Iran’s Missile Strike on Israel – The attack, defence & Israel’s counter-strike

For years the shadow war between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Israel played out mostly indirectly or in the shadows. Iran would support various proxies like Hamas, Hezbollah or the Houthis, usually leaving them to take the risk and often retribution that came from striking Israeli territory directly. In turn, Israel officially did very little, although observers sometimes noted that it sure did seem like things the Iranian government might value, like weapons stockpiles in Syria or nuclear scientists, often sure did seem to have shorter lifespans than one might expect.

Earlier this month however, the conflict took on a much more overt and public turn, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps launching a massive missile and drone attack on Israeli territory from Iran. The attack flew into the face of one of the largest air defence operations of the 21st century. And so today we are going to talk about the Iranian operation, potential Israeli counterstrike, and what it all might mean for the very fluid strategic environment that is the Middle East. To do that I'll break this up into a couple of sections, firstly the Iranian attack, including a discussion of what Tehran might have been trying to achieve with the attack.

And which countries, if any, were major winners or losers as a result. Then we'll have a look at Israeli retaliatory capabilities and what it seems like they might have chosen to do so far. Before zooming out in closing to ask a wider question: namely, what if anything does this attack tell us about the nature of deterrence, war and conflict in the Middle East, and potentially more broadly? What does it mean to operate in an environment where you might expect to fire hundreds of missiles at a country one day and not expect to be at war the next. I think that's an interesting question with wider implications,.

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Covering, as I said, an unlimited number of devices with a 30 day money-back guarantee. So with my thanks to a long-term and valued sponsor, let's get back to it. And realistically that means introducing some caveats up front. It's important to understand that the episode that follows is about events that literally just happened. It's taking place in a context where no source is likely to be entirely truthful, and no source is likely to have all the relevant information. That doesn't mean every source is likely to be equally reliable, but it does make verification very difficult. I'll try and focus on those big picture elements where we can have at least some.

Degree of confidence over what actually happened, but keep in mind this is still early analysis based on an incomplete picture. But for today's episode we are jumping straight forward to the events of early this month that precipitated the Iranian missile and drone strikes. On the 1st of April reportedly an Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria, was suddenly struck, and when I say it was struck, as you can see on the right there the building was in fact comprehensively demolished. Israel didn't officially claim to be behind the attack, but the international community did broadly attribute it to them.

It was generally observed that Israel had launched other operations against targets in Syria in the past. And the fact this sort of apparent precision strike would be well within known Israeli military capabilities. Also relevant to the Israel dunnit theory was who was reportedly killed in the attack. With casualties reportedly including a Brigadier General of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of Iran, General Mohammad Zahedi, his deputy, a number of other IRGC advisers, all of whom were believed to be involved in the IRGC's Quds Force,.

Which we talked about in our video on Iranian military capabilities. Within the IRGC structure, it's the Quds Force that's responsible reportedly for interacting with many Iranian proxies and carrying out operations abroad. Zahedi was, as his rank suggested, a very senior member of the IRGC. He joined the guard in the early 1980s, held a command during the Iran-Iraq War. And with his death becomes the most senior Iranian military officer to be killed since Qasem Soleimani. There were also a number of reasons he would have been a person of interest to Israel, both generically because of the work with the Quds Force, engaging with various Iranian proxies and transferring weapons allegedly to places like Yemen.

But also potentially for reasons that might have been both more recent and potentially quite visceral. Reportedly, there have been some voices in Iran, including the Coalition Council of Islamic Revolutionary Forces, which in a statement reportedly hailed Zahedi's “Strategic role in forming and strengthening the Resistance Front, as well as in planning and executing the Al-Aqsa Storm,” Al-Aqsa Storm, by the way, is a reference to the October attacks on Israel from Gaza. The one in which approximately 1,200 Israelis were killed, 250 taken hostage,.

And which was generally expected to be the spark of the current Gaza war. If that were true, it might give the General's killing something of a historical precedent. But for now I'll leave that discussion to one side, and jump to the Iranian response that followed. Noting of course that when you are looking at reporting around events like these, a healthy dose of scepticism can sometimes be in order. Between the 1st of April and the Iranian attack actually being launched, the political build up seemed to play out in almost slow motion. Most international actors basically went out of their way to say that this had nothing to do with them. It was reported for example that the US had told Tehran that it had no involvement.

Or advanced knowledge of the Israeli strike in Damascus. And as most international actors seemed to be stepping away from the fight ring, leaving just the Israelis and Iranians in place, Iran started telegraphing pretty early that it was going to be doing something in response. The Iranian ambassador to Syria for example was reportedly quoted as saying that Iran would strike back at the same magnitude and harshness. As well as telegraphing an attack publicly, there's also a question over whether or not the Iranians signalled their intention in private. Iranian sources alleged that they gave the United States warning of the attacks.

Before they occurred, US officials deny that happened. But several other regional actors say they were warned in advance. And given that top secret information in diplomatic channels (along with high school gossip) are the only two things that humanity has yet discovered that are capable of travelling faster than the speed of light, it's entirely plausible that forewarning for just about any state in the region could very easily have become a long period of forewarning for the US and Israel. And given the way the defensive operation played out, I think it's clear that at the very least Israel and its various allies were pretty confident that an attack was coming.

Getting an exact figure on what weapons and how many weapons were fired by Iran against Israeli targets is obviously difficult. But there's been a set of figures reported by organisations like the Associated Press that might give us a good idea. They indicate that over the course of the attacks Iran launched approximately 170 drones, 30 cruise missiles, and about 120 ballistic missiles. And when looking at that attack, I think it's worth breaking it into its constituent components. Because they each represent very different capabilities and very different signals about the commitment of Iran to this attack.

But at a high level, I think it's worth noting that compared to some of the large scale Russian attacks we regularly see in Ukraine, this actually had a higher density of more expensive, more capable systems. Russia generally launches more Shahed drones than it does cruise or ballistic missiles. Here the Revolutionary Guards Corps, who remember in Iran control all these long-range weapon systems, appear to have gone with more of a 50/50 high/low mix. The drone component reportedly was mostly made up by different members of the Shahed family, 131s and 136s, which we are very familiar with given Russian usage of them in Ukraine. And perhaps, although I haven't seen any firm confirmation,.

A number of jet powered variants as well. These were likely the cheapest systems used, at tens of thousands of dollars per unit, but they would also be the most vulnerable to interception, carry relatively small warheads, and given the distances involved, while they did clearly have the range would generally take something like 5 or 6 hours to traverse the distance from Iran to Israel. More than enough time to get fighters in the air and defensive measures in place. The cruise missile component reportedly was the smallest part of the attack, and would have sat in the middle in terms of cost and capability. Interestingly, at least according to the reporting that's come out so far,.

