Col Douglas Macgregor: NO the IRAN WAR is NOT OVER

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1:00Finding a hoodie that lasts through the season can be tough. The American Giant Classic Foolsip hoodie is made to last year after year. Snag the hoodie that brings comfort for life. Save 20% off your first order at american-giant.com with code staple20 at checkout. On day 10 of Operation Epic Fury, we are winning with an overwhelming and unrelenting focus on our objectives. Well, that was Secretary of War, Pete Hicks, just a couple of hours ago. First thing this morning, right out of the block. She wants you to know on day 11, don't worry, Doug. Everything is fine. We are winning. And to try and help us put some finer points on this and just wrap this war up before it's over is Colonel Doug McGregor, defensive form policy analyst, former adviser to Secretary Defense, highly decorated combat veteran. And dare I say seer who can see all this stuff in ways others can't. Welcome to the show, Doug. And just let me ask, what is your reaction to that comment from Secretary War? Well, we probably ought to hurry up our analysis before the war ends and we don't have anything

2:04else to talk about, right? Well, I'm sorry, but maybe you can find something. Actually speaking, what I found more interesting than Secretary Higgs's remarks were General Keynes remarks. Do you have those? We do have some. Because he stood there next to him behind the podium with his head down reading off statistics. Can you bring that up? I don't have anything for him, he's keen in that one. Okay, no, I don't have that one. No, sorry. That's a shame because it was deja vu from Vietnam, you know, I was looking at this thing and listening to all these days, we've hit 5,000 targets. We've flown to, I don't know, we are, we are accomplishing our mission. I mean, I listened to that from 1965 until about 1972 when we gave up and left. And to the very day that we were leaving, we were flying hundreds of sorties and dropping thousands of those, so forth, and we lost.

3:05So I think we're listening right now to a flood of statistics about how many aircraft are dropping, how many bombs are, yeah, there it is. Can you bring up the sound? Third, we've against our objectives, we've begun to target arounds, military and industrial complex, again, focusing on centers of gravity to get upstream of the shooters out in the field in order to deny them the ability to continue to generate those, those one way of tactrums. Let me spend a minute talking about the joint force across, you know, and we're having enough of this. Very, entirely, and tireless work. And I can't begin. All the sort of, all the, all the commentary about the joint force, because the year force historically has not done a good job of talking about the joint force. That's fine. But I was looking for the, where I guess we may have passed it where he sort of ran off all these statistics about how many, how many sorties and how many strikes and how

4:07many targets and so forth. It's very, when you listen to this, it's easy to become enamored of the statistics, but it doesn't tell you anything. It's sort of like Norman Schwartzkopf back in 1991 saying, yesterday we reported 252 tanks and armored fighting vehicles were destroyed, and the next day we have on and on and on. And what did we discover? You hadn't accomplished very much until you attacked on the ground. I think you have the same thing going on right now, and I think people are desperate in Washington to paint a picture of success. And the truth of the matter is, this war is not over. You know, President Trump mentioned yesterday to the world said, this will be over soon. And what was the response of the market? It was, you know, a bullion, everyone jumped on board and said, that's great. And suddenly everyone went from the doldrums back up again. In other words, don't worry about the price of oil. Don't worry about the problems that you see because it's all going to be over soon.

5:08There is no evidence for any of that. I don't think the Iranians got the memo because as far as their concern, this war is going to continue. And the other point is that despite the fact that most of their air defense capability doesn't exist anymore or it hasn't worked very well, they are able to shoot down what I would call all of the terrestrial ISR platforms. These are man to none man that fly in order to verify confirmed targets on the ground in the perpetual chase to find ballistic missile launching sites. All of those continue to be shot down. That's very important if you're an Iranian because that means it's still very hard for us to find and target everything. And secondly, there's no evidence that the Iranians are running out of missiles. In fact, they now announce that their ballistic missiles will carry as a minimum a thousand pound payload. That means a thousand pounds of explosive up to two thousand pounds of explosive. In other words, they're not skimping in any way, shape or form.

6:09They are pulling out the stops. And we continue to see tremendous damage inflicted particularly on Israel, which we don't see very much on television, but it's pretty severe. And the Israelis are taking on the shorts, as they say. And in fact, toward that end, I don't have General Cain saying it, but I do apparently have President Trump last night, obviously he had been briefed with Cain. Dead with some numbers. We continue to target Iran's drone and missile capabilities. Their drones are way down. Their drone manufacturing has been hit starting today. We know all of the places they manufacture the drones and they're being hit one after another. Their missile capability is down to about 10 percent, maybe less. We're also hitting where they make missiles and where they deliver missiles. But it's all resulting in a 90 percent decline in various things, but in particular, Iranian

7:09missile launchers and 83 percent drop in drone launchers, as you know. The drone launchers are pretty well shot, but we're at over 90 percent decline in the Iranian missile launchers, which is very hard to reproduce and very hard to get. Now that reminded me of something, and you brought up a second ago on it. But if you could comment, from the time you and I were fighting on the ground in desert storm, we were preceded by around 38 days of non-stop perpetual bombing from the air. And as you said, there was a daily read off of all the stuff, and yet when you and I got up to the point of contact, we discovered that not as much had been destroyed anywhere near as we thought. Do you think there's anything similar going on here with whatever President Trump is being told by his advisors? What is that translated to in your opinion on the ground in Iran? I don't think that we're having the effect that he's describing. He's still describing, for all intents and purposes, the numbers of weapons, the numbers

