Tehran may either fracture under combined pressure or endure in a weakened state, stripped of key deterrent capabilities for years<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is no precedent for regime change through an air campaign,\u201d Brig. Gen. (res.) Eran Ortal told The Media Line.<\/p>\n
There is no precedent for regime change through an air campaign<\/p>\n
As the joint US-Israel strike campaign against Iran moved deeper into a multiday fight, analysts said the central question is no longer whether airpower can wreck military infrastructure\u2014it can\u2014but whether leadership losses, communications breakdowns, and sustained pressure can crack Tehran\u2019s hold enough to trigger collapse from within. The alternative end state is narrower but still consequential: a surviving government stripped of key military capabilities and coerced into a far weaker regional posture for years.<\/p>\n
Air campaigns can shatter arsenals and paralyze command-and-control, but they rarely topple regimes unless political collapse follows inside the target state. Ortal said this war is now testing whether Iran is entering that kind of internal moment.<\/p>\n
Since February 28, when Washington launched Operation Epic Fury and Israel began Operation Roaring Lion, US and Israeli forces have carried out waves of strikes aimed at Iranian command nodes, missile infrastructure, and other strategic targets.<\/p>\n
The goal is not for the regime to fall, but to create conditions that will enable the Iranian people to topple it<\/p>\n
\u201cThe goal is not for the regime to fall, but to create conditions that will enable the Iranian people to topple it,\u201d Professor Danny Orbach, a military historian from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told The Media Line. \u201cIf the Iranians don\u2019t take advantage of the opportunity, the war might end with less ambitious goals achieved\u2014the destruction of the Iranian navy, its missile arsenal, and the remnants of its nuclear program.\u201d<\/p>\n
CENTCOM described the opening phase as an attack package launched from air, land, and sea, involving cruise missiles and advanced fighter aircraft. US officials portrayed the initial strike package as one of the most concentrated deployments of American firepower in the region in a generation.<\/p>\n
On social media, footage showed Iranians celebrating in the streets after confirmation was made public that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been killed in an airstrike, as strikes and counterstrikes pushed the conflict beyond a conventional \u201cdegrade capabilities\u201d campaign and into an uncertain political endgame.<\/p>\n
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump encouraged Iranians to seize the moment and overthrow the regime. The air campaign is intended to help set that chain of events in motion, though there is no guarantee it will happen.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe duration of the operation depends on its goal,\u201d Ortal said. \u201cThis goal could change as the success of the operation becomes apparent.\u201d<\/p>\n
Israeli officials said the opening days brought heavy strike volume, with hundreds of targets hit and more than 1,200 munitions dropped, a pace that officials said could indicate a prolonged campaign.<\/p>\n
Ortal framed what comes next as two broad paths. In the first, he said, leadership losses and a communications breakdown combine with extreme public pressure to produce a rupture that ends the regime\u2014an outcome he stressed airpower alone has not historically produced.<\/p>\n
\u201cSeeing Iranians celebrating the attack in the streets increases the optimism that this scenario could materialize,\u201d Ortal explained. \u201cThis could create a domino effect that cannot be foreseen in which the disappearance of senior leadership, major communications disruption, and extreme public pressure destabilize the leadership, who then abandons their positions.\u201d<\/p>\n
If that cascade does not happen, Ortal said the likely endpoint may be a government that survives politically but is left strategically broken. \u201cThis will leave the regime without military capabilities, weak and neutralized and fully subordinate to American whims and future coercion,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
For Orbach, the campaign\u2019s political bet is tied to a target set that tends to receive less attention than missiles and nuclear facilities: Iran\u2019s ability to project power at sea. \u201cThe navy is more important than what most people think,\u201d he said. \u201cThe navy is the ability to project power, especially through the threat of blocking the Hormuz Strait. Its destruction will humiliate them and turn them into a country that cannot project power.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Strait of Hormuz remains a pressure point with global consequences, carrying roughly a fifth of the world\u2019s traded oil. Even limited disruption can rattle energy markets, shipping schedules, and insurance costs for commercial traffic, and the loss of credible maritime leverage would narrow Tehran\u2019s ability to coerce neighbors or threaten the global economy during crises.<\/p>\n
The broader logic of the strikes is rooted in the structure Tehran built over decades: a regional proxy network paired with missiles and drones designed to deter direct attack and impose costs through escalation. Degrading those tools changes Iran\u2019s bargaining power as much as its battlefield options.<\/p>\n
\u201cIran\u2019s ability to influence the Middle East is tied to two abilities\u2014its proxies and its missiles,\u201d Ortal said. \u201cIran no longer has air defense systems, and its missile launchers are gradually depleting. Iran has no ability to face this, leaving the regime subdued to American pressure it will not be able to withstand.\u201d<\/p>\n
Iran\u2019s ability to influence the Middle East is tied to two abilities\u2014its proxies and its missiles<\/p>\n
Iran\u2019s nuclear program remains the central backdrop. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action temporarily restricted aspects of Tehran\u2019s enrichment program in exchange for sanctions relief, but after the US withdrawal in 2018, Iran expanded enrichment and reduced international monitoring, raising tensions that set the stage for the current confrontation.<\/p>\n
Orbach argued that if Washington and Jerusalem want more than a military rollback\u2014and instead aim for collapse from within\u2014they would need to sustain pressure and widen the target set beyond headline military assets to the regime\u2019s internal enforcement apparatus, including the institutions used to suppress protests and enforce control.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe way to increase the odds of toppling the regime is to eliminate its leader and his heirs, in several rounds, rendering them weak and scared,\u201d Orbach said, estimating the chances of the regime surviving are slim. \u201cIn addition, the oppression mechanisms of the regime also need to be hit. The question is how long Israel and the US will persist in this effort.\u201d<\/p>\n
Iran\u2019s internal condition may matter as much as the strike count. Years of sanctions, corruption, and heavy security spending have strained the economy, while inflation, infrastructure decay, electricity shortages, and water crises have deepened public frustration\u2014factors that could magnify political aftershocks if the leadership and control systems continue to falter.<\/p>\n
\u201cIran\u2019s economy is in a catastrophic state and deteriorating further,\u201d Orbach said. \u201cThis will only worsen after the war, including raging inflation and the water crisis. Add to this a succession struggle and popular unrest, and it is hard to see the regime surviving in the long run.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even if the campaign\u2019s political ambition narrows over time, Ortal said the military impact alone could reshape the region for years. \u201cEven if the goals of the operation will be downgraded, still Iran will be rendered extremely weak and subdued for a substantial number of years,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
In the near term, analysts said four indicators will show which direction the campaign is taking. One is whether strikes expand beyond military assets to the regime\u2019s internal enforcement apparatus. Another is whether Iran\u2019s naval leverage in and around the Strait of Hormuz is neutralized. A third is whether internal unrest grows beyond scattered signals into sustained pressure. The fourth is whether Washington and Jerusalem begin describing success in narrower terms tied to long-term military degradation.<\/p>\n
What remains uncertain is the central fact Ortal pointed to: airpower can decapitate, disrupt, and degrade, but it cannot vote, march, or govern. The coming days may determine whether the strikes merely dismantle Iran\u2019s security apparatus\u2014or whether they open a path for Iranians themselves to dismantle the system that wields it, defying the history Ortal says has held for air campaigns.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tehran may either fracture under combined pressure or endure in a weakened state, stripped of key deterrent capabilities…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":317350,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,46,43],"class_list":{"0":"post-317349","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-israel","8":"tag-il","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=317349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317349\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/317350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=317349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=317349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=317349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}