For months, Iran’s remarkable resilience in its ongoing war against two of the world’s most capable militaries has perplexed foreign policy experts, politicians, and military analysts alike. The United States and Israel have launched thousands of precision strikes against Iranian targets, systematically demolishing vast segments of the nation’s military infrastructure and eliminating many of its top leaders. Yet, despite this overwhelming firepower, the Islamic Republic has not only survived the onslaught but has also continued to maintain significant offensive capabilities.
To account for this resilience, observers have pointed to various tactical advantages. Some credit Iran’s effective deployment of low-cost, precise mass weapons, such as the Shahed-136 one-way attack drone, which have complicated defensive calculations for Western and allied forces. Others argue that the decentralized, self-repairing nature of the regime itself allows it to absorb heavy blows without suffering a catastrophic collapse of state control.
While these factors have undoubtedly played a part in the ongoing conflict, military historians and strategists point to a much more straightforward reason for Iran’s staying power: the American and Israeli decision to rely primarily on a sustained air and stand-away naval campaign to bring the regime to its knees.
This strategic approach did not emerge from a vacuum. Air supremacy has been the defining tenet of U.S. and broader Western military doctrine for decades. In the post-Cold War era, the United States has perfected the art of airpower—winning total control of the skies so that enemy armies, navies, and territory can be bombed at will—to a degree that no single country or coalition of nations has ever matched. When pitted against an adversary’s deployed ground forces, this strategy has consistently yielded impressive results, serving as a powerful and reliable deterrent to would-be aggressors across the globe.
Yet, historical precedent suggests that few adversaries have ever conceded to maximalist political demands solely in the face of punitive bombing campaigns, even when conducted by the world’s most formidable air forces. Operation Epic Fury is only the latest in a series of contemporary conflicts—including Russia’s prolonged war in Ukraine and the international responses to persistent Houthi threats in Yemen—that have exposed the inherent limitations of relying heavily on airstrikes to unseat a government or defeat deeply entrenched insurgent forces.
For American and Western strategists, distinguishing between the different uses of airpower will be crucial moving forward. The ongoing campaign against Iran has exposed a profound misuse of military resources, highlighting the strict policy limits of what airpower can achieve on its own. However, analysts warn that it would be a dangerous mistake to conclude that the United States should abandon its core doctrine of prioritizing air superiority as it prepares alongside NATO and Asian allies for entirely different strategic threats in the coming years.
The Wages of Destruction
During the major conventional wars of the twentieth century, U.S. and Allied air superiority was undeniably critical to achieving battlefield success. Yet, airpower consistently fell short of forcing political capitulation from determined adversaries.
During World War II, Nazi Germany fought to the bitter end despite the Allies carrying out systematic, devastating bombing campaigns against its cities, industrial heartland, and transport and fuel networks. In the Korean War, North Korea fought the United States and its allies to a standstill even as fleets of American bombers obliterated the vast majority of its cities and civilian infrastructure. Decades later in Vietnam, North Vietnamese forces outlasted the United States despite the U.S. military dropping more than a million tons of ordnance on cities, factories, and crucial supply routes during successive punitive air campaigns.
In the defining counterinsurgency conflicts of the twenty-first century, air superiority proved no more decisive in achieving ultimate political ends. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States and its allies rapidly established absolute air dominance, calling in precision airstrikes at will and granting allied ground troops an enormous tactical advantage in combat. Yet, in both cases, these extensive campaigns ultimately failed to secure their long-term political objectives.
A similar dynamic is playing out in modern conflicts. Despite near-daily aerial barrages targeting Ukrainian cities, critical power infrastructure, and industrial centers, Russia remains no closer to vanquishing the country more than four and a half years after its brutal invasion began. In Iran, U.S. and Israeli airstrikes have failed to spark the widespread popular pressure needed to end the war from within. This comes despite major anti-government protests that rocked the country shortly before the campaign began—protests that were ultimately stamped out only through extreme state violence. Inflicting severe economic and physical hardship on the general population appears uniquely unlikely to alter the calculus of the Iranian regime, particularly given its historical willingness to kill thousands of its own citizens simply to maintain its grip on power.
