Tim Davies critiques the UK's "bonsai military," arguing that unrealistic 2030 diversity targets for combat roles and privatized training have degraded defense capabilities while ignoring demographic shifts. He highlights the inefficiency of expensive assets like F-35s against low-cost drones in Iran's complex terrain, where pilots operate as tools with limited discretion. The discussion extends to Joe Kent's resignation over the Iran strike and the nuance of geopolitical conflicts, suggesting that Western binary thinking fails to grasp the shades of grey in modern warfare, ultimately questioning if current recruitment strategies will leave the state reliant on groups opposing its ideology. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello and welcome to podcast of the Lotus Eaters episode 1377.
It is the 18th of March, Year of Our Lord 2026 and I'm joined by Bo, special guest Tim Davies.
Thank you much for coming in.
Thank you.
And today we're going to be talking all about the Oscars.
Who's in?
Who's out?
No, only joking.
Nobody watched it.
I didn't.
You didn't brief me on that.
I have no idea.
Yeah, no, not interested in actors, I'm afraid.
No, it just stirred you up.
No, actually, we're going to be talking.
I'm going to track down a pilot and ask them about air operations in Iran, if that has to be a thing.
A real-life pilot?
An actual pilot.
A real life pilot.
Pilot actually knows about stuff.
Yes.
Really?
Yes.
We didn't find such a man.
Exactly.
We will track one down.
You're going to tell us about UK military strength.
I'd imagine this could be a very short segment.
Yeah.
Seven seconds.
Minimal.
Next segment.
Not much.
On.
And you've got Joe's Kent resignation, haven't you?
Yeah, the US counterintelligence fella who handed his notice in.
Let's talk a bit about that.
It was eye-opening.
It's all over the news today, right?
It's a big story today in the corporate mainstream media.
Yes.
And of interest, I thought.
I think so.
I think so.
I agree.
And also, let's announce breakfast with Bo.
Why would you not want to have breakfast with Bo?
Yeah, why would you spend your time with like Jeremy Kyle or that other dude?
Yes.
What's his name?
I don't even know.
I watch you.
I honestly watch you every morning.
I just watch the Mojim or something.
I watch you.
It's the best breakfast show, right?
It's the most base breakfast show out there.
Yeah, it really is.
Breakfast with Bo, the Bo Show.
Lotus Eaters Breakfast Club.
Hashtag The Real LBC.
Watch it.
It's great.
I loved one time I was watching and some story came up and all the mainstream media thought this was really important.
And you just looked and said, yeah, I'm not interested.
I'm going to talk about that.
Move straight on.
I love that.
I do that quite a lot.
If anything's too sloppy, if it's too far into the realm of slop, just move on.
Just forget it.
I'm not interested.
Like the Oscars.
Yeah.
Yes.
No one cares.
I'm not interested in some freaks that read out other people's lines.
It doesn't matter.
Yeah, it's of no interest.
I think the film was rubbish I read anyway.
Yeah, absolutely.
Right.
So.
Oh, it's my one, isn't it?
Right.
Okay.
So, Tim, you've got an interesting background because am I right in thinking you were both a Navy pilot and an RAF pilot?
I went through the Navy in training up until the very end of the training.
I was going to go on the Sea Harrier, although my combat wasn't that good, so I was probably not going to be the best on the Sea Harrier, but they decommissioned it.
It would have been now early 2000s, somewhere, I guess.
And so they offered about nine of us as opposed to going and retraining through helicopters.
You know, it takes you three or four years to get through fast-check training.
The Air Force turned around and said, well, we've got massive gaps.
Do you want to come across and fly us?
So I transferred after five years into the Air Force and flew tornadoes within 15 years, yeah.
So it's a bit worrying when they start the conversation is we've got a big shortage of pilots for some reason.
Yeah, it's a common thing though.
And I was saying back in 2014 that this was going to happen.
And that was what now?
So how long is it?
It's 12 years ago now.
So we all could say any pilot from that era would say exactly the same thing was going to happen.
You can see it with the privatization of military flying training.
A lot of privatization was going on.
We see now what's happening with Dragon.
Well, she's gone to sea now, but she couldn't go to sea because a lot of people were working a nine-to-five job at the dockyard.
So the issue being, if you don't take defence seriously, someone will come knocking on your door.
The enemy gets a vote and unfortunately you're going to be embarrassed.
And that was before the era of them calling white men useless.
Well, I did a lot of content on this.
Absolutely right.
Yeah.
So the white man, let's be honest, and it is the white man.
Overwhelmingly, the white British man is their core demographic.
Has been for years.
Of course it has.
But they don't want them.
Well, so that came out of an office somewhere with an email.
And I think the great thing about that was someone had said what everyone was thinking.
So if you want to talk about diversity and things like this and the damage it's done to the military, in fact, I heard Ed Stringer talking on Winston Marshall's podcast the other day, an eloquent man, an air marshal, who I'd never met before, but he also attacked the DEI thing when I was attacking it.
Neither of us ever spoke together, ever.
Okay, never.
But I remember thinking, well, he's an air marshal saying the same thing as me.
This was after I launched out about DEI, but it did huge damage.
Absolutely right.
Because the minorities weren't joining.
And we can talk about the Muslim strength versus the Jewish strength in the military if you want.
The white guys were joining and the white girls were joining.
But the military was going into Nando's, literally, I'm not joking when I say this.
They went into Nando's and they were picking black kids and they were saying, have you thought about a career in the military?
Now, why this is so damaging is because those black kids had not thought of a career in the military.
I thought of a career in the military since I was seven.
I started building at school rulers on pens and flying them around and landing them on desks, you know, building little paper airplanes.
I still remember the first thing where I am with my father in northern France.
We bought like an airport and I built this little airport together.
You know what I'm saying?
It's that kind of thing, right?
So from a young kid, then you start going to their training court, you read all the stuff about the military.
And then when you get to the interview, strangely enough, you know quite a lot and they can tell that you're enthusiastic because flying training takes a long time to get through and people fail.
So you've got to have a lot of people.
So it requires a lot of commitment, I'd imagine.
Yeah, to be honest, would I do it?
I probably wouldn't do it again, knowing now what I knew then and how much effort it takes and what happens when you fail and the continual anxiety a student lives, even an instructor lives with that anxiety because you're only as good as your next performance in the air.
Everyone's watching you.
You're in a den of lion on a squadron.
Everyone's a lion.
So everyone's looking for a weakness, you know, because you want everyone to be strong.
So when you talk to young black kids in Nando's, do you want to join the military?
They're like, not particularly.
And you go, well, here, these are the offers, the money.
I will.
The problem is they come in, they don't know what to expect.
They don't like it.
They don't stay very long.
And of course, then you don't get the longevity of service that you would have got from an ethnic British guy who'd thought about it from the age of seven.
So it was more damaging than people realize.
Oh, I'm sure.
Credibility was lost as well.
And I think now what's happening with the service is they're talking about shortages in recruitment.
They're massaging the figures.
And of course, we're now seeing the discussions on that.
Well, I do want to sort of pick on your expertise because, look, we've got the incident in Iran going on at the moment.
And okay, maybe, you know, Trump says it's going to be a short war.
And I think he's tried to call it off a couple of times.
He's tried to declare a bit of win and so on.
But the Iranians aren't cooperating.
So we have to at least change that.
The enemy doesn't cooperate.
They should do really.
Of course, but it is worth sort of testing sort of my sort of amateurish civilian assumptions on how this would work.
So I've got a whole bunch of questions for you about this kind of thing.
Can I quickly ask one?
I've had hours and hours chatting with Tim.
Check it out on Lotace.com.
One thing I never asked you before, and I just wondered, when you sort of, the dream of flying a Harrier, they said, no, come and fly tornadoes in the RAF.
Had you had your heart set on the Harrier?
No.
Okay.
There's just a tiny bit of interest because I've never actually asked you that before.
No, I don't think, I think people, you never know about the aircraft type before you're streamed onto it.
You hear things.
Like, for example, you would have thought the F-35 is the best aircraft to go onto and everyone wants to fly F-35.
But the majority of students coming out of Valley want to fly Typhoon.
Highly dynamic.
It's operational.
You get to fly it, not just do simulators.
The F-35 is very sim-heavy.
So what we think is a great airplane to fly, a lot of people, the reality is not that.
And the Harrier was a complete bitch, right?
Oh, the Harrier would be great.
Wasn't it really hard?
Well, I hadn't even thought of flying the Harriet in the Air Force, of course, because I was going to fly the Air Force Harriet in the Navy.
In the Navy squadrons, these guys were legends.
Sleeves rolled up.
They're always walking to the jet with a cigarette.
You know, these guys are awesome.
You've got to be gashed to be good.
There was a whole ethos about it.
And I really bought into that, you know, long sideburns down here, you know, just to piss the Air Force off, you know, because we're, you know, duty beard, because the Air Force won't allow beards, but we could wear beards and maybe.
So I loved it.
So going to going to Air Force, it was something that most of us didn't really want to do ever.
And the tornado for me wasn't so much about the aircraft.
It was about flying somewhere where we knew there was good flying.
So Scotland and the valleys of Scotland.
And it was the most operational aircraft that the Air Force has had in decades.
Everyone knows about the tornado GR4, this was not the F3.
The F3 didn't do a great deal.
It did some operational stuff in Iraq, but the GR4 was where David Cameron would always say, where are my GR4s?
So in that respect, it's more about, you know, where can I get a war?
How do I kill as many people as possible?
And that sounds awful, but you want warfighters to fight wars.
And I wanted to fight wars.
That's a whole point ultimately, isn't it?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's strange that, isn't it?
I do have to quickly mention the Lotus Eaters Live event.
So do go and check that out if you haven't bought your ticket yet.
That will be happening on the 11th of March.
Okay, so one of the things I wanted to start off with.
April.
April, yes.
Quite right.
Because that's not in the past.
So this Strait of Hormuz is closed at the moment.
Now, I understand that.
Okay, so you've got shipping lanes.
I know the whole thing is about 21 miles wide or something like that.
Yeah, 21, yeah.
That's right.
But the shipping lanes are only two miles wide.
And the problem they've got, let's see if we can do measure distance on this.
Get a submarine through there.
Yeah.
It's quite shallow, though, isn't it?
I've heard the whole Persian Gulf is really quite shallow.
That's why the shipping lane is quite narrow.
But the drones and the missiles that can attack in the Strait of Hormuz have a range of about 300 kilometers.
So it's basically everything within that semicircle is a potential firing site.
Right.
And that is an area larger than England.
So, I mean, I look at that and I just think, how the hell do you deal with that problem?
And really mountainous, right?
Yes.
And mountainous.
So easy to hide stuff in it from the Iranian point of view.
Definitely.
To the last second.
Oh, you've got to.
You roll it out, fire your thing.
Well, let's just say it's fantastic for a start.
From an Iranian point of view, this is exactly what asymmetric warfare is about.
But as air operations, how do you even start that problem?
Well, you don't get into it in the first place.
Let's be realistic.
What you do is there's conversations, the dialogue, there's other aspects of not allowing Iran to become what Iran's become.
Else we've got to deal with it.
And that's what Trump's trying to say.
I'm dealing with it now.
I haven't got to deal with it later.
However, it could well be a forever war.
We know that.
I think it's probably heavily Israeli-led.
There's probably a way that Israel has dragged America into this thing.
The problem that we've got is we're launching £100 million worth of F-35 or Typhoon, and we're firing £200,000 worth of Amram to shoot down a drone costing £20,000.
