Hegseth: We're Negotiating w/BOMBS /Lt Col Daniel Davis

Literally minutes ago from the White House, President Trump made an announcement that he

thinks things are going in a good direction with the Iran War and negotiations.

Maybe we won't have to get to that fifth day when the ultimatum comes to an end.

And in a one-sense, it was kind of Christmas today, apparently, Iran gave President Trump

a gift.

And if you think that sounds weird, then this is just another day in the life of America

in 2026.

Let's start.

Let's get right into it.

Here's what President Trump first of all said that oddly enough, he says, you know,

I think we've actually succeeded.

We got regime change.

We have really regime change, you know, this is a change in the regime because the leaders

are all very different than the ones that we started off with that created all those

problems.

So this was, I think we can say Jason, this is regime change, right?

Why do you say what makes you, do you think I trust them or trust them?

Then why bother talking to them?

Just they're going to make a deal, they're going to make a deal.

Well, we've had regimes, okay, that we need a little definition work here for President

Trump because a lot of people were saying before this war started that one of the objectives

of the United States needed to be regime change.

Never forget we were showing Jack Keane who was in emphatically sank.

We don't want negotiations, remember, this is in January.

We don't want negotiations in February.

Lindsey Graham, don't negotiate because if you negotiate and you have an end where

that government stays in a power, then it's a loss for our side because they'll only

wait.

So he said, they'll only wait until later on they'll come back at us again.

Never mind the fact that they never came after us in the first place.

They only re-out retaliated against our attacks and they never attacked us from scratch before.

Always in response.

But forget that for the moment, nevertheless, they said, don't have a negotiated settlement.

We only want a war and we want to destroy the regime.

Well, that obviously meant that you would change the regime, i.e. regime change, which

means that you put in place something else, like with Saddam Hussein, like with Momark

Khaddafi, that's what a regime changes when you get rid of it.

What happened in Maduro in Venezuela?

That was not regime change.

All you did was exchange the leader, but the regime itself stayed in place.

Now then, you have, yes, you assassinated the leader, but the regime itself and the government

is still fully in place.

So no, Mr. President, I'm sorry, you have not had regime change.

You had leader change by dent of execution or assassination, as we may want to call it.

Any more than we had regime change in the United States after Joe Biden left office and

you assumed office.

I mean, I guess using that same definition, we've had regime change.

Obviously, it didn't because the government stayed the same.

You just changed the person at the top of it.

So what it sounds like is President Trump is trying to find some way to, I don't even

know, rationalizes the right word, just if I probably didn't either, try to make it sound

like he's really accomplished something that, and who knows, maybe he's trying to say this

in order to get some of his critics to say, okay, well, he can end this war now and he

can negotiate something away and he got regime change.

He succeeded because he said so many times to include yesterday.

We showed you some of the soundbots when he was out in front of Air Force One, where

he says, you know, we killed the first layer, we killed the second layer and we don't

even know for sure who's in charge now and all this.

And so now he wants to say, well, that was regime change.

So maybe that means he's thinking, okay, now we can bring this war to an end because

we accomplished our objectives.

Well, of course, that's absurd because the objective set was no potential for nuclear weapons,

meaning you're going to get rid of their entire nuclear program to include all of the enriched

uranium, the 400-some odd kilograms of 60 percent enriched uranium.

You say you're going to destroy their Navy, you're going to destroy their Air Force, and

you're going to destroy their missile, long-range missile programs.

That's what you set out at the beginning.

Well, you certainly assassinated the leader, but that's not regime change.

You haven't changed the government.

The government is still fully in place.

The president is possessed yet, is still the president.

Foreign minister Arakshi is still the foreign minister.

So two of the key players there, but the system itself is literally unchanged.

Nothing has changed whatsoever in the government.

So you haven't changed the regime at all.

All you've done is change a few people there.

They still are showing that they have complete capability to launch missiles right now.

They're not as frequent as they were at the beginning, but they are now at some corner

of a sustained rate, where they were able to fire missiles every day.

Every single day they can fire missiles and drones.

You haven't stopped that to include this day.

