Angry Planet - The Iran Strikes Beg the Question: What Is Airpower For?

Episode Date: July 9, 2025

You can’t win a war with airpower alone, despite what the U.S. Air Force will tell you. For more than 100 years, the masters of the air have promised that military and political objectives can be achieved if you just let them drop enough bombs.It’s a theory that’s been tested, and fallen short, many times. Operation Midnight Hammer, the Trump administration’s use of 14 GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrators on Iranian nuclear sites, is just the latest test. The promise is that this has set back Iran’s nuclear program (it probably has) but Israel is hoping for much more—regime change in the Islamic Republic.Time will tell, but I’m not betting on it.On this episode of Angry Planet we zoom out and talk about the strategy behind airpower in the 21st century. Robert Farley, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Kentucky, is on the show today to give us his thoughts on the Iran strikes, airpower in general, and the lessons to be learned from watching the war in Ukraine.Should we abolish the independent Air Force?Was Israel’s war on Iran a success?Has airpower ever forced regime change?Curtis LeMay mentionedBombing doesn’t create revolutionary fervorAirpower as theater“Israel-splaining”What’s a Golden Dome for anyway?Are FPV drones part of the air force arsenal or infantry weapons?Strikes on Iran Show the Force, and Limits, of AirpowerRobert on PBS in KentuckyBuy Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air ForceThe Five-Ring Circus: How Airpower Enthusiasts Forgot About InterdictionSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hello there, Angry Planet listeners, Matthew here. Did you know that Angry Planet is almost entirely listener supported? It's true. Go to Angry PlanetPod.com and sign up for $9 a month.

You get commercial free and early versions of the mainline episodes. There's a great one up right now that is an interview with Dr. Pauline Shanks Corinne, who was a military professor at the U.S. Naval War College. She resigned in protest. Find out what that is all about over at angryplanetpod.com. And now on with the show. Hello and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. I am Matthew Galt.

We were finally getting around to talking about Iran. I know we've been off for a little bit. It's been a bit of a hot summer here between Jason and I. So, you know, I thought it would be interesting to kind of step back for a minute and have a broader conversation about air power in general and what these things might accomplish. And to do that, I have a very special guest with me today. Sir, can you introduce yourself? Yeah, I am Robert Farley. I work at the University of Kentucky in the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce, where I teach national security and diplomacy classes.

So just at the very beginning, because this is a take. of years that has haunted me for like 10 years. Do you still think that we should abolish the independent Air Force? Yeah, so this is something I've been thinking about a lot over the past year, especially in context of the Russia-Ukraine war. I mean, since the book was written, and I guess it's 11 or 12 years right now since 2014, you know, I've learned a lot more about the U.S. military. I worked at the Army War College, you know, and a lot of other things have happened technologically.

I think that the, you know, I think that the basic argument is still sound, right, that the integration of war planning and of procurement into a tighter, more singular structure makes more sense than the arrangement we currently have. And I think that's especially true in the context of sort of this emergent space force. which may just be the first of the new services, right? I'm still waiting for the next shoot of drop on cyber force being built by President Trump. But, you know, and I think we'll talk about this today, there are some pretty interesting arguments to be made about Air Force independence just in context of what Israel and the United States just did to Iran, especially what Israel did to Iran.

And so, you know, it's a much different picture of air power than what we have seen over the past three years with Russia and Ukraine. I still think it's one that can be worked into a sort of two-service format rather than a multiple-service format, which was what would result if we didn't have the Air Force. So, you know, 10 years later, there remain good arguments on either side, on either side. But, you know, I think that the cause is still worth fighting with respect to Air Force independence. We're talking on, actually let me follow up with a thought on there. And I know this is going to kind of get into some of the broader conversation, but it's too good a thread not to chase.

What is it about the Russia and Ukraine conflict that has altered your thinking about this? Well, I mean, the Russia-Ukraine conflict is in the air being fought much differently than all of the wars that the United States has fought in the air, really since Vietnam, right? there is the subordination of the air to the ground. Both sides' air is relatively ineffective. You know, the reasons for that ineffectiveness, you know, really require a lot of plumbing. A lot of it is technological on both sides in terms of offensive capabilities and defensive. A lot of it is doctrinal, though.

And, you know, I think, again, like this gets us into the Iran-Israel question. like why do why did the Russians fail and the Israelis succeed here? But, you know, were we to be sitting back in learning lessons from Russia, Ukraine, and what that means for the long term of air power, you know, I think it has to bring up some really relevant questions about, is this thing manned air power that we've been doing since 1916, 1917, is this really being subordinated, right? is this something that is going to continue to return the investment that countries have been making into it,

especially Western countries, especially the United States, have been making into it given that there are all these new kinds of technologies which are, you know, capable of either deterring air forces or of inflicting very serious damage on them, even in their bases. And, you know, does this thing,

the Air Force still makes sense. And that's where, you know, just over this last week, we've gotten so much more leverage, in terms of thinking about what air forces can still do. So it's your position then, and this is kind of like, I'm very interested in hearing basically everyone's opinions on this. And I think there's 3,000 opinions. So this was a success. Israel and America's attacks have been a success.

