“Something BIG Is About to Hit Israel and America” Scott Ritter: Trump’s Iran War is DOOMED!

0:00 I believe that the United States would, that Israel would take responsibility for decapitation and Tehran and the United States would take responsibility for ballistic missile suppression. I had said, I may have said it to you. I know I said it to others, that I couldn't believe that the United States would pull the trigger on this attack unless they really, really had the goods on the Iranians, that they needed to have been penetrated to Venezuela-like extent. You know, because that's the only way with the force structure you had and the limited forces you had. I mean, this was predictable, the lack of precision-guided munitions, the lack of ballistic

0:49 missile defense. This was a war that needed to be concluded in five to seven days. And that was originally the timeframe that they were talking about. Very intensive, um, you know, operations five to seven days in. It turns out we, I mean, we can't say that we had an intelligence coup. Ali Khamenei was at home. So, I mean, what kind of intelligence coup is it when you assassinate a man in his home with his 14-month-old granddaughter doing a regularly scheduled visit? We didn't kill too many people else. I mean, there's talk about, you know, some other people dying with, you know, with Ali Khamenei. But in terms of the rest of the Iranian leadership, they appear to be alive and well and living. In fact,

1:34 the CIA came out earlier this week, I think just yesterday, and said that Iran is 100 percent in control of the Islamic Republic, that the government's lost no control functions. And the government has said, we will continue to govern throughout. We're not running away. We're not going into hiding. And so the surprise is how poorly prepared we were for this war. You know, yes, we have some very well-trained pilots. Pilots can take off, fly to point A, release their standoff weapons, return. They can do their electronic warfare. They can do all the stuff they need to do. We can deliver bombs on targets. And I'll tell you this, had we delivered bombs on the right targets, we'd have a different kind of war. But the fact that we're a week into this and Iran is doing whatever Iran wants to do, means that we're not

2:21 hitting the right targets. We're blowing up a bunch of empty buildings. And the biggest proof positive of this, the one thing that allows me to say with high confidence, the entire targeting deck is garbage, is the strike on the school. Because we now know the United States carried out that strike. They carried out that strike using the joint standoff weapon fired by an American aircraft. We now know that the U.S. government was assisted by some sort of civilian This means that this isn't targeting done by professionals. Let me just make it clear. I used to do this for a living. I've done this in wartime. I know what it takes to make a target. And we don't use civilian contractors using artificial intelligence. That's just 100% a no-no. When you're going to ask American service members to

3:11 put their lives on the line, to fly a multimillion-dollar strike aircraft, to put steel on target, to take human lives in a war, you need to make sure that everything is right as possible. This isn't a reaction. This isn't close air support. This isn't troops in combat. This isn't flying in by the seat of your pants to try and rescue people. This is a pre-planned strike mission. against a target, a known target, a known place on the ground. You better know what you're striking. And we didn't. We guessed. We hit a spot because some stupid AI program run by some stupid civilian company told the Central Command that they needed to put a missile in this building. Because 15 years ago, this building was affiliated with a larger Iranian Revolutionary Guard Command naval compound.

4:02 Fine. Again, like I said, I've done this for a living. In 1985, I was scrubbing the intelligence targets for the operations plan for the Marine Corps to put a division across the shore in Chabahar or Bandar Abbas. These are Iranian cities on the coast of the Persian Gulf. I scrubbed the target deck. I went through the target deck and, you know, this is 1985. Some of these targets have been in place for about six years and you go through the targets and you have to confirm, you can't go off six year intelligence. So you go through the latest intelligence. What's the latest intelligence? Is this bridge still here? Did it get swept away by water? Has it been rebuilt? Is there another bridge there? What's the material of that bridge? Has the road been repaved? Is it still Macadam or is it now asphalt? These are important questions because we find out when you ask the

4:51 questions, you get an answer and you realize we're We have to update the target deck because different building construction, different things have, you know, different munitions have to be used, different outcomes. You have to update it. What this is apparent to me is that the Pentagon was not planning for this kind of war until around mid-January. Up until mid-January, the Pentagon had one target deck. There was a regime change target deck. That was the target deck to kill Ali Khamenei, senior Iranian regime and suppress security targets. But they were told we have to expand the target deck. So instead of getting intelligence professionals to do this, they went on the cheap. They did it the peak

5:38 headsets way. They rented out to some civilian company, gave them access to all the data. You know, in this digital age, we collect a lot of information. Instead of letting people sort through, because that's manpower intensive, We have programs that do it. We have artificial intelligence. And they went in there and they squeezed out and they produced target decks, target, you know, target nominations that were approved. We bombed a school. We bombed a school. We killed 170 children because we don't have what it takes to have an intelligence professional like me scrub the damn targets before we put bombs on target. We've lost this war, Joe. We lost it on day one. I said we lost it on day one when we

6:25 tried to kill Ali Khamenei because that was just stupid. But we lost it on day one when we hit that school, not because of the morality factor of that, because it proves that we're not ready for this war. It proves that we're doing nothing but bombing empty buildings. That's all we are doing is bombing empty buildings. And the Iranians are laughing at us. They are chortling at us. Pete Hegseth can get up there and say all the garbage he wants to say about this, that, and the other thing. We're bombing empty buildings. That's a 100% guarantee. We might be killing a couple things when they're in the open, but a lot of things that we're bombing are decoys. They're literally set up to absorb our expensive tier one weapons. which apparently we don't have infinity of. Remember Donald Trump said we have it all. We're fully stocked. We're good to go. Well, we don't actually. We don't have any weapons. And so now he had to call in this emergency meeting of

