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How Iran’s two-week retaliatory strikes exposed cracks in US military architecture in Persian Gulf

By Mohammad Molaei | Press TV | October 18, 2026

The two-week exchange of fire between the United States and Iran, triggered by Washington’s attempt to force open an illegal southern corridor through the Strait of Hormuz, represented the most consequential direct military confrontation between them since the 40-day war.

The Iranian response to the unprovoked and illegal American aggression was not a chaotic escalation but a methodical, layered military campaign that drew on years of doctrinal development, weapons investment, and operational planning.

The efforts of the Islamic Republic’s armed forces, spearheaded by the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) aerospace and naval branches, executed a decisive and swift response.

What unfolded was a layered operation with nine distinct but interlocking lines of effort. Each line reinforced the others. Infrastructure degradation reduced American operational tempo; area denial forced repositioning that compounded the effects of that degradation; extended-range precision strikes demonstrated that repositioning offered no sanctuary; ISR attrition blinded American targeting systems; terrorist suppression closed the land flank, while strikes on utility infrastructure imposed costs on host nations and denied services to American bases.

One can employ the open-source reporting, satellite imagery, and the observable pattern of strikes to examine each dimension of Iran’s military response in detail, and construct a coherent operational picture. It is getting exceedingly clear that the ceasefire period has very likely translated to a window for reconstitution and preparation in Iranian strategic calculus.

The primacy of solid-fuel tactical ballistic missiles

Iran’s decision to anchor its retaliatory campaign in solid-fuel tactical ballistic missiles was not accidental. It reflected a decade-long investment in a specific capability designed precisely for this kind of confrontation. Solid-fuel ballistic missiles offer decisive operational advantages over their liquid-fuel predecessors. They require no fueling time at the launch site, dramatically compressing the window between a launch order and missile departure.

This matters enormously in a sensitive environment where adversary assets, particularly MQ-9 Reaper drones and maritime patrol aircraft, are actively hunting for launch preparations.

A liquid-fuel missile requires a visible, time-consuming fueling sequence that creates a detectable signature. A solid-fuel missile can be transported, erected, and fired in a fraction of that time, often before a targeting solution can be developed and a strike authorized.

These missiles are road-mobile, launched from transporter-erector-launchers (TELs) that can disperse across Iran’s mountainous terrain, making pre-emptive targeting extremely difficult.

Having destroyed much of the air defense systems belonging to the US and its Arab allies using the older, less sophisticated liquid fuel missiles in previous wars, Iran’s strikes this time primarily relied on its tactical solid-fuel ballistic missile inventory, meaning the various variants of the Fateh family.

Simply put, the choice of solid-fuel systems reflected a calculated assessment of the adversary’s weakened interception capacity, an assessment that proved accurate.

The air defense inventory crisis

Perhaps the single most consequential factor shaping the operational environment was the state of US and allied air defense missile inventories.

The United States entered this round of military aggression with critically depleted stocks of its most capable interceptors. The Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) and Standard Missile-6 (SM-6), which arm Aegis-equipped destroyers and cruisers and provide the American Navy’s primary ballistic missile defense capability at sea, have been drawn down through a combination of expenditure in the Red Sea campaign against Yemen, the costly defense of Israel during two previous wars, and the simple reality that production rates have never kept pace with consumption.

The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, which provides upper-tier defense against medium and intermediate-range ballistic missiles, is similarly constrained.

The decision not to employ Aegis and THAAD at full capacity was therefore a forced one. The United States simply could not spend its remaining meager inventory of SM-3 and THAAD interceptors against Iranian tactical ballistic missiles, which, while accurate and damaging, are not the only threats to American interests.

Doing so would have left the United States strategically exposed against another serious contingency in East Asia or Europe. The calculus was that American military bases had to absorb more hits to preserve the interceptors.

Moreover, the Patriot system, which bore the brunt of terminal-phase defense in recent weeks across the region, was in no better condition. Years of expenditure across Ukraine, the occupied territories, the Persian Gulf, and the Red Sea mission have drawn PAC-3 and PAC-3 MSE stocks to extremely low levels.

The Pentagon’s response was telling. Rather than accelerating full-capability PAC-3 MSE production, it has chosen to pursue the cheaper, less capable PAC-3ACE Cost Reduction Initiative variant. More revealing still were the recent PAC-2 GEM-T orders, an older interceptor not procured by the US in decades, signaling just how severely stocks had been exhausted.

