Here We Go Again

Things in Iran are once again boiling over. For nearly two weeks, the regime has imposed one of the most sweeping, sophisticated internet blackouts ever attempted, cutting tens of millions off from the outside world while protests roil the streets. Independent monitors and major outlets describe a near-total shutdown that began on January 8, with connectivity throttled even for domestic services, a blackout designed not only to silence dissent, but to bury the evidence of what happens in the dark.

What escapes that darkness is fragmentary and grim. Rights groups and global opposition warn of a rising death toll but caution that verified numbers are hard to come by under an intentional communications blackout; early tallies document dozens killed, with activists claiming far higher figures that cannot yet be independently verified. The latest figure tops 30,000 dead. Murdered. That is precisely why regimes kill the internet first. It hides the scale, delays accountability, and buys time. 

Meanwhile, across the water, you can feel the steel moving. Washington is shifting major assets toward the region: a carrier strike group, fighter squadrons, and additional air-and-missile defenses, the classic choreography of “setting the force” for contingencies. The precise decisions remain opaque, as they should be, but the visible posture is unmistakable. It is designed to deter a wider war and to give the commander-in-chief options if Iran escalates. 

Iranian officials, for their part, are not speaking in whispers. Tehran’s foreign minister has warned publicly that if attacked, Iran would “fire back with everything we have,” invoking the 12-day war of last June and threatening a broader, longer conflict. The message is not subtle; it is meant to shape decision-making in Washington, Jerusalem, and every capital that sits in the path of a regional chain reaction: Doha, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh.

From where I sit – not in a think tank, but under the flight path into Ben-Gurion – the “chain reaction” is not an abstraction. Foreign air carriers have again started trimming or canceling service to Israel when the risk needle spikes; we have lived through these cycles since 2023 all the way into mid-2025 after missiles struck near the airport, and the pattern is re-emerging as tensions rise today. When the overseas pipelines close, a de facto siege follows, even as Israeli carriers do their best to keep the airbridge open.

Civil defense is again front and center. Israel spent 2025 scrambling to harden the home front by adding mobile shelters, refurbishing old ones, and putting blast walls where gaps were obvious. That was a response to real salvos and painful lessons. The logic hasn’t changed. In a saturation scenario, seconds matter, concrete matters, discipline matters. And because not every neighborhood is equally protected, you once again see mobile shelters popping up in places with thin infrastructure – a blunt, necessary hedge against the next barrage. 

Why the urgency? Because the other side is reloading. Analysts across the spectrum assess that Iran has been working to rebuild and improve its ballistic missile force since last summer’s exchange. Some assessments argue that the stockpile and rate-of-fire could again challenge Israel’s layered defenses if a new round opens, particularly if salvos are shaped to complicate interception and to tax interceptor inventories. Volume, not just velocity, is the adversary. And Iran learnt quite a bit about Israeli missile defense last June.

This is the macro picture. The micro picture is my eighteen-year-old daughter doing national service in a town near the airport, texting to ask if tonight is the night. It’s the low growl of military turbofans at 2:00 a.m. over our roof and the reflex, learned last year, to leave the phone on, volume up, shoes by the door. It’s the new Israeli colloquial blessing: “Have a quiet evening,” which we now say with the gravity of a prayer. We’re not chasing drama. We’re hedging against physics.

I often write about defense in terms of first principles: cost of intercept, rate of fire, magazine depth. Those are still the right lenses. Against massed ballistic salvos, the equation starts ugly and gets uglier as the wave count rises. You don’t beat saturation with rhetoric; you beat it with geometry, automation, and logistics: more eyes, faster loops, smarter cueing, deeper magazines. But there is another variable we don’t talk about enough: stamina. National stamina. Civilian stamina. The stamina of an eighteen-year-old who goes to sleep without knowing how many times she’ll climb out of bed before dawn, who actually thinks that her father still has all the answers.

Readers abroad sometimes treat our reality like a geopolitical miniseries – compelling, confounding, and always renewed for another season. I get it; from a distance, it reads like a thriller. Up close, it is something else entirely. It is the choice to buy groceries a little earlier “just in case.” It is calculating the time from your kid’s bus stop to the nearest shelter. It is teaching your family that when G-d grants you ten seconds, you use all ten.

I don’t know what will happen in the coming days. I do know that deterrence is a conversation held in unmistakable tones, and everyone in this neighborhood is speaking loudly. The United States is moving pieces; Iran is warning in headlines; airlines are quietly voting with their flight plans; and Israelis are tightening their routines with the fluency of a people who, for all our arguments, know how to square up when the siren sounds.

Here we go again. May our preparations be sufficient, our leaders be wise, and our evenings be quiet. And may this one, at last, stick.

Good things,

Ari Sacher