Now that the dust has settled from the Israeli strike on the Iranian diplomatic mission in Damascus, the Iranian response with drones and missiles, and the Israeli counterstrike with a drone attack on Iran, it is worth taking a step back to understand what happened, and what it all means.

The tl;dr version is:

Israel is not merely losing its war against its enemies – it has LOST.

I do not write this with any pleasure. As I have pointed out many times, I have been to Israel myself, and I think it is a remarkable country. Personally, I like the Israelis – I am pleased to count several of them as friends. I would like to see Israel survive and thrive – even though I strongly disagree with modern Talmudic Judaism, which is NOT the Judaism of the Bible, and even though the ultra-Orthodox types in Israel persecute Christians of all stripes in the Holy Land.

But my FEELZ have nothing to do with objective reality. What Iran achieved with its attack was nothing short of remarkable, and it was hugely impressive from a tactical and technical standpoint.

Here we run into some problems with figuring out who is telling the truth. When the Iranians launched their strike, they claimed they had inflicted tremendous damage on Israel. Their media used images and videos purporting to show and prove this – but it turns out, those were outright LIES, using hijacked videos from years ago:

Similarly, the Israelis have publicly claimed the Iranian attack did almost no real damage – but have very conveniently refused to let their own investigative reporters into the affected bases to assess for themselves the true extent of the damage to Israel’s military infrastructure.

This, alone, indicates the Israelis suffered a far greater blow than anyone there is willing to let on.

The more important aspect of the Iranian strike, though, is the principle that it has established in the Middle East. The Iranians essentially upended the entire military and political calculus of the region with that one strike.

Israel’s Strike on Damascus

Let us start with the fact of Israel’s strike on the Iranian consular building in Damascus. It is important to note here that Israel has not, at any point, claimed credit for the strike on Apr 1, which hit and apparently “flattened” a building adjacent to the Iranian consular building – which was part of the consular compound itself. However, that is standard Israeli practice, and given the actions and reactions of Israeli government figures, the international community, and other parties, it is pretty safe to conclude that Israel did, in fact, launch the attack.

Let us be very clear about something: attacks on consular buildings and embassies are ACTS OF WAR. These are not something you do lightly. Attacking an embassy or consulate is exactly the same, legally speaking, as attacking the country itself, because that ground is considered the sovereign territory of the country in question.

The Israeli government risked a dramatic escalation across the entire Middle East, to kill an Iranian general and his deputy in that strike, and did so willingly.

This takes a special kind of crazy, frankly, because it is not like just killing a general or two is going to stop the Iranians from doing what they need to do in securing their position in the Middle East. President Trump’s assassination of Brig. Gen. Qassem Soleimani a few years ago – which I, wrongly, celebrated at the time, not knowing then what I do now about the dynamics of the region – was one such incident. This assassination was very likely another.

Iran’s Strike on Israel

The Iranians, naturally, were none too pleased about what the Israelis had done, and vowed a substantial retaliation. In reality, however, all parties involved were working very hard behind the scenes to deescalate things and prevent an all-out war in the Middle East.

We now know the Iranians gave the FUSA and its allies a solid 36 hours’ notice before actually launching their strike, which involved some 301 different projectiles – most of them drones.

The strike itself was very obviously carefully calibrated and timed. None of the projectiles sent against Israel, targeted civilian infrastructure. The entire strike was all about hitting military targets in a highly-calibrated, well-orchestrated, and precisely designed show of force.

The message to Israel was clear: continue to F*** Around, and you assuredly will Find Out.

And that is precisely what the strike achieved.

Quality vs Quantity

The true power of the strike does not lie in the actual impacts, or in terms of what was destroyed (which was very little of anything important). No, the true importance of the Iranian strike is in terms of what it demonstrated to Israel – and the world.

The Iranians used a mixture of cheap drones – their Shahed “flying Dorito” drones are the inspiration for the Russian Geranium II (Герань-2) drones, which the Russians have since extensively modified, upgraded, and updated to be much more stealthy and lethal – and somewhat more expensive ballistic missiles.

Israel, the US, the UK, Jordan, and various other regional actors expended colossal quantities of AD missiles and effort to bring down all of these projectiles. The Israelis themselves have admitted that they expended around US$1.3B in AD missiles to stop the incoming swarm of drones and ballistic missiles.

That does not count the costs to the US and its regional allies, which sent up fighter jets and AD missiles from Arleigh Burke-class missile destroyers stationed in the region to take on the Iranian attack. The latest data indicate the US shot down well over half the incoming wave of drones and ballistic missiles, long before they ever reached Israel.

