"In the first 24 hours they destroyed 27 of our bases in the region" - Col. McGregor

"In the first 24 hours they destroyed 27 of our bases in the region" - Col. McGregor

....one of the arguments that's being made by President Trump and his administration is, well, if we hadn't done this, they would have attacked us first.

No evidence, absolutely none whatsoever.

In fact, Moscow and Beijing had been very clear to Tehran, repeatedly saying, whatever you do, do not preempt.

Let's not give up the advantage that you have from being the victim because you will be a victim. Let them attack you first.

Then you are justified in whatever you need to do to preserve your country.

So they were not going to attack us.

They're just these are just bold-faced lies.

But what I think you're seeing is the absence of any thorough planning.

I think we've already had lots of evidence for that provided by leakage from the Pentagon, where people speaking on behalf of senior officers have said, well, we don't have enough firepower on hand.

We may not have enough missiles, you know.

The Chinese build 1,000 rocket motors for cruise missiles only every day. We build 100 missiles a month. Think about that.

The Chinese are backing Iran, and they are not going to allow Iran to go under. They're supplying them with whatever they need.

Now, that's not just because China draws 50% of its oil and petroleum products from Iran.

It's also because they figure, well, if the United States gets away with this, they'll turn on others.

And we've got to draw a line somewhere and stop the rogue nation called America under this man, Trump, from attacking anywhere whenever he wants to do so.

So I thinkright now you've got to look at this and say, this is not carefully thought out. This is not objectively assessed.

And what you're hearing come out of the administration, frankly, is a lot of hot air. Oh, we've already established air superiority.

This will be over in a few days. Really?

Then the next day or two, they said, well, this might last four weeks or less, but they're going to lose no matter what.

Pretty soon they'll be talking about six weeks, maybe seven.

The problem that we have is that the only thing Iran has to do is survive.

To win, what do we have to do?

We have to destroy the country and conquer it.

I don't think that's going to happen.

Then finally, you have the economic blowback. What's happeningright now?

What's the price of oil?

What's happening to those economies that are desperately dependent upon oil?

You know, 72% of Japan's oil comes from the Persian Gulf. 65% is what comes to South Korea. China 50. Now, China has large petroleum reserves.

They've been storing up ostensibly in response to what they think is going to happen and has happened.

But South Korea and Japan are in a lot of trouble.

Did we talk to our allies in Seoul and Tokyo about the consequences of our actions and consult them? Not a chance.

You know, what about India? 50% of its petroleum comes from the Persian Gulf, and they don't have any reservesright now.

Their ceramics industry, everything that depends upon petroleum, has probably got five or six days of production left, and then we'll have to shut down.

Tire production, everything you can think of, automobile production and export, all of these industries are now suffering.

The various financial outlets are telling us that we are now sliding into a global recession.

This is what our decision to go to war with Iran has produced.

And what's the justification? All is nonsense.

It's not true about a nuclear weapon.

And since when was it in our interest to destroy Iran, a nation of 93 million?

What is Iran, some sort of dangerous state that's about to invade America?

Not on your life. Nothing could be further from the truth.

And the Iranians have done what you would expect them to do.

They've responded by destroying everything with our name on it in the region.

In the first 24 hours, they destroyed 27 of our bases in the Persian Gulf region.

They actually launched most of the unmanned aerial vehicles we call them drones and a number of very important radars.

We've probably lost three or four billion dollars in the first 24 to 36 hours in terms of radars that we've established over there, including those in Israel.

They've destroyed the Patriot and THAAD batteries that they could find.

I thinkright now we've got a real problem on our hands because the Iranians are firing missiles that travel at 4,000 miles per hour.

That's over Mach 5. That's a hypersonic missile.

We can't shoot them down.

I don't know how many they've used, but I know they've got an awful lot.

And there's nothingright now that we've got that can stop them.

And what we're trying to do is use satellite surveillance and fly around the countryside looking for these things.

That's not working out very well.

