00:05:31.320For you readers at home, I am no expert at all on anything related to anything in the air.
00:05:37.720My great expertise and my knowledge of all things related to missiles, air war, electronic intelligence, all that comes from playing High Fleet, Deus in Noblis, the wonderful Doom-themed dieselpunk game online.
00:06:03.380So I have a gamer's understanding of the concepts, also playing old U-boat simulators from like the 2000s.
00:06:13.960I feel very, very little about everything related to missiles and airframes.
00:10:52.320zulu uh march 1st i'm not sure we just check what time that is uh 11 30 a.m uh today uh he
00:11:04.320he used to find uh info from from the following countries so qatar is reporting 65 ballistic
00:11:15.280missiles and 12 drones intercepted. Bahrain, 45 missiles and 9 drones intercepted. Jordan,
00:11:23.12045, 49 missiles and drone figure of which, 13 of which were intercepted. Israel, over 200 missiles
00:11:33.520and drones intercepted. The UAE, 137 missiles and 209 drones detected, 105 of which were intercepted.
00:11:45.280And Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have strikes targeting their countries.
00:11:51.780However, neither have confirmed how many drones or missiles have been intercepted.
00:11:58.460Importantly, several countries, you'll notice that those are non-standard reporting statistics across those I listed.
00:12:10.720Israel and Ukraine kind of started this.
00:12:14.180But it's become fairly standard to conceal missile and drone hits or like to blackout and censor like cell phone footage and stuff of the hits or to not report it.
00:12:32.100and this this is there's an innocent reason for this which is of course that uh you know you don't
00:12:42.580want to give accurate reporting on hits if the enemy doesn't have it you don't want to let them
00:12:47.380correct their shots but uh another big part of it is the propaganda value that you don't want
00:12:54.660your own people or allies uh seeing is to see you and uh from the 12-day war we still don't know
00:13:05.640the extent to which uh israel was hit we don't really have casualty figures for the 12-day war
00:13:11.880that are at all reliable or like damage figures and we probably aren't going to get that for this
00:13:17.640war from any of those countries although several of them were honest and like reported the figures
00:13:25.040for the missiles that they didn't intercept uh the UAE didn't get the message that they aren't
00:13:31.140supposed to report how many they detected without intercepting but uh this is thousands of drones
00:13:37.800souls that have got it if for my takeaway uh in my ignorance is that uh is that
00:13:53.600the u.s and like its allies do not have that many interceptors especially uh
00:14:00.920uh when we're talking like very cheap like
00:14:04.880two thousand to like thirty thousand dollar drones that's so you're talking about like
00:14:13.060the shahed type right like um you know the the flying lawnmower from ukraine um so the shahed
00:14:20.100type does not require a very sophisticated interceptor to uh to deal with right there
00:14:25.520there's footage of people in like you know yak 5 trainers you know like cessna type aircraft
00:14:30.900in Ukraine, knocking them down with light machine guns. And in theory, you know, a radar-controlled
00:14:37.72020-millimeter autocannon could deal with many of these threats. You don't need something extremely
00:14:43.360fancy like an SM-3 interceptor to deal with these. But there has been some reporting by
00:14:51.000fairly mainstream journalists that the U.S. has sort of underestimated the Shahed threat and not0.98
00:14:57.980deployed enough low-end air defense to deal with them. And as a result, we've seen hits from Shahed1.00
00:15:03.380type munitions on fairly important U.S. bases, like the Naval Support Activities Bahrain base
00:15:11.280on day one, which has been somewhat alarming for the U.S. side. On the other hand, the U.S. has
00:15:18.560actually cloned the Shahed. We've turned it into something called the Lucas, the low-cost0.97
00:15:24.420like unmanned aerial system and we have been deploying those against iran so they're also0.88
00:23:44.880Plenty of missiles were intercepted, plenty also got through.
00:23:48.400The Israelis have been doing a bit of a better job with1.00
00:23:52.160And we're getting out of there. And it's also sometimes kind of hard to tell what's from this year and what's from last year, because it's the current war kind of echoes the last one in a lot of those sorts of respects.0.99
00:24:04.220And it's a similar story inside Iran. There's some video coming out, but it's often difficult to tell what was actually hit from them.
00:24:12.000And so the sort of scale and targets can be a little bit difficult to pick out.
00:24:18.540Iran seemingly enjoyed a greater degree of success in hitting U.S. bases and also infrastructure targets in the various Gulf states.
00:24:27.660And those U.S. bases like Ali al-Salem in Kuwait, Al-Udeed in Qatar, Al-Dafra, Al-Minhad in the UAE and such like were largely abandoned about a week ago because they kind of figured that something was coming and it wasn't really too realistical.
00:24:47.840there the some of the u.s bases at least still had patriot batteries defending them it kind of
00:24:56.480looks like ali al-salem probably didn't because it was hit by at least one shahad 136 probably more
00:25:02.740we did get some chinese satellite imagery lending some suggestions of the amount of damage that was
00:25:09.320actually done there the infrastructure targets in the gulf states so far it looks like it's
00:25:16.420basically a sort of counter value campaign of economic warfare so production facilities
00:25:24.340airports and seaports essentially the three big gulf state airlines of emirates qatar and etihad
00:25:35.780have been business essentially overnight because their global hubs have been closed at least for
00:25:40.180the time being so we'll kind of see the economic impact of that over time and also to a degree
00:25:46.500tomorrow morning when the markets open probably a shock in oil prices is probably inevitable
00:25:52.900the iranians announced the closure of the strait of hormuz and have hit at least one ship some
00:26:01.140others as of this time. And some kind of preliminary observations about the broader
00:26:11.300strategic effects of the actual strikes on Iran are that the decapitation was immediately successful
00:26:19.500insofar as it did kill its intended targets, arguably unsuccessful in that the state didn't
00:26:26.600collapse which a bit of speculation but it seems like the intended outcome here was that
00:26:32.840the air campaign would provoke some kind of uprising probably supported by us and israeli
00:26:39.240intelligence within iran which would overthrow the either install or turn really threaten anyone
00:26:47.800so so far that hasn't happened the iranians have had a couple of reps at this point of
00:26:52.200reacting to decapitations and lines of succession seem to have gone fairly smoothly with other
00:26:58.560people taking over the head of state and or government is the now the previous vice president
00:27:04.780essentially an interim supreme leader has been appointed we'll see what happens to them over time
00:27:10.940but uh that seems to be the net effect there for now the only public large public demonstrations
00:27:18.640inside Iran appear to be in support of the government, at least as of the moment.
00:27:26.220So going forward from now, Kulak, you mentioned the potential worries about shortages of air
00:27:33.920defense interceptor missiles in the U.S. and Gulf state inventories.
