Bulwark Takes - Two American Soldiers Killed as Trump’s Iran War Spirals

Episode Date: July 18, 2026

Sam Stein and Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling (Ret.) take on the deadly Iranian strike on a U.S. base in Jordan, the mounting American casualties, and a rapidly widening war with no clear path to de-escalation.

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Blending since 1999. Hey, everybody. It's me, Sam Stein. Managing out of the Bullwark, I am joined by Mark Hurtling, who, is here on a Saturday afternoon, 5 p.m. or so. We're coming to kind of in an emergency setting because news is broken earlier today about the death of two additional U.S. service members in the war that we are engaged in with Iran. That brings the number of service members, according to New York Times, who have died in the war up to 16. These two service members

were killed in Jordan after an attack on the base there. Setcom confirmed it. And look, it's obviously horrible. It is horrible. It is, frankly, and Mark, you can take over here. It's pretty foreboding, honestly, because this comes amid the falling apart, the absolute dismantling of the memorandum of understanding with Iran, the escalation of hostilities. And frankly, as it becomes harder and harder to see any de-escalatory path out of this. But let's start with the service members. Mark, you've lived.

through this. And I just sort of would love to hear your thoughts on what people in the service must be going through the horrors they're going through right now. Well, yeah, Sam, not just the service members, but their families too, because, you know, anyone that's assigned in Jordan, their families know where they are more than likely. But what CENTCOM reported was the death of two. There's another service member that's still missing. And they talked about the wounded that were returned to duty and some had minor injuries. But we'll show the film, I think, in a minute. But this all occurred at the Mollifax Salty Air Base, which is in Jordan.

It's near a town called Azrak in eastern Jordan, which is about 60 miles west of the Iraqi border. And it's part of the rat line that goes from Syria through Jordan into Iraq. It's about 25 miles from the Saudi border as well. but if you were to see the map of this area, it's not only a strategically important coalition air base because of what's going on now in Iran, but it's also very close to Israel. From a military perspective, Mofwak Salty matters because, yeah, it's an airbase of one of our partners, Jordan, but it's also a forward operating location for U.S. Air Force fighters,

intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft, tankers, which are a especially important when you're talking about the long legs from the Middle East and the Levant to Iran. But it also has special operations forces there. It's one of, in my view, one of the principal hubs supporting the operations over both Iraq and Syria. And it's a critical node for CENTCOM operations throughout the Gulf. So if I were explaining this, I'd say Iran didn't randomly select Jordan because this is an operational hinge. They're not trying to hurt Jordan. They're trying to hurt the U.S. and the alliances we have and our potential to not only conduct operations in Iran, but also

to support operations in Israel and Lebanon. Yeah, you got ahead of a question I was about to ask, which is why Jordan seems to be such a focal point right now for these attacks. You mentioned the troops who have been hurt in addition to those who have been killed. I'm just going to read from the Times, and then I want to show the video. The first attack to hit U.S. forces in Jordan struck a residential facility at the King Faisal Air Base, wounding as many as five U.S. service members. Second hit a base in Eastern Jordan where the U.S. Black Hawk helicopters were operating from,

damaging a significant number of them. Then 48 hours ago, Iranian missiles hit the head Jordan's Malafak Salty Air Base in Azrak, which is the same base where the troops were killed on Friday, which we referenced. The earlier strike wounded about 20 troops, U.S. troops rushing to take cover in bunkers. No one was killed in that barrage,

but on Friday when the Iranian struck the base again, two U.S. troops were killed, and four other service members were injured. That's according to U.S. officials. Let's play two videos in a row. Let's play the one to show sort of just how violent the hit was and how dramatic it was. And then we'll play the one with the interceptors. Okay, and here's the interceptors. You can see in this one the interceptors going up,

and there's a mingling of both the interceptors and the, you know, missiles or drones coming down and then you see the strike pattern of the two hits. I would guess that's probably about two or three kilometers away and it's some pretty good explosions. Let's talk about the first one, the first explosion, because I don't think people would usually get that type of footage. It was close, Sam, and I also think it was very large. I mean, I'm not a explosive ordinance demolitions expert, but I'm,

I would say that's at least 200 pounds worth of explosive. That's more than you're going to get, certainly, on what I experienced in Iraq as mortar rounds or even rockets that were fired at bases. That is, that's going to spill your coffee. You know, and what I'd also say is, you know, for the injured that are returned to duty, I'm harkening back to when President Trump said a couple of years ago when a base was hit in Iraq, he said, oh, yeah, they're just a couple of headaches. No, no, no, this is going to cause some traumatic brain injuries and some concussions. Forgive me from my ignorance here, but what is Iran firing here? Are those missiles or those drones? Are those drones with some explosive technology on them?

