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David Rutherford Show: What a Ground Invasion of Iran Would Actually Looks Like
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David Rutherford
What does invading Iran actually look like? What would we face? How many troops would we need? What would happen economically? And definitely what would be the political fallout today on the David Rutherford Show. Welcome back to the show, everybody. I'm David Rutherford, your host. Thank you so much for all the support lately. It's been been incredible. We really appreciate you. Again. What helps us is if you like subscribe and share, tell all your friends you're getting good quality content and we're delivering on our promise to give you the flashbang of truth and to contextualize the tsunami of information coming at you. All right, let's get started. Where are we right now with the Iranian war? All right, so we launched on February 28, right. We've had probably over a thousand strikes in the first couple 12 hours. We killed the supreme Leader and his family in a ton of the other echelon. Right. Operation Epic Fury. As we're 21 days into this thing, we've had over 7,000 US targets struck, 7,600 Israeli struck strikes. And we'd have a pretty aggressive air campaign on Iranian naval vessels as well as other strategic missile sites around the country. Iran's response has been, I guess, in my mind, pretty predictable. But apparently other people didn't predict this. But there's been massive waves of missile strikes all throughout the region, including at Israel, US Air bases in Iraq, Bahrain and Kuwait and Qatar's Ras Lafan LNG refinery. And Saudi and UAE energy sites have also been hit as well. In terms of casualties, rough estimates in Iran are about 4800 military KIAs, 19 US KIAs, 13 combat and six aircraft have been taken out. Iranian civilian casualties, some are saying it's around 1400 with about 18 and a half thousand injured. There's a new supreme leader that's been placed and that's Moi Toba Khamenei, Khamenei who's the son, and the IRGC is dedicated its loyalty to them. The IRGC is also claiming that most of their weapons caches are still intact and that they've only been getting rid of the old missiles and that they still have predominantly all their new technology waiting to deploy, most especially all their drones. The massive stockpile of drones they've had. On a side note, regionally, the Lebanon war has been reignited and some people are saying 850 people have been killed, Lebanese with a million displaced, and that there's also been strikes on some other major civilian infrastructure including the Dubai airport, which is one of the most busy airports in the world. All right, so one of the things that is being heavily contested, debated obviously last week the director of the Counter National Counter Terrorism Center, Joe Kent, former green beret tier 1 covert SMU unit as well as a Special Activities Division ground branch member for 25 plus years, basically resigned suggesting alleging that Israel is basically in control of making strategic decisions within the war in Iran. And what he says is that this has been proven several times over by statements that Marco Rubio, the, the Johnson, speaker of the House as well as Trump has said and then Tulsi Gabber was on the Hill last Thursday suggesting that there is no imminent threat from Iran. Now a lot of people have different opinions of that. Radcliffe, the head of the CIA immediately said afterwards, no, there is an imminent threat. And then Tulsi actually came back and said, listen, it's up to the President of the United States to decide what's imminent and what's not. So one of the things that now we're getting to is a point of is it realistic to begin a ground war? Now we've seen Trump launched a mew of about 4,500 Marines over a couple weeks ago. We saw another large contingency, large, I mean for Marines, you know, 2000 is a lot that was just recently sent over. We all also saw an aircraft carrier was removed from the area because they had a massive fire outbreak which basically left about 200 sailors without birthing. And some other things. We also did see the first F35 to ever get shot down on the border of Iraq. Iran, we're still waiting to get some more information about that as well too. Okay, so what does it mean to invade Iran in order to really have an impact on the so called regime change war? Now as I led into this, I'm trying to maintain kind of a historical perspective on this. And so the historical perspectives I wanted to really root myself in was the first Gulf War and then Iraq, Afghanistan with Iraq, Afghanistan being the most relevant way to analyze potential numbers of troops cost, the impact of, of forces on the ground, the whole, the whole gamble that you have to analyze when you're drawing up war plans for an operation of this magnitude in size. And just so you know, most military experts and think tanks and military historians are suggesting this would be the single greatest requirement on resources, military and civilian resources that we've seen since World War II, even more so than, than Vietnam. So I just wanted to give you a little bit of analysis of what we've seen in the past to get through and I'm going to break this down military, militarily, economically and then politically. So let's start. All right Now, Desert Storm 1991, there were 697,000 U.S. troops, 750,000 total coalition from 34 different nations. The largest U.S. deployment since Vietnam. All right, Iraq enemy forces totaled roughly about 600,000 Iraqi military and at the time they were the fourth largest army in the world in their terms of their conventional force. Now it opened, there was a five week air campaign, a thousand sorties a day. Then there was a hundred hour ground war. Now I remember this man, I was up at boarding school going through and I remember watching straight for 24 hours, CNN the time thinking, oh boy, this is it, this is where I'm going to get drafted, I'm going to go to war, you know, the whole thing. And man, it was, it was an interesting time for me, as I'm sure it's very interesting for a lot of young men that are out there trying to figure out is this the time to enlist, is this the time to join, is this time, is this a righteous war, Is this something we could do? Obviously when you do have a guy like Joe Kent resign the way he did, saying that he does not believe that we should go any farther with this and that our tactical or military strategic initiatives are being led by Israel. Now obviously that has been refuted vigorously from the top down. From Pete Hagseth to Donald Trump, President Trump to Marco Rubio, everybody out there is basically saying, you know what, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about. He hasn't been involved in, in a lot of the military planning that's been taking place and the build up to it. So he's, he's not accurate with his assessments. So now here was some kickers and this is something I want you to start thinking about because in my mind this is the, the greatest Strategic thing that we have to evaluate, which is basically terrain, right? Waging war all the way back to Sun Tzu. When you go back and you read those writings, one of the most substantial aspects of waging any kind of war is where you're fighting, if you're ground troop, where you're fighting, what does the terrain look like? What does the weather look like? What's the heat, right? What's the freezing temperatures? You know, is there supply routes that are going to be accessible in these