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I had thought to write something discussing what we can and cannot evaluate about the technical performance of Iranian missile systems during the 12 Day War, but in the act of writing it, I realized that such a thing could not be feasibly discussed without a more comprehensive discussion of the war itself, its causes and objectives, and the strategic situation Iran found itself on June 13. Because of these considerations this post has grown to into something I did not originally intend, and seeks to deliver a preliminary account of the entire war, the performance of the Iranian missile force during the conflict, and where Iran goes from here. Obviously, we cannot cover everything that has happened, but I hope the following does at least a satisfactory job explaining the performance of Iran’s missile forces during the 12 Day War and how their force structure shaped their response to Israel’s attack.
INTRODUCTION
Iran’s missile force, which began as a small force hurtling North Korea built Scud missiles at Iraqi cities in the 1980s, has dramatically expanded over the past 40 years into the main pillar if Iran’s coercive force. This force has now been challenged to do what it was designed to do: deter Israel, and if that fails, punish Israel for attacking. It has failed at both tests. Not only did Iran’s missile force fail to deter a major Israeli attack, but it also failed over 12 days to deliver sufficient damage to Israel that would dissuade Israel from conducting further attacks. Israeli attacks did not cease because Iran had delivered sufficient damage to force Israel to stop; Israeli attacks ceased because Israel accomplished its objectives, targeting and either destroying or damaging the facilities that supported the Iranian missile and nuclear programs (with a little help from a friend). This collapse of Iran’s coercive power has been in the works for the past two years as Israel has slowly chipped away at Iran’s credibility, and now the dam has completely broken. Not only did Iran not perform well when the time came, but Iranian technical capabilities have been further revealed to be inadequate at the task of delivering damage to Israel’s military capability.
Iran certainly retains significant capability at certain missions however. Despite the immense damage Israeli airstrikes have done to Iran’s air defense and many of its missile bases, some of the Iranian missile arsenal likely remains intact, especially missiles at bases along the southern coast dedicated to targeting American military installations in the Gulf. Iran’s ability to effect shipping in the Strait of Hormuz also remains intact. But very few of these cards are capable of deterring Israeli action, especially at low levels of conflict, and if Iran cannot effectively conduct deterrence and compellence, then the force is effectively without purpose. While Iran retains some ability to inflict punishment, the punishment they can generate is likely insufficient to deter future conflict, and future military action between the two states is inevitable.
The purpose of this article is to explain how we got here, what happened in the 12 days of conflict between Israel and Iran, and where Iran’s coercive strategy goes from here. This will proceed in several sections. In the first, I discuss Iran’s prewar deterrent posture, its slow degradation at the hands of the Israelis, and immediate prewar developments in Iran’s nuclear program. In the second, I discuss the war, Israeli target selection, and depict the significant problems Israel introduced into Iran’s ability to respond effectively. In the third section I discuss the performance of the Iranian missile force against Israel and the problems revealed by its choice of strategy. In the fifth, I discuss the short- and long-term effects of the war for Iran and Israel, and the possibility of future conflict. In the sixth section I discuss possible decisions Iran may take to alter its deterrent posture in the future, and in the final section, I summarize broader lessons learned.
IRAN’S PREWAR DETERRENCE POSTURE
Before we discuss the war we must first discuss where Iran stood before it started and how it attempted to both deter and constrain Israel. Iran’s coercive strategy against Israel, and also the United States, had four key components:
- The Axis of Resistance, groups of Iran-supplied paramilitary forces across the Middle East. This includes Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and the PMF in Iraq. These forces were directly supported by Iran’s Quds Force, effectively Iran’s special operations division. Hezbollah and Hamas, when they existed as coherent fighting forces, could generate forces to harass Israel’s southern and northern fronts and conduct rocket and missile attacks on Israeli population centers.
- Iran’s long range missile force. The crown jewel of the Iranian force, Iran’s missile force includes likely thousands of drones and missiles hidden away in massive “missile city” cave complexes across the country. This is theoretically how Iran deters at higher levels of conflict, threatening massive salvos of missiles in the event of an existential threat.
- Iran’s naval and missile forces along the southern coast. These forces can threaten the critical supply of oil transiting through the Strait of Hormuz on its way to markets around the world. Iran continues to maintain a significant force of minelayers and that could close the strait at will. This force is a double edged sword however, has Iran’s own economy also relies on this critical trade route.
- The nuclear program. Before the war started Iran’s nuclear facilities were under IAEA safeguards, but Iran attempted to wield their effectively mothballed nuclear weapons program as a deterrent. Since 2020 Iran had begun enriching uranium and successively higher levels, progressively shortening their theoretical breakout time to a nuclear weapon, but had no detectable weaponization program.
Since Sinwar’s great folly on October 7th, 2023, Israeli attacks have slowly dismantled the various key aspects of Iran’s coercive strategy. Israel’s campaigns against Hamas, then Hezbollah, then the Houthis, deeply degraded the ability of the Axis to attack Israel in any significant manner. The collapse of the Assad regime in Syria was another major blow, as Iran had long relied on Syria has a smuggling route to get weapons to Hezbollah in Lebenon. American and Israeli campaigns against the Houthis have likely damaged the Houthi’s ability to involve itself as well, evidenced by the surprising lack of activity in the Red Sea during the war. The successive collapse of Iran’s Axis of Resistance organizations as effective fighting forces has taken away various tools Iran has relied on in the past to coerce Israel at lower levels of conflict.
Iran did not take these blows without responding. Iran’s missile force, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Air Force (IRGC-AF) mobilized their forces twice in 2024 in an attempt to compel Israel to cease attacks on the Axis of Resistance. The IRGC-AF’s large arsenal of missiles is largely sequestered in deeply buried underground “missile cities” spread throughout the country. The underground tunnels of the missile cities are effectively impossible for Israel to destroy with any weapon in its current arsenal, but this defense comes at the cost of readiness. Each missile city, filled with launchers and missiles, can disperse its forces to launch positions across the area and fire. If Iran does not disperse in time, they risk being attacked by Israeli airpower destroying entrances to underground tunnels of attacking launchers moving about in the open. As we will see, Iran’s lack of readiness will be a major problem for their ability to resist the coming Israeli cost imposition campaign.
The IRGC-AF has been tested in combat before. In January 2020, in retaliation for the American targeted killing of IRGC Quds Force Major General Qasem Soleimani, Iran launched a salvo of 12 ballistic missiles at al-Asad Airbase in Iraq, at the time not defended by missile defense batteries. In March 2022, Iran launched another small salvo, this time against a mansion in Erbil that the IRGC claimed was hosting a Mossad cell in retaliation for an Israeli airstrike that killed two IRGC colonels in Damascus. At the time these strikes were considered to be quite accurate. The Erbil mansion strike in particular achieved multiple hits effectively dead-on target.
It was not until after Israel began its current campaign in Gaza that we saw Iranian missile attacks, direct from Iran, on Israeli territory. In April and October of 2024, Iran launched massive salvos of drones and missiles at Israel in response to Israeli attacks on Axis of Resistance members and Israeli targeted assassinations in Tehran. These operations were dubbed by the Iranians True Promise I and II respectively. The first of these occurred on April 13, and involved not over one hundred ballistic missiles, but also a large number of drones. These strikes were not effective. Out of the ~300 munitions expended against targets in Israel, only nine missiles hit open areas of Nevatim and Ramon airbases. The drones were shot down by a combination of Israel and American airpower as they slowly made their way across Jordan. The strike produced, effectively, no major damage.
