Israel\u2019s recent retaliatory strike inside Iran, in response to Tehran\u2019s\u00a0unprecedented missile and drone assault on Israel proper the weekend before, was a brilliant work of what practitioners of intelligence statecraft call \u2018strategic signaling.\u2019<\/p>\n
The message delivered to the ayatollahs on April 19 by the Jewish state was so daring, direct and unequivocal that it will likely compel Iran to abandon its new bold tactics of direct kinetic warfare. Jerusalem has enforced its red lines with Iran, making a successful kinetic counterattack by Iran inside Israel unlikely. Here\u2019s why.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s government has demonstrated to the Iranian regime that its skillfulness at bombastic rhetoric and ability to gin up anti-Israel fervor among various groups across the globe doesn\u2019t compensate for its military\u2019s ineptness at conventional warfare.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There was a lot of drama unfolding in multiple corners of the world, with the usual theatrics coming out of Tehran. The Iranian Parliament\u2019s National Security Committee spokesman Abolfazl Amoue warned a day before Israel\u2019s retaliation that Iran will use \u2018weapons that we have never used\u2019 to attack Israel. Iran\u2019s President Ebrahim Raisi threatened a \u2018painful and severe\u2019 response if Israel takes even the \u2018slightest action.\u2019 \u00a0<\/p>\n
Doubling down on these warnings, Raisi, speaking at Iran\u2019s annual army parade, issued a threat to launch a \u2018massive and harsh\u2019 retaliation if Israel launches even a \u2018tiniest attack.\u2019 And Iran\u2019s Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri Kani vowed that the speed of response from Iran, if Israel strikes back, \u2018will be less than a few seconds.\u2019<\/p>\n
The usual anti-Israel suspects were ratcheting up fear-mongering rhetoric, in an attempt to put pressure on Israel simply to \u2018eat\u2019 the provocative Iranian attack, in order to avoid further escalation. \u2018The Middle East is on the brink,\u2019 U.N. Secretary-General Ant\u00f3nio Guterres told a Security Council meeting in response to the Iranian strikes. \u2018The people of the region are confronting a real danger of a devastating full-scale conflict,\u2019 he said, calling for maximum restraint.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Russia\u2019s Vladimir Putin warned against a \u2018new round of confrontation fraught with catastrophic consequences for the entire region.\u2019 Media outlets across the world ran headlines that evoked fears of open warfare breaking out between Israel and Iran, dangers of conflict escalation into a regional war that could drag the United States in.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Following Raisi\u2019s telephone call with Putin on April 17, fear spread from the doomsayers to the international \u2018expert\u2019 class. U.S., European and Middle Eastern intelligence officials and weapons experts privately expressed concerns, according to major U.S. media outlets, about Russia\u2019s pledge to supply Iran with advanced fighter jets and air defense technology that are capable of destroying stealth fighter jets operated by the U.S. and Israel. Even President Biden reportedly urged Prime Minister Netanyahu to \u2018take the win\u2019 after Israel and its allies intercepted most of the missiles launched during Iran\u2019s attack.<\/p>\n
And then came the Israeli counterstrike. Kinetic. Precise, yet calibrated, using measured force. Stealth technology was likely used in what appeared to be a covert action, combining conventional warfare and special operations. The ayatollahs didn\u2019t know what hit them.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Israeli strike took out Iranian air-defense missile batteries in Ishafan, rendering them inoperable. The choice of target \u2013 located near the Natanz enrichment facility that is critical to Tehran\u2019s nuclear program \u2013 was deliberate.<\/p>\n
The Israelis went after the very systems that are designed to prevent such attacks. It was, in Western military strategy parlance, a shot across the bow. And the message to Iran was clear \u2013 knock it off, or we will decimate the very crown jewel of your war-fighting machine \u2013 the nearly operational nuclear capability. Iran has playedits nuclear card as a psychological weapon to intimidate the region and the West and, most importantly, to manipulate Washington into giving the regime billions of dollars and other concessions.<\/p>\n
Compare Israel\u2019s limited albeit strategically commanding strike with that of Iranian airstrikes on Israel on April 13. Out of about 320 drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles, only 1% made it through combined Israeli, American, Jordanian and Saudi air defenses. The IDF\u2019s spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, called it \u2018a very significant strategic success,\u2019 and it was 99% ineffective for Iran. It was a vivid display of impotence of the Iranian combat force.<\/p>\n
It is no wonder that Tehran played down the Israeli counterstrike and almost immediately declared that it has no plans to respond. Shortly after Israel\u2019s limited but highly effective strike, the Iranian foreign minister, Hossein Amirabdollahian, speaking in New York, where he was attending a U.N. Security Council session, stated that Iran would not escalate conflict. He belittled Israeli weapons as \u2018toys that our children play with\u2019 without acknowledging that the attacks came from Israel.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Iran is considered by the U.S. intelligence community to be one of the top four threats to the United States. The other three are China, Russia and North Korea. The 2024 Annual Threat assessment issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, characterized Iran\u2019s \u2018hybrid approach to warfare \u2013 using both conventional and unconventional capabilities\u2019 \u2013 as posing a \u2018threat to U.S. interests in the region for the foreseeable future.\u2019 The report also noted that Iran\u2019s ballistic missile programs have the largest inventory in the region, and highlighted that Tehran is putting emphasis on improving the accuracy, lethality and reliability of its missiles.\u00a0<\/p>\n
While the threat posed by Iran cannot be underestimated, it is more of an asymmetric rather than conventional nature. For instance, Tehran has been developing clandestine networks inside the United States for more than a decade, with the goal of kidnapping, assassinating and otherwise harming high-level government officials and law enforcement and security personnel. The Iranian regime is now agitating the anti-Israel movement that is raging at universities across America.<\/p>\n
But when it comes to conventional warfare, Israel clearly has demonstrated to the world that the Iranian military is not a match for it, and certainly not for the U.S. military.<\/p>\n\n
Israel\u2019s recent retaliatory strike inside Iran, in response to Tehran\u2019s\u00a0unprecedented missile and drone assault on Israel proper the weekend before, was a brilliant work of what practitioners of intelligence statecraft call \u2018strategic signaling.\u2019 The message delivered to the ayatollahs on April 19 by the Jewish state was so daring, direct and unequivocal that it will <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":18682,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-18681","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18681\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}