Iran is Making MORE Oil Money Since the War Started | EYES ON GEOPOLITICS

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“I wanted to bring up, and I didn't talk about this with Jonathan before, like we struck that girl school, they killed 180 kids, no bueno, just want to make sure we acknowledge that fuck up.”

Some of the more recent updates are, you know, they started mining the straight-of-harm moves with small, like their speed boats or whatever they have, I know they have a lot of those, even though we're saying that we destroyed their navy and all that stuff, which is probably true,

but last number I saw in terms of the navy was about like 42% of the navy was knocked out, you know, there's still a good amount more.

Everyone can tell the oil prices have gone up, there's no real end insight to this, President Trump did say yesterday in some statements like he was talking about how, I don't know if he's floating the idea that this is going great, and it's like we're done, we've achieved our objectives and he's going to declare victory and just, you know, go home without thinking of like the river variations of this stuff. A couple other things that came out yesterday as well, during the nuclear negotiations, Steve Wickleff and Jared Kushner didn't have a nuclear like expert with them in the room, which you would think, you know, anybody with like, some wrinkles in their brain would have somebody in the room that knows what they're talking about in terms like off the technical specs of what's happening.

“Yeah, so just I just dire, you know, puked out a bunch of stuff, John, what are you tracking as far as what's happening.”

Yeah, so what's most interesting to me is the economic impact of the conflict because that's obviously the driver of how long this can go on for the United States as a capitalist country, the US is beholden to the world economy.

The interesting part of that economic angle is that Iran is actually shipping and receiving more revenue than before the conflict in oil sales to China.

“Both in actual like real volume and in dollar returns on those oil sales and put it in perspective, there are 10 vessels currently inside the Persian Gulf that are moving eastward out into the ocean from Iran.”

There's zero vessels from other countries doing the same. These vessels are bound for China. So China is continuing to obtain oil from Iran despite what's going on. This is because for some reason that is inexplicable Iran is able to pass through these supposedly mind and dangerous areas. On molested while other ships cannot and the US is unable to guarantee that those vessels could move just like these falsely flag vessels. And I say falsely flag for example, one vessel has the flag of camera room and it's not actually like so normally when Iran tries to move these vessels they'll get a flag of some country and Africa typically in West Africa, which is where these flags typically issue from these flags aren't even from those countries are actually fake.

But they're still being tracked by two European agencies that are monitoring. This is why we know that they're there.

And each of these vessels has around 2 million barrels of oil on it. If you do the legit oil price, which right now is around $80, that's a $160 million per vessel. But these are not being sold in legit market. They're being sold in the black market. So you can increase that perhaps by double or even more per vessel. It's going to go into the pockets of the regime. And the important thing is when we think from a western perspective, we think the oil sales happen in China and the money goes back to the country that sold it Iran. That's not how it works. It actually goes into banks and Hong Kong, for example, which is most common.

“And from those banks and Hong Kong goes to banks in Europe and United States and Canada.”

And this is how the regime stores its assets from these oil sales because you can't take a suitcase full of dollars back to Iran because Iran doesn't belong to the swift banking system because we kicked it out in 2018.

Which basically pushed them wholesale into the black market instead of a little bit in the black market. They had no other place to go. So they completely moved into the black market.

So these dollars are and pounds and euros are going to banks that we consider friendly. The regime also has banks in France. There's a bank in Hamburg, there's a bank in London. Part of the bank Meli network, bank Meli is actually the official bank, the state bank of Iran. That's underneath the central bank of Iran that is still operating 100% in all these places I just mentioned in other countries as well. And there is a London branch of Bank Meli in Hong Kong. So it's not the central banks direct branch. It's a subsidiary of the British bank in Hong Kong, where this money goes into the UK.

And I'm sure people have seen the headlines about most about the new Ayatollah, who is miraculously put into the position by the IRGC rather than the process that's supposed to exist in the system.

He has $100 million or pounds of real estate in London that he uses to generate income. Very interesting that someone who's grown up in a charitable capacity who has never worked and had income has 100 million pounds of real estate in London. So I just want to put that economic spin on it because this is part of the conflict and you cannot exclude economics from brand strategy. We always learn this in the military that there's diplomatic informational military economic and political components to a brand strategy, and a lot of what we're seeing in the media is the military instrument of national power.

“And I think it's very important to bring the economic instrument into this, especially in an oil or commodity space to conflict, where the price of a commodity affects not only the outcome of the war, but the length of the war.”

John, when we're talking about, and this is more than somatic, so when we're talking about the Iranian administration owning these assets, we're really talking about the IRGC right, and then in the wake of the appointment of the new Supreme Leader, I've read articles that assert that this really is kind of a... solidification of IRGC's power. It's not even a... I mean, a subtle shift in a sense from the last vestiges of the Revolution and the Mueller's right lock stock and parallel into the hands of the IRGC, so maybe that's...

You know, it's a question, is that perhaps one unintended consequence of this... of this conflict we've talked about the downside of decapitation, right, that might be one of the downsides of remuni, removing clomeini from the chessboard. You're right, and actually...

“Yeah, the four D chess that we're all pawns in. So basically, you're right, and what it is, is kind of the veil has been removed, so there was this pretense that the clerics were ruling the country, it's an Islamic,”

clerically ruled country, et cetera. Although, at the same time, it was actually run by the IRGC, which we have spoken about many times in the show, and many others have, that veil has gone. There's no longer the pretext that, oh, this is actually a clerical regime. Now we see that it's actually the IRGC ruling the country inside and out. I'm talking about the idea. What, what do you get to see? I'm sorry, I had to do some TV, very early in the morning, which I'm sure none of you watched, because you don't watch TV at five in the morning.

If I'd known you are on, Mark, I would have set my name on earlier. You're in good, yeah, I did BBC at 1 AM, I'm surprised you're watching my god. But the BBC doesn't pay, do they? No, they pay you in exposure. That's what they say. It's implied. Yeah, I got you. Well, it's the same thing here. I don't pay anybody here.

