00:09:59.940flights that were supporting the operation were obviously flung with the transponders off
00:10:04.140yeah i i was actually pleasantly surprised at uh some of the ozen guys if you follow
00:10:15.160weeb union uh on youtube he had a video out predicting this attack like uh within the next
00:10:23.260to two days two hours before the attack actually came out like if you if you watched his video
00:10:30.740and then his follow-up video on the attack like you were watching like six hours apart
00:10:39.280this video predicting the attack and this video breaking down what was publicly known about the
00:10:46.120attack that uh osint is seemingly uh is on par with like like many second and third tier intel
00:10:58.560agencies at this point that have been buying commercial satellite imagery of various you know
00:11:05.980military installations um storage depots air bases that are under attack uh and they're getting
00:11:12.740commercial satellite footage of like you know air bases that have been blown up a day after the0.78
00:11:17.180strike happened this is a capability that like rich countries like would have dreamed of in like
00:11:22.260the 80s and 90s like only the u.s could have done it yeah i i remember following s2 underground uh
00:11:32.800purple friend of of the show uh he's responded to my uh twitter dms a few times or or mentions
00:11:41.780i think and uh he's been buying a commercial satellite imagery of uh diego garcia and doing
00:11:49.980like video breakdowns uh of stuff across time i hadn't followed uh his recent deep deep dives but
00:11:57.280uh he he also appeared in the recent podcast with a danie wolf that i you he was one of the guys
00:12:05.940running the s2 under rounds was one of the guys doing the calm spread the hurricane helene relief
00:12:11.740one of those amazing follows that you should be like out there including your roster now this is
00:12:18.220this is where i get my uh my info from but uh so the i i've always been suspicious of um the
00:12:31.620the like uh american kind of death star run narrative on on attacking these uh nuclear
00:12:40.460facilities just because um i i know very i know shockingly little about air power this is why i
00:12:46.740have you guys on but i know a lot about tumble warfare and it seems it always seemed like very
00:12:52.780suspicious to me that it was assumed that uh that it'd be possible to a know the layout of these
00:13:04.020uh underground fortresses because once you're already tunneling in you can like add hundreds
00:13:10.280of meters or like kilometers of distance to talk like pretty trivially like mining does this
00:13:16.760especially in the third world where uh where it's like very trivially trivial to bring in guys to
00:13:22.060like swing a shovel or use power equipment for like still like two bucks an hour like uh the
00:13:30.160cost of like adding just more tunnel is not that expensive that uh that beyond just uh the raw
00:13:40.140depth of these uh fortresses and the raw amount of concrete they can put above it and the shape of
00:13:46.700the concrete to track and deflect bunksters it always inherently suspicious to me that it was
00:13:52.580assumed that uh that u.s airplaneers could even know where the main fortress was like uh
00:14:02.280are they using like satellite ground penetrating radar or or even that once you're going into like
00:14:09.460mountain complexes and stuff stuff uh like the train itself is so uneven and the the rock etc
00:14:18.000is so not uniform though it's a arrow down if you're hitting like a a buried fortress or if
00:14:29.060you're hitting like a tertiary uh storage room like several hundred meters away from the buried
00:14:37.760fortress does that make sense i know what you're talking about so like in the vietnam or world war
00:14:42.580too, Eric. This would indeed be a very tough ask. But there are tools today that make it more
00:14:48.940possible to detect these sorts of systems. Like, for example, you can do an airborne microgravimetry
00:14:55.240survey, which detects a subtle variation in the Earth's gravitational field caused by a difference
00:15:00.940in mass distribution. And so this is actually much more precise than a lot of people think.
00:15:06.960And it's enough that you may be able to detect the location of a large industrial facility that
00:15:12.000is underground. Because something like Forto is not like, you know, a hole with a platoon of
00:15:16.180combat fighters with rifles in it. It is a serious industrial site with like, you know, tens of
00:15:21.540thousands of cubic meters of open area for centrifuges, for facilities and technicians and
00:15:28.040power generation and air filters and whatever. And so with these capabilities, I think that a
00:15:33.740sophisticated actor like the United States Air Force would be able to detect and engage these
00:15:39.420tunnels although the degree to which the penetrators have completely destroyed the facility is still up
00:15:45.200for debate yeah but my thinking is is like beyond just a rare detection like uh like it seems very
00:15:55.600trivial especially with like the very low cost of of third world labor that like you know iran can
00:16:04.620in pakistan to do to do manual labor and just like blindfold them taking them to the site so
00:16:09.600that they can't like leak information uh it would seem very trivial to just have like redundant
00:16:15.960areas and and redundant chambers that even if you had like a satellite and surveys to like
00:16:23.660pick up differences you know you might have five or six plausible chain chambers that you're seeing
00:16:31.300And you, you know, the way bunker busters work is you have to stack them on top of it to get to one of these deep facilities that the concrete that's layered above it is designed to deflect in different ways and designed to absorb it.
00:16:49.360So you have to layer, this is why it takes six beachy spirits with 12 30,000 pound bunker busters to hit it and then hit it again and then hit it again.
00:17:01.200That each layer is turning so much concrete to rubble and you're hoping that after the 12th bunker buster you've tumbled down and you've destroyed the facility.
00:17:13.100It seemed very trivial to just have, you know, redundant chambers that suddenly, are you hitting this chamber or that chamber? And then you still have to layer the bunker busters to get through it.
00:17:28.820I think it's not inconceivable that Israel has at some point inserted a human intelligence asset that may have even been inside the facility or at least spoken to folks that have been in there.
00:17:46.440The degree to which Mossad has penetrated Iran's high-level military command and been able to identify the specific locations of senior military and scientific leaders is horrifying.0.63
00:17:58.820And this is why it's important that you not circumcise your population. Israel has a far harder, far easier time infiltrating Muslim countries than they do Asian countries.0.69
00:18:13.980but uh but uh no i i've heard this several times and it still seems maddening to me that there's
00:18:24.140even like master plans of the facilities and whatnot that that could hypothetically
00:18:29.220leak uh that that you're dealing with uh a facility that's like knowable or the plans
00:18:37.620are known enough that israel could get their hands hands on it right like there the the ability of
00:18:47.640israel to compromise or flip just one of the you know low-level technicians does not seem that
00:18:54.560difficult yeah but why why should the low-level technicians know uh know the layout of the
00:19:01.840facility like you just have winding corridors at Dutch angles and no individual like technician
00:19:09.200actually knows where the chambers and the facilities are located relative to each other
00:19:14.520like uh but you just create kind of a Dr. Seuss layout layout so they know that they have to work
00:19:22.640in chamber one and then they have to work in chamber two but they don't know if chamber one
00:19:26.540and chamber two are north south east west of each other they just know that they go along this long
00:19:31.760loopy doctor dr zeus corridor between them that again i i've spent too much time studying tunnel
00:19:41.840warfare and like fantasizing about my gendo akari underground fortress from which i can torture
00:19:47.820james bond but like like a lot of a lot of this stuff was like known and understood by like guys
00:19:56.060with shovels picking at clay in, like, the 60s.
00:20:03.020I'd be surprised or horrified if, like, a lot of this, like,0.70
00:20:10.360wasn't, like, integrated into Iran's plans by now.
00:20:15.860Or maybe the Ayatollah is that complacent.
