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So if that's the end state, a negotiated settlement, and we refinance the regime as a result of it. They would never sign anything unless we remove sanctions and remove frozen assets and give them money to recover. What does that really get us? It gets us passing the Iranian regime to the next administration to cope with it. That's not where President Trump is.
And it's not where he started, and I don't believe it's where he's going to finish. General Jackin with me yesterday. You're right. In fact, I talked to the President 20 minutes ago, and I'm done talking with those blank blanks. And why?
Because it's not like dealing with the Soviets. It's not like dealing with the Russians. Yes, they had much more they had missile capacity. Nuclear weapon could have blown up the world multiple times, but they weren't irrational. These guys are out of their minds, but they're not crazy.
They might be our term crazy, but they're talking from all different aspects. You can never believe a word that they say. They haven't lived up to anything that they claim to have. They didn't even realize the MOU was a deal of a lifetime. It was terrible for us.
And they blew that up. And now we're getting almost as much oil out of by bypassing the strait and using it and escorting the strait as we were prior to. february twenty seventh, when this all started. Tom Carrico joins us now, Senior Fellow with the International Security Program, the Director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Tom, who's where is time Whose side is time on in this standoff?
I think unfortunately, Brian, I think time is not on our side. The Iranians were just shooting a bunch of missiles at us again. And of course, that means we have to shoot a bunch of defensive interceptors at them in response in order to not. Get hit. And despite our very darndest efforts, and look, the military, the U.S.
military has amazing capability, but despite our very darndest efforts, they have proven resilient to being able to hide these capabilities from our strikes and being able to still get them off. And so, as you were saying about the MOU, they don't seem to want peace. They're having too much fun keeping this going. And I think their, you know, time is on their side more than it is ours. You think they're having fun?
Well, I think they want revenge. They're not going to give up. I think, as you were saying a second ago, they're not looking for peace. They're looking to exact revenge, and I think they're going to exact it as hard as they can. Um Did you see some of the video of our strikes o over the last two days?
What's worse than you thought of them technically?
Well, you know, technically, the video that I think CENTCOM put out was of Tomahawk missiles, our longest-range cruise missiles. And again, every time I. I see that. I think that's one less tomahawk to deter China. We need all that strike capability, that long-range standoff strike capability for the pivot to the Pacific.
And the longer that we stay and our readiness degrades, Dan Driscoll is reportedly conveying that to the president in his exit interview. Reportedly, our readiness is degraded. Our stocks are being degraded. And at the very least, our force posture is taking stuff out of the Pacific. And so when I see that sort of thing, look, there's plenty of things that I would like to see destroyed.
And presumably they're trying to hit anything that moves or anything they can, any target they can identify. But whenever I see the tomahawk, Uh uh missiles launching the videos, that's that's the first thing that comes to mind.
So, when you see, do you see their missile stock being degraded?
Okay. The Iranians?
Well, that's hard to know, but whenever you see that they launched off a big salvo the other day, Then we have confirmation that it's insufficiently degraded. And I think the president said maybe two months ago, maybe a little bit longer at this point, that they had an estimated 20% of their missile. Forced left. And so, look, that's degraded, but unfortunately, not enough. Interesting.
Here's Rebecca Heinrichs on where we're at right now from her view from Hudson, COT19. As the United States and the IRGC trade blows right now in the Strait, the United States has successfully escorted 18 million barrels of oil through the Strait of Hormuz under the nose of the IRGC, which is a wartime high, so close to the 20 million we got pre-war, just before this war began.
So the United States has an incredibly strong hand here, and the regime is severely weakened.
So and there are also today's Washington Post shows that we're using over-the-ground transportation through Syria, which was once an ally of Iran, not anymore. Yeah, I think I would be a little less sanguine. It's good that there's 16 versus 20 million barrels going through, but it's going through at a high price. And yes, it is a testament to the capabilities of the U.S. military to do that under the nose of the IRGC.
But having said that, it's taking a lot of effort for us to do that. And we're still below the pre-war levels. I think that's sort of undeniable. And as long as we have to have our forces there to do it with a great deal of effort, then we're not better off than when the war started. If the IRGC is such that they're Uh threatening to impede that and make it hard on us.
Well, then that's That means that they have not been sufficiently degraded.
So going over to Ukraine right now, they are desperate for patriots. Where could we get them? To them.
Some people say South Korea, that the Vice President Pence says they have a lot. That would be one thing that they could do. After all, North Korea is providing troops and missiles. Yeah, so South Korea, I think I'm not sure what Pence was alluding to, but I suspect it was actually an allusion to South Korean air defenses.
So they have some of their own indigenous capabilities that they have, it's taken them a while to develop them. You know, the Germans have Iris-T and the French have their aster.
So there's things like that. You're right, the Ukrainians want Patriot. I think unfortunately Post-epic fury, that's going to, it's now even harder to get there. And it's not just because the United States has to replenish, it's that we're replenishing from the foreign military sales that are going to our allies. And so that means that we're not making deliveries that, in some cases, our allies have already paid for.