The main missile the Iranians used for this component appears to have been the latest version of the Soumar cruise missile family, the Paveh. This is pretty much the top shelf of known Iranian cruise missile design, and it was only seen in public for the first time in 2023. But the most significant part of the Iranian attack by just about every measure other than sheer numbers, was almost certainly those 120 or so ballistic missiles. Unlike drones and cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, as the name suggests, fly a ballistic trajectory. While that does mean their launch is likely to be easier to detect, it also means they spend a lot of their flight path at much higher altitude.

Well beyond the capacity of many air defence systems to intercept. It's worth noting that Russia has been a major user of relatively short-range ballistic missiles in Ukraine, they have become known as some of the most difficult systems for Ukrainian air defences to intercept. By Middle Eastern standards, Iran has long been something of a missile superpower. Some estimates out there hold they have about 3,000 missiles in inventory, but those range a massive spectrum in terms of quality and range. Identifying what sort of missiles Iran used in this attack might give us some good clues about what they were trying to achieve,.

And what sort of investment in resources they made. And for various reasons I'll go into in a moment, I think the evidence points to the use largely of medium-range ballistic missile systems. Although here there's a quick bit of critical background on a topic I'm sure you never knew you desperately needed in your life: Iranian missile naming conventions. In many Western militaries, it can sometimes feel like you'd have better luck convincing the institution to embrace voluntary disarmament than to change the name of a system. Hundreds or thousands of modifications or technical improvements can be made that completely alter the performance characteristics of a system,.

And all you'll get for your trouble a lot of the time is a model or block number. Take a Cold War-era F-16 and a modern F-16 with an IESA radar, a new control system, new weapons integration options, and a variety of other improvements, and it's still going to be called an F-16. The oldest Abrams and newest Abrams have completely different guns, sensors, protection packages etc. but all it's got for its trouble so far is the addition of that A2 SEPv3 at the end. And who knows, by the time we are using rail gun equipped variants to fight off an alien invasion in the mid-2050s, maybe, just maybe, we'll be up to the A4 or something.

The downside of this is that when you hear something like “Ukraine is getting AMRAAM” or “Ukraine is getting F-16”, you don't know without further clarification whether that means something from the 1990s, or a piece of new-build 21st century air combat technology. Iranian practice by contrast is often at the extreme other end of the spectrum. If you take the Shahab-3 liquid-fuel medium range ballistic missile, which is a derivative of a North Korean design. Well, extend the range of the missile, new name. Improve the guidance system, new name.

Or in the case of another Iranian missile system, show it off to the public one year, and then show off the same missile again the next year and, believe it or not, new name. All this to say, that when someone talks about Iran potentially using a combination of missiles, say for example (and please forgive the pronunciation here) the Emad or Ghadr-110, in any other military they'd be describing the usage of (in that case) increasingly fancy versions of the Shahab-3. It's those Shahab-3 derivatives, along with the solid-fuelled missile, the Kheibar Shekan, (which only entered service in 2022) that reportedly played at least some role in this attack. That would be significant, because it suggests Iran used.

Some of its best available systems to launch the operation. And I think there's a couple of bits of evidence that allow us to be at least moderately confident that that's exactly what they did. We can start with a simple physics-driven process of elimination. Missiles fired from Iran to Israel need the range to be able to do so. Which basically instantly rules out all of the shorter-ranged cheaper systems. Similarly, physics allows us to eliminate some systems based on what we know about the intercepts. We have videos of some missiles being shot down in what look like exo-atmospheric intercepts, that is, interceptions that took place outside of Earth's atmosphere.

But if you're going to have literal space battles, you need a missile to be able to reach that altitude. And while a lot of shorter-range missiles do travel on ballistic trajectories, systems like ATACMS or Iskander never make it into space. And we do have reported statements from Iranian sources suggesting that those longer-ranged MRBM systems like the Emad were used. Then of course we have wreckage, some of which has been shown off by the IDF, other images supposedly taken in places like Iraq. In all the cases I've seen, the wreckage recovered seems to be far too large to be part of a cheaper, short-range option.

For the sake of comparison there I've included an image of the Russian Iskander TBM on the [bottom] and a missile segment claimed recovered by the IDF on the [top]. As you can see, the Russian system has something of a length disadvantage when it comes to its Iranian peer, something which indicates this was a longer-ranged system. That leaves us with a suite of Iranian medium-range options that might be the culprit, but given the apparent targets, it probably makes more sense for some of the more modern options to be used. The older Shahab-3 missiles for example, which still make up a part of the Iranian inventory as far as we know, have the range necessary to reach Israel, but they're also believed to have a Circular Error Probable of about 2.5 kilometres.

That's probably not the level of accuracy you are going to want if you intend to target things like hangers or runways. So while our confidence level isn't great, our final picture of what the Iranian attack looked like is probably something like this. A combination of relatively cheap drones and reasonably expensive cruise missiles flying a path across Iraq and Jordan to make it to Israel, while more than a 100 of some of Iran's best medium-range ballistic missiles were fired directly against Israeli targets. An interesting observation here is those attacks don't appear.

To have been synced up to arrive at the same time. With their much faster flight time, the ballistic missiles appear to have arrived in Israeli territory at a different time than a lot of the drones and cruise missiles. Which I can only presume is the way the operation was designed. Unless everyone in the IRGC is under the mistaken assumption that drones can somehow fast travel. Once the Iranian attack was launched, the air defence story began. And from what we can tell so far, a lot of that effort appears to have been by various multinational forces a long way from Israeli airspace. Because they were flying at relatively low altitude, Iran's drones and cruise missiles in particular.

Had to pass through the gauntlet of Iraqi and Jordanian airspace. There they were engaged by a variety of assets, including US aircraft and the Royal Jordanian Air Force, who don't appear to have been too keen to allow Iranian projectiles to continue flying over their territory. As well as various ground and sea-launched interceptor missiles. A US Patriot battery in Iraq for example is reported to have engaged some Iranian targets. While in sum total, US Central Command claims to have destroyed about half of all the Iranian drones used in the attack. They also claim to have destroyed about 6 Iranian ballistic missiles,.

Including one that was destroyed on the launch pad in Yemen before it could be fired. While we don't know how many of the Shahed drones might have made it to Israeli airspace, the numbers on claimed intercepts do add up. Out of 170 supposedly launched, the US claims to have destroyed 80, Britain an undisclosed number, the reports are the Jordanian Air Force destroyed dozens of targets over its territory, giving a lower bound of 24. While France, like the United Kingdom, didn't give a number. But even if we gave those ancient allies credit for only a single drone each, that would still be a clear majority of the drones accounted for.