Well, so I would want to qualify that, right? You know, compared to Russia, Ukraine, the Israeli attacks, And I think it's really the Israeli attacks because the Israelis are really the ones who rendered the Iranian Air Defense Network absolutely prone. Right. I mean, the United States just showed up the end. Compared to Russia, Ukraine, I mean, this is a spectacular success because Iranian or Israeli planes can fly around Iran and can do what they want, when they want, and any time they want, right? you know, to the extent that the Israelis and the Americans fail in the overall objectives of the campaign, it is not something that's due necessarily to doctrinal or tactical factors, right, which has been outstanding, right? As successful, I mean, if you blueprinted it, right, and said, show me a spectacularly successful air campaign, you'd be looking at this in terms of the ability of the Israelis to do what they want. you know, if it's a failure, it will be because it failed to destroy the nuclear capabilities,

fissile material, other kinds of nuclear equipment, nuclear expertise, and so forth that the Iranians had, that it failed to break the back of the Iranian state, and it propels Iran in a much more aggressive direction with respect to building nuclear weapons. Now, those all would, I think, be categorized as, you know, can be categorized as, you know, as strategic failures of air power, right, in the sense that they may be things that you are asking air power to do, that even at this late date in human history, air power simply cannot do, right? That it cannot destroy incredibly heavily fortified bunkers. It cannot completely disrupt a leadership team, and it cannot undercut support for a regime. And so if those

things end up being true and the campaign fails because Iran ends up with a nuclear weapon, then, yeah, this is still an L for air power, but it's a, you know, it's a W in terms of the ability of the Israelis to tear apart this air defense network and do what they want over Iran. My two thoughts are, doesn't that also mean that Israel's air power is kind of subordinate to its intelligence system? Because it seems like that, that to me, is one of the incredible successes of Israel's wars in the past few years, almost the entire time it's existed, actually, is that they have an incredibly capable and powerful intelligence network.

So, you know, you find out where the air defenses are from them and find out where to strike and, like, figure out how to get everyone in the same room at the same time so you can hit it with the air power, A, and then B, isn't some of the history of air power since 1916, these battlefield Ws but strategic losses. So, you know, on the first point, it's really, really interesting. And I just recently listened to Michael Kaufman's latest podcast, which is more or less on the same subject we're talking about right now. You know, that, that, I mean, it should not surprise us that the Israelis had fantastic intelligence, their ability to integrate that intelligence into a series of strike packages.

And the integration of intelligence isn't just humid, right? It's all of the, I mean, there's cyber, there is, there are people on the ground in Iran doing all these things. The ability to sort of carefully orchestrate and build out this campaign plan between air and intelligence is really, really remarkable. And it's all the more remarkable sort of if you compare it to what was supposed to be a really intelligence-driven effort on the part of the Russians. back in February of 2022, right? That really, in a lot of ways, the intelligence services were supposed to be leading the charge, right? They were supposed to be, you know, essentially laying the ground for a successful air campaign, which was going to lay the ground for a successful ground campaign.

And the intelligence services sort of failed on their own. They failed in interaction with the air, and then the air failed to do anything useful for the ground. Yeah, I mean, I think the other sort of the point that you make, about air power being able to do these outstanding things, but still, you know, not being able to deliver a victory. I mean, there are a lot of separate components of different kinds of military capabilities that cannot deliver victory on their own, right? And I think the problem with air power and air forces, which, you know, to go back, I allude to in the book, right, is that it sort of, it creates an intellectual structure and a temptation for thinking,

that things which cannot be accomplished with air power alone can, in fact, be accomplished with air power alone. And that's one where, yeah, I do think that despite sort of spectacular successes, the ledger is mostly that, no, you can't do this on your own, right? It's not enough to succeed at the things you want it to succeed. And I'm kind of curious, like down the road, when we get sort of a much cleaner assessment of what this campaign did. And when we get a much cleaner assessment of what exactly the Israelis wanted, which I think is still in a little bit of doubt, like sort of what they're fundamentally wanted out of this campaign, we'll have a better sense of whether we can say this was a W or an L. Yeah, you've got a great line in your recent peace and foreign policy that I'm

going to read here that I think cuts to the heart of this. The Israelis believe, or at least purport to believe that attacks against regime targets can induce regime change in Iran, blow up enough police stations and kill enough government apparatchiks, and the machinery of oppression will grind to a halt in the Islamic Republic will collapse. Is there any, has that ever happened ever in the history of their power? No, not real. There are cases which are closer, and there are cases that are farther away. You know, certainly, certainly, you know, whatever.

