Welcome back to My Weird Prompts. I am Corn, and I am sitting here in our living room in Jerusalem with my brother. It is a quiet evening outside, which is something we definitely do not take for granted anymore. The city feels different since last summer, does it not, Herman?
Herman Poppleberry here. It is good to be back at the microphones, Corn. And you are right, the atmosphere in Jerusalem has shifted. There is a certain weight to the air. We have been looking at a lot of heavy data lately, but this specific topic is something we have lived through quite literally. We spent those twelve days in and out of the reinforced room, listening to the thuds of the interceptions overhead.
Exactly. Today is February eighteenth, two thousand twenty-six, and we are looking back at the events of last summer. Today's prompt comes from Daniel, one of our long-time listeners. Daniel wants us to dive into the military significance of that twelve-day war between Iran and Israel that shook the world in July of two thousand twenty-five. It is a topic that feels very fresh because, as Daniel pointed out in his message, we are currently standing on the edge of what could be a second round of open conflict. The rhetoric coming out of Tehran and the Kirya in Tel Aviv is reaching a fever pitch again.
It is a fascinating prompt because it asks us to look past the headlines of last year and really dig into the mechanics of what happened. Most people remember the sirens, the terrifying glow of the night sky, and the non-stop news flashes, but the actual military strategy involved was unlike anything we have seen in the Middle East before. It was not just a conventional exchange of fire; it was a masterclass in asymmetrical preparation, integrated defense, and what military theorists are now calling "hyper-kinetic theater."
I remember those twelve days vividly. The sheer speed of it was overwhelming. But you have been digging into the after-action reports, the think tank white papers, and the declassified briefings that have trickled out from the Pentagon and the I-D-F since then. Daniel mentioned in his prompt that this was not a conventional aerial war. Why is that the starting point for understanding this conflict?
Well, when people think of an aerial war, they think of the Battle of Britain or the first Gulf War—dogfights, massive bombing campaigns, and air superiority being established through pilot-to-pilot combat. But in the twelve-day war of two thousand twenty-five, the Iranian Air Force was barely a factor. Their fleet is aging, mostly comprised of old F-four Phantoms and F-fourteen Tomcats from the nineteen-seventies, along with some newer Russian Su-thirty-fives that they finally received. They knew that putting their pilots up against Israeli F-thirty-five Adirs would be a suicide mission. So, the war was fought through two primary channels: long-range ballistic missiles and suicide drones from Iran, and a very sophisticated, multi-layered defense and sabotage strategy from Israel. It was a war of buttons and algorithms, not stick-and-rudder flying.
Let us talk about that defense. Daniel brought up the S-three-hundred system that Iran uses. There was a lot of talk before the war about how that Russian-made system, and its indigenous Iranian variants like the Bavar-three-seventy-three, would make Iranian airspace impenetrable. The media often portrayed it as this "no-go zone" for the Israeli Air Force. But that is not what we saw when the missiles started flying.
Not at all. And this is where the historical significance really starts to show. The S-three-hundred is a capable system on paper, but it is a generation behind the electronic warfare capabilities that Israel has developed. More importantly, as Daniel noted, the Iranian regime used a lot of these systems for domestic messaging. They needed to show their people and the world that they were a fortress. They would parade these missile batteries through the streets of Tehran to project strength. But military experts knew there were massive gaps. The real story, however, is what Israel did months, and even years, before the first missile was ever launched in July.
You are talking about the sabotage. Daniel mentioned advanced sabotage to degrade those defenses. We have seen bits and pieces of this in the news, but how deep did that rabbit hole actually go?
It was incredibly deep, Corn. We are talking about a combination of cyber operations and physical kinetic sabotage that started as far back as two thousand twenty-three. For months leading up to the breakout in summer two thousand twenty-five, there were these mysterious fires at Iranian electrical substations and unexplained outages at command-and-control centers. At the time, the Iranian state media reported them as industrial accidents or heat-related failures. But we now know those were targeted strikes. Some were carried out by quadcopter drones launched from within Iran by local assets, and others were sophisticated logic bombs planted in the industrial control software of their power grid.
So they were blinding the giant before the fight even started?
