Podcast: The Israel-Iran War And Defense At Le Bourget

Listen in as editors at the Paris Air Show break down Israel's latest offensive and how that country's defense companies have been walled off here at the show.

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Robert Wall (00:06): Welcome to the latest episode of the Check 6 at the Paris Air Show defense edition recording at the end of day two. But we are going to be looking far beyond Le Bourget on the outskirts of the French capital. And look as far afield as no surprise Tehran. Joining me to bring you their analysis on what's been unfolding in the Middle East and at the show are Steve Trimble, our Senior defense editor and Tony Osborne, our European Defense editor. I'm Robert Wall, Aviation Week's executive editor for Defense and Space. So let's start with the Middle East where Israel on June 13th launched wave after wave of air raids on Iran to degrade that country's nuclear weapons program and other military infrastructure. It's been quite a remarkable operation using elite military personnel and drones with Iran to take down Iranian air defenses, enabling airstrikes that have given the Israeli Air Force seeming air dominance. Steve, what struck you so far about what we've seen?

Steve Trimble (01:05): Well, the most dramatic thing has been the Israeli Air Force operating with not even near impunity, but just impunity over Iranian airspace. Despite these rumors or tweets about Israeli aircraft being destroyed, none of those have been confirmed and they appear to be very unlikely in any evidence is easily debunked so far. And that's not a huge surprise. The Iranian Air Force is clearly outmatched against what the Israelis can bring to bear in air power for sure, but to not see initially from the outside looking in an air power response from the Iranians. So their aircraft are very old, F-14s, F-5s, F-4s, probably not in great shape, but they still have these aircraft. They still have their own missiles. They've been flying them and demonstrating them and using them as somewhat of a deterrent, but to not see them in the air from the outside, it was kind of a shock.

Robert Wall (02:16): Well, do you think they're just absent without leave or what's going on?

Steve Trimble (02:21): It's impossible to know for sure from the outside. All we do know is that there's just been no reports of air-to-air engagements. There have been some reports today within the Hebrew language part of the Israeli media where they've been interviewing the pilots, the Israeli Air Force pilots, and these are very scripted managed type interviews. The Israeli national security is still heavily censored in the country. Any discussion about that? So this is sanctioned information that is being released by the pilots to the Israeli public. And in these interviews they're saying, several of the pilots are saying that as they entered the Iranian airspace, they saw the Iranian fighters scrambling and getting into the air, but then not engaging, not engaging with the Israeli Air Force aircraft that were invading their airspace. And obviously I have no way of verifying that the claim is remarkable, and so it maybe is part of the propaganda push, but it does. I mean, we didn't see any air-to-air engagements on Friday or a Saturday or over the weekend. And so I am still to process that because I still would've expected the Iranian Air Force to respond and if they did scramble to actually engage. But if that didn't happen, it really is something hard to kind of process and understand what it was that was really going on there. It's very strange.

Tony Osborne (03:53): I was going to say it's really interesting also, there's been no interference from any of the nations over which Israel has obviously been flying over to reach Iran. I guess the only air force that could really do that is Iraq with its feet of F-16s and F/A-50s, but they don't seem to run any form of interference. And in fact, we've seen imagery of tankers flying low over Syria and over Iraq running reviewing tracks. And again, without interference, it's quite really,

Robert Wall (04:19): Of course Israel has taken down the Syrian air defense

Tony Osborne (04:22): As well. And probably those actions against Syria were practice for the big event that is happening now.

Steve Trimble (04:28): There are so many things that have happened that all my expectations about an Israeli invasion of Iran going back several years, it's all been turned upside down. Partly it's because there's not a stockpile of ballistic missiles owned by Hezbollah in the Bekaa Valley because that's all been neutralized more or less by Israel in the past year. The Syrian air defense is down, the Iraqis are for some reason, not involved, and then the Iranians themselves are not defending themselves. I expected them to at least try if they were being invaded by the Israeli Air Force. So it is kind of this mind bending thing. What I would've normally have expected to be this cataclysmic world changing event has been and quite costly to the Israelis has played out totally different than my expectations going back. My expectations had adjusted somewhat based on what has happened in the past year, but still it is still hard to catch up with just how devastating the Israeli Air Force was able to be in this scenario.

