Aydin Kerimov.
Israel's Failure: Iran on Top.
During the last armed confrontation between Iran and Israel in the summer of 2025, Tehran demonstrated an unprecedented ability to strategically adapt in the conditions of the active phase of the conflict.
According to the assessment of the American Center for Monitoring Conflict and Missile Technologies (CMCRT), the Iranian armed forces used the tactics of "training battle", allowing them to analyze in real time the effectiveness of Israel's missile defense and promptly adjust their offensive strategy.
In the first stage of the conflict, only 8 percent of the missiles launched by Iran reached their targets, bypassing the Israeli multi-layered air defense system. But by the second ten days of June, this figure had risen to 16 percent, which is an alarming signal about the declining effectiveness of the Israeli Iron Dome, David's Sling, and Hetz missile defense systems.
The most destructive day of the war was June 22, when 10 of the 27 Iranian missiles hit targets in Israel, including infrastructure facilities in Haifa and Ashdod, as well as a military base in the Negev desert.
Later, fragments of a hypersonic Fattah-1 missile were found in two different areas - Netanya and Kiryat Gat - which became the first recorded use of this type of weapon on Israeli territory.
Iran demonstrated high flexibility in the use of combat weapons. Instead of massive missile attacks from one point, Iranian forces began to use distributed launch platforms throughout the country, including hidden installations in the provinces of Isfahan, Fars and Sistan-Baluchestan, which significantly complicated Israel's reconnaissance and preemptive strike capabilities.
Experts also paid special attention to Iran's use of short-lived fire control channels based on local communication systems and satellite synchronization, which reduced the risk of electronic suppression. Each series of Iranian missile strikes was a step in evolution, not just an attack — interceptions were analyzed, launch angles and trajectory altitudes were adjusted, and missile types were redistributed: from ballistic to hypersonic.
Before the conflict, the Israeli military command assumed that existing air defense systems would be able to neutralize at least 90 percent of threats. But practice has shown that with proper management, even a limited number of high-precision missiles can penetrate a deeply echeloned defense.
The problem of Israel's missile defense was aggravated by the fact that a significant portion of the interceptions were aimed at protecting Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and strategic facilities in the center of the country, which left Israel's periphery less protected. Thus, as a result of the hits on June 18 and 22, electrical substations in the Ashkelon region were disabled and an oil tank in the south of the country was damaged.
Current events indicate a change in the tactical paradigm in the Middle East. Iran, despite the sanctions pressure and technological backwardness, has demonstrated the ability to conduct 5th generation operations, in which the speed of adaptation, asymmetric thinking and hybrid methods play an important role.
It is worth noting that, according to estimates by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), Iran has up to 3,000 different short- and medium-range missiles, including up to 150 experimental hypersonic warheads. At the current level of effectiveness, even 15 percent of hits from such an arsenal are capable of causing significant damage to Israeli infrastructure.
To sum up, I would like to note that the latest phase of the Iran-Israel conflict has demonstrated the vulnerability of high-tech democracies to a non-standard and adaptive adversary. Israel, despite its significant superiority in intelligence capabilities and air defense systems, was not ready for Iran's rapid change of tactics.
The coming months, according to experts, will be critical for the Israeli military establishment: it will require a revision of the missile defense architecture, an update of the supply chains and a transition to more predictive countermeasure systems, including AI analytics and space intelligence.
The silence of the Jewish state at the official level, coupled with the fact that the American newspaper Wall Street Journal published the data faster than the Israeli Defense Ministry, is not just an information failure, but a symptom of a systemic vulnerability, ignoring which is becoming dangerous not only for the State of Israel, but also for its Western allies.
One-sided analysis.
Not a word about Iranian air defense against Israeli aviation.
The opinion of Iranian military analysts is still unknown. However, the official, deeply scientific point of view of Iran was recently voiced by the authoritative theologian Hojetulislam Mehdi Karami:
"Considering the history of Zionist control over jinn, it can be said that many of their missions are carried out through them."
www.jpost.com
