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
But the other 31 countries that are part of the alliance and the other 15 or so that are part of Europe are not just going to chime in and support us when we need them and when we ask them.
You know, it's interesting, the UK has been one of the nations that has incurred President Trump's wrath.
And in every case before, when they were informed of what the United States was going to do, and in some cases, which was contrary to their national security, they would join us.
And they did so as part of an alliance that's dated back a couple of hundred years.
This time, Starmer said no.
And in my view, rightfully so.
When you're not told what the war is about, when you're going into it with Israel and you don't really have an end state, when it seems the strategy is not calculated very well and you don't have a stated end state, you're not going to get involved.
You should be smarter than that.
I think there's certainly a point to getting many of the NATO alliance members to pony up a little bit more.
But that's been happening since 2011 when Secretary Gates went to the NATO ministerial and said, you guys are not paying your way.
And it's not a check that's written to a big bank somewhere.
It's, hey, your security, it depends on what you do in your budget for your own military forces.
And some of you are lacking.
And in 2011, Gates proposed a 2% of GDP figure.
Now, that was a very round and generous number.
Trump is looking primarily now at just the percent, and has made it almost a fixation
where instead of understanding what the 32 members do, his fixation on percentages has distorted the discussion of what the alliance is and how NATO generates collective strength and how the members do different things together.
And to the audiences listening to this, not all militaries in Europe will build tank brigades or artillery units or huge naval aircraft carriers or submarines.
Each one of them have a different culture, a different fiscal constraint.
They have other things on their plate from a national security perspective.
Showing 21–40 of 460 · page 2 of 23
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