Operation Epic Fury, which began on Feb. 28, has showcased a formidable display of airpower. U.S. aircraft have struck targets including air defenses, coastal surveillance systems, command and control facilities, missile and drone sites, naval forces, and communications networks. As the war drags on, with the Strait of Hormuz closed and Iran retaliating across the region, the target list increasingly includes so-called “dual-use” targets that serve both military and civilian purposes (see my analysis). Tactically, the air campaign has been impressive. The United States enjoys not merely air superiority but air supremacy over Iran, enabling it to strike with relative impunity (AFDP 3-01, Counterair Operations, p. 2).
In an earlier Just Security article, I assessed Epic Fury’s strategic coherence using key principles from Clausewitz’s On War, particularly those addressing a conflict’s objectives, type of war, center of gravity, culminating point, and friction. Here, I want to examine the strengths and weaknesses of airpower in achieving strategic objectives, as well as the optimal ways to employ it for that purpose. My goal is to provide readers with a primer that will enable them to draw conclusions about the use of airpower in this conflict, both thus far and going forward.
The focus is on “strategic attack,” defined by the U.S. military as “an offensive action against a target – whether military, political, economic, or other – that is specifically selected to achieve strategic objectives.” The most comprehensive treatment of the subject appears in Air Force Doctrine Publication 3-02, Strategic Attack (August 2025). It is the fulcrum on which the discussion that follows rests. Although service-specific, AFDP 3-02’s principles apply equally to strategic air attack by Navy and Marine Corps assets and to coalition partners such as the Israeli Air Force. Most apply equally to strategic attack by non-air means, such as naval cruise missiles or ground fires.
Three caveats are necessary at the outset. First, the utility of airpower is highly contextual, turning on the campaign’s objective, the assets and time available, the adversary’s capabilities and resilience, geography, alliance architecture, and many other factors. Epic Fury faces different constraints and enjoys different enablers than, for instance, Operation Midnight Hammer, the June 2025 strikes on Iranian nuclear assets. In that operation, airpower proved relatively effective given its limited objective.
Second, airpower operates differently in an operation spanning multiple domains and instruments of national power – as here, with naval fires, the blockade, sanctions, and diplomacy – than in one relying primarily on airpower, such as NATO’s 1999 Operation Allied Force, which responded to the humanitarian crisis in Kosovo. In a multi-instrument conflict, crediting or blaming airpower alone would be an analytical misstep.
Finally, I note that the administration has announced the end of Operation Epic Fury. However, the international armed conflict between Iran and the United States is ongoing as a matter of international law and of fact. For ease of reference, I will use “Epic Fury” to refer to the hostilities from Feb. 28 to the present.
Airpower’s Original Promise
Early air power theorists made sweeping claims before the new domain was tested. In The Command of the Air (1921), Italian General Giulio Douhet argued that aircraft could bypass the enemy’s army and navy to strike its “vital” industrial and population centers, bringing a State to its knees without a ground campaign. Hugh Trenchard, the Royal Air Force’s first Chief of the Air Staff, similarly asserted in 1919 that “[a]t present the moral effect of bombing stands undoubtedly to the material effect in a proportion of 20 to 1.” In the United States, General Billy Mitchell made an analogous claim in Winged Defense (1925), while the Air Corps Tactical School’s “industrial web theory” posited that because a modern war economy is a web of interdependent nodes, precision strikes on a few nodes could cause its collapse.
They correctly understood that airpower could be leveraged to deny enemy forces sanctuary beyond the battlefront and enable direct strikes on the enemy’s sources of strength, such as its industrial capacity. What these early theorists got wrong was the mechanism and timetable. For instance, the 1945 United States Strategic Bombing Survey found that German armament production rose through 1944 despite Allied bombing, although the later focus on oil and transportation did impact the war economy. Civilian morale fell sharply, but bombing did not by itself produce political collapse or surrender. In other words, bombing was not a panacea. It needed to be applied surgically and over time. It is a strategic enabler, not the only solution.