Tony Osborne (05:37): I was going to say, I also wonder, obviously we saw the change of administration, let's call it the change of government in Syria that then forced the Russians out. Would this still been possible had we still had significant Russian presence in Hmeimim, for example, would they have also run interference with this? It's that sort of change of circumstances that's allowed this to take place.

Robert Wall (06:04): I mean, it's not like the Iranians haven't responded all obviously they've fired round and round of ballistic missiles at Israel and also UAVs obviously something we've seen before. It almost seems like they're less effective than they maybe were last time. The Israeli seem to have been quite prepared for what's coming, but maybe you guys have a different take on that.

Steve Trimble (06:28): Well, there's been two rounds of this already in April of last year, in October of last year, which demonstrated that the Israelis and the Coalition of Allies through this layered defense approach was able to do this. Now, I still think a big part of this was because you don't have Hezbollah with several thousand ballistic missiles and rockets all poised in waiting for this moment basically to unleash from the Bekaa Valley into Israel. That is a game-changing part of this scenario. Despite that, obviously the Iranians have been demonstrating this deterrent capability. They've been rolling out new missiles almost every couple months. They've come out with a new medium range or intermediate range ballistic missile or what they call a hypersonic live vehicle. And we don't take a lot of that seriously in quantity. That's still a big serious issue. And several of them have clearly gotten through the Israeli defenses and cause damage, but still they clearly do not possess the capability so far that we've seen to damage Israel materially through a conventional missile attack.

Robert Wall (07:44): And interesting, also, the Israelis clearly have kind of stepped up and David Sling, for example, intercepting a ballistic missile, not something it was necessarily supposed to do. They have some ship based air defenses they use in anger for the first time. But I think the point you were making about Hezbollah is really interesting. I hadn't really thought about it that way. And they really know last time they had to look at several places, had to worry about rockets coming from Gaza and from Lebanon plus the long range stuff from Israel. And there's just the risk, you're going to miss something. Right now they basically are looking at Iran and a bit of Yemen. So it's a very different situation. So I think you're right. They're probably much more focused, which is helping their effectiveness.

Tony Osborne (08:26): And of course in Israel has been preparing for this for what decades. I mean all that weapons development has all been focused against this one particular task. That's why we have those air launch ballistic missiles, those spice, long range guided position guided weapons. They've all been developed with the key aim of this specific target set.

Steve Trimble (08:49): It's the three circle strategy for Israel and Iran was the outer circle, and they have invested significantly in the command and control and the targeting and the firepower to address that issue. Even so, I am still surprised at how costless it has been for the Israeli Air Force to do this. That's so far no losses

Tony Osborne (09:15): At all. And impressively the level of sustainment of the number of sorties, the availability of the aircraft, we've seen F-16s being really hard work.

Robert Wall (09:25): The maintenance effort is probably overlooked, but it's incredible really.

Tony Osborne (09:29): Absolutely astonishing.

Steve Trimble (09:30): We should also mention Fordow and Natanz are not based on satellite imagery substantially damaged at this point and Iran's ability to manufacture nuclear weapons as been set back but not eliminated, which seems to be what's driving all of this. So the threat is still there and we're still dealing with it.

Tony Osborne (09:50): It's definitely a key lesson here for serious high intensity conflict, particularly for Europe. As we look to the future and rebuilding capability that high, that capability that Israel has shown is probably what's going to have to be recreated in Europe

Robert Wall (10:05): And again, gets at the mass, right? They've been dropping so much ordinance and fire in so many interceptors, but we're not quite leaving Israel. We're just going to use Israel to take us to by a hop, skip and a jump basically because Israel was also in the news at the air show here, maybe in ways it didn't really want to be, but its own conflict here on the outskirts of Paris. Steve, why don't you tell us about the black curtains?

