The drama appears to have come to an abrupt end after Iran's hybrid drone strikes on Israel soil, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles. Looking back now, it was a game where all three sides won. For Israel, on the one hand, it claims to have intercepted 99% of Iranian missiles, demonstrating its strong military scientific and technological strength; for the United States, regardless of whether Israel intercepts Iranian missiles on the ground or weapons, it directly declares Netanyahu to win, so that Biden himself can avoid falling into another Middle East war, and of course he has won; for Iran, launching more than 100 missiles and drones to strike at Israel itself, no matter what the hit rate is, daring to counterattack is a huge political victory in itself.
If we objectively analyze the effects of Iran's confrontation with Iran, which claims to have the world's most dense air defense network, and launches a large-scale long-range weapon hybrid strike, we can still find many patterns. On the one hand, Iran's ballistic missile penetration level is indeed not high. Iran's ballistic missile technology is related to the Hongqi-2 air defense missile imported from China, which has a relatively low terminal flight speed and a relatively fixed trajectory, and its penetration capability is still poor; on the other hand, Iran's cruise missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have to cross thousands of kilometers to reach the Israeli mainland, and they have finally succeeded in being intercepted by Israel, the United States, Britain, Jordan, France, and other countries in multiple waves, and the results are relatively bleak. But no matter how much the Israeli bullhide blows, third-party sources prove that as many as seven Iranian ballistic missiles may have hit the Nevatim airbase in the Negev desert. Moreover, the cost of weapons consumed by Israel and the US military to defend against Iran's ballistic missile strikes is very staggering, and it may be dozens of times that of the Iranians if you count the money.
What is more interesting is that this long-range strike show of Iranian missiles not only shows us the strength of Israel's air defense, but also shows us the shortcomings of the long-range strike strength of the US military's air defense capability.
On the one hand, a real missile strike will be a brutal war of attrition. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards' strike on Israel is essentially a political show, and a real war cannot be a single wave of long-range strikes. No matter how strong the air defense of Israel and the US military is, when Iran fights a few more waves, you will still end up with a dead hanging, because it costs more to defend against these incoming missiles, and the air defense weapons will soon be depleted. You can imagine how sour the scene would have been if the PLA Rocket Force had attacked the US airfield, and after several waves of strikes, the US military had no ammunition available. The US military's purchase cost of a Standard 2 missile is $2 million, and a Standard 6 missile is $4.2 million.
Second, without ground- and ship-to-ship strike supersonic missiles, ballistic missiles, and hypersonic missiles, the long-range penetration capability of the US military's active missiles will not be much stronger than that of Iran. Because Iran's long-range strike weapons have to fly more than 1,000 kilometers, most of the drones and cruise missiles were shot down by fighter jets in the middle of the way, and the same situation applies to the US military. The U.S. military plans to strike China's long-range weapons, the same subsonic flying Harpoon, Tomahawk, and Rasmus stealth cruise missiles, and after launching from 1,000 kilometers away, it will take one hour for these missiles to fly to the Taiwan Strait, and we can also dispatch fighter jets and warships to carry out multiple waves of interception. As for the missiles that China uses to strike US targets, hypersonic missiles and ballistic missiles that fall from the sky in more than 10 minutes, and the penetration capabilities of the two are very different. Therefore, this strike incident proves that for an adversary with a well-developed early warning system, the slow flight speed of long-range strike weapons is a fatal shortcoming.
The third point is that the penetration rate of hypersonic missiles is 100%. There is also a theory that the seven missiles that Iran hit the Israeli airfield were all hypersonic missiles, and the probability of penetration is 100%. Although Iran's missile terminal guidance level is not high, it can also represent the penetration capability of hypersonic missiles to a certain extent, and this capability of the PLA is far more powerful than Iran I don't know how many times, and the US military is still 0 in the field of hypersonic missiles so far.
To put it another way, the U.S. and Israeli defenses proved to be quite reliable in using fighter jets and warships to defend against subsonic missiles and slower, more flying drones. China's armed forces have the world's largest fleet of early warning aircraft, the world's largest fleet of heavy fighters, and the largest number of warships equipped with vertical hair systems. With such air defense strength, the results of the engagement are very clear for those cruise missiles of the US military, which are flying relatively slowly. Overall, Iran's attack on Israel shows us the decisive impact of the performance of long-range weapons on the effectiveness of strikes, and also proves that the prospects for defense against subsonic missiles are very bright. In this respect, the United States is only beaten compared with the People's Liberation Army, or fighting at China's doorstep.