Before they reached Israeli air defences. What these largely fighter-based interceptions couldn't engage however, were the ballistic missile attacks. But here too it's possible that a number of systems never made it to Israeli airspace. Again due to a multinational effort, but here it's Iran itself that really gets to take the prize. With some Western sources reporting that as many as 50% of Iran's ballistic missiles may have suffered technical failure and fallen short of their targets, rather than being intercepted. That's incredibly hard to validate, and I'd recommend taking the claim accordingly. But if it were to turn out to be true, you could probably argue the most effective.

Anti-ballistic missile defence system of the night was not the American Aegis system, or the Israeli Arrow, but the no doubt exemplary efforts of Iranian quality control. Then having crossed the intimidating gauntlet of allied air defences and questionable manufacturing standards, a substantial number of surviving Iranian projectiles made it to the area of responsibility for Israel's integrated air defence system. We've talked about the Israeli air defence system before, but this attack was really the first opportunity for some of its higher-end elements to be tested at scale under combat conditions. The Israeli approach relies on layers of different systems.

Separated from one another by major differences in range, cost and capability, as well as the targets they are intended to engage. At the lower end, the famous Iron Dome system functions as a short-range defence system against relatively uncomplicated threats. Its interceptors might only cost $50,000 per shot and be used to engage targets like incoming artillery rockets, artillery shells, or potentially, slow and vulnerable incoming targets like drones. The intermediate David's Sling system is capable of engaging even ballistic targets over a much longer distance.

While Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 are true anti-ballistic missile options, costing millions of dollars per shot, but in the case of the Arrow 3 is advertised as being capable of engaging advanced ballistic missile threats even outside the bounds of Earth's atmosphere. I should note that even though we have evidence of at least one extreme altitude interception taking place, we can't be sure if that was the result of Arrow being used, or because the US Navy was reportedly able to use its SM-3 anti-ballistic missile under combat conditions for the first time. This tiered nature of the Israeli air defence system.

Probably means it's less vulnerable than some other air defence systems to high/low tactics. You can't really spam the Israeli system with artillery rockets or cheap drones in order to run it out of interceptors and then fire ballistic missiles at it. Because the system intended to engage those high-end ballistic missile threats, Arrow, would never be fired at an artillery rocket or a drone. That doesn't of course mean the system isn't incredibly expensive to operate, but it may have played something of a role in the results we ultimately ended up seeing. Once missiles started reaching their target areas, the true battle began. Namely, the internet arguments over just how much damage had been done.

Israel claimed a 99% success rate, which with some basic high school maths suggests that at most maybe 3 or 4 systems got through. By contrast online, there was all sorts of narratives of tremendous damage being done. I found this video on a number of occasions for example, which claimed to show a massive inferno at an Israeli airbase in the Negev Desert. In reality, it was an old video of a fire in South America. It actually got to the point where the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps itself had to make public comment in order to say it had done less damage than some sources were claiming. In particular an IRGC spokesman would come out to rebut claims.

That Iran had targeted Israeli nuclear facilities, reportedly saying, “The Dimona nuclear facility has not been among the aims of the Islamic Republic of Iran's penalising measures. And the publications of such a big lie is a malicious move in line with the enemy's psychological warfare to deceive public opinion.” Obviously statements like that should be taken with an appropriate grain of salt, but it did add an interesting dynamic to the overall public debate over just how damaging these strikes had been. As best we can tell, based on some of the satellite imagery,.

Photography and reports that have started to come out since the attack, it does look like there were more than just 3 impacts in Israeli territory against more than one target. A number of Israeli media reports, as well as this report from the Washington Post, indicated that Iranian projectiles impacted in a number of areas. Ballistic missile impacts were reported at both Ramon and Nevatim air bases in southern Israel, alongside other potential impacts on the Golan Heights. Based on the imagery that's come out so far, the damage to the two air bases appears to be relatively minor, with some damage to runways, hangers and maybe a C-130. Counting exactly how many missiles may have hit these targets is always going to be difficult.

Some of the damage shown in video images released by the Israeli Defence Force appears to have been caused by things other than a massive missile warhead. Smaller craters or signs of damage for example, may instead have been caused by falling debris. A cautious early assessment however, would probably be that a 99% interception claim is probably too aggressive. There's too much reporting and evidence of impacts to feel comfortable with that figure, given what we've been told about the scale of the operation. At the same time this was reportedly a relatively low casualty event, and we aren't exactly talking about air bases full of burning F-35s.

With the assessed damage, especially relative to the amount of missiles that were launched, being relatively minor. Which brings us then to the question of effectiveness: did these attacks accomplish what they were meant to accomplish? Unfortunately for us, most nations are usually not obliging enough to publish their top secret planning documents on-line. And the combination of the War Thunder forums and the occasional hilariously over-cleared Air National Guardsmen can only take us so far. So usually we're left trying to reverse engineer an objective from public statements by both sides,.

As well as the actual composition of the strikes and the apparent targets. The problem with these attacks, from a purely military perspective, is that there's no real prospect of Iran being able to defeat Israel by bombarding it. Or even gain much, if anything, of a net military advantage by doing so. In Ukraine, long-range drone and missile attacks by both sides on roughly this sort of scale aren't just not unheard of, they are now relatively frequent events. And there it's conceivably possible that sustained missile and drone attacks might succeed in stretching opposing air defences, creating gaps, or depleting magazines. For the Iranians however, basically none of that logic applies.

Israel is too geographically compact for its air defence system to be geographically stretched. Israel's capacity for missile defence and domestic economic resources are both greater than Ukraine's, and so the purpose, the potential underlying calculus, just isn't as clear. So if the Iranian strike may not have made sense from a purely military perspective, it seems reasonable to assume that at least part of its purpose might have been driven by politics and messaging. But even if we accept that, I'm not sure that all theories about just how damaging this Iranian attack was meant to be are equally valid. And to demonstrate that let's quickly look at two extremes of interpretation.

So theory one is that this attack was genuinely intended to do the maximum possible amount of damage. But if that was the case one reasons, it probably would have been carried out by surprise, rather than arguably being better telegraphed than some Hollywood releases. Secondly it probably would have just been carried out on a larger scale, more drones, more cruise missiles. The target profile might have been different. Ballistic missiles impacting on an urban area for example, would potentially be a mass-casualty event. And perhaps most importantly, if the only objective was causing as much damage to Israel as possible, you have to imagine that Iran would have made the decision to engage Hezbollah.

