Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 3/20/25 Ken Klippenstein on How the US Would Wage War on Iran

Episode Date: March 24, 2025

Ken Klippenstein joins Scott to discuss some articles he recently wrote about the plan the American government has for fighting a war with Iran. They start with a discussion of Trump’s strikes on the Houthis of Yemen and then get into all Klippenstein’s learned about how Washington would go about fighting a hot war against the Iranian regime.  Discussed on the show: “Trump Is Now at War With Iran” (Substack) “The Iran War Plan” (Substack) “The Nuclear War Plan for Iran” (Substack) Kenneth Klippenstein is an American journalist who worked at The Intercept. Prior to joining The Intercept, Klippenstein was the D.C. Correspondent at The Nation, and previously was a senior investigative reporter for the online news program The Young Turks. Follow his work on Substack This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, and author of Provote, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. Sign up for the podcast feed at Scotthorton.org or Scott Horton Show.com. I've got more than 6,000 interviews in the archives. for you there going back to 2003 and follow me on all the video sites and X at Scott Horton show hey you guys on the line once again although for the first time in a long time I've got Ken Clippenstein he's an investigative reporter and boys he investigates stuff and he's

got his hands on some important things and his substack is ken clippenstein dot com and he's got a couple of articles here starting with the Iran war plan welcome back to the show Ken how are you Hey, Scott, I'm doing all right. Thanks for having me. Very happy to have you here. So you got your hands on some documents, huh? The DOD kind? Yeah, the military planning kind, which is becoming relevant now. If you look at the war of words between President Trump and Iranian leadership, and now the war of actual actions, if you look at the strikes against the Houthis in Yemen,

I thought that made all this relevant. Okay, so, well, I'm not. just take us through it what do you got yeah so the strikes on uh huthy forces in yemen i thought was kind of poorly reported by the press which kind of took it as a chance to um you know just sort of titter at the trump administration for doing the same thing that the bide administration had done it's true that the bide administration had carried out a bunch of strikes on the houthis which were not effective obviously the houthis are still attacking um you know ships in the red sea which is a corridor that a lot of commerce passes through.

But there was one big difference between the two sets of strikes. And obviously, I'm not defending Biden's policy. I'm just saying that they were different, and the media sort of missed this. The difference was that the Houthi strikes conducted by Trump this month targeted command and control facilities as well as senior Houthi leadership, which not only the Houthis made clear in their own statements to media, but National Security Advisor Mike Walts said that as well. very significant escalation, which I think was just sort of overlooked by the press.

Because when they do something like that, that is going to, you know, that is going to provoke a response. And indeed, I think it was reported last night that the Houthis launched a missile at Israel and they've launched, they claim to have launched missiles at U.S. assets in the region. And what's concerning about that is Trump has said that he is going to treat now any attack by the Houthis as an attack by Iran. And in his mind, they're one and the same. He points to the Iranians support logistic and otherwise for the Houthis, but that's a big departure

from how the Biden administration treated it. Boy, you better hope that America's not 100% responsible for every proxy our government supports like our current conflict with Russia right now. Yeah, funny how that only works in one direction,

huh? Yeah. Well, so listen, you know, I was very sympathetic, not to the Houthi regime, but to the poor Yemeni people stuck between Obama's essentially just making

this corrupt deal with the Mohammed's bin Zayed and bin Salman in UAE and Saudi to launch this war against these people who'd done nothing. In fact, even the horrible, evil Houthi rebels were working with Obama

and we're working with Lloyd Austin to hunt down and kill al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula at the time, which I'm not in favor of that, But at least they're the enemy who killed American civilians and all that. Although fighting them just made matters worse, of course. But anyway. But then, and I understand that I guess I believe them when they say that they're fighting on the side of the Palestinians, that they're obligated to intervene when there's a genocide going on, and there is one.

