U.S. and Israeli Air Dominance Over Tehran Hasn't Broken Iran's Resolve - Israel Security
As the war launched by the United States and Israel against Iran approaches the completion of its first week, an end or decisive conclusion are nowhere in sight. The balance of forces has clearly favored the attackers from the outset. The damage, the losses, the strategic blows that Iran sustained this week are all immeasurably larger than what it was able to inflict on its enemies.
But while U.S. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are bombarding the citizens of their countries with gung-ho messages of a victory at hand, it's best to see things as they are, at this stage.
The opening action of the war scored a major operational success. The American and Israeli intelligence domination of the scene in Iran remains apparent, allowing them to launch precision strikes of critical sites. But as of Thursday night, the Iranian regime was showing no signs of capitulation. Tehran seems adamant about fighting on, activating its Middle East proxies and extending the scope of the campaign to Gulf states and to Europe's edges (Azerbaijan and Cyprus).
The Americans undoubtedly still have surprises up their sleeve. But over time, if no decisive conclusion is achieved, Trump will have to weigh an alternative course, namely a compromise on a new nuclear agreement. Such a deal would impose severe restrictions on the Iranian project but not ensure regime change. (On the contrary, lifting international sanctions from Tehran will send more money into its coffers and increase its prospects of surviving.)
That's the course the president abandoned last week when he decided to attack, after it became clear that the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, was not willing to display flexibility on Iran's basic principles regarding its nuclear project. Now, with Khamenei assassinated and rule placed in the hands of his son, Mojtaba, the United States may reevaluate if there is anyone to talk to and about what. The Iranians, for their part, know that the vast American force can't deploy forever in the Middle East – and will not easily be sent to redeploy if negotiations fail.
The Trump administration wages wars like no other administration before it. The president himself talks to reporters every day, while in Israel no one in the government bothers to talk to the embattled citizens, other than the Home Front Command spokespersons. At the moment, Trump looks like he's enjoying the spotlight and the chance to come across, at least in his eyes, as a distinguished commander-in-chief.
Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense (secretary of war, as Trump calls him), doesn't resemble the generals that Trump surrounded himself with in his first term, and with whom he soon started squabbling. Trump became fond of the current secretary, a retired major in the National Guard, when he saw him analyzing wars on Fox News. In his speech on Wednesday, Hegseth made it clear that the Americans weren't looking for a fair fight, but for victory: inflicting a total defeat on their foes.
In an interview at the beginning of the week, Trump spoke of needing four to five weeks to achieve the war's goals. Contrariwise, a senior security source in Israel, who briefed reporters on Wednesday, said that the Israel Defense Forces would need at least two more weeks of combat. Netanyahu's milieu didn't like that remark and reprimanded the army. What has hardly been talked about relates to the goals of the war. Do they include toppling the Tehran regime? White House statements this week made no mention of regime change.
Danny Citrinowicz, from the Institute for National Security Studies and one of the most in-depth and accurate Israeli commentators on Iran, wrote that victory in the war means toppling the regime. However, he noted, there is no certainty that the administration is willing to invest the time and resources that the goal would require.
Israel aspires to topple the regime via war, but the political decision-makers look to be more optimistic than the military about the prospects of that happening. Unlike in the past, there doesn't appear to be real tension between the government and the General Staff about how to prosecute the war. There are no longer 'hawks" and "doves," as there were in the dispute about attacking Iran 15 years ago.
Since October 7, the army has supported the use of broad force almost at every opportunity. However, in the light of new insights, will the point come at which the military will tell the security cabinet and the full cabinet that the use of force is no longer effective and that another way out needs to be found?
Iran's effort at recovery included bringing Hezbollah into the fray. The Shi'ite organization is coordinating with Iran the launching of simultaneous volleys, in a bid to overwhelm Israel's interception systems. The entry of the Lebanon-based organization into the war conforms with the early assessments of Israeli intelligence. Even Sheikh Naim Qassem, the cautious and retiring secretary general who heads Hezbollah, could not have stood by and done nothing in the wake of the assassination of Ali Khamenei, the most senior leader of Shi'ites worldwide.
Israel responded to the attacks from Lebanon with a series of measures. The air force attacked in Beirut, in the Bekaa Valley and in the south. The IDF is now putting in place more outposts in the narrow security strip it has imposed north of the border, and is threatening to occupy additional territory.
On Thursday, Israel demanded that the residents of the Dahiyeh suburb in south Beirut and residents of southern Lebanon who live south of the Litani River to evacuate their homes ahead of planned bombing raids. Attacks on a massive scale were expected as of press time.
Hezbollah clearly seeks to deploy units and systems that have been dormant since the cease-fire with Israel was reached in November 2024. Meanwhile, the Lebanese government, army and leading politicians are vying with one another in issuing condemnations of Hezbollah.
The times are changing across the Middle East.
The Israeli dilemma
Shi'ite militias in Iraq joined the fight this week, firing drones. Israel thinks the Houthis in Yemen may also intervene down the line. This is a regional war, even if not all the sides are involved or invested in it to the same degree.
The Iranian response looks like a conscious decision to inflame the entire region. Hundreds of missiles, rockets and drones have been fired in parallel at Israel, at a number of Persian Gulf states that host American military bases and, as noted, at Cyprus and Azerbaijan, with a similar accusation. The Gulf states' biggest anxiety is that their stocks of interceptors will run out before Iran's offensive arsenal does.
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The thinking of the Iranians, with their back to the wall, was apparently that this course of action would generate Arab and international pressure on Trump to stop. So far, the opposite seems to be happening. The Arab states are intensifying cooperation with the United States and are hoping to receive fresh supplies of interceptors, in light of the scale of the attacks on them.
