Bannon's War Room Episode 5269 examines a hypothetical DOJ reversal of civil rights laws under a future administration, speculating on Mike Lee's AG appointment and Todd Blanche's prosecutorial role. The discussion pivots to Iran, where despite 12,000 targets hit, the U.S. F-15E downed near Isa defies White House claims of regime change success. Drawing parallels to Saddam Hussein's sarin gas use and Iranian human wave tactics, the segment warns that deploying ground forces risks a new quagmire while unconfirmed CNN reports confirm ongoing civilian infrastructure targeting. Ultimately, the episode suggests current strategies mask strategic failures rather than securing victory. [Automatically generated summary]
I think the legacy of Pam Bondi is going to begin with her politicization of the Department of Justice to go after Donald Trump's political opponents.
So I think that's like top line, right?
The fact that she was willing to open criminal investigations and pursue political investigations will be the biggest legacy.
It's going to be her use of the Department of Justice, not just to gut enforcement of the civil rights laws, but to actually reverse them, to actually turn the Department of Justice for the first time under either Democratic or Republican presidents into a tool of the vote suppressors.
And the people who want to overturn minority voting rights.
And that is a dark legacy that, unfortunately, like the first one, is going to be really hard to shake.
I mean, it's going to be hard to unring the bell about the politicization of the Department of Justice.
It is also going to be hard to unring the bell about all the damage that has been done by having an election denier, not just in the White House, but an election denier running the Department of Justice willing to do anything to undermine the rule of law, the Constitution, and the voting rights of Americans.
Notes that some senators are pushing for Senator Mike Lee.
Hmm, wonder why.
Some senators are pushing the White House to appoint Senator Mike Lee as attorney general and plan to pitch Trump directly on the idea, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter, largely because they like him out of the Senate because he's been making folks uncomfortable there for some reason.
The other, which is another interesting one from the flashback, the Texas Tribune.
Donald Trump at the time noting, I would actually, Trump said Saturday when asked by KDF. WTV, if he would consider Paxton for National Post.
Quote, he's very, very talented.
I mean, we have a lot of people that I want that one and will be very good at it.
But he's a very talented guy, and there's a little bit of noise to promote him largely because he's got a Texas problem right now with Paxton and Cornyn running for that U.S. Senate seat.
How do you see this thing landing from your experience inside the building?
Looking out, looking back into it now, who do you think the president would likely lean on if the goal here is to prosecute his political opponents?
It's really hard to say in this kind of circumstance because Trump has been so unconventional all around in his handling of all matters related to the Justice Department, including the leadership.
Pam Bondi is coming into DOJ.
She came into DOJ without any experience working in that organization whatsoever, which is Is very unusual for an attorney general.
And if he's willing to bring in somebody who's never been in DOJ before, that really opens up the field to potentially many, many people.
And I think that it really is anyone's guess right now who it will be.
But I'm not sure that who is serving that sort of figurehead role that Bondi served is actually the person we really need to be worried about.
It's Todd Blanch, who's been running the day to day operations of DOJ behind the scenes under Bondi's leadership.
He's now been elevated to the number one position, but he's already been.
Playing a very important role behind the scenes that, in many ways, has been more important and more impactful than what Bondi has been doing in front of the cameras.
unidentified
Why is there an objection to sending ICE officers to polling places?
I mean, the thing about Pam Bondi is she was, you know, she was of the election denier movement, but she also fashioned herself to be a prosecutor.
You know, this is the reason why some people early on when she was first nominated, I think, were taken in by her.
I never was, but there were people who were because they said, look, she had been an attorney general.
There are a lot of people that could be put forward who are much worse, who are just straight up election deniers and are just, you know, are much more cold blooded in their willingness.
To overturn the results of free and fair elections.
And there are a lot of those names that are familiar.
There are some of those names that would be less familiar to people.
But just to answer Todd Blanche's question, the two people who were most famously gunned down and killed in the streets of Minneapolis were both US citizens.
The people who we see had their windows broken in their cars and dragged out and their seatbelts cut off, those were US citizens.