Analysts at @JamesMartinCNS have conducted a geospatial review of the high resolution imagery of Nevatim and Ramon Air Bases in Israel following the Iranian strikes. There is little to minor damage at both facilities. pic.twitter.com/ZUkoJdkkSt
— Decker Eveleth (@dex_eve) May 15, 2024The strikes in October of 2024 were larger and reportedly used more advanced ballistic missile systems, involving around 200 ballistic missiles launched against at least three distinct targets: the Israeli intelligence center in Glilot, Nevatim Airbase, and Ramon Airbase. In Glilot, only one missile managed to penetrate, and was potentially allowed to leak through. Israeli ballistic missile defense batteries can predict the impact points of oncoming ballistic missiles, and this particular missile missed by a wide margin. It impacted ~500 meters away from the intelligence center, destroying an electrical box at a nearby intersection.
The clip aired by Iran's National TV, claiming to show the destruction of a military radar near the Nevatim airbase, is false.
That's not near the airbase, and it's not a military radar
It actually showcases an Iranian strike in Glilot (Central Israel) that hit a electrical box. https://t.co/EalXPsK9Y6 pic.twitter.com/pvEVBURM2w
The October 2024 strikes did achieve many more impacts than the April strikes, mostly because Israel chose not to contest the second wave of missiles against Nevatim Airbase with terminal interceptors. As an uncontested strike, the October 2024 strikes at Nevatim still serves as our clearest indication of what Iranian missile accuracy looks like in wartime conditions. I wrote about this at the time, which you can find here, but I will summarize: Iran scored about 35-40 hits on the airbase, and achieved some moderate damage, with one direct hit on an F-35 shelter, several direct hits on support buildings, and one direct hit on a large aircraft hangar. Despite these moderate successes, the overall performance of Iranian missiles was not particularly impressive. Many of the missiles involved did not hit anything in particular or missed wildly, overshooting the airbase’s infrastructure by 500 meters or more. These attacks seemed to suggest that unlike the accuracy we saw at Al-Asad and Erbil, in wartime conditions and across much longer ranges, Iranian missiles were simply not that accurate or have a shockingly high failure rate. We will discuss why later.
Notably, in response to these strikes Israel retaliated by attacking and destroying the engagement radar systems for some of Iran’s S-300 long-range surface to air missile systems. This would be the beginning of what would be a very embarrassing year for Iranian air defenses, which do not seem capable of mounting any effective defense against Israeli SEAD/DEAD capabilities. Before the war started, my former colleagues Sam Lair and Jeffrey Lewis noted that the air defense batteries around Natanz did not seem to be networked at all. Given the performance of the rest Iran’s air defenses during the 12 Day War, its possible that’s true across the force.
Special attention must be paid to Iran’s nuclear program as it is the apparent casus belli for this entire episode. We do not have the space or the time to dedicate to a full retelling of the tale of Iran’s nuclear program. What is immediately relevant to our purposes here is that Iran, despite mothballing their nuclear program a decade ago, has consistently used the threat that their nuclear program could be restarted and rush to a weapon as a deterrent to Israeli or United States action against it.
In the months preceding the beginning of the 12 Day War, tensions had been steadily rising over a confrontation between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which monitors the compliance of states with the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). As a signatory of the NPT, Iran is legally prohibited from building nuclear weapons, but has used the threat to build weapons as a deterrent tool for decades. In addition to limits placed by the NPT, Iran also signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2015, a ten-year agreement that placed a series of additional limits on Iran’s ability to enrich uranium, a necessary step in the process of making nuclear weapons. In exchange, the other signatories of the JCPOA, including the United States, made certain concessions on economic sanctions levied against Iran. Trump withdrew from this agreement in 2018, and in 2020, Iran slowly began enriching uranium in excess of the limits agreed to in the JCPOA.
The JCPOA is only a minor part in this particular story however. For years, the IAEA has requested explanations from Iran on where certain material and machinery had gone from four sites that Iran had dismantled years previously but never declared to the IAEA. This included several sites that Iran had not only demolished, but filled with fresh dirt shipped in from elsewhere, certainly in an attempt to ensure soil samples taken by the IAEA did not return evidence of the presence of uranium isotopes. This did not work, and in 2019 and 2020 soil samples did suggest the presence of isotopes. After years of pressuring Iran to explain its previous activities at these facilities and produce whatever material and machinery was at these sites, the IAEA Board of Governors finally convened in early June to discuss Iran’s compliance with its commitments made under the NPT. On June 12, 2025, the IAEA Board of Governors found Iran not in compliance with its safeguards agreements. Israel began attacks the next day.
These events are important to consider, but we should be careful not to overemphasize their centrality to Israeli decision making. According to reporting by the Washington Post, Netanyahu had decided that a confrontation with Iran was both inevitable and desirable sometime in 2024. It is likely that the decision by the IAEA’s Board of Governors served as a useful justification for war. It is also important to note that the degradation of Iran’s nuclear program was only part of Israel’s justification for the war: the other major justification was to prevent Iran from developing a missile arsenal capable of overcoming Israel’s missile defense shield.
Over 2024, I noted and reported on Reuters that Iran was massively expanding missile production facilities at three locations: Bidkaneh, Khojir, and Sharoud. This expansion – which appeared to mainly take the form of additional facilities for the production of solid-fueled ballistic missiles – would have dramatically increased the Iranian rate of production. This caused the IDF to apparently assess that Iran would soon expand their force of missiles capable of reaching Israel from 2,000 to 8,000 missiles. This level of risk apparently proved unacceptable to Israel.
What specific objective the Israelis were attempting to achieve with its attack likely depends on who in the Israeli government you are speaking to. The IDF war plan was likely drawn up with the primary goal of degrading Iran’s military capabilities. This does not mean that certain political officials in Israel did not see the entire campaign as an attempt to generate regime change in Tehran, but this was far from the only objective. We should not attempt to judge the success of failure of the Israeli campaign solely on whether or not it generated regime change in Tehran. If the campaign was successful at generating significant delays in Iran’s missile and nuclear program, then it can be considered a success given the goals of many within the Israeli administration. The degree to which the campaign succeeded in doing that is unknown, however.
THE WAR
What follows is a short summary of the war. We do not have the space to dedicate to a full, play by play reconstruction, so I will boil down some of the top-level events in a manner that is hopefully more easily digestible. On June 12, Israel launched a military campaign involving air and special forces elements against strategic targets across Iran. These initial attacks appear to have targeted five distinct sets of targets: leadership, missile bases, air defense, communications, and scientific personnel. The first three categories of targets included the commanders of the IRGC-AF who could have ordered an immediate response or increase in readiness. Apparently, the Iranian contingency plan for a sudden Israeli attack was to gather the entire staff of the IRGC-AF at the same bunker outside Tehran, an astonishingly ill-advised plan, especially when Israeli intelligence penetration is a well-known fact. Unsurprisingly, the Israelis struck this bunker in the opening hours of the war after these commanders had gathered, meaning that many of the individuals who could have ordered a retaliation were dead and the facility with the communications equipment that could have transmitted such orders was destroyed. Israeli aircraft and special forces teams also attacked various air defense facilities across the Western Iran, giving Israeli aircraft the ability to penetrate deep into Iran in particular areas.
