Why Can't We "Just Airdrop AR-15s" to Iranian Rebels?

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]number of people ask me why the US can't just drop guns uh into Iran for people who want to overthrow the regime. And the funny thing here is that whenever someone says, "Why don't we just like it's everything that follows after the just is probably going to indicate that person really didn't spend a lot of time thinking about the problem, right? Like, oh, you're not the first person to come up with this idea there, bub." Um, and that's how project managers are made. Uh but yeah, look, it in fairness it actually kind of makes sense, right?

[00:00:30]Like if the problem is, oh, the Iranian people don't have guns to rebel, well, why not give them some guns, right? Um but there's a couple of reasons why this might not work. Uh first off, before I get started, uh only 5% of you are actually subscribed. Uh so make sure you're subscribed and hit the bell, uh so that you get notified when I come out with new videos. And I I'm traveling right now. Uh I am doing this from a hotel room. I have to fly to another country in a few hours, so this video will be a little different without all the edits and jump cuts and stuff. First of all, the idea of like giving rebels guns tried during World War II with the Liberator pistol, which is the small cheap oneot 45 caliber pistol. Uh I'm sure Ian McCullen from Forgotten Weapons has a video on it. And the the idea is that uh if you're a member of the French resistance and you wanted a gun uh you could just use the liberator pistol to take some German soldiers gun, you know, like uh German soldiers at a checkpoint and it's night and he's bored and he's having a cigarette, you know, and you walk up to cigarette and uh auvigarette au cigarette and Then when he reaches for the cigarette, you shoot him with your liberator and you take his much more effective crag 98 or um uh MP40.

[00:01:57]And the problem is that there's usually more than one German at the checkpoint, right? Uh so it was actually just easier for the French to pose as prostitutes and get the German soldier drunk and naked and then, you know, take him for everything they've got.

[00:02:13]So, just kind of in general, just dropping guns just doesn't work. Uh, next, you know, uh, firearm ownership in Iran is legal, but it's rare. Most guns are shotguns, and they're mainly owned by farmers and hunters. So, if you drop off a bunch of guns, sooner or later, the police are going to become aware of that. And now you're going to have police going door todo looking for these guns. And if you have one, you're going to be in a lot of trouble. There is a reason why authoritarian states disarm their people.

[00:02:45]So now you've got like a giant felony scavenger hunt going on and maybe a few of these police or besieged officers or besieged officers might get uh might get the barrel of the gun that they're looking for. Uh but there's a lot more of them that wouldn't and they'd also find other stuff that they were looking for as they're looking for these guns. And I think the regime would just end up with a lot of these weapons. Next thing is ammunition. You need a constant supply of ammunition in order to have a rebellion. Um, that actually isn't as hard as you think, the ammunition portion of it. Because if you drop weapons that are if you drop weapons that are designed to accept the same caliber as the weapons you're using, it's going to be a lot easier to do uh battlefield pickups of ammunition.

[00:03:38]parched. Um, but this is kind of like season eight of The Walking Dead, you know, the all out war season where you go like, where the hell did Rick's group get all this ammo, you know? So, ammunition resupply, uh, would be a concern. Um, and you know, uh, you also need things like spare parts, uh, and people, armorers who know how to repair weapons, right? Guns break, they need maintenance.

[00:04:06]uh are we dropping spare parts of all these weapons? Uh you know, you need a logistical tale with any kind of army, even a rebel army. Another problem is how do we get the weapons to the right people? Anyone who has fought in Afghanistan can tell you that it was hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys. You might have some dude whose neighbor cheated their grandfather out of a goat a 100 years ago. So the grandson goes to US forces and says, "My neighbor is al-Qaeda." You you also saw that in Iraq with people who wanted their neighbors house and they'd be like, "Oh, my neighbor is Jamal Sama."

[00:04:43]And then we kick in the door like space aliens take the dude to jail. Neighbor moves in into the place when when the guy's in jail and we leave. And this this is the same problem that the US has run into with Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, the Contras basically like, "Hey, let's arm the rebels." Like, it doesn't always work. In fact, it rarely works. You have to answer like what who are the good guys? Uh who controls them? What happens if the the good guys lose? What happens if they win, right? Because now now you have a government to run and now you have all these guns floating out there.

[00:05:20]What if the guns end up in the hands of criminals or separatists or jihadists or whatever, right? Or some dude who just wants to settle a family dispute.

[00:05:30]Persians are a lot different than Arabs.

