Keane: This will bring Iran to its knees

And we have General Jack Keenan, retired four-star General Fox News Senior Strategic Analyst, Chairman of the Institute of the Study of War. So General, here we are on day 31 of a war with Iran that's 47 years in the making. How would you characterize this mission so far?

Yeah, well first of all, I think it's the right goal, the right mission. American people understand that after the 12-day war, what was surprising to Prime Minister Netanyahu and to President Trump and advisors around them is the renewed commitment that Iran had to all of its goals. And by that I mean they began to rebuild the missiles that they lost. They immediately began, they made a decision to recover the nuclear program even though it was set back considerably, and they were going to increase

their drone production. And they immediately began funding streams to their proxies using different banks to deceive it, this time through Istanbul, very complicated process. So their goal of supporting their proxies, destroying the state of Israel, driving the United States military out of the region, and using their ballistic missiles as a threat, nuclear weapons eventually, both of those leaders came together and said, they haven't changed one bit. And how are we going to get them to change and the conclusion was the only way we're going to get this regime to change is certainly through force. But the president still, if you recall, tried to do some diplomatic effort and a decision

was made, we've got to stop this. So it was the right decision to make and I know some people don't agree with that, but I don't know how you continue to kick the can down the road when Iran is a growing menace and threat, much more so than the other presidents who had to deal with it. There were other presidents who should have confronted Iran because they were killing Americans.

That alone should have been justification. Now the reality is what they could do to us, as much as we want to hold them accountable in retribution for what they did to us in the past, what they could do to us is the reason for this operation. And I think 30 days plus in, it is going remarkably well. We are accomplishing the tasks that have been assigned to the CENTCOM commander on behalf of the president, to the IDF on behalf of the prime minister.

And we probably have a number of weeks to go for our audiences. It's condition-based and by that I mean the enemy has a vote here every day. And we're kind of on, use a football analogy because I think it fits, we're on the 20-yard line. We've made progress. We've come all the way down the field. We can see the goal line.

We can see our objective in sight. And we're 20 yards away. And guess what? The enemy is throwing everything they can at us to slow us down. What do I mean by that? They're hiding missiles as much as they can.

They're hiding their small boats. They're hiding their drones They want to preserve some capability to retaliate after the United States stops And so the targets are becoming more challenging to acquire the target not to destroy it but to acquire the target and That's why they they need as much time going forward now as they have had in the past to get to the 20-yard line At the end of the day, we're gonna we're gonna get in the end zone for sure

You said pretty amazing to me you have a worthless currency in the real you have a country that just got bombed for 12 straight days, and you have water problems in your nation's capital, and still the money you have, you say, is still being sent to Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis? That's the mindset of a government that has no worry about re-election or what the opinion of the people are.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's the action that they took right after the 12-day war. I mean that was back in June So we've had a lot of time to assess all of that Yeah, they are who they are and that's why I'm not optimistic about the negotiations Because the Iranians what they would have to do to meet our demands is give up everything that we're

taking away from them by force. And they're not going to do that. And even if they did that, I still prefer the military option. Why? Because the military option so weakens the leadership that they're going to be in very difficult shape.

And the military option does not provide them any economic relief whatsoever. If you negotiate with them and you're greedy, they're gonna give up everything. The immediate request they're gonna have of us is sanction relief and frozen assets that we have tied up.

An influx of money, just like the Obama administration did when they made the nuclear deal. So billions of dollars heading their way that would give them an infusion, so to speak, and help them to recover and stay in power.

So the question is, how do they get this missile technology? North Korea, according to a report today that you probably knew about already, in 2005 gave them what they needed to have an intermediate range rocket, the one that was attempted at Diego Garcia. And then we have the ballistic missiles are from China. And the leverage that we could have to stop that the day after this war would be the Gulf

states. China wants relationships with Qatar, with Saudi Arabia, with the UAE. They finally look at Iran as a complete enemy. And maybe that would help the possible rearming of Iran, the outlaw state, if China learned that economically you're not going to benefit from anything to do with the investments of those states if you continue to be the benefactor of Chinese military, excuse me, of the Iranian military?

Yeah.

Would that get their attention?