No, I was going to go to cash to my family. Yeah, that's that is, that is these hook to those very issues. I will pay you an exposure, and it works. You get some big names.

I've never heard of that before.

Paying for, you know, podcast paying for guests, but maybe people do. Certainly, I don't, when I go on as a guest, I don't get paid. I don't think so. No, I mean, we don't do it. I don't think people, you know, it would be, we're not even a big podcast, but if you're going to a podcast, you know, that's massive exposure. I mean, BBC at MSNBC, sure, there's people watching, I guess, maybe.

“I look at this, do you know, my, my espionage skills like Snatch Day on mode from the studio today?”

Espionage skills. That's the thing to watch you at the farm. Yeah, we did. That's cool. One of the camera men's like, take it. I'm not watching. I'm like, I'm taking it. I'm going to pay it.

All right. So, Eddie, you were going to say something. So I actually, I had another question for Bo John and Mark now. So it, and obviously we're all outside. We're all outside, thank goodness, the, you know, the planning decision making execution process here. But someone asked me a question the other day that really kind of resonated with which is,

He, on, on the military side, right?

We always learn that at the, you know, the nexus between at the strategic leadership nexus, right?

Between political leadership and the military, the, the obligation of the military leaders is to give, give best military advice, right? But they're not necessarily just staying back and said, hey, I advise them, right? So, you know, the, the question really is this, and I know the answer, but we all know that this plan has been around for a while.

You know, the execution of this plan, it didn't just emerge in the last few months. It's something that all of us have been somehow connected with in the previous slides. But connected with this plan has always been in conditions and in state in vision, right? That, and that was the best military advice.

“Hey, this is the best way to get to this end state.”

Do you guys from what, from your informed speculation background, do you think that conversation is taking place right now? As in, hey, boss, we can't get there from here, or, hey, another, another week, and we should have achieved those air conditions. I mean, do you think the administration based on that advice has a very clear picture of where this ends? Or do you think perhaps there's a little bit of static in that, in that nexus between political and civilian leadership now,

where the military leaders are saying, hey, this campaign is designed to do X. It's not designed to do Y, and conditions for X. We will know, and we will let you know when they're happening. And we advise, you know, at that point the campaign has reached its natural termination right? It's achieved its end state.

I'll jump in first on that, on the operational level and, you know, building the campaigns, as you mentioned, Andy. So the component commander and the, the four commanders, you know, the set com commander, for example, about those strategic end states, for the campaign, but he can't set the strategy for the overall connection of campaigns together.

And we can see, you know, there's always the air campaign, the ground component, and the sea component, all these things coming together,

which at the operational level can be set by that set com commander, but the president sets the policy objective, which is a grand strategy objective. And the set com commander can't come in and shake the president, say, please give me an end state. We've said he's got to operate off of what he expects that end state to be based on what the signals are from the Oval Office of National Security Council. Whoever else is setting policy to the best of his ability. And at the operational level, we see the campaign plan is actually kind of easy to do that to, to make those inferences.

But the problem is those inferences might not be accurate, because politics changed much more rapidly than campaigns plans change.

“And now I've got to follow up with this question exactly, right?”

So this happens a lot, we saw it happen in Afghanistan, we saw it happen in Iraq. And what we saw, I thought, was this kind of attitude of, well, I gave my advice. You know, whereas, for me personally, having, you know, background is a military office of a 31 years, I think there's more to it than that. It's hate, hate boss, I just want to let you know, these are the risks of continuing, right? It's not simply, hey, I'm trying to guess what you want boss and his, is the campaign.

It should be at some point, sir, I need to talk to you about what your goals are because this is what I've given you. But I can't go, I can't go beyond that and we can't achieve anything beyond this. You've got to tell me what you want. Yeah, I think that also shows the difference between military risk that we think about like risk to personnel and risk to mission versus political risk, which are two totally different things.

And if you look at the operational plan for that, it's exceptionally risky, it's one of the most risky plans I have ever seen. And the reason it was approved was not because the president was willing to take on the military risk, it's because he thought it as a political risk problem.

And he basically subordinated the military risk to the political risk factors that were in his mind.

And that's a president who was probably thinking through this more clearly than presidents that came after him up until now. And the question is now looking back to Trump won, for example.

“I remember when we received a list of three dozen cultural sites in Iran that the U.S. was going to strike after the Soleimani assassination because Iran had retaliated and struck all the side airbase in some other targets.”

And we were getting ready to strike all those targets inside of Iran in Sankham.

And there was a lot of discussion about the political risk of viewing this versus the military risk of doing this. The military risk was actually relatively low for a short term view that the regime wouldn't be able to do very much at that time, but the political risk was considered too high. And so the president actually backed off because of the political risk balance, which is an interesting inversion of what we're talking about right now. And where it seems that the president's more willing to take political risk now, which is pushing the military force in the military into a position where there is no strategic end state that's been announced, which is a challenge for forming the end state so those campaign plans are supposed to fit into those strategic end states.

So the one thing I would add on this is that, you know, under normal circumstances, you know, a military campaign just does not, of course, only have the military component.

And, you know, these things are usually planned, and I don't think it's happened now, and that's why I think you see this, you know, this tactical military success, but then this strategic end coherence, but it's usually planned with a national security process. Where you have all elements of US power, it's diplomacy, it's the state department, obviously it's the US military, the intelligence community. The Department of Treasury, others, but they are part of a very kind of sequence set of meetings, the national security advisor, the NSC, you know, chairs this, and everything comes into kind of focus together, so you have a coherent plan that uses just about every tool in the US government and everyone is on the same page.

“And in these discussions, there will be, you know, a policy process and an end state, you know, what are we here to achieve work and how can each element of US power achieve this?”