7:12 the major of the big four defense industries and say, I need you to quadruple production as if Donald Trump's golden wand can make it happen. Hey, Donnie, baby, that's not how it works. First of all, even if you had the production lines and you don't, you know, you need the money. Has Congress allocated the money for this? The answer is no. But let's say they even do. Have they hired the right people? I don't know, Donnie, have they? Do they have the equipment? Because just opening up a production line doesn't work that way. You need the production equipment, the people can do it. Have they been certified to handle classified material? How long does a security clearance take? Have they been certified to do classified work? Has the building been inspected for counterintelligence purposes? I used to do this for 11. I know what it takes, and it doesn't happen overnight. That's for sure. But the other problem is the

8:00 supply chain. Half the stuff we need comes from supply sources we no longer have available because we've pissed the Chinese off. Oh, yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Chinese have been producing sensitive electronics that are used in America's most advanced weapons. So have the Japanese. We outsource it because we don't do it anymore, and we don't have them. So there's a reason why F-35s rolled off the production line with empty spaces where the advanced radars are supposed to be. because we don't have the ability to produce it ourselves. We need foreign assistance and we don't have it. And Donald Trump doesn't have a magic wand to make this all go away. So even if he ordered the quadrupling of this, we're not going to even see some of that stuff run off the production line for at least two more years. We lost this war. It's over, done, finished. There's not a damn thing we can do to reverse trend. It's,

8:48 and now they're even, they're getting stupid now. They're mobilizing the 82nd Airborne as we speak. They're sending out a warning orders to other units. Donald Trump went from, we're not going to have a ground war to today saying, I think it might be a good idea to have a ground war. Well, I will also say this in 2007, I was at, uh, at the school of advanced military studies in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where I had been invited to come in and speak to the student body. And they took me through where the majors were doing up their workup. And oftentimes, um, like we saw this at the Marine Corps at the Command and Staff College, too, major school. You get real world problems and then they just tell the majors to run with it. And then guys come in and look at it and say, hey, this is pretty innovative. This is innovative. The majors were working a scenario where

9:35 Iran had attacked Azerbaijan and the United States was now working with Azerbaijani forces to counterattack and advance down the Caspian Sea coast to Tehran, threatening Tehran from the Azerbaijani direction. The Iranian attack is just politics. It's an invasion plan for the United States and Azerbaijan to invade Iran. Now, why am I bringing this up? Because over the course of past several days, the CIA has been working with Azerbaijan to fabricate false flag incidents, flying drones into buildings at an airport that doesn't matter, attacking a pipeline but not doing any real damage. But now they blame it on Iran. the Azerbaijani military is mobilizing as we speak. They're approaching the Iranian border. They're going to attack Iran

10:24 and they're going to secure what is known as the Zangazar Corridor. It's something that's been in the works for some time now. J.D. Vance was just visiting the region and he talked to both the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis about the Zangazar Corridor. Turkey very much wants this. So there's going to be a second front opened up as Azerbaijan's going to get involved. Let me just tell you what's going to happen in Azerbaijan. They're going to lose the totality of their oil infrastructure. And then there'll be a pauper state for the rest of their lives, the rest of their pathetic lives. The Zaguzar corridors are going to save them. Two, their army will be annihilated. They were pretty good against the Armenians. They have no chance against the Iranians. The Iranians will wipe them off the face of the earth. But they're going to do it anyways. And we may get American troops involved in this, too. So American troops may be coming into Iran from Azerbaijan. We will all

11:15 die. We don't stand a chance. American special forces are already working with Kurds. Some of them may be on the ground in western Iran. They're going to die. This we will not win this war everything we're doing right now is reactive in nature None of it is based upon a significant pre-planning We don't have the logistical sustainability to support a military operation out of Azerbaijan because this was a 2007 Scenario that was worked up that never got followed through we don't have prepositioned stockpiles. We don't have anything So we're making it up as we go along because I'll come back to my original thought we lost this war There's a reason why we've had five war plans articulated in seven days. That's because none of the war plans worked. They're

12:00 all failing. They're all derived from Donald Trump's big mouth and small brain. I mean, when this man comes out and says, oh, we're going to take the U.S. Navy and we're going to sail it right through the Strait of Hormuz and keep it open. And the U.S. Navy goes, no, we're not. And now Donald Trump had to say, ah, we really don't need to do that. We don't want to do that. We can't do that. But he's stupid across the board. He doesn't think about cause and effect. He thought this would be a quick war. Suddenly now we don't have oil and we're not going to have oil for a very long time, months, if ever. The Qataris have stopped producing natural gas. This is bad news for Europe because you see all these Russian liquid gas natural gas ships that are heading to Europe because Europe was still buying Russian liquid natural gas because there is no

12:47 alternative. They have pivoted. They have turned around and they're heading to different markets now. Markets that used to buy oil or gas from Qatar can't buy anymore because Qatar stopped producing it. Russia's sitting there. Europe's not going to have any gas. This is the end of Europe. Europe is literally over. They haven't recognized it yet, but there is going to be an energy crisis. And Thanks to Donald Trump. So how does Donald Trump respond to this? Now, remember, Scott Bessett, the secretary of treasurer, was all about sanctioning Russian energy. We're going to bring Russia to its knees because Russia sells oil and the profits they make off of oil sales fund this war. And we're going to stop the Russians from funding this war. We're going to bankrupt them. We're going to destroy them. Except today, Donald Trump said, screw it. Let the Russians sell oil because that's the only chance we have on the market. There's no other

