Feb. 28, 2026 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
40:33
[SPECIAL] - Scott Ritter : Trump attacks Iran - 'Epic Fury' or Epic FAIL ?
Scott Ritter and Judge Andrew Napolitano expose the U.S.-Israel’s botched four-day decapitation strike on Iran, failing to kill Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei or President Pazashkian while Iran’s advanced missiles neutralized outdated defenses. The campaign, marred by criminally sloppy targeting—like bombing two girls’ schools (63 dead)—and ammunition shortages mid-conflict, reveals a war launched on political desperation, not security. Congress’s cowardice and the military’s ignored warnings (one admiral fired for honesty) underscore systemic betrayal, with Ritter warning escalation will worsen before collapse. [Automatically generated summary]
Tragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression, with no complaints from the American people.
Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government.
To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected.
What if sometimes to love your country, you had to alter or abolish the government?
What if Jefferson was right?
What if that government is best which governs least?
What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong?
What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave?
What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now?
Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Saturday, February 28th, 2026.
Welcome to this special edition of Judging Freedom with Who Else?
Our foremost military expert, Scott Ritter-Scott.
Thank you very much for joining us on this momentous day on what here in the United States is a Saturday morning.
So can you give us, before we get granular, can you give us a big picture of what the United States and Israel did in the past 12 hours and what they're trying to accomplish?
Well, the United States and Israel have kicked off a joint coordinated attack against Iran, the goal of which is regime change.
There are subsets within this.
Donald Trump spelled them out in a presentation he made earlier this morning, destroying ballistic missiles, destroying nuclear sites, destroying X, Y, and Z.
But at the end of the day, this is a regime change operation.
This entire effort fails if the Iranian regime survives at the end of the day.
And it's a massive attack.
I think the initial aspects of it are supposed to go for four days.
So the United States has a four-day air campaign sustained.
I don't know what they expect at that point to take a pause and see if the Iranians surrender.
But the Iranians, I believe, aren't going to end at four days.
The Iranians will continue to turn on the heat.
This is an existential war for the very survival of the Iranian nation, which began with, and this is, your audience needs to listen very carefully to what I'm about to tell you.
Go ahead.
The United States and Israel tried to kill Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, Ayatollah.
He is the second most revered man in all of Shia Islam.
This is like trying to kill the Pope.
This is like trying to kill the Archbishop of Canterbury.
This is like trying to kill the head of the Russian Orthodox Church.
And the United States and Israel tried to kill him and are still trying to kill him.
They tried to assassinate the president of Iran.
If you think for a second the Iranian people, the Iranian nation, are going to walk away from this and say, that's all right.
You're very wrong.
The gates of hell have been opened.
And unless the United States has a competent battle plan to complete this mission, we're going to lose this war.
In fact, later on we can get into it, but we've already lost this war because we failed to achieve our initial objectives.
And now we're going to have a cascading series of consequences that will result in us depleting our limited ammunition resources and we're going to run out of ammunition before we run out of targets and Iran isn't going to run out of ammunition.
You say that the Americans and the Israelis tried to assassinate the Ayatollah and President Pazashkin.
You mean in the past 12 hours they tried to assassinate him unsuccessfully?
Correct.
The initial, I think there were 50 cruise missiles fired out of Israel.
We don't know if they were all Israeli, if there was a mix of Israeli-American cruise missiles involved.
50 cruise missiles impacting 30 sites in Tehran.
That was the initial salvo.
They destroyed the presidential palace, that is the residence of the presidents, and they destroyed Ali Khomeini's personal residence where he not only sleeps and eats, but where he entertains companies.
He's a religious figure.
And so, you know, he entertains people.
When I say entertain, people come and visit him and talk to him.
And these were the first two targets hit.
So, yeah, it was a definite assassination attempt.
Do we know that the Ayatollah and President Pazashkin either weren't there or otherwise survived these assassination attempts?
According to Foreign Minister Arakhib, both Ali Khomeini, who will be speaking shortly to address the Iranian people, and the president of Iran have survived.
They also said that almost all the senior leadership survived.