And that's exactly what I would do if I was Iran.
And I would saturate.
There are train lines coming in from China into Russia.
They're building these drones.
shipping him into iran uh you you've got to see this is the great thing about it If we go for the most bespoke Air Force military that we've done, we've always tried to get the greatest product, whether it's Ajax or whatever we're building, we want the best thing and we change it.
I was a requirements manager in the military.
I still fly in jets, but my last job was to deal with the requirements as well.
People would try and change stuff all the time.
Every change, a million pound here, you know, 500, 500,000 there.
Ajax had something like 3,000 changes.
Ajax is the infantry fighting vehicle.
It's like a little light tank that weighs 40 tons, so it's not light.
It's seven years over budget.
It costs £10 million each.
And it was going to get scrapped.
They've managed to keep it in, had vibration issues for its crews.
That's the sort of thing that is being replaced by a very lightweight drone.
So it goes around looking at reconnaissance on the battlefield.
So we tend to build things that one-on-one are exceptional.
Oh, very, very good.
What we actually end up against is not one-on-one.
It's one against 30, 50 drones.
Don't look at it from the wrong.
So if I was a politician, I'd say, I want to build British, British jobs.
And that's important.
People need to get money, don't they?
When I was working defense, I was getting paid like 100 grand or something.
It was a horrible job.
I don't want to do it again.
And I don't own that now.
And it's great.
But that money, other guys are owning the same amount.
They're saying, we're on a massive screw here.
Brilliant, yeah.
Well, it is because you're going home, spending it on TVs and cars.
It's going back into the economy.
That's why the government pays that much money to people.
But can I pin you down on this?
I mean, how does air operations solve this problem that you've got an area the size of England, bigger than England, where firing sites could fire from?
Well, you don't solve it, do you?
Well, it's not obvious to me that you can, but I thought I might be missing something.
Well, if we, if it was solvable, yes, we would have solved it, right?
You know what I mean?
The clue is in, yeah, you don't solve it.
Um, special forces are very good, of course, at dealing with a lot of this stuff.
I know Israelis had a lot of um but they're still going to need to know where to go, yeah.
Well, if I was the Iranians, what I'd be doing is that is a huge area.
I would be setting up things that look like launch sites that cost me pennies all over the place and then just saying, come on, so you would have thought we'd learn from Afghanistan, which we didn't.
Like, you can't win when I flew over Afghanistan and I wasn't actually with the US Army on the ground, but just doing the IP stuff for comms on the on with various factions.
You see these valleys.
The thing about Afghan, very similar to um Iran, is that you can't conquer it because most people don't come out of the valley, so the communications don't really get to the next valley.
You know what I mean?
You can't say, by the way, you're defeated now, because they don't understand it because they're in their valleys.
And the same thing in Iran, it's disparate, it's spread out.
The only thing that I could possibly think of is the best I could do is not actually disrupt any launch sites, but just basically take out the key roads in this whole area and just make moving around it more difficult.
That's a very partial solution.
What Iran did, though, with Khomeini's death is they devolved responsibility, hadn't they, to individual command units.
And a lot of the attacks, when they happened on Dubai, my brother lives in Dubai, he's an airline mate there.
A lot of the attacks happening in Dubai.
Not that he's told me this because he wasn't even in Dubai when this happened.
He was down route with the jet.
When it happened, I think Iran was saying, look, we have no control over people launching.
They actually apologised, didn't they, to a lot of the other Arab nations?
They said, we're sorry about this now.
You know, a lot of this was devolved to our commanders.
We can't.
And that, they knew they were going to cut their head off the snake.
And so they devolved all the responsibility and they said, keep attacking, keep attacking.
Like the Japanese after the Second World War, there's always that Japanese guy is in there 40 years later defending the Japanese.
No one told him.
You know what I mean?
The Iranians did the same thing.
So this is Persia.
I mean, Bo would tell us.
These are intelligent people.
These are warfighters, right?
Yeah.
I mean, one thing I would say is, is it not possible, though, as big as that area is, a lot of it, it's what it's like, the Zagros Mountains there and like the Gedrosian wastes.
I mean, even going back to the age of Alexander, this is like a well-known landscape, well-known.
Is it not possible, given enough time and ordinance that Israel and the United States could take out every possible site that could launch?
The Transitional State of Drones00:14:43
I mean, given enough, you say impossible, and I would be inclined to agree with you.
I feel like it's not.
But presumably, a lot of them are very.
I mean, there might be single-use sites, there might be mobile sites.
I mean, just identifying them in the first place.
And the other thing, I mean, I saw that, you know, and, you know, I think we should probably expect this, but Russia is providing Iranian intelligence.
So if, you know, it's not even like they need to rely on coastal spotting and radar.
If they're getting real-time intelligence from the Russians and Chinese, it just seems like an incredibly difficult problem to solve.
Well, look, what you said is if you had enough ordnance, of course.
If you had unlimited infinity fighters, yeah, of course.
We don't do it.
Everything has a cost.
That's all militaries are, is there a cost.
And so what you're looking at, and also Russia, of course, with what's happening in Ukraine, his interest is to get us tied up somewhere else.
So, and this is all these players do.
And we don't look at the enemies on the same level of us, but they don't look at us.
They are intelligent people.
Of course they are.
And they're going to tie us up for as long as possible, whatever they can do.
The other thing I was wondering about is, okay, so there's a whole bunch of Air Force bases in the area.
I mean, this map is showing ones that are being targeted by Iran and so on.
Practically, when it comes to flying out of these bases, I mean, how practical is that?
I mean, I don't know how long it takes to cover that distance, how long pilots are.
I'll tell you right now.
I was based at LUD down there in Qatar.
I flew out of LUD back in 2007, something with the big jet.
And it takes about an hour to get up to the border with southern Iraq there.
It'll take another hour.
You're a fuel there, another hour to get up to Baghdad, which Baghdad's actually reasonably sort of southern.
It's about there where your cursor is, if I remember.
So Tehran's a lot further.
Well, it depends where you're going.
I mean, yeah, I mean, to do those kind of sorties, you're on a multiple refueling.
Remember, people always look at the jets when they're clean, so without stores.
Like, yeah, a fast jet could get there in two hours.
No, no, you're hanging big missiles off these things.
You're hanging big bombs.
Now, if you carry...
What is the range of a...
Again, what's it carrying, right?
So if a GR-4, like a clean GR-4, internal fuel only, I'm probably looking at an hour and a half reasonable to get up somewhere.
Now I need to hunt for fuel.
From this airbase up to Tehran?
Oh, if I was flying a clean, that means nothing.
There's no stores on this jet whatsoever.
I've probably got like an hour and a half, maybe two hours.
I need to start looking for fuel.
If I've got tanks on the jet, I could probably fly that jet for maybe two hours, just over two hours, and then I need fuel.
And the reason I need fuel is because those fuel tanks weigh something, like the fuel in them weighs it.
Also, there's drag.
So now I've got drag as well.
I need more power because the more drag.
And you get this issue where the more fuel you carry, the more power you need and the more fuel you need to use.
So it's not about carrying as much fuel as you want.
But presumably you don't.
What Dan's asking, an hour and a half, two hours isn't enough to fly from Qatar to Tehran and back.
Not unless you refuel on the way.
Right.
You would need to refuel.
You have to refuel on the way.
So you've got to refuel, yeah.
And again, then you start looking at your fit.
What weapons am I carrying?
But then presumably, you're not going to fly just for the hell of it.
You're going to fly to destroy something and that's going to add extra weight and drag as well.
It's going to act assets need to be put in place.
So now I need, I'm a strike packers.
I need to be defended.
So I need air assets there.
And then how does that practically work?
Because, I mean, there is going to be some sort of air intercept, even if it's at a basic level.
And I just kind of assumed a fast jet is too fast to worry about that kind of stuff.
But refuelers presumably are quite slow.
So how does it work actually maintaining an air operation over hostile mountains?
Well, the first thing you do is you phone up every commander of every surface air missile battalion that you can find in the country and you tell them they're going to kill their kids in the morning if they go to work.
So you start with that.
If you go to work in the morning, I'm going to kill your children.
Most of them don't turn up to work.
That's what we did in Iraq.
Phone them all up.
If you go to work in the morning, we're going to kill your family.
Most of them don't turn up to work.
So now you've got a very degraded surface to missile.
You think war's easy?
It's not.
It's all quite nice.
Do you think that would work with the Iranians?
Probably not.
No, because no, no.
I mean, I'm not saying it would.
I'm saying what happened in Iraq and how we worked Iraq probably is developed quite a lot.
I think Iran's very different.
But again, genuinely, I don't know how they make up now, how they've devolved that responsibility.
So you probably find no one's picking up phones.
You know, no one knows who's in command right now.
If you are looking at targeted strikes up there, you've got to get in first.
So you've got to degrade what we call an integrated air defense system or ground-based air defense system, their network of surface-air missile systems that can target your AWACS aircraft, your electronic warfare aircraft.
Am I right in thinking the fast jets don't have to worry about that so much because they're so fast?
No, you still worry about a lot.
Yeah.
So you've got to degrade it.
I mean, I was an electronic warfare specialist, right, in the military.
So I would brief my teams on the surface-to-earth missile threats, the radars, how we recognise them, how we can defeat them.
You have systems such as the B-2, some complicated aircraft that can fly a certain angle of approach, the way they fly around these systems and can penetrate this airspace at cost.
So every flight of a B-2, you've got to have it on the ground for servicing.
You don't need to deliver so much ordnance from that B-2.
It may not be precision.
When you got airborne from the states to attack that system, it may not be there anymore.
It may have moved it.
So there is complex.
So what you're telling me is this is also actually an incredibly tough nut to crack.
Oh, yeah, I think so.
Yeah.
This is why, I mean, in all honesty, I mean, Israel obviously got people on the inside.
And those people are able to say, if you target this, it's a node of power.
We can drop a level.
And Israel is very good at doing that.
Israel doesn't comply with international law.
What are we going to do about it?
You know, it doesn't matter, does it?
So they're very, very good at doing this kind of stuff.
In fact, when Israel, when I worked with Israelis in the past in America, I can tell you this.
One of the things the Americans said to us was, because we're working with Indians, Israelis, this is on red flag, going back in the day.
And one of the things the Americans told us was, they said, just be careful of the people on the exercise.
And I thought they meant, you know, where all the other nationalities, Germans, the French.
No, they didn't.
They meant the Israelis.
The Israelis will try and take every secret you have.
Israelis will, absolutely.
And they will use it, they re-engineer it because they're fighting for their lives there.
They're surrounded, aren't they?
And as far as they can see it, they're in total war the whole time.
And that's the difference between our defense budget and their defense budget because everyone is behind their defense budget because they know if they don't, they're going to get killed.
They can see it every day, October the 7th, classic example.
We work, we just try and be, we try and be everything to everything.
Another quick question is, we're kind of in this transitional state where we're still using fighters, but drones are obviously coming in much faster.
And drones can be anything from small little guided bombs to things that resemble fighters.
Yeah, very much so.
Yeah.
I mean, how far along that transition are we?
I mean, is it still always very obvious when you're using a fighter as opposed to some of the developing television?
Where are we on that transition?
Okay, so I'm not working defense right now.
I know a lot of guys that are.
The drone technology, it's quite fast-moving, but we've kind of been left in the lurch a bit.
It's not that China, I think I was reading something about China.
It's not that they're much cheaper to manufacture stuff, it's just they can get on the materials there and they can make it at scale.
