Transcript: Webinar – What’s Next for Iran?

Click here to watch the webinar.

PANELISTS

IDF MG (ret.) Yaakov Amidror

Distinguished Fellow, JINSA; Former Head, Israel’s National Security Council

Ambassador Eric Edelman

Distinguished Scholar, JINSA; Former U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy

Gen. Frank F. McKenzie Jr., USMC (ret.)

Hertog Distinguished Fellow, JINSA; Former Commander, U.S. Central Command; Former Director for Strategic Plans and Policy, Pentagon

The discussion was moderated by JINSA Vice President for Policy Blaise Misztal.

—

TRANSCRIPT

Transcript has been lightly edited for flow and clarity.

Blaise Misztal:
Welcome to JINSA’s webinar. I’m Blaise Misztal, JINSA’s Vice President for Policy. We are here today to discuss the situation between the United States, Israel, and Iran. We were expecting the ceasefire that was announced two weeks ago to expire at the beginning of the week; instead, we’ve had a continuation of this ceasefire. We have an expert panel to discuss what it all means, where we are going, and what to expect next.

I’m pleased to be joined by Ambassador Eric Edelman, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy; General Frank McKenzie Jr., former Commander of U.S. Central Command; and Major General Yaakov Amidror, JINSA Distinguished Fellow and former Israeli National Security Advisor.

Ambassador Edelman, let’s start with you to characterize the current situation. There was a ceasefire to allow negotiations. Negotiations are still not happening. In the meantime, the U.S. imposed a blockade, Iran claims it’s a violation of the ceasefire. Trump posted about creating a kill zone in the Persian Gulf.

What is the current situation? How should we understand where we are in the current situation?

Ambassador Edelman:
We have an unstable ceasefire. We had a pause in kinetic attacks by the U.S. and Israel against Iran. Technically, the blockade imposed by the U.S. is an act of war, hence Iran sees it as a violation of the ceasefire. The Iranians also violated the ceasefire, conducting attacks on shipping in the Gulf, which the president reacted to with the post you mentioned.

The goal of the ceasefire was to allow negotiations. The Pakistanis, as mediators, tried to bring Iran and the U.S. together to negotiate. The president postponed the end of the ceasefire indefinitely, although reports in the media said for three to five days to allow us to see if a ceasefire is possible.

But now his proposal, which was presented by the Pakistani leaders, has received no response at all from the Iranians, which raises the question of whether they are even capable of responding.
Then the president will have a fundamental decision to make: whether he goes back to kinetic military activity in order to try to coerce the Iranians to go back to the table, or whether he simply allows this ceasefire to drag on indefinitely. It might mean we would be in a no-peace, no-war scenario.

The only thing I would say, and I defer to my friend and colleague and former CENTCOM commander, General McKenzie, is that the president seems to have shown a real wariness recently about resuming kinetic military activity.

If you look at the movement of U.S. assets into the region, both seaborne and air assets, it is clear that General McKenzie’s successor, a couple of times removed, is preparing options for the president should he decide to go back to kinetic activity.

But the real question is whether the president is ready to do that in the face of what he has shown himself to be quite sensitive to, which is the reaction from the market and by American public opinion. Public opinion remains extremely negative about this war. In fact, support for the war has declined over the past eight weeks, not grown or even stayed stable. So that, I think, is where we are right now.

Blaise Misztal:
Thanks, Ambassador Edelman. I definitely do want to talk about options, especially on the military side, if the ceasefire were to fail. But first, I wanted to ask you, General McKenzie, if you could give us an operational assessment of the blockade that the United States has imposed.

We have tweets from CENTCOM giving us statistics on the number of ships it has turned back, reaching almost 30, I think, at this point. But there are also reports in the media that maybe an equal number of ships have somehow evaded the blockade.

What is your assessment of both how well the blockade is working and what its effects are, and how the United States is going about making sure that ships are not getting out of the Persian Gulf?

General McKenzie:
The problem with a blockade is one of broad-area maritime surveillance, BAMS is what it is known as. You get broad-area maritime surveillance by integrating imagery from satellites, signals intelligence from other platforms, manned aircraft and unmanned aircraft, and AIS, which is a maritime navigation system that should be used, but often is not used in the Middle East. There are a whole variety of sources that CENTCOM gets information from. They build a very comprehensive picture of what is out there.

