I Simulated The Iran War for 20 Years (Part 1)

Speaker 2:You've been running simulations on a war with Iran.

Speaker 1:Yep, every strategy for 20 years, and it's playing out right now. So I can tell you that we are losing control of the situation. Like, we don't know where that nuclear material is.But they have the material for 16 nuclear bombs. And we've given them every incentive to develop them.

Speaker 2:Professor Robert Pape might be the single most important, credible person we all need to listen to right now.

Speaker 1:The supreme leader that we took out was against nuclear weapons. The new supreme leader, he's way more aggressive. He's advised two decades of presidents in the White House.President Trump is really stuck, but he thrives in chaos.

Speaker 2:And spent 30 years building the curriculum that trains the Air Force for the exact type of war that's taking place now in Iran. And one of the most mind-blowing things I've learned is that there are three stages to this conflict. Unfortunately, Professor Robert Pape, who has two decades of being correct with his predictions, gives a 75% chance that Trump is about to escalate to stage three.In this episode, we're going to explain exactly what this means. Guys, I've got a quick favour to ask you. We're approaching a significant subscriber milestone on this show.And roughly 69% of you that listen and love the show haven't yet subscribed for whatever reason. If there was ever a time for you to do us a favour, if we've ever done anything for you, given you value in any way, it is simply hitting that subscribe button. And it means so much to myself, but also to my team, because when we hit these milestones, we go away as a team and celebrate.And it's the thing, the simple, free, easy thing you can do to help make this show a little bit better every single week. So that's a favour I would ask you. And if you do hit the subscribe button, I won't let you down and we'll continue to find small ways to make this whole production better.Thank you so much for being part of this journey. It means the world. And yeah, let's do this.Professor Robert Pape, what the hell is going on in the world? Now, I should ask, I should ask first, who are you and what have you spent the last several decades of your life studying and doing? And how does that relate to what's happening in the world right now?

Speaker 1:We are going through a crisis, more and very intense right now, but it's a crisis that we have been through before. 20 years ago with the Iraq war, even before that, we saw the bombing of Qaddafi, we saw the reactions there. Now, I have been studying military strategy, air power, international terrorism, now terrorism inside the United States, and also political violence in the United States.It's not related to particular groups. So I've been studying political violence for 40 years.

Speaker 2:What is the headline that people need to be aware of when you've looked at 30 years of these types of wars?

Speaker 1:That bombs don't just hit targets, they change politics. What does that mean? That means that before the bombs fall, and even as the bombs are falling now, we tend to focus on the tactical success of bombing.We tend to ask, did the bombs hit the targets? And it's, with the smart bomb age, it's almost mesmerising. They hit the target and destroy the target.Crater dirt, crater concrete, destroy buildings 90% of the time. The problem is, wars are not just about the hardware. They're not just about the military operation of putting a bomb on a target.They're about politics. And when the bombs start to fall, the politics in both the target, the enemy, change. And the politics in the attacker, the initiator, change.And that threshold is the beginning of what I'm calling the escalation trap. Because you get at stage one, tactical success, often. What's missing here is the next consideration, which is politics.

Speaker 2:Who have you advised? And at what level have you advised them on strategy, war, etc, etc?

Speaker 1:So, when I finished my PhD, right away, we started to fight the First Gulf War, which was an all-air power war. And I found my work from the 1980s suddenly more relevant than ever. I was in the Washington Post, USA Today, Frontline, designing the stories, because we didn't have the talking military heads at the time.And then I get a call from the US Air Force. And they're asking me to come in and help, not just teach, but to build the curriculum. Then what happens as time goes on, I end up advising every White House from 2001 to 2024, including the first Trump White House.

Speaker 2:I also heard that you've been running simulations on a war with Iran.

Speaker 1:Yep, the last class of every strategy for 20 years. In fact, we did it just last May, just before we started the bombing. And 90 minutes.The class goes a whole quarter, strategy in all kinds of different ways. We ended with the bombing of Iran. And what did that mean?That meant we took out the whole target. We have the target set laid out. We have the attack plans.We really go through the bombing of Natanz, Fordow, Esafan. There's a number of these facilities and so forth. Then we look at what's going to happen.And what you see right away is 90 plus percent, those B-2s are going to destroy those targets.

Speaker 2:B-2s being the aircraft.

Speaker 1:The stealthy aircraft that can penetrate the airspace. Very small risk of loss. And then you see, but we don't know where the nuclear material is.The whole point of this is not to destroy a building. It's to get at the 5%, 20%, 60% enriched uranium. That's the material for bombs.And last May, it was very clear they had the material for 16 bombs. Now, not- 16 nuclear bombs. 1-6.Nuclear bombs. Yes, nuclear bombs. Not to produce them all in a single week, but over a period of months.And then after we did that simulation, we didn't know where a single ounce was. And we weren't going to know for months after. So at the end of every, I make some predictions.I say, what's going to happen? What's going to happen is after about a year, we are going to panic because that material could be dispersed anywhere in Iran, anywhere in that country. And that country, look how big that is compared to the United States.Could be dispersed anywhere now. And how many of those are actually developing toward a bomb? We will not know.So what will we do? Regime change.