They said they lost a couple commanders, but these commanders will be replaced.
But that if this was a decapitation strike, it failed miserably.
Do we know how effective Iran's defenses are, air defenses, military air defenses to intercept American and Israeli missiles and drones?
Our air defenses are modern, but they're insufficient to the task.
The Patriot 3 system, or the Patriot missile, is a snake-bit system.
I've talked about this before, derived from 1970s technology.
Raytheon, rather than starting from scratch when meeting a U.S. Army requirement, took this technology and updated it and modified it to fast track a system that could be sold to the Army.
The Patriot has never worked as designed.
It's a very inferior system.
It has significant flaws, and the Iranians have identified all of these flaws.
And the missiles that Iran has are capable of defeating the Patriot 3 system.
The same with the FAD.
The FAD is a more capable system, but the Iranians, again, we're talking about older technology.
We're building missile defenses that are designed to intercept missiles that are about 10 years old.
The Iranians have the most modern missiles, and they haven't even started firing them.
That's the other thing, is that we can't stop the attacks that are being done by lesser quality missiles.
What the Iranians are doing is mapping out, again, thanks to the Chinese, mapping out our response.
As they fire, they're getting real-time intelligence on where missiles are being launched, where air defense systems are, which ones are active, what radars are active.
And then they're going to launch a second wave to take out the air defense.
And then when everything's laying there naked, they're just going to destroy everything, including American military bases, including Israel, including the cities of the Middle East.
I'm sorry, the Gulf Arab states, your complicity in the attack on Iran was noted by the Iranian government, and you too shall pay a price.
How effective is the Iranian military defense system against American missiles and drone and Israeli missiles and drones?
Well, we don't know.
I don't know.
We don't know how many of the missiles were shot down, what percentage hit targets.
What I can say is this, is that we don't have a good track record.
The Gulf War was over 35 years ago.
the desert storm.
And the effectiveness rate of the Tomahawk cruise missile is still classified.
We're not allowed to say what percentage of the Tomahawks reached their target.
And there's a reason because that percentage isn't very high.
And the Tomahawk has never recovered from that.
So even if the Iranians don't defend themselves, the Tomahawk has a tendency not to work.
We'll see.
I don't know what's turned on, what's turned off.
What we do know, though, what we can see is that the Iranians were ready for this attack because immediately they began responding.
When the 12-day war started last June, there was a sort of a time gap between the Israeli attacks and the Iranian responses.
Here we see the Iranians responding broad spectrum, hitting all the target sets necessary and now continuing the strike.
The Iranians were prepared.
Whatever we thought we were going to do against their ballistic missile launch capabilities, and President Trump admitted that this is one of our primary goals, we're not doing it.
At least we haven't done it yet.
And we're starting to pay the price.
I mean, you have to be careful what you read, but it appears that there are casualties and those casualties could climb even higher.
The Americans and Israelis have attempted to murder, as you said, assassinate President Pazashkian and the Ayatollah.
Is Benjamin Netanyahu personally a legitimate target?
Yes.
I think some of the indications are that his residence was struck by the Iranians.
And I think the Iranians now have the death of Netanyahu and Israeli leadership is now a legitimate target.
There's no reason to hold back.
There's no reason to say, well, let's not attack them because we don't want them to attack us.
They started by trying to kill everybody.
And so they are legitimate targets.
And I would caution the Gulf Arab leaders too, be careful what you say, because you're part of a process that tried to assassinate Ali Khamenei and to try to assassinate the Iranian president.
You are now fair game.
And, you know, it just is what it is.
Explain to us why you say other Arab leaders are part of the process and are a fair game.
Because they looked the other way when the Americans and the Israelis attacked?
Because they gave the Americans and the Israelis airspace or cover?
Well, first of all, they've played home to American forces for some time now.
The United States doesn't get to use these forces to gather intelligence and intimidate Iran.
And then three days before the shooting war begins, withdraw the force and say, there, you can't touch that base.
That base is still plugged into the system.
There's still radars in the base collecting intelligence.
