Loading summary
Transcript53 lines
- [00:00]
A
Ben.
- [00:00]
B
I'm Ben Parker from the Bulwark.
- [00:03]
C
And I'm Mark Hertling from the Bulwark. And we've got some real live breaking news right now, and we hope to talk a little bit about Carg Island.
- [00:11]
B
Yeah, this is a breaking news edition of Command Post, because just a few minutes before we went live here, the President of the United States announced that maybe possibly at some indeterminate point in the future, we're going to be invading an Iranian island, Kharg island, which is where they do most of their oil exports from in the street of Hormuz, quote, assume total control of their oil and gas markets, much like we have with Venezuela. So we've talked about this possibility before. It is. It is. Well, I'll hold on this for now, but my immediate reaction when I see this is just like pure, unadulterated anger. And I can explain why. But first, General, what do you make of this?
- [00:54]
C
Yeah, well, you know, what we might want to do, Ben, is, is explain to our listeners where Cargill island is, what it does. And, Matt, if you can bring up that map we talked about. There it is. So you see the Straits of Hormuz, the Strait of Hormuz, off to the right, where UAE and Iran kind of intersect in that narrow body of water that's been on the news for the last couple of weeks. But Carg island lies in the northern Persian Gulf. It's about. About 20 miles off Iran's coast in their Bashir Province, which is an area that was bombed the other day. It sits northwest of the Strait of Hormuz, and It's. It's about 55 kilometers away from the port. It's a coral outcrop island about 5 miles long and 3 miles wide, with a total area of roughly 20 square kilometers. But it's one of the few Gulf islands with fresh water. It's surrounded by deep seawater, which allows the very large crude carriers, the merchant ships and supertankers, to dock directly offshore and take on their products. And what's interesting is most of Iran's coastline is too shallow for tanker traffic to go into the coast. But CARG is uniquely valuable because of this. It has about 8,000 residents that live on the island, although the access of those citizens is tightly controlled because of the strategic oil ports and the military facilities there. Now, let's talk a little bit about what it does. Carg handles about 90% of Iran's crude oil exports. Its loading capacity is about 7 million barrels per day. That is just unfathomable for Me, I'm not a tanker expert or a shipper, but it just seems fascinating. Their storage capacity there exceeds 30 million barrels in dozens of large storage tanks, which we would be able to see on any kind of satellite photo or even in Google Maps if you zoomed in on Carg island. And there's an old expression that I learned, and I'll tell more about this in a minute. If the Strait of Hormuz is Iran's front door, then Carg island is its cast register. Now, it has a lot of military folks on this island. It's an air defense hub. Now a lot of those have likely been damaged by the strikes that have already occurred. But in the past it's considered a defensive location with surface to air missile radar sites, air surveillance facility and some of the IRGC security forces, which I'm sure have been moved from there lately. But it also sits astride all of the Iranian offshore oil fields and it's right smack dab in the middle of the Northern Gulf shipping routes. So all of these things contribute to this importance of this island and why President Trump and the military planners would focus on it because some might even call it, Ben, as we talked about the other day, a center of gravity using the Clausewitzian term. So that's kind of a description of the island. And what I told Ben this morning was back in 1988 when I was part of the SAMS course at Leavenworth, which I was a young major at the time. This is before I went off to Desert Storm and we were studying the operational art in a one year additional course to the Command and General Staff College. There were 40 students in that course, all army officers that would go on to be operational planners and division planners in the Corps and the divisions in the U.S. army. Well, I've mentioned this briefly before, but one of our big exercises was a war game against Iran. And the reason it was topical for us at the time is we were getting real live information from the Iran Iraq War from 1980 to 1988. And interestingly enough, I told Ben, I pulled out an old notebook of mine in a footlocker this morning. Kharg was one of Iraq's primary targets during the so called Tanker war. So for a four year period, Saddam Hussein repeatedly attacked Karg island and found it very difficult to overcome. Now that's not saying it's impossible. And I'm sure the US Military is much better than the Iraqi military was, even though Iraq's military in 1988 was the fourth largest in the world. So we might have an easier time in terms of doing things against Karg, but I think that's what we want to talk about today.
- [05:48]
B
Yeah, I want to. I mean, I am sure that if Trump gave the order, we could attack, bomb, take, and for some period of time hold Hog Island. Right. Like that is the kind of thing the American military can do. Why? Yeah, that is my big question. Trump says, oh, well, we're going to control their oil exports. Why?
