Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 4/10/25 Bill Buppert on the Prospects for War in Iran and Northern Mexico

Episode Date: April 13, 2025

Scott interviews Bill Buppert about two potential conflicts that some groups within the Trump administration appear to be pushing for. They start with the reported interest shown in carrying out direct military operations against the Mexican cartels. Scott and Buppert discuss why this would be a terrible idea and that it would likely not stay contained in Northern Mexico. They then take a look at the prospects for a war with Iran and draw similar conclusions.  Discussed on the show: Sicario (IMDb) Chasing Ghosts Podcast WarNotes Podcast Bill Buppert is the Smedley D. Butler Fellow for Military Affairs at the Libertarian Institute and host of Chasing Ghosts: An Irregular Warfare Podcast. He served in the military for nearly a quarter century and was a combat tourist in a number of neo-imperialist shit-pits planet-wide. He can be found on Twitter at @wbuppert and reached via email at [e-mail]. 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

he did a he did a kind of symposium at one of these think tanks in DC where they had all the pro coin you know Petraeus and McChrystalites this is right in the era of the escalation of the Afghan war in the early Obama years

and you know how some of these things they'll have a token opponent to come up and say why everybody's wrong you know. Indeed. Like Peter Schiff at the Realtors Banquet in Las Vegas in 2006. So in this case, they said,

okay, well, we're going to bring on our naysayer. Our naysayers are going to be Andy Bacevic. So come up here, Colonel, and tell us why we're all wrong. And so then he proposes that we invade Mexico and install good men and fight a massive counterinsurgency campaign against the native population who resist us in the name of wiping out

and also in conjunction with wiping out the drug cartels and all of this stuff and the fact that it's you know it's our neighbors but it's essentially a somewhat different civilization from ours down there and all of that notwithstanding

we're just going to put the right viceroy in charge and we're going to remake Mexico the way we want it to be and so and in fact I think the way he said it was he proposed exactly what they were saying for Afghanistan and then he was saying yeah Mexico that's where we need to do this

right guys you know if this would make perfect sense you know if you overlay it with y'all's claims of the problem that we're trying to fight and how we're going to fight it and then I'm not explaining it that well but the point of the thing was nobody in the room thought that we should apply the Afghanistan model to Mexico

but then if they didn't think it would work in Mexico, why would they think it would work in Afghanistan? The whole thing is completely stupid. I think Bacevich did a great job with that exemplar, and I'm always thankful that Al-Qaeda did not conduct their operations out of Mexico City instead of Kabul and where they were hosted by the Taliban, because the logic you and Bacevich just portrayed

would have driven that drive into Mexico. Yeah, I mean, and W. Bush already was the one who insisted that Vincente Fox militarized the drug war and make everything ten times worse than it already was down there. There's nothing a government can't do that doesn't make things worse when they step in, whether it's large or small. Yeah. You know, a friend was asking me for this recently, and I swear I'm right about this, but I could not find it anywhere.

I don't know what's wrong with my cross-reference of how I think about this footnote that makes it incorrect. But I could have just sworn it's a New York Times article. It's about the DEA. It focuses a lot on El Paso and their war there. And as DEA agents explain to the New York Times, yeah, you know, it's ironically funny and interesting that when we arrest the top leader or kill the top leader of the cartel. It causes all this terrible violence

as all these captains all fight for power and all these innocent people get caught up in it and all this and like, oh well, but that's the job and so we're going to keep at it. And then I still, I swear the way I remember it was the DEA agents themselves are the ones describing to the New York Times that you know what it used to be was

you had these guys they were like the Jimmy Buffett characters with the open shirt and the private play and the good time, you know, the beer with the lime, having a good time flying cocaine in from the Caribbean somehow, you know, getting in there from Latin America that way. Then they clamped down on that. So they tried boats.

And then they clamped down on that. So then they started trafficking all the cocaine across Mexico. Of course, the cocaine isn't made in Mexico, right? It's all made further south from Mexico. But it was the DEA that had forced the situation where now they have to rely on these land, roots. So now you have these massive criminal cartels that were built up just to traffic the to like literally just deliver the cocaine across the length of Mexico to the American market. And then W. Bush comes and demands that the army down there does something about it.

