US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sauntered up to the podium in the Pentagon press room 10 days ago.

“The combination of the world’s two most powerful air forces is unprecedented and unbeatable,” he boasted of US and Israeli airpower flying over Iran. “Fighters and bombers all day, picking targets as they choose, as our intelligence gets better and better and more refined.”

Indeed, when it comes to airpower, Iran is overmatched. Tehran can do nothing to keep Israeli and US bombers from striking where they want, whenever they want.

American and Israeli air superiority enables many things — picking apart Iranian air defenses, assassinating enemy commanders and destroying entire weapons industries.

But experience shows that air campaigns can only do so much without complementary boots on the ground.

Toppling the regime, which both US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu see as a desired outcome for the war, would seem to be beyond the reach of an aerial campaign, judging by their century-plus history.

“Air campaigns are good at destroying things and play a tremendously valuable role shaping battlefields and aiding ground forces,” said Daniel Byman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank. “And of course they can now kill leaders with a high degree of precision, which is valuable for regime change. However, they are less able to impose things on the ground — there you need control of the ground.”

Trump and Netanyahu have indicated, for good reasons, that the joint offensive against the Islamic Republic will be limited to a strategic air campaign, without troops on the ground.

“I think that we need boots on the ground but they’ve got to be Iranian boots, and I think they’re coming,” Israeli ambassador Yechiel Leiter told CNN on Sunday, referring to a popular Iranian uprising bringing down the regime.

While regime change in Iran has not been presented as an explicit war aim, neither Netanyahu nor Trump has hidden their desire to see the Islamic Republic fall.

If the Iranian people don’t rise up against the regime, then the US and Israel will remain with control only over the skies. Expectations for what the war can actually achieve when it is said and done should thus be tempered.

“We don’t have any precedent in military history of air power alone bringing about the end to a war or to decisive results,” said Eitan Shamir, Director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, “certainly not to the fall of a regime.”

A century of strategic bombing

Many of the same theories around airpower guiding US and Israeli planning against Iran had already emerged at the dawn of human flight.

Decades before the first manned flight, airpower captured the imagination of military planners and the public alike. In 1862, writer Victor Hugo imagined a utopian end to national borders as the result of man’s ability to fly.

That tendency to imagine drastic geopolitical changes as a result of flight has persisted since then.

Widespread use of military airpower emerged during World War I, and with it the notion of transforming warfare by winning through the air. Germany sent Zeppelin airships, and later bombers, to pound English cities in an attempt to break their morale. The British, meanwhile, focused their raids on Germany’s war machine — airship bases, aircraft factories, and naval bases, and later on German industry.

At a time of domestic unrest between the ruling elite and the working class, paranoid European leaders were on the lookout for signs their own publics would rise up, and assumed that enemy resilience would crack for the same reasons. None of those effects were realized, but the seeds were planted for the massive bombing campaigns of the Second World War.

After the war ended in 1918, military planners looked for ways to avoid a repeat of the carnage of the Western Front. A generation of prominent theorists like Italian Giulio Douhet and American Billy Mitchell believed that airborne forces acting as an independent military corps could break enemy morale and push the public to force their leaders to give in.

“And even if a semblance of order could be maintained and some work done, would not the sight of a single enemy airplane be enough to induce a formidable panic?” wrote Douhet in his landmark The Command of the Air. “Normal life would be unable to continue under the constant threat of death and imminent destruction.”

But while bombing cities put added pressure on civilian populations, they repeatedly failed to sufficiently shift public opinion to bring about an enemy’s surrender.

The theories were put to the test first in the Spanish Civil War, most prominently in the bombing of Guernica. But instead of causing the will of civilians to crack, bombing had the opposite effect, shoring up resolve and creating a sense of solidarity.

Strategic bombing was employed from the first days of the Second World War. Both the British and Germans tried to knock each other out of the fight through the bombing of cities to shatter public will and factories to harm their ability to maintain a long war.

But the experience proved the strategic bombing theorists wrong. Though London  created a somewhat exaggerated myth around it, British resolve stiffened during the Blitz (suicide rates fell during those years and Londoners told Gallup pollsters that the winter weather was a greater bother than the bombs). The German population remained in the fight as well, and its wartime production actually peaked in late 1944 while under intense Allied bombing. The major exception was attacks on German oil facilities, which had a measurable impact on its ability to train, fly, and maneuver on the ground.

The Japanese population, too, rallied around protecting the Emperor despite having dozens of their cities firebombed. While the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by nuclear weapons dropped from the air did manage to force a Japanese surrender, it was not due to pressure from a Japanese public that had endured privations for years, and was living in a tightly controlled information environment.

Purposely bombing civilians to change public opinion largely went out of style following World War II, but militaries still utilized air power to meet strategic goals apart from supporting troops on the ground. Yet the effect was largely the same.

