Trump Cannot Achieve Iran Goals With Bombing Alone, Expert on Airpower Warns

Several days into the U.S.-Israeli strikes against Iran, President Donald Trump has offered mixed messages about the war’s eventual aims and objectives. 

When announcing the beginning of Operation Epic Fury in the early hours of Saturday morning, the President framed the war as necessary to stop Iran from attaining nuclear weapons, but also implied a goal of regime change when he urged Iranians to “take back your country.”

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Days later, he said the goal was to destroy Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities, navy, and stop its support for proxy groups in the region, with a broader goal of protecting the U.S. and its allies from attacks. 

Read more: Here Are the Countries Trump Has Ordered Strikes On in His Second Term

Trump has also given contradictory statements about the scope of the mission ahead, with estimates ranging from “four to five weeks” to “as long as it takes”.

At the same time, other top Trump Administration officials, such as Vice President J.D. Vance, have committed to a brief, clean campaign.  “There’s just no way Donald Trump is going to allow this country to get into a multi-year conflict with no clear end in sight and no clear objective,” he said Monday. 

But analysts have warned that Trump’s ambitious aims in Iran—a nation of more than 90 million—may be impossible to achieve with airpower alone, and suggest that the U.S. may be forced to choose between an escalation or an embarrassing climbdown.

Robert Pape, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, is an expert on the use of airpower and served as an adviser to Barack Obama during his presidential campaign and later his presidency. He is also the author of “Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War.” 

 As part of TIME’s ongoing coverage of the conflict with Iran, we spoke with him about the objectives and limits of the current air campaign, the risks of escalation, and what may come next.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Q: You’ve argued throughout your work that it’s very difficult to produce regime change with air power alone. Is there any reason why this operation would be different?

RP: In announcing the goal of regime change through air power alone, President Trump is up against the weight of history. Not just Iran, but the weight of history. For over a century, states—including the United States, European states, Russia, and Israel—have tried to topple regimes with air power alone. It has never—and I’m choosing my words carefully—it has never worked.

This strategy was tried in the dumb-bomb era. It was tried in the precision age many times. It was tried when also calling for pro-democracy movements to rise up, just as President Trump did. So the idea that this is going to work here is just the longest of long shots. It would be a historical first.

[Editor’s note: A “dumb bomb” refers to a traditional, unguided munition that falls solely under the force of gravity after being dropped, without onboard guidance systems to steer it toward a target. By contrast, precision-guided “smart” bombs are equipped with technologies such as GPS or laser guidance that allow them to adjust their path mid-flight and strike targets with far greater accuracy.]

The key reason for the consistent failure is that when you have foreign air power trying to topple regimes, you inject nationalism into the politics of the target, which makes positive regime change in the direction of the attacker’s wishes almost impossible.

Instead, one of two effects happens: either a slightly modified version of the current regime, or a much more radical regime. Both are bad outcomes. When you get a more radical regime change, this is usually because a much younger generation, more vigorous, more willing to take aggressive risks, takes over. The more aggressive, the more willing to lash back. This can lead to catastrophic costs for the air power attacker.

Q: What is the escalation trap, and how does it apply to this conflict?

RP: The escalation trap occurs when supreme confidence in tactical success leads to not taking seriously that the enemy will become more nationalist, more aggressive as a result of the attack. With precision smart bombs, the trap is especially seductive. Smart bombs are nearly 100% tactically successful. But the goal is not just to crater, knock down buildings, [or] kill individuals. The goal is to produce a change in the policies of the enemy government. For that, you need to change politics in your direction, not just destroy objects or kill people.

However, even when the attacker may have 100% tactical success, politics almost always moves in the opposite direction of what the attacker wants. The bombing itself infuses nationalism in the regime and across the society, and that nationalism as it’s infused in the politics, radicalizes and makes the regime and society more coherent against the foreign attacker, more willing to take risks, to retaliate against the foreign attacker, more willing to accept costs, not to give in to the foreign attacker.

You see this on display in Iran in the last few days. In President Trump’s interviews, his public statements have ranged from describing a short campaign to a potentially longer one. Thirty-six hours ago he publicly spoke about off-ramps. That’s the illusion of control, the very illusion of control that is encouraged in the smart bomb age. When a leader sees a PowerPoint briefing that shows over 90% probability of destroying that target, that creates the illusion of control. However, it’s a mirage. Tactical perfection does not automatically lead to strategic success and overconfidence that it does is the trap that leads to the opposite—strategic failure.

I specifically call this the “smart bomb trap” because it is the particular tendency for false strategic optimism with precision air power.

That is the structural trap leaders face at this stage of a campaign. The president may think he can walk away, take an off-ramp, just as he did after Fordow. This is what I describe as the second stage of the Smart Bomb Trap. With the aerial assassination of the Supreme Leader and numerous other leaders in Iran, he’s crossing a threshold that changes the willingness of the new leaders to take risks and impose costs. Iran’s retaliation is just that. The war is already in the process of widening. The trap has not closed shut fully, but it is tightening its grip.

