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If we’ve learned anything from the last five years of Happening, it’s that American and Israeli air power is really good. A modern extended bombing campaign against Iran would look nothing like the strategic bombing campaigns of the 20th century. It would look like what Israel did to Hezb. The ISAF and IAF would degrade Iranian air defense into irrelevance, then start dropping precision munitions on anyone regime associated who popped their head up. If you think that the American Air Force with target selection done by Israeli spies would get the same results that air campaigns with massed unguided bombs did 50-80 years ago you just haven’t been paying attention. It is true that you can’t just outright win a war, but you can cripple the command structure of an organization. In a country like Iran where there is lots of internal turmoil already, that could be enough to give the opposition an opportunity.
That doesn’t mean it would be a good idea. Iranians are mostly patriots even if they hate the mullahs, so there would be a rally around the flag effect. Regime officials would be able to hide in bunkers and move around. It is possible that enough of them would survive that they could continue coordinating resistance and ruling, and I think you are right that they would go balls to the wall for a nuke if they retained the capacity to do so. All your points about how this would deplete our munitions and damage us diplomatically are good points. We should not risk blowback just for a chance to destroy the Iranian regime.
Basically it seems like you think it definitely won’t work and we shouldn’t do it. I think it might work and we shouldn’t do it.
Besides the obvious previously mentioned example of Hamas, the USAF bombed Yemen relentlessly for over a year (over a decade counting the civil war) to basically no effect whatsoever, including under Trump. They failed to disable Houthi air defenses and nearly lost multiple jets including an F-35 as a result.
We have much worse intelligence against the houthies than the Mossad does against Iran, so I don’t think it is apples to apples.
As far as I know basically all the air assets we lost were reapers. If we are flying slow drones over the country at all, that means the air defenses are highly degraded. That’s like saying the VNAF won the air war because a lot of American airplanes went down. The reason the Vietnamese had so many targets to shoot down was because of our constant presence and dominance in the air.
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Was it really so relentless? There sure were a lot of videos of random explosions floating around, but the Yemeni cities that appeared in them never seemed to be anywhere near the total rubble state that the Gaza strip, or Ukrainian frontline cities, were reduced to. I would guess that there was some consideration for the Saudis there, who probably don't want one of those "joining a terrorist militia is the best/only career path available to young men" territories on their border.
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I agree that the capabilities of air power have changed.
I also agree that this does not mean that air power can suddenly deliver on the promise of strategic objectives. The US may well invest a few billions to force Iran to abandon its barracks and police stations. But nothing would stop the regime from evenly distributing their goons evenly over the apartments of Tehran. Even if the US can bust any bunker the regime might dig out, I am not convinced that the bunker busters are actually cheaper than digging out bunkers.
As others have pointed out, Hamas is a cautionary tale on what you can not do even with total air superiority.
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I agree completely with the rally-around the flag effect, I expect there's probably enriched uranium or plutonium dispersed or hidden somewhere too.
But also I think air power is a bit of a mirage.
If US/Israeli air power was so great, why haven't they been able to destroy Hamas? That was their goal right? Hamas didn't have any air defences whatsoever. Israel's bombing has been extremely intensive, they've wrecked most of Gaza and gotten lots of lefties upset with how intense the bombing has been, people have been throwing out terms like 'absolute destruction', just look at all the footage. In addition Israel controls entry and exit into Gaza so they've been able to quasi-besiege it and block off food imports. But it still wasn't enough to destroy Hamas!
Nobody in the West really likes Hamas that much, they're considered a terror group. Gaza is a pretty small mini-state right next to Israel. Hamas is a tiny fraction of the Iranian military in strength. There have also been Israeli ground attacks. Even if Hamas was destroyed and Israel achieved a full victory it would not necessarily show that airpower would work in Iran, since just about every factor is much worse for an Iran campaign. And yet Hamas is still around, they're shooting collaborators.
If air power was so great, Hamas should be gone, right? You can blow up a commander, they just replace him again and again and again. I suppose that Hamas and Gazans are highly motivated to be anti-Israel and this compensates for being bombed? But it also seems that the strength of airpower is overrated if in even a highly favourable environment it fails.
