Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 3/5/26 Robert Pape on the Limits of Air Power

Episode Date: March 8, 2026

Scott interviews author and scholar Robert Pape about the insights he’s gained from his decades of extensive research into the strategic effectiveness of air power in war. Pape argues that, while modern precision bombs are remarkable at carrying out their tactical functions, they alone are not enough to win wars. And further, the obsession with tactical bombing campaigns can distract decisionmakers from the political dynamics that primarily determine how wars end. Discussed on the show: Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War by Robert A. Pape The Escalation Trap Robert A. Pape is Professor of Political Science and Director of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats and the author of Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War. Follow him on Twitter @ProfessorPape Audio cleaned up with the Podsworth app: https://podsworth.com Use code HORTON50 for 50% off your first order at Podsworth.com to clean up your voice recordings, sound like a pro, and also support the Scott Horton Show! For more on Scott's work: Check out The Libertarian Institute: https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott's other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott's books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/47jMtg7 (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/3tgMCdw Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/3HRufs0 Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott’s full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Incorporated https://rrbi.co Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.com You can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/https://scotthortonshow.com or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest. Reporting to the American people, what's going on in this country. It's the babies I make it. We're dealing with Hitler Revisited. This is the Scott Horton Show, Libertarian Foreign Policy, mostly. When the president visit, that means that it is not illegal. We're going to take out seven countries in five years. They don't know what the fuck they're doing.

Negotiate now. End this war. And now, here's your host. Scott Porton. All right, you guys, on the line here, I've got Robert A. Pape. He is a professor at the University of Chicago, or at least the last time I talked to him. Okay, good, still there. Still there.

Yep. And so we all know him because he's in my books. And fools, Aaron, and enough already. And from his own great books, dying to win and cutting the fuse about the strategic logic of suicide terrorism in the war on terrorism and all that. for that, his scholarship was on air power and its efficacy or lack thereof. And the book is called Bombing to Win. Ah, you see where Dying to Win came from there. Exactly right.

So, boy, now that I think about it, we've been doing this about 20 years. So welcome back to the show, Bob. How are you? Yes, bringing the band back together. And I'm sorry to say, in a usual situation that we're heading Southass. Yeah, I know. know it. So, well, I think if the Pentagon's numbers are to be believed, they are extremely capable, the Air Force and the Navy, of firing missiles from either, you know, ships or from planes

and putting firepower on targets and destroying a lot of them in large numbers. And I think they're saying they've already dropped as many bombs as the first Gulf of. on Iran here? Yeah, by the day, we go into the details. That was a 39-day war, but we'll get to the details, yeah. Yeah, okay, well, anyway,

at maybe the rate, whatever it was, hopefully more smart bombs than dumb bombs then. I know it was like 92% dumb bombs. They dropped then and pretended they were all laser guided and whatever for the PR. Anyway, the point being that if one were a Navy aviator

commander or if one were an Air Force general, one might think that like, hell yeah, we can do anything with our awesome jets and their awesome ability to put firepower on targets. So my question of you is, what's your problem if you think that there's anything that they cannot do with these ultra-sophisticated airplanes that they have and cruise missiles that they fire. Well, see, this exactly was the puzzle that got me into studying air power in the first place. I had no military background. I was in the 1980s, and I want to know why we lost the Vietnam War with all the military power, G&P, all the technology, all the air power advantage. And in fact, we've had air power advantages at every single conflict we have for so long. We can't even

imagine a conflict where we don't have the air power advantage. And the bottom line is that that grossly misses the core issue. You see, when we talk about air power, we tend to talk about bombs destroying targets. That's the tactical effectiveness of air power. Well, what I discovered is that you can be really quite highly tactically effective. and lose the war and be strategically ineffective. So in the case of the Vietnam War, I'll just pick it since we started with that one.

There was the two famous 242 Joint Chiefs target set. These are the most critical targets and are going to destroy all the economic power, all the industrial power, all the military power in North Vietnam. We destroyed all but a teeny number five of those 242 targets here in a campaign called Rollin. thunder. We kind of rolled through them all, and that did not stop us from losing that war big

time. The way I like to say is we, and others, too, we never lost the battle. We just lost the war. And the problem is politics. The problem is our enemies, no, they are weaker. They often don't want to go up and set peace battles against us because we're the big Goliath, and they're always the David. So they're looking for a way, a different strategy of the week like David. They're looking for a way to beat us, and it's usually the long war. That's usually the key thing. And so the issue is how do they survive that opening? They plan for it.

