School of War - The Dangerous Pause in Iran, with Mark Montgomery

Episode Date: July 28, 2026

Mark Montgomery, senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral, returns to School of War to analyze the latest military developments across the world. Why has the Iran war entered such a dangerous and uncertain phase? What role will the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea play in its next stage? And what do Iran and Ukraine reveal about the changing shape of global conflict? 02:22 - Why the Iran War Suddenly Paused 04:44 - An Uneasy Ceasefire and Dueling Blockades 05:35 - The Challenge of Escorting Ships Through Hormuz 07:19 - Why America's Convoy Strategy Isn't Working 09:15 - The Navy's Readiness Dilemma 09:59 - Blockade vs. Convoy 12:08 - Why the U.S. Must Take More Risk at Sea 14:10 - America's Munitions Problem 15:05 - The Weapons Shortages Shaping the War 16:29 - America's Drone Defense Gap 21:11 - The Electronic Warfare Deficit 23:13 - The Red Sea and the Houthi Threat 26:15 - How Iran and Ukraine Are Connected 30:37 - Russia's Options for Escalation 35:04 - Is a Long Blockade Better Than Escalation? This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, the builder platform for the American warfighter, fielded across the force and live on the frontline today. Learn more at palantir.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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What the heck is going on in the war with Iran? It looked for several weeks there like we were on a steady march to escalation, but as is the way of this administration. As of Friday night, things seem called. off for now. What's the future of our blockade in the Strait of Hormuz and Iran's own blockade? How does this war connect to the war in Ukraine? What the heck is going on in the Red Sea? By the way, how does it all fit together? What's going to happen next? We are joined, of course, with probably what are the best guests to address these questions? Mark Montgomery. Let's get into it.

and they state we continue to face the rain situation in the ground. Ending ground and fighting the fields and in the street, which will never have a right. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today, Mark Montgomery. He is a retired rear admiral in the United States Navy, senior director of FD's Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation. He's also a senior fellow at FD. He served in the United States Senate on the Senate Armed Services Committee after his career in the Navy. importantly, of course, he is a regular guest here on School of War, helping us understand the world at war. Mark, thank you so much for coming back on the show. Thank you very much for

having me, Er. I thought we would start sort of in the obvious place, which is big picture on Iran. We're recording here at 8 in the morning on Monday, July 27th. And for what seems like not the first time in recent months, the last week to two weeks was this steady march to escalation, not just in the president's rhetoric, which was definitely pointing in that direction, but in meaningful military steps and deployments to the region, it did look like Central Command was really about to expand what it was targeting in Iran. Only for Friday night, the party apparently it seems to have been called off, at least for now, forgive the flippant language there. Mark, help us understand what's going on here.

Yeah, thanks. So, you know, I think that's exactly as you described, that, that Neither side, I don't believe, I think what President Trump looks at how hard it would be to drive around to the trading table with economic pressure, I think he is always looking for another solution. I'm personally from the school of if he should just keep up the economic pressure. He should have escalated the bombing campaign. We should both hit the area around Bondur-Boss to knock down their ability to affect straight or removes shipping. we should increasingly attack their industrial base, anything attached to the military. By the way, anything attached to the IRGC, and the IRGC owns a ton of construction, shipbuilding, all kinds of other industry in Iran.

In other words, put real pain on the IRGC, not just on the Iranian people. And then obviously, concerning the blockade, which is still in effect. That's how you pressure them to a good deal. But President Trump, as is often the case, I think, is looking for the quick deal. And the quick deal was to call it off for now. Now, he did threaten, he did get them to agree to the call off by threatening, you know, bringing in increased forces. I agree with that decision. You know, bringing in increased fighter squadrons.