13:35 oil out there. We just shut off the Middle East. So Russia now gets to sell oil to India. And they're going to get to sell oil at prices that are sky high. We literally just bankrolled the war, balanced the Russian budget, gave them a profit and everything. And Vladimir Putin's just like, thank you very much. Didn't have to do anything for that one. But it was inevitable. It was going to happen because Donald Trump doesn't think Scott Besson is an idiot. Pete Hegseth is worse than an idiot. There's not a competent person in this staff. We are a nation at war and the war is being managed by the most incompetent people in the world. I mean, it's frightening just how bad this is. We have lost every one of our major military installations in the Middle East now is being dismantled. This is the greatest destruction of American military power in the history of the United States. I'll say

14:23 that one more time, just so people understood exactly what I said. This is the greatest destruction of American military power in the history of the United States. We have never suffered at the hands of the enemy losses like we're suffering right now. And this is just the beginning. By the time this is done, our entire footprint in the Middle East will be eliminated. Gone. And we'll probably never come back because we're also evacuating our diplomatic footprint. running for our lives. We're not safe anywhere. Our embassies are being attacked. We try to relocate to hotels. Those hotels are attacked very deliberately. The room is where we're staying. We are running for our lives. The Iranians know everything, and they have the weapons to deliver death and destruction to us. But you don't see the Iranians going out there and doing a peak headset type press

15:08 conference, because they would be justified in talking about unprecedented death and destruction. We're talking about lethality, baby. I mean, when we come to play, we come to play to win. You don't see that from the Iranians. You see it from Pete Hegseth, who a moron, who sat there cheerleading like this is a game while Americans die, while our military is humiliated. And he's pretending that just by talking loud and bench pressing 315 pounds, not too bad for his age. I mean, I have to say I'm a little impressed. I can't do it. But still, that's not how you win wars, Pete. And Donald Trump is destroying this nation. He's destroyed our nation from a moral standpoint. Who in the world can trust us? No one can trust us again, ever. Jared Kushner and Steve Whitcoff, these failed

15:58 corrupt New York state real estate people were out there playing arms control. And they didn't understand what was going on. They didn't understand that Iran gave them the greatest gift. Donald Trump kept saying he wanted to deal better than Barack Obama's joint comprehensive plan of action. The Iranians gave him that deal. They gave him the greatest deal you could have, one that guaranteed Iran would never have a path to a nuclear bomb, one that allowed U.S. inspectors on the ground. Iran was never going to allow U.S. inspectors on the ground. This one they did. And they threw it away for this war. And what they also did in the process, and we can delve into this deeper if you want to, Iran now is more than likely on the path towards acquiring a nuclear weapon. The man who was stopping it, Ali Khamenei, is dead.

16:44 The clerics who are there now are the ones who had convinced Ali Khamenei to make a cutout, said if Iran was ever threatened with its existential survival from nations possessing nuclear weapons, that the fatwa could be overridden. Well, today, Iran is threatened with existential survival from two nations possessing nuclear weapons. They're not going to give a public announcement, but I believe as we speak, 450 kilograms of 60 percent enriched nuclear Uranium hexafluoride is going to be processed through secret centrifuge cascades. It's going to be turned into about 92% enriched sometime next week. Then it's going to take about a week and a half to process that into metal. And then probably another week or so to process that metal into the slugs needed for a gun

17:31 style weapon. And then they're going to be loaded on about 10 warheads. And Iran will have 10 deliverable nuclear warheads. And it didn't have to be. Donald Trump could have ended it all. He literally could have closed the door on Iran's nuclear weapons program. Donald Trump says he's the man who says Iran will never have a nuclear weapons program. I think that, you know how we called the first bombs a fat man and a little boy? We should call the Iranians should call it, you know, orange face man. And, you know, come up with some other derogatory term for, you know, obese, toupee wearing douche. That should be the name of the two bombs because that's what they... Donald Trump helped them. He made it happen. And Israel will disappear. I mean, the Iranians

18:19 are not playing games right now. They have really fought this thing out. Everything has been planned. I mean, Higgs has said one thing that was correct. He said, you know, he used a very horrible sports analogy because we're talking about death and destruction, not touchdowns. But he said, you know, the Iranians are like the team that, you know, planned their first 20 plays. You're right, Pete. Iran is the team that planned their first 20 plays. Then they planned the next 20 plays and the next 20 plays and the next 20 plays. Their entire game is pre-planned. It's on full automatic because they have broken their country into 12 self-sufficient autonomous military districts that are operating off of 12 different plans because they don't believe they can have unified leadership. When they get unified leadership, they can do some coordination. But right now,

19:07 you literally have 12 separate Irans. To defeat Iran, you'll have to defeat 12 Irans. There's not one Iran. You can capture one of these districts. There's 11 more. We don't have the ability to do that. And these districts will fight to the death forever. And they are operating off a pre-planned thing that can't, that there's nothing we can do to do it. So we've lost this war. And I'll leave it at that. Joe, America has lost its war. Going to personal experience. When I was a weapons inspector in the Soviet Union, I worked with a CIA outfit called the Office of Imagery Analysis, OIA. It was separate from INPIC, which is the National Photographic Interpretation Center,

