Last Monday at the White House, President Donald Trump declared that destroying Iran's missile capabilities was one of the main objectives of American attacks on the country.
However, identifying and destroying Iran's entire ballistic missile arsenal, as well as their production facilities, could prove particularly difficult for the US and Israeli militaries, which launched joint attacks on Iran on February 28.
Airstrikes alone cannot “destroy” the plans and technical know-how to build these weapons. Iran has shown the ability to secure the equipment needed to restart production lines, placing at least some of them underground in fortified facilities.
The Iranians have also shown that they can disassemble their ballistic missiles into smaller parts, which are more easily transported covertly to proxy forces, and then reassembled for use, a factor that makes it even more difficult to identify all the missiles.
Data from January showed that after the 12-day war last June, Iran had massively rebuilt its ballistic missile program. US Central Command announced on Sunday that it had used B-2 stealth bombers to strike “ballistic missile sites” with 2.000-pound bombs.
General Dan Kane acknowledged on Monday that these facilities were located underground.
For decades, Iran has developed a wide range of missiles that can hit targets far beyond its borders, including ballistic missiles that fly high into the atmosphere and then exploit gravity to reach speeds many times faster than the speed of sound.
Iran's longest-range ballistic missile can hit targets up to about 1.931 kilometers away.
In 2019, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported that Iran had "the largest and most diverse arsenal of ballistic missiles in the Middle East."
On Sunday, Israel claimed to have destroyed about 200 Iranian ballistic missile launchers and damaged dozens more, but Iranian forces continue to fire ballistic missiles at neighboring countries. In Washington, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Monday that the United States will continue to strike Iran until its objectives are achieved, including destroying Iran's ballistic capabilities.
Tom Caraco, said in an interview: "The military is doing everything it can to hit these targets. We likely have a good idea where they are, but the ability to neutralize them all and then verify after the attack that you hit them will be difficult, especially from the air."
He added that eliminating underground missiles and production facilities could require sending American or Israeli special forces into the field to inspect known or suspected locations.
From 1987 to 2019, the US was bound by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, and as a result, it left behind many of the Pentagon’s non-nuclear missiles. After the US and Russia withdrew from the treaty, the Pentagon was given the opportunity to develop new ballistic missiles such as the Precision Strike Missile, which has test-flown beyond the previously prohibited 499 km range.
Unlike the US, Iran, which was never a party to the INF treaty, has built an arsenal of ballistic missiles categorized as “short-range” (48–306 km), “short-range” (306–998 km), and “medium-range” up to 1.996 km.
In his State of the Union address, Donald Trump expressed concern that Iran could develop intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), but US intelligence assessments say Iran is at least a decade away from developing ICBMs.
The 2019 DIA report explained that Iran develops missiles in part because it lacks a modern air force. The missiles provide long-range strike capabilities to deter regional adversaries, particularly the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, from attacking Iran.
One of the clearest examples of the Iranian missile program is the capture of small ships illegally transporting weapons to Houthi fighters in Yemen.
According to a February 2024 DIA report, between 2015 and 2023, US and Yemeni forces intercepted 18 ships carrying Iranian weapons, including ballistic missiles, to the Houthis. The Houthis' arsenal included Iranian Fateh-110 (306 km), Qiam-1 (1.207 km), and Shahab-3 (1.931 km) missiles.
The 2019 DIA report emphasized that Tehran's desire for a "strategic balance" against the US could lead to a future ICBM development effort.
The focus on identifying and destroying ballistic missiles from the air is not new to the Pentagon. During Operation Desert Storm in 1991, the US military created a special team to locate Iraqi small Scud missiles, but the effort had “little success,” according to a CIA report. Allied pilots, the report says, “were overly optimistic” about the success of Scud-tracking missions. /Panorama
edition
t7 live