In World War II, we did not precision incinerate Japanese and German police stations. We just burned down the whole city around the police station, right? But those governments did not collapse. You know, more precise engagements in Korea and Vietnam did not induce collapse. I think that the best cases for air power or sort of terror air power actually inducing collapse are some colonial wars, and these are early colonial wars in the history of airpower, where, you know, literally people had never seen airplanes before, and then suddenly poison gas is being dropped from them. And it does induce the collapse of, you know, state-like

structures. You know, another pretty good case is probably Italy, 1943, which not a lot of people talk about, because it seems like such a best case for air power. But, you know, to my understanding, the, to my understanding, the evidence is fairly clear that the threat of pretty heavy bombing of the Italian peninsula was really pretty critical to the decision of the Italians to surrender. And then, of course, they have the entire peninsula fought over anyway, so it doesn't save them destruction. But yeah, I mean, this is, you know, this idea that you could destroy critical regime nodes, right, using precision air power and incredible intelligence, right? You know, it comes up in John Warden's air campaign piece, which I think are still a really useful way of thinking about air power, the five rings. You know, we're never able to quite do it. This is about as close.

The Israelis have been talking about how you could do this because the Islamic Republic is a rickety house of cards. It's totally oppressive and blah, blah, blah, et cetera. So you blow up the prisons and you blow up the police stations and you blow up state TV. while it's playing some propagandistic news program, and it'll convince the people that the machinery of oppression is going to collapse. You know, like I say in the piece, this remains an unproven assertion at this point. And, I mean, I don't know whether the Israelis right now are thinking, okay, let's step back and see if everything worked out, or if the Israelis are saying, I guess this didn't work out at this point.

But they've certainly been talking in maximalist terms, and not just Israelis, but also, you know, what we used to call neocons in the United States, that you just really had to tip the, you just had to punch the house of cards once and it would collapse. This seems to me like a pretty, you'd say it's unproven, and that's true, but I would almost call it a fantasy. And I say that because since it, to my mind, since at least World War II, we've kind of been, there's some, some, some. somebody has been selling this to somebody. That as long as you have the right amount of, you've dropped the right amount of bombs, hit the right targets, either precision or just do a big fire bombing campaigns,

like the Allies did in World War II, then that will save you having to send in ground troops and take and hold territory. That will achieve whatever political goals you're looking for. And I think that like, and correct me if I'm wrong here, that the American independent outforce, Air Force is like an outgrowth of that kind of idea. And then you get wonderful characters like Curtis LeMay

who make their entire career just like selling that. But, and again, you know more about this than I do, but to my understanding is like any time you study what happens to a population after an air campaign or during an air campaign, it tends to raise morale. People get mad. They don't get mad at the government. that's in charge of them, they get mad at the people that are bombing them.

And I would think that, like, you would think that Israel would know this better than anyone, right? Right. Thoughts on all that. So, I mean, it comes back, the reasoning why, the reason why this thought, right, that especially authoritarian regimes, although, you know, back when people were coming up with the reasoning for why this would happen, I mean, this is very old thinking, right? it goes all the way back to the 1920s and you know as part of Royal Air Force it's part of Italian air power thinking

you know I mean a lot of it comes back from a lot of it is a response to the Bolshevik revolution right where it really did seem like oh my goodness right if a state temporarily loses or you know loses its grip over the the raw instruments

of oppression right loses the police stations loses the control of the train stations loses communication and so forth. It really could all go away, right? You could lose a 600-year-old empire, right? The empire stays, but control of the empire goes, right? And so building out of that, you have these sets of theories that, you know, modern repression,

the modern state is built around institutions, right? And if those institutions are unable to do their job, right, that that's fundamentally the same use of the state, and you can cut the tendons of the state and then the limbs don't do anything anymore, right? There's so many metaphors you can use for this, right? And of course, we've tried, right? We've tried in precision ways. We've tried in less precise ways.

You know, this one, the reason people think or had the reasons that people could have given themselves could have convinced themselves that it might work here is that, you know, I mean, it really feels like the Iranian state is pretty unpopular. that they consistently have to use active repression, not even just passive repression, but active repression, in order to maintain control. And so, you know, bombing both the symbolic structures of the regime and the actual institutions of repression and the communications that really hold the regime together. And this last one here is interesting, right, because that's as much as an intelligence thing, right? I mean, when regime officials are unwilling to talk to one another because they're worried they're going to get assassinated, the machinery of the state shouldn't work, right? So, you know, I think one way we could maybe look at this is to say, this is maybe the best case we've ever had for the idea that you can cut apart a oppressive regime with air power and intelligence alone, right? and because it's the best case we've ever had, we need to at least take seriously the possibility that it might work. That said, the Islamic Republic still seems to be there.

And, you know, maybe there'll be some other best case that we can't even imagine. But if it didn't work here, it's really hard to imagine under what circumstances it might work. I would also say that everything is forever until it's no more. and, you know, who thought last year that Assad would suddenly be gone? You know, these things tend to have, when the, when the tipping point comes, almost no one ever, it feels like no one saw it coming and it happens very quickly. And we're still days out from the, like a lot of these precision strikes. So what happens in six months?

