Iran’s Military Capabilities Against Israel, Explained | WSJ

Israel has launched one of the largest attacks on Iran in history. It crosses a threshold that we've thought about, considered about, war-gamed for 15 years at the very least. It's really brought this conflict, the Iranian-Israeli conflict, into uncharted territory. The first strikes hit areas throughout Iran, including several key nuclear and military sites. Now, Iran is hitting back. But Tehran is entering this conflict in weaker position. Here's what its military capabilities look like. Iran's supreme leader leads Tehran's large military operation, two branches of its own military, and a network of proxies that extend outside of its borders. In the past, these proxies have been Iran's first line of defense. The Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s was devastating to Iran. It convinced them that they never wanted war to return to Iran. So dealing with the proxies kept war away from Iran's doorstep. Israel has already kind of laid the groundwork for this attack against Iran by either destroying or severely degrading Iran's proxies in Gaza and in Lebanon. So much so that they're basically no longer potent military forces. The difference now is that Iran is all alone. And when Iran is all alone, it really only has one option to hit Israel, and that's to use its missiles and drones. Iran has sophisticated missiles that can strike at various ranges and reach well into Israel. Israel's ambassador to the United States told CNN that Iran has considerable volume of ballistic missiles somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,000. Ballistic missiles are large and destructive, but its arsenal also includes less powerful and less expensive cruise missiles and drones, which can fly low and be hard to detect. In previous strikes, Iran has used a mixture of these missiles to overwhelm Israel's defense system. What Iran tries to do when it attacks Israel is to shoot all of these things at once. So you have things flying at different levels, at different trajectories, at different speeds, which is meant to saturate radar systems, right? So that Israel has to pick and choose to knock this down, to knock that down. But with all of that, you're hoping that something gets through. Iran staged a retaliatory attack on Tel Aviv and a number of Israeli bases in October, after Israel killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Roughly 180 missiles were launched, and some were able to penetrate the defense system, but no deaths were reported. Most of the missiles that got through, you know, landed sort of in parts of the military bases that were not occupied. Patches of sand or a runway or, you know, a warehouse, but they didn't do significant damage. When Israel launched the recent strikes on Tehran, it hit some residential areas. Later, Iran launched a barrage of missiles aimed at populated areas in and around Tel Aviv and breached the defense system. Those types of attacks would have a lot less strategic utility, but they could be much more devastating to Israel, in the sense that they could kill dozens, hundreds of people. Because Iran needs to launch so many missiles in order to make that breach happen, the battle comes down to numbers. Even though they have thousands of missiles, because they have to fire hundreds of missiles each time in order to penetrate Israel's defenses, it's not really a stockpile that would allow them to sustain a long, drawn-out conflict that was fought through the air. But Israel also can't fully defend itself on its own. In the recent attacks and in both of Iran's attacks on Israel last year, the U.S. assisted in intercepting the missile barrages. Other allies have also offered assistance.