We can't do that.
And also, we have this thing, this legacy thing in the UK.
I think the Americans have it kind of as well, that we need fighter jets.
It's all about fighter jets.
I think it's changing a little bit now with Anderil, is it in America, where they're making low-cost drones and munitions and things like this.
Palmer is the guy's name.
I might be wrong there.
So we're starting to look most definitely at that kind of stuff.
But the problem is we wait for something to happen and then people say, what about drones?
Politicians be like, we haven't got many drones.
We should make some drones.
I mean, and then you find that these guys have been hammering out drones for years and there's no competition now.
It's their classic thing of quantity over quality.
Yeah, of course.
And the Americans have got something like the F-22.
Yeah.
Pure quality.
Or an half of them or something.
Yeah, right.
Pure, absolute grade A quality.
You couldn't get a finer thing.
But there's not that many of them in the scheme of things.
It sounds like we're behind the innovation curve.
And the Iranians have got like drones that cost what, a few grand.
And it's basically just a delta wing with a tiny little prop at the back.
Anyone can make that?
It's super straightforward.
Ukraine is the same as super straightforward.
We're kind of running out of time, but there is one more question I wanted to get.
And actually, maybe we should do a brokenomics.
Oh, my segment is fantastic.
My segment, your segment are similar one, I think, aren't they?
Well, yeah, I mean, yours is, I just talk about state of the military, strength of the military.
But I mean, no, I'd love to do a broken ox with you and get further into this stuff.
But, you know, if I've got to ask one more question on this segment, I kind of want to ask about that, you know, that girls' school that got blown up.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Now, I think that was missiles.
It wasn't pilots or anything like that.
But at some point, if this does go the distance, if this doesn't get wrapped up in the next few days, and they're going to run out of targets that they really wanted to hit, because if the targets they really wanted to hit, they would have already hit by now.
You're going to get into more situations.
And there must be situations where pilots do something like blow up a girls' school or a market or whatever it is.
So what I'm kind of interested in is what does a pilot actually know that they're going after?
Do they have any discretion when they get there if it doesn't look right?
And how do they deal with it afterwards if it turns out that that was actually a horrendous target to have hit?
All right.
So one of my men hit a square in a market town where they were supposed to be, he dropped in cloud, which was fine.
It's a position weapon, but it killed a lot of women and kids.
And he was a young guy at the time because when he had kids later on and he realized that his kids were very similar to the kids that people never had and it all started impacting him, everything, it started messing him up quite a lot.
The Intel will really do a good job at that intel.
They'll really make sure that what you're hitting is a valid military target.
Well, clearly with the girl school in Iran, they didn't.
But by the time you get there, things may have changed.
And sometimes things like that happen.
Yeah.
Don't get me wrong.
These things do happen.
So you may look at it.
You may think it's a valid military target.
All the stuff is done.
You go off and you drop a bomb and it comes back and someone says, dead kids.
Yeah, dead kids.
So what we normally do is go to the bar, get smashed up, you know, probably not fly for a few days.
It's an horrific thing to, I mean, I've never witnessed it on a squad I've been on, but I know guys where it's happened to, probably not as bad as that.
And as I said, one of my men did have this awful experience.
War is war, though.
Don't get me wrong, right?
So total war, some of these countries, Iran, for example, is thinking they're at total war.
They will do whatever they possibly can to survive.
We're not at total war.
We might think we are, but we're not.
Okay, a nuclear threat for the future.
So, but we're not doing things.
How much can you actually see when you're coming in on a target?
I mean, do you have the ability and the optics to look at it and say, oh, that looks like a school or a market town or something?
Not really.
No.
For me, it'll be if I'm dropping, say, a low level, which is rare now, I'll be down at 100 foot, doing about nine miles a minute.
So I've probably got eyes on that target for two and a half, three seconds.
And what I'm doing is making sure the mark is in the correct place.
So I'd have done a lot of study on that target.
This is a visual target now.
All right.
We can talk about high PGMs and everything else.
So if I'm doing a low level one, I'm probably being shot at.
Okay.
Else, why am I going for the target?
If it's not, it's going to be world effective.
That was one of what the GR4 did, right?
Really low level, super low level strikes at night a lot of the time or in cloud.
So I can't see anything then.
All right.
So I'm looking at a mark.
If I can make out the target and I would have briefed with my crews and everything, right, I'm looking for a house building, road there, fine, got that.
Backstop is a town.
Visual of that.
And then my nav in the back, weapons officer, would be recommitting the mark, what we call it, where he's just making sure, or she's making sure the marks on the place on the target.
If it's not, I'll say I'm taking phase two, take phase two, just mark it, commit the weapon, it's gone.
And now I'm fighting.
The bomb's gone.
I'm fighting my way out.
I'm probably going to jettison stores.
I'm fighting in.
I'm fighting out.
People don't understand sometimes like the bomber pilot mentality.
It's not an airline pilot.
You know, I'm at war and I'm fighting everything.
I'm fighting there.
And once you send tornadoes to go to a target, it's really hard to call them back.
There's a lot of comms jamming out there.
You don't know.
You've got a lot of codes and who's talking to you.
There's no real, I've never really even known how someone would take me off a target.
Like you go through a command set, whatever from high level, but yeah, it's not really going to happen.
So it's not like you're sitting at 20,000 feet just watching the target for 20 minutes, waiting for the green light.
There is close airport.
Oh, it looks a bit like a mosque or a school.
No, it's not, it's nothing like that.
Not for the GR4 anyway.
Well, close airsport for the GR over Afghan and stuff in Iraq was a thing.
I did close airsport over Iraq.
I never dropped there, not in close airsport.
And we sat there and you can look at the target.
You can look at the fighting.
You can find the roads.
The guys on the ground will walk you in, walk your eyes in.
Do you see the road?
I see the road to the west.
Far up the road, a kilometer, do you see the town?
I see the town.
And they walk your eyes in to where the threat is.
And then you can see that.
But you may just see fires and stuff.
You don't see little women running around a courtyard.
And even if you did, you'd probably question it.
But the thing is, there's a lot of deception, everything else as well.
The truth is that when someone tells you to drop a bomb on a target, you're a tool.
You're to be used by command.
It's like when you tell a submarine captain.
It's not your call necessarily.
It's their call.
You know, I'm not going to see a kid running across the road when I'm strafing traffic.
I just, I'm trafing armoured vehicles and the kids running across the road.
I'm not even, my mind isn't even on that.
My mind is how many of these can I kill?
And I want to kill them all.
I want to kill them quickly because I'm using fuel and people are trying to kill me and I want to get out of them.
One more very quick question and then I'll have to hand off.
But there was that Friendly 5 incident early on in this, wasn't it?
Was it a Kuwaiti Juwai jet took out an American jet or something?
Yeah, the F-15s were shot down by the F-18.
How does a fuck-up like that happen?
Well, I did a YouTube thing on that, but I think I called it right at the beginning because I looked at the smoke trails and I thought that's a side one and that's not a Patrick.
You know, the damage was on the rear hemisphere of an aircraft.
So the rear hemisphere is being hit.
The engine's the hotspot.
Heat seeking missile, not a patchet.
And then we can get complicated, but a patch would tend to lead and hit the dynamic center of the center of mass.
So it would look like another aircraft shooting down those aircraft.
But if you think about flying over the Gulf region, there's a lot of sort of haze in the air a lot of the time.
So visibility is actually quite a problem down there.
The sand is just a problem.
And I think they've said this guy now was a sympathizer for Iran.
And no one knows what's happening.
You know, obfuscation, of course.
So were both explanations equally likely that he could have been a sympathizer or he could have just got a genuine mistake.
Well, I was a pilot.
Yeah, apparently.
I don't know.
You know, how do we ever going to know?
Because remember, they said initially it was Patrick.
They knew straight away what had happened.
So I just, and I think he just went up there and it seems like he shot down what he thought were either drones or he shot down.
And your audience will be in the thing going, no, he was definitely shot them down on purpose.
You know, but you don't know, right?
Missile Hits on Rear Hemispheres00:16:06
Nothing's really come out that I've read.
But it does seem that he did shoot these things down on purpose and whether he thought they were drones or not.
And it is easy to mistake that.
I know it is.
And you've done a full video on this.
Yeah, I've done on my YouTube channel.
Yeah.
What's your YouTube channel?
Fast Ship Performance.
Fast Ship Performance.
Yeah.
Come and watch all my stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah, come and check that out.
Heat seeker.
Pretty sophisticated for a bunch of half-ass mountain boys.
That's it.
I'll hand over to your segment.
Well, okay.
So I'm just going to talk about the degradation of the British Armed Forces.
You know what?
I'm not really talking about that.
I'd like to talk about the demographics and I'd like to talk about why we've been pushing diversity so much on recruitment drives into the military and what we're going to do in the future and how we're actually going to recruit this.
So this is the paper from, I think this was, is this the 20?
Oh, this is where we are now.
This is 2021, 72.5.
They were trying to lower the army down to this.
And I think, and I've just got some links we can just go through.
But again, the conversation's more really about where we were and where we are now.
So if we were to rewind back to 1998, the crowd says, Bo, selector, Craig Davis, seven days.
I joined the Navy back then in 98.
And back in 98, we had a quite substantial military.
So when I was based out of Plymouth on a warship called H Miss Boxer, wrong, London, there is a pitch around somewhere, but don't worry about it.
We had about, I think, about 10, 15 of these ships.
Now, all those Type 22s have gone.
We've got about seven frigates and about six destroyers.
And none of those, remember, only one destroyer really can be put to sea at any one time.
The French are embarrassing us.
Okay, so the carriers can't get put to sea.
So we've got this expensive navy.
The carriers need support, don't they?
Yeah, of course.
They need to go and carry air wing group.
So it needs something.
You've got the carriers, but not the group.
Well, the issue being, we could have either had personnel to man the carriers, or we could have had the carriers.
And that was the decision that was taken quite a while ago.
And we decided that we'd want the carriers, thinking we'd always get the manpower.
But we never got the manpower.
And now the armed forces, the big takeaway from 98 when I joined to where we are today, the forces have been reduced by 40%.
72,000 troops.
That's barely sufficient to make defense, let alone doing anything.
Is that the Army, Navy, and RAF?
Oh, that's the Army in the 72.5.
So when I joined the Air Force, it was about 50,000.
The Navy was 40,000.
Now they're both around about 30,000.
I think the Navy's like 27,500.
So don't you for operations need whatever you've deployed, you need two and a half times that for rotation and so on.
Yeah, but they thought they were going to do it, though, through the reserve service.
And there's quite a lot of guys in the reserve.
And if people really want a purpose in life, go and join the reserves.
Why not?
You know, they're really good.
The reserves are really, really good.
But the government really wants a massive reserve force.
But this is barely sufficient for keeping the small boats off the shore, let alone...
Yeah, we're not doing that, are we?
When I was in Afghanistan, we had an army of 100,000 and we could only field, they said we can field 10,000 from the army.
But the actual truth was, when I was there, I was doing the figures.
It wasn't 10,000 from the army.
It was 10,000.
I was an Air Force officer in Iraq and they were counting me as one of the army 10% that they'd fielded.
And next to me, I was bunked up with a Navy guy.
Not like bunked up, you know what I'm saying?
But the guy there was a sub-mariner in the same packing crate that I was living in.
And he was still counted as one of the 10% from the army that they sent.
So, and we never had it.
8.5 was the maximum we had in Afghan, even though they were counting 10,000.