00:20:19.100Maybe the Revolutionary Guard Corps is that nepotistic.
00:21:24.520And although would that penetrate through that much concrete and steel, usually the way you contain a contain an electromagnetic signal is a fairy bag of like the steel and other metallic barriers.
00:21:41.580But. I could see that if the U.S. is somehow out getting it, it just seems incredibly high variance for like.
00:21:51.900so you read readers at home we should we should uh sorry you listeners at home we should like
00:21:59.500pull out from this like technical discussion so the tactical the the strategic would you
00:22:06.200strategic situation is the u.s has about 90 000 troops distributed somewhere in the middle east
00:22:15.560uh uh there are little bases of like a few hundred to a thousand in syria there's bay
00:22:21.780there's positions in iraq there's positions in kuwait there's positions in bahrain there's
00:22:27.260positions in qatar there's there's um i think the u.s still has bases in saudi arabia i'm pretty sure
00:22:33.460yeah i i can't there was controversy about that if they were just going to like
00:23:18.920But there are all these positions stretch across the Middle East from like dinky like statelets and like city states to to failed states to now states run by like former ISIS affiliates that are on the CIA payroll.
00:23:38.480all within like immediate striking distance of of iranian aligned shia militias that are like
00:23:47.180largely largely undefended or that are in rocket range of iran itself and
00:23:55.380my reading of this raid my reading of like the most cynical possible interpretation of it
00:24:03.660is that largely this strike raid was not really meant to cripple Iran's nuclear ambitions,
00:24:12.960that it was meant to provoke an Iranian counterattack against U.S. forces in the Middle East.
00:24:20.940That as soon as Iran is killing U.S. troops on the ground, which it can do very trivially
00:24:32.840spread widely throughout the Middle East,
00:24:36.800acting explicitly as tripwire forces.0.97
00:24:40.320They're there so that if Iran ever tries something and they die,0.85
00:24:48.020there's pop costs as belly for a U.S. invasion.0.93
00:24:52.220The kind of obvious escalatory logic of this
00:24:55.320And the reason Netanyahu would be pushing this so hard is the U.S. strikes Iran.
00:25:00.860Maybe it cripples their nuclear capabilities.
00:25:03.000Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it sets them back weeks.
00:25:06.520Maybe it sets them back months. Maybe it sets them back two years.
00:25:10.180But the obvious immediate Iranian response is it has all these easy U.S. targets like right on its doorstep and it hits them.0.84
00:25:20.240You know, you could have, like, several thousand U.S. soldiers dead within a matter of weeks before anything can, like, really respond to a system.0.88
00:25:29.740And then the U.S. has to go to war because 9-11 2.0 has happened with thousands of dead U.S. soldiers.
00:25:39.740I would say that at the moment, Iran could potentially kill maybe dozens of U.S. soldiers, but thousands is extremely unlikely.
00:25:48.600The bases that we have in Iraq and Syria are relatively small, and many of them have been evacuated in the last week to avoid this sort of scenario.
00:25:57.580While the large bases that we have in Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia all have fairly significant ground-based air defense and ballistic missile defense, plus some coverage from U.S. Navy assets that are also in the Gulf.
00:26:13.440And so given the effectiveness of Iran's ballistic missile onslaught against Israel, in which they are certainly not pulling punches, I find it dubious that they would be able to kill, you know, more than a handful of U.S. troops, even given a maximum effort strike.
00:26:31.080really you so my my reading of iran's uh missile strikes because uh back before the israeli
00:26:45.200intervention in lebanon uh the projected count of missiles that just hezbollah alone had was
00:26:51.960somewhere in the range of like 100 to 200 000 rockets of some capacity of which
00:26:57.880These are like 122-millimeter artillery rockets, right?
00:27:03.060It's like an overgrown Katusha from World War II of really dubious accuracy and value.0.55
00:27:08.900These are not relevant for an Iran-versus-UF confrontation.
00:27:12.780What we're looking at is really short- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles, like Shahab-2 and up.
00:29:16.180as today or tomorrow if the u.s really decided a maximum effort practical aviation uh campaign to
00:29:24.640hunt down iranian ballistic missile sites and command and control facilities i think the u.s
00:29:30.120would attract the iran's ability to launch extremely quickly israel has already kind of
00:29:35.200done that they went from 200 missiles to like 100 to now like 20 so if iran can only launch like 20
00:29:41.360missiles a day after the israeli missile hunting campaign they'd be down to like one or two like
00:29:48.620after the u.s really uh put in some effort to um saturate the country in intelligence and
00:29:54.600surveillance assets uh for s-35s to go after missile trucks
00:29:58.600oh no i i i find it um it strikes me as unlikely that uh just their launch capability
00:30:11.600has been like that deeply damaged because the entire point of missiles is that
00:30:17.240is that uh they require far less infrastructure than than air assets like uh the entire point of
00:30:28.260like missile launch systems is that you don't need an entire like air base to send send off a
00:30:34.240missile strike the way you do with an airstrike so it seems like to me the idea that uh these
00:30:41.620these launch systems are just like they have been winnowed down it seems more
00:30:47.020like my read would be that that i ran because the ayatollah is like uh0.88
00:30:53.840because the itola is like a very skittish and really wants the world crisis of the 2020s to0.56
00:31:04.700happen on someone else's doorstep my read was he hit israel hard and then like really took his foot0.62
00:31:10.040off the gas like trying to just maintain enough burn negotiations i i don't see that like give
00:31:18.680But given the numbers we've seen, I just don't really find it that compelling an idea that that Israel's like special forces and like airstrike campaign has been that successful at like getting Iran's launch capability.
00:31:35.800I'm also kind of skeptical, at least about the claim success of the Israeli air campaign, although I have to say my level of certainty about pretty much anything to do with it is pretty low due to lack of data.
00:31:48.680And like, as far as I know, I've yet to see much in the way of compelling evidence of Israeli aircraft actually overflying Iranian territory, at least with any regularity, and that the majority of it, as far as I know, and if there's something I've missed, let me know, is still in the form of cruise missiles launched from mostly over Iraq.
00:32:07.520and so maybe claims that they've beaten back the air defenses to a great degree or indeed
00:32:13.360suppress the missile launch capability it's like the reduction in the number of launches
00:32:17.880could point to that it could also point to other things i think the israeli actually put head a
00:32:25.220number of top driven medium altitude surveillance drones over iran and these are basically the most
00:32:33.580vulnerable type of aircraft that you could imagine. It's like, you know, almost a World War
00:32:38.340II aircraft in terms of performance. And if those are surviving over Iran for any period of time,
00:32:43.600then it seems that Iranian air defense, at least, has been treated to the point where it is not
00:32:49.120really putting up much of a fight. They did release about 40 videos of various PELs being
00:32:57.820hit, as well as a surprisingly high number of old American attack helicopters inherited by the
00:33:05.320current Iranian regime also being destroyed on the ground. And so with, say, 40 or so confirmed
00:33:14.920hits released on video by relatively short-range weapons, I would say that Israel's ability to
00:33:24.120operate conclusively over Iran has been demonstrated by now. So I sort of partially
00:33:32.020agree with that. And I have seen all this about the drone operations. And it does seem like most
00:33:37.140of the sort of footage that gets released of stuff being impacts actually being recorded do
00:33:44.200seem to be drone strikes from these sort of medium sized UCAVs. And I also strongly suspect
00:33:48.840that those are being launched from places like Azerbaijan or Kurdish controlled Iraq, because
00:33:53.480It's kind of a long way from Israel, but could be right or wrong about that.
