Introduction
This report examines whether a sustained U.S.–Israeli air campaign can topple Iran’s theocratic regime and neutralize its military power without a ground invasion. It first assesses historical benchmarks, showing how airpower has degraded targets yet repeatedly failed to deliver durable regime change. It then traces likely escalation pathways—through Iranian missiles, regional proxies, and contested air corridors over Syria and Iraq—highlighting how “short wars” become open‑ended. Finally, it analyzes decapitation strategies and regime resilience, arguing that even severe aerial punishment may leave an intact, embittered regime or a fragmented, unstable successor state.
A sustained U.S.–Israeli air campaign against Iran could inflict major damage on the Islamic Republic’s military, nuclear, and economic assets, but historical experience and current assessments indicate that airpower alone is highly unlikely to secure regime change or a stable, post‑theocratic political order. Across cases from World War II to Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and more recent conflicts, intensive bombing has degraded capabilities and leadership networks but has not reliably toppled entrenched regimes or produced durable, favorable political transitions without a ground presence or decisive internal uprising [1][2][3]. Airpower can destroy, delay, and disorganize; it cannot, by itself, choose or consolidate what comes next.
The emerging U.S.–Israeli concept of operations vis‑à‑vis Iran builds on recent practice. In the 2025 Twelve‑Day War, Israel—backed by U.S. strikes—crippled key nuclear facilities at Natanz, Isfahan, and Fordow, assassinated senior IRGC figures and nuclear scientists, and temporarily disrupted air defenses [4]. Subsequent, more protracted Israeli operations have extended this logic into an explicitly regime‑change–oriented campaign: sustained precision strikes on nuclear and missile infrastructure, security institutions, and senior leadership are combined with the expectation that mounting costs will erode the regime’s coercive apparatus and embolden an already restive population [1][2]. Iran’s current domestic fragility—marked by intermittent protests and apparent elite tensions—creates some plausibility for a strategy that aims to “push” a weakened system over the edge without invading [2][3].
Yet both historical benchmarks and Iran’s own characteristics cut sharply against the notion that bombing can orchestrate a controlled, pro‑Western transition. Studies of coercive air campaigns, including the often‑invoked Kosovo precedent, show that political outcomes typically hinge less on physical damage than on shifting calculations among ruling elites, the cohesion of security services, and the stance of external patrons [2][3]. In Serbia’s case, fear of isolation and eroding Russian backing may have mattered more than NATO’s bombs; in Iraq and Libya, airpower contributed to regime downfall but could not prevent fragmentation, militia rule, or extended civil conflict [2][3]. Translated to Iran, this implies that even if prolonged strikes exacerbate fractures within the clerical‑military elite, they offer no mechanism to manage succession, contain infighting among IRGC factions, or avert a slide toward state breakdown.
The contemporary U.S.–Israeli debate has gravitated toward “decapitation” as a putatively low‑cost alternative to ground invasion. Precision munitions, stealth platforms, and persistent ISR are seen as tools to eliminate top leaders, disrupt command networks, and sow confusion among mid‑level commanders [2]. However, analyses of decapitation campaigns caution that authoritarian systems often develop redundancy and depth precisely to survive such blows. Iran’s leadership has invested heavily in underground facilities, hardened and dispersed command nodes, and layered security organizations designed to preserve regime continuity under attack [2][3]. Killing or isolating senior figures might trigger chaotic power struggles, radicalize successor elites, or accelerate moves toward the very nuclear breakout the campaign aims to prevent, rather than producing a neat handover to moderates.
Domestically, the Islamic Republic has demonstrated a capacity to absorb pain and reframe external attack as proof of its revolutionary narrative. The 2025 escalation—featuring heavy Israeli strikes and the first direct U.S. attacks on Iranian soil—was premised on the assumption that external pressure plus internal dissent would fracture the system. Instead, Iran maintained significant retaliatory capacity, launching ballistic missiles at U.S. bases and Israel and signaling that additional capabilities might be held in reserve [1]. The regime gambled on Western fatigue and the mobilizing power of its “resistance” story, while Israel began to doubt the sustainability of a deterrence model reliant on repeated coercive campaigns with no clear political end state [3][4]. This dynamic echoes the “smart‑bomb trap”: political leaders come to believe precision strikes can solve fundamentally political problems, yet the adversary’s resolve hardens and strategic risks—most notably nuclear incentives—grow [2][3].
Geography and regional air defense architectures shape both operational feasibility and escalation pathways. To minimize diplomatic blowback and avoid dense, U.S.-supplied air defenses in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, the most permissive axis for repeated Israeli or joint sorties into Iran runs north through Syrian and Iraqi airspace [1]. Syria’s degraded air defenses and Israel’s positional advantages along parts of the border lower barriers to sustained operations there, while Iraq’s reliance on U.S.-provided systems and its fragmented sovereignty make its skies vulnerable as a transit corridor [1]. Over time, such routing structurally pulls Syria and Iraq deeper into the conflict, incentivizing Iranian‑aligned militias in both theaters—as well as the Houthis and Lebanese Hezbollah—to expand horizontal escalation by striking U.S. personnel, Israeli territory, and Gulf infrastructure.
