Military Watch:

Israel Plans ‘Zone Defence’ Anti-Missile Network to Stop Iran’s New Mach 13+ Hypersonic Glide Vehicles

Middle East , Missile and Space

Military Watch Magazine Editorial Staff

August-20th-2025

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Hypersonic Glide Vehicle in Flight

Vice President of Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defence Systems Yuval Baseski has outlined plans to develop a defensive capability against attacks launched using hypersonic glide vehicles, highlighting that this had forced the firm and the Israel Defence Forces to rethink their approach to missile defence. Following Israel’s launching of large scale attacks on Iran on June 13, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps gradually escalated its ballistic missile strikes against Israeli targets, and on June 18 announced that the country’s first class of hypersonic ballistic missile, the Fattah, had been launched. The Corps alleged that the missile’s employment marked “the beginning of the end” for Israel’s “mythical” missile defences. “The powerful and highly manoeuvrable Fattah missiles repeatedly shook the shelters of the cowardly Zionists tonight, sending a clear message of Iran’s strength to Tel Aviv’s warmongering ally, which continues to dwell in delusions and false assumptions,” the Corps claimed, stating that the new missile class left Israel defenceless against its precision strikes.



Iranian Ballistic Missiles Arrive Over Israel




“Hypersonic missiles open a new era in air defence,” Baseski said regarding the new challenge, warning that traditional approaches to missile defence would not be effective against such targets. “Every air defence system today is based on flying faster than the target. But this principle does not apply to hypersonic missiles. To intercept an object moving at Mach 10, one would need a defence moving at Mach 30, which is impossible in the atmosphere due to friction,”he stated. Drawing an analogy to basketball, he observed: “One interceptor missile tracking one hypersonic missile is like defending LeBron James with a single player. You may keep chasing him, but you won’t stop him from scoring.” He instead suggested a “zone defence” model, under which multiple interceptors covered defined areas and engaged threats as they entered.



Surface-to-Air Missile Launch From Israeli David`s Sling System



A growing number of strongly corroborating sources have indicated that the fallout from Iranian missile attacks has far exceeded prior Western and Israeli expectations, with military bases and key infrastructure targets such as Haifa Port, the Haifa Oil Refinery, Ben Gurion Airport and the Weizmann Institute of Science and Technology suffering serious damage. The headquarters of Rafael was among the targets singled out for attacks. Commenting on the extent of the strikes at the subsequent NATO summit, President Donald Trump observed: “Especially those last couple of days, Israel was hit really hard. Those ballistic missiles, boy they took out a lot of buildings.” Hypersonic missile attacks were notably far from the only serious challenge faced by Israeli air defences, with the extreme cost of anti-ballistic missiles and the resulting limited supplies available making a sustained defence against missile strikes wholly unviable. The severity of the damage, and the fast diminishing ability of Israeli missile defences to blunt the attacks, was considered a primary factor leading Israel to accept a ceasefire on June 24.



Damage in Tel Aviv After Iranian Missile Attacks




Unveiled in June 2023, the Fattah is Iran’s first class of missile with a hypersonic glide vehicle, making the country the fourth country after Russia, China and North Korea to field such an asset. The missile has a 1400 kilometre range, and can achieve a terminal speed of between Mach 13 and Mach 15. Its combination of speed and manoeuvrability make it nearly impossible to intercept. After North Korea first flight tested a ballistic missile with a hypersonic glide vehicle in September 2021, the Hwasong-8 with an estimated 1800km range, it was speculated that Pyongyang could quickly transfer key technologies to Iran’s defence sector, with North Korean missile technologies having been steadily transferred to Iran for over four decades. North Korea previously responded to Israel’s procurement of Patriot missile defence systems by Israel in the 1990s by supplying manoeuvrable reentry vehicles and associated technologies to both Syria and Iran to strengthen their penetrative capabilities.

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