It’s doubtful that the state-of-the-art stealth technology cloaking American B-2 bombers as they attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities on the night of June 21 was even necessary. Iran’s airspace, by then, was like a red carpet. With two heavy blows—one last October and one in mid-June—Israel had already destroyed Iran’s air defenses and taken control of its skies.
President Donald Trump claimed that the air strikes he ordered “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear ambitions, which they probably didn’t. The air strikes have certainly set those ambitions back. But the accomplishment was not America’s. It was Israel’s.
Leaving aside questions about the wisdom and efficacy of the Israeli and American attacks on Iran, this much is clear: The Israelis achieved complete air supremacy days before the B-2s took off. How did they do it? What does it say about Iran’s fate, or about air war in the 21st century? During the past several days, I posed these questions to some former top military officers, most of them only recently retired.
At a time when talk about the future of air war focuses largely on drones, satellites, and hypersonic missiles, Israel’s success (and Iran’s failure) is something of a throwback. “I think the general plan for this has been on the books for years,” General Joseph Votel, who led the U.S. Special Operations Command and then the U.S. Central Command before retiring in 2019, told me. Israel “certainly made getting into the target area a little less dicey for our forces.” Israel’s offensive employed but did not rely completely on the most modern technology. And as quickly as Israel prevailed, its triumph did not happen overnight.
Success involved, first, Israel taking steps to protect itself against devastating retaliation by dismantling Iran’s surrogate militias, Hezbollah and Hamas, and building, with American help, an effective shield against missiles and drones. Air strikes by Israel against Iranian targets in April 2024 likely helped locate and damage Iran’s air defenses. Then came two joint air-force/special-operations missions: the initial one on October 26, 2024 (Operation Days of Repentance), and the second on June 13 (Operation Rising Lion).
The star of both was the much-maligned F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, an aircraft that rightly earned criticism for its costly development and production, and that more recently has been slammed for lagging behind cutting-edge and less expensive, unmanned alternatives. In November, Elon Musk called the F-35 “obsolete.” But it was Adir fighters, Israel’s F-35 variant, that made the all-important initial stealthy forays deep into Iranian airspace last year, evading detection and destroying Iran’s ability to track and shoot down incoming aircraft.
In that first wave, Israeli F-35s likely overflew nations such as Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, or Syria without seeking permission, moving too fast to trigger a response, and then entered Iranian airspace. Given Iran’s weak air force, old airplanes, and poorly trained pilots, Israeli aircraft didn’t face much danger of being challenged in the air. But Iran’s anti-aircraft defenses, including Russian S-300 and possibly S-400 ground-to-air missiles, are modern and formidable.
These batteries were probably among the primary targets in Israel’s initial wave, but pilots also had to be alert to immediate threats. In their cockpits, they were immersed in visual displays, both projections inside their helmet visors and, directly in front of them, a large touch-screen monitor. The images integrated the steady flow of data from the airplane’s multiple sensors, giving a complete, moving, spherical, 360-degree picture of the airplane’s surroundings. Pilots can “see” an enemy fighter or ground-to-air missile battery well before they are in visual or targeting range, and they are also alerted immediately if their jet has been “painted” by enemy radar. Danger must be assessed and decisions made very rapidly. If a fighter has indeed been painted, how urgent is the threat? Should pilots preempt the assigned mission and attack the threat, or should they evade it and proceed?
Israel says it did not lose a single one of its $100 million Adir fighters in the course of its attacks. Iran claims to have shot down four of them in June. Either way, the F-35s got the job done, probably striking the anti-aircraft batteries themselves but also vital command-and-control networks needed to coordinate their use. These systems rely on the feed of radar readings to command centers—the “eyes” of the system—giving defenders a picture of what is happening in the air. Smashing them would have the effect of blinding Iran to attacking planes, drones, and missiles. It effectively opened the door for two more waves of air attacks, more than 100 aircraft in all, including non-stealthy F-15s, F-16s, refueling tankers, and surveillance planes, plus helicopters that delivered covert ground-combat units. It is likely that these covert units helped find mobile missile launchers—easier on the ground than in the air. Israeli teams apparently located and destroyed—either by themselves or by directing air attacks—most or all of the Russian-made batteries. Meanwhile, the coordinated attacks in June destroyed Iranian air force F-14 and F-5 fighters on the ground.
The initial October 2024 Israeli operation came weeks after Iran launched some 180 missiles at Tel Aviv and other targets throughout Israel in response to the assassinations of Hezbollah and Hamas leaders. Operation Days of Repentance was seen at the time, by the public at any rate, as tit for tat. It wasn’t.
“It was principally to reduce their air defenses in anticipation of a more robust strike,” retired Air Force Lieutenant General David Deptula told me. Deptula, who now heads the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, helped build the air-attack plans for the Desert Storm campaign in 1990–91 that took back Kuwait from Saddam Hussein.
That more robust strike, Rising Lion, began on June 13, hitting dozens of military and nuclear sites, including the main uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, centrifuge workshops near Tehran, laboratories in Isfahan, and the Arak nuclear reactor. Again, without losing a plane or suffering a casualty, Israel killed as many as 30 military commanders, including the chief of Iran’s armed forces, General Mohammad Bagheri; the head of the separate Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force, General Amir Ali Hajizadeh; and the chief of the Revolutionary Guard, Hossein Salami. Also killed were nine of the country’s top nuclear scientists.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, was reduced to hiding in a bunker, duly naming successors in the event of his own death and sending orders mainly through a trusted aide.