These initial attacks, especially the dismantling of Iran’s air defense network, gave Israel more time to strike and bottle up various missile bases close to the Iraqi border. In the opening day of the war, Israel attacked and successfully disabled key missile cities close to the Iraqi border, including bases in Tabriz, Kermanshah, and Imam Ali. Iran used these facilities to conduct the attacks in Iraq and Israel over the past two years, and they likely contained a significant number of medium range missiles capable of attacking Israel.
Here we see the great problems inherent in Iran’s missile cities basing mode. As discussed, the deeply buried nature of the missile cities means that Iran’s missile stockpile is protected from direct attack. But this comes at the cost of responsiveness and leaves Iranian missile cities vulnerable to attacks that button up entrances and strike ventilation shafts. Israeli attacks on tunnel entrances at missile bases across western Iran made the missile forces kept protected inside completely irrelevant for the rest of the war. Even if these bases had dug themselves out, they likely could not have maneuvered into position to fire under the constant overwatch of Israeli long-range drones. This eliminated as a threat to Israel a considerable portion of the Iranian missile arsenal capable of reaching Israel.
This is not to say that Iran was completely unaware or unprepared for such an eventuality. Iran had apparently placed missile canisters in firing positions at at least one location before the war, giving Iran a small quick launch capability. These sites were also attacked and destroyed early in the war, either by special forces teams or airpower. This is a notable activity, and I expect that we may see Iran lean into this sort of capability going forward, especially considering what we are about to see in the performance of Iran’s major missiles bases.
9. Borujerd Missile Base
A relatively small base with no storage tunnel. Around 10 fixed container-style launchers were added in 2024, alongside rail-based launchers.
All fixed launchers and the high-bay hangar were destroyed.
<<< pic.twitter.com/OkU2hPl5Xc
After this initial assault, Iran apparently planned to launch a massive salvo of some 1,000 missiles against Israel, according to the New York Times, as many expected. This did not happen. In fact, we did not see any significant Iranian attack until 16 hours after the initial Israeli attacks. The Iranians predictably called this operation True Promise III. The reason for this delay likely has multiple causes. It is possible that Israeli attacks on Iranian command, control, and communications nodes interrupted the ability of Tehran to talk directly with base commanders through Iran and to issue specific orders, and this lack of coordination has disastrous consequences for Iran’s ability to launch missile attacks of any notable volume.
When attempting to attack targets protected by multiple layers of air defenses, coordination between missile forces is extremely important as you must ensure that missiles from multiple launch companies arrive at the target at roughly the same time. This concentration of missiles complicates Israeli air defense as Israel must maneuver interceptors and time launches of interceptors in a way that avoids interceptor fratricide, while simultaneously keeping track of and discrimination multiple incoming warheads. Close salvos also give individual interceptors batteries effectively no time to reload if the missile salvo density is high enough to meaningfully exhaust specific point defense emplacement. The necessity of this tactic places some command-and-control burdens on Iran – if Iranian commanders cannot get into contact with enough missile bases to order concentrated strikes, their overall penetration effectiveness will decrease.
Seemingly unable to respond to Israeli with the massive salvos they had obviously originally planned, with many of their missile bases bottled up and, likely, command and control still extremely disorganized, Iran chose to engage Israel with smaller numbers of ballistic missiles, launching multiple salvos totaling around 100 missiles. Over the next six hours, more salvos were launched containing another 100 missiles, for a total of ~200 missiles launched on the night of the 13th and the morning of the 14th. These first two waves came 16 and 17 hours after the initial Israeli attack. This would be the largest night of missile salvos for the war and constitute roughly 40% of the missiles fired during the entire war. The initial targets for these two salvos included airbases and major headquarters buildings of the IDF, all expected and obvious targets. This initial set of salvos saw similar success rates to the previous attacks in 2024, achieving scattered impacts across airbases and populated areas. Initially, the only major visible impacts of this first night was an impact ~400 meters from Matcal Tower, the headquarters of the Israeli Ministry of Defense in downtown Tel Aviv, and one impact on an apartment building in the middle of Bat Yam, a city on the periphery of Tel Aviv.
Iran also launched at multiple Israeli airbases during these first salvos, and did achieve a small number of hits on open areas of multiple airbases. This included two impacts on taxiways at Ramon Airbase and at least 4 impacts on Tel Nof visible on satellite imagery, which includes the destruction of a warehouse. No hits are evident on any part of the base involved in critical flight operations, and it’s very unlikely that these strikes seriously impaired Israeli combat operations at either airbase. I am also unable to determine which of these hits are from warheads that genuinely penetrated Israeli missile defenses and which were allowed to impact as Israeli air defense systems predicted they would miss. These two salvos would be the first of many waves over the next 11 days, but none of the salvos that would occur for the rest of the war could match the size of the initial salvo, and seemingly none of the later salvos managed to replicate the initial success against military targets.
The attacks on Israeli command nodes and airbases that occurred in the first 24 hours of the war constitute the first of three distinct phases in Iranian targeting. This first phase of Iranian targeting aligned perfectly with prewar expectations: that Iran would focus on Israeli airbases in an attempt to suppress their activities while also targeting high value targets like Matcal Tower that happen to be in the middle of major population centers. But as the war went on, Iranian targeting increasingly did not align with prewar expectations. The second phase of Iranian targeting, which began on the night of day 2 of the war, saw Iran begin to shift from targeting Israeli missile facilities to conducting tit-for-tat attacks on target types that Israel had just attacked on Iran. In the final phase of the war, Iran seemed to shift to a strategy of simply attacking targets that they had experienced success targeting before, capitalizing apparent gaps in Israeli missile defenses.
On the second day of the war, Israel conducted strikes on a variety of scientific and industrial targets, including striking the South Pars gas field on June 14, likely in an effort to signal to Tehran the level of damage Israel could inflict to the Iranian economy if it so chose. Israel also began striking targets related to the Iranian nuclear program, including critical buildings at Natanz and Isfahan. Tehran responded in kind, and somewhat successfully, beginning the tit-for-tat phase of the war. In response to the attacks on South Pars and scientific establishments, Iran targeted the oil refinery complex in Haifa, striking it three times, and the Weizmann Institute for Science in Rehovot multiple times. It is possible that Iran also attempted to attack other military-scientific establishments across Israel at this time as well.
Despite these successes, tit-for-tat strategies would be a losing battle for Iran. Iran could not match the size or scale of Israel’s attacks on similar facilities throughout Iran, especially as salvo sizes began to dwindle. Iran’s attempt to successfully coerce Israel into ceasing attacks on scientific facilities in Iran certainly failed, as evidenced by continued Israeli attacks on Iranian facilities, most notably the destruction of the containment dome at Arak heavy water reactor on June 19.
The IDF releases footage showing its strike this morning on Iran's Arak heavy water reactor.
The reactor was only partially built, and Iran had informed the IAEA that it planned to begin operating the facility next year.
The military says “the strike targeted the component… pic.twitter.com/VWZG4UG0fz
Iran also failed to deter further attacks on Iranian military facilities, both facilities related the Iranian missile force, and assets related to the Iranian conventional force. Almost every missile base in Iran exhibits some form of damage, even if in some cases the damage to the facility is limited to tunnel entrances or above ground maintenance facilities. Iran’s air defenses, long range radar capabilities, and in some cases, major conventional bases, were all targeted and dealt heavy damage, and in-kind Iran was only able to produce limited to negligible effects on Israeli military, industrial, and scientific sites. The below list if a good, if incomplete, list of Iranian missile bases targeted by the Israelis in the 12 Day War:
In-Depth Analysis of Israel’s Strategic Blow to Iran’s Missile Capabilities.