- [06:15]
C
Let's talk about what Saddam said, because he basically said the same thing back in 1984. He said he spent four years trying to knock Carg island out of the war to damage Iran's economic capability. So he repeatedly sank ships, reduced the Iranian exports, but he never, Saddam, never achieved the strategic effect he wanted because the lesson of attacking an enemy's economic center of gravity can create certainly pressure like it has against the United States. But pressure alone doesn't necessarily produce capitulation. And what we know, Ben, because we've been talking about it, is Iran has had economic sanctions and pressure for probably the last three decades, and they haven't crashed yet. They're in trouble. I mean, they have some economic problems, certainly within the country, and that requires tighter control by the Iranian government. But it's something, the question you just asked, why, why would we want to do this? What does it get us in terms of more pressure against the Iranian government?
- [07:28]
B
Yeah, I mean, we've talked about this a little bit, and maybe it's time to have a fuller discussion of it now based on just this one vague truth social post from the president, but also based on a lot of the ways he described this war. He's described the Strait of Hormuz and the blockade of the blockade. He seems to be thinking, which is not surprising for him, exclusively in economic terms. I shouldn't even say economic terms. Exclusively in financial terms. He thinks that costing someone money is the way to hurt them. And that's probably projection. That is certainly true of him. And so he thinks what hurts me is what hurts other people. And I don't think that's quite true for Iran. Yes, the. Every country's economy is important, and the economy and national security are intimately related. And so it doesn't help to have your economy weakened. But if economic pressure were enough to bring down an opponent, then there would be no North Korea today. There would be no Iranian regime today. Economic pressure cannot compel the Iranians to give up their nuclear weapons program. Economic pressure will not compel them to just say, well, I guess we're not leaders of Iran anymore and go home. And frankly, to me, it looks like, as we discussed yesterday on our regularly scheduled command post, it looks to me like the President is out of ideas and mad and flailing. He doesn't have a goal, he's just mad. And so he's lashing out by ordering attacks, by suggesting we might do an invasion. And the part of this that. Well, I'll let you respond to that because I'm sure you have much more sophisticated thoughts. And then I'll tell you why this makes me so angry and why I'm sitting here seething.
- [09:08]
C
No, you bring up some great points, Ben, because if you're looking at it from a vulnerability perspective, Karg is it's economically decisive because unlike other Gulf states, Iran's export infrastructure is highly concentrated there. It's one point of failure, we could call it. It's militarily vulnerable. There ain't much stuff there. I mean, even if there, if the IRGC was still there as part of the island, it's a small location and it can be decisively taken. Taken. It is politically sensitive to most of the Gulf states specifically. I would guess that 90% of the American public have never heard of Cargill island before. But the Gulf states know about it. So it could be called a single point of failure. But I would not say it's a decisive military objective to win a war. You know, Iran's still going to possess missiles. They're still going to have the ayatollah as the grand leader, and they're going to have an IRGC component that is making demands and they're still going to exist. Tehran would still retain political control of the rest of a very large country and the maritime threats in the Gulf would continue. So if I were a military planner advising the President, I would say, yes, Karg is an important and it's a vulnerable point. It could be a strategic pressure point, but it's not a war ending objective. So again, going back to your original question as we started this whole thing off, what are we trying to do? What are we trying to do? Kharg is an island. It's the junction where geography, economics and military power intersects. It's five miles long, it's relatively small, but it's, it can create pressure on Tehran, but it doesn't automatically generate a victory, that's for sure.
- [11:10]
B
All right, so we've been talking about the, the limited possible benefits of actually taking Harg Island. And here's the part that as soon as I saw this, this post by Trump Got me so angry. As you pointed out, Hag is not that far from the Iranian coast, and we're not talking about invading mainland Iran. And as we have seen, we have not been able to eliminate Iran, Iran's missile or drone capabilities. So what we're talking about, in effect, is putting American marines or soldiers, sailors, airmen on this island and then I guess, having them sit there while Iran gets to shoot at them with missiles and drones. And we know Iranian drones have the range because these are basically the same drones that Russia is using in Ukraine, which have ranges of hundreds of kilometers or more. So, yeah, easy target. The. It's, it's sort of a, a, an air defense nightmare because you have missiles coming from steep angles, drones coming from shallow angles, drones that can come from any direction. They can come, you know, they can be shot from anywhere in Iran and, and, and hit the, hit the island. So you have to defend, like, basically in 360 degrees. And, and the President has made the situation worse. If he does actually order this attack by telegraphing it. I mean, imagine if, if Franklin Roosevelt had said, you know, three days before D day, by the way, we might invade Normandy.
