00:00Joining us now is retired Brigadier General Mark Kimmett. He also served as the former
00:04Assistant Secretary of State for Political Military Affairs under George W. Bush. General,
00:09I do want to ask you, we have some sound from Marco Rubio about putting ground troops into
00:14this conflict. I want you to listen to that really quickly. We're going to destroy their factories
00:18that make missiles and rockets and drones. We're going to destroy their Navy. We're going to destroy
00:22their Air Force. And we are going to significantly destroy their missile launchers so they can never
00:27hide behind these things to get a nuclear weapon. We can achieve. We are achieving all those
00:31objectives. We are ahead of schedule on most of them. And we can achieve them without any ground
00:36troops. All right. Without any ground troops. Do you think it's clear that the U.S. can achieve
00:42those goals? What are those goals? And can they do it without ground forces? Well, first of all,
00:48to answer your question, I think they can do most, if not all of that, without ground forces if they're
00:52talking about hard destruction of missile sites, of discovered nuclear sites and their Navy. If,
01:00on the other hand, they want to conduct short-term operations to, say, go against their speedboats that
01:05have been so effective in the past, and we saw in Yemen with the sinking of the USS Cole by
01:11the
01:12speedboats, that may take troops on the ground for a short period of time. And of course, the Karg
01:17Island question begs the question if we're going to have to put ground troops there.
01:23It begs the question, how are you thinking about that at this point in time? So it's something
01:27the administration has floated. The president's been a bit coy about whether or not it's something
01:30that he might pursue. At this point, as we approach the five-week mark here in this conflict,
01:36does it make strategic sense for you, to you rather, for the U.S. to get involved in taking Karg
01:41Island? Well, listen, I think it may make sense to take Karg Island if we can't get through the
01:47Strait of Hormuz or if Iran sets up the toll booth, as they say they're going to do. I just
01:52don't think
01:53it necessarily needs to be done with ground troops. In fact, I think ground troops is probably the worst
01:58option of all because, obviously, we'd have troops at risk. We'd have Iran firing at those troops,
02:06probably destroying some of the infrastructure. I think we've got to ask, what is the purpose of
02:10taking Karg Island? And that is to put the oil terminals at risk. Well, the fact is we could very
02:16well do that with a cyber attack on the electricity that pumps that oil into the ships. We could go
02:24against some of the pipes as well. I would say the best way to do this is by a short
02:29-term,
02:30quickly reversible mission that allows us to control the pumping going into those tankers rather
02:37than put Americans on the ground. Something you said there might be key, and that's quickly
02:41reversible because one of the things that military as well but diplomatic folks are really concerned
02:49about is the fact that if the U.S. destroys Iran's infrastructure and economy, you are less likely to
02:55get a functional regime that can support the goals of a potentially democratic Iranian people if they
03:00can't support their own economy. If you destroy their infrastructure, their early infrastructure,
03:04you're going to have a failed state there. So you think that something like a computer virus or like
03:09a cyber attack would be better because that is easily reversible? That's something you can claw back
03:14when you need to? Yeah, you've got it. I think the ability to – we have the ability to disrupt
03:21for periods of time the flow of oil into those tankers. Like you said, I want it to be reversible
03:28so that at the time we've achieved our military objectives and our strategic objectives, we can
03:33turn that back on for the good of the Iranian people primarily. I want to ask you about the
03:39relationship between the U.S. and Israel. We've talked about this a bit on the show over the course
03:44of the morning. You had the president saying he intended to pause prospective strikes on energy
03:48infrastructure, power infrastructure in Iran. And then not even 24 hours after that, we saw Israel
03:53going after some of those sites. What does that tell you about the level of coordination here,
03:58and I guess more broadly speaking, about the way these two countries, these two allies,
04:02see the war going directionally from here on out? Look, I think we've got to understand that countries
04:07act in their own national interests, even when they're working together. For us, Iran is not a daily
04:14existential threat. For Israel, it is a daily existential threat, which will be compounded
04:191,000 times if Iran gets a nuclear weapon. So it does not surprise me that even though the
04:26coordination is as good as it's ever been, far better than when I was the lead planner at CENTCOM,
04:32I can understand why there's a divergence in national interests. And at the end of the day,
04:38you've got to take care of your national interests rather than your coalition interests.
