S5 E15 - End It, Trump. Take the Fight to Iran

How to End the War With Iran: Stop Managing, Start Winning | The Tenth Man

Kevin Travis argues the U.S. is not losing a war with Iran but “managing” it while the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commits piracy and war crimes by seizing commercial vessels in international waters. He says defensive measures like arming merchant ships may deter boardings but won’t end the conflict, and criticizes relying on large modern destroyers unsuited for shallow-water patrols. Travis calls for an offensive posture: deploy shallow-draft patrol craft with helicopter support to hunt IRGC speedboats and strike the fixed shore bases, docks, fuel depots, and command structure that enable the seizures, citing historical precedents from the Barbary Wars to Vietnam and special operations raids. He then proposes a “surprise twist” solution: drop crates of rifles into Iran to give protesters the means to resist the regime, framing the core problem as a lack of will rather than capability.

00:00 War Ends Tomorrow
00:34 Managing Not Winning
02:51 Piracy Is War Crime
04:25 Defense Is Not Strategy
06:07 Destroyers Lost Purpose
08:01 Hunters In Shallow Waters
10:39 Take Fight To Shore
13:53 Are Iranians The Enemy
16:22 Arm The People Twist
19:40 Willpower And Wrap Up

#SecondAmendment  #AmericanExceptionalism #IranConflict

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Transcript

The Tenth Man 0:12

The war with Iran could be over tomorrow. We know exactly how to end it. It's not a question of capability, but a question of will. Today, on The Tenth Man. We're not losing the war with Iran. Let's be precise about that. American forces are not being routed. Our ships are not being sunk. Our cities are not burning. But we are managing to do something that's in some ways worse. We are managing the conflict. Managing a war with a pirate nation is not a strategy. It's the absence of strategy dressed up in diplomatic language. It means accepting week after week that Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps units, the R- IRGC, can board merchant ships in international waters, seize cargo, detain crews, and treat a global shipping lane as their personal toll road. And the world's response will be an emergency session, a press conference, and a paragraph in the UN record that nobody will ever read Now oddly, the press calls Donald Trump a warmonger, and the irony is considerable because a warmonger is somebody who goes all out to win wars. Think Vladimir Putin What we have is a president managing a conflict, perhaps more aggressively than other presidents might do, but still, he's doing it carefully, incrementally, with one eye on the cameras, and doing it against an enemy that has no interest in being managed. A warmonger president would have ended this by now and attacked another country probably. We should be so lucky. So before you tell a friend about this episode, and I would ask you to do that, this is The Tenth Man with Kevin Travis. Let me show you though what ending this actually looks like, because the options are not secret and they're not complicated, and every one of them leads to the same place. And we're gonna have a surprise twist for you at the end, one involving the Second Amendment Let's call what's happening in the Arabian Gulf by its correct name. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is committing war crimes, not provocations, not aggressive posturing, not even fighting, but war crimes. The boarding and seizure of commercial vessels in international waters is piracy under international law, under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, under customary international law going back centuries. Innocent passage is a legal right we all have, and interdicting it is not a negotiating tactic. It's a crime. But the IRGC does this in broad daylight with helicopters and rifles and grappling hooks against ships that have nothing to do with Iran, crewed by sailors who have nothing to do with this conflict. The same kind of sailors, incidentally, as Captain Phillips, who we covered in the previous episode, whose story you well know, and whose crew's best weapon was a fire hose. So the world watches, and the world convenes a meeting, and then the world negotiates. Well, we should stop negotiating, and we should start fighting. And the distinction I want to make today is this. There's a difference between waiting for them to come to you and you going to get them. We've been doing the former, but we know how to do the latter. We've done it before, and actually, we've done it recently And yes, we could arm the merchant ships. We covered that ground in detail last week. Small arms on deck will stop men with small arms, and the private security studies from the Somali pir-piracy peak proved it conclusively. So have Marines on every transit or on every tanker transiting the strait. And a Phalanx, a self-contained radar-guided twenty-millimeter cannon bolted to the stern for anything more sophisticated. Because the ones who have quit piracy entirely are gone. They've largely resettled in Minneapolis with Ilhan Omar, but that's a different episode. And all of that that we've just discussed should be done, and none of it is the point, though, today. Why? Because one simple reason. Arming the ships is defensive. It's waiting for the IRGC to come to you and then merely making the visit unpleasant. That changes the math on that boarding attempt, but it does not change the math on the broader conflict. It just lets them delay and try to wait you out. It doesn't shut down the bases the IRGC operates from. It does not degrade the command structure that issues the orders, and it does not make anyone in Tehran calculate that the cost of this war has become intolerable to them. For that to happen, you