The Iranian opposition don't seem to be armed, unless they're armed I don't think they're too relevant, the government can crush them if they want Tiananmen style, it's just that they don't particularly want to.
I’m increasingly starting to suspect that the Gaza war was intentionally fought with the aim of going on forever while still leaving Hamas intact. It’s not great for Israel’s security, or the IDF soldiers deployed there, or for the civilian population of Gaza, but it is pretty good for having a permanent excuse to skip your court dates.
Sorry, court dates?
Who do you think is calling the shots in this scenario?
https://www.timesofisrael.com/court-agrees-to-cancel-pms-testimony-this-week-after-briefing-by-security-chiefs/
Oh. I guess that makes more sense.
I would still disagree with the suspicion, if only because I don’t see an obvious way to actually fix the problem.
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I would not consider Gaza a place where air power is well suited. Air power works on opponents who are at least moderately sophisticated and organized. A tiny band of terrorists who belt toddlers to themselves instead of bullet proof vests every morning is exactly the opposite of the type of target that air power works well on.
I think the way it works well is in combination with good intelligence to wage assassination campaigns against enemy leadership and important weapons systems. You can’t destroy an enemy organization, but you can degrade them and scare whoever the next guy is. I think the right way to think of it might be like a correction for a dog. If you just assassinate their top 10 guys every time they cross some line, they’ll keep filling those spots but the next 10 guys might start to think twice about being as oppositional. It’s definitely not a silver bullet, but I don’t think that means it is useless.
Or eventually you find one of those top 10 guys that you have a special relationship with and/or identify as a relative moderate, at which point you can then ensure the space above him is kept conveniently open and facilitate a regime change in which somebody you can actually negotiate with gets put into the top job.
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I know everyone seems to have forgotten but the US tried this against the Houthis. First Biden and then Trump bombed Yemen for over a year to stop them from attacking ships or launching missiles at Israel, they blew up a bunch of Houthi leaders including the "top missile guy" yet in the end the targets were replaced and the missiles continued even as Trump basically signed a separate peace that didn't even oblige the Houthis to stop firing missiles.
My suspicion is that an extended campaign against Iran would resemble the Yemen campaign, with the exception that Iran, unlike the Houthis, have the firepower to actually kill a significant number of Americans if they're backed into a corner.
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Obviously in this day and age you can't trust anything (and I can't even dig the video in question back up), but Russian telegrams were circulating something that purported to be a CCTV video of protesters acting like a not completely incompetent fire team with some sort of machine guns. I'm sure the Americans and Israelis would have no trouble getting some of them trained and equipped if they wanted to.
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Hamas are deep inside thousands of tunnels and tightly embedded among civilians, counting on Israel (who are being held to first world standards) to value Palestinian childrens' lives higher than Hamas does. They have solid intel on Israel and their capabilities and prepared for just such a war for decades. Why are you ignoring that?
I'm ignoring that because it's not true. The Israeli military has been eager to bomb and wreck Gaza and they've worked hard to limit and constrain food and medical supplies coming in, despite pressure from the US and EU. The ethos is not 'first world standards' but 'the bare minimum that can be dubiously defended as first world standards'.
Since when did first world countries routinely shoot children trying to collect food? Or claim just about every UN/human rights NGO is biased against them? Even Israeli sources have been going 'what is the point of this, what are we trying to achieve by setting these arbitrary lines and shooting people who try to cross them':
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-06-27/ty-article-magazine/.premium/idf-soldiers-ordered-to-shoot-deliberately-at-unarmed-gazans-waiting-for-humanitarian-aid/00000197-ad8e-de01-a39f-ffbe33780000
It's definitely true that they prepared for decades against the war that Israel would wage, with thousands of tunnels and human shields. An air war would not succeed, because Hamas made sure of that.
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Could you quantify these "first world standards"? Because from where I'm sitting, the Israelis killed more Gazans in the average day prior to the "ceasefire" than the Iranians killed protesters even using the highest death projections despite the Iranian population sitting between 50x and 100x that of Gaza.
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