There's still intelligence people doing things.
That base is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
So if you're an American base on the soil of any Arab nation in the region, you are a legitimate target.
But it's more than just the government's allowing America to be based there.
Politically speaking, Iran did extensive diplomacy, traveling to all of these countries in an effort to prevent exactly this from happening.
And yet, what the Iranians have found is behind their backs, every single one of these Gulf Arab nations, with the possible exception of Oman, has articulated to the United States: if you're going to attack Iran, finish the job, get rid of the regime.
We will support a regime change operation.
And that's what we got.
So, if you're an Arab state that says we will support a regime change operation, don't be surprised when the regime that you didn't change holds you to account.
Got it.
Got it.
Scott, for the second time in eight months, the President of the United States has personally lulled Iranian negotiators into a false sense of security and literally in the midst of negotiations commenced an attack.
What message does this send to the rest of the world, particularly the Kremlin, about the United States?
Well, let's parse it out.
We know that the Omani ambassadors and representatives of foreign ministry were on the news talk circuit here in the United States, playing up the fact that the Iranians were making all the compromises necessary, that there was a real deal on the table.
And then Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, announces that he's going to be traveling to Israel on Monday, implying that we're going to give diplomacy a chance.
And yet, the night after he made that announcement, we attack.
There can be no doubt that we never had any intention whatsoever of seeking a diplomatic solution, that the military option was always the only option.
Everything else was a setup.
There might be some people out there that prior to this were saying, well, that's a little harsh.
You can't condemn them for a one-time bad deed back in June.
Past patterns of behavior repeat themselves.
We now have a repeated behavioral pattern.
And the other thing is that the people involved, Witkoff and Jared Kushner, they're also involved in negotiating with the Russians.
I think it's been proven these are not legitimate negotiators.
They are actors there to play a part, to lead people down a false path while the United States does other things.
And it's time for Russia to wake up and realize that this administration is setting you up for failure, that there's no intention whatsoever of seeking a diplomatic resolution of the Ukrainian conflict, that the United States is simply using Ukraine as a means of setting Russia up for failure, because ultimately our policy goal with Russia is the same as our policy goal with Iran, regime change.
We want Vladimir Putin out.
The Trump administration wants Vladimir Putin out.
And if this doesn't prove that, then shame on Russia for not engaging their brain housing complex.
Chris On Negotiations And Attacks00:12:07
Here's the Iranian foreign minister this morning.
This is very candid and very telling.
Chris, I don't know why the U.S. administration insists to start a negotiation and then in the middle of negotiation attack the other party.
Today happened exactly what last June happened.
We were in the middle of negotiations and it was interesting that this time we made a big progress.
last two days ago and on thursday we had a very good meeting in uh geneva uh together with steve vitkov and jared kushner and we were able to address uh serious questions related to iran's nuclear program we obviously have differences but we resolved some of those differences and we decided to continue in order to resolve the rest of questions.
And we actually instructed the technical team to go to Vienna and have a meeting with the IAEA.
So in order to find technical solution for the problems we are facing in the negotiation.
And everybody was happy at the end of those negotiations.
As you saw, His Excellency Badr al-Busaidi, the foreign minister of Oman, who is mediating between us, he concluded by posting a tweet saying that today we made significant progress.
Is there any reason to disbelieve that?
No, it's 100% accurate.
Well, how vulnerable is Israel?
Does their iron dome, is it a myth or will it keep them safe from Iranian missiles?
Well, I think we've already had that answer.
Iran has fired in their first round of missiles against Israel using older technology, 127 missiles, 33 of them hit their targets.
The Iranians have put Israel on notice that in the United States that they haven't even begun to use their advanced stuff, that that is coming and there's no stopping that.
So, you know, Israel told the United States that they can absorb about 700 ballistic missile impacts.
And, you know, today they got about 5% of them and they hit hard.
This is just going to continue and continue and continue and continue and Israel will be destroyed.
And there's nothing that anybody can do to stop it.
How sustained, you used that word earlier in the program, Scott.
How sustained is the U.S. attack?
