Things have settled enough that I'm going to give my current thoughts on the recent fighting between Israel and Iran.1 This is approximately half commentary on the specifics of that conflict, and half broader lessons we can take from this and apply more generally.
I think the first and biggest lesson is that the results of battle, and thus the lessons to be drawn, are really contingent on the details of who is doing the fighting, and on the difficult-to-measure aspects of their competence and capabilities. If you look at the Ukraine War, ground-based air defenses (GBAD) looks formidable. Nobody dares fly over the enemy, and the most effective air-launched weapon is a long-range glide bomb. If you look at Iran, Israel has effectively neutered Iranian GBAD and rules the skies, striking what it wants. So, all we can definitively say is that Russia and Ukraine appear to be broadly matched in capability, while Israel is much better than Iran. We can't say for sure how Israel (or the US) would fare against Russia.
But this has been the first major air campaign by a first-rank Western power against a serious adversary since 2003, and it did provide proof that it is possible to disassemble an air defense network with shockingly few casualties. Most of the work was done back in October when Israel made a series of strikes that took out pretty much all of Iran's air defense systems, as well as much of its missile production. The exact details are still not public, but given what has been said, I'm reasonably certain that the bulk of that work was done using long-range air-launched cruise missiles. On the other hand, Russia has quite a few cruise missiles of its own, and Ukraine has been supplied with Franco-British Storm Shadows, which should be approximately as capable as anything Israel has, and both countries continue to have air defenses, a disparity I don't have a satisfying explanation for.2
It has also shown the capability of modern aerial attack in a way that no previous campaign has done. The pinnacle of this has been the targeted attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists. The ability to locate exactly where a scientist lives, confirm he is there in real time, and then pass that to an airplane which can drop a bomb capable of essentially taking out that one apartment with minimal damage to the rest of the building is something that would have been science fiction 20 years ago. Some people may complain about the deaths of wives and children and a few neighbors, but by any objective historical standard, this is an absurdly clean strike, and if the Iranian nuclear program was a serious threat to Israel, more than justified under international law. Not very many countries could have pulled this off.
Another area that bears highlighting is the success of Israel's covert operations within Iran. Not only were they able to gather intelligence for the attack, they set up a drone base near Tehran. This is something that is far beyond the capabilities of the CIA, at least as far as we know,3 and coming on the heels of the beeper attack last year, it reveals that Mossad is head and shoulders above everyone else in covert action. They were undoubtedly helped by the general unpopularity of the Iranian regime, which makes it a lot easier to recruit agents, but as I understand it, US networks in Iran have been rolled up several times, and I know we never did anything nearly as ambitious as trying to stage a short-range drone attack from inside the country.
In the past, I've been somewhat down on the competence of the Israeli military, and I've heard a lot of very credible stories from the Cold War about their performance, which was only good by the standards of the armies they were fighting, many of which set new bars for incompetence.4 Their reputation took a serious blow in 1991, when NATO armies met Arabs for the first time, and realized that all of them were pretty bad.5 But whatever the case may have been 30 years ago, they have clearly gotten their act together these days, as their Air Force is setting a new standard of performance.6 Their Army's performance in Gaza has been less stellar, though still competent, and this isn't surprising given the apparent priority given to air power, and other areas like cyber warfare, all of which take very competent people to do well.
Oh, and they've been doing this over 1,000 miles or so, which requires a lot of aerial refueling on the way. Not quite Black Buck levels of tanking, but conducing this kind of campaign over that distance is deeply, deeply impressive. Of course, it might not be possible were it not for the collapse of the Assad regime, which means that there's no Russian GBAD in Syria, something that had significantly constrained Israeli freedom of action, and which they couldn't act against nearly as freely for obvious political reasons.
Also worth noting is the continued importance of missile defense. This is a recurring theme here, but once again we saw ground-based missiles take out something like 90% of the Iranian strike, and cut Israeli casualties on the ground by a tremendous amount. The same thing could happen to a nuclear attack if the US would buy Aegis ashore instead of wasting time and money on an absurd and expensive orbital system.
And then, a few hours before this post went up, came the wild card of apparent US involvement. It's too early to say for certain, but it looks like B-2s used the MOP (Massive Ordnance Penetrator) on the Fordow site. MOP is by far the most powerful non-nuclear bunker buster ever, and about the only thing that could really get at Fordow. The odds of Iranian retaliation are pretty high, and the next few days are certainly likely to be exciting. Longer-term, this is a pretty strong incentive to Iran to get nuclear weapons, as those pretty reliably stop people from doing this kind of stuff to you (as the Kims have repeatedly demonstrated), and I am somewhat skeptical that there is a solid long-term plan to keep this from happening.
If you want to follow every twist and turn, there's an active thread on this in the Naval Gazing Discord, which provided a lot of the material here.
