Key Points – Israel’s recent precision strikes against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, likely carried out by its F-35I “Adir” stealth fighters, demonstrated the aircraft’s critical role as a strategic equalizer.
-While based on the F-35, the warplane is only flown by Israel. The U.S. Air Force doesn’t even fly the Adir.
-The F-35I—an Israeli-adapted variant with unique electronic warfare systems, longer range, and indigenous weapons integration—successfully penetrated heavily defended airspace to hit key facilities, a feat that stalled diplomacy could not achieve.
-This act of preemptive self-defense, executed with chilling precision, not only recalibrated Iran’s nuclear ambitions but also sent a clear message to other adversaries like North Korea about the potency of advanced, fifth-generation air power when wielded with strategic resolve.
Israel’s F-35I Adir Stealth Fighter Quietly Crippled Iran’s Nuclear Program
The warplanes that most likely turned parts of Iran’s nuclear weapons infrastructure into molten wreckage were not hypothetical sixth-generation prototypes. They weren’t space-based, drone-swarming, or AI-directed.
They were real aircraft – Israeli F-35I Adirs – and they appear to have done what no other fighter has ever done: penetrated one of the world’s most heavily defended airspaces, struck targets of strategic consequence, and exited without detection, interception, or attribution.
It is now clear, if it wasn’t already, that the F-35I Adir is not just a status symbol. It is the tip of the spear.
As of June 14, 2025, the Israeli government has struck hard, and that looks like the handy work of the F-35I Adir.
The IAEA confirmed serious damage to critical nuclear infrastructure, including centrifuge assembly halls and uranium conversion facilities.
Iranian state media blamed “foreign aggression” while scrambling to contain political fallout. And open-source analysts spotted the telltale signs: limited explosions, zero radar signature, and no intercepted aircraft debris – just enough evidence to suggest that an Israeli fifth-generation ghost squadron came and went like a breeze through a crack in the door. It’s the kind of strike Israel has long prepared for, trained for, and – despite constant threats – resisted until the strategic conditions aligned.
What Makes the F-35I Adir Special
This wasn’t about vengeance. It wasn’t about headlines. It was about denying Iran the ability to cross the nuclear threshold, permanently or at least long enough to buy time. And the Adir likely made it possible.
The F-35I Adir is not a standard F-35. It’s an Israeli-adapted variant built for operations in precisely the kind of mission profile we just witnessed. Longer legs. Indigenous weapons. Modified avionics. Enhanced electronic warfare. Crucially, it is integrated seamlessly into Israel’s national command structure, unconstrained by the shackles that bind so many other Western air forces to multilateral decision-making or American export restrictions. Israel owns these jets—technically, tactically, and strategically. And when it came time to act, it did so with chilling precision.
What’s remarkable is not just that the operation succeeded, but that it was executed with such poise. This was not the messy spectacle of the 2007 strike on Syria’s Al Kibar reactor, nor the clumsy sabotage operations that characterized past Israeli efforts to slow Iran’s nuclear program. This was clean. Surgical. Humbling. And it was made possible by a weapons platform that has been ridiculed, politicized, and misunderstood for over a decade.
Why Nations Need to Buy F-35 Fighters
For years, critics across the West – especially in Canada, where I’ve written extensively on our own dithering over the F-35 – have dismissed the Joint Strike Fighter as a budgetary black hole, a Cold War relic in stealthy clothing, or worse, an American leash masquerading as a fighter jet.
But Israel just demonstrated why all of that talk was always beside the point. The F-35 is not a showpiece. It is a capability. And when in the right hands—hands that understand the limits of diplomacy and the logic of preemption – it can be a strategic equalizer.
Some will say this sets a dangerous precedent. That it undermines non-proliferation norms or threatens regional stability. But these arguments miss the core truth of the matter: nuclear deterrence only stabilizes when it is matched by credible conventional deterrence and, when necessary, limited preemptive force. Iran was never going to be dissuaded by negotiations alone. Its calculus was always shaped by the perception of risk. That perception has now been recalibrated.
The implications extend far beyond the Middle East. North Korea is surely watching. Pyongyang, long thought immune to conventional strike due to geography and fortification, now sees a sobering example of how even the most hardened programs are vulnerable to a platform like the Adir – especially when wielded with discipline and clarity of purpose. And make no mistake: North Korea’s strategic modernization program, which has recently featured successful tests of solid-fuel ICBMs, hypersonic glide vehicles, and tactical nuclear delivery systems, is aimed at exploiting Western passivity and disunity. Israel just reminded the world what active deterrence actually looks like.
It’s not a stretch to imagine how this affects deterrence dynamics in Northeast Asia. South Korea and Japan, both now flying variants of the F-35, may begin thinking more seriously about strategic autonomy, preemption doctrines, and the role of stealth platforms in blunting North Korea’s accelerating nuclear and missile capabilities. There is a reason Pyongyang reacted with such immediate fury to the news of the Iranian strike. It knows what this means. So should we.
The F-35I Adir Provides a Powerful Example
The message is equally stark for those in the West still under the illusion that hard power no longer matters. Canada, in particular, must reckon with this. After years of hand-wringing, half-measures, and procurement paralysis, Ottawa has finally committed to the F-35 – but our forces won’t see a fully capable operational fleet until the end of the decade, and even that is an optimistic projection. Meanwhile, we face the same world Israel does: a world where great powers play for keeps, where peer and near-peer adversaries use ambiguity and tempo to reshape regions, and where second-rate airpower is indistinguishable from no airpower at all.
The Adir strike should serve as a wake-up call. You don’t deter a future North Korean provocation, or defend the Canadian Arctic, or contribute meaningfully to allied operations in the North Atlantic or Indo-Pacific, with fourth-generation fighters and a strategic culture stuck in the 1990s. You do it with hard power. With modern weapons. With will.
The strike also explodes the myth that F-35s are politically paralyzing. For Israel, the platform has enhanced—not diminished—its strategic sovereignty. It did not have to ask permission to fly. It did not have to assemble a coalition of the willing. It acted. Quietly. And now the global balance of threat has shifted, however slightly, as a result. This is not escalation for its own sake. It is an act of restraint—restraint sharpened into steel, guided by necessity, and executed with a minimum of collateral chaos. That is what deterrence looks like in the 21st century.
Stealth Rules
Those who continue to see airpower as a relic, or the F-35 as a sunk cost, are missing the bigger picture. The F-35I Adir did not just likely carry out a mission. It signaled the return of airpower as a tool of strategic decision—not in the abstract, but in the real world of contested skies and hard choices. In an age of multipolar disorder, it reminded us that freedom of action is the ultimate currency of power—and that the ability to act, swiftly and precisely, remains the foundation of security.
What happened in Iran is not an anomaly. It is the beginning of a new phase in international affairs, one where denial, deception, and defense are no longer enough to guarantee survival.
The future belongs to those who can strike first, fly unseen, and still control the escalation ladder afterward.
That future has arrived. And it arrived on the wings of the F-35I Adir.
About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham
Andrew Latham is a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities and a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. You can follow him on X: @aakatham.
Iran War
B-2 Bomber: How America Would Strike Iran
Pingback: Israel's Dolphin-Class Submarines Summed Up in 2 Words - National Security Journal
Pingback: How to Ensure Iran Never Gets the Bomb After Israel's Strike - National Security Journal
Pingback: Forget the Iran War: The F-35 Stealth Fighter Has 'Engine Problems' - National Security Journal