Transcribed automatically: it certainly contains errors. It’s pretty good, just not perfect. We provide it here because, for accessibility, it’s better than nothing.
Jeffrey Lewis 0:09
You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, a distinguished scholar of global security at Middlebury College and a distinguished fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Aaron Stein 0:27
And I am Dr. Aaron Stein, president of said institute. Jeffrey, it's good to see you again. It's been a long time. How you doing, boss man? Good. Actually, I saw you less than a month ago in Colorado Springs, but doesn't that feel like it was two years ago?
Jeffrey 0:42
Yes. Oh, it feels ages and ages and ages ago. And it was a month ago, so the president said the war in Iran would be over in two weeks, so that was two wars in Iran ago?
Aaron 0:55
Well, the war seems to end every Sunday, right, before the markets open. It's amazing, isn't it? And then escalates after the markets... Open and then starts to deescalate around market closing time. And so we just, I call it the yo-yo. It's just going up and down. So I think it's a daily, it's sort of a daily vibe.
I mean, somebody getting rich on Polymarket. What's funny is it's the most reliable indicator, I would say, we have of imminent combat operations outside of when you guys found the traffic jam on the road to Kiev.
Jeffrey 1:28
It's really a remarkable time we're living through. So listeners, we are so sorry that we have been so negligent in podcasting. Still can't fully explain why, but boy, it's been a roller coaster this past month.
Aaron 1:50
I was on a long airplane flight and watching the Bob Dylan movie with Chalamet. Yeah. The lyrics to Times They Aren't Changing, I remember like, it's a really well-written song. We don't really get those anymore. But I would say Times Will Soon Be a Changing. Oh, my God. We're managing that, and we'll have announcements about that later.
Maybe. Maybe. Working on it day by day.
Jeffrey 2:19
I don't know if you know, when your ship comes in, or when the ship comes in, which is a very bitter Bob Dylan song, the ship might come in for some people.
Aaron 2:27
I don't know. Or we'll be working on Maggie's farm. Oh, boy. I'm trying to transition.
Jeffrey 2:33
Well, we're going to try to make it up to listeners with a big old vibe out on the Iran war. Like, where the hell are we? Where is this going? How much does this actually have to do with nonproliferation? And then maybe we'll talk about my favorite dork, Eagle.
Aaron 2:53
Oh, yeah. Okay, so we're going to vibe in on Iran, nonproliferation, and then we will end with Dark Eagle because you went into a dark hole.
Jeffrey 3:01
I am still in a dark hole. I have vibe-coded Thrusty, an incredibly powerful... Rocket Performance Calculator, where I am just now three months in managing an agentic coding workflow, modeling the pull-up and turn of the glider for that MF-er. So, yeah, I'm in deep.
Aaron 3:34
All right, so let's talk about the war in Iran. The last we left this, the nuclear program had been obliterated, which we did do a podcast about where we tried to define what obliterate means. And then war begins again. I'm going to say this from the get-go. I don't think this war has anything to do with nonproliferation and stuff like that, but maybe I'm wrong.
Jeffrey 4:00
No, I said that with the first iteration of this, Operation Rising Lion, where I pointed out that they did not call this... Is it a gazelle? Is that the animal of Israel? What is the animal of Israel?
Aaron 4:20
I don't know. Ask Claude.
Jeffrey 4:21
It's been so long that I've forgotten my own joke, Aaron. Okay. Maybe it's like a mirror cat. I don't know. No, the Israeli national animal is... Wait, you can hear me clicking away.
Aaron 4:39
This is great podcasting. This is what the people have been missing.
Jeffrey 4:44
Yeah, it is the mountain gazelle. It is the mountain gazelle. All right, so... I said that the original operation was not counterproliferation gazelle, it was rising lion. This has always been about regime change.
Aaron 4:57
I would definitely say that there is just no doubt in my mind that the Trump administration thought that they, which they actually were right, to be honest with you, is that in one fell swoop, they could kill the guy in charge, right? Which they did, right? And that the guys who would come behind him would be nice to him and give him things that he wanted.
And I think as part of that would be the, as he calls it, the nuclear dust. But the point was not to get the nuclear dust. It was to actually remove the guys in charge who he didn't like.
Jeffrey 5:33
You know, and I think a good example of this is on ex-Gerald Steinberg, whose politics I completely disagree with, but who I think is fundamentally pretty honest. And, you know, like in these troubling times, Aaron, people whose opinions are wrong but are expressed honestly are like gold, right? Like you can still argue with them. You know, his argument was regime change and nonproliferation were the same thing because the only safe guarantor of nonproliferation would be a change in regime.
And I think that that is genuinely how the Israelis think about it. They the the risk of nuclear weapons is like one aspect of the general. Opposition they have to the Islamic Republic and for them, ultimately, there is no diplomatic solution, like people like been lying from the get go or Mark Dubowitz lying from the get go.
They don't want a partial solution. They want the end of the Islamic Republic, which they believe then will solve all these other problems.
Aaron 6:40
Oh, I think that's exactly right. You know, I think that that opinion and that was the sort of main Substance that was the real argument that was made against the jcpa was throw out all of the technical annexes throw out all of the wonky stuff that we nerded out on the real problem is that the guys that we don't like are still in charge and we can't trust those guys and so they gotta go And that was how you dealt with the Iranian nuclear issue, was not managing diplomacy.
It was just getting rid of the guys in charge and putting people in charge who would be more amenable towards dismantlement to the program itself.
Jeffrey 7:20
Yeah. I mean, I think throughout the entire run up to this period, the existence of Iran's nuclear program was useful as a justification for sanctions. And the reality is that a lot of people wanted those sanctions in place because they wanted to bring down the regime. And that's why they were so upset about so-called pallets of cash and all of the sanctions relief is not because the deal itself wasn't good enough, other than to say it wasn't regime change, which, again, they believed was the only reliable route to nonproliferation.
And so anything that took pressure off the regime was just not worth doing.
Aaron 7:58
Mm-hmm.
Jeffrey 8:00
And so, you know, here we are.