00:27:41.060That is certainly a concern that is being talked about quite a lot right now with a
00:27:48.280lot of this being that if the Iranians can sustain their effort, if their missile launchers
00:27:54.440aren't suppressed, destroyed, or reduced in capacity at some level, that those magazines
00:28:00.040will probably be exhausted in not much more than a week. We'll see if things actually do
00:28:06.640shake out that way. Similarly, the US and Israel do have limited stocks of their own
00:31:29.820to level major urban centers in Czechoslovakia and then the Netherlands.
00:31:34.340And reportedly that played a role in convincing the leadership of those countries to surrender immediately
00:31:42.080rather than wage a protracted ground war against the Germans.
00:31:46.420But in the current sense, air power alone is unlikely to provoke some sort of mass uprising or defection by the military.
00:31:54.860Iran has spent the last 50 years building the IRGC up as a parallel military to ensure the loyalty of the conventional force.
00:32:05.240And as such, with most of the ringleaders from the previous round of rioting in January already liquidated, it's unlikely that we'll see mass civil in Iran right now.
00:32:19.160The rally around the flag effect is probably more likely at the current moment.0.84
00:32:24.860I definitely do want to talk about the decapitation strikes going on.
00:32:34.520Currently, it looks like Ali Larijani might be in charge.
00:32:48.360So Ali Larijani is a former IRGC general and former speaker of their national parliament, as well as the chair of their equivalent of the National Security Council.
00:33:03.360So he is a sort of defense and political leader of the first rank.
00:33:09.700The Guardian Council would not actually let him run for the presidency, which is very interesting.
00:33:13.780But it has been widely speculated that he is currently the leading figure in Iran and has been responsible for much of the crackdown against the protests and rioting in January.
00:33:28.440He's part of a position called the Multalafe, which is a conservative group, not the most hardline group, but also not reformist in any sense.
00:33:39.060um originally he studied engineering and computer science as a younger man
00:33:45.340uh so he is definitely more technically uh informed than the purely religious leader class
00:33:53.100and during the breck war as well so he has quite some substantial military experience
00:34:01.280as such i think that he will very likely become the power behind the throne in iran
00:34:07.480even if he is not formally part of the three-man governing troika has been formally known as the
00:34:15.980new leadership the ayatollah that is currently on that council um ali reza arafi has is basically
00:34:24.480like the rector of uh iranian religious seminaries the man has you know plenty of religious leadership
00:34:32.320experience but absolutely nothing relevant on the military strategic industrial or economic sense
00:34:38.260so i suspect that larry johnny will be in the country if he can avoid being liquidated uh in
00:34:45.960this area campaign so this is something that um so my read of the strategic situation
00:34:56.720is that uh the u.s seems to not really have a strategy and you can see this from like
00:35:04.820how the trump administration has behaved over the past year year plus that the strategy seems to be
00:35:12.180um domestic political strategy or one might or donor class political strategy that uh okay if
00:35:20.640we do this or we negotiate this uh that takes the pressure off um there's that coordinated uh
00:35:28.600i'll hit you and then you hit me like uh attack and retaliation in this last summer uh during the
00:35:37.160seven days during the where um the u.s hit iran's nuclear facilities but then like it they coordinated0.98
00:35:47.380and arranged the exact number of bombs and missiles
00:38:22.020And over the past year plus is the failed Israeli attempt at regime change during the
00:38:35.820day war, during the protests around them prior to the U.S. nuclear strike.
00:38:43.560Israel has, like, actually been exhausting a lot of its, like, intel resources in Iran.
00:38:48.760Like probably something like 80% of their espionage assets they probably burned last summer trying to have that uprising and all those coordinated strikes.
00:39:00.480And then, you know, these protests over the past month are probably they screwed over the Kurds and a few other ethnicities in Iran, dumping the contents of Syrian prisons on the Iranians to like bolster the paramilitary side of the protest.
00:39:22.920Obviously, there were real protests that happened, but a lot of the 10,000 that allegedly died during the Iranian response were not ordinary protesters.
00:39:37.200They were various paramilitaries and others who were, like, sent in to disrupt the place.
00:39:45.380Like, these are a lot of the assets that had been expended.
00:39:50.100But usually you want a concentration of force when you're, like, going for all the marbles and trying to take down a government.
00:39:57.280Like, usually you want all your air assets and all your espionage assets and, like, a culled levy paramilitaries that you pulled in from other countries and whatnot.
00:40:09.320like you don't want to do it like the nightmare scenario is you do what has happened which is you
00:40:14.200you use all a good chunk of your air assets and you use your espionage assets at another time
00:40:21.680then you use your paramilitary assets and you know you go in the congo line of death where you go in
00:40:27.420one at a time time and like and none of these assets are supporting each other properly like
00:40:35.100what's happened is each of these failed attempts has burned the resources that should have been
00:40:40.820all been used at once and uh the and like that's on the Israeli side on the American side
00:40:48.680uh it looks to me like uh entirely a wag the dog situation where a lot of the
00:40:56.440the strategic and like tactical goals are having to be interpreted or like written back into the
00:41:05.760script you know like uh like uh the star wars novel writers like trying to trying to draw
00:41:13.380themes out of uh the prequel movies uh that you have to come to this work that's been given to
00:41:20.420you, and all the decisions were made for odd reasons, and then write in a meaning to them
00:41:25.900that all the mid-level officers at the Pentagon and whatnot are basically novel writers for
00:41:40.940an expanded universe they didn't make the decisions on, that's my interpretation.
00:41:48.200that a lot of this is like, like very ad hoc, wag the dog type stuff that the, the Likud
00:41:55.400Maga intersection of like these very, very old Jewish donors are not, are like, to the
00:42:08.160extent they're thinking strategically are thinking in two years, we might not even have0.79
00:42:12.880the power to do this we gotta do this now and like uh our largely senile 70 and 80 year olds
00:42:19.700who like wouldn't be thinking that strategically anyway uh does that does that narrative like have
00:42:27.400any attachment to reality or am i like reading my political resentments into the situation
00:42:32.660i reckon it more or less does of a u.s interest at play that doesn't necessarily involve iran
00:42:45.040directly as such insofar as they want some easy victories as a show of force to the rest of the
00:42:51.400world to restore their military credibility supposedly according to various american
00:42:56.700officials mr hegseth has been marching around the pentagon bellowing about restoring deterrence
00:43:02.220So there's that's certainly a major part of it. And the other half is purely Israeli interest. They want to turn Iran into a failed state the same way has happened to Libya and Syria. So as not to have any counterbalancing power in the Middle East to check on their ambitions.
00:47:33.480And so destroying Iran's infrastructure, their industrial base and their existing military
00:47:39.780reduces the viability of that sort of plan.