and yet I kind of lectured my Yemeni friend when they started intervening last year or I guess was it in late 23 or was it in 24 when they started intervening that yeah I understand you got all your reasons and whatever but this could turn into a regional war even under Joe Biden that's not a stretch in the mind

of the American foreign policy establishment that Shiite means Iran and if you guys are are doing this this, then it's the Ayatollah doing this, and it could really spread. It was already, of course, spreading to Lebanon and into Syria and whatever. So just like you're talking about is a real danger, even though it's not true that the Houthis are Hezbollah and are that loyal and that close to Iran. It took the Iranians years to recognize the Houthis after they took power in the end of 2014. And they've not been that close. And Yemen's been under

blockade most of the time. So, you know, what do they do? Paypal them some money or email them some schematics for how to make a drone or something. But otherwise, the rest of this is all embellished alliance anyway. Iran and Yemen don't really have the ability to help each other at this point in any meaningful way. So I think it's probably a real stretch. I don't know exactly what's going on with their relationship now, but I bet it's a real stretch to talk about their relationship as being that close and certainly to blame Tehran for everything that Sanaa does just makes no sense or not without them really demonstrating why it should you know right it's particularly silly in the context of we we have some very prominent examples now of powerful countries and their

partners diverging let's say on their objectives whether that's in Europe with Ukraine and disagreement over how to, you know, wrap up this war, or as you said earlier, U.S. and Israel, even within the Trump administration, which is very pro-Israel, you know, they clearly with their negotiator Steve Whitkoff are having a lot of disagreements about how to handle the Gaza war, even though, again, you know, overwhelming support from the Trump administration in a lot of ways, these things are always more complicated than this sort of one-to-one binary picture that that Washington tends to have about, okay, it's a client, therefore, everything they do. I mean, you know, the metaphor I use is to think of, on a much smaller scale, just a family

and kids. I mean, clearly the parent has all of the power on paper. I mean, they're a legal guardian, so on and so forth. How often do you know that kids are doing exactly what their parents want them to do? Almost never, right? Well, in fact, in this case, too, I'm sorry, just one more. The Iranians told the Houthis not to take the capital city at the end of 2014, because they said you're going to cause a war. The Saudis are going to bomb you. Don't do it. And they ignored that.

So how do you like that for an example? Yeah, when the press covers the stuff, it's always Iranian-backed. And it's like, I guess maybe for economy, you can say that. But what that leaves out and sort of misleads audiences about is then you think it's like just a private security force that answers to them. And the picture is much more complicated. And they still call them rebels, even though they literally captured the capital city. a decade ago. Yeah, the whole discourse around is really dumb.

Another thing, you made an important point when you said, you know, things were already quite tense. There's going to be on the part of the liberal press now, I think, this attempt to, you know, act like suddenly all this is happening. But the reality is those strikes that Iran carried out on Israel, then Israel carried out back in response to them, the assassination of, you know, Hania, all this stuff is, like, very serious. And a frustration of mine, I pay very close attention to the military side.

was when I was watching the press conferences by the Biden Pentagon, they would repeatedly say, oh, you know, we're avoiding a large-scale war. And that, I guess that might be true in the sense that, you know, there's not a huge ground invasion of the Iraq sort. But what that sort of glosses over is the highly targeted fighting that's happening in the airstrikes, the assassination campaigns, the shadow war, as it's been called. which I think is just the face of warfare today.

I mean, look at what happens when Russia goes into Ukraine. It doesn't go well. And so war doesn't really look like that anymore. And, you know, a theme I've tried to hammer on in my newsletter that you mentioned on the top is that the war is already happening. And to say that, you know, we need to avoid war, you know, conceals from people, the fact that there is already active hostilities. There are people being killed.

There's fighting that has happened now. And yes, that could intensify. But it's already there. And so, you know, it's not about preventing the war, it's about stopping the one that we already have. Right. Okay. So tell me everything about these war plans that you have and what they describe. Yeah. So I learned from a kind of cache of procurement records that provide some insight, you know, frustratingly elliptical and contextual, into the Pentagon's kind of third generation, they're updating their war plans for Iran, which has only really happened twice. before. So in the piece, I kind of sketch out, just broadly speaking, how the Pentagon's first war plans for Iran were established in the context of the Cold War, when there was different

leadership in Iran, political environment was pretty significantly different in a lot of ways. And then when 9-11 happened, then they were kind of like, you know, I think there's just a sense in popular culture that it's like, oh, well, the military plants are everything. But the reality is that to prepare for a major theater war, I think, is the phrase that's used in these planning documents is really expensive, time intensive. And for the first time ever, it's in across the U.S. government effort. It's not just the Pentagon. They're coordinating with the CIA. They're coordinating with other parts of the U.S. intelligence community. So this is a huge undertaking that they're doing first time since at least, you know, at least a decade, probably a couple

