Iran and Israel’s Missile War

Jeffrey Lewis 0:06

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I am Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:23

And I am Dr. Aaron Stein, the president and CEO of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. It is good to see you, Jeffrey. You are back off a plane from Korea. Yeah.

Jeffrey 0:32

I am off a plane from Korea. I am chilling at my own home for two nights, two glorious nights. And then I'm off to Zurich for yet another meeting. I keep thinking that if I take flight after flight, that my problems like my baggage will not make the connection. This may be wishful thinking.

Aaron 0:53

Is there a direct to Zurich? As a former resident of Switzerland, I know there's one from Los Angeles, but you'd be going from San Francisco?

Jeffrey 1:00

Yes, I have a direct flight from San Francisco to Zurich. I've put in my plus point bid for an upgrade. We'll see.

Aaron 1:08

Okay. Well, the listeners are on the edge of your seat for whether you get business class or not. It's the next podcast.

Jeffrey 1:16

Like Hugh Grant, I like to go horizontal. Hugh Grant in Wonka. I don't know. Anyway, I bring you data, Aaron. We've been examining craters at air bases in Israel, or at least one air base in Israel. And we've been trying to work out questions about the reliability, the accuracy of Iranian missiles, and the efficacy of Israeli missile defenses.

So it's been a fun time.

Aaron 1:52

Yeah, I think our listeners are probably plugged into the fact, even though it seems like forever ago, is that the Iranians fired a bunch of drones and a bunch of missiles at Israel and most didn't make it.

Jeffrey 2:04

Yeah, most didn't make it. But, you know, this work takes time. You have to get a satellite image. And in our case, you have to let the satellite image clear for public release. And our friends at Planet have a 30-day hold on imagery so that bad people can't do bad things with images of Israel. And so that time is now expiring.

Aaron 2:27

So let's start. I think the number of impacts in Israel, I think, was reported at three or was it eight? I'm doing this off the top of my head. So what was it?

Jeffrey 2:36

So there is no official reporting. I have seen officials say up to nine. Five at is it never a team air base?

Aaron 2:48

I was never bar mitzvah listeners will, will know this. So I don't speak Hebrew at all, but let it arms control. Tradition was just butcher it. Never team sounds good to me.

Jeffrey 2:59

You know, tell your parents that we really could have used them to come through on this one, pal.

Aaron 3:05

Just reminds me of my favorite Kirby enthusiasm episode, The Ski Lift, when Larry gets stuck and has to pretend to be orthodox. If listeners haven't seen that one, go do it. But go ahead.

Jeffrey 3:15

OK, so nine, four or five at Nevatim Air Base, then the balance at Ramon Air Base?

Aaron 3:28

Ramon.

Jeffrey 3:28

I want to say Ramon. Oh, it's like a, OK. And then maybe one other landed near a radar site. So we have been looking at satellite imagery of Nevatim.

Aaron 3:44

Okay, so a Neva team, Joey Ramone, and a radar base 30 days ago.

Jeffrey 3:50

Which is not a lot of impact points, given that it's reported that something like 120 ballistic missiles were launched, as well as a sort of similar number of, I don't want to call them cruise missiles, really long-range loitering munitions.

Aaron 4:11

Yeah, I call them, you know, slow-flying loitering munitions. They took a long time to get there.

Jeffrey 4:18

Yeah, I mean, we're mostly interested in the ballistic missiles because the loitering munitions, you know, they really, they have like a teeny tiny little payload. And so using loitering munitions for a 1,500-kilometer range attack is like... Yeah, it's not really that effective. So we were really interested in 120 ballistic missiles. There are reports that about half of those failed in route, which would be a low reliability rate.

Although I will make two observations. The first is that Similar failure rates were reported for Russian missiles in Ukraine. Right. In the early days. There were reports of sort of 40 to 60 percent failure rates. And so 50 would not be that far off. And we just sort of assume that U.S. missile... Success rates are going to be like way up above in like the 90% range.