In other words, is it wave after wave after wave or are there periods of lull?
Well, my understanding is that this current attack is going to be four days of 24-7 attack.
We've already started the reattack.
So basically, we're going to launch, recover, rearm, refit, launch, recover, rearm, refit, and just keep launching and recovering for four days while we hit targets.
But the way an air camp works is you have a finite number of resources that have to hit a certain target set.
I say this because I've done this.
listen to me people we will go after you're so valuable to us Scotty Go ahead.
We'll go after certain targets with assets.
For instance, in the Gulf War, we started the attack against Iraq's ballistic missile infrastructure out west with two F-15E Strike Eagle squadrons.
These are very precious resources that we needed to be plugged in elsewhere in the air campaign.
But we needed them to launch the first night's attack and a potential follow-up attack.
So they were plugged into these targets, but they didn't destroy the targets.
So what that meant is they had to be kept on that target and we had to divert resources that were supposed to be striking other targets to assist them so we could solve that target because we couldn't move on until this target that was solved.
So we fell behind the power curve.
Now, with Desert Storm, we had sufficient resources and sufficient ammunition where we could drag this thing out.
We know now because of the revolt of the joint chiefs that we don't have enough ammunition.
We don't have enough ammunition.
We're going to run out of ammunition, which means that they retailored the strike plan to use to accomplish the same thing with less ammunition, which means they're making assumptions that we're going to meet our target elimination schedule on target without deviation.
A major aspect of this campaign was decapitation.
And we were just told by Aragchi that that didn't work.
So not only did we expend a tremendous amount of resources trying to decapitate, it didn't work.
In order for all the rest of the campaign objectives to fall in place, we have to finish the decapitation job, which means now we have to expend more resources, divert resources away from other target decks, which means we're falling behind on the rest of the air campaign, which means we'll never catch up, which means we'll run out of ammunition long before we achieve anything remotely resembling what the president says he wants.
We have lost this war already.
The New York Post reports, now, when I was at Fox News, if you started your comments with, according to the New York Post, everybody that's stop right there.
But they are reporting that Iran has hit, what is it?
What is it here?
Has hit a U.S. naval base in Bahrain.
Yep, the Fifth Fleet.
Pardon?
Does that make sense to you that they would attack a U.S. naval base in Bahrain?
Yeah, it's headquarters of the Fifth Fleet.
I've been there many times.
I've been in that building that's about to get hit.
You know, of course they're going to hit it.
It's the headquarters of the American military presence in the Persian Gulf.
The Fifth Fleet is there.
Other military resources are there.
And it makes perfect sense for them to hit it.
Here is the President of the United States in the middle of the night.
I think when he says imminent, he means imminent, but I'll let you dissect what he says.
Chris, the third one, the longer one that we just viewed of President Trump.
A short time ago, the United States military began major combat operations in Iran.
Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime, a vicious group of very hard, terrible people.
They've rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can't take it anymore.
Instead, they attempted to rebuild their nuclear program and to continue developing long-range missiles that can now threaten our very good friends and allies in Europe, our troops stationed overseas, and could soon reach the American homeland.
Just imagine how emboldened this regime would be if they ever had and actually were armed with nuclear weapons as a means to deliver their message.
For these reasons, the United States military is undertaking a massive and ongoing operation to prevent this very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests.
What imminent threat to the United States of America is posed by the Iranian regime?
What could he possibly be talking about other than propaganda?
Well, it's 100% propaganda, but he's posturing that Iran was Seeking to build a nuclear weapon that they were reconstituting capabilities.
But it's a straight-up lie because, as the Omani foreign minister pointed out, the Iranis are actually doing the exact opposite, bending over backwards.
Not only were they making major concessions to the American negotiating team, but they were meeting with the International Atomic Energy Agency to get international inspectors back into Iran to verify their compliance with every aspect of this.
So the president is a straight-up liar.
Sorry to say that.
But he, you know, the other thing is, you know, he's reading a speech written by others.
More important to me than the words that he was speaking was his tone and his posture.
This is a defeated president already.
