School of War - Ep 97: Edward Luttwak on the IDF and the War in Israel

Episode Date: November 7, 2023

Edward Luttwak, strategist and co-author of The Art of Military Innovation: Lessons from the Israel Defense Forces, joins the show to talk about the research and development methods of the IDF and events on the ground in Israel. ▪️ Times      •    01:51 Introduction      •    03:05 R&D the IDF way     •    21:30 Evaluating Israel’s strategy     •    25:30 Stopping the clock     •   29:51 Downside of discipline      •    34:07 Macro-innovation     •    39:26 Iran     •    43:21 Qatar Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

We recorded this episode of School of War at a live event last week for Edward Lutbach, a strategist and author and longtime iconoclastic fixture of debates in Washington about defense policy and strategy. The event was about his new book, which is about the Israeli defense forces in their impressive capacity for innovation. And we had it on the calendar well before war in southern Israel broke out. So obviously, we discussed the war too. Let's get into it.

It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a statement. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. The people who not see buildings down. We shall fight on the beaches. We will fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets.

We shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram, and also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Welcome, everybody. My name is Aaron McLean. It is a great delight to welcome tonight, Dr. Ebert Ludbach. I have elements of his bio written down here. We could, and I've seen this happen, we could go all night unpacking and exploring different aspects of the bio. He is a contractual strategic consultant for the United States government. He's the author of numerous books. I'll just name a few that I personally have learned from Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, coup d'etat a handbook.

It's a book on strategy itself, The Rise of China versus the Logic of Strategy. There's a book from 1975 on the IDF aftermath of the 73 War. And then tonight we, of course, are gathered here to celebrate and talk about the appearance of the art of military innovation lessons

from the IDF. So please join me in thanking. Thank you. Dr. Lippack for joining us tonight. Just one more note before I turn it over to Edward here to start by talking a bit about the war. I came to Edward's work a little bit later in my career so far, and it was 2016. So you have, you know, Trump and you have Brexit and all this kind of stuff going on.

And I saw on Twitter, what was then Twitter, someone tweet an article by Edward. It was about right-wing populism. And my immediate response, well, okay, tell me something I don't know. It's hardly breaking news in 2016 that right-wing populism is alive in one. And then I looked at the date on the article, which appeared in the London Review of Books. It was 1994. And that really was, I think, a bold prediction in 1994. And Edward has a record of bold predictions that turn out essentially to be accurate. So with that, you know, we're going to talk about your books, sir, obviously. But before we get to that, your book is about how the IDF is this

source of innovation to be, to be imitated. And I'm curious, just I'll start you with this question. In the aftermath of October 7th, you know, what role, what share of the responsibility does the IDF bear amongst other elements of the state? How do you account for that? And how's the IDF doing now? Well, the book is not about Israeli military history or what they did in the past or the present. The book is strictly about research and development. It's about why you can develop a system like Iron Dome, which is a perfectly normal radar. perfectly normal software and interceptor, which is a bit cheap, but otherwise perfectly normal, except to do it in four years. If you do it in four years, you do not have to do what we

do with weapon system development, which is that you have to, you work for five years, and then you have to stop because all the microprocessors have changed. You go backtrack, then you go forward again, and you go sideways, and so. So these are any method of development is high-speed development. It's a different method. That's what the book really is about. And how they are not trying to absolutely minimize waste, fraud, or so on, even mismanagement at all. What they're trying to do is to get a weapon system develop quickly so that you put it in a field and you can start improving it instead of being in an ever-never-ending thing. And one. Secondly, the other thing is that they're willing to learn from others. For example, the heart of

the F-35 is the so-called helmet-mounted display, which is, as I'm sure you know, it's not a helmet-mounted display at all. It means simply you put this thing on your head and you can see below your aircraft because there are all these visuals outside. So sideways beyond, you can see back, forward, and you can direct a missile by looking at the target and signaling, and the missile head turns so that the missile gets launched right off the airplane without waiting those long minutes before the whole airplane turns and all that stuff. All of these, where did they get this from?