features? Is it going to require airlifts? Are there choke points of ingress and egress? You know, what are the, what does urban warfare look like in these situations? So, you know, when you start to break down a tactical perspective of waging a ground camping, even if you're a small unit like I used to be a part of, you still evaluate every single piece of detail from, you know, if you're doing a recon on a compound, you know, what are the doors made of? What are the hinges? Does it open in, does it out? How many vehicles, are any of the vehicles armored? How many personnel are there? What type of weapons systems they have? How many women are on site? How many children are on site? Do they have air cover? They have antennas? Do they have comms? Like it's everything that you can think of. Where are we going to assault from? Is it helo born? And if you look at our past, right, in the SEAL teams, we, we suffered the two single biggest loss in one day in both Iraq and Afghanistan with Operation Red Wings and the helicopters getting shot at. This guy, including the recon team that the three out of four guys died. And then also if you look at Extortion 17, where we lost, you know, 22 SEAL Team 6 members as well as air crew and some Afghans on that as well too. So, you know, and that was in what mountainous terrain where a lot of that took place. And we actually had one more helicopter that we lost a life in the beginning of the Afghan war. Neil Roberts they were going into a very defended position where there was an anti aircraft gun during Tora Bora. And they said, you know, some people were like, don't go in there. And they're like, no, we got to take out this, this, this defensive position and shot a rpg. He fell out, ended up getting killed. But also we lost what perhaps was one of the most impressive Medal of Honor recipient actions ever, which was Chapman seal, another SEAL also received the Medal of Honor during that as well too. So when you think about Iran, what I want you to do is I want you to think about a map of Iran and maybe Jordan. You could pull up a topographical map while I start thinking about this. Right? All right, so when you think about Iraq, right, mostly flat terrain, especially from Kuwait all the way into Baghdad. Ideal for armor vehicles. I mean, hell, that's when we first used the desert patrol vehicles. Our, our guys did, you know, really positive terrain for massive troop movement. All right, you got that? Want to flash it up for me real quick? I just want to give them a reference point for how the mountain terrain looks in AF in Iran. And, and we'll, we'll reference that again here. Said. Okay, you can take it down now. All right, so what I want you to start to think about too, is, is populations. Because in Iraq at that time, you know, it was, it was 437,000 square kilometers. There was an 18 million population right now during that war, we had KIA, American KIAS of 299. And the cost of that was $61 billion. Okay. Very short war. In, out. All right. It was one of the things that actually George Bush senior said we, we broke the mental hurdle of what the Vietnam War had done to the consciousness of, of America. It regained our US as a superpower, military militarily, that we can be quick decided and, and, and, and show an overwhelming power of, of, of might and military and technology. Right? And that's what it was. Now let's move to Iraq in 2003. Right. We had an initial invasion force of 170,000 people. I have several buddies that were part of that. Some really interesting ops during that time. Now, this coalition initially was US and the UK and it was a very, it was a much smaller coalition. Why? Because many people had already bought into the coalition of Afghanistan, which had taken place start beginning in October of 2001. And a lot of people were saying, you know what? We don't buy the intelligence. Your spouse, remember Colin Powell, this is a slam dunk. Weapons of mass destruction, you know, very similar intelligence collection during that war, the Iraq war, as what we're seeing now. And so it really was, you know, we, during the Iraq, we didn't have enough for occupation, but we still went for it. Now, the enemy forces during that time, 375,000 Iraqi military and which had been dramatically weakened by 12 years of sanctions and the Republican Guard of about 80,000 people. Now everybody remembers their TV, the shock and awe, right? And everybody's like, oh my God. And you know, last summer we saw pretty substantial shock and awe at the ending of the 12 day war. We saw this 32 aircraft, you know, bunker busting, JDAM dropping, like assault on the nuclear, and, and everybody's like, damn. And then you combine that with what happened in Venezuela and I think people had a little bit of that shock and I'll vibe going in them again, right. Where nobody's going to beat us down. Like, we're running the tables now. Meanwhile, let's just ignore everything that we saw in Ukraine and Russia over the last few years. I'm not going to pay attention to that, that stalemate of probably 1.51, you know, 1.7 million men grinding it out in drone trench warfare. Not going to look at any of that. Nope, nope, nope. I want to look at our shock and. Aha. Okay. So again, the terrain of Iraq was, was really in our behalf. I mean when you think about jets and helicopters flying over massive ground troops, rolling in tanks and rolling in Humvees and you know, all these vehicles and helicopters and all this stuff, like it's, it's about perfect. One of the worst things that you would face during those times was sandstorms, right? Really beat up on helicopters and other aircraft. Impedes visualization. Obviously the technology we had then wasn't great drone technology. Now obviously we were in a whole new battle space in terms of unmanned aerial drones, you know, vehicle drones, every kind of drone you can think of. And as well as the aircraft that we have from technology, our, our satellite systems, you know, being able to, you know, watch a guy picking his nose from, you know, a mile up in the air. Right. You know, that's the kind of technology we do have now. But again, going back to this, so obviously, you know, there was, once we got through, we kind of toppled Saddam's group pretty, pretty rapidly. I remember the, the Saddam's like second in command. No, we're winning the war. Meanwhile, there's like a tank behind him rolling through the city, completely lying on, on television. Meanwhile, you know, Saddam Hussein nowhere to be found. He found his little hole, right? All right, now here's some other things right in the country. Again, as I said, 300 and 437, 000 kilometer square kilometers, 25 million population now Kias, American Kias through 2011 was 4,431. And remember, primarily after 04, moving into 04 into 05, we were fighting an insurgency and not necessarily the Iraqi military, although there, many of those people just took off the uniform and became a part of the insurgency. But that insurgency was led by Al Qaeda. Iraq right in the Sunni triangle. And then there was Eastern with Muktada Al Sadr that was being supported by Iranian proxies to fight against us. And that's something I want you to think about. Right when we went in. Before that it was Sunnis fighting, Baas fighting, Shias fighting whatever. Right. Iraq, Iran war back in the day, them fighting each other, which was a stalemate war that we funded, both sides by the way, for eight ears. Right? Okay. Ground to a halt. Just beating the snot out of each other. Okay. Want you to really think about these details. All right.
