Episode 5179: Day 2 Of The War In Iran; 3 American Soldiers Killed
Episode 5179 dives into Israel’s reported strike killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, framed as a "decisive victory" by officials amid protests in Karachi leaving three U.S. soldiers dead. Military analysts question regime collapse despite 40+ Iranian leaders eliminated, citing the IRGC’s resilience and fractured succession plans, while critics warn air strikes alone risk Libya-style chaos. Iran retaliated with failed missile swarms—including a disputed attack on the USS Abraham Lincoln—and economic sabotage in Gulf states, as U.S.-led strikes (900+ sorties) targeted military assets. Captain Finnell insists U.S. air/sea dominance persists, but warns of lingering submarine and MANPADS threats, while political fallout over intelligence transparency and Trump’s leadership dominates the debate. The episode ends with skepticism about stability, as Iran’s asymmetric warfare and fragmented response prolong the conflict’s uncertainty. [Automatically generated summary]
Israel has confirmed that the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been killed as a result of those Israeli strikes that took place earlier today.
One of these sources saying that Israel actually has photographic evidence of Khamineh showing his dead body.
The second source told me that an official announcement is in the works, although it is possible that the Israelis will allow President Trump and the United States to make this announcement officially.
But this is enormous breaking news here that the Israeli government is confirming that the Supreme Leader of Iran was killed in Israeli strikes earlier today.
This is a day that many Israeli government officials have hoped would come eventually.
It is also, we should note, a day that many Iranian dissidents, Iranian protesters had hoped would eventually come.
And indeed, it has come now.
And it is an earth-shattering moment for the Middle East and for the future of Iran.
The most evil man on the friggin planet is dead, stone-cold dead, because of President Trump's resolve.
And if we lose anybody in this operation, they will have died a noble death because they will have risked their lives and sacrificed their lives to make us safer here at home.
They come into our country and try and assassinate people.
They're the biggest promoters of terrorism.
And the Democrats immediately, knee-jerk, they defend the terrorists, like to defend the illegal aliens and the criminals.
There's something wrong with that party.
That at a time we should be celebrating the most spectacular military act I've ever seen.
Khomeini's gone in 20 hours while their president Biden was funding the Iranians billions of dollars while Obama was paving the way for them to have nuclear weapons.
Donald Trump loves this country.
He knows right from wrong.
And we've had a real SYOP going on in this country for 10 years against this man where they try and pretend he's the authoritarian.
He's the dictator.
No, they are.
They talk about the War Powers Act of 1973.
Anybody who is a serious constitutional lawyer knows that act is unconstitutional.
I see all these lawyers writing these pieces like they're smart.
They're dumb.
And every administration, Republican and Democrat, has questioned it.
Questioned it.
But they haven't brought it to the Supreme Court because neither the Congress or the president wants a resolution.
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If President
Trump didn't want to see Iran hitting back and pushing back, President Trump should have not started this war from the beginning.
It was a war of choice, but there was no necessity to start this aggression.
They wanted the commander-in-chief to be elected by the entirety of the nation.
And they're even talking about impeaching him if they take the House of Representatives.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have an enemy within, and it is the Democrat Party.
Every reprobate, miscreant, and malcontent is in that party.
The Marxists and the Islamists are in that party.
Do they act like they love the nation?
Do they?
When we have men and women in uniform, Democrats, Republicans, and independents, fighting an enemy, fighting terrorists, the greatest terror regime in the world history.
And we're winning.
And that's why they're going nuts.
We're winning.
This is so spectacular what's taking place.
And I want our troops to know something.
These people who are trying to undermine you, they are a small percentage of the population.
We red-blooded Americans, we love victory.
And we love you.
You are of us.
And most of us have had relatives that found ourselves in the military.
Chuck Schumer means nothing to us.
Hakeem Jeffries means nothing to us.
You, Mr. and Mrs. America, we support our military.
We support our commander-in-chief.
We support victory.
This is a spectacular, spectacular military operation with our spectacular ally, the Israelis, with their spectacular prime minister.
It's working.
It's effective.
It's spectacular.
And these guys, we have to hurry back to Congress.
We need to have a vote on the War Powers Act of 1973.