And that may be true for some systems, but like if you go back and look at early SSPK calculations, a lot of people used like 70% as a success rate for US ICBMs. Because you know, like, when you're testing things, you're testing them in like really kind of nice pristine environments. And so, while I do think in the US we get our reliability rates up you know, I, I, I think the Iranians, even if they really maxed out their reliability, probably would still only get up to around 70 percent. I, I just, I just think that's the nature of the technology. So about half failed in route, so that leaves you like 60 missiles.

We don't really know how those were divided up among targets, but if you say 30 were targeted in Nevatim, I'm just sort of, or, you know, half of the ones that survived were allocated to that airbase, you know, of that, five get through. And so that allows us to talk about the efficacy of missile defenses and the accuracy of the missiles themselves.

Aaron 6:29

Yeah, I mean, and then maybe we should talk about the missile defenses that were involved. There was Arrow, the Israeli system. There was the SM-3 that U.S. Navy ships fired. And what's funny is a good buddy of mine lives in Erbil, and he can confirm the report that Patriot shot in Erbil as well.

Jeffrey 6:49

So does that mean that there was a launch against Erbil? So that's what I don't know.

Aaron 6:55

You know what I mean? Like, what was Patriot used for? Like, was that one of the failing missiles?

Jeffrey 7:01

Well, there was an attack on Erbil during the attack on Ain al-Assad.

Aaron 7:07

So I think they moved one there to protect, like, the consulate and perhaps U.S. forces. And then my buddy has sent me some videos. I think I sent them to you, didn't I? No.

Jeffrey 7:17

Now I'm feeling a little left out. Hey, so one thing, before we talk about all of this, I mean, one thing I really want to say is that Data is kind of hard to come by in part because the Iranians, I think, are not being completely truthful. And the on the other side, both there's uncertainty. We don't know what the Iranians were targeting.

And it's hard to tell if you hit something and intercept it or if it just misses. And it's also sometimes missile defenses fire at phantoms. Right. Right. And that's not that's just I mean, that's. That's just how it is. And so, you know, you may think that you're under attack because you're primed to think you're under attack and, you know, there may be no missiles at all.

That's just how it goes. You know, it's funny. The Israelis say they intercepted 99% of the missiles. That is patently untrue because— You know, if a half fail in route and so then 30 of those are targeted to the airbase and, you know, five get through. Five of 30 is not it's just not 99 percent, not how math works.

I think one of the interesting things is the U.S. said it intercepted, I think, five. Yeah, it's a smaller number. And then hit a sixth one in Yemen. On the ground, and by the way, congratulations to those geniuses. The U.S. was unable to get a single Scud missile on the ground prior to launching. During the Gulf War, mobile missile crews are really supposed to be able to pull this off, so I just want a big ups to the guys who got themselves killed by being the only missile launch crew ever to get hit prior to launching their missile.

Great job, guys. Sure, you made your family's proud. The arms control walk wall of wall of fame. Well, I think it's in your apartment and it's in your house. Excuse me, I mean whatever you like, crank the missile up and then like you broke for tea or something, like push the button and get the out of town. But so one, one question is okay. So I'm, I would, I would, I worked backwards.

Five missiles fell. Those five missiles fell sort of within about a kilometer of one another. Which suggests that the CEP of the systems we saw, which are mostly Nodong variants, you know, Shahab 3 variants, like the Ahmad, that's most of the debris we're seeing. I think there are other systems mixed in there, but definitely Ahmad's. We would have expected that system to have an accuracy on the sort of order of a couple kilometers.

And it seems sort of consistent with that since I'm assuming some larger number fell out in the desert and didn't hit anything and therefore are ignored. The funny thing is the Ahmad was supposed to be more accurate than that. It has a separating warhead with little maneuverable, like little fins on it. In order to deal with atmosphere when it reenters.

And so I had seen people say that maybe it was like a 500 meter accuracy. And I'm thinking they probably didn't get there. We don't really know what they were aiming at.

Aaron 10:49

But- Well, the Iranians said they were aiming at the air base because that was one of the, that was the origin of the strike on the facility in Syria.

Jeffrey 10:59

Yes, and that's what they did at Ain al-Assad is they targeted. So what I don't know is did they target specific bits of the air base or did they just draw, you know, did they just put a point in the center of the air base and then.