A Mega Thread 🧵
Operation "Rising Lion" had two goals: stopping a nuclear breakout and neutralizing the ballistic missile threat posed by Iran.
This analysis will focus on the latter:
<<< pic.twitter.com/kHW1MnbTsZ
Notably during the first week of the war, Iranian launches became somewhat predictable, so predictable I began to predict their launch schedule. For the first two or three days, Iran launched missiles at predictable time intervals in the dead of night, almost certainly in an attempt to evade Israeli sensors and airpower operating in the day. But as the war progressed, and Iranian commanders started to see what areas were relatively safe from immediate Israeli attacks, they began to launch attacks during the day. However, Iran’s salvos also began to be increasingly few in number, and by day 4 Iran was only able to launch ~30 or less missiles per salvo, sometimes only launching below 10 missiles, and generally only managed to launch one major salvo per day. Iran never replicated the salvo densities we saw in the first two days of the war.
Right on schedule. Iranian missile salvo patterns hint at some interesting things about Iranian C3, and also their lack of confidence in avoiding optical satellites. https://t.co/sqqHvQebbe
— Decker Eveleth (@dex_eve) June 15, 2025Despite the low number of missiles in each salvo, there were some instances in which the Iranian missile force achieved an anomalously high number of leakers, most notably during the strike on the Israeli intelligence center in Glilot on June 17 (if you think that’s a big secret, let me point out they have an intelligence museum effectively on the same campus). Five impacts were recorded at Glilot, but all landed far from Iran’s likely target, the Intelligence center HQ itself. One struck the premise of a nearby water treatment facility, while another impacted a warehouse in a nearby intelligence support annex. These attacks appear to be genuine leakers, as evidenced by how active the Iron Dome battery around the site is during the attack.
Looks like Iran scored some ballistic missile hits on the HQ of Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate (Aman) at 32°08'32"N 34°49'00"E. This does house divisions such as Unit 8200 (SIGINT) & Unit 9900 (Visual Intelligence, VISINT) which are a crucial aspect of Israel’s… https://t.co/AQzhSzpt0i pic.twitter.com/45BSNF6nhs
— CAIRO X (@egypt_warfare) June 17, 2025In what would turn out to be the final phase of the war over the last couple of days before June 23, Iran began launching small numbers of ballistic missiles, mostly at targets they already knew they could hit with reasonable confidence. According to public reporting by the WSJ, the penetration rate of Iranian missiles steadily rose from 8% to 16% as the war progressed. This is likely partly explained by degradation of the Israeli interceptor inventory, although we do not know how many missiles Israel fired or what portion of the Israeli inventory was consumed. My former colleague Sam Lair at CNS has done some heroic work estimating interceptor expenditure based on publicly available footage of Iranian missiles crossing over Jordan, but the dataset is inherently limited as such missiles are generally not visible during the day, so the footage is broadly only capable of detecting night attacks. The numbers are likely low, as we can only count Arrow and THAAD expenditure, so we cannot see Stunner and SM-3. But even so, we should note that Arrow makes up a relatively small portion of interceptions – judging from not only Sam’s work, but videos of interceptor engagements over the first 24 hours of the war, Stunner and other terminal point defense interceptors clearly played a large role.
But the success of Iranian targeting during this final phase of the war may be due to Iran increasingly targeting spots in Israel were interception was much more difficult, either because such places were not covered by terminal interceptors, interceptors were not available, or both. For example, Iran repeatedly struck civilian targets in the city of Be’er Sheva in south Israel in the last two days of the war. Iran had struck a hospital in Be’er Sheva on June 19, potentially unintentionally. Iran had been successfully striking the nearby Negev Technologies Park 1500 meters from the hospital and it appears that an Iranian missile might of overshot (something I noted Iranian missiles were tend to do when Iran attacked Nevatim in October 2024). As Iran had already landed multiple hits on Be’er Sheva, it is likely that Iran decided to use its remaining launchers to strike a target it knew it could hit. Unlike previous strikes on the Be’er Sheva area, where probably targets close by could be reasonably determined, strikes on Be’er Sheva at the end of the war increasingly strike targets in residential areas away from any apparent scientific or military target. This includes the deadly strike on the Neve Ze’ev neighborhood on the final day of the war (31.236532°, 34.772321°) a neighborhood far from any target of note. This could indicate that Iran was at this point not aiming at anything in particular, but simply populated areas. The story is reflected in strikes on Haifa during the final two days of the war, where missile impacts began to occur in areas not near any specific military, industrial, or civilian target.
This change in targeting is likely an effect of Israel being apparently successful at targeting mobile missile launchers. As the war progressed Israel also made notable strides in targeting Iran’s launchers, but the exact number of missile launchers Israel was able to destroy is unclear. I would expect that these successes have been enabled by Israeli medium altitude long-range drones that can loiter for extended periods of time covering various Iranian missile bases. Israeli used these extensively throughout the war, and several of them crashed in Iran and were recovered by Iranian authorities. Despite these loses, such aircraft were likely very successful at pinning down missile forces at a variety of locations. Without air defenses or even radar to track these aircraft over particular areas Iran likely had limited capability to see and shoot these drones, which likely attacked Iranian missile launchers as they broke cover and moved to firing positions. This constrained – but did not eliminate – Iran’s ability to retaliate, as the immense distances Israel’s slow moving drones and even jet aircraft have to travel to strike launchers in Eastern Iran certainly produced immense challenges for Israel. This is certainly partly why during the early phase of the war many of Iran’s salvos were conducted from missile bases in the Tehran area, but as the war progressed, Iran was increasingly forced to rely on missile bases farther from Israel that hosted longer-range liquid fueled systems in places like Shiraz and Isfahan.
This map identifies the downed drone types—Hermes 900s, Herons, and Orbiter-5s—and their impact locations. Most are arrayed along a west-to-central corridor, matching known radar blind spots along the Zagros. pic.twitter.com/CeYrXxleGd
— Nicole Grajewski (@NicoleGrajewski) July 11, 2025But degrading Iran’s at hand missile force was only part of Israel’s goals in the war. Israel also targeted missile development and production sites as well as a variety of sites related to the Iranian nuclear program. As the war progressed, Israel attacked a variety of locations linked to Iran’s ability to produce long-range missiles. This included the big four missile production facilities that Iran has been massively expanding over the past year: Bidkaneh missile production facility, Parchin, Sharoud, and Khojir. At these facilities Israel focused their attacks on apparent mixing and casting buildings, and did not aim to achieve complete destruction of the facility, likely due to ammunition constraints.
We have low resolution imagery available via @planet documenting extensive damage to facilities at the Khojir missile complex. Various missile production facilities destroyed, some producing large explosions.
