Scott Ritter explains military planning

These are three interviews I’ve watched with Scott Ritter, who is entirely in his element.

Israelis will begin to leave on their own

There is a lot of great military analysis in this video but an interesting point that Ritter and Alkhorshid make is that many, many Israelis are quite well-off and quite privileged. Many of them have options outside of Israel. These people will not long suffer the deprivation of a country at war with a real enemy, and will begin to leave. These demographic shifts will have difficult-to-predict consequences.

Scott Ritter: The U.S. Has Lost and Is Trapped in the Iran War With No Way Out by Dialogue Works | Nima R. Alkhorshid (YouTube)

He provides a wealth of military information. He discusses how planning occurs, or how it should occur. But it doesn’t. The U.S. and Israel aren’t doing their homework, and they don’t respect Iran’s cleverness and planning. They are blowing up decoys, just as they did in Yugoslavia. Te U.S. is dancing about their missile strikes but most of the stuff they’re hitting isn’t what they think it is—because they didn’t do their research, and they don’t respect the possibility that Iran might know what they’re doing. The U.S. and Israel is used to bombing defenseless enemies from above.

He says also that the Iranians are holding back on killing soldiers. They are hitting military infrastructure as precisely as they can. They aren’t killing U.S. or Israeli soldiers or citizens, not versus what they could be doing. They’re all holed up in known locations and could be supersonic-ed to death. They’re holding back even though there are so many reasons to lash out: the schools, the Ayatollah, etc.

If Iran sticks to their goal as it appears to be now—making Israelis miserable but not dead—they will leave on their own. The Israelis are wealthy and can leave if there’s no water, fuel, or infrastructure. Since Israel and the U.S. opened up the shelling of infrastructure like desalinization plants, Iran might take out some of the same in Israel, where they depend on desalinization for water much, much more. Enough Israelis will leave on their own to collapse things there. The ones I’ve talked to are sick to death of war.

Iran is ready, while the U.S. is not

Iran has been preparing for this war for a long time. The U.S. has been threatening it for a long time but apparently not specifically preparing for it.

'Prove Me Wrong' – Scott Ritter Says This War Could End US Power in the Middle East by India & Global Left
| Jyotishman | Scott Ritter (YouTube)

“Iran is not relying upon weapons that have yet to be produced. They’ve already produced them and they’ve already stockpiled them and they’ve already factored in attrition. They have produced these. You know the Shaheed series drones, which, surprisingly, are being very effective against targets everywhere. They’ve produced missiles advanced missiles. They have stockpiles of older missiles and they have a a strategy on how to employ these missiles to maximum benefit. The Iranians have already built this stuff, so it’s a sunk cost. It’s done. But it didn’t bankrupt them to do it.

“By the way, the United States, who is the premier supplier of interceptors, to give you an example, the United Arab Emirates apparently bought $2 billion worth of missile interceptors. and they’re out, done, finished, gone. Zip. And who replaces them? There’s no production line right now functioning that can replace them. The United States hasn’t gone into war-production mode. We’ve already strained the entire system supplying air defense systems to Ukraine and now the Middle East has just shot through its load and there’s nothing left to replace it.

“This is the reality. The United States itself has, you know, stripped bare other theaters. I mean, when the president has to talk about we have plenty of ammunition all around the world, what he’s saying is, so sad, too bad, South Korea and Japan, we’re taking the missiles meant to defend you. Too bad Taiwan, those missiles are gone, too. And Europe, sorry, we’re taking those missiles as well. You know, so this is the reality. Iran fires a drone that cost $20,000 to produce and we shoot it down with three interceptor missiles that cost 3 to 4 million each to produce.”

“[…] we can’t do this because we are married to a legacy system of large amphibious assault assault ships, where we put hundreds of Marines on it, still have to sail it close to shores, and, if they sink one of those ships, we’re screwed. And yet, that’s exactly what will have to happen here. We will have to forcefully seize an Iranian port. Forcefully seize an Iranian port. Then forcefully seize airports and then seek to, you know, offload hundreds of thousands of troops under fire.”

“[…] with the exception of Normandy, we never invaded a space as large as Iran. So, let’s say we land in Tschahbahar. Then what? You see, Pete, I’m the guy that actually helped plan that very operation, the OP plan for Americans to put forces into Iran to respond to a Soviet invasion. So I’ve actually done this, Pete, and I’m telling you, it ain’t going to work. You can’t do it. So stop talking as if you can do it.

“You are going to war with what you have and what you have is not enough and you were told by your generals it won’t be enough.

