EP:37 - Trump-Netanyahu Attack Iran

All humans break the difference between humans and gods as the gods can break humans. The ghost is now hand in this world. You're watching provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton debunking the propaganda lies of the past, present, and future.

This is pervoked. [MUSIC] All right, everyone, welcome to provoked on tonight's show that, of course, is your co-host, the great Darryl Cooper, Martyr Made. And I am, of course, not Scott Horton.

Highlands alone, I'm filling in for Scott tonight. I am, you know, he is the boss over at the Libertarian Institute. So I hope I don't mess anything up too bad and screwed up for him. But Darryl, a lot to talk about tonight. I mean, so much has unfolded in the past week.

Last Friday night, the last thing I watched before heading off to bed and waking up to Warren the morning was you and Scott discussing the situation.

“So I mean, can we start off with, like, just your general thoughts on where we are?”

We're not in a good place. And it is great to be here with you, Kyle.

I was going to say at first, Scott got a lot better looking, but more hair, at least.

There's a live show I can't edit that anymore now. But look, man, this is a, I'm trying to, like, I've spent a lot of time today. Working on my notes and trying to put things together because I need to be careful about what exactly I say, because I've been talking to a lot of people who are very much deeply embedded in the system at the Pentagon mostly.

But various other, various other places that, well, the primarily have to do with the air defense side of things. But what I could tell you is that this war is not going well. Okay, do not believe the hype that you're seeing on TV. The viewers kind of, if they've been watching this show, they know that I have an air

defense background.

“That's what I did for 20 years with the DOD.”

And that's where most of my, like, really good contacts are in the system. And since this is a war of, you know, shooting missiles into each other's cities and trying to intercept those missiles, I guess that's, you know, a good specialty to have for this. But it's, you know, I'm kind of like, I, I'm really torn on this one hand because, like,

on one hand, I've done a million ballistic missile tests.

I've worked on development for new systems, new age of system. I was, you very much involved with very much in the, in the thing where you're, you know, I was involved when we shot down that satellite about what was a decade ago or now. Or so, when you're, when you're doing exercises like that, man, you're holding your breath and you just come on, like, we've done all this, like, hit, you know, get the hit

the satellite. They'll, you know, do this to us. And like, you're so happy when it happens, but it, like, so you do that. But over time, as anybody who was being honest about specifically ballistic missile defense could have told you, it's, uh, we knew.

Doesn't that great, especially when you're dealing with saturation attacks that have different kinds of targets and, and, and, and decoy, you know, decoys like the Iranians are putting up using all different kinds of tactics, kind of look for trying to move their launchers around and take different trajectories toward their various targets. I mean, they're, they're adapting their tactics on the fly.

And I can tell you that, like, when we would, when we would do testing, you know, if we want to do ballistic missile tests, we would put one of our ages ship say, in the missile task range. And we knew, literally on the ship, they're over the loudspeaker, counting down to us, okay, launch in fa, you know, counting it down.

We know when it launches, we know exactly the trajectory that it's going to be flying over. And it's done on a trajectory that is like our maximum radar cross section, just to make every condition perfect, you know, and, and even then, you know, we are, like, you know, I won't talk about exact percentages, but you don't have to get lucky to hit them, but it is not easy, it's, it's not easy.

And so, on on that point, Darrell, the essential launch point is so important.

“We've seen these reports that some of the radar systems and the golf, I think, particularly”

in Kuwait and Bahrain have been hit. And so, would that really make a difference on being able to intercept a missile? Because I think those are the ones that kind of detect the launch point. I'm sure satellites are involved in that too, but that early trajectory has to be important to hitting that later on.

Yes. So, so far, what we have caught to, because there's satellite photos that have proved it, or they may not have caught that, they've taken out three of our sad radar, the radar

I'm pretty sure we only have one left in the theater, and it's in Turkey.

We might have another one in Saudi Arabia, but what that does is it puts huge holes in our layered defense network, you know? And what we've been finding so far is that, and, and also, as you said, the FPS 132 early, early detection system that we have, which is very, you know, very important for,

“like, the, you know, for the, for the detecting launch point, you know?”

And allowing the rest of the network to sort of prepare itself for intercept. And I was talking to one of my buddies at the Pentagon the other day, or no, today, earlier today. And I asked him, I said, you know, at the beginning of this war, I was watching all these videos, and, you know, there'd be missiles coming in, and for every missile that was coming

in, I'd see, like, two, three, maybe four interceptors go up. And now the last couple days, I'm seeing, like, 15 to 20 of them go up. I am seeing, like, five to 10 interceptors for every missile that's going up. And it's because we're not, we're not hitting.

We're hitting, you know, 10, 15 percent hit rate in some of the zones where we don't

have, like, the multi system layered defense set up anymore because of the holes that have been poked by the destruction of some of the radars, you know, the eight, we've, like, we've got ages ships out there, the ages are not ships are not really able to participate much. I mean, the ones over in the East Med, off the coast of Israel, like between Cyprus and

Israel, they can defend Israel a little bit, but that's all. I mean, you know, the, the, the, the radars on those ages ships, I don't think I'm supposed

“to say the exact range, but like, it's not 10,000 miles, you know, it's not, I think.”

And so, you know, sometimes we have systems set up where, like, the whole point of, like, this integrated network system is that, yeah, you know, we have an early launch detection radar that picks up the track.

That information is passed on to the next stage that picks it up and mid course.

And by the time we get to the part where we want to fire at that missile, like one of our systems, we can draw a fire control data from any number of the radars that are tracking it and sharing that information with each other. A lot of them are interoperable now. And when you start poking holes in that, you're relying on a single platform to do the whole

job. I mean, it's just, it's just not working. I mean, it's just not working. We're, we're hitting, you know, one or two out of every 10 incoming missiles now and people

“pointed out that, you know, the rate of incoming as slowed down over the course of the”

war. And part of that is because we've degraded their launcher capability, you know, the number of launchers they have available, but a huge part of that is also just that, and this again, I got told this from somebody who sits in the meetings, who knows, there's not much left to shoot at.

It a lot of these basins that really is worth shooting at. I mean, especially our basing Kuwait in Bahrain, those places are absolutely trash, trash. Like I would be surprised if we even go back there to be honest. The one in codder is a little bit different, you know, because, well, the, the, the Iranians seem to be taking it easy on the Qataris and the Saudis for political reasons, you know,

but Bahrain and Kuwait, I mean, those bases are trashed. And the Iranians are shooting at them still, sometimes, but not as much, because there's just not as many valuable targets to waste missiles on and to expose yourself for over an Israel. I mean, which is where all the videos coming out with intercept, you notice this, too, is like

at the beginning of the war, you were seen videos in, you know, in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and codder, are all these other places where you'd see missiles coming in, drones coming in, interceptors going up, interceptors, you know, seeing those videos anymore. There's no more interceptors in those places for the most part. Like they have some where they can defend like things that they think are going to hit

like very, very valuable places. They have them very concentrated and put, you know, input and specific places, but they are not even, they're letting just the slow flying shaheds come in and like hit buildings, because it's just not worth spending a missile on it because they don't have that many left.

