Nancy Youssef

What is the U.S.

hoping to achieve through those military options?

That hasn't been, in my mind, clearly articulated such that you see a military planning towards that.

Right.

Not every, because they don't have enough.

For example, we don't have the 170,000 U.S.

and allied ground troops that we did in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, right?

We don't have the capability, for example, to go in and remove the leadership of Iran or...

put in a regime change such that we are there and able to shape that post-outcome.

They're preparing for an outcome where it's the same strikes over targets, potentially nuclear targets, potentially ballistic missile and other defense targets, I would say, and potentially to go after leadership from the air.

No, it's such a great point.

So right now we have two carriers in the region, more than 120 aircraft and drones and roughly 40,000 ground troops.

In the run-up to the 2003 invasion, we had five carriers, multifold more aircraft, and 170,000 U.S.

and allied troops assigned to go in Iraq.

That's the difference in scale.

That doesn't mean that this is small.

It's one of the largest military buildups we've seen since 2003, but it is not on the same scale of 2003.

Stephen Wyckoff said as much.

He said in an interview with Fox earlier this week that the president was curious that the presence of U.S.

military forces near their shores wasn't enough to lead to a capitulation of some kind.