No, Israel's Air Campaign Isn't Futile: 'Airpower Alone' Is A Straw Man

Forbes

3 days ago

Israeli Air Force F-35 fighter jet
In his recent article 'Israel's Futile Air War,' Robert Pape argues that Israel's effort to destroy Iran's nuclear capability and pressure the regime through airpower is doomed from the start. He claims that only ground forces can achieve such goals, pointing to historical U.S. operations as cautionary tales. But Pape's central premise—that 'airpower alone' cannot accomplish strategic objectives—does not only misinterpret modern military history but also distorts understanding of the nature of joint operations and of how to best employ military forces to attain political goals. Furthermore, and fundamental to appropriately invalidating his conclusions, neither the civilian nor the military leadership of Israel claims that Israel can accomplish its strategic objectives using 'airpower alone.'
Warfighting at a campaign level does not occur in any domain 'alone'—not on land, at sea, in space, in the electromagnetic domain—or from the air. Israel does not rely on airpower in a vacuum. It applies air and space capabilities in coordination with special operations, cyber operations, psychological warfare, and strategic messaging. That is the modern model of coercive power—and it has proven itself before.
If boots on the ground were the magic ingredient, the U.S. would have prevailed in Vietnam at the peak of ground force employment in 1968; in Operation Restore Hope in Somalia (1993) against a hostile warlord; and in Operation Enduring Freedom (2001) in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003)—both extended ground occupations with hundreds of thousands of land forces—but they didn't.
Military victory depends on a far more complex set of variables that characterize the desired effects associated with achieving the political objectives of a particular operation. Those variables include strategy, operational concepts, technologies, tactics, and of course the conditions and environment of the specific conflict. Pape is entirely wrong to suggest one set of means is superior to another absent this broader assessment.
'Airpower Alone' Is a Straw Man
Pape argues that Israel is falling into the trap of believing it can achieve its goals through airpower alone. But this is not what Israel believes—it is Pape's mischaracterization. No credible strategist views any domain in isolation. Israel does not have to occupy Tehran to deter Iran's nuclear ambitions; it must impose high, repeatable costs that degrade capabilities, lengthen timelines, and keep the regime off balance.
The idea that only land invasions can achieve military objectives belongs to a bygone era—one that has cost the United States dearly in blood and treasure. The blunders of U.S. ground-centric military strategies in both Afghanistan and Iraq offer the most recent evidence.
Desert Storm: Airpower Was Decisive
Pape's dismissal of airpower's effectiveness ignores perhaps the clearest counterexample—Operation Desert Storm (1991). During that campaign, U.S. and coalition forces employed airpower during all 43 days of the war, but it was only on day 39 that the first ground forces were committed. Airpower paralyzed Saddam Hussein's regime and rendered his military ineffective. Airpower negated the Iraq's command and control systems, obliterated its air force, suppressed its surface-to-air missile systems, and devastated its ground forces—all before coalition ground forces entered Iraq and Kuwait.
When ground operations began, the Coalition soldiers required only 100 hours to finish the war and to reoccupy Kuwait. This largely involved rounding up Iraqi Army troops already defeated by airpower who were looking for U.S forces to whom they could surrender. Of the over 500,000 U.S. troops deployed to the Gulf, 148 were killed in combat. While any loss of life is unfortunate, that astonishingly low figure underscores the strategic value of using airpower to dismantle the enemy's warfighting machine before exposing ground forces to risk. Had the United States pursued a traditional attrition-based ground-centric campaign the death toll on both sides of the conflict would have been enormously higher. Yet as decisive as the air component was in Desert Storm, that does not diminish the necessity of using ground forces to execute the operation.
Clearly, Desert Storm represents a successful example of using airpower as the principal instrument of war, with ground forces in a supporting role. Desert Storm was thus an exemplary demonstration of true jointness—using the right force at the right place at the right time to achieve a given objective.
Enduring Freedom: Strategic Success, Undermined by Mission Creep
Another example Pape ignores is the opening phase of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. The United States rapidly achieved its core national security objectives using airpower as the key force, supported by indigenous ground forces and a small contingent of U.S. special operations forces providing intelligence: 1) the Taliban regime was removed from power; 2) a friendly government was established in Kabul; and 3) the Al-Qaeda terrorist training camps in Afghanistan were dismantled.