1/4: pic.twitter.com/eDNTkQNpPl
In addition to these major facilities, Israel also attacked several facilities related to Iran’s oft overlooked liquid fueled program. This includes the defense chemical facility at Garmsar that NCRI quite ridiculously labeled as a tritium production facility, a facility I pointed out as a probable missile fuel production location some years ago. It also included the original Scud/Nodong missile assembly and fuel production facilities built with North Korean assistance in the Isfahan area, like the below (32.334613°, 51.313196°):
These strikes have likely interrupted Iran’s ability to produce ballistic missiles, but I cannot offer an evaluation of how long these strikes will fundamentally delay Iran’s missile program in the long term. Israeli attacks at least damaged facilities related to every single stage of missile production, from fuel, to casting, to airframes, to integration, to launchers, but in many cases the damage is limited. Fundamentally the question of how long it will take Iran to recover from such strikes rests in if Iran has the domestic production capability or ability to import critical technologies involved in the process. In the case of solid-fueled ballistic missiles, fuel must be mixed in a vertical planetary mixer. These mixers are large, expensive to produce, and export controlled. The inability of Iran to produce such mixers was, in decades past, a major constraint on their missile production capabilities. Iran targeted such mixers in their response to the October strikes and destroyed multiple mixing buildings at missile production facilities as well as a factory for making more. I do not know how long it will take Iran to reconstitute these pieces of technology. I am skeptical that many of these sort of technologies constitute a major constraint on Iran’s modern program, especially as export control enforcement in general appears to be growing weaker.
The major closing action of the war was the involvement of the United States in destroying the buried facilities at Fordow and Natanz. We will not be looking into a BDA of the Iranian nuclear program, as I primarily want to focus on Iran’s conventional performance, so we will not dawdle here. Rather, I want to talk about Iran’s response. After the attacks on Fordow and Natanz, Iran responded with a salvo of 12 missiles aimed at Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the largest base in the region. One of these missiles managed to get through air defenses and struck a geodesic dome, originally reported to be a radome (it was obviously not a radome considering its position and elevation within the base) that protected communications equipment. This potentially represents the most precise strike Iran conducted in the entire war.
The first images have now emerged appearing to show a AN/FSC-78 Satellite Communications Terminal, part of the Modernization Enterprise Terminal (MET) operated by the U.S. Air Force at Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, which was destroyed in last month’s Iranian ballistic missile… pic.twitter.com/Re6LdK1o07
— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) July 14, 2025On June 23 Iran and Israel agreed to a ceasefire that would come online at midnight Israel time on June 24. In the time between the announcement and the ceasefire time, both Israel and Iran fired their parting shots, with Israel striking a variety of targets around the Tehran area and Iran striking Be’er Sheva with several missile salvos right up until midnight. These final Iranian salvos saw more success, and killed 3 people in a strike on an apartment complex.
The total number of missiles fired at Israel is still unclear, but the generally accepted figure is somewhere around 500. 40% of that number was fired in the first two days of the war. The total number of hits is also unclear – Israeli media reported 31 hits on “populated” areas, with other media outlets reporting “over 50” impact sites reported across Israel. Some extremely ill-advised combinations of numbers and statistics are floating around, including reports that Israel did not intercept 243 missiles that impacted somewhere in Israel. This is fiction. This number appears to be produced with the following method: if Iran achieved 36 hits, and Israel achieved an 86% success rate, that would indicate that the total number of missiles that Israel attempted to intercept is around 257, which, if Iran fired 500 missiles, must mean that 243 missiles impacted.
The latter interpretation of the numbers would imply that Israel is somehow hiding – in a country 12 miles across at its narrowest point – about 250 impact points. This is not supported by any data we have available, especially now that the results of optical and radar change detection passes are being reported in media. These sort of studies are always treacherous as change detection will come with a high false positive rate, and indeed, after reviewing imagery of some of the targets specified in the Telegraph report at logistical hubs, I am not seeing damage I would consider consistent with ballistic missile impacts. But they also definitely not return results as high as 250. There are impacts on various places throughout Israel, but these impacts are not numerically significant, and would place the total number of impacts across Israel at around 50 or perhaps 60.
Almost certainly, the true reason why the Israelis attempted to intercept only a portion of the Iranian missile attack is due to the high failure rate of Iranian missiles. Recall that during the Iranian attacks in April and October of 2024 Iranian salvos experienced a high failure rate, amounting to about half the force. It is very unlikely that Iran managed to increase the reliability of their stockpiled missiles in the eight months that have passed since Nevatim. Many of these missiles likely failed in flight, burning up over Iraq and Jordan on the way to their targets. To make calculation attempts worse, recall that Israeli missile defense systems are designed so that operators can predict (assuming ballistic or simple maneuvers) which warheads will miss. This means that some portion of the impacts in Israel were allowed to hit and were not intercepted, so we cannot take any estimate of impact sites in Israel and extrapolate the total number of attempted intercepts.
IRAN’S PERFORMANCE
Iran’s military performance during the 12 Day War is far below what was expected. While Iran’s difficulties in penetrating Israeli missile defenses was expected, as was the wartime performance of the Iranian missiles themselves based on previous data from 2024, the level of penetration and dominance Israel achieved over particular parts of Iranian airspace and the level of damage Israel managed to inflict upon both Iranian command and control and missile forces inside Iran was not. This in turn likely resulted in a significant degradation in the number of missiles per salvo that Iran was able to launch at Israel. The story of the 12 Day War is as much a story of Israeli overperformance as it is about Iranian underperformance.
That said, Iran did underperform. At the end of my writeup on the Nevatim strike that occurred in October of 2024, I issued a warning that Iranian failure to accurately target Israeli military targets should not lull us into a false sense of security about the level of damage Iran could inflict to the Israeli population with massed missile strikes. But we saw Iranian underperformance in this area too, partly owning to Iranian strategy not being what I expected. I had expected that Iran would fire large concentrations of missiles against single, high value targets in an attempt to coerce Israel to end the war. Iran could have focused their efforts on Israeli airbases or focused their efforts on critical high value targets, and Iran seems to have done that in the first day of the war. Like during the strikes in April and October of 2024, Iran began the war by attempting to strike airbases across Israel, likely in an attempt to disable the bases and give their missile forces more time to reconstitute. While Iran does appear to have succeeded in generating impacts at various airbases – most notably on Ramon and Tel Nof – few of these impacts can really be considered “hits” on critical infrastructure at the base. At Ramon, for example, Iran generated two impacts on the taxiway, damage that was easily repaired. At Tel Nof, there are 4 or 5 impacts on empty areas of the base or in parking lots, damaging a small number of buildings. None of these impacts would have significantly affected Israel’s ability to conduct military operations against Iran. Some of these impacts were likely allowed to pass through Israeli terminal defenses as their trajectory was calculated and it was predicted they would not hit anything. As for other high value targets, Iran came close several times to landing hits on Matcal Tower in downtown Tel Aviv and the intelligence headquarters in Glilot, but never connected directly. These initial strikes achieved effectively no strategic effect, but who knows what could have happened if Iran had kept up these attacks. If Iran had at least focused its efforts on Tel Aviv, they could have generated significant political effects.
But after these initial strikes, Iran’s strategy seems to have shifted to a tit-for-tat strategy attempting to manage escalation with Israel by proving to Israel it could feasibly threaten the same sort of targets Israel was attacking in Iran. This strategy involved Iran engaged in tit-for-tat strikes with relatively smaller number of missiles on targets across Israel. This meant that Iran had fewer missiles in each salvo to both penetrate Israeli missile defense and achieve target destruction given their accuracy. This is obviously partly a result of the operational constraints Israeli operations introduced after their successful air and ground operations over the first two days, which forced Iran to rely on a smaller number of missile bases deeper inside Iran.