They got it because when the East German government collapsed, the West German Air Force inherited some MEC 29s. The Israelis knew that the Syrians were getting MEC 29s. So they were very, very anxious to go. the Germans were very nice to let him go into the airplane. The first thing they saw there was a helmet mounted display. It wasn't the two and a half million dollars plendiferous, technicolor, beautifully painted thing, but it was that thing. And they immediately, frankly, tried, started to copy it. And they developed it for their own zone. And the U.S. Air Force, in the meantime,

even though the Army had such helmets for the helicopters, the Air Force couldn't care less. And also, the Israelis reported that the Mick 29 is a fantastic airplane. It's an intercept. It goes right up. It will shoot things down and something. I read the whole U.S. report on the Mc29, U.S. Air Force report. Well, the paint wasn't very good. Secondly, the radar screen was dim.

And then they pointed out, of course, it doesn't have long range because the engine drinks a lot. But it's an interceptor. So it's not supposed to have long range unless the plane is defecting. You know, it's supposed to get off and shoot down the bomb. The report was not an attempt to find out about Soviet technology. It was to explain why Soviet technology is rubbish, okay? So that's a difference, okay? So it's high-speed development, willing to learn around and open door.

There are two footnotes in the book about open-door meme, okay? One is when I was visiting, I was a tourist, basically. 1970. It was a tourist and they lost the RF4, two-seater, two-engine phantom to take pictures across the canal. So I immediately went to the Ministry of Defense to see the chief scientist and to tell him that in Switzerland, my rich relatives in Switzerland had just bought an airplane for their kid that could fly 50 kilometers and you could put the dangled camera on it. So who did I tell this to? Well, the chief scientist, who was a mathematician who I read, How do I get to see him? I went to the guard outside. The guy, you know, the soldier

outside and I said, I want to talk to the chief scientist. He said, why do you want to talk to the chief scientist? So I'm not telling you, because it's a secret. And so the guy picks up the phone, calls the office, chief scientist says, come right upstairs. That happened when I was a kid, a long time ago. Then, four years ago, I was an Israel on holiday with my wife and I got the inviting me to go and visit the Hizbalah village built on the side of Mount Carmel which is a full reproduction containing all the rockets everything and I said how do you get into the tunnels here and the guy says oh well so Yerite goes in a specialized unit you put ropes under the arms we're going to lower him into the thing he has an uzi he'll shoot and I said

forget it I said the way to do it is to drill holes there we're using iron RPGs. The Russian makes wonderful RPGs. They're very cheap. And all we take is an M-1-1-3, which is this boxy, useless, true carrier. The Israelis have thousands of them, and they're selling them online, by the way. How much? I don't know. But they were getting rid of them. I said, we take this, we put a Malbara box, a Marlborough cigarette-type magazine in the back, and a little arm to pull them out, dangle them to get things, and we start drilling holes. We don't know where the tunnels are, but the fact is the villages are quite compact, they're between the houses. These things are very cheap, let's do it, and so on. Again, I was there on a family thing.

I see this thing on Mount Carmel. I tell these thoughts of mine to the brief, to the escorting officer who was just a general purpose, lieutenant colonel, infantry at reserve, and next morning, people showed up at the hotel. It said, and by that night, I meant the head of R&D. command. In other words, open door, open door, okay? People have ideas, listen to them. Open door is very important. And in this country, Open Door would do much more. There is no open door. And a final thing about R&D, it's very good that there's economic constraints, that you don't have all the money in the world. And you are a Marine, right? So the Marines, This is desperate, Berger, the commander of Marine Corps, desperately wanted to get many more

landing things, landing, call them landing craft, okay? Many more landing craft and because it's distributed strategy to be able to tackle this dem distributed islands, the Chinese harbors. So it goes to NAF-C, Naval Sea Systems Command, because Marine Corps do not have any zero, the Navy doesn't let them develop anything at all. all. They have to deal them. So they go to NAFSI and the Marines say we want the smallest possible, simplest possible thing and we want it next week. And it was called the light landing craft and they was advertised. They were very proud. They got the price

down to $100 million. It's a box. It's a steel box with an engine supposed to move people. I don't know why it cost 100 million, but they were proud instead of being ashamed. Well, then what happens? Nafseille looks at this thing and it's called the light landing craft for 100 million dollars and they started working on it, working on it. And Berger, Marine Corps, commandant found out that they were not going to do these boxes for him. They were going to start developing them, making bigger and better. So he intervened, they told them to buzz off.

