Horn and fair of face.
Morning Ding dong.
Hey, I'm just kind of curious. The census doesn't count people that are staying in hotels and motels, do they? I mean, you know, that would just boost the numbers for people for representation. Most of the people who stay in motels are US citizens, but they don't get counted correctly, even if they are just passing by. Kind of seems weird that they be doing the illegal.
I think we just, well, don't we just make up a number every state? Just make it, just make up a number. I don't normally do this, and it's and it's risky because it may just fall flat on its face. But because I'm curious, then I want you to be curious. At eight o'clock Eastern time six o'clock our time, the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs held a news conference to hold a second briefing on
the success of the Iranian strikes. Well, I've been watching and our clipping service hasn't posted anything, but a couple of other outlets have. Let's see one, Fox News has posted something and MSNB has posted something. So let's start with Fox because they start out with Hegsath at the beginning, and let's listen to what he had to say. I'm honestly, with all due respect to the Secretary of Defense, I'm more interested in what the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
had to say. But let's listen to a couple of minutes of the Secretary of Defense, and then we'll skip back over and we'll go to the General Kine and see what he had to say. So here we go. Let's we're doing this together. Find out what they said. Maybe interesting, dolls.
Hell, game changing and historic, a shift in burden sharing to European responsibility in NATO that most would have said was impossible at the beginning of his term.
But he said NATO needs to pay up.
They started in the first term, and here in his second term, we've accelerated that.
Thirty two NATO countries committed to spending five percent.
Of their GDP on defense on actually investing in the NATO alliance.
So I hope, with.
All the inkspilled, all of your outlets find the time to properly recognize this historic change in continental security that other presidents tried to do, other presidents talked about.
President Trump accomplished it. It's a huge deal.
You see, we're here this morning because in hunting for scandals all the time, in trying to find wedges and spin stories, Corps and the press Corps miss historic moments, miss historic moments like five percent at NATO, which when you hear I was in the closed door briefing, I wish there could have been cameras in there when you heard the prime ministers and presidents of other countries to a man and to a woman looking at President Trump and saying, this never could.
Have happened, never would have happened.
This seemed impossible five years ago, two years ago, eight years ago.
But here we are because of your leadership. If you ask them the question, I bet they'd say the same thing.
But searching for scandals, you miss historic moments like recruiting at the Pentagon historic levels, and the Army, the Air Force, and the Navy.
Yeah, maybe there'll be a little mention here or there.
But because it was under President Trump's leadership, because it was because Americans are responding to him as commander in chief, the press Corps doesn't want to write about it or bring us to the topic of the moment.
On the highly successful strikes in Iran. Let me read the bottom lying here.
President Trump directed the most complex and secretive military operation in history, and it was a resounding success, resulting in a ceasefire agreement and the end of the Twelve Day War. There's been a lot of discussions about what happened to what didn't happen.
Step back for a second.
Because of decisive military action, President Trump created the conditions to end the war, decimating choose your word, obliterating, destroying Iran's nuclear capabilities. I want to read some of the assessments that have been provided, because whether it's fake news, CNN, MSNBC or the New York Times, there's been fawning coverage of a preliminary assessment.
I've had a chance to read it.
Every outlet has breathlessly reported on a preliminary assessment from DA.
I want to pause it for just a moment. I want to mention something about the Defense Intelligence Agency. There's a hierarchy in the intelligence community and it the d i A probably ranks in the bottom third of that hierarchy. And insofar as the PDB, the Presidential Daily brief when when they when those briefers from the CIA or the d N I would come to my office to give that briefing in terms of a just take a topic. Whatever the topic may be, doesn't make any difference. Let's
say there's some uprising in I don't know Poland. So an uprising is going on in Poland. Well, every part, every aspect of the IC of the intelligence community will have their human intelligence, their signal intelligence. They'll have their their analysts back here in or or back there in d C H or Fort Meta, wherever whoever it might be, or Langley. Those analysts will take all that human and signal intelligence and they'll analyze it. They'll also analyze, interestingly,
analyze all of the stuff that's into public domain. What are what are the local reporters saying, what are the international reporters saying, what are the cable channels saying. They'll they'll compare and contrast all of that. The point being, there's this hierarchy, and the D I A is in
the lower hierarchy. So if I'm looking at a chapter in the daily Brief that happens to be on uprising in Poland, there will be put together by the C I A. Now the D and I there will be the overall brief that takes into consideration all of the other n s A, the the d i A, all of all all of the components, I mean even Homeland security. Every component will have theirs, but there will be the one at the top that is a compilation based on their analysis, is of everybody else, and usually the d
i A is one of the first. Therefore one of the least reliable, and one that is not given as much credence as what is normally given, particularly to the president. Like you would not give the president just the d I A briefing, they would get the entire ic briefing. So when he talks about the Defense Intelligence Agency, I always took it with a slight eye of skepticism. It's it's kind of the equivalent of the first reporter on the scene of an accident, or the scene of a crime,
or the scene of a natural disaster. Those first reports are generally and there's some truth to them, but they're not entirely accurate, And as you get more contacts and more information, the entire com the entire complexity of that particular report may change over time.