It's only over in Israel that you really see a lot of that, partly because, you know, we moved so much of our defense capability out of those air countries over the Israel, something that, you know, you've been reading about, our allies are not happy about. And, you know, we're really in a place, I mean, we're in day six of the four or three or four day war against Iran, and it is very clear at this point that, you know, somebody

convinced Trump that, you know, we'll knock out the leadership, the place will fall apart, somebody else will step like whatever, that'll be that. And he apparently bought into it, I guess, but that they had absolutely no plan to be. And that they're just flipping through the rollovets, looking for something thrown against the wall, hoping it'll work. And I mean, if you think about, like, you know, there's a lot

through, in between the lines to, like, get it. Like when they're talking about how, like,

US, you know, officials and CIA officers are meeting with the Kurds to discuss them possibly, like, moving in. It's like, okay, so what you're actually admitting here is you didn't have that in place, like, before the war started, like, this is something that, like, you're scrambling to get into place now, because things did not go the way you thought, you have no plan. You know, and, of course, the Kurds want nothing to do with it. The below, just the below,

she's in the east, which I think a lot of people were kind of, you know, were, were banking on, they want nothing to do with it. In fact, they're cutting videos, like in support of the regime, the Azari's, you know, they're talking a lot of crap. The Azari's aren't going to do anything.

Like, if they do, it's because they're being threatened in some profound way, because, I mean,

the Azari's, or, I shouldn't say Azari, there's Azari's in Iran and stuff, Azari by John, like, Azari by John, the country. They get 80% of their exporting come, and 60% of their government budget from one refinery complex that could be vaporized in no time at all by the Iranians. Okay. And they're not going to do it. The Iranians ability to escalate against them, I mean, is, you know, to say they have escalation dominance is, is a huge

understanding. And I would be shocked if the Azari by John got involved. And so, you know, we're in this place now, where, you know, our Arab al-Haiser, very upset with us, because we did not, you know, we did not prepare them for this. We didn't let them know, like, exactly when this was coming and get themselves ready. And when it did come, we had moved a lot of our stuff. I mean, just imagine, like, how they're looking at things, where we kicked this thing off

without giving them fair warning, like a head of time. And they look around and they realize we've evacuated a bunch of our bases. We're just going to let them get hit. And we've taken a lot of the air defense equipment with us and went and gone over to Israel with it. I just imagine, you know,

“you have to think. And I know that, like, the Gulf monarchs are venal corrupt, you know, just”

apparently just lacking in all on our leg regimes over there. But they have to be looking around and understanding, like, these American bases that are here to defend us or whatever, those bases that we have in Arab countries exist to kill Muslims and defend Israel. That's what they're there for. And I don't know how they could possibly escape that conclusion anymore, you know? And so it's a disaster, dude. And we have no way to end this war that is going to be satisfactory

to the people who started it. I mean, which is why I'm really worried about where this is going to go. Like, I think, I can't imagine Netanyahu and Trump just accepting the fact that, you know, they're not going to get their way in this and that they're going to have to leave with the Iranians still lobbing missiles and talking crap as they go. I can't imagine they're going to take that. So I don't know what they're going to do as they lash out as reality starts to set in.

But this is, this is, this is really bad. I mean, each saw the story today, NBC News was talking about, you know, the behind the scenes, Trump is showing strong interest in putting ground troops

“in. It's like, A, good Lord, like, just imagine how things are going. If that's what we're talking”

about. But B, that's ridiculous. Like, and his generals have got to be telling them. There's absolutely no chance we're putting the ground force. I mean, you could do special operations here there or something like that. But the idea of putting like a strong ground, we don't have the shipping capability to keep them supply. We don't have any of the logistical infrastructure in place to do anything like that. I mean, like, we could not do desert storm right now if the

fate of the nation depended on it. Like, we just don't have the capacity to do it. And, you know, what we're trying to do is the thing that, you know, air-war theorists over the years have tried again and again to convince people and usually to great effect, unfortunate effect, will work, which is just to terror bomb them into submission. And we've tried to, you know, and just so many

wars in the world were to it never works or six days into this war. And, you know, the Iranians just

in their, just last night, their nighttime, they had another just mass mass demonstration in like Iran, several other cities, hundreds of thousands of people in the street, wave in the flag, holding up pictures of the Ayatollah. I mean, these people, look, we, maybe we could break them

“if we went just World War II scorched earth for the next five years, but that's what it would take.”

That's what it would take. Like, this is like, and so you start to ask yourself, well, if that's what it's going to take, if this regime is not going to buckle and the people are not going to turn on it. And in fact, we solidify this legitimacy, at least for the time being, you know, while this war's going on, then what exactly is the plan here? You know, you, you really like, the Iranians are not going to come to the table and like accept the deal that they were offering

that that, that they'll be back here again in six months. They'll be back here again in a year.

“There's just, they really clearly feel that they have to, they have to make it so that we”

don't ever want to do this again. And they're, they seem very committed to it. And, you know, we've got probably, it looks like a new Supreme Leader coming in whose family we just massacred in a surprise attack that in the middle of negotiations, where, you know, to trick them into thinking we weren't going to attack that morning, all the IDF guys, like they went home for their normal Shabbat schedule and stuff, like baking a religious observance to like fool the Iranians and

thinking they weren't going to attack and then we sneak attack them and massacre the whole family, hit this girl's school. I mean, these people are not going to just break. They're not going to just break. And so then the question is, what are you going to do about? How are you actually going to get them to stop flying drones at tankers going through the straight or horn moves? Because we don't have months. We don't have years. We probably don't have weeks before this starts to show

major, major, major downstream effects, you know, who else is like, this is not really hitting the news yet, but you're starting to see some statements, our Asian allies are, they're so challenging too, like Japan gets like 95% of its energy resources from the Persian Gulf, like all of our Asian, I was saying a poor, you're everybody over there. And they're like, what is this? What's on here, you know, and well, I don't know if you saw it there,

but they're so short on interceptors. They're taking the thad system out of South Korea. And of course, we forced that on the South Koreans. We wanted it to be there for purposes of monitoring China and having advanced radar's close to China. And that, of course, you know, Beijing was

“upset at Seoul about that. I think they took some trade repercussions out on them. But now,”

you know, it's supposed to be there to defend South Korea, but now as soon as we need somewhere else, we just pick it up and move it, and the South Koreans are, like I've saying, what the hell? So before we get too far away from everything else, I'm just wondering to the extent that you could say, do you have any idea, like the Pentagon even believes right now that Iran's missiles are going to run out before our interceptors do? I remember talking to you on my show. It was less than a

year ago. And we were discussed, it was before the war against Iran, June, we were discussing kind of interceptor math, right? The idea that you're firing between two and four interceptors

at a single missile. So it just, it never seemed likely to me that the US would be able to win

a war against Iran in the way that we wanted to, because the interceptor math didn't work.

“Yeah, I mean, you know, they're banking on the hope that they can degrade their, there's not the”

missiles so much. They're not going to treat their missiles before we run out of interceptors, but that they can take out enough of their launchers to make it so that they can't, you know, they can't send many or any over. That does not, I mean, look, we've taken out a bunch of their launchers, but there are whole regions of the country where we know they have a bunch of them, because they were using them in the last days of the 12-day war that they hadn't even fired up yet. You know,

out in the East, they have like, they have huge stores of missiles, launchers, everything out there that they haven't even used. They haven't even let those things off. And so, you know, you're talking about, it is not easy to, it would be, it would be one thing if we had like complete in total air supremacy over the place. You know, if we had like Israel has in Gaza where you can just fly a buy plane, a hundred feet over and, you know, hopefully nobody shoots you with a rifle,

because that's the only threat that's there. But that is not the case, and it's not going to be the case anytime soon, just because, I mean, look, we're going to be able to fly our B2s in there. We're going to be able to fly in our F-35s, like those things probably can defeat any of the radar systems that they have available in there right now. I don't think they have any S-400s if they do, it's just a couple, and you know, they may have been destroyed for all I know, I don't know.