That the world’s most sophisticated air defense enterprise was compelled to resurrect a 1990s-era design to sustain basic readiness is the starkest indicator of the American munitions crisis that Iranian planners appear to have understood, measured, and exploited with precision.

The situation among Persian Gulf states was equally dire. Saudi Arabia and the UAE had expended substantial portions of their Patriot PAC-3 interceptor stocks during years of Yemeni military missile and drone attacks, and entered the 40-day imposed war with depleted inventories. The situation is even direr in Kuwait and Bahrain, with the Persian Gulf microstates effectively running out of Patriots, being forced to solely rely on American-operated systems.

PAC-3, the most capable variant of the Patriot system against ballistic missiles, has effectively been exhausted in several batteries. PAC-2, the older and less capable variant, is the only available option in certain areas against Iranian missiles, and even that missile is running low as well. The collective air defense architecture of the Persian Gulf states, which had appeared formidable on paper, has been effectively hollowed out.

Iranian operational planners were aware of these facts. The sequencing and volume of Iranian missile salvos during the exchange reflected a deliberate attempt to exploit the gap between what the defense could theoretically intercept and what it could actually intercept given real-world inventory constraints.

Iran’s multi-layered operational strategy

What distinguished Iran’s response from a simple missile barrage was its architectural coherence. Iranian planners did not merely fire missiles at American targets; they executed a phased, multi-domain retaliatory campaign with distinct operational objectives at each stage, each phase creating the conditions for the next.

The campaign can be understood as having five interlocking lines of effort: infrastructure degradation, area denial and operational displacement, precision strike at extended range, ISR and logistics attrition, and proxy terrorist force suppression.

Together, they constituted a campaign design far more sophisticated than most Western analysts had publicly credited Iran with possessing.

The overarching logic was one of progressive operational constriction. Rather than attempting to destroy US forces – an objective beyond Iran’s reach given American conventional superiority – the campaign aimed to degrade, displace, and exhaust them.

Each successful strike reduced American operational capacity; forced repositioning that consumed time and resources, and demonstrated to regional partners that proximity to American occupation forces carried real costs.

Infrastructure degradation

The first phase of the Iranian retaliatory campaign targeted the physical infrastructure of American military power in the Persian Gulf region. This was not indiscriminate bombardment. Satellite imagery and post-strike assessments revealed a pattern of targeting that prioritized specific high-value nodes: radar installations, fuel and ammunition storage facilities, maintenance hangars, and communications infrastructure.

Radar systems were a particular priority. The ability to detect, track, and target Iranian missiles and UAVs depends on a layered network of radar systems. By striking radar installations at air bases, Iran degraded the situational awareness that underpins both offensive operations and defensive intercepts. A radar that is destroyed or forced offline creates a coverage gap that cascades through the entire air defense architecture.

Before-and-after imagery of an AN/FPS-117 early warning radar installation at Ahmad al-Jaber Air Base, Kuwait, showing structural damage

Logistics infrastructure was targeted with equal deliberateness. Fuel depots, ammunition storage sites, and maintenance facilities at American bases around the Persian Gulf were struck with sufficient accuracy to cause meaningful operational disruption.

An air force that cannot fuel its aircraft, rearm them, or repair battle damage cannot sustain sortie rates. The targeting of logistics was a direct attack on the tempo of American air operations to derail the American aggression against Iranian sites and reduce the pressure on Iranian forces.

The accuracy of these strikes, achieved at ranges of several hundred kilometers, validated the operational utility of Iran’s solid-fuel ballistic missile force and demonstrated that the IRGC aerospace force had developed the targeting data, launch procedures, and quality control necessary to achieve consistent results against fixed infrastructure.

The anti-access/area denial campaign

The most strategically significant dimension of the Iranian retaliatory campaign was its systematic execution of an Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) strategy that progressively pushed American air operations out of the Persian Gulf and into increasingly distant and operationally constrained locations.

The logic of A2/AD in this context was straightforward. The closer American aircraft operate to Iran, the shorter their flight times, the larger their payloads, the less refueling they require, and the more sorties they can generate per day.