8:12of aircraft that are being flown, that these kinds of statistics really aren't terribly meaningful. You know, it's sort of in the same category as well, we killed the Supreme Leader, and there was an expectation everywhere that killing a Supreme Leader would lead to some sort of statewide collapse that we could then exploit to compel them to negotiate. Well, that didn't happen. None of the efforts to assassinate the top people have made much difference on the contrary. We've discovered what we knew before we started if you had any sense or any experience, and that is that replacements show up. Successors come into power, and they exercise authority. I just think that at this point, the administration wants very much to convince everybody that everything is just fine, and this won't last much longer. I think the point we need to make is that no, everything is not just fine. The UAE just shut down the largest oil refinery in the world with no prospect of reopening

9:16anytime soon. You have a similar set of circumstances in Qatar. In other words, whatever you say about what you're doing to the Iranians, you have to look at the facts on the ground. Are the Iranians continuing to launch theater ballistic missiles? Yes. Are they continuing to hit targets in Israel and around the Gulf region? Yes. We haven't even talked about Eastern Iran where you have more underground missile cities, none of which have been touched, because frankly, frankly, Eastern Iran is out of range for the most part of our weapons systems. This is not ending anytime soon, but I certainly understand why President Trump said that because he wants to reassure the markets. But eventually, the markets are going to figure this out. Well, that's exactly where I was going to go next, because that graphic I'm showing here, this is showing that the Gulf nations have slashed output by 6.7 million barrels a day. That's 33 percent of regional protection for the reason you just mentioned that the storage

10:17is full, and that they can't bring any more out of the ground. But just for everybody's understanding, the way this works is that the system is designed to not have war so that when they pump stuff out, they put it in a holding tank for a while, the ships come in empty, they fill them up, they roll out, and it's just this nonstop whatever, 15, 20 million barrels per day. Well, if all of a sudden you shut down the straight, then there's nothing to offload in those storage tanks are not made to go for a long period of time. So now the only thing left is to shut down production, and that's going to have longer effects even after the straight gets opened up. But right now, Doug, I haven't seen any evidence that it's going to be. No, the first thing we need to keep in mind is that roughly 25 percent of the world's oil is now offline. That's a quarter of the world's oil supply. Now that is offline, not for a few days or for a few weeks. In some cases, it's indefinite. So that's the first thing, 35 percent of the world's fertilizer is now no longer being

11:23shipped, and that, too, is a vital aspect of our lives that we don't pay a great deal of attention to. You know, natural gas fuels over 40 percent of U.S. power. Higher gas prices lead to immediate utility bill increases for consumers. So what does this mean? This manufactory is a fertilizers and chemicals face higher feedstock costs. It eventually we're going to see the price of food and consumer goods rise dramatically. And what about monetary policy? Persistent energy driven inflation could prevent the Federal Reserve from cutting any interest rates as they previously planned in 2026. So when you go to regions of the world, you look at a place like Europe. You know, we went into March 2026 with a very low inventory compared with previous years. Roughly 46 billion cubic meters of liquefied gas and global gas.

12:26So at the end of February compared to 60 billion cubic meters in 2025, we have 46 billion. So by February 28th, there were reports coming in indicating that LNG liquefied natural gas, specific storage, fell below 30 percent capacity. In Asia, the demand rate remains extraordinarily high, particularly in China and India. Each of those countries depends upon 50 percent of their oil from the Gulf. And even though Iran has said if it's a Chinese or Indian ship, you get to go to the Gulf, well, if you're not refining anything, if you're not extracting anything, if you can't store anything, what does that say about the global supply outlook? So we expected that there would be in 2026 a projected rise of say 7 percent in global LNG supplies. The fastest grosses 2019 driven by new projects in the United States, Canada, and Qatar.

13:28Now that's gone. That's out. And everyone is feeling the squeeze. You just go down the list 100 day buffer as of 2026 China holds 104 to 115 days of net import cover in its strategic petroleum reserve targeting the shadow supply, well, by capturing the durable and Venezuela and striking Iran, the US has taken as effectively shut down the two primary sources of discounted oil that China used. The result China is now forced to buy more expensive, transparently traded oil for the global market rapidly depleting its cheap reserves. You know, I guess what I'm trying to get across is we are not feeling the profound impact as quickly as the rest of the world, but it's going to catch up with us. It's going to catch up with us. You mentioned a second ago, Doug, that President Trump has got to be keenly sharply aware of this, because that's something he has always paid attention to, but he's also trying to calm markets here where he was last night.

