I mean, game is on now. The administration realized they're not going to meet their objective of opening up the straits or solving the nuclear weapons program by negotiations. Five straight days of intense bombings on an expansion of targets have Iran absorbing tremendous damage, but the U.S. has yet to control the strait. Why I think Trump ramps up before anything comes down.
I'll bring that to Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery, you senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation for the Freedom of Defense of Democracies. Admiral, welcome back. I believe the president's going to ramp up before he comes down. Do you think so too? And what do you think of the targets he's picked so far in this internation on this fight?
Well, thank you for having me, Brian. And I definitely think he should ramp up before he ramps down, because we're going to need to continue to impose cost, particularly in that area 75 miles, you know, from Bushir to Bandur Abbas, 75 miles either side of the Strait of Hormuz center line, 50 to 75 kilometers deep in Iran. We've been working that over for five nights. We've got to continue to work it over so that it is very difficult to launch drones or missiles or assemble small boats for putting in the water. Because what you want to do is create, is minimize the risk, minimize the number of effects that are coming out towards ships that are doing the southern transit scheme, you know, closest to Oman.
And so that U.S. Navy shipping and aircraft from overhead and from the fringes can reasonably protect those ships without putting our ships in unrealistic danger. To do that, you're going to have to continue to strike. I don't believe Iran, after 47 years, is going to negotiate with us in any kind of good faith short of being punished like this. And of course, I know we'll talk about it, but you combine this with a blockade to get maximum effect.
So he's also expanding targets. To the 388th Brigade is located around 200 kilometers from the Iranian coast. Most of the strikes in July have been concentrated around its southern coast. The Artesh has conducted operations throughout the war and most recently claimed on July 15th, that's yesterday, that it conducted drone strikes targeting U.S. forces in and around Jordan.
So they're trying to find where this stuff is emanating from.
So they're opening up the target list.
So this is regular Army, right? 308th Brigade, that's regular, or is that RAGC? No, that's correct. That's Artesh, and it's regular army. And look, I mean, I'm not sure with this president, I'd go bragging online about attacking America or its allies and not expect that the next evening you're going to get some steel because we have all these things targeted.
And we've spent the last two months creating new target decks based on what survived our original targeting, 14,000 targets, and making sure, you know, and seeing where we were wrong or where we missed. And so we're ready to go back at those again. Like, as you said there, I would concentrate on the southern targets. But if there's stuff that's clearly hitting out at our allies, we should strike that as well. I expect this to go up to three to four hundred strikes a day over the next week.
I don't think we'll stay down around 140. At one point, will we be in the not too just like within a week, be able to tell merchant ships we can protect you? Do you think within a week, I'm not saying we're going to win in a week or they're going to quit. I'm not saying that, but is it going to be at a point where we okay, we got your back here? I think that we'll tell them that it's a manageable risk within about a week.
whether they accept that manageable risk and start going through at the numbers we want, which is about seven or eight large carriers a day, which is fourteen to sixteen million barrels, two million barrels. We had about one hundred though. We had about one hundred prior to the war, right? We got we had about uh twenty million barrels a day.
So about 10 ships a day going through. 100 ships overall, that's LNG fertilizers, all kinds of other things. But 10 of these really big ones. Not all ships are definitely not all ships are created equal in this transit plan. We really want those two million barrel a day large crude ships and the large LNG ships going through.
So that'll be an interesting point. But do you know what Admiral? It's always easy to get caught up in the day-to-day and not realize the significance of what's happening. We watched for the longest time and you studied. This was what you were doing for a living.
What happened? What are we how are we going to handle Iran? How are we going to keep Iran in line? What are they going to do next to Israel, to our neighbors? How are they going to circumvent us in Iraq?
And we've done nothing. Until this president took out Salomaney, then bombed out their sites in 2025, and now is hitting them again. We really never really hit them before outside Reagan blowing up a platform, right? Yeah, that's right.
