Phillip Stewart

You know, it's fascinating because there's two ways of looking at this.

One is to go back and forth between these oscillations that you've been discussing, right?

One day, President Trump's talking about dramatic escalation, and the next day he's talking about negotiation.

But from the national security space, what reporters are trying to do is just look and see what he's doing.

And what he's doing is sending thousands and thousands of troops.

The most recent reporting that we have, it talks about 82nd Airborne being deployed.

But late last week, we were talking about sending Marines and sailors to the Middle East as reinforcements.

So what you're seeing is kind of a steady buildup beyond the buildup that was already there that is giving President Trump more options for the days and weeks ahead.

Well, I mean, I think there's different ways to take that argument and analyze it.

One is that the U.S.

military undoubtedly has struck thousands of Iranian targets.

It's definitely degraded its missile and drone capabilities and decimated its Navy.

There's no doubt about that.

But the Iranians still have tremendous capability that they can still launch against their neighbors and against the US forces in the region.

There was this aha moment I had at a press conference last week where Defense Secretary Hegseth was talking about the tunnels that Iran had spent lots of time and money building these really fortified tunnels where they put away a lot of their equipment for use for later.

And he drew a comparison to the war against Hamas, Israel's war against Hamas.

And I think we all remember that that wasn't, you know, a one week or two week or three week or three month or, you know, whatever war.

It was a long campaign because of that.

And so the Iranians have a lot of capability they can bring out.

And it's a lot of it's hard to get places.