“We don’t have a strategy to win.”
Air power expert, Professor Robert Pape (University of Chicago), says air power campaigns don’t effect regime change.
He warns of the “smart bomb illusion,” where precision targeting gives the illusion of control over escalation. We are distracted by the success of precision air strikes, but they cause escalation, and we don’t see the long war coming.
Acknowledgement
- Robert Pape, The Escalation Trap: Victory Narrative vs. Escalation Reality – When regimes are decapitated from the air, wars rarely end. They widen.
Colin Twiggs is a former investment banker with almost 40 years of experience in financial markets. He co-founded Incredible Charts and writes the popular Trading Diary and Patient Investor newsletters.
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Does Prof. Pape have any better ideas? (I couldn’t find any in the referenced essay.) Or is he suggesting that we should have sat on our hands while the mullahs manufactured 100 ballistic missiles per month?