14:30Like you do exactly that, Bob, trying to say this whole oil thing, not a big deal for us. The effects of other countries, much more than it does in the United States, it doesn't really affect us. We have so much oil. We have tremendous oil and gas, much more than we need. We have Venezuela now as our new partner, great partner, and it's a massive source of oil, gas, everything. We're in a very good position, but very unfair to other parts of the world, like China, is it example? We're doing this for the other parts of the world, including countries like China, and we're protecting the world from what these lunatics are trying to do. Now, what if you could talk about that, because obviously we do have plenty of domestic oil, but oil is a global commodity, which still affects our economy. I wonder if you can explain what the risks are for us. Well, I think the first thing to understand is that inflation is going to catch up with this, and electricity costs are going to rise, industrial goods will become more expensive,

15:35and our monetary policy is going to be constrained. You can't cut interest rates in the current setting, current environment. So, I think those three things, electricity costs, industrial goods, monetary policy, all of those will affect us negatively. Now, that may not be felt by the middle of April, but I suspect you'll start feeling it by then, but certainly by the time the summer hits, it's going to get us out. Luckily, and this is something that's going to hurt us badly as a country through the summer, and we'll have profound consequences for the President. And now, when you go overseas, of course, the global economy and recession are not going to make friends for us. And I think the pressure on us to end this, whatever it takes for us to end this, will be enormous. Now, when I say whatever it takes, I'm not talking about a nuclear weapon for God's sake, what I'm saying, is that people will say this has got to stop. And if you're desperate because of the impact of all of this, then you may be willing to

16:35weigh in on the side of Iran, which I think is going to happen, frankly, particularly when it comes to the Chinese and the Russians. And in fact, that's actually what I want to talk about next, because, first of all, the spot Trump's com was there to try and make the markets calm. That can work on just American Joe Q, public that watches on TV, it's not going to work for the people who really understand what's going on. But I think Trump's real terrifying and fear of all what's going on, and his anger really showed up after he made those comments when he posted this on Truth Social to where he's just really just kind of going over the top to warn Iran and anyone else that if Iran does anything that stops the flow of oil within the straight of hormones, which, as you pointed out, is already the case, they will be hit harder by the United States 20 times harder than they've been hit thus far. Additionally, we will take out easily-destroyable targets that will make it virtually impossible for Iran to ever be rebuilt back as a nation.

17:36And then he goes on to talk about that, and we better keep the straight of hormones open. This tells me that he is aware of how critical this is, and he's trying to use words to coerce the opening of the straight. But the question is, will that work? Is that going to coerce Iran to open the straights? No, not at all, in fact, right now. I think from the Iranian perspective, they are being told either you submit unconditionally to what the Israeli's demand. That's important to understand, because the demands that President Trump has been making are not his. They never were. They are Israeli demands. So what are they? No enrichment of any kind. You effectively have to dismantle your ballistic missile inventory so that you compose no threat under any circumstances to Israel, and you can't have any friends or allies in the region with whom you cooperate. These Iranians are not going to do that. They're not going to surrender, and they know what surrender means.

18:40So frankly speaking, I think they're in the mode of, it's better to live on your knees and die standing up. So I don't see any evidence that what President Trump is saying will happen. The other point is that he was complaining earlier that these ship captains that are responsible for these tankers are gutless. Why doesn't someone try to force their way through the Straits of Hormuz? I guess he doesn't understand the insurance industry. You can't ensure anything that tries to go to the Straits. They're not going to ensure something they know will be sunk. And if there's one thing we can absolutely guarantee, is it anything that tries to go through those Straits that the Iranians don't want to go through, will in fact be sunk? They have extensive weapon systems, missiles dug into the cliffs, ready to go out and sink whatever is threatening the integrity of the Gulf. So I just don't see how he's going to achieve what he wants by simply doubling down on what

19:41I think is already a failed strategy, especially since it's not necessary for us. Secretary Hicksett this morning also commented on that, but for all of his declaration and all of his, you know, tough rhetoric and stuff, this sounds kind of soft and tepid to me on Hormuz. What do you think? He takes very seriously the condition of that Straits. We have capabilities that no other nation on Earth has and we're certainly working with our energy partners across the administration to control for that. It's part of that scoping of this. The world needs to understand this doesn't have, this isn't intended to be nor is it something that will expand. We know exactly what we're attempting to achieve here, scoped properly, and the American people can count on that for sure. Do you think really that we know what we're doing? It's scoped properly. We can count on that. What say you, Doug? Well, I've never heard of a war that was carefully scoped. And if you go back to 1965 and come forward, we have scoped wars, as he says.

20:42In other words, we've imposed limitations on ourselves or we've tried to emphasize one thing or the other. But with the exception of Desert Storm, where we employed a very large ground force that could have easily crossed the river and marched on Baghdad, had it wanted to, we haven't had much success. You can blow things up and again, explosions on the ground. How do I put this? They're very seductive. You see the giant explosion and you're absolutely convinced that what you did made a difference. That's not necessarily true. The other thing is this has become extraordinarily expensive. I think it was $5.4 billion. We're spent just in the first 24 to 36 hours thanks to the intensity of our airstrikes and our use of all these precision-guided weapons. The cost of our air campaign, which lasted 78 days back in 1999, only cost at the time $4 billion.

