Caller Brasco defends President Trump against declining major news credibility before introducing Atlantic writer Nancy Youssef, who analyzes the Iran war's undefined military end state and the costly "battle of munitions" where $30,000 Iranian drones strain U.S. defenses against multi-million dollar Patriots. Youssef further argues that despite leadership shifts following strikes on Air Force One, the core regime remains unchanged as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps retains power and negotiation willingness, challenging claims of successful regime change. [Automatically generated summary]
So your initial assessment of what you just heard at that press conference.
unidentified
So we got a couple new details.
What I heard the chairman in particular say is that the U.S. has military objectives that are defined as making sure that Iran can't pose a threat to its neighbors and region, and that the way the U.S. wants to do that is by reducing their ballistic missile and drone capability, namely.
He talked about labs for the nuclear program, but he didn't say, the chairman didn't say nuclear weapons specifically.
He mentioned 11,000 targets that had been hit.
But what they didn't define is what does that state look like?
How many strikes have to happen for Iran to no longer pose a threat?
And does that mean that they have to hit 100% of their capability, 90% of their capability, 11,000 out of how many targets, for example?
And does removing those capabilities then allow for the U.S. and its partners to find ways to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, for example?
Does it make it straight?
That's right.
And between that and the President's social media post this morning saying that it's on Europe to reopen it, it seemed to suggest that they believe that once the Iranians are weaker militarily, that it'll be harder for them to close the strait and therefore Europe can come in afterwards and sort of negotiate the ways to reopen the strait.
They also didn't talk about proxies.
Is it such that the U.S. wants to make sure that the Iranians cannot provide capabilities to its proxies?
And so we heard a sort of smattering of details about what the U.S. has been able to do militarily, a broad definition of military success.
What we didn't hear is what that end state looks like.
What is an acceptable outcome for the United States and Israel?
He talked a lot about the defense industrial base, both in Iran and in the United States.
You wrote an article, and the title is this, The One Variable That Could Decide the War.
What is that?
unidentified
Munitions.
The Iranians right now are using drones primarily, along with ballistic missiles.
Each of their drones are called Shahid drones, cost about $30,000.
The defenses that we're using, the missiles we're using to shoot them down, cost somewhere between $1 and $5 million each.
And oftentimes they're launching more than one.
And there's a limited supply of them, not only for the United States, but for its Gulf partners that the Iranians are also targeting.
And so there's real concern that between the limited supply, the munitions that have already been provided to the Ukrainians, and the time it takes to restock U.S. supplies of those, that there is a battle of munitions, that there could come a point where the U.S. is having to, and Israel and its Gulf partners are having to make decisions about what to shoot down and what not because of that cost difference between what the Iranians can produce quickly and at a relative cheap price and how long and expensive the U.S. and Allied defense is.
So Iran actually can just keep making them since they're easy to make and they're made quickly and maybe outpace the U.S.'s ability to make those defensive weapons.
unidentified
That's right.
And so that's why you heard General Kane saying that they're focused on the supply chain because the best way they can combat it is to go after the factories or the places in which they build them.
The challenge becomes how much do they have now and is that enough supply to keep them in the war days, weeks?
We haven't gotten any fidelity on that from the United States military.
The challenge is, yes, there are different people in charge than there were a month ago, and we've seen several iterations of people in charge of defense, Intel, and of course the Ayatollah himself.
But it's the same regime in that you still have the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, you still have a government that has core values that the United States said that it was seeking to combat at the start of this war.
This is not a government that is going to be ready to negotiate in the ways that I think the United States was hoping when it started the war.
This is not a fundamental change in principles in terms of governance within Iran.
And I think we're seeing that in terms of how the war is playing out.
You are not hearing a regime come forward and say, we are interested in negotiations.
We are open to the president's optimism about talks.
We are hearing government elements say, we are not interested in talks.
We don't trust this United States government because when we negotiated with them in the past, they conducted strikes against us twice, June, and then again last month.
We are not hearing a change in tone from the government.
or a hardening or lessening of their positions in terms of what they're seeking to achieve in this war.
Both the United States and Iran are still sort of holding on to, some would argue, maximalist aims that they're trying to achieve in this war.
The United States wants to eliminate Iran's military capability.
The Iranians are seeking payment for the damage that has been caused, potential control of the strait of Hormuz going forward, and the promise that the United States will not strike again.
So while the people have changed, we have not seen evidence that the core principles that have governed Iran have changed.