The people who were harassed and tear gassed for simply standing and holding up a cell phone to record what was happening.
Myself and my colleagues, and that is that despite close to five weeks of war now, that Iran maintains, as you said, John, significant ability 50% of its launchers, 50% of its one way attack drones, a significant percentage.
Of its coastal defense missiles, as well as large inventories of both medium and long range missiles.
One problem we're hearing is that Iran has maintained a capability to move those missiles around with mobile missile launchers and hide them underground, which has made it difficult for the U.S. and Israel to take out all of them despite more than 12,000 targets hit since the start of this war.
And I'll tell you, that continued capability. explains what we've been experiencing quite consistently here in Tel Aviv, John, over recent days, which is consistent incoming fire from Iran.
Yesterday, one of the busiest days since the start of the war.
And, of course, this contradicts what you've heard from President Trump last night, but also the Pentagon.
That missile capability has been dramatically destroyed, reduced maybe, but not eliminated.
And some of the sources telling us, That Iran may be holding back some of those capabilities, which explains some of the reduction in fire in recent days.
I should note here was the White House response to the story.
White House spokesperson Anna Kelly saying, quote, anonymous sources desperately want to attack President Trump and demean the incredible work of our United States military in achieving the goals of Operation Epic Fury.
We should note that this is a U.S. military assessment that has found that continuing Iranian capability.
And China is more powerful, Russia is richer, NATO is weaker, and Americans are less safe and more isolated.
This has been Operation Epic Failure, and this president owns it in entirety.
There have been presidents in the past, John, that have started wars that they've had to hand off to their successors.
There have been presidents in the past that have had to end ingloriously wars that were not working, but Donald Trump is going to be the only president in American history to single handedly start and lose a war.
I would say the thing that I'm saying to you, and that is you have to be really clear about your purpose and your end state.
There are lots of different options you can choose.
We have fewer now than we did at the beginning.
Notwithstanding the fact that we have certainly degraded a malign regime, we have certainly disabilized it.
But the idea that an air and maritime assault would overthrow a regime or leave a nation of that heft Without action still to play is just not realistic.
So, my question would be here's the situation on the ground, here's what we assess.
What are we going to do now?
And the other thing I'd just say is people don't intend to escalate.
They tend to escalate because they will think it will lead to deterrence.
And so, I think that's one of the soundtracks you're hearing by both the president and by Iran they're doing this thing of can I make a threat?
Can I escalate?
And where we've left ourselves is words won't be enough to achieve the outcomes that we probably require.
The president is trying to cover his tracks on a strategic failure, claiming that there is regime change because we've replaced an 86 year old terrorist hardliner with a 56 year old terrorist hardliner, claiming that somehow Iran has been deterred from ballistic or nuclear power projection.
Meanwhile, he's frantically dialing 911 in the form of paratroopers and the Marine Expeditionary Units.
And what Congress needs to do. in the face of this strategic incompetence is prevent the deployment of ground forces on any of the islands or the shoreline around the Strait of Hormuz.
Because if this president deploys these Marines or paratroopers to seize these islands, they'll take them.
But then after 15 to 30 days, they're going to need reinforcement and resupply, and we are in a boots-on-the-ground quagmire for the third time in the 21st century.
The American public is exhausted by these failed forever wars.
They don't want them.
They want us investing here in the United States.
They want us working with our allies.
And instead, this president is berating NATO, making it weaker, and he's strengthening our adversaries in China, Russia, and Iran.
It is Good Friday, 3 April in the year of our Lord 2026, the most solemn day in the Christian calendar.
Good Friday.
We'll have our program today, plus special program tomorrow on Holy Saturday and then Easter Sunday.
I'll talk more about that in a little while.
As we come on the air, I think, and I'm not sure we've gotten confirmation from CENTCOM, but I believe there's at least enough reporting out there that a F 15E. Strike Eagle has been shot down, or the pilots have ejected in Iranian territory.
We got Dr. Bradley Thayer is going to join us in a moment, and Brandon Weickert is going to join us.
And we're going to talk through everything about the escalatory trap.
What's happened in the last 24 hours as the war intensifies?
