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- [00:00]
Farnoosh Tarabi
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- [00:51]
Bleacher Report Host
Bleacher Report app is your destination for sports right now. The NBA is heating up, March Madness is here, and MLB is almost back. Every day there's a new headline, a new highlight, a new moment you've got to see for yourself. That's why I stay locked in with the Bleacher Report app. For me, it's about staying connected to my sports. I can follow the teams I care about, get real time scores, breaking news and highlights all in one place. Download the Bleacher Report app today so you never miss a moment.
- [01:20]
Strawberry Me Career Host
Let's be completely honest. Are you happy with your job? The fact is, a huge number of people can't say yes to that. Too many of us are stuck in a job we've outgrown or one we never really wanted in the first place. But we stick it out and we give reasons. Like what if the next move is worse? And I've put years into this place and maybe the most common one. Isn't everyone miserable at work? But there's a difference between reasons for staying and excuses for not leaving. It's time to get unstuck. It's time for Strawberry Me. They match you with a certified career coach who helps you get from where you are to where you want to be, either at your existing job or by helping you find a new one. Your coach helps clarify your goals, creates a plan, and keeps you accountable along the way. Go to Strawberry Me career and get 50% off your first coaching session. That's Strawberry Me Career.
- [02:16]
Charlie Sykes
I'm Charlie Sykes. Welcome back to to the Contrary podcast. It's another day that ends with why, which means the markets are roiled, we appear to be slouching towards a ground war in the Mideast. Donald Trump who declared the war completely won and then declared that the negotiations were ongoing is back to making threats, attacking the infrastructure of Iran. Where are we going? Does anyone have any idea? Well, we'll try to find out. Joining me is our good friend, Lieutenant General retired Mark Hertling, who's out with a new book if I don't, A Father's Wartime Journal. Good to talk with you again, General.
- [02:57]
Lieutenant General (Ret.) Mark Hertling
It's great to be with you, Charlie. Thanks for having me on today to talk about these important things that are happening back and forth.
- [03:03]
Charlie Sykes
So, General, let's just start off with where we are and with all the caveats that this is the foggiest of foggy wars. By the time people listen to this, who knows where we might be in the news cycle? Just talk about the growing drumbeat for boots on the ground, an actual ground invasion in Iran. Your thoughts?
- [03:28]
Lieutenant General (Ret.) Mark Hertling
I'm concerned about it, Charlie. I've heard the reports from various news outlets this weekend, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, even Defense One had some interesting articles about what they had heard from various administration officials as to the president leaning toward using military forces inside of Iran potentially. And everywhere you turn, there was a different course of action option, what we in the military call a course of action. Where are we putting, what are their missions expected to be? How are they going to get there? And this follows up a couple of weeks of some deployments of a couple of Marine Expeditionary Units, units that come on board smaller than an aircraft carrier, carriers. They have not only the Marines and their amphibious landing crafts, but also helicopters and aircraft, two of those with the force of about 2,500 Marines on each. There's also been the deployment of the ready brigade is what we call it from the 82nd Airborne Division. That's a brigade that can be wheels up from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in about 18 hours. They are allegedly on the way to a forward staging area, a place unknown right now, along with the tactical command post of the 82nd Airborne Division, which implies to me that they expect to bring more forces to from that particular unit into country. So while all of that was going on, the president also said he thinks that we'll need about his words, 3,000 more strikes of the close to 10,000 we've already conducted. He has been back and forth all weekend saying that good things are happening and then bad things are happening. And then, you know, the fact that this morning he, this Monday morning he tweeted out, or true socialed out something about again warning the Iranians to come to his way of thinking or he would begin bombing all the energy plants and the desalinization plants, which was something that was debated last weekend. And most lawyers that I've talked to have said that is certainly an indicator of a war crime. But then you also had not as reported over the weekend, there were several strikes by the Iranian on the Iranian forces on King Sultan Air Base, where they significantly damaged an AWACS aircraft as well as other aircrafts. Pictures showed up across the web. To me, they don't look like deep fakes or AI generated, they look like real airplanes being struck. And the importance about those AWACS is there aren't that many of them in the force. There's just about, I think it's 14 or it's just a little over a dozen of those very expensive and critical command and control aircraft that give early warning. So that's the other side of the story. And the fact that Iran continues to launch ballistic missiles. So that's my quick 90 second sit rep to you, Charlie, as we say in the military.