So we've never had it.
And that's the problem.
We've always done defense on the cheap.
Expensive in unit costs, like Ajax or F-35.
Of course, it's expensive.
The nuclear deterrent, the submarines, each individual element, very expensive.
But as a collective whole, we've neglected defense for a lot of people.
But this is like a boxt tick arm.
It's simply there to say that we've got one, but I can't imagine what this is going to do.
So I mentioned Ed Stringer as the air marshal that was on the other podcast recently.
He talks about it being, and I really like this term, a bonsai military.
So we used to have a big tree, used to try and do everything.
Okay.
We never knew when things were going to happen.
He says we've got this bonsai.
And he's written strategic papers and he's obviously quite an educated guy.
And, you know, fair play to him.
I like that term because what it means is we've still got the quality, just not much of it.
You know, we've got lots of quality, can't do much with it.
So when you put a submarine to sea, the ship's company or the boat's company on a submarine are exceptionally talented, well-drilled, they're amazing, but they're one boat.
And yet we've got four bombers and most of them are parked up in Faslane getting, you know, getting some work done to them.
That's the problem they've got.
Can I make a point though?
And it will sound like cope and it is cope on some level.
However, I feel like it's a valid point.
That historically, I mean, in the last segment, you said we're not at total war.
And we're not.
When you look at history, it's often, if not always, the case, that you have a very, very, very small armed services until you actually badly need it.
So I'm thinking of just before World War II.
Just before World War I, just before the Peninsula War against Napoleon, have a tiny little army and then we need yesterday a much, much bigger army and then you do it.
Well, the details.
And we're not at total war with anyone.
No.
And so as cope as it is, as huffing copium as much as that is to say that to put that number in the market.
We don't need at this moment, like a quarter of a million man army.
If and when we do, that assumes we have the luxury of being able to roll it out.
To put that number in perspective, we've got four million Muslims in the country.
Let's decide that 10% of them decide that this country needs to be an Islamic country to it's even yes, and that the army is outnumbered five to one.
It's a little bit worse than that.
And I'll tell you why, because if we look at the amount of Jews in the military versus the amount of Muslims in the military, Jews outnumber per capita Muslims 5.7 times.
So there's 5.7 more Jews per capita.
There's like, what, 300,000 of them?
250, yeah, 250, 300.
But what I mean by that is Jews are more likely to fight for the British military than Muslims.
Muslims will not.
If those numbers are right, very significantly more so.
Absolutely.
But more Muslim people join ISIS than they were recruited for all our services.
They did.
So that's the thing that we should be looking at.
Almost none.
Like, we know that the Ummah is more important to Muslims, it seems, than the country in which they live.
These conversations are not being had.
Either having on my YouTube until it gets banned with this online safety act soon, obviously the Islamophobia laws, which are the anti-Muslim hate laws, I'm not going to be able to get around that.
I'm going to be taken down.
You guys are in trouble.
You know that already.
You know what I'm saying?
Speak to Carl about that.
But the truth is, we need to talk about it because we do have 6.5%.
And that 6.5% 4 million Muslim figure was in 2021.
That's when the census was, 2021.
So it's not that figure anymore.
It's not 6.5%.
Sorry, Dan, one quick bit.
But yet they put out a recruitment video with a guy getting his mat out to pray.
Right.
Not anymore, they don't.
Now they need white guys to join.
They've stopped doing that.
Well, now you're going to die.
So what madness, what type of psychological malady ever got us to a place where they put out a recruitment video targeting directly Muslims?
That you'll be in a unit with a guy and five times a day I have to stop for prayer.
We stopped for prayer now, didn't we?
I think in what was the thing I saw recently?
The football match.
There was a football match where they stopped after 12 minutes to let the guys break their fast.
There were Muslim players on the leads, was it recently?
They stopped.
They allowed the guys to break their fast.
What is going on?
You see, I'm the reverse of that.
I'm like, no, you fit in.
It's not the other.
You know what I mean?
We're all the same.
You'll be writing history books on this one day, by the way, about this madness.
But I lived through this and your books would be amazing.
Everyone's going to buy them, obviously.
And you'll be writing stuff about the economics.
And I wanted to chat about that at some point, about the value of this rate of immigration and why we've gone infinity immigrants and what that's going to do to the country because we know it's a loss at the moment.
And as it directly relates to this, I mean, I don't know what the government target is for the Islamic population of Britain, but they're presumably targeting 50% as fast as they can get there.
I don't know where that's the case.
It looks like it isn't.
Yeah.
But how are you going to maintain a military if half of your population is more likely to join the enemy than your own forces?
It's not, and I'll be real with you now, and people hate me for saying this as well, but as a fast jet mate with women on fast jet squadrons, women is the other thing we need to think about.
Now, when Mike Wigston, who I went up against, he was my boss back on 12 Squadron on Tornadoes, and I really like the guy.
He doesn't like me very much.
He met my wife recently in London by accident at a train station.
Didn't want to speak to her.
He actually ran the Air Force, Chief Air Staff.
So I say he's a lovely bloke.
He did a lot of damage to the Air Force, though.
And he wanted 40% women and 20% immigrants or 20% Muslims.
No, 20%, yeah, it was minorities, you use the term, minorities, by 2030.
That came from Ben Wallace.
And I argued with Ben Wallace online about this before.
And Ben was saying, are you expecting me to make policy for the military?
And I'm like, yeah, as Defense Secretary, that'd be nice.
You know what I mean?
That would be a good thing that you could actually kind of have some direction there.
So it caused huge amounts.
If you have a military with 40% women in it, you don't have a military.
Or you do, but you've got to make it 1.4 times the current size because women have different needs to men.
Now, some men are quite weak and fragile.
We understand that.
But women have to have children.
So on a fast jet squadron, if you put, well, here, just do the maths.
If my army was entirely men, would it work?
Yes.
If it was entirely woman, would it work?
Let's be realistic about it.
You can't send an entire army of women to war.
It's not going to work.
They can't carry the loads.
They're not as capable as men when it comes to the physical excesses demanded of a modern day conflict battlefield.
We know that, right?
So when we start saying that we can allow infinity women into the military as well, that is a problem.
Let's be realistic about it because it's not all sitting behind a computer pressing buttons.
It's a physical thing.
The stresses are high.
And when my women, I say my women, the women on my squadrons, when I was their flight commander and they were coming through training, sometimes they come in.
And you know what they say?
I can't fly today.
Well, they've got period pains.
And you know what we wear in fast jets?
We wear G-pants.
And you know where they press?
They press across the abdomen.
Where's it painful for a woman in that exact location?
That's the first time the women in their flying training have had to wear G-pants when they get to our school on the Hawk.
So of course, we say don't fly.
We don't fly them that day or maybe the next day as well.
You think about how that works on a squadron now when they start harmonizing on their menstrual cycles.
I know no one likes to speak about it, but it's important to speak about it when you start talking about that.
Well, that's good intel for the enemy as well.
Absolutely, of course it is.
You know, we know that, you know, how heavy is your unit when it comes to women.
So what do they do?
They take birth control.
Now, this has another factor.
A lot of them get they split up with their boyfriends because they meet their boyfriends when they're off birth control.
And what we want when we're off birth control, I'm sure you guys know, you want a rugged man, you want a guy look after you.
When you're on birth control, you look for a more effeminate man.
So when they go on this birth control, their man all of a sudden is a toxic man, all this kind of stuff.
And they tend to separate.
They tend to just drift apart from their guy.
Or the alternative happens where they're with someone they don't want to be with and they get someone, you know.
So it is entirely complicated.
And war needs to be as simple as possible.
There's two things that I think is it not right to say that you've got people that don't need any in the military, all the all the wings of the armed services.
There's no real physical requirement, someone that does actually just sit at a desk all day.
Surely, absolutely.
Those people can be women.
I feel the same in the police force.
Those people can be women.
Fine.
But as you say, those that actually do anything that's physically demanding, whether it's a fast jet pilot, whether it's a Royal Marine that's got a lug, got a yomp, a massively heavy burden across dozens and dozens of miles.
When you damage a woman, you damage the mate.
It's not misogyny.
It's not sexism.
Yeah, exactly.
It's reality.
You stop them having children because the stress is on the body.
So in the cockpit, it's such a stressful environment for these women going through flying training.
I'm sure when they get to the front line, they're a lot better.
My students had children when they got to the front line.
But again, they're on the front line.
We trained them for the best part of four and a half, five years.
They have children.
They're off for nine months.
I mean, for the most part, when they, as soon as we find out they're pregnant, we can't put them in a jet again because they might lose the child.
So as soon as they say, a lot of them don't say they're pregnant for a while, you know, you never know.
And then, of course, but a lot of them can't get pregnant because being in the cockpit, forced oxygen, stresses on the body.
The organs are moving around a lot.
Of course they are.
We're compressing the legs.
We're force-feeding them air to compress the cavity between the lungs and the chest to try and keep blood in their head, especially on typhoon.
That's not a conducive environment for someone to have a child.
Women cannot get pregnant when they're doing that job.
Well, another clip I've seen that's got millions and millions of views is a US special forces.
I don't remember if it was Navy SEALs or something like that.
Yeah.
And he said, what happens if you take a woman, the strongest of women, the most robust of women, you give them £150 pack and tell them to march all day and all night?
What happens?
They crumple up.
They can't do it.
They can't do it.
But that's okay.
You put them behind a desk somewhere.
Okay.
Well, women can do a lot.
I mean, don't get me wrong.
But the problem is, is when someone like Ben Wallace says, I want 40%.
I know.
I want 40% women.
Well, but wait, wait, I argue with them.
You're crippling our ability to fight wars.
Exactly that.
Intentionally.
Intentionally.
This is where the traitors' behavior becomes.
This is where I talk about.
I'm not talking about my book, but I talk about these values that men, especially British men, need to have.
It's about integrity.
It's about calling out this behavior.
This is traitorous behavior.
There's no two ways about it.
You're weakening the country because you want to look good in front of people.
This is what you're doing.
It should be, everyone's the same.
If everyone's the same, why is diversity so good then?
If everyone's supposed to be equal, why is diversity so popular all of a sudden in the military?
Because if everyone was equal, you wouldn't need diversity.
You wouldn't need any diversity.
We wouldn't need anything other than just a white dude from Portsmouth like myself.
Is there any pushback from the senior ranks of the military or do they just go along with this stuff?
No, I think there is now.
I think there is.
A member Rich Knighton, who is the chief of defense staff now, and I interviewed for his personal staff officer position, which I rejected mid-interview, not because of Rich.
He's a very clever guy, engineer, lovely bloke.
For many reasons, I didn't want to just be based in London.
I thought we were going to be doing more stuff.
But he's a very clever guy.
But he's chief of defense staff now.
And he was the right-hand man to Mike Wigston.
When Mike Wigston was bringing in the diversity policies, he could have said something.
He never said anything because if he did say something, he never, you know, we understand how it works.
You've got to play that political game.
I'm rubbish at playing it.
If I was good at it, I wouldn't be sat here on your show talking about diversity, would I?
You know what I mean?
Waiting for my YouTube channel to be taken down.
Like, you know, losing all my students from my school.
My students from my school are good people, of course.
So I think there is that conversation.
There was when it came out in the Air Force, especially when Elizabeth Nicole was a group captain that said, I can't, it's wrong to put this diversity in en masse because the Air Force put a lot of minorities in at once.
What people don't know about that, it stopped white guys getting in, of course.
What people don't know is they put them into the Air Force with no job to do.
