99% of Iran's 300 missiles and drones intercepted | Hacker News Reader

99% of Iran's 300 missiles and drones intercepted

theguardian.com

Little damage and

> A growing chorus of US congressional leaders are calling for the supplemental aid bill to be passed, with US Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer saying it was the clearest way to help Israel. The $95bn supplemental spending bill includes $14bn for Israel ...

This particular attack seems to have been quite successful for Israel. Hopefully that will be part of their retaliation calculation. Everyone loses if this escalates further.

Most likely that Iran calibrated this attacking not to cause much damage. They also made clear that this was it.

So they had to respond to Israel's attack but they want to avoid further escalation, which probably suits Israel as well.

Yeah, they just want to respond enough to not seem weak, but otherwise Iran is quite happy letting the spotlight be on Gaza.

The biggest question now is what Netanyahu will do as retaliation(which he did promise).

He won’t do shit. No one wants a war with Iran. They’ll just keep bombing their targets in Syria and Lebanon.

Countries outside of Iran are where Iran's military actually operates. The Lebanon embassy strike wasn't a reprisal: they killed the commander of the Quds Force in Lebanon. I think --- unfortunately --- that you're actually quite wrong, and that the Netanyahu administration would be more than happy to be engaged in an open war with Iran (which they would with certainty win, not just because of US support, and not just because the IDF/IAF is much better equipped than the IRGC, but also because the entire rest of the region is locked in an Arab/Persia conflict that is if anything more salient than the one Israel is in).

Iran's air assault response here looks surprisingly weak. They telegraphed it in advance, clearly set it up to avoid causing any major civilian disruption, announced "the matter can be deemed concluded", and basically managed to create a giant advertisement for Boeing and for pan-Arab resistance to Iran. Ever since October 7, the vibe I get is that they're trying to Homer themselves back into the hedges as quickly as they can.

It’s a replay of their Soleimani response which they also telegraphed in advance, only targeted military targets, and also resulted in zero fatalities.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Martyr_Soleimani

I see a clear message of: “please stop assassinating our generals, and next time we won’t be saying please.”

That's most likely, indeed.

The West will lose, but Israel won't. America has to support them in case of a full scale war or risk losing even more prestige and influence, which further opens the door for a new world order based on China.

Netanyahu knows that once the missiles fly freely, nobody's going to look too closely at Gaza or the West Bank. Meanwhile, in open warfare Israel can pound Iran into dust, sustaining minimal damage in the process. Jordan and Egypt will do their best to stay out of it, and America will be stuck retaliating for anything that hits US troops in Israel via Syria.

> Everyone loses

Not everyone. For every escalation there is a small risktaking contingency that cashes in, all according to their calculations. These cliques are entrenched in their communities, exist on both sides and are dependent on each other to keep the conflict alive. Innocent victims be damned. This is how sectarian conflict can finally engulf the whole world if reason is not allowed to prevail, and these conflictdependent risktakers are not contained.

What happened to people to make them take extraordinary claims by governments at face value? PR is an observable phenomenon.

It's not at all unbelievable. Israel and the US have put a ton of work into stopping these relatively slow-moving attack. We've seen similar results in Ukraine.

And conversely, if large numbers of attacks were getting through, you'd be reading very different news stories about large numbers of civilian casualties in Israel. It's hard to deny a story like that.

This is entirely believable. It may or may not be true, but it's not as extraordinary as you're suggesting.

So you appeal to other extraordinary claims to buttress this one.

What do you propose happened instead?

I don’t really care. It has nothing to do with me in America. The social phenomenon I mentioned does, however.

The big winner here is Israel’s defense industry. An attack of this magnitude is basically a doomsday scenario for most countries, and Israel got off without a scratch.

So only three (3!) got through?

Sure. Which three?

Crowing about interception rates misses the point. This was Iran’s targeted retaliation to the 1 April embassy bombing. And now there’s reports that Biden is planning a “diplomatic” (not military) response, and will not help Israel attack Iran. The whole settler-colonist thing depends on regional domination to ensure and reassure your settlers that they are safe. It doesn’t look like that’s the case to me.

And don’t forget Iran also captured an Israeli-owned ship, reinforcing that they indeed can project power in the Strait of Hormuz. Overall seems like, if anything, a strategic defeat revealing how exposed Israel is.

Interceptions rates certainly matter, if Israel would have been hit hard by this attack you think it wouldn't have mattered? Iran's settler colonialist regime (see what I did there?) is based on terrorizing the neighboring countries (and Ukraine) by proxies using mostly inexpensive drones and missiles. If this strategy has big holes in it yes it does matter.

The interception rate is what allows Biden to tell Israel not to reply with force.

This is retaliation for Israel's embassy bombing a week ago. More retaliation would provoke even more retaliation.

So a high interception rate is about the best we could hope for here. Iran gets to claim they struck back. Israel gets to put the matter to rest. We all get to live one more day.

Maybe not two more days, because they will continue to provoke each other. But for the moment, it's not escalating.

This seems to have been a completely calibrated response. Everyone knew it was coming. Iran threw a bunch of a cheap drones at Israel with hours of warning.

Others have commented the same, but Iran just wanted to give a small slap, step back from the limelight and continue to let Israel politically isolate itself.

They could have done that with 20 drones, why use 300 drones, cruise and ballistic missiles?

Why broadcast it ahead of time? They said for weeks they are going to do this.

They can do 300 drones because they are cheap. They don’t use the American procurement system to pay 1 mil per drone.

Ballistic and cruise missiles aren't cheap, they used those as well. I do agree that they didn't want a full fledged war (especially not with the U.S) and even said this before the attack. But I also think they probably expected to be able to do more damage than they did (pretty much no damage at all as it seems)

Yeah they probably expected to be a bit more successful. But we also don’t know the exact numbers of either drones or cruise missiles fired.

Now the US is reporting about 200 in total. So it might take a few days to figure out what was involved in the attack

More than 300 according to CNN. But sure, we'll know more in a few days. It was certainly a huge attack though.

Hagari says 200. So even exact counts all over the place. Someone will post a blow-by-blow at some point in the next week

https://www.axios.com/2024/04/14/biden-netanyahu-iran-israel...

OK. In any case I think we can agree that's a very large amount of drones and missiles for one attack. When I read about a big Russian attack against Ukraine they usually number a few dozens dronez/missiles. It's also huge compared to Iran's attack against Saudi's Aramco:

"A spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition fighting Iranian-backed rebels in Yemen, stated that 25 drones and missiles were used"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abqaiq%E2%80%93Khurais_attack#...

So I don't know what the end game was/is for Iran, did they really want to start a war or what. They certainly used enough missiles and drones to kill hundreds of people and cause huge damage, but everything was intercepted to such perfection I am starting to suspect Iran was trying not to hit anything. Either that or the Israeli + coalition (U.S, Britain, and the moderate Arab forces) have truly stunning defenses.

Yeah, i agree. Whatever the number it was definitely higher than it should be (or at least what we thought is needed).

But there are so many variables I prefer to just look at the actual outcome. Some Minor damage to an airfield and one injury. That could be due to an amazing air defense. Or it could be due to Iran broadcasting how, where, and when these attacks would come in back channels. I don’t think we’d ever know the exact reasons because both actors have an incentive not to divulge: Iran to make people think they calibrated this right, Israel to make it look like they have an impressive defense.

The only way this gets worse is by Israel escalating (which seems to be the only conclusion everyone agrees with).

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