General Pushes Back on MS NOW’s O’Donnell Ripping Trump for Not Having an End Date on Iran War: ‘Good Strategy Isn’t Calendar-Driven’

MS NOW military analyst and retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Gen. Mark Hertling pushed back on Lawrence O’Donnell after the MS NOW host knocked President Donald Trump for lacking an end date to the Iran war.

Hertling joined O’Donnell on The Last Word where O’Donnell opened the interview by asking about the president not having a “time schedule” for the ongoing war.

“Gen. Hertling, you’re in the middle of a war started by the president of the United States. And the president of the united States says, I have no time schedule. None. And he’s in no hurry. How does that land on the service members serving in this war?” O’Donnell asked.

The general pushed back, saying such publicly-shared dates would provide little to no benefit.

He said:

Well, first, Lawrence, what I’d say is the president doesn’t need to give us a date or a time stamp. He needs to give us an end state. Good strategy is not calendar driven, but the conditions we are attempting to achieve is critical to the mission. As a commander in combat, I wouldn’t tell a subordinate unit to take a hill by 5:00 in the morning unless it was critically important to the rest of the mission state. I would say take the hill. So this is the kind of information that we don’t need from our president. To say that he doesn’t have a time stamp on when this war is going to end or what will come next is an indicator that the plans and the synchronization of efforts are not well developed. And I say that hesitantly because I don’t know what the plans are, neither does the Congress of the United States or the American public who should be supporting a war.

Trump told Al Jazeera he is “not in a hurry” for Iran to return to the negotiating table and he has no timetable for when they would be prepared to do so.

“I have no time schedule, none. I’m not in a hurry. I have no time schedule at all,” he said.

O’Donnell argued the statement made Trump seem “lost” when it comes to the war.

Gen. Hertling said he hasn’t seen enough of a specific, diplomatic approach from the administration and he argued officials have not been the best spokespeople for the Iran war’s mission.

He said:

The application of our national power, which comes in the realm of diplomacy, economics, information in the military, it’s the famous dime acronym that they teach at the war colleges are all synchronized, Lawrence. And that’s what we haven’t seen. We have seen an emphasis on the military for the first several months of this conflict. We haven’t seen a diplomatic approach that’s feasible or anything beyond dysfunctional right now, because the individuals that were sent to negotiate were not welcomed by the Iranians, and they didn’t have a plan in terms of what they were trying to achieve. The informational process has been chaotic as well. We haven’t informed our allies. We haven’t informed the American people or Congress.

Watch above via MS NOW.

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