And I think that this doesn't necessarily exist in the Trump orbit, I think they sit around, I mean, maybe this is a little dramatic, but they, you know, they kind of come up with stuff on an app and then the oval. But quarter of the state department is gone, gone under this administration, you have an NSE staff that's been hollowed out. The National Security Advisory Marco Rubio wears 14 hats and there's nothing more fun than watching all the memes on social media, you know, whether he's there today, I think he was in a, is a mine layer out there, yeah, I mean, come on, other times he's the grand, you know, vice-roy of Venezuela.

And so, or he's the old Shah and kind of romantic Iranian garb. But, you know, where is he on this? And so I don't think there's a process in which Andy, the things that you asked about, you know, why is this not kind of more cohesive, I think it just doesn't exist. And then you get, you know, the perfect example, there's so many examples of this, but, you know, how in the world. If you serve in embassies overseas, you know, one of your core functions in the country team eating is ensuring the safety of Americans and how we, we kind of screwed up the evacuation of several hundred thousand Americans citizens is incredible.

I mean, and so that was not done correctly, and then you go to the mix messaging. I mean, every day there are three or four different goals that Secretary of War, Secretary of Defense, what do you want to call him? Peter Exeth, and then Marco Rubio with all of his hats and Trump, they all say different things. And then you have, you know, Sankam chief coming out and saying, you know, these were our three objectives as well. So everyone, not in no one's on the same page. And you throw on top of that, a president who is just, you know, bases his decisions on kind of the whim of the day. And so he might just decide, let's just call it quits now.

Oil prices are too high, energy infrastructure targets are being hit. You know, now we have to deal with, I don't know if you guys talked about it already. The mining of the state of Ramos, how does the US, you know, Navy conduct this kind of, you know, operations.

“If you remember in the 80s when we were escorting ships through this, I think we escorted one ship a week. It would take about three years to get the 300 ships clogged in the straight right now through.”

But again, it's, but these things, I mean, all these kind of problems sets that are now out there, like we should have been addressing this earlier, and that, that, I mean, I sound like a bureaucrat, and I was one, I guess.

But now, I don't know if any of these things are going on, and so, you know, ultimately, I think that it's a, a lot of this function is because of really this unique nature of the administration.

And so, you know, there's, there's just, and, and again, it's a present who at any time that they were done.

“Now, you know, these are going to go crazy with this because they want to keep going, and I think the increase is really strikes or a function of they're getting nervous now.”

That Trump is just going to start getting really really nervous, really worried about the US economy, and I don't know, I apologize again, I was late, but, you know, one item to talk about is how administration officials are openly manipulating the oil markets. I mean, the idea that I think it was that was the energy secretary or someone came out yesterday and said that we actually were escorting a ship through US Navy was through the straight-of-armouth, which was false oil prices dropped after that.

I mean, this is not even like they're not even hiding it, and I think that's a reflection of how nervous they were.

They're buying the dip. I mean, it's crazy, you know, this. Yeah, I, I mean, I, at, at Mark, yeah, I mean, I think that was a great, you know, great, great summary.

“I, and I, you know, my, my point is not an argument against that, it is simply, I think we've got used to four stars being just very docile in this process, right?”

So, you know, think back to the, the shellaking that Mackenzie General Mackenzie took in the aftermath of Kabul, which, you know, I think was justified, right?

It wasn't, it wasn't that everyone was blaming him for political errors. It was the fact that people were blaming him for not speaking up when plans were clearly not going to work in his best military judgment and result. And, and, and, and the probability of bad things happening from the way things were evolving was high, and that he is the, as the, as the, the senior military commander had an obligation to, to voice his reservations. And because those reservations were so serious to offer his resignation, if, if is, you know, so that's, I, I'm not suggesting we're at that point, but I'm suggesting that I am saying that there is a, there is a gap here, right, there's a void, and that military leadership has a role when there is such a void to speak out.

Now, it's also the president, I mean, so, you know, I mean, you know, the, I think that tendency is, you know, everyone is, so this is, this is just human nature, people want to keep their jobs. And, you know, and Trump is, is over praise of the chairman of the joint chiefs over and over and over again, I mean, that starts to get to your head, I'm sure. I, you do hear reports that can as it's provided council to Trump that perhaps there's some courses of action he shouldn't take, but I would have go back to the responsible person in this should be the national security advisor.

He is the one who is supposed to kind of correlate all different views and asked for dissenting views. But, I mean, I don't know, like, there's reports in the press that everyone's wearing the same type of floor shine shoe because Trump, you know, is asking that everyone wear this shoe, you know, you guys know what I'm talking about. Yes, yes. And so, you know, there's, there's pictures of Marco Rubio wearing these oversized shoes, people are zeroing in on it, I just don't know if there's the ability to, to provide dissent to Trump because he's so mercurial.

So Andy, perhaps you're right on that, but I also think that at senior level as career is comes through, it's just human nature, it's not great.

“You should never, you should, I like when I hear stories of leaders who walk into a position of seniority who have a resignation later typed out in their desk in their safe.”

They have to be able to look at themselves afterwards, but a lot of times people don't do that, and that's across all, all administrations too. I mean, I, I've lost count how many times I've been disappointed when people haven't, you know, done the right thing. I had an old boss in mind at CIA, you know, and she gave me some tremendous advice and she, I would say it was just simply that just do the right thing every time period. And if you got to leave, you got to quit, that's okay. I'm, you got to be able to look at it.

But I don't know how it works. I would go back to, so yes, absolutely, when you've got an administration where everyone's wearing the same shoes. You, you do have to rely on the one guy who's worn cornframes all his life, right, which is, that's where I'm getting back to sometimes that that guy who, who is not even part of the administration, but happens to be a four star component, I mean, a, a, a four star combatant commander, he's, he's the guy in that hot seat. Right. The challenges have been, these are, these are Senate confirmed positions, and especially within the last year or so generals that have been put into three and four star positions rely on those positions, because if they're political views more than their military

Which, which emphasizes again, why the military needs to be, you know, that very obvious point, right, because you want a guy regardless of political background context, who is just saying, hey, this is, this is not going to turn out well.