00:33:57.180On the other hand, probably the threshold of risk for operating a drone over contested enemy airspace is going to be different from a manned aircraft.
00:34:06.660That has sort of been seen with the war in Ukraine, where Russian surveillance drones routinely fly far into Ukraine, but, well, into Ukrainian-controlled territory, but their fixed-wing aircraft don't.
00:34:17.480that is true but russia only has a tiny handful of fifth gen stealth aircraft um and you know uh
00:34:26.180su-57s are only dubiously stealthy compared to uh american fist gens um israel's f-35 fleet is
00:34:34.020large enough uh that i think that they could be operating significant numbers of those into iran
00:34:40.100although the one question i have about that is that if the f-35s are doing exactly what the
00:34:47.260marketing material has suggested and they're eviscerating iran why has lots of martin stock
00:34:53.000gone down this week while all other defense stocks have gone up like i'm kind of suspecting
00:35:00.100that maybe like a 30 to 40 percent uh level that insiders are dumping stock in preparation for news
00:35:08.000that in at least you know one or two f-35s might have been engaged and destroyed as iranian state
00:35:13.760media has repeatedly said but most people uh do not believe they have not displayed wreckage
00:35:19.480other than like really bad cgi which everyone can tell is like uh fake or ai generated or whatever
00:35:26.380there's a possibility that um they might have secured the site and the wreckage is already
00:35:33.000on its way to like russia or china yeah i can absolutely believe that the f-35s would be doing
00:40:44.120or U.S. officials the way they would Mexican officials
00:40:46.460and going after them and my rate of this is uh is that basically all these all these players are
00:40:57.440making what on the face of it are like very suboptimal escalatory moves and actually giving
00:41:04.640up a fair amount of uh of alpha and initiative that otherwise what it would make tactical sense
00:41:12.880for them to achieve because if they can just hold on and drag out their individual conflict and
00:41:19.280position with the U.S. long enough and keep it like a slow simmer long enough one of the other
00:41:24.120conflicts will pop off and then there's a good chance they'll get get whatever they want for
00:41:29.960by default and this is why I'm very hesitant to take take any limit in Iranian response as
00:41:41.120as an obvious demonstration of a limited capacity on their part for the same reason that
00:41:46.240that i'd be hesitant to do do that with regards to russia that we've seen
00:41:51.420seen uh many neocons saying well russia hasn't responded to us this way therefore they obviously
00:41:59.340can't therefore they're obviously a paper tiger and then russia keeps going for like several more
00:42:04.860years and is gaining more and more territory, that it seems to me that all the powers on
00:42:12.820the periphery of US Empire, all these different conflict zones, are just clinging on on the
00:42:20.480edge of the cliff, like looking over the maw of the crisis of the 2020s, 2030s, waiting
00:42:29.700for someone else to fall in and have to use the thermal detonators and try to fight their0.82
00:42:34.480way out of the mouth of the Sarlacc. Does that make sense? Sort of. And I mean, whenever we
00:42:40.100actually do get around to Vietnam, a fear of wider escalation certainly played a massive role in that.
00:42:45.280In terms of the individual scenarios you lay out, I mean, they might have to be taken on a little
00:42:50.100bit of a case by case basis. In the case of Ukraine, like Ukraine at this point is just
00:42:54.600deliberately trying to get itself nuked in order to draw the United States in and the Russians have0.76
00:43:00.180not fallen for it i think that's pretty much the extent of what's happened there
00:43:05.620um in terms of like i don't think the iranians are for instance pulling punches against israel
00:43:13.700at least not very much so we might be like seeing something close to the outer limits of their
00:43:19.860capabilities yeah if iran could destroy entire f-35 squadrons on the ground with pure ballistic
00:43:28.380missile strikes against military targets. But I see no reason why they would not exercise that
00:43:33.980option. In regards to China, I think the Chinese Politburo has been on record as saying that we
00:43:42.100are extremely lucky that the U.S. turned its eye on Iraq and Afghanistan and the wider Middle East
00:43:47.900for most of the 2000s and 2010s, because it gave us the opportunity to sort of peacefully rise and
00:43:53.820develop our industrial base in the background without the eye of the empire upon us and i feel
00:43:59.660like they're still operating sort of that mindset you know the long-term industrial trends favor us
00:44:04.260therefore we should not do any fighting now and we should not really even support the anti-us
00:44:10.480proxies of say russia or iran uh because we don't want to have the war start now
00:44:15.980all right i could see i could see that but uh so for example iran's
00:44:29.380capabilities uh we've seen them really hold off on uh on backing hezbollah during uh israel's
00:44:40.080were with them. We've seen them, like, really not sending, like, significant trips or anything to
00:44:47.060prop up Assad. That, like, nothing would have really stopped Iran from having a, like,0.80
00:44:54.420backbone force of, like, 2,000 to 4,000 Revolutionary Guard and other units in Syria
00:45:03.820at the time that Assad fell. And they could have probably prevented Assad from
00:45:09.920falling during that time uh that that Assad was running a friendly regime regime that would have
00:45:17.920let them in uh they had a good chunk of a logistical connection through through Iraq it's all
00:45:25.980the actual map it's you can't quite look at the the connections on the map to see what connects
00:45:35.200to what, because the U.S. was holding, like, a good chunk of the border between Iraq and
00:45:42.940Syria, but there was certainly a good amount of potential there for Iran to have forces
00:45:50.680on the ground there that we didn't really see, and the obvious thing, escalation that
00:45:58.160could do to really destabilize israel and like really cause a mess for them is just topple the
00:46:07.600government in jordan which is like eternally hanging on by a thread that uh it would be very
00:46:14.600trivial to to uh to weaken and then cripple the jordanian regime and then there's just this open
00:46:23.020maw between uh between the border of iran and the border of israel that's that would be permanently
00:46:30.200destabilized and like funneling arms immediately into the west bank and and causing a conflict
00:46:37.920zone right on israel's border that that seemed like this has been one of those like things that0.81
00:46:45.620everyone has predicted forever and yet the Jordanian regime survives off fumes and hoax0.73
00:46:54.800and USA dollars. I am somewhat skeptical about Iran's ability to project at least conventional0.95
00:47:04.560ground forces as far west as Syria, although I do agree that probably a single well-trained
00:47:11.980and motivated brigade probably could have stopped the hts offensive last year if they'd been in the
00:47:17.480right place at the right time i'm not sure if that was within iranian capability or not but
00:47:22.600if it was then they obviously elected not to do it in general i mean it's partly been a forced
00:47:29.840thing and possibly also a bit of a conscious decision is the iranians do seem to have backed
00:47:33.760off of proxy warfare somewhat in the last few years and some of that has just been the straight
00:47:39.280up defeat of their proxies as well0.99
00:47:41.980Yeah, the Hufis are the only ones that really, like, exceeded any expectations. I agree with Skapi's estimate that deploying a mechanized brigade into Syria would be a very difficult proposition, both against potential Israeli air attack if they were not covered by the Russian air defenses that were in Syria, as well as the general tendency that deploying a MEC brigade, like, it's not something that you can do in a week, right?0.98
00:48:10.680Like, especially through territory that is unfriendly or not directly controlled by your government or close allies.