By the way, the best way to impose more, impose more cost on Iran is bomber forces. And we brought him B-1 bombers for some of the strikes last week, so demonstrating we would do that. So I think he was ramping up. I would have kept going, but I understand why he did it because I'm starting to understand Donald Trump, which is, you know, he's not looking for the best solution. He's looking for the fastest solution. And when you say he got them to agree, that is to say, we've also seen the Iranians stop their retaliatory rounds of strikes. So we seem to be in a position where we're back to some kind of uneasy ceasefire of sorts, but with the two dueling blockades at work in the straight. And almost no flow. I mean, probably a couple million. barrels a day max, plus the pipeline flow. So probably under, you know, a total of 10 million barrels

max a day, you know, 50% or less of normal. And that assumes max flow through the pipelines in Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. Well, let's talk about that because there's a bunch of stuff I want to get to here. I want to talk about the munition stocks issue and air defense in the region, missile defense in the region, all this stuff that's been top of mind the last couple weeks. But let's focus it on the straight for a second. You and I have spoken a number of times since it started this conflict about what it would take to escort shipping through the straight in the face of ongoing Iranian resistance. I think both you and I concluded pretty early, probably you before me, because you did it. You served in the Gulf in the 80s.

So you saw it firsthand, Rzai had to figure it out from reading and talking to you, that this was going to be a protracted thing, that that's just what war with Iran. involved, assuming you didn't get swift regime changes, you were signing up for protracted problems in the Gulf and in the Strait of Hormuz. Back in early March, when we were talking about this, I was certainly envisioning an escort operation that looked a lot like the 1980s, which is to say it involved, you know, a lot of surface vessels in close proximity to the ships that they were guarding. I've been surprised. One, I mean, I was initially surprised back in March, April by the president's reluctance,

really to do much at all in that front. Then I was surprised when Project Freedom in its short-lived public form and then apparently it's longer-lived, quieter form thereafter, how aviation-dependent it's been. And I personally find it very hard to figure out exactly how well it's working or not. That is to say, the ships that it's taking through obviously go dark. So they're not necessarily getting counted in all of the sort of publicly reported information. But then, but I don't, you know, this is not my area of expertise. So, Mark, I guess I'll land this in the form of two questions. One, have you been surprised at how escrow operations, project freedom, call it what you will, have actually shaped up in practice? And two, what is your evaluation of that part of the

overall operations so far? Yeah, thanks. You're right. Since the beginning of the closure, which is about, you know, during actual act at really heavy combat operations, I didn't expect much flow, but, you know, particularly after the ceasefire at the beginning, you know, the beginning of April, I expected flow to go back up because I expected convoy operations. I wrote a piece on this in New York Times and said, look, so do this, you need airborne cover, you need helicopters doing small craft attack, you know, shooting small craft coming in, and then you need actual ships escorting, because that's what, look, that was my experience. And maybe, for a little bit, I thought maybe I'm dated and I don't get the coverage windows completely, but I'm not.

because ships were getting hit. The bottom line is, what we did was two destroyers or frigates at the time. We'd have to use destroyers today with, you know, two, three, four escorts, you know, big, and I'm from the VLCCs. If you're a small ship, you want to get behind them, okay. Or, you know, on the Omani side of them, go for it. But there's two, three, four ships that are two million barrel, you know, large crude carriers or LNG ships and we're escorting them through.

And then we take empties back under escort and you take a, back in and out. And it requires a lot of destroyers. I'd said you need 24, 25, and I was surprised when we kind of stabilized at 18. But that's part of the Central Command's plan, which is not to escort them, but instead to put, you know, destroyers some distance away that really have a marginal role to play, except maybe on an off-axis shot or something. But the reality is aircraft overhead are shooting down drones and cruise missiles. And they're not perfect, particularly on cruise missiles. So, I mean, I think we took risk, plus smaller drones that don't quite meet the aperture originally of a mis, you know, one-way attack drones.

And a couple of those have hit ships. So the bottom line on this is they need to go to escort. They need to put more ships in. And that's painful for the Navy. The Navy has about 20% of its destroyers in the Central Command area of responsibility. they could probably at any one time get 40% of destroyers underway, maybe 50%, you know, for combat operations. But they're unwilling to do it because they're worried about the readiness burn on the backside. Well, kind of not winning the war is worse than the readiness.

