Bonus - Strategic Bombing, Air Power, and the War with Iran w/ Robert Pape (Preview)

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And so let me go back to my discussion of the smart bomb trap.

And let me then also link this to the 20 years I've been modeling the bombing of Iran in my classes at the University of Chicago.

So every spring I teach a class called strategy, and for 20 years, the last day for 20 years, including last May, was 90 minutes on the hypothetical bombing of Iran, where we're going to start out with, we're going to weigh it out, we're going to do the bombing of the nuclear sites, we're going to talk about the consequences and dot, dot, dot.

And what I tell them is this is going to go the analysis is this is going to go through stages stage one, which is stage one of the smart bomb trap, the specific variant of the escalation trap, the smart bomb trap is the bombs will destroy the targets, the American bonds 90%.

The Israelis can't take out for Dell, I explained to them only the Americans could, and that's exactly what happened in the real world.

And the, and the Israeli Air Force, by the way, has listened to this, and they gave me a patch one time because they thought I had gotten the analysis so, so close here, and I'm talking about the analysis of bombing Iran.

So the stage one is where the bombs are near 100% tactically successful in hitting their target.

But what happens in stage one is they're strategically a failure, because the goal is not just to destroy the industrial sites of Hordeaux and Natanz, which enrich uranium, but to get the enriched uranium itself.

And by last May, the enriched uranium was a thousand pounds 60% enriched, 10,000 pounds five and 20% enriched.

And the, what that is is enough material for between 10 and 16 nuclear weapons.

Let me say that again, 10 and 16 nuclear weapons.

Then moreover, I say, and it's not just they didn't destroy it, but this material can be stored in scuba tank like size stuff, and then doesn't have to be all stored together, it can be dispersed.

And what's going to happen is then months are going to go by, they're not going to let the IAEA back in, that was our best intel to begin with, and must the months go by, we are going to obsess about that dispersed material.

How much is it dispersing? Where is it going? What's happening with it? Well, that then leads to what I call stage two of the smart bomb trap, which was always regime change, always regime change in my 20 years of modeling.

Because once you know that that material is somewhere, you don't even know where it is, once you know you don't know, then you'll panic, and you will get some inklings along the way that'll help you panic, but what are you going to do?

You've already bombed the tons, and for now you can bomb them again and have the bubble rebel bounce, but the bottom line is you will probably try regime change.

So I said for 20 years, the way you'll get bombing for regime change is first you're going to bomb the nuclear sites, and then a year later, and I said a year or two later, always, so they did eight months later, you're going to go for regime change because you're still going to be worried about that dispersed nuclear material.

That's why we have a military issue here with the Ron in the first place. It starts in 2002. I first start to do my modeling of it in 2005. That's when I'm start this modeling of this, and it's always been about the enriched material.

And I'm laid out the double tap attacks with Sy Hirsch in the New Yorker in 2004 because he calls me up and says, Bob, the only way they can get it in the tons is nuclear atomic attack news. I say, no, Sy, we've never done this before, but one thing you need to know

is that GPS is not just two-dimensional. It's three-dimensional. So you could do double tap attacks. And what happened? That's exactly what they did. So I've been very much following this issue. Now we're in stage two of the smart bomb trap here, and we're about to go into the next stage, which is we figured out we still don't know where the dispersed material is.

And you heard President Trump actually a few days ago talking about this. So I have on my substacks some civilian satellite photography of what may well be at these sites, stuff being dispersed. Okay. And what else did they disperse in coffee pots? I don't think so.

So this is the trucks are there. And you can see this on this video that I did on Sunday. So the bottom line is, I think this is really as much as their chaotic all over the place. I think there's a real issue here that we need to be aware of, which is we're not just bombing and failing. We're not just bombing and not and strengthening the regime.

We're bombing and this starts in June and they are dispersing the nuclear material. Now that nuclear material can be dispersed inside of Iran. And just before I was on with you, I was on with Dubai, it can be dispersed outside of Iran.

I have radiological pieces of this. If you give it to the Houthis, they're going to want to put it on the nose cone of different things. So you could see right away that what's hitting Dubai could change. Now I'm not saying they're going to do it, but they have the capability. This isn't a capability women.

We'll women, you say. So now this, what is what do you do now? You're at this stage. This is where I think you're seeing the real ground power dilemma. I call it.

I'm not saying we've got a good ground power option to go get. We couldn't find Samantha Guthrie's mother. Okay. And what happened is that that's the same problem. She's about the same size is one of these things. And every day that goes by the radius gets bigger and bigger.

We're talking about a country two and a half times the size of Texas three and a half times or more the size of a rock. Okay. This stuff could be anywhere. And so I think this is why these senators are coming out of these briefings action faced. It's because what if we this is what have we gotten ourselves into you see what I mean. And and so there's not a lot of easy off ramps here.

I'm not. I'm not. Yeah. If I thought, you know, we just walk away. I would say walk away. But we're really having a problem right now. We've got ourselves truly in the escalation trap.

And this is exactly what I was worried about a week before the bomb and started. And that's why the first sub stack pieces the smart bomb trap laid out literally before the bombs are falling and it lays out the stages. And we just went right through the stages.

And in the third piece on the sub stack is how it actually happened. So yeah.