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David Rutherford
cost of the Iraq war. What do you think, Jordy? You want to take a shot at what that that number was that I got here?
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Jordy (Co-host or Guest)
Total cost, I want to say 2 trillion.
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1.9 trillion.
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David Rutherford
Good job, Bud. There we go, Jordy. Nicely done. All right. Afghanistan, right? 2001. One that we invaded, right? In October. September 11th went in. I think it was like October 20th something. October 30th something. I remember buddies of mine at red team like free falls, hey ho. Jumping in, right? They were driving cars. I in ground branch and then what the triple nickel Oda. Those guys up in the north riding horses in man. Like that's what, that's what we did in Afghanistan. Why? Because the terrain was insane up north and that northern Hindu Kush coming in from Uzbekistan, right? He had to climb over the Hindu Kush to get down into the other side of Bagram, right? You have the mountains on Pakistani border and then you come down, all the way down and then you kind of the plateaus across western Afghanistan into Iran, like landlocked Iran, right? And then down in the southeast corner where Mullah Omar was in Quetta, you had the Desert of Death down there. So again, insane terrain, insane difficulty. And again, I just, I know I'm saying again, a lot, I'm doing some Kayla, but I just want you to stop and think about Afghanistan, right? There's a reason why people say Afghanistan is the place where empires go to die, right? Russia invaded it twice, lost both. Britain or England invaded it twice, lost both. We went in, lost that one. Now I got it. I know what you're going to say if you're out there. You're die hard patriot like I am. You're going to say, right, man, Rut, buddy, listen, listen, we won all the, the battles. We just couldn't. We just weren't allowed to win the war. And I agree with you, man. I was there 100%. I agree with you. But what the does that get us? That's all I'm saying, man. Like what is the strategic win you're talking about? Then, yes, we became the most elite fighters on the planet in urban for Iraq and and, and land and mountain terrain in Afghanistan. But technology is all but erased a lot of what we thought we were the best at anymore. Because now you can buy a 500 drone, put a hand grenade on it or a claymore, fly it over 25 dudes and drop it in their thing in the middle of the night because you've got infrared or flares or any different type of ability for low grade technology that everybody has access, most especially Iran. Why? Because they are partners with Russia and China, who by the way, Russia has just become what battle hardened over the last four or five years in Ukraine. So now they have the technology up to speed weapons production, the whole thing dialed in. And then you also have Chinese ability with satellite support, intelligence support, all that. So again, Iraq didn't have any of that. Afghanistan didn't have any of that stuff. All right, all right, now, Afghanistan, 652,000 square kilometers, 25 million people in our conflict, we had us Kias, 2461 bunch of my friends and a cost. Jordy, what do you think the cost in Afghanistan was, buddy, I'm going to
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Jordy (Co-host or Guest)
go lower than Iraq. I'm going to say only, only 1 trillion.
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David Rutherford
Nope, that'd be $2.3 trillion.
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Jordy (Co-host or Guest)
I couldn't be more wrong.
