Forged Under Fire: Middle East Air Defense After Iran’s 2024 Attacks on Israel

The scene: Two combat jets race through the night sky on opposite sides of the Saudi-Jordanian border. In one cockpit, a pilot from the Royal Saudi Air Force. In the other, one of Israel’s top air commanders. For most of modern Middle East history, this might have been the prelude to a mid-air dogfight waged by combatants in one of the region’s multiple wars pitting the Jewish state against its Arab neighbors. But on the evening of April 13, 2024, a radically different scenario was unfolding. Rather than enemies, these pilots were part of a remarkable multinational coalition, mobilized under American auspices, to defend Israel against a massive Iranian aerial assault involving more than 300 ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones—among the largest barrages in the history of warfare. Rather than firing at each other, the Israeli and Saudi jets were on a shared mission of hunting down and neutralizing hundreds of incoming Iranian projectiles.

More than a year later, fully comprehending and assessing the monumental nature of what transpired that evening remains something of a challenge. Since the shocking Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, Israel has been at war for 20 months, fighting at times on up to seven fronts against Iran and its network of heavily armed proxy groups in Gaza, Lebanon, the West Bank, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq. The rush of daily events, battles, death, destruction, and geopolitical disruptions has been relentless and oftentimes overwhelming. No sooner does one extraordinary development occur only to be overtaken or overshadowed by the next day’s crisis. In the face of that kind of information onslaught, it’s all too easy, especially with the passage of time, to lose sight of the history-making nature of any given moment in the conflict’s extended timeline.

This report is an effort to go back and analyze at greater length the two large-scale missile attacks that Iran launched against Israel in 2024. The first attack, noted above, occurred in the overnight hours of April 13. The second, less than six months later, took place on October 1. As an initial matter, we attempt to describe the crises themselves in as systematic and factual a manner as current information allows—in terms of how they were triggered, the nature of the attacks themselves, and their military consequences. As part of this effort, we also seek to identify and account for some of the important differences between the crises and the way Iran’s attacks were defeated.

We then highlight the significance of the attacks along two important lines: first, in terms of what they tell us strategically about the state of Israel’s evolving relations with its Arab neighbors; and second, in terms of what they tell us, at a military operational level, about the unexpectedly rapid advances being made in the region’s most important cooperative defense project—integrated air and missile defenses, or IAMD. Finally, based on our analysis of the attacks, we develop a series of lessons learned and recommendations on what further steps should be taken by the United States and its partners to leverage the remarkable successes of 2024 in order to take Middle East IAMD to the next level.

This report builds on the work of two previous JINSA studies: A Stronger and Wider Peace: A U.S. Strategy for Advancing the Abraham Accords1 and Build It and They Will Come: A U.S. Strategy for Integrating Middle East Air and Missile Defenses. The first, written in late 2021, came in the immediate aftermath of Israel’s entry into the U.S. Central Command’s (CENTCOM) area of responsibility (AOR)—a move JINSA had been advocating since 2018. A Stronger and Wider Peace urged Washington to prioritize IAMD as the cornerstone of its efforts to advance Israel’s defense cooperation with its Arab neighbors and establish a new regional security architecture under U.S. leadership. Congress quickly seized on the idea in late 2022 to pass the DEFEND Act, which tasked the Pentagon with developing an official strategy for building IAMD to take advantage of Israel’s entry into CENTCOM and counter the accelerating missile and drone threat from Iran and its proxies.

Click here to read the report.