Just after midnight on June 13, 2025, an Israeli operation codenamed Rising Lion unfolded in two distinct but mutually reinforcing acts. First came swarms of small explosive drones that Israeli commandos had reportedly pre-positioned inside Iran months earlier, striking air-defense radars and communications nodes, while decoying attention toward Tehran’s western approaches. Minutes later, over 200 Israeli fighter aircraft—many of them F-35 Adirs carrying standoff munitions—conducted precision strikes against more than 100 nuclear and military targets across Iran, including senior military leaders.
The result was operational dislocation: Iranian early-warning networks were saturated by low-observable drones, senior commanders were killed or forced into hardened shelters, and decisionmaking channels fractured just as long-range penetrating fires arrived. This shock-and-awe approach by Israel explains the limited initial Iranian response, firing only 100 drones compared to the mixture of over 200 drones and ballistic and cruise missiles fired during Operation True Promise in April 2024.
The attack illustrates how combinations of conventional long-range strikes and unconventional operations have a unique role in modern war, reminiscent of the dawn of modern special operations and the “ungentlemanly warriors” of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS).
Advantage in battle, when each side can see the other side using even commercial satellite images, goes to the side more able to generate asymmetries that produce shock and dislocation. That effect requires more than a standoff precision strike: It requires the ability to pair airpower with special operations to generate effects across the depth of the battlespace simultaneously.
As a result, Operational Rising Lion is a blueprint for future joint campaigns and suggests key investments the U.S. military will need to make to adapt to the changing character of war. These include accelerating efforts to integrate special forces with low-cost drones—similar to the foundational work with Project Replicator—with long-range precision strike campaigns, alongside rethinking defense in depth to protect critical assets.
Relative Superiority in the Drone Age
Admiral William McRaven defined relative superiority as the moment a smaller attacking force gains a decisive advantage over a larger, better-defended adversary through a combination of training, speed, and surprise. Israel’s strike, like Ukraine’s earlier Operation Spider’s Web, validates how small, autonomous systems—when staged forward and synchronized with long-range fires—compresses the timeline to relative superiority.
In both cases, drone swarms exploited gaps in air defenses, sowed confusion, and set the conditions for follow-on strikes. Modern war combines scale and precision. Autonomous navigation, low-cost attritable designs, and cross-domain intelligence networks enable planners to choreograph hundreds of aim-points across massive distances.
This combination extends the depth of the battlespace and the relationship between strategy, operations, and tactics. It creates a new form of campaigning in which a series of audacious raids, defined by relative superiority, create operational-level effects, which in this case shocked Iran sufficiently to conduct strikes in depth across the country targeting leadership, nuclear facilities, air defense, and ballistic missiles.
“Ungentlemanly” Warfare, Then and Now
While drones, stealth fighters, and global intelligence networks are new, combining conventional and unconventional warfare are not. During World War II the British SOE and U.S. OSS pioneered sabotage, special reconnaissance, and raids—described during World War II as “ungentlemanly warfare”—and integrated them with larger conventional campaigns.
The mandate of these agencies was to soften deep targets so conventional forces could attack at decisive points, whether by air, land, or sea. Israel’s Rising Lion resurrects that model, substituting pre-positioned drones and fifth-generation strike packages for Jedburgh teams and Royal Air Force bombers.
Seen in historical context, Israel’s Operation Rising Lion offers three takeaways about joint military campaigns in the twenty-first century. First, deep integration of special operations forces (SOF), autonomous drones, and AI-enabled intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance is now the baseline for theater entry because these “ungentlemanly robots” overwhelm air defenses and disrupt command loops faster than any single strike package.
Second, layered defenses must also assume insider threats, as pre-staging shows that distance is largely psychological and physical depth becomes porous when loitering munitions can hide inside something as ordinary as a commercial truck.
Finally, the fusion of covert emplacement with long-range fires erodes strategic warning, compressing decision timelines for defenders and allies and shrinking crisis-management windows from hours or days to mere minutes, paralyzing the adversary.
Preparing for the Next War
While the operation is still ongoing, Rising Lion is a harbinger of how the U.S. Department of Defense needs to adapt to the changing character of war:
- Adapt to the new blueprint of offensive strike campaigns. To increase its ability to generate asymmetries in the emerging battlespace, U.S. policymakers should expand SOF-autonomy experimentation by formalizing tactics for covertly planting autonomous sensors and munitions that can cue conventional long-range fires. In many respects, this drive should build on prior efforts like Mosaic Warfare and Replicator to create entirely new campaign designs and even prototypes.
- Rethink the old idea of defense for the new era. Adversaries can now conduct strategic-level attacks next to major targets like bomber airbases (Operation Spider’s Web) and military command and control facilities (Operation Rising Lion).
- The United States should make investments in defenses that envelop critical infrastructure—not just military bases—in layered security umbrellas that combine counter–unmanned aircraft systems radars, patrol drones, and behavior analytics used to detect deep-cover operatives.
- This deliberate approach to twenty-first century defense in depth needs to be packaged with U.S. exports to its partners and allies. If democracies adopt these measures, they will be far better positioned to survive waves of “ungentlemanly robots” and missile salvos in the next fight.
- Reevaluate deterrence signaling at the strategic level. Attacks launched from inside an opponent’s borders render traditional red-line messaging far less credible. There is no sanctuary, meaning for low costs, adversaries can jump up the escalation ladder to conduct no notice demonstration attacks on interior zones (e.g. Furthermore, using low-cost drones to strike high-value nuclear targets changes the costs and benefits of coercion, allowing states to gamble without exposing themselves to high sunk costs.
Benjamin Jensen is director of the Futures Lab and a senior fellow for the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C.