Chartbook 392 Incoming from outer space: The geo-military radicalism of Iran v. Israel 2025.

The clash between Israel and Iran has been on the cards for such a long time and there is so much investment in the West in normalizing the bombing of Iran, our senses are so dulled by the pounding violence from Gaza, to Lebanon, to Syria and back to Gaza, that it takes a conscious effort to comprehend just how extraordinary this war is.

I don’t mean by that the politics of the Iran-Israel clash: the huge international effort to anathematize the idea of an Iranian nuke; or the conflation of Israel’s utterly ruthless strategy of preemption and regional dominance with anodyne assertions of its right to self-defense. I mean the strangeness and novelty of the war itself, as a war.

Source: Haaretz

Though the casualties and damage are so far limited, in geo-military terms, this war already has a claim to be one of the most radical ever waged.

Start with the distance between the combatants. From Tel Aviv to Teheran is 1585 km. That is slightly less than the distance between between Berlin and Moscow (1614 km). But, unlike Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1941, Israel and Iran have no land border. There is no “frontline”. The countries in between - Syria and Iraq - are not directly involved in the conflict. In terms of European geography is is as though the Netherlands and Spain, or the Netherlands and Italy were trading blows over the heads of the French.

To attack targets in Iran, Israel’s small but high-tech air force flies thousands of km on each sortie, across foreign air space and sparsely populated territory.

Israel’s F15, F16 and F35 fighter bombers can operate at these long ranges thanks to refueling and the routine violation of foreign air space.

This would not be possible if Iran could mount a significant counter to Israel’s incoming air force. In Ukraine, air operations by both sides have been far more constrained. This is where the huge gap in economic development that has opened up between Iran and Israel over the last fifteen years of sanctions shows its effects.

Modern military aircraft are immensely expensive. The procurement price of a single, upgraded Israeli F35 stealth fighter is $110 million and that does not include the cost of servicing and maintaining them. Israel has over 40 F35 in its operational fleet.

By comparison, Iran’s airforce consists of aircraft that are decades old. Wisely they have played no role in the conflict. With Israel’s fighter bombers having freedom to operate at extreme ranges, they have subjected Iran’s anti aircraft defenses to sustained attack, starting already during the exchanges in 2024. This has allowed Israel to establish freedom of operations for its jets which can now operate seemingly at will in the skies above Iran.

Think about that for a second. From the ground, everything in the sky above Iran must now be considered hostile. An extraordinary state of affairs for the Israeli air force to have created, one thousand miles away from its home bases.

The ordinance that Israel is deploying is itself not particularly sophisticated. It consists largely of gravity-bombs. The older weapons are retro-fitted with precision guidance kits. But, as crude as the bombs may be, in conjunction with air superiority, their impact is devastating. Short of bunkers buried in mountains, Israel can destroy virtually anything it wants. Israel has plenty of bunker buster bombs and is not afraid to use them. It used no less than eighty US heavy bombs to kill Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut on 27 September 2024, overkill so staggering that it raised eyebrows even in the Pentagon. The problem is that the heaviest US bomb, the 14-ton GBU-57, can only be carried by a heavy bomber like the B2 which, at a cost of $2 billion per aircraft, is more than even Israel can afford.

Anticipating its disadvantage in any clash with Israel, the Iranian regime has innovated. Give the focus on the Iranian atomic weapons program and on the Iranian drones, relatively less attention is given to the program that actually allows Iran to strike back at Israel - its ballistic missiles.

Iran response’s to Israel’s bombing is to fire missiles towards Israel, 1000 miles away. Linger over this statement. This too is a radical and anomalous fact.

Israel flies its aircraft a thousand miles to drop bombs. Iran fires missiles, a thousand miles back the other direction.

Iran’s missiles are not exactly cheap. A large salvo of ballistic missiles might run to $200 million, but it pales by comparison with the tens of billions of dollars embodied in Israel’s 200 strike aircraft.

