Mark Kimmett

I've seen the Iranians, how they negotiate, frankly, since it was the Persian Empire.

They are brilliant negotiators.

They will pull you in every direction.

They will delay.

They will deny.

They will deceive.

And they will typically end up in a better place than you hope they would be.

Their sticking point should be their original war aims, the removal of the ballistic missile program, the nuclear program, and the proxy program.

Try to hide, try to find the right time to contact your rescue team and don't attract anything other than those aircraft that are coming to save you.

And I think they can do most, if not all of that without ground forces, if they're talking about hard destruction of missile sites, of discovered nuclear sites and their Navy.

If, on the other hand, they want to conduct short term operations to, say, go against their speed boats that have been so effective in the past.

And we saw in Yemen.

with the sinking of the USS Cole by the speedboats, that may take troops on the ground for a short period of time.

And of course, the Clark Island question begs the question if we're going to have to put ground troops there.