Bombing Because You Can: Iran
Part VI: “True Regime Change (but Not Regime Change) from the Air Has Never Been Tried Before”
For the second time in the Trump administration, the United States has embarked on a large-scale air campaign in the Middle East. The first, directed against the Houthis in Yemen generated more than 1,000 sorties in roughly six weeks and consumed vast quantities of precision munitions, tanker hours, and carrier flight-deck cycles, all for results that were, at best, operationally ambiguous and strategically inconclusive. Launch sites were struck, depots were hit, and individual commanders were killed, yet the political object remained elusive: the Houthis continued to fire, continued to govern, and continued to demonstrate that an air campaign, however intense, is not synonymous with coercive success.1 The ongoing air campaign against Iran appears to be even more ambitious, trying to instigate full-blown regime change, which is also not regime change according to the Trump administration, but with most of the senior leadership in the Iranian government and the IRGC targeted anyways. President Trump called for the Iranian people; “Now is the time to seize control of your destiny, and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach. This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.”2 The air campaign is also simultaneously aimed at stopping Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.3 This is after the Iranian nuclear program was supposedly “obliterated” a year ago.4 This is not simply a counterproliferation strike or a punitive raid. It is an explicit attempt to translate aerial destruction into internal political collapse.
The military logic of the campaign appears to rest on three simultaneous objectives. The first is leadership decapitation, understood as the systematic removal of the clerical and IRGC command structure in the expectation that the regime’s coercive apparatus will fragment or lose the ability to launch attacks outside Iran or coordinate repression against the Iranian people. The second is the traditional counterforce mission directed against nuclear and missile infrastructure. The third, made explicit in presidential rhetoric, is the triggering of a popular uprising that will exploit the shock created by the first two. Of course, these lines of effort do not automatically reinforce one another.
It should be noted, however, that this interpretation reflects my own reading of the situation.5 One of the striking features of the current crisis has been the degree to which official statements appear to shift within hours of one another and often contradict the statement that preceded it.6 At times the operation is framed as a narrowly limited effort to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. At other moments it is presented as an opportunity for the Iranian people to overthrow the regime. Still other statements emphasize that the United States is not seeking regime change but “the regime sure did change.”7 This ping ponging makes it almost impossible to determine whether the campaign is pursuing a single coherent political or military objective or several overlapping ones that have not been reconciled in the slightest at the strategic level.
The immediate Iranian response has unsurprisingly shown the limits of equating leadership loss with regime paralysis. Within hours of Khamenei’s death, a provisional leadership council composed of the president, the head of the judiciary, and a senior cleric announced that it had begun its work, signaling at least some sense of institutional continuity, something they had been planning in conjunction with the American military buildup.8 At the same time, Iran has continually launched missile salvos against Israel and U.S. positions across the Gulf, demonstrating that the state’s retaliatory capacity, both military and symbolic, remained intact.9 Decapitation, in other words, has not produced immediate strategic disarmament.
Nor has the campaign remained geographically contained. Iranian retaliation has struck targets across multiple countries, closed large portions of Middle Eastern airspace, and disrupted civilian air travel on a massive scale. Just this morning, an American nuclear submarine sunk an Iranian frigate off the coast of Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean 2000 miles away from the region.10 This illustrates how quickly an air campaign designed to achieve political effects within a single state can become a regional war in operational terms. This widening of the battlespace is not an accidental by-product. It is structurally embedded in any attempt to use airpower for regime change against a state that possesses both conventional strike capabilities and a network of regional partners.
Diplomatically, the operation has produced the familiar polarity. The administration has framed the strikes as a lawful act of preemption against a nuclearizing adversary, while Iran, Russia, and others denounce them as an illegal war of aggression, and European states call for a return to negotiations. That split matters because regime change from the air is not only a military process but an international political one. The survival of a state has always depended as much on external recognition, economic access, and elite cohesion as on the physical survival of individual leaders.
Most striking, however, is the conceptual premise behind the campaign, namely that the removal of the regime’s leadership, combined with precision strikes against its strategic assets, will produce a cascade effect inside Iranian society. This is the purest contemporary expression of what might be called the political shock theory of airpower, the belief that a sufficiently dramatic demonstration of vulnerability at the top will dissolve the regime’s claim to inevitability and unlock latent opposition.11 Yet the empirical record assembled over the last century suggests that leadership targeting produces highly variable political results. In some cases, it accelerates fragmentation. In others it generates elite consolidation, nationalist backlash, and the rapid construction of successor mechanisms.
This raises the central problem for the campaign. The U.S. is attempting to achieve, from the air (with the support of sea and land based long range fires), two political effects that historically have required very different conditions. Preventing nuclear acquisition is a finite and physical task tied to facilities, supply chains, and timelines. Changing a states government is an open-ended social political process that depends on the behavior of millions of people, the cohesion of armed organizations, and the emergence of an alternative authority capable of governing.12 Conflating the two creates a theory of victory in which the destruction of targets is assumed to produce the collapse of a political order. None of this is really that new. What is new is the degree to which it is being stated openly as the operational purpose of an air campaign.