I'm looking at it right now again. It was preliminary A day and a half after the actual strike.
When it admits itself.
In writing that it requires weeks to accumulate the necessary data to make such an assessment.
It's preliminary.
It points out that it's not been coordinated with the intelligence community at all. There's low confidence in this particular report's oh, that's interesting.
The Secretary of Defense is making my exact point. So I'm curious where he's going with this. But he just made my point. I didn't know he's going to say that. I just hadn't de positive there because he mentioned DA and he just confirmed what I said.
It says in the report. There are gaps in the information.
It says in the report multiple lynchpin assumptions are what this assessment a lynchpin assumption.
You know what that is.
It means your entire premise is predicated on a lynch pin.
If you're wrong, everything else is wrong.
And yet still this report acknowledge is it's likely severe damage.
Again, this is preliminary, but.
Leaked because someone had an agenda to try to muddy the waters and make it look like this historic strike I wasn't successful. I'm gonna get to the chairman in a moment because he's gonna lay out the particulars for you based on his professional military experience.
But here's what other folks are saying. The d IA that put that.
Report out says, this is a preliminary low confidence report and will continue to be refined as additional intelligence becomes available.
Okay, if that's the case, then I want to I want to skip that and let's just go I think he's just gonna make whatever points he wants to make politically. Let's instead go to General dan Kine the termine of the Joint Jesus of Staff UH and see what he says.
Transfers.
You got to get rid of that.
Here we go.
Thank you for thank you for being here.
As a follow up to my comments on Sunday press conference, I wanted to give you a few updates this.
Morning on something I'm honored to do as a.
Chairman, and that's a chance to get to talk about some of our service members and the incredible things that they do on behalf of our nation. And I apologize ahead of time for the length and the detail. Today, I'm going to brief you on a couple of things. First, I'm going to talk about our air defenders at al
you did in Qatar and their actions on Monday. Then I'm going to walk you through a little bit about the academics that went into the attack against four dah, the massive ordnance penetrator weapon, and we're going to show a video that highlights the.
Effects that that weapon has.
Of course, nobody was down inside the target, so we don't have video from the target first. On Monday, as the President has stated, on Monday morning, we began to receive indications and warnings that Iran intended to attack US bass in the region that morning. Building on the work that Sencom Commander Eric Carilla had done and on the orders of the President. At Alud'd Airbase and Katar and around the region, we assumed a minimum force posture.
Most folks had moved off.
The base to extend the security perimeter out away from what we assessed might be a target zone, except for a very few Army soldiers at alu Ded at that point, only two Patriot batteries remained on base.
Roughly forty four American.
Soldiers responsible for defending the entire base to include Sencom's forward headquarters in the Middle East and entire air base, and all.
The US forces there.
The oldest soldier was a twenty eight year old captain. The youngest was a twenty one year old private who'd been in the military for less than two years. So let's put ourselves out there for a second. Imagine you're that young first lieutenant. You're twenty five or twenty six years old, and you've been assigned as the tactical director inside the command and Control element. You at that age
are the sole person responsible to defend this base. Listening next to you is your early warning operator, whose job is to notify you of imminent attack. There's five people inside a vehicle and five people outside of a vehicle
around these total of as I said, forty four. By the way, you've sat in the Middle East for years, deployed over and over again, extended multiple times, always being prepared, but unsure of when that particular day will come that you must execute your mission and not fail at doing it. In this case, these Patriot crews were deployed from Korea and Japan as part of our US forces there to ensure that we had the most capable missiles in the
sentcom area of responsibility. As the day continues, you start to hear more and more chatter in the information space about an appending attack, and as the sun starts to set in the west, you get orders from your higher headquarters to make sure that your missile batteries are pointed to the north. There are just a few other teammates. It's hot, you're getting nervous, and you expect an attack
outside of those Patriot vehicles. Your hot crew, which is one NCO and four additional soldiers, turns a key and relinquishes control of those missiles to that young lieutenant inside the vehicle.