Right now we're in a trapped position. And doing it kind of half-assed is not, I mean, I'd rather go full-ass and get it done than go half-ass and string this out. Still end up with a readiness burn on the backside where destroyers and aircraft carriers and Air Force fighters, squadrons are not available two, three, and four years from now. But when the war we're in. And we are operating this blockade. I saw a report that we went after another ship that was trying to evade it just over the, at least one that was trying to evade it just over the weekend. The Iranians are, by the way, continuing with their own efforts in this vein. Is there a trade-off question between the blockade itself and running escort operations? Like, that's one thing that,

So two things immediately occur to me in terms of their reluctance in addition to your point about overall readiness. One, the resource tradeoff with the blockade demands, but I'm not sure that's real. I don't know enough about naval tactics to know how real that is. And then two, this question of, you know, the technology itself, like whether or not it's necessary. I guess your point, your point is just it's, it is necessary, as evidenced by the fact that Iran keeps succeeding. Yes. So look, there's a whole bunch of lines of effort for the surface combatants, the destroyers. A couple of ships off of Iran off of Israel defending against a ballistic missile attack against Iran. You know, we had three at one point, then two. You either have to have one or two, probably two. You then have a couple, two to three to four, usually three, defending each carrier strike group, and there's two of them. You then have some on blockade. That's the steady state laid on right now. those three missions. Now, a fourth mission is the Bob El Mandeb has always had one or two, and now it may need more if we're going to need to defend that up to three or four. And then

you have the convoying operations. I've gone well past 17, 18 total. That's why I said 24. You know, if I'm wrong, it's 26, it's 26. The numbers, whatever, the Commodore and the strike group, whoever, you know, fifth fleet commuters say is necessary for convoy to be added it as a line of effort. But I'm guessing the convoy line of effort, probably, needs, you know, five or six pairs of two, you know, to do these back and force, back and force and have a little bit of respite in between. So, you know, from my point of view, we're going to need more destroyers in there. And then that burns readiness, you know, but I would get it, I would get it done now. I would have pushed harder, you know, to do that now. And I know it's

painful. Look, the ships that have done transits, you know, the rumor mill in the Navy is, there are a lot of weapons fired at them and they fired a lot of weapons. back, but you got to do that a couple times, be successful. And by the way, the enemy exposes themselves every time they do it. So when you do these convoids, they have a little extra lead up overhead to shoot the shooters, you know, and get rid of the archers instead of the arrows on a lot of this combat. So there's ways to make this work. Unfortunately, it takes risk in investment.

And we haven't seen, you know, we're not seeing that in this element of the Maritime Theater. Right. You point to yet another problem, which is these sort of cycles of escalation that tend to stem every time we sail ships, U.S. Navy ships through the straight, you end up in these intense exchanges of fire, which then in the past have led to these rounds of escalation, which lead us into problems that the administration is apparently dealing with right now in terms of munitions and have sustainable that increased level of fighting is. I guess, you know, in a world we would want to live in, I was about to say in a perfect world, but I think I'm not there anymore. the last couple weeks of strikes up and down the coast of Iran could be setting conditions for moving U.S. Navy ships back and forth through. Well, I hope that that's what I assumed it was. And I was excited when they're 150 to 200. And if you want to lay on economic strikes, like I mentioned earlier, they're additive.

I would keep up to 150 to 200 each day on there. So it's too painful for them to come out. But, you know, I thought that's the, I thought that was the prehist. they were setting exactly at the preconditions to do a more aggressive convoy operations. But apparently I was wrong because we've now gone. And I'd say this. It's been two days of pause. I mean, the side wave of this conflict is about four days.