They expect it. And then what do they do? Well, this is what you saw in Vietnam. And now this is what you've seen in numerous precision guided air campaign since that we haven't done so well in. And now what you're seeing is something quite similar just in the opening days. And Scott, I've got a new term for it. I put it on the escalation trap. I call it the smart bomb trap.

And it's because the idea that the smart bombs are near 100% tactically effective is mesmerizing. And it gets decision makers to take their eye off the politics of the problem. And that is the trap. The trap is now you're, you're trapped in the politics and you can't like escalation dominance your way out of it. Certainly not without a pretty long costly campaign. You might ultimately win. It's not all you would get an L every time, but it ends up being a lot more costly and a lot

more politically costly. Yeah. Well, so in Iraq War I, they did really bomb the hell out of Saddam Hussein's army I don't remember the exact, you know, famously the ground war was 100 hours. I think it was like two weeks of bombing. 30 days of bombing and four days of the ground war. This is got to remember, Scott, this is what I live in this stuff. So when I talked for the U.S. Air Force, it was the pilots who had just bombed at.

I was at Max War Force Base. I was, you know, buried in all the data and the sortie runs and everything. I watched all the videos from the gun camera video. So I know this like the back of my hand, and you're quite right. We bombed the bejeezes out of Saddam Hussein's regime. And the original plan was called Instant Thunder. It's supposed to be a six-day air war, three days really, but a six-day air war to defeat Saddam by regime change with air power alone.

And the original plan was a 94 targets. I remember 242 targets. They wanted 94 targets. Well, what we did in three days is we almost tripled the number of regime targets we hit from the original plan. You turn to U.S. Intel lose. They're going to find more targets. We bombed them viciously, those regime targets. And you know what?

That did not stop the Scud missiles. That did not stop the need for that ground war. And it didn't stop even the Shia uprising we called for. When we, after we took Kuwait, President Bush the first call for the war, Shia to rise up, much like Trump did. And then he had to stand by and in 24 hours, Saddam piled the bodies in the streets. That's what happened to that Shia uprising.

And that was after 39 days of bombing and four days of a ground war. So it's really pretty difficult to have air power redo regime change. This is really up against one of historically most difficult problems there is in military. But I have to say, though, I mean, the legend of Iraq War I is different from your book, Bob. You know, the legend of a Rock War I was the airpower went in there, just as I kind of repeated. The air power went in there, upon the crap out of their armored divisions and whatever. And then they sent in Colonel McGregor and McMaster and Davis to go in there and clean up the remains with their tank divisions, which was such a short thing.

And after all, like, it's easy for me to imagine anyway, because Iraq is a giant flat desert that America had no problem locating their old Soviet tank divisions and blasting the crap out of them. There must have been some damage done there. So, Scott, my book is not saying air power always fails. It fails alone, especially against leadership. If you combine air and ground power together,

now you have what I call in my work hammer and end them. That's a different story, you see. So that's what you're explaining, what you're explaining there. But I just want to also say that first Gulf War, people may wonder, is it really worth paying that much attention to a 1991 war? Well, that still is where Stratas just cut their teeth. And that's still fighting right now. He just mentioned the Shiite uprising then.

I mean, this is the same. We've been bombing Iraq for 35 years now. So it really is, Scott. So you're talking about what is the actual place to go to study the precision revolution. And at the time, I was teaching for the U.S. Air Force. I had a clearance. And I was involved in these big debates on bombing strategy in Bosnia. You see.

And if you look at that, the actual targets in what's called deliberate force in 95 that ended the Bosnian Civil War, You'll see that's hammering anvil, like I'm saying, not strategic, bombing, all-law, leadership, targeting. That was a battle. Classified battles here that you may never hear the light of day on Easter, no less. This was really of the first order battle at that time. Because as you're saying, there was not just the PR war, but there was a fair bit of confusion about what actually won the 91 war. And that mattered because it was going to matter. Could you actually end the Bosnian Civil War?