I think the blockade is generally successful. I cannot tell you that one or two ships have not slipped through, but I suspect far fewer than are advertised have successfully slipped through. So I would assess the blockade as an operation that has largely been quite successful.

As you see, they are expanding operations into the Indian Ocean and further west. But there are a couple of things to bear in mind. A significant fraction of the U.S. Navy’s cruiser-destroyer force is now engaged in this operation, probably at least 20 CRUDES assets, as we would call them, mainly destroyers and probably a couple of cruisers. Add in the carrier, LCS ships, amphibious warships, and Marines. So this is a big endeavor. CENTCOM is fully capable of running this operation. They have the command-and-control architecture to do it. But a significant number of ships are tied up.

The second thing is that there is risk here. First, the Navy does not like to operate in narrow waters. I do not blame them. Those ships are not meant to operate with their radars over land. They can do it, but it is not the preferred method, and your warning times are very short. If you get a major attack or a cruise-missile launch from metropolitan Iran, warning may be measured in seconds.

We have seen the Navy perform very well down in the Red Sea against the Houthis with a threat like this, so I have no doubt that the Navy can defend itself if necessary. Nonetheless, the risk is high. Additionally, if you do VBSS, shorthand for visit, board, search, and seizure, there is always the opportunity for somebody on the ship to decide that this is the day they want to make a last stand. They could attack the boarding force, blow the ship up, or do a variety of things, all of which can result in casualties. Naval Forces Central Command, U.S. Fifth Fleet, the Marines, and CENTCOM are managing this, but it is a risk we should recognize.

There is also the risk of floating mines. The Iranians do not adhere to the standard law-of-war practice, which says that if you mine, you must record where the mines are. They are well beyond that, believe me. So it is possible that mines are drifting out there, or that they have deployed mines in order to create a circumstance in which a warship might hit one.

Let us be clear: a warship hitting a mine is very different from a tanker hitting a mine. On a 150,000-ton tanker, if you hit a mine on the bridge, people might look at each other and say, ‘Gosh, we just hit a mine.’ On an 11,000-ton warship, if you hit a mine, everybody knows you hit a mine. In fact, the ship is probably in danger of sinking. All of these things are being accommodated by the people working this problem right now, but the risk is high.

The last thing, and we may know more over time, is that there are two navies that Iran has: the regular Iranian Navy, and that navy is largely destroyed. Its larger warships, typically, we have cited numbers of 150 or more, have been largely decimated. But the IRGC Navy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy, is made up of small boats. A lot of them are still left.

More significantly, we know from past practice that the IRGC Navy selects and promotes officers based on aggressiveness and ideological purity, not competence or level-headed decision-making.

We have seen this play out in several incidents over the last 20 years up in the Arabian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz, where U.S. sailors and British sailors have been taken prisoner, ships have been attacked, and drones have been shot down, an RQ-4 in July 2019, for example, without reference to higher command. There is always that risk.

The Iranian chain of command is already a little rickety. Now you have the IRGC Navy operating up there, and the principle is that they are willing to make very aggressive decisions, confident that Iran will have to back in and follow them. So this is a high-risk operation. The U.S. Navy is doing a magnificent job of it right now, but the risk is very high. I do not want to minimize that risk.

Blaise Misztal:
General, if I could stick with you for a second, you mentioned both the risk of mines and the risk of the IRGC Navy, their fast boats and other capabilities. I think President Trump, in that Truth Social post, referenced both recently.

We also heard yesterday that, at a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee, defense officials said there might be up to 20 mines that the Iranians have placed in the Strait, and that it could take up to six months to clear them. President Trump today, in that post, said, ‘We are clearing them; it would take just a couple of days,’ and also that we are going to go after the small boats and other IRGC Navy threats.

What are our options for demining and trying to deal with the IRGC Navy, and how much risk do they pose?

General McKenzie:
Here is the way to think about it: think about it in terms of four operations that CENTCOM can undertake or is undertaking. The first one I have just described to you, which is the blockade. The second is the clearance of the Strait of Hormuz. You do not have to clear the whole Strait. You have to clear a proofed passage, a key route, where ships can pass.

