Why War With Iran Cannot be Won w/ John Fieldhouse

with Iran. You know, we basically came to the conclusion then and I haven't changed my mind at all, is that you can't the United States can't win a war with Iran, even if they're fighting alongside Israel, which Israel never does. I think that war with Iran is pretty much impossible and would just be an endless quagmire. So I asked you to come on to talk about it. And people have heard yn here before. Your suggestion on the coupdetas the look back book went over very well

and helping me and give adding context to that. People have come to know you. But can you give as much of your background as you can on you know, as far as military goes, and why your opinion, why you might have an opinion on this that people can listen to.

buddy is, and he says it's great. Is understand that a strategic planner, unless something is specifically declassified, something like this is going to be classified, which makes it a crime to share it. So the only people who are going to share it are people directly affiliated with the game, and therefore are going to show things that support whatever

the regime talking point of the moment is. So yet, to be very clear, I have never in any way participated in strategic level planning for a hypothetical invasion of Iran. That said, I am a former military officer, primarily logistics, but I've also done some combat arms and some other things. I'm not going to get into too much detail about those. We talked about some of my academic background before, which doesn't directly relate to this because most of my stuff's

in organizational theory. But again, I was a military officer. I have done mid level professional military education. I've been an instructor at professional mild level excuse me, mid level professional military education where for much of the two thousands we used a hypothetical invasion of Iran as the war

game scenario. And consequently, I am not away claiming to be an expert on this, but this is something that me, as well as you know, maybe a quarter of the active duty Army officer cohort of the timeframe I was in, have also done. Is we've done a lot of time looking at what an invasion of Iran would involved, which makes us, I think, very aware of the costs and consequences of trying to play around with something like this.

The United States wasn't even equipped manpower wise to undertake I think Lee said that the I think the paper said that in order to do it properly using the men who are active right now, you'd probably have to institute a draft within three to four months, because that's

the kind of attrition that you would suffer. So, looking back on that and knowing there hasn't really been a run on a military enlistment in the last year, what kind of manpower do you think you would need for an Iranian ground invasion at this point?

didn't have enough manpower to pacify the population afterwards. I think Iran would require significantly more, not just manpower, but also the weapons and equipment, and unfortunately, some of those things take even longer to produce than man power, though obviously the man inside is much more important than the weapon. That's a good question. Maybe three quarters of a million,

It's hard to say. I don't even necessarily know an answer to that, or would be able to give an answer to that, because I don't think it's feasible to in any way think that America today or anytime in the near future would be able to get that amount of man power, largely because I can't imagine anything being possible in which conscription could be successfully implemented for essentially

a war of choice in the Middle East. In a best case scenario where you turn on hypothetically the civil or the selective service system tomorrow, essentially do what happened, you know, the day after Pearl Harbor in the United States. It takes I would say, a minimum of six months to actually take those people, properly train them, integrate them into units where they would be able to do their jobs. And that's a best case scenario. And we don't have

a best case scenario. For instance, we have a selective service system that nobody since the Carter administration has really thought needed to work. Therefore they haven't really maintained it.

Not to mention, we have training facilities that it would be very difficult to expand those every night things like that, to the point it would probably take more like two years to even have an army capable of doing this, and in a world with global information technology which can be used as a targeting tool, you know, that's two years where the enemy has a chance to disrupt you every or every day along the way. So it's my

long winded answer is how big. I don't think it's even possible, given the amount of time it would take to pull that off, to think that that could happen in this world.

enforcement capacity. They had the Besiege, which is a militia force somewhat like a national guard that's separate from whatever reserve forces may exist in the regular army, and they also have the Kods Force goods is Arabic for Jerusalem, which you know, which is their Special Forces Force, which are the guys who had worked with Iraqi forces during

the fight against ISIS in Iraq. They're also the guys who are working with as Law, who've worked with the Syrian military, who have heavily worked as trainers for insurgents, as well as regular Arab forces. So yeah, you have the regular force, then you have the IERGC, which is more than just you know, a one, you know, piece

of the pie. It's like several things belong to the larger IERGC as well as internally, they have security forces law enforcement Jender Maris that could be used as you know, a security force against invasion as well.

are fully trained. So we're looking at about it this would tell me nine hundred and sixty thousand military personnel ready to go.

