In this episode, we talk to the Chief of Staff at the United States Air Force, Lt Gen. Robert Pape. He talks about how he became the Air Force's Chief Strategist, how he got into the service, and why he thinks we should all be worried about what we do next.
00:06:04.100What's the real strategy, the actual strategy of strategy is in between the tactics of military force hitting things and political outcomes.
00:06:18.080I lay them out, but it's this middle that's very hard to get a grip on.
00:06:23.280And that's really what I've been doing for the better part of 30 years is focusing on, I call it the escalation dynamics.
00:06:30.860And that's true in all of my work, really, not just the air power part of my work.
00:06:35.920And that's one of the reasons I've advised every, when I worked for the Air Force, I got in big debates about bombing strategy to end the Bosnian Civil War.
00:06:44.620And I was very strongly showing the limits of leadership decapitation, which was becoming the Air Force's favorite way to use precision air power.
00:06:55.520And the bombing strategy that stopped the Bosnian Civil War had no leadership decapitation.
00:07:49.840So, Professor, we've been really looking forward to this conversation.
00:07:54.040And there's a lot of people in the UK, America, right away around the world who woke up, saw the strikes happening and going, why did this happen?
00:08:05.160So could you just explain what you think is the American strategy for this war and why they started it?
00:08:12.660Well, I can also try to explain why these strikes, I couldn't say the date, but why they were almost inevitable that they were going to happen.
00:08:20.340So I've been modeling the bombing of Iran for 20 years.
00:08:23.700And it's important to understand that starting in 2002, the relationship between the United States and Iran fundamentally changed.
00:08:34.080Now, for decades before that, there was political tension. Absolutely. There was issues of Israel. Absolutely. But what happened in 2002 is that's when we discovered, the American government discovered, that Iran was going to enrich uranium.
00:08:50.600That became the Natanz issue, and they were getting equipment from Pakistan.
00:12:03.540Now, as I'm doing this, Iran is developing from Natanz to Fordow, and there's a whole discussion of that I can give you.
00:12:12.920And then we, too, when Fordow came on, we built the Moab, which is the 30,000-pounder.
00:12:18.640So all the way along the way, every year I'm updating.
00:12:23.160Now, that's like the details of this, of the actual on paper.
00:12:30.260But what does it mean in terms of the attack?
00:12:32.560What's the what's the strategic reality? So right from the beginning, it was always going to be clear that we, the Americans, would be able to attack Natanz, Natanz and Fordow with 90 plus percent tactical success, meaning the bombs would hit their targets.
00:12:55.720So I went through all the different targets here that we were going to destroy.
00:13:00.300But we would and we would be able to do that more effectively by far than the Israelis because we could carry in our bombers bigger payloads than they could.
00:13:09.140And so what you would end up with is high degree of tactical success in stage one of the escalation, but very little strategic success.
00:13:32.500Because you couldn't be sure you would ever, you might be able to disrupt the centrifuges.
00:13:37.220So just to give you a sense of the way this is set up.
00:13:41.660So let's just pick Natanz, just for one, here.
00:13:44.580So Natanz is like a football field here.
00:13:46.640So it's 100 meters by 25 meters across.
00:13:50.180And you've got rows of centrifuges here, which are about the size of us, maybe a little shorter than us, except there's thousands of them in these rows.
00:13:59.340So when you do the double tap attacks, you are always likely, even if you didn't quite get to the chamber itself, to cause earthquake.
00:14:10.920And that earthquake would always likely to be.
00:14:14.160So this is the, you know, having studied bombing for a long time.
00:14:17.680It's not it's it's the there's a blast effect. You see what I mean? So the blast effect itself was very likely to disable maybe 50, 70, maybe even 90 percent of these centrifuges, in which case you would stop the industrial production enrichment of the uranium.
00:14:38.140But the problem is that you wouldn't necessarily even cause fires down there.
00:14:45.020You would be shaking everything up, more or less.
00:15:07.420You see what I mean? What you wouldn't be able to see, and this was always the uncertainty, always, was what happened to the enriched uranium. Now, I'm not saying for sure none of it would have been damaged. That's not the problem.
00:15:21.720The problem coming out of this is that enriched uranium, especially as the quantities grew over time, you see, you would only need portions of that to produce nuclear weapons.
00:15:37.000You would also need even smaller portions of that for radiological weapons, which I'll say more about down the road.
00:15:44.560So right from the beginning, there was stage one of escalation.
00:15:49.180And so in my escalation trap that I published before the war started, I laid out three stages of escalation we were going to go through.
00:15:57.720And this was days before the war, all three stages.
00:16:01.980Stage one of the escalation trap was the bombing tactical success, and we'll go back to June, in Fordow, Natanz, where you do destroy the facility as an industrial uranium enrichment production center, just as I'm describing.
00:16:19.180OK. And it's 90 percent plus likely that happened. So, well, that is true. But you wouldn't know
00:16:26.140what happened to the uranium itself. And that then would lead to stage two. And I always said about
00:16:33.220a year later, two years later, actually, it happened about eight months, a little bit sooner.
00:16:38.020That's when you'd get the regime change war. And the reason so there had been regime changes called
00:16:43.640from Israel. How would you actually get America behind the regime change war? You would start by
00:16:51.160going after Cordeaux and Natanz. Once you did that, you started the trap because you did,
00:16:58.700you triggered, you did destroy, but you probably triggered, you wouldn't know for sure, but you
00:17:04.180probably triggered dispersal of that material. You see dispersal. And we saw some satellite evidence
00:17:10.580of that. And I have that on my substack. So we actually have some civilian. So if we have that
00:17:15.100in the civilian world, I can guarantee you there is humans, SIGINT, there's a lot of more.
00:17:21.700And in fact, just thinking logically, given the 12-day war, President Trump said they obliterated
00:17:30.560everything, destroyed everything. The fact that there is now a follow-up is clear evidence of
00:17:35.300the fact that President Trump and his team believe that material is still there.
00:17:39.160And they, and President Trump, it's, I cannot get inside his head. I'm not going to put him on the
00:17:44.360couch. But notice, even after the 12-day war, what did we do? Right back to negotiating with
00:17:49.820the Iranians. Now, if we had actually destroyed all that enriched uranium, the 1,000 pounds of 60%,
00:17:55.800the 10,000 pounds of 5 and 20%, what are we talking to them about? Okay, I mean, what is
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00:19:48.080So stage one is the United States hit them.
00:19:55.540And then over the months, your intel, you have no more IAEA, which was your best intelligence.
00:20:02.160So people think, oh, it must be the CIA and Mossad who are the best.
00:20:06.620Well, they can turn individuals James Bond style.
00:20:09.760But there's nothing like going into, just like you're asking me to come here, there's nothing like being on site and actually looking right across.
00:20:17.080And if I'm the IAE, I want to actually measure you as the enriched uranium and actually get my measurements out.
00:20:23.280There's nothing that's going to beat that.
00:20:26.360So once you bombed, you were, number one, tactically successful, but you're strategically at a minimum uncertain, likely failed, and it's dispersing.
00:20:39.160And then number three, your intel is terrible.
00:20:43.220So that's going to put you in a situation of, over time, panic, because you will get little drips and drabs of additional intel of this and that happening with that material, and we will just simply panic.
00:20:59.740Now, we won't say we're panicking because we want to exude control, but we're losing control here, and that's what then sucks, that I always said would lead to stage two, which was the regime change war.
00:21:13.220So just, I'm asking questions just to make it very extra simple.
00:21:17.300Your explanations are brilliant, but I always like to clarify things for our audience even more so.
00:21:32.440So stage two is you go, and we know this from some of the things that are being revealed about the negotiations
00:21:38.280that Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff had with the Iranians.
00:21:41.000the Iranians claim to have the ability to make 11, 11, they said, right, they're talking smack
00:21:46.900across the table. This is what the Iranians are saying. And they're saying we've got the
00:21:50.160nuclear material to make a bunch of bombs. And your argument is, well, that's when everybody
00:21:55.360basically panics. And so I'm saying they were probably were incrementally panicking along
00:22:00.560the way because that material in June was enough for between 10 and 16 bombs. Right.