This would be the same party that dragged us into Vietnam, right?
Was that a declared war?
No, it wasn't a declared war.
And I could go on and on and on about the hypocrites in that party.
It's their president that was about to hand nuclear weapons to this enemy.
It's their president who handed them billions of dollars in cash and so forth.
This president isn't going to put up with it, and he hasn't.
You have to remember this is an ideology that permeates the entire society.
Now, it doesn't mean that that ideology and the people that represent it aren't weakened.
They certainly have been weakened.
There's no question about it.
But what we're talking about is really what is in people's hearts and minds.
And that is really hard to change, especially if they have the belief system that they've had for, what, 47 years now.
That's a really difficult thing to change.
And the strikes that Israel and the United States have launched against Iran have been very directed at leadership targets, you know, taking out the head of the armed forces of Iran, taking out just a few minutes ago, the IDF reported they were taking out two fighter jets that old fighter jets, F4s and F4 and an F5 that was about to take off from Tabriz airport in Iran.
And that really shows that this is a multiple targeting effort.
In other words, what we're doing is we're taking out the leadership, but we're also taking out some of their instruments of power.
And that's going to go a long way to neutralizing Iran.
But it is not going to completely eliminate the ideology behind this regime.
But what we are seeing is a very divided picture, of course.
I want to take the city of Isfahan, the second largest city in Iran, as an example.
We saw these massive pro-government rallies in the streets, people mourning, crying for the supreme leader's death.
You have to remember, of course, though, that Iran is trying to orchestrate an image of strength because just hours earlier, social media video shows people honking their cars in the streets, celebrating, women waving their hijabs in celebration.
Again, and that divided picture that we're seeing on the ground in Iran is, of course, reflected across the region.
You mentioned the attacks on the U.S. consulate in Karachi, where you see those protesters breach the initial security barrier and then bang on the consulates with sticks, very dramatic images, very similar to what we saw in the green zone in Baghdad, which is where the U.S. embassy is located there as well.
Flashbangs being used, security forces cracking down on protesters angry about the death of the supreme leader.
But you're also seeing celebrations abroad as well, particularly among Iran's expat community.
There's a strong expat community here in London.
Some of them were out celebrating this weekend after the announcement of the death, as well as in Los Angeles, of course, in the United States.
But then there's also some anger and some resentment in the U.S. as well.
There was a demonstration in New York saying hands off Iran.
So as the memory of the Ayatollah is being debated and played out across the region and globally, you're seeing this very divided reaction.
But very importantly, this is a man who's going to be remembered in his final months for a brutal crackdown that killed thousands of Iranians.
And if we lose anybody in this operation, they will have died a noble death because they will have risked their lives and sacrificed their lives to make us safer here at home.
It's Sunday 1, March, in the year of the Lord, 2026.
The noble and honored dead of America, we're going to get to that in just a minute.
CENCOM has put an announcement.
I want to thank Real America's Voice, Parker and Rob Sig, our entire team in Denver.
Also, our fantastic team here at the war room.
We're going to go seven days a week because of like events that have just happened here in covering this major military operation as the president defines it or war until that time it's deemed unnecessary to cover it seven days a week.
So we'll be seven days a week.
This is our first.
And I want to thank, we've got, we're packed with some of the smartest minds about the region, the nation, geopolitics, military operations.
And I really want to thank them for changing their Sundays up to be with us.
Jack Bosobic, CENCOM's just put out Lindsey Graham, Mark Levin.
I mean, I think to torture the war room posse, we'd play an hour of Mark Levin, just over-the-top revolting comments of Levin.
But we'll spare you one in the cold open just to see what's playing on Fox 24-7.
We're trying to give you a, quite frankly, a more detailed and sophisticated look at what is actually happening.
Jack Bosobic, CENCOM, has just announced, I think, three Americans killed in action.
And I'm working right now with my sources at the Department of War within the Pentagon and other areas of the intelligence community and the military to be able to try to figure out exactly who that was.
CENTCOM saying that they're going to be holding back the information for 24 hours while family members are contacted.
I'm trying to see if we can figure out if they'll release at least which branch it was.
