Operation Epic Fury: A Mass of Shifting Objectives

Dr Charles Kriel examines the Iran War as an information operation and identifies what Western StratCom still refuses to understand about it

President Donald J. Trump oversees Operation Epic Fury at Mar-a-Lago, Palm Beach, 1 March 2026. White House photo by Daniel Torok/Alamy

Senator Mark Warner walked out of a Gang of Eight intelligence briefing on Monday and told reporters that the stated objectives of the Iran War had shifted, by his count, four or five times in four days. Nuclear capacity. Ballistic missiles. Regime change. Something unspecified. He did not sound confused. He sounded like a man watching a technique he recognised and had no tool to stop.

That technique has a history.

Vladislav Surkov, the Russian political strategist who shaped Putin’s information environment for two decades, held a conviction that most Western analysts spent years dismissing. Surkov had no particular interest in winning arguments. His interest lay in dissolving the conditions under which arguments could be won or lost. He saturated spaces with competing frames, provisional justifications, and simultaneous contradictory positions until his opposition lost its footing. His achievements were structural. Remove the coherent object, and accountability collapses around it. You cannot challenge a position that has already moved. You cannot build a counter-movement against a justification that expires before you print the placards.

Four or five shifts in a four-day-old war. Each one landing before the previous had faced serious scrutiny. The mechanism Surkov refined deserves examination now, because it no longer arrives from outside the Western alliance.

It runs from within it.

Targeting Successors

The Khamenei succession crisis tells you what the press conferences won’t.

Israel claims its forces killed thirty senior Iranian officials within the first thirty seconds of the opening strike. Trump told Fox News that forty-eight Iranian leaders fell in the first two days. The strikes, which the operation’s own commanders described as both heavy and pinpoint, hit their targets across Tehran, Isfahan, Qom, Karaj, and Kermanshah with precision.

Iran’s leadership keep dying before anyone can speak with them. Khamenei fell in the first hours. Senior IRGC commanders followed across the days after. The leadership council that would carry a transition toward negotiation now scrambles inside an active military campaign. There are no numbers to call.

Trump acknowledged this himself, without apparent discomfort, in a call relayed by ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl. The administration had identified candidates within the Iranian Government to lead after Khamenei. “The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates,” Trump told Karl. In remarks to reporters on Tuesday, he added: “Most of the people we had in mind are dead. We had some in mind from that group that is dead. And now we have another group. They may be dead also based on reports. Pretty soon we’re not gonna know anybody.”

A military campaign that wanted negotiation would leave someone to negotiate with. A campaign that wanted transition would leave the transition infrastructure intact. The Assembly of Experts, the eighty-eight-member clerical body that selects the supreme leader, convened inside a country under active bombardment. Israel then struck the building where it met. The succession crisis did not develop despite the precision of the strikes. The precision produced it.

The Iraq Comparison

Senator Warner drew the Iraq comparison, and he had every right. The intelligence that turned out to justify a conclusion already reached; the weapons that never materialised; the war whose objectives kept mutating after the invasion because the original objective could not survive examination. Warner named the parallel accurately. What he left unsaid was why the structure is repeating.

The nuclear weapon Iran has not yet built functions as a particular kind of object in this operation: the impossible threat, always just over the horizon, that justifies everything in the present tense and resists resolution permanently. You cannot negotiate away a capability that has not yet come into existence. You cannot declare victory over a weapon that nobody has yet made. The object stays live precisely because nothing can close it. The game, as designed, carries no endpoint.

Benjamin Netanyahu said it himself, on Fox News, without embarrassment. It falls to the people of Iran, in the final count, to change their government. This came from a man who spent years watching Iranian proxies dismantle what he had built, who carries October 7th as a failure of protection that no military success will fully answer, and who found in Washington a partner prepared to hand him the most powerful military on earth as an instrument of response. Whether Washington grasped the logic it was lending itself to, historians will contest. The result presents itself clearly enough: a war with a brand name – Operation Epic Fury, objectives that shift every forty-eight hours, a succession architecture targeted alongside the leadership that inhabited it, and a President who names his preferred successors as he reports them dead.

Destabilising Allies

Then, while the Gulf burned, the President of the United States attacked Keir Starmer.

And Spain.

Not rivals. Allies.

The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, a country whose intelligence services run through American operations at depths the public never gets told about. Whose bases and airspace the broader campaign depends on. Whose soldiers stand inside the same treaty structures.

No European government can build a stable position as the ground continues to shift. The options available, supportive, critical, cautious, engaged, each carry a cost that changes shape before any government can absorb it. Iran’s Foreign Minister has warned that defensive action by European states, purely defensive, constitute an act of war. Washington destabilises European leadership in the same week. The strategic vacuum I wrote about last month has not closed. Something else has now moved into it.

This follows its own logic. In Munich on Valentine’s Day, Rubio performed warmth to Europe’s face. He told European populations, over the heads of their governments, that their cultural anxieties carried American validation. That warmth made the operation more dangerous than Vance’s attack the year before had been, because seduction reorganises desire where attack only hardens resistance.

Six days after Munich, the same Secretary of State briefed a war whose objectives he could not hold consistent across a working week. The seduction and the chaos belong to the same operation. A disoriented Europe cannot build the stable domestic consensus that a coherent response requires.

The Visible Cost

Western strategic communications doctrine has been developed to counter adversarial information operations: Russian framing, Chinese disinformation, the kind of operation Surkov designed and that the field spent a decade learning to name. The research has real substance. NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence has published serious work identifying exactly the structural failures I’m describing: the shifting object, the impossible threat, the exhaustion of the capacity to form opposition.

The Iran War already runs those same mechanics from inside the alliance. And it makes that cost visible in a register that white papers can never manage.

The domestic American audience for whom this content is generated – the brand name, the announcement graphics, the rotating justifications – bears none of what the operation produces.

The people who bear it do not appear in the briefing room. They appear in the footage that runs between the analysis segments. In the smoke over Tehran and Isfahan. In the closed Strait and the halted tankers. In the school in southern Iran that the Pentagon said it would look into.

The objectives keep shifting. The dead stay dead.

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Dr Charles Kriel serves as Senior AI Fellow at Sympodium Institute of StratComs. He served as Special Advisor to the UK Parliament Committee that brought down Cambridge Analytica. His research focuses on AI, psychoanalysis and influence operations. He co-directed People You May Know and Dis/Informed.