The Limits of Air and Naval Power Against Iran

In late February 2026, the United States and Israel launched a sustained air campaign against Iran that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and decapitated much of the regime’s top leadership. The President of the United States quickly framed the objective in maximalist terms: there would be “no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” to ensure that Iran “never” acquires a nuclear weapon. Months later, after intermittent ceasefires, a June memorandum of understanding that both sides spun in opposite directions, and a July resumption of strikes focused on degrading Iran’s ability to threaten the Strait of Hormuz, the Islamic Republic’s core institutions remain intact. A new leadership has coalesced. Missile and drone attacks continue. No nationwide uprising has threatened the regime. The United States has relied overwhelmingly on air and naval power, with only limited ground forces present in the broader CENTCOM area of responsibility—forces insufficient to execute major maneuver warfare, seize territory, or pose a regime-threatening ground capability.

For more than a century, theorists from Giulio Douhet onward have argued that air power could shatter an enemy’s will or capacity to resist without the messy necessity of ground combat. The empirical record has been far less cooperative.

The only clear World War II case of a defended position reduced primarily by bombardment was the Italian island of Pantelleria in June 1943. After more than five thousand Allied sorties and accompanying naval shelling, the garrison of roughly 11,000 Italians and a handful of Germans surrendered as landing forces approached. Water shortages and the cumulative weight of the bombardment left the defenders unable or unwilling to resist further. Yet Pantelleria was a military outpost, not a sovereign nation. Troops still went ashore to accept the formal surrender. No equivalent exists for an entire country.

In the opening days of Germany’s May 1940 Blitzkrieg against the Low Countries, Dutch forces were already locked in combat with advancing German ground troops and airborne units when the Luftwaffe’s bombing of Rotterdam and the explicit threat of further city destruction triggered national capitulation the same day. German ground forces were fighting inside Rotterdam itself, the Dutch air force had been largely neutralized, and the broader invasion was a classic combined-arms operation. Air power accelerated an ongoing ground campaign; it did not act in isolation.

Japan’s 1945 surrender is the most consequential case involving strategic bombing. The atomic attacks and the long naval blockade that had already strangled Japan’s merchant fleet were major factors. By mid-1945, conventional firebombing had destroyed large portions of Japan’s urban industrial base, while submarine warfare and mining had reduced its shipping capacity to a fraction of pre-war levels. Yet historians continue to debate the relative weight of the Soviet ground invasion of Manchuria—which eliminated Japan’s last hope of a mediated end to the war—and the imminent threat of a massive Allied amphibious assault on the home islands. The decision to surrender was multi-causal. Pure air and naval pressure, however devastating, did not act alone.

The 1999 Kosovo campaign is often cited as the purest modern example of air power alone coercing political concessions. NATO flew for 78 days without committing ground combat troops and ultimately compelled Slobodan Milošević to withdraw Yugoslav forces from Kosovo. Air-power advocates initially celebrated it as historic validation. Subsequent analyses, however, revealed a more complex picture: NATO was visibly preparing a ground option, the Kosovo Liberation Army exerted pressure inside the province, Russia withdrew diplomatic cover, and the bombing threatened elite interests inside Serbia. Even then, the result was limited territorial and political concessions, not the occupation or collapse of the Yugoslav state itself. Serbia’s government and most of its army survived.

Even in cases where standoff air power coincided with regime collapse, such as Libya in 2011, the strikes succeeded only because they served as flying artillery for an active indigenous ground force that physically seized territory and occupied the capital. Operation Desert Storm in 1991 remains the benchmark for the limits of air power even against limited objectives. Thirty-nine days of the most concentrated, technologically advanced air campaign in history failed to compel Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait or induce internal regime collapse; a massive 100-hour combined-arms ground offensive was still required to eject his forces and force compliance.

Naval blockades have likewise contributed to attrition—Britain against Germany in World War I, the Union against the Confederacy, the Allied submarine campaign against Japan—but in every major instance they operated alongside significant land campaigns or the clear prospect of them. The British blockade of 1914–1918 produced severe shortages and undermined German civilian morale, yet the armistice came only after the failure of the 1918 offensives and the collapse of the Western Front. The Union’s Anaconda Plan steadily strangled the Confederate economy, but victory still required the destruction of Southern armies in the field. No modern nation has been forced into total strategic submission by naval power in isolation.

These patterns help explain why pure air and naval campaigns so often fall short of decisive political results. In his landmark study Bombing to Win, Robert Pape demonstrates that coercive air campaigns fall into two fundamental categories: punishment (inflicting pain on infrastructure and elites to break political will) and denial (destroying an adversary’s physical capability to control territory or wage war). The current U.S. strategy mistakenly treats a punishment campaign as if it can achieve denial results without boots on the ground. Threatening tit-for-tat escalation—such as bombing a key bridge or power plant for every American warfighter killed—is classic punishment. It attempts to manipulate the regime’s cost-benefit math rather than decisively pursue a singular objective. Against a leadership facing existential stakes, punishment rarely breaks political resolve; it merely escalates infrastructure destruction while leaving the regime’s core coercive machinery intact.

