Over the past week, Israel has engaged in a protracted air campaign in Iran to achieve something no other country has ever done before: topple a government and eliminate its major military capability using airpower alone. Israel’s attempt to achieve these highly ambitious goals with an air campaign and sophisticated intelligence networks, but without the deployment of a ground army, has no modern precedent. The United States never succeeded in achieving such goals just through airstrikes during the massive strategic bombing campaigns of World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the wars in the Balkans, or the Iraq war. Nor did the Soviet Union and Russia in Afghanistan, Chechnya, or Ukraine. And Israel itself has never attempted such a campaign in previous conflicts in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, or even in its most recent operation in Gaza.

Israel, the strongest military power in the Middle East, has scored numerous tactical successes using precision airpower and exquisite intelligence since Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023. The Israel Defense Forces have assassinated senior leaders in Iran’s proxy organizations, including much of Hezbollah’s mid- and high-level leadership. In a previous exchange of missile fire in April, the IDF destroyed a variety of Iran’s air defenses and missile capabilities. And its most recent attacks on Iran have killed senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leaders, destroyed important regime communication systems, damaged important economic targets, and degraded some of Iran’s nuclear program.

But even as it continues to score individual victories, Israel appears to be falling into the “smart-bomb trap,” in which overconfidence in precision weapons and intelligence not only allows the country’s leaders to believe that they can stop an Iranian nuclear breakout and even topple the regime of the Islamic Republic but also leaves Israel less secure than before. Airpower, no matter how targeted and intense, is not certain to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program in its entirety, nor will it clear a path for regime change in Tehran. In fact, if the historical record is any indication, Israel’s overconfidence in what its technologically advanced weapons can do is likely to harden Iran’s resolve and produce the opposite of its intended results: a more dangerous Iran, now armed with nuclear weapons. Without a ground invasion (highly improbable) or direct U.S. support (which the Trump administration may be wary to provide), Israel’s military successes in Iran and beyond could very well be short-lived.

Israel’s strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities are motivated not by the fear that Iran is capable of assembling a nuclear weapon—in 2025, Iran can certainly master the 80-year-old technology used for building crude nuclear weapons such as those the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—but rather that Iran may already be on the verge of acquiring the crucial fissile material for the weapon. Iran can develop this material in two ways: enriching uranium ore to achieve the purity of isotopes necessary for bomb grade, at Iran’s uranium ore mines, uranium gasification plant at Estefan, and enrichment facilities at Fordow and Natanz (which was somewhat damaged by Israeli strikes); and stripping off the plutonium that is a natural byproduct of any nuclear reactor, such as Iran’s operational reactor at Bushehr.

Israel faces three impediments to knocking out these facilities altogether. First, much of Iran’s nuclear program, including its uranium enrichment facilities, is buried deep underground. The well-developed facility at Fordow is burrowed hundreds of feet under a mountain, and a new underground facility at Natanz, at depths similar to Fordow, has been under construction for several years. Thus far, Israel has not targeted Fordow at all and has limited its attacks on Natanz to its power generation facilities rather than attempting to destroy the centrifuges and stockpiles of enriched uranium buried 75 feet under the surface. No available evidence suggests that Israel has the airpower payload capacity........

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