Robert Pape

That's what I'm telling you.

Now, when we had the Vietnam War, this was a material disaster, but it was a disaster for our power beyond simply the material consequences of what happened in Vietnam because that small country beat us.

In fact, what started me on my quest to understand air power as a dissertation topic in the 1980s, I wanted to know how we could lose to such a small country.

I was going to go into the Foreign Service.

I was going to become in the Reagan administration.

I was going to go get a Ph.D.

And, you know, I was I told you a liberal Republican.

Reagan's basically a liberal Republican.

He might not admit it, but that but he is.

And I was going to go and try to spread democracy here, but I wanted to know, if I'm going to do this, how did we lose?

Because, after all, I don't want to lose here.

That's not the point.

But what you saw then is the military, not just the Reagan administration.

We upended ourselves in the military.

That school that I taught at at the Air Force, it was a brand-new school.

It started in 1991.

by Larry Welch, Chief of Staff of the Air Force.

And he told me, and other four-star generals directly told me, because they wanted to fix the problem they saw in Vietnam is airmen did not know air strategy.

And I was being hired because my book, my work, they wanted some civilians.

Well, they couldn't find any who had studied air strategy.