Aaron 8:01
I don't think this is controversial. I don't think this is a controversial. Barack Ravine called me a conspiracy theorist for a second. I don't think that's conspiracy. That's exactly what was going on.
Jeffrey 8:10
Because it didn't deny this, right?
Aaron 8:14
They say, like, we just wanted a better deal. We could have gotten a better deal. I mean, sure, but they were saying that because the prospect of the conflict that the Trump administration ultimately launched seems so remote up until it wasn't. And that's ultimately what's really fascinating to me is just how fast the conflict started. Not that we don't have the capacity as the U.S. military to sort of surge and fight.
It was that it just sort of like we were negotiating, Witkoff and Kushner wouldn't call that sort of the – Some of the leaks would suggest that there was a misunderstanding about the baselines of information about how one builds a nuclear weapon. I'll leave it there.
Jeffrey 8:57
I mean, I know it's always senior official number one or number two, but you can always tell when it's our boy. Actually, it's very funny, Aaron. I think the best way to understand The way Witkoff talks is you can tell he's gotten a briefing. Yeah. And that briefing has simplified things for him. And he has, I think, roughly grasped it.
Mm-hmm. Not the details, but like the vibe. The vibe, yeah. And so he's faithfully reproducing the vibe, but then mangling all of the details. Yeah. And so anytime I'm like senior official whatever, and I see that pattern, I'm like, oh, that's Witkoff.
Aaron 9:49
Got a good staffer, though. The Iranian side, Araghchi, he was the guy, the second in command of the JCPOA talks. So he had been at this for at least half a decade. And so not to suggest that one is smarter than the other, but when you are steeped in details, one, I would say, the Iranian side probably actually had a lot more – Grasp of the technical details.
And I think that was, again, assuming that the two sides were actually negotiating in good faith, which I don't think either side was, to be honest with you. The technical details were what the Iranians were coming into. And the US side was basically saying, give us it all and we'll leave you alone.
Jeffrey 10:27
Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I do, you know, I don't think either of these Groups of men, and they appear to be all men, are particularly good at this.
Aaron 10:47
No, I think that's part of it as well. I think the caliber of individual in those rooms, let's say, was not what we would have selected for the A-team. No, no.
Jeffrey 11:00
I mean, I do think, though, there is this old saying that in a democracy, you get the government you deserve. And I just actually think that's generally pretty true, not just in democracies, that the people who end up in power are the ones who adapt best to their domestic circumstance. And the consequence of that is we're not selecting...
For people who know anything about these issues, right? We're, you know, selecting for people who can win a primary in South Carolina or they're selecting for somebody who, you know, I don't know, is like makes cogent points over tea about, you know, Islamic theology. And so, you know, you mash this all up together. And if you get somebody with like some technical expertise, you just you're real lucky.
Aaron 11:52
Yeah, and so those didn't really go very, very far. And then, you know, combat ensued. And it just kind of feels like we've come to the end of combat. I don't actually think either side wants to go back to the war with a, well, that was a really weird interlude in U.S.-Iranian relations, but the fundamentals are still the same.
Jeffrey 12:19
Yeah, I think... I think we should write something about this. You and I occasionally write things together. We don't do it enough.
Aaron 12:30
It's less and less, but yes, it's been known to happen.
Jeffrey 12:35
I think almost every war begins, not every war, that would be too reductive, but many, many wars begin with incredibly optimistic assumptions. And so, you know, I think Putin invades Ukraine because he thinks the Ukrainians won't fight and this will be over. Yes. There's a huge historical debate about how optimistic or not people were in World War One.
So I guess, you know, we can table that. But I I think. I think Trump believed that if they killed Khamenei. This whole thing would collapse and this would be easy. And this is not unlike Iraq.
Aaron 13:25
I think that's exactly right.
Jeffrey 13:27
Where we thought we would kill Saddam on the first night, we didn't get it. We eventually get Saddam. And we thought once you just topple the regime, you know, inside every Iraqi is an American, you know, like struggling to emerge. That's right.
Aaron 13:38
And worse lights and tattooed up and ready to go.
Jeffrey 13:40
Yeah. And I just... On the one hand, it's very easy to condemn the Trump people for not thinking about all the second and third order implications of the actions they were going to take. But I think all of those are fruit of the same poison tree, right? The same root stupidity, which is always the case, which is just, you think it's going to be easy.
And you wouldn't, if you had considered all of the second and third implications, then you would have thought it would be hard and you wouldn't do it.
Aaron 14:16
Yeah. And I think to be fair, other governments have faced these questions and were more risk averse. I do think that the different circumstances, and it's not sort of a unique thing to, let's say, IQ level in the Trump administration. I think they were looking at data after the 12-day war, after those big street protests in Iran, after...
Triple-digit inflation that continues and major challenges that the government was facing and just was like, well, all they need is a push. You know what I mean? And the push will just sort of... So all of those second-order things, which I'm sure at some point was in a briefing packet, right? There are professionals... But that's sort of like when your eyes glaze over after you read the abstract, you know, as you're making your way through some dense political science paper and you sort of just go to the abstract and the conclusion, and you're just like, okay, I got the gist.
Jeffrey 15:12
Well, and I will say, I think part of this emerges in, you know, where this is neither arms control disarmament or nonproliferation, but it goes back to my kind of fundamental sense that all of this is domestic politics played out on a global stage, right? We don't have very good models of regime change. We have fairy tale stories about protesters and we have cinematic ideas that the protesters triumph and the bad guys fall and peace breaks out.
But in fact, all of our experiences with societies after conflict suggest that the societies themselves are incredibly damaged. That there are huge numbers of people who are resentful of the new order. There's a whole new universe of winners and a whole new universe of losers. And so I think it is no surprise that the collapse of the Soviet Union results in Putinism.
And it's no surprise that the Arab Spring and the collapse of the Mubarak government in Egypt after a brief fling with democracy returns to the same succession of military leaders that existed before. Because that was our experience with the French Revolution. The French Revolution was great. It was amazing. The monarchy was toppled, and it's a hop, skip, and a jump, and then you're into Bonapartism.
Aaron 16:45
Yeah. Which, by the way, my kids go to a French school, and I saw a handout on Bonapartism yesterday. This right eyebrow went up. Like, ooh, that was an interesting sort of interlude.