Early indications seem to be just based on what I've seen that this may be related to some of those on-base attacks, those strikes that we've seen, Bahrain, Qatar, some of the other ports all along the Middle East.
But of course, we've also seen attacks on U.S. bases otherwise.
One of the interesting pieces that we've seen is that there was a Sikorsky helicopter that was flown from Bahrain.
It's known for a medical combat rescue.
It was flown from Bahrain to Doha International.
That's something that we're tracking to see if that was related to this attack.
But as we could see right now, this is not bloodless for the United States.
We've lost three American service members, and we're told four or five in critical condition.
CENTCOM, by the way, confirming that the IRGC had claimed at one point that they had targeted the Lincoln with four ballistic missiles.
This is just about an hour ago.
CENCOM now confirming that the Lincoln was not struck by those ballistic missiles.
So this does not appear to be related to any attack on the Lincoln.
The Iranians claimed earlier they had targeted the Lincoln with four ballistic missiles.
So CENTCOMs, because a lot of times the Iranians are, you know, obviously in the Foggle war, the first casualty is truth.
They're always putting out.
Obviously, the first hit yesterday, they said, was a girl school that's still being, you know, that's still being worked through, whether it happened or not.
But did CENCOM actually concur that four ballistic missiles had targeted the Lincoln?
They said that the missiles did not come even close.
So I take that to mean that the missiles did target the Lincoln.
We know that Iran had supplied those anti-ship cruise missiles to the Houthis across the Arabian Peninsula there in the Red Sea area with anti-ship ballistic missiles or anti-ship cruise missiles in the past.
So certainly this is within their capabilities to target the carrier.
Of course, the carrier would be the ultimate target for any of their strike forces, strike packages.
And that's why the carrier has that defensive screen with the standard Missile 3 interceptors fired from the Arleigh Burke destroyers with their Aegis, their Aegis air defense systems.
They're fully capable.
Again, we don't know exactly what the status was, how it was that those missiles did not strike.
Now, they're saying ballistic missiles, not cruise missiles.
That could be something that's lost in the WASH.
But of course, it remains to be seen exactly what capabilities they're bringing to bear.
But yes, it does appear that it was targeted by missiles.
And the missiles, at least as of now, as we know, they have not been struck.
And of course, if the carrier had been struck, we'd be seeing images and videos, and Iran would be showing it everywhere.
I mean, this would be a high-value target in terms of propaganda for them.
So we would know immediately if that were struck.
There was a carrier that Iran seems to have struck, or excuse me, a tanker that Iran seems to have struck in the Gulf of Oman, the port of Oman, a Palau-flagged oil tanker that is currently sinking right now, as well as, by the way, CENTCOM striking an Iranian naval corvette that is currently on its way to Davy Jones Locker.
Yeah, Captain Finnell is going to be on about this, the Straits of Hermuse, because that will have a definite impact on oral markets tomorrow.
Jack, it's interesting.
I'm going to bring you Eric Princeton now.
Jack, you know, one of the justifications, rationale for why it had to go now, as the White House said yesterday, is that they had intelligence that the Revolutionary Guard was going to target American, they were going to strike first and target American, particularly American vessels and bases, but that's where they went.
Eric, a real, it seems like it's not as intense as the strike that ended the 12-day war, but spectacular results, correct?
I mean, they took out the Ayatollah and its top 40 guys, what, having a picnic lunch in the afternoon or gathering.
The intelligence was pretty special in the fact they took the Ayatollah and 40 of his top guys out, sir.
I don't think the regime has ever been changed by air power alone.
It's wishful thinking, and now it has indeed cost American lives.
I don't buy the argument that it was only because of they were doing it to preempt.
When you load that many troops and that many aircraft in an immediate area, you could almost guarantee a response.
But again, how does the regime get changed?
I don't think that Reza Pahlavi is a strong enough leader to, even though there may be some protest in Iran asking for him to come back, there's an absence of security apparatus to get him to get him to change.
The IRGC is the most powerful force in the country.
They are the ones that made money from all the sanctions.
They control the guns and the muscle, not even the Iranian army.
So I don't know what the plan is to name some interim leader.
I am discouraged.
And it will uncork a lot of chaos in the area.