them into a theater that isn't fully developed. So interesting, complete toll, you know, random facto it is the ABRAMS is there one of the largest main battle tanks in the world. It's not the largest, probably anymore, but it was something that was built to be bigger, heavier than

most previous tanks of any army in any size. And that's partly because for those who don't know a lot of the vehicle dimensions, the width, especially the axle with on most vehicles comes from the fact that historic roads in Europe had that with which actually goes back to the Roman Empire. Right that literally the design on wheeled vehicles today, you know, the dimensions are heavily influenced because

that's what the Roman army built. Anyways, Abrams were bigger so that it was done without those constraints which made them harder to move around. Back in the Cold War, war plan was, hypothetically, if we were fighting in the Folder Gap, we were fighting, you know, across the inner German border. Forces were going to be located there, and there was no issue with strategic lift. You had your weapons systems in place. It was moving those into a combat zone and getting the fight there.

they organize, and they go out and prepare to fight. Now, the problem with that approach is if the equipment sets aren't there already, as I keep repeating, is it takes a long time to get them into that theater, which is a big part of the problem with a hypothetical war with Iran. Where are we gonna put them? Because again that you know, heavily influences which direction we were going to invade country from. Not to mention, it really

gives away to the enemy which way you're coming. I know, I'm rambling.

in some ways it's the same concept. Is it takes a long time to get those forces there. Every step along the way is an opportunity for a competent enemy to get them there. And again, which direction are you going to come in from? In you know, where you preposition your equipment decides that and you take away a lot of your flexibility that way, the enemy is going to have a real good idea which direction you're coming from, just by where you're prepositioning your equipment.

are going to allow you to do it. Above you can't.

chance for them to keep shooting at us. And if it has to become a situation which we have to forcibly attack and subdue Iraq in order to go into Iran, that's why, well, congratulations, now you were at war with Iraq and you haven't even gotten to Iran yet.

from the sea. For those who don't know, for most of the two thousands, the wargame scenario of invading Iran, and to be clear, this is a declassified scenario so I can talk about it involved taking again the mechanized forces heavy forces, using two ports in Georgia in order to get them into the continent, moving those forces over into northern Azerbaijan, which in this scenario we saw was at least passively supportive of US forces, then inviting south

into the southern part of Isozerbaijan, which we thought would be where fighting was, and then invading into the northern part of Iran. And the biggest issue with that scenario the reason well, first off, the fact that they used this a non classified, unclassified training scenario, which again the Azerbaijanis were enemies in the scenario, and we had Azerbaijani's students, real world sitting in there, which again that tells you everything about the level of just competence we have in

strategic planning in the US military. But the fact that this was a declassified scenario tells me that nobody thought they were going to use this, or at least it was implausible to think they were going to use this. But that scenario involved, again those two ports that you needed in Georgia in order to get stuff in there. Those are the same two ports that Russia took away and was it two thousand and nine when they had that hasty attack or hasty operation by Russia on Georgia.

So again, if you don't have the ports, you're not getting anything in there.

actually said. They were really nice and polite, the Russian commander and said, you guys got to stay on post tell us when your supply convoys come in, so we can make sure they come through. But you got to stay there, and we're okay, is what they told the Americans.

became in its independent country. So since September eleventh, we've had a diplomatic game balancing act of playing India against Pakistan because those countries engage in armed conflict against each other, have fought each other despite the fact they're essentially cousins. They fought themselves each other several times, and anytime the

US cooperates more closely with one country, it alienates the other. Now, all the time that we spent working in Afghanistan forced us to cooperate with Pakistan because heavy equipment had to come in through ports in Pakistan and then be shipped north into Afghanistan. The last few years, the Biden's administration has tried to heal the relationship with India, which arguably is a good thing. You know, the world's first or second most populoust country. There's no reason for US to

have a pissing contest with them. But unfortunately that goes back it damages that relationship with Pakistan again. Could we stage there? Maybe I don't see us doing that. It's also an interesting bit of geography with the coastal parts of Iran are fairly coastal, but within you know, dozens of miles, you start having the mountains, you know, rough mountains pop up and you have to cross those mountains and you may not have any major targets or population

centers until one hundred miles inland. So it's sort of like the problems with the amphibious landing. If you invade through Pakistan, you end up in a part of the country where you still have to get through the other side of the mountains, and it doesn't necessarily help you a great deal to come from that direction. So number one, I can't imagine that. Number two, even then, it puts you in a situation you wouldn't want to be well.