They kept them in billets for two months prior to them even starting training.
So the taxpayer paid for this.
They paid for people to get paid in the military with no job to do whatsoever.
That never came out in the press.
Just so they can say we're doing this.
Just so Ben Wallace can go on Radio 4 with Max Hour and saying we're doing it.
We're progressive.
Traitorous behavior.
That's what we're not at the expense of our ability to defend ourselves.
Taxpayer is worse off.
People are getting less welfare.
People that need it, like single mums that are like really struggling, were getting less money because Ben Wallace wanted to look good with his diversity statistics.
The Air Force wanted to look good with the diversity statistics because the Air Force only had 2.5% minorities.
The Navy had about six.
The Army, because of the Gurkhas and other regiments like that.
The Navy recruits from the Commonwealth, so it was quite good.
They had more, like 10% or whatever.
The Air Force had 2.5.
So the Air Force wanted to boost those diversity statistics.
And so it put them in all at once.
Even the guy that actually did it before Elizabeth Nicole, the guy got an MBE for doing it.
So you can see the problem now.
You know, if you don't solve these things, you're not going to get up the ranks.
And it was that huge behavior going back into around about 2020, wasn't it?
When that happened, and people were doing it.
And that's what it means.
But really, for what?
Was it really so that was it Mike Wiggs?
Mike Wigston.
Wigston.
So Wigston or Ben Wallace, those types, really so that they can say in an interview or something, we're progressive.
Well, we come back now to me dropping a bomb on a school because you tell me to, I'm a warfighter.
So you tell me I'm going to get it done.
And so when you tell someone in the military to do diversity, and it was a conversation because I met someone connected with Ben Wallace's team at a party, shall we say.
Lessons from Appeasement History00:04:50
And he said, I was in that meeting.
He was very connected with, and he said, it was literally a couple of throwaway lines.
We need more diversity in the military.
And all the heads of the military, where they are, pass that down.
Definitely.
We're doing diversity.
And they went and did diversity.
You tell a guy in the military to do something, he's going to get it done because they can do people.
And that's what I mean.
When you put a bomber to sea, like a boat, like a submarine, the people on that ship are exceptional.
But there's not many of them.
So we're very good at going and assisting the Americans with a surface vessel or putting a Typhoon squadron alongside or down in Qatar somewhere.
They're going to work really hard.
You burn them out and they'll leave.
They'll burn them out, but they're very, very, very good on an individual basis.
I don't know if you know the answer to this one, but if we had to fight the ancient enemy again, if we went to war with France, would we win?
France, I think.
France is almost defeated already, isn't it?
Looking at the immigration stats from France.
Yes, there is that.
We've both got nukes.
Paris and London are both reduced to the mass.
TC to glass in an instant.
France has done well, though.
Like the amount of ships they've got at the moment, they're defending Cyprus.
They must be loving it, the French.
They just happened to fall on a good time, but all their ships are serviceable.
None are in maintenance.
And they're like, yeah, we're normally like this.
You know what I mean?
It's crazy.
Is that right?
It just happens to be a great moment for the French Navy.
Yeah, it just happens to be.
I don't get the impression we could beat Poland.
So I'm just wondering if France, I mean, at least we should be able to beat France.
I think we must have something on people.
Like, we must have like dirt, like Epstein dirt level of dirt that we kind of turn around to some countries and go, just don't come to war with us right now else we're going to steal your house in Kensington or something.
You know what I mean?
This investment you Chinese man have made and you're buying half the property in London.
We're nick it.
So just don't, we must have that kind of, that's what global politics is about.
And as much as I hate the civil service, I think that's why the civil service is good.
It's got these people at the top that kind of the Antonio Romeo is that kind of know how to use that leverage.
And it means that we can have a lesser military and still survive in this world.
But again, I'll be honest with you, though, let's be realistic because it comes back to integrity.
If you want welfare and you want education and you want the NHS and you're happy to have infinity immigrants, you won't have a big military.
The end.
There's no more of an argument than that.
You make a choice.
But the truth is, some people in the UK are so, and it's not their fault.
They're just living, like trying to get money so that they can pay that car park, by the way, £12.
That is ridiculous.
It's a car park for like three hours or whatever.
It's like any portion of 24 hours.
So, what are we doing in the UK?
£3.70 for a cup of tea at Starbucks recently.
My own mug.
I bought the mug out from the car.
V-bag water.
Three, come on, we're smoking crack.
Now, what's going on?
Unless we start challenging this now, we say, right, we're going to not.
I mean, because there are some people that are really hard off in this country, and they are British people that we should be looking after.
And when you start, you know, when you start taking that money away from them for crap ideas like DI and stuff, you know, it is, we should be looking after these British people.
So it's complex, isn't it?
Well, this is one of the weird things about, you know, Trump came out recently and said, look, you know, we're going to easily defeat Iran.
And then he came out and said, well, actually, I need help.
That's right.
Well, why would you be asking for our help?
I think there's a link I've got down here exactly like that.
He needs so the thing about Iraq, remember, when we went to Iraq initially, he wouldn't be able to go there.
The UN resolution bit was a bit dodgy.
That was political cover, wasn't it?
Yeah, so he basically needs people to back up, or Bush needed people to back up what he was saying.
And England's always that gives that credibility.
And I'm going to hate to say this, and your audience may hate me for this, and that is absolutely fine.
I think Stalma's kind of, and as much as we don't like Stalma, I think he's kind of right with what he's saying about Iran.
Like, I've said that, I'm having a good time.
Have you said that?
I didn't, I'm sorry, I didn't, I don't know.
I think he's right to say, I'm not ready to commit into a forever war with you right now.
Like, when we're talking about appeasement, right?
Remember, people don't realize this.
Like, before the Second World War, the appeasement, we appeased it because we weren't ready to go to war in 38, were we?
We didn't have an viable military force to go to war.
If we'd gone to war, we would have been even more destroyed than the forces left at Dunkirk and trying to, you know, so we did the right thing and we built up our forces.
But the people that went to war were not the same people that invaded the beaches back in 44 on the 6th of June.
They weren't the same people.
The people that went initially, remember, we didn't even have any people in the army.
So the army and the air force and the navy, these are shock troops that go in and then we backfill from the population.
And that's what the reserve plan is about.
That's why we want a big load of reserves that we can.
I mean, Finland, excellent at it, amazing, because they're facing one big threat.
They can see where it is anywhere.
It is.
It's happened to them before.
Everything, dig down tunnels.
They're amazing what they're doing.
Because we're importing our threat.
We're trying to fight every war, everywhere, every time.
Whereas Finland are going, well, I'm never going to be dealing with anything in the Middle East.
I'm just looking at Russia.
So they can really get their threat.
No one's going to come to Finland, are they?
From China and go, I'm going to nick, you know, Russia is a threat.
We're like, well, we want to have presence in Asia, the Pacific.
We want to have.
So we can't do it unless we sacrifice a lot of things.
And we have to look at the NHS and we'd have to look at government spending elsewhere.
Fighting Every War Everywhere00:03:17
I'm not an expert.
This is where you come in because, you know, but I don't know what we do.
I just want to fly fast jets and just girls.
Yeah.
Well, thanks very much for that.
Bo.
All right.
Well, actually, if you've super chairman, she comments.
Yeah, comments, aren't we?
We can do both of those together.
Have a go at me, aren't they?
B Bobbin 2 says, How can I get a gig as a British admiral?
50 for 49 combat ships and 850 plenty of time for golf.
Saying there's a lot more admirals than the ship.
Yeah, it's fair play.
He says, sorry, one admiral for every 850 sailors.
That does seem like a lot, isn't it?
That's the crazy thing when you look at military history from the ancient world till now, the size of the officer corps compared to the size of the rest of the army.
It's a classic military history nerd thing to look at.
And there's something terribly wrong when you've got too many officers, basically.
Yeah, I mean, they make a decent point.
Yep.
There.
Absolutely.
I don't know what the answer is.
I'd like their pensions.
I'd like that pension.
That'd be good.
Yeah.
Admiral's pension.
Question for Tim: How real is Top Gun Maverick?
Yeah, it's totally real.
Well, it's Star Wars, isn't it?
It's Star Wars for the new generation.
They haven't seen Star Wars.
Oh, yeah, it is, isn't it?
Yeah.
So they go through the valley, they drop a thing in.
They can only have to get the one.
You can't, you've got to get it directly in, like on the Def Star.
Exactly.
Have you seen that film?
Did they somehow contrive it that he's still flying an F-16 or something?
An F-18, yeah, so he's an old 65 or something.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, he's old Tom.
But then he gets shot down and then doesn't he have to get in an even like a Tomcat?
He gets in a 15 Tomcat.
It's their full team.
It's brilliant because they say they've got to put the air starter into it.
They get all the starter process right.
So my students in my school are geeking out on this.
They're like, oh my God, they're doing exactly how we do it in the school.
You know what I mean?
And it's great.
And it is great.
It's a great piece of entertainment.
It saved Hollywood.
That film saved Hollywood.
And there are some people who are.
Because it saved Hollywood.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, it's rubbish, isn't it?
But they must be thanking Tom for doing so.
But he refused.
It went on during a time of COVID, didn't it?
When they were filming, he refused to do what Hollywood wanted, basically.
He said, we're not having any of this woke nonsense in it.
I mean, there's banter.
There's always that geeky navigator guy in the back weapons officer.
There's always the girl who's trying to be a bit masculine.
They got all that stuff really right.
There's always old instructor, which is what I was basically trying to tell everyone how to do it.
And I'm the old guy getting kicked out.
So, yeah, no, it's a good film.
It's a good piece of entertainment.
And you can watch it again.
And it's great how it starts off with the original and then goes into the New Jet piece.
I think it was a great piece of entertainment.
Not as good as Iron Eagle, though.
With Dougie Masters, Chappie Sinclair.
You guys haven't seen it.
I'll send you links.
Iron Eagle.
It's the original.
Is that old?
Is that really?
it came out about three months before top gun came right you need you guys need to get in i'm going to send you links okay I'll watch that.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
It's awful.
Awful film.
There's a few more.
Dwight Power says, stealing our military secrets, just one of the many benefits of the relationship with our greatest ally, LaMau.
Yeah, I saw a thing on that David Betts.
What's that guy?
He's got a massive podcast, David Betts.
Yeah, Civil War's got a guy.
Civil War guy.
Yeah, Civil War guy.
Yeah.
He's a historian.
Oh, no, no.
There's another guy.
Anyway, another big podcast.
Not him, another big podcaster, really big podcaster.
And he did an interview with a CIA dude.
The Iran Bomb Debate00:15:49
Oh, yeah.
Like a lifelong retired now CIA dude.
And he said, every time Mossad came to Langley, they tried to give us a gift.
Oh, listening devices.
They had a listening device.
And he goes, well, not every single time.
Every single time.
Exactly.
They did that.
They do it to everyone.
That's why when I was on the exercise, they said, don't trust the Israelis.
The Israelis will.
And you kind of understand it in a way.
They're kind of surrounded.
They're in this total war.
Anything they will.
They actually sent an aircraft, but they also need allies.
Well, they sent an aircraft that was a tanker, the red flag, to do tanking.
Aerials all over the place.
It was a listening aircraft.
It was oovering up all the signals.
I don't think it tanked anything.
So, yeah, crazy people.
But I mean, I think it's still, you know, go and support them, whatever.
It's fine.
Fortier and Barber says, the Bodade experience featuring Carl Benjamin, which is what the Lotus Eaters is.
