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 by Russia in Ukraine.
Three US soldiers were killed last Friday in an attack on the Muwaffaq Salti airbase in Jordan, which was being protected by a Thaad air defence system. Satellite imagery later released by Iranian media showed several buildings had been destroyed.
It is not clear why the air defence system failed in that incident, which is 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, said a combination of better intelligence, missile navigation, manoeuvrability and coordinated attack planning amounted to “a real transformation”.
It was the product, Krieg said, of three years of technological development of Iran’s ballistic missile programme, which remained roughly ۷۰% intact on US intelligence estimates, despite previous claims from Washington that Tehran’s military capabilities had been obliterated.
The first step was to use Chinese satellite imagery to help identify targets at US bases and other sites in the Gulf. The US imposed sanctions on three Chinese companies in May for providing such images.
One, Mizar Vision, exposed the presence of US military aircraft and Patriot and Thaad air defence systems at bases in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the Jordanian base hit last week, and imagery released on social media was widely picked up.
Some experts, however, said they were less sure Beijing had been providing intelligence. Sidharth Kaushal of the Royal United Services Institute said Iran had focused on static targets at US bases, for which commercial imagery was 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,’” he said. At the same time, however, questions have been raised about whether US bases, built to withstand attacks from insurgents, are sufficiently hardened against Iranian missile and drone attacks.
A string of accurate Iranian attacks on CIA facilities across the Gulf during the bombings made US analysts wonder whether Russia had shared locations with Tehran, but the hypothesis is tentative.
The US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, told Congress this week that China and Russia were helping Iran to some extent. But Donald Trump contradicted him on Friday, saying Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin had personally assured him that 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, and re-entry speeds, which are 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 its ballistic missiles, Kreig said. Heat-seeking and optical navigation for the terminal phase means they are not vulnerable to electronic jamming because they are not using radio communication.
All this is enough to present a serious challenge for US air defences at a time when stockpiles of Patriot and Thaad interceptors have been run down by about half after the ۳۸-day US-Israel bombing campaign in the spring. Add in energy sites, oil refineries and desalination plants and there is a large area to cover.
Iran has also evolved tactically in its missile attacks, using methods similar to Russia in Ukraine, where smaller salvoes can be more effective than larger ones, and drones are used to distract air defences, making way for a ballistic attack.
Kaushal said he believed it was a case of the two countries’ militaries learning from each other’s experience – “a convergent evolution” – rather than it necessarily being the result of Moscow directly teaching Tehran.
Though there is a degree of anti-western understanding between Iran, Russia and China, as well as North Korea, the so called “axis of upheaval” is far from a consistent military alliance.
“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.