Force into the headquarters for everything, we've created the problem where they don't necessarily do closer air support with a whole lot of effectiveness. As a ground soldier, I have my hatred of the Air Force reason but they're not like Marine corp Aviation that does cast very effectively. And they're still mad that we have helicopters, and you know, they're really angry that we made them keep the the AT and war Dog, which they didn't like.

know what the status of it is today. I think it's been retired, but you know, it's sort of like they you know, they put their ball home and didn't want to play with anybody else, and they're really angry that we made them continue to operate those those planes.

everything changes in light of reality. Late nineteenth century, you know, machine guns, early machine guns like the Maxim gun and

the Gatling gun were developed. The British actually had huge, made heavy use of machine guns throughout the late nineteenth early twentieth century, but they mostly used it against tribesmen in Africa, so Arabs and black tribesmen, and a lot of times they were using them against people who were largely using fairly convention mounted or you know, close order tactics and machine guns against people marching close order is just a slaughter and it worked probably as much as

anything just to discourage uprisings, but at the same time, nobody really had an idea of what those were going to do. In the Western Front when two armies using those weapons met each other, and again early nineteen fourteen the Western Front, we had engagements with incredibly high number of casualties. Then troops dug in. Then there was a race to the sea in which you had the huge trench lines going from it was the English Channel all the way down to Switzerland, and you know, long periods

of trying to break the stalemate of the trenches. And I think it's very plausibly with changes in aviation and drones in particular, that seeing something like that in Ukraine, we've had a lot of incidents, incidences where we know that American armor and you know, mechanized tanks and UH infantry fighting vehicles are nowhere near as good as we

thought they were. As soon as you take away air supremacy, if you take away air cover, you know, tanks and Bradley's and things like that suddenly become very easy to destroy or at least disable. And you know, it's also become very hard to maintain air supremacy because of you know, man man portable shoulder fire anti aircraft systems, things like the American Stinger. So we're in a situation where it's

really hard to maintain air supremacy. You can create a situation where basically everything that flies dies and suddenly that forces how the ground war changes. So that's part of the the you know, again, this is all X factor, and I'm saying that there are changes here that we don't entirely know yet, and I encourage caution because of that. So the Iranian Air Force, you know, they started off, or at least the Islamic Republics started off with you

know stuff the shawst Air Force had. They had F fourteen's, they had some other American fighters. They didn't have the

first generation of avionics, targeting stuff. A lot of cases, they never updated their stuff, and they're using third party repairs, so they don't necessarily have very good you know, targeting and communications and radar stuff for those weapons systems, which a lot of their planes are fairly out of date by now, so it may not matter, but we do know that they have some amount of anti aircraft stuff, and the fact that the American pissing contests with both

Russia and China has forced the Bricks to share a great amount of military technology. We don't know how much, but there is a level of military cooperation there which again is unknown, which leaves a lot of room for potential threat. So what anti aircraft systems have the Russians provided with them? More importantly, what anti aircraft systems would

the Russians provide for them? And the answer is we don't know, and all of them could be bad, which means that there's a very high possibility that they could kill aircraft that we have that we've never really forecasted losing. Because again, one of the common themes of the US military is, yes, we're incredibly powerful, we don't necessarily have

the ability to absorb casualties. The ability to have min weapons and equipment destroyed, are captured or disabled, and to continue to fight as you reorganize around your casualties is a fairly hard thing to do. And you know the fact that we don't really have to practice doing that, we may have difficulties working around that. So hypothetically, it's not just what we lose in aircraft, it's our ability to continue to function as cohesive units after that. The

other thing is drones. How effective are their drones, how effective with the drones that Rush or China would provide them with be and again drones hypothetically use drones to fight fighter aircraft. It's important to understand you don't need them to be great dog fighters. You don't even necessarily need them to be great with missile technology. If you can with some degree of accuracy fly those things into your planes using drones is then just you know, run

them into aircraft. You could probably knock down a fair amount of fighters, and especially the reality is if you're a drone controller and drone pilot, you're not going to die when you ram that other enemy aircraft, so you don't necessarily care. So there's a high degree of possibility that Iran could inflict casualties on a long range aviation attack and that those things could really mess up in attacking force.

really didn't do much damage. I think there was one civilian died for military personnel, and the damage is being reported has really been minimal. And I've actually seen footage of a lot of their a lot of what they launched. They're just being taken down and taken right out of the sky.