Current U.S. military doctrine is accordingly more modest. Observing that “[e]arly airpower advocates suggested that strategic bombing alone could win wars,” it notes that “[s]ince then, we have learned that” strategic attack operations “provide the bedrock for strategic deterrence, give our nation’s leaders timely and measured options for the application of force, and expand the battlespace during joint campaigns” (AFDP 3-02, p. i). Airpower alone is unlikely to yield strategic victory, but it can produce strategic effect, most notably by weakening the enemy’s military capacity.
Ends, Ways, and Means
Clausewitz understood that “the political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose” (On War, p. 87). U.S. Army Colonel Arthur Lykke built on that insight, defining strategy as the confluence of ends (objectives), ways (plans), and means (resources) in his influential 1989 Military Review article, “Defining Military Strategy.” He illustrated this with a three-legged stool, whose legs must be balanced – the greater the tilt of any leg, the greater the risk. Air Force planning doctrine has adopted this framework, comparing courses of action by “the ends, ways, means, and risks associated with each” (AFDP 5-0, Planning, p. 47).
Analysis of airpower’s effectiveness turns on where the tilt lies. When the ends are the problem, airpower is doing what was asked, but the ask was flawed or has changed. Doctrine requires that strategic objectives be “clear, decisive, measurable, and attainable” and tied by cause and effect to the efforts aimed at achieving them; because they “are not static, realignment is called for when they and the operational environment fall out of alignment (AFDP 3-02, pp. 5-6). Ways are the problem when the objective is attainable, but the concept for the use of airpower is misaligned, as when it focuses on attrition of enemy forces without regard to the effects the ends demand. Means are the problem whenever the concept is sound, yet the assets are insufficient. In this regard, “requirements for airpower will almost always outpace its capacity” (p. 29).
Epic Fury’s publicly stated objectives and political rhetoric have not always aligned. Official U.S. military aims have emphasized Iran’s missile forces and production capacity, naval and security infrastructure, support for proxy groups, and its nuclear program. Statements from U.S. and Israeli political leaders and the opening attacks on Iran’s leadership also suggested ambitions involving regime change, while later phases have placed increasing emphasis on reopening the Strait and changing Iranian behavior more broadly. The result is an end state that appears to shift over time, leaving the relationship between ends and ways imprecise. Indeed, the concept has drifted toward gradualism, applying force in bursts separated by pauses (President Donald Trump announced another round of strikes on Aug. 2). Recently, means have become a problem too, as reflected in current concerns over dwindling munitions and interceptor inventories. As a consequence, airpower is operating in a strategic fog.
What Airpower Is Good At
Since the effectiveness of airpower is context-dependent, much depends on what it is used for, how it is used, and with what means. Still, airpower is generally well-suited to certain uses.
Denying the enemy the air domain. Control of the air ranges from parity through superiority to supremacy (AFDP 3-01, p. 2), and doctrine treats its attainment as a sine qua non: “[o]ne of the highest-priority objectives for air component commanders is gaining the degree of control of the air necessary to make other operations possible” (AFDP 3-02, p. 7). Indeed, a foundational premise of airpower is that “[c]ontrol of the air is a necessary precondition for control of the surface” (AFDP 1, p. 8). Airpower is the primary means of establishing such control, and the speed with which U.S. forces gained air supremacy over Iran was undeniably impressive.
Disrupting enemy military strategy. Long before there was an air domain, Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War that “[w]hat is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy” (quoted at AFDP 3-02, p. 2). Airpower is highly effective at disrupting enemy strategy by creating uncertainty, degrading command and control, limiting options, and shifting the initiative, thereby “allowing the attacker to dictate the conflict’s direction” (id.).
This lesson is Robert Pape’s central finding, drawn from more than 30 campaigns, in Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (1996). Of the four coercive mechanisms he identifies – punishment, risk, denial, and decapitation – denial has by far the strongest record. Airpower coerces most effectively when it convinces the adversary that continued resistance cannot achieve military aims, even if the adversary remains willing to bear substantial costs. Attrition may contribute to that conclusion, but it is the resulting infeasibility of the adversary’s strategy – not destruction for its own sake – that supplies the coercive pressure.