Conversely, every additional hundred kilometers of distance imposes compounding costs: greater tanker support, longer mission times, reduced payload, increased crew fatigue, and more complex coordination. By rendering the Persian Gulf operationally untenable for American air assets, Iran systematically degraded the offensive capacity of the aggressors.

The first displacement was from the Persian Gulf itself. Sustained missile and drone attacks against air bases made sustained operations from those locations unfeasible. The American response was to shift primary air operations to bases in Jordan – Al-Azraq and Muwaffaq Salti –which offered greater distance from Iranian missile systems.

Iran’s response was to extend its reach to Jordan. Multiple strikes against American bases, documented by US casualties and satellite imagery showing damaged hangars and destroyed aircraft, demonstrated that Iran had the capability to contest operations from that distance.

The retaliatory strikes destroyed American aircraft, damaged infrastructure, and forced the US war machine to reconsider the viability of Jordan as a primary operating location.

The second displacement was to the occupied territories. American air assets, including tanker aircraft critical to sustaining long-range strike operations, were pushed further west to Israeli military bases.

This displacement carried its own operational costs. The distance from Iranian targets increased further, and the concentration of American assets in the occupied territories created its own targeting opportunities for Iran, which has demonstrated both the willingness and capability to strike at extended ranges.

A particularly telling indicator of this displacement dynamic was the repositioning of the RQ-4 Global Hawk strategic reconnaissance aircraft, which had been operating from Al Dhafra in the UAE and from Jordanian facilities, to Sigonella Naval Air Station in Sicily.

The Global Hawk, with its long endurance and high-altitude sensors, is a critical ISR asset for tracking Iranian missile launches and providing targeting data. Its displacement to Sicily represented a dramatic reduction in persistent surveillance coverage over Iran and the Persian Gulf, with direct consequences for the effectiveness of American strike operations.

A qualitative leap in extended-range precision

One of the most significant revelations of the recent round of US aggression and Iran’s retaliation was the demonstrated accuracy of Iranian ballistic missiles at ranges exceeding 1,000 kilometers. Previous assessments of Iranian ballistic missile accuracy had generally been skeptical about the ability to achieve consistent precision at such distances. The strikes on Jordanian targets, located well over 1,000 kilometers from Iranian launch sites, completely shattered that skepticism.

The circular error probable (CEP) – the radius within which 50 percent of strikes fall – observed in the Jordanian strikes was dramatically smaller than what Iranian missiles had previously demonstrated at comparable ranges. Strikes that hit specific buildings, specific aircraft shelters, and specific sections of structures, rather than simply landing somewhere on a base, indicated a qualitative improvement in guidance accuracy that demands explanation.

Several hypotheses present themselves, and the evidence suggests that the answer likely involves a combination of all of them. First are technical improvements. Iran may have upgraded the terminal guidance systems on its Kheibarshekan, Haj Qasem, and Fattah variants, potentially incorporating improved inertial navigation, satnav receivers, or optical terminal seekers that allow the missile to better correct its trajectory in the final phase of flight.

Second are tactical improvements. Iranian launch crews may have refined their pre-launch survey procedures, improving the accuracy of the initial position fix that the missile’s inertial navigation system uses as its reference point. Third are software improvements, which mean updates to the missile’s flight control algorithms could improve trajectory optimization and reduce the accumulated errors that degrade accuracy over long distances.

The most likely explanation is a combination of all three – a systematic program of improvement across the technical, procedural, and software dimensions of missile accuracy that had been underway for years and was now being demonstrated operationally for the first time at this range, following the experiences of the 40-day war.

The MQ-9 hunt

The MQ-9 Reaper drone occupied a central and uniquely vulnerable position in American military offensives against Iran. The Reaper is not merely a strike platform but the primary persistent ISR asset used to locate and track mobile Iranian missile launchers, particularly after the heavy attrition of similar Israeli military systems.

Without the MQ-9’s ability to loiter for extended periods, the capacity to find and destroy TELs before they fire, or to conduct battle damage assessment after strikes, is dramatically reduced.

Iran understood this dependency and targeted it systematically during this campaign. The campaign against MQ-9 assets operated on multiple levels. Ground-based air defense systems, which had previously demonstrated the ability to engage high-altitude targets, were used to engage Reapers operating over Iranian territory and adjacent areas.

