Trump Says the War Is Ending. A Navy Commander Says It’s About to Escalate

Hello and welcome to the Tara Palmeri Show, with the Ken Harba, well, Ken is a former Navy pilot, who actually did recon missions as a mission commander over the straight-up or moves.

So, he is going to give us all of the details about what is going on right now and what we can trust from President Trump following his address to the nation. And also released drone hunters of Kerson and was a coproducer of a documentary film called Densel enemies about domestic violent extremists. So, Ken, thanks so much for joining the show, couldn't be better timing.

“I think a lot of us are still processing last night's address to the nation. I don't think we got a lot of answers. We don't know if President Trump is actually going to deploy troops on the ground.”

And the straight-over moves, he basically said last night as soon as they want the Europeans can use it, as soon as we leave Iran. Like it's no big deal, guys, flip the switch right back on.

And I really would love to talk to you more about that. So, you're just a few contradictions. He says the war is nearing completion, but he also said that the next two to three weeks will be will include major escalation. So, what is that contradiction tells about where this actually stands? Well, first of all, thanks for having me, Tara. I think what we are seeing from this administration is a total lack of a plan, which follows on the heels of a total lack of a rationale going into this.

“After plenty of opportunities to explain to the American people why we needed to do this every one of those opportunities missed, I thought last night would at least be an offering of some kind of explanation for what's in it for the United States.”

We got none of that. It was so much worse than I thought it would be not just the absence of facts and the presentation of lie after lie, but the the affect. And I'm putting myself in the shoes of a soldier or marine or an airman or sailor headed down range right now or a parent of one of those people heading into harm's way. I just cannot imagine watching that performance last night thinking we have any idea what we're doing as a country. It was really alarming and should be setting off alarm bells all across Washington all across the Pentagon. Unfortunately, I suspect this morning that people surrounding the president are telling him he did a great job. And that's the most alarming thing.

“Every president needs someone with the integrity and the courage to be able to walk into the Oval Office and say this is what could go wrong. I don't think President Trump has that person.”

So, you know, I've been checking him with Republicans on the hill in close to the administration, you know, president allies to see what they were looking for from the speech and we talked about it last night. I mean, we expected that he was going to say mission accomplished right and that everything's going well and that we're going to be out soon. You know, one of my sources described as rambling and incoherent and didn't outline goals for winding down, but they said I think he did what what we said, which was he would make the case that we want and he's going to finish the job. Another Republican hill source said that, you know, pointed to the Dow Jones being down the SMP being down and said, you know,

there were no specifics. No one feels reassured and the reports appear to be that there are going to be ground operations, seizing car putting troops around some of the sites with the uranium for a week or so as they can dig it out, but like is that even realistic, can you just drop, you know, a group down and feels like you're sitting ducks and you'll get, it feels so dangerous. It feels like a mission accomplished moment for those who are old enough to remember the bush landing on the aircraft carrier and that banner behind him during that speech.

Look, I hope people in the Pentagon have stopped high-fiving each other about destroying Iran's Navy and Air Force because they need to be reminded that rocks Navy and Air Force lasted all of five minutes and the war went on for years and years and years. Afghanistan didn't even have a Navy and the US left Afghanistan with its tail between its legs.

The Iranians have a massive asymmetric advantage which is what the drone warfare and the advent of that new technological approach to warfare is all about and we still don't have an answer for it.

“Yeah, exactly. You know, it's interesting too because he keeps saying we've taken out Iran's capabilities but if they can still disrupt the straight of our moves, what does that say about how degraded they really are?”

We reach out and attack American assets in theater and American allies. We just lost an E3 centering AWax 700 million dollar aircraft on the ramp in Saudi Arabia from an Iranian attack likely supported with intel provided by the Russians. But the Iranians are not the first rule in warfare is that the enemy gets a vote and the Iranians are showing that they still have capability and when this morphs into the kind of asymmetric conflict that we ended up seeing in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Iranians have a massive advantage.