04:42One of those diverging interests really seems to be the new front that Israel has opened up in
04:46Lebanon. And today you have an Israeli opposition leader warning that the Israeli military is
04:52stretched to the limits and beyond. Of course, this is coming after those attacks and the conflict
04:57in Gaza. This is, you know, they're taking incoming from Iran and now going after the second front in
05:03Lebanon. Do you think that Israel can sustain that effort without the United States? And if the
05:10United States pulls out, will that essentially end this operation? Or do you think Israel will try to
05:14continue on its own? Well, two things. What is happening in Lebanon is separate from what's
05:21going on in Iran. Lebanon is a unilateral Israeli operation that is providing ground forces. They
05:28are stretched. Israel depends to a great extent on the reserve forces that are only brought on for
05:34certain periods of time. So if Israel is stretched, and it can very well be that it is, that's on
05:41the
05:41land forces. If we pull out and Israel wants to continue the airstrikes into Iran, I don't think
05:48we'd pull out completely. I think it would be more like a Ukraine situation where if we pulled out,
05:55we'd still be providing intelligence, still be providing support. We just wouldn't have American
05:59aircraft in the air. I'd love for you to put your planner hat on again. As you mentioned, you were
06:04the
06:04lead planner at CENTCOM a while back. When you hear the president talking, as he did last night,
06:09about there being 3,554 targets left in Iran, or that we're just kind of floating over the country
06:14looking for whatever we want, and we're hitting it, how do you react to that, given the kind of work,
06:20the granular work that you did, you supervised when you were at CENTCOM? How do you feel, how
06:25comfortable are you with the level of planning that has been done in advance of this military
06:28operation indeed is going on right now? Yeah, that's a very good question. In a bit of
06:36self-promotion, I just wrote an article on this two days ago for the national interest talking about
06:40the Vietnam body count fallacy. I think it's important to understand that we can knock out
06:46any target we want for the most part inside of Iran, but blowing up stuff does not necessarily
06:52equate to strategic victory. The Iranians are not stupid. They have taken a resistance
06:58defense, not an active defense. They're saying, we're going to wait out these bombs. We can handle
07:04them. We're going to depend not on our military capability, but on the impatience of the American
07:10people. So if we can hang in there, just like they did in Afghanistan, just like they did in
07:18Vietnam, just as the Israelis have done in Lebanon time after time, they'll eventually tire of this.
07:24They'll pull out. And even though we've had a significant amount of destruction, well, that's for
07:29the resistance. And we win, they lose. They believe they win by not losing. Are they right?
07:38I think the fact that we are already talking about political off-ramps, military off-ramps,
07:44words like Rubio's, Secretary Rubio, that says it's a matter of weeks. If I was an Iranian in the
07:52IRGC planning department, I'd say, let's just put on our helmets and wait till this is going to end.
07:58The Americans say they're going to be done in two weeks. War will be over, and we can get back
08:02to
08:02our nuclear program. I also want to ask you, as somebody who has extensive military experience at
08:07CENTCOM and somebody who worked at the State Department, that Poly Military Affairs Bureau,
08:12there's some very good folks in there that I've worked with as a reporter over the years.
08:15Are you at all concerned about the lack of subject matter experts being brought into these
08:20strategy sessions, being brought into these negotiations? You have a very small circle
08:24of people. Keep in mind, Marco Rubio is not only Secretary of State, he's also a National Security
08:28Council director. I've talked to some folks at State who are largely not being consulted when it
08:33comes to these negotiations. You have Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, leading the way on multiple
08:38fronts. Would you like to see the administration rely more on some of these folks who have spent
08:43their lives studying this, or do you think they've got it handled?
08:47Well, I also was head of the Middle East Bureau at Department of Defense as well,
08:52and I share the concerns that people have expressed by the fact that they are not bringing in the
08:58experts. But as long as I see people like Dan Kane as the chairman, I think the military in uniform
09:05is
09:05going to be okay, because he has really impressed me throughout this military campaign, not only in
09:12terms of his planning, but in terms of his communication with the American people. I do agree
09:18with you that there may not be as much advice taken within the State Department, within the National
09:24Security Council, and that's pretty much being run by the special envoys. So, yes, there is a concern,
09:33but I'd also suggest that watching decades of Middle East negotiations done by the self-appointed
09:39experts, and they have gotten them nowhere, sometimes you need people that come in and
09:44break the glass. Nonetheless, I have been surprised at a couple of the things that are going on with
09:51regards to the Iran war. But I think by and large, the experts could have added marginally, but this is
09:58not like the crowd that says, if they had listened to us, we wouldn't have gone into Iraq. That's just
10:04not
10:04the case here.
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