So, you know, on the whole, I think this is a very ill-thought-out, ill-conceived, self-defeating operation.

Let me ask you, this is what's always bothered me about the Iran subject.

As far as I know, the best numbers I've been able to get, Iran has a GDP of somewhere around 385 billion, which is a little over a third of just our military budget. Okay. Their defense budget is 23 billion.

Ours is a trillion or a thousand billion to 23 billion.

How do they manage to be a, you know, to the extent that they're a threat to us while we're attacking them in the region, how do they manage to put up any kind of a resistance against, you know, a force that outspends them by so many orders of magnitude?

Well, like Richard Nixon, I'm glad you asked that question. Okay.

The Iranians are demonstrating pretty conclusively that to defend their country and their interests, they don't really need a navy.

They don't even need an air force.

What they have is an army on the ground consisting of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Standing Iranian Army and certain other supporting militias that are protecting this vast arsenal of maybe a quarter of a million missiles.

They have built underground facilities over the last 20 years, and these underground facilities stretch for miles.

They have 31 identified command and control nodes where the nodes themselves are responsible for some unknown number of missile facilities.

They can fire missiles for days, for weeks that are based underground.

They can fire missiles from the desert. When you look at where the missile comes out of the desert, you try to figure out from where it was launched.

You can't. It blends in so perfectly with the desert terrain or the mountain terrain, mountainous terrain.

So they put all of their money into these missiles, and we're discovering that America's supposed deterrent capability is completely irrelevant.

They're flying right through early warning networks associated with air and missile defense, and they're doing enormous damage at very low cost.

I mean, how much does an F-15 cost? How many do several how much does a B-2 bomber cost versus how many missiles and how many unmanned aerial vehicles or drones can you build that you can't stop at the other end?

I mean, the trade-off is not good.

You know, this is the problem with the Patriot missile and the THAAD missiles, these JMTs and so forth.

All these anti-missile missiles are very expensive.

They cost millions of dollars to produce.

Then you throw in X number of drones, and each one is what, a few thousand up to perhaps half a million.

And these things prove almost impossible to stop.

And if even if you stop some of them, the majority or those that are the most lethal get through in any case.

Remember, they launched in the first 24 hours one drone that flew 1,100 miles to strike a British airbase on Cyprus.

And they were able to put that British airstrip out of business.

If you put the airstrip out of business, you can't fly in and out.

What good is the base?

They've done that all over the Persian Gulf.

And it's very frustrating because it works.

So do the Iranians really need a navy?

Do they really need an air force, or do they just need lots of missiles and drones?

I think they have built something that was very cost-effective, and it's doing enormous damage to us.

You know, on the damage thing, of course, you know, for non-military people, it's all kind of vague when you name some of the bases and what they've hit there.

The United States has lost six soldiers, and although, you know, that's tragic, I don't want to make diminish that.

When you see the U.S. doing all this damage and only having lost six people so far, it almost seems like this overwhelming victory.

But what, like, what are we not seeing?

What are civilians not seeing in some, I guess, the capability of the U.S. to make war in that region that has been lost that might not come out in the casualty numbers? Yeah, no, that's a good question.

First of all, I think we've sustained far more casualties than we are admitting.

And what you need to understand is that in every major war we've lied, what we've done is we've slow-rolled telling people the true picture.

During World War I, we fought for 110 days, and during 110 days, we had 318,000 casualties, of which 110,000 men were killed.

But we didn't hasten to release that information.

We would wait and wait and wait because we wanted to soften the blow on the public, because most Americans had not wanted to go to war with Germany and Austria-Hungary anyway.

And so when we started losing heavily in terms of casualties on the battlefield, we said, well, let's not tell everybody everythingright away.

During World War II, we did similar things, particularly in Europe.

During the Battle of the Bulge, in the first 24 hours, we had 25,000 American soldiers surrender to the Germans.

We didn't tell everybody that at the time. Why would you?

I mean, it was a catastrophe.