But Iran also struck the ground infrastructure that supports MQ-9 operations: the maintenance facilities, fuel systems, satellite communication ground stations, and launch-and-recovery equipment that allow the aircraft to operate.

Western media reporting confirmed the destruction of a number of MQ-9 aircraft on the ground at Jordanian bases and, in a particularly striking detail, the destruction of some aircraft while still in their transport canisters before assembly.

This achievement indicates that Iran has developed targeting intelligence on the logistics chain supporting drone operations, not merely the operational bases themselves. Destroying aircraft before they are assembled and made operational is a force multiplication achievement. It eliminates capability before it can be employed, at a point when the aircraft is most vulnerable and least defended.

The cumulative effect of the MQ-9 campaign was a significant degradation of American persistent ISR coverage over Iran. This directly reduced the effectiveness of the hunt for mobile missile launchers, allowing Iranian TELs greater freedom of movement and survivability.

Suppressing proxy terrorist forces in Iraq

From the first day of the exchange, Iran conducted daily retaliatory strikes against armed terrorist groups in Iraq that had the capability and potential motivation to conduct land attacks against Iranian territory or to serve as a forward platform for American-directed operations.

This campaign was methodical and comprehensive, targeting personnel concentrations, weapons storage facilities, and command infrastructure.

Iran’s western flank, which includes the border with Iraq, represents a potential vulnerability. Armed terrorist groups in Iraq, some with historical ties to American intelligence, could in theory conduct cross-border raids, provide intelligence for American strikes, or serve as a distraction that forced Iran to divert defensive resources.

By striking these groups preemptively and continuously, Iran sought to exhaust their operational capacity before it could be brought to bear.

The daily rhythm of these retaliatory strikes was itself a message. It demonstrated that Iran had persistent targeting intelligence on these groups’ locations, that it was willing to expend munitions on this secondary campaign even while conducting the primary campaign against American forces, and that it intended to maintain pressure regardless of any ceasefire negotiations that might be underway.

The logic of reciprocity

Iran’s retaliatory strikes on electrical and water infrastructure in Kuwait represented a deliberate response that operated on two distinct logics simultaneously.

The first was reciprocity: Iran’s own civilian infrastructure had been targeted, and the strikes on Kuwaiti infrastructure were a direct signal that such targeting would not be absorbed without response to the aggressor and its facilitators.

The second was military utility. American forces in the Persian Gulf region depend on host nations’ electrical grids and water supplies for base operations. Infrastructure that serves both civilian and military purposes is, under the laws of armed conflict, a legitimate military target when the military use is substantial and the strike is proportionate.

The targeting of Kuwait’s infrastructure was also a message to Persian Gulf states more broadly. Kuwait, like Bahrain, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, hosts American military facilities and had provided varying degrees of support to American operations.

By demonstrating the ability and willingness to strike Kuwaiti infrastructure, Iran was communicating that the costs of hosting American forces were not abstract. They were concrete, immediate, and would be borne by the host nation as well as the American military.

The pillars of operational success

Iran’s two-week retaliatory campaign against American aggression and attempts to force open an illegal southern corridor through the Strait of Hormuz largely succeeded on every dimension that its operational planners had identified.

The exchange demonstrated that Iran had developed, over decades of institutional study and investment, a military capability genuinely capable of contesting American power projection in the Persian Gulf region, even after two high-intensity wars.

It demonstrated something relevant to the strategic environment of the region – that the costs of American military aggression in the Persian Gulf had increased substantially; that the infrastructure of American power projection was more vulnerable than pre-war assessments had suggested; and that Iran possessed both the capability and the operational sophistication to exploit those vulnerabilities in a systematic and disciplined manner.

October 18, 2026 Posted by | Militarism, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How Iran’s two-week retaliatory strikes exposed cracks in US military architecture in Persian Gulf

The mother of all propaganda: Why the hype over US MOAB strike against Iran is nothing but theater

By Arman Shariati | Press TV | October 18, 2026

American media this week began circulating a carefully placed story, claiming that the US military has drafted strike options against Iran that include deployment of the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb, the weapon branded as the “Mother of All Bombs.”

CNN was the first to report it on October 15, followed immediately by a wave of amplification across the mainstream American and European media.

US President Donald Trump, appearing later on Newsmax in an interview, did not deny the story. He offered instead a characteristically garbled endorsement, describing the MOAB as “like a tiny nuclear bomb, but it’s not nuclear,” and adding that the US may have to “take a shot” at Pickaxe Mountain in Iran’s Karkas mountain range.

