Why and When Bombing Still Wins

“Air power never delivers on its extravagant promises.” - Max Hastings, Noisy Reality Zoom call, 26 July 2026

Using U.S. ground forces is pretty much off the table as the logistics lines of communication would be long and vulnerable to guerrilla warfare in the difficult terrain of the Zagros Mountains which lie between any entry point on the Gulf coast and Tehran. A ground invasion would suffer all of the difficulties of the recently ended “forever wars,” plus the added problem of already diminishing support of the American people. We are therefore reduced to relying on airpower, seapower, and economic power, in what the Chinese used to refer to as, “Noncontact Warfare.”

Another example is Operation DESERT STORM in 1991. Under the weight of 38 days of bombing, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein actually did capitulate to Coalition terms. However, a major U.S. objective was to destroy the Republican Guard, so the White House ignored the agreement and began the ground campaign before anything could stop it. University of Chicago Professor Robert Pape, in his book, Bombing to Win (1995) stated that, “By the end of February, before the ground attack, Iraq had indicated its willingness to abandon Kuwait. The main obstacle to an agreement was the U.S. demand that Iraq also abandon its military equipment” (p.357, Bombing to Win). Pape went on to say rather prophetically, “[ODS] is worth studying as a denial campaign both because it did in fact coerce Iraq into withdrawing from Kuwait and because the reluctance of Americans to risk heavy casualties means that future war planners may be asked to coerce an enemy with air power alone” (p.212, Bombing to Win).

The most relevant example is Operation ALLIED FORCE in 1999. Airpower forced Serbia’s President Slobodan Milosevic to pull his forces out of the “sacred” province of Kosovo and accept its independence. To be clear, Allied ground forces played no part in OAF, yet Milosevic caved to NATO demands. There were many elements, including diplomatic isolation and economic sanctions, but those tools were in place long before the bombing started. 

To be sure, even bombing didn’t work immediately. The bombing campaign went through several succeeding phases, reminiscent of Operation Rolling Thunder 30 years earlier. NATO politicians gradually opened up the target list to include infrastructure targets, but only in limited geographic areas south of Belgrade. When that didn’t work, they eventually allowed targets in Belgrade, itself.  With the infrastructure campaign not taking hold quickly enough, a new strategy, “Crony Attack,” was finally authorized.

The theory behind crony attack, as explained by Major Julian Tolbert, is straightforward: coerce the regime’s key patrons into pressuring a change in policy. The trick, of course, was to find out who Milosevic’s cronies were and what pressure points they would be susceptible to. The analysts at the Joint Warfare Analysis Center (JWAC) mapped out who Milosevic was dependent upon, and what economic interests they had, and targeted those. This is why we seemingly inexplicably bombed the Yugo factory, a tobacco manufacturer, and a copper smelter, among other seemingly disjointed target sets. Almost as soon as the Crony attack began, it ended with Milosevic running up the white flag, withdrawing his army, and consigning Kosovo to independence from Serbia. Interestingly, Ukraine seems now to have adopted Crony Attack in targeting the Russian on-line retailer, “Wildberries.”  The company’s founder and CEO, Tatyana Kim, is a billionaire Oligarch and a backer of Putin. She may be the first of Putin’s cronies to feel the heat of a Ukrainian Crony campaign.

After the war ended successfully, the U.S. Army claimed the victory. They couldn’t concede victory to the Air Force, because they were deeply invested in their dogma that airpower is incapable of winning wars — only “boots on the ground” can do that. Therefore, it was obvious to them that Milosevic was frightened into accepting defeat, lest he suffer a ground invasion. This, of course, is laughable given the Serbian national identity being bound up in the spirit of the Partizan. Milosevic could do nothing to strike out at NATO while the war remained entirely in the air. He would have had his prayers answered if NATO had invaded the mountainous country that lacked the infrastructure to logistically support such a thrust. No matter what happened, he could at least draw NATO blood.

An objective observer would say that airpower is one tool in the national security toolbox, along with land power, sea power, economic power, etc. Sometimes the right tool is airpower (Japan in 1945, Desert Storm in 1991, Kosovo in 1999) and sometimes it’s land power (in the counterinsurgency wars, and wars where the enemy’s strategic Centers of Gravity are off the table, like Korea and Vietnam). And sometimes, a less desired tool is called for, because we can’t use the best one for the situation, given political or other imperatives. The question then becomes, how can a less-desirable tool be wielded in a way that brings victory, anyway?

Today, we find ourselves caught up in conflict with an on-again and off-again nature that we have no way of knowing how long it can go on in this way. Obviously, if the U.S. Army could march on Tehran, we could compel our enemies to submit to our will. For various reasons, that tool is not available to us. So, the tools we must use to end this conflict are economic and diplomatic power, airpower and sea power. As compared to land power, these tools work via coercion; while Tehran may defy our will, they can only do so up to the limits of their pain threshold. In the Iran-Iraq War, Tehran seemed able to bear the loss of half a million or more soldiers and civilians without breaking, but in the end, Ayatollah Khomeini was coerced to end the war — in his words, he was “Forced to drink the chalice of poison” and make peace.  His pain threshold was very high, but present nonetheless.