But the idea of being able to just have aircraft that are going around scanning the area, looking for mobile launchers and stuff, which is what you'd have to really be able to do, is just, it's just not feasible, and it's not going to be for quite some time. I mean, the real issue that we're facing right now is, you know, we're on this ticking clock that apparently nobody planned for. I mean, there's like, we're finding out now that like

several of our allies, their strategic petroleum reserves are only like a third of a third full

because they just weren't planning for this. To last, it sounds insane because to me,

what's going on right now seems like the obvious thing was going to happen. Like, of course,

like, what are you talking about? Like, for them to shut down, this is the other thing. Like, for them to shut down the straightaway moves, they don't need, they don't need, you know, their intermediate range ballistic missiles for that. They don't even really need their drones for that. They can hide artillery units in the hills like on the around the coast there, and disrupt shipping enough to make it so that, yeah, you could probably sneak through there

a lot of the time, but your ships aren't going to get insured for trying to do it, you know, and it's just, it's a trivial thing for them to lock down that straight. And Trump's talking about telling the Navy to go up there and actually escort ships through, like, through the straight.

If the chief of naval operations, he'd better refuse to do it and make him fire him, because that

is just taking a bunch of American sailors and sending them on a suicide mission. I mean,

“that would be insane. But, yeah, I mean, the real question here is, how does this, how does this end?”

Because you can tell people in the administration are now figuring out that we're not going to just topple this regime. It's not going to happen. We're like, they're going to outlast our munitions stockpiles. Like, we just, we don't want to have, and even then, you know, I mean, it's like, you got to think about, I was talking about this with somebody earlier. It's not a military guy. And he's like, well, couldn't we just like keep escalating until, you know, we just get them

down to the point where, you know, the people that are left, like, they're so beaten down. They want to, they just want this to end. And I was like, look, man, it took, it took Israel two, two and a half years to do what it did to Gaza. And they were able to fly over that place at will from airports that were 15 miles away, 20 miles away. And they could roll in and just destroy buildings with artillery units with like no resistance. And it took them two and a half years to do that to that

place. Tehran itself is like four or five times the size of Gaza city. It's way bigger. And they have way more places. And all their capabilities are way more distributed. And so it's like, even if you were going to try to just tear bomb them into submission, we just don't have the munitions for that. We don't have the capabilities to do it. And so, you know, I'm going to real loss as far as like what people who are, like, people who are the actual planners of this, you know, not the political

decision makers, the people who have to like, who've spent, you know, 35 years in the army and Air Force and have to sit there and keep a straight face when Pete Heggseth is a freaking press conference. Like, I just wonder what those guys are thinking right now because we need a way out of this,

“you know, and obviously like, you know, the only way that that's going to happen, I think,”

is if we can find a way to save some face. But, you know, the one thing like I'm really placing my hope on is the fact that Trump, one thing about him is he'll just say things, you know, just completely disconnected from reality doesn't matter, you know. And he may just decide at a certain point to say, yeah, we won and we had total victory in the Iranians, totally capitulated. In fact, they're going to give us all their oil and we're leaving and we leave and the Iranians are still

shooting missiles and they're not given us any oil and they're like telling us to get well. But whatever, like Trump doesn't care, maybe that's like our best hope, you know, because it's, it's, yeah, I mean, at this point, I can tell you that this war will end when Iran says it ends and that's not a place, I don't think that the people who put us into this war expect it or plan to be. You know, although I do know for an absolute fact that they were warned, you know,

“general aim, he warned them that we, we cannot accomplish what they're wanting us to”

account what, Trump was wanting us to accomplish with the forces that we had in being and even even just, you know, it's a poor, we, we couldn't with the rest of the equipment and resources we had around the world without compromising so many other missions that we have. He was absolutely warned about that and Kane was just ignored. He was just straight up ignore. And so while we're kind of there, you know, like it's, you're, we're in the White House a week ago, right? And it seems obvious

that this, this scenario we've seen now that, and there we say, this is an area we see now is going to play out. So, why do it? Do you, you know, I'm sure you saw Marco Rubio saying the Israelis were going to attack Iran, Iran was going to respond by attacking Americans. And so essentially saying the

Israelis force their hand, I guess, you know, if you're on the second most popular narrative is

this is Operation Epstein's Fury, right? Donald Trump needs to get Epstein out of the headlines or, you know, Netanyahu is using Epstein files to blackmail down Trump to guess into war. Why, you know, Trump in the lead up to this was kept saying over and over again, right? That Iran just has to say

saying five different times to five different outlets in English. We don't want a nuclear weapon. We're willing to deal on the nuclear issues. So, what is it that actually could have been

standard Trump to sign off on this? So, part of it is what you said, the, the first thing you said

“with a nuclear twist. And I mentioned this, I think last week, but I was talking to, you know,”

when Tucker Carlson went to meet with Trump, meet with Trump. The, it was like a week and a half ago now. It seems like it was 10 years ago, but he met with him in the White House at a one-on-one with him for a while. And I was talking to him like throughout the rest of that day just about what was going on. And, I mean, yeah, so a huge part of it is that the Israelis were telling us, we're going, whether you go or not. And part of it may be, I mean, you know, rubios

excuse that all they would have started attacking all of our stuff if, you know, if that happened. So, we had to get ahead of it. I mean, that seems like kind of a canard to me just because we could

have told the Israelis, don't do it. And if you don't, if you do it, then you're on your own.

And we could have called Iran and said, hey, this isn't us, you know, if we wanted to. But really,

“I think what it was, and this is what I heard before any of this kicked off, is that the Israelis,”

I don't know if they were saying this, but that the fear was and the belief was that if they went this, they did this alone, and we didn't go in with them, that we've already seen nuclear weapons used by now. And I mean, because look at it, I mean, is there any doubt at this point that Israel, I mean, they can't, they, they have no hope whatsoever taken around on one on one, are you kidding? Like take all of our forces, all the resources we have in the Arab allies have like out of the picture,

and Israel will be flattened by now. I mean, there's just no possibility they can handle around one. And so, you know, they may have been, you know, just sort of subtly or not, so subtly sending the message, and because I know for a fact, this was the belief, like, you know, among a lot of the planners here, that we're going to do this, and hopefully you come, and we won't have to get too crazy, and now we can keep this conventional if you're there with us. But if not, you know, who knows what's

going to happen? And so that's a, that's a big part of it, which, you know, on one hand, like I almost, I mean, you would, you would hope that you'd have a leadership structure, leadership cast in this

“country who could get Israel under control, if that's the way they're behaving, and that's what”

they're threatening. But A, Trump is not that guy, and B, with Netanyahu, man, I don't know if it would work. I mean, he's getting old, and he has a very messianic view of his mission in the world, and his role in my Jewish history and stuff. And so, I don't know if it would work with him. I think he, they might have been thinking like, we could tell him, no, have fun, go fight the Iranians yourself, and he might do it, you know? And so if that's the case, and you really think he's going to,

he's going to light Iran up with nuclear weapons and get that whole ball rolling in that region, and everything, it's kind of a rock and a hard place, but at the same time, if that's really what happened, and if that was the driving force, then one way or another, when this is all over with, I mean, you got to just recognize it, Israel's not only not an ally, like there are something close to an enemy, if they're threatening that kind of thing to pull us into a war like this. And, you know, it's,

it's, some things going to, something's going to change with respect to our relationship to Israel after this is all over. It's not going to change as long as Trump is in the White House. I mean, Trump is clearly just block, stock own, just completely owned by Tel Aviv. So, but in the future, I mean, this is something that's going to really break that relationship, and, you know, I guess that's a good thing.