The historical record is remarkably consistent on this point.13 Strategic bombing against Germany did not produce regime collapse despite the destruction of much of the urban and industrial base. Bombing against North Vietnam did not generate negotiation on American terms. The air campaigns against Iraq in the 1990s degraded military capacity but left the regime intact. Serbia in 1999 is often treated as the exception that proves the rule, yet even there the outcome depended on a combination of Russian pressure, the threat of a ground invasion, and the limited political objectives of the NATO coalition.14 Libya in 2011 achieved regime change from the air only because an organized armed force on the ground captured the functions of the state, and the result was not a stable political order but the fragmentation of the country that largely continues to this day.15
In each case, the same analytical error appeared in different forms. The destruction of targets was treated as a political language that the enemy leadership would be compelled to understand in the same way as the attacker. War, however, is not a technical process of damage accumulation. It is a contest of organized wills embedded in social and institutional structures.16 Regimes do not survive because their leaders are physically safe. They survive because they retain control over the instruments of coercion over their citizens, because elites continue to calculate that their survival is tied to the system, and because no alternative authority emerges that can replace them.17
The appeal of airpower in this context is obvious. It promises to bypass the most difficult parts of war. It offers the possibility of achieving the most ambitious political objective, the replacement of a hostile regime, without the costs of occupation, mobilization, or long-term responsibility for the political order that follows. It is, in effect, a way of seeking the results of a ground war without fighting one. It is also politically attractive. Airpower allows an administration to demonstrate resolve and decisive action while simultaneously signaling restraint. Strikes can be framed as limited, precise, and technologically controlled, avoiding the language of invasion, occupation, and nation-building that has become politically toxic in the United States.18 Officials repeatedly emphasize that this campaign “is not Iraq” and “is not Afghanistan.”19 Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin went so far to suggest that “We’re not at war with Iran. We’re making sure that they do not have the capability to harm us anymore.”20 Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna added that, “strategic strikes are not war.”21
This sort of rhetorical maneuvering has become omnipresent in contemporary warfare. States attempt to preserve freedom of action while limiting the political and strategic commitments that traditionally accompany it using vocabulary of “strikes,” “operations,” or “limited campaigns” which functions as a way of signaling to domestic audiences that violence is being applied without crossing the conceptual threshold into full-scale conflict. Yet the underlying reality remains unchanged. Airpower may allow governments to manage the political framing of violence, but it does not alter the basic fact that the application of military force against another state, particularly in pursuit of objectives as ambitious as regime change (even though we are not doing apparently), is still war in the most basic Clausewitzian sense.
As of this writing, we are only 96 hours into this conflict so of course its quite difficult to ascertain where exactly this all goes. But air campaigns rarely end neatly because their operational logic tends to generate their own momentum.22 Once begun, pressure builds to demonstrate progress, to service more targets, and to escalate incrementally in the hope that the next set of strikes will produce the decisive political effect that the previous ones failed to achieve. The administration has set as much stating that they will have “an escalating series of strikes with off-ramps along the way.”23 The absence of clear political movement from the target state is therefore rarely interpreted as evidence that the strategy itself is flawed. More often it is taken as proof that the campaign has not yet gone far enough.
In the case of Iran, this dynamic is particularly dangerous because the objectives of the campaign point in opposite strategic directions. If the primary goal is counterproliferation, then the logic of the campaign should be limited and focused on delaying or destroying nuclear infrastructure.24 Such an effort might require repeated strikes over time, but it would at least remain bounded by a relatively narrow set of military targets. If the goal is regime change, however, the logic shifts toward sustained pressure on the political and coercive institutions that sustain the state. That kind of pressure almost inevitably pushes the conflict toward broader escalation, including attacks on regime security forces, infrastructure, and potentially urban political centers.
The early trajectory of the campaign suggests movement toward the latter. Leadership targeting, strikes on command nodes, and the open encouragement of domestic revolt all indicate that the political object extends well beyond simply degrading nuclear capacity. Yet regime change from the air creates a paradox. The more pressure the attacker applies, the more incentives the targeted regime has to consolidate internally, mobilize nationalist sentiment, and expand the conflict outward in order to raise the costs for its opponent.
Iran possesses several avenues for doing exactly that. Missile strikes against Israel and U.S. bases can continue at varying levels of intensity. Proxy forces across the region retain the ability to attack shipping lanes, Gulf infrastructure, and American partners. Directly closing the strait of Hormuz to the transshipment of oil to other parts of the world could ricochet across the global economy. Cyber operations and economic disruption offer additional tools that do not require direct conventional confrontation. None of these actions needs to outright defeat the United States militarily. Their purpose is simply to ensure that the war becomes more costly, more complicated, and more politically difficult for the United States to sustain.