He has lost this war and he knows it.
He knows that his presidency is over.
He knows that he's going to lose the midterms, that his gamble failed.
And that's what I heard there.
I didn't hear a competent man speaking in a way that would motivate a nation.
I saw an old, tired, defeated man reading a script that he doesn't believe because he knows that every word he said there was a lie.
Well, it's interesting you say that.
We have another clip we're going to show, which compares him on election night addressing the concept of war.
And last night, a little snippet from which we already showed you.
Before we get to it, if I could be a little selfish for a minute to the audience, we love you.
There is an enormous, enormous number of you watching us now.
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Like and subscribe.
Okay, now back to Chris, the election night and last night comparisons of Donald Trump.
But we had no wars.
They said he will start a war.
I'm not going to start a war.
I'm going to stop wars.
A short time ago, the United States military began major combat operations in Iran.
Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.
I think you're right, Scotty.
The man has aged tremendously in 15, 16, 17 months.
Yeah, and he knows that he has been trapped here.
This is, you know, he has been told by people that, you know, this could be done quickly, could be done easily.
The Lindsey Grahams of the world, the Benjamin Netanyahu's of the world, all of the Zionists he surrounds himself with.
And he stopped listening to the people that matter: the Tulsi Gabbards, the JD Vance's, his joint chiefs of staff.
And so he was led down a path to where even if he wanted to stop the war, he couldn't.
That speech we heard was a speech given by a man who was powerless to patch 22.
You know, we have deployed so much military force forward that we have no choice.
We have to use it or lose it.
Either use it in a given window or it has to start going back home.
And once it starts going back home to bring it back, you wouldn't get it back there till the summer.
America Bomb Shelter Targeted00:04:22
And that's right before midterm elections.
And the peace president can't go to war, an illegal war of aggression in the summer.
Even if you win, the fallout would be.
He needed to deliver a military victory by the end of March that he could then package to the American people as I am the man, peace through strength.
I am the peacemaker because I destroyed that which could not be destroyed for 47 years.
And he could carry that through the summer and hope that that helps push him over the line in November.
What he realizes now is that it literally is all over.
He is going to lose the midterm.
He's going to be swamped in the midterm and it's finished.
And Judge, if I might just for a second, this man is talking about striking targets to defend Americans and all that.
I've been to war.
In the Gulf War, I was involved in targeting.
And one of the things that we did is we targeted a place called the America bomb shelter.
We knew it was a bomb shelter, but we had good intelligence that said it had been converted to used as a national level command and control facility.
To be exempt, just so the people understand what I'm talking about.
We were hunting Scud missiles unsuccessfully.
Israel is ready to get involved in this war, and we had to prevent Israel from doing that.
In order to do that, we had to show that we were seriously hunting down Scud missiles.
We believed that the command and control for the Scud missiles were being carried out by Saddam Hussein.
And Saddam Hussein used a system called the Mark 14 radio telephone.
It was made by Siemens.
It was an encrypted radio telephone system with a unique signature, unique frequency ranges, etc.
And we had detected the Mark 14 signal coming from antennas associated with this bomb shelter.
And we had reason to believe that the Iraqis had located senior command and control in this place.
And so, you know, we reviewed it, we reviewed it, we reviewed it.
There was no indication that it was being used as a bomb shelter.
I helped pick the impact points.
And my job was when the mission strike came back to look at the photographs to determine whether or not we did it.
And I know that we had to put two GBU-28s through the same hole to achieve the result.
And we did it.
We destroyed it.
And I signed it off as destroyed.
And I was feeling pretty good.
A little while later, CNN came on and we found out that we had hit a bomb shelter and 408 women and children were dead, killed.
The most horrible kind of death.
When the first bomb went in, it created fire that trapped them.
Neighbors could hear the women and children screaming, trying to get out.
The second bomb came in, ignited, and it boiled.
The firefighters were putting the water in and all of these bodies got turned into fat.
That's what happened there.
And there's not a single day, you know, that that doesn't haunt you.
It haunts you for the rest of your life.
We have hit two children's schools.