We are exercising our sovereign right, and it's an understandable and probably necessary thing to do. But what's going on right now that I think is not sufficiently appreciated is that we are having to divert these weapon sales that we keep telling our allies to buy American, but now we're having to redirect them to our own military to replenish. And what that means is you're going to see this, and you're going to see this with Japan. They released their draft budget last week, and there's a lot more references to indigenous capability as opposed to buying American. And so, what you're seeing in Europe-Can we give Japan the licenses to build our Patriots?
They build a small number, a small double-digit number of Patriots per year for their own purposes. They've exported like a very small number to us in 2025, but they're not producing them for the global market. They'd like to do more, and they will be doing more, but not nearly enough to. to kind of meet the need here. Interesting.
Ukraine right now, they said that one of the things they want to do is go after the archer instead of the arrow.
So, they want to get to where a lot of these missiles are. Do they have the offensive capability to do that? Being that they are generating their own. I think that's what you're seeing. And whenever you see these drones flying into Moscow, yes, going after the energy infrastructure, and that's great.
Going after military depots, and if they can get to it, the production facilities for Shaheds and what have you. Presumably, they're getting some assistance, targeting assistance from us, as they have over the years. We want them to go after. I would say not merely the archer. Let's say the bombers that may launch cruise missiles off, but also the Fletcher, which is to say the maker of the arrows.
And they're doing their best. And I think, frankly, at this point, the prospect for Ukraine to get more Patriots is low. And so their best bet is to continue to go on the offense and strike things in Russia and raise the pain level on that side. I don't know if you've seen the Russian statements. Vladimir Putin yesterday.
He's telling everyone about how much land he's got and how well things are going. And the speculation is, does he even know that he's lying at this point? He reiterated Russia's continuing unwillingness to freeze the current front line. They're moving forward with their plan is going well to capture all of the Donbass. That is not the truth.
And he's almost every refinery in his country has been hit, and Crimea basically has been isolated and uninhabitable. That's pretty much not the game plan that he was thinking five years ago. Sure. And, you know, it's hard to know in the House of Mirrors what a dictator or an autocrat knows or what's inside his mind. That is, as you say, unfortunately, a speculation.
But yeah, I think that continuing to stay on the offense is exactly the right thing to do. It's unfortunate that the Ukrainians are also paying a heavy price as the Russian missiles are continuing to strike them on a weekly basis. But going after Putin's pocketbook and hitting him where it hurts on that front, I think is a very, very good development. Yeah, I guess so. And I guess we'll see what's going to happen.
Have you heard anything in terms of progress when it comes to mass production? Reading a lot more last week about these other companies that have propped up in terms of missiles and rockets and interceptors. Are you seeing any promise that the Pentagon's beginning to understand they got to do things quicker? Mm. The answer is yes.
The answer is yes and no.
So, not just new companies propped up, but contracts. And so, the Pentagon has said, I want to highlight a couple of things here. A low-cost containerized missile, basically a low-cost cruise missile, and they're buying them by the thousands, which is to say they've contracted them by the thousands with, I think, five companies. That's the sort of development that's very good. You know, the counter-drone stuff, we need lots more coyotes, and they're scrambling to get more of those, to be sure.
But then also you have the Pentagon's larger munitions effort for what is essentially Raytheon and Lockheed as the primes for the dozen or so prioritized munitions, tomahawks. We want to go from 57 tomahawks a year to 1,000 or more per year. We want to go from 650 PAC-3s a year to 2,000 or more. a year and then we're talking about this decade.
So I think you're going to see some eye-popping numbers in calendar 27 in terms of what the companies are able to put out because it's You know, it's gotten extremely serious. Unfortunately, there are stockpiles, and so it is extremely urgent.
Well, the one thing that hasn't happened so far is contracts. And so, what you're seeing is the company spending billions with a B, billions of dollars out of Hyde. To get started on this munitions ramp. But unfortunately, we still need Congress to appropriate. And now we're probably going to kick to the lame duck.
And we're going to be lucky to get the triple-digit billions that were planned in the reconciliation and such. But a lot is writing on that. And so we're going to go through the midterms, but that lame duck session, everything's kind of riding on that. Is sort of presumably last bite at the apple to really get this appropriation so that everything can get on contract. You get systems.
You get systems in place no matter who's president. And we got to get out of this one or two year deals. We got to get out of five year deals that administrations pledged to fulfill. I mean, can we get some of that ingrained in legislation? That you can't come in as a president and say, well, I don't want those tanks, or I don't want those interceptors.
Well, there's always authority in the sitting president and the sitting Congress. We wouldn't want it any other way. But having said that, the plan is to go with seven-year contracts and to make the termination and liability clauses so painful that it would actually be more expensive for the Pentagon to cancel the contracts in a couple of years than to continue them. And so I think that's a pretty clever. contract structure but We first have to pull the trigger.
We've got to pull the trigger and get it going. The legislation, the multi-year procurement authority was there in the last two Defense Authorization Acts.
Now we need the appropriations. Got it. Tom Carrico, thanks so much. All right, thank you.
