Iran’s Options for Retaliating Against Israel

Israel has recently conducted Operation Rising Lion against Iran, which saw a mix of drone attacks alongside over 200 Israeli fighter jets striking hundreds of nuclear and military facilities as well as targeting military commanders and nuclear scientists, but the larger question is how Iran will respond over the coming weeks. However, the larger question is how Iran will respond over the coming weeks. Historically, Iran has used a mix of attacks on commercial ships overseas, proxy groups, cyber operations, and threats to close the Strait of Hormuz alongside salvos of missiles and drones to retaliate against adversaries.

That playbook still holds, but the most likely response will be firepower strikes—combinations of cruise and ballistic missile salvos alongside waves of drone attacks—targeting Israel over the coming weeks. Given Israel’s unilateral decision to strike Iran, Tehran will be reluctant to take actions that draw Gulf States and the United States into a broader war. Iranian leaders will see if their surviving missiles and drones are enough to overwhelm Israel’s air defenses in the coming weeks. As a result, the major policy challenge confronting the United States will be how much to assist Israel in defending its skies from Iranian missiles while Israel is trying to salvage ongoing nuclear negotiations.

Past Iranian Firepower Strikes

Firepower strikes are an emerging concept that cuts across multiple states. They involve large, combined attacks by air-, land-, and sea-launched cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and attack drones—often supported by a larger array of information effects—used to attack military and/or civilian targets. In Russian doctrine, there is a concept called noncontact warfare that discusses how to use standoff precision attacks in pursuit of operational and strategic objectives, including attacking critical infrastructure. In the People’s Liberation Army doctrine, a firepower strike system is one of the five major forms of system warfare. Even in U.S. doctrine, there is an emerging discussion about convergence and pulse attacks, used to overwhelm adversary intelligence and defensive capabilities to enable joint campaigns.

Past Iranian firepower strikes provide a portrait of how Iran might respond to Operation Rising Lion. In September 2019, Iranian-backed militias launched salvos of drones and ballistic missiles at oil processing facilities in Saudi Arabia in what is called Abqaiq-Khurais attack. The strikes involved 10 drones and ballistic missiles, launched from locations over 500 miles away in Yemen, targeting two crucial installations. These attacks significantly disrupted global oil supplies by halting production of approximately 5.7 million barrels per day. The incident demonstrated how inexpensive drones could effectively execute high-profile attacks. In fact, the increase in these attacks and their potential led to a de facto truce between the Houthis and Saudis in 2022.

In January 2020, Iran executed Operation Martyr Soleimani in response to the assassination of an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps general by the United States in a drone strike. The Iranian attack involved launching over a dozen ballistic missiles directly from Iranian territory at two military bases in Iraq—Al Asad and Erbil—which hosted U.S. and coalition personnel. Ten missiles struck Al Asad, one hit Erbil, and four failed mid-flight. Despite no U.S. casualties, this represented a significant escalation.

In January 2024, Iranian-backed militias launched a salvo of ballistic missiles and rockets at Al Assad airbase in Iraq. The attacks came on top of an increase in drone and missile strikes by Iranian-backed groups in Iraq and Syria in the fall of 2023. The pattern here was sporadic, indirect salvos that did not do lasting military damage.

More recently, in April 2024, Iran launched Operation True Promise to retaliate against Israel for its bombing of the Iranian embassy in Damascus. The attack involved an estimated 170 drones, 30 cruise missiles, and 120 ballistic missiles. Despite the size of the salvo and mix of munitions, which usually decreased the rate of interception, the attack did little damage due to a mix of Israeli air defenses alongside support from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Jordan, consisting of fighter patrols and intelligence support.