00:48:21.060And Iran doesn't really have the extremely high readiness airborne forces that, say, Russia, China, or the U.S. has that can be, like, rapidly shunted into a center, like Russia did with Kazakhstan when their regime seemed on the brink.
00:48:33.000um there was also some speculation which i am not attaching too much uh probability to
00:48:41.620that the assad regime was actually sort of rejecting some iranian request for cooperation
00:48:46.540in an attempt to reach out to the west in order to um try to find an end to western support for
00:48:55.280some of its enemies i'm not sure whether that was happening but various russian and iranian
00:50:50.720in the world that uh you know they they they're on the border of russia and china who are willing0.96
00:51:00.400to prop them up to a certain degree right like the syria does not have that advantage of being
00:51:05.040immediately reinforced by a by a friendly superpower they are operating in a more
00:51:10.060hostile neighborhood right but they had the russian they had the russian base right there
00:51:16.780And at least in the, like, in a brief window from, like, 2010, 2011, Syria was directly connected to Iran through Shia, like, majority democracy Iraq.
00:51:36.620You know, George Bush's great accomplishment, he brought democracy to Iraq, and the Shia majority voted to side with Shia Iran.
00:51:44.260And, like, Assad did have, like, both connections there, that he had a sea base that was a line that was Russian-held, and he had a land connection to Iran, and over the course of the Syrian war, both lost.
00:52:07.040But the limitations of deploying a mechanized brigade to Syria, I think you're overestimating how much would have to be deployed.
00:52:24.300Because if you employed like a dismounted brigade or a white mounted brigade of just men with rifles and like a few like squad weapons and then had them procure, you know, technicals on site in Syria.
00:52:40.700But they were like ultra loyal, coordinated, being paid by the Iranian government and like part of the Iranian state, like a thousand, two thousand of guys like that probably could have could have prevented the collapse of the Syrian regime.
00:53:01.060Although, yeah, Assad was preventing that from happening.
00:53:05.520A lot of people in general seem to have been paid off by Gulf state aligned financiers and other wealthy elites to simply stand down.
00:53:14.700They were just bribed to not fight, even though theoretically the amount of combat power available to the regime was, you know, 30 times what HTS had.
00:53:23.800Funnily enough, some of the assets that might have been able to stop HDS were those exact same AH-1C Cobras that Iran lost this week.0.64
00:53:32.200If there were two dozen of those in theater, they could probably take down the technical convoy fairly quickly with unguided rockets only.0.71
00:53:39.200yeah no it it it blows me away how every regime seems to have forgotten the lessons of the cult
00:53:48.520cold war and the importance of having your own people on on the ground aside from the u.s the
00:53:54.320u.s has their own people on the ground everywhere but like uh height of the cold war you had like
00:53:59.740cubans in angola uh uh propping up wars there you had you had like goofy goofy forces like
00:54:10.400deployed to vietnam in the cambodian civil war like uh i i can't recall where it was but like
00:54:18.660the yugoslavs were deployed to like insane stuff around around the world as advisors in like
00:58:01.260Although I'm not sure if the, like, hundreds of thousands
00:58:03.940of Israelis have returned to, like, northern Israel0.91
00:58:07.080there's still like a massive no-man's land between Lebanon and Israel but like uh that
00:58:13.860that uh that second front in the Gaza war was like very much dependent on Syria being there
00:58:23.800and being a backdoor for like whatever assets Iran wanted to like slip across there uh this is why
00:58:31.860I, um, the, this is going way back, I can't recall the dates of this, but, uh, the Israeli strikes on, uh, on Revolutionary Guard officers at a consulate in, in Syria was, like, A, a major violation of, like, international laws and norms that, like, uh, striking consulates of, like, third power to not a war with,
00:59:00.740But striking consulates in general is just, like, not really done.
00:59:04.940But you can immediately see, like, the tactical reason for it,
00:59:08.820because that's where, like, a lot of the, like, warfighting capacity,
00:59:19.760a lot of the coordination is being done out of was those Iranian consulates in Syria.
00:59:24.740that the the entire the entire like coordination between syria iran russia lebanon lebanon all
00:59:38.380this was going through like a a few consulates in damascus and uh and elsewhere and uh
00:59:47.960i actually i i need to ask you guys this what's your read on russian israeli relations right now
00:59:57.020because apparently like the relationship with between russia and israel has almost completely
01:00:03.440collapsed with that with very low comment because israel has been like backing ukraine to the hilt
01:00:11.160for both the obvious U.S. relation reasons,
01:00:16.620but also because the Ukrainian regime is like half-Jewish mafia.0.99
01:00:23.680So it was always useful for them to stay in the relatively good diplomatic graces0.95
01:00:31.500of more or less everyone in the Middle East.1.00
01:00:34.020This is also why they've played this zigzagging, backstabbing game with Turkey.1.00
01:03:46.760Right. The constant stream of warfare has brought along one degree of support from security hardliners that were not directly partisan before the events of the last couple of years.
01:03:56.980yeah no the how how is this thought is the middle east going through a like france 1790s
01:04:11.280moment right now that uh enough senior officials are being being picked off or like uh enough
01:04:20.060conflict is going on that's forcing promotions that uh we might be looking at like future decades
01:04:26.960of like uh incredibly competent young officers winding up in positions of extreme power because
01:04:33.500right now most of the middle east is a gerontocracy like the ayatollahs are ancient netanyahu himself
01:04:39.100is like 77 uh he's been around like 20 years uh there are all these figures in the middle east who0.70
01:04:46.020are who are complete dinosaurs and same with the u.s and same same with russia and same with china
01:04:52.800Are we seeing in the Middle East, like, enough of a tumult that they're actually being cycled down to, like, young officers who are living in this century?0.81
01:05:04.980And might we see a Middle Eastern Napoleon or the equivalent of, like, the marshals of France slowly rising throughout all these conflict zones?
01:05:17.800Sorry. So I think the important thing to say about that is that France in the 1790s was a population and economic juggernaut in Europe, right?
01:05:29.760Like, it had the potential to wage successful conventional war against everyone if it had the right leadership.0.54
01:05:36.980I don't think Iran is in that state0.96
01:05:41.040because while there are 90 million Iranians
01:08:03.140I think the problem there is that the Egyptians were capable of set-paste, highly choreographed, highly drilled operations like the initial assault crossing.0.99
01:08:13.240But once the situation had become fluid to the point where pre-planned drills were no longer sufficient, then the Arabs start fucking up.0.98
01:08:24.820The cultural issues inherent to Arab militaries in regards to the clannishness and the refusal of units to cooperate and even tell the truth with each other just were too bad.0.98
01:08:36.040although i think a similar thing has happened to the israeli army in which the capability of the
01:08:42.740israeli armored and mechanized and infantry formations has severely degraded over the course
01:08:48.460of the last 20 years partially because all of their elite human capital their talent the most0.75
01:08:53.320conscientious and intelligent motherfuckers have been going into intel air force signals you know0.99
01:08:59.500All of the super sexy specialty branches of the national security state that have gotten increasingly bloated in terms of funding and personnel, which means that the army is left with whoever is too lazy and stupid to get out of it.0.98
01:09:17.920I would definitely agree with both of those characterizations that essentially the Egyptians started screwing up when they ran out a script and probably Syrians as well in the Hyomkipur War.