[00:05:34]Um, you know, Persians, they've had their own culture for 7,000 years. They don't really have that tribal culture that's so plagued Iraq where like some dude was like, "Well, now that I'm the chief of police, everyone in my tribe is going to be in the police, right? That that isn't really a thing in Iran. Like Persians are just much more they're much more civilized, right? They they've been really Yeah, they're much more civilized. Persians had been a civilization for 7,000 years longer than China. So that that whole tribal thing isn't really that that that predominant inside of Iran. Um, a better template for what we could do or a template for something that was successful was the special forces fight with the Northern Alliance soldiers against the Taliban in 2001. We brought the Taliban government down in like I think six weeks, a little over six weeks with mujahedin guts and American air power. And even then, you know, weapons diversion and blowback were were constant concerns. In Syria, we kind of emphasized vetting where these weapons and supplies were going uh that were being dropped to anti-ISIS rebels. We're vetting weapons being sent to Ukraine. You have all these people saying, "Oh, Ukraine is selling these weapons to Mexican cartels." I wasn't aware that Mexico had M1 tanks, but okay.

[00:06:58]Right. But we have entire special forces dudes there whose only job it is to to track which weapon shipments are going to to what units. And they're pretty strict on that. At least we used to. We pretty much cut off sending weapons.

[00:07:14]So, um, another thing is that sending weapons to rebels would give the IRGC this amazing propaganda gift, be the gift of a lifetime, right? The regime already says these protesters are foreign backed. So, drop American rifles into Iran. And now you have Tran say, "See, see, we told you this, this was an American coup. This is a CIA operation.

[00:07:41]every protester suddenly becomes an American agent. Right? Here's proof that the CIA is really behind this.

[00:07:47]Revolutions need legitimacy. This is one of the reasons Maria Karina Marado wasn't installed as a leader of Venezuela after we kidnapped Maduro, right? Um Maria Cotina Machado has been out of the country. She's been out of Venezuela for years. If she came down the ramp with a C17 with two Marines on each side, her legitimacy is gone because the people of Vene Venezuela have been dealing with that crap while she's been flying around the world getting the Nobel Peace Prize, right?

[00:08:17]Her legitimacy is based on those Marines and that makes it's going to make it would make it really hard for her to govern, right? The military wouldn't respect her, the people wouldn't respect her. And finally, rifles are just part of the equation, right?

[00:08:32]Um, e even rebel armies need things like radios, food, batteries, training. What we could do is something that I actually advocated months ago, and that was to perform an amphibious landing on her on Hermuz Island because that that has controlled the strait of Hormuz since uh 1507 when the Portuguese colonized it.

[00:08:56]Then we take Bandor Abos in maybe an airborne operation. Uh we bring in green berets and we start teaching the people in Bandar Boss how to fight, at least the ones who want to and we send them north. We say go north, shoot everybody who's not dressed like you and we have special forces right behind him calling in Jams on Iranian targets just like we did in Afghanistan. That that could work. And in fact, the Artesh, the uh Iranian, for lack of a better term, secular army, because Iran has two armies, the IRGC, which is a religious army, and the Artesh, which is like the secular army. And they're still Muslim, but they're they're not the IRGC. The Artesh might even join us on our on our trip up north. So, now we got that 2001 Northern Alliance template, which which worked, right? uh the special forces component would be critical but but the time to do that was in March like the second week of March that was the correct time to do that. Uh we may have missed our window here. Um so that that that I don't really know how we would move forward with any kind of special forces operation because we we had momentum on our side uh back in the early part of March. So just airdropping rifles, I don't think that would have much of an effect without training, without guidance, without special forces dropping JD dams. Um, but I uh it's it's it's one of those things that sounds like a good idea until you actually get into the the heart of the matter, the meat of the matter when it comes to training, logistics, and uh whether or not uh these weapons would even be remotely effective. Um, flying to a different country in a couple of minutes. Uh, thank you guys so much for watching. Make sure you're subscribed and hit THAT BELL. OH MAN, I HAVE TO WORK IN THIS GIFT. MAYBE I'LL JUST TAKE MY PHONE IN THIS GIFT. HEY KID, WHAT'S GOING ON? THINK TANK. YOU KNOW, TAKING A PHONE into the skip isn't cool. It could really hurt your friends. But a t-shirt or hoodie from Bunker Branding sure is cool. Wow. This meeting could have been SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE. THAT'S LIKE every meeting and bunker branding is all torture weather merchandise. Intellite air assault live lap launch for destroyer trident and patriot. Think outside the bomb drone sweet drone department of the boat people landmines and even the tow missile. It would behoove you to grab one today. You know I don't think you can smoke in here. Oh, I'm not smoking. I'm just holding a lit cigarette in my mouth. Now I know and know it's half about coner.