Why air strikes alone are not enough to bring down a regime

On 28 February 2026, the images were shown on a loop across all the world’s news channels: plumes of smoke rising over Tehran, government buildings blown up in a matter of seconds, the Israeli army spokesperson announcing that they had “eliminated 40 senior officials, including Khamenei, in one minute”. Operation “Epic Fury”, conducted jointly by Washington and Tel Aviv, had just struck at the heart of Iranian power with a precision and ferocity unprecedented since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, Ali Khamenei, aged 86, had died in the rubble of his command complex in the heart of the capital.

Yet, from the very first hours following this devastating strike, something was happening that should have given the strategists in Washington and Tel Aviv pause for thought. Iran was striking back. Massively. Missiles and drones were simultaneously raining down on 27 US bases in the Gulf, on Israel, on Bahrain, Dubai and Doha. The Revolutionary Guards, whose headquarters had just been destroyed according to the Pentagon, continued to coordinate ballistic missile strikes on a regional scale. A transitional triumvirate was taking the reins of power in Tehran. And the question that the most clear-sighted American analysts were asking themselves in private was precisely the one that history has been posing for a century: if the objective is regime change, will bombs suffice?

The answer, backed by decades of strategic studies and the concrete record of all major air campaigns of the modern era, is no. Not because the strikes would be militarily ineffective, but because destruction is not governance, and because overthrowing a regime requires far more than eliminating its visible leaders. It is this uncomfortable truth, repeated from the Second World War through to the lessons of Iraq and Libya, that the Iranian moment of 2026 brings back to the fore.