You see, so it wasn't just his. And they lied about Bosnia and Kosovo and the effect of that air war there. So I don't know what they, you know, you guys had at your classified briefings. But if you go and look, you can see where Milosevic was already determined to make a deal before they started their campaign. And then Richard Holbrook climbed down about 10 rungs on that ladder and gave the Bosnian Serbs way more than they were going to get under any of the previous deals. And they also sideline the Bosnian Serbs and let Milosevic deal on their behalf.

So they can give credit to Airpower all they want. I think you're right. But let me fill in a little bit of the blanks here. So you see the big, your listeners will see the picture, which you probably know, which is what happened in 95 wasn't just air power. There was a Muslim-Croatian ground offensive that combined. with American airpower. Now, what happened when Holbrook wrote his book,

The End of the War, is he kind of quietly downplayed that part of the Muslims. Because, you see, this is what we do when we tell our stories. We often, and this is why there's a real confusion for would be, you know, future general. So I was teaching that kind of folks here in the military. And the problem is, it's not good enough to have that BS level, PR level that's self-serving.

The problem here as a future general will see it is, they're on the hook and they will lose big time if they lose that war by getting the story wrong. So we actually spend a fair bit of time with that, but you're right. If you just go and try to get like the first level into this, you're going to run into the PR battles here all the time because Kiss and Tell Books are always trying to get the next bigger job.

And that is true. and it's a problem. And fortunately, I'm very happy at the University of Chicago. I don't want a bigger, better job. I've got the best job in the world at the University of Chicago. And I've had that job for a long time now. I'm very happy. You know, they always said, Scott, you keep drinking that much coffee.

You're going to turn into a cup of coffee. And then it finally happened. I am coffee now. And if you go to Scott Horton.org slash coffee, you two can get Scott Horton's show flavored coffee. branded coffee there. It's Ethiopian mixed with Sumatran blended coffee. It's so good, and I have some of it right here. In fact, I'm drinking my Libertarian Institute mug, you can see. This is how I wake up in the morning, and this is how I stay awake in the afternoon. And if I was a drunk,

it would be how I get home from the bar at night. So I sound advice to you guys there, you know, take an Uber. Artisan Coffee. Get it. They hate Starbucks because Starbucks, well, first of all, doesn't taste that great. And then also, they support the war party. But Moondos Artisan Coffee does not. They support peace. So check us out at Scott Horton.org slash coffee. So tell me, though, Bob, so is it then that sort of the myth of Iraq War I and the myth of Bosnia, they help inform the strategy in Kosovo, which is we can win this war from 60,000. and we'll just fall in a bunch of cardboard tank. That's exactly what happened, Scott, and I interviewed almost everybody related to that, except Holbrook, who wouldn't talk to me. But here's the thing.

Holbrook had a team, okay? So you know these names, Richard Holbrook. So your listeners can Google. He had a team around him in 95. They then said they won the war with their power alone, totally dissing the Muslim Croatian ground offensive, which in my reading, and I think what I hear from you too,

did 70% of the work. Okay, so I wouldn't give the American... Or your capitulation to the Bosnian Serbs on 10 things that they had previously held out on, too. I mean, that's the... Yeah, I'll give you a little bit of a clue, right? Holbrook rolling over while he talked... Well, but then the price was paid in March 99

because they hoodwinked Bill Clinton. And I know I talked to... And what happened is, Bill Clinton was told strike 51 targets in and around Belgrade in March 99. Holbrook met with Milosevic just before that bombing run, much like you had the negotiators here. And Holbrook said, you understand Mr. President Milosevic, we will bomb you. And Milosevic said, yes, Ambassador Holbrook, you're going to bomb me and I'm sure you'll bomb my house, which is what we did. So he was fully aware, no, none of this miscalculation stuff also that is totally about PR again is going on here.

This is very, very clear-eyed business. But the problem is that Bill Clinton was being told that they had won with air power alone. He's super smart guy, but he doesn't have time to do, you know, all the deep dives. And then what happens is they didn't prepare for the worst case, the worst case. And the worst case was after that three-day air war, they had no ability to stop Milosevic on the ground. Remember, there's no ground anything here. And Milosevic sends 30,000 ground troops into Kosovo,

expels a million Kosovo from the province. That's 50% of the population. Thousands are killed. This goes on for almost three months. It's a disaster for NATO. This is where things go awry with Russia, which is still the case today. That was the break point with Russia. So this was not just a minor little thing.

