Episode 5255: War Rages As Iran Attacks Airport; No Kings Protests Across The Nation
Bannon's War Room Episode 5255 details the Trump administration's 15-point plan to end the Iran war, noting thousands of deployed troops including the 82nd Airborne near Kishm and Larak islands. While Rubio and Vance claim success without ground forces, an Iranian missile attack injured two service members and damaged an aircraft, complicating negotiations amid conspiracy theories linking Russia and Al-Qaeda. Simultaneously, "No Kings" protests drew an estimated 8 million participants nationwide against perceived authoritarian overreach. Experts debate amphibious assault feasibility compared to Gallipoli, asserting the conflict's center of gravity shifted to the Strait of Hormuz, while religious tensions flared after Israeli police blocked Cardinal Pizzaballa from Jerusalem. Ultimately, the episode argues U.S. strikes systematically dismantle Iranian capabilities despite media narratives, highlighting a strategic pivot toward energy security control. [Automatically generated summary]
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters a short time ago that he was expecting Iran's response to a U.S. peace proposal at any moment.
The Trump administration has offered toran a 15-point plan to end the war, and this comes as the two sides could potentially begin face-to-face negotiations in the near future.
At the same time, the U.S. is sending thousands of troops to the Middle East, though Secretary Rubio says that Iranian military capabilities can be destroyed without putting any American troops on the ground.
We can achieve, we are achieving all those objectives.
We are ahead of schedule on most of them, and we can achieve them without any ground troops, without any.
Now, in terms of why there's deployments, number one, the president has to be prepared for multiple contingencies, which I'm not going to discuss in the media.
And again, I refer you to the Department of War, who will probably tell you the exact same thing.
But we can achieve all of our objectives with our ground troops, but we are always going to be prepared to give the president maximum optionality and maximum opportunity to adjust to contingencies should they emerge.
So we don't have the exact number of servicemen or women who were actually injured during this attack, but I was just told by a source moments ago that two of the service members did have shrapnel wounds, but they were clear to say that these were non-life-threatening wounds.
I'm also told that aircrafts, at least one aircraft was damaged in this strike, but it's not something that's going to totally take out their capabilities on that air base.
Now, in terms of the shrapnel wounds, in terms of the wounds overall, the injuries overall, we do not have clarity on how many service members, men and women, were actually injured.
We do not have clarity on what those injuries were other than the at least two servicemen and women who were injured with a shrapnel injury.
Now, of course, all of this is going to further complicate what is supposed to be happening behind the scenes right now and what we are told is happening, which is this quest for diplomacy, these ongoing negotiations.
And I will say, we heard from the Secretary of State earlier today who said that they were waiting to hear from Iran on that 15-point plan and that they still didn't know who they were supposed to be talking to and what they were supposed to be talking about.
And the reason why that's so critical, that 15-point plan, I mean, that's supposed to be the basis of these negotiations.
So if Iran doesn't accept that, what are they actually going to talk about if the two sides sit down together either late this weekend or early next week?
But when it comes to what happened in Saudi Arabia, I mean, this was, this information is still very fluid.
It is coming in.
It does sound like the injuries that we know of were non-life threatening.
But again, this is still a very fluid situation after this Iranian missile strike.
Through rain or shine, massive crowds poured into the streets in big cities and small towns alike, all with a unifying message: there are no kings in America.
And Justin, the No Kings Coalition, which is made up of organizers of rallies nationwide, tells MS Now that an estimated 8 million people showed up to today's demonstrations, making it the largest single-day nonviolent protest in modern American history.
Organizers in Chicago estimated that about 200,000 people turned up there alone.
And here in New York Cities, in New York City, organizers told me that an estimated 350,000 people showed up.
For reference, the first No Kings Day last June drew an estimated 5 million people.
The second one, held in October, an estimated 7 million.
The flagship No Kings rally was held today in Minneapolis, which has, of course, become the site of some of the Trump administration's most glaring examples of overreach.
Every morning when I get up, I reach for my phone to look at the headlines of the day.
And for some time now, I start every morning depressed about the latest outrage from our would-be king.
I mean, it's amazing.
Every day, there's something new and crazy.
But it's different on this day because all over the country, in cities and towns, and factories, and on farms, north, south, east, west, millions of us are coming together to declare no kings.
