> conflict was settling into a "war of the cities" scenario with both Israel and the US exhausting interceptors rapidly
Iran was rapidly running out of launchers. Once Israel gained air supremacy, it severely reduced its launcher deployment to avoid losing them for nothing.
> What happens when it turns into a contest of rocket production and absorption against a country with 10x the population and 20x the land area? Completely unwinnable for Israel
Iranian rocket production rates aren't particularly amazing. Tehran's deterrence came from the size of their stockpile, and the fact that they could fire on Israel from four directions (Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis and Iran proper).
> Iran doesn't need air superiority to fire rockets
Where did you get this?
Iran's MRBMs are mostly liquid fuelled [1] and stored in fortified bunkers (like V2s were). This leaves them highly vulnerable during fuelling (same as V2s). With air supremacy one can take out the missiles on the pad. (Which, due to the aforementioned fortification requirements, are predictably placed.) This is one reason Iran's missile firing rate collapsed during the war [2]--Israeli intelligence combined with targeted (land-origin, it seems) strikes took out their launchers.
Iran also has a fleet of solid-fuelled missiles which can be launched on short notice, but these are also less accurate, have to carry smaller payloads and more cheaply intercepted.
Moreover, in a war of attrition (which we did not reach, both sides were burning stockpiles) production reigns supreme. You need at least air parity to fire missiles. You need a favourable air situation to run fixed factories.
Iranian solid-fueled MRBM production rates were estimated by Israel to be at 200 a month, and rapidly increasing. That is actually a pretty remarkable production rate - basically the yearly production rate of interceptors. And that's only the solid fueled (by now the most produced), and only in ranges that can reach Israel. There is no reason why they would be any easier to intercept - plenty of aeroballistic missiles and even HGVs are propelled by solid fueled boosters.
Iranian missiles launchers are pretty cheap, and reportedly quite plentiful - they are relatively simple modifications of domestically produced truck platforms.
The Iranian account for why the strikes slowed down, FWIW, is that it took a significant amount of time to dig out the exits of the missiles bases, not that they ran out of launchers. Given the recycling of footage from launcher destruction and the simplicity of the launchers I personally find that account significantly more plausible.
The Iranian missile arsenal and production is now focused on solid fueled missiles, so they were emerging from a predictable place, but with a fuelled rocket they could fire in minutes.
Since it took at least an hour for a cruise missile to make it's way and around 15 minutes for an ALBM to make it's way, that means that once Israeli drones started being shot down, they were able to dig out the entrances, exit and launch faster than it took for a munition to be delivered.
Of course if Israel had been able to fly manned aircraft deep into Iran and for prolonged periods of time, that would have been impossible, and they would actually have been unable to fire. But that wasn't the case and so they were able to fire, probably limited by the ability to dig out the entrances and synchronize launches between different sites.
That's all well argued, but I can't get over the asymmetries of country size and the asymmetry of missile defense vs shooting the missile.
Russia wasn't supposed to be economically capable of a war this long and yet here we are. And that's a war of choice. If Iran is being attacked, they have no choices. People will find a way to make missiles underground if they have to.
And that's all before we get into political and psychological factors. How long does Netanyahu stay in power if Tel Aviv is hit every day?
(I have to note, USA vs Iran and Israel vs Iran are very different economic comparisons. It would be impossible for Israel to sustain 24/7 suppression over a country Iran's size but maybe with enough American funding its more feasible.)
Iran has a choice - it could choose not to support Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis or any other group firing rockets on Israel. It could also choose not to enrich uranium.
> I can't get over the asymmetries of country size and the asymmetry of missile defense vs shooting the missile
You're referring to strategic depth. Iran has lots of it. Israel does not. Countering that, however, is power projection capability. Israel has a lot of this, through its air force and allies. Iran was thought to have a lot of it, through its proxies, but that failed.
Without its proxies, Iran's fire on Israel has to originate from its own territory. That means trading missile range against the protection offered by its strategic depth from Israeli counter-battery fire. Hence why Iran's launchers were somewhat distributed across its territory. But! If Israel has air supremacy, that strategic depth changes from a risk to a logistical cost. If Israeli jets can freely access Iranian air space, that extra distance Iran's central and eastern launchers have to fly don't trade against any defensive upside--they're still going to be blown up shortly after a pad is revealed. They just have to burn more fuel to get the same payload to the same place.