Which is impossible. Yeah. So now let's talk about that because I read a real smart thing by Fred Reed one time where he goes, oh, let me introduce you to the Sierra Madre Mountains that apparently you don't know anything about but you think you're going to tame the people there you're wrong about that so i i wonder i mean i don't know too much about mexico like literally i've been there a couple times but just on the outskirts so what do i know about it but i doubt i don't know what it would look like by bet you have a better idea what it would look like and they're talking about this calling out the drones calling out top tier and second tier special operations forces to go in there and bill i know you've heard this one before get the

bad guys, man. You know, it's funny that you say that because sometimes people will say, hey, I want to be a cop, and I say, why? And they'll say, I want to go after bad guys. And I say, the only way you could do that is to be in internal affairs. Then you'll be able to go after bad guys. Otherwise, you won't, because those are all government creations of bad guys. So episodes 58 and 59 on chasing ghosts was a Mexican cartel conundrum,

war without end, both parts, in which I talked about this, because initially, I guess it was a month ago where they said, we are going to designate the cartels, says terrorist organizations, and that comes with presidential prerogatives that you wouldn't ordinarily have if you simply said it's going to be a war on criminality. When terrorism, as you very well know, because you've written the books on this, all of a sudden it opens the government's capability and employment portfolios, to very dastardly and gruesome dimensions. You know, you have the enhanced interrogation

and the torture protocols of the early 21st century that were employed in our war on terror during, you know, that you and I are so accustomed to studying in Iraq and Afghanistan and everywhere else that it's gone. But what the French learned in Indochina and in Algeria, which was considered part of metropolitan France,

starting in 1831 and then with the disastrous withdrawal in the 1950s is that they employed torture back then and torture not only corrods the soul and makes a person bad who is doing the torture along with the tortured but it really twists into knots the morality play that is government and allows them to expand their anti-human crusade to a greater degree. But getting back to what we're talking about here, if you make war on the Mexican cartels, you declare them terrorist organizations, and you start to employ paramilitary, military,

and law enforcement assets down there, you are making war in the Mexican government, whether you acknowledge that or not. And that's going to happen in two ways. The first permutation is that you're making war on the Mexican government, government because you will have bases down there. You will have permissions that are going to be needed to go in there and use military force against Mexican citizens or maybe central and South American expats who may very well be there. And then second of all, when you're making

war on them, you have to make that assumption about the Mexican government because no one knows who's on the payroll. No one. As a matter of fact, north of the border, How many folks are on the cartel payroll, whether consciously or unconsciously in government organizations and private organizations? And if there's anything we know about the cartels, and if there's anything that you and I, as Austrian economists, know about black markets, when those black markets are there and there's a lot of competition, whether it's a monopoly or a monopsony, what's going to happen is violence is going to ensue. there are no alcohol cartels there are no cigarette cartels that are fighting in the streets or have human trafficking or are bringing all this stuff across the border because those things are legal even though my preference is decriminalization when it comes to that but that sort of puts a tamper on the violence when you when you legalize it and then it's regulated again not something

that I would want to do because I'm in favor of decriminalization but maybe it's best better than the violence we're presently seeing with this. But here is the second and third order effects of this. You know that I'm fond of saying that Newton's third law is a stone cold mother fracker and that it dominates human existence, especially when it comes to military violence in a way that few people can comprehend unless they've been on a two-way range. Imagine the reach of this cartel that is not only delivering these goods, whether it it's bulk marijuana or not so bulky cocaine and everything in between to include fentanyl,

they have very sophisticated marketing networks, logistics warehouses, warehousing capabilities, real estate. They have both wheeled and two-legged coyotes that come across and deliver all this stuff. But once they cross the border into America proper and Canada proper by extension, they must have the capacity to deliver through their wholesale networks to their retail networks. So I'll bet if we could look at the tentacled combine that is cartel delivery and logistics in the United States. People would be astonished that it probably insinuates itself from the East Coast to the West Coast in practically every state in the Union and in a very sophisticated fashion. So with that preamble, that brings me to what I think is going to happen.

don't want this to happen, Scott, but this is my prediction. If we go down there inevitably using military force, less so law enforcement, although I think collateral damage will occur. Once you start to maim and kill innocent women and children, you start to put the steel into resistance organizations and you start to expand the ranks of those who wish to throw off an oppressor or an invader. In this case, you have this kind of hyper-cartel violence. Some of your listeners may have seen Sicario or Sicario Salado. I recommend those movies. I think they're terrific.

