Over 40 days, nearly 19,000 sorties struck some 24,000 targets without major ground engagement and without any credible domestic armed opposition. For the first time since 1945, this amounted to a real-scale test of the maximalist airpower thesis—the claim that aerial force alone can topple a major regional regime. The attempt failed in its central political objective. The April 8 ceasefire registered an implicit downward revision of US–Israeli ambitions. 

Yet the campaign cannot be dismissed as a total failure: its execution demonstrated an unprecedented mastery of airpower across several lines of operation. It demands instead a careful interrogation of contemporary airpower’s capabilities and structural limits.

The coalition’s theory of victory rested on regime change by decapitation, sustained by an alignment between Israel and the US, by Iran’s relative weakening, and by an emerging hubris fed by the perceived successes of Operations Midnight Hammer (June 2025) and Absolute Resolve (January 2026). It drew on a distinctively Israeli strategic culture characterized by a preference for elimination over neutralization and the primacy of intelligence-driven targeting—rather than on the classical canons of airpower theory—and on the twenty-year maturation of the Israeli Air Force (Heyl Ha’Avir) since the 2006 Lebanon shock: industrialized dynamic targeting, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-assisted kill chains, fourfold sortie generation, and longer reach through Sparrow aero-ballistic missiles and the F-35I Adir.

The campaign’s dynamics were shaped as much by Iranian counterstrategy as by allied planning. The opening triptych (decapitation, air superiority, preemptive disarmament) was executed with rare precision. But Iran’s “mosaic defense” construct, patiently built since 2005, absorbed the initial shock, allowed rapid reconstitution of a hardened command structure, and imposed costs through horizontal escalation against Gulf bases and via proxies. The coalition was forced to inflect its effort, sliding from the original logic of political paralysis toward attrition, and then toward a coercive logic initially excluded from its theory of victory.

Three cross-cutting lessons emerge. 

1. EF/RL should be read as one episode in a meta-campaign open since April 2024, if not the October 7 attacks, with multiple phases of “shaping by striking”.
2. Full air supremacy proved out of reach even against a moderately equipped adversary whose integrated air defense system (IADS) had already been degraded by two prior offensive sequences. What remains attainable is conditional superiority, dependent on continuous suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) effort and confined to certain altitude bands; the lower layer is contested by short-range and infrared systems, and projected bases remain vulnerable to one-way attack (OWA) drones and ballistic missiles.
3. Modern high-intensity air campaigns are now governed by the industrial sustainability of the salvo competition: production capacity, magazine depth, and the hi-low effector mix matter as much as platform performance—a calculus that current Western budgets and industrial architectures cannot solve in the short term.

The verdict on EF/RL is therefore suspended. Of the five declared objectives, regime change failed; the dismantling of the nuclear program and of ballistic capabilities were partial successes, the question of 440 kg of highly enriched uranium still dissimulated in several facilities remaining unresolved; the destruction of the Islamic Republic of Iran Navy was substantially achieved; the disruption of Iran’s regional proxy network failed, with Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iraqi militias still active at the ceasefire. The reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, an objective added by economic necessity, remained unrealized, with crude trading above $100 one month after the ceasefire, compared with $70 before the war.

The implications for European air forces are direct, and they do not rest on the relevance of the Iranian theater to European interests. They follow from the transposition of EF/RL’s parameters to the high-intensity hypothesis against Russia, in a context where US strategic rear-support and backfilling can no longer be presupposed.

Three hard points stand out:

1. The inadequacy of European SEAD capabilities and anti-radiation munition stocks against a Russian IADS of an entirely different order of magnitude. 
2. The gap of one to two orders of magnitude between European inventories and the volumes consumed in 40 days of EF/RL; and the obsolescence of a model centered on a narrow core of advanced platforms, which must give way to a complete capability ensemble—stand-off and stand-in effectors, multilayer air defense, persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). 
3. An industrial base sized to reconstitute stocks at the cadence of their consumption.

No European air force possesses this today; no European coalition possesses its cumulative sum. The cost of building it will be considerable. The cost of facing the coming decade with an air model calibrated for 1990s expeditionary operations would, in light of EF/RL, be greater still.

This study is also available in French.