Yeah, it is.
I said that.
I said that.
Yeah, it's not going to like that.
You're out.
That's it.
Yeah.
He says, it's good today.
Nice to see other spice bows like Dan occasionally.
Excellent.
And what was that?
Cassidy Duan says, the problem is the 80-20 principle.
80% of Iranian missiles, drones, launch sites can be taken out with 20% effort, but the last 20% of assets take 80% more effort.
Okay, that's a more clever person's cleverer than me.
So I see what you're saying, can actually.
It's an almost more effort is required to get the last little bit.
Yeah.
Yeah, and that makes sense.
So you never, it's going to be that kind of exponential curve, isn't it?
Where it's never going to win.
Yeah.
I imagine that is true.
It's guerrilla, astymatic warfare, isn't it?
Yeah.
And that's what the books, I hate to say it, the books that a lot of people are reading right now in the UK because they know what's going to happen in the future, unfortunately.
So they're reading those books about, yeah, about what happens.
All right, so I did the last segment.
Okay, we need to talk a little bit.
Samson, have you got my links?
Can you make sure my links are up there on the screen for me?
Sorry?
They are those ones, are they?
Okay.
All right.
So, it's in the news today.
It's all in the news today, that in America, a guy called Joe Kent was the head of counterintelligence.
They had a counterintelligence center, and he was the director of it.
He used to be in special forces.
Apparently, he had something like 11 deployments as a special forces dude.
Then he was in the CIA.
And you can only imagine, Tim, right?
If you're an ex-special forces dude that goes over to CIA, you're not sitting in Lang Lee on a keyboard, are you, probably?
You're doing some special stuff.
Right.
So he did all that.
That's his life.
That's his career.
And then Trump picked him.
He's a Trump pick to be the director of all counterintelligence.
Yep.
And he's really base.
Like, the Dems hate him.
He barely squeaked through his confirmation because the Dems hate him.
He's got loads of base takes about the Proud Boys and all sorts.
Is this the guy who got the endorsement from Nick Fruentes, but then turned on Nick and there was a big feud about it?
Because I think I had heard his name before.
I think he's quite sensible.
Okay.
Yeah, he seems like an all right dude, pretty base dude.
So, okay.
Now, he came out yesterday.
It might have been right at the end of their Monday.
He came out and he did an open letter resigning because he had all sorts of problems with this war.
So just a few links here, just to show, like, on the Financial Times, it's the top thing on the Financial Times.
And it's just all over the news cycle at the moment.
The BBC, what's his terrorism?
What was his issue?
Okay.
Okay.
Should we read, should we just let him speak for himself?
He's got absolutely his own words.
Is that the guy there?
It looks like a warfighter, doesn't it?
It looks...
Yeah.
He's got that.
Yeah.
Jeez, he's staring through us.
Don't look at his eyes, dead-eyed.
Yeah, don't look him in the eyes.
Yeah, he will end you if you leave.
Oh, that's great.
He's got a family and everything.
Look at that.
Unfortunately, his wife was killed in a suicide bomb in Syria in like 2018 or something.
Oh, that is crazy.
what's he who's deployed at the time i guess or she i think she's she was in something Yeah.
Wow.
So, okay, he was in charge of all counterintelligence.
Okay.
And he said, he wrote this.
President Trump, after much reflection, I've decided to resign from my position as director of the National Counterterrorism Center effective today.
I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran.
Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation.
Again, if anyone knows, it would be him.
It would be to the most, the highest level of intelligence.
Would be him.
It would be him.
Okay.
He says Iran posed no threat to...
I'll let Trump, in his own words as well, respond to this in this segment.
That'd be great.
I'm not purely standing for this guy.
We'll see the counter-argument in a moment.
But this is what he wrote.
That Iran posed no threat to our nation and it is clear we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.
I support the values and the foreign policies that you campaigned on in 2016, 2020 and 2024, which you enacted in your first term.
Until June of 2025, you understood that the wars in the Middle East were a trap that robbed America of the precious lives of our patriots and depleted the wealth and prosperity of our nation.
In your first administration, you understood better than any modern president how to decisively apply military power without getting us drawn into never-ending wars.
You demonstrated this by killing Kwazam Suleimani and by defeating ISIS.
Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First Platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran.
This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States and that you should strike now, that there was a clear path to swift victory.
This was a liar and it's the same tactic that the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women.
We cannot make this mistake again.
As a veteran who deployed to combat 11 times and as a gold star husband who lost my beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel, I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives.
I pray that you will reflect upon what we are doing in Iran and who you are doing it for.
The time for bold action is now.
You can reverse course and chart a new path for our nation or you can allow us to slip further towards decline and chaos.
You hold the cards.
It was an honor to serve in your administration and serve our great nation, Joseph Kent.
That's hardcore, isn't it?
It's not really pulling any punches, is it?
I have never seen something at this level that explicitly names Israel in this way.
No.
No, I haven't.
What's remarkable to me is his position as the director of all counterintelligence, counter-terrorism, is not an is far from a nobody.
He only answered to Tulsi Gabbard and the president.
It's very, very, very, very senior dude.
So we were told, like, if you've got an issue with command, go and speak to command about it.
I imagine he did try something.
I can only imagine.
I know he tries something like that and deaf ears.
And he feels painted into a corner to do this.
I don't know that.
Trump is sometimes.
Trump can be black.
He could be like, no, Connie, I'm doing this.
But it does.
I've always felt, it does seem that this is, like, someone was saying that Netanyahu has been trying like a 30-year plan to take out Iran.
It's been very explicit.
Even in the last two weeks, he said, just openly, explicitly, on camera, a couple of weeks ago, it has been my dream to take out the Iranian regime my whole adult life.
People have done compilations of Netanyahu over the last 30 years where they do that thing where him speaking in the date.
And they've shown over 30 years, we must attack Iran.
They're on the verge of a nuclear weapon.
He's never hidden it.
He's never hidden in it.
It's the same agenda.
How does he get dragged in?
I mean, because he said he was never going to get into these wars.
That's the whole point of Trump.
A couple of things in here before I play you a clip of how Trump responded because he's already got a clip of him responding to that.
So we'll let Trump respond to it.
But before we do, a couple of things in there, which are quite striking to me, saying that Trump was like the victim of a misinformation campaign and just explicitly calling it a liar.
The idea that the Iran were within weeks, I saw Trump say that about a week or so into this conflict.
He said, Iran were a few weeks away from getting a nuke.
Did he really say that?
The weapons of mass destruction argument.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Which is odd because Operation Midnight Hammer was supposed to have completely obliterated their ability.
So in summer last year, they completely obliterated it.
But a couple of weeks ago, Iran was within weeks of getting a nuke again.
So which one?
Both those things can't be true.
So, all right.
But Joseph Kent said that Trump was in some sort of echo chamber and deceived into believing that there was an imminent threat, which in fact was a lie, according to Joseph Kent.
Okay, this is airing your dirty laundry in public a bit, isn't it?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
This must be embarrassing.
Whether you agree with the war or not, whether you agree with Trump, whether you agree with MAGA or not, this is airing your dirty laundry.
Yeah, I mean, we need to be careful on this stuff because apparently like 89% of the American public are backing the war.
I think that's a bit serious thing.
Yeah.
I've seen polling that suggests that.
Now, I'd imagine that's a bit reflective.
It's more popular than not.
I don't know if it's as high as that, but I think, yeah, it's not disastrously unpopular, it seems.
Without a ground war, you can't win.
You're never going to win without a ground war.
Unless you know something on history before, which you won't because air power didn't really exist.
But I suspect that is mostly a reflective instinct that when your nation is at war, they sort of the Americans are very jinguistic.
I'm not saying that negatively.
They just are that.
But I mean, the question I'd ask to, no doubt we've got plenty of viewers who are American and support the war.
Yeah, yeah.
The question for me is, well, how does it benefit America?
I understand how it benefits Israel, but how does it benefit America?
And then you get some vague stuff about, oh, it's degrading China, but I think it's actually strengthening them in the region.
Well, they are like, it's like Hezbollah and Hamas lapdobs of Iran and the same thing with China, isn't there?
Reckon Iran was like a proxy.
So China is using Iran as a proxy war.
It's just making China and Russia look like better future potential security guarantors than 100%.
And that's the sixth order effect people don't really look at.
Yeah, absolutely right.
I've said this a long time, about Russia, especially.
There is also the argument that Iran, and I believe this, I've bought an into this narrative, that Iran was destabilizing the whole region and to a lesser extent the whole world with exporting terror in various ways.
100%.
I've said that once or twice on the Bo Show and people said, oh, you've bought that liar that that's not.
No, you can prove that.
No, it is.
I mean, just here's a link from simply from May last year in Britain.
I remember it happening, yeah.
These are Iranian nationals, various terror cells of Iranian nationals in Britain last year.
So don't tell me Iran doesn't export terror.
Don't tell me that.
In fact, do you notice where this is at all?
Yeah.
It's only in Swindon.
Just there, just out of shot, is Iceland.
The Iceland in Swindon.
Jeez.
Yeah, look, there was Iceland.
You just saw it up there.
This is that's just outside computer exchange.
That's the Cafe Nero, sort of next to computer exchange, opposite Greg's.
Wow.
Last May.
Last May.
Mind you, if there were seven Iranian agents in Swindon, I probably wouldn't notice them through the four or five hundred Pakistanis and Albanians and all the rest of it.
So I fully accept that Iran is a bad state.
My question is, just is it worth 6,000 American bodies to do something about that?
And I accept that Iran would destabilize the region and was a bad regime.
Put it this way, and I've said this on the morning show a number of times.
I'll say it again right here.
If I could just push a button and remove that theocratic Islamic oppressive regime and Iran got a stable, good, reasonable government and a good civil society, I would mash the button.
Of course I would.
But is it a liar that they were weeks away from getting a nuke though?
People say the same thing about Putin.
Good luck with that.
You know what I mean?
You've got to be careful what you wish for.
Well, and also you can't be weeks away from a nuke for 30 years.
Right.
Oh, no, but we know that.
But it's the same with the weapons of mass destruction, the 40-minute thing, the dossier, wasn't it?
The dodgy dossier.
It's all that rubbish, isn't it?
We know that.
The thing is, if you sell that lie long enough, people believe it.
Of course people, and actually, to be fair...
They actually do, yeah.
There's a credible argument saying if you leave them long enough, they're going to get this bomb and then they're going to kill Israel and Israel's going to...
So yeah, we get all that, you know.
I want to give Trump a right of reply.
John then, does he attack you directly, does he?
No.
Well, let's just, honestly, just let Trump speak for himself when he was asked the question.
Mr. President, Mr. President, your director of national counterterrorism, Joe Kent, he just resigned today.
He said he can't support your conflict with Iran.
What's your reaction to that?
And did you say that?
Well, I read his statement.
I always thought he was a nice guy, but I always thought he was weak on security, very weak on security.
I didn't know him well, but I thought he seemed like a pretty nice guy.
But when I read a statement, I realized that it's a good thing that he's out because he said that Iran was not a threat.
Iran was a threat.
Every country realized what a threat Iran was.
Questions whether or not they wanted to do something about it.
And many people, many of the greatest military scholars are saying for years that president should have taken out Iran because they wanted a nuclear weapon.
They were, if we didn't do the attack, or if I'll go a step further, if I didn't terminate the Iran nuclear deal given to us, one of the worst deals ever made by Barack Hussein Obama.