That means the Israelis actually expended over US$1.3B in intercepting only about 120-140 projectiles – and the cost to the US was much, MUCH higher than that, given US SM-3 interceptors cost upwards of six times what David’s Sling missiles do.

War MAFF

And that was to repel a single Iranian attack, focused on specific targets, using what the Iranians claimed (in Farsi) were obsolete missile and drone technologies.

As I have pointed out several times already, the mathematics involved here are simply too stark to ignore.

If repelling a single attack of less than 150 projectiles, only a handful of which were hypersonic – and evidently, ALL of those specific projectiles punctured Israel’s missile defence shield – cost at least 0.25% of Israel’s GDP, in a country that already is experiencing a 20% economic contraction, and spends 5.3% of its GDP on national defence, and also took out a substantial percentage of its existing stock of missile interceptors…

Then that is not sustainable long-term. It is just that simple.

The Iranian response also unveiled a powerful new threat. I have seen the argument that drones are a passing fad that will easily be dealt with by emergent technologies. I very much beg to differ. The data on the ground in the Banderastan War show the exact opposite. Neither Ukraine nor Russia have any truly effective deterrent against cheap, simple, easy-to-manufacture drones, and they have been slinging them at each other for 2 years now.

The Russians have the world’s most powerful and sophisticated AD, with a claimed (and almost certainly real) effectiveness rate of over 95%. Their jamming systems are capable of literally frying the GPS guidance circuits in American guided artillery and ground attack missiles in-flight.

Jamming is effective against drones that use GPS or satellite-linked guidance of any kind. Iran’s Shahed-136 drones apparently use some form of guidance that incorporates either GPS or mobile network data. A powerful enough jamming system can, in theory, knock out or hijack those drones – the Russians have certainly demonstrated that capability, for instance, against Ukrainian drones.

Yet, jamming systems can do NOTHING against inertial guidance, which is precisely the system used in many classes of ballistic missiles, and in some classes of drones. For those, you need actual missile interceptors.

And that is where the mathematics become immediately prohibitive.

A single “moped” – the affectionate nickname given by Russians to the Geranium-II, due to the two-stroke piston engine used to power the original generation of “flying Doritos” – costs as little as US$20K. A single Iron Dome Tamir interceptor costs as little as US$40K – but that is a very short-range system, designed to bring down projectiles travelling on easy-to-calculate ballistic trajectories. The David’s Sling missiles, on the other hand, cost US$1M each. This is comparable to US PATRIOT PAC-3 MIM-104 missiles, which cost, apparently, north of of US$2M a pop.

It does not take much imagination to figure out what would actually happen, in the event of a serious Iranian strike on Israel.

Missile Mania

Consider a situation in which the average cost to Iran of any given attack or suicide drone – they have many different types – is US$30K, per unit.

All the Persians would have to do, would be to send a swarm of a thousand drones – total cost, around US$30M – to swamp Israel’s air defence systems. This, for Iran, is trivial. As the West is now finding out, Iran, like Russia, has a level and depth of manufacturing capacity that it never imagined.

Furthermore, the Iranians demonstrated they can very easily time the flight of their drone swarm to arrive right before any major missile strikes. It isn’t difficult – you could run the basic MAFF In a spreadsheet on your laptop.

All they have to do, then, is swamp Israel’s AD with repeated waves of drones and cheap ballistic missiles, costing a few hundred thousand to million dollars apiece. And then, once those defences are depleted, it will be very straightforward for Iran to deploy its latest, most sophisticated Fatteh systems – which are hypersonic and quasi-ballistic, therefore impossible for Western and Israeli AD to handle – to take down Israel’s critical infrastructure.

As I have stated before, repeatedly, there is no stopping those missiles.

This is rocket science, in the sense of figuring out how to compute the right flight times and trajectories. But it is not difficult to understand that quantity has a quality all of its own, and Iran proved this conclusively.

This is before we get to the issues involved with the cost-effectiveness of missile defence systems. The Russians seem to be the only ones who have a really powerful layered AD system, and it is undoubtedly hugely expensive for them, because of the asymmetry involved in fighting cheap-and-cheerful drones. For anyone else, to include both the US and Israel, it seems the cost of missile defence, relative to what it actually delivers, is prohibitively high.

PATRIOT Games

Further, the US will be of very limited help in such a situation. It turns out that, during the Iranian attack on Israel, the US Navy shot down most of the missiles and drones sent against Israel. But that was against a series of obsolete and straightforward targets. Against Iranian hypersonic weapons of the most advanced kind, there is no defence.

These are weapons the US PATRIOT cannot counteract – as demonstrated clearly by the Russians, who used Iskanders, Kinzhals, and other weapons to wipe out multiple PATRIOT batteries in 404 – and which the newer THAAD system can only theoretically counteract.

