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- [00:00]
Tim Miller
Hey everybody, before we get to general hurtling, I got a few news items and programming notes for you for Next Level fans. Jbl, Sarah and I will be together on Thursday, so we're taping a little late this week. It'll be out probably Thursday evening, Friday morning. Keep an eye on your podcast feeds. Also, a reminder to download our Bulwark Takes podcast feed on your podcast player of choice for bonus content, breaking news, hot takes, etc. Because there's no Next Level, I wanted to pop off quickly on a couple news items for you. The House passed a budget to keep the government open. It was a continuing resolution with support from one Democrat, Jared golden of Maine. Now it goes to the Senate where it will need seven votes to pass. This is a little bit of a sticky wicket for Senate Dems, and while I think they should hold the line in opposition, I've already seen Chris Coons out saying that this morning. There's going to be some legitimate counter views, so I'm going to explore that more tomorrow with Sam Stein, et cetera. But I think that will be an interesting strategic battle coming this week. One wrinkle in this budget for our DC Listeners. One fucking enraging wrinkle really is the bill includes 1.1 billion in cuts to the D.C. budget that could affect policing. I thought these guys were tough on crime. It is going to affect access to healthcare services and other public services for people that live in D.C. and here's the crazy thing about this. It doesn't actually even save a single cent. It is just the cruelty is the point all the way down. It is just revenge and resentment and going after these big city Liberals and the D.C. swamp and whatever this money is D.C. it's in the D.C. budget. So it will just sit around in the D.C. treasury rather than be used as the mayor and the city council had determined. So I expect to be a big fight over that in the Senate and a couple of other items as well. We'll have more on all that tomorrow. There's a new CNN pull out today I wanted to flag. It shows Trump with his lowest marks on the economy ever for good reason. It looks like the economy's in shambles right now. It's lower even than it was during COVID as far as his personal approval ratings on the economy, 56% opposed. I think there's room to grow there. And there's already a Politico story out this AM where some internally are trying to blame Howard Lutnick for all this. That's right, the Secretary of Commerce is responsible for Donald Trump's impulsive, ridiculous, harmful trade wars and all of the other instability that is resulting in the market crash that's resulting in the cuts to jobs, particularly in the federal workforce. But as my colleague Andrew Egger reported this morning, even in some private sector companies, we're starting to see announcements that there are gonna be layoffs related directly to Trump's policies. So I don't know, Lutnick maybe the fall guy for this. We'll see. But it's telling that even inside the administration, they're recognizing the trouble they're in on economic matters. So. All right, up ahead, we got a deep dive on foreign policy. Our good friend, excited to welcome him back to the podcast. Mark Hertling, Stick around for hello and welcome to the Borg Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back a retired lieutenant general and the former commanding general of the US army in Europe and the pride of Christian Brothers College high school in St. Louis. It's General Mark Hertling coming at us from Florida. How you doing, sir?
- [03:33]
Mark Hertling
Hey, Tim, how you doing today?
- [03:35]
Tim Miller
I'm doing all right. You know, we're just, we're both just living here, recovering from the flu in the red states, you know, trying to hold, hold the line, you know.
- [03:43]
Mark Hertling
Yeah, just thankful it's not measles or Covid. That's the way I feel about it.
- [03:46]
Tim Miller
You know, no measles yet, no mumps, no rubella. I wanted to give people an update on the state of play regarding Ukraine. And then we've got a bunch of other kind of related issues. There was, I guess, the outlines of a deal, at least a deal between us and our adversary Zelensky in Riyadh. The US Put out a statement that was kind of weird and overly fawning towards the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia who hosted us. But they announced that Zelenskyy had agreed if Russia agrees to a 30 day pause in fighting. U.S. intel sharing has continued. Now that's already happened. U.S. weapons shipment are back on. That's, that's already happened. The polls confirmed that this morning. Meanwhile, the Russians didn't really change their operations any. There were reports of explosions in kyiv last night. 14 killed across the day across Ukraine. And so Russia. I guess the other thing I should mention is that there's a Reuters report out this morning saying that they may not agree to a temporary truce. There's a Peskov statement saying, you're getting a little ahead of yourselves. We don't want to do that to reporters asking about the truce. So That's, I think, my summary of the state of play. What I miss. What do you want to add to where we're at?
