The world has learned a great deal about airpower over the last three years. Russia and Ukraine have waged a brutal air campaign that has raised serious questions about the future of manned combat aircraft. By contrast, Israel and the United States have unleashed a devastating air campaign that appears to have rendered an enemy with formidable defenses nearly incapable to resist.
Why has traditional airpower been sidelined in one campaign while dominating the other? And what does this answer hold for the future of airpower?
The best place to start for an evaluation of how the air campaign has changed remains retired U.S. Air Force Col. John Warden’s “Five Rings” model. As an analytical tool, the Five Rings model divides targets into five concentric rings: armed forces in the field, population, infrastructure, organic essentials, and leadership. The idea is that each ring is successively more difficult to strike but gives greater leverage in terms of damage to a regime.
As a normative argument, the model implies that force is best spent attacking the critical inner rings rather than the hard outer shell. While there are other models of airpower, this one may be the most useful right now for thinking about the differences between Ukraine and Iran.
In three years of war over Ukraine, the air defenses on both sides have largely held. After the chaos of the first weeks of the war, manned aviation was generally pushed back from the front lines, with lethal air defenses making it difficult to inflict serious damage on the fielded forces of the enemy and nearly suicidal to conduct deep strikes.
The Russians have opted for standoff attacks launched from Russian-controlled airspace, including using strategic aircraft to launch cruise missiles against Ukrainian population and infrastructure targets and tactical aircraft to deliver “glide bombs” against fielded Ukrainian forces. The former have been supplemented by long-range precision drones (often either built in Iran or under Iranian license). Ukrainian air defenses have a strong record of intercepting the strategic attacks, albeit at considerable expense.
The real story of airpower in the Russia-Ukraine war has been the replacement of manned aircraft with a dizzying array of unmanned aerial vehicles. Launched from a wide variety of platforms, these drones have been used by both sides for tactical and strategic effect, in situations that would be suicidal for manned aircraft.
Yet neither Russia nor Ukraine has had much success in pushing past the first three rings. Neither side’s efforts have made a decisive impact on the enemy. Russia’s air campaign against Ukraine has thus far failed to noticeably dent morale among civilians or on the capacity of Ukraine to maintain fighting forces in the field. Russia can kill random civilians in Kharkiv and Kyiv at will, but these deaths haven’t hurt Ukrainians’ willingness to fight. Ukraine’s drone campaign has inflicted serious attrition on Russian forces but hasn’t induced strategic paralysis or anything approaching regime collapse.
By contrast, the Israeli campaign has been spectacularly successful across an entire range of targets. A combination of drones and manned aircraft have struck Iranian forces in the field, infrastructure, organic essentials (the nuclear program), and even Iranian leadership figures. The recent U.S. strikes have similarly hit the nuclear program—although there are still many as-yet-unanswerable questions as to how damaging the impact was.
But the joint U.S.-Israeli campaign also creates some difficult questions for airpower advocates and for the Five Rings model. Israel and the United States enjoy virtually unparalleled access to Iranian leadership and organic essentials. U.S. and Israeli aircraft can range across Iran virtually at will, destroying targets at their convenience. The Israelis believe, or at least purport to believe, that attacks against regime targets can induce regime change in Iran. Blow up enough police stations and kill enough government apparatchiks, and the machinery of oppression will grind to a halt and the Islamic Republic will collapse. U.S. President Donald Trump endorsed similar thinking in the wake of the U.S. strikes.
This is, to put it mildly, an unproven proposition. Most of the theories of why the Iranian state might collapse are ad hoc to the point of wishful thinking. Strikes on leadership and repressive machinery have failed to destroy other repressive governments, whether in Nazi Germany, Serbia, or Iraq. It is not obvious how many police stations Israel and the United States would need to destroy in order to undercut the foundations of the Islamic Republic. The answer may well be all of them—and then some. People tend to respond to being bombed with hostility toward the enemy, not their own government.
Have Israel and the United States succeeded where Ukraine and Russia have failed because of technology or because of less tangible factors? We don’t yet have full details of the U.S.-Israeli campaign, but initial reports suggest the importance of both technological and organizational factors.
Russian and Ukrainian air defenses are denser and more sophisticated than their Iranian counterparts, although the gap is not huge. U.S. and Israeli aircraft (especially stealth fighters and bombers) are far more advanced than anything Russia or Ukraine has committed to the conflict and are supported by an arsenal of electronic and cyberweapons that have blinded and disrupted Iranian defenses. Finally, U.S. and Israeli pilots have trained individually and organizationally to defeat and destroy sophisticated air defense networks in a way that Russian and Ukrainian pilots have not, largely because of differences in ideas about air-ground cooperation from the Cold War.
Books will be written about each of these campaigns and about the comparison between them. Yet the dilemma for airpower remains what it was in 1917. An air campaign cannot compel anyone to do anything; the target gets to decide when it has suffered enough pain to comply with the demands of the attacker.
Iran can extend this campaign as long as it wants by simply doing nothing, and there is nothing that either Israel or the United States can do to force Tehran’s compliance. Russia can kill Ukrainians with airpower but needs waves of infantry to take territory. A campaign that could actually tear apart the sinews of governance would change the logic of this equation but remains largely the stuff of speculation.
The technical questions associated with Israel’s dazzling success are important, but as of yet, the answers don’t change the fact that there are simply things that airpower cannot do, no matter how effectively employed.
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