We said President Trump is looking for a not an off ramp, but are looking to roll this thing up in two or three weeks.
He said he was going to, if they didn't look like he was going to get a deal.
He was going to escalate.
I think they kind of escalated a little early.
They took out bridges and infrastructure.
Bibi Netanyahu's been on Israeli TV talking about the infrastructure and other aspects of Iranian civil life that the Israelis are pounding.
So last night, another intense bombing campaign.
We're also going to have, we're going to talk about Pambandi, this entire situation.
There's so much going on, particularly in the state of Texas.
Julie Pickren and others are going to join us to talk about this Texas School Board meeting on Tuesday.
We need people lined up today by 5 p.m. Central Daylight Time.
We need you to sign up to, if you're going to address the Texas Education Board, we need to do it by today.
And that's where I'm going to have a whole lot going on.
Birch Gold, we have Philip Patrick, is going to join me for a couple of segments tomorrow morning.
We're going to walk through everything in the Global capital markets and commodity markets, particularly precious metals.
Now, more than ever, we put out series number eight, the eighth installment at the end of the dollar empire.
You can get it by going to birchgold.com, promo code War Room.
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You get the eighth free installment here.
We very much focus on the current status of the dollar, which is under assault from both deficits here, the BRICS nations.
On the shoulder of the dollar rests so much of the financial stability of this planet.
So we get into it in great detail.
Installment number eight, birchgold.com, promo code Bandit.
But most importantly, you get to talk to the experts, Philip Patrick and the team.
So make sure you do that today.
Maybe over this holiday weekend or on Easter Monday because people get back to work or maybe the day after.
Other than to what Brandon provided, that it was, it seemed to be about 50 kilometers inside or that is north of the Persian Gulf.
So it looks like southwestern Iran.
In terms of the location.
And I hadn't seen, Brandon mentioned a 60 down, and I hadn't seen that, but obviously that's, we obviously pray for the crews of both the 60 if it went down, and then of course of the F 15E.
And obviously, if the locals are putting out these news, so called news reports, encouraging their tribesmen to go out and hunt these, uh, These pilots down.
Obviously, they have very good reason to believe that the U.S. pilots are alive.
Now, these pilots, as you know, Steve, are trained in evasion tactics.
They actually, my understanding is, I think they go through SEER training as well.
So these are not just flyboys.
These guys are designed to evade and withstand a lot if they are shot down.
So it's a matter of time now.
It's a race to the finish.
Our guys get them, or God forbid, the Iranians find them.
I'm sure it's the Air Force also, but the Navy, every pilot, my kid brother's a LAMPS helicopter pilot who was in the Gulf during the tanker wars of 86 and 87.
You had to go to Sears School, and Sears School is very intense.
So the training for the pilots to evade and to stay alive until they're rescued is almost as intense as their pilot training, which is the best in the world.
Brandon, I want to go because both you guys are authors of amazing books.
It's one of the reasons I think you're both you guys, although you kind of take different.
Views of the world are such good observers and analysts because you've done deep research into the topics you have.
Your book on Iran, I think, is spectacular.
Just this part of Iran where they are, people forget after the Shah fell in 1979 and they then took the embassy in early November.
And that's when my ship deployed from the Pacific Fleet.
We sent carrier battle groups, which we had never done before.
The fifth fleet at that time was, you know, a couple of ships, I think, were painted white like the British fleet in Bahrain.
It was very small.
But ever since that time, the Americans have really, the North Arabian Sea has been, back then it was Camel Station and Gonzo Station where the two battle groups were.
But a lot of people don't remember, probably outside of World War II, one of the most horrific wars of the 20th century took place shortly thereafter between Iraq and Iran.
And remember, in our fiasco in Iraq, a big part of Iraq today.
Is basically controlled by the Shiites because the Vatican of the Shiite religion happens to be geographically, I think it's in Najaf, right?
Where we had that during our movie, The Last 600 Meters, we showed the assault on that.
In fact, if you look at Moulton, the congressman, who's a left wing congressman now, he was the kind of heroic Marine captain that led that assault for a couple of weeks.
