Transcript of Dizzying Week with Iran/US & Russia on the Back Foot | EYES ON GEOPOLITICS New

Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Eyes on Geopolitics. I'm here with Mark Polymeropoulos, Mick Mulroy, Andy Milburn, and Jonathan Hackett. 3 Marines, I don't like it, um, and a Greek, uh, that walk into a bar. Yeah, walk into it. What's like a start of a joke? Happy Mother's Day to everybody's moms out there, wives, you know, all that. Enjoy your day, have fun. You got to do what you got to do, so grin and bear it. You got to go to brunch. Hopefully you got some flowers and stuff for mom and everyone enjoys it. A lot happening this week as usual. It's been pretty dizzying. I had like a ton of notes and it's just like I don't even know where to begin, you know. Supposedly we're under a ceasefire. We have a ceasefire going on with Iran right now. Obviously not. Iran's been shooting missiles and drones at the UAE. We've been stopping tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. Uh, we had the Operation Project or whatever was called Project Freedom Fries or whatever it was called that lasted probably 18-24 hours before that ended. Um, Saudi Arabia was not happy with us.

They denied us, uh, use of their bases. I think that's part of like— you guys can correct me if I'm wrong, but that's part of the reason why we got rid of or we paused Project, uh, Freedom. And we all know the reason why Project Freedom and it's not Operation Epic Fury is because they're trying to make a case for the 60 days in Congress, like whether or not we're able to use military force or not. And then a couple of days ago, there was a one-page memo, like it was drawn up on the back of a napkin that people were taking under advisement. There was some talk about possibly an end to the war and like an agreement to start talking about the nuclear issue after the fighting has subsided or the war ended or whatever you want to call it. It's just chaos. Frankly, the messaging is chaos too. Just now, right before we started going, it was all over Twitter being reported saying that like Iran gave Pakistani mediators their response. Like, okay, like, what is this? Are we on a TV show? Like, what's the response? Like, can we get some answers here as to what happens next?

There's so many other little stories too. Israel's got a base in Iraq and we're telling the Iraqis not to go near it. I don't know how you feel like that if you're an Iraqi and there's somebody in your sovereign territory, you know, just setting up a base. It's just chaos. Lebanon's continually getting bombed. Gaza's getting bombed. Like, it doesn't seem like exactly like these ceasefires are doing what they're meant to be doing. I mean, there's just so much shit going on. Mick, you go first. I'm picking— I'm going to just start swinging my pick first.

What the hell?

I know, you're right. I think he's the— is he— was he the highest ranking? Who's the highest ranking here?

Is it—

fuck off! Is it Andy? No, no, we have two SIs. Mick, you're actually muted, Mick. Who's the highest? Andy, you were a colonel, bro.

I was talking for you, little prick.

Oh, sorry.

A fucking 4-star, dude. What the fuck?

Is that a 4-star? Wow.

It doesn't mean—

should I salute you?

It means—

Mick was at Dazney too.

Yeah, I know.

At least equivalent of a one-star.

You know what he needs? He needs his assistance that he had when he was at Dazney to fix his microphone. Yeah, that would be great.

Hey, I have something, but there's an important little opening that we have to talk about. Mick, you and I messed up. We should have been in Athens last night. You know why? Metallica played in Athens last night.

I saw that.

That would have been badass. They play like the Greeks, that Greek song that everybody likes, like Zorba the Greek.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, to see the theme from Zorba, they were playing that. I mean, that is epic. Anyway, go do the show now. But that, that's the biggest news of the, uh, of the week.

Metallica. We'll let Mick, we'll let Mick fix his audio stuff. So let's start with the SIS 4. I'm sorry.

No, no, no, no, no, no, please, please go ahead, go ahead.

I apologize. I did my two, uh, my two cents, the Metallica All right, then I'm going with the full bird colonel, Andy Goetz. John, you're getting fucked out of this. You're an enlisted guy, bro.

I'm sorry, I was enlisted.

Well, yeah.

So I'm just gonna, you know, as you know, I'm in the Middle East right now, country not to be named, but the biggest concern here has nothing to do, well, that's not exactly true, but it's not necessarily the Straits of Hormuz. The biggest concern here, as you're probably aware, is the massive gaps in their defense to, well, short-range air defense against drones. And that's no secret to anyone who's been tracking this. And the country that I am in right now that shall remain nameless did, like many other countries, bring a Ukrainian advisory team on but they're buying assets, passive infrared radar and a kinetic solution, not from the United States, but from the Italians. And there's an undercurrent of feeling here that— and I'm not saying this is the case because short-range air defense is a big— it's a big problem across the board. But there's an underlying feeling that the US is not the solution to these problems. Yes, we have an absolutely unbeatable architecture for intercepting cruise and ballistic missiles, but when it comes to mass launch of relatively expendable— I mean, the Shahed drone is between $10,000 and $20,000— there are two issues, right, with short-range air defense.

One is there just aren't enough systems. There's 3 problems. There just aren't enough systems to focus on drones. Two, that the same systems that we have that are designed for cruise missiles and ballistic missiles like the THAAD and like the Patriot don't work so well for drones because of the radar cross-section, the speed at which drones fly, and the attack profiles of drones. And the third piece is is a huge expenditure mismatch. And that's, you know, that's well publicized, right? I mean, you hear all the time that you're using a million-dollar interceptor against a drone that is a few thousand dollars, a little more than a few thousand dollars. But for the US, it's not so much an expense problem, it's a magazine problem. But out here it is both. Now don't get me wrong, of course everyone's worried about the flow of oil. Through the Straits of Hormuz, and that is an issue. But the continuous penetration— indeed, don't turn this into a pure old dirty joke— but the continuous penetration of the air defense systems here by drones, and the fact that on the Iranian side, there doesn't seem to have been a noticeable depletion of their of their stores.

And now there's news about the Russian support for the Iranians being able to provide fiber optic cable drones of the sort that were used in Ukraine and satellite-guided drones, all of which can bypass, obviously, jamming techniques. That is causing real concern.

Can you guys hear me? Just sort of. Okay, thanks.

Gotcha.

Oh, well, we got—

see, now, now, now we're back to the hierarchical pyramid, D, and you can bounce that back. I'm scared now.