And I really wonder what is the plan if there is not a clear successor person that actually takes power to try to keep some kind of interim government together.
And subjecting our foreign policy to Israeli foreign policy, I have a real issue with that.
I said it before.
I said it weeks ago in your show, not that this should not be the path forward.
And the president's chosen to do it.
I just wonder who pressured him that much to do it this way.
You've worked around and with the administration the first time.
You've been a, you've been, I've known you now for what, 15, almost 20 years.
You are certainly America first, but you've seen all the conflict all over the world.
You've been supportive of what the president's done to date, particularly in things like Venezuela, although for hemispheric defense, a lot of people are not even happy with that.
Just let's walk through this because you're an important voice here.
Why are you disappointed with what the president's actions have been?
If there is a viable ground force that could seize and hold terrain and control terrain, then I guess air power and a decapitation strike makes more sense to me.
But clacking off against the leadership and leaving a real void right now, I'm concerned that it's going to ensue with a lot of chaos because who knows what other weapons the Iranians have stocked away and they're going to unleash on the region or what they would do inside the United States now.
So it is undoubtedly a bold move.
I hope it was the president's decision alone to do this and that he wasn't arm twisted by supporters or billionaire donors around him to do this.
They're saying now, Axios reports that if there had been a viable diplomatic solution, and the reporting is pretty deep on this, that Kushner and Witkoff did think they were getting tapped along at the end, that the Persians really weren't addressing the issues the Americans needed to address, particularly ballistic missiles and other things about the nuclear program.
Do you believe it's a correct response?
The president's put down, they can't have a nuclear weapon, and I'm not really getting anywhere in negotiations to go in and take out the leadership, or do you think there's so many, it's so deep in the MULA bench, in the IRGC bench, that you're just going to get even worse bad ombres up there?
Why are we so worried about nuclear weapons now if we had all these strikes a few months ago that supposedly eliminated their nuclear program?
Again, if regimes get changed by, yes, removing the top, the top management, taking away the inevitability, but then having a viable replacement, I have yet to see any evidence that there's a viable replacement anywhere that can actually seize control of what was a significant empire.
90 million people, intelligent, hardworking, with a lot of tech and a lot of capability, is not an easy endeavor to accomplish.
And so the air power alone, I'm concerned.
And I'm concerned that this was not our fight, that this is Israel's fight that we got dragged into.
And already three Americans dead, five seriously wounded.
But you're arguing that to see regime change here, that that army or some part of that organized that's not IGRC or maybe some rebel units from that are going to have to lead the Persian people against the apparatus?
Yeah, I mean, the natural option here would be the Kurds, the Kurdish, the Iraqi Kurds supporting the Iranian Kurds to do it.
But this is an extremely bold move.
I don't know why it was decided that I had to do it now.
I'm shocked, and I'm just wondering what political pressure was brought to bear for the president to make this because this is certainly not what he campaigned on.
Nobody knows this territory better than Eric himself.
And, you know, it reminds me, in a sense, what he's talking about.
I wonder if he's drawing back from the lessons of Libya, where the United States came in, United States Navy predominantly with airstrikes on the infrastructure, airstrikes on missile defense, the leader being taken out.
People in that case rose up, but those people ended up being rebels.
They joined in with Al-Qaeda.
They joined in with ISIS, and it led to a mass civil war.
Jack Basovic, by the way, once again, want to thank Real America's voice.
You're watching special Sunday coverage, and we're going to continue with this seven days a week until that time when it's not necessary to have seven-day a week coverage because you see so much has happened overnight and this morning.
Jack Basovic, do you think we're going to come to a point, particularly got three casualties?
I think CENTCOM has also just reported that the missiles fired at the Lincoln did not come close, according to SEMCON.
CENTCOM.
Do you think the president, you know, Eric Prince, a big supporter of the president, clearly in the mumble tank about this?
And Captain Finnell, I think, is going to give us a very different perspective.
Do you think the president at some point in time, tonight, tomorrow, next couple of days, has more than the two o'clock in the morning video, which was very straightforward?
I mean, he laid out regime change, we're going to go to war, all of it.
Now it's a little bit of a firestorm on Capitol Hill about what exactly is the authorization.