This strangely asymmetric mode of long-range warfare, with expensive air forces squaring off against cheaper one-way cruise and ballistic missiles, first emerged in modern history over eighty years ago, in 1944 over the skies of Western Europe, when Nazi Germany countered the overwhelming superiority of the British and American airforces with their V1 and V2 rockets. The V1 and V2 are the ancestors of today’s drones and ballistic missiles.

In the case of the ballistic missiles, to speak in terms of ancestry is not metaphorical.

The Soviet ballistic missile program of the 1950s and 1960s, like its US counterpart, drew heavily on expertise captured from Nazi Germany. The Soviet Scud series or rockets accounted for the vast majority of ballistic missiles fired in anger in the second half of the 20th century, notably by both sides in the 1980s Iran-Iraq war and by Saddam during the first Iraq war. The Soviet Scud series formed the origin of Iran’s ballistic missile program. But both the Iranians and the Russian ballistic missile programs have since the 2000s graduated to a new generation of solid-fueled rockets with much higher precision.

Since 2022, Russia has fired over 600 Iskander missiles against Ukraine over ranges of up to 400-500 km. What makes Iran’s attacks on Israel radically new is their geo-military ambition. Never before have ballistic missiles been fired in anger at such long range.

Not only is the range extraordinary, but the altitude the rockets reach. At the apogee of their flight, Iran’s missiles hurtling towards Israel at speeds exceeding Mach 5, regularly cross the Kármán Line. At 100 km above earth, the Karman line marks the dividing line between the earth’s atmosphere and the exo-atmosphere or outer space. Some of Iran’s missiles are credited with reaching a maximum apogee of 400 km, before reentering for their final plunge towards their targets.

The video clips circulating on social media of incoming Iranian missiles capture only the final moments of flight paths that are unprecedented in the history of warfare.

Exo-atmospheric trajectories are a radical novelty for sustained missile attack under actual wartime conditions. The only previous occasions were in 2023 and 2024 when Iranian or Iranian-derived missiles in the hands of the Houthis were fired towards Israel.

An eloquent witness to the sophistication of the Iranian missile program is Dr Uzi Rubin, father of Israel’s missile defense system, his assessment can be watched here.

Source: Meforum

The counter to Iran’s missiles developed by Dr Rubin and his colleagues on the Israeli side, is no less extraordinary. With US assistance, Israel has built interceptor systems, notably the Arrow 3, which meet incoming Iranian missiles towards the peak of their apogee, in outer space.

Again, we have become so inured to talk about Israeli missile interceptions in the context of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iron Dome that we have to make a conscious effort to defamiliarize the Iran-Israeli confrontation and grasp its geo-military radicalism.

On the image of the globe below, Israel’s familiar Iron Dome defenses are marked by the tiny dark blue circle. The Arrow 3 system that Israel is activating against Iran’s exo-atmospheric ballistic missiles span the vast outer circle that reaches from the Eastern edges of Iran, to Yemen, the border of Libya and Algeria and most of Italy.

Source: ABC

The Arrow series of ballistic missile defenses is a joint US-Israeli collaboration that goes back to the 1980s, to Reagan’s dream of Star Wars/SDI and to increasing Israeli anxiety about the proliferation of Scud-derived ballistic missiles across the MENA region.

Design work on the Arrow 1 began in 1986 and was paid for by US SDI-funds under an agreement with Israel signed in 1988. From the outset Israeli expertise and the urgency of its needs, were important to keeping the Star Wars dream alive, insisting that it would be possible to “hit a bullet with a bullet”.

Arrow 1 was never deployed but served as the basis for Arrow 2 on which work began in the early 1990s jointly involving Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), Boeing (U.S. subcontractor), Elta, and Elbit Systems.

The US provided the majority of the funding for Arrow 2, to the tune of $2 billion. Arrow 2 missiles are intended to disrupt heavy ballistic missiles that neither Iron Dome nor David’s Sling can hit, hitting them in the middle phase of their final, plunging descent in the higher reaches of the atmosphere (endo-atmospheric), up to ~100 km altitude.