To win this conflict as quickly as possible, economic, and diplomatic force should be applied as tightly as possible. Sea power is doing an important, even decisive, job of strangling Iran’s ability to sell its goods to the world. An additional contribution that sea power (here including the U.S. Marine Corps) has left to employ is to take the four islands just inside the Strait, Greater and Lesser Tunb, Abu Musa, and Siri Islands. The Dupuy Institute’s Wargaming and Combat Simulations team has determined with historically calibrated models that these islands could easily be taken with minimal casualties. The loss of these islands would be a tremendous shock to Tehran, who seized three of them from what is now the UAE in 1971. The loss of situational awareness these islands currently give to Iran would make it much more difficult to track and attack shipping entering the Strait.

The four islands. Marines and Paratroopers from the 82^nd Airborne could seize and hold them, while troops from the UAE would garrison the islands, allowing U.S. troops to reconstitute a theater reserve. Courtesy Google Earth.

This leaves airpower. To this point, U.S. airpower has almost entirely been applied to destroying Iran’s air defenses, Iran’s Air Force and Navy, but mostly it has been used to degrade the IRGC’s ballistic missiles and drones in an effort reminiscent of the “Great Scud Hunt” of 1991.  For those who think airpower has failed yet again, it honestly hasn’t been tried.

We will never succeed in finding and destroying every ballistic missile and drone. What we need to do is make them want not to launch them at us, or at our GCC allies. We must strike disproportionately hard at targets Tehran holds dear. There are several means to amp up the impact of airpower. First, airpower can be used to further isolate Iran physically from the rest of the world. Iran has neither been trusted by, nor trustful of its neighbors, and therefore has very few border crossing points, and those are generally very low volume traffic points. Attacks on those and the few rail lines leading into the country from outside would severely choke off the import of goods and weapons. Secondly, mining Iran’s Caspian Sea ports would seal off Iran from the outside world.

Entry points from Iran’s neighbors. There are only a few major truck, and even fewer rail entry points. The Caspian Sea ports are very small and not suitable for sustaining Iran. Courtesy Google Earth.

Destroying key parts of Iran’s oil industry could send a telling message to Tehran that their entire economy is subject to collapse at our will. We could choose to destroy machinery that would be extremely difficult to replace from Iran’s internal manufacturing resources. Electrical power generation should be attacked, but very selectively. If we bring the entire grid down — which is easily within our reach — hospitals could not keep many civilians alive — not a reputation we need. If regime change is to happen, it must come from the grassroots up, and we need to send a clear message to the Iranian people that we are working hard to keep from harming them.

After Operation ALLIED FORCE concluded in 1999, Military analyst Stephen V. Cole presciently opined on the mechanism for victory in that conflict:

Infrastructure has emerged from the Kosovo War as the decisive strategic target…Serbia was brought to its knees not by the economic blockade or the attack on its forces in the field, but by the constant and rapid erosion of its key infrastructure. Systematic attacks, planned more by industrialists than warriors, can take a nation's economy apart. If a national leader has to awaken every single day to news of yet another industry which his nation no longer has, with no effective means of defense or counterattack, that leader must quickly surrender or he will certainly be removed from power by the more pragmatic sub-leaders around him. Such targets will largely be economic and political. There is little to be gained by attacking empty military garrisons. Attacking enemy air bases is normally done as a matter of course in establishing air supremacy, and is a means to an end not an end in itself. But if a country finds itself on Monday morning unable to produce armored vehicles for the next decade, and on Tuesday morning unable to produce aircraft for the next decade, and on Wednesday morning unable to produce military or even consumer electronics for a decade, and on Thursday morning unable to produce assault rifles or pistols, and on Friday morning unable to produce refined gasoline, the national leaders must wonder if there is any point in waiting to surrender until three weeks later when they can no longer produce furniture, canned vegetables, or silverware.

Mr. Cole hit the nail on the head, vividly describing how coercion via airpower works. Since we are clearly executing a coercion campaign against Iran, we must acknowledge that Iran’s leadership may never bow to our demands, and would prefer to suffer our worst. Simply blowing up military equipment won’t cut it. We have to destroy things that they value so much that they will concede to our demands. And we must hit targets that will gain our objectives, even if they don’t relent. If we destroy their infrastructure such that at the end of the campaign, they cannot rebuild the capability to threaten our interests, we will have won, even if they don’t fly the white flag over Tehran.

Finally, the Supreme Leader and his supporting elements, including the Majlis (parliament) and the entire IRGC are corrupt and have a high degree of susceptibility to Crony Attack. We should diligently seek out their economic interests and systematically destroy them, one at a time. Chances are very high that pathway into a Crony Attack campaign, the Supreme Leader will, “Drink the chalice of poison” and submit to our demands.

William A. Sayers made his 30-year career in the Intelligence Community in Washington D.C. as a military analyst at DIA, CIA and the National Counterterrorism Center.  He holds Master’s degrees from the Marine Corps Command & Staff College, the Marine Corps School of Advanced Warfighting (where he was their only civilian graduate through at least 2011) and the Marine Corps War College.  He spent 2 years on active duty in the USAF and 3 years as a reserve intelligence officer in the Air Force Intelligence Service.  Sayers has published articles on the air war over North Vietnam in Air Power History and twice in Vietnam magazine.  He is currently the Principal Research Fellow and Director of Wargaming and Combat Simulations at The Dupuy Institute in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia.

This article has been reviewed and approved for public release by the Central Intelligence Agency. All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not0 reflect the official positions or views of the U.S. Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author's views.

image: A member of the military affiliated with Iran's Revolutionary Guard, stands next to Kalashnikov-style assault rifles in a military training course at a camp set up in Imam Hussein Square in Tehran, Sunday, Oct. 4, 2026. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)