It turns out the command of the Marine Corps. The only way he could impress on them would have been to take his sidearm and shoot them because they pay no attention. And now the Navy proudly announces that in five years time, there'll be the medium landing thing. The light one is dead. They have the medium one, and of course, instead of having 50, they're going to have four, and so on. In other words, all those people who are seeing right in columns deploring the small size of the U.S. Navy, the thing to do is to go there to NAFC and shoot every second person, because they are responsible.

They refuse. If it's an aircraft carrier, it can't be just a $7 billion aircraft carrier. It has to be $13 billion by putting on an electric. They don't have this. They have the great poverty is great. Finally, a few other, a couple of other things. One is that I got the information by talking to a lot of people. My co-author, he is a reserve officer, very interested in R&D.

He talked to a lot of people. Then he has students, graduate students at the university, who went to research various things. And this is wonderful, let's call it, normal research to find out things and so. But then I got a wonderful resource. The wonderful resource is that Israel has a controller general. He has a person who makes sure that things get done properly, that there isn't mismanagement, there isn't waste, and that procedures are followed.

And so I read his report on the Iron Dome, and it's a catalog of absurd, ridiculous, and enormous violations. The guy, this guy, gold, his name is the, who wanted the Iron Dome, he was a catalog. He wanted to develop this in four years. Okay, four years. So he went to industry and said, I don't have actually a budget for this, because he only had the R&D budget, but, you know, there will be money. There will be money because the politicians who will understand that we have to

have it. So all these different state, well, the state companies, you know, they all started doing things. So the Comptroller General lists an endless series of violations of proper rules and procedures. If they had been followed, the Iron Dome would be now being tested out. And his catalog of violations, what the rule was and what they actually did, tells you how to do R&D, which is ignore the rules, do it, and that's what they actually do. So they have actually erected in the same machinery of 5,003 regulations that burden the Defense Department, but they have an advantage. They don't respect it. They violate it.

Now, less funny is what happened there on October 7. And two things happened. First, intelligence fell into the recurring Israeli delusion that there will be one day some Arab leadership that is actually interested in development. So they saw that Hamas wasn't launching rockets anymore. Hamas was tipping them off about Islamic jihad rockets. And the Israelis were getting very,

good intelligence from their spies in Gaza and very good intelligence from Hamas. Indeed, when they went and hit something that was, there was a nice explosion, that was Islamic jihad, and it was prevented from launching his rocket. So intelligence was deceived very skimfully by Hamas, by feeding them intelligence, by not launching rockets, and by telling, say, we've turned the corner, we want the people of Gaza to live well, and so forth, and all that's similar. that went into the tunnels and so on, all came through Hasdarkport,

and he was paid for by Qatar and everything is wonderful and so on. The recurrent delusion, that there is an Arab leader somewhere who actually does what Portuguese leaders do, Norwegian leaders do, and, you know, Haiti would be

the exception, but even Kurosau leaders do and some, which is to try and, you know, improve things a bit. Still a little money, but also a something to happen? So that was the intelligence mistake. But the intelligence mistake is, was not sufficient for October 7. You also had to have a military planner's mistake. And the military planner knows that the business of intelligence is called intentions, intentions.

That's what they get from all their gossip. And there the military planner has to deal with capabilities because intentions can change overnight. So the military planner should have ignore this optimistic intelligence, realize that Hamas could change his mind, therefore they should have had proper presence there. So you may have seen a film clip of the Hamas people jumping around the top of America. That was a single tank. Before there was a troop, that was three tanks. Before there was a company, nine tanks. So military planners are always supposed to row against intelligence. If intelligence is, you know, they have to take into account the possibility of the intelligence is being too optimistic.

That's what they're paid for. And they didn't do it. They didn't do it at all because they had slimmed down all these presences. So for example, the observation, all the observation was done by these observation towers, their points, and they were manned by a single soldier who happened to be a female because females are supposed to be more attentive. A single girl. all the words. When Hamas attacked his towers, there was a single girl in them. Now, if you think

that this is unusual, it's not. I was a very, very old guy, and I wasn't in the 73 war. I crossed the canal. I had the best time, ate a lot of French cheese because one of Eric Sharon's admirers sent a truckload of French cheese, which was staking up our troop carriers, so we had to eat, you know, debris and all that stuff, crossed the canal at a great time. But that war, how did that war start? they had 22 forts along the canal. This was not supposed to be real forts, but just outposts, 22 outpost. Each outpost was supposed to be manned by like, let's say, a platoon. Let's call it 25 or something, not a full platoon.

