Military briefing: how Israel’s air defences withstood Iran’s missile barrage

Most of the roughly 180 missiles that Iran fired at Israel on Tuesday night were intercepted by Israel’s air defences, working in close tandem with US naval destroyers in the region.

The Israeli military was still assessing the damage caused by the attack, which began at 7:31pm local time, but from early indications there had been no casualties, despite several hits.

If that continues to be the case, it will be a remarkable testament to the effectiveness of the country’s air defence systems and US military capabilities — especially as Tehran unleashed the salvo with no warning.

“This attack failed. It was thwarted thanks to Israel’s air defence array, which is the most advanced in the world,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said they had launched “tens of ballistic missiles” in retaliation for the assassinations of Hizbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah and a senior Guards commander in Beirut last week. The Guards said the assault was also in response to a suspected Israeli attack that killed Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July.

In a statement, the Guards claimed that 90 per cent of the launched missiles had hit their targets, most of which were military facilities in or around Tel Aviv. Video footage suggested one missile may even have exploded at or near the headquarters of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service.

However, an Israeli security official said most of the 180 missiles that Iran fired were intercepted by the Israeli Air Force working with AFCENT, the air force component of US Central Command, the country’s military unit responsible for the Middle East.

“In co-operation with AFCENT, the IAF operated in an effective and precise manner, intercepting most of the missiles — several hits were identified, and the damage is being assessed,” the official said.

There were several important differences between Iran’s latest missile attack and the first-ever barrage that Tehran fired against Israel in April.

In that earlier attack, Iran fired about 170 drones, 30 cruise missiles and more than 120 ballistic missiles. According to the Israeli military, 99 per cent of them were intercepted, with only a handful of ballistic missiles landing inside the country, causing minimal damage.

That high interception rate was thanks to the combined efforts of the US and its allies, the tracking of the missiles’ flight paths by US partners in the region, and Israel’s own, highly sophisticated air defences.  

Crucially, Tehran also telegraphed the attack long in advance.

By contrast, this attack came with no warning, with both the Pentagon and Iranian officials at the UN in New York saying that Tehran gave no prior notice to the US or Israel.

Iran’s latest attack also seemingly consisted solely of ballistic missiles, instead of a mass barrage of drones and missiles designed to overwhelm air defences, as Russia has used against Ukraine.

Fabian Hinz, a research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies think-tank, said the exclusion of drones could have been part of a deliberate Iranian strategy to minimise the warning and response time available to Israeli defences.

“The slower UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] — requiring hours to reach their targets — offer adversaries more preparation time compared to ballistic missiles, which arrive within minutes,” he said.

Furthermore, Iran might have used its “hypersonic” Fattah-1 missile for the first time in this strike, Hinz said, as well as its advanced Kheybar Shekan solid-propellant missile.

Ballistic missiles, which fly high into orbital space before plummeting down to earth at supersonic speed, are often harder to intercept than cruise missiles, which fly at lower altitudes and are rocket propelled.

Pentagon spokesman Major General Pat Ryder said that two US Navy destroyers, the USS Bulkeley and the USS Cole, fired approximately a dozen interceptor missiles in defence of Israel during the latest attack.

John Healey, Britain’s defence secretary, said that British forces had also “played their part in attempts to prevent further escalation in the Middle East” — an elliptical statement that suggested RAF fighter jets had intercepted some Iranian missiles, as they did in April.

However, the rest of the missiles would have been intercepted by Israel’s layered air defence system.

Over the past year alone, this has had to deal with sophisticated Iranian capabilities — such as guided, long-range ballistic missiles — and, at the other end of the spectrum, unguided and short-range rockets used by militant groups such as Hamas from the Gaza strip.

Although widely regarded as being among the world’s most effective, Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari has often cautioned that Israel’s air defence systems is “not hermetic”.

The outer layer of Israel’s defence system, called Arrow 2 and 3, is specifically designed to defend against long-range ballistic missiles by intercepting them outside the earth’s atmosphere.

Arrow was first used operationally during the current war, when it successfully shot down incoming ballistic missiles from the Iran-backed Houthis. It also helped block April’s attack from Iran.

Israel’s second layer of defence is known as David’s Sling, and its remit is to shoot down heavier rockets and tactical ballistic missiles, such as Scuds, in the range of 100km-300km.

The system, which went online in 2017, has only seen real action over the past year. Its Stunner interceptor missiles struck several projectiles fired from Gaza and also reportedly intercepted a Hizbollah missile that was fired last week at Tel Aviv.

The centrepiece of Israel’s air defence is the Iron Dome. Funded and developed jointly with the US military, it was introduced in 2011 and has since intercepted thousands of short-range artillery rockets fired by Hamas and other Gaza-based Palestinian militant groups.

During the 2021 Gaza conflict, the Israel Defense Forces claimed a 90 per cent interception rate for projectiles fired at populated areas of the country by Hamas and other militants.

Analysts say the Iron Dome’s high success rate is largely due to the platform’s sophisticated radar, which is augmented with additional artificial intelligence capabilities.

These enable it to discern in seconds which incoming rockets, within a roughly 70km range, are likely to land harmlessly on open ground and which could harm civilians or troops.

This also allows the IDF to conserve the finite supply of its more sophisticated Tamar interceptors, which cost tens of thousands of dollars per missile.

A sea-based version of Iron Dome, often referred to as C-Dome, is also deployed on Israeli navy corvettes. It has successfully shot down attack drones fired at Israeli assets in the Red Sea by the Iran-backed Houthi militants and at Mediterranean gas rigs fired by Hizbollah.

“The logic of the system is that one layer backs up the other,” Yaakov Lappin, an Israeli military affairs analyst, said.

Some of those layers could be seen in action on Tuesday night, when video footage of the sky above Tel Aviv showed interceptors streaking upwards where many of them managed to intercept incoming Iranian projectiles.