decades. And what's interesting about how they're plotting this out is what is the catalyst that? Why don't they rely on the same, you know, broad operations, plans, concept of operations that they had previously. Well, like I was saying before, the nature of warfare has changed and the battlefields changed as well. I think people really overlooked the significance of that set of strikes that the Iranians carried out against Israel in 2024, because that was a huge within the military, just talking to people, that was a like sort of 9-11 event for people that focus on the CENTCOM region? Because if you think about it, what is an example of something like that happening before? Right. So the damage wasn't that great, but the spectacle sure was,

which is what the point of it was, right? And this is one thing that I don't know if the Trump government appreciates this very much, but I guess actually maybe they don't appreciate it the same way I do but you talk about this in the article that the the Ayatollah sort of does these weak in effect sort of symbolic strikes because we can't let this aggression go unpunished but he also never seems to really be trying to escalate the thing he doesn't want to fight obviously persians in a position of weakness compared to the United States what's he really going to do about us you know what I mean but you're I think you say in here and I'm not sure exactly if this is just your interpretation or if people are telling you this, too, that Trump seems

to just take the lesson that, well, I can do what they want. They're not really going to do anything. Oh, exactly. And that's the lesson that CENTCOM has taken as well. I mean, look at the Houthi strike. The sense that I get from talking to people is that they looked at the, not just Trump's strike on Soleimani, but the Israeli operation killing the senior Hasbolo leadership, including Hassan Nasrallah. And the discussion at the time is, oh, my God, there's going to be this huge backlash and you're really going to pay for it.

And so since there wasn't that, Suncom looks at him and they think, wow, we totally got away with that. And so I think on the political side, on Trump side, he thinks, well, there was basically no downside for me. And then on the military side, the Pentagon side, they think, okay, well, looking at that,

it seems like it was a big success for Nanyahu. So what's the downside here? So I think the risk appetite has really dramatically changed beyond the one that already existed because again, we were carrying out the Biden administration was carrying out constant air strikes. It seemed to have little and no effect for whatever reason they think that

intensifying that will have effect. Now, we've already seen within like the several days since the strike, the Houthi's not just striking at U.S. assets in the area, but Israel as well. So it seems to me that this is just pouring gasoline on the whole thing. And in the context

of all this, Trump has a new plan that he didn't have in 20, when he left office, which is updated to incorporate all kinds of different things from, you know, military deception, you know, small scale stuff, right up to the use of nuclear weapons. And there's no discussion of any of the change in defense doctrine, what triggered it, which is a lot of the geopolitical stuff I'm talking about now, the sense that you can get away with more, that Iran is weaker than we expected that somewhat paradoxically that they carried out the strike and something has to be done.

You know, I think the press and to some extent ordinary people kind of understandably saw that strike and they thought, well, you know, I don't think they killed anyone. It was just in Israeli military facilities. And they said, okay, so, who, good thing, you know, nothing major happened. But within the halls of the Pentagon,

they're not looking at it that way. They're looking at it as, I believe, the first ballistic missile strike on Israel from Iran in at least 30 years, maybe, I don't know why. So that was really impressive just in a sort of abstract doctrinal sense, which is how the top brass of the military tends to see a lot of things. They're not looking at it in the same common sense way that ordinary people would, which is to look and say, oh, thank God, no one was hurt.

Let's move on. That's not how they see it. So Trump comes into office with this new, updated plan. And I think another misconception that people have about war planning is they say, oh, the Pentagon plans for everything, like I was saying before, only is it very costly to do so, it's a huge bureaucratic undertaking that takes years to complete. It wasn't undertaken by Trump. This was a, this was a Pentagon thing. So, so, so that they undergo the updates for this for this whole plan. And what's interesting about it, so again, I think

that the kind of counterpoint to this, the reason media probably hasn't picked up this story is to some extent they think, okay, so there's a plan. So what? That's not going to happen. We have a parallel sort of experiment that, that history conducted for us, which was, In 2020, when Trump was presented a menu of options, today that menu would include this war plan as to how to respond to, I think they killed an American civilian Pentagon contractor in Iraq, if I remember correctly,

an Iranian-backed militia group or however you wanna call it. You know, they briefed Trump on a menu of options and ordinarily they'll give them three. And the bureaucrats strategy here is to try to steer the president or the principal towards the middle option and make them feel like the one at the top is the extreme one, so they won't pick it.

And at the top of that list was the decision to kill Soleimani. And Trump ended up taking that. And it's been reported at this point, I think pretty conclusively, that his aides were shocked. They were not expecting that. So I don't think that, first of all, with Trump individually, you can count on him just picking the moderate option, whatever. Secondly, the geopolitical situation is entirely different. And third, I don't think anybody can look at the Trump administration, whether you like what he's doing or not, and say that he has a lower risk appetite or even the same one than he did in this first administration.

