Although the IDF has set back Iran’s military industrial complex by years if viewed in a vacuum, military sources on Thursday admitted they have no way to estimate how much quicker the regime might recover in certain areas, such as ballistic missiles, if China were to assist.
Last September, Mossad Director David Barnea said China and Russia ought to think 10 times about helping Iran, The Jerusalem Post exclusively reported. The Mossad and Israel had declared the IAF’s incredible air supremacy against the regime’s missiles to the entire world, he said.
Pressed on reports that China was already gambling more heavily on Iran, Barnea said the Mossad would double down and warn the Chinese to think 1,000 times, because their systems could be attacked if Iran used them.
Despite this, foreign reports have credited Beijing with helping Iran quickly rebuild its ballistic-missile apparatus after it was heavily bombed by Israel during the 12 Day War last June.
At the start of the Operation Roaring Lion, aka Epic Fury, the IDF had mapped out 2,600 industrial defense complex sites.
As of Sunday, two-thirds to three-quarters of them had been destroyed by Israeli and American airstrikes.
Since then, the IDF has focused on destroying what remained in one of its highest targeting priorities. Military sources said on Thursday that additional significant progress had been made and that the target list was almost ready.
Multiple IDF sources have said they hope this broader destruction of Iranian military supply chains and sectors would set back any future push by Tehran to rebuild its ballistic-missile capabilities and support for terrorism.
This is important because, so far, although many of Iran’s ballistic-missile launchers have been destroyed or neutralized, it appears that a smaller percentage of their ballistic missiles have been destroyed.
Iran maintains capability to fire missiles
As a result, Iran was nowhere near losing its capability to fire missiles at Israel, the IDF said Thursday.
Furthermore, Iran appears to have shown that it can rebuild missile launchers at a rapid speed, given that in around eight months, it appears to have rebuilt and even exceeded the number of missile launchers – an estimated 200 – that the IDF destroyed last June.
Asked whether all of the attacks the IDF carried out against the wider supply chain would really block Iran from rebuilding its ballistic-missile apparatus, or whether it would only weaken other portions of its military power, two
IDF sources declined to give clear answers. One of them declined to refute the possibility that China could help Iran rebuild its missile power faster than might otherwise be expected.
If the regime survives, and China steps in to assist, the future is unclear. Although Israel has made significant progress against Iran’s ballistic-missile apparatus, a dispute emerged on Thursday between various IDF sources regarding the extent of the progress.
On Sunday, a senior IDF source said the IAF had destroyed or neutralized 75% of Iran’s estimated 470 missile launchers.
On Thursday, another senior IDF source said the percentage was about 60%.
This is not the first time the IDF has had trouble estimating how much damage it has caused to Iran’s ballistic-missile launchers.
During the 12 Day War, some senior IDF sources said two-thirds of Iran’s ballistic-missile launchers had been destroyed, while some said it was about 50%.
Either way, the IDF has certainly made progress against Iran’s ballistic-missile apparatus, with missile fire on Israel dropping from about 100 per day to around 20 per day, to sometimes four or five per day.
To the extent that judging how many missile launchers and missiles Iran has left to fire at Israel is complicated, however, it also makes it more difficult for the IAF to allocate resources at the right time to the right place to eliminate the remaining missile threats.
For example, the IDF said an area near water infrastructure had been quiet for most of the nearly three weeks of war so far, but suddenly, a missile team emerged from the area to fire at Israel.
Iran’s landmass is three times larger than France, which makes it hard for Israel to finish off the smaller missile teams after successfully hitting many of the larger command centers and staging areas in the early days of the war.
