A week into one of the most audacious military operations in history, what is the state of play? Iran is petulantly lashing out, flailing, while Israel is tearing its way through the regime, inflicting 2 to 3 orders of magnitude more damage on Iran than vice versa. 🧵(1/7)
Their attacks are simply depleting their remaining stocks, exposing their launch sites, but doing no damage at all to Israel’s military apparatus. They have killed 22 Israeli civilians, as well as 5 Ukrainians, and done perhaps $50 million worth of property damage.
The cost to them of these attacks, when all is said and done—including the sanctions they forced their people to bear over decades, the R&D, the opportunity cost? Certainly hundreds of billions of dollars. Most of what they built up over 40 years has disappeared in a week. (2/7)
Almost comically, they have sent over 1,000 drones against Israel in the past week, and not a single one has made it through. On their drones, they are zero for a thousand. (3/7)
After the previous Iranian strikes in 2024, it was always inevitable that they would turn their launchers on Israeli cities the next time. Why? To understand why, we need to understand some statistics and the concept of CEP—circular error probable.
This is a map of Iran's impact sites on Nevatim airbase in October 2024. While the calculations are more complex, experts agree that the CEP of the missiles is approximately 800 meters. That is to say, if the IRGC targets a specific static target, half the missiles it sends at that target will fall within a circle of radius 800 meters from that site, and half will fall even further away.
The probability of hitting the actual target, or getting close enough (within about 20 meters) to destroy it with the 500 kg warheads, is extremely low. And so it was: Nevatim base lost a single empty hangar, and its operations weren’t disturbed at all. (4/7)
The Iranians don’t have access to satellite guidance, which Israel blocks anyway, so they are dependent on 1950s technology. Western weaponry can reliably hit a static or even moving target nearly every time. The CEP is almost moot. They only miss when there is a malfunction.
Not so Iran. To destroy an Iranian airbase, a pair of fully loaded F-15s is sufficient. To destroy an Israeli airbase, Iran would have to shoot more missiles than they possess, and even then, they would harm no active aircraft, since Israel has enough warning to scramble their planes into the sky. (5/7)
The Israeli Air Force has clearly largely attrited and suppressed the Iranian missile force in western Iran, forcing it to fire its much rarer and more expensive missiles from further east.
The cost and complexity of missiles increase exponentially with their range: a missile with 2,000 km range is much more precious, rare, and expensive than one with 1,000 km range. They are firing them because they are increasingly out of options. (6/7)
So, Iran's entire operation—for which it is burning up its weapons—is just a terror raid for domestic PR purposes. They might think they are exhausting the Israeli population, but like Sinwar, they greatly misunderstood the resilience and forbearance of the Israeli public. (7/7)
So, the inaccuracy of the Iranian missiles means that they can't hit anything smaller than a town, as the demonstrated to the world in 2024, and so they simply aim at towns. They spent 40 years, and trashed their economy, to recreate WW2 style rockets.
Two of the graphs above are from today's Telegraph article by @COLRICHARDKEMP — for some reason, the tags didn't work.
telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/06/1…
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