[0:03]Undeclared wars are commonplace. Tragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression with no complaints from the American people.
[0:13]Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government. To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood
[0:26]and rejected. What if sometimes to love your country, you had to alter or abolish the government. What if Jefferson was right?
[0:35]What if that government is best which governs least.
[0:39]What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
[0:42]What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave.
[0:49]What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now.
[1:02]Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, March 26th, 2026. Colonel Douglas Macgregor joins us.
[1:13]Colonel, we've missed you, welcome here. Thank you for accommodating uh, my schedule. Why is uh, President Trump so desperate over this war in Iran?
[1:24]Judge, I think there are a number of reasons. The first and and most important, obviously, is that he faces public humiliti humiliation here at home and abroad.
[1:39]Uh, things have not gone as he anticipated or as people predicted they would that work for it.
[1:43]In other words, this was not a short, decisive campaign designed to decapitate the leadership, crush the government, provoke internal unrest.
[1:52]Having not succeeded at that, we then began this long, slow process of trying to cause the disintegration of the Iranian state by bombing targets, targets having been picked for all sorts of reasons, most of them military but not exclusively.
[2:10]And so now he has this terrible uh mess on his plate.
[2:16]And that's why he is now taken a five-year five-year, five-day break with the goal of putting together a war ending offensive from the air and with missiles and bombs, and I think that's what we're going to see shortly in the next week.
[2:32]Is he planning a ground offensive and what do you think that would look like Colonel something that doesn't appear as though it was in the original plans.
[2:44]No, I think there was never any thought given whatsoever to the use of ground forces and why would you. This is a nation of 93 million people, the size of Western Europe.
[2:54]So it makes no sense to think about something like that unless you wanted to declare a national emergency uh open a draft and then uh plan on invading after at least 12 to 18 months of preparation with at least two to three million people.
[3:10]No, that was never part of it. And I think I think what they're trying to do is first and foremost launch what they hope will be a war ending offensive.
[3:17]They've replenished their stocks, at least on the American side, of the most exotic munitions, missiles and capabilities, Jazam and and these other uh weapons that have been launched from outside of Iranian airspace into the Iranian state.
[3:33]I think they're going to put those together and and once they feel that they've got a comfortable edge, that will give them 72 to 96 hours of non-stop attacks.
[3:47]Then I think they'll turn to the ground option, which for them is very limited. It it amounts to the seizure of some islands.
[3:53]Everyone talks about Card Island, whether or not that actually needs to be seized, is another matter, but it's certainly a target.
[4:01]And there are other islands inside the straight itself and not far from Bandar bus, right offshore.
[4:09]That theoretically have Iranian uh IRGC, Iranian revolutionary guard core elements, small boats and so forth that can exert some influence.
[4:18]But everybody forgets a couple of things. First of all, what really closed the straight of hormoose was not Iran itself, but Lloyd's of London.
[4:26]Uh suddenly none of the ships could get insurance and if you can't get insurance, you're not going to take a tanker worth hundreds of millions of dollars uh through the straights of hormone.
[4:38]So that was number one. Once it became clear that you couldn't get insurance, then the Iranians were in a position to say, well, if you're not supporting the war against us, you're not allied with Israel or the United States in some way.
[4:52]And uh, you know, your destination is China or India. Now increasingly Japan, then we'll be happy to uh let you through.
[5:00]Provided of course that you've paid for the oil and you own. This is an effort to get at the petro dollar.
[5:06]So, I think I think what we've got now are two kinds, two levels of warfare.
[5:10]On the one side, there is economic warfare that we're losing because the entire world is suffering as a consequence of this war in the Persian Gulf.
[5:19]And then secondly, we have the Iranians who are exercising a new form of warfare.
[5:23]It's the 21st century answer to the American World War two paradigm, our World War two paradigm is on display.
[5:32]You see it with aircraft carriers and destroyers offshore, submarines and then at the same time, numerous uh aircraft flying from various uh airstrips ashore and even back in the United States and and Diego Garcia.
[5:46]That is being our instrument of war. It hasn't worked out as well as we'd hoped because the new way of war is essentially almost limitless quantities of precision guided missiles and unmanned systems.
