Noah Rothman
National Review, June 13, 2025
“The Israelis have many lessons to teach us, but foremost among them is that there is no substitute for victory.”
It hasn’t even been two weeks since the Ukrainians pulled off a defensive operation of such magisterial competence that it could only be compared with the feats achieved by Israel’s special forces. Well, today, it looks like the Israelis have done something so adroit that the closest precedent is the one set by the Ukrainians.
Israel’s initial strikes on Iranian military and nuclear targets have made the weaponized pager operation against Hezbollah terrorists look like child’s play. Acting in simultaneous concert with the hundreds of Israeli aircraft that executed dozens of strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Israeli intelligence and special forces on the ground inside Iran disabled the country’s air defence systems. The operation reportedly relied on the use of drones and missiles launched from inside Iran. One Israeli source told N12 that they had “establish a covert drone base ‘in the heart of Iran,’ to neutralize Iranian air defences and create other critical effects to kick off the long-awaited campaign.”
Accurate damage assessments from the first waves of Israeli strikes may take time to assemble, and Jerusalem maintains that this is only the outset of a campaign that could take days or weeks before it concludes. But early reports indicate significant success.
Israel has so thoroughly penetrated the Iranian security and intelligence establishment that it was able to target and neutralize much of Iran’s military and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leadership within the first minutes of the operation. Much of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, including Tehran’s primary uranium-enrichment complex at Natanz, appears to have been disabled. Israel appears to have avoided targeting the regime’s political leadership, although the precision with which it dispatched IRGC and army commanders suggests it might have and still could — a fact of which the mullahs are surely aware. ….SOURCE