On the night of March 11, Israeli drones descended on security checkpoints across Tehran, killing scores of Basij militiamen within minutes. Iran's state-affiliated Fars news agency confirmed the attack, acknowledging at least ten security personnel dead — other sources put the toll far higher. The message was unmistakable: Israel can now reach inside Iran's capital, pick its targets at will, and strike at the very apparatus the regime uses to repress its own people.
This is something qualitatively different from the thunderous opening of Operation Roaring Lion. These weren't F-35s screaming in from the west. These were drones — patient, cheap, and expendable — doing the work that once required a pilot to strap in and fly a thousand miles.
Israeli officials have signaled explicitly that this escalation is deliberate and will intensify. On March 5, Israeli officials announced a shift to the "next stage" of the campaign, moving beyond the initial goals of air superiority and missile degradation toward targeting what they described as the "foundations" of the Iranian regime — its internal security apparatus, its command structures, the instruments of domestic repression. The Basij checkpoints fit that template precisely.
This new stage of the war, with heavy reliance of drones, can be seen as part of the larger strategy.
The opening days of Operation Roaring Lion were a feat of almost superhuman intensity. Israeli fighter pilots flew to Iran and back three times a day — a sortie tempo that stunned military observers worldwide, triple the usual rate. The trick, as pilots eventually disclosed, was pharmaceutical: modafinil, a wakefulness-promoting drug already authorized by the U.S. Air Force for long-duration operations, allowed crews to sustain the punishing schedule. Besides overwhelming Iran's launch capabilities before it could adapt, the initial attacks were meant to make the skies of Iran safe for slower but more numerous drones.
Stimulants can only push the human body so far, but drones can stay in the air for many hours. The math shows that drones are a far more effective platform once air defenses are defeated. Israel's active drone inventory stands at roughly 1,015 platforms — nearly four times its fleet of approximately 284 manned combat aircraft. During last June's Operation Rising Lion, 70% of all IAF flight hours were already being flown by UAVs rather than manned aircraft.
The flagship platform is the Hermes 900 "Kochav" (Star), built by Elbit Systems: over 30 hours of endurance, operational ceiling of 30,000 feet, payload capacity of around 300 kg, operational range exceeding 1,000 km. At roughly $6.8 million per unit — a fraction of an F-35's cost — losing one is an accounting entry, not a national tragedy. In the current campaign, Hermes 900s have been flying around the clock over Iran, with AI-driven algorithms fusing data from electro-optical, infrared, synthetic aperture radar, and hyperspectral sensors to locate missile launchers, radar systems, and mobile air-defense batteries. Wreckage recovered in Iran has confirmed they are also carrying combat payloads — twin or quad pods of air-dropped munitions. They are not merely watching.
Most of a drone's mission time is transit; any single platform may loiter over Iran for only six hours or so before heading home. But with over a thousand drones and a centralized AI-targeting architecture, Israel can sustain continuous coverage over Iranian territory through coordinated rotation — launching platforms in waves so that each drone arriving on station relieves one departing. What looks like a constraint on individual platforms becomes, at fleet scale, something close to a permanent presence. Crucially, because the targeting data is shared and continuously updated across the network, each incoming drone doesn't start blind. It inherits an accumulated intelligence file from its predecessor: known positions, movement patterns, the behavioral signatures of specific units. The individual drones may only be watching for several hours, but the network never sleeps.
For strike missions that don't require recovery, Israel also fields loitering munitions — kamikaze drones that solve the range problem by simply not returning. The Harop, with operational figures suggesting up to 1,000 km range in some configurations, can be air-launched from a fighter that carries it most of the distance and releases it well clear of dangerous airspace. The pilot turns around; the drone completes the mission autonomously.
This is all assuming Israeli drones are being launched exclusively from Israel. This may or may not be true. What we already know about US-Israeli cooperation during this operation is striking enough on its own. American F-22s were deployed at Israeli Air Force bases; American refueling aircraft operated from Israeli airfields serving both nations' planes; Israeli pilots shared real-time targeting data with US command at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, integrated into a single AI-driven kill chain in which the nearest available asset — US or Israeli — received automatic engagement authorization. The two forces were not merely coordinating. They were merged.
US aircraft carriers in the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Oman sit far closer to Iran than Israeli airfields do, cutting transit time dramatically. Gulf states, whatever their public statements about not hosting offensive operations, have powerful reasons to see the Iranian regime destabilized and have been operating in deep intelligence partnership with both Israel and the United States. Azerbaijan — which has long-standing defense ties with Israel and was itself struck by Iranian drones during the conflict, likely as punishment for suspected cooperation — remains an intriguing possibility for forward drone staging, though that remains unconfirmed. The operational incentive to use closer launch points is obvious; the diplomatic incentive to deny it publicly is equally obvious. So while it is operationally possible that Israel's drone fleet is operating exclusively from Israeli soil, it very possibly has a considerably shorter route.
If anyone believed that Israel's opening surge represented its maximum sustainable effort — that once the pilots came down from their modafinil-fueled sprint the campaign would necessarily slow — they were wrong. The initial phase was designed to create the conditions for the phase we are now entering, one that requires no stimulants, no heroic sortie rates, and no pilots at risk. A drone fleet of over a thousand platforms, rotating continuously, inheriting an ever-richer intelligence picture, striking when and where it chooses against a degraded and demoralized adversary — this is not a lesser form of air campaign than what came before. It may be a more effective one.
When Israeli officials say the attacks will accelerate, it is not hyperbole. It was always part of the plan.
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