The kind of violence that they will employ in the United States will be unleashed. And I suspect what will happen is they were talking, well, we're going to take our CAG guys, which used to be referred to as the Delta and Unit. These are Tier 1 organizations that are basically assaulters and shooters, all the military forces and departments in the American DoD have one. Cag, Delta, is probably the premier assaulter and shooter organization that we have. They can go down there, and they can mess things up, and they can kill people, they can break things, they can do the rendition activities, which is a fancy word for kidnapping,

and they can do all that. Here's what the cartels are going to do. The cartels are going to go after families. They're going to go after the soldiers' families. They're going to go after law enforcement families. They're going to go after the families of the politicians. Did I leave out that when they get the opportunity to target the actual shooters, assaulters, law enforcement personnel, they're going to do that.

They're going to do all of these things because this is what they know. This is their wheelhouse to respond to warring factions within their own black market. And when these interlopers come in and do the same thing, it's just going to be disastrous. Well, and, you know, this has not been our highest priority on the show, but we have covered it, and certainly I know that this has been in the news over the years, where some of these cartels are absolutely vicious and even comparable to bin Ladenites in their terrorism against innocent civilians. Can you talk a bit about that? Oh, you bring up such a great point. If you don't mind, I know you like the phraseology bin Ladenite. Laddnites, I'm simply going to call them Islamist. The secondary functionality of the cartels has been human trafficking because what they did is they said, hey, there's a business opportunity here. We have been shuttling drugs into the country for decades, and we've been shuttling wholesale

bulk drugs like marijuana, which led to them saying, what capacity do we have to bring illegals in? So they have. Other than Mexicans, O-TMs, account by some men, measures, and I think it's impossible to get a really good count on this, Scott. But let's call it 10% for easy math. So if it's 10% of a million, that's 100,000 people. If you have 20 million people passing over the border, that's 2 million OTMs. Are all the OTMs bad guys, but what if that 2 million, not 10%, but 5%, and in this case, that would mean 100,000 people are malefactors, which means that some of those OTMs

that are in there and I'll let folks do math in their head as far as that's concerned, because the bulk of them are gonna be Mexican nationals and probably Latin American nationals who are coming up that north-south arterial. But how many of those involve, work with triads in Asia, work with Middle Eastern drug cartels,

work with the wholesalers, probably not the retailers, but the wholesalers of opium in the Taliban and the tribes in Uzbekistan and Pakistan and places like that. how do they get their product into the country, along with their personnel, they probably have a relationship that has been longstanding. So what you're mentioning is sort of like the secondary secondary effect, which is not only

will the cartels respond with their indigenous soldiers and Sicario's, but they will have already, over the years, shuttled in probably, I would estimate thousands, if not tens of thousands, but we'll roll with thousands of Islamist sleeper cell members into the country, scattered from the east coast to the west coast, maybe Hawaii, maybe Alaska, and they're here. And I think that, as I mentioned in my Storming America podcast series, where I talked about what happened at October 7, 23, the Gaza incursion into Israel, what if that were supersized, upsized, and replicated in America? Now, what makes you think that there's that many?

people. Go ahead. What makes you think that there's that many people here and following one chain of command ready to strike in concert? So this is sheer speculation because how do you get the evidence of that? For instance, how would I get the evidence of the exact numbers for the drug trade coming in, things like that? Well, I mean, you could have some strong indications, you know. I would I would rather assume worst case scenario. And the worst case scenario that I'm assuming is that over a 10-year period of time, 10,000 members of Islamist cells are here ready to be clacked off on a given day. And the worst part about this kind of fight is that it wouldn't have to be organized. This could be fire and forget. What happens is they're on a cell phone network