When a government calculates that compliance equals the end of its rule or the dismemberment of the state, the threshold for capitulation rises dramatically. Iran has spent years preparing precisely for this contingency. Its “Mosaic Defense” concept disperses authority, multiplies command nodes, and distributes retaliatory capabilities. The country’s size, mountainous terrain, and population of more than 85 million make occupation extraordinarily costly. Even after the loss of Khamenei, institutional continuity proved possible; a successor process unfolded and core security organs adapted.

Crucially, air campaigns against autocratic regimes often produce a domestic "rally 'round the flag" dynamic that the state leverages to its own advantage. External bombardment provides the Islamic Republic with both the ideological pretext and emergency authority to crack down internally. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) routinely uses external strikes as cover to enforce martial measures, ration critical resources, and ruthlessly suppress domestic dissent—framing anti-government sentiment as treason during a national crisis. Rather than inciting a popular uprising to overthrow the state, standoff bombardment often tightens the security apparatus's grip over a population consumed by daily survival.

The ground-force posture is decisive here. Limited U.S. forces in the CENTCOM region—primarily in Gulf partner states, Jordan, and other locations—can defend bases, support air operations, and conduct limited raids. They cannot threaten the seizure of Tehran, the occupation of key population centers, or the systematic destruction of Iran’s remaining ground-force and internal-security apparatus. Without a credible ground component—whether conventional U.S. divisions or a heavily organized, equipped, and backed indigenous opposition force—Iranian leaders can reasonably conclude that they can absorb further punishment, impose reciprocal costs through missiles and Hormuz disruption, and wait for political fatigue, oil-market pressure, or alliance fractures to erode American resolve.

Moreover, the longer a pure-air campaign continues without decisive political results, the greater the risk of horizontal escalation. Iran has long accepted that it cannot compete in conventional maneuver warfare; instead, it built its regional strategy around state-sponsored terrorism, missile harassment, and proxy operations. Tehran’s asymmetric reach—underscored by recent drone strikes expanding the war into previously untouched sovereign nations, including Egypt’s Mediterranean ports—proves that external bombardment does not isolate the fight. Rather than forcing submission, an open-ended standoff campaign gives the Islamic Republic both the pretext and the time to expand the conflict regionally—testing American alliances and driving up global economic pain.

Two of the classic Principles of War help explain why this pattern is so persistent. The Principle of the Objective requires that every military effort be directed toward a clearly defined, decisive, and attainable goal. In the current campaign the political objective has shifted—from demands for unconditional surrender, to ensuring Iran never obtains a nuclear weapon, to protecting commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Each successive formulation is more limited, yet the force applied has remained essentially the same: air and naval power without a credible ground component. When the objective itself moves, measuring progress becomes difficult and the campaign risks becoming an open-ended exercise in attrition.

The Principle of the Offensive is equally relevant. The initial strikes in late February seized the initiative through surprise and concentrated force. That initiative has since eroded. Iran has adapted its missile tactics, dispersed residual capabilities, and imposed reciprocal costs. A prolonged air-centric campaign that reacts to Iranian actions rather than dictating the terms of the conflict gradually cedes the initiative the United States once held.

None of this is an argument for a full-scale occupation of Iran. History and practicality both counsel against such an undertaking. The point is narrower and more practical: the type of force employed must be matched to the political-military objective actually being pursued.

If the objective remains truly limited—temporary freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, or a measurable delay in Iran’s nuclear timeline—sustained and focused air and naval power may still be sufficient. But when the objective is defined as Iran never obtaining a nuclear weapon, the problem changes character. The Islamic Republic’s ideology includes the destruction of Israel and sustained resistance to the United States. Nuclear capability is treated as the ultimate insurance that would allow the regime to survive long enough—and deter retaliation sufficiently—to continue pursuing those goals. Absolute and permanent denial of that capability is therefore a regime-threatening demand. History shows that air and naval power alone have not reliably delivered such outcomes against governments that view a forbidden capability as essential to their survival.

Policymakers therefore face a choice grounded in evidence rather than aspiration. They can accept more limited objectives that air and naval power have historically been able to support, or they can recognize that guaranteeing permanent nuclear denial—or full regime capitulation—requires either a credible ground element to alter the enemy’s strategic arithmetic or a serious commitment to a capable proxy ground force. Continuing to rely primarily on air and naval instruments while demanding outcomes that history shows those instruments cannot deliver alone is a strategy of hope over experience. The Iranian regime, like others before it facing existential stakes, appears prepared to test which approach prevails.

Stephen D. Cook is a retired U.S. Army Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel with 25 years of service. A combat veteran decorated for both heroism and valor, he is the author of the field manuals When We’re Finished and Choose the Heavier Ruck, and the techno-thriller precision-strike trilogy leading with In the Shadows of the Sky. His work explores the intersection of elite military decision-making, intuition, and disruptive leadership. He is based in St. Augustine, Florida.