Tony Katz & Major Mike Lyons on Rescued U.S. Pilots

0:00Yo, it's your boy B-Titty. Ashley Renee. G and Q. You're a crew with the what is you doing podcast? The only show where the sports takes a while, the bets are questionable, and the laughs are guaranteed. If you're into sports picks that sparks fights, parlay dreams that always go left, pop culture chaos, and a kind of the base that'll make you yell at your phone, this is the podcast for you. Catch every episode on all podcast platforms and watch the full unfiltered Madness on YouTube. Subscribe now and ride with the crew, because if you ain't tuned in, what are you doing? What are you doing? So how exactly does the military work a mission like that to save the pilot shot down in Iran? Tony Katz, Tony Katz today. Good to be with you. Find everything I do over at TonyKatz.com. Live streaming on the YouTube, check it out for yourself. YouTube.com slash Tony Katz. The chat room is open. The phone number, because sometimes people ask, 833 got Tony, 833, 468, 8669. Major Mike Lyons joins me right now.

1:00Retired, United States Army, a military analyst, an hour guy with the knowledge of what's happening. Let's talk about this, this exultation that took place. The level of deception that took place you were saying during the break, it's sunsoo, right? A warfare is deception. For sure. First, we talk about this plane, the F-15E Strike Eagle being shot down. What can you tell us about this plane? I only know that it can do low altitude kind of work. Do you know how it was flying, what was happening, and how it was taken down? Yeah, it was flying in a low enough altitude that likely a man pad, a shoulder fire, S-A-7 or Sam, or something that was not part of this, tied in global or regional air defense platform that Iran has. Those systems are gone. They can no longer defend their airspace at scale, but what they can do is have a one-off person like this individual who pulled the trigger, and if the F-15 gets low enough

2:02and all the conditions are set, it's possible that from the element of surprise that this could happen, which is likely what happened. I mean, again, commanders expect losses and the fact that with over 20,000 missions now flown, they really only fired and shot down, or is it four, is the total number of aircraft, an A-10, a couple helicopters this one. So again, they will probably review the low altitude missions at this point and might not use this aircraft again, because that's probably what happened. I don't want to say they got overconfident, but they probably didn't take this threat as that serious because that was likely what took it down. So the plane is shot down. Both pilots eject one pilot was quickly recovered. That's the actual pilot. Then you have the weapons officer in the rear. Do we have any understanding of what happened to him after he ejected? Well, no, only reports have been sketchy

3:02coming from different individuals who say that they have this information. Well, probably hear more from the president here at one o'clock, he'll want to tell this story. But they were obviously separated by a distance, they would have been picked up both at the same time. But what we're hearing, he was injured and in a classic style of this combat search and rescue mission, there's a certain template playbook that goes out there. He has on his person encrypted ways to communicate because in the old days, the chair was a certain one of a beacon, but that becomes a beacon for everybody. The enemy could see that as well. So that's why he has to get away from that as best as he can. If we're pilots and airmen take a course called series, escape and evasion, resistance, course, survival course, that's pretty difficult day. They offered it actually back to the military academies when I was going there as well. Very challenging. And in this case, it's designed to simulate what specifically could happen to you if you're captured.

4:02Well, the first part of it is getting away, evading the enemies, the most important thing, and having the guile. And what keeps those pilots and airmen going is the fact that they know someone's going to come after and the combat search and rescue guys are going to come after them. So right now, we know there was a great distance. He had to go about 7,000 kilometers up a ridge line where he held his position there and then decided to signal that that's where he was at. And then the plan went in place to pick him out of there. Talking to Major Mike Lyons, retired United States Army military analyst, a mission like this for X-Field. And hearing the CIA taking credit for, credit being given to the CIA. I don't know what's true there. Isn't about pushing that, hey, this was a maritime operation. We're going to hit him at the coast or that's where he is to misdirect. You would think that they would already get the hint that everything we're saying can't be trusted by any level. But that level of misdirection, what's happening with this with this White House

5:02or this Pentagon and stuff that I appreciate and that I like from what you know of the mission to get him back, exactly how difficult is something like this? Yeah, extremely difficult. And again, the planning that it took to set up that misdirection to basically tell the Iranians, hey, we have him and we're going to get him to this certain spot. It was all about to take any IRG forces that could possibly have been in the area and get them moving in a different direction totally. We know that creeper drone was well above the clouds and would use to protect the individual. Anybody that got into three kilometers of them was subsequently taken out by the drone. And so it was designed because they knew that they would likely meet some level of resistance when they got into the ground based on the amount of material that they were bringing in, Delta Special Forces, Navy SEALs and the like. And so again, all of warfare is deception and that is true today as it was back in Sun Seuss time.

