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As the crisis in the Middle East escalates, Iran has been bombing US bases and critical infrastructure in the Gulf with increasing accuracy, helped by Chinese satellite imagery and tactics learned from Russia in Ukraine.
Three American soldiers were killed last Friday in an attack on the Muwaffaq Salti airbase in Jordan, which was being protected by a US Thaad air defence system. Satellite imagery later released by Iranian media showed several buildings had been completely destroyed.
It is not clear why the air defence system failed on that occasion, in an incident that remains under Pentagon investigation, but it is a reminder that Iran retains an effective missile capability that its new leadership is willing to deploy.
Andreas Krieg, an associate professor at the School of Security Studies, King’s College London, argues that a combination of better intelligence, missile navigation, manoeuvrability and coordinated attack planning amount to “a real transformation”.
It is the product, Krieg said, of three years of technological development of Iran’s ballistic missile programme, which remains roughly 70% intact on US intelligence estimates, despite previous US claims that Iran’s military had been obliterated.
The first step is using Chinese satellite intelligence to help identify targets at US bases and other sites in the Gulf. Three Chinese companies had sanctions imposed on them by the US in May for providing satellite imagery to enable Iranian missile attacks.
One, Mizar Vision, exposed the presence of US military aircraft and Patriot and Thaad air defence systems at bases in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and at the Jordanian base hit last week, and imagery released on social media was widely picked up.
Experts say they are less sure the Chinese state has been providing intelligence, however. Sidharth Kaushal of the Royal United Services Institute, said Iran’s military has focused on static targets at US bases, for which commercial imagery is enough.
“I haven’t seen anything where Iran has struck a target so dynamic that I’ve looked at this and gone this has got to be foreign aid,” said Kaushal. But, at the same time, questions have been raised as to whether US bases, built to withstand attacks from insurgents, were sufficiently hardened against Iranian missile and drone attacks.
A string of accurate Iranian attacks on CIA facilities across the Gulf during the bombing have raised question among US analysts as to whether Russia has shared locations with Tehran. But the hypothesis remains tentative.
Earlier this week, Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, told Congress that China and Russia were helping Iran to some extent, though he was contradicted by Donald Trump on Friday who said he had personally been assured by presidents Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia they would not sell weapons to Iran.
Iran’s ballistic programme relies heavily on Chinese electronics and ammonium perchlorate for rocket fuel, but the finished weapons are considered sophisticated enough to be able to occasionally defeat stretched US and Gulf air defences.
Iranian missiles boast complex navigation using GPS, China’s BeiDou and Russia’s Glonass simultaneously as they launch towards targets, while high re-entry speeds, several times the speed of sound, always make anti-ballistic defence a challenge.
Tehran has also developed “steerable warheads that can adjust their course during descent” on some of their ballistic missiles, says Kreig. Heat seeking and optical navigation for terminal phase means the ballistics are not vulnerable to electronic jamming because they are not employing radio communication.
All this is enough to prevent a serious challenge for US air defences at a time when stockpiles of Patriot and Thaad interceptors have been run down by about a half in the 38-day US-Israel bombing campaign in the spring. Add in energy sites, oil refineries and desalination plants and there becomes a large area to cover.
Iran has also evolved tactically in its missile attacks, using similar tactics to Russia in Ukraine, where smaller salvoes can be more effective than larger ones, and drones are used to distract air defences, followed by a ballistic attack.
Kaushal believes it is a case of the two countries’ militaries learning from each other’s experience – “a convergent evolution”, he said – rather than necessarily the product of direct teaching from Moscow to Tehran.
Though there is a degree of anti-western understanding between Iran, Russia and China, and also North Korea, the so called axis of upheaval is far from a consistent military alliance like Nato.
“There is a kind of collaboration there but it doesn’t produce the kind of massive net benefits that Nato produces,” said Matthew Savill, a defence analyst from the Royal United Services Institute.