00:47:42.720It makes it so that the Chinese really don't want to invest in Iran and they would consider
00:47:47.000Iran to be too risky and essentially not worth plowing significant investment into
00:47:54.620Um, that I think is broadly, broadly rational, but at the same time, destroying much of Iran's capabilities doesn't meaningfully degrade China's options in the rest of the world. So on that truly most grand strategic of levels, it doesn't actually matter that much for the true Cold War between the US and China.0.74
00:48:14.920so i i'm not sure to what extent the u.s is like capable of degrading iran's industrial
00:48:24.920capacity like uh like at at the uh as goffy has said it doesn't look like there's much in terms of
00:48:35.280like out like air contesting uh i was faced like uh like even the air i think that's about to change
00:48:45.980oh so in the first 24 hours it was largely standoff munitions but we've seen some footage
00:48:54.400from the last eight hours of allied jets over tehran itself of reaper drones over mainland
00:49:01.540Iran firing Hellfire missiles at point-blank range against ballistic missile transport erector
00:49:07.200launchers. There's going to be a degree of caution in the literal first 24 hours while battle damage
00:49:15.880assessment of the initial strikes against Iranian Cedar air defense have been going on. But even in
00:49:22.400the 12-day war, there were Israeli fourth-generation jets, like their upgraded F-15s and F-16s over
00:49:29.920Iran itself. Iran has not had much of a chance to rebuild its center air defenses. They haven't
00:49:36.960really been able to import significant numbers of new radars and command centers and actual
00:49:43.940launching batteries from either Russia or China, and their domestic production is thoroughly unable
00:49:50.240to replenish losses within, you know, nearly one year. I would be confident in saying that
00:49:58.000by the end of the week, if the combat continues at the current rate, that U.S. jets will essentially
00:50:04.960find high altitude over Iran to be nearly uncontested.
00:50:12.280I can't say I've come across anything yet showing U.S. and Israeli aircraft over Iranian
00:50:18.140territory itself. Can you maybe send me something to that effect?
00:50:23.980So, like, what surprised me is that, like, Iranian air defendants would be exposed to being picked off in this way.1.00
00:50:40.420I would assume that these are, like, fairly disguisable and conceivable.0.80
00:50:46.840Like, we know all the Taiwanese camouflage tricks, tricks around their various assets, and Iran is like a much larger territory to hide stuff in, like, just hangers, under positions, etc., you know,0.72
00:51:12.700optical multi-spectrum camouflage that much is true i that much is true that you can
00:51:22.060hide like you know a small missile launcher in a cave or whatever but the more the larger
00:51:28.080your missile is the larger your system of systems is the more difficult it is to hide and iran is
00:51:34.940mostly mountainous and arid so they don't have like a thick dense jungle foliage to to hide
00:51:41.800behind either. And especially if you want to engage aircraft at high altitude, you can't
00:51:47.420rely entirely on ground-based infrared detection systems either. You need to radiate. And if you
00:51:54.280are radiating, you can be pinpointed and then targeted immediately, which is the problem for
00:52:00.840any of these shoot and scoot missile launchers. It's definitely possible to wage an asymmetric
00:52:06.200anti-air campaign like the Hussies did, right? They shot down over a dozen Reapers, but those0.97
00:52:10.940reapers were flying very low in order to identify specific who see leaders if we're going after
00:52:16.920something as big as like a flap lid radar for an s300 we don't need to fly low this this is
00:52:22.120something that you can do from like you know 50 000 feet or even with a satellite yeah exactly
00:52:27.640the u.s like signals intelligence satellites um as far as geostationary orbit um have been able
00:52:34.760to detect these things um you know from you know something like a third of the way to the moon
00:52:39.880incidentally i do have a full page of notes on iranian air defense systems if you're
00:52:48.200curious about finite details you do go into this um because again my knowledge of air defense
00:52:55.860and missiles and and electronic intelligence and all of this is all derived from uh suffering some
00:53:04.020simulators in a high fleet so you will be edgy and almost certainly are listeners
00:53:10.440yeah so you mentioned systems that are essentially capable of having a relatively
00:53:18.360low profile and potentially waging an asymmetric campaign the most numerous system in that
00:53:23.640category and sort of the medium range sam designed to operate in an ambush posture is the
00:53:59.560All in one. It's designed to operate under fairly tight emissions control so that they, again, don't have to emit with their radars very much, although this does limit its capability in terms of range.
00:54:12.740So it has basically optical and thermal cameras combined with a fairly long-range laser rangefinder, and the idea is that it can detect, track, and launch on a target and then only energize its radar to illuminate that target for the last few seconds before impact.
00:54:30.280i suspect that relying on optical and thermal tracking may be quite potentially quite severely
00:54:38.620hindered by bad weather but i'm not too much of a technical fine details sort of chat thank god
00:54:45.480they do also the iranians do also operate certain systems in the medium range category that are
00:54:52.500probably a lot less of a threat like the aforementioned uh soviet cub but just upgraded
00:54:58.400to use iranian rod missiles they also have american hawks which are a medium range system
00:55:05.200from the early 1960s some of which have been upgraded to the mersad standard with new missiles
00:55:12.080but again those are all semi-active radar homing systems so they have to illuminate
00:55:18.000a target all the way until impact so they have a much larger signature essentially
00:55:26.000i i believe they also have have caught the chinese hq7 which was derived from the french
00:55:35.340crotal system but um yeah like all of these systems like in a vacuum they do have some
00:55:42.780potential to spot an aircraft through a either thermal or electro-optical system but like the
00:55:50.800amount of sky that those systems can scan at any given moment is very limited compared to the
00:55:55.880amount that a broader tracking radar can. And without proper integration between different
00:56:02.040radars, command centers, and launchers, the entire system's effectiveness degrades, right? Like
00:56:07.720striking at the links between command centers, radars, and launchers is much more useful for
00:56:16.160degrading the effectiveness of an air defense system than blowing up every last launcher.
00:56:21.900and there also is a difference between total standoff tactics and total stand-in tactics right
00:56:27.520like the u.s uh glide bombs like the the kind that the russians have been using to devastating
00:56:33.700effect in ukraine that can be lobbed from you know 30 or 40 kilometers out without having to
00:56:38.760get right over the target like you might have to do with like a a desert storm era gbu right and
00:56:44.900like the glide bombs are still extremely cheap compared to like a jasm or tomahawk or that new
00:56:51.000stealth tomahawk that was first debuted, um, on the first day of the conflict as well.
00:56:59.280Yeah. And the sort of bigger picture thing that I was going to add to that is that sort of my
00:57:03.240assessment of Iranian air defenses is that they're not, um, certainly not capable of
00:57:08.760like fully closing the sky and denying the airspace. And obviously they've been having
00:57:13.440a lot of trouble intercepting, uh, cruise missiles as well, especially, um, stealth ones,
00:57:17.900But essentially what they can do is create a certain level of risk that will maybe alter the calculus of an adversary.