And so it really shows how you get these wars wrong. You're setting yourself up for failure in the next war. So the idea, oh, yeah, I'm just going to exaggerate a little bit what I did in the war. No, this is the problem with we can't live in a war. world where we don't have at least debate. And that's what I was fortunate enough with the Air Force in the 90s. I just got to give credit here. Chief of staff of the Air Force himself on an Easter with said, we're going to have a classified trial on Pate's arguments here. And I guarantee you, the two-star generals that had to sit there in judgment give up their Easter with their families,

were not happy about this. So as much as I criticize the Air Force, it was, there was some real, something I saw that when real lives were on the line, I saw some good there. So I'm not telling you about that's true all the time. I understand. It was true in that case.

Yeah. His name was, oh, anyway, okay, I told you a lot of stories here. It's all right. No, I like this stuff. Yeah, I mean, another thing is, and this goes to the future lessons, all based on these three major wars of the 1990s,

was also in 1999, they capitulated to Milosevic, and they repealed and canceled the secret appendix B, where he would have to allow America to occupy, NATO to occupy the entire Yugoslavia. And that's what ended the war. They did not win that war at all. He was already willing to sign the deal

without the appendix B, which they added as the poison pill. And so, but again, you have so much value here, Scott. Well, I wrote a book about all this stuff. Yeah, it's really important that we do this. And by the way, that's why I had half of a book written called The Smart Bomb Trap, which I've been so busy writing other stuff, if you see in my work in the last 10 years.

And so that's why I decided, before this war started, I saw a comment. And I put that out on X, which a lot of people I could tell appreciate it. And then what happened is I decided, what am I sitting there? on all this material for. And so if you go to the substack, you're going to see these are a lot of things that were portions of chapters and things like that that I dusted off.

You know, and now with substack, which we didn't have 15 years ago, you can really communicate. It's like a better X. I mean, you can actually communicate with substance in ways we could only imagine before. So anyway, that's what's on that.

That's what's there. So there's big discussions of a lot of these cases et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, yeah, it's really great. And what is your substack? Is it an easy address on there? It's called the escalation trap.

The escalation. The escalation trap. It's right. That's why I had your folks put it on that banner there so that they would see it. So the audience should be able to, if I can see it, they can see it. And I think they'll go and they'll see. There's a lot of stuff there just are ready because I saw it coming. So I've been working like crazy to, again, take that old.

old stuff and get it out. Yeah. Yeah, you know, I remember in the beginning of 2009, you came on the show and you said, you know, Obama should not escalate the war in Afghanistan because he's just going to cause a campaign of suicide bombing. We've just been doing this for so long. I can't think of all these things you were right about over the times and all. It is, but we get a chance when it does go south, then to come in and explain it.

And we don't always help forever, but we do help. Like with suicide terrorism, notice that we manage for some time to keep it down, both parties. So that was quite a thing. Now, unfortunately, you got President Trump saying, starting to talk about the idea of ground forces again here. And this is just like, it's like beyond belief that we could be doing this again. But it is the case we did help for some time.

Yeah. And, you know, I think it's really important, too. and I don't know everything about Shiite Islam, but I know that there's a lot more cohesiveness and it's sort of one single religious order compared to all the different kinds of Sunnis out there with all their own kind of community-picked religious leaders and so forth. So if they declare jihad and a full fatwa,

that could be extremely disrupted, bar beyond the legions that bin Laden was ever able to stop. Well, and one of the things that's really interesting to me, I have a piece coming out in foreign affairs on Iran's horizontal escalation strategy. You'll be out on Saturday. I was actually editing it just before we came on. And what's really interesting to me is that Iran, which is Shia, is actually got quite a smart.

I don't know if it ultimately win, but quite a smart horizontal escalation strategy against the Sunni Muslim countries it's up against. And what it's doing is it's. It's taking a version of our parallel attack. These drones are precision-guided drones, and it's inflicting costs. But at the same time, it's inflicting costs. It's calling attention to Israel.