Much of Epic Fury’s attention in the recent exchanges has focused on denial, for instance, by destroying the ships, launchers, and drone facilities on which Iran’s capacity to close the Strait of Hormuz depends. Defeating the Iranian strategy with airpower will be difficult, though, because it depends less on Iran’s military capacity than on simply maintaining a credible threat to shipping. In other words, it is the fact of the Iranian threat as much as its scale that is deterring passage.
Bypassing fielded forces. Airpower need not fight through the enemy’s army and navy to reach what sustains them. Strategic attack bypasses fielded forces to deliver asymmetric force against centers of gravity, matching “strength against weakness to achieve maximum gain with less effort” (AFDP 3-02, p. 2). This works because war-making capacity is an interdependent system in which “relatively small or localized inputs can yield desirable system-wide changes” (p. 6).
The conflict with Iran illustrates this logic in the maritime environment. Consider Iran’s ability to threaten shipping. It depends not only on ships, drones, and missile launchers but also on surveillance that locates targets and on the links that direct fire against them. Striking those assets degrades the threat far more efficiently than hunting small craft one by one.
Imposing shock through simultaneity. “Parallel operations” is the preferred form of employment of airpower. It involves “simultaneously striking a wide array of targets chosen to cause maximum shock across an enemy system.” The rationale is cognitive as much as physical; such attacks limit the adversary’s ability to adapt and may “trigger system-wide shock, thus inducing paralysis or collapse” (AFDP 3-02, p. 22). Lieutenant General David Deptula’s account of the launch of Operation Desert Storm in 1991 is illustrative. Parallel war, he explains, “entails more than compressing sequential attacks into one simultaneous attack;” it exploits three dimensions at once – time, space, and levels of war. Across the breadth and depth of Iraq, over 50 targets on the master attack plan were struck within 90 minutes (over 150 within 24 hours), with national leadership, operational headquarters, and deployed units attacked simultaneously.
Epic Fury followed this logic to the letter. As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine announced, the attack involved “a massive, overwhelming attack across all domains of warfare, striking more than 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours.”
Offering fast, scalable options. Airpower’s range, speed, and flexibility make strategic attack a “scalable, on-demand capability” deliverable anywhere in the world (AFDP 3-02, p. 2). In particular, forces and the force they deliver can be rapidly dialed up or down to adapt to evolving situations.
Epic Fury demonstrates this airpower strength. Strikes were mounted across Iran without the months of buildup a ground campaign would have required. The target set has since shifted from air defenses, leadership, and naval and missile forces to infrastructure supporting Iran’s interference with shipping. Airpower, in large part, made that possible. And tempo has ranged from nightly strikes to complete pauses – all with essentially the same forces. The result is unique political utility, which explains why airpower, especially carrier air, is so often the instrument of first resort. It is also a source of temptation to use it where it is ill-suited, as this campaign illustrates.
Airpower Caveats
The most consequential passage in current U.S. airpower doctrine is perhaps that appearing under the heading “Will and Capacity to Fight”:
SA alone is not likely to achieve the desired outcomes. Successfully conforming adversary behavior to our security interests normally requires a comprehensive strategy; one that combines all instruments of national power (diplomatic, informational, military, and economic) in a working concert. When forces employ it in unison with other forms of national and military power, SA can generate an enabling, symbiotic effect (AFDP 3-02, p. 10).
It is telling that the service most invested in airpower stresses its limits as an independent tool. Five caveats loom large.
