Israel announced that it had gained aerial superiority over western Iran, including Tehran, 48 hours after the start of “Operation Rising Lion,” something Russia hasn’t been able to do in three-and-a-half years of war in Ukraine.
Why one succeeded while the other failed was the subject of a report by The Wall Street Journal on Monday. The most obvious reason is that the Israel Air Force is more capable than the Russian Air Force.
British Air Marshal (ret.) Edward Stringer, who oversaw the air campaign in Libya in 2011 and headed operations for the British Ministry of Defense, told the WSJ that the key reason the IAF succeeded is that it surpasses Russia’s in culture, training and innovation, while combining intelligence and cyber capabilities.
“All the Russians have is pilots. They grow these pilots to drive flying artillery, and that’s it,” he said.
Israel ticked off several more successes on Monday. The military said it had destroyed a third of Iran’s total missile launchers. Key Iranian intelligence figures were also eliminated.
“At this time, we can say that we have achieved full aerial superiority over Tehran’s skies,” IDF Spokesman Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin announced at a press briefing.
It is an achievement that Russia has tried but failed to realize since the start of its war against Ukraine in February 2022.
Its inability to do so is one reason Moscow’s military has been “bogged down in grinding trench warfare, sustaining staggering losses,” the Journal reported.
Despite the differences in the two wars, “the experience of these two conflicts, closely observed by militaries around the world, reinforces what war planners have known for decades: Control over air is everything, if you can get it,” the paper reported.
“The two campaigns are showing the fundamental importance of air superiority in order to succeed in your overall military objectives,” U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. (ret.) David Deptula, dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, who oversaw allied air operations against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan in 2001, told the Journal.
“In the case of the Russia-Ukraine war, you see what happens when neither side can achieve air superiority: stalemate and devolution to attrition-based warfare,” he said. “In the case of the Israel-Iran war, it allows Israel unhindered freedom to attack where it possesses air superiority over segments of Iran.”
Israel has already capitalized on its control of the skies. It had started the campaign with its most advanced fighter, the F-35, which has stealth capabilities, but now also uses older F-15s and F-16s. With Iranian air defenses eroded, it also started using inexpensive and abundant short-range bombs vs. more expensive and less numerous long-range missiles.
“Israeli warplanes began dropping bombs from within Iranian skies,” the Journal reported. “That is a feat that the giant Russian air force has been unable to achieve in Ukraine in 3½ years of war.”
Israelis now have “the ability to use the whole suite of their offensive weapons—in greater mass, more efficiently, and spreading them out,” British Air Marshal (ret.) Martin Sampson, who supervised British air operations against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, told the Journal.
Another reason cited by experts for Israel’s success and Russia’s failure is that Ukraine has proven to be much better on defense than Iran.
“Iran’s air defenses … represented a much easier target set than Ukraine’s air defenses in almost every respect,” said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment think tank and an expert on Russian and Ukrainian militaries.
While Ukraine and Iran both have air forces with outdated fighter jets, unlike Ukraine, Tehran didn’t build up ground-based air defenses.
“Over decades, Tehran underinvested in air defenses and bet instead on the deterrent firepower of its own missile forces and those of its regional proxies,” the Journal reported.
Ukrainian air defenses, Soviet-era S-300s and Buk surface-to-air missile systems, were better integrated in 2022 than Iran’s today.
“Tehran relies on a mishmash of S-300, Chinese batteries and locally made air-defense systems,” the Journal said.
“Iran never relied on air defenses alone to ward off attacks like this. The idea was always to use deterrence,” said Fabian Hinz, a military expert at London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Iranian deterrence relied on its proxies. Its main one, the Lebanon-based Hezbollah terror group, had been decimated by Israel in the fall of 2024. As a knock-on effect of that Israeli success, the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad fell. A key Iranian ally, his territory was used by Iran to resupply Hezbollah.
Also, the element of surprise was lost to the Russians thanks to U.S. intelligence warnings. Ukraine concealed most of its mobile air defenses in February 2022.
Iran was caught off guard, convinced that Israel wouldn’t attack while nuclear talks with the U.S. were ongoing.
Israeli Mossad intelligence agency teams penetrated Iran and set up drones within its territory. It then destroyed Iranian air defenses at close range during the outset of the campaign.
“Basically, what Israel did with Iran is what Russia wanted to do with Ukraine: They thought they could pull off some cloak-and-dagger thing, and infiltrate and decapitate the Ukrainian regime,” Michael Horowitz, an Israeli geopolitical analyst, told the Journal.
“But it turned out that the Ukrainian society has a resilience and cannot be so easily penetrated—whereas when it comes to Iran, the regime is so unpopular that it’s easy to find people there who will agree to work with Israel,” he said.
Despite its successes, Israel continues to sustain damage from retaliatory Iranian strikes on its population centers. Two barrages totaling 65 missiles and dozens of drones were launched at Israel overnight on Sunday.
Most were intercepted, but four areas in northern and central Israel were hit, killing eight civilians and injuring dozens.
“This is the face of the Iranian terror regime: While we target military and nuclear capabilities intended to destroy the State of Israel, they fire at population centers with the aim of harming civilians,” Defrin said on Monday.