I mean, what exactly do you think they're firing at the base? It looked like, and this is just a guess on my part, those were drones because of the slow movement toward the ground. If you had true missiles coming in, they'd be coming in a whole, lot faster. And why did the interceptors not, obviously nothing's infallible and things will get through, but in this case, it appears according to reporting that the interceptors are not getting as much, that the rate of interception is declining significantly. Yeah. And I think that's because Iran has destroyed a lot of the radar systems for incoming missiles. They've also destroyed some of the command and control, the guys inside the vans who are pushing the buttons. But they're also,

from what I can see in that video, they're trying to overwhelm the defensive systems. When you have air defense, it's something, you can't move them around a lot, so it's a point defense. And you can't say, hey, we're going to defend here today and defend here tonight and defend here tomorrow and get everything coming in at the same time. Any kind of air base is going to have good defensive measures around it, especially with that amount of U.S. aircraft using that Mofwa base. But I would suspect that what Iran is attempting to do is overwhelm the defensive measures. You can only fire two or three at any given time against the missile. So if you shoot four or five missiles or five or six drones at one location and do it sequentially,

it's just going to overwhelm the systems that are defending it. Let's back up a little bit because what we've had now is, an aggressive escalation of hostilities over the past seven days. We've had nighttime bombing of Iranian sites by U.S. forces for seven days in a row. We've had Iranian retaliation, not just in Jordan. There was a, I'm going through the list here, a ballistic missile launched at a U.S. base in Saudi Arabia. The Iranian struck a vital oil facility in Kuwait, which you could say. see from satellite imagery was burning. Oil workers, oil sector workers were injured there.

And then on the U.S. side, we have now taken to going after desalination plants in southern Iran. There is questions about how aggressively we're doing that, but Iranian authorities, officials in Iran, said that about 10,000 people are facing water shortages because of those hits to Bridges, Rojas, desalienization plans. Mark, what the hell's going on? When it's time to scale your business, it's time for Shopify. Get everything you need to grow the way you want. Like all the way.

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And that's reducing Iran's offensive capacity. It didn't work real well because Iran is a big country and they can resupply things to areas where they have storage out to the places where they want to shoot. It appears like I would say we're in phase three. And this is where the U.S. is instead of merely destroying weapons, or locations, we're attacking systems that allow the Iranians to regenerate military power. So we're seeing now a campaign against places like Bandera-Bas, Isfahan, transportation hubs, bridges, military logistics facility, industry, fuel distribution.

This is the same kind of thing that Ukraine is attempting to do against Russia. These are all operational sustainment targets. But, you know, if I went down and explained more about the importance of Bandra Bas and Isfahan, you can see what the U.S. military is attempting to do under the direction of the president. They're trying to literally stop any movement inside of Iran so they can resupply the weapon systems. The problem with this, Sam, I'd say this is attempting to force a threat. a strategic decision. Rather than, you know, I'll recount what the U.S. has been trying to do, rather than seeking regime change, the campaign now appears to be presenting Iran's leadership

with a choice between, number one, continuing the conflict and see progressively more of the country's military and economic infrastructure degraded or destroyed, or having them start to negotiate from a weaker position. Right. And so far, neither one. of those things are working. Let me stop you for a second. Because we did negotiate. We had a negotiation. I'm not saying that you can't go back and renegotiate, but we did negotiate. This is all falling apart of the memorandum of understanding. And I know it seems like a simple question, but why are we here? Is it just simply because the Iranians and the Americans had a disagreement over whether the Iranians were going to start charging tolls in the straight of our moves?