- [04:56]
Mark Hertling
Yeah, I'll just say from the very beginning, I'm very, you know, I was skeptical of the Hamas, Israel cease fire 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 ski, 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 Walsh 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 ammunition 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.
- [06:08]
Tim Miller
That's a good point. Let's actually roll back the clock a little bit before we go forward because it does seem pretty clear at this point that the ending of intelligence sharing was aimed at forcing Ukraine to the table and that the United States, the President, Vice President Rubio, Waltz, had decided that it was okay to sacrifice the Ukrainian deaths and the injuries and the destruction that we saw over the course of last week because that served the longer term goal of, I guess, bullying Zelensky into coming to the table on this sort of deal. That was pretty clear at the time. But with the view of hindsight, that seems like that's what happened, right?
- [06:51]
Mark Hertling
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, 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.
- [07:38]
Tim Miller
I thought I was really negative and outraged over what happened to it. That's really just settling in with me right now. The accessories to war crimes element of it, because it is true. I mean, it is. It's a great point, because that's really what they were doing. I mean, they were attacking Kyiv, attacking cities, attacking first aid workers, which they've.
- [07:54]
Mark Hertling
Been doing since the very beginning, by the way.
- [07:57]
Tim Miller
Right. But they had a lot more success because without the intel sharing, a lot more of the drones and bombs were getting through, essentially. That's basically what happened.
- [08:06]
Mark Hertling
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 operations, the special military operations, are war criminals. And if that's the fact, if we're giving them an advantage, then we do become complicit in their war crimes and maybe even accessories to the act.
- [08:58]
Tim Miller
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- [11:44]
Mark Hertling
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 US 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 Nargano Karabakh or Kaliningrad or South Ossetian Abkhazia?
- [12:23]
Tim Miller
I'm three for five on that. That's not too bad.
- [12:25]
Mark Hertling
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 Donbas and Crimea. And in every single one of them they have continued to stoke that over the years and the decades to disrupt governments. I'll use the case of, well, 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 Iron Dentist or a minor civil war in Transnistria, in 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, Zaporizhzhia 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. 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.
- [15:01]
Tim Miller
Don't give MAGA any ideas about giving away California and Oregon. That might sound like a nice idea. I know the other one. So what is your sense? You don't have a crystal ball, but if you were gaming this out, war gaming this, are you expecting that Russia will accept this ceasefire?
- [15:20]
Mark Hertling
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 Wallace wished 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 UN is the one that normally establishes a peacekeeping force and the UN 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 Czechoslovakian 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, you know, 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.
- [16:34]
Tim Miller
I saw one military expert when I was reading this morning about kind of the various possibilities suggested something that seemed interesting to me, which was that this could be Putin at his most devious. Or maybe you decide to kind of play along with this for a little while and then Trump up some pun not intended there some idea that the cesar is broken by Zelenskyy because his goal in the end is to continue to not have the US be invol more and more. And so you don't want to anger Trump, though I don't even know what you could do that would have Trump in Vance change their tune on giving more weapons to Ukraine. But maybe something, but I don't know. What do you think about that notion?
- [17:15]
Mark Hertling
Yeah, I don't think we're gonna 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 US 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 is turned around.
- [18:45]
Tim Miller
All right, well, I'm going to read you the spin then from the ostensibly pro Ukraine, the old traditional pro military wing of the Republican Party. And you tell me me what you make of this. Here's Dan Crenshaw. He wrote this yesterday following the deal. Great work by Team America. Let's examine what happened. One, Trump means what he says and is intent on making good on his campaign promise to end the war. Two, ending the war and ensuring Putin obliges and never takes Kyiv is in America's interest. Our strategic deterrence remains established. Three, Trump isn't abandoning Ukraine. The pause on aid was very short, but Zelensky had to be brought back to reality. Trump did that effectively. Four, the minerals deal is a great idea. Five, now the ball's in Putin's court. He'd be a fool to continue his maximalist policy. Six, Trump still has plenty of leverage over Putin. Even without additional military support. There are still many economic screws that can be tightened on Russia. What do you make of the Dan Crenshaw spin on the state of play?
- [19:44]
Mark Hertling
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 and he will play it the way he wants to play. You know, I read a piece by Ann 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 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.