and they have cell leaders over 100 men, which has 10, 10-man teams, but one cell leader. Antifa, according to Andy Knoe, sort of orientes itself this way for their activities, both violent and protest activities, where they have these cell cut out so that if one cell is compromised by law enforcement, or in this case, if we extend the war, by the military, then not all of them get rolled up at the same time. For easy math, I like to use a number of 10,000, 10 man cells, 1,000 cells. they clack off on a Tuesday morning and then according to William Fortune in Day of Wrath, his prognostications. Kurt Schlichter does the same thing in the attack. What happens over a three-day period of time

is that on the first 24 hours, they hit malls, they hit schools, they hit those kind of things. Second 24 hours, second day, they would hit residential areas. Third day, they would hit infrastructure targets. And each time the government's a day behind, because on the second day, the government's protecting what they assaulted on the first day. On the third day, the government's protecting what they assaulted on the second day.

You will have tens of thousands of dead Americans. You will have hundreds of thousands maimed and killed if this happens. And I really do think that this is a matter of when and not if that it is going to occur. And by the way, if you want to fast forward this, go to war with Iran and why. what happens. But and you had just mentioned Scott, you said command and control. There's no command and control here. What you do is you have these guys in a 10-man cell who on their cell phone when you get a zero-day call that says go into action, they take whatever small arms they may have, could be airs, could be Kalashnikovs, could be M16s, along

with grenades, explosive devices, V-beds, whatever the case may be. And they go and their instructions are, you will do as much damage and killing as you can until you are unable to continue or dead. So it's fire and forget of these 1,000 cells. I mean, can you imagine what the aftermath is in 72 hours? Yeah. Hang on just one second for me here. You guys, I'm so proud to announce the publication of the Libertarian Institute's 14th book. It's Israel, winner of the 2003 Iraq Oil War. Undue influence, deceptions, and the Neocon Energy Agenda by Gary Vogler, former senior oil consultant and deputy senior oil advisor for U.S. forces during Iraq War II. Remember how I wrote and enough already about how Ahmed Chalabi sold the neoconservatives on a plan to rebuild the old British oil pipeline

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I mean, look, I don't want to be Pollyanna, but I think the numbers have got to be much lower, but I'm saying the minimum concern would be something like New Orleans on New Year's Day, where this guy was an American Army veteran who was reading online about how whoever he's mad at he wants to switch sides in the thing now. And they haven't released his statements yet, but you know what he said in there about what's going on in Gaza. now, of course, has got to be a huge part of his motivation there just like always. But you could have as far as like infiltration from Mexico in my imagination

I could see high tens or maybe even low hundreds or something, but just imagine just even what two or three teams of five guys with just semi-automatic legal rifles that they got, but just working together. Imagine the New Orleans attack, but he has

four guys in the bed of his truck. and they got guns and then you know because what happened in that when if people don't know what happened was the guy he ran down bourbon street and he hit all these people i'm sorry i don't know the final casualty camp but it was absolutely horrific massacre people and then he crashed and when he crashed he crashed right there were some cops right there and he got out with guns in his hands and they just blew his ass away i think he got a couple shots off but didn't hit anyone and he was dead and it was over but yeah it didn't have to be that way and if he had had a few friends with him, you know, or if he had not crashed, but just got out and, you know,

but imagine if he just had a few friends sealing off the entrance streets and, you know, corraling everybody in, whatever, just four or five guys. I mean, think of what one horrible stupid teenage kid can do at a school. We've seen that. So a team of five guys who have any training and any, like, practice whatsoever with these firearms and what they want to do with them, could do, you know, we've seen it in Mumbai and wherever, do it's easy. This country is nothing that allows you with soft targets in every town, you know?

Yeah, yep. In 2008 in Mumbai, November 2008, there were 10 members of Lashkar-Aidiyibia. It was Pakistani-based, of course it was, because India and Pakistan have been at war with each other since just after World War II. And 10 members, they carried out 12 shooting and bombing attacks. over four days during that time. So it's a multiplier effect with this.