You know, four days are going one way, four days ago in the other, and you're just kind of riding it. The 14 days was a little long. That's great swore metaphor making right there, the side wave time. I love that. Okay. So let's talk about the reasons. why we may be at a more dramatic pause than what you recommend, one where we have these dueling blockades, but otherwise it's a bit of a phony war in the sense of the 1939, 1940 period between

France and Britain on the one hand in Germany and the other, where you have a state of war, but not a ton of fighting. Munitions depletion. And then the interlinked issue of missile defense in the region, which has to do with the number of interceptors, presumably, and the, the disposition of various launchers and radars. Help us understand how real this problem is. It reportedly seems to be affecting the administration's decision-making in a major way. What's going on and should it be affecting decision-making like it is? Yes, I break this up into three groups of munitions,

and two of them are impacting the administration in the way you have heard there. The first one is long-range precision strike, Tomahawk, Jasmine, R, a couple other weapons. We did use a lot more than I expected in the initial days of the four-day conflict and continuing to ride it for a little bit, but those are usually necessary when you believe your adversary has an air defense capability that you need to knock back. So those got low, and they're at an undesirable state for, certainly for simultaneousity with Russia and China, you know, two wars at once. But they're even low for just a China. campaign. But to their credit, the administration in Congress had already started to ramp up production

of both those weapons systems, you know, of Tomok and Jasmine. I feel like that can restore it's up pretty quickly, but it's certainly an impact today. But I don't think they're necessary for what we're about to just, you know, what we would be going for the next couple months in Iran. The second group of munitions is the one in better shape. That's shorter range precision munitions like J-DAM, J-D-M-E-R, you know, the kind of 5001,000, 2,000-pound precision guys. munitions. I think we have, you know, more than 100,000 of those rounds. It's, I think we're okay to continue to pound somebody, you know, 500 rounds a day for a while, you know, so Matt, and it wouldn't be five, we haven't done 500 in a long time, but you know, less than that. So I think we're okay there.

But the third one is the one that, that I think is really driving their thought process that you describe, and that's defensive interceptors. That's Patriot, Thad, and then most importantly, our inability to shoot down drones. And I think we still have an inability to shoot down drones. One of the things I noticed, I know we'll talk about Ukraine later, by bringing one point in here. In Ukraine, I was there last week, observing these strikes, even with the newer Jaron drones,

the Ukrainians are shooting down 90% plus of drones, but only 50% of ballistic missiles. I think it's the flippity floppity in the Arabian Gulf. We're shooting down 90% plus of ballistic missiles, but only, you know, 50% of drones, and particularly drones shot at short range at Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, eastern Saudi Arabia.

They're getting through. We just don't have the defensive systems to handle it. And I still think we don't because we've ignored. There was only one general I ever came across in the U.S. Army that really got it. His name was C.D. Donahue, and we fired him, you know, or, you know, forced retired him about two weeks ago. And we didn't listen to him for the last year anyway when he said, look what's happening in Ukraine. We've got to be ready for this.

And the U.S. Army is not ready. And there's a 20-year trail of tears on this where they failed to be ready for low-cost cruise missile, you know, for short-range, low-cost cruise missile defense. And they failed to be ready for drone defense. And now our forces and our allies' critical infrastructure are completely exposed. And that is a problem for the administration. This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, administered by OSW CDAO powered by the Palantir platform.

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The warfighter closest to the fight is now the one building for it. That's how you fight at the speed of war. war. So we're getting hit pretty well with these cheaper weapon systems closer into Iran and I guess just more or less lucky that we haven't lost service members so far to that. We did lose that one guy to the controlled detonation in Iraq, which I guess you could say is downstream of that, because my understanding is that was an Iranian drone on the ground. And that the strike in Jordan, which killed the three folks out there at Mawafik-Sultan Air Base,

That was a ballistic missile, no, or am I confused about that? Look, for the overhead imagery, it looked like it to me. Just to burn, you know, the impact crater in the four what looked like burthing trailers. That could have been. Like I said, I think it's in the 90% above. You're going to still be hit. But you're not going to be hit with the frequency that the critical infrastructure is getting hit in those countries and our bases. I mean, the U.S. maritime.

Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain has been hit, you know, it would appears to be a dozen, you know, more than a dozen times. Almost every structure looks like has had some impact. Not every structure. A majority of structures have had impacts on them. I mean, we're close in and we're getting hit. That's the drones. Jordan took a hit.

Israel hasn't yet. I haven't heard about Western Saudi Arabia. Any facilities there are getting hit. But, you know, we could defend, I mean, it is a reasonable risk calculus for the ballistic missile defense. There's an unreasonable risk calculus for the drone defense right now. And that is a complete, you know, hole in our swing. And, you know, a year ago is on your show talking about the air defense aspect of this,

a cruise missile defense aspect of this, and the Army's abject failure. And I hate to put it, the Navy has all kinds of abject failures. But right now, the Navy's abject failures are not costing a servicemen and affecting America's ability to impose its national will on this Iranian conflict. This is a failure. I don't think any service can be, you know, the Air Force is like, crap. They've actually said, we're going to defend our own air bases now. Even though that's an Army responsibility, we've given up on them.

We're going to do it. The Marine Corps always is the Second Land Army of the United States, you know, was developing its own air defense systems. But I think they would struggle in a heavy drone environment. The other big thing is electronic warfare. As you'll remember from your days in the Marines, we are not good at electronic warfare anymore. It's a missionary that we've allowed to decay away. When I sit in Ukraine, electronic warfare takes care of a chunk of an inbound raid. You know, it really thins the herd, particularly in the short-range UAVs, the ones at lower altitudes.

And we don't have any of that. We don't have any of the, you know, the soldier-equipped, soldier backpack. You know, we have insufficient amounts of that. I would fear for the Marines taking trying to seize and hold Kargai Island. Not that they couldn't seize it. They'd kick ass. But holding it under that kind of threat would be absolutely, you know, negligent because of the number of forces that we would lose to one-way attack drones fired from Iran. So a real hole in our swing here.

And if we don't address that, it does affect our ability to both execute this war, to both execute this war. and protect our soldiers, you know, which is our number one mission set. Well, I am going to get some hate mail in response to that comment, Mark. But I welcome it because I'd be curious to see what the responses are for folks working this problem. I will say for, you know, 15 years ago or so in Afghanistan dealing with the Taliban operating largely on, you know, walkie-talkies in the open, you know, our signals intelligence and electronic warfare capabilities were up to that task. I remember there was a truck park nearby me at one point during the, during Marja,

and every now and then a Marine would lean out of the truck and shout, they're going to shoot an RPG. And lo and behold, they almost always did shoot an RPG right after that. It was pretty useful. So wait, no criticism here is Sagan and passive EW. The problem here is active EW jamming. Yeah, yeah. I'm conflating to you, obviously.

Both the Army and our second Army, I mean, the Marine Corps, you know, are struggling with this. And they know it. They're working on it now. But even now, if you're to look at the delivery dates on battlefield jamming capabilities, they're way too far in the future for the challenge we face today. All right. So let's zoom out a bit from Iran and the Strait of Hormuz.

There's at least two other things that we should talk about. Maybe touch on briefly the situation in the Babelmandib, which if the Houthis prove effective at hitting traffic going south there out of the Red Sea, seems like a major. And plus, we don't get the amount. of oil escorted through or energy resources escorted through the straight up to an acceptable number. Those two factors in combination seem to me like they are going to be a major problem, short, mid, long term, whatever for energy markets. So I'm curious your thoughts on that. And then we should conclude by talking about Ukraine from which I think you recently returned. So have some fresh insights for us there. So I'll pick up on Bobo Mandeb. You're exactly right. It's it was the beginning of this maritime conflict.