Remember when they sent Boeing 757s over there?
Loaded with cash.
Hundreds of millions of dollars.
You would have been very happy.
This was a wonderful.
They sent hundreds of millions.
People forget that.
Does anybody remember?
Right?
You remember?
Hundreds of millions of dollars in a Boeing 757.
I think that two of them loaded.
They took the seats out and they put cash.
And it was so much that there wasn't a bank in Virginia, Maryland, or D.C. that had any money left.
They stripped them of all their money, put it into place, sent it to Iran, almost as ransom.
That's not going to happen with Trump.
And nobody ever did anything about it.
Nobody ever said anything about it.
Can you imagine if I did that?
So they've been a threat for a long time.
But they've really been a threat.
If I didn't terminate Obama's horrible deal that he made, the Iran nuclear deal, you would have had a nuclear war four years ago.
You would have had nuclear holocaust, and you would have had it again if we didn't bomb the site.
So when somebody is working with us that says they didn't think Iran was a threat, we don't want those people because, and there are some people, I guess I would say that, but they're not smart people or they're not savvy people.
Iran was a tremendous threat.
And virtually every NATO nation, and this is the thing, if they told me it wasn't a threat and therefore they don't want to help, but when they say it was a threat and it was a major threat, every one of them, I think every one of them, I don't know of one that said they're not a threat, but when they say it was a threat, but we're not going to help, I think they're very foolish.
Daniel Ellsberg and Truth00:09:10
You know, it's interesting.
Okay.
Okay.
Well, I mean, so there you go.
You've got a lot of what Trump said there, I couldn't argue with.
Few points.
I'm like, I don't know.
I'm not sure.
But it's broad point to say, yeah, he's that Iran was no threat.
Well, that's not true, is it?
A guerrilla's a threat in a cage.
Unless you open the cage, it's going to be a threat.
But if you leave it in the cage, it's not a threat anymore.
And what he's trying to say with, I mean, he was saying that they were giving Iran a lot of cash, weren't they, to not build a bomb.
What he was saying is they were taking that cash and they were building drones and everything else.
I mean, I agree with that.
That Obama deal was obsessed.
Yeah, yeah, right.
Stop that.
Okay.
But the implicit assumption he makes is the moment that Iran gets a nuclear weapon, if they are truly going for it, the moment they get it, they will instantly use it on America.
Well, on Israel.
Well, and okay, well, yeah, but North Korea got a nuke and they haven't used it.
It's a deterrent.
So, one, I don't think he's right, but they maybe they are truly trying to pursue Hannibal Doctrine, which is the Israeli doctrine of the last resort, isn't it?
They go and send weapons to everyone else, and they blow it, so they get killed themselves.
So it's the last sort of thing that Israel will do.
And I think that's something he's probably considering.
If Israel's attacked and they think this is the end of us, they're going to attack other countries in order to get attacked back.
And the thing is, he didn't attack the man, really.
He said he was weak on security.
He's like, well, he was your number one guy.
But fine.
So he obviously did respect what the guy had said.
There's obviously some truth there because if he didn't respect that, he would have gone after the guy, wouldn't he?
Interestingly, with Trump, what he's been doing over the day, if you listen to what Trump's been saying over the Iran stuff, he's been making comments like, he keeps saying I was advised to do this by Jared Kushner and I can't remember the other one.
I don't think he wanted to be involved.
Stephen Whitcock.
So he is making it clear.
I was kind of, well, I was led into this position.
So he can't refute his frame entirely because that's the frame that Trump himself is doing because he's starting to realize that actually you can start a war with Iran, but Iran gets to decide when it ends because they get to decide when the straight-ups are.
The biggest thing is this.
This is what people aren't missing.
It's like you can start whatever you want.
Iran will drag this out intentionally.
That's exactly what they would do.
And exactly what I would do if I was, I'm going to drag this out forever.
And that's what he's saying about the Middle East wars.
The chap you put up first off.
He's saying, well, this is the problem.
We're sending good, we're going to send good people onto the ground to stop this, and it's going to be dragged on forever.
We're going to kill Americans.
We're going to spend lots of money over there.
And it's going to benefit Halliburton, KBR, Brown and Root, all those contractors, Lockheed Martin, all those kind of people.
It doesn't change.
But that's what America does.
You probably know this quote, being a history guy, but who was it who said, and it was a famous general, something like, Wars start when you will, but don't end when you please.
I don't know.
That's a good one.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Off the top of my head, I'm afraid.
Yeah, yeah.
But that's the kind of problem that America has got into.
Okay, you can start the war, but Iran decides when it ends.
People always talk about the day after, right?
Or an off-ramp or whatever you want to say, or all those things.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, okay, it's difficult because there are various things that Joe Kent said and various things Trump said there, which are both true.
Are both true.
I thought what was very interesting to me from that clip we just watched of Trump was what he didn't say.
A couple of things.
He didn't decide to just completely character assassinate.
And he normally does as well.
Yeah, he didn't like make up a funny comedy joke nickname to ridicule him.
He didn't do that, did he?
He didn't go down that route.
He didn't say, we've always suspected, we've always hated.
He didn't do any of that.
And he didn't address, he didn't address some of the core things that Mr. Kent had said about Israel.
He addressed any of them, really.
No, he talks about you're saying it's not a threat.
They were a threat.
All right.
Okay, Trump.
All right.
Yeah.
Can't disagree with you there.
That's a fair point.
Yeah.
Okay.
Now, what about the specifically that you were manipulated, basically manipulated by Israel to think that there was a giant threat when there wasn't one?
Like, he didn't say anything about that, did he?
Thomas Saul, you know, Thomas Saul.
He said the black American economist, lovely guy.
I follow him a lot.
I read all his books.
I'll paraphrase this, but he says, like, politics is a compromise.
You know what I mean?
It's just everything.
Like, for example, if you want healthcare, you can't have defense.
The same thing.
Like, yeah, Iran's a threat.
Maybe not now, but give it three years.
They're going to be a big threat.
Let's go in now.
And so there's that as well.
There's like, there's just grey.
This is the problem with war.
It's just grey.
It would be great if it was absolutes, wouldn't it?
But even Tony Blair was dealing with this when he went to war with Bush back in, was it 2003 or whatever, when I was in Baltimore?
He was kind of saying, you know, it's like, yeah, we've got to go.
We've got to do it.
It was like, it's not black and white.
It's never black and white.
And so you can be both right.
I hate to say that.
They can both be kind of right.
I think they both are right.
I think that's why he's not taking him apart because that's why I think that Joe hasn't taken the president apart.
They probably respect each other a great deal.
But the truth is, there's other external pressures.
A lot of the senior officers would say to me when we'd have these open, you know, very senior officer whole station would be saying these things.
They'd be saying, yeah, I'm dealing with different things.
I'm dealing with a balance at a political level.
It'd be great to give your squadron money so you didn't keep hemorrhaging guys out into defense and getting paid lots of cash.
I need that money to put into this because I need to grow this aspect.
It doesn't make anything wrong.
It just makes it different degrees of right.
And I think what I find people can't do anymore is deal with nuance.
I put a video out talking about nuance.
I think I talked about Israel Palace.
I can't remember now.
Oh, no, I talked about Ukraine and Russia.
That was right.
Worst video ever.
The hate in the comments.
Because I'm trying to deal with a bit of a bit of subtlety.
Like, not everyone's right.
Russia's not necessarily wrong.
There's a reason that Ukraine and Russia are both right and both wrong.
It's not as simple.
You know what I mean?
It'd be great if it was, wouldn't it?
Like, Putin's the bad man.
It'd be great if that was.
But it's not true.
I could prove it right now.
Everybody wants geopolitics to be a Disney cartoon with a clearly identifiable goodie and a bad.
Exactly.
It's not.
It's absolutely uber complex.
But here's the truth as well.
When you commit to war, commit to war, destroy everything, and then we can have it in the debrief.
The time for questioning it is not there.
So that's probably why he's upset because what Joe's done there is weakened the president's argument here.
Yeah.
And that's what I've always told in defense.
It's like, if you're going to be in that position, you go along with it.
Well, the other argument is you pour shit all over it before he commits to ground troops.
Yeah.
Well, what you do is, if Joe, I mean, Joe would, Joe should have stood down before the action happened.
I can't support this.
I'm standing down.
Because you're not contributing.
If Joe's like that, he's not contributing towards the war effort if he really doesn't believe in it.
So what we're always told to do, like there were people that never went to Iraq, not in my squadron, there weren't pilots.
All the pilots are going, of course.
But there were people that just said, I don't want to do the Iraq thing.
I'm stepping down.
And they put their leave chit in for the Air Force or whatever.
There wasn't many, but we did hear about a few.
My argument being, when you're going, you're going.
And you're going with 100%.
You're going to kill as many people as possible because that's going to stop the war quickly.
But the more people you kill in the smallest time possible, the war stops quickly.
Because it makes sense.
If I've got a tank brigade coming across the horizon, if I take half of them away, the rest of the tanks turn and go home.
If I pick them off one by one, they all keep fighting and then more people are going to die.
So we try and have a massive impact.
And that's not what's necessarily happened here either.
That's the problem.
Without a ground force going in like they did back in the Iraq war, you leave this disparate command structure that's still fighting on forever.
And they're flying drones into Dubai and all that kind of stuff.
The thing this reminds me of a bit is Daniel Ellsberg.
Do you either of you know much or ever heard of Daniel Ellsberg?
He's a person from yesteryear doing the Nixon stuff.
During Vietnam and Nixon.
Now this Joseph Kent, they're very, very different in other ways.
Daniel Ellsberg was a full lefty.
Right.
Right.
Eventually he was shown to be a fool lefty.
This Joseph Kent seems to be a bit of a proud boy guy.
So they're very different in that sense.
But they're similar in the sense that they were like a whistleblower.
Daniel Ellsbergberg worked in the, I think it was the State Department.
And he came out, not quite as a senior as this Joseph Kent dude, but nonetheless, sort of a senior guy.
He came out and he said, look, Vietnam's unwinnable.
It's a crazy thing.
It's a crazy world.
This isn't in our interest.
Okay.
Now, you can see Daniel Ellsberg as either a complete traitor.
It was his job not to do that.
It was his job to be on board with his country, come what may.
Or you can say he's a bally hero.
You can do both.
But for standing out and saying what he truly believed in his heart of hearts.
And that he told the truth above everything.
And that that's noble and great.
Both those views of Daniel Ellsberg are kind of valid, right?
It's up to you to make up the middle.
It's up to you to make up your mind about someone like Daniel Ellsberg.
Same with this guy.
Was it his job not to resign like this?
And it's terrible what he's done here.
He's undermined his president and his country in his war effort.
Or he's a hero for telling the truth.
Standing Out for Beliefs00:06:15
You're never going to get.
See, the thing is, it's easy to go.
People like the binaries.
This is the big problem we've got in the UK at the moment.
I've got a sister who is a binary lefty.
There's no shades of grey.
She's anti-borders, right?
This is my elder sister.
My younger sister, the police officer, she's very different.
But when I say to my sister, so do you lock your door at night?
She says, yeah.
But she wants open borders.
I try and say to her, well, the border is a closed door.
You know, trees are names.
She's lovely, right?
But, you know what I mean?
Does she have kids?
She's got four children.
Does she not see what's happening?
I say that to her every day.
And she goes, you know, my kids, it's going to be really hard for me to get on the housing ladder.
Yes, it is because a finite supply of housing and we're giving it to infinity immigrants.