They haven't even mined the straight yet. They have restricted access to the straight, simply with the threat from Bond or Abbas and the assets in the area.

When they begin to mine the straight, that becomes almost insurmountable challenge. It is really easy to dump a mine, a seaborn mine off of the back of a fishing vessel or a tugboat and what are we going to do destroy every fishing vessel and tugboat in the Gulf? Of course not. They have the advantage in this domain and we still don't have a counter to it. You know, he, again, he suggested that the straight could just reopen or that allies could naturally. Yeah, is that even realistic to see completely misunderstand how the straight actually works as I mentioned earlier.

You are a mission commander who flew recon missions over the straight.

The real tragedy is that we have planned for this. I knew it was a lieutenant 20 years ago that page one of the Iranian military's playbook was closed the straight of Hormuz. The military has probably a dozen different scenario plans for dealing with this, but again, you go back to an administration that doesn't have anyone in it who can walk into the oval office and lay out the worst case scenario. And you wind up in a situation where the Department of Defense is shocked that the straight of Hormuz is closed or where the president went asked about all of these missiles landing in capitals across the Gulf.

His response is well, it all happens so fast. They are totally unprepared for what is happening on top of the lack of rationale for going into it and they don't have a plan now for getting us out of it. But it is more than saying it will happen naturally, which incidentally was the exact same language used when saying how COVID would end. Like, it doesn't work that way. We're dealing with laws of gravity here. You cannot open Pandora's box like we have in the Gulf and say it's just going to end naturally.

“Yeah, yeah, I mean, how could you realistically move oil for the straight of Hormuz safely?”

With the Iranians permission and I think that's where we're headed. Iran is going to come out of this with a deal are stronger than they went into this with they won't have a Navy in an Air Force, but it turns out as we're seeing right now they don't need a Navy in an Air Force to secure the straight of Hormuz. And you know what? We had a deal with the JCPOA under Obama that restricted them in very severe effective ways limited their ability to enrich uranium actually force them to surrender in rich uranium.

If we get a deal half that good now, the deal that Donald Trump tore up because it happened to be an Obama deal.

“I think Trump is going to declare victory. I mean, the hypocrisy of it all is it's almost done imaginable.”

Yeah, yeah, I mean, it could we realistically take or secure the straight what would that require? Taking the straight would require the kind of leverage which I think is the rationale for taking carguerland carguerland doesn't actually control the straight, but it's Iran's major oil export hub. It's hundreds of miles from the straight, but if we can control their main source of oil revenue, I think that the thinking is that then we can force them to open up the straight to actually physically to force them.

Why are allies want no part of it? We started this bar fight in a tough neighborhood without our friends behind us, and now we're begging for them to come bail us out, and I think they're wise not to.

I can understand the bar fight analogy very well, actually.

“Ian Hamilton says the thing that annoys me, Tara, is Russia is clearly helping Iran target US forces and Trump just believes that and and Trump believes that it's just the eye atola. Do you think that he's right about that?”

Well, I mean, Russia and Iran have operated hand in glove, not just in this theater, but in Ukraine as well. Remember the main mode of drone attack for the Russians for the first phase of the war against Ukraine was shed drones. Iranian-made drones now those should heads are being produced in Russian factories inside Russia. They work very closely together in terms of strategy in terms of planning, and we can all but guarantee that some of the targeting information provided to the Iranians to attack US assets, including that base in Saudi Arabia was offered by the Russians.

And we're not we're not catching up to that threat in any way. I think it is a damning indictment of our inability to match the threat that we have actually had to reverse engineer Iranian drones to make our version of that to be able to counter the Iranian drone threat. I mean, we are so far behind the eight ball when it comes to drone warfare and the Russians and the Iranians have been have been learning in Ukraine by the day. How are we so behind in drone warfare? Why? If I had to boil it down to a single explanation and it's a complicated issue, but if I had to boil it down to one, it's it's arrogance. It's the hubris of the Pentagon and the Trump administration in particular made all the worse by the fact that Ukraine has offered to help.