From the Navy's point of view, that was a start of the bad days, right? You know, so, you know, Sometime after October 7th, you know, the terrorist attack by Hamas on Israel, the Houthis began to fire into Israel and began to fire at shipping, quote, Israeli shipping, but pretty much anybody's shipping, going through the Babo Mandeb. Bobo Mendeb almost as constrained in many ways as the Strait of Homoos, although the part that the Houthis control isn't quite the apex of the strait. to deal with that two or three years ago, the United States shepherded Operation Prosperity Guard. In fact, Brad Cooper, his fifth fleet commander, set it up originally, with European allies

and we're able to, again, we didn't do exact convoy operations. We did kind of defended area operations, but two things on this. One, it's going to draw U.S. destroyers if we have to defend, if they can. keep shooting. The Saudis cannot defend their convoys. The alternative of going through the Suez is doable, but adds a ton of expense to the oil market. Again, it could happen. But if they want to come down to the Babo Mandab, that's 7 million barrels a day, it's going to have to

be defended. Now, here's a place where Europe could step up. Europe was a prosperity guardian. Europe, in theory, doesn't like the Houthis. The attacks from the Houthis are just a terrorist organization. If there's any game left in Europe, and that's a big if, they should be there. And here's a little trick. The problem when you under-resource your military for 25 years is the service that suffers the most

is the Navy, because it buys big, expensive things that has to maintain them. So both the only three navies, I think they could provide something useful, destroyer-wise, or the British who might be able to provide one, maybe two. The French could provide one or two. And the Spanish, so I'm going to discount the Spanish,

even though they have nice agents to destroyer. because they're just uncooperative in any possible way. But those other two countries should join us and maintaining an air defense thing, and that would take a little pressure off the U.S. so he could use destroyers elsewhere. And so I'm hoping we come to an international solution on the maritime air defense problem

that we're going to face in the Babel Mendeb. On Ukraine, I mean, there are any number of points of contact between these two conflicts. It really is, I think, fundamentally an error to see them as isolated conflagrations. One, I mean, there's a direct one. The Ukrainians just struck a ship. I think a Russian ship taking stuff to Iran in the Caspian Sea, which is leading to some strong words out of Tehran.

Two, as you recently pointed out, President Zelensky has, you know, essentially offered his own view on something that's been widely discussed, which is Russian targeting assistance for Iran in the war. So help us understand how these two wars. together and I want your take on how how things in Ukraine are going where for recent months, you know, the the public story, the sort of the Western press narrative has been very positive for Ukraine, culminating in this very positive meeting between Zelensky and Trump and Ankara. Like it's much better looking for Ukraine than it was in the winter. I want to know your view on what the reality is. Yeah. So I'm glad we're approaching that framework. How are they related? They're related in the key way that Ukraine is fighting for countries.

Russia principally Iran who provided the Shahed group a lot of thousands of them and then the blueprints to build more that's evolved into the Jaran drones North Korea who provided 6 million rounds of artillery mortars

and 12,000 troops it is now planning another 30,000 troop provision these ones may enter Ukrainian sovereign territory held by Russia right now

but Ukrainian territory which they haven't in the past. And then China backstops the whole affair and provides, you know, a lot of the microelectronics for ballistic and cruise missiles. Similarly, in Iran, we're fighting Iran who's getting targeting information from China and Russia. We believe satellite information. We've accused both. By the way, when Zelensky says they see it, believe me, they have good intel penetration of Russia. It's one of the ways they're not losing. And so I believe him, particularly on this. But in addition, you know, they're, uh, the Russians, have, and the Chinese have provided parts and equipment both immediately prior to the start

of the war and during the war. And we absolutely have to, you know, have to recognize that we are fighting this axis of authoritarian and they work together. That's why the European angst over Iran is so, you know, frustrating. I get Trump was, his treat you terribly. I get, he didn't tell you, by the way, I wouldn't have told Europe about it either. It would have leaked in a minute. But, and I get he didn't like stroke you afterwards and say, I do love you. Now come join the war. But you got to join this war. These are authoritarians. Iran's a 47-year authoritarian regime. Terrorist sponsors have killed thousands of Europeans, European soldiers in NATO and a thousand American soldiers in NATO. I mean, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and then independent operations in Iraq. Killed 30,000 of their own people. Get over it. Recognized with the big. your picture is, but the Europeans are taking the lazy way out and pretending the Iran issue

