Transcription
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the "At the Water's Edge" podcast, where we look for insights beyond the headlines and take a practitioner's view on national security and geopolitics. It's the 29th of July, 2026. Let's get started.
Now, we are back today with Professor Robert Pape from the University of Chicago. We're putting this out on Wednesday. It was scheduled for Tuesday, uh, because Chicago got hit by a bunch of tornadoes, lost a bunch of power, and the professor actually had to drive around this morning to lots of different locations in the city till he could find a spot where we could get enough of a signal through to actually go ahead and record an interview. So, very grateful that he uh worked through that on his end and made this interview happen today. Stuck around for over an hour. We had a great conversation looking at what it actually looks like to destroy enough of a city's infrastructure to force the civilian population to capitulate. At what point do you actually achieve that objective, and what other problems do you cause along the way? Also took a look at the drone threat with Iran and how difficult it actually is to suppress their drone force to the point where you can actually militarily reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Lots of great stuff there.
Uh, if you've enjoyed this series, please like, subscribe, share an episode with a friend. And on YouTube, in the first pinned comment, uh, there will be an email there. And if you send questions to that email, I will pick a couple to ask Professor Pape on Monday when we talk again. With that, let's get to the professor.
Uh, well, good morning again, and welcome back again. We are starting this uh, 25 minutes late due to uh, unforeseen technical difficulties uh, with recording, but happy that we have found a solution. How are you doing today?
>> Uh, I'm doing great, Scott. It's good to speak with you and uh, everybody on the front lines who are listening. Um, and essentially, welcome to Camp Chicago. So, I live in Chicago. The lower third of Chicago, if you haven't heard, has made national news. Uh, we've been out of power for a couple days now. Um, it's due to tornadoes. It came still a little further south. Uh, so, uh, I'm fine. Our house is fine. Um, but trees are down everywhere. Uh, power is down. We just got cell service back last night. Um, and I am in a uh, uh, essentially a village facility that has um, uh, its own power, backup power generator. So, I think some of the military probably a little bit used to this. And so the um, uh, and we'll, we'll see, uh, fingers crossed, uh, the power company says we might get power here in just a few hours, and if not, it'll be Saturday. So that's the, that's the situation here. And this kind of a little bit of opportunity. And at some point, Scott, we'll, I want to talk to you about what it means to take down electric power in Tehran. Uh, something I, I know something about. And um, uh, and this is kind of a, a situation where that I can make some tight analogies and why, uh, the first couple days start similar, and then things depart rather dramatically after that.
>> Yeah. Well, this is an interesting case study too, because, you know, folks have been talking about how lucky it is that we haven't been hit by a hurricane that's disrupted oil production in the Gulf. Um, because that would just really throw a wrench into everything going on in the Middle East as well. So, it's interesting to see the city of Chicago dealing with this problem in real time. Um, but let's, let's get into that.
>> Yeah. The different. Yeah. So, what would you like to start? Because there's been a, there's a lot happening here. We can start big picture. We can start the specifics. And, and I've got time here, Scott. So, uh, cleared the, cleared things for you.
>> Appreciate it. Um, okay. So, let's start with the electrical grid. And I'll, I'll tie in two things that we heard in the past week from the president. Um, he said the quiet part out loud on Air Force One. He said, "We are running out of bombs and interceptors." No big surprise there. Uh, we don't actually have a defense industrial base in America. We have an overly financialized big five contractor base. Sorry, big five plus two. Palantir and Anduril are on the list now as well. Um, and then General Kaine has said that we have run out of targets to bomb um, with the IRGC. So, the only things left for America to target, if we wanted to, would be civilian infrastructure at scale that we haven't seen yet. Um, so let's get into that. What, what does it actually mean to go after Iranian civilian infrastructure?
>> Yeah, there's actually, uh, we, we're going to widen this discussion here. We'll start with electric power. Um, but if we were, for example, to go forward, um, u, with a big drone hunt and so forth, I want to talk to you about that. Uh, so, yes, it's true that I'm sure, uh, that Cooper is, is, is being direct when he says run out of certain targets, but this is, uh, uh, this is not the end of the war. The, the war is not about to become over because of this. It's about to become much, much more costly, is what's really going to happen. Uh, so, um, the, so as we know, President Trump has threatened for quite some time, um, to take down electric power. Uh, and just, uh, last week, it looked like we were moving in that direction, and then there was a pause. Uh, that we talked about what could be possible reasons for the pause. But what just happened in the last 12 hours is just after the meeting between Trump and Netanyahu, we saw a, uh, an attack, a surprise attack by Iran. They initiated it. This was not a tit-for-tat retaliation, hitting, aiming, ballistic missiles at our, uh, base in, in Jordan. Um, apparently, we shot down or knocked down all the missiles. They did not apparently do, uh, do damage, but this, of course, has set Trump off this morning, and he's already, you know, talking about, uh, the retaliation again. And so the, the big things to, um, we're going to talk about, like the, uh, the trajectory of the escalation trap, a little bit differently here. I want to really zero in on, uh, the issue of, uh, electric power and what that means, and especially what this would mean in Tehran.
So, in the 1990s, and nothing I'm about to say here is classified. Um, in the 1990s, I taught for the U.S. Air Force, but this wasn't teaching PME in the usual sense. Wasn't just teaching, you know, sort of history or IR theory. I, uh, helped stand up the School of Advanced Air and now Air and Space Studies, SAS, for the Air Force. It was designed as a school specifically for air strategy. It was, uh, Larry Welch, Chief of Staff of the Air Force idea, along with some other generals, Boyd, four-star generals, who thought the Air Force, one of the reasons we lost the Vietnam War, is the Air Force did not know much about air strategy. Now, that may come as a surprise to people in the military, because people are used to the military that they know everything. Okay. Well, putting bombs on targets, tactical success, is not the same thing as strategy, strategic success. And, um, uh, and so this is my work. That's how I got involved. They reached out to me. I was one of the maybe the only true civilian they could find who actually was on this wavelength. The other civilians, there was 10 PhD faculty, was half military, in officers actually serving military, half civilian, but the other four civilians were all retired military. So I was the actual only civilian here. And I was there because of my academic work specifically about air strategy, and that is a lot of what we have been talking about: how, uh, military action impacts politics, and that's how you get a political outcome. That middle is what's often left out. So PME, you know, president, you design the outcome, and then we will design the campaign. Well, there's a gigantic middle there, and that is called strategy, and that is not, uh, you don't learn that by commanding troops, uh, here. You won't learn that by, uh, having 4,000 hours in an F-15, uh, here. This is a very, very different, very, uh, very, um, special, uh, area.
