Scott Ritter answers the question: Can the U.S. Open the Strait of Hormuz?

"No. Iran has ballastic missiles" - Scott Ritter

Yeah, I saw Trump put up a tweet, something along the lines that we hit 5,500 targets - which is much of a strategy just to blow things up. As you said, it begins to look childish.

One would want to see what the objective is and how these targets achieve that objective.

You mentioned the inability to open Hormuz. Trump has argued this is an objective: to open the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump argued if the Iranians dare to close it, keep it closed at least, he will hit them 20 times as hard.

And Macron has also now suggested that the French have a defensive mission in the Strait of Hormuz to open it up. To what extent is such a military option actually possible, though?

Ooh la la, the French getting involved, isn't that? That's a game changer.

(sarcasm) I mean, my God, Macron, the military genius that he is.

I mean, the French, that, that changes everything. I think Iran's going to surrender tomorrow. Um, it's stupidity.

We're running out of standoff precision missiles, which means future strikes would require aircraft to actually penetrate the Iranian airspace. Iran has held back on its air defense.

They've, they've retained a significant portion of it. And if we start penetrating the air defense, I think you're going to start seeing air, um, air defense ambushes. And, uh, we'll start losing aircraft, which is going to be problematic because then we have to rescue pilots, which they put in combat search and rescue team. They could go down. We get a Blackhawk down, Persian style.

Um, it's just a bad, it's a bad, it's a bad look all around. Um, we, we, we are running out of precision standoff weapons. They're very expensive. And, um, again, anybody knowing anything would have said, we just, it's, it's, we don't have enough. Um, we're going to run out of cruise missiles.

We, you know, we fired enough to kill a bunch of children, but we haven't retained enough to sustain this, uh, this conflict. So, you know, the next steps are just to blow up more things. I mean, that's what General Cain said. That's the only option we have is to blow up more things. That's all President Trump can threaten to do, to blow up more things. Um, we don't even know what they're blowing up, though.

Again, if we've shown so much confusion in our initial, uh, wave of our attack where we should have had the best intelligence possible, and yet we put out of four places targeted in the Manab, uh, naval facility, two that were empty warehouses, one was a hospital, one was a school, uh, 50% of our targets were illegal under a law of war.

Makes you wonder what the percentage is that we're striking today that are illegal. We will never know because, uh, Pete Hegseth closed down the, um, the units responsible for screening targets to make sure that they were not civilian in nature. Um, and but now as we become more and more desperate, we're just going to start expanding the target deck.

And, uh, you know, if, if we've bombed 5,000 targets and now Trump says we're going to bomb more, uh, where are they going to come from? What targets are they? Who's making these targets? Who's making the decision? Is this AI-driven? Uh, how many homes are we going to strike? How many schools are we going to strike? How many hospitals are we going to strike? How many mosques are we going to strike?

And the answer is a lot, because this now has become literally a, a war of, um, you know, cultural genocide. Um, you know, and that's, that's what the United States will be. And we're not going to win. The Iranians are not going to blink.

I mean, I'm, I'm sure, I'm sure you have, um, studied, uh, at least peripherally the, uh, strategic air campaign during the Second World War against Germany. And you're cognizant of the reality that, um, it didn't achieve the strategic results they wanted to achieve. The German production actually went up, um, became more efficient.

Um, and the, the, the will of the German people to resist was not broken by the strategic air campaign. So what we're proposing is basically to, you know, increase the scope and scale of a strategic air campaign that history shows doesn't work, doesn't, doesn't achieve the outcomes you want.

Um, you know, there's a reason why Azerbaijan backed off. Uh, this, this war was sold as a regime change war, even though now Trump says it's not. Well, it's not because we can't, but we tried.

And, um, you know, the idea was, you know, if you kill Ali Khamenei and you have people in the streets shouting death to the, uh, to the Ayatollahs, uh, the Kurds might be more inclined to say, "Okay, we're in." The Azeris might say, "Yeah, Zengus in our corridor is looking pretty goodright now.

Let's, uh, let's jump in on this one." But when you kill the Supreme Leader and the end result is a unified Iran screaming for revenge, the last thing you want to do is get your list on that, uh, revenge list. Um, and the Kurds are suddenly, they woke up and they went, "Whoop, we're not doing that." And the Azeris went, "Yeah, we're not doing it either.

The Saudis, they're not doing it." Lindsey Graham can take, talk to at least Pink in the face. Um, but, you know, he may look cute to his, uh, never mind, I'm not going there. Um, you know, I don't like Lindsey Graham, but no reason to get ad hominem on him.

Um, you know, but he, he, this is a man who talks tough, but he, there's nothing tough about him. He's a pancake. He's a perfume princess. He's nothing. Um, he's a senator who, you know, for whatever reason, people listen to, but hopefully he's being disgracedright now. And I think he's embarrassed.

I think he's embarrassed by the fact that he's sold a war to Trump and that war's going bad and his political capital is going out the window and he's coming up on a contentious, uh, election that he may very well lose, which would be the greatest thing South Carolina has ever done. Um, so he, he's becoming more in desperate, threatening Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia doesn't care about his threats. The biggest consequences to Saudi Arabia would be the destruction of their, uh, energy production capability, which is a guarantee if they, uh, jump in two feet into this war against Iran. The United States has proven that it can't defeat Iran.

Iran has proven that it can continue to inflict destruction beyond its borders, even after absorbing 5,000, you know, the bombs dropped on its territory. So, um, it doesn't matter what Lindsey Graham says. He's irrelevant.

He's simply fodder for the, um, mainstream media to, uh, to sell a war that is increasingly becoming impossible to sell.