Report questions true threat of Iran’s missile capabilities

A report by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies has questioned the true scale of the threat posed by Iran’s ballistic missiles to Israel and potentially other regional countries.

Based on the April assault on Israel in which around 350 missiles, rockets and drones were fired towards the Jewish state, the fact most were intercepted by Israel and a US-coalition, shows only “some ability to strike Israel”, said Sam Lair, from the center.

Speaking to the Associated Press, he said: “If I were supreme leader, I would probably be a little disappointed.”

Lair said that if Iranian missiles are not able to hit targets precisely “that recasts their role”. He added: “They’re no longer as valuable for conducting conventional military operations. They may be more valuable simply as terror weapons.”

The report comes as Iran’s shadow war with Israel has once again peaked in the wake of the assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July.

Though Israel has not claimed responsibility, it is believed to have been an Israeli missile strike from inside Iran’s borders.

Since the assassination, Iran has threatened to retaliate, but has waited several weeks in a bid to heighten the psychological war against its arch-enemy who is currently in the midst of a multi-front war with Iran’s proxies.

April’s assault was triggered by an alleged Israeli airstrike at the Iranian consulate in Damascus, killing a senior Quds Force commander and several other senior military personnel.

But its retaliation fell short of expectations, with claims from Iran of hitting the Nevatim Air Base falling flat. Instead of hitting the valuable fighter jets and military assets, the attack merely dented some holes in the runway, as seen by footage released by the Israeli military, showing that at least four missiles hit the base.

A team of experts from the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies examined the alleged strike on the base, 65 kilometers south of Jerusalem in the Negev Desert, and said the only debris found in the area, collected from the Dead Sea, suggests Iran used Emad missiles to target Nevatim, the analysts told AP.

The liquid-fueled Emad, or “pillar” in Farsi, is a variant of Iran’s Shahab-3 missile built from a North Korean design with a reported range of 2,000 kilometers. That indicates the Emads were likely fired from the Shiraz area, which is within the estimated limits of the missile’s likely capabilities, the report said.

Based on Iran’s focus on the F-35I, the James Martin analysts assumed the likely target point for the Iranian fire would be a cluster of aircraft hangars. That offers “a much more valuable target” than just “poking holes in the runway,” Lair said. But none of the Iranian missiles directly hit those hangars.

Assuming Iran targeted the hangars, the James Martin analysts measured the distance between the hangars and the impact zones of the missiles. It gave an average of about 1.2 kilometers for the “circular error probable”, a measurement used by experts to determine a weapon’s accuracy based on the radius of a circle that encompasses 50 percent of where the missiles landed.

“This means the Emad is much less accurate than previous estimates indicated,” Lair said. “This indicates the Iranians are a generation behind where previous assessments thought they were in accuracy.”

Former British paratrooper and former Sandhurst senior lecturer, Andrew Fox, said Iran’s capability “is a paper tiger”.

“This is why they created their network of proxies and why the regime so desperately want nuclear weapons,” he said, speaking from Israel. “We know their capabilities from the Iraq-Iran war. They are no match for Israel’s military firepower and defensive strength.”

While Iran’s leaders continue to threaten a follow-up to April’s attack, he said it would be nothing more than “embarrassing”, and risk drawing the US into the battle.

“A far more likely method of revenge against Israel for the Haniyeh assassination is for Iran to use their proxies to stoke tensions in the West Bank and try to create a third intifada,” he said.

US intelligence agencies said in a report in July that Iran has “the largest inventory of ballistic missiles in the region and continues to emphasize improving the accuracy, lethality and reliability of these systems”.

The report from the director of national intelligence also said “Iran probably is incorporating lessons learned” from the April attack.

However, Behnam Ben Taleblu, an American Iranian and a senior fellow at the NGO, the Foundation of Defense of Democracies (FDD), told Iran International that while Iran's progress in its missile program should be looked at in the context of the maturity of the program, it cannot be downplayed.

“In the past few years people have been talking about Iran’s advances, in range and precision, but it has to be seen as relative in terms of the program and capabilities.

“Over the last decade, the missile attacks had not faced defended targets like the April attack against Israel. Never had Iran launched ballistic missiles from its own territory against Israel or against a defended target, and at that long range."

During the Iran-Iraq War, following the West's refusal to help build Iran's capabilities, Tehran significantly ramped up its missile program.

Many strikes have been launched by Iran but the targeted nations have often remained silent either due to a lack of military capability or an unwillingness to respond, as seen in Iraq and Syria. Notably, Pakistan stood out for its swift and decisive response to an Iranian missile attack.

He said the latest report, while important, reads like "more of the same" to those following Iran's progress closely. "It’s an indictment of the medium range systems that employ liquid propellant rather than the short range ones employing solid propellant," he said.

Iran’s medium range, nuclear capability missiles, remain weapons of terror, but with the capability to improve over time, he said, "though that hasn’t been brought to bear yet".

“If we see it as a nuclear delivery vehicle, we must still mention that four to seven missiles still reached Israel. Even if one of those had a nuclear warhead, it could be a game changer. So all of this has to be taken into account."