There's this thing called mid air refuelling. No, they won't be at their limit. Besides, they don't need a long time to launch a few missiles and sweep the skies. F-4s are pigs and can't dogfight a modern fighter to save their souls and their avionics aren't up to modern missile combat.

The F-5s are good little light fighters. Iran has a fair number of them and they are decent dogfighters but they are old and outmoded. The Israelis won't bother to dogfight them, they'll just wipe them out with standoff ordnance.

No, what passes for the Iranian airforce won't stand a chance. A lot of it would probably get blasted on the ground as it's so old and in many cases badly maintained.




That's for political reasons. As you say, the Shavit is based off the Jericho. This is Israel, they'll work. They'll be well maintained and their crews will be well trained. Israel's right to focus on aircraft anyway - ballistic missiles aren't the most accurate things in the world and really aren't what is needed for the kind of wars Israel fights. You want to hit an individual building, not a whole town.



Entirely different things. Gaza is a kind of insurgency war (kind-of). They don't bomb it properly for political reasons, not military ones. They could bomb it utterly flat if they wanted to, and I'm sure they've been tempted, but the political fallout would be too high so they don't. Basically, they don't want to look like bullies.

Now if Iran started tossing NBCs around at civilian targets? NOW who's the badguy? All the political clout will be behind Israel, even including most of the Arab nations.

Keep in mind too, that they'll be shooting those missiles over Iraq and Jordan or Northern (Kurdish) Iraq and Syria in order to get to Israel. Guess how much those nations are going to like that, particularly when the ones that fail start dropping their ordnance in the hinterlands.

Keep in mind too - Iran doesn't have that great a ballistic capability. Have a read here:

http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/39332.pdf

And Israel has the Arrow counter SAM which has been successfully tested.

It's likely at this date that Iran has probably around a hundred Shahab's. Might be higher, might be lower - that's not the kind of info that Iran likes to get out easily. That's not enough for any kind of sustained attack. It would be enough to do a lot of damage on a first strike depending on how many get through Israel's defences and depending on whether Israel let them deploy and fire first. Keep in mind that the Shahab is bigger than a SCUD and while it is still road mobile harder to hide and slower to launch as it is liquid fueled.



You honestly don't get how BIG these installations are. They are large, they are vulnerable and they are quite easily destroyed by air. What you don't realize is how much work nuclear refinement is. In order to describe the discovery of Uranium (238 I think) Madame Curie had to produce a gram of it - that being the rule at the time. She started with twelve BOXCARS of pitchblende and wound up with a beaker that glowed in the dark. She still didn't have a gram of Uranium. They wound up changing the rules for her in order to allow her discovery.

In order to get basic Uranium that is fissionable you need to refine the Uranium to 80% purity, but that still won't go boom. You then need to refine THAT to something like 98% purity in order to get low end weapons grade.

This isn't something you do in a garage. You need a massive infrastructure doing the refinement THAT is why they are vulnerable to air attack. They're big and they are soft.



Politics. Iran has been a pariah state for a long time. Russia got in extremely hot water even for selling them those MiGs. Dollars are all well and good, but spending on an air force is easy to check. Planes have to fly out of someplace and you need to fly them in order to train with them. So it's easy to monitor even with nothing more than satellite photos.

Russia and China have had their hands full with the rest of the world trying to do what little they can with Iran because of all those petro dollars, but at the end of the day, it's not worth pissing off the US and Europe just for a few more bucks and who else is going to sell to them?

It probably explains why Iran is building their own aircraft - but all those petrodollars only help so much without a lot of background infrastructure and skills that they just don't have a lot of. That's why they only have a dozen or so Iranian developed and produced planes in their air force.