There's already been missiles in Tel Aviv the last day and a half or so.

There was big strikes in Dumona and Arad.

We've shown you pictures of that earlier today.

So Iran is still very viable militarily.

The Gulf of the Strait of Hormuz is still closed.

Maybe the ships with oil that Iran allows to go through are going through.

So that means that they are making more money because we, to try to keep enough oil going

through there, we have incentivized Iran by saying, Hey, how about we take some of the

sanctions off of you so you can send even more oil out there.

And even though Scott Veson wants to, you know, have a little he he moment and pretend

like he's out jujitsuing Iran, the everyone is aware of the reality that they are selling

more oil now by count about 400, 400,000 barrels a day more at a substantially higher rate

than they had before.

So while you're certainly causing tremendous damage, you're also giving them flush with

much more cash than they were before we started this war.

So anyway, you want to look at it.

And of course, you can add Russian to the list.

We have taken sanctions off of them for a period of time allowing them to sell more oil

at a higher rate.

Or go there making more money too.

So that doesn't seem to be fixed in this claim that you've destroyed their navy.

You've blown up a bunch of boats that were on the surface that were frankly part of their

old navy that they didn't use much.

Most of them were at ports in the anchor.

They weren't even they weren't out patrolling hundreds of the boats that matter to the

Iranian navy have not been touched because they're in underground cabards in places where

they can actually roll in and out of the of the ocean from the side of rock.

You haven't even hit any of those.

We've shown you some of the the drone boats that they have that are underground and they

won't be brought out until they're ready to be used, meaning they still have the viability.

You haven't destroyed it.

And of course, obviously they're a long range missile program remains fully intact as they

demonstrate on a nightly basis on a daily basis.

And the IRGC is still fully viable.

So none of the none of this objective that we said at the beginning have been met.

The only thing is it has cost us a lot because there are 13 Americans dead that should never

have been dead.

There are I think the last count I saw the official count was 240 Americans wounded to one degree

or another that that number keeps ballooning up.

Our bases have been destroyed billion dollar radar system and hundreds of millions of

dollars in other radar systems and other facilities have been destroyed in the region.

So it has cost us a tremendous amount.

Now that we're having to have a 200 billion dollar supplemental to try and pay who knows

how long this is going to go.

It's costing somewhere around $2 billion per day.

And we're dwindling down on all the our interceptor missiles, the pack threes, the fad systems.

Now the jasms were starting to really starting to get into that too.

There's an end date to this.

We just don't have an unlimited amount of missiles in.

We don't have the defense industrial base to continue up air go right now.

What about the the spreadsheet that shows who's got the balance of power right now.

The balance of leverage is with the Iranian side.

We can still inflict a lot of damage and kill a lot of people and we do that on a regular

basis.

9,000 strikes as of the 23rd according to sent come 9,000 strikes have been leveled on

your run.

So obviously that's they're all hitting something.

So that's a tremendous amount of damage and firepower and losses on the Iranian side.

It is a country four times bigger than a rack, 93 million people never forget that.

And the most important thing is the straight of hormones continues to be closed.

And when Trump says that, you know, I'm not going to, you know, he was asked, well, do

you trust them to make a deal something that they'll live up to and he says, well, why

should I trust them?

Well, you have to have a level of trust.

If you want to reach a deal, the better question is, why would they trust us?

Seriously, take your hubris off and your, you know, your nationality, whatever and just

look at this objectively and honestly, because that's the only way you can.

If you just look at it with the lens of what I want to be the case, then you're going

to miss something and you're going to help, they're going to be part of the problem that

we have is why we're in this trouble.

We have to look at it objectively.

Why should they trust us when we lied to them about 20, 25 when we said we were in negotiations

but we just used it as cover to attack and then we did the same thing this time after

the third round where they offered us basically the moon and we said, yeah, we don't want that.

We went to war with them anyway, even though they were literally willing to do the other

thing.

And now here we are again in a situation where we say we want to negotiations, but evidence

is starting to pile up that we're just getting ready for military operations.