- [06:40]
Charlie Sykes
Well, one of the takeaways I had from your book was when you talked about how unreliable much of the intelligence was, the reports, particularly in a fog of war, even going back to Clausewitz. The fact is that once a war begins, nobody really knows what's going on. And that appears to be the case as well. I mean, one of the things that we saw over the weekend, whether it's verified or not, I don't know, was a Reuters report that intelligence assessments could not verify that we had taken out more than a third of Iran's missile capacity, which of course is completely different than what Donald Trump had said, that we had obliterated everything. So part of the problem, look, in every war, misinformation, disinformation, wrong information is a problem. It seems to be exponentially enhanced in this particular war with this administration.
- [07:31]
Lieutenant General (Ret.) Mark Hertling
Yeah, it does. And I'm not sure if that's the fault of the intelligence community providing the information to the president in small gatherings or, excuse me, I should say representatives of the intelligence community, because in my view, the intelligence community is probably as good as they've ever been. But it's how that intelligence is represented in the small meetings of the primaries in the Oval Office. Or it could be the fact that there's a common cultural bias to the key players within the administration thinking that they're doing things that they're not doing because they wish it to be so. And along with that, I think the inexperience of many of the people in terms of what military forces are and what they do is contributing to that, certainly. So you add that to the fact that I think the president is the kind of individuals that he's the kind of individual that likes a lot of sycophancy, people around him that tells him, tell him what he wants to hear. And when you have an individual who doesn't know much about the details of military operation and demands to be told certain things, now that's just a guess on my part. I've never been in the room with the man, but it sure seems like that's what it looks like based on the number of people that have been fired or that are sucking up to them in Cabinet meetings and things like that. All of those make for a pretty dangerous stew in my book, especially when you're thinking about putting young American men and women into harm's way.
- [09:01]
Charlie Sykes
Well, let's talk about that because there's a lot of talk about the political fallout from this, the economic fallout from this. Talk to me a little bit about how this is sitting with the troops. The troops who have left their families very suddenly been redeployed to the Middle east are being staged for a possible invas that we don't really fully understand or they don't. So give me some sense of what this means for the officers and the men who are right now on the bubble in the Mid East.
- [09:33]
Lieutenant General (Ret.) Mark Hertling
Well, the senior commanders, first of all have to make sense of what the political objectives are so they can craft a sort of campaign plan. And what I mean by that, you know, the military executes battles. Senior leaders take those battles and shape them into operations, into the operational art. Our campaign plan and all of that is driven toward reaching the political end state, the political objectives. Because we have been so confused not only as a nation, but I think, I believe the military has been a little bit confused about what the desired end state is from a political perspective. In this war, it's very difficult to craft a campaign plan. And even as former Secretary Mattis, Trump's former secretary of defense, said the other day, the number of strikes don't equal a great strategy. And when you talk about 7,000, 10,000, whatever the daily roll up is for strikes, that doesn't necessarily mean you're gearing toward meeting your political objectives. So that in and of itself is challenging. And it is. And I don't mean this to sound the way it's going to sound. It's a whole lot easier to run an air campaign and connect and conduct kinetic strikes from the air driven by dropping of precision weapons from aircraft, Tomahawk missiles from Navy ships, those kind of things, than it is when you really get, I'm going to use the expression, we always like to use coffee breath close to your enemy when you have to put those soldiers on the ground, those Marines on the ground conducting operations that, that really have to have some key intelligence to get it right, but they also will fall into that fog and friction that also contributes to intelligence not always being correct when you actually put forces on the ground. And if that's what the President's considering to do in the near future, I'm not sure, again, what the objectives are, and we can talk about that for a second, and what the various courses of actions are.