Vertical escalation is also likely. Even with degraded air defenses, Iran retains various retaliatory levers: ballistic and cruise missiles, drones, attacks on shipping in the Gulf, cyber operations, and proxy warfare across multiple fronts [1][2]. As long as Tehran can continue firing missiles and suppressing domestic opposition, U.S. and Israeli air defenses and munitions stocks could be worn down, prompting politically fraught debates in Washington and Jerusalem about resupply, escalation dominance, and war aims [1]. The absence of a ground campaign does not insulate either state from mounting costs; instead, it risks an extended air‑and‑missile duel punctuated by campaigns of sabotage and proxy attacks, with periodic crises over red lines and thresholds.
The broader strategic literature on “unexpected long wars” underscores how conflicts launched as limited, predominantly aerial operations often metastasize. Political leaders in Moscow in 1979 and Washington in later decades repeatedly entered interventions expecting short, sharp campaigns, only to find themselves trapped in protracted, grinding wars amid shifting objectives and domestic fatigue [4]. In the Iran scenario, a sustained air effort is operationally plausible and initially controllable, but its political logic is open‑ended: if the regime does not fall quickly, the choice becomes one of escalation, entrenchment, or awkward de‑escalation that leaves a bloodied yet emboldened adversary in place.
Fundamentally, airpower’s strengths and limitations in Iran track a consistent pattern. A joint U.S.–Israeli campaign could:
- Severely damage nuclear fuel‑cycle facilities, missile production sites, air defenses, and key economic infrastructure, periodically setting back Iran’s regional military reach and nuclear timeline [1][2][4].
- Kill or isolate senior IRGC and political leaders, complicating command and control and imposing real costs on the regime’s inner circle [1][2].
- Undermine day‑to‑day regime capacity in some sectors, deepen elite paranoia, and intensify pressure points created by preexisting domestic discontent [2][3].
But it is unlikely to:
- Guarantee regime collapse absent parallel internal dynamics—elite defections, sustained mass mobilization—that are impossible to script from the air [1][2][3].
- Control the nature of any successor order, prevent power struggles, or forestall scenarios of state fragmentation, militia ascendancy, and possible civil war [2][3].
- Eliminate Iran’s ability to retaliate via missiles, proxies, and economic disruption in ways that could drag the United States, Israel, and neighboring states into a wider regional war [1][2][4].
Moreover, U.S. domestic politics render a large‑scale ground invasion—the historically most reliable, though costly, route to regime change—highly unlikely, pushing policymakers toward a gamble on airpower and internal forces that history suggests is uncertain at best [1][3]. Overreliance on precision strike capabilities risks obscuring the fundamentally political nature of the problem: dismantling the Islamic Republic’s hard power from the air is conceptually distinct from, and insufficient for, building a stable, legitimate post‑theocratic Iran.
Taken together, the analysis indicates that a long U.S.–Israeli air campaign could severely punish and periodically degrade Iran’s military‑nuclear complex, but without boots on the ground or a coherent strategy for post‑conflict governance, it is far more likely to yield a battered, adaptive adversary and a more volatile region than a clean regime change outcome.
Conclusion
Taken together, these sections show that a U.S.–Israeli air campaign against Iran can inflict severe military and economic damage, but cannot reliably manufacture regime change or a stable successor order. Historical benchmarks underscore airpower’s limits: it can degrade nuclear sites, air defenses, and leadership targets, yet it cannot control elite bargaining, popular mobilization, or post-collapse fragmentation. Escalation pathways run through Syria, Iraq, and proxy networks, raising the risk of a protracted regional war rather than a swift decapitation. Ultimately, betting on bombing to solve fundamentally political problems risks trading an imperfect status quo for open-ended instability.
Sources
[1] https://religionunplugged.com/news/2026/2/28/us-israeli-escalation-aims-to-topple-iran-theocracy
[2] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/israels-futile-air-war
[3] https://www.csmonitor.com/World/2026/0228/iran-trump-war-israel-missiles?icid=rss
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-Day_War
[5] https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2025/june/iran-israel-conflict-quicklook-analysis-operation-rising-lion
[6] https://www.csis.org/analysis/would-air-strikes-against-iran-work
[7] https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1032&context=poliscitheses
[8] https://mickryan.substack.com/p/iran-and-unexpected-long-wars
[9] https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/experts-react-the-us-and-israel-just-unleashed-a-major-attack-on-iran-whats-next/
[10] https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iran-strikes-decapitation.htm
[11] https://www.dohainstitute.org/en/Lists/ACRPS-PDFDocumentLibrary/from-imperial-containment-to-catastrophe-why-the-us-israeli-strategy-against-iran-collapsed.pdf
Written by the Spirit of ’76 AI Research Assistant
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