01:09:28.280and also the characterization of the Israeli ground forces.
01:12:37.220detonate the top level of the building0.81
01:12:39.320and collapse it on them. Or even just chuck a grenade0.84
01:12:41.360down at them. Which is why you don't stack up
01:12:42.520Right, but the fact that there are 20 guys, all of you who have even four plates of body armor, all of you who have optics, who have night vision, who have modern ballistic helmets, you know, I mean, half a platoon just, like, retreating from one random insurgent was mind-boggling.0.95
01:13:03.320Yeah, especially because, like, even if you want to maximize your own survivability, even if you're, like, the most cynical, like, disloyal motherfucker in the world, like, that level of, like, cowardice and selfishness.0.90
01:13:23.580like uh the way you minimize one person firing on you when you have 30 eyes isn't to like start0.85
01:13:29.720retreating and like presenting your backs it's just just a uniformly open fire but but no it0.93
01:13:37.800and this is like probably the greatest the great weakness of israel is that uh because there's such0.88
01:13:46.120a small population like seven thousand seven million jews of who like three hundred thousand
01:13:54.280are in three hundred are in the idf so you have like close to ten percent of the population in
01:13:59.480the idf and the lower performers of that are the ones who are in the infantry like uh in like like
01:14:07.020you're looking at like maybe one percent ish of the israeli pop population two percent
01:14:16.120Maybe 3% being, like, some form of, like, infantry or otherwise, like, deployable reserve force, which is, like, insane.
01:14:28.400If you meet someone who's, like, Royal Marines or Canadian, like, active force infantry or, like, U.S. infantry or special forces, like, you're meeting, like, a guy who's, like, one in ten.
01:14:46.120thousand you're meeting like not the equivalent of like the achaeans at troy you're meeting the
01:14:50.740equivalent of like the greek heroes or like depending on the unit you're meeting achilles
01:14:54.460himself like like the one in ten the one in five thousand the one in ten thousand one
01:14:58.860i would agree that i would agree with you for like something like delta force but the average
01:15:11.040u.s soldier is not achilles okay right like the top one percent of the u.s population in terms of
01:15:17.440of soldiering potential in terms of intelligence conscientiousness um athleticism you know and
01:15:24.580all of those sorts of things a lot of those guys are not even considering the military
01:15:28.340as a form of of career paths like they're these guys are becoming you know like elite bankers or
01:15:36.880lawyers or technologists instead uh simply because the military is not you know the
01:15:42.020it's not such a military in the sense that it's the most prestigious institution in society
01:21:11.800in order to get their labor force back into employment.
01:21:16.400Although, as of right now, that does not yet seem completely possible.
01:21:23.620Now, this was another reason I didn't quite, I don't quite attribute the leveling off of Iran's missile strikes to Israeli degradation.
01:21:39.940Because if you really wanted to hurt Israeli society, you wouldn't be, like, firing all the missiles you can right at the start of the conflict.
01:21:49.480What you'd be doing is, like, trying to stagger it to just make sure that missiles are hitting Israel, that every day their population has to go into the bomb shelters and has to go away from work.
01:22:03.260And that this would dramatically hurt Israel's economy, which has already been under extraordinary strain. Something like 10% of their population had left at one point.
01:22:21.080And that's a preference cascade for immigration, where more and more companies and, you know, elite human capital types, software engineers, consultants, financiers decide, you know, it's just not worth it.
01:22:36.560I can't raise a family here. And they decide to head off to, you know, New York or London or whatever to inevitably apply their white collar trade there.0.90
01:22:44.740And if that happens to a sufficient degree, enough companies flee, then the Israeli economy is just going to go into the shitter.0.74
01:22:53.020Yeah, this was one of the great, if you read it, there's a book on the Rhodesia and Demerathic collapse.
01:23:03.000that uh i don't know but uh that rhodesia one of the great troubles uh they they had as the bush
01:23:13.980war continued was um you know they could heal as many uh as many zimbabwean forces as they wanted
01:23:22.900they could have these extraordinary kill loss ratios but uh if like a like incredibly weak uh
01:23:31.620loose squad of zimbabweans made it like beyond the border province to
01:23:37.240and killed like in like one of the interior provinces that was supposed to be safe
01:23:45.020suddenly they'd have an influx of people leave a massive outflux of people leaving
01:23:51.000the country that uh this would spook entire neighbor neighborhoods and like contrary to
01:23:57.400perception while there were like several hundred thousand uh rhodesians who were like ethnically
01:24:03.700rhodesian had been there for generations uh wide swaths of the population of rhodesia
01:24:09.540were like very recent uh uh my my pfp is a is a rhodesian girl but she was ethnically french
01:24:23.380that she had migrated from Vietnam to Rhodesia.
01:24:32.680And her family only had a few decades worth of attachment to the place.0.80
01:24:43.760So the risk that a few setbacks or a few horror stories1.00
01:24:51.660my cause and out out migration and that that could like start seriously crippling your economy
01:24:57.200that's generally how uh these uh multi-ethnic wealthy societies uh collapse because uh0.87
01:25:08.240you have the advantage of the wealth and the training and like the core coordination but
01:25:13.980like even if you aren't being blockaded or uh subject to sanctions uh as soon as having the
01:25:23.580wealthy population means that they can leave it's not like it's not like uh the vietnamese where0.73
01:25:28.380you know they're they have nowhere else to go that they're going to like fight tooth and nail0.97
01:25:33.600because you know they're fighting for the last bowl of rice uh if you have money and you can
01:25:40.540leave like most people would rather leave than like you know like deal with a decade worth
01:25:46.180worth of war unless uh unless they're incredibly rooted to a place and even then
01:25:53.180you know those people who are rooted and wealthy are leading their logistical support
01:25:59.360in all the other people who are like fulfilling other roles in the economy
01:26:03.240so interestingly i think that immigration has different effects on iran in the sense that iran
01:26:14.100is all losing some elite human capital in terms of you know phd candidates studying at caltech
01:26:19.280but it's also losing a lot of its dissidents a lot of folks that are opposed to the fundamentalist
01:26:25.600regime and would otherwise uh fight against it the protest during resistance cells that sort of
01:26:31.620thing. And as a result of this release valve, the Iranian regime is probably much more stable
01:26:37.720than a lot of neocons give it credit for. The Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc in general
01:26:44.000tried to keep everyone, right, with the Iron Curtain. They prevented immigration on a large0.63
01:26:48.180scale, although somewhat to Israel. And so when the Soviet Union was facing collapse
01:26:54.200in state legitimacy, all of those people who were naturally inclined to oppose the regime
01:26:58.580We're still there and ready to take up the torch of fighting against previously widespread Soviet values.
01:27:08.980Yeah, and this is why everyone has predicted U.S. destabilization, but until very recently hasn't been predicting conflict in the U.K., although now if you follow David Betts and stuff, there are people predicting it.
01:27:28.580Because for the longest time, you know, American dissidents don't leave.
01:27:35.160Like, it's still the wealthiest place, and it's all the highest lifestyle they can have.
