Below Senior Fellow Can Kasapoğlu gives an overview of the tactical and strategic implications of Iran’s October 1 ballistic missile strike against Israel.
Executive Summary
- By launching a large-scale missile attack against Israel on October 1, Iran has made a critical attempt to regain escalation dominance.
- This strike differed from Iran’s April 13 attack. This time, Iran employed a blitz salvo of ballistic missiles rather than a mixed strike package of drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles, giving Israel minimal warning.
- The Iranian ballistic missile barrage saturated, and to some extent evaded, Israel’s air and missile defense architecture. Israel’s passive defenses, especially its public shelters and hardened military bases, provided extensive protection to civilians and defense equipment.
- An Iranian attack with weapons of mass destruction would be catastrophic for Israel at its current interception rate.
What Happened?
On October 1, 2024, the Islamic Republic of Iran unleashed a large salvo of nearly 200 ballistic missiles against Israel.
Iran’s attack came only five days after Israel conducted strikes to eliminate several high-ranking officials of the Iran-backed proxy terror group Hezbollah—most notably late Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah. Israel’s strike also killed General Abbas Nilforoushan, the former deputy of operations for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and Muhammad Ja’far Kasir, the chief of Hezbollah’s Unit 4400, a special body tasked with overseeing weapons transfers between the proxy network and Tehran. Iran’s strike also coincided with the Israel Defense Forces’ initiation of limited ground operations in Lebanon.
The Strategy and Concepts of Operations behind the Attack
In its April 13 attacks against Israel, Iran unleashed a mixed strike package of drones alongside cruise and ballistic missiles. This offensive configuration complicated Israel’s efforts to defend its skies, as sensors have greater difficulty tracking slow-moving drones and dealing with ground clutter. But the slower projectiles also gave the Israeli Defense Forces hours of notice before Tehran’s more powerful missiles neared their targets. The early warning made it all but impossible for Tehran to maintain the element of surprise during the April strike.
This time the IRGC prioritized surprise, opting for a blitz strike package consisting solely of medium-range ballistic missiles with hypersonic speed and brief exoatmospheric flight capabilities. This gave Tehran’s long-range salvo lightning pace: while a Shahed-136 drone takes up to 10 hours to travel from Iran to Israel, ballistic missiles make the same journey in under 15 minutes.
The technical requirements for launching ballistic missiles may have given Israel some advance warning. Solid-fueled systems, such as the Kheibar Shekan, require little time between preparation and launch. Liquid-fueled missiles take longer to prepare. It is therefore safe to assume that Israel and its allies’ advanced intelligence capabilities detected unusual activity at Iranian missile bases before Tehran launched its attack.
Moreover, the boost phase of a ballistic missile gives off a characteristic heat signature, which infrared sensors can detect. But once a missile reaches the end of its boost stage, air defense systems have limited time to prepare for the projectile’s mid-course and homing phases. Therefore, Israel’s interceptors had a fraction of the reaction time they enjoyed on April 13.
Commercial flight data reveals that Tehran did not even issue a notice to air missions (NOTAM), a warning to pilots about potential hazards on a flight route, prior to launching its salvos. As a result, several commercial airplanes flew dangerously close to military launch sites, only narrowly averting disaster.
Visuals released from the IRGC headquarters in Iran revealed that General Hossein Salami, the commander in chief of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, ordered Iran’s strike, while General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the IRGC Aerospace Forces, and General Mohammad Bagheri, the chief of staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, oversaw the implementation of the campaign. Notably, the New York Times reports that Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, was not informed of the attacks until they had already begun.
Weapons Systems Assessment
Iran struck Israel with medium-range ballistic missiles at hypersonic speeds and exoatmospheric flight capabilities. As a result, only the Arrow baseline, Israel’s most advanced anti–ballistic missile system, could engage the threat effectively. Two Arleigh Burke–class destroyers from the United States Navy, the USS Bulkeley and USS Cole, also fired a dozen interceptors at incoming Iranian projectiles from their positions in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, though the Pentagon’s spokesperson stated at an official press conference that no precise interception data was yet available. While much mainstream media coverage suggested that Israel’s lauded Iron Dome air defense system failed to defend against Iran’s attack, this assessment is inaccurate: the Iron Dome is a counter–rocket, artillery, and mortar (C-RAM) solution that is not designed to engage longer-range ballistic missiles.
Therefore, there can be no doubt that Iran sought to saturate Israel’s air and missile defense network. The limited amount of open-source intelligence evidence around launch sites and wreckage zones complicates efforts to identify the weapons systems Tehran used in its attacks. Available information suggests that the IRGC employed Kheibar Shekan, Emad, and Ghadr missiles.
The Kheibar Shekan is a solid-propellant medium-range ballistic missile with evasive maneuvering capabilities designed to stress interceptors. The Emad and Ghadr are upgraded derivatives in the liquid-fueled Shahab-3 ballistic missile family. Iran’s Tasnim News Agency claimed that Tehran’s attacks also involved the Fattah-1 missile, a projectile with a high-hypersonic speed and a moveable nozzle that enables thrust vector control. But so far, no open-source intelligence has confirmed that Iran used the Fattah-1 in this attack.
The Islamic Republic announced that its attacks targeted at least three Israeli military bases. This includes Nevatim Airbase, which hosts the Israeli Air Force’s F-35I fifth-generation air warfare assets, and the headquarters of Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency. Geolocation of missile impact sites reveals that Iranian projectiles hit near these targets as well as populated areas in and around Tel Aviv. Nonetheless, no evidence suggests that any air bases were rendered nonoperational or even severely damaged. Moreover, the Israeli Air Force stations its combat aircraft in hardened structures. On October 2, the day after Iran’s attacks, Israel continued to strike Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Simulating an Iranian WMD Strike Package
The strike proved that Iran’s medium-range, exoatmospheric ballistic missiles can penetrate Israel’s airspace. Several factors limited Israel’s human and material losses, including Iran’s use of conventional warheads, the imperfect accuracy of Tehran’s missiles, and Israel’s advanced network of passive defenses, especially bunkers to safeguard civilians and hardened structures to protect military assets. Also, electronic warfare measures likely played a role in engaging the attack.
Nonetheless, ballistic missiles have the potential to serve as delivery systems for weapons of mass destruction. Both the Emad and Ghadr possess modernized warhead designs that enable higher-velocity reentry and airburst detonation; the latter capability theoretically enables nuclear delivery concepts. If even a small percentage of Tehran’s ballistic missiles had been equipped with nuclear warheads, Israel would have faced a catastrophic threat. Even endoatmospheric interceptions of nuclear projectiles would pose an unacceptably high risk of fallout over population centers.
Escalation Dominance Tilts between Israel and Iran
Israel’s elimination of Hezbollah’s highest-ranking figures allowed the Israeli military to begin to reclaim escalation dominance—the ability to control escalation in ways that will be dangerous to an adversary—over the Islamic Republic’s Revolutionary Guards. On October 1, Iran aimed to claw back the escalation dominance it held before April 13, the first time that it directly attacked Israel.
At the time of this writing, the ball is in Israel’s court. Israel’s political and military leadership is likely considering three main target sets:
- Critical nuclear and military facilities.
- Hydrocarbon production and export infrastructure.
- Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s inner circle, including the top of the IRGC’s chain of command.
None of these options are mutually exclusive, and each might help Israel tilt the scales of escalation dominance back in its favor. In return, each option will determine Iran’s next step in the regional power play.
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