I heard the six-month comment, and I also heard the White House disavow that, but I think six months is a pretty conservative estimate of how long it would take to clear the Strait. It might not be six days, but I do not think it is six months to do this. I do not know what we are doing; I do not have access to information about what we are doing or not doing to clear the Strait of Hormuz. But I can tell you that, in order to do that, you are going to send vulnerable platforms into an area to sweep mines.

CENTCOM is going to want to be sure that the Iranians cannot attack our vulnerable mine-countermeasure platforms as they do their work. That means you have to go up there and strike those fast-attack boats.

You have to strike where you think short-range missiles can be launched. You are going to go after Iranian observation posts, either visual or electromagnetic. CENTCOM was in that program when the ceasefire occurred. I think they got well into that program, but there is probably more work to be done before you are completely confident about your ability to go in and do this clearance.

That is an operation that is hanging out there. What I would look for is this: if you see U.S. warships transit the Strait of Hormuz, that will be an indicator of where we are in this process. That has not yet occurred. We could be doing work right now; I just do not know the answer. Some of the precursor work has been done. So there is the clearance of the Strait. There are two other operations out there.

The third would be, if we are directed, and I believe we have now been directed, to go in and prevent counter-seizure activities. That is going to raise the risk a little bit. You are going to have to get closer up into the Strait.

Your small attack craft are either working against what mine-laying efforts are out there, or, if we decide to extend that protection to other ships going into the Gulf that Iran challenges, then you are going to be in direct confrontation with the Iranians. You are going to be in a gun battle up there. We will prevail in that gun battle, but the risk to the U.S. Navy gets higher as you do each of these steps. That is the third module that could be employed.

The fourth module, of course, would be the resumption of large-scale combat operations against Iran. CENTCOM has plans for that. We can pick those plans back up and get into that program very quickly. That would include strikes on everything across the whole gamut of the Iranian military and perhaps other targets as well, if the president directed it.

These are the four operations: the ongoing blockade; the clearance of the Strait; counter-seizure operations or directed action against ships that are challenging our mine-clearing operation; and fourth, if the ceasefire is over, a large-scale resumption of strikes against Iran. That is how I divide the four military options.

Blaise Misztal:
Thanks, General. Could you quickly follow up on that third set of activities, the counter-seizure activities? Is that principally something that has to be conducted from the water by naval vessels? Is that an aerial task? Or is it a combination, joint air-and-sea operation?

General McKenzie:
It is joint. Sometimes we get the impression that it is just the Navy up here doing this work. This is a joint operation. It is Navy-centric because those are the platforms we see, but land-based airpower has a huge role to play here.

Sea-based airpower does as well. The Marines are fully engaged, potentially raid forces if necessary, also a significant combat airpower that deploys with a marine expeditionary unit. Army attack helicopters are involved as well, as are possibly Army missiles launched from the southern end of the strait, if necessary, fired against targets up there. It is a joint operation, which is why it is a complex operation. But CENTCOM has the command and control to do it.

Blaise Misztal:
Given how much of our surface fleet is involved in this blockade and in operations around the Middle East, how long do you think we could sustain the blockade as it is currently being deployed?

General McKenzie:
Nobody in the world is better than the U.S. Navy at underway replenishment and keeping ships supplied at sea. I would think CENTCOM is working on plans to rotate ships offline. Just because there are 20 ships up there does not mean 20 ships are working all the time. You can bring them into ports; you can do a variety of things. They will want to keep that very quiet, of course, so the ships do not become targets.

A ship is much safer operating at sea than alongside in port somewhere. But they will rotate that. We can do this for an extended period of time, in my opinion. The price, though, will be paid in future maintenance costs. That is something I knew as a CENTCOM commander. When you maintain large forces in CENTCOM that are not programmed in the global force management process, there is a future bill that accrues and eventually needs to be paid. I would also add, as an observation, that the Navy needs to be much more efficient in its approach to managing its maintenance cycle.

Blaise Misztal:
Thanks. Let me pivot now to you, General Amidror, and the view from Israel. In particular, what is Israel seeing Iran doing during the ceasefire? Is Iran in any way reconstituting any of its military capabilities? How has it been used this period?

