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One major, little-recognized reason for President Donald Trump’s failure to push the Iranians into surrender—even after hitting more than 13,000 targets with bombs dropped from planes or with missiles fired from long range—is this plain fact: No nation has ever won a war with air power alone. To the extent bombs and missiles have played a role in victory, they have been in coordination with forces on the ground, an escalation of involvement that Trump wisely wants to avoid.

In other words, even if Trump hadn’t overestimated the Iranian regime’s fragility, even if he’d devised a clear strategy of what he wanted the war to accomplish, he would almost certainly not have won this war. He might have done so, if he or Israel’s leaders had prepared and trained a cadre of rebels, perhaps from within Iran’s army, to rise up against the regime’s leaders as the bombs fell. But they didn’t do this, unless you count Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s harebrained scheme—thoughtlessly approved by Trump—to groom former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, one of Iran’s most brutal and unpopular leaders, to storm the palace after Israeli bombs assassinated the entire top layer of Tehran’s government.

In any case, the plot would have almost certainly failed, even it had been carried out, because Ahmadinejad had no followers inside his own country and because the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would have quickly grabbed control of the social, political, and economic levers that it has long dominated—as it indeed did, without pause, in the hours after the bombing began. For a while, there was talk of recruiting Kurdish militias in Iraq to storm across the border and seize power in Tehran—until, perhaps, someone realized they would have no support from Iran’s largely Shiite population either.

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