- [12:30]
C
Right.
- [12:31]
B
He is not. It not only makes it less likely that any operation would be successful, however we define that. It also puts the lives of the people he would be ordering to carry out that order in danger. And that just frustrates me so much.
- [12:45]
C
Yeah. Matt, could you put the map back up again, too?
- [12:48]
A
Ben?
- [12:48]
C
Ben, in addition to all the things you talked about. Well, you can't much see it on the map, but Kuwait is pretty close to Karga.
- [12:56]
B
Oh, yeah, you can see it right there on the left.
- [12:58]
C
Yeah, you can see Kuwait. You can't see Turkey. You can't see Iraq. Those are all other, let's call them Middle Eastern states. Turkey is not quite a Middle Eastern state, but it sort of is. This could certainly widen that conflict because it would be a concentrated area. But what I want to point out is the arrow points to Kharg. Look at the rest of the Iranian territory. It's three times larger than the nation of Iraq, where we spent 10 years. And if you're looking for a decisive military victory by striking one point, it gets to what you were saying a minute ago, Ben. There's a whole lot of other things that could affect any kind of military campaign by just seizing one island. You're not going to limit it to an economic victory just by seizing this oil port. And the other thing that I might mention is when we were talking about doing this, breaking News segment this morning and I saw the post by the President. My immediate reaction was troop to task. Whenever you establish what a mission is for forces, you have to determine how many people will have to conduct that mission. If you're only talking about carg, you could do it with probably the force limited in the Gulf right now. But what else would you need to ensure that that potential seizing and securing of an island would contribute to effects through throughout the country of Iran? It's sort of like Russia saying, hey, we're going to go into the Donbas and take that area and the rest of Ukraine is not vulnerable or not willing to fight back. And we're assuming a lot of things away that it's going to be a quick and easy war. And what we found so far is nothing has been quick and easy. Nothing has occurred in two or three days, nothing, nothing has been finished in the first week. As the President proclaimed. This is going to be, and I hate to even use the Q word, but quagmire, this is going to be difficult and it may not be the right approach.
- [15:20]
B
It does feel like we're sort of going through all of the strategic motions of Vietnam, but on a speed run. And as if to confirm that, we have a clip of Trump on Fox News this morning talking about how we're just not bombing enough. Matt, can we play that clip?
- [15:32]
A
Please read the Wall Street Journal. It's like they did an editorial today about we're not hitting them hard enough. I mean, it's just not hitting them hard enough. We dropped $250 million worth of bombs on them last night. You know, the whole thing is crazy. But, and they're, and they're really in submission. They just don't know it yet. Okay? To be honest with you, they just don't know it yet.
- [15:58]
B
You know, we talked yesterday about how in a lot of ways Trump and Putin have the same strategic thinking right now. And that sounds absolutely Putinesque to me. Oh, this is gonna be over very soon. You know, no one else, I'm the only one who realizes how close we actually are to victory. It is just mind boggling. And this guy clearly lives in a bubble. He is not getting a realistic view of what's going on.
- [16:19]
C
Which brings up another point. Is this now a war? It wasn't a war before. Does it become a war? And does he have to have concurrence by Congress and the American people on it? Is it different now than it was yesterday? This seizing and securing an oil port in Iran is certainly a warlike. Action. If we already have declared that an embargo and a blockade and sanctions and all the other things are not, this would certainly meet the conditions of a war. And I'm being facetious here and a little bit sarcastic, but we've already been in a war and that has already blown past the US Congress and the American people.
- [17:04]
B
Yeah, well, Congress seems to be getting a little bit more antsy about all of this. They did, the House at least did pass the War Powers Resolution recently, which obviously is going nowhere in the Senate for now, but at least we have that. Okay, let's, let's take a quick break here so that I can gather myself and take some deep breaths. And then we'll come back and we'll, we'll discuss some of the other news about what's going on in Iran.