- [20:51]
Tim Miller
Yeah, I think the interesting thing of both the Crenshaw comment there, a number five on the ball on the court there, he said he'd be full to continue his maximalist policy of fully conquering Ukraine and eventually moving on to other Baltic states. In Moldova, Marco Rubio, in the aforementioned spat with the polls that you talked about earlier, he said something similar, which is like the Polish they need to thank us because Russia would be on their border if it wasn't for the effort here. And to me, that just shows there's this massive disconnect between like the old neocon wing who's who are kind of quasi, acknowledging that Putin does have aspirations beyond Ukraine and like the J.D. vance Trump argument, which is essentially like this was Trump, you know, this was about NATO and encroachment and you know, it was Ukraine started it. I don't know how you square those, those two points of view.
- [21:46]
Mark Hertling
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. And by the way, Hegseth has eliminated exercises from the European force. So we can't work and play well with others next year. All of those things are detrimental to our security. And I can't see what level of earth these guys are living in right now to think any of this is good.
- [23:09]
Tim Miller
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- [25:44]
Mark Hertling
Yeah, I mean, it would be possible. I think when you're talking about the overall strength of NATO, they are very good, and they outweigh Russia and their military force, but that's really not what I'm worried about. If they are together as a NATO, they can withstand any kind of Russian aggression. But what we're seeing is it gets to one of Putin's strategic objectives. When he started this war in 2022, he truly believed that NATO was very divided and the US Was very divided, and he didn't think anyone would take action. Well, he was surprised over the last three years. Well, now the question would become, will NATO pull together without a US Input? I think they will, but you now even have competing governments saying, no, we're the lead. No, we're the lead. I mean, the dynamic between France, Poland, and Germany right now is very interesting to see. Who is building armies? Who's going to be in charge? The Supreme Allied Commander. Europe has always been an American because they tried to pull all the nations together. The question is going to be there, truthfully, is, as Rumfeld once said, an old Europe and a new Europe, and the new Europe has experienced the threat of Putin during the Cold War. The old Europe is kind of good in their economic standards, and they're feeling good about themselves. The question is, can those threats, 32 countries of Europe, 31, if you discount the United States, pull together under one real main body? And if Poland gets attacked, or let's put it in a different way, and I'm sure Michael Weitz is concerned about this because he's got a lot of friends in the Baltics. If Estonia gets attacked or Lithuania gets attacked, is Brussels. And is Poland. Well, Poland will. But will Spain, Will Norway, Will they come to their aid? That's the big question. Will Article 5 drive these 31 other countries to pull together and defend against Russia? That, quite frankly, is a third of the size of the Californian gdp. And their military is three quarters of what it used to be or one quarter of what it used to be. So I don't know. I can't tell you.
- [28:02]
Tim Miller
But just like, on the equipment. Oh, yeah, yeah. As far as that's concerned, like, Europe could do it. I mean, obviously, there'd be a massive.
- [28:10]
Mark Hertling
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, but we made that mistake when we said well, Russia's got the equipment.
- [28:15]
Tim Miller
Yeah. Right.
- [28:16]
Mark Hertling
The key is, do they have the will to come together and fight? And we found out in Russia is, no, they did not.
- [28:21]
Tim Miller
The French have been pretty impressive. Speaking of old Europe, though, what we've been seeing from Macron and really across the board, I mean, hell, even Le Pen is kind of saying is, Le Pen sounds better than Marco Rubio sometimes when she's talking about the war, which is interesting.
- [28:36]
Mark Hertling
Yeah, it doesn't take much.
- [28:37]
Tim Miller
Yeah, that's true. One more thing on Europe, because there's some news this morning on the other kind of the economic element of this, which is certainly going to impact our relations. In addition to the military, Trump imposed 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum coming from the EU. Just before we started taping this morning, the EU announced they're retaliating. The measure would cover about 28 billion worth of goods, not just steel and aluminum, but also home appliances, agricultural goods, motorcycles, bourbon, peanut butter, jeans, all the American apple pie will also be hit. You know, again, having dealt with like the sensitivities of these on the military side, like, obviously this, this sort of trade war is going to exacerbate the tensions and the issues as well. Right, Sure.
