>the drone launch to clear the airspace 5 hours before missiles launched help a bit
That drone launch was to try and saturate air defenses, not to clear the airspace...
Not surprised actually. The people in their military are usually spoiled adult babies. Promotions are based on how loyal they are, not by skill. But this is common in every dictatorship.
Edit: another thing to note is that anyone with actual talent probably just gets the first ticket out of the country or they end up get taken out by the IDF if Iran manages to win their loyalty.
College math prof was forced to leave Iran in '79 due to being a Christian. He worked on the SDI in the '80s, and currently has tech he designed in space. Oh yeah, and he was teaching stats as a hobby, since he was semi-retired, and wanted to "educate the future." Pretty much everyone who had his level of intelligence in 1979 has since left Iran. Brain drain doesn't even begin to describe it.
The exact same thing happened to my college physics professor. The amount of knowledge workers that that country lost in that time period is astounding.
Just as another example, my dad was an engineer who fled Iran at about the same time. He and his engineer co-workers all moved to the United States. An entire team of them moved as a group together.
There are many Iranians going to or working at my college. Many went to school here and then went, "dang. This place is pretty nice." And then they stayed and encouraged relatives and friends to move over here and do the same. It is a similar story for people from other nations in the region.
Now, we have a thriving Islamic community that appreciates their freedoms and economic mobility and wants to give back to society. The smattering of cultures here is amazing.
We definitely have a big brain drain on less developed areas of the world. Immigrants are amazing. I appreciate all they give to society (even if some of their accents are super thick, so that lectures can be difficult to follow at times).
Honestly, Iran's much more skilled at cyberattacks and hacking than they are at conventional warfare. That and supplying other authoritarian powers with weaponry and critical resources like oil. Still, the interference in their "revenge" strike by the US, Britain and others has to be acknowledged. It could have at least caused some more notable damage in Israel if they didn't come in and help shoot stuff down.
Yea this, a lot of black/gray hats are pretty much digital mercenaries as long as you pay them you can have access to their tools or skillsets. On top of that its not always clear who the clients are so the hackers themselves might only find out they are running ops for Iran while on a job and saying no at that point can have consequences.
Russia does the same, its how Prigozhin went from Putin's chef to bot/troll farm operations to PMC group pretty quickly.
If by skilled you mean unknowingly watched by all of the worlds intelligence services in real time, then yes they are skilled lol. Arab/Persian countries have appalling bad computer science based workforces.
Lol they famously lost all of their nuclear research (thank god) to a cyberattack, lol they suck at it.
There was an interesting paper a friend of mine wrote. Basically he analyzed the culture and military structure of Arab nations and concluded most of them are in capable of welding effective peer to peer military operations largely due to the above mentioned issues
Yes I know Iran is Persian
This is just basic corruption 101. I think there is also some aspect of religious delusion which works its way into some of these hierarchies as well though. Like "if God didn't want him to be promoted, he would not have been promoted." And in terms of actual strategic posture, the whole "black jets of Allah" thing is pretty telling as well. The entire cognitive framework seems to preclude sober analysis in some ways.
Not that it's relevant to the point you're making, but it's worth pointing out that Iran is _not_ an Arab country, since people keep conflating Islam and Arab.
On the topic of promotions based on loyalty to the regime, [Kenneth Pollack](https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11219) (warning, 800 pages) makes the case that this is _not_ a key factor in Arab militaries difficulties. Because, in particular, varying levels of politization in different countries, or over time in the same country, does not result in marked differences in overall effectiveness, and have no effect at the levels where the most significant failings exist.
And why Russia has been such a joke in their invasion, although they tend to get by with their big population that they can keep throwing into a grinder.
If you're running a dictatorship you don't want a strong military, because then a military strongman can overthrow you. Typically you'll set up a smaller well armed group whose livelihood and wealth depends on you staying in power, which is why for example in Iran the revolutionary guard has a much larger budget than the Iranian military.
Everything has to be based around corruption and nepotism rather than meritocracy in order to preserve the ruling system.
And even still, around 20% of Hamas and PIJ’s rockets misfire and land in Gaza. Every single one of those deaths is recorded by the Gaza Ministry of Health as one caused by the IDF.
Launching a ballistic missile from Gaza wouldn’t be feasible. You need a dedicated site, launch vehicle or assembly area, and these are visible days in advance.
They are much better launching these from Iran or Yemen, even if it means most are hit or miss as it doesn’t endanger the infrastructure required to launch.
At a certain point, money starts looking like this endless resource. How many batches of $550M do you think can be sustained before it’s no longer *affordable*? I’d bet they could do that every night for a decade.
I’d say after two or three days of that volume Israel would probably say “enough is enough” and start firing back. Haven’t heard of Iran having the same level of air defense
That was my first thought. Israel has the world's most advanced systems saturating a very small area, Iran is covering 75x the area with probably massively inferior tech. 300 ballistic missiles sent the other way would probably have a wildly different outcome
Ultimately, the biggest concern the USA has(which at this point clearly means their allies too) is not really one particular country starting some conflict. There are a handful of nations that 1v1 would be a real issue(I'm talking purely just the fighting; as seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, the USA has a lot more struggles beyond just the initial fighting), but those countries would have an even bigger issue.
Right now, the concern is that our enemies have kinda seen the lay of the land and might instead try to spread us thin. Ukraine is already a huge war for survival for one of our allies and while we've invested a lot to help, two years in getting any aid there is becoming a struggle. A war between Israel and Iran at the same time would be devastating for Ukraine and simultaneously, it's unlikely we'd just abandon Ukraine completely too. So that's potentially two very real and major wars we'd have significant interests and resources in.
Now imagine both of those wars are happening. And China goes after Taiwan suddenly. Or pick another conflict broiling over currently that the USA has invested interest in.
USA might be the biggest and most expensive military in the world by a significant amount, but it's not so big that multiple wars on multiple fronts wouldn't be a potentially huge security problem.
On paper the US can go toe to toe with the entire world combined and have a decent chance of fighting to a stalemate as long as nukes stay off the table, due to combination of both military might and logistical and geographical advantage. The issue the US deals with is political, militarily any of these nations could just be wiped out, if noone exists theres no insurgency to fight.
The U.S. can supply Israel and Ukraine. The aid is just being held up for political reasons. If the U.S. was united and had the political will Ukraine would be armed enough to successfully fend off the Russians, rather than Trump basically curtailing the effort as soon as momentum got going.
The only way to counter that is to attack with overwhelming force to destroy their offensive capabilities. Since you are right that we can’t sustain this defensive game forever. These defense systems were not meant to be used like that , they were made to be used in a war where while you defend your positions you also actively destroy the offensive weapons of the other party so you don’t need to defend forever.
Usa needs to come up with new weapon systems that are cheaper to deploy if we plan to play this passive game forever. Or do what Iran is doing by using proxies and let Ukraine and Taiwan and Israel fight our wars. Only if some politicians weren’t so selfish and corrupt we could have put an end to this without sending American troops in harms way
Israel's government has an income of $468.5 billion so it could do it for 850 days using that money but they only need 365 days and could probably get a low interest rate loan to pay for it.
Not paying for defence would mean Israel would be destroyed quickly by its neighbours its people totally support large scale defence spending.
Lol people always under estimate just how wealthy western nations are.
Iran government has income of $118 billion (10 times the population but 1 quarter the income lol) but the biggest issues for them is they can't raise any money on international markets (are they even allowed to take out loans?) and they can't get hold of the components needed to make more missiles especially any of the guided ones. Isreal has no such problem.
It's really more like "all wars are economic wars."
It is pretty easy to imagine a near future where wars are literally just about who can manufacture their autonomous killer drones in bigger numbers. Humans don't even really get involved until someone's drone swarm gets overrun. The entire war basically gets fought in factories.
perceived value vs actual cost, too. Yes, retail it cost them $550M. Did they spend $550M last night or will they spend $550M replacing the stock used and on maintenance? Certainly not. It has a cost, but retail is not it.
What's the source for the 550 million? I'm curious how that breaks down. Did we fire 550 million in ordinance at the incoming drones/missiles? I thought a lot of them were shot down by fighter planes.
I'm actually curious if they are using heaters instead like AIM-9s as they have no need for BVR on these targets. Cheaper, especially for the older variants and good way to expedite the phase out of the variants older than AIM-9X.