General Amidror:
First of all, it is clear that the decision is now on the American side. We are preparing ourselves to resume the war. We aren’t taking part in the blockade. Our navy isn’t built for such operations, we can help in intelligence and special forces, but no more than that. What we see in Iran today is, first, that they are trying to get out of the tunnels, which have been blocked by us and by the Americans, with as many launchers and missiles as possible.

They understand that the only capability they have, if a decision is made to resume the war, is to launch more missiles. I do not believe they have any secret cards in their hands. What we probably see is more of the same.

How much more depends on our ability, and when I say ‘our,’ I mean the Americans and the Israelis, to identify where they are hiding the launchers and missiles, and to destroy as many of them as possible at the beginning of the war, as we did in June. Israel’s main job during the ceasefire is to identify the movement of the launchers and the missiles so we will be in a better position to do what is needed if the war resumes.

The other area where we see the Iranians working very hard is rebuilding their air-defense systems. They cannot go back to the same capabilities they had before. Since June, they have lost the majority of them, the vast majority. They will try to preserve something that might threaten American and Israeli pilots. They were very happy when they succeeded in intercepting an F-15, but from what I understand, they did not succeed in rebuilding their air-defense system. These are isolated capabilities around launchers that they succeeded in saving from the Israeli operation in June.

The Iranians are speaking about something new they will do. I do not see them having such a surprise underground. I think they will probably focus on the countries around them, the Gulf countries, because it is easier.

Those countries do not have the capabilities to defend themselves in the same way as Israel, and the Iranians understand that they are also part of the Israeli-American alliance. They may not be taking part in the war itself, but they are still part of the American axis. The Iranians will try to put pressure on the United States and Israel by launching many rockets and drones towards Gulf facilities.

I believe that will be the big difference from the previous stage – focusing more on the Gulf instead of dividing their weapons between Israel and the Gulf. They now understand that it is very hard to overcome the defensive capabilities we have in Israel, including anti-missile systems and the air-defense batteries here.
Israel is preparing itself, we have a new list of targets. The decision will be made by the Americans and Israelis about which part of the Iranian system we now want to attack and destroy. I believe that after 24 hours, in which we – Israel and the U.S. – will destroy the air-defense systems Iran was able to rearm – the military superiority over Iran will again be achieved and will be the most important card.

Blaise Misztal:
General McKenzie, do you have a sense of how quickly the Iranians are moving, either in terms of taking out the missiles and launchers, or on the defensive side, putting their defense system back together? Another way of asking that is: how long does the ceasefire go on before Iran gets back to a more dangerous place?

General McKenzie:
I think they are probably having more success digging missiles out than they are working on air defense. A lot of those air-defense systems have to be replaced. Those are complex systems, radars have to be tuned, and you have to do a lot of work to get an air-defense system working. The good news is that I assess that we have very good operational ISR overhead, both electronic and visual.

We should have a very good picture of what they are doing. I continue to believe that while the Iranians may have been able to protect missiles by putting them into deeply bunkered storage sites, that was also an error on their part because it localized them. It allows us to focus our collection. We can see those locations, and it makes it very easy to track those systems when they come out. I am sure they are trying to do that. I would say they are probably going to have more success trying to rebuild their missile force.

But, of course, it is not only the missile; it is the tractor-erector-launcher (TEL), and there are a finite number of those. We have destroyed a number of them. They do not need TEL for every weapon system, but for the longer-range and bigger systems, they certainly do. So while they are making progress and digging some of that stuff out, I would say it has given us an opportunity to further refine our own targeting. Should we be directed to do so, we could get after that with a really high level of ferocity.

Blaise Misztal:
General Amidror, do you share that assessment, or do you have a sense of how quickly they are moving?

General Amidror:
I agree with General McKenzie. This is the area in which we are focusing our efforts. The role of the combination of Israeli intelligence and American intelligence is identifying real-time movements of the launchers, which Iran tries to move out from the tunnels after the Iranians open the tunnel exits that have been blocked by us.
The question, at the end of the day, is a race between their ability to move from one place to another and our ability to intercept the targets on the ground.

We learned a lot through the war, as did the Americans, about tracking and targeting the launchers, and probably we will be better in the future. But we have to understand that the Iranians are very smart, and the Iranian system is learning all the time and changing. Unlike our Western bureaucracies, where it is not so easy to change, they can change very fast. That is not so easy in America and in Israel. We should appreciate their ability to learn and adapt.