1 Or it had before the US got involved, but the retrospective stuff should be fine, so I'm going to post anyway. ⇑
2 It's not entirely mysterious. A quick sketch probably involves a combination of Israel having better planes with better EW tech, superior real-time intelligence on the locations of Iranian air-defense systems and more missiles to throw, as well as Iran not having good short-range backup weapons to shoot down missiles aimed at their long-range systems, or all that many long-range systems in general . Oh, and Israeli covert efforts, which ranged hacking Iranian systems to disable them at a critical time and providing people on the ground to get real-time intelligence all the way to literally setting up a drone base near Tehran, which would allow attacks with weapons very much outside of the normal defensive envelope. I'd guess that covers most of the major contributors, but don't want to venture a guess as to the relative importance of the listed factors. ⇑
3 A comment I heard about the beeper attack could be summed up as "if we tried something like that, there's no way someone who didn't like the idea wouldn't leak it long before it was done". ⇑
4 Probably my favorite example of this comes from the 1973 Yom Kippur war. The Egyptian high command, despite their best efforts, simply could not figure out how to get junior officers to give accurate reports about what was going on. Their eventual solution to the problem of learning how their own army was doing was to build an intercept center to pick up Israeli transmissions, as the Israelis basically broadcast everything in the clear. The Egyptian success during the opening days of that war came down to staff officers preplanning everything, and units training on specific tasks every day for a year or more. This worked great for a few days until friction built up and things fell apart, but that was enough to achieve Egyptian goals in the longer term. ⇑
5 I have a book, published just before the start of the ground war, that says that the Iraqis are a formidable force that will not go down without a tough fight. On the other side, Egypt sent its two best divisions, and they were assigned to cover the gap between the Marines on the right and the Army's VII Corps, the main attacking force that would strike into Iraq west of Kuwait. The Egyptian force failed to reach its first-day objective after three days despite almost no Iraqi resistance. ⇑
6 Yes, it's possible that Iran is really bad, but first, they have traditionally been surprisingly good at fielding competent forces, for instance in 1980 after the chaos of the Revolution, when they were able to fend off Iraq. Also, there's some minimum level of competence you need to pull something like this off without taking any losses, as Israel has managed so far. ⇑
Comments
Hormuz?
At which point, the Good Idea Fairy will tell someone that this exact scenario inspired the creation of the LCS.
A more generalized thesis on ground based air defense I’ve been thinking of is about “defects.” Ground based air defenses are really prone to catastrophic defects in training, tactics, or technology that get them destroyed very quickly. But they can adjust fairly quickly in many cases.
We’ve seen complete collapses when the aggressor’s magazine/depth capability is large compared to the defenders air defense. Iraq, Armenia, Iran, etc.
But if the ratio is the opposite then the defenders can adjust and maintain coverage even after paying sone tuition with early losses. Which I think is the case with Russia and Ukraine where each had significantly more depth than Iran and lack a history of great SEAD/DEAD.
I consider Iran, though a theocracy, to a communist country. Central planning with a failing economy with the expection of oil being sold to China. They have taken a beating, first from the Isrealis and now us. My thoughts are they, Iran, are pretty much tapped out. I dont expect that there will be much in the way of retaliation.
I've seen excitable TV news commentary about how this might "set the Middle East ablaze". Maybe so, but I think this would actually be worse for the Iranian regime, not better.
I can't see how the Israelis are carrying out these long range air operations without agreement, or actual cooperation, from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq. In the past couple of decades Israel has changed from eternal enemy of the Arabs/Moslem world to maybe annoying neighbour but preferable to the Ayatollahs.
I do not think Iran can reasonably be called a "communist country," because you really, really can't have socialism without the concept "private ownership of the means of production is illegal." Drop that from the picture and whatever system of government you have, be it autocratic, kleptocratic, theocratic, whatever, it's not socialism any more. Sort of like how you can't honestly call a country a "republic" if it doesn't hold elections and you can't honestly call a country a "dictatorship" if there's no dictator.
It's not even about whether having elections, or dictators, or banning private ownership of the means of production is bad or good, it's just that these are commonly accepted "you must be this tall to enter" requirements for the definitions of the terms as normally used in political science.
It's very much possible to have a government that exercises considerable central control over the economy, without having any form of socialism. A capitalist country that undergoes total war mobilization, for example, has not become a socialist country. It has not become illegal for the capitalist to own a factory or an apartment building or a big pile of investment cash, the kind of things a Marxist would call "means of production." The capitalist is likely still allowed to make a profit, and some businessmen have become very wealthy during times of war mobilization. A socialist country would never allow that.