A 1972 Congressional study found that Operation Rolling Thunder in Vietnam, which saw American pilots drop far more tonnage in three-and-a-half years than the allies dropped in the Pacific theater during World War II, managed only to punish North Vietnam for its war against the south, while failing to interrupt the flow of supplies, break North Vietnam’s will, or force it to the negotiating table to end the war.

“The claims made for strategic and interdiction bombing have consistently exceeded their accomplishments, and the extravagance of the rhetoric supporting the current air offensive against the North has a familiar ring,” wrote the author.

The 1972 Operation Linebacker II — 11 days of intense bombing meant to force North Vietnam back to the negotiating table — did bring about a resumption of talks that led to the Paris Peace Accords, though some say that the North Vietnamese were simply happy to get the US out of their country on the same terms Washington had rejected months earlier.

A US and Israeli technological revolution

As US commanders returned their focus to the conventional Soviet threat in Europe, they confronted the problem of the Soviet numerical advantage in ground forces. Instead of meeting Russian armor head-on, the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs, or RMA, envisioned using new precision technology and improved intelligence capacity as the keys to devastating enemy forces.

These capabilities were showcased in the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq. Air Force planners, led by Col. John A. Warden, sought to correct what they saw as the failures of the use of airpower in Vietnam, and called their campaign Instant Thunder. Warden and his strategic bombing advocates believed the air force’s rapid, overwhelming force to singlehandedly bring about the toppling of the Ba’athist regime.

We assumed that there was a high probability that there would have been a coup of some sort.

We assumed that there was a high probability that there would have been a coup of some sort.

“At the end of 6 to 9 days, we assumed that there was a high probability that there would have been a coup of some sort and that Saddam Hussein would have been overthrown,” said Warden.

Even if air power would fail to cause the Iraqi people to take their destiny into their own hands, Warden argued that the effects would still constitute a strategic victory:  “He will not have any offensive power nor will he have any strategic defense. He will not be able to march outside of his own country. He will not have a nuclear program… He may still be in power, but he isn’t any threat to anyone outside his own country.”

In practice, the air campaign dazzled with new precision capabilities against a rigid, hierarchical enemy in a flat desert — an ideal environment to showcase the potential of strategic bombing.

But it didn’t do anything to bring about the end of the Saddam Hussein regime in six to nine days, or even in six weeks. The air campaign consisted of 6,295 attacks — including 260 strikes against top regime officials — but not a single senior political leader or military commander was killed. Nor did it cause the regime system to stop functioning or bring Iraqis into the streets to overthrow Saddam.

Coalition airpower was important for softening up the Iraqi army for the short and successful ground campaign that followed — but the fact that the ground campaign was necessary is evidence of the strategic air campaign’s failure. And enough of the elite Republic Guard survived the tactical bombing and ground offensive to crush Shi’ite and Kurdish rebellions after the war.

“While technology has enabled an increased efficiency of ways and means, there has been no increased efficiency of ends,” wrote a Marine Corps officer. “The results of Desert Storm reaffirmed that the means of strategic air power, despite tremendous gains in efficiency, are of little consequence in the present day.”

The results of Desert Storm reaffirmed that the means of strategic air power, despite tremendous gains in efficiency, are of little consequence in the present day.

The results of Desert Storm reaffirmed that the means of strategic air power, despite tremendous gains in efficiency, are of little consequence in the present day.

An air campaign in Europe at the end of the decade was held up as a watershed in the use of air power. In March 1999, NATO began air strikes on Yugoslavia to stop an ethnic cleansing campaign in Kosovo ordered by president Slobodan Milosevic, initially a two-day coercive exercise.

Seventy-eight days later, Milosevic pulled his forces out of Kosovo and accepted NATO’s terms.

The outcome, wrote leading historian John Keegan, “proved that a war can be won by air power alone.”

But using the case as evidence of air power’s ability to bring down leaders is extremely suspect.

Despite NATO’s air superiority, it took months for Milosevic to give in. That gave him time to intensify his efforts and nearly complete his ethnic cleansing campaign. There was also the threat of a NATO ground offensive, and Russian pressure on Milosevic, neither of which are factors against Iran.

“To the extent there was victory, it became possible because the administration did escalate its public wrestling with the idea of possible ground intervention,” said Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution.

Israel’s shift in the 1980s and 1990s

While the US was transforming its precision strike capabilities, Israel was going through its own Revolution in Military Affairs in the 1980s and 1990s. Its increasing preference for airstrikes over its classic ground campaigns became impossible to ignore in the mid-90s.

The two major and indecisive operations against Hezbollah rocket fire — Accountability in 1993 and Grapes of Wrath in 1996 — were conducted entirely through stand-off firepower, without boots on the ground.

Advances in stealth technology, UAVs and electronic warfare in the 1990s and early 2000s led some Israeli planners to entertain ideas of a “perfect war,” according to Itai Brun, a former head of the IDF’s Military Intelligence Analysis Division. Though they might not have been explicitly cognizant of it, security chiefs seemed to be working under the implicit belief that Israel could carry out campaigns with no casualties to its forces and no civilian deaths on the other side.