Blaise Misztal:
General Amidror, do you think they are capable of that sort of adaptation and disseminating lessons learned and new tactics and procedures, even given the damage that has been done to their leadership and command-and-control structures? Do you think they are adapting in real time right now?

General Amidror:
No question they will learn. They will learn, adapt and change. They are very flexible in their decisions. As I said, we should appreciate their ability to learn and adapt.

Blaise Misztal:
Is that something we might have underestimated, thinking that the decapitation strikes at the beginning of the campaign would cripple their ability to command and control more than it did?

General Amidror:
No, the campaign did cripple their command and control, for example, to organize big salvos of missiles at the same time. But it did not change the ability of the Iranians to learn and change.

Blaise Misztal:
Ambassador Edelman, let me come back to you and the diplomatic front. It seems like there has been a bit of a two-step going on, particularly with the American delegation, which was going to Pakistan on Monday, then was not going to Pakistan, then was going to Pakistan, and then did not go to Pakistan. Ultimately, President Trump extended the ceasefire, saying he is waiting for a unified proposal from the Iranians.

Is this merely an issue of disagreement between the two sides on a deal? Are there bigger logistical problems in these negotiations? What is going on, and what are your expectations about whether we are actually going to see further rounds of talks, either tomorrow or at some future point?

Ambassador Edelman:
Some of the herky-jerky nature of this negotiation is a consequence of the success that the joint force, both the United States and Israel, had in the opening days of this war. Eliminating the command and control, and particularly eliminating the supreme leader, has complicated Iranian decision-making. You get the sense that they have moved from having a robust, vigorous debate about policy at a lower level of the system, but with decisions ultimately being made by the supreme leader and then implemented by others, to a more tentative collective leadership, where the debate is continuing.

The fact that the president said the blockade was continuing, and then said that the Iranians were, in essence, capitulating to every demand he has made, I think, did not sit well with a number of the Iranian leaders. Given the fact that it is now harder for them to make decisions, blocking things is always easier. So you have a situation where a return to negotiations can be blocked, particularly because the high pace of U.S. military sustainment may be interpreted as preparation for renewed conflict.

The air bridge bringing more munitions, aircraft, and refuelers into theater could easily have been read by the Iranians as indicating that they were going to face a repetition of what happened both in June and more recently in February, when they were negotiating and then the United States launched an attack. That explains why this has become more complicated. They are not negotiating something like the JCPOA in 2015, which was a very lengthy document with a number of highly technical annexes. They appear to be negotiating some kind of interim memorandum of understanding with broad heading points that would then have to be filled out by future negotiations.

Therein lies the rub, in part because it is not clear to me that the American negotiators are all that familiar with some of the technical details here. There is potential for misunderstanding, particularly because this is not face-to-face negotiation. Part of this is being mediated by the Pakistanis, who have an interest in keeping the parties at the table.

The tendency, I think, is for them to shade a little bit what they are hearing from both sides in order to keep the parties at the table. That can lead to misunderstandings and miscommunication. We have already seen some of that – in the first round of talks, where the Iranians insisted that Lebanon was part of the ceasefire, the U.S. side said, ‘No, it is not,’ and the Pakistani media said, ‘Yes, it is.’ So you have this kind of misunderstanding when mediation is going on.

Blaise Misztal:
Ambassador, do we have clarity on what the U.S. negotiating position is? What is the deal that the Trump administration has put on the table? Do we know?

Ambassador Edelman:
All we have are fragmentary reports in the press, some of which the administration has denied and some of which appear to be better sourced than others. It does appear that they have called for a 20-year total moratorium or freeze on any enrichment activity by Iran, as well as some steps on the disposition of the 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium at 60 percent. That is what we have seen in the press.

What that does not tell you is, for instance, what would be the disposition of the more than 9,000 pounds of HEU that has been enriched at 20 percent or below level, and how that would be disposed of. That is one reason why I am stressing that the lack of technical expertise among the U.S. negotiators is a little worrisome, at least to me.