We have bombed two children's schools.
63 dead children, girls, little girls dead.
Their mothers waiting for their daughters to come home.
They sent their daughters to school on the belief that there wouldn't be a war because there was diplomacy going on, that there wouldn't be a war because Marco Rubio said he was traveling to the region in Monday.
So they sent their girls to a school.
The girls were in school and we bombed it.
And we bombed another one.
There's 100 girls buried under that rubble being dug out now.
Girls that will not survive.
This is the horror of war.
But what I'm trying to say is at least when I was involved in the bombing of the Amaria shelter, we did our damnedest to make sure that it was a military target.
We were wrong and it haunts you forever.
What in God's name could lead us to bomb two girls' schools?
I'm involved in this.
I did this for a living.
I know you don't make those mistakes.
This is the sloppiest kind of targeting possible.
This is what happens when a military is told you must sustain a strike.
Must hit certain numbers of targets and they're given artificial metrics to meet.
Sloppiest Kind of Targeting Possible00:07:56
And so they're desperately looking for anything.
And they bombed two girls schools, killing scores of young little girls.
This is what we're doing.
Judge, this is the war we're fighting.
It's indefensible, it's not just inhuman, it's criminal.
We have waged an illegal war of aggression against a nation that did not pose a threat to us, was bending over backwards to meet any demand we put on them about their nuclear program, and yet we lied lied lied lied, and now 63 little schoolgirls are dead.
It's uh, it's horrific, Scott.
My next uh question is really more my field than yours.
Uh, when uh the government kidnapped Nicholas Maduro, they claimed it was the arrest of somebody from uh fugitive from justice.
He had been indicted and we had the right to arrest him.
And that was nonsense.
But that was their argument, and because it was a simple arrest, they didn't need Congress, Congress's permission.
They can't make that argument now.
There's no question but that this is a war.
Its goal is the destruction of a foreign state.
Where is the Congress?
So it's a.
It's the fairest question of all, and the the interesting thing is now, Congress the, the Democrats, deliberately put off the vote so they wouldn't have to vote, because they are the most cowardly people in the world.
And now next week they're going to try and push this through and try to retroactively stop and say, you can't do this war.
But they, they didn't do it when it could have mattered.
Um, but Congress doesn't matter anymore.
They've literally punted, um there's there's no, you know, separate but equal branch of government.
The president's already told the Supreme Court they don't matter.
And now Congress is just acting as if they don't matter.
So we have a literal dictator out there sending American kids.
Well, you know, this man had the gall, the gall to stand there and say there will be American casualties.
Well, you know what, Donny Baby, you got a son named Baron.
He needs to be on the front line right now.
I don't care if he's not a serving member, send him there.
He needs to be standing next to Billy Joe Bob, the blue hauler boy who joined because he needed a job.
He joined because the economics required him.
He didn't join out of patriotism.
Maybe he did, maybe he didn't, but he joined and he's there, he's serving and he's dying right now, dying and you just glibly throw it away because those mothers are going to pick up the corpse of their son and bury it in the ground and spend the rest of their lives thinking about the hole in their heart.
And your, your son, your six foot six Baron, spoiled little brat, is in some elite university fooling around with good-looking girls, eating great food, living the high life.
If you were a man Donnie, you'd put your son on the front line, and the fact that you don't and you condemn other Americans to die for your fake war speaks volumes about who you are and frankly, it speaks volumes about Melania.
Melania, you dare talk about the children of Ukraine and write a letter about something you didn't know about.
Look at the video of the Iranian mothers on their knees, snot coming out of their nose because their daughters aren't coming home.
You need to be on your knees Melania, snot coming out of your nose, ready to receive the torn body of your son.
Baron, if your husband was a man, he'd send his son to die instead of sending other sons to die.
I am sick of this man.
I am sick of the the, the hypocrisy of every single one of these American politicians who talk about war war war, war and they never go.
I've been there.
That's why i'm so against it and these guys just sit there and say, let's do more, let's do more, and all it does is kill innocent people.
You know, if you want to kill soldiers, kill soldiers.
