Yes, Hamas and Hezbollah are the IRGC's remote occupying armies in the adjacent territories of Gaza and Lebanon, and they have launched rockets into Israel on a near-daily basis for years.
The difference is Ham/Hez rockets are small, unguided, generally aimed at residential or commercial areas to cause disruption, and are generally low-intensity and are routinely intercepted.
The differences are:
1) The attacks from Iran are large warheads on intermediate range ballistic missiles, with precision targeting.
2) They are fired in coordinated barrages along with drones and other rockets specifically intended to over-saturate the Israeli missile defenses.
3) The attacks are also targeted specifically at industrial infrastructure with the intent of causing maximal damage to the world economy.
4) The targeting uses high-precision satellite data and intelligence from Russia and China to cause maximum global damage.
Those are major differences in both quality and quantity of the attacks.
Before, the risk was relatively low: not targeting this type of industrial site, not using high-intelligence and high-precision targeting, not saturating, and using small warheads unlikely to cause major damage.
The situation since 28-Feb-2026 is entirely different.
I mean, it’s not like Iran built those intermediate range ballistic missiles / hypersonics as yard ornaments for their underwater basket weaving community classes.
It’s not like the location of US bases in the area is a secret.
If Iran wanted to use those hypersonics in an act of defence they would target military installations only.
We can then safely assume that those intermediate range ballistic missiles have been used for their intended purpose: the intentional destruction of industrial and residential areas in Israel and industrial targets of US allies in the area.
The probability that those missiles would be used on those targets was always unity.
>>The probability that those missiles would be used on those targets was always unity.
Yup
In your assessment, unity.
In my assessment well above 80%, certainly so much that they IRGC missile program should have been dealt with decades ago.
But in the assessment of the rest of the market, both the stock market and the industry planning 'market', the probability was in single digits. Likely in no small part due to normalcy bias. If it had been any higher, they would have made backup and recovery plans already.
Of course, I think the US should have been making a stockpile of replacement power grid transformers, and requiring every house to have 1kW of solar power decades ago. But they don't.
It is the new situation in consideration of their lack of insight into the probabilities and planning that makes it different, no? Just because you an I can foresee a problem, doesn't mean everyone can, or will do anything about it. So now, if that target is not defended, the backup plan is years away instead of already running. Worse yet, if the backup plan was already running, targeting that production facility would be near-pointless...
Of course any of these problems can be solved in a long time, 5-10 years.
The article is talking about the problems of between potentially supply being shut off tomorrow and being fixed in "a long time". Not good times.