I do not see how anyone can conceivably claim that this shift in strategy worked – because of the small size of individual Iranian missile salvos, the salvos produced only limited or no damage to most strategic targets. Exceptions to this trend include the refinery in Haifa and the Weizmann Institute. The success of those strikes is no doubt a function of the size of the target. The Weizmann Institute is a major campus involving dozens of buildings. The Haifa refinery is roughly 600 meters across. This gives Iranian missiles a much higher change of actually striking their targets given their relatively low accuracy. One could argue that the strike on the Haifa refinery could be considered a success as we saw no further attacks on Iranian oil infrastructure, but if the intent of the Weizmann strike was to like Israeli attacks on Iranian scientific institutions, than it failed spectacularly. More generally, Iran’s tit-for-tat strategy failed to control escalation or interrupt Israeli attacks on Iran.
However, it is notable that Iran did achieve increasingly high penetration rates as the war dragged on. This could be due to any number of factors, such as Iran changing its missile maneuvering tactics, using more modern missiles, or simple exhaustion of Israel’s arsenal of interceptors in specific locations. Iran may have had this in mind – after Israel’s success at targeting missile bases, launchers, and command and control facilities, Iran was forced into a war of attrition with the goal of simply outlasting the Israelis, and eventually degrading the Israeli interceptor arsenal to such an extent that even small Iranian salvos could penetrate.
We should not mistake any of this for strategic brilliance on the part of the Iranians. Iran fought a war of attrition because it had to, not because it wanted to. No one plans to fight a war of attrition. If Iran could have launched larger, more accurate salvos to disable the Israeli air force, they would have. The fact that Iran shifted from their original strategy of massed missile attacks on Israeli airbases to smaller tit-for-tat strikes is not a sign of Iranian strength, but relative weakness – unable to immediately degrade Israeli will or capabilities to the extent that it would end the war, Iran was forced to make the best of the situation with the hope that force preservation and continual attrition would do the job and manage escalation. This strategy did not stop Israel – and the United States – from deeply degrading Iran’s other conventional military capabilities and destroying numerous nuclear facilities.
Iran’s lack of performance is also likely a function of its unresponsive basing mode. As discussed, the missile cities basing mode, while secure and survivable, mean Iran’s missile force is not only underground, but unassembled. If you examine video of Iran’s underground bases, you’ll note that the missile bodies, warheads, and in the case of liquid-fueled missiles, fuel, is stored separately. Theoretically, the base’s hardened properties mean you have the time and protection to fuel up, bolt the warhead on, disperse, and fire. But as the war proved, this is not necessarily true. Israeli aircraft penetration of Iran and attacks on tunnel entrances meant that in many cases, Iran really didn’t have the time – airspace was not as contested and they thought it would be, and Israeli aircraft quickly pinned down missile cities, drastically limiting the number of missile launches available to Iranian commanders at any given time.
ACCURACY
It is difficult to make any definitive claims about Iranian missile accuracy based on our experience in the 12 Day War. I have seen reports that Iranian accuracy increased as the war progressed, but have not really seen any evidence that would verify this statement. Iran did manage several hits on civilian targets that could be due to changes in Israeli interceptor priority, changes in Iranian missile strategy, or simply dumb luck. There are numerous complicating factors that make straightforward analysis impossible.
The major problem with attempting to determine accuracy based on performance in the 12 Day War is that Israeli and US BMD systems are known to prioritize incoming missiles that are very likely to hit military targets or civilian areas. This can create a mirage that Iranian missiles are more inaccurate than they appear. This fact likely has limited impact on Iranian missile salvos aimed at targets in the Tel Aviv area, as basically everything around there constitutes a civilian area, so Israel was forced to defend against every missile in salvos against those areas to prevent loss of life. In other cases – like Iranian attempts to target specific military targets in rural areas, like Nevatim and Ramon airbases, this fact matters a great deal, as the amount of empty space in and around those airbases means interceptor batteries have much more freedom to simply allow particular missiles to land in empty space.
There are only two salvos in the 12 Day War that appeared to include a large number obvious leakers: the June 17th attack on a series of complexes in Glilot that are associated with Israeli intelligence and the salvo against Tel Nof, which occurred quite early in the war (around June 13). In the case of Glilot, we saw four hits in the area, despite the heroic last ditch efforts of a local Iron Dome battery. Even then, Iranian missiles failed to hit their targets, despite claims from some that Iran intentionally targeted a warehouse nearby. I am skeptical that Iran, in its darkest hour, would launch a dedicated salvo at a warehouse complex, especially when that warehouse complex happens to be 700 meters from the headquarters of Israeli intelligence and 500 meters from intelligence buildings of note elsewhere in the complex. At Tel Nof, we saw multiple impacts on the airbase and the destruction of one warehouse, but Iran failed to disable any critical infrastructure at the base, and some of the impacts on soil around the airbase may have been intentionally allowed to impact.
Because of this, the uncontested strikes on Nevatim in October of 2024 remains our best metric for Iranian missile accuracy. Unlike salvos that occurred during the 12 Day War, the second salvo against Nevatim in 2024 was entirely uncontested by terminal air defense batteries, either because they had expended all their ammunition or because they simply decided not to contest the attack. Regardless of precisely which counting mechanism you would like to employ to count impact groupings and measure accuracy, the fact remains that the accuracy at Nevatim is quite poor – even using the most generous to Iran set of assumptions about targets and grouping, accuracy does not exceed 300-500 meters. It is likely higher given what I consider to be the most likely set of assumptions. It is extremely improbable that Iran has dramatically improved its missile accuracy in the intervening eight months.
Why are Iranian missiles so inaccurate? And why did Iranian missiles demonstrate greater accuracy at Al-Asad in 2020, Erbil in 2022, and in Qatar most recently in 2025 than they against Israel? To discuss, we must first discuss how Iranian missiles actually work.
Iran utilizes two overlapping methods to guide its missiles. The first is inertial guidance (INS). INS acts as something of a dead reckoning system, calculating its trajectory by measuring its speed and direction, allowing the missile to know where it is if you tell it where it began its journey. In other words, the missile knows where it is by knowing where it isn’t.
Iranian INS systems are not particularly sophisticated by western standards. Iranian INS systems are what we call “strap-down.” In a strap down system, the accelerometers and gyroscopes are strapped directly to the missile body. This is in contrast to stabilized systems, in which the accelerometers and gyroscopes are attached to a stabilized platform, minimizing vibration. Strap down systems, while acceptable for shorter range missiles, have extreme disadvantages when used in missiles of longer range. Because they are not isolated from the extreme vibrations a missile is exposed to during flight, strap down systems accumulate significant drift in its gyroscopes and accelerometers over time, throwing the missile off course. This drift degrades accuracy at best and at worst generates complete system failure if drift becomes so extreme the missile is convinced it must maneuver in ways that produce missile breakup. This problem has plagued Iran’s – and in previous decades, Iraq’s – missile program for years. Over medium ranges, strap down guidance systems are effectively unable to produce pinpoint accuracy.
To make up for some of these deficiencies, Iran also makes use of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) like GPS and GLONASS. GNSS systems triangulate the position of the missile by measuring the delta in time between transitions from multiple satellites, along the system to triangulate its position with high accuracy. GNSS remains accurate throughout the flight of the missile and enables even missiles with rudimentary guidance systems to achieve sub 10-meter accuracy. The problem with GNSS is that it is easily jammable or degraded. The Chinese discovered this fact much to their horror during the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1996, when the United States jammed or degraded DF-15 missiles that utilized GPS that China was launching into the sea around Taiwan. Israel is also known to utilize GPS jamming extensively. Iran also utilizes GNSS jamming, and this has interfered with civilian vessel and aircraft navigation in the strait and in Iraq. Missiles flying from Iran to Israel would therefore be exposed to multiple zones of serious GPS interference during their flight, leading to significant loss of accuracy against targets in Israel.
