Sabitlenmiş Tweet
A kinetic campaign will likely seek to defang the regime by suppressing its retaliatory bite with a massive combined air op aimed at taking out its over horizon detection and early warning grid, gulf coastal assets, missile and drone launch sites, c2, and com infrastructures in the opening sorties and operations. The US has demonstrated multidomain sof insertion capabilities for targeted suppression of ‘Samson’ option sites.
The next phase exploits the time window and opened air corridors to eliminate irgc elite and artesh loyalists. The irgc is three or four times the size of Hezbollah at its peak. Ground, aerospace, naval, Quds Force all cap at under 200,000 core personnel. Taking out 1,000 - 2,000 of its senior hardliner command, sinking its navy, burying their c2s and silo entrances in rubble can disorient, degrade and send a resounding signal across the region and beyond, not just it Iran. The irgc can be weakened considerably in a manner that it would not be able to simply shrug off to rapidly organize or recuperate.
In the next phase critical components of the regime’s internal coercion can be shut down or materially degraded leaving the clerics vulnerable and the ayatollah exposed. Fusion centers like Tharallah, intelligence services centers and infrastructure, Basiji hq and ammo bunkers, loyalist police hq, and regime broadcast apparatus are all more difficult to defend than hardened subterranean facilities.
The theory of victory follows coerced reconfiguration. There’s no guarantee of total regime collapse, but a de facto change of leadership via kinetic fiat can be designed to leave vacuums in optimal places, tipping the balance toward lower level artesh command and local police networks and creating openings for more pragmatic figures like Karroubi and local networks of Munich Convergence coalitions alike.
Khamenei’s humiliation is more important than his elimination by allied bombs. Let the people of Iran put him on trail. There is no turning back from the massacres the Islamic Republic has perpetrated. It knows this. Leaving the regime unattended under strangulating pressure risks a sprint to strategic deterrents and increased internal security control.
Inaction is not a risk free proposition. A sacralized regime under siege can accelerate extreme internal control measures and regime insurance behavior even without US intervention. The Soviet trajectory is questionable. A North Korea type hardening is also not a clean fit. But while regime decay without hard intervention will find its own historic path, liberalization is less likely than authoritarian hardening with a strategic deterrence sprint to secure survival.
English