We have actually today, just before we came on here, I saw this here, this is about an

hour ago, is that orders have been given out that the 82nd Airborne Division will deploy

to the Middle East.

President Trump's Department of War is keeping the operation full steam ahead, maximum

leverage over the reshade.

This is of course, Eric Dardy, who's a huge supporter of the President Trump and always

characterizes everything in the most glowing terms necessary.

And then you have to say, okay, well, what would they do?

Because now that means you're going to have at least one ready brigade when you look

into the details.

It's not the entire division.

It's the immediate ready brigade.

So it's about 3,000 or so soldiers in there.

You've also got about 5,000 total Marines and two separate Marine Expeditionary Units,

the 31st and the 11th M.E.U. are steaming to the Gulf, the USS Tripoli and its battled

group, is nearly there right now, apparently by Friday, they will be operational and ready

to go.

Well, then the question is going to be towards William, because we already know there's

Army Special Forces on the ground there.

There's now the 82nd headed that way.

There's a bunch of Marines.

What are they going to do?

There's a few operations.

There's a few options here.

Is number one, you can go after Carg Island.

You can see that's up in the northern part of the Persian Gulf there, that little red dot,

you can see.

Then there's some other options inside the horseshoe of the Strait of Hormuz.

You see those also in red dots, there's a number of islands, which could be spots where

the U.S. could try and have an interdiction.

They could try something further inland to see some locations behind the Strait, maybe

to put pressure on them from that direction.

You can see in the upper left-hand corner of a third option, not be to try to fly in

and take some kind of target on the ground in Tehran.

That's what those green dots that are attached there in the middle of that area, just south

of the sea there in the top.

You see some helicopter paths going in there or they could try to go into somewhere where

they think maybe some of the nuclear material, this four-in-some-odd gram, kilograms of

nuclear reprocess material is said to be located.

Those are all bad options.

Let me just tell you, again, I hate to beat a dead horse, but it's critical to understand.

You're talking at most 3,000 army soldiers, maybe a few hundred special forces and maybe

5,000 total Marines.

It's really not even that.

That's not the deployable because a lot of those are operating the ships and they're

not going anywhere.

In terms of deployable, I think it's like 2,200 Marines, so about 4,400 roughly total Marines

that are combat capable in three, so maybe 7,000 total deployable forces, somewhere around

there.

There are a half a million in the Iranian Armed Forces when you're talking about the

seas, the IRGC and the regular army, and then of course there's police and other paramilitary

groups out there providing security.

Wherever that material is, you can certainly imagine that they're going to have maximum

security on that.

That it's going to be in a location that's very difficult physically to get to.

That probably has multiple layers underneath the ground.

There's no question that it's, I mean, it would be absurd to think anything else that

it's going to be buried underground, that it's going to be defended by multiple layers

and it would be an incredibly difficult task if you found it, if you were able to find

it.

And if their Marines were foolish enough to put it all in one place, I doubt that they

would do that.

And if they're not aware of how that we're monitoring their channels and their networks

and they have given us misinformation, you know, under the cause of they're trying to

be secret and then we intercepted some traffic who knows we could be going into an absolute

ambush.

I've heard a number of people talk about that as well.

There is some rumors and there is some words coming from those who have access to troops

that are deployed downrange and they say this is going to happen sometime this weekend.

I have no way to independently confirm that, but that is a great concern.

And based on all of these movements, one would think that's the way again, back to President

Trump's comment, how can you trust Iran?

If that's the case, then why would Iran ever trust us, and especially when you're talking

about not even a month into this war so far?

Well, that's not the only thing that President Trump was talking about.

He was also talking about some issues about how strong we are militarily.

And I hate to say that they're defenseless because, you know, until that last missile is

fired, they have little power, but we are in about the best bargaining position where

way ahead of schedule.

And again, they have no Navy and they have no Air Force and they have no missile protection

and most of their missiles are gone.

Most of their launches we've killed, you know, we've killed about 82% of their launches.

So even if they had a missile, they can't launch it.

I don't know where all these specific detailed numbers keep coming from that we say we've

had all their launches.

