[0:00]Fox News alert, we are awaiting word from the president as he meets with Ireland's T-shot or Prime Minister, Michael Martin to mark St. Patrick's Day.
[0:10]He could speak of course, the big backdrop to everything these days, the conflict with Iran and developments breaking just a short time ago.
[0:18]I'm Harris Faulkner. You are in the Faulkner Focus. Central command has released new video of operation Epic Fury.
[0:26]On the left of your screen, you see the precision strikes taking out that terror regimes targets.
[0:33]On the right side of your screen operations from on board an aircraft carrier with the caption team work makes it all work.
[0:42]Indeed it does. The very latest update from Centcom is this.
[0:46]US air strikes have hit more than 7,000 regime targets so far. 6500 combat flights have taken off during the mission.
[0:55]And strikes have destroyed or damaged more than 100 terror regime military vessels.
[1:00]President Trump on the mission.
[1:04]We hit them so hard like nobody's ever been hit. We hit them very hard.
[1:09]And we've extinguished most of their missiles. We've extinguished most of their drones.
[1:15]We've extinguished most of the places where the missiles and the drones have built.
[1:21]We've fully extinguished two layers of leadership.
[1:25]Israel has announced today joint strikes with the United States have killed two more top Iranian officials.
[1:31]And that is a huge headline. One of them was leading the regime's national security council.
[1:38]The other was the leader of a brutal force tasked with slaughtering all those protesters.
[1:42]Retired Navy Vice Admiral and former Deputy Centcom Commander Mark Fox is coming up in focus.
[1:49]First, let's go to Chief Foreign correspondent Trey Yingst in Israel. Trey.
[1:54]Harris, good morning. Significant strikes overnight. The Israelis say they took out Ali Larijani, the de facto leader of Iran.
[2:00]The man who was the Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, and he was even in the streets of Tehran on Friday, directly threatening President Trump and the United States.
[2:12]Today, he is dead, along with another top commander in a separate strike against the Basij forces.
[2:18]This is a wing of Iran's IRGC, and Gholam Reza Soleimani, the man responsible for ordering the crackdown on protesters earlier this year, was also taken out.
[2:27]An Israeli official tells me more than a dozen Basij officials and commanders also killed with him.
[2:33]Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking today about the success of these operations.
[2:39]We are destabilizing this regime in the hope of giving the Iranian people the opportunity to remove it.
[2:44]It won't happen all at once, and it won't happen easily, but if we persist, we will give them the opportunity to take their fate into their own hands.
[2:54]Earlier today, the Israelis launching a fresh wave of air strikes against the Iranian regime.
[2:59]You can see in this video released by the IDF on Sunday. These strikes have pummeled Iran for the past two almost and a half weeks as this operation continues.
[3:08]All of this taking place as the Iranians are responding with ballistic missile fire toward Israel and using their proxies to target US interests in the region.
[3:17]Overnight, an Iran backed Iraqi Shia militia targeted the US Embassy in Baghdad with rockets and drones.
[3:22]You can see on the horizon here in Baghdad that explosion. The proxy Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon launching new attacks overnight against Northern Israel.
[3:29]This is the community of Nahariya, and there were a significant amount of rockets fired over the border.
[3:37]Six people injured there. President Trump over the weekend was asked about the possibility of a deal with the Iranian regime.
[3:43]Now into the third week of this bombing campaign, what would that deal look like? What are the the ask that you're making of the government of Iran?
[3:50]They want to make a deal. They're talking to our people.
[3:55]I don't know if they say that to you. Maybe they do. Maybe they don't. Don't forget. They are a country that for years, I didn't know this until recently.
[4:02]Their country based on disinformation, and now they're using disinformation plus AI.
[4:09]And that's a terrible situation. That's a terrible situation.
[4:14]The Israelis focused on Iran but also looking at Lebanon where they launched new strikes against the Dahea neighborhood of Southern Beirut.
[4:20]Some of the aftermath of those strikes you can see here. Israeli ground forces are moving deeper into Southern Lebanon to try to reduce this threat from Hezbollah.
[4:30]And Harris, we do have some new information for you here. The Israeli transportation Authority at this moment is considering closing the airspace over Israel tonight.
[4:39]They've gathered intelligence indicating that Hezbollah is planning another large rocket barrage into this country. Harris.
[4:44]Trey, thank you very much. And fact, we'll start there with my first guest. Mark Fox, retired Navy Vice Admiral and a former Sentcom Deputy Commander. Good to have you today, sir.
[4:55]First of all, closing the airspace of Israel, uh, because Hezbollah terrorists, the proxy, that terror proxy of Iran could fire missiles.
[5:05]Your first reaction and thoughts on that? Well, the uh, you know, the Iranians have not changed their stripes. And they're using proxies, just like they have in the past.
[5:15]Lebanese Hezbollah being primary one of them, but Hamas, uh, the Houthis. And so, um, that's their playbook and that's all they know how to do is they're aggressive against their neighbors.
[5:30]They are the, the author, the, uh, reason for all of the malevolent activity that's been going on in that region for, uh, 47 years.