This also explains why Iran did achieve effectively pinpoint accuracy in Al-Asad, Erbil, and against the US base in Qatar. Not only is the range involved much shorter, meaning there is less opportunity for serious deviations in accuracy, but the lack of GNSS interference means Iranian missiles can rely on extremely accurate course corrections throughout their flight. In the case of the strike on Qatar, there was little of GNSS signal jamming in the gulf the night of the attack, but there was at the Strait. The relative lack of GPS denial over Bahrain means Iranian missiles maneuvering during the terminal phase could hit their targets accurately. Without the constraints of range or terminal guidance jamming, Iran achieved substantially greater accuracy than anything they managed to achieve against Israel. This should remind us that while Iran has great difficulties targeting Israeli military installations, American airbases in the region can be more vulnerable for a variety of reasons, and not simply because they are closer to Iran. Because these bases are on foreign territory, various courses of action likely cannot be taken without approval of the host nation. GNSS denial is one such action. Qatar certainly would not approve of the United States conducting sweeping GPS jamming operations across the entire peninsula. It is also notable that, despite Qatar’s large inventory of air defense batteries, no Qatari force was involved in defending against the Iranian strike. In a true large-scale war, this would certainly change, but at the lower end of conflict intensity, symbolic Iranian strikes like the one absorbed can produce specific effects.
Finally, a note on missile types. No doubt the observant among you have noticed I have not discussed variation in Iranian missile types being a possible explanation for the variations in accuracy. Many of the more inaccurate hits we are seeing may be simply older missiles, while all the intercepted missiles that would have hit are more modern, accurate systems. This is definitely possible, but beyond our ability to analyze due to the paucity of data. I would, however, challenge some of the assumptions that go into the argument. Iran has been developing and producing a multitude of long-range missile systems designed, in some way, to complicate Israeli missile defense efforts. This includes not simply missiles that can maneuver in during their descent with fins but missiles that have powered warheads which can theoretically maneuver during the midcourse as the missile is traveling through space. Some claim that these missiles are more accurate, and while this is likely true of any missile equipped with fins, most Iranian missiles now have some sort of capability to maneuver in the terminal phase. But beyond that, we don’t actually know if something like the Fattah is magnitudes of order more accurate than something like an Emad. If the guidance systems inside the missiles are the same and still not up for the job of keeping accurate track of the missile’s position throughout flight and during maneuvers, the missile will still miss. I have seen no evidence that newer missiles like the Fattah are using much more advanced guidance systems, or that Iran can even produce extremely advanced guidance systems necessary to build a force of missiles with very high penetration and accuracy characteristics.
FUTURE WARS AND LESSONS LEARNED
The war is now over, and there is an opportunity for both sides to lick their wounds and make changes to their military force posture and strategy. Israel will likely not feel such a need, as their military strategy worked. Iran, on the other hand, will likely be having lots of meetings on how they can effectively achieve their objectives next time around.
I have seen it claimed that Iran successfully compelled Israel to a ceasefire because of the amount of damage it inflicted to civilian and military targets. This is doubtful. It is worth remembering how high the expected damage toll was in the opening hours of the war from both Israeli defense officials and experts. The IDF intelligence chief and the chief of staff called the battle “existential.” The IDF chief of staff called up tens of thousands of servicemen in preparation for the scale of the Iranian response and warned the Israeli population that the “expected toll [of casualties] will be different to what we are used to.” Israeli leadership was obviously more than willing to accept a large number of casualties and damage to its critical infrastructure if it meant that Israel would either roll back the Iranian missile and nuclear program substantially, or end the Iranian regime.
Now compare these statements to the sum total of what the Iranian missile salvos managed to accomplish. 28 Israeli civilians have been killed. Many buildings have been damaged, but it’s hardly as if Tel Aviv is in ruins. Some damage has been done to Haifa Refinery, but this will be repaired in weeks to months. On the military side, Iran failed to disable any major military installations. Despite impacts at major airbases like Ramon and Tel Nof, none of these salvos managed to hit anything that would have interrupted Israeli military operations or destroy Israeli aircraft. The biggest piece of damage I’ve seen so far to Israeli airbases is the destruction of a warehouse at Tel Nof.
If one believes that the struggle you are engaged in is existential, you do not fold to the house over a couple of blown-up warehouses. Granted, the amount of damage inflicted on Israel would likely have increased dramatically at some point as Israeli was forced to conserve interceptors, and once the damage started piling up, Netanyahu likely would have begun suffering political consequences. But Netanyahu was obviously willing to accept this damage before he began the war. I do not see how a level of damage potential that Netanyahu had already accepted would suddenly cause him to seek a ceasefire.
Almost certainly, the reason why Israel accepted a ceasefire is due to the fact that they had already achieved most of their major objectives, save, of course, regime change. And despite predictions, that last objective did not seem to be imminent. Despite Israeli propaganda and promises of support, combined with Israeli kinetic action against various Iranian domestic security targets, the Iranian people did not rise up against the regime. Instead Israel’s targeting of domestic security targets, including the office of the state broadcaster and, somewhat bafflingly, Evin Prison, has generated genuine anger even from the anti-regime Iranian diaspora.
This recognition that Israel apparently believes that it is engaged in an existential struggle against forces that seek to annihilate it is also the reason why I expect to see major changes in Iran’s force posture going forward. After Nevatim, I spoke on record several times that I did not anticipate Iran’s deterrent strategy to change. While Iranian missiles were inaccurate, they were clearly still capable of doing their job against cities and other large targets, which would theoretically deter the Israelis enough. I no longer believe this to be the case. What I did not fully understand at Nevatim was the degree to which the word “deterrence” had effectively already become an irrelevant concept. Deterrence stability is in part produced by the understanding that neither side of a conflict is irrational or committed to utterly destroying the other. If you believe that the other side cannot be deterred, why would you hold yourself to inaction?
This is precisely why deterrence between Iran and Israel collapsed not because of any specific nuclear action the Iranians took in the lead up to the war. Deterrence between Israel and Iran collapsed on October 7, 2023, the day Israel became convinced that Iran and its allies were committed to forcing an existential battle for Israel’s survival. Since that day we have been living in a completely different dynamic. The task now before Iran is not to deter Israel – it is to coerce Israel into abandoning its current path of degrading and constraining Iranian military actions inside and outside Iran itself.
The bar for coercing changes in Israeli policy is for a variety of reasons much, much higher than simple deterrence, and the current military balance is not in Iran’s favor. Israel achieved all their shorter-term objectives, degrading Iran’s ability to expand their missile force, soaking up a lot of Iran’s existing inventory, and further degrading Iran’s air defense systems. Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities and targeted killings of Iranian nuclear scientists have also almost certainly destroyed or damaged a large portion of Iran’s available machinery and tacit knowledge it could put to use for a nuclear program. Furthermore, the war and the previous two attacks on Israel in 2024 revealed the immense mismatch between the cost effectiveness of Iran and Israel’s long range strike capabilities. In order to generate effectively any damage against a prepared and fresh Israeli ballistic missile defense grid, Iran has to launch significant numbers of ballistic missiles. As demonstrated by Israel’s pinpoint destruction of Iran’s S-300 radar in October 2024, Israeli only needs one missile. Because of this, Iran has effectively no credible reply to low-level Israeli attacks on Iran beyond symbolic action, as it cannot economically engage in tit-for-tat tactics with Israel without expending a likely unacceptable number of ballistic missiles.