Blaise Misztal:
General Amidror, President Trump, while extending the ceasefire, said that part of the problem was that the Iranian regime is fractured. Do you have a sense of how well decision-making is working within the Iranian regime? Is it, in fact, fracturing? Are we seeing any splits between the different elements, or is it all staying fairly unified?

General Amidror:
I do not know, but I think it is not important. What is important is what the terms of the agreement will be, how we reach the agreement, how long negotiations will be, what the people say in the middle, how it will be represented by those who want and don’t want the negotiations. At the end, we need to focus on what will be the Iranian answer, whether there is one, whether that answer is enough to begin negotiations, and, most importantly, what the results of the negotiations will be. We have so many blank points in the puzzle that trying to understand what someone told someone in Tehran along the way is missing the main issue, and we just don’t know what’s happening behind closed doors.

Blaise Misztal:
And from Israel’s perspective, is there a good deal that would be acceptable?

General Amidror:
Yes. I agree with the concern about the lack of experience and knowledge on all the technical issues on the American side of the negotiations. If it is for 20 years, it will be like the Obama agreement. The sunset was the weakest point of the agreement under Obama, and it could be the weakest point of the agreement under Trump.
Similarly to the Obama agreement, no one is mentioning the 20 percent enriched uranium, and no one is mentioning the missiles, and these are very important to us.

By the way, under Obama, the lack of addressing the missiles was also part of the problem. So I hope this administration will not make the same mistakes, and I hope this administration has better negotiators.

Blaise Misztal:
I want to open it up momentarily to the audience. If you have any questions for our panelists, please feel free to submit them using the Q&A function in Zoom, and I will read them out. But first I wanted to turn back to you, General McKenzie, and maybe dive a little deeper into that fourth option that you laid out, which would be a return to kinetic operations. If you were still commander of CENTCOM and you were presenting the president with options now, what would a return to operations look like?

Would it just be a continuation of what we were doing before the ceasefire? Is there anything more that we could do this time around, either to go after more of those Iranian capabilities, missiles, drones, and fast boats, or perhaps to go after countervalue targets to gain leverage on the Iranian regime and try to get them to end this conflict?

General McKenzie:
The Iranians, of course, are not the only learning organization in this conflict, and so we have an opportunity to examine our strikes to date. I am sure CENTCOM has given a lot of reflection to that. I think we would be ready to go right back against missiles, drones, manufacturing areas, bunker areas, any decision against countervalue targets would have to come from the president. Targets that would affect Iranian ability to govern – electricity production, bridges, and things of that nature would all have to come from him.

CENTCOM has these options. The point I always make is that this is a plan that has been worked for many, many years. This is not something that we are doing from scratch. I had responsibility for this plan for three years. My successor owned it for three years. Now it is being executed. It has been refined.

We continued to look at it now. We have had several weeks of engagement to update our targets and look at how they are doing. Even though we are not striking them, we are looking at them very hard with visual, electronic, and other measures, and we have a good picture. I am sure we could go very quickly back into this, should we be directed to do it.

Blaise Misztal:
Are you concerned at all about our stockpile of munitions, either offensive weapons or defensive interceptors, and our ability to sustain another round of fighting?

General McKenzie:
I think we have the capability to take another round of fighting. Commanders are always concerned about something like that. The United States has a very good system for leveling this around the world, and the secretary of defense has the authority, with the staff, to decide how we rebalance these loads against contingencies, not only in Central Command, but in other areas across the world. I think it is a matter of a little concern in the short term. In the long term, though, we have to rebuild the defense industrial base. We have to create conditions where people are willing to build these weapon systems and projectiles, and not be afraid that the next year the orders are going to come off for some other reason. If you want to solve this problem in the long term, steps have to be taken. That is really beyond this discussion.

General Amidror:
We took into account, planning these operations throughout the years, that the ability of the Iranians to launch was much more significant than what we expected it to be. Our ability to identify, destroy, limit and make life difficult for those launchers was much more successful than expected. The number of interceptors needed to intercept the missiles was much less than we had planned for. All in all, it was between 10 and 20 percent of what we had taken into account. So the fact that we are not under any pressure on interceptors is because what we had in mind was a much bigger number of missiles being launched.