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David Rutherford
More wrong. And guess what? After 20 years in the fight there, we ended up giving it back to the Taliban. Left them $86 billion. And now there are roughly 20 to 23,000 terrorists or, you know, different organizations and whole list. Go check out Sarah Adams to get the whole list of who's training there. Right. And by the way, they do say that some of the people that perpetrated October 7th in Israel had trained or received training from people or trained in Afghanistan, which by the way is bordered right next to where Iran. And also if you go to the other side, Iran. What's that border to? Right. Iraq. And Iraq is border to Syria. And who's in charge of Syria now? The former head of Al Qaeda in Iraq. And guess who's in charge of Iran now? All of the Iranian proxies from eastern Iran that came in through Maktar Al Sar. Those who now they're basically. They've taken over Iraq. Right. I'm just trying to map out the strategic layout of that region and what we would face. Okay, all right, let's talk about. We already went through. Let's talk. All right, here we go. Let's talk about just some strategic concepts to get your mind thinking again. All right. Pull up that map of Iran again for me, would you? I want to just keep doing this for people to get this visualization. All right. Now if you, if you can't identify where Iran is on the map, then you need work. Right. So pretty unbelievable place. Yep. Bring up that one that has kind of the, the, the color, structure and relief right there. That, that's a good one to, to start with. So if you look at that, obviously if you look at the topographical relief, what you're looking for is variations in terms of terrain because the steeper the terrain, the harder it is to fight. Right. And then you have to. Because what are you doing? You're going to have to invade. So there'll be invasion points. Right. So there will be a waterborne invasion from our aircraft carriers off offshore. Right. Maybe landing in. We'll have helicopter landing, waterborne invasions maybe like D day and stuff back in the day, maybe through the Caspian Sea up top. We do have relationship with Azerbaijan and some of those other countries, maybe a waterborne from up north. But essentially what you need is you need to be able to position your forces in a place that can amass. Scale it up like we did in Kuwait. Right. Or we did in Uzbekistan. We certainly didn't amass them in Pakistan for Afghanistan. We didn't amass them in Iran for anything, right? What we do, we, we captured Bagram airfield and then we started, you know, land in C17s, C5s, C130s and just, just tons of, of, of air, air supply planes with materials. Because guess what? Your soldiers need to eat, they need to drink water, they need more bullets, they need more kit, they need to take rest, they need equipment that they can drive around through terrain, right? It's a logistic thing. So you have to think now while you're looking at that map right there, I want you to think, right, Iran in particular, Tehran, there are these massive, massive mountain change. There's the Zagros Mountains and the Albor's Mountains, which is basically like a natural fortress. And by the way, Iran is four times the size of Iraq. There's a 1500 kilometer mountain wall on the western approach, right, that just right there, isn't it? And the country is 1.65 million square kilometers with a population in the high 80. Low, low 90 millions, right? That's 68 larger than Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Right? Combined with 40% more people. I also want you to think that, remember, Iraq had a big dispersion of people. You had Sunni, Shiite, Baathis, right? Afghanistan, you had the Northern alliance, the, the, the Pashtawan people. Then you had the kind of the Sunni radicals that had been flown in the former Muhajideen. And then you had all these tribal regions spread out as well too, that were basically independent governor governments, right? All right. In Iran, these people are pretty unified. Now granted, we've seen uprisings, we've seen people in the streets, the whole thing. But I don't want you to go too far overboard with your valuation of that potentiality. Like, like we're going to, you know, sneak through these mountain passes, which are, are pretty radical in terms of our heights. And I'll get to that in a bit of. And what it might look like now. So so far in, in the war in Iran, we have, you know, 19 USA US members that have been KIA. We've spent roughly what, $120 billion or something like that and climbing each day, 5 to 7 billion a day. Now the rough estimated people are throwing around right here, low end 1.5 trillion, high end 5 trillion. And that's just in these immediate futures. Right? Now, the key number, this is what you got to think about, because you got to think about your grandson, your granddaughter now, right? Because they're involving women in Combat operations. And they're going to need every, every single one of them. We've got roughly, what, maybe 1.3 million people in our military right now across all the branches. And then who knows, with contractors, you could flex, certainly. But right now you only have about 1.3. And then you have to think about the next thing, right? You have to think about where they're stationed. How long does it take to mobilize the sizable force you would need to enter into Iran and sweep through village to village, city to city, right region to region, to capture the strategic right initiatives in all over the country? And, and how would you do that? And, and granted, they've already had these plans, they've had these plans for years and years and years and years. All right, so rough estimates, estimations, it's somewhere between 500 to 1 million troops for the invasion. All right, now let's talk about. I'm going to put this into a frame of reference for you. So during the G wat, probably, you know, SOCOM Special Operations Command flex to somewhere between 70 to 80,000 personnel, right? With, you know, and you think, oh, well, you know, we've got all these special operations guys that are just killing it, right? At a height. During the G, what in the teams, I think we had a maxed out somewhere around, like maxed out numbers, somewhere around 36, 37, 3800 dudes. And not all those guys are operational, right? Only at the teams in the platoons, they're operational. Everybody else is logistics or support or admin or whatever. So of the set, let's call SOCOM 70,000, 75,000 personnel, right? And they just did a big SOCOM brief. You can go, just go into X and type in SOCOM Congressional brief and that. You can hear all the SEAL admiral and some generals talk about the current state of SOCOM and their operational capabilities, right? You gotta listen closely to their answers because there's always some military jargon they throw in there. All right, so you've got the rough estimate, 500,000 to a million. You're going to need with logistics to put these people in there and, and the contracting. Jordy, will you look up. I didn't, I didn't do this one. You look up how many at the height of the gwat in both Iraq and Afghanistan, how many US Contractors were employed? All right, all right, so now let's take a look tactically at the Iranian military presence. All right, so they have this kind of dual structure, right? They have the artes, which is the regular army rough estimates about 350,000 regular conventional forces. All right, now the IRGC is about 125 to 190,000. And these are your asymmetric, your operators, if you will. Right, who, who answer to the Supreme Ayatollah. All right, now the IRGC is not your typical military. It's like I said, it's like their soft unit, right? And their intelligence, they're in charge of their economics, their ideological enforcer of what the Ayatollahs want. Right? And they control about 30% of Iran's economy. What number did you get there for me, buddy?
