Israeli defense officials, including figures in both the IDF and Mossad, have been stunned by the speed at which Iran is rebuilding key military capabilities following the 2026 war, with the most alarming recovery taking place in Tehran’s ballistic missile program, according to a report in The Jerusalem Post.

For months after the war, senior Israeli military professionals maintained that the scale of the damage inflicted on Iran’s military-industrial complex had set the country back by years. Four months after the main fighting ended in April, however, the IDF is now seeing a far faster recovery than expected across multiple areas, including the ballistic missile threat.

The concern is especially significant because this is not the first time Israeli assessments have underestimated Iran’s ability to recover. After Israel struck 20 key ballistic missile and military-industrial targets in October 2024, the IDF assessed that Iranian missile production had been set back by at least a year. By early 2025, Iran had already restored its high-speed production pace.

Israel dramatically expanded its strikes in June 2025, hitting roughly 100 missile and military-industrial targets and dropping a far greater volume of munitions. Israeli officials then believed Iran’s production capabilities had been damaged for several years. Yet Tehran once again managed to rebuild rapidly. An estimated arsenal of approximately 1,300 missiles in June 2025 grew to roughly 2,500 by February 2026.

During the roughly 40-day war this year, Israel and the United States struck more than 2,600 missile and military-industrial targets and collectively carried out around 30,000 attacks against Iran. Israeli officials said afterward that virtually every major and minor element of Iran’s military industry had been shattered, with the country sustaining an estimated $300 billion in military damage.

Senior Israeli defense officials are now acknowledging that Iran has developed creative methods to prioritize and rapidly rebuild specific military threats even while large parts of the country remain devastated. The New York Times had previously reported that Iran used bulldozers to reopen underground missile cities that had been blocked during the war, but Israeli officials are now also seeing evidence that Tehran has resumed producing new weapons at a significantly faster pace than anticipated.

That development is changing the nature of Israel’s calculations. Until now, much of the debate centered on whether Iran retained closer to 500 or 1,000 long-range missiles capable of reaching Israel after the war. That question becomes far less important if Iran can rapidly replenish its stockpile.

If Iran succeeds in returning to a production rate of 100 to 300 ballistic missiles per month, it could rebuild its arsenal to June 2025 levels by early or mid-2027 and potentially become an even more serious threat by 2028. Even at a slower pace, steady rebuilding could restore a major ballistic missile threat within several years.

The unexpectedly fast recovery is also likely to influence future Israeli decisions over whether another military strike may eventually be necessary, regardless of negotiations involving the Strait of Hormuz or Iran’s nuclear program. Another possibility raised in the report is that Israel could place less emphasis on the ballistic missile issue if the United States prioritizes reducing Tehran’s nuclear threat instead.

Responding to the report, the IDF said that throughout the war it had “substantially harmed a diverse range of central components relating to Iran’s military capabilities,” damaging both Tehran’s ability to use certain capabilities and its ability to restore them at their previous scale and pace.

The military added that it has since been “closely and continuously” monitoring Iranian efforts to rebuild and that its assessments are constantly being updated based on developments on the ground. The IDF declined to provide specific estimates for the speed of Iran’s rehabilitation, saying that doing so could expose intelligence sources and methods.

The emerging picture is therefore more troubling than Israeli officials initially expected: after three separate rounds of major strikes, Iran has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to restore missile production faster than anticipated, forcing Israel to reassess how lasting even extremely large-scale damage to Tehran’s military infrastructure may ultimately prove to be.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)