S8 Ep751: 2. General Blaine Holt suggests China may have allowed its satellite technology transfer to Iran to be discovered. He highlights the US Air Force's successful air campaign doctrine and impressive technological capabilities.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 16 April 2026
⏱️ 9 minutes
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Summary
2. General Blaine Holt suggests China may have allowed its satellite technology transfer to Iran to be discovered. He highlights the US Air Force's successful air campaign doctrine and impressive technological capabilities.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batchel, Gordon Chang, my colleague and friend at Gordon G. Chang, and we welcome our colleague, |
| 0:23.5 | General Blaine Holt, the United States Air Force, retired to help us with a story that is on the stark |
| 0:30.1 | pages of the Financial Times. That's the Pingsheet out of London. I trusted enormously |
| 0:36.2 | because it is Europe's opinion right now. It's editorial decisions |
| 0:42.5 | right now in English. Iran used Chinese spy satellite to target U.S. bases. Subhead, leaked |
| 0:52.0 | documents show IRGC secretly acquired system and used it to guide strikes during war in March. |
| 1:00.3 | General, a very good day to you. |
| 1:02.1 | I asked the difficult to answer question, but it occurs to me that everything down is up in a war. |
| 1:09.0 | Did China want to be caught doing this, transferring technology |
| 1:14.0 | into the hands of a combatant against the United States? And as far as I can tell, the rest of |
| 1:19.7 | its neighborhood. Good day to you. Yeah, good evening. It's a fascinating question because I can see |
| 1:27.0 | why the Chinese would want to get caught. |
| 1:30.5 | And the reason in my own view is they are trying very hard not to upset the apple cart with Iran because they desperately need that oil and they need the straits opened. |
| 1:43.1 | And that's that's for very, very good reasons in their own |
| 1:46.8 | country with instability right around the corner. And so by getting caught, could you then make a |
| 1:54.3 | plausible argument that, oh, we're caught, there'll be no more of that. You understand we have a |
| 1:58.9 | difficult situation with America. And then there's |
| 2:02.5 | really no appetite on our part to start getting more aggressive with the Chinese or opening up |
| 2:09.7 | a new front in this fifth generation war, if you will, by making that the new focus, shifting the |
| 2:16.7 | focus out of Tehran and into Beijing. |
| 2:18.8 | There's plenty of time for President Trump to work on Chinese issues. |
| 2:24.2 | And that visit that he's making to Beijing is just around the corner. |
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