Yeah, you know, another thing on that point, Darrell, like the second or third day of this war, Donald Trump

came out and said, something along the lines of the people we hoped to pull in charge or dead, the second wave of people we hoped to pull in charge or dead, I'm pretty sure the third wave of people we hoped to pull in charge or dead, and pretty soon we're not going to know anybody in Iran. And from the reporting that I read, it seems like he has, while the Americans targeted the IRGC military bases during the initial attack, it was the Israelis that killed the Iotola,

killed the senior leadership, or actually targeting Iranian individuals. So, I do wonder if Donald Trump had this notion that we are going to kill the Iotola, he had somebody he'd like to put in charge, and that this was going to turn out like Venezuela, like, you know, not quite as clean a two to four-day operation, but essentially a simple leadership change where he could declare victory, they'll sign as JCPOA, silent agreement and be done with it, and Netanyahu knew that was

around that downtrump wine to take, and decided to kill anybody who could potentially quickly

objective can no longer be what was initially supposed to be, and that's why we on my day four,

and five of the war, we have officials coming out and saying, "Oh, the goal is to destroy the Iranian Navy." Nobody ever talked about the Iranian Navy before, it seems like, you know, a goal that they feel like they could easily accomplish, and it's now like a war without a real objective, and so I don't know if you have, like, kind of a take on that whole scenario. Right, yeah, I mean, that's exactly what happened, in terms of we had the U.S. and Israel going in

with really two different missions and two different visions of what they were trying to accomplish here. I mean, Israelis make no mistake about it, and it's been perfectly obvious for a long time.

“Their goal is to turn Iran into Libya, into Syria. That's what they want to see. They want to see”

civil war, they want to see devastation, atrocity, cannibalism. They just want Iran to be taken off the

board, period, as any kind of a power whatsoever, because they understand something, they understand these people better than we do. You know, these Israelis, for all their, you know, their leadership casts problems. I mean, they do understand something about the people that live around them, and they know perfectly well that whatever comes out of this war is not going to look kindly upon them. You know, if you go ahead, air drop the shot back into Iran, so he can get Benizir

booted on day one when he arrives. I mean, like, they know that whatever comes out of it, there's an intact state. It doesn't matter if it's democratically elected. It doesn't matter what it is. It is going to be hostile to his purity. They understand that. And so their goal is to

“destroy the state and make it a non-viable society. You're Balkanized, warring, you know,”

just collection of, you know, principalities. We went in there very much with this stupid idea, high on our own supply after Benizir, we could pull something like that off, which by itself is so stupid, even if the Israelis didn't kill all the other leadership that might have gone into replace anybody who thought that just think of like, is there any country in the world

that would respond that way? I mean, Benizir was basically a failed state with like a cartel running

it. So like, yeah, they're like, all right, get rid of this guy and like, more move on. This is not a failed state. This is a real state, you know, and is there any real state out there that if you roll in there and kill the leader and his entire family, his 14-month-old granddaughter, you know, and you and bomb a girl school for good measure while you're at it on a day that is

“happens to be a holiday where you celebrate, killing a bunch of their people. Like, is there any”

group of peas? Is there any state on the planet that would be like, all right, fine, we bow down, and you're the best, and like, you know, we're going to, of course not. Anybody which should understand, and like it just baffles my mind that people have no concept of honor, apparently like in the West where that wouldn't be perfectly obvious to them. And so, I mean, look, they can kill this next eye atola. They can keep doing it. I'm telling you right now, they cannot kill enough

people to break them through terror and just through assassination. It's not going to happen. Like, this is eventually going to have some kind of a negotiated ending or an negotiated ending, like a real one where Ron has, you know, something to bring to the table and threaten with, or it's going to leave with us being militarily defeated. I mean, that's, that sounds crazy, because they can't invade America or anything like that. And if we don't, you know, they can only

hurt us to the extent that we get close to them. But I'm telling you right now, like, over the last two days, we have moved from, we might not achieve our objectives, we might be looking at a military defeat. Okay. I mean, like, our ageships, like, they can't even, they can't even really get close enough on the Arabian seaside to participate in the fight. You know, and each one of them anyway, that's like, 12, depending on the mission, maybe for this mission, they loaded them up a little

more maybe they have 24 or so ballistic missile interceptors, SM3's on board. I mean, because, you know, they carry Tomahawk and we can fire in those like crazy, they carry SM2's because you got to be able to shoot down cruise missiles and stuff too, you know, and drones. And then you got your SM3's, which are for long range ballistic missile shoot downs. They don't have that many of them. I mean, and then you fire off 12 or 24, whatever you got, which is the rate that we've been firing off

interceptors is like, after they fire three missiles at us, we've burned through our interceptor magazine. And then guess what, you got to call your ass all the way back to like Diego Garcia to reload, and it takes a couple days. There's cranes and hard hats and like people like it's a big industrial operation, you know, and so we just don't have, yeah, we don't have the

hope, don't, not when I say, I say the Royal Wii here because, you know, as a veteran with knowing

that there's, you know, that there's Americans out there like, you know, American servicemen out there, like I don't want to say I'm rooting for a wrong or something, but man, like we're, you know, I mean, you just have to be honest about things sometimes and like look at this and say that we're just very obviously the bad guy here, you know, where you can say whatever you want about it, right? Well, all they've been at war with us for 47 years, what about the Marine barracks,

what about, you know, the roadside bombs, they're supposedly helping with an wreck. Okay, let's add all of that together and tell me, if all of it together, rub is 1% of us giving chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein that he used to launch into the residential areas of their cities. I mean, what have they ever done? It's even remotely close to them, like that's an insane warrior, Saddam Hussein, like this butcher, you're going to give him chemical weapons when you know that

this is already when we start giving him to him, it was already a war where they were just launching missiles into each other's, you know, cities. We knew what he was going to do with them, and so the idea that like we have more reason to be upset with them than they do with us is just completely insane absurd, but you know, our politics now has just gotten to a point where

“I can't remember who said, who put the tweet out, it's like this viral tweet that gets”

shared all over the place now. He says like something about like the way to understand the left, the right wing guy putting this out is to just understand their whole, their whole discourse is basically pretending not to understand things that they do understand until you get exasperated and quit the current rage quit conversation. And so when you see like today, you know, there was representative or a senator, I can't remember who it was exactly,

but when we found out that the Russians are apparently providing intelligence and targeting information to the Iranians, he's like, how dare they? Oh, could they do this? And I'm like, are you serious right now? Like how can you say something like that? It's so infuriating because like you just want somebody anybody to get out in front of a podium and actually just talk like a

person, like a human, get out there and be like, look, here's the situation here's what we're trying

to do, whatever, but to get out there after we've been like helping the Ukrainians kill Russians, assassinate Russian civilians, you know, for years and then to be like, I just can't believe they would do this. There must be consequences for this unacceptable, just unprecedented crime. You know, it's just totally insane. It's like Mark Levin posting a picture of one of those cluster munitions coming in from one of the ballistic missiles coming in over Tel Aviv and being like,

“"war cry, I mean, fuck, you can't be serious right now." But I don't know, I honestly don't”

know if they are serious because my brain is like, they can't possibly be serious. Like they have to be cynical, right? They have to be because how could you just, I mean, these aren't people with like 32 IQ, presumably like Mark Levin's a more on an emotionally incontinent person, but if you gave him an IQ test, he'd probably score average or better. I mean, you know, and this is like, there's nobody that can't understand these things and yet at the same time, and you see the

fanaticism. I just really do wonder if that's true. If we're really using the same operating system to work through all of this. Yeah. Quickly, I respond to the comments. I am not Scott Horton and Scott Horton is alive. He is just traveling to New Hampshire to give a talk. You can buy his coffee. That's Scott Horton dot org slash coffee. He really endorses the stuff and he is up like 18, 19 hours a day fighting the worst states. So I'm sure it's absolutely great.