Coercion can harden resolve. War is about coercion – making another State take an action it does not wish to take, or refrain from one it wishes to pursue. The “key to coercion is to deter or compel with sufficient strength and credibility,” such that the adversary, facing the cost of non-compliance, chooses the course the attacker wants (AFDP 3-02, p. 8). Compellence is the harder task, for it seeks to change behavior already underway; this means “the choice of compliance remains with the adversary” (p. 9). Moreover, susceptibility to compellence “relates inversely to [the adversary’s] willpower and what it perceives to be at stake.” In other words, the risk is that the enemy’s resilience will exceed the will or ability to continue engaging in the coercive actions (pp. 8-9).
The challenge of coercion through airpower is structural, not a matter of execution. Air strikes can expend one form of leverage – the threat of damage still to come – while generating another by demonstrating capability and resolve. Against a finite target set, however, the coercive value of additional strikes may diminish as the campaign progresses, especially once the most valuable and vulnerable targets have been attacked.
Moreover, airpower is generally less able than, for instance, occupation or blockade, to impose a continuously operating condition that the adversary must reverse. Persistent air operations can maintain pressure, but between individual strikes, the coercive condition is often less tangible than the continuing loss of territory or denial of access imposed by surface forces. Rather than an ongoing condition that it must negotiate or fight its way out of, the adversary faces discrete events it can choose to absorb. The coercer can only promise more of what it has already done, which is precisely what the adversary has shown it can survive.
Epic Fury bears this out. Five months of uncontested air supremacy have produced extensive destruction but not compliance, partly because the most valuable targets were struck first. Killing the Supreme Leader on opening night expended the campaign’s greatest leverage before bargaining began and signaled that regime survival was at stake – which goes far toward explaining Iran’s willingness to endure great pain. Having withstood the campaign, Iran is emboldened (see also Pape on relative power).
Relatedly, compellence carries the risk of escalation, as the attacker may feel compelled to climb the escalatory ladder if coercive actions fail (AFDP 3-02, p. 9). But escalation is not the attacker’s prerogative alone. Iran has escalated horizontally rather than vertically, striking across the region and at shipping – rungs regarding which U.S. air supremacy counts for little, and, for that reason, the ones available to Iran (see also Pape on escalation). Now, it plays the role of the coercing party by putting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz at risk
Shock erodes over time. The shock described above depends on the rate at which strikes occur. That rate is difficult to sustain because munitions, sortie generation, and crew endurance are finite. Doctrine therefore observes that parallel operations may be foreclosed by “resource or political constraints,” and warns that proceeding sequentially “compromises airpower’s ability to mass and produce shock” (AFDP 3-02, p. 23). Parallel operations are easiest to sustain during the opening phase of a campaign. But over an extended campaign, resource, political, and operational constraints ordinarily force a greater sequential component, reducing the advantages of simultaneity and shock.
Epic Fury illustrates this dynamic. The first night was doctrinally parallel, with correspondingly dramatic effects. Five months later, the campaign proceeds in cycles of strikes and pauses – doctrine’s “gradualism” (AFDP 3-02, p. 28) – each affording Iran an interval that parallel operations were designed to deny. And a contest of endurance against dispersed targets is where airpower counts the least.
Decapitation depends on irreplaceability. Attacking the adversary’s leadership “is most effective when an enemy is led by a single charismatic and authoritarian figure who cannot be easily replaced,” or against “organizations with rigid, hierarchical leadership structures” that make it easy to identify, locate, and remove key leaders and their replacements (AFDP 3-02, p. 11). Both cases describe a particular kind of target, one in which authority is concentrated in individuals rather than distributed across institutions. Where authority is distributed, decapitation produces succession rather than collapse.
What makes airpower well-suited to leadership attacks is also its limitation. Once air superiority is achieved, airpower can reach a target anywhere on short notice, without first defeating the forces protecting it. But the purpose of an attack is to generate an effect, and while airpower is uniquely suited to killing individuals, it cannot control succession, a successor’s acceptance, or whether the strike weakens or hardens resolve. It cannot, in short, control the effect.
Moreover, leadership attacks risk “second- and third-order effects that may jeopardize a country’s long-term stability.” Accordingly, U.S. doctrine reminds those relying on it that U.S. forces “have often avoided attacks on the national leadership of an enemy State … to help ensure that authorities exist with whom” peace may be concluded (AFDP 3-02, p. 11).
