news

Items to discuss:

1. Israeli assassination campaign

2. Israeli air campaign

3. Iranian missile campaign

4. Israeli targeted killings

The Israelis kicked off their attack on Iran early yesterday morning (local time) with a series of targeted attacks aimed at assassinating senior leaders in the Iranian armed services as well as nuclear scientists. Alongside several scientists and Ali Shamkhani (a very prominent diplomat), three prominent figures in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps were killed: General Hossein Salami, commander of the IRGC; Major General Mohammad Bagheri, Chief of the Iranian General Staff; and Major General Gholam-Ali Rashid, whom I've gathered was in charge of a joint forces command.

This move was likely counterproductive to Israeli strategic goals, to the point I suspect these men may have been set up to be killed. Allow me to explain.

For decades, Iran has followed an "aggressive proxy" strategy of confronting Israel under which they provided arms, technical know-how, and occasionally direct military support support to proxy forces positioned to directly attack Israel. This is why Lebanese Hezbollah, Ansar Allah in Yemen, and Baathist Syria received so much support from Iran. It's why Suuni Hamas got the same. The thinking was that these Iranian proxies would gradually wear down Israel while establishing a friendly maneuver corridor across Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon for the Iranian military to gloriously march on and reclaim Jerusalem from the hated enemy.

If this sounds like millenarian nonsense that's because it was - the odds of such a maneuver actually succeeding would be, in my professional judgment, approximately zero percent. With that being said, Iran in the '90s was a millenarian revolutionary garrison-state that had just spent a decade fighting Saddam and people in that kind of situation can make some genuinely insane plans.

The thing is that it's not the 1990s any more. It's the 2020s and Iran is an increasingly wealthy and industrialized country and the Iranian elite increasingly leery of an endless jihadist project against Israel they get no return on investment from. As such when push came to shove in the last two years we've seen a rapid transition away from direct confrontation with Israel and towards a strategy of defensive deterrence, with the Iranians abandoning proxies in Lebanon and Syria and striking back at Israel directly when their interests were threatened. Of course the Israelis have manifestly not been deterred yet, but that's what the present exchange of fire is about establishing.

And, well, the Israelis just killed three of the architects of that very IRGC-focused "forward proxy" strategy, who probably lobbied and would have continued to lobby in favor of a strategy that saw military resources poured into funding random terrorists instead of invested in the conventional military capabilities and economic development that could make Iran the preeminent power in the Middle East. And driving this home further, Bagheri's replacement as Chief of Staff is out of the regular Army - not the political IRGC.

Why do I think they could have been betrayed? Same reason I think Ismail Haniyeh got sold out - someone very powerful in the Iranian power structure wants to wind down the proxy strategy and they're not above using Mossad to solve their problems for them. As I pointed out earlier, the Iranians may not have known the exact details of the attack but they sure as hell knew enough to take cover.

2. The Israeli air campaign

I pointed out last night that the Israelis didn't seem to be accomplishing much with their air campaign, and I stand by that assessment - the Iranians don't seem to have lost anything they couldn't afford to part with. Many Israeli attacks in the last day seem to have hit dirt, hardened facilities they could not successfully penetrate, or at best "soft" dual-use aboveground facilities. They manifestly failed to knock out Iran's hardened military nuclear facilities, missile forces, air defenses, or a decisive balance of their command and control nodes.

This goes back to the rope-a-dope remark I made earlier tonight - Iran's air defenses seem to have taken a 12-hour siesta at the start of the battle and only "woke up" as the sun set. When they came online, however, they did so all at once and in full force - to the point there were rumors of Israeli aircraft shot down and the IAF seems to have become markedly more circumspect with multiple reports late in the day of large strike packages assembling and then aborting.

The explanation making the rounds for this is that this was due to an Israeli cyberattack. I don't really think that's particularly plausible given the near-total lack of any air defense response for much of the day, without even much manual antiaircraft fire seen. I think it's rather more plausible that the Iranian air defenses were ordered to hold fire and remain in hide sites while the initial Israeli strikes went in.

Why would they do this? Because the Iranians could be reasonably confident those strikes would not fatally damage their hardened strategic infrastructure and those strikes - many of which would be directed at known or templated air defense positions those launchers and radars would not be occupying - would largely expend the IAF's limited inventory of standoff weapons. Lest we forget, the main combat mission of the IAF is milk runs to bomb Gaza, not complex SEAD. When the IAF transitioned to attempting to run aircraft directly into Iranian airspace late in the day to attack with conventional bombs the (still very intact) defenses deployed out of hiding and illuminated, immediately and drastically crimping the IAF's campaign plan given they were then faced with a largely intact air defense network their initial long-range strikes had failed to destroy. Ergo the "rope-a-dope" analogy: the Iranians sat down and waited as they took a beating - one they knew would exhaust their enemy worse than it would hurt them.

3. The Iranian missile campaign

There's not much to say about this that I haven't already said in previous rounds of Iran-Israel skirmishing. The Iranians have ballistic missiles that can penetrate the Israeli missile shield, they have enough of them stockpiled that they don't seem to be in any immediate danger of running out, and this force was manifestly not destroyed nor even suppressed by Israeli attacks today. And as of today they've revealed a willingness to throw them at the heart of the Israeli state and its strategic infrastructure if sufficiently threatened.

Moreover we haven't even seen Iranian drones and cruise missiles launched yet, at least as far as I've been able to gather. Some from allied militias in Iraq, certainly, but nothing from Iran proper. You can bet the Iranians have an apocalyptic stockpile of these relatively cheap and simple weapons ready to launch at a time and place of their choosing.

Going forward? I hope there's a ceasefire soon, I think by now both sides have made their point and there's little purpose in continued fighting. The IRGC hardliners who would have agitated for a nuclear attack on Israel are dead or discredited, the Iranians have established they can eat Israel's worst and bounce back, and deterrence has been adequately established going in both directions.