“I mean, I'll give you just just examples, Mark already brought up a couple, but the, the drone threat, right, the drone threat was clearly and John, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, but we should have anticipated that.”

There's no doubt about it, there should have been a contingency plan, this isn't me being smart after the fact, before the fact, I know that drones were, no, no one cares about, I mean, they do, but blistered missiles are not such a threat, cruise missiles, not such a threat, especially when you talking their distances from Iran. You would think that given the distances from Iran, like over a thousand kilometres towards that targets, that slow moving drones might be an easy and intercept, but recent experience to include from Ukraine shows that they are almost impossible to intercept when you have a large enough inventory.

This is an excellent point where it's a very rare opportunity to see something like that used in combat and evaluate it from intelligence perspective before this conflict, and we were able to do that, or we had the opportunity to do that in Ukraine, when Iran built that alabuga facility in Russia, and we could actually see what combat level production capacity looks like for an active armed conflict, which is obviously Ukraine, where they're produced 400 to 600 drones per month. So we could actually see what a production levels look like in wartime, and then we could actually create intelligence assessment, okay, in the future, if we were to war with Iran, we can expect this level of productivity, even though during peacetime it's lower, obviously, so we're not surprising ourselves by this tripled output during wartime, and I think Israel put out some intelligence saying there were 80,000 of these drones already produced before we kicked off.

“Right, and of course, in wartime, Iran is absolutely going to produce more than they normally would produce, so we can expect to do replenishing those very rapidly.”

The other challenge, I don't know if you've seen the imagery of the GPS jamming around the Gulf, so the GPS jamming is a big problem if you have GPS in your equipment.

You don't have GPS, you don't need to worry about it, and some of these smaller drones don't have GPS, they have pre-programmed positions, some of them are just going in a specific direction that set before they launch without even adding mapping. Exactly, and I actually saw these in action in 2011 and Afghanistan, there was an Iranian drone over our base that lost contact with its handler, but still had pre-programmed activities it was supposed to do in flight, and did those activities without any control from the controller over the horizon, and that was 15 years ago.

“And they've been modifying these, obviously, in using them to great effect in learning combat errors in Ukraine and adjusting those errors, not only in production, but in the capacity of those drones to move through air defense systems.”

And again, this is something that we could evaluate and hopefully had evaluated, I don't know if we have or how we view that evaluation in this current conflict.

So there is an exact example of when military leadership has failed to give best military advice, hey boss, I want you to know this is what could happen because, and again, since where I kind of push back, I feel a little bit on the distinction, because there isn't always a clear distinction between military and political risk, and here is one area where they both combine, right? That, that, that gap, which was significant, although perhaps not in terms of casualties, not even in terms of infrastructure destruction, it was a significant military and political risk, because of the threat to Gulf cooperation, counsel company, GCC countries, right?

Exactly, our regional allies.

I mean, especially those partners close in. I mean, this is, it's not, this is not a huge kind of analytic stretch, I mean, maybe the, the four of us here know a thing or two, but I mean, the idea that we are unprepared for this, the sheet for the drone warfare, after seeing what happened in Ukraine, is extraordinary to me. And so it's not, you know, is the US military, who is unprepared, we're about the intelligence community, I mean again, when you go through these operations and things are presented in the National Security Council, there are, you know, cost benefit assessments, this is what could happen, you do all the left of boom planning.

I mean, this is just basic, I'm adding any one of us could have said this off the top of our heads, hey, we got to get Americans out of the region, the Iranians are going to use drones, look what would happen in Ukraine, this is tough, are we ready for this? I mean, this is not rocket science. So I think that's one of the things that really surprised me that we weren't as well prepared for this, but there's, there's another thing that I think for both, for Andy and John to comment on, it has to do with this notion of boots on the ground, and I was laughing, there was, I can't remember if it was on Fox or Newsmax or one, you know, there, they had someone come on and said, well, you know, the use of special operations forces, that doesn't count as boots on the ground.

But you're in Iran, I don't know, even if it's for a couple hours, what are your thoughts on that? Because, and I think that's, it's most important when we think about two things, one is what to do about the, the Iranian nuclear program. You know, it is that, again, we're not sure if that's a goal anymore, because they keep changing, but the idea of, you know, how do you get to that, that, you know, highly enriched uranium, do we have to have, and you all, but you guys know this, you're going to address it, there are, you know,

our kind of top soft units are trained in this, whether it's, you know, dev group or, or Delta, you know, do you expect that to happen? And then I think on the, on the other part has to do with, and I know we're going to get into weeds is about, you know, how to kind of deter the Iranians potentially, or they are mining the straight of our moves, what about Carg Island, would there be some kind of effort of US to take that, which I think is the kind of the huge, you know, kind of the locus of,

“of Iranian export capability. So what, what do you guys thoughts on that?”

Yes, I always tell this anecdote, I actually used to teach a class on, on military diplomacy and about why the boots and the ground thing is so contentious.

So we're in Syria with Marsoc, we're in Syria, and Obama comes on and he says, we have no boots on the ground in Syria, and we look at our boots, and they're on the ground in Syria, and we're like, look at each other like, what? And, you know, and it's funny because, you know, on the ground level as a force there, you know, you're not part of this big political discussion, you're just, you're just there doing the thing that you're supposed to do, you know. And there's actually reasons they say boots on the ground, and they're like legal distinctions between what does it mean to be deployed.

“And anyone who's had to be in a command position to have to put forces out there, you've had to sign something called a boots on the ground letter or a bog letter that says we have X number of forces in this country.”

The chief of mission approves that number of folks based on NSDD38, which is something that Ronald Reagan put into place, where the chief of mission is the one that gets to say how many forces are in the country.

But if those forces aren't there for military reasons, they're there for something else, they don't count for the boots in the ground number.

