English transcript

I have studied every air campaign since World War I. This is my specialty.

I spent three years teaching conventional targeting strategy for the US Air Force.

I've studied leadership decapitation in detail. I've modeled the bombing of Fordow,

regime change in Iran for 20 years.

So this is something I know quite a bit about. And literally 10 days ago,

I started on Substack "The Escalation Trap," because I worried

exactly watching the armada being built,

we would fall into the escalation trap. And that's what's happened.

We are now in the grip of the escalation trap,

or the smart bomb trap to be more precise. Where the illusion of the

100% tactical success, which is real...

it's the...

the success of the bombs blowing up the targets is not false.

It creates the illusion of control of escalation.

And that is the smart bomb trap, and that is what has gripped us right now.

And the problem is that

once we drop those bombs and once we announce regime change is our goal,

and we had no other tools, trying to do this from the air,

this has never worked in over a hundred years.

This is not

like it works sometimes or rarely works. I'm choosing my words carefully.

President Trump is up against the weight of history here.

And it's the illusion of the smart bombs being near perfect in destroying

their target.

And the problem is when those bombs fall,

they inject... they change politics

in the target. They inject nationalism into the regime,

they inject nationalism into the society, and they essentially

fuse the regime and society against the air power attacker.

And this is what you are seeing.

Because now society and the regime are taking more risky steps.

And they do things that no one anticipated before.

And that failure to anticipate the worst case, that has happened numerous

times with smart bombs,

that's just what happened in the last 36 hours.