It is indeed a beautiful, hopeful day in the United States of America.
And you, Minnesota, are at the epicenter.
It is your courage and your commitment that have inspired all of us.
You have shown the power of nonviolent protests.
You have shown bravery in the face of armed attack by government thugs.
And you stood together and ran them out of town.
Toast yourselves, pat yourselves on the back, take a bow, but don't take a break.
Because today and everything that has gone before is just a start, a rehearsal for the big show that's coming.
You know, the arrogant would-be king is absolutely scared to death about losing his power and will do everything he can to hold on to it without regard to legality, morality, humanity, nothing.
Alex Predi, VA nurse, executed by ICE, shot in the back and left to die in the street without even the decency of our lawless government investigating their deaths.
Their bravery, their sacrifice, and their names will not be forgotten.
Pakistan is hosting foreign ministers from Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia to talk about ways to de-escalate this joint U.S.-Israeli operation in Iran.
Now, the countries have seen their borders and energy security come under threat as well.
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I believe Russia is actively helping Iran target American forces in the Middle East right now.
Since 9-11, a whole bunch of the leadership, including Bin Laden's son, escaped from Afghanistan to Iran, were given sanctuary by the Iranian regime, and they've been using it as a hub for terror around the world.
And Al-Qaeda and Iran have teamed up for a series of terrorist attacks against us.
People don't realize this, but we remember the bombings of the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which should have been our warning that 9-11 was coming.
That was planned and the terrorists were trained by Iran for doing that because al-Qaeda didn't know how to bring down buildings, so they turned to Iran in order to get the training to do that.
So the idea that Iran, which is Shia, and Al-Qaeda, which is Sunni, would cooperate is not beyond measure.
In fact, I mean, you know, the Hamas is Sunni also.
Iran works with Sunni terrorists around the world.
And if we don't get that enriched uranium and they want to get back at us for what we've done, the easiest way to do it would be to give it to al-Qaeda and let them use it for a dirty bomb.
So we have got to get what Donald Trump correctly calls the nuclear dust before this operation is done.
Well, the president said, look, we've accomplished the gross majority of our military objectives.
I think you can make a good argument.
We've accomplished all of our military objectives.
The president's going to keep at it for a little while longer to ensure that we, once we leave, we don't have to do this again for a very, very long time.
That was fundamentally the president's goal.
He said, look, this country, they're threatening us in all these ways.
They're still trying to build a nuclear weapon.
We need to neuter them for a very, very long time.
And that's the purpose.
You're right.
Gas prices have certainly gone up because of what's going on in the Middle East, but they're going to come down, right?
This is a very, very temporary reaction to what is going to ultimately be a short-term conflict.
I think the president's been very clear about this, that we're not interested in being in Iran a year down the road, two years down the road.
I've never seen, you know, I know that people turned against the Iraq war after a period of time.
They turned against Afghanistan after a period of time.
The Democrats did.
But I've never seen a war where the Democrats turned against the war on day one and are rooting for defeat.
You know, there are people in this country who hate Donald Trump more than they hate the Iranian regime that just massacred 32,000 people in their streets.
You know, they were all very upset about what was happening in Gaza, but 32,000 people massacred.
And then Donald Trump comes in to wipe out the genocidal regime that actually was committing genocide against its own people, massacring them in the streets like that.
And Donald Trump, because it's Donald Trump, we have to play it down.
We have to say it's a defeat.
We have to say we're losing.
And they're all going to have egg on their face because we're about halfway through this thing.
And when this is all over, this is going to go down in history as possibly the greatest military campaign the United States has waged since the American Revolution.
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Come, mothers and fathers throughout the land and don't criticize what you don't understand.
It's Palm Sunday, the 29th March, Year of Our Lord, 2026.
I want to thank Real America's Voice for all the support and great work at CPAC, also with helping us on now our new Sunday show, particularly here on Palm Sunday.
We're going to go through obviously a lot of detail in the war.
This is the beginning of Holy Week, and I think it will be a pretty intense week in the Middle East.
Breaking news.
So I've got Eric Prince, Dr. Bradley Thayer, Captain Jim Finnell to start off this morning and to set us right here on what's going on.