And there are all these different ways you can like push these levers to get that tier one unit in there without actually saying, legally that they're even there. Which is kind of fascinating, we had the problem in Libya as well when we said when Obama said there are no forces in Libya, there was a Marsoc unit rolling across the airfield with their weapons out, which they weren't supposed to have in the newspaper. So there's all these examples of when we say that and it's not true.

Of course there's reasons for that, obviously, the operation security reasons and many other reasons.

But on your point about the car island, there's just want to jump on that because if you look at a satellite image of car island, it's not very large. It's a very obvious oil refined oil shipment point. There's nothing else on the island except these vats of oil and gas on the island, which to me is like in a conflict where oil and gas are at the center of the conflict as far as the Gulf is concerned. The legitimate military target, if the regime is selling this on the black market to China and to no one else, there are no other benefactors of this oil.

It's just screams to me right here, like there's like a big ax on it, like hit this spot. And for some reason that has been one spot, the US has not touched at all, and I just don't understand why it doesn't make sense to me.

“I think so a couple of comments on that. One is the difference between certain number of boots and ground on the ground and more boots on the ground is not such a big difference, right?”

So that, you know, John two point about unfamiliar with the bulk report that that went through endless machinations. We could look as though we have fewer guys in for instance a rock and then Syria and OIR, right? But it's a huge significance between no boots and some. And you know, while all of us understand that politically there's no difference between conventional and soft or covert boots on the ground. And in in practice, I mean, politically there isn't, but in practice of course there is because we just over the last three or four decades, United States has had just not good experiences of putting mass boots on the ground, right, flooding the zone.

So when we're doing things a little more with a little more precision, and we're using soft or using the agency. We've had generally a much better record right all the way back to, you know, you name it, I mean back to El Salvador plan Colombia. But yeah, so, but it's an emotive term and we've seen how this hit the media, right? So did you see the headlines a couple of days ago, the president does not rule out boots on the ground.

But having said all that, all right, I don't, you know, as a, it's a lengthy way of saying, I don't think we did a planned book conventional troops on the ground, but I could be proven wrong.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was a plan for soft or there were covert plans, and I just hope that those plans are linked.

“Link to the practical term to strategic and state, and for instance, I hope we're not putting all our eggs in the Kurdish basket, right?”

And in the hope that we're going to replicate the, we're going to take what the SDF did and replicate that in Iran, because all of us here again know that doesn't happen. I think these Kurdish friends turned that off. Erdogan, erdogan fit fit on through a fit. So I'm not sure that's going to happen with the Kurds. I think these rallies are doing it, but I don't know if we're going to do it. Who knows?

Can I have a practical, other practical missions for, you know, a molecule mentioned, I essentially BDA right on the nuclear facility.

How do you secure the highly enriched uranium? I mean, that's, you know, obviously, I'm not saying anything secret. It's out in the press. I mean, we have our, you know, tier one units. There's specific units trained for this. If we really want to make sure that Iran is not a nuclear threat, we have to find that that remaining HU and presumably, hopefully they know where it is. There are like two dozen locations that we have publicly disclosed have some of this uranium and other materials. So think that's not just the uranium itself. It's also the centrifuges, the computer equipment that's used.

All of us has to be taken, not only because of the technological capacity that it provides to the regime, but also because it's actually radioactive. We have to remove some of this, this material from the country and places like Ispahon, for example, have huge amounts of uranium. You can't just send a small team in with a backpack and take it out. You have to have logistics and sustainment behind them moving it out safely. You know, for example, the United States when we move nuclear material around, we have security forces, the Marine Corps and Air Force as well, that actually go with that material and transport it on the ground wherever it's going.

Not tier one units doing this, but regular forces doing this because it has to be escorted so that there's no possibility if we ever see the movie broken arrow with that kind of day. That was a great movie.

And that's the thing you don't want to happen is that this nuke just makes its way out somewhere or the uranium makes its way out somewhere.

And that's only one mission though because there's the uranium counter WMD mission, but there's also the UW-Fid mission, which if we were using Kurds or zeroes, those are two separate missions under two separate authorities, which introduces a lot of complexity because you can't have the same commander doing both activities. So now you have two task forces in there managing that, plus external actors like the agency, Department of Energy and others who are going to be also playing a role in this as well.

And as I keep mentioning, if you think about all these layers, if you'reocracy, they're being added when these two simultaneous operations are occurring, rather than just one of them or the other.

“Do you think it's going to happen? Do you think that that soft units will be involved in such an operation against the Iranian nuclear program?”

I think in a normal political atmosphere it would be easier to answer that question, but because of the whipsaw nature of foreign policy right now, it's very hard to say. Andy, quick question for you. And I'm going to get certainly in trouble this morning when I did a TV hit. I said Steve Woodcoff is the worst U.S. envoy in diplomatic history. I think that's fair.

But it's because I'm going to ask you about is one he actually said yesterday said that we're taking Russia's assurances that they're not providing targeting assistance to the Iranians. That gave me and a lot of other people I think post-traumatic thoughts in the Helsinki out for that. From Helsinki a couple years ago and Jonathan Lamar is a friend of mine asked President Trump, who do you believe about Russian interference in Trump said, "Well, I believe Putin." What do you think of Woodcoff's comments on that? I am asking you only because of your Ukraine experience too.

And Woodcoff is kind of bummed through Ukraine. I mean this is a more influential member of Trump's team, more so than Marco Rubio, I think, giving the Russians a pass. I think everyone was astounded at this.

“I think it does not all go well for Woodcoff's understanding of, this is a vast understanding, right?”

So where I'll go from here, I think it's part of a larger problem, right? That my concern and I don't know this is the case, but that this administration is kind of so set against Zelensky and Ukraine. And so inclined to give Russia a pass that this wasn't the only era, right?

And of course the Russians are doing that. And of course they would justify it ethically because they are defending and ally under attack for the United States.

“And after all, we did that with the Ukrainians, right?”

