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Even if we accept the propaganda that they shot every drone down, it's still a clear Iranian victory. They forced Israel to use far more resources to defend themselves than Iran lost attacking. Most of those drones are hardly worth an hour of keeping a fighter jet in the air, let alone the air to air missiles or ludicrously expensive ABMs.
They could fling 3000 drones at Israel and saturate air defences, that's what matters. Hezbollah's forced Israel to abandon much of Northern Israel with it's missile barrages: https://nationalpost.com/news/world/in-israels-evacuated-north-lives-suspended-upended
I think this tweet is a pretty effective summary of the recent direct Iran-Israel hostilities that started with April's missile attack.
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The "it costs more to shoot down than it costs us to build" logic applies to asymmetrical warfare, not to a hypothetical direct war between Iran and Israel.
Iran is not some terrorist group living in the hills. They are a country which has actual targets for Israel to retaliate against. Here's how the math might work.
Cost of drones: X
Cost to shoot down drones: 3X
Cost of retaliatory mission: 5X
Damage caused by retaliatory mission: 100X
This last step is what Israel can do to Iran which they can't do to, for example, the Houthis. Iran has plump targets. How much is their oil industry worth?
Israel has proven they can fly a mission over Iran which Iran can't detect, then assassinate a target whose location is top secret. It's a stunning display of power. And Iran may lack the capacity to retaliate at all except via its terrorist proxies.
And escalation means that Iran's top leaders will be killed. They can be got to. No one is safe.
Russia has been intensively bombing Ukraine with thousands of missiles for several years and they have not yet broken a country of 30-40 million. Iran is twice as populous. There is nothing that Israel can do to greatly harm Iran short of a nuclear strike or a US invasion, at which point we may learn how well developed the Iranian nuclear program really is. Assassinating leaders does not matter, it's totally irrelevant.
Meanwhile, Iran can fire off hundreds or thousands of missiles in a non-telegraphed attack for a change, overwhelm the Iron Dome and demolish Israel's first-world high-tech economy. Israel is a small country, it is inherently easier to bomb and wreck than Iran. Nobody is going to build chip factories in a warzone. Oil is stuck in the ground, laptop workers and tech companies can leave for safer climates.
Does Iran want to get into a massive painful struggle with Israel and presumably the US? No. But their patience is not unlimited. It's not 2003 anymore, Americans have gotten a little less gullible about these Middle Eastern wars. It's not 2003 anymore, Western firepower apparently can't deal with little countries like Yemen. Times have changed and Israel should adjust its tactics to meet the new situation.
Russia isn't waging a total war of destruction with Ukraine. It would be extremely easy for them to destroy power delivery infrastructure and this water supply if they wanted to.
If anything, despite what western propaganda would tell you, they've tried to minimize civilian casualties. Meanwhile the Ukrainians are using civilian housing, hospitals, schools, what have you
They have not tried to maximally maximize it, and they are not yet fully on Syrian bombing strategy but... They have not exactly tried to minimize them
We know that it is not extremely easy because they tried and succeeded only partially, that is why they now switched mostly to destruction of power stations. It is not clear how well they succeed but it seems to be going better for Russia. Still, far from "extremely easy".
(unless you claim that they kept attacking power infrastructure because they had too many rockets and no good use for them or something)
One notable reason is that it is hard for them to escalate further without use of nuclear weapons. They already using nearly full available resources (OK, not all forces were pulled from NATO and Chinese border - though very significant part was).
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"We can hypothetically launch more drones at you and actually do harm" after launching a few is not a victory in itself. It looks like they won very public assassinations of their allies and vassal leaders on their home turf. What else did they win?
The problem with launching 3000 drones is that is usually called a war and they don't want that kind of war. Whereas Israel appears to be asking for one or certain they won't get one. Israel did say they'd kill all Hamas leadership, so maybe there's an understanding. That's what proxies are for. Dying so you don't have to.
Israel can't defend its own citizens on its own soil, they're hardly doing better than Iran. Rockets are constantly getting through their missile defences because missile defence (at least the missile defence Israel is trying to do) fundamentally is not cost-efficient. Northern Israel has basically been abandoned because of this. Every so often drones hit Tel Aviv, the Houthis snuck one through just a few days ago.
One year in, Israel has failed to destroy Hamas. They've blown up a lot of Gaza, yes, but they don't control the territory and they haven't beaten the weakest of their three primary enemies. As soon as the IDF gets sick of being ambushed and pull out of any one part of Gaza, Hamas moves right back in. I can tell you that Israel didn't recently decide to start bombing Hamas leaders, they've been doing this for years. That was their mowing the lawn strategy. They do this all the time and it clearly doesn't work because just after the last exchange of rockets and bombs we had October 7th:
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/mow-lawn-israel%E2%80%99s-strategy-perpetual-war-palestinians-185775
So many people here are posting as if this is another crushing Israeli victory like the Six Day War. It's not!
That's true. I would call a new neighboring government in Gaza that only required minimal military action to maintain on a path to a formal state recognition would be a victory, but many Israelis would not. Politics has them in a perpetually compromised position. They punch above their weight imo.
Yeah they've done the 'mowing the grass' strategy for a long time. It's management, not solution, which is probably the best they can ask for with the parameters set. It's one of a few options they can do when there's no desire to officially rule a territory or go all the way via violence.
Israel is not impervious to rockets landing in the country. I'm not too interested in talking about how important or effective Iron Dome is. All I said was that if Iran's great show of force doesn't deter actions such as this strike on a target supposedly nearby Iranian officials, then what great success is that show of force? Just because Israel has targeted Hamas and Hezbollah leaders before, and will again, does not make the strike insignificant.
I also don't see many people calling the current state this conflict a victory for Israel. Shills are very optimistic as ever. Resistance types still insist it is a fake and gay country filled with Jews. The current state of the conflict seems about right. Maybe better than they could hope for considering what they were prepared for when it came to entering Gaza. Having an actionable plan for governing the territory, or transitioning power there, seems like it would've been a pretty good idea to get going 9 months ago. Perhaps that's impossible too, but I suspect that's mostly political as well.
There's a lot of brain worms when it comes to Israel. Oh well that's cyber for ya.
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