Israel takes control of Iran's skies—a feat that still eludes Russia in Ukraine
Within 48 hours of starting its war on Iran, Israel said it gained air superiority over the western part of the country, including Tehran. Israeli warplanes began dropping bombs from within Iranian skies instead of relying on expensive long-range missiles.
That is a feat that the giant Russian air force has been unable to achieve in Ukraine in 3½ years of war. This setback is one of the reasons why Moscow's troops have been bogged down in grinding trench warfare, sustaining staggering losses, ever since they failed to rapidly seize Kyiv in February 2022.
On Sunday, Israel was exploiting its advantage, saying it had taken out dozens of surface-to-air missiles in western Iran and killed the intelligence chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, along with his deputy.
The two wars are very different in many respects—for one, there is no conventional land component to the Israeli campaign in Iran. But the experience of these two conflicts, closely observed by militaries around the world, reinforces what war planners have known for decades: Control over air is everything, if you can get it.
'The two campaigns are showing the fundamental importance of air superiority in order to succeed in your overall military objectives," said retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula, dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, who oversaw allied air operations against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan in 2001.
'In the case of Russia-Ukraine war, you see what happens when neither side can achieve air superiority: stalemate and devolution to attrition-based warfare," he said. 'In the case of the Israel-Iran war, it allows them unhindered freedom to attack where they possess air superiority over segments of Iran."
The initial Israeli airstrikes were using the fifth-generation stealth F-35 aircraft, enhanced with Israeli modifications. Now that most of Iranian air defenses have been suppressed, older warplanes such as F-15 and F-16 are joining the fight. Israel has also started dropping short-range JDAM and Spice guided bombs, which are cheaper and much more abundant than missiles, to devastating effect.
'Over the past 24 hours, we completed an aerial route to Tehran and conducted an aerial breaching battle. IAF pilots are flying at great risk to their lives, hundreds of kilometers away from Israel, striking hundreds of different targets with precision," said Israeli military Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir.
The Israelis now have 'the ability to use the whole suite of their offensive weapons—in greater mass, more efficiently, and spreading them out," said retired British Air Marshal Martin Sampson, who directed British air operations against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq and now heads the Middle East office of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. 'From Israel's side, the campaign objective is to destroy and degrade—and Iran doesn't have that ability."
The Israelis have certainly learned from Russian failures—and Ukrainian successes—as they planned their own campaign against Iran. But, military officials and analysts say, the most obvious lesson so far is that the Israeli air force is intrinsically more capable than the Russians—while Ukraine is much better at defense than Iran.
'Israel achieved surprise and overmatch over Iran's air defenses, which represented a much easier target set than Ukraine's air defenses in almost every respect," said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment and an expert on Russian and Ukrainian militaries. 'The asymmetry in qualitative capability between Israel's air force and Russia is also vast and can be easily observed."
Retired British Air Marshal Edward Stringer, who ran the air campaign in Libya in 2011 and headed operations for the British Ministry of Defense, said that the overall culture, sophisticated training and innovation of the Israeli air force, combined with its integration into intelligence and cyber capabilities, is a key reason why the Israelis succeeded where the Russians have failed. 'All the Russians have is pilots. They grow these pilots to drive flying artillery, and that's it," he said.
Just like Ukraine, whose Soviet jet fighters were badly outdated by 2022, Iran doesn't have warplanes capable of surviving air-to-air combat with its foe. Unlike Ukraine, however, Tehran has spectacularly failed to organize ground-based air defenses in ways that could have significantly impeded the ability of enemy aircraft to operate over its territory.
This was, above all, the result of a fatal political miscalculation. Over decades, Tehran underinvested in air defenses and bet instead on the deterrent firepower of its own missile forces and those of its regional proxies.
'Iran never relied on air defenses alone to ward off attacks like this. The idea was always to use deterrence," said Fabian Hinz, a military expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
But the main component of Iranian deterrence—Lebanon's Hezbollah militia—was decimated by Israel last year, and then physically severed from Iran by the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria. Subsequent Israeli bombing of Syrian air-defense installations created a superhighway that Israeli aircraft can use unimpeded on their way to Iran.
Ukrainian air defenses—primarily the Soviet-vintage S-300 and Buk systems—were much more robust and better integrated in 2022 than Iran's turned out to be once Israel attacked. Tehran relies on a mishmash of S-300, Chinese batteries and locally made air-defense systems.
Equally critical was the element of surprise. Thanks to U.S. intelligence warnings about the impending Russian invasion, the Ukrainian military command dispersed and concealed the bulk of its mobile air-defenses in February 2022. After a handful of Russian jets were downed over Ukrainian cities, manned Russian aircraft stopped operating beyond the front line—the situation that remains in place today. To strike targets deep inside Ukraine, Russia must rely on the limited supply of cruise or ballistic missiles, or on drones, which are slow and carry a limited payload. Ukraine is using its own drones to strike back.
Unlike Ukraine in 2022, Iran was caught by surprise—in part because of deceptive Israeli threats to launch the attack should U.S.-Iranian talks scheduled for June 15 fail to produce progress. Instead, the war began two days earlier.
Israeli special-operations teams got into Iran covertly and destroyed key Iranian air-defense assets with short-range drones at the start of the campaign, using a method similar to how Ukrainian intelligence barely two weeks earlier blew up several Russian strategic bombers. At the same time, Israel was able to assassinate much of Iran's military leadership—another operation made possible by superior spywork.
'Basically, what Israel did with Iran is what Russia wanted to do with Ukraine: They thought they could pull off some cloak-and-dagger thing, and infiltrate and decapitate the Ukrainian regime," said Michael Horowitz, an Israeli geopolitical analyst. 'But it turned out that the Ukrainian society has a resilience and cannot be so easily penetrated—whereas when it comes to Iran, the regime is so unpopular that it's easy to find people there who will agree to work with Israel."
Despite Israeli strikes, which resulted in numerous civilian casualties alongside military targets, Iran continues to lob ballistic-missile salvos at Israeli cities, also causing death and destruction. Time, however, now appears to be on Israel's side—at least in the immediate future.
'It's a numbers game, and it seems like Israel has the upper hand because they can now go after the missiles that are shooting at them with direct attack. After all, the best way to shoot a missile is on the ground while it's in a container, and not in the air while it's flying," said retired U.S. Air Force Gen. Timothy Ray, a former U.S. Global Strike Command commander. 'What the Israelis are doing is just steadily leveraging an advantage."
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com
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