And of course, what was, I wouldn't call it comical, but morbid and sad, you had Indian police chasing them with cane sticks and things like that. They simply weren't ready for what happened. The wild card in an attack on America is the access to personal firearms and where those will be. That has always been the wild card for any terrorist action. in America, let's say it takes place in a mall or near a school or whatever the case may be, they never know where armed Americans are going to be. And that, because a police response is going to be minutes, maybe hours away,

a military response is going to be hours or days away. And the way you stop those kind of attacks is that you instantly respond to it with whatever you have on you. Israel, for instance, they get attacked and people are wondering, well, I thought all the Israelis are armed. No, because Israel is a very anti-gun nation, despite what you see in the imagery of reserve soldiers with their M-16 slung going to a shopping mall. They, only less than 5% of the Israeli population has a license to own a gun because they don't have the Second Amendment. They don't have an inherent a priori right to defend themselves. And they get 50 rounds a year.

Those 50 rounds include training and whatever they have to do, whatever, they have to use to conduct social work. So for me, the wildcard is going to be atomistic possession of guns, which will stop some of these in a fashion that probably no other country on earth would be able to. Yeah. Well, I mean, that is the good news, is that you do have armed people everywhere here.

You do in Texas. We do in Florida. Yeah. You're right. It's not true everywhere. We still have Joe Biden's gun-free zones in a lot of places as well. I mean, I'm at home and I carry one. I can't believe that was ever invented and approved. What's that? A gun-free zone with just a sign and no armed man to enforce it. It's amazing, isn't it?

What's amazing? What's amazing? Yeah, what's also amazing is why, if you were asking me to surrender my ability to defend myself, what have you put in the breach to substitute for that capability? In other words, you've disarmed me and I come into your store or your government facility and then all of a sudden a shooting occurs, who's responsible for disarming me? It's not the criminal who conducted the shoot. It's the government that dictated to me that I must be disarmed.

And let's not omit that the USA is, again, and still the number one supporter of al-Qaeda terrorism in the world, including just abetting their takeover of Syria, for God's sake. And so that's going to be part of the blowback. backstory to the next big one hits, along with our support for Israel motivating it. I think the Shia have traditionally the Shia being a smaller minority, but the Shia Sunni rivalry being informed by the Saudi Wahhabist Sunni making it their business and their mission in the Middle East to do everything they can to make trouble for mischief and eradicate the Shia Crescent for the first time in our history, I think we may have the Shia so rattled, upset and

angry, that they may conduct extra contiguous attacks. I have no doubt that if America is foolhardy enough to invade Iran, and I wrote on that in a, well, I broadcast in a recent episode concerning the mountains of madness of what it's going to be like if the military goes into Huthyland, which is Western Yemen and how bloody mountainous it is. And the fact that Iran, when you look at a relief map, everybody should take the time to do this. All your listeners should do this. Look at a relief map of Yemen. Look at a relief map of Iran. And you will find incredibly mountainous terrain. So it will be very militarily difficult to best it. Yep. I mean, see, I'm so old now, but this was a cliche back in the W. Bush years when they

were so often threatening against Iran that Iran is three times the size with four times the population and mountains instead of flat deserts. So forget it. By the way, here's something that I thought I learned a long time ago that I want to make sure I'm still right about. I said this the other day on somebody's show. That the way I had learned it was for America to wage an effective air campaign of any kind, you need to send in tens of thousands even or at least thousands of SOCOM guys to put laser designators on the anti-aircraft for the initial wave and so there is no air war without also a special operations war and then back to step one and step two three times the size four times the population and also step three mountain ranges um this is where

is that really right that that's how it would have to be and that's why it's such a absolute deal breaker? Because... So having been a guy who has been trained and employed GLID, which is laser guiding of munitions from aloft and brought them down, that has become late 90s and early 20th, 21st century technology. There's two parts of this. There's a mission called Seed, which is suppression of enemy air defense. We have wild weasel platforms that it would be a modified F-18. or whatever they're going to employ to do it, that goes in there and when those air defense modalities are squawking and making noise and having emissions, they go in there to blow a corridor

through all of them. So that can't be done without troops on the ground to actually blow the corridor. Then you can blow the corridor and then your strike packages go in and they deliver the goods and they have to escape. Now for primitive, relatively primitive, because I stopped using the term near peer recently for primitive third world countries in which you're doing that maybe you could get away with that but I'm here to tell you that when it comes to tackling Russia and China because of China's A2AD their aerial access aerial denial missile frameworks that they have there those strike packages by the way when a carrier sends a loft to strike package after you have the the combat air patrol and the barrier combat air patrol think of two