Uh, now, one of the things we did is, um, we got serious. This was in the 1990s, right after Desert Storm. We got very serious about how to take down countries. And I, um, thought this was extremely important to do because, uh, there were no studies in the Air Force about what this meant to take down countries. Now, there are lots of contingency plans of how to attack different target sets. That's not what I'm talking about. So, if you want to take down a country, it's very different to, uh, attack, say, uh, infrastructure and actually, uh, take down the economy. That's a different story. Or if you're going to attack leadership, that's very different. The bunkers than actually take down the government. These are the core issues in air strategy. These are the issues in say, World War I Air War Plan A, uh, what this is about. We, we, um, if you look in air history and you know the details of this, which is often not taught in PME, but you actually look at the plans like the opening air plan for World War II, the opening air plan for Korea, you will discover that these are written mostly by colonels. They're mostly written in about two weeks. Same with Desert Storm, by the way. Um, and they're brief to generals, uh, here, but they're mostly done in two weeks where the mad scramble is not, um, how to, how to hit a bunker. The mad scramble is how are you actually, if you hit these targets, going to, uh, it was, it's called in the military, take down the government, take down, uh, the, uh, uh, the economy. You could also talk about taking down the society. Now, this is not typically done in peacetime, and there were no, um, uh, analyses of this. And I know because, um, uh, I had a complete cart, well, complete is a little strong. You never have complete. I had wide range to be able to know what we did and did not know. So I, uh, when I took over, I didn't just teach a class or so forth. I stood up a targeting group, much like the Air, the, uh, the Air Corps Tactical School targeting group in the 1930s, where we actually studied and did papers on how you take down electric power, the economy, how you take down the oil sector. And I thought this was absolutely very important because, uh, once you did this, you would see the big problems that are going to emerge. You would be able to understand the limits of how this would not actually likely impact and reduce the enemy's military fighting capability, but it would impose rather tremendous economic, sorry, economic and and and civilian costs, which are going to make the enemy fight even harder to kill us and kill us very viciously.
So, now, does that conclusion, did you know that before showing up, or was that a conclusion that you drew from the targeting groups?
>> That was a con-
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>> Boasts. That was a conclusion that we, uh, that I, um, uh, had from studying the air campaigns in history. So, keep in mind my book, "Bombing to Win." You will go through that, and you will see all the air campaigns in history, and what it will do is it will track, we hit, uh, these target sets, oil, electric, all the details in all these different wars, and then it will track what are the political effects, what are the economic effects, what are the social effects on the society in detail, uh, here. Well, so I, uh, wrote that as a dissertation before I came to the School of Advanced Air Power Studies. Um, they hired me because of that dissertation, uh, here. Um, and then I, um, instead of publishing it right away, I spent years working for the Air Force, and that became "Bombing to Win" because then I realized how much more I had to improve what I had done, to thicken it up, to make it stronger, deal with counterarguments, show all the different squiggles and so forth. And that's what "Bombing to Win" is. Uh, and that's why 30 years later, it is still the, uh, core required reading. There's, I don't, sorry, not to be humble, I don't think there's a better book on air power than "Bombing to Win." It still remains that way. So, uh, and it's because of air strategy, if you see what I mean. And it's not because it is up to date with the most current technology. So, deal with all of that stuff, uh, here. So, this is not true that as soon as technology changes, just throw away all the history books. It's all different. No, that's true with tactics. That's not true with strategy.
So, anyway, back to the, uh, and then we did the targeting groups. Uh, here, we, we had a, a special group, um, and a lot of those papers got published, uh, here at SAS as master's theses, uh, so you can actually go and find them on DTEK and so forth and so on, some of them, um, in, in some of the air power journals here, but mostly as master's theses because we tended to write like 75-page analyses, not 12-page analyses. So, it was really quite a, um, and, and the folks who were doing it were the best and brightest in the world. I, we used to joke, the Rhodes Scholars couldn't even get in the group. They couldn't keep up. So, this was, these these folks were highly motivated, super smart, uh, best pilots in the world. They had just come from, uh, you know, F-111s and, you know, F-17s. I mean, these are the best of the best who had done, uh, the best, the, you know, everybody knows in an air wing, you have three squadrons, A, B, and C's. These are all the A's.
So, anyway, um, coming back to, um, uh, what, what this, so I was also working here with John Warden. Uh, and as people will know, I've disagreed with John, uh, over the years. Um, and, uh, basically, he would explain why, uh, taking down electric power was going to win wars. And I said, "Okay, let's find out if that's really true. Let's not just disagree philosophically. Let's actually." And John was basically up for this, uh, uh, to a point. To a point. It's always tough when you get to that point. Um, but to a point. And, um, and what he did to help facilitate this is, um, he brought in, um, actual, uh, engineers who were electric power plant engineers, uh, to really teach us how to take down an electric power plant. What are the, what are the systems, uh, what would you do, uh, and so forth. Uh, so, bottom line, so, so this, uh, led to a series of studies which then reinforced this. And on electric power, uh, you'll be able to find a paper by Thomas Griffith, uh, uh, target, it's, you know, magically called "Targeting Electric Power," okay? So, you will-
>> Very creative. Very creative. Yeah. Very creative title.
