Over the last year, Air Force Chief Maj.-Gen. Tomer Bar ordered the assassination of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, decimated Hezbollah's strategic missiles and rockets, as well as bombing much of the Assad Syria regime's threatening weapons, Iran's nuclear program, and the Houthis in Yemen, and kept up a steady string of attacks on Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists who got too careless to show their faces in public.
Of course, the Israel Air Force never acts alone. IDF intelligence units 8200, 9900, or 504, or the Mossad, or the Shin Bet always supply it with information.
But overall, the combination of all of the above air force attacks helped return an aura of supremacy to the IAF – which Bar commands – and which had taken a huge dent after it did little to stop Hamas's October 7 invasion.
That does not mean that the IAF and Bar are perfect.
IAF strike on Qatar
Results from the recent attack on Hamas officials in Qatar seem to be mixed. Potentially, the operation could even be considered a failure.
If the top Hamas leaders were not killed, it is possible that this was due to a failure in Israeli intelligence, and anything that would have been within the ability of the air force to rectify.
But if the bomb they dropped was not large enough to take out the Hamas leaders, given a variety of rooms those leaders might be in, then some of the blame may be placed on the air force also.
After all of the above, there is no doubt that the IAF, under Bar's leadership, has altered the course of history on several of Israel's fronts, and he will be one of the new officials who were in office on October 7 whose reputation remains strong.
No. 14: Jan Koum, Michael Dell, Bill Ackman, Marc Benioff, Larry Ellison, Michael Bloomberg >>