Steve Trimble (10:29): Right. So we all arrived here yesterday morning and saw these walls up around the Israeli stands as I made my way in about seven 30 in the morning. I didn't really know what to make of those. I didn't know if the Israelis did that as some sort of protest or if it was the French who did that to basically walls around the exhibit booth of the major Israeli contractors, Elbit Systems, Raphael, Elbit and Israeli aerospace industries. And very quickly throughout the day, we became aware that this was not the Israelis making that decision, that this was a decision by the French government according to the airshow organizers, and that there had been meetings taking place the day before as you reported Robert, that according to the Israelis, the French wanted them to remove some offensive missiles. I put offensive in quotes because it's a little bit difficult to define exactly what that means in this context.

Steve Trimble (11:27): And the Israelis refused. They all left. And when the Israelis came back, they were locked out of their own booths that they had paid for. And as I was walking to another event, I happened to be walking by while Rafael executive, the director of their Iron Dome program, was giving an impromptu news conference in front of this wall that had been erected, saying, and clearly perturbed at this circumstance and saying that they have been shut out of their own booths. They have not been allowed to conduct business in the normal way here. They have not been kicked out of the show. They're allowed to continue to walk around and meet with people outside of their booth. But he said, this is not what we came here to do. This is just part of doing our business and we're being denied that opportunity. The reaction was not subtle.

Robert Wall (12:21): They've been here for decades as I pointed out. They've been coming to the show for a long time of big presence, spent oodles of money here obviously.

Steve Trimble (12:30): Well, I can also understand the reaction in the sense that, I mean, this is everywhere, right? Major events that include Israeli contractors, not just in aerospace and defense, but really in any industry are being targeted by protesters because of the situation there. I'm not here to say who's right or wrong or anything like that, but it's just the situation. And if certain, especially in the aerospace and defense area, if certain organizations start saying, no, you can't show the spice bomb or you can't show David Sling or whatever it is at this event, that could cause problems for them just around the world. They were almost denied the ability to exhibit here in Paris at Euro Satory back in 2022. I think it was

Robert Wall (13:16): Last year, I think even, wasn't it?

Steve Trimble (13:18): And was it last year too? Yeah, sorry, I don't remember. It's all a blur at this point. But that got worked out the last minute and they were allowed to, I think it was last year actually. And the Israeli response is basically based on they need to defend their ability to do their business overseas in the normal way that other companies are doing, no matter which country they're from. And we see every country in the world represented here, with the exception of Iran and Russia at the moment.

Robert Wall (13:48): I mean, interesting. Also, Israel had just reported record of defense exports and the IAI CEO kind of made the point, well, they're kicking us out because the French government and industry are just jealous that we're taking their business in Europe.

Tony Osborne (14:01): It's probably important to say also this is one of the few trade shows now that still has a public day and these halls are open. So who knows what kind of groups that could have sort of allowed into the show to potentially protest or whatever.

Robert Wall (14:15): Well, there's a lot more going on than that obviously here at the Paris Air Show on the defense side in particular this year with everything that's going on with increasing defense spending in Europe. We are a bit short of time. So let's do a bit of a rapid fire round. If you only had one thing you can leave our listeners with that you've learned so far at the show, caveat to our listeners, we are only on day two. We have much more time to go, so don't hold us against us if something big comes tomorrow. So what would that be, Tony? Why don't you go first?

Tony Osborne (14:51): Yes. Okay. So certainly I think compared to previous Paris Air shows there's a lot less naval gazing. There's less focus on the future, but more on the present. And the immediate issue around European rearmament and I've, all of the most clearest answers to this was the appearance of the Rafale and the relatively near future upgrade with the UCA that will be tethered to it. But behind it was a model of the future combat air system next generation fighter that had been almost sidelined. It was no longer the big deal that it was because the big focus is on those present day fighters. But we're also seeing things like developments of low cost munitions. We're seeing deals on UAVs and so on to do that immediate rearmament. So I think that's the key thing here.

Robert Wall (15:52): Do you really think having the next generation fighter model at the side of the Dassault, the location was driven by the focus on today, or

Tony Osborne (16:02): Might it have been something else? It could also have been sort of Eric Trappier's clear dislike of the development process. I refer there of course to the Dassault CEO, who's been very open in his dislike of this program and sort of the work share around it. I'm fairly sure he would've played a part in this, but I do think that there's a messaging there that maybe just the Rafale takes center stage at the moment as they make this grand push to re-arm Europe.