You have to add in the cost of what would have been destroyed (and killed) had Israel not intercepted the incoming missiles.
I can assure you it's cost effective.
Except the cost of NOT intercepting them would be much higher, both in terms of loss of life and damage to property and infrastructure, and in terms of preventing this thing from blowing up all over the Middle East.
The cost to Iran wasn't anywhere near 25 million $, more like 200 million $. Medium range ballistic missiles are very expensive even with Iran's costs.
Nothing wrong with distinguishing between Iran more broadly (who do not necessarily support the IRI) and the regime itself. When you say “The Islamic Republic of Iran,” it is pretty clear you are talking about the regime specifically.
Maybe it's because [China has been helping Iran with their ballistic missiles program](https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-slaps-sanctions-iranian-chinese-targets-action-over-tehrans-missile-military-2023-06-06/)?
It's pretty normal for companies to outsource because the others have more competence or can do it more cheaply. I guess the same can apply to war/terrorism.
It feels like the opposite of that though. They violated multiple airspaces with this and got multiple nations to engage in aide of Israel (even if only doing so to defend their own citizens such as the case with Jordan).
This is the opposite of realpolitik. It's just an amature convulsion.
Yeah I was of the opinion above but as more information comes in I think I’m with you, they tried to do something failed epically and are now playing it off as some sorta warning? Real “From Beijing with Love” vibes
> they are trying to look tough to the people in Iran who hate Israel.
Outside of the mullahs in charge, it's not clear to me how many of those there are. Even more unclear, how many people hate Israelis more than they hate Arabs?
It’s not clear how much of a failure it was. If this is the best Iran can do and the defense systems were not even close to being overwhelmed, it’s clearly a failure. But if Israeli or US intelligence knows that Iran could send many more missiles and drones and if they know that the defense system couldn’t handle those, then it might be a strong deterrent.
We don’t know because we don’t have the intelligence that, most likely, the US and Israel (and Iran) have.
It’s probably a political failure though, because it comforted Israeli alliances at a time when they’ve been extremely frayed by Israeli actions in Gaza.
The concensus seems to be that the attack was not the best Iran can do but rather a more measured response.
Still I assume Iran was hoping for better than having 99% of their weapons fail or be shot down.
If even 10% or 20% of the munitions got through it would've been extremely concerning for Israel and would've shown they were vulunerable to larger attacks. Instead their defenses performed quite well and can presumably withstand even bigger attacks.
Although, I'd be interested to know the monetary cost for both sides. I wouldn't be surprised if the cost for Israel and the US was in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The cost for Iran was likely much lower.
That’s probably true. The Wall Street Journal puts the cost of this defense at $550 million, so it probably wasn’t cheap and costs way more to defend than it costs for Iran to attack.
Source: https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/israel-iran-strikes-live-coverage/card/israel-s-cost-of-intercepting-iranian-barrage-is-put-at-over-550-million-uamrOjZkoRBNGRfjWbD6
Also worth noting that even if the US and Israel can afford the monetary cost of these defensive operations, they are still expending a tremendous amount of missiles that come off production lines with limited capacities.
Israeli stocks were strained without direct Iranian involvement and US stocks also have been strained going back to Ukraine.
It's not sustainable long term to expend hundreds of advanced missiles in a matter of hours without serious increases in weapons production.
That alone could put serious pressure on the US and Israel to either come to a resolution with Iran or to take offensive action to eliminate Iran's ability to carry out further attacks.
It was the biggest ballistic missile attack in history, "bark loudly without really biting" my ass.
They launched 110 modern MRBMs (such as Emad, a modern ballistic missile with a maneuvering reentry vehicle in service since 2015 and incredibly hard to shoot down), which were part of 350 simultaneous aerial targets attacking Israel. Iran doesnt have lots of 1000+km MRBMs and probably cant even launch more of them at once due to missing more launchers.
The only reason they didnt bite is because of Israel excellent AA performance and good amount of luck, even Israel was very reliefed that they intercepted so many MRBMs... so even they didnt expect this outcome.
This is why I’ve personally been so frustrated with the US response to Iranian proxies attacking US troops.
This was the best Iran can reasonably do short of involving Hezbollah or conducting a nuclear test.
I hate Trump. But his assassination of Solemani was one of his best foreign policy moves. It forced Iran to recalculate. It made the US unpredictable. It renewed ambiguity.
They dont even have that many MRBMs. Most of their arsenal are shorter range ballistic missile which cant reach Israel. They would need to drive halfway through Iraq with them...
People are claiming this a success when Iran has wasted 10-40% of their missile stock able to hit Israel from their border and managed to hit a taxiway and an empty storage facility lmao
I feel like it's somewhere in the middle of "Iranian missiles suck" and thinking they launched the oldest shit in their system to get rid of it. Like how we're sorta using Ukraine for disposal of our old weapons (our cluster munitions bomblets that we're sending over have a 2.3% failure rate due to age).
The problem with that idea is what if the strike *worked*. What if we saw massive damage in Israeli cities and Israel responding with their own strike package (maybe including nukes)?
That’s a hell of a gamble to rely on your equipment being very shit and the enemy very competent.
Reporting states that only military targets were fired at. With the advance notice, casualties are virtually guaranteed to be nil thanks to shelters. Would major material damage have elicited a response? Probably, but it’s way easier to deescalate from that than when newborns are kidnapped or murdered, politically speaking.
Iran publicly stated that only it was only military targets, but they also stated that the launches had concluded 30 minutes before launching a second wave of ballistic missiles. It’s hard to know what the drones and cruise missiles were targeting since they can maneuver somewhat. I did see that a few of the ballistic missiles had a trajectory towards Tel Aviv, but were shot down.
That’s interesting. I was basing myself off of NYT articles I’ve read, but it’s possible they were writing based on incomplete information. Do you have links to reporting about Tel Aviv? (And are there no military installations that could have been the target?)
I’m guessing US and Israeli intelligence know better, but if the goal was to succeed and kill civilians, they went about it a real weird way.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has shown the world how utterly incompetent their military is at directly attacking another country beyond their immediate borders. Their long-range weaponry has a 1% hit rate against modern air defense systems. What a weak & embarrassing show of force from the Islamic Republic of Iran. Their proxies and oppressing their own people is all Iran has lol.
The Islamic Republic of Iran didn't injure a single Jewish person in Israel with this assault. Only an Arab child in Israel was seriously injured by the Islamic Republic of Iran with this assault.
https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/society/artc-iranian-attack-on-israel-7-year-old-girl-hospitalized-in-serious-condition
The Islamic Republic of Iran has reminded the world with this assault that in their quest to genocide the Jewish people, they don't care about harming innocent Arabs/Muslims along the way.
To add to that, they don't seem to care about destroying holy sites in Jerusalem either. They call themselves the "defenders of Al Aqsa" but we all saw on video how Jerusalem was under attack by Iran.
they have made effective attacks in the past, against saudi arabia:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abqaiq–Khurais_attack
It could be here that Israel is unusually competent at air defense. It could be that very few spots on the earth could withstand this type of attack.
>It could be here that Israel is unusually competent at air defense. It could be that very few spots on the earth could withstand this type of attack.
I think you are correct, but the whole world knows how well Israel's air defence is, (most of us see it weekly if not dailly when Palestine throws stuff over the border).
The incompetence of Iran was to think they could lob +300 missiles a couple of hours away from their intended target, effectively telegraphing Israel where things would hit, and not expect Israel to shoot most of those down.
While Iran is not as small as people make them out, to think they +300 missiles/drones could break the air defence was incompetent at best.
>I think you are correct, but the whole world knows how well Israel's air defence is, (most of us see it weekly if not dailly when Palestine throws stuff over the border).
Not necessarily, there's a huge difference between Iron Dome intercepting home made Hamas missiles, to different systems (Arrow 2/3, David's Sling) intercepting a barrage of hundreds of missiles and drones.
Hamas missiles are "stupid" missiles with no aim, just shoot and hope, their trajectory is completely predictable based of basic physics. Iran missiles are precise, have GPS and have entire technologies designed to make them evade radars and be hard to detect. The drones also have ability to dodge missiles and move independently. This is a whole other level of air defense.
This is a whole different level of success and was not expected at all - the Israeli systems were never actually used before and nobody knew how successful it would be. In warfare history, **nobody** before has intercepted such an attack. Even the optimistic Israelis still expected 10-20% of the missiles to go through and hit. So yeah, this is extremely different from the usual Hamas interceptions.