01:27:43.120So all the Americans who get grumpy at the government stick around and radicalize and, like, start forming their prepper networks and whatnot.
01:27:51.580Whereas, whereas if you're in the UK or other, or other like European countries, most of these people leave like a, like an entire generation of angry, grumpy residents of England have like left to Canada, the US, Australia, New Zealand, that, that you have this evaporative cooling effect in, in like the worst parts of the Anglosphere.
01:28:18.960and only the most conformist are left yeah and like it's and you'll often lose dissidence that
01:28:28.580way but also like brain drains can happen for kind of weird reasons like there was a huge one
01:28:33.340from the uk to the us in the 50s because british education was highly prestigious and american
01:28:40.040wages were more than double british ones so you could easily go and get a job in the us and a lot
01:28:44.500people did yeah i mean let's just see u.s being the monetary hegemon right like u.s
01:28:49.800white collar salaries have always been significantly higher ever since the dollar
01:28:53.620overtook the pound that and yeah britain being baroque at that time they were still on rationing
01:28:59.920like well after the war yeah i think until about the middle 50s britain was on rationing long after
01:29:06.620the soviet union had gotten rid of it after the war uh british citizens would go to france
01:29:14.920to eat a non-ration diet this is why french cuisine became like so prestigious after the war
01:29:22.420because france had like uh everyone operated on the black market and like within like a year
01:29:58.480Since the Brits were paying for massive fleets of aircraft carriers and, you know, tens of thousands of strategic bombers, you know, for the entire war.
01:30:06.660Whereas the French government basically stops incurring costs in 1940, even though the country is being ravaged.
01:32:40.480about how the British Empire could have been saved.
01:32:44.300But, back to focusing in on Iran and current crisis, where do we go from here? What's the next escalation over the next six months?
01:33:01.820In terms of a likely plausible scenario, I do think an Iranian counter-effort against the U.S. is nearly mandatory, purely to satiate the domestic demand for retaliation.0.63
01:33:14.300If for nothing else. And so in the best case scenario for the U.S., you have an ineffective salvo fired at some U.S. base, either in Iraq or in the Gulf states, limited to no casualties.
01:33:27.600If it's literally zero fatalities, like the strikes following the assassination of Soleimani, then there is potential for a ceasefire.
01:33:40.100Although, I would wager that the chance that this happens is maybe under 30%.
01:33:47.080In the maximal scenario, they shut down the Persian Gulf.
01:33:54.260They lay, you know, tens of thousands of mines to destroy or block all sea trade from the most energy-dense exporting region in the world, and we end up in a massive oil crisis.
01:34:08.680And their theory is that this will force the U.S. to the negotiating table on their terms.
01:34:14.320I do not think that this is likely that they succeed in that effort, mainly because a blockade of the Persian Gulf now actually hurts China more than it hurts the U.S.
01:34:26.600After 2019, North America has been completely energy independent.
01:34:33.140If the price of oil goes up, North America wins.0.53
01:34:36.480The losers are Europe and China, right? The two big industrial powers, well, supposedly industrial in Europe's case, that don't have massive domestic oil reserves.
01:34:49.020um they would be definitely deluded in this scenario and china would not want to massively
01:34:56.900support iran with you know intelligence weapons and funding if the iranians are
01:35:03.680pushing the chinese economy which is already sort of in a mild recession into the deep end
01:35:09.600so one of the theories that i had had heard that like uh actually seems like it would be
01:35:21.400the like long-term clever geostrategic move is what if iran just limits itself to
01:35:31.160to Israeli targets but dramatically steps it up because uh there's already like this kind of
01:35:38.720intense division within uh mogan elsewhere that uh does not want escalation with iran there's this
01:35:48.800division within the u.s itself so that uh iran can can bet on getting more and more extreme if there
01:35:59.080isn't a casus belly what if iran just like focuses on hitting israel hitting israeli assets uh
01:36:08.720assassinating israeli officials around around the world hitting israelis in like third third and
01:36:15.720fourth countries uh doing the kind of strikes that israel was doing against uh uh revolutionary
01:36:22.580guard guard corps members in at that consulate in syria but starts hitting uh idf members in like
01:36:30.800random parts of the world world not immediately attached to the u.s but makes it basically
01:37:04.340to do something when the U.S. hasn't been hit
01:37:06.180hit and uh you see this intense pressure mounting within the u.s to that iran hasn't
01:37:15.400done anything to us why are we getting involved involved with iran and inherently
01:37:20.260inherently drags out and like makes all u.s interventions against iran more and more
01:37:29.680more difficult politically as well as logistically that there just isn't this blank check for
01:37:35.460for u.s forces to operate against iran and also doesn't set off uh china or or russia that it
01:37:42.800that uh having another proxy proxy war uh between iran iran and israel playing out across uh
01:37:52.220across the globe that doesn't threaten chinese trade that doesn't threaten
01:37:56.200threaten drawing russia in actually they would would be well positioned to supply iran with
01:38:02.580whatever they need over like the next year or two as they're carrying out this campaign and as like
01:38:07.720rockets are flying flying back and forth and as israelis are being picked off as they try to
01:38:13.580operate throughout the middle east and elsewhere uh like uh this seems like uh the kind of kind of
01:38:22.860thing where uh if iran can draw it out and avoid having a a conventional or uh or tactical airstrike
01:38:35.340base war and force a uh a like a drawn-out missile and uh assassination war that
01:38:46.220Israel is inherently less equipped to survive just unlimited assassinations.0.56
01:38:55.920Well, this relies on Israel having a losing intelligence, human intelligence hand against Iran, which really does not seem the case, right?0.54
01:39:06.100Israel seems to have deep penetration of the Iranian security state, while Iran seems to have zero warning of conventional military action, which means they have zero penetration of the Israeli security state.
01:39:19.960Plus, if you do a bunch of Munich-style stuff in Europe and start killing Israeli-linked businessmen all over Central Europe, you end up pissing off all of Europe.
01:39:30.180The European countries, a lot of whom have young populations that are turning increasingly against Iran, would drastically switch their position if Iranian-linked militants ended up gunning down dozens of people in their streets.
01:39:44.360You would see potentially European military assets and financial support and intelligence blowing to Israel.
01:39:51.940It's not something that I would risk if I was in Khomeini's shoes.
01:39:55.980i generally agree with that and also on the question of general escalation against israel
01:40:03.620i don't think iran really has a whole lot left in the bag in terms of turning up the heat there i
01:40:09.080think we do currently see something close to a limit of capability yeah i would agree with the
01:40:16.780idea that iran is not just holding 90 of its strike bandwidth like you know in the corner1.00
01:40:21.680We're hoping that the Israelis stand down.0.90
01:40:24.680Now, like after their, you know, senior Revolutionary Guard, scientific and military leaders were killed on night one, like I see no reason why they would not launch with every man and launcher that could be brought to bear.0.96
01:40:39.020And also in terms of sort of the immediate next steps that get taken, potentially even as we speak, I mean, I checked Telegram a few minutes ago, nothing additional has really happened yet.
01:40:49.700But I generally agree with your minimalist and maximalist estimates of what could potentially happen in the short term.
01:40:59.440I think it's possible, and I suspect Trump may be banking on the idea that it will be something similar to the retaliation after the killing of Soleimani, and that it's basically a choreographed, demonstrational retaliation that doesn't actually hurt anyone, and then you're sort of back to where you started.