Unlike US and NATO planners, in Israel there wasn’t an expectation that air power would be sufficient for victory. Instead, victory started disappearing from Israel’s lexicon.

Air power could achieve deterrence, Israeli leaders decided, and embarked on a series of primarily air campaigns against Hamas and Hezbollah that bought quiet for a couple of years, but only gave the enemy cover under which to keep building its forces while learning how to adapt to Israel’s air supremacy.

Difficult and demanding

In the two main military campaigns following the terrorist invasion of October 7, 2023, against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, Israel shelved its reliance on air power alone, dispatching ground forces in both largely successful wars.

But in the fight against Iran, it is trying to achieve the same decisive victory by using strategic air power alone. Success on those terms would be a world first.

“Usually, if it’s air only, you’re trying to achieve less because you are committing fewer resources and assuming less risk,” said Byman.

Christoph Bergs, an airpower analyst at the Royal United Services Institute, said air power could achieve only limited results.

“If your goal is to erode specific capabilities in another nation, then an air campaign can bring forth that result,” he said.

“With Operation Rising Lion [in June], if the goal was to degrade damage, destroy, Iranian nuclear facilities, then air is able to do that,” Bergs added.

The current campaign has loftier goals, namely ensuring that Iran can no longer pose a threat to Israel. That means fundamentally changing what Iran is.

“If you’re talking about trying to prevent Iran from ever having nuclear weapons and long-range surface-to-surface missiles, then you have to change the regime,” said Eado Hecht of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

According to Netanyahu, Israel fully understands it can’t bring down the regime itself. It is, however, working to make it as likely as possible that the Iranian people will rise up and that the Islamic Republic will be too hollowed out to stamp out the next revolt.

“What you can do is weaken the regime by destroying its capabilities, by ruining its economy, ruining its finances,” said Hecht. “It gets harder and harder for it to operate, gets harder and harder for it to act against internal dissension.”

That might be Israel’s hope, but it would be an unprecedented result.

Strategic bombing in both world wars failed to bring enemy industry to a halt or force the population to turn on their leaders. In Vietnam and Kosovo, the effect of overwhelming airpower on adversary decision-making is extremely unclear. And in the 1991 Gulf War, it took a ground offensive to achieve the war’s aims, and even then Saddam’s regime survived and crushed Iraqis who rose up.

“When it comes to more sort of long-term goals,” said Berg, “it is questionable whether an air campaign in itself, without the threat of additional escalations in terms of, for example, ground forces, can result in substantive political targets being reached.”

Israel has proven its ability to achieve things that no other countries have managed, on the battlefield and beyond. But one should be cautious before assuming that it will prove a regime can be toppled or an enemy completely neutralized, exclusively from the air, even with the world’s most powerful military fighting alongside.

Tactically, Israel and the US might be making the campaign seem relatively straightforward, but strategic success in wars from the air is anything but.

“The century-long experience of air warfare has shown, above all, that one must know a great deal about an enemy (in terms of politics, economics, culture, and social organization) to understand where its weak points are and how they may be exploited by bombing,” according to Tami Davis Biddle of the United States Army War College.

“It has revealed, too, that effective aerial bombing is a difficult, demanding, and technology-dependent enterprise.”

Are you relying on The Times of Israel for accurate and timely coverage of the Iran war right now? If so, please join The Times of Israel Community. For as little as $6/month, you will:

Support our independent journalists who are working around the clock under difficult conditions to cover this conflict;

Read ToI with a clear, ads-free experience on our site, apps and emails; and

Gain access to exclusive content shared only with the ToI Community, including weekly letters from founding editor David Horovitz.

We’re really pleased that you’ve read X Times of Israel articles in the past month.

You clearly find our careful reporting of the Iran war valuable, at a time when facts are often distorted and news coverage often lacks context.

Your support is essential to continue our work. We want to continue delivering the professional journalism you value, even as the demands on our newsroom have grown dramatically during this ongoing conflict.

So today, please consider joining our reader support group, The Times of Israel Community. For as little as $6 a month you'll become our partners while enjoying The Times of Israel AD-FREE, as well as accessing exclusive content available only to Times of Israel Community members.

Thank you,David Horovitz, Founding Editor of The Times of Israel

1 Inside storyGulf states opposed war with Iran. Most are now pushing to keep the fight going

2 Israeli, US researchers find brain’s signals that make OCD behaviors hard to stop

3 15 injured, one seriously, as Iranian cluster munitions impact in central Israel

4 Veteran avocado farmer killed in north; IDF checking if he was hit by Israeli fire

5 Paleolithic chic: 500,000 years ago, Israel’s ancient toolmakers had a taste for sparkle

6 US said planning weeks-long operation to reopen Hormuz Strait; IDF strikes Tehran overnight

7 AnalysisIn the war’s fourth week, the hunt for Iran’s enriched uranium takes center stage

8 Amid Israeli warnings, UK minister says no proof Iran trying to hit Europe, doubts it can do so

2026 US-Israel war with Iran

© The Times of Israel