Jeffrey 16:55
I wonder what you're saying. So I think we don't have good domestic models. And so, like, if the... If Iranian politics were different, yes, it would have a different government. But it's not an accident that these jackasses run the country, just like it's not an accident that the jackasses who run our country run it. You know, like Donald Trump is increasingly less popular, but he has a kind of appeal that is rooted in something fundamental about our society.
And like, I mean, it's one of the reasons I get, you know, people people joke that About Trump dying, and I don't really care one way or the other about the man, but the idea that he's just by himself a singular thing, I think is like a fantasy. We have real domestic divisions in our country and those are persistent.
Aaron 17:52
Yeah.
Jeffrey 17:54
One thing that I find- I love how you're struggling to reframe this. Get us back on track.
Aaron 17:58
No, I'm trying to bring us back to the point of the podcast. Because in much the same way that, you know, you can always tell with Senior Official One, a.k.a. Steve Witkoff, right? He's gotten a briefing, right? Yeah. It does seem like they've appended the nonproliferation or disarmament mission to the air campaign, even though the air campaign's been paused for a couple weeks now.
Yeah. And it ends up on true socialist nuclear dust. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. And these are the things, this is the sort of the enriched uranium.
Jeffrey 18:35
It's probably better than precipitant, right?
Aaron 18:37
Because when it's in the canisters, if you don't heat it up, it... You know, I was trying to explain this to an audience here in Philadelphia a couple weeks, a couple, like a week ago, actually. I was like, it's not that bad of a term. Do you know what I mean? It's sort of like ground up stuff that's sitting in canisters.
It's not like super fancy. It's not... You know, it's not a gas, it's not this. And so it's like, don't think of it as sort of, it's okay. Until you heat it up, exactly. But my point is, is like, we knew, this was after the last one, the last thing, that this stuff was just stuck in a mountain, right?
And so it's sort of become this metric of success. And I don't understand why it's a metric of success.
Jeffrey 19:24
You know, Aaron, I find myself occasionally falling for it.
Aaron 19:30
I don't really care about it anymore.
Jeffrey 19:31
I don't care about it either. And yet I get suckered into, you know, is because because in a way they've set their own their own, you know, metric for success. I mean, I think the reason I went on that long diatribe about like the nature of governments is I think what we know now is it's very unlikely that the Islamic Republic is going to fall.
Aaron 19:56
Certainly, yeah, certainly not. I think they're pretty good. Now, I mean, whatever. What the Islamic Republic is now, though, is different. I think that's worthy because the Supreme Leader's son, Moshe Taba, nobody's seen him. Yeah, well, apparently he's disfigured. I don't know. I mean, he's disfigured. He's injured. Maybe he's afraid the Israelis will kill him. Maybe all the above.
I mean, it is weird. He doesn't come out of hiding to at least give a talk in a bunker. Yeah, that's not to suggest that the regime will fall. It's just like, I'm not sure how much the Supreme Leader in the regime, as we like thought about it like six, eight weeks ago, I think that's right, is still the same, right? You know, and it's the same on paper, but it's certainly different actors. But go ahead. Well, I just mean though that there's still a power structure in control in Iran, and that that power structure is both hostile and our interests.
Jeffrey 20:47
It has successfully closed the Strait of Hormuz. We've counter-closed it, so now it's hella closed, but like... Yeah.
Aaron 20:55
Well, then we kind of opened it yesterday in operation, but then it closed again. So, like, again, who does?
Jeffrey 21:00
You know, but, like, you know, markets... Markets are skittish. But that's why I think ultimately this is a failure, because... The people who said, look, none of this works unless we change the regime, which now they're trying to pretend was not their position because they failed, have left the Iranians in possession of quite a lot, which we should talk about.
Aaron 21:29
It's a lot. We should care about it. But it's sort of like there is increasingly... I never want to say never, right? But there's an amount of fantasy that A, that we can go get it without Iranian consent, which maybe we could.
Jeffrey 21:48
John and Sam have been playing Next War Iran. Just trying to open up the straits. And by the way, the conclusion is you basically, you have to invade Iran. And so they- Oh, yes.
Aaron 22:00
And they send Marines to their death. There's a way to go get it. It just requires a lot of risk, and those second and third order effects are politically... Well, we could occupy the country. Yes. We could totally do Iraq. Yeah, and that really is the options that the president has, which is why... I've stopped caring so much about it because I don't think we're going to invade the country.
And so either it's going to stay and it's going to have to go under monitoring. It's going to stay and it won't be under monitoring and they can make a rush to the bomb. They can give it to the Russians or in Donald Trump's head, in a later to be determined date, they'll give it to us. And I just don't think any of that's really likely.
Jeffrey 22:44
So I really do think, and this is what I try to remind myself of because I keep starting to grade them on a curve. The question is, is whatever agreement they get better than the JCPOA? There's no way that answer is going to be, yes, it is better, and we can talk about that.
Aaron 23:08
That is the standard.
Jeffrey 23:10
The deal you had, because you walked away from the deal. Donald Trump walked away from the deal. By the way, eight years is apparently a lifetime. People don't know Trump left the deal.
Aaron 23:21
Oh, I know. I was there. There's a podcast. We have history where we talked about this. We should probably dig that one out.
Jeffrey 23:25
And people think that Iran's responses all occurred After Biden came into office. I know that. And FDD literally selectively edits graphs to not show the steps that the Iranians began, by the way, openly taking in 2019, in which they said, Trump left the deal. We are taking these steps. They are temporary. We will reverse them if, you know, Trump or the next administration comes back in the deal.
Like it was incredibly transparent and that people are just lying about it.
Aaron 23:57
Yes.
Jeffrey 23:59
And FDD, I mean, basically at this point, the quote unquote good ISIS is basically the T-Bureau for FDD, are just like genuinely lying. It's amazing.
Aaron 24:12
I mean, again, you can check the receipts, go back into our archives. We would talk about this stuff. I remember the first podcast, and then we had multiple podcasts as the crisis with Iran over this nuclear issue was escalating again. And yes, we also criticized the Biden administration because they went too slow.