Exactly. By the time the twelve-day war actually started, the Iranian integrated air defense system was like a giant with a blindfold. They could swing their arms, but they could not see where the punches were coming from. When the Israeli F-thirty-five squadrons finally did enter Iranian airspace to strike the missile silos, the S-three-hundred radars were being fed ghost images or were simply failing to hand off targets to the interceptor batteries. It was a total collapse of the "kill chain." Israel did not just blow up the radars; they made the radars lie to their operators.
That is a terrifying thought. But even with blinded defenses, Iran still has an enormous arsenal of ballistic missiles. That was the second threat Daniel mentioned. We saw those launches on the news—hundreds of streaks of light heading toward us. Israel successfully thwarted most of those, but it was a massive effort. I remember the sound of the Arrow missiles launching from the coast. It felt like the ground was shaking.
It was the largest test of a missile defense shield in human history. Iran launched over four hundred ballistic missiles and nearly a thousand Shahed drones over those twelve days. We saw the Arrow two and Arrow three systems doing the heavy lifting for the high-altitude interceptions. The Arrow three is particularly impressive because it intercepts targets in space, outside the atmosphere. But what made it a historical case study was not just the technology—it was the ad-hoc alliance.
Right, Daniel mentioned France, Jordan, and the Royal Air Force out of Cyprus. It was not just Israel standing alone, which was a major part of the political narrative at the time.
That is a crucial point for anyone trying to understand the military significance. Jordan opening its airspace and actually participating in interceptions was a geopolitical shift that people are still analyzing. Think about that: an Arab nation using its own F-sixteen pilots to intercept Iranian drones headed for Israel. You had French naval assets in the Mediterranean and British Typhoons from Akrotiri in Cyprus all linked into a single tactical data link. They were sharing radar signatures in real time. It was a proof of concept for a regional air defense architecture that people had been dreaming about for a decade. It proved that you can have a coalition of nations with very different political goals working together to stop a common ballistic threat. It was the "Middle East Air Defense" alliance, or MEAD, finally working in a live-fire environment.
But despite all that technology and cooperation, the war ended in a way that Daniel described as inconclusive. There was no formal admission of defeat, no signing of a treaty on a battleship, and no clear victory. Why did it just stop after twelve days? It felt so abrupt. One day we were in the shelters, and the next day, there was a ceasefire.
It stopped because both sides reached the limit of what they could achieve without a full-scale ground invasion, which neither side wanted and neither side is actually capable of sustaining. Israel had degraded the ballistic missile launch sites and used those United States-supplied bunker busters, the G-B-U-fifty-seven Massive Ordnance Penetrators, to strike at the Fordow and Natanz nuclear facilities. That was the climax of the twelve days. Once those strikes were conducted, the primary Israeli objective, which was resetting the Iranian nuclear clock by at least two to three years, was partially achieved.
And for Iran? What did they get out of it?
For Iran, they had shown they could penetrate the most defended airspace in the world with at least a few warheads. A handful of missiles did get through and hit the Nevatim airbase and a few other sensitive spots. They maintained the survival of their regime, which is always their number one priority. They could tell their people that they had stood up to the "Zionist entity" and its Western allies. So, it was a stalemate of sorts, but a very violent and expensive one.
You mentioned the cost. I remember reading that the cost of the interceptors alone was staggering.
It was. Israel and its allies spent over two billion dollars in interceptor missiles in just the first forty-eight hours. An Arrow three interceptor costs about three million dollars. A David's Sling interceptor is about one million. Iran was launching drones that cost twenty thousand dollars. This is the "cost-imposition" problem that Daniel touched on. Even if you win the kinetic battle, you might lose the economic one if the war drags on.
Which brings us to the present. We are standing here in early two thousand twenty-six, and the rhetoric is heating up again. Daniel asked what we should expect from a second war. If the first one was a twelve-day sprint, what does the sequel look like? Because it feels like the "pause" we have been in for the last six months is about to end.
A second war would likely be much more intense and potentially much longer. The element of surprise regarding the sabotage is gone. Iran has spent the last few months hardening its remaining infrastructure and moving its command-and-control to even deeper, more redundant locations. They have also learned from the failures of the S-three-hundred. We are seeing intelligence reports that they are trying to integrate more indigenous, decentralized drone swarms into their defense strategy.