Speaker 2:From all of your years, I mean, 31 years old, you start teaching about air power and war in this regard, and you are 65 now. Yeah. What is the, from everything you know, 30 plus years studying this stuff, Iran, running simulations on Iran, advising the White House, being a master and probably arguably the most informed person in the United States right now about air attacks, like the one the US performing on Iran.What is the headline that you're trying to send to the world at this moment in time? Like what is it we're missing? Because we're seeing Trump come out and Trump say, it's going well, everything's amazing.We've taken out all their guys. What are we missing?

Speaker 1:We're missing that we're stuck in a trap of our own making. I'll explain what that trap is. But the key consequence of the trap is we're losing control.We are losing control of the situation. And what you were seeing with President Trump is he's trying to regain control. Now, the problem is that starting not just a week of Saturday, but starting back in June when we took out Natanz Fordow, we started to lose control.And what are we losing control of? Knowing where that nuclear material is. And we now have civilian satellites, and you can see them moving things.What would they be moving around the nuclear areas? I wonder. You think they're moving the, you know, what are they moving here?It's most likely going to be that nuclear material because their plan there, you can see they have prepared for this war just as we have, except they've been preparing for how to be resilient, how to now lash back in increasingly aggressive ways. They are winning the escalation part of the war. And that's not an accident.This you can see coming in stages.

Speaker 2:But for anyone that doesn't know, we've got leaders that have different levels of sort of information and knowledge here. I'm going to try and summarise this and butcher it in the most indelicate way I possibly can. So earlier last year, last year, the United States suspected that Iran were very close to enriching uranium.They're at 60 percent. They're at 60 already. If they get to 90 percent, they have a bomb.

Speaker 1:Yes, but possibly even with the 60 percent, Stephen, it depends on just how good their scientists are, and we're not really sure. So we're at 60 percent. We're already very worried.You go to 90, it's a gimme.

Speaker 2:And then the United States dropped these big bunker buster bombs. They flew those B-2 airplanes in, dropped these bombs, smashing up the site. And then it felt like it was over.And then the United States went into negotiations with Iran to try and get some kind of deal done.

Speaker 1:To get the material we didn't get. You see, why are we even talking to them? If this has really obliterated the program, why are we bothering to talk to them?What exactly are we talking about here? Do you notice the inconsistency here? So when you say we thought it was over, that's the public.Okay, now the public, you need to understand, they're very busy people. They're playing for the price of eggs. Okay, so they're not supposed to be able to be up on this.It's a good point I've never thought about. Why would we be talking to them? Why are we talking to them, you see?So right from the get-go, and by the way, all of the Israelis, we have a thing called the Defense Intelligence Agency. Their reports that were done after the bombing were leaked. And they all say the same thing, which is we created holes.We probably shook these underground chambers. We're not sure because we had no eyeballs on that. But we have no idea where that enriched uranium is.And we have good reason to worry they got them out because we actually have a satellite picture that shows two days before we bomb Fordow, there's a bunch of trucks moving stuff out. Gee, what do you think you might move out if America's about to bomb your site? Again, I don't think they're moving out the popcorn.So and it's pretty, this material can be moved in what look like large scuba tanks. They call them scuba tanks, but I try to show pictures of this too. They're actually like as large as this table.So you need basically trucks, trucks like that satellite photography shows that they took out. So we can't say for sure. But what you see is these are the indications that you worry they've dispersed the material even before we hit the site.And then we attack.

Speaker 2:Yeah. The United States attacks in February, February 2026.

Speaker 1:Yeah, February 2026, February 2028. We start again, this time with regime change. Notice we don't go even after the fizzle, the nuclear material.We don't know where it is.

Speaker 2:So for the average person, the average person would think if you take out the supreme leader, then the war is over. Drop the bomb on the person and the war is complete.

Speaker 1:Yeah. So let's talk about your Jenga thing here because what I find, Stephen, so keep in mind, I am advising, teaching some of the most brilliant minds in the country. Now, a lot of these smart people, though, they don't know that they've been given like one-inch deep briefings, maybe even one-sentence briefings.So their image is often like this, and it's wrong. This is what they think the regime looks like. And they think that because they've been given, they basically have been consuming probably for years, one or two sentences about the structure.They know there's a supreme leader. They might know there's nuclear facilities, missiles come in. And so it looks like, oh, my goodness gracious, that if you could just simply take out the right node, you would be able to make this whole thing fall down.OK. But that's the wrong image, Stephen. This is the way smart people think.The problem is this is a false image of most regimes, even the bad ones, and certainly the Iranian regime. Let me just focus on the Iranian regime. The Iranian regime is more like a matrix.It's more, it's not brittle the way this is. So you can keep trying to pull things out, but with a matrix, or I think the corporate structures now are built to be adaptive, to change, because you have so many changes that happen. The structure needs to adapt to change.That is basically the structure of revolutionary regimes going back to before World War I. OK, I want to ask a dumb question. Yeah.

Speaker 2:When they took out the supreme leader in Iran, who's going to give out the instructions?

Speaker 1:The adaptive system adapts and fills in the holes. It fills in the holes usually with what's left. And in this case, the supreme leader that we took out, this particular hole, this was the guy who had two fatwas.They're called, these are religious edicts. It's like a people edict against nuclear weapons. It's a religious, he's the leader of essentially the religion, a little bit like the Shia pope.And he is actually issuing religious doctrine, and that's called a fatwa. And as a religious doctrine, he issued two that said Iran should not have nuclear weapons.