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Jordy (Co-host or Guest)
All right, so the key numbers are in the Iraq peak, the DoD employed155,826 private contractors in Iraq alongside 150,000 ISH troops. Afghanistan peak, private security contractors alone peaked over 28,000 total. Peaked around 117,000 in 2012 combined, you gwat total. There's not a clean number, but you're talking between 1 and 200,000.
- [39:42]
David Rutherford
So let's triple that for Iran. Right? Triple it, Triple that. And trust me, there's a lot of dudes that would, would throw their kit back on for sure if this reduced to a ground ground engagement as well. But there's also a lot who wouldn't, by the way. And that's, I'll get to that politically here. All right, then you've got the KUDZ force, right? And this is their elite troops. These are the guys that were making the EMP or the, the EFPs and the V bids and all the real technical, efficient explosive devices, improvised explosive device that killed so many American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan too, and out in Herat in that area as well. So, you know, think about these guys. And you know, these are the people who train the Hezbollah, Hamas, the Iraqi pmf, the Houthis, right? And these are the, the, those kind of guerrilla forces. These are your ground branch guys, your, your special mission unit who use local forces. So they'd go out into all these different regions in Iran and we pull up how many different regions are there in Iran too as well, and they'll go and they'll train the civilians in there to wage what, a counter insurgency warfare. Now if I say counterinsurgency, hopefully that's triggering your head back to 2004 when we had four contractors from Blackwater get stopped in Fallujah, gunned up, had their bodies taken out, mutilated, burned to death, and, and hung from the bridge there, which kicked off the battle of Fallujah and really launched. Yeah, go for it.
- [41:30]
Jordy (Co-host or Guest)
So Iran has 31 provinces, which are the primary administrative divisions.
- [41:36]
David Rutherford
3.
- [41:36]
Jordy (Co-host or Guest)
In 2014, those 31 provinces were grouped into five administrative regions. You've got. It's basically northwest, northwest, south, and east. I'll show that on the screen. So there you go.
- [41:48]
David Rutherford
And there you have it. So each one of those will be decentralized and act as its own military command center for the region. So they have different regional protective defensive programs or tactics or, or systems in place for each region. And also each region has their fair share of drone production, Capab and drone reserves and missile reserves, as well as explosives. Right. These IEDs or V bids or all these different ways to engage plus anything, they're going to be fed through their lines through these different areas around. Remember, remember, China also owns Bagram Air Base now in Afghanistan. So they can fly stuff into Afghanistan and then either fly it or truck it over the border. Herat, or fly into Herat, because there's an airport in Herat. We built one there too. And they can basically just funnel as much as they want in to support these regions. Now, obviously, we'll set up, you know, defensive, or try and interrupt those supply routes. We'll do overflights and, you know, and those types of restrictive supply will cut off those supply chains as much as possible. But still, in any counterinsurgency, rat lines become all over. Especially if you have the will of the people that don't want to be conquered, they will participate in that. All right, let's see. We talked about Iraq, Iran's missile defenses, all this stuff. Obviously, we've destroyed much of their Air Force. Much, almost probably all their Air Force, all their Navy. But again, all you need is a fishing junk filled with 500 pounds of C4 and you've got the USS Cole bombing that took place pre 9 11. All right, now, total active members, something like 610, 000. Maybe 960 with reserves. It's. It's pretty substantial. All right, let's talk geography again. All right, The Zagros Mountains. A 1500 milli kilometer wall along the entire western border with peaks up to 4, 000 meters. Right? I don't know about anybody, Jordy. You're, you're. Give me that. Mathematician. What's 4, 000 meters and feet, buddy?
- [44:08]
Jordy (Co-host or Guest)
Was that 12, 000 or so?
- [44:10]
David Rutherford
12, 000ft? You ever tried to operate at 12, 000ft, bud?
- [44:14]
Jordy (Co-host or Guest)
I don't think I've ever been 12, 000ft if I was in an airplane.
- [44:17]
David Rutherford
Yeah. I'll tell you what, it's not easy, right? Anything over 8, 000ft becomes more difficult. Anything over 9, you're starting to look at some type of potential sip or sudden induced pulmon problems at altitude, right? Plus, mountain warfare is its own unique training, right? Think 10th Mountain Group, very famous group back in World War II, you know, fighting in the Swiss Alps, the French Alps, the Italian Alps. I mean, just incredibly difficult warfare. All right, then you have the Albor's mountains to protect Tehran from the north. There's a whole northern mountain change that you have to get over to hit Tehran too. And these peaks go up to 5,600 meters. We're. That's almost what, 16,000ft or something like that? I, I'm out.
- [45:10]
Jordy (Co-host or Guest)
Count me out, dude.
