Cyber operations play a critical role in shaping the battlefield, with actions designed to weaken the adversary’s defences, morale and command capabilities before kinetic hostilities commence. The combined capabilities of the United States and Israel ensured that a range of such actions were undertaken even before the first bombs were dropped.

Senior US military officials stated that coordinated cyber and space activities degraded Iranian communications, sensors and command-and-control networks. According to Gen. Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “The first movers were USCYBERCOM and USSPACECOM, layering non-kinetic effects, disrupting and degrading and blinding Iran’s ability to see, communicate and respond.”[1] Secretary of War Pete Hegseth also alluded to “classified effects”, which, in US military parlance, refers to the outcomes produced by an operation, not merely the tools employed, underscoring the emphasis on integrated effects across the cyber, space and kinetic domains.

Early Operational Effects and Infrastructure Disruption

On the second day of the conflict, the Israeli Defence Forces claimed in a statement that the headquarters of the IRGC’s “cyber and electronic headquarters” and its “Intelligence Directorate” were destroyed in aerial strikes.[2] Monitoring organisations reported that Iran’s internet connectivity dropped to about 4 per cent of normal levels due to multi-layered attacks on BGP routing, DNS infrastructure and SCADA/ICS systems, with some regions experiencing near-total blackouts.[3] Who was responsible for this was difficult to assess, as the Iranian government had itself imposed a blackout to prevent civil unrest, which was likely intensified by coordinated external cyber and military operations targeting Iranian communications infrastructure.[4]

Among the initial strategic objectives was the decapitation of the regime. In the early phase of the conflict, Trump’s messaging implied that regime change or regime collapse in Iran could be a potential outcome of the war. Among the tactical steps undertaken in pursuit of this goal was targeting the entire regime leadership, including Ayatollah Khamenei.

According to reports, Israeli intelligence leveraged existing access to Tehran’s traffic camera network and mobile phone infrastructure to trace the movements of the Iranian leadership with unprecedented precision.[5] In earlier reports, Israeli officials had said Iranian operators had broken into municipal traffic‑camera networks and used the live feeds to assess missile‑strike damage, track emergency‑response movements, and identify whether specific targets had been successfully hit.[6] Such capabilities highlight the role of cyber access in enabling precision targeting, blurring the line between intelligence collection and operational execution.

Information Warfare and Psychological Operations

Coordinated cyberattacks simultaneously targeted Iranian digital infrastructure. Described in some reports as the “largest cyberattack in history”, these operations........

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