But breaking news.
I've got Poso Pasobic and hopefully Ben Harnwell from Rome in the second hour.
Breaking news, very disturbing story this morning about Palm Sunday.
Israeli police prevented Cardinal Pizabella from entering the church of the Holy Sepulchre early today as he went to say Palm Sunday Mass.
They put out a press release from the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem in the custody of the Holy Land.
This morning, the Israeli police prevented Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pizabella, head of the Catholic Church in the Holy Land, together with the custodian of the Holy Land, from entering the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem as they made their way to celebrate Palm Sunday Mass.
Georgia Maloney and the Italian government, I think, have already called for the Israeli ambassador to come have a visit.
So we're going to break all that down, find exactly what happened.
Eric Prince, you join us.
Eric, thank you.
And thank you for the, obviously, the guidance you gave from the stage at CPAC.
Right there, we've got two messages.
We have a message from the National Security Advisor to the president, Marco Rubio, and also, I think, backed up by the vice president that says we don't need combat troops.
We're going down, as Jim Finnell has been showing us every day, a methodical process of defanging and declawing the traditional combat arms of the Iranian government and the Revolutionary Guard.
That continues on.
I think they say they have 3,500 targets left.
And it's just a massive pounding every night, unrelenting.
Although I would say that I believe ever since the Israelis attacked the gas fields of the Qatar, that the initiative, the center of gravity of this battle has shifted to the Persian Gulf, the toll gate that now somehow, you know, the Houthis have in the Red Sea and the Revolutionary Guard feels they have the Strait of Hormuz.
There's, I think, about 8,000 combat troops between 82nd Airborne and two Marine Expeditionary Units that now are essentially on station if the president so chooses.
But Marco Rubio tells us, and he told us many times, we're not going to need that.
You've got the vice president saying we're almost done, a little while longer, I think what the quote was.
But you have the Mark Levins and Thiessens and all the cheerleaders for the Iraq war.
Everybody got it wrong in the Iraq war.
They're telling us that there's nuclear dust or there's some cause.
Their current version of weapons of mass destruction that we have to go in and send troops in.
Well, first, Steve, let me speak to Palm Sunday in Jerusalem.
I know Cardinal Pizzabala.
He actually contacted me after the Gaza debacle started, and he said the Holy Father had instructed him to get involved.
And he asked me to make a plan to build a whole refugee camp to take care of the Gazan civilians and was blocked by the Biden administration.
But imagine for the first time in centuries since the Ottoman rule, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, Christians are denied to have mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
This is truly unprecedented times.
I cannot see any legitimate reason, security-wise, to ban people from going to mass.
I mean, if they're going to mass, they're clearly in commune, in community with their Lord.
If they're killed going to Mass, I think they'll take that risk.
It is a horrific affront to Christianity.
And every Catholic, evangelical, every Orthodox in America should be irate about it.
Before we go to number two, I want to go back to number one.
My understanding after this story broke and with my inquiries, and that's where we're trying to get Ben up from Rome in the second hour, is was there any, to your knowledge, was there anything transmitted to the church through official channels to tell them?
Because this is unprecedented for hundreds of years since the Ottomans controlled Jerusalem.
Was anything communicated through official channels to the church that this might happen, sir, to your knowledge?
In fact, the Cardinal in his statement even said that he has been adhering to every request and security stricture.
He was not going with some grand procession, even.
He was going privately with another clergy to the church to say mass on Palm Sunday and barred.
So if you give a gun and a badge, you get a bigger one.
And perhaps that's the case of some security apparatchik in Jerusalem that doesn't care that it's a cardinal, has no respect for Christendom.
This is a really, really bad look for look, it starts to take away any understanding about, or I guess it adds to understanding of even Muslims that are angry at their access to Al-Aqsa Mosque.
And again, a completely unforced, stupid error by Israeli security forces today.
We live in a very in a world of transparent battlefields.
If you get within 30, 40 kilometers of the front line in Ukraine, you are completely at risk because of the amount of surveillance and drones sensors.
The idea that you're going to hide an amphibious ready group, a MU, with an LHA, that's probably a what, eight or 900-foot ship, weighs 40 or 50,000 tons.
Believe me, there's multiple countries in the world that own the means to track that in real time.
