Through trial and error, Iran found gaps in Israel's storied air defenses

Israel's recent war with Iran served as a cautionary tale for countries with sophisticated missile defenses and those that seek to have them.

- Zvi Smith & Benoit Faucon

Over 12 days, Iran pierced Israel's defenses with increasing success, showing that even the world's most advanced systems can be penetrated.

While most of Iran's missiles and drones were knocked down, Tehran changed tactics and found gaps in Israel's armor through trial and error.

Tehran began to launch more advanced and longer-range missiles from a wider range of locations deep inside Iran, according to missile-defense experts who analyzed open-source data and public images of missile fragments. The regime also altered the timing and pattern of attacks and increased the geographic spread of targets, the analysts found.

As the war went on, Iran fired fewer missiles, but its success rate rose, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from think tanks based in Israel and Washington, D.C.

In the first half of the conflict, 8% of Iran's missiles slipped through Israel's defenses. By the second half of the war, 16% got past Israel's interceptors, according to data from the Washington-based Jewish Institute for National Security of America, or Jinsa.

The success rate doesn't take into account missiles that failed to launch or were intercepted before reaching Israeli airspace, said Mora Deitch, head of the Data Analytics Center at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University.