I don't want to overstep.

So, so that's, so that's kind of the, the defense problem, right? And the secondary problem, and, and I would be interested to hear everyone's point of view on this, is that, that what we're— a lot of the predictions about the effect on the global economy and on the US economy, because that's in the end what all the US voters care about, is likely to be far greater than, than is being predicted. It's, it's kind of the tip of the iceberg because there are knock-on effects to everything. You know, I was just talking to someone who happens to be, uh, a senior executive in Lockheed Martin. So he's, he's, he's got no reason to argue against this kind of war. It's been good for business at Lockheed Martin, but he's telling me that, for instance, he went to the dentist and there was a shortage of— I forget— helium or something. Um, and, and then that stocks are likely to get less and less. My point is this, that when— if you just talk purely in terms of oil and shortage of oil and the fact that the US— you hear all the time, oh, the US is self-sufficient and the effect on the US is likely to be less, uh, than on the, on the global economy, and that the effect on the global economy is only going to be short-lived The, there are many who are saying that it's absolute bullshit and this is going to have a catastrophic and longer-term effect on, on the global economy and the US.

So at that point, that is, that is all my rounds exhausted, and I'll turn back to you, D.

Uh, I'm gonna give it to John. I'm gonna let the enlisted guys shine a little bit before the senior guys.

Yeah, actually, on the DASD thing, I got corrected one time because we were having a delegation coming to Jordan. We had the, a bunch of DASDs coming, and one of them was a DASD for Africa. I won't name who it was, but, uh, we had like a group chat where we're supposed to put the precedence of who it is so we can announce them ahead of time as they're coming in through security and stuff like this. And I put them down as a 1-star equivalent for where they were supposed to stand in line, and I got corrected intensely for that, that they're a 3-star. Um, so I learned that pretty fast.

Uh, really? Because these are apparently—

that's what she said.

Yeah. So, so we've got, um, we've got 7 stars just waiting around in this particular group chat.

The group of the stars celebrating.

I'm not sure about the shout-outers anymore, gents. You know, the cool thing about living in Montana, they don't know what the hell a Dazdi is and they don't really care.

The Jordanians didn't either.

My family doesn't care because I still got to take the garbage out and do half the cooking.

Yeah. So speaking of that sovereignty, so Iraq, the Israeli base there, which is the kind of thing in the news right now, the Wall Street Journal article about it's pretty interesting. I've seen some arguments for it, some against it. I think it's interesting to see those arguments, and especially if you turn the situation around where, you know, one of the arguments was, what if there was a Chinese base in the United States that was used to attack the United States? How would you feel about that? Because some people are saying, you know, the base is an invasion of Iraqi sovereignty. But kind of looking at it more objectively, I mean, look how many bases there are in Syria that the US used to have. Look how many bases in Lebanon that Israel used to have. Israel has activity in Golan Heights already. I mean, there are other countries too, like in Somaliland. Part of the reason Somaliland is becoming independent is because Israel is really leveraging that area in the Horn of Africa to gain a foothold, toehold there. So this stuff shouldn't be like geopolitically surprising, I don't think. I mean, it's always kind of shocking to see one country doing something in another country that wasn't supposed to do it in the first place.

But it's kind of the way things work, especially look at the US bases in the Middle East. There are many, many U.S. facilities in the Middle East. It's kind of shocking to see when you look on a map how they look. It's almost like a noose around Iran. And that's how a lot of Iranians in the government look at it, that the U.S. is there to encircle the country. But from a, from a tactical perspective, it's actually a very wise move to put that base there because you need a forward area to do refueling. You need to preposition activities. You need to have search and rescue guys there. You need to have equipment on the ground to help, especially with certain radar activities, to be able to, be able to predict what's coming into Israel from Iran faster, with better precision and clarity. There's a lot of reasons why you put that base there. Almost none of it has to do with offensive activity, although it is very sad that an Iraqi soldier was killed going to investigate an intrusion on their sovereign territory, which is where a lot of this, this negative feeling comes from.

But I think it's just kind of interesting to zoom out and look at it from a more rational perspective than just a pure invasion of Iraqi sovereignty, especially because there's already been Israeli activity in Iraq for many years. The Peshmerga were not just trained by the United States. So that's another thing to just think about, that in the bigger picture, this is not a new development, so to say.

But John, wouldn't you say it's new in this sense? I mean, from an Israeli point of view, all right, from the global point of view, the Israelis could justify— I'm not arguing for or against, I'm just saying it's a step beyond because their presence in Lebanon, they could directly relate to rocket attacks on their sovereign territory, right? Our presence in Syria was directly related to the fact that at the time Syria was an ungoverned space. Uh, the Bashar Assad was not, you know, though, yes, it was nominally a sovereign country, but it was a raging civil war taking place. And so, you know, and it, and, and we had from our perspective a, a direct reason for being there because of the rise of ISIS and all of that. Whereas for the Israelis to be in Iraq, that's, that, that is a stretch, both in terms of justification and in terms of the fact that Iraq is indeed a sovereign country with no recent history, not since what, 1967, of aggressive action, aggressive action against Israel. Not the case of Syria and not the case of Lebanon and, you know, against Israel.

You're absolutely right, especially from that, that big picture perspective. The UN Charter says that there should be no offensive wars, period. I mean, that's the whole reason it was written. And, uh, this is an offensive war no matter how you try to describe what's going on. Is it defensive, offensive? This is a preemptive attack. Um, and Israel often uses the preemptive self-defense doctrine, which is basically offensive action with a you know, it's a euphemism. So, you know, they start with the idea that it's defensive and then justify what they're doing in exactly how you mentioned. They say, well, we are under attack or we will be under attack. That justifies us doing these activities that normally look offensive, but because of the way we're framing it, they're defensive to us. And I think that's how they're trying to justify that with a very thin justification that doesn't really stand up to the UN Charter, which is not— it's absolutely against that kind of activity.

Hey, I just want to, before the listeners chime in, but I misspoke. Since 1981. 1981 was the bombing of Iraqi's nuclear—

Oh, Iraq. But actually they bombed Syria's nuclear reactor in 2003, I believe it was. And that killed about 100 North Koreans, something like that.