And so if you, by doctrine, if you try to get that entire amphibious group within range of them starting to discharge their troops, they're going to be heavily and highly targeted by all for the same reason that they pulled the carrier air wing back mysteriously after the laundry fire on board the USS Ford.
So highly dangerous to put amphibious troops into that area because of their so many precision missiles.
And obviously there's no surprise left if they somehow manage to get all those Marines off and move them somewhere else to launch an amphibious operation to try to force open the Straits of Hormuz, maybe, but hard to do deception now.
And second, they truly don't have maritime superiority when the Iranians can launch as many missiles, drones, and suicide vessels against them as they can.
Could you actually do a without active Arab support, could you actually take Carg Island from the Could you actually go to Karg Island unless you got the LHAs, unless you got the amphibious ready group, at least part of the contingent into the Persian Gulf?
Or would you do it standoff and station the helicopters and the Osprey, I guess?
It's some, you know, up in Qatar, you know, to the to that point, you know, up in Iraq, in Iran, Iraq.
I mean, as I recall, that Mew would have a maximum of 10 V-22s on board.
And so you're not going to move more than 20 or 30 troops per lift.
So yeah, your initial assault into Karg Island is going to be mighty thin because those aircraft have to cycle.
And that's assuming you don't have any losses from maintenance or from missiles.
Do you do a mass drop of the 82nd on the Karg Island?
Again, that's pretty sporty.
And an airborne invasion in a place that has thousands and thousands of missiles, not to mention the Iranians have been learning.
They've certainly been paying attention to modern drone warfare and have certainly implemented FPVs down to that squad level.
I mean, you see videos of the Israelis in southern Lebanon losing tanks, losing armor personnel carriers to the same FPVs that the Russians have been using with great effect in Ukraine.
So it is, again, a fight against Iran, they're not Arabs.
They're Aryans.
They are a highly intelligent, highly skilled warfighters.
And it would not be the pushover by comparison that you see of the Iraqi army that worked.
The other thing the Iranians have done, seeing what the U.S. military did to Iraq in 2003 and four, where they decapitated all the military command structure, is they decentralized the decision-making into 31 military districts with a standing order to make war, as much war for as long as you can.
And the only person that can countermand that is the supreme leader, not their minister of defense or their chief of the armed forces or their president, only the supreme leader.
So it's at that point, even hard to negotiate with any of the other people that come to meet JD Vance or whatever.
And I think we just killed the head of the parliament, who was the other guy that was supposed to come and negotiate with JD Vance.
So I'm not sure that U.S. interests are even in parallel at all to Israeli interests because they seem to be whacking a lot more of the leaders, taking those names off the board, people that are supposed to be negotiating peace with.
Look, clearly, President Trump, I keep saying, and Rubio picked it up, optionality.
He needs optionality, needs a range of alternatives, and you're never going to give your strategy.
That being said, the National Security Advisor, Marco Ruby, and the vice president were pretty adamant to go back to the military objectives.
President Trump doesn't even refer to it as a war anymore.
It's a military operation.
You've got those four or five objectives of, you know, deindustrialize them, taking out the Navy, taking out the Air Force, their defense capabilities, air capabilities.
We have air supremacy now, or at least air superiority.
And Marco was adamant or pretty adamant, and repeated many times, we're not going to need combat troops for this.
Is the combat troops we have and another 10,000 being prepped?
Is that so President Trump has another option?
Is it for leverage against these guys?
How real do you feel right now moving in to take uh to make sure they take that those those couple of islands down by straight of Hormuz and then Carig Island?
And you're thinking this through and putting in that logistics base or that logistics premise, a predicate.
Uh, how real do you think we're moving on uh with the cheerleading of Mark Levin and Thiessen and all these other, you know, they're Lindsey Grahams of the world?
How realistic do you think it looks like uh combat troops?
Well, unlike the chattering classes in Washington, Steve, I've actually sailed through the straits of Hormuz on a sailboat, oddly enough, with a huge Blackwater logo on the sail doing a race, the Dubai musket race.
Um, it's narrow.
And those two islands on the north side, one is Keshem and one is Larik.
Keshem is the size of Okinawa.
Larick is the size of Iwo Jima.