21:43Did $6 billion worth of damage, but it only cost us $4 billion. What is this costing? Do some work with adjusting dollars. If you keep this up, I don't know that $50 billion as a supplement will be enough to cover it all. Again, why are we doing this? What is this going to do for us? How is our security enhanced? It's not. We're making enemies everywhere at a very high rate of speed. Let's just take a look at what the options are for President Trump because obviously this is having, he's got to, he's President Trump clearly feels the pressure. He's got to get that straight back open. He's got to get the oil flowing because of the ramifications that has domestically on his electoral chances coming into the midterm. He talked about that yesterday too with Republicans about their strategy going into the midterms, which didn't include a lot of higher-price oil. What's he going to do? There are also those, and this is an American we're about to show you here, but I really

22:45think this is more like on the Israeli side about not getting weak needed, not stopping this war because Trump talking about this is going to be over soon, and we're winning anyway, and headsets saying that at the top here, I think that there are those in Israel who are afraid, hang on, I don't want you guys to get weak needs to come to an end like you did 12 days into the last war here, and here is Jack Keen warning against stopping the war. Now we really saying that we cannot accept several weeks of oil prices maybe being higher than what they should be to take a run off the map as a predator in Middle East for decades to come. Is that what we're really saying that we're so preoccupied with that, that we're not willing to make that kind of a sacrifice here? I think not. I mean, I think we've got to open our eyes, get a little clear right about what is really happening here, and if we fall prey to walking away on this prematurely over oil prices, we've just given a run of wind, they certainly want that.

23:48Well, that's a great point. I think we're much tougher than that. Yeah, I don't know about tougher, but let's look at the premise of what he's saying, Doug, and that militarily, he's saying, are we going to walk away from a chance to take you run off the map? So that's saying that with the naval and air power we have a rate throughout the region, we can, if we just keep going, take them off the map with no ground force, nobody on the ground at all. Is that really possible? I've said from the very beginning that we have enough firepower and the air force and the Navy to destroy Iran. I don't think there's any question about that. You can destroy everything. If it doesn't move, if it's a building, if it sits still, you can strike it. And that's the kind of thing that the Airmen become involved with. They start running out of militarily attainable objectives, and so they just destroy everything that's in sight. I think we can do that. Now will that cause the disintegration of Iran and society? Will that cause the state itself to collapse, which seems to be the underlying hope, if

24:49non-assumption? I don't know. I don't think so. And I don't think that the world, after week, after week, will stand by and watch and do nothing. That's been my contention for the beginning, because it's always clear to me this was never going to be over in a few days. It's going to take time. And I don't think we're going to get what we want. Because remember, how does Iran win? It survives. So effectively, what General Keen is insisting is we can exterminate this country. In other words, we can kill enough people, do enough damage that Iran as a nation state no longer exists, and he equates to that with success, and he sees that as a positive development for the world. I don't. I never have. Not interested in seeing any country anywhere in the world, destroyed for vanity or for any other purpose, or for Israel's interest or anyone else's, because we have no interest in that. We really don't. We're not interested in the damage we're doing to ourselves economically and financially.

25:51And that damage has just begun. That's the point that we've been trying to get across to people. Eventually it will hit. The guy that comes home at night and says, I'm going down to the 7-11, get a six pack of beer and pack of cigarettes, and then I'll be back and watch the game. His life is going to be disrupted. Not the billionaires. We know the billionaires will go on being billionaires. But his life, the average America's life, will be disrupted. So no, I think it's a terrible goal. It doesn't make military sense. It's not politically useful to us or economically useful to anybody, but that's where we're headed. Let me ask you what the consequences are. Let's say that President Trump listened to that, and he does listen to Jackie, and there's no question about it. Let's say that he listened to it. He said, all right, now my knees are strengthening it up. Sure, we're not going to go with this. We're going to leave the hormones until we can force the thing open, whether it's by escorting shifts and all the common drama that would take. And eventually we could probably blow up enough of those things to get it open theoretically.

26:56But if they succeeded then at doing what she suggested and literally blew up everything, what would that do? Number one, that would take an enormous amount of time in this massive country, four times bigger than Iraq, and what would that do to our arsenals at home because we would have to bring it down way below red levels that would make us at risk everywhere else? How does that work to the trade-offs? Well, if you're Trump, you're telling yourself, I've used military power to remove access to Venezuela and oil for China. And I'm stealing Venezuela and oil and selling it at a profit for the United States. And that's a good thing. Now we don't control Venezuela. We don't rule the place. The government is not responding to us at all. We're simply going along with, unfortunately, what it cannot reverse. And that is the exploitation of their oil resources at least temporarily or for the moment by the United States. And this is seen as a good thing because it reduces China's access to cheap energy.

28:00That's step number one for the White House. The second is impose 10% global tariffs to fund domestic AI, rare earth, element infrastructure and protect U.S. markets. We're trying to do that because we forget that AI demands enormous, enormous energy. And the administration wants to fund that with natural gas. And that brings you to the third step. And that is you turn to Russia and you say, all right, we'll remove sanctions in exchange for a trade deal that secures minerals and energy and will unplug from, unplug you from the Russia-China-Iran access. Now, what happens after 80 to 100 days and China decides to retaliate? You know, in other words, it says, I'm not going to put up with this anymore. You want to war? We'll give you a war. And what makes anyone think that Russia is going to walk away from its ally in Beijing?

