The Israeli Build

The Israeli army is designed for strategic defense and tactical offense. This means it is extremely powerful close to its home base. Its primary task is to destroy any nearby army that threatens Israel. However, it has almost no expeditionary capacity and lacks the logistical infrastructure to invade and occupy distant countries.

To give an example of its capabilities: Russia needed about a year to mobilize 300,000 troops. Israel can do it within a week.

The weaknesses of this build are:

• The force Israel can project drops sharply beyond a few hundred kilometers.
• Any prolonged mobilization puts significant strain on the country, the entire concept relies on achieving a rapid decision.

Moreover, the Israeli army is one of the few in the world that could lose an entire war in a single afternoon. It has no strategic depth. Retreat and regrouping would be like trying to breathe underwater. For comparison: Ukraine’s diversionary excursion into the Kursk region reached up to 80 km, that’s farther than the distance from the West Bank to the Mediterranean coast.

This creates a strategic dilemma: Israel can defeat most opponents almost every time, but it can never truly vanquish them. That means an adversary might be tempted to try again and again, hoping to eventually land a decisive blow.

To deter that temptation, Israel has armed itself with nuclear weapons. The intended message to its enemies is: “Even if you win a conventional war, we can still destroy you.” Israel has never officially confirmed its nuclear arsenal and publishes no doctrine regarding their use.

2/6

The Iranian Build

If the Israeli build already seems unusual, the Iranian build easily takes it a step further:

• Iran doesn’t have just one military build, but two: the Iranian Army (Artesh) and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
• Iran has been under heavy sanctions for over 40 years and can only acquire weapons under very limited and specific conditions.

The combination of having two military structures, limited resources, and few external suppliers has produced a rather unusual force.

The task of the regular army is the defense of the country. While it is much larger in terms of personnel and equipment, it receives less than half the funding of the IRGC. The IRGC also owns large parts of the Iranian economy and generates significant independent income. As a result, the regular army is huge, but most of its equipment is substandard, outdated, and lacking spare parts. Even in a purely defensive role, this army is far weaker than its size (about 340,000 soldiers) suggests, and there are even more degrading factors I’ll discuss later.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has two main objectives:

• To secure the regime domestically
• To project power beyond Iran’s borders

These goals do not reinforce each other, and combined with the shortage of resources, they rule out any classic form of power projection. As a workaround, the IRGC has focused on three strategies:

• Building a network of proxy forces near its ideological enemy (Israel)
• Developing a relatively modern missile and rocket force
• Pursuing nuclear weapons capability

As far as we know, Iran does not yet possess nuclear weapons, but it is inching closer to that capability. Officially, Iran denies having any nuclear weapons program. However, its actions strongly indicate the opposite.

As a result, the offensive component of Iran’s strategy has fallen to its proxy network, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. This strategy has the added benefit of allowing Iran to hurt Israel without taking direct responsibility. These proxies offer a mix of low cost and plausible deniability, but they come with the downside of reduced direct control.

3/6

Situation at the Start of the Conflict

As of early June 2025, the situation presented itself as “complex”:

• Following the Hamas attack in October 2023, Israel has effectively dismantled Hamas and nearly annihilated its military capabilities.
• Hezbollah has been significantly weakened, though not as thoroughly as Hamas. Still, it is in no position to pose a serious threat to Israel.
• Syria, until recently Iran’s closest ally, has undergone a regime change. The new leadership, having suffered politically from Iran’s support for Assad, holds little goodwill toward Tehran.
• The Houthis are geographically distant from Israel, possess few resources, and have launched an international conflict of their own. While potentially distracting, their military impact is limited.
• The Israeli army’s campaign against Hamas has become increasingly unpopular, both domestically and internationally, due to extremely high civilian casualties. For the first time in Israeli history, this has led to mass resignations from the army reserves.
• The current Israeli government is expected to suffer heavily in the next elections due to the massive intelligence failure that allowed Hamas to succeed with its terror attack. It needs a spectacular success to offset the political damage.
• It is widely expected that the government coalition would collapse should the current war effort end without a clear win.
• The Iranian regime, on the other hand, would stand no chance in a free and open election. To stay in power, it relies on suppression and violence. For that reason, it must not appear weak. Any perceived weakness could destabilize the regime decisively.
• Unlike during the Iran–Iraq war of the 1980s, the general population in Iran feels no personal stake in the current conflict. Civilian casualties are blamed almost as much on the Iranian regime as on Israel.
• A nuclear-armed Iran would dramatically shift the regional balance of power in favor of Tehran, not just vis-à-vis Israel, but also in relation to its other regional rivals.
• Russia, one of the few nations willing to supply Iran with weapons, currently lacks the capacity to assist.
• The United States, traditionally a major supporter of Israel and a stabilizing force in the region, is rapidly losing influence. Its leadership lacks a deep understanding of the situation and is unwilling to listen to those who do.

4/6

Goals and Means

This part is highly speculative. I can only outline what I perceive to be the goals and available means of both sides.

• Israel’s primary goal is to end the Iranian nuclear program once and for all. However, I do not believe that Israel is capable of fully destroying the program on its own. It can disrupt it, and it can inflict serious damage on Iran, but it lacks the means to achieve its strategic objective without outside support.

In my opinion, Israel can only win under one of the following scenarios:

• The United States joins the conflict, either as a result of Iranian actions (e.g. closing the Strait of Hormuz), or because Israel manages to persuade the U.S. to get involved.
• The Iranian regime is destabilized to the point that it either cannot continue its nuclear program or is overthrown altogether.

But the chances for a "win" look even worse for Iran:

• Iran’s regime, meanwhile, seeks to survive long enough for its nuclear armament to shift the balance of power in its favor. It does not have the military capability to prevent Israel from striking it. However, it must be seen as striking back, or at least hurting Israel, in order not to appear weak, both to its own population and to its regional rivals.

In summary:

• Both sides are currently engaging in the conflict using some of the most expensive and advanced weapons in their arsenals. Neither side, however, has the industrial production capacity to sustain or scale up such weapons to a decisive quantity.

5/6

@masek Nice thread, but this is the weak spot.

Israel's (official) goals are changing on daily basis: First nuclear weapons, then missiles, now industrial base. All decorated with the perspective of a regime change and quite a lot of lies regarding their achievements.

Without knowing the goals, it's pretty difficult to guess how the war will develop.

Thank you for the rest of your analysis, sounds pretty plausible.