“We have tried time and again to reach out to the Americans and say, we're a drone superpower. We have been fighting and winning this drone war in in Ukraine.”

Fending off these Russian drones let us teach you how to do it. And we have said, no, we have the most expensive military in the world. It turns out doesn't make it the best military in the world. The first mass casualty event inflicted upon Americans in this war was that the hands of a shahed drone, a $20,000 cheap plywood drone, maybe, you know, some composite material in there as well. But I've seen shaheds. I've seen seeing them flying overhead. They're not expensive weapons. And one of those shaheds got through every layer of our defenses in the region hit an American base in Kuwait that incidentally had no overhead protection and killed six Americans.

I've figured out years ago how to take those things down cheaply and at scale. And we're trying to do it with a million dollar interceptors. I mean, think about the imbalance of that equation.

Iran doesn't actually need its shaheds to hit their targets. If they're soaking up a million dollar American missiles for every $20,000 drone. They're winning with every shahed they launch regardless of whether they make it to the target.

“These are all proxy wars, obviously going on. What is China doing in the background right now?”

China's laughing China is laughing at America's folly and it is learning. It is learning from our failures in Iran. It is certainly learning from the Ukrainian battlefield. China has observers watching what is happening on that battlefield where America has has held back. And China is leading the way in a lot of these areas when it comes to drone warfare. You see a lot of Chinese parts in both Ukraine and in Russia that wind up at the front in this this exchange of drones. I've seen them myself. China is learning all of the lessons that we should be learning in both Iran and Ukraine.

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Yeah, that's pretty much sums it all up, doesn't it?

“Yeah, it's bad. It's bad. And that is the larger geopolitical ramification of all this.”

If you don't think Taiwan is implicated by our failures in the Gulf, if you don't think Taiwan is implicated by our failure to be there for Ukraine, you're kidding yourselves. Taiwan is definitely next in line as are the the Baltic states who know just how threatening Russia is because that's their neighbor. And we're no longer the security guarantee that we used to be nobody can count on America's word much less. It's defensive shield anymore.

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“I'm saying, you can say that you're a jerk. You're a jerk, right? But you don't understand.”

"I'm not a girl, it's just a challenge."

"Make the whole thing like this, and if you do it, you will be able to do it." "That's right." "Safe, like this, you're a girl." "Now it's just a challenge." "Thanks again, guys." "Let's bring the hand back in."

"And thanks for that minute from our sponsors." "Trump says he's going to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age." "How credible is that?" "And what would that actually mean in practice?"

"First of all, it doesn't work, even if you can achieve it."

"We bombed Afghanistan or claimed to have bombed Afghanistan back to the Stone Age." "And it did not work." "You cannot provoke regime change from the air with those kinds of bombs." "If anything, there's an argument that you actually entrench a power like the IRGC because it becomes even more fanatical." "And who's to say that the new Iatola, whose parents we killed, whose family we have destroyed,

isn't more fanatical than the regime he is replacing. You cannot provoke regime change from the air that requires boots on the ground. The other thing you can't do is secure nuclear material. There's 460 kilograms of enriched uranium somewhere in Iran right now. And air power does nothing to address that issue.

So I know it's an easy go-to option for a president like Donald Trump because it seems relatively low-risk. But it opens that Pandora's box.

“And I think that is why you're seeing the movement of the marine expeditionary units,”

the positioning of the 82nd Airborne. If you're going to do the things that he is claimed he is going to achieve in Iran, you need ground troops, there's no other way, and he's caught himself between a rock and a hard place here." "Okay, so ground troops, he didn't actually commit to that yesterday during his state of the

the address of the nation, excuse me, state of the union is not great, address of the union." So he's got to commit ground troops. "What does that look like? How long is it going to take, can I realistically just dig for uranium?" "Well, I think there is an alternate pathway for the administration, which is just a bug out,

because Donald Trump has never cared about what his predecessors are going to inherit,

much less what he is leaving the rest of the world in terms of his messes to clean up.

“So I think that is a possibility as well that he'll have opened this Pandora's box.”