00:22:06.060And that is with high degree of confidence. That's the IAEA's estimate. We know that the time to make those bombs and so forth, it's not a few days. It's more like finishing the enrichment is a few weeks. That's when President Trump's talking about the few weeks. But then it's probably six months after that to actually fashion the bomb.
00:22:25.620So we have some idea of this, of the actual dimensions.
00:22:29.900And so I'm not saying that it's literally the foreign minister of Iran's comment here.
00:22:36.220But the package of information we're getting from Intel, from the negotiations,
00:22:48.780And you are concerned because there's so much of that material now.
00:22:54.740You see, this isn't just tiny amounts. It's not the 300 kilograms of 5% that was there with the Obama deal. Now we have fantastic amounts more. And so even portions of that can be really, really concerning. And it doesn't even have to be for a nuclear bomb.
00:23:14.120So you're now seeing the precision drone capabilities of Iran, which I have to say, I'm a bit surprised was not taken more seriously ahead of time because Iran produced 55,000 of those precision drones in 2025 and gave them to Russia.
00:23:32.960So the idea that you're not, I don't know if we have any idea how many thousand they have, I'm not saying that, but I'm saying the idea that you wouldn't think they would have a lot of thousands here for themselves and they've just given everything to Russia, I think this is kind of foolish.
00:23:50.360But then put the radiological material on the tip of a drone.
00:25:36.460Well, how are you going to get a grip on that material,
00:25:39.840the nuclear material that is now, you're worried, is going to have some nefarious purpose,
00:25:45.200and I've given you a number of them. You only have two choices. One, the Iranian regime will
00:25:50.820negotiate it away. That's what happened with the Obama deal. But once we went through the,
00:25:56.960and I always argued for something, I didn't know it was the Obama deal, but I was arguing
00:26:01.700that that would be the best thing we could do, even before we had a thing called the Obama deal.
00:26:06.620And there's a whole story about the kind of linkages there that when I was on Obama's primary team, I was recommending for that.
00:26:14.640So if you want to, if you're interested in that, but I mean, the point is that the reason you go for regime change, Constantine, is because you're desperate.
00:26:22.580And you think, well, OK, the negotiations aren't giving me a big enough deal.
00:26:27.500They still want to keep their 3.5 enriched uranium.
00:26:30.940They're not giving the whole thing up like they did for Obama.
00:26:35.800you're left with trying to take out the regime. And it's not because it's a great option. It's
00:26:41.040not. History will show it's not. But the fact of the matter is you're getting more and more
00:26:47.120desperate here. And I think that's really what led to stage two. And that's what I said. This
00:26:52.480is how you will get the regime change war by the United States. It will be an air war and it will
00:26:59.100also fail. It will fail because in 100 years, air power alone has never toppled a regime. I always
00:27:05.780went through the modeling of the regime itself. I do this on my substack, glad to do it here.
00:27:10.800There is nothing special about this regime that makes it more likely to collapse with
00:27:15.240there. In fact, it's the other way around. And I'm glad to explain all that. But the fact of
00:27:20.360the matter is you're going down this road. And then the trigger, when would you push the go
00:27:25.600to go for regime change? Well, in history, this was in 2003 as well and other cases,
00:27:32.460America typically goes the hour it has eyeball sighting of the leader it wants to kill.
00:27:41.060Not general idea. Okay. Not vague idea, but often eyeballs on the target. And then there's a gap
00:27:51.220because you have eyeballs on the target, maybe a sat phone here. Well, it takes about six or
00:27:56.680eight hours to get those bombers there. F-117s, B-2s, whatever. It's going to take a little bit
00:28:01.800of time to get there, no matter how fast you think you can make that happen. In 2003, this is when
00:28:07.500CIA Director Tennant ran into the Oval Office with George Bush, somewhere around the 20th or
00:28:15.46022nd of March, 2003. And he writes this in his book. So there's nothing classified here. This
00:28:21.240has all been made public. And he says to President Bush, we've got phenomena sites. He's at Tarnak
00:28:27.740Farms. He's right there. We've got our human agent in the basement and Saddam is going to have dinner
00:28:34.520there tonight again. He was there last night for dinner. He's coming again for dinner. And we have
00:28:40.720our agent there with a satellite phone and he is telling us this is happening. So that's when
00:28:46.620George Bush, March 2003, orders the F-117s to go. And it takes about, you know, but they timed it
00:28:53.440right for the dinner. And also, just so you know, we didn't tell the human agent. So we left the
00:29:00.020human agent in the basement. And we bombed the farm, destroyed that, killed the agent as well.
00:29:07.140And it just so turned out that Saddam just decided not to go there. Not for any, you know,
00:29:13.520it's just the randomness of history of luck here. So that's why we didn't kill him at that time.
00:29:20.120But this is, and I said, the most likely reason you would what would trigger the regime change in a very tactical sense is you'd have some probably human eyeballs on the leader that you want to kill.
00:29:32.980And I didn't know would be the supreme leader, but that makes perfect sense under this.
00:29:36.700I'm not saying it's a good idea, but that's what they I can see the tactical reasons for this.
00:29:42.540I think what you had is you had this you had this pressure here of essentially fear of what was happening with Iran's dispersing nuclear material and what could happen with that over time, mixed with this very exquisite intelligence about this day, this hour, this leader, this group is right there.
00:30:01.400And it's not one or the other. It's all of those coming together. And I'm fusing it here for your
00:30:09.760listeners because I can understand why they're confused. They're getting sound bites of six
00:30:15.200seconds here, six seconds there. This is why I wanted to talk to you to give a fuller picture
00:30:20.120of why. So we are now in the regime change war. What's next? Well, the regime change war is
00:30:28.060failing, and it's failing strategically, not tactically. Just want to be super clear. Again,
00:30:34.120our smart bombs are hitting their targets 90-plus percent of the time. Our military
00:30:41.600is hyper-professional at making those bombs hit those targets. The military is not failing here.
00:30:49.300The strategy is failing. That we have to be super clear. And why is the strategy failing? It's
00:30:56.040because at this stage, stage two, the goals are, number one, topple the regime, meaning positive
00:31:03.160regime change, where this regime goes away and new leaders come in who are more amenable to what
00:31:10.640President Trump wants. That's what I mean by positive regime change. Well, that's not happening,
00:31:15.580and it's not happening because what you're seeing is the pattern of history over 100 years. This has
00:31:21.660never happened, just to be super clear. Not rarely, it's never happened. And that's what my books show
00:31:29.340and so forth. But why not? It's because when you kill the leaders, as we did here and as we've done
00:31:37.580before, as we kill the leaders, the replacement leaders, all the incentives are for the replacement
00:31:45.960leaders to come in more aggressive than before. Some of its age, just because they're younger,
00:31:52.600it's like my graduate students are more aggressive than I am. Okay, that's all true. Okay. But some
00:31:58.640of it is just plain organizational. So just imagine that when you have a situation where
00:32:06.000there's a two-actor game, the society versus the regime, society versus the regime. Now you bring
00:32:12.800this third outside actor, the foreign military power that's a Godzilla. This isn't some little
00:32:20.080pipsqueak. We're the Americans. We're the omnipowerful American military. And on top of
00:32:27.300that, in 1953, a long time ago, but still historically will be remembered, it was the
00:32:33.380United States that toppled a democratic leader with the CIA controlling pieces of the Iranian
00:32:41.620military. It was a military coup that we orchestrated. So it didn't use air power,
00:32:46.320literally made the military do it. Well, that's when we put in the Shah, a dictator, not democratic,
00:32:53.400and the Savak. The Savak was the secret police, and the secret police were right up there with
00:32:58.900Joe Stalin's secret police. So this is not a nice situation. So this is what this gorilla,
00:33:05.480this Godzilla is over here, this changes the politics here. And it changes the politics
00:33:12.160because suddenly whatever the tensions were here, the gap, which is real, just like 40% of America
00:33:19.700supports Donald Trump today, there's a gap between America and our government. Well, does that mean
00:33:26.120that if Iran assassinates Trump, and we know they're trying, that you're going to get the
00:33:30.720Democrats here in Times Square, they're going to come out, they're going to have a party in
00:33:34.800Times Square, and they're going to invite the Iranians to come on over for the party.
