Israeli Air Defense

As you know, Israel has established its multi-tier Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Arrow 2/3 defense systems for defending against incoming rockets and missiles.  Official claims have put the success rate somewhere in the 90+% range. However, based on careful consideration of photos and reading between the lines of various attack news stories (mostly Iron Dome) over the years, ComNavOps places the success rate at something closer to 40%-50%.  Now, with the latest hostilities between Iran and Israel, we are accumulating a new, extensive set of data with seemingly much less public relations spin applied.
 
A Breaking Defense article states,
 

As of this report, the IDF said Iran had managed to launch at least 400 missiles in 17 salvos since Israel’s strike on Iran last week, in addition to 1,000 drones.
 
The drones do not appear to have penetrated Israel’s defenses, but more than 20 of the ballistic missiles have, killing more than two dozen people.[1]

As of Monday morning, Israel reported 24 dead and 500 injured which gives an indication of the degree of penetration of Iranian missiles through the Israeli defenses.
 
So, what does all this tell us about the effectiveness of the Israeli defense system?  The numbers we have suggest a success rate of 95%, on the face of it, however, my understanding is that many missiles are not even engaged due to being assessed as not a threat.  Iranian missiles are not exactly renowned for accuracy.  Thus, if 400 missiles have been fired at Israel, only a fraction of them were actual threats and had to be engaged.  Here, now, is where we have no basis, whatsoever, to further judge effectiveness.  However, for the sake of illustration, if only, say, 30% of the Iranian missiles were actual threats then the defensive success rate would drop to something on the order of 80%.  You can plug in whatever numbers you wish and calculate resulting defensive success rates, if you’re so inclined.
 
The takeaway from this is that the state of the art Israeli defense system, matched against some pretty low capability Iranian missiles, still allowed, perhaps, something on the order of 20% of attacking missiles to get through.  What does this mean to us?  Well, consider what will happen when Aegis faces modern, highly capable Chinese missiles.  What will the defensive success rate of our ships be?  Who can say, but this is just another data point that leads ComNavOps to conclude that Aegis will be nowhere near as effective as we hope.  This, in turn, strongly suggests that we need to mount many more short range and close in weapons on our ships.  Combine this with the analyses we’ve done about engagement windows and it paints a pretty bleak picture – one that Navy leadership is ignoring instead of preparing for.
 
 
 
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[1] Breaking Defense website, “Left of boom: Israeli strikes concentrate on Iranian missile threat”, Seth J. Frantzman, 18-Jun-2025,
https://breakingdefense.com/2025/06/left-of-boom-israeli-strikes-concentrate-on-iranian-missile-threat/