He'll have set this region of the world ablaze, and that he will just bug out and leave it to them to clean up the mess. In some ways, that is a preferable option to boots on the ground, because that introduces so many variables, and who knows what the outcome of something like the takeover of carguerland would be. The Iranians might well blow up the infrastructure before we get it,

and carguerland isn't some remote, unpopulated island that we can just pull our LSTs,

our amphibious ships up to. It is very close to Iran within striking distance of Iranian drones, it has something like 20,000 people on it, they will fight for it, and we can't get to it through this straightforward moves, because the straightforward move has been closed. So that assault is

“almost certainly going to have to be from the air with V22 Ospreys and other assets,”

maybe even the 82nd airborne, that kind of thing is really, really difficult to sustain a marine expeditionary unit has maybe two weeks of supplies, which means we have to secure a supply train into an operation like that to keep those Marines alive, and I don't know how we do that with dramatically increasing the footprint. And we haven't even talked about what it takes to secure the thousand pounds of enriched uranium somewhere in Iran. I mean, it sounds

like a lot, it's not. It's 20 guys with backpacks, right? You can disperse that really easily. How do we track it all down? Really, really difficult mission. Leaving says leaves the street as a tool toll booth, Iran wins, and what happens with the Petra dollar. Petra dollars, excuse me. Well, that's, I mean, that could be the the biggest strategic blow here, if the Petra dollar turns into into the Petra one, if we give China that leverage after literally generations after the

post World War II consensus around the Petra dollar, if that is blown up, because of this war of choice, it puts America in a, I mean, an historically weak position. And again, Harkin back to that cover to the economist, our enemies are laughing at us right now. Action against quality and neither of the price has in hand. So, for example, a certain number of 40 centimeters, only 78 centimeters, or a certain number of challenges,

only 70 centimeters. And there are all the products in our period and in the Action App, action, small prices, big people. What could victory look like, can? We've already, what could victory look like victory has to be minimizing the damage. At this point, victory would have been a JCPOA that was honored that was enforced and that had the, the democratic world behind it. The JCPOA was the Obama deal that restricted Iran's ability to

to make a nuclear weapon set them back years. And it was torn up. I hate to go here, but I think it's unavoidable at this point. It was torn up by Donald Trump, because it had been negotiated

“by a black president. Donald Trump did not want Obama to get credit for the JCPOA. And that's why”

he tore it up. And we're in a position now where Iran will very likely get a deal even better than the JCPOA. And Donald Trump will throw up his hands and declare victory and we'll be left with Iran in full control of the straight-of-form moves. That's the other thing about the,

the situation in the Gulf right now. The control over the straight was always a threat.

It was a theory. It was this sort of damages that Iran hung over the region and said, we can do this if we want to. And everyone was thinking to themselves, can they really will they really Donald Trump has given them the opportunity to prove now that they have a strategic weapon that is as powerful as a nuke. When you can control 20% of the world's oil supply, and when you're given the opportunity to actually demonstrate that, you have a weapon of mass destruction.

Wow. Okay. I'm going to show everyone a video. Abby's going to pull it up for us. She's our producer.

now. Oh, Abby's asking what video. Hold on. Let me tell her. So the Guardian is reporting that

“JD Vance was, he was speaking to a senior Iranian official considered one of the more reasonable”

peaceful-minded. And they were in fact channel discussions about how this conflict could end. And all of a sudden, the residential building that he lives in was bombed on clear if he's alive. What kind of message does that send right now in the middle of this conflict? Well, it undermines our ability to present ourselves as a good faith actor, even if that conversation was happening in good faith, even if it was a real negotiation, who was going to take the risk of talking to JD

Vance now when your signals are compromised, when when a strike hits your compound. As I understand

it, we don't know if this was an American attack or an Israeli attack, but if you're on the receiving end, does it really matter? You were on the phone with the Vice President of the United