00:33:38.980That's not going to happen, you see. Same dynamics here. So the government, you can see
00:33:46.000the leaders who are taking over now, much more likely to be hawkish because of the issue here
00:33:53.520with the... We have to fight Godzilla. You got to fight Godzilla, and the Godzilla is going to eat
00:33:58.180us here if we either fight him now or fight him later, but we got to fight Godzilla. But even the
00:34:03.280pro-democracy movement starts to create, it starts to create problems because now you are a traitor
00:34:10.820to your country. You're, you're, you're not getting self-determination. And when President
00:34:16.920Trump says, well, we will pick who will be your leader. The former Shah's son, not good enough.
00:34:23.680Well, that's probably a good, I'm not saying he would be a good choice. What I'm saying is that
00:34:28.440notice that it's the president of the United States who's picking who the leader of Iran is
00:34:33.460again. So no matter how we describe this, no matter how much we try to put a velvet glove
00:34:40.040over this, this is the use of force to dominate Iran's society. And that is what then takes away
00:34:49.900self-determination. It shrinks the pro-democracy movements here. It builds nationalism, which
00:34:56.680confuse parts of this, and not instantly, I want to make it clear, that politics takes time to work
00:35:03.500itself out. So now, what is this going to mean in stage two? Lashback. Lashback. So you are likely
00:35:12.060going to see not just a hardened regime, but a regime that's still very capable. They'll take
00:35:18.580more risks. And that's what you saw with the horizontal escalation. I published a piece in
00:35:23.900foreign affairs literally days after the moment. How could I do that? Because I had it ready to go,
00:35:29.820that this was very likely going to be Iran's lashback because they had drones. They have
00:35:36.860mines. Those drones have precision on them. This was always likely coming. Could I be 100 percent
00:35:43.080sure? Of course not. That's why I didn't publish before. But once it started and I saw on the
00:35:48.100Saturday that the Pentagon was saying, well, these aren't serious attacks by Iran. These are just the
00:35:54.560spasms of the dying body. That's when I knew that there was a lot of, I thought, misunderstanding of
00:36:00.520what the politics and the way this would work itself out. So history, there's a lot of cases
00:36:06.060that are similar to this in history I could explain to you, not with drones, but with the
00:36:10.540lashing back in an orchestrated way. And I had a sense of what Iran's capabilities were, because
00:36:16.240again, I'm focused on air power and Iran had a lot of precision drones they were giving to Russia.
00:36:22.220Why wouldn't they use them in their own defense here? And this was the regional escalation
00:36:27.720strategy is a reasonable lash back for them. That's a rational approach. And now we're coming
00:36:34.940to the end of stage two here or starting to move to a new stage because that horizontal escalation
00:36:41.140strategy hasn't just been a retaliation strategy. Iran has gained power with that horizontal
00:36:49.220escalation strategy. So let me explain that, which is that, so we are now in a situation where before
00:36:56.720the war, Iran controlled 4% of the world's oil, 4% of the world's oil. Today, it controls 20%
00:37:05.480of the world's oil. So five times more of that. That's a big increase.
00:44:17.780So the idea that he's going to walk away when all this enriched material is now dispersing and all those problems, on top of that, now it's an oil hegemon, and that billion and a half dollars will come in every two weeks.
00:44:42.560But they're going to be bigger than Bambi.
00:44:44.520Maybe there'll be a bear versus Godzilla.
00:44:46.340But it's there. There won't be Godzilla. I just want to be super clear. But you've changed this. This is now Iran is gaining power here. Relative power. That is that's the pull here for President Trump to go to stage three, which is likely coming in the next week or two.
00:45:06.700not three months from now, but now in the near term, which I called before the war started the
00:45:13.900limited territorial option. And what I mean by that is we would take ground forces and they would
00:45:22.340be limited ground forces. That's how it will be called. And they will be limited here at first.
00:45:28.840Sorry to interrupt, Professor. When you say limited, what's the number? What does that mean
00:48:10.540Where would you stage the ground from?
00:48:12.420Well, you're going to have to come on the sea.
00:48:15.620Azerbaijan is a great staging place. It's a great staging place. And once I saw that they hit
00:48:23.660Azerbaijan here as a brushback pitch, that told me they were right on it. That told me they are
00:48:29.920studying this appropriately. It's like people studying old chess games for 20 years. They're
00:48:35.380going down the natural routes because they're persuading, they're telling Azerbaijan, don't
00:48:42.020even think about letting American ground forces use you as an aircraft carrier, as a staging area
00:48:48.960here in Azerbaijan, got the message. Yes, sir, Iran. No, we're not doing that. Okay, we got the
00:48:54.540message. And so far, that's been the way it is. So you start to see right away that the stage three
00:49:02.520of these limited territorial conquests here, these options lead to military control routes
00:49:09.420that are start to become pretty predictable. And that is what we're facing right now. So we're now
00:49:15.840at the cusp of moving into stage three. And as we move into stage three for this, this will be a
00:49:25.400another, you know, sort of a, you know, sort of a shock to the public and to the world because
00:49:30.960ground force, oh my goodness gracious, you know, this was the one thing that President Trump was
00:49:35.180never supposed to have done. And of course, we've just come out of these forever wars.
00:49:41.200And there's still more issues with ground forces I'll describe. But in this situation,
00:49:46.860the amphibious assaults that we're talking about, these are some of the most dangerous
00:49:53.600military operations ever here. And the fact we're a Godzilla, this big, huge, we're still
00:50:01.920talking about exposure here. So what I am explaining, I just did a sub stack last night
00:50:10.320on this where I'm trying to explain that we're about to transition from disruption costs that
00:50:17.680are temporary, relatively quickly, you can reverse them to damage costs, which are much more difficult
00:50:25.820to reverse. And that's what this stage three is really about. It's not just military operations.
00:50:32.640We're moving to a different equilibrium of the escalation. This is a whole threshold we're
00:50:40.480crossing. And it's a threshold of the type and length of the costs that we're talking about.
00:50:48.080So, Professor, saying all that, I mean, what you're saying in layman's terms is effectively
00:50:54.080boots on the ground are inevitable and 75 i've said this before i'm when i you there's nothing
00:51:01.440mechanistic francis just so you know yeah and i know people when i and i'm talking very very
00:51:06.600directly as much as i can and so it's it's fair for people to say oh professor papes being just
00:51:12.100too mechanistic about the world i i do want to qualify even myself and say i'm i'm not saying
00:51:17.740anything is 100% inevitable. Of course. But what you're seeing is the trap and it's 75% likely.
00:51:25.680That's the way I would. Well, the Marines are already on the way to the Middle East. Oh yeah,
00:51:28.820they're halfway there and they should be there, you know, sort of end of next week. So this is
00:51:33.120a Friday here, the 20th. I would expect by the 27th, they'll be there. They might need a few
00:51:38.280more days. We don't know exactly here, but we're not far from the cusp of a decision point by the
00:51:46.760president. At this point, he's planning, putting pieces in place. Again, after being in sort of
00:51:54.760West Wings here, four different administrations, I don't believe presidents really commit in
00:52:01.500advance. I believe what they do is they bring pieces together. And then only at the very last
00:52:06.600second do they actually know what they're going to do. OK, because I think this is just the way
00:52:11.220presidents are. I don't think it's just Donald Trump. And I think he is coming to a pretty clear
00:52:16.440point of decision called a D-Day here. And I don't know when that'll be exactly, but it's going to
00:52:23.100be in the next week or two. But that's going to be a political catastrophe for Trump, isn't it?
00:52:27.400Because he ran on a platform of there's going to be no more wars. There's going to be no more
00:52:32.760forever wars. I'm not going to get involved. I'm not going to sacrifice any more American lives
00:52:38.260in the Middle East. Well, if he does that, he's going back against every one of his promises.
00:52:42.920And that means that he will potentially not only alienate voters, but also the base itself.
00:52:49.340Yeah. So he is on the horns of a dilemma, Francis, where there is no golden off-ramp here.
00:52:56.140The idea of the golden off-ramp here, we're long past that.
00:53:01.320So what President Trump is really facing is he's facing two terrible choices.
00:53:08.780and he's going to have to choose between two terrible choices. They're terrible for the world.
