What Iran is facing: Israeli strike power combines precision with mass
On October 1, before Iran launched more than 180 missiles against Israel, an X user called @MossadIL posted a video of the Damavand power station. It’s a 2.9 GW combined-cycle natural-gas plant that is the largest of its type in the region and the main source of power to Tehran.
The implication was unsaid but unmistakable: ‘Nice power plant. Shame if anything happened to it.’
Even online trolling can sometimes have a germ of reality to it. On October 9, Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant said, ‘Our strike will be lethal, precise and above all, surprising. They won’t understand what happened and how. They will see the results.’
It’s the ability to deliver large numbers of fire-and-forget, accurate, small but lethal weapons that gives Israel’s leaders the ability to hold at risk a very large range of Iranian targets with controlled effects. They could be energy or transport infrastructure, military targets, such as bases and missile plants, or many other facilities. This includes a capability, as Gallant suggests, to achieve surprise.
Evidence that Israel is not bluffing comes from the April 19 reprisal for Iran’s April 13 massed drone attack. A guided weapon hit and destroyed a mobile radar unit in Isfahan, 500 km from the closest border to Israel. The radar was part of one of Iran’s three prized Almaz-Antey S-300 long-range surface-to-air missile systems.
The exact weapon combination used has not been disclosed. But the message is that even when Iranian forces could be expected to be under high alert, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were confident they could penetrate deep into Iranian airspace and attack, of all things, an air-defense system.
Israel has developed a powerful and unique regional, conventional strategic strike capability, with a steady modernisation effort that started in the mid-2000s when Iran’s nuclear ambitions became clear and when Iran increased its supply of weapons to Hezbollah.
The modernisation effort has occurred alongside the growth of Israel’s information technology sector and amid a long-term change in the defense industry towards a more export-driven, more commercial structure.
The IDF’s philosophy at all levels of warfare is to obtain the clearest possible operational picture, fused from the inputs of many high-end intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) systems. Israel has developed and retained a sovereign satellite launch capability, even though geography dictates a less efficient, eastward launch for its Ofeq electro-optical and radar spacecraft. The country selects orbits that provide frequent passes over the Middle East.
The IDF already has Israel Aerospace Industries Shavit (signals intelligence) and Eitan (airborne early warning) aircraft, based on Gulfstream G550 business jets. They were joined in service this year by the first Oron, a G550 equipped with a multi-sensor ground and air surveillance suite and new-generation processors including artificial intelligence that can pick out targets autonomously.
The air force’s fleet of combat aircraft has been steadily modified with an emphasis on improving reach and survivability while integrating new weapons that have either greater range or reduced size and cost.
The fighter force is on its way to a 2034 inventory that will consist entirely of Lockheed Martin F-35Is, Boeing F-15s of a further improved variant (the F-15IA) and Lockheed Martin F-16Is. Although the F-15 was originally a fighter, Israel’s version is close to being a medium bomber. The F-16I has conformal fuel tanks for longer range and, to go even farther, routinely operates with two external tanks that each hold another 2300 litres. And IAI is developing external tanks for the F-35.
Both the F-16I and F-15I are equipped with electromagnetic warfare suites from the Israel’s advanced manufacturer IAI-Elta.
Israel’s F-35Is have unspecified differences to other F-35s, and the country uses one of them as a test asset, supporting integration of Israeli weapons. Israel has a sovereign capability to modify mission data files (which for other F-35 users are generated under US control). The F-35I almost certainly has a special Israeli datalink whose transmissions would be hard for an enemy to detect.
The air force has more than 250 aircraft suitable for strike missions, plus tankers to extend the range of some of them and other F-15s, designed mainly for air-to-air missions, to cover them.
Both IAI and Rafael have been publicly promoting long-range, high-speed weapons, indicating that there is either a domestic or export competition for such equipment underway. Rafael’s Rocks is based on the Black Sparrow ballistic target missile. Its guidance system, combining scene-matching and passive radar homing, suggests a focus on suppressing the enemy’s air defences. IAI’s Air Lora is an air-launched variant of the company’s surface-to-surface Lora artillery rocket, using jam-resistant GPS-inertial guidance.
While these weapons are important, the watchword for Israeli air-to-ground development in the 21st century has been ‘mass precision’. Earlier air-to-ground weapons could achieve mass or precision but not both. For example, laser or command-guided electro-optical weapons are inherently limited in numbers because they need control; GPS-INS weapons are less accurate and subject to jamming in the target area. The Israeli goal has been to overcome this limitation to precisely hit a great many target points.
A clear example of this capability is the combination of Rafael’s Spice-250 glide bomb and Litening 5 target designation pod. The pod has improved optics and adds a shortwave infrared band. Shortwave infrared’s most important attribute is that it penetrates atmospheric moisture better than other IR or visual wavelengths, so the aircraft can launch a weapon farther from the target.
Litening 5’s 60km targeting range is too far for laser designation, but the Spice family of weapons use a different, fire-and-forget terminal-guidance system. The weapon is programmed with a set of images located around the target and the target’s position relative to those points. Even if the target is obscured by cloud or smoke, the weapon will still guide, and the target map is large enough for the missile to find the scene even if GPS has been jammed in midcourse.
Additionally, Spice-250 has an imaging-plus-datalink human-in-the-loop mode that makes it possible to track moving targets or abort attacks.
Spice-250 carries an 80kg warhead. Elbit’s ordnance division has worked since the 2000s on the fundamentals of bomb and warhead design. It has created a series of bombs that look like the US Mk 82/83/84 series but are designed for focused blast and fragment effects against surface targets and better penetration of buildings. Elbit claims that the MPR-250, of about 230kg, is as effective as the United States’ 900kg Mk84. The same technology makes the Spice-250 warhead more effective than its size would imply.
Spice is integrated with a smart quadruple rack that includes a targeting-management processor and a datalink with front and rear antennas. This means an F-16 can carry 16 rounds, and an F-15 can in theory carry 28 weapons.
Decades of combat experience have shown that a small number of 900kg-class weapons with moderate accuracy tend not to damage large-area industrial targets severely; four times the number of precise impacts are a different matter.
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