If you are trying to break through a missile defence system like the Israeli one using saturation tactics, as the name suggests – numbers matter. You need to present the system with so many threats over such a short period of time that racks are emptied, magazines drained, and ultimately you start to get missiles through to their targets using the Zapp Brannigan school of counter-air defence strategy. That is going to be much, much harder for the IRGC to do only launching missiles from Yemen and Iranian territory, as opposed to leveraging the enormous missile arsenal of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Whereas attacks from Iran have to rely on things like Shahed drones,.

Cruise missiles and medium-range ballistic missiles, anything with a range longer than a medieval catapult can probably hit something in Israel from Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon. Hezbollah also just has an enormous arsenal available to them. A lot of those wouldn't be particularly notable in this sort of attack scenario, things like ATGMs for example or short-range artillery rockets. But that list on the right there includes a slew of short-range ballistic missiles that could potentially have been used to try to overstress Israeli air defences while also bypassing coalition defence operations in places like Iraq and Jordan.

However, so far at least, Hezbollah has stayed pretty much on the bench. At the same time I don't think we should chalk up the attack as being merely symbolic, because while in the end the only known casualties caused were literally collateral damage, it's very clear from the attack profile that things could have been different. And the IRGC threw a lot of very valuable assets into this. For example, riddle me this: if the attack was intended to be purely symbolic with all of these missiles being intercepted, why would you deploy some of your most capable cruise missiles that you only showed off for the first time in 2022, rather than older versions? Specifically older versions that still have the necessary range,.

But are less accurate or less capable of penetrating defences. Why would you fire more than 100 ballistic missiles, which may have required a mobilisation of a majority, or even close to all of Iran's MRBM launchers? Why would you fire modern missile systems that are available in smaller numbers, are more expensive, and often differ from some of the older systems you have primarily in the fact that they are meant to be more accurate and more capable of getting through defence systems? Iran might have thousands of ballistic missiles, but MRBMs are a minority of that inventory. And some of those most modern systems that were used are a minority of that minority.

Plus, if all you want is a purely symbolic exchange where none of your missiles make their way to specific Israeli targets, then arguably you have a lot to lose and very little to gain by deploying systems whose primary selling point is meant to be that they are more precise and more capable of getting through missile defences. If they don't get through the defences, congratulations, you've just wrecked your own propaganda. And quite possibly boosted international demand for Israeli-built anti-ballistic missile systems in the process. Meanwhile if they do work, get through the defences and destroy.

A bunch of valuable personnel and equipment, well, you didn't wreck your own propaganda, but you did wreck the whole symbolism thing. Because now your symbolic attack has a few shades of Pearl Harbour about it, and the chance of retribution increases significantly. With this attack Iran didn't throw everything it could at Israel, but it threw some of the best it had. After the fact we've had IRGC statements trying to characterise this attack as one carried out using only minimal or obsolete weapons. With the IRGC pointing to the claim that a number of borderline experimental systems for example weren't used.

But it's hard to describe using systems like Emad or your latest cruise missile as “minimal or obsolete from an Iranian perspective.” Emad is nearly 10 years newer than the Russian Iskander system, and has more than two decades on the first American ATACMS. And if early versions of the Kheibar Shekan were used, as reported by some sources, then you are talking about a missile that was first shown off to the public in the ancient, far past era of 2022. Iran likely did have some systems in inventory that it didn't use in this attack, but it also does appear to have sent a lot of some of its best.

And to me, that suggests that there was an intention despite the forewarning and the pulled punches to do some serious damage. Just a certain, calibrated, amount of damage. An element to establish here is that when you look at this attack or many other military actions that take place in the Middle East, or indeed sometimes elsewhere, is that the driving force behind the plan does not appear to have been simple military utility. To me, this operation doesn't look like something a bunch of military planners would have come up with if they were told that their core brief was to bring about their opponent's decisive military defeat and allow Iran to impose its will on Israel.

Instead, it's an operation that looks like it was optimised for some other goal. It is resource intensive, it's risky, and it's not clear how exactly it's meant to meaningfully contribute to the military defeat of an opponent. But if you view the attack through a primarily political lens, then perhaps it starts to make more sense. Showing off new technology, penetrating the Israeli air defence system, doing some damage to Israeli military targets, are all things that might be interpreted as demonstrating Tehran's military capability. And I've seen a number of pro-Iranian sources describe the attack.

As a carefully calibrated sub-threshold response. One where the goal was to demonstrate that Iran was not deterred and [was] willing to strike Israel, but without causing so much damage that Israel or the United States called “game over”. Those are some of the reasons why it argued the attack was neither ultimately empty symbolism, or an all-out military effort. It was more resource intensive than it needed to be and less destructive than it could have been. And so if we proceed on the assumption (noting it is an assumption) that those were the Iranian goals involved, then the results of the operation were probably mixed at best. Iran did demonstrate it could reach Israeli territory,.

But didn't demonstrate a capacity to comprehensively defeat Israel's missile defences. They expended a number of Israeli missile interceptors, but at a cost of many of their own missiles. And while there may have been a symbolic advantage gained by launching weapons against Israel directly, politically speaking, doing so probably strengthened Israel's diplomatic hand internationally, and took some degree of international attention off the ongoing situation in Gaza. All of which is a way of saying that just because you calibrate an action to try and achieve a particular response, that doesn't guarantee you'll get it. Now a calibrated action it might have been, but also probably an expensive one.

Both in terms of the cost of launching the attack and also fending it off. And so since this is a Perun video, we do have to spend a moment talking about the defence economics of all this. Because, perhaps in part because the missile attack failed to do much in the way of significant military damage to Israeli targets, a lot of attention instead seems to have been pointed at the relative cost of interception. With a number of articles picking up on the idea that it might have cost Israel perhaps a billion dollars in order to defend against these attacks, while the Iranians supposedly were able to launch it on the cheap.

Now make no mistake, shot exchange and sustainability do matter. If for example, Iran was able to generate an attack for $10 million that required a billion dollars worth of interceptors to fend off, and then critically was able to repeat that exercise again, and again, and again, eventually Israel's air defence potential, like Ukraine's, would come under intense pressure and potentially start to crack. But ultimately, and I know this is out of character, I think the sustainability question here is probably less significant than it is in places like Ukraine. For one, because in Ukraine it's the attacker which has the financial.