For our audience to understand, the most significant strategic change in terms of US national interest really has to do with the coalition that came together, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. And we're just several years into this. But they truly are partners. And it's in Russia and China and North Korea's interest for Iran to achieve some kind of a victory here, for the United States to stumble, and that would reduce the United States' influence

in the world. That is why they're all in, you know, supporting Russia in the Ukraine war. I mean, the Iranians provided and developed these one-way killer drones. That was their conception. They built a factory in Russia.

The Shahi drones that fly into Ukrainian cities by the hundreds, they just blew into Odessa this weekend 252 flew in they shot they killed them all except 21 which did penetrate. That's a Ronnie and developed one way drone the the North Koreans put thousands of troops on the battlefield and gave them huge amount of artillery which was a major weapon system for him and the artillery pieces and China has been their financier

They've been buying all this Russian oil on discount prices So they're all in and they're all we shouldn't be surprised I was surprised during a 12-day war that they had their hands off And not and not support Russia and China in particular and not supporting the Iranians. But they're much more in

now. So is there anything we could do to back them off? For example, the president said, well, kind of figured that we do the same thing with Ukraine. That could be what he says publicly, but they might be supplying the coordinates where our bases are located in the area. They might have been responsible for whether our base was in Saudi Arabia over the weekend. They certainly were the ones who provided the information to Diego Garcia

they The Iranians know where all of our bases are and they know what's there So there's no surprise on that what they what they likely give them is One where our ships because our ships are moving around Yeah, and it would change in of ships for all the obvious reasons. One, to protect the ship itself,

but also depending on what the target is. We may be shifting around because they're firing offensive missiles from those ships and some of them are there for defensive purposes. So constantly moving them around, they're likely giving them that information.

And they may have, have listen Russia is a sophisticated Intelligence network system that they have we give the Ukrainians exquisite intelligence every single day Where are the Russians? What are they doing? And we have a targeting cell that provides the information for them to target particularly at distance not to close fight But anything that's at distance Certainly anything in Russia comes from us. We provide them exquisite intelligence and they decide if they're going to hit it or not. Sometimes it's out of the range of

the weapon systems they have. So we shouldn't be surprised that Russia has turned their intelligence system on to help them. But we've got to remind ourselves that there is a coalition here. I think one of the things I've been advocating, but likely not going to be done, to get China's attention is we should be stopping the transit of all the ships that are going through the Straits of Hormuz. Where are they going?

Iran is going to let it... If everything can't get through, none get through. Those ships are being OK'd by Iran to go through, and they're going to China. They're going to Pakistan. And they're going to Turkey, and they're going to India. The majority of them are going to China.

If we quarantine those ships and pull them, and then use it as a threat, now, would it affect oil prices? Yes. But use it as a threat. Now it would affect oil prices, yes, but use it as a threat to those countries to get some leverage over them. I'm focused on China, not so much the rest of them. I think that would have major impact on them. Look, if we ever went to war with China, one of the things we would likely do,

just so our audience understands, Chinese oil is coming out of the Persian Gulf, they're completely dependent on it, we would lock that up. Yep. We would lock it up. And that would absolutely bring them to their knees if we were in a conflict with it.

It would affect the world economy, yeah, but the world economy of China and the United States go to war is going to tank anyway.

Were you against us allowing the Russian ship to deliver 737 million barrels of oil to let that tanker through?

I don't, I would not sacrifice what's happening in Ukraine for the benefit of what we're doing here. And yeah, I would not have done that. But those are other considerations that the president and his team are working through, you know. But you're asking me straight out, that's my answer. I'm not going to dodge it. I wouldn't have made it.

Yeah. So yeah, my hope is the president was going to let that through because if you're looking looking to flip Cuba and lock them out of our hemisphere. That's just this extends the life of Cuba. We're going to be back just in a moment. General Jack Keane's with us. We've got much more questions because day 31 of this war and some big decisions going to be made.

Don't move.

You listen to Brian Kilmeade show.

This is the Brian Kilmeade show. They added another two, so it was 10 votes.

And now today they gave us as a tribute. I don't know. I can't define it exactly, but they gave us, I think out of a sign of respect, 20 boats of oil, big, big boats of oil going through the Harmos Strait. And that's going to be

tomorrow.

The air force is going to be more and more straight. And that's taking starting

tomorrow morning. Over the next couple of days, a lot of boats. So that was president on air force one last night talking to the press as he always does

general Jack Keane's in studio right now we're just talking about the latest on the war. to go through there a day. That's what was happening before. Now, the president's saying they're going to put 20. How do you view that? Is that showing that I'm looking to do a deal in Pakistan when both sides talk?

