On the other hand, the internal Cyber Police HQ got bombed today. If the institutions of internal suppression are sufficiently disrupted, maybe some form of resistance could be form. Who knows.
People keep wishcasting this idea, but just because many/most Iranian people don't like the regime does not mean they want to be bombed by Israel/the USA.
The one thing we’ve learned over and over again since WWII: strategic bombing does not actually achieve any objective except temporarily disrupting logistics. If anything it strengthens the resolve of the people being bombed, giving the target regime more ammunition to carry on.
Did the US ever invade Japanese home islands (Kyushu, Shikoku, Honshu, Hokkaido) during the war? I am pretty sure they got some of Okinawa then dropped two nukes, then Japan surrendered. Do I have the order of events incorrect?
Yes, you're most probably not taking into consideration the Soviets' incursion into Northern Manchuria, which started on August 9th. The last thing the Japanese leadership wanted was to see a big part of their country turn communist.
This is dumb. Strategic bombing did work in WWII, but it was never as effective as its advocates claimed at the time mostly because the bombs rarely hit anything important. They had to drop far more munitions than originally envisioned to actually do critical damage to infrastructure.
You can't really compare WWII dumb bombs dropped from 25,000 feet to modern precision weapons that can hit precisely the weakest point on a target, times thousands of targets, within the span of a few hours or days.
I mean, we literally just watched a massively successful strategic bombing campaign over the last week! Desert Storm was massively successful, Iraqi Freedom (the actual invasion, pre-nationbuilding part) was massively successful, Israel's bombing of Hezbollah was massively successful. I don't know how anyone can argue that strategic bombing with precision munitions isn't successful.
Strategic bombing doesn't work. With the exception of maybe nukes, wars aren't won from the sky and strategic objectives are hard to achieve. The bombing prior to Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom was operational bombing, its purpose was to flatten resistance so the Army could roll in.
It appears that no matter what, no matter the technology involved (maybe with the exception of nukes), you always need grunts on the ground to hold it.