Epic Fury opened with the air strike that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. His son Mojtaba succeeded him and is considered at least as hardline as his father, while institutional authority – especially within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – survived and may have strengthened. Airpower was well suited to conduct the leadership strike, but it had little ability to control the political and institutional consequences of Khamenei’s death.
Airpower cannot hold territory. Airpower’s advantages – range, speed, flexibility, and the ability to strike without proximity – stem from not being present. Yet presence is what holding territory and the related ability to verify the effects of an attack require. For instance, an aircraft can destroy a facility, but confirming what was inside it from the air (or space) is another matter, as is gauging the attack’s indirect effects, the direct measurement of which, doctrine concedes, “may not be possible” (AFDP 3-02, p. 26).
The current campaign confirms this premise. Airpower has failed to topple the regime or reopen the Strait; the former would require the ground operations the air attacks failed to make unnecessary, and accomplishing the latter has proven unachievable so far despite air supremacy. As for the nuclear piece, Trump claimed Iran’s capability had been “obliterated” during Operation Midnight Hammer. Yet, renewed operations within a year demonstrated that air attack had not definitively resolved the issue, at least not according to administration justifications for Epic Fury. Today, the location and disposition of substantial enriched-uranium stocks remain unverified. Reliable accounting will require renewed Iranian declarations and effective on-the-ground access for the International Atomic Energy Agency; air attack alone cannot provide that verification.
Employing Airpower Well
The caveats describe boundaries. Within them, airpower doctrine offers concrete guidance on employment.
Operate inside the enemy’s decision cycle. Although AFDP 3-20 does not cite it, Colonel John Boyd’s “observe-orient-decide-act” (OODA) loop underlies one of its core propositions on strategic attack. When air operations keep an adversary constantly off balance and unable to adapt, commanders can “operate and execute inside the enemy’s decision cycle,” thereby amplifying the effects of follow-on strikes (AFDP 3-02, p. 18).
The key is tempo. By striking faster than the enemy can observe events, make sense of them, and choose a response, a properly executed strategic attack denies the decision time that would otherwise allow coherent adaptation. Doctrine illustrates this dynamic by reference to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Early attacks on the Iraqi leadership and key security infrastructure enabled “a swifter interdiction operation against Hussein’s Republican Guard” (AFDP 3-02, p. 18; on interdiction, see AFDP 3-03, Counterland Operations). That campaign demonstrated how airpower created a fleeting operational opening that Coalition forces were postured to exploit.
The same logic applies to Epic Fury. The opening phase clearly unfolded inside Iran’s OODA loop, but no follow-on operation was positioned to exploit the disruption to achieve strategic objectives. Because nothing converted that temporary advantage into concrete operational or strategic gains, the benefit of moving first – and faster – rapidly decayed.
Target effects, not targets. Planners “should be able to draw a clear line of logic starting with the objective, followed in order by effect, target, and finally, the means” (AFDP 3-02, p. 17). For instance, when a command-and-control node is the target, the objective is not its destruction. Rather, it is “an impaired ability to control forces and possible defeat of enemy strategy” (p. 5). Destruction is merely how the effect is produced. This is the Lykke framework expressed as a planning discipline.
But there is always a danger of drifting toward an inputs-based approach, a temptation that intensifies as strikes are executed over time. By losing sight of the objective, “a logical disconnect between ends and means” occurs (AFDP 3-02, p. 17).
Epic Fury shows how easily this can happen. Early target sets were tied to identifiable effects, but as the war has waged on, emphasis has shifted to the cumulative attrition of Iranian capabilities. In strategic attack, more is not necessarily better.
