Iran's Asymmetrical Warfare Campaign Against The U.S And Israel

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McCallum. I'm Jason Chafetz and this is the Fox News rundown. Thursday March

12, 2026. I'm Jonathan Savage. Iran tries to choke the global economy.

They're able to conduct these attacks remotely in a distributed way. Very small

boats to attack tankers in the Persian Gulf. This kind of asymmetric, unconventional

warfare will be very difficult for the US to attack from the skies. This is the

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underwriting and health questions. The price of crude oil has let back up hovering

around $100 a barrel. That's because Iran continues to attack ships near the

Strait of Hormuz, one of the oil trades most crucial waterways. It means there's

much less oil on the market. And lower supply means higher prices for traders,

for airlines, for transportors, for you and me as well. While President Trump

insists this is temporary, Iran's Supreme Leader is threatening to keep the

Strait of Hormuz closed. So what's Iran's strategy here? And what can anyone do

about it?

I think this strategy has been, has been very sort of asymmetric and not

conventional.

We're speaking with Bill O'Dell, CEO for the Americas for the security and

strategic intelligence firm, Control Risks.

And it's sort of reinforced by what we, what we saw from the very first statement

from Mojshava Khamenei, since he was selected as the new Supreme Leader just a few

days ago. And he, he reaffirmed the use of the Strait of Hormuz as a

key tactic for the Iranians and the closure of the Strait. He reaffirmed the

use of proxies. So he mentioned, Hezbollah, he mentioned groups in both Yemen and

Iraq and said that the Iranians would continue to go after US bases in

neighboring countries. That while he wanted a positive relationship with, with

neighboring countries, that wouldn't happen. And that attacks would continue

until those, until those bases were closed down. And that comes from, you

know, very much his background as a, as a more, more significant hardliner than

his father was. And his sort of upbringing within the Islamic Revolutionary

Guard Corps. So very tightly associated with the IRGC, which has long been a

source of, of the sort of asymmetric warfare. We also saw the most

significant cyber attack just yesterday, conducted by the Iranians. So this

was against Striker, which is a US-based global medtech company. And this was a

wipe attack erasing and potentially exfiltrating their data. It was

obviously targeted due to the US affiliation of the company. And we're

likely to see more of this. I can obviously talk more about the, the cyber

threat implications as well. But if you look at their cyber capabilities

continuing, even though the US has targeted the sort of headquarters of the IRGC

and the MIS, they're, you know, able to conduct these attacks remotely in a

distributed way. Or if you look at the use of their, you know, very small boats to

attack tankers in the Persian Gulf, this kind of asymmetric, unconventional

warfare will be very difficult for the US to, to attack from the skies.

Yeah, that was going to be my next question, I think. How is Iran able to choke off such

an important waterway as the Strait of Hormuz so easily?

A lot of it is based on, you know, the threat of them doing it. They have, they have

indeed attacked about six ships. So just, just today, those three oil tankers

particularly off the coast of Iraq, but they're doing it by very low, you know, low

sophistication drones and small attack boats, which has, you know, been their signature.

So even though the US Navy has destroyed, you know, the, the sort of majority of Iran's

conventional Navy, its ability to attack ships and harass ships in, in this very narrow,

very confined area of the Straits of Hormuz is, I mean, it is the source of, of this,

of this energy disruption and, and, and the supply shop that we're in the middle of right now.

So we've seen that, that sort of vulnerability of energy supply and global supply chains

to shipping as a result of that asymmetric capability.

So in your opinion, was this adequately foreseen unprepared for?

There was, I mean, over the course of years by the US and Israeli government, there's

obviously a lot of voices that were warning about this. And we saw, if we look back to,

if we look back to the, you know, the, the Iran-Arap War in the 1980s, there was, you know,

we had similar issues with attacks in the Straits of Hormuz and mining in the Straits of Hormuz.

So this is, it's certainly these sorts of attacks, you know, dating back all the way to those

times, or are definitely not unprecedented. So some of this was very much foreseeable.

The, I think the resilience of the Iranians, kind of, low sophistication capabilities and,

you know, so whether that's low sophistication drones or the speedboats, attackboats,

those sorts of things that have been able to, you know, effectively stop shipping in the Straits

or have led to shipping companies and oil and gas companies, you know, stopping transits

through the Straits of Hormuz. Those things were probably not completely foreseen by the

administration and by the Israelis in terms of the level of economic shock. There was also

probably a sense that there was a potential for the Iranian people to sort of step up and

overthrow the regime. So if we look back to the early days of the conflict, there were a number

of different justifications for the, for the war given by the US administration. One of them,

obviously, it was regime change. And what we've seen from the Iranians has been a little bit the

opposite. So Mojtaba being a more of a hardliner, no surrender insight, doubling down on the

use of the Straits of Hormuz and, you know, internally no meaningful voices for regime change

from the inside right now. So that is, you know, that is certainly not what the US had hoped.