Seen from this perspective, Iran could opt for a series of smaller, targeted missile raids against critical infrastructure similar to its previous attacks on Saudi Arabia or a single Israeli airbase. The challenge with smaller attacks is that Israel is a small country with likely the highest air defense per capita and per square mile of anywhere in the world. As a result, smaller attacks tend to produce limited results absent a way through Israeli air defense, such as cyber operations or sabotage. At this stage, it is unlikely that Iran would retaliate against the United States and/or Saudi Arabia, as seen previously, since it would widen the war at a moment when Tehran is weakened and still diplomatically isolated.

Firepower Strikes: A Perspective from Ukraine

The ongoing Russia-Ukraine war provides insights into potential Iranian responses over the next 90 days. The CSIS Futures Lab Russian Firepower Strike Tracker reveals extensive use of Iranian-designed Shahed drones and various ballistic and cruise missiles. Russian reliance on Shahed drones increased significantly due to their affordability and domestic production capability. This suggests that Iran likely maintains substantial drone stockpiles. However, the effectiveness of Shahed drones against Israel is questionable due to Israel’s sophisticated air defense systems, such as Iron Dome, and the greater distance, which provides more time for detection and interception, between Iran and Israel compared to the Russia-Ukraine context.

According to the Ukraine Air Force data, Russia’s 90-day average of Shahed launches is around 600 until the second half of 2024. This number significantly increased to over 5,000 in the last six months, with increasing launch capabilities and stockpiling/production capabilities. In fact, this 90-day peak launch reached 10,000 in the last month. But this took two years to scale up. So, in the case of Iran, we can expect a Shahed drone launch between 600 to 5,000 in the next 90 days.

With respect to cruise and missiles, Russia’s 90-day average of launches is around 70 for ballistic missiles and 300 for cruise missiles. Yet, Iran’s calibrated and telegraphed attack last year included more than 100 ballistic missiles in a single launch. So, Iran’s ballistic launch capacity will be more than what the Ukraine war shows, and Iran will be able to launch a more significant salvo.

Yet there are reasons to suspect an upper limit to Iran’s ballistic missile salvos in any firepower strike as well. The higher-end estimates for Iranian ballistic missiles are an inventory of 3,000. Yet, some of these missiles would have been struck in the opening stages of Operation Rising Lion, and only about two-thirds of the inventory is a mix of solid and liquid-fueled medium-range ballistic missiles capable of flying over 1,000 miles to strike Israel. There are also questions about the readiness of the force, as well as how many ballistic missiles Iran would want to keep in reserve to deter future attacks. This suggests that despite an estimated inventory of 3,000 ballistic missiles, Iran might only have 1,000 available weapons. That number implies leaders in Tehran have to decide whether to try and overwhelm Israel in a small number of large salvos or conduct a sustained set of attacks, which will be complicated by Israeli airplanes circling over known launch sites waiting to strike.

The Next Salvo

Washington now faces a critical choice of whether to treat Operation Rising Lion as a fleeting skirmish or the opening salvo in a wider regional conflict. With increasingly limited options, Iran is likely to adopt a strategy of “strategic patience,” waiting for a more advantageous position to punish Israel. There will be multiple, successive waves of firepower strikes targeting Israel, but they are unlikely to overwhelm Israeli air defenses in the next two weeks, absent significant external support from Russia or China, which is unlikely at this point.

If the current series of long-range strikes becomes a protracted conflict, that logic changes. Then the question is which side is better able to mobilize resources and convert them into combat power. In this scenario, the United States will face a difficult choice. Every air defense system and bomb sent by Israel draws Washington deeper into a conflict that President Trump sought to avoid. It also increases the chance Iran further expands the war, drawing in Gulf States and spiking global oil prices. Regardless, the logic of the firepower strike is likely to persist, and Tehran will explore how best to combine ballistic and cruise missiles alongside long-range attack drones to overwhelm Israel’s air defenses in a pattern similar to what occurs nightly over the skies of Ukraine.

Yasir Atalan is a data fellow in the Futures Lab at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. Benjamin Jensen is a senior fellow in the Futures Lab at CSIS.