The only way you can have that kind of fidelity is if you have a spreadsheet that has

lists every single launcher that they have.

So you have accurate knowledge of how many launches they have and then you have accurate

information for how many have been destroyed and then you can just do the math and say that

leaves this percentage wise.

Otherwise, it's a literal guess.

And since all those videos Gary showed you, since it's worth starting about just these

cavernous underground facilities, nobody has any idea exactly how many they have to be

able to say that they've taken out any certain number.

And as we've shown you also, they have now a very clever way to bypass a lot of this

that they will fire missiles seemingly out of sand.

No one even knows where the launch points are.

They don't need launchers for that.

They don't have to have they don't bring them out.

They don't bring them out of the tunnels, which sometimes they do, of course, they have

the ability to repair the damage.

If we find the tunnels and we bring say a cruise missile on top of that, that can really

cause a lot of damage, but they've shown that they can clear the damage and bring other

launchers back in there.

They'll fire and they'll get back in.

And it's a cat mouse game to see who can who can be the fastest.

And they bring that missile carrier out there, launch something, get it set up, launch,

and then get it stowed back and then get back into the protection of their missile,

of their underground facility before we can bring a missile back on them.

It's a country four times the size of Iraq.

This is not like, it's not like Israel where you can just loiter over it right there and

it's just really supposed to stamp size country.

And as soon as you see something, you've got plenty of assets there.

You've got this whole country and you believe me.

They're spread to the four winds of this country.

That's why they have decentralized operations 31 military districts spread throughout

so that you can't just loiter over one.

And of course, we've seen that we've lost a number of MQ-9 reaper drones.

We've lost several aircraft.

We always claim it's an accident or our friendly fire.

We'll see.

I think we've only admitted one F-35 was hit by enemy fire, but nevertheless, we don't

have free rain over.

So it's going to be a difficult task, but we've seen whatever that number is.

However many that has been hit, they have continued to maintain fire every single day.

So why do you want to say that, yeah, we've knocked them out and they just have a couple

left?

I mean, that briefs well and that for your followers, I guess that's good.

But if that doesn't match reality, they know the reality.

You've got to understand that.

The Israelis know the reality because they're catching most of these in the teeth.

So they're the ones that are getting hit in Dimona, in Iraq, in Tel Aviv today.

So they're not fooled if anybody else is, but the question is the most important thing

is, why would you run, trust us, and then why is it wrong to make some kind of a deal

when they still have this capacity and they still control the Gulf of Formos and they

know that that ticking clock of the price of a barrel of oil, especially after Friday,

one way or the other is going to go up either President Trump is going to attack them like

he said, he's going to try something on the ground and then they're going to respond

the way that they have said, or I don't know what they would do if it's a ground

accursion as opposed to hitting their energy sources.

Maybe they would have a different reaction, but there will be one.

You can be sure of that and that probably will make the price of oil go back up.

And if you don't have the power to bring them to heal, then it's not going to matter.

Well, President Trump said one thing in terms of this negotiation, this was the strange

part.

Because this is a flashback to December, if it's kind of Santa Claus came while we weren't

looking, but there was something about a gift.

They did something yesterday that was amazing, actually.

They gave us a present and the president arrived today.

It was a very big present, worth a tremendous amount of money.

And I'm not going to tell you what that president is, but it was a very significant prize.

Let me give it.

So that meant one thing to me would deal with the right people.

Is that nuclear related?

No, it wasn't nuclear related.

It was oil and gas related and it was a very nice thing they did.

But what it showed me is that we're dealing with the right people.

A present which arrived today.

So apparently it wasn't, I guess, a willy to do anything, it had arrived, implying

that it's a thing, but it's related to oil and gas, not related to the nuclear program.

And if President Trump said all these objectives, I mean, how are you going to walk away from

something if the regime is still in control, the government still exists as it did before,

that they still have long-range missiles that you clearly haven't destroyed them all,

and they still retain the beginning, that their navy, which has been protected underground,

is still in existence there.

If they still have the assets that they have in the middle, sorry about that, I'm in New

Dixier, I'm sorry about that, the choice of being alive on the air.

