What Does Israel Actually Want? The War Aims Behind Operation Epic Fury — and Whether They Are Achievable
Israeli military and intelligence officials have been remarkably transparent about the objectives of Operation Epic Fury — more transparent, in some ways, than their American counterparts. The objectives, as articulated publicly and confirmed by multiple briefings to foreign governments, are: permanently eliminate Iran's nuclear weapons capability; destroy or severely degrade the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' capacity to direct and supply regional proxy forces; eliminate as much as possible of Iran's ballistic missile and long-range rocket arsenal; and create conditions under which the Iranian government either collapses or is so weakened that it cannot reconstitute the threats Israel has been managing since the 1979 revolution. These are ambitious objectives. They are also, in the assessment of most serious military historians and strategic analysts, objectives that bombing campaigns have never fully achieved in modern warfare.
On the Nuclear Question
The nuclear objective is the most concrete and the most contested. Israeli and American officials claim that strikes on Natanz, Fordow, Isfahan, and multiple other sites have severely damaged Iran's centrifuge infrastructure, destroyed significant quantities of enriched uranium, and eliminated key scientists and engineers whose expertise cannot be quickly replaced. Independent assessment of these claims is difficult given restricted access, but the broad outline of significant physical damage is credible based on satellite imagery analysis.
What is much less clear is whether the damage achieved is permanent or temporary. Iran has been preparing for exactly this contingency for at least fifteen years, dispersing its nuclear programme into hardened underground facilities specifically designed to survive air attack. The Fordow facility, buried under a mountain, was specifically cited as strike-resistant by Israeli intelligence before the campaign began. The degree to which it has been damaged, and the degree to which Iran can reconstitute enrichment capability from dispersed backup facilities, will only become clear over months and years — not in the initial battle damage assessments.
On the IRGC and Proxy Networks
The objective of degrading the IRGC and its regional proxy network is even harder to achieve through airstrikes alone. The IRGC is not merely a military organisation — it is a political-economic network deeply embedded in Iranian society, controlling significant portions of the economy and providing social services that give it a popular base that aerial bombardment cannot easily sever. Killing IRGC commanders, however senior, does not dismantle the organisation; it creates vacancies that are filled.
The proxy network — Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, Iraqi militias — has been under considerable pressure from Israeli strikes over the past two years and has demonstrated considerable resilience. The Houthis in particular have continued to launch maritime attacks despite months of American and British strikes on their infrastructure. The lesson of asymmetric proxy organisations under external military pressure is that they adapt, disperse, and persist in ways that regular military forces under equivalent pressure do not.
The Achievability Assessment
The honest assessment is that Operation Epic Fury has almost certainly achieved some of its objectives partially and temporarily, and has probably not achieved any of them fully or permanently. That is not a criticism of the operational execution — Israeli military planning and execution has been tactically impressive by any objective measure. It is a commentary on the fundamental limits of what air campaigns can achieve against distributed, hardened, politically motivated adversaries in their home territory.
The question of whether the partial and temporary achievements are worth the costs — the global economic disruption, the damaged alliances, the accelerated Iranian motivation to acquire a nuclear deterrent, and the precedent set for great-power military intervention in regional nuclear disputes — is one that will be argued over by historians and strategists long after the shooting stops. It is also, inescapably, a question that should have been examined with more rigour before the first aircraft took off.