00:57:26.720Like they will probably shoot down some U.S. and Israeli aircraft, but not enough to meaningfully affect the outcome.
00:57:33.920But just enough to sort of negate the don't let them see you that the Trump administration seems to have been pursuing so far.
00:57:45.560in absolute terms that kind of broke this morning when they admitted to the first
00:57:49.440casualties yeah so and israel has also lost a couple of medium altitude like uh long endurance
00:57:57.380drones as well of the i think hermes like 900 series um i don't think we've seen any indication
00:58:04.500lost manned coalition aircraft nor did we see any evidence of israel losing any jets during the 12
00:58:09.880day war i think there is a decent possibility that even if this goes on for another like two
00:58:15.240weeks that the u.s and israel might get through this without losing a single manned strike jet
00:58:19.620that's um the level of confidence that i have in iranian air defense
00:58:24.920oh did you see the footage of the reaper firing the hellfire at point blank range that i posted
00:58:35.900where is that sorry um in the general chat or the voice of uh the server that we're oh okay
00:58:52.060uh it's age restricted on reddit so i have to work around that for a second
00:59:53.460instance because I mean it might in a ground war
00:59:55.520but really not in an air war because it's breaking
00:59:57.420up line of sight for the SAMs so badly
00:59:59.160so then is the correct move from iran to try and force an escalation into wider regional war0.93
01:00:08.680that uh they've sort of already done that right by striking targets in every arab country in the
01:00:16.500gulf they have gotten those countries to contribute their air and missile defenses to the american
01:00:22.520cause. Iran just doesn't really have that many allies that it can call upon, right? Like Hezbollah
01:00:29.520has started launching against Israel, but Hezbollah is somewhat degraded from the state that it was in
01:00:34.100last year. And even last year, it wasn't really able to force Israeli capitulation. The Hussies
01:00:39.500have started launching again as well. But again, the Hussies have only had limited resupply
01:00:45.220I sense a rough rider and they also do not have the capabilities to really go beyond the level
01:00:52.960of damage that they did last year it's difficult to point out a pause condition for Iran at this0.99
01:00:59.440point other than hope that the limited number of casualties that they can inflict from you know
01:01:04.060short-range ballistic missiles and shaheads against U.S. and allied targets in Bahrain and
01:01:09.100qatar and the uae can force uh trump to throw in the towel
01:01:14.840yeah so so my raid would be that like iran iran's two wind conditions would be forcing trump to
01:01:26.980kind of chicken out and back out or force a ground war of some kind because uh how would
01:01:37.100what scenario would would do this like are they going to like somehow like
01:01:44.460march an army into iraq and then kuwait like that that just seems very implausible at this point
01:01:49.400so there there's kind of a few things like uh if they kill just a bunch of americans for example
01:01:58.840That could force the ground war that there's presumably a threshold at which America has to respond with something approaching like an Iraq-style ground invasion of some sort.
01:02:22.240because it's just, it's just too politically intolerable otherwise.
01:02:29.540Like, if Iran somehow, somehow managed to kill a thousand Americans, for example,
01:02:36.540there's a point at which the administration loses enough face that has to escalate.0.69
01:02:44.360But there's also, like, Iraq basically is Iranian territory
01:02:50.000in terms of, like, Iraq is run by its Shia militias.
01:02:56.180You know, George W. Bush killed that country to Iran.0.66
01:03:01.640Like, there are a lot of ways for those militias
01:03:06.820to destabilize other countries in the region.
01:03:11.080The one that I think of most of all is Jordan.0.99
01:03:15.400that basically all of Israel's security depends on the half of Shemites in Jordan staying in charge.1.00
01:03:25.800And they're eternally very unstable.1.00
01:03:31.140The Jordanian regime has only a few million people in their country.
01:03:40.000and and and like several million of them are palestinians yeah 9.9 million and then uh
01:03:50.420some obscene yeah two million of the 9.9 million people in jordan uh 2.1 million are registered
01:04:01.840Palestinian refugees, which have not been given Jordanian citizenship.0.97
01:04:08.300But this is the backbone of Israel's internal security, because as long as the Jordanian
01:04:16.840remains stable, there's no way for arms, et cetera, to flow into the West Bank, and no0.87
01:04:25.000outside force can kind of overthrow the uh the vichy government that the vichy palestinian
01:04:34.640authority that runs the west bank uh uh if iran can knock off the jordanian government
01:04:43.040all of a sudden the kind of throat of the israeli state is like heavily destabilized
01:04:53.200because there's chaos immediately on its border and the chaos immediately on its border flows
01:04:58.480immediately into the west bank which can't really be secured and uh the west bank where
01:05:04.900it's close like the west bank immediately borders tel aviv it's like 10 20 kilometers from like the
01:05:13.420edge of the west bank to uh to the mediterranean and like tel aviv is in that 20 kilometers like0.86
01:05:21.760Like, it would seem to me that Iran actually has, like, a fair number of different options to just make the Mideast go nuts.0.90
01:05:35.320Beyond that, the seven countries, basically, that Iran has attacked.0.95
01:05:41.240We saw this in Qatar. Iran hit a U.S. base. The public in Qatar start cheering and hooting that they love that Iran was hitting U.S. bases.
01:05:58.480That none of these regimes, it's actually kind of the opposite of what's portrayed to the West.
01:06:06.020Basically, all the U.S. ally regimes, Qatar, Bahrain, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, all
01:06:15.800these are like artificial dictatorships.
01:06:19.080They're propped up by the U.S. and Israel.0.83
01:06:21.760And like the trade flows, they're like, none of them have like a feedback loop through
01:06:26.900like any democratic system whatsoever.
01:06:35.360These are the already relatively unstable despised dates of conspiracy theories you like.
01:06:44.560There's a very good chance that the Las Vegas shooting of that country music concert was part of a wider assassination attempt on Mohammed bin Salman.
01:06:57.320that uh that the mass shooting was meant as like a cover for an assassination attempt
01:07:04.580uh the mandalay bay was owned by by prince bin solman and you basically the we have no idea
01:07:16.100where muhammad bin solman was that night they've never confirmed he was anywhere else and allah
01:07:22.060Yeah, Tucker Carlson has done an entire expose on this.
01:07:31.300But of, like, stability that Saudi Arabia has,
01:07:34.920that their own millions and, like,0.99
01:07:39.360may have started the largest mass shooting in U.S. history
01:07:43.340as cover for an assassination attempt on who is currently the proud prince of Saudi Arabia.
01:07:49.740Like, these are not very stable countries without their cash flows, that it's very possible that if the Strait of Hormuzes is shut or the cash flows stop or there's merely malicious and whatnot erupting,
01:08:09.360that several of these governments could fall without an extraordinary effort on the part of the U.S. to prop them up.
