It was the largest combined drone and missile attack in world history. On Sunday Iran launched a huge air strike package of roughly 320 munitions against Israel, consisting of some 170 drones, 120 intermediate-range ballistic missiles and 30 cruise missiles.
It was twice as big as the biggest single Russian air raid against Ukraine, which occurred in December 2023 and comprised 158 missiles and drones. The ballistic missile element of Sunday’s attack alone constituted the largest salvo of these massive weapons ever recorded.
The prompt, accurate and effectively complete annihilation of this entire threat by joint allied action represents an extraordinary demonstration of Western military-technological prowess in every sense. The full magnitude of this achievement is difficult to comprehend. Orchestrating such a complex multi-domain defensive operation, across so many different allied forces using an array of different types of sensors, platforms and interceptors, against such a multi-layered threat coming from multiple directions, has now set a new benchmark for 21st-century battle management and warfighting at the high-end of the scale.