As to the question of potential Iranian retaliation, the problem is that the Iranians have a wide spectrum of possible reactions between "do nothing about this, ever" and "immediate massive military bombardments." We're staking out the geopolitical position that in relations between Iran and America, it's okay to blow things up and kill people more or less because one feels like it, without there necessarily being any direct provocation. Iran may get passive-aggressive about that and decide to act on it a long time from now, or even deliberately wait for a period of economic and civil disorder within the United States that makes it hard for us to respond in any lasting, decisive manner without committing major war crimes of our own.
And Hugh... the transition of the Arab states' perception of Israel from "Enemy #1" to "tolerable but preferable to Iran" was something that happened from roughly 1980 to 2000. It's been an entire generation since that became the status quo. It may still be and may remain the status quo, but it's also possible that Israel's actions over the past few years may turn perceptions around on that point. An Israel that is strongly revanchist and expansionist and willing to launch first strikes against key infrastructure of neighboring regimes, especially in the absence of any direct military attack upon Israel as inciting incident, may seem more threatening than an Iran which is less likely to do the same.
One of the first rules of "interstate anarchy" is that you usually align with a weaker neighbor to bring down a stronger one, not the other way around. Do it the other way around and you get gobbled up. If Iran does indeed prove the weaker neighbor, that alone may cause some surprising realignments.
Only long-term plan that makes sense is regime change.
OTOH it'll have to come from within as there's no way Israel could occupy Iran and even the US is unlikely to want to (plus history).
We're talking a dictatorship that isn't under much threat so of course the military is bad.
As for fending off Iraq, not forever and they did inherit a somewhat competent military from the Shah (but still coup-proofed).
I wonder if part of this is due to deliberate targeting decisions on the part of the Ukrainians. Ukraine doesn't have much of an air force to begin with, so degrading Russian air defenses will have a limited benefit for them, as compared to hitting other targets (like ammunition depots or transport infrastructure). So the Ukrainians have chosen to hit the targets that would hurt the Russians' ability to bring troops and equipment to the front line, rather than "waste" missiles blowing holes in Russian air defenses that they wouldn't be able to exploit anyway.
However, as far as Russia is concerned, I'm also confused. It almost seems like the Russian military is committed to being a comic book villain sometimes, using rare and expensive munitions, such as the Kinzhal air launched ballistic missile, on targets such as power substations and apartment blocks, rather than targets with more immediate military relevance.
@Austin
That's probably not a bad model, although we're still operating on fairly few data points.
Re "setting the Middle East ablaze", I don't think so. Nobody really likes Iran, and if anything, they're all going "we owe Israel one, but would rather not talk about it."
I am not sure this is how neighbors will see it. None of them are sponsoring the firing of rockets at Israel, or anything even remotely like that, and there's no particular reason to expect Israel to start bombing people who aren't doing that, or to try annexing bits of neighboring countries that they haven't been occpuying for half a century.
Yes, but there's normal bad and then there's the sort of utter incompetence that loses you the Toyota War. Now, Gadaffi was unusually bad even for a dictator, but that wasn't all or even mostly him.
I'd think the Iran-Iraq war is very weak evidence against the thesis of `maybe Iran is just really really bad.' Both because the Iran-Iraq war would have been fought mostly by a military inherited from the Shah, whereas after 40 years of Islamic republic there will be a totally different military in place, and because, well, Iraq was also really bad. CF Russia's performance in the first Chechen war probably didn't tell us much about how the Russian army would perform in 2022...
One point about precision I should have made earlier. Being able to take out one apartment in a building doesn't just save lives. If you can't do that and you want to get the guy, you have to blow up the whole building. That takes thousands of pounds of bombs instead of hundreds. Those heavier weapons will have shorter ranges, so you have to get closer to air defenses. And the plane dropping them needs other planes to carry aa weapons, and so on. The effect precision is a reverse death spiral massively amplifying airpower.
@cassander: to the best of my knowledge, airpower alone (unsupported by boots on the ground) has never sufficed to win a war. Are you opining that precision has changed matters enough that the age of strategic bombing has finally come?
Regime change won't come to Iran just by bombing a few apartments (especially if Israel wants a say in what the successor regime is like).
For that there will either need to be an invasion or an uprising.
Whether that's true depends on what victory conditions the state or alliance carrying out the air campaign wishes to achieve. It's true (so far) that air power has not overthrown unfriendly regimes and installed friendly governments in their wake. But not every war needs to end in the total and complete overthrow of one of the combatants. Air power did get Serbia to stop its campaign against the Kosovars in 1999. Although peacekeeping troops eventually did go in after the fact, Serbia was coerced into signing the military technical agreement with NATO by air power alone. In this case, air power did result in "victory", because NATO defined victory as the withdrawal of Serbian forces from Kosovo and the deployment of international peacekeepers. Operation Allied Force allowed NATO to achieve both of these objectives, so I think it should count as a "win" for air power.