01:08:20.520I seriously doubt that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia or Kuwait or any of these powers
01:08:29.800are really willing to dedicate any of their militaries to a ground fight in Iraq
01:08:36.320or elsewhere to try and prop each other up0.97
01:08:39.460because they need those molters at home0.95
01:08:52.400They've been launching sporadic light drone,
01:08:55.520mortar RPG, and harassing small arms fire
01:08:59.740against various U.S. and Allied-related targets in the area,
01:09:07.120but they seem to be having very limited effect.
01:09:09.520They certainly can't take the war as far as Jordan,
01:09:12.280since most of Western Iraq is just open desert,
01:09:15.960you know, hundreds of miles of desert.
01:09:17.480And if you try to drive a convoy of technicals from Eastern Iraq,
01:09:22.680where most of the population is, to Jordan,
01:09:24.540you will be utterly annihilated by the Israeli Air Force en route.
01:09:27.880I do agree that Jordan's status as a linchpin of the American and Israeli-led security architecture in the Middle East is, but I see no indication that despite some populist grumbling and distaste for Israel, that the regime may be about to fall.
01:09:47.260You will remember that during the Arab Spring, that it's the republics of the Middle East, right? It's Syria, it's Libya, it's Tunisia and Egypt that have massive destabilization and public uprisings that lead to the fall of various leaders. But all of the monarchies in the Gulf were essentially fine.
01:10:06.620There were some minor protests in Bahrain and Qatar, and they were rapidly suppressed because over there, it's the the royal family's extended clan that runs the regime's internal security forces, like literally the family of the of the king or the emir.
01:10:24.300They have all the guns. It's not like the U.S. where, you know, every random hillbilly has a shed full of AR-15s.
01:10:31.620Very difficult for popular uprisings to threaten the regime, despite, you know, what may be genuine anger at a policy of supporting the hated Israelis.
01:10:46.320You will also remember that all of these countries have massive entitlement states for their population, right?0.63
01:10:53.300All of these people are getting discounted food, energy, jobs where you don't have to do anything, massive pensions, free health care.
01:10:59.640They live, you know, first world quality lives and spend most of their time on TikTok.
01:11:03.720These are not the hardened desert, desert nomads of 1911.
01:11:07.680They don't have the same will to fight that their great grandparents did.
01:11:11.000So, you know, they'll complain, they'll, they'll protest, but I can't really see them doing some sort of suicide bomber campaign or massive human wave rushed to take down their hated king.
01:11:29.640bad isn't it interesting thought again part of this is is uh this is part of my eternal world
01:11:40.380view is i expect things to be way more kinetic because i have a very kinetic personality and i
01:11:45.320adjust to uh to like well people just behaved rationally with my model rationality but uh
01:11:54.700You are very right that whatever you listeners at home may think of Westerners and our propensity to go along with the regime or the government or tyranny, it is nothing compared to what you see in a lot of Middle Eastern countries.
01:12:15.720Like, uh, like modernity has hit, hit the, uh, the Gulf states, uh, in terms of like
01:12:25.420hue and cap quality a lot harder than most of the West.0.98
01:12:30.220I will say that the Hussies are still real men, like their great grandparents were.
01:12:33.720They have exceeded all expectations for their willingness and ability to fight.0.96
01:12:38.300But, uh, everyone in the Northern Gulf, you know, they spend all their time on, on TikTok
01:16:52.980The Korean War, or any of these great power wars that have been centered,
01:17:01.080seemingly none of China, U.S., and certainly not the EU,
01:17:09.440confident in their own internal stability to fight a medium or great war.
01:17:20.320that Russia's strategy in Ukraine has been seemingly to drag out the war as long as possible
01:17:27.380and hope that they win by default when something else happens.
01:17:36.040China seems in no rush at all to retake Taiwan.
01:17:41.240The Middle East, every actor in the Middle East has seemingly been trying to really avoid an escalation.0.57
01:17:47.480And, like, presumably Iran is kicking itself now that they could have, you know, they could have been having this, like, major missile war back in, like, 2024, yeah, 2024, 2023, when Syria was still intact, when Syria was still under Assad, when Hezbollah still had their full strength,
01:18:13.840and when Gaza was still, like, very kinetic and Hamas had not been defeated yet,
01:18:21.620that they probably would be much, much referred to be having this war back then
01:18:28.600when they had all those other options on the table as opposed to now.
01:18:33.400But they were also playing this old man's knife fighting game
01:18:36.800where they weren't quite that confident in their own internal stability
01:19:00.340Well, they stand off and occasionally take a swing at each other0.51
01:19:03.920but really don't want to get in a grapple or anything like that
01:19:08.500Because even if you're an old man and you win a knife fight, you know, you get stabbed once, that wound probably is never going to heal.0.96
01:19:16.980Because you're an old man, you don't heal well at all.1.00
01:19:19.180You'll probably die of sepsis of, like, the wounds you sustain.
01:19:23.620So the state of world geopolitics, my model of it is that the U.S. is declining.
01:19:32.080Everyone knows that it's relatively declining in terms of economics and its demographics.
01:19:37.500and everything else and so at the same time all these other powers that are like also internally
01:19:45.360weak and like don't really want to get stuck in in or getting bald in anything hoping someone else
01:19:51.440will be the hoping that the if the world crisis happens will be somewhere else uh at the same
01:19:59.480time the u.s is like trying to shore up the dollar and uh its authority by by chasing a bunch of easy
01:20:07.140When Venezuela is the most obvious one word, you shore up your authority, you bring a bunch of the world's oil back under the U.S. dollar system, and you spook everyone else into not messing with you in a way that might threaten U.S. interest rates or the debts or, like, cause or threaten to cause inflation.
01:20:32.220so in this model that I have where everyone's just waiting and hoping that the great crash
01:20:45.400out will happen somewhere else it seemed to me that both Russia and China really wanted
01:20:53.780the crash out to happen on each other's border like China it seemed would have really liked for
01:21:00.260russia to the war in ukraine to ask escalate in the all their rivals to be fighting russia
01:21:09.160and and russia would have really liked it to happen in the strait of taiwan uh
01:21:17.100and iran seemed to be the one place that like the other actors kind of didn't want to happen
01:22:28.860So the Chinese do appear to be doing some intelligence sharing with the Iranians.
01:22:34.260They did this quite publicly before the war kicked off
01:22:36.980by publishing satellite imagery of where U.S. aircraft were on various bases.
01:22:43.680They put out a few various things that have been hit since it started.