- [11:42]
Charlie Sykes
I mean, it does seem as if he's kind of boxed himself in. One option, of course, is the one that I thought he was going to take early on. Simply declare victory, find an off ramp, get off, or you get drawn deeper and deeper and realize that if you really want to open the Strait of Hormuz and you can't do it through negotiations, you are going to have to put the boots on the ground, invade Kharg island, possibly the mainland of Iran. So he's faced with two very, very, you know, stark choices. And again, it depends what his objective is. Does he really still think at this point that he is going to be able to overthrow the regime? Does he think he's going to be able to denuclearize Iran? Does he think that he can open the Strait of Hormuz simply by military force? I mean, those are the big questions, aren't they?
- [12:36]
Lieutenant General (Ret.) Mark Hertling
Well, they are. And what I've detected, and I started writing them down as they popped up on the Sunday news shows, there's an emerging menu of what we in the military would call limited objective options. Seizing a piece of terrain like you just said, like Carg Island, Isolate, which is several hundred miles to the north of the strait, isolating various parts of the Straits of Hormuz. There's several islands that you would have to control in order to control that very narrow waterway. Conducting raids for different options, escorting ships was another thing that came out. Recovering sensitive nuclear materials. Now, that sounds like, I think to most Americans that you would send special operators in and find the place where they're being stored and then suddenly launch a helicopter and get it out of there. Well, what I would say in each one of those missions, they are a lot more difficult and troop depending, you know, troop to task, dependent than most people would understand. And when you're talking even about the size of the force that is currently deployed. You know, like I said, 2,500 Marines in each one of the Meuse. So that's 5,000, maybe another 5,000 in the 82nd Airborne Brigade that is in the area. That's 10,000 forces. And whereas that sounds like a lot of troops, I think to most Americans, that is what I would put into the category of a baby bear action. If you're talking about mama bear, papa bear and baby bear, this is baby bear. It is not big enough for a full scale invasion. It's not just right to align the various campaign objectives that he's talking about. It's something much smaller, more limited, probably more politically palatable and easier to conduct and initiate. But it is, in my view, having war gamed an Iranian scenario back when I was a major, it's horribly insufficient to conduct any kind of military operations beyond the narrowest objectives.
- [14:48]
Charlie Sykes
And of course, then the question is, who is he listening to? You know, we've heard that he doesn't actually read his briefs. And so what, they've been giving him these little sizzle reels, these kind of, you know, short take snuff films showing things blowing up. It seems that Donald Trump, you know, depending on what day you're talking to him, is, you know, who became bored with peace and then he became bored with war. But again, the question is, who is he listening to? Pete Hegseth comes in with these sizzle reels. Give me your take on Pete Hegseth and how that lands with the military. Somebody referred to him as almost like, you know, pornographically aggressive. The kind of, you know, the kind of bravado. The kind of, you have to have big, you know, big biceps and, you know, vicious. Not just lethality, but viciousness. How's the military looking at Pete Hexith these days? Because he's the guy who's leading them into war.