So, instead of relying on one big radar that can be jammed or spoofed, they use thousands of small eyes in the sky?
Precisely. It is called "distributed sensing." And from the Israeli side, the focus will likely shift from just interception to total suppression. In the first war, Israel was somewhat restrained in its targeting of Iranian civilian infrastructure to avoid a total regional collapse and to keep the international coalition together. In a second war, that restraint might not be there. We could see a focused effort to take out the entire Iranian power grid and the oil export terminals at Kharg Island in the first forty-eight hours. The goal would be to paralyze the state so it cannot sustain a long-range missile campaign.
That sounds like a much more traditional, devastating war, even if there are no boots on the ground in Tehran.
It would be. And the risk of escalation is much higher. In the first war, the Hezbollah front in Lebanon stayed relatively quiet—they fired some rockets, but it was mostly just skirmishing to keep Israeli troops tied down in the north. In a second war, it is almost certain that the northern front would open up completely. Israel would be fighting a three-hundred-sixty-degree war. This is why the twelve-day war is such an interesting case study. It was a controlled explosion. A second war might be a wildfire that consumes the entire region.
I want to go back to something you said about the bunker busters. Daniel mentioned the United States deploying those. That was a huge moment because it signaled that the United States was willing to provide the specific tools needed for a deep strike, even if they were not flying the planes themselves. Does that dynamic change in a second conflict? Does the U-S stay on the sidelines?
It might not. The political landscape in Washington is always shifting, but the military reality is that only the United States has the truly heavy ordnance needed to reach the deepest Iranian facilities, like the ones buried under mountains at Fordow. If a second war breaks out and Iran has moved its enrichment process even deeper underground, Israel might not be able to do the job alone with just the munitions they currently have. We might see a more direct involvement of United States B-twenty-one Raiders or B-two Spirits. That moves the conflict from a regional one to a global one very quickly.
This really highlights why the first war was so unique. It was almost like a laboratory for modern warfare. You had cyber, you had space-based tracking, you had multi-national integrated defense, and you had the use of specialized deep-penetration weapons.
It was the first true war of the twenty-first century in terms of how technology was used to substitute for traditional military mass. Usually, to win a war, you need more tanks, more soldiers, more ships. In the twelve-day war, Israel used more data, more precision, and more preparation. They used the months of sabotage to make up for the fact that they are a small country fighting a much larger one. But as Daniel pointed out, the lack of a clear victory means the first war did not solve the problem. It just paused it. And now the pause is ending.
What do you think is the biggest lesson that the military planners have taken from that inconclusive ending? If you are sitting in a basement in the Pentagon or in Tel Aviv right now, what are you worried about?
The biggest lesson is that defense is not enough. You can have the best missile shield in the world, you can intercept ninety-nine percent of the incoming threats, but that one percent that gets through is still a catastrophe if it hits a population center or a chemical plant. And more importantly, the cost of defense is ten times the cost of offense. Last summer, the coalition spent billions of dollars in just twelve days on interceptors alone. That is not sustainable for a war that lasts months.
So the strategy for a second war has to be "offensive-defense." You have to stop the missiles at the source before they are even launched.
Exactly. We call it "left of launch." The goal in a second conflict will be to destroy the launch capability within the first few hours. That means a massive, pre-emptive strike on every known silo, mobile launcher, and storage facility. It is a much more aggressive posture. And that is why the twelve-day war will be remembered as a historical anomaly. It was a war where the defense actually held the line for a short period. In the future, planners will assume the defense will eventually be overwhelmed, so they will hit harder and faster.
I also find the domestic messaging aspect that Daniel mentioned really interesting. He said the Iranian air defenses were used partly for show. It makes me wonder how much of modern warfare is actually about the physical destruction and how much is about the narrative.