Well, when the Egyptians attacked with 20,000 people in the very first wave, there were 411 soldiers in 17 of these outposts. There was only one outpost that was fully manned, up to Sten. and it never fell. It never fell right through the war. All it had was it had the platoon instead of having four or five guys and it's resistant.

So in other words, if people go out and build the stake, they're going to be optimists. They're going to be optimists and they're going to be risk-takers. So what you had on October 7 was the come-up of risk-taking optimists, encountering Hamas,

which, of course, in it's a deeply, you know, a fairly deeply perverted phenomenon because there are people who control the territory who don't give a damn about the territory. In fact, just the other day, somebody interviewed the Hamas person who said, you have all these tunnels, how come you don't let people shelter from air attack in the tunnels?

So no, no, no, the tunnels are for us. People, it's the UN that has to protect the people. Now, it was, they take no responsibility at all. That's Hamas. Behind Hamas is, of course, Iran. And the Tehran Times, my favorite news space, today was saying, well, Hamas was only the start. This is just the start.

We have the whole region. We have many possibilities to attack because we have the militias that we own in Iraq. We have, of course, Syria. And then, of course, the Houthis already launched a thing and so on. And you know, and you can see how broadly, how very tolerant these people are. Because Hamas ideology is Sunni, strictly Sunni, and according to them, the Shia are heretics, and strict Sunnis really believed that it should be killed. And Islamic State acted on that.

If somebody did not know the Sunni form of prayer, they killed it on the side of the road. But they are broad-minded, these Iranians. They support Hamas, even though Hamas, for example, Hamas would never let the Shia, if there were a Shia in Gaza, have a job like a teacher. In Egypt, there's a law, I guess that. But Hamas would not like the Shia exist in Gaza, really, but they will support them. They're very liberal, you know, and all that.

Houthis also, Houthis are nominally Shia, but they are not 12-birds like the Iranians. The Houthis are seveners, like the Israelis. And yet, they're broad-bounded. Of course, if you're in Iran as a seven-er, you're in real trouble because you're a heretic, but they're very broad-bundings to support. In fact, in Yemen, they even support the Zaitis, who are fibers.

So, the broad-minded Iranians, and we have to find a way of deterring them like tomorrow. Yeah. Well, on that theme, let me ask you. So that's... Can I just say two words about R&D? You can say 10 words. Research and development is not technology only. It's also about special units.

And the special units, they have developed purpose-designed special units. Some of them are world famous, like 8,200. They generate people. Others are much less known. But they are also doing things of some broader interest. For example, they have, they, and autistic soldiers are recruited, and they're serving a specialized unit of intelligence. Turns out that autistic is actually very good for differentiating intelligence photographs and

all kinds of stuff. There are all kinds of, in other words, having, since you have to have an army, one not use that army to raise your whole population by education and so on, but also deal with problems like juvenile delinquents. They have units. They don't put them in normal units. Units of juvenile delinquents that they socialize, socialize, and some of whom emerged from these units good enough to go into office school and become officers. So it's, you know, it's about the fact that, okay, you have to have an army. People have to serve. three years. About three years is a long time. That means you can really elevate the population

by injecting a lot of education and so on, and that's in a book as well. How do you evaluate both the strategy that's been pursued since October the 7th, which of course ultimately is the government's responsibility, but also how do you evaluate operational progress in Gaza? How's the IDF doing? So the purpose of the strategy is to actually find as many, how much must lead as possible and kill them. Every day, they find new ones, they publish their photographs, their names, and their functions. And how do you find these people by attacking headquarters?

The headquarters are not, you know, large headquarters. They're small outfits in different places. They're in tunnels and some. How do you locate those headquarters? You locate them among the things because of the fact that the October 7 attack. which people compared to the Holocaust was nothing like the Holocaust because they found more than a thousand dead Hamas people who had been killed by householders, villages, people there with their handguns, with their rifles, and so on. And on them, they found a lot of documents. Strangely enough, they were carrying documents. First thing you do when you're going to combat, you empty your pocket. They didn't, or empty their pockets. They didn't have elaborate manuals or something like that, but they had actually things like,

go to hear little memo chits and things like that. So they're able to process that intelligence. Communication intercepts gave you something. And then, of course, the other thing is that from the moment the operation started, Arabic speaking, Israeli soldiers have entered individually dressed as locals of different kinds. They're in Han Yunus. They say they are from Jabaliyah. They're in Javalia.

