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.
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.
“The goal is not for the regime to fall, but to create conditions that will enable the Iranian people to topple it,” Professor Danny Orbach, a military historian from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told The Media Line. “If the Iranians don’t take advantage of the opportunity, the war might end with less ambitious goals achieved—the destruction of the Iranian navy, its missile arsenal, and the remnants of its nuclear program.”
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.
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 “degrade capabilities” campaign and into an uncertain political endgame.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US 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.
“The duration of the operation depends on its goal,” Ortal said. “This goal could change as the success of the operation becomes apparent.”
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.
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—an outcome he stressed airpower alone has not historically produced.
“Seeing Iranians celebrating the attack in the streets increases the optimism that this scenario could materialize,” Ortal explained. “This 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.”
What happens if Iranians do not topple their regime?
If that cascade does not happen, Ortal said the likely endpoint may be a government that survives politically but is left strategically broken. “This will leave the regime without military capabilities, weak and neutralized and fully subordinate to American whims and future coercion,” he said.
For Orbach, the campaign’s political bet is tied to a target set that tends to receive less attention than missiles and nuclear facilities: Iran’s ability to project power at sea. “The navy is more important than what most people think,” he said. “The 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.”
The Strait of Hormuz remains a pressure point with global consequences, carrying roughly a fifth of the world’s 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’s ability to coerce neighbors or threaten the global economy during crises.
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’s bargaining power as much as its battlefield options.
“Iran’s ability to influence the Middle East is tied to two abilities—its proxies and its missiles,” Ortal said. “Iran 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.”
Iran’s nuclear program remains the central backdrop. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action temporarily restricted aspects of Tehran’s 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.
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