Robert Wall (16:36): Yeah, there's definitely some messaging there. We can debate what the message was.

Tony Osborne (16:41): Yeah, don't put baby in a corner, I think is it said in Dirty Dancing. Yeah.

Robert Wall (16:46): Steve, how about on your side?

Steve Trimble (16:48): So I go with US companies coming in here with collaborative combat aircraft CCAs. So they're showing their full scale mock-ups of the General Atomics YFQ-42 and the Anduril YFQ-44. These are the two CCA prototypes are funded by the US Air Force to go potentially into production one of them anyway next year and then go into service shortly afterwards. And this is a new type of aircraft. It's got its autonomy, it's just like any other UAV except it also includes an autonomy control system. So it can operate on its own in collaboration with other of these types of CCAs or with crewed aircraft. And so the fact that they're here means that those manufacturers see an opportunity to market them and sell them in the European market and further abroad. And in fact, I talked to David Alexander, the president of General Atomics, Aeronautical Systems Inc.

Steve Trimble (17:55): Who confirmed in fact, yes, they are in the process and very close to getting the licenses they need from the State department to actually export or to start presenting information to potential export customers about what their YFQ-42 can do. And I just talked to Anduril, they're announcing here at the show that they're partnering with Rheinmetall to offer among other things, new versions or new mission configurations and even up to co-production of the Fury, which is the generic term for the YFQ-44, not the US Air Force model itself. That's not part of it, but a European variant of that that they consider to be called the Fury. And that's interesting too because this is a non-traditional defense, OEM. Now it has a bigger market cap than most of the defense contractors, but they're still not considered a traditional prime and they operate in a different way. And they're partnering up with one of the big defense primes in Europe that has a very sort of established presence there in Germany.

Tony Osborne (19:03): Just to add to what Steve was saying, there was definitely a fight back here of the American companies. I was in a press conference with Boeing earlier and they were highlighting the investments they were making in Europe. They are definitely trying to fight back against issues such as Trump tariffs, what President Trump has said about trying to talking about Canada and Greenland, but also things like the kill switch, which has obviously got a lot of attention a few months ago around could America turn off platforms like the F-35. That got on a lot of attention. So there was definitely clearly a fight back here by the American companies to try and regain that trust to get back into Europe.

Robert Wall (19:48): Yeah, we still care about Europe even if the administration does not. Alright, well I'll go back to my old faith world, the A-400M surprise surprise, but does feel like the program might be a bit of a turning point. It's been a bit of a headache for decades, almost really a bit of a problem child. A lot of questions in the last few months, even kind of raised by Airbus. We need no more business or else the program is at risk of eventually shutting down or in the not too distant future, even if not imminently. But it does feel at the show that they got an agreement with France and Spain to accelerate some purchases that smooths out production at the minimum rate of eight a month for the next few years. That also buys some time to gen up some export orders.

Robert Wall (20:39): We were talking to the program boss, a real sense of confidence. I think those export orders are now coming. They've increased the payload capacity, which they, as he points out, resonates well in certain markets, which are warmer than even Paris right now. And they're starting to talk about adding new capabilities, cruise missile and drone deployments and firefighting obviously is one as well. So it's really thing I'm maybe a bit too early to call, say it's entirely past its problems. As Tony as you pointed out, there are still some issues around some bits. Bits and bobs here,

Tony Osborne (21:21): Certainly around the engines, propeller gearboxes, availability propellers. But nations are getting more and more availability. They're flying a lot more. They're doing more and more missions, they're relying on it. They're beginning to sweat it a bit that bit more. They're trusting it. They're replacing C-130s with it. So these are all signs of a positive go. I think T. Weaver, the program head said most of the troubles are now behind it. It's just getting a few more sold. And that's the big, that's the big, just right in time 20 years later, actually the C-130J, when it came into service actually had a lot of these same issues.

Steve Trimble (22:04): Well it was around the same time as A-400M.

Robert Wall (22:08): Alright, play nice. This is not Airbus versus Dassault. So play nice kids. We'll argue about this offline maybe. Alright, and with that we're going to leave you for today. Thank you for listening. And please check back for the commercial edition of the Check 6 at Paris podcast.