Israel sent figher jets to bomb a nuclear power plant in Iraq in the 1980s, and they did the same thing in syria in the 2000s, they sent fighter jets to strike a nuclear power plant there too.
My question is why would Israel use fighter jets for these missions, why not use rockets? These are stationary targets. Is it cheaper to send fighter jets? Do the jets offer more firepower than rockets/missiles? Why not just use things like Jericho missiles that have a range of 2000km or more? Nations like Syria or Iraq shouldn’t have the power to shoot down these missiles, I wouldn’t think.
I’m no Middle East expert by any means, so I’m not sure how many of these specifically apply to Israel. These are just thoughts I had from a technical perspective on the capabilities of planes vs missiles.
One consideration is that missiles like Jericho will take a straight ballistic path from point A to point B. This means they will pass several early warning radar stations enroute and give the target time to ready their defenses. With planes, a more complicated snake like route can be planned to fly through gaps between radar coverage. They can also use natural terrain like mountains and using low altitude flight to avoid detection until the last moments before the attack.
There could be a neutral third party country between yourself and the target that denies you use of their airspace. Planes can be used to take a longer, alternate route to avoid this political complication.
A ballistic missile path could also be easily traced directly back to Israel and confirm they were the attacker. Planes can strike from any direction. This gives Israel deniability for the strike, even if in reality everyone suspects they are responsible.
This fact can also prevent escalation. If it is 100% confirmed Israel fired several ballistic missiles into Iraq, then this is undeniably an act of war. Iraq would be honor bound to declare war and retaliate, even if it’s not in their own best interest. Planes may give just enough deniability to allow Iraq to not openly retaliate without losing too much face among their Arab allies.
There are a few reasons. One is that all other things being equal, a manned aircraft (or even an unmanned one in the near future) is going to be able to deliver a larger payload more accurately than a ballistic missile like the Jericho. Ballistic missiles are really good at delivering a big warhead over a long distance where pinpoint, or even moderate accuracy isn’t an issue because 1) the target is a large area target and/or 2) the warhead the ballistic missile is carrying is a nuclear one. If you really want as precise of a hit as possible, and have control of the airspace over the target, anything that a ballistic missile can do, ordnance carried by an aircraft can do better.
The strike on the Iraqi nuclear power plant in 1981, Operation Opera, was conducted at the edge of the IAF’s operating range at just short of 1,000 miles and well outside the range of the existing Jericho I missile, which only had a range of 310 miles and had a CEP of 3,300 feet. Which means 50% of the Jericho I’s fired would land within 3,300 feet of the intended target, and Jericho I could only carry a 400kg warhead - which is perfectly acceptable if that 400kg warhead happens to be say, a nuclear warhead. Wink wink, nudge nudge.
Lesser-known fact: the Israeli attack on the Osirak nuclear facility was the second attack on it. The first, Operation Scorch Sword, was carried out by the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force and disabled the facility for three months. Iran and Israel had been jointly worried about the plant dating back to before the Islamic Revolution in Iran, and sharing intelligence to attack it, which continued on this matter even after the Revolution.
As the others mentioned, with F-35s, you can have stealth in a way that many missiles can’t, and also you can pack a lot more punch. A bomb dropped from an airplane can deliver a lot more explosive power because it can be packed with explosive whereas most of a missile has to be fuel and other components.
Missiles are pretty accurate but they have a few 100 meter circle of area where they land. We have been told modern fighter jets can put a missile through a specific window on a building.
Also, I wonder about cost. Sure the jet + bomb/missile probably cost more than one ballistic missile but the plane is re-usable, you will probably have them anyway and the ordinance is less expensive than a ballistic missile (assuming it has some targeting ability and is not a dumb-fire thing like Gaza would fling at Israel…accuracy sucked but they just wanted to hit a city).
ETA: Also practice for your pilots. Sounds shitty but it is a part of it. You can send them to bomb a painted target in the desert on a bomb range or actually drop a bomb on something you want gone.
This might be an issue if the place you want to wreck has missile defenses like Iron Dome. And even that is limited in effectiveness. Works well for Israel when it is a small country in size and all the missiles are coming from one direction (not sure they are even ballistic).
Most places do not. IIRC the US gave up its missile defense system (maybe Washington D.C. is protected…not sure).
Because when you are “fighting” unarmed civilians, it is more cost effective to just drop ordnance out of planes.
What are they going to do? Shoot back?
Right. Osirak is, at minimum, 800 kilometers away from Israel. Over the course of “Opera,” the attack on that reactor, the IAF used 8 F-16s, each carrying two Mk-84 (2,000-pound) unguided bombs. At least 8 of those bombs hit the reactor dome. That target was ~40 meters across. As @Dissonance notes, this is well outside the performance of the Jericho I missile available at the time.
To the extent that Israel has an medium-range ballistic missile now capable of putting a 1,000kg warhead on a target 1,000km away with a 20m circular error probable, that is probably within the capabilities of the Jericho II, which did not enter service until over a decade later. The more or less equivalent Pershing II had a unit cost in 1983 of ~$4.3M, or ~$14M in today’s dollars. Presuming 16 of those would have been sufficient to disable Osirak (Pershing II has a 30m CEP and Jericho II is assumed to be similar), that’s a quarter of a billion dollars right there.
The attack on the al-Kibar site in 2007 is less well-documented. It’s closer than Baghdad, but not that much closer—a minimum ~550km, well outside the range of something like the ATACMS seen in Ukraine and still into MRBM territory. They used a similar number of planes and, according to Reuters, “18 tonnes” of ordnance. In other words, a similar cost in terms of ballistic missiles used, except that the Syria attack used laser-guided bombs. Those have a CEP of ~1 meter, more than an order of magnitude more precise than the Jericho II.
So for those kind of long-range attacks, there were not and probably still are not rockets capable of doing the job, certainly not without extravagant cost and in any case with what are I assume unacceptable tradeoffs in terms of flexibility.
The OP asks a question in the present tense about events ~40 and ~20 years ago.
Back then the difference was air-delivered bombs hit their specific chosen targets within a complex whereas medium range ground-to-ground missiles land in the same general area as the target complex, but most likely outside it.
One kills the target, the other inconveniences it. Big difference.
Today with the latest weapons, the calculus will probably be different.
Well. This appears to be Israel’s continued approach.
I’m not sure that we are likely to get precise operational details about “Operation Rising Lion” any sooner than we are likely to get more information about the 2007 attack, but it appears one of the targets was the Natanz nuclear facility, which is—as the crow flies—twice as far away as Osirak. Video released by the IAF on Twitter shows their F-15I strike fighters equipped with 2,000-pound bombs, i.e. the same as the attack on Osirak, so they can carry the same kind of ordnance over double the range without relying on missiles.
It seems that, like the strike on al-Kibar in Syria, the attack was carried out in conjunction with operatives inserted on the ground. So, as @Alessan suggests, the answer would seem to be that the chief Israeli concern is to be as accurate as possible and to be able to assess (and adapt if necessary) in real time, which is never really going to be possible with ballistic missiles. I assume that is going to hold true as long as the IDF can continue their impressive ability to degrade hostile air defenses, since Iran was apparently not capable of reacting to these attacks.
Another reason is flexibility. Short range missiles can’t be used on long-range targets, long-range missiles are too expensive to use on short-range targets, but planes can be used against both short and long-range targets, and can do lots of other things as well. When you don’t have unlimited resources, you can’t overspecialize.