It will be difficult to topple the Iranian regime with only an air campaign and no ground forces, according to experts.
While the U.S. military currently has no troops on the ground, both President Donald Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth have left the door open to such a decision. Through one week, the United States and Israel have hit thousands of targets and killed dozens of Iranian senior leaders, but they maintain broad control of the country so far. Speculation about ground troops being deployed to Iran reached a crescendo on Friday when the U.S. Army canceled a training exercise for the elite 82nd Airborne Division, stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.
“I’m highly skeptical that we’d be able to accomplish a complete regime change without some force on the ground, either U.S., allied, or surrogate,” Grant Rumley, a former Pentagon official, told the Washington Examiner.
The U.S. and Israel killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and dozens of his lieutenants in the opening attack last weekend. It’s unclear who will succeed him, though Hegseth noted that, “Iran’s senior leaders are dead, the so-called governing council that might have selected a successor, dead, missing or cowering in bunkers, too terrified to even occupy the same room.”
At the same time, localized Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps units continue to fire ballistic missiles and drones at targets across the region, creating chaos and threatening to expand the conflict. They have targeted U.S. bases and personnel, including Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, and Oman.
“Regime change from the air is really quite hard,” Emily Harding, an expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Washington Examiner. “It very rarely works. So if that is actually the goal, then it may not be enough.”
Trump, on Friday morning, declared that the U.S. will not make a deal to end the war unless it includes the Islamic Republic regime’s “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!”
There have been reports that the U.S. could arm anti-regime groups in Iran and neighboring Iraq, which would allow American forces to stay out of the country.
“An air campaign can only do so much, and so I think the administration’s hope is that some type of surrogate force will emerge on the ground, whether that’s armed by the U.S., supported by the U.S., or sort of a popular opposition that we, like we saw in January, to sort of take this thing over the finish line,” Rumley said.
If the U.S. can avoid putting American service members on-site in Iran, it “reduces some real, significant logistical concerns,” retired General Joseph Votel, who commanded the U.S. Central Command about a decade ago and oversaw the campaign against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria, told the Washington Examiner.
There are geographical concerns about the possible deployment of ground forces. Iran has a population of more than 90 million people and is roughly the size of Alaska, which makes it the second-largest country in the region behind only Saudi Arabia, and would pose challenging questions for operations.
“There’s just a lot involved when you have people on the ground, and there’s just a whole other perspective of that,” Votel said, referring to the current wartime dynamics. “So we are largely controlling the bases, the ships, the other things we operate from. We’re not having to fight to control places from which to do that.”
Former CENTCOM commander, retired Gen. Frank McKenzie, who succeeded Votel, said on the School of War podcast on Thursday that implementing regime change “is a reach goal.”
US WAR IN IRAN IS ‘FULL STEAM AHEAD’ WITH CONTINUED BOMBINGS
“What would regime change mean? It would mean you would have a leadership structure in Iran that is markedly different in terms of outlook than the one that exists now,” he said. “Problem is, how do you get there from here? It’s hard to do.”
He did, however, note that the U.S. military and national security apparatus are “terrible at predicting the failure rate of totalitarian states under pressure,” and referenced the fall of the Assad regime in Syria in late 2024.