And therefore, your children who deserve you know, house prices get she can't see it.
Why?
Because she's working 16 hours a day for the NHS.
That's overstretched.
All right.
She's putting her patients first.
And she's a single mum with three kids.
One's left, one's older.
So she's very, so she can't see it.
But she's on a binary.
So people will like to be on a binary.
They're going to be Trump or they're going to be Joe on this one.
And the truth is, unless we start talking about that area and great, and we do it maturely and responsibly, and we listen to people we don't get on with, which is really hard, especially on these social sites, I can be the same we're never going to move forward, are we?
I think we're quite lucky with our audience, because 70 can deal with it, but at least 30 of comments are still getting final.
Yeah, can I pick up on one aspect of that?
Just just the Israeli aspect of it.
I mean, the other thing that i'm thinking is, you know, Trump is a second term president.
The next Um president is going to have to go through a Republican primary.
It feels to me like we got to the stage where one of those candidates at least one of those candidates is going to explicitly be withdrawing from Israel or irrit.
No, we're basically ending this.
Oh right, maybe Israel has over the Us and and that and that was.
I wouldn't, I wouldn't count on that, you don't think.
At least one candidate, I mean, we've now got to the point where people are resigning and explicitly calling out Israel.
Maybe, if I wouldn't count, like it is changed, maybe I, I think you're going to have at least one candidate who's going to stand up and say, you know, we've got to end this relationship.
I think the Republican big beasts, or at least at the moment in the in 2026, is what?
Vance Rubio uh, I think, oh yeah, that Noum, uh lady Surname, there's a she'll probably put her hat in the ring.
Um, I don't think any of those people are gonna turn their back on it.
On Israel, I doubt it.
There's that Fish guy in Texas i'm, i'm probably getting it might happen, though it might happen.
How would you get in if you were turning your back?
On Israel?
I mean, the funding for your campaign is going to come largely yeah well, unless you but, mind you, Trump didn't come with a lot of funding.
I mean, I know he, I know he had self-funds, a billionaire in his own right.
Also, he's a term, final term president.
What people want to talk about is the final term president.
That's the other thing as well.
He hasn't got to.
He's never got to go to the public, ever again.
No, that's right.
He can do exactly what he wants.
I think he's embarrassed about what's happening now with Iran.
I get the impression there he's kind of he didn't want to be that guy that's starting wars.
I think that's why we haven't got any kind of ground.
I know he's got the marines going out there and stuff, and you send the US Marine Corps when you want something done, like and they want to do it.
You know they they really want to, they want to go in, they want to just uh.
So he sent them out there.
But if he commits to a ground war, they don't have the same size military that they used to have as well.
This is the other thing.
There's no in depth, there's no reserve in depth, and that's.
You know, they're very good at the kind of expeditionary stuff, much better than we are because they're much larger.
But again, to resource it from the back they've got to lean on the guard or whatever.
They've got to lean on reserve forces.
Uh, in a way they didn't have to going back uh, when I was out and out in Iraq and stuff.
So I feel like maybe, just maybe, and this take could be terribly off off that that where he took out that Solemni in his first term, didn't he?
He did that operation Midnight Hammer seemed to be remarkably successful.
He did the Maduro Adventure.
That's beautiful, seemed to be perfectly executed, and he felt like they could do something similar, I think the whole of Iran.
I know.
It's to cut the head off the snake, isn't it?
He thought that that would...
But everyone knew Iran was devolved, the leadership was devolved.
Yeah.
So...
Well...
Well, Trump himself knew.
If you go back to when he was campaigning for his first election, he explicitly said, I'm not the kind of guy you would.
That's right, he did.
He invaded Iran.
That's right.
But he did understand it.
This is why I come back to the, you know, did he have, did Epstein have something?
I know it's a conspiracy.
I'm not saying it's true.
But why else would you let Israel dictate your foreign policy like this?
I can't get my head around it.
Suddenly, well, not suddenly, but now he's sort of in bed with someone like Lindsey Graham, who has also famously wanted to bomb Iran forever.
Suddenly he's his golf partner and things.
Okay, I mean, that's our time up, I'm afraid.
But I mean, make your own decisions up about it out there, what you think about it.
Okay, excellent.
Thank you very much.
Do you want to pick out a few comments?
I don't have to, but it's up to you.
Okay, Cranky Texan says, we should understand the propaganda.
Two weeks' claim appears to be how long it would take Iran, given their existing centrifuge capacity, to enrich their stockpile of uranium to weapons grade.
I don't know.
Why have they done that already then?
Yeah, I don't know where you're getting that from exactly.
Maybe that's something I speak in America.
They're being told, look, if we don't do it now, they've got this uranium, but they can enrich it in two weeks, whatever.
I thought he took out all those risks.
Yeah, I thought all that was obliterated in midnight hammers.
That's what we were told.
I mean, I happen to know a fair bit about, well, not loads.
I'm not a nuclear scientist, but all about the science around those centrifuges and how you get uranium enriched up to sort of 90% weapons grade.
It's not something that like you can just do in two weeks or you're close.
We need another two weeks.
It's much more complicated.
It's much more of a bigger process than something like that.
It's much, much more complicated.
Maybe that's why he said maybe it's the propaganda that you actually said that.
Oh, maybe, sorry, maybe I've misunderstood your exactly what you're saying there.
Maybe misunderstand the propaganda.
Cranky Texan.
If I've missed people.
No, we've got to do it because in two weeks time, that's their weapons of mass destruction.
Sorry, if that's what Cranky Texan meant by saying that, then apologies.
But yeah, so we like Texans.
I like Texans.
Yeah, yeah.
Do we have any video comments, Samson?
Not today.
Right.
Okay.
We can do some of the other comments.
All right.
Misunderstanding the Propaganda00:04:26
Jordy Sawsman says, note yourself, if ever at War with Dan, place schools on all my bases, he will never be okay with attacking them and go full starming when it does happen.
If you ever go to war with me, God help you.
I will duel you personally.
But yeah, I see the point you're making.
It is difficult, but I still don't like blowing up kids.
So it's all a bit tricky.
Michael Drybelby says, the West, US, UK, NATO hasn't actually been in an all-out war since World War II.
Yeah, I mean, this is exactly the problem.
They've got luxury beliefs when it comes to war.
We go on these little military excursions where lawyers write our rules of engagement in 100-plus page manuals.
Meanwhile, the enemy in the Middle East are fighting a real war indiscriminately, killing anything they view the enemy and getting in the way, not their problem.
Yeah, that's the thing.
Just temperamentally, we in the West, we just can't fight wars.
I mean, I heard one American saying that in a previous war that they'd been in, it might have been might have been Afghanistan, they had rules of engagement such as if you could see the enemy were using pistols instead of rifles, you had to switch to your pistol.
I haven't heard about that, but it sounds pretty horrendous.
They said even in the Falklands, actually in the Falklands fighting around Stanley, don't shoot back until you're fired at.
That's the rules of engagement.
You can't shoot Enemy combatant until they shoot at you, which might be a headshot, of course, or whatever.
I mean, it's and people in the Middle East don't necessarily play that way.
You're dealing with an international lawyer.
I mean, Starma was an international law lawyer, wasn't it?
It's a humanitarian thing, wasn't he?
So you're dealing with.
And I suspect their views will change extremely fast if they ever get put on the front line themselves.
Well, here's the thing about it, right?
Say it was your daughter that was stabbed at a Taylor Swift dance concert.
Let's say it was.
Didn't they kill in America?
That guy that went into the score did a YouTube on this.
He killed the ROTC officer.
A Muslim guy killed the ROTC officer.
So it was like an officer training corps thing.
It was recent.
It was at school.
The guy went in there and with an AK-47 or whatever.
And he shot up the place.
He hit about three people.
One of them was the officer taking the class.
He shot the officer and the students killed the assailant.
They killed him.
And that came out about a few days ago.
I did a YouTube about it.
And that's what I mean.
If someone, we don't have this anymore, we're supposed to not look back in anger.
It's like all, I'm all about the anger.
Yeah, yeah.
That's all I am.
I will look back in anger.
That's all I'm going to do.
I'm looking back in anger before it happens because I know it's going to happen.
I'm looking back in anger.
In fact, when Lee Rigby's killer walked up to the police club, when the police came up, Lee Rigby's killer walked up, blood and everything.
The woman got out of the car and shot him straight away.
The police woman got out of the car and shot him straight away.
He's coming towards her, blood every day, the head on the floor.
He's coming, you know what I mean?
So she got out and shot.
That's how we should be, preemptive.
And it's that kind of thing, isn't it?
It's, yeah, it's complicated.
I don't know if you can see the comments if there's any you want to respond to on your screen.
On the right here?
Okay.
In front of you there, yeah.
The pilots don't have the opportunity to personally inspect each target.
Yeah, I was just given targets.
I had no, I can't choose them.
The Intel guys, Intel guys are very good.
They're supposed to make sure it's a good target, but they're not all knowing.
And we have grades as well of damage, destroy, harass.
There's different ways you can attack targets.
So to take a bridge down, you might need 16 bombs to destroy the bridge.
But if you harass the bridge, you might need one.
If you're going to damage the bridge, they say, well, we'll put it out for three weeks.
You need two bombs.
So they do all that work and then you deliver the ordinance on the target.
The target is valid.
When you get airborne, it's a valid target.
And then you're not paying any attention to anyone.
There's no one calling you off the target.
You are focused on that mission to get there.
Which you should be, right?
You're an attack pilot.
That's your job.
It's not there to question someone else's judgment.
They're doing this in the cold light of day.
I'm trying to fly a weapon system, trying to work with a guy in the back to try and stop himself getting other aircraft trying to kill me, by the way, that I can hear how far though.
When I was on the Iranian border, I was being attacked by an F-14.
Two F-14s were coming at me at Mark 1.4.
They've got a missile on.
They could have fired by about, I think, about 90 miles away or something at the height they were flying at.
And I was doing some reconnaissance on a target and I was just counting.
My guy in the back was counting down.
It was a girl, actually.
She was counting down.
Ginny, just counting down, just going, right, we've got about two and a half minutes.
We've got about two minutes.
We've got about a minute, 30.
We need to go now.
Like now we need to go.
And so we turn, keeping the F-14 at a range where they couldn't kill us.
So all the work we're doing, there's constant, and I'm working fuel.
So for me, then look at a target and go, oh, there's a push chair.
Not going to happen.
Excellent Guest Tim Davies00:01:02
You know what I mean?
It just doesn't happen like that.
I guess we wish it could.
But when you fire a tomahawk from a nuclear sub, it's the same thing.
You know, yeah, people are going to die.
So this is the thing.
You've got to think about war before you do it because people are going to be killed.
And that's why when people play around with this stuff, they play around with like come back to the diversity in the military or they play around with immigrants coming in and taking over city centers.
People will die.
And then those people that have kind of campaigned for DR, you never hear from them again.
You know, they're going to be there going, oh, I'm just going back to my job.
So this is why people are dangerous like that.
I think, yeah, okay, those comments are all good comments.
I haven't been, no one's told me I'm saying anything nasty, which is always good.
Yeah.
Not like my YouTube channel sometimes.
Did you want to pick out anything else?
Let's wrap up there and half a dozen times.
Excellent.
Okay.
Well, thank you very much for joining us.
Tim, you've been an excellent guest.
Thank you so much for coming on.
Very kind.
Watch fast check performance, is it?
Yeah, on YouTube, fast chip performance.
Yeah.
I put out like three or four videos a week if I can.