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00:00President Trump spoke to NBC very briefly and said the situation with the downed pilot doesn't alter negotiations with Iran
00:07or the trajectory of this war.
00:09What's your take on that?
00:11Well, he's saying what he feels he has to, but we have no evidence as to what's going to happen
00:17if the pilot is killed or the crew member, I should say,
00:21if the crew member is held hostage or if the crew member is rescued.
00:24Three very different scenarios that can affect very differently how Iran deals with the United States and therefore how the
00:31United States deals with Iran.
00:33You know, Trump has benefited from these reporter calls where he kind of says nothing or sort of delivers the
00:39same message he says on Truth Social, and there's not much pushback.
00:43And so here he's sort of being given that advantage.
00:46But the reality is this, is that the White House yesterday was expecting that it was Good Friday.
00:51People were going to be in and out of the office pretty quickly, and they'd be out by mid-morning.
00:56And instead, what wound up happening was this.
00:59And there was an all-day meeting, all-day meetings in the White House, the Situation Room.
01:03The president was, and rightfully so, very concerned.
01:06And there's a lot of worry.
01:07There is some indications that there might be some sort of special operators in the United States on the ground
01:12assisting in the search.
01:13But that's only an indication.
01:14We don't know.
01:15Nevertheless, this marks a real major turning point in the way in which this war is discussed, for the reasons
01:21you just said.
01:22Namely, while the United States does have a lot of air superiority over the skies of Iran, it doesn't have
01:27complete air superiority.
01:29And in this case, thinking that the United States did, helped lead to this pilot being shot down.
01:35General Kimmett, we'd love to hear from you on both ends of this search.
01:38First, the actual search and rescue operation that's underway right now, whether it includes boots on the ground or the
01:44C-130s and helicopters that we saw video of over the weekend.
01:48But also, what is this pilot going through?
01:50These are, of course, very well-trained men and women for an instance like this.
01:55Talk to us about the SEER training that they are putting into place now.
01:59Let's first talk about the SEER training.
02:02That's a very, very specialized course given to pilots and, in some cases, other special operations forces.
02:08They go through a couple of weeks of this exact type of scenario.
02:13You're on the ground.
02:15Your plane has crashed.
02:16You're possibly injured.
02:17You have nothing more than what you're carrying on yourself and some communications.
02:22The first and most important thing is to, as they say, learn to live like a bunny.
02:29In other words, imagine you're a small, fragile, quiet little bunny.
02:35Don't try to be brave.
02:37Try to hide.
02:38Try to find the right time to contact your rescue team.
02:43But first and foremost, get yourself in a place where you can't be found.
02:47And don't attract anything other than those aircraft that are coming to save you.
02:55And, General, when they eject, they don't eject together.
02:57They're on two different parachutes.
02:59What is the protocol?
03:00Are they supposed to find each other?
03:01Does it depend on the situation?
03:03I know the big impetus is survive.
03:06What do you do?
03:07Do you look for your other guy or do you run and hide or does it just depend?
03:10Yeah, it just depends, as you say.
03:12I mean, for example, if you've seen the other parachute go down and it's near where you are, you might
03:18want to try to link up.
03:19But typically, your first focus is on yourself.
03:22You don't do anything to expose yourself.
03:24You may get over to your buddy to make sure that he or she is not injured.
03:28But it's got to be an independent action that the individuals are taking.
03:33Because more people just bring in more, attract more, attract more.
03:40Yeah.
03:41Ethan Brawner, we know that Tehran is offering a reward, as Christine mentioned, $66,000 to citizens who capture the
03:50pilot alive.
03:50To what extent might this American pilot run into friendly people on the ground?
03:58Well, I wish I could really answer that with any authority.
04:01Look, I mean, the Mossad has been offering vast rewards in Iran, too, for a long time now.
04:06And some of them are getting answered.
04:08I don't really know if the $66,000 is going to do it.
04:12I think that this is a battle that isn't really fundamentally about money.
04:16You know, it is about two cultures at war with each other.
04:19And, of course, within Iran, there's a culture war as well.
04:22So I don't know.
04:24I mean, you know, I think I would say that also in the history of wars, you know, one downed
04:29crew member is not a huge tragedy.
04:31But it's just for us.
04:33We don't really consider this to be a necessary war, most Americans.
04:37And therefore, everything that happens seems like it's going to knock the thing off over the edge, right?
04:43And also, maybe you know, I don't.
04:45What is in southwestern Iran?
04:48I mean, it's pretty rural.
04:50The provincial governor is one of the people who's called to this bounty.
04:53What's out there?
04:54Who's out there?
04:55And where could the dangers be?
04:57I mean, I don't have any greater granular knowledge than you do of what's in southwestern Iran.
05:02I'm sorry.
05:03No, I'm sorry to put you on the spot.
05:04I just, yeah, it's just interesting to me because we've seen some of these other pilots.
05:09There was another aircraft that went down as well.
05:11And the pilot was able to punch out and get to, I think, Kuwait.
05:14And so I'm assuming they're close to the water there.
05:18But I don't know what the infrastructure is or even where these pilots would be trying to go.
05:22In southwestern Iran it is, right?
05:24Yeah.
05:24You know, we've barely talked about the A-10 warthog because there is not a search and rescue operation underway.
05:30But, Mark, this is a pretty big deal, too.
05:32We just added a number of these aircraft to the region to help with strafing runs along the strait
05:37and be ready for whatever the president might be asking for.
05:40Do we have any information on what caused this plane to go down?