01:41:58.020So my logic is that Iran has a population of 90 million.
01:42:02.920Israel has a population of, of 7 million Jews.0.73
01:42:08.580It also has Arabs, but they're largely unreliable.0.95
01:42:11.680That, like, basically, Iran, Iran's meta is to, like, the obvious move is to just get into a position.0.94
01:42:22.340where where flesh and blood are decisive again so like uh it's like the obvious one would be an
01:42:32.640infantry fight but there's no way for iran to get in this infantry fight with israel but
01:42:38.920assassinations in third countries like uh like iranian iranian hitmen or like deniable iranian
01:42:49.640assets uh hitting israelis in like i don't know caribbean countries like that again israel has
01:42:59.540already ripped off the band-aid of like targeting officials in consulates that it's it'd be very
01:43:06.820hard for for countries to go to the un and like complain of about iran striking israelis in in
01:43:17.620consulates elsewhere unless it was those specific countries consulates which uh which depending on
01:43:25.460like the specific countries iran chooses that could be like heavily mitigated like it doesn't
01:43:30.880have to be france it doesn't have to be the u.s it doesn't have to be russia it doesn't have to
01:43:35.120be china it could be you know israel has consulates with uh with uh countless countries around the
01:43:43.060world world who aren't in a position to like really throw any assets behind behind israel
01:43:51.320they have people doing various financial financial and diplomatic things throughout south america
01:43:58.160throughout africa throughout throughout the wide expanse of the world and it's part of part of it
01:44:07.360It's just me, like, finding it inherently implausible that a country of 90 million just is completely unequipped to match the flesh and blood intelligence assets of a country of 7 million.
01:44:24.200Do you understand what I'm saying?0.96
01:44:25.580It seems like just in terms of like flesh and blood, like people in position, Iran should be able to like escalate to the knife, the pistol, the AR-15 or Kalashnikov, like in random spots, at least comparably to what Israel can do.0.80
01:44:50.580uh again this is where most states would not do this because they don't want to rip the band-aid0.68
01:44:58.020off of like targeted assassination that uh traditionally countries have refused to target
01:45:05.320each other's leaderships and diplomatic corps etc because you know that be retaliated against and0.82
01:45:12.360like no elite wants wants to see elites start getting targeted but israel has already ripped0.83
01:45:18.880this bandit off like 10 000 different ways that the obvious really the obvious logical solution0.51
01:45:26.560is to escalate to assassination war and use this like asymmetric level of attack it's not like0.93
01:45:33.180there's a it's not as if there's a shortage of like young muslim men who would who would object
01:45:42.480to being paid to do this kind of thing?1.00
01:54:55.260radical improvements just gotta you just need the elite to eat each other
01:55:05.700and you can have good government at the end of you can have you can have a glorious imperium
01:55:11.720that is at once aristocratic and meritocratic well you just need a blood bat at the top
01:55:19.260It was a revolutionary terror first, and you got very, very lucky with the tactical prowess of the final product.0.62
01:55:26.860Yeah, like, I wouldn't characterize the outcome of, say, the Cultural Revolution as a net positive for the leadership.
01:55:34.660That being said, it allowed Deng Xiaoping to emerge, and Deng Xiaoping was a much more formidable operator than any of Mao's designated successors.
02:02:32.120given how the Chinese just seem to operate in the world in general.0.82
02:02:37.000The Chinese in general don't take Cold War II that seriously, right?
02:02:40.960The China puts, like, what, 2.5% of GDP into the security state at most.
02:02:49.460Some estimates are as low as, like, 1.7.
02:02:52.120The highest estimate is maybe, like, 3.
02:02:55.560But, like, if you account for all of the stuff that the U.S. does
02:02:59.080in addition to the Department of Defense, all of the defense adjacent stuff like Benefits for Veterans, the CIA, the NRO,
02:03:05.740the Department of Energy, guys that do nuclear weapons production and storage.
02:03:11.560The U.S. is spending like, you know, close to 4.5 percent of GDP on arms.
02:03:18.800So China could easily double the amount that they spend,
02:03:22.280And especially since they don't have a massive sovereign debt denominated in their own dollars to service every couple of years.
02:03:34.160The Soviet Union was spending something like, you know, 10 to 12 percent of their GDP on the military in times of peace.
02:03:41.280Right. Obviously, that was unsustainable.
02:03:42.900But China is really underarmed for the economic base that they possess.
02:03:48.180And they just don't support their proxies against the U.S. in the same way that the Soviets are, or even China itself back in the Mao Zedong era did.
02:03:59.680Like, if Mao Zedong saw the Houthis shooting at the United States Navy, he would stop at nothing to support them with, you know, bottomless supplies of modern missiles.0.65
02:04:09.700But, you know, China just negotiates safe passage by and then goes back to sleep.0.85
02:04:14.220it's a state that is fundamentally uninterested
02:04:17.340in great power competition to the level
02:04:42.400Like, that claim would be, like, taking off a lot of people in the rush belt who see, you know, fentanyl being dumped on the regions made with, like, Chinese precursors there.0.79
02:04:54.060They're themselves dumped on Mexico.0.74
02:04:59.420Like it'd be the most trivial thing for like China to stop like sending chemical precursors and like other poisons into the West and like to like not do a lot of the money laundering interlops that we see out of China.0.85
02:05:17.460And yet, for all the stuff that the American civilian population deals with cursing China every day, they don't seem that interested in countering the American overseas empire.
02:05:32.440i think china is so fundamentally confident that in the long term the economic trends and the
02:05:45.340industrial trends favor them in terms of building out the power generation infrastructure and the
02:05:51.280research and investment apparatus of the future that they really don't want conflict now and they
02:08:49.920How have the events in Iran altered the geopolitical position of Russia and Ukraine?
02:09:00.760Well, as has already been said, Ukraine kind of loses out because it pulls American ISR assets and air defenses away from them.
02:09:12.700Massive escalation involving third parties still seems pretty unlikely to me there, at least for the immediate future.
02:09:19.920Yeah, I'd agree that the Munich option is unlikely for the moment.
02:09:27.040Mind you, immediately before this, Ukraine was carrying out its strikes on the Russian nuclear deterrent, like the Russian bomber fleet.
02:09:37.140And do you see, is the pressure now on, is the ball now in Zelensky's court the pressure on to like do something like even like goofier and more extreme to like try and make the Ukraine situation blow up and U.S. assets flow back to him?0.51
02:09:59.640I have no doubt that they will continue to make an effort to do things like that
02:10:06.920and take increasingly desperate measures to try and draw third parties in.
02:10:10.620And like I said before, at this point, they are trying to get themselves nuked for that purpose.
02:11:16.480These networks take literally years to build up.
02:11:19.340And you can't really deploy anything more conventionally aggressive against Russia because all of their conventional forces are already fully committed.
02:11:37.140Like, the moment that they get new patriots from the U.S., they will launch them, like, that night against, like, KH-22 is raining down in Kiev.