We helped the Ukrainians with the Russians. But it's another thing for the crowd to be on our first one, I'm not justifying what the Russians are doing. No, no, I'm saying what the administration is doing. What I'm saying is that we're willing to overlook acts of war from Russia because we're so set against Ukraine. The other, but perhaps even the more serious aspect of this is, we didn't consult with Ukraine before doing this.

And now Middle Eastern countries are saying, are contacting the Ukrainian government directly. And indeed the Ukrainian government agreed to send mobile training teams to Middle Eastern countries. Now United States is going to do that. Yeah, billions of United States not part of this, right? In order to help with their short range air defense.

So we have failed on to it first of all because we have known for a long time that we have a gap in our short range air defense, right?

We've known this and we've never closed that gap.

We've never closed that gap and we haven't, the Ukrainians have. The Ukrainians are everything from drone target acquisition and I'm not going to get too technical, mainly because I'm hanging up on my fingernails here. But why are, you know, drones are a different problem set than cruise and ballistic missiles. You, you can use patriot and fat, but first of all, you're mismatching your inventory. It's not cost effective. Secondly, you're running your magazine slow and thirdly patriot and fat are not the best interceptors for small drones with a, I mean, for drones slow moving low altitude, low radar cross section.

Okay, this has been our problem for a long time from acquisition to engagement using integration of EW and other means to short term kinetic defense. We have a massive gap and that's no secret. It's been a gap for a while. And we made no effort as we plan this to reach out to Ukraine to try and close that gap. We lost credibility with our partners because of that. Now they're saying, hey, thanks very much for your help United States.

So we're going to reach out to the experts. So what's funny is yesterday, Axios came out with articles saying US dismissed Ukraine deal for anti Iran drone tech last year. And seven months ago, Ukraine officials try to sell the US their battle proven technology for downing Iranian may drones. And they said, no, thanks. Could that have been useful? I'm not a military expert, but I'm going to say yes.

We'll never know. Yeah, okay.

I want to shift just one quick thing here because I thought there's, and this, I'm going to defend a phexat on this and the, and the Pentagon, you're always doing that.

“That's what I usually do. There was a controversy or maybe something about about, you know, the millions of dollars spent on stake in lobster.”

And all I will say is when you're in kind of shitty places, if you can get a good meal of stake or lobster, it's a glorious thing. So I will, I will back up the DOD and whatever they want to spend on this kind of stuff. You guys have been there. And I will add one other thing to it and talk about the agency budget, but CIA always had it, every war zone based great food. We had great chefs. And that is important. I can't even imagine how, you know, the level of like getting ripped off the CIA is getting for like chefs and cooks.

Who's the fucking carrots? You're saying like, I'm just saying like, they're probably super exciting. Oh, fuck. Do you ever have to fill out a missing gear statement, train your time in the agency? No, I didn't mean I have more say pay pay for a lost poncho liner.

Right.

So I think the issue with that was last month, this last month of DOD spent 93 billion in the most since 2008 when we were actually in a war.

I don't care. I don't care.

“Yeah, that, I mean, and you got to agree with me, right?”

I agree with you. We actually had lobster and steak on the Navy birthday in Afghanistan. I remember it. I don't care who's birthday it is, and I haven't taken lobster. Bring it on.

I mean, beneath their marries, you know, and so I thought that was funny. What's interesting is they said it was 93 billion and then they listed a bunch of stuff that was like, all right, you're listing a ton of stuff that's like not adding up to 93 billion. Right. You know, it's adding up to maybe a few hundred million.

It's like, shouldn't we actually look at what the DOD spending besides like state the bullshit like that? Like it was just the story, you know, to get viral, to go viral. Yeah. So anyways, I'll defend the Pentagon and the Secretary defense on that. Bring on the lobster.

I, I thought it was, you know, when, when you are, when you have a bunch of stuff that is happening or not happening that is quite serious.

I, I thought it was a delving into my new shifts. So coming off to the right meals, right? How about, you know, the topic we just discussed, the short range interference. Now that is, that is, that that is potentially criminal negligence, right? I'm, I'm, I'm of using the term criminal.

I don't mean literally criminal, but it's negligence of the high order. That we ignore this so we didn't destroy. Didn't destroy. Didn't one of our big radar domes get destroyed in a Kuwait? That's costs, you know, a couple of dollars.

I think it's a bar range. Sorry.

That costs a couple billion dollars and can't just easily be replaced.

“You know, I think that's why they don't want to talk about it because it seems like the narrative coming from the Department of Defense, which by statute.”

It's still called Department of Defense. Right. Is that they don't want you to reveal any weakness in their narrative. So they're unwilling to acknowledge that there are combat losses, even in losses of life. If you see the way that they describe losses of life in injury, general came did a good job of it during his press conference last week.

But the civilian side is doing very poor job of acknowledging any cracks whatsoever, which I think is also a mistake because it looks a lot like hubris, which is one of the most dangerous errors, or perhaps is the most dangerous error you can make in combat operations. And we've seen this before. I mean, again, you know, the, you know, the, in the 20 years of the GWAT,

I mean, Afghanistan and Iraq, there was a lot of bullshit spewed at press conferences. I do think cane, you know, is an interesting figure. Again, he's the chairman. So he's the president's advisor and military affairs, but, you know, and these, when they do these joint press conferences, you know, you go through the cringe-worthy moments of headset when he's acting like a JV football coach. I'm using all of this kind of, the same crap that you guys probably heard when you were, you know, young in your careers from, you know,

from a second lieutenant or a captain, but, and then cane comes out and he's much more sober, and kind of, I don't see him acting with the hubris that certainly headset is just kind of spewing forward all the time. That gives me some hope. But again, as you noted before, there's the military aspect of this, but then there's also the, you know, what are our goals. And so, it perhaps that's something that can, you know, I mean, it's not his job to be the national security advisor.

My, his job is to go out and try to tell the truth, the American public, and I, you know, I think when he's, it was even asked about, you know, how's the war going? You know, so you said the Iranians were fighting back. You know, the enemy does get a vote. And so I think that's important.

