President Donald Trump has ordered a start to “Operation Epic Fury,” a joint U.S.-Israeli air campaign targeting Iran’s naval, nuclear, and missile forces, and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The president’s strategy appears to center on throwing as much firepower against the core instruments of Iran’s power as possible in the hope that doing so will bring down the regime or produce a more malleable negotiating partner. What will happen next is very hard to predict.
In a speech announcing military action early Saturday morning, Trump declared that he had chosen to “defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” Addressing the Iranian people, Trump added, “The hour of your freedom is at hand… take over your government.”
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Hundreds of missiles and bombs have been fired at targets across Iran, with a number of senior Iranian officials reported dead. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated on Saturday afternoon that Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been killed. Whether he is in fact dead or not is largely irrelevant: he will almost certainly be dead in the coming days. The big question: what comes next?
Speaking to Axios, which also reported that the provisional U.S.-Israeli plan calls for five days of strikes, Trump suggested he had not yet decided how long to sustain military action. “I can go long and take over the whole thing, or end it in two or three days and tell the Iranians: ‘See you again in a few years if you start rebuilding [your nuclear and missile programs]… in any case it will take them several years to recover from this attack.”
This rhetoric suggests that Trump’s strategy is to neuter key elements of the regime’s power in the hope that whoever replaces Khamenei is more open to serious concessions in any new negotiations. The regime was already under unprecedented economic and popular domestic pressure before this air campaign. Trump will hope that by greatly diminishing the regime’s centers of power he can cause even a hardline successor to Khamenei to relinquish Iran’s ambitions for nuclear power and to accept limits on its ballistic missile programs.
But whether this gambit will succeed or not is a very open question. This regime is defined by a large and highly motivated group of ideologues. They believe they are on a mission from God. They will not easily be cowed into submission. They may believe they can outlast the U.S. by responding with terrorist attacks and other manifestations of chaos. To truly eradicate this regime, the U.S. would need to deploy at least a limited number of ground forces into Iran.
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In addition, while Iranian retaliatory efforts have thus far failed to cause significant harm to U.S. forces and regional allies, we’re only in the opening stage of this conflict. Iran has a great many terrorist cells and supporters spread across the globe. And as the first round of targets is eliminated, regime forces will become far harder to locate. Israel’s impressive human intelligence apparatus in Iran will not be able to maintain constant coverage of these individuals. And as they hide in population centers, the risks of civilian casualties will increase significantly. At the same time, the U.S. is expending air defense munition stocks already in very short supply to shoot down Iranian missiles.
Put simply, this will be a military campaign fraught with risk and uncertainty.