19:54 which operated out of the Naval Yard in Washington, D.C. And the reason why I bring this up is I was inspecting a missile and I saw something strange on the missile, something we hadn't seen before, a metal stripe. And so I took notes of that, went and talked to the people. I said, you know, something different here. And they said, well, that could be a telemetry antenna. That means that this missile could be designed for missile testing. Why don't you go talk to, and they gave me the name of this guy at the Office of Imagery. So they said, he monitors these things. That's a polite way of saying that he's a fanatic, that he spent his entire life sitting at a desk looking at imagery about this one place and everything that happens. I mean, if a mouse farted, he would pick up the

20:39 dust cloud and say, a mouse farted right here. And mouse is only fart on Fridays. And therefore, this means this. I mean, that's how good this guy was. And I went and talked to him. He did his thing. But my point is, this would have been in 1990. In 1991, I was working for the United Nations. I was brought in to create the intelligence unit there. And we started getting the U-2 aircraft to fly for us. American U-2 aircraft were flying on our orders, taking images. They were supposed to give us the film, but the United States decided that they were going to control us by controlling our access to this. So the CIA would send a team of photo interpreters. who would come in and brief us on different sites. Now, 1991, 1992, we started to notice a couple of things.

21:29 The guys that worked at OIA were no longer there. They were all fired. They shut OIA down, part of the peace dividend. Duplication of effort. You didn't need OIA. You didn't need somebody who spent 30 years looking at a single place. I mean, because my God, that's very expensive. Okay. So instead they purged them. And then they brought in these new, this new class of trainees. Now I'll tell another story just so you understand where these trainees are coming from. I was recruited by the CIA in 1992 to be an analyst. And I thought, okay, why not? Let's go, let's go take a look at that. And I went and interviewed with a guy who ended up being an acting director of the, of the CIA, Morrell. And, but he ran what was called the office of Russia and East Europe

22:16 or Eastern European affairs, Oreo. And I interviewed him, interviewed some other people. And, you know, and I'm coming off this in 1992. In 1990, I received my second classified accommodation from the director of the CIA for the work that I'd done in Russia, analytical work. So I'm like, I'm sort of pretty good at this. I'm not bad at this. I should be hired. This should be very easy. I think he came back and said, we're not going to hire you. Why? He said, well, you represent the old school. the old way of doing business. We only want people that have new way. We don't want people mired in facts. I mean, literally, he's like, we don't want you to be facts and the Soviet thing. We want new people coming here who are freer thinking about, you know, this, that, and the other thing. Basically, he said, we don't want experts. We don't want experts. We want people who we can shape. Okay. Now we transfer back to the UN. We have these teams come

23:05 in. They start briefing us. Now, the first teams are pretty good. They actually, these are people who have been looking at Iraq for a long time. We just came off Desert Storm. So these are the people that helped build those. But suddenly they disappeared and they started bringing these younger people, not experts. They were the people that they were supposed to be They weren't supposed to be masters of trade. They were supposed to be jack of all trades. These are people that would come in and work at Target for six months to move over to another six months to another six months. So they had broad spectrum analysis. They're supposed to be able to understand everything, but you don't have to worry about mastering any of this. They would come in and I would bring an inspection team back from Iraq and they would come in with imagery. and put it up there. And I remember it was just, I'm sitting there looking at it and the guy goes, and they put the

23:51 side up that I just inspected. And I had written a detailed report, debriefed the CIA, the whole thing. And they put the, uh, the side up there and they go, Oh, we got suspicious crane activity on the Northeast corner here. Uh, we believe that they might be installing equipment in this room here because the roof is removed from this room. And I, I'm like, Hey, uh, question. Did any guys read my inspection report? Well, who are you? Well, I'm the chief inspector of the site that you're, that disinspected the site that you're talking to. Oh no. So what did it say? Well, it said that there was heavy flooding in that area a week before, and it washed out the foundation of the building. And so the cranes were there to move rocks to shore up the building. And you know, they had to shore

24:36 it up from inside and outside. So the roof had been removed so they could take the cranes and lower it in and all that stuff. It's all in my report. They're like, Oh, So I said, so basically everything you're saying is bullshit. And they're like, well, we're doing the best we can. No, you don't know. And this, Joe, is the answer. We don't have experts anymore. We don't have anybody who's an expert anymore. We hired so many people, especially after 9-11, hired so many people we call intelligence analysts. If you walk into one of these rooms or take a look at a photograph, you'll see a room full of people staring at a computer. None of them are experts. None of them know anything other than their narrow little slice of the world. When I was in, you could have that

25:24 room, but there'd be one person sitting at one desk, me. And I had papers all over because I had to know everything. And I had a phone and I would pick up the phone and talk to experts and we would meet and we We learned everything. These people have their one little slice. They're not allowed to get out of their slice. They have to ask permission, go up the chain of command to get out of their slice. They're experts of nothing. And so now when you need to react like this, they contract it out. And we started to see that at the end of the Cold War, the contracting out of problems. Again, just another war story since we're telling war. We used to keep something called the Great American Novel. The Great American Novel. It was basically a notebook that we'd take kept track of everything in and out of the Votkins factory. And I helped turn it into

26:11 a formal collection process. It wasn't spying because it was serendipity, but it was now organized. So the notes just aren't all over the place. And we had produced a whole bunch of it. And finally somebody said, well, you know, cause I wrote a report based on that and got my first commendation from the director of the CIA and other people started to say, well, I mean, is this data really useful? Is there anything we can do with this? Da, da, da. And I said, yeah, it's very useful. And so I said, why don't you guys take a look at it? Well, they couldn't because they didn't have enough. So they contracted it out to one of these contractors and they took all this data. And about a month and a half later, I was invited back to a meeting and they came back and they said, well, here's your notebooks back. They said, we've concluded there's nothing in here of value, that this is a waste of time. There's literally no patterns here. There's nothing.

