Israel Strikes

Everywhere and Repeatedly

Well, so much for my my one time effort to set a publication schedule!

Here’s what we know so far. Actually a surprising amount.

At a little after three AM on Friday 13 June in a combined drone and aircraft attack, the IDF struck military targets all over Iran: not just the nuclear production facilities, but airfields, air defense system and missile launching bases, and senior Iranian leaders.

The breadth and depth of the strikes is impressive, particularly given the distances involved, and it’s clear that Iran was caught by total surprise.

As of 9 AM CDT (5 PM in the Middle East), it appears that the air strikes are continuing, as an IDF spokesman has admitted that there have been five separate waves. The most likely explanation for this is the IDF is establishing complete control of Iranian air space. Although an earlier strike, coupled with the Syrian collapse, clearly must have destroyed Tehran’s long range threat detection assets, probably short range low altitude systems were mostly still in place, so to have total dominance those have to be eliminated.

Early on in Ukrainian invasion, when I saw videos of Russian ground attack aircraft I realized that either they didn’t understand the concept of air dominance, or they’d failed at achieving it. Either alternative suggested very strongly that their invasion plan was going to run into major difficulties.

Since it’s been daylight for hours, we have photographic evidence of the damage in Tehran, and their television network has been surprisingly frank about about personnel losses.

Those include both the commander of the Iranian military commander, Mohamed Bagheri, Hosein Salami, head of the IRGC, together with most of their senior staff. In addition the strikes eliminated two important nuclear scientists.

Now looking at the photographs of the damage in Tehran, I was struck by how you would see a high-rise residential building, the building was intact, but one or two of its apartments had been destroyed.

Basically, that level of precision air strikes gives us two piece of important information. First that Israeli intelligence knew exactly where these people lived, and second, that the strikes had been carried out by drones.

And Israel promptly confirmed that there had been a covert effort to sneak drones into Iran, and that the air strikes had been coordinated with drone strikes on military bases. The same plan that Kiev had used in it slightly earlier wave of drone attacks all over Russia.

Eliminating your enemy’s command and control system is extremely important, as it makes it extremely difficult to respond to an attack, or even to organize your defense, in timely fashion.

As far as the success of the IDF attacks on military and nuclear assets outside of the capital, there are no verified reports, just isolated Iranian videos and eyewitnesses reporting lots of explosions elsewhere, including one video of a pretty major one somewhere in Tehran.

However, here’s what’s significant. As Sherlock Holmes famously observed, the case of the dog that didn’t bark. Here it is, nearly twelve hours later, and not only are the strikes continuing, but Iran’s only response has been to attack Israel with a large fleet of drones—at least a hundred. It does not appear that any of these managed to reach Israel, which is hardly surprising.

But the absence of any sort of ballistic missile response is significant. There are three possibilities. The air strikes have largely destroyed both the missile required and/or the launch sites. The devastation of he military leadership has affected Iran’s ability to respond quickly, or, perhaps as a function of that, it will take time for Iran to organize the sort of massive missile attack that would be required to overwhelm Israel’s air defense systems.

And as of 5 PM local time, IDF strikes were continuing, and definitely on Iranian bases, since Iranians TV reported loud explosions at one of the more important ones.

Frankly, given the total failure of Iran’s last two efforts, both of which involved hundreds of missile, I’m skeptical that they can manage another one. As I’ve said, the key element in conventional explosive tipped missiles, is not how many missiles you have, but how many you can launch at one time. Clearly, since Israel’s system was capable of handling strikes in the low hundreds, for a strike to be successful, it would have to involve more.

Sure, it’s possible. On the other hand there are two important factors militating against that. First, it’s not like the IDF isn’t aware of the risk of a massive missile attack, and we know their air defense system has been straightener since the last time. Second, these repeated waves of IDF air strikes may well have been aimed at destroying just that capability, as well as eradicating the low altitude air defense systems.

As I’ve said before, I don’t think the penetrating power an accuracy of the latest generation of precision “bunker busters” is realized. So we’ll just have to wait and see.

Predictably, Khomeini’s response, which curiously, was just a statement (as opposed to an appearance on Iranian television), was more of the usual threats.

However, at pretty much the same time, Hezbollah declared they weren’t going to get involved, and the American secretary of state said that the American would respond if there were any attacks at American facilities in the region.

I haven’t seen any reports of statements from the Houthi or from Hamas, and France and Germany have already said the obvious: Israel has the right to defend itself. Elsewhere, just more of the same pious and hypocritical blather.

Finally, I would argue that regardless of how successful the IDF strikes have been in destroying Iran’s nuclear and missile launching capabilities, Tehran now has a major problem. If they respond with militarily and largely fail, their powerlessness will be painfully obvious. But if they don’t, the result will be the same.

Now it’s certainly possible that Tehran will gamble, hope to inflict at least some significant damage on Israel. The situation in that case is pretty much like the jocular adage about being killed by cow: it’s very low, but it’s not zero.

That being said, however, it’s important to realize that in the First Gulf War, the Iraqi spokesman, who later became derisively referred to as “Baghdad Bob,” was insisting that Iraq was winning, right up to the point that American troops were overrunning the Baghdad airport.

Don’t hold your breath, in other words.

Lastly, we don’t as yet have any idea of how the Iranian people will respond to this, or for that matter, how Iran’s northern neighbors will.