- [45:11]
David Rutherford
Which essentially creates a natural fortress. Now again, shock and awe. Everybody's going to say rut you just shocking all the hell out of the city and flatten the city. And, and then what do you do? You enrage populations. You, whatever, you know, now you got this counterinsurgency nightmare. All right? You know, there's also, there's two big deserts in Iran that, that cause issues. If you go back and you think about Desert Eager Desert Claw, which was the failed rescue attempt from Delta for the Iran hostage crisis. They were out in the desert, they had a helicopter hit, a refueling thing, and it blew up and some people died and they had to cancel that rescue, that hostage rescue. So those deserts again, those, you know, Jordy will show you some pictures of the desert. It's hard to operate out in the open in the desert for sure. So again, you know, the bottom line is this, I think these, these estimates and you know, I tried to search like RAND Group, CSIS and some other, you know, think tanks in terms of my analysis and where I was pulling from. But the rough estimate, they believe, or they're saying, is about 500,000 to a million US ground troops. That means a draft. There's no ifs, ands, buts. That means a draft. If you get up to a million, that means a draft. And remember, at its height in, in Vietnam, I think we had something like 600, 700,000 people in Vietnam at one point, right? What was the max number of US personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2011? Jordy, would you tell me that, please? All right, now here's the other thing. If you were not to do a draft and you pulled our troops from all over the world, right, Germany, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Guam, everything, put everybody in theater, what happens to our capabilities to protect Taiwan or to protect, to support Ukraine. Because you ain't gonna be able to support Ukraine anymore if we go all in on a war here, I'll tell you that right now. And it doesn't seem like there's a lot of support. You got that for us? What is it? What was it?
- [47:32]
Jordy (Co-host or Guest)
I do. So the, the, the peak in terms of personnel was actually 2007 and 2008. So the peak was about 168,000 troops plus roughly 150,000 contractors in Iraq. In Iraq at the peak.
- [47:49]
David Rutherford
Yeah, at its peak. And that was way bigger than Afghanistan. Understand? So. All right, so just think again. Numbers. Think about numbers and logistics. Wars are won and lost by logistics. It's a numbers game. It's always a numbers game. And if you don't believe me, just go back and read a freaking history book, okay? It's there. It's all there for you. So when you start to get into this like. But we're the U.S. bay man. We can kick anybody's ass. Like Ann Holt, right? And Holt, you have to think realistically. And warfare is logistics, plain and simple. Right? All right, so again, and then the last little piece, say we, we mass this, this group, we send them in. Then there's also all the other regional players that could come to help them as well too, that are trained in counterinsurgency guerrilla warfare that could wreak havoc. You don't need a lot of fighters to wreak havoc against U.S. personnel. There's time and time again where you've seen it, right? Where you've seen it happen. And now with drone technology, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's pretty, pretty Substantial support
- [49:13]
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- [52:21]
David Rutherford
for the interruption of the show. I hope you're enjoying the content, but I wanted to really give a shout out to a new partner with us and that's Revival Nutrition. This is an incredible company that is providing the latest in technology for supplemental delivery. Now, what do I mean? Typically we get our supplements from pill or powder, which by the way, is, is pretty low on its bioavailability. What does that mean? What is absorbed into your gut and into your system? With, with pill and powder, you can lose up to 50% of the supplemental impact, right? Well, with revival nutrition, and there are two lines. There's an adult line called Revive a som and a kid's line named Revival Sprout. What you do is it's a liquid form and your body absorbs about 80% of that. So I just can't tell you as a person who takes about 13 to 15 supplements a day, this has really changed the way I think about now. The other great aspect of it is that it tastes phenomenal. Right? I put it in my shakes in the morning, I mix it with my juice at night. Right. These are incredibly good tasting product for supplements, which typically have bad taste to them, but these are phenomenal. The other aspect is our value. I would hold our value against any other company out there. In fact, better in most cases. It's just, you can't be. It's better science, it tastes better and it's a better value overall. All right? One of the products that I really just love is this magnesium complex, right? This is so awesome. Now, if you're not taking magnesium complex, some of the things that it can promote is it promotes relaxation and restful sleep, supports the body's response to occasional stress, supports balance and emotional well being, supports heart health and cardiovascular vascular function, and promotes healthy bones and teeth. So right before you go to bed, you take a little magnesium complex and you feel great. The other one is glutathione, right? Glutathione is an incredible product that I've been taking for the past year and it has done so much for my system in terms of my immune function recovery, longevity, aging, gastrointestinal health because I have a bad gut from being at war so much. And then also antioxidants in terms of skin. So with all saying all that, to say this, just give us give them a shot. Go to revivalnutrition.com rut rut. Check out all the different things we have to offer. And if you decide to buy, you're going to get a free box of vitamin C with any purchase price that you have. And if you type in the promo code David D I V I D in your checkout, you're going to get another 20% off from me. So once again, check the link below or go to revivalnutrition.com forward slash rut and you type in your promo code, David. When you check out and enjoy your liposomal supplements each and every day, Hooyah. Now you got to start to think, all right, what would be the economic fallout of all this? And I'm going to go through this pretty quick. All right, so some of the things that you want to really think about is what were some of the ideas that took place economically. So first Gulf War, Gulf War, Desert Storm, first one. All right, basically it was a short war, right? Yes, oil popped a little bit, but afterwards there was a huge, huge rally in the, in The S P 500 came back strong. Now the year later, and essentially after 91, 92, we went into an inflationary place. And that was probably from all the spending that was kind of hidden that came up to speed. You had the savings and loans 87, you had the COVID war in Afghanistan. There were some other economic challenges that took place during that time. But again, you know, wars, typically short wars, boost economy. Now what I want to do is I want to talk about defense spending. Okay, so defense spending, basically 2001, two years prior to. But we, we started 9, 11. Defense spending was $335 billion a year. By 2007, that number had gone to 557 billion. All right, there you go. Great graph up there. And so when you look at defense spending in the Afghanistan war prior to 292, same thing by the end, up to five. What is that? Five?