flying perimeters around the carrier flotilla. You're lucky to get 10 aircraft in that strike package to include your seed package, your wild weasels that are going to blow that corridor. Imagine you've got this entire carrier of flotilla out there to send in probably 10 minus aircraft, of which maybe a half dozen will deliver ordinance and they've got to get back. The point that I'm making is that when it comes to a peer conflict with China or Russia, A lot of them simply aren't going to make it back because of the thickness of the air defense. And the reason why I'm saying that this is very problematic now, too, is that you have the U.S. Navy saying, you know, we're in this Red Sea kerfuffle with Yemen.

We're at the, I think it's Al-Dabib or something like that. I'm probably mispronouncing it, but it's that narrow choke channel just at the southern edge of the Red Sea that the ships have to pass through over which the Yemenis, the Houthis in this case, have tremendous missile advantages. So what they've done is the Yemenis, who have no Navy to speak of, Scott, have literally dictated terms for the U.S. Navy, allegedly, one of the pure surface navies on earth, on where they can go and where they can't go, and how they can do it when they're not under fire, and they don't have a Navy. Because the Yemenis, last time I looked at their order of battle, I think that they had some

1975 or older Soviet patrol boats in their inventory. The Iranians, they have sort of a navy, but this is the missile match. I mean, what's going to dominate warfare for the remainder of this century is missiles. All right. So now back to Iran for a second then. So if Trump sends the B-2s and the B-1s and the whoever's, the B-52s. He won't be sending any B-1s. Are they going to get?

Are they going to get air dominance over Iran? They're just going to be able to clear a path through those air defenses and bomb Tehran until they're done or not? In my estimation, no. And it's funny you use the term air dominance. And go ahead and insult the B1 again because I didn't quite pick up what you said there. Oh, the B1B, it's called the bone. It's the one that has these scissor wings.

You can look it up. They have a really tough time going aloft. really cruddy maintenance standards, and they've been a mess. It's the reason why the B-52, last one came off the factory floor in 1962, had its shelf life doubled from 50 years to 100 years because its successors, which would be the B-2 and the B-1B, are simply not up to snuff. I have a friend who was a B-1 pilot in Afghanistan, actually.

Say that again, Scott. I have a friend who is a B-1 pilot in Afghanistan. Okay. I mean, remember, flying in Afghanistan, it's not contested airspace. You just use the phraseology, air dominance. And air dominance means there's three permutations of that. Air supremacy means that you just own the air. Air superiority means that in certain sectors of the air, you own the air.

Air dominance is sort of like a fuzzy halfway point between the air. the two, but air dominance in this missile age in which you can have third world countries like Yemen, maybe supplied by Iran, maybe supplied by Russia, and the more sophisticated peer nations like Russia and China, when it comes to air dominance, I don't think anybody really has it anymore. As a matter of fact, I would be so bold as to say that the era of manned combat aircraft is over. I would certainly say that the era of manned tanks is over, and this is where.

where I'm really putting the turd in the punchbow, I think that carriers are the crossbow and chariot of the 21st century. What a tremendous waste of resources, money, blood, treasure. I mean, all of the, all 11 carriers that we have, I view them as future fish apartments in a war. Yeah, well, oh man, there's so many different subjects here to tackle. but uh sticking with the threat of the war with iran since i guess that's what's coming up here what's your assessment of how stealthy is stealth the f-35 and the b2 and all this because uh

i actually was too busy with other things and i didn't take a good look at it but i know that israel bombed iran recently they said with f-35s and they got pretty deep into iran and iran couldn't do anything about it did you take a deep look at that yeah i don't i don't buy any of it and uh And the thing is, stealth is very fashionable, but any long wave radar that you have out there, and these are very large facilities, but they have a lot of reach, you can detect that radar cross section that it has. What stealth tries to do is not only does it try to take angles off an aircraft, so it can't be detected by shortwave radar or radar maybe on other aircraft or things like that, but it's

trying to reduce that radar cross section to that of a bird or whatever the case may be, When it comes to a long-wave radar detection, stealth can't hide from that. And what stealth also does, in the case of the F-35s, is it means that all of your weapons complement must be in the fuselage and then released. And it obviates your stealth, by the way, once you release because you're opening it up and you're creating angles and arithmetic that even some short-wave radars can detect. The Iranians have sophisticated radar sets. Now, of course, all these can be destroyed. But as far as the undetectability of B-2s and things like that, take a look at a map and look where Diego Garcia is. Diego Garcia is almost directly south, probably, I would say, 10 degrees due south-east of Iran proper.