- [17:29]
D
Far away you are Aura Frames keeps you and your dad connected and it makes the perfect Father's Day gift. Plus super easy to get started. It only takes about two minutes to set up a frame using the old Aura app. So we sent an aura frame to my mother in law. I was able to add all these photos of my kids playing baseball, playing the piano, doing the swimming meets. Just kind of being cute because my kids are kind of cute. I gotta be honest with you, they look great on that OR frame. They're always on a loop in her house. And look, my sister in law got kind of jealous because her kids weren't on that loop. So if you have a little competition in the family or frames helps you win it. Plus Aura frames come with free unlimited storage so you can add as many photos and videos as you want and you can add preloaded photos before it ships. Keep adding from anywhere, anytime. That reminds me, I gotta add some more frames to my mother in law's aura frames. It was named number one by wire cutter so you can save now by visiting@auraframes.com for a limited time. Listeners can get $35 off of select frames with code Bull Work takes. That's a U R A frames.com promo code bull Work takes. And you can support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions do apply.
- [18:48]
B
I like how in the last A.D. sam said that, you know, he takes THC gummies because of his kids. So now he feels the need to accent how cute they are just to make it up to them. Listen, I wanted to move on but we we as as much as we try, we just barely keep up here. So we have yet another clip of Trump talking about ground troops in Iran. Let's listen to that one night.
- [19:09]
A
Yeah. There will be more bombing tonight. It'll be a bigger, bigger, more powerful. Don't forget we've knocked out all of their anti aircraft. They don't have any anti. They have nothing. I mean, they may get lucky with a shoulder weapon or something, but for the most part, you know, they have no, they have no defense.
- [19:27]
B
What did the representative say in your phone call?
- [19:29]
A
They're finished. Excuse me? They're finished. But the papers. The media refuses to write it. They're finished. We can walk in there tomorrow. We could take soldiers. I don't want to have boots on the ground, but if I wanted to, we could put a small group of soldiers and take over the whole place. They're finished. And the media is crooked. They're just like our elections. The media is crooked.
- [19:56]
C
I had a flashback to secretary Rumsfeld from 2003 saying we would just walk into Iraq and they would greet us with flowers and open arms.
- [20:08]
B
You know, you mentioned earlier the, the, the, the idea that Russia thought they could invade a country of 40 million people with about150,000 troops. I think Iran's population is closer to 90 million.
- [20:22]
C
Yeah.
- [20:23]
B
So that's what, like somewhere a quarter, a third ish the size of the United States. And the idea that we could take a small number of troops and, and just waltz in there. I mean, this is, this is bad. This is not good. I don't know what else to say about it. This is really dumb.
- [20:39]
C
I think the other comment too, that after the President announced this, this morning, I don't know if, Matt, if you have the post, but Senator Graham came up and said, yeah, go for it, Mr. President. What a great idea. Let's take Carg Island. And I'm paraphrasing certainly, but I think the President actually misread some of the comments in the Wall Street Journal article that he quoted a little bit ago. There was a whole lot more than just do more. It was basically take a look at what you're doing and continuing to do. What we've done so far isn't working. So doing more of it probably isn't going to work either. Yeah, there's Senator Graham's quote. Thank you, Matt. It's truly amazing to me. Senator Graham, who is also an Air Force JAG who spent some time in Iraq on the staff of General Petraeus as a lawyer, should be saying some of this about, yeah, simply go in and basically have more American soldiers and marines invade an island. So where does that leave Us, Ben, what are we?
- [21:58]
B
I didn't know that about Lindsey Graham. I thought he was in Congress the whole time. But we can double check that he
- [22:03]
C
was in Congress the whole time. He would take his National Guard time and spend time in Iraq as an active, you know, as a Floyd Air Force colonel.
- [22:12]
B
Oh, that's interesting. I didn't know that. The other thing I just wanted to point out, we were talking about the details of Hog Island.
- [22:18]
A
So.
- [22:18]
B
Okay, so the way, my understanding is the way the oil infrastructure works is that you have all the export terminals and these, you know, long sort of port facilities on Hog Islands that the ships can pull up in the deep water, as you said, fill up on oil and then leave through the Strait of Hormuz. Hog island itself, I think, is connected via an oil pipeline to the mainland. Right. Because the mainland is where the oil is.
- [22:40]
C
Correct.
- [22:41]
B
This gets very complicated. But why, if we were in control of Hog island, would the Iranians allow oil to flow from the mainland to Hog Island? Trump thinks we're going to be able to sell Iranian oil as if it's ours, which is to say steal it, take the oil, as he's been saying for years, and then sell it for our own profit, as if that solves any of the problems we have with Iran. But I don't see why that would have to happen. Couldn't the Iranians just shut down the pipeline?