Do you think it behooves the commander in chief to come forward either tonight or over the next day or two and actually lay out what the plan is and what we're prepared to sacrifice to execute this?
Well, Steve, unquestionably, the American people want to know what the plan is.
The American people want to hear from their president, the president that they chose, winning the popular vote, winning seven out of seven of the swing states.
The American people want to hear directly, especially as we've now seen these stunning operations across the Middle East.
Also, hearing that four B-2 bombers flew an overnight run, pounding some of the underground ballistic missile sites there in Iran and then returning to base within the United States, similar to Operation Midnight Hammer.
So the American people want to hear.
And of course, now that we have confirmed three American KIA fortified in critical condition, the people of the United States, of course, want to hear from their president what is the plan, what is the strategy going forward, what is the commander's desired end state, and how long should we expect this operation to continue.
Steve, over at Human Events, we're reporting a four-week campaign is what the administration is expected to conduct.
So a four-week campaign where we're going to see, just kind of like we reported yesterday, that you'll see strikes, then pause, strikes, then pause to be able to assess the battle damage.
And we told you that bigger strikes yesterday, we told you that bigger strikes were going to be coming.
And indeed, they came last night when those B-2 bombers flew in after the initial strikes took out the air defense, the early warning radars.
And by we, I should say specifically the Israelis, and this is another interesting story: is that the Israelis really took the point yesterday with phase one strikes.
We provided a lot of the suppression of enemy air defenses and a lot of sort of supporting role, but it was really the Israelis who did a lot of standoff weapons, a lot of standoff attacks, BVR attacks, and they clipped a lot of IRGC commanders.
So there's no doubt that the U.S. and Israelis have destroyed a lot of the regime's leadership, but we've not gotten the kill shot in yet.
And I think that we're still going for that, but we haven't gotten it yet.
The Iranians, meanwhile, are also trying to get in significant kill shots.
They've gotten some hits, but we've been able to sustain them so far.
I want to make it also very clear.
The majority of these strikes have been done, as far as I can tell, from beyond visual range, which is very interesting because it indicates that we are still concerned about the Iranian overall air defense systems.
We've certainly degraded it, but we haven't finished it off yet.
Another issue is related to those ballistic missile strikes or attempted ballistic missile strikes on the carrier.
I was told yesterday, and I'm still trying to confirm this, but if it's true, and I think it might be, if Cameron wants to pull up that satellite photo I sent him before we got going, basically, there's an open source intelligence group.
They took satellite photos of Bandar Abbas and they identified many of Iran's diesel-electric submarines.
There's one missing, which is a Fatah-class air-independent propulsion diesel-electric submarine.
And I was reporting at 1945.com last week that that single submarine is a very significant threat to the carrier group because in 25 years of war games, the U.S. Navy has shown that it cannot always detect diesel-electric submarines within torpedo range of the carrier.
And I was told that last night or in the last 24 hours, and it's related to those ballistic missiles, Steve, that the Iranians attempted to, with that submarine, get torpedo hits into the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, and our carrier group managed to sink the submarine.
Now, that is not confirmed, but as I wrote at 1945.com last week, if the Iranians really wanted to try to hit the carrier, they're going to need to do both ballistic missile swarms plus the diesel-electric attempted attack.
So it looks like this might be connected to that.
Thus far, the Iranians have not gotten in that kill shot.
We're going to bring Captain Finnell and Jack, two naval intelligence officers.
As people know, there was a 79 and 80.
I was there on a destroyer, a combatant.
My brother later, a Navy helicopter pilot, a LAMPS pilot, was on the Reasoner, a frigate.
Our focus and job, Captain Finnell, as you know, was not just plane guard, but was ASW for any back then, potential Soviets, if there was the fast attack of the Soviets, where he get involved.
How much does that concern you, Captain Finnell, to know that they may have a diesel boat that actually slip out of Straits of Hormuz and even potentially threaten the strike group, sir?
Well, we know that the Iranian Naval Order of Battle had somewhere from 28 to 30 submarines.
So this is not a surprise.
It's not some kind of a secret that they would try to use their naval forces to try to go after us.
