The attack carried out by Tehran on September 30, with 181 ballistic missiles counted launched against Israel, will have been the largest ballistic missile strike in history, far exceeding the hundred missiles launched on April 13, or the 88 Scud missiles launched by Iraq against Israel in 1990.
While the two previous strikes did not lead to a change in posture, particularly in the West, regarding tactical ballistic weapons, it could well be that the one on 30/09 will lead to a completely different reaction, particularly from Western armies.
Indeed, for the first time, the use of these weapons will have made it possible to catch out Israel's air defense, supposed to be the most efficient in the Western camp, probably even on the planet, due to the density of resources deployed, and the recognized performance of Israeli anti-aircraft and anti-ballistic systems.
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181 Iranian ballistic missiles have overwhelmed the planet's most powerful and dense anti-ballistic defenses
Like evoked in a previous article, there is now no doubt that the Iranian strikes have succeeded in overwhelming, at least partially, the Israeli air defenses, contrary to what is being said by the IDF general staff and the American Centcom, the central command of the theater of operations, based in Qatar.
Thus, several videos published on social networks, shortly after these strikes, demonstrate, without possible ambiguity, that a significant portion of the Iranian missiles managed to get past the Israeli anti-ballistic shield, to strike several targets, including the Mossad headquarters and the Nevatim air base.
For the time being, while the Israeli and American denial that the air defenses have intercepted all proven threats against its civilian and military infrastructure is openly challenged, Iranian claims, speaking of 20 Israeli F-35i destroyed on the ground, are impossible to confirm, especially since Iran does not have satellite means to attest to this toll.
However, the published videos show that Nevatim was hit, at a minimum, by about twenty ballistic missiles detonated in just twenty seconds. Each Iranian missile carrying an average of one ton of explosives, so 15 to 20 tons of explosives would have detonated on the surface, on this base, necessarily causing very significant damage.
However, since the Egyptian and Syrian preemptive strikes at the start of the Yom Kippur War, Israeli air bases have never been hit by enemy means, precisely thanks to a particularly dense air defense, creating an impenetrable wall, at least until now.
Expensive, time-consuming and difficult to produce, ballistic missiles also have unique characteristics today.
While they were used by the American and French armies during the Cold War, with different models of short and medium range ballistic missiles, non-strategic ballistic missiles completely disappeared from the inventories of Western armies with the end of the Cold War.
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