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
Of course, Ukraine, what's going to happen next? I don't know. And it scares the hell out of me because we cannot allow Putin to get away with this invasion of a territory and a sovereignty that he's been doing for the last almost three years now. He has to be stopped.
And I'm afraid that some in our government will tend to placate him, which will only cause more frozen conflicts, which he's created five of the continent of Europe. The partnership between Putin and Kim is just horrible.
And I think Kim's getting the worst of it now because reports this morning saying that, you know, he's sending waves of North Korean soldiers against Ukraine and they're being destroyed. So he may be getting missile parts for his intercontinental ballistic missiles in North Korea, but... It's not going to help them in terms of doing anything for that country.
And then, of course, even though China's economy is in the toilet and going down faster, they're still a major threat because they've got the biggest military in the world and they have great ambitions. Is that all? No.
Domestic terrorism, international terrorism, climate change activities, and anybody that's scoffs at that, I'll tell you the Department of Defense has been looking at climate change for the last 30 years, and they know what the implications of that are. I could go on and on. It's a bad world out there. It's the worst that I've seen in my 40 years as a professional.
Yeah, that's a huge possibility. But what I've learned in the Middle East and the amount of time I've spent there, whenever you think everything's about to go right, suddenly there's another car bomb somewhere and it causes more things to happen.
So yeah, I would agree with you that Iran's capability, they have been embarrassed and their capability was always poor and they've lost all their proxies. So it could be good. But again, there's always a fight somewhere in the Middle East.
Yeah, boy, that's a great question. And there's been a couple of folks that see it from the stand. If you've never been to Israel, you don't understand it. I was in Israel in 2012 with my counterpart there near the place where the concert occurred, where the Gazan division was. And we were just standing around talking on the outside and suddenly a couple of rockets started coming in.
This was in 2012. And he said, this is a typical experience. When you have the kind of terrorist threats they do, And when you have the terrorists doing things that Hamas and Hezbollah have done, specifically create the victim's doctrine, as they call it, in 2014, where everything that Israel does, we will call it the worst thing possible and take film of it and get it out on the world stage.
And at the same time, they're building literally hundreds of miles of tunnels underneath Palestinian citizens and wanting those citizens to be killed to put more blame on Israel. Yeah, you can understand both sides of the story. Israel has executed the war, in my view, very well.
There's been a lot of horrendous casualties and killings, but they had no other choice because they had a major terrorist organization three miles from their citizens. Uh, they had to do so. We would, we would do the same, I think. And Katie bar the door. If someone, you know, as far away as New Jersey started attacking Manhattan Island, we would go in and bomb New Jersey to smithereens.
So from a military perspective, they probably the X, they executed the war the best way they could. It's the political perspective that why did it get to this point? What caused them to come to the conclusion of no intelligence, lack of interaction with the Palestinian people, doing the kinds of things they were doing on the West Bank and in Gaza to really subjugate those Palestinians?
That all contributes, and you've got to account for that as well.
You know, I think Russia is on the weakest footing they've been on since the start of the war began. I mean, truthfully, you know, you've got Putin as a kleptocratic authoritarian mafia boss who has destroyed his military. I mean, it's about three quarters of his military, it's estimated, has been destroyed. His bond market just went flat yesterday. His economy's in the toilet.
His GDP is on a war footing, and it's paying nothing but hopefully for regurgitation of more forces that are going to get destroyed on the battlefield. And now he's using... North Koreans as his cannon meat, their equivalent term for cannon fodder. So nothing has changed in terms of the way they've conducted operations other than getting more fierce and more diabolical and more criminal.
So the potential for a Putin collapse and a Russian collapse, which is dangerous in and of itself, I think is much higher today than it was three years ago.
The problem is if support for Zelensky and the Ukrainians dry up, then we've got potentially another frozen conflict where Russia has been able to grab 20% of a sovereign territory and get away with it and will potentially rebuild and grab more if they're allowed to do so.
Yeah. I agree. You know, Putin is not the kind of guy you negotiate with for two reasons. First of all, he always wins. And secondly, he never lives up to his promises. He's a liar. So when you put them in a position of the Minsk Accord or the Normandy conference or anything like that, he has lied every single time.
And even a week before the invasion, he was telling everybody he wasn't going to invade. So how do you trust somebody like that? And say, oh, yeah, we can move forward if we can just get him to the peace table and give him X amount of Ukrainian territory and call it even. That's not what the Ukrainian people deserve.
He lies and doesn't negotiate in good faith, much like other autocrats around the world.
Showing 381–400 of 460 · page 20 of 23
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