“Within 48 hours of starting its war on Iran, Israel said it gained air superiority over the western part of the country, including Tehran,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

“Israeli warplanes began dropping bombs from within Iranian skies instead of relying on expensive long-range missiles.”

The report continued by noting that this is an accomplishment that the giant Russian air force hasn’t achieved in Ukraine in 3½ years of war, resulting in a “grinding trench warfare” and staggering losses.

Of course, the two wars are very different because Israel had not launched a ground offensive in Iran. Nevertheless, according to the report, the two conflicts reinforce what war planners have known for decades: Control over air is everything, if you can get it.

“The two campaigns are showing the fundamental importance of air superiority in order to succeed in your overall military objectives,” said retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. 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.

“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 them unhindered freedom to attack where they possess air superiority over segments of Iran.”

The Israelis now have “the ability to use the whole suite of their offensive weapons—in greater mass, more efficiently, and spreading them out,” said retired British Air Marshal Martin Sampson, who directed British air operations against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq and now heads the Middle East office of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “From Israel’s side, the campaign objective is to destroy and degrade—and Iran doesn’t have that ability.”

Military analysts note that the Israeli Air Force is far more capable than the Russians, and Ukraine is much better at defense than Iran.

“Israel achieved surprise and overmatch over Iran’s air defenses, which represented a much easier target set than Ukraine’s air defenses in almost every respect,” said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment and an expert on Russian and Ukrainian militaries. “The asymmetry in qualitative capability between Israel’s air force and Russia is also vast and can be easily observed.”

Retired British Air Marshal Edward Stringer, who ran the air campaign in Libya in 2011 and headed operations for the British Ministry of Defense, said that the sophisticated training of the Israeli air force, combined with the IDF’s intelligence and cyber capabilities, is why the Israelis succeeded and the Russians failed.

“All the Russians have is pilots. They grow these pilots to drive flying artillery, and that’s it,” he said.

Iran has also failed to organize ground-based air defenses to impede enemy aircraft, instead relying on deterrence through its missile forces and those of its proxies.

“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 the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Israel also relied on its advanced intelligence capabilities to carry out sabotage operations within Iran before and during its opening strike, destroying air defenses and missile launchers and carrying out a series of assassinations of senior Iranian and military intelligence officials and top nuclear scientists.

“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,” said Michael Horowitz, an Israeli geopolitical analyst. “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.”

According to the WSJ, time is on Israel’s side.

“It’s a numbers game, and it seems like Israel has the upper hand because they can now go after the missiles that are shooting at them with direct attack. After all, the best way to shoot a missile is on the ground while it’s in a container, and not in the air while it’s flying,” said retired U.S. Air Force Gen. Timothy Ray, a former U.S. Global Strike Command commander. “What the Israelis are doing is just steadily leveraging an advantage.”

(YWN Israel Desk—Jerusalem)