And you wait.
You know that you're going to have approximately two minutes, one hundred and twenty seconds to either succeed or fail. And then at approximately twelve thirty pm on Monday, that's seven thirty pm in Katar, as the sun sets in the.
West, Iran attacks. As the targets were detected, round after round.
Of Patriot missiles are ejected from their canisters by an initial launch charge.
Then the main.
Solid rocket motor ignites. You can feel this in your body if you've ever been around a Patriot taking a shot, and round after round goes out and guides against those missiles coming inbound. We believe that this is the largest single patriot engagement in US military history, and we were enjoyed. We were joined in this engagement by the Katari Patriot crews.
I'm not going to tell you how many rounds were shot, but it was a bunch because of classified purposes, and we're aware that something there's reports of something getting through. What we do know is there was a lot of metal flying around between attacking missiles being hit by Patriot boosters, from attacking missiles being hit by patriots, the Patriots themselves flying around in the debris from those Patriots hitting the ground.
There was a lot of metal flying around, and yet our US air defenders had only seconds to make complex decisions with strategic impact. These awesome humans, along with their Katari brothers and sisters and arms, stood between a salvo of Iranian missiles and the safety of value.
Deed, they are the.
Unsung heroes of the twenty first century United States Army. And I know a lot of you have seen the videos online and the excitement as those Patriots departed their launchers and went up and guided.
This really demonstrates.
The combat capability and capacity of our army Air defenders simply stated, they absolutely crushed it.
If you'd flip this over. Thanks. Let me Let me next.
Move to a walkthrough of the GBU fifty seven Massive Ordnance Penetrator weapon and share a little bit about the planners who did this and their work on the weapon. First, let me set the stage for you. There's an organization in the US called the Defense Threat Reduction Agency DITRA. DITTRA does a lot of things for our nation, but DITTRA is the world's leading expert on deeply buried underground targets.
In two thousand and nine, a Defense Threat Reduction Agency officer was brought into a vault at an undisclosed location and briefed on something going on in Iran. For security purposes, I'm not going to share his name. He was shown some photos and some highly classified intelligence of what looked like a major construction project.
In the mountains of Iran.
He was tasked to study this facility, work with the diligence community to understand it, and he was soon joined by an additional teammate. For more than fifteen years, this off ser and his teammate lived and breathed this single target four dough, a critical element of Iran's covert nuclear well.
We haven't got to what they did though, Michael previous talkbacker just call one of you there space.
No, he's referring to Dragon.
No, no, no, I'm ding Dong. You're fair and face.
I'd rather be ding Dung.
That sucks to you, then, Dragon, I.
Were just complaining during the break.
Well, Dragon wasn't complaining.
I was complaining about our clipping service, you know, something as big as this briefing that they didn't already have it.
Up for us to use.
But during the break I did find, ironically on ABC News. So ABC News has up on their website the part where General kin the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, has been describing what DITRA does.
And I've got the whole thing up at Michael says, go here dot com.
Yeah, but don't go there yet. Listen here first, then you can go there. So here's General Kane. I think I found the inflection point where he really shifts from He just described what DITRA does and how this team's been working for years studying Fedor and what that site is like and how it is, how it has been hardened. So now he's going to describe what they did. This is what I wanted to hear.
I am so honored to be a part of this. To you both, thank you and thank you to your families. Operation Midnight Hammer was the culmination of those fifteen years of incredible work, the air crews, the tanker crews, the weapons crews that built the weapons, the load crews that loaded in.
Before I run through this video, today.
I want to talk a little bit about weaponears and what goes into an attack. Weaponeering is the science of evaluating a target. I mentioned all of those factors before that these two DITRA officers had thought about. Ultimately, weaponeering is determining the right weapon and fuse combination to achieve
the desired effects and maximum destruction against a target. In the case of four DAH, the DITTER team understood with a high degree of confidence the elements of the target required to kill its functions, and the weapons were designed, planned and delivered to ensure that they achieved the effects
in the mission space. By the way, in the beginning of its development, we had so many PhDs working on the MOP program doing modeling and simulation that we were quietly and in a secret way, the biggest users of supercomputer hours within the United United States of America.