They say from Han Yunis. And they've been going in and doing things like volunteering, you know, volunteering. And so, oh, well, you have to volunteer, go there and so. So beginning a lot of Intel to locate these headquarters or these leaders or these hangouts, whatever they are. And that's what they're doing. They're not trying to find hostages.

They're not trying to find the very top leaders. Of course, I mean, the top is in Qatar. They could easily find him. In fact, they should find him. But they don't just kill him with a shot. It's too easy and something more imaginative, you know. But the aim is to destroy the cadres, you know. Find counters and along the way when you approach one of those situations,

there might be a couple of people who are protecting them, so they get rid of them. So it's basically getting rid of people and then since these people are in tunnels or nearby, then you identify tunnels and when you finish with the tunnel, of course you destroy the tunnel. Now, most, all of the rockets are produced in tunnels. The materials thereof are held in tunnels. And so until you destroy the tunnel system, a very large part, they can continue to make, assemble, and launch rockets.

Because at the end of this tunnel, you turn right, then there's a hole above, and you just launch a rocket. So that's what the operation is. It's strictly detailed operation. It's infantry. And the Israelis are doing it at the peak. pace and what they're not doing is to do, you know, rushing forward and so on. Because among the things, every one of the tunnels so far entered was booby trap. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let me ask you

about the pace then. I mean, I find myself worried. I assume a lot of folks in the room are worried because there is a window, I think, internationally that will ultimately close in terms of sympathy for the Israeli cause, in terms of American support, this administration support, I should be more specific, for what Israeli. is doing, you already hear calls for a pause, which there's no such thing as a pause, just temporary ceasefire. So there are already calls for ceasefires. The deliberate pace may have very good operational justification, as you just cited. But it's, you know, your book is about this sort of spirit of innovation and daring and surprise. Whatever is happening right now seems

sort of linear and deliberate. Okay. So they are looking at the clock, okay? For example, they can accommodate the pauses, no end deposits, by simply making them localized. We have a localized pause here for you to do this, like you remove people, or to bring supplies to a hospital. They can do localized pauses. This is not a World War II air bombardment of vast areas. These are a single targeted bombing, so they can accommodate the pauses. That's what they figured out they can do. As for deliberation, the deliberation is they're not deliberate in a sense. of, you know, what were to, let's postpone the day by a year, you know, so we're better prepared. We're talking about deliberation, about sort of running in versus rushing in, you know,

and they are losing soldiers along the way. They know they're going to lose soldiers. This war will not be fought without losing soldiers. But what my understanding is that they, as soon as President Biden talked about pauses, That was their solution. Localized pauses. That's how you manage it. Now, as for losing support, the way to gain support is to be a victim. So I'm afraid there's a limit to how much you prioritized, you know, having support. You're willing to go without support, lose support along the way. And so, but so far, interestingly enough, support has been maintained much more than anybody could have expected

from a range of European governments. The only European leader I've put, talked to is Meloni, who is an old friend of mine as it happens. I asked Meloni, I said, Melani, when will the pressure on you be that you have to switch and start deploring what's going on and says, it says only the church is bothering me. I don't care about them of the far left. I don't care, of course. You know, the Caribbean area can deal with them if they assemble. But the church bothers me all the time. The church, you know, the church really loves Palestinians, it turns out. So, and Ba'i is not the churchgoer. You know, I mean, you know, she's a woman who has a child,

never bothered to marry. So they picked the wrong Prime Minister from that point of view in there. The German, on the hand, as you know, the very interesting that the German left is the one aggressive on Ukraine and so, but they're holding. For the time being, there's more time, more time. And they are trading of how many soldiers do you lose, versus how much time, and I think they're trying to trade this off every single day. So I'm conscious of our time.

