June 17, 2025
ROBERT A. PAPE is Professor of Political Science and Director of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats. He is the author of Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War.
Over the past week, Israel has engaged in a protracted air campaign in Iran to achieve something no other country has ever done before: topple a government and eliminate its major military capability using airpower alone. Israel’s attempt to achieve these highly ambitious goals with an air campaign and sophisticated intelligence networks, but without the deployment of a ground army, has no modern precedent. The United States never succeeded in achieving such goals just through airstrikes during the massive strategic bombing campaigns of World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the wars in the Balkans, or the Iraq war. Nor did the Soviet Union and Russia in Afghanistan, Chechnya, or Ukraine. And Israel itself has never attempted such a campaign in previous conflicts in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, or even in its most recent operation in Gaza.
Israel, the strongest military power in the Middle East, has scored numerous tactical successes using precision airpower and exquisite intelligence since Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023. The Israel Defense Forces have assassinated senior leaders in Iran’s proxy organizations, including much of Hezbollah’s mid- and high-level leadership. In a previous exchange of missile fire in April, the IDF destroyed a variety of Iran’s air defenses and missile capabilities. And its most recent attacks on Iran have killed senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leaders, destroyed important regime communication systems, damaged important economic targets, and degraded some of Iran’s nuclear program.
But even as it continues to score individual victories, Israel appears to be falling into the “smart-bomb trap,” in which overconfidence in precision weapons and intelligence not only allows the country’s leaders to believe that they can stop an Iranian nuclear breakout and even topple the regime of the Islamic Republic but also leaves Israel less secure than before. Airpower, no matter how targeted and intense, is not certain to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program in its entirety, nor will it clear a path for regime change in Tehran. In fact, if the historical record is any indication, Israel’s overconfidence in what its technologically advanced weapons can do is likely to harden Iran’s resolve and produce the opposite of its intended results: a more dangerous Iran, now armed with nuclear weapons. Without a ground invasion (highly improbable) or direct U.S. support (which the Trump administration may be wary to provide), Israel’s military successes in Iran and beyond could very well be short-lived.
KNOCKOUT POWER?
Israel’s strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities are motivated not by the fear that Iran is capable of assembling a nuclear weapon—in 2025, Iran can certainly master the 80-year-old technology used for building crude nuclear weapons such as those the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—but rather that Iran may already be on the verge of acquiring the crucial fissile material for the weapon. Iran can develop this material in two ways: enriching uranium ore to achieve the purity of isotopes necessary for bomb grade, at Iran’s uranium ore mines, uranium gasification plant at Estefan, and enrichment facilities at Fordow and Natanz (which was somewhat damaged by Israeli strikes); and stripping off the plutonium that is a natural byproduct of any nuclear reactor, such as Iran’s operational reactor at Bushehr.
Israel faces three impediments to knocking out these facilities altogether. First, much of Iran’s nuclear program, including its uranium enrichment facilities, is buried deep underground. The well-developed facility at Fordow is burrowed hundreds of feet under a mountain, and a new underground facility at Natanz, at depths similar to Fordow, has been under construction for several years. Thus far, Israel has not targeted Fordow at all and has limited its attacks on Natanz to its power generation facilities rather than attempting to destroy the centrifuges and stockpiles of enriched uranium buried 75 feet under the surface. No available evidence suggests that Israel has the airpower payload capacity to carry the 30,000-pound large earth-penetrating bombs developed by the United States that would be necessary to carry out an attack to totally destroy Fordow. The fact that it has not already attempted to attack the shallower underground chambers at Natanz suggests it faces constraints, either from the United States or from its own limited firepower, against even these more vulnerable facilities. Israeli military leaders seem to acknowledge the fact that a decisive operation against Fordow would be impossible without U.S. support: former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant stressed that the United States has “an obligation” to join Israel’s military campaign against Iran’s nuclear program.
What if the United States, with its bunker-busting bombs, joins the attack? Could Israel actually knock out Iran’s weapons program with such support? Even if President Donald Trump were to take up Gallant’s request to bomb Fordow, and even if the United States’ large bunker-buster bombs could burrow all the way into Fordow’s most deeply buried chambers, the United States and Israel would still face more challenges to eliminating Iran’s ability to acquire nuclear weapons. There would be no “mission accomplished” moment in which both countries could conclude with absolute confidence that Iran could not proceed covertly. If anything, a U.S.-assisted attack on Iranian facilities would only put the United States directly in Iran’s nuclear cross hairs rather than solve the problem for good.