Jeffrey 24:28
But they chose not to reenter. They chose not to reenter. Joe Biden owns this. I mean, Trump chose to leave the deal. Trump chose to launch the war. But Biden did not reenter the deal, and that then therefore gave Trump the ability to enter the war. So that was, you know... We know who we are in the Biden administration who believe the deal was a reward for the Iranians.
You also own this, even if you're criticizing it on TV right now.
Aaron 25:05
And then we watch them accumulate... The nuclear dust that's now buried in Pickaxe Mountain. No. Right? We don't know where it is. No? We assume it's in Pickaxe. No, we assume it... Well, we assume it's in Isfahan.
Jeffrey 25:19
Isfahan. Sorry. You're right. Sorry. I made a mistake. You're right. But is it? I don't know. I got a lot of pictures of cranes and trucks at that facility in the fall, which nobody wants to talk about.
Aaron 25:31
Yes. Again, we talked about that on the podcast.
Jeffrey 25:34
Why was there a crane at that? Maybe it was just to lower somebody in to go check on it. I don't know. Maybe it was lonely.
Aaron 25:39
I don't know, man. I was taking a couple calls to a place around the corner. They had a crane there because they were building a pergola.
Jeffrey 25:46
Maybe they're building a pergola.
Aaron 25:47
Maybe it's a pergola.
Jeffrey 25:52
It's a dark pergola.
Aaron 25:56
And then that was because, so, okay, now I'm rambling, but my point now is, so I don't want to grade on a curve. No. Because I feel like, well, A, no matter what we get, it's going to be bad. But I feel like the main limitation to the obvious agreement is that Donald Trump knows it's going to be bad and is resisting taking action.
Iranian offers, at least according to the leaks that we see, the last leak that the Iranians set was actually a pretty good one. It was about the JCPOA with four or less inspections. I would have taken that one, but he's not going to because he's made it about the nuclear dust coming out to the United States. And that's why I say I don't care about it anymore.
We have bigger fish to fry.
Jeffrey 26:38
It's crazy to me, by the way, and I understand that this is because of Iranian domestic politics. But man, if I were the Iranians, I would cough up the material. And I would be like, we're suspending our program and the IAEA can inspect all of our destroyed sites. And I would just build a parallel program on the side that was completely undeclared.
Aaron 27:01
Oh, yeah. Look, that's what we had always suggested.
Jeffrey 27:04
And you know how I would take all the scientists out of the counter? I'd be like, they're dead.
Aaron 27:08
Yeah, they got buried in the bunker. They're dead.
Jeffrey 27:12
Yeah. Nothing for you to see here. They're dead.
Aaron 27:17
And even if the Israelis or the Americans ferreted it out and starts to leak like it did last time, it sets you up in this position where you then have to bomb them again. And then they close the Strait of Hormuz and start shooting at things in Dubai and Fujairah and Saudi Arabia and Jordan and Kuwait. Or we sort of go back and forth.
Jeffrey 27:36
Oh, this is the other thing that annoyed me about... He was talking about how this was... About how the problem from the JCPOA is that if the Iranians had stayed in it, they would have been... Position to break out? They've not been in it for ten, you know, for eight years. Like, what? He's like, well, what would we have done then if they had broken out?
Like, I don't know. We could have, we would have killed the leadership, we would have attacked them, they would have closed the Strait of Hormuz, and it would have looked exactly like this fucking shit show that you have authored, you dumbass.
Aaron 28:12
Correct. Correct. ... One thing that I guess we learned as wonks is we've gotten better at scud hunting. Much, much, much, much better at scud hunting. Yeah, maybe. You still have that problem with mass, and it's hard to scud hunt every scud.
Jeffrey 28:32
You know, I want to say a couple of things about that. It's hard not to be better at scud hunting than 1991 because we didn't get any. Correct.
Aaron 28:44
So the floor was zero and now I would say it's pretty good. I think we have slight disagreements here.
Jeffrey 28:51
Well, no. Well, let's explore them. That's worth doing. I think the Iranians operated their Scuds in not the smartest way.
Aaron 29:05
No. The missile cities have proven to be pretty stupid.
Jeffrey 29:08
Right. And so that allowed us to focus.
Aaron 29:13
Yeah.
Jeffrey 29:14
And I think the lack of air defense in Iran was a pretty serious shortcoming.
Aaron 29:26
Yes, there was. Yes.
Jeffrey 29:30
And I think, you know, I mean, the Iranians have been able to maintain a fire rate of like 30 missiles a day or something.
Aaron 29:37
Yeah, no, they were able to hold on. So, you know, I don't...
Jeffrey 29:44
I know, again, I'm fundamentally a nuclear person.
Aaron 29:47
Yeah.
Jeffrey 29:47
And so if you tell me that they're able to maintain a fire rate of 30 nuclear missiles a day, nuclear-armed missiles a day, I'm like, oh, that's got to hunt some failure. Yeah. But I take your point. I mean, I think also we saw this in... Did we end up writing that piece? We were both looking at writing that piece about how both in Iran and in Ukraine, we were looking at how drones dramatically improve your ability to hunt strategic targets.
Aaron 30:16
Sam, I think, took the shot at it, and I sort of tossed some things in there, and we bought some stuff, but yeah.
Jeffrey 30:21
Yeah, no, I think you're right. It's better, but is it better in a way that you think is meaningful?
Aaron 30:28
With conventional, yes. With nuclear, no.
Jeffrey 30:31
And with conventional, again... Because again, I think it's always a better investment to shoot the archer than to shoot the arrow. So I'd rather spend all the money that we're spending on defense on hunting. It's just, I wonder how good we can get.
Aaron 30:50
To be honest with you, the answer is I don't know. Based upon the open source, I think it's probably the most successful tell hunt ever conducted.
Jeffrey 30:57
Yeah. I take your point.
Aaron 31:00
We're baselining it against 1991, which was 0 for 100, right?
Jeffrey 31:06
Sometimes they got them after they launched.
