Israeli defense officials shocked by rapid speed of Iran's military recovery

TEL AVIV, August 14. /TASS/. Israeli defense officials have been shocked by the speed of Iran’s military recovery, The Jerusalem Post reported, citing sources.

According to the report, this includes officials in both the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Mossad intelligence agency. Despite critical reports in the Western media, Israeli military experts had until recently maintained that Israeli strikes had set Iran’s military capabilities back by years.

However, four months after the main campaign against Iran ended in April, "the IDF is now seeing a stunningly speedy turnaround that it did not expect and not in merely one or another specific area, but in many areas, including regarding the ballistic missile threat."

"Part of what is surprising in this story is that the IDF was already surprised by the Iranians in this area of rapid recovery twice: in October 2024 and January 2025. After striking 20 critical ballistic missile and industrial military targets in Iran in October 2024, the IDF claimed that it had set back Iranian future missile production by a year or more. <...> After attacking around 100 missile and industrial military targets in June 2025, the IDF said it had found the formula to truly set back Iran’s missile production by multiple years. There was reason to believe this given that five times as many targets had been struck and that the IDF had dropped an exponentially larger volume of bombs. Yet, once again, somehow, Iran figured out ways to recover high-speed missile production, again stunning the IDF," the newspaper noted.

According to The Jerusalem Post, "top Israeli defense officials are now admitting that Iran has figured out creative ways to focus on rebuilding the missile and other defined threats, even if massive parts of the country still remain in ruin."

"If Iran can return to manufacturing 100-300 missiles per month, then it can restore its missile arsenal to June 2025 levels by early to mid-2027 and might become a prohibitive threat in 2028," the newspaper concluded.