Talk to people about this 10 year war because right now it looks like our pilots.
Are down in that region that was so intensely fought.
People don't, I think there was a million casualties.
It was the, I think it was the, I think it was one of the bloodiest wars of the 20th century.
And it was very similar to World War I, where you had sort of, you initiated with a war of maneuver and then it just became this locked in trench warfare struggle for 10 years in which the U.S. nominally backed Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
He even gave them precursors for chemical weapons, sarin gas and whatnot, which they then promptly used on the Iranian front lines.
And then the Iranians who were still sort of rebuilding from the revolution that overthrew the Shah just a few years before the war began, they started conducting human wave attacks where they basically would round up people as young as nine years old, give them a Quran, give them a green bandana, the color of Islam, and tell them run at the Iraqi front.
Run at the foxholes.
And of course, the Iraqis were well armed, but they were not as numerically superior.
And ultimately, the Green Wave is what it was called.
And that was how the Iranians pushed the Iraqis back.
And if you listen to the rhetoric ever since then of the regime in Iran, they speak about the Iran Iraq War in much the same way the Russians and the Soviets talk about the quote Great Patriotic War.
In fact, there was a lot of similarities between the Eastern Front, between the Soviet Union and the Nazis of World War II, and the Iran Iraq War.
The Iraqis had technology, they had our support, they had a lot of advantages, but they weren't able to overcome the will, the ideological will of the Persians and the Islamists of Persia.
And the fear today, I talked with Matt Bracken, a former Navy SEAL, on my show a couple weeks ago.
He said his fear is that the United States is essentially on a grander scale, possibly replicating the Iraqi basically failure in the Iran Iraq war.
And we don't understand the Persian.
Mindset, and we certainly don't appreciate the ideological fervor with which the Islamic Republic rules Iran.
And if they're shooting out our search and rescue birds, as you see in those videos, that indicates to me that the Shiite resistance mentality, going back to the breakdown of the Sunni Shiite split hundreds of years ago, I think that's now informing their response to us.
They're not pro overthrow, they're not pro regime change.
Even the ones you get a combination of Persian nationalism, because these are very proud people.
It's an ancient civilization and it's fought the West, it's fought the Roman Empire from the beginning.
I want to go back to this time, though, because I think it's important to think about.
The other day, Brandon and then Dr. Thayer bringing in, the other day there was a report coming out of Tehran that the ideological masters of Iran, this theocracy, were saying and going to round up.
I think kids as young as they were talking about children, kids as young as 10, 11, 12 to augment.
And people, when it first came out, people were saying, Well, these guys are horrible.
That'll never happen.
This is how they broke the Iraqis.
They just used cannon fodder.
They had no concern whatsoever if these kids weren't even armed.
I mean, they had no concern at all whether these kids lived or died.
I mean, it was just, you're going to head, it's like the Chinese in Korea, right?
In North Korea, when we fought in the Korean War, you just hit wave after wave.
Human life to these people means nothing, means absolutely nothing.
It's a totally different and complete mindset.
I'm not saying the Persian mentality.
This is the theocracy that is now in charge.
And like I said, I think we've got harder core people.
So the Iran Iraq war is still a living thing to many of these people, particularly because they think it was one of the great victories, if not the greatest victory.
Besides overthrowing the Shah and running the Americans out of their regime.
Short commercial break.
Search and rescue for an American pilot right now in the Iran war.
One of the OSINT people that I deal with told me that it was a Special Forces UH 60 Blackhawk.
It was hit, did not crash in southern Iraq, made it across the border to safety in southern Iraq, and apparently it has returned to base.
That is what I'm being told.
So, yeah, and there's that video there.
They're shooting from this bridge.
The people on the ground in Iran, these are just ordinary people, are shooting at our birds there that are conducting search and rescue operations for that F 15 Strike Eagle, the two pilots, or the pilot and the Wizzo, that are down in Iran somewhere.
So, this is a developing situation, but the Black Hawk is fine, I am told.
Yeah, and look, CENCOM obviously has preparation for all this, but I will tell you that it looks like pretty barren territory.