2007.

2007, sorry.

I was there.

Yeah, that was clearly offensive. There was no justification.

Who are the senior boys want to take this over now?

Mick, go ahead.

Yeah, so where to start? My grandmother used to say, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, which is a polite Irish way of saying that things are all screwed up and we need a lot of help, I think. Not that we're all screwed up, but you know what, I'd start with this. I think it's important that the world start speaking up because right now both Iran and to some extent the United States seem to think this is all about us when it actually is not, right? So when Iran decides that you're just going to take their time to respond to things that they already knew exactly what they were going to say a long time ago and just delay this thing and, and, and play the games and the Lego stuff. And I'm not saying we're not doing a lot of hyperbolic things that aren't necessary either, but it's impacting the entire world, right? So we've been talking about it a little bit. Uh, it's not just energy prices, but there's some places in, in the Far East that are like running out of fuel, right? There is going to be a major disruption of food production because 30% of the nitrogen that goes into it comes out of this.

It's going to get more and more intense, and it's time for, I think, the, the parties that are involved— and I agree with Jonathan, this is an elected war of choice, even though I support a lot of the objectives. It's on us to end it, right? And Iran, I know it's playing the victim, and yes, it was attacked, but Iran's been the most destabilizing force in the Middle East for almost 50 years. And in their response to being attacked, they've taken it out on the rest of the world, right? So they're the ones shooting at people at innocent commercial, uh, shipping, um, for no apparent reason other than they want to just, uh, control the strait and make everybody pay because, uh, of their war with the United States. So I really would start with that. It's impr— it should be on everybody involved, uh, to try to find an end to this because you are having a major impact on everyone in the world who had no choice to enter the war and Essentially, it's just getting the consequences. Big issues, obviously, what the response is going to be. We'll find out. Hopefully it's something that the United States and Iran can just talk about without having to post about it, and we can get into this 30-day proposed period by the United States to get into detailed planning.

Ultimately, they need to have the straits open. Obviously, the blockade would have to come off because of it. And we need something that's more stringent and restrictive than the first JCPOA, mostly for political reasons, right? Because it's going to be hard to explain why we got out of that in 2018 and then got back into it now. If it's not more stringent, which means no enrichment, then this is going to be viewed as a strategic— not a success. But we can still pull it out. I think we have made some strides going after the leadership. We've certainly degraded their military. We've degraded their strategic assets like ballistic missiles, perhaps not as much as we thought we did. But I think, you know, we talked about this last time, just be upfront. This is what happened. This is what we're looking at. And this is what we're trying to do to fix any shortcomings that we have. So I think, I think we're in a spot there right now, uh, when it comes to the war in Iran, that this is going to either go into, uh, real, like, adult negotiations, or we're going to be in a standoff for— I mean, what the CIA report that was, you know, reported on in the media says, 4 months before major impacts on the Iranian regime, if that.

I mean, I don't know, but if that's accurate I don't know that the rest of the world's going to want to wait around for months to see where this goes. And then the other alternative, of course, is escalation. And now we're hearing, and this is something we always knew about, you know, there's a potential challenge to the, not only the Strait of Hormuz as far as passage, but there's a lot of fiber optic cables that run through there that transmit an incredible amount of financial activity, global financial activity, classified communications, just everything that makes the world go round. It's about the same percentage, by the way, as energy. So, and it's very vulnerable. For those who've spent a lot of time in maritime operations, which I did, these are very vulnerable communications, lines of communications. So that's another real threat to the world. Hopefully cooler heads prevail and we can start having real negotiations on any of this in a way that's conducive to the United States. Obviously, that's my perspective. But I do think we have to concede some to the Iranians or this is not going to happen. That's just the way negotiations work.

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So I think we're in a bit of a mess. I'm not really as— not saying that you're optimistic, but, you know, the only optimism you could actually have is if we had anybody in charge, any adults, and we don't. The negotiating team is still led by two real estate guys. This proposed memorandum, MOU, the memorandum of understanding, this 14-point plan is just as stupid as the Gaza end of the Gaza War, the 20-point plan, which didn't do anything other than stop the war, but nothing. There's been no progress on disarming Hamas or anything there. Same thing with their one-pagers in terms of the Russia-Ukraine war. And so we don't have any adults in charge. And the MOU, even if it is agreed upon, is just to extend the ceasefire 30 days where we talk more about stuff such as what to do about the nuclear program in which you know, whether you like the JCPOA or not, it took 18 months and, you know, several hundred pages with multiple experts, and we have none of that. They don't exist. And so I don't see us in any kind of positive outcome here. I think the Trump administration is in a huge bind.

Certainly our allies are getting antsy. And, you know, and the flip-flop of what happened last week was pretty extraordinary, whether there's going to be this escort mission, not really an escort mission, and not after the Saudis freaked out. And so, you know, we're at this point now in which I'm not sure the administration really knows what to do. I think if you take a look at, and there is no, I don't even know what a best-case scenario is. Would that be some type of JCPOA-like deal in which, you know, it's a bit strengthened, but then you end up giving sanctions relief and then the hardliners, the regime survives. I mean, that's the conundrum of this. Like, literally a deal, even whatever you call it, means the regime lives even longer. I think really the best-case scenario in terms of bringing the Iranian regime down is to do what we're doing and just wait them out. It's going to be a test of patience. And if it takes 4 months and they lose half a billion dollars a day, perhaps then the regime crumbles. But of course, the Trump administration won't do that with the midterms coming up.

I think one of the things that to me is is most interesting is this call from the right and certain elements of the right, whether it's Hugh Hewitt, who's a very influential commentator, Mark Thiessen, who writes for the Washington Post, and who apparently is incredibly influential on Trump. I know Mark, and people have, he's gotten a lot of grief because he was kind of a never-Trump guy at first, but now he's tight with the president, but he's, and Mark Levin from Fox. And so there's a whole bunch of folks who are howling for Trump actually to resume the war. And so, and basically they're saying, they're calling him out that, hey, this is, you know, the US does not look very strong right now. We are not responding, you know, militarily to the Iranian intransigence. So it's gonna be interesting to see which way Trump gets pulled. This has nothing to do with the Israelis, by the way, D, sorry. I know you want Bibi to pull all the strings. But in this case, clearly I think the Israelis would like the war to be resumed. But I think that Trump's, the pressure Trump is feeling is from those who are, and it's gonna drive him nuts.

