Behnam Ben Taleblu
Israel’s long-awaited retaliation against Iran has highlighted the clerical regime’s conventional military weakness and sense of strategic vulnerability. Designed to make Iran “pay” for its Oct. 1 missile barrage — which marked the largest single-day ballistic missile operation in history — Israel struck more than 20 military targets in three essentially uncontested waves of attack. It remains unclear, however, if these strikes will be sufficient to elicit a change in the right direction from Tehran.
In the wee hours of Oct. 26, Iranian authorities watched as Israel gutted two of their traditional pillars of deterrence — the ability to “deny” an adversary the chance to land a blow, and their ability to “punish” an aggressor.
Iranian radars, as well as air and missile defenses such as Russian-provided S-300 platforms, were reportedly taken offline or destroyed. So too, were several ballistic missile facilities tied to solid-propellant missile production, such as those at Parchin, Khojir, and Shahroud, as well as other sites believed to support Iran’s domestic missile supply chain.
While Iran’s arsenal of ballistic missiles — assessed by the U.S. intelligence community to be the largest in the Middle East — numbers around 3,000, it appears to have been untouched by the recent strike. Instead, Israel targeted Tehran’s ability to produce over time more medium-range systems capable of reaching the Jewish State from Iranian territory.
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