I'm Kyle Lam's loom filling in for Scott today. Darrell, is there anything else? I did want to ask you because I thought you might have an interest in take on this. The destruction of the

“Iranian ship near Sri Lankan waters and apparently went to India. I believe on like a military”

exercise. It was unarmed. It was, I think, more ceremonial thing. And the US just blew it up. And some people will kind of say, you know, it's war. It was a warship. And now, other people will point out that even if it was war, it was a warship. It was unarmed. And so, you know, from just moral standard, you would be better to intercept the in capture. But then also, if you intercept it and capture it, you now have leverage. All right, POWs that you could trade if there's ever

an American pilot captured in Iran. You have an Iranian warship when you install a new government that you could get back to that country. So they have some kind of military vessel. So I'm just wondering

what you think about that. You know, the Navy was traditionally, it was always the, the branch of

aristocratic branch, you know, like traditionally I got up until really not that long ago.

“Like, you know, the British Navy was based on the people who were in the Navy were, for the”

most, they were all aristocratic officers. And like the crew, the people who did all the jobs,

on the ships and stuff, they were people you recruited, like right before you went out, basically.

A lot of more experience, you can see them again and again. But they weren't like prominent members of the Navy or something. This is like a very aristocratic tradition bound institution. And so things, you know, when we have, when we have things that are, you know, not not even centuries, millennia old laws of naval warfare, it's something that until very recently we took seriously. And I mean, we charged a German admiral at Nuremberg for instructing his captains,

his ship captains, not to pick up survivors after sinking a ship. And, you know, it's, it's infuriating to me as a former Navy guy. I can tell you that because like, it was unarmed and people say, well, how do we, how are we supposed to know that? Oh, we knew, because we were supposed to be in that exercise in India with them and tell like just a few days before. And we knew that the rules, like to go to that thing, your ship had to be completely, all its magazines had to be completely empty.

So we knew, we knew it was unarmed. We could have interned it. We could have just, you know, told it, any number of things we could have done. They did this, this is what kills me the most, man, like it's just the way, the cavalier way that all this is being handled. They did this,

“so they'd have a cool video to post on Twitter of a submarine shoot and a thing. That's why”

they did that. And there's no, there was no other reason to do it. I mean, that thing was never

going to make its way back to Iran, you know, in, during, during this war, it could have easily been interned. It could have easily been turned around and like, there's just, there is no absolutely no excuse for it. And one of the things, this is like, the thing that absolutely kills me, I know I'm living in the past here. You know, ever since World War I really, that's when it started, it really hadn't gotten too out of hand. But like with the advent of heavy artillery is like the main

battlefield weapon, you know, any kind of like these standoff weapons where it's like, you know, you're killing people at a distance where they're not really able, the people aren't able to do anything back to you. You know, and then especially, of course, when air warfare, and now drone warfare became, you know, predominant on the battlefield, it just stripped any semblance of honor out of warfare. I mean, it just doesn't exist anymore. You know, we, you start a war in the middle

of negotiations for the second time in less than a year, and you start it by just assassinating,

like everybody in the government, like, it there a bunch of Al-Qaeda leaders or something like that. I mean, this is just something that didn't, in people who think, oh, it's war. That's just

“war's hell. That's how it's always been. No, it's not. Okay, that is, that is not true. Like,”

that is not what the Western way of war has, has been. You know, you have your like certain wars that go off the rails, like the 30 years war, and everybody looks at that and says, wow, that got really bad. That was terrible. We shouldn't do that again. And guess what? For 250 years. It didn't happen again. You know, wars were fought with a sentence of honor, of concern for the, for the enemy, treatment of prisoners. All of these things can't, they were,

they were considered, you know, close to, close to sacred. And in the 20th century, obviously, that, you know, was, was degrading rapidly on all sides with the advent of air power. But now, to do it in a way where, you know, this is not a, I mean, this isn't even a war choice for us. This is a war of like, whim, you know, like he's like, ah, we could do it or we couldn't, like, anything would be different if we did or didn't do it. But we're just going to decide to do it.

And we're going to do it in this most raven way imaginable. Two of people, by the way, who that stuff still matters to, you know, like, you go over there and you talk to people in the Middle East and like don't get me wrong, like, you know, the countries and culture over there, have their problems, like anybody else I guess. But like, but they understand, like, and are, and are deeply offended by those kinds of breaches of honor, you know, and it's a kind of

thing that steals them for a long fight. And you're really seeing that. I mean, you're seeing Iranians like from all cross sections of society, including people who are literally out at the protests just a month ago, who were out there. They're not saying I'd love the regime. I missed the eye at all or whatever, but they're 100% behind the state and they're 100% against us and against the Israelis. And they should be because, you know, we're the villain in this story,

dude, like, and I hate to say that. But because my buddies who were out on those ships, because I do have a few of them, the guys who were, you know, who were out there, like, taken fire, you know, I see people every once in a while, especially like in the sort of, in the

quit at any time blah, blah, blah, it's like, yeah, okay, fine. But like, you know, you're asking

a lot for a person to, you know, sort of just at the spur of the moment, go against a lifetime's, a lifetime of indoctrination regarding like what's honorable and what's good and what's expected of him as a good citizen. And what's expected of him as, you know, as a comrade to the guy who's next to him, you know, like he's not going to abandon those guys. You can say that all you want, it's not easy to do. I feel bad for those guys. And I feel really bad that they're being

put out there and made to do things and put their lives on the line for something that is just inherently dishonorable. I mean, it is just absolutely dishonorable. And it really just discussed me. And that some Marines shoot at that frigate. I mean, that's just icing on the cake, you know, it's just, yeah, it's horrible, man. It's freaking horrible. Yeah, I mean, anything else that

“you really wanted to hit on, if not, I think there's some questions and the super shads that I could,”

I don't know how to pull them up exactly by a certainly cast, you know, get your thoughts on some things. Yeah, let's see, I think we can just click on them here. All right, we got Emily, Muller, saying really glad to hear Darrell rant about honor and warfare. I am sick of hearing people say that international laws only for losers. Yeah, look, this is like, it's really, it really reflects like the degradation of our culture that has taken place, especially like

really accelerated during the war on terror. You know, like, I think honestly, like, it, I really think today that if we had like an obu group or a Mi-Lai massacre or some like thing that in the past, when the truth really did come out, we felt contritioned for, I don't, I think, a good number. You'd have two groups of people. You'd have people like me who are just outraged by it. You want to overthrow the government for it, you know, but then you'd have the other half the