And it's calling attention to how this is a war for Israel and Israeli hegemony. Now, what that's doing is even though they're Shia, okay, this is really quite interesting. This is planting the propaganda seeds for Sunnis bottom up to start putting pressure on their regimes. You see what I mean?

This is, we've not taken seriously enough Iran's approach here in the last five days. I'm not telling you it's surely going to work, but it's certainly going to produce, it could produce a long war, which may be good enough for Iran. But it is really interesting to watch how they have smartly handled this.

Yeah. Well, you know, they're talking about there's a leak to Politico says the Pentagon is planning on the war lasting through September. So, God, you know, they're already now. Now we're in LBJ territory of Trump. So I'm literally editing this in this foreign affairs piece, okay, which is you have the Vietnam War rolling thunder. We just talked about 242 target set. And then we hit all those targets, right? And LBJ was saying, that's what we got to do. We got escalation dominance. we're going to do this. And then what happens is the TED Offensive in January 1968. And that is this giant uprising.

Again, it's kind of like horizontal escalation spreading or geographically through the south of Vietnam. And we don't actually lose a toe-to-to-battle in that situation. But it was so clear that it was going to cross this war to go on and on. we lost the political battle in the war. It became clear it was going to become a forever war. LBJ actually stepped down from running for re-election. And of course, his VP got smashed, and Richard Nixon just rode in high on the tide.

And so you could really see that this thing's going to go on until September. What's going to happen in these midterms here? I think you might end up not just having Democrats get the Senate. I wouldn't, I don't, I don't, I'm not, I'm not David Axelrod. I let him speed the predictor, but, you know, 60 seats for Democrats. I mean, maybe. We'll see. I mean, this is really that bad. Well, look, we should. Hey, guys, you know I have another podcast now, right?

Yeah, me and the great American historian, Daryl Cooper, that is Martyr Made. He's my co-host, and we host a show every Friday night. We might be switching to two days a week here sometime soon, but right now we're doing Friday nights live at 8 o'clock Eastern time on the YouTube's. Checked out our Twitter handle, Provoked Show. Well, look, we shouldn't, you know, be naive here or omit the real cynical, ugly truth behind this thing, which is the Israeli strategy, as they've explicitly said in their own press and in the financial times, is to destroy Iran and to cause a civil war between the Kurds, the Azeris, the Balukis, and the Sunni Arabs and the Shiite Persians.

and make them all murder each other, turn the place into what Syria was 15 years ago, America and Israel's. Well, turn it into a Lebanon, turn it into a Syria. And then the problem here for us, I'm talking to Canada tomorrow. Canada is asking me about, like,

what does this mean for them? And I said, well, the real issue is if it becomes this prolonged war, you're going to have a hornet's nest of terrorism. And Iran's got plenty of capability to take down aircraft. And you can already see they're perfectly focused on, on aerial, you know, what you think of this, man, and I'm sorry for my own audience. I'm a broken record about this. And I hope that this is completely stupid and off base.

I don't know, man. But the Ayatollah Ali al-Sastani, who is an Iranian, but who lives in Iraq, in Najaf, and is the most powerful, he is already outranked the Ayatollah Khomeini before his death, even though he's not the supreme leader of anything. But still, he had a higher religious. ring. And he's very old and is very cautious, right? He's not quick to anger or anything like that. However, he is the one who called George W. Push out on the carpet in January 2004 and said, I want one man, one vote. And everybody who believes in God wants one man, one vote, right? Everybody

and they all the Shiites, 60% of the population in the country went outside and said, that's right. We all want one man, one vote. And that's why they had a giant civil war and the Sunni's lost and a million people were killed. and we have a Shiite dominated Iraq today is because essentially he enslaved George W. Bush that day in January 2004. He said, you want to start this war all over again? And Bush said, no, sir, I am your humble servant.

You know, history of Iraq War II there. Oh, my goodness. Opening this can of worms again. I can't believe. I keep telling my wife this, I can't believe we're opening this can't a worm again. So one more now. Obama builds the caliphate for them in Syria, but instead of taking out Assad and Damascus,

it rolls east into Western Iraq and creates the caliphate and Sax Mosul and all that in the spring, in the early summer 2014. And then the Ayatollah Sistani says, if you believe in God, I want you to grab a gun and go fight the caliphate. And in America took the Shiite side again,

which they wish they hadn't in Iraq War II, they took it again in Iraq War III to destroy the caliphate that they built and it was a little too big for their liking, I guess. So, but then my point being about this Ayatollah Sistani is that sometimes he'll say things like, look, if you believe in God, do what I say. And sometimes those things can be, there are people who need killing, including Baghdadi and his Caliphate, for example. He could say the same thing about Americans.