You see what our kids, so I keep telling folks, this is like the frickin' moon when you're over there, right?
So once again, the heroism and valor and training.
They're trained for this.
This is why these pilots can go in under enemy fire and do this.
Also, you might know one of the things we did say, Dr. Thayer, let me get you in the conversation here.
We kept saying that the expeditionary operation in late June.
To totally obliterate the nuclear weapons program, then the Venezuelan, and the Venezuelan heroic, I mean, a special forces, and they took a, you know, they almost lost the helicopter that went in if it was not for the incredible airmanship and bravery of the pilot who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for that by President Trump.
Here you're going in, and, you know, they talk about air supremacy, air superiority, those are kind of, Military terms and mathematical equations.
But you've got resistance.
I mean, these people are resisting.
The Iranians are going to put up a fight.
And like we said, they've shifted the center of gravity of the battle to the Persian Gulf.
And they've shifted it to the, in many respects, they've taken the initiative.
It shouldn't be lost on people that the search and rescue area is down close to the Persian Gulf, close to the Tigris and Euphrates, close to Iraqi territory.
So it's closer to there.
It's hundreds, not thousands of miles away from.
You had been not adamant, but you said, hey, look, I don't think President Trump's gotten into an escalatory trap, right?
First, we want to remember that Saddam Hussein attacked Iran in 1980 because he thought the Iranians were going to be a pushover.
He thought that revolutionary Iran was weak and that he could just slice off a province of Iran, the southwestern province, and occupy it, and the Iranian regime would yield to that.
So he was thinking he had a limited aim strategy, he was going to fight a limited war.
And that turned in immediately, almost immediately, to total war that lasted eight years.
So we always want to bear in mind, of course, the Persians that Iran is not going to be a pushover, that the regime and the Iranian people, the Persian people, are formidable, of course.
And we're seeing that as we're looking at the videos that you're showing today.
Second point to keep in mind so Saddam Hussein thought he was going to get a quick and easy victory.
And it turned out that he got a hellish victory.
Conflict that rivaled World War I, as we referenced earlier.
Secondly, with respect to the target set.
So, President Trump said, of course, in his address that he was thinking, considering expanding the target set from the military targets and the objectives that Secretary Rubio laid out and that President Trump laid out to infrastructure, right?
To the oil, to water, and other aspects of civilian infrastructure.
And you did see with that bridge hit.
Obviously, a taste.
I see what President Trump is doing is conveying to the Iranians, of course, that we can escalate, we can broaden the target set, but, and that was an indication that we could do so.
If they don't yield, more is to come, right?
So that there would be additional attacks, leaving aside what Israel would do, but from the U.S. perspective, there would be additional attacks against the civilian infrastructure.
And I want to get to Weichert in a second about this because I think delving into the Iraq around war is quite important here for people to understand because these folks in the Middle East, I mean, they think they got vendettas from a thousand years ago, right?
They got a vendetta from the Crusades.
It's not like in America where people, right?
Most people are not the war audience because you guys are more up to speed on this, but you go on to CNN or MSNBC or some of these youth groups and they're going, Iran, Iraq fought?
What are you talking about?
I didn't know that.
The Iranian people, the Persians, how do they?
They don't know any of this.
And we're not even sure what the leadership is because they're so dispersed, but the internet's totally shut down.
All they see is that they're bombing first military targets or communications.
The next thing you know, you're taking out bridges and taking out the basic functions of life.
It was like the Israelis bombing the oil depots on Saturday night and causing a firestorm like Dresden a couple of Saturday nights ago.
And then coming back a couple of days later and bombing the gas fields.
The Iranian people are completely.
Blacked out, right?
There's no Starlink.
There's no internet.
One of the reasons we took out command and control.
So, how is this signaling?
Is this going just to we hope the Iranian, whatever's left of the Iranian guard and all this dispersion, and still we can't get face to face negotiations?
We're going through some of the most nefarious people in the world, the Pakistanis or the Turks.
I mean, this is kind of what I'm not saying it upsets me, but in this region of the world, starting in Israel and going to Saudi Arabia and going to UAE and going to Pakistan, you can't trust any of them.