Anybody that knows anything of American maritime amphibious history knows those names and how many thousands and thousands of soldiers were killed by a very dug-in enemy.
Now, those islands are generally flat.
So even if you put guys over the beach and you take them, the bunkers, prepared fortifications, which I would imagine are there.
Worse than that, on the mainland Iran, there are mountains very, very close by, which are also laced with caves, tunnels, and survivability from which can be launched rockets, missiles, and drones, making both of those islands that you're trying to put, potentially putting Marines ashore as one large beaten zone.
And I think it's important to think of other military history of a grand amphibious operation planned by the British in World War II at Gallipoli, which is to try to take the Dardanelles and take out Turkey from the war.
And it ended very badly because they never seized the highlands.
The Times of Israel is reporting now about the incident, Eric, with the Cardinal.
And Italy is furious about this.
I think they've called the ambassador over.
Maloney is taking this personally for action.
So we'll have more on that.
Ben Harnwell, Jack Posobiec in the next hour.
Before I get back to Gallipoli or to the great one, Alexander the Great, and his trial and tribulations in the same part of the world where we have our Navy and we're potentially sending young American men and women.
Certainly was a candidate to be the Pope, but a serious guy, not a crazy, not a crazy person.
And so again, keeping with his obligation and joy to celebrate Mass on Palm Sunday to be blocked is just ridiculous.
And knowing that guy, he did not do that as some provocation, But an expectation, as his forefathers did, as his predecessors did for centuries, even during other wars, World War I, World War II, other clashes in the Middle East, Mass was always open for business, but not apparently under the IDF now.
By the way, so you were talking about Gallipoli, right?
And this is from the landmark Arian, the great historian of Alexander the Great's campaign on his retreat back from India, where I guess Eric, his generals, they had a council of war when they got too far in India after they'd gone through the Khyber Pass and fought their way, what, 8,000 miles.
They said, hey, maybe we ought to just go back to Baghdad or Babylon and regroup.
That's the coast you're talking about.
If that camera can be pulled in.
And if you read this history, as you know, Eric, it was absolutely brutal.
In fact, it was such a brutal retreat or march back up country that he put half of his army with one of his generals on a fleet that went through Hormuz.
When people say it's 21 miles wide, the channel itself, I think it's like two miles.
They say five, but having, I didn't have the pleasure of going on Eric's Blackwater excursion.
I actually did it on a Navy combatant, but you're right.
It's not a very dangerous sea detail.
And that's under the best circumstances, right?
Just with so much traffic and these little Dows going around, kind of like going into Hong Kong in the old days.
But Eric, you brought up Gallipoli.
Talk about this second.
You see, this is very inhospitable.
You got right when you go through Hormuz, you got those cliffs.
In fact, I don't even think that the tribes down there, I believe, are not even Persian.
I think down there, they got some Arab tribes that think it's their territory.
They're very territorial.
These are kind of like the Houthis.
These are tough kind of mountain people, the very tough, you know, Henri.
And we've tried to take them out with the 2,000-pound bombs.
And, you know, these guys are these guys are fighters.
Well, that was a planned, massive amphibious operation planned by the British against the Turks in World War I.
And it went terribly.
60,000 dead, 250,000 casualties, dozens of vessels lost.
Again, assaulting up difficult terrain.
Those islands, like I talked about in the Gulf, are fairly flat, but they're immediately backed by steep terrain, which contains lots and lots and lots of fortifications.
Again, 15-point plan, whatever.
I want, trust me, I want America to succeed.
I want this to be done.
This is, I don't believe this was in our strategic interest in the first place.
So I would like to extricate the United States as quickly and as painlessly as possible.
But smashing in with an amphibious operation in the front door is an exceedingly dangerous course of action, especially, right, if we think, again, the mantra in Washington is, oh, we've serviced all these targets and there's only a few left and it's great.
We did that already, supposedly, to the Houthis who had been shut.
They shut down the southern end of the Red Sea, another choke point waterway called the Babu Mandab, pouring billions of dollars worth of precision weapons, supposedly into those Houthi positions.
Now, the Houthis compared to the IRGC are a ragtag bunch of guys, and yet over that year and a half, two years, never affected their ability to choke off that waterway.
And so now if we think we're going to force our way into Hormuz?