Second, aside from Iran’s enrichment facilities, the Bushehr reactor, which is approximately 11 miles southeast of the city of Bushehr, presents a significant challenge. The reactor can be modified to generate plutonium that could be used for nuclear weapons. This risk cannot be eliminated as long as the reactor exists. But if Israel were to destroy the Bushehr reactor, it could risk the release of a Chernobyl-like radiological plume over the city, which is home to roughly 200,000 people, as well as over population centers across the Persian Gulf. It would also invite Iranian ballistic missile retaliation against Israel’s nuclear reactor complex at Dimona.
Last, and most important, even following extensive airstrikes against the nuclear facilities, significant uncertainty about the condition of surviving elements and their ability to be reconstituted would remain. Without onsite inspections, Israel would not be able to conduct reliable assessments of the damage done to Iran’s uranium enrichment capabilities and existing stocks of enriched uranium. Iran is not likely to allow international inspectors, much less U.S. or Israeli teams, to assess the exact degree of damage to its enriched uranium stocks, determine whether usable equipment or material has been removed before or after strikes, or pinpoint the manufacturing locations for the components for Iran’s significant domestic centrifuge production. Commando teams could attempt onsite reconnaissance but would face obvious risks of attack by Iranian forces. This lack of knowledge means that Israel—even with the United States’ help—would never be confident that Iran no longer has a path to the bomb. Concerns about Iran nuclearizing in secret would fester, mirroring the fears that drove the United States in 2003 to launch a ground war to conquer Iraq in search of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.
MISPLAYING THE NUMBERS
The statistics available on Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile make clear the impossibility of Israel’s stated goal of completely and permanently dismantling the nuclear program. Even if one assumes that Israeli strikes have effectively destroyed all the enriched material at Natanz, Iran’s 60 percent enriched stockpile remains at Fordow. According to an International Atomic Energy Agency report from May, that stockpile stands at 408 kilograms, up from 275 kilograms in February—enough material to produce ten nuclear weapons after a few weeks of further enrichment (40 kilograms are needed for one weapon). Unless airstrikes could guarantee that a strike would destroy over 90 percent of all of the 60 percent enriched uranium at Fordow—a daunting task even if the United States were to join the mission—Iran would have remaining fissile material for at least one and possibly more nuclear bombs, to say nothing of the 276 kilogram supply of 20 percent enriched uranium, which would be enough for two additional bombs.
Because Iran has been increasing its rate of uranium enrichment so dramatically, to completely prevent the possibility of reconstitution of the nuclear program, Israel would also need to knock out a substantial portion of its centrifuges, as well as centrifuge manufacturing facilities, the locations of which have never been disclosed. And as Iran scrambles to hide its remaining capabilities, Israeli intelligence will be left to rely on loose estimates that will only grow more uncertain over time, at the precise moment that Iran has every incentive to refit its still-standing facilities in a desperate bid to speedily develop a weapon.
NEW REGIMES DON’T FALL FROM THE SKY
The tactical limitations preventing Israel from completely eliminating Iran’s nuclear weapons capacity likely explain why Israel wants to induce regime change. If military strikes are unlikely to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons capability, replacing Iran’s regime with a new government would seem like an attractive solution to Israel’s strategic conundrum. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has indeed suggested that Israel’s bombing campaign has left the Iranian regime perilously “weak” and susceptible to a popular revolt.
But regime change is an overambitious goal. Such a gambit would demand not just the decapitation of Iran’s entire senior leadership and the removal of hard-liners throughout the operational areas of the administrative government; it would require the installation of a friendly government willing to abandon the remnants of Iran’s existing nuclear program and guarantee that it would never pursue nuclear weapons in the future. Put differently, Israel would need to achieve a version of what the United States and the United Kingdom achieved when they inspired a military coup in 1953 to topple the democratically elected leader of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, and replaced him with the Western-backed puppet regime of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
But unlike the United States and Britain during Mosaddegh’s overthrow or in other successfully orchestrated foreign-sponsored coups, Israel would be attempting to use airpower as the main tool through which it would overthrow the existing regime rather than a local group of Iranian military or civilian leaders. That strategy would likely stir great opposition to foreign military intervention without seriously dislodging the government of the Islamic Republic.
