The central military lesson of the present era is no longer only how to achieve air superiority through the suppression and dismantling of integrated enemy air-defense systems, but how to keep one’s own defensive shield alive and operational under sustained precision attack.
The contrast is historic. Operation Dugman 5 (Model 5) in the 1973 Yom Kippur War became a warning about the cost of attacking a dense air-defense network without adequate suppression, while Operation Arzav 19 (Mole Cricket 19) in the First Lebanon War in 1982 demonstrated the decisive effect of a well-orchestrated SEAD campaign.
The campaigns against Iranian air-defense assets in 2025-2026, culminating in Operation Lion's Roar, confirmed both sides of that lesson: integrated air defense can be dismantled rapidly, and therefore one's own batteries must now be treated as prime targets.
Operation Roaring Lion and Operation Rising Lion showed what a modern coalition can do to a hostile integrated air-defense system. Israeli and American forces combined intelligence, electronic warfare, anti-radiation attack, loitering munitions, and precision strike to disrupt Iranian radars, command nodes, and missile batteries. The campaign was operationally impressive, but it also exposed a dangerous mirror image: Whatever can be done to the enemy's shield can be done to ours. The same logic that guided strikes against Iranian nodes can now guide attacks against Israeli, Gulf, Jordanian and American defensive architecture.
That is why air superiority must be redefined. It is no longer only the freedom to operate offensively in the air. It is also the ability to preserve the defender's own warning, tracking, command, and interception architecture under sustained attack. An enemy does not need to defeat fighter aircraft in air-to-air combat if it can blind radars, suppress launchers, disrupt networks, and create temporary holes large enough for missiles and drones to penetrate.
The shield is now a frontline target
For Israel, this is not a theoretical concern. The national defensive umbrella depends on a tightly connected architecture of sensors, command nodes, relays, launchers, logistics, and elevated detection assets. The battle has shifted from the distant front to the defended home front and to the soft underbelly of the national air-defense system itself.
A strike on a single critical component, whether a radar, launcher, relay, C2 node, power source, or elevated sensor, can generate disproportionate effects across warning, detection, tracking, interception, and civilian protection.
The practical implication is doctrinal as well as technical. Air and missile defense must be treated as a system-of-systems, not as isolated batteries. Green Pine radars, Arrow and David's Sling nodes, Iron Dome command launchers, communications links, and special surveillance assets must all be regarded as frontline targets. Protecting them is not a rear-area force-protection task. It is a condition for national endurance under fire.
The Gulf and US warning under fire
Recent combat experience in the Gulf reinforces the same point. Open-source reporting by CNN, Reuters, and The Wall Street Journal, together with official US Central Command (CENTCOM) statements and congressional testimony, has shown that Patriot- and THAAD-related assets, radar-linked positions, and forward US defensive sites have increasingly been treated as priority targets.
Public discussion around missile threats to THAAD, including USFK-related testimony, further suggests that adversaries across theaters now understand the value of striking the defensive backbone first.
The lesson is strategic, not local. Damage to Gulf sensors or relay architecture can reduce regional warning depth and weaken the shared air picture on which Israel and its partners depend. In other words, the same radar-first doctrine that Israel and the United States applied against Iranian air defenses is being studied in reverse by their enemies. “Defend the Defenders” must therefore be a coalition principle, not only a national one.
How to protect the battery
The first requirement is physical protection, combined with mobility. Critical nodes should be hardened through shelters, blast-resistant enclosures, buried connections, redundant power, and protected operating positions. Yet hardening alone is never enough. Batteries must also move. Transportable radars, mobile launchers, alternate firing positions, pre-planned displacement corridors, and disciplined shoot-and-scoot routines complicate the enemy's targeting cycle and reduce the value of pre-planned strike packages.
The second requirement is camouflage, concealment, and deception (CCD), or signature management. Multispectral camouflage, thermal masking, terrain exploitation, decoys, expendable emitters, and controlled emissions all increase uncertainty in the enemy kill chain. A battery that radiates predictably, remains static, or advertises its logistics pattern helping the attacker. By contrast, a battery that conceals its signature and deceives the enemy forces the attacker to spend time, munitions, and attention on false or low-payoff targets.
The third requirement is active self-defense and ground defense. AMD batteries need local protection against drones, loitering munitions, rockets, sabotage, and infiltration. That means collocated short-range interceptors, counter-UAS systems, point-defense weapons, and where feasible, directed-energy solutions, integrated directly into battery command and control. Ground defense, perimeter security, and rapid local response forces are equally necessary because many high-value nodes can be disabled by small teams or cheap systems if they are not physically guarded.
The fourth requirement is survivability through redundancy, rapid repair, and cyber defense. Resilient architecture uses overlapping engagement zones and a heterogeneous sensor mix that can include active radar, passive RF, EO/IR, VHF/UHF, and space-based inputs. Mesh networking, hardened line-of-sight links, SATCOM backup, modular spares, line-replaceable units, and rapid repair teams reduce mean time to restore. Cyber hardening is indispensable because digital disruption can create effects like physical destruction. The objective is not invulnerability. It is graceful degradation and continuity of effect under attack.
Doctrine, training, and coalition integration
Engineering alone will not solve the problem. Doctrine, training, and command culture must change with it. Units should routinely train for emission control, deception schedules, rapid displacement, degraded-mode command, and accelerated repair after attack. Red-teaming and war-gaming should focus not only on missile interception rates, but on campaigns that target sensors, C2 backbone, logistics, and power. Rules of engagement and automated handover procedures must be clear enough to prevent confusion or fratricide when parts of the architecture fail under pressure.
The coalition dimension is equally important. Israel, Gulf partners, and the United States require interoperable warning architecture, shared survivability standards, and a common operational language for battery protection. If one partner loses sensor depth, the others may lose warning time and decision space.
A regional defensive network is only as strong as its most exposed nodes. For that reason, common drills, resilient data sharing, and agreed concepts for protecting high-value defensive assets should become standard practice.
The enduring lesson of Operation Roaring Lion and Operation Rising Lion is simple: Modern air and missile defense survives only if it is built to survive attack under precision pressure in war. Defending the Defenders must therefore guide procurement, deployment, training, and coalition planning. Hardening, mobility, deception, self-defense, cyber defense, redundancy, and rapid recovery are now essential conditions for preserving both air superiority and civilian protection durably.
The writer is a Brigadier-General (res.), former commander of the Israeli Air and Missiles Defense Command, former IDF spokesperson, senior fellow for Air and Missile Defense Studies.