- [15:50]
Lieutenant General (Ret.) Mark Hertling
Yeah, I can say how I feel. I certainly can't speak for the military writ large, but I will tell you that I think most senior commanders want a Secretary of defense that can bridge the gap between what the military is being asked to do and what the President's demands are. If that Secretary of defense, and I'll include in that the Secretary of State as well. If they're not bridging that gap between military options and political requirements, personally, I don't want a cheerleader to the troops. That's done by squad leaders and boat captains. That's not done by the Secretary of Defense. He's the guy that's got to understand the implications of some of the things they're asking. But you also have to link that with a president, as has been reported, that likes to see his intelligence in two. Like you said, two minute sizzle reels. Boy, that's an extremely dangerous situation because when you're talking about decision making in the Oval Office, all the easy decisions get made before they come in there. Only the hardest decisions are discussed with the President so he can make the call. So the focus, even, I think, on Carg island is kind of indicative of what is happening inside the Oval Office because it has become a shiny object. Now, this is an island that's not very big. It's about seven or eight miles in diameter, and it's the hub of which the vast majority of Iran's oil experts flow and are controlled. It's a transfer point because ships can't get into most of the harbors in the Iranian coastline. So they have this offshore island, it's a couple of miles offshore that they can fill up ships. So it's a control facility. Okay, great. You send in Marines, an amphibious assault, you know, a D Day type invasion. What are you getting? What's the objective for seizing Carg Island? Is it to control the flow of oil? I thought we were trying to open up the flow of oil. If. If you're just trying to control it. What I would suggest is because Iran is facing an existential threat to their country, they're going to blow that island up. They don't care if Marines are on it. Marines are going to be sitting duck, in my view, on that island. They are going to be attempting to control oil sources. And truthfully, Charlie, I'll give you a vignette. When my last combat tour in northern Iraq, in my area of operation as the commander of Multinational Division north, we had both the Erbil oil fields and the Beijing oil refineries. And Al Qaeda was very interested in controlling both of those facilities because it drove money for them. But they wouldn't care if the Americans took it over along with the Iranian forces. They'd just as be happy as blowing it up, as controlling it. And I think we're going to see the same kind of thing with a potential invasion of Karnak Island. But I think the President has that shiny object in his mind because someone's mentioned to him that that's where all the oil flows from. So therefore he probably has said, well, we've got to control it. And that's the kind of decision making you get when you don't get more of the intelligence details.
- [19:14]
Bleacher Report Host
The Bleacher Report app is your destination for sports right now. The NBA is heating up, March Madness is here, and MLB is almost back. Every day there's a new headline, a new highlight, a new moment. Moment you've got to see for yourself. That's why I stay locked in with the Bleacher Report app. For me, it's about staying connected to my sports. I can follow the teams I care about, get real time scores, breaking news and highlights all in one place. Download the Bleacher Report app today so you never miss a moment.
- [19:44]
Strawberry Me Career Host
Let's be completely honest. Are you happy with your job? The fact is, a huge number of people can't say yes to that. Too many of us are stuck in a job we've outgrown or one we never really wanted in the first place. But we stick it out and we give reasons. Like what if the next move is worse? And I've put years into this place and maybe the most common one. Isn't everyone miserable at work? But there's a difference between reasons for staying and excuses for not leaving. It's time to get unstuck. It's time for Strawberry Me. They match you with a certified career coach who helps you get from where you are to where you want to be, either at your existing job or by helping you find a new one. Your coach helps clarify your goals, creates a plan and keeps you accountable along the way. Go to Strawberry Me Career and get 50% off your first coaching session. That's Strawberry Me Career.
- [20:40]
Charlie Sykes
So the key seems to be opening the Strait of Hormuz. You're suggesting that, and I think a lot of people have thought of taking Carg island as a step that would make it more likely that the strait would be open. You're not seeing it that way way not at all.
- [20:55]
Lieutenant General (Ret.) Mark Hertling
I mean, if you're controlling the oil transfer facilities, what does that have to do with getting ships through the actual strait? You know, in order to control the strait and I think I'm an army guy but I've. I've war game this particular things with Navy with this particular action with navy individuals a long time ago and I can tell you about that later on but you have to really control a small cluster of islands that in the strait that Iran uses to monitor and control the shipping lanes. They're called Abu Musa, the Greater Tomb and the Lesser Tomb Islands. Those names have not appeared in any press reports just yet, but those are the key in many people's opinions to controlling the strait. And each of those islands sit astride the maritime routes. And each of them have been heavily fortified with not just IRGC forces, but also Air Defense Forces. And each one would represent its own singular tactical objective, which all of this gets into a point. When you deploy forces, the first thing you do is an assessment of the area. The second thing you do is ask, what is your mission? The third thing you do is assign what the military calls troop to task. If there's 100 different tasks, you need more troops. If there's only one singular task, you need much smaller troop. We don't know what the task is as the public, maybe the military does. I don't know. I'm not privy to classified information anymore. But when you're talking about shifting troops around to do a multitude of actions, you just need more forces.