“Moreover, there’s a you know there are two clocks ticking away here. The first clock is availability of resources. As I said, they’re running out of ammunition very fast. But there’s another one too because, as we speak, Aramco facilities are ablaze. As we speak, Qatari gas terminals are under attack and Qatar stopped shipping liquid natural gas. As we speak, the Strait of Hormuz is shut down. By the end of the week, Europe is going to be screaming. By the end of the month, Europe is going to be dead. By the middle of the month, Americans are going to be screaming.

“And this this is a reality. This president will not be able to withstand the political pressures brought on him at home, domestically, and abroad, globally um about the consequences of this illegal war of aggression.”

“[…] the British in all of their imperial stupidity have decided that they want to play a role in this conflict, that they have suddenly decided that they are pro-Israel. And so, Iran has fired missiles against British bases in Cyprus. What did the Greek government do this morning? They’re sending F-16 fighters. They’re sending air defense. They’re sending naval ships. Now, what do you imagine Türkiye’s response to this is going to be? Because the last time Greece deployed military forces to Cyprus, Türkiye invaded. And Türkiye is not going to sit back and allow Greece to do. So we may very well see in the very near term a new regional war between Türkiye and Greece. And ain’t that going to be pretty, NATO fighting amongst itself? And this will be a war of existential proportions because Türkiye will go for the knockout blow against Greece. They’re not going to put up with this. And then what is NATO going to do?”

On the nature of monarchy in the Middle East

Scott Ritter: Iran Wins the Long War − U.S. & Israel Losing Ground! by Dialogue Works | Nima R. Alkhorshid (YouTube)

“The Gulf Arab states can’t fight, don’t know how to fight, won’t fight. They farm it out. I was in a hotel in Riad before the war started. We would take our meals there. We work down in the in the bunker of the Ministry of Defense building. So we go across the street and they had this, I think, it was a Sheraton hotel. Had a nice, you know, buffet spread. And so, we would go there and the Saudis paid for it all because they got a lot of money. And so we’re sitting there and I had just spent the day, you know, preparing, you know, going through target lists and all this stuff about a conflict we’re getting ready to fight to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation.

“And, at the same buffet, were a bunch of Kuwaiti princes who had fled Kuwait City, and who were now taking refuge in Saudi Arabia. And we overheard them. They were sitting there talking to their Saudi hosts and they said, ‘you know, these Americans are our mercenaries.’ You know, we’re paying them to come here and liberate at night and the lieutenant colonel I was with basically ordered me out of the room because he saw that I was going to get up. I was going to go over there and I was going to beat the living shit out of this Kuwaiti, stomp him into the ground. I’m nobody’s mercenary. I take the orders only from my legitimate chain of command. it was deeply insulting.

“But the problem is: that’s their mindset and that’s how they view everything. They don’t view anybody as their equal. They don’t view anybody as a partner. You are a paid servant. When they pull out their wallet and they start putting money on the table and you take that money, they believe they own you. And in fact, they do.

“Except now what they’re finding out is they’ve been played the whole time. That we’ve let them sit there and and treat us to free lunches and free hotel rooms and free this and they buy our goods. But at the end of the day, all they’re good for is facilitating the desire of their Israeli masters to promote greater Israel.

“What do you think the Abraham Accords is? It’s not about, you know, collective empowerment through economic development. It’s not about mutual beneficial relations. It’s about the Arabs subordinating themselves to a greater Israel. 100%. That’s all it’s about. And that’s what they’ve done. That’s what these perverse, fat, pale, effeminate, non-men rulers of these nations have done. And I’m going to say, I’m just tired. We have to start calling it out. You can’t solve a problem unless you accurately define a problem. And so if we continue to pretend that Saudi Arabia is a military power when it’s not. Iran can defeat Saudi, and I pray they will.

“If Ansarallah’s listening to this: march on Riad, do it. do it. Get rid of this ridiculous family that only came in because a bunch of bunch of Wahabis ran around on camels and intimidated other Bedouin tribes in the 1920s and 30s. That’s it. There’s no legitimacy here. There’s no mandate from God. They just happen to be a tribe had better camel-operators than everybody else.

“It’s the same thing with the rest. The, you know, the Emirates, the British put them in. The British put everybody in. It’s colonial legacy. There’s no legitimacy. They have no mandate of the people. There’s no democracy. And then they got lucky because they happened to be sitting on a bunch of oil and gas that has now made them richer than they can possibly imagine.

“But the money doesn’t bring legitimacy. The money just makes them rich. Legitimacy has to come from standing for something. Standing for something. They don’t stand for democracy. They don’t stand for liberty. They don’t stand for justice. They’re just rich. That’s it. And they believe that they could sit there and leverage their control of the United States into controlling Iran. But it turned out that it was the United States controlling them, using them on behalf of Israel. And that truth has now come out.