Aaron 11:12

Right, exactly.

Jeffrey 11:13

You know, in Ain al-Assad, to us, it looked like they targeted specific buildings because that was much closer and you had higher levels of accuracy. And they got maybe something on the order of 15 to 30 meters accuracy in that strike. This is, you know, twice as far away. And so your guidance errors compound over time. So you would expect them to be significantly less accurate.

And we, you know, we see some of the wreckage of the guidance systems. Which look pretty scuddy to me. I mean, they look like kind of no-dong systems. So my guess is they put a pin in the center of the airbase, and they got five in the sort of, you know, I'll call it 700-kilometer range. So maneuvering reentry vehicle probably helped a little, but still not that accurate.

Aaron 12:01

Yeah, and it does underscore, well, hold on before we get there. And we were talking about this in one of the Twitter groups. It does seem like the intercept points, the best that we can tell, were way out there. I always found that impressive as it was going on.

Jeffrey 12:21

Yeah, I mean, so... One thing we are trying to do is work out how many were intercepted. I would say, by the way, good news from a missile defense perspective, I think for the first time we are confident that some of these things were intercepted in combat.

Aaron 12:36

Yes.

Jeffrey 12:36

Which has never been the case before. I mean, I know people have asserted that it was the case, but countries like always lie about the percentage that they intercept. And I think the Israelis were also untruthful. But having said that... We actually now have documented cases where the second, sorry, where the stage of the, not second, but just the stage of the Ahmaud.

Fell far enough downrange and was damaged enough that we're. And by the way, also there are Arrow boosters that fell in the same area. Like, that's a pretty strong indication. I think that, that they intercepted some percentage of them. So, I mean, that's it. First open source documented proof that a specific intercept probably occurred. So that's kind of a big day.

Aaron 13:33

Yeah, definitely. And again, they were downraged. The debris that we're seeing is all over the place, but I think the ones you're talking about were over a rock.

Jeffrey 13:42

Oh, the ones I'm thinking of are over Jordan.

Aaron 13:43

Over Jordan, okay, okay. Yeah, but still, like, that's out there.

Jeffrey 13:46

It's way out there. And then the SM-3s are intercepting from the ocean. From the Mediterranean, which is insane, the East Mediterranean. Which, you know, I mean, that's a high-altitude interceptor. So one interesting question is the SM-3 is, on paper, pretty reliable. And if we assume that 120 are launched and 60 fail, and I assume the failure happens pretty early so there's no intercept attempt against them, it's unclear to me why the U.S. only intercepts six.

Right. Five or six. I forget what the official number is. Because does that mean they shot at all 60 and only got— 10% or does that mean they shot at some smaller percentage and, and, and, and did better? I don't know.

Aaron 14:42

Right. What were your takeaways about the arrow?

Jeffrey 14:47

Well, so I tend to think that, you know, five, so we know five got through five, clearly were not intercepted of the, of the, about 30. What I can't tell is how many would have fallen in the desert outside of where we took a picture. Because if something just lands in the desert and blows up, you're probably not going to report it and you're not going to know about it.

And I'm not prepared to ask a planet to image every square kilometer, you know, like 10 square kilometers or something. But I'm imagining that some slightly larger number than five actually got through. And it's just that we only are counting the ones that hit the airbase. If you think between five and 10 of 30 got through, then, you know, you're looking at You're looking at a, you know, sort of 60, 70, 80% intercept rate, which is pretty good.

I'm guessing it was probably toward the lower end of that, but like that's still really, really valuable. Well, valuable is a funny word. That's still pretty good. But then it raises a question about value, which is five got through and they put one hole in the runway. It's very hard to damage things with ballistic missiles when you only have a ton of explosives.

Aaron 16:06

So that's where I was going earlier, but then I tabled it. It reaffirms how difficult it is to damage air bases with ballistic missiles because air bases are large and they tend to be built in concrete's heart.

Jeffrey 16:19

Yeah, and you just come and you like fill in the hole.