“country or whatever, however many people who would just be saying like, yeah, FAFO, you know,”

that war war is hell, suck up and that really like, you know, that is not a shift that takes place in a society without consequence. For all of us, you know, including those of us who don't necessarily think that way, but still have to live in that culture, you know, when it degrades like that, it really does damage to our souls and our minds, you know, and it sad, you know, but it really does seem like it's not something that's going to change until, until someone forces us to change it,

you know, I mean, some of these videos that you see coming out of them, like, you know, like an NFL player, like running at another guy and as he crashes into a boom, like a building explodes, it shows one of the, it's just so disgusting, you know, and he would just wish, and it was not that long ago, by the way,

including like Obama and Bush administration, so they did a million like horrible things,

but they weren't out there, like, just openly gloating and treating like a football game, the fact that they're out there sending people to their deaths and giving orders that, you know, are resulting in the deaths of 160 little girls or whatever. That's something that like, it will at least matter a little bit, you know, or at least they felt like they had to put on a show that mattered to them, because it mattered a little bit to us, you know, and, and they don't have

to anymore, because at least the base that is behind this administration now, like it's still behind them now. You know, they're really proving Trump correct when he said I could shoot somebody on camera on Fifth Avenue, and my people would still support me. This is just a version of that, and it really is. I mean, he's, he's proving that to be true, and it was not a compliment for, you know, on the loyalty of his followers when he said that, it was contempt for his followers,

and it was deserve content. Darryl, the next one, Quill, Mara, rap, are Wop, Darryl, during your time, the military, how much evangelical religious fervor was present amongst the higher ups, then, verse, current reporting. I'm guessing you've seen the idea that, you know, Trump is setting up the Armageddon rapture happening. And I mean, this is something I'm big curious about all week to ask you, actually, is just how much do you think this is? You know,

we hear from, it's the Iranians who are religious extremists and relate waging a religious war. It sure seems more to me, the religious war is being waged out, washing can tell if he, by both, you know, Christians, Zionists and Jewish Zionists. I can't say like, as far as the first

part of the question that I never, I never saw anything like that when I was, when I was in. I mean,

it's not like you wouldn't necessarily like meet a person that if you started talking to them

“about religion or whatever, they maybe that you find out that that's what they are, but it was not”

anything that was like in the air, like at all. And so that's very interesting. I wonder if it has something to do with, you know, the, just the fact that, you know, over the last year since Trump

their administrative state and get rid of all the DEI stuff that, you know, that everybody hates

so much. And I really kind of wonder if under the cover of that, if they've been elevating people who are just real fanatics that can be counted on like in a, you know, in a time of, when, when they have to do things that are wildly unpopular, you know. Like my talk could be does not care if he's the only person in America who thinks that like, you know, we have to serve as or he does not care. That's his religion and he means it, you know. And so there might be a lot more of those people now.

As far as like, I mean, look, I'll put it this way. Like, I would have been the type of person who thought, now, come on. But then like I was thinking about it, and I actually said this to

Tucker when we were talking, the other day I was like, you know, in retrospect, it's really not that far,

“like far fetched to think that a guy who's entire life is built around, putting his name on big”

real estate developments would want his name could be convinced by his, kabod, sun and law, you know, and close family friend of Benjamin Netanyahu that the thing that he should really do, that'll keep his name, you know, in lights for not a century, but for thousands of years, is attached his name to the greatest real estate project of all, you know. I can see Trump being convinced of that, honestly. Like, so who knows? I mean, if that's the case,

due to fate, like, if they go that direction, like, you know, if something happens to that mosque in Jerusalem, it's going to be, I mean, uncontained. What happens after that will be uncontained. And the worst part about it is that we're going to be on the site of Satan if it does. And that's absolutely kills me. The next one, can you ask Scotty for me, where what were Putin's other options? I guess they're asking about, you know, sky in his book, "Purboat" argues that Putin had

“other options in early 2022, rather than invading Ukraine. Like, you know, look, I think Scotty's”

probably best to answer for himself here. He has a whole such an honest book on it. If you go to the skyhore and show art quives, there's an interview, probably from two years ago, with Aramaate, where the two of them go over this. But, in short, you know, kind of bulletpoint, Scotts says there's international agreements that Putin could be either withdraw from or threaten to withdraw from other international bodies, you know, from the Soviet era, or after the fall,

that, you know, he could really try to use to get his point across. I think the bigger and stronger point that Scotts makes is that Putin could have turned off the effort, the flow of gas and oil to Europe, and really tried to make his point by playing with the economic markets. But, you know, if you ask the question, again, when Scotts on the show, I'm sure he would give a much more thorough answer than I did there, darela thing to add on that. I mean, Scotts got

good points, of course, he always does, but I've always been skeptical of that particular,

like, what do you want to say, caveat? We know, when you say we provoke the war, but Putin, Bob Obama, it's kind of, it's almost like a, it's almost like a, like a necessary caveat for somebody who's very, like, anti-war to say, because war he didn't invade the country and we're against war. So, but honestly, man, I mean, look, you're seeing, like, you've seen for the last several years that that Ukrainian military that we built up since 2014 is no freaking joke. I mean,

it's broken down and, you know, and, and rough shape now. That was a, that was a powerful, powerful military that they were facing. And he's looking at this thing building up on the other side of his border. And I mean, it was obvious. And it became obvious to them that excuse me, that, you know, what we were doing was saying, oh, no, we're not putting them in NATO, right now. Just relax, relax, but we are. But we're not done. I'm put them in NATO or you know,

“you have to wait, but we are, you know, and then at a certain point, they were going to have”

built that place up so much, you know, that it would have been too costly for the Russians to ever do anything about it. And then we'd have been like, oh, I guess they're in NATO, sorry. And he saw that. And everybody who was even a half-way reasonable person saw that that's what's going on. And when you, when you add to that, the fact that, you know, the Ukrainian, I say the Kiev government, you know, they had been killing people in the east. I mean, you have to think about the, you know,

what, we're fit to seven minutes into this. I'll tell you what, I'll get into this with Scott again next week, because I do want to talk about this actually. But that's a good question. I can't pass up on this one. Kind of least the rise at the White House thoughts. That's my thought. And then the, the other one, Darryl, that I definitely want to get your

I'm guessing that the US isn't covering up the death of 800 soldiers in the Middle East right now.

“But, you know, if it's a dozen, that certainly seems potentially believable to me.”

Yeah, I would say this. The Iranians, they don't know. Those numbers, you know, they're making those up in terms like you know, maybe they estimated or whatever, but they don't, they don't know. I mean, there, you know, a lot of them, they're putting out the numbers, like, just shortly after the strike that, you know, supposedly killed them. And so they don't have that information. I will say that I saw today news that our big military hospital that we have in

Germany, the biggest US military hospital outside the continental United States, has suspended all labor, NATO, delivery, just anything I'm going to do with like little babies, services for indefinitely, so that they can focus on their quote-unquote primary mission of processing casualties from the Iran war. So, doesn't seem like something that you're going to be doing if you've got six dead, and you know, it doesn't or two wounded. It does seem like the, I mean, look, I've seen,

I've seen some of the satellite photos of these bases. And these are bases that I've spent a lot of time at, especially the one in Bahrain. I've been there. I probably spent collectively, like, you know, probably four or five months on that base. I know that base. I know where everything is, and the places that I look at these photos on and see destroyed, I mean, it's possible. We just evacuated those places completely, I guess. But anything short of that, I mean, there's just

just don't be surprised if you start seeing more rolling. Because you're right, they can't hide 800 casualties. I mean, it wouldn't even, they wouldn't even bother trying to do that. They might slow roll them now, you know, a little bit for, you know, just a little bit to see, especially when they're in a war, we're like, they keep, they keep telling themselves, like, I don't think that when they come out, and they say, you know, this is going to be four days long. We'll be done to be wrapped up. We'll be home

parting with the champagne. Maybe two weeks. Yeah, I may be four weeks, mate. Like, I don't think that,

“I think that's them, like, changing their own opinions in real time. Like, I don't think they're like,”

all right. So first, we're going to tell them four days. And then, I don't think they're doing that.