“That truth has been played out in broad daylight by Iran. This is one of the greatest gifts Iran’s given to the region and the world by bringing everything to a head. The world will now get to see what kind of country Iran is. They’ll get to see the support that the Iranian people provide to their country. And they’ll also get to see the fact that the United States has been using the Gulf Arab states on behalf of Israel for decades. And they’ll get to see what Israel’s real plans are. that Israel is nothing more than a genocidal state wrapped in a tiny piece of territory with meaningless biblical references.”

“I wouldn’t want to be them. Because they’re just going to get used, abused, and slaughtered again. Basically, we have no options. None. Now, had the CIA and HEGs and everybody sat down with real experts and held a panel discussion, they would have known this upfront. Had they sat down with real experts about Iran.

“It’s funny. Some of the big advisers out there are guys who served in Task Force 17. Delta Force. These guys are good. They got big muscles and they got tattoos. They’re really good at jumping out of helicopters and sprinting into buildings and killing people. Hoorah, Delta. But they were given they were supposed to carry out this covert war against the Kuds force in Iraq and all this stuff. And so you have these thick-necked knuckle-draggers, some of whom are, you know, smart enough to have learned Farsi.

“And they were involved in a campaign that they lost ultimately. but now they’re the ones posting themselves as regional experts and providing the advice. These are the people saying that the Iranian people want to be overthrown. that they hate the regime. So we got Delta-Force, knuckle-dragging losers, guys who haven’t won a war yet. Big L stapled on their heads. They probably got their ass kicked in Afghanistan. They came over and got their ass kicked in southern Iraq.

“And then they went home and started thinking about their relevance to the world. So they started selling themselves as “regional subject-matter experts” is a term they like to use. And they’re just ignorant. If they’ve been in Iran, it’s because they landed there one night to insert somebody or extract somebody or to plant a device or to do something. But they haven’t wandered the streets of Tehran interacting with the Iranian people talking about to them.

“They haven’t, you know, gone to Kashan. They haven’t gone to any of the places that were blowing up. They didn’t go to Manab. They certainly didn’t meet with the families of the school children they were slaughtered by the bombs. These people know nothing about Iran. Nothing about Iran. And yet they’re the ones saying, “No, all we have to do is kill Ali Khamenei and the system comes down.”

“But had they talked to real experts, they would have known that killing Ali Khamenei will only strengthen the system that it will backfire fire. And that’s exactly what happened.”

“I don’t know what Hegseth thinks he’s doing because we went to war on a half-ass plan that was there to appease greater Israel. Israel is laughing all the way to the bank. They don’t care about Americans. They don’t care that we’re bankrupting ourselves. They don’t care about anything other than the fulfillment of their plan of greater Israel. And so they’re they’re laughing as we break our backs here. And we are breaking our backs.

“And you can see it in the panic in Hegseth’s mind. I mean, when you take joy out of sinking a ship that would had gone to India to participate in a festival, a shipping festival. So, it’d been paraded on the shores and now it’s off the coast of Sri Lanka, not an active combatant, heading home or heading to wherever they’re going to head.

“And we send a submarine. We’re not in a state of war. What legal authority did we have to sink that ship? The Congress authorized that. We had legal authority, apparently, according to Congress, to preempt the Iranian missile attack against us. But this ship is out there and we sunk it. The most cowardly act possible. We didn’t give it an opportunity. The submarine didn’t rise up and say surrender or something like that, send a signal. That’s that ship was sailing, not in combat mode, and we sunk it. And Pete Hegseth is bragging as if this is some sort of um example of, you know, American marshal supremacy. It’s something we’re supposed to be proud of. No, Pete, we’re ashamed of you and we’re ashamed of that action. It’s something that the ship’s commander should never have done. That submarine commander should never have sunk that ship. That ship posed no threat to anybody. and why did we sink it? Because we can.

“And don’t tell me we’re at war because Congress refuses to declare war. Congress called this a defensive action. I mean, that’s what Mike Johnson was saying. It’s defensive. Therefore, it’s not really a conflict. We don’t even get involved. It’s purely defensive. Was that a defensive action to send a submarine off the coast of Sri Lanka to sink a ship? Sounded pretty offensive to me.

“And this is what we’re doing on everything. I mean, this this is an incompetent campaign that was all premised around the notion of regime collapse. Now that that’s failed, now they don’t know what they’re fighting for. They’re just blowing up buildings. And that’s all they’re doing is blowing up buildings. If you think there’s anything inside the buildings being bombed, you’re dumber than dirt because anything of value has been long since evacuated and hidden in any one of hundreds of hide sites the Iranians have been preparing since 2005.”

A Young Scott Ritter