Assume a thinking, adapting enemy. Doctrine attributes analytical failure primarily to “[a]ssuming a static, unreactive enemy,” warning that “strategists should view the enemy as a thinking, adaptive agent” (AFDP 3-02, p. 28). The paradigmatic example is the World War II Allied bombing of Schweinfurt, a German town whose factories produced most of the ball bearings on which the country’s tanks, aircraft, and vehicles depended. The raids inflicted heavy damage, but the Germans had stockpiles, could buy abroad, and could redesign machinery to use fewer bearings, so production never collapsed. The strikes worked; the theory did not. Planners should expect the enemy to work continually to defeat strategic attack and avoid “projecting their own internal values and perceptions into estimates of adversarial rationale” (pp. 17-18).
Iran has adapted in the same way. First, it closed the Strait of Hormuz. With that adaptation, its strategic capacity rests on mines, small craft, and shore-launched missiles, which are cheap, mobile, dispersible, domestically produced, acquired abroad, and replenished relatively quickly. U.S. strikes reportedly destroyed substantial portions of that inventory, but they did not secure durable freedom of navigation; commercial traffic through the Strait remains severely constrained. U.S. military leadership anticipated this possibility, but political decision-makers rejected the premise.
Integrate, do not merely accumulate. Strategic attack offers independent and potentially decisive options. Still, doctrine holds that it is “usually most effective when employed in conjunction with joint all-domain operations and other instruments of national power” (AFDP 3-02, p. 23). For instance, interdiction cuts the flow of materiel whose production strategic attack halted at the source, while ground offensives accelerate consumption and open fresh vulnerabilities for strategic attack to exploit (p. 24).
Importantly, synergy is not simultaneity. Instruments combine not because they are used at once but because each is assigned a bespoke role in changing the adversary’s behavior. Against Iran, the United States has assembled an unusually comprehensive set – strikes, blockade, sanctions, and diplomacy. Whether they are run as a single integrated design or merely in parallel is the question.
Treat legal constraints as design inputs. Doctrine states that the success of strategic attack depends on conducting operations in compliance with the law of armed conflict; commanders should build “preventing, mitigating, and responding to civilian harm into mission objectives from the start” (AFDP 3-02, p. 17), rather than merely considering it after target nomination. The Al Firdos strike during Operation Desert Storm shows why this is an operational imperative rather than a mere compliance proposition. In that case, hundreds of incidental civilian deaths during an arguably lawful attack on a military objective “harmed US efforts publicly and significantly hampered strikes on targets near the center of Baghdad for the rest of the war” (p. 28). As political leaders threaten to unleash airpower against Iran, they would be well-advised to remember that non-compliance with the law of armed conflict is almost always operationally and strategically foolish.
Concluding Thoughts
Operation Epic Fury demonstrates that airpower is both essential and insufficient. U.S. forces rapidly achieved air supremacy and substantially degraded Iranian military capabilities, but strategic success ultimately depends on altering Iranian behavior in ways that advance U.S. geopolitical objectives. Five months into a campaign that was originally promised to last weeks, and with Iran continuing to control the vital Strait of Hormuz – which was open when the operation began – U.S. military operations, including the air campaign, have fallen short. Tactical and operational success has not yet translated into the desired strategic outcome.
Should hostilities continue, the manner in which airpower can be used to achieve U.S. objectives is increasingly limited, even if those objectives were clear. And “the enemy gets a vote.” Iran has absorbed extensive damage while adapting horizontally and asymmetrically to U.S. operations. By threatening regional interests and maintaining its hold over the Strait, it is pursuing a coercive strategy of its own – and, thus far, doing so effectively. Air supremacy has given the United States unfettered freedom to strike at will, but it has not given it corresponding control over Iran’s responses, the course of escalation, or the conditions for terminating the conflict.
Further air strikes may still constrain Iranian options, degrade its capacity to sustain operations, and create bargaining leverage. However, their strategic value will diminish unless they are tied to a credible plan to translate military effects into political results. Epic Fury’s ultimate measure of success will therefore not be the quantity of destruction inflicted on Iran, but whether the United States’ operational advantages can be applied in a way that contributes to an acceptable and durable termination of the conflict.