Furthermore, geopolitical dynamics suggest that winning wars through economic and military pressure has grown increasingly difficult compared to the twentieth century. In an increasingly multipolar world order, targeted nations can frequently rely on international support systems to mitigate the devastating damage of a sustained enemy strike campaign.
In Ukraine, this is evidenced by the continuous influx of American and European weaponry, as well as vital economic, military, and technological assistance, since Russia’s 2022 invasion. While this aid has not spared Ukrainians from horrific loss and hardship, it has successfully enabled the national economy to function and the military to consistently replace lost and expended equipment over time.
In the case of Iran, China has provided a vital, stable market for Iranian oil and gas exports, keeping the national economy afloat until the imposition of a stringent U.S. naval blockade in April. More recently, Beijing has also extended military assistance, including short-range air defense systems designed to sustain and improve Tehran’s capacity to threaten U.S. and Israeli aircraft operating at medium or low altitudes. Russia has similarly remained a key ally, supplying intelligence used to target U.S. forces in the Gulf and assisting Iran in developing advanced military capabilities, such as supersonic anti-ship missiles. In both conflicts, external international support has rendered sustained air and missile campaigns far less likely to result in political capitulation or total economic and military collapse.
Sitting Ducks and Hidden Jackals
Despite its poor historical record in forcing political capitulation through bombing alone, air superiority has proved decisive in numerous conflicts by decisively altering conditions on the battlefield.
The U.S. military’s overwhelming success against the well-equipped and battle-hardened Iraqi army during Operation Desert Storm in 1991 remains the defining example of how an air-centered approach can yield rapid victory. The initial U.S. air campaign in January and February of that year sufficiently degraded Iraqi forces, communications, and command-and-control capabilities, enabling coalition ground forces to decisively defeat the Iraqi army in less than 100 hours of ground combat.
Other partial successes include NATO’s 1999 intervention in Kosovo, where a 78-day air campaign ultimately compelled Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw his forces. Similarly, the European-led air campaign against Muammar al-Qaddafi’s forces in Libya in 2011 rapidly destroyed government tanks and artillery units attacking Benghazi, facilitating a subsequent rebel advance toward Tripoli supported by further airstrikes.
In each of these historical instances, air superiority rendered the battlefield situation entirely untenable for enemy ground forces, forcing them into retreat. The fundamental difference distinguishing these effective uses of airpower lies directly in the objectives the enemy was attempting to achieve. When an adversary pursues goals that require the significant, visible deployment of ground forces—such as an outright invasion to seize the territory of a neighboring state—establishing air superiority over that adversary almost always confers an overwhelming military advantage.
During World War II, the combined Anglo-American bomber offensive against German cities failed to force a surrender, but once the Allies established air superiority in a given operational theater, the operational defeat of Axis armies on the ground became inevitable. In North Africa, Italy, Normandy, and Germany itself, roving Allied fighter-bombers rendered daytime movement by armored vehicles and supply columns prohibitively dangerous while delivering devastating close air support to ground units.
In 1991, Saddam Hussein’s strategic objectives required the Iraqi army to hold captured territory in Kuwait against U.S.-led ground forces. U.S. tactical airpower rapidly made this impossible by systematically dismantling air defenses and conducting a massive interdiction campaign against armor, logistics, and communications. In Libya in 2011, Qaddafi’s forces deployed visible armor and artillery to crush rebels and civilians, making them easy targets for European combat aircraft. While the ultimate rebel victory and Qaddafi’s death did not secure long-term political stability in Libya as Western leaders envisioned, Qaddafi’s conventional military forces were decisively defeated, rendering his objective of crushing the uprising by force impossible.
By contrast, in counterinsurgency conflicts like Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington’s adversaries had no need to field regular military forces in the open. By maintaining a steady tempo of improvised explosive device attacks and ambushes against patrols before melting back into the civilian population, these groups denied coalition forces the security required to foster stable state-building. Whenever militant groups attempted large-scale operations to overrun bases or towns, they were met with ferocious airstrikes enabled by total coalition air superiority. Yet, just as in Vietnam, winning major battlefield engagements was not enough to secure the broader political objectives Washington sought. The Taliban and Iraqi insurgent groups simply needed to maintain a security vacuum long enough to exhaust Western political patience for discretionary, protracted conflicts.