>> And you'll be able to go and see, and it's still the best study on electric power, uh, to this day. Uh, and, um, uh, so what, uh, when you target electric power, uh, here, there's two, there's basically two types of aim points here on a power plant. Um, and one is, um, the, uh, the transformers or the, uh, power lines, uh, that connect the power plants to the electric grid, or connect it to the, um, uh, you know, the basically the, the rest of society. Uh, which is a lot like, uh, that particular aim point. What happens when we have the, uh, uh, storm like here in Chicago, the tornado, which brought down the power lines? Uh, that is, uh, aim point number one. There's different parts of it, but still, let's just call that a single aim point, even though it's really made up of more. Then there's a second aim point, which is the generator hulls themselves, the generator hulls themselves. That's a different type of target of targeting. Now, when you target, uh, for instance, when we've taken down, when we, um, took down, uh, electric power in say, World War II, when we took it down in Korea, we went for the hulls. Okay. Now, when we did this in Kosovo, we did a little bit of this, partly as a result of this paper by Tom Griffith, by the way, because he briefed. Well, anyway, um, the, um, uh, we were, uh, either, uh, after Tom's paper, we either stopped targeting electric power altogether, uh, or we only did it in ways that would hit these transformers or the power lines. And the reasons you're about to understand here, um, which will become quite clear, uh, and this is really, uh, uh, I did this in a big paper on the Substack. I published it on Friday, uh, here. This was the Friday before Trump met with all these other folks. I don't know if that made it up to the to the meeting. They didn't invite me, but nonetheless, I did it because everybody really needed to see this and lay out in detail in a paper. So, it's on the Substack here, published last Friday. Uh, anyway, the, um, um, so when you, when you take down the, the power lines, uh, here, these can be repaired within say, several days, and that's what's happening right now in the city of Chicago. Now, a lot of power lines are down here in the, in the, in the south side of Chicago, and there's also the other part of Illinois. So, there's a lot of work to do. So, it's a progressive process of you're taking crews and you're just repairing the, uh, this, um, and the power is slowly going to come back, uh, here. Now, what happens when it's out for two days, is what's happening right now in my community. Um, we don't have power. We didn't even have cell phone service, uh, because all the lines tend to come down at the same time here. U, and so what does that mean? That means you need to, uh, you, you, um, uh, you need to go to say, um, um, a McDonald's, you need to go to a Starbucks. And what you're doing there is you're, you're getting some food and you're getting some coffee, but the very first thing you're really trying to do is charge your phone and see if they have cell service here. Uh, so it becomes little mini refugee camps, if you see what I mean. And that's what's happening right now out here. The parking lot is overflowed and and and so forth and so on. And people are charging every outlet there can, and we have really good internet in this space. That's why we're able to do this here. Um, and so that's not true just a couple miles away where I live. So that's not, that's why I had to drive over here. Uh, but that is, uh, going to get fixed here. Now, it may not be fixed in the next couple hours, but it's probably going to be fixed by Friday. Now, if you don't like that, uh, staying here, you can try to get a hotel, but they're all booked right now. You can try to do that. So, you can do that, but this is still, it's, u, and the temperature here right now is only about, um, 75 to 80 degrees where I live. This isn't too bad. Okay. Um, so, we, we can kind of muddle through and and so forth. But what would happen if this power stayed down longer? And how would that happen? If you hit the hulls, you knock out the hulls. And this is six months out, three to six months out. And you're not putting this back because they're all special custom-made. They're, they're gigantic, first of all. And you are not have, there are no spares. This is not a situation where, oh yeah, I've got the fuse in and I just got a few fuses. We're just going to turn some, some fuses, or we just have to wait for the crews to come, the power line crews. No, you're going to have to go and you're going to probably have to manufacture these. You'll do it as quickly as possible. Operation Warp Speed. Think that model. But you're, you're, you take out those hulls, and now you're in a completely different situation of lack of electric power. So those hulls, these are, these are now not individual lines or individual transformers. You're taking down the actual network itself. That's what Trump has been threatening. Whether he does it or not, that's another story. But let's talk about the, what this means. So you take down the hulls here. Um, you, you are going to take down, in, the, the, uh, all of the power for a long period of time, not just a few days. Again, uh, think weeks, months here. And if you took it down for, uh, an entire region, say, everything around Chicago, this would be the city of Chicago, not just where I live, the southern part, the city would be out of power. The city of Chicago's 3 million people. And now all of a sudden, the kind of thing I just described, where just think about it. So I just said for the last two days, we didn't have cell phone service. Well, that's not coming back for months. Okay? Uh, for the last few days, um, uh, we're having, um, uh, to go and recharge our phones and recharge things. Well, that's not happening now for months. Uh, all the food in our refrigerator has now spoiled because it's been two days, uh, here. So, after a couple days, you, you eat it out as much as you can, but I don't want our, my, my family eating this food right now. So, we will throw it away. However, because, um, the, um, grocery stores have some power, backup power generation that's still going on, we can go, sorry about that. We can go get, we can go and get some more food in a few days. When this goes down for several weeks, there's no going to the grocery store for any. So, a quarter of all food will rot, and there's nothing you can do about it. It's usually 25% in a major city. Just to put some numbers on it, it's not 100%. You can eat cereal, but of course, all the milk is spoiled. You can, all you can eat cereal, you'll eat cereal with water and so, but you will, you will have, uh, food, but 25%, uh, is going to, uh, uh, is going to go away, uh, here. For Tehran, keep in mind, we're talking about 10 million people, not like 3 million in the city of Chicago. Talking about 10 million people. And suddenly, within a period of about, uh, two weeks, so it's about a two, there's somewhere around a two-week threshold. It's a little hard to say exactly the day of the threshold, uh, here, but 25% of the food's going to, uh, completely disappear, and you're not going, and people are going to be scrambling to get the rest, and they're going to hoard it. They're going to fight over it. They're going to start shooting each other over it, probably things like that. They'll be like Katrina. Um, and so then, but it gets worse than there because, uh, in order to, um, right now, there's water in my faucet at home. Uh, in fact, I was able to take a shower today. Um, but once the, um, all the, uh, electric power for an entire city goes down, all the pumping stations won't work. So, you need, in order to pump all the, you know, nearly one, uh, trillion gallons of water here that you need on almost a daily basis for, uh, Tehran, uh, here, you, you, you need a massive amount of power to turn and generate all that, uh, here. And, um, this is, and, and now you would say, "Well, isn't there some way to back it up?" Yeah, it used to be before electric power. You know how we did it? We had all those water, um, uh, wells in the sky. Remember, if you sort of watch Petticoat Junction or you see some of these old things, you'll see, oh, there's the water tower and all. Well, that was the water tower. Well, guess what? We don't have water towers anymore. Okay? So, you might build them. All right? But you don't, you don't have the back up to the, we have all, and that's true in Tehran as well. So, so you, you are going to suddenly have much worse than the food problem is going to be the water problem. And, um, uh, and it's, you're, you're not going to be, well, Tehran doesn't, uh, turn on desalination, desalination plants. That is, uh, that's a problem for Kuwait, others, very little for, for, uh, uh, Iran, and none for Tehran. That said, it needs the electricity to pump the water here. Uh, and so you're going to have a massive water shortage that's going to occur. Uh, now, it will take time here for this to really become a truly dire. But if you project this out again over a month, over several months, what you start to see, and then also the hospitals are down. So, now all of a sudden, Tehran has 170 hospitals, 5,000 dialysis patients. Well, there's no dialysis here. So, so those folks are, are, you know, either dead or likely dead within a few weeks or maybe a month. Uh, some short period of time. Not they're not going to be able to last for years. Um, none of the surgeries that you would have, like say, heart surgeries or any of the other life-saving surgeries here, they all turn on electric power. Now, you'll have some backup power generation, to be sure, and they'll be able to try to, you know, do what they can, like a mass unit to. So, but you are going to have substantial losses of, uh, this high critical, high-end critical medical care that's going to, uh, going to occur. And then I haven't even talked about air conditioning. Now, in Tehran, the average, uh, temperature now, and I know our folks in the Gulf will don't need me to tell you this, probably near what we call about 100 Fahrenheit, maybe even a little bit, a little bit higher. So, right now, that's why I said I'm dealing-
>> But it's a dry heat. It's totally fine.