So all of that is what motivated me to write this story and why I think people should take, you know, take this approach this with some concern rather than just, oh, it's just a plan. What can they do? It's more than that. Okay, well, so it's important what you said there that this isn't Trump's plan. This is, and, you know, there's a lot of people trying to speak for the incoming Trump administration, like remember Robert O'Brien. and wrote that thing in foreign affairs about here's how it's going to be everybody you know so um so it's important that as you say he didn't order this there are also times when he tangled with the iatola where he actually even let the iatola have the last word i can't remember if it was solomani i think it was the solomani thing where then the iatola launched some missiles at the empty corner of an american base in iraq and some guys did get concussions from that but still they deliberately didn't kill anyone and then trump let him have the last word and didn't

continued to escalate. There was also when the drone got shot down. And I don't know if he was skeptical of whether the Pentagon was lying to him or not. I am about where exactly that drone was. But then apparently he asked, well, how many people are going to die? And he said, well, no, civilians. He said, no, how many Iranian military will be killed if I do the strike that you want me to do? And they told him and he said he didn't want to do it. Which, you know, makes him more of a hippie than Jimmy Carter, really. You know what I mean? I don't know. Um, at least on that anecdote, and I know it all started, you know, not that one, but he did do assassinations and he bombed Yemen for four years straight and Afghanistan too and whatever, so don't get me wrong. But at least in that case, he didn't just go along with them or he certainly could have been worse.

On the other hand, he and Mattis both agree that he wanted to assassinate Assad and that Mattis stopped him from doing it, where the worst thing about Mattis is what an Iran hockey is, which that's what's wrong with. Assad as he's friends with Iran. And Mattis talked him out of it, apparently, or refused to do it. Um, but anyway, so yeah, it's, it leaves a lot to speculation. But, um, so anyway, tell us more about the, the global campaign plan and what this thing would look like. If, and I, oh, I guess here's one thing that maybe you could address too, which is, maybe you kind of already did, that all of this tit for tat on a relatively lower level, where the Ayatollah takes a few on the chin, because what else is he going to do about it? There's a limit there. And this goes to, you know, W. Bush back in January of 2007, the chiefs told him, we don't want to do this.

Like the Air Force and Navy think it to be fun, but the Army and the Marines and Special Operations Command, they do not want to go to Iran. especially not when they're in the middle of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also even if they weren't, they don't. Because they've got to do a lot of dying to try to even just take out the anti-aircraft the Socom guys do to even allow for the possibility of air superiority in this massive country full of mountains and all this stuff. And it's just, and the key word then was escalation dominance.

We don't have it. We're not going to control every stage of the war, so we don't want to fight one. And even though we don't have 100,000 troops in Iraq and 50,000 in Afghanistan now, like we did then, we still have 50,000 or something in Kuwait, and we've got the Al-Ulid Air Base in Qatar and the naval base for the 5th Fleet in Bahrain and Sentcom Command in Qatar. And they have some anti-missile systems, I'm sure, but the Iranians could put up a hell of a fight over there if it came to a real go-for-brose. broke use them or use them use them or lose them kind of a war with the united states there and never mind all the economic targets in the gcc countries there as well so it could very well escalate into a real war and in fact you know the iraqi government would be loyal to iran in that case as well so any troops that we do have in iraq would be subject to at least the threat of an order 66

type stab in the back thing there. So that's all to take into account here that, yeah, they are in a position of weakness, but so was Ho Chi Minh. It didn't mean he wasn't willing to fight, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So just quoting from the procurement records here, they describe a, quote, unique joint staff planning effort.

And the term that really jumps out is major regional conflict. So that's distinct from the sort of pinprick attacks that we've seen, the highly targeted, low-intensity stuff that Washington is able to just sweep under the rug, this would be a more conventional kind of thing. I mean, this would involve multiple branches of the armed services from cyber command to not just air power, but even sea power and troops as well. So I think the operative question here is what motivated them to update this?

Because, again, I think people have the sense that, oh, they just do this periodically. But if you look at the two previous iterations, there's no regularity to it. They do this in response to perceived conditions that they think necessitate, you know, needing to have some kind of plan in place. And it's particularly interesting,

given the orientation of the Trump administration, which and the military generally, which was supposed to be turning away from, you know, the CENTCOM region, supposed to be focused more in Asia. There seems to be, at least rhetorically, in the salons of Washington, sort of broad agreement that, yeah, we should be doing that.