have to take the fight to them Now, we have the Navy in the Persian Gulf. We have some Navy destroyers. I served on a Navy destroyer, but the word destroyer has become a misnomer. Today's Arleigh Burke-class guided mish- missile destroyer displaces nine thousand tons. It carries 90 missiles and costs over two billion dollars. It's by the standards of any previous era, a cruiser, a term we don't really use anymore. And it's also approximately as well-suited to hunting Iranian speedboats in the shallow northern reaches of the Arabian Gulf as a freight train is to navigating an alley And there's a lot of irony to this, and here's why. The original destroyer, and the name is short for torpedo boat destroyer. That's what they were built for. They were purpose-built to hunt and kill exactly the kind of small, fast attack craft the IRGC operates today. The torpedo boat destroyer of the 1890s, the first ones, displaced less than 300 tons. That's one-twentieth the size of what we call a destroyer now. It was fast, shallow draft, and predatory by design. That name meant something specific. Here's a vessel whose job is to find the small, dangerous boat and destroy it before it reaches its target. It's not a guard dog sitting in wait. It's an attack dog. It's a hunting dog. And that's not what we're doing in the Arabian Gulf. We're parking 9,000-ton ships at the entrance to the strait and then hoping their presence is enough, or maybe shooting at the enemy if they choose to show up. And that's not enough. It has never been enough In Vietnam, we remembered what the original mission looked like. The brown water navy, river and coastal patrol forces ran swift boats up the rivers and waterways of the Mekong Delta, hunting the enemy where he lived. These patrol craft, the PCF, it was a 50-foot aluminum vessel, shallow draft, fast, and heavily armed John Kerry, a Democrat, ran for president in 2004, commanded a swift boat in Vietnam. His story was famous during that election campaign, and that boat worked on the same principle. So we're not talking about a partisan idea. In fact, the Dems should be all over this idea because John F. Kennedy, a Democrat also, this was in the Second World War, he commanded an 80-foot PT boat in the Pacific. multipurpose craft, these boats attacked big ships as well, but their bread and butter was attacking Japanese small boats. They attacked Japanese small boats directly to keep them from accomplishing their mission And the IRGC operates fast boats out of ports and island bases in the northern Gulf. That's important. They're not operating from the open ocean where you'd have to hunt them down. They're operating out of fixed locations on predictable patrol patterns, and only against targets that currently cannot shoot back. But a force of shallow draft armed patrol craft operating with helicopter support and current intelligence that we have, it would make those patrol patterns lethal to the people running them. Not lethal to American sailors. It would be happy hunting to them. It would be lethal to the IRGC units conducting the war crimes in international waters. We have the doctrine, we have the history, and twenty years ago, we had the Mark V Special Operations craft, an eighty-foot high-speed attack boat purpose-built for exactly this environment, used to insert ex- and extract Navy SEALs in contested coastal waters. We retired them around twenty twelve with no replacement Would you call that a capability gap or a bad decision? And like every other decision that has left us managing this war instead of winning it, somebody made it deliberately and somebody should answer for it. But the water is only where the IRGC shows up. It's not where they live. Their bases are on land. Their commanders sleep on land. Their fuel, their weapons, their orders, all of it originates on land. Hunting them in the water is better than waiting for them to come to you, but taking the fight to the shore is how you end it. And the United States Marine Corps was invented for exactly that purpose 200 years ago, the young United States faced this exact problem. Islamic states again, but this time on the North African coast, were seizing neutral merchant ships, including Americans, putting their crews into slavery, and demanding that we pay tribute. And their justification again was religious. Infidel ships had no right to sail those waters without paying for the privilege. And doesn't that sound familiar? But President Thomas Jefferson refused to pay. He sent the Navy and he sent diplomats, and when that failed, he sent the Marines into the harbor, into the fortress, hand-to-hand fighting. And the Pasha of Tripoli came to the negotiating table. That's where the Marines hymn gets its first line, "To the shores of Tripoli." We've been taking this fight directly to the Islamic pirate for two centuries. We know how to end it Now look, we got Bin Lad- what was it, Abbottabad? Helicopters in the dark, SEALs on the ground, one hour and done. And on January 3rd of this year, American forces went into Caracas and came out with Nicolás Maduro, a sitting head of state in his own capital. We walked in and took him. Now, if we can send a small team, if we can extract one person alive from a compound surrounded by armed guards, then a conventional assault force can take an IRGC torpedo boat base with overwhelming firepower and capture those who surrender and destroy the capability of those who don't. It's simple. These are just patrol bases, docks, fuel depots, small garrisons of men who have spent their careers boarding unarmed ships and have never once faced an opponent who shot back. They need to face a real force, a force of American fighting men who take the base, take the prisoners if they want, and leaves the rest dead as a message The IRGC is laughing at us right now. But Maduro is not