A huge portion of it is narrative. In the twelve-day war, the Iranian regime needed to show their people that they were attacking the "enemy." Even if their missiles were being shot down, the footage of them launching was enough to satisfy their domestic propaganda needs for a while. They used Telegram and X to flood the zone with videos of launches, even if those missiles ended up as debris in the desert. On the flip side, Israel needed to show its citizens that the Iron Dome and the Arrow systems were keeping them safe. Both sides were fighting a war for the hearts and minds of their own people as much as they were fighting each other.
But you can only play that game for so long. Eventually, the physical reality catches up with the narrative. If the missiles keep falling and the electricity stays off because of cyber-attacks, the domestic messaging fails.
Precisely. And that is where the danger lies for a second war. If the Iranian regime feels that its domestic grip is slipping because they look weak, they might be tempted to use more extreme measures, like chemical warheads or a "dirty bomb," just to prove they still have teeth. Daniel mentioned the threat of chemical warfare on ballistic missiles in his prompt. That is something that was a huge concern last summer but thankfully did not happen. In a second war, with a regime backed into a corner, that threat becomes much more real.
It is a sobering thought. We are talking about these things as analysts, but we are living right here in the middle of it. When the sirens go off, it is not an academic exercise. I remember the specific sound of the "Red Alert" app on everyone's phones going off at once in the grocery store. It is a sound you never forget.
It is not. And I think that is part of why Daniel wanted us to talk about this. Understanding the mechanics helps take some of the mystery out of it, but it also highlights the stakes. The twelve-day war was a warning shot. It showed what is possible when modern technology meets ancient animosities. It was a test of systems that had never been used in a real-world, high-intensity environment.
So, looking ahead, if you had to predict the defining characteristic of a potential second war, what would it be?
I think it would be "Total Transparency." Between satellite constellations like Starlink and the various military-grade synthetic aperture radar satellites, there is nowhere left to hide. In the twelve-day war, Israel showed they knew exactly where the Iranian systems were because of their sabotage and intelligence. In a second war, that transparency will be even greater. Both sides will be able to see each other's moves in near real-time. The winner will be the one who can process that information and act on it the fastest. It will be a war of algorithms as much as a war of missiles.
That brings up a point we have discussed in past episodes about the role of Artificial Intelligence in targeting and defense. If the reaction times are measured in milliseconds, humans are essentially out of the loop.
We are already seeing that. The Arrow three system's fire control is almost entirely automated because the speeds involved in high-altitude interception are just too fast for a human to track and authorize. In a second war, we might see A-I-driven swarms of autonomous drones that can hunt for mobile missile launchers without any human intervention. It is a terrifying and fascinating evolution of the battlefield.
It really makes you realize why that first conflict was so significant. It was the end of the old way of thinking about war in the Middle East and the beginning of this new, highly technical, high-stakes era. It was the first time we saw a regional conflict that was truly multi-domain: cyber, space, air, and information.
Absolutely. And the fact that it ended inconclusively just means we are in a long-term state of high-intensity competition. The "second war" might not even be a single event; it could be a series of these intense bursts over the next decade. We are living in the "Gray Zone," where the line between peace and war is permanently blurred.
It is a lot to process, Herman. But I think we have covered the core of what Daniel was asking. The military significance of last summer was not just in the damage done, but in the systems and alliances that were tested and the new reality that was established. It proved that the old Russian systems like the S-three-hundred are no longer the deterrent they once were, and it proved that a regional alliance can actually function under fire.
I agree. It is a historical case study because it redefined the "Gray Zone." We are now living in a world where you can have a twelve-day high-intensity conflict and then go back to a tense standoff the next day. That is a new phenomenon in international relations. It is "Warfare as a Service," almost. You turn it on, achieve a specific objective, and then try to turn it off before it spirals out of control.
Well, Herman, as always, you have given us a lot to think about. I hope our listeners find this as insightful as I did, even if it is a bit heavy given the current news cycle.
It is important to understand the world we live in, Corn. Knowledge is its own kind of defense. If you understand the "why" and the "how," the "what" becomes a little less frightening.
Very true. And before we wrap up, I want to say thanks to Daniel for sending in this prompt. It is a crucial topic for anyone trying to understand the current state of the world in two thousand twenty-six.
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This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks for joining us today in Jerusalem.
Stay curious and stay safe. Until next time.
Goodbye everyone.
Goodbye.
