Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast.

I'm your host, Tim Miller.

It is Friday.

So we have the convergingly one staff writer at the Atlantic, Professor Emeritus at U.S. Naval

War College.

His books include The Death of Expertise. It's Radio Free Tom Nichols. How you doing, Tom? Hey, Tim. How are you? You know, caveats included. I'm doing, all right. Tough loss for the Honey Badgers, the girls basketball team I coach last night, one point loss. I didn't really agree with the refs foul call at the end.

And no one cares about that except for me really agree with the refs foul call at the

end. And no one cares about that except for me, but now the listeners of this podcast have to care. Well, they can still win if Mike Pence has the courage to him. That's true. I want to go through the latest with the war. I was going to run through some headlines, then we'll tick through them one at a time.

The U.S. KC. 135 refueling aircraft went down in Iraq earlier this week.

All six crew members aboard are now confirmed deceased.

Oil prices are teetering around $100 a barrel.

The F.T. says that the U.S. has burned through years of munitions since starting the war,

including Tomahawks.

The Navy is going to be filling the pinch for years. Axio says that Trump claimed in a call with his G7 allies that Iran is about

to surrender. He simultaneously said nobody knows who is the leader, so there's no one that can announce

surrender. That's a paradox I want to get to. Hague Seth had a presser this morning. He opened it by criticizing CNN and saying he's excited for David Ellison to take over.

And he said that Hamini, the new Supreme Leader, is wounded and likely disfigured.

So that's the run of show.

I want to start with the surrender paradox because I guess that's how Trump thinks we get out of this war.

How can we know that they're about to surrender if we don't know who the surrenderer is?

We can't.

And also, surrender to whom?

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