And then to update this whole plan, again, hold government effort, you have to share intelligence. I mean, it's a bureaucratic headache. And then to do that, I mean, that certainly doesn't send the message of that. We're going to gradually back away from sent com. And I think that if you look at leadership's testimony to Congress like General Corolla,

It's pretty clear that they see this shift away from, you know, areas of responsibilities, as I call it, away from the China area. They see that as a loss of their own portfolio. And so there's a bureaucratic imperative here to try to remain relevant. And so I'm not saying anyone's going to start a war just to be relevant, but, you know, it leads them to estimate that military action is maybe a little bit more appealing than they might have otherwise. I think that's an important way to view this whole thing.

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Well, okay, and so we have, essentially, you know, the situation going on with the Houthis. Now, they can frame it however they want, but since, Since the Houthis, in reality, are not just agents of Iran. I think we can take that as a pretext. So you mentioned in your article that they seem to have downgraded the pretended nuclear weapons threat, not entirely in their rhetoric, but in their actual thinking here. And Donald Trump, in fact, Trita Parsi pointed out that Trump even said, you know, and this is absolute heresy from the chair he's sitting in to say this. you know there's you know one school thought says that ron doesn't even really want to nuke even anyway so we ought to be able to make a deal with them uh so uh you know you talk about in here

though their escalation there for example working with russia and their advances in missiles and drones and so what else do you think other than i don't know what netting yahoo wants or what's the real motive for doing this do you think yeah trump's a difficult figure to report on because he doesn't adhere to the kind of MSNBC picture of him. Like, I don't, you know, on the one hand, I don't think, I think it's oversimplifying him to just say that he's an anti-war dove. But on the other hand, it's also oversimplifying things to just say that he's a warmonger. I mean, if you look at the case of the Soleimani strike, he was watching, it's, you know, it's been reported that he was watching the news, saw people criticizing him for not responding to the death of that, you know, American civilian Pentagon employee. and he was just irate about the nature of the coverage and responded to it.

So he responds to a different set of incentives than I think conventional politicians do who might care more about what think tanks think. And that's why they wouldn't say what he said, which is, you know, I don't think they really want one. And then the way the coverage is, I mean, the U.S. military has to issue a, I think it's called a nuclear posture of EU each year where they summarize their best intelligence about, you know, where the different nuclear threats stand at. And they always mentioned the Iranian regime. And every report, it's been consistent.

And I think the last one came out late last year. That, you know, yes, they are enriching, but the strategy is to get as close to possible to weapon. If you then make the decision to want a weapon, as opposed to actually wanting to go ahead and create it, they just want it to be something they can complete, approximate to, you know, some kind of urgent need. That doesn't mean they've decided to go ahead with it. Right. So it's a lot, the discussion of it is a lot more nuanced on the part of the military that actually has to watch these things than the, I mean, the news headlines are just like the Iranians have, you know, enriched another percentage or whatever. And it's just no context at all about what, that their strategy is not to obtain a bomb. It's to be able to get one if they have to have to. So, so I think, you know, I think Trump is right in that case. And there's no evidence to suggest that they have crossed that line yet. And, and, you know, if the media told the truth about that, I think there'll be a lot. lot more interest in, you know, Trump being able to proffer a deal that's perhaps more, you know, more realistic and able to win Iran's support than what he has. Because what it is now, it's just

seems like a non-starter. Basically, the deal now is you have to preemptively give up your nuclear program as a precondition to be able to engage in any sort of serious agreement. Right. And, you know, I was talking with Muhammad Sahimi, who's a great expert in all these politics. about how the new president or relatively new president of Iran, how he had brought back Javad Zarif, the guy who had made the deal with John Kerry. And the idea was, let's at least be open to talk into the new Trump government.

As soon as he comes in, let's see if we can play this nice. I think at first they had said a couple of nice things, and then they turned to hardball. and then the iatollah said well listen we're not going to deal with you if you're acting like that and so the whole thing was set back unnecessarily i'm a i just think and i think everybody who thinks along these lines at all if they agree at all ought to make this point all the time trump should just go to teheran right if nixon can go to china and shake hands with mouse a tongue then donald trump can go and get along with the iatola and that and you can go and

Yahoo can pound sand or just cash another welfare check and shut up about it. Yeah, I don't understand the aversion. I mean, again, Trump comes from this, I don't know how articulate he is about expressing it, but the general view is supposed to be focused on China. And so I would like to hear the ball put in Washington's court to have to explain why we need to still be litigating the 60-year-long, you know, war. when they say, they themselves say that their focus is supposed to be elsewhere. I just, I don't understand how those two things fit together.

