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
It's not as dangerous as eliminating the nuclear guys that he eliminated that monitored our nuclear programs, but it is pretty frigging dangerous on an individual level for something that Abraham Lincoln created to say, let's take care of those who fight our wars. It just is mind boggling to me. You can't predict the repercussions of the slices to people who work in the VA facilities.
But it's everything from doctors and nurses who get paid a whole lot less working at the VA hospitals than they do working at a major healthcare organization because they have a sense of patriotism, all the way up to the
the people who run the cemeteries, which there are hundreds of across the country, and even the people that answer the phones on the VA crisis hotlines for people who are thinking about committing suicide, which the military has the largest suicide rate percentage of any organization other than railroad workers in the country.
Well, it's tough because the veterans can comment like I'm commenting right now, but the active duty force can't. They, according to civil military semi-requirements, you don't talk about the administration if it's elected by the people. You work for them. So there's this restraint by the military in that regard to even talk about it.
And even guys like me as retired generals, they say, hey, you've got to stay in that zone, too, where you can't really show disrespect to the administration that's been dutifully elected by the majority or, in this case, the plurality of the population.
But I will tell you, there is unbelievable amounts of talk from what I'm hearing, not just at the senior leader level, but from soldiers I used to work with. And they're scared. They are very concerned. We could go into the Department of Defense and what they're doing to denigrate women or transgender.
But I mean, even that is, I think, going to cause challenges with recruiting and retention, because why would you want to stay in an organization that doesn't? doesn't seem to care for you while you're there, and then also doesn't treat you well after you leave.
Yeah, well, that's been reported by a lot. I mean, I don't think we have a whole lot of proof of any of that happening other than what Trump said happened.
Yeah, but it seems to be a very strange pick. I met Dan Cain one time in a very short office call with him in one of his assignments. And he was an Air National Guard guy who rose to three stars and then left the military. I'm sure he's a very competent guy. But I do worry about the continued politicalization of the military by the current Department of Defense secretary and others.
You know, President Trump meets somebody and says, hey, they look the part. They're the movie role characters. model of a general. They say the right things in a three or four minute interaction. And then as Mr. Trump has found out with Mattis and Kelly and others, and Milley, by the way, I mean, I keep going back to the fact that he chose Milley to be the chairman and he chose C.Q.
Brown to be the chief of the Air Force. So, you know, that those initial impressions sometimes are not long lasting. And what I'm very concerned about is there seems to be a tug on toward doing everything the president wants, whether it's illegal, immoral, or unethical. And I think that's what he's trying to set up in a bunch of different organizations. And that concerns me.
Well, it gets to the requirements of the various cabinet secretaries. And if we want to use Secretary Hegseth as one of them. Do they have the competencies of running the large organization that they've been put in charge of? Do they even know what those organizations do?
Do they have the savvy to listen to the experts, the people who have been there for 40 years and say, here's why we do the things we do? I mean, I had one assignment to the Pentagon. It was on the joint staff, and I had a lot of interaction with Secretary Rumsfeld. And that was tough in and of itself because he was smarter than everybody in the room.
And whenever you have someone that's smarter than everybody in the room, you tend to make mistakes because – They don't understand they're not the smartest one. Secretary Hegseth just recently said that over the last weekend, I wrote an article today about his comments regarding climate change.
And that seems to be one of those things that, you know, there are elements of society that says, why are we even doing this? It's a hoax. It's a fake. Well, the Department of Defense have been studying this and they have data that says it's going to be really critical that to understand what climate change does to bases and to combat operations and to the force.
And yet they're throwing that all away, as Secretary Hexler says, because it's all a bunch of crap. Well, it's not a bunch of crap. And when you dismiss something as important as that, it may not be your top priority of lethality and warrior spirit at the platoon level, but it is pretty important for a large organization. The question comes back to,
What would you do to a CEO of a major corporation that was doing some of the things that they're doing to disrupt the efficiency and effectiveness of the various organizations some of these people run? The answer would be the board would fire them immediately.
It's not just the UK too. I've talked to a lot of European guys, especially Australia and New Zealand are saying the same thing. But of course, if I were having in the old days, a conversation with the chief of the German intelligence, and I knew anything I might say would be broadcast by their chancellor, I wouldn't say it. And I wouldn't share intelligence. And those are the kinds of
partnerships that are created and alliances where, you know, what you do is you don't, you know, I've said this many times before, you don't win hearts and minds, Tim, you win trust and confidence, and you don't deploy trust. It doesn't just come up in a heartbeat. It's something that's built over years. And when you suddenly become distrustful of another military leader's government,
Which, by the way, I had to on a couple of occasions in Europe when I was commanding there. I mean, we were distrustful for a while of the Italian government because of Berlusconi. We couldn't give anything to our Italian counterpart because we were afraid of where it would go. And that was minor compared to some of the things we're doing right now.
Showing 341–360 of 460 · page 18 of 23
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