And it is fun for those of us in the media to kind of cut with that needle like, "Hey, wow, you look like President Obama," and there's nothing worse in Trump's mind if you equate him with Obama. So I think we're in a bit of a pickle. I'm not sure exactly how to get out. The other interesting point, which has been bandied about, Lindsey Graham said something I think incredibly stupid and naive, but that's not unusual, when he said that we should have a Second Amendment solution and flood the country with weapons. That should be the COVID action plan, which if you know covert action plans is preposterous. But it did kind of make me start thinking about, well, you know, Trump has complained a bit about it looks like there was a covert action plan that went astray, that we did arm the Iranian Kurds and they kept the weapons. It's kind of funny. He's been talking about that. And then the Israelis, remember, pushed this very strongly in that famous White House Situation Room meeting where David Barnea, the Mossad chief, talked about some type of kind of regime change operation. Marco Rubio's response was bullshit.

But it did start me thinking about, you know, is there actually any kind of COVID action solutions? Mick and I, you and I have talked about this before because I think that, you know, if you think about, and I don't know that the answer to this, but if you think about ways that actually could work over time, perhaps that is one of them. That would not be as, you know, not in terms of overt military pressure. Ultimately, again, I'm not sure where we are right now. I don't know if it's an escalation trap or this kind of spiral, but I'm not sure how we get out of this right now in which US interests are actually protected. And so we'll see. And the other people who think they know which way Trump is thinking, I mean, I think he honestly changes his mind so much, we really don't know because the flip-flops on policy have been pretty remarkable. I mean, literally you had Marco Rubio speaking in favor of this escort mission and then several, and he went on all the talk shows and he was eloquent and everyone's like, wow, that sounds like, you know, we seem to know what we're doing.

And then literally Trump reversed himself and all of that got thrown out. And so, you know, we go through this whiplash nonstop. We're talking now on Sunday, on Tuesday we could be doing something totally different.

Yeah, on the COVID action If I could just touch on that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, from my perspective, covert action needs to be part of a comprehensive policy. And, and this might not be the majority view, and continuous when it comes to our adversaries. Like, we shouldn't go, oh, let's do a covert action program now because things aren't working. Right. I mean, that's, that's like the worst case scenario for the agency. It's like, okay, so the policy goes— Right. Like, okay, so we can't figure it out diplomatically. The military says they can't figure it out, so let's just hand it to the agency. And then they wonder how it doesn't work out that well. It needs to be comprehensive in the sense that it's just one element of a national capacity that we use against our most difficult adversaries. And that's this case. Obviously, Iran is, is becoming one, unfortunately. So I do think we should have one. I assume we do. I don't know. I don't— not asking, because if I did, I wouldn't be talking about it. But it should be continuous because you never know when elements of it are more important than other elements of it.

And if you don't have the groundwork, there's nothing to turn on. You see what I mean? So I think, and I hope, that we do have a robust covert program, not just, you know, what everybody thinks, you know, give, you know, drop parachutes of pallets of weapons and stuff like that. But the influence side, all that stuff, which I don't think we're doing that great of a job on, at least what I can see. I think we should have all that stuff. The idea that we're just going to arm 90 million people, I mean, the— if the regime is good at anything, it's staying the regime, right? And they've already showed they have no problem slaughtering innocent civilians. They already did it before the war. So we got to be careful what we're doing, because unless we really don't care what happens to the Iranian people, we could actually cause, you know, a major, uh, that would pale the prior extermination of protesters, uh, in comparison. So we need to make sure it's done in comprehensive, uh, step with a cohesive, comprehensive policy, and that it should be, uh, something that's enduring, right? So it should be, it should last past this.

And, and they're doing it to us, right? So it's not like You know, if they'll do everything they possibly can to us, them being Russia, China, Iran, other countries. So I think we should, we should view it that way. But to throw it to a covert program when you can't figure it out is, is like the worst case scenario for the agency.

Well, I mean, think about our covert action programs that did not— that were not successful. Um, think about the Syrian program, reportedly in the press. Again, US policy was all jacked up there. And let's, so let's say there's a US covert program for regime change, but we sign some kind of limited JCPOA 2.5, giving massive sanctions relief, strengthening the regime. How does that work? That's not in concert with each other. That's right.

That's the comprehensive part. Yeah, that's a good point.

So it's got to be, you know, what's the most important thing?

Is it a non-nuclear Iran? Like, or regime change? What's the most important thing we need to get out of this? What's the aim?

I would argue regime change. I mean, you know, which originally that was Trump's comment in January. The, you know, the non-nuclear Iran part is the JCPOA, frankly, which the right wing in the Republican Party lambasted mercilessly for, you know, for years. And so—

Because they took their orders from Trump and Trump hated it because Obama made it. It's real simple how the Republican politics works, you know.

Pentagon was pushing to keep it, and if you had issues with ballistic missile, um, you know, collection and proxy force operations, we could address it separately.

Yeah, those— and now we're back to the same place.

So I mean, not that anybody would keep in mind what the DOD did back then or their position, but it's kind of justifying it now because even the current administration is They're not talking about ballistic missiles. They're not talking about proxies in this new nuclear agreement, at least that I can see. Right. So the criticism that was levied at the prior group, mostly because I think a lot of it was just political, which I could care less about, is now coming back. And now we're just talking about nuclear ambitions, not the other components that was so criticized before.

Would you not say that where covert programs go wrong is largely because, again, you know, covert— good covert programs— and I'm not an expert like you guys are, but good covert programs should begin with a solid intelligence base, right, collection base at the strategic level, so you understand what is going— what is the calculus that's going to change behavior, right? And I mean, we talk all the time about regime change. What we're really talking about is changing the behavior, right? Either through regime change, either through, either through attritional methods or coercive methods, but changing behavior. In order to understand that, you need a strategic intelligence understanding of what that calculus is, how the regime thinks. And I don't know, but I don't know where the gap is, but there's definitely a gap there. I don't know if the gap's whether on the part of the IC that they're just not collecting at that level, they don't have the assets, or whether they do and they're providing the advice, but the gap lies between the advice and our political leadership and not following that advice or not listening to it.