>> Dry heat. Totally fine. But what's going to happen is, uh, babies, old people, we know that these are the folks who, who, who die. And in the city of Chicago in 1995, we had just a, we had a five-day outage, not a two-day, not a three-day, a five-day outage. And what happened after we got to day five is, um, about 750 dead, uh, here in the city of Chicago. So, again, the, this, this happens. Um, the first few days don't, is, is like going camping. Then it gets a lot worse, and it gets worse quickly. Uh, it's an abruptly, and there's, it's worse for many, many people, if you see what I mean. And you just have a, a much more dramatic effect. And that's why when say, the hurricane that hit, Cat 5, that hit Katrina, this was, this wasn't so bad for the first few days, and then it got really bad. That's what the issue is here. And there's, so what, what do you end up with? You end up probably, uh, uh, refugees leaving the city, but they don't have any place to go. They're not going to have any more water there. Uh, you're, you're going to, you're going to end, and what do you end up with? Uh, here, you end up, in my book, "Bombing to Win," I grade, I have a measurement stick for civilian punishment: low, medium, high, very high. So, this is all done systematically in the book, uh, here. And so, what you end up with here is actually what I call medium punishment because you're not firebombing the cities. Okay. I know-
>> This is still medium. Okay.
>> Yeah, this is totally medium, folks. So, so this is, uh, I, I understand-
>> Medium is not that bad. It sits right in the middle. It's just what you do. It's a medium.
>> Just know how to order a steak. It's just medium. Yeah. You know,
>> It just gets, there is higher levels of this. I've studied this. This is what it means to really do this in a serious way. Um, and the, um, um, but what happens in that medium punishment is, uh, anytime you hurt somebody, throw a punch at somebody, you get fight or flight. Well, uh, when you have medium, you just wound somebody a little bit, that's when you get the fight, not the flight. And so this is what happened when we did medium civilian punishment. And so when I say I've studied this, I can actually grade like what happened to different towns in Germany in World War II. It's not all painted with a broad brush. And when you had the medium punishment towns, those are the ones who wanted payback. Mhm.
When you actually go and firebomb a town for real, and you're killing, um, you know, uh, tens, if not more, thousands of people, those people are so, uh, focused on staying alive the next hour, the next week, the next day, uh, here, um, that they're not really thinking about revenge at that point, uh, because they're just too traumatized. They're right in the heart of it. And that's like, uh, another example would be Pearl Harbor. So, when the Japanese killed the 3,000 of us at Pearl Harbor, per the people in Pearl Harbor were ground zero, and they were traumatized, and they weren't really all that much up, they weren't really, um, uh, and certainly not for months, looking for payback. People in the continental United States, they wanted the payback.
>> Okay.
>> So, so that's what's going to happen in, in Iran. So, you, you, you do this to the city of Tehran or to other cities, to take down this electric power, and, and you think it's bad now, the, the attack on Jordan. Okay, you're not going to need tit-for-tat for them to want to come at the desalination plants, uh, here. And, and by the way, um, you're not going to get it, that they're, this idea that we're going to scare them. No, this, this is how people will take risk to die, to kill, uh, here. They're really, really going to be emotionally upset. And you, you think, "Oh my God, I couldn't believe they're so emotionally upset." Now, th, this is, this is what I mean by things could get much, much, much worse. And, um, uh, and then they're not just going to look to come at our bases here in the region. They're going to look to come at America, uh, here, and Americans. Uh, now, I can't tell you that's going to happen on exactly what day. Okay? So, people want to polygraph me, you know? So, they're always, "Ah, you know, you said something was going to happen, and it didn't happen on that."
>> So, you have reading the comment section. Okay.
>> Well, actually, I was just on Piers Morgan's. I was debating here with Wesley Clark and General Kim, and I hope a lot of people will watch this because that's about the drone hunts out here. Yeah.
>> Uh, and I was explaining a lot of what's, uh, what the problems are with the drone hunt, and I want to do that for you, you folks here, too. But I'm just saying that they should go and, and so, th, this is about folks, we need to understand this is about stages, and we are not out of this war, and these things I'm talking about coming, they're not off the table. Okay? That's not. No, in fact, we're getting, you're just, it's, um, uh, and, and this is why we need to really understand these consequences, and we are not, um, causing, you know, when you, when you hit, it's fight or flight, and you're not causing the fight, you're, or flight, you're causing the fight. And so Iran here, um, you know, a lot of, a lot of people have asked, you know, is Iran a monster? I don't know if they were a monster before February 28th. They're a monster now.
And you're not stopping us just because we decide we're, we're done now. We, we, we decide we're too busy. We're going to go have a midterm now. We're too busy to deal with you now. We're, we're just going to take some time off. We're up against a country that is the most biggest challenge for America since Germany in World War II. Not since Vietnam, not since Korea. This is not Iraq. This is not Afghanistan. This is the most difficult challenge we've had since Germany in World War II, and we're treating it as if it's Grenada.
