Applying US Air Warfare Theory and Doctrine to Evaluate the Campaign against Iran, Part 1

The US-Israeli combined air campaign against Iran should be evaluated based on whether it achieved its political objectives, which is the core purpose of any military operation. The campaign to this point has degraded the Iranian ability to project force and thus satisfied a key military objective. The United States and Israel have destroyed a significant portion of Iranian missile, drone, and naval capabilities as well as the industrial base that enables Iran to produce more. The current ceasefire will not secure US interests by default, however, because the United States and its partners have yet to achieve necessary conditions for a positive political outcome. Iranian leaders continue to threaten international shipping around the Strait of Hormuz and have expressed their intent to continue restricting access to the strait. Any future agreement between the United States and Iran that does not secure the strait would severely undermine what the campaign has achieved so far. Though the war is not over until a permanent ceasefire is reached, the current pause in fighting provides an opportunity to evaluate what the campaign has achieved to this point. We will publish a series of articles in the days and weeks ahead assessing the success and shortcomings of the campaign.

The US-Israeli combined force designed its air campaign against Iran based on long-established US air warfare theory and doctrine, which are the basis on which we will assess the campaign. The purpose of any campaign, according to that theory and doctrine, is to compel a positive political outcome—not to destroy every enemy military asset or try to control every tactical action that the enemy may take.[i] US doctrine focuses on attacking the entire enemy system with special emphasis on centers of gravity, which it defines as the “sources of power [providing] moral or physical strength, freedom of action, or will to act,” in order to paralyze the enemy, make it unable to execute its concept of operations, and ultimately impose the desired political outcome.[ii] The US military targets centers of gravity through an approach known as “parallel warfare.”[iii] Parallel warfare involves achieving specific effects on an enemy system by conducting rapid strikes across the whole depth of an enemy state or territory at every level of war.[iv] This is exactly the approach that the US-Israeli force has taken in the design of the campaign against Iran.

Modern US air doctrine emphasizes the establishment of air superiority as a prerequisite to successful air campaigns. Air superiority enables friendly forces to execute operations “at a given time and place without prohibitive interference from” enemy threats.[v] Air superiority can be limited to specific areas, altitudes, and times.[vi] Air superiority enables all other operations. The United States and Israel rapidly achieved air superiority over Iran within 72 hours of launching the war and have maintained it since.[vii] Achieving air superiority does not prevent tactical losses, however, especially when a force has sustained an extraordinarily high sortie rate for a prolonged period, as the US-Israeli combined force has. 

Parallel warfare, which the United States debuted in the first Gulf War, is meant to achieve “specific effects [against the enemy system] rather than the absolute destruction of a list of targets.”[viii] Parallel warfare views the enemy organization as a system of systems where friendly forces must affect essential systems—centers of gravity—to render the entire system ineffective.[ix] It also aims to act against many individual systems simultaneously “to achieve rapid dominance” and paralyze the enemy.[x] These simultaneous attacks against key systems seek to “render an adversary ineffective” by preventing its organization from functioning, which means that “the ramifications of a parallel attack extend well beyond the arithmetic advantage” of hitting many targets in a short period of time.[xi] Evaluating the campaign based on the number of targets destroyed is therefore inconsistent with US air doctrine, which emphasizes qualitative measures of battlefield success.

Effective parallel warfare requires an accurate understanding of enemy doctrine to understand which systems constitute centers of gravity and their respective vulnerabilities. Centers of gravity are relative in that they are framed by how an actor views their enemy and how it envisions accomplishing its objectives.[xii] Centers of gravity can be determined through the study of an actor’s doctrine and concept of operations in specific circumstances. Centers of gravity have three elements: requirements, capabilities, and vulnerabilities.[xiii] Requirements enable capabilities needed to accomplish objectives, while vulnerabilities are “those aspects or components of the requirements that are deficient or vulnerable to attacks that will achieve decisive results.”[xiv]

US air doctrine emphasizes attacking vulnerabilities to prevent the enemy from using the capabilities that it needs to accomplish its objectives. For example, the Israeli decision to destroy some TOMBSTONE radars for Iran’s S-300 air defenses in April and October 2024 rendered Iran unable to accomplish the objective of defending its airspace. [xv] The Israeli strikes only destroyed one target at each battery—the radar—but because the radars were a critical requirement that enabled the battery’s critical capability of shooting aircraft, the entire S-300 system became ineffective. That Israeli success weakened Iranian air defenses significantly ahead of the 12-Day War in June 2025 and the ongoing US-Israeli war against Iran.

The nature of US air doctrine makes definitively evaluating the success of the campaign before its completion premature, which will impose inherent limitations on our analysis. It is impossible to assess the military effectiveness of the campaign using quantitative values based on open sources, both during and after the campaign. US air doctrine seeks to achieve qualitative effects, some of which are invisible in the open-source information space and others are difficult to observe because the effects take considerable time to become apparent. For example, US strikes against German oil infrastructure in World War Two ultimately resulted in major fuel shortages that made German Panzer formations considerably less effective, but those results took five months to manifest clearly.[xvi] We will nevertheless try to assess the qualitative effects of the campaign at least partially based on the information available.