Can you talk about what you found?

Yeah, so one of his new initiatives is creating a new corps of cadets at several civilian universities, which on its own wouldn't be worrisome.

But two of the five he chose are conservative Christian private universities.

And the memo establishing it explicitly states that he wants a commissioning program to put new officers in the military that's focused on American heritage.

That's a pretty shallow dog whistle for cadets.

White people.

And he's saying the current service academies like West Point or the Naval Academy are not doing a good enough job at commissioning officers who value American heritage.

And the goal, the stated goal, was to out 800 top officers by January 1st.

I mean, where does the U.S. sit strategically in light of this? I mean, does it have realistic options outside of ending the war and getting the best deal it can, which may not be very much right now?

Very good question.

And first, thanks, Omar, for having me.

Thanks to Don.

And thank you especially to everybody who's taking the time out to watch us.

So, yeah, where do we sit strategically? I think it's, you know, I will start by saying because there isn't really a serious strategy here, we've got to kind of zoom out and see what does Trump actually want out of this war.

I think at this point we know he does not care about the minutiae of uranium enrichment.

But Harrison.

Why? Because I thought Ukraine had so much sort of knowledge around drone warfare now that they were in a position to kind of go to the United States and say, hey, we can help you figure out how to deal with Iran's drones.

They can help us maybe defend against Iranian drones, but there's been a constant evolving arms race as Russian-Ukrainian forces and inventors learn from each other on the battlefield that's been going on basically since day one.

And any technological advance maybe gives one side an advantage for a couple months before somebody else learns how to deal with it.

Now, allegedly, Russia maybe has AI-guided drones, which allow it to overcome all of the jamming networks that Ukraine's developed, for example.

But now, I mean, first of all, I think it's worth recognizing that you don't send Kushner and Witkoff when you actually really want to get something done.

We can look at their track record, Iran, Gaza.

You can notice Vance and Rubio are nowhere near this right now, which gives you an idea of the lack of seriousness, in my view.

I don't think the U.S. has— Confirmed that out loud, or did they? They

Yeah.

And, and nice to meet you, Preston.

But yeah, in, in the, I think opening moments of the war, basically, or the first days, a, you know, it...

And everything we know, by the way, is from press, right? The...

So to the extent that we know, reportedly, um, an American Tomahawk missile hit a school, um, in southern Iran, uh, in a, an area called Manab.

Uh, we, we now know it was a succession of three Tomahawks on the same school, uh, and it killed about 150, uh, schoolchildren and other people.

The, the reason that it looks like the school was hit is that it was formerly on an Iranian military base, um, and was still near an Iranian military base but had not been actually on, on the base, which had moved to no longer include the school, uh, for, for about a decade.

Do you view your role right now as kind of speaking on behalf of the service members that cannot speak out to things like that?

How did you respond when you saw this painful essay in The Guardian?

So incidentally, even though I was an Army officer, uh, we were actually assigned to the US Navy headquarters in Bahrain, and I, I had several soldiers, um, who did a tour on Navy destroyers joining their boarding team.

Um, this was back in 2019.

There was a, a...

some kind of illness that forced the ship to be quarantined, and so my soldiers were on that ship much, much longer, uh, than intended.

Um, you know, these are, these are people who are not sailors and had never spent an extended amount of time at sea before.

Uh, and it, it took quite a clear psychological toll on them.

I agree with that, but I don't mean to interrupt, sir, but, um, um, Major, my man, what I would say is we're in the war now, so then what do we do?

I mean, how are we supposed to look at this?

Yeah, I've said for months that the administration was out of ideas for the Iran war, and I didn't expect them to come out and announce it themselves.

And so if we were looking for any clear evidence that they have no idea how to extricate themselves from this illegal war they started, here it is, trying to crowdsource solutions for getting a less embarrassing way out of the Iran war.

But the story has not changed really since, I'd say, late March.

And they've refused to accept reality, which is that they were unable through the U.S. military to destroy the Iranian government or to forcibly reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

And we've seen Hegseth and Trump and the rest of the team struggle with that reality for five months now.

And They haven't had new ideas.

Do we know what kind of production capacity they have?

He was like, "I have to ask legal," and I was like, "I feel like that's something you would check on."

So in, in the Vietnam War, uh, US government treated, uh, congressional appropriations as de facto approval even though Congress never actually approved that war.

Um-

So there's precedent.

There's precedent and, you know, regardless of the legal argument, in reality, this is the only tool that Congress, that our members of Congress have to approve or reject this war, cutting off the funds.

So, you know, regardless of, of how you interpret the constitutional law, it is a de facto approval.

