The Real Lesson of the Iran War

For months, Iran’s resilience in its war with two of the world’s most capable militaries has perplexed many politicians and confounded public expectations.

Israel and the United States have hit thousands of Iranian targets, systematically destroying much of the country’s military infrastructure and killing many of its top leaders.

Yet the Islamic Republic has not only survived but continued to maintain significant offensive capabilities. To account for this, some have pointed to Iran’s effective deployment of low-cost precise mass weapons, such as the Shahed-136 one-way attack drone. Others have looked at the decentralized and self-replacing nature of the regime itself.

Although these and other factors have played a part, there is a more straightforward reason for Iran’s staying power: the American and Israeli decision to rely on a sustained air and stand-off naval campaign to bring the regime to its knees. This approach did not come out of nowhere. Air supremacy has been the defining tenet of U.S. and wider Western military strategy for decades.

In the post–Cold War era, the United States has perfected the art of airpower—winning control of the skies so that enemy armies, navies, and territory can be bombed at will—to a degree that no country or even alliance of countries has matched. When pitted against an adversary’s deployed ground forces, this strategy has consistently yielded impressive results.

The U.S. ability to achieve rapid air superiority has also long served as a powerful deterrent to would-be aggressors. Yet there are few examples in history of adversaries conceding to maximalist demands in the face of punitive bombing campaigns alone—even by the world’s greatest air force.

Indeed, Operation Epic Fury is only one of several recent or current conflicts—including Russia’s war in Ukraine and international responses to the Houthi threat in Yemen—that have exposed the drawbacks of relying heavily on airstrikes to try to unseat a government or to defeat insurgent forces. For American strategists, then, it will be crucial to distinguish the different uses of airpower.

The Iran campaign has been a disastrous misuse of military resources, and it showcases the policy limits of what airpower can achieve. Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that the United States should shift away from its doctrine of prioritizing air superiority, as it prepares alongside NATO and Asian allies for very different threats in the coming few years.

THE WAGES OF DESTRUCTION During the major wars of the twentieth century, U.S. and Allied air superiority was critical to successes on the battlefield. But airpower still failed to force political capitulation by adversaries. In World War II, Nazi Germany fought to the very end despite the Allies’ systematic bombing of its cities, its industrial base, and its transport and fuel networks.

In the Korean War, North Korea fought the United States and its allies to a standstill, even as fleets of U.S. bombers obliterated most of its cities and infrastructure. And in Vietnam, the North Vietnamese outlasted the United States, despite the U.S. military dropping more than a million tons of ordnance on cities, factories, and supply routes, in successive punitive air campaigns.

In the defining counterinsurgency conflicts of the twenty-first century, there is little evidence to suggest that air superiority proved any more effective. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States and its allies quickly established total air superiority over the enemy and were able to call in precision airstrikes at will, giving allied troops a huge advantage in combat.

Yet in both cases, these campaigns also ultimately failed to achieve their political objectives. Despite near-daily barrages of Ukraine’s cities, power infrastructure, and industry, Russia is no closer to vanquishing the country more than four and a half years after its brutal invasion began. In Iran, there has been little sign that U.S. and Israeli airstrikes have fueled popular pressure to end the war.

This is despite major antigovernment protests throughout the country shortly before the campaign began, which were stamped out only after mass state violence. Indeed, inflicting hardship on the population seems especially unlikely to change the calculus of the Iranian regime, given its willingness to kill thousands of protestors to stay in power.

If anything, there is reason to think that it may be even harder today to win wars than in the twentieth century. Because of the increasingly multipolar nature of the world order, countries can often rely on international support to mitigate the damage from a sustained enemy strike campaign.

In Ukraine, this can be seen in the influx of American and European weapons and economic, military, and technological support into the country since Russia’s 2022 invasion.

This assistance has not prevented Ukrainians from experiencing terrible loss and hardship, but it has enabled the Ukrainian economy to continue functioning and its military to consistently replace lost and expended equipment and ammunition over time.

For Iran, China has provided a stable market for Iranian oil and gas exports, which helped to keep Iran’s economy afloat until the imposition of a U.S. naval blockade in April.