You can't trust any of them.
None of them have America's interests in heart.
And so, Dr. Thayer, when you're saying this bombing, how is that?
Well, what's being communicated, of course, is that we can escalate and that we could go after additional targets, an economic target set that would.
Uh, greatly hurt the Iranian economy.
We haven't done that yet.
Uh, our objectives, as they've been laid out, don't require that.
Uh, but it's something that we could do.
Uh, likewise, the threat is present from the 82nd and from the Marines, uh, that the United States could take, um, Karg Island, as has been discussed many times, or other parts of Iran.
So there's the threat of escalation to attempt to coerce.
Clearly, the Iranian government to come to some type of an agreement, which is what President Trump wants.
All of this should be expected, as President Trump has identified, this is going to be going on for weeks, right?
We're going to have, you know, weeks, two or three weeks more, of course, in the conflict.
What you believe now is going to go more than two weeks.
But hang on a second, I'm going to come back to you.
I want to go back to this round war because one of our engine room personnel just brings to mind and says, Hey, look, at the time that this war took place, people got to remember what it was like back then.
The Persians under the Shah, it was a different Middle East.
Israel wasn't our big ally, our big ally was Iran.
The Shaw.
They had the most sophisticated weapon systems.
In fact, one of the reasons that it got so big and intense is that the weapons industry had a customer, another customer besides the U.S. government.
And particularly with the wind down of the Vietnam War, they're always looking for new markets.
They were loaded up.
When I went to Officer Candidate School in Newport, I think we had a couple of hundred midshipmen go through every class.
We're 90 day wonders.
There were 500.
Iranians, they would all send them to Newport, Rhode Island for their first training.
And then they would disperse them out to go get air down to Texas or Pensacola to learn how to fly, or they go to other aspects for military preparedness.
We were, my point in that time in the all volunteer force post Vietnam, we were training as many Persians over here as we were training people to go.
Because at that time, we didn't have Reagan's 600 ship Navy.
You had 200, I think we had 250 ships.
The Navy was quite small when I got in.
And we were training as many as Iranians.
When the Shah fell, that was the strategic ally of the United States, and we pumped in the most sophisticated weapon systems in the world.
When we were thrown out unceremoniously, right in 79, when the Shah left, and then when they seized the embassy, Brandon Weicker, in your book, what Saddam was saying, because he's always the cleverest guy, right?
It wasn't just taking a province, he was going for a deep strike to take the oil.
He thought, hey, these guys are all messed up.
You got this crazy guy from Paris.
They're all, you know, they've thrown all their officers are dead.
All the leaders of the Iranian militia don't know how to use this equipment.
And I just want people to understand something.
When they had their, because you see President Trump telling the Europeans, hey, Hormuz is precious to you.
Just go in and seize the oil.
The last time someone tried to seize their oil, they sent nine year old kids and they took a million casualties.
Brandon White, well, if I can just build off that, I would argue that the straight line from the end of the Iran Iraq war to Desert Storm to 2003, collapse of Saddam Hussein, it all goes back to the Iran Iraq war.
Had Saddam never done that, I don't think there would have ever been any problems with Iraq and Kuwait or Iraq and us.
That was all a downstream, unintended consequence of the Iran Iraq war.
So, I don't think the networks are confirming this, but CNN's had some reporting up.
Let's play CNN.
Jack Basobic's going to join Brandon Weichert.
And before we go to that, real quickly, Brandon, about the Iran Iraq war, remember you mentioned sarin gas and the gas that was used later when he used it because he was outnumbered and he had these nine year old kids coming in, not all nine year olds, but young people coming in waves.
He did use sarin gas, he did use it on the Kurds.
Of course, that was used against him years later in his weapons of mass destruction.
The same people on Fox cheerleading this war right now were the same exact crowd, Lindsey Graham and that crowd cheering.
Bill Crystal were going to be throwing roses in front of the U.S. Marines as they go to Baghdad.
Those guys were the guys that were saying Saddam Hussein is the biggest monster in the world because he used gas.
Pamela, I'm going to be very careful because the information we have at this point is incomplete.
