Iran’s Attack On Israel Is Foiled, But Missile Defense Challenge Grows

A multinational and multilayered air and missile defense complex stretching hundreds of miles deep and over 60 mi. high foiled an Iranian mass missile strike on Israeli military bases on April 13-14.

• The assault followed two years of missile barrages
• Ukraine’s new front-line defense system reveals an alternative path

The near-perfect performance by air-, land- and sea-based interceptors against more than 300 Iranian projectiles came with caveats. Tehran made little effort to achieve surprise, lacked or withheld forces to suppress or destroy interception attempts downrange and employed a diverse mix of long-range weapons that fell short of state-of-the-art technology. All of these points appeared to be conceded by Lt. Gen. Heath Collins, director of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA).

“This one was a little different, maybe, over the weekend, as far as foreshadowing and difficulty,” Collins said in an April 16 keynote speech at the Missile Defense Conference hosted by the National Defense Industrial Association.

But the Iranian barrage—involving more than 170 attack drones, over 100 ballistic missiles and at least 30 cruise missiles—was not an isolated event. And the scale and duration of modern campaigns are driving U.S. officials to search for new ideas, with a focus on a less expensive and more integrated architecture.

Since 2022, an improvised Ukrainian air and missile defense complex has struggled with ammunition shortages and interoperability issues between inherited Soviet and donated Western systems. But even that piecemeal defensive complex—including a new low-cost, front-line layer—has frustrated Russia’s military goals in its a two-year blitz on Ukraine that included more than 8,000 missiles and 4,600 attack drones through February.

In the Middle East, meanwhile, a coalition of Israeli, American and European systems have fought off more than 60 anti-ship ballistic missile and drone attacks by the Houthis since October. The attacks have succeeded in disrupting commercial shipping through the Red Sea, but damage to maritime targets has been limited, with the sinking of a single cargo vessel, the Belize-registered Rubymar container ship, on March 2, according to U.S. Central Command.

More worrisome is that missile attacks continue to evolve in quantity and diversity with each salvo, combining air and missile threats in ways designed to overload a defender’s capacity for ammunition, sensing and decision-making.

“It is getting worse,” Collins said. “When they really want to make it tough on us, they can make it tough on us. And we have got to be prepared for a level of capability and capacity that we haven’t even seen yet today.”

Israel defeated Iran’s April 14 mass assault with volume of its own. An international coalition of fighters shot down all of the attack drones before they reached Israeli territory. By eliminating these slow-moving threats, Israel’s command-and-control system could focus on an Iranian volley of medium-range ballistic missiles, with a handful of interceptions contributed by a U.S. Army Patriot battery in Iraq and U.S. Navy ships in the eastern Mediterranean Sea.

An unspoken concern is the volume and sophistication of China’s missile arsenal. The U.S. military estimates the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force alone has fielded more than 3,000 ground-launched missiles as well as additional inventories of air- and sea-launched threats. Such concerns have driven urgent plans to install a multilayer defensive complex on Guam, the island U.S. territory within 1,500 nm of Taiwan. In addition to mass and missile diversity, the challenges for Guam include fending off threats from all directions.

The scale of such a challenge raises new concerns, especially as U.S. officials review the record of recent air and missile defense efforts in Ukraine and the Middle East—as well as fundamental assumptions about the feasibility of a prolonged defensive campaign.

For example, U.S. Navy ships have fired more than $1 billion worth of defensive interceptors in the Red Sea since October, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro told the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee on April 16. The value of the defended assets—warships and commercial shipping—justifies the use. But the cost-exchange ratio of firing, say, a $7.8 million Raytheon SM-6 at cheap Houthi attack drones and missiles is problematic in the long term.

John Plumb, assistant defense secretary for space policy, faulted the current U.S. air and missile defense architecture in his address to the missile defense conference on April 16. The most expensive interceptors are launched at targets first. If any missiles survive, they face shootdown attempts by cheaper alternatives, including machine gun options, such as the Raytheon Phalanx Close-In Weapon System.

“We roughly have that backwards, the way we’re doing it,” Plumb said.

A desperate battlefield innovation by Ukraine’s military showed another path is feasible, he noted. Facing chronic shortages of the most advanced interceptors supplied by Western partners, the country has adapted. Its most expensive surface-to-air missiles are positioned near the most sensitive targets deep behind the front lines, such as Kyiv, Plumb said. In forward areas, Ukraine has constructed a much less expensive alternative. Ground-based acoustic sensors, including cell phones, detect Russian attack drones and low-flying cruise missiles. Those sensors are networked to central command centers, which cue a network of Phalanx-style machine guns to track and shoot down the targets. That preserves the more expensive interceptors to attack only the weapons that leak through.

“You want the first layer as pickets and to let the pickets have the cheapest shots,” Plumb said. “Then you want to see your most exquisite interceptors with the highest cost for leakers.”

Such an architecture is desirable but not easy. In addition to one-way attack drones and subsonic cruise missiles, China has stockpiles of advanced weapons—including maneuvering, hypersonic glide vehicles and cruise missiles—and nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of deploying fractional orbital bombardment systems. The least expensive defenses often lack the speed, range and firepower necessary to shoot down such weapons.

“This kind of layered defense in depth is hard,” Plumb said. “And it’s even harder . . . if maybe the cheapest stuff doesn’t have the legs.”