29:04I don't see that happening. So I think that this broad strategy that is animating Trump is going to fail miserably. It's going to drive everybody away from us. It's not going to bring anybody to us. And let's take a look at that. So you mentioned Russia a couple of times now. Before Trump made those comments that we have showed you clip from yesterday, he got on the phone with Vladimir Putin. And according to Peskov this morning in the Russian media, he's explaining what has happened. And he said at the moment, Peskov said there is no such opportunity to quickly end the war to specify that there are no such intentions. These proposals were conveyed by the president to his interlocutor. Let's see how the approval process will go further. But Putin's proposals to end the conflict in the Middle East are still on the table. Russia is ready to contribute to the peace process, but coordination with many parties is necessary. So Putin has some ideas to end the war, but apparently those did not go well with Trump because he didn't say anything on them.

30:05But then, and this is important too, after that conversation with President Trump, Putin came out and made his own comments about the Strait of Hormuz. Let me remind you that last year, about one-third of the world's seaborne oil exports passed through the Strait of Hormuz, and that is around 14 million barrels per day. Of these, about 80 percent were headed to the countries of the Asia-Pacific region. Now this route is effectively closed, oil production that is tied to the use of the Strait risk coming to a complete standstill as early as the coming month. At the same time, I want to remind you that the countries of the European Union plan to introduce additional restrictions on the purchase of Russian hydrocarbons starting April 25, including liquefied natural gas, up to a total ban on such supplies in 2027. In this regard, the government has already been set the task of assessing the possibility and expediency of terminating the supplies of our energy resources to the European market. We should not wait until the door is demonstratively slammed in our faces, but to do it right now

31:10and move these volumes away from the European market to more interesting directions, well, and to gain a foothold there, which is the most important thing. It sounds to me like Russia is looking to take an opportunity here to exploit the situation by saying, hey, we're going to chase this moment to stop on our time schedule the oil supplies that we're going to Europe, which in addition to the Middle Eastern problem with fuel for the global commodity is going to put even more pressure on the Western economy and the Western countries. What do you think is intent is here? Oh, I think is intent is to make life miserable for Europe and the United States. And if you were in his position, why would you not do that? I mean, after all, we're the ones that have imposed all these punishing sanctions, and he's simply paying us back for what we've done to him in the past. I don't think there's any news there. What I thought was interesting or what I expected that President Trump might do is offer a strategic bargain to Putin and say, look, we'll pull out

32:16of Ukraine. We'll get all of our advisors, all of our equipment, everyone in and out of uniform out of Ukraine. We will stop supplying Ukraine. We will not provide any more money. We won't provide any more equipment. And that's number one step. And number two is we'll meet with you. We'll put a map on the table and we'll decide how to divide this child once and for all. Now, if he'd said that to President Putin, that would have been very attractive. I don't think that that would have persuaded him to abandon China. I don't think Russia will abandon China because it makes too much sense for the Russians to do business with China. China is right next door and it's their principal consumer of everything they produce. But that could have since sensationally, I would say, changed the balance of power. Because then there would have been a greater incentive for Putin to compromise potentially in the Middle East on some of his aims, all of which we do not know. That didn't happen, Dan. So how do you persuade someone to

33:23cooperate with you if you give absolutely nothing up? He's allowed sanctions on Russian oil to be lifted. This is supposed to be temporary to help people that need it. It's too late. That doesn't make any damn difference at this point. For the rest of the world, they're all headed on a fast train down into the abyss. We just happen to be on the train behind them. It'll take us a little longer to get there, but we'll get there. And the Russians aren't interested in that. Well, you know, all of this is going to depend on how this this dynamic, I mean, whether you're talking China, whether you're talking Europe, it's the global economy, American economy, everything hinges on what happens right now in the Gulf of especially between the United States and Iran. And let's take a look now at the Iranian perspective, because foreign minister Abbas Arokshi was asked yesterday, what is your intent on this oil? Is this a weapon you're using or is it something you're trying to get rid of? Watch his answer. Is limiting oil supply part of your strategy here?

34:27Well, actually, this is a war imposed on us. And what we are doing is only defending ourselves. We are facing an act of aggression, which is absolutely illegal. And what we are doing is the act of self-defense, which is legal and legitimate. Well, we have already warned everybody in the region that if the U.S. attackers, since we cannot reach the American soil, we have to attack their bases in the region, their facilities, their installations, their assets. And as a result, the war would be spread into the whole region. So this is the consequence of the U.S. aggression against us. So he's saying, yeah, that is exactly what we're doing. So they have a very clear understanding in their one of their IRGC leaders this morning, just flat out said, we will continue to destroy anybody who tries to go through the straight without our permission to keep that prohibition in place here. So if Jack Keen gets his way, and we just continue bombing, and the

35:32Iranian say, we're going to continue keeping it blocked off, because that's part of our strategy. Who bleeds first? Well, he's General Keen is essentially saying that we are going to destroy the global economy, and we're arguing that the effects on us are going to be minimal. And so we just need to stay the course to hell with the rest of the world. I don't think that's going to go down very well, especially for the people who are at least in theory allied with us in Europe, because they're among the people who are most likely to suffer. So you know, I don't, the logic escapes me. We are treating Iran as though it is some sort of bacillus, a violent and dangerous disease that has to be killed and cut out, even if the patient dies in the process. I don't think that's a good answer, Dan. And so where do we go from here? Because I don't want to play one more soundbot from the secretary, heck said. In fact, actually,