“States and you've got attacked. I think that that is a major disincentive to opening any kind of”

negotiation with the Americans, given the exposure that that entails. And given the fact that that you can't be sure that the Americans aren't part of it, it is also another damming and indictment of our inability to coordinate with our supposed allies in the region. The fact that that the Americans in the Israelis, if it wasn't Israeli attack, were not coordinating as JD Vance was talking to a target is pretty humiliating. Yeah, Abby is going to find some of the pictures from

the bombing. It's quite startling. And you know, they're saying was a U.S. Israel attack, right? But doesn't it? Yeah, it's a missile strike. Seems like it's Israel though, right? If we're having conversations with you. I mean, it would seem to me, this is all speculation. I don't want to talk out of turn here. But even if it was an Israeli strike, not a U.S. strike, what does it say about our total lack of coordination and communication with our supposed partners in this, the Israelis

that they would kill one of the people, JD Vance was in the process of talking to. Yeah, and obviously JD Vance is more of an isolationist. He would probably like to take a diplomatic route who would help him politically in his future career. This is the former foreign minister in Iran. So he's not technically in the regime anymore. But yeah, it's quite striking. His name is Kamal Karazi. And he was injured. So I mean, maybe that means they can pick up talks again.

“But then again, why would you pick up talks after something like this happens?”

Seems pretty risky. Yeah. You know, and how do you think it impacts the possibility of negotiations going forward? I think we have to ask ourselves, do the Iranians want to negotiate. Every time the president has tried to calm the markets by saying negotiations are ongoing, the Iranians say no, they're not, which raises a number of issues. The biggest to me being the total lack of faith we can put in the words coming out of this administration. I mean, it is

it is wild to me that our fact checker of the American administration, the American president, is the Iranian administration. I mean, think about the Iraq war and what it would have said, what it would have felt like if every time George W. Bush said something that our fact checker was Saddam Hussein. That would have been insane at the time. Yet we're at the point now, where Americans have as much of a reason to trust the eye at all is as they have to trust the

Trump administration itself. That should shock everyone, the fact that this administration and this Pentagon is so unreliable, so untrustworthy that we have a better chance of learning the truth from Al Jazeera or from the Iranian media or from the Iranian government than we do from our own

government. It feels like it feels like new ground. I know governments and presidents have always

lied. I'm no stranger to the five o'clock fallies from Vietnam and the history of that kind of thing,

more truthful in many cases than our own government. I know every time Trump says it was ceasefire,

“I always re-tweet and say waiting for confirmation from the Iotola, which is saying something, right?”

Or just add them allegedly in front of it. I know you have a hard out now, so I want to ask you

one last question in the next 60 seconds. Are we closer to ending this conflict or we closer to

something much bigger? We're closer to something much bigger. We are closer to something much bigger because it is now out of our control and the enemy gets a vote and we haven't even seen the deployment of the massive asymmetric capability that the Iranians have and I'll just offer one example as a metaphor for how this thing could go. The USS coal, which admittedly was struck by an al-Qaeda affiliate, not an Iranian affiliate, but the USS coal, and I say this as a navy vet, was a warship,

which with its picket defenses, had the most sophisticated anti-missile system in the history of warfare, but it wasn't a missile that blew a hole in the side of the USS coal in Yemen and killed 17

“of my fellow navy sailors. It was a tugboat and that's what asymmetric warfare looks like.”

The Iranians don't need a navy or an air force to inflict massive damage on the U.S. and its allies in the region. You have 100,000 hardened IRGC fighters who are deeply motivated now to wreak havoc on the region and have weapon systems in the form of drones and other asymmetric weapons for which

“we have yet to develop a counter. I think that is coming.”

Well, on that note, thank you Ken. Appreciate your time and you can support the bus by hitting that subscribe button. If you are on sub-stack, please consider becoming paid subscribers to both of our shows. I tell you keep it going. And if you're on YouTube, hit that subscribe button as well, share this with all your friends. Ken has invaluable information, helping us decipher what they said, what they meant, what is real, what to expect, and can't thank you enough. And thank you

for your service as always. Thanks, Sarah. Good to be with you.