Andy, don't forget, and I'm gonna be very careful on this, there is a plethora of press reports from the 2011, 2012, 2013 timeframe over a catastrophic agency disaster in which reportedly covert communication systems were so compromised that we lost our, basically our entire asset base. I don't know the status of that. I can't talk about it obviously, or really in relation to what's going on now. But I think it does call into question is, you know, what is our asset base? How much do we know about Iranian plans and intentions? What's the penetration of senior-most levels of the Iranian regime? The political, military, diplomatic, economic sphere. I don't know how good our collection on Iran, which obviously is a hard target, but there was a devastating compromise several years ago. And so, you know, one could ask the question, I'm surprised national security journalists haven't, is what's the status of the IC's, you know, reach, look into inner workings of Iran? I think it's a fair question. I'm just surprised no one's asked it.

I think a lot of it too is that we've outsourced a lot of our humans to Israel to collect on Iran inside of Iran, where there's a lot of US collection outside of Iran. But for actual resident agents in Iran, a lot of that is Israel, and we're relying on their intel provided through that conduit to us, which carries a lot of bias implications, whether they intend to or not. Similar to Curveball, which was the source before the Iraqi invasion in 2003, that was a BND German source that we weren't allowed to access or talk to for several years while he was being debriefed. Giving us all kinds of fabricated information that we couldn't verify through asset validation because he was not a source of the US. And this is— it's not intentional. The Germans didn't intentionally do that with Curveball. Mossad might not be intentionally doing that with the US, but there's always that, that tint of the person giving you that information secondhand. We trust them, they're good at it, but there's going to be some, some taint on what exactly is the purpose of this information and which information do they choose to share or not share?

Do they modify what they share? Taking some off, including some other stuff to kind of influence how we receive it, to give us a different picture of what's actually going on politically, especially at the higher echelons of government in Iran, deeply penetrated by Mossad, less so than the United States. Not just because of what you mentioned, Mark, about the compromises, but it's— they've had a longer time to develop this infrastructure that's been uninterrupted inside of Iran versus the United States, which has had a lot of interruptions, especially with the wars that have been going on.

I mean, isn't the intelligence picture now in terms of like how many guys we have placed in there and stuff like that, completely thrown on its head? It's like a puzzle that's almost done and then we just threw the puzzle off the, off the table when we started, when we smoked 40 senior leaders.

Well, that's going to be factored in, but you can't really predict exactly how it's going to go. I mean, even if you have somebody that's completely cooperative, that's been recruited and is working, you know, really well with you and has been vetted, once they start seeing people dying around them, their motivations begin to change. And if you can't swoop in there and have a face-to-face with them to like, to reassure them and make sure they're still on board, you might start to lose them, and you might not notice that because you're at a distance. You're at that 1,000-mile-long screwdriver trying to handle this guy.

Hopefully we have as much influence agents in there as collectors, right? We actually need people to start prodding the regime in a certain direction, uh, and that's another, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a covert, uh, program type of scenario. And I would hope that that's— we're, we're thinking as much about that as the kind of swashbuckling type, like, uh, you know, like launching crates of AKs, uh, in a certain— not that I'm opposed to that in general, but we need to do more on the influence side to get this, get this regime to a place that is conducive to ending the war. We should really focus on ending. I want to win, I want to be successful, but we should really focus on ending the conflict because this is This is something we elected to start. I know we think we're the only country that matters, but we're not. And this is going to have major impacts that's going to last a long period of time on countries that can't afford it, right? So they can't afford to lose food supplies, right? And there's countries that will be the last in line to get the food that's left.

Right? So it's imperative for us to get to that point, and then we can work out the details and the negotiation. If Iran is just going to play, you know, the game and just— they've decided that they could outlive us, then we're going to have to look at escalation. I mean, it's— I don't know that we can just sit in this current situation forever, but the escalation comes with a lot of risks. So we need to be ready. We also have, of course, a shortage of precision strike munitions, but we don't, to my understanding, have a shortage of other weapons we can use, munitions we can use, uh, that are GPS guided, etc. But, um, it's going to be something that we have to consider. But I think as this goes on, if Iran keeps delaying or if it's just nowhere in the right ballpark, we're going to be looking at an escalation. I just don't know if that escalation is actually going to do the trick.

Hey, can you guys— And you're definitely gonna respond. Can you guys comment on the importance of the, or maybe lack of, but the upcoming summit between Trump and President Xi in Beijing? I mean, it's clearly Trump wanted this thing to be over before that. I think the summit was delayed because of the war, but now he's going. And in some ways we lose a lot of leverage. I mean, ideally this would've been a summit when you talk about tariffs and trade and all the kind of the sticky things, but now the war's gonna dominate this. And we're actually, you know, probably going to be asking the Chinese for help and how they influence Iran. What are your all— what's your thoughts? I'm not a China expert at all, but, you know, perhaps look at it from the Chinese point of view. What is Xi going to try to get out of us? Will they help? Do they like to see the US totally in disarray right now? You can make that argument. What does it mean in terms of, you know, future conflict with Taiwan? Think about this in the kind of the great power competition.

I think China thinks it has upper hand now because everything you just said, Mark, I think they, they think, okay, the US has gotten to win a war they chose. They clearly won out. I think that's obvious to everyone involved. And China can help. Therefore, they have cards. If you want to use that analogy, they have a lot of cards. That doesn't mean they can automatically play and will concede. But when it comes to the trade war, tariffs, etc., the United States is going to be asking China to do things and not do things to support Iran, and they're going to want something in return. And of course, it does have an impact. They do get some of their energy from Iran, and any reduction causes issues everywhere, right? So the cost and everything else and the global economy going down impacts China, of course, substantially. So there's going to be a pretty— I think it's going to focus actually on the war itself because it does impact everything else that would have been on the agenda. And that's what we surely wanted it to be about, not about us going to them looking for help on the war with Iran.