I'm asking you a question or two about the book and the IDF more broadly, and then we'll see if we have a few minutes, if anyone in the audience has a question. So this question comes from the Marine in me. I feel compelled to ask this question. In the book, you talk about, I believe it's Motion, Diane, visiting the White House and observing a Marine review, a ceremonial, probably Marines from Aft. Yeah, right, right. And he comments, and you record in the book, that he feels, in some ways, offended,

that you have these fine fighting men being used as sort of marionettes. Are you sure it was the Marines and it wasn't the ceremonial guys? Promise it. Well, they're a ceremonial Marines. You have to have the third infantry from the Army. Same applies if it's the third infantry. Same principle. That these fine fighting men are being used for performances, marionettes,

and this is not how we fight. We don't fight information like this, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that's all well and good. And I confess the times I've been around the IDF all after my marine career, the informality of the IDF, which you make a strong campaign. for in the book makes me uncomfortable. And the case you would make for the kind of very visible performance of discipline you see in a place like the Marines or certain units of the U.S. Army is, here, I'll make a 15-second

version of it. Standing post is one of the hardest things any soldier will ever do, because most of the time you stand post, nothing will ever happen. You might go years, you might go a whole career with nothing ever significant happening as you stand guard. And yet, when something does happen, you'll have seconds, maybe a fraction of a second and to react, which requires extraordinary vigilance, excuse me, and how do you generate that vigilance without the kind of culture that's created at a place like, say, Paris Island?

How does the IDF for all that it gains from this culture of discussion and debate and everything that there are clearly virtues to, are there also drawbacks to it? At the end of the book, I actually have an eyewitness involving Beirut, 1982. I was in Beirut, 1982, and I was actually visiting a friend of mine who was there in one of the units, and suddenly I see a group of Marines who have landed there. They've landed there because Kemp Weinberger wanted Israelis out, and he didn't want any cooperation at all between Marines and Israelis because there was a whole idea, politically and something. So there's this Marine lieutenant and some other guy.

they're looking for Israeli officer because they were just trying to liars. They're just arrived. And I look around and I see the Israeli officer. He's sitting on the ground with his soldiers, with his back against the wall, and he's eating out of a can using the can opera,

whatever the one is as a spoon. He has no thing. And his hair is wild. He's unshaven. And his uniform is, you know, all messed up, just like his soldiers. So the Marines, I could see on their face, they're disgust,

the idea that an officer is sitting on the ground, eating out of a can. The nice thing happened is that there was some shooting started. So immediately these guys got up in a tactical pose all around the officer, they're all alert, they hold their weapon, and they're ready to do it. So the Marines went through both, and I mentioned this. Because I asked him, I said,

you were disgusted when you saw these guys, sitting with their backs against the wall, completely like that, and making no attempt and something. But they're tactically responsible. The mess and the mess and outward in discipline and all that are all part of an unseparable culture. And I read the conclusion. I write about it because I got from fantastically good data.

There was a reserve unit which specialized in getting people who served in foreign armies. And so this officer, commanding, interviewed these people about the early army. And all of them agreed that never been in their lives in such absolutely messy, confused, disorganized, chaotic organization like the Israeli army. And then one of them got up and said,

you know, I was a South African army. And every time when we're moving into Angola, every night we stopped, we established a camp. The camp was all arranged, a line that we painted in white, the interests and so on. And it took us six months. to realize that the insurgents were using our self-delineation and stuff. So in other words, you cannot separate the dynamic, you cannot take that and get the other,

you have to make a choice. You have to make a choice. But this marine problem was raised in Israel a long time ago by the commandant general of the tank force, General Talik, who absolutely believed that if, if there's no outward discipline, there is no inward discipline. And that lack of inward discipline manifested itself in the poor maintenance of arm and vehicles that need very specific, very careful maintenance. So he instituted in the armor corps absolutely per uniform check drills, saluting the whole thing in the armor core.

And he coexisted with the others there. So they're aware of this because one of this, one of this, in the Israeli army was the people served in the British Army. You know, and they, General's Child, made the Army, if you joined the Army Corps, you had to have clean boots, okay? And the shining boots. And then, you know, they're aware of it, they're doing. However, you will, you cannot, even if it were a superior model, you couldn't apply it. Yeah. Final question for me, and then we'll take one or two from the team here.

You talk about this concept of a macro innovation, and you talk about how the Israeli complex allows for the military industrial complex unique to Israel allows for these macro innovations. And this ties into topics you've been writing about your whole career and how strategy works. What is a macro innovation? Okay. You haven't, you go into a building and it says research and development. They have a budget. And you asked them, what are you doing? And what they're doing is they're taking an existing configuration, an existing weapon system. And let's make it better. Okay. So, So when you take an existing configuration and make it better, several things happen.