Is that literally it? No, I think it's because the MOU was really dicked up. I mean, it was just a terrible document. It allowed both sides to say to the other side, you're not following what we said we were going to talk about. And I think on our side, we jumped the gun and said, hey, we're going to start now sending ships through the straight. And Iran said, no, you're not because that was what we were going to talk about. So we're going to start hitting ships again. And it spirals out of control from that point. And both sides are pointing at the other because the original memorandum of understanding,

which was a path toward further negotiation, was so incredibly bad that both sides had misunderstanding of each other. Iran said, we're not going to allow you to do this. And President Trump said, well, then we're going to bomb the hell out of you, which he said multiple times. I find it shocking, honestly, and this is my own personal opinion, obviously, but it is such an object failure, the MOU. I'm actually surprised that the embarrassment and the blame for its failure is so confined. I mean, J.D. Vance put this together, and he's now scabbling around the United States talking to Joe Rogan for three hours as this entire thing falls apart. As U.S. service members are getting killed, as 10,000 people in Iran are without water.

as the Middle East is on edge, as the Kuwaitis are dealing with a huge vital oil facility up in flames, that to me seems like an abject failure of diplomacy. And they should own it. And I don't feel like they're owning it. They're not. They're not. And what we're seeing from the very beginning, and I think we've talked about this before, it's a continuous transition from battlefield attrition, you know, strike targets, kill people,

You know, I have J.D. Vance and Hegset and Trump all saying how much they're destroying to attempt at strategic coercion, which is not working with Iran. This is a different kind of warfare. You'd have to ask yourself the question, what strategic objectives are our targets, what we're targeting accomplish? If the answer is, well, we're striking them because they disobeyed what we wanted them to do, then we're seeing escalation driving policy rather than policy driving military operations. Well, then doesn't escalation drive more escalation in this case? Because Iran's not going to say, oh, you destroyed our bridges and you bombed our desalination

plan. We give up. I mean, maybe at some point, but it doesn't strike me that they have ever done that. No, I don't think so. And what this is, historically speaking, for anybody that studied warfare and combat and history, this is where the war becomes more and more difficult to control. neither side wants total war on this, but both are widening the range of targets that could certainly escalate to a position where total war is going to be the result. And that's what scares

a hell out of me. And I guess the other question is, how do you get back to an MOU after one was ripped apart so quickly, right? Like what kind of trust do either side have for one another at this juncture? What kind of diplomacy can he do? They clearly don't trust Wickoff and Kushner, the and Trump clearly doesn't trust the Iranians. Yeah. It just strikes me that there's not really much in the way of diplomatic channels here to resolve this. There's not. There's not.

This is where one side or the other has to say, okay, this is ridiculous. We will stop everything we're doing and let's come to the table. But that, you know, that's not in Trump's psyche. He won't do that. And it's not in the Ayatollah's psyche either. and the Revolutionary Guard Corps, I'm sorry, I said Republican Guard before, but the Revolutionary Guard Corps does not want to do it either. They've been attacked.

They've had thousands of their citizens killed. They've been embarrassed in a culture where embarrassment is the ultimate sin. So Trump has a narcissistic approach. Iran and the Ayatollahs and the IRGC has a embarrassed approach. approach. So it's not just a lack of trust. It's the cultural dynamics that are involved. I guess the one component here that sort of stands out, because we know that this is on Trump's mind, is global oil in the markets around global oil. I mean, Trump admitted that the reason he did the MOU to begin with was that we were four weeks away from a global oil catastrophe.

I saw some data points that there's something like eight ships going through the straight in 24 hours well off anything pre-war, but even basically down to where we were when the first round of conflict was at its peak. I don't know what we're looking at in terms of global oil supply at this juncture, but oil obviously is going up. Do you have a sense of anything on that front or is that, I don't know, do you have a sense of anything on that front? No, I mean, that's what Iran has been doing from the very beginning.

They understand asymmetric warfare. Okay, you're going to use your military against us. We're going to use the one strength we have against you, which we know will bring you to your knees. But here's the one thing I'd add to that, Sam, as we start to get into this spiraling of escalation, and we start hitting a lot of infrastructure, that's not going to play well on the world stage. When, you know, there are certainly military targets that you can hit. But when there's confusion about, is it a military target or is it affecting the civilians of the nation, then the United States increasingly appears to be a pariah on the world stage.

So not only are we damaging the energy markets and the economy on the global scale, we're now being seen, much like Russia is being seen when they strike civilian targets as the ones that commit war crimes. Dark stuff. This has been a really troubling, honestly, 48 hours. It is foreboding. You can see how it can really spiral out of control. and let's hope it does not.

General Mark Hartling, thank you, man. Really appreciate you unpacking this stuff. And for those who watch and appreciate Mark's work, he does command post, which you should check out. He writes more than basically anyone on staff other than Bill Crystal and JVL. So we appreciate all your contributions. Thank you, Mark.

All right, thanks, Sam. Talk soon. Take care.