27:00 I went, no, there's everything in here. They said, no. And the CIA went, well, I guess that means there's nothing there. So I took those books, went back, and I spent a weekend, and I broke the freaking code of the railroads that weekend. I sat down, and by looking at the pattern analysis, broke the codes, and I could predict exactly when missiles were going to come out of the factory and what kind of missiles they would be. I knew the production rates, and I went and tested that system in Russia, 100% correct, came out, published a paper, got my second commendation. The point is, a trained pair of eyeballs attached to a trained pair of brain is the best thing in the world. The best thing in the world. But you only get that by actually doing the job. When you contract it out to civilians whose sole purpose is to make money, they're not patriotic. None of these people did that are patriotic. I burned the midnight oil because I'm a patriot, because I

27:49 was given a task by my commander in chief to do this job. And I poured myself into it because it was my mission, my duty as an American. These are contractors, nine to five. They get a paycheck. They don't care. They don't care. There's no consequences for this. That's the danger of contractors. And now we've contracted it out to these people who are lazy, intellectually shallow, don't have any depth. Their job is just to produce a product, a deliverable. That's what they do, a deliverable. The deliverable isn't tested. So they delivered a deliverable that led to a missile hitting a school, killing 170 children. And that blood is on the hands of every American who allowed this system to go downhill. Not the average American citizen, because they didn't know about it. But I'm talking about there's significant people in the military, in the Pentagon, et cetera, that know that what we're doing is wrong. And what we need to do is start hiring real intelligence professionals, train them properly, and let them do

28:39 their damn job. And do their damn job means get rid of the freaking computers and let them get out there and get their hands dirty, their feet dirty, get bloody, get in there, learn it, live it. But no, they're sitting behind a computer. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Oh, look, target, bomb it, kill it, nothing. That's not how it works. Intelligence is an art form. It's not just a science, it's an art form. You actually have to live it and bring it into you if you're going to be good at it. None of these people today are any good. They're all horrible. They suck. There's a reason why we couldn't get Bin Laden for such a long time. Because we suck at what we do. We got lucky. Everything that happens in this world is luck. We don't have anybody doing skill anymore. That's just my take. So it's

29:27 a matter of this is worse than politicized intelligence, like in the 2003 invasion. We're talking about no intelligence anymore, basically. You're incompetent. You're 100% incompetent. These people don't know anything. When I went after Saddam Hussein's hidden weapons of mass destruction, just one of the techniques I used was to break apart the family structures. they have something called the Khams, the five circles of relatives around. And his security apparatus was embedded within this Khams. So I identified the different tribes. I sat down with tribal experts. I sat there and learned all about the different tribes, the different clans and everything. And then went in and I reverse engineered it and found the people in there. And then I went through my inspection reports and located the people where they could be. And we actually made contact with one that was ready to defect. But it

30:15 didn't happen because some AI program said it happened because I spent about 10,000 hours on that problem. This is that's what an intelligence professional does. You become intimate with every detail of the problem. And today, these people are as shallow as the day is long. They don't know anything about anything. And when they think they know, when they get involved, they call themselves subject matter experts. They're so locked into their Pete Hegseth type muscle flexing that they get drawn. You know, when I hear a guy say, I'm an expert on Iran, and then he sits there and belittles Ali Khamenei, I'm like, you're not an expert on Iran then, because no expert on Iran would say what you're saying. That's just the truth. And

31:01 this is probably the day where those reports haven't been digitized yet. And of course, with AI, we no longer read. We do AI summaries. We get AI to scan the material for us and give us a summary of the material. Seriously, that's how it's done today. Nobody reads. I used to have to, when I did my research, you know, there's these things called footnotes. I love footnotes. You know, but you read something, then you get the footnote because the footnote tells you what the source is. But generally you read that footnote and you go, oh shit, there's a footnote in the footnote. And so you have to get that one too. And my wife would hate this because I'd start reading a book and I'd get the book. And next thing you know, I'm going to the bookstore to get five more books because I got footnotes. And then I start reading those books and I have to go get 10 more books. So by the time I finished the first book, I got 15

31:47 other books. And she's like, how do we afford this? I said, honey, it's, that's how you learn. And it's, it's how you learn. You read, you get down to the root cause, the root source, you read everything. And nobody does that today because it takes time. It takes time. It takes a lot of time. And people are intellectually lazy and They don't want to do the work. And now we have AI that does summaries. And we see the infection in college. In college, how the students are starting to print out AI papers. They don't know anything. They don't study because all you do is have the AI give you the summary and then you print it out. You haven't read it. So now you're writing about a subject that you're supposed to have learned by reading the book and the footnotes and the books in the footnotes. But instead, you have AI give you a summary. Maybe you go

