Iran Shows Its Ballistic Missiles Are Still a Force to Reckon With

The strike on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base on Friday that killed two U.S. servicemembers was likely carried out by Tehran’s most effective missiles, including the Kheibar Shekan medium-range system, military analysts said. That missile system and others were housed in vast underground facilities that the U.S. and Israel spent weeks pounding in March and April. Since then, Iran has dug out the openings and resumed firing from some of the bases, analysts said.

That underscored the continuing challenge the U.S. is facing: More than a week after resuming airstrikes against Iran, it has been unable to quell Tehran’s ability to strike back. U.S. forces struck military targets in Iran on Tuesday night, marking the 11th consecutive night of attacks, U.S. Central Command said on social media.

It was the fourth Iranian attack in five days on U.S. troops in Jordan, an indication that Tehran hasn’t exhausted its missile stocks and might have become better at evading U.S. air-defense systems, military analysts said.

For Iran, the goal is to raise the cost to the U.S. of prolonging the conflict, hoping that Trump will back away from his threats to escalate the war once again and renegotiate a settlement that leaves Tehran in control of the Strait of Hormuz.

“Iran’s incremental scorched-earth policy against the Arab world is designed to get America to back out of the region, not to double down,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior director of the Iran program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters in April that Iran’s missile program was “functionally destroyed” with launchers and missiles “depleted and decimated and almost completely ineffective.” Trump said last month that only 21% of Iran’s prewar missile stockpile remained, though he acknowledged that it was “still a lot.”

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D., Ga.) sharply questioned Hegseth on Tuesday during an Appropriations Committee hearing about statements in April that the U.S. had achieved its objectives in the war, including to “obliterate Iran’s missile threat.” Hegseth replied: “We never expected they would stop having capabilities to shoot. The question is at scale against an opponent like the United States of America.”

With a range of at least 900 miles, the Kheibar Shekan was introduced in 2022 and has solid fuel and a satellite-guidance system. Iran has claimed it has a maneuverable re-entry warhead to evade air defenses. A video issued in recent days by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which oversees Iran’s missile forces, said the latest attacks also included Fattah, Zolfaghar, Fateh-110, and Qiam ballistic missiles, as well as Shahed drones and Paveh cruise missiles.

Tom Karako, a missile expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the continuing attacks highlight the difficulty of defending against missile attacks from an adversary that has spent years studying the U.S. military.

“The Iranians, having watched decades of how America fights, have built an overall infrastructure that is designed to ride out” a war with the U.S., he said.

That the missiles were able to slip through U.S. air defenses points to the challenges in protecting the estimated 50,000 troops stationed in the region, even though Iran is shooting fewer missiles in its salvos than it did earlier in the war.

Ran Kochav, a former commander of Israel’s air and missile defense forces, said it was likely more missiles are getting through because of damage to radars and other air-defense systems from Iranian attacks earlier in the war, he said.

“Their radars are exposed; their infrastructure is exposed,” he said, noting that radars and air-defense batteries in Jordan and in Gulf countries were hit in the first phase of the war.

Iran’s so-called missile cities were key targets early in the war. War planes and armed drones circled over the cavernous bases, striking missile-carrying launchers when they emerged to fire. Meanwhile, waves of heavy bombers and Tomahawk cruise missiles were used to attack tunnel openings at the sites, entombing the Iranian weapons below ground in some locations.

Iran has used the ceasefire to rebuild. In multiple missile base locations throughout the country, Iran has been setting new roads and reinforcing tunnel entrances, according to Ben Tzion Macales, an Israeli geo-analyst who has studied commercial satellite images of the sites.

One attack in the early days of the war inflicted heavy blows to an Iranian missile base north of the city of Kermanshah. Multiple buildings were turned to rubble, and munitions left large craters where access roads previously led to tunnels bored deep in a mountain. By the first week of June, crews had repaired the two roads, enabling trucks, visible on satellite images, to clear dirt and work on reopening the collapsed tunnel entrances.

“They can go after the tunnel entrances, but as we’ve seen, the Iranians can take those out with their engineering teams relatively quickly and get back to operations,” said Jim Lamson, a visiting research fellow at King’s College London and former Central Intelligence Agency analyst focusing on the Iranian military.

The missiles fired at Jordan likely came from a base near the city Tabriz or other bases in western Iran that have resumed operations, said Nicole Grajewski, an expert on Iranian strategy at Sciences Po in Paris.

“It means that Iran was able to replenish its missiles or maybe dig out some of the ones that were in the bases, and they clearly still have some of their more efficient missiles,” she said.

Write to David S. Cloud at [email protected], Anat Peled at [email protected] and Milàn Czerny at [email protected]