But here's what we know Iranian state media is reporting that search and rescue operations are underway in southwestern Iran by the U.S. for downed pilots.
As you noted, they previously claimed today that they had shot down a U.S. aircraft.
There are videos that have been circulating online which appear to show a refueling operation in the air, an aircraft refueling to helicopters would at least Which would at least be consistent with a search and rescue operation.
Earlier, as you noted, there were pictures posted and shared by Iranian state media which appear to show a piece of wreckage from a U.S. aircraft consistent with an F 15.
CNN has repeatedly reached out to Central Command, U.S. Central Command, and has not yet received comment on whether a jet was indeed shot down and whether search and rescue operations are underway.
We continue to see.
Comment from them.
I don't have to tell you, Pamela, or Wolf, the seriousness of this if it is confirmed that a jet has been shot down and that those pilots are on the ground, either been captured or that Iranian authorities are now looking for them.
But again, we're treating this with caution because the information is incomplete at this hour.
Our reporting from CNN regards a U.S. military assessment that has found that even after close to a month of war now and the U.S. striking more than 12,000 targets in Iran.
That Iran maintains a missile capability, that it still has 50% of its missile launchers, 50% of its one way attack drones, as well as a significant percentage of its coastal defense missiles, those particularly important because it allows Iran to project power over the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz to threaten shipping there, not just shipping of oil, fertilizer, containers, et cetera, but also potentially U.S. warships operating in that area.
We're told that according to the assessment, While the U.S. has had great success striking multiple ballistic missile targets, launchers, missile storage facilities, that it has been more difficult to strike mobile missile launchers and to strike both launchers and missiles that are stored underground.
The response has been to try to strike the entrances to those underground storage facilities to block them in, and it seems that they've had some success there.
But at a minimum, Iran maintains what I think you could call remarkable capability a month into the war, and that helps explain the fire, the continuing incoming fire we've seen here in Tel Aviv.
Just a few minutes ago, we were back in the shelter here in Tel Aviv once again.
And, you know, based on the pictures that we've seen so far, it is consistent with an F-15, not an F-35, as the Iranians have said, but an F-15.
So one of the key things about this is the F-15 is not a stealth fighter.
It's an older generation aircraft.
It is designed for multiple missions, but mainly air superiority type missions.
The kind of anti aircraft fire that the Iranians are capable of conducting.
So, you know, in conjunction with the reporting from the U.S. intelligence community that says that the Iranians still have major capabilities, this is one more evidence, piece of evidence, that they have those capabilities and it's dangerous still for our pilots.
You know, Jack Vasoba gets pretty amazing after, I think, 11,000 or 12,000 combat sorties.
They finally, if this is true, CENTCOM has not confirmed it, but it's been a remarkable record so far.
But these types of things happen when you're in a shooting war.
You're going to have pilots shot down, you're going to have planes shot down, you're going to have search and rescue, and the danger of search and rescue is orders of magnitude even more than the pilots going in the first time.
And I would remind everyone that it was that friendly fire incident over Kuwait where it was, again, three of the F 15 Eagles that were shot down in that friendly fire incident.
But in that incident, all of the pilots and crew, the WISO, the weapons officers, We were able to eject and were safely recovered.
So there are indications that we've seen this already in Operation Epic Fury, where there's been ejections and recovery.
Now, of course, not over Indian territory, Indian country like this is here in Iran.
And that's why those CSAR missions are out there the way that they are.
But it seems to be that every indication is that with them flying low and slow the way they are, that they do perhaps have indications that an ejection did take place so that the pilots can be recovered.
Of course, We're also monitoring Iranian channels on Telegram and other places to see if locals attempt to pick up the pilot.
And we saw that in Kuwait a number of times.
So we will see what happens there.
And, Steve, I just got to say, man, Jim Sciutto, seriously, this guy is the, he like never served a day in his life.
He is the biggest wannabe over at CNN sitting over there in Tel Aviv.
Look at me.
Look, he's an Obama staffer.
All right.
This guy was an Obama staffer.
They stuck him over with Gary Locke in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.