The firing aimed at European countries, and the fact that it's impossible to draw a distinction this time between the American and Israeli moves, is reducing the criticism in the West over the assault on the Khamenei regime.
The Iranian response this week wasn't the only thing displaying determination. It appears that, time after time, Iran surprises Israeli intelligence with the speed at which it repairs damaged systems and renews the military struggle against Israel. It is also evident in the rapid restoration of production lines of launchers and missile stockpiles since the end of the previous war last June, and in the readiness to initiate a counterattack, in coordination with Hezbollah, whose steep price is known in advance.
But herein also lies the Israeli dilemma. It can no longer be denied that the regime desires to annihilate Israel, or that it tends to see this as a practical goal. If the partial rehabilitation was so rapid – eight months after the last war ended – is it possible to continue with a policy of periodic rounds of warfare? Should an effort be made to persuade Trump to aim for genuinely vanquishing Iran? Over time, the Israeli economy will have a hard time sustaining a distant military campaign at a rate of once or twice a year.
Initial surveys conducted in Israel and the United States show broad support for the war here and large reservations there. (There are preliminary signs of a positive movement among Republicans, in the light of Trump's success in marketing his first moves as an achievement.) Still, the limited scale of the missile fire so far – which is related to Iran's efforts to pace the use of its remaining munitions – is ameliorating the harsh effect of the war on the Israeli public.
Despite the astonishing opening blow, this looks like a somewhat strange war. It lacks momentum. The threat to the home front is smaller to date than what Israel feared, while the dimensions of the damage inflicted on Iran remains vague.
Even so, most Israelis accept the war and its impact as a fateful decree: another total shutdown of the economy after eight months, the frequent threat to people's lives, the uncertainty about when it will all end – and the picking of a fight with the Iranians, and in fact with all Shi'ites, given the exceptional decision to assassinate the supreme leader.
On Thursday, just when apprehension arose about increasing fire from Lebanon, the Finance Ministry announced the easing of some restrictions on the economy. It effectively left it up to parents to decide whether to return to work while their children are stuck at home because all schools remain closed.
None of this apparently bothers Netanyahu. The prime minister looked especially haughty this week. His supporters are insisting (rightly) that he be given credit for the decision to go to war with Iran, but are determined to absolve him of the slightest responsibility for the blunders that made the October 7 massacre possible. The arrogance was made manifest in midweek when his bureau let it be known that Netanyahu himself launched from afar bombs from a drone that was flying across the skies of Iran. The pilots and the operators of the drones are only extras for the prime minister.
For now, Netanyahu has many reasons to be pleased. His criminal trial has been put on hold. The attorney general is again being slammed. The fight over the Haredi army draft law has been instantly forgotten. Plus, he and he alone will decide on the date for the general election, at the most convenient time for him.
So overwhelming is the haughtiness that the coalition didn't even bother this week to suspend the legislative process to advance the regime overhaul.
Shoulder to shoulder
The contacts between Israel and the United State about a renewed attack on Iran started immediately after the end of the war last June. While Trump gloated about destroying Iran's nuclear program and Netanyahu declared victory, the generals in both countries were more realistic.
Toward the end of 2025, intelligence began to accumulate about the repair of the ballistic missile production lines, combined with concern about a resumption of the nuclear project (although the stockpile of more than 400 kilograms of 60-percent enriched uranium is still apparently where it was). The entry of a new commander of U.S. Central Command, Adm. Brad Cooper, accelerated the joint preparations.
Israel prepared to attack the missile sites in mid-2026, without knowing whether the United States would back or join the operation. However, the protests in January and the regime's brutal response, massacring tens of thousands of civilians, caught Trump's attention and tipped the scales.
Netanyahu's visit to Washington at the beginning of February helped persuade the president that war was unavoidable and that Iran would in any case incorporate attacks on Israeli targets into the campaign.
Several U.S. media outlets reported this week that the attack's timing – Saturday morning – was decided in the middle of the previous week. Netanyahu spurred Trump to act, when he passed on information obtained by Military Intelligence that Khamenei intended to remain exposed aboveground in his residence, during those hours.
The operational opportunity made available to Trump hastened the decision. On top of this, Trump was angry at the Iranian negotiators, believing they were deliberately wasting his time. The last round of the Geneva talks took place last Thursday in the shadow of the secret preparations to eliminate Khamenei and other ranking figures.
Because of legal constraints, Trump preferred for Israel to take out Khamenei, but in the light of the success he quickly claimed credit for himself. He told several reporters that he had actually forced the assassination on Netanyahu. Because both men have frequently been caught exaggerating, misleading and lying, it's hard to know which of them is telling it like it was.
What is not in doubt is the unprecedented operational and intelligence coordination between the two militaries in the joint campaign. A high-ranking Israeli told me this week that the offensive was carried out "shoulder to shoulder, wing to wing," and was discussed daily in many dozens of meetings and conversations between commanders on both sides.
Here's what two Pentagon veterans, who served in senior positions there, say. Prof. Elliot Cohen wrote in The Atlantic magazine that the assault this time included attacks of identical size and numbers of the two air forces. Israel, he added, is this time an equal partner, not a junior one. No European army, he added, would have been capable of handling tasks of a similar complexity.
And Dana Stroul, a senior researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote: "Much more so than even last year's war, the two allies are equal military partners in the current fight. ... it is hard to overstate how groundbreaking the partnership is. Normally, the U.S. military works in broad coalitions, designing the operation, commanding it, and doing most of the fighting."