How do things look in six months? It could be very different. So, like, I'm still willing to give it, I'm still willing to not call this one, I suppose. And you're right. Like, it is a best case, this would be like the version you would almost design in a computer lab or simulation, right? Right. And, you know, we should note that at least in terms of propaganda, the Israelis are leaning very heavily into sort of trying to create a narrative that is similar. to the narrative you first talked about, right?

Or to the reality you first talked about, which is that bombing tends to increase morale, right? Or at the very least, I mean, you know, the evidence on bother bombing increases morale is actually a little bit mixed, right? What it absolutely doesn't do is create revolutionary fervor, right? People may not feel happy, but they blame whoever's bombing them,

and then they either just die or stop going to work or stop being politically active while the bombing is continuing. I mean, the Israelis here have tried to make, make the argument that what we're really demonstrating is the impotence of the Iranian state, right? That since you have built up this idea that this is a bulwark against the Jewish state, a bulwark against the Israelis, we're just going to beat the hell out of you and demonstrate that you can't do anything about it and then let you solve the problem of how to manage your rest of populace afterwards.

We'll see if that works. well it also goes to in this I'm kind of working out this idea as I talk through it right now something I've been noticing in the last definitely is part of like Israelis Israel's various wars in the past few years there's a lot of theater around modern conflict there is a lot of back like there was a lot of back and forth bombing between Iran and Israel before this, before things got a little bit more serious and directed. And it also seems like air power is an excuse to,

it's a cheap way in terms of human lives to create a little bit of theater and sir your populace, that you're doing something, that you're acting in some way. Do you see that? And I'm also wondering, like, do people buy that?

Well, you know, I'm sure that, I'm sure that you have had the experience of talking to, an Israeli about Middle Eastern politics, right? And there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, terminology I like to use here, right? You've been Israel-splained too, right? Much like mansplaining, right? But, you know, very often any American or, you know, anybody else, I presume, we'll sit down and try to talk strategic theory within Israeli, will just have loudly, just be loudly talked over about, you don't understand, I'm not going to try to do the accent. I thought for a second I would, but it's like, you don't understand the Arab mind. You don't understand. You don't understand.

the Persian mind. We understand how these people think and we understand what's going to, you know, either terrify them or please them or, you know, whatever else, right? And it sort of goes into that. And I think that actually does have an impact on how, on how the Israelis design their operations, right? Because they do have this theatrical aspect to them, which is supposed to be sort of sourced in their, in their close and incredibly impressive understanding of the Middle Eastern mind, which Westerners can't really, can't really understand. You know, from my point of view, it is absolutely the case that the Iranians in particular are engaging in symbolic politics here, right? Symbolic warfare. They're not engaging in anything symbolic that's hard to understand.

Right. It's like, okay, we just got the hell beaten out of us. We have to give some indication that we're still alive. So let's fire a missile at Qatar, right? But please let them know it's on the way because we don't want to be hitting. anymore, right? So we're having to throw one punch at you and then please don't punch me anymore. I mean, that's very simple and very straightforward. It's very clear symbolic politics. I think a lot of the attacks they've launched against the Israelis, you know, probably at the beginning they were a little bit more optimistic than they should have been with respect to

whether they could penetrate ballistic missile defenses. But, I mean, a lot of it for this entire conflict we've been watching now on the Iranian side seems to be entirely solid. It seems to be entirely symbolic acts of resistance, right, rather than sort of genuine efforts to hurt either Israel or the United States. Speaking of ballistic missile defense, if I can take us down a couple of other roads here

and get your thoughts on a couple different things. So, again, Israel is like a beautiful textbook case for missile ballistic missile missile defense working under the perfect variables.

It's the small state about the size of is it New Jersey? Something like that. I always get it wrong when I start comparing American states to foreign countries. We'll say New Jersey and we'll be corrected by a listener later. It's easy to, or not easy, but it's possible to set up ballistic missile defense to shoot things down out of the air over an area of that size. What do you think of the chances of bringing something like that over to America in constructing, say, a golden dome? So, I mean, there are so many narratives around ballistic missile defense that have been so wrong over the years.

And I've been on the wrong side more than a few times, right? I mean, I used to be sort of like following Ted Postal and like, here's all the clear indication that these systems don't actually work. And then, you know, the more you pay attention to it, the more you sort of come to the conclusion, well, you know, they don't work if what you need is one. 100% coverage against nuclear attacks, right? In which you have a, you know, a savvy opponent who is using a number of different means, decoys, everything else, right? That that's probably too much to ask. You know, but under most cases, shooting down nine or nine and a half out of ten missiles that are being shot to your country is actually a good thing. You know, I also worried, is this too expensive, right?

