An Israeli missile has hit Iran, two US officials have told the BBC’s US partner CBS News.
Iranian state media is reporting that flights have been suspended over several cities, according to Associated Press.
Iran has been on high alert after Israel said it would respond to an Iranian attack against it on Saturday night
I’d be careful about considering Israel’s defense as a complete success, or at least an easy one. According to Israeli sources cited in this article, achieving that result cost Israel as much as $1-1.3 billion USD, and I can’t find out if that includes the price of interception by other countries - a lot of the heavy lifting was done by the USA after all. Given that they say that’s the cost for Israel specifically, I don’t think it does but I can’t find sources. Regardless, it’s a big bill for an attack that everyone knew was coming days in advance and gives a sense of the economics involved in an open war several times more intense.
It’s also incredibly significant for future missile attack that all their radars turned on and all those intercept assets are revealed and clocked and analyzed. Assuming a video going around portrays what it claims, Hezbollah even zeroed in and missiled an Iron Dome launcher site during the attack.
Counterbattery in general is fucking hard. If the proxy can pull that shit off, you had better expect the state actor to take even greater advantage.
Iran also gave notice of their attacks.
it’s a complete success compared to Iran’s defensive measures
How so? I’m honestly asking if you have a source. As of the most recent updates, Iran is reporting no damage, no threats, and has lifted the restrictions on flights in their airspace. There were explosions heard, but the source is unknown and Iran has said air defenses shot down 3 drones.
It was costly, but the relative cost to Iran to launch the attack was far larger.
Source? Because the articles I can find such as this one from Reuters say very much the opposite: “Although Israeli officials have given no details, according to calculations by a number of analysts, the price of Iran’s attack probably amounted to $80 million to $100 million — but cost Israel and its allies around $1 billion to repel.”
Here’s another analysis: “Experts have calculated the cost of the April 13 attack for Iran at $100-$200 million — perhaps five to ten times less than what Israel spent to repel it. That means a huge recurring bill if Iran were to keep attacking.” They go through the math of it and cite specific weapon systems costs.
I’ll wait to see if you can back up your assertion, but I’m quite skeptical at time of writing.
Key word relative. The US did the vast majority of the heavy lifting. $1B is 0.0625% of the US military budget. $100M is 0.4% of Iran’s, nearly an order of magnitude more costly relatively, more than one if it’s on the high side.
That would only be a fair comparison if the US was willing to devote it’s entire military budget to these actions the way Iran can. It would also assume that the US can (and is willing to) spend 1 billion dollars + costs required with overseas operations every time Iran spends 100M on missiles. Iran broke the top 15 for military spending a few years ago so they’re going to have decent capabilities when it comes to being a pain.
It also ignores the cost of dealing with Iranian proxies like Hezbollah and the Houthi, which has Pentagon officials worried as detailed in this article “A $2M missile vs. a $2,000 drone: Pentagon worried over cost of Houthi attacks.”. I’m definitely not cheering for Iran, but I don’t think your total budget vs. total budget comparison is true to the actual economics of a US defense of Israel in the case of sustained attacks. Or even relative cost given that the US has it’s budget spread across many more pursuits than this region.
To add to that, every commitment to defending Israel while it is provoking and escalating things in the region, means less resources to Ukraine. So if the western European countries are committing more to helping Israel in its bullshit, that shifts the power balance in Europe more in Putins favor.
So it is not only about the relative cost to cost and relative cost to economy/budget but also relative from budget to budget.