> Russia wasn't supposed to be economically capable of a war this long
There were a variety of estimates. Most of them assumed Russia's economy would crumble under sanctions and so Moscow would lose the will to fight. I don't believe any showed Russia would lose the ability.
> If Iran is being attacked, they have no choices. People will find a way to make missiles underground if they have to
Rockets, sure. Missiles? No. The Shahab-3 reaches altitudes of 400 km [1]. That's where the ISS orbits [2].
> How long does Netanyahu stay in power if Tel Aviv is hit every day?
How long does Putin stay in power if Ukraine keeps dismantling Russia's energy infrastructure? The sad truth is war-time leaders tend to be deposed after unpopular wars, not during them.
> It would be impossible for Israel to sustain 24/7 suppression over a country Iran's size
Again, they don't need to. They just need to destroy the launchers.
It's estimated Iran went from 350 to 100 launchers in the war. Once you've levelled the launchers, you're defending against unguided rockets (which everyone in between will try to pot) and drones (which are cheaper and easier to destroy and cause less damage).
> would be impossible for Israel to sustain 24/7 suppression over a country Iran's size but maybe with enough American funding its more feasible
Israel's economy is twice the size of Irans's [3][4]. Its smaller territory means it can concentrate air defences. And with 10x fewer mouths to feed, it can devote more of that economy to its war machine in a spurt.
Iran-Israel is super interesting because they don't share a border, and they sort of min-maxed their militaries and economies in very different ways. If Iran had maintained its proxies, I think your original analysis stands. Without them, when it can only fire from one direction and from far away, all while Israel can scoot up close and right on top of it, many of its advantages turn into liabilities.
Don't know why you're getting downvoted for a thoughtful comment.
I think you're overindexing on a prepared sneak attack with maximum ops velocity from Israel. They threw the best punch they had and it.. disrupted Iran. Didn't knock them out.
Longer term, Israel has 260 fighter-bombers and Iran is huge. Allied analysts after WW2 generally concluded that strategic bombing didn't really move the needle on German war production, and that was with 10s of thousands of bombers, although admittedly a lot less precision. Any long, flat building in Iran's gigantic, mountainous country could be building missiles. And new launcher locations won't be plotted out ahead of time for a high-tempo 72 hour operation, they'll be coming up continuously over the long haul. They don't need to be hypersonic once interceptors are exhausted.
How's Israel going to sustain that long term, especially if they take any amount of ongoing civilian losses at all? It stops being an abstract conversation about collateral damage to civilians pretty quickly once it's happening to them. 10/1 ratio is nowhere near good enough for the polity there.
A more relevant historical parallel was the Iran-Iraq war. Iraq, in the first 5 years of the war, had largely degraded Iranian air defenses and was able to carry out many thousands of airstrikes, at some points even using strategic bombers, many of them with precision weapons. That was enough to degrade Iranian industry, but not enough to destroy it, and by the late 80s Iran still won the war of attrition, and managed to develop their weapons industry.
By the end of the war Iran was using domestic surveillance drones to direct artillery, and was even experimenting with the first attack drones by fitting RPGs on their larger surveillance UAVs, had reverse engineered and started domestically producing TOW missiles, had started producing the Shahab-1 ballistic missile (a Scud clone), Silkworm-clone radar-guided antiship cruise missiles, etc..., all the while their air force was down to less than 100 hundred aircraft in various degrees of disrepair and with very few advanced munitions remaining.
The war ultimately ended in a stalemate, even after the US intervened in Praying Mantis.
The attacks on Iranian industry had zero land attack component. Iran is a very large country and Iraq was not able to hold much Iranian territory, the distances involved mean that Iraq was just like Israel reliant on airpower for these strikes.
> How's Israel going to sustain that long term, especially if they take any amount of ongoing civilian losses at all?
Long term, no clue. The best strategy would be a system of regional alliances, but they've screwed that pooch with Gaza. Second best is setting red lines for Iranian missile production and stockpiles and intervening when those thresholds are breached.
Being extremely hasty with setting red lines and enforcing them is what got Israel into this situation. The "mow the lawn" strategy means perpetual conflict and they have to win every single time.
What right does Israel have to govern Iran's self defense capabilities? Iran's been attacked unprovoked by USA/Israel several times in the last 6-7 years, they're not the ones starting shooting wars.