More recently, Beijing has also provided military support in the form of short-range air defense systems, which will sustain and improve Iran’s capability to pose a pop-up threat to U.S. and Israeli aircraft loitering to seek targets at medium or low altitudes.

Russia also remains a key Iranian ally, providing Tehran with intelligence to target U.S. forces in the Gulf and helping it develop new military capabilities, such as supersonic antiship missiles. In both wars, external support has made sustained air and missile strike campaigns far less likely to result in political capitulation, or economic or military collapse.

SITTING DUCKS AND HIDDEN JACKALS Despite the poor record of punitive bombing campaigns in forcing political capitulation, air superiority has proved decisive in many wars through its impact on the battlefield.

The U.S. military’s overwhelming success against the well-equipped and battle-hardened Iraqi army in Operation Desert Storm, in 1991, was, perhaps, the defining example of how an air-centered approach can be effective.

The initial U.S. air campaign in January and February 1991 sufficiently degraded Iraqi forces and command and control capabilities to allow coalition ground forces to decisively defeat the Iraqi army in less than 100 hours of ground combat operations. Other partial successes include NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999, in which a 78-day air campaign led to Milosevic’s withdrawal of Serb forces.

Yet another was the European-led air campaign against Muammar al-Qaddafi’s forces over Libya in 2011, which rapidly destroyed government tanks and artillery attacking the city of Benghazi, and facilitated a subsequent rebel advance to Tripoli with further airstrikes. In each of these cases, air superiority made the battlefield situation untenable for enemy ground forces and forced them to retreat.

The fundamental difference that distinguishes this effective use of airpower lies in the objectives that the enemy was seeking to achieve. When an adversary is pursuing goals that require the significant deployment of ground forces—such as an invasion to seize the territory of a neighboring state—establishing air superiority over that adversary almost always confers a decisive military advantage.

In World War II, the Anglo-American combined bomber offensive against German cities and industry failed to force Germany to surrender. But once the Allies established air superiority in any given theater of operations, the operational defeat of Axis armies in the field was only a matter of time.

In the Western Desert, and then in Italy, Normandy, and Germany itself, roving Allied fighter-bomber patrolsrapidly rendered movement by armored vehicles and supply columns by day prohibitively dangerous. They also could provide devastating close air support whenever Allied ground units met strong Axis positions or units.

In 1991, Saddam Hussein’s objectives required the Iraqi army to hold territory in Kuwait against U.S.-led ground forces, and U.S. tactical airpower rapidly made that impossible, by destroying Iraqi air defenses and then conducting a massive interdiction campaign against armored vehicles, logistics convoys, bases, and communications infrastructure.

In Libya in 2011, Qaddafi’s forces deployed tanks and artillery around Benghazi to bombard rebel forces and civilians, but these were easily found and destroyed by European combat aircraft, as were units that Qaddafi deployed to try to stop later rebel counterattacks toward Tripoli.

The ultimate rebel victory and killing of Qaddafi did not deliver long-term policy success in Libya as the Western world would define it. But Qaddafi’s military forces were decisively defeated by Western airpower and his objective of crushing a popular uprising by force was rendered impossible. Air superiority has proved decisive in many wars.

In Afghanistan and Iraq, by contrast, none of Washington’s adversaries needed to field regular military forces in the open to achieve their objectives. Simply by maintaining a steady tempo of IED strikes and ambushes against U.S. patrols, and then melting back into the wider civilian population, these groups were able to deny coalition forces the security they needed to foster democratic state-building.

Of course, whenever militant groups attempted larger operations designed to overrun bases or towns, they were met with ferocious firepower, much of it delivered by airstrikes, thanks to ubiquitous U.S. and coalition air superiority. But just as in Vietnam, victory in most major battlefield engagements was not enough to secure the political objectives that the United States sought.

All that the Taliban in Afghanistan or militant groups in Iraq had to do was to maintain a security vacuum for long enough to exhaust U.S. and European patience with discretionary “forever wars.”

Although every war is different, the United States confronts a similar problem in Iran: it is trying to use airpower to achieve maximalist aims against an enemy that can largely afford to keep its conventional military forces dispersed, hidden, or underground.

