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As you can see here and here, I did a few posts over the weekend trying to make sense of just what was happening in the skies over Israel. As I noted, I initially thought the fusillade was essentially performative. The Iranians fired off a mix of drones and missiles they knew would be shot down, so they can make a big show of striking back while being confident that the damage would be limited enough to avoid the risk of further escalation. But as more information came in, that seemed less credible.
The Iranians fired off a large number of ballistic missiles — well over 100 by latest reports. These missiles are qualitatively different from cruise missiles and especially drones. They are the ones that go in a parabolic arc. They travel incredibly fast. Israel and the U.S. have defenses against them, but in the nature of things you can’t fire off dozens of surface-to-surface missiles and have any real confidence they’re all going to get shot down. There was also the fact that the U.S. especially and also a number of Arab states were heavily involved in the shootdowns. If it’s just a elaborate fireworks display, I don’t think you need that much help handling it. In any case, there were a number of reasons why that initial interpretation didn’t really add up. And I was confirmed in this read by others who know a lot more about the relevant technologies than I do: this wasn’t just for show.
What I’ve been looking for is a good technical analysis of the relevant questions here. Because understanding what happened requires understanding a number of specific factual questions about the technology. And I finally found one (there are probably others) here from the Institute for the Study of War. The ISW has some neoconish lineage. But the discussion here is pretty specific and technical, so I think it’s reliable. And these guys’ have been quite good at analyzing the progress of the war in Ukraine. Again, not from a “takes” perspective but battle plans and technology, pretty brass-tacks stuff.
One of the things that is interesting in the ISW discussion is the idea that the mix of munitions and the strategy was taken from Russian actions in Ukraine. The general idea is that you throw up a lot of low-value stuff to saturate the air defenses and overload them, and then you fire off a lot of surface-to-surface missiles. According to this discussion, the Ukrainians have been able to shoot down 46% of all Russian missiles during major attacks but only 16% of Russian ballistic missiles. The Iranians would certainly know that Israel’s and U.S.’s anti-ballistic missile abilities were substantially better than Ukraine’s. But they likely didn’t expect it would be well over 90% or that the U.S. and other countries would be involved to the extent they were.
This has pretty major implications for understanding how massive an escalation this was on the part of Iran and the impact of the success rate of U.S. and Israel missile shootdowns for what happens next. We’ll come back to that in another post. I also noted yesterday that we shouldn’t understate just how skillfully the White House seemed to manage a major, major crisis over the last few days. High stakes foreign policy crises like these generally have an almost limitless number of ways they can go wrong and one or two ways they can go right. And so far the White House has managed to prevent damage in Israel and prevent further escalation. Don’t underestimate how many moving parts this required managing.
Finally I found the results of this poll out of Israel very interesting. According to think tanker David Makovsky, a new poll from Israel’s Channel 13 measures reports these results. On the question how should Israel respond to the Iranian attack:
React Immediately: 29%
React at some point: 37%
Don’t React: 25%
Don’t know: 9%
“React at some point” at least implicitly suggests real flexibility about timing and the means of reacting. But overall this suggests that support for an immediate retaliation is fairly low. So the Israeli government has a fair amount of latitude with the Israeli public in how it chooses to respond and when. That is significant.