- [29:24]
Mark Hertling
I, I, I mean, you couldn't do more things to disrupt the norm than what is going on right now. And that's the other thing. You, you know, you read Crenshaw's state statements. There just seems to be an apologist approach and in fact appraising approach to all the things that the administration is doing without the recognition that it really is first of all driving our economy. But for me as a military guy, more importantly, driving our national security toward the base, toward the bottom. And I just don't understand why, when things are in pretty good shape, you can comment on trying to get the NATO countries to live up to their gdp, which percentage of their GDP spent on defense, which is happening. Or you can say, hey, we really need to take a look at our economic relationships with different countries unilaterally. But to throw something directly at the entire European Union, it represents a big hand, little map approach to national security. And not every country in Europe is Germany. There are differences of the 49 countries that make up the European footprint.
- [30:39]
Tim Miller
I guess it doesn't really matter what the motivations are behind this. But really, if you just assess that there are only really two options, one is just Trump pettiness. He thinks everybody else has been idiots and he wants to prove that everyone else is an idiot. And he's the Right. One. And so we've got to go it his way. And the other is that he actively actually prefers the autocratic world order and would like Putin to gain strength and is fine with our democratic liberal democracies weakening. I mean, it's. It's one of those two things. And there's no other possible explanation. Right.
- [31:12]
Mark Hertling
And it's gotta be the latter, based on the attempts at damaging various institutions that contribute to what we are as a democratic nation, all the way from the 3 billion elements of government to the institution of the courts, the military, all of the different bureaus. I mean, it's one thing to say, as we've talked ad nauseam, it's one thing to say, hey, let's take a scalpel and eliminate waste. It's another thing to just chop halfheartedly in terms of what, you know, people do and how you're going to destroy institutions.
- [31:48]
Tim Miller
Let's talk about those chops. The thing that's been particularly striking to me is the va. That one's kind of hard for me to wrap my head around. I mean, look, as we are recording this morning, it seems like there's going to be massive cuts to the Department of education, maybe 50% or more in workforce. That's something that everybody saw coming, whatever going after EPA grants. Any Republican administration would have done that. For better or worse, the indiscriminate cuts at the va. I don't really understand the rationale behind that. And I'm curious, like, what you've been hearing from other veterans and like, the degree of impact we're going to see there.
- [32:27]
Mark Hertling
Well, you know, Tim, I kind of compare this to what happened with usaid. Most people in the United States could not even spell USAID a couple of months ago. They had no.
- [32:39]
Tim Miller
I mean, the letters are all right there.
- [32:42]
Mark Hertling
That's what I mean. But they had no idea what that organization did or does. And I would think, you know, when you say VA to most Americans, what do they think of? Well, they think of, you know, former retired military people going to hospitals and getting medical treatment. But the VA is just a massive organization that does everything from taking care of cemeteries throughout the country, all the veterans cemeteries, you know, the national cemeteries, all the way to, you know, suicide help lines. For a generation of veterans who have experienced post traumatic stress, to have somebody like an Elon Musk who has never served go in and just start chopping away at it and eliminating programs without even knowing what they do. It's not as dangerous as eliminating the nuclear guys that he eliminated that monitored our nuclear programs. But it is pretty friggin 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 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.
- [34:33]
Tim Miller
What's the chatter like about this? And I'm sure you're on either text chains or email chains or message we're hearing from people. That's not my world. As somebody that hasn't served, I'm just kind of wondering what you've been hearing from folks.
- [34:45]
Mark Hertling
Well, it's tough because the veterans can comment like I'm commenting right now, but the active duty force can't. You know, 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, 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. You know, 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 seem to care for you while you're there and then also doesn't treat you well after you leave?
- [36:00]
Tim Miller
You said one thing there that piqued my interest, talking about how it's a semi requirement for active duty. The military did not comment on politics. It does raise this time the pun is intended. The new nominee for the Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Raisin Cain. I'm just curious what your thoughts are on that. I mean, obviously you're not going to disparage somebody personally, but there is the situation with him where he put on the MAGA hat and said he'd kill for Trump. Some stuff that was a little eyebrow raising to those of us who are outside of the military. I'm just wondering what you made of his pick.
- [36:33]
Mark Hertling
Yeah, well, that's been reported by a lot. I mean, I don't think think we have a whole lot of proof of any of that happening other than what Trump said happened.