After almost forty years of investment, it is the conflict unleashed by the Hamas attacks of October 7 2023 that are being celebrated by the defense establishment as the vindication of the joint Israeli-US strategic missile defense concept and of Reagan’s dream of Star Wars. As one US expert put it, after years of practice and simulation, the engagements of the Israeli and US militaries since 2023 have been a "missile defense-a-palooza”.

The first Arrow 2 battery became operational in 2000. It scored its first shoot down of an incoming Iranian ballistic missile almost a quarter of a century later, on October 31st 2023.

Arrow 3 is even more sophisticated than Arrow 2 and is designed to knock out ballistic missiles whilst they are the high point of their arc in outer space. Arrow-3 became operational in January 2017. It achieved its first operational interception of an actual missile on November 9 2023, when it shot down a Houthi-launched ballistic missile in outer space, marking the first wartime, exo-atmospheric intercept. This is Star Wars for real.

When they work, missile interception systems provide an almost eerie sense of security to the population “under the dome”. This is how Israel’s current director of Israeli Missile Defense Organization, Moshe Patel, described the operation of his systems in response to the intensive bombardment on the night of 13-14 April 2024.

Anyhow, between the – it is on the night between 13 and 14 April 2024, which we have a massive attack from Iran, the first time; 120 ballistic missiles were headed Israel with warheads of half a ton or a ton, together with another 220 – almost – cruise missiles. Anyway, these – everything was synchronized in order to hit Israel population synchronized, and all the proxies that were part of the celebration from the south, from the north, so on that specific night we had more than 550 articles that actually flown into Israel. … all the time we have the, you know, expression that you need to counter or you need to take into account what is the price if you don’t have a defense compared to the price of, you know, the system, and the price of – so again, once you counter those kind of threats and you’ve succeeded, you save, first of all, a lot of lives, you save a lot of property damage. And, you know, the fact that – you know, April 14 the stock exchange in Israel continued to work, and people went to work on that day. You know, with all the expenses that we had until that day, I think that they were worth it, so this is how we are looking at it.

“We did our job. The stock exchange stayed open. People went to work.” You can’t make this stuff up!

But if economics is the issue here, the question in the coming days and weeks is who has placed the right bet? Israel-US or Iran?

According to Israeli estimates, its interceptions of incoming missiles during an intensive bombardment costs as much as $285 million per night. Each Arrows 3 interceptor is priced at $ 2 million. And more importantly than price, it is physical stocks and production capacity that are limited. Even sharing the production runs on a 50/50 basis the military-industrial establishments of Israel and the US cannot keep up with demand for the interceptors. According to American analysts, the most pressing question in coming weeks will be whether Iran or Israel runs out of rockets first.

And in the wake of this? Expect more talk about Trump’s Golden Dome, his gilded version of Reagan’s SDI, to resume with full force. As Israel’s own analysts point out, Israel’s experience has little actually to teach the US faced with the challenge of defending the continental United States against incoming ICBM. But the precedent of the Israeli Iron Dome apparently caused copyrighting issues for America’s own plans, which were subsequently upgraded to the President’s favorite color, gold. As Trump insists, America will have an “All American” system.

Where Israeli technology will be deployed for immediate use is in Europe, as part of the Sky Shield initiative launched by Olaf Scholz. An order for billions of euros has already been signed for Arrow 3 systems.

Against the ennui of the overfamiliar disaster scenario, the long-anticipated escalation, the chronicle of a confrontation foretold, mark this moment for its radicalism.

The fact of two military powers trading blows over a span of 1000 miles, over the heads of millions of uninvolved bystanders. Massive rockets roaring at hypersonic speeds into outer space … and being intercepted there.

Mark this moment!

With the Russian assault on Ukraine and the ramifications of the October 7 attack, 2023-2025 may well go down in history as the moment not only of the advent of drone warfare, but as the opening of a new era of missile and anti-missile combat. Against this backdrop, Israel’s conventional aerial bombardment of Iran, as dramatic and effective as it may be, is the “ground game” compared to the hypersonic contest raging on the edges of the atmosphere and beyond.

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