This dynamic produces three broad possibilities for how the conflict might evolve. The first is a limited coercive campaign that gradually winds down after degrading specific capabilities, leaving the Iranian regime damaged but intact. The second is a prolonged air war in which both sides exchange strikes while avoiding full-scale escalation, a pattern that would resemble the episodic conflicts that have characterized the region for decades. The third is the most dangerous scenario, in which the campaign continues to expand into a wider regional war involving additional actors and potentially forcing the United States to consider the very ground commitments that the reliance on airpower was meant to avoid in the first place.25
The campaign against Iran therefore reveals a deeper pattern in contemporary American strategy despite the fact this administration has constantly repeated they are different from previous presidencies. It reflects the persistent belief that technological superiority and precision strike capabilities can solve problems that are fundamentally political in nature. The United States can reach almost any target in the world. It can destroy infrastructure, eliminate leaders, and impose enormous physical costs on its adversaries. What it cannot do reliably is determine how those adversaries reorganize themselves politically in response to that violence.
Airpower is an extraordinarily powerful military instrument and it is extremely useful, but it remains only one instrument among many. Its effectiveness ultimately depends on how well it is integrated with political objectives that are realistic, coherent, and grounded in an understanding of the enemy as a political community rather than a collection of targets.26 When the political object becomes the transformation of an entire regime, the limits of what airpower alone can achieve become increasingly apparent.
The war now unfolding against Iran illustrates those limits in stark form. The campaign seeks decisive political effects while relying on a form of force designed to avoid the commitments that decisive political change historically requires. It is an attempt to reconcile two contradictory desires: to reshape the political order of a major regional state while avoiding the risks and responsibilities of fighting a war large enough to do so. Whether the Trump Administration figures this out, we will see (but I doubt).
“Read Trump’s full statement on Iran attacks,” Associated Press, February 28, 2026.
Ibid,.
I’m not going to bother to litigate that here.
If you want more academic work on U.S.-Iranian relations, see John Ghazvinian, America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present (New York: Vintage, 2021).
Just for example the Treasury Secretary stated this morning that the U.S. and Israel had complete control of the air followed by Secretary of Defense/War Hegseth an hour later stating it would take another week to achieve so.
Michelle Price and Konstantin Toropin, “Hegseth insists the Iran conflict is ‘not Iraq’ and is ‘not endless’,” PBS News, March 2, 2026.
Farnaz Fassihi, “Inside Iran’s Preparations for War and Plans for Survival,” The New York Times, February 22, 2026.
6 Americans have been killed in action, as well as 3 F-15’s shot down by accident, and additional damage to U.S. installations.
Pamodi Waravita, Anupreeta Das and Lynsey Chutel, “U.S. Submarine Torpedoed Iranian Warship Off Sri Lanka as Conflict Widens,” The New York Times, March 4, 2026.
See Colin Gray, Understanding Airpower: Bonfire of the Fallacies (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University, Air Force Research Institute, 2009) and David Fadok, John Boyd and John Warden: Air Power’s Quest for Strategic Paralysis (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 1995).
The President has floated the idea of arming Kurdish militias in Northwestern Iran to spark an “uprising.” Natasha Bertrand, Alayna Treene, Zachary Cohen, Clarissa Ward, Vasco Cotovio, “CIA working to arm Kurdish forces to spark uprising in Iran, sources say,” CNN, March 4, 2026.
See the book in the memes, Robert Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).
For this debate, see Daniel Byman and Matthew Waxman, “Kosovo and the Great Air Power Debate.” International Security 24, no. 4 (2000): 5–38, and Daniel Lake, “The Limits of Coercive Airpower: NATO’s ‘Victory’ in Kosovo Revisited.” International Security 34, no. 1 (2009): 83–112.
See Karl Mueller, ed. Precision and Purpose: Airpower in the Libyan Civil War (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2015).
Carl v sends his regards.
At least on the timeline the Trump administration envisions.
“Death & destruction from the sky all day. We’re playing for keeps. Our warfighters have maximum authorities granted personally by POTUS & yours truly. Our rules of engagement are bold, precise designed to unleash American power, not shackle it ... we are punching them while they are down” is a real quote. Matthew Olay, “Four Days In, Hegseth, Caine Say U.S. Making Decisive Progress in Iran,” Pentagon News, March 4, 2026.
“Hegseth insists the Iran conflict is ‘not Iraq’ and is ‘not endless’.”
Emily Brooks, “GOP says it’s a targeted, limited combat operation, not a war, with Iran,” The Hill, March 4, 2026.
Ibid,.
Operation Rolling Thunder is the classic example of this phenomena.
See the Israeli Air raids in 1981 or American and British strikes in 1998.
Multiple administration officials and the President have stated this as a possibility. Rebecca Schneid, “Trump Says He Would Deploy Ground Troops to Iran ‘If Necessary’,” Time Magazine, March 3, 2026.
See Richard Fontaine, “Trump’s Way of War,” Foreign Affairs, March 2, 2026.
When you actually have a variety of tools but insist on only using a hammer–
Given that trump has significantly degraded counterterrorism units in this country, we can probably expect attacks here. The Iranians are good at that sort of asymmetric warfare. This will work out wonderfully for trump as he can then declare some form of martial law and complete his authoritarian takeover.