[6:00]They could be launched from anywhere inside the border against targets out to almost a thousand miles from Iran.
[6:08]And this has been very effective.
[6:11]It's driven our fleet way offshore, it's forced us to bring in hundreds of uh aircraft that have to be refueled on a routine basis over Iraq or Saudi Arabia or other areas.
[6:23]So it's a different kind of warfare, but it's turning out to be very successful.
[6:26]Iran doesn't need an Air Force, doesn't need a Navy. It has an army and it has lots of missiles and drones and these things are prepared for use almost immediately from various underground enclosures.
[6:40]So that has to be defeated from the standpoint of President Trump, because if he can't defeat that and you try to put ground troops on these islands, we have about 10,000 light infantry right now for that purpose.
[6:51]They're at high risk of of being killed once they come ashore.
[6:55]In fact, Iran still has pretty capable air defenses for everything under 15,000 feet of altitude, which means that if you try to fly them in with V 22s and helicopters, they're going to very much be at risk.
[7:07]So I don't know how this is going to work, but I think first of all, we have to understand the two ways of war.
[7:25]What the Iranians are doing is that they have built enormous quantities of standoff attack weapons.
[7:31]Primarily ballistic missiles and unmanned systems, we call them drones, in huge quantities, most of them underground. They can be launched at will, and we keep saying, well, we've eliminated all their launchers.
[7:43]Well, you know, I have a lot of difficulty understanding that. I don't think we've eliminated all their launchers.
[7:48]I think there are more launchers out there that we care to admit. I don't know how many decoys we'd struck.
[7:53]We hit a lot of decoys in Kosovo back in 1999. I think we're hitting lots of decoys inside Iran.
[8:01]But the point is, they've built all these systems.
[8:04]They have what we call persistent surveillance. Sometimes people call it a surveillance stare as in staring at something.
[8:12]At all sorts of levels. Now, if they come down to lower levels, like the MQ nine, the Israeli Hermes, the Iranians have been shooting those things down.
[8:21]But at higher levels, they haven't been able to do that, and unless you can jam the satellites that the Chinese and Russians are utilizing on behalf of the Iranians, I don't think we can, or we can disrupt them in some dramatic way.
[8:37]Uh, that means that wherever we go within a thousand plus miles of Iran, we are being watched.
[8:44]Whatever we do is is being identified. In other words, from where do you move?
[8:50]If you're going to attack inside the straight, are you going to fly off of uh carriers that are what, 7, 800 miles away from the straight?
[9:01]Are you going to fly ashore somewhere into Saudi Arabia? Are you going to fly into Jordan? Are you going to fly into Kuwait?
[9:07]Anywhere you go, you're going to be identified. They're going to find you. They will discover you.
[9:13]Then the only question is, how long do they wait until they concentrate their tactical ballistic or theater ballistic military power against you, along with untold numbers of drones?
[9:24]It's going to be very difficult to protect against that, especially since we haven't found that our air and missile defenses are nearly as effective as is claimed.
[9:33]I mean we hear, oh, 90% effectiveness. That's not true. I I'm getting reports from people in the fleet that suggest it's infinitely lower than that.
[9:41]So how are you going to guarantee that they could even get in and how do you protect them once they are in?
[9:48]And you know, how do you get them out? This is another exercise in, well, we're going to be successful so don't worry about that.
[9:56]What if you're not successful? How do you extract your troops? How do you evacuate the wounded? How do you keep these people alive?
[10:04]Where do they get water?
[10:07]And remember, Iran has already said, if we're going to destroy their power plants, they're going to destroy everything in the Gulf. And 90% of the electric plants, in other words, the power plants in the Persian Gulf on the uh Eastern or the west side, are all along the coast.
[10:25]They're all identified. They're easily struck and put out of business.
[10:28]What about the desalinization plants? We hit those, they're going to hit them.
[10:33]And the people in the Arabian Peninsula are then in very serious trouble, not just our troops.
[10:39]In other words, I don't think this is a good idea, but we're back to the end, the war ending offensive.
[10:45]Develop a war ending offensive for me so I can walk out of the Oval office and say, victory at last. The Iranians are surrendering. Good luck.