And during the Battle of the Bulge, just within the small area of the Bulge where we fought in Belgium, we had 110,000 casualties.

The Germans only had 68,000.

Now, when you broaden that, you end up with 200,000 casualties stretching across France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany where we were fighting.

And the Germans add another, perhaps, 25,000 casualties. Well, what's the point?

The Germans took remarkably few casualties against us, despite the fact that we had overwhelming air superiority and they had no air support whatsoever.

So what did we do? We didn't tell the truth. We lied.

We said that we inflicted 200,000 casualties on the Germans and said that we had less than 70,000 casualties ourselves.

What I'm trying to get across to you is you're not going to get the truth.

Not right now. You may get it down the line, and everyone is very reluctant to release it.

Now, that may change if they manage to hit something at sea.

But as I said to a lot of people before this began, regardless of how good your missiles are, if it's a long traveling range, in other words, if you got to launch a missile 800 or 1,000 miles to reach a ship, even if it's hypersonic and is moving at 4,000 miles, miles per hour, that ship is going to maneuver and move from the time that you launch the missile until it actually impacts.

So your chances of hitting even a large target like the aircraft carrier, if it's far enough away, are actually small.

And I think that for that reason, they've tended to look more carefully at what they can destroy that doesn't move or is on the ground.

Now, if you're dumb enough to close the range with the missiles, President Trump announced that he was going to send American warships to escort tankers through the Straits of Hormuz.

Well, if we do that, we'll lose them all because those ships are sitting ducks when they come through the Straits of Hormuz.

That's easy. It doesn't take any trouble at all. But that's something the Iranians can handle very effectively.

That right now, there are 3,200 plus ships that can't get into or out of the Persian Gulf. I mean, this is catastrophic from an economic standpoint, and we can't do anything about it.

Then President Trump announced that he would cover, that is, the United States, we, the American people, would cover the insurance costs for ships that wanted to go through the Straits of Hormuz. Well, I don't think that's going to happen.

And I don't think the United States Navy, the admirals I know, would politely tell the President of the United States that he should consider, you know, taking a vacation, but absolutely don't give us dumb orders that we're going to put us in harm's way and absolutely make it a certainty that we lose capital ships.

The Navy has pulled back.

The Navy's a thousand miles away from Iran, down in the Indian Ocean, or even up in the Mediterranean.

They've pulled hundreds of miles back.

And if we have to reload right now, we can't use any of the facilities that we used to because they've been destroyed.

We've got to fall back on Indian ports or Diego Garcia or into Europe, go back to Greece or even further. So this is a logistical nightmare for us.

That logistical problem is not a big one for the Iranians because they are already there. They have shorter supply lines.

They have more things in storage.

They have redundancy in terms of missiles and launchers and equipment. I'm not saying that this is a walk in the park for the Iranians.

It absolutely isn't because they have trouble with our airpower.

There's no doubt about it.

Our airpower is superb, but they've still, we've still lost some aircraft, and we don't always tell the truth about that.

We don't like to reveal what works or what doesn't work against our aircraft.

So I imagine that's something else we'll find out about more later.

But my point is thatright now, the only thing Iran has to do, Tom, is survive.

That's it. If they can last out six weeks, eight weeks, ten weeks, they win.

We are the ones that have put ourselves in the position of having to demonstrate unambiguously to the world we really are the greatest power.

And we're going to have to reduce Iran to dust and destroy it and conquer it.

Now, somebody's brought up the ground troops.

I'm sure you've seen that.

Hegseth said that we hadn't ruled out ground troops.

Well, we don't have very many ground troops.

Today's army is a shadow of the army that I was in.

It's a fraction in size and capability of what it was 30 years ago.

What are we going to send?

Where would you put them? How did they get there?

Well, for the most part, they're going to have to fly in or sail in.

And if you sail in or fly into places in close proximity to Iran, you're going to be destroyed because they have precision-guided missiles and unmanned systems that will find you and kill you.