N I don't want to hear from what's his name from the shark tank, so we'll skip that and get to skip and here we go.
So let me talk about Let me talk about the graphic a little bit. In the GBU fifty seven, which all of you I know know, is a thirty thousand pound weapon dropped only by the B two.
It's comprised of.
Steel, explosive and a fuse programmed bespokely each weapon to achieve a particular effect inside the target. Each weapon had a unique desired impact, angle, arrival, final heading. In a fuse setting, the fuse is effectively what tells the.
Bomb when to function.
A longer delay in a fuse, the deeper the weapon will penetrate and drive into the target.
So on four.
Doh in June of two thousand and eight, you can see these three holes depicted Here is the main exhaust shaft, with two additional ventilation shafts on either side. The United States decided to strike these two ventilation shafts seen here on the main graphic as the primary point of entry into the mission space.
In the days preceding.
The attack against Fourdeaux, the Iranians attempted to cover the shafts with concrete to try to prevent an attack.
I won't share the specific.
Dimensions of the concrete cap, but you should know that we know what the dimensions of those concrete caps were. The planners had to account for this. They accounted for everything. The cap was forcibly removed by the first weapon and the main shaft was uncovered. Weapons two, three, four, five were tasked to enter the main shaft, move down into the complex at greater than one thousand feet per second,
and explode in the mission space. Weapon number six was designed on each side, so there were six on each side. Weapons number six was designed as a flex weapon to allow us to cover if one of the preceding jets or one of the preceding weapons did not work. The video I'm about to show you is a culmination of over fifteen years of development and testing. As I said, hundreds of test shots on various models.
This is one weapon.
So if you take a view of this is five additionals, you'll get a sense of what this looks like. Hopefully you can see it and there's not too much reflection. Tom runs our videos out there.
We'll run it.
At full speeds so you can see it and then go back through it.
Go ahead, Tom, and it shows the bomb going into a ventilation, shows the penetration of the bomb as it penetrates, it waits.
This is the part where you can go to Michael says, go here dot com Yeah, and then it explodes after it's gone down into the ventilation shaft.
Keep it going for a minute.
You'll see the inside the mission space.
So this will be the sixth or seventh bomb. Then it explodes inside the space.
Unlike a normal surface bomb, you won't see an impact creator because they're designed to deeply bury and then function. I know there's been a lot of questions about that. All six weapons at each vent at four doh went exactly where they were intended to go. A bomb has three effects that causes damage, blast, fragmentation, and overpressure. In this case, the primary kill mechanism in the mission space was a mix of overpressure and blasts ripping through the
open tunnels and destroying critical hardware. The majority of the damage we assessed, based on our extensive modeling, was a blast layer combined with the impulse extending from the shock. Imagine what this looks like six times over a point that I want to make here. The Joint Force does not do BDA by design. We don't grade our own homework. The intelligence community does. But here's what we know following
the attacks and the strikes on four dough. First, that the weapons were built, tested, and loaded properly.
Two, the weapons.
Were released on speed and on parameters. Three the weapons all guided to their intended targets and to their intended aim points. For the weapons functioned as design, meaning they exploded. We know this through other means, intelligence means that we have that were visibly We were visibly able to see them, and we know that the trailing jets saw the first weapons function and the pilots stated, quote, this was the brightest explosion that I've ever seen.
It literally looked like daylight.
Let me now turn to the bomber crews themselves give you a few details about them. The crews that attacked Fordeaux were from the Active Duty Air Force and the Missouri Air National Guard. The crews ranked from captain to colonel, and most were graduates of the Air Force Weapons School headquartered at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. I will state for the record that there is no beach, volleyball,
or football at the Air Force Weapons School. They were male and female aviators on this mission, and a crew member told me when I talked to them on video the other day that this felt like the Super Bowl, the thousands of scientists, airmen, and maintainers all coming together.
One last story about people.
When the crews went to work on Friday, they kissed their loved ones goodbye, not knowing when or if they'd be home. Late on Saturday night, their families became aware of what was happening, and on Sunday, when those jets returned from White Men, their families were there, flags flying and tears flowing.
