McInerney on Iran Options

Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney, one of the best military analysts on TV, if not the best, was on Hugh's show last night. Here's the link to Radioblogger's transcript. Here's one of the key exchanges in the interview:

HH: Okay. Let's go to the idea of the hard targeting that would have to happen, that they've got these hardened and deeply buried facilities that we can't touch. As a professional, what's your reaction to that?

TM: Well, first of all, we can touch them. And we're developing, and it's in development. It's going to be dropped here very shortly, a 28,000 pound bomb. A B-2 can carry two of them. You put two of those in the same hole, that's 56,000 pounds of TNT, hardened, that will penetrate the 70 feet of concrete, reinforced concrete that we're talking about penetrating. Today, we could put 16-32 5,000 pound bunker busters into the target area simultaneously. Someone did a snowflake, I think, and said what could we do? Could we do it with nuclear? And that may be where Seymour Hersh came up with his article, or his pronouncement, which by the way...

It sounds to me like those bombs would be more than enough to do the job. Frankly, I never bought into the notion that these sites were impenetrable. They're strongly reinforced but the tricky part isn't the reinforcement. It's in the way they've hidden their equipment.

HH: And so, obviously, you think we've got the capability to do this. What about the second objection, that the Iranians have a secret track that we don't know about, that our intelligence is not up to destroying all of their facilities. How do you respond to that?

TM: Well, you'll probably not get all of them, but you don't need to get all of them. What we're talking about, and the military option that I'm talking about, and this is my own, my notion, though, is we'd go in and hit 1,500 targets with precision weapons in a time frame of 24-36, maybe 48 hours. We would take out as much of the nuclear development as we could take out. We would in fact take out their navy, their army...excuse me, their air force, their integrated air defense system, and their retaliatory capability with the Shahab-3 missiles, as well as we would take out their command and control. Now...and then, simultaneously, we would start a covert operation campaign using dissident forces, and there are lots of dissidents in Iran, and get them...let the Iranians take their country back with the help from us in Special Operations forces, CIA operatives, etc.

That works with me. After hearing Gen. McInerney's sketch of an Iran plan, I feel much better if we're forced to using the military option.

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Posted Thursday, April 13, 2006 6:26 AM

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