>> Yeah. Let me ask you this, because there's a counterargument embedded in what you just said. If, you know, we get to medium, and that triggers a fight response, you know, how high up do we have to go until we get to flight? Is there a level of punishment if we just, all morality-
>> Once you get to nuclear destruction. So, once you get to nuclear destruction, you start taking, you know, killing 5% of the society, uh, here, um, so, um, that would be 5 million dead here, uh, over, over a period of a month or two, couple months, um, uh, then you will have, um, you, you're going to start to traumatize the society to the point where, um, uh, at least we, we don't know how long the effect will last, uh, here, because, uh, history, uh, we can see some in history, and some is verified. So, I can't tell you that once you get to that level, I call it the Mongolian solution. Um, the extermination solution. Um, the, um, I can't tell you that you will never get payback here. That's not really, um, uh, the position. The position is, though, that that again, once you, um, once you reach that massive level, then what's really happening is, the actual population is so focused on just simply surviving to the next day, the next week, uh, uh, trying to help their, um, you know, people with nuclear weapons, it's radiation burns and, you know, things like that, uh, here, and there's no medical and so forth. Um, so you have a, um, uh, you, you, you really are traumatizing society to the point beyond a, um, you know, um, uh, but that said, we, we don't really know what would, what will happen. But what I would, what I would suggest is the, the Muslims around Iran are going to be more in the medium category. See, they're going to get the radiation clouds over them, or they would get the spillover effects of killing that many people in Iran itself. And so that is a problem because, um, essentially, just put it in terms of, of Israel, you've got, uh, 7 million Jews in Israel, surrounded by 4 to 500 million Muslims, depending on how you want to. And right now, there's only a teeny tiny fraction of these Muslims who are actually motivated, uh, to kill, much less be, uh, suicidally motivated to kill, Israel. Well, well, you, you start killing this level of population here in Iran, that curve is very likely to go up. Not so much in Iran itself, as the concentric circles around Iran, and then others are going to start to get very upset and start thinking about, uh, uses of nuclear weapons, say, Pakistan, to make sure you don't think you're doing it to them. So, this is, and then of course, others will want nuclear weapons, Saudi, Turkey, Egypt, right away, uh, here. So, these are not going to, so, so this, uh, this idea that some people might have, oh yeah, all we got to do is just kill them all. Well, there's a lot of "all" there that we're talking about. So, again, it's, there's, um, the actual, you know, my, my studies have disaggregated this so that we can really understand the reactions of different populations in these medium to the high. And it's really, you have to go all the way to very high before you truly knock out the revenge, uh, factor. And it's just, it's called, it's called producing apathy. And it's not much, they're, they're pro, they're not pro anything, they're just literally trying to survive, uh, here. And so once you create that situation, um, but anyway, I hope that helps because I really don't see us punishing our way out of this, uh, here, and the kind of levels of damage that we're talking about here. Um, again, you, you might be able to, um, uh, you know, cause that, uh, that effect for Iran itself, the 90 million people in Iran itself. That's not going to stop the other 300 million Muslims around Iran. And they're, and they're just going to, they're just going to rush the bases. They're not going to, this isn't going to be about drones, and it's not going to be about missiles. Okay. Um, that's, this is going to be just much, much, much more barbaric than that. You're, you're literally creating barbarism here. That's what happened, by the way, on the Eastern Front in World War II. So, uh, in chapter 8 of "Bombing to Win," I lay out, so I actually had a much bigger section on this because I thought it was so important, and then the press made me cut it down, but there's a big section on, uh, just how barbaric it was between the Germans and the Russians on the Eastern Front of World War II, crucifixions, nailing people. I mean, this was much, much different than what the Western Front was like. So, we thought west, we were in the Western Front. We thought that was, and so the, this is why the Germans would not surrender. They wouldn't surrender because this is what it meant when the German, when the Russians were going to occupy, and, and so when you see that, you say, yeah, I see, might as well fight rather, might as well fight and die rather than just surrender and die. So-
>> Yeah, some of the most horrific stuff I ever read were accounts of what it was like when the Red Army actually got to Berlin.
>> Um, yeah.
>> And then I dug into more and I realized everything that happened before the Red Army got to Berlin. I'm like, "Yeah, this is-"
>> Putin's forces in Bucha. Um, if you go, if you'll Google Bucha and see what happened in Bucha here in, um, March 20, um, uh, 22, had people, you know, hundreds and hundreds of people with their, uh, handcuffs on or tied hand tied behind their back, shot in the head, uh, here. I mean, just complete, I mean, it was unbelievable what happened at Bucha, uh, here. Um, and this is, you know, this is what we mean, you know, when you, you create barbarism here. Uh, this doesn't, this isn't going to turn off here easily. So, people wonder why the Ukrainians are still fighting.
>> Yeah. Well, let's turn now to the drone hunt, uh, and what's going on there, because that is a very tactical task, uh, and you studied it up the wazoo. Um, folks in the region actually trying to do this, there's only so many straws they can look through down at the ground to look for stuff to to put bombs on target. It's like looking for a needle in a haystack, but the haystack is mountains.
>> That, that's right. That's right. And, and the big issue here is, um, so I'm a professor, too. I know what it means to try to communicate complex problems to people. And I've been doing that, and I've given a lot of thought to this. Um, a lot of Americans, and this is true, of course, in the military, they know their geography by now. They know where Iran is roughly. They know even know where Hormuz is. The big issue with the drone hunts that is so difficult to get across is one word: scale. It is not geography, it is scale. So, on my "Diary of a CEO" interview that I, I did, people can go and listen to that. Um, I also did a big thing on my, uh, "Escalation Trap" Substack. Uh, here, it was the day before. I did it. Stayed up all night, literally eight hours here before I did this "Diary of a CEO" interview, and it's because they did props to try to help because I explained to them I want to talk about this issue, and the problem is scale. Okay.
So, um, let me try to do this here verbally. Uh, we don't have the maps. We don't have all the the the the visuals that will help this, but I will do the best I can. Uh-
>> Do you, do you have them? If you send them to me, I can embed them in the video for folks.
>> Actually, um, are you on the, uh, do you have the, the Substack?
>> Uh, Substack.
>> Yes. Yeah. So, it's not this last Monday. It's the week before Monday.
>> Okay.
>> Uh, you'll see in the middle, most of the maps are there, and most of the visuals are there. Uh, here. Uh, there's only one visual that I created afterwards that I'll tell you about. But if we, um, you can even call them up now. I don't know if you can call them up now so that we can kind of walk through these.
>> Let me try, because actually, society wants me, and if you want me to see if I can call them up here with the screen share.
>> Yeah, go for it.
>> I might be able to go ahead and do that. I mean, this is a little risky anytime I, what I found, of course, is anytime you do anything, um, that is out of the ordinary, but if you don't mind, and I, I don't mind at all, mind. Let's, let's actually try to do my screen share here because this is what I did, um, for my Substack audience, uh, last Monday night. So, just a couple days ago, I went into my UN university office, um, and then also, um, Scott, uh, there's so many people that want this. I'm going to do it again on Saturday. Oh my God, this is turning out to be, because you see, it was Professor Pape's nightmare scenario. So, so I mean, you know, a lot of, I don't know how many hundreds came into something. It was one of the biggest ever. And then afterwards, it was like, oh my God, nobody told me it was going to be that important. And look at. So, so anyway, this is a lot about me and a lot about this. So, I'm going to skip over this, but I'm going to. So, here's the real operative question, Scott. So, let me, can you see this?
>> Yep.
>> Can America open Hormuz by the midterms?