All you have to do is have a guy with a radio or a cell phone or whatever, and he's watching the tarmac there. and when they leave he starts a clock and with that clock he's going to give a rough guesstimation using air speed weather things like that of when its arrival will be when its arrival will be will allow them to start queuing on vectors in which they expect the b2s to come because what you want to do is you want to cue it which means that within a 90 degree fan all of a sudden I've got something and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to try to try to triangulate with other radars to find out precisely where it is in airspace. And then we do something in targeting methodology.

That is, I have a detection and declaration that I have to do. Detection is, okay, I've got something. A declaration is, is it enemy? Is it neutral? Is it an airliner? Is it friendly? They take that determination. And then they take the appropriate means to service that target when it comes.

I am convinced that last April. When the Iranians launched that missile offensive, as it were, and cruise missile offensive as it were, on Israel, that was a reconnaissance by fire. I think that what the Iranian military did is they went into all of their bunkers and they said, give me your oldest lot numbers on all of our missile tech, even the loud missile tech, even the emissions burdened missile tech and stuff that just isn't too sophisticated so that they could send those aloft, have people on the ground there who would make these assessments, what time did they come in, what time did they react, what reacted to them,

how fast did they do it, what was their reconstitution tactics, techniques, and procedures, how did they do their reloading, what did it do to their kinetic magazine levels and inventories, things like that. So you should never underestimate how savvy and a threat or enemy can be because if you don't underestimate them, then you may just cover the worst case scenario if you always assume that you're better than everybody else you are going to leave yourself wide open for some very unpleasant surprises yeah well you know on the diplomatic side of this i really hope i'm right about this but i just think that trump is bluffing that he doesn't want to attack iran at all he this is just his opening card i hope you're correct

talks this weekend. And then we already know that the Ayatollah already wants to play ball. Anyway, he's been wanting to play ball since he took office in 1989. I think, or at least since 90, whatever, three. Yeah. So I get the sense. It's interesting you bring that up, Scott, because Trump was the first president by lifetime in 2016 who didn't start a new war, which was very curious because when you look at Obama's last year, and I'm sure you know this, he dropped 26,000 PGMs, Precision Guide. Hey, look, I mean, it should be said, though, that Trump did keep the Afghan war going and the Yemen War going for his entire four years in office. And he did negotiate an end to the Afghan War, and I'd give him credit for that, for sure. But he could have done that his first year. Notice I did say

specifically he didn't start one. Yeah, no, that's true. But he killed like a few hundred thousand people, so still. Yeah, I mean, people say, well, Carter didn't get us into a new war. Yeah. He laid the conditions for what Iran's going through right now. Yeah, of course. He was the one who kicked off. Well, so did Eisenhower, didn't he? Iran, Afghanistan, and bin Laden and Saddam and everything. All of it. All of it. That's what enough already should be called. Enough already. How Jimmy Carter ruined everything for everyone. All right. Well, listen, this is why I love your podcast so much. you're so smart and you got all these great takes,

but also you talk the way people write instead of the other way around, which is really great. And I always enjoy learning all this stuff from you, and so I listen to the show every time I'm driving my truck, so that's pretty good. Well, you're very kind, Scott. I do the same thing.

I remember you are probably my... I've been anti-war for a very long time, even when I was in uniform, as ironic as that sounds. but I remember listening to your interviews way back when. So, yeah. Very good. All right. Well, thank you for being part of the Institute,

and thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me, Scott. All right, you guys. That is William, you know, Bill Bupor. And he is at the Libertarian Institute, of course, libertarian Institute.org, and check out his great podcasts, chasing ghosts and war notes.

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.