Operation “Roaring Lion / Epic Fury”: When Untrustworthy Leadership Attempts Regime Change
By Francisco Torres, Editorial Director of Sustainabl.
In the early hours of February 28, 2026, Israel and the United States launched coordinated attacks on Iran. Israel named the offensive Operation Roaring Lion; Washington, Operation Epic Fury. This was not a short-range surgical incursion: the target package included nuclear facilities, ballistic missile sites, air defenses, radars, command structures, and, according to reports, compounds linked to Iranian leadership.
In Tel Aviv, the human element is immediate: sirens, repeated entries into shelters, home improvisation, and a weary routine of resilience. This scene—a country functioning between alerts and WhatsApp—contrasts sharply with the strategic scale: an explicit pivot towards regime change, announced by Donald Trump as he spoke directly to the Iranian populace.
From a management perspective, the angle is neither moral nor ideological. It is operational: what kind of leadership decides this, with what internal legitimacy, what theory of success, and with what execution structure?
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Key Facts: Scale, Objectives, and Political Signaling
The data that matters for understanding the nature of the operation:
- Magnitude: The Israeli Air Force executed its largest recorded sortie, with around 200 aircraft and approximately 500 targets in cities like Tehran, Isfahan, Qom, Karaj, and Kermanshah.
- Iranian Response: Missile launches towards Israel triggered an emergency state declared by the Israeli Defense Minister.
- Sustained Nature: The U.S. spoke of “major combat operations” and without a closure date, suggesting a campaign, not an episode.
- Stated Objectives by Trump: To prevent nuclear weapon capabilities, destroy missile and naval capacities, neutralize threats to the U.S., and enable Iranians to “take control” of their destiny.
- Context of Continuity: The offensive follows previous attacks (including the degradation of the Iranian nuclear program the year before) and comes after months of U.S. military buildup in the region.
In management terms, this defines a project with maximum ambition (regime change) and highly complex execution in an environment of extreme uncertainty and dependence on external variables (Iranian internal reaction, regional alignments, escalation containment, energy market, etc.).
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The Central Blind Spot: A “Exit Strategy” that Depends on Others
Regime change, by definition, is not a controllable deliverable by those who declare it. Unlike degrading infrastructure (a technical objective), changing a power structure requires internal actors—security factions, political elites, mobilized masses—to execute aligned decisions.
The framework suggested by the coverage implies a tactical hypothesis: strike sufficiently to break the aura of invulnerability, force internal tensions, and stimulate defections, with promises of amnesty to those who separate from the regime. This approach has instrumental logic but exposes three operational fragilities:
1. Dependence on Internal Coordination: The opposition and factions within the system must move with timing and critical mass. This cannot be “ordered” from outside.
2. Ambiguity of the Final State: “The regime falls” does not describe the replacement, territorial control, or new coercion balance.
3. Risk of Prolongation: Without a ground invasion (which is neither considered nor plausible according to reports), the campaign may lead to an unstable interim: neither collapsed regime nor closed conflict.
In corporate terms, I would say it is a transformational program without control over the critical resource. In geopolitics, it is similar: the critical resource is the internal dynamics of Iran.
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The Underestimated Variable: Legitimacy and Trust in the Executing Leadership
The original piece introduces an uncomfortable but operational element: the low public trust in the two leaders behind the decision.
- Trump carries a reputation for volatile narratives and confrontation with intelligence assessments.
- Netanyahu faces electoral pressure and internal political weariness.
This is not about moral judgment. It is about governance: when the decision-maker's credibility is low, the costs of coordination rise.
In warfare—as in a business turnaround—execution requires multiple actors to accept instructions under stress: military commands, allies, emergency services, private sector, civilian population, markets. If trust is fragile:
- official communication loses potency,
- the reading grows that “this responds to internal incentives”,
- alignment with allies and narrative discipline becomes costlier,
- and the risk of decisions made for the political cycle rather than the operational cycle increases.
That deficit does not prevent action but reduces the tolerable margin of error.
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Human Impact and Operational Continuity: Resilience is Not Free
The scene of shelters in Tel Aviv is more than just color. It is a reminder that continuity relies on micro-decisions: moving, waiting, returning, working as usual. This accumulates costs:
- social fatigue,
- interruptions in productivity,
- sustained anxiety,
- strain on services and urban logistics.
In management, real resilience is the ability to sustain operations with acceptable degradation. However, if the campaign lacks a clear horizon, resilience erodes. The fact that the operation is described as sustained and without a closure date forces one to view the conflict also as capacity management: moral, civil infrastructure, baseline economic stability, and security perception.
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Signals of Escalation: The “Impact Radius” is Expanding
Reports mention alerts regarding internal security in the U.S. (FBI and Homeland Security) and the possibility of regional expansion. Operationally, this means the conflict is not a singular “theater”; it is a network of risks.
Possible implications (without speculating beyond what is reported):
- increased friction in energy markets due to uncertainty and disruptions,
- increase in asymmetric threats via non-state actors or residual capabilities,
- pressure on allies and neighboring states for interception, logistics, or positioning,
- informational volatility: claims of “obliterated damage” versus divergent technical assessments.
In complex execution, the multiplication of fronts is the primary trigger for error: not due to lack of strength but due to saturation of decisions.
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What to Observe to Determine if This is Strategy or Just Force
From a cold operational and scalability lens, the qualitative metrics to follow are:
- Consistency of Objective: if the message shifts from “degradation” to “regime change” and back, the coalition weakens.
- Communication Discipline: less epic, more verifiability. The gap between narrative and evidence is corrosive.
- Containment Capacity: interceptions, protection of critical infrastructure, basic economic continuity.
- Internal Signals in Iran: fractures in security and governance elites, not just spontaneous protests.
- Temporal Cost: how long can a campaign be sustained without an operationally manageable “end state”?
If these variables do not converge, the operation could lead to a wear-out scenario where the political objective (regime change) becomes decoupled from execution capacity.
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Conclusion
The shift towards an explicit objective of regime change elevates the operation from a military problem to a complex systems management problem, where the critical variable is the political and social coordination under low trust in leadership and high dependence on Iranian internal dynamics that cannot be controlled from the outside.