00:53:14.820They're terrible for his presidency. So these are not like one is good for the world. I would argue
00:53:22.540one is better, but they're not golden. The one that you're describing is he goes forward and
00:53:28.540crosses the threshold of phase three. And you're explaining this, what people will be talking about
00:53:35.900next week, there will be a four and five to the escalation trap. I have not even put on the
00:53:40.220sub stack yet that I'll be talking about on my next live briefing on Sunday. So there's more
00:53:45.360coming here. We're not done with the stages of the escalation trap. But you're right. He is going to
00:53:50.840be creating an enormous political liability for himself. Right now, you know that Tucker Carlson,
00:54:00.560Megyn Kelly, others, he's just had the first recognition from his administration of very
00:54:05.400high level here, breaking away from this. These are pro-Trump people. These are people who
00:54:12.840campaigned for President Trump. So you're seeing this fracture here, but he's got another problem
00:54:23.120on the other side. And I think this is why he's going back and forth, which is if he doesn't go
00:54:29.320forward, then Iran is going to be an oil hegemon. 20% of the world's oil. It's going to keep it.
00:54:39.600So it's not as if President Trump has an out where, okay, Iran, I'm going to declare victory
00:54:48.020and now I'm going to pull all my forces out. I'm going to take, I'm going to cancel the marine
00:54:55.380amphibious. I'm going to send that back to Japan. I'm going to take the aircraft carriers, put them
00:55:00.220back over to Venezuela. I'm going to do Cuba. Okay. So I'm going to go get myself pinned down
00:55:05.160in Cuba. And so let's say he does that option, which I think is, he's been thinking that over.
00:55:12.160Iran is not going to look at that and simply say, here's your oil back UAE. Here's your oil back
00:55:18.440What the Supreme Leader's statement here has been quite, was quite clear.
00:55:24.060It's, I grade people every year, and I did this in the Air Force as well, Air Force officers, on their coercive strategies, the logic and quality of their coercive strategy.
00:55:38.440The Leader's statement is a B plus, A minus, okay?
00:55:42.000It's not perfect, but this is not a C student.
00:55:45.200And I'm not saying he wrote it either, okay?
00:55:48.440But I've seen C-students. This is not a C-student. They really understand the pressure points here
00:55:56.660and how they're using. And I'm glad that I can unpack that for you. But what I'm trying to tell
00:56:02.200you is there is no sign I see that if President Trump picks up the armada and says, I'm just going
00:56:10.360to now get bogged down in a different war over here with Cuba, that Iran's going to say, oh,
00:56:15.140man, I'm glad that's over. And so here's all the oil back. I don't think that's happening here.
00:56:21.620And so you're going to have a situation where these are the two choices here that he's facing.
00:56:27.280So, and Iran will start to make a real geopolitical hay out of this. You see, the oil hegemon,
00:56:38.180if it's only been a few weeks that they've had this control, we're not seeing yet how this is
00:56:45.080going to play out with, we see the beginning, but not fully with China, India, Russia,
00:56:52.700other Gulf of the Gulf states here. This has the potential to fracture the GCC coalition that
00:57:04.920Trump and Jared Kushner have been spending years to build with the Abraham Accords against Iran.
00:57:11.720This has, I'm not saying that they will all fracture all at once,
00:57:15.700but you just saw the first fracturing in President Trump's orbit in Washington.
00:57:21.580So what I'm expecting here is these multiple different Gulf states,
00:57:25.720they're going to start to go their own way.
00:57:27.720You see, they're going to have slightly different interests here.
00:57:30.820And also Iran has been very, very smart in that what they're effectively doing
00:57:36.920with their propaganda, and this can be turned up many notches,
00:57:40.340is they're telling the GCC and not just the leaders, but the publics, this is all a war for
00:57:46.580Israel. And what it means to be a war for Israel is Israel's conquest of you. You see, so you're
00:57:54.840going to sit back for a second and people are going to start scratching their heads and saying,
00:57:59.000why exactly am I paying costs here to help Israel take me later? You see, this is what Iran has
00:58:09.360seen. And that's why I say it's a it's a B plus, A minus in terms of the coercive strategy. It's not
00:58:14.900perfect, but it's a it's a pretty strong approach. And there's no reason to think they're just going
00:58:20.780to give up 20 percent of the world's oil because there's real geopolitical hate to make.
00:58:25.860It's somehow March. I don't know how that happened either. But here we are. And I still have the same
00:58:31.760goals I had in January, which is the good news. The bad news is I'm absolutely the person who
00:58:37.440looks up at 1 p.m. and realizes the only thing I've consumed since waking up is coffee.
00:58:43.180Just coffee, no breakfast, no lunch, pure caffeine, and good intentions.
00:58:47.500So lately, I've been keeping Huel Black Edition around to stop myself doing that.
00:58:53.860On the days I'm out the door before I've had a chance to think,
00:58:56.700I grab a Black Edition ready to drink.
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00:59:05.260no artificial sweeteners and it's under five bucks which is cheaper than a coffee shop coffee that
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00:59:16.860even if it wasn't a sponsor then when i'm home and want something more substantial i use the black
00:59:21.480edition powder blend it with ice and milk if you want a proper smoothie or just shake it with water
00:59:26.760when i'm keeping it simple 40 grams of protein same complete nutrition you just have more control
00:59:32.900over it. The RTD Plus Powder Duo has basically become my insurance policy against chaotic days.
00:59:39.680Right, here's the offer. For a limited time, you can get 15% off online for new customers with
00:59:46.220code TRIGGER15 at Huel.com slash TRIGGER15 or click the link in the description. New customers
00:59:54.300only and thank you to Huel for supporting Trigonometry. But if you take, so if you take
01:00:00.680your point about israel and the propaganda well look at what happened to qatar the gas field of
01:00:06.500ras la fan which produces around 15 to 20 percent of the liquid natural gas of all the globe needs
01:00:12.740in order to continue functioning i mean that got bombed and effectively shut down for between three
01:00:17.520to five years and qatar are furious i mean they're not going to be pro-iran at this point oh well
01:00:23.120let's talk about this so first of all that was in retaliation for israel right um and what happened
01:00:30.100here. The Qatari said their statement exactly is, we're mad, but just so you know, everybody,
01:00:37.280we're not getting in this fight. We're going to stay diplomatic, just so you know. So they
01:00:44.140reinforce neutrality here as a result of this. Even President Trump said he's not happy with
01:00:51.760what Israel did. And it's because- And Bibi promised not to do it anymore.
01:00:54.840Well, yeah, I wouldn't count on, I don't think anybody's counting on that.
01:00:58.120What I'm trying to get at is your point, which is this was a retaliation for Israel striking Iran's gas facilities, which even President Trump didn't want to happen.
01:01:09.080That's right. And so that means President Trump can't end this war on his own. He can pull out on his own.
01:01:15.620Yeah. But that's not going to end the war because it's not going to end Israel's attacks.
01:01:20.700It's not going to end Russia's intelligence to Iran.
01:01:24.340And it's not going to end Iran's control of the Strait of Hormuz and therefore 20 percent of the world's oil.
01:01:30.160So what you have is a situation where, as I'm getting back to this, President Trump is on the horns of a real dilemma because it's lose here, lose there.
01:01:40.100And so it's a matter not of where is there a gain versus a loss.
01:01:44.720It's a matter of assessing where, which loss are you, it's pick your poison, which loss do you want to take.
01:01:52.060And just to be clear, Bob, option one, which you've described in quite a bit of detail, is you pull out now, you leave Iran with control of the Straits of Hormuz, you leave the current regime in place, you still haven't got control of their nuclear material, and that doesn't seem like a win to me.
01:02:13.480Of course, there's all kinds of risks related to that.
01:02:15.880The other option, the other option is what we started talking about, which is you put Marines on Carg Island, you put Marines on the coast of the Persian Gulf to try and control it.
01:02:29.940It's going to have that. That's what I was talking about earlier, Constantine, about we're shifting from disruptive costs that we're paying to damaging costs that are not reversible.
01:02:57.840And I'm sure you're used to risk exposure.
01:02:59.880So same thing with the military tactics.
01:03:02.660The attacker, in order to take ground, always has to get up and expose themselves over the ground they want to take.
