On Sunday, the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky urged Israel to send more aid to his country, particularly the Iron Dome missile-defense system. As Jim Geraghty points out, this request may not be reasonable or even feasible, given Israel’s precarious relations with Russia and the logistical hazards of shipping the system’s components through a war zone.

At least based upon publicly available information, Israel still doesn’t have as many [Iron Dome] batteries as it would like to have, and the country doesn’t have any spares lying around. If Israel did choose to ship an Iron Dome battery to Ukraine, it would have to choose an area to leave unguarded. And as we’ve noted, those systems are very expensive to replace.

Then there’s the question of transferring the weapons system to the Ukrainians. The good news is that Iron Dome systems are meant to be mobile, and the components can be relatively easily transported by truck. In 2020, the U.S. began putting its two Iron Dome systems on Oshkosh trucks—and it brought those U.S. trucks to Israel on an Antonov 225 cargo plane, the largest plane in the world.

Alas, only one Antonov 225 cargo plane was ever produced—and it was destroyed in the Battle of Antonov Airport outside Kyiv on February 24.

Even if the Israelis broke down an Iron Dome system into smaller and more easily transported parts, flying it into Ukraine through contested airspace is likely to be deemed too risky. With these systems so valuable and expensive, neither Israel nor Ukraine would want to risk some Russian pilot getting lucky. . . . Then there’s the question of how quickly the Ukrainians can get trained to use the new system. As of September, the U.S. was having a difficult time getting its two delivered systems up and running.

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.