Cordesman/Wilner, Iran & The Gulf Military Balance
AHC 6/3/12
149
sortie generation capability over even Iranian soft targets. As for hardened and underground targets, the IAF's mix of standoff precision-guided missiles – such as Harpoon or Popeye – would not have the required lethality with conventional warheads and Israel's use of even small nuclear warheads would cause obvious problems. Israel may have specially designed or adapted weapons for such strikes, and bought 500 bunkerbusters from the US in February 2005. Experts speculated whether the purchase was a power projection move or whether Israel was in fact planning to use these conventional bombs against Iranian nuclear sites. These speculations were further exacerbated when the Israeli Chief of Staff, Lt. General Dan Halutz, was asked how far Israel would go to stop Iran's nuclear program, he said “2,000 kilometers.” The hard target bombs it has acquired from the US are bunker-busters, however, are not systems designed to kill underground facilities. They could damage entrances but not the facilities. What is not known is whether Israel has its own ordnance or has secretly acquired more sophisticated systems. The “shell game” or “lottery targeting” problem illustrated in comparing the two very different target lists in Figure IV.58 and Figure 59 would be equally serious. Israel may or may not feel it has an accurate targeting list of all key Iranian facilities. It is very unlikely, however, that this list is perfect, it is almost certain far too long for Israel to strike at many suspect targets, strikes could involve significant innocent civil casualties and collateral damage, and Iran may well be hiding and dispersing much of its highly enriched material and ability to produce advanced centrifuges and reconstitute its nuclear programs. Moreover, at least some of these facilities seem to be in northeast Iran, greatly complicating the range-payload and survivable strike problems Israel would face, and radically altering the kind of strike profiles shown in Figure IV.67 and Figure 68. Unless Israel has near total, real-time, transparency into Iran’s programs, it could probably only hit a limited number of nuclear facilities – and probably no missile, biological, or chemical facilities unless it was certain these posed so active a threat that they could no be avoided. This means an Israeli strike on Iran’s best know targets might appear to be successful, but actually be a failure. It also raises the critical issue of legitimizing an Iranian nuclear weapons program in the eyes of Iranians and many others that could recreate a threat under conditions involving far more resources and where Iran found an excuse to withdraw from the NNPT and halt all inspection. Another key problem would be refueling Israeli fighters – particularly if they had to engage in even preparatory air-to-air combat or surface-to-air missile evasion -- and creating a survivable mix of tankers and any mix of enabling electronic warfare, intelligence, and air control aircraft. Israel’s 5 KC-130H and 5 B-707 tankers are slow and vulnerable and would need escorts – and its ordinary B-707 AE&W, ELINT and electronic warfare aircraft are also slow fliers, although the new G-550 Shaved ELINT aircraft is a fast flier and the IAF has some long-range UAV that could support its aircraft, before, during, and after such missions. The big manned “slow fliers” would have serious problems penetrating and surviving in Iranian air space. The radars in the countries involved would probably detect all IAF and US missions relatively quickly, and very low-altitude penetration profiles would lead to serious range-payload problems. The countries overflown would then be confronted with the need to either react or 149