that Iran wants Russia to provide those assets. I think it's more likely than not that Russia has provided those assets, But which assets, I don't know. It could be a lot, especially if they have next generation shoulder fire weapons systems. So yeah, my big caution there would be they probably have a lot more than we think they have, especially if they're small enough and they can be dismantled. You

could potentially put them on you know, civilian airliners. You can even put them on regular passenger planes and break down the components to ship them in cargo. So things like that are completely possible. Where they would have a lot more stuff than we think, not to mention the potential to move stuff in there directly from Russia. And again, like you said, the mountains are good for covering concealment, especially if you don't control anything around those mountains. This

isn't like Afghanistan were for twenty years. Yeah, we didn't necessarily control the key mountains, but we had some points, and we had some forces in the area, and we had some idea of the geography. Iran would be completely different that circumstance, I wouldn't know. So yeah, it's everything you said, but to a degree much higher than we would anticipate, meaning you're right, and it's probably a lot worse than you think.

different level of restraint that Americans are used to. The thought is that those massive attacks by Iran against Israel, those large missile attacks, that they were probably used as a reconnaissance and force.

It's also the kind of complexity that Iranians are known for, so they have that kind of targeting capacity, and they probably have it to a much greater degree of precision than anything in the US military. Long range precision missile artillery is not something the US military is very good at.

a lot of societies going through decolonization. There's the whole fight about whether or not the culture should represent the dominant ethnic group or multiple ethnic groups, and by naming Iran, it was essentially saying it's not just for Persians, it's for all the other minority people who who are there as well. Just as in aside, ethnic Persians only make

up about sixty percent of the Iranian population. You've got some Arabs, We've got Kurds, You've got a Luki's, You've got lots of people of very different, various relations apparently, you know, it's it's a diverse country. There was a great deal of a great amount of modernization that occurred under the Polavi dynasty. Education was brought in, you know, famously, we've all seen, you know, the photos from the fifties

and sixties of women in many skirts in Iran. Iran or Persians especial, but also Kurds and some of the other ethnic groups are a little unusual in the fact that they're simultaneously they have a reputation for being both very religious in the practice of shiaid Islam, will you know, being very worldly, and how they lived their life, which it's really hard to compare them to something maybe like old school Italian Americans, who are you know, very Catholic,

but that's never stopped and stood in the way of them being able to deal with reality in places the priests may not like. You know, I don't mean that as an assault. The Catholics are Italians, so they had a fairly modern education system that was trying to modernize the culture. They had modern universities that which were established

with Western support, mostly British, some American. A lot of them do a lot of English languae education because again STEM training is only done in so many languages in the world, and English is one of them. So lots of you know, what we'd call third world countries, the actually educated people speak fluent English because that's what they need to do in order to do a STEM education

to go become an engineer or whatnot. There was after the Iranian Revolution, there was a you know, there was a big purging in the beginning where many of the Shaws loyalist loyalists were removed, but that didn't necessarily damage the educated or yeah, it didn't necessarily remove the educated factor in society because the revolution, the Iranian Revolution wasn't even really an Islamist revolution in the beginning, so much as there was an anti Shaw Revolution amongst people who

were Shites, and you know, became a site revolution because Comania was the only guy who could unite the factions, so a lot of their educated people weren't taken out. Like I said, students were a huge part of the revolution. So you have lots of you know, lots of people with higher education, some guys with PhDs and whatnot, but a lot of people stem education. So my point here is these are not monkeys living in caves. These are people that a large strateg or society is very educated.

A large part of contemporary ron is urban, either urban or they live in you know, a greater metropolis metropolitan area, meaning they live in essentially what would be suburbs or even rural areas there you know, within a half day drive of a major city. So these are not you know, bumpkins in the middle of nowhere. Even in the places where they may be in the middle of nowhere, they have a fair amount.

expensive country or more economically developed countries around you. I don't know about their ability to produce like aviation assets, or hire and armor equipment, or missile systems and whatnot, so that I m also not necessarily I wouldn't necessarily be worried about that if I were them, just because an alliance with Russia means you can get those things. You also potentially have the ability to trade things for them that they are going to find valuable. So that answers your question.

you know, getting outside the American banking credit system. My guess is they probably have a lot of sway over them, since you know, Russia was completely locked out of Western markets and they've worked with other countries to create alternative systems, and Iran has been locked out for it was a decade plus now, so they have every reason to cooperate. So I imagine there's probably a lot more influence than

we've seen so far. It's also a situation where Putin, for all of his talk of him as being an overbearing dictator, and I don't necessarily have any love loss for him, but he's he has demonstrated the ability to be to exercise sort of a soft touch with people that he's influencing, meaning that he'll more request and cooperate for things than trying to force compliance on things, which ironically is sort of the American way of doing diplomacy, despite the fact.

that are detrimental to them in the long run. I think the war in Ukraine is an unfortunate consequence of American overbearing behavior, which is forced the dichotomy between Russia and Ukraine and which people which killed a lot of people we claimed to care about. So, Yeah, the Slavic parts of the former Soviet Union and before that the Russian Empire have an interesting history. It's like history historically, the the ethnic Russian people of the Rowski people, as

opposed to just the people who were citizens of Russia. Traditionally, they referred to themselves as greater Russians, with the idea that the Ukrainians and bel Russians were you know, you know, other varieties of Russian cousins. So, yeah, there's a huge amount of connection there, which you know, the fall of the Soviet Union in post World War two or yeah, post Cold War geopolitics is you know, created a cleavage between those related peoples that the probably wouldn't have existed otherwise.

