President Donald Trump triumphantly announced on Saturday that Israeli and US strikes had killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He was the biggest target in a “decapitation” mission that also reportedly killed a significant number of top Iranian regime figures.
When presidents order airstrikes aimed at debilitating an enemy’s leadership and forcing political change, the logic feels compelling: Strike senior figures. Destroy command nodes. Shock the system. Avoid a costly ground invasion. Bend the regime’s behavior from the air.
It is a recurring promise of modern warfare: decisive political results without occupation. And many will interpret the latest news as the ultimate proof that decapitation works. Removing the head of the regime appears synonymous with removing the regime itself.
History suggests otherwise.
Airpower is extraordinarily effective at destroying infrastructure and eliminating individuals. It is far less reliable as a tool for reshaping political systems. There have been no successful regime change operations carried out solely from the air.
This does not mean that every air campaign fails or that every regime survives unchanged. It means that when airstrikes are used with the explicit goal of forcing political collapse — and in isolation from ground forces to impose political control — outcomes are often far less desirable, and far more dangerous, than attackers anticipate.
Leaders fall. Regimes adapt.
Modern decapitation strategies rest on the belief that regimes are tightly bound to visible leaders. Take out the individual at the top, and the system falters.
Removing a central figure is not insignificant. But in practice, regimes are networks: security services, political elites, patronage structures, ideological institutions. When an external power kills a leader, those networks often consolidate rather than fragment. Successors can emerge. Martyr narratives can mobilize support.
Iran’s current response — expanding missile attacks, widening the battlefield, and signaling willingness to escalate — fits a historical pattern seen in Serbia, Libya, Chechnya, and elsewhere.
Take Chechnya in the mid-1990s. On April 21, 1996, Russian forces executed one of the most precise assassinations of the modern era. The target was Dzhokhar Dudayev, leader of Chechnya’s separatist war against Moscow. After repeated failures to locate him, Russian intelligence exploited a diplomatic opening. As Dudayev spoke on a satellite phone during a mediation effort, signals intelligence fixed on the transmission. Two missiles homed in and killed him.
By operational standards, it was flawless — a textbook decapitation. No ground assault. No Russian casualties. No ambiguity about success. The head was removed.
Dudayev’s death elevated him to martyrdom. Hard-liners gained ground and renewed their offensive. The insurgency adapted rather than collapsed. Violence continued until a fragile settlement later that year — one that unraveled and led to renewed war by 1999. Tactical brilliance produced no strategic breakthrough. Killing the leader did not kill the conflict; it reshaped it.
Kosovo, which is often seen as an air power success story, demonstrates a different pathway to the same problem. In March 1999, President Bill Clinton launched a sustained NATO air campaign against Slobodan Milošević’s Serbia to halt repression in Kosovo. This was not a single decapitation strike and the stated goal was not to topple the government. But Clinton suggested at the outset that the Serbian people should oust Milošević over his actions, and the campaign was a protracted effort not only to degrade the government’s military capacity, but also to damage the regime’s domestic infrastructure, fracture its leadership, and force political compliance.
Instead, Serbian forces accelerated ethnic cleansing operations. Nearly one million Kosovar Albanians — roughly half the province’s population — were expelled within weeks. The bombing did not immediately break the regime. It coincided with some of its most extreme actions. And the regime only negotiated an end to the war amid credible fears in Serbia that ground troops might follow.
Air power alone can’t fuel a revolution
The Iranian government has faced major protests over the years, including a mass outbreak that it brutally suppressed in January of this year, killing thousands. On Saturday, there were reports of spontaneous celebrations in multiple Iranian cities as the news of Khamenei’s death reached the public.
The regime’s unpopularity has raised hopes that an air campaign alone may be enough to tip it over the edge. Trump has called on ordinary Iranians to “seize control of your destiny” and take over the government after the initial bombing.
Ultimately, the risk in these moments is not borne by the American leader issuing the call to confront the regime. It is borne by the people on the ground. And there are historical parallels in the region — also involving the US military — that would hang over the situation.
In 1991, President George H.W. Bush encouraged Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War. Afterward, he negotiated a ceasefire that left Hussein’s government in place — which went on to massacre Kurds who had revolted. With Trump himself signaling he may call off further strikes if he achieves other objectives, Iranians have to worry if they’ll similarly be left out to dry.
They also have to worry about whether the strikes will strengthen the regime in the short term. Air campaigns do not operate in a political vacuum. They reverberate inside the targeted state. Iranian leaders have framed the strikes as violations of sovereignty and international law, portraying resistance as patriotic duty. That framing can matter more than the physical damage inflicted.
When external attack is cast as aggression against the nation, internal political space often contracts. Moderates and reformers can be sidelined. Security services gain expanded authority. Nationalism becomes a unifying force.
This dynamic is not unique to Iran. It has appeared repeatedly when regimes face foreign bombardment. Foreign military power intended to weaken ruling elites can instead strengthen the institutions responsible for internal control, and the perception that they face an existential threat can push them toward even greater levels of violence and repression.
Recent crackdowns in Iran, including massive violent suppression of nationwide protests, demonstrate the regime’s willingness to use lethal force against dissent. Under conditions of foreign air attack, doubling down by the security forces accelerates, and it is easy to paint the pro-democracy movement as agents of the hated Americans who toppled a legitimate Iranian government before in 1953 and are eager to do so again.
Retaliation can come on an uncertain timeline
Another feature of regime-targeting air campaigns is the unpredictable timing of retaliation.
Across Trump’s two terms, Iran has engaged in progressively widening responses to responses to foreign airstrikes.
After Trump ordered strikes that killed Iranian military leader Gen. Qassem Soleimani in 2020, Tehran’s retaliation was measured, limited, and telegraphed to avoid further escalation. Four years later, following Israeli airstrikes on Iranian and allied targets in 2024, Iran crossed a threshold by launching direct missile attacks on Israeli territory from Iranian soil — the first such state-to-state strike of its kind. In June 2025, after further Israeli and US air operations, Iran escalated again. Hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones were launched toward Israel in sustained barrages, sending thousands of civilians to hospitals and forcing millions into shelters.
More recently, Iranian strikes have expanded beyond Israel. After the attack on Saturday, missiles and drones targeted US installations across the Gulf, including the headquarters of the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, as well as nonmilitary targets in major cities. The US military announced on Sunday that three troops had been killed and another five were seriously wounded while supporting the operation.
But the initial barrage is not the only one to worry about. Rarely does retaliation come on the air power attacker’s schedule, and it does not always take conventional form. High costs are common and fallout is unpredictable.
After President Ronald Reagan launched an attempted decapitation strike on Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 1986, the response to US airstrikes — blowing up Pan Am Flight 103 in a terrorist bombing, killing 270 people, including 190 Americans — came two years later. And even after Gaddafi was killed by rebel forces with US-led air support in 2011, the resulting chaos was deadly for Americans as the country spiraled out of control.
Iran’s responses to Israeli and US strikes have ranged from days to months, and the Iranian regime has engaged in terrorism in the past. Federal, state, and local authorities in the US are already on high alert for similar unconventional attacks.
It’s possible the Iran strikes will be judged a tactical triumph in the coming days and that the response will be limited. But the absence of immediate escalation is not the absence of retaliation. Regimes under pressure adjust, regroup, and respond in ways that complicate strategic control by air power attackers.