- [22:39]
Charlie Sykes
Well, you were in Iraq and you just mentioned al Qaeda. And one of the things that I think that we learn over and over and over again is that when you're fighting an enemy who has said, we say, asymmetrical motivations, it's complicated. The zealots, the extremists who are just not going to give up, who are not going to be intimidated. This idea, you could fly some airplanes over their heads and they would be so awed by that that they would surrender in vast numbers. Now, that may be the case. It was certainly the case in Desert Storm that you have many, many surrenders. But when you're dealing with zealots and true believers who believe they face an existential threat, many of those calculations don't work. And I wonder whether. And you know, again, you may not have to be concerned when you're having just an air war, but when you put troops in within, what would you call it, coffee breath distance, that becomes highly, highly relevant.
- [23:37]
Lieutenant General (Ret.) Mark Hertling
Absolutely. You do have rabid followers within the IRGC because they are paid better, they have a better lifestyle. They're connected directly to the Ayatollah. They have been, by the way, for 47 years. And during that entire 47 years, they've been screaming death to the great Satans of Israel and the U.S. well, now they're facing off on it. Now, there are certainly some within the population that would want a better life and want a replacement for the Ayatollah. But there's just as many, in my view, that are okay with the status quo. And that, in and of itself is dangerous. I'm going to go back to what you said just a minute ago there in terms of the asymmetric approach. You know, Iran has been Attacked over the years by nation states that have a very effective and efficient military. The US and Israel, they have learned from all of that. They know they can't beat us with those same kind of equal means. So what they do is they apply the kind of means we're seeing economic warfare to counter military warfare. They have ballistic missiles with standoff that are deeply hidden all over a country. Three sizes, three size, three times the size of the nation of Iraq. So they can bury them in, not in the sand like Iraq had, but in the mountains like Iran has. They have these things all over the country. And it gets back to your earlier statement about the pronunciation of how many, what's the percentages of facilities have we destroyed and how many rocket launchers have we destroyed? You know, I've been there before and I've heard the pronouncements by some in our military of saying this is what we've killed. And every time that happens, it turns out the percentages ain't quite right. You know, it's not as good as you think it is. It is literally the modern day equivalent of the body count. And it really doesn't matter what the body count is. It matters the will of the people you're fighting against. And every time you fight against someone with a strong will that is experiencing an existential threat, the enemy is going to get a mighty big vote because they have been preparing for this.
- [25:57]
Charlie Sykes
You know, I am old enough to remember watching the evening news where every single night they would show the body count or the alleged body count. You know, when I asked you before about the soldiers, what they must be thinking, I was actually thinking of your book, which I'm holding up again, if I don't return A Father's wartime journal, which really begins with, well, based on the letters that you as a young major wrote home to your family. And I was thinking that, you know, every one of those 50,000 or whatever number of troops in the Middle east, these are all, you know, men and women who are writing home to their families right now, you know, and basically, you know, thinking through what if I don't return. And one of the things that really struck me was, you know, that it's important for us to understand the, you know, to personalize, you know, all of the resources. And I see, I don't want to even use the word resources, the human beings that we're putting in harm's way, what it means for their families, what it means for their communities, what it means for their commanders. And so what a weighty decision it is to do that. And so to watch the unseriousness of this is really painful, especially reading your book. And I did two things yesterday, and I read your book. And I also was reading this long interview that David French had with Stanley McChrystal. If you've seen it in the New York Times.
- [27:17]
Lieutenant General (Ret.) Mark Hertling
Yeah, I did see it. And by the way, David French was part of our division in Iraq in 2003. I don't know if you knew that.
- [27:23]
Charlie Sykes
I did know that.
- [27:24]
Lieutenant General (Ret.) Mark Hertling
He was a soldier in the first Armored Division. Yeah, Great guy.
