00:00When we started this conflict, folks were explaining to me the geography of the strait
00:03and how it's kind of hazy and there's usually this like low-lying fog that sits over it.
00:08And I feel like we're dealing with that and the fog of war
00:10and the lack of communications from both of these governments
00:13makes it really hard to understand what's going on.
00:16But is this an escalation in the conflict or is this just more business as usual
00:20as this kind of mid-range conflict, not a war, not a battle,
00:24whatever the president wants to call it, continues to drag on?
00:28Yeah, I would say it's more of the same.
00:30I think what you're seeing right now, though, is, especially on the U.S. ENCOM side,
00:34is being able to come back and say, if you try and shoot at my carrier
00:38and you try and shoot at my guided missile destroyers,
00:40there is going to be some type of ramification.
00:42And it's not going to be just hitting something minuscule
00:46that's sitting alongside of the strait, right?
00:48I mean, I think right now you saw a lot of the coastal attacks
00:51against small fast ship vessels and all of those things.
00:54I think this is a continuation of some of the economic pressure campaign
00:58that's going on there.
00:59It also shows some of the economic interdependencies that are tied in,
01:03both with the military and the way that Iran is doing things, right?
01:06We've talked about the hydro model before, right?
01:08Because you have the IRGC, you have the supreme leader,
01:11as well as the presidency.
01:12You have to get all three of those together
01:15if you're trying to make a deal with Iran.
01:17And so by going after one of the tankers as a self-defense
01:21back from them shooting at our tankers or at one of our carriers,
01:25this is what they're doing.
01:26Colonel, Christina sort of mentioned this in the intro.
01:29The president and the secretary of war or secretary of defense
01:32have made a big deal about how decimated the Iranian military is.
01:36Is it as decimated as the United States says?
01:41Yeah, from a conventional military perspective, I absolutely agree.
01:45When you look at the conventional forces of the Iranian army,
01:48the Iranian navy, they absolutely are.
01:51The problem is, is that the IRGC has a lot of asymmetric capabilities, right?
01:55They are dealing with Houthis as proxies.
01:57You're dealing with a lot of IRGC fast boats throughout the strait.
02:01You talked about the geography.
02:02You don't need a guided missile destroyer or an aircraft carrier, excuse me.
02:07Those are blue water navy problems or forces,
02:10but you're dealing with a brown water navy problem.
02:13You're dealing with something that's very narrow.
02:15You're not going to want to put an aircraft carrier
02:17directly into the straits to deal with that.
02:20So it's a sea denial strategy that's coming from Iran
02:23versus a sea control strategy for the United States.
02:26And both of those are a little bit out of sync with one another.
02:29I also want to ask you, you have,
02:31your latest analysis breaks down some of the missile systems that Iran is using.
02:35I want to ask you how important Chinese support is to the prolongment of this conflict,
02:39because you talk about this indigenous weapons system that I think is called a BVAR,
02:44a BVAR, I've never, this is not, I don't know this one, you can correct me if I'm wrong,
02:48373, and also S-300s from Russia.
02:51And they're, these, the missile systems that Iran makes and has been using
02:57have been hit or degraded or they're out of munitions.
03:00So they're relying on other systems.
03:02Where are those coming from?
03:03And are they getting Chinese supplies of these HQ-9B, HQ-16 air defense systems?
03:10Yeah, the HQ-9, HQ-16, those are some of those sophisticated air defense systems
03:14that do come out of China.
03:15And it's something that right now, right, the U.S. has touted for quite a while now
03:19that we've had air supremacy, air superiority in the region.
03:22So we can fly wherever we want, because we have decimated the launcher capability.
03:27And so Iran has been looking for it.
03:29But so if you look at Russia's S-300, S-400 air defense systems as well,
03:34some of these components, they're separate pieces that make up an air defense system.
03:38So you have your launchers, you also have your radars, you have the interceptors themselves,
03:42and then the command and control system that has to make all these things communicate with one another.
03:46So as different pieces come in, these countries are able to say,
03:50oh, well, I didn't give a whole system, I only gave part.