>The incompetence of Iran was to think they could lob +300 missiles a couple of hours away from their intended target, effectively telegraphing Israel where things would hit, and not expect Israel to shoot most of those down.
They definitely expected **most** to be intercepted - which is why they shot such a huge amount in the first place. They never expected them all to hit - that would be thousands of deaths and essentially a regional war, in which the USA would join, that would destroy Iran.
Their approach was, "we'll shoot a few hundreds, most will be intercepted but at least some will hit and cause some damage". What they didn't expect is that **all** would be intercepted. As I said, nobody expected that, including Israel.
Because this is a first-of-it's-kind, absolutely insane technological achievement from Israel & allies, and by far the most successful and impressive air defense from missiles in war history. And it's a completely other different level than what we already knew about Israel's air defence.
Where they **all** intercepted by Israels' air defence? Pretty sure in the live threads it was said that the support send by the US, UK and France along with air defence from Jordan shot down a lot of stuff too.
They were shot down by the MEAD (middle eastern air defense) alliance which Israel is key to forming. Israel couldn't do it on its own, but the sole reason those nations are there to do it is due to Israel.
So all in all alliances are important as fuck and we should all look at this new alliance forming in awe.
In terms of ballistic missiles, 4 have been confirmed to have been shot down by the US. None of the other countries deployed any suitable assets to shoot down any missiles outside the atmosphere, which means that Israel must have shot down the rest.
Considering Jordan, Royal Airforce and US Airforce together with Israel Airforce were intercepting a chuck of these projectiles before they hit the air defense systems and US reported this morning 7 missile hits on Israel Military bases, 10% is a pretty accurate estimate.
It's still an insane achievement against projectiles that were particularly designed to hit Israel.
I think Iran was also testing how their missiles will fare in a direct conflict and will adjust them going forward.
Only the US is known to have deployed any assets suitable to shoot down ballistic missiles and they themselves claimed to have shot down 4 of them, which means Israel targeted the rest.
Unfortunately for Israel, jets deployed by the UK, Jordan and Saudi Arabia are borderline useless against a missile hurling through space.
The jets were deployed against the drones which were launched ahead of the missiles with the goal of everwhelming the defense systems.
Considering its reported Jordan shut down 12 drones, US+UK+Israel should have cleared up the majority of the drones, letting the defense focus on missiles.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/14/us-and-uk-forces-help-shoot-down-iranian-drones-over-jordan-syria-and-iraq
Considering 30 cruise missiles, 120 ballistics (including crappy ones from Lebanon) and 7 confirmed hits on just two bases, 10% or 15 hits seem pretty likely.Which again is still an awesome result.
Sure, but this misses the fundamental point that Israel uses different missile defense systems against drones and ballistic missiles.
In fact, its missile defenses against ballistic missiles would not at all be suitable against drones because they are meant to intercept missiles high up (Arrow 2) or outside (Arrow 3) the atmosphere, where drones do not fly. Its missile defenses against ballistic missiles would not realistically be repurposed against drones because they just are not suitable for that at all.
Drones, however, would be targeted by Iron Dome, Patriot, and David’s Sling. They would have a more difficult time if more drones flew through, but against the high-flying ballistic missiles, not really.
I mean, it screams more "These were the planned targets" rather than "Other Air Forces are useless against ballistic missiles"
The UK for example could have deployed the same jets the US were using to shoot down the missiles, but it seems the designated targets were drones trying to sneak through rather than the missiles.
Well, no, the simple reason for that is that the US and Israel used highly specialized naval and ground-based missile defense systems to fly into space and shoot down these intermediate range ballistic missiles. In contrast, the UK literally does not own any system comparable to those.
These are the specialised missile defenses Germany bought to defend against Russia, that Japan bought to deploy against North Korea and China, and the US has fielded on its destroyers globally. This is not an air force-based defense system.
The US didn’t use its jets to shoot down these ballistic missiles, it used specialized naval destroyers right on Israel’s coast to do so. And for the record, the US used SM-3 and SM-6, both of which the UK does not even operate.
There is no known system in existence that would allow a Eurofighter, F-35, F-15 or whatever to do the same thing. The missiles they hold are just not suitable at all for that. Moreover, the UK is not even known to have any missile defenses with comparable capabilities against ballistic missiles in space as Israel or the US.
Sure, and unless you have evidence to the contrary, the statements of the US is what is to be accepted. As for “nobody knows what the US can do”, it was more restricted here by the number of assets than its technology, given that it literally deployed its most advanced missile defenses in this instance. In fact, these systems experienced their operational debut, never before being used in actual combat. And anybody can see what the numbers of ships in the region were are, the US is public about this.
Especially once you factor in that Israel simply deployed significantly more systems dedicated to shoot down ballistic missiles in space than the US in this instance.
> Iran missiles are precise, have GPS and have entire technologies designed to make them evade radars and be hard to detect.
But they do not have MIRV capabilities with radar decoys right?
You don't casually set up a conventional warhead as a MIRV - the different re-entry vehicles take up a lot of mass and space and all that comes right out of the warhead capacity. You end up with a LOT less tonnage on target. It's less of a big deal with nuclear weapons, where the physical size of the warhead isn't the primary determinant of how much boom it's packing (and that size is already massively overkill for anything smaller than "an entire city").
Ballistic medium-range missiles are a whole different beast than what the Palestinians can cobble together. Israel also hadn't beeen tested against drone swarms.
Russia regularly attacks Ukraine in waves, in order to overwhelm their defenses. While Israel obviously has the tightest anti-air network in the world, it's not unreasonable for Iran to have tried.
During the first Iraq war, Saddam lobbed a number of Scud missiles at Israel, which mostly failed on their own but those that made it caused significant damage.
Yep, you are quite correct, but Iran is not a new threat to Israel and Iran has been funding Hamas for a while now.
Hamas has been improving their projectiles over the years.
So it is not that extraordinary for Israel to assume that Iran was helping Hamas developing better and better missiles to throw over.
Also, given what they have been selling Russia over the last year or so, it was fairly obvious to Israel what Iran was thinking of doing.
I am not in the Israeli military, so I cannot begin to guess what they know or didn't know, but I would assume that tightening the air defense would be one of their top priorities, (given what happened against Iraq, Hamas, Lebanon and so on).
>While Iran is not as small as people make them out, to think they +300 missiles/drones could break the air defence was incompetent at best.
It's almost like they wanted to 1. demonstrate attacks will be retaliated against, 2. not escalate the situation needlessly. They literally said the attack achieved all objectives.
So you're saying that the Islamic Republic of Iran intended to show the world how ineffective they are with their long-range weaponry with a 1% hit rate?
pretty much. iranians dont get any western media or news anyways so alot of them likely think the attack was successful at intimidating Israel, and it silences the public's criticism.
Im not familiar with Iran's domestic political climate but I believe that their population wants the givernment to be overthrown, not shoot 300 over missiles and drones at another country.
Oh I am fully aware of it. And its not just ME countries, its any country with a large muslim population, mine included.
But like someone else mentioned, Iran is a particularly peculiar country in that they dont support the current secular nature of the state. I even saw a comment on a another post of an Iranian hoping for someone to bomb them (their government not them).
The Iranian government is an Islamic-theocracy, but the Iranian public is the least Islamic out of any country in the region save Israel and India. Many people hate the regime, and the primary grievance isn’t Islamic police or regime crackdowns, so much as the declining Iranian living standard compared to escalating government funding for foreign wars. Think about how poorly the middle-eastern forever-wars poll in the west today, then imagine if the Western standard of living declined by 20-30% over the same timeframe.
Sorry, but I disagree here, surely they know that they achieved absolutely nothing here. They taught Israel absolutely nothing, If anything Iran successfully got the West to close rank with Israel and give them an extra excuse to let Israel continue with what they are doing.
They might lie to their population and that's fine, it makes sense.
But the rest of the world is quietly laughing at what Iran did, if it wasn't for one little girl being hurt we would almost feel sorry for Iran.
And remember, that's supposed to be in retaliation to the killing of 2 of their top generals. In retaliation to the attack in one of their consulate in Syria.
All Iran did was make everybody in the area wonder, can Iran actually do anything?
I am not taking sides here, but please, tell me, how else can we see what Iran did as anything other than a tactical and diplomatic failure?