- [27:26]
Charlie Sykes
I did. I did know that. But it was an interesting discussion. And I don't know whether or not I'm gonna be able to connect the dots about what our military is becoming, because you're describing a military that was still a citizen force, even though we didn't have a draft. And yet it does seem that increasingly the. And David talks about this all the time, that the military is becoming a culture separate from the main culture, that so few Americans actually actively participate. So that if you create a warrior cast, there are consequences to that. And you have a line in the book where someone is giving. I can't remember whether it was you or not. It was. Somebody's giving advice to a young. I think you're quoting a novel, actually. Somebody is giving advice to a young careerist officer. And it was something like, you know, if you have a choice between being a good soldier and being a good human being, be a good human being first. That's how you become a good officer. And I thought that really encapsulates, you know, your. Or the understanding that the character of the military is crucial, that a lot of these decisions flow from character, which makes what's happening now, I think, so dangerous and so painful. Are we in danger of creating a politicized military that actually has different values and different incentives from the rest of the culture? Because this is something that we have avoided for most of our 250 years. Do you worry about that?
- [29:00]
Lieutenant General (Ret.) Mark Hertling
That I do. And first of all, that quote was from Anton Myers, once an eagle. What you just said triggered something I hadn't thought of in a very long time. And I'm drawing a blank on the author's name. He wrote Bonfire of the Vanities.
- [29:17]
Charlie Sykes
Oh, sure, yeah. Yeah. Tom Wolfe. Tom Wolf. Yeah, Tom Wolf.
- [29:21]
Lieutenant General (Ret.) Mark Hertling
Tom Wolf. When I was a young cat. Tom Wolf. When I was a young captain at West Point, he came up to talk to the cadets, and I happened to hear his presentation, and it was fascinating. And one of the things he said, and this was in the mid-1980s. He predicted this. He said the military, because it's becoming a caste, will become sentinels at the bacchanal, sentinels at the bacchanalian feast. I'll never forget that line. The other line he used was monks at an origin. And of course, the cadets laughed back in 1984. But I think that's exactly what we're seeing to a degree now. We're seeing less than 1% of our nation wear the uniform. 99% do not. And part of the reason I wrote the book is to help people understand not just combat and character and leadership, but also families and what they go through. What my family went through during a couple of deployments with soldiers who were young first and then became soldiers on their own. But the point is that, yeah, it is created. Let me cite another example. So I teach an MBA course, and every soldier that is in the military can name the seven army values. Loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage. And they attempt to live by those values. When I teach my MBA class of young executives from various industries, one of the first questions I ask is, what are your values? And I get the dog looking at a ceiling fan. Look, they don't know what I mean. And what we do from a leadership perspective is explain. If you don't have a personal and a professional set of values, it's very difficult to make decisions because you turn into a windsock. You make decisions that aren't related to what you truly believe. So. So, yeah, I think the dependence on values and discipline that the military gives make them a very unique profession. Other professions have the same, the medical profession, the legal profession. But in the military, it's very different. And I think we're beginning to get to the point where most citizens of our nation don't truly understand service in the military. They'll wear a yellow ribbon and thank you for your service or tell you how their grandfather served in World War II, but they don't really understand what it means to serve something larger than yourself.
- [31:58]
Charlie Sykes
Well, but Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are trying to remake that military culture into their own image, aren't they?
- [32:05]
Lieutenant General (Ret.) Mark Hertling
They are, yeah, they are.
- [32:07]
Charlie Sykes
You know, one of the things, you know, and this was something that David French and General McChrystal talked about. You know, what happens if you have a warrior cast? And, you know, General McChrystal said, look, people who are professional soldiers have a reason to want conflict. And then there's the danger of politicization, you know, particularly in the current environment, you start to shape that military, and it starts to maybe align with certain political leanings. When I was in the service, you never knew what your peers felt politically. You never talked about that. And I think that's under pressure. And so I guess the question is, as I was reading your book, where these military values are so front and center, you know, are you describing a culture under siege at the moment?