- [56:59]
Jordy (Co-host or Guest)
506 billion.
- [57:00]
David Rutherford
506 billion. All right, first war. It actually dropped post post war. But again, we weren't even talking. We were talking about such a de minimis fight there. And it wasn't a full regime change. Remember, we went in, punched him in his nose, got Kuwait back, and then took off.
- [57:18]
Jordy (Co-host or Guest)
All right, by the way, this is per year, yes?
- [57:22]
David Rutherford
Yeah, yeah, sorry, I wasn't clear. This is per year right now, right? Where are we right now? President just requested. We're all, we're close to a trillion dollars a year in SPE now. 900 and some odd billion. And the president just requested to go up to a $1.5 billion spend on defense. Maybe he knew, had a little premonition of, of what was to come or, or not. But think about that. And that's, you know, again, what is it potentially going to happen for def. Defense spending here? Right. So rough estimate if, if ground troops go in, history says oil is going to go skyrocket over 100 barrels. Let me go back and I Just want to talk about oil prices. Iraq War 2. This is one's key, right? In 20, 22,002, one year prior to the Iraq War, oil was $26 a barrel. All right, 22,003 it went to 2031. It rose throughout the year, oh 4. $42. 05. 57, 06. $66. 07. 72 and then spiked to what, $147 a barrel in 2008. What also happened in 2008, Jordyn?
- [58:55]
Jordy (Co-host or Guest)
There's a movie about it.
- [58:58]
David Rutherford
Yeah, Great big short. The big short. A massive economic collapse we have now. Is that going to necessarily happen? I've talked to certain economists who believe we're already on the precipice of an economic collapse or recession, minimally, maybe a depression. Obviously we've got the AI laying off thousands of jobs. We've got the market kind of weighted and only 7, the Super 7, those stocks, the tech stocks. We've got a massive problem going on in commercial real estate devaluation. And in many places they believe that we're in a home sale economic sales. Way more sellers than buyers out there right now. So we're, we're all teetering and flirting with this whole thing. All right? Now I will say this, that when the military industrial complex gets ramped up and starts producing, we can shift to a war industry, a war footing economically, which can have some benefits. But, but again, long term impacts do not generally are favorable for oil prices as well as the markets. All right. Now the other challenge is long term spending in terms of our overall deficit. Obviously we're coming up, we're right around 39 trillion. High probability we'll cross 40 trillion in debt. Now again we have to pay interest on that debt and the interest payments are skyrocketing right now. So that's a factor too in all this. You combine that with global. You pulled up the infamous debt clock on me, buddy. Holy. What's that sucker say over there? How close are we to. We went over 39, right?
- [60:49]
Jordy (Co-host or Guest)
Oh yeah, we're, we're just over 39. Just over 39. Congratulations.
- [60:53]
David Rutherford
Yeah, yeah. Hoo ya. Everybody. Your kids have $600,000 in debt before they even get out of middle school. All right. The other challenge you ought to think about is what is it? How does it affect politically? Right, that's the last little piece. And I'll be quick about this. I'll wrap this up in the next few minutes. All right. Politically, first and foremost, if you look at the first Gulf War, right, Desert Storm one, we had A good little coalition going in right there, right to in particular the UK because they had very strategic initiatives with their energy production in the region as well too. When you look at Afghanistan, we had a massive coalition, right? Iraq, things shrunk down. And what we've seen over the last few weeks is a very substantial pushback from our NATO members. And now that our Gulf Coast Gulf State collective group, they're all pretty pissed off right now. But what's going to happen is we're going to be at this thing by ourselves. Trump just went out and basically called everybody cowards because nobody wants to dedicate warships to open up the Straits of Hormuz because they don't want to jeopardize their personnel because what happens if they do it destroys them politically. And I also think there's some gamesmanship going on with the NATO allies because they're pissed. Trump said, well, we're not going to keep spending all the money for Ukraine. You guys got a pony up too. And if you don't, you've probably forgotten already. Just four or five months ago, NATO is coming out and saying we don't need America. We're going to increase to $800 billion annually for our defense spending. Meanwhile, the UK has what, 100,000 or so troops, right? You think they're gonna go into an enlistment or a conscription to support a war in Iran? Hell no. They're not going to do that. This is our war, we own it. All right, okay. So the worldwide geopolitics is very problematic, right? There's already been a huge push with bricks, the initiative of bricks to start driving away from the dollar being the reserve currency. Now typically in global conflicts, the dollar gains strength and remains in particular within energy sectors, which is a lot of what the everybody's paying the close attention to. But if Energy gets to $200 a barrel or more, and by the way, we can be self sustained in America, especially with our new deal with Venezuela, because we have refineries in the Gulf that are designed for that heavy crude to refine that. So regionally with our own energy production we should be good. But what happens is we lose prowess overseas in particular, China's probably still purchasing oil from a bunch of different people in the yen. Russia is can produce its own oil all through there. And you know, we have all these other ways to go around. But again, the energy crisis is going to affect everyone, including what supply chains. Again we saw how catastrophically weak we were during COVID when those supply chains got shut down. And guess what? Do you think China could start to pinch our supply chain a little bit or India pinch our supply chain? So you got to think about fertilizer. You got to think about all the different chemicals and things that we import around that area of the world and that being reduced dramatically in an already kind of economy