36:38Garrett, he can first put that true social from Trump up last night, because there's something that's important here further down that I want to talk about. And Trump was saying last night, not just he was warning about the straight of horror moves, but he also was warning that 20 times greater firepower is coming if you don't open this thing up there. See, I think, yeah, we got that. You see, he's at 20 times harder than they've been hit thus far. Additionally, we'll take out additional deployable or destroyable targets that will make it impossible for Iran to ever rebuild back as a nation. Today, Secretary Hanks said this. He takes very seriously the condition of that straights. We have capabilities. Today will be yet again our most intense day of strikes inside Iran, the most fighters, the most bombers, the most strikes, intelligence more refined and better than ever. So that's on one hand. On the other hand, the last 24 hours have seen

37:38Iran fire the lowest number of missiles they've been capable of firing yet. Just a bifurcation, just the trend lines that we talked about on our first briefing. So a couple of days ago, Trump said something on social media, then allegedly we had the biggest strike that we've had. Now, here he says it's 20 times bigger and something much, much bigger is coming. What is going to be the cumulative effect on this? Is it, does it matter if it's 40 times bigger? Are we going to be able to bring them to their knees any time soon? And if we're not, what is that going to do to our side if we keep expanding that kind of ordinance, but it doesn't translate to any action on the ground? Well, the last time these kinds of comments were made, the Iranians responded with the enormous ballistic missile strikes on Israel, along with large numbers of unmanned systems or drones. And not only did they attack Israel, they attacked locations in the Gulf and more American military bases. So I think that's what will happen initially. The Iranians will strike back

38:41with larger and more capable explosives on missiles. I would say the following. First of all, if you need medication of any kind, you better go out and buy all the medicines you can get because in a few months, they won't be available because the petroleum ministry has a big role to play in the production of pharmaceuticals. So that's my first piece of advice. And secondly, start thinking in terms of storing food and any other items that you think you may need because as this war continues and it's going to continue, the impact that I talked about earlier is going to be felt here. There is no evidence that anybody in Tehran is going to pop up on the phone, call President Trump and say, oh, we're so sorry, we surrender, we'll do whatever the Israelis want us to do because that's really what it's all about. Now, we have other interests,

39:42we think we're harming China. I don't know what the Chinese will do, but I think the Chinese over the next few weeks, they're going to surprise everybody by what they may be willing to do. I don't know if the Chinese will fly some aircraft into the airspace over Iran and essentially tell us, look, we've had enough stop or we'll go to war. Maybe the Russians will do something similar. Who knows? Are there any number of things that they could do to signal? That's it. We've had it. But in the meantime, I think you just need to prepare for the worst here. Once the stock market figures out or the investors, the people in New York that run the financial system who are largely part of the problem for us, they're going to say, oh my god, and you're going to watch the stock market tank and you're going to watch the cost of a barrel of oil go up to 200 and potentially all the way to three. And all of that is going to bring everything inside the United States to a screeching halt. Now, right now, President Trump is betting based upon what he's hearing from

40:46General Cain and others that with enough explosives, we can win this thing and what's the win for us? The win is Iran, cries, uncle. We're surrendering. You can have what you want. We've taken all the weekend. We'll do what the Israelis say. I just don't see that happening, Dan. Well, so let's let's look militarily because that's exactly exactly what I wanted to talk about here, militarily, what is possible because clearly, Trump believes what you just said that with enough firepower, we're going to finally bring them to their knees and they will cry, uncle, as you say. But let's look back at the 2025 war. It was at 12 days. If anybody was crying, uncle, it was Israel because they said, all right, we're taking too much damage. We have to get a ceasefire. Let's go in here. Israel has, very wrong. This time has said there won't be a ceasefire in 12 days. They emphatically categorically said that last night. But you've seen you and I saw 38 days of an air campaign in Iraq that didn't bring them to their knees in 1991. You worked under,

41:47I think it was 78 days or whatever it was in this anti-serve war that that never brought them to the knees the way we thought it was going to. And even that was a more narrow political objective. You had World War II where both Japanese and German cities, we bombed them just almost into the Stone Age and it never caused the populations to surrender until a nuclear weapon was used. What can you, what, based on what you know here of the Iranian culture of their people of the terrain and of our bomb making capabilities, how long could this go before we get some kind of resolution militarily? I would urge one correction to what you said before we go to Iran and that is that the imperial Japanese armed forces were very concerned about Russian intervention that could have resulted in a German-style solution to Japan dividing it in half. And they knew what the Soviets had done in Eastern Europe and Germany and the Japanese weren't going to accept that. And so they decided to endure the humiliation. The bomb itself, while impressive, did not impress them to the

42:53extent that we think and the really decisive factor for the emperor and the general staff at the time was the very high probability that the Soviets would invade and they didn't want the Soviets on their soil. I think Iran looks at this as we survive, we win. The Americans are going to feel the pain economically. We're going to try and make them feel the pain militarily. We will inflict what inflict what losses we can on them. But we have to stay the course because the very existence and survival of our country is at stake. The Turks know this and the Turks have quietly tried to provide the Iranians with assistance in terms of intelligence and information. I think the Turks and the Iranians will grow closer in the weeks and months ahead. We've already seen the Kurds that we tried to rope into some sort of ground attack, turn us down knowing full well. Not only would they be