01:03:11.380the defender can be in foxholes and be behind things and camouflage and so forth so that's why
01:03:16.880the defender always has a three-to-one advantage at the tactical level it has to do with this issue
01:03:21.240of exposure well that issue of exposure is at its maximum in amphibious operations because the water
01:03:29.600is there's no cover on the water okay um and um you've got the now russian intelligence kind of
01:03:37.060even exacerbating that. You see what I mean? And then when you get up to the territory,
01:03:43.060there's some of the shows I've been on here, the cliffs, the actual terrain. This is some of the
01:03:50.740most difficult terrain to try to control because you've got mountains, you've got stretches of
01:03:55.900beach. So for the defender, there's all kinds of crevices and crannies and things like that
01:04:02.000here. But for the attacker here, the side that has to actually take the territory,
01:04:10.400the exposure is at its maximum. Now, we will absolutely have the best professionals in the
01:04:15.720world work in this problem. I spoke to the Army War College about a week before this kicked off.
01:04:21.400I have military officers coming in, their PhDs under me. I really have nothing but the greatest
01:04:26.240respect for our military, really. They're really quite good at what they do. That said, there's
01:04:32.400only so many, let's take Karg Island, for example. There's only so many ways you can approach Karg
01:04:39.180Island, and that will have been assessed not just by the U.S. military for decades, but by the Iranian
01:04:46.480military, and they will know their terrain better than anybody else. As much as we think we will be
01:04:51.520able to assess their terrain. They will know their terrain. So if there's a possibility,
01:04:57.120I'm not saying there is for surprises here, we will have some tricks up our sleeve. They may
01:05:03.920have tricks up their sleeve, but overall it's about length of time of exposure. The longer
01:05:10.640the time of exposure, the transit time to go from like the Strait of Hormuz up to CARG is going to
01:05:18.700be, I don't know, somewhere between a dozen and 20 hours here for the amphibians. And they're
01:05:24.620big hunks of metal. These are the things that you're going to be able to eat. The most easy
01:05:30.680targets to find are big hunks of metal in open water. So they're going to be exposed for long
01:05:37.800periods of time. You will do everything possible to defend them without a doubt. But that's a lot
01:05:43.920of time. And then when they get there, there's going to be hours to get on and actually control
01:05:49.900before they can get undercover. So if you watch the opening of Saving Private Ryan, it's very
01:05:55.000similar. You've got to cross the open area and be exposed. Then when you get on the other side,
01:06:01.580now you can go pillbox to pillbox and you got some cover too. So it's not as if you can't.
01:06:07.100And so I'm fully expecting we're going to win. I'm not saying we won't take the ground. It's
01:06:13.080really a matter of the cost. And I can't give you a number. We haven't done any amphibious
01:06:19.020landing like this in so long up against really this kind of a determined enemy. It's going to
01:06:24.700be very difficult to put numbers on this. I think this will be hard for General Cain,
01:06:29.320our Joint Chiefs. He will be asked by President Trump how many are going to die. And I think it's
01:06:35.460going to be hard for him, not because he's going to be, you know, sort of a dovish or not want to
01:06:40.180give the numbers. It's just going to be hard because he's going to have to go back to, well,
01:06:44.200when we did this in World War II. I mean, where are you going to go to find the good,
01:06:48.700actual, deep analysis of this, you see? And part of the calculus, I imagine,
01:06:53.980in any president's mind at this point is what happens afterwards, at least I hope it is,
01:06:58.920which is we will take hundreds of Marines as casualties, God forbid. Now what?
01:07:05.900Well, and then let me say the next piece. So we've only focused on the military casualty piece. As this is happening, from Iran's perspective, this is now a much bigger threat to actually achieve. Now we're bringing ground forces in. So remember I've said air power alone has never toppled a regime. That's over 100 years. Sometimes you put ground forces in, you can do that.
01:07:29.120OK, so Iran's going to know that and they're going to, even if they don't know it, they're certainly going to feel it right away.
01:07:34.720So once this even starts, even though it'll be described as limited, they're not going to Tehran, we'll say all that, I'm sure.
01:07:43.320OK, that's not how the other side is going to see this.
01:07:45.640They're going to see this as the beachhead like Normandy to the end of Germany, you see, which even though that was a year later or 10 months later, so did the Germans.
01:07:56.760Everybody understood, even though there's a lot of miles to cover.
01:08:00.340Once you get the Americans, especially, but the Americans and the British are on shore here, Germany is in real trouble.
01:08:08.880So what's going to happen is they're likely to be very willing to destroy the oil infrastructure in response, just to be very blunt.
01:08:18.420So why would they destroy the oil infrastructure?
01:08:21.300It's because they're going to want to impose long-term damage here.
01:08:24.860And they're not going to be concerned that they would want to use it for themselves because, for them, they may be dead, I mean, as a regime, in six months.
01:08:33.960So this isn't even—they're not even probably worrying about that.
01:08:37.580Once you go down this road, you are increasing pressure on the regime.
01:08:44.120Chances you may actually topple it, not in a day, but over time.
01:08:47.940And also then more risky strategies by them here, which will have costs on us.
01:08:55.540There'll be damaging costs because when you destroy the infrastructure, these are special made pipelines, rigs.
01:09:05.560In the 90s, where I really got into this was when I was teaching for the Air Force and the leadership decapitation crowd in the Air Force, who were my bosses.
01:09:18.220Okay, they were literally my bosses, the actual architects of all of this.
01:09:23.060So I know all their arguments really, really well.
01:09:26.100They really liked the idea of electric power targeting.
01:09:29.600so they brought in um people from the electric power industry to teach us how to take down
01:09:34.680electric power plants and grids and so forth and and um nothing classified so there's nothing this
01:09:40.420was not a secret briefing or anything um and um uh and so we uh and i had students here who wrote
01:09:47.360master's theses on how to destroy electric power plants that are still available that you could
01:09:52.360still say the big thing i learned is that in an electric power grid you can take out the
01:09:59.100transformers which are like the fuse boxes in your house and that knocks out it causes a brownout
01:10:07.200like when you overload the system when there's too much uh you know it's too hot and there's too
01:10:11.480many electric i'm sorry air conditioners and that is a problem for a week or two because you can fix
01:10:17.340the fuses okay but if you go after the the actual infrastructure which is the generating halls
01:10:24.400and you destroy the generator halls they're out for a minimum of six months maybe a year because
01:10:31.920those larger pieces of equipment that are the actual infrastructure this would be the equivalent
01:10:38.200of these transmission pipelines that are going from the land to the tankers and things like that
01:10:43.940these are special design there's not bunches of them laying around so when you start to destroy
01:10:51.040that and that's what's happening in Qatar so what what happened in Qatar is they didn't just hit a
01:10:56.280little a little LNG they went after some of the infrastructure and this is again moving up the
01:11:02.080escalation ladder to damage and that's why the Qataris are mad because that is out for a minimum
01:11:07.900of a month maybe three months because and that assumes they're even going to fix it because if
01:11:13.200they fix it, Iran could do it again. So you've got a situation where the damage here is not
01:11:19.820reversible. Like the shipping could be reversed because Iran will just simply say, ah, you can
01:11:24.540pass. Once you start not taking out and destroying the actual big pieces of the infrastructure,
01:11:30.980this is months. And that starts to dovetail with what the economists are now telling us in the
01:11:37.260newspaper, which is you don't have to worry about the price of oil until it stays that way for a
01:11:42.920month or two then you'll get a recession and everybody's oh that's so comforting because we
01:11:49.820know it could go right back down right not if you destroy the infrastructure once the infrastructure
01:11:56.040is taken out now you're in that month's period and I can't give you a more precise estimate because
01:12:03.000I don't know exactly what the damage will be but I'm trying to lay out the principles here there's
01:12:07.580nothing. You just need to have spent 30 years to figure out how to take down economies and what
01:12:14.380that looks like for real. And this is what this looks like here. And this is also, by the way,
01:12:21.360not something that you do when you're a pilot in the Air Force. You don't spend six months,
01:12:27.460a year, five years studying the enemy oil and gas grid and so forth. What happens is once you get
01:12:35.380in the crisis, you bring in, you know, people to give you advice and you try to do your best by
01:12:39.480staying up and pulling all-nighters. So again, I've spent long periods of time thinking about
01:12:47.440how air power and other military instruments actually interact with economies. And this is
01:12:54.820what I'm trying to explain, which is we're about to move from what I call disruption to lasting
01:13:01.200damage. And that is going to put us in the OPEC 73 territory. So that's why you see me really,
01:13:10.500really genie-ing up coming on your show. I've been on, I think, you know, why am I, you know,
01:13:17.520spending 18, 19 hours a day doing this? I'm extremely concerned because as much as this
01:13:24.260has been dangerous so far, we're going to cross the next threshold, which will be much
01:13:31.140more difficult. I'm worried. And so I'm going to do everything I can to explain that here,
01:13:36.720because crossing this threshold, I think, is going to lead to now the beginning of truly
01:13:42.380lasting, reversible over several months at quickest cost, not just a day or two,
01:13:49.800where Iran will just simply decide, oh, sure, your ships can pass.