is just two co-equal belligerents. So from my point of view, these two are linked by who the threat is, who the adversary is, and then they're also linked by the tactics. I think you're revering to this as well, the idea of these long-range strike tactics, you know, by the smaller power against the larger power imposing their will. Now, I have to tell you, the destruction in Russia far exceeds any destruction, the U.S. and our Arab partners have. suffered in the conflict with Iran. And it's going to get much, much worse in Russia. Both the long range and medium range strike are just coming into maturity and scale in Ukraine. And they're only to get larger. And the Europeans are helping there. And they're going to help with that scaling

and capacity. Their targeting is getting better. And their equipment has a higher likelihood of striking. They're doing significant damage, not just to the oil and fossil fuel industry. but to military, industrial base complexes all throughout Russia. And being 11 time zones big does have its drawbacks. It's hard to air defend 11 time zones. And Russia is struggling. So I want to offer a couple of thoughts here before we close just to get your reaction. The first, just sticking with Ukraine for a second.

The overall, just to make an obvious point, the overall global. situation feels extraordinarily dangerous, maybe even more dangerous at this moment than we all thought back in the fall of 2022 when there was all this talk of Russian nuclear escalation. Just if for no other reason, just the complexity of the situation has increased the sunk costs in particular of the Russians, you know, is an acute factor for them. I do worry a little bit about the deterrence effect of our own performance over the course the last few months, all this discussion of the munitions problems, all these discussions of the presidents resolve.

All of these things seem to me to form a cocktail that make, you know, the summer of 26 onwards for an indeterminate period of time, an extraordinarily dangerous moment and just emphasized for me, what has been obvious for some time, which is we've definitely entered a, you know, a pre-war period having spent many, many years in a post-war period. It's just unclear what the shape of it will be and whether or not, God willing, we're successful in deterring it. What if Russia looks at the situation you just outlined and in general, a pendulum that at the moment at least seems to be swinging against it

and decides that the only way out is escalation one way or the other. And that could mean more nuclear saber-rattling, but it could mean a lot of other things too. And they have a lot of options. It seems to me, I mean, maybe you'll tell me that actually they've been so degraded by fighting in Ukraine that they're actually not the kind of threat to the Baltics that they were before. But like, I'm curious your thought on Russian options for escalation and how to account for that

in our own thinking and planning. Yeah, I think that's a great point. Putin, you know, is not, you know, he's not a humble man. This is going to be a tough, he's getting a tough, you know, a tough, uh, you know, a tough, uh, situational assessment passed. I mean, I imagine he's being lied to, but at some point, four and a half years of not progressing, you know, even, you know, there's so much Gerasimov can tell him that before he just doesn't believe it anymore. And, and the strikes all over the country, you're starting

to hurt him, were there to be any kind of sanctions in position, his ability to fund the war and fund, you know, kind of babushka payments, payments to his base, he'd have to compromise one of the two. You know, he spends 40% of his budget on, on the war, and 60% on, um, entitlement payments. They're doing no critical infrastructure investment, none of that. They're completely war-driven, military-driven economy now. They're in a precarious position. I think nuclear saber-rattling will happen. I don't think they'll use nuclear weapons because he'll lose support from, the whole world in Toronto, including China and India, and it will be an actual economic collapse of this country. And I think he does understand that. I think the Chinese have communicated that to him,

but also logically understands that. What he could do is do a full-scale mobilization and throw 600,000 troops a year at this problem. Unfortunately, I think that would just mean, you know, since that's 150% increase in the size, there would be 150% increase in the deaths. I don't think that solves the problem. It just means more dead Russians.