The narrative was set, and it deserves to be taken apart with facts.

The GBU-43/B is an enormous munition by conventional standards. It carries approximately 8,500 kilograms of high explosive in a casing that brings its total weight to around 9,800 kilograms, just under 10 tons. Stretched end to end, it measures just over nine meters.

It is GPS-guided and essentially designed to detonate above the ground.

The MOAB is a thermobaric, or fuel-air, weapon. This description explains precisely why the weapon is irrelevant to the current discussion. A thermobaric weapon does not carry all of its oxidizer within its casing the way a conventional explosive does.

Instead, on detonation, it disperses a fine aerosol of fuel particles or reactive material into the surrounding atmosphere. A secondary ignition then detonates this cloud together with the ambient oxygen in the air itself, producing a pressure wave of exceptional duration and reach.

The fireball essentially consumes the atmosphere around it. The result is a weapon optimized for destroying things on or just above the surface, such as personnel in the open, light structures, and cave mouths, across a wide area. What the MOAB does not and cannot do is drive energy downward through hundreds of meters of solid rock.

Trump’s description, “like a tiny nuclear bomb,” is not merely imprecise. It is exactly the kind of rhetorical inflation that makes the current hostile military campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran intelligible as communication strategy rather than military planning.

The MOAB has been used in combat once. On April 13, 2017, during Trump’s first term, a single GBU-43/B was dropped on a tunnel complex in Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan, claiming to target the ISIS (Daesh) Khorasan infrastructure.

The US administration at the time announced that the strike had killed approximately 90 ISIS-K militants. The actual battle damage assessment remained classified. What was confirmed is that a very large explosion occurred in a mountainous area of eastern Afghanistan.

The strategic effect on ISIS-K’s operational capacity in the region was, at best, ambiguous. The organization has continued to carry out attacks in the months and years that followed. That one strike, against an unprotected tunnel network in soft ground, in an area with no air defense, delivered by a slow cargo aircraft operating in uncontested airspace, is the entire operational history of this weapon.

The target reportedly under consideration is Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La, internationally known as the Pickaxe Mountain, in the Karkas range of central Iran. The facility buried beneath it reportedly sits under more than 100 meters of hard granite.

To suggest that an air-burst weapon, however large, could threaten such a target is to misunderstand the physics of the problem at the most elementary level.

The United States possesses a weapon actually designed for this task, namely the GBU-57/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator; a 13,600-kilogram bomb built specifically to drive through reinforced concrete and hardened rock before detonating.

The MOP was used against Iranian nuclear sites on June 22, 2025, during the 12-day imposed war. Its effectiveness against the deepest and most hardened of those facilities, particularly the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, remains a matter of genuine debate.

If the weapon engineered for penetration cannot be confirmed to have neutralized Fordow, a target much less protected than Pickaxe Mountain, then the notion that an air-burst weapon detonating above the mountain surface would accomplish anything beyond scorching rock is not a serious military proposition.

Even setting aside hardened underground targets, the MOAB offers no material advantage against any conventional surface target that cannot be achieved more efficiently and with far less operational risk by using multiple precision-guided JDAMs delivered from fighter aircraft operating at standoff ranges.

The MOAB does not expand the target set. It does not add capability. It adds spectacle.

There is a further operational reality that receives almost no attention in the current American media narrative. The GBU-43/B is confirmed to be deliverable only by the C-130 family of cargo aircraft. Flying such a platform into contested Iranian airspace is not a minor planning consideration and introduces significant operational difficulties.

The United States lost two MC-130J Commando IIs during its wars of aggression against Iran. The idea of routing another slow cargo aircraft into that same environment in order to drop a weapon that cannot reach the target it is supposedly meant to destroy compounds the absurdity.

What the current MOAB narrative resembles most closely is not a serious military planning process. It resembles the late-war German doctrine of the Wunderwaffe, the wonder weapon.

Under mounting pressure, facing an unwinnable strategic position, Nazi Germany’s leadership turned to announcements of extraordinary new weapons that would change the course of the war. The V-1 and V-2 generated genuine fear and caused real casualties.

