Mark Hertling is one of the people I follow on Ukraine. He is a staunch advocate for arming Ukraine, but he recently had a tweet thread defending what some see as the overly cautious and slow approach taken by the United States. Here are some tweets from his thread: Warning: This will NOT be a popular thread. I anticipate a high degree of pushback from those who follow me. But…I thought it might be useful to provide some thoughts as to why the US may be "rebuffing" the request to provide ATACMS to Ukraine. 1/15https://t.co/yNfXOjttFx— Mark Hertling (@MarkHertling) September 16, 2022 On ATACMS, @SecDef – a smart guy with battlefield savvy – likely weighed a lot of advantages/disadvantages of providing ATACMS to UKR. I don't know what those were,
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Mark Hertling is one of the people I follow on Ukraine. He is a staunch advocate for arming Ukraine, but he recently had a tweet thread defending what some see as the overly cautious and slow approach taken by the United States. Here are some tweets from his thread:
Now, maybe we should be sending more weapons to Ukraine, and doing it faster. Maybe Hertling is being too generous to a public official he identifies with, or perhaps knows personally. There are smart people who think we should be more aggressively arming Ukraine. I actually tend to agree with them.
But what is really clear is that this is a hard and complicated decision, the people making it are trying to deal with multiple other problems at the same time (dealing with logistics and training, helping Ukraine with intelligence and advice, managing an international coalition, getting legislation through Congress, weighing the risk of a Russian nuclear strike, etc.). What I find admirable and rare in Hertling’s thread is his willingness to be charitable towards government decisionmakers who we have every reason to believe are doing their best in a difficult situation and who at the very least seem to be getting things more right than wrong.