- [36:40]
Tim Miller
Right. It was Trump that said that he did that.
- [36:42]
Mark Hertling
Yeah, that's right. But it seems to be a very strange pick. You know, I met Dan Cain one time in a very short office call with him in one of his assignments and he was a National Guard, 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 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 CQ 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 toward doing everything that 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.
- [38:03]
Tim Miller
Yeah, that takes us back to heg, Seth. I mean, it's like equal parts farcical and scary. Like this idea that we're going to scrub the websites. We're doing a control F for the word gay. So we're going to get rid of the Enola gay. We're doing a control F for transition. And so we're losing biographies where it mentioned that somebody transitioned from one job to the next. The whole thing is absurd. But I'm wondering what you make of it and whether there's any serious ramifications beyond just this kind of how offensive and ridiculous it is.
- [38:39]
Mark Hertling
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 put into 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. And 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 has been studying this, and they have data that says it's going to be really critical 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 Hegset 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.
- [40:41]
Tim Miller
A couple of the other cabinet or quasi cabinet, in the case of Musk on Tulsi, we've had this mixed bag, right? On the one hand, you know, she has done some things that would assuage people's concerns about, you know, intelligence sharing, et cetera. You know, she did not go fully down the crazy pipeline right out the gate on a few of her decisions. That said, there were some reports out of the UK that now they're concerned that our allies in the UK are saying we're just, we're concerned about sharing intel with our allies in the U.S. i guess my question for you is, like, if you had an old counterparty in the UK call you, you just to talk this over how would you even think about this if you're in their shoes?
- [41:20]
Mark Hertling
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 in alliances where what you do is. You don't. 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.
- [42:19]
Tim Miller
Right.
- [42:19]
Mark Hertling
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. You know, you. Well, I could cite all kinds of examples. But when you have the kinds of release of information or the kind of terrorizing of the intelligence community and what they produce and the knocking of their capabilities, it does everything to eliminate trust between nations.
- [42:48]
Tim Miller
And then in addition to that, we have our shadow cabinet member, or maybe a supra Cabinet member, whatever you want to call him. Elon Musk. I wanted to get your take on Senator Mark Kelly. We did an interview with him on our YouTube page, folks, to go check out. Andrew Egger did that. And he's been really stalwart on this. And he was over in Ukraine right after the. We stopped sharing intelligence, basically just get a sense of what was happening on the ground to do what he could to kind of reassure partners there, meet with counterparties. And he posted a picture of this of himself being in Ukraine. And Elon Musk replies, you are a traitor. That's pretty ominous stuff.
- [43:29]
Mark Hertling
Yeah, it's pretty damning. When I saw that, it was like. Because I know Mark and Scott Kelly, by the way, both of the twin brothers, both are great guys. They are true patriots, unlike some of the patriot that's term that's used by others who aren't quite patriots. And they are trying to do the right things for the right reasons in every situation. And to have someone with the visibility of Elon Musk say something like that about another individual, first of all, it's uncivil, and that's the best you can say about it. But secondly, it's. And I'll say this, it's idiotic. Here's a South African saying, someone that has rode a rocket, rode a piece of dynamite into the sky a couple of times, and has conducted combat operations and really is trying to help a nation that's had its sovereignty and territorial integrity invaded, and he's being called a traitor. It just, it's mind blowing in terms of the ridiculousness of it. You have to refrain from becoming furious so many times every single day to just not react to this kind of craziness.
- [44:36]
Tim Miller
I struggle with that.
- [44:38]
Mark Hertling
Well, and right after he calls him a traitor, he's ethically proclaiming all of the quality of his Tesla products on the lawn of the White House, which tells me that's traitorous toward how we look at the separation of the state and the citizens.