But we must also recognize that these are all short-term victories. Iran is bloodied, but hardly declawed. Its missile forces, especially its short-range missile force and the force it has at its disposal to attack American military bases in the Gulf and ships in the Strait of Hormuz was not expended and is largely intact. Despite high levels of damage to Iran’s military bases along the Iraqi border, it’s likely that the missiles deep inside tunnels at these bases can be recovered. Iran’s situation is not hopeless, and there are a variety of things they can do to alter their ability to coerce Israel and increase the survivability of its forces.
Most obviously, Iran could move much of its existing force posture further east. This would put more distance between Iran’s primary coercive force and Israel, potentially putting most of its force out of reach. This however is effectively impossible with the majority of the Iranian force, as most of Iran’s missiles simply don’t have the range to hit Israel from far eastern Iran. Iran could potentially solve this by reducing warhead weight, but they cannot substantially augment the size of the missiles themselves, as doing so would mean such missiles would no longer fit on their launchers. Reducing warhead weight also decreases the effectiveness of the missile and makes the accuracy problem worse. Potentially more feasible would be Iran shifting to a posture that deploys missiles forward to permanent launch positions in western Iran. Instead of having hundreds of missiles in a few major underground bases, Iran could preposition launch units and have such units out in the field for long periods of time, hoping that the simple volume of missiles deployed mean that, in the event of an Iranian strike, some portion of the force would survive and respond immediately. Effectively this would be a large scale version of the missile canisters Iran has up till now deploying in small numbers.
This is a high-risk high reward game, and one that relies on Iran having multiple overlapping tactical communication systems that would enable a damaged Iranian missile force to report when one battery gets destroyed so that the others could respond (or at least, report back to Iranian central commanders the combat readiness of their batteries in real time.) It is unclear if missile forces in the field actively communicate back to IRGC-AF base or national commanders. I would not be surprised if IRGC missile units practice radio silence after leaving the missile base. It is possible that fire missions are planned hours in advance before units disperse, which may explain Iranian ceasefire violations if Iranian commanders do not exercise active control over the force while the force is dispersed. It also explains why early Iranian missile salvos were so predictable.
This apparent lack of robust communications between IRGC units in the field and central commanders will need to be rectified if Iran hopes to have a more responsive missile force capable of conducting operations under fire early in a war, especially if Iran does not successfully reconstitute its air defenses. Without some sort of responsive and robust command system, Israeli attacks on Iranian command, control, and communications infrastructure will once again hobble any immediate Iranian response.
Iran could also – if it can and if its cost effective – increase the effectiveness of its coercive force by investing in better guidance systems. The lack of Iranian penetration and accuracy is related to the command and control burden – because Iran must fire large salvos of missiles from the same locations at the same time, IRGC commanders must effectively organize and synchronize the actions of a large number of moving parts, putting stress on the whole mechanism. This will change if Iran begins fielding missile systems capable of evading Israeli defenses and accurately hitting targets with low salvo numbers. This would allow much smaller missile units to operate more flexibly and strike targets without having launchers be organized into more detectable and predicable large operations.
This is, however, a big if. Damage to the various parts of the Iranian missile program have likely destroyed certain machines necessary for force reconstitution and Iran likely does not have the capability to domestically manufacture more advanced guidance systems. They would need to import these in large numbers to rebuild an advanced force, and I’m not sure who would. Unlike importing industrial machines that have civilian uses, advanced gyroscopes and accelerometers are clearly a military item, and I don’t think even China would be willing to risk sanctions and turn a blind eye to their export.
However, none of these solutions solves the core problem that Iran cannot seem to protect its forces form Israeli airpower in the first place. Iran will likely try to procure advanced air defense weapons from overseas to compliment what they already have, but it’s unlikely that anyone will risk sanctions to sell Iran such sophisticated weapons.
Finally, Iran could decide to augment its existing deterrent force with nuclear weapons if it decided the economic costs of such an action did not outweigh the security value. And it might. But whether or not Iran can easily do such a thing is another question. I do not think an Iranian breakout is at all feasible or desirable in the short-term, but as time goes on and no IAEA inspectors visit, Iran could rebuild its program elsewhere, utilizing what centrifuges it has left to begin enriching uranium to weapons grade. This would be a long-term process, not a short-term one, and Iran would likely try to hide its program while attempting to avoid economic consequences. And as I wrote previously, Iran would need a lot of nuclear weapons to credibly threaten Israel.
One last parting thought. In an attempt to destroy targets Israel judged to be important to the Iranian regime’s ability to keep control over its population, Israel bombed a variety of targets throughout Tehran involved in either state television or domestic security. Most notable among this target set was the main TV station in Tehran and Evin Prison, with strikes on the latter killing many prisoners. This is an attractive target set if you believe that the regime you are at war with thinks its domestic position is precarious – if you can theoretically destroy the mechanisms by which that regime exercises control, you can impose costs and extract concessions. Potentially threats to regime security is one reason why a ceasefire was reached, but that’s arguable – I do not see any evidence that the Iranian people were on the verge of rising up. Instead targeting these regime security targets appears to have backfired – not only were the strike internationally embarrassing for Israel, but they seemed to have hardened public opinion against Israel in both Iran and in the Iranian diaspora community. Iran’s repeated strikes on Evin Prison is particularly baffling and the Iranian diaspora has not been pleased by this action.
I have seen some argue that in the event of war with China, the United States should target similar security forces inside China in order to weaken the regime and threaten the stability of the CCP. Those in favor of this should look closely at the lessons learned in the 12 Day War. All assessments of regime stability in peacetime become detached from reality the second the first shot is fired in anger. A CCP weak enough to be destabilized by strikes on internal security forces (and for the record, my personal opinion is that the CCP is not weak) in peacetime could become strong in war as the population rallies around the flag. Attacks on internal security and propaganda targets may also generate real outrage inside the country, as evidenced by the outrage Iranians felt when Israel bombed the broadcasting studio in Tehran. Such strikes are just as likely to backfire as be effective.
CONCLUSIONS
I have written for too long and it is time to bring what I am still charitably describing as a blog post to a close. This is not the end of this story, and continued hostilities between Israel and Iran are likely. While Israel achieved many of their short-term goals, the main issues Israel went to war over are still unsettled. The Iranian missile force is degraded, but still maintains some capability to inflict some damage on Israel, especially if the next time this happens Iran is prepared and can properly disperse. The Iranian nuclear program, while damaged, is also capable of being reconstituted in the long run. And despite a significant number of dead IRGC generals, the regime continues. Furthermore, Israel’s wild success without a single Israeli aircraft downed will likely embolden Israel to do this again, unless the tenuous Israeli domestic political situation finally boils over and some sort of change happens in the Israeli government.
As previous said, the task before Iran is to prevent further wars by deterring Israeli action in the short term and in the long term coerce Israel into not seeing Iran as simply grass to be mowed. I have significant doubts that Iran is up to this test given their recent performance, but militaries can learn. We will not like the outcome of these lessons. Iran may decide to augment its conventional vulnerability with a more aggressive missile posture or decide to dedicate itself to the eventual procurement of nuclear weapons. Whatever changes occur in the Iranian military force, it is doubtful that anything could be sufficient to deter further Israel action in the short-term. We will see how well Iran fairs the next time Israeli jets come knocking.
