RESCUE PILOTS

“Let me talk about how the Iranians are likely to mine. We have reports, as Admiral Foggo mentioned, that they put some mines in the Strait. Probably not true. Nobody's seen one, nobody's hit one. But if you're going to mine someplace, generally speaking, it's going to be someplace you don't want to go. And the Strait is someplace Iran wants to go.”

“I don't think the regime wins in the long term, regardless, but I'll tell you, it would be a mistake for us to cease hostilities before, whether it's by negotiation or through military conquest, before the Strait of Hormuz is open. It has to be open at the end of this. So we have a mission to make sure that the seas are open and free, all of them. And so the Strait of Hormuz is part of that.”

“They're a very smart population. They flew F14s from the mid-70s, when the airplanes first came out, until last month. You know, we had trouble flying F14s as much as I love the airplane. It was a difficult airplane to maintain. And we owned the supply chain. They flew F14s for 40 years after the revolution, without having access to any of the supplies that they needed to maintain the airplane, yet they did it. So, we shouldn't discount their ingenuity and their drive to succeed.”

“I was at sea on the Mount Whitney and I thought, you know, they launched the missile, they shot it down. This was a really bad plan. It turns out that it was a mechanical failure. And I called my classmate, Admiral Pegg Klein. She was the commander of the Expeditionary Strike Group Number Five on the Keir Sarge. And I said, you got to get your trap ass at Zereborn and get two aviators that are out there that went down. She beat that timeline because there were Americans in Jeopardy and we launched the V-22s to go get these guys. Those aircraft went in feet dry over Libya, not knowing what they were going to be exposed to, without hesitation.”

“So I don't want to get too much into the Battle of the Atlantic, because that is Admiral Foggo's forte. But this is not the Battle of the Atlantic, where we'll convoy up a bunch of ships, we'll put some escorts around them, and we got to make our way into or out of the Gulf. And some of the ships are going to make it, and some of them aren't. We don't live in that kind of world. If you own one of these very large crude carriers and it gets sunk, the insurance will cover your loss. But you're not going to get another ship for five years. And they won't cover five years of no wages.”

“I would speculate that the decapitation strike that took place in the first hours of this particular war with Iran or this campaign with Iran, there was an assumption that once the leadership went away, that the IRGC would fall apart, and they haven't done that. So we probably made some incorrect assumptions, and the IRGC has proven that it is resilient and that it has a C2 structure that is diversified, so they're able to continue to do these strikes.”

“Kharg Island is a particular problem. We don't have to have the ships transit through the Strait to do that is the point I want to make. Kharg is a little bit different not just because it's close, a lot of these islands are very close to Iran, but because it has all the oil infrastructure. And presumably we would like that oil infrastructure replaced at the end of the conflict. How you seize that island, how you take that island without destroying any of that is a little bit tricky.”

“I can recall the first time I went to Baghdad. We ended up going to the arched swords that Saddam Hussein had erected after the Iran Iraq war and we got out of the MRAP because it was a secure area and walked around stretching our legs. As I was walking around under these bronze swords and this hand holding the sword which is supposedly cast to look like Saddam Hussein's hands, I thought I was walking on cobblestones. I was walking on helmets. Helmets of the Basij who were the young Iranians that attacked Iraq and were either gassed, killed, blown up in hundreds of thousands. And then the Iraqis got all these helmets and sunk them in concrete and made the road, if you will, underneath the sword.”

“There's a sustainability issue that we obviously are learning, particularly with the Shahed drones. We're on the wrong side of the cost curve when the Iranians are launching ballistic missiles in terms of how much it costs them versus how much it costs us. We're way on the wrong side of the cost curve when it comes to drones. And so what we've seen is the Ukraine Armed Forces come rushing to the GCC countries to be able to show them, okay, this is how you do a counter drone campaign, and this is how you do it at a price that you could afford.”