- [44:55]
Tim Miller
Yeah. On the anger part, the thing that got me angry and it was rare for me, General, So maybe I'm growing, but I drafted a tweet that I deleted because I was so mad, because I felt like it was, in some ways, it might be read by Senator Kelly or his folks as being a slight to them. And I didn't intend it that way. So I want to explain my view longer. But he said on cnn, I think, with Kaitlan Collins, that several of his Republican colleagues have called him in private to just say that they were, they were offended on his behalf and sorry and blah, blah, blah. And I don't even know if he said the word sorry. And I saw that. And that is the thing that made my blood boil. I was like, if I was Mark Kelly, Mark Kelly's a bigger man than me because if I was Mark Kelly and these guys called me and said that I would tell them to kiss my fucking ass and you can go on Fox and say it and then call me, but I'm not really interested in your private entreaties. But it is, I think, pretty telling about the nature of these guys, that they know there's at least some of them left, fewer maybe than in 2016, that know better, that know this is wrong. And I don't know what their calculus is here. So I don't know if you got anything to add on that, but I felt like I needed to get it off my chest.
- [46:06]
Mark Hertling
I'll go back to my army days, Tim, and say there are seven army values. And one of them is personal courage. And all our new soldiers think about, well, that means you attack and throw yourself on a grenade when your other. No, it also means standing up for what's right and doing the ethical and moral thing. And what we've seen is a deterioration of that in some of our elected representatives who seem to have forgotten the phrase representative in their name. They represent other people. And yeah, they may be voted on by a majority or a plurality. But there's a great line in the play 1776 where the Congressman from Georgia, and I can't remember off the top of my head the name, stands up and says he's going to vote for independence even though most of his constituents don't want to. And he was the remaining vote for the declaration. And he says, sometimes your morals have to override what the people tell you to do. And we're not seeing the personal courage or the morality of some of our members of Congress. Which is the most disturbing part of all of what Trump has done to co opt. I mean, there was a. I won't name his name, but I know him very well. There was a congressman all over CNN and MSNBC yesterday proclaiming how. A Republican congressman proclaiming how we had to stand with Ukraine and bigger than Dallas. He voted for the CR last night, which basically shows he continues to support Trump when he knows that that was not a good cr. So anyway, that's my thought on it, and I don't know what we do about that.
- [47:44]
Tim Miller
Me neither. I think it's gonna have to get worse before these guys get smoked out. All right, well, some ominous topics today. Can we, can we end with a laugh? Can we end with a laugh for folks, please? All right, we'll see. Bill Burr, he's comedian. You know that guy? Yeah, he was on Fresh Air with Terry Gross earlier this week. I don't know that Terry knew what she was signing up for and somehow he got on onto Elon Musk. And I just thought it would be a nice way to end the episode to listen to Bill Burr talking about Elon Musk.
- [48:10]
Bill Burr
Elon Musk, that guy, like, who evidently is a Nazi. Like, I just refuse to believe that it was an accidental two time Sieg Heil. And he does it at a presidential inauguration. This is why I hate liberals. It's like liberals have no teeth whatsoever. They just go, oh, my God, can you believe I'm getting out of the country? I'm just like, you're gonna leave the country cuz of one guy with Dyed hair, plugs, and a laminated face makes a bad car and has an obsolete social media platform. You're gonna leave this? Why doesn't he leave? Why isn't he stopped? What are we so afraid of? This guy who can't fight his way out of a wet paper bag.
- [48:52]
Tim Miller
General. Got anything to add to that?
- [48:55]
Mark Hertling
No, I think he pretty much covers it.
- [48:59]
Tim Miller
I think he pretty much covered it, too. Thank you so much as always, for coming back. The pod. I think that we will need your expertise a bunch in the months ahead. So I look forward to talking to you again soon.
- [49:09]
Mark Hertling
Okay. Hey, thanks, Tim. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
- [49:11]
Tim Miller
All right, everybody else, we'll be back here tomorrow for another edition of the Borg Podcast. We'll see you all then. Peace.
- [49:17]
Unknown
Out my window Cool and bright fade.
- [49:20]
Mark Hertling
So slowly into night? It's funny how things look the same.
- [49:24]
Unknown
Now that my friend E changed? Give me one that I used to know? Now he's down with the PLO he's cold, kicking it out with the KKK no jbc, no JFA school He was sporting back in his shoes dealing was looking for something to use With a pistol in his pocket and a bottle of booze? Been you? Oh, how you changed? Oh, you changed? Oh, how you changed? I give you a hard time, didn't want to stay? You got out of jail just the very next day not see my friend is a Nazi? It feels like I'm the only one to blame?
- [51:03]
Tim Miller
The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.