US-Israeli airstrikes may dominate the footage from Tehran, but a decisive contest is also unfolding in code: a live demonstration of how modern coercion targets a state’s digital nervous system as deliberately as its physical assets.

This is not cyber replacing kinetic force. It is cyber fused with kinetic force—an integrated assault on a nation’s technology ecosystems. Far beyond just destroying hardware, the objective is to blind sensors, distort information and, critically, appeal to both civilians and commanders.

For countries such as Australia, the question is not just who prevails in Tehran militarily; it is whether we could absorb, and continue to function, under such sustained, systemic cyber pressure.

What is unfolding in Iran fits a pattern examined ^[1] in Venezuela: cyber effects layered with kinetic operations to degrade situational awareness, compress decision-making cycles and widen windows of advantage. Cyber tools are being used to make it harder for a regime to see, communicate and respond at critical moments. Then they’re used to sustain pressure through reversible, deniable disruptions to power, telecommunications and digital services. The objective is  to degrade public trust in authority.

Alongside air and missile strikes, Iran is experiencing significant digital disruption through the targeting of news agencies and other state services. National internet connectivity, already strongly constrained before the attacks, has also plunged. Whether externally imposed, internally controlled, or by some combination of both, the effect is the same: the digital layer is being treated as operational terrain.

The reported hacking of BadeSaba, a widely used Islamic calendar and prayer-timing app, illustrates how deeply this contest now penetrates. As strikes commenced, Iranian users reportedly received push notifications urging surrender and promising amnesty. Attribution remains contested, though the action matches Israel’s capability. Regardless, the ability to reach directly into the public’s everyday digital tools shows the target is not just the infrastructure enabling connectivity but the Iranian public’s connection to their community and country.

There is nothing new about this logic. Psychological warfare has long accompanied physical force. During the Blitz of 1940 and 1941, as Nazi Germany bombed Britain, Adolf Hitler’s regime, through propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, waged a parallel cognitive campaign through print and radio. British prime minister Winston Churchill did the same in reverse. The aim was not only military degradation but the shaping of morale, identity and resolve. Bombs targeted factories and docks; broadcasts targeted belief and belonging.

More recently, Russia has refined what it calls ‘active measures’ across the digital domain—deploying disinformation, influence operations and narrative manipulation. From interference in electoral processes to information campaigns surrounding its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has demonstrated how online ecosystems can be weaponised to polarise societies and distort perception at scale.

Cyberspace has turbocharged this dynamic.

What once remained at the conspiratorial fringe can now be algorithmically amplified into the mainstream. As Peter Pomerantsev argues in How to Win an Information War ^[2], the real power of propaganda ‘is not to convince or even to confuse; it’s to give you a sense of belonging.’ Modern coercion recognises that identity, not just infrastructure, is a centre of gravity.

That is why appeals reportedly directed at Iranians did more than denounce the Islamic Republic as a brutal regime. They sought to activate alternative bonds—encouraging military personnel to join ‘forces of liberation’ and to ‘defend your brothers’. The aim was not simply persuasion. It was to fracture one community of belonging and cultivate another.

Classic coercion theory has long asked whether bombing campaigns can compel political change. American political scientist Robert Pape’s work suggests that punishment strategies, such as bombing to break civilian will, do not achieve effective regime change. Outcomes remain contingent on elite cohesion, national resilience and external backing.

That debate has resurfaced in commentary on Iran. One argument is that precision strikes and elite decapitation could trigger cascading political effects. Another cautions that airpower alone seldom breaks hardened regimes.

That’s where cyber effects come into play, altering the operating environment in subtler ways. They target not only infrastructure but the cognitive and bureaucratic processes through which leaders interpret events and act. They strain a regime’s ability to maintain aligned command chains, trusted communications, credible narratives and bureaucratic functionality over time.

In Iran’s case, cyber–physical pressure appears aimed at multiple levels: degrading military command-and-control; forcing ministries and financial authorities to operate through distrusted or degraded systems; and injecting uncertainty into the apps and communications platforms that structure daily life. Ultimately, this is designed to generate within the public simultaneous doubt about the credibility of the once all-powerful regime and confidence that a revolt could be a revolution.

None of this guarantees regime collapse. But persistent friction forces a regime that cannot fully trust its own systems to divert strained effort into verification, loyalty enforcement and narrative control. This is precisely a vulnerability NATO ^[3] recently highlighted: if the decision-making architecture itself is stressed, even intact networks cannot guarantee coherent action.

Over time, the test is not a single strike but sustained strain. Can the target state maintain functional integrity through months of military, economic and informational shocks and counter-shocks? The contest is not merely military or even economic; it is informational at its core.

The same digital systems authoritarian regimes use for surveillance and repression can also be the channels through which citizens organise, document abuses and potentially rebuild political life. Prayer apps, messaging platforms, payment systems and cloud services are instruments of state control but also part of civil society’s nervous system.

No doubt Beijing, for all its authoritarian control over China’s internet, will be looking for lessons—both vulnerabilities to tighten and opportunities to exploit.

For Australia, in addition to the confirmation of the power of air and maritime forces, a strategic question is whether our own national systems could endure sustained cyber–physical pressure. We already know sophisticated adversaries position inside critical networks long before crises surface, creating what former Australian Signals Directorate director-general Rachel Noble described as ‘digital dynamite’.

This requires designing systems to operate in degraded mode—backup communications, manual fallbacks and rapid recovery processes. It also demands a focus on social infrastructure, including media platforms, communications channels, financial systems and public information networks.

History cautions against assuming that bombing and digital disruption alone can force regime change. But that may be the wrong measure of success.

The wars in the Middle East and Europe demonstrate the combined force of kinetic and cyber power. In the Indo-Pacific, however, hybrid pressure is already constant, shaping the environment long before open conflict. If we wait for war to confront its cyber dimensions, we risk strategic defeat without a shot fired.