I have chills literally talking about this.
The jets rejoined into a formation of four airplanes, followed by a formation of three, and came up overhead white Men, proudly in the traffic pattern, pitching out to land right over the base and landing to the incredible cheers of their families who sacrifice and serve right alongside their family members. Like I said, there were a lot of flags and
a lot of tears. One commander told me, this is a moment in the lives of our families that they will never forget that, my friends, is what America's Joint Force does. We think, We develop, we train, we rehearse, we test, we evaluate every single day, and when the call comes to deliver, we do so. I could not be more proud standing up here today of our joint force. I'm filled with gratitude that I get to tell their story.
And as we stand here right now, our forces remain on a high state of readiness in the region, prepared to defend themselves. And one last thing, our adversaries around the world should know that there are other Dittri team members out there studying targets for the same amount of time and we'll continue to do so.
Thank Wow.
Now that's pretty good. That's basically saying to our enemies, you know we have these you know, the teams that put together the planning, the modeling, everything for how we would destroy this location. We've got teams studying other locations too. Wow, you talk about a shout across the bow. Don't test us. Yeah, we'll be right back.
Listening to that report that you just played really makes me feel proud to be an American and proud that Donald Trump is our president because he said don't don't screw with us. Thanks Michael.
Yeah, that's why I want, you know, just a little inside baseball.
I know that.
For you P one listeners and for those for those of you that you know tune in and out of radio all at time time, will you'll probably hear this later on today. I just wanted you to hear it from me first. That's why I was so adamant about trying to find some video some audio of what was said today. Is the other thing that he mentioned that I think is worth kind of focusing on is DITTRA,
the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. I had. I had interactions with DITRA quite a bit because they do in all their research that they do of how to reduce threats. Obviously FEMA prior to DHS had a lot to do with that. I was fascinated to hear that they've been working for fifteen years to develop the GBU fifty seven MOP, the massive ordnance penetrator bomb, specifically for fifteen years, specifically to target the Iranian subterr Ranian nuclear facilities, particularly for DOE.
And he then went on to note how Dittrich's efforts focused on ensuring that the MOPS the Bunkerbuster mombs could penetrate and destroy deeply buried and hardened Todd targets, like for those underground centrifuge halls. It's they're planning and all of their programming and modeling and then turning it over to okay, here's what we think we need. Here's what we need. Now, contractors go build this. That all ensured
that those initial strikes. Notice how he said that we know the Iranians tried to cement over the ventilation shafts. If you imagine like almost like a pitchfork, except just three prongs. You had the main ventilation shaft and then two shafts coming out from the main shift out also, and they knew that the Americans did. We knew it, and they tried to cover all three holes with concrete.
And apparently we knew the depth of that concrete, so we could model and make sure that everything for the mops for the bombs that they were designed to first penetrate that and then do their penetration even further, and they were able to do so because we knew exactly how thick that concrete was. That is precision weapon performance.
And that's all because of Ditra and he credited that fifteen year effort in developing the bomb and their precise planning, specifically for targeting for DOE, as pivotal to what he described as and I wrote this down the operations tactical success, ensuring this strikes hit their intended marks with maximum impact. So, just because I'm a nerd, one of the things I'll do when I finish here is I'll go home and I'll read more or listen to more about what they said.
He also said this. He reiterated that the initial battle damage assessments indicated extremely severe damage and destruction to all three sites. Becautioned that a full assessment would take time because of the subterranean nature of the targets. Well, that's just logical. If you've blown up the guts of a mountain, the satellite photos will tell you some but until you're able to get and I don't know that we'll do this,
we probably won't. But listening last night to one of the experts that I quoted yesterday, I forget the which organization it was, but he talked about how Massad has infiltrated the the IRGC to such an extent that they really have moles inside the ig RC that IRGC that we'll be able to tell them, Hey, here's what we hear, here's what we're being told, or here's what we've seen, depending on the level of the particular mole that they've
got inside the IRGC. So Massad is probably as we speak, collecting all of that human human intelligence to give us more details, and that's how we're going to get these battle damage assessments done. We'll actually let the Uranians do it for us totally. Hey, this is really cloak.
And dagger stuff.
This is wonderful cloak and dagger stuff, and it shows how good we are and to your point on the talk back, how it sends a huge psychological shiver down our enemy's spine.