He could say the same thing about the West. It's a wild card. Just as you're, and I'm glad you're bringing it up, Scott. I don't care if it's a broken record. I think this is really important because, I was really struck that on Monday, President Trump was asked about worst case scenarios in the Oval Office. And his answer, I thought, was really stunning to me. I mean, the idea that the worst case is it's, you just goes back to what it was.

No, this is not that. That's just not the case. There's real dangers here. And I'm going to have more to say about that on the substack over time. It is something that we really need to understand. And it's not that we can have crystal ball. We can't really exactly predict the future. It's not quite right.

But we can do some risk assessment. We can do some trajectory analysis. So we can do a lot. And that's why you say when you bring me on, it seems a little more prescient here. And if people go to the substack, they'll see I laid out the stages of the smart bomb trap before we even bombed. And then I have another one saying, my goodness,

it's just right on schedule. And it's because we can. can we can we don't know everything in advance of course but we can know quite a bit um and i think this is a case where uh letting this thing fester letting all these uh different actors now get at it the idea the curds we're going to somehow win this with the curds when you've got 18 million curds with turkey and turkey's been going out of it with the curds for so on the the the the kind of different genies we're letting out of the bottle here oh my goodness yeah and including al-Qaeda and the Islamic State that are still not gone and are still not done killing Americans either.

Even if we're taking their side against the Shiites, that has never bought their loyalty this whole time still. Yeah. Yeah. We help them against the Serbs and we help them against the Russians and that didn't prevent September 11th. In fact, it only helped cause it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

I think you just got your finger right on it here. And I think that it really is something that we've got to, we've, it's, it hasn't been a lot of time for the public, but it's becoming enough time, you see? So we didn't have any much discussion about this before, and I know because I was following this so closely. And then now that it's happened, it was also kind of a shock in the first couple of days here. I think you could see the news media.

They just totally, you didn't know what to say. I mean, they're just in shock because it's totally blindsided everybody who in Washington and thought they knew they had the fingers on the false. but now things are starting and you're starting to hear a little bit more actual analysis and where it's really starting and this has often been true in London.

So I was just on TRT here and it was really impressive to see their coverage because just as you go on the programs they put you on for like 15 minutes to hear the run up to you, that kind of thing. And I just have to tell you and this has happened in the other words

we've been involved in with Scott where we've been talking. I'm really impressed here that there are international that start, and then that tends to seep into the Americans slowly and slowly. It's too slow for me and you too, I'm sure. But it is there. And I think this is now also, we're in the age of substack now. We're in the age of X and these things interact, which I'm learning.

I mean, who would have thought I would do threads on X? You know, seriously, my wife is looking. at me like, what is a thread? I know, I've seen you on there in recent days and I'm like, all right, it's Bob Pape's big comeback, man. And I'm just telling you, it's because of COVID. You know, people don't, well, we do a whole show

on us. COVID just put me more in tune with things online. And you had to be here. Right? I did a little bit before, like everybody else, I could kind of fumble and Zoom here and there, but now we're on teams and Zoom and this and that. And in fact, when I

work with our research team, the center, I have the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, we now could be in the same room and we look at ourselves through the computers. Yeah. You see, it's stunning to me, but if I want to do research now, I just have to be. And it's a race between me and my 40 and 50-year-old researchers about who's going to learn this or that next.

All right. Well, man, it's so great. great to have you back here and to see you out there in the public and spreading your wisdom around about this war. I'm sure I'll probably be begging you to come back on the show. Oh, you don't, because that'll mean it'll be good. Yeah. Oh, yeah, the bad news is I expect to talk to you against too. Yeah, exactly.

But it's so great to talk to it. So congratulations to everything that's going with you. Thank you. All right. Well, thanks very much, Bob. Everybody, the book is bombing to win in the substack. is the escalation trap. The Scott Horton show is brought to you

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