Aaron 31:08
Yeah. The Israelis, which just fundamentally can't generate as much air power as we can. And so they did a good job too, but not nearly at this scale. And that's really it, right? There's really no other case studies. And so iteratively, we're improving each time around. But I still maintain this. The Iranians, there was a good piece in the Washington Post, I don't know if you saw it, where they were able to do some battle damage assessment on U.S. bases in the Middle East.
Jeffrey 31:38
Mm-hmm. And they got a bunch through. Yeah.
Aaron 31:42
But they got a bunch through at bases that were in most part like really reduced in force. So there was like hardly anybody there. So they were chosen not to be defended. And so it ends up in this really weird place where like, yes, you got all these tells. Yes, you were able to decrease the fire, but the fire that squeaked through in most cases or maybe not that are hitting basically empty buildings.
And so what's the efficacy of hitting empty buildings with conventional attack?
Jeffrey 32:09
Yeah, other than for combat, not for broader economic disruption to to the world order. Yeah, I mean, this really gets to a thing I haven't worked out in my head, which is how do I think about the relationship between the drones and the ballistic missiles? Because I just don't think the ballistic missiles are accurate enough. No, and the shorter range ones seem to be the longer range ones now? Yeah, that's right. The shorter, I mean, the Right?
That's math. Inertial measurement. How does it work? How does drift accumulate? But the drones seem to be better in terms of accuracy. The Iranians have hit a fair number of missile defense radars.
Aaron 32:59
Yeah, they're just so slow and so hard to see with certain radar. Yes, yes. I wrote a long piece about how it should be.
Jeffrey 33:05
And so I just, I guess I wonder, now this will get to a whole other set of questions that I've had. If Iran had done nothing but drones... Would they have been better off? I mean, it basically recapitulates the German argument at the end of World War II, where the V1 was just much cheaper and much more accurate than the V2.
And the Germans probably should have done the V1 in mass. But the problem is rockets are penises, and so they did the V2. The Iranians probably should have learned that lesson and just done the drones en masse. But then again, there may be some range issues I'm not thinking of. I don't have a good sense for the really long range stuff.
If your goal is to put political pressure on the Israelis, maybe you still need missiles at that range.
Aaron 34:02
And if you do the V1 versus the V2, do you still get to Apollo? See what I did there? See what I did there?
Jeffrey 34:09
Yeah.
Aaron 34:12
Maybe. The answer is I don't know yet because I'm very skeptical of the shot head has revolutionized war because I'm not sure it has, because I'm not sure about the efficacy of each shot head shot, right? Because they're not all accurate. Look, they had some accurate shots, but when you're looking at sort of the cost efficiency, I realize they're cheap of shooting these things in mass and having really, really limited effect on the adversary's ability to project combat power.
I think it makes for a pretty picture, and I think it makes for a worthwhile discussion when you're going in saying, how can these sort of loony tunes even compete with the United States? But when you actually step back, they're not really competing with the United States. We hit them with any number of tens of thousands of munitions, and they've had 100 sort of hits on largely empty buildings.
Jeffrey 35:02
I think that's right. I mean, I think the inability to meaningfully degrade U.S., Missions is pretty important.
Aaron 35:13
At a time when the country is not actually mobilized for war, the reason why we run out of munitions is because we just have a fixed stockpile that we're debiting against without mobilizing the country for war.
Jeffrey 35:25
We are half-assing it and yes.
Aaron 35:31
I actually have a controversial take. I don't mind the huge $1.5 trillion because it's going to get so much missiles into our arsenal. We've got so much work to do. It's going to be fantastic. But that's a side note.
Jeffrey 35:41
Well, yeah. I mean, there was that joke that every RAND briefing you end with, and buy more munitions. I love it. I'm all for it. I'm in. I want it. The golden age of missiles. Give me it. But anyways. Yeah. I mean, I do think if you're the Iranians... All of that investment in ballistic missiles and drones, I may be more positive about drones than you are, would have been better spent on surface-to-air missiles and radars to protect one's airspace.
And better accuracy. I mean, just the, well, that too, but just the complete inability to protect their own airspace, I think is... Because again, you're not meaningfully degrading the number of planes that are coming at you. Yes. And so if you can't do that, then you need to actually endanger those aircraft when they're close to you.
Aaron 36:32
Yeah, so even like the big attrition event, which is the 5KC-135, is that because they snuck one through or is that because the crews got lazy and didn't disperse? And the answer is I don't know yet, right? But I think it's a thing of the, like, it's both, right? And so, like, when we look at sort of broad meanings, it's like, oh, they should have dispersed.
It's like, yeah, they were probably Air National Guard, like, Like, how long do they trained to disperse? What were the orders that were given down to them? What was that threat briefing coming to them? You know what I mean? And so like, it's yes, Iran got lucky. Yes, it's bad that the that the tankers got the and the E3 got got blown up. But is it because warfare has changed, or is that because the guys and gals who were there didn't read the threat deck, or a little bit of both? And again, I just haven't made up my mind yet. I really just debate these things all day because I'm a nerd.
Jeffrey 37:25
Other big question that I have is what do you make of the tempo of this war, or this set of military campaigns, in the broader context? Like, we have this idea that a a missile fought nuclear war will be over very quickly. Oh, but And these are conventional missile attacks, but it's like salvo, salvo, limited aims. Does this change how we conceive of the way a nuclear war would unfold?
Aaron 38:01
That's a really good question. So I think this is the most intense air campaign that has taken place since 1991. And I think the level of destruction in Iran is tremendous. But the... And that's why I'm a little hesitant on regime change. It's not that I believe that there will be regime change. It's that the regime will have to deal with the fallout.
Well, and it was weak to begin with. And it was weak to begin with, right? And so the reason why I'm slightly caveating is not that I agree with the conflict, which I think is quite clear, and to the best of my knowledge, I do not. But I don't think that we've seen the end of it in Iran, even if combat operations stay ended.
Well, and there's never, there's no end.
Jeffrey 38:48
There's no end to stories.
Aaron 38:51
Yeah.
Jeffrey 38:52
Right? Like, I mean, the Iranian government could fall and we have a big party and it could be replaced by a democratic government that's pro-Israel and we could have a big party and then that government could be overthrown. Like, history will keep going on and like, you know, whether you get to better long-term stable states or not, yeah, we'd be fools to try to predict that.