- [32:51]
Lieutenant General (Ret.) Mark Hertling
Absolutely. And I think Stan said it, and Stan and I are good friends, and I watched the interview with great interest. I also thought what he said about the three fallacies about the military that most citizens are beginning to understand. But, yeah, it is becoming a culture to itself, and it is under siege because there is so much. There are so many dynamics where various leanings in our political spectrum want to be associated with the military. I think that you're absolutely right in terms of it is under siege because there are so many people that want to be associated with the military, but not many people who understand it. I think most of the senior leaders in the military would tell you that military action should be the last resort. And unfortunately, it's becoming the first resort because our military is so effective, is so efficient and is so capable that they want to put us in first. They want to put the military in first. Diplomacy is hard. Economic issues are very hard. Informational dynamics in an age of misinformation and disinformation and malinformation are increasingly hard. So let's just let the military do the operation and clean this up for us. It troubles me. I hear a lot of people, and I had this conversation with Nicole Wallace on a podcast, say that the military needs to save us as a country. They need to bring us back together. That's not what we do. We have to be apolitical. We can't stand behind different presidents. We need to get out of the crowd cheering for one political party or another. And we need to talk facts and reason and logic and not so much emotion, which I think most of the American public is leaning toward.
- [34:50]
Charlie Sykes
I wanna switch gears and talk about Ukraine and something that you wrote in your book about when you were in Europe. But before that, your thoughts, your comments on the story from late last week that Pete Hegseth had personally intervened to take several minorities, women, off of the promotion list. Tell me how unusual that was and what you read into that.
- [35:13]
Lieutenant General (Ret.) Mark Hertling
In my 40 year, my four decades of service, I've never seen it happen. Once there have been people taken off promotion lists, but not by the secretary of defense. It's usually by A member of a Senate staff or something like that for an egregious like we saw Senator Tuberville do, where he blocked promotions for a while. There have been others. I have seen friends of mine on two occasions been blocked from getting promotion because of something that a Senate staffer held against them, which was in my view, despicable. When you are the Secretary of Defense and you pull someone off and then one of your staffers, as that happened last week, is asked by Congress and the Secretary is asked by Congress, why did you do this? And the answer is, well, I can do that because the individual serves at the pleasure of the President. Yeah, you can, but what's the reason? Why did you do it? And they're not given any reason. So that troubles me. And having sat on promotion boards for one star, two star generals, colonels majors and command boards, I've sat a total of. And sergeants majors by the way too. I've sat a total of six promotion boards in my life. They are the most fair system of promoting those with the most potential that you can imagine. I wish people would see how promotion boards are run because they are run very effectively and they get the best of the best. So for an arbitrary pulling of two women and two males, one of which I think was African American, that's just horrific in my view. Unless you can give a reason for it.
- [36:54]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah. And apparently they don't want to articulate what the actual reason is. Okay, so let's switch gears to Ukraine. And I want to go back to something you wrote in your book. Probably the strongest frustration that you express in this book is something that happened back. And correct me if I get these dates wrong, back in 2012, when you were in Europe and you were trying to convince Congress and perhaps the administration do not remove the armored brigades from Europe. They serve a major deterrent force. If you do that, you will embolden Vladimir Putin to make various moves that that he's been contemplating. But as you point out, you were dismissed as a Cold War general. Everybody wanted to basically move on. And in fact you lost that argument.
- [37:54]
Lieutenant General (Ret.) Mark Hertling
I did.
- [37:54]
Charlie Sykes
And then you make. Okay, just talk to me a little bit about that because as you try to go back and re engineer why certain things happen. We remove our armored brigades, two years later, Putin moves into Crimea and the Donbas.
- [38:11]
Lieutenant General (Ret.) Mark Hertling
Correct.
- [38:12]
Charlie Sykes
And you describe that as an avoidable tragedy. Just. Can you briefly talk about that? Because this seems like one of those things that reminds us that these actions have consequences and that deterrence is important and credibility.