05:44No, we don't.
05:46One of the things that a lot of people point out, which, you know, as the general there can talk
05:51about more than I can,
05:53is the A-10 warthog is a very old plane.
05:56I mean, my father was in the Vietnam War, and they were in service at that time.
05:59And there have been moves by the Air Force periodically to get rid of it.
06:02But it's sort of an iconic airplane in part because it flies slow enough and fires so many rounds that
06:09it has a lot of advantage.
06:11But nevertheless, whether it's mechanical or whether it was brought down by enemy fire, I'm not quite sure.
06:17But we shouldn't rule out the mechanical reasons for the reasons stated.
06:20That is, these are very old airplanes.
06:22General, to that point, I was asking some military folks about that yesterday.
06:25I was asking, you know, why we're still using the F-15, why we're still using the A-10.
06:28And maybe you can explain it a little bit, but I was told that the F-15, excuse me, has
06:33almost a perfect airframe.
06:35And there was actually an incident where one of the wings was shot off and the plane could still land.
06:40Is it because these planes are just workhorses, they're around, and they do get the job done?
06:45Why are we still using these, and what are they really good at?
06:49Well, first of all, I think you're referring to the A-10, not to the F-15.
06:53The F-15 is a high-performance aircraft, flies high, flies fast.
06:58Drops precision munitions.
07:00The A-10 came into use in the 80s.
07:04It's a tank killer, has 30-millimeter gun on it, which has depleted uranium rounds on it.
07:10And it was built to stop the Soviet assault into Western Europe.
07:15It is essentially a plane built around a gun.
07:19And as you said, it is so sturdy, you can blow a wing off and still land it.
07:24Very slow, very vulnerable.
07:27But the pilot actually sits in a titanium bathtub because he is expecting or she is expecting to get hit
07:34by ground fire.
07:35That 30-millimeter gun is about the size of a Volkswagen bug inside the front of that airplane.
07:41It's pretty remarkable.
07:42Ethan, I'd like to ask you about Iran's offensive capabilities beyond what we saw in the shooting down of this
07:48airplane.
07:49Iran is launching about 20 missiles a day at Israel, firing one or two at a time.
07:55How long can it continue this cadence?
07:58Right.
07:59This is a great question.
08:00I mean the Israelis have been saying for weeks now that they've taken out 70 percent of the launchers and
08:05the vast majority of their missiles, ballistic missiles.
08:09And then, of course, every day we see more of them still coming in smaller amounts, as you said, one
08:14or two per volley and therefore eminently gettable with Israel's defense systems.
08:19But they don't seem to be able to stop them at all, and there's a growing sense that they're able
08:26to repair them more quickly than has been alleged.
08:29And as we know, of course, President Trump one day says one thing and one day another thing, and it's
08:33very difficult for us to know exactly.
08:36It's an enormous country, 90 million people.
08:39And the idea that somehow we are able to know exactly what's going on across the entire region and all
08:45the launchers seems unlikely.
08:47And this is a country that's been at war on and off plenty and is clearly ready to suffer while
08:55it takes down in that asymmetrical way against a bunch of Western country that really isn't entirely sure why it's
09:03there.
09:03And speaking of that flip-flopping, Mark, we have some sound from the president over about how the objectives of
09:10this war and what we've heard from the administration, the messaging, has changed throughout the conflict.
09:13We're going to play that for you.
09:15We're going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks.
09:20We're going to bring them back to the Stone Ages where they belong.
09:24In the meantime, discussions are ongoing.
09:27Regime change was not our goal.
09:30We never said regime change, but regime change has occurred because of all of their original leaders' death.
09:39They're all dead.
09:40The new group is less radical and much more reasonable.
09:45All right, it's not regime change, but we got regime change.
09:48The new group is less radical, which I think is a source of quite vigorous debate on that.
09:53And we're also hearing this familiar two-week time frame.
09:56We were saying earlier, it's almost like when the airlines tell you, oh, 20 more minutes, 20 more minutes, the
10:00White House just keeps saying, oh, two more weeks, two more weeks.
10:02What's your take on all this and how the messaging is impacting operations and how people feel about this conflict?
10:09Well, colleague Barack Ravid and myself in Access, we had written about the complications of kind of understanding what the
10:17actual signal versus the noise is coming from the president because it has lots of things.
10:21Some of them are contradictory to his opponents and his critics.
10:24This is just sort of madness to his supporters and people in the White House.
10:29This is part of a strategic genius, keeping things ambiguous and keeping everyone off balance.
10:33But I think it helps to go back to the original February 28th announcement with the beginning of the war
10:39that Trump had made.
10:40He laid out four goals that the U.S. military would accomplish, which is destroying the nuclear missile and naval
10:46and terrorist proxy funding capabilities of Iran.
10:49He then added another one saying that he hoped essentially that the people of Iran rose up and shook off
10:54the regime.
10:54So while he didn't say we are going to do regime change, he made it clear that the United States
10:59would like the Iranian people to do that.
11:01Now, contrast that with the clip you just played, which is the president of the United States is saying that
11:09we're going to bomb them back to the Stone Age.
11:10And that's a little different from sort of suggesting that we want to help liberate the people of Iran.
11:15Originally, we want to help liberate them from oppression, and now we're possibly going to plunge them into darkness and
11:20destroy all their infrastructure and their electricity.
11:23Now, it's not that quite clear and simple, but it is heard that way, and that speech caused the markets
11:28to plunge, which is a nightmare scenario for the president.
11:31It's something he didn't want to have happen.
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