Iran Won Because America Is Stuck in the ‘Smart Bomb Trap’

Sure.

My name is Robert Pape.

I'm a professor at the University of Chicago.

I have been studying air power escalation dynamics for well over 30 years.

The subject of air power was the subject of my dissertation in the 1980s when this was not a hot topic.

I thought I was going to get a Ph.D., go off into the Foreign Service.

So I wanted to learn something I thought would be useful getting a Ph.D., such as how we lost the Vietnam War with all the power we had, all the technology we had, all the air power we had.

I went to the library at the University of Chicago.

That's where I got my Ph.D. And I wanted to get the book that was laying out all the air campaigns in history and told me to tell me, well, how do they succeed? How do they fail? Couldn't find that book.

Well, that ended up becoming a dissertation that ended up leading to when the Cold War ended.

I was hired by the U.S. Air Force to teach about essentially my book and the frameworks in my book.

And that became Bombing to Win, Air Power and Coercion of War, which lines up all the air campaigns in history and starting World War I, of course, and has I have published on every air campaign.

war since, including just about, geez, middle of March here on the most recent air war in Iran.

So I'm somebody, I give talks on this all the time.

I helped stand up the School of Advanced Air Power Studies.

Now it's Air and Space Studies.

This was a A school that the Air Force began in the early 1990s specifically because the leaders of the Air Force, including the chief of staff, Larry Welsh, thought that airmen lost the Vietnam War because they did not know enough about air strategy.

I know that sounds a little hard for folks that don't have much military experience.

How can that be that the Air Force doesn't know air strategy? But it's important to know that we have the best pilots in the world at putting bombs on targets.

Air strategy is about how bombing or military activity in general impacts the politics, the politics on the target state, That's how you get a coercive outcome where they surrender, they give up, they bend the knee, or politics in our home country.

So my specialty, and I do know a lot about how to put moms on targets, but my specialty is really about the impact of military force and politics.

And that's, um, uh, all just kind of telescope all the way forward that went through, uh, how to deal with international terrorism, how to deal with many, many cases, Bosnia, Kosovo.

We'll probably talk about a lot of these cases in the next, uh, in the next bit.

Um, but all the way up then to advising, uh, every White House from 2001 to 2024.

That's too Republican, too Democrat.