Key Points and Summary – A new analysis of the recent “Twelve-Day War” concludes that while Israeli and U.S. airpower achieved “dazzling” tactical success, it was a strategic failure.
-The air campaign exhausted resources and established air dominance but failed to deliver a knockout blow. It did not topple the Iranian regime, which appears unshaken, nor did it permanently end Tehran’s nuclear program.
-This demonstrates the classic limitation of airpower: no matter how impressive the fireworks, they cannot achieve transformational political goals on their own, making a future conflict likely.
A Brutal Lesson from the 12-Day War
The first significant histories of the Twelve-Day War, itself evidently the culminating action of the Wars of October 7 that have gripped the Middle East for the past two years, will not emerge for some time.
Serious analysis and assessment will require direct information, not just from Israeli and American sources, but also from Iranian sources.
Accounts from Gulf State envoys will allow us to better understand the diplomatic context of the war. Eventually, we may even get a better sense of Chinese and Russian thinking on the difficulties of giving Iran any direct support.
Waiting for History on 12-Day War
There is much to look forward to. Nevertheless, while some of these lessons will chiefly be of interest to historians, others are critical for policymakers who need to make decisions today and prepare for tomorrow.
Israel and Iran may yet return to war in 2025, as key questions of the military balance have yet to be solved. And while the evidence remains fragmentary, the early verdict of the Twelve Day War leads us in a familiar direction; airpower is an essential tool of statecraft, but has critical limitations that cannot be wished away by material superiority and tactical wizardry.
The Twelve-Day War left Israel in a dominant position over Iranian airspace, able to go where it wanted and do what it wanted without a serious threat from Iranian defenses. However, it did not compel Iran to yield on Israel’s critical demands and did not destroy the Iranian regime.
Israeli air forces ended the war triumphant but exhausted, having destroyed most of their initial priorities before moving down the endless list of less critical military and regime targets.
In this, the Israeli effort followed the typical trajectory of all air campaigns, as each new wave of strikes does less damage than the previous one, targeting less important sites, those that have already been damaged, and those that have been evacuated or otherwise rendered redundant. An extremely carefully calibrated campaign can “save” some targets of value for follow-on attacks in order to keep up psychological and popular pressure on the regime. Experience suggests, however, that demands for “results” incline both political and military decision-makers to pursue the highest leverage targets first, rather than leaving them for future attacks.
This led to a situation where the return on investment from airstrikes was steadily declining. And air campaigns aren’t cheap. The war badly taxed Israeli resources by depleting munitions and badly taxing the IDF’s archaic fleet of tankers. A longer, more thorough American campaign might have done additional damage to Iran’s military and nuclear infrastructures. Still, Washington had little taste for a more protracted war. Iranian retaliation rapidly drew down both American and Israeli reserves of interceptor missiles.
And in this context, Israel and the United States failed to decisively achieve their goals. Israelis and Israeli proxy organizations have argued for a long time that the Islamic Republic was a shoddily built edifice that could collapse at the merest nudge. As attacks against regime infrastructure undercut the physical and bureaucratic capacity for repression, a firm display of the regime’s helplessness under attack would undercut its ideological foundations. Notwithstanding these hopes, the Islamic Republic does not seem to be on the verge of collapse and is not even suffering from significant internal protests. Worse, the United States has signalled impatience with the work of keeping Iranian oil exports under sanction, offering a financial lifeline for the regime.
Moreover, despite the tactical success of Israeli and American strikes against the infrastructure and human capital of the Iranian nuclear weapons program, the problem of a nuclear Iran has not in any way been solved. Iran still has enriched uranium, can still enrich yet more uranium, and has more than enough scientists to continue work on the program. Worst of all, Tehran has less incentive than ever to engage in good-faith negotiations about the future of the program.
Iran’s Nuclear Program Lives On
Israel’s use of airpower was dazzling, and the US strikes that helped end the war achieved extraordinary levels of tactical success. But they did not end the Islamic Republic or the threat that (according to Washington and Jerusalem) it poses to regional and international stability. The strikes did not end (and possibly did not seriously delay) Iran’s nuclear program.
This means that the Twelve-Day War offers a lesson common to the history of airpower; no matter how impressive the fireworks might be, they cannot, on their own, accomplish transformational political goals.
This is why future historians may conclude that we have not yet seen the last of the Wars of October 7.
About the Author: Dr. Robert Farley, University of Kentucky
Dr. Robert Farley has taught security and diplomacy courses at the Patterson School since 2005. He received his BS from the University of Oregon in 1997, and his Ph. D. from the University of Washington in 2004. Dr. Farley is the author of Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force (University Press of Kentucky, 2014), the Battleship Book (Wildside, 2016), Patents for Power: Intellectual Property Law and the Diffusion of Military Technology (University of Chicago, 2020), and most recently Waging War with Gold: National Security and the Finance Domain Across the Ages (Lynne Rienner, 2023). He has contributed extensively to a number of journals and magazines, including the National Interest, the Diplomat: APAC, World Politics Review, and the American Prospect. Dr. Farley is also a founder and senior editor of Lawyers, Guns and Money. You can follow him on X: @DrFarls.
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Jim
July 30, 2025 at 9:54 am
The history of war since World War II has been that air campaigns have an effect, but ground troops taking and holding territory is a necessity.
Nazi Germany suffered under an unremitting bombing campaign, but ultimately allied soldiers on the ground is what finally brought the war to an end.
Japan also suffered under terrific bombing campaigns, but it took the A-bomb to end the war (some revisionist historians assert Japan was ready to surrender before the A-bomb drop, but wanted to keep the Emperor, which ended up happening, in any event).
The idea a bombing campaign is sufficient to cause regime change is not supported by the evidence or the facts.
Frankly, it’s claimed Israel was attempting a regime Change decapitation, but more likely the initial attack was meant to cause chaos and suppress defenses, possibly regime collapse, but regime change? Who was going to take over?
Certainly, Israel would have been satisfied with regime collapse, but they failed, in fact the best evidence currently available suggests Iranians rallied to the government, rather than seeking to change it.
What’s the point? Aerial bombing campaigns, while they do inflict punishment and destruction and destroy production (at least temporarily) aren’t sufficient on their own to cause regime change.
Iran can’t be taken out by aerial bombing alone (unless it’s an A-bomb).
Marching troops to Tehran?
A World War II type effort would be needed to go all the way to Tehran as it’s centrally located well away from any points where troops could march across the border and occupy it, not to mention the numbers of troops and logistics involved would be massive.
Regime change from the air is a pipe dream.
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