Airpower, even when paired with intelligence networks, has never toppled a government. Since the dawn of strategic bombing doctrines in World War I, early airpower theorists were captivated by the idea that, if organized correctly, bombing campaigns could encourage populations to revolt against their own governments. Since then, militaries have attempted a wide variety of schemes, including the intense bombing of cities to compel civilians to rise up and demand that their government make whatever concessions necessary to halt the assault. In over 40 instances of strategic bombing from World War I to the first Gulf War in 1991, such barrages, whether concentrated and heavy or light and dispersed, never compelled civilians to take to the streets in any meaningful numbers to oppose their governments.
Regime change is an overambitious goal.
The invention of precision weaponry over 30 years ago has not changed this fact. Even with highly accurate “smart bombs,” killing leaders from the air often depends as much on luck as on accuracy and intelligence. In 1986, the United States attempted the first precision decapitation, targeting Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. The strike hit Qaddafi’s tent, but not before he had stepped out. Qaddafi claimed that his daughter was killed, leading to Libya’s revenge bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988, which killed hundreds of civilians. The United States unsuccessfully tried to kill Iraqi President Saddam Hussein with precision airstrikes in 1991, 1998, and 2003, each time hoping superior intelligence would do the trick. Only the U.S. ground invasion ended Saddam’s reign.
Even when airpower does kill a leader, the outcome is rarely straightforward. In 1996, Russia killed the Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudayev with antiradiation missiles after pinpointing Dudayev’s phone signal during a call with Russian President Boris Yeltsin. A new, more radical leader soon took over, kicking Russian forces out of Chechnya and precipitating a brutal ground war to restore pro-Moscow rule in the region three years later. Airpower has successfully led to regime change during the precision age only when it is employed alongside local ground forces in a “hammer and anvil” model, as the United States did to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001 and Qaddafi in 2011. Unlike the United States in Afghanistan and Libya, however, Israel does not appear to be willing or able to conduct the kind of major ground operations in Iran that could bring about the collapse of the Iranian regime.
Finally, the biggest stumbling block to installing friendly governments is popular sentiment, or nationalism, in the targeted country. Nationalism tends to grow rapidly when local populations are confronted by the prospect of rule by foreigners and especially rule as the object of a foreign military intervention. It is the principal reason that the United States’ efforts to install ostensibly democratic regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan were met with terrorism—and why Israel’s current military conquest of Gaza has faced similar difficulties. Airstrikes targeting local leaders only exacerbate this tendency. Local dissatisfaction with leadership, however intense, does not mean a population wants to be governed, directly or indirectly, by a foreign master willing to kill any leader with whom they disagree. Israel might have learned from its own experience to this effect: every time it has decapitated a terrorist leader, their successor has never been friendlier to the Israeli government. Iran would be no exception.
CAUGHT IN THE TRAP
Israeli airpower cannot decisively knock out Iran’s nuclear program; Iran could reassemble its program from the remnants covertly, with even less Western oversight and intelligence about weapons development. If Israel had a plan to launch a military coup against the Iranian government, it likely would already have pursued it. Without U.S. intervention on Israel’s behalf, Israel will be alone, with no good options, facing a more dangerous Iran than it ever has. As the situation stands now, the conflict is escalating into a “war of the cities” between Tel Aviv and Tehran, as Israel and Iran assail densely populated urban areas. As civilian casualties mount, both countries are likely to grow more defiant, with increasingly disastrous consequences.
The Trump administration, for its part, has emboldened Israel in its war in Gaza and threatened military strikes of its own against Iran in the lead-up to nuclear negotiations, which now seem to be entirely off the table. More than 20 years after launching its own preemptive war in Iraq, the United States may yet join Israel’s in Iran.
But U.S. intervention is not inevitable. If Iran acts with restraint, Trump may be persuaded not to join what could become another forever war. It took the 9/11 attacks to motivate Washington to wage a preventive war against Iraq. In the absence of a major provocation, few U.S. leaders, especially one as image conscious as Trump, would relish another such misadventure. In that case, Israel would remain on its own to face the possibility of Iranian covert nuclear acquisition. Ultimately, there may be no way for Israel to escape its smart-bomb delusion—or another quagmire in the Middle East.
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