Well, and also, why do they want to switch their focus to China when we made friends with China 50 years ago? That's the whole thing. We don't have to fight with them either. Yeah, no, I agree with that. I'm just saying even from their, even from the last perspective, it doesn't make any sense to me. Yeah, so. No, I think you're right. No, it does make sense to you and you already explained it, which is there's no such thing as the government. There's just a bunch of people who work for and they have their own interests in perpetuating this thing.

Hillary Clinton tried to pivot to Asia in 2011, but events conspired to disallow that from happening. Some of them were directly at her behest, of course, like Libya and Syria, but you understand what I mean, though. They never quite get around to making that pivot. There's too much other stuff still going on. Yeah, and, I mean, it's a little bit alarming. I feel like the press has focused so much on things that I do think there should be coverage of,

like Doge and, you know, the green car holders and things, that I can't find any investigation into, you know, when Trump says, for example, maximum pressure, like what nobody seems to wonder what that means. If you think about it, that's kind of like when, you know, I think people say these sort of offhand things sometimes. They say by any means necessary. And they don't necessarily know what that means. But if you think about it, it's like, okay, well, I don't think I'd want to do anything in pursuance of really any goal. Like, I'd have some things I wouldn't be willing to do. And in this case, I don't know that we wanted to do maximum pressure, like the most we can do. And so how does he define that maximal option is the maximal option, like the one that he went ahead with in 2020 and killed Soleimani?

If it is, there should be some kind of discussion of this, instead of this unilaterally happening in the White House. But I don't see any discourse about it to try to figure out, like, what are we, you know, what are we willing to, what consequences are willing to accept as we climb up to escalatory life? to try to pressure them to make a deal, which, you know, he's pretty open is his, is his strategy. So, I mean, it's strange because it's like he clearly doesn't have this issue with Ukraine. Well, why can't he approach it in roughly the same fashion where he's, where he's willing to, you know, talk to the other side and see where they're at. Because of the Likud. That's why. Yeah, Israel. Yeah. All right. So tell us about your follow up here, the nuclear war plan for Iran. And that's, again, everybody at canclippenstein.com.

Well, yeah, I found this particularly hair-raising, just because if you look at some of the exercises they've been conducting, you know, just last, I think it was last, yeah, it was last month. They flew B-52 bombers. They didn't say where. The Pentagon is so careful, I always say, in the CENTCOM area of responsibility. And the effect that that has, it might not sound like much, but that prevents headlines like, I suppose I would have used in my newsletter, like saying, you know, bombers conduct exercise right next to Iran, which is where it was. They dropped live explosives in an exercise in eastern Iraq along the border of Iran. And if you look at the Iranian press, they definitely know what's going on. They're not like Sencom where it's like,

oh, you know, Sancom are responsible. They said, I can't remember which outlet it was, but I quote them as saying, you know, these B-502 bombers are nuclear capable. They're at our borders. This is clearly pointed at us, and I think they're right. I mean, that is what that is. And so not just that, they've also flown joint exercises with the Israelis, Israeli F-16s, mid-air refueles, which is what, which is exactly what would need to happen if there was going to be a strike on Iran, maybe their nuclear facilities, because Israel's F-16s can't reach Iran and then make it back without a mid-air refuel. They don't have that, they don't have enough of that capability. So, so we have this escalation in these exercises that simulate exactly what you would need to do to hit them.

And again, since the public doesn't know what's happening, because they're told, okay, well, nothing counts as war unless it's a full skate, unless there's boots on the ground, they can't mobilize against it because the media doesn't talk about it taking place. Because, again, it doesn't cross that threshold. It's like they're still living in the 20th century where they think that, you know, every war is going to mean 40,000 troops or something. And it's like there's been a huge shift towards air. I mean, just look at even Ukraine where Putin tried to do it that way with the ground troops.

It's overwhelmingly drones and air power. And that's like, you know, that's a much weaker military that's less sophisticated than our. So we really, I think we really have to update. I think particularly any war movement needs to update its definition of what war is. Because this is, to me, this is war. This is what war looks like in the 21st century. not just these exercises, but hitting Houthi leadership. I mean, in any political context, that's war.

