Weekly Commentary: Policymakers Beware: Iran and Its Allies Are Racing Up
the Learning Curve - Simply Intercepting Their Attacks Is Not The Solution
Dr. Aaron Lerner, 18 April 2024

At this very moment, a team of top Iranian engineers is burning the midnight
oil, studying how to overcome the mechanical and other failures that caused
half of the missiles they launched to fail.

Another team of Iranian experts is reviewing how most of the remaining
missiles were intercepted and also how some succeeded in reaching their
targets.

Since the start of the war, Hezbollah has been carefully monitoring every
move of the IDF in its ever-escalating "not-yet-war" with the Jewish State,
so that it can constantly enhance its capabilities in battle.

In some instances, Hezbollah has used these enhanced capabilities in attacks
whose sophistication surprised us. But that's only the "tip of the iceberg."
We are painfully clueless about what else they have already developed or
will in the future.

And of course, all this time Iran and its allies are literally counting how
many of each type of interceptor Israel has launched (both from the ground
and from airborne platforms) in order to estimate how many we still have,
after taking into account their estimates of the quantities of new
interceptors Israel has added to its stocks since October 7th.

It is critical that our policymakers recognize we are in a dynamic situation
in a race against the clock.

Let me take this to an extreme: even if we possessed unlimited funds and a
magic tube into which you insert a billion dollars at one end and all the
interceptors we used this week miraculously popped out of the other end, it
would still be a critical error to apply the "kick the can down the road"
approach, which the Iron Dome facilitated as a policy towards Hamas.

Because Iran and its allies are racing up the learning curve, so that two,
three, or even four billion dollars a round won't suffice.

And since there is no magic tube, and replenishing the billion dollars of
interceptors is going to take time, our race against the clock is even more
critical.
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