And resource advantage over the defender, whereas in this case Israel, let alone Israel and its various supporters, has a significantly greater pool of military and financial resources to draw on. Plus, in this case, I think the imbalance between the attacker and defender in terms of resources expended is perhaps a little less cut and dried than it is with cases like drone attacks in Ukraine. The first reason is that often the cost data being used, particularly on the Iranian side, can be more than a little dubious. Let's be clear, costing anything that comes out of the Iranian military-industrial complex is going to be difficult from the start.

Just about all the entities involved are going to be state-owned enterprises, bonyads, or similar. There's often zero in the way of financial transparency and reporting requirements, and no profit motive. So costing Iranian production is notoriously difficult, and some of the data out there causes me to raise a bit of an eyebrow. If you remember the video I did on the Indian military, I pointed out some cases there where Wikipedia articles for Indian weapon systems were using sources that didn't always match the claim they were being claimed to match. Well, in some articles on Iranian systems, they avoid the dubious source problem by just not using a source. The Kheibar Shekan

MRBM that entered service in 2022 for example.

Is cited as costing 300,000 US dollars per unit. But your guess is as good as mine on where that number came from. If you want a cost comparison, much smaller TBMs produced by countries like Russia or the United States are usually going to be 7 figure weapons despite being considerably smaller. Perhaps the most extreme example I saw was a claim that Iran's ballistic missiles used during the attack cost about £80,000 per unit, or just under 100,000 US dollars. And that Iran had thousands of them in store. That I think potentially falls into the trap of another issue when it comes to costing estimates. People looking at the entire Iranian ballistic missile inventory,.

Including the thousands of short-range ballistic missiles and old crap they still have an inventory, and applying those costs to an attack that seems to have been conducted with a bunch of higher-end medium range systems. Put another way, if Iran actually could build a medium-range ballistic missile with a range of 2,000 kilometres, a CEP of a couple of metres, and the ability to manoeuvre through any missile defence system, all for less than the cost of a higher end Cybertruck, then I actually think they are going about their national security strategy all wrong. Their goal if that's the case, should just be to negotiate an end.

To international sanctions by any means necessary, which will presumably give them access to more components and bring down costs even further. Then they could just become a fabulously wealthy manufacturing superpower by exporting their miraculously cheap weapon systems. Forget trying to break through the Israeli air defence system, at that point you'd be able to buy the companies that maintain it. Now if you wanted to stay focused on the issue of shot exchange in this recent attack, there are a couple of other factors you could go through. You could try and determine how many missiles actually needed.

To be intercepted versus suffered technical failure. How many needed to be intercepted by Israel? How many interceptors might have been fired per incoming ballistic missile versus how many threats might have been dealt with by David's Sling or Iron Dome? You could even turn around and try and factor in some opportunity cost elements. When Iran fires a missile at Israel for example, it may not just be giving up the cost of the missile, it may potentially be giving up the potential profit it might have realised if it had sold that system to Russia instead. Noting that Russia has reportedly been willing to pay quite a premium for some Iranian systems,.

But is probably more likely to pay full price for systems that are intact rather than scattered as debris across the Iraqi, Jordanian or Israeli countryside. But I'm not sure in that case that that would actually be the most useful way to analyse all this, because it doesn't appear to have been central to what Iran was trying to achieve. This doesn't appear to have been part of a sustained, attritional-based campaign to wear the Israeli air-defence system out of missiles or tax the Israeli budget. But instead one which might have been aimed at a variety of political, signalling and military goals. So if we are going to embrace a more holistic set of criteria here than just counting the dollars expended on both sides,.

How might we (for lack of a better term) assess who the winners and losers were out of Iran's attack? And here unfortunately, like many other things in the Middle East, I think the answer is a bit messy. Because even though a lot of resources have been expended and a number of lives impacted, I'd argue the balance of net impact isn't entirely cut and dried. There are a couple of elements to come out of this that Iran might claim as wins. By launching this attack they clearly demonstrated that they were willing to launch the attack, that they were not deterred from doing so. And that message was arguably reinforced by them crossing a threshold they'd never crossed before, a direct missile attack from Iran to Israel.

Pro-Iranian sources also put a lot of emphasis on the fact that they were able to get a number of missiles apparently to their targets despite what appears to have been a massive missile and air defence effort not just by Israel, but by a number of allies. That provides empirical evidence demonstrating that the Israeli air defence system isn't perfect. It can leak, and if you throw enough stuff at it something might get through. On the flip side this was clearly a major offensive effort on Iran's part, involved the use of some valuable resources, and if it did prove a point I don't think it was one that was being seriously argued.

Most observers have long assessed that the Israeli air defence system is one of the most complex and capable in the world. But I'm not sure how many serious commentators there were out there saying that it was perfect, or that it would be able to deliver 100% success rates against incoming ballistic threats. Missile defence is a very, very difficult game. And even the US military with its much greater resources, has shown time and time again that it can't always protect its facilities or its personnel against attacks by ballistic missiles. So yes, some of what Iran fired may have got through,.

But to the extent it did, that's probably to be expected. There's also the argument that, directly or indirectly, Iran may have contributed to strengthening Israel's defences in the future by launching this attack. The IDF now has additional data on what it looks like to be under Iranian missile attack. And while there's been a lot of focus on the cost of fending off the attack in monetary terms, the US aid package to Israel, which this attack seems to have helped un-stick, looks like it's going to go a long way in the other direction. That package contains 4 billion US dollars for replenishing Israeli stocks of air defence missiles, 1.2 billion US dollars for the Iron Beam system,.

And close to $2.5 billion for US operations in the region. The attack may also have frustrated some other nations in the region. Generally countries aren't a huge fan of you firing projectiles through their airspace, and may also potentially prompt additional international sanctions on the Iranian government or members of the IRGC. Whether all of that represents a worthwhile trade or not for the capability demonstrated, I'll leave to the audience. For Israel too, assessing a potential win or loss is probably a matter of perspective and priority. Israel proved its air defence system was effective, but not perfect.

It proved it still had international allies that were willing to intervene directly to defend it. But at the same time, those allies called on it not to strike back. It was made clear that Iran wasn't deterred from launching an attack like this one, but at the same time, that Tehran was cautious about contributing all of its potential assets to the operation. And of course, there are all the wonderful vagaries involved whenever you talk about Israeli internal politics. I'd argue if there are any clear winners or losers out of this attack, it's probably not the Iranians or the Israelis.

