By all accounts so far,
Operation Rising Lion, Israel's preemptive strike against Iran's strategic military assets has been a spectacular success.
- Israeli commandos operating within Iran, including near Tehran, launched drones and Spike NLOS missiles at Iranian air defense weapons and radars. This also suggests that this attack was ordered well before Wednesday's IAEA report (the latter providing a fait accompli for the Israelis).
- The Mossad seemed to know exactly where Iran's top military and nuclear program officials were before/when the attack was launched.
- Israel achieved at least temporary air superiority over large areas of Iranian airspace. There's video taken from the ground in Iran purported to show Israeli strike fighters refueling from a tanker aircraft.
Big Picture Questions:
I'm worried that world powers are going to draw the conclusion from this attack and, to a lesser extent, Ukraine's recent Operation Spiderweb, that a surprise first strike against a strategic rival or near-peer offers a very high degree of probable operational and strategic success. China's got to be taking notes and using what they've gleaned to plan (and maybe even prepare) for an assault on Taiwan.
It's wild to me how successful the Mossad has been in recent years with their intelligence gathering inside Iran and, to a slightly lesser extent, in Lebanon, when, apparently, they did not see the Oct. 7, 2023 attack coming. Are Hamas counter-intelligence capabilities that much better than Iran's?
I wonder how much the US administration knew, in advance, about the attack. Was there close coordination, or at least informed consent? Were the recent bilateral talks between the US and Tehran a smoke screen, to lull the Iranians into a false sense of security while Israel finished final preparations before launching Operation Rising Lion? Or, was each ally acting independently, and Israel just took advantage of the situation offered by the US-Iran talks? Trump's claiming he knew everything ahead of time, but it's hard to take anything he says at face value. I don't know how the rest of the world sees us in this particular situation but, if the US was up-to-speed on Israel's surprise offensive v. Iran, it could look like the former was taken advantage of or used, at least. And, as some observers have pointed out, US assets in Iraq and Syria are more vulnerable to Iranian retaliation than Israel is.
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