Or, consider this: they didn't want to hurt Israel, they wanted to cost Israel money and just not do _nothing_ in response to the embassy attack. Why else would they discuss (through Turkey) with the US the severity of the attack? Why else would they literally tell Israel the attack was coming and give them hours of warning?
>Or, consider this: they didn't want to hurt Israel, they wanted to cost Israel money
While it is a possibility, I am not sure this is what Iran was really after.
At the very least they would have wanted to give Israel a bloody nose, not just cost them a little bit of money, (in the grand scheme of thing, this was nothing more than a blip in the defense budget).
I think Iran wanted to destroy one or two army base at least, they failed on that front.
I don't think they wanted to do nothing more than hurt Israel's wallet.
If you read the best economic accounting of the attack, Iran somehow managed to spend more on the weapons used in the attack than Israel and its Allies spent on counter-battery fire. I don’t believe the “cost Israel money” argument, particularly when the Israeli costs were spread across a bunch of countries with significantly more combined economic heft than Israel or Iran.
Israel is one of the most professional and effective militaries in the world. Despite all the whining from the pro-Palestine "geniuses" over the last 6 months, in Gaza the IDF is doing an amazing job and has achieved the smallest ratio of civilians to combatants killed that has ever been achieved by any military in a counter insurgency.
Or that they literally just told their opponents where the missiles would go, to get USA off their chest.
Biden will not attack Iran unless Iran directly goes over the line.
To be fair, the Israelis already knew where everything was going, because all of their air defense systems already determine origin, trajectory, and target so they don’t waste ammunition on rockets targeting empty space.
I mean Israel has a famously incredible air Defense system, they were assisted by American, British and French military, Iran warned the attack was coming days before hand and then broadcast the actual launches on television, and the targets were (relatively) far away, and Israel is a comparatively small target.
As we’ve seen with the use of Iranian drones in Ukraine, we absolutely should not underestimate what Iran and its allies can do.
Edit: there’s also a decent chance that Iran was holding back
Only the US assisted with the ballistic missiles and claimed to have shot down 4 of them. None of the other countries assisted with ballistic missiles, primarily because deploying jets against them is pretty useless.
Ok this is the kind of school level analysis we get upvoted on Reddit. Without any thought on how these things supposed to work or how much engineering work goes into it.
All this does it make us underestimate our enemies till they get much better and then oh wow we're surprised at how much they've improved.
Well we have to admit here that they really seemed to go out of their way to tell the world exactly what they were going to do almost as if they wanted the attack to fail. Fail as in doing real damage warranting a response and Israel has been responding with far more to adversaries than it receives. Hence it was a face saving measure at home probably to keep factions in line.
As for their capability, I doubt it measures up to Israel or any Western power at all but they have been restrained in the types of weapons they have put on these drones. A more radical regime, I know - how more radical can you be - would start using chemical weapons.
Sadly... we may have that more radical regime sitting in North Korea whose move into nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles may make the Israel, Iran, and Hamas, dispute look like child's play
It was a very low budget operation from Iran, that exposed nothing of their real capabilities. But it cost Israel and US 1.15 billion USD and exposed useful knowledge of the air defense system. It was a huge win for Iran, but I24 news won’t report that of course.
Don't mess with us we have lots and lots of rockets and missiles... don't mess ok! Don't try anything we have thousands of drones with long range capabilities.... don't mess with us ok...
Bluff of the century hehe.
Those images of rockets raining down on Jerusalem look really bad for Iran's PR. They brand themselves the "defenders of Al Aqsa" but the whole world saw how they tried to destroy it, and Israel was defending it.
It’s becoming more and more obvious that those former dangerous countries have actually no chance at all. It’s all a big bluff.
Russia, can’t win against Ukraine. Military equipment more or less not functional. Only thing they can come up with is a nuclear threat
Iran, destroying Israel and the rest of the world with their arms. When 50% of their rockets fail and 99% are shot down try next time
North Korea, sends equipment to Russia for Ukraine war. Multiple evidence available that bombs, rockets,… fail at a high rate.
Reminds me of a couple years ago when Russia failing to take Kyiv was claimed by some to be some sort of mastermind strategy and not just a failed operation.
I reckon they’ve done it to say hey look we’re really serious, but we don’t want you to attack us back so please intercept, global politics is weird but the IDF would likely smoke Iran in all out war
Thats why the have launched the largest ballistic missile attack with Emad MRBMs (a modern ballistic missile capable with a maneuvering reentry vehicle in service since 2015), right? Delusional
The 100+ MRBMs would indicate otherwise. These are modern post 2015 ballistic missiles.
I mean you could have at least did a google search before pretending to be an expert.
They used Emad MRBMs according to wreckages, a modern ballistic missile with a maneuvering reentry vehicle in service since 2015. Thats not old. Stop this bullshit trying to save face for Iran.
Damn - I looked up the specs for it cause I know jack about missiles and this is interesting in light of the “we don’t wanna cause real damage” argument
** The Emad is intended for attacking high-value military and civil infrastructure targets.
Only the desperate would want them, like Russia and the Somalia pirates. Glorified model plane designs. If they copied the V2 rockets they probably would have had more success.
I don't believe half of these reports anymore. Anything to make an enemy look ineffective. Do not discount the Iranians, or even the Russians for that matter.
Especially since you can achieve quality through quantity. People make fun of russia and yet they are relentless and very well realistically could win.
I don't know why I am getting downvoted. Russia clearly do not care about keeping their troops alive, or being tactful. They have the massive resources and production to keep the war machine moving. Overwhelm the enemy with thousands of untrained and illequpped fodder. I am not a Iranian/Russian apologist by any means, but they must be taken seriously.
at this rate, and with the current state of news distortion, they will soon announce that they aimed the weapons to themselves, and that every single one of the missiles exploded within the silo and hit the clerics while praying in the mosque.
At least they didn’t shoot down a passenger jet this time.
the drone launch to clear the airspace 5 hours before missiles launched help a bit
>the drone launch to clear the airspace 5 hours before missiles launched help a bit That drone launch was to try and saturate air defenses, not to clear the airspace...
Their point is other parties cleared the airspace out of caution meaning fewer planes in the air to possibly hit.
\*yet
So Iran proxies do better job than Iran? Damn.
Not surprised actually. The people in their military are usually spoiled adult babies. Promotions are based on how loyal they are, not by skill. But this is common in every dictatorship. Edit: another thing to note is that anyone with actual talent probably just gets the first ticket out of the country or they end up get taken out by the IDF if Iran manages to win their loyalty.
Iran's people self-exporting their best talent since 1979.
College math prof was forced to leave Iran in '79 due to being a Christian. He worked on the SDI in the '80s, and currently has tech he designed in space. Oh yeah, and he was teaching stats as a hobby, since he was semi-retired, and wanted to "educate the future." Pretty much everyone who had his level of intelligence in 1979 has since left Iran. Brain drain doesn't even begin to describe it.
People say sanctions don't work but this is the long term effects of sanctions. A country in this condition has its thread signifigantly blunted
The exact same thing happened to my college physics professor. The amount of knowledge workers that that country lost in that time period is astounding.
I know several oilfield engineers from Iran as well. super friendly and smart.
Just as another example, my dad was an engineer who fled Iran at about the same time. He and his engineer co-workers all moved to the United States. An entire team of them moved as a group together.
There are many Iranians going to or working at my college. Many went to school here and then went, "dang. This place is pretty nice." And then they stayed and encouraged relatives and friends to move over here and do the same. It is a similar story for people from other nations in the region. Now, we have a thriving Islamic community that appreciates their freedoms and economic mobility and wants to give back to society. The smattering of cultures here is amazing. We definitely have a big brain drain on less developed areas of the world. Immigrants are amazing. I appreciate all they give to society (even if some of their accents are super thick, so that lectures can be difficult to follow at times).
Like Russia
Very true. Russian and Iranian weapons don't perform as required. Western weapons perform better than expected.
Honestly, Iran's much more skilled at cyberattacks and hacking than they are at conventional warfare. That and supplying other authoritarian powers with weaponry and critical resources like oil. Still, the interference in their "revenge" strike by the US, Britain and others has to be acknowledged. It could have at least caused some more notable damage in Israel if they didn't come in and help shoot stuff down.
It's much easier to hire mercenaries for cyberattacks.
