Following Israel’s twelve-day bombing campaign against Iran’s leaders, nuclear facilities and missile program, two key questions have been how deep is Israel’s missile defense interceptor magazine, and how long Israel can sustain relatively high intercept rates against the retaliatory Iranian strikes. While the ceasefire which started on June 23 may dampen the immediate significance of these questions, they are still important in the long term, especially if the ceasefire breaks down.
We think we can use videos of the Iranian attacks to track interceptor usage, providing some insight into those questions. Based on the data reviewed, at least 34 Arrow-3, about 9 Arrow-2, and 39 THAAD interceptors were used during the twelve-day campaign.
| Arrow-3 | Arrow-2 | THAAD | |
| Interceptors Used: | 34 | ~9 | 39 |
As in April and October of 2024, the Israeli missile defense system performed well, achieving relatively high rates of intercept (though exactly how high is a discussion for another post). The system uses two-stage exoatmospheric Arrow-3 interceptors, complemented by single stage Arrow-2 and Stunner interceptors inside the atmosphere.
Additionally, the U.S. has been aiding Israel in intercepting Iranian strikes. The U.S. Navy has reportedly been contributing and SM-3 interceptor debris has been spotted, while a U.S. THAAD battery was deployed to Israel in the wake of the October 2024 Iranian attack.
The Wall Street Journal reported on June 20 that Israel had started to run low on interceptors. While this provoked a denial from the IDF, there is very little open-source data about interceptor expenditure rates. This vagueness is similar to October where the Navy only stated “a dozen” interceptors had been fired, intercepting “a handful” of missiles. The Israelis were, unsurprisingly, not forthcoming with their own expenditure rates in October.
Thankfully, there is a key source of open-source data which has allowed us to make our own assessment of interceptor expenditures. Zaid Abbadi is a Jordanian photographer who takes videos of the missile strikes from an Amman suburb and posts them to his Instagram. The video he made of the October strike got used in many Iranian sizzle reels, and makes for striking viewing. I would encourage readers to give his videos a view.
In the videos, the camera points southwest, towards Israel, and captures the long-range exoatmospheric interceptors flying out over the camera to attempt intercepts over Jordan. After the interceptors pass overhead, the Iranian missiles arrive and are engaged by shorter range defenses on their way to targets across Israel.
The October video has been invaluable to our analysis of that strike, and Abbadi’s videos since the start of the war on June 13 have been similarly helpful. However, the estimates we make based on his videos set floors on interceptor expenditure rates. Since Abbadi has not captured all of the Iranian missile strikes since the conflict started, there have certainly been interceptor launches we haven’t seen in the videos. In short, these are the minimum number of interceptors launched so far, and many more have likely been used since June 13.
There are two ways to identify which interceptors are seen being used in the videos. The first is by using the characteristics of the interceptor. An easy one is whether the interceptor has one or two stages. Arrow-3 interceptors can be identified since the footage shows the first stage burn out and the second ignite a few moments later.
Another characteristic is first stage burn time. Some of Abbadi’s videos include a timestamp so we can roughly time an individual interceptor’s burn. Based on videos of testing and operational use I reviewed, the first stage of Arrow-3 burns for at least 45 seconds or so. THAAD, on the other hand, appears to burn for somewhere in the ballpark of 15-17 seconds in a video of an engagement with a Houthi missile in December (for which The War Zone did a good write up). That is pretty close to Arrow-2 which burns for about 19 seconds. (No videos I have found of Arrow-2/3 or THAAD have shown a full stage burn) So while we can distinguish between THAAD/Arrow-2 and Arrow-3 using staging and burn time, those are not as helpful for separating the THAAD and Arrow-2 launches.
The second way to identify interceptors is geographically. By drawing trajectories from where the video was taken in an Amman suburb towards the various interceptor launch locations, you can identify different ABM sites across Israel.
Specifically, they line up with six Arrow launch sites (from south to north: Dimona, Nevatim, Sdot Micha, Palmachim, north Tel Aviv, and Ein Shemer) and the THAAD site in central Israel.
Many of these ABM sites were active during October, including Nevatim, Sdot Micha, Palmachim, N. Tel Aviv, and possibly Ein Shemer.
The THAAD battery was deployed in late October 2024 and is visible in Google Earth imagery from December 2024. Our friends at Planet Labs got a lovely photo of it in February as well.