Indeed, the PATRIOT’s record against ballistic missiles and drones, in actual combat, is actually very poor, and this pre-dates the Banderastan War.

(Supposedly, the US Arleigh Burke destroyers in the area shot down at least 7 exoatmospheric Iranian ballistic missiles using SM-3 interceptors, which cost US$12M each. According to David the Ass, a military ANALyst with a background in – and I’m not making this up – graphic novels, this by definition means American missile defence works. The less said about that, the better.)

The only people who have successfully shot down hypersonic missiles, under actual combat conditions, are the Russians – the Ukrainian Tochka-U and Grom systems are low-hypersonic, and Russia has successfully intercepted and destroyed multiple examples of both.

But hypersonic ballistic missiles are not the only tool the Iranians have in their arsenal. They also have quasi-ballistic manoeuvring missiles. And I have no doubt they are talking to their Russian and Chinese friends to figure out how to build air-breathing, scramjet-powered, hypersonic cruise missiles – which the Russians have, and have tested in combat.

Again, it does not take much to realise very quickly that this is not a game Israel can play long-term and win. In fact, it has already lost.

Point – Counterpoint

Iran does not need an air force, or a military presence on the ground, to take on Israel – or even to take it out. It just doesn’t. All it needs are stand-off strike weapons – which it has, in spades. The very limited, precisely calibrated Iranian response to the embassy attack, achieved several critical objectives:

• It told the Iranians exactly where Israel’s heaviest clusters of AD capabilities are;
• It gave them vital intelligence on the depth and quality of those defences;
• The use of allied forces to intercept missiles also told Iran where the paths of greatest and least resistance are;
• Iran confirmed to itself that its fastest and most powerful weapons cannot be intercepted by Israeli AD;

The Iranians are therefore not bluffing, at all, when they state that any further Israeli escalation in the region will be met with an overwhelming response. They are more than capable of doing precisely that – and turning all of Israel into a parking lot, in the process.

The Israeli deterrent is its nuclear capability. But that has substantial limits. Iran is a gigantic country, but sparsely populated, with only about 90 million people. For a sense of perspective, that amounts to more people than Germany, spread out across a country five times the size – in terms of area, Iran is larger than Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, and Switzerland COMBINED. Much of it is mountainous.

And the Iranians, despite the handicap of being Shi’a Muslims – which means they believe in things so ridiculous, even Sunnis consider them idiotic, and that takes some doing, given how colossally stupid the death-cult of Izzlam actually is – are an intelligent and capable people, hailing from an ancient and proud civilisation. This means they have taken great pains to hide their most important military facilities in the mountains, out of reach of the weapons Israel has.

On top of that, the Israeli Air Force – which is the IDF’s greatest weapon, as its land forces simply cannot fight a sustained war far from home – do not have the range and punch to get through to Iran.

The upshot of all this is, Iran has established clear deterrence in the region.

And there is not one damned thing Israel can do about it.

Conclusion – There Goes the Neighbourhood

As a direct result of this understanding, Israel had to pull its return punch, hard. No doubt Brandon and his clique of idiots begged the Israeli government to avoid a really crazy escalation – which I would not put beyond the likes of men like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, who are ultra-ideologues – and start an all-out war with Iran. That is why Israel essentially used a very minor and limited drone attack to do, basically, not much of anything to Iran in response.

Ultimately, the response from Israel was, essentially, “message received – we’re standing down”.

That cannot have been an easy message to swallow, especially for the Israelis. I know something about what they are like – and as Larry Johnson, Alexander Mercouris, and others have commented before, the Israelis, especially their governing elites, have a colossal arrogance to them, that you have to see to believe.

The consequences of this change will be felt for years, if not decades, to come. Iran has just demonstrated to the entire Muslim world that the “Little Satan”, as they call Israel, can be defeated not merely at the physical level of war – Israel conclusively lost the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and is losing the war against Hamas in Gaza – but on the moral and mental levels as well.

And people in Israel – albeit the liberal ones, the type who write for Ha’aretz, which is like The New York F***ing Slimes, but only slightly more respectable – are beginning to admit as much.

Ten years ago, I would never have imagined such a thing happening. Even as little as three years ago, this sort of scenario was virtually unthinkable. But, today, the entire Western world’s military has been shown to be overrated and impotent, because the realities of war have reestablished themselves.

In the end, what matters is not technology, or air power, or the latest whiz-bang gadgets. No, in the end, what truly matters is industrial capacity.

The West (and Israel) lacks it. Eurasia has it. The MAFF is not difficult to compute.