It was sort of the interceptor problem, and that's the problem that the Ukrainians have really run into. that the interceptors are just often more expensive than the things that they're shooting down and they can't afford it. But the Israelis have also managed that problem too, right? You know, both because they are able to call on nearly infinite resources from the United States and because they're selective about what they shoot down and what they like it through. And so, you know, it is certainly, it is untenable at this point to insist this thing, which people have been fond of insisting that ballistic missile defense just doesn't work.

Right, it does work, right? It works for any number of different category cases that you can imagine, and lots of people should want it, and it should work well for them. The idea of the Golden Dome, I don't know. I mean, it just doesn't seem... I'm not sure exactly what it's supposed to be. I mean, is it supposed to be SDI II

and shooting down every Chinese or Russian ballistic missile that would be flying? that seems to be the be the pitch from I mean I know it's it's all very nebulous right like you don't get a lot of concrete details out of this administration but it from my understanding the pitch is yes satellite interceptors like SDI2 presumably I mean up until recently I would have said SpaceX satellites equipped with some sort of defense system shooting rockets out of the skies they come into. America, which doesn't seem, and that's going to be an awful lot of satellites, right? It'd be an awful lot of satellites. And it also, I mean, just, you know, the comparison with Iron Dome, and that also makes me, it makes me wonder, right? Because, like, is it the vision here that we're going to irritate Mexico and Canada enough

that they're going to want to shoot rockets over the border? What would you be trying to hit? There's not much along the border, either. And so that also confuses me, right? But, you know, if, I mean, what it sounds like to me, and the way you describe it especially, right, is that, you know, a lot of the long-term missile defense people within the Pentagon are happy to rebrand. Right. They're rebranding. They have much in the same way that the space people caught Trump's attention in Trump 45 and we're able to get themselves to Space Force.

It sounds like what we have here is like, well, this is something we've wanted to build in some. some version in some fashion for a really long time. We are going to try to capture the president's attention and go ahead and build it. Right. But it's really expensive. And I think probably something that's not addressed enough is it's going to continue being expensive, right? Because everything we build that is going to threaten the Chinese and Russian second strike capabilities is going to incur a reaction from them either quantitatively. There's building a lot more missiles or building a lot more different kinds of attack systems or qualitatively, right, and they're just they're just going to figure out ways to directly defeat Golden Doe.

So I don't know, it seems like a lot of money to to prevent something from happening that our ICBMs already more or less prevent from happening. Yeah, you bring up an interesting point, which is that if you're focusing on the borders, our northern and southern borders, that's one thing. But presumably these weapons, the Golden Dome would be to knock Russian and Chinese missiles out of the air. And unless you're talking about like an ICBM, anything else would have to fly an awful long distance across a pretty vast ocean to get here. Right. And it just, it's, it's, I think it's people don't understand. That's, it's, it's not as easy to launch a more traditional cruise missile from that distance, right? Right.

Right. And it also seems like all the people that were saying hypersonic over and over again the past few years are now saying Golden Dome. Right. Right. And the hypersonic thing was always weird because it's like, oh, hypersonics, this is something new. Well, a ballistic missile has always been hypersonic. Right. It's not anything different.

Right. But, you know, there have been to be these groups within the Pentagon. and around the Pentagon who have been able to secure for a really long time, really substantial sums of money to keep pushing this, right? And it's gone through lots and lots of different iterations. You know, I would also say there is a fundamental political problem here. And I'm going to go on a limb here and I will say, I don't think Trump understands this, right?

Which is like sort of the world that he wants to build, which is this sort of spheres of interest world is incompatible with the most aggressive. I think he feels like it's compatible with the most aggressive version of missile defense, a golden dome, but it's not compatible, right? Because fundamentally, Russia and China, in order to be secure, even in their spheres of interest, have to feel like they could hurt the United States. And if our missile defense system is too aggressive and relieve some of that feeling, that's actually a major problem for great power relations. And I'm not, maybe people in the White House are talking about this. Maybe they're thinking about this in ways that aren't very public, but it does seem to run

against sort of this idea that the world can be this peaceful sphere of interest type of great power politics. No, I think that's absolutely right. And it is something that doesn't get talked about a lot in the wider conversation is that deterrence only works if you think you've got peer capabilities. Right. Right. Which is one of the reasons that China's digging new ICBM silos. And the minute you start building systems that you tell your populace will make sure that a nuke can never hit the country, well, then we got to make sure we, we build.

build a bigger nuke that can get through your missile defense systems. Right. Right. And if, and I'm sure you know this as well as I do, right, if China can ramp up the production of its Navy to be producing like seven ships for every ship, I don't know what exactly it is, but it's a lot for every ship we build. They can do that with ICBMs too, right? You know, China right now is a lot richer than Russia was in the 1970s, and it can build lots and lots of ICBMs in ways that that, that, that would make any kind of missile defense system very uncomfortable. All right.