So we did do strikes in 1983. Six, and again in 88, 89, as you said, under President Reagan, in response to the tanker war and in response to attacks on mining that affected U.S. shipping. But you're absolutely in fact we. At the time, that was our biggest naval shipping exchange since World War II.
It was greatly surpassed by what happened during the 40 days this spring. But look, this is a 47-year authoritarian regime that has killed a thousand American soldiers in combat, killed 500 NATO soldiers, killed 30,000 of its own people. This is the appropriate thing to do. I don't understand why Vice President Vance considers this warmongering. This is what I would consider normal U.S.
national security response. to a threat from an authoritarian regime. I want to hear what Brett McGurk said. And the whole thing, I know we're adjusting your shot, you change it a little bit, but the shot was pretty steady. You don't really have to adjust if you don't want to.
But I think what's most important is the Vice President has come out, and he is responsible for the MOU. The MOU is deeply flawed. Everybody knows it's deeply flawed. I listen to look at Brett McGurk. I was listening this morning, 4.30 in the morning.
As you know, he worked for the Trump administration last time, and I find him to be reasonable. Uh and not a hater, in other words. Cut 18. It's one of the strangest international agreements I've ever read. It is kind of there's so many gaps and potential areas of misunderstanding, and yet it was signed by the President of the United States and the President of Iran, the first time ever that this has ever happened since the Iranian Revolution.
Has he ever had such a high-level signed agreement? But the crux of it, the Strait of Hormuz. In Article 5, it basically says Iran will determine the arrangements in the Strait of Hormuz. The Americans have said, and I've heard this from Middle East mediators as well, that there's actually a side agreement that all ships should be going through. It should be unfettered.
But whatever happened after the MOU was signed, the Iranians and the Revolutionary Guard have determined we are going to control the Strait of Hormuz. We'll attack ships that are violating our understanding. And until you can break that impasse, we are stuck. His verbiage that he signed off on, that he handed over to the president. has really muddied up the waters.
No, it has. Look, it is not it's it the President signing it's not unusual. As you know, the President this is an unusual President. He is more involved when he wants to be involved, and there's nothing wrong with that. But the writing of the f of of uh the fifth you know, the the fifth point of agreement, it is written poorly.
It it is certainly lends itself to the Iranians believing that in violation of international law, uh they would have some kind of control over uh transit through the strait. And so um You know, I wish it was written better. I wish we'd put more attention to this. You know, I'm not saying having State Department official you know, kind of career State Department officials is, you know, is the secret elixir to everything, but I think it might have helped in this case to have a few more of our professional diplomats going over this and catching these kind of inconsistencies that are now becoming problematic. This is going to be an extremely busy month.
I have to watch 104 soccer games, follow the pregame, the post-game, yell useless opinions at the TV. It's a lot.
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Please drink responsibly. Yeah, I want you to hear what he said to Joe Rogan, Cup 15. But I think fundamentally we are on the right trajectory. It's just going to be really messy, and there's going to be a lot of stops and starts.
So, what happens? The first week after we sign the MOU, we get 20 million barrels a day of oil out of the Strait of Hormuz. That's what it was before the war. The price of oil comes way down. And there are elements, the hardliners in the Iranian system, kind of freak out a little bit.
They're like, oh, sh. that we just give away our major leverage points. Screw nuclear weapons. We just gave away the SO in this MOU. And so there was this kind of freak out in their system.
So they shot at a couple of ships. We responded. And I think that's entirely appropriate, of course.
So is that how you saw it?
So, well, glad to see the Vice President speaks like a salty sailor. I'll say that he's correct in the sense that. I don't believe that they thought we could establish A flow, a channel through the Oman Strait, what was normally the southern transit system.
So we set up our own. And get numbers. Yeah, and yes, and get up with the IMO's International Maritime Organization.
So, really, the way you're supposed to do things. Clearly, we did some kind of queue route, which is a quick mine clearance to make sure there are no mines in that transit scheme, and then put aircraft overhead. to sh uh to take out uh small boats coming out and then Ships nearby to try to get at missiles and drones. And I think they were surprised at the degree we could do that. And clearly, they decided to disrupt that.