Which, by the way, is why I don't think we should do shit like this, because you don't know what the outcome will be. Oh, absolutely. And so, okay.
Aaron 39:22
And so now you're talking to me about the tempo of the conflict. So I also have, against my own personal tank, and you may disagree, I think in the absence of satellite imagery and in the absence of internet in Iran, there is no counter-narrative for a media person, no matter how well-intentioned, to tell. And so the only stories that we get are from the perspective of the attacker.
Jeffrey 39:49
Yeah.
Aaron 39:51
And so it is necessarily stilted towards the thing that we want it to be, whether it's David Albright and the good ISIS, which is, this is the greatest thing ever, or on the other side, which is, I can't believe how dumb we are. Because we actually have no comparative variable. And once the hold on satellite imagery is released, we are going to start looking around and it's going to go, oh my God.
It was bad for them, you know what I mean, in ways that we didn't appreciate. That doesn't mean we won, right? It doesn't mean that the level of attrition led to the political outcomes.
Jeffrey 40:26
The level of suffering is extremely high, yes. Right.
Aaron 40:29
And so then when you cost compare that to, again, a couple of shot heads that hit Bahrain, the naval station that's mostly empty, it's like, well, it's bad. It's going to cost $25 billion equivalent to rebuild these places if we choose to do so at all. But the bill in Iran is going to be like $300 billion.
It's going to be pretty bad.
Jeffrey 40:51
You know, but Aaron, this is why I went on that rant at the beginning about domestic politics. Trump's approval is lower than it's ever been. And so even though we have not objectively suffered, the military operation has proved politically damaging and divisive and then damaging for him in a very salient way. What I don't know is whether the bombing has eroded support for the Iranian regime or whether it has enhanced it.
Because again, I think we have this simple idea that all these people hate the government and the worst things get in Iran, the more likely people are to overthrow it. But the reality is when people are attacked, they sometimes, not always, but they sometimes see that at least their leader is On their side, right? And so, you know, I mean, I remember after 9-11, George Bush's popularity shot up.
Yeah. Now, is that enduring? No, no. Slow but on Milosevic. We did this with Milosevic in Serbia, where we assumed he would fall after the humiliation of allied force. And in fact, he became incredibly popular. Now that was very brief and he was foolish enough to hold a free and fair election. Thinking that he was so popular, he was going to win, and then he lost.
History can be amusing in this way. But I think we don't know whether this will ultimately benefit the regime or harm it, and we don't know whether those benefits or harms will be enduring or not. I take this point that the economy was already terrible. Yeah. On the other hand, do you know who has a terrible economy and doesn't seem to be going anywhere?
The North Koreans.
Aaron 42:50
Oh, us?
Jeffrey 42:56
You know, but I just, I think this goes back to that fundamental thing I was saying at the beginning, which is we have these, I think, simplistic, almost childish models of how Suffering relates to regime stability. And I think those models are basically wrong or at least too simplistic. But we make policy on the basis of them.
And it's like, if I turn up the dial, the chance of regime change goes up in a linear way. And it's like, well, what if it's a Lorenz water wheel, right? Where the system is actually chaotic and you can't control it.
Aaron 43:32
So what do we think the status of the nuclear program is? Because again, we're focused on the nuclear dust. Let's put the nuclear dust aside. The stuff to enrich the nuclear dust. Where do you think it is?
Jeffrey 43:48
I think there are the following underground facilities that, as best I can tell, remain unattacked. There's Isfahan, where the dust is, which I know you said put it aside, but I just need to have it on the list for completeness. It's there, sure. Okay.
Aaron 44:05
I meant in terms of like what we should be looking at. Go ahead.
Jeffrey 44:09
We know that the Iranians declared to the IAEA the existence of another underground facility somewhere in Isfahan. There is a kind of tendency to say, oh, it must be actually at the existing facility. There are other tunnels around Isfahan that I can see.
Aaron 44:28
Yeah, it could be at the facility. It may not be.
Jeffrey 44:30
The point is we don't know. There are other tunnels around Isfahan that I can see. Are they empty? Are they involved in the missile program? Are they where Iran stores ancient theological texts? I don't know. But there's the facility that the Iranians told the IAEA about, but they did not tell them where it was. There is Pickaxe Mountain next to Natanz.
And at Parchin, there's a big underground tunnel complex that was built as part of the nuclear program and that is described in the Atomic Archive. Maybe some of the above-ground buildings were hit, but that underground facility is still there. There was that campus in Tehran that the Israelis hit that appeared to be where they moved the nuclear program to.
It is in a hilly area. I bet it has some underground aspects to it. That place got pretty well damaged, but I don't know. There are a fair number of underground facilities.
Aaron 45:52
I don't know that we have struck the machines that make centrifuge components. That's a big question for me. I don't know the answer to that either.
Jeffrey 45:59
I know that our boy Stevie Dubs said that Iran had moved to reconstitute centrifuge production right before the war. Maybe that's what he meant. If that's what he meant, that would strongly imply that they had retained those machines. They probably have a stockpile of centrifuges.
Aaron 46:25
I would assume so, somewhere.
Jeffrey 46:29
I don't think that conversion is the bottleneck that the enthusiasts for this war believe it is. James Acton did a really nice piece where he observed, he showed us exactly what the Manhattan Project facilities for uranium conversion looked like. It was a 1920s chemistry lab.
Aaron 46:51
Was not at the cutting edge, let's say, of chemistry.
Jeffrey 46:55
You know, and so, you know, I know what the, you would probably cast the pits. So you'd need some foundry capabilities and you'd probably want to machine them. But the Chinese did that in the 60s, no problem. I mean, that's a really basic technology. I'm sure they still have the designs. And I don't imagine that we've killed every single person in Iran who can do this.
Know, I mean, there was a particularly gruesome thing I said the other day where he said something like, you know, well, we all know you can't bomb knowledge, but you can destroy know-how. Which is like, I've apparently missed this brief, thanks. This has gone on and I I I've actually not been paying attention. You just sort of, you're you're you're you're wise, but it's just like I understand that they are getting some kind of emotional thrill from killing these scientists, but I don't think they're killing them at anything like the rate that would actually prevent weaponization if Iran had the material.