The United States faces a strikingly similar dilemma in Iran today. Washington and its allies are attempting to use airpower to achieve maximalist political aims against an enemy that can afford to keep its conventional military forces dispersed, hidden, or deep underground.
While the initial U.S. and Israeli campaign to establish air superiority was exceptionally successful—with advanced aircraft and tactics working precisely as intended—subsequent months of airstrikes have encountered structural limits. Although bombings have destroyed portions of Iran’s massive ballistic missile arsenal, the vast majority of its remaining stockpiles and production facilities are housed inside deeply buried underground "missile cities," safely out of reach of conventional bombs and missiles. Furthermore, following a brief 12-day war in June 2025 when U.S. airstrikes targeted Iranian nuclear infrastructure with specialized bunker-busting weapons, the bulk of Iran’s remaining highly enriched fissile material, movable equipment, and scientific assets were likely dispersed and hidden long before Operation Epic Fury even began.
To defeat American war aims, the regime in Tehran does not need to deploy regular armed forces in the open. It merely needs to maintain internal control over the population, a task the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps executes effectively through pervasive daily repression. Meanwhile, along the extensive and rocky coastline of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, Iran can easily conceal the small boats required to lay naval mines, alongside mobile anti-ship missile launchers and drone positions. Airpower alone is unlikely to secure victory against such an asymmetrical posture, regardless of how frequently advanced aircraft strike targets across the country.
This underlying challenge mirrors the frustration experienced by the United States and its allies in attempting to halt anti-ship drone and missile strikes launched by the Houthis in Yemen. While airpower has repeatedly destroyed Houthi forces operating in the open, it cannot permanently prevent the group from posing a sustained threat to commercial shipping from concealed launch sites tucked away in coastal territory under their control.
The Bomb Power NATO Needs
The protracted conflict in Iran has undeniably tarnished the global aura and perceived omnipotence of U.S. airpower. Analysts note it is unlikely the Trump administration would have launched Operation Epic Fury had it known that seven months later the military would still be locked in an inconclusive slugging match—one that has depleted a massive share of Washington’s complex munitions stockpile at an exorbitant economic and geopolitical cost. Combined with the ongoing war in Ukraine, where neither side has managed to establish definitive air superiority, a genuine risk exists that policymakers and the public may lose faith in advanced air capabilities as the central pillar of Western military advantage.
Military experts argue that such a conclusion would be a profound mistake. The primary lesson of the war against Iran—much like Vietnam, post-2003 Iraq, and post-2006 Afghanistan—is that conventional military superiority achieved through overwhelming airpower cannot substitute for realistic political goals. However, the secondary lesson is that this failure stems from political overreach, not inherent weaknesses in American air capabilities.
On the contrary, airpower remains the most potent component of the United States’ conventional forces, serving as the primary source of both deterrence and warfighting advantage against state aggression. Had the strategic goals of Operation Epic Fury been limited to defeating a conventional Iranian invasion of a neighboring state, the air campaign almost certainly would have accomplished that objective within a matter of weeks.
This hypothetical scenario holds direct relevance for the most significant non-discretionary threats the United States may face in the coming years. In the event of a Russian invasion of a NATO member state in Eastern Europe, or a Chinese military move to seize Taiwan, an adversary would be forced to make massive deployments of regular ground forces to capture and hold territory. In both scenarios, advanced U.S. and allied airpower capabilities would be absolutely essential to defeating the aggressor rapidly. Much like Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, such actions could be rendered militarily untenable if NATO or U.S.-led forces were able to rapidly win and exploit air superiority over the contested territory.
To prevent larger, far more catastrophic wars between Western powers and major rivals like China or Russia, convincing both adversaries that allied forces can rapidly establish and leverage air superiority in the event of an attack remains vital. Achieving this requires targeted investments and strategic force decisions. Urgent priorities include restocking and upgrading air-launched munitions, accelerating the domestic production of missile interceptors to defend critical airbases and naval task forces, and fast-tracking the development of next-generation fighter, bomber, and support aircraft.
Although establishing air superiority over an area actively contested by advanced Chinese or Russian forces will prove exponentially more difficult than doing so over Iran, maintaining this capability is essential for preserving conventional deterrence and avoiding a major great-power conflict. Air superiority cannot win every political objective on its own, but when credibly maintained, it provides a powerful foundation for deterrence against state-sponsored territorial aggression.