32:32 in and change, you know, 20% of the words, I don't know what the legal standard is now for not being plagiarized, you know, where you can go in and you can change a certain number of the words in the word order, and then it's not plagiarism. And so they go and do that. So they're playing stupid writing tricks so they can get credit for a report of a subject they don't understand. If you use AI, your brain is going to die. That's a 100% guarantee. AI in the pursuit of intellectual accumulation of knowledge is a suicide pill. The brain must be exercised. The brain must do the work. And if you allow AI to write for you, then it's over. You have to write based upon what you've learned because you have to take that information and then turn your brain on

33:17 and have your brain tell you what that information was. And then you put it down on paper and you capture it using your thought process. But when you cheat with AI, you eliminate the thought process. And when you eliminate the thought process, it means you don't know anything. So if the commander asks you a question, you're going to blink three times and fart because that's all you can do. Instead of saying, I know the answer, you're just going to sit there. Oh, because you don't know the answer because you don't know the subject. You're not a subject matter expert. You're not an intelligence professional. You're an amateur, an AI amateur. And that's what we have today in the intelligence business, AI amateurs. And they put a missile on a school building and killed 170 children. Not the mouse that roared, it's the mouse that farted, as you said before. What

34:04 is Israel's excuse? Now, they're using AI, too. We saw, well, where is your daddy in Gaza, for example? Now, you would expect that they would have enough experts to tell Netanyahu and these other numbskulls there in the cabinet, this is, you know, we could lose this war against Iran. This is what could happen. Are they not getting that intelligence? Are they ignoring it? Or are the Israelis also... almost as bad if they lost their expertise. They know the region. Presumably they know the Arab countries. They know Iran. We suspect, we would think. You know, I can say this, that the Israelis, when I worked with them, and I worked with them at a very close level from 1994 to 1998, their experts were real experts. I mean, these guys... They knew the subject. I worked with

34:53 two technical intelligence officers that could take a Scud missile apart in their sleep and tell you each part. They could feel it in their hands and say, oh, yeah, this is a Chinese clone. Or they could sniff something and go, no, no, this one was the machine. Yeah, I smell some English in there. I think this came from England, from the lathe in England. I mean, they were good. They're like sommeliers of missiles. They were very good at what they did. And they attended all the conferences undercover. They pretended to be purchasers of technology, they go do this stuff. But that's a heavy investment, a heavy investment. And what happened with the Israelis is right about 1998, they decided that knowing the truth wasn't important, that it wasn't about what the facts were. It was all about WMD in Iraq, because I had

35:40 worked with the Israelis to the point that by 1998, they admitted there was no WMD left in Iraq. But then that suddenly became a politically unacceptable finding. And so they brought in a new guy, Amos Gilad, and he became the new director of military intelligence. And he said, nah, there is now weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And we're going to make it look, we're going to come up with the data. And so they stopped being professionals and they started becoming con artists and manufacturers of data. And so the technical experts who have integrity and went, nope, they left, they got out. And I know both the guys I worked with, they just left. They said, we can't do this. This is this is not right. And then they recruited new people who came in and they fell. They fell into the same model. They have people now. They recruit large numbers of people and they look at a narrow slice. But their job isn't to be experts. Their job is just to

36:28 be functional in this one narrow sliced area. And we saw in 2000 and I forget, I think 10, maybe the first time in Gaza where they started to say, this, this problem is, is very difficult. So we're going to look for AI to help us come to fill in the gaps. And they started to use AI unit 8, 200 started programming it and you create an intelligence units built purely around AI model generation. And then they, they adopted it. They use it to target. They use it. You know what they did? I mean, they, they went in there and they basically, if, if you had a guy deliver post mail, deliver mail in Gaza, because the mail service was run by Hamas. He got labeled as a Hamas fighter. And then they would do pattern of life and they would find out his uncle and everybody, and they would go around and assume every male around him is a

37:15 Hamas fighter. So he'd go home and they'd drop a bomb on him saying, we killed a Hamas fire and 15 other supported fires. All they did is kill a postman and his immediate family. And had they had real intelligence officers, they would have known that. But they used AI because it all becomes now You know, report generated how many terrorists we come because political, how many terrorists, etc. The Israelis are just as bad as we are anymore. They they're not good. And the proof is in the following. They just again, they just put paratroopers on the ground in the Beka Valley and they may all be dead now. They were surrounded, cut off, helicopter shot down, being slaughtered as we speak. Other units are being slaughtered. The Israelis aren't any good at what they do anymore when they go up against somebody who is. You

38:00 know who doesn't use A.I.? Hezbollah just fights. They're experts. They crawl on the ground. They can go blindfolded from one high side to the next because they know how many crawls they have to do. They feel for the bush. They turn around. They don't need to, you know, they know it all. They don't need to be in a computer. But the Israelis, it's all AI. You're going to land here. You're going to do this. I talked to a guy named Opti Al-Adinov. You may know him. He's a lieutenant general in the Russian army, a Chechen. He commands the Akhmat Special Forces. He talked about the Russian incursion into the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk in August of 2024. And he said this was the most advanced NATO style army we've ever seen. These people were more advanced than NATO because NATO had given them all the tools, all the toys. These guys went in. Each one

