Why Iran relies on ballistic missiles to threaten its adversaries

Iran’s missile strike against Israel was its largest yet, forcing Israelis to take shelter for almost an hour as missile impacts boomed near military bases and Tel Aviv. Iran’s choice of weapon, the ground-fired ballistic missile, reflects the distance between the adversaries and the decline of its air force in the decades since the revolution.

Iran fired an estimated 181 ballistic missiles at Israel on Tuesday. While most were intercepted by Israel’s air defenses, with help from the US Navy, some impacted, causing minor damage. Iran used more ballistic missiles than the 120 it launched during its April barrage, its first direct attack on Israel.

“Iran uses ballistic missiles as a replacement for aircraft and it has become increasingly sophisticated in using guiding systems to strike distant targets,” Nicholas Heras, senior director of strategy and innovation at the New Lines Institute, told Business Insider.

Iran and Israel are separated by roughly 800 miles and two countries, Jordan and Iraq. Ballistic missiles can traverse this distance in minutes and in a large attack, like Tuesday’s, stretch Israel’s cutting-edge air defenses. Iran has also shown a preference for firing ballistic missiles against less-defended targets closer to home.

“Iran’s large-scale combat use of conventional ballistic missiles in, shall we say, quasi-peace time is unprecedented,” Sebastien Roblin, a widely published military-aviation journalist, told BI.

Since 2017, Iran has also used its ballistic missiles against ISIS in Syria, following terrorist attacks in Iran and, on one occasion, alleged militant targets in Pakistan. In January 2020, it targeted an Iraqi airbase hosting US troops following the assassination of a top Iranian commander, leaving over 100 American troops with traumatic brain injuries. In January 2024, Tehran even used ballistic missiles to destroy a businessman’s residence in neighboring Iraqi Kurdistan.

“Perhaps Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would argue they are using missiles and drones in the way the US has used air strikes and Tomahawk cruise missiles against regional adversaries,” Roblin said. “The US, of course, has a much greater ability to deliver accurate strikes than Iran does with its longer-range missiles.”

Iran once had the most advanced fighter jets in the Middle East besides Israel, including the US-built F-14 Tomcat. After the Islamic revolution in 1979, Iran invested more heavily in ballistic missiles and drones and neglected the air force, which became outdated over the intervening decades; it still flies aircraft like the F-4 Phantom II and the F-14 that the US retired decades ago. Its recent order of Su-35 Flanker fighters from Russia, which remain undelivered, marks its first fighter aircraft acquisition in over 30 years and could bolster the country’s beleaguered air defenses.

Using ballistic missiles instead of fighter jets carries significantly less risk.

“An airplane crashed or shot down is a humiliating news story, particularly in peacetime — a shot down or missed missile isn’t,” Roblin said. “Iran’s approach broadly has been to expose its jet fighters and bombers to as little risk as possible.”

Iran used more than one ballistic missile type on Tuesday. IRGC media claims that Iran launched its less accurate liquid-fueled Emads to engage Israel’s interceptor missiles, possibly in an attempt to overwhelm those defenses so its more powerful missiles — like the Kheybar Shekan and Fattah solid-fueled missiles — could reach their targets.

“Assuming that Iran utilized the Fattah series of ballistic missiles in the attack, it would be a strong and clear signal from Iran that it was willing and capable to use its more advanced capabilities to strike at Israel,” New Lines Institute’s Heras said.

The Israeli military confirmed Wednesday that the missiles that damaged several air bases and 100 homes and that Iran used the most advanced missiles in its arsenal. Iran claims the Fattah-1 reportedly used in the attack is hypersonic. Israeli Air Force and intelligence officials have said there are no indications of hypersonic missiles in the strike, a class of the most advanced missiles that maneuver to evade air defenses after re-entering the atmosphere.

The two strikes on Israel this year and the one against US troops in Iraq in 2020 were undoubtedly the most high-stakes attacks involving Iranian missiles. The latest one appears to have killed a Palestinian man in the West Bank, but no other fatalities have been reported in what Roblin said was a combination of luck, early warnings and effective air defenses.

“This seemingly has encouraged Tehran to further wield missile attacks as a big stick, perhaps misestimating (or not caring) how close they came to triggering more destructive retribution.”

For the US, the missiles will undoubtedly represent a threat to their forces in the region. The troops attacked in Iraq in 2020 had no Patriot missile defenses on their base to protect them; a lesson likely heeded in subsequent years. The US was revealed to have a Patriot system deployed in Iraqi Kurdistan when it shot down at least one of the Iranian missiles heading toward Israel during the April attack.

“Iran is becoming adept at ‘tack driving’ or accurately firing ballistic missiles against a variety of targets and this represents a clear threat to US forces housed in the Middle East,” Heras said.

“The reality is that Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities are forcing the US military to devote a significant amount of surveillance assets to identify when Iran is in a posture to attack with ballistic missiles, and to shoot the missiles down.”

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