I think that they're changing their own opinion real time as things don't work out the ways that they want them to. And when they're in that mode, where they keep telling themselves, like, we just need one more night of heavy bombing. We just got to take out this guy, this guy in this guy, because they're the glue that's holding it together right now. And so, you know, just slow roll the casualty numbers and the damage assessments for a few more days, you know, a few more days. I could see that totally

being the case. That kind of thing has happened before. So just real quick, do you know, like, as soldiers in the Middle East right now, do they like have their cell phones? I know, like, you know, during a normal deployment they would. And so I guess one of the things that I had to consider is if, if there were more than maybe a few dozen U.S. casualties, of course it would just be hard to hide because people would be be talking, right? Yeah. Yeah. It would be hard. Speaking of cell phones

though, by the way, one of the things that, you know, this was going around on X, uh, maybe three four days ago. And I can tell you, for a fact that it was true, that SENTCOM sent out a notice to all of our personnel in the theater to turn off the location services on their cell phones and to delete like several apps, Uber was one of them a couple other apps. And it was because the Iranians were were using those, they were using that to target our personnel. And it's a pretty sophisticated

capability. You know, I don't know if they were getting help from the Russians or anybody else with that, but I wouldn't surprise many persons or smart people. But yeah, to your question though, yeah, I mean, you can't, you're not something that you could hide very long for sure.

“All right, Darrell, should we get out here right now or now?”

Um, yeah, is there any, let's see, let me, let's do a couple more of these super chats. Okay. I don't want to keep you all day, Kyle, but no, I'm going to go as long as you want to go there. Yeah, Tucker Fleming, question for Darrell, the situation continues to degrade across the board in the

U.S. Yeah, there you go. Would you consider moving out? No, never. I would never move out of the U.S.

ever. You're in a good spot if you know, things in the U.S. get a little less than desire. First of all, I have to contend with the fact that I'm probably not welcome in a lot of European countries or Canada. So there is that little issue, but no, this country could fall apart and be ruled by the anti-Christ. And I would stay here and do my best under it under no circumstances, what I would believe in U.S. Well, about this one, worried about Israel rebuilding the temple. I somewhat, at least.

I mean, the thing about it is like, you don't need it to be like official state policy that this is

with like enough like, you know, enough extremists in the security services to

“fall asleep on watch like the Epstein guards did while it happens. And, you know, they go do something”

like that. And then once the fire is lit, I mean, the fire is lit. And so I'd moreried about that for sure. I mean, that would be absolute chaos, dude. I mean, for real chaos. Oh, we got one here, brand new one. Darryl, what's your budget? Put prediction, length, more countries, boots on the ground, new to use. We've covered a lot of that through here. But I am, you know, one thing we haven't touched on Darryl is we've seen a lot of fighting in Lebanon now. Israel's demanding all Lebanese

north of the Latani river. They're bombing the southern suburbs. They root there. Mostly Shia. I saw

the PMF in Iraq. That's the Shia militias of Iraq that were of course formed under the Iranian

Kurds force, seeing that they're willing to start striking US positions around the Middle East in support of Lebanon. And also, I mean, again, my read isn't necessarily that the Iraqi Kurds are signing up to fight in Iran. But if they would, I could see a situation where the Iraqi Shia militias are then fighting against the Iraqi Kurds. And so I mean, do you see like wars breaking out kind of across the Middle East that are related to the war in Iran, but or even uprising in Bahrain? You know,

in all the videos of Bahrain, I see a lot of people cheering and happy that the US bases or even the hotels are burning. Yeah, I was in Bahrain during the Arab Spring. And, you know, I had to go from monomata the Jafar base a few times. And one of the times my tax cab ended up having, you know, took a wrong turn and ended up down a street where there's riot police and people going crazy and banging on the windows and stuff and, you know, tear gas coming through the vents into the car.

That that's as far as it went. I don't have any more exciting stories in that, but like, you know, yeah, that's a majority Shia island with a ruling click that's SUNY that is not popular. You know, back during the Arab Spring, you know, every time a sod killed a, you know, a rioter or a militant, you heard about it on front pades and extand the New York Times, do the Saudi sent in forces and massacre people on Bahrain and you heard nothing about that unless you were like

on anti war dot com or something. I mean, so yeah, they're not popular. That's very possible. And not only that, one of the reasons Saudi Arabia is very reticent about getting too involved with this is, you know, they have not a Shia majority by any means, but in the region where the

basically all of their oil is, that is the Shia majority area. And so they got those problems to deal with.

I mean, one of the things, too, that this is a, a little bit different topic, I guess, but they talk about other groups getting involved. I mean, one of the things that tells me that the Iranians do not feel desperate by any means right now is the hoodies were still keeping their pistol in the holster. You know, the hoodies could be causing serious problems right now. They're not. They're there. They're ready. They're, you know, letting everybody know that they're, that they're ready, but they're not involved.

“Well, did you see that the, I think it was the Ford left the Eastern Mediterranean and is”

had went through the Suez Canal, presumably south through the Red Sea, and off to maybe escort vessels through the strait of her moose is some of the speculation, but doesn't that mean that aircraft carrier then has to go off the coast to Yemen? That, that certainly seems like a potential for on Sarala to find themselves involved in this conflict. Yeah, we're going to have to see what happens with that, because I mean, I think at this point probably they're starting to make

their way through the Red Sea takes a while to get through the canal, but I mean, look, they could they could, they could have hit that thing in the canal if they wanted to. They're perfectly capable of targeting a stationary target with all its radars turned off in the canal. They'd piss off the Egyptians and like cause a lot of problems. And so, my understanding why they didn't do it, but they could have. And yeah, it's going to have to go right, right by their area. And

man, like, I swear, if they something like that happens, you know, if they hit one of our carriers, I mean, there's just no question that Trump is going to try to use that to escalate to like 11. You know, I just know chance we're going to walk, you know, just crawl away with their tail between our legs if that happens. And so I really hope that doesn't happen. At the same time, if that did happen, I mean, that would really start to limit

America's options in the region, right, to lose the largest aircraft carrier we haven't.

“And why I say lose, I think, you know, the more likely scenario would be like one of their drones”

causes enough damage to the flight deck or some other, you know, lift system, launch system,

months. And now you have one aircraft carrier, strike group in the region. And I mean, obviously,

that's not enough for the fight-in hand. And now you're dealing with Yemen on top of a rod. Yeah, I mean, you know, we have 11 carrier strike groups, but, you know, that's not as awesome

“as it seems. I mean, those are, you know, I think I think currently, like right now, we have three”

that we can put the sea. We've got a couple others that are in dry dock right now that we could rush out. And we could just forego all of their standard. It's usually like six months of sea trials after you get out of dry dock, like going out and doing, we could skip all of that and just hope for the best, you know, try to do some of the more important ones as it makes its way across the Atlantic or something. But, but yeah, I mean, it's, we just, people think we have infinite resources

and we don't, you know, and it's not even a money problem. People say, you know, who care,

they're just going to request another 50 billion, another 100 billion, like money doesn't matter

apparently anymore. And yeah, that's true enough. But like, I was explaining this to my wife when we were talking about this earlier when they were talking about how the defense contractors have agreed to quadruple their production lines, like to build like various missiles that

“were running low on. And so like, yeah, could say that all they want. Like, it's not something”

you can just snap your fingers and do. Like, you can't just build another factory. And if you could, it's not as if we have a bunch of like heads of engineering departments who happen to be intimately familiar with these very specific detailed systems just sitting around unemployed. You know, we don't have the skilled workers, we don't have the engineers, we don't have all of that takes a lot of time to set up. And so, you know, this is like, back during World War II,

we could tell General Motors and Ford, hey, you're making tanks now. Because if you can make a car, you can make a World War II tank. That's not the case today. It's not how it works. This was super highly specialized. We cannot just tell like, you know, like other companies like start doing X, Y, Z. We can't just ramp up the industrial process, like as much and as quickly as we want to, because we just don't have the educational pipeline in place. We just don't have the person out.

