Israel tests theory that war can't be won with air power alone
Since last week, wave upon wave of Israeli warplanes has hit targets across Iran—testing the limits of what air power alone can achieve in conflict.
Conventional wisdom among military thinkers has long been that missiles and bombs, while essential to modern warfare, are seldom enough to achieve victory on their own, especially if the strategic aims of the warring states are expansive.
In this case, Israel has said its goal is to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, by physically destroying its ability to do so or by coercing Iran to give up its atomic ambitions in some kind of negotiated settlement. Israeli politicians have also called for the ouster of Tehran's theocratic regime.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants the U.S. to join in and boost his chances of fulfilling his goals. American bunker-busting bombs, for instance, have the best chance of knocking out Fordow, Iran's fortified underground uranium-enrichment facility.
The White House said Thursday that President Trump would decide within the next two weeks.
Israeli policymakers appear to be counting on the ability of air power to win the day without ground operations, perhaps aside from small deployments of special-forces soldiers and intelligence officers assisting airstrikes.
For Israel, there is little choice. It lacks the wherewithal to mount large-scale ground operations far from its borders and against a vastly bigger adversary. The U.S. has the capacity, but the Trump administration has signaled great reluctance to put boots on the ground in any foreign war.
If Israel succeeds, with or without U.S. help, it could prompt a serious reassessment of the capabilities of modern air power, its effectiveness augmented by unmanned aircraft and more sophisticated surveillance and intelligence-gathering technologies. But skeptics abound.
There are few if any precedents for a large-scale armed conflict in which two states exchanged blows via air power alone.
This approach, with no ground forces, 'certainly changes the course of any war—you cannot physically seize things, you can only physically destroy," said Phillips O'Brien, a military historian who teaches war studies at St. Andrews University in Scotland.
Both sides have to look at the enemy country as a functioning machine and identify components, such as military production or command and control, whose destruction can lead to a win. 'That's never easy—which is why there are so few" purely aerial wars, O'Brien said.
Israel and Iran have been trading blows overtly and covertly for years. Since 2023, the two have been at war indirectly, via Iranian-backed militant groups in Gaza, Lebanon and Yemen, and directly with exchanges of missile salvos and airstrikes last year.
'If you have limited political goals that don't require a presence on the ground, then in theory you can achieve victory even through air power alone," said Ofer Fridman, a former Israeli officer now at King's College London. 'The problem is we don't know what really are the goals" for Israel now.
Israel's broad array of targets, from military and nuclear facilities to props for regime power such as police and economic assets such as oil refineries, make it difficult to divine just how expansive Israel's strategic aims are.
Iran's war aims are simpler. The regime wants to preserve its power—and its freedom to continue the enrichment of uranium. But its capabilities are far more limited. Iranian ballistic missile attacks haven't caused major damage in Israel, given the country's robust air defenses.
Meanwhile, Israeli planes dominate the skies in the western half of Iran and are bombing targets at will. Tehran's best hope, say analysts, is to hold on grimly until Israel's expensive, logistically onerous air effort runs out of time.
How does this end?
There are at least four ways the war could end.
Israel—especially with U.S. help—might succeed in physically destroying so much of Iran's nuclear program that it would take Tehran many years to rebuild it.
Alternatively, mounting damage could force Iran's leaders to cave in and sign a deal that foreswears uranium enrichment. Thirdly, the Iranian regime might collapse, taking its nuclear ambitions with it.
But a muddled outcome is also possible if the regime holds on and doesn't give in on enrichment, and if the damage to its nuclear facilities is incomplete. Tehran might then repair its nuclear program with greater determination, with less international monitoring and in harder-to-hit locations.
Even if Fordow is destroyed, the war might only buy time until Iran tries again to build a bomb. That too would be a gain for Israel, depending on the length of any delay. In the time won, other events could intervene. The Iranian government could collapse or change its approach.
When Israel used airstrikes to destroy nuclear reactors in Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007, it set back the nuclear-weapons programs of Saddam Hussein and the Assad regime.
In Iraq, 'the short-term effect was success and the long-term effect was to drive Iraq underground with its future programs," said Michael O'Hanlon, a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Iraq's nuclear-weapons program was largely dismantled after it lost the 1991 war over Kuwait against a U.S.-led coalition. Another U.S. invasion in 2003 put an end to Saddam's rule.
In Syria, civil war broke out before Bashar al-Assad could do much to revive his nuclear program. He fell from power last year, in a surprise side effect of Israel's mauling of his Lebanese ally Hezbollah.
Change from above
Examples of air power on its own leading to regime change are nearly nonexistent, say military historians. Experience suggests it takes ground forces too—or at least a competent allied rebel force on the ground.
When a U.S.-led coalition ousted the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, it cooperated with local military forces known as the Northern Alliance. U.S. ground troops were also quickly deployed. (The Taliban returned to power 20 years later when the U.S. pulled out.)
Israel's battering of Iran from the air could weaken the government's prestige and damage its mechanisms of domestic control and repression. But there is currently no sign of an opposition force in Iran that can sweep the regime away, whether through armed rebellion or mass protests.
So far, the population is busy trying to find safety, not rise up.
If Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, loses power, it could be to another pillar of the regime, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, leading to a hard-line military government, analysts say.
That doesn't mean Israel's campaign won't lead to regime change. But such an outcome would be virtually unprecedented.
Air wars are hard
Established military thinking holds that controlling the sky is vital for winning a conventional war—but it isn't enough.
In an influential U.S. Air Force booklet published in 1995 called 'Ten Propositions Regarding Airpower," Col. Phillip S. Meilinger wrote: 'In reality, the attainment of air superiority has not yet brought a country to its knees. Therefore, the proposition remains that air superiority is a necessary but insufficient factor in victory. It is the essential first step."
Almost all major air campaigns in history have been part of wars that involved ground forces too. Examples include Nazi Germany's blitz against Britain, Allied strategic bombing of Germany, the prolonged American bombing of North Vietnam, the first weeks of the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 1991 and Russia's ongoing bombing of Ukraine since 2022.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization's air campaigns in former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Libya involved cooperation with local allies. India and Pakistan traded airstrikes in May this year but also shelled each other with artillery.
Air campaigns that weren't a preparation for a ground operation have rarely had decisive results. Often, they either failed to deliver the war-winning breakthrough that their planners hoped for, or else—as with Allied bombing of German cities—their efficacy has been hotly debated ever since.
Even NATO's air campaign in Kosovo, in which local rebels played a junior role, struggled to badly damage Serbia's well-hidden army and took much longer than expected to force a Serbian withdrawal. The war was one factor behind mass protests that brought down Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic the following year.
Israel waged an intensive air campaign against Hezbollah in 2023-24, but four Israeli army divisions also invaded southern Lebanon, while its spy agency Mossad also contributed to Israel's success by blowing up Hezbollah cadres' pagers.
The closest precedent for a purely aerial war, apart from the Israel-Iran clash, might be Israel's fight with Yemen's Houthi militia since 2023. Involving exchanges of long-range missiles and bombing raids, it has been the most inconclusive front in Israel's wars since the Oct. 7 attacks. The U.S. also struggled to subdue the Houthis with airstrikes. Trump settled for a U.S.-only cease-fire, while the Houthis continue to fire at Israel.
Write to Marcus Walker at Marcus.Walker@wsj.com
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