You're killing children, little girls that didn't do.
They didn't do anything to anybody.
Scotty, it's a dismal, horrific state of affairs, but thank you very much for joining us.
Thank you for your incomparable passion, your extraordinary knowledge of these things and your personal courage.
We're all wound up now, but I will wish you a good weekend.
And we'll be back with you soon, early next week, because more will happen in the next two days.
This war is not ending, guys.
It's going to get worse before it gets, it's not going to get better.
Let me ask you this.
Do the Joint Chiefs know that they can't win this?
Was that data that was leaked earlier last week true and accurate?
They told the president duplicitous.
They have a campaign plan they believe will work.
And they believe that the American forces, if they implement this plan, can achieve the objectives.
The problem is they don't have the resources to make the plan work.
And so they've initiated a plan that requires a certain sortie rate, sustainable sortie rate.
Sortie is when an airplane takes off and lands.
And you have to have ammunitions linked to the sortie, different kinds of ammunition, missiles, bombs, et cetera.
And when you look at what we have available, we don't have enough aircraft to sustain the sortie rate.
And we don't have enough ammunition to deliver steel on target.
So we're going to start a campaign and we're going to not be able to finish the campaign because our airplanes are not going to be able to meet the sortie rate.
And we're going to run out of ammunition well before we get to the end of the campaign objectives.
And so the admiral that was fired is the guy that said, we're going to lose because we're going to run out of ammunition midway through this war.
And when we run out of ammunition, it doesn't matter.
So instead of taking seriously what he said, they fired him.
They fired him and then they went to war.
And so again, if Congress was doing their job, they would, when this is over, subpoena every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and every member of the Combatant Command, Central Command, et cetera, and bring them in and ask them a series of questions that gets to, why did we go to war if we couldn't win?
Why did we go to war if we didn't?
Who was responsible for counting bullets and bombs and everything?
Who was responsible for reporting up to chain of command?
Where did this fail?
And basically fire every single one of them and deny them their pensions and make them paupers or whatever, because it's the most dishonorable thing in the world.
You know, when you put on the uniform, your job isn't to make the president happy.
He has a wife who puts on uniforms to make him happy.
Your job is to be honest to the American people, which means you have to report honestly what the facts are.
Not tell your boss what they want to hear.
Tell them what the facts are.
The president gets paid the big bucks to make decisions.
And he's supposed to make the decisions based upon the information provided him by honest men of integrity, honest women of integrity, people who say this is the truth.
Now, if the president wants to receive that and say, I hear you, I mean, we were taught this day one in the basic school.
Hey, boss, I'm looking at the plan.
If I launch this attack on Hill 861, we're all going to die.
And the boss says, yep, but we need you to hold the enemy down for a certain period of time.
So launch that attack.
And yeah, I'm ordering you to die.
And at that point in time, you go, okay, I guess I have to go die.
That's fine.
If the military tells the president something and they're honest about it, the president says, I've made a decision that we're going to execute anyways.
You have to obey that order.
But don't lie to the president and say, oh, no, everything's great.
It all smells like roses.
We have more than enough ammunition.
The plan's going to work like a charm and all that.
Because now you've deceived not just the president, but you've deceived the American people.
Wow.
Larry's Bet on War00:01:01
Just to make light of this for a second, if there's any humor in any of this, yesterday on this show, our colleagues and friends whom we both admire and revere, Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson, were knocked down drag out.
Larry, of course, is on your side.
Ray is on the side of the angels because he sees only the good in people.
Anyway, I love them both, but they're both cheap skates.
They had a bet as to whether or not the war would come last night.
Do you know what they bet?
$2.
Not dinner at a fancy French five-star restaurant, but two bucks.
Yeah, I would have put a bottle of expensive bourbon on the table.
You'll be speaking with Larry later on.
Scotty, thank you very much.
Love you, my friend.
We'll talk to you next week.
Thanks.
Thank you.
And coming up later today, if you're watching us live in 45 minutes, if we can find him, and we spoke with him this morning live from Tehran, our friend Mohamed Morandi.