David McCloskey

Yeah.

That's the thing is there's also levels inside that in the besiege, right?

So there's the people who are, you know, they get the phone call at 10 at night that, hey, we need to go out and put your leather jacket on because you're going to drive your motorcycle around and harass people.

Yeah.

But your day job is, you know, you're a bricklayer all the way up to more professional elite sort of anti-riot kind of, you know, units, right?

So there's a wide range even inside an organization like the besiege.

There's a hierarchy here, and we went through it sort of bottom to top, right?

The anti-riot, the national police, the law enforcement, command, up to the besiege, up to the IRGC.

One of the interesting things about this hierarchy

series of protests at unrest is, I think, an indicator of how strained the security forces were, was the need to use the IRGC, to use the IRGC's sort of ground forces in anti-riot or sort of protester suppression, right?

Because

If you're the regime, you'd prefer to not be using units like that to suppress a protest.

I mean, this is what the law enforcement command and the besiege are for.

So I think it's a sign of how, you know, one of the other kind of dynamics that's just, I think, worth elaborating a bit is like how you suppress these kind of uprisings becomes to some degree a resource management problem.

Yeah.

And you have to think about, okay, you've got a certain number of units that you probably know if you're the Supreme Leader or the people around him, without a shadow of a doubt, will do the things that you need them to do, right?

Yeah.

Where do you allocate those units?

And how do you make sure that you don't put units...

like low-level riot police or besiege who might flee in the face of protesters or armed resistance or not shoot.