6:03And this shows you that the CIA, along with the Israeli Musad, I'm sure that they had a lot to do with this as well. I know they had troops on the ground helping this as well. It's easy to stall the enemy in a false sense of security when that enemy is desperate for a win. They were desperate to find that pilot. They were absolutely had to have them wanted the propaganda, wanted this to be this kind of North Korean moment there. And when you're desperate for a win like that, you make bad decisions and that's what ended up helping us get them out of there. So we get this pilot. We're able to show we can get our people at a moment's notice and you bring up the idea of they were desperate to have this trophy and the abuse would have just been horrifying. Is this demoralizing for the Iranians or is that a bit of guesswork to which they know they're losing, they know they're being hit, they know they're being attacked, they know that they keep losing people,

7:05the Israelis confirming today the taking out of the intelligence chief of the IRGC, Kademi KHA, DEMI. Does this further demoralize what could be any level of Iranian resistance? And does it improve the odds of the people taking on the IRGC sooner rather than later? I think the IRGC gets taken on once we take out their infrastructure, once we take out the grids what the president plans on doing tomorrow. Let's hope he does. I think that's all part of finishing this job. I think that's going to be an important element of this. I don't think this alone does it. This is a very resilient regime that's been around for a long time and can suffer many losses, appear to have decentralized a lot of things. So for example, we know that they had groups, small area groups in the location where they thought the pilot was that were able to fight. So that, and then combine them with the Basige, which is the local town and local cops, they're still a pretty large resistance

8:06that from my understanding, from the intel community that's still kind of out there, it's going to take that lights getting shut down and the people having more weapons, having more opportunity to do that, but I'm seeing happening now. Can we get into that for a moment? Okay, we can take care of the dogs too. No, no, hey, please, what are you gonna do? Yeah, somebody loves puppies and I think that's fine. Talking to major, my clients, retired United States Army military analyst, let us break this down a little bit because you said I hope they do. And very much we have seen President Trump take the tact of I could hit the refinery here, I could hit the power thing there, I could hit the grid here, I could hit the infrastructure there, but then we have to rebuild that and I don't want to do that. You're saying you hope we do it. Talk to me about its effect, talk to me about its ripple effect on the people of Iran who now have to deal with the fact that this part of their grid, this infrastructure is gone. Yeah, if we need to wage war

9:07and wage war means by all means taking away from the enemy has to do that. And everything in Iran is dual use. Watching politicians get out there and try to say that this is a bunch of war crimes, it's just a bunch of nonsense. The grids that they have support the IRGC, they'll be very strategic about what they take down and what they take out. But let's say let's take the oil refineries, for example. You could take out areas just before them and maybe we can control those, but it's probably right, we're not, they're not in any, but it's interest to destroy them necessarily what's the president's threatening I do. But again, what's it gonna take for the IRGC to lose their power there? And so again, we're at this next logical step of escalation and sometimes you have to escalate to de-escalate. And so I think that's a good thing and I really would like to see bridges dropped. I'd like to see much more infrastructure gone after and I'd like to see, and I get it, the Iranian people might have some hardship to go through, but that's how countries wage war on another.

10:08So now let's do this again, because I agree with you, the people screaming war crimes are people who will scream that for anything. No, no, they don't care if they're correct. That part is inconsequential. But this idea of ratcheting up, it does that mean that there's been a recognition that the IRGC is not going to break until they're broken and then the follow-up there, forgive me to do two questions at once. You said that the infrastructure exists for the IRGC. We heard this about the B1 bridge, which the president and the Pentagon took out just a few days ago, people saying, my gosh, this major artery between Tehran and another city, but we learned that it's a bridge only used by the IRGC to move weapons and to move their personnel. So this idea that the infrastructure is for the IRGC's use, can you expand on that? Yeah, I mean, they've built it for themselves. They have, it's the primary objective is to move vehicles, equipment, ballistic missiles and the like in to different areas, rail lines,

11:10all those things are all about moving these weapons forward. The IRGC has been preparing for this war for the last 47 years as well. They had a couple of little starts and stops with a war in Iraq that was, again, more or less on their border went back and forth. They decided to tap out of that back in the 80s, but again, this is all dual use stuff because the IRGC runs the country. They're not, they don't have, you know, take out schools and take out obvious civilian targets. Most of the infrastructure are designed to support what the IRGC's doing, especially anything that has to do with the oil refineries, because that's how they make their money. And so again, I think it's all open for discussion. I think it's all open for targeting. I'd like to see us take those refineries. I think that's gonna be a difficult military mission. I'm not sure we've hit that island enough militarily that we would have some kind of casualties. I've said before, commanders expect losses and the fact that we were able to get and capture that pilot, for example, that having another capacity, thank God.

12:11But I do think that if we do launch some kind of ground operation into Carg Island or so, there's gotta be some expectation that there will be some casualties. I think the most important number on the board right now that's probably in the White House is a number 13. It's on the upper right-hand corner. That's the number of U.S. casualties so far to date. And that number's gotta stay there. And in order for the American public to at least go along, what's going on? I'm glad we dug in on the second part of the question. The first part can wait for another time. Major Mike Lyons retired United States Army Military Analysts. Follow him on the X-MAJ for Major Mike Lyons, L-Y-O-N-S Major, I appreciate you taking the time. Moor's coming up. This is Tony Katz today.