And then Trump made it very clear in his statement. He says, we don't differentiate between the Houthis and Iran at that point. So think of the corollary of that. He's saying we struck Iran, right, since he sees him as one and the same. So, you know, with all that in the background, the nuclear planning, It was the part of the war planning that I thought was most concerning just because, again, why update that? You already have the post-9-11 set of strategic plans for how to go about doing this. And again, when I talk to people in the military, there is a sense that the political environment has shifted such that they're able to draft up different plans and I think see this more favorably.

So, for example, they perceive that they have more support on the part of the Gulf states for things that they want to do, particularly the thaw with, you know, the UAE and the Abrams Accords, all of that. If you look at that, the way that's trickled down to military planners, SETCOM, Israel used to be under a Yukon. Did you know that? It used to be under European command because they didn't want to piss off the Arab Gulf allies by having them in the same AOR. So on Trump's last day in office in 2020, the Pentagon mandated that they were going to move Israel for the first time to the CENTCOM region. And that puts them fighting shoulder to shoulder with all the other CENTCOM partners. And I think, again, there was a sense that, okay, this is going to really piss people off. And it didn't happen to the extent that they thought. So they thought, oh, great, we got away with it.

So we don't have to deal with the Palestinian problem. The Arabs are going to be fine. and all of this just leads to this sense of almost like when you're a teenager and you feel you're invincible, it's like you don't think anything's going to happen. And that leads to, I think, the extremes we're seeing in planning now and just the general posture. And it's like there's no discussion of any of this. Because again, everyone's waiting, the questions in the Pentagon Press Corps are always, are there going to be boots in the ground?

And it's like if there, by the time it gets to that debate, it's too. late. They've already decided to go ahead with the war, right? That's like a late stage development in war. So that's where I'm trying to look at this stuff at the planning phase as opposed to at the buildup phase where you have all these troops in Saudi or whatever. And it's too late because there's already so much bureaucratic momentum. It's not a video game. You don't just parachute in. It takes years of logistical preparation and planning. And that's exactly what we're seeing. And that's what that's what this update in the war planning is. Yeah. Well, a couple of things there is it probably would take nukes, but I don't think nukes would really do it to take out Iran's nuclear facilities, especially at Com and at Natant's. They're buried under five stories or more of granite down there. And it would take troops on the ground to go in there and destroy that stuff probably. Maybe a few bunker busters in a row, but at that point, you don't really need nukes. I don't know. Because, you know, I don't know. I don't think.

think nukes are maybe a nuclear bunker buster type special design thing but i don't see you know on the margin of like are we really going to go that far it doesn't seem like it's worth it when they have conventional ones and then the good news about this and i'm not saying it's a fail safe because it sure ain't a fail safe but it is absolutely clear that don't trump is terrified of nuclear war yeah and i don't think he has any interest in in escalating to this kind of thing you know Well, I think another thing it's important to look at is the difference between when people think of nuclear war, they think of like the huge mushroom clown, everyone's zombies. And they have a lot of low yield options now that they didn't before. They have a lot of, you know, what are called targeted strategic.

So so usable nukes. Right. So the idea that part of the planners is, oh, okay. So, you know, this, this offers us steps on the escalatory ladder, as they call it, that that are that are, that are. smaller than the leap up to like a thermonuclear bomb, for example. And so, I mean, in a sense, I guess that's good that they're not thinking of thermonuclear. But it also risks thinking that any of those options are sane, you know, because you can say, oh, it's just a small thing.

Like you said, targeted at their missile capabilities or whatever. And, you know, that opens up a whole, because then you've normalized it and every nation looks at it. Like, okay, they did it. And so it would carry its own problems. It makes the whole thing way more complicated, I think. You know, another thing they can do with nukes is they can bomb them conventionally and they can tell them you better not fight back in any real effective way

or else we'll use nukes on you then and just use them as that threat. Yeah, I use a metaphor in the article I say, you know, people are waiting for the gun to go off in order to say stop, but there are intermediate steps between it, like loading the gun, cocking it, pointing it, like saying that you have nukes, saying what Trump has been saying, which is, you know, what do you say? We can rain hell down on the Houthis. That's using a new, like language like that is using the nuke in the same way that pointing a gun is using a gun. You know what? Yeah, there's a great article, maybe even a book. I can't remember. I'm sorry.