But, you know, he might do one of those. And then finally, the one you have mentioned, he could do something in the Baltics, but it would not be a ground invasion. What we're talking about here is a really aggressive, what they call next generation warfare, you know, a mix of terrorism, cyber attacks, influence operations,

weaponized migration, you know, those kind of things, really aggressive against power grids, against transportation systems to really hurt and press the NATO countries to try to get them to back off. And I don't think it would have that effect, but it's something he could try. All of these are bad, right? Sabre-rattling, increased mobilization, you know, cyber-enabled economic warfare attacks,

or whatever you call it, against the Baltics. All of those are bad. I don't think any of them stop where Ukraine sits today, which is they're not going to lose this war on the ground. So my second provocation for you then is you basically laid out a case earlier in our conversation that maintaining our blockade and increasing the amount of friendly energy traffic through the straight are important parts of the recipe for the way forward. But you really want to see increased targeting of economic targets to keep the pressure on Iran. How do you respond to the argument that actually just the blockade, and I agree with you,

with it increased efforts to get friendly energy through the strait, that that's actually stand you alone better than a continuation of the air campaign in Iran itself, except insofar as you need to do it tactically to facilitate either the blockade or the counter blockade, either our blockade or efforts to fight Iran's blockade. And my argument for that would be something like every time we hit, we do these rounds of strikes inside Iran, often in response, by the way, to an original Iranian attack. Like oftentimes these cycles began as our retaliation for Iran's strikes. It inevitably leads to significant Iranian retaliation on Gulf partners on American forces throughout the Gulf, leading to the couple weeks we've just had.

But you're sort of this, you know, I'll call it medium intensity. I feel like if you're standing on one of those bases there, if you're one of those Gulf countries, it doesn't feel all that medium. But in the grand scheme of things, medium intensity warfare between the two countries that is, um, uh, politically difficult to sustain. It is difficult to hold our partners together in the face of something like that. It just has costs that what I'll call the phony war option, the blockade and counter blockade, just continuing indefinitely with real economic pain for Iran in the long run. And ideally, if you get the escorts operating properly, economic pain, but manageable economic pain on our end, that that is the lower cost, longer time line option that that avoids some of the

costs of the medium grade conflict. And also the problem that if you do escalate to those economic targets, maybe you're taking time off Iran's clock. But my concern about the sort of of the president's threat of mass of escalation was, well, we had massive escalation back in early March, and it didn't lead to regime change. And it didn't lead to them coming to the table to talk in good faith. So what if you do it again this time? and it still doesn't do it. Where does that leave you? Which sort of leaves me in this place of wondering, maybe the phony war is actually good enough. What do you think?

All right. So we have three, first of all, I glad you're betting on Donald Trump being a patient, deliberate leader who can get that response. I'll let you in your collection of one other supporter, sitting a corner on that one. So we have choices. You're right. You could do blockade. Blockade alone won't do it. We could agree on that. You could do blockade plus we convoy through.

Now, that's going to require pounding, Bondur Abbas 150 to 200 rounds a night, that strip of area around there, because you're going to constantly have to knock down the threat. Or we can do blockade plus convoy ops plus economic, hitting the industrial base of Iran, targeting IRGC companies. So transferring the blockade pain hits the Iranian people and then the IRGC. The IRGC hitting IRGC own targets, it's the IRGC and then the Iranian people. And so I kind of like all three. If we go with, I will tell you, the most of the last 13 days of strikes were that lower level, just Bondur Abbas, and they still struck out at our allies and partners and our bases. Because in the end, they can't accept this. And if our convoy ops were successful, I guarantee you they'd immediately strike.

The minute they assess that we're up at 15, 16 million barrels a day again, that we got to temporarily a couple weeks ago, three weeks ago, through the alternate. Whenever we got to that, I think it was $10 million a day through that alternate pass, you know, the closest to Oman, they began to hit targets because they have to stop it. And they couldn't stop it, you know, with the missiles at the time at the ships. So they were getting through. So they attacked our partners' infrastructure and U.S. bases. So I think you're going to have to use a mix. I would go for all free, convoy, blockade, and striking economic targets. I think mine gets us there faster and recognizes that they're going to strike out, lash out at targets in the Middle East, no matter what.

Mark Montgomery of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, always a thought-provoking and interesting conversation with you. Thank you for all the times you've come on to help us understand what's going on since the start of this war and looking forward to more conversations in the future. Thank you for having me, Er.