For months, Iran’s resilience in its war with two of the world’s most capable militaries has perplexed many politicians and confounded public expectations. Israel and the United States have hit thousands of Iranian targets, systematically destroying much of the country’s military infrastructure and killing many of its top leaders. Yet the Islamic Republic has not only survived but continued to maintain significant offensive capabilities. To account for this, some have pointed to Iran’s effective deployment of low-cost precise mass weapons, such as the Shahed-136 one-way attack drone. Others have looked at the decentralized and self-replacing nature of the regime itself.

Although these and other factors have played a part, there is a more straightforward reason for Iran’s staying power: the American and Israeli decision to rely on a sustained air and stand-off naval campaign to bring the regime to its knees. This approach did not come out of nowhere. Air supremacy has been the defining tenet of U.S. and wider Western military strategy for decades. In the post–Cold War era, the United States has perfected the art of airpower—winning control of the skies so that enemy armies, navies, and territory can be bombed at will—to a degree that no country or even alliance of countries has matched. When pitted against an adversary’s deployed ground forces, this strategy has consistently yielded impressive results. The U.S. ability to achieve rapid air superiority has also long served as a powerful deterrent to would-be aggressors.

Yet there are few examples in history of adversaries conceding to maximalist demands in the face of punitive bombing campaigns alone—even by the world’s greatest air force. Indeed, Operation Epic Fury is only one of several recent or current conflicts—including Russia’s war in Ukraine and international responses to the Houthi threat in Yemen—that have exposed the drawbacks of relying heavily on airstrikes to try to unseat a government or to defeat insurgent forces. For American strategists, then, it will be crucial to distinguish the different uses of airpower. The Iran campaign has been a disastrous misuse of military resources, and it showcases the policy limits of what airpower can achieve. Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that the United States should shift away from its doctrine of prioritizing air superiority, as it prepares alongside NATO and Asian allies for very different threats in the coming few years.

THE WAGES OF DESTRUCTION

During the major wars of the twentieth century, U.S. and Allied air superiority was critical to successes on the battlefield. But airpower still failed to force political capitulation by adversaries. In World War II, Nazi Germany fought to the very end despite the Allies’ systematic bombing of its cities, its industrial base, and its transport and fuel networks. In the Korean War, North Korea fought the United States and its allies to a standstill, even as fleets of U.S. bombers obliterated most of its cities and infrastructure. And in Vietnam, the North Vietnamese outlasted the United States, despite the U.S. military dropping more than a million tons of ordnance on cities, factories, and supply routes, in successive punitive air campaigns.

In the defining counterinsurgency conflicts of the twenty-first century, there is little evidence to suggest that air superiority proved any more effective. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States and its allies quickly established total air superiority over the enemy and were able to call in precision airstrikes at will, giving allied troops a huge advantage in combat. Yet in both cases, these campaigns also ultimately failed to achieve their political objectives.

Despite near-daily barrages of Ukraine’s cities, power infrastructure, and industry, Russia is no closer to vanquishing the country more than four and a half years after its brutal invasion began. In Iran, there has been little sign that U.S. and Israeli airstrikes have........

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