>> Yeah. This is the operative question. It is not can we ever open Hormuz. And the reason this is the operative time frame is because, um, if, uh, there was not, uh, a victory or big down payment on victory, uh, by President Trump between now and the midterms, which is, uh, only three months away, 100 days away, um, then the Democrats are likely to win both houses of Congress and shut down the war. And what I mean by that is do something quite similar to what happened in 1974, which is, uh, cancel all the money for the war. So, the reason the Vietnam War ended, a lot of people don't know, like that there was an actual thing that caused it to end. It didn't just peter out. It was in 1974, um, Congress literally shut down the money for the war. Uh, now, you'd say, well, wait a minute, there's money in the pipeline, and there's the president's power, and all that. Well, that's, that's all true. So, it, the war didn't shut down literally in 1974. It went on, um, uh, months after that, but it stopped. And it was stopping because it really is true that Article One of the Constitution gives Congress, uh, both the power to declare war and the power of the purse. So, uh, President Trump is going to, could try to work around this, but this really is the crucial, crucial pressure here, um, for President Trump, and every indication that he definitely understands that. So, the real question here that we have, and this is for our, our, our folks in CENTCOM and Emerald Cooper, is, can you actually open this Hormuz by the midterms? And the big issue here, as I'm explaining, is first of all, um, what counts as victory? And not what President Trump says what it means to actually open Hormuz is not the tactical-
standard of measures of military performance that SenCom holds itself to. Missile launchers destroyed, strikes declined by Iran. I mean, if we'd taken some Iranian uh here, um, this is how uh militaries measure their performance uh here. But this isn't the actual what counts as victory. There's the strategic standard, um, and what does it mean in this case? It means that uh the return of normal commercial shipping. And who decides that? Not President Trump, not SenCom. That is decided by uh the shippers themselves. They have to decide that the sh that the risk is low enough uh that uh there is essentially normal shipping coming through. That is what counts as strategic victory. So, notice right away, we're not even in charge of what the meaning of victory is here. This is how difficult this problem is. That's only issue number one.
The really, really big operational issue is scale. And Iran is simply too large to suppress quickly. Uh, and let me explain what I mean. So, we know that Shahed drones are being used to attack ships. Um, yes, you can use uh cruise missiles and anti-ship missiles, but this is plenty good enough. Uh, and um, this is what the drone uh looks like uh here, just to get it. And uh, notice that it's uh cheap. Uh, costs somewhere between 20 and $35,000 to make. Uh, these are relatively, you can build them in mass. Uh, you use them usually in swarms. Again, I'm just going to say this. I know many of the folks listening will know this, but it's almost impossible to stop once there are swarms of five or 10, multiple of them for hitting ships, and that's how you stop the ships. And you only need a few hits uh per week to shut down commercial shipping uh here. And so you would need to reduce an arsenal, and the folks at SenCom will have better numbers here, but I know it's in the many thousands, and they can build Shahed drones every single week and every single month. But you need to reduce this and keep it suppressed to something like 200 or less to really end the threat.
Now, the key challenge here is not just the numbers, but it's the range. Um, and I'm putting the operational range, the outer range is about 1,200 miles. Um, that is with rocket assists. Here, I'm putting the actual operational range at somewhere between 500 and 1,200 miles, Scott. And I'm going to use 500 miles as uh my my measure because I think that's a better way to understand it. So, this is what the drone launch zone then looks like here in um uh in Iran, uh where you assume 500 miles of coastline. That's the coastline here from Kuwait all the way to uh the Gulf of Oman. I realize it's a little bit longer than that, but but I'm just going to make it simple. Uh, here, but it's the depth, of course, which is 500 miles deep. And so this is the drone launch zone. Uh, and anywhere within this um within this zone, um, you should assume that the Shahedes would uh would, if if you haven't destroyed them, um, be able to target uh ships and or at least enough of them that they would basically keep this shut down.
Now, the first thing to know is the scale compared to California. This is bigger than California. In fact, it's one and a half times the size of California. So, this is what I mean by the large drone launch zone. Um, but it's this is a 2x2 depiction of scale. >> Uh, and it is much worse than a 2x2 problem because notice those mountains there. Okay. Yeah. But before we get to that, let me also give you another way to think about the size of a Shahed drone, which is the size of a Shahed drone uh is about the size of a king mattress, uh just twice as heavy. So, just to put this in some perspective here, um, these a king mattress can be anywhere in a building. Uh, it can be in a basement. It can be on the first floor. It can be on the second floor. If you're in a skyscraper, it can be on the 30th floor. Uh, here. So, but just understand we're talking about finding stuff that's the size of a king mattress, and there are thousands of them, and you've got to get it under 200.
So, the real problem here is the third dimension, which is not the real problem, but the additional problem is the third dimension, which is uh the Zagros Mountains here, um, which is most of this drone area is in the Zagros Mountains. Not quite all of it, but a lot of it. And those um Shahedes can be just about anywhere in this uh, they can be on any crevice. They can be at any level. They can be deeply buried. They can be in uh, in caves. They can be in many, many, many different places here. And I'm just trying to show you that it's a bit, a mountain is a bit like um a skyscraper in this regard, because as I was trying to explain, those drones could be uh in the basement of the skyscraper. They could be on the first floor, the second floor, the fourth floor, and you can carry them around. So, just because you've stored them one place doesn't mean you have to launch them from that place, because even though they're they're they're heavier than a mattress, they're only twice as heavy as a mattress, essentially. Uh, here. So, this is not a situation where they are unmovable and so forth.
Now, of course, you would uh, if you're Iran, you want to use uh uh trucks if you can. You want to be more efficient if you can. But this is these are um uh these are these are the efficiencies, not the minimums, uh here. And so, and also, I'm just trying to give you a sense of this, which is it's not just the Zagros Mountains are 10 times taller than the Empire State Building, but you can see, you can put a million and a half, over a million and a half Empire State Buildings inside of this 500 by 500 mile area. So, >> So, we're looking for king-size mattresses in essentially the entire Rocky Mountain range. >> Exactly. Which is another way to put it is um that this 500 by 500 mile area um is 11,000 Manhattans, just to kind of put it in that in that perspective. This is the fundamental problem that we have. And so, I think uh here that suppressing the drone threat is uh at minimum a three to six month problem. I'm not sure you can actually do it at all, but I don't think they're doing this by the operative time frame of the midterms.
>> If they went full ham and took down the power grid, would that impact their ability to to make these things, to use these things? They require infrastructure. >> Well, that would make the that would make the problem uh that would slow them down. Uh, here. The the problem is, uh Scott, that um even if you cut their production rate in half, if you make it so that they can't use um, you know, the grid to move things around, well, you might be able to make it hard to open say doors in an underground chamber, but they're not limited to underground chambers. You see, these are way too mobile. They're they're they're not quite bazookas, okay? But they are um, you're you're dealing with a weapon that is just uh, yes, you might you might want to um um store things underground. You might want to then shut down uh X, Y, or Z, but the idea here is, is it's much more challenging than that. So, you could suppress 70% of the drone production, 70% of the drone so they couldn't fire and completely strategically fail. That's what I'm trying to say here, Scott. Um, it's not that they would fail in their OEERs. It's not that they didn't work 18 hours a day and do the very, very best they could.