01:22:48.820On the sort of big geopolitical chess game vis-a-vis Russia, if Iran goes south, it does potentially create a nasty security situation not too far away from them, albeit one that Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia all have to put up with first.0.53
01:23:04.820But one more immediate effect is they would make a killing on the oil market in the short term.0.70
01:23:09.960that much is true and it also diverts u.s and eu surface-to-air missile production
01:23:18.440to the middle east to shore up their own installations rather than donating these
01:23:24.120things to ukraine so in the short term if iran can survive like the next few months
01:23:29.740russia may be an actual winner and especially if iran's need to massively increase its cadence
01:23:38.720of arms purchases from russia after all of this ends if they can serve
01:23:43.360in terms of the logistics of like iran actually like securing arms of my impression is it's way
01:23:56.260easier for them to get arms from russia than from china uh like russia there's about like
01:24:02.780three or four land routes that go through through very stan countries that uh the u.s
01:24:11.900really doesn't have much control to like stop shipments and like well they literally share
01:24:17.820a border on the caspian sea russia can just ship stuff on like a container terminal to iran through
01:24:23.380the caspian sea that literally would be very difficult to interdict um china presumably
01:24:30.520they would just go through russia i i don't think that the u.s could really stop china from
01:24:34.300seriously delivering quantities of equipment if the chinese wanted to uh during a time of peace
01:24:40.260well this is the the thing with during a time of time of peace it might not be that difficult but0.58
01:24:46.780uh if you actually look at like the chinese the chinese border regions like going through
01:28:03.960One of the big reasons that the riot has kicked off the military
01:28:07.460The new Iranian government, under President Khashnikan, wanted to somewhat cut Iran's energy subsidies to, you know, consumers and small businesses in order to free up more funding for these sorts of defense and industrial related spending items.
01:28:24.860But the population decided to riot, of course, potentially instigated by foreign actors.
01:28:29.840But the amount of money in Iran's system to be able to pay for these things is just extremely limited.
01:28:37.460my eyes nearly popped out of my skull a while ago and i found out how cheap the subsidized
01:28:42.380gasoline is anyway yeah it's crazy right is the subsized gasoline in turin the equivalent is
01:28:49.540between one and three cents a liter depending who you are yeah oh so they're like actually
01:28:56.720literally just giving it to them basically it's oh nearly free yes
01:29:00.980and this creates like massive over consumption right like if you're if something is massively
01:29:06.860over subsidized people are going to use it way more than if it was at a market clearing price
01:29:12.840um yeah like if you have like some business making venture that you can make like two cents worth
01:29:20.200the product once for that one cent worth of gasoline like you're going to you you're going
01:29:27.460to be like burning all the gasoline you can to create like two cent products that can't justify
01:29:34.240the burning of the gasoline, like, according to internal economics, that's, that's insane.
01:29:45.340This is, this is, again, one of those things that, like, we, we don't appreciate here in0.90
01:29:52.040the West, like, we, like, obviously, we hate our own economy because it's so screwed up0.96
01:29:57.520like uh you know white men aren't allowed to have jobs or jobs doing anything important0.91
01:30:06.160because you have to hire someone to ink confident but like almost every other country in the world0.98
01:30:13.200has something like equally insane and retarded economically they're like uh you know we we pay0.98
01:30:20.720gasoline taxes you know we assume that the gases can be more expensive than did you than the1.00
01:30:29.420economics actually demand uh whereas like like the amount of gibbs that uh the the brown third world1.00
01:30:38.900uh demands ongoingly is totally incredible it's funny because venezuela had a very similar system1.00
01:30:48.600Right. Like much of the third world is indeed the beneficiary of these absurd energy subsidies.
01:30:55.260And by spending that much money on these things, they don't have that many options for financing, you know, massive investment in productive enterprises or weapons from abroad.
01:31:06.560And the amount of that they have spent on Russian weapons was largely misallocated.
01:31:11.240There was a recent delivery of MI-28 heavy attack gunships from Russia to Iran.
01:31:18.560And that's the type of weapon system that is just utterly useless in this kind of fight.
01:31:22.520If they attempted to deploy that sort of system against, say, U.S. bases in Bahrain or Qatar,
01:31:30.000they'd get shot down before they even made it to the coast.0.80
01:31:33.820The one potential use for this kind of thing is giving it to the IRGC
01:31:37.420so that if the armored divisions of the Iranian regular army decided to revolt against the regime,
01:31:42.860then the IRGC would have a very potent anti-tank asset to uh to attack the regular army with but
01:31:49.560fortunately for them this scenario has not really happened yet or it's about silver of
01:31:56.220internal counterinsurgency campaign yeah i would even say counterinsurgency because like you don't
01:32:02.620need a in a very modern gunship to deal with um you know militants with ak's hiding in the hills
01:44:23.080Oh, I just wanted to say that the U.S. and its allies still maintain by far the most potent tanker force on the planet, far outstretching the Russians or Chinese, who have a much higher ratio, like fighters and strike aircraft to enabler.
01:44:37.720nearly backbone of of uh all warfare issues how efficiently and convolutively you can ferry fuel
01:44:53.140uh you preppers at home stock up on jerry cans uh that that's the thing that's actually going
01:52:46.780You can say that about the U.S. as well.
01:52:48.500yes very much so uh mind you actually if trump
01:52:55.540actually arguably the senile old men are instructional in the u.s does the senile old
01:53:04.020men who who need uh israeli money on their election campaigns and like party with epstein
01:53:11.780in the 90s and 2000s like if they go there could be massive policy policy shifts in the u.s
01:53:18.260Whereas I suppose the assassination of this prick will probably, well, almost certainly cause policy shifts in Iran, but it seems less structural to Iran's geopolitical position than having Trump or McConnell or Lindy or all these aging figures in the U.S. system are to the U.S. political continuity.
01:53:48.260I do think that the assassination of senior leaders within Iran's defense hierarchy has made their campaign against the U.S. and its allies more uncoordinated than it otherwise would be.
01:54:00.740The Iranians are launching sporadically at, you know, at Israel, at Bahrain, at Qatar, at Kuwait, at the UAE, at Saudi Arabia, et cetera, instead of focusing their efforts on one target at a time in a way that would create the massive total weight of their salvo against a limited missile defense defense system to overwhelm it.
01:54:21.140And this is because, I believe, the Iranian leadership, defense leadership, specifically their chief of general staff, their defense minister, you know, who have all been killed in the last 48 hours, and their staffs have not been able to coordinate this properly.
01:54:36.160So the individual battalion and brigade level commanders in the field who are ordering these missile launches are doing so without direction from a higher level HQ and as such are wasting much of the potential of their salvos.
01:54:48.260interesting i i would have thought that that would be um relatively pre-planned like uh
01:54:59.540like whether or not you would or wouldn't go after the uae or uh bahrain or uh qatar
01:55:08.740that that would have been like um it's something pre-planned or like scenario
01:55:14.860So, ta-da, that just, like, you know, more planned art.
01:55:19.540I think the planning definitely helps for the first, like, you know, 48 hours of a conflict.
01:55:23.980And we're still, like, essentially in that phase.
01:55:26.560But after that, without battle damage assessment and level planning strikes have actually managed to achieve,
01:55:37.200then executing the pre-war plan, you know, by the book doesn't really add that much value.