The initial U.S. and Israeli campaign to establish air superiority was very successful, and in general, the advanced aircraft and tactics the two militaries deployed worked as intended.

But although subsequent months of airstrikes have destroyed some of Iran’s enormous ballistic missile arsenal, most of the country’s significant remaining stocks and production capacity are in deeply buried “missile cities,” out of reach of almost all conventional bombs and missiles.

Because of the earlier 12-day war in June 2025—when U.S. airstrikes targeted Iran’s nuclear infrastructure with highly specialized 30,000-pound bunker-busting bombs—the bulk of Iran’s remaining highly enriched fissile material, movable equipment, and scientists were likely dispersed and hidden from further airstrikes long before Operation Epic Fury began.

To defeat U.S. war aims, therefore, the regime does not have to deploy regular armed forces in the open. It simply has to maintain control of the country, which the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is well placed to ensure through widespread day-to-day repression.

And in Hormuz, Iran can easily conceal the small boats it needs to drop mines, its antiship missile launchers, and its drone launch positions along the extensive and rocky coastline. Airpower alone is unlikely to deliver a victory against Iran, despite Israel’s and the United States’ ability to functionally strike almost anywhere in the country, at will, for months on end.

This is in fact the same problem that has frustrated earlier attempts by the United States and its allies to stop antiship drone and missile strikes by the Houthis in Yemen.

Airpower can and has been used repeatedly to destroy any Houthi forces identified in the open, but it cannot prevent the group from posing a sustained threat to commercial shipping with concealed missile and drone launch sites in coastal territory that they control. THE BOMB POWER NATO NEEDS The war in Iran has significantly tarnished the global aura of U.S. airpower.

It is unlikely that the Trump administration would have launched Operation Epic Fury if it had known that seven months later it would still be facing an inconclusive slugging match—one that has wasted a huge part of Washington’s complex munitions stockpile and come at exorbitant economic and geopolitical cost.

Alongside the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, in which neither side has been able to achieve air superiority, there is a real risk that policymakers and the public lose faith in advanced air capabilities as the central pillar of American and wider Western military advantage.

That would be a huge mistake. The first lesson of the war against Iran in 2026—as in numerous other wars, including Vietnam, Iraq after 2003, and Afghanistan after 2006—is that conventional military superiority gained through overwhelming airpower will not be enough to achieve unrealistic political goals. But the second lesson is that this failure is not about weaknesses in U.S. air capabilities themselves.

On the contrary, airpower remains the most potent piece of the United States’ conventional forces, as well as its main source of both deterrent capacity and warfighting advantage against conventional aggression by hostile states. If the U.S. goals for Operation Epic Fury had been to defeat an Iranian invasion of a neighboring country, then the air campaign would almost certainly have done that within a few weeks.

That hypothetical scenario is highly relevant because it bears on the most significant non-discretionary threats that the United States may be forced to deal with in the coming few years. In the case of a Russian invasion of a NATO member state in eastern Europe or a Chinese move to take Taiwan, the enemy would need to make large deployments of regular ground forces to seize and then hold territory.

In either case, advanced U.S. and allied airpower capabilities would be absolutely essential to defeating them quickly. As with Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, both actions could be rendered militarily untenable if NATO or U.S. forces could rapidly win and exploit air superiority over the territory that had been invaded.

To prevent larger, far more costly wars between Western powers and either China or Russia, then, it will be vital to convince both adversaries that NATO forces in Europe and U.S.-led forces in the Pacific can rapidly establish and leverage air superiority should either power decide to attack. To do so, the United States will need to make the right investments and force decisions.

Especially urgent priorities include restocking and improving U.S. air-launched munitions, ramping up production of missile interceptors to defend airbases and naval task forces, and accelerating the development of next generation fighter, bomber, and enabler aircraft.

Although establishing air superiority over an area contested by Chinese or Russian forces will be far more difficult than doing so over Iran, it is an essential task for the United States and its allies if they want to maintain conventional deterrence and avoid a major great-power conflict. Air superiority cannot win all wars.

But if it can be credibly achieved, it all but guarantees deterrence by denial against state opponents considering territorial aggression of their own.