And that's what's got us back at the table.
So that part doesn't surprise me. And in his idea that we're in fits and starts is probably right. I just think for him to say we're probably going to have to keep doing this bombing and then accuse Vice President Pence of being a warmonger for saying that we need to do the bombing, that's kind of inconsistent. I think almost all of us understand if we're going to get this thing resolved correctly, we're going to have to hold, you have to push back Iranian military capability and capacity around the strait. We're going to have to blockade their ships.
And we're going to have to do this for the amount of time it takes for them to break. What role should Israel play? I think that as long as Israel is not being attacked by Hezbollah. From Lebanon, we probably want to do most of this ourselves. If there's any shots fired from Iran towards Israel, Katie bar the door.
They're going to come down hard on all the nuclear and ballistic missile sites. But probably at this point, we can handle the right number of missions a night on our own and let us and keep it this way. I don't want to give the Iranian regime an excuse to really open this up bro more broadly. Are you worried about the Houthis shutting down the Red Sea? Yes, I think that's a great point.
You know, there was a flight, we've tracked some flights. from uh cargo flights from Iran to Yemen. Look, I don't think they're sending them like tents and water and food, right? I think they're sending them weapons, missiles, and drones and launch equipment and radar and small disk radars so that the Houthis can get back in the business of trying to shut down the Babo-Mendeb. Because the way that Saudi oil is going from east to west across Saudi Arabia, it now has to come out this Babo-Mendeb Strait to get into the Indian Ocean.
So I fully expect the Houthis to be back in business in the next weeks or months. You're in Kyiv right now, and I understand Zelensky really changed the tide of the war with drone technology and the 35-year-old defense minister.
Now there's nationwide protests in Ukraine, unless you know differently, because he fired him yesterday. Why did he fire the guy? What am I missing? I'm not sure.
So you're absolutely right. Defense Minister Fedoroff came from the Minister of Digital Affairs, and he'd been a drone expert there, brought his drone expertise in. He's done a lot, but he was unable to get control of the generals, the general staff. And as a re and he complained repeatedly to Zelensky about it. Uh and he what he was I I think at some point Zielinski Viewed Fedorov as a threat, you know, maybe politically long term, but viewed Fedorov and his chief of, you know, his actual general chief of staff being in conflict with each other unacceptable.
I think he did the wrong thing here, Zelensky. I mean, it's a democracy. This is the beauty of democracies. Stuff like this happens. People get pissed.
They go in the streets. I mean, I drove through it today when I was coming back from our training session. We're going to the Corps. It was, you know, it's packed, thousands of people, very unhappy. Could you imagine the United States, the Secretary of Defense gets fired and thousands of people are protesting, you know, in Lafayette Square?
I just, I don't see it happening. But in this country, in the middle of this war, this leader, Fedorov, was seen as a change agent. Good. And I get the sense that Crimea has become uninhabitable, and I think the Ukrainians love that in every way. That started this whole thing.
It's been fantastic. Look, I gotta tell you, their medium range strike. Really enabled by a U.S. weapon, by a weapon provided by Eric Schmidt's company called Hornet. and by air weapons delivered by US weapons delivered by Ukrainian aircraft called ERAM.
We have made that the Ukrainians have made the logistics line from Russia, the land bridge to Crimea, untenable. They cannot resupply Crimea. They've hit the Kerch Bridge. Crimea is has limited power. Limited food, tough to get weapons and gas for their gas for their weapons and munition for their weapons.
The Ukrainians are doing fantastic damage in the middle strike, and that's not even mentioning the long-range strike, which is impacting their ability to produce, distribute, and refine fossil fuels. It's great. Yeah, and they've, I think, 23 of 33 refineries. Admiral Mark Montgomery doing great work in the hotspots that are keeping America busy. Admiral, thanks so much.
Thanks for having me.
