Conquering Through The Air
I am probably more knowledgeable about 20th century military conflicts than most, so perhaps it is useful to remind everyone of this -- I can think of no country in history that ever capitulated or initiated a favorable regime change in response to air attacks alone. The closest I can think of is the Netherlands that surrendered to Hitler in 1940 after the brutal bombing of Rotterdam, but this capitulation occurred when Germany had an overwhelming force of infantry and armor slicing through that nation. You can soften them up through the air, but you win on the ground. Neither the UK, Germany, the USSR, Poland or later North Korea or North Vietnam ever gave up after an air campaign (the latter an example of where the US attempted to bomb a country into the stone age that started the war in the stone age).
All this of course is to reiterate my skepticism that bombing the sh*t out of Iran is going to lead to any sort of surrender or favorable regime change. I see of late that Trump supporters have adopted the defense that their purpose in Iran is to degrade Iran's military ability and ability to support terrorism and conflicts in the region. But that sure as hell was not the Administration's public line at the beginning of the war. My recollection was that Trump's reasoning was we were going to decapitate the leadership and the people would rise up in revolution, an outcome I found unlikely from the first day.
Postscript: I would have thought it a perfectly defensible position in a war like this to argue against the efficacy of our attacks while still believing the target regime is awful. Apparently that seems to be a bridge too far for most war opponents, as I increasingly see those on the anti-war side attempting to portray the Iranian government as morally superior to the US. For all our flaws and our failure to live up to our own standards, that is frankly absurd. But I still see it every day, women in the US running around protesting conditions for women in the US wearing Handmaid's Tale outfits while simultaneously defending the ethics of the Iranian (or Gaza) governments.
So I will add my usual postscript: I put all of the above in the "I wish I were wrong" category. Opponents of wars frequently fall into the trap of supporting the other side. The Iranian government is one of the worst in the world, both in how it treats its people (or at least the half without a Y chromosome) and its proclivity for inciting violence and mayhem in other countries. It is a totalitarian regime responsible for much of the current instability in the Middle East and I would love to wave my magic wand and see it gone.
There is no way to bring down the Iranian regime through a bombing campaign. The regime still exists, after we've supposedly bombed over 10,000 targets. The people killed will be replaced by other people chosen by the same regime that chose the last ones. If anything, the new crew will be less cooperative than their predecessors.
The Iranian regime now has the initiative. They've absorbed the worst we can do to them, and they've shown their ability to strike their neighbors, and to threaten most of the world by closing the straits of Hormuz. We can bomb all their drone bases, rocket launchers, and speed boats, and they'll still have the capability to close the straits of Hormuz next week after they've gotten more drones and rockets. They can further escalate by attacking more fixed facilities neighboring states, further reducing oil supply and raising oil prices.
It seems to me that degrading Iran's military capability was a low priority objective, because Iran has barely used its conventional military capability since the end of the Iran-Iraq war. Setting back their nuclear program could be achieved, but we can never know how effective the bombing was, and whether the Iranians are now 3 weeks, 3 months, or 3 years from building a bomb. But we can be sure that they have much more reason now to develop a bomb than they had a year ago.
The Iranian regime is bad in nearly every way. As Warren noted, they are terribly oppressive of their own people. They support the worst regional terrorists. They've sponsored attacks against civilians around the world. If we could end the regime through bombing, I'd be in favor. But we can't end the regime, we can't end their nuclear program, we can't end their missile program, and we can't do much to advance any other conceivable objective. Whether the bombing ends tomorrow or five years from now, the regime will still exist, and we'll have to deal with it in some way. We'd be best off cutting our losses and finding an acceptable ending.
Unlike previous examples, the US and Israel have total air dominance. They could fly cargo planes over and drop bombs out the back. It’s really a question of who is bluffing more or will give up first. Every time Iran uses a weapon it will be destroyed. It’s still a very risky strategy. My SWAG is a 10% chance of Iran surrendering and the world is a better place.
Japan? Obviously they suffered defeats on the ground as well, but only a small part of their army was engaged in the island hopping campaign, and the actual campaign against the home-islands was won via bombing.
Not sure that gives much hope for Iran though. The American public is (happily) not going to tolerate nuking Tehran, or even conventional firebombing of Iranian cities.
The bombing campaign weakened the regime to the point that there are only local warlords and armed militia with tenuous allegiance to the mullahs. If the regular population can be armed with rifles and ammo then they can be the foot soldiers needed to take control.
The ground campaign is the job of the Iranian people themselves. One of the clear objectives of the US mission was to create the conditions to weaken the central government's control.
If they can overthrow the government internally, great. If not, that is on them.
It was done in 1979. It can be done again though.
Good point. The interesting aspect to the current war is that at regime change was not on the list of our objectives in this war. We are content with destroying much of what made the mullahs and the IRGC so dangerous and their attacks on everybody else in the Gulf shows the rationale for us believing them to be insanely dangerous. Plus, of course, they've said it a thousand million times.
The other point I'd note is that the Christmas Bombing did all that was intended and it essentially ended our participation in Vietnam. No, it wasn't the powerful blow one presumes merely the hint that we had not yet begun to bomb and lay waste to North Vietnam but that was still something we could do fairly easily and like LeMay, we'd run out of targets long before we ran out of bombs, aircraft, men or gas.
If we look at all bombing, how did the IRA work out using just bombs and terror against the United Kingdom? I can't recall how much longer Thatcher survived after the big ones.
Nowadays, you could more easily push any W. European off a cliff than a baby duckling just by hinting you'd use force on them.