We've been speaking with Bill Udel, CEO for the Americas, for the security and strategic

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You mentioned cyber warfare, the threat of cyber attacks from Iran. What can they do and what

can have impact could that have? Their cyber capability, as I said, even though the US has attacked

their main established, large, advanced persistent threat cyber capability, they still have a

large, remote cyber capability through both the IRGC and the Ministry of Intelligence and

Security, M-O-I-S. This attack against Striker is the most significant one but we've seen a lot

of other activity via both directly from the IRGC and the M-O-I-S and then through proxies.

We would expect this low sophistication, high visibility series of operations by pro-Rani and

proxy activists, including DDoS attacks and website defacements and political messaging and

data leak operations targeting both Western governments but also Western companies to continue

as a conflict persists. One thing they are definitely doing because we saw it listed in their

targeting is going after particularly US tech companies and almost every major US tech company

was named in this targeting list that has come out in the last 48 hours. Looking very closely

at that, they are particularly focused on US infrastructure as a target and beyond those tech

firms, I think it's clear that supply chain operators that touch Israel in any way or that are in

any way associated with the conflict are certainly fair game for the foreseeable future.

Multiple Gulf nations are now caught up in this, their oil fields are being attacked, drones

punching holes in high-rise blocks, aviation battered. Are these countries now angry at Iran

or are they angry at the US and Israel for taking this military action in the first place?

Publicly, they're certainly angry at Iran. These are direct attacks from Iran to their

infrastructure and to their livelihood. Their primary goal is keeping their people safe and then

secondly avoiding further impact to their reputations as safe, stable, peaceful, and business-friendly

global economic hubs. That is certainly in the balance. I think more privately, they are probably

a bit frustrated that this conflict started when it did and the US and Israeli

decision to attack in the way that it did because it has obviously had a direct impact on that.

They will be pushing for an end to the war soon to avoid some of the most damaging consequences

of the energy crisis and their continued inability to export oil and LNG.

I would say that even if the war were to end right now, there are still long-term consequences

for them, for oil and LNG in particular. It's not as simple as turning the taps back on.

Some of these wells have already been shut in because there's no place for the oil to go.

It can't be exported and there's only a certain amount of storage capacity that they have.

Even if it were to end right, they're obviously looking at the duration. The duration really

matters in terms of their impacts to them. Even if it stops right now, the ability to turn the

spiket back on, it could take weeks or months. You worked extensively in Iraq, I understand,

working with embassies, NGOs, companies, help them stay secure. Is there any way you could have

prepared them for what's going on right now? In some ways, what we're seeing is the worst

case scenario of what we would have been concerned about in a war with Iran, if we were to rewind

five or ten years. What we're preparing companies for now, and if I were to look back in terms

of what we've said to companies over the last several years, is really about making sure that

supply chains are diversified, making sure that they have scenario plans that account for

a wide range of geopolitical risk scenarios that they're monitoring threats and risks that they

have government affairs to be able to sort of, and intelligence functions to be able to predict

what state actors are going to do. These are obviously unprecedented events, whether we're

talking about an unprecedented supply shock or Iranian energy supply shock or Iranian activity

in attacks across the Gulf, but companies can make themselves to a certain degree resilient

in the long term, but this will have to fundamentally change how they scenario plan going forward.

We do have this Iranian regime, which, as you mentioned, they lost their leader

multiple high-level officials, and yet they are still clearly pursuing a very similar path

with the new Supreme Leader. There's no talk of regime change being a worry many more.

So, how do you think the Islamic Republic will come out of this?

So, like I said, I think the Moujjjabrachimni is first statement was really indicative of what we've

been seeing and what the likely end state is for the Iranian regime. There is no sense of retreat

and no sense of surrender. There's statements by the Iranians that they view this as the last war,

and the lack of meaningful voices for regime change from within, I think, indicate that what we're

likely to see over the next kind of days and weeks is Moujjjjjabrachimni consolidating power

relying heavily on the IRGC. He's not a particularly strong Supreme Leader, so he doesn't have the

same religious credentials that his father had. He's been largely out of public sight, but he is

more radical and more aligned with the IRGC. So, the outside of American boots on the ground,

which the administration is certainly not likely to do or not inclined to do in large capacity.

We are likely to have some version of the Islamic Republic continuing and very much driven by

the IRGC and the more radical elements of within Iran.

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