I forget the footnote, but I bet people could find this where somebody did a history of America's nuclear blackmail and threats and the number of times. The only, unbelievable number of times that American presidents have threatened to use nuclear weapons, dating back to, you know, Truman. That's our main purpose. I mean, again, it's late in the game if you're waiting for a nuke getting, like, mounted to say, hey, don't do that. And that's my frustration with the anti-war movement generally is I think they're,

I think they're understandably operating on, you know, opposition to a style of war that existed in the 70s or 80s, much less the 90s, and now it's like everything is much different even than it was, just look at drones, for example. That's what? Like 20 years ago, that became, and everybody's still waiting for the grounded, they're like, no troops, no troops. It's like, that's not how it works. So I'm running around trying to explain to everyone because we have this postmodern style of warfare now where it's so easy to ignore, right? Not just with AI, but with every aspect of it. It's stuff that you, it's not, it's not people coming back missing limbs in the same way that it was, even in Iraq. And so I don't think people, I don't think people's

sort of immune system is updated to it to identify this pathogen, which is, which is everything will be automated, everything will be farmed out to regional partners, special operations will train them, you won't see any of it. Like in Ukraine, for example, we have all kinds of guys there. It's just that legally, Biden or Trump can say, we don't have anybody there because they're not under title, you know, they're under the intelligence authority. They're advising equip. They're telling guys how to point the guns, even in some cases helping them. But it's technically intelligence rather than boots on the ground. So the whole boots in the ground thing is just a layup for the national security state because then they can say, hey, we don't have them. No worry, nothing to see here. And that's what they're saying with all the CENTCOM stuff is like, you know, okay, yeah, we had three exercises of nuclear cable B-15. He's dropping bombs right next to Iran.

But we don't have troops, so what do you worry about? Right. Yeah, it's just the very edge of war. And hopefully we won't go, you know, into a real ass bombing campaign in Persia. See, that's the thing is that escalation dominance. I hope that the Pentagon is telling Trump the same thing that they told W. Bush, which is, well,

we could win a war against them eventually and everything, you know. but only had an incredibly high cost and discouraging it in every way. Again, you know, the story then was Gareth Porter wrote about this. The Air Force was like, let's do it. We live in a Lockheed promo commercial, you know, a promo video.

We didn't do anything. It's fine. And then the SOCOM guys and I guess the Army and the Marines too, but especially the SOCOM guys were like, yeah, no, we don't think we want to lose 10,000 guys, you know, trying to put laser designators on anti-aircraft in this massive country. This is three times the size

of Iraq and with mountains and stuff is impossible to I mean, the problem in history was the Persians taking over other countries. Nobody took them over, or I don't know who did, maybe the Soviets for a little while. Right. Yeah, I think it's

particularly dangerous. Like, people tend to look at this as like the decider as Trump. But like you said, the state has many different components or, you know, factions or whatever. So Cyncom has its own set of incentives. And we have all of these far-flung bases in Syria and Iraq and elsewhere.

And just going back to this whole money thing, all it takes is one of those getting hit, someone getting killed, and that changes Trump's entire calculus. Like that's the incentive structure he's under, which is to not look like a pushover when an American is killed. And I have to say, we saw three US Army National Guardsmen

killed in Jordan. last year, something like that could happen at any moment. And so the question, so the reason people need to think about this stuff now is like, by the time that happens, you better have your arguments ready or at least laid the groundwork for it because it's too late. And then that's when he's going to be watching TV, seeing if people are making fun of them or not, and then decide whatever he decides. And it's just, it's the worst situation because these far-flung bases have poor security.

I mean, the Tower 22 case in Jordan that I mentioned a moment ago, that's a perfect example. It's these far-flung things that Americans don't think about, and as a result of that, they're not particularly well-defended. And so they're just sitting ducks for any group like we were talking about before that might deviate from what Iran wants to do. I mean, you can't really stop them. So either we remove the troops or you just forever have this button sitting there that all it takes is one guy willing to go against what Tehran wants to push that button. And then, you know, we just pray that Trump doesn't get too angry at the coverage about it. Right. Yeah, exactly. And who knows how he might react to whatever some lady says on TV about him. God's sakes. This is the way the world ends, maybe. All right, listen, I better let you go. Thank you for coming on, man.

Great to talk to you again and great work here. All right, you guys, that's Ken Clippenstein, and he is at Ken Clippenstein.com. That's his great substack over there, the Iran War Plan, and also the nuclear war plan for Iran. Scott for you. Thanks for listening to Scott Horton show, which can be heard on APS radio news at Scott Horton.org, Scott Horton Show.com, and the Libertarian Institute at libertarian institute.org.