For our audience on a Sunday morning, just for people that have been over there and had to deal with this, you got the Houthis, you got guys in Afghanistan.
This is kind of, I say the equivalent of the Scotch-Irish in Appalachia.
These are tough ombres.
The Houthis, the Egyptian army lost, I think, 25,000 men decades ago under NASA trying to take them out.
50, the British, these are tough ombres.
We've just seen since President Trump came into power in 17, we saw the Saudis, which is a disaster.
They're pretty pathetic.
But then you had UAE.
You've had some pretty good operators take their best punch at these guys, including the United States Navy last summer.
Captain Finnell, Marco Rubio and the vice president are kind of taking your line of saying, hey, look, we've got military objectives.
This is a military operation.
We're pounding this.
We're defanging and declawing historically.
We got a couple more weeks.
Maybe that's two weeks.
Maybe it's four weeks.
But there's some period of time that Admiral Cooper has a timeline and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Kane, has a timeline, and we're moving down here.
Do you still believe?
And I know because you've got a lot of insight baseball on this.
Do you think we're still progressing down that at the rate that you felt at first?
Even the CENTCOM commander said on, I think, on Friday that we are on schedule or ahead of schedule to the plan that they've had.
I think there's a bit of cognizant dissonance going on in the media and what we're hearing and being subjected to.
And I saw the front page of the New York Times today, there's an article top above the fold, quote, a toothless Iran, question mark, missiles and drone strikes show it can still inflict pain.
So that's the messaging that we're hearing from the media and from all kinds of sources.
And if that's true, and I think it is, I think there's still some capability in Iran, clearly.
But if that's true, then how come we're not getting kind of an objective assessment of what 11,000 strike flights, flights, combat missions, and over 11,000 targets have struck and targets that are like the Iranian command and control centers, Iranian communications, military communication stations, IRGC headquarters, IRG intelligence sites,
ballistic missile sites, drone sites, ballistic missile production facilities, drone production facilities, and their Navy with over 150 vessels struck, 92% of their navy is erased.
Their entire Air Force is erased.
And we are flying A-10s.
We're flying Apache helicopters in and around and over Iranian territory, plus F-15s, F-16s, F-22s, F-35s.
We're dominating them, but we're not getting that appreciation.
So what we hear is, well, we're going to get a non-sequitur about the Dardanelles and Gallipoli, as if we didn't ever study history ourselves.
We're getting a lot of negativism where we should be asking ourselves, what is the community, the impact of four weeks of daily strikes by the United States and Israel.
And when then you listen to the leadership, the president, the secretary of war, the national security advisor, the vice president, all saying we're there to neuter Iranian military capability.
They're not saying they're invading anything.
They're talking about getting rid of the gun from the Iranian regime.
And we're working on that.
Does that mean every pistol will be destroyed?
Does that mean every guy in a cave will be destroyed?
No.
But what it means is the massive buildup that they've had for 50 years, funded by the United States, funded by Russia, funded by China, that's all being destroyed systematically.
And that is the mission that the president said.
And I think what's happened over since Vietnam, since I was a young man and watched the Vietnam War and watched Walter Cronkite, we have seen the politicization of our military analysts, our military personnel, our admirals and our generals, and the people that report on it.
So now when we talk about war, we want to talk about, you know, go in four weeks right to some kind of what is the political outcome?
How come we haven't solved this?
As opposed to saying we're going after a nation that spent 47 years arming itself as one of the most armed nations on the planet, and we're systematically destroying it.
And that this idea that we're going to want to have immediate results, you know, instant gratification without addressing our destroyer.
Well, the facts are there hasn't been a mine in the strait.
The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Office and their joint maritime information reports are consistently saying there is no confirmed mines in the strait.
But you do agree that the Revolutionary Guard has set up a toll booth.
For the first time, they have a toll booth and they let in who they want.
I think they let out 10 ships over the last couple of days, of which they take a toll to go to their partners, of which I think we allowed them to monetize their oil.
Anyway, Captain Finnell, Eric Prince, all of it next.
Look, they had to drive the Mew over from the Pacific area, and they had to launch another Mew urgently all the way from California because I don't think they really figured they were going to close the Straits of Hormuz.