- [23:11]
C
One would think. But again, this is what you do when you war game and when you look at action, reaction, counteraction to everything you do, where you take into account what the enemy might do. And just announcing that this morning, I mean, this may have been an idea floated by some of the planners, which those are the kind of things that you do in military operations when you're advising the civilian leaders on what they should do next. But it seems to me that the president has grasped hold of this thing because he thinks it might work. And again, Ben, what I'll say is this is a lack of understanding of the Iranian culture. If they're only taking the advice of the planner, saying, this is what we could do, Mr. President. And then he latches onto that. Where is the intelligence community on this? Where's the State Department on this? What are the allies thinking? And to announce it at whatever time it was this morning, 9:00am this morning, hey, we're going to take Carg island tonight. And tonight's bombings are going to be even worse than last night's. It just, it tells me that there's not a whole lot of coordination or War gaming or red Team going on, because that not having that is what got us into this in the first
- [24:35]
B
place, in my view, 100%. I do wonder where, where General Kane is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, because it seems reading between the lines of the reporting like he's been the one going to the President and saying, you can do this, that the other thing you want to do here would be the costs. And Trump does seem to be very sensitive to casualties, which is not necessarily a bad thing. It certainly, I think, has kept him from making some mistakes in the past, just caused him to make others. But I, I, it's sounding to me like General Kaine is maybe not in the room right now, maybe literally not in the room right now. And so no one is saying to Trump, yes, we have a plan on the table to take Hog island if you order it, and our expected casualty figure is blank, and we expect this many killed and this many wounded over this period of time. And I, so I think Trump is only, is only seeing dollar signs like a cartoon, you know, banker villain and not seeing caskets.
- [25:42]
C
No, I, well, he may be, but I'd also suggest he's also trying to find a way out of this. That's, I would suggest that's probably number one on his priority. How do I get this to stop? It's bleeding me dry from the standpoint of we're not getting anywhere. He's got to know it's affecting the economy, even though he keeps playing that down. Amazing. But the job of the chairman is to give options. And when he gives those options, he talks about the dynamics, the constraints and restraints and what might happen. But if you haven't had the experiences and you just want to get out of something and you think something might work. Trump, Trump is a gambler. He's a risk taker. He's a real estate magnet. In the past, okay, if this fails, well, then you've lost a couple million dollars and by the way, he's gone bankrupt multiple times. But in this case, you're potentially gambling away risk with lives of Americans and further dynamics that you don't want to garner from an operation like this. Again, Ben, there's meticulousness, if that's a word, in military planning and whole of government approaches and it just seems like every day we're getting a new decision from the commander in chief that has not been coordinated with the people that actually do the job on the ground.
- [27:20]
B
Yeah, I want to, I want to talk about war crimes in just a second, but to put A. To put a name on that. We talk, you and I especially talk a lot about Pete Hegseth and his decision making and priorities and not. Not speaking for you. But I think he's been an absolute disaster and a disgrace and an embarrassment. The person, by the way, who is in charge of doing that whole of government coordinating the meticulous planning with the Defense Department and the State Department and the treasury and the Commerce Department and the intelligence community is the National Security Advisor, and that's Marco Rubio right now. And he's National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, which one would think means that he is really in charge of this administration's foreign policy. And he's just kind of nowhere. He sometimes talks. He talks especially about Central and South America and America's policies in, in this hemisphere, which makes me think that instead of being National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, he's kind of the America's czar. But clearly there's no process. Clearly, Trump has complete comfort just saying whatever he wants without Marco Rubio. And I think Rubio deserves a lot of the blame for the situation we're in.
- [28:30]
C
I think you may be onto something there. The other thing that Rubio, Secretary Rubio, does not have is any military background. Not that you say that you have to have that, but you at least have to have an understanding of that. As a National Security advisor and the State Department lead, you need military understanding in both of those, because the teamwork between especially the military and State is critically important. There's also teamwork, as you said a minute ago, with Treasury, Commerce, Energy, all the other departments. And, you know, every one of those two jobs that you just named that Secretary Rubio has are just bone busting and draining and all consuming. And when you're working with a guy who just likes to make decisions on his own and wants to continuously be complimented on his actions, and you have a guy in the Defense Department who is a sycophant. I think I can say that about Secretary. I won't comment on his competencies, although I'd like to. You know, he's a squad leader. While all this is going on, he's in Guantanamo doing bench presses and pumping up the troops just like a platoon leader would. That's not the role of the Secretary of Defense, especially when you've got a war going on.