We wanted it to be on economics. So yeah, I think we're in a situation. It's up to us how we play it. But I think we're going ahead with it because The president has decided it's in our interests and maybe he can convince the Chinese to do things to push Iran closer to our position.

The US just sanctioned a couple of Chinese companies that were providing satellite imagery for precision strike in the Gulf area. Yes. And I think that's going to probably come up in the summit as well. Not just those companies in particular, but how, how the US is reacting to Chinese behaviors back and forth will definitely be discussed. And I think, as you mentioned, Mick, that still puts China in a position of strength because now they have more cards that they're able to play, whether those cards are good or not. They have more cards. The US is kind of like using its cards as this goes along, and it makes it a lot tougher for that to become a more balanced discussion, I think.

Absolutely. And those— I mean, that matters, right? That high, high-value intelligence is what the Iranians need to adequately target us. And using satellite imagery and everything that comes with it, everything else they might be providing. And Russia as well. And Russia's resupplying all their drones, by the way. I mean, there's plenty of reports on the components coming in through alternate means. So I mean, if you ever did have a question about whether Russia was our enemy, I mean, they just prove it over and over. I mean, and then we're going to get to Russia and Ukraine. We need to talk a bit about that. But Russia is Once again, the malign actor, not the friend of the United States, never has been, never will be. And we're touting how we've depreciated their drone capacity, which is good.

Russia's filling it back up. Yeah, there's an Economist article. The Economist apparently got hold of a GRU document that showed how the plan to support Iran— untold whether that's already taking place, but Yes, supporting with components of the upgraded Shaheds, which are now being made in Russia, of course, with a view to the Ukraine conflict. That's important too, because, you know, I mentioned the fiber optic and satellite-guided versions of drones, so harder to intercept. But a really interesting part of this. It was all interesting. And we talk about perhaps our absence of COVID action. Uh, the Russians had to have a plan to train drone operators. And one thing I didn't think about, but there are 10,000 Iranian students in Russia right now. And so there's a discussion in this document about, uh, about training a portion of these students. They're just using that as one potential source for for drone operators. And so they're providing expertise, not just equipment. And yeah, I would love to talk about Ukraine and Russia maybe at the end, but just a teaser to throw out there. I listened to an interview the other day with the Estonian foreign minister.

Of course, the Estonians have their eye on the ball very closely because they think they are next, right? And he said, you know, one thing because the tide has turned. There's no doubt about it. The tide has turned in Ukraine and, uh, and Russia's on the back foot. I mean, it's as incredible though it may seem, that has happened. Ukraine now has the edge across the board. I'm not saying that victory is near. I don't think terms like victory are useful in that conflict, but certainly Russia's on its back foot. And, and so this Estonian foreign minister said that he— they have uncovered plans because the Estonians are really open when they uncover Russian stuff going on in Europe, you know, the Germans and even the Brits, they try and keep it on the down low, except when in certain instances when it's already gone out to the media. But the Estonians right away was saying, hey, look, the Russians are doing this. So he said they stumbled on a Russian plan for if and when the conflict comes to an end, it's when by some kind of ceasefire, or even shorter that because one of the Russians' problems now socially are all these returning veterans.

They've got about 1.5 million guys who have served in Ukraine. A lot of them were former convicts who have had amnesty and they're having a lot of problems. You can read about this across the board, open source media, rising violent crime and all this. Well, the Russians have a plan according to Estonians of releasing, of just pushing all these guys, 1.5 million people into Schengen, right? And infiltrating them also into the UK. And there doesn't have to be a covert action plan linked to that. Undoubtedly, there will be to subcomponents of this group, but just destabilizing influence, pushing 1.5 million guys who are mentally unstable, a lot of them before the war were criminals, brutalized, and now they're running around in the Schengen zone, uh, doing all kinds of— causing all kinds of mayhem. Undoubtedly, that's believable. It's something that everyone is focused on the short-term target, can't wait till the war ends, you know, it's going to be a ceasefire. But, but what comes after that? Russia, it's not good, you know, that's, that's not the end for Russia because the, the goal is to— continues to be destabilize Europe.

How good was it, by the way, that Zelensky was trolling Putin? Zelensky allowed this ostensible 3-day ceasefire, allowed Putin to have his little Red Square victory in Europe. I mean, celebration, unbelievable, shocking when you think about over the last several years. Yet you also have, I mean, Tulsi Gabbard in that open testimony, the DNI several weeks ago said that US intelligence still assesses Russia has the upper hand. I mean, what planet are we on if we say that?

Tulsi Gabbard's planet, which is, as we all know, quite a different— It's really incredible.

I mean, what are the figures? A million casualties, including 350,000 dead. I mean, these numbers are incomprehensible for Americans. And the point of this, I think maybe it's a good discussion to have, is Ukraine actually doesn't need us anymore. So much of us were kind of in this panic because the Trump administration took a pretty radical turn. And that, you know, this would be the end of Ukraine, but it's not. And frankly, Trump's gotten bored with it. We don't hear much about peace efforts. Every once in a while, Kushner and Witkoff, the dynamic real estate duo, meet with some Russian down in Miami. I think they just happened, but nothing's happening on that, and that's good. The less we actually talk about or say anything on Russia-Ukraine, the better, because Europe stepped up so much and there's more to do. But, you know, I think those doomsday scenarios didn't happen, and there is a theory that many people have, I think, that I tend to agree with, the less we actually meddle in this now because our intentions are not pure. We are, you know, we should be on Ukraine's side. We're not. Just the less any Trump ever talks about Ukraine, Zelensky, the better it is.

What do you guys think of that?

I think Putin's talking about this because he realizes now he can't win. He cannot win. He's not going to win this thing. And hats off to the Ukrainians because They have proven everybody wrong, right? From the beginning of this where all of us analysts were saying, "Oh, you know, a couple weeks and they'll be— 3 days, 3 days and they'll be in Kyiv," right? And look where we are. And they've, through their, not just their innovation, but certainly their innovation and tenacity, they have fought a so-called superpower to a standstill. And now they realize, you know, I think we could have done a lot more up front. I think we could certainly do even more, obviously, than we're doing now. But they realize even with the level that they're getting of support right now, that this is— the clock's running out. Right. So this is the best chance for Russia to have a U.S. administration that isn't, you know, super pro-Ukrainian as right now. And the clock's running out. and it's going to run out, and the Ukrainians know it, and they're going to— and now they're going to turn the tides here. And then at the end of the day, the power base in Europe is going to be Ukraine.