For US allies in Ukraine or the Asia-Pacific, Iran's missile attack appears to have done its part to un-stick aid in the US House. That means billions of dollars of US assistance will soon be flowing to those regions, and we'll look at the potential implications of that in the future. But I can't imagine Moscow is thrilled with the idea either of that aid package being passed, or the Iranians firing a lot of perfectly functional ordnance that could otherwise have been sold. And critically, all of that analysis around potential winners and losers may still very much be a work in progress. Because even though Iran indicated after it launched the attack.

That it now considered the matter concluded and the game was over, what we've seen in the last few days is that despite Iran's warnings to the contrary, the Israelis may have chosen to respond regardless. It's a state of affairs that demands (I paraphrase a traditional Australian saying), namely that in international affairs, as in so many things in life, when you start shit, there is often a non-zero chance of getting hit. So now I want to pivot to talking about some of the tools Israel has available to it, that have enough reach to strike at Iranian territory. Note we will get to how Israel has apparently chosen to strike so far at the end,.

But just in case this isn't all over yet, let's have a look at the tool kit. A majority of Israel's conventional long-range strike potential is provided by the Israeli Air Force. Here there's a range of platforms that could be used, but the one with the greatest combination of payload and reach would probably be the F-15I. While the F-15 is perhaps best known as an air superiority platform, the Israeli version, the Ra'am, is a two-seater roughly equivalent to the American F-15E Strike Eagle. The squadron that flies the F-15I, the so-called “Hammers”, specialise in using the platform in the long-range, almost quasi-strategic, bombing role. And with the right payload, even without mid-air refuelling,.

The F-15I does have the legs hypothetically to make it to Iran, drop off a delivery of some kind, and then make it back to Israeli airspace. The problem with the aircraft as a long range strike platform isn't so much its range or payload limitations, as the fact that everyone would be able to see it. This is a chonker of a 4th generation aircraft that would probably be carrying significant external payload, that would have to make its way over some combination of Syrian, Jordanian and Iraqi airspace. Meaning that just as the world was able to see Iran's drones and cruise missiles headed towards Israel, there would be no shortage of observers in the region.

And potentially Iran's own integrated air defence system that will be able to see them coming too. So if used against Iranian targets, you would expect it either to be part of a larger operation that degraded Iranian air defences, or an operation that employed some sort of stand-off munition to keep the aircraft themselves out of Iranian reach. Which by the way, might be exactly what we've seen happen, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. Let's instead assume for a moment that the Israeli Air Force might be looking for an option that didn't involve pushing a 4th generation fighter too close to Iranian air defences. An intuitive option then might be to instead leverage the Israeli version of the F-35, the so-called Adir.

F-35 is a much more subtle, low-visibility platform when flying in a clean configuration. And they are likely to be survivable enough against enemy air defences that you might not need to send even more aircraft along with the strike to suppress or destroy those air defences in order to allow other aircraft in the formation to press on to the target. The problem here is that while the F-15I can probably comfortably make it to Iran and back, the Adir can do it but only in a way that would probably put constraints on payload, configuration, flight plan and the amount of manoeuvring pilots could potentially do during any operation. Strapping too many external stores to the thing for example would be like.

Putting a person in a ghillie suit and then making them wear a hi vis vest. The underlying platform might still be stealthy, but no one's going to have any trouble seeing your chosen accessories. Basically, one of the greatest barriers to any Israeli Air Force operation against targets in Iranian territory is just going to be the distance between them. And with none of those intervening countries being particularly keen to look like they are actively assisting or condoning any Israeli long-range air strikes, the chance of being able to set up mid-air refuelling in any of those countries is also probably minimal. The US Air Force is probably not going to be particularly keen to fill up the tanks of an Israeli aircraft.

That's doing exactly what the American government is telling the Israelis not to do. And if you thought people might notice an F-15I flying over the skies of Iraq, then they are almost definitely going to know something's up if they see a formation that includes a Boeing 707 or a KC-130. Then we need to point out that Iran isn't the only country here with access to long-range missiles. And Israeli Jericho missiles are believed to be related to the proven Shavit 2 launch vehicle, which has been successfully putting objects into orbit since the late 1980s. Now if practicality were the only concern, this is probably not the system that Israel would go with here. Not just because this is a very expensive and limited way to deliver payloads over long distances,.

But also because it's commonly understood that the potentially intended payloads for the Jericho missiles might be considerably more damaging to their targets than regular high explosive. And even Israel's closest allies would probably view that sort of response as just a slight overreaction. Now this hasn't been an exhaustive run through of every long-range system Israel has. But hopefully it provides some background on the tool kit to underpin the next section, where we discuss how Israel may have calculated its response options, and then look at the option it appears to have gone with. And so to do that, I thought we'd start with some response and escalation management 101. OK, so congratulations, your nation has been attacked.

And you need to decide on a retaliatory option. What I've thrown up there is a pretty basic graphic to help you decide how you are going to do it. What it lets you do is basically dial in a response based on two axes. Firstly, how actually damaging and large scale do you want the attack to be? Ranging from a passive/aggressive Twitter post at one extreme, or all the way through to the deployment of weapons of mass destruction. The other axis is about the sensitivity, symbolism and importance of the target. Targeting proxy forces for example, is going to be far less sensitive than, say, striking against your opponent's presidential palace.

And depending on what your priorities are and what you're trying to achieve, you might choose to pick a response option at different points on that chart. So to illustrate how this might work, let's go through a few of them, starting in the bottom left corner. In the bottom left corner, a low intensity option against a low sensitivity target would be to basically do nothing. Don't strike back militarily, but instead cash in as many diplomatic benefits as possible. This might have been a difficult ask in the context of Israeli coalition politics, but it probably would have won Israel some diplomatic points with its various allies and the international community more broadly.

The risk however from an Israeli perspective may have been that if they did nothing, Iranian decision makers may have assessed that their attack succeeded in deterring Israel. An example of a high-intensity option against a low sensitivity target, would have been perhaps to intensify military operations against Iranian proxies in Israel's proximity. Locations in Syria or Lebanon for example are much closer to Israeli bases than those in Iran. And so the IDF has a lot more potential to direct firepower against them than it does against targets further away. On the flip side, a low-intensity option against a medium to high sensitivity target.

Probably would have meant hitting something in Iran. This – spoiler alert – appears to have been the option Israel ultimately ended up going with. Although with a response like this one, when you are trying to select a response as a decision maker, there's still a spectrum of options involved. Israel could have elected to strike something completely unimportant with limited demonstrative value, or, hypothetically, it could have chosen to target something extremely sensitive. Which leads to an option that got more than its fair share of media commentary and speculation, an Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear facilities. Now remember, Iran is very clear that it does not have a nuclear weapons program.