The issue is that none of the things that you've said were terms have been met.

So whatever gift they may have given you, when you say it means that you're dealing with

the right people, it probably says that the people you're dealing with know you, because

President Trump has always really responded well to gifts.

I mean, you have the FIFA gift prize, you have the peace prize that Machado gave him that

he didn't earn, but they made this big presentation with him, every time he turned a golden crown

from South Korea, everybody loves to get Trump gifts, and he loves to get them, and everybody

recognizes that, because that's a way into his heart, that's a way to appreciate yourself

to him, and it seems that the Iranians are aware of that.

I've been looking on it a lot, and you know, he literally made these comments moments

ago.

So, so far, I haven't seen anybody even speculate what this gift was, he didn't admit

it there, but it's something that made him really happy.

But the question is, is that really going to matter?

Is it going to matter whatever he gave him, whatever kind of gift he had, because I showed

you, 82nd Airborne is there, one Marine Expeditionary Unit is there, there's another one on

the way, there's Army Special Forces on the ground, and of course, all our air and

naval power continues to do its dirty work, as in fact, during that same speech, or during

that same press conference, Secretary of War at Pete Hexeth wanted to put his negotiating

two cents on the table too.

We see ourselves as part of this negotiation as well, we negotiate with bombs.

You have a choice, as we loiter over the top of Tehran, as the president talked about,

your future.

The president has made it clear that you will not have a nuclear weapon.

The war department agrees, our job is to ensure that, and so we're keeping our hand on

that throttle, as long as it's hard as it's necessary, to ensure the interest of the

United States of America are achieved on that battlefield.

So, so we are hovering over the battlefield, we are pushing the throttle, we're doing,

I mean, he's very demonstrative, he's really good on TV.

I mean, you got, you got to give the man that, but negotiating with bombs, I guess that's

one way to look at it, because that is the American way it seems, that we don't actually

negotiate with diplomats, that's why we sent Jared Kushner and Steve Whitkopf into talk

to the Iranians, and that's why we haven't even seen a hot and erasure of the alleged

top diplomat, the Secretary of State, he's almost, he's like AWOL from this, and instead

we're talking with the Secretary of War, who loves to talk about killing people, loves

to talk about blowing stuff up, and now he just openly says, we negotiate with bombs.

So what that means, let's make sure that everybody's crystal clear on this, if you're in

Iranian, that means do what we say or will kill you.

Is that really negotiation?

I mean, is that really something you can trust or so?

We're already bombing them, so where's the advantage to doing more of that, thinking

that well, now then we're going to really put more bombs on you, and then you're going

to capitulate.

Listen, there have been, according to sent-com, 9,000 strikes against Iran since this thing

started.

That is a tremendous amount of firepower, I don't know how much bomb and tonnage that is,

but it's a lot, and that means that there's a lot of Iranians who've been killed, a lot

more who have been wounded, a lot of facilities that have been destroyed, a lot of military assets

that have been destroyed, energy assets, a water desalinization plant in one case has

been hit, so all kinds of damage has been done.

And the longer this goes, the more damage is going to be done.

But I keep telling you, it is incredibly important to get this.

The Iranian side understood what they were getting into.

They knew when war came, what it was going to cost, and they have experienced it this.

It's not theoretical, they have physically done it.

They survived for eight years in a war against Iraq that was supported by the United States.

They've already got direct experience in this.

And there were scores of people, of leaders that were assassinated during that time and

killed during that.

Hundreds of thousands of Iranians were killed.

I think over a million were wounded.

They had a tremendous number of casualties during that war.

They never gave up.

And so they now have these underground cities, so they have resourced already ahead of

time.

Knowing that bombs were going to come, they put things beyond the capability of the bombs.

So they have storage facilities, and that means Navy equipment, that means launchers,

that means missiles, that certainly means raw materials to continue to do this.

It means manufacturing facilities.

All of these things are underground, the storage for the equipment, all of it is underground.

So they have the ability to go a long time and still continue to be viable.

And I understand, remember again, the primary objective for the Iranian side right now is

survival.

