RT Armchair Warlord
It occurs to me that we're seeing a pattern here.⬇️
The Iranians are probably baiting our air and missile defense radars in the Middle East into illuminating and giving up their exact positions with ballistic missiles and then killing them with drones. Their cruise drones are by all indications quite precise and effective enough at sliding through fighter sweeps and the very limited SHORAD coverage that exists, likely because the Iranians got a dress rehearsal last year and the Russians have shared industrial amounts of combat data from Ukraine with them. We've lost a terrifying proportion of the total number of THAAD radars in existence just in the last week, not to mention some ultra-heavy fixed radar installations and an unknown number of Patriot radars.
We're already seeing the results of this. Missile warning times in Israel have already decreased to a matter of seconds. Missile warnings in the Gulf States are sporadic to nonexistent. Replacement systems are being frantically flown into the Middle East from elsewhere. And the Iranians are getting essentially the same number of missiles through and continuing to strike important targets despite significantly fewer launches - suggesting they're metering their launch campaign by effects on target to sustain a long war.
This also, by the way, suggests that we got head-faked by Iranian strike doctrine. We've been laser-focused on countering the flashy high end of their strike system - the ballistic missile force, while the Iranians didn't use their drones very effectively in previous rounds. During the Twelve Day War the trickle of Shaheds the Iranians flew off was trivially interdicted by fighter sweeps, which may have lulled US and Israeli war planners into a false sense of security about the true effectiveness of these weapons. This may have been precisely the impression the Iranians wanted us to have of what we know, from extensive combat use in Ukraine, is a pretty formidable weapon.
The Iranians may actually have taken a pretty serious lesson from Ukraine (that flashy weapons draw fire) and shifted to considering their drone force - easily produced in gigantic quantities, quiet to launch, easy to store, frustratingly difficult to intercept, and lethal and precise enough to disable key nodes - to be their primary striking arm.