Aaron 16:22

Unless you live in Philadelphia, then they would come and fill in the hole and maybe in six to seven weeks.

Jeffrey 16:28

You know, I mean, but it's funny. Like, I think we have exaggerated ideas of the military effectiveness of individual systems because it is uncertainly true that ballistic missiles are much better than, for example, how the British put a single crater in the runway in the Falklands. Where they had to manage this massive operation involving a significant number of bombers refueling other bombers in order to refuel one bomber that dropped a small number of munitions, only one of which landed in the center of the runway in the Falklands.

And it did put the runway out of business because the Argentines didn't have any equipment on hand to repair the runway. But that was a huge effort. To get a single explosive on a runway. Missiles are more effective than that. But I don't know that they... I think what I take away from this is at the accuracies we saw at Ain al-Assad, missiles are very, very effective.

Aaron 17:25

Conventionally armed missiles at 1,500 kilometers range, I think are much, much less effective.

Jeffrey 17:32

And that to me raises interesting questions about... You know, is Arrow good value? Maybe, maybe not. I mean, I think it's good political value for sure in terms of protecting an air base. I don't know.

Aaron 17:49

So I think it is because I think the cost exchange ratios that you see out there, the one for one, one Arrow costs, whatever it is, versus one no dog variant costs, whatever it is. I do think that's not a good way to look at it because you have to look at the cost of a successful missile, let's say.

Let's say if all 30 got through to run it through and 30, say, impacted the hangar where you have a bunch of your aircraft inside, all of a sudden your cost exchange ratio starts to look bad. Why wouldn't you defend these things?

Jeffrey 18:25

Yes, yes. I think I'm still on the skeptical side because at Ain al-Assad, we didn't have missile defenses. All 15 did get through. And, I mean, actually, I care a lot about the traumatic brain injuries. The casualties, I think, are significant. And so that, well, maybe that is worth it. But in terms of the functioning of the airbase, you know, it was out of commission for a couple hours.

Aaron 18:49

I'm talking about what was on the R base. What was on Ain al-Assad was more like unmanned systems. So in that sense, yeah, whatever. But in that case, they say that I think Neva Team's an F-35 base.

Jeffrey 19:00

Yeah, no, that's true.

Aaron 19:01

And those cost a lot of money. And it costs a lot of money to produce a pilot and all that stuff. So if you kill all the pilots, and then if you kill a couple F-35s, a couple million bucks for a missile seems like a bargain to me.

Jeffrey 19:13

Yeah, I guess at the end of the day, I come away pretty unimpressed with the ability of conventionally armed missiles at 1,500 kilometers, more so than I come away impressed with defenses.

Aaron 19:24

So do I. So when I was walking the out, the one, like a couple... I have some friends in the Air Force. But like, it must have been a lot of fun to shoot those little things down. Right. Oh, yeah. Of course.

Jeffrey 19:39

The loitering munitions. Yes. Yeah.

Aaron 19:41

That's a lot of fun. A lot of target practice on those. I came away thinking, you know, we talk a lot about this podcast about sort of the inherent strengths of the Iranians. Distance still really matters. And the fact that Israel is far away, you know, sort of. Cools me out on regional escalation risks. Now, if I was sitting in Dubai, you know, or something like that.

Oh, very different. And you have the US air base in UAE or Qatar or something like that. You're just right across the water there. I feel a lot different than if I was sitting in Joey Ramone's air base.

Jeffrey 20:16

Right. Well, because I would I would I look at what happened in Ain al-Assad and I think to myself, you know, the personnel issues are enough that I I think I probably would want I probably would want defenses for Ain al-Assad. So, you know, I think. Proximity makes a big, big difference. And you know, I look at maybe that the Iranians improve their reliability and they improve their accuracy, and so instead of this being a big failure, maybe it's a wake-up call for the direction things are headed. On the other hand, boy, if I were the Iranians, if one of those missiles had been nuclear armed, it'd be a very different story completely. It, it reaffirms.