- [38:26]
Lieutenant General (Ret.) Mark Hertling
Yeah, I not Only shared my personal thoughts and the trend lines we were seeing as US Army, Europeans, Europe. But I also showed some intelligence that came from several of our intelligence agencies about what we saw happening. All of that was in a classified session with several congressmen. And one of the things that just frustrated me was one congressman. I'll never forget this. I won't say who he was or what state he was from, but he said he would much rather have that armored brigade in the post that was near. Well, that was part of his district, so that they could support the economics of the region as opposed to buying schnitzels in Germany. Before I went before many of these congressmen, one of the members of my staff came to me and told me that some of the. He showed me which members of Congress I was speaking to did not have a passport. So I was talking to individuals who had never been out of the country, in some cases trying to convince them the importance of. Importance of our alliance with the NATO nations and with Europe and how much it meant in terms of all the things that they were questioning, like economics, the ability for training with allies. Because you don't just train with allies, you build trust with allies. You can deploy soldiers, you can't deploy trust. And that was my big argument. And the amount of forces we were keeping were relatively small. It was about 5,000 in a group of 30,000. Now, during the Cold War, there were 350,000 U.S. army soldiers in Europe. Now there are less than 30,000 other than what's been reinforced due to the Ukraine war. But all of this would have, I think, really been a detriment to Mr. Putin, thinking that he could easily advance into Ukraine. And he has met his political. Putin has met his political objectives during this war. One of the things he wanted to do was further divide the United States States and further divide NATO. He has executed both of those strategic end states.
- [40:37]
Charlie Sykes
Well, the thought that I had when I was reading your book 30,000ft over probably Oklahoma at the time was, you know, we withdraw those tank brigades in 2012, 2013. A couple of years later, he moves into Crimea. We don't really do anything about that. We let him get away with that. That then he moves, you know, he invades. He invades Ukraine. We could be on the precipice of the disappearance of almost all of the American deterrent forces from NATO. I'm not predicting that's going to happen, but it's certainly possible that Donald Trump will remove remaining troops from Europe.
- [41:19]
Lieutenant General (Ret.) Mark Hertling
Yeah.
- [41:21]
Charlie Sykes
What will that lead to? What will the consequence that will Europe be able to fill that gap or. Or will this be the decisive strategic move that will embolden Vladimir Putin to do even more? What do you think?
- [41:35]
Lieutenant General (Ret.) Mark Hertling
Well, yeah, I think it will. And you talk to any European force, especially the Poles, the Nords, the Baltics, some of the ones that believe, and I understand why they believe that they are certainly under threat for increased actions by Russia against their societies. And they believe it because they've seen seen it. I mean, if you were to ask most Americans what happened in Estonia in 2007 or what happened in Moldova in 2012, they wouldn't know. But those are active measures being conducted by the Russian military. And, you know, I can talk about it openly. At the time, it was classified, but we were seeing what the Russians were doing in every single state in Europe. We were tracking it. And so without the US There, I believe, can Europe continue to defend themselves? Absolutely. Can they defend themselves as a unified body without the United States? I'm not sure. But I'd go even further, Charlie. As we're talking Europe, there's also the same issues occurring in South Korea. There's also the same issues occurring in Taiwan and in every other nation that depends on us and sees us as a light on a shining hill. As a president once said,
- [42:52]
Charlie Sykes
this would suggest that the world is becoming a much more dangerous place rather than ushering in an era of peace that we're going back to and sort of everyone forward of themselves and some of the old rules that we thought had been changed our back. Thank you. General. Thank you so much for your time and for your insight and for this book in which I strongly recommend, if I'm holding it up here, if I don't return A Father's Wartime Journal. And when I said it was unexpected, it was unexpectedly, very, very. And focusing on the life lessons that, frankly, you don't have to be. It's not just war stories. It is not just an account of what it was like to be in Iraq, but it's also what you learned and what you want your children and your grandchildren to learn. It's a very, very powerful book. I strongly recommend it. Thank you for writing it, by the way. General.
- [43:41]
Lieutenant General (Ret.) Mark Hertling
Thank you, Charlie. I sure appreciate you saying those kind words. It was an honor to write that book. It's an honor to be with you today. And we just got to continue to build character within our nation and come back a little bit more humble and a little bit more kind to each other.
- [43:54]
Charlie Sykes
Thank you so much, and thank you all for listening to this episode of to the Contrary Podcast. We're going to continue to do this in war, in peace, in good times, and in bad times, because it has never been more important to remind ourselves that we are not the crazy ones. Thank you.
- [44:24]
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- [45:12]
Charlie Sykes
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Charlie Sykes
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Lieutenant General (Ret.) Mark Hertling
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