America and Israel Remind the World How Wars Are Fought to Victory

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, March 05, 2026

 

To hear administration officials tell it, the objectives it hopes to achieve in Iran run the gamut.

 

The White House wants to put an end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions for all time. It seeks to neutralize Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities and their potential to deny Western military forces access to the Middle East. It intends to arrest Iran’s support for terrorist groups throughout the region. “All I want is freedom for the people,” Donald Trump told the Washington Post, introducing the promotion of liberty abroad as yet another goal of this conflict.

 

Each of these objectives would accompany the implosion of the mullocracy in Tehran. The Trump administration is wary of saying outright that regime collapse is its true goal, but the Israelis aren’t.

 

Jerusalem’s objective is to “create the conditions” for regime change, according to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Toward that end, one Israel-based security expert told the Financial Times, Israel is attacking “the pillars of this regime” and “everything that holds it together.” But what will follow the Islamic Republic? That’s tomorrow’s problem. “If we can have a coup, great,” the analyst added. “If we can have people on the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great.”

 

Israel is fighting this war as it has fought every conflict it has waged since October 7, 2023, with the goal of achieving tactical victories at the lowest possible cost in blood and treasure. The full flourishing of the Iranian people would be nice. And who wouldn’t welcome the establishment of a durable and placid social contract throughout the Middle East? Those are fine outcomes, but the IDF has a narrower agenda: break the back of the Iranian regime and rid the world of its terror masters once and for all while putting its soldiers at as little risk as possible.

 

The U.S. has joined the IDF in that enterprise, but Americans have not seen their military fight that kind of war in a long time. For some, it is a disorienting experience.

 

The United States Navy is the subject of withering criticism, for example. CENTCOM seemed rather proud of itself when it revealed that a U.S. attack sub used a heavyweight torpedo to break the hull of an Iranian frigate — a first for U.S. submariners, according to Pete Hegseth, since World War II. But this “cowardly attack,” according to a detractor, disregarded the fact that the Iranian warship was “uninvolved in the war.” In addition, according to the “historian” Craig Murray, the attack amounted to a crime of war. “Despite there being no threat of any kind, the US submarine sailed away with no attempt to pick up survivors, leaving them to drown,” he wrote.

 

“Literal Nazi behavior,” the British journalist Richard Medhurst said of the U.S. Navy for executing that attack “in international waters” well outside “the combat zone.” Contrary to those who have convinced themselves that the Iranian ship was no threat to U.S. forces, however, the IRIS Dena, one of Iran’s newest warships, “was armed with heavy guns, surface-to-air missiles, anti-ship missiles and torpedoes.”

 

Naturally, every platform that allows Iran to project power is a legitimate target in this war, and the advanced American attack sub didn’t surface because that would expose its position to the enemy. These are best practices in combat if the objective is to defeat an enemy force.

 

For some, the U.S.-Israeli air campaign is just as vexing as the war at sea. “They are just carpet bombing a place more dense and crowded than New York City,” Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King said of the attacks on Iranian regime targets in Tehran. We can at least comprehend King’s ignorance. He just doesn’t understand what he’s looking at.

 

King doesn’t seem to know that the vertical pillars of smoke erupting from these strikes are indicative of penetrating ordnance (the column shoots upward because it is funneled in that direction by the crater the munition had just made). Nor is he apparently aware that virtually all of America’s gravity bombs are fitted with Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) kits that transform them from “dumb” bombs — the sort once used in “carpet bombing” raids designed to level a discrete area — into precision-guided weapons.

 

Indeed, the whole operation is “a war crime,” according to “human rights barrister” Geoffrey Robertson. “There can be no peace without justice, whatever happens to any future government,” he wrote, gesturing impotently in the direction of “international law.” The “warmongering powers” America and Israel “should have no say over a set of rules that should instead reflect the values of decent democracies,” he declared.

 

But the U.S. and Israel will have not just “a say” but unrivaled influence over the direction in which a post–Islamic Republic Iran progresses, because that is the spoil they will have won for themselves on the battlefield. Have we forgotten? That is how wars work.

 

What we’re witnessing is an informative exhibition of how complex military engagements are actually won — through the application of overwhelming and ruthless force.

 

Moreover, this demonstration of Western power has had a sobering effect on America’s adversaries. In much the same way that Chinese military analysts were clearly impressed with the tactical acumen the U.S. armed forces displayed in Venezuela in January, the People’s Republic’s thinkers are giving the American military credit where it’s due. As one Chinese analyst confessed, America’s power-projection capabilities are limited by its “will.” Contrary to the happy narratives bandied about in Beijing, “the U.S. retains formidable economic strength and possesses unparalleled military power globally.” Even Trump’s antagonism toward U.S. partners and allies seem not to have mattered much. Washington’s “diplomatic influence remains significant,” another Chinese observer admitted.

 

But what we’re seeing is not the result of diplomatic overtures. Diplomacy is not what united the Gulf states against the Iranian regime as it lashes out in all directions. Diplomacy did not convince the Lebanese government to, miraculously enough, outlaw the Iranian terrorist group Hezbollah and begin to finally crack down on its militants. And diplomacy is not crushing the Islamist regime in Tehran, which is already coming apart at the seams. “Israeli intelligence sources suggest that there are signs of Iranian soldiers, police officers and IRGC members failing to show up for duty,” The Economist reported Wednesday.

 

This is all quite bewildering for those who believe that any exercise of U.S. military power is illegitimate, and for whom defense is not a priority — not when we could be shoveling U.S. taxpayer dollars into the insatiable maw of America’s ever-expanding entitlement liabilities. And yet, while this confusion is explicable, it is not excusable. Theirs is a cultivated ignorance — a benightedness encouraged by policymakers who, for decades, convinced themselves that wars can be lost but never truly won.

 

That was a paradigm Washington occasionally forced on Jerusalem, but not today. This war is being fought with the aim of ensuring that the Islamic Republic is not only defeated but that its agents and sympathizers know they have been defeated. That sounds quaint. It’s not supposed to be how wars are fought anymore, if they are fought at all. “Every new war reopens an enormous question,” the left-wing journalist Robert Koehler wrote. “How do we evolve beyond this?”

 

If you see the application of Western military power against a malign force already at war with the West as an evolutionary cul-de-sac, a vestigial trait the enlightened among us long ago sloughed off, you’re likely to be hopelessly confused by events. But what we’re watching is not at all confusing. Rather, it’s exquisitely simple, albeit rare: We win, they lose.