'War on the cheap': Expert slams Hegseth's half-measures on Iran

President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth do not have a real plan in place to neutralize the threat from Iran, NBC national security reporter David Rohde told MS NOW's "Morning Joe" on Thursday.

"The problem is if it's just more airstrikes, that didn't work," said Rohde. "And the real issue, the biggest leverage Iran has is that it hasn't attacked the energy facilities that exist across the Persian Gulf, the refineries, the natural gas processing facilities and pipelines. They've hit a few of them, but that's their sort of, you know, their top option ... their biggest threat is that if the U.S. bombs again and bombs their infrastructure, their power plants, they will take out all those facilities and it will take months, months to rebuild them. So this goes from an energy crisis that lasts for a few weeks to months and months."

"I reported a couple of weeks ago, Trump himself actively considering still potential ground assault," said anchor Jonathan Lemire, noting that even many Republicans don't want an operation like that to move forward. "But the Pentagon has those plans ready to go and assets are in place if needed."

"They are, but we're still only talking about, it's not clear, 10,000 Marines, roughly, there's U.S. special forces, there's some thousands of troops from the from the U.S. Airborne," said Rohde. "That's not enough for a ground invasion."

By contrast, he said, during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, "we had 150,000 ground troops there. And what the — this is back to this basic premise that just American air power is enough to topple a government, that has never happened in modern warfare."

"And so it's — again, it's sort of a war on the cheap," Rohde added. "We're just going to do it from the air. We're going to do it ourselves with a certain number of ships. We don't have enough ships to totally reopen the Strait of Hormuz. We don't have enough ground troops to really threaten that we're going to topple the regime. I'm not saying we want a ground invasion, but you know, that's what we did in the past. And then we botched the post-war effort."

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