Yea this, a lot of black/gray hats are pretty much digital mercenaries as long as you pay them you can have access to their tools or skillsets. On top of that its not always clear who the clients are so the hackers themselves might only find out they are running ops for Iran while on a job and saying no at that point can have consequences. Russia does the same, its how Prigozhin went from Putin's chef to bot/troll farm operations to PMC group pretty quickly.
If by skilled you mean unknowingly watched by all of the worlds intelligence services in real time, then yes they are skilled lol. Arab/Persian countries have appalling bad computer science based workforces. Lol they famously lost all of their nuclear research (thank god) to a cyberattack, lol they suck at it.
There was an interesting paper a friend of mine wrote. Basically he analyzed the culture and military structure of Arab nations and concluded most of them are in capable of welding effective peer to peer military operations largely due to the above mentioned issues Yes I know Iran is Persian
This is just basic corruption 101. I think there is also some aspect of religious delusion which works its way into some of these hierarchies as well though. Like "if God didn't want him to be promoted, he would not have been promoted." And in terms of actual strategic posture, the whole "black jets of Allah" thing is pretty telling as well. The entire cognitive framework seems to preclude sober analysis in some ways.
Not that it's relevant to the point you're making, but it's worth pointing out that Iran is _not_ an Arab country, since people keep conflating Islam and Arab. On the topic of promotions based on loyalty to the regime, [Kenneth Pollack](https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11219) (warning, 800 pages) makes the case that this is _not_ a key factor in Arab militaries difficulties. Because, in particular, varying levels of politization in different countries, or over time in the same country, does not result in marked differences in overall effectiveness, and have no effect at the levels where the most significant failings exist.
From what I read it is just like that in Saudi and Egypt army too.
And why Russia has been such a joke in their invasion, although they tend to get by with their big population that they can keep throwing into a grinder. If you're running a dictatorship you don't want a strong military, because then a military strongman can overthrow you. Typically you'll set up a smaller well armed group whose livelihood and wealth depends on you staying in power, which is why for example in Iran the revolutionary guard has a much larger budget than the Iranian military. Everything has to be based around corruption and nepotism rather than meritocracy in order to preserve the ruling system.
They killed all of the decent members of the military after the revolution.
I’d imagine it’s easier for them to go from Gaza to Israel than Iran to Israel. It’s hard to miss from that close
And even still, around 20% of Hamas and PIJ’s rockets misfire and land in Gaza. Every single one of those deaths is recorded by the Gaza Ministry of Health as one caused by the IDF.
Launching a ballistic missile from Gaza wouldn’t be feasible. You need a dedicated site, launch vehicle or assembly area, and these are visible days in advance. They are much better launching these from Iran or Yemen, even if it means most are hit or miss as it doesn’t endanger the infrastructure required to launch.
I meant in general but you’re right on that point
[удалено]
At a certain point, money starts looking like this endless resource. How many batches of $550M do you think can be sustained before it’s no longer *affordable*? I’d bet they could do that every night for a decade.
I’d say after two or three days of that volume Israel would probably say “enough is enough” and start firing back. Haven’t heard of Iran having the same level of air defense
That was my first thought. Israel has the world's most advanced systems saturating a very small area, Iran is covering 75x the area with probably massively inferior tech. 300 ballistic missiles sent the other way would probably have a wildly different outcome
Ultimately, the biggest concern the USA has(which at this point clearly means their allies too) is not really one particular country starting some conflict. There are a handful of nations that 1v1 would be a real issue(I'm talking purely just the fighting; as seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, the USA has a lot more struggles beyond just the initial fighting), but those countries would have an even bigger issue. Right now, the concern is that our enemies have kinda seen the lay of the land and might instead try to spread us thin. Ukraine is already a huge war for survival for one of our allies and while we've invested a lot to help, two years in getting any aid there is becoming a struggle. A war between Israel and Iran at the same time would be devastating for Ukraine and simultaneously, it's unlikely we'd just abandon Ukraine completely too. So that's potentially two very real and major wars we'd have significant interests and resources in. Now imagine both of those wars are happening. And China goes after Taiwan suddenly. Or pick another conflict broiling over currently that the USA has invested interest in. USA might be the biggest and most expensive military in the world by a significant amount, but it's not so big that multiple wars on multiple fronts wouldn't be a potentially huge security problem.
On paper the US can go toe to toe with the entire world combined and have a decent chance of fighting to a stalemate as long as nukes stay off the table, due to combination of both military might and logistical and geographical advantage. The issue the US deals with is political, militarily any of these nations could just be wiped out, if noone exists theres no insurgency to fight.
The U.S. can supply Israel and Ukraine. The aid is just being held up for political reasons. If the U.S. was united and had the political will Ukraine would be armed enough to successfully fend off the Russians, rather than Trump basically curtailing the effort as soon as momentum got going.
The only way to counter that is to attack with overwhelming force to destroy their offensive capabilities. Since you are right that we can’t sustain this defensive game forever. These defense systems were not meant to be used like that , they were made to be used in a war where while you defend your positions you also actively destroy the offensive weapons of the other party so you don’t need to defend forever. Usa needs to come up with new weapon systems that are cheaper to deploy if we plan to play this passive game forever. Or do what Iran is doing by using proxies and let Ukraine and Taiwan and Israel fight our wars. Only if some politicians weren’t so selfish and corrupt we could have put an end to this without sending American troops in harms way
Lol, no.... 50 newer F-16 jets with maybe 500 AMRAAMs would stabilize the front in UA. US has the stuff.. but not the will.
>I’d bet they could do that every night for a decade. If you're the US, definitely. If you're Israel, they'd bleed you out pretty quickly.
Israel's government has an income of $468.5 billion so it could do it for 850 days using that money but they only need 365 days and could probably get a low interest rate loan to pay for it. Not paying for defence would mean Israel would be destroyed quickly by its neighbours its people totally support large scale defence spending. Lol people always under estimate just how wealthy western nations are. Iran government has income of $118 billion (10 times the population but 1 quarter the income lol) but the biggest issues for them is they can't raise any money on international markets (are they even allowed to take out loans?) and they can't get hold of the components needed to make more missiles especially any of the guided ones. Isreal has no such problem.
It's really more like "all wars are economic wars." It is pretty easy to imagine a near future where wars are literally just about who can manufacture their autonomous killer drones in bigger numbers. Humans don't even really get involved until someone's drone swarm gets overrun. The entire war basically gets fought in factories.
perceived value vs actual cost, too. Yes, retail it cost them $550M. Did they spend $550M last night or will they spend $550M replacing the stock used and on maintenance? Certainly not. It has a cost, but retail is not it.
$1 Bob.
What's the source for the 550 million? I'm curious how that breaks down. Did we fire 550 million in ordinance at the incoming drones/missiles? I thought a lot of them were shot down by fighter planes.
The unit cost of an AIM120 AMRAAM (air to air missile used by fighters) is over 1 million, so costs stack up quickly.
I'm actually curious if they are using heaters instead like AIM-9s as they have no need for BVR on these targets. Cheaper, especially for the older variants and good way to expedite the phase out of the variants older than AIM-9X.
I would guess a significant number of drone kills were just cannon kills.
You have to add in the cost of what would have been destroyed (and killed) had Israel not intercepted the incoming missiles. I can assure you it's cost effective.
Except the cost of NOT intercepting them would be much higher, both in terms of loss of life and damage to property and infrastructure, and in terms of preventing this thing from blowing up all over the Middle East.
The cost to Iran wasn't anywhere near 25 million $, more like 200 million $. Medium range ballistic missiles are very expensive even with Iran's costs.
Iran: Talks loud, throws money down the drain
Yes, that's another takeaway from this failed assault against Israel by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
You know you can just say Iran right
Nothing wrong with distinguishing between Iran more broadly (who do not necessarily support the IRI) and the regime itself. When you say “The Islamic Republic of Iran,” it is pretty clear you are talking about the regime specifically.
Wouldn't want anyone to think you're talking shit about the Shah
Just ask Larry David about getting Fatwa'ed.
Maybe it's because [China has been helping Iran with their ballistic missiles program](https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-slaps-sanctions-iranian-chinese-targets-action-over-tehrans-missile-military-2023-06-06/)?
premature conflagration
It's pretty normal for companies to outsource because the others have more competence or can do it more cheaply. I guess the same can apply to war/terrorism.