The United States met all these objectives by December 31, 2001, without deploying tens of thousands of ground troops. The success was swift, efficient, and decisive—an exemplar of the asymmetric application of airpower and supplementary capabilities.
But instead of recognizing success and withdrawing from the area with a warning not to repeat husbanding Al-Qaeda or we would return, U.S. political and military leaders defaulted to the traditional belief held by the Army-dominated leadership at Central Command headquarters and incorporated in U.S. military doctrine of the day: that only a traditional ground presence could secure the peace. As a result, the United States eventually deployed hundreds of thousands of ground troops—the ostensible 'decisive force.'
In one of the costliest examples of mission creep in U.S. history, the objectives in Afghanistan shifted from disrupting terror networks to 'winning hearts and minds'—in essence, trying to transform a 16th-century tribal society into a modern Jeffersonian democracy. The result was a 20-year quagmire with over 20,000 U.S. casualties that ended with the Taliban returning to power following a humiliating U.S. capitulation—proving that the early air-led campaign had achieved more in three months than ground force occupation did in two decades.
Contrast this with Operation Allied Force (1999), a 78-day NATO-led air campaign that unseated Slobodan Milošević and halted human rights abuses in Kosovo with no NATO lives lost in combat.
Israel Understands the Lesson
Unlike the ground-force-dominated leadership of the U.S. military over the past two decades, Israeli leaders today have no intention of changing Iranian society or democratizing Iran. They are applying precision air and space power to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, eliminate senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) leaders who pose a threat to their country, damage critical infrastructure used to secure Iran's nuclear objectives, and erode the regime's ability to control events—all while minimizing their own exposure and the risk of escalation.
This is not fantasy. It is the smart use of airpower—and, in conjunction with other means, it can achieve desired political outcomes.
Strategic Delay Is Strategic Success
Pape sets up a false binary: Either Israel eliminates Iran's nuclear program, or it fails. But this ignores how modern coercion works. Damaging Iran's nuclear facilities, decapitating its leadership structure, and repeatedly disrupting its enrichment efforts forces Tehran into a permanent state of caution. That amounts to success through delay—a repeatable outcome, sustained through intermittent precision attacks. With air superiority established over Iran, Israel has already secured the means to exercise this strategy option over and over again.
This strategy also keeps Israel's alternatives open. Tehran must now reconstitute its nuclear program under threat. Iran would undertake any new effort to enrich uranium or build covert facilities under the shadow of Israeli air attack—which imposes a degree of strategic control over Iran.
Boots on the Ground? No Thanks
Pape implies that the only path to success is the deployment of massive ground forces—a strategy that would lead Israel into the exact kind of grinding occupation it seeks to avoid. The lessons of U.S. ground operations in Afghanistan and Iraq—where U.S. ground forces succeeded tactically but failed strategically—should warn analysts away from such logic. So should the results of the Russia-Ukraine war. Neither Russia nor Ukraine has proven able to secure air superiority in that war, resulting in a stalemate and devolution into an attrition-based struggle. Russia has suffered nearly a million casualties to date and that number is growing at a rate of 1,500 a day.
Israel has no appetite for repeating America's or Russia's misadventures based on old paradigms of warfare. That is why it is leveraging the domains where it holds clear superiority: air and space.
Conclusion: Control of the Sky Remains Vital
Airpower does not offer a panacea. But it is also not the fragile fantasy Pape suggests. When applied strategically—as in terminating World War II in the Pacific, breaking the Iraqi army in Desert Storm, bringing down the Taliban in the early phases of Enduring Freedom, ending Serb atrocities in Allied Force, and now Israel's effective air operations over Iran—airpower can achieve real, measurable results with dramatically reduced risk and cost, providing strategic advantages not otherwise achievable.
Pape's straw man of 'airpower alone' obscures the actual lesson: that modern conventional airpower integrated with intelligence, cyber-attacks, special operations and other tools can shift the strategic balance—without occupation, without regime change, without the illusion that democracies can be built with bayonets, and without masses of casualties.
Israel's air campaign is not a mistake. It is a masterclass in 21st-century coercive strategy.