But I think the reality is that we have been there for the Lincoln's been there for at least two weeks with her support ships and her submarines that are in escort of the strike group.
And they have had what we call air supremacy and sea supremacy.
And so they are watching the undersea domain.
There are assets there that can provide information on where this is.
And so the Iranians can try it.
They may get lucky.
That's the risk of war.
But I think at this point, we haven't seen anything even close to getting near our carriers.
The fact of the matter is, we have knowledge of where they are.
And so even before that slipped out, we knew if it was leaving.
So I think it probably slipped out before combat operations started since we've already seen them attack and sink a Jamar-class, this Jamar-class, not class, but this Jamar frigate that was in base in Shah Bahar, which people are talking about now.
You said air superiority, air supremacy, air dominance to Brandon's thing that we're still doing standoff.
Do you think that we've taken out, I mean, is any knowledge you have that we have taken out the Iranians' air defense and that we can have at them at will?
I think the Iranian air defense was already severely degraded in the strikes in June.
And then since then, and with all due respect to Brandon, he just told us that we had B-2s that flew from continental United States and flew over Iran and delivered ordinance.
We have Iranian or Israeli Air Force taking out two or three Iranian fighters, two F-5s and one F-4 that were trying to take off at Tabriz.
So we're operating over the country.
We have, and then doctrinally, the Air Force calls it air superiority where you have control for a time and air supremacy when you have more time, long duration, and greater geographic area.
So I believe that we're in the air supremacy phase.
You can call it air dominance, but doctrine is called air supremacy.
And I think we're operating at will over Iran with due regard because there are man pads, man-portable air defense systems, handheld things that can still be a threat.
But for the most part, there are no strategic SAMs left in Iran that I am aware of that are being effectively employed.
So we are, what I said yesterday, we're in the process of defanging the Iranian military regime.
We have to take out their missiles, as the president said, the missiles, missile production industry.
We have to take out their Navy and all these coastal defense cruise missile sites and artillery sites.
They have to be taken out.
And we're doing that in a systematic way.
There was over 900 sorties from the U.S. side or attacks, probably with TLAM and aircraft.
If you have two carriers, 200 sorties a day, that's at least 400 sorties flying off of the Ford and the Lincoln.
And then the rest are from our ground-based air assets in TLAM.
So we're going through the target list and then we'll be going back systematically down that list, going for things that we may have missed, and then being on call for what we call time-sensitive targets.
So there's no reason to celebrate.
There's no reason to be negative either.
We're in the war right now and we're going forward.
And I think what's really interesting is we haven't seen a lot from CENTCON.
We haven't seen a lot from the Pentagon, the president either, because this is deadly serious.
And so for the past 35 years with CNN, when we did Desert Storm and we watched Baghdad Bob tell us there was no problems, we have been in this age of information where we expect to be hands fed all this information.
And I think President Trump and his team recognize we're at war.
People's lives, Americans' lives are at risk and our allies, friends are at risk.
And we're not going to be involved with being so concerned about running a public affairs campaign as we are more focused on taking out and defanging the Iranians and taking out their senior leadership, which is what the president said they're about to do and are doing.
And before I wasn't commenting on the B-2 strikes, I was speaking about the general sort of situation.
But yes, there's no doubt that there are pockets of air supremacy that we are clearly exerting.
But my point was that we've not yet gotten the regime collapse that I think we were hoping for.
Obviously, this is a longer planned war, but I do believe that the Trump administration was hoping the sooner the better.
So, right now, the Iranians are clinging on.
You're right, though.
The systematic nature in which we are dismantling a lot of those AD systems and we're degrading them is very helpful.
This is why the Iranians haven't gotten a kill shot on us.
But I do think it's imperative that we point out that the Iranians are still popping off missiles.
It may not be as coordinated as I thought they were going to be, which is good for us, but they are still popping them off and they are getting some good shots on us.
Remember the radar that was destroyed yesterday.
I believe there's other damage to key AD systems of ours and the Arabs.
So I would be very cognizant of that.
And I think those men that were killed were probably involved at that Bahrain base.
I think that we are still in the thick of this thing.
I would be very, very cautious about spiking the football right now.
The Iranians, I think, still have many capabilities they've not brought to bear.