One of them is that that platform, that, you know, the parameters thereof already block off all kinds of innovations because they don't fit the platform. You can't do something revolutionary and you end up spending a lot of money to upgrade the platform. And then since you are operating within unchanged parameters, it costs even more. example, our last two aircraft carriers. There were two aircraft carriers we have, and I forget what is the Bush or the Reagan,

whatever it is, and they have the exact same number of aircraft on board. They can generate exactly the same number of sorties, and one cost $7 billion and the other $13 billion, while not adding one sortie capability. Why was that? Well, because they had, they did, when you have research and development,

money and you do not change the configuration. So then you're taking the same thing and you spend a lot of money to get very minor incremental upgrade. In the case of the aircraft carried, they spent $5 billion to replace the steam catapult with an electromagnetic catapult, five billion, and the electromagnetic catapult didn't work for a long time. When he got it to work, he wasn't working any better than steam thing. In other words, if you confined R&D to incremental improvement. You spend a lot of money to get very little. You have to do macro.

Macro, that is to say, not a slightly better way of having something, but something, spend your money to achieve complete configuration change. Now, why is that? Why is it different in civilian life? It's completely different for the following reason. Every weapon system you have has evoked countermeasures. has evoked tactical countermeasures, counterweapons, countercensors, and all that.

If you change the configuration with a whole new platform, then you'll get a countermeasure holiday. You get the period of time until the other side learns how to develop the specific countermeasures. If you remain in incremental improvement and not jumping, then you don't get the countermeasure holiday. Like, for example, when Israelis were the first to do, these, you know, what we call now drones,

they used to be called UAVs, then they were before that called RPVs, remotely the vehicle. They were the first. Since nobody else had them, they did not have to put data leaks for information because nobody had any way of intercepting the data.

Now, somebody who does the same thing encounters all the countermeasures against them. So macro innovation is to come up with a new configuration, a new platform, so that you get the benefit of the X number of years until they get countermeasures. And that is the difference is very different because one of them is you need obedient institutional people who do these incremental improvements. And the other thing you only get when you bring in outsiders. Macro means outsiders.

So it's very important to have outsiders with ideas should have access because they're the only ones who are going to say, oh, there's a completely different way of doing it. And a series of them. I'll just mention one. Now, there's a German, world famous German, well-famous expert on explosives. Absolute. Top of the thing.

And he invented reactive armor. Reactive armor. These boxes that you put on top of armor that pre-determine bazookas and stuff. So he's as a top explosive expert, of course, he had established relations with Krauss-Mefay that makes armed vehicles in Germany. So he goes to them and say, let's put boxes to blow up

to stop bazookers and so on. They told him to get lost. We're not going to pay money to put explosives around tanks. He went to the army, the army told me get lost. So then he picked up the phone and he called the Israeli defense officer in the embassy, in Bonn, as it then was. And he calls him up, and he happened to be a naval officer who knows nothing at all about armor.

Naval officer heard what he was saying. He called the chief armor development, the same guy, the discipline, clean boots guy, who developed the Merkovash tank all by himself, you know, one-man shop, the whole wreck of all this general child, tells him on the phone and the science, call him back, buy him a ticket, I'm waiting for him at the airport tomorrow. This guy who was a well-known scientist could not get his, you know, the German army even to look at it. He's flown to Israel and the Israelis had these boxes, put him on their tax, and all

the time. He also made a lot of money because eventually the Israelis exported them and he got a royalty. All right. We have time for just one or two, but Dr. Lovelock may stick around when we're done chatting. Cliff May. The Islamic Republic of Iran has a strategy. Your strategist, and the strategy is essentially to use proxies to fight their wars. So that's Hamas, Islamic Jihad, various Shiah, militias against the Americans. Seems to me that we don't see the list that Israel and certainly the United States does not have a strategy to defeat this enemy that is waging a war. against them, death to Israel, eventually to be followed by death to America. Constant Noble was not destroyed in a day. What would be, what strategy would you recommend to both Israel and the United States?