38:47 of their vehicles had a... Starlink-enabled computer console that allowed intelligence to come down. And what would happen is they'd gather the intelligence about Russian force dispositions, then AI would make predictions on how the Russians would behave, where the Russians would respond, and identify gaps in the Russian lines. So Ukrainians were told, shoot this gap. No reconnaissance. Don't go in there. Shoot the gap and go as far as you can. And the AI was pretty good early on. They shot the gaps were there and they were shooting and they were advancing. The Russians like Dan, these guys are advancing really, really fast. Then Opti came in and what Opti did is he just stopped playing that game. He employed his drone unit as a screening force playing a cavalry mode. The AI wasn't ready for that. And so the AI says,

39:36 shoot the gap. Ukraine, shoot the gap and the Russian drones kill them. They're like, well, wait a minute. How'd that happen? And then the whole Ukrainian offensive fell apart because it was AI driven. AI works and everything is, you know, doing what AI wants it to do. But AI isn't really artificial intelligence. It's just programmed. It's programmed behavior. And when you operate in a way that falls outside, again, look at what happened to Google. Google, give me a picture of the founding father. And it puts up George Washington as a black man. Well, I'm sorry, uh, George Washington wasn't a black man, not even close. He was a slave owner. But Google had been programmed to do it that way. And now you have the NATO AI telling the Ukrainians how to fight. And once the Russians broke up that algorithm, that was the end

40:25 of the Ukrainian offensive. That's the danger of using AI in war. AI can't replace the human brain. And do you know if Iran is using AI? Because if... Either way, they're doing pretty good in terms of the damage they're doing to U.S. military installations. And that's really the main thing I wanted to talk to you today is your damage assessment of the U.S. military in the region and how Washington is reacting to that, how they're coping with that. What are they telling the public about it? Well, they're not talking about it. They're just saying how much damage we're doing to the Iranians, that we're well ahead of the power curve here. We're doing so much damage. I'm telling you right now, we're doing no real damage. We're blowing up buildings. There's nothing in those buildings. They've been evacuated. I may have

41:12 said this before about what the Iraqi told me. I went back when we were blowing up Iraqi buildings. He said, Mr. Scott, you guys are really good at blowing up buildings. No one better than you. And we're really good at pouring concrete. He said, the problem is when you blow up a building, there's nothing in it. We've evacuated. By the time our concrete cures, we put the stuff back into it. We're back in business. You did nothing to stop us. Nothing. Nothing. The only people that stopped him was the inspectors. We came in and we found the stuff and we got rid of it. But all this stuff that's supposed to be destroyed by bombing wasn't. And now we're in this AI driven bombing campaign where we're simply bombing buildings because at some point in time they had a specific title attached to it. There's nothing in those buildings. Ferdos was the nuclear enrichment plant that we blew up

41:57 during Operation Midnight Hammer. That was an underground enrichment hall. Now, a lot of people think that the Iranians purpose-built Firdos for the enrichment. That's not true. Firdos actually built as part of an overall evacuation site program that was triggered after 2005 when Dick Cheney said he wanted to invade Iran. The Iranians said, we have to be prepared for a strategic air campaign. So we need to go in and we need to create underground sites all over Iran so that when you get the word we might go to war, we evacuate material from factories into these sites. They'll blow up the factories, but then we'll just come back and rebuild the factories and put the material back in. You can always replace a building. You can't replace what's inside the building. And the proof on this is in

42:46 the 12-day war, we struck a lot of places of buildings in a place called Parchin, which is the Iranian missile factory. We blew up a lot of places. Um, But when the war ended, they rebuilt the buildings and they start producing missiles again. How? Because none of the equipment was destroyed. It was all evacuated. We're not destroying any equipment today. It's all been evacuated. That's a statement of fact. But we're running around talking about how well we're doing. The Iranians, on the other hand, they've been monitoring the United States this entire time. To show you, I mean, again, to talk about how good that monitoring is, remember, the Iranians are the ones that stole the... Oh, gosh, the RQ-76 or 176, the Beast of Kandahar, the big B-2 bomber looking, you know, stealth drone. They stole it. It took off

43:37 and they intercepted the signal and stole it. And landed it. You know, that's how good they are. They've been following us and they've been doing this. They're the ones that taught a unit in Karbala to... or in southern Iraq, to dress up in American military uniforms, operate American Humvees, speak American accent in English, get through the checkpoint, because they've been watching how they go through, and go in and kidnap a team of Americans, and end up killing them all. I'm not praising it, I'm just saying they're very good. They observe, they learn everything. And so they know everything about where our bases are located. But they've now been given the ability to update that intelligence, you know, right before they attack. The Russians are now flowing real-time intelligence to them. And that enables the Iranians to sit there and say, okay,

44:25 we want to attack X. For instance, we have THAAD units, which are the advanced air defense units. The radars are the key to that. They're very expensive, very expensive radars. And so what we'll do is we'll prepare like five different radar positions. move that radar around so it's not in the same place on any given day. But if the Russians are taking a picture and the time of flight is measured in, I don't know, using a drone, say an hour, they'll go, okay, the radar's locked in, launch, and that drone will come in and hit that radar and kill it. They've killed all of the THAAD radars. We don't have any more THAAD coverage. In Israel, we