They did not alter the strategic outcome by a single day. The function of the wonder weapon is not primarily military. It is political. It tells a domestic audience and a wavering alliance that there are still options, that new instruments of power remain available, that the situation is not as bad as it looks.When strategy fails, spectacle fills the gap.

The Trump administration is conducting a war that did not emerge from American strategic interests. It entered the war of aggression to further Israeli goals and expansionist ambitions, has absorbed significant losses and embarrassments, and now approaches midterm elections with a public that has not been offered a clear account of what victory looks like.

In that very context, the MOAB story makes complete sense as an information management campaign, to paint a picture of a strong American military, when the truth is something else.

There is one more thing worth stating plainly. Even if the MOAB is used, even if a C-130 penetrates Iranian airspace, releases the weapon over Pickaxe Mountain, and produces the largest conventional explosion seen in the region, Iran will be compelled to respond.

Not because the strike will have damaged anything of military significance. A major attack that fails to achieve its stated objective does not end a war. It resets the escalation clock. Tehran’s hand will be forced, and it will answer with something commensurate in visibility, and Iran has demonstrated repeatedly that it possesses the means and the will to do exactly that.

The MOAB is a very large bomb, but it is particularly good at the thing it is now being asked to symbolize. What it is, in the current context, is a prop, useful for an interview, useful for a news campaign, and essentially useless for anything happening 100 meters below the surface of a granite mountain in central Iran.

Arman Shariati is a Tehran-based military analyst and researcher.

October 18, 2026 Posted by | Militarism, Wars for Israel | , | Comments Off on The mother of all propaganda: Why the hype over US MOAB strike against Iran is nothing but theater

Iran says it possesses technology behind US 14-ton GBU bunker-buster

Al Mayadeen | October 18, 2026

Iran has obtained the technology behind a US-made 14-ton GBU bomb and now possesses samples of the weapon, Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Naqdi, senior advisor to the Commander-in-Chief of the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC), stated.

Speaking during the “Fedayeen for Iran” military exercise in Sari, Naqdi said Iranian forces acquired some of the bombs after they failed to detonate during the 12-day war, allowing local forces to seize them and study their technology.

“We should recall that during the 12-day war, 14-ton bombs were dropped,” Naqdi said, adding that “the failure of some of the 14-ton bombs to explode enabled the local forces to seize them.”

“Today, Iran possesses samples of these bombs alongside the manufacturing country,” he asserted, adding that Iranian forces have analyzed all the technologies associated with the US 14-ton bomb and now possess its technology in full.

What is the GBU?

The weapon Naqdi referred to is a GBU, or Guided Bomb Unit, a designation used by the US military for a broad family of air-dropped precision-guided bombs.

GBUs use guidance systems to direct their warheads toward designated targets, with different variants ranging from conventional precision bombs to much heavier bunker-busting weapons.

The term “14-ton bomb” is generally associated with the US GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a deep-penetration weapon designed to strike heavily fortified underground facilities, such as Iran’s nuclear facilities bombed during the 12-day war.

The GBU-57 is one of the largest conventional bombs in the US arsenal and is designed to penetrate deeply buried and hardened targets before detonating. Its deployment requires specialized heavy aircraft.

Iran has heavy fighter jet at hand

Earlier, Iranian Defense Minister Mehrdad Akhlaghi announced Sunday that a heavy Iranian fighter jet will take its first flight next year.

Naqdi also warned that Iran’s response to any renewed US aggression would extend to infrastructure and energy investments belonging to those involved in attacks against Iran in the region.

“In the event of any mistake, the investments related to the infrastructure and energy of the aggressors in the region will be within the operational targeting circle,” he said.

Responding to US threats involving the use of weapons such as the “Mother of All Bombs,” Naqdi said Iran’s Armed Forces have demonstrated advanced missile and deterrence capabilities capable of delivering a decisive response to any aggression.

Iran advances domestic defense production

The emphasis on domestic defense production forms part of Iran’s broader strategy of military self-reliance.

Iranian officials have repeatedly linked the development of indigenous defense capabilities to the need to maintain national security and deterrence without relying on foreign suppliers.

The focus on precision, missile range, and warhead development also reflects the importance Iranian military planners place on technological advancement as a component of deterrence.

October 18, 2026 Posted by | Militarism, Wars for Israel | , | Comments Off on Iran says it possesses technology behind US 14-ton GBU bunker-buster