They are paying the Trump administration to keep fighting this war if they approve any of this funding.

What do you think of this moment and this shift in Congress?

I think on one hand, it's a massive victory for anti-war, pro-peace Americans who've been pushing for this for years, who wanna reevaluate, uh, the US relationship with Israel.

Um, and you know, on the other hand, we have to understand why we suddenly have, you know, up to two dozen new Democrats, uh, finally voting to, to withhold aid to Israel.

Um, and it, it's not just 'cause they suddenly found religion or changed their mind about their sense of morality.

Uh, it means they are finally more afraid of their own voters than they are of pro-Israel donors and PACs like AIPAC.

That is the shift.

Uh, the American people at large, and specifically Democratic voters, uh, have wanted to see this for a long time.

What do you see?

I'm gonna show you the cover of the, the New York Post, um, which, uh, under here it says, uh, "US will be the guardian angel of the waterway." I usually don't pay my guardian angels, so how does this work?

This is, this is just new, [laughs] new levels of desperation that I, I didn't, uh, couldn't, couldn't have imagined a couple months ago.

Um, I think we gotta remember that the free protection from the US Navy has not been successful for the past several months.

It's why we're in a, in a new series of, uh, cycle of, of escalation.

Um, over the past week, uh, the Navy has repeatedly tried to secure transit through the Strait of Hormuz.

Uh, Iran has still been able to attack ships.

So the protecting ships part of it we already know won't work.

Replenished fast enough, yeah

So how would you describe the current situation, Harrison?

Before we go into why there is no deal today, I do think that from actually both Trump and Tehran's point of view, the 60-day MOU is probably as close to a peace deal as they're going to get.

The fundamental issue for Trump now is Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz.

It's not their nuclear program.

You know, he kind of...

I don't think Trump really cares about or personally understands the peculiarities or specific details of uranium enrichment.

He does kind of understand that Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz is not sustainable for him politically.

Have you heard any reporting about why the chairman of the Joint Chiefs rushed down to Florida to try and stop that operation?

I think

what he's referring to there is... getting ships that are loaded up on Gulf Arab States oil, not Iranian oil, basically helping them escape the Strait of Hormuz and deliver it to markets.

This is basically, you may remember the short-lived Project Freedom scheme to have the U.S. Navy trying to help trapped ships get out of the Strait of Hormuz.

He is referring to that.

And it is true that basically throughout the duration of the war, a trickle of ships, both carrying Iranian oil and carrying the Gulf Arab oil that Iran is trying to blockade, have basically snuck out of the strait and avoided attack by both blockades.

So that has happened.

I was just looking at a chart of this.

There'll be no give and take, I don't think, out of this guy, because for me, it's all about his ego and for for his I guess for a better lack of a better word, his bully tactics.

And that's that, that vague, the vagaries of that, how you're phrasing that is like, yes, it's that, it's at that level of like flat platitude.

It's like in retrospect.

And I can tell you, right.

This was, this was the biggest thing.

This was an op-ed that I think was in like, september of 2025 so already after the the breakdown of the trump quote-unquote ceasefire which then led to you know unprecedented total israeli siege and starvation of gaza and then you had the dam break where mainstream democrats finally because because people were being starved basically in an even more accelerated and and difficult to ignore way and Trump was president mainstream Democrats got a little more comfortable criticizing the U S Israel relationship and criticizing the Israeli government.

And then months after that, we see that we see these guys for the first time go like, Hey, you know what? Maybe, yeah, maybe we should have conditioned weapons a little more.

And what they're, what they're not saying is, is A, apologies for the constant law breaking, because we now know there were multiple laws related to US foreign assistance that they very knowingly and deliberately broke to make sure they could keep sending weapons to a country that was committing obvious gross violations of human rights.

as,

What are the conversations like internally when somebody like you, are there conversations internally when somebody like you perceives a policy goal or a tactical failure that doesn't correspond to your understanding of what military ethics is? Do people talk about that internally?

I think it's important to understand, for folks who are not familiar with government work or military work, and it's a lot of the same norms, it's really abnormal that you would examine like the strategic logic of the larger campaign or policy that you're a part of that, you know, cause your, your job or your office's job or your department's job is going to be one very specific piece, which out of context might not be that objectionable.

Maybe your, your office is just in charge of like resupplying us forces or like Right.

In the case of the part of the Navy that I was ended up supporting, it's like, well, we don't want more weapons to get smuggled to the Houthis.

I'm like, OK, that's that's not evil.

You could you could disagree with the strategic logic, but that's that's not a terrible thing on its on its head.