Blaise Misztal:
On that point, let me read out a question we received from John Hannah, JINSA’s Randi and Charles Wax Senior Fellow. General Amidror, maybe you can start, and then General McKenzie, I would be curious for your take as well. John asks: Is it fair to draw a preliminary conclusion that Israeli and U.S. intelligence probably underestimated the size of Iran’s missile and drone arsenals, not the size of the barrages that would be fired toward Israel necessarily, but the arsenal and what it would take to degrade it?

General Amidror:
I think we had the numbers. We succeeded in destroying a third of them; a third were blocked inside the tunnels; and they used only a third of what they had. As far as I know, our assessment was very close to the real number of launchers and missiles.

General McKenzie:
It is a very reasonable question, but I would like to wait a little while on that. I do think we may have underestimated drones a little bit. They are much harder. If I were to give ground on anything, I might say they had more drones than we thought. But drones are such an explosive new thing in warfare that we are still dealing with it. I think our responses have been very good, but I would tend to give more weight to that side of the argument than to missiles.

Blaise Misztal:
Maybe sticking with that point, let me push a little further. General McKenzie, John asks: Do you think we underestimated the Iranian response toward our Gulf Arab partners, or that we were underprepared to protect those partners and their assets?

General McKenzie:
I think we were as prepared as we could be, given the limited resources we have. I do not think we could have done a lot more than we did, given the finite number of resources available. I do think that ultimately, the Iranian decision to attack the Gulf allies, and particularly to go after civilian targets, countervalue targets, is going to prove to be a strategic disaster for them. In fact, I would put it on the scale of Hitler’s decision to declare war on the United States in December after Pearl Harbor.

After Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt had no trouble marshaling the American people against the Japanese threat, but there was still broad division in the United States, not widely remembered today, about going to war against Germany. Hitler declared war on the United States and took the problem out of Roosevelt’s hands. In many ways, the Iranian decision to strike our partners in the Gulf made it a lot easier for them to cooperate with us, to go from icy neutrality to something far more helpful.

I do not think that process is over yet. Whatever short-term gain the Iranians achieved, and I understand why they did it; they did it to increase pressure on the United States from our Gulf allies, saying ‘Please make it stop’, it has not been that clear-cut. Ultimately, it will work against them strategically in the long term, in my opinion.

General Amidror:
I agree that it was maybe one of the most important decisions of the Iranians, but I think it is too early to judge the result. It very much depends on how the Gulf countries understand the lessons after the war. One scenario is that the lesson of the Gulf countries is that Israel and America are strong and determined, that they can trust them, and that they cannot trust the Iranians, and the Iranians showed them the real enemy in the Middle East.

Another scenario is that they conclude in the Gulf that the Americans and Israelis speak very highly, but at the end of the day they stop and do not complete the job, and that the Gulf countries will remain there with Iran while the Americans go back far away to Washington and the Israelis go back to their own place, then they may conclude that these two actors cannot be trusted. That would be another Middle East.

The result would be that the Gulf countries decide to compromise with the Iranians because the Iranians are more determined, because the Iranians are there, because they are not going anywhere, and because they have to find a way to live with the Iranians rather than trust the Americans and Israelis. So yes, it was a very important decision by the Iranians. But we do not yet understand the consequences. It will depend greatly on the lessons the Gulf countries draw.

Ambassador Edelman:
I just wanted to put some of this discussion of estimates of Iranian missile capability before the war and now into context. First, because most of their missiles are mobile, going after them is extremely difficult. In the first Gulf War back in the 1990s, we did not do very well, as some of the major studies after that war demonstrated. Bomb-damage assessment is always, in my experience, and I defer to the two generals on the platform here, an art, not a science.

Most pilots come back and say, ‘Yes, I hit the target.’ But that does not really tell you whether the target was destroyed, damaged, or something else. That takes time and analysis by the intelligence community. We have gotten a lot better at it since the 1990s, and really what has been accomplished is amazing. But people should not be surprised if postwar assessments say we did not do quite as well as we thought we did, because that is just the nature of the beast.

Blaise Misztal:
General McKenzie, maybe I can come back to you quickly on the point you raised about the momentous decision Iran made to attack civilian infrastructure and our Gulf Arab partners. We have heard that, in fact, that has spurred some of them, particularly the Emirates, to offer to get involved in offensive operations. Is that something the United States should consider in order to augment our military power? Do they have anything to offer in this fight?