The technology employed against Iran has advanced far beyond what Deptula had to work with in Desert Storm, but the playbook, he said, is not dissimilar: “attacks on the same centers of gravity that we applied in paralyzing Saddam’s ability to respond—military leadership, command and control, and key essential systems infrastructure.” In a modern twist, Israel likely added large attack drones and special-ops units that spun up short-range quadcopters and microdrones—very small flying devices that can be used inside buildings, and that can either carry their own lethal small explosives or provide precise targeting information. Deptula called them “inexpensive cruise missiles.”
Retired General Jim Slife, the former U.S. Air Force vice chief of staff, was also reminded of Desert Storm, where the first military order of business was “to roll back the air-defense system so you can gain air superiority.”
Air attacks are only as useful as the intelligence that guides them, and here may be the most significant Israeli accomplishment. The U.S. has extensive spy networks, human and electronic, and its reach is global. Israel’s focus is far narrower. For the past 40 years, Israel has concentrated its efforts mostly on Iran and its proxies, and in particular on Iran’s nuclear ambitions. A country the size of New Jersey with only two major cities, Israel would not likely survive a nuclear attack.
Mossad agents have infiltrated the top ranks of Iran’s government and military and have recruited spies in every sector of Iranian life. Iran’s mullah-led government is extremely unpopular. Given the pinpoint success of its attacks, it appears that Israel made use of a deep-seated bench of valuable informants. Most of the prominent Iranians killed knew they were living in Israel’s crosshairs and presumably had taken precautions. Killing them meant knowing exactly where and when to strike, says retired General Raymond Thomas, a former commander of U.S. Special Operations Command. “I think we all appreciate the Israelis have extraordinary intelligence infrastructure already in country. I think they’ve completely permeated Iranian intelligence, Iranian security. I don’t know the specifics, but I’m sure that they are everywhere.”
Israeli special-ops teams were likely inserted into Iran to destroy targets themselves and to act as a rescue force in case any Israeli planes were shot down. But, most important, their job was to steer aerial attacks precisely to their targets.
“If you’re taking out the military leaders, taking out the scientists, that sort of thing, you probably have Israeli special-operations guys on the ground knowing where, say, General so-and-so was, right?” one retired senior officer told me. “‘We’ve been following,’ you know, ‘General Jones, and we know that he’s just gone into this apartment building. He’s on the 11th floor.’ And if you’re going to send in a TLAM”—a Tomahawk Land Attack Missile—“it’s got to hit the window on the 11th floor, right?” This is not something that can be seen from a satellite, he said.
Iran’s military defenses and its government and research networks had also been laid bare by decades of cooperative U.S. and Israeli SIGINT, or Signals Intelligence—information gathered by surveillance and interception. “What the Israelis are particularly good at, and what we’re particularly good at, is fusing multiple disciplines of intelligence,” a retired Army general told me, noting this long, cooperative effort. “Not just imagery from satellites but electronic intelligence, you know, RF”—radio frequency—“collection, being able to do that from space, and just a sustained focus. Years of analysts following movements of vehicles and equipment and so on. I think what you’re seeing is the degree to how much more transparent everything becomes with the right capabilities.”
Among the things that became “transparent” were Iran’s ground-to-air missile systems. “Through intelligence analysis, you figure out where the key nodes are to an air-defense network,” Slife, the retired Air Force general, told me. “You attack them and then the whole system comes down.”
Long-term intel analysis could also track the habits and movements of important Iranian military leaders and nuclear scientists. To target them, Israel reportedly used small drones “just like the Ukrainians used in Russia,” Thomas said, referring to the Spider Web attacks earlier this year that damaged or destroyed on the ground an estimated 34 percent of Russia’s cruise-missile-carrying aircraft. Small drones like these may have been smuggled into Iran in parts over months or years—or, Thomas speculated, were manufactured inside Iran using 3-D printers.
Iran has itself to blame for much of its vulnerability. Its military and government have been compromised by years of corruption and poor management—promotions based on loyalty or family connections rather than competence. “It’s a fundamentally dishonest regime,” one former senior U.S. defense official told me. “They’ve been drinking their own whiskey. There were enormous holes in their air defenses to begin with.” The defense official went on: “There have always been ways to get in and out.”
For Deptula, who studies air war, the successful Israeli operations “ought to put to rest, for now, the idea that we don’t need manned aircraft anymore.” He acknowledged that unmanned fighters—the kind foreseen and touted by many defense analysts—are coming. “But I’m here to tell you it’s going to be a lot longer than people anticipate based on what you’ve seen hyped in the media.” He said it will take a long time for AI to catch up to “what a human mind inside a very capable sensor-shooter aircraft can accomplish.”
Iran has been humiliated, and it will likely find ways to strike back. The air cap that Israel put in place is too expensive for its relatively small air force to maintain for long. Permission for the constant flyovers that such a cap requires would have to come from Arab countries unlikely to cooperate, so positioning Israel’s air force on friendlier ground would add to the expense. But even if Iran can rapidly reconstitute some of its air defenses, Israel has shown how quickly they can be crushed. For the foreseeable future, Israel owns Iran’s sky.
“You can put anything you want over the adversary’s territory,” explained retired Air Force Lieutenant General Marc Sasseville: fighters, tankers, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance platforms, and other types of sensors and capabilities. “You can basically operate with impunity over the enemy’s capital and there’s nothing they can do about it, because they can’t shoot you down. They probably don’t even know what you’re doing, and you can attack at your leisure.”
As the United States did, courtesy of Israel.