Hopefully, they won't.
But I would definitely not think this thing is over by a long shot.
The president needs to address the nation.
As you know, I used to work on the Hill, and a former friend of mine who's a Democrat texted me something this morning.
I don't know if it's true or not, but the Democrats are apparently claiming that the Rubio did not share all intelligence with the Gang of Eight before this began.
So there could be real political complications going forward if we don't wrap this thing up quickly and successfully.
Also, Brandon, I know you're working on another huge book on hemispheric defense, but can we put up, if everybody wants a quick primer on this situation, on the long war against the Persians, the Iranians, your book, Shadow War, is a great way to start.
If people want to catch up, can we get the cover there?
Where do they get that, Brandon, in your writings?
Also, I write under the pseudonym nowadays, a NATSEC guy on emerald.tv, and I am the Wednesday night host of the National Security Hour on AmericaOutloud.news.
You can find that on iHeart every Wednesday at 8 p.m. Eastern.
Well, Steve, of course, we're starting to now see elements of the Iranian response to this while U.S. end-Israeli strikes continue.
Israel also conducting a bombing campaign of Tehran, as we speak, a very powerful bombing campaign.
We're also, and again, we saw those American B-2 bombers.
We were reporting that yesterday, I came on here and briefed that we're likely seeing some these shaping operations, suppression of enemy air defense to pave the way for those B-2 bombers, the larger strikes.
That's exactly what happened.
And we're seeing Iran conduct asymmetric warfare.
Iran is not just attacking U.S. military and coalition military.
Iran is attacking economic implements, economic infrastructure, tankers, oil platforms off the Emirates.
They're attacking Dubai, the fort of Jebel Ali.
They're attacking the U.S. partners all across the Gulf.
And it appears that Iran's strategy is to be able to attack U.S. naval assets, U.S. military assets when possible, but also employing asymmetric warfare.
This is what the IRGC does.
This is their top TTP because they think that those countries can put pressure on the United States to sue for peace.
So they think they're going to continue these economic attacks, whether it be these business regions, financial regions like Dubai, these ports, or being able to go in and then, of course, attack the oil platforms as well all across the Gulf.
Well, Steve, by just declaring that they were closing the strait, that pretty much started the decline.
If you look at AIS automatic identification system tracking through the strait, it was starting to go down when they made the announcement.
Then there's this attack that was off the, in the port in Oman, right there, south of Kesham Island, Bon Rabbas.
So there's no virtually now, there's no traffic going through.
There's reports of 150, 200 tankers sitting well outside south of the strait waiting.
So that will spike the oil price, no question.
But the larger issue is, and my assessment is, is that, and we talk about this when we talk about China, about this impact of Xi and the purging of his generals and admirals, and we talk about the impact on the PLA.
But what we're seeing here in Iran is this decapitation of these 40 leaders plus others.
There's reports now today of riot police are being targeted also by our strikes, Operation Epic Fury.
And so we're going after the people that are terrorizing the people of Iran.
But it's like if you're a patient and you've been in a car wreck and you're in shock, and what they need to do is get you to the hospital immediately.
And then they need to get you on medicine.
They get an IV hooked up and you need to be stabilized and you should take no more shock.
But what we're finding out is that the Iranians are continuing to be attacked.
We had the B-2 strikes that we talked about, even in this press release from CENTCOM that just said that the alleged ballistic missile strikes or attack against the USS Abraham Lincoln didn't even come close.
And more importantly, it said in the second part of that announcement, that press release, flight operations continue.
So we're continuing to pound Tehran.
And so what we're seeing is a reaction.
It could have been the last best orders that those on-scene missile brigade commanders received from their leadership a week ago, two weeks ago.
Given their order of battle and naval forces, given their order of battle in air defense and air forces, given the supposedly strict discipline they had, we only got about a minute.
Does that surprise you that even with the American-Israeli hits and on their calm and air, it doesn't seem to be a more organized strikeback?
You had said you were always concerned Venezuela and the first strike were not like the Chinese Communist Party will counter in, you'll have to do these in a situation where you're getting counter.
Are you Do you put this at that level of counter that you were concerned about hitting American forces?