Middle East: Rising Lion

By Richard North - June 14, 2025

It was particularly thoughtless of the Israelis to launch their attack on Iran in the wee small hours (UK time), long after the newspapers had gone to bed with headlines emoting over the “Accidents Inevitable” air crash.

And while Charlie Boy is still focused on “this awful tragedy” in Almedabad, requiring the royal family taking part in the Trooping the Colour parade to wear black armbands, as a mark of respect to the victims of the crash.

The King has requested a minute’s silence – the same honour afforded to the millions of servicemen who lost their lives in two world wars – set to be observed after his inspection of the parade on Saturday – in recognition of “the lives lost, the families in mourning and all the communities affected.

Meanwhile, Iran has declared that Israel’s raids on its territory amount to an “act of war” which means, in essence, a recognition that the state of war that has existed between the two countries since 7 October 2023 has now come fully out into the open.

This, of course, has been a done thing anyway, after the Iranian missile attacks on Israel in April last year and again in the October, ostensibly in retaliation to the Israeli airstrike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus in the April, and the limited strikes on Iran on 18 April 2024 when the IAF targeted the air defence radar site guarding the Natanz nuclear facility.

For a long time though – getting on for many years – Israel has had to live with the spectre of Iran developing a nuclear bomb. In the manner of its attack on Iraq in June 1981, when the IAF took out an unfinished nuclear reactor just outside Baghdad, it has long been prepared for action.

At that point, back in 1981, the Israeli government established what became known as the Begin Doctrine which explicitly stated the strike was not an anomaly, but instead “a precedent for every future government in Israel”.

This locked into its counter-proliferation measures the policy option of a “preventive strike”, which was said to add another dimension to its existing policy of deliberate ambiguity in relation to the nuclear weapons capability of other states in the region, and in particular Iran.

The ambiguity in this context was largely theoretical as it has long been an open secret that it was only a matter of time before Israel launched a full-scale preventative strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. In fact, the attack last year on the Natanz air defences was widely seen as a precursor to such a strike.

However, after the Iran missile attack on Israel in October last year, which was expected to trigger a full-scale retaliation, there was an element of technical discussion on the IAF’s capability to deliver an effective attack.

This recognised that the Iranians – anticipating an Israeli strike – had buried their nuclear facilities in deep, hardened bunkers, so heavily protected that it was mooted that even the heaviest of “bunker buster bombs” would have difficulty destroying the sites.

Since, at the time and currently, only the US had the aircraft capable of carrying the heaviest of the bunker busters, the GBU-57, weighing in at nearly 30,000lbs. This had The Times citing Matthew Savill, director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute, who argued: “Israel probably cannot destroy the [Iranian nuclear] programme, but it can do a lot of damage and set it back by a few years”.

The implication was that, to conduct a successful strike, direct US assistance would be needed, with the provision of the B-52 or B-2 platforms, aircraft not available to the IAF.

I had cause to disagree with the thrust of this article, writing a blogpost pointing to the availability of the newer GBU-72A, designated the Advanced 5,000 Pound Penetrator, abbreviated to A5K.

This new weapon had been designed with a lethality “substantially higher compared to similar legacy weapons like the GBU-28” and while details remained classified, the performance was believed to be comparable with the GBU-57 series of weapons.

Crucially, the 5,000lb weight was within the capacity of the Israeli fleet of F-15I Ra’am fighters, the upgraded version of the US F-15E with increased range and load capacity.

But there was another essential feature to the new weapon. It was a precision weapon, employing the very latest in guidance technology. Therefore, I noted, its effect could be enhanced by the simultaneous launch of multiple weapons, all targeted at the same point.

It is the latter capability which seems to have enabled the current Israeli attack. Using a technique tried and perfected in the attacks on Hezbollah last year, the Israelis employ what they call a “drilling strategy”.

The bunkers are targeted with successive precision strikes using multiple bombs, with each bomb clearing the debris created by its predecessor and penetrating deeper each time, until eventually the defences are breached.

The point is made by David Blair in the Telegraph that Netanyahu will have achieved nothing if all his forces do is create a short delay in Iran’s path to nuclear weapons. To secure a strategic effect – without the direct assistance of the United States – the IAF must destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities, not just damage them.

However, this is not the only operational innovation the ever-inventive Israelis have introduced. In addition to decapitating the Iranian military high command, and killing many of the nuclear scientists, the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, used clandestine techniques to neutralise the Iranian air defences.

Mossad agents, it has now been revealed, snuck into Iran and set up a factory to build explosive drones for use against Tehran’s air defences ahead of the air strikes. Additionally, the drones were used to attack missile launchers aimed at Israel, in a bid to reduce the expected retaliatory response.

The operation, we are told, would have been years in the making, and also involved vehicles carrying weapons systems being smuggled into Iran, such as ATGWs, ground-launched anti-tank weapons which were used by agents to destroy anti-aircraft missile batteries.

But the job is not over until Iran’s nuclear facilities are smouldering ruins. And the Financial Times this time is recruiting Matthew Savill from RUSI to express doubts as to whether the Israelis can do it on their own.

It is the Telegraph’s Blair, though, who warns that it never pays to underestimate Israel’s capabilities or assume that its air force, which specialises in destroying underground targets, could only knock dents in the hardest target at the Fordow enrichment plant, where the bunkers may be as deep as 100 metres.

The vital need, therefore, is for the IDF to mount a maximum effort until it has achieved its aim, only then to have the fool David Lammy – taking time out from leading on the Air India crash – to urging “all parties to show restraint”, even as Iranian missiles rain down on Tel Aviv.

But, as Admiral John Fisher, in a 1911 letter to Winston Churchill, observed, “restraint in war is imbecility”. Similar sentiments have been expressed by others, such as Clausewitz, who in his treatise On War (1832) argued that moderation in war is absurd when total victory is the goal.

Restraint is precisely what we don’t need at the moment. The path to safety for the region and the rest of the world is for the IAF utterly to destroy Iran’s bomb-making capability for the foreseeable future and, preferably, to so damage the regime that the people are able to overthrow it.

Fortunately, the Israeli effort – unlike the British government – is not run by cretins and, in the next few days, we may learn whether this operation “Rising Lion” has been a success.

Failure to achieve all the objectives, as the BBC gleefully tells us, brings a risk that the Iranian regime will accelerate its race towards building and even testing a nuclear bomb.

If that happens, it says, then it will almost inevitably trigger a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, with Saudi Arabia, Turkey and possibly Egypt all deciding they need one too.