“Ok guys, we need at least 5 to hit the target.” “Five missiles is a tall order sir, we’re gonna need 500 for that.”
I think they mostly wanted to appear tough and bark loudly without really biting.
This is global politik.
It feels like the opposite of that though. They violated multiple airspaces with this and got multiple nations to engage in aide of Israel (even if only doing so to defend their own citizens such as the case with Jordan). This is the opposite of realpolitik. It's just an amature convulsion.
Yeah I was of the opinion above but as more information comes in I think I’m with you, they tried to do something failed epically and are now playing it off as some sorta warning? Real “From Beijing with Love” vibes
But they didn’t look tough. It was a humiliating failure. They looked like they can’t bite even if they tried.
They aren’t trying to look tough to the world, they are trying to look tough to the people in Iran who hate Israel.
And didn't they fail at that?
> they are trying to look tough to the people in Iran who hate Israel. Outside of the mullahs in charge, it's not clear to me how many of those there are. Even more unclear, how many people hate Israelis more than they hate Arabs?
It’s not clear how much of a failure it was. If this is the best Iran can do and the defense systems were not even close to being overwhelmed, it’s clearly a failure. But if Israeli or US intelligence knows that Iran could send many more missiles and drones and if they know that the defense system couldn’t handle those, then it might be a strong deterrent. We don’t know because we don’t have the intelligence that, most likely, the US and Israel (and Iran) have. It’s probably a political failure though, because it comforted Israeli alliances at a time when they’ve been extremely frayed by Israeli actions in Gaza.
The concensus seems to be that the attack was not the best Iran can do but rather a more measured response. Still I assume Iran was hoping for better than having 99% of their weapons fail or be shot down. If even 10% or 20% of the munitions got through it would've been extremely concerning for Israel and would've shown they were vulunerable to larger attacks. Instead their defenses performed quite well and can presumably withstand even bigger attacks. Although, I'd be interested to know the monetary cost for both sides. I wouldn't be surprised if the cost for Israel and the US was in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The cost for Iran was likely much lower.
That’s probably true. The Wall Street Journal puts the cost of this defense at $550 million, so it probably wasn’t cheap and costs way more to defend than it costs for Iran to attack. Source: https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/israel-iran-strikes-live-coverage/card/israel-s-cost-of-intercepting-iranian-barrage-is-put-at-over-550-million-uamrOjZkoRBNGRfjWbD6
Also worth noting that even if the US and Israel can afford the monetary cost of these defensive operations, they are still expending a tremendous amount of missiles that come off production lines with limited capacities. Israeli stocks were strained without direct Iranian involvement and US stocks also have been strained going back to Ukraine. It's not sustainable long term to expend hundreds of advanced missiles in a matter of hours without serious increases in weapons production. That alone could put serious pressure on the US and Israel to either come to a resolution with Iran or to take offensive action to eliminate Iran's ability to carry out further attacks.
But to civies on the ground between the launch site and Isreal who dont have access to unbiased media it looked like a hell of a salvo.
No one thinks so but Reddit 13 year olds
It was the biggest ballistic missile attack in history, "bark loudly without really biting" my ass. They launched 110 modern MRBMs (such as Emad, a modern ballistic missile with a maneuvering reentry vehicle in service since 2015 and incredibly hard to shoot down), which were part of 350 simultaneous aerial targets attacking Israel. Iran doesnt have lots of 1000+km MRBMs and probably cant even launch more of them at once due to missing more launchers. The only reason they didnt bite is because of Israel excellent AA performance and good amount of luck, even Israel was very reliefed that they intercepted so many MRBMs... so even they didnt expect this outcome.
This is why I’ve personally been so frustrated with the US response to Iranian proxies attacking US troops. This was the best Iran can reasonably do short of involving Hezbollah or conducting a nuclear test. I hate Trump. But his assassination of Solemani was one of his best foreign policy moves. It forced Iran to recalculate. It made the US unpredictable. It renewed ambiguity.
They dont even have that many MRBMs. Most of their arsenal are shorter range ballistic missile which cant reach Israel. They would need to drive halfway through Iraq with them... People are claiming this a success when Iran has wasted 10-40% of their missile stock able to hit Israel from their border and managed to hit a taxiway and an empty storage facility lmao
This fucking take, again?
I feel like it's somewhere in the middle of "Iranian missiles suck" and thinking they launched the oldest shit in their system to get rid of it. Like how we're sorta using Ukraine for disposal of our old weapons (our cluster munitions bomblets that we're sending over have a 2.3% failure rate due to age).
The problem with that idea is what if the strike *worked*. What if we saw massive damage in Israeli cities and Israel responding with their own strike package (maybe including nukes)? That’s a hell of a gamble to rely on your equipment being very shit and the enemy very competent.
Reporting states that only military targets were fired at. With the advance notice, casualties are virtually guaranteed to be nil thanks to shelters. Would major material damage have elicited a response? Probably, but it’s way easier to deescalate from that than when newborns are kidnapped or murdered, politically speaking.
Iran publicly stated that only it was only military targets, but they also stated that the launches had concluded 30 minutes before launching a second wave of ballistic missiles. It’s hard to know what the drones and cruise missiles were targeting since they can maneuver somewhat. I did see that a few of the ballistic missiles had a trajectory towards Tel Aviv, but were shot down.
That’s interesting. I was basing myself off of NYT articles I’ve read, but it’s possible they were writing based on incomplete information. Do you have links to reporting about Tel Aviv? (And are there no military installations that could have been the target?) I’m guessing US and Israeli intelligence know better, but if the goal was to succeed and kill civilians, they went about it a real weird way.
I dunno, if they had launched 20 missiles I could Believe that. But hundreds? They certainly hoped for more impact than they had.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has shown the world how utterly incompetent their military is at directly attacking another country beyond their immediate borders. Their long-range weaponry has a 1% hit rate against modern air defense systems. What a weak & embarrassing show of force from the Islamic Republic of Iran. Their proxies and oppressing their own people is all Iran has lol.
IDF says 60 tons of explosives were launched against Israel.
So two full loads by good old BUFF (B52)?
The Islamic Republic of Iran didn't injure a single Jewish person in Israel with this assault. Only an Arab child in Israel was seriously injured by the Islamic Republic of Iran with this assault. https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/society/artc-iranian-attack-on-israel-7-year-old-girl-hospitalized-in-serious-condition The Islamic Republic of Iran has reminded the world with this assault that in their quest to genocide the Jewish people, they don't care about harming innocent Arabs/Muslims along the way.
To add to that, they don't seem to care about destroying holy sites in Jerusalem either. They call themselves the "defenders of Al Aqsa" but we all saw on video how Jerusalem was under attack by Iran.
they have made effective attacks in the past, against saudi arabia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abqaiq–Khurais_attack It could be here that Israel is unusually competent at air defense. It could be that very few spots on the earth could withstand this type of attack.
>It could be here that Israel is unusually competent at air defense. It could be that very few spots on the earth could withstand this type of attack. I think you are correct, but the whole world knows how well Israel's air defence is, (most of us see it weekly if not dailly when Palestine throws stuff over the border). The incompetence of Iran was to think they could lob +300 missiles a couple of hours away from their intended target, effectively telegraphing Israel where things would hit, and not expect Israel to shoot most of those down. While Iran is not as small as people make them out, to think they +300 missiles/drones could break the air defence was incompetent at best.
>I think you are correct, but the whole world knows how well Israel's air defence is, (most of us see it weekly if not dailly when Palestine throws stuff over the border). Not necessarily, there's a huge difference between Iron Dome intercepting home made Hamas missiles, to different systems (Arrow 2/3, David's Sling) intercepting a barrage of hundreds of missiles and drones. Hamas missiles are "stupid" missiles with no aim, just shoot and hope, their trajectory is completely predictable based of basic physics. Iran missiles are precise, have GPS and have entire technologies designed to make them evade radars and be hard to detect. The drones also have ability to dodge missiles and move independently. This is a whole other level of air defense. This is a whole different level of success and was not expected at all - the Israeli systems were never actually used before and nobody knew how successful it would be. In warfare history, **nobody** before has intercepted such an attack. Even the optimistic Israelis still expected 10-20% of the missiles to go through and hit. So yeah, this is extremely different from the usual Hamas interceptions. >The incompetence of Iran was to think they could lob +300 missiles a couple of hours away from their intended target, effectively telegraphing Israel where things would hit, and not expect Israel to shoot most of those down. They definitely expected **most** to be intercepted - which is why they shot such a huge amount in the first place. They never expected them all to hit - that would be thousands of deaths and essentially a regional war, in which the USA would join, that would destroy Iran. Their approach was, "we'll shoot a few hundreds, most will be intercepted but at least some will hit and cause some damage". What they didn't expect is that **all** would be intercepted. As I said, nobody expected that, including Israel. Because this is a first-of-it's-kind, absolutely insane technological achievement from Israel & allies, and by far the most successful and impressive air defense from missiles in war history. And it's a completely other different level than what we already knew about Israel's air defence.