01:13:53.400Because what you're essentially talking about is economic warfare. And then the knock-on effect of
01:13:59.240that is that it's going to affect not only economies, it's going to also affect politics
01:14:04.280right the way through the West. It's going to change how people vote. It's going to change
01:14:08.620how people see particular leaders, how people see the right, the left.
01:14:13.380Now you see why the Europeans don't want to touch us with a 10-foot pole,
01:14:17.320because as these costs start to accumulate in this way, if they're part of the coalition causing it,
01:14:26.180they then face being toppled by their own people because over because as if this goes down is in
01:14:32.820this in this trajectory here those costs are going to be bidenomics where we had nine percent
01:14:38.640inflation this is going to be nothing okay we're we're we're we're we're and it's going to be that
01:14:43.860way the ground war is not just something that you can do uh and then take back you're what you're
01:14:52.120doing is you are sending the most credible signal that you intend to use ground forces to topple
01:15:00.540this regime. You can say all you want. You're never going to do that, okay? If you're on the
01:15:07.060other side and it's your survival that's on the state, you don't believe this for a moment. Just
01:15:10.660like when we laughed about Netanyahu promising not to bomb. So you're really going to take
01:15:15.260President Trump at his word that he would never think about using ground, never think about doing
01:15:20.860No, you're not going to do that. You are going to see that what's coming at you is not just one hand of the gorilla, which was the air power, but now it's the other hand and both legs of the gorilla starting to get really, again, D-Day, save and private Ryan, Normandy, you know, June 1944 leads to May 1945.
01:15:46.740And it's also not only going to affect the reputations of certain politicians at home.
01:15:52.340This is really going to damage Israel's international reputation because there's a lot of people from both sides of the political spectrum who are looking at Israel and going, you started it.
01:16:17.520So everybody's now starting to try to tack to what they should because they're seeing which direction this is going and who are you going to blame?
01:16:26.300Well, I don't think you can easily blame the U.S. military.
01:16:29.300I mean, there may be some people that will try to do that, but I don't see how you blame them.
01:16:33.980They've been, like, tactically superb through this.
01:16:37.400They've saluted when the president has said jump.
01:16:56.280So I think it's going to basically start to come down to Israel and President Trump and the Republicans, which have there's always been this this this division inside of MAGA, you know, about half against foreign wars and the other half, you know, more on the other side.
01:17:24.140MAGA is holding together at the moment in the opinion polls only because they're supporting Trump, you know, and that's but as this unfolds and as you get into the midterms and in the summer, I the way I say this is that I think Trump is going to start to have an LBJ problem.
01:17:40.100So if he crosses this Rubicon and he goes down this road, I see that this stage is going to go on for quite some time.
01:17:47.800And I think that's why the 200 billion dollar request is coming through.
01:17:51.640They want to put that request through now, because if you cross this Rubicon, I'm not saying he's going to do it, but I think it's 75 percent likely you're going to need to spend 200 billion and more.
01:18:03.200This is going to be very expensive. So you're going to have this war is going to go on.
01:18:07.660And as that war goes on, this is where the real problems for the senators and the House members are going to face when they run for reelection in the midterms.
01:18:18.780and so you you already had a situation before this where there was a likely a blue uh modest
01:18:26.200blue wave coming where the democrats would win the house and maybe a few seats in the senate not
01:18:31.060quite clear they would take the senate here in this situation you could see a much bigger blue
01:18:38.440wave coming and why do those house members and those senators want to just go home i don't think
01:18:44.780And so I don't know what they will each make, just like the Gulf states, this will fracture the coalition of MAGA and it won't be necessarily cleanly in a division.
01:18:56.360It'll be more like what I'm describing when coalitions fracture.
01:19:00.500Typically, what happens is the actors that are part of it start to go their own way.
01:19:05.740And it's not clear that it'll all break in one way.
01:19:09.840I'm not saying they'll all break against Trump either.
01:19:12.340It's going to be probably seat by seat, state by state, but it's not going to be the unified situation it is today.
01:19:21.340It's going to be this more fractured situation.
01:19:25.460And so those are the real political costs that are coming.
01:19:29.620And I would say by June 1st, June, you know, now we're going through the primaries here and we haven't crossed the Rubicon yet of stage three.
01:19:37.440But as that were to unfold, I would say it won't take long.
01:19:41.300you won't have to wait till august for this this will lbj when when the bottom fell out of lbj's
01:19:47.540presidency it was march 1968 so he had prompt that we're very much in a similar like escalation trap
01:19:56.200here where lbj had been promising that just one more rung up the escalation ladder would get him
01:20:02.720out of the escalation trap everybody realized by um end of 67 we were in an escalation problem
01:20:09.600because the V.C. were getting stronger and stronger and taking territory, actually literally taking territory.
01:20:15.460And then what happened is he kept promising it, and there was a spectacular event called the Tet Offensive.
01:20:23.940The Tet Offensive was at the end of January 1968.
01:20:28.760And what the VC did is they, over a period of just a few days, they did a parallel attack across multiple different fronts at the same time, multiple different of our bases at the same time.
01:20:44.680And they lost each and every one of the individual battles.
01:20:51.20025,000 of them died, apparently, in just this week or so to do this offensive.
01:20:58.200This led to the political bottom falling out of the Vietnam War.
01:21:04.360So as I've often said, we won every battle in the Vietnam War, including in the Tet Offensive.
01:21:11.680We lost the war because what they did was a political strategy,
01:21:16.840similar to the horizontal escalation strategy that Iran is doing.
01:21:20.820This is a strategy where the endpoint is political fracture, not gain territory.
01:21:26.800and the political fracture is the soft underbelly of America. That's how our enemies beat us.
01:21:35.260Remember I said I wanted to know how we lost the Vietnam War. It was because we didn't understand
01:21:40.000the politics of the situation. It wasn't we didn't understand the military. It's we didn't
01:21:45.440understand how militaries and politics fit together. And that's what I've been doing for
01:21:50.180the last 30 some years. So coming back to the military side of it, I get the sense that you
01:21:55.440certainly feel that even though it's a terrible option, pulling out and not continuing the
01:22:00.580escalation would be the right thing to do. Is that fair? Well, it's fair, but I want to pose
01:22:04.520a third, at least a variant of that, which is, so what I think, once you see these terrible
01:22:12.760choices here, then you're quite right, Constantine, that you're going to want to
01:22:18.560take your losses now because you might be able to recover your presidency.
01:22:25.440If you wait, then you're in Lyndon Johnson where it's unrecoverable.
01:25:50.780The real part is the on-site inspection, which is intel.
01:25:55.260That is the actual teeth in the NPT, you see.
01:25:59.640So that's the part that Israel is not actually giving up its nuclear.
01:26:03.080It may say that, but it's not the reality.
01:26:05.900The reality is that there will then be tit for tat.
01:26:09.960And President Trump, this is going to be a big political cost.
01:26:13.620I was going to say, I mean, you started a war because you wouldn't do a deal that you now have to do a worse deal.
01:26:22.260That's a humiliation. I mean, there's no two ways.
01:26:24.940That is the political. That's what I'm saying. You pick your poison.
01:26:28.440So it's either that. But what I also would like to explore.
01:26:30.840You can possibly save your presidency, or you don't, and you can't save your—what I'm saying is, there's no option here to come out the victor here, like gladiator, where everybody's cheering, okay, for the new general.
01:26:47.320That's not happening in this situation.
01:26:50.320And if we keep waiting for that, then what it is is Lyndon Johnson.
01:26:54.220These are the real choices, I think, in front of the president.