So you teased this. You talked about this in your foreign policy article, and you did mention it earlier. Can you tell me what the Five Rings model is? Yeah. So the Five Rings model, it's a pretty clever model of thinking about an air power campaign, thinking about the basics of air power. That was come up with guy named John Warden in the Air Force. He was pretty important dude.

People recognize theoretically that this was a really important construct. And the idea of the five rings is that it is five concentric rings, right? And it starts off with, I want to get these all right. It starts off with the fielded enemy forces, right? So the enemy army. The population is behind that. Industrial infrastructure is behind that. Sort of core regime functioning is inside that.

And the very inner ring is leadership, right? And so the idea that Warden had, and I call this neoclassical air power theory because it sort of derives a lot from classical interwar air power theory, but it puts it into new and interesting themed bottles. You know, the basic idea here is that you get more leverage the farther you get into the rings, right? So that in some sense, it makes more sense to attack the population than it does to attack the fielded forces. It makes more sense to attack the infrastructure than to attack the population. And if you can get all the way to the leadership, it makes more sense to kill the leadership than to destroy the entire army. And so, you know, how this worked out in almost sort of perotic fashion in the run-up to the first Gulf War back in 1990, was John Morden, you know, making this argument. He was part of the initial planning teams with Schwatzkoff.

And he was making the argument that the Iraqi army should, be spared, that air attacks should concentrate only on the first two circles, and that after the first two circles, the inner two circles had effectively been destroyed, we would need the Iraqi army to occupy Iraq, right? So that, you know, now that we have the precision and the reach to actually hit those inner circles, that's pretty much all we should be doing. Now, there's a whole bunch that is misleading about this model, and obviously it didn't work in Iraq and it hasn't worked here, but it's still, it's still an interesting, an interesting way of thinking about an air-only campaign that sort of, at least it gives you a story about how these different elements are

going to interact, and it gives you a story or a way of understanding what you're trying to hit and what you're trying to destroy and why you're trying to destroy those things. So it's a not uncontroversial model, but, you know, I still find it pretty useful. I mean, Warden is a not uncontroversial guy, but I still find it a useful model for thinking about air power. Why is he controversial? Well, I mean, my understanding, it was pretty controversial within the Air Force. You know, the 1980s was a time in which the idea of the air campaign, of the solo air campaign, was not well thought of, largely because the air, the Air Air, you know, the air Force had more or less subordinated itself to airland battle doctrine, which was army doctrine

that basically shoehorned the Air Force into stuff that the Air Force didn't mind doing, but was a, you know, sort of a long way from a, from a World War II-style bombing campaign. And so it was considered a little bit embarrassing for to have this sort of be put forward at a time when Air Force Army relations were pretty good. And, you know, for some of the same reasons, I think he was controversial later on because of the arguments he had made about Iraq, about what could be done with respect to Iraq. And, you know, for again, sort of reviving this idea that you could have

a solo air campaign that would not really require overwhelming contribution from the other two services, but it was, you know, sort of getting back to this argument that the Air Force can do it on its own, right? you know and and here is a different theoretical tool for thinking about how the Air Force could do it on its own. And so that I think was controversial within the Air Force and in the Pentagon more broadly. It's that what I call a fantasy comes back up again, right? Right.

It keeps, it keeps, and you know, it's funny because it feels like the global war on terror version of this, that 2001 to like 2020 period was drone power. Right. If we just assassinate the right guys with these drones, then the whole thing will collapse. It morphs and changes, but it doesn't seem to go away. Right.

And the Five Rings model is very state-centric. It's harder to apply to a terrorist organization, right? And, you know, in part because the first two ring, Really, the first three rings don't really exist for a non-governmental organization. So all you're doing is attacking the leadership and the core assets. But that's also one of the problems, right? It was a problem for it in the war and terror, that it did not really apply to the things we wanted to do in the war on terror. All right.

Can we talk a little bit more about Russia and Ukraine then? I'm particularly interested in speaking of drones, this thing that everyone's kind of upset. with right now, small FPV drones. How have they changed the nature of air war? Or do you even consider that part of the air war? I mean, that is a question I am grappling with, right? And I'm fascinated by it, right? Because it was very interesting. In response to the, you know, the really spectacular attack the Ukrainians pulled off on, you know, the very core of Russian air power, right, of Russian strategic air power with these

really small drones, right? Were they FPVs? I guess people, they were kind of FPVs. They were FPVs. And that the Israelis replicated. Right. What's crazy is the Ukrainians

and the Israelis both pulled off these attacks within like a month of each other. And Stephen Walt over in foreign policy, he wrote, well, you know, this war has demonstrated that air power just isn't very important. And I'm like, well, okay,

these are things that fly Right. And I understand, right, an artillery shell flies, but we don't consider it air power, right? We consider it ground power. We do consider a strategic bombing to be air power. What about this, right? And like, is this just flying artillery? Flying artillery is very, you know, is very transgressive, that idea to Air Force people. They are really alarmed by it. It's not a safe space for them. You know, bigger drones seem to fit fairly well into classic traditional air power theory. These FPVs don't fit very well into classic traditional air power theory, in part because they can be operated pretty adequately and pretty effectively by ground personnel. Right. I mean, so much of air power theory in history is based around this idea that pilots should not be ordered around by sergeants. And that's just like the core tension, right? that no sergeant in a trench is going to tell me what I have to bomb or when I have to bomb it, right?