And again, I do not deny the existence of the Ukrainian people like some do, but I also think the fact that America's claim to support Ukrainians has killed a lot of Ukrainians.

So again, I think Nennyah who's behaving like a cornered animal, and a lot of it's driven by his behavior. I doubt that anybody in the IDF thinks that a land war, a land invasion, conquest of Iran is possible at all. You know, maybe in two thousand and two, before we invaded Iraq, we thought that that could happen, and we were just move US forces into Iran. But reality proved otherwise. Obviously,

Israel wouldn't go send its own forces. They have a hard time getting their the reservists to go and fight in the West Bank and the gods the Strip, They're definitely not going to go fight in Iran. I don't think the United States will ever have the ability to wage that kind of offensive war ever. Again, I don't see people sending their sons away, especially in a world where people only have one child. So it's not just

the population growth issue. It's the fact that you know, most parents today only have one or two children, and you're not trying to, you know, kill your child, your only son, and your neighbor's only son in order to you know, piss shit away. For people who aren't willing to fight for themselves and have to create conflict with everybody in their world, what do.

So what I'm trying. What I'm trying to do, but I have this conversation with you, is showing people that that's not that's not the issue. That's completely off the table. Everyone knows it. And you know, other than somebody starting to launch nukes, we need to shift our still pay attention to what's going on with this insane alliance we have with this little shitty state in the Middle East. But this isn't going to be about it Ran.

can't do this, the war with Iran can't happen. And a lot again I prepped with Bill Buper from Chasing Ghosts podcasts for a lot of this, and one of the conversations we had this morning was the American military right now is essentially divided between two world views. A lot of what the Obama and Biden era did was essentially put woke officers, you know, everybody's favorite pet subjugated groups into the military and higher levels as a sort of purge of the officer cord, the general officer cord

of the army to make it less right wing. And unfortunately, so much of the counter reaction against that in the military and America's supporters just think, no, we're America and we can go fight the world. So the response to woke, unfortunately a lot of times, is saying, let's go and invade,

you know, let's start World War three. And part of what I'm trying to fight is, you know, people released culturally on our side, trying to get them to understand that war with Iran will be existentially devastating to America. You know, from Apple Atrial, Greater Appalachia from the south.

You know, people like me die in these wars. I don't want people like me to die, so especially so certain classes and cultures of people who hate us can go in a rural world rule the ashes of the world after we've you know, blend and died for them. I also want to make sure that people on our side, everybody on our side, understands that war isn't free, right. People die, And everybody said, yeah, of course not. It's like, no, America hasn't fought a real world against a real enemy

in a very long time. And I remind people, even during World War Two, you know, something like eighty percent of the wehrmachs cow'shuildings were inflicted by the Soviet army. You know, the reality is the United States provided a lot of logistics and then open it up the second front to play Kate Stalin in the course of a world war that we meet the world safe for Stalinism.

So world War two we were kind of like we're sort of like the kick return team of World War two, right, I mean, of the Allies we fought, but we were not quite the front line starting lineup, and.

which has a fair amount of support. And despite the fact that people say that they hate the Islamist regime in Iran, invading their country will change that immediately. You know, when gang banners come into your neighborhood suddenly your next door neighbor, you may not like to cooperate within the

fight the intruders, and we could create that situation. And my biggest fear is Iran is some dipshit trying to do things invading because they don't know any better, which is a real fear I had with Kamala getting in there. And as soon as our forces get bogged down, we're bogged down in sort of like an Eastern Front scenario in World War Two, where we're slugging it out for an extended period, except now we're doing that in the war in the world where there are nuclear weapons on

the table. So again, when I'm rambling here to everybody saying, look, war with Iran without any better, Sorry for my profanity, but it's fucking stupid and people like me and you are going to die, and they're going to die for the people we hate. So let's not do that. And that's what I'm trying to say to everybody. And I apologize for my profanity.