They have to survive as a cohesitive, a cogent political force, been able to control its

country.

And within its borders, they have to maintain a viability militarily.

They've got to be able to defend their borders.

And they've got to be able to maintain some kind of steady flow of fire from their drones

and from their missiles.

If they can do that for a long time, for months, a year, two years, even, there's a claim

that they can do a lot.

It would be crazy if they didn't, if they didn't have that much capacity already planned,

then they would be very foolish.

And I haven't seen the evidence that they were foolish, and so far they've been so good.

If you think Secretary Hexeth that you're going to bomb them into the stone age, and

that for all these attacks that we've done here on the now the 25th day, so close

and in on four weeks, and you think that's going to cause them to submit and to give

it into something that's going to mean that they're going to have to give away something

that's of core value to them, that's not likely to happen.

And if that's what you're banking everything on, then we're going to be in trouble.

Because listen, for the Iranian side, not only do they have to endure the bombing, but

they also understand that time is an asset that's more on their side than none.

The longer it goes, the more damage they can have, the more people that can be killed.

And it will harm their country, and their economy has continued to suffer.

There's no question about that.

So it's not an automatic, it's not an easy thing for them to survive.

It's a gamble and a difficulty for them to endure.

But if they're able to endure that, they can go a long time.

They can go a long time suffering and underprivation.

They've done it before.

It's in their mentality, it's in their culture.

They've done it before.

But the question is, they also recognize, not the question, but the point is, they also

recognize our limits of power, even though we don't.

We claim that we'll never run out of ammunition.

President Trump publicly says, many times, we have an indefinite amount.

There's no truth to that at all.

The Iranian side is no doubt very aware that we are running low on the standoff weapons,

the Tomahawk cruise missiles, jasms, which have about 400 meter kilometer range on it

that we fire from our aircraft.

And air defense missiles, especially the PAC-3 and the THATs, we're very, we're critically

low on those already.

We cannot, if they're able to maintain any kind of consistency that they've been doing

over the last week or so in terms of the volume of fire that we have to try and intercept,

we're going to run out of some point and we're going to have to start going to older stuff

like the PAC-2 air defense missiles, which are simply not as effective and then even

the PAC-3s are not that great.

But the PAC-2s are having even less capability, which means more of the Iranian stuff will

get through.

They're aware of that.

So they know the longer it goes, it's not just a ticking time bomb, I'll tell you about

the process of oil, it's also about our own inventories, both the standoff offensive

weapons and the PAC-3 defensive and THAT, especially air defense weapons.

So they are, it's in a test of wills, I'm just telling you, this is what it's all about.

I doubt very seriously whether we're going to get any kind of a resolution in between

now and Friday.

It would be illogical, interaction for Iran to give in now, when they've stood all this

time and endured all these losses and inflicted the difficulty on the United States of dwindling

our capabilities and causing the damage to us that he's caused as well, when now then

they could be close to success when they have control of the straighter hormones.

As long as they can maintain political viability and they have it and keep that control of that

straighter hormones and they have it, then they're in the position, they're in, I won't

say the driver's seat, but they're in a position of superiority.

They have the stronger position right now.

Time is more on their side than it is on our side.

Trump desperately wants to get this thing over with, but he has set such high standards

for the military objectives he's set to be able to claim victory, walk away, and the

Iranian side has apparently hardened in their requirements to say, no, we're going

to have to get terms we can live with whether you like it or not or we're going to keep fighting.

So it's a test of wills right now.

And I fear that especially with this announcement of the 82nd airborne, the 31st Mew arriving

on location, special forces apparently being seen in the area that we're getting ready

to do something really stupid and maybe even doing it as soon as this weekend.

We'll have to keep a watch on that.

This thing could blow up in our face if we go down the path, but when to make sure you

are aware of that, because that that just happened from the Oval Office here just short

period of time, but like always, you can count on the Daniel Davis deep dive to keep your

praise to what's going on and telling you what really matters besides what's being said

out loud.

Thank you very much folks.

We'll see you tomorrow on the Daniel Davis deep dive.

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