But in this case, air power has become part of the toolkit of the infantrymen, right? The toolkit of the Marine. And so when it's that, does it stop being air power? I don't know that I am willing to have a decisive answer even for myself on that. question yet. I'm curious what you think. I mean, obviously, these are things that fly. They don't fly very, well, I mean, they fly far enough, right? But they don't fly very high. You know, obviously the idea of swarming drones attacking a flying F-35 may be part of Elon's fantasy, but it's complete nonsense. So, you know, one of the things that interest me, especially on the

Russian side, is that they seem to be doing organizational restructuring around having drone-specific commands, drone-specific formations, and possibly a drone-specific service. And that's really interesting to me. But, yeah, I'm not settled on the question of whether FPV drones, both the fiber optic or the electronic variety, constitute air power or constitute some sort of halfway bridge between air power and land power. I'm curious, your thoughts. I think to first to counter the argument from the other foreign policy guy,

if this proved, if that attack proved that air power didn't matter, then why were the targets what the targets were? Right. Right. They were, they went after strategic bombers and one of the, the radar planes as well. Right, right, right. Like all these things that helped make Russian air power possible. So, like, it sure seems to be.

matter to the Ukrainians. I think, like, just thinking about it, I think it, I think it may be infantry. Because it's in kind of their space. It's right above their heads. It's kind of, it's kind of, I've often heard it described more as like a piece of artillery. It is not going so far up into the air that maybe you're not even seen by your opponent unless you've got, like, specialized devices. and like it is being

controlled on the ground by, but I mean, so is a drone pilot, like if they're in you know, a box in New Mexico piloting something across, you know. So yeah, that is but there's just something about it when I imagine the combat

space that it is part of the infantry because you've got these, like if you can shoot it out of the sky with a shotgun, you know, that's, that makes it a different thing. I think. But maybe it is,

it's a totally new category that resists being easily put into one of our existing paradigms. Now, I would love to hear from, I would love to hear from folks. You know, this is a time, I really enjoyed my,

my time at the Army War College. I would love to hear from some infantry officers about what they think drones are. Right. I mean, you know, evidently, we've really, evidently,

at some higher levels. We're still really struggling with the FPV in the U.S. Army, maybe a little bit less so in the Marines. But I would love to hear how they think and how they make arguments one way or the other about what these things are. Because I think you can definitely say, like, this is eyes of the infantry. These are infantrymen killing other infantrymen with a weapon. Not a gun, not light artillery. But beyond that, it feels like something that's fundamentally, you know, fundamentally. fundamentally an infantry problem. Right. Yeah, I mean, a bullet flies through the air, too, right? And it's not, you wouldn't call a bullet air power. Right, right, exactly. And to me, it just seems like another tool in the toolkit for, yeah, for infantrymen to hit each other. And it's, well, I was going to say, like, the targets often aren't like big strategic assets.

But again, Ukraine just did just do that with that PV drones. So, like, you, it does happen. But typically it is, you know, these kinds of back and forth between, infantrymen. What problems are you seeing the army have with integrating drones? So this is mostly secondhand, but in fact, it's almost all secondhand, just sort of a general, sort of a belief that the U.S. Army will mostly be able to solve the problem of FPB drones with electronic warfare, which is a little bit true, but the right. Russians have solved that problem and the Ukrainians have solved that problem. And, you know,

from what I understand, like, people just, and I've explained this to my students. Like, and you have to explain like several times. No, they really are fiber optic cables, right? They really do have fiber optic cables because the students will just like, how does that even make any sense? It just drags it behind. Yeah, kind of. I mean, that's, that's what it does, right? Yeah, explain these because it's super, this is super fascinating. And some listeners may have not seen these or heard of this? Yeah, I mean, these drones that don't rely upon satellite or direct radio connection, but that literally are like wire controlled, right?

They are like wire controlled torpedoes, right, with just extremely light fiber optic cable that goes off for kilometers, right? And it just seems so unbelievable, but it solves fundamentally the jamming and electronic warfare problems, right? Because, you know, you have to come up with new ways of cutting the fiber optic cable to solve solve the problem. But, you know, it's a really innovative way of fundamentally solving how do you make drones work in an incredibly dense electronic, you know, where orders and commands and information just can't be relayed because there's just so much stuff in the air. And, you know, again, I wish I was

in better conversation with a lot of army people. And I would love to know exactly, like, how are you guys thinking about dealing with these. That's not EW, because EW doesn't work. So, yeah. Yeah, a lot of the things that Russians are coming up with are pretty fascinating. My favorite is like custom reloads

of shells where they'll kind of make like blowos out of like shotgun shells or load weird shot into it to kind of get a spread to try to to hit the rotors. But even then it is a little it's not a great.

