATO because they can't right now. The member action plan says you can't have a conflict on your territory. And both of them have, in fact, irredentist or a minor civil war in Transnistria and Moldova and in the two provinces in Georgia.
So you can see not only those kind of active conflicts, the so-called asymmetric warfare of Russia, but then you include things like electronic attacks in Estonia or little green men going into different places or assassination attempts in Great Britain and Germany. So all of those things contribute to the kinds of turmoil that Russia creates. When we now go into Ukraine,
And we're talking about a ceasefire, which includes, first of all, a 700-mile front in the four occupied territories. And it takes away 20% of Ukraine's territorial integrity, which includes the Oblast or the provinces of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson, as well as Crimea since 2014. I think it might be best even to compare it to the United States.
If we were to have 20% of our territory taken away, it would be like occupying all of California plus South Carolina or all of Florida, Georgia, and Alabama together. And when you do that, when you occupy those territories or draw a line, a fence line or a pausation line between a no man's zone, if you will, you're talking about taking away grain production from Ukraine.
It's most of the sunflower oil, which Ukraine produces, which is indicated by their yellow over blue flag is in the region which was taken over their coal mining and metal. I mean, I could go on and on. But you can see the disadvantage it puts Ukraine at if Russia continues to occupy these territories and how it gives Russia a foot forward in controlling the country.
Absolutely not. Absolutely not. They will not. There will be boundary disputes, additional requirements placed on each side. You know, the big thing Ukraine is looking for is some type of security agreement. And I think Rubio and Walsh wish that away. They said the Europeans will put up a peacekeeping force. Really? How do they control that? And what does it look like? Because the U.N.
is the one that normally establishes a peacekeeping force and the U.N. has not been involved in this at all. There is the continued asymmetric possibilities that Russia could do. And, you know, I'm a Cold War kind of guy. I was a young lieutenant when the Cold War was still going on all the way up through the rank of majors.
And I actually, as a tanker, did border patrol between the old Czechoslovakia and West Germany and West Germany and East Germany. And you know for the guys on those front lines, even in a Cold War, that there are activities taking place that have to do with kinetic events, people shooting at each other. This is a hot war. This is not a Cold War.
This is going to continue on along that 700-mile front. And Russia will take advantage of it because I know that's what Russia does.
Yeah, I don't think we're going to see that. I mean, Trump has already in his first administration has said he wants to get out of NATO. And he's already made comments about getting all of our forces out of Germany and maybe putting them in Poland. But now there's a fight between Poland and the United States. I mean, that's going on.
So when you take a look at the European continent and who would be supportive of U.S. forces over there, everyone would be Except Mr. Trump, you know, he is doing the shift or the pivot toward Asia, which is, you know, it's a strategy. I'm good with it. But I was there when Obama said he wanted to do a pivot toward Asia and it caused huge disruption on the continent in terms of.
how people were interacting. I spent a good part of my career in Europe and understand how NATO works, how the US forces in Europe work, and what they do for a relatively small amount of people. They fight above their weight class in terms of pulling people together. But you make that combination with the fact that the Trump administration continues to demonize Zelensky and Ukraine.
And I can't figure out how they're getting away with that with the American people and even with members of Congress, because there were so many people in Congress and the American people that understood that all of these things were transgressions against Ukraine, and they were supporting them from the very beginning. And now almost half of that has turned around.
Well, we'd take about an hour to go through all those things. But he is, I think, as we sometimes say in the army, talking through his ass. You know, he would like all those things to be true, but none of them are. Trump has not put Putin under his thumb.
He created a huge problem by interfering with the supply chain to Ukraine and basically negating their intelligence feed for even a short period of time. The ball isn't in Putin's court. He knows exactly what he's doing and he will play it the way he wants to play. You know, I read a piece by Anne Applebaum this morning. about the ball being in Putin's court.
And she said, yeah, he can hide the ball, take the ball away and go home, deflate the ball, throw it over the fence. And she basically said all the things that this so-called ball being in Putin's court could create that would go wrong. She's a great writer, by the way, and she knows Russia more than anybody in the United States. So she knows exactly what's going to happen.
And I'm always in agreement with her.
Well, it's interesting because Vance was at the Munich Security Conference. And whenever I used to get with a group of Europeans, they would all tell me how much they hated Russia. In fact, Georgia makes a joke out of toasting. When you toast with beer as opposed to with wine, you're supposed to say something you don't mean.
And I had one Georgian toast with a beer and he said to Putin's health, you know, they hate this guy. Because the majority of them have been under Putin's thumb. And I'll bring up the point too, it just shocked the bejesus out of me yesterday, Tim, when I saw all of the European force chiefs, all of the military chiefs from the European countries coming together with Macron.
Because back in the day, when I was the commander of US Army Europe, we used to have something called the Conference of European Armies, where we would have all the European defense chiefs in Heidelberg, and we would talk about commonalities and things we were going to do and exercises. And by the way, Hegseth has eliminated exercises from the European force.
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