[5:37]We don't feel like we've been at war necessarily that whole time, but every single time you hear them say, death to America, I think we ought to take that pretty literally and, and seriously.
[5:47]They've been at war with us for 47 years and we ought to, we ought to take it seriously. And we are.
[5:52]What does it say though, uh, about the air space situation in Israel?
[5:58]And I ask that because there have been so many more drones than anybody had anticipated reportedly.
[6:05]I don't know about the ballistic missile situation and the count of those, but we seem to have decimated them by north of 90%.
[6:12]So if that's the case, why close the Israeli airspace? What is the immediate danger that perhaps we did or didn't see?
[6:18]Well, there are still an awful lot of missiles in Lebanon. They, they eliminated, you know, 75% of them, but we're talking probably close to a 100,000 missiles in Lebanon.
[6:33]So there's still, I think in the thousands of missiles that they may still have to deal with.
[6:37]Uh, they've reduced that threat tremendously, but it's not gone completely.
[6:40]That's so interesting because when I was talking about that decimation, that's Iran, but what you're saying is there are still a lot of missiles in Lebanon.
[6:47]Uh, House Speaker Mike Johnson just responded to the director of the National Counterterrorism Centers resignation.
[6:54]Here's what he said, quote, Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation. Johnson's response was this.
[7:00]We all understood there was clearly an imminent threat that Iran was very close to, uh, the enrichment of nuclear capability.
[7:07]And they were building missiles at a pace that no one in the region could keep up with. They were far out pacing our, our, our allies and, and, and us in our defense capability because we had personnel, installations, uh, members of the armed services and civilians in the region.
[7:26]Uh, Iran was building up ballistic missiles at such a rapid pace and we knew that their plan was to fire them upon Americans.
[7:33]What's your reaction?
[7:36]Well, you know, Iran's strategy to to close those straight of hormuz to fire missiles at its neighbors.
[7:42]Just think about if we had not initiated this campaign and how much worse it would be if they were able to complete their plan to build thousands and thousands of ballistic missiles and drones.
[7:54]So this, as I mentioned before, the Iranians have not changed their stripes. They are the author of everything that's bad in that region and it's time for them to be, um,
[8:06]that threat to be eliminated from the family of nations.
[8:09]You know, I want to ask you about the two, uh, top leaders.
[8:14]One was reportedly the National Security Council member and the other was this commander of the Basij elite group inside the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the IRGC.
[8:24]How is replacing those people maybe not as worrisome knowing that you've taken so many out?
[8:30]Because we were seeing a fold in, you know, I atoll agon then a son, reportedly, we still haven't seen proof of life on a son, but there you go. What's your reaction?
[8:39]Well, bad things happen to bad people sometime.
[8:43]I guess that's the only way I could put it.
[8:46]I, and are it should, should we be concerned about how they might fill the roles of these two men who were pretty critically at the top of of what we've been seeing, the killing of thousands upon thousands of protesters just in the weeks before this conflict began?
[9:35]Oh, yeah, this campaign, I, let's put it in context. This is probably the most remarkable air campaign ever waged.
[9:44]Uh, back in desert storm, we were airplane, how many sortties per target back in Iraqi freedom. We had shifted into precision weapons and how many targets per sorty?
[9:56]They've taken this to an entirely new level now. This is unprecedented.
[10:01]And so, in spite of the fact that, yeah, Iran is twice the size of Texas. It's a large country, a lot of people and they've built a lot of very bad things that need to be eliminated.
[10:11]Back to the discussion of, uh, the succession of leaders, um, I think that as long as the Iranian regime as it is known today,
[10:20]there will always be people they don't think the same way that you and I think, Harris.
[10:28]These are the, this is the regime that sent little boys with plastic keys in the Iran Iraq war back in the 1980s to clear mine fields.
[10:37]That was their, they, they sent little boys out to die to clear mine fields.
[10:42]And they gave them little keys to the kingdom. That's the kind of people we're dealing with.
[10:47]So we may have to kill a lot of them in this regime to be able to accomplish, uh, our objectives, but we must not grow weary of doing what we know is right.
[10:55]Look, the straight of Hormuz, last question, is there a way to tackle that? Our allies are so slow in Europe to to get on board with what the president is asking them to do.
[11:00]Your last thoughts on that.
[11:08]Well, the straight of Hormuz is, it's a solvable problem, but it takes time. Uh, the geography is set. It is what it is.
[11:17]And we need to have an absolute godlike awareness of what's going into the water.
[11:21]I don't I haven't seen or heard any reports of mines going into the water.
[11:26]And we've also destroyed their small boats and their mind layers. So I think, in terms of mines, um, I think we're probably okay, but the the ships that have been damaged have been hit by these drones and by coastal defense cruise missiles and we still need to continue to eliminate them.
[11:44]But if you look at the, how many weapons that they're expending as opposed to what they started with, uh, the curve is in the right direction. We are eliminating their ability.
[11:55]Vice Admiral Fox, thank you so very much for being with me. I can't wait to have another discussion.
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