“That's what concerns me too about, if the US pulls out right now and stops, turns it off and says,”

I don't know if you saw Caroline leave it, said that Trump will define what the unconditional surrender looks like, which is a very interesting new way to look at how a war ends. And I just think about the enemy gets a vote.

And especially now, Iran is in a position to react in ways that we probably hope they had never acted.

And especially if we look back in the war in Iraq when they activated she militias and they were using explicitly foreign penetrators. That is a small drop in the bucket to what a dime regime will use. They will do anything, right? And I think that that's the scariest type of enemy is one who's not constrained by any rules anymore. And we've given them the opportunity to remove those constraints. In fact, we have removed the Marseilles from them, right?

And I think that's perhaps what is scary to me is that if we say it's over, it's actually not over and it's worse. We've also given our adversaries, Russian and China a kind of the moral high ground for sighting with Iran openly now, right? For a number of reasons.

“I mean, I'm not criticizing execution of the plan because I think, you know,”

I mean, it's a complex question. Was the war just five? Wasn't it just five?

But the bottom line is again, those of us here know Iran's been a bad actor, a bad regional influence for some time.

And inevitably something had to be done about it, right? You know, even if it was just moving the grass, that's not what I'm critiquing. But again, it's the being sure if you're in a state, being sure of your goals. Being open and transparent with the American people. And of course, the elected representatives about what those goals are.

That is how a democracy fights a war, and that is the way that's those are the things that concern me. I agree with it. And having, yeah, go ahead, go ahead, sorry John. I was going to say having end states publicly announced does nothing to operational security. And it sounds like that's the excuse a lot of the administration folks are trying to say is that if we say what we want to do, it's going to disrupt what we're doing. And I look at history and I think that that's never happened.

And then you can make an end states are typically quite nebulous. They just kind of point in a direction. They don't actually say on this date, on this time, this is happening. I think World War I was the only time that we actually picked the date that it's happening.

And I don't think that's what Americans are looking for.

“And I, and looking at the approval numbers for the war, I think it's like 20% 26% of Americans approve of it.”

Well, you can get those numbers up if you communicate. When there's an unknown, people aren't going to be comfortable with that unknown for a variety of reasons. And some of them are not even political.

Some of them just want to know what's going on in their country.

And I think that might be contributing to the negative decline of that. That approval rating. Hey, are you guys concerned about again? And I think Andy, you just raised it. So we are that now.

Now my art again in a Middle Eastern war kind of extraordinary as, as, you know, the Trump, the campaign and his kind of the soul kind of reason for being on foreign policy was this not to happen.

“But when you, when you think about, you know, what's the long term pacing threat to the United States?”

And I think a lot of, maybe I don't know if you guys agree, but there's used to being the national defense strategy.

It's not anymore, but China was that, you know, with with the amount, you know, we're spending a billion dollars.

But we said, as a billion a day, the numbers are extraordinary, but with, you know, all sorts of stocks now being reduced with our, I mean, I can idea, you know, our, our fleet of aircraft carriers are going to be going to need serious retrofitting after this. Are we, you know, how dangerous is this moment now as China looks at this and says the US actually whether US military is, I think we would agree the most powerful, you know, force on the planet we're going to be exhausted after this. Is there some danger in that have we left a specific, you know, way, you know, exposed in, in what's happening now in the Middle East?

I think looking at our defense industrial base for a long time, it's been clear that we are not able currently to sustain an actual conventional conflict with China.

“I think this is kind of well known, right, and China is currently evaluating how we're reacting to a much lesser adversary in Iran and probably getting very positive feelings from that evaluation.”

Especially considering the further logistical challenges across the straight of Taiwan, just much further, some 10 times further across than the Gulf is. And the ability of the US to resupply and continue to conflict in that smaller space. It's financially more difficult. It's not a geometric difference. It's an exponential difference across the straights. And that's just the straights. That's not the smaller islands like the Spratlies and the cross islands, things like that in South China Sea, which will be also a major theater of conflict if we had a war of China.

And we have Guam very far away, very far away from the actual weapons engagement zone that we would be inside of if we were fighting against China. Not only that, we've also pushed away our allies and partners in the Pacific, starting with the National Security Strategy that recently came out, excluding those partners now lies from the strategy. If we looked back at the Biden strategy, mentioned to allies and partners something like 270 times and only 20 pages, right, it doesn't mention them at all in the National Security Strategy now, which is is our strategy.

That is what the policy position is of the United States. It's not like there's some secret policy somewhere else like this is the strategy. China reads that, China understands that, and China probably believes it. I would imagine it would be smart for them to do so. So I think they're looking at that at this and probably feeling a little more confident than before the war kicked off that they'd be able to actually take Taiwan and suffer less resistance from the US side, at least not talking about the Taiwanese themselves, but from the US, I think they're feeling more confident probably.

Yeah, I would say this, and I don't, I'm not a China expert, but I would say that Xi undoubtedly has a plan undoubtedly, and I think this simply, this reduces, this is validation reduces the risk on that plan, and I would guess. Of course, I don't know, but I would guess that that plan includes step one consolidation in the South China Sea, all those places, John, that you mentioned in others, right, where they were trying to spend pretty aggressive anyway, and has pushed ahead despite conversations from the front of enemies and the Philippines and amongst others. They will continue consolidate there, and then step two, I would guess, would be a kind of an anaconda policy on Taiwan, right, beginning with political infiltration or affecting the parties, manipulating Taiwan selections as much as possible, and they don't.