01:26:57.640And what I'm saying is you're you're absolutely right. But I'm this is why we have to put this bluntly out here, because people from your program will be listening to people in the left wing will be listening.
01:27:10.180And and this means very directly that they will have to put pressure on Israel and that pressure will be threatening to cut off the military aid for real, not just kind of.
01:27:23.800now he can try to gussy it up. And by the way, President Trump, I do believe, just to put
01:27:29.060something here about why he might be able to do this, it's not just because of his relationship
01:27:34.680with Israel, but President Trump is the best PR politician we've had, certainly at the equal of
01:27:43.280Obama, certainly the equal of Reagan. Some of my friends who don't like Trump don't like it when I
01:27:49.260say this, I think he's better. Just think about this. He did January 6th and got reelected.
01:27:56.320Just think about this for a moment. We have not seen, I think, this level of understanding the
01:28:03.740media and how to, he understands the media better than the media understands the media here. So if
01:28:11.080there's somebody who can recover his presidency, even with all these liabilities, I believe it is
01:28:17.620President Trump. He can sell this deal as an actual victory to at least his base. And enough
01:28:24.200time will pass. They'll find other things. We have time. He has time to recover. You take this down
01:28:31.840where we're still talking about this, not just talking, but fighting this war in July. That's
01:28:38.100gone. See, that's space. He needs space for the PR. This PR is not something he can ginny up
01:28:44.320overnight. Let's talk about that, because temperamentally, I wonder, you know, your
01:28:49.820assessment of 75 percent, just from it, just judging characters, I imagine he would be quite
01:28:55.700tempted to go with a hard option, potentially. Well, sure, because he's faced with these horns
01:29:01.720of a dilemma and he has some hope. But I also think he put pressure on Netanyahu to stop
01:29:08.080um, the ethnic cleansing in Gaza in September. Uh, and, um, I was one of the people, um, who
01:29:15.160was thinking that he might well do that. And it's for the good of Israel, because I didn't believe
01:29:21.360that it was in Israel's interest to cleanse the Netanyahu may think that, but I didn't think it
01:29:27.300was in Israel's interest. And I was on podcasts in this city. Uh, uh, Norm Dorfman does the, uh,
01:29:33.020comedy seller here and so yeah yeah he he's i'm sorry i said the name norms now now now he's
01:29:39.700gonna get mad at me no uh but dome yeah no please no no um but uh you can go and listen and and and
01:29:45.960he uh uh he and i had a let's call it a feisty hour and a half discussion about this in august
01:29:52.500and i kept saying uh that no what you're not seeing is i believe that in fact um uh president
01:29:59.920Trump himself may see the wisdom of going down this road. And, uh, I don't know if that at all,
01:30:05.680you know, I'm not saying there was any connection here whatsoever. Um, but what I am saying is that
01:30:10.220I do think that, um, that the president Trump has, uh, he has the power and I think he, he may
01:30:18.000well have the interest. He may see that what I'm saying here is, is the best for the country,
01:30:24.020the world, the region, and his own presidency.
01:30:29.380Bob, I want to come back to the other option, which we haven't followed up,
01:30:34.060the military option, the Marines on Kargah Island controlling the coast.
01:30:38.760You've hinted that there are more stages to this if that option is pursued.
01:30:43.040So far we got to, let's say they get the Marines, dangerous operation, very high risk.
01:30:48.140Let's say it's successful with casualties.
01:30:50.740The Iranians begin to destroy their own old facilities.
01:30:53.340I imagine likely the other Gulf states as well at the same time.
01:30:58.040At this point, I'm not a great strategist, but I imagine the temptation from Israel and
01:31:03.700America is to say, well, look how terrible these Iranians are.
01:31:07.260So let me, to give you and the listeners some framework here.
01:31:13.160For the last 30 years, my scholarship has been about air power, economic sanctions,
01:31:19.440lots of books, articles on sanctions, and suicide terrorism. And we have not talked about the third
01:31:27.620shoe, terrorism. So after 9-11, I compiled the first database of all suicide attacks around the
01:31:35.860world. Israel did not have this database. They had a database who was attacking them that was
01:31:41.54020% wrong, and I show them, and they fixed it. So I compiled this database, and it produced a
01:31:49.580finding. And I've published two books on this, lots of articles. But it produced a finding,
01:31:54.200which is that 95% of all suicide attacks are not due to religion. Half of them at that point in
01:32:00.8602001 were by secular folks, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. But 95% were in response to foreign
01:32:10.080ground forces, ground forces. It's not that you didn't have any of those attacks before. It's
01:32:17.540that when you put the military, the foreign ground forces in, they went up 20 times,
01:32:21.520just to give you a sense. Many, many cases of this. Well, before this was even published,
01:32:29.720I knew Paul Wolfowitz. He was our deputy secretary of defense. I knew him from the 90s.
01:32:34.500I had other connections with the, uh, with the Pentagon. I gave Secretary Wolfowitz here, um, uh, the studies here. Um, and this was somebody coming from me. I'm basically a liberal Republican. You could, I had all these friends at the NSC. You could imagine that I was, you know, possibly going down that road here.
01:32:53.460Well, this is why I never went down that road. It's because I was showing them rather directly that if they invaded Iraq, and I said this in so many words to them, if they invaded Iraq, they would touch off the largest suicide terrorist campaign in modern times.
01:33:08.520They would produce more attacks on Western targets. I didn't know London was coming a few years later, but things like that. They were not stopping the next 9-11. They were assuring things like that would happen in the future.
01:33:23.180Came back, this was in November 2002, from the, and again, nothing classified here, but it's not been widely known, from Andy Marshall, and some of the listeners here will know who that person is, highly credible conduit, that we're not going to take Iraq off the table, Bob, but what we are going to do is pull our forces out of Saudi Arabia.
01:33:47.980So that's how that happened. Because of this analysis, that's what led to IUD being open. That's what Marshall told me. Well, then we did launch the war in Iraq. And six months after the war, five months after the war, the largest suicide terrorist campaign of modern times actually happened, just as I was explaining here.
01:34:08.180and who started my center, the Chicago Project, this was in February 2004. I had the Wolfowitz
01:34:16.900Rumsfeld Defense Department reached out. They wanted more work on suicide terrorism. I had
01:34:22.600to create a center. So my center at the University of Chicago was at first called the University of
01:34:28.260Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism. Over the years, I've kept the acronym CPOST, but I've
01:34:34.640morphed it to Chicago Project on security and threats. So they expanded a little bit,
01:34:40.200but I've kept CPOS. So it's so ironic, but it was the very people that I was telling were doing
01:34:47.340exactly the wrong thing that started the center. And then Wolfowitz left and Eglin became the next
01:34:53.980deputy. And there was all these interactions because, as he said, the NSC really wanted to
01:34:59.980know how good was Pape's data because there were other places we were thinking of putting armies
01:35:04.240And we never put those armies there. So there's a whole set of stories about that. So when I say advised and so forth, this is some of the this is this was my experience.
01:35:14.300So so I've had experience where people that I have disagreed with here and this was public.
01:35:20.340So I knew then I was never being hired by an NSA here. And once you once you go down these these roads, notice that nobody's really going to want to want to hire you because you can't you you're I'm not a card carrying Democrat.
01:42:00.800And it's very parallel to what's happened to us.
01:42:03.680So stage one, they thought they had a quick and decisive victory strategy. It's with air and ground power, so not just air power. And they get right to the airport in Kiev here, so right to the gates of Kiev. They get very, very close. But the fact is, they couldn't get over the edge here.
01:42:22.980And then within just a few days, and by the way, I said this to some Congress folks who came literally right out of a briefing, a classified briefing, telling me that they had just been told that Keeve's going to fall in three days.
01:42:50.720So from March, April, May 2022, they're recovering, lashing back.
01:42:59.700And who's holding on by their fingernails?
01:43:02.200It's Putin, you see, until he then fires all his military.
01:43:07.100You know, this is when he's doing all the rearranging of his staffs and so forth to go to stage three.
01:43:14.060So stage one had the quick and decisive stage to the lash back.
01:43:17.860Stage three for Putin was the war of attrition. And right now there's barely been any movement
01:43:24.000since June of 2002. You're talking about a handful of miles. 22. 22. Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. 22.