01:55:41.980You need leaders to reconsider what sort of effects are going on.
01:55:46.400What sort of effects do we want to generate?
01:55:48.460How can we use remaining forces to execute those?
01:55:50.900And so by a certain point, just reading the book.
01:56:00.240And I want to emphasize this to anyone listening.
01:56:03.880This is where it's really important to have like set infrastructure for stuff like motorcycle
01:56:11.240carrots and whatnot that uh it's very easy to lose uh communication uh during strikes like
01:56:20.540this and you within 24 hours you should be able to re-establish those communications and plans via
01:56:29.220via just physically delivering messages which is if nothing else if nothing else is working or you
01:56:39.100get jammed or ship has has been taken out like you should you should be able to do it redundantly
01:56:48.640with sheets of paper if if necessary this is one of my eternal necks is that uh that modern
01:56:57.180militaries have forgotten how to do things old school and so something like this happens and
01:57:02.560And it takes them, you know, days on end to figure out something that militaries in World War I could have done in hours.
01:57:17.380A lot of the air tasking orders for Operation Desert Storm were delivered on paper by hand, albeit they were flown from place to place rather than transported by road, because there just wasn't enough secure bandwidth at the time to transmit it.
01:57:30.800Yeah, the early SACCOM system of the 90s just couldn't handle operational planning of that stuff.
01:57:38.140And we didn't have the landlines that NATO command had in Europe that we would have used for communication.
01:57:46.200There definitely is room for couriers.
01:57:48.960Are you guys all familiar with the millennial challenge of, I think, 2002?
01:58:11.460ever or found it if you let us at home i can look for that but um the general principle
01:58:22.920300 page summary, I would read all 300 pages.
01:58:29.720Yeah, I think there's like a Reddit interpretation that the Red Force player, I think General Van Ripper of the Marine Corps, it's funny, his name is literally General Ripper, outplayed the Blue Force by using all of these asymmetric techniques.
01:58:48.380and used information that he shouldn't have had
02:05:44.200irregular fighting version but um if you're a professional force if it's a infrared or laser
02:05:54.220uh any force that has uh for example air dominance over you or has a vigil on your
02:06:00.940position with the right optics can see the laser
02:06:04.140sure but if you're in the right position they can also see your light
02:06:09.660No, no, no, because you basically keyhole that, that, uh, that, like, you have, like, a room or two deep in a house that, uh, unless you're looking through the specific window at that specific angle, it's invisible.
02:06:28.420Yeah, you can do that with a laser, too.
02:25:16.960And hitting, like, little girls and, like, the goal in heights and this being the motivation for, like, some escalation that, you know, don't let it, never let an atrocity go to waste or an accident.
02:25:33.920the other thing i'll add to the campaign against various infrastructure targets in the gulf states
02:25:42.280is that uh i did see in one case some uh pro-iranian sources claiming that one of the
02:25:49.260specific hotels that was close to the u.s naval base in bahrain was housing u.s personnel no idea
02:25:55.000if that's true i suspect that at least some of them if not maybe all are incidental i do think
02:26:00.960that attacking the obviously is deliberate and almost certainly the airports as well
02:26:07.760because a bit over a quarter of the uae's gdp comes from its airline industry so
02:26:13.340closing dubai and abu dhab airports even for a short period plays absolute merry hell with that
02:26:20.080i i would definitely agree with that right like basically their entire economy is shut down for
02:26:27.480the duration of hostilities right their petrol exports their tourism their status as a finance
02:26:32.220hub so their ability to endure pain um may be critical to how they pressure one on how long
02:30:18.900the war now i've already compared it to to the phalophanesian war at the start uh it does seem
02:30:25.620like one of those like complex complex uh alliance alliance wars that could just like snowball into
02:30:36.120a rolling crisis crisis that like draws in tons of unpredictable angles uh
02:30:45.840do you guys have like a short medium and a long scenario
02:30:50.060um in the okay i can take a crack at that right like the short best case scenario
02:30:59.920for the u.s the regime decides to present an internal case that they can declare victory
02:31:08.440and you know show off video of u.s bases getting hit and then effectively uh surrender
02:31:15.400but not capitulate right they would agree to disarm certain of uh nuclear enrichment facilities
02:31:22.660and then dismantle some of their longer-range ballistic missile bases in return for
02:31:28.300cessation of immediate hostilities right and the medium-term camp scenario is just this but after
02:31:34.500two months of like immense pain being inflicted on iran's domestic industry i feel like the only
02:31:40.340long-term campaign that looks even kind of good for iran is a scenario where russia and china
02:31:47.260both take drastic steps to shore up the iranian regime rather than allow it i think that is
02:31:56.760somewhat unlikely but something that decision makers in tehran might be desperately hoping for
02:32:02.880and in terms of like the survivability of the uranian regime we've seen like ukraine a hold
02:32:14.620on for extraordinary amounts of time and we've seen other states like uh perpetuate in
02:32:21.980in cases of like extreme impoverishment and like uh suffering for like years and decades on end
02:32:32.720obviously the germans in world war ii but like iraq in the 90s and early 2000s
02:32:42.060perpetuated under extreme financial and internal hardship
02:32:46.960iraqi example is very much in the minds of decision makers today because while saddam
02:32:54.000hussein's regime was able to cling to power it lost its weapons of mass destruction program
02:32:58.460Its conventional army and air force massively shrunk. Its nuclear, biological, and chemical programs were essentially shut down. And its ability to project power was crippled. I think many in Washington would see that as a similar wind condition today, with the regime still technically in power, but desperately clinging on to dear life and unable to threaten anyone else. That's our wind condition.
02:33:21.720yeah i would uh generally agree with that and sort of0.88
02:33:28.680along with the same line that iraq was more or less salami sliced to death as was
02:33:36.600syria seemingly as well it just withered for so long under a continuous if relatively small
02:33:44.000amount of pressure until eventually someone sort of kicked the door in and it fell apart
02:33:50.560iran seemingly wants to avoid this if they can but i don't know if can't i would also like to
02:33:57.800point out the west loves generating ethnic proxy forces to do all the dirty work on the ground0.78
02:34:03.040during these sorts of air salami slicing campaigns right famously the kurds in both iraq and syria0.73
02:34:08.860although they keep on getting thrown under the bus whenever uh the kurds out of illness i suspect0.91
02:34:15.220that the U.S. may look to either the Kurds again or ethnic Azeris in Iran to generate potential
02:34:24.680anti-regime forces that could be armed and moderately supported to absorb casualties
02:34:29.620and attention on the ground. I would argue that Ukraine is effectively a scaled up version of0.61
02:34:36.200this. Yeah, right. The Russians try to do it with their two proxy puppet republics in Donetsk and0.91
02:34:42.220luhansk but you know they're not that good at it right like you'd argue that like taiwan is like
02:34:46.400in western in the other way around actually pop it in the yeah
02:34:52.300it's been like the anglo-american grand strategy for like the last 500 years to do this right like
02:35:02.060germany only became a great power because prussia was the uk's or great britain at the time
02:40:15.800They sent hundreds of thousands of construction troops and air defense.