- [30:01]
B
Well, that's why they're calling it an excursion.
- [30:03]
C
Yeah.
- [30:04]
B
Okay. So we talked. We talked yesterday about how, in the absence of a plan, one of the things Trump apparently wants to do is war crimes. Again, no one knows why, but he has threatened multiple times to attack Iranian civilian energy infrastructure, to attack Iran's water infrastructure, to. As you pointed out, he has threatened to destroy the entire Iranian slash Persian civilization. And we just have a report from the New York Times this morning. Matt, I think we can put it up that it appears that there may have been an American precision strike on a freshwater facility, a civilian freshwater facility in the south of Iran. We don't know if there was an order specifically to attack a water facility. This could be an unfortunate mistake. We will have to learn more. I somehow doubt we're going to learn a lot more from the Defense Department under this leadership, but certainly a worrying sign. We saw early in the war there was that terrible mistaken attack on a girl's school because the intelligence was outdated and they thought it was being used for its previous purpose, which was an IRGC facility. So we don't know exactly why this building was targeted, but when the President says, we're going to hit their water facility, and then we hit their water facility, it certainly looks really bad.
- [31:26]
C
Yeah. You know, correlated to this. I think I've been watching very closely Admiral Brad Cooper, who's the Central Command commander. Everything I've heard about him, I don't know him, never met him, but everything I've heard about him is he's an extremely good commander, a good sailor, a great joint officer, being able to command different elements of the US Military. I was a little bit troubled by a previous testimony that he had before Congress when he was being repeatedly pressed about Secretary Hexev's words of giving no quarter, and he refused to answer the question. He kind of tap danced around it. That troubled me quite a bit. But a few days ago, I also read a letter that he wrote to his troops of Central Command saying we will conduct ourselves in an admirable way. We will only fight the enemy. We will not affect civilians. And I can't remember exactly what the letter said, but it was one of these kind of letters that I'd read that said, okay, he gets it. He understands he has to play the game with the Secretary of Defense, who continues to voice potential war crimes and lethality over legality and hands not being tied. But when he's talking to his members of his command, he's telling them the right thing. Now, this comes up this morning, I won't vouch as to whether or not this was a mistake in targeting or even if they hit the target. Or could this be propaganda by the Iranian regime, which some Middle Eastern nations tend to do a lot they propaganda. American striking targets that have civilian involvement to bring us down. It's an information campaign. It's part of that kind of psychological operations. But if this really did occur, that's troubling because this is mainly, as I understand it, a civilian desalination plant for the citizens of Iran. This has no military values. So, yeah, this is something we gotta be watching in the future, Ben, and see how this evolves a little bit.
- [33:46]
B
Yeah, no, I agree. And I think our best hope at this point for all of this is that it's more bluster and that the President is just sort of saying things. And if we did a full tally of everything he's ever threatened and everything he followed through on, the number of threats would be many times the number of things he followed through on. In fact, follow through in general, I would say, is not a big strength of his. But hopefully, you know, he has a conversation with General Kaine later today and said, and, you know, General Kaine presents him with some. Some real serious casualty estimates, and Trump decides that this is just a threat and a bluff because the alternative is. Is much, much worse.
- [34:30]
A
Yeah.
- [34:30]
C
Can I bring up one more point, maybe close on this. At the same time, we've talked in the past about munitions and the expanded use of precision strike munitions, which is a good thing, except the fact that there have been numerous reportings and numerous comments within the defense industry and also the Pentagon in Washington saying that we are using an excessive amount in this campaign and it's threatening other contingency plans around the world. There was again a report this morning saying that the White House is having a special session of. Of a lot of defense industry officials to talk specifically about the consumption of precision weapons. That is troubling. And I don't think it's a story that's getting enough attention. But you can be certain that our foes are watching very closely in how much ammunition we're expending, especially now that again, we've started restriking Iran and the President is promising even more damage tonight until they give up. You know, it's. It's a tough road to hoe, Ben, because again, Iran is a big country. They likely have ammunition dumps and caches and launchers all over this very big country. And my experience in a little smaller country of Iraq is every time you think you've destroyed everything they've got, there's always a whole lot more where that came from.
- [36:05]
B
Yeah, it's not a good situation. I don't know what else to say, General, thanks so much for enlightening us this morning.
- [36:12]
C
Thanks, Ben. Great to be with you again.