The geographic spacing between interceptor launch sites helped distinguish between THAAD and Arrow-2 launches. I assumed the only interceptors being launched from the THAAD battery were THAAD interceptors, and only Arrow interceptors were launched from the Arrow sites. No launchers other than the 6 THAAD launchers are visible at the THAAD battery in satellite images since the conflict started.
As of writing Abbadi has posted 6 videos of missile strikes since Israel’s campaign started. Two videos (linked here and here) for the night of June 13-14, and one video each for the nights of 14-15, 15-16, 18-19, and 20-21.
Counting up the different types of interceptors from each site we can get initial estimates of interceptor usage. I estimate that at least 34 Arrow-3s, about 9 Arrow-2s, and 39 THAAD interceptors have been used so far. Again, it is likely that many more interceptors have been used since not all the Iranian strikes were recorded in the videos. But these estimates provide an open-source baseline.
| Date | Arrow-3 | Arrow-2 | THAAD |
| June 13-14 | 20 | ~1 | 2 |
| June 14-15 | 3 | 0 | 9 |
| June 15-16 | 4 | 6 | 16 |
| June 18-19 | 4 | 2 | 12 |
| June 20-21 | 3 | 0 | 0 |
| Total: | 34 | ~9 | 39 |
| Date | Dimona | Nevatim | THAAD | Sdot Micha | Palmachim | Tel Aviv | Ein Shemer |
| June 13-14 | 1 | 1 | 2 | ~3 | 1 | 15 | 0 |
| June 14-15 | 0 | 1 | 9 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| June 15-16 | 0 | 4 | 16 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 3 |
| June 18-19 | 0 | 0 | 12 | 2 | 0 | 4 | 0 |
| June 20-21 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| Total: | 1 | 6 | 39 | 10 | 1 | 21 | 4 |
That is a lot of interceptors to have fired in less than two weeks. 39 THAAD interceptors is nearly the full loadout of a 6 launcher THAAD battery without a reload, 48, so that system may be close to being out of interceptors. It seems likely it was deployed with reloads based on the satellite imagery, but considering the number of Iranian strikes missing from Abbadi’s videos, I think this is a fair judgement. Similarly, 34 Arrow-3s is a lot, nearly double the number used in October. While there is little insight into how deep Israel’s Arrow-3 magazine is, the presence of THAAD in Israel suggests it may not be much deeper. Nevertheless, based on the WSJ reporting and this data, it seems likely that Israel and the U.S. THAAD battery are hurting for interceptors.
According to the FY 2025 Missile Defense Agency budget, each THAAD interceptor costs approximately $12.7 million. The minimum of 39 THAAD interceptors therefore cost over $495 million. The budget projects only 32 THAADs will be procured in FY 2026, so more than an entire year’s worth of interceptors were fired in twelve days (The production rate in FY 2025 was only 12 interceptors). Arrow-3 costs are more difficult to estimate. The $4 million price-tag often mentioned is probably not quite right. While the exact cost is unclear, the 34 Arrow-3s cost at least more than $100 million. Considering these numbers I think it is fair to say that more than a billion dollars was spent on interceptors during the twelve-day conflict.
Between the start of the war on June 13 and the announcement of a ceasefire on June 23, a race was under way. The Israelis were racing to destroy Iranian missiles and launchers before the Iranians launched enough missile salvos to deplete the Israeli interceptor magazine. Considering estimates placed Iranian ballistic missile stocks at about 2,000-3,000 before the war started, the Iranians would eventually exhaust Israeli interceptors if they weren’t attrited, making the left-of-launch or missile defeat element of the Israeli strategy critical. If the Iranians had the missiles and launchers available to continue generating salvos against Israel, there would have come an inflection point in the amount of damage they were able to do, and that inflection point would have arrived once Israel ran out of interceptors.
It is difficult to tell how close that inflection point was before the ceasefire started, especially given the more limited information coming out of Iran and the restrictions placed by the Israeli government on media coverage of the missile attacks. In the day before the ceasefire Iran was still generating strikes of over 10 missiles while Israel was still intercepting most of them. U.S. efforts to replenish the THAAD interceptors could have also prolonged that process and pushed the inflection point back. Hopefully the ceasefire holds and we never find out how close it was.
Ultimately, these videos are a good place to start generating estimates for interceptor usage and begin thinking about what missile defense insights we can draw from this conflict. This initial analysis begins to outline the difficulty of defense under persistent, large scale missile attack.
[This post was updated June 24. I removed a sentence about Arrow-3 costs which was based on a misreading of a MDA budget document.]
