“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 founded PVT Capital (AFSL number 546090), which provides income and growth strategies to wholesale clients.
Colin also co-founded Incredible Charts and writes the popular Patient Investor newsletter.
Using a top-down approach, Colin identifies macro trends in the global economy and then combines fundamental and technical analysis to evaluate opportunities in sectors that stand to benefit.
Focusing on interest rates and financial market liquidity as primary drivers of the economic cycle, he warned of the 2008/2009 and 2020 bear markets well ahead of actual events.
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?