>> So, careers are intact. Everyone's still getting their participation medals, joint service medals, all around accommodations. Okay. >> But, but society is still going to get really, really mad at the military here. I mean, this is the thing I'm trying so hard. So, I'm on Newsmax. Not quite every day, but oh my god, am I trying to because I I'm very worried about what's coming, not this month or next month, but like two or three years from now. Uh, here. Um, and and uh, and I think a lot of our generals are, are you see it in their face. I think they're very, very worried about this. Uh, because what's the problem here is um, the the public just isn't going to, it's the uh, in Vietnam, we did a thing called the body count, where we had almost on a weekly basis, we listed out the number of VC we killed or imprisoned, captured, and that is like the tactical effectiveness measure, and it's something organizations can track. And for a while, in the in the in the public, a bit like when Higgath was talking about the number of launchers we were taking down, uh, this kind of holds for some um, for the support for the war for a while. Uh, the problem is, um, later, uh, here, this just completely gets steamrolled. Nobody remembers it in the public, and a lot of the reasons um, that the Vietnam vets for decades and decades um, had huge problems here with the US public was because nobody cared about the the um, the body counts. In fact, it's now famously called the body count fallacy, uh, because it does not equal strategic victory. And that's the issue. That's why my books are called Bombing to Win. My, you know, it's to win. It's not to be effective. It's not called Bombing to be Effective. Uh, here. And it's because um, this is the actual measure of merit uh that we have to achieve. And this is why we need to talk as bluntly as possible here. Um, I'm going to stop sharing here, Scott. Uh, why we need to talk as bluntly as possible um about the challenges that we face and to try to get this information here. And if people are going to say, as so I'm about to debate uh some other folks here. Um, I think I'm going to debate Admiral uh Montgomery on this on Monday. Uh, here. Um, that was what the point on on um, if you listen to Piers Morgan, you'll see they brought me on to debate uh Wesley Clark and General Kimme. And um, I I don't think there was any, they they didn't push back. >> Yeah. >> So, I think you go watch for yourself here. And the reason is because once you, let's take this seriously. We're not going to just talk in broad brushes and philosophically about the need to win and the consequences of defeat. We're actually going to go and win a war or not. But we're not going to win this war by talking at these hyper hyperbolic levels here and just trying to, you know, give the rah-rah speech here. Um, this is about not um, you know, if you, you folks go watch Any Given Sunday, you'll see um, you'll see some Al Pacino give one of the great speeches here at halftime, that's a really good rah-rah speech. Well, I guarantee you, if they can't actually scheme their way out of this, they're not, that rah-rah speech is going to last about three minutes in the second half. You've got to actually come through with some actual schematics here. So, um, I'm not trying to, you know, I'm not running for any political thing. I'm not trying to get a job. In fact, I'm pretty sure this, none of this, no one's going to, nobody wants me around because >> Everyone go subscribe to the Substack. Support this man. >> Economic prospects. >> He only has two sports coats. >> That's pretty much. Yeah, that's pretty much right. And a daughter who's about to get married. And I mean, look, you know, this is just the, you're right. People are wondering why. >> I got to ask on behalf of the comment section. Is there a certain number of paid subscribers that you get on Substack that will trigger you to go buy a new suit or sports coat? >> I'm going to tell my wife that I'm going to go tell my wife you said that because um um and I and I got a 12-year-old. Well, and you're going to hear it. I got a 12-year-old pug. I just took her to the vet. That's the doggy ER. And those, I've had dogs my whole life. And >> And you know my, just I just told my wife, you know, you, you thought we were going to go someplace, right out the window. That credit card just got maxed out right there that weekend. So, so anyway, but no, I will tell my wife that. And I also have a 97-year-old mother-in-law. >> And she's constantly saying this because she sees the same thing. So, I'm, I will pass that along. And I >> I just saw an ad two days ago. Joseph A. Bank has a sale. It's like 159 for a three-piece. I think it's, it's Joseph A. Bank has good stuff. It's, it's not bad. >> It, it's, it's true. And and what you're seeing is Men's Warehouse in Chicago does pretty well. So, I'm a big guy, and that's usually where I go because they're, they're pretty good for a guy like me. But, uh, that's what you're actually seeing there. Um, and we are just, uh, you know, people wonder. So, I guess economists get paid much better. Maybe that's the thing I should have become an economist. But not really. I would not have given up for for the anything the opportunity to try to, it's so humbling and such an honor to be uh involved here with um, with with trying to help our country. It's, I just can't tell you. And and that's true for my, my family as well. They definitely understand, uh, they understand that, and it is really just an incredible honor. But we really are in a really deep, uh, in a deep problem, and and this is going to be very difficult. We're in the escalation trap. So, in the most macro pictures, really zeroed in on these on these issues. We are in the spiral phase of the escalation trap. It's a spiral, and in that spiral phase, uh, here, you have a horizontal escalation happening. That's the Red Sea. Now has opened. And and by the way, Scott, uh, if you go to my um, June 15th Substack on Iran's Era of Maximum Leverage, this is what that says, that as the oil inventories run down, that's when the Red Sea front is likely to come. And what is Iran going to want? They're going to want to, their demands will go up, and they want American troops out. This is not the, this is not, this is US troops out, uh, here. Their demands have suddenly gone up. Uh, and it's because, uh, this is very, very predictable. But we're, that was the horizontal escalation. Then we have the vertical escalation. Uh, here, uh, and we also now in the spiral phase, you will have surprise pauses, and you're going to have surprise attacks by multiple actors: the United States, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Houthis, Hezbollah, and I'm leaving out what the Iranian >> Uh, well, there's Ukraine. Okay. So, I'm going to, in the in the Professor Pap Substack, probably not this week, but next week, um, I'm going to be, uh, probably talking about how those two wars can or cannot be connected in the near term. Uh, here. Um, but these are the um, the spiral phase of this escalation trap. And if President Trump, uh, here, um, keeps owning, I call it owning the loss, that loss keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Uh, people keep saying, well, he won't do these things because the military risks here show that there's such little payoff to to this. Well, that's exactly what Lyndon Johnson, uh, uh, knew. And we have in real time, his words on tape, as he's escalating, knowing the risk is very, uh, great that this escalation will not work. And why is he doing it? He's doing it because there's some chance, some good fortune, he'll pull a rabbit out of his hat over the next few months. But if he capitulates, then he instantly becomes the lamest of lame ducks, and his entire domestic agenda disappears. What does that mean for President Trump? That means all those deportation ideas, all this idea of getting um, uh, he wants to fix our elections here. Um, now, I'm not telling you I agree with these positions, but I am telling you he certainly agrees with these positions, and he's got lots of people who are who are voting for him for that. He becomes the lamest of lame ducks. None of that is going to happen. In fact, you you might end up with the Democrats sweeping in and bigger, more open borders than ever, zeroing out. I mean, lots and lots of things here are are at stake if he truly does capitulate. This is not just, and so you say, well, no, he won't let the world, we're on the Titanic. We're about to hit the the iceberg or go over the cliff, however you want to describe it, with the world economy here. Um, for President Trump, there's just a lot worse thing than seven, eight gas, uh, here. Now, you might say that you don't agree with that. And I'm not trying to get, I'm not trying to to get you to agree with President Trump. I'm trying to explain how this idea that we're we're going to just kind of nudge President Trump along and and he's going to understand he shouldn't do these things. Uh, no, that no, that's not really going to be the way it's going to go down here. Um, and you're seeing some of the advisers are pushing back a little bit more, but he can all fire them. Okay. Apparently, there's some rumor going around. He he a few months ago asked what it would take to get rid of JD, uh, here. So, these are, uh, again, don't these are not surprises here because this is the level at which we are. The the consequences here in both ways are much, much th, this is on the order of World War II, even though it's not fighting, you know, you know, China and, uh, this is big consequences. This is not even just the Vietnam War, okay? And it's not because we're at 50,000 dead battle deaths here. It's the the consequences are the political consequences are that big. And so this is why we're in the spiral phase. I think it's more likely than not that President Trump is going to find ways to escalate. I don't buy for a second that the uh Interceptor, the Patriot Interceptors are going to be the showstopper. Um, I've long um uh assigned Ted Postal's uh analysis of their failures in the '91 Gulf War, uh, here. So, I've long thought they were overrated, basically due to Ted's uh Ted's analysis, uh, here. I don't mean that they're zero effective. So, I wouldn't, I'm not saying that, but I'm not at all surprised that they're not um uh they're not proving to be very effective. Them. Uh, what is the surprise is that apparently we didn't notice that Iran was suckering us into get them all used up early on. So, we didn't husband them. They husbanded their best, and we didn't. And that was really kind of that was the surprise.