01:43:31.380Yeah. Thank you. Since June 2022, three and a half years plus here, barely any movement of
01:43:38.740the line of contact. So why would Ukraine do? And what they had is they've come up with other ideas
01:43:43.920like drones, you know, and you've got donors, some of them from Chicago. Jennifer Pritzker is one
01:43:52.360who has given all this money to the Ukrainians to build these drone factories. And the drones
01:43:59.220are really making it difficult for Russia to gain any territory. And so what does Russia do?
01:44:05.900They've got their drone factories in Iran, and they've made it difficult for the Ukrainians to
01:44:10.560territory so you've got basically a stalemate like korea that's occurring so they don't need
01:44:16.080suicide uh this isn't this would make it's not it's a my book is called dying to win the strategic
01:44:22.800logic of suicide terrorism and it's explaining it's not a religious logic the way most people
01:44:29.520think it's strategic and that explains the ebbs and the flows the origins and the ends of the
01:44:36.540campaigns. Religion, everything should just be a constant. Look, there's going to be a lot of
01:44:41.720people who are listening to you, Professor, who are thinking to themselves, they're looking at
01:44:46.160the strategies, particularly that the Americans have pursued, the Strait of Hormuz, and they're
01:44:51.540thinking to themselves, why is it that they haven't predicted what is going to happen?
01:44:59.180They've got some of the most intelligent people. They've got access to some of the most brilliant
01:45:03.240military minds in the world, military strategists, etc. Why is it that they haven't predicted what's
01:45:09.380going to happen? I call it the illusion of precision control, Francis. So I've been in the
01:45:16.840rooms when very, very senior, super smart people, and there's no cameras on, are getting these
01:45:25.260briefings about what air power can hit and from people with stars on their shoulders.
01:45:32.560It is amazing to watch. And this can be Republican, Democrat. This is not about
01:45:38.480party. This is about human beings. You put people in these rooms here and I and I show you and you
01:45:45.620really believe not just maybe these bombs will hit their targets 90, 95 percent of the time,
01:45:52.080but it's going to be the reality it's two things are inescapable number one immediately the mind
01:46:00.760goes what leader can i kill i mean even if the briefer is not talking about that by the way
01:46:05.640immediately the mind goes to that because the briefer is explaining and again these people
01:46:11.240many stars generals um that the bombs will hit within you know five to 15 feet they'll talk about
01:46:18.960the winds, and they'll talk about all these different conditions, and you will, then it'll
01:46:23.660be immediately, well, that's about the size of this room, and who would I like to take out from
01:46:28.260this on the other side here? So number one, that's where the leadership decapitations idea really
01:46:33.620come from. But there's a second thing that the mind goes to that I've seen, and again, I think
01:46:38.140this is just human nature. I don't think it's any deeper than that, which is the illusion of control
01:46:44.380of the escalation after that, because I can have this exquisite opening. It's like a chess game
01:46:51.100where I have the exquisite opening in chess. It may be the absolute perfect exquisite opening in
01:46:59.340chess, but it's still just the opening. It's not the middle game, which is really where all the
01:47:04.820strategy in chess is all about. Here, it's like territory and the moves and the feints and so
01:47:09.880forth. And then it's not the end game. So you can't. And so just like in chess, you can study
01:47:17.680end games, but you can't really think about what end game strategy to have until you get through
01:47:22.760the middle. You see, so strategy here with the smart bombs, I call this in with the smart bombs
01:47:29.100in particular, a smart bomb trap, because what happens is it's like an opening in chess. You are
01:47:34.980so absolutely mesmerized by the accuracy of what you're about to do and the perfection
01:47:41.180of that opening, that you're really imagining you can totally control the middle game.
01:47:47.820You can control the escalation from that point on.
01:47:50.860And even if the briefer here, and I have no reason to think General Cain would not have
01:47:56.880been cautioning President Trump, starts to give caution about what might, don't overread
01:48:02.300that opening, sir. And, you know, there's the middle game. Even if they do that, the seeing
01:48:07.780that and seeing it so close and believing it's true here, I think it creates the illusion of
01:48:16.320control. And that's why I think you've seen this with when President Reagan dropped bombs to
01:48:22.180assassinate Gaddafi in April 1986. We the bombs hit there. That was the very first precision
01:48:28.820decapitation campaign. We hit his tent, killed his family, some of his family. He just stepped
01:48:36.660out of his tent, literally. He was sleeping in a tent, literally, just for a second.
01:48:41.560But two years later, he brought down Pan Am Flight 103, killed 271 civilians, 190 Americans,
01:48:49.020as his retaliation. President Clinton, let me pick a Democrat. March 1999, President Clinton
01:48:56.260wants to negotiate for the pro-democracy movement in Kosovo. And he wants to tilt the hawk and the
01:49:02.480dove balance in the Serbian government, who's on the other side. So he launches a three-day,
01:49:08.780what was supposed to be a three-day air campaign, hitting 51 targets in and around Belgrade in
01:49:15.180order to shift the hawks and doves, shake, if not degrade, if not topple the Milosevic regime.
01:49:20.820And the bombs hit their targets perfectly. But what happened is the Serbian regime did not fall. It was hardened. And Milosevic countered by ordering 30,000 troops into Kosovo. And he expelled, that is ethnically cleansed, a million Kosovars from the country.
01:49:41.240That's 50 percent of all the civilians from that province.
01:49:46.320And we had to fight 78 days and put a ground army there to we didn't we we didn't have to actually conquer it, but to take it if he didn't back off.
01:49:58.140And that's what led Milosevic to give up.
01:50:00.320It was it was a disaster that we only pulled out at the end by putting in the ground forces here.
01:50:07.900So, this is what we're up against with the smart bomb trap.
01:50:12.460Now, I talked to, on the NSC, President Clinton's briefer, the person on the NSC, I won't say the name, whose job it was to give all the worst case scenarios.
01:50:24.680And he showed me the 400-page briefing.
01:50:28.440This was a year later, because I interviewed Adesari, the president.
01:50:32.360I spent a lot of time studying these, not just kind of casually.
01:52:39.660Well, now we're teaching them very strongly that they must have nuclear weapons.
01:52:46.500I think that's why I want to come back to what I said is the offset with Israel.
01:52:52.580So if you can offer Iran the possibility that Israel will be contained, containing Israel, that's worth quite a bit.
01:53:04.940That's worth quite a bit because you really, as much as I'm laying all this out, notice I'm saying things are 75.
01:53:12.380That means there's still 25 percent over here.
01:53:14.840And that's so so you are if I was advising Iran here, I would say if you can get the containment of Israel, you take it.
01:53:24.060And what does that mean? OK, you keep your three point five enriched uranium, but you open yourself back up to the IAEA.
01:53:31.620You open yourself up to 24 seven inspection. You're going to get some tit for tat where you're going to get some inspection of Israel now, too.
01:53:38.740So this is not just you who's up for this, but this, what I would say is if you want to maximize your survival here and your Iran, that's what I would do.
01:53:49.320Because there is some chance that we're going to go down these roads and as much as we're saying, we'll never put 100,000 troops in Iran.
01:53:59.720J.D. Vance said, we're never putting ground troops in Iran.
01:54:02.760And what are we talking about doing next week is ground troops here at the beginning.
01:54:07.140Now, still limited, but there's no way that Iran can really be sure we're not going to come at them with some multi-division attack down the road and that they'll be able to offset that.
01:54:21.900So I would still say that the bottom line here is containing Israel for Iran, that's something I think they would be foolish to give that up, to surrender that, because this is an uncertain world.
01:54:37.580Professor Robert Pape, it's been an absolute pleasure.
01:54:40.140Thank you so much for coming on the show.
01:54:47.680What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?
01:54:50.960We still haven't talked as much as we should have about the enriched uranium that's floating now, dispersing.
01:54:58.880We think it's dispersing at least some inside of Iran.
01:55:02.540It could be dispersing outside of Iran.
01:55:04.600And so we've talked about stage one, two and three. I told you stage four, I'm worried about the terrorism. There is a stage five in the fall, which is that dispersed uranium finding its way into bad things happening here. So so I see a lot of bad possibilities here that get worse.
01:55:23.440That's why I've been putting out images on X of the funnel getting worse here over time.
01:55:30.280And I think that I'm hoping we won't have to have those Sunday briefings