02:40:19.940They gave most of their own AK-47 production to North Vietnam.0.76
02:40:23.220And then in the end, they had to fight Vietnam because the Vietnamese realized that the Chinese were worst patrons in the Soviet Union.0.61
02:40:33.420They looked at the U.S. interventions across the Middle East during the global war on terror, where the U.S. spent trillions of dollars essentially handing Iraq over to Iran and then leaving Afghanistan back into the hands of the Taliban.0.56
02:40:49.200And they're like, why would we do such a thing? Why would we attempt to bolster these regimes that are unsalvageable? Right. They're learning in Africa that after a extended period of heavy investment in the Belt, One Belt, One Road project, that the investment in Africa in infrastructure and industry and ports and in helping these regimes stay afloat is not paying itself off.
02:41:09.900none of these regimes are remotely competent enough uh to deliver the kind of kind of return
02:41:16.100that they're looking for they look at pakistan which has been one of their biggest strategic
02:41:20.140allies you know against india for the last 50 years and they think that these people0.99
02:41:23.500you know are religious extremists they're unreliable they can't do jack shit they can't0.97
02:41:28.840be trusted it's not worth protecting these people um and so when they look at iran they think the0.99
02:41:34.300same way, right? The Iranians think that they're better than the Chinese. They don't trust the1.00
02:41:41.580Chinese. There isn't this sort of grand anti-American alliance that's being built up
02:41:46.380because, quite frankly, all of these countries have no reason to trust each other other than
02:41:51.720mutual hostility. There's no ideological similarity. The Chinese think that the
02:41:57.380Iranians are religious fundamentalists. The Iranians think that the Chinese are godless0.90
02:42:00.720atheists um it just leads to a scenario where the reformist faction in iran wants to open up
02:42:08.820to the eu and like there's no one in the conservative faction that just understands
02:42:12.880economics so chinese investment despite the 400 billion dollar theoretical deal from you know
02:42:19.100five years ago is just not materializing i have nothing to add to that many have learned how
02:44:27.840So in the last year, they have approved the power of Siberia pipeline, too, was in discussion for like something like a decade in which much more of Russia, Eastern Russia and Siberia's oil and natural gas will be available for Chinese markets.
02:44:44.540They're also working on developing some additional overland links like a railway to Pakistan for importing oil.
02:44:52.780But by and large, their plan seems to be weaning their economy off Middle Eastern oil by developing, you know, 100, I think something like 60 new nuclear fission plants, as well as new technologies for synthesizing oil using other renewable power sources, like the absurd amount of cheap solar that they have coming online, right?
02:45:16.680of those systems plus massive like billions of oil in caverns they can remain caught fight in
02:45:25.700even three to fight against the u.s with no access to middle eastern oil and stay largely afloat
02:45:30.860in their defense industrial base even if the civilian sort of quality of life will drop
02:45:37.240this also sort of explains their investment in uh in ev infrastructure that's very different
02:45:49.160from north america's uh yeah they're all in on this stuff strategic rationale and to make a
02:45:56.040crap ton of money yeah because yeah they're actually growing their power grid enough to
02:46:01.860support electric vehicles in a way that we really haven't yeah they put something like0.81
02:46:06.500for Francis working on renewables online every year and accelerating.
02:46:13.780Well, also like, uh, this is the thing. So, um, electric vehicles really do not make much sense
02:46:22.300in the North American context because, um, North America, like, uh, you have to be able to drive
02:46:30.420extensively uh just because of the geography of the place like the the cities are all like very
02:46:39.080sparse uh there's tons of territory in between and uh just generally like uh especially if you're
02:46:48.360in canter or any cold environment uh ev electric vehicles have a reputation that for like crapping
02:46:56.440out or like losing their range uh right at the time of year where you don't want to get stranded
02:47:01.800whereas china like uh like most of their their infrastructure is centered around
02:47:12.220around like uh urban commuting or like uh or like a short trips they're they're even doing like0.95
02:47:22.120flying vehicles which like would be unthinkable in the amer in the american market like uh
02:47:30.240like automated automated flying vehicles which might just be like propagandist
02:47:35.900and stuff but uh the the willingness to like in the chinese market looks like the autonomous or
02:47:45.780or centralized fleet-owned electric vehicles
02:47:51.840might actually become like a major thing
02:47:56.760in a way that's been theorized in North America
03:03:48.480And does this translate to Shia Islam?
03:03:55.220Because obviously, like, there's a ton of variance across, like, individual ethnic populations in the Middle East, especially.
03:04:03.240Like, there are some ethnicities that are almost basically white in the Middle East or, like, and, like, certainly look at it and outperform massively.
03:04:13.000And there are other ones that are, like, uniquely dysfunctional.
03:04:18.480up so i'm not an expert here but from my understanding it is a problem in iran but
03:04:26.040not as bad as it is in the gulf like places like kuwait and um and like uh saudi arabia
03:04:34.620and pakistan have much worse incest rates than iran but iran still has a much higher
03:04:39.220incest rate than you might find in say east asia or western europe all right so this this would
03:04:46.540actually really explain why houthis still exist because like usually you think well that's right
03:04:55.580on the border with saudi arabia saudi arabia is a larger country that has a larger military budget
03:05:01.520why can't they just send in ground forces why are they only like i mean they did right like
03:05:07.840you remember the battles in like 2011 where entire saudi regular army and national guard
03:05:14.020maneuver brigades were encircled and destroyed by irregular houthi fighters
03:05:17.680this i was not paying attention at the time i i remember the uh the wars from like 2015 onwards
03:05:28.660i was not paying attention in 2011 do you do in fact this this is this is the before time long
03:05:34.840long you know i suspect many of our listeners do not remember this let me make sure i have the
03:05:42.060year right it might have been the it might have been 2015 they started some operations before but
03:05:47.260let me track down the year of the decisive battle there's a russian version of oryx you know the
03:05:52.420site that tracks is tracks um destroyed vehicles in ukraine i think they call it like lost armor
03:05:58.420r u yeah that's it yeah they have like pages and pages of of saudi operated labs and bradley's
03:06:07.820and like M163 like air defense Gatling sort of APCs
03:06:14.480that were destroyed in Yemen at the time.
03:06:18.720And it really suggests that like Mohammed bin Salman
03:06:21.600sent in like the equivalent of an entire division1.00
03:06:23.860in to try to, you know, overrun these ragtag hoosies.1.00
03:06:28.060And they got their faces kicked in.1.00