But you wouldn't necessarily be discussing, OK, well, what's the connection to that, to this pretty pointless, destructive thing? criminal war right you're not really even even like and i was struck like more senior officers at that time they complained about the saudis like this was not a a trusted or trustworthy partner or partner we particularly liked on on like the level of of uh leadership um but nowhere in there in those discussions of like how do we do our little piece of this better are you are you evaluating like well what's the point of this whole war and you got to remember um I mean, that's not how I think almost any part of the government works, not just the military.

And And despite all of those kind of systems level things, I personally, as a member of this organization, have to divorce myself from all of this.

One, this idea of war crimes, but two, something he just said, "We have a long history of attacking infrastructure." When you hear that, can you help me understand the history there?

Yeah.

Uh, as somebody who resigned under the last administration to avoid being complicit in war crimes, I unfortunately have some experience on this.

Um, there is a long history of the US attacking civilian infrastructure.

Sometimes, under very specific circumstances, uh, it can be justified legally if you say that this power plant or bridge has military value.

Uh, but in this case, Trump himself has made it very clear that these targets have no military value.

Uh, that's why they haven't been blown up yet six weeks into this war, and he's only threatening them, uh, threatening to destroy them as a punishment to the Iranian government.

Well, one of the things that's interesting is seeing this conversation happen with Democrats as well on, and on the left, which is how do you spend your time if you want to stop a war, [laughs] right? Do you do a war powers resolution? Do you have all of this talk about war crimes? Um, like, w- uh, what's a useful way for people who were against this to protest it, those who are in political office?

Tell us what that ground invasion can look like as the US is bringing thousands more US troops to the Gulf region.

region.Thank you.

So for context here, I think really from day two of this war, the Trump administration has not known what to do and, and how to get out of this, so there's, there's really little left to try other than a ground invasion.

Uh, the other context I wanna add is that from the Israeli side, as your last guest, Trita, mentioned, uh, a long war that, that aims to collapse the Iranian state is good for them.

So with that in mind, um, there's, there's a couple options that Trump administration officials themselves have, have floated in the press.

Uh, one is doing a, a landing on something called Kharg Island, which handles ninety percent of Iran's oil exports and is located deep, uh, in the Persian Gulf past the Strait of Hormuz.

Uh, another option also floated by Trump officials themselves is some kind of raid on Iranian nuclear sites to, uh, to try and secure or sabotage Iran's highly enriched uranium.

To, uh, what level of a strategic blunder, uh, do you consider what has happened here with this, uh, war in Iran, historically speaking, in terms of the US, uh, and its military?

Tell us what that ground invasion can look like as the US is bringing thousands more US troops to the Gulf region.

region.Thank you.

So for context here, I think really from day two of this war, the Trump administration has not known what to do and, and how to get out of this, so there's, there's really little left to try other than a ground invasion.

Uh, the other context I wanna add is that from the Israeli side, as your last guest, Trita, mentioned, uh, a long war that, that aims to collapse the Iranian state is good for them.

So with that in mind, um, there's, there's a couple options that Trump administration officials themselves have, have floated in the press.

Uh, one is doing a, a landing on something called Kharg Island, which handles ninety percent of Iran's oil exports and is located deep, uh, in the Persian Gulf past the Strait of Hormuz.

Uh, another option also floated by Trump officials themselves is some kind of raid on Iranian nuclear sites to, uh, to try and secure or sabotage Iran's highly enriched uranium.

To, uh, what level of a strategic blunder, uh, do you consider what has happened here with this, uh, war in Iran, historically speaking, in terms of the US, uh, and its military?

Tell us what that ground invasion can look like as the US is bringing thousands more US troops to the Gulf region.

region.Thank you.

So for context here, I think really from day two of this war, the Trump administration has not known what to do and, and how to get out of this, so there's, there's really little left to try other than a ground invasion.

Uh, the other context I wanna add is that from the Israeli side, as your last guest, Trita, mentioned, uh, a long war that, that aims to collapse the Iranian state is good for them.

So with that in mind, um, there's, there's a couple options that Trump administration officials themselves have, have floated in the press.

Uh, one is doing a, a landing on something called Kharg Island, which handles ninety percent of Iran's oil exports and is located deep, uh, in the Persian Gulf past the Strait of Hormuz.

Uh, another option also floated by Trump officials themselves is some kind of raid on Iranian nuclear sites to, uh, to try and secure or sabotage Iran's highly enriched uranium.

To, uh, what level of a strategic blunder, uh, do you consider what has happened here with this, uh, war in Iran, historically speaking, in terms of the US, uh, and its military?