@quanticle, most histories of the gruesome Yugoslav breakup include for example Operation Storm, the biggest land battle in Europe (at the time) since WW2 with tens of thousands of troops on either side, or Operation Mistral. NATO airpower undoubtedly helped, but I for one suspect US training of Croatian ground forces to deliver boots on the ground was more important to Serbia being coerced into peace.
@quanticle
I feel it bears repeating that, the Serb airforce was destoryed to disrupt its use against a hostile army in Kosovo.
So, naked airpower is useful if you have local armies you can cooperate with. Good luck having friendly local armies on demand, though.
I would say this whole "Air force can not win wars alone" argument is completely stupid. Because it is not about, that you can win war completely without someone on the ground (but any doctrine of any western army never said that), but basically that it is the air force which decide the war. If you win the complete aerial dominance and you have enought of fighter jets you can even now probably win the conventional war on the ground with WWII Polish land forces. That is point of air-land battle doctrine.
It is different with asymetric wars. You can go to the Iran bomb them into the oblivion, then steam through them with Polish WWII land forces and any time anyone attacks your troops you can just withdrew from that city and make it into the dust with B-52s. But this tactics can not be really applied in case you are fighting with terrorists and you do not want to hurt local population. And also have favorable PR at home (not PR of someone who kills the children).
The problem is that we are not really fighting wars where air-land battle can be use to its full effectiveness. Either we are fighting assymetric conflict, or we are fighting wars with very strict ROE. Even if NATO decide to send its air forces to Ukraine you still can not have full aerial dominance, because that would mean attacking all the Russian airbases, command centers in Moscow etc. which could generate megatons of problems... And similarly would look war over Taiwan in my humble opinion.
If there are no friendly local armies to support (or, at the very least, "friendly" insurgent groups) why would the US even be considering an air campaign?
Please re-read my comment again. Not every war results in regime change. In fact, most wars don't. We don't need to bomb Moscow in order to defeat Russia in Ukraine. We only need to make it clear to Vladimir Putin that further fighting is fruitless and that accepting a peace agreement that preserves Ukrainian independence is the best option. To do this, a hypothetical NATO, EU or American intervention could enforce a no-fly zone over Ukrainian territory and conduct an air campaign against Russian troops who are inside Ukraine's internationally recognized borders.
Similarly, with regards to Taiwan, we don't need to fly B-21s over the Forbidden City in order to defeat the PLA. We only need to make it abundantly clear to Xi Jinping (or his successor) that launching an invasion of Taiwan would result in a catastrophic defeat for the PLA, and have the resources in place to make that defeat a reality should the People's Republic attempt to effect an invasion of the ROC anyway.
Nothing about defending Ukraine or China requires the US to commit to a large-scale bombing campaign against the Russian or Chinese homelands, or regime change in those respective countries.
quanticle:
But regime change is a likely result of losing a war and under dictatorship that tends to also result in the dictator losing his life (which is a large of why Putin in continuing the 'special military operation' despite it not even being worth winning).
"hypothetical NATO, EU or American intervention could enforce a no-fly zone over Ukrainian territory"
Do we - "we" being the combined air forces of the NATO member states, including the US - even have the ability to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine? Ukraine is pretty big for a European country, especially east-west, and as of now all our bases are either way to the west of their western border, or way to the south across the Black Sea. It would take a LOT of fighters, supported by a LOT of tankers, to maintain standing patrols over the length of the Russian-Ukrainian border. Said standing patrols would need to be in some strength, too, since we'd be trying to hedge out a fairly large and relatively modern air force, so the numbers involved would be even greater. It's a much taller order than previous no-fly zones enforced against the already-defeated remnants of the Iraqi or Serbian air forces.
@Philistine
Eurofighter Typhoon and Dassault Rafale should have range to attack land targets anywhere in Ukraine from Romanain airbases withou need for aerial refueling (and I would guess, based on Wiki numbers, that the same holds for Labunie in Poland).
If the European countries decide that they are willing to deplete their millitary stockpiles (HARM, Scalp, Taurus) bellow their minimum for war it is probably managable just by Europe. The problem is political. Even if the ROI would forbid european fighters to fly outside Ukraine, they would still need to permit them to attack air defence targets at least 150km in Russian territory, which is not going to happend, so no-fly zone is not going to happend.
@quanticle
Yes, I completelly agree with you. I was not saying that no-fly zone over Ukraine is bad (even it is not going to happend), I was only saying that the air-land battle could not be unleashed in its full power, because NATO would be heavily restricted by ROI.
@Philistine
You're probably right if we consider the no-fly zone a failure if anyone flies within it. But if we consider it basically a way of giving Ukraine air cover without officially coming in on-side, then we can probably shoot down a lot of Russian planes over the battle zone without too much difficulty, even if they can get through an occasional flight.