Operation Epic Fury: Day Two
Two days into the US-Israel military campaign against Iran, retired Australian Major General Mick Ryan offers an early battlefield assessment that is notably clear-eyed for the fog-of-war moment. Writing from the vantage point of a career soldier who served in Baghdad during the worst of Iran-supplied IED attacks, Ryan brings both operational expertise and personal stakes to his analysis of what the Pentagon has dubbed Operation Epic Fury.
The opening phase, by Ryan's account, went about as well as the coalition could have hoped. He breaks Phase 1 into three target sets:
Phase 1 of the military campaign focussed on three target sets and was largely successful: command and control (leaders, staffs, and networks); air defence networks (radars and other sensors, C2 and launchers); and Iran's long range retaliation capacity (long and medium range missiles, TELs, storage depots, naval vessels and possible missile factories).
That the strikes commenced in broad daylight, catching Iranian defences off guard, speaks to a level of tactical surprise that Ryan flags as significant. It is a detail other militaries -- particularly China's -- will study closely.
The Division of Labour
Ryan identifies a noteworthy split in the coalition's approach. The United States appears focused on degrading Iran's military capacity, while Israel concentrates on something more politically ambitious:
American strikes appear to be focused on destroying or degrading Iran's military capabilities, including military leaders as well as command and control, munitions storage locations and air defence systems. Israel appears to be focussed on strikes that bring about regime decapitation, collapse, and hopefully, regime change.
This is a useful distinction. America breaks the hardware. Israel goes after the regime itself. The arrangement makes strategic sense given Israel's intelligence penetration of Iran and America's unmatched capacity for sustained precision strike.
Trump's four stated objectives for the campaign are ambitious by any measure: deny nuclear weapons to Iran, destroy its ability to proliferate weapons, neutralize the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and create conditions for regime change from within. Ryan notes these were only articulated after the bombing began, a sequencing choice that raises its own questions about democratic accountability in wartime.
Iran's Response and the Long War Gamble
On the Iranian side, Ryan frames the conflict as existential for the regime. Tehran has responded with hundreds of missiles and drones, but the results so far have been unimpressive:
Thus far, Iran has launched hundreds of missiles and drones against American bases and regional targets. While they have killed Americans and others in the region, the Iranian response so far has been largely ineffective. But, that could change.
Three U.S. Army soldiers killed. One F-15 lost to friendly fire. Those are the coalition's casualties after forty-eight hours of strikes against a nation of ninety million people. The numbers are remarkably low.
Ryan suggests Iran's best strategic play may be to drag the conflict out, banking on the well-documented Western allergy to long wars after Iraq and Afghanistan:
Even the Iranians understand that western nations have low patience for protracted military commitments in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan. They may seek to draw out this conflict to adopt a 'long war' strategy. But of course, the leaders who take Iran down this pathway have to survive long enough to do it.
That final sentence is the sharpest observation in the piece. A long war strategy requires leaders who are alive to execute it.
The Airpower Question
The most intellectually honest section of Ryan's analysis concerns the limits of what airpower alone can accomplish. He cites Professor Robert Pape, whose research on coercive bombing carries significant weight in strategic studies circles:
Airpower is extraordinarily effective at destroying infrastructure and eliminating individuals. It is far less reliable as a tool for reshaping political systems. There have been no successful regime change operations carried out solely from the air.
This is the article's central tension. The military campaign is succeeding on its own terms. But military campaigns do not build new governments. Ryan lived this reality in Iraq and returns to it here with evident frustration:
The questions remain however: have they established an integrated, effective post-conflict civil capacity building apparatus. Military organisations can win military campaigns, but winning wars requires societal, economic and other non-military endeavours. We did not do this well in Iraq or Afghanistan.
It is worth pressing this point harder than Ryan does. The Trump administration has spent the better part of a year dismantling the very State Department and USAID infrastructure that would normally lead post-conflict reconstruction. There is no evidence of a Phase 4 plan for Iran, and the institutional capacity to execute one has been deliberately hollowed out. Ryan gestures at this gap but does not name it directly.
Wider Reverberations
Ryan broadens his lens to consider what the Iran campaign means for the global chessboard. His observation about the pattern of Trump-era military action deserves attention:
After Venezuela and now Iran, one could draw the conclusion that the Trump administration is avoiding taking on major powers -- Russia and China -- and focussed on beating up weaker entities.
The implications for Taiwan are obvious and Ryan knows it. If Beijing is watching -- and it is always watching -- the lesson may be that American military power is reserved for adversaries who cannot fight back at scale.
Ryan also raises the question of what happens to Hamas and Hezbollah when their principal sponsor ceases to exist. The answer is not straightforward. Proxy organizations do not simply dissolve when their patron falls. They adapt, fragment, or find new backers. The history of the Middle East is littered with armed groups that outlived the states that created them.
On Russia, Ryan is measured. Moscow lacks the manpower to dramatically escalate in Ukraine while America is distracted, but it could exploit any decline in Western air defense supplies flowing to Kyiv. That is a concrete and testable prediction worth tracking.
The Personal Dimension
Ryan closes with a passage that reveals the emotional core beneath the strategic analysis:
In 2005, I served in Baghdad with a U.S. military unit. It was during this time that Explosively Formed Penetrator IEDs began to proliferate in Iraq due to the Iranians. It was a terrible time, and I damn the Iranian regime every day for this intervention and horrendous deaths of American service personnel it caused.
This is not a dispassionate observer. Ryan watched soldiers die from Iranian-supplied weapons, and he is candid about his satisfaction at seeing those responsible held to account. That transparency is valuable. Readers should know where the analyst stands.
Bottom Line
Ryan delivers a solid Day Two assessment that is strongest in its operational detail and its identification of the right questions. The military campaign has gone well. Surprise was achieved. Coalition casualties are low. Iranian retaliation has been ineffective.
But the hard part has not started. Ryan knows this because he has seen it before. Bombs can topple a regime. They cannot build a replacement. The article's most important contribution is its insistence that the real test lies not in the kinetic phase -- where American and Israeli forces have overwhelming advantages -- but in everything that comes after. On that question, the silence from Washington is deafening.