laughing. Bin Laden is not laughing. The bases from which war crimes are being ordered and executed could be rubble before the next news cycle. And any enemy fighters who walked away from them would carry the lesson for the rest of their lives And Here's where it gets uncomfortable, but we need to stay with this for a moment. You will hear from diplomats and commentators who want to sound thoughtful that we are not at war with the people of Iran. Oh, no? Well, that's what war is. It's two nations fighting. The IRGC does not operate in secret and by every standard of international conduct ever applied to a nation at war, applied to Germany, to Japan, to every population ever held responsible for its government's actions, the Iranian people are participants in this conflict, whether they volunteered for it or not. And in any case, we want to have civilized warfare, but the rules of civilized warfare are only binding to people who choose to observe them And once one side has discarded the rules, as the IRGC has discarded them the framework that protects the other side dissolves with them we may choose restraint, but let's not pretend that we are bound by a contract the other party has torn up. So if we choose to bomb their cities and destroy their means for making war, well, they would do that to us if they could, and they are trying to do it. So should we treat the Iranian people as enemies? Well, that's the question we've just walked into, and it turns out to have a more interesting answer than the people asking it might expect Do the Iranian people actually support their government? We don't really know because they are helpless. A population that cannot organize, cannot arm itself, cannot resist without being shot in the street, has not expressed its true preferences. The protests of 2009, of 2019, of 2022, or this year, they were not performance art. These were people willing to die in the streets for the right to choose their own government. They were outgunned and unsupported, and they lost. The regime survived because it had weapons, and the people did not. Well, maybe it is time the people did have weapons. You realize that in no European country, what we call the prosperous nations, the wealthy nations, the nations of the modern Western world, in none of these are the people entirely disarmed. In all of the greatest nations, the United States, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, throw in Australia and Canada, any person who desires a firearm can obtain one. The right to resist tyranny is not an American invention. It's a human conclusion reached independently by every civilization that has ever tried living without it. The Iranian people have been living without it, and the Iranian regime has been counting on that fact for forty years. So there's one option to end this war that costs almost nothing, and it produces no political ramifications worth serious discussion, and it has a genuine chance of ending this conflict in a way no military operation can: drop crates of rifles into Iran The Iranian regime is not loved, it is feared, and those are not the same thing, and the difference matters enormously once someone hands the fearful a rifle The French resistance in World War II were not a professional army, and we armed them. The Afghan resistance in the 1980s was not a professional army, and we armed the Mujahideen fighting against the Soviets. History is full of regimes that looked permanent until the people had weapons and the regime ran out of men willing to die enforcing fear And of course, we're sending far more than just small arms to Ukraine so that they can have self-determination against Putin, who considers them one of his provinces It's funny that the West already exports birth control to nations whose governments oppose it on religious grounds, on the theory that access to basic tools of self-determination is a human right. Well, small arms are a more foundational human right than any of the other rights we already fund abroad If the Iranian people chose to use the weapons to revolt and the regime fails, then that's their victory. If they choose not to, then that is their answer, and at least we know where their hearts are. And they deserve the right of self-determination apart from any goings-on in the Gulf The Iranians could overthrow this government if they had half a chance, and we have not given them half a chance. And that seems to be the one thing we will not do. Carrier strike groups, yes. Sanctions, yes. Strongly worded statements, endlessly. But the one action with the lowest cost, the highest leverage, and the clearest moral foundation, that one we will not take. So if you want to know what weakness looks like at the level of grand strategy, that is what it looks like We talk about this war as though its conclusion is uncertain, as though the options are limited, as though the best available move is to manage the situation carefully and hope the diplomats find an exit ramp before something gets worse. But none of that is true. All that is necessary is clear and direct action. We need to send hunters instead of watchdogs into the waters where the IRGC operates. We could go into their harbors the way Americans have gone into enemy harbors for two centuries. And if we want to end this war rather than just win a battle, we could put rifles in the hands of people who have been trying to end this regime for twenty years and kept losing because they are deprived of the human right to bear arms. It's not a lack of options. It's not a lack of capability. What we have is a shortage of will, and a shortage of will at this scale with these stakes is indistinguishable from weakness We know how to end this. We've always known. The only question is whether we're going to. This is The Tenth Man with Kevin Travis. Thank you for listening