And so, you know, that's a, yeah, that's a pipe dream. We just, we don't have infinite resources. You know, these things are expensive. They take a lot of time to build. This is, this is really, I mean, this is something that a lot of people in the military logistics side are procurement side, which I spent a couple of years and I stood up the procurement office at the installation where I worked several years ago. And so I didn't know anything about procurement, but I learned

a lot about it then, because I had to set up and leave the office for a little while. And one of the things that people complain about, people were in the know, is that the incentive structure of our procurement process, meaning like dealing with the defense contractors, what systems are we going to

“develop, which ones are we going to keep and expand and which ones are we going to sideline?”

It's, you know, there's a couple of different reasons for it, but like, you know, it's very, very much biased toward, we want like super expensive, super complicated, like big systems that require decades-long commitments. Like a good example of one that is good, the ages weapon system. That's a great platform, like the destroyers that have that, those are great platforms, there are a lot of different missions and fine. But then you end up with things like the F-35,

you know, and getting rid of the A-10, which is a beautiful aircraft. Everybody loves the A-10, except for, like Air Force pilots, who, you know, they want all their planes to look like Ferrari, and so it's, you know, I'm not cool. But like, there's a huge problem with that, because it makes it so that our supply chain is extremely fragile. It relies on so many different inputs. I mean, you need microchips, you need fiber out, you need just so much stuff. And then

you need a ton of super high, not only highly skilled, but people who are very specifically trained, like, in these very specific systems, you can't just go take some random electrical engineering, plug them into a new weapons production plant and be like, you know, just get going. It just doesn't work like that, you know? And so, yeah, I mean, it's, yeah, we just don't have the resources to, to do a lot of the things that people are fantasizing about. Yeah, and, well, things in this

country are not built quickly right now. You know, it's not pretty World War II or like factories go up and theme start coming out. You know, they're years of permitting processes and bureaucracy. And look, that's a part of the whole system where everybody along the line is getting their cut, you know, they're looking the other way on the zoning stuff and all of this. So it adds time. So, yeah, they're trying to open up new factories. It's, it's not going to go quick and

talking about weapons systems. I'm always reminded of the zoom walk class destroyer. They built

it an entire just class of destroyer that lapped a main gun and they couldn't even use as a rescue operation ship because it did not fare well in rough water. So, yeah, I didn't do justice to add

example because it's pretty good airplane. That's 35's a great airplane now. But for what we paid for

it, I mean, I, that was not money well spent. Like we had a lot of other platforms already in existence that we could have developed more and expanded on. And, you know, the fact that we built that thing and like cut the F-22 from the program is just, that's just madness. You know,

“it's just, it was not money well spent, but it is a good aircraft now. Yeah. I think they're just”

one more super chat here. There are no, you know, who they're talking about here, but have you seen the Chinese professor on breaking points? He said that Ron will target the solidization plants in the Gulf States. And that certainly seems like it would be a major escalation. I mean, really make a point, although that might do some like irreparable damage with the Gulf

monarchies because these are countries that don't have a lot of water, right? I mean, do you think

Ron would take that step? Not against the Gulf countries. Unless the Gulf countries buckle under our pressure and like get really heavily directly involved and even then like, but I mean, look, Israel relies on desalination for most water. And Ron could have taken those plants out on day one if they wanted to. Clearly they're keeping that in their pocket as a potential escalation, you know, that they could resort to under, you know, extreme circumstances, but it's been,

it's it's not that they've been firing missiles at their plant, the desalination plants in Israel and missing. And then you just haven't been doing it. It's like they haven't fired at Demona yet, the nuclear plant. So, you know, they seem to be keeping that in their back pocket and I'm glad they are. That's, you know, I mean, one with regard to the Gulf States, like it does seem like the Iranians are trying to sort of like sort of like Putin has been doing with Europe in a way,

like keeping in mind the fact that this is going to end one day and you've got to live next to these people and like leave some semblance of a bridge till there's that you can like, you know, communicate across. And so they've been trying to do that. I think that's very obviously been very diplomatic in like their statements regarding the Gulf States. I you read today that the Saudis and the Iranians are apparently having one on one like talks

directly. And so, but yeah, even with Israel, I mean, you know, Israel's got critical infrastructure

“that the Iranians have not been targeting. And you have to only assume, I mean, just we've seen,”

like if you see some of the sat photos of some of our installations in Jordan and Bahrain, some of these other places, you know, you'll see like there's this, there's this one satellite photo where there's a bunch, there's there's a couple radomes, like these are those are the white domes, you see they're like protected covers over certain radar systems that we have. And we have a couple of them like, they're sort of here, here, here, here, here and there's a

before and after picture in the satellite photo and those missiles hit here, here, here and here. They didn't carpet bomb the whole area, they didn't saturate, they hit those specific things. It's not a targeting issue, it's a matter of choice that they haven't targeted those things. And, you know, you hope it doesn't come to that. I mean, because again, the real danger here, like the real real danger is that Israel feels back into a corner and they resort to nuclear weapons.

That's like the, that's the, that's the worst case scenario here, not only because, you know, God knows how many people would get killed, but just the down, I mean, what you'd see is the next day or that night Turkey would have to nuclear weapon. You would start to see like everybody like starting to realize that that, that they need that for their own survival. And so,

“hopefully that doesn't happen for a million different reasons. And I think that Iran is maybe”

cognizant of the fact that they're dealing with a bunch of psychopaths in Tel Aviv, who if they do start hitting their nuclear plants and their water disalination plants, they might do something like that. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. All right, Darrell, I think that's the super chats. Just before we get out of here, I'll mention that I host the Kyelan's loan show. Darrell Cooper was one of my very early guests on the show.

It's been about a year since he's been on, but maybe I'll try to wrangle him back on the show again soon. It'd be great to, you know, get your thoughts on this as it all involves. And of course, Darrell, the chat is on fire. They want to know when they're going to get another episode of the, your, your new series. Of course, I'm waiting on it too. I tend to do home renovation projects while listening to it. I think the Israel Palestine series I listened to twice while I

did my kitchen. So my wife will also be happy when the show drops. So one is at Darrell. So I'll just tell you where I'm at. I will admit that over the last six days or so I have been, you know, a little more distracted by all the doom scrolling with this war, but I have been working

And I've been working my way through. So this episode, for all you insiders, now you're going to know,

“is going to deal with period from right after the first World War up through all the revolutions,”

to take place in eastern central Europe. And just, you know, a lot about the German Freikor and a lot

of the people who are going to play major roles like later on in the chaos that they were experiencing

after the war. Many of them, as like a very formative experience, you know, because they were,

“a lot of these guys were, a lot of these like Freikor guys were 17 years old when the war ended”

in 1918. And then they went spend a couple years fighting a bunch of revolutionaries in the Freikor and the Baltics or in Russia and Berlin. And so this is very formative for them. I've gotten through

the first three sections of that. I'm writing the section about the Russian Revolution right now

to kind of, you know, it's not going to be like obviously like a full history of the Russian Revolution. It's going to be more like just describing the chaos that was taking place there at the time, because that was the real fear that everybody in Germany and the other countries were really concerned with. That's, we're going to be like that if we don't get things together, you know.

“And so that's what I'm working on now. I would say, I think I can have this thing done in like two”

weeks. That's my goal. That's what I told my wife earlier. So I think I can pull that off. Of course, I say that it's going to be three weeks, but like, but that's not going to happen. That's what I'm going to shoot for. I'm pushing really hard to get this done. All right. Well, as long as it's now like the Trump administration here and you're talking about the timber or something like that, we'll be all right there. All right. I'm play the outro and I guess off.

Provoked.