43:54destroyed, but we would abandon them. I think more and more of the world will come to Iran's side as a result of what we're doing. We are seen and I happen to agree with this as engaged in and in justice. And the people that are most anxious to destroy everything are unfortunately Dan or people of my age, people who are quote unquote boomers. And they say, oh, blast blast these people. Kill them all. That's the edge of the answer. This is something that goes back decades to the frustration with our failure in Vietnam. And the failures we've had more recently. The answer is always kill more, destroy more, kill more, destroy more. That's what we should have done. That's what we have to do now. We need to be more ruthless than ever. Now I don't think that's going to happen on the US side. I think smarter people will prevail. On the other hand, in Israel, that's a very different set of circumstances. And remember that if anything, Mr. Netanyahu has demonstrated

44:56conclusively that he exercises more influence over us than we do over him. We're doing all of this at his insistence. And we can go back and talk about the Zionist billionaires in the United States that effectively purchased the Congress and controlled the White House. But what's really important to understand is that Israel is being pulverized. That pulverization is not going to stop. And it's important for us to understand that we've said over the last several days, several times, we have hit this, we've hit that, and it's all stopped. It hasn't stopped. There is no danger of the Iranians running out of missiles. They can replace launchers, and they can fire missiles and drones. And they will do so when it is convenient and useful for them to do so, but that will continue. And that's why we get back to this question of what are we going to do on the ground that's not going to happen. This country will not tolerate a draft. You know that as well as I do. So what does Israel do? And depending upon how desperate they are, they may decide to use a nuclear weapon against

46:00Iran. Now we can only speculate what the rest of the world will respond with if they do that. And I think it would be kind of cosmic. And you point out that, you know, the world or the country won't tolerate a draft, but that is on the table, according to Caroline Levitt, when she was asked yesterday. But there's another aspect of this. I want to almost hesitate to do this to you, but it was said. So it's got to be addressed here. You mentioned that there had been some aborted attempt to see if we can rope the courage into doing our dirty work on the ground. That didn't work. But there is one retired general officer who thinks that a ground, incursion, a massive ground to incursion is necessary. It's really hard to imagine the collapse of the regime and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in the Basis without some kind of massive ground presence. Maybe this could be in the former

47:01protests or a fissure, a breakaway, a part of the security forces, the Artech, which is like the conventional army, maybe elements of that could turn against the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, where there could be even members of the RGC who say, and enough of this. So I think that's what we're kind of playing for. There could be the use as a president instead of troops. And it's important to recognize that for some of these missile threats, they're tough to get out exclusively from the air, although we're dropping off the numbers of missile launches and drone strikes. But also some of these deep buried sites, for example, could be another target. But you really need the whole elements, land, sea, air, cyberspace, space to get to a final resolution. I think he admits something correct there that you just can't win this from the air alone, because there's too many targets you can't get at. But what do you say about the first

48:02because he's definitely not the only one saying this is that, hey, maybe we can get them to turn against the regime at home, and then they'll rise up and they'll become our own ground force. What do you say? Well, I think that's not a reasonable assumption. It's not even useful to speculate on it. We don't, we can't make that kind of assumption. So I think you have to go back to where is the ground force. And how many troops would you need? Probably 300,000 plus. Well, first of all, where do you get them trained ready to execute? That's question number one. How do you move them? You got to move them to the region. Are you going to move them into Southern Iran? I mean, the Aleuka Stan down on the coast there. It's a thousand miles from one end of Iran to the other south to north. I don't think we're going to do that crossing endless desert. So where are you going to move in from? Are you going to move in for the Mediterranean? And most of

49:05this will have to be done by sea. What ports are you going to use? Well, Haifa is the logical place to go. But Haifa is now being destroyed, or at least it's no longer functional. Where are you going to go? Turkey, are the Turks going to let you in? We tried that in 2003. The Turks said, thank you very much. No, thank you. We're not interested in seeing you come in and destabilize the region again. Where else can you go? Let's assume that you come in somewhere along the northern Syrian coast. Let's just for discussion purposes. We managed to come ashore. You really think that satellite imagery and high altitude intelligence gathering collection systems are not going to find you. If they do, are the Iranians still going to ignore it, or are they going to target you? Well, they can target you with very accurate, theater ballistic missiles. I don't know if you remember or not, we were standing around in al-Jabal for quite a while, all floating in our equipment before we finally disappeared into

50:06the desert. And I remember standing here with a regional commander and he said, what do you think? And I said, I'm very concerned. We need to get out of here. He said, I agree. Both of us were worried about the same thing. What if Saddam suddenly had an intelligent thought and launched say 50 scud missiles at al-Jabal? That's al-Jabal in the map right there, by the way. How much destruction could you inflict? Tremendous. You could kill large numbers of people, but you could shut down the port. You could destroy the port. You could sink vessels. You'd be up until the end of the air campaign. There was a marine amphibious ship or a couple of them sitting in the harbor. And one scud missile, quite by accident, got within a hundred yards that landed in the harbor in the ocean. What if these things had been massed? Well, we got away with it. Let's put it that way. We survived. We got away with it. We fought. So this right here, this is the jabal. This is where the ships would have to come in and dock. And all they would have to do