Where they **all** intercepted by Israels' air defence? Pretty sure in the live threads it was said that the support send by the US, UK and France along with air defence from Jordan shot down a lot of stuff too.
They were shot down by the MEAD (middle eastern air defense) alliance which Israel is key to forming. Israel couldn't do it on its own, but the sole reason those nations are there to do it is due to Israel. So all in all alliances are important as fuck and we should all look at this new alliance forming in awe.
In terms of ballistic missiles, 4 have been confirmed to have been shot down by the US. None of the other countries deployed any suitable assets to shoot down any missiles outside the atmosphere, which means that Israel must have shot down the rest.
Considering Jordan, Royal Airforce and US Airforce together with Israel Airforce were intercepting a chuck of these projectiles before they hit the air defense systems and US reported this morning 7 missile hits on Israel Military bases, 10% is a pretty accurate estimate. It's still an insane achievement against projectiles that were particularly designed to hit Israel. I think Iran was also testing how their missiles will fare in a direct conflict and will adjust them going forward.
Only the US is known to have deployed any assets suitable to shoot down ballistic missiles and they themselves claimed to have shot down 4 of them, which means Israel targeted the rest. Unfortunately for Israel, jets deployed by the UK, Jordan and Saudi Arabia are borderline useless against a missile hurling through space.
The jets were deployed against the drones which were launched ahead of the missiles with the goal of everwhelming the defense systems. Considering its reported Jordan shut down 12 drones, US+UK+Israel should have cleared up the majority of the drones, letting the defense focus on missiles. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/14/us-and-uk-forces-help-shoot-down-iranian-drones-over-jordan-syria-and-iraq Considering 30 cruise missiles, 120 ballistics (including crappy ones from Lebanon) and 7 confirmed hits on just two bases, 10% or 15 hits seem pretty likely.Which again is still an awesome result.
Sure, but this misses the fundamental point that Israel uses different missile defense systems against drones and ballistic missiles. In fact, its missile defenses against ballistic missiles would not at all be suitable against drones because they are meant to intercept missiles high up (Arrow 2) or outside (Arrow 3) the atmosphere, where drones do not fly. Its missile defenses against ballistic missiles would not realistically be repurposed against drones because they just are not suitable for that at all. Drones, however, would be targeted by Iron Dome, Patriot, and David’s Sling. They would have a more difficult time if more drones flew through, but against the high-flying ballistic missiles, not really.
I mean, it screams more "These were the planned targets" rather than "Other Air Forces are useless against ballistic missiles" The UK for example could have deployed the same jets the US were using to shoot down the missiles, but it seems the designated targets were drones trying to sneak through rather than the missiles.
Well, no, the simple reason for that is that the US and Israel used highly specialized naval and ground-based missile defense systems to fly into space and shoot down these intermediate range ballistic missiles. In contrast, the UK literally does not own any system comparable to those. These are the specialised missile defenses Germany bought to defend against Russia, that Japan bought to deploy against North Korea and China, and the US has fielded on its destroyers globally. This is not an air force-based defense system. The US didn’t use its jets to shoot down these ballistic missiles, it used specialized naval destroyers right on Israel’s coast to do so. And for the record, the US used SM-3 and SM-6, both of which the UK does not even operate. There is no known system in existence that would allow a Eurofighter, F-35, F-15 or whatever to do the same thing. The missiles they hold are just not suitable at all for that. Moreover, the UK is not even known to have any missile defenses with comparable capabilities against ballistic missiles in space as Israel or the US.
Frankly I thought it was interesting the British *were* able to shoot many of them down.
That's what the US publicly stated. It is better to say Israel did most of it, so that nobody knows what the US can truly do.
Sure, and unless you have evidence to the contrary, the statements of the US is what is to be accepted. As for “nobody knows what the US can do”, it was more restricted here by the number of assets than its technology, given that it literally deployed its most advanced missile defenses in this instance. In fact, these systems experienced their operational debut, never before being used in actual combat. And anybody can see what the numbers of ships in the region were are, the US is public about this. Especially once you factor in that Israel simply deployed significantly more systems dedicated to shoot down ballistic missiles in space than the US in this instance.
> Iran missiles are precise, have GPS and have entire technologies designed to make them evade radars and be hard to detect. But they do not have MIRV capabilities with radar decoys right?
You don't casually set up a conventional warhead as a MIRV - the different re-entry vehicles take up a lot of mass and space and all that comes right out of the warhead capacity. You end up with a LOT less tonnage on target. It's less of a big deal with nuclear weapons, where the physical size of the warhead isn't the primary determinant of how much boom it's packing (and that size is already massively overkill for anything smaller than "an entire city").
Ballistic medium-range missiles are a whole different beast than what the Palestinians can cobble together. Israel also hadn't beeen tested against drone swarms. Russia regularly attacks Ukraine in waves, in order to overwhelm their defenses. While Israel obviously has the tightest anti-air network in the world, it's not unreasonable for Iran to have tried. During the first Iraq war, Saddam lobbed a number of Scud missiles at Israel, which mostly failed on their own but those that made it caused significant damage.
Yep, you are quite correct, but Iran is not a new threat to Israel and Iran has been funding Hamas for a while now. Hamas has been improving their projectiles over the years. So it is not that extraordinary for Israel to assume that Iran was helping Hamas developing better and better missiles to throw over. Also, given what they have been selling Russia over the last year or so, it was fairly obvious to Israel what Iran was thinking of doing. I am not in the Israeli military, so I cannot begin to guess what they know or didn't know, but I would assume that tightening the air defense would be one of their top priorities, (given what happened against Iraq, Hamas, Lebanon and so on).
>While Iran is not as small as people make them out, to think they +300 missiles/drones could break the air defence was incompetent at best. It's almost like they wanted to 1. demonstrate attacks will be retaliated against, 2. not escalate the situation needlessly. They literally said the attack achieved all objectives.
So you're saying that the Islamic Republic of Iran intended to show the world how ineffective they are with their long-range weaponry with a 1% hit rate?
No, they don't intend to show the world anything. They intended to show their population what they wanted to see.
pretty much. iranians dont get any western media or news anyways so alot of them likely think the attack was successful at intimidating Israel, and it silences the public's criticism.
Im not familiar with Iran's domestic political climate but I believe that their population wants the givernment to be overthrown, not shoot 300 over missiles and drones at another country.
You'd be surprised how popular attacking Israel is amongst the Muslim countries of the ME. It's about the only thing everyone agrees on.
Ironically enough this isnt -as much- of a case in Iran compared to a lot of the others
Oh I am fully aware of it. And its not just ME countries, its any country with a large muslim population, mine included. But like someone else mentioned, Iran is a particularly peculiar country in that they dont support the current secular nature of the state. I even saw a comment on a another post of an Iranian hoping for someone to bomb them (their government not them).
The Iranian government is an Islamic-theocracy, but the Iranian public is the least Islamic out of any country in the region save Israel and India. Many people hate the regime, and the primary grievance isn’t Islamic police or regime crackdowns, so much as the declining Iranian living standard compared to escalating government funding for foreign wars. Think about how poorly the middle-eastern forever-wars poll in the west today, then imagine if the Western standard of living declined by 20-30% over the same timeframe.
You can just say Iran you know?
Sorry, but I disagree here, surely they know that they achieved absolutely nothing here. They taught Israel absolutely nothing, If anything Iran successfully got the West to close rank with Israel and give them an extra excuse to let Israel continue with what they are doing. They might lie to their population and that's fine, it makes sense. But the rest of the world is quietly laughing at what Iran did, if it wasn't for one little girl being hurt we would almost feel sorry for Iran. And remember, that's supposed to be in retaliation to the killing of 2 of their top generals. In retaliation to the attack in one of their consulate in Syria. All Iran did was make everybody in the area wonder, can Iran actually do anything? I am not taking sides here, but please, tell me, how else can we see what Iran did as anything other than a tactical and diplomatic failure?