China knows they don't have to do of stuff as complex as what Russia did in 2016 in the United States. You're talking about similar cultures, you're talking about the same language, they're very, very understanding of party politics within Taiwan, and how they'll influence it, and that would be step one combined with economic incentives and diss incentives, you know, I don't think they even have to get to the blockade point, but I'm sure that's on there, you know, their escalation of force, and then what you're talking about actually crossing the streets, you know, by that time,

Perhaps not a pro-Chinese government, overtly, stronger pro-Chinese government in Taiwan, but certainly a lot of pro-Chinese sympathy and mobilized, right, that mobilized political forces within Taiwan, that favor, if they unification. Was it? Wasn't there the Indo-Pacam chief, or I know as Bill Burns too, there's this mythical 2027 date, but we're coming up close to it, that was when, I guess, the consensus military in the intelligence community was the Chinese would be ready to do something.

Well, it's, I don't know, it's March of 26, it's coming up, and that didn't even take into account a very tired and exhausted US, you know, a military.

So I think. I just add on there. What's that? So I just want to mention, so I worked in the South China Sea quite a bit in with Marsak as well, and I was inside the nine dash line, right on the tip of the cows tongue in Natuna Bassar, which is a very small island that's actually an Indonesian island. And it's Indonesia's only physical territory inside the nine dash line.

And while we were there, this is 2014, so 12 years ago, China was doing daily two ship over flights with fighter aircraft, interfering with Indonesia's airspace every single day. And Indonesia could do nothing about it, and neither could we.

“And this is really important to understand because China is not a democracy, obviously.”

Their strategic outlook is far longer than ours, not because they're brilliant or special, but because of the way their political system domestically set up. So if they pick a strategy 20 years ago to do something, there's no disruption to that strategy politically. It remains in place, and it has been in place, like I said, it's been in place for decades, they've been thinking about this for a very long time. Since they entered the World Bank back in the early 2000s, and you know, they became this new economy within the international system, which I think a lot of people don't remember this, that China was not always economically viable, even in the recent memory.

This is a new thing, it's a new entrance economically, and China does not want to let go of that.

The South China Sea is a major part of that, the internal island chain, the first island chain is very important to that, which includes Taiwan.

The second island chain is Japan, and all the way down through up to Okinawa. And the US doesn't really understand what some do. There are some people within the government that understand this important kind of philosophical outlook that China has in the Pacific. This is a strategic opportunity right now for China to leverage that. That doesn't necessarily mean using the military international power. In fact, they probably won't, they'll probably use a combination of diplomatic information and economic levers, and avoid the military leverage.

Because it is extremely expensive with disparate impacts to use the military instrument. I have a friend who's in the Taiwanese government now mentioned to me about in Taiwan on TV, and at like gas stations, for example, they have little screens at the stations. There's Chinese propaganda all the time on all of those screens right now that the Taiwanese government's unable to do anything about. China has already been doing the informational instrument, and this is something, again, to those who have been watching it, they know this.

“It's obvious, but to, I think, the general public is not something understood that it's not going to be a salvo ballistic missiles like we have with Iran right now.”

It's a war that has already begun has already been going on for decades. And with that, of course, if they do it, and that's kind of slower methodical measure. And let's say they did it under this administration, that almost guarantees the US doesn't respond in any fashion. Right, and if we're looking at this from a grand strategy level, what they want, what China wants to happen, no shots fired, they want a government in Taiwan that's elected that ops to join China.

This is the goal, it's not a war, and I think for us in the West we're thinking like it's always about war, no.

It's about the easiest and cheapest way possible to achieve the objective that this country has, and that is a domestic choice to rejoin the mainland. And they're well positioned to do that. The well positioned to influence and there's nothing right now the United States is doing to counter that. We've actually turned to speak it down in the last, let's say, seven years or so. Good God, guys, things are going great.

Hey, do you have some good news for you? I'll tell you some red socks bullshit. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is the side of my age. I actually went out and I bought some sketches.

Like the shoes? Yeah, the shoes. The slip on sketches. Congratulations. Isn't that that is a sign?

I got you got back in Florida. So, you know, I was hanging out with a lot of old folks and so I'm not going to wear some sketches around. How do you like that full retiree mode? It's incredible.

Um, guys. As usual, this is not. Give me any confidence with the world today.

“Perhaps you should have different people on the podcast, right?”

You might be right. I might just have like a good news podcast or something just like, so I'm not depressed every time we do this.

Uh, what's like, if you know, like, in terms of internal polling and Taiwan,

“what are our people for reunification against it?”

Like, where's where's that? So, the competing party right now that's possibly going to take over the next election is pro mainland. And this is kind of a crazy thing to believe that this is possible. Let's say it was 10 years ago.

You wouldn't have believed I'd be saying that.

But there's been such incredible pressure from mainland on domestic politics in Taiwan

that they have, they have been succeeding in gaining significant ground to the point where this person I know who's in the current government is concerned that they're going to lose the election to this party. And I think that is what China wants. I mean, like, that exact outcome is what they've been pushing toward

“and investing resources into and they're very likely to succeed right now.”

When is the election next year? Twenty twenty seven. Great. This is going great guys. Jesus Christ.

All right. Anything else? All right. Do us a favor. Get everyone's books.

Everyone here has a book except for me.

I haven't come in on September, actually. I'll drop that. But it's not a book of business. Yeah. Yeah, right.

Yeah.

“John Hackett, links are in the description.”

Mark P. Link are in the description. There's something else I wanted to say. Oh, teamhouse. Patreon.com/teamhouseopsporttoshow. So I could pay these guys.

Eventually. Thanks guys as always. Yeah. Thanks everyone. Thank you.

See you next week. I want to tell all of you today about a new newsletter that we're launching. But encompasses both the teamhouse podcast, the eyes on podcast. And the high side news outlet, which I run with Sean Naylor. The newsletter is going to be once a week.

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So this is a once a week email. It'll slide in your inbox. And it will have the greatest hits of that week. It's really good. Check it out.

The website for it is teamhousepodcast.kit.com/join. The teamhousepodcast.kit.com/join. Go there and you enter into your email list or you enter your email into the little thing on the website and you're good to go. And that'll be it. So we really appreciate your support and I hope you'll consider signing up.

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