Iran's supply chain is already fully domestic thanks to sanctions. Repeated strikes on that supply chain will only serve to harden it.
Iran's GDP PPP is 1.75 trillion. The capacity for Iran to produce domestic designs is far higher than Israel's. Iran's nominal GDP has fallen drastically because of sanctions, but in terms of domestically produced and domestically designed military equipment, PPP is far more accurate.
> It's estimated Iran went from 350 to 100 launchers in the war. Once you've levelled the launchers, you're defending against unguided rockets (which everyone in between will try to pot) and drones (which are cheaper and easier to destroy and cause less damage).
That's possible, although no one actually knows how many TELs Iran has, and no one knows how many have been destroyed : Israeli evidence to that effect has been very very slim. Iran's TELs are essentially a pneumatic piston and a FCS (read: Beidou GNSS receiver) bolted onto a domestically-designed 8x8 or 10x10 platform. Iran has far, far more than 400 8x8/10x10 military trucks, so it's essentially impossible to know how many of those they can or have configured as a TEL at any given moment, especially since those conversions are easily done in undergound facilities.
So the "they just need to destroy the launchers" theory is very thin, on the edge of wishcasting. The launchers being domestically produced and similar/lesser in cost to the missiles they fire suggest that even if it does work once, it's not a viable long term strategy.
Iran has a very large automotive industry - they produce over 1 million cars per year. If the main strategic hit was to destroy 200 trucks made in a country that cranks out 1 000 000 cars, I'm going to very skeptical about claims of neutering them.
You may be confusing the guidance mechanisms of early ballistic missiles, which relied entirely on on-board inertial guidance. These missiles therefore needed quite precise initial guidance and an expensive TEL with a myriad of expensive sensors in order to calibrate themselves. Modern ballistic missiles don't work like that : they have non-inertial GNSS guidance (and for the most sophisticated, some kind of active or optical guidance system in the mid course and terminal phase) to complement inertial guidance. That means that the TEL just needs to communicate an initial position, so nothing much more complicated than a GNSS receiver is needed, and to the extent that this is incorrect, the missile can correct itself.
> Rockets, sure. Missiles? No. The Shahab-3 reaches altitudes of 400 km [1]. That's where the ISS orbits [2].
What does that have to do with anything? The Shahab-3 missile has a small fraction of the dV necessary to reach orbit, and is therefore much smaller than the kind of rocket you need for that. We already know that they are stored in large numbers underground, so what's the bottleneck that prevents underground production?
In fact, in Masyaf, Syria, Iran placed the planetary mixers which are the most sensitive and expensive component underground. There is no clear reason why they wouldn't have done so at home.
The rest of the production of solid-fueled missiles is bottlenecked by casting pits. Iran has placed mant of these above ground - obviously we can't know if or how many they have placed underground, but they seem to have largely resisted Israeli airstrikes - they are not a sensitive target. See : https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1220847/guest-post-a... for an independent account of Iranian MRBM-scale solid fueled rocket motor production. The only easy target are the planetary mixers - Israel has claimed to have targeted them, but in Masyaf, Syria, they failed to destroy them using airstrikes and had to resort to a commando attack on the underground facility, so that theory is thin as well.
> Its smaller territory means it can concentrate air defences.
That's right, which is why Israel uses weapons designed to evade air defenses and exploit gaps, while Iran uses weapons that simply exhaust interceptors. The former is easier to exploit from the get go, but the latter fails catastrophically once the breaking point arrives.
> And with 10x fewer mouths to feed, it can devote more of that economy to its war machine in a spurt.
Yes, but Iran doesn't feed it's citizens in US dollars (at least not anymore), it feeds them using a PPP-adjusted basket of goods. And similarly while Israel's interceptors are in large part manufactured in the USA and paid for in USD, Iran's missiles are almost entirely manufactured domestically, with workers paid in a much cheaper basket of goods. In terms of exchaning interceptors and ballistic missiles, Iran is ahead.