I don't know. I think there was a DIA data statement the other day that said they're basically same distance they were from a weapon before the war. Yeah. And that makes sense to me because you've got all the same uncertainties, you have a significant number of untouched facilities, and none of the obvious bottlenecks seem destroyed to me.
Which again is why if I were the Iranians, I would be like, of course we're never going to enrich again. Please take all our material. And then when the IAEA asked to look inside Pickaxe Mountain, I would be like, why? That's... That's where we store our historical materials on Supreme Leader Khamenei.
Aaron 49:00
Yeah, that's where his medical records are. Yeah. It's none of your business. That's HIPAA. That's HIPAA. That's HIPAA. It's covered by HIPAA. We haven't moved to EPIC or digital records yet. So they're all in paper format. It's up there, right? I mean, maybe the first 400 feet are all archives.
Jeffrey 49:15
It's like a false wall. The Israelis. Oh, that's an interesting wrinkle in all this we should talk about. But, you know, the Israelis, when the U.S. was inspecting, did like the I think they did like a false control room for Tim.
Aaron 49:32
Oh, yeah. Yeah. By the way, I'm saying that as well.
Jeffrey 49:37
Did you see that just as a bellwether of how remarkably unpopular Israel as a as a partner has become among Democrats, which I think is a predictable outcome when Netanyahu decided to try to put relations on a party-to-party basis, like the North Koreans and the Chinese. A bunch of Democrats are asking the Trump administration to declassify information about Israel's nuclear arsenal.
Aaron 50:07
I saw that. I definitely saw that. I didn't know how I feel about it. Again, it's been 60 years. Yeah, I know how I feel about it. It's been 60 to 70 years. I think we'll survive.
Jeffrey 50:23
I mean, Avner Cohen, my colleague here at Middlebury, argues that secrecy is bad for Israeli democracy.
Aaron 50:33
Yeah. It's a good book. I've read it twice. I wonder how much we learn outside the book. But yeah. Yeah.
Jeffrey 50:39
I think that's probably right. I mean, I think as a democratic society, Israel should be open. Tell the truth. I don't see why we're obligated to keep ally secrets that aren't given to us on a confidential basis.
Aaron 50:58
Should we talk about all eight, Dark Eagle?
Jeffrey 51:02
Maybe just a little.
Aaron 51:06
Told you, we're blowing out the podcast today, so I was some of your team. We I I was texting with some elements of your team for you know, for for for for stuff. Increasingly our team, Aaron, yes, and I said, where's Jeffrey? I think one of them was like, it's his day with Dark Eagle, he's gone into his dark space right now. And I was like, what do you mean it's his day with Dark Eagle? He's like He's obsessed with this missile.
And you've spent a lot of time with it. So let me...
Jeffrey 51:44
There is one level at which the United States government has been incredibly secretive about Dork Eagle. The all up round, which to be clear, that's a long range hypersonic weapon. Is that what we're the actual, that's the army version. So the army and the Navy have done a very unnatural thing. The air force and the Navy could never do this, but the army and the Navy basically can, which is, it is the same round with the same glider.
But the Army one will be fired from a square canister on a transporter erector launcher, and the Navy one will come out of a round canister in a tube.
Aaron 52:25
VLS tube, yeah.
Jeffrey 52:26
Yeah. But the round, the all-up round, including the common hypersonic glide body, that's going to be the same. But the Navy hasn't... I mean, the Navy is deeply involved in the production of this, but the system that's deployed in a very limited way right now is the Army one. So Dark Eagle it is. Also, it's funny to say Dork Eagle.
So they've been incredibly secretive about the parameters, and it's been just an incredibly satisfying modeling exercise because they won't tell you how much it weighs, but it's the... Loaded and the spent mass is printed on the canister. So I could work out how much it weighs. And I know it's two stages. They won't tell us how much thrust the booster produces, but they did tell us how long it was.
And so I was able to take the acceleration of the missile. And I realized that not only do I have a pretty good estimate of the thrust, that the first stage has a strongly regressive burn. So I know that the grain is probably like a double anchor or something like this, where you get a lot of your thrust up front and then it tails off.
That's because it's turning over hard in the atmosphere. There are very scattered references to the altitudes at which it operates, one in a CBO report, one in an interview with John Ismay at the New York Times. So I know the altitude at which the equilibrium glide occurs I know that the common hypersonic glide body is based on Sandia's Swerve.
Aaron 54:16
Oh, that's a podcast legend right there, Swerve.
Jeffrey 54:19
Very secretive, but a bunch of shit about Swerve was published when in the post-cancellation period where they were talking about using it for Mars missions.
Aaron 54:34
OGs of the pod should remember our episode on Swerve.
Jeffrey 54:37
Yeah. So we have actually a surprising amount of data about the launcher and the glider. And I, using Claude code, built a tool called Thrusty.
Aaron 54:52
You're very proud of Thrusty. We've had a long lecture about this at Colorado Springs. I mean that slightly facetiously because we're very proud that Thrusty is very impressive.
Jeffrey 55:01
You know. Thrusty is my fourth child. And your favorite. No comment. The other three are very charming. The... What's neat about Thrusty, I mean, it used Jeff Forden's program as a base, and then I used Claude to implement a number of what I would regard as improvements, some of which Jeff agrees are improvements, others of which I think he might be more dubious.
But it's got a really nice workflow, so I can upload the navigational warnings, and so I can then fit the trajectory to the navigational warnings And so it produces this iterative approach. Oh, the last thing is, because it's America and still a free country, at least for the moment, this guy, John Consilis, got this beautiful video of a Dark Eagle test where I can watch both stages burn out so I know how long the stages burn.
So on the one hand, all this information about this missile is incredibly secret. And on the other hand, I have what I think is an absurdly high-fidelity model I think I, you know, I mean, it's real close to the real thing.
Aaron 56:19
And so CENTCOM wants it. I don't know why. I don't know why CENTCOM wants it. And then Trump, I guess, in order to punish Chancellor Merz, is at least for now not sending it to Germany, which is where they were going to send at least one, right? Yeah.