Aaron 21:00

I mean, maybe it goes against some of the stuff that we've talked about on this podcast is that we've talked a lot about how there's inherent value in developing conventional ballistic missiles. But perhaps we need to put a range on it. Like there is out to, let's say, 1,500 kilometers and below. I mean—

Jeffrey 21:16

You need to be more accurate than a couple of kilometers and you need to have a better reliability rate than 50 percent because, you know. So, yeah, honestly, I think this strike is probably an advertisement for not using loitering munitions and ballistic missiles, but maybe really long range cruise missiles might be the way to go.

Aaron 21:35

I was going to praise Dennis Gormley because it's a walking advertisement for Tomahawk.

Jeffrey 21:42

Yes, it is. Yes, it is.

Aaron 21:44

I always have different favorite missiles on this podcast, but Tomahawk always gets shortchanged. It's a wonderful missile.

Jeffrey 21:48

Well, I mean, I still love the SM-3, and I'm very uncertain as to why the SM-3 intercept rates are so low, so that's still a question. Well, you've got to go, though.

Aaron 21:56

No, no, I push my callback by five minutes because I have one more question for you. OK. Because when we're talking about defenses in the Gulf, everybody talks about Patriot, Patriot, Patriot, Patriot. Doesn't THAAD make much more sense now when you're looking at how far you can get out with these things?

Jeffrey 22:11

Yes.

Aaron 22:12

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Jeffrey 22:13

And I mean, ultimately, Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 are like what? Pack 3 and THAAD kind of. I guess Arrow 3 really gets out there. But yeah, I think. Yeah, these are not, you know, this is not Iron Dome stuff. You really want longer. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, obviously not if you're in the Gulf, but, you know, Israel.

You know, I think Israel probably wakes up after this strike and feels, you know, pretty good about the performance of Arrow 2 and 3.

Aaron 22:47

How about the Germans? Should the final word be about the Germans?

Jeffrey 22:51

I mean... I think, no. You know, like, I just...

Aaron 22:57

I saw this on Twitter. So the reason I do this, it's largely in jest, is people are like... Oh, you're winding me up, Eric. I'm winding you up because I saw somebody on Twitter, I won't name check it, he's a great writer, but he was just like, this reaffirms the Germans made the right choice with Arrow. And I was like, no, it doesn't.

Jeffrey 23:13

I mean, maybe if the Russians were to turn around and buy a bunch of Shahab 3s, but yeah, no, none of... Arrow 3 is not... Again, Arrow 3 does not relate to any missiles the Russians actually have.

Aaron 23:29

Yeah.

Jeffrey 23:29

No, but it, but it does work. And you can see why the Israelis built it. It was, you can go back and listen to that podcast about why we. Yeah, I mean, it's a wild, it's a wild interceptor design. so you know, I think one thing I would say very quickly is we are trying to identify the boosters. and I don't know, I think we have at this point only identified Aero 2 boosters. We have not identified any Aero 3 boosters. But that, you know.

I'm sure there were a significant number of intercepts and there are more pictures to emerge. But yeah, I'm thinking Arrow 2 and probably Arrow 3 seem to have performed pretty well. But we have to wait on Arrow 3. I haven't confirmed that yet.

Aaron 24:10

Well, another 30 days. In that case, we can do another sleep update for you on whether or not you got to lay flat across, I guess, the continental United States over the North Atlantic and into Central Europe on the way to Zurich.

Jeffrey 24:24

Yeah.

Aaron 24:24

Very, very excited. I don't love milk chocolate, but maybe I'll make an exception. They'll love your German accent. So you should bring this. But anyways I think we hit all the we hit all the the high points. Anything we missed? You want to talk about before we sign off here?

Jeffrey 24:46

No, I just love having data. It's been fun. I don't know what it all means yet, but, boy, is it interesting.

Aaron 24:52

And listeners, if you want to engage with us, you can tell us how to actually pronounce Hebrew words. You can do that in our Slack channel, which is at patreon.com slash acwpodcast. But to get access to it, you have to become a Patreon. $3 if you're a student, $5 if you are not. And you can teach Jeffrey and I Hebrew in real time.

So with that, Jeffrey, it's good to see you. Good to see you, Aaron. And thanks for listening.