It just is a civilian program that keeps accidentally enriching uranium well above the levels required for civilian use and close to weapons grade. And I'm actually entirely serious about part of that. When the International Atomic Energy Agency detected uranium enriched to an 83.7% level of purity, just shy of the roughly 90% you'd need to turn any time zone into a morning time zone with a click of a button, Iran's reported response was legitimately: “that unintended fluctuations in enrichment levels may have occurred during transition period at the time of commissioning the process of 60% product, or while replacing the feed cylinder.”.

I'll leave it to the audience to decide which option is scarier: a country deliberately making bomb grade material, or a country doing it by accident. In any case, Israel has long declared that Iran is pushing towards nuclear weapons capability. And the IAEA was reportedly so concerned that Israel might after this last round of strikes attack Iran's nuclear facilities, that it temporarily suspended inspections at Iranian sites and kept its inspectors at home. To an extent you can see the logic behind that kind of suspicion, these would obviously be very valuable targets. And Israel does have a historical record of launching strikes against nuclear facilities.

Operation Opera against some of Saddam Hussein's facilities in the 1980s, or strikes in the early 2000s against targets in Syria. But I think there's a few reasons to suggest that an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities now was always going to be unlikely. It would be a difficult mission against hardened targets protected by concentrated Iranian air defences. Even if the Israeli Air Force could make it to the target, there's a question over whether or not any of the conventional weapons in Israeli inventory are really powerful enough to crack some of these hardened facilities. And even if they could, there would obviously be massive political and diplomatic implications,.

As well as a question of whether or not the attacks could be repeated. Once a country commits to assembling an atomic weapon, it is probably going to take more than one strike to make sure they never do so. Facilities can be restored and repaired, new ones can be built. And with enough resources and a public justification both being thrown at the problem, there's a non-zero possibility that an air strike actually speeds up Iran's path to a nuclear weapon rather than slowing it. In a nutshell, if there's ever going to be a strike against the Iranian nuclear program, Israel is probably going to want the United States to be in on it.

The US can get a lot more payload into Iranian airspace, has a lot more dedicated systems for destroying harder targets, and is going to be much more able to repeat and sustain those sort of attacks, if necessary, than Israel is. So while you can never rule anything out in international relations, and this one will probably keep popping up in the media, for now I put this sort of scenario at the extreme end of the available Israeli options. And I think we saw a hint of that with the option Israel ultimately seems to have gone with. Obviously here there's still plenty of ambiguity and unknowns,.

And Israel may yet carry out more operations. But so far as what's already happened, let's start with some of the things that multiple sources seem to agree on. Both the Iranian government and Western media sources seem to agree that a couple of days ago something happened near Isfahan. That's notable because the region is home to some strategic locations, including air bases, defence manufacturing, and facilities belonging to Iran's nuclear program. There also seems to be agreement that a number of small drones may have been involved. Iranian officials and media have claimed that 3 small drones were shot down.

With Iran's Foreign Minister appearing to clarify that these weren't long-range strike drones, but rather small quadrotors. As he put it, “They are more like the toys that our children play with, not drones.” Finally, everyone seems to agree that Israel hasn't officially claimed responsibility, and that Iran isn't quick to blame them. With the Iranian Foreign Minister essentially saying that no connection to Israel had been proven. It's at this point however, that views of the potential incident start to diverge. According to some but not all Iranian sources, what you've heard so far is basically all there was to this.

A couple of small quadcopters launched by infiltrators from within Iranian territory that were successfully engaged by air defence systems. However, according to some Western media reports, and importantly satellite imagery, there might be one extra teensy tiny detail. Those reports and images seem to suggest that something, likely a precision missile, hit and either damaged or destroyed the primary radar system of an Iranian S-300 battery located at the 8th Shikari airbase in Isfahan. It would probably make this operation, to use our old chart, a low intensity strike against a medium to high sensitivity target.

The damage involved is clearly very minor. So little damage in fact that the Iranian government so far has been able to basically write off the attack and justify non-retaliation. But at the same time, the sensitivity of the target probably has some impact from a deterrence perspective, S-300 is probably the best air defence system the Iranians have. It was in a sensitive location defending an air base in an area which is home to some of Iran's most valuable facilities. The underlying message might be then that Israeli systems can reach that location,.

Penetrate the defences and potentially hit other more valuable targets if a decision is made to do so. As perverse as it might sound, what that sort of thinking does is transform these missile strikes from distinctly military actions into a form of political signalling. Where the goal probably isn't so much to achieve decisive military results, as it is to convey intention and capability. Now normally you might think that missile strikes are very expensive and impractical alternatives to a message that arguably could have been an email. But this is the Middle East in the 21st century,.

Where sometimes communication has a tendency to become kinetic. Which leads me into the final and perhaps the most important part of this presentation. Namely what this recent exchange might mean for our understanding of what it means to be at war or peace. And how deterrence and conflict might function in the region and potentially the wider world going forward. To start this section I'm going to ask what you'd probably think would be a relatively simple question, but really isn't. Namely, given that Iranian military forces just openly carried out a mass missile and drone attack against Israeli territory and that Israel then apparently reciprocated,.

Are Iran and Israel at war? I mean usually a major long-range attack against an opponent's military infrastructure would generally be perceived to be an act of war. But while they are clearly not entirely at peace, you can't really call the current situation an all-out war either. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, as with many parts of history, war was often thought of as being a binary state. Peace of a kind might be considered the default. And historically in many cultures it became the norm that if peace ended.

You would send some sort of message or communication to your neighbour informing them that you were no longer cool, and that you would shortly be seeing them on the battlefield. That was by no means a universal practice, but when you look at how international law has evolved, a significant amount of it has done so on the assumption that countries are either in a state of war or a state of peace. Not somewhere in that messy grey middle ground. However, of course it was a simple reality that countries could compete with each other in ways that fell short of full-scale war. And especially post the invention of the atomic weapon, countries had plenty of incentive to do so.

The United States and Soviet Union had very few reasons to just get along. But at the same time, both had a pretty strong incentive to avoid global thermonuclear annihilation. And so in circumstances like that one, you start to see more discussion around ideas like escalation ladders, grey zone warfare, and the idea that there exists this escalating ladder of mechanisms you can use to put pressure on an opponent without making the leap into sparking a full-scale direct state-on-state conventional war. Supplying proxy forces for example was very common throughout the Cold War, and has arguably continued to be relatively common in the 21st century. Sponsoring and potentially controlling proxy forces.