>> To to be fair to some of the an out there, there were folks in uniform that had raised that up to what they thought were the appropriate audiences. At at what point in the chain that analysis stopped moving up, I don't know. Um, but it it was not a surprise. A lot of people getting shot at right now that >> Well, well, that's right. But I'm not even sure I would tell the folks to die on their sword, you know, fall on their sword over that issue because again, I'm coming at this a higher level, okay? So, I definitely hear because you got all these podcasts I'm on, they all want to hear, well, this will be the showstopper and everything. And I'm here, I am explaining it's not, and it's not been a showstopper, and maybe you get a little pause here or there, uh, but the reason is this, which is um, as as President Trump, I think is looking at these different uh political downsides to everything he does. Very low on the totem pole is going to be the actual immediate harm these missiles are doing to our bases and to our uh uh to the allies here, uh, in the Gulf. That is there. I'm not saying he's uh, and and maybe he is more insensitive to it than I know. I'm not saying he's completely insensitive to it, but I'm trying to explain that he he will see very likely higher priorities. This is what presidents, White Houses do, uh, here, and that is what keeps them chugging up the ladder and keep this war going. And this war, I think, is definitely going to go on through the midterms, almost surely through January. Then you might have an opportunity for some sort of a reset once, because I think for Iran right now, their their their goal, and I've been saying this for a long time, but their their goal here is to wreck President Trump's presidency in a permanent way, not just a flesh wound, but a sucking chest wound to President Trump's. And how do you, what's their, what's their means? The economy. And how do you wreck the economy? You're going to have to wreck a big hunk of the world's economy. And that then they will do as much damage to President Trump as probably will be possible to be done. And I'm not, I'm not trying to give you a calibration. I'm just saying as much as possible to flatten the curve by January. By January. So, by January, we will know, uh, not just what, uh, President Trump's opinion poll ratings are. We're going to know who controls um, the houses of Congress. And I'm not saying who wins the election. I'm saying by January, we'll know who controls Congress because remember President Trump did January 6th. So, he has used extra-constitutional means before. So, so I'm not saying he will certainly do it. But the idea that this is, we're not going to talk about this, and we're going to ignore this, stick our head in the sand on these things. This is this is just, you know, this is just Fox, you know, talking, you know, talking head stuff. Okay. This isn't reality. No. Once he, somebody does something, they could do it again. Okay. So, you know, um, anyway, but but what I'm saying is I'm not trying to give you the exact prediction. What I'm trying to tell you is by January, there's a very good chance you'll you'll have a much clearer idea if you're Iran of how wounded this president is going to be. Um, and you'll calibrate it, and then you'll be thinking about the next couple of years. But for Iran, I think they have a pretty short time horizon. What can they do to wreck President Trump's presidency, uh, here, and that is in the next three to six months. This is their, I think the time horizon. Everything I see is built around that. I think it's extremely consistent with this. Um, and because if they don't wreck President Trump's presidency, um, and they don't really smash our face in it, then then why exactly are we not going to come back at them or do this again? I mean, you know, this, there, there's you would never, you, there's no confidence ever here, and we might still come back at them anyway, but um, they've, they've already faced uh two surprise attacks by us or us and Israel over a 12-month period of time. The idea that we wouldn't do it a third, fourth, and fifth time, you got to be kidding me. Okay. Um, so this is, we just got to take this seriously as opposed to thinking they're a bunch of, you know, namby-pambies, and they and they're just going to get impressed by our awesomeness, and now they really see our awesomeness, and so forth. No, I don't think so. We're this is, but come January, there might be a different opportunity here to have a different situation. Uh, but I don't think we're going to be able to think our, and that's why I'm not making like predictions into like 2027, 2028. There are some bigger picture things that are happening. Uh, I did a Foreign Affairs piece on this. It came out a week where we really are, uh, uh, in a second precision revolution. It's a cheap mass drone revolution. So, it's, it used to be that you would think of precision versus mass. Now it's precision and mass. And that's going to have big effects over the coming years. And not just for America. It's going to have big effects for China and Taiwan, Russia and Ukraine. Uh, it's going to have big effects for Israel, Hezbollah, and Israel. So, these are these are the bigger um, tidal wave effects that will come that the that are connected to the Iran war, but are broader than the Iran war. So, I'm not saying you can't see those. What I'm saying is the immediate trajectory of the Iran war itself, I think you can say some things pretty confidently between now and January. I don't know that we can say things beyond January at this point.
>> Gotcha. Well, we went very long today. Um, but I do think that's a good place to wrap >> Something. So, thank you for having me, Scott, and I hope that all this is useful. >> Uh, very appreciate your time and uh back to Mondays next week. >> Yep. Yep. We'll do Mondays here. Um, and we'll keep posted. And so, I wish everybody here uh the very best. And I I know we're doing it's just such an honor to uh talk to you and and really um uh you you are our future here and it may be may be a tough in this in the short term, but I really believe in our country. I believe in our military, uh, and I believe in in in America. >> Likewise. Thank you so much. >> Absolutely.