It's not a perfect solution. And the other interesting one I've heard, and this is a defense startup here in the U.S., so who knows how well this would actually work. It's one of those kinds of things. It is a custom stock and then a little computer that sits on a, like where you would put a scope. And that custom computer watches the skies, and it calculates the trajectory of the drone. for you and then the stock has like servos and like it kind of like you're pulling the trigger but it kind of does the aiming. So like you would have a, you would be able to use this computer to

perfectly pick your shot basically. And that's one of those things like all this stuff is just in testing. But it's bad. And there's 10,000 big clunky weird bazookas with four different prongs on the front of it that they say will jam, you know, whatever out of the air, etc. right? Yeah, I mean, one of the things that's, yeah, it is a terrible human tragedy, right? But, you know, the Russian military organizations for the longest time have this reputation as being great learning organizations, right? And I suppose you could make the argument, well, it's because they're so terrible when they start out. Right, but that they have to be great.

But, you know, you go through enough time and you watch these organizations and how rapidly they change. and evolve under characteristics of conflict. And you also kind of admit to yourself, well, and the Ukrainian army is basically a Russian army too, right? And so what you really have are these two outstanding learning organizations just changing the way war is fought and changing the way the battlefield looks continuously over three years. And that's just fascinating. For someone who's really interested in organizational learning, it's absolutely fascinating to watch. I would say that's the nature of all, it's not just them, it's all con.

Well, I mean, maybe America doesn't always learn so great when it's in the field. But, you know, I would say that that's the nature of a lot of conflict is you don't know, you don't really know how well these weapon systems are going to work until they're actually put to the test on the battlefield. And then I keep thinking about that every time I see a new pitch from a startup that's trying to sell a solution, a counter-UIV solution. or this new SDI thing. There's a lot of people in the United States making an awful lot of money selling weapons systems that they probably pray to God will never have to find out if they work or not. Right, right, exactly. Yeah, I have one more thing here.

Sort of going back and talking about how successful this Israeli campaign has been. I am certain that the Iranians right now are working very hard on creating, you know, what is this? What did the Ukrainians call the operation? It was some really awesome. Oh, Spider's Web, right? Operation Spider's Web. I am sure that the Iranians are working right now on creating Operation Spiders Web type utility, right? That they can export to the militias that they still control, the militias that they still have.

an association with because no matter how fantastic all the Israeli planes are, they have to land somewhere, right? And Israel is not a big place. And so, you know, it's really, really outstandingly impressive that the Ukrainians were able to get these capabilities so deep into Russia, but you don't have to get it deep into Israel to have some of these same effects where $90 million of F-35 disappears under a few drones, right, that land on it and that explode. That, I'm sure the Israelis have also thought about it, right? That has to keep people in Israel up at night, right? This idea that there's going to be these, you know, swarms of drones being launched

off of flatbed trucks. They're going to try to destroy the foundations of Israeli air power at the beginning of the next conflict. That makes me wonder if their missile defense systems, like what their counter drone systems look like if they have them. And like, is the, could their missile defense systems factor in, just knowing what I know about them, it doesn't seem like they could, like factor in these small FPV drones that are kind of flying below their sight line, right? Right. Right. I mean, it's curvature of the earth. And if you know they're coming, that's one thing. But the whole point here is that you don't know that they're coming.

Well, then you've got to have, you have, for them to pull that off, I think you'd have to have more faith in the Iranian intelligence apparatus than I perhaps have. So it doesn't seem like they've been doing so hot the last few years. All right, I think we covered everything. Do you have anything to plug? Do you think there's anything we should,

is there anything else about air power you think the audience should know before we bow out? I mean, nothing off the top of my head. I have been considering writing, like I think I said at the beginning, going back to the American prospect, which is not a magazine which is really known for its defense coverage, but I published an initial article on abolishing the Air Force, I think, in 2008. And I've considered going back and seeing, you know, could we, because one of the reviewers for the book sort of very clearly said, this will never happen. if it does happen, then this will be the book that did it and it will be famous forever. If it doesn't happen and it will never happen, the book will always be useful, right? Because there will always be in Air Force, right? And so I might want to revisit that in article length form.

I think that's true, actually, sorry, that probably will never happen because these things, short of some sort of horrifying event that makes us realize we need to give more control over the air powers to the individual branches. Like, especially in this country, these things kind of have this way of just moving forward and growing and acquiring more and more. Robert, thank you so much for coming on Angry Planet and walking us through this. Well, thank you for having me. That's all for this week, Angry Planet listeners. As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. created by myself and Jason Fields.

If you like the show, please go to angry planetpod.com. Kick us $9 a month. You get early access to the mainline episodes, and they are all commercial free. We will be back again very soon with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.