#294 Pete Blaber - Part 1: Delta Force Commander on Roberts Ridge: The Battle of Takur Ghar

**Pete Blaber** (0:00)
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**Shawn Ryan** (0:30)
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**Shawn Ryan** (0:50)
The Pete Blaber hot question. If tomorrow you were tasked with eradicating the cartels, but you could only bring five movie actors or fictional characters, who's on your team and why? And in the most general terms, what's your weapon of choice? And what air support would you want overhead?

**Pete Blaber** (1:13)
Wow. Well, I wouldn't go down that. I wouldn't use that approach.
I wouldn't. I'd use, and you know, you've been down there, you've been, and we're going to talk about Columbia. We both went to Columbia, through, with, and by, clandestine, especially in, you know, south of the Rio Grande. If you're a gringo and you're seen in some of these places, especially now after Venezuela, you know, they're going to see you, they're going to ID you. It's, you know, you're going to have a really hard time collecting the on-the-ground intel you need. I don't want to throw a damper on that. So, like, if I had the five, I don't, you know, as soon as you said that, I was going, well, I take Larry. I think you just interviewed Larry. You know, I take a really good shot.

**Shawn Ryan** (2:10)
Yeah.

**Pete Blaber** (2:10)
Larry would be my shoot, one of my shooters. And, you know, I probably wouldn't take any Hollywood actors because...

**Shawn Ryan** (2:17)
I wouldn't either.

**Pete Blaber** (2:19)
Because, you know, they're just not... Again, when you go into a contentious, very sensitive area like that, like counter-narcotics, where it's sensitive because, as you know, the narco-traffickers are embedded in the local society. And not all of them are the rich cartel kingpins.

**Shawn Ryan** (2:45)
Some of them are the fruit stands.

**Pete Blaber** (2:47)
Yeah, exactly.

**Shawn Ryan** (2:48)
Side of the road.

**Pete Blaber** (2:48)
Exactly. So you start, you know, if some of them are included, collateral damage or whatever, you've just lost the hearts and minds for further ops. You might get one cartel kingpin, but you're not going to clean up the cartels. So again, my advice would be go low-viz, make it a clandestine. We should never say we have, we're even, you know, that mission is ongoing, but the infiltration should be starting right now. Obviously, Spanish speakers are a lot of seventh group guys, a lot of guys who, you know, can blend in down there would be needed. And I think, you know, it would not be that hard to do some serious damage to them.

**Shawn Ryan** (3:37)
You don't think it would be?

**Pete Blaber** (3:38)
I don't. I think, I think if we had the intel.

**Shawn Ryan** (3:42)
What would, how do you, when I just go to drones, marking a target, drone it.

**Pete Blaber** (3:48)
Yeah.

**Shawn Ryan** (3:49)
Is that, is that what you would do?

**Pete Blaber** (3:51)
Well, but the drone, you know, you'd have to know who the guy you're going for and where he's at. And if you got that, yeah, the drone would work. But, you know, again, as soon as you start that, they're going to start looking for the drones. And, you know, we had drones, we had predators for Bin Laden, and we couldn't find him. We couldn't find Zahra O'Harey. We couldn't, you know, find Mullah Omar and most of their lieutenants. We couldn't find, and we had those drones flying all the time. And, you know, a predator is better than most of the drones that are flying today.

**Shawn Ryan** (4:29)
Is it really?

**Pete Blaber** (4:30)
Yeah. Resolution level, flight time, the whole thing. The little ones.

**Shawn Ryan** (4:36)
Have you seen these new Shield AI drones?

**Pete Blaber** (4:39)
Yup.

**Shawn Ryan** (4:40)
It's like 1200 nautical mile.

**Pete Blaber** (4:42)
Yeah.

**Shawn Ryan** (4:43)
With payload. I can't remember altitude, but it's up there.

**Pete Blaber** (4:48)
Yeah. And then remember the thing, end of 24, the supposed drone invasion in New Jersey and all that.

**Shawn Ryan** (4:56)
Yeah, yeah.

**Pete Blaber** (4:57)
I mean, that was, they were-

**Pete Blaber** (4:59)
Everybody remembers that.

**Pete Blaber** (5:01)
Well, I'm in, I told you I got a cabin in the Tehachapi Mountains. And so when you look south from my, where I'm at on the mountain, Edwards Air Force Base is right over to the east in the Mojave Desert there. And Edwards is where, you know, Skunk Works is and everything else, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin. And they were doing the same tests. I could, from my cabin, I was watching and you could see what it was.