You can chase the different dogs or you can go to the owner. And the way to go to the owner is that the owner happens to be an oil exporter. And he has no pipelines, all is exports by panthers. And the thing you do is to wait outside the state. straits of our moves. Tanker has the Iranian oil. You don't let it through. You'll sit, you sell it. He put the whole U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf not to attack the Iranians at all, but to defend our friends. So you have the U.S. Navy in the President of Gulf not touching and not attacking, simply protecting our tank, you know, our friends' tankers

and service, their tankers don't reach destination. Cut off the funds. That's maximum. Yes, because the Israelis can only reach Iran and bomb Iran with nuclear weapons. So the Iranians keep talking about destroying Israel. If they destroy Israel, Tehran, Isfahan, Shirans, Hamidam, they're all going to burn. So by nuclear weapons are too powerful to be useful. The Israelis cannot deter with nuclear weapons any more than poor Putin can get anything with nuclear weapons. They cannot do it. As for conventional bombing, the Israelis can reach and bomb Tehran, but they will be symbolic

amounts of ordinances and you couldn't achieve what you want to achieve. So my view is first the US government has to be in the business of deterring Iran. They have to do so realistically, not by starting a war and all. No, simply stopping the tankers, stopping the tankers, cutting off the entire income because the Iranian economy is not flourishing, as you might say. And so on. I was in Iran three years ago. I didn't actually go to Iran because my friends are not there. And I'll tell you the place is pissed poor.

And so people were standing all day selling a few ducks on the side of the road. Tabriz itself is not the favorite town of the regime because of the regime. But still, pretty miserable. So you cut off the oil funds. They have no funds to give to them because they sell the oil on Monday and they give the money Tuesday to Hezbollah and to the militias in Iraq and Syria and Yemen. So that's the thing to do.

We need to have deterrence. We need to have a way of doing it and not by starting the World War, et cetera, et cetera. Simply stopping the tankers, intercept them well outside the Persian Gulf, but you have to put the whole U.S. Navy in the Gulf to protect our guys. I got to ask, how was the visa process three years ago?

Do you mail the paperwork into the interest section, or how does that? Listen, I don't know where you were brought up. I was brought up in Palermo, history. Okay? So, I do not, when I go to countries of that sort, I do not actually use a passport, you know, because, you know, paperwork, paperwork.

Yeah, it's a pain. However, if anybody doubts my story, which may sound improbable, I actually, I had with me by my assistant, to the Japanese lady, and Japanese are well known for taking lots of pictures. She took lots of pictures. All right. One last question. Yes, sir.

Hi. Since October the 7th, the role of Qatar is an intermediary to release hostages and such has been sort of highlighted. And I've been convinced that, you know, those of us on the Israel, pro-Israel side of things, I think we are maybe too content with, like, how is it that this country, how is it that we are okay, that they are friends with the terrorists and they can get us a few hostages, yes, which is good. But should it, Like, shouldn't, isn't it time for our side of the fight to reevaluate how much we tolerate the Qataris and all their shenanigans?

So I forget when he was, but the Saudis asked the US military to leave the soil of the kingdom. They went to Qatar and established a base. That base is a comfortable base. Qatar is on the water. Everything goes fine. And so they accommodate. Then they have, of course, always had Al Jazeera,

which is the old Nazareth, the old Arab national and Sopranza Western and everybody saw as a so. So don't talk to the Saudis about the Catharists, because the Saudis would like to go there and squashed them. Just get rid of them. The whole lot of them. It's a bunch of upstart out of fringe bedrooms. Their so-called royal family, there were people

who had the other guys had one camel, that, you know, there had two camels, so they became the ruler, okay? These... Qualitated military edge. Saudis wanted to sweep them off the board. What happens is they accommodate the Iranians. They accommodate Hamas.

They all of course had the Mossad office in Doha, a long time. And the people in Doha has probably put on weight also. So they serve everybody, and the Qataris are open to the Israelis. I mean, they have a Mossad office in Doha. You know, and they have the Iranians there, the Americans. is there and nobody wants to hit them because everybody has this thing. However, you might conclude if somebody were doing foreign policy in the United States, there may be such a person, I have not heard of him yet.

They might conclude that the negatives are worse than the policy. But for example, in regard to cement, the cement of the tunnels was brought into Ashdard court. And who gave permission to bring it in, the Israelis? Who paid for the cement? Qatar. Why was the cement brought in? Well, because this poor person is living in refugee camps, like the Jabaliyah refugee camp. I've heard about a lot in the last few days. The pictures don't look like a refugee

camp. You don't see a single tent there. Maybe is there some kids practicing camping behind one of these apartment houses. But anyway, the Israelis allowed the cement to go in. Okay? And the Qatar is paying for it, et cetera. So that's the story. All right. Dr. Everett looked back. Thank you for doing this. on the book. Thank you, sir. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.