The main issue Iran has is that their missiles are mostly not accurate enough to degrade Israeli force projection, and that while missile production is very high, it hasn't been for a long time and thus stockpiles are not great. That's a problem that has an expiration date, and that's why Israel attacked Iran, because the window is closing. Iran only very recently demonstrated the kind of technology that is needed to execute precision strikes using MRBMs: the first missile design they claim is able to do so is the Qassem Basir, which only entered service this year. If that works and if they can scale production, the advantage Israel has in being very concentrated and densely protected turns into a liability - Iran then has the ability to directly attack Israeli BMD radars, and then directly attack airbases. It's a serious threat, and that's exactly why the Israelis decided that they needed to attack.
Granted. We're still talking about a 3x difference, advantage to Iran, in the face of a lot more territory to defend, population to manage and a technical deficit.
> if the main strategic hit was to destroy 200 trucks
MRBM launchers are not trucks.
> You may be confusing the guidance mechanisms of early ballistic missiles
Guided vs unguided refers to the ability to course correct en route. An unguided missile is a lobber rocket. A guided missile has reaction controls onboard.
> What does that have to do with anything?
That it's a complicated machine you can't whip up in a garagd.
> while Iran uses weapons that simply exhaust interceptors
A strategy undermined by collapsing launch rates.
> If that works and if they can scale production, the advantage Israel has in being very concentrated and densely protected turns into a liability
Absolutely. I'm not saying Israel is indefinitely invulnerable to Iran. Just that in the last war, it neutered Iran's capacity to hurt it.
It's a piston mounted on top of a utility truck. It's a truck! If a semi-truck with a refrigerated trailer is a truck, then an 8x8 utility truck with a hydraulic piston is also a truck.
> Guided vs unguided refers to the ability to course correct en route. An unguided missile is a lobber rocket. A guided missile has reaction controls onboard.
That's not what I'm referring to. Early ballistic missiles only had inertial guidance, and therefore needed an accurate positional and attitude fix provided by the launcher, which made it expensive and complex. Modern ballistic missiles have absolute guidance mechanisms, so the launcher is now much simpler.
> That it's a complicated machine you can't whip up in a garagd.
Iranian UGFs aren't garages. They are called missile cities for a reason.
> A strategy undermined by collapsing launch rates.
25-35% of ballistic missile impacts on Israel occured on June 22nd. The Iranian capacity to actually hit targets in Israel did not collapse through the 12 day war.
> Absolutely. I'm not saying Israel is indefinitely invulnerable to Iran. Just that in the last war, it neutered Iran's capacity to hurt it.
Iran's ballistic missile strikes were most successful on June 22nd. In the last week of the war, there is plenty of evidence pointing towards Israeli BMD degrading faster than Iran's ability to launch ballistic missiles.
The only way to conclude that Iran's ability to launch was neutered is if you believe that, were the war to continue, Iran's ability to launch missiles would have continued to degrade. The only argument to that effect is that they'd run out of launchers - I find that implausible on the basis of the launchers being simple modifications of extremely plentiful military truck platforms.
after first week or so iran could launch only from bases that were much further away from Israel (way east), because Israeli air control was weaker there
Iran was rapidly running out of launchers. Once Israel gained air supremacy, it severely reduced its launcher deployment to avoid losing them for nothing.
> What happens when it turns into a contest of rocket production and absorption against a country with 10x the population and 20x the land area? Completely unwinnable for Israel
Iranian rocket production rates aren't particularly amazing. Tehran's deterrence came from the size of their stockpile, and the fact that they could fire on Israel from four directions (Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis and Iran proper).
> Iran doesn't need air superiority to fire rockets
Where did you get this?
Iran's MRBMs are mostly liquid fuelled [1] and stored in fortified bunkers (like V2s were). This leaves them highly vulnerable during fuelling (same as V2s). With air supremacy one can take out the missiles on the pad. (Which, due to the aforementioned fortification requirements, are predictably placed.) This is one reason Iran's missile firing rate collapsed during the war [2]--Israeli intelligence combined with targeted (land-origin, it seems) strikes took out their launchers.
Iran also has a fleet of solid-fuelled missiles which can be launched on short notice, but these are also less accurate, have to carry smaller payloads and more cheaply intercepted.
Moreover, in a war of attrition (which we did not reach, both sides were burning stockpiles) production reigns supreme. You need at least air parity to fire missiles. You need a favourable air situation to run fixed factories.
[1] https://www.iranwatch.org/our-publications/weapon-program-ba...
[2] https://jinsa.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Iranian-Ballist...