we got right going right now. All right, politically in the United States, domestically, we're already seeing it happen, right? I, I, you, you might not believe so, but I'm telling you here, I pay attention. The MAGA coalition is broken, hands down. I hate to be the bearer of bad news. I hate to tell you what you don't want to hear, but if you don't start paying attention to this, you're, you're, you're living in a, in a, in a siloed perspective. The MAGA coalition is broken. You've got an anti war group, you've got an anti Israeli government group. You've got, you know, a pro Trump at all costs. You know, you've got America first group. You've got all these factions now that are out. And then on the flip side of that, you've got the, the Democrats where all the pressure and all the eyes are on that. They're regrouping right now. They're regrouping around all this messaging, and you're starting to see that take place on Capitol Hill. So whereas we thought we had them completely defeated if we lose the House, which most people are predicting in 26, and that's not coming from Democratic polling or, and by the way, I hate Poland. It's just ridiculous. But we, you know, when we, when polling suits us, we love it. When polling doesn't, we call it bull. All polling's bull. It is what it is. You got to be paying attention to the sentiments of what's taking place on people who are in quotation influencers or the new media. The new media is where you're hearing the sentiment of what's going on. Just look at legacy media. The last three elections, completely living in LA la land. Well, guess what? Now's your turn to come out of la La land and start paying attention to independent media, because that's what you have to pay attention. The numbers, the sheer scale of numbers. Let's just take Megyn Kelly's number. In one month, Megyn Kelly did like 157 million downloads on her show. That's, that's every major news outlet all combined, and she still defeated them one person. So if you still think that Fox is relevant, CNN's relevant, MSNBC's relevant. Newsmax is relevant. Any of that. You're out of your mind. Right. People are sourcing the information, especially young people. And by the way, they are a significant motorbike. They're bigger than you boomers. If you're a boomer and you're listening to this Gen Z and millennials, they're a bigger contingency of voters than you are. And they're not paying attention to Fox. They're not watching any of this. And they're pissed off. I'm telling you they are. Yes, there is a big group out there that is Go America. As Am I right? I want America to win always. I'm not a ayatollah sympathizer. I'm not anti Semitic. What I am is a realist. Because why? Because I've seen 22 years of combat and the GWAT. And what it did to our forces, what it did to our economy, what it did to our debt and what it did to our population in terms of skepticism for what? New regime change, wars. And that's what's taking place right now. So we will know soon enough. We will know In November of 2026 the profound impact now, if we lose the House and we lose the Senate, I guarantee you Donald Trump will be impeached. I guarantee it multiple times. Right? This is going to plus all funding will be shut down for this war. They'll stop funding it. They'll stop doing this. Maybe, I don't know. Usually when people come out and bark a big game, but if they've got some military component in their region or area, they're going to still in private, you know, vote for more funding because it helps their constituents. It's just the same, the world. All right. But I will tell you this, it certainly will make 28amuch more difficult reality for Republicans. All right. That was a lot of information. I've been going for about an hour. I hope you have some more context in this. A ground invasion of Iran is a multi year million plus. And I my estimation we would probably lose 100,000, 200,000 ground force troops in, in that three to four, three to five year period. Right? Because this is unlike anything we've ever engaged in. It's not Iraq, it's not like it's not Sudan, it's not Libya, it's not Syria. Right. It's none of that. This is the next level of technological warfare in the modern era. And we would have to throw millions of our young men and women at this, this effort in order to be able to eradicate the regime, hold it for long period of time and figure out how to install somebody in a country. 90 million plus people, you got to figure 80% of them are die hard Shia Islamists or supportive. And after we go in and we kill a couple hundred thousand or a million civilians, women and children, now all of a sudden you hyper radicalize an entire country, the oldest, longest running culture and society in human history against the great Satan America itself. So that's a sobering thought. I'm just once again trying to contextualize this. Is there a high potential for victory? It depends on how you gauge what victory is. What is mission success for you? Is mission success? Does it look like Afghanistan? Does mission success look like Iraq? Does mission success look like Vietnam? Does mission success look like Korea? What does mission success look like? And if you're old enough to remember or you've studied enough, if mission success is World War II, we lost over 400,000 people and another millions affected long term for that type of engagement. Right. Again, I just want to be a realist. I want to give you some context. If you're gung ho about waging a ground war in Iran, what some ideas that you need to process and think about. All right. Thank you so much for tuning in with us, Jordy. Once again, thanks for all your help, buddy. I love doing a show with you. I hope you all enjoyed this. If you learned something new, please share it with somebody, a friend. Super easy. Just click the links below, clink the links below or follow us on all social media sites at David Rutherford show or on X at D. Rutherford or follow me at Team Frog Logic on X on on Facebook Team Frog Logic and on Instagram at Team Frog Logic for posts and ideas behind this. And I just am so thankful for you and and I just my prayers are that that God can come down and generate some peace in that region and we can go back to some civility and young people can stop dying at scale. All right,
- [72:35]
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