Yeah, the Straits of Hormuz are the center of gravity.
And the question is, it will remain closed and it will remain under the control or influence of the IRGC for a long, long time.
Their ability to inflict pain on any vessel transiting there will remain extremely high.
Even if you take the first 50 or 100 miles of the Straits of Hormuz, they can still launch and smash commercial vessels.
There haven't been any commercial vessels attacked or mines, apparently.
Yeah, because they haven't been trying to transit.
Any vessels that are transiting are now being forced through a narrow channel, not through the normal shipping channel, but through the toll gate erected by the Iranians going between Larick and Kesham Islands.
So that you're right.
The center of gravity is the Straits of Hormuz.
That is basically the polled grenade pin they have against the rest of the world economy when you have all of East Asia's economies going on severe fuel rationing now.
30% of the world's fertilizer supply, 22% of the gas, 20% of the crude that's supposed to pass through the Straits of Hormuz largely is not other than the ones solely authorized by the IRGC, like to their friends, the Chinese Communist Party.
This is not, or the first thing you, like the first thing you're supposed to learn when you join the U.S. Navy is power projection, choke point control.
We now, the U.S. Navy does not control two choke points in the world.
It is an important, the point that you've all said, and I'm not disagreeing with that fundamentally.
The question is, how do you open it?
And the answer has to be to continue the plan that we're working on.
And don't rush in there before you're ready.
And so, yes, it costs the price of gas has gone up a dollar.
It's still under what it was when Joe Biden was president.
The point is, is that you have to make the battlefield ready and clear that.
And I would say the indicators are that it's becoming more and more ready to be transited by warships that are escorting and providing these escorts for these tankers in and out.
Yes, they're running a toll boat through Keshm and Larik.
We've seen that.
But there are other ships that are not squawking AIS that are coming through.
Very small numbers, less than a dozen, but this is happening.
So why is that happening?
Why is it that the Iranians can't see those ships that are not squawking AIS?
Why is it that the number of missile attacks and drone attacks has dramatically dropped since 12 March?
And I would submit that it's because we are systematically destroying their capacity to do anything in that region.
And all up through the Strait of Hormuz and up to Khar.
We're working that.
It's not finished yet, but we're working it.
And we're moving in and having the capacity to have other carriers there.
The Fordo, by the way, with the fire, didn't go back to CONUS.
It left Ceuta Bay, and guess where it is right now?
It's in split Yugoslavia, Croatia, and it's going to be repaired and probably come back to the gun line.
The USS George Bush is now leaving the East Coast and heading over to the fight as well.
So we are not backing off on the campaign to vaporize essentially their missiles, their drones, their mine layers, their fast attack speed boats.
The fact that we're flying over the strait all the time and nobody is shot at it, despite what Eric mentioned, that the head of the IRGC with their down echelon command structure ordered their down echelon commanders to make war and make as much as you can.
That order was given four weeks ago.
So where are the results of those orders?
If that's all they can produce, then I'm trying to get across that maybe the Iranians are hurting more than we're appreciating and that the fact that they get off a missile here and there does not mean they're controlling the tempo or the timing or this operation.
That's not my point.
They're not in control of this.
We are.
And we have to be able to appreciate what the cumulative effect of 11,000 targets being struck and many, many more to be struck are having on that regime, especially after you take out layers and layers and layers of leaders and their ability to communicate.
If the Russians and the Chinese are providing the Iranians with such exquisite, and is it the Financial Times reported, real-time targeting, then where are the results of that real-time targeting combined with the orders to make war and do as much as you can?
The rhetoric is not matching the Iranians' output while our output is being underappreciated.
And I'm not saying we're winning.
I'm not saying anything else.
I'm not giving you a body count.
I'm just saying that it's not as bad as the world's media is portraying it.
And I think we should be patient and continue to do what we're doing and stay on the plan and let the flack of all the naysaying go by us and keep driving in to destroy and kill that enemy.
If I was Iranian, I'd want them to know we're coming for you and we're going to kill you.
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Let somebody take a hard money loan out about that.
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Talk to Natalie Dominguez and the team over there.
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It'll be a very short commercial break.
Dr. Thayer is going to jump in here.
We've got Jack Masobi, Ben Harnwell, maybe even Brandon Weikert.