45:11 might, but outside of Israel, we have no more THAAD coverage because all of the THAAD radars have been destroyed. Now, maybe we're going to fly in some replacements from South Korea, etc., but my point is, this is how good their targeting is. They've taken out the $1.1 billion early warning radars in Al-Udai Air Base that used to detect the launching of Iranian missiles, and then they'd feed that launch data into the system. That would be predictability data. By looking at the launch, they'd be able to estimate time of flight and the point of impact and give alerts so you can be able to layer your defenses, be more effective in responding to it. That's gone, so we're not getting any early warning from that. So that means that we're reacting later in the game, making our defenses even more inefficient. The reality is the Pentagon is admitting

46:01 that we have suffered more damage to military infrastructure with Iran than we have at any time in our military history. The more damage we've done to the U.S. military than Pearl Harbor did. We've never been attacked like this. We've never paid this price. The Iranians are taking apart our military installations piece by piece by piece. And when this is done, there will be nothing left. And this is why you see the Gulf Arab states, Iran sent some pretty early signals about destroying their energy infrastructure. You see, they're all stopping production. They're all stopping because it's very important. If you're, if you're producing an oil well, you have to keep that thing pressurized. The oil well is it's very carefully managed piece of property. If you screw it up, if you just shut it off in an emergency, water's going to flood

46:48 in, you're going to, I mean, you're going to get tainted, you know, and it just ruins the, it ruins the, the well, it ruins the, the, the, the, you know, proven reserves that are contained there. So what you see right now is that, um, You know, Kuwait is starting to shut down oil production. That means they're gradually shutting down the fields, maintaining the field at pressure, but they're stopping the production so that they make it less of a target. They're telling the Iranians, we're not producing oil. Qatar, we're not producing gas. And the end result is Iran's getting all the bang that they want because what Iran is doing is shutting down energy for the world. They're making the world pay a price for America's actions. And, um, and, and, but you're seeing the Gulf Arab States starting to comply, stop the

47:39 production of energy. so that Iran doesn't destroy the... But if you continue to produce energy, Iran's going to destroy those energy fields. And this is how Iran has seized control. Again, a sign of the effectiveness of the Iranian campaign. Now the poor Azerbaijanis are going to allow a ground campaign to take place, and the Iranians are just going to take out their oil production. And once you take out a field that's not being properly managed, you've corrupted that field. And some of these are older fields that need a lot of management, and if you corrupt them, that's irreversible. You're never going to get a reasonable production out of that. So this could be the end of Azerbaijan as an oil producing state if they, if they make this stupid decision. Are you saying the Pentagon is admitting that this is the worst damage done to the United States, worse than Pearl Harbor? Yeah. I mean, no, they haven't come out

48:25 and formally said this, but you're, you're hearing, you're hearing this from people in the Pentagon who are saying that, I mean, you just look at it, you know, the billions of dollars that we've lost so far and, and, and they're hitting exactly what they need to hit. I mean, this is surgical destruction of the of the US. And it's not just this. The CIA, you know, thought that they were going to have meetings and let their stations work. And the Iranians are taking out their covert meeting places. Not the you know, not just the CIA office in in the embassy, but, you know. the rooms where the CIA guys will go in and rent a room under a different name to have meetings with, uh, with agents that they run, they're hitting those. They're hitting the rooms in the same hotel where the CIA officer checked in. Um, I used to meet with the CIA all the time in New

49:12 York city. Um, what was that? Helmsley, the Helmsley hotel on a 42nd street right there down by the UN, you know, the one I'm talking about, um, CIA used to come in and, um, They'd be like, okay, well, we can't tell you what room we're going to be in until we do it because we have to be secret because we're the CIA. And so, okay, fine. Next thing they call, okay, we're in room, you know, 13. Wow. And then you go there and you have your meeting, but that's the meeting room. But they would also rent two rooms upstairs because there was an overnight meeting. These guys would then go up because they couldn't be in the meeting room. They had to be in another room. And what I'm trying to say is the Iranians know all this information. So they're blowing up the meeting room and they're blowing up the bedrooms and they're killing these guys. and driving them out. The military is doing the same. They're getting out of barracks. We put them into hotels in Erbil. The hotels blow up. People say, you're blowing up a

50:00 civilian site. No, we're blowing up a barracks. It's just that the United States moved their troops into these barracks. And so we have to start evacuating. They have our numbers. So it's not just Russian-provided intelligence. The Russians are providing intelligence, according to this report. The Iranians are just also very good. They do intelligence the old-fashioned way. They earn it. They don't have AI driven models telling them what to bomb this night. Look, I'm not saying AI doesn't, there's a role to play for AI. Even the guys who, um, who, you know, are like me and wouldn't want to do it. They're telling me that I have to be a little bit more open-minded about the potential of AI that I'm letting my prejudices get me, that there are things that AI can do to help. I don't believe so. I'm the kind of guy that, you know, I love GPS, but I'm going to have a map and I'm going

50:46 to have a compass because one day we're going to run out of batteries or the satellites are going to work, but my map will always work. My compass will always work. I don't I don't trust AI at all. I think it's just a it's an intellectual crutch. And if you use it, that means you're not exercising part of your brain. AI means a part of your brain is going dead. But there's people out there that believe that there's a utility for it. And maybe the Iranians have found a utility for it. But I think the Iranians are also old school. And I think that the proof is in the pudding because the targeting they're doing right now against the United States is an AI driven targeting. This is precision targeting, the kind of target you get only when you have really good intelligence. And you only get really good intelligence when you have really good intelligence officers.