51:08is take these two basic big targets out. And then the whole rest of the port is almost worthless. And we can't offload. Yeah, of course, but we're not going to go through the straight of four moves. I don't see any admiral anywhere who's going to advocate moving through the streets of four moves. They're not stupid. They're supposed to keep the water out and the people in and keep the ships afloat. So how are you going to do that? That's why you say you're really driven further north. Do you go to the Russians? You know, they're not going to assist you. I mean, I just think it's ludicrous. So we have to understand something. Precision guided missiles linked to overhead intelligence surveillance reconnaissance have changed warfare profoundly. We've seen it in eastern Ukraine. Now we're seeing it in the war in Iran. We've got to come to terms with it. It's a new challenge. We're sort of like the army, the army that just won the Battle of Omderman in 1899 and killed all of the, you know, the

52:13Sudanese tribesmen. And suddenly we're transported in 1914 to the battlefield in front of the Germans. And we come to terms with something we've never seen before. Heavy artillery, machine guns, barbed wire, so forth. We're in a new war-fighting paradigm for which we are not prepared in which we cannot understand something else as increasingly the defense is becoming or at least demonstrating its superiority over the offense. We are offensive in our forced posture, structured, kind of worked on. Now, if I'm proving wrong, I haven't come back in six weeks since I get I was wrong. Everyone in Iran is dead or both of them and everything's destroyed. So you know, maybe we're like the Romans, make a desert and call it peace. I still don't think that will happen. Yeah. Well, I mean, the history and an analysis of the geography of the forces

53:20array of the defensive capabilities certainly auger well for your assessment to come true. But just let me ask you in the final question here. One of the things that, of course, everything's focused on what's happening here in the Middle East for obvious reasons. But I, once in the time that we have here just a little bit left over, what does all this do to the Russia Ukraine war? Because already Zelensky is going crazy because he's not getting any more interceptor missiles because we're chewing through them all in the Middle East now along with Israel. Russia is continuing to work on the front line. They're still that they've slowed down over the last couple of months, I guess, for various reasons who can only know. But what impact does this war have on that war? Well, my assumption is that since the Russians are now doing a land office business by selling oil at very high prices to anybody who wants it, and that cannot do anything but benefit the Russian economy, that the Russian military is now poised for the size of operations. If we look at the distribution of their forces, it's not difficult to divine

54:24that they have a concentration towards the south aimed in the direction of Zabarisha. They have another concentration in North, potentially aimed at Karkov. Now, will they act? Will they now finally cross the Upper River, move south and take Odessa? I would assume so. And why Odessa? Somebody said, well, why not just go straight to Kiev? Well, once you control Odessa and you shut off what remains of the Ukrainian state from the sea, you're also eliminating a huge problem that they've had to deal with from the very beginning. And that is the arrival of weapons and mercenaries and personnel and intelligence agents and everything you could think of coming through Odessa into Western Ukraine. Once that's shut off and they control Odessa, effectively, I think Ukraine is cooked. It's a landlocked country. It's dependent entirely on what comes through Poland to the Baltic States from the Baltic Sea. And we all know where that's headed right now thanks to the

55:28war in the Persian Gulf. There's not much coming. And I think they'll starve Zelensky in Kiev now. They may yet cross the river and decide to finally move in and arrest Zelensky. What we've already found on the west side of the Upper River is that special operations forces, Russian special operations forces can operate with a great deal of freedom of maneuver. So they've got lots of options, but I think the first one on the table is probably Odessa. Car call will fall anyway. And then the question is what do you do about Kiev? Yeah, well, all of these questions will be answered at some point. And none of them are moving in the direction that are beneficial to the United States in either capacity. I can only imagine that probably President Trump these days is just dying, wishing he had listened to your advice in January of 2025 when he first took office and gotten the whole Russia Ukraine thing off the map because whether we sold them or gave them to Ukraine doesn't make any difference.

56:29We have all flooded a ton of equipment that he probably would like to have in his arsenal right now, but we are where we are. So now we'll just have to hear from him. I'm thinking strategically in Washington, the coal to Putin that was made yesterday would have had profound consequences. And I'm right here. What do you want? What do you want? Let's talk seriously and work it out over the phone and say I'm going to send a team over there. We're going to put this in writing and we're out. But there's no sense of proportionality. And this is the final point. We have no sense of limitations. We think our resources, our capabilities are limitless. They are not. And we're going to get a lesson in that. Yeah, I think it's going to be a very painful one because President Trump does not accept that. But history and in reality has a way of imposing it. We'll see. But in any case, thank you so much for coming on today, Doug. And given this year, an intimidated and uncompromised reality check

57:32about what's going on here. And we will watch and see how this stuff works out. Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks. Bye bye. And we appreciate you guys today. Also the lot more to cover here. First of all, with Robert Pape is going to be on at two o'clock today. Great historian who really is on top of a lot of the stuff has been for decades. I read a lot of his work in the our war against in Afghanistan. I studied a lot of his stuff and it really played out on the battlefield there. He really understands the Middle East. You will not want to miss this at two o'clock today. And most likely, I will be on possibly as soon as 30 minutes from now. I'm going to look a little bit more in depth at something secretaries of state of the defense headsets said this morning, which is maybe a little more illuminating on what other real state of affairs are in the minds of the administration that you might not have gotten. We shouldn't tune into that. And we will see you then on the Daniel Davis deep dive. You know, we don't have sponsors because we hate to hit

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