General McKenzie:
As you know, the UAE, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, all of the Gulf states, have very effective fighter aircraft. I would say this is not something we are just thinking of right now, and I will leave it there. They have a role to play here. We talked about that when I was the CENTCOM commander. If we had a situation where we had to defend the Arabian Peninsula, we are not just now coming to considerations of how to employ them today. This is the result of a lot of thinking over a number of years. Depending on their appetite for it, yes, there are things they can do, and I am sure we would be happy to incorporate them into those things.

Blaise Misztal:
Ambassador, a question for you on the diplomatic side from Charles Wax: How can we trust any agreement that the Iranians make, considering their long history of lying and cheating?

Ambassador Edelman:
Very good question. The answer has to be that if there is an agreement, and I agree with General Amidror’s comments about the deficiencies of the JCPOA, which we have discussed at JINSA for years, it cannot just be an agreement that the United States reaches with Iran. It has to be backed up by very intrusive inspections by the IAEA, unimpeded by any kind of cat-and-mouse games that the Iranians might want to play. There would need to be, in my view, some understanding that if they were to cheat or retreat, as they have in the past, there would be pretty commensurate and immediate consequences militarily.

Blaise Misztal:
Sticking with you, Ambassador, another question from John Hannah: Can you give an idea of what a realistic deal on Iranian missiles would look like, especially taking into account the fact that the main threat to our Gulf partners is short-range ballistic missiles and drones?

Ambassador Edelman:
That will actually be one of the hardest things to get to. One of the things I worry about is that it might not be addressed in this MOU being discussed right now. In my view, it is likely to be left for a longer-range negotiation, and that could end up creating the situation General Amidror just described, in terms of fears in the Gulf about being left to deal with this problem on their own.

I do not have a good answer for how you would get after that problem in an agreement. Again, you have to have some ability to verify it, whether by national technical means or by inspections. I cannot imagine Iran agreeing to inspections of its missile facilities, so it would probably have to be some kind of agreement where they allowed us, at least from overhead, to see what they are up to. But that would be very hard to do.

Blaise Misztal:
Are there any existing arms-control agreements that you think would be a sufficient basis or good model to build on here?

Ambassador Edelman:
The model would be the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. President Trump, wisely in my view, withdrew from it in 2019 because there were only two countries in the world whose intermediate-range missiles were being limited, the United States and the Russians, and we were the only ones abiding by the treaty. So the withdrawal made sense. But if you recall, the verification mechanism for that treaty was something we would have to try to replicate. I cannot believe the Iranians would agree to it.

We had a presence at the portal of the missile-production facility in Votkinsk, and we scanned, with very sophisticated equipment, every vehicle that came in and out of that facility to make sure they were not carrying missiles that were banned or regulated under the treaty. I think you need something akin to that to really be able to verify any kind of agreement on short-range or medium-range missiles.

Blaise Misztal:
To close out the hour, I wanted to ask all three of you to give your predictions, always a dangerous game, I know, about how long you expect the ceasefire to last and whether it will end with a deal, a return to war, or something else. General Amidror, I will start with you.

General Amidror:
I do not know. What I can say is that, from our point of view, it is better to have no deal than a bad deal.

Blaise Misztal:
All right. General McKenzie?

General McKenzie:
I cannot improve on that comment. I would just add that if we decide to go back to combat operations, I think the joint force is ready to go and could do whatever the president requires.

Blaise Misztal:
Ambassador Edelman, you will have the last word.

Ambassador Edelman:
On the ceasefire, I think it is likely that we may have about two weeks of ceasefire. I would not expect it to go much longer than that. As to whether it yields an agreement or not, I completely agree with General Amidror’s comment: better not to have a deal than to have a bad one.

I do not think we can exclude that we may end up in a kind of no man’s land of neither peace nor war, with the president carrying this forward for some period of time, in the hope that the blockade itself will bring the Iranians back to the table to make a deal the president finds acceptable.

Blaise Misztal:
Ambassador Edelman, General McKenzie, General Amidror, thank you so much for your time and insights this afternoon. Thank you to everyone who tuned in, and please stay tuned to JINSA.org for all of the latest analysis and updates.