It's going to be— it's good. It's going to be a hell of a turn of event, uh, and then what is Putin going to be looking at? He's going to be looking at an expanded NATO. He's going to be looking at Germany's adding like 400,000 troops. I mean, who thought that would happen? He's going to be looking at a revitalized, strong Europe and Ukraine as the most advanced, experienced military in Europe. Uh, and he— and if you look at it from his perspective, he has made a horrible strategic mistake. And I hope we just pound that in, uh, even further if this goes forward. Um, and I— and the Ukrainians are doing it. I thought it was awesome, to your point, Mark, that, uh, he was basically trolling Putin. You can have your little parade, right? Down 1 million soldiers, right, but have your little parade. He has proven that he is not a strategic thinker and he has miscalculated this entire thing.

A parade without vehicles, by the way.

Yeah, I was just going to say the parade was really pretty watered down, like first time in like 19 years, I think it was. And they moved a ton of like anti-air stuff closer to Moscow and stuff like that, worrying about You know, worrying about drones and things like that. I mean, it's pretty obvious the writing's kind of on the wall that Russia is, you know, not the fucking superpower, like you mentioned, Mick, that we all thought they were. It's, it's, it was an interesting week when it comes to Ukraine. And like, listen, Ukraine's down in the Middle East teaching, yep, probably us and our allies, like how to fucking fight, you know, drone swarms and stuff like that, which You ask me, we probably should have known that before we went into Iran guns blazing.

We're going to use all their lessons learned to train our military for the future battle that will inevitably come. And it's a lot of it's coming out of Ukraine.

I mean, it's a giant lab experiment. I mean, but it was even, even when the fight was in the east before the Russian invasion, I remember, you know, folks from the IC and the soft world coming back from Eastern Ukraine. And when I would talk to them, they would say exactly that. This is a lab experiment, a lot on EW, on electronic warfare, but really extraordinary. And that's only just kind of quadrupled at this point. And, you know, I mean, look back at both the Israelis and the United States initially rejecting Ukraine's assistance, offers of assistance and teaching us about drone warfare. And now they're doing so. But we all said we were— there's a lot of hubris, there's a lot of arrogance. And we said no at first. And take a look at what the Israelis are facing now in southern Lebanon with Hezbollah using FPVs, which is scaring the crap out of everybody, and it should. And you guys would know this much more. I mean, I don't know if there's like, there's, you know, doctrine being rewritten right now for, you know, for land warfare. But this idea of these, you know, swarms of drones, I mean, it's pretty wild because you've just seen lines just not move for years on end.

it's like old World War I trenches, but it's because of drones. That to me is just incredible. And that, you know, what kind of lessons do we and the Chinese take for the future? But really interesting stuff.

We are training, you know, my company trains our folks out here in Montana on the incorporation of lessons learned from— and it's, it is, it is something we have to get way ahead of. Drop the hubris. We don't have the experience, they do. That's what smart armies do, that we learn from others, right? And I think we're doing it right now, for sure.

Anything else, guys, that's like tickling your fancy? Talk to me. I got to roll.

I got Mother's Day brunch.

Mark, get out of here. Happy Mother's Day.

Yes, Mother's Day. Happy Mother's Day. John, you tracking anything?

I feel like you needed to have something you wanted to say. Later, Mark. Thanks.

Nothing in particular except about the internet in Iran. They just put out— there's a lot of more information coming out these days about actually how it's, it's operating. And there's a very interesting thing called a white SIM card that the regime is actually letting people purchase. And if they have enough money, they can buy this and it actually lets them have complete access to the outside world. So it's only certain registered users, for example, universities, hospitals, defense industrial base. And it's all— every, every applicant is vetted first before they are given this card. So it's not just if you have money, you get it. You have to actually be aligned with the regime to get it, and it gives them total unrestricted access. And there's a second thing called Internet Pro, which Iranians have to pay for. So to put it in context, the average monthly salary in Iran is $300 a month. Employment is around 60%, so that means only 40% of those people are making $300 a month. The others are making zero. 1 gigabyte of data is $13. To get a gigabyte of data with a VPN, So your, your average person, which is the majority of the country, can barely afford a single gigabyte of data for a month to even communicate to the outside world.

That means like going on Twitter and downloading a video, right? I mean, that's like one video, one gig these days. Whereas this white SIM has no limit on it, but there's a huge, there's like a 10, a 20 million toman entry fee, which is several thousand dollars. There's, uh, it's like hundreds of dollars per month just to have the thing activated. And then it charges you by the gigabyte as you use it. So it's a huge cash cow money-making machine, which the regime is very good at extracting black market fees on things. This is another way they're doing it, and they're able to still obviously monitor all the stuff that's going on on the internet. It's not like it's free internet, it's free monitored internet that the regime is letting people use. So I thought that was just kind of interesting that that's now coming kind of into the public sphere. And so there was a lot of time in the past 2 months where people were kind of like word of mouth telling each other how to communicate outside the country because it was so dangerous to do so. They executed a guy last week, publicly hung him off of a crane because he had a Starlink terminal that he was using.

So people are very nervous about how to actually communicate with this. So the fact that the regime publicized these tools is kind of interesting to see. And of course, Iranians in Iran can't see that because they can't even get on Twitter to see that because they can't afford it. So there's a very interesting divide going on. And back to your point earlier, Nick, about COVID influence, part of the reason I think it's not effective in Iran is because people can't be influenced using that kind of media because they can't get on it. So if we did something like a low Earth orbit mesh network, direct-to-cell communication, something like that to enable them to actually get on the internet, then we can start influencing them from abroad. Otherwise, it's gonna be really tough logistically to access the amount of people necessary to actually create some sort of unified movement that, that covert influence would seek to attain.

Hell yeah. What's holding us back from doing that? What's holding us back? How much would that cost, ballpark?

The thing it costs is political will. If, if there's a will, there's a way.