Well, in terms of getting ships through, obviously that's going to be a military operation. And it's got a couple of pretty important ingredients to it. One is the obvious, the ships will be escorted by warships. And it's just, you mentioned it, I mean there's hundreds of ships that you have to move and continue to move them to do an operation on that kind of scale.

The United States cannot do this by themselves. We have ships that are there for offensive region in the region they're firing on these targets inside of Iran, and we have other ships that are there for defensive reasons, to protect our bases, to protect the Arab states, and also to protect Israel. We move those ships around.

So, to begin to do escort duty, which is another mission, we could probably afford some ships for that, but we can't afford enough to complete the mission. We absolutely need others to do that. And that's why the president made that appeal.

So that's a challenging mission in and of itself. And you'll see in the coming days when we get doing that, the military's bringing in the headquarters to take charge of that operation entirely. There'll be a full staff under the command of a general officer doing that because it's a complicated mission. We don't want the CENTCOM, he'll work for the CENTCOM commander who's running the whole

overall war against Iran, but we don't want to get his staff tied down in something like that. So that'll be like a task force in charge of that. And we've done that years ago, so we know how to do it. But then the other part of it is to reduce the Iranians' capability to interfere with it. And certainly this is going to be job one for the Iranians when that mission begins. Right now, and for the better part of a couple

of weeks, we've been suppressing the Iranian capability to hit ships moving through their long-range systems, anti-ship missiles, ballistic missiles, and also one-way long-range drones. And these drones can go almost 1,000 miles, some of them, particularly the ones that the Iranians

developed for the Russians.

So they're very good at it. So suppressing all of that makes a lot of them, particularly the ones that the Iranians developed for the Russians. So they're

very good at it. So suppressing all of that makes a lot of sense. And then you have near-term capability and those are small boats that could be suicide vessels, they could launch a missile from the boat, they could launch a drone from the boat and they also can lay mines now They have they laid any mines? Yeah, they've laid a few mines, but they're not interfering with the shipping because Iran Shipping is still going through there for China Russia India and Turkey That shipping is going through and obviously you can't have a bunch of mines in there to do that

But once we try to suppress this and get involved in it, I would imagine they're going to mine it. They'll try to mine it. And what we've been doing is trying to kill as many of these small boats as possible. I think we've pretty much eliminated the larger boats that do the mine laying. But the smaller boats are trying to hide from us for all the obvious reasons, as I mentioned, they're hiding missiles and the rest of it. So that's why we have brought in, and it's been reported here, Apache helicopters, which

are attack aircraft inside the Army, and we brought in the A-10 Warthog, which is a close air support aircraft. This is the only aircraft in the inventory that is designed singularly to provide support for ground troops. That is its mission. And so that aircraft flies much slower and has a huge 30 millimeter cannon on it, as well as the attack helicopters.

They're very good at being able to get units on the ground that are hiding and eliminate that. And that is going on as we speak. So when this operation finally kicks off, it's a complicated operation. We'll have drones up in the air protecting it. We'll have Apache helicopters.

We're going to have these close air support, the A-10s protecting it all from the air. Obviously, drones looking ahead to make certain nothing pops up. If something pops up, a boat or a firing unit, it's going to be signal sensors immediately and Apaches or A-10 will take this thing on. It'll be a dynamic operation and it's complicated.

But no doubt in my mind we'll open up the straits and keep it open.

And that will be key and that will relieve a lot of the economic pressure, keep the Houthis out of the Red Sea and then we could be on our way. We'll keep an eye on those talks, but most of all keep an eye on the military mission. General Jack Keane, thanks so much.

Appreciate the quality time. Yeah, it's great here being with you in the studio always. Thank you.

And with the Yankees 3-0.

Those are two things you're happy about.

Well, Friday's opening day. We'll be there.

Of course. Thanks so much.

Back in a moment. that you're not going to miss any great commentary, any great news bites, any great interviews coming your way on Fox. You can get it all here on YouTube. So Back in a moment. that you're not going to miss any great commentary, any great news bites, any great interviews coming your way on Fox. You can get it all here on YouTube. So subscribe right now.