From Reagan precision leadership decapitation attacks against Libya in 1986 to Russia’s against the Chechen regime in 1996, to Clinton’s attacks against the Serbian regime in 1999, to numerous such efforts against Saddam Hussein across multiple presidents, all the bombs hit their targets, sometimes the leader was even killed, but never did a friendly new regime emerge, and all for the same reason—the illusion of precision control led to missing the worst-case scenarios of retaliation again and again. 

Q:  Has this been the most “lethal and precise air power campaign in history”, as Pete Hegseth has claimed?

RP: This is the most massive precision air campaign since the 1991 Gulf War. In that war, Desert Storm, the peak of sorties was 1,500 a day in the first week, and it fell to about 1,200 a day. This is close to that; from what I can tell, it’s about 1,000 sorties a day. In terms of quantity, it’s slightly lower, but these are almost all precision-guided sorties with precision weapons. In Desert Storm, only a fraction of those sorties had precision weapons. So, yes, Secretary Hegseth may be correct on that score.

Here’s the bigger picture. What you are seeing is not a limited coercive campaign. You are seeing industrial-scale precision bombing that we have not seen since the 1991 Gulf War. This scale did not happen in the counterinsurgency “forever wars” that we fought after 9/11 in Afghanistan or Iraq. This scale did not happen in the over-the-horizon, counter-terrorism drone campaigns we fought in Pakistan and in Somalia or the air war against ISIS. Ten years ago, I led a 15-volume study of those campaigns. It is clear the air campaign against Iran is beyond the daily scale in America’s post-9/11 wars. 

Q: Some of the images coming out of Tehran over the last few days appear to show widespread bombing in densely populated areas. At what point does “industrial-scale precision bombing” become, or look to the layperson, like indiscriminate bombing? 

RP: Here’s the key underappreciated fact: when we say precision, we mean specifically that the bomb will fall within about 10 feet, maybe 15 feet, of the aim point, 90% of the time. However, accuracy ignores the other effects of bombs—especially the blast radius. The warhead on a precision bomb may be 2000 lbs, common when you are going after, say, bunkers, and many were probably used to attack the Supreme Leader’s compound. But the blast radius of 2000 lbs of explosives can easily be 25 meters. The shock radius is even larger. So, when precision bombs fall on targets in urban areas, the blast and shock knock down buildings next to the target building and sometimes for half a block or more.

So that’s why, when you see precision weapons in urban areas, especially when you do industrial-scale bombing, it becomes really difficult to distinguish precision from indiscriminate bombing. For civilians, they often can’t tell the difference and do not care whether the building that falls on them or their families was the “target” or collateral damage. Of course, blast and shock effects are less relevant when hitting a tank in the open desert or a ship on open water.

Q: When the bombing stops, do you think there will be an opening or even a motivation for people to challenge the regime, or what’s left of it, as Donald Trump is asking them to do? 

RP: One may hope. But almost surely not. The hope is part of the precision illusion, the idea that 100% tactical success allows the attacker to calibrate political dynamics toward the attacker’s goals. With Iran, I have heard the following idea: We’re going to bomb for a while, then we’re going to stop, and after the bombing, we’re going to bring in the Shah’s son to lead a populist wave for a new regime. This is an illusion, one that’s dangerous for the pro-democracy movement in Iran.   

[Editor’s note: Reza Pahlavi, the son of Mohammad Reza Shah, who was deposed in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, has been put forward by some as a potential transitional leader if the current regime in Iran should fall. It is unclear what—if any—popular support he has inside Iran.] 

Read more: After Khamenei: What Iran, and the World, Face Next

It’s important to understand that just a month ago, President Trump publicly encouraged the protesters in Iran. He effectively said, “We got your back,” and then he did nothing as somewhere between 3,000—that’s the number given by the Iranian government—and many times more, were slaughtered in the streets in three days. So illusions can come at a heavy price and the harshest price, the greatest risk is borne by the people in the streets in Iran.

History has a brutal analogy. In 1991, in the first Gulf War, the U.S. fought a 39-day air campaign, pounding hundreds and hundreds of Iraqi regime targets, all the leadership bunkers we could find. We also defeated Iraq’s army in Kuwait in a 4-day ground war. Days after all this damage to Iraq’s regime and military, President [H. W.] Bush publicly called for the Shia in Iraq to rise up and topple the regime and finish Saddam Hussein. And on paper, he looked vulnerable, even more vulnerable than Iran today. But in just two days, Saddam slaughtered the Shia who revolted by the thousands—and we couldn’t do anything to stop it. Even with our army just on the other side of the border in Kuwait, the cavalry could not arrive in time.