Political, like a U.S. political will? Yeah, we attack.

Yeah, we already attacked Iran.

Let's go for it. The thing that would change is how do you get those things up there, right? So what you have to do is launch— there's only 2 launch points in the world that you could launch this. There's actually 3, but one's Chinese-controlled, so the other 2 are in the United States. So you'd have to launch thousands of these antennas up into space at low Earth orbit, which is very possible. That's what Starlink is. But it'd have to be dedicated in geosynchronous orbit over Iran, or it would have to be designed in such a way that although it is not geosynchronous, it's still orbiting to provide 100% coverage 24 hours a day, which is way more expensive than geosynchronous. The problem with geosynchronous is that it's much further away from the, the Earth. So that means there's, there's different layers that would have to be put into it so that it can still communicate to the ground. And there's a couple of other logistical problems with that. So that wouldn't require an entire kind of industrial base to be built around this thing that doesn't exist right now in the government side. There is a private sector option, which is Starlink, and there are other competitors as well that, uh, Jeff Bezos is also working on this too.

So if the US wanted to, like, the government wanted to support this, they could support the private sector in doing this because the infrastructure is there. We did that in Ukraine for a while, and then Elon Musk pulled back off of that and then went back into it and allowed it again. But you'd probably need some kind of protections over that because China would probably start interfering with that communication. So there'd be those kind of political layers built on top of it. It's something that's not impossible at all, something that already exists now. And it would just require US political will at the government level to actually go and support that.

John, quick question about that. Is this something that can be built by the military or the intelligence community, launched, and right now it's— it would be over Iran, right? Doing that for Iran. Would it be able to be moved to different— if we needed it, like a capability that we could use at different times and places? Let's say another war popped up.

Yeah, we already have it. We already have these. Why aren't we doing governments The thing is you gotta have ground systems. So you can't just have the, the, the air terminals. You also have to have ground terminals. You'd have repeaters depending on what type of system you're using. And for example, the— Cell phones. So you can do direct-to-cell communication. You just need to have that dedicated mesh network over the target area, which requires a huge saturation of the airspace in that, that, that bubble. So you can do it. It just requires a lot more than already is there because on the military side, you're talking about a small footprint. Special operations force, for example, let's say in Africa, you only need a few handsets that have the actual antenna that can, that can reach that far, that, that, that level of, uh, frequency. And you need a lot of power to be able to keep that transmission open. And you only need so many satellites if you have, let's say, a team of 15 to 100 people using it. If you've got millions of people using it, now you've got a massive energy draw. You're gonna have a percentage of the equipment lost just for various, you know, accidental reasons.

So you need to have a lot of ass up there, basically, with power, which means solar power, a lot of stuff up there, um, and also have people on the ground that actually have the handsets that can communicate. And the issue is, if it's projecting too much energy down, it'll be easier to interfere with because Iran will immediately begin trying to interfere with that communication, whether that's with jamming or other means, or with China helping them with anti-satellite weapons, which China has used. And actually, most of the space debris in orbit around the Earth is because China used an anti-space weapon, anti-satellite weapon, blew up a satellite a few years ago. And now there's tens of thousands of pieces of space junk that are damaging all of our active antennas up there because of this one single strike they did. So we know China can do it. They've demonstrated it. Russia also has a GPS jamming capability that can mess up a lot of this low Earth orbit. Stuff. So there's a lot of state actor challenge built into this that's gonna require an expansion of the program plus US support the entire time. It can't just be like a fire and forget thing.

We have to basically be a shield for this on the ground and in the air as it's, as it's going through. Again, not impossible. How much? Ballpark? Really depends on how much you wanna do. It's in the billions for sure. Um, but I mean, it's probably not as much as the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier that had a fire in its laundry room and now is sitting in, uh, Subic Bay. In a beautiful location. 15 billion.

I feel like that's— yeah, the amount of money we fucking throw around. I feel like this is a capability that keep the capacity for the future. Like you said, it's a home run. I feel like why wouldn't you not try and do this, whether it's some kind of hybrid with private sector or not? Frankly, I would avoid that.

I mean, but it would also be an intelligence coup for us because we'd be able to monitor all that traffic. So like if everyone's using this in, in Iraq, in Emirates, in Saudi Arabia, because all the Gulf countries will want to use it too, and we can give them metered access to it. And in doing so, we can also monitor the communication. So like, it's like a win for us long-term strategically to have this thing up there because who else is going to put that up there? It costs so much money. The barrier to entry, it's very high. Yeah.

So $15, $20 billion, that was Mick's like private jet budget when he was at the agency, I think, right?

Air America. Yeah.

Yeah, that sounds like something they should totally be really seriously thinking about doing and like scaling it as fast as, like, exponent, like, you know, make, putting this to the front of the line in terms of like an intelligence capability. I don't know why they wouldn't.

Is it anywhere there's freedom is quashed, right? Yeah. Yeah. All these despotic governments would have their citizens actually finding out the truth.

In Russia right now, that's a big problem. They're blocking Telegram, which is a very common Russia tool, and it's being blocked. That would be a thing you could just put overhead, Mesh Network. Direct-to-cell communication back on Telegram. Yeah. Wow.

Well, maybe we are working on this, but we need to speed it up.

Yeah, it's viable. That's super cool. All right, boys, um, always a pleasure, as you know, blah blah blah. Go— I want everyone to do me a favor, check out the Whitefish Security Summit. That link is in the description. The next summit is February, end of February, February 27th, the weekend of that, or the right before. 24th, 26th. 24th to the 26th. Apologies. Of course, Jonathan Hackett, his books, Iran's Shadow Weapons and The Theory of Irregular Warfare. Or is it warfare or war?

War. And I actually talk in the book about why it's not warfare.

Very important. Hell yeah. So if you— yeah, check that out. Andy Milburn, of course, great book. All the links are down in the description. Mark P, if you want to tell him he's a liberal, his Twitter's down in the description. Anything you need. And the best place to help support the show is patreon.com/theTeamHouse. You get ad-free episodes and early episodes of both the Teamhouse and Eyes On. And thanks again, guys. A pleasure. And happy Mother's Day.

Happy Mother's Day.

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