03:52But if they're able to put these systems together, then you have some level of capacity.
03:57And I know that's something that USNCOM, as well as Fifth Fleet, keep an eye on,
04:01is to whether or not some of these components are being put together
04:03to reestablish some of the air defense capabilities for Iran.
04:07Did I say that even remotely correctly?
04:09B-A-V-R?
04:10You did great.
04:11You did great.
04:11You're such a liar, but I appreciate it.
04:14They do say it separately.
04:15They say it in a lot of different ways.
04:17All right.
04:17Let's talk about munitions.
04:19The president has really bristled at reports saying that the United States is low on munitions.
04:24And he put out another true social post about that just recently.
04:28Give us your take on what the supply is and what the risk is that the United States is depleted.
04:36Yeah.
04:37When you look at specific weapon systems, you are correct, right?
04:40If you're looking at our interceptor capabilities, some of them have been depleted quite a bit.
04:45And you look at PAC-3 interceptors for the Patriot system.
04:48You look at SM-3 and SM-6 that are some of our naval interceptor programs.
04:53These are some of the interceptors that we have had to use a lot because there is this separation between
04:58the capability to fire a bunch of drones at us at the United States.
05:02And then we are shooting them down with very high-powered, very highly expensive munitions to be able to shoot
05:09these things down.
05:09So during that time frame, we were actually using quite a bit of it.
05:13What you're seeing right now on those, the PAC-3 and all those, is that RTX as well as Lockheed
05:19Martin have tripling and quadrupling demand coming from the DOD to be able to build these back up.
05:25But it is a longer process because you're dealing with a lot of different pieces of a supply chain.
05:30It's not as simple as you just put it in order and it comes out.
05:33A PAC-3 interceptor has 400 suppliers that make up a portion of that with several of them being very,
05:39very large.
05:39Obviously, Lockheed does a bulk of it, but if you're looking at your propulsion side of the house, it's coming
05:44from L3 Harris.
05:45If you're dealing with guidance and control, you're dealing with Honeywell.
05:47So they have to put all these pieces together to start making sure that we're ramping from 650 PAC-3
05:54interceptors per year right now to trying to reach 2,000 by 2030.
05:59Now, we have a lot of munitions that are gravity-fed, gravity bombs, something like Boeing's JDAM, which is a
06:04joint direct attack munition.
06:06Those are ones that you just fly overhead and you drop these bombs and they're GPS guided to their targets.
06:11And for an Iranian scenario, the U.S. military has a ton of these.
06:15They still have a lot of different options in the arsenal.
06:18It's some of the exquisite ones, both on long-range precision munitions as well as on the interceptor house,
06:24that we are more concerned about for an Indo-Pacific theater engagement
06:28because that's where you need higher level of sophistication for a peer-to-peer adversary,
06:32and that's why you're seeing the urgency of demand right now.
06:35The other part of that Trump true social is the president alleges, he says,
06:38the Biden administration gave far more munitions to Ukraine than we have used in Iran.
06:43I know you guys track this as much as we can.
06:45Do we know if that's true?
06:48Well, so what we know is that three Patriot batteries have been given to Ukraine during the Biden administration,
06:54and what we don't know is how many interceptors come with that.
06:57Now, a normal standard package is somewhere between 72 PAC-3 interceptors and 96 PAC-3 interceptors.
07:03So when you think about a battery, let's call it, you know, simple army math, call it 300 interceptors,
07:09and these are at $4.1 million apiece.
07:12So when you start looking at not only the cost, but also when you have a limited capacity to build
07:18these,
07:19if you have that many, you're literally talking about half of a year's supply worth of interceptors that have been
07:25provided.
07:26So six months that could have gone to an Iran scenario or even to a China scenario.
07:31That's where I think the president is trying to go with this, is that, yes, we have provided that.
07:35There's also been a lot of the PAC-3 interceptors that have come from NATO allies as well as part
07:40of their Patriot supplies.
07:42So you do see this as part of the geopolitic safety piece, not only for NATO and a Russia scenario
07:47as well.
07:48All right.
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