We didn't have to face that in 1990 or '91.

It's now a reality.

So I wouldn't expect anything other than special operations forces to go into that country.

And even special operations forces who go in are going to be in a very high-risk position.

And normally, we're pretty careful about using special operations because it's a very capable force, but on the other hand, it's very fragile.

They have to live on what they carry with them, and someone has to come and find them and get them out.

And they have to be protected from above. All these things are difficult.

So I don't see that happening.

Cutting through the pretense that this isn't the U.S. interests at all and just getting to Israel, what would success for Israel look like if, yeah, at the end of all this, when it's time to stop fighting, what are they hoping for here?

Well, I think they'd be very happy if we destroyed Iran for them.

And now, quite recently, former Prime Minister.

But would that benefit them if Iran's destroyed?

I can't imagine, like, a John F. Kennedy or even a Mitt Romney character is going to lead it after that.

It's probably going to be a lot more radical, a lot more radical Islamist, wouldn't it be if?

Well, if you've reduced the modern state.

Well, if you reduce Iran to ruins and you reduce the population to total poverty, I think that would satisfy the Israelis.

I think that would be very attractive to them.

And Naftali Bennett spoke recently, and Mr. Netanyahu followed up a few days later and said that Iran is a problem, but we have a potential enemy that's even more dangerous called Turkey or Turkiye.

So I suppose once we've successfully destroyed Iran, they'll probably want us to destroy the Turks.

I don't think that's going to happen.

And I don't think we're going to destroy Iran because I don't think we can.

The other thing is that presupposes that Iran stops firing missiles at Israel.

Well, that didn't happen during the 12-day war.

I don't see any evidence that it's going to happen now.

So the real question is, what does Israel do when the missiles just don't stop?

They continue. And how much damage can Israel sustain?

We don't know how many people are left in Israel, but it's probably not six million. It's probably closer to five.

A lot of people have left. And will they come back?

Do people want to live in that country in the aftermath of this war, whatever happens?

Those are questions that have yet to be answered.

There's something else that worries me because it smacks of desperation.

I think people are bluffing when they talk about the use of U.S. ground forces, although I see evidence that they're trying to pull troops out of Europeright now to potentially use in the region.

How and what, I don't know. Anything is possible with this administration, though.

And I don't see any evidence for any senior officers telling them no.

So I think we can't rule it out, but in the meantime, we've got the CIA working closely with Mossad, and I assume MI6 from London, to build up a Kurdish force in northern Iraq and in eastern and northern Syria that could invade northwest Iran.

Another proxy force.

Now, I don't think it'll work very well because the Turks are not going to allow that to happen.

Because the notion of a Kurdish state emerging in the aftermath of an Iranian defeat is something that they regard as an existential threat to them.

And the Iranians and the Turks have already cooperated on the intelligence level to make sure that sort of thing doesn't happen.

But the fact that we're now openly discussing it suggests to me that maybe this air campaign is not going as well as everybody says it is.

Yeah, I just can't believe the Kurds would again trust Washington.

It seems like, like that's the one constant throughout all of these Middle East wars is somehow or other they promise, make a whole bunch of promises to the Kurds and then break them.

Is there a way out of this that you could foresee where Washington says, you know what, there's nothing more we can do here.

Is there a way for them to get out of it that's politically acceptable to them?

That's a good question, Tom, and I don't have an easy answer.

My concern is this does drag on.

The global financial and economic situation grows much worse.

Nations are demanding an end to this.

So that it's not just a question of, are we going to give up on the complete and utter destruction of Iran as much as it is?

We can't keep up this business much longer because our problems here at home, financially and economically, are growing.

The world is suffering badly from our actions.

So we have to find a different way.

So somebody may make something up to help justify it.

There's something else though that I'm concerned about, and that is that I think people may finally decide that Mr. Trump shouldn't be president.

And there is the 25th Amendment.

"In the first 24 hours they destroyed 27 of our bases in the region" - Col. McGregor