Jeffrey 56:32
So, I mean, it's an interesting system because there's an unclassified range. And then General Lozano gave the classified range in an open mic to the Secretary of Defense recently. I mean, so I guess it's unclassified now. But Lozano told Hegseth it had an operational range of 3,500 kilometers, which probably includes distance lost to turning. I think that's important because it the glider means that that it's that last stage of it is turning in the atmosphere, and that will necessarily slow it down, right? Well, and and it's not going out, right? It's going left, right? Right, right. It's like driving through Vermont, so you don't just go north, south, there's a lot of east, west in there. Yeah, and so I think, you know, if you look at the navigational warnings, it's like at least 4,000 kilometers of straight glide, and then just Kinematically, it could be probably a bit more than that, although it gets a little complicated.
It's a really long range system. 3,500 kilometers minimum, maybe 4,000. There's no reason to send that to the Gulf. No, the Gulf makes no sense.
Aaron 57:53
I don't understand why CENTCOM even wants it.
Jeffrey 57:57
You, like, even Jordan might be a little too close. No, it's way too close. I mean, Jordan, you could hit Moscow. Jordan, you can hit Moscow, which is the interesting wrinkle. So, like, you could almost. Diego Garcia is a little bit too far. I mean, it would be really stretching it. But, yeah, it's much too close. And, like, I don't, we only produce, like, one a month.
I think the initial buy was eight. Yeah, they were trying to get up to two a month, so they're not producing that many. My first observation for CENTCOM is, and by the way, the warhead is like, well, The warhead is probably like the Prism warhead. It's like approximately 100 kilograms of tungsten and there's like 30 pounds, I think, of explosive to just fragment it and send the tungsten everywhere.
Aaron 59:01
You mean you use tungsten flechettes to do hard kill?
Jeffrey 59:05
Yeah, probably BBs.
Aaron 59:07
Yeah. Okay. That was controversial when the Russians did it.
Jeffrey 59:12
I don't know why. Now that's where we're moving, because it complies with our cluster munitions policy. It's a more humane way. So just ask those little girls who played volleyball in Iran. Dark and morbid. I know. Hey, this war is a great moral evil, okay? It's a strategic blunder and a moral evil, so it's a twofer. But that...
Like, what universe in which 12 to 24 additional strikes will result in a different outcome?
Aaron 59:48
I have no idea. I just think they want it because I think it's cool. I really think that that's it.
Jeffrey 59:52
It makes no sense. The numbers are so low, and the capability is not particularly novel for this situation. Like, you know, they're not shooting at stuff. You don't need to turn, right?
Aaron 1:00:06
Why would you destroy a target in Iran with a missile we only have eight of when you could just send a Net-15 with a $30,000 JDAM to do?
Jeffrey 1:00:15
It makes no sense. Now, the reality is if you do stick it in Israel or in Jordan, it can target Moscow.
Aaron 1:00:21
That's the really interesting thing to me because, of course, we have to have political nonsense about not putting it in Germany, which is just like –
Jeffrey 1:00:28
And by the way, somebody I like on Twitter, X, was like, well, if it's under CENTCOM's command, they can't shoot at Moscow. They can definitely shoot at Moscow. I don't know, but I had to explain that on the one hand...
Aaron 1:00:43
The Earth is round?
Jeffrey 1:00:44
Well, I think this person imagined that U.S. planning is more rigid than it is. So, you know, like but Odyssey Dawn, the was it like nominally was an AFRICOM mission in Libya until they handed it over to SACEUR. I mean, you just reassign authority for the units and, you know.
Aaron 1:01:05
What I find interesting about it is the flexibility of the missile. So let's say you put it in Jordan or you put it in Israel because Army HQ and CENTCOM wins out in this bureaucratic turf fight. And they say, we need this cool missile to do whatever, right? And a launcher shows up there and they justify it as an exercise.
Yep. We will sit there and go, that's really dumb to be able to shoot at... Iran was something that we're not going to use to shoot at anything in Iran. What is really, really interesting, just to tie this in a bow, is you had Thrusty. You probably arrived at this independently, but I also asked you to do it.
I was like, will you put Dark Eagle into Thrusty and put it in the middle of Jordan and tell me how far it goes?
Jeffrey 1:01:55
Beautiful cartography options on Thrusty. You could basically hit, yeah.
Aaron 1:02:02
And this was always the Russians' concern, right? Is that if you put long-range fires into their quote-unquote underbelly, you can attack Moscow from, let's say, unanticipated directions. Because I have to guess the Russian radars are oriented towards NATO and the Poles just like ours are, right? And it's coming the other way? That's a really cool missile.
Jeffrey 1:02:27
That's a cool thing. I think regardless, without any regard to whether we would actually do it, the Russians will have kittens. Yeah, that's a bad thing. I mean, I will I will enjoy going to my my track two meetings and watching the Russians have strokes, and I'll be like, well, somebody wanted out of the INF Treaty. I don't know exactly, it's like you sort of was like the either treaty, because this is was one of the record, I was like, you're gonna regret this, this is not a good idea for you. But you know, yeah.
Aaron 1:03:00
Think of the 2026 budget, which I like, even though it's going to destroy public finance, but you know, we'll deal with that problem later, is that we could buy more, but we just, you know, we could just raise taxes, hurt rich people. Yeah, I don't want to do that. Well, we've done an I think this is a record hour and five minutes. I like the vibe casting.
Jeffrey 1:03:27
Yeah, this was good.
Aaron 1:03:28
I've got to do this more often. Now people from my office are calling me, which means that we have officially gone off the rails. Patreon.com slash ACW podcast for the people who still listen to this podcast, despite the fact that we've left you all without a podcast for about a month.
Jeffrey 1:03:46
We're going to keep doing them, and I hope you enjoyed this hour-long podcast.
Aaron 1:03:51
Guess five code on where we feel Iran's going. I don't know, I've gotten pretty pretty loose and organic with this thing, so we'll see where we're at next year, in the next week. All right, check the calci markets. All right, talk to you later.