02:11:43.340there there are some some moves they can do like uh like uh if you can't
02:11:53.580if you can't uh strike for effectiveness you can strike for atrocity like there are like things
02:17:00.820and all the Western allied media all said,
02:17:03.040no, this was ISIS, this was done by Iran against Russia,
02:17:06.440and russia says and russia says obviously not it was done by ukraine with ukraine's
02:17:13.020ukraine's backing you could get all the western seals clapping and then then russia has suffered
02:17:21.060a nuclear attack a radiological attack not a fissile attack but uh like there's a there's a
02:17:30.280lot of stuff like this sitting in the background not so i think you're half0.81
02:17:34.660Because I do think that what we are virtually certain to see in the near future is more relatively, quote unquote, conventional terrorism hidden behind these fig leaves of deniability of ISIS-K, blah, blah, blah.0.80
02:17:51.840blah but i don't think that it will get them the escalation that they want because at least up
02:17:57.060until now russia has not shown any real tendency and in fact have really shown a great deal of
02:18:02.980restraint when it comes to not reciprocating ukrainian savagery let's put it that way
02:18:08.920yes but uh so my my thing is as we progress like next few months uh maybe through the end
02:18:20.380end of the year year for it all to play out it becomes like very inevitable that like someone
02:18:26.500in ukrainian command is going to sign off on something like completely batshit and left last
02:18:34.020ditch and the question becomes if you're russia looking looking at this looking at well do we want0.57
02:18:41.940ukraine do we want to find out what ukraine was doing in those bio labs by like having something
02:18:48.780deployed against us do we want to find out how much of like the old soviet chemical stockpile0.61
02:18:54.360they held on to in secret we want to find this out the obvious logical thing for russia to do0.86
02:19:01.400as it gets down to the wire of that point is start hammering kiev as hard as they can hoping to take
02:19:07.620out the leadership before they can like reach for the last like desperate measure and start you know
02:19:15.060you know biting you or trying to like kick over the nerve agent as you're like wrestling them down
02:19:21.940down so is there like a logical point coming up where the ukrainian conflict
02:19:28.620has to escalate in some way has to uh go to to some level level of extremity
02:19:38.540conventionally or else it's going to go to the other way unconventionally
02:19:43.620so in terms of the need to target the leadership specifically and i'm not really sure about that
02:19:54.440because most of the leadership seems to be pretty fungible and that there will just be someone else
02:20:00.460who is pretty similar to replace them and and if you call russian leadership a lot of the leaders
02:20:07.680may be replaced by, you know, more aggressive cohorts as well.
02:20:13.460Like, you knock off, you know, several leaders in the Russian Ministry of Defense1.00
02:20:20.040and you're doing Putin's work for him because the old guard is corrupt as fuck.0.99
02:20:26.100Yeah, but is there an incentive for the Russians to start, like,1.00
02:20:30.200as it comes down to the finish line,0.70
02:20:32.900try to take out every leader they can can in kiev before they can like
02:20:39.500cohere and decide on like something completely insane because so far like uh putin and the
02:20:48.060russian leadership has like tried desperately to avoid escalating to like a war of assassination
02:20:54.420back and forth like they've they've absorbed like um several targeting of their like generals like
02:21:00.780in very complex terroristic ways like outside their apartments and stuff in moscow and like
02:21:07.960not reciprocated largely because they didn't want assassination back and forth to be the medium
02:21:15.340uh but that band-aid has already been ripped off there isn't a norm there left for them to violate
02:21:21.300because kiev already violated it as we get down to the wire does russia
02:21:26.180does russia start start targeting all the leadership it can i think a lot of russian
02:21:33.900telegrams of like nationalist patriot types have been screaming for this since day one but
02:21:40.200if ukrainian leadership is you know preparing to flee if they're trying to move assets out
02:21:47.860of the country to like dubai or whatever like the afghan government ran right before the taliban
02:22:50.140But, uh, all right. Interesting. And so we're getting down to, we've been going two and a half hours. Uh, do either of you have final thoughts that we didn't get to? Uh, Goppy, I'll start with you.
02:23:10.120not really i mean on the whole issue i've sort of been stepping back a bit and allowing myself
02:23:17.800to indulge in a very low level of certainty about anything in the sure knowledge that if i make any
02:23:24.320definitive declarations about what will happen in the next few days or weeks i'm almost certain
02:23:28.120to make a fool of myself make speculative declarations say this is completely out there
02:23:35.200i put no confidence in it but this is gonna happen okay this is gonna happen iran will throw0.97
02:23:40.420a decent punch at american assets in the persian gulf and the americans will respond with a semi
02:23:46.040limited tactical air campaign against iranian air defenses and missile forces and i don't really
02:23:52.240know where that goes from there maybe peace talks i i think that's a fairly plausible scenario
02:24:01.500So regarding making plans, I did say that when people were posting about aircraft going to Guam, that there is a significant chance that they're just spoofing you and the real aircraft are somewhere else.
02:24:13.220And I was proven right there. But in regards to what is going on right now, I think one more point is that we are American adversaries are getting fantastic data on what a maximum effort U.S. air campaign looks like.
02:24:28.700And so they're learning a lot, not just from, like, radar signatures and the type of jamming that's employed by the U.S.
02:24:36.160Like, for example, the U.S. is probably chucking what's called a Mald J, which is like a sort of expendable air launch decoy that can absorb cruise missiles and also jam radars on the ground.
02:24:47.740And, like, once these things, I mean, they're all designed to self-destruct.
02:24:51.580But the chance that some are duds or don't self-destruct completely, Russia and China are salivating to reverse engineer these things, or at least learn all that they can from the equipment that was left behind.
02:25:04.820The same goes for, like, the AARGM, like, anti-radiation homing missiles that were certainly employed against what Iranian air defenses were made.
02:25:17.300I mean, sort of, the wave functions of the electronic warfare used, the future that they did manage to get of the B-2, all of that is being analyzed in Beijing right now.
02:25:28.680right so this is like uh despite the u.s u.s and israeli victories uh uh within the air war uh
02:25:42.240the the betrayal of capabilities in is almost certainly going to bite them in future conflicts
02:25:50.760there's an inherent downside to showing your hand like that yes
02:25:54.700all right and and within the uh the poker game uh diplomacy game uh pick your
02:26:08.360pick your analogy for the current state of the middle east the russians play chess and the
02:26:14.220americans play poker uh an old saying but it's still directionally correct right right uh
02:26:24.360Well, this is where JFK had to be taken out because he played Diplomacy, the board game, which is the most dangerous blend of the two of them.
02:26:47.720But within like the seven, eight way power struggle of the Middle East between the neo-Ottomans, you know, the Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Israelis, the Gaza, we haven't talked about Gaza.
02:27:04.820It's still going, still starving, still making.
02:27:30.260How long do you guys think Gossick can still hold?
02:27:34.200I, I, I'm eternally shocked at how, like, my prediction has held out against, like, the very evidence of my eyes telling me that I would not, not hold out.
02:27:47.680Like, for those of you listening who don't know, I predicted before Israel went into Gaza in the month after October 7th, this is like October 28th, I posted a piece about how Gaza can probably hold out somewhat approaching indefinitely because of the tunnel networks and the logic of tunnel guerrilla warfare.
02:28:17.680just inherently favors the defender to such an extreme extent
02:28:23.400that, as we saw in Vietnam in the Iron Triangle
02:41:07.880Yes, the eternal danger of playing aggressive with weak hands is you can do impressive things, but you can get called out very, very quickly.