Might allow a country to influence the outcome of a particular situation without directly and publicly engaging their own forces. That last bit is particularly significant because throughout the Cold War, and to an extent even today, there existed this understanding that if for example American troops were to directly engage Soviet troops even say in a relatively short fire fight, there would be a risk of that situation escalating in an uncontrolled fashion until the stage where the place it all started could be called a flashpoint in more than one sense of the word. You still sometimes see evidence in media and public discourse that when it comes to escalation management there are very clear red lines.

There was an article in the Guardian recently, and one line really stood out, it was discussing the potential for an Israeli counter-strike against Iranian territory. And it said the following, “Any direct attack on military or infrastructure targets inside Iran would almost certainly trigger all-out war.” It's not stated as a risk or a concern, it's stated as a fact, an inevitability. And my question to that is basically: why? Iran had just done exactly what the article suggested: striking military targets inside Israeli territory without sparking a full-scale war. And based on the most recent evidence available to us,.

It seems like potentially small strikes within Iranian territory might also be able to occur without that sort of escalation. If a model sounds really nice, but doesn't match the available evidence, then it should probably be discarded. And in the late 20th and 21st centuries, we have heaps of examples of countries attacking infrastructure and targets inside each other's territories without it triggering a full-scale war. In fact I'd argue we have far more examples of that happening than them causing uncontrolled escalation. Russia was able to invade and annex Crimea without starting a full-scale war.

Iran has been able to fire ballistic missiles at American bases without sparking a full-scale war. US and allied air strikes in [insert long list of countries here] have again not inevitably led to full-scale wars. And for the enormously long-suffering people of Syria, the number of states that have bombed targets in that country is so long that the nation's airspace bears at least a passing resemblance to a free-for-all zone with friendly fire enabled. And the sad fact about all of that is you could argue it makes intuitive sense. In order for a conflict to escalate to a full-scale war,.

One side or the other has to choose to do so. Countries are not in fact legally obliged to go all pistols at dawn with each other just because one side or the other delivers a metaphorical slap. And if neither side has a reason to opt for a full-scale war, even after a given escalation, clearly a majority of the time they can find ways to avoid it. What is very clear from both Iran's strategy and media communications is that they seem to understand this. This was made very clear in some of the communications they issued soon after the missile attack on Israeli territory.

These included, potentially most notably, a statement by Iran's permanent representative to the United Nations, they said after the last missiles had fallen that “the matter can be deemed concluded.” Suggesting the Iranian government was officially taking the position that in circumstances like this one, they felt they could take what they characterised as a retaliatory action. Fire a very large salvo of missiles and drones at Israeli territory, and that after that, like the bell sounding at the end of a round of boxing, the matter would be at least temporarily concluded.

And both fighters would go back to their corners waiting for the next round to be rung in. Even if you discount Iran's statements, you can look at Iranian actions. For example back in 2020, Iran reportedly launched ballistic missiles against American bases in Iraq from Iranian territory. This was stated to be in response to the American operation that killed IRGC General Qasem Soleimani. While advanced warning was provided, there was every possibility that these attacks would kill American troops. The attacks did end up causing wide-scale traumatic brain injuries and damaged American facilities.

And so in a traditional sense, it's very hard to argue this wasn't just an outright act of war. It was an armed attack against the military personnel of another country. And while, yes, the American troops in question were in Iraq, not American territory. The USS Maine was docked in Cuba when she blew up, sparking the Spanish-American War. And as the name suggests, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which sparked a greater US involvement in the Vietnam War didn't exactly take place in Times bloody Square. But to jump back to the 21st century, here you have a potential act of war by Iran against the United States, and yet the Iranians did basically none of the things that you would expect a country to do.

If it thought it was genuinely about to go to war with the USA. Starting a full-scale war with Uncle Sam tends to be a fairly transformative experience. And yet Iran didn't feel the need to transition over to a war footing in advance, call up its reserves, build up stockpiles of critical goods, prepare the civilian population, or any of the many other things that you would expect to do if you thought there was a non-zero chance that you were about to experience a Desert Storm rerun. I'd suggest that the evidence we have indicates that Tehran probably calculated that it could launch these attacks without sparking a full-scale war. And it's probably only because they did so that they were willing to launch them.

Instead of being binary, what we observe more often now is a sort of fluid conflict. Where the intensity of a conflict might wax or wane over time, like the tide going in or out, but where things never either boil over into a total war and vice versa never really end either. There may be periods where nothing is actively exploding for weeks or months at a time, but it would arguably be a mistake in these sort of strategic contests to mistake quiet for peace. Instead periods of quiet might just be the result of all sides involved having an incentive to not throw a punch at that particular moment. But also fully aware of the fact that they could throw a punch, if they chose to do so, without it necessarily turning into a 9 round bout that ultimately goes to knock-out.

And when the situation does occasionally flare up or escalate, there's a chance it only does so through carefully calibrated actions that sometimes feel about as choreographed as a large brand social media post. The level of risk and relative advantage in those sort of fluid conflicts though, probably depends on both side's understanding of it. If you have a scenario where one side accurately understands that it can push the boundaries, it can break the rules, and it can do so without sparking uncontrolled escalation. While the other side self-deters and says, “Oh no, we can't possibly do any of that because it would inevitably.

Lead to a full-scale war and we don't want that now.” Then all else being equal, the side with more freedom is going to be the one with the advantage. If one side is confident that the other will consistently self-deter, they are going to have considerably more scope to take the initiative and potentially the strategic advantage. Another closing note might be that in the case of these sort of fluid conflicts where the intensity of the fighting waxes and wanes but you neither see the outbreak of a full-scale war or a lasting peace, it's that even when a lot of the military actions involved may be carefully calibrated,.

Clearly telegraphed, and be designed to posture or apply pressure rather than cross the final threshold, there is always a chance that someone miscalculates. That one side or the other does cross a threshold without intending to do so. For the moment, this recent engagement between Iran and Israel appears that it might be in a de-escalation phase. With Iran basically denying that any further retaliation is necessary, and Israel so far seeming to opt for a relatively subtle response option that doesn't force Tehran's hand. But in the end only time will tell if the de-escalation lasts, or if there's still a punch or two to be thrown.

And I'll throw in a brief channel update here because this has been a longer episode. After the recent events I knew I'd have to make a video like this one, but in the end I ended up making the video about two or three times. That's one of the difficulties in doing a video on current events: what is current tends to keep changing. In any case however, I hope you are happy with the results as it turned out and the ground I was able to cover. Next week I will be returning to some more regular-style programming, with one asterisk. Perun gaming people, the system has in fact arrived,.

And once this video is live I'm going to look at getting some content done for you. Thank you very much as always to all of you, and I hope to see you all again next week.

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