A toothless Iran? Missile and drone strikes show it can still inflict pain

An Iranian strike on a US military base in Saudi Arabia, injuring two dozen troops. Two drones targeting a port in Oman, and a strike on the Kuwait International Airport. Workers at an aluminum facility in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, wounded by a missile and drone attack.

President Donald Trump has said that the United States has all but obliterated Iranian military capabilities, portraying Iran as a defanged adversary. The US military says that the number of attacks Iran has launched has declined by roughly 90 per cent from the opening days of the war, and the Israeli military says it has rendered roughly 70 per cent of Iran’s hundreds of missile launchers inoperable.

But a series of attacks against Israel and Persian Gulf countries in the past several days is only the latest evidence that Iran retains enough missiles and drones to destabilize the region and inflict a punishing cost on its foes, while signaling that, contrary to Trump’s declarations, it is still very much in the fight.

Millions of Israelis are still rushing into bomb shelters day and night to take cover from Iranian missile fire. The daily routine of sirens and booms sows fear and paralysis. Seven people were injured in central Israel on Thursday following missile barrages, according to the country’s emergency service. Surveillance video captured footage of two people rushing out of harm’s way before a silver car they were standing near exploded then pinwheeled through the air. On Friday, a Tel Aviv man was killed by a bomblet from a missile with a cluster-munition warhead.

Even when Iranian weapons are intercepted, they can still inflict damage. Two people were killed in Abu Dhabi on Thursday when they were struck by shrapnel falling from an intercepted missile.

The US-Israeli campaign has been very effective in attacking Iran’s leadership, killing many of them and destroying many military installations, and it has almost completely destroyed its air force and navy, said Farzin Nadimi, a security analyst at The Washington Institute who specializes in Iran and the Persian Gulf.

“In terms of optics, a sunken navy, totally obliterated air force is very important as a metric for victory,” he said. “But we all understand that the main metrics of success for Iran is to be able to continue to fire ballistic missiles and drones at Israel, at US bases and Gulf countries. And we know that they have still been able to do that.”

Iran still likely possesses thousands of Shahed drones and could still have hundreds of ballistic missiles despite American and Israeli strikes over the past four weeks, one US official said. But the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss military capabilities, cautioned that it is impossible to know for sure, as US intelligence on Iranian capability is limited.

Public statements from the US military have been carefully worded. For instance, Adm. Brad Cooper, commander of the US Central Command, said Wednesday that “Iran’s drone and missile launch rates are down 90 per cent,” courtesy of American and Israeli strikes. That is not the same thing as saying those strikes have eliminated 90 per cent of Iranian drones and missiles.

Kelly A Grieco, senior fellow at the Stimson Center, a foreign affairs research institute in Washington, says the number of strikes may not matter as much as how effectively Iran is using its arsenal.

Grieco has analyzed open-source data on Iran’s salvos and, while cautioning that the numbers are inexact, found that Iran’s hit rate has increased as the war has progressed, more than doubling since March 10.

“Adversaries adapt,” Grieco said. “There are signs here that we don’t have a defeated adversary and that we may have one that’s adapting and learning and doing enough damage to implement its strategy.”

The US military may have mistaken reduced activity for reduced capacity. Iran could have been firing fewer missiles and drones because it was repositioning them, she said, not because they were destroyed. The Iranians may have been slowing their pace of attack as they integrated new intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance information into their targeting decisions.

“This administration is very fixated on bombs dropped and on how much the strike volume is down for Iran. They love to say the 90 per cent number,” Grieco said. “Is that number obscuring that there has been a shift in Iran’s approach?’’

The wave of Iranian strikes showed no signs of letting up this weekend, with missiles and drones causing damage across the Gulf region, disabling a radar at the Kuwait airport and injuring a worker and damaging a crane at the Omani port. And the willingness of the Houthis to strike at Israel on Saturday suggests more firepower will be brought to bear against Iran’s enemies.

While Israel’s military says its air defenses have managed to intercept the vast majority of the ballistic missiles, Iran struck a symbolic blow last weekend when one crashed into the southern desert city of Dimona, barely 10 miles from Israel’s nuclear research facility and reactor, one of its most protected sites, injuring dozens.

Iran has also found an apparent chink in Israel’s armor by firing ballistic missiles with cluster-munition warheads at population centers that break open above ground, then disperse dozens of small bomblets across several miles.

The bomblets generally cause much less damage than a missile with a single large explosive charge, though on some occasions they have proved deadly.

The optimal way to neutralize such missiles is to intercept them above the atmosphere, where parts of the wreckage can burn up harmlessly, officials and experts said. Israel’s Arrow 3 interceptors that operate at such high altitudes are costly and in short supply, while lower-tier interceptions may not be able to stop the missiles before their warheads release their payload.

Iran’s capacity for retaliation during this war represents a quick recovery from the 12-day assault that Israel launched against it in June. After that round, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Israel had achieved “a historic victory” that would “stand for generations.” Iran’s ballistic missile production capability had been “destroyed,” the prime minister said.

If Israel had underestimated anything, analysts said, it was the speed with which Iran had begun to rebuild that capacity.

Like Israel, Iran did not sit idle after the June war but used the time to prepare for the next conflict.

“They had nine months, like we had, to sit and plan,” said Miri Eisin, a retired Israeli colonel. Iran’s capabilities were, and are, being “degraded” and “diminished,” which she said is as much as can be achieved in weeks of combat.

“Even though the US and Israelis have been pounding Iranian missile bases, staging areas, some factories, warehouses, they still have been able to launch missiles at a considerable number — around 20 to 30 missiles” a day, Nadimi of The Washington Institute said of the Iranians. “Some of them are very large liquid fuel or missiles that have a noticeable footprint before they are launched. And they still have been able to do that.”

That suggests, analysts said, that Iran has maintained access to the tunnels that lead to its underground “missile cities” and drone storage warehouses. Or, that the Iranians have secret missile bases that have managed to evade detection from US and Israeli intelligence efforts — though Nadimi said he thought that was less likely.

Farzan Sabet, an analyst of Iran and weapons systems at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland, agreed with Grieco’s analysis that while Iran was launching fewer missiles, they had higher penetration rates than at the beginning of the war. They also appeared to be threatening more sensitive or eye-catching targets — such as the Diego Garcia air base in the Indian Ocean, almost 2,500 miles away, or the strike on Dimona.

Earlier in the war, Iran’s ability to fire large barrages of missiles and drone attacks wreaked havoc on the Gulf and on global energy markets. But once that sense of insecurity and instability has been created, he said, “you don’t need to have, thousands or even hundreds of launches a day. You might be able to do that with dozens of successful penetrations.”