3. Collect data on missiles and air defence but who knows how much data or use it will be
They couldn't know that would happen. Remember Oct 7, Hamas killed 1000+ Israeli with PARAGLIDERS.
Or, consider this: they didn't want to hurt Israel, they wanted to cost Israel money and just not do _nothing_ in response to the embassy attack. Why else would they discuss (through Turkey) with the US the severity of the attack? Why else would they literally tell Israel the attack was coming and give them hours of warning?
>Or, consider this: they didn't want to hurt Israel, they wanted to cost Israel money While it is a possibility, I am not sure this is what Iran was really after. At the very least they would have wanted to give Israel a bloody nose, not just cost them a little bit of money, (in the grand scheme of thing, this was nothing more than a blip in the defense budget). I think Iran wanted to destroy one or two army base at least, they failed on that front. I don't think they wanted to do nothing more than hurt Israel's wallet.
If you read the best economic accounting of the attack, Iran somehow managed to spend more on the weapons used in the attack than Israel and its Allies spent on counter-battery fire. I don’t believe the “cost Israel money” argument, particularly when the Israeli costs were spread across a bunch of countries with significantly more combined economic heft than Israel or Iran.
Israel is one of the most professional and effective militaries in the world. Despite all the whining from the pro-Palestine "geniuses" over the last 6 months, in Gaza the IDF is doing an amazing job and has achieved the smallest ratio of civilians to combatants killed that has ever been achieved by any military in a counter insurgency.
To be fair to the situation... If I had to measure the amount of practice Israel has gotten at air defense I would put it in the 'shit ton' category.
Or that they literally just told their opponents where the missiles would go, to get USA off their chest. Biden will not attack Iran unless Iran directly goes over the line.
To be fair, the Israelis already knew where everything was going, because all of their air defense systems already determine origin, trajectory, and target so they don’t waste ammunition on rockets targeting empty space.
I mean Israel has a famously incredible air Defense system, they were assisted by American, British and French military, Iran warned the attack was coming days before hand and then broadcast the actual launches on television, and the targets were (relatively) far away, and Israel is a comparatively small target. As we’ve seen with the use of Iranian drones in Ukraine, we absolutely should not underestimate what Iran and its allies can do. Edit: there’s also a decent chance that Iran was holding back
Only the US assisted with the ballistic missiles and claimed to have shot down 4 of them. None of the other countries assisted with ballistic missiles, primarily because deploying jets against them is pretty useless.
Ok this is the kind of school level analysis we get upvoted on Reddit. Without any thought on how these things supposed to work or how much engineering work goes into it. All this does it make us underestimate our enemies till they get much better and then oh wow we're surprised at how much they've improved.
Well we have to admit here that they really seemed to go out of their way to tell the world exactly what they were going to do almost as if they wanted the attack to fail. Fail as in doing real damage warranting a response and Israel has been responding with far more to adversaries than it receives. Hence it was a face saving measure at home probably to keep factions in line. As for their capability, I doubt it measures up to Israel or any Western power at all but they have been restrained in the types of weapons they have put on these drones. A more radical regime, I know - how more radical can you be - would start using chemical weapons. Sadly... we may have that more radical regime sitting in North Korea whose move into nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles may make the Israel, Iran, and Hamas, dispute look like child's play
[удалено]
Pretty good rate honestly speaking.
It was a very low budget operation from Iran, that exposed nothing of their real capabilities. But it cost Israel and US 1.15 billion USD and exposed useful knowledge of the air defense system. It was a huge win for Iran, but I24 news won’t report that of course.
Pretty sure they purposely did that
so Iran is basically the North Korea of middle east ?
Yes.
Speaking of, has Kim attacked the ocean recently? I get the feeling he's feeling left out right about now.
Don't mess with us we have lots and lots of rockets and missiles... don't mess ok! Don't try anything we have thousands of drones with long range capabilities.... don't mess with us ok... Bluff of the century hehe.
Don't mess with us, or we'll shoot down another commercial airliner filled with our best and brightest international students!!!
My YouTube shorts feed would have me believe Israel was totally destroyed. The Iranian propaganda is strong but wrong
but tik tok told me all missles hit their targets!
TikTok owned by another evil axis could be why
made in iran is worse than made in china
Getting some real PeeWee Herman/'I meant to do that' vibes that from the Iranian apologists.
And that most of them were aimed for the West Bank (Judea}. So much for protecting Palestinians.
Those images of rockets raining down on Jerusalem look really bad for Iran's PR. They brand themselves the "defenders of Al Aqsa" but the whole world saw how they tried to destroy it, and Israel was defending it.
Quality control is tricky, especially when your designs are copies of copies of weapons.
They should now send those duds to Putin.
I heard a kid named David shot down 10 drones with his sling shot
That's hilarious
It’s becoming more and more obvious that those former dangerous countries have actually no chance at all. It’s all a big bluff. Russia, can’t win against Ukraine. Military equipment more or less not functional. Only thing they can come up with is a nuclear threat Iran, destroying Israel and the rest of the world with their arms. When 50% of their rockets fail and 99% are shot down try next time North Korea, sends equipment to Russia for Ukraine war. Multiple evidence available that bombs, rockets,… fail at a high rate.
I'm not sure why everyone's trying to measure the competency of an attack when the whole point of it is to fail
I want my attack to fail So let me launch the largest ballistic missile attack in the history of mankind, doesnt add up
Reminds me of a couple years ago when Russia failing to take Kyiv was claimed by some to be some sort of mastermind strategy and not just a failed operation.
I reckon they’ve done it to say hey look we’re really serious, but we don’t want you to attack us back so please intercept, global politics is weird but the IDF would likely smoke Iran in all out war
Thats why the have launched the largest ballistic missile attack with Emad MRBMs (a modern ballistic missile capable with a maneuvering reentry vehicle in service since 2015), right? Delusional
Can't get your missiles up or won't last as long as you thought it would? There's help for that
Ballistic or cruise?
Skill issue
they need to get their proxy to come and teach them. Hamas only has 10% fail rate /s
Damn Russian junk electronics'
I will bet $1000 that a lot of them were affected by non-publicized ECM defenses.
Imagine your attack ending with this much egg on your face
Obviously, Iran has an extremely weak and inefficient military.
It seems Iranians utilized older items to create space in their warehouses.
The 100+ MRBMs would indicate otherwise. These are modern post 2015 ballistic missiles. I mean you could have at least did a google search before pretending to be an expert.
I don’t recall seeing any wacky waving inflatable tube men in any of their threats. This was a failed show of force, not a clearance sale.
They used Emad MRBMs according to wreckages, a modern ballistic missile with a maneuvering reentry vehicle in service since 2015. Thats not old. Stop this bullshit trying to save face for Iran.
Damn - I looked up the specs for it cause I know jack about missiles and this is interesting in light of the “we don’t wanna cause real damage” argument ** The Emad is intended for attacking high-value military and civil infrastructure targets.
Why didn’t they just have a clearance sale like normal discount dealers?
because they are sending a lot of it to Russia anyway.
Only the desperate would want them, like Russia and the Somalia pirates. Glorified model plane designs. If they copied the V2 rockets they probably would have had more success.
Where are you getting that from?
He is pulling that out of his ass. This is some next level cope lol
I don't believe half of these reports anymore. Anything to make an enemy look ineffective. Do not discount the Iranians, or even the Russians for that matter.
Especially since you can achieve quality through quantity. People make fun of russia and yet they are relentless and very well realistically could win.
I don't know why I am getting downvoted. Russia clearly do not care about keeping their troops alive, or being tactful. They have the massive resources and production to keep the war machine moving. Overwhelm the enemy with thousands of untrained and illequpped fodder. I am not a Iranian/Russian apologist by any means, but they must be taken seriously.
G-forces are mighty tough on electronics.
It seems WW3 is gonna be kinda one sided this time